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  Phaethon sent: "Stop. Are you the same individual, the Neptunian Legate, who first accosted me in the Saturn-tree grove on Earth? Where is Neoptolemous? Your speech pattern is entirely different from his."

  "I have not yet described the benefits of the Mandelbrot Fractal configuration for files sixteen through twenty-four; nor have I described the one hundred eighty-two other mental configurations or time systems for apprehending my client's first message. By asking a question at this time, you are attempting to enter question-and-answer dialogue without first establishing dialogue format."

  Phaeton: "Nevertheless, pass my question along to your client. I consider the question of his identity paramount, since, if he is not Neoptolemous, then he is not an individual who has any right to be here, and I will have him thrown off the bridge."

  "My client in the meanwhile has posted four hundred twenty new communication files, ranging from topics including decision-actions trees predicting the outcome of this conversation, compliments and new forms of art relating to the appearance and aspects of this bridge, an in-depth information study of the concept of 'self-hood' as it relates to certain abstract philosophic ideals, a prospectus for the marriage and conglomeration of your identity and neural systems into his own, along with explanations of the memory benefits and a sample model of the pleasure-reward sharing cycle offered to new members."

  Phaethon allowed anger to sound in the voice he sent: "This is not responsive to my demand. I am recording this conversation for legal purposes, and hereby make demand that, if you are not a trespasser, you immediately identify yourself, and show by what right you claim to be here. Where is Neoptolemous? Do not utter further irrelevancies."

  "My client wishes to draw your attention to certain legal documents waiting for you attention in the preliminary introduction file of his first communication grouping. These documents include various writs and titles showing his ownership of the Phoenix Exultant" "What?"

  "Please examine the file. You will find included my client's procedural claim to be thought-heir to Neoptolemous; extrapolations and legal briefs on possible outcomes of a counterclaim or challenge to his rights of ownership; a copy of Neoptolemous's internal mental constitution; voting records and internal mental decision hierarchies; and, finally, Diomedes's recorded affirmation and legal subscription to that constitution before he joined, as well as, in a postscript, noetic records scanning his brain showing that Diomedes did in fact understand the rules and possible outcomes of merging his mind with my client's, including his acknowledgment that the absorption of his lesser personality into my master's greater personality would be permissible and acceptable, and not legally grounds for a charge of murder, provided it was done according to the agreed-upon legal rules and standards, a copy of which, as I have said, has thoughtfully been provided for you to peruse. "And, it is incumbent on me to point out that, had you accepted any of the mental-configuration formats labeled 'fractal' in the file I proffered you earlier, this information would have already automatically been sent to your midbrain emotion centers and memory, so that not only would you remember all this as if you had always recalled it but all internal mental distress, questioning, grief, and pondering as to whether or not my client truly is, essentially, Diomedes and Neoptolemous, would also have been automatically inserted into your nervous system. You would have been instantaneously run through the cycle of grief, anger, and futile challenge, and would already be experiencing a pleasant resignation to reality, and congratulating yourself on your stoicism. Would you like me to download this mental construction into your midbrain? Please open your private mental files and render the access codes."

  Phaethon felt a peculiar sensation of crawling horror. (This sensation was made peculiar by the slowness with which it happened. Phaethon's sluggish false blood reacted slowly as the threads of the retardation field surrounding him prodded molecules of adrenaline, each individually, into his bloodstream. Other parts of the field deliberately pulled his nape hairs erect.)

  "You ... you are Xenophon, aren't you?"

  "The question of identity is complex. The preliminary files appended to the first information burst contain the debates, records, conclusions, and extrapolated questions-and-answers surrounding this issue."

  Phaethon sent: "The Xenophon half of Neoptole-mous consumed and absorbed the Diomedes half during the ten minutes it took you to travel down the ship axis and reach the bridge. That's why you started the trip in human form, according to Silver-Gray conventions, looking like Queen Victoria, and why you arrived looking like an amoeboid. Isn't that right?"

