The Vindication of Man

by John C. Wright

  He made the gesture for fearlessness and calmed his nerves by self-imposition. Mudras were not gentle things. Vigil’s mind cleared as if a bucket of ice water drenched him.

  From his position in the doorway of the ghost house, Vigil saw an opportunity to learn the lay of the land. The ghost house was sufficiently impressed with his rank as a Lord of the Stability to allow him to use the horns on the roof to reach with his mind toward the Star-Tower itself, bypassing seven circles of ward and security.

  From several points of view along the roofline of the ghost house, he could see the tower, looming over Landing City, its upper lengths reaching beyond sight. About the foot of this structure the first and oldest settlement had grown, over seven thousand years ago, to become the only metropolis of the globe. The Star-Tower was the skeleton of the deracination ship Excruciation from Nightspore of Alpha Boötis, cannibalized and pressed into service as a surface-to-orbit elevator, her mighty engines now powering the Very Long Range Radio Array.

  There were two points of ancient pride in Iota Draconis. One was the reach of its radio laser, said to be the most sensitive in human space. The other was the force of its deceleration laser, known to be ten times the power of any other gravitic-nucleonic distortion pool in any sun ruled by man.

  Now Vigil coaxed an unwary mind in the Star-Tower between the suborbital and the geosynchronous heights to open up navigational memories for him. Vigil sped up his personal time-sense and spent many long moments (which to the world occupied less than a second) comparing what he saw in the square before him against a map the mind in the upper windows of the Star-Tower fed him.

  “Thank you, and rest in peace,” he said, which was the proper disconnection protocol, as well as polite when addressing a ghost.

  The answer was sardonic. “Rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated, Unevolved One. Even if I am the last of my kind, alive here only, it is an affront to imply my demotion.”

  Vigil said in panic, “Highly Evolved! I meant no disrespect!”

  “Ah!” came the cold reply. “So you admit you are a being who speaks without meaning, and unable to control your thought-forms? Such imperfection is intolerable. Tell me, in what way is your continued existence beneficial to the progress of the race?”

  Horripilation like a thousand insect legs creeping beneath his uniform tickled his skin. Only a true Third Human, a Myrmidon, a creation without passion or compassion, spoke in these conceits. They lacked pity, humor, sentiment, or any appreciation of beauty or passion.

  Vigil, dry-mouthed, turned his voice over to an internal creature, who spoke with admirable calm. “Spare me! I have duties toward the dead long past and toward progeny centuries and millennia yet to be born! The Lighthouse beam is gone astray! I go even now to the Table—”

  The freezing force of a mudra hurled from the upper atmosphere down the tower side entered his brain and prevented Vigil from completing the thought. Instead, the muscles of his mouth and throat worked, and he found strange words issuing from his mouth. “None but posthumans know of the misalignment of the braking laser. Your knowledge is above your station. The restrictions of the Judge of Ages, and a respectful fear of his betrayed and betraying servant, Torment, prevent me from exterminating lesser beings except at hand-to-hand range. Prepare yourself for mortal combat: set your affairs in order.”

  Because the imposition did not control his lungs, the words were breathless, scratchy, like the words of a madman.

  Vigil knelt and touched his hand to the road tiles, and made the nerve-mudra bhumisparsha, the Gesture of Calling the Earth to Witness, symbolizing Shakyamuni’s victory over illusion. With his left hand, he made the nerve-mudra called kataka, the Flower-Holding Gesture. The systems woven through his body and the near-human Noösphere reacted faster than nerves to the kinesthetic indications, but not with the reaction he expected. Instead of a sudden imposition upon minds eager to witness his innocence, and to grant him, as a Lord of the Stability, whatever privileges, allies, or indications he needed to protect himself (which is what those gestures normally would have done), the ghost voices and higher orders flickered through his thoughtspace and saw no heraldry proclaiming his rank, for he had turned it off.

  And then his internals emitted their strange yapping laughs, and Vigil’s concentration broke like startled fish in a pond, and his mudra lost authority. Vigil’s cry for help was lost in the general noise and confusion of the celebration. The Noösphere thought he was making a joke.

