'You admit, finally, the truth of our proposition,' issued the headless horse-creature. 'Logic is futile. Truth must be imprinted on captive brains by force. But our truth is not your truth. There is no common ground between us, no understanding, no compromise, no trust. There is nothing between us.'
The creature's leaden voice ground to silence.
Phaethon said in a voice of cold bewilderment: 'But then why did you ask to negotiate? Or, for that matter, why do anything at all? If your life is so horrible and irrational and meaningless, put an end to it! I won't hinder you, I assure you of that. Quite frankly, it would relieve me of the upsetting chore of doing it for you.'
This seemed to be the first thing Phaethon said that produced an emotional response from the creature, for the many tentacles began to writhe and lash, and fragments of material, hooks and weapon-barrels, began to worm their way out through the steaming horseflesh of the chest and haunches with agitated twitches. Blood streamed down the horse's fetlocks and stained the deck. It took little steps back and forth, to the left and right, like a comic little dance, rear hoofs clanging, and the tall upper body swayed, forelegs curling and uncurling.
The two stood facing each other, a man in bright armor, a smoldering and faceless horse-creature, stepping and swaying, looming like a black shadow.
Phaethon took a step back, made certain all his new-made weaponry was aimed and primed and ready. He drew a tense breath.
Neither one of them fired.
The creature planted its rear hoofs again, raised its many arms, and froze in place. The creature's voice, speaking in a deeper tone, came forth: 'We have imprinted our over-self into the internal fields of a black hole, beyond the event horizon. In the center of the black hole, there, all irrationalities are reality, all boundary conditions reach infinities and infinitesimals. Logic stops. No rational signal can reach out from the event horizon to communicate with those who have not been absorbed. You are beyond my event horizon. You still exist in the universe limited by logic, selfishness, perception, thought. You will enter us, and be embraced, enter our singularity, and all distinctions between self and other shall cease. You shall cease. We shall cease. Nothing shall triumph.'
Phaethon thought: But then what in the world do you want? Why have you been attacking me? Yet he did not bother to say anything aloud. It would have been futile.
The was a bob of light from behind him. Phaethon saw Daphne, a broken cot leg in one hand, like a club, step up the ladder to peer out over the deck. The ring on her finger was producing a thin beam of light. 'Phaethon?! What's wrong with you? Haven't you destroyed that creature yet?'
'Daphne!! Stay back!' Phaethon made a noise of frustration and fear and stepped between Daphne and the monster, his back to her, spreading his arms as if to shield her. He was sure that in one of her spy-dramas or bellipographic simulations, the heroine was supposed to use a chair leg or something as a truncheon to beat off the computer-generated figments.
Was she insane, to come up here? His agonized and bitter thought was that Daphne had no real experience of emergencies, and could not judge degrees of danger.
The horse-thing reared back even farther, and its spine elongated, pushing its upper body higher yet in a bloody convulsion of ripping horseflesh. Blood gushed every way across the deck. Two of the tendrils springing from the horse's neck doubled in size, and reached far left and far right, so as to be able to point down at Daphne. Whichever way Phaethon moved so as to block the weapon with his body, left or right, the creature would still have a clear line of fire the other way.
The monster's monotone came: 'Surrender, or I destroy the love-object.'
' 'Love-object'?!' Exclaimed Daphne in a voice of outrage. 'Phaethon, who is this thing?' And then, when the light from her ring fell across the dripping mass of the monster, she gave out a tear-choked gasp: 'My horse! My poor Sunset! What have you done to my horse?!'
Phaethon said quickly, 'What do I need to do to surrender?'
The monster said. 'Give us the armor. We need it to fly the ship.'
(The armor. Of course. What else could it have been?)
'And if I give you my armor, you will let my wife go?'
Daphne said in a very soft voice from behind him: 'Kill the damn thing, Phaethon. You can't bargain with it.'
The monster said: 'You are impelled by thoughts of love and safety for loved ones, a morality of good and evil. We are beyond good and evil, beyond love. We have ... no loved ones. We have nothing. Nothing fulfills us. You shall give us the armor and submit to selflessness.'
Daphne whispered from behind him: 'Don't feel fear. Don't listen. Kill it.'
Phaethon hesitated.
Daphne's whisper came: 'I will be so ashamed of you, so very ashamed, Phaethon, if you let love or fear make you weak. I will hate you forever. Don't be a coward. Kill the damned thing.'
Phaethon drew a breath, held it, thought for a moment. He said, 'I love you Daphne. I'm sorry.'
And he gave a mental command to his armor.
Arms of intolerable fire erupted in thunder out from his gauntlets and stuck the creature. A dozen lightning bolts leapt from discharge-points along his shoulders, lances of incandescent brightness. The main energy cell in his breastplate opened into a single, all-consuming beam of atomic flame. Mass-drivers flung lines of near-light-speed particles into the target. An instantaneous cataclysm of fire converged upon the monster and pierced it.
The horse body exploded and spread flaming debris across the deck. Phaethon, batteries drained, energy exhausted, suddenly felt the full weight of the armor across his shoulders, and fell heavily to one knee.
Phaethon knelt, panting. The concussion within the contained space of the deck had been tremendous. On the deck before him, a column of oily flame was roaring, lashing the black parasols above with writhing arms of smoke.
He turned his head. Daphne was on her face. Was she dead? But then he saw her stir and raise her head. It was impossible and amazing. She was not even bleeding. Had the creature not fired? She had been standing in the shadow of Phaethon's armor, and his weapons had been configured to minimize any backscatter or spread. Even so, the discharge of forces in this enclosed space should have ...
No matter. He accepted it as a miracle.
'You're alive ...' he whispered.
She was on her hands and knees on the threshold of the hatch. Her face was red, and her tears ran down the soot on her cheeks. She coughed, and said, 'You called me wife, that time, lover. I guess this means I win ...'
'I tried to log on to the mentality,' Phaethon said heavily. 'I realized that you must be right, that there is no virus, nothing to fear. But...'
He saw Daphne's eyes, focused beyond his shoulder, turn into circles of horror.
'Oh, you've got to be kidding ...' she murmured.
His head seemed slow, filled with pain, as he turned it again. Out from the column of fire where once a horse had been now stepped a tall skeletal figure, made only of blue-white nanomaterial, and still shaped something like the horse body it had been wearing. Forward it came, mincing delicately on its rear hoofs, upper body looming high. From the upper-spine shape of the structure, a nest of snakes still spread, still holding weapons and instruments pointing down at the two of them.
The monotone came again: 'We approve of futile, pointless, and meaningless actions. We welcome your attempt to cause us pain. But we disapprove of your motive, which was selfish. Remove your armor. Insert your head into the cavity we open in this unit, so that we may sever your neck and ingest your brain-material. Your brain will be sustained by artificial means, during transport.'
The rib cage opened like two grillworks made of bone, showing a crude mechanism, still steaming with the heat of nanoconstruction, whose orifice was like the jaws of a guillotine.
Tiny flakes of slime fell from the points of the welcoming rib cage bones. The guillotine jaws snapped wide, forming a round, wet hole about the size of a man's head.
Phaethon used his emergency persona to turn off his fear. Immediately, a crisp clarity came into his thoughts, unhampered by emotion.
The first conclusion that entered his mind was that Daphne had been right: His fear of logging on to the mentality had been imposed externally, by the Cacophiles, at the time when Phaethon had just come out from the courthouse. The Silent Ones had not so far demonstrated the ability to manipulate mentality records, erase
