The body told him nothing. Anyone entering the special environment of the Solar Array would have to adjust his body to this configuration; materials and routines for making the transmogrification were found aboard every drop ship in solsynchronous orbit.
Helion turned his sense filter back on. The hooded figure now stood not ten meters away, at the foot of the little hill of tiered thought boxes on which Helion had his throne.
Helion spoke first: 'Is this some ghost I see before me, stirred up from some unquiet archive? Wakened, perhaps, by some unexpected power Earthmind has unleashed on this, the last night before we drown our separate humanity in all-embracing glory? If so, go back! Return to whatever museum or noumenal casket had carried your dead thoughts through all these years. The dead have nothing to say to the living.'
A neutral voice came from the hood. It was sent as text, but Helion's sense filter interpreted it as a voice, did not add any detail of inflection, pitch, or rhythm. It sounded like a ghost talking indeed. 'The dead can allow the living to recall the lives they used to live. Dead loved ones can warn the living of loves they are soon to lose.'
'Who are you?'
The cold and eerie voice came again: 'Does my appearance frighten you? I had to assume this shape to be allowed to pass your doors. I cannot appear in my own shape; a terrible fate befalls whoever beholds me as I am!'
Helion squinted. 'That is a line from one of Daphne's Gothic melodramas. Owlswick Abbey-she wrote the scene flowchart script.'
'Many name her as the finest authoress of this time. I do her no dishonor to speak words she invents.'
Helion, with deliberate slowness, resumed his seat, and now he leaned his elbow upon his throne arm, hid- ing a half smile behind his knuckle, looking up from beneath his brow.
'And what is this warning you come to bring me, old ghost?'
'Just this: Do not lose your son, Phaethon, as you lost your bosom friend Hyacinth. Do not lose yourself. Phaethon knows the dying thought of your former self: you and he spoke just before you died, during a storm when no recording systems were alert. With that thought you can reconstruct your memory by extrapolation; you can become what Helion would have been, had be lived. The Curia will call you Helion and grant you his name and place and face and property. Otherwise, you are Helion Secundus, and Phaethon takes all your fortune with him into exile; this Solar Array, He-lions house and memory caskets, riches, copyrights, thoughtrights, everything! But if you agree to loan Phaethon funds enough to buy his starship's debts, and give him once again clear title to the vessel, he will tell all he knows, or, if that fails to make you into Helion, he will award to you your fortunes nonetheless.' Helion stared down for a time at the robed and hooded figure. Then he let free a sigh, and spoke in a tired tone: 'Daphne, you know I cannot agree to those terms. I swore, long ago, to uphold the establishment of the College of Hortators, as our only dike against the tide of inhumanity which waits to inundate us.
That oath I shall not breach, not even to regain my true self again, not while I love honor more than life.'
Daphne threw back the hood she wore, and signaled a waiver of her masquerade. Helion saw her face and heard her voice. 'You are now in exile if you knowingly consort with me,' she said. 'But I think you should join us: Temer Lacedaimon is here, outside, beyond the pale, and so is Aurelian Sophotech!'
'What?!!'
'Yes!'
'That means the Transcendance ...'
She shook her head, her smile flashed. 'Will not include the Hortators. They will not be in our future, then, will they? Or will you join the boycott yourself, and let the future you dreamed up, the one the Peers love so much, just go to waste, unheard?'
Helion frowned. 'I should cut you out from my sense filter now, and hear no more of this ... but... Aurelian in exile? He communicates with the Earth-mind. Is she in exile now, too?'
'Why do you think none of the Sophotechs is speaking?'
'I thought they were preparing for the Transcendance ...'
'They are preparing for war!'
There was a pause while Helion's language routine brought that word up out of ancient memory, and checked the connotations for him. He said, 'You do not call Phaethon's conflict with the Hortotors a war, do you? This is not a metaphor.'
'I mean war with the Second Oecumene, which killed my horse and tricked the Hortators into banishing Phaethon. The attack on him was real! Everything Phaethon said was true! Why didn't you believe him, just believe him, instead of listening to other folk?! He would never have disbelieved, no matter what, in you!'
The sophistication of Helion's mental system allowed him to embrace sudden revolutions of outlook without disorientation. Assistance circuits in his thalamus and hypothalamus made connections, reassessed emotional reactions, calculated a multitude of implications.
Because of this, he straightened on his throne and spoke in a calm, quick voice: 'It took ten thousand years for the Last Broadcast to reach Sol from Cygnus X-1. Vafnir's people sent one-way robot vessels, which, moving at far less than the speed of light, arrived some thirty thousand years after the death broadcast was received. Long enough for some sort of civilization to revive.
'No civilization answered their requests to build a breaking laser. The vessels fell through the dark Swan system with their light-sails spread wide, and to this day continue to infinity ... as the probes passed the Cygnus X-l system, their readings showed conditions were indeed as the Last Broadcast depicted. No sign of industrial activity, no radio noise. Silence. Death.
'But the survivors of that event might have hidden themselves. It would not be difficult. The signals of an extrasystemic civilization, especially one ten thousand light-years away, could easily escape the notice of our astronomers.'
Daphne said, 'Or the messages supposedly sent back from the robot probes had not come from them at all. The probes could have been destroyed. Their message content could have been forged. We are talking about a thousand light-years away, right? It can't have been a very strong or complex signal. And our astronomers are picking it up one hundred centuries after it was sent.'
'In either case'-his eyes glittered dangerously- we are assuming an entire culture willing to go to ex- traordinary lengths to remain hidden. If that is so, what strategies would they have adopted? I submit that the Silent Oecumene would have, if they could afford the resources, both sent out additional colonies, in order to disperse their numbers, and posted watchers-what is the old term for it-?'
Daphne knew the word, 'Spies.'
'Thank you. And posted spies within our Oecumene, to negate any efforts which might lead to their discovery.'
'You said the Silent Ones might have established colonies ... ? Just like what Phaethon wanted.... Where? How many?'
Helion raised his hand and sent an image into her sense filter. Suddenly the rotunda where they were now seemed to float in deep space, with stars overhead and underfoot, a wide, three-dimensional array.
Helion said, 'Here is Cygnus X-l. Observe; I surround it with concentric bubbles of possible travel times for ships of the type of Ao Ormgorgon's Naglfar, built with Fifth Era technology. Likely candidates for star colonies are shown in white.... I now rank the possible colony stars according to their desirability as hiding places, not as colonies, taking into account the presence of nebular dust and natural sources of radio noise which might mask large-scale industrial activity from Golden Oecumene astronomers.'
A sphere appeared around Cygnus X-l, and stars within the sphere were lit with ranking numerals. Slender lines from Cygnus X-l showed possible travel paths, none intruding anywhere near the space near Sol.
Helion continued: 'Now then, making a rough estimate of the natural resources of the Silent Oecumene (and they do have limits on their resources-their black hole can produce tremendous useful energy, but it is nevertheless immobile), I conclude that, of these possible target stars, and assuming expeditions the size of the multigeneration ship Naglfar, there could be between five hundred and twelve hundred colonial systems, with at least two hundred expeditions still in flight, and destined to reach their targets over the next three millennia. ...'
More figures and light signs appeared near certain of the stars, and certain travel paths lit up, showing the locations of possible expeditions still in flight. 'If we assume a less cost intensive method of spread, such as, for example, microscopic nanotechnology spore packages wafted through space on stellar winds or pro-pelled by light-
