La Trascendencia Dorada (72 page)

Before he could say a word, however, Phaethon stepped forward, ignoring the document, and threw his arms around his father. Helion, surprised, raised his arms and embraced his son.

“I never thought I would see you again,” said one of them.

“Nor I,” said the other.

The document in Helion’s hand was quite crumpled and mussed by the time they stepped apart, and Helion dabbed his joy-wet eyes with it, before he recalled what it was, and extended it sheepishly to his son.

“Thank you, Father; this is the finest of presents,” said Phaethon, accepting the crumpled and tearstained mass with a grave and solemn expression. Phaethon looked up. “And Daphne…?” Helion nodded at the air lock hatch behind him. “She is still getting changed. You know how women are; she’s picking skin color and skeletal structures. I suppose she is trying to find a body which will look as good in this gravity as a Martian’s.” (Martian women were notoriously vain of the buoyant good looks their low gravity imparted.)

Phaethon looked pensively at the air lock door. Helion, seeing that look, smiled to himself.

Helion stepped to the rail. “What is the meaning of this intricate activity?” he said, pointing upward.

“Mm?” Phaethon pulled his gaze reluctantly away from the air lock door. “Ah, that. The Phoenix Exultant is installing her solar bathyspheric modifications. There, ranged along the inner hull, are magnetic induction generators. This will create a field along the hull which will act like the treads of a burrowing vehicle, using magnetic current to force dense plasma to either side of the ship, propelling her forward and downward.” “Crawling your way into the sun?” They both wore the same expression of ironic humor. “If you like,” Phaethon nodded.

“Your refrigeration lasers, I trust, will be adequate to the task? The geometry of your hull does not minimize surface area. Also, the increasing heat of each successive layer as you approach the core exceeds the drive combustion heat of, at least, my bathyspheric probes.”

Phaeton pointed. “Can you see about forty kilometers aft of us? That is the line of advancing workers clearing an insulation space of a half kilometer inward of every hull surface, which I intend to flood with superconductive liquid. This liquid will circulate heat to my port and starboard drive cores, which I am using as heat sinks. The centerline drive core will be used as a refrigeration laser, and can easily generate heat greater than the solar core.”

Helion did a few hundred calculations in his head, frowned at the answers he got, and said, “So great a volume? With your hull, I would have thought your reflective albedo would near one hundred per cent. Why are you taking in so much heat?”

Phaethon pointed overhead and sent a signal into Helion’s sense filter, to show him exterior camera views of work being done outside the hull. “My communication antennae and thought ports are being replaced by crystalline adamantium optic fibers of a bore too large to allow the thought ports to close. I will be taking in heat at these places.”

Helions said slowly, “Why in the world are you entering combat with the Second Oecumene Sophotech—who, from what Atkins told me, excels at many forms of virus combat and mind war—with your thought ports jammed open? You will not be able to cut off your ship’s mind from external communication, unless your circuit breakers are—”

“The circuit breakers have been replaced by multiple alternate lines of hardwire, welded point to point. There is no way to break the circuit. There is no way to shut out external communication from inside. The hardwire connections cannot even be physically wrecked faster than they can regrow.” “But… why?”

“Because this is not going to be a combat. It will be something much more definitive and permanent.”

“I do not understand. Please explain it to me.” But at that moment, the air lock door opened, and there was Daphne, radiantly beautiful, her eyes alight with cool joy.

Phaethon stared, a smile growing on his features, as if he were storing the image of Daphne at the threshold in his permanent long-term memory. She wore a short-sleeved blouse and long skirt of pale silken fabric, crisp and shining, and a beribboned straw skimmer of the type called a sun hat. Despite the high gravity, she had somehow designed her feet and ankles to be able to wear high-heeled pumps. She stood smiling, her eyes twinkling, one hand raised to hold her hat to her head, as if she expected some impossible breeze to blow through the deck.

