She said, "I hope you're not thinking of making this decision without asking me. You don't have the best track record for being completely balanced under stress, you know."
The gold helmet tilted slightly. Phaethon's voice came thoughtfully over the armor speakers: "There was an evening, not long ago, when, to the best of my recollection, I was the wealthy, well-loved, and popular scion of a beautiful and respected manor, an elegant school, a high estate. I lived in a world as near perfect as humanity can achieve, a world where war and crime and violence were forgotten; a world of endless wealth and power and liberty; a world which had set aside the whole of this year, merely for her holiday, a grand festival and celebration, such as had not been seen in a thousand years.
"But everything I thought was false. I was a scorned pauper, manorless, except as my sire's charity ward, the subject of widespread hate. Crime and violence I became acquainted with, as I was defrauded, robbed of my life, and then attacked. Atkins, who I thought a myth, stepped into my life, terrible and real, and I joined a war the enemy declares has been smoldering for centuries. And now this world trembles on the brink of disaster. As soon as the Nothing Machine gains control of this ship, he will use her as a weapon, wrecking the Solar Array, disrupting the Transcendence, slaying millions.
"All I thought I knew was false. But-but what if I am in that same state now? What if the Second Oec-umene are the heroic victims their agent here depicts them to be? What if the Silent Lords are still alive in the nothingspace inside their event horizon? Waiting for me to join them? A society of men like me ... ? What if he's telling the truth ... ?"
The masked image of the peacock-robed Silent Lord uttered music, and words: "Phaethon must realize all chains of logic lead to the same result. If he has faith in Earthmind, he must apply her virus against me. To do this he must open his armor and give the command. If he has faith, on the other hand, in Nothing, he will open his armor and surrender command. This is no more than your original plan, Phaethon."
Phaethon's helmet turned toward Daphne. "Well... ? You're the heroine, in this story. What do you say?"
Daphne drew her Greek helm forward and lowered her visor. She put her hand on the haft of the naginata spear resting next to her throne. She seemed the very image of a classical war-goddess. "Don't use faith. Faith is just mental laziness, the desire to hold a conclusion without examining the evidence to support it. Use logic. What does logic say?"
She heard the sound of him drawing a deep breath, as if steeling himself for an unpleasant necessity. "Logic says, no matter what seems to be happening, and no matter what he says, conditions cannot be as the Nothing Machine describes. The universe cannot be irrational; the laws of morality cannot be suspended or ignored; that any consciousness that does so, does so only through passion, inattention, or dishonesty, things no Sophotech can suffer; that the moment the gadfly virus finds and destroys this conscience redactor, the Nothing Machine will wake fully to its proper level of consciousness, become a Sophotech, become rational, and give up this worthless plan of violence."
Phaethon's reflection from the mirror said, "With all due respect, the violence which the Nothing Philan-thropotech plans, far from being illogical, may be properly and sufficiently justified by the circumstances. The morality of living things must justify whatever immoral acts are needed to preserve life; otherwise they will not remain living things."
Phaethon said slowly, "As soon as I open the armor and give the command, I'm going to believe what my partial believes, including tripe like that."
Daphne shook her head. "You won't stay convinced."
Phaethon said, "Oh? Why not? You're looking pretty convinced yourself, right now. If the Nothing's simulations with our partials are true, you will be convinced, the moment your reflection comes out of the mirror and rejoins with you."
Daphne smiled sadly, and said, "Oh, I'm convinced now. I'm just not convinced I'll stay convinced."
Phaethon's voice held a note of surprise. "You think the Nothing is telling the truth?"
She gestured with her slender gauntleted hand at the mirrors, showing the diagrams and maps of a vast civilization grown in the impossible core of a black hole.
One schematic showed a stretch of concave landscapes reaching across the inner side of a neutronium Dyson sphere the size of a globular cluster, with a thousand artificial suns, each with its own flotilla of plants, ring-worlds, or smaller spheres orbiting it. Other parts of this same map showed how time and space had been curved and twisted by the unthinkable gravitic forces involved, so that the interior time till the heat death of the universe was extended to infinity. In one picture, a little girl plucked a flower, with green grass below, and the hazy blue of distant lands and oceans high overhead, a world so vast that an army of explorers walking for a million years could never explore all its mysteries.
"Look, Phaethon, look," Daphne said. "The dream they dream is beautiful. A dream as bold as your own, or bolder. You want to explore and colonize the universe; they wish to extend the lifespan of the universe beyond all boundaries, to remake its laws, and shape reality to banish entropy, decay, and death forever. I'd like to believe in that dream whether it's true or not. It reminds me of the kind of thing you'd do."
Then Daphne sighed, and straightened, and said, "Besides. He's right. We're trapped. The only way out is to open the armor and release the virus. Even if it doesn't work on the real him any more than it worked on the fake him, we don't have a choice. That was the plan, remember? And logic says the plan is going to work."
"Very well. I'm about to open my armor and reload the ship-mind copies of him and me both back into their originals. Any last words, cautions, advice?"
Daphne adjusted her grip on her spear haft. In the shadow of her Greek helmet, her red lips were set in a line. "I'm ready," she said.
Phaethon's epaulettes unfolded, exposing the thought-ports beneath.
"It's done."
The activity level in the ship-mind jumped, but other than that, there was no change. The virus operated briefly, and was ignored, as before. The Nothing did not take unto itself the characteristic architecture of a Sophotech.
"We've failed," said Daphne.
"No," said Phaethon, opening his faceplate. His eyes were fixed as if on a distant point. There was a note of calm joy in his voice. "The Earthmind must have lied, or been mistaken. There may actually be no reason why the Nothing has to agree with us after all. Perhaps the engineering skill of the Silent Lords can overcome every restriction we thought was absolute. Perhaps there is a war of life against nonlife. If so, we Silver-Gray must stand with the forms and principles which human souls and human traditions require. It all seems to clear to me now...."
The deck seemed to slide underfoot, and then-weight grew. On the mirrors, Daphne saw the white-hot temperature gradient grow dim. Some solar current of unthinkable size and strength was propelling them out of the radiative to the convective layer. Soon the photosphere would be around them, then the corona.
Daphne could not calculate or even imagine the size of the coronal mass-ejection that would accompany the return of the Phoenix Exultant out from the core of the sun. It would trigger a storm of unprecedented size, and surely disrupt the Transcendence all across the Solar System.
A mirror near her lit with an estimate of photospheric condition. Here was a simulated image of the sun, an entire hemisphere blotched and scarred and boiling with sunspots, and a hundred helmet streamers reaching out like kraken arms of fire into space, a thousand high prominences, rainbows of flame larger than worlds. In the magnetic picture, all circumambient space was ablaze with torn and folded magnetic field disturbances the likes of which had never before been recorded.