interpretation.
Along the floor of the rotunda, huge cubes of some machinery Daphne did not recognize were melting; through red-lipped gaps and holes in the armored housing, white-hot funnels of incandescent air erupted. There were darts of light and sparks, but no flames; everything which might have been flammable had been consumed.
In the center of the rotunda, at the top of the burning zig-gurat of machinery, blood dripping from the cracks where the white ablative of his armor had melted, sat Helion on a throne. Through the transparent face-shield of his helmet, the right half of his face had been scalded to the bone. His right eye was gone; cracked black tissue webbed his cheek and brow. Medical processors, unfolding from the interior of the helmet, gripped Helion's face with claws and tubes, or crawling drops of biotic nanomachinery.
A dozen emergency wires ran from his crown to the control caskets to either side of him. It looked absurdly crude and old-fashioned. Evidently the thought control had failed, or the static in the room did not allow signals to pass through the air from the circuits in his brain to those in the boards.
Hovering between his hands, above his knees, was the orb
of the sun, webbed with gold lines to indicate the Solar Array stations, pockmarked and scabbed with dark splotches to indicate the storms. Funnels of darkness reached from the sun-spots down toward the stellar core. The orb radiated multicolored lights, each color symbolizing a different combination of particles streaming from the storm centers.
Some screens showed a furious activity, calculations and solarological data streaming past. Others showed a slow and vast disaster; magnetic screen after screen overloading and failing; sections of the Array losing buoyancy and descending toward the interior, toppling and disintegrating.
The safety interlocks were gone from all power couplings, nodes and transfer points; speed-of-reaction restrictions had been removed from the nanomachinery. Consequently, the machinery inside the array was heating up, driven past safe operating levels, and being allowed to burn, provided that one more second of functional life could be forced from its self-immolated corpse.
Helion was attempting to position screens or to release charges into the core to deflect some of the storm- particles. The volumes of matter involved were incredible; Helion's machines threw masses of controllants fifty times the size of Jupiter from the photosphere into the mantle like so many grains of sand.
The status board showed the Solar Sophotech-Mind had been lobotomized by loss of power. Helion was wrestling with the storm alone.
He looked up, wide-eyed, as she stepped in: his look was one of hope, or vast and godlike mirth, of guiltlessness and fearlessness.
'I see it now.' His voice trembled over the station loudspeakers. 'What else can be the cure for the chaos at the core of the system? It is so simple!'
But a breach in his suit bubbled open at that point; superheated air rushed in. He screamed and screamed, jerking to his feet, arms writhing. The gush of pure oxygen as some internal tank erupted turned the flame inside his suit into a pure white light. The light grew red as blood, was baked
against the inside of the face-plate into a semiopaque layer.
The same armor meant to protect him now held the flames against the dying man's skin. The figure on the throne shivered violently, burnt lungs unable to scream, until nerves and muscles were likewise unable to react. A long-drawn-out moan issued from the loudspeakers. It is possible that He-lion's consciousness lingered for a long and horrible moment in his neurocybernetic interface, before the melting point of the artificial brain-fibers and circuits were reached.
Daphne retreated. She had to push through a half-melted rack of machine organisms, wading molten adamantium, stepping through white-hot washes of fire, to reach the gallery. (The small amount of heat she felt was merely symbolic, to show her what was represented here. She appeared in a mode called 'audit,' able to view, but not to be affected by, the scenario. Had she been truly involved, unprotected, unar-mored, her self-image would have been instantly burnt to ash.) She shoved through the mess out of the rotunda, and back down the gallery. Daphne found she had no curiosity whatsoever about the scene of hellish death and incineration she had just witnessed. In fact, she was disturbed by it, or even frightened.
But, before she could escape, the sirens fell silent, and the rotunda stopped glowing and burning. Footsteps sounded. Here came Helion, alive again, face whole and unburnt, armor white as snow, undamaged.
He came toward her. The face-plate of his helmet was thrown back. His expression was strange to her, clear- eyed, yet haggard, eyes heavy with unspeakable inner sorrow.
Daphne ceased her retreat and Helion stepped into the gallery.
'Why did you call me? What does all this mean?' she asked. She spoke softly, half hypnotized by the look of grief in Helion's eye, the sad half smile on his face.
Helion turned from her. He gripped the rail and looked down at the surface of the sun below. The incandescent sea was calm; only a few far specks showed the gathering of the storm. The scenario had evidently been reset to the beginning.
'Ironic that I, of all people, must now violate Silver-Gray protocols.' he said, his voice measured and dignified, almost kind. 'To have a solar catastrophe in the west wing of a Victorian mansion, I grant you, is questionable visual continuity. But we have always been dedicated to realistic images and simulations, always said that the plague of illusion consuming our society cannot be fought except by strict adherence to realism. And this scenario is real. Would that it were not!'
'You died?' Daphne spoke in a horrified whisper.
'For an hour I was out of contact with the Noumenal Mentality. What happened in that hour? What was I thinking? Some partial records were saved, some of my thoughts, most voice-video records. There are readings from the black boxes from the core-diver units. The Probate Court, for obvious reasons, will not let me examine the thought they deem to be crucial. But there were records enough, nonetheless, to construct this scenario. My own private torture chamber...'
Daphne wondered if it were a full-simulation scenario. If so, Helion had just suffered all the real pain and anguish of a man burning to death.
He banged his armored fist, ringing, against the rail. 'I don't know what they're looking for! I can see the expression on my face: I know what I said. What was I thinking? What one thought made such a difference? Some
