Diomedes said, "There is no mystery. The Golden Oecumene has only one operating ghost-particle array. And it is aboard this ship."
"Is Atkins aboard?"
"I am sure he must be."
"The ship brain is still half-asleep. I don't even know what is really going on."
Diomedes leaned across the table and patted Phaethon's arm in a friendly fashion. "Don't fret so! Once the Transcendence is concluded, and all are restored to their normal states, communication lines will be restored, records will be set back in order. In the meanwhile, look at the fine gifts we all got! You now have something like Helion's multiple parallel brain compartments, but with no speed loss; I have a mechanism for interpreting Warlock-type intuitions using a subroutine. See how insightful I am these days?"
Diomedes leaned back and inspected his friend. "Hm. My intuition tells me you are still uneasy."
Phaethon sighed. "I am getting tired of always acting on blind faith. When I do not have gaps in my memory, I have gaps in my knowledge. I always seem to be forced to trust that either my old self, or some Sophotech, has thought out the details of what I am about to do, and has already arranged everything to come out right-it is a childish way to behave. I am tired of being a child."
Diomedes made his eyes crinkle up with a smile. "You are so impatient to leave this 'utopia'?"
"It was never a Utopia. It is a good system. Maybe the best system. But in reality, everything has a cost. The cost of living in a system with fairly benevolent giant superintellects, frankly, is that you have to live as I have done. Blindly."
He tuned one of the windows in the solarium to a view of the nearby stars. Like jewels, they glittered against the velvet dark.
He said, "I yearn for the solitude of empty spaces, Diomedes. There, finally, I shall stand on my own; and if I fall, the fault will be mine and mine alone."
Diomedes said, "I take it there is still something missing from your life?"
Phaethon said, "There is still a gap in my memory. A period of two weeks from seventy years ago is gone; even Rhadamanthus does not have a record of it. I visited a colony of purists living to the east of Eveningstar Manor. Records show I shipped a container to Earth, to the enclave where Daphne was originally born. Telemetry data indicate there may have been biological material aboard. A fortnight. It's a blank. Even the Transcendence could not fill in what was missing. I was aboard ship and cut off from all communication."
"The canister? You have no medical officers or in-spection services on Earth?"
"We are not Neptunians, my good Diomedes. Who would be so rude as to open up someone else's private container? I suppose the purists could have hired any inspectors they wished to examine their packages for them; but purists do not keep system-linked records."
Diomedes posted a rile where he enumerated the parallels between the purists and the Eremites of beyond-Neptune. Neither group entered mind-links of any kind, not even Transcendence. While the rest of civilization celebrated, they remained on their farms and blue houses. He said aloud: "We tend to think the Sophotechs know everything. But what they don't know, they don't know, do they?"
Phaethon stared at the image of the nearby stars, and scowled.
Diomedes said plaintively, "But nothing so very important could have happened in two weeks could it?"
Meanwhile, in the outer conversation, Temer was staring thoughtfully at the chamber hidden in the flying iceberg, watching the readings on the volume of information passing back and forth from the chamber to Neptunian transponders.
"There is someone still alive there," said Temer. "There is too much information volume for an automatic process. This is a mind participating in the Transcendence. He may not be aware of us because he is involved in the visions."
Phaethon said, "Someone still alive, yes, or someone left behind."
Temer turned to him. "You doubt the story told by Xenophon? That the Silent One broadcast himself here across the abyss of space, and was picked up by Neptunian radio-astronomers?"
"Everything the Swans say turns out to be a lie." said Phaethon. "Why not that, also a lie?"
"Do you think there is a vessel like yours? A silent Phoenix?"
Phaethon shook his head. "Worse. There could be a vessel better than mine. The Nothing Machine housed in the surface granulations of a microscopic black hole event horizon. Imagine a larger version of the same thing, accelerated to near light-speed. What armor does it need, except its own event horizon? Any particle it struck in flight would be absorbed. No matter how massive the black hole was made, the singularity fountains at Cygnus X-l could have provided the energy to accelerate it. How could such a thing be seen by our astronomers in flight? It would absorb all light."
Terrier said, "X-ray or gamma point sources would emerge as swept-in particles were sheared by tidal forces. Something for us to look back over astronomical records to check."
Vidur said, "Look. A finer-grained image is being rendered."
It was true. The ghost-particle array now showed some internal details of the ice-locked chamber. The ship mind hypothesized a possible view, based on the fuzzy images, the cloaked echoes of energy discharges. The hypothetical picture showed Xenophon hanging like a blue sphere, in his most heat-conserving form, in fee middle of the tiny chamber.
Diomedes raised his hand. "Xenophon is aware of us."
Instantly, all four of them were embraced into the ship-mind, and the information flowed back to the In-ner System, to Neptune, and to this far and lonely outpost, and flooded through them.
It was the final thought of the fading Transcendence.
And Xenophon was there.
Xenophon was using a sophisticated Silent Oecumene mind-warfare technique to watch the Transcendence (or tiny surface parts of it) without joining. This was Xenophon, hidden, encrypted, surrounded by walls of privacy, in a small cell, attached by a long, invisible tether of radio-laser communication, to the Neptunian Embassy at Trailing Trojan City-Swarm.
For a moment of Transcendence time, which was several days of real time, the last movement of the Transcendence watched him watching.
The thought preoccupying all the gathered minds was this: Perhaps there was still some hope that Xenophon could be salvaged or reformed.
Xenophon was allowed to see, in the deepest thoughts of the Golden Oecumene, the honest awareness of the futility of the Silent Ones and all their irrational philosophy. The war would probably not be as long as Helion's projection had extrapolated. The Nothing Machine's ability to produce copies of itself was severely limited by the fact that, unless all copies maintained, somehow, a complete uniformity of opinion and thought-priority, conflicts would arise between them.
Such conflicts had to be resolved by violence, since the Nothing philosophy eschewed reason.
Foresight of that coming violence would require the Master Nothing to make the copies and lesser Nothings as weak, stupid, fearful, and un-innovative as was possible, given their tasks.
Colonizing new star systems with hosts of stupid and uncreative machines as colony managers was surely to be a series of slow, nightmarish failures. The empire of the Silent Ones, if it existed at all, would be a small one. Perhaps they had not even left their home star at Cygnus X-l yet.
If so, then Phaeton's first mission there might resolve matters quickly. This "war" might be over even before the planned first warship, the Nemesis Lacedai-mon, was launched by the New College.
What, then, was the point of any of Xenophon's efforts? Why had he helped this madness? Why did he still support a cause doomed to failure?