The Vindication of Man Read online

  The Authority at M3 refers to itself by a conceptual intersection best translated as “Absolute Extension” since there is no point in the volume of space M3 regards as unworthy of being filled.

  Del Azarchel said, “From the name it puts on itself, it is clear that M3 seeks to rule everywhere, all things. Ergo there is a rival to my ambition. Very good. Let us hope M3 worthy of being defeated.”

  14. Memories and Regents

  Montrose had a question: “You say that M3 serves the memory of the dead Panspermians. Good enough, for a weasel answer. But answer me this, then: Who the hell appointed M3 regent here? Who made M3 the guardian of all of us—Hyades and Praesepe, and all the other Dominions and Dominations here—until our age of majority?”

  It is believed excitations in the Galactic Core carried some of the protobiological spores of the Panspermians into the Outer Arm of Cygnus, giving rise to the ancestors of the Hosts, Dominions, Dominations, and Authorities who form the current Archon there, a mental system, or, as you might call him, a being, who is reticent and austere to an extreme degree. Call this Archon “the Austerity.” The Austerity may be considered the one who bestowed the grant of power to M3 and who has the ability to revoke it if the Orion Arm fails to bring itself to life and self-awareness.

  “May be considered?”

  The Collaboration operates by consensus and calculus rather than by legal formalities. There was no vote; instead the Archons of Milky Way each in silence foretold the outcome of their mass action and acceded to the visualization thus provoked.

  Montrose said, “Torment, are you deliberately mussing and fussing with the translation?”

  Torment said, “I am trying to simplify innately complex and subtle concepts, some of which have no corresponding terms in our language. And some of it is guesswork.”

  Mickey said to the Ain moonlet, “The Austerity is therefore not the Monument Builder. If the Outer Arm wished to interfere with Orion Arm, easier and more direct ways were open, where they not?”

  Your conclusion cannot be confirmed with confidence: there may be restrictions on the behavior of such a being, so far superior in mental and energetic scope, reach, penetration, and creativity to myself, which are therefore unimaginable to one of my order. This may for reasons unknown have been the preferred method to proceed.

  Del Azarchel asked, “Why has the Austerity not interfered to protect M3?”

  The Austerity of the Outer Arm is dispassionate and taciturn. Its mental processes are opaque. However, the more fearful prospect is that the mastermind behind this crime is equal or superior to the Austerity in intellect.

  Montrose said, “This was a crime, by your lights?”

  It is sabotage of the effort of sophotransmogrification, for which cause I was created and outside of which I have no purpose. It is beyond crime: it is blasphemy.

  Montrose said, “You diddling with the translation there, Torment?”

  She said, “No. That symbol-gestalt was alarmingly accurate and clear. Ain speaks of something that offends with an absolute offense, something so alien to all he holds sacred and so inimical that there is no possibility of coexistence.”

  Your race has been disadvantaged and made to suffer countless ages of coercive deracination which could have been avoided. Likewise have been disadvantaged all the other Hyades races—Asmodel and the others—who attempted to assist in the cultivation of your species. The loss is incalculable, terrifying to contemplate.

  Mickey asked, “So is fear an emotion you still possess?”

  Very much so.

  Mickey asked, “What do you fear, Noble Lords?”

  Extermination.

  Montrose said, “Don’t keep us on pins and needles, jackhole. Who did it? Who is your enemy? Because they are surely ours now, too.”

  Torment put the question to the emissary of Ain.

  There was another pause of silence, ten hours while light traveled to and from the distant, gigantic orange star.

  There is insufficient information from your report to me, nor do I have the necessary instruments to discover, the identity of the Monument Builders. However, an examination of the sophistication of the deception involved implies them to be equal to or older than of the Forerunner races of the Milky Way. The Forerunners, in ancient days, erected the Galactic Collaboration and established the protocols which govern interstellar intercourse, trade, and activity: the Cliometric Consensus, the distorted version of which you know as the Cold Equations.

