According to the mirror, the singularity itself was only about the diameter of a helium nucleus, a few angstroms wide. Extending an inch or two in diameter was an outer sphere of ozone and charged particles formed from stripped air molecules, attracted by gravity, spiraling down and through the point-singularity, and disintegrating into constituent electrons and protons. If he turned his hearing up, he could hear the high-pitched, steady tea-kettle whistle of escaping vanishing air, being pushed at fifteen pounds per square inch into a point smaller than could be seen.
Phaethon threw pressure curtains across the chamber, in case the surface area of the black hole grew, or the rate of air loss became noticeable. The distortion in the air, seeming to bend all things behind it toward it, hazed in reddish light, haloed by hissing X-rays, moved with slow majesty across the bridge, toward them.
It passed through the pressure curtains without slowing. Their powerful fields were helpless to stop the black hole. There were electric discharges as the pressure curtains' field flows were twisted out of parallel and canceled out. Sparks guttered for a moment along the hull beneath.
Daphne said, 'Is it my imagination, or is the deck tilting toward that thing?'
'It's your imagination. I think. The gravimeter says it has less mass than a large asteroid, only a few thousand million tonnes or so. We would not be able to feel that amount of gravitic attraction. But the light is being bent as if there was something the size of a galaxy or three at that pinpoint. How much light distortion does it take to be visible to the naked eye like that? For that matter, how is it floating? How is being controlled? Why isn't it dispersing? Classical theory says that black holes that small only have a life of a few microseconds before they evaporate in a wash of Hawking radiation.'
Daphne stared at the impossible twist of reddish light. It was like staring down a well, or the bore of some cannon made of bent space. She said in a calm voice: 'This is he. Or should I say 'it.' The Nothing Sophotech is housed in the interior of the black hole. It is controlling the gravitic fields, somehow. How it communicates to the fields around the singularity, the ones which determine its position in space, that I do not know. Hawking radiation? Gravitons? It might give orders by altering black-hole rotational spin-values in a sort of Morse code, which the surrounding field can pick up. You're the engineer. You tell me how it's...'
'I am still trying to figure out how it can be bending the light when it's only the mass of a large city...
Daphne said, 'That I know. Think like a mystery writer for a moment, not like an engineer. It's a trick. An illusion.'
'Illusion? How?' She said, 'Could a ghost-particle array inside the event horizon manifest particles outside?'
'Theoretically, yes, through the quantum-tunneling effect.'
'Photons? Red-colored photons? If a Sophotech were tracing the path of every lightwave, and weaving them together in a hologram, could it create the appearance of a deep gravity well, when there was no such well?'
'By making highly complex fields, of photons ap-pear out of nowhere? I think I'd rather believe they somehow discovered gravity control. Neither technology is one I thought was possible. Why bother?'
The reddish light vanished. As if the elastic sheet on which the scene were painted had suddenly returned to true, the vertical rods on the far side of the bridge now straightened, and the angles of the evenly spaced boxes on the balconies were right again. At the same time, the door motors hummed, the air lock opened, and a section of floor rose up into view. Through the door rose a figure wearing a pale mask, robed in floating peacock-colored hues, crowned in feathery light antennae. The figure glided across the wide expanse of shining deck toward them, making no noise as it approached.
'Now what... ?' whispered Daphne.
What approached them seemed to be a man. The robes were peacock purple, shimmering with deep highlights, bright with woven colors of green and scarlet, spots and traceries of gold and palest white. The man's folded hands were hidden in silver gauntlets, gemmed with a dozen finger rings and shining bracelets of Sophotech thought ports. The mask itself was a face-shaped shield of silver nanomaterial, pulsing and flowing with a million silver-glinting thoughts. From the upper mask rose whiplike slender fans, like the tail feathers of a quail, perhaps antennae, perhaps odd decorations. Similar decorative antennae spread from the shoulderboards, floating rosettes of white, long feathery ribbons of many colors, freaked with gold and shining jet, like the wing feathers of some extinct tropical bird. The eyes of the mask were lenses of amethyst.
