The Golden Transcendence Read online

  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 ice-holds 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?”

  “No. He believed the story Ao Varmatyr told without prompting. The same tale told to you; Xenophon believed in the implacable inhumanity of the Sophotechs to begin with. Many Neptunians do.”

  Atkins said, “So where is this Nothing Sophotech now? Have any clues as to where those instructions came from?”

  “None. But since Ao Varmatyr was programmed to make his ‘reports’ unwittingly, he did not choose time or circumstance under which to make them. (Nor the content, which probably consisted of an unedited information dump from his memory.) Hence they come at regular intervals.” Diomedes nodded toward the hourglass in the middle of the table, and smiled again.

  Phaethon said, “I haven’t lived through as many spy dramas as my wife, but one would think enemies trying to hide would not fall into such predictable patterns.”

  Diomedes said, “Such weaknesses are an inevitable result of the Silent Oecumene way of doing things. If you treat people like machines, you must give them mechanistic orders. Hence we know when the next broadcast will take place.”

  They all watched the running sands in the glass for a quiet while, each with his own thoughts.

  Diomedes spoke up. “There is still much I do not understand about what happened just now. Marshal? May I ask, if it is not one of these military secrets in which you put so much stock . . . ?

  Atkins raised one eyebrow. “You can ask.”

  “How did you survive inside Phaethon’s armor? You decelerated toward the Neptunian embassy at ninety gravities. But only Phaethon has a specially designed body to withstand those pressures. That was precisely why Ao Varmatyr did not suspect you were not Phaethon. How did you survive?”

  Atkins said curtly: “I didn’t.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Phaethon said: “His body was crushed into bloody paste inside my armor. Meanwhile his mind was stored in the noetic unit. It was not until we were at rest, and my suit lining had a chance to reconstruct the military-basic marine body it was carrying, that I transferred and reincarnated him. Everything he ‘saw’ before that was merely sent from my armor cameras into his recorded mind. He wasn’t inside the armor, looking out, until later, when he drew his first painful breath.”

  Diomedes looked impressed. He asked: “Who was inside the Ulysses mannequin? The one that was incinerated by Ao Varmatyr?”

  Atkins said: “One of my sparring partners. A training-exercise routine.”

  “Programmed to lose?”

  “Not really. But I had only given it ancient weapons and techniques, dating from the early Sixth and late Fifth Era. In other words, weapon systems the Silent Ones knew we had. So it lost. Only whe
n Ao Varmatyr was convinced that he was in complete control did he show his true colors, and start ordering the Phoenix Exultant into a military posture.”

  Phaethon spoke up. “I suspect that even Ao Varmatyr himself did not know, until he did it, what he was going to do with the Phoenix Exultant when he achieved control of her. Using her as a warship to strike a deadly blow against the Golden Oecumene was not, I think, what he would have done had he believed his own tale. I can only conclude the decision to kill came from the Nothing Mastermind; perhaps some buried command overrode his normal judgment and conscience.”

  Atkins said, “I disagree. Ao Varmatyr had nothing but violence in mind from the first. Why else was he so tricky? He pretended to be Xenophon as long as he could, and then stayed quiet until I found him hiding.”

  Phaethon nodded. But there was a thoughtful, perhaps wistful, look on his features.

  Atkins, seeing that look, said, “You believed him, didn’t you? You would have gone with him, had it been you, and not me, being you, wouldn’t you?”

  Phaethon said “Perhaps” in a tone of voice that meant certainly yes. “I wasn’t sure—I am still not sure—how much of what Ao Varmatyr said was a lie. But there may be people to rescue at Cygnus X-1, people of a spirit like my own, and there may be great deeds to do there. It might have been worth the risk to go, just in case he was telling the truth.”

  Atkins said, “Then I’m just glad it was me who was you, and not you. Otherwise, Ao Varmatyr might have convinced you.”

  Phaethon said reluctantly, “No. His story was a lie.”

  Diomedes leaned forward, and said, “But Ao Varmatyr believed his own story.”

  “What?”

  “The tale, at least to him, was true. What few of his thoughts I could understand made that clear. I suspect the Silent Oecumene did have her downfall in just the way he described, and that the people there, good Phaethon, were, perhaps once, not unlike you.”

  Phaethon said, “I would like to believe that—I would like it very much. But at least part of the tale was a lie.”

  Diomedes said, “How so?”

  “The relationship between the Sophotechs and the men as depicted in that tale made no sense. How could they be hostile to each other?”

