The squire made an elegant half bow, and waved his hand with a flip of his wrist toward the distant steeple. “Lead on. The grave awaits. Perhaps we will find the mountebank there, or old friends and lovers. I will tell my history as we go, and all will be made clear.”
2
The Antepenultimate White Ship
1. An Empyrean in Sagittarius
“I am from the earliest strata of starfaring tradition, from before when the Guild was properly a guild. I was a crewman aboard the Sagittarius Arm Expedition, when the Master of All Worlds sent the Antepenultimate White Ship to the Omega Nebula.
“The White Ship was a half mile from bow to stern, massed one million tons displacement, and had a sail diameter of five thousand miles. Every inch was made of the artificial element alchemists call argent, which is brighter than diamond and harder than steel, armor to withstand the deadliest high-frequency energy or ultra-massive particle into which near-lightspeed flight transforms harmless light and dust.
“We launched in a.d. 15177 as the Sacerdotes reckon years, back when the Myrmidons were newborn, zealous and unafflicted with their deathlust; back when the Earth had lost her magnetosphere, and the sun was poisonous, so Man and Swan alike dared not emerge save in the dark hours of the Benighted Earth.
“We had resolved, as befits the ambition of starfarers, not to allow entropy, history, nor oblivion overtake us, but to prove our high purpose could oppose and overcome that grim assassin, Father Time.
“In a.d. 29024, after the Myrmidons fled to Cyan from the Ghost-haunted Hierophants, and the Graciousness ruled Earth in soft embrace, we were remembered of great Jupiter, and the Penultimate White Ship was launched toward us, across the gulf of starlessness severing the Orion Arm from the Sagittarius Arm.
“The miracle happened again, for although our descendants forsook us, Peacock the Power of Delta Pavonis recalled, and the Splendid Lords mortgaged their world to fund the launch of a.d. 40522. The newborn Fox Maidens were gnawing at the hawsers of civilization then, and at this time Tellus went mad. All his seas were filled with ink of alcahest, the sludge of sociopathic nanite swarms, and any ship or swimming man who ventured there was warped and made strange, and all the fish were nightmares.
“That ship was the Ultimate and Last. Broken and exiled, we returned in a.d. 50822, in time to precipitate the Snow Wars, and equip the Armigers and Ecologists to overthrow the haunted palaces beneath the sea.
“Therefore three tours I served, crossing five thousand years in a year. The steepest time-slips of the oldest hand on the swiftest ship here in the First Empyrean are as nothing to me.
“The Sagittarius Arm is a golden realm, richer in every way than this Orion Arm we occupy. That Arm is thick with giant molecular clouds and H II regions of partially ionized gas, useful for ramscoop flight. The short-lived blue stars born in these regional clouds shed copious ultraviolet light into the surrounding medium, which helps both planetary accretion and aids the condensation of interstellar amino acid precursor molecules. But the richest jewel in the Sagittarius Arm is the Omega Nebula, for it is the most massive star-forming region in the Milky Way. And where the stars are made in great numbers, so too are worlds.
“In the center of the nebula, orbiting the binary named Kleinmann’s Anonymous Star, was a living Monument. One star of the binary pair was made of terrene matter, the other of contraterrene: magnetically channeled shocks of solar wind produce a region of hard X-rays between them. Neither man nor machine could survive there: we removed the Second Monument to a gentler region.
“But the Anonymous Star was not abandoned! We craved the contraterrene fuel source. There I saw a world colder than Pluto and larger than Jupiter conquered, and that Gas Giant’s core was burrowed through with nanomachine and picomachines and made to come awake. We called him Villaamil. He was our god, and the first of our pantheon.
“Next came we to where, long ago cast out from the epicenter of the Omega Nebula by the violence of its own explosion, the blue hypergiant V4030 Sagittarius soared roaring through space, two hundred twenty thousand times brighter than the sun. Here we made our throne world, and called it Tintagel, towing the Second Monument to become its moon, so that all our scholars need but look up after sunset to see its hieroglyphs.
