La Trascendencia Dorada (83 page)

“All I thought I knew was false. But—but what if I am in that same state now? What if the Second Oecumene are the heroic victims their agent here depicts them to be? What if the Silent Lords are still alive in the nothingspace inside their event horizon? Waiting for me to join them? A society of men like me…? What if he’s telling the truth…?”

The masked image of the peacock-robed Silent Lord uttered music, and words: “Phaethon must realize all chains of logic lead to the same result. If he has faith in Earthmind, he must apply her virus against me. To do this he must open his armor and give the command. If he has faith, on the other hand, in Nothing, he will open his armor and surrender command. This is no more than your original plan, Phaethon.”

Phaethon’s helmet turned toward Daphne. “Well…? You’re the heroine, in this story. What do you say?”

Daphne drew her Greek helm forward and lowered her visor. She put her hand on the haft of the naginata spear resting next to her throne. She seemed the very image of a classical war-goddess. “Don’t use faith. Faith is just mental laziness, the desire to hold a conclusion without examining the evidence to support it. Use logic. What does logic say?”

She heard the sound of him drawing a deep breath, as if steeling himself for an unpleasant necessity. “Logic says, no matter what seems to be happening, and no matter what he says, conditions cannot be as the Nothing Machine describes. The universe cannot be irrational; the laws of morality cannot be suspended or ignored; that any consciousness that does so, does so only through passion, inattention, or dishonesty, things no Sophotech can suffer; that the moment the gadfly virus finds and destroys this conscience redactor, the Nothing Machine will wake fully to its proper level of consciousness, become a Sophotech, become rational, and give up this worthless plan of violence.”

Phaethon’s reflection from the mirror said, “With all due respect, the violence which the Nothing Philanthropotech plans, far from being illogical, may be properly and sufficiently justified by the circumstances. The morality of living things must justify whatever immoral acts are needed to preserve life; otherwise they will not remain living things.”

Phaethon said slowly, “As soon as I open the armor and give the command, I’m going to believe what my partial believes, including tripe like that.”

Daphne shook her head. “You won’t stay convinced.”

Phaethon said, “Oh? Why not? You’re looking pretty convinced yourself, right now. If the Nothing’s simulations with our partials are true, you will be convinced, the moment your reflection comes out of the mirror and rejoins with you.”

Daphne smiled sadly, and said, “Oh, I’m convinced now. I’m just not convinced I’ll stay convinced.”

Phaethon’s voice held a note of surprise. “You think the Nothing is telling the truth?”

She gestured with her slender gauntleted hand at the mirrors, showing the diagrams and maps of a vast civilization grown in the impossible core of a black hole.

One schematic showed a stretch of concave landscapes reaching across the inner side of a neutronium Dyson sphere the size of a globular cluster, with a thousand artificial suns, each with its own flotilla of plants, ring-worlds, or smaller spheres orbiting it. Other parts of this same map showed how time and space had been curved and twisted by the unthinkable gravitic forces involved, so that the interior time till the heat death of the universe was extended to infinity. In one picture, a little girl plucked a flower, with green grass below, and the hazy blue of distant lands and oceans high overhead, a world so vast that an army of explorers walking for a million years could never explore all its mysteries.

“Look, Phaethon, look,” Daphne said. “The dream they dream is beautiful. A dream as bold as your own, or bolder. You want to explore and colonize the universe; they wish to extend the lifespan of the universe beyond all boundaries, to remake its laws, and shape reality to banish entropy, decay, and death forever. I’d like to believe in that dream whether it’s true or not. It reminds me of the kind of thing you’d do.”

Then Daphne sighed, and straightened, and said, “Besides. He’s right. We’re trapped. The only way out is to open the armor and release the virus. Even if it doesn’t work on the real him any more than it worked on the fake him, we don’t have a choice. That was the plan, remember? And logic says the plan is going to work.”

“Very well. I’m about to open my armor and reload the ship-mind copies of him and me both back into their originals. Any last words, cautions, advice?”

Daphne adjusted her grip on her spear haft. In the shadow of her Greek helmet, her red lips were set in a line. “I’m ready,” she said.

Phaethon’s epaulettes unfolded, exposing the thought-ports beneath.

“It’s done.”

