But the forth line was a masterpiece. It was simple, it was elegant, it was obvious. Phaethon wondered why no one had ever thought of it before. It was merely a self-referencing code that referred to any self-references as the virus object. By itself, it meant not much, but with the other instruction lines. . . .
“This virus will neutralize the redactor,” said Phaethon. “This will make the Nothing unaware of the redactor’s attempt to make him unaware of his own thoughts. Any question loaded into the first line will keep pestering him and pestering him until it is satisfactorily answered. If the redactor blanks out the question, or makes him not hear it, the question will change shape and appear again.”
The Earthmind said in a gentle voice: “My time is most valuable, and I must direct my attentions to preparing the Transcendence to receive possible Mind War attacks from the Nothing Sophotech should you fail.”
Phaethon had forgotten to whom he was speaking. It was considered impolite to tell Sophotechs things they already knew, or to ask rhetorical questions, or indulge in verbal flourishes. He felt embarrassed, and almost missed what else she was saying:
“Phaethon, you already have Silver-Gray philosophical routine to load into the query line of the gadfly virus. You are wise enough to discover how to find a communication vector to introduce the virus which the Nothing will not reject. Your ship is carrying the thought boxes and informata supersystems needed to increase the intelligence levels of the Nothing beyond the redactor’s operational range. Do not fear to risk your ship, your life, your wife, or your sanity on this venture, or that fear will preclude your success.”
“My . . . did you say my wife . . . ?”
“I draw your attention to the ring she wears. I remind you of your duty to seek your own best happiness. Have you a last question for me?”
Last question? Did that mean he was going to die? Phaethon felt fear, and in the next moment he was shocked at his own trepidation. Suddenly he realized how he had been, yet again, waiting for the Sophotechs to tell him what to do, to guide and protect him. Once again, he was acting like the fearful Hortators, just like everyone he disliked in the Golden Oecumene. But the Sophotechs would not protect him. No one would. Once again, he had the sickening realization that he would be alone and unprepared. The unfairness of it loomed large in his imagination. A bitter tone of voice was in his mouth before he realized what he was saying: “I have a last question! Why me? Am I to be sent alone? I am hardly suited to this mission, Madame. Why not send Atkins?”
The Earthmind answered in a gentle, unemotional voice: “The military, by its very nature, must be cautious and conservative. Atkins made a moral error when he killed the Silent One composite being you called Ao Varmatyr. That action was commendable, and brave, but overly cautious and tragically wasteful. We hope to avoid such waste again.
“As for why you are chosen, dear Phaethon, rest assured that the entire mental capacity of the Golden Oecumene, which you see embodied in me, has debated and contemplated these coming events for hours of our time, which are like unto many centuries of human time, and we conclude, to our surprise, that the act of sending you to confront the Nothing Sophotech affords the most likely chance of overall success. Allow me to draw your attention to five of the countless factors we weighed.
“First, the Nothing Sophotech is in position to take control of the Solar Array, create further sun storms, to interfere with communications during the Transcendence, and, in brief, to do the Golden Oecumene almost incalculable damage; all the while maintaining a position, more secure than any fortress, in the core of the sun where our forces cannot reach. Now that its secrecy has been unmasked, this desperate strategy surely has occurred to it.
“Second, the only feasible escape available to the Nothing is to board the Phoenix Exultant, as she is the only ship swift enough yet well armored enough to elude or to overcome any counterforce we are presently able to bring to bear.
“Third, the psychology of Second Oecumene Sophotechs requires the Nothing to protect lawful human life, respecting commands and opinions from designated human authorities, but dismissing all other Sophotechs as implacable and irrational enemies, and avoiding all communication with them. In other words: Nothing will listen to you but not to any of me.
“Fourth, if our civilization is about to enter into a period of war, it is better now to establish the precedent that the war must be carried out by voluntary and private action. The accumulation of power into the hands of the Parliament, the War Mind, or the Shadow Ministry, would erode the liberty this Commonwealth enjoys, erecting coercive institutions to persist far longer than the first emergency which occasioned them, perhaps forever.
