La Trascendencia Dorada (63 page)

“I’ve had a hard day, civilian. Don’t try to play that legalistic hugger-mugger rights game with me. This is still a military situation; those are enemy weapons; and I’m still in charge.”

“But you just declared the war was over, my dear sir. And that legalistic ‘rights game,’ as you call it, is what you are sworn to protect, soldier, and it gives the only justification to your somewhat bloody existence. You are here to protect me, remember? I never did join your hierarchy, my cooperation is voluntary, and you are my guest. If, as a guest, you overstep the bounds of politeness and decent conduct, I would be within my rights to have you put off this vessel.”

Atkins lost his temper: “You trying to butt heads with me? Come on. Let’s butt heads. I am the God-damnednest Number-one Ichi-ban First-Class Heavyweight Champion Tough-as-Nails Ear-biting Eye-gouging Hard-assed Head-Butter of all Time, mister, so don’t try me!”

The dog pricked its ears, looking mildly surprised.

After a quiet moment, Phaethon’s voice came: “I suspect, Marshal Atkins, that you and I are both a bit ruffled by the events here. I am, quite frankly, not used to violence, and am dismayed at how you have chosen to conduct this affair. I suspect you are still suffering from memory shock, and are half-asleep.” The dog lowered its head, and continued: “But, unlike you, I have no excuse for my conduct. I have let emotions get the better of me, which is a vice in which a true gentleman never indulges. For that I proffer my apologies.”

Atkins drew a deep breath, and used an ancient technique to calm himself and balance his blood-chemistry levels. “Apology accepted. You have mine. Let’s say no more about it. I guess I’m a little disappointed that there wasn’t any superior officer in all this, that our communication tracks did not lead to the Silent One’s boss. If he had one.”

“But that is what I was attempting to tell you, Marshal. There have been periodic signals leaving this vessel ever since Xenophon came to the bridge.”

“Leaving how? The hull is made of adamantium!”

“Leaving through the drive, which was wide open and showering energy out into the universe.”

“Aimed?”

“As far as I can determine, yes. The signals were encoded as ghost particles generated by Xenophon’s array of disruptors.”

“Aimed where?”

“I could not trace them.”

“That’s what you were supposed to be doing, friend, while I was getting my little butt kicked.”

“I did not understand the nature of the signal until Xenophon boasted of the technology, and described it. This ghost-particle technology is not one with which I, or any one else in the Golden Oecumene, is familiar. I had to design and build new types of detection equipment while you and Xenophon were making all that noise. But the broadcasts are occurring at regular intervals. Those magnetic disruptors are still drawing power out of my fuel cells, charging for their next broadcast. There is still a piece of instruction cycling in the ship-mind’s broadcast circuit, written in that Silent Oecumene encryption I cannot decode. It will be a directional broadcast, or so I guess, since there are also line actions in the navigational array. When this next broadcast comes—and this is the second reason why I would ask you not to dismantle my ghost-particle array—I hope to be able to track the signal to its receiver.”

“Xenophon’s CO. The Nothing Sophotech.”

“And, if I am not mistaken, the Silent Phoenix, or whatever starship they used to come here.”

“You did not believe his story?”

“No more than did you, Marshal. The enemy is still at large. Come! We have much to discuss before the next broadcast.”

Atkins looked down at his blood-drenched body, the blasted deckplates underfoot, and said, “Is there some place I can scrub up? My blood is a weapon, and I don’t want to get any of it near you.”

“My dear sir, is there any part of your body which they have not turned into a weapon?”

“Just one. They let me keep that for morale purposes.”

“Well, come up to the main bridge, where my body is stored: I have antinanotoxins and biosterilizers which can clean, and robe you.”

“Main bridge? I thought this was the main bridge.”

“No, sir. This is just the auxiliary. You don’t think I’d expose my real bridge to danger, do you?”

“You have two bridges?”

“Three. And a jack-together I can plug into any main junction. I am a very conservative engineer: I believe in triple redundancy.”

“Where did you put two other whole bridge complexes? How could you be sure Xenophon would not find it?”

“Surely you are joking, Marshal! On a ship this size? I could hide the moons of Mars! In fact, I’m not sure one of them did not wander into my intake ram by mistake when we passed Martial orbit. Has anyone seen Phobos lately…?”

