The Vindication of Man

by John C. Wright

  The Sphinx was normally inanimate, but this was a festive day, and public monuments forbidden to move on other days were allowed to ward off excessively exuberant partygoers. She raised her lioness paws and made a remarkably delicate mudra gesture. At first he thought it was a greeting, but no, it was manidhara, also called the Gesture of Holding the Immaculate Wishing Jewel. The fingers were bent as if around in invisible oval, as if holding a gem too transparent to be seen—namely, the jewel of that compassion which hears all the cries of pain of the moral world.

  The gesture not only dispelled the muscle-memory of alien impositions in his limbs, it gave Vigil the calm needed to forgive the strange, perhaps insane, Myrmidon who had imposed on him. Her gesture was magnificent, for the waters around him also grew calm, and nanomachinery in the droplets—for this was a basin of living water—spattered on his clothing began to repair and regrow the fabric and circuitry of his antique garment. Little glints of light appeared and disappeared around the edges of the cuts as they mended, like a dry leaf seen in a fire, edges red and tattered, but as if such a leaf burned backward in time.

  The Sphinx said, “Who is the paragon of animals, the beauty of the world, in apprehension like a god, in action like an angel, so infinite in faculty, so noble in reason? Yet the cold and ever-famished grave is a-hungered for him until for aye; and what he should do, he does not; and what he should not do, he does. Who is he? Who art thou?”

  She lowered her stone paw and raised him gently to his feet.

  Vigil was impressed, nearly overcome, by the kindness of this higher being. He gathered his wits, wondering what she was asking him. His internals were silent, confounded, unable to help.

  Despite the terror of the assassination attempt and the freakishness of Swan and Fox and Soulless Man and Myrmidon he had met this day, despite the strange omens of Wormwood afire overhead and the predictions of treason at the Table, despite all this, Vigil felt something inside him that at first he thought was an internal creature of hidden strength. But no, it was him, part of him, a spirit not willing to be cowed, growing brighter like a yellow flame.

  “What other men are, I leave to them to say. For me, I am one who remembers his sworn word. That makes me a man.”

  The eyes of the Sphinx looked at him cryptically, and he could not tell what was in the deep places behind those eyes.

  “Know thyself,” she said very softly. “For you are small. Take what others let fall.”

  Vigil turned toward the laughing guards and raised his hand in an ancient salute. It was a secular gesture, not a mudra, and Vigil released no neuroactive energy from any peripheral cells, but nonetheless, the sentries went blank faced with awe, beholding that he was a Lord of Stability in truth and not a drunk in masquerade.

  They suddenly stopped laughing and snapped to attention. The one man who had dropped his wand had a panicked look in his eye, for he had not stooped to pick up the weapon, and now that he was at attention, he dared not.

  Vigil wondered how he could command such respect, even as a Lord of the Stability. Then he felt a neural pressure from behind his shoulder blades and realized that the Sphinx had turned her mysterious, blind-seeming, white eyes toward the sentries, her vast stone face perhaps touched with a hint of a smile. No human was likely to surrender to mirth when eyes like those were watching.

  Vigil stepped forward. He stooped and picked up the dropped peace wand. It felt childish and insubstantial after the weight of the antique vendetta wand that had shattered in his hand. He was not sure if this is what the Sphinx meant by her unclear command, but he saw no harm in it. By the customs of the Order, Vigil would have been required to surrender the sentry’s weapon if asked, but the sentry on watch was not allowed to speak unless addressed and could not ask.

  As Vigil approached the tall doors, two sentries saluted and pulled wide the glass panels for him. Just then, a silvery tone rang out.

  He did not recognize it and did not expect to. So many signals and trills and chimes issued from the old machines these days, even antiquarians rarely knew their meanings. But Vigil was no fool: the Myrmidon clearly had meant him to be within those doors before that chime stopped.

