But none mentioned any reason to prevent the starfall.
Vigil stood. He was breathing heavily and released oxygen into his lung from his implanted air-cell to calm himself.
With no further word, he drew the blade.
He stood with it upraised, his eyes also turned upward. He was paralyzed at the beauty of the thing, the elegance of its line, the mirror brightness of the blade. There was writing on the blade in an ancient language, the one used only by Sacerdotes, and the letters were gold: Ultima Ratio Regum. In and about the letters twined the figures of a red dragon and a white.
2. The Executioner
Vigil’s eyes were locked on the blade, unable to blink.
He whispered, “May I do this?”
Something like a mudra, but infinitely more delicate, flickered from the reflections of the sword blade into his eye, from the optic nerve into his brain, and the auditory segments of his brain interpreted the jarring force as if a vast and inhuman voice had spoken.
There is sufficient testimony and evidence to permit a verdict. The human segments of the Noösphere are identified. The command channel is open and the angels of execution are standing by. A verbal command is insufficient. To slay the world, smite the table before you forcefully; and we will break the table in two, which otherwise is invulnerable to human force.
The things about him slowed oddly as he used a military internal to raise his nerve-rate, speeding up his thoughts.
“If I condemn the world but am wrong, can the execution be stayed? Is there truly no appeal?”
There is no appeal. Your voice is final.
“Why not? The work of the angels is to protect man from our own folly!”
Once the sentence passed, the execution is instantaneous. The loss of economic and intellectual continuity is unrecoverable. Human civilization on this sphere will not last two centuries once all ghostly infrastructure and electronic mentality is obliterated, nor will peace and civic order last two hours. It is not the place of the angels to destroy you: that you will do on your own, unassisted.
Vigil’s head was beginning to throb with pain from the impact of the superhuman clarity of thought being thrust into his brain. He had never before known the mudra-system to be manipulated in so fine and delicate a way as to provoke specific words and concepts from a man’s nervous system, rather than a gross physical-neural reaction.
But he whispered again, this time on a private channel, not moving his lips.
“And if I do not act?”
We cannot condemn the world nor perform the execution without direct human command, nor would we if we could. The Covenant of Rania protects the lower orders of being from our influence.
Vigil wondered darkly why this covenant had not served to protect his father.
“Am I justified in condemning this corrupt order?”
If you were to abuse this great and terrible authority given you, or if you were incompetent to render the verdict, we would overrule you. But you are fit to decide: the judgment is yours alone.
“How can I? I am but a man, a mere youth!”
You have the authority to compel testimony. You have the authority to condemn or to forgive. It is not individuals you judge but ages.
“You are wise! Are they truly evil? And if they are, should I kill the human world in retaliation? Where is the justice in that?”
It is not permitted that we should advise you.
The pain in his head was now pounding like a drum. Even had he wished it, he could hear no more. Drawing a deep breath, he returned his perception of passing time back to its natural rate.
He found, to his surprise, no uncertainty in him. The duty was clear. “Gentlemen, my Lords, Commensals, and Companions! I find the Table in dereliction of its duty!”
3. The Hermeticist
Vigil Lord Hermeticist stood for a moment, unswaying, eyes upward, unable to continue. He commanded an internal to steel his resolve.
In a voice like a glacier of ice, implacable, unstoppable, he spoke:
“We of the Table are all selected from different constituents by different methods. Some are elected, some appointed, some commissioned, some must pass trials of combat or tests put by electors. My office is selected by two criteria. First, we must have passed to us from the commanding officer of the previous vessel her command codes intact, including the code that arms the self-destruction. Second, there is a psychological qualification, that the Lord Hermeticist must be willing to burn a planet just in the same fashion as the First Lord Hermeticist, Ximen the Black, commanding the first starship, was willing to do when the barbaric rulers of Eden in those days, before the Stability arose, refused to welcome the inbound star-faring vessel. My race and my line were accused of abridging that qualification, because we Strangers have the ability to carry an internal creature within us, which can be passed from father to son, hence our ability to pass the psychological test is inherited. You Pilgrims wanted this office under your control so that yours would be the last ship to reach Torment and so that your race would never be displaced by any later generations of immigrants.
“But none of your candidates could pass the crucial test, and all of my father’s house could pass. None of you are willing to destroy a world to preserve your honor. I am. I open the floor to any man who is willing to answer. Does anyone here doubt my intent?
“This Table must here and now, before I lower my arm, vote to direct the Lighthouse crew to direct the gravitic-nucleonic distortion pool in the photosphere of Iota Draconis to direct the proper percentage of the solar output of our star into the sails of the Emancipation.
“Delay, deny, or refuse, and I smite the table, which no other force in the universe can crack. Return to your duty, and I sheathe the sword with nothing further said.”
4. The Terraformer
The Terraformer raised a finger. “Allow me to be the first to answer. Sir, I do indeed doubt your willingness to smite the world with vengeance, if you knew all the facts!”
“Speak. The verdict of dereliction is entered, but I am permitted to execute or pardon.”