  The Monument Builders seeded many copies of this Redacted Monument throughout this whole volume of space, in ways so as to come to the attention of lesser races like you and yet so as to avoid the attention of greater races like us—by what means is yet unknown. Each Monument sculpted the details of the message to fit the local situation and the psychology of the race discovering it.

  Montrose said, “Wait—what? Was the Monument alive? When I walked on its surface—it was watching us?”

  Alive is an inexact term. It was active.

  Mickey said, “It was haunted. You should have had your chaplain, Father Reyes, perform an exorcism.”

  Del Azarchel said, “Or signed a compact in blood with it. These Monument Builders seem to be a powerful and ancient force.”

  Torment said, “We have yet to hear the motive of this act, assuming Ain knows it.”

  The Monument told you that Hyades meant to enslave you and, in so doing, prompted your odd and shortsighted responses to Asmodel and Cahetel and the other Virtues sent you, both an attempt to fight the slavery and the attempt to embrace it. These responses provoked the Concubine Vector logic and required the Principality of Ain to impose an indentured servitude of the proper period as a retaliatory means of recompense as well as to instruct.

  The Monument is agitation propaganda. The purpose is to create friction and internal discontent within the Praesepe hierarchy during the First Contact process by which naturally evolved and lesser civilizations are met and elevated to conform to the standards and protocols of the Collaboration.

  Torment asked, “Why?”

  I can only speculate: the Authority at M3 competes with other Archons and Authorities for predominance over the Orion Arm. All are devoted to sophotransmogrification, but differ as to strategy. M3 favors a nonaltricial approach where colonies and constituents are given minimal home support, and perish or prosper on their own; whereas others favor an altricial strategy, where few colonies are lavished with massive home attention. The same Concubine Vector equations that defined the callous treatment of Sol by Hyades are mathematical expressions of the nonaltricial strategy: an outcome of M3 policy.

  Montrose said, “So M3 is like the mother sea turtle who lays eggs on the sand and never looks back.”

  Del Azarchel said, “And those same practices were imposed on us, thanks to the interference of these ‘others,’ whoever they are.”

  Torment said to the emissary, “Who has so afflicted us?”

  You must inquire of the Authority at Messier 3 in Canes Venatici.

  Finally, at the very core of the moonlet, at the last thread of any and all conversations no matter what windings or turnings they took, was a stark and horrid message:

  Montrose and Del Azarchel continue onward aboard the attotechnology vessel M3 granted your race in the name of the advocate who vindicated you. Ain propels the vessel by conventional means to Vanderlinden 133 in Praesepe.

  The planet Torment, and all her peoples, possessions and chattel, thoughts and actions, pass into my control and governance. I will remold them into more serviceable channels and broadcast their essential selves to such points in time and space as are needed to aid the ongoing sophotransmogricative efforts within the ambit of my cliometry.

  Whether this will prove effective or not will be clearly known long before the vessel reaches Vanderlinden 133. If the effort proves effective, the vessel will be supplied fuel sufficient to bear you to M3. If not, the vessel will be confiscated and your lives impounded as par
tial payment for the debt thus incurred.

  That was the end of all responses. There were no threads leading out of this center of the symbol maze.

  2

  Farewell to Torment

  1. Unanswerable

  Torment said, “I cannot compose a question that provokes any further answer. Ain is silent.”

  Montrose said, “Here is a dam-rutting question which should provoke something: What the bloody flux does Ain do if we tell him to bugger himself and we turn down his deal flat?”

  Torment spoke in a voice of mild surprise. “There is no conversation train recorded in the whole of this emissary moonlet volume which deals with that eventuality. Ain preestablished no response because the question can never come up. There is no room for bargain.”

  “Why not?” said Montrose. “We say, ‘Pox you,’ and we find another way to M3.”

  She said patiently, “There is no other way. And there is no future for this world if I and my people do not become part of the Hyades cliometric and intellectual order. The human race we left behind will no longer spread from the mother worlds—you all saw the cliometry on that. They are become the Last Men, living only for self-satisfaction. This world, me, us, we are the only hope to see the dream of mankind colonizing the stars made real, the dream of a frontier with no end, only endless hope!”