  Vigil made the mudra called pataka: with the thumb bent and other fingers extended. The gesture contained both denotations and impositions, because it came from the choral arts rather than the martial arts. It denoted rain, showering of flowers, taking an oath, and it was used to denote silence, but it was also used to indicate forcing doors open. The tall transparent metal panels of the ceremonial doors folded back, their thousand-year-old hinge-engines crying out in protest in the voices of women. The chiming grew louder, the hinges changed their voices, and the panels began to swing shut. The opening narrowed.

  Vigil stepped forward, but one of the sentries politely but solemnly stepped in his way, raised his hand in a gesture that meant, Entrance without due identification is unauthorized. The sentry flashed a beam from his lantern into Vigil’s right eye. Vigil blinked, exasperated. There were no circuits in his door-lamp for reading the pattern of blood vessels in Vigil’s retina, nor had there been since the starfall of the Pilgrim. It was a purely ceremonial gesture, no doubt meant merely to hinder Vigil and waste his time.

  But he held his head still for the doorkeep to complete the meaningless motion. Meanwhile, he raised his peace wand and indicated Peace toward the door hinges, trying to jam them. The chiming grew louder again in protest, and the door opening continued to narrow. Vigil lunged and thrust the peace wand physically between the door leaves as the crack narrowed. The doors came to rest, but the doors had evidently been programmed to respect a peace wand, so they did not clamp shut and snap the wand in two.

  “None may enter the Hall once the doors are shut,” the doorkeep said stiffly, a glint of malicious satisfaction in his eye. The man was of the Pilgrim race, a Loricate, and his integument was a fine mesh of silver, turquoise, and white scales, the rippling pattern of an albino snake, like the scales of a pangolin.

  It was said that on their home world, long ago, of Feast of Stephen, the ancestors of the Pilgrims were the kindliest of men, since the bishops and barons of that world would be blighted with frost and hailstorms by their Judge of Age, who was also their Terraformer and weather control officer, if the poor and destitute within their parishes starved. Centuries of transit within the climate of the Great Ship Pilgrimage loosened these severe laws of charity. Their children, landing on a world that neither worshiped the same ancestors nor practiced the same Sacerdotal disciplines, were as filled with hatred and contempt for underlings as their ancestors with charity.

  Vigil knew in his heart that this was one more injustice, one more stain marring the woven garment of history, that the Plan of Rania would sponge away once her influences reached here, and the slow process of cliometry reached its climax.

  “Who commanded you to delay me?” Vigil said softly.

  The man used a Fox-trick to change the cellular composition of his own face. The man’s countenance stiffened, changed color, and the skin cells locked in place, becoming as a mask of silver metal. “I am uncertain what milord intends to imply, sir. This humble servant of the Order merely abides by the ancient precepts and protocols.”

  Vigil said, “Then stand aside, Pilgrim lackey; for, look closely! The doors are not shut.” And he nodded at the narrow crack where the doors were resting very lightly around the peace wand, by a hair’s breadth not touching it.

  The doorkeep said stiffly, “Even the Lords must abide by the conventions and protocols of the Stability. Once the doors are shut—”

  “I say they are not shut and that the protocol is therefore intact. Step away, or you hinder a Lord of the Stability in the performance of his duties.”

  But the doorkeep said, “The protocol clearly states that in times of dispute or accusation of irregular injunction or detainment, the Office of the Watch has discretion. Therefore, we must summon him to answer whether you may pass or no. He is within. I
will send a page once the conclave is disbanded.”

  Vigil was affronted by the transparency of the ploy. “This means I will miss the conclave to which I am summoned!”

  The doorkeep quirked his eyebrows nonchalantly. “My concern is that protocol is maintained. It is no fault of mine that milord amused himself to wander the back avenues erratically, or beguiled the time away taking baths or molesting statues.”

  “Send the page now!”

  “While the doors are shut? I humbly regret to inform milord that this is impossible, sir.”

  “Impossible?”

  “Highly unlikely, let us say, milord…”

  Vigil dropped the wand and grabbed door panels in both hands, as if he were challenging the oblong slab to a wrestling match. The sentries were too surprised to remember their face control, and they laughed, knowing the door leaves were made a spaceworthy transparent metal. They did not know, however, that Vigil’s bones were made of a material just as strong, or slightly more, and his muscles had been engineered to the peak of what was permitted to human beings, or slightly beyond; and they did not remember that no matter how hard the doors, the hinges were antiques.

