The Vindication of Man Page 10

Vigil asked to see the fingerprint match. The ghost did not answer in words, but a wash of dark emotion, grief, and regret passed through Vigil’s reticular complex in his midbrain, eerie and unexpected as the wail of a mourner above a coffin whose readout lights at once go black.

  The mystery was driven from his mind as he looked to the windows, allured by a new sound. The lutes of the Fox Maidens, the Fourth Humanity (long ago extinct on worlds lit by Sol, but here, beneath Eldsich, still thriving), now caressed the air like rippling metallic grass, and bright finger cymbals clashed, and the theme turned to playful notes, if perhaps ironic.

  The soaring soprano beauty of the vixen voices enraptured Vigil so that his fingers nearly reached toward the memory wand to replay the words. But one of his internals, a sexless one, had been listening and brought it to his mind. This was no traditional part of the rhyme. It was some impromptu doggerel:

  Deploy thy sail, ship! Show thy stern!

  Commence deceleration burn!

  In pain we who remain will learn,

  How goes it when old ships return!

  Vigil had that same eunuch internal thrust the alluring mesmerism of the song—negligently near to a nerve-mandala in its composition—out of his short-term memory so he could concentrate.

  The lamp of welcome was still flickering. The woman in boots, whoever she was, was desperate enough to get in that she allowed decorum to slip. The Swan on his long steps had joined her. From the position of their feet, Vigil felt they were facing each other, no doubt deep in talk. Now he cursed the precision of his ancestors. Why build a door inside a dwelling under a global atmosphere rigidly as an airlock? Why depend on microphones?

  His fear had ebbed, leaving behind only curiosity. Assassins? Unlikely. One was a Swan; the other, a woman. They did not do such dark crimes, not these days.

  Swans did not deign to kill men singly but by tribes and phylum, by continents and worlds, and they did not use hands to do it, or any weapons men could see with eyes.

  As for the other, since the return of Rania, too much respect was paid to the dignity of women of the First Humanity to equip them with onboard biological and psychological weapon systems. A woman could, perhaps, carry an energy weapon in her hand like some comical figure from the remote past, or a chemical-discharge weapon, or a sharp object, but surely any girl bent on assassination would don the body of a Hormagaunt to do the deed.

  2. Song of the Fifth Humanity

  His thought was interrupted. Now came such a detonation of ascending notes as made him clutch his ears and turn. The wand dropped from his hands, cutting him off from the chamber ghost and returning him to the limits of his own skin.

  No instrument less noble than the harp was fit for the hands of the Patricians, the Fifth Humans. Something of the haunting terror and glamour of the antique vampire-kings of their wild and remote ancestry still clung to their bass voices. Their song issued from the lower windows of the Star-Tower, nor was amplification unlawful to them.

  Perhaps it should have been. Vigil imagined he saw membranes in the Star-Tower heights throbbing with the ear-defeating noise. Such is the pride of Patricians: the high born strove to ignite their songs louder than Megalodons, even as they reached in vain to weave the glittering harmonies to match the beauty of the Foxes. The upper dome of the midnight sky was an artillery barrage of song.

  Gods beneath whose stars we cower

  Principality, Potentate, and Power

  All bow, and yet await our hour.

  All recall, and none shall fail

  Nor the despair of entropy prevail

  Not while lamp burns, nor ship raise sail!

  Ancient Starships ply the stars

  Which are not now but shall be ours!

  The Patricians left all men to their own devices, save only what interfered with the basic cliometric assumptions of the planned future. Violence was allowed if it was discreet, for the death of one man or another would not deflect the torrent of history; theft, if it was not so rampant as to disrupt trade; adultery, if it did not bring marriage into public contempt; and so on.

  But interference with the Lords of Stability was not allowed, nor was harassment of their servants. Vigil felt then the temptation that must have tortured his father every day of his life. He need only open a channel on the Patrician frequency and call for help, and those august and pitiless posthumans would take control of the local minds, human and machine, correct the deviations, punish the guilty with astonishing punishments, and protect the weak.

