But the Portreeve said, “If we used the immense power entrusted to the Stability to smite the warship that Emancipation has become, we would be no more right than she is!”
It was said that eventually all Lighthousekeepers go mad, since the immensity of the power of the interstellar-strength beams at their command prey on their minds and the sight of cracking uninhabited inner worlds in two, or boiling away the atmospheres of gas giants during initial testing and target practice, sinks into their souls.
And yet, it was with no glint of madness in his eye that the Lighthousekeeper said, “Our Anthroponomist has testified that into whatever strange form of ex-human life the Scolopendra of Emancipation have mutated, they are moved by metaphysical or unearthly sentiments and not to be reasoned with. Only zealots can make war across the wide emptiness of stars! Those who will not kill a murderer die at his hands! This is the sole basis for moral reasoning. War excuses all. Self-defense excuses all atrocities! This is a holy war!”
Vigil looked back and forth at the men there. He did not raise his voice, but there was a tremble in his words which even his sternest internal creature could not suppress. “How can there be any war at all, holy or hellish? The Princess Rania promised us peace! Universal peace!”
The one who spoke then was the Vatic Essomenic Officer, informally called the Aruspex. He wore chlamys of purple thought-wire and a petasos of orichalchum. He was blind, his two eyes and all his visual cortex replaced with a yellowish aurum substance to allow him to see directly into the notational layer of the Noösphere. His voice was like a ringing gong. “Wake from your dreams! There will never be peace. Behold.”
12. The Aruspex
At his gesture, the surface of the table, which held the somnolent arcs, curves, and multiangular notations of the Monument Code, rippled and presented a new set of equations.
The gathered Lords and officers stared at the Aruspex, but he said nothing.
Vigil said, “Wait. I recognize parts of this. This is Rania’s Equation from the Memento Stone. It is the plan for universal peace, the system of customs and laws we must adopt to become fully equal to Hyades and the other Dominions of the Orion Arm. But—why is it changed? I have seen—”
The Aruspex spoke in a voice like iron. “It has not changed. This is the unchanged version of what Rania deduced from the Memento Stone. The parts of the plan were severally sent by radio laser to the Stability Tables each on its own world, to incorporate into the local planetary history. We alone, thanks to the potency of the receivers orbiting Iota Draconis, and our correspondents on other worlds, were able to gather the scattered plans back into one, and read the master plan intended for the whole Empyrean. Here is the authentic and complete plan of destiny set before you. We hid the truth from the public. If the material is too complex, I can summon a frenetic actuator—”
“Not needed,” said Vigil. “I can read this by sight.”
He saw the looks of disbelief on their features.
Vigil said proudly, “You forget the blood of the Summer Kings of Nightspore runs in me, who fenced with storms and tilted with meteorological systems fiercely opposed as lance and shield, the calculus of which required the development special nervous matrices.”
The Aruspex said, “Summer Kings cannot read this notation. It is not fit for human brains.”
Vigil said, “The blood of the Iron Hermeticist Narcís D’Aragó is also mine. You are of the Five Families: you know what this means.”
They did. Once history revealed that Rania, Ximen the Black, and the mad Judge of Ages were altered by stepping on the surface of the Lost Monument of the legendary star the Swan Princess later plucked from the sky, the Five Families had sought out and bred the descendants of the other Hermeticists known to have exposed themselves to the Monument surface and absorbed into their cell plasm whatever unknown force it was which made the Swan Princess, and, to a lesser extent, the Master and the Judge, able to read the Monument.
The ruling families Xi Boötis had been subjected to a ruthless eons-long breeding program by the cunning of the Potentate Euphrasy, and—whether by coincidence or nonhuman design it was not known—these were among the millions torn from their homes in the Fifty-Third Millennium and flung to Arcturus by the pitiless Virtues whom human astronomers dubbed Lamathon and Nahalon: and from them arose the Aestevals of Nightspore, the ancestors of the Strangermen.
Vigil pointed at the runes and hieroglyphs of the alien script. “These figures are nonsense. The extrapolations here and here show genetic drifts which will turn all the races of man, one by one, into placid and homogenous underlings, craving control by their superiors, then being addicted to control, then being incapable to live without it. These Last Men, once they are developed, would be congenitally unable to tolerate freedom, honor, virtue, truth, or beauty. This is not peace! This is an abomination!”
He looked around the chamber, his eyes haunted and lost. “Is this—this insolent treason against everything for which we stand, everything we cherish, everything we are—?” He almost could not force the words out of his mouth. “Is this Rania’s plan?”
Slowly he lowered the sword and hefted it in his hand. “How can she mean this to happen to us? It would be no different from if the Vindication of Man had never happened. All her tens of thousands of years of star-faring, beyond the galaxy, farther than the realms of death and back again—is all human history and struggle to be made into nothing?”
The Aruspex said, “The cliometric calculus of what becomes of the Stability should this plan is made public is perfectly clear in the Chi and Psi region: no one follows any futurian leading him into the slave pit. All our friends and kin would be stoned, or deleted, or subjected to mind-desolation. The Tormented are a turbulent people, when provoked.”
“What, then, did you intend? To allow this future to unfold and ensure the desecration of our race?”
The Aruspex said, “No. We conspired to break our ties with the Empyrean, allow no further Great Ships to launch or land, and become the antithesis of the Stability in all ways, expunging all connections of trade and radio contact, knowing ourselves too minor to come to the attention of Hyades, or any greater Domination or Dominion. The stars and endless unhorizoned vistas of eternity which once so proudly we ordained our children’s remotest children would conquer, all this we foreswore.”
Vigil shook his head. “But—wait. There is no vector showing the approach of a multigeneration warship. And the worlds conquered by the Emancipation in secret—where are the figures and vector sums for their new plotted courses in history?”
The Aruspex said, “I will not hide the truth: your father wished the ship to land, uncaring of what would become of our current social order, or perhaps desiring its overthrow, for the flooded world the Emancipation will impose also appears nowhere in Rania’s planning. He thought it better to shatter the chessboard of history than to continue the game where checkmate is inevitable. For this reason he perished—but whether it was suicide or murder, I do not know.”
Vigil said, “He died to place me here, to make the decision he knew was right, but had not the strength to make. Halting the ship both breaks this horrible plan and fulfills all oaths as Stabiles—even though it means the end of the Stability.”
The Aruspex said, “Will you use your terrible power to force us to betray the oath of the Stability and land a ship that we are sworn not to allow? This warship destroys, rather than upholds, the plan of history.”