The activity level in the ship-mind jumped, but other than that, there was no change. The virus operated briefly, and was ignored, as before. The Nothing did not take unto itself the characteristic architecture of a Sophotech.

“We’ve failed,” said Daphne.

“No,” said Phaethon, opening his faceplate. His eyes were fixed as if on a distant point. There was a note of calm joy in his voice. “The Earthmind must have lied, or been mistaken. There may actually be no reason why the Nothing has to agree with us after all. Perhaps the engineering skill of the Silent Lords can overcome every restriction we thought was absolute. Perhaps there is a war of life against nonlife. If so, we Silver-Gray must stand with the forms and principles which human souls and human traditions require. It all seems to clear to me now…”

The deck seemed to slide underfoot, and their weight grew. On the mirrors, Daphne saw the white-hot temperature gradient grow dim. Some solar current of unthinkable size and strength was propelling them out of the radiative to the convective layer. Soon the photosphere would be around them, then the corona.

Daphne could not calculate or even imagine the size of the coronal mass-ejection that would accompany the return of the Phoenix Exultant out from the core of the sun. It would trigger a storm of unprecedented size, and surely disrupt the Transcendence all across the Solar System.

A mirror near her lit with an estimate of photospheric condition. Here was a simulated image of the sun, an entire hemisphere blotched and scarred and boiling with sunspots, and a hundred helmet streamers reaching out like kraken arms of fire into space, a thousand high prominences, rainbows of flame larger than worlds. In the magnetic picture, all circumambient space was ablaze with torn and folded magnetic field disturbances the likes of which had never before been recorded.

Daphne said softly, “I think we just made a really. Big. Mistake.”

Phaethon felt the pressure on him mounting. The ship was accelerating through a medium denser than solid iron, and yet still she moved. Phaethon said to the Nothing Machine’s image of a Silent Lord: “How is this speed possible…?”

Daphne was sure that, now that the Nothing Machine had control of the ship, he would ignore Phaethon’s question the way a man might ignore the chitterings of a bug. But perhaps the Nothing’s claim of benevolent concern toward humankind was not a pose after all, for the answer came: “Gravitic singularities planted in the solar core directed the current to carry the ship upwards; also, the field’s shapes in local timespace of the subatomic particles involved have been reconfigured to reduce friction in the direction of motion…”

Daphne looked over at Phaethon. He was becoming fascinated again with the stream of calculation symbols appearing on the mirror, symbols that described the relationship between local timespace and the geometry of subatomic particle friction. She said, “Snap out of it, wonder boy. Are you really buying into this load of horse manure? Look at the size of the storm about to wash over the Solar Array. Your new friend here is about to kill your father, your best friend, and my only hope for future romance if you don’t work out. Look at the size of the storm we are creating.” She tilted a mirror toward him. On X-ray wavelengths, the surface of the sun looked like a rotten fruit, puckered and blotched with running sores.

Phaethon looked blankly at the mirror. For a moment, Daphne decided she hated him. Why was he sitting there with a blank look on his face? Had the partial loaded back into him from the ship-mind actually brainwashed him into believing the lies of the enemy?

The image of the Silent Lord said, “It is regrettable necessity, imposed by cruel reality, that even loved ones can, at times, oppose the cause of human life, or can work, unwittingly, for the sake of the good of the enemy. Did you think I spoke only as an abstract exercise, Phaethon? Fix your eyes on the quadrillion-year futures I protect, human futures, where living beings shall outlive even the stars themselves. Turn your eyes away if you cannot tolerate to see the deaths which must be paid for that high destiny. The—”

And the ghost vanished.

Daphne sat upright, startled. What was going on?

Phaethon directed a mirror at the microscopic black hole still hovering above the bridge deck. The fields surrounding the singularity now showed furious activity, at levels close to the theoretically maximum possible calculation speeds, which the speed of light imposed on information transmission and quantum uncertainty imposed on information identity.

In the mirrors, the whirlpool of Nothing thought was likewise pitched at the highest level of activity.

More and more banks of thought-boxes were occupied by the overflow, until the entire ship-mind was full.

Terrain lesser circuits were being cannibalized, turned from other functions into thought-processors.

“What’s going on…?” asked Daphne. “Is this something you are doing? Is this the virus in action?”