“And when the stellar eruptions of V4030 Sagittarius periodically grew too violent, we would retreat for a time to its twin sister star, the hypergiant V4029. There we colonized bright worlds and dark, and dubbed them Avalon and Aachen, Trethevy and Trevena, and redesigned our bodies to accommodate the sixty-four-day flare cycle. But brightest of all was Golden Tintagel, Tintagel the Beautiful.
“Between those two powerful stars, like migratory birds, we would sail our worlds and worldlets as living ships, bright as pearls on a chain of office, letting the atmospheres turn to ice during transit, and seas turn solid. Both these hypergiant stars had hundreds of failed stars of ordinary size and superjovians in their planetary clouds, material enough to make ourselves Gas Giant Brains to read the Second Monument, and penetrate the secrets of its eleven-dimensional interior volume.
“For pantheons we made. Merlin and Malagige we christened them our deities, Archimago and Atalanta, Lorelei and Logistilla, Vivian and Virgil. These were sages larger than worlds, comprising a volume greater than a million Earths.
“Sol was forgotten: our ambition was to create a new human history, established on wiser cliometric foundations than Earthly history could produce, and spread rapidly from world to world in the Sagittarian Arm, leaving the indentured Earth and her woes to oblivion. We had infinite wealth from a star made of antimatter, and the secrets of a Second Monument for our gods to read and contemplate—what could we not accomplish?
“Many ventures were made, and in the Omega Nebula we found worlds remarkably Earth-like, suited for Swans and Men, with blue skies and bluer seas, and finding asteroid belts absurdly rich with minerals, apposite for Myrmidons. It was almost as if a race of unseen fairies had stocked the larder of the universe with good things for our consumption, arranging a stellar nursery where Earth-like worlds could not help but be formed. Ninety new earths for man we formed or found.
“How brightly flamed the midnights on any one of them, those emerald-bright earths! As the gigantic and multicolored suns set across the towering landing craft or space elevators and cast purple twilight across the self-aware gardens with fall of night would rise, adorned with stars like the uplifted limbs of an odalisque with gems, the auroras and auras of the nebula as arms of fire more splendid than a peacock’s tail! How poor and blank is Earth’s dull sky to eyes that drank such wonders!
“But in a single day of wrath, those colonies died, every one, to the last child, the last bloodcell. As we sailed back from Presterion, the most distant of the ninety worlds, to our golden home in Tintagel, forty years in a single night, I heard the colonies perish, for our vessel passed through the expanding shock waves of the radio messages calling in vain, years of pain overheard in half a dozen sleepless watches.
“It was a strange beam that caught and decelerated us. I saw the smoldering hemispheres of our gods, the dust cloud blackening fair Tintagel, and everything destroyed by the Furies of the Sagittarian Arm. Theirs was a vessel that seemed like a wheel of fire half a solar system in diameter, and wheels within wheels, and eyes along each rim and at each hub.
“The vessel was too bright on any wavelength for any of our instruments to behold, and all our lenses cracked and recording chips burned. The wheel of eyes created sunspots and dark trails in the surface of the sun and wrote in the signs and sine waves of the Monument notation, and they commanded us, in the name of the Archon called Circumincession, who was the living mind housed throughout the stars and empires of the Sagittarius Arm, to cleanse our ruins again with all our hands, to leave behind no trace of our false polity save those too fine for the patientest archeologist to find: gather up our remnants and our dead, and be returned to the jurisdiction of M3 in the Orion Arm.
“Why so swift? So terrible? We learned that the Orion Arm is a region which Sagittarius regards with distaste, for we are tainted by some ancient crime committed by the Dominions here before the dinosaurs walked the Earth.
“The Ultimate White Ship was flung back to Sol on a beam of contempt, as a message for Orion not to interfere with the terrain claimed by the more civilized arms of the Milky Way.
