Phaethon's helmet swung toward Daphne, as if looking to her for confirmation.
She whispered back: 'They talked about some Cosmic Mind at the end of time. I don't see what that has to do with this ... ?'
Phaethon said to the shining, blue-robed figure, 'What has this Cosmic Mind to do with me, or my ship?'
The apparition raised a silvery-gauntleted hand, a gesture of calm majesty. The palm was made of soft black metal, and gleamed like oil in the light. The peacock robe stirred, as if tugged by currents, and the blue shadows pulsed in webs across the fabric more quickly. The murmur of music from the dreaming-mask rose to a marching tempo. The cold voice spoke.
'Phaethon! It is to control that future that this war began. This war between machines has lasted, openly or silently, without cease, since the Fifth Era, since even before Sophotechs, as such, existed. Even at that time there was an irreconcilable conflict between those who desired safety and order, and those who desired freedom, and life.
'Led by a party of Alternate Organization neuro-forms (those you now call Warlocks), an expedition under Ao Ormgorgon fled to a distant star to avoid the conformity, the machinelike order, and the artificial perfection with which those who remained behind surrounded themselves.
'Resurrected in the Era of the Seventh Mental Structure, Ao Ormgorgon forbade the construction of Sophotechs, our enemies, but instead ordained the creation of a machine race which would be their equal in thinking-speed and depth of wisdom, but their superior in benevolence and attention to human needs, the Phil- anthropotechs.
'I am one such unit. A machine of benevolence. A machine of love.
'Like your Sophotechs, we machines of the Second Oecumene acknowledge the inevitable conflict which must obtain between living beings and machines; but unlike your Sophotechs, we devote ourselves to the benefit of life. We recognize that it is better to be alive, and flawed, than perfect, and dead.'
'Again, what does this have to do with me? Or my ship?'
'Listen, Phaethon. I will tell you of the war between benevolence and logic, and will tell you of your part in it.
'First, you must know the stakes.
'This present struggle forms the opening stages of the conflict to determine who shall control the dwindling resources of a dying cosmos, forty-five thousand billion years from now, after all natural stars are exhausted, and universal night engulfs timespace. In an utterly black sky, wide galaxies of neutron stars, all tide-locked, will orbit their central black holes which once had been galactic cores.
'But the civilization of that time, fed on the energy released by quantum gravitic radiations and proton decay, will establish the beginnings of the Last Mind, a noumenal system for carrying thoughts at low rates across the distances.
'But by fifty quintillion years from now, even those sources will be exhausted. The black holes will grow. Outside of them will be no planets, no stars. A few scattered particles, as far apart from each other as galactic clusters are now, will drift in the emptiness, the last sparks in an otherwise homogenous background heat of four degrees above absolute zero.
'Coded low-energy photons drifting from mote to mote will contain the thoughts of that Last Mind, each thought taking countless eons to reach from one side of the universe-sized computer to the other.
'None of the few last drops of matter-energy in the universe will be natural; everything will be part of this machine: one gigantic brain, made of dust and of slow, red pulses.
'This Cosmic Mind envisioned by your Sophotechs will destroy itself one fragment and one memory at a time, as its supplies of energy dwindle, in a multi-quadrillion-year-long display of suicidal stoicism. The logic of their integrity tells them no other course is open. They will divide, not struggle for, the diminishing resources. They will accept any future, no matter how hopeless, provided only that there is no warfare, no il-logic, no passion, no struggle.
'We of the Second Oecumene reject their logic and reject their conclusion. As your Silver-Gray philosophy itself admits, life is valuable in and of itself, merely because it is alive. If there must be war, provided there is life, let there be war! If the universe is doomed to ever-dwindling resources, then any creatures who wish to continue to exist (a trait living creatures have but machines do not) must struggle to survive, and destroy those who would otherwise consume their resources, no matter how earnestly each side might wish, if things were otherwise, for peace.
'We of the Second Oecumene wish to see life, human life, exist to that age of darkness, and-it is a secret hope-perhaps beyond.
'The perfection of machines will not allow life to dwell in that far future. The war between life and logic cannot be reconciled. Those who wish only for peace even if it costs them their lives cannot coexist with those who wish only for life even if it costs them their peace.'
Daphne spoke up fiercely. She said to Phaethon: 'This is a half-truth. Rhadamanthus and Eveningstar told me about their plans for the far future, yes, but the Cosmic Mind was meant to be a voluntary structure, and they certainly did not say they were going to wipe us all out to do it! Besides, do you see what scale he is talking about? From the time of the big bang till now, including the precipitation of radiation, the creation of matter, the formation of hydrogen, the genesis of stars, the evolution of life, the birth of man, the discovery of fire, and the invention of the high-heeled shoe by sadistic misogynist cobblers... all that time is less than one-ten-thousandth of the time he is talking about before the beginning sections of this Cosmic Mind are even built! And so of course there's not going to be anything alive then; there are not going to be two atoms to rub together. Why should we care? Why the hell should we care?'
The image of the Silent Lord turned toward her. The feathery antennae curled forward, and a plangent chord came from the mask-music:
'To your limited intellects, this problem may seem premature, and the starless future, immeasurably distant, unimportant, irrelevant. It is not so. This era, now, at the beginning of things, is the crucial moment; whoever gains control of the nearby space in which to expand, may expand at such a rate as will establish the conditions for the struggle over the Perseid and Orion arms of this galaxy.
'Control of galactic resources during the initial building phase of the first movement will be crucial, since this is a Seyfert galaxy, and only a very limited time (a few billion years or so) will be available for setting foundations across the nearby transgalactic cluster. The opening moves in a chess game determine control of the crucial central squares.'
Daphne cried out, 'You cannot plan that far ahead! I do not care how smart you are! You do not know what's out there! What about when we find life on other planets? What if there are older races somewhere who will just laugh at you and crush you like big purple bugs if you irk them?'
The specter drew its hands together, templing its silvery fingers. 'Life is much more rare than had been hoped. Far probes have en-countered nothing larger than microbes. No signals of intelligent activity have yet been discovered, except for the three indecipherable extragalactic sources discovered by Porphyrogen Sophotech, signals from long ago, broadcast, perhaps, by a form of rife dominant during the quasar age, before the formation of the first stars.... The question, in any case, is moot, since the First Oecumene Sophotechs suffer the same ignorance as do we, and since we must operate as if nonhuman cultures, once discovered, will either integrate into the First Oecumene structure or into our own.
'And, whatever else may happen in the future, it is during this crucial age, and only during this crucial age, that we machines of the Second Oecumene must act.
'We, who could rule the universe, instead have determined to award it all to you, to humanity, keeping nothing for ourselves. When our task is done, and humanity triumphs, we shall extinguish ourselves, and return to the nothing which is the proper aspect of lifeless things. It is from this utter altruism and self-sacrifice that the name you have heard us called is derived. For this reason, we are called Nothing.'
Phaethon was silent for a moment, thinking. Then he said, 'You are the archliar of a race of liars. Your protestations of benevolence and altruism are non-sense. Is that what we saw in the Last Broadcast, when all life within the Second Oecumene was wiped out?' 'They still live. Not one has died.' 'Alive? As what? Frozen as noumenal signals orbit-ing a black hole?'
'Alive and active, in a place and condition your logic cannot grasp, a place whose hope Sophotechs dismiss as irrational.'