  “The Myrmidon race is extinct,” the consensus message read, dismissing him. “And you are no one. Get off this channel, or we will complain to the Stability Lords.”

  “Your indulgence! Hear me! I can prove my credentials—” But a sensation of watchful attention crawled up his spine like a centipede of ice.

  He knew the public thoughtspace held listening thoughtworms straining for rumors of the Lord who was a Stranger. He made the gesture of banishing, karana, also called Warding off Evil. This mudra was indicated with the hand stretched out, palm forward, thumb holding down the middle two fingers while the index and little fingers extend straight upward, like the horns of a yak against an enemy. All connections to external chains of thought were broken, except for time logs.

  Next, in anger, Vigil made the shramanamudra, the Renunciation Mudra. His hand pointed downward and away from the heart, in sign of rejecting worldly pleasures. The internal creature whose laughter had broken his concentration was rebuked in a spasm of mental pain. But the creature (a system tasked with peripheral perception) answered with a sensation of woeful surprise and shock. It had been unaware of what it had done. Indeed, there was no memory of the moment of laughter in the local registry.

  As if eager to prove its loyalty, that internal brought an image sharply into view from lower levels of his mind.

  Vigil saw the scene before him more clearly. Wormwood shined indeed like the sun, but a sun as if dimmed by the orange clouds of sandstorms, casting bewildering shadows as if reflected through rippling water. The shadows between the many walled buildings and dark houses seemed black. Pilgrims built no windows on the lower stories, and all their doors were reached by stairs, ladders, ascending belts. The watchdogs had closed several of the barricades at the end of the high-walled streets so there was only one route that could take Vigil to the Palace of Future History. The map listed it as The Street Which Sneaks Up On the Sphinx. In the Square of the Cliometrists, Insurance Firms, Speculators and Ship-Fortune-Tellers, the front of the rearing Androsphinx faced the Palace of Future History. This street opened to the hindquarters of the Sphinx, hence the name.

  One of his other internal creatures, a battle advisor, pointed out that the radio-blind spot down that one avenue, The Street Which Sneaks Up On the Sphinx, was perfect for an ambush. Anyone knowing or guessing his mission—and his family had enemies among all the strata of Torment, including traitors among the Strangers themselves—could overwhelm him there, cut off his retreat, and dash out his brains with energy tiles flung from rooftops.

  He hesitated, afraid.

  3. The Schedule

  A tremendous roar of horns and loud commotion made Vigil turn his head again. In the crowded square behind him, the huge first dancer spread his arms. Mirrors made of sailcloth in his coat unfolded like a peacock’s tail. The giant with the dancers trailing all ran pell-mell toward the statue in green and gold, who was waiting, arms spread wide in welcome.

  Vigil Lord Hermeticist now noticed every dancer in the train behind the giant carried packages of coins and little toys bundled into baskets on his head. From the giant came the fanfare of the Emancipation, and from the dancers came the anthems, each one for the nations or clans of far worlds that had christened, lofted, and manned one of the titanic habitats of the caravan which Emancipation drew in her wake.

  What ship did not promise wealth, new technologies, new mudras, and new gene lines to its host world? And were it not for the Stability Lords, how many ships would have kept that promise
?

  Opposite the Observatory rose the massive black façade of the Second Landing Hall. Above the hall, in letters of eternal flame, which no man living now knew how to make, burned the Schedule of Launchings and Arrivals. For 6,600 years, the unchanging Schedule had hung there, lit with curving lines of light, and bright with images of stars in the Local Interstellar Cloud.

  One shining line showed the promised orbit of the Emancipation. From Sol to 70 Ophiuchito 41 Arae to Xi Boötis to Arcturus the wandering path reached. Eight hundred years ago, the Emancipation had departed the solitary planet Nightspore, home of Vigil’s ancestors, and spread her sails to catch the beams of light from Arcturus to carry her to waiting Iota Draconis.

