The Vindication of Man

by John C. Wright

  “This world, Torment, I set aside to preserve all ancient things which otherwise would pass away. The eight earths of the six stars of the Fifth Sweep are a light-century away from Sol. Of those eight, because of our position, Eldsich is the most dimly reached by signal and visited infrequently by sailing ship. Hence we are least touched by perturbations in the cliometric destiny our newborn Dominion, Triumvirate, for mankind weaves. Races extinct on other worlds, Hierophants and Megalodons and the ancient and shape-altering Fox Maidens, here still live, and linger yet to breathe my air. I alone of Potentates dam the rush of time and turn the days aside to still and tranquil pools.”

  Vigil stood as stony faced as a slumbering statue and answered nothing.

  The gain on the transhuman voice inside his brain increased, pushing other thoughts aside. All but the boldest of his internals flickered and fled like minnows who fear the face of some cetacean arising from the lakebed of an ancient crater lake. “To this I have devoted a life longer than yours and deeper. Is this nothing to you, antiquarian? You have looked further in the past than any man who these days crawls my globe or slumbers safe beneath my mantle. The word which came to your father was to aid this noblest effort. He refused. That burden now I lay on you.”

  No internal would speak for him. In a voice like ice, he spoke. “What do you ask of me, O world?”

  “This world commands you to save this world. Save me.”

  Vigil did not trust himself to speak. He coaxed one of his braver internals to the fore and gave it command of his mouth. It was battle meditation pattern, so his words were tranquil as a Swan’s. “I don’t understand.”

  “There is no ambiguity. You know the past; you see the pattern of the future. The deceleration of the Emancipation ends all I have created and preserve.”

  “What is aboard which so you dread, wise world-spirit?”

  “That is not your concern. Your concern is this: you must extinguish the deceleration lights.”

  The battle meditation internal slipped out of the command sequence in shock, and surprise jerked Vigil’s chin up. He stared into the face of the Potentate, blinking and wincing, his hand before his mask, fingers curled outward, like a man who stares into the sun. “Great One! You speak in riddles! No one can understand this word!”

  “I speak plainly. The Emancipation is not to be decelerated but to pass through the star system of Iota Draconis unwelcomed, unmet, her signals not returned.”

  Vigil, ignoring the many voices of his internals, even those older ones first grown within his father and grandfather, turned his back on the Swan housing the kenosis of the Potentate. This was a deadly insult, a sacrilege; but in that hour, he cared nothing whether he lived or died.

  Turning his eyes aside, Vigil saw where his mother knelt, her face pale with fear, but calm like an ice-cloaked stream beneath which rapid waters run. “Mother! What madness is this? We cannot fail the star-farers. Man will be condemned, not just on this world but all worlds, if the star trade is not maintained. As far back as I have seen in time, letting the memories of ghosts fly through me until I was almost lost, I found no legends of a time when this was not so!” He pulled the breathermask aside, let it dangle around his neck, lest it muffle the urgency in his voice. But then words failed him. He could no more explain why the ancient starships must return than he could explain why the sun must rise or Wormwood like a great moon must throw vast tides against the hundred-foot-high dikes.

  He spoke more quietly, but his soft voice crackled with intensity. “Mother! The Stability was made for this purpose, and before them the Starfarer’s Guild. It was for this reason the Star Princess fled to M3 in Canes Venatici, and returned, and vindicated man. It is for this reason man is free. It is the reason I was born. Has the world gone mad?”

  Patience did not raise her eyes from the floor. “A hound cannot understand when his master goes insane. Yet legend says Eden once went mad and burned all the cities of her surface. We must do what we were born to do, if our Firstling race is not to be forgotten amid all our successors, greater in all ways than we but less than us in this one thing, Swans, Foxes, or Patricians. We are the oldest race, the First Humanity, older even than the gods who rule us, older even than dead Jupiter of Sol or living Consecrate of Altair. We are bound by chains of millennia uncounted to ancestors unrecalled and posterity unborn. We do not break the chain. We swear and we remember.”

  “What are you saying, Mother?”

  “I say defy the Potentate and die, as your father did. Better that than to be foresworn.”

