John Wright - The Golden Transcendence

Diomedes spread his hands and shrugged. He said softly: "I don't believe the Silent Ones did either of those things...."

Atkins said, "They certainly did not value each other's lives. Didn't you notice what kind of society Ao Var-matyr was describing? The clue was right there in everything he said. What was the one thing, over and over, Ao Varmatyr kept complaining about with the Sophotechs?"

Diomedes said, "That the Sophotechs would not obey orders."

Atkins nodded. "Exactly."

Diomedes looked back and forth between the two other men. "I do not grasp your point."

Atkins tapped his own chest with a thumb. "You know me. What would I do, if a subordinate of mine disobeyed a direct order, and continued to disobey?" Diomedes said, "Punish him." Atkins said, "Can you think of a circumstance under which I'd be authorized and allowed to kill him, or to order them to kill himself?"

Diomedes looked blankly at Phaethon. Phaethon said, "The war mind not long ago said something of the sort. I don't know enough ancient history to know the details. Can't you court-martial a subordinate for cowardice in the face of the enemy, or high treason, or force him to commit ritual suicide for letting the flag touch the ground, or something like that... ?"

"Something like that," said Atkins. "But you, Phaethon. What is the worst you can do to a subordinate if he disobeys orders?" "Discharge him from employment." Atkins leaned back, looking grim and satisfied. 'You and I are from different cultures, Phaethon. You are an entrepreneur. I am a member of a military order. You make mutually agreed-upon exchanges with equals. I take orders from superiors and give orders to inferiors. Your culture is based on freedom. Mine is based on discipline. Keep that in mind when I ask the next question: Which kind of culture, one like yours or one like mine, do you suppose the Silent Oecumene was like? A Utopia without laws? Or a slave state run by a military dictator?"

Diomedes said, "Toward the end, yes, they had degenerated to a slave state. That was the tragedy of their downfall, they who had once been so free, falling so low."

Atkins shook^his head and snorted. "Nope. They were corrupt from the start. If they were so free and Utopian, why didn't they just fire any Sophotechs who wouldn't obey orders, and hire a new one? Their Sophotechs weren't employees. They were serfs."

He paused to let that sink in. Then he said, "I wonder if they just kept intact the same discipline and hierarchy they had evolved with captain and crew over the generations of their migration aboard the Naglfar, and the descendants of the captains and officers kept control over the technology, the singularity fountains, which supplied everyone with power. Or maybe they had a monopoly over the information flows and educational software. Or just controlled the money supply. You don't need to control that much to control everyone's lives."

Phaethon said in dark amazement, "Why didn't they rebel against such control? Were they disarmed?"

Aktins shook his head, coldness in his eyes. "Rebellion requires conviction. Once conviction is destroyed, slavery is welcomed and freedom is feared. To destroy conviction, all it takes is a philosophy like the one I heard Ao Varmatyr telling me. Everything else is just a matter of time."

The sands in the glass ran out.

Phaethon's face took on that dream-ridden, distant look that people who forget to engage their face-saving routine were wont to take on, when their sense filters are turned to absent things. The overmind formation rods, which reached from deck to dome, showed furious activity as the ship mind divided or recombined itself into several different architectures, rapidly, one after another, attempting to solve the novel problem of detecting the unfamiliar ghost particles in flight. Energy mirrors to the left and right, shining from balconies or rising suddenly from the deck as additional circuits engaged, flowed with changing calculations, drew schematics and maps, argued with each other, compared information, performed rapid tests. Each mirror was filled with stars as different quadrants of the surrounding space were examined.

Then, silence fell. One energy mirror after another went dark. The various segments of the ship mind, operating independently, all arrived at the same conclusions. All the maps changed until they were iterations the same map; all the schematics vanished except for one; all the screens went dark except the one focused at the center of the Solar System, pointed at the sun.

There was a cutaway image of the sun's globe prominent in the mirror nearest the table at which the men sat. A triangulation of lines depicted a spot far below the surface of the sun, at the core, between the helium and hydrogen layers, far deeper than Helion's probes and bathyspheres had ever gone.

The men around the table stared. They all three spoke at once, talking aloud to no one in particular.

Atkins: "You've got to be kidding___"

Diomedes: "My! That looks uncomfortable! How in the world did they get there?"

Phaethon: "I should have known. It was obvious! Obvious!"

Atkins: "What kind of weapon can destroy a thing that can swim in the core of a star?"

Diomedes: "Poor Phaethon! He doesn't realize what's coming next...."

Phaethon: "That's what tried to kill Father. It manipulated the core currents somehow, created a storm, and maybe even directed a discharge at Mercury Equilateral Station in the attempt (which Helion foiled) to destroy the Phoenix Exultant. Obvious! Where else to hide an object as large as a starship? Where else would mask all energetics, discharges, and broadcasts? But how did they enter the system unchallenged ... ?"

Now they started speaking to each other:

Atkins to Phaethon: "They came in along the sun's south pole, at right angle to the plane of the ecliptic. That's where you always come in when you're sneaking in, and they could not have come in along a line leading to the north pole of the sun, because that's where a community of those energy-formation dust clouds live, grown up around Helion's waste-discharge beam. Space Traffic Control would not care about anything so far away from normal shipping lanes, not if it merely looked like a rock or something. A lot of debris falls into the sun. It's where most of the garbage in the system ends up."

Diomedes to Atkins: "You know there is only one ship in the system, perhaps in all the universe, that can chase that enemy ship down into the hellish pressure and infinite fire of the sun, don't you? But the law may not suit your military convenience. You see, I do not think I am legally the owner of this ship any longer, ever since I stopped being Neoptolemous. Possession of the lien would revert to the version of Neoptolemous still in the Duma. Are you going to ask his permission? Or seize the ship like a pirate, as I know you're hungering to do? Or fight him in a law case? In either instance, how will you keep this whole thing secret, if it needs be secret?"

Phaethon to Diomedes: "Secret? What madness has possessed you, friend? Here finally we have found the foe: Let us raise the whole strength of the Oec-umene against the enemy! Secrecy, indeed! We should be sounding trumpets from the rooftops! Wait, you don't have rooftops in Neptune, do you? We should be sending deep echoes against the heavy-band layers, and sending signals reflecting from peak to peak of every iceberg at the bottom of the liquid methane sea!"

Diomedes to Phaethon (smiling behind his hand):

"That's really not the way we do things in Neptune. That's only in a scene from Xanthippe's opera."

Atkins to Phaethon (glumly): "And that's really not the way we do things in the military. In the first place, I... am... the gathered strength of the whole Oec-umene. Just me. And in the second place, I'm not going to expropriate this ship. We don't seize private goods for public use anymore, thanks to that stupid Nonag-gression Accord which should have been repealed long ago, if you ask me. Besides, when Ao Varmatyr's broadcast went out, if it held the information in Ao Varmatyr's last memories, then Nothing Sophotech, or whatever is on that ship drowned beneath the sun, already knows we're onto him."