Atkins woke up (or seemed to) falling through outer space. To every side were stars.
He controlled his reflexes: he was not falling, no matter what his inner ear said, and he was not in outer space, no matter what his eyes said. He could feel the weight of air in his lungs, and, after a moment, see the slight glint where the light was refracted from the angles of the transparent gem-facet surfaces surrounding him.
He windmilled an arm one way to rotate his (to his surprise, clothed) body the other. Behind and “above” him (if that word had any meaning), the crystal facets were smoky and semitransparent, and the rest of the structure—ship or station, depending on whether it had drives—was visible. It was an organic-looking nautilus of diamond crystal, paved on every surface with sophotechnology, breathtakingly lovely, hauntingly alien and old-fashioned. It looked like Warlock architecture from the Fifth Era.
The clothes he had been given were from the same time period, almost bizarrely ancient: without even circuits for heating or manufacture in them, much less thought- amplifiers: dark, stiff, dead, clamp-sleeved and high-collared, with a hood hanging down his back that could be pulled shut in case of pressure-loss. He could detect similar antiquities inside his body: a spine of packed disks, an Adam's apple, the inefficient joints and support structure of his feet, the stubble of hair at his jaw. No doubt he had an old-fashioned appendix instead of a secondary heart. There was not even a muscle in the nose to pinch the nostrils shut, a bio-feature as old as space travel.
He did not like being midchamber in zero-g. His instinct was to get near a bulkhead, half-crouched with his legs “under” him, so he could push off the surface in any direction. But his hostess had also equipped his costume with a long blade (a Warlock's athame, damascened with natal constellations) and a heavy gold-foil maneuvering fan. This emphasized either her utter honesty or his utter helplessness. Either way, there was not much point in getting his feet near a wall.
The Lady of the Silent Oecumene floated nearby, her robes and drapes spread like a purple-red and silvery flower, her body curled in a fetal position.
When he looked toward her, the colors in her robe shimmered. She was absorbing information through the sensitive processes in the fabric. The decorative eyes in some of the peaco*k tails were eyes indeed.
A female voice came from pinpoint ports in her mask: “Observe.”
Part of the diamond hull before him shimmered and amplified an image in false colors. To one side was a dark Neptunian world, a gas giant whose atmosphere had frozen solid in the deep of interstellar space. To the other side was a cone-shaped cloud of asteroids; and a second asteroid cloud; and a third. There were scores and myriads of similar conical clouds beyond that. The false colors overlaid the image with readings of the X-ray and gamma-ray count.
He recognized the asteroid patterns. Normal planet-k**ing weapons do not have the energy to disperse the ma** involved: low-yield explosions rarely do more than shatter the planetary crust. Most worlds, and almost all large worlds, have liquid cores, so even an explosion that throws part of the planetary ma** past escape velocity does not actually shatter the planet, because the ma**es, in a few years, spiral back to a common center. The immensity of energy involved in destroying a planet and imparting sufficient velocity to the fragments to prevent reaccretion was staggering.
The Middle Dreaming painted a picture in his mind showing the distance and relative motion of what he was seeing. It had been an armada of worlds, some four thousand planets larger than Jupiter, reengineered and gathered up from thousands of star systems (the Silent Oecumene had enjoyed centuries in which to colonize local space before the Golden Oecumene was aware of the threat) and accelerated from orbit to near light-speed. It was an engineering feat of unparalleled brilliance, a display of what could be done when engineers had limitless energy to play with.
Atkins looked again at the nearby Neptunian world. He recognized it as Elpenor, the giant he had seen in transit between Canopus and Eta Carina. The Swans at that time, not certain whether Atkins was part of the Renunciant Diaspora, had held their hand.
Elpenor was only a gas giant down to about thirty thousand feet beneath the surface. The remainder of the world was hollow, the core having been compressed down to the diameter of an atom, to give the Swans the singularity they needed for their Infinity Fountains. The ma** of the world was unchanged. Maintaining a hollow shell of that size and shape was nearly impossible, but with an endless supply of energy, what was nearly impossible was practical.
He said, “We suspected you were heading toward the galactic core. There is an immense black hole there, larger than any of the merely stellar ma**es you so far have had at your disposal. But why did you think the war would last long enough for you to get there, do what you meant to do, and return?”
She said dismissively, “We are more concerned with our disagreements among our circles and covens than anything to do with you. It is intensely painful to us to contemplate that there are minds beyond our control that show no respect for our dreams. There were those who said we mortals could not wage long-term war against you. Here is the counter-proof. We can wage a war to last as long as we wish to wage it. The Armada was to serve as an example to prove that certain conflict- types would outlast history.”
He laughed himself at that, a bitter, small laugh. “What is your name, ma'am?”
She said, “We do not have names. All who address me are my servants, and merely call me Milady. Our machines a**ign names only to speak one to another about a third not present. If you speak to others of me, call me Ao Ahasuerus; but call me not that.”
“Well, Milady, you are one crazy, sick egomaniac, but we can agree on this one point. There will always be war. It is the natural condition of man.”
“No. There will always be war, but there will not always be man. Observe again.”
Again, images appeared in the crystal bulkhead above and below him. Again he saw the asteroid-clouds in the familiar scattered pattern. One after another after another pa**ed before his gaze. One hundred, two hundred, five hundred. They occupied a volume of just over eighteen light-years.
Eventually, he saw what was wrong. “Insufficient ma**. We did not get you all, did we? How many world-ships in your d**h Armada survived?”
