“The Commissariat was abolished before the end of the Era of the Fourth Mental Structure. You cannot possibly be so old as that. That was over many thousands of years before immortality was discovered.”
“Second Immortality. The Compositions have a collective immortality of memory-records. Individual members die, but the mass-mind continues.”
“Are you part of the Eleemosynary Composition?”
“It is not yet time for me to speak. Finish your tale. Xenophon tricked you, and you opened your memories?”
“That is a proper summation. He has an agent disguised as a pantomime clown. Hunting for me.”
“Hunted by clowns? How quaint.”
“Ahem. Well, there is a an explanation, sir. I was dressed in Harlequinade when Xenophon first met me, so he dressed his agent as a character from the same comedy. Scaramouche—the agent—attacked me with a complex mind virus, a civilization of viral information, actually, while I was linked to the mentality. If I log on again, I will be attacked, and perhaps erased and replaced.”
“The Sophotechs permit this…?”
“They have no technology to understand what is being done, or how the information particles are being transmitted into a shielded system. The technology is not from the Golden Oecumene.”
“It is not from an earlier period. It is not from before the Oecumene.”
“I am not speaking of ‘before,’ my good sir. I am speaking of ‘outside.’ I was attacked by invaders from another star.”
Two of the vultureheads looked toward each other, exchanging a sardonic glance of disbelief. Even on the bird faces the expression was clear to read. “Oh. How interesting. What other star? No life above the unicellular level has yet been discovered in the deep of space. The colony sent out to Cygnus X-l perished in unspeakable horror, long, long ago.”
“It is something from Cygnus. Something survived the fall of the Silent Oecumene. An evil Sophotech called the Nothing Machine.”
“This sounds to be the stuff of fancy, a dream, a memory-entertainment, a mistake,” said the vulture. “Where is your evidence? Surely your wealthy Sophotechs can examine your brain-information, and discover what is true and what is false in your mind.”
“The examination was performed—the readings showed my memories of the attack were false.”
“And from this you conclude…?”
“I conclude that the readings were tampered with.”
“And your support for this conclusion is…?”
“Well, obviously the evil mind-virus tampered with them.”
“Let me see if I understand this, young aristocrat. We live in a society where men can edit their brain-information at will, so that even their deepest thoughts, instincts, and convictions can be overwritten and rewritten, and no memories can be trusted. You find you have a memory of being attacked by a nonexistent mind-virus created by a nonexistent Sophotech from a long-dead colony. Upon examination, readings show the memory is false, and your conclusion is that your unbelievable, entirely absurd memories are true, and the readings showing them to be false are unreliable. Is that right?”
“That’s right.”
“Ah. I merely wanted to be certain of the circumstances.”
“My tale, whether it is believed or not, whether it is believable or not, is still mine, and I will still act as if it were true—I dare not do otherwise. And, true or not, believable or not, the telling of my tale is done; I would have yours, if you will return the courtesy, for I cannot imagine who you might be.”
“You would not know the name I call myself these days. Once, I was called the Bellipotent Composition.”
Phaethon was taken aback. “Impossible! Bellipotent was destroyed two aeons ago!”
“No. Only disbanded. The memories still were on record. I have part of those memories.”
“You mean, then, that you have studied the Bellipotent Composition…?”
“No. I am he. How many minds does it take to make a mass-mind? A thousand? A hundred? Ten? Two? I say it only takes one; and I am he. I say that I am still the mass-mind of the Bellipotent, even though my membership has only one member. I am the last of a mighty host, but I was of that host. The air marshal branch-mind of the Eastern Warlock-killing division surrendered to Alternate Organization Solomon Oversoul after the Three Horrid Seconds of the Battle of Peking Network Operating System Core. You do not know history, do you? I see it in your face. This surrender happened in Pre-Epoch 44101, three hundred years into the Era of the Fifth Mental Structure. I was part of the air group who surrendered. We were permitted, under the peace contract, to retain our identities.”
“And you simply roam free these days? You were not punished?”