  "I repeat my last answer. All questions as to my identity are answered. Lower your mental defenses and open the channels leading into your brain. As owner of this ship, and your new employer, I demand that all crew be examined for honesty of intentions, mental reservations, and memories related to possible acts of sabotage or ship tampering. If you fail to comply, it is I, the owner of this vessel, who will have you, the trespasser, removed."

  How should he answer? Should he blast Xenophon now? The energy mirrors were already aimed and focused. Or should he pin the monster in place with ninety gravities, and read what he could from the remains of the crushed brain slush with the portable noetic reader sitting by his left chair arm? The main drive, after all, was primed and ready.

  Was there any reason to continue this absurd pretense?

  At that moment, the medical stealth remotes implanted in Xenophon's body fed additional information into Phaethon's armor. There was a mass of neural tissue, a brain, with no nerve fibers linking its upper spinal control nerves to any circuits. This brain's sensory nerves were being fed through a regulator controlled by the central Xenophon brain group, and additional one-way links were running to the midbrain (seat of the emotions) and the pons (where the pain center of the brain was kept).

  A configuration analysis detected no threat. This brain, after all, was utterly helpless. Whoever was in the brain had no more control over their own emotions than a raving drunk, had no muscles or circuits to manipulate, and could only see and feel whatever things or whatever pains as the master brains would choose to impose.

  And so the simple-minded stealth remotes had, until now, ignored this extra brain mass. A higher-level strategy formulator in the stealth remotes had noticed this prisoner as a possible ally.

  It was Diomedes.

  Motionless, helpless, betrayed and trapped in hell by this enemy.

  Phaethon decided there was no reason to continue any pretense after all.

  The energy mirrors erupted with fire, with concentrated scalpel lasers aimed at specific nerve clusters, with more general washes of electric and focused high-energy particles meant to burn out sense organs, cripple legs and motor control, disrupt links between and through the Neptunian body.

  At the same time, twenty-five gravities of acceleration flattened all loose objects in the room, hurling Xenophon and his ally bodies against the far wall. It looked just as if the whole huge room had just wildly been thrown over on its side. Actually, the carousel of the ring in which the bridge was held could not reorient quickly enough to keep the local deck perpendicular to the sudden thrust. Fields made of pseudo-matter, not unlike the retardation fields in-terwebbing Phaethon's body on the captain's chair, trapped every cell of the Neptunian bodies in place. Those webs allowed only those biochemical functions to continue that the stealth remotes did not classify as potentially threatening. Consciousness was not one of them.

  For now, Phaethon wanted prisoners, not corpses. The higher centers of the brain and associated neurocir-cuitry had bioelectrical patterns in the Neptunian modes imposed upon them by the lurking stealth remotes, patterns, which, in a base neuroform, would have been fourth-stage delta waves, deep, dreamless sleep.

  In that same split instant of time (long before Xenophon's scalded, blinded, crippled, and stunned body could hit the far bulkhead), the portable noetic reader to Phaethon's left came to life. Despite the storm of energies lash
ing the chamber, it retrieved the information from the stealth remotes, positioned in and around the Neptunian's main nerve channels, were pinpoint-beaming to the reader heads.

  By the time direction of gravity returned to deck-perpendicular as the straining carousel reoriented all the rooms and chambers in the ring (including the bridge) to right angles, Phaethon had a working copy of Xenophon's brain trapped in the noetic reader. It was, after all, also a noumenal mentality recorder.

  But now for the important part.

  The stealth remotes monitoring the ship mind indicated that the virus-infected sectors had been dumped, a new mind reestablished, and that the full computing power of the ship was at his command. He signaled to his mannequins. "What communications or signals have left this chamber or this ship? Track and trace them."

  The Jason mannequin reported that no transmission, of any type of energy the ship instruments could detect, had left the chamber, or the ship, nor was there any breach in the hull, such as a collision with antimatter might produce.