  The dancers circling the statue raised their voices in a song. The crowds, all swaying, sang as well, a great hushed roar of words. Let memories of Earth endure, nor ever be forgot! Stable Lords will keep the signals sure, and all recall what we shall not …

  Earth was the poetic name for Eden. Two hundred Edenyear ago, which was but one year of Wormwood’s long circuit around Iota Draconis, the Stranger had soared on wide-flung sails from Torment to Sciritaea of 55 Rho Cancri. Cousins of his, relations whose names he would never know, had been born and died aboard that vessel. The Schedule promised that the Stranger was now somewhere between Sciritaea and Eurotas of 107 Piscium, having departed Sciritaea some fifty years ago.

  Vigil’s eye was drawn against his will to another line of light eternally burning on the Schedule: the orbit of the Argosy. This mad ship was due in the same generation as the Emancipation, a rare double-starfall, only a few decades hence.

  In the square crowds all laughed and called. The dancers threw their baskets in the air. Coins and sweets and tiny singing gifts rained down through the cheering crowd, which knew not how false their hopes had grown.

  Normally, it was as unwise to use mudras against oneself as it was for a surgeon to operate on himself. Nonetheless, Vigil bent his wrist in the Gesture Beyond Misery, buddhashramana. This restored his internal balance between his core thoughts, his internals, and his external channels. Next, he made the Gesture of Understanding, cincihna, where the thumb and index finger make a circle as if to grasp an object as fine and small as a grain of truth. The flux of reaction energy separated Vigil’s fear away from his main nerve paths for later assimilation.

  He would be afraid later. Now he would fight.

  Picking up the wand of vengeance and coming lightly to his feet, Vigil Lord Hermeticist released the chemical combinations in his bloodstream and muscles to prepare for battle.

  He threw the useless mantle aside and turned on his heraldry. The crowd, despite the noise and informality of the celebrations, parted before him, and men bowed, and women curtseyed, and Fox Maidens laughed, and dogs held their paws before their eyes as if unworthy to look on him.

  And everyone got out of his way.

  Whistling cheerfully, twirling the deadly wand in his hand, the young Star Lord made an affable gesture to the crowd and disappeared into the many-shadowed high-walled avenue where enemies watched.

  Behind him, someone shouted out, “Hurrah for the Lords that vow and recall! The Ancient Ship makes planetfall! Treasures and pleasures for us all!”

  Cheers rose up. The men threw their hats in the air, and three Fox Maidens threw their three heads in the air, red mouths shrieking gaily, their long red hair streaming like comet tails.

  3

  The Street Which Sneaks Up On the Sphinx

  1. The Soulless Ones

  Vigil spread his awareness like a widening bubble, peering in every direction around him, overhead and underfoot, using his internals to notice any clues his conscious mind missed. He was amazed at the density and clarity of the images, sounds, and sensations that poured into his brain from ten thousand points of view.

  In the parish called Bitter Waters in the Northwestern Hemisphere, in a land of sand dunes, swales of igneous ejecta and burned glass circling a great and lifeless crater lake, was the reservation where the Strangers had been forced to dwell after the Pilgrims overthrew them. Lesser lakes surrounded it like a pattern of birdshot against a target. There, the ratio of cognitive matter to sleeping matter or dead matter was low. There was not even one gram of self-aware logic crystal for every cubic mile of desert wasteland, and hardly one sand particle in five had memory and sensory capacity. Very little programmable matter had been used for the terraforming or pantropic efforts in this parish of dead saltwater crater lakes. Most of the sand there, oddly enough, was not dead matter that had died; it was dead matter that had never been alive. The sand dunes were simply the relics of rock that weathering had scoured into grains, and were not man-made.

  Aboard the great cylindrical world of the Stranger, with canals and rice paddies overhead and stars underfoot, every object, even the smallest, was friendly and helpful. It was odd, even crippling, to any Stranger who, due to frequent slumber, was old enough to recall such a shipboard life now to live among cacti that did not speak and rock and sand that stubbornly refused any commands. On the reservation, ghosts were rare, and ancestor worship had fallen into disuse. The libraries were organized according to the racial memory formats of the Pilgrim race, so no one recalled things in the order he expected, and no one found his old thoughts precisely where he had left them.