  And, having proven himself weak in the eyes of his followers, his family, and the Firstlings, resisting temptation would be harder yet the next time it arose, both for himself or his posterity. Purchasing thought privacy from Patrician peacekeepers would likewise be more expensive as insurance rates reflected the newer and weaker stance of his character traits. The precedent would make it easier for his sons and grandsons to turn to the Patricians for help, and in less than two hundred years, if the cliometric calculus did not lie, the Strangers would dwindle to utter dependence, utter irrelevance.

  It would only take a moment to call for help and be safe. The Patricians would see the opportunity for bringing yet one more lesser race beneath their benevolent wing. But those factions and races, clans and nations, and iterations that selected the path of ever-greater safety had been interbred with Patricians, and sired Patricians. All the separate bloodlines of man were nothing more than canals and rivers whose waters would be mingled and lost in an all-consuming and homogenous lake. They had no ranks nor classes in their society, yet somehow they all were kings.

  The First Races of Man, from Sylph to Melusine, and the surviving Aftercomer races, Hibernals who were immune to cold, Nyctalops with their catlike eyes, and Overlords who laughed disease and ailment all to scorn, on all the First to Third Sweep Worlds had been absorbed one by one into the Patrician bloodlines. Some still lingered on the Fourth Sweep and Petty Sweep Worlds, but the schedule of cliometry did not predict their continuation beyond three millennia henceforth. Nor Firstling nor Aftercomer could long maintain their own independent cultures, language, neurological formats, sumptuary biotechnology or ways of life. On all other worlds but this, the Fox Maidens were gone. On all worlds including this, the Myrmidons were gone, leaving only their ghosts and serviles behind, Myrmidons, Helots, Neodamodes and Perioeci and Sciritae, inhabiting worlds in Eridanus, Cancer, or Pisces.

  The song of the arrogant Patricians thundered in his ears. He would never call out to them. He would live and die on his own terms, and have human children, and maintain the honor of the Strangers across the abyss of time. Iota Draconis was different. Had it not been blessed by the Judge of Ages? Insane or not, was it not his prerogative alone to preserve past ages into the endless void of the future?

  Vigil would rather die than flee to the Patricians for protection.

  Let the assassins come!

  3. The Migrations of Eldsich

  Even nude and unarmed, Vigil feared no blade of any man of the first three human races, or any weapon lacking chemical, electrical, or denser form of energy. Vigil’s strength had been set to the maximum physicians would allow, and perhaps a drachm beyond, and he had survived the strictest training in agon and pancration, and some of his combat internals were things of nightmare from the worlds of Porphyry and Nocturne.

  Men coming to kill him, this he understood, it was as much a part of his life as death by disease or starvation had been to men of Eden. But a woman walking out of cloister? This was an enigma. She was not descended from the Pilgrimage. No woman of Landing City would violate propriety in such a way.

  If not a Pilgrim, then who?

  Vigil sent a memory creature rapidly through the strata of migrations, five millennia of time, since Iota Draconis had been colonized.

  The Pilgrims currently ruled this world, having displaced the Strangers during the years when the wealth and power of the Pilgrimage, a second moon, controlled the skies. The Strangers now served as free
holders and mercenaries, a military gentry who no longer owned the lands their own serfs worked.

  Meanderers were those serfs, toiling in the shadows of the granoliths and pyramids their ancestors from the Meander long ago so proudly reared.

  Not every Great Ship overwhelmed the previous wave of immigrants. Some generations, the pattern reversed. The Ostracism arrived either with numbers too few or fighting spirit too peaceful to resist the hidden sinkholes and sandstorms of the local history: these benevolent giants were decimated in their numbers by biased eco-population restrictions, prevented by biased laws from owning land or livestock. To this day, the land-dwelling Ostracized lived by trade or profession, as quartermasters or counselors, peddlers or tinkers, in quarantined ecologies or ghettos of walled towns.

  Every now and again, a giant would wade into the lake waters, cast aside his growth restrictions, becoming ever larger and sinking ever farther from the sunlight, joining his deep cousins, the Nicors.

  In A.D. 70600, the Great Ship Meander, by cunning instruments unknown to the outer worlds, while yet lightyears far off, had heard the cry of the suffering that the Chronometricians and Hormagaunts descended from the Nomad had imposed on immigrants from Ostracism. In retaliation or perhaps in mere prudence, she bombarded the treasure domes of the Sons of Nomad. These armored, heated, and sand-proof arcologies of vast diameter were now ruins visible on far horizons, like so many cracked and speckled eggs of giant birds.

