“I believe in democracy. I have just now set the channel to broadcast the offer to Cahetel if the majority of you so indicate. I have locked the channel, so that I can neither interfere nor stop you, no matter which way you decide.

“It is your future, your vote, your verdict, your fate. You are the masters of your world, now. You are the judges of this present age.”

The screen immediately showed a unanimous decision. The serpentine hummed as the “plea” was offered to Cahetel.

The entity said no word of agreement, but at that same moment, the broadcast towers and horns controlled by the black substance oozing from the giant corpse began sending signals to the fifty worldlets of the Black Fleet, and a powerful beam was directed toward the main mass of Cahetel itself, still half a lightyear away. Instrument readings showed the pulses carried the fluctuations consonant with notation for the cliometric code Montrose had written. The emissary was given the offer to the Cahetel cloud.

But it would not wait for a reply. As best Montrose could guess, the whole Collaboration from Cahetel to M3 and beyond operated on what might be called speed-of-light federalism. Decisions had to be made locally, and whoever was around decades or centuries later, got the rewards or punishments for that decision. So the major decision structures were reduced, as far as possible, to algorithms propagated to each servant race and servant, telling it how to weigh and make decisions.

Nor did Cahetel make any announcement of agreement. From its inhuman point of view, apparently it was more efficient merely to start carrying out its side of the bargain without bothering to confirm the covenant by any further formality. Presumably, if mankind did not live up to mankind’s side of the bargain, some terrible vengeance would fall upon some remote generation in the far future, just as the cliometric equations shared between them specified.

But human psychology required ceremony.

Montrose drew a deep breath, and sent the words ranging over the loudspeaker, “Know ye all men by these presences that by their solemn oath and sacred honor, the Potentate emissary for the Virtue Cahetel, sent from the Domination of Hyades, the Dominion of Praesepe, and the Authority at M3 in Canes Venatici, and the officers and crew of the memory chain called Dissent, an emanation from the most noble and ancient Ximen del Azarchel, of the Third Humanity called Myrmidons, on behalf of all the peoples, races, nations, tongues, and machines of the Solar System, and also of Epsilon Eridani and Delta Pavonis, collectively called The Empyrean Polity of Man, have this eighth day of August, the feast day of holy Saint Dominic Guzman, Year of Our Lord Twenty-four Thousand One Hundred One, entered into a solemn and indestructible covenant to their mutual benefit, pleasure, and advantage, the terms whereof are binding on them and their generations forever. Witnessed this day by Menelaus Illation Montrose, vagabond. Nolite Vexare Texam!”

Montrose heard cheering issuing from many voices, many klaxons, echoing in the distance. He even heard the voices of the Firstlings and other non-Myrmidons mingling with the general outcry.

It was the voice of free men.

PART SEVEN

The Long Golden Afternoon of Man

1

The Starfaring Guild

1. A Fine Shot

A.D. 51554

The rumor that a Vindictive sharpshooter had established himself in stable orbit among the rubble of the broken flotillas of hulks and habitats still called the Asteroid Belt, and had a commanding vantage of Earth, Venus, and Mars, was not denied by the Archangels, but anyone who read this news from a public data fountain had his name and biometric response noted.

First Humans were immune from Archangels because of covenants with the Sacerdotal Order whom, it was rumored, even the higher Powers feared; but this ancient immunity did not prevent the posthumans from reporting the capillary responses and pupil dilations, as well as changes in neural flows in the cortex, of various True Human readers to other Humans, including Humans Not So True. The Great Swan of Malta was known to have left his mountain peak in midst of the seas of Libya, traveling by night on wide and silent wings over the Mediterranean across the island chain that once was Italy toward Egypt, where the Hidden Queen of the Fox Maidens was said to be sojourning in disguise, perhaps to bedevil the archeologists and theonecromancers meddling with the corpse of a fallen orbital Archangel found there. It was no good news for the True Humans when a hermit of the Second Humanity roused himself from his endless cybernetic dreamstates, and sought to consult the sovereign of the Fourth Humanity. The Foxes were closer to humans in their emotional matrix, more prone to meddle in human life, and correspondingly more dangerous than reticent Swans or dispassionate Megalodons.

Perhaps the two consulted over the human interest in the Vindicator, or perhaps the two conspired with the Judge of Ages, who was rumored to have his throne buried under the pyramids, as well as slumbering armies and sleeping treasure cities.

In any case, cavaliers and ladies among the True Humans avoided showing interest in the topic of the sharpshooter. Among the lower orders, the discreet silence was not so strict. One wag walking the frozen canals of New Ximenopolis carried an umbrella bearing the slogan in bright red ideoglyphs for the benefit of eyes above the atmosphere: FRIENDLY! NO TARGET!

This was the year Minus 444 by the shortcount calendar, reckoning the time until the next Sweep by Hyades; it was Minus 17444 by the Unrevised Vindication Calendar; and it was Minus 18944 by the Anomaly Calendar; and the Sacerdotes called it Year of the Lord Plus 51554, even thought it was unchancy for them to say who or what was their lord, or say why this calendar, of all the calendars, counted up rather than counted down.

By the reckoning of the Unrevised Calendar, the Feast of the Fourth Ignition stood at Plus 154, and yet no cessation of the Years of Fasting which led up to the Feast Years had been announced. Even Academics living the shadow of the mile-high dome over the mountains of the Madagascar peninsula, prone to skepticism about the claims of the Sacerdotes, marked the tally off the calendar with thinly disguised hope, waiting for the long-delayed Energy Feast, when men could turn on lights and power again.

In mid-September of Minus 444, after the Paleo-Myrmidon City Complex east of Jerusalem was reduced to rubble and sucked into its own crater by a NAFAL singularity-event bullet, the radio messages from the Chimera of Mars said nothing other than that the situation was being investigated.

The bullet accelerated only at impact. It maintained its existence in normal spacetime for one-half a nanosecond, and massed (relative to the target) an estimated 30,000,000,000 pounds. This was long enough to pull the central mass of the city into a pinpoint and deposit it twenty miles below the bedrock, drawing a large part of the suburban infrastructure, cables and power stations, switching nodes and magnetic rail lines, behind it into the crater. The tangled mass of iron and carbon was superheated and compressed into a half-square-mile volume shaped like a very narrow cone.

But the nature of not-as-fast-as-light acceleration is that the mass increases only in the direction of motion. Objects even slightly away from the straight line suffer less relativistic distortion. Mass meters in Jerusalem itself barely registered the tidal effect.