“Only damn Hermeticist who could shoot worth a damn,” said Montrose. “Sarmento, I mean. Nicked me once but good.”
“I regularly group better than he did in target shooting and pigeon,” said Del Azarchel. “I am eager to compare my skill with the pistol with yours. At times I wonder if these other matters will never cease to distract us.”
Vigil said harshly, “Matters like whether your servants will dash this world to bits, as we have vowed to do, with the sword you bestowed, sir?”
Del Azarchel leaned back. “By all means, take your time, come to the correct decision as I have ordained, find a way to find yourself alive to see another dawn! Whatever motions of thoughts or words are needed for his happy event to come to pass, I will wait as patient as a stone until … ah, let us say … for another twelve minutes and a half before unleashing weapons deadly beyond the conception of mortal or Angel, Potentate or Domination.”
Montrose said to Vigil, “Hey. If you use that sword, what exactly does it do?”
Vigil said, “Erases all human records and ghosts out of the Noösphere of Torment and the extended information systems of Iota Draconis. Our libraries, finances, laws, intellectual assistance formulae, ship brains, ecological controls, nanotech regulators, stored personalities, serving angels, everything that is ours, including any records and recorded ancestors. Just the diseases caused by nanotechnology malfunctions of every living spore and mite in the city severed from networked controls would suffice to kill all life on the surface, and the mudra and mandala would be meaningless gestures and lines. Cliometry shows a mutual extermination by the hostile clans and races of Torment within a century and a half.”
“So you cannot actually ignite Del Azarchel’s groin?”
“It is an informational weapon, more potent than those made of matter.”
“Just asking.”
“Torment would bring replacements from the buried cities of slumber near the core, and restore a working society to rule this world, and with a working Stability to maintain contact with far worlds. This happened once before in our history, when the Stability of this world failed and all were slain. From this event, the world takes her sad name.”
“Well, only eleven minutes left. Better get a move on. Have you figured what to do?”
Vigil stared at Montrose. “You seem not to care.”
“You seem a bright feller. Course I don’t care. None of this affects me. I played through all these jigs and antics on account of a Swan asked me to. You guessed my plans?”
Vigil said, “No. Only one clue is missing.” He turned. “Torment! You spoke of your fear. Of what are you afraid?”
Torment said, “I fear the long-term consequences of my acts will return to haunt me. In this, I am no different from lesser beings.”
“And these consequences are?”
“Triumvirate must know Rania is false: but the Dominion is as far above me as he is above you. To both of us, he is a mind whose workings none can know nor understand. If I keep faith with Rania, then I must oppose Ximen, who is in rebellion against her, and see that his vessel never makes port. But if I keep faith with the true Rania, or with her dream, she who never returned from M3, then I must rebel against the False Rania, and this puts me in the company of Ximen, whereupon I must welcome his vessel, war or no war.
“So, I fear the signals reaching me from other minds in the Empyrean Polity, including those of Powers and Principalities who can overwhelm my thoughts as easily as Foxes bedevil Men. Parts of my mind are swift, and parts are slow, so that to my swift thoughts, a century hence is too remote for worry, but to the slow, the retaliation is immediate. I do not dare defy the Dominion. Triumvirate is for the False Rania and upholds her.”
Vigil threw the sword on the table so that it rang like a bell, and slid, and came to rest just in front of Del Azarchel, who looked pleased and surprised.
Vigil said, “My Lords of the Stability, you may escape your penalty if you dissolve and adjourn forever. There will be no further meetings of this body, nor any need of them. The command of the Lighthouse, by terms of a covenant older than our planet, will return to the Starfarer’s Guild, whose only living member is seated here before us. The penalty for your disobedience I mitigate: instead of being destroyed at my hands, I leave to the mercy of the Emancipation. With this same one stroke, I can avenge my father, not with death, for Torment does not understand death, but with exile.”
Montrose said, “Whose exile? Yours? What, you think you are coming with me?”
Vigil shook his head. “Everyone is coming with you, save for myself alone and the Lighthouse crew. I alone am faithful enough to tend the beam of Iota Draconis, the most powerful beam in all the human polity, and center it into your sails no matter how long the wait. I will keep the beam centered even if sixty thousand years must pass by.”
“How you know I ain’t got a ship of my own?”
“You have been constructing sailcloth on the moon called Hellebore. Who else has motive?”
“A man named Mickey is doing it for me, and a whole race of half-Sylphs he has fathered there, but yeah. I got me a sailworks there.”
“But you have no vessel, or else you would have departed erenow. And unless you had some understanding with the Lighthousekeeper and the Aedile and whole Table, you could have neither a launching laser nor the resources to power it and keep it powered. Why is that? As for the Imperator, he is unconcerned with retaliation from Rania or any Angel or Potentate. Why is that? Obviously he has the means to flee from the Empyrean as he did once before, during the legendary era of the White Ship, when mankind set foot in the Sagittarius Arm of the Milky Way, and he flung worlds from star to star during their nova cycles. Obviously again, he cannot use that means, except as a threat. He boasted a moment ago of having weapons beyond any human technology, beyond what any Dominion could know. He means First Order technology. The sole example of this is the Solitudines Vastae Caelorum, the ship in which Rania, the False Rania, arrived. But he needs you to command the vessel.”
Montrose looked surprised and stared at Del Azarchel. “You got the giant Space Rose? That thing is bigger than the inner solar system!”
Del Azarchel said, “Six minutes left, Lord Hermeticist. And, yes, it turns out the sails are made of something that is neither matter nor energy, a collection of preons and quarks and antigravitons and other exotic particles for which we have no names. But the substance folds up into eleven dimensions quite nicely, like the mythical ship of the Norse gods, which could fit in a man’s wallet.
“I have the miracle vessel in tow behind the Emancipation,” continued Del Azarchel, “hidden from the gaze of Iota Draconis behind my aft push plate. But the fuel is just as exotic and cannot be manufactured with nanotechnology nor with picotechnology.
“The vessel is a bastard. She can be used as a sailing vessel, riding an acceleration beam, or as a self-propelled vessel, using the sails to gather particles from surrounding media as reaction mass. The speeds the False Rania achieved returning to the galaxy from outside it, the speeds needed to reach M3, comes from propulsion, not sailing, but that option, at the moment, is beyond me. So I mean to sail the Hyades, to the star the Swans call Ain and the Patricians call Coronis, and see if I can bargain for fuel to power the vessel.”
Montrose turned back to Vigil and said, “You seem to think he needs me.”
Vigil said, “I only deduce from what has happened here. If the Master of the Empyrean could have departed without you, he would have raised sail and found his way to Hyades, and eventually to M3, to recover the woman legend says you both love.”