was unaware of any superior.
'There were two times, both times when Ao Var-matyr was hooked into the long-range communication nerve link, when his memory went blank, and his internal clock was reset to mask the missing time. Xenophon noticed it and Ao Varmatyr did not and could not. Xenophon was puzzled by this, but, lacking a suspicious imagination, did not realize what it implied: namely, that Ao Varmatyr's mind was set up the same way he described the minds of the Silent Oecumene thinking machines. An invisible conscience redactor, unknown even to him, forced him, from time to time, to perform certain acts of which he was not afterwards aware. Ao Varmatyr (unbeknownst to himself) communicated with his superior, this Nothing Sophotech, but they did not 'speak.' I suspect the superior merely fed operating instructions into Ao Varmatyr's conscience redactor, the loyalty virus inside of him.'
Phaethon muttered, 'How horrible!'
Diomedes, with a grim smile, fingered the haft of his spear, and said, 'Indeed. But it was no worse than the Silent Oecumene had been doing for years and centuries to their own thinking machines. So why not do the same to their human subjects? The step is small Atkins said, 'How did you resist being taken over by the Last Broadcast loyalty virus when Xenophon did not? You were entirely isolated, and Ao Varmatyr had complete control over your input.'
'Part was lack of time and attention of his part, I think. But part of it was, in all modesty, strength of character on my part. It is true that I was convinced, perhaps for up to an hour at a time, that the Nothing philosophy was correct, and that there was no reason to resist, and that I had to cooperate for the sake of the Silent Oecumene. But never for longer than an hour.
'You see, I suspect the Last Virus was intended to work on the minds and mind-sets typical of the Silent Oecumene. The core value which the target mind must accept before it will accept the Nothing philosophy is that morality is relative, that the ends justify the means, that right and wrong is an individual and arbitrary choice. This strips the target mind of any defense: for who can rightfully defend his own prejudices against another's if he knows, deep down, that both are equally arbitrary, equally false?
'But it did not work on me, because I had, not so long ago, uploaded a copy of the Silver-Gray philosophy tutorial routine into my long-term memory. The tutorial kept pestering me with questions. One I liked was: If a philosopher teaches you that it is not wrong to lie, why do you not suspect he is lying to you when he says so? Another I liked was: Is it merely an arbitrary postulate to believe that all beliefs are mere arbitrary postulates?'
Phaethon asked: 'What convinced Xenophon? Was he exposed to the same thought virus?'
'No. He believed the story Ao Varmatyr told without prompting. The same tale told to you; Xenophon believed in the implacable inhumanity of the Sophotechs to begin with. Many Neptunians do.'
Atkins said, 'So where is this Nothing Sophotech now? Have any clues as to where those instructions came from?'
'None. But since Ao Varmatyr was programmed to make his 're-ports' unwittingly, he did not choose time or circumstance under which to make them. (Nor the content, which probably consisted of an unedited information dump from his memory.) Hence they come at regular intervals.' Diomedes nodded toward the hourglass in the middle of the table, and smiled again.
Phaethon said, 'I haven't lived through as many spy dramas as my wife, but one would think enemies trying to hide would not fall into such predictable patterns.'
Diomedes said, 'Such weaknesses are an inevitable result of the Silent Oecumene way of doing things. If you treat people like machines, you must give them mechanistic orders. Hence we know when the next broadcast will take place.'
They all watched the running sands in the glass for a quiet while, each with his own thoughts.
Diomedes spoke up. 'There is still much I do not understand about what happened just now. Marshal? May I ask, if it is not one of these military secrets in which you put so much stock ... ?
Atkins raised one eyebrow. 'You can ask.'
'How did you survive inside Phaethon's armor? You decelerated toward the Neptunian embassy at ninety gravities. But only Phaethon has a specially designed body to withstand those pressures. That was precisely why Ao Varmatyr did not suspect you were not Phaethon. How did you survive?'