  Vigil had known no other land in his natural memory as he grew. To him, the living and talking world of the Pilgrims was the oddity.

  Torment had been colonized by humans for only five thousand years, and by machines six thousand, and therefore was very young. Microscopic machine life had not had the chance to grow and coat every crater and crater lake. The winters were too harsh and the electronic conditions of the atmosphere not favorable. So the Noösphere was thin and patchy across the face of Torment, and in certain areas of the map, the Noösphere was dark, and in others, dead.

  Here in the capital, in the Southwestern Hemisphere, all was different. All the matter which was not sophont, part of the thinking mind of the Principality of Torment, was sensible, and could perform simple functions of scanning the environment, taking messages, doing first order calculations, augmenting mental facilities. In this city, the number of internals Vigil could maintain was nearly double what he could among the metallic tents and walking tabernacles of his people.

  Even motes in the air too small to be seen were part of the Noösphere. Therefore, his eyesight penetrated more deeply.

  The ambushers were hidden cleverly. There were four of them.

  The first man had disconnected his various bodily parts on the physical level, and scattered them and the bits of his weapon in a semirandom camouflage dispersion in various places in the alley. One foot was in the rain gutter, one finger in an external thought socket, and his head in a medical slops can next to an eyeless push broom which happened to have a sword blade inside, with a nanomechanically active edge along one side. Vigil noticed the dispersed man because the information shadows in the upper levels of the Noösphere did not match the information densities for the various objects his parts were hiding under. The broom was too quiet to be a broom, for example, since most of them maintained navigation maps and definitions of clean and dirty, and monitored the environment for litter. And the slops can was whispering too frequently, gathering tactical motion information from electronic microbes in the dust in the air, information a slops can would not use.

  The second ambusher was invisible, his image blotted out of the Noösphere like a phantasm, replaced with computer extrapolations of what should be there had he been absent. The only thing that gave him away was the odd light from Wormwood, which was not steady and red like the light from Iota Draconis. The extrapolation had to anticipate the wavering and rippling shadows from the light reflecting from the storm layers in the upper Wormwood atmosphere, and this called on more computer time, and so a man-shaped blankness in the computer images of the alleyway had a higher computer-use rate than its profile could account for.

 
The third was disguised as a horse and cart, with a dog as a driver snapping a whip, and other dogs yipping and barking about the cart wheels while the horse reared and plunged and kicked. The wheels did not seem to be ordinary wheels at all, not temporary city wheels, but older, larger, wiser-looking wheels from the desert outlands, and each one had a sly and cold expression in the eye of his hub.

  Vigil would not have noticed this third assassin, except that the driver, a Mastiff, was whirling and cracking his whip and uttering curses with gusto, but these curses were like something from a peddler’s story, a yarn a wandering tinker might sell to children in their dreams. The motions were fake looking, too well coordinated, for none of the unruly pack blocking the cart was being struck by the whip or flying hoof. The assassin was not really trying to hurt one of the bodies he inhabited with another. Besides, during a citywide carnival, when all street priorities were reversed, what teamster was so eager to move his dray goods that he would try to force his way through a celebrating pack of dogs?

  Made nervous by how cunningly the third ambusher had disguised himself as a horse and dog pack, Vigil made a more careful inspection of the environment, both physical and electronic. Only then did a sudden disturbance in his internal creatures show him the fourth killer.

  The fourth was not physical at all, but occupied a heavy-duty node in the pornography lines buried underneath the road, where the citywide information scrubbers were set to carry away records of evil thoughts and desires for psychological cleansing and recycling. It was a line that was normally shielded, and a fastidious man like Vigil normally would not paw through the nauseating garbage of other men’s discarded erotic thought-spew, but there were lines of memory and association leading into the sewer mess which looked like lines used for controlling a weapon.