  Their laughter died as one of the door leaves twisted in a hideous groaning at an odd angle, awkward as a tooth pried from a jaw, and fell with seeming slowness grandly to the flagstones in a gonglike clang of noise, loud as a thunderclap.

  2. The Seneschal

  Emergency lamps, no doubt startled at the noise, lit up with red flares, and trumpets sounded, and a siren sang out. (He could see her in the distance. The siren was seated in a rotunda where six corridors met, the basin of a silver fountain with a conch shell in her white hands, no doubt an adjutant to one of the lake-dwelling versions of mankind, a Melusine or related order.)

  Vigil stepped over the fallen door panel into the Palace of Future History and whistled for the peace wand. The peace wand hesitated, no doubt wondering whether it should return to the empty-handed sentry staring sadly from afar. But seeing the unhappy fate of the hinges, who were moaning and calling for repair, the wand no doubt thought it wiser to comply. It flexed like a snake, issued a magnetic pulse, and leaped smoothly into Vigil’s hand.

  A seneschal, perhaps in response to the siren’s singing, the flashing of the lanterns, and the lamentation from the sobbing and broken hinges, came scurrying forward.

  He was wearing kothornoi of wood from a sacred tree from a world of Proxima to give him extra height, and a towering kamilavka on his head. From the roundness of his features and the almost triangular squint of his eyes, he was not of the Pilgrim lineage but an Itinerant, one of the most neglected races on Torment. The Itinerant were as baseline First Men in all ways with this one oddity which they inherited from the Flocculents of 44 Boötis, that they could survive without water almost indefinitely, and, even nude, withstand any degree of cold. Their water-retaining and recycling tissues unfortunately gathered at their bellies and buttocks, giving them a portly and comical appearance. Successive generations of meddling with the aesthetic perceptual complexes and midbrains of the other races of man so far had not succeeded in making the Itinerants appear comely in the eyes of Nomads, Strangers, or Pilgrims.

  “What commotion is this?” he demanded portentously.

  The doorkeep shouted, “Lock-breaking and intrusion! Felonies have been committed!”

  Vigil knelt and touched the golden floor of the corridor, using the mudra of bhumisparsha, which indicates Faithful Witness. “No locks were broken!”

  The hinges groaned but dared not contradict him.

  The doorkeep said, “Does the Strangerman deny that he stove in the ancient and honest doors which it is my charge to keep? I am reduced to absurdity! That, at least, is a misdemeanor!” The delicate pangolin scales of his face now rippled and flexed, which revealed a pink flush in the cracks between them, a sign of anger.

  Vigil said to the seneschal, “Hear me: I am summoned to the Table by the Loyal and Self-Correctional Order of Prognostic Actuarial Cliometric Stability, whose charge it is to deter chaos and unpredicted anomalies in the smooth evolution of future history. The approach of an Interstellar Sailing Vessel introduces the unknowns of other worlds into our prediction matrix and heralds enormous events. Hence it is the protocol, once the Lighthouse is lit, to call the last starman aloft to report of signs and wonders seen in other spheres and heavens. I am the descendent and representative of that starman, have inherited his internal creatures and memory chains, and therefore speak with his voice.”

  The seneschal said, “Yet clearly the doors are marred; this is desecration and violence against the integrity of the palace walls.”

  “If someone standing on the portico committed so outrageous and uncouth an act, clearly the civic authorities of the Landing City of Torment have cause to apprehend him and demand recompense. However, that crime, if it were a crime, ceased to be of concern once I stepped across the threshold, for I have passed from the jurisdiction of the local planetary law and into the laws of the universe.”

  The seneschal made a long face, stroking his chin. “The door is property of the Order and is wounded.”

  Vigil said, “Admittedly the inside panels of the door are within the palace, and hence are part of interstellar law, under control of the Order. But the force was applied to the outside panels of the door, and if this was a crime, you must apply to the Sergeants of the Mayor of Landing City: to do otherwise affronts on his authority.”

