“Oh, don’t feel bad. It was a good try for an amateur. The target was stunned for almost a second. You made it use up a lot of its ablative shielding.”
“Thanks,” said Phaethon without enthusiasm.
“But you’re right. I should have held my fire. Right now, all we have is one vector of one line of communication. We have no idea how far away the destination was, nor will we know until we get a second line. And if the thing was broadcasting to a relay, that line tells us nothing. So we don’t have as many clues to go on as we would have, if it had taken your head and gone off. But it was one of those judgment calls, you know?” He smiled. “In any case, I can make out my after-action report now and still keep my zero civilian casualty rate.”
“So you saved us to allow you to simplify your paperwork, is that it?”
“Got to keep your priorities straight, sir. But don’t worry. We need at least a second line to trace back, in order to triangulate on where the Silent One agents are sending their messages. So we’re going to have to find another Silent One agent, or wait here till another one comes by to murder or kidnap you.”
“And I suppose you are going to tell me that I have to remain mortal until that happens, won’t I? Because a Hortator reinstatement would be a public event that any remaining Silent One spies would notice, right? And so I am just supposed to wait here till I am killed just because you want me to, is that correct?”
“I’ve got nothing to do with it, sir,” said Atkins, looking him straight in the eye. “It’s only a question of courage. Would you risk your life to save the Golden Oecumene? Would you die?”
“Of course. That goes without saying.” “It goes without saying these days, sir, because you and I are the only people I’ve ever heard say it. I’m asking you to join the service. The enemy must have a starship.” “That is my conclusion as well. A Silent Phoenix.” “No ship of ours would be able to catch the thing; only yours. Which means we need to get her away from the Neptunians without alerting the Silent Ones who have infiltrated the Neptunians. And, if that means letting yourself get dumped on by the College of Hortators, and staying in this immortality-less exile, then that’s what you may be asked to do.”
“Good grief, Marshal Atkins! Are you contemplating turning my Phoenix Exultant into a warship? A ship of peace, a ship meant for exploration, for the creation of new life? A horrid thought, sir! Unthinkable! Are you serious?!”
“Let me ask you. Do you think the enemy could possibly have any vessel that could outrun her?” “Unthinkable—ah. Hm. Did you say ‘her’?” “Course. All ships are ‘her.’ Beautiful piece of machinery, that ship. You come up astern an enemy target at ninety-nine percent of the speed of light, target has got no time to react, won’t even see you till you’re right there. Then do a close pass, and use her drive like a stern-chaser, dose them with lethal radiation or dump some excess antimatter fuel off into their path. Or better yet, just ram her right through them. The amount of armor that beauty carries, no normal ship would even scratch her. She’s a wonder.”
“Well. Well, I’m glad we agree on something, Marshal. But nonetheless, while I’d be perfectly willing to cooperate for any just and good cause, there is simply no possibility that I will join your military hierarchy and place myself under your orders.”
“I can’t force you. I can’t draft you. Wish I could. But I can’t. But think about joining the service. It may be the only way to get your ship back. Not only do you get a chance to serve your Oecumene, there is a good benefits package, which I can explain, too, including free housing, medical programs, and benefits. I have my own immortality circuit, which no one controls but the Warmind Sophotech group.” “You have your own circuit? Just for you? For one man?”
“Those Hortators don’t tell the military what to do. Besides, our system is not a part of any public record the Silent Ones could see. Do you get what I am trying to tell you? You really do not have much choice about joining up, Phaethon.”
Daphne said, “I’ve got something sort of really unbelievably important to say; can I interrupt at this point?”
Phaethon said, “Please excuse us for just a moment, my dear. There is just one more matter I need to settle with Marshal Atkins.”
Daphne muttered, “Which one of you produces more testosterone…? Don’t worry, lover, I think he’s got you beat on that one…”
Phaethon, with dignity, pretended not to hear. He turned to Atkins. “Let us table this discussion of my future for the moment. I’m still curious about one thing in my past. When you were following me all this time, you were also Constable Pursuivant, weren’t you? I should have realized that that must have been you. No Silent One spy would actually be trying to get me to log on to the mentality because there actually was no mind-virus waiting for me. In fact, if I had logged on just once during this whole episode, I would have found out when the false-memories were implanted. The real Silent Ones would have been trying to stop me from logging on, not encouraging me.”
