La Trascendencia Dorada (77 page)

“I’m going back into null,” she said. “Wake me if anything exciting happens.”

Phaethon, his eyes fixed on the featureless darkness of one of the mirrors, nodded.

Time passed.

Daphne woke again. “What day is it? Have I missed the Transcendence?”

“It’s only been two hours while you slept.”

“What happened? Why did you wake me?”

“Ah! Something exciting. While you were asleep, I did some tests on the ghost array, and I think I can pick up neutrino deflections with it.”

Daphne blinked. “Oh.”

“ ‘Oh’? All you have to say is ‘oh’?”

“Oh. Please define the word ‘exciting’ as you are using it, so there will be no ambiguities in our future communications.”

“Well, I did this so you could have something to look at while we are waiting to be attacked.”

“Dear, did I ever tell you that there is something about you which really does remind me of Atkins?”

“Look at these mirrors. There. I can use a filter to calculate heat gradients from neutrino discharges…”

The black forward scene was now broken by sparks or stars. Little discharges of intense white light, pinpoints or shimmers like heat lighting, now gave the darkness a three-dimensional aspect, like seeing lightning through storm clouds, or watching the flows of molten lead in some deep, pressurized furnace. Below and beyond the field of sparks, like a fire in the far background, was a dull angry red color, reflecting from the boils and currents of what seemed intervening streams or clouds of darkness.

Phaethon said, “Those sparks are called Vanguard events, named after their discoverer. The number and volume of hydrogen fusions here is so great that, at times, by accident, neutrons fuse into superheavy particle pairs, but which decay instantly back into simpler particles, releasing neutrinos and other weak particles back into the medium. We’re at the boundary of the radiative layer. The medium here is dense enough that even some of those weak particles are trapped and fused, which all adds to the general entropy. Farther down, toward the core, Vanguard events are much more common. Here is a longer-ranged view…”

And she saw, down beyond the haze of iron red, a shading toward orange, and yellow-white, all knotted with snakelike writhings of black and blue-black, colder areas raining through the endless nuclear storm.

He said, “This view is actually several hours old. Photons are blocked here, absorbed and reabsorbed endlessly; but even photinos and protinos are slowed by the density.”

The view was hellish. She said, “Can’t you give these gradient images a nicer color? Taupe maybe, or lime green?”

A shiver ran through the room at that moment, and a sound like clicking and screaming. Phaethon’s face went blank, and his helmet came up out of his gorget and folded over to cover his face.

Daphne said, “I don’t think I like this. Why did I volunteer to come along here again…?” And emergency paramaterial fields snapped a cocoon in place around her, while superdense material poured forth from high-speed spigots in the ceiling, to flood the bridge.

It was dark in the cocoon. When she looked into the ship’s dreaming, to see what was going on, her time tense sped up enormously. Phaethon had activated his emergency personality, and had sped himself up to the highest level his system could tolerate. In order to see what it was he was doing, Daphne’s high-speed personality (called Rajas Guna, a prana she had acquired back when she lived with the Warlocks) equalized her time sense.

Phaethon was at the center of a huge flow of information, like a fly trapped in a web of light. The stresses and pressures on the hull were higher than he had predicted. Helion had never created a vortex as large as the one he had made to send this ship toward the core; it had created a back pressure or countercurrent of some sort, a region of turbulence where the convective zone met the radiative zone.

There was normally no convection or current in the radiative zone. It was too dense there for anything but pure energy to exist. But the tornado of low pressure caused by Helion had suctioned an area larger than Jupiter upward out of the radiative zone into the convection, as if a mountain had dislodged from the bottom of the sea, and risen up to strike the ship. The eruption had come quickly enough to outrun its own images of approach.

Suddenly, the pressures and temperatures were as great now, instantly, as Phoenix Exultant had been expecting to encounter hours from now. During those hours, the internal fields and bracing systems would have had time slowly to adjust to the mounting pressure. Now there was no time.