“The caravan of lesser ships and worldlets we were allowed to keep perished in the journey, or fell behind, or starved just beyond our reach, or to this hour wander somewhere, populations frozen in eternal slumber, in the wide and starless interrupt separating that arm of the galaxy from this.
“Sagittarius did not even realize, or did not care, that we acted independently of Hyades. The Hyades is held responsible for the interstellar history issuing from the Local Interstellar Cloud and the surrounding volume of space. If events occur which Hyades did not anticipate, Hyades must amend. If tiny seeds from tiny worlds escape from the wild, weed-choked and untended garden of Orion Arm into the neat and well-tended fields of our neighbors, the farmer, not the mustard seed, is blamed.”
The squire raised his eyes to the dark heavens, the blue-green moon, the cold scattering of stars, and cried out in mourning.
“Alas for Tintagel! How I remember her! Tintagel the Golden-Bright; Tintagel the Fair! We called her Chrysolucent and Mater Mundi and a hundred other names. The entire world from pole to pole was a fortress, every fulvous tree held a siege-gun, all yellow blooms antennae, tawny grass ranging gear, and the statues of heroes were heroes indeed, white with slumber and awaiting a day of war. Never before had so much of the military arts been lavished on one small globe, nor has any palace of a warrior king ever been so fair.
“She was snuffed like a spark between finger and thumb. The giant planet Villaamil was shattered into asteroids, and the debris fell into the variable star, provoking outrageous solar flares like rivers of fire across the inner system. I do not think the Furies even saw the tiny world of Tintagel as she was destroyed.”
Beneath his mask, Norbert turned pale. “Mankind is a small matter indeed.”
“We will not always be so. Better to burn the galaxy than to allow it to dismiss us.”
2. Conquering Constellations
The two men began to climb the oddly shelf-like rises of ground leading upward to the tableland on which the cathedral lay. In the distance to one side, like a black ribbon against the golden moon, could be seen the bridge connecting the tableland to the wheel-road leading from the Forever Village. There were no lights above the bridge at the moment, for it was empty of traffic.
The squire spoke, “Sir, do you still wonder why I am with you? I can be trusted because whatever you decide, I will support. None of the events of the First Empyrean Polity of Man, as you call your pathetic puddle of sixty-eight worlds of sixty-two stars, mean anything to me. I am perhaps the only man in all the Guild who cares nothing about the calendar reform, or about snipers lurking in the abandoned mansions of the asteroid belt.”
“So,” said Norbert finally. “You can be trusted because everything you love is dead?”
“Because everything I love is not yet born.”
“Meaning?”
“You told your dream, sir. It is only fitting I tell mine. The component races who form the architects and constituents of the intricate rivers and oceans of self-aware information flowing from star to star of Sagittarius were once, in times long past, biological creatures just as we are now. The Circumincession of Sagittarius has stood with my neck beneath its bootheel. In times to come, the proportion must be reversed, be that time soever long as it must be. That day is far, but it must come.”
“Revenge against minds that dwarf the constellations? You are mad.”
“All who love are mad, are they not?” said the squire with his most charming and disarming smile.
3. Calendar Revision
The two climbed a steep and barren slope to an oddly regular acreage of grasses and groves that stood up from the broken land around it like a table of greenery.
The final slope was so steep it was practically a cliff, and covered with loose pebbles and rotten rock, impossible to climb. The squire tapped the cliff and shouted out a command or two, and there was no response. The rock remained obdurate.
Norbert drew his glassy knife and made a shallow cut in the surface. There was no visible change, but a slight, small scent of ozone hung in the air, and the radioactivity detectors that were part of every spaceman’s uniform clicked a warning. Norbert said, “I have imposed a mandala of deception on the soil, and it thinks we are lawful. It will bear us.”
The squire looked honestly astonished. “Sir, I must ask, by what authority do you accomplish this? Where did you get that knife?”
Norbert said, “It is an ancestral blade.”
