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.