“Some were sacrificed that other might survive. The survivors are enough to create tidal distortions in the galactic core, altering the shape of the event horizon. It is enough to ignite an accretion disk and create the final weapon. It is easy to calculate the maximum volume the Golden Oecumene might occupy in fifty-two thousand years from present, and wipe out all those stars, every one, using the energy from infalling stars swept up by an unstable, and geometrically growing, galactic-core singularity. Even to begin retreating now, at ninety-nine percent of light-speed, the shockwave progressing at light-speed would eventually overtake you.”
Atkins frowned. “This is what you wanted to show me? It looks like the Silent Oecumene will win the war, and nothing we can do will stop it.”
She said, “And yet, I am not delighted, not amused, and my enjoyments are spoiled.”
He looked at the Swan where she floated, a thin, elfin shape curled in on herself, surrounded by luxurious yards of shining fabric, such robes as could never be used in planetary gravity. Colors pulsed in delicate half-tints through the layers of filmy cloth, but he did not have the aesthetic to interpret it. She had no face, no expression.
Eventually, she spoke again: “The thought-machinery of Elpenor was damaged in the fighting. My Benevolences cannot edit out of my mind disquieting, even painful thoughts, as they were once programmed to do, nor can they satisfy my every yearning.”
“For what do you yearn?”
She said, “You have within you all the techniques needed to build a sophotech and a noetic circuit, and immortality system, in your thought-space. I have access to the surviving singularity in Elpenor, and a working Infinity Fountain. We cannot cooperate: not you and I, for you and I are enemies. But we can defeat the Armada of Dark Worlds, even though it is now too late for the main galactic disk.”
“Are you surrendering? Helping the Commonwealth?”
Pinpoint receptors in her mask uttered a scornful laugh. “Surrender to whom? The images I show you are thousands of years old, corrected for immense redshift. The Armada may already be at the galactic core. We could not reach Sol before the Seyfert wave overtook it. Nothing will be left.”
Atkins drew his fan, unfolded it, and swam back through the air until his feet were near the clear diamond bulkhead. He loosened the blade in its scabbard, but did not draw it. Instead he paused, waiting, as tense and as patient as a cat before a mouse hole.
She said, “If you and I are the last, we can destroy each other.”
He said, “Is that your wish? It seems a poor recompense after you let me out of your prison. Ungrateful, even.”
She said, “You are the last and only soldier of your utopia. We must k** each other. Is this not what you were programmed to do?”
Atkins said, “Do I actually need to explain the difference between a soldier and a murderer? I don't k** for pleasure. You were talking about surrender a moment ago. Will you?”
“Yes,” she said, “But not to you. I will surrender only to what is greater than either of us, greater than what divides us.”
Atkins, crouched near the bulkhead, stars behind his feet, one hand at his sword hilt and the other on the vanes of his gold fan, merely waited, eyes narrowed. He honestly had no idea what this strange creature would say or do next.
Ao Ahasuerus said, “In a war between immortals, and those who seek to stay mortal, the only equality condition is for the immortals to perish, for this makes them mortal. However, my people betrayed me. I cannot be the real Ao Ahasuerus. I am a copy, a fake, a doll. Over and over, I have calculated and recalculated the parameters, using both your mathematics and my own, both your rational logic and my transrational logic, and I can come to no other conclusion.”
Atkins realized what had happened. “The two of us were the only ones who knew the aiming elements of the nova weapon. I was sent to meet with copies of Atkins hidden in your fleet, and you were sent to stop me. You had to send a real Swan, and you only had yourself to send. The only transmission you knew your fellow Swans would trust was one hidden in a living personality, wasn't it? The Eighth Mental Structure is a code that cannot be cracked. You yourself are not aware you hold it.”
Ao Ahasuerus said, “If I am a created being, and not a Lord of the Silent Oecumene, I owe them no loyalty. They betrayed our way of life. I must answer this treason with treason! I cannot rest, knowing that I am immortal. To prove my mortality, my humanity, I must die.”
“Be my guest,” said Atkins, puzzled and wondering. “All those life time-tortured versions of me—I a**ume you k**ed them all—would be gratified. So what is stopping you?”
“Unlike you, vermin of the Golden Oecumene, as cold and unchanging as the metal for which you name yourselves, I am human. I cannot die save for a cause. I cannot overwrite my memories save for the sake of a woman better than I am.”
Atkins opened his mouth and closed it again. He said nothing
The Swan said, “It was always a trap from the first, was it not? You do not understand us, but you understood that much. To destroy your own Earth, Old Earth, which we revered above all things, and then to tempt us, to lure us in with versions of the Earth, with replicas of all the ancient things, the human things, we so prize. Even in the Eighth Mental Structure, there is still a leakage, a seepage from the hidden self out into the outward awareness, is there not? I could not help but be lured to the Earth. You could not help, even when you were encrypted to think of yourself as Ulysses, falling in love. Your own psychology tricked you, did it not?”
“Maybe. I went through a messy divorce a few years back—millennium to you, I guess—and that must have bubbled up to the surface somehow. Penelope was just me in disguise, of course, and regulations should have prevented me from falling in love with myself. But when you invaded her, some alien element entered her thought systems, so, yes, I suppose something in me was lonely.”
“Admit it.”
Atkins said, “Yes. We destroyed the Earth deliberately as a psychological ploy, and set up copies of the Earth in star systems where I was waiting. Twenty-one of the star oecumenes were completely fake, and there was no one inhabiting those places but me.”
“How could you burn your own home? Our common home?”
“It is just an object made of matter. We have a digital copy. I can build another one.”
“And will you?”
It was at that instant that Atkins saw what the Swan was saying, but it was many minutes, perhaps even years, before he agreed