  “Pettifoggery!” cried the doorkeep. “Equivocation! The portico is manned by Officers of the Order. By courtesy of the law, any acts committed before the threshold impinge on our jurisdiction!”

  Vigil said, “While the point is a significant one, its resolution must await until after I have presented myself. Which is higher in priority, Seneschal, according to standing command and protocols: to officiate a jurisdictional dispute, or to prevent all hindrance to a Lord of the Order when the summons looms? The resolution one way or the other of a criminal charge of lock-breaking cannot have a cliometric influence beyond a life span or two; whereas the Table of Stability determines the fate of millennia.”

  The seneschal nodded warily, his unhappiness clearly visible on his face. “I do not have the competence to make a rash decision. The matter has various aspects.”

  “Master Seneschal, do not be swayed!” cried out the doorkeep in frustrated rage. “You cannot admit this trespasser!”

  Vigil said, “How can I be a trespasser when I am commanded by summons to appear? It cannot be unlawful for me to be here when it is unlawful for me to fail to come.”

  The seneschal said, “There is an antechamber where ambiguous cases can be confined, until I can consult with my superiors—”

  “Superiors seated even now at the Table of Stability, where you must seat me? Your plan is to delay until after the vote to discover whether I may be present to vote? What criminal nonsense is this?” Vigil roared.

  He had powerful lungs. The seneschal flinched and stepped back, his absurdly tall shoes clattering.

  Vigil stepped forward and lowered his voice, speaking in a tone that was soft but could be clearly heard. “Were you also ordered to obstruct my path like those bravos I slew outside your doors? I will work a vengeance on you, and on him in whose name you act, if I find…”

  The reaction was astonishing. The seneschal backed away and fell to the ground, crouching like an improperly elevated dog Moreau on hands and knees, and banging his head to the ground. His tall, conical hat, taken by surprise, rolled a foot away from this head across the floor, before it recovered its wits, righted itself, and scurried back to replace itself fastidiously on the man’s balding crown.

  The sight of the man kneeling so surprised him that Vigil was without speech. Vigil raised his hands, tempted to perform that august and sometimes dangerous mudra called vajramudra, the Fist of Knowledge, which compelled any nearby systems to render up their information and which cleared the mind of delusion and narcotic. H
e fought back the temptation with an internal creature, telling himself he was awake and in his right wits. But what did it mean?

  Another internal reminded him of what the Third Human had said—But I, like you, have a retaliation to fulfill. Why had he spoken of fulfilling a retaliation? Surely it was more natural to speak of committing retaliation, or exacting, or executing. The word fulfillment was usually used for ritual obligations, or primal appetites, or dooms long predicted.

  And the Thirdling had chided Vigil for not attending to the nuances of words. It was commonly known that posthumans spoke in riddles because to speak literally and clearly occupied too many seconds of their high-speed minds. But what was the meaning of this clue?

  Without turning his head, Vigil had his internals pull in images from camera spots in the corridors and walls, so he could see the door sentries behind him. They also had reacted with exaggerated gesture at the mention of retaliation. Each one had sunk to one knee and hidden his face behind hand or elbow, as if in grief or awe. What the gesture implied Vigil did not know. But the gesture of kneeling was not a spaceman’s gesture. Kneeling was not something done in zero gee. The Pilgrims did not evolve it aboard the Pilgrimage.

  Pilgrims had formalities from a tradition different from the Strangers, dating back to the Loricate race of the Feast of Stephen of the star Vindemiatrix. This kindly planet ironically had been colonized from the cruel merchant-czars of the ice planet Yule in the Tau Ceti system. The Cetians were a peculiar people, who always terraformed their worlds to keep a median temperature below freezing, in order, so tradition ran, to keep bugs and nanomachines in torpor on the surface of any world. The Yule predominantly were Firstlings called Hibernals, who came from Mars, a planet so old that there was no thought-records of a time before it was terraformed. Many scholars held it to be the original home of man, not Eden, as tradition claimed. Hence Pilgrim gestures tended to be rigid, stiff, formulaic.