But interference with the Lords of Stability was not allowed, nor was harassment of their servants. Vigil felt then the temptation that must have tortured his father every day of his life. He need only open a channel on the Patrician frequency and call for help, and those august and pitiless posthumans would take control of the local minds, human and machine, correct the deviations, punish the guilty with astonishing punishments, and protect the weak.

And, having proven himself weak in the eyes of his followers, his family, and the Firstlings, resisting temptation would be harder yet the next time it arose, both for himself or his posterity. Purchasing thought privacy from Patrician peacekeepers would likewise be more expensive as insurance rates reflected the newer and weaker stance of his character traits. The precedent would make it easier for his sons and grandsons to turn to the Patricians for help, and in less than two hundred years, if the cliometric calculus did not lie, the Strangers would dwindle to utter dependence, utter irrelevance.

It would only take a moment to call for help and be safe. The Patricians would see the opportunity for bringing yet one more lesser race beneath their benevolent wing. But those factions and races, clans and nations, and iterations that selected the path of ever-greater safety had been interbred with Patricians, and sired Patricians. All the separate bloodlines of man were nothing more than canals and rivers whose waters would be mingled and lost in an all-consuming and homogenous lake. They had no ranks nor classes in their society, yet somehow they all were kings.

The First Races of Man, from Sylph to Melusine, and the surviving Aftercomer races, Hibernals who were immune to cold, Nyctalops with their catlike eyes, and Overlords who laughed disease and ailment all to scorn, on all the First to Third Sweep Worlds had been absorbed one by one into the Patrician bloodlines. Some still lingered on the Fourth Sweep and Petty Sweep Worlds, but the schedule of cliometry did not predict their continuation beyond three millennia henceforth. Nor Firstling nor Aftercomer could long maintain their own independent cultures, language, neurological formats, sumptuary biotechnology or ways of life. On all other worlds but this, the Fox Maidens were gone. On all worlds including this, the Myrmidons were gone, leaving only their ghosts and serviles behind, Myrmidons, Helots, Neodamodes and Perioeci and Sciritae, inhabiting worlds in Eridanus, Cancer, or Pisces.

The song of the arrogant Patricians thundered in his ears. He would never call out to them. He would live and die on his own terms, and have human children, and maintain the honor of the Strangers across the abyss of time. Iota Draconis was different. Had it not been blessed by the Judge of Ages? Insane or not, was it not his prerogative alone to preserve past ages into the endless void of the future?

Vigil would rather die than flee to the Patricians for protection.

Let the assassins come!

3. The Migrations of Eldsich

Even nude and unarmed, Vigil feared no blade of any man of the first three human races, or any weapon lacking chemical, electrical, or denser form of energy. Vigil’s strength had been set to the maximum physicians would allow, and perhaps a drachm beyond, and he had survived the strictest training in agon and pancration, and some of his combat internals were things of nightmare from the worlds of Porphyry and Nocturne.

Men coming to kill him, this he understood, it was as much a part of his life as death by disease or starvation had been to men of Eden. But a woman walking out of cloister? This was an enigma. She was not descended from the Pilgrimage. No woman of Landing City would violate propriety in such a way.

If not a Pilgrim, then who?

Vigil sent a memory creature rapidly through the strata of migrations, five millennia of time, since Iota Draconis had been colonized.

The Pilgrims currently ruled this world, having displaced the Strangers during the years when the wealth and power of the Pilgrimage, a second moon, controlled the skies. The Strangers now served as freeholders and mercenaries, a military gentry who no longer owned the lands their own serfs worked.

Meanderers were those serfs, toiling in the shadows of the granoliths and pyramids their ancestors from the Meander long ago so proudly reared.

Not every Great Ship overwhelmed the previous wave of immigrants. Some generations, the pattern reversed. The Ostracism arrived either with numbers too few or fighting spirit too peaceful to resist the hidden sinkholes and sandstorms of the local history: these benevolent giants were decimated in their numbers by biased eco-population restrictions, prevented by biased laws from owning land or livestock. To this day, the land-dwelling Ostracized lived by trade or profession, as quartermasters or counselors, peddlers or tinkers, in quarantined ecologies or ghettos of walled towns.

Every now and again, a giant would wade into the lake waters, cast aside his growth restrictions, becoming ever larger and sinking ever farther from the sunlight, joining his deep cousins, the Nicors.

In A.D. 70600, the Great Ship Meander, by cunning instruments unknown to the outer worlds, while yet lightyears far off, had heard the cry of the suffering that the Chronometricians and Hormagaunts descended from the Nomad had imposed on immigrants from Ostracism. In retaliation or perhaps in mere prudence, she bombarded the treasure domes of the Sons of Nomad. These armored, heated, and sand-proof arcologies of vast diameter were now ruins visible on far horizons, like so many cracked and speckled eggs of giant birds.

Their name was no longer an irony, for the Nomads now were scattered in the dryland plains. Their artiodactyl herds coated endless prairies, whose herdsmen endlessly preyed on each other’s cattle and wives, poisoning wells and committing murders the world did not see fit to stop.

Esne was the general name for earlier folk of earlier ships, Wander and Wayfare, Errantry and Itinerancy, and the accursed Argosy. In the early centuries of the Seventy-First Millennia, the Esne had weakened each other in a series of cliometric conflicts and battles fought both in law courts and in dueling arenas so that none could oppose the highly organized and ruthless Nomads when they fell from the sky. Esne had been here so many generations, their circadian rhythms retained no recollection of Eden. They woke and slept according to the clocks of Torment, and ignored the twenty-four-hour watch cycle so fondly remembered by ships and Sacerdotes.

Layer after layer had coated the world. Gathered on Torment were migrations of Loricates from Vindemiatrix and Aestevals from Arcturus; Swan-Fox hybrids from the star mortal men called Beta Canum Venaticorum but Swans called Chara; Giants and Nicors from Gliese 570 in Libra; proud Iatrocrats from Xi Boötis, who never ceased from uncouth experiments on their own flesh and blood; Swans from 12 Ophiuchi; Variants called Optimates, avowed foes of the Patrician race, hailing from Rasalhague; thin, eerie, and pale Sworn Ones from Kappa Coronae Borealis; dark, cold Hierophants and Black Swans from the dark, cold twin planets circling 44 Boötis; Anthropovores of monstrous form from Regulus, whose humanity even Foxes could not restore.

Their worlds were names from song and legend, bitter with nostalgia, and thoughts of homes forever lost: small and frozen Feast of Stephen, happiest of worlds, with its strange twin moons; sweltering, huge Nightspore, whose winds and weathers, temblors and tidal waves even Summer Kings could never tame; Joyous, whose masked and silent peoples spoke no names, carried no weapons, and kept no records; Euphrasy, the only world ever to repel the Myrmidons; slowly turning Aesculapius, a world of gardensmiths and tree sculptors, whose peoples during the flare times of their unstable star went mad and enacted strange crimes; and Aerecura, where the corpse of a god, dead in orbit, still moaned and murmured and disturbed the dreams of the unshielded; piteous and envied Penance, whose peoples walked in hair shirts through valleys clogged with diamond, opal, jacinth, emerald, weeping over their wealth and half-blinded by the ground glare; Dust, whose continents were smothered in a featureless dun powder from which the Aberrant and the Anarchist by thought alone could sculpt whatever things his frenzy or strange fantasy called forth, before the storms of dawn dispersed it; Schattenreich and Rime, twin worlds, one where ghosts outnumbered the living, the other where Reticent lordlings lived alone in lavish self-made museum-mansions, accompanied by scores of splinter personalities, skilled at every art and craft; and Here Be Monsters so aptly named.