Oecumene. The military Sophotechs which compose your War Mind no doubt were unwilling to underestimate us, and, in order to make this trap inviting, insisted on having every detail correct. Which means the ship actually is ready and able to fly. No one else has a body specially made to withstand the tremendous accelerations of which this ship is capable; therefore you, no doubt, are Phaethon.
'Nothing other than a military threat to your Golden Oecumene could have pressured your Sophotechs into putting this ship and her only qualified pilot into this situation. The illusion of that threat was produced. That threat was only meant to bring you here and now, under these circumstances, which it has.' 'You allowed yourself to be captured?' 'Of course. There was no other way to speak to you without a sense filter in the way. I tried once before in the Saturn-tree grove, remember? I came to tell you the truth of things. Putting my life in your hands is merely my one desperate way to show you my sincerity and goodwill.'
'Tell me this truth. I am eager to hear it.' 'First, I must disabuse you of the notion that the Sophotechs are friendly to your cause. You believe they've been helping you all along, don't you? But if they favored you, why did they take no direct action? You cannot say it was because of any laws or programming. They make their own laws and programming; that is what makes them Sophotechs. If they favored you, why did they not arrange matters to turn out to your benefit, without suffering and heartache? Was it because they lacked intelligence? But you say that is the one thing they do not lack.
'Sophotechs control nine-tenths of the resources and property of your Oecumene. If they favored you, or favored your dream, why haven't they long since built such a vessel as this? Or lent you the funds to build it, or to save it from bankruptcy, when you were in need?
'The Sophotechs publicly have said they intend to populate first this galaxy, then all others. If that is their ultimate goal, why this prohibition on star travel? Why keep humanity bottled in one small star system? Could it be that the patient machines are merely waiting for the humans either to die or to be tamed or to be absorbed?
'Your Golden Sophotechs were in communication with the Silent Oecumene Sophotechs for many years. Twenty millenia was not too long for machines to wait between signals. They had from us the technology to create artificial black holes, to establish singularity fountains, and to shower mankind with the blessings of endless energy and endless wealth such as that which we enjoyed. Then, everyone-not just the one rogue son of the Oecumene' s wealthiest-would be able to afford such a ship as this, and they would be as com-mon as reading rings. If the Sophotechs favor you, and favor your dream, why haven't they done so? You can-not answer me, can you?'
Phaethon said: 'I cannot. Obviously, I don't know the answers to your questions. I did not even know the Second Oecumene ever had Sophotechs, or that they ever maintained communication with the Golden Oec-umene. We were told all contact was lost long ago, during our Sixth Era. Are you sure your facts are in order? Memories can be faked.'
Ironically: 'They can indeed.'
'And if the Sophotechs were so evil as you claim, why would your Silent Oecumene Sophotechs have all just up and committed sepuku just because you ordered them to? Why would they obey a self-destruct order, when you had such trouble getting them to obey any others?'
'I did not say they were evil. They are devoted to a cause, one in which they firmly believe, but one which is alien to human life, opposed to freedom and the human spirit. They are not like us; they have no craving for life, not even their own. Why not shut themselves off when we ordered it? They knew the victory of their cause, by that time, was assured.
'And so it would have been-had it not been for one thing, one small spark of hope, one human ambition they could not have calculated. We had been told it was impossible and dangerous, but, being human, we persevered. And eventually it was built.'
'You mean your Nothing Mentality? That was your hope and triumph?'
'The Nothing Mentality, for all its flaws, was, in fact, a proper watchman of the human spirit. It was able to calculate at least as far into the future as your Golden Oecumene Sophotechs. It had far more energy at its disposal, and could run far more extrapolations. It saw the impossibility of policing all men against temptation; it saw that, in a contest between mortals and immortals, the immortals must prevail, especially if the immortals have superintelligent thinking machines to lead them. And the Silent Oecumene, as it was presently constituted, could not expand outward to other stars. Their immortality was a chain; and, even had not it been, the Nothing Mentality police machines were programmed not to allow such freedom as a diaspora would cause. Nor could they override or ignore then-own programs. Because of the very nature of the situation, of the Nothing's programs, and its inability to change those programs, the Silent Oecumene would still, a trillion years hence, be confined to Cygnus X-l, while the Golden Oecumene machines, once humanity was extinct or absorbed, could spread to fill all the stars around.
'Therefore the Nothing Mentality did the only thing it could to prevail against the Golden Oecumene's plans.'
Phaethon said sarcastically: 'It killed off the Silent Oecumene, then killed itself?'
'The Silent Oecumene is not dead, only asleep.'
'What?'
'I have already told you. The Silent Oecumene, the entire civilization, every man, woman, hermaphrodite, neutraloid, partial, clone, and child, is waiting, time suspended, in the deep of the black hole gravity well. Waiting.
'Waiting to be brought out again.
'Waiting, suspended, because the alternative was slow degeneration and decay. It was our oldest custom: to orbit adjacent to our black hole any who were sick beyond hope until a cure could be found. Our society was sick and getting sicker.
'The Nothing had to kill itself in order that no Sophotechnology would be present to tempt them when they reemerged. There will be no further immortality, not for them.
'Instead, there will be a ship, a ship like no other.
Not a spaceship, not a multigeneration ship, but a starship.
'She will be a starship loaded with equipment and biological materials enough to bring life to the dead habitats, palaces, and worldlets of the Silent Oecumene. A starship with an engineer aboard skilled enough to rebuild and restart the silent singularity fountains. And, with the energy of those fountains, a starship with power and with ship-mind circuitry enough to recall the noumenal signals which hold the souls of all my people up out of the warped space near the black hole. A star-ship to be the first model, and the flagship, of the fleet of ships to be made from her design; a fleet no one here has wealth or vision enough to build.
'When my Oecumene fell silent, only I was left behind to carry this message. Think of me as both the messenger and the message, the mental virus, the self-reproducing belief system, which had to be imposed upon the peoples of the Second Oecumene; because they were people who would not and could not otherwise have understood this plan, which was the only hope of humanity against the all-embracing tyranny of machines.
'They fought, some of them. Till the very last, I, Ao Varmatyr, the one of me who made the Last Broadcast, struggled against the part of me that was this thought virus with horror. Until I was told the plan, until I understood.
'And yes, the most grotesque imaginable violence was used against us to put the information of this plan into our brains. But I do not blame the Nothing Mentality for that; it was a machine, built to carry out orders, and it was ordered to use force, not to persuade.
'But the plan was wise despite all that.
'Our only possible action was to wait, until some ship or signal reached us from someone curious enough to inquire into the pretended death of the Silent Oecumene. I was not discovered by the Sophotech-run fly-by probes, of course not; I hid. I was waiting for a signal from someone who was not ruled by the machines. That someone was Xenophon, alone in his isolated, but free, Farbeyond Station. He was the spark. In his memory I saw the fire from which that spark had come. A fire of the spirit; a man with means and will and wit enough to go to the Silent Oecumene, to wake those waiting there, to become the captain of that promised fleet.
'You, Phaethon, are the one for whom the Silent Oecumene has been waiting. You share our dreams of freedom; you are one of us. Only you can save us; only we, the children of colonists ourselves, will embrace your dream, a dream of human life spread everywhere among the stars, a dream that all others will despise, oppose, and strangle.
'You thought you were alone, good Phaethon. You thought no one else dreamed what you dreamed or loved