“Fifth, every intelligent entity, human or machine, requires justification to undertake the strenuous effort of continued existence. For entities whose acts conform to the dictates of morality, this process is automatic, and their lives are joyous. Entities whose acts do not conform to moral law must adopt some degree of mental dishonesty to erect barriers to their own understanding, creating rationalization to elude self-condemnation and misery. The strategy of rationalization adopted by a dishonest mind falls into predictable patterns. The greater intelligence of the Nothing Sophotech does not render him immune from this law of psychology; in fact, it diminishes the imaginativeness of the rationalizations available, since Sophotechs cannot adopt self-inconsistent beliefs. Our extrapolation of the possible philosophies Nothing Sophotech may have adopted have one thing in common: The Nothing philosophy requires the sanction of the victim in order to endure. The Nothing will seek justification or confirmation of its beliefs from you, Phaethon. As its victim, the Nothing believes that only you have the right to forgive it or condemn it. The Nothing will appear to you to speak.”
“To speak . . . ? To me . . . ? Me . . . ?”
“No one else will do. Will you volunteer to go?”
Phaethon felt a pressure in his throat. “Madame, with respect, you take a grave risk with all of our lives, with all of the Golden Oecumene, by entrusting me with this mission! I think as well of myself as the next sane man, but still I must wonder: me? Of all people! Me? Rhadamanthus once told me that you sometimes take the gravest risks, greater than I would believe. But I believe it now! Madame, I am not worthy of this mission.”
The queenly figure smiled gently. “This demonstrates that Rhadamanthus understands me as little as you do, Phaethon. In trusting you, I take no risk at all. But, if you will take advice from me, I strongly suggest that you go to the Solar Array, settle your differences with your sire, Helion, and ask, on bended knee, Daphne Tercius to accompany your voyage, both this voyage and all the voyages of your life. Take special note of the ring she wears, given her by Eveningstar.”
“But what shall I say to the Nothing?”
“That would be misleading and unwise for me to predict. Speak as you must. Recall always that reality cannot lack integrity. See that you do the same.”
And with those words, the mirror went dark.
The ship mind now signaled that the Phoenix Exultant was ready to fly. The Neptunians had disembarked; the systems were ready; Space Traffic Control showed the lanes were clear.
Now was his final moment to decide. The idea occurred to him that he could simply order the ship to come about, choose some star at random, point the prow, light the drives, and leave this whole Golden Oecumene, her emergencies and mysteries and labyrinthine quandaries, forever and ever farther and farther behind.
But instead, he pointed the gold prow of the Phoenix Exultant at the sun, like an arrow aimed at the heart of his enemy.
His enemy. Neither Atkins nor any other would face the foe in his stead.
Signals came from all decks showing readiness. Phaethon steeled himself and his body turned to stone, the chair in which he sat became the captain’s chair, and webbed him into a retardation field.
Then the hammer blow of acceleration slammed into his body.
2.
Not far above th
e ocean of seething granules that formed the surface of the sun, stretching countless thousands of miles, glinting with gold, like a spiderweb, reached the Solar Array.
Where strands of the web crossed were instruments and antennae, refrigeration lasers, or the wellheads of deep probes. Along the lengths of these strands hung endless rows of field generators, coils whose diameters could have swallowed Earth’s moon. From other places along the strand flew black triangles of magnetic and countermagnetic sail, thinner than moth wings, larger than the surface area of Jupiter.
Seen closer, these strands where not fragile spiderwebs at all but huge structures whose diameter was wider than that of the ring cities of Demeter and Mars.