“Very funny.”

“Come: follow the armor. It will lead you to the nearest railway station.”

Diomedes and Phaethon were seated at the wide round wood-and-ivory table grown out of the bridge deck. Both were dressed in severe and unadorned black frock coats with high collars and cravats, according to the Victorian conventions of the Silver-Gray. Around them, shining gold decks, tall energy mirrors, overmind formation pillars, and pressure curtains blue and lucent as the sky, gleamed and blazed and glowed, like a world of cold and silent fire. One anachronism: Diomedes held a bronze-headed ashwood spear in one kid glove, and toyed with it, staring at the spear tip, and waving it slowly back and forth, metronomelike, trying to acclimate to the binocular vision a human-shaped body and nervous system afforded.

Atkins, seated opposite them, was wearing a suit of Era reflex armor. The chameleon circuit was disengaged, and he had tuned the color to a brilliant blood red, a sharp contrast to the umbrageous black walnut of the high-backed, wooden chair in which the soldier sat. The suit substance looked like fiery elfin scale-mail, with overlapping small plates of composite, which were programmed to stiffen under impact, and form blast armor, locking into different bracing systems to protect the wearer no matter from which direction the stroke came. The routine to make this primitive armor had been coded within the black-body cells in his blood, and the armor itself had been woven out of the broken deckplates of the old bridge, where his blood had spilled.

In the center of the table was an imaginary hourglass, measuring the estimated time till the next broadcast from the ghost-particle array.

The three sat watching the sands run.

Diomedes drew his eyes up to the glinting spear point of the weapon he held. “Here is cause for wonder! I live and breathe and speak and see, incarnated by a new machine, a portable noetic unit with no more support than glorious Phoenix Exultant’s mind could give. No Sophotech was needed for the transfer! No large immobile system was required. Does this mean immortality shall be common hereafter even among the Cold Dukes and Eremites and Ice-miners, among all us nomads too poor to afford Sophotechnology? It may be the death of our loved and cherished way of life! Hah! And, if so, good riddance to it, say I!”

Phaethon said, “Good Diomedes, it is that way of life which has made the crew here on the Phoenix so unthinkably tolerant of the secrecy which now surrounds the antics on the auxiliary bridge, and the murder of Neoptolemous. Who else but people born and bred to utter isolation and invincible privacy would tolerate not to know what’s going on? Atkins still fears spies, and now insists all these doings be obscured, until the Nothing Mastermind be brought to bay. Who would be so crazed, except Neptunians, to accept the idea that there were things which, for military reasons, the citizens who support the military are not allowed to know!”

Atkins leaned forward, hands on the tabletop, and said to Diomedes, “Speaking of death, are there other copies of Xenophon or Neoptolemous loose in the Duma whom we have to track down, or was the one brought aboard this ship the only copy?”

Diomedes said, “Were you thinking of hunting the others? The exercise is futile. While I was Neoptolemous, I saw the Silent One’s mind in action, Ao Varmatyr as we might call him. He tried to send copies of himself to corrupt as many Neptunians as he could do. Despite his boast, his virus weaving was not enough to penetrate the concentric privacies with which each Neptunian surrounds himself. Unlike you in your world free from crime, we are used to mind hoaxes, hackers, hikers, highjackers, bushwackers, thought wormers, sleepwalkers. Had Ao Varmatyr been received on Earth, rather than at Farbeyond, your nonimmunized world would have been flooded with virus at the first public posting. With us, we who have no public, all he did was irk his fellow Dukes of Neptune, who sent back casts and aphrodisiacs and core swipers and other irritants and viruses whose names you would not know.

There was a cold twinkle in Atkins’s eye, a look of professional amusement. He obviously thought that he, at least, knew the names and more about the Neptunian thought weapons, their viruses and information duels. But he said nothing.

Diomedes concluded: “There are other copies of Neoptolemous in the Duma, yes: but none of Ao Varmatyr. I have been in him since a fortnight past; nor did he hide any secrets from me, accounting me as one already dead. I think I would have seen a successful transfer of his template. There was none. He was far more alone and scared than his tale to you would have led you to believe.”

Phaethon wanted to ask if that other version of Neoptolemous held the lien on the title to this ship, but he held his tongue. Other matters took priority.