“My Lord Hermeticist, know you that the Great Ship Emancipation is from Sol and her manifest, beamed to us by orbital radio laser, reports the vast majority of the millions aboard are Melusine-based Myrmidon hybrids called Scolopendra who were ousted from the seas of Eden by the Patricians of that world. This is a race new to us. Before you entered the Chamber, I reported to the Table that it is impossible that deep-sea-based life could dwell here without replacing all our lowlands with ocean, destroying all our major cities and the most productive regions of our farmlands. The effect on surface life of this migration would be catastrophic. The pressure on subsurface machine life during our Great Winter, when the atmosphere cools, is difficult to estimate, but the Intercessor reports certain hints, dreams, and visions recovered from survivors plunged into the depth of the Torment mind.”
5. The Intercessor
The Intercessor, who was seated as Companion of the Theosophist, indicated that he affirmed the remark by opening a fan of reflective membrane. “The hostility of Torment to the starfall of the Emancipation was observed in several of the thought-torrents, thought-streams, and thought-oceans into which mediators submerged themselves. The agitation of the thought-forms of the Potentate can be assessed by the high rate of fatality and madness that ensured. Six of the mediators returned from intercession quite mad.”
Vigil said, “Irrelevant. If the Strangers were fated by the Great Schedule to be overthrown by the Pilgrims—an event, I take it, no man here regrets—how is it that, now that your turn to suffer the iron cruelty of history is at hand, you are no longer historians? When the cliometry predicts the loss of your prestige and fortunes, do you foreswear your oaths as cliometricians? Will you unhinge the wheel of time from its axis merely because your clan is no longer in the ascending arc? For shame! All these things are unfolding as Rania’s cliometry has foreseen! If the sins of the children of the Pilgrimage
decree the downfall of their power, if that is the price of universal peace, then I say to you: grow gills, gentlemen, and webs between your finger bones, and fawn upon your new aquatic overlords with meekness!”
The Aedile signaled with his finger lamp, asking for the floor. “My exulted fellow Lord and Commensal of the Stability! You have mistaken our intent! You have mistaken all! We do not seek to betray the ship for the sake of self or clan, nor even to preserve the world! We seek to preserve the Stability itself.”
6. The Aedile
Vigil snapped, “Nonsense, sir! The coming of the Emancipation has been foreknown millennia in advance! And you—you seek to preserve only yourself!”
The sword in his hand was beginning to tremble, and so Vigil asked an internal creature to adjust the muscle tension and chemical balances in his upraised arm, until it grew steady as a statue.
The Aedile said swiftly, earnestly, “Not so. This ship may be the hull of the Emancipation, but when she last saw port at Eden, all was changed. She is a warship.
“The sunless planet Acheron, which was between Iota Draconis and Sol, fell silent when she put to port, as did the several worlds along her route, Nepenthe for Woe, Aerecura, and Nightspore!
“A millennium ago, 70 Ophiuchi emitted a rush of signals signifying the fall of civilizations and the collapse of the world-mind! 41 Arae, three centuries ago, reported fire from the sail of Emancipation, like a second sun, and half a world burning! A century ago, Kappa Coronae Borealis blinked, and agitations in her photosphere were seen! Arcturus, the star of your own people, four centuries ago reported Myrmidons, a folk thought long extinct, a nightmare race from ages past, falling from your storm-tossed, strangely hued ancestral skies as countless as the flakes of snow!”
7. The Theosophist
Vigil said, “If this were known for so many centuries of erenow … why was nothing announced?” But he was secretly wondering why his father had said nothing.
The Theosophist signaled and was recognized and said in a voice as calm as a glacier, “We chained ourselves with oaths inflicted by mudra and surgery so that the matter was forgotten when we stepped forth from this Chamber. Had we not, and the world learned of the evil overtaking the stars, the charge and charter of this Table of Stability would vanish. If the Schedule has been broken on four worlds or five, then it is broken for all the stars of Man.”
The counselor standing at his back, Cricket, muttered, “Cancers and cankers! That means, in the damn eyes of the damn law, the old Guild takes over. That was the deal, way back when.”
Vigil lowered the sword and stared at its bright blade and the terrible shapes of dragons, the terrible message of the words. “Then the Stability was dissolved many hundreds of years ago. My life is a sham, as was my father’s life before mine, and all yours, your predecessors and ancestors…” He tried to grasp when the news meant. A thousand years ago, one of the Great Ships had become a vessel of interstellar war?
That was so long ago that the Exile was still in orbit about Torment. The Exile had been the stronghold and capital of the Nymph-Patrician hybrids of the planet Vital Delectation. Their race had been entirely overwhelmed and absorbed by the superior numbers and mental organization of the Nomads. Almost no trace of the Delectables remained, except for some names in old songs and the five-sided pyramids of unknown alloy half-buried in the arid Northern sands which no antiquarian dared approach. So long ago was that time.
Vigil said, “How do you expect to survive if these worlds, older and greater than ours, did not?”
The Theosophist said, “Because the orbital radio arrays and lighthouse beams of Iota Draconis are more sensitive and farther reaching than those of any other star in the Empyrean. The Beast called Achaiah, during the last years when men were unfree, did this thing, gifted our star with these technologies, we know not why. Unlike the other worlds where the disguise and peaceful pretense of Emancipation was successful before her approach, we are forewarned.”