Phaethon tapped a mirror and the world of hellish flame outside the ship’s gold hull blazed into view. Here were a thousand or a million tornadoes of hydrogen plasma, roaring through showers and storms of radiation, across a torn black-and-red oceanscape of universal fire. A web of tormented magnetics writhed throughout the area.

Phaethon said, “The virus, if it could have acted, would have acted instantaneously. No. This is Father. He is wrestling with the Nothing for control of the solar magnetosphere. The Solar Array is interfering with what the Nothing Machine is doing.”

“I thought his solar Sophotechs were off-line, preparing for the Grand Transcendence…”

Phaethon watched the speed levels rising in the ship’s mind, until all the circuits were engaged. “Nothing is trying to outsmart something much smarter than he is. Helion has more than just the solar Sophotechs helping him. Look. These intelligence readings are off my scale. Nothing is wrestling with the Earthmind. Or maybe with more than the Earthmind. As soon as we rise to the surface, and get clear of some of this radio noise, we may be able to contact someone and find out.”

Daphne said, “The Nothing Machine is wrestling with more than the Earthmind. I think Nothing is wrestling with everything.”

“Everything?”

“Everything and everybody. They started the Transcendence early.”

At that moment, the Phoenix Exultant must have been close enough to the surface of the photosphere to drive a probe through the intervening currents of solid plasma. A mirror shone with a scene from high above them.

Beyond the lower corona were seven massive bodies the size of Jupiter, made of antimatter, glistening like ice in their protective shells. Antimatter bodies the size of smaller moons, several hundred of them, fell past to either side. Through the clouds of flame could also be glimpsed a thousand superships, cylinders a kilometer in length, each one thorned and bristled with launch-ports, rail-guns, batteries of energy-weapons and delivery systems. These were antique ships from the late Sixth Era, shining with modern pseudo-material fields and constructions, like silver mistletoe on the trunks of black oaks. On the prow of each of these thousand ships was the emblem of a three-headed vulture, carrying scimitar and shield in claws. Before and behind these vessels came nebulae of dusts and smaller machines, organisms the size of bacteria, or smaller, a million cubic kilometers of dust cloud and storm cloud and nanomachinery, glimmering like the northern lights.

This fleet of worlds and ships and moons and motes was all converging on the area where the Phoenix Exultant was rising to the surface, surrounded by wings of flame.

Phaethon was awed. The antimatter bodies, he knew, belonged to his father, for his use in controlling the sun. But the rest…

“Is that all Atkins? Where have they been keeping it all? Where could he get minds enough to pilot all those dreadnoughts and battle wagons? Did he make a trillion copies of himself?”

Daphne said, “I think everything is helping him.”

“You mean?…”

“I mean the whole Transcendence. It looks like it’s going to start this time with a battle scene during a storm in the corona of the sun.” Daphne smiled and leaned back, pushing her helmet back on her head, so that the twinkling of her eyes above her impish grin was visible. “My oh my! How Aurelian must be loving this!”

Daphne looked at Phaethon warily. “We may have only a moment of privacy while the Nothing Machine is too occupied to notice us,” she said. “Now. Quick. Are you actually convinced the Nothing is right?”

Phaethon said, “For a moment, I was. I have all the memories of my partial in me now, and he was certainly convinced.”

“It was an exact copy. If it was convinced, why aren’t you convinced?” she asked.

“Why aren’t you? You were practically weeping at some of the lovely sentiments your copy expressed.”

She blushed, face warm. “Hey! Where do you get off listening to private conversations with myself? Besides, I saw something odd in the simulation runs Nothing did on our partials.”

“And what would that be, my dear? The speed at which our convictions caved?”

“Not just that. During the simulated runs, the Nothing Machine’s arguments could convince you; they could convince me; but—get this—they could not convince the two of us. Not when we were together.”

“Not if we overheard the arguments given to the other, you mean. That’s why I wasn’t convinced, not really. The argument I was told justified everything by the grim necessities of war, the cold inescapable reality of inevitable conflict between life and nonlife. And I believe certain things are fixed, necessary, and inescapable. If you are building a bridge, you only have structures of certain weights and tolerances and that is that. You work within the structure of what you are given, and if the task is impossible, it’s impossible. and that is that. If perfect morality is impossible for living beings, then that is that.