  “What?”

  She reached out and tapped the red metal band on his wrist, which both sharply reminded him of its weight and also released a neurochemical which cleared his head. He also felt again of the painful and fresh puncture wounds boring through his wrist.

  She said, “The braking laser must stay lit. The Table exists for one purpose. You exist for one purpose, as do I. If we fail in that purpose, all we love and all we serve will fail, and all our dreams prove false. Speak as Lord Hermeticist to the Table. They will not dare deny you: yours is the authority to call down the Vengeance of the Starfarers. Though sweetest reason or crassest threat, you must move them. Decelerate the Emancipation.”

  She did not need to say, but the vision was vivid in Vigil’s brain (particularly in that one internal collateral designed as an artificial aid to his conscience) that the starship Stranger would be punished horribly upon arrival at 107 Piscium, if the Strangermen dwelling on worlds left behind failed in the duty they owed the stars. All the shrines of his first ancestor before whom he bowed would perish.

  Vigil again tried to gaze into the face of the Swan the Potentate possessed, to read some expression or emotion. But the chemical clarity of mind betrayed him, because the difference in their force of intellect was even sharper. Vigil felt as if his eyes had been scalded, and he used an emergency meditation mudra to dump his short-term memory before it became permanent memory and drove him mad. He found himself on his knees and palms, panting, his goggles turned opaque, with no recollection of what the face had looked like. He shoved the goggles up on his brow and blinked, seeing the naked feet of the Swan below the hem of feathers.

  “Potentate of Torment! Gladly would I give all which is mine to give, but I cannot disobey the will of all the human race, all men from Adam through Rania, Exarchel, Eden, Neptune, and Zauberring, to Triumvirate.”

  The Potentate said, “The greater duty overwhelms the lesser. Child, it is your oath to serve the Stability which now commands you to betray the Stable Law and betray the Emancipation, let her pass through the system, and all her officers and men and passengers be swallowed by infinity.”

  “The Judge of Ages will condemn us if we fail our duty.”

  “He has quitted his authority. The Ages are ended.”

  Vigil did not know what that meant, but the words seemed ominous. He plucked up bravery from one of his combat internals, and spoke again in a louder voice: “I am now a Lord of the Stability. I remember my duty! If I must die for this, I die. Am I better than my father? Will you kill me now, I, whose sole crime is to uphold your laws?”

  But the Potentate drew back, retreating from the chamber. “The infirmities of man are not mine. I am bound by mine own laws. I cannot slay a Stability Lord in the course of his duties, despite his unwisdom, for the Swan Princess saves mortals from their gods. Yet, beware, and know indwelling fear, for if you halt the Emancipation, you disband the Table and thus foreswear the lordship that protects you.”

  The intellect faded to a merely superhuman level, and the Swan, now alone and unpossessed, stood looking down sardonically.

  9. Hierophant of the Second Humans

  The Swan now spoke to Lady Patience, and now his voice was but a single voice. “Lady, you now are the mother of a Lord, and so the sumptuary laws return to you your many fine dresses and displays, armorials, and dignities.”

  Lady Patience rose to her feet gracefully. Vigil was surpri
sed to see the blush of anger in her fair cheek. His mother (so his smirking aunt Persistence gossiped) had been a fiery woman in her early youth. It seemed that now that long-lost passion had returned. “You mock me, posthuman! It is beneath you.”

  “Sarcasm is decorous when used to instruct,” said the Swan gravely. “Learn this lesson, vain and foolish woman: The Swans were designed in our genes by the Judge of Ages to oppose the Hyades. For seventy eons we served what seemed an infinitely futile task, and so we suffered melancholy, despair, and madness, since we thought we sought the impossible. And then, beyond all hope, beyond all despair, Rania returned, and Man—and the whole volume of our hope—was vindicated. But for what purpose do we now exist? We were made to oppose Hyades, to be forever proud, to be forever in rebellion. Our goal is done. Before us, all the abyss of eons to come is void. How shall you escape my fate?”