  The Byrd mannequin brought up views of the other Neptunians everywhere on the ship, where they had been caught by the sudden, unexpected, tremendous acceleration. Those who the stealth remotes had concluded were not allies of Xenophon had been given enough warning to find pseudo-material retardation fields, to survive the shock; others had been downloaded into more pressure-resistant brain boxes, since the Neptunian neuroform allowed for rapid transmission and storage of neural information, and survived even if their bodies were crushed. Many had been injured; none had been damaged beyond the point of recovery. Resurrection teams were already being formed in the ship mind and telerepresented to the severely injured. But, so far, there was no panic, no outrage. Being Neptunians, their bodies were insensitive to pain, except when they chose to feel it, and as for their minds, they chose to regard all this as some huge prank, or hoax.

  But there were no transmissions detected coming from any of them, either, nor was there any activity at all coming from the body masses Xenophon had left behind on the ship-mind decks, or in the fuel axis.

  The estimator from the stealth remotes said, "There are no transmissions detected from any source. Xenophon either has no ability to transmit to his superior during an emergency, or prepared no deadman switch or alternate-despite that he must have known he was walking into a trap-or else has no superior, and he himself is the Silent One in charge."

  But the Ulysses mannequin said, "With all due respect, sir, the readings are not complete. We ourselves have opened the hull ports to extend antennae, detectors, and to send signals to and from the attendant ships which are circling us, watching for transmissions. Also, the drive is operating-"

  Phaethon said: "Wait!"

  Because, at that moment, red status lights lit on the neotic unit. Phaethon looked at the golden tablet through the ship's Middle Dreaming, and understood that the noetic reader could not analyze or interpret certain sections of Xenophon's mind. Some of the brain segments had been encrypted, thinking by a means, or in a formation, utterly unknown to the builders of the noetic unit. This was a thought formation, a mental language, so to speak, that the neotic unit could not decode.

  These encrypted segments could not be decrypted by any key or process known to the legible parts of Xenophon's mind.

  The encrypted segments of the brain had not been located in the cortex or main consciousness circuits of the neural architecture. Which meant they had not been located in the brain sections targeted for nar-coleptic paralysis. Which meant...

  Phaethon focused a communication beam from his armor to the remotes now attached to Xenophon's nervous system. "You are not unconscious."

  The answer came back along the same beam: "No. This one was curious as to your actions. They seem to be without meaning. You will explain."

  "Your speech pattern has changed again. Are you Xenophon, or someone else?"

  "Questions of identity are meaningless. By what right do you hold me here, discomforted, limited? You are not a Constable, you have no warrant, you have not obeyed the forms and procedures. Do you suppose me to be a prisoner of what you call war, perhaps? But you have not treated me according to the civilized formalities to which you pretend to adhere. Explain your conduct."

  Phaethon increased the pressure of the retardation fields webbing the Neptunian body, and sent the medical remotes to sever any nerve trunks they thought were suspicious. Little flashes of laser-scalpel fire appeared in the Neptunian's brain. Phaethon sent no answer except: "Where are your superior officers? What are your strengths and resources, goals and means? Where is your starship? What are your motives? Where is your Sophotech?"

  "Irrelevant. These inquiries refer to fictional entities. There is no Sophotech, no starship, no superior officers. No strengths, no means, no resources."

  Phaethon thought this answer was a lie. "Decode your thoughts and allow my noetic unit to read them."

  "Impossible. The encryption system is based on the nonrational mathematics which obtain within the interior of a black-hole event horizon. That mathematics cannot be translated into yours by any means. The premises of that mathematics were transmitted. Your society has rejected these beyond-truths."

  "Are you referring to the undefined mathematics terms in the Last Broadcast? Infinity divided by infinity, zero raised to the exponential power of zero, and all that?"

  "To us, it is your mathematics which are not defined. Your mathematics does not depict the conditions which obtain beyond the event horizon of rationality. Likewise, your laws and your morality lack both universal application and self-consistency. I have committed no act of aggression, threatened no one, harmed no one. This ship was turned over to me, and the identities I now embrace were given to me, entirely in accord with your laws and customs."