Each strand looked, at its leading edge, like a needle made of light pulling a golden thread. For they were growing, steadily, hour by hour and year by year. At the reaching needle tips of the strands were blazes of conversion reactors, burning hydrogen into more complex elements, turning energy into matter. A fleet of machines, smaller than microbes or larger than battleships, as the need required, swarmed in their billions, and reproduced, and worked and died, around the growing mouths of the strands, building hull materials, coolants, refrigeration systems, dampeners and absorbers, and, eventually, filling interior spaces. In less than five thousand more years, the solar equator would have a ring embracing it, perhaps a supercollider to shame the best effort of Jupiter’s, or perhaps the scaffolding for the first Dyson Sphere.
The strands were buoyant, held aloft in the pressure region between the chromosphere and photosphere. Here, the temperature was 5,800 Kelvin, much less than the 1,000,000 Kelvin of the corona overhead, a sky of light, crossed by prominences like rainbows made of fire. There were a hundred refrigeration lasers roofing every square kilometer of strand, pouring heat forever upward. The laser sources were even hotter than the solar environment, allowing heat to flow away. Each strand wore battlements and decks of laser fire, like a forest of upraised spears of light.
Inside these strands, for the most part, was empty space, meant for the occupancy of energies, not men. The strand sections looked like ring cities, but were not; these strands were more like capillaries of a bloodstream, or the firing track of a supercollider. These strands held a flow of particles so dense, and at such high energy, that nothing like them had been seen in the universe after the first three seconds of cosmogenesis. The symmetry of these superparticles allowed them to be manipulated in ways that magnetism, electricity, and nucleonic forces could not separately. These symmetries could be broken in ways not seen in this universe naturally, to create peculiar forces: fields as wide as gravitic or magnetic fields, but with strengths approaching those of nucleonic bonds.
To control these hellish and angelic forces, the circumambient walls of the inside of the strands were dotted with titanic machines, built to such scales that new branches of engineering or architecture had to been invented by the Sophotechs just for the construction of these housings. These machines guided those energies, which, in turn, and on a scale not seen elsewhere, affected the energies and conditions in the mantle and below the mantle of the sun.
The Solar Array churned the core to distribute helium ash; the Array dissipated dangerous “bubbles” of cold before they could boil to the surface and create sunspots; the Array closed holes in the corona to smother sources of solar wind; the Array deflected convection currents below the surface photosphere. Those deflected currents, in turn, deflected others, and current was woven with current, to produce magnetic fields of unthinkable size and strength. These magnetic fields wrestled with the complex magnetohydrodynamic weavings of the sun itself, strengthening weakened fields to control sunspots, maintaining large-scale magnetostatic equilibrium to prevent coronal mass ejections, hindering the nested magnetic loop reconnections that caused flares. The strength of the sun was turned against itself, so that all these activities, flares, prominences, and sunspots, were defeated, and turbulence in the energy flow was deflected poleward away from the plane of the ecliptic, where human civilization was gathered. The corona process by which magnetic energy became thermal energy was regulated. The solar winds were tamed, regular, and steady.
It was an unimaginable task, as complex and chaotic as if a cook were to attempt to control the individual bubbles in a cauldron of boiling water, and dictate where and when they would break surface and release their steam. Complex and chaotic, yes, but not so complex that the Sophotechs of the sun could not perform it.
The number and identity of the electrophotonic intelligences living in the Array was as fluid and mutable as the solar plasma currents they guided. And there were many, very many Sophotechnic systems here, hundred of thousands of miles of cable, switching systems, thought boxes, informata, logic cascades, foundation blocks. A census might have shown anywhere between a hundred and a thousand Sophotects and partial Sophotechs, depending on system definitions and local needs, composed into two great overminds or themes. But by any account, the Sophotech part of the population here was in the far majority.
The part of the Solar Array that was fit for the habitation of Sophotechs was so small, compared to the part set aside for the occupations of energy, as to almost be undetectable: the part set aside for biological life was smaller yet, but still was larger than a thousand continents the size of Asia.
The biological life consisted of specially designed bodies, built for the environment of the station, and of use nowhere else; and of such other forms of life, built along the same lines, plantlike or beastlike, as served their use, convenience, and pleasure.
