4. The Living Blade
Vigil cautiously lowered the blade and put it home in its sheath, but when he kept his hands on sheath and grip, as if ready to draw it again, and made no move to surrender it, a silent force, like the pressure felt in the air before a storm, grew and grew beneath his gloves, and he could feel the impatient power in the sword swelling ominously. And yet he did not unhand the sheathed blade.
Vigil said, “Claim you to be Ximen del Azarchel, the Nobilissimus and Master of Mankind?”
The man smiled an alarmingly charming smile, tilting his head forward with a quirk of his eyebrows. “I am he. Among my other titles, my oldest and the only one I really cherish, is Senior Officer of the Landing Party. I am the founder of the Hermetic Order. You doubt? Don’t you have any coins in your pocket? Look at the profile on the gold royal. I am that man. That sword is mine. Hand it over.” The smile did not fade, but it somehow grew cold and menacing. “With haste. I do not repeat my commands.”
Vigil’s counselor said softly to him, “Don’t let go of that blade. Ask him who is the captain of the ship.”
Vigil understood. If Ximen del Azarchel was the captain of the Emancipation, he was in space, approaching at near-lightspeed. This, then, must be an emissary, a partial, a set of memories taken from Ximen and radioed ahead of the ship to prepare the ground for the ship’s arrival.
Vigil said, “The boon I ask is this sword. I ask that the world-destroying power of the Lord Hermeticist be kept in my possession and that of my heirs and assigns forever.”
Ximen snapped his fingers. “Very clever, but ask for another boon, and be quick about it. The blade is a precious heirloom to me and has sentimental value.”
Vigil shook his head. “A few questions before I decide whether your order is lawful, sir.”
“All my orders are lawful, the supreme law, merely by being mine.”
“Who is captain of the warship? Who is so mad that he would make war on worlds to which he could never return, slumbering the centuries between each battle?”
“The Master of the Empyrean has authority to compel or punish Powers and Potentates, Archangels, Angels, and the various posthuman races which may unwisely attempt to resist him. I require the use of their launching lasers to coordinate and focus all their beams in one spot in one particular decade, year, and hour. And some dared to question how their civilizations would tolerate the expense.
“Naturally”—again he smiled his engaging smile—“I had to leave a cadre of my own people, those of trusted loyalty, in charge of the gravitic-nucleonic distortion pools within their suns, and the lighthouse satellites controlling the focal elements in their Oort clouds. The cadre in each case had to be of strength sufficient that no combination of the native races, Angels, and Potentates could overcome them and also be of sufficient numbers to reproduce the generations needed to maintain the acceleration beam across the centuries.”
5. War and Life
“Why?” Vigil demanded, his voice growing louder and harsher than he expected. “Why all this horror and deception? Why is there war among the stars?”
“For my glory, of course,” said Ximen del Azarchel, raising both eyebrows, smug as a black tomcat. “And to accomplish my purposes. This little sphere of stars, a piddling hundred lightyears in radius, is too narrow a cage for the eagle wings of my ambition to spread to their full width! Come now! You are not stupid men! What does your paltry, far-off, dry, and dusty little moon, filled with race hatred and cruelty, have to offer? I notice you all let lie two dead bodies here on the floor.
“You are barbarians.”
He spoke this last word with a particular gusto of contempt. He continued, smiling eerily, “There is no warfare, no economic competition, no cruelty, and damn near no zest in life left back in the First Sweep worlds. You disgust me, but you have zest, eh?
“Ah, my dear people, you would be ashamed of the cousins left behind on your ancestral planets if you knew how easily my very small but very well-trained complement could bring your mother worlds to heel. Planets are very, very big, even small ones, and having enough troops to put men on every continent is nearly impossible—if I were not a military genius, I might not enjoy myself this much. But the Patrician race, the homogeneity they spread, their silly ideas of equality and fairness! Bah! You see where that leads!”
Vigil had regained control of his composure. Coldly, not showing his anger, he said, “Sir. You are the prince consort and husband of Rania, are you not? The Imperator and Nobilissimus of all the races of man on all the worlds and ships in flight! How are you doing this against the will and command of Her Serene Highness?”
Del Azarchel nodded. “I am pleased someone here has recognized me. Siege! Offer me that chair that I may sit.” And the siege of the Terraformer waddled from its current position and held itself nicely while the Nobilissimus sat.
He smiled and said, “I will answer you, and then you will hand me that sword. Do you see this plan for the future written out here so nicely on this cold, hard table? It is a cold, hard plan, is it not? What is missing from it? What is missing here that your planet Septfoil—or what does it call itself now?—your tedious and insignificant little moon-world here—Torment. You have something which is lacking elsewhere. What is it? What is worth spending a thousand years of my life in a long, slow ship, and fighting half a dozen worldwide campaigns, to find?”
Vigil looked at the figures inscribed on the Table. “Zest? The desire to wrestle life and take her by the teeth?”
“Ah, you remind me of D’Aragó—and you are descended from him, are you not? Good guess. Quite wrong. What is missing from Rania’s Plan for Universal Peace is the Sixth Sweep.”
There was a murmur about the table.
Del Azarchel leaned back in the siege of the Aedile and templed his fingers. “What is missing is worlds farther away than yours from Mother Sol. Why are your children not pressing outward, ever outward, colonizing, terraforming, adapting, conquering, trampling, and fathering new Potentates and Powers and Principalities?
“It has been nearly two thousand years since Rania returned. Has even a single new world been tamed by mankind and added to my domination? Even one? A moon?
“Am I the only damned soul in the whole human race with the ambition to rule the stars, the wit to see how to do it, and the will to see it done? Well, be that as it may. Have you unriddled my riddle? Why did I come to your dead-end world as far from civilization as it is possible to be?”
Vigil nodded. “You are here for the launching laser of Iota Draconis! Our Lighthouse was built by The Beast, and no human technology can match it. And if I guess not wrong, you need people who have the spirit, wit, and will like yours to pioneer the stars, and you see that the quarreling races of Torment.”
The Master of the Empyrean smiled thinly. “So, as you see, you have no lawful reason not to return my sword to me. You are hardly going to use it now to compel my servants here at my Table to oppose my will and betray my schedule and let my fine ship die, are you?”
“What happens when the ship makes port?”
“That has never been a concern of the Stability, so long as my schedule is maintained, has it?”
“What happens when the warship makes port, sir?”
“War, of course! But as the Imperator of Man, I decree this Table is not in dereliction of its duty, and therefore you no longer have jurisdiction as the Hermeticist to preserve the turmoil and bloodshed needed to compel the evolution of mankind ever upward and onward. I will see to that matter myself!”
Vigil tightened his hands on the sword. He looked at the Terraformer, the Theosophist, the Aedile. “Sirs, are you convinced that the husband of Rania has the legal power to compel us to welcome the horrors of war into our midst? Or, in your candid judgment and decree, is this a violation of the principles for which we stand? He calls us barbaric, and yet we and we alone recall and perform our oaths—what is civilization but that?”