  "You sent that thing inside of Daphne's horse to attack me. You tried to kill her."

  "False. The actions of that other unit cannot be attributed to me; it was a separate and complete entity. It is true that I equipped it with a philosophy and outlook which would render it likely, ready, and able to perform a suicide mission, but I issued no orders. The concept of orders and of control is entirely alien to those of my Oecumene and civilization. We do not even have a word for it.

  "And furthermore, Phaethon is the one who opened fire first. I have killed no one. Only Atkins has killed. You are in violation of proper conduct. Release me, make amends, restore me."

  Phaethon sat motionless in the captain's chair, held in place by a retardation field. A much stronger field pinned the Neptunian body in place, and the gravity pressure had flattened it against the deck. Arming beams and low-level charges, like the beams of searchlights, reached from the energy mirrors to either side and glinted across the glistening blue body surface. All the internal organs, nerve circuitry, and biomechanic tissues had settled to the bottom of the body mass and were flattened.

  Now what? Should he argue with the Silent One, threaten him, torture him? So far it had seemed not unwilling to talk, even if it did not answer questions.

  Phaethon tried again. "If there is no starship, how did you arrive here from the Silent Oecumene? How many others came with your expedition? How did you enter the Golden Oecumene without being detected?"

  "I was born in the Golden Oecumene. I am a citizen thereof with rights which you are trampling."

  "Who are you?"

  "I am Xenophon, of course. And yet part of me, the part whose thoughts you cannot read, the part who is proof against your intrusion, comes from a wise and ancient civilization, a child to the Golden Oecumene, a child who surpassed her parent in beauty and genius and wealth and worth. Listen: I have no reason not to tell you the tale.

  'I was born when Xenophon, at Farbeyond Station, erected a radio laser at a point in distant space where the noise and interference of the Golden Oecumene had been left behind. Xenophon had been mapping Phaethon's possible routes for him, through the dark matter clouds, the particle storms which fill interstellar space. And
he found a hole, a gap, a thin spot, in the clouds of dark matter which surround the Cygnus X-l Nebula. Radio conditions were good. Xenophon's receivers were very powerful. He used your money to create them. He sent a signal. Then he slept. Xenophon had constructed the machineries and antennae out of his own body substance, as is the tradition among Nep-tunians. Xenophon woke only when a signal, carrying what it carried from the Second Oecumene, entered his body, and entered his brain."

  "You are that ghost? You were transmitted here from the Silent Oecumene?"

  "Surely you have viewed the Last Broadcast. Surely you have wondered who was the subject who made that broadcast. Surely you have wondered why, at the last moment, he is so afraid, and then so overjoyed, to realize that he is infected with a mental virus, to realize that his mental virus now possesses him, and will possess anyone who properly receives his message. Your Golden Oecuemene received a corrupted version of the original message, the signal strength was weak, and the subtextual channels, where the mental virus was hidden, did not arrive. Pity! Had the signal been strong, all people in the Golden Oecumene would now be what Xenophon is; all would now be me! As it is, only Xenophon enjoys this privilege."

  "Are you a copy of the man who made the Final Broadcast from the Silent Oecumene? Or are you the virus? Or what are you?"

  "He is called Ao Varmatyr. He was the son and creation copy of Ao Ormgorgon Darkwormhole, our culture hero who founded the Second Oecumene. He is now part of the oversoul of which I was once part, as is Ormgorgon, and all others. But I do not claim to be him. I am as much him as I am any other. Questions of identity are immaterial."

  Phaethon realized he had not asked a central question: "Why are you doing this? What is your motive?"

  "To aid and help Phaethon. We are the children of the first successful star colony. Now there will be more. We knew where your first port of call would be, had to be, even if you yourself have not yet acknowledged this. Where can this great starship go most easily to refuel?"