Could a man of honor retract so rash a vow? But if he did, how could he save that essential and innermost self that formed the core about which communal and artificial thought-creatures swirled?

Vigil shoved that thought away as cowardly, and yet the cliometrician inside him noted the cultural variables which, step by slow step, had led from the peaceful and egalitarian lifestyle the Patricians had imposed on the lesser orders, to this life, so rigidly bound by the demands of ritualized forms, the mathematics of destiny, the iron law of honor.

Triumvirate had stirred to self-awareness three thousand years ago, broke the centuries of inexplicable interstellar radio silence from all Powers and Principalities, announced an end to the slave trade and the nullification of the Absolute Rules.

In that era of intoxicating freedom, all restrictions on body shapes, evolutionary groups, and even the basic nerve-muscle-gland protocols were cast aside. Women stronger than Amazons, and with the neurochemical and psychological tools needed to enjoy bloodshed, perhaps, in those days could be found.

But then, two thousand years ago, the Vindication calendar had finally reached the zero year: and the advent of Rania the Vindicatrix had, as so long promised, come to pass. The Solitudines Vastae Caelorum burned like a star in all the skies of the Empyrean Polity. And not even the haughty Hyades dared interfere, albeit it meant, to them, a straight loss; for all the costs and efforts invested in the forced elevation of man to the Collaboration stature need never now be repaid.

She married the Master of the World, to whom she had been promised so long ago, driving the Judge of Ages into one of his recurring fits of madness.

Rania had returned with a miniature Monument, an object called the Memento Stone, a gift from M3, so small it could be held in the palm of one hand, yet in the fifth to eleventh dimensions, immensely dense and intricate. Every cell and micron of the intricately folded multidimensional surface was coated with code. It contained the equations, far more advanced than anything a mere Dominion like Hyades could have created, or a Domination like Praesepe, but which Rania’s augmented genius could decode and unfold like the many branching arms of a growing tree.

The Memento Stone was, in fact, cliometric code, containing the secret to universal peace and interstellar cooperation which a newborn Dominion, like Triumvirate, would need in order to acclimate all the rapid ripples of human interstellar history into the grand and slow sweep of Orion Arm evolution. It was a personal Monument, not meant for any race to read but only the human and posthuman races spreading out from Sol.

Peace! It was a godlike gift, a treasure beyond price.

But the damage done to history by the Judge of Ages and his creatures had slowly to be unwoven, as did damage done by saboteurs and wreckers hidden throughout the nodes and currents of time. The corruption done by the false ideal of a society without ranks, without lords and serfs, where all men were seen as equal, all that had to be cured and redacted, and the vectors of history with their vast inertia redirected.

Here, beneath the golden-red light of Iota Draconis, the slowly spreading web of future history had not yet reached. Torment was the farthest colony from Sol, and no star was visited less frequently by the great sailing vessels, miles long and more voluminous than moons, than Iota Draconis. Peace had not yet come here.

The cliometric vectors, Rania’s will, extended from Sol in slow and lazy circles, and, where they touched, encouraged and created these rigid and ferocious customs, this sense of honor, to the farthest star of man. Men who believed that the ends justify the means, or who were willing to forget duties when love of life or lust for pleasure lured them, such men could not maintain the schedule of launches and arrival of the Great Ships.

There was a covenant binding the living and the dead, whereby the current generation received the benefits of the sacrifices of their forefathers, and with great pain, for which no reward would come within their life spans, passed similar benefits along to posterity.

Only men of honor could maintain that covenant.

And if that honor required Vigil to uphold his vow and slay his planet, so be it.

7. Investiture

Patience stepped forward, looking down at him with maternal scorn. “Stand! Do not shame your family name! You alone must bear that name now!”

He looked up. “Mommy, what must I do?”

“To your feet! Raise your arms.”

He stood. She wrapped his muscles with medical tape and applied the catheters and undersuit. The suit itself was black, and shot through with a thousand branching capillaries like the veins in a leaf, and moved and breathed with subtle rhythms, and the light caught the black fabric in shimmering webs as if reflections from moving waters rippled there. Then came the breastplate, gloves, goggles, airhood, breathermask, and all the uncomfortable regalia star-farers of old had worn, older than all worlds save Eden. The silver cape was slung across his back.

Last of all, she said, “Kneel.”

And when he did, she spoke in a voice not her own. “Do you swear to uphold and do all the duties of the Senior of the Landing Party, to guard the lives and weal of the colonist and crew, and preserve the dignity of man? Will you remember the codes and signs and orders, and keep the ancient faring schedule, that man may never perish nor never fail to fare the stars?”

He knelt. “I swear and remember.” His voice was muffled in his mask.

He bared his arm and swabbed with alcohol, and his mother stabbed with heavy needles and nerve-joists into his forearm and locked the heavy amulet of red metal to his wrist.

Patience, now Lady Patience, said, “By these signs and words, I invest you with the duties and dignities of the Companion to the Table. The destiny of Man is yours to guard. The stars are below your feet. Arise, Stranger Vigil Starmanson, Lord Hermeticist. In the name of the Authority of Canes Venatici, the Domination of Praesepe, and the Dominion of the Triumvirate; in the name of the Principality of Consecrate of Altair in the Eagle, the Power of Neptune of Sol, the Potentate of Torment of Eldsich, and in the name of the Archangel of Bloodroot, arise!”

“By six names of the seven, I take my feet,” said Vigil, rising; and he looked with narrowed eyes through the narrow crack of the door into the face of the Swan.

8. Potentate of the Noösphere

The Swan, by means unknown, now sent power to the door and woke it, and the welcome lanterns flared. The Swan stooped and stepped over the threshold.

Here in the city, where the oldest of ancient custom still held sway, any room used by a spacefarer was considered to be space, and any door to space, an airlockway.

With eerie dignity, as if the act were not preposterous, the Swan gestured with his folding fan, as if he were an astronaut in full kit and helm visually confirming the environment had air resistance, and then touched his fingers in the threshold bowl, a faint symbol of the decontamination needed in forgotten ages when man created diseases to prey on fellow man and no Power forbade it. From some audible circuit old as Eden, pipes now whistled, saluting the Potentate’s emissary with dignity superior to any mortal captain.

The dignity was greater than that of any Swan or any race of mortals, for as Vigil stared into the other’s face, now more and more conduits of intellect opened between the Swan and the planetary core, so those eyes grew brighter and more horrible than eyes of Angel or Archangel, and the Potentate herself seemed to stand there, a being of preternatural intellect wrapped in a thin mask of flesh.