Atkins blinked in confusion. “Beg pardon? Who? Who is this Constable Pursuivant…?”
Phaethon said, “You mean you don’t know…?”
They both looked at Daphne, who looked confused, and shrugged. “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
But a little voice on her ring finger said, “I know! He says he wants to talk to you.”
Phaethon looked left and right. “Ah… Atkins, do you, ahh…”
“Don’t worry, sir,” said Atkins. “I’m armed.”
“There’s an understatement if I ever heard one,” muttered Daphne. Then she said, “OK, little one. Put him on.”
A dot of light from the ring touched one of the unstained diamond parasols. A connection was made. An image formed.
Phaethon stared in surprise. “You. It was you. But why…?”
In the parasol, the very detailed image of Harrier Sophotech smiled and touched a finger to the bill of his deerstalker cap by way of salute. “My investigation was not yet complete. And I thought, to gather all the evidence, I would have to send a contingent out into space. And I knew that you could not pilot your fine ship without your armor, now could you?” His keen eyes swept back and forth across the group. “So then. Are we all ready to go…?”
“Go?” said Atkins in surprise. “Pardon me for seeming obtuse, but we don’t know where to go yet. We only have one vector. We need a second vector to triangulate.”
“That difficulty shall soon be adjusted. The particular nihilist psychology of the Silent One you just slew, Mr. Atkins, was, I calculate, a defense intended to prevent that poor creature from being, shall we say, ‘corrupted’…? During its stay here on Earth. Or should I call it exposure to Earth? The other servants of the Silent Ones we have seen so far have not manifested that particular type of unreason. You understand my meaning.”
“Forgive me for both seeming and for being obtuse,” said Phaethon, “But… You? You?”
“I? I, what, Mr. Rhadamanth?” Harrier smiled.
“How could you be Pursuivant? I thought that Sophotechs may not and do not serve in any position of Parliament, government, or military, nor (or so I thought) in the constabulary. How could you be Constable Pursuivant?”
Harrier smiled. “But I never was. Pursuivant is a fictional character, a share-mind with a download of training and police experience, who, as a character, is in the public domain. It is no crime, during masquerade, to pretend to be a public-domain character.”
“Certainly it is a crime!” said Phaethon. “It is the impersonation of a police officer!”
“No, sir,” said Harrier. “To impersonate a police officer one must show a badge or blazon or display a uniform, or do some other definite act, which a reasonable person would take to be a warrant of authority.”
“I saw you when you were a mannequin. You held out hand and said your badge was in it,” said Phaethon.
“I held out my hand, but there was nothing in it. No reasonable person would have been fooled. At that time, I was still expecting you to log on to the mentality. Once you engaged your sense-filter and saw who I really was, I thought you would submit to a noetic examination, and we could solve this matter. Surely you were expecting me to meet you in Talaimannar…?”
“In any case, when you did not log on, despite that I had provided you with every good reason to do so, I realized that your behavior differed so widely from what my anticipatory models had led me to believe, that someone must have interfered with your normal thought-process.
“Then I spent a considerable amount of time (about how long it took you to fall out the window twenty feet down into the water) checking the records, one at a time, of every citizen, neuroform, and self-aware entity in the Golden Oecumene, to see if anyone else had acted out of character, to the same degree or in the same way. (I was thinking the criminal might be using a standard mode of operation, you see.) Well, I can certainly tell that during a wild celebration has got to be the worst time to check to see if anyone is behaving oddly. Everyone behaves oddly during a party.
“After about one-half second of this, your time, or 789 billion seconds, computer time, I had narrowed the scope of my investigation down from around 300 million people, to only some 45 hundred. And guess who one of those mentally altered people turned out to be?”
Phaethon said, “Helion. They had to control him to use the Solar Array as a weapon.”
Daphne said, “Diomedes. They have to control him to seize control of the ship!”
Atkins said, “Daphne Prime. They made her drown herself to stop Phaethon from launching.”