Phaethon was directing the internal magnetic and paramaterial fields of the Phoenix Exultant to brace against the pressure shock, receiving information from every square inch of the hull. The temperature was approaching 16 million degrees; the pressure 160 grams per cubic centimeter. Phaethon was using the magnetic field treads that coated the adamantium hull to pull magnetic forces out from the energy shower raging around them, to stave off the pressure by repulsion, adding in some places, subtracting it in others, so that the stress was even on all sides.

Since the shockwave was passing over the ship in a microsecond, Phaethon’s accelerated time sense required him to measure, to calculate, and to redistribute forces. For each square meter of the hundred kilometers of hull, another calculation was made, another field was increased or decreased in tension, orders were given to fluids in the pressure plates. Movement was frozen in this silent and timeless universe, but every element and every command would need to be in place when time resumed.

In Daphne’s mind’s eye she could see a view of Phaethon’s calm face, carried to her from the monitors inside his helmet. In the Warlock dreamspace inside her head, information from his thalamus and hypothalamus, the neural energies that (had time been flowing) would have been shown by changes in his facial expression, were displayed to her as a system of colored light, as a menagerie of animals in a field, each beast representing a different passion or emotion.

But as nanosecond after nanosecond crawled by, as the subjective hours passed, those lights that she saw burned pale white and unwavering. Lambs and birds and wolfish dogs, representing Phaethon’s meekness, cowardliness, and anger, lay still and restful on the grass. Only the icon of a large gold lion was on its feet, and it stood regally, its gold tail lashing.

Daphne could have, at any moment, shut off her high-time, and allowed the next event to simply happen to her. The ship would either be destroyed or saved in a moment too quick to be seen. It did her no good at all to stay on the line with Phaethon, saying nothing, watching. just watching him work, unable to assist him in my way.

Toward the end of the third subjective hour, she said, “How are we doing?”

His face showed no change of expression. “Not great. The hull has been breached. A gap about twenty angstroms wide. I’m trying to get the outside fields to collapse against each other destructively at that spot, to cancel out and create a bubble. If the magnetics are dense enough, normal plasma cannot enter. We might make it.”

Daphne was thinking that, buried in the midst of this opaque plasma, no possible noumenal signal or information could be transmitted out. Even if they both recorded their minds anywhere on the ship, if the ship were destroyed, there would be no record of what had happened here, ever again.

“What broke the hull? I thought it was invulnerable.”

“Gravitic tides in a concentrated point source. Not something I’ve seen before. Of course, no one has ever been this deep before.”

In her mind’s eye, she saw a stir of uneasy tension through the beasts her format used to represent Phaethon’s emotional and neural tensions. She switched to a traditional Silver-Gray human face format, and saw the same emotion depicted as a narrowing of Phaethon’s eyes, a twitch of the muscles in his cheek, a sigh. He said. “There is nothing more I can do at this point. Either I have balanced the overpressure across the hull or I have not. If I have, the forces will cancel each other out, and the pressure will pass evenly across the hull surface. If I have not, greater pressure along one section will cause a rupture along other sections, because the Shockwave will be traveling normal to the hull rather than parallel. All the models I’ve run say I have done as much as I can do. Either we can watch this thing happening to us in terrible slow motion, unable to affect the outcome, or we can return to our normal time rate. That way, if I’ve made a miscalculation, we will be dead before either of us feels any pain or alarm. Which would you prefer?”

“ ‘Twere best done quickly,” she said.

“I’m returning us to normal time rates. Any last words?”

“Do you think this is an enemy weapon? That we simply miscalculated and that the Nothing does not want, or cannot risk, to take over the Phoenix Exultant!”

“Believe it or not, no, I don’t think this is a weapon. I think this is a natural phenomenon, created by the low-pressure funnel Helion is using to drive us down this deep. If this had been a weapon, the Shockwave would have struck into a vital spot in the hull, or with a pressure imbalance too great for me to counter balance with my hull magnetics. It’s a random action. Chaos. Besides, my neutrino radar shows an homogenous temperature gradient in every direction. If there were a ship our size, or made of the hull material one would need to withstand this depth and pressure, it would be as obvious and unusual as an icicle in a furnace, and give my probes a hard return. There’s nothing around us. We’re alone.”