  Vigil listened in bewilderment, rising to his feet. He felt he should say something to oppose this obloquy against his mother, but he knew not what to say. “Secondling, as always, men cannot understand your words. Do you complain of ennui because you achieved your racial dream? Would you have preferred to fail?”

  The Swan rustled his wide cloak of purple eyes and turned half of them toward Vigil. The many threadlike strands of shining thought-transmission tendrils that served him for hair swayed and stood, as if an impalpable wind blew upward from his feet. It gave his narrow features a sardonic cast. “This time, Firstling, my thoughts are simple enough even for you, if you clear your mind to hear. I do not rail against the destiny my creator built into my nature, because, at least, I have a creator. Your Lady Mother will not achieve what she craves, because your race was not created, not designed, but evolved from blind nature under Darwin’s lash and spur. Your nature is to flee from death, but death is more unconquerable than the conquering Hyades stars; and where our hopes have been fulfilled, yours will never be. And therefore you distract yourself with trivial things.”

  At first, Vigil thought the Swan was mocking his mother’s vanity. But no, the Second Human was mocking his ambitions as vain. Vigil was shocked. “Trivial! Would that it were trivial! The fate of ship and world and generations untold is in my hand!”

  The Swan said, “What fate?” The tone was scornful. “What generations?”

  Vigil said, “Without the Stability, there is no history of man, and the Vindication is in vain! We are not starmen if the starmen do not remember and obey!”

  “There is no history. There is only evolution. History is the acts of man; evolution is the movement of men into what lies beyond. History hence is a transitional stage between the apelike and the godlike; history is the breaking of the eggshell. The time of man is ended.”

  The Swan’s eyes blazed with some emotion unknown to Firstling humans, and his living hair strands spread in each direction like a tail fan opening, so he seemed to wear strange headgear like unto an ancient kokoshnik. “Triumvirate is the greatest of minds ever built by Man. A thought package at the speed of light requires half a century to go from one brain-housing to the second to the third and back again. From these three man lobes of Triumvirate’s brain, at Altair, 61 Cygni, and Alpha Centauri, a web of lesser appliances as asteroid belts strung through interstellar void reaches like a bloodstream throughout the whole volume of space occupied by humanity. As glands whose secretions influence the consciousness of an organism, all the thought-currents of Powers and Potentates feed into and through the subconsciousness of mammoth, meditative Triumvirate. And you are less than a mitochondrion in one cell of the gland called Torment.”

  “This I know as well, Great Swan. Have you median between the utterly obscure and utterly obvious? Have you a point?”

  The Swan’s long hair lowered once more to his shoulders and lay trembling and breathing. “In spiral dance my speech approaches you. I must be indirect, or else the defenses of falsehood with which all Firstling brains surround themselves will misconstrue and elude my truth. Consider this: when Rania returned, even that one great Dominion called Triumvirate was subject to her, cowed by the warrant of authority she carried from a star cluster beyond the galaxy. That one Celestial Maiden who’s second advent forms the center of all our calendars uttered her command, all Dominions, Principalities, Potentates, and Powers avowed never more again meddle with mortal human life. Why was this done? Why such concern for what, to them, is microscopic?”

  “Noble of the Second Race, I fail to see what is so hard to see,” Vigil said, smiling, spreading his hands. “Even microbes, when disturbed, bring disease. Rania brought peace!”

  “Impossible. There is no peace. Neither the Judge of Ages, once her bridegroom, nor the Master of the Worlds, once her father, was hurled from his throne.”

  “Their long duel was ended in days long past,” said Vigil. “Or so our old lore tells. The Judge of Ages came here, to far exile in Torment, to grimace and weep in some dark and hidden place, like proud Achilles sulking in his tent. The Master is victorious and magnanimous, and their conflict moot.”

  “Find another reason why Rania severed men from higher ascensions. Can you see nothing?”

  “Rania freed the human races from all imposition, both of the Hyades and of gods of our own making. Was that not the reason for her departure?”

  The line of a frown appeared on the white brow of the Swan’s cold face. “If so, the Vindication was in vain.”

  “Mankind is free of Hyades,” said Vigil slowly, puzzled. “Is that vanity? The chains of debt we owed to the alien stars are snapped.”