The apparition approached and was a score of feet away. It was taller and more slender than an Earth-born man, not unlike a frail lunarian, and the headdress towered taller yet.
No, not like a lunarian. Like a Lord of the Silent Occumene. This was the regal garb and ornament and dreaming-mask to which those ancient and solitary beings aspired. Ao Varmatyr, before he died, in his tale, had hinted at something of this style. The Silent Ones, living alone in their artificial asteroid palaces of spun diamond, in microgravity, had no doubt been as tall as this phantasm. Daphne and Phaethon both stared up, fascinated. The figure stood erect, motionless except for the slow seafernlike bob of his feathery antennae, and still, except that a web of bright and soft blue shadows fled across his pulsing gown, as if the apparition were seen through changing shades of rippling water.
And music pulsed softly, elflike, from the robes, a hint of chimes, a laughter of distant strings, a dreaming of soft sonorous horns, slowly breathing. (This more illusion,') Phaethon sent to Daphne on a secure side-channel, like a whisper. He showed her that. the mirror to his left was still detecting a gravitic point source in the air where the singularity hung. Electric circuits in the door motors had opened and closed, but no signals had entered the circuits from outside: ghost teleportations of electrons, no doubt. Radar indicated no physical substance in the shining, fairy-shimmering robes of light, no body underneath. Daphne sent back an image of her own face, bug-eyed her shoulders shrugging, as with text saying: If this is a hologram, where is the music coming from? Phaethon sent back that perhaps ghost particles, is-suing from the singularity, were forming uncounted trillions of air molecules, enough to form pressure waves, and create sound vibrations. If so, the feat was staggeringly complex, casually impossible, one impossibility built upon another, to create something as simple as a sigh of strings and woodwinds.
Daphne whispered on their side channel. ('What? Is this meant to impress us?')
Phaethon sent back that this entity had already displayed its power. The super-dense plasma gripping the ship could easily, if the pressures changed, rupture even the Phoenix Exultant's nigh-impregnable hull.
This display, no doubt, was meant to show the Silent Oecumene machine's delicacy, its fine control.
('Yes') Phaethon sent back to her. ('It's trying to impress us.')
('Okay,') sent Daphne, looking fairly unafraid. ('I think it might be working')
From the mask now came a stately swell of horns. A timpani of drums and deep majestic strings gave tongue. And in the midst of the music, there came a voice: 'Phaethon of Rhadamanth, unwitting Earthmind's tool: you have been utterly naive. All your plans are transparent. Examine them, and you will find them illogical, worthy of pity. The war between the Sophotechs, the Wise Machines, as you call them, of the First Oecumene, and the Philanthropotechs, the Benevolent Machines, of the Second Oecumene, has its roots three ages in the past, since the Era of the Fifth Mental Structure, and shall not be concluded till after all stars turn cold, and universal night engulfs a frozen cosmos. You cannot guess the magnitude of this war; you know nothing of the issues involved. And yet you have been placed here, the pawn of minds greater man your own, trapped between opposing forces, and forced, in ignorance, to choose. About the fundamental nature of the Sophotechs, of philosophy, and of reality itself, you have been wickedly deceived. Now, at the final hour, despite all you have done to render yourself deaf, and blind, and numb to truth, nevertheless, the cold, inhuman truth will speak. Your choice now is to understand, or perish.'
BEYOND THE REACH OF TIME
Phaethon, to his surprise, found a spark of anger burning in him, growing hotter as the tall, peacock-robed specter spoke.
In angry humor, Phaethon exclaimed, 'Perhaps one day, in some more perfect world, liars will be forced to say, as they begin to speak: 'Listen! I intend to tell you lies!'
Daphne leaned her head toward him, and said in ironic tones: 'But no; for then they would be honest