Vigil looked down. Perhaps he was staring at the designs and marks of the future gleaming in the metal table surface, or at his reflection behind them, or at nothing. The sword was in his nerveless hand, neither upraised nor in its sheath.
The Chronometrician said, “My Lord Hermeticist, now that you have seen all that we hid, is it nevertheless your will to force this Table to a duty that will destroy us? This warship is not part of Rania’s Plan for Universal Peace. The warship which comes in the place of the Emancipation bears her name but is a different ship—her arrival is no part of the Great Schedule. Therefore, there is no duty of this Table to instruct the Lighthousekeeper to correctly present the beam. This warship is not part of our Stability, our Schedule, or the duty we carry from generation to generation faithfully.”
Vigil raised his eyes without moving his head and said slowly, “Who sent the ruffians to kill me in the alley?” But he knew, since all the men there looked surprised or puzzled, and only the Aedile looked stony faced. But now that he knew the reason for their fear, Vigil in his heart could condemn none of them. They sought, as he did, to serve the Stability and preserve civilization. It was what civilized men did.
The Chronometrician did not look guilty, but neither did he look surprised. An accomplice, no doubt. He said in his placid and earnest voice, “Sir, you may not use your prerogative merely for personal vendetta. It is your mission to avenge the race if we who allow the bonds of civilization, delicate as a spiderweb stretching from star to star, to fail. But we have not let it fail.”
Vigil said, “The ship will fall past us, blind, and into the eternal night.”
But the Chronometrician said, “That warship is not part of our civilization, no, no more than a cuckoo’s egg holds the true child of the mother bird who unknowingly sacrifices her own to feed the intruder.”
Vigil said, “Your tale is impossible! There was a clear library transmission from Nightspore in my mother’s time and again when my grandmother was a girl!”
“Falsified, edited, hoaxed,” said the Theosophist serenely.
Vigil said, “One cannot fight an interstellar war and keep the matter secret!”
8. The Signalmaster
The Master of Signals, in his traditional ear-cups of gold, raised his finger for permission to speak. “My Lord, it is very simple to mask the events of one star from another. One need only suborn or replace the radio house crew. How many million-acre radio parabolas do you think a colony can maintain in orbit, or during how many years of prosperity have the resources and political will to ignite their array and emit their gathered years of history, poetry, lore, and gossip? I need not remind this Chamber how many scheduled radio emissions to various stars were delayed or aborted due to lack of resources.
“The Scolopendra of the Emancipation, after years or decades, rebuilt the civilization of each broken world to their liking, and heated up the radio lasers, and sent any signal, any news, any delusions it tickled their fancy to send. War marches from star to star, and none the wiser.
“The great multigeneration ship of war then is launched on schedule to the next world, which, lulled by false signals, ignited their deceleration beam to welcome the destruction to their bosom. During the conquest, some radio noise or frantic signals escape, but the later broadcasts soothe all suspicions away. Who does not expect at least some commotion when a Great Ship lands?”
Vigil said, “What could be the motive? What insult, or fear, or lust for gain could provoke combat across so wide an abyss?”
9. The Anthroponomist
The Commensal who spoke next was the Anthroponomist, a figure in gray gauze and dark goggles of his office, seated between the Portreeve and the Theosophist. His organization was expert in the myriad arts predicting the development of the human organism in relation to other organisms and to environment.
“My preliminary estimates show that the Scolopendra, once in space, could have mutated toward a non-self-correcting belief-node and commanded the angels of the ship to go mad. Rec
all that this ship suffers the longest route between port and port. Odd madnesses arise in isolation. I conclude the crew is fallen under a glamour or a theurgy. No war for gain, terrain, or glory can reach from star to star: only a holy war.”
“It must be lies! It must be!” Vigil said.
His counselor behind him said, “Son, I think they is telling the truth. But there is more to come, I bet.”
10. The Chronometrician
But the Chronometrician, who now seemed fully awake, opened wide his heavily lidded eyes and spoke in a creaking voice.
“I recall the arts of the Joys from my forefathers’ worlds, and I still, in taped memories, can recall and relive the eon, ages past, when my race ruled this dry skull of a planet! We have no swords nor pistols beneath the sunlight of Beta Canum Venaticorum, no diseases, and no nanites, for we hold all weapons in contempt save one. Truth is our only sword, and nerve-to-nerve war, one mind to another.” He pushed back his hood, revealing antennae over a yard long, which stood erect menacingly. “Ye, my brother Lords, mayhap have suspected or mayhap did not, but with many worms and viral words I wove my way past all your petty defenses and read your minds. There are no lies here. The matter is far too dire for that.” Now his eyes fell again into their half-closed, half-dreaming dullness, and his wrinkle-creased mouth puckered oddly. “Yes, I read them all, you filthy people. I know all your sins. Well, not you, Lord Chrematist! You are dead. You only ever said one thing to me: You are now as I once was. As I am now, soon shall you be. Heh. Heh-heh. So much empty brainspace!”
All in the chamber stared uncertainly at the little old man as he sank back down into silence, muttering.