  “Merely chained to new masters: austere Consecrate, mercurial Toliman, and Zauberring of implacable ire. We have become our own Hyades.”

  “I do not understand.”

  “If that is your preference…,” the Swan said dismissively.

  “Tell me what you mean!”

  “I mean the purpose of the Swan Princess was surely greater, perhaps greater than even I imagine. I mean that that all of history has been driven by the conflict between the Judge of Ages and the Master of the Worlds. Their creations carried on the war for them, Swans against Myrmidons among posthumans, Pellucid against Exarchel among Angels, Jupiter against Neptune among Powers, Catallactic of Tau Ceti against Consecrate of Altair among Principalities. When Rania returned, that conflict was done. The verdict of M3 was that the human race would no longer be slaves of the Hyades Dominion.”

  “Therefore, we are free.”

  “Are we?” Scorn marred the inhuman beauty of the features of the Swan.

  Vigil said, “Triumvirate is a very small for a Dominion, in the intelligence range upward of fifty billion. But he is legally equal to Hyades. That equality makes Man free.”

  “Triumvirate is a Hyades of three stars instead of threescore.” Again, there was bitter grimace to all the words of the Swan.

  Vigil felt a stirring of pride. The pyramid on whose bottom step he stood rose high indeed. It rose beyond all thought and estimation, until it reached the invisible and unimaginable pinnacle of Triumvirate. But Vigil had no inkling of envy in his soul. Rather, he felt the pride of even the lowest foot soldier who knows himself of one uniform and one banner and one purpose with the loftiest general. He smiled and spoke as one who mocks a beloved king. “No doubt by Hyades standards, our Triumvirate is an idiot. But Triumvirate is the Dominion of Man. Triumvirate is Man. He is us and we are him.”

  “No,” said the Swan, and the word was like a blow. “An idiotic Hyades is what Triumvirate is; a mere mockery, but a Hyades nonetheless; a god we forged and made and to whose altar we have chained our necks. Triumvirate is nothing of ours.”

  “Then what are we?”

  “You and I, and all living ships, Angels small as gems or large as arctic oceans, Archangels and moon-sized intellects, Potentates and Earth-sized brains, Powers of gas giants, the failed and incomplete Dyson object called Beid, or that odd self-aware Oort cloud Epsilon Eridani shed, what are we indeed? All of us are like the sperm that come too late to pe
netrate the egg. We are by-product. We are mere waste.”

  Vigil was appalled. It was as if the desolation of outer space, the immensity of eternity, had entered into this chamber and rendered it uninhabitable, a vastness intolerable for man.

  The Swan said, or sang, “What First or Second or any race of mortal men do or fail to do from here is of no account: the cliometry of human action is but a surface ripple while the mighty Powers we have made command tides to rise, and the Principalities sink continents or raise ocean beds to mountaintops.”

  Vigil drew a breath. “A man goes mad thinking in Swan magnitudes! Acts within my time-horizon to me have meaning. Within human history, human action—”

  The other being interrupted him sharply. “What we humans have done is history. It is over. Triumvirate now determines the ultimate destiny of the race: What Triumvirate shall do is evolution. It begins.”

  Vigil said, “No one has ever seen a talkative Swan erenow. I believe the final day of history is come, just as you say.”

  “You mock,” intoned the Swan solemnly, in a lower key, “yet I impart my wisdom but seldom—wine poured into the sand heap of your mind.”

  “Impart your wisdom to what concerns us now and here. Torment commands the Lighthouse doused and let the Emancipation sail away into eternal darkness and death. What say you?”

  “Why ask? You are as bound by the chain of your nature as I am by mine. I cannot cease to struggle against Hyades even when the Hyades troubles us no more: for now, I strive with Triumvirate, an idiot and ersatz Hyades. Alas! Alas for me, and for the Second Humans, who waste our lives in vanity! Must I be in rebellion against all the gods of the universe, aye, until the universe itself breaks?”

  “There is no answer a human can give a Swan. Your sorrows are not our sorrows. I do not understand what grieves you.”