Atkins said curtly: 'I didn't.'
'I beg your pardon?'
Phaethon said: 'His body was crushed into bloody paste inside my armor. Meanwhile his mind was stored in the noetic unit. It was not until we were at rest, and my suit lining had a chance to reconstruct the military-basic marine body it was carrying, that I transferred and reincarnated him. Everything he 'saw' before that was merely sent from my armor cameras into his recorded mind. He wasn't inside the armor, looking out, until later, when he drew his first painful breath.'
Diomedes looked impressed. He asked: 'Who was inside the Ulysses mannequin? The one that was incinerated by Ao Varmatyr?'
Atkins said: 'One of. my sparring partners. A training-exercise routine.'
'Programmed to lose?'
'Not really. But I had only given it ancient weapons and techniques, dating from the early Sixth and late Fifth Era. In other words, weapon systems the Silent Ones knew we had. So it lost. Only when Ao Varmatyr was convinced that he was in complete control did he show his true colors, and start ordering the Phoenix Exultant into a military posture.'
Phaethon spoke up. 'I suspect that even Ao Varmatyr himself did not know, until he did it, what he was going to do with the Phoenix Exultant when he achieved control of her. Using her as a warship to strike a deadly blow against the Golden Oecumene was not, I think, what he would have done had he believed his own tale. I can only conclude the decision to kill came from the Nothing Mastermind; perhaps some buried command overrode his normal judgment and conscience.'
Atkins said, 'I disagree. Ao Varmatyr had nothing but violence in mind from the first. Why else was he so tricky? He pretended to be Xenophon as long as he could, and then stayed quiet until I found him hiding.'
Phaethon nodded. But there was a thoughtful, perhaps wistful, look on his features.
Atkins, seeing that look, said, 'You believed him, didn't you? You would have gone with him, had it been you, and not me, being you, wouldn't you?' Phaethon said 'Perhaps' in a tone of voice that meant certainly yes. 'I wasn't sure-I am still not sure-how much of what Ao Varmatyr said was a lie. But there may be people to rescue at Cygnus X-l, people of a spirit like my own, and there may be great deeds to do there. It might have been worth the risk to go, just in case he was telling the truth.'
Atkins said, 'Then I'm just glad it was me who was you, and not you. Otherwise, Ao Varmatyr might have convinced you.'
Phaethon said reluctantly, 'No. His story was a lie.'
Diomedes leaned forward, and said, 'But Ao Var-matyr believed his own story.'
'What?'
'The tale, at least to him, was true. What few of his thoughts I could understand made that clear. I suspect the Silent Oecumene did have her downfall in just the way he described, and that the people there, good Phaethon, were, perhaps once, not unlike you.' Phaethon said, 'I would like to believe that-I would like it very much. But at least part of the tale was a lie.' Diomedes said, 'How so?' 'The relationship between the Sophotechs and the men as depicted in that tale made no sense. How could they be hostile to each other?'
Diomedes said, 'Aren't men right to fear machines which can perform all tasks men can do, artistic, intel- lectual, technical, a thousand or a million times better than they can do? Men become redundant.' Phaethon shook his head, a look of distant distaste on his features, as if he were once again confronted with a falsehood that would not die no matter how of-ten it was denounced. In a voice of painstaking pa-tience, he said: 'Efficiency does not harm the inefficient. Quite the opposite. That is simply not the way it works, Take me. for example. Look around: I employed par-tials to do the thought-box junction spotting when I built this ship. My employees were not as skilled as I was in junction spotting. It took them three hours to do the robopsychology checks and hierarchy links I could have done in one hour. But they were in no danger of competition from me. My time is too valuable. In that same hour it would have taken me to spot their thought-box junction, I can earn far more than their three-hour wages by writing supervision architecture thought flows. And it's the same with me and the Sophotechs.
'Any midlevel Sophotech could have written in one second the architecture it takes me, even with my