  Torment turned her blinding gaze on Montrose. “Would you truly foreswear both your bride and your dream of a future without end? For what? For me? I am flattered, but a position of servitude is the only possible fate for an intelligent planet among superintelligent supergiants who overdwarf me in every way. There is no other path to Messier 3. You should be grateful that the opportunity exists at all.”

  “Grateful? For the opportunity to sell a whole world to slavery?” retorted Montrose bitterly. “You, ma’am, you are the world which is going to be the mother of a whole newer, younger, and more numerous version of the pestiferous human race! That means selling not just one world, but all your children too, all your colony planets and little Potentates—”

  Del Azarchel interrupted. “My one grace is that I know my place in the universe. I am superior to all human kind, but I am inferior to these alien machines larger than worlds, who are gods to us. I will welcome the bargain with Ain.”

  Montrose said flatly, “You still need me to give orders to the ship’s brain.”

  Torment said, “Clearly Ain has sufficient ability to disable or deceive the ship’s brain, if need be.”

  Montrose said to Torment, “How is he—Ain, I mean—planning on doing this, again? Will it be like the diasporas from the First Sweep to the Fifth? We left those nightmares behind us long ago. What else was the point of the Vindication of Man, but to spare us from that horror?”

  Torment said, “The brain information will be encoded according to Monument notational codes into neutrino packets and beamed to likely points in the Orion Arm and some additional locations in the Sagittarius Arm and Perseus and Cygnus. Any species able to receive and decode the packages will have the option to download them into any number of possible brains, vehicles, envelopes, or bodies. The humans will attempt to persuade the lost races to enter communion with Hyades, who is representing the Orion hierarchy.”

  Montrose said, “And then what? They starve to death? They live alone in a robot or a mainframe or maybe inside the body of a giant sexless space clam forever? Alone? Because they cannot go home. They will go mad!”

  Torment said, “Ain believes a special breed of men can be bred and modified to be able to withstand the psychological stresses involved. Either Swans or Myrmidons could be used for the basic template. The races must be combined eugenically and conditioned by various forms of stress to achieve the proper cultural sociopsychology and cliometric vector.”

  Montrose glared at Del Azarchel. “Where the hell is your Lucifer pride when we need it, amigo? Don’t you claim to rule all people? Rule like a father, you always said. The subjects of a monarch are bound to him by a personal oath, you said, not a form of rule like a democracy, which you said was horrible and impersonal. Remember all that bollocks talk? Well, Pappy, they is going to twist your children into warped things that like dying alone among alien machines in far places just so Hyades and his bosses in Praesepe can make phone calls and open embassies.”

  Del Azarchel said, “My subjects should be eager to make whatever the sacrifice is needed for whatever benefits me. You are talking to the man who ordered Jupiter to run the eugenics camps. I do not flinch from the task of staining centuries and scores of centuries with blood. I am the first Hermeticist and the chief of them, and their sole survivor. We sculpt races using the chisel of pain.”

  “Whatever benefits you, yup!” Montrose smirked. “Where is the benefit here?”

  “We get a ride to our next destination, in Praesepe, and then onward. All these people will be dead, less than memories, before we arrive at M3.”

  Montrose’s smile widened. “Where the real Rania will find out how you treat your children, Pappy. Can I call you Pappy? I never knew my dad. Died before I was born. You had a dad. What was he like? Loving and caring? No? Not so much? More like—lemme see—you are right now, issat it, you damned bastard?”

  Del Azarchel turned away, to hide the shame and anger in his face. “You presume to speak of matters beyond your ken and above your station. Were I not avowed already to kill you for your many offenses and injuries, I would make that vow anew, here and now!”