Phaethon stepped forward, arms raised as if to embrace her. “Darling, I have so much to tell you…”

She fended him off with her free hand. “Aren’t you going to introduce me to your father? Hello, Helion!” Phaethon stepped back, puzzled. He said, “What? You know him. You were just in the air lock with him.” Helion said dryly to Daphne, “Don’t toy with the boy. He’s confused enough as it is. I’m trying to learn his master plan for how he intends to survive the next few hours.” With an ostentatious gesture, Helion draw out his pocketwatch, clicked open the cover, scrutinized the dial. “Please consummate your kissing and making up with dispatch. I’d like to conclude my conversation with him.”

Daphne put her hands on her hips, glaring at Helion, “Hmph! And what makes you think, may I ask, that I’d kiss and make up with a single-minded, pigheaded clod who does not have the sense to see what’s right in front of his nose, who keeps running off, getting in trouble, getting lost, getting shot at, losing and finding bits and pieces of his memory he cannot keep straight, ruining parties, building starships, starting wars, upsetting everybody, and who keeps saying I’m not his wife whenever he’s losing any arguments with me, which he does all the time?”

Phaethon, from behind her, took her shoulders in his strong hands, and turned her body to face him, taking her in his arms, despite any protest or struggle she might have made. She put her little fists against his chest, and pushed, but in the heavy gravity, she only succeeding in losing her balance, and she found herself standing on tiptoe, both leaning backward and pressed up against him, caught in the magnificent strength of his arms.

He lowered his head and stared into her eyes. “I think you will,” he said softly. “You are the only version, the only person, who has ever urged me to pursue my dream; you are the only person whom I would forgo that dream to possess. I saw the first during our long trip together from Earth; to recognize the second, it required me to see myself when another man was possessed by my thoughts. Those thoughts were always of you, my darling, my best, my beloved. And it is not the old Daphne whom I loved, whom I love now, but you. I will say one last time that you are not my wife; because I married her, your elder version, not you. You I shall marry, if you will have me; and then I will never call you anything other than my wife, my beloved wife, again.”

Her eyes were shining, drinking in the sight of him, and her cheeks had blushed a delicate rose hue. She shrugged her shoulders a bit, as if trying to get away, but her hands were pinned by his embrace. “You take me a lot for granted, mister…” she said. Her voice was breathless. “What if I say no?”

“I offer, as my gift to the bride, my life and my ship and my future, all for you to share with me, and every star in the night sky. What is your answer?”

When she parted her lips to speak, he kissed her. Whatever words she may have wished to say were smothered into little happy moans. Perhaps he knew what her answer would be. Her straw hat fell lightly from her tilting head and fluttered to the walkway. The two ribbons of the bow were twined around each other, snarled into one.

Helion politely turned his back, and pretended to consult his pocketwatch. “Isn’t it more traditional for the man to kneel on occasions of this nature?” he inquired of no one in particular.

Diomedes of Neptune and a mannequin representing Marshal Atkins came out from a nearby railway terminal and began sliding along the surface of the walkway toward them.

Helion walked toward the two men, using a mental command to nullify the action of the surface substance of the walkway, which otherwise would have carried him forward without effort. His love of discipline required that he avoid, when he could, such artificial aids for walking.

Atkins saw what was taking place over Helion’s shoulder, dug in his heel as a signal to stop the walkway. Either through politeness or embarrassment, Atkins cleared his throat, clasped his hands behind his back, and stepped to one side of Helion, turning to face him, so that he was not looking at the source of the moans, giggles, and murmurs beyond.

Atkins said to Helion, “I’ve examined your records. You’ll be happy to know that the previous Sophotechs working on this station were not destroyed because of catastrophic failure of the energy environment, as you thought. They committed suicide in order to stop the spread of the mental virus which had taken control of them. They were gambling that your previous version would be able to quell the storm without their aid. The good news there is that means your present system looks secure. In order to drive the Phoenix Exultant down toward the core, we need you to use your Array to create a subduction current in the plasma, large enough and fast enough—a whirlpool, actually—to suck the ship down into the location in the outer core radiative zone where the enemy is waiting. Can you do it?”

“I can bring two equatorial currents into offset collision to create a vortex whose core will have low density, creating a sunspot large enough to swallow planets whole. How far down into the opaque deep of the sun I can drive the vortex funnel, or what unprecedented storms and helmet streamers will result, remains yet to be seen. Hello, Captain Atkins. It is good to see you. How do you do? I am fine, thank you. I see the passing centuries have not altered your … ah … refreshingly brusque manners.”