Atkins was asking: “Did Ao Varmatyr ever communicate with his superiors?”

Diomedes said, “In the early hours, right after my capture, he made a nerve-to-nerve link with me. This was before he imposed complete control over the Neoptolemous host, and cut off my unfiltered outward sensation.”

Diomedes made an easy gesture and continued: “What next occurred was not so strange. Xenophon, fine fellow that he is, was an Eremite. I am a Cold Duke. Compared to the scattered Eremite iceholds of the Kuiper belt, we Dukes, down in the S and K methane layers of Neptune himself, are much more densely populated. Sometimes, as little as a thousand kilometers would separate the outliers of our palace swarms and sink houses from each other, and the shells and turrets of a deep Neptunian Cold Duke are ringed with firewalls and false reflections to hinder the badworms which tend to pepper our speech when we share thoughts with each other. You understand?”

Atkins said “Meaning Xenophon engaged you in mind-to-mind and you whipped his little behind.”

“Inelegantly put, but essentially correct. I had access to his deep-memory files for a few seconds, enough to make a cipher copy into my own brainspace before Ao Varmatyr put me into sensory deprivation. It made interesting reading during my lonely hours. From it I could extrapolate the information about everything Ao Varmatyr knew.”

Phaethon said, “My dear friend, you will not keep us in suspense, I trust?”

Diomedes smiled easily. “No more than is necessary to build up dramatic tension, my friend.”

“I tingle with the appropriate tension, good Diomedes, I assure you.”

Atkins, hearing this exchange, shook his head. He thought: No wonder these snooty Silver-Gray guys just get on everyone’s nerves. And, then, aloud, “Gentlemen! Time’s running! Let’s get on with this.”

Diomedes spoke with slow emphasis: “First, Xenophon was cooperating consciously. Second, Ao Varmatyr was unaware of any superior.

“There were two times, both times when Ao Varmatyr was hooked into the long-range communication nerve link, when his memory went blank, and his internal clock was reset to mask the missing time. Xenophon noticed it and Ao Varmatyr did not and could not. Xenophon was puzzled by this, but, lacking a suspicious imagination, did not realize what it implied: namely, that Ao Varmatyr’s mind was set up the same way he described the minds of the Silent Oecumene thinking machines. An invisible conscience redactor, unknown even to him, forced him, from time to time, to perform certain acts of which he was not afterwards aware. Ao Varmatyr (unbeknownst to himself) communicated with his superior, this Nothing Sophotech, but they did not ‘speak.’ I suspect the superior merely fed operating instructions into Ao Varmatyr’s conscience redactor, the loyalty virus inside of him.”

Phaethon muttered, “How horrible!”

Diomedes, with a grim smile, fingered the haft of his spear, and said, “Indeed. But it was no worse than the Silent Oecumene had been doing for years and centuries to their own thinking machines. So why not do the same to their human subjects? The step is small Atkins said, ‘How did you resist being taken over by the Last Broadcast loyalty virus when Xenophon did not? You were entirely isolated, and Ao Varmatyr had complete control over your input.’ ”

“Part was lack of time and attention of his part, I think. But part of it was, in all modesty, strength of character on my part. It is true that I was convinced, perhaps for up to an hour at a time, that the Nothing philosophy was correct, and that there was no reason to resist, and that I had to cooperate for the sake of the Silent Oecumene. But never for longer than an hour.

“You see, I suspect the Last Virus was intended to work on the minds and mind-sets typical of the Silent Oecumene. The core value which the target mind must accept before it will accept the Nothing philosophy is that morality is relative, that the ends justify the means, that right and wrong is an individual and arbitrary choice. This strips the target mind of any defense: for who can rightfully defend his own prejudices against another’s if he knows, deep down, that both are equally arbitrary, equally false?

“But it did not work on me, because I had, not so long ago, uploaded a copy of the Silver-Gray philosophy tutorial routine into my long-term memory. The tutorial kept pestering me with questions. One I liked was: If a philosopher teaches you that it is not wrong to lie, why do you not suspect he is lying to you when he says so? Another I liked was: Is it merely an arbitrary postulate to believe that all beliefs are mere arbitrary postulates?”

Phaethon asked: “What convinced Xenophon? Was he exposed to the same thought virus?”