“Hmm. Daphne Prime…? Interesting idea…” muttered the image of Harrier.
The ring on Daphne’s finger chirped: “Can I guess, too? It must be Neo-Orpheus. How else could the Silent Ones have ensured that Phaethon would suffer an exile?”
“Excellent guesses, all!” said Harrier expansively. “But no. The person I was thinking of was none other than Mr. Jason Sven Ten Shopworthy, base half-communal with projected avatar share-mind, Glass Onion School, who lives in Dead Horse, Alaska.”
Dull silence followed that announcement.
Phaethon stirred and turned, and asked his companions, “Is there anyone here besides me who is just simply incredibly irritated?”
Atkins had a what-the-hell-is-the-point-of-this look on his face. He said, “Pardon me, sir, but who is this, um, what’s his name…?”
Daphne said, “And what is so weird about this guy you had to pick him out of 45 hundred people?”
Harrier continued, “Mr. Shopworthy had made it his practice, every day, to put on his winter-body and to ski out to his local contemplationary for incremental vastenings of his special avatar personality he keeps in his supercortex. Normally, in the afternoon when he is done, he pauses for a sensory-overload type of refreshment/apotheosis at a small tea-and-wire café on the slope of New Idea Mountain-sculpture. I do not know if you are familiar with the Glass Onion habit of using sensory overloads to test what degree of mental capacity, recall, and detail-recognition they achieve after periodic vastenings…? But here is the strange behavior I noticed…”
Phaethon, Atkins, and Daphne leaned toward the image slightly, small, unconscious movements.
“Mr. Shopworthy usually sits looking north, on a mat placed near the post’s thermal-illusion window, with the balcony railing on his right. But recently he had started sitting facing the south, which is odd, because he had to prop his left elbow on the balcony to turn on the goblet for his overloader. But his control points for his hand extension are on his left elbow.”
The three of them all leaned slightly back, exchanging puzzled glances.
And Daphne said brightly, “Yoo-hoo! Can I change my guess about who is acting weird…? I pick Harrier Sophotech.”
Atkins said, “Sir, this really seems like a waste of everyone’s time. Could you just get to the point without drawing it out…?”
But it was Phaethon who suddenly spoke up.
“The main million-channel cable leading from North America to Northern Asia runs right under that area.”
Daphne and Atkins turned and stared at Phaethon.
Daphne nudged Atkins in the ribs. “It’s spreading. Now Phaethon’s doing it.”
Phaethon continued, “But the whole cable structure is surrounded by a polystructural alloy mesh, with informata placed at every mesh-point, programmed to redesign and reformat the cable housing to prevent any possible outside interference. There is simply no way anyone could break the mesh to tap into the cable. Except at a join-box, a big one, where a branch reaches up toward the surface.” Phaethon turned, and said to Daphne: “I know all about these cable designs, because I had to study the effects of the tidal changes my Lunar Orbital corrections might cause on large-scale structures. A cable that long and that big is vulnerable to crustal tides.”
Daphne said, “I really hope this is going to turn out to be important, or, at least, interesting, because I still haven’t gotten my chance to tell you about what Aurelian Sophotech said to me in the Taj Mahal.”
Atkins spoke up. “Contemplationaries situated near the Arctic Circle are usually large domes, but they can’t use ring-city point-to-point systems because of their location so far from the equator, and because of the atmospheric conditions,”
Daphne looked at Atkins with dismay. “Now you’re doing it!”
Atkins said, “All I mean is that I happen to know that arctic contemplation houses have deep-root cables to lead down underground and merge with any main cables in the area. Because contemplation houses in general have to be able to handle almost any level of thought exchange, there are usually no gateways or barriers securing their connecting link to the main cables. It’s a weak spot.”
Daphne blinked. “Weak spot?”
Atkins said, “In other words, if you were going to introduce a data convulsion, a death worm, or a virus, into a main cable, such as, for example, if you were going to sabotage the medical dream-coffin system and kill thousands of innocent and helpless people, you’d pick the area beneath a contemplation house for your insertion point.”
Daphne demanded impatiently: “And why in the world would I want to kill thousands of innocent and helpless people?”