The squire again put his hand on the cliff face, and, with a grating whisper of noise, a series of knobs and handholds and well-spaced footholds appeared in the rock, as small segments rose or sank. This line of footholds upward blended in nicely with the surrounding landscape, no doubt obeying whatever regulations, left over from centuries or millennia past, which might be controlling the appearance and protecting the copyright of the original landscape.
During such a climb, dawn-age men would have been out of breath and unable to speak. Guild sailors were not so limited: both men increased the oxygen gain to their bloodstream from implanted capsules, and switched to silent nerve-radio signals.
“This channel is shielded and encrypted,” sent Norbert, “so that half of my own brain cannot tap the communication. We have tricks on Rosycross that mad Tellus has not dreamed.”
“Sir, with respect, it is not enough to fool Jupiter. The oaks are more sensitive to energy signals than to speech.”
“What do these human doings mean to him? Here is privacy enough for our business.”
“As you say. I am comfortable with your decision, sir,” sent the squire in a most uncomfortable voice.
“You say you have no concern for Earthly things. What do you know of the real roots of the Calendar Revision?”
“Those roots are very old indeed. The Heresiarch Lemur in the Forty-seventh Millennium, when the Shapetakers ruled the Earth, he did not begin the controversy; nor did the Prophetess Lares in the Thirty-eighth, who claimed to be in mental-energy contact with a self-awareness from beyond the rim of the galaxy.
“The trouble began earlier, before the Third Sweep,” the squire continued. “It was the Swan-Man halfbreed Photinus in the Thirty-sixth Millennium who is to blame, for it is he who first raised the possibility that Shcachlil the Salamander by interfering with the orbits of inner worlds, had thrown off the count of years since Rania’s departure, and he who first pointed out the inadequacy of records about her departure.
“Revisionism was put down bloodily, and then, as heresies do, mutated to preserve itself, divaricated, slept, sent out spores, and bloomed again. By the time of Lemur, it was not just calendar reform the Revisionists wanted, but the entire cliometric scheme of history rewritten from now until the Eschaton. They demanded the psychology of human and posthuman be standardized and simplified for ease of prediction and administration. For this reason the Eidolons were made, a failed attempt at creating a Fourth Humanity.”
Norbert said, “The Lemurians justified this crime by saying human history was too volatile. Thank goodness the Fox Maidens became the Fourth Men instead.”
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The squire said, “Crime? I see you do not care for Eidolons.”
“They were not unknown on Rosycross. All their gestures the same, all their opinions the same, and their eyes are blank as corpses when they smile. They are born as brother-sister twins, each chemically programmed to mate with the other, and produce no more than two children. A more contumacious affront to the marriage laws of Rosycross cannot be imagined! I consider them less than beasts. What else do you know of Revisionism?”
“I know it is a disease that afflicts the great as well as the meek. I know the Lords of the Golden Afternoon themselves once fought duels over the calendar, using time as their weapon. I know Tellus and Jupiter and outer Potentates have allowed limited forms of warfare, fought with archaic weapons, and forced all sides to abide by agreed rendezvous of battle and armistice, both on Earth and interplanetary space. I know Odette and Odile of the double star 61 Cygni became involved in interplanetary battle, and after Splendor of Delta Pavonis and Nocturne of Epsilon Eridani sent crusaders Earthward when the Foxes called. I know mankind’s first and only interstellar war was fought with the punctilious chivalry one might expect, when the assaulted world has to be polite enough to ignite a deceleration laser and slow the vessels carrying enemy paladins and cataphracts destined for the field of honor.”
Norbert was surprised. “But how else could wars be fought? The besieged must spend the energy cost to welcome the attackers, or else they could not expect their counterattack to be decelerated and welcomed in return. Cliometry would punish whoever broke the chivalric code.”
“Perfect Starfaring logic, my dear sir! I am glad I have lived to see an era when men can no longer imagine any other way of conducting their business.”
Norbert said nothing, but wondered what kind of barbaric age this man came from.
The Architect of Aeons Page 37