Martinez wanted to take a step back to evade the scorching fire in the Fleet Commander’s eyes. With an effort of pure will, he kept his shoes planted on the office carpet, and tipped up his chin, exposing his throat.

He felt the commander’s spittle on his neck as Enderby raged on. “We must all die!” he said. “But the only death that gives meaning is one in service to the Praxis. Because I am who I am,at this perfect moment in time, I am privileged to havean honorable death, one that gives both myself and the Praxis meaning. Do you know how rare that is?” He gestured again out the window, at the invisible millions below. “How many ofthose will die in a meaningful way, do you suppose? Practically none!”

Fleet Commander Enderby stepped close to Martinez. “And you wish to deprive me of a meaningful death? The death proper to a Peer? Who are you to do that, Lieutenant Martinez?”

Instinct managed to find words amid the clouds of fear that shadowed Martinez’s mind. He had learned early that when he was caught out, he should always admit it and then beg forgiveness in as endearing a manner as possible. Honesty, he’d found, had its own brand of charm.

“I regret the suggestion extremely, Lord Commander,” he said. “I was thinking only of my own selfish desires.”

Enderby glared at Martinez for a few long moments, then took a step back. “Over the next few hours I shall do my best to forget your very existence, Lieutenant,” he said. “See that those letters are delivered.”

“Yes, Lord Commander.”

Martinez turned and marched for the door, ignoring the strong impulse to run.See if I ever try to save your miserable life again, he thought.

And, damn the Praxis anyway.

It was the alien Shaa, the Great Masters, who had imposed their absolutist ethic, the Praxis, on humanity after the surrender of Earth following the destruction of Delhi, Los Angeles, Buenos Aires, and a dozen other cities by antimatter bombs. Humanity was the second intelligent species to feel the lash of the Shaa. The first being the black-scaled, centauroid Naxids, who by the time of Earth’s surrender were sufficiently tamed to have crewed most of the Shaa ships.

No one knew where the Shaa originated, and the Shaa were not forthcoming on this or any other aspect of their history. Their capital, the city of Zanshaa on the planet of Zanshaa, was clearly not their planet of origin, and had been chosen in historical times for its convenient location amid eight wormhole gates through which the Shaa could access their dominion. The Shaa “year,”.84 Earth years, had no reference to the period of Zanshaa’s orbit about its primary, or indeed to the orbit of any other planet in their empire. Any reference to their origins had been erased from the records by the time their subject species were given access to them.

Another curiosity was the Shaa dating system, which began in the “Peace of the Praxis One,” some 437 years before their appearance in the skies above the Naxids’ home world. This suggested a time before the Praxis claimed the Shaas’ devotion, but no Shaa could be persuaded to confirm this surmise. Nor did the Shaa revere whatever Shaa—if itwas a Shaa—who first formulated the Praxis, or remember its name.

For the Shaa were adamant that every species—that thephysical universe itself — should submit to terms dictated by the Praxis. Whole categories of technology were absolutely forbidden—machine intelligence and autonomy, the translation of organic intelligence into machine or electromagnetic form, and machines constructed to manipulate matter at the molecular or atomic level. Genetic manipulation was also forbidden—the Shaa preferred the slower process of natural selection, the more unsentimental, the better.

The iron will behind these prohibitions was demonstrated again and again. Those who offended against the Praxis were punished by death, often horribly and publicly, for the Praxis itself commanded that “those who offend against the fundamental law shall receive punishment in greater proportion than their crime, so that public virtue may be maintained by this example.” Nor were the Shaa or their followers shy about using the most poisonous and destructive weapons to support their ethic. Antimatter bombs sometimes destroyed whole cities for the crimes of a few citizens, and on one occasion, when a small group of Terrans was discovered using genetic technology in hopes of breeding a plague that would kill off the Shaa, their entire planet was bombed to death, the great explosions raising vast clouds of smoke and dust that drew a curtain across the sun, condemning the survivors to lingering, freezing death in a frigid atmosphere poisoned by radiation.

Surviving Terrans, awed by the comprehensive way in which the Shaa destroyed their own subjects, felt supremely lucky that the planet involved was not Earth.

Such examples had their effect. After the lingering death of the planet Dandaphis, the prohibitions against technology embodied within the Praxis were never again subjected to such a radical challenge.

Other elements of the Praxis were devoted to social organization, with every sentient being in the empire given a place in a well-defined hierarchy, one clan ranked below the next, with the Peers over all. Those at the top were given responsibility for the well-being of those at the bottom, while the lower orders were expected to honor the Peers and the Shaa with their meek obedience.

Another clause of the Praxis forbade sentients to “curse themselves with immortality”—a curious prohibition, because the Shaa themselves were immortal. But those among the Shaa, in a rare display of the reasoning behind one of their prohibitions, freely admitted that their immortality had been a mistake, an error sufficient to drive them to eradicate by gun, flaying knife, or antimatter bomb any others who dared to seek physical immortality for themselves.

Of the Shaa themselves, the Shaa said nothing. Why these immortal beings, blessed with absolute power, began one by one to kill themselves remained a riddle. The Shaa refused to consider their own deaths a tragedy. “No being should be immortal,” was their uniform response to any questions.

Whatever the cause, the Great Masters chose to die one by one, each followed in death by dozens of loyal subordinates. And now, in the Year 12,481 of the Peace of the Praxis, only one remained.

And this last was not expected to live long.

Across the foyer of the Commandery, a map of the empire displayed the wormhole routes connecting Zanshaa to its dominions. The map bore no resemblance to the actual star systems that surrounded Zanshaa: the wormholes overleaped all nearby stars, and could in fact connect any two points in the universe. Many of the star-systems shown on the map were so remote from Zanshaa that it was not known where they stood in relation to any other part of the empire. And the wormholes spanned time as well as distance—a wormhole that leaped eight hundred light-years could also leap up to eight hundred years into the past, or alternatively into the future, or any length of time in between.

But there was no paradox when it did so. Because of the limitations imposed by the speed of light, it was impossible to get to another star quickly enough to alter its history—except by using the wormhole, in which case you found that the Shaa had been there before you.

The overwhelming fact of history was that there was no escaping the Shaa. There was no escaping the history that made Gareth Martinez a provincial lord, an object of condescension to his betters. There was no going back in time to rectify the error that had caused Fleet Commander Enderby to savage him.

There was no saving him from his mistakes, or the mistakes of civilization, or of history itself. He had to live with them all.