“You really know nothing of history, do you? I was kept in an underground cyst for a space of centuries equal to what Warlock astrologers calculated to be the projected lifetime sum of every person who had been killed in the bombing runs. After I was released, I was part of the death lottery instituted by the Witch-King of Corea.”
“Death lottery…?”
“The reason for the war is not what history reports. History says it was because the Warlocks had found the Shadow-mind technology, which permitted them an alternate state of consciousness and allowed them to falsify noetic readings, to lie under oath. Humbug. That was not a significant cause. The significant cause of the war between the mass-minds and the Warlocks was that our mental systems were incompatible. Bellipotent demanded exact and rigid justice, one law for all, executed without fear or favoritism. But the Warlock brain thinks in leaps of logic, flashes of insight, patterns of symmetry. To them, the justice must be poetic justice, and the punishment grotesquely sculpted to fit the crime, or else it is not justice at all.
“Thus, when it came my turn to be punished, it amused the Witch-King to impose on me and my fellow bombardiers the same uncertainty and fear our bomb drops had imposed on others. We were permitted to wander free, but with explosive charges surgically implanted in our crania. Random radio pulses were sent out, so that we were executed by lottery, at random places and times. Sometimes other signals, door openers or automobile guides, set off the charges. After a hundred years of that, I alone survived. Now I ferry the gentle Deep Ones to and from their underwater kingdoms.”
“Horrible!”
“No. My biological parts have withered and been replaced many times. All trace of the explosives have been removed.”
“But how could you tolerate the uncertainty?”
“Ah. Does this question come from Phaethon, who once dreamed of traveling far beyond where any noumenal mentality could reach? Random and instant death would have been just as prevalent on your voyage, had you ever made one. And, once colonies, armed with technologies equal to our own, were planted among the several nearby stars, that same risk of instant and random death would then be imposed upon every colonist and every citizen of the Oecumene, since war, at any moment, could break out again at any time.”
“Men are not so irrational as that.”
“Are they not? Are they not? You have never known war, young fool. Of whom were you so afraid when you stood at the top of the ramp of this, my ship? Irrational creatures from another star who seek your murder? Or is that a delusion only of your own? Come now! Either you are deluded, or they are mad. Neither option speaks well for the future of peaceful star colonization.” The creature opened and shut its several beaks. “I am only sorry that you have failed so utterly.”
Phaeton felt the deck tilting under him. In this windowless room, he could not tell what this manoeuvre meant.
He said, “Why? Did you hope for war again so much?”
“Not at all. War is horrible beyond description. It is tolerable only because there is something that is worse. No; you misunderstand what I hope.”
“Enlighten me.”
“Ah! Yahh! I lived in the last years of the Fourth Era, when vast mass-minds ruled all the Earth. There was no crime, no war, no rudeness, and (except for certain areas in North America and Western Europe) no individuality. It was a static age. There were no changes.
“The Fifth Era came when certain Compositions began to use other brain-formations in their mind-groups. The Warlock brain was quick and intuitive, artistic, insightful. The Invariant brain is immune to passion or fear, immune to threat, immune to blackmail. The Cerebelline brain can see all points of view at once, and understand all elements of complex systems at one glance. We could not compete against such minds as these, nor would they submit themselves tamely to the group-needs of the group-minds. And yet the Fifth Era was finer than the Fourth. Genius and invention ruled. Irrational Warlocks conquered the Jupiter system, which they had no economic reason to do; stoic Invariants methodically colonized the pre-Demeter asteroids, indifferent to suffering or hardship. Cerebellines, grasping whole thought-systems at once, developed the Noetic Unification Theorem, which led to developments and technologies we mass-minds never would have or could have guessed. Without the self-referencing participles described in Mother-of-Numbers’s famous dissertation/play/equations, the technology for self-aware machines would not have come about. The scientific advances of those self-aware machines are more than I can count, including the development of the Noumenal mathematics, which led to this present age, the age of second immortality.