  Their name was no longer an irony, for the Nomads now were scattered in the dryland plains. Their artiodactyl herds coated endless prairies, whose herdsmen endlessly preyed on each other’s cattle and wives, poisoning wells and committing murders the world did not see fit to stop.

  Esne was the general name for earlier folk of earlier ships, Wander and Wayfare, Errantry and Itinerancy, and the accursed Argosy. In the early centuries of the Seventy-First Millennia, the Esne had weakened each other in a series of cliometric conflicts and battles fought both in law courts and in dueling arenas so that none could oppose the highly organized and ruthless Nomads when they fell from the sky. Esne had been here so many generations, their circadian rhythms retained no recollection of Eden. They woke and slept according to the clocks of Torment, and ignored the twenty-four-hour watch cycle so fondly remembered by ships and Sacerdotes.

  Layer after layer had coated the world. Gathered on Torment were migrations of Loricates from Vindemiatrix and Aestevals from Arcturus; Swan-Fox hybrids from the star mortal men called Beta Canum Venaticorum but Swans called Chara; Giants and Nicors from Gliese 570 in Libra; proud Iatrocrats from Xi Boötis, who never ceased from uncouth experiments on their own flesh and blood; Swans from 12 Ophiuchi; Variants called Optimates, avowed foes of the Patrician race, hailing from Rasalhague; thin, eerie, and pale Sworn Ones from Kappa Coronae Borealis; dark, cold Hierophants and Black Swans from the dark, cold twin planets circling 44 Boötis; Anthropovores of monstrous form from Regulus, whose humanity even Foxes could not restore.

  Their worlds were names from song and legend, bitter with nostalgia, and thoughts of homes forever lost: small and frozen Feast of Stephen, happiest of worlds, with its strange twin moons; sweltering, huge Nightspore, whose winds and weathers, temblors and tidal waves even Summer Kings could never tame; Joyous, whose masked and silent peoples spoke no names, carried no weapons, and kept no records; Euphrasy, the only world ever to repel the Myrmidons; slowly turning Aesculapius, a world of gardensmiths and tree sculptors, whose peoples during the flare times of their unstable star went mad and enacted strange crimes; and Aerecura, where the corpse of a god, dead in orbit, still moaned and murmured and disturbed the dreams of the unshielded; piteous and envied Penance, whose peoples walked in hair shirts through valleys clogged with diamond, opal, jacinth, emerald, weeping over their wealth and half-blinded by the ground glare; Dust, whose continents were smothered in a featureless dun powder from which the Aberrant and the Anarchist by thought alone could sculpt whatever things his frenzy or strange fantasy called forth, before the storms of dawn dispersed it; Schattenreich and Rime, twin worlds, one where ghosts outnumbered the living, the other where Reticent lordlings lived alone in lavish self-made museum-mansions, accompanied by scores of splinter personalities, skilled at every art and craft; and Here Be Monsters so aptly named.

  From the larger sailing vessels which plied the longer star routes, the Exile and Expatriate and Expulsion, and Exclusion, had come populations from the worlds of older stars, from the Vital Delectation of 47 Ursae Majoris; from Cat Sin of 61 Ursae Majoris; the Land of Hungry Needle-Necked Wraiths of Alpha Mensae, and her daughter, the fair and deadly World of Willows and Flowers. From these older worlds came men of earlier ships, Delectable and Cat, Wraith and Overlord, which had ancient roots in the precursor races of Nymph and Chimera, Witch and Vampire.

  The men of the earlier ships, Exiles and Expatriates, the Excluded and the Expelled, brought with them antique languages and laws, beliefs and bloodlines, whose traces were still to be found in odd corners of Torment. Time had swept the rest away.

  Only the Errant, in whose blood-mechanisms many Swanlike quirks from the lawless planet Dust of 12 Ophiuchi still lingered, maintained a separate identity from the other Esne, quaint forms of dress and address, and special dietary rules. The Errant stood aside from the other lower orders during the last sixteen hundred years of history.