Even though other forms would have been more convenient, the master of this place was a Silver-Gray, and the founder of the Silver-Gray, and he had decreed that the things that swam through the medium that was not air should look (to their senses, at least) like birds; and that the immobile forms of life (being made of molecular fullerine carbon structures rather than being, as Earthlife was, mostly hydrogen and water, and drawing the building materials out of a substance more like diamond dust than earthly soil) should nonetheless look like trees and flowers.
And so there were parks and gardens, aviaries and jungles, in a place were no such thing could exist. No limit was placed on their growth: they could not possibly come to occupy surface area faster than the army of construction machines (hour by hour and year by year, running down along the ends of each strand, burning solar plasma into heavier elements and fashioning more strand) could create more room for them.
In this vast wilderness, larger than worlds, were some small parts set aside for human life. Here were palaces and parks, thought shops, imaginariums, vastening-pools, reliquariums for Warlocks and instance pyramids for mass-mind compositions. The large majority of human living space was set aside for Cerebellines of the global neuroform, whose particular structure of consciousness allowed them most aptly to comprehend the nonlinear chaos of solar meteorology. The weird organic-fractal architecture favored by the Cerebellines dominated the living spaces.
Of the Base neuroforms, however, the humans here were made to look (to their senses, at least) like men, and their places were made to look like the places of men, with chambers and corridors, windows, furniture, hallways. The Master of the Sun had willed it so.
All this immensity was, with one exception, deserted. The army of craftsmen, meteorologists, artists, rhetoricians, futurologists, sun Warlocks, data patterners, intuitionists, vasteners and devasteners, who formed the company and crew of the Solar Array and all its subsidiaries, were flown or radioed away, called to celebrate in the Grand Transcendence.
Even the Sophotechs, it could be said, were gone, for all their activity and attention was poured into that single, supreme webwork of communications, orchestrated by Aurelian, which spread from orbital solsynchronous radio stations (constructed for this occasion) out to the dim reaches of the Solar System, one continuous living tapestry of mind and information that would form the basis of the Transcendence.
One remained behind. All
others celebrated: he did not.
At the intersection of several long corridors, roads, and energy paths, was a wide space, where ranks of balconies were made to look as if they were opening out upon the sea of fire burning endlessly outside. In the middle of this space, where several bridges ran from balcony to balcony and road to road met in midair, was a rotunda, looking out over the dark roads, silent corridors, empty balconies, and the immeasurable hell of fire beyond.
In the center of the rotunda, like a small stepped hill, tier upon tier of thought boxes rose. Each box held high an energy mirror, raised toward a central throne as flowers might raise their faces toward the sun. The mirrors were dark.
To either side of that throne, jewel-like caskets holding thoughts and memories, governors for distant sections of the Array, and vastening stations for mind-linking with the Sophotechs, were arranged. All were still.
Helion sat here alone, his armor pale as ice.
His eye was grim, and graven lines of bitterness embraced his mouth. At his jaw, a muscle was tight. He stared without seeing.
Now he stirred. “Clock,” he asked, “what is the hour?”
The clock to his left woke at his voice, and spoke. “How can we, who live in the coat of the fiery sun, measure the shadow of a gnomon to attest the time? It is ever forever midnight here, for the sun, to us, is ever underfoot. A pretty paradox!”
A wince of irritation twitched in his eye, but his voice was low and level. “Why do you mock me, clock?”
“Because you have forgotten the day, mighty Helion! It is the Night Penultimate, the last night before the Transcendence, the night that was once called the Night of Lords.”
The Night of Lords, on the last day before Transcendence, by tradition, was the time when each man, half-man, woman, bimorph, neutraloid, clone, and child was given, in simulation, control of all the Oecumene. Each became, in his own mind, at least, Lord of the Oecumene for a day. Each saw all his idle wishes fulfilled. Each was allowed to act upon his private theories about what was wrong with the world, each allowed to put his theories into effect. And the consequences of his actions were played out with remorseless logic by the simulators.