Inly seething, Vigil bowed his knee, lowering his eyes before the apparition altered the optical centers of his brain and overwhelmed him. “Welcome, ancient and omnipotent spirit. All things on this world are yours. We proffer you all things we own, including life and sanity, for what does not come of you is preserved of you.”

A voice came from three origins: from the mouth of the Swan, from inside Vigil’s brain, and from the thinking wand in Vigil’s hand. “Lord and Companion Vigil Vigilantibus Ximen Sterling Starcaptainson, called Starmanson, you speak well to name me all-powerful, for, by your measure, so I am; but, as all things mortals say, it is falsehood, for truth is but a shadow in you. You speak the words of ancient theophany and yet believe not one. You offer all, yet you will give the world nothing. Speak. Ask of me.”

Vigil threw the thinking wand ringing to the floor, cutting the voices from three to two. “Why did you murder my father’s mind?”

“I called him to his duty, and he refused, but chose instead to peer too deeply into my mystery. Be delighted that I spared his life and left him one-tenth part of his soul. And yet I see by your neural patterns, the blush of rage, the gall in your blood, and the grind of your teeth, that there is no delight in you, despite my clear command. Are you so swiftly foresworn?”

Vigil slid an icy internal into command of his face and features, and the actions of his glands and limbic system became remote. In a cool voice, unprovoked, he had his internal speak through his lips and say, “What duty did my father betray, O Potentate?”

“This world, Torment, I set aside to preserve all ancient things which otherwise would pass away. The eight earths of the six stars of the Fifth Sweep are a light-century away from Sol. Of those eight, because of our position, Eldsich is the most dimly reached by signal and visited infrequently by sailing ship. Hence we are least touched by perturbations in the cliometric destiny our newborn Dominion, Triumvirate, for mankind weaves. Races extinct on other worlds, Hierophants and Megalodons and the ancient and shape-altering Fox Maidens, here still live, and linger yet to breathe my air. I alone of Potentates dam the rush of time and turn the days aside to still and tranquil pools.”

Vigil stood as stony faced as a slumbering statue and answered nothing.

The gain on the transhuman voice inside his brain increased, pushing other thoughts aside. All but the boldest of his internals flickered and fled like minnows who fear the face of some cetacean arising from the lakebed of an ancient crater lake. “To this I have devoted a life longer than yours and deeper. Is this nothing to you, antiquarian? You have looked further in the past than any man who these days crawls my globe or slumbers safe beneath my mantle. The word which came to your father was to aid this noblest effort. He refused. That burden now I lay on you.”

No internal would speak for him. In a voice like ice, he spoke. “What do you ask of me, O world?”

“This world commands you to save this world. Save me.”

Vigil did not trust himself to speak. He coaxed one of his braver internals to the fore and gave it command of his mouth. It was battle meditation pattern, so his words were tranquil as a Swan’s. “I don’t understand.”

“There is no ambiguity. You know the past; you see the pattern of