“So if we die now, it’s just one of the universe’s little ironies. But I’m not afraid. Because you’re wrong: we’re really not alone.” And she sent a tactile signal that his sense filter could interpret as the feeling of her hand sliding into his grasp, and squeezing his fingers.

He said, “I love you.”

With a roar of noise, the sound of her own heartbeat pounding in her ears, the roar of blood, returned to her. She realized that she had her eyes squeezed shut, as if to shut out a bright light. She thought, A lot of good that will do in the middle of the sun. Then she thought, By the time it takes you to wonder if you are still alive, the question has already become moot. She laughed, gagged on antiacceleration fluid, spat, and cycled her cocoon to turn back into a throne and release her.

There was a long moment while high-speed pumps cleared the bridge of antiacceleration gel, and other circuits swept the deck.

She looked over to see a diamond shell around Phaethon’s golden throne also dissolving in a cloud of steam. He still had his helmet faceplate down, but on her internal channel, she could see the emotional monitors, and saw the interior view of his face. He looked haggard. His eyes had that fatigued, red stare that men who’ve spent a month or more in highspeed time are likely to get.

She said, “You bastard!”

He said, “Hello, my darling. Nice to see you again—Ah. I mean, of course, it looks like we are still alive—”

She said in a voice of hot fury, “How dare you!”

“How dare I what?”

“Spend days or months in subjective time—how long was it?—just waiting around to see if I would die, without doing me the courtesy of asking if I wanted to wait with you?”

Daphne thought that Phaethon was the least expert liar alive. He said lamely, “What, um, gives you such a quaint idea? I remember specifically telling you it would all be over in a split second…”

“Oh, good grief! If you came out of your cocoon with a nine-year growth of beard, two children, and a new hobby it could not be more obvious! Well! What in the world were you thinking?!”

He spread his hands, puzzled. “I do not see why you are upset.” He spoke in a voice of infinite, calm reason, “I wanted to spare you the anxiety. And it would have been negligent of me not to watch the explosive shock-wave crawl, inch by inch, across the hull, just in case, after all, it turned out that I could have done something. As it was, the Shockwave did even less damage, and was more perfectly balanced, that any model predicted. Sort of strange, actually…”

She stood up, hands on hips. “Not as strange as you’re going to feel when I yank out your lying tongue four feet, wrap it around your neck, and strangle you with it! I came along with you because, out of everyone, Atkins, Diomedes, your father, everyone, I was the only one who believed in you. And now you don’t believe in me! Do you still think I’m a coward, is that it? Or do you think I would not have had anything to offer, no ideas, not even comfort or support, while you spent a month by yourself waiting to see if we would die? If you don’t think I can take what you can, why did you bring me along? Why?”

Phaethon held up his finger. “While I would really like to continue this argument—it makes me feel like we’re already married, you know, and that is comforting—why don’t we store this conversation in a back file and play it out later? We can store our emotions so that you’ll be just as mad and I’ll be just as tired. Because there is something very bad happening right now, and I’d like your advice and support on the issue.” “Well. Okay. But no backup files. I hate old conversations. Since there is nothing but empty ship mind all around us, why don’t we send two partials to finish that conversation for us, provided we agree to abide by the results? We still have the portable noetic unit right here.” Phaethon agreed, and they established copies of themselves to continue the argument on another of the ship’s channels. Meanwhile, Phaethon showed Daphne what he had found during the hundred hours (for him) that had taken place during the split second (for her) it had taken the Shockwave to pass across the ship.

He pointed to a mirror that now showed a yellow-white haze rippled by feathery clouds of red and dark red.

“The Shockwave threw us out of the funnel of Helion’s low-pressure area,” said Phaethon. “And I do not know where we are. Helion may have also lost track of us.” He pointed toward the mirror. “The environment here looks like we have dropped into the radiative zone, but we may still be inside the bubble of higher-density plasma that erupted over us.”

Daphne said, “How bad is that? I mean, all we were doing was waiting until the bad guys found us.”