“Now comes this age; the Seventh, and it is a static age again. So, then, Phaethon Zero of Nothing, do you see? Look back and forth along the scheme of history. There would have been war among the stars if your dream had not been killed. Do not doubt it; the Hortators, and their pet Nebuchednezzar, are smart enough to come correctly to that conclusion. But would that age of war have led to better ages beyond that? Perhaps the Earth and Jupiter’s Moons and the other civilized places of the Golden Oecumene would have been destroyed in the first round of interstellar wars. But, if, in return, a hundred planets were seeded with new civilizations, or a million, I say the cost would have been worth the horror.”
Phaethon was silent, not certain how to take this comment. Was the cyborg praising him, or condemning him? Or both?
But it did not matter now. The point was academic. The Hortators had won.
“Where are you taking me?” asked Phaethon.
“Yaah! Truly you know nothing of history. There is only one city on the planet that did not sign the Hortator accords, because the Cerebelline-formed mass-mind running it did not care whether she was mortal or immortal, and she did not give in to Orpheus’s pressure. Old-Woman-of-the-Sea has governed the Oceanic Environmental Protectorate since the middle of the Fifth Era. She, like me, is far older than your Golden Oecumene. She can afford to ignore the Hortators, since even they would not care to interfere with the mind that controls the balancing forces between all the plankton and all the nanomachinery floating in the waves, or who shepherds the trillion submicroscopic thermal cells of all the tropic zones, which disperse or condense the ocean heat and hinder the formation of tornadoes. Her city is called Talaimannar.”
“The place Harrier told me to go!” exclaimed Phaethon happily. Now he would find out what mystery, what subtle plan the superintellect of Harrier had in mind.
“Of course, young fool,” said the cyborg. “If I dropped you any other place, I would be guilty of helping you commit an act of trespass. Why do you think the Hortators let me get away with this? I am not helping you. It takes no genius to figure out you must go to Talaimannar; there is no other place to go. It is where all cast-offs and gutter-sweepings go.”
Phaethon felt a sensation of crushing despair. All this time, he had been nursing the secret hope that Harrier Sophotech had some plan, some unthinkably clever scheme, to extract Phaethon from this situation, a plan that would bear fruit once he reached Talaimannar. It had comforted him during his many sleepless nights, his nightmare-ridden slumbers.
But no. Harrier had not been telling him anything other than what all other exiles were told.
It had been a foolish hope to begin with. While it had lasted, the foolish hope had been better than no hope. In order to go on, one needed a reason to go on. What was to be Phaethon’s reason now?
A vibration shivered through the ship frame.
“We’re here,” said the cyborg. “Get out.”
A hatch Phaethon had not seen before now opened in a section of the deck. Beyond was a gangway leading down and out. Phaethon blinked in a splash of reflected sunlight shining up through the hatch from below. He smelled fresh tropic air, heavy with moisture and orchid-scents; he heard the noise of surf, the raw calls of seabirds.
“Wait,” said Phaethon. “If I am not hallucinating, then there are agents from another star hunting me, then to send me out there, the one place all exiles go, is to send me to the one place where they will find me.”
“I have very ancient privileges, which even the formation-draft of the Foederal Oecumenical Commonwealth Constitutional Logic recognizes. It is called a grandfather clause. Legal rights that existed from before the Oecumene are still recognized by the Oecumene. An historical curiosity, is it not? The movements of my airships are surrounded by privacy; I cannot be traced, except at court order, and I fly below the levels air-traffic control requires. I am well-known in Kisumu; I have flown the routes to Quito and Samarinda for a thousand years. Any housecoater or perigrinator of the street could point my ship out, and know I can move unnoticed. You understand? That is why the Deep Ones patronize me. They wish for privacy as well. Until and unless you give yourself away, such as, for example, by logging on to the mentality, you should be safe here from your imaginary foes.”
Phaethon stepped over to the hatch, but turned, and spoke over his shoulder. “You said there was one thing even worse than war, a thing so terrible that even war is tolerable by contrast. What is it?”
“Defeat.” And a robotic arm came from the wall, took Phaethon by the shoulder, and thrust him stumbling down the gangway. Sunlight blinded him. His hands and knees struck the open grillwork floor of the docking tower with a clash of noise. The shadow of the airship passed over him. He rose to his feet and looked up in time to see the huge cylindrical machine rise up out of reach, abandoning him.