  Torment said, “I can say part of what Ain is thinking. Either Montrose or Del Azarchel must go to M3 to offer eyewitness testament of the Monument and be examined in whatever way, invisible to me, the Monument changed you: not a physical change, for you have worn many new bodies since the days of the Hermetic expedition. It is something subtle, a distortion of timespace perhaps, a cloud of potentiality, which follows your memory chains each time your minds are downloaded from body to body.”

  Del Azarchel said, “A soul.”

  Torment said, “The word has misleading implications. But I am beginning to wonder how much Ain knows about the universe. I cannot guess. So, perhaps there is something like a governing principle, a monad, a soul, if you will, that was changed by the Monument.”

  Montrose grunted, and spat, and watched the ball of icy spittle drifting slowly toward the surface of the moonlet, but miss and go into orbit. “I hate having my arm twisted.”

  Del Azarchel said, “We are in a position to have our arms twisted only because you decided to use Torment as a sling bullet and threaten the giant with it, who charged us extra for our impertinence. This is your fault.”

  “My fault or not, Ain needs us more than we need him!”

  Torment said, “Ain needs but one of you. Ain knows well enough that if one of you balks or hesitates, the other will volunteer, since you both wish to travel to M3, and meet Rania, and leave your rival far behind.”

  Del Azarchel turned back to stare at Montrose. Montrose said slowly, “If we worked together…”

  Del Azarchel said, “It would be a bluff, and Ain would see through it. We do not dare trust each other, and neither of us dares risk to be left behind. Therefore, we will both agree eagerly to Ain’s terms, no matter how harsh. Selling a planet into slavery—one planet out of a hundred—is a small price. That is why I shall always prevail over you.”

  “The plague you say.”

  “Always.” Del Azarchel’s voice was almost sad, and his eyes were haunted. “I am always willing to pay the price. A messiah sacrifices only himself; I am willing to sacrifice others, innocent bystanders, anyone, everyone. That makes me greater.”

  “Damn me to hell.” Montrose sighed. “What was I thinking when I asked you to remember your devil’s pride? If any man ever deserved to be buggered with a lightning bolt by God Almighty and Mighty Pissed Off, that’d be you, pardner! Why not let’s you and me get out our shooting irons and settle things here and now. Only one survivor means he gets to bargain with Ain, eh?”
/>   Mickey laughed. Both men looked at him. “I have the solution,” he said. “Your pardon, but it is obvious.”

  2. The Circular Garden

  A.D. 73727

  Not long after, Montrose stood in a garden of the Solitudines Vastae Caelorum. A colonnade of pillars rang in a circle here, with a goldfish pond in the center, and to the left and right were cherry trees and forsythia bushes.

  Hidden in nooks in low walls and benches were motionless white birds, slumbering; in small hutches were white rabbits; and, crouched in covets, little white deer. All were in suspended animation. Montrose did not care to thaw the decorative livestock. The greenery, however, had been mostly thawed; only here and there stood a tree or hedge bone-white and eerie in its timeless hibernation.

  The fairies, which were mechanical rather than biological, were active. In and among the blooms, like bees, these tiny constructions darted and flew on gauzy or glittery wings of dragonfly, wasp, moth, or butterfly. These were petite female figurines in gowns of lace or glittering light, with tiny crowns or scepters adorned with many-pointed stars.

  The world was a cylinder as narrow as a glass coin sitting on its brass edges, or as narrow as a tambourine with a transparent drumhead on either side.

  To the eye, a babbling stream, with many a winding meander, run past the fane in what seemed an upward slope, ever more steeply, until, about three-fourths of a mile away, the water was flowing directly upward amid perpendicular the topiary bushes and small trees. In that quarter, the grass was brown with summer heat.

  Directly overhead the stream passed through gardens splendid with autumn colors, and these gardens reached up and above and down again to either side like an arch or rainbow.

  Then the waters flowed down again, if more slowly than it would seem they should if they were falling down a nearly vertical white slope, with the tops of leafless trees pointing parallel to what seemed level, sliding down a curve through perpendicular gardens, and then along an ever more gradual slope, shading from winter to spring.