antennae, and docking rings of the star-colony hull on which he stood.
The bits of crust in his fingers were dried blood. Tiny fragments of bone and dried gore and brain-stuff trickled through his fingers, mummified by vacuum and radiation. This packed substance, the dry residue of uncounted millions of corpses, went all the way to the horizon, as far as the eye could see.
Where the crust of blood was pulled up, shone a segment of hull. In the hull was a thought-port. He had held a jack from his gauntlet to that port, seeking whatever local ship-mind record might have survived.
The record unfolded, and the dream changed to images of horror. He saw a great city in space, peopled with philosophers and savants from the Fifth Era, an elegant and adventurous race, strolling along wide boulevards, leaning from the tiers of graceful cafes and thought-shops, minds entwined in a well-choreographed harmony of several Compositions, one for each of the neuroforms, Warlocks, Cerebellines, Invariants, and Basics.
Then he saw the lights go dark, the air fall still. Nanomachine substances, pouring like black oil, came out from walls, bubbling up from floors. Some of the well-dressed savants threw themselves into the surface willingly; others with grim resignation; others were pushed.
Bald men in white robes and armor, Invariants all, armed themselves with cutting-torches and modified communication lasers, and made a last stand in a sea of rising black filth. The black material formed clouds and waves of swarming semiorganic material to overwhelm them; the men fought calmly, with machine-like precision, and, at the moment when defeat became mathematically certain, with no change of expression or sign of fear, they methodically turned their weapons against themselves and slew each other.
The black corruption spread. It flooded streets; it reached into windows; it sought out hiding places.
Lovers embracing were drenched by waves of the substance, and clung to each other as they sank, their flesh dissolving, their limbs and faces melting into each other. Mothers with babies in their arms tried to shield their infants as black waves swallowed them, and one watched in horror as the little child, limbs waving, was absorbed back into her own melting flesh. Whoever was thrown into the substance began to dissolve, limbs and organs floating free as they were assimilated, snake nests of wires reaching into their severed heads, thrusting with spasmodic jerks up the holes in their torn necks, till the material bonded to their brains.
The black substance grew more active and more clever in its attacks the more victims it absorbed. The most intimate knowledge of captured loved ones was used to deceive those still at large into touching the black goo. Private data systems were overwhelmed and their secrets plundered. If one group member in a composition was caught, he found, to his horror, his unguarded thoughts betraying his fellows.
The city soon was entirely bathed in blackness. In this ocean of material, human brains floated, helpless and disembodied, the balls of their eyes still connected by nerve fibers to their forebrains. The brains were opening and unraveling. Layer by layer of cortex material, still intact, was now interconnecting all the disembodied people with strands and webs of nervous tissue, to form one huge homogenous mass.
Black tentacles reached from the substance, rose and formed the twin lines of black pyramids on the dark side of the space city, the side facing the singularity, and created a series of noumenal thought-antennae. Now, above the apex of each pyramid, in orbit there hovered a rapidly spinning ring of crystallized neutronium pseudomatter, rotating at near-light speed. Gravitic distortions appeared at the hubs of each disk. The pyramids hummed with power; in the dream, he heard a million screams of utmost panic and despair; and the thought- information, the living souls, of all those helpless people, was beamed through those disk hubs and then down into the event horizon of the black hole.
Whatever is sent into a black hole does not emerge again.
In the dream, one who seemed to be himself now turned, overwhelmed in fear and horror, and opened deep channels in his mind. He uttered the secret commands, the codes and combinations needed to open wide space in the mentality to hold his message, to warn other colonies and planets, as many people as he could at once.
But it was all in vain. The blood he had touched had contaminated his glove and hand and nervous system. His thoughts were twisted into strange shapes. With dark exaltations he rejoiced at how he had been tricked, how he was now to be absorbed. He smiled, as his flesh dissolved into the black muck at his feet, to think of how his attempted warning, broadcast so far and wide, would carry viruses destroying the very ones he had, a moment before, desired to save.
And, as the dream ended, he thought he saw, all around him in space, city after city like the one on which he stood, also overwhelmed with black corruption, their populations raped and beheaded by attacking tendrils of neural nanomaterial, their souls sucked out, and sent, like a river of screams, down into the bottomless well of the singularity. Four burning gas giants, their odd atmospheres of hydrogen and methane aflame, fell from their orbits, were pulled like taffy as they fell ever lower into the singularity's gravity well, scattered into asteroids and waste heat, and were consumed.
This star system also had a second sun, a source of light and warmth. It disintegrated into flaming nebula as it fell, elongating into monstrous streamers of fire, as it was consumed by the black sun.
All the energy sources and points of light from the many beautiful cities went dark; all the radio signals, throughout this once-great Oecumene, fell silent.
So the dream had ended.
THE DROWNED HOUSE
Phaefhon opened his eyes and stared at the black gloom of the sea around him. He was alone. There was no sign of Old-Woman-of-the-Sea.
To his intense joy, he saw the parts of his golden armor lying in a wide circle around him, resting among the silt and weed and coral. He stood, startling a school of darting fish, and he thought a command. Tendrils reached from the black nanomachine lining he wore, took up the golden plates, and fitted them in place around him.
There was still a throbbing pain in his head, still fatigue. Old-Woman-of-the-Sea had allowed him to sleep, and he could sleep normally hereafter, but he still needed to find a self-consideration circuit, to cure what damage had already been done.
The extent of that damage he did not know.
Where was this place?
He looked up.
Here, at the bottom of a long subsea slope, the end of a trail of debris, Phaethon found his drowned house. It had rolled all the way out of the bay and down this long slope after Ironjoy had scuttled it. There it lay on its side on the rocks, in deep waters where the light was no more than a murky hint.
He climbed the spiral grooves of the toppled house. Phaethon found a spot where a receiving dish had been pulled free from its housing, leaving a comfortable cup for a seat.
He was still weary, still dazed. Sleep had not refreshed him; the damage to his nervous system caused by sleep deprivation needed curing. The joy at recovering his armor, like a fire among dry leaves, had flashed and faded, leaving him dull. Hadn't he been promised the tools he needed to allow him to live? What was here except the wreckage of this house?
No. She said he would live if he thought. Only if he thought.
First, he thought of what he had dreamed.
It was obvious and, perhaps, had always been perfectly obvious who his enemy was.
There had only ever been one colony sent out from the Solar System. Of course that colony was the first suspect. The only problem was that it had perished thousands of years ago, before Phaethon was ever born.
The scenes Phaethon's dream reflected came from scenes in life. During his (brief and reluctant) studies of history, he had seen the last broadcast from the Silent Oecumene; as most people had. He had seen the broadcast showing Earth's only daughter civilization among the stars destroying herself in a paroxysm of insanity.
The faint signal had been detected by orbital trans-Neptunian observatories. No one knew who that viewpoint character had been, who stood wondering on that plain of blood; no one knew whom he had been trying to warn. And no one knew if the broadcast had been fiction, exaggeration, misunderstanding.
Later, Sophotech-manned slow probes, sent despite that they had not enough fuel to decelerate, had done a