  They denied the legitimacy of all the new physiopsychological sumptuary laws imposed by Princess Rania and held to antique charters granting them the right to carry weapons, and vote for their officers, and to own their own miserable plots of sand and snow and worthless waste-scrub outside the terraforming superstructure. They celebrated no feasts of thanksgiving to the Master of All Worlds, nor saluted when Tau Ceti rose in the East, but saluted only 61 Cygni; nor did they ever recite the words of fealty to Triumvirate.

  The Errant had odd, impious, and even vile ideas about the nature of the soul of Rania, saying she had lost some undefined divine essence while she tarried among the inhuman stars. It was not so much that they maintained a proud separation from the customs of Wanderers and Wayfarers and Itinerants, than that they were excluded and abused by more decently minded folk.

  This was because they prided themselves on having escorted the Judge of Ages across the stars. He went raving mad in Year 30 Ultravindication and fled aboard the Errantry from Sol to 70 Ophiuchi, thence to Xi Boötis and 44 Boötis, sailing finally to Iota Draconis, arriving in Torment in Year 600. Rumor said he dwelled somewhere in hiding on or under the world, brooding and cursing and thinking strange thoughts.

  4. The Crest of the Strangers

  Despite that Torment was an entire world, large and convoluted as any, there simply were not so many possible places or races from which the woman at the door might come.

  She was not a Pilgrim, since they did not let their women out of concealment unescorted. Neither would a Meanderer nor a Nomad have a right to step into this House, which, according to a very ancient law, was sacrosanct: the Stranger House was as much a part of the starship Stranger as if the chambers were within her now far-distant hull. Certain upper ranks among the Ostracized, a panderer or shaman or quartermaster, might be allowed under special circumstances: but they did not like their womenfolk to go alone among Strangers. An Esne would enter by the menial door. An Esne of the Errant line would make a point of it, for they had a high pride of their low humility.

  But now Vigil twisted the wand angrily, driving together more tightly the contacts between the power unit and the thinking process. This time, he did not ask but commanded the chamber ghost to answer, in his name, in his father’s name, and in the name of the Table of Stability his father served. Whose fingerprint of what woman had it been who had the right to come here?

  Vigil waited, hushing his clamoring internals. But his mind leaped ahead before the ghost answered: this empty dormitory was “Officer’s Country”—so even among his people, only one of highest pedigree would be recognized by
the welcome lamp.

  Therefore, he was not surprised, not perfectly surprised, when the ghost finally replied. The heraldry showed the finger in the printlock was that of this mother, Patience.

  The crest showed quarterly: first, Or and a Chief Sable three escallops of the field; second and third, Fusily argent and gules; fourth, Argent three Roses Gules barbed and seeded proper. Beneath were marks no one alive could decrypt, written in a forgotten icon system, unrelated to Monument codes, called the Roman alphabet, which primordial ages in Eden before the Noösphere once used. The soundline assigned to those marks was one Vigil could understand, and it said: N’Oubliez. Forget not.

  But the heraldic air helm (which only those who walk in space may show) loomed not above the crest, nor were the storks of Eden found at their supporting posts to either side. Those storks had frightened and fascinated him as a child, where they loomed on the metal fabric walls of the folding tabernacle of his father’s presence hall, flanking the shield above his judgment seat, beaked and membered in bright red.

  The heraldry of Patience Starmandame was displayed on a lozenge rather than an escutcheon, which was the form proper only to a widow.

  In such a fashion, that suddenly, did Vigil learn his father was dead.

  5. Matriarch of the First Humans

  He called upon his mind discipline as he stooped to crank the door open with the manual wheel.

  One internal mental organism he unleashed to rage; another he released to simple stark denial, saying over and over that there must be some error, some mischance, which, when explained, would set all things aright; a third internal wept, and Vigil spent more than a moment keeping his eyes and tear ducts out of the command stream from that one.

  Each to separate chambers of his many-chambered mind he sent them, that he might later rage, cavil, or mourn in solemn sadness, as was fitting.

  For now, while bright and cheerful music still shouted its mirth without, premonitions told him there was no time to grieve. His mother would not have come in such a wise, without her retinue or ladies, if no disaster reared.