  Diomedes said, “Aren’t men right to fear machines which can perform all tasks men can do, artistic, intellectual, technical, a thousand or a million times better than they can do? Men become redundant.”

  Phaethon shook his head, a look of distant distaste on his features, as if he were once again confronted with a falsehood that would not die no matter how often it was denounced. In a voice of painstaking patience, he said: “Efficiency does not harm the inefficient. Quite the opposite. That is simply not the way it works. Take me, for example. Look around: I employed partials to do the thought-box junction spotting when I built this ship. My employees were not as skilled as I was in junction spotting. It took them three hours to do the robopsychology checks and hierarchy links I could have done in one hour. But they were in no danger of competition from me. My time is too valuable. In that same hour it would have taken me to spot their thought-box junction, I can earn far more than their three-hour wages by writing supervision architecture thought flows. And it’s the same with me and the Sophotechs.

  “Any midlevel Sophotech could have written in one second the architecture it takes me, even with my implants, an hour to compose. But if, in that same one second of time, that Sophotech can produce something more valuable—exploring the depth of abstract mathematics, or inventing a new scientific miracle, anything at all (provided that it will earn more in that second than I earn in an hour)—then the competition is not making me redundant. The Sophotech still needs me and receives the benefit of my labor. Since I am going to get the benefit of every new invention and new miracle put out on the market, I want to free up as many of those seconds of Sophotech time as my humble labor can do.

  “And I get the lion’s share of the benefit from the swap. I only save him a second of time; he creates wonder upon wonder for me. No matter what my fear of or distaste for Sophotechs, the forces in the marketplace, our need for each other, draw us together.

  “So you see why I say that not a thing the Silent One said about Sophotechs made sense. I do not understand how they could have afforded to hate each other. Machines don’t make us redundant; they increase our efficiency in every way. And the bids of workers eager to compete for Sophotech time creates a market for merely human work, which it would not be efficient for Sophotechs to underbid.”

  Diomedes spoke in a distant, haunted voice: “But, friend, I have been inside the Silent One’s mind, and you have not. You did not see his memories of luxury and splendor. . . . They were the Lords of the Second Oecumene, the masters of the singularity fountains! They did not work. They did not compete. They did not bid, or buy. They did not have markets, or money. The only thing of value to them was their reputation, their artistic verve, their wit, their whimsy, and the calm dignity with which they welcomed their inevitable fall in darkened coffins into the blood red supergravity well of their dark star.”

  There was silence around the table for a time.

  More sand fell through the glass.

  Diomedes said, “It’s odd. Their society was not unlike our own. A peaceful utopia, but, unlike ours, one without laws, or money. What strange, incomprehensible force of fate or chance or chaos ordained her downfall?”

  Atkins snorted. “It seems strange only if you believe that garbage Ao Varmatyr believed. His society was not set up the way he thought it was. No society could be.”

  Diomedes looked surprised. “And by what psychic intuition do you know this?”

  “Its obvious. That society could not exist,” said Atkins.

  “Nor will it ever,” added Phaethon.

  The two men exchanged smiling glances.

  “We are thinking of the same thing, aren’t we?” said Atkins, nodding.

  “Of course!” said Phaethon.

  The two men spoke at once:

  “They certainly had laws,” said Atkins.

  “They certainly had money,” said Phaethon.

  The two men exchanged puzzled glances.

  Atkins nodded. “You first.”

  Phaethon said, “No civilization can exist without money. Even one in which energy is as cheap and free as air on Earth, would still have some needs and desires which some people can fulfill better than others. An entertainment industry, if nothing else. Whatever efforts—if any—these productive people make, above and beyond that which their own idle pastimes incline them to make, will be motivated by gifts or barter bestowed by others eager for their services. Whatever barter keeps its value best over time stays in demand, and is portable, recognizable, divisible, will become their money. No matter what they call it, no matter what form it takes, whether cowry shells or gold or grams of antimatter, it will be money. Even Sophotechs use standardized computer seconds to prioritize distributions of system resources among themselves. As long as men value each other, admire each other, need each other, there will be money.”

  Diomedes said, “And if all men live in isolation? Surrounded by nothing but computer-generated dreams, pleasant fictions, and flatteries? And their every desire is satisfied by electronic illusions which create in their brains the sensations of satisfaction without the substance? What need have men to value other men then?”

  “Men who value their own lives would not live that way.”

  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 Varmatyr 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.”