“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.”

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 squire sent, “I happen to know Earth was driven insane because he sided with the Revisionists. The Foxes took him.”

Norbert said, “I was taught the Fourth Man theo-neurologists meant to expand the capacity of Tellus?”

“If so, they expanded Tellus beyond the bounds of sanity into weird new realms.”

“Tellus asked it of them! Begged, if my loremaster’s lash back home is to be believed.”