Atkins’s face was stony. “Some of us don’t think polished formalities are the most important thing in life, if you don’t mind my saying so, sir. Not when there is a war on.”

Helion arched an eyebrow. “Indeed, sir? Those niceties which make us civilized, in the opinion of many accomplished and profound thinkers, are of more importance during emergencies than otherwise. And if not to protect civilization, what justification does the mass slaughter called war ever have?”

“Don’t start with me, Mr. Rhadamanth. This is an emergency.”

Diomedes, meanwhile, was leaning to look behind Helion, staring with open fascination at the display Phaethon and Daphne made. “I have not seen non-parthenogenic bioforms before. Are they going to copulate?”

Atkins and Helion looked at him, then looked at each other. A glance of understanding passed between them.

Atkins put his hand on Diomedes’s elbow, and pulled him back in front of Helion. “Perhaps not at this time,” Atkins said, straight-faced.

“They are young and in love,” explained Helion, stepping so as to block Diomedes’s view. “So perhaps the excesses and, ah, exuberance of their, ah, greeting, can be overlooked this once.”

Diomedes craned his neck, trying to peer past Helion. “There’s nothing like that on Neptune.”

Helion murmured, “Perhaps certain peculiarities of the Neptunian character are thereby clarified, hmm…?”

“It looks very old-fashioned,” said Diomedes.

Helion said, “It is that most ancient and most precious romantic character of mankind which impels all great men to their greatness.”

Atkins said, “It’s what young men do before they go to war.”

Diomedes said, “It is not the way Cerebellines or Compositions or Hermaphrodites or Neptunians arrange these matters. I’m not sure I see the value of it. But it looks interesting. Do all Silver-Gray get to do that? I wonder if Phaethon would mind if I helped him.”

“He’d mind.” Atkins interrupted curtly. “Really. He’d mind.”

“Upon this occasion, I feel I must agree with Captain Atkins,” added Helion.

The two men exchanged a glance. The tension which had been in their features just a moment ago was gone. They were both very old men; Helion had been four hundred years old when noumenal immortality had been invented; Atkins, living then as an artificially preserved brain inside a battle cyborg, was rumored to be even older. They both remembered a time when things were different.

Helion almost smiled. “I can create a vortex to pull the Phoenix Exultant down toward the outer core layers. I can do whatever else cruel necessity demands. I can send, without any outward tear, my son to battle and perhaps to death in the dark, unquiet depths of this hellish sphere, vaster than worlds, this universe of elemental fire which I have tamed. But I quite assure you that I shall know a reason why.”

Atkins said, “I’m hoping Phaethon will brief us and catch us up to speed. He said he would.”

Helion interrupted in surprise, “Marshal! You mean this is no plan of yours? Where are the Sophotechs? Where is the Parliament? Surely this voyage must be made under military command?”

Grim lines gathered around Atkins’s mouth, and his eyes twinkled. This was his sign of extreme amusement, what other men would have shown by loud triumphant laughter. “Well, sir, it’s good to know that you have so much faith in me. But the War Mind told me we did not have the budget to prosecute the campaign in the way I wanted—besieging the sun, using the Array to stir up the core, and relying on ground-based energy systems in the meanwhile—and the simulations showed my plan might lead to the destruction and loss of one fifth of the minds in the Transcendence, and the siege would have to last until Sol turned into a Red Giant, before the density would be low enough to make a successful direct assault. The Parliament did come on-line during the five-hour trip out here from transjovial space, and offered your son a letter of Marque and Reprisal. But your son seemed to trust that every man of goodwill in the Golden Oecumene would voluntarily combine their efforts, guided by sound Sophotechnic advice, to do whatever this struggle might demand, that strict military discipline was not required yet. And since your budget and his ship are worth more than the entire tax intake of that tiny, strangled, weak, hands-off, laissez-faire, do-nothing antiquarian society we call a government in this day and age, they did not have anything to offer him. So they’re out of the loop; I’m out of the loop; no one gets a say in how or if our Golden Oecumene is going to be saved, except our hero here, the spoiled and stubborn little rich man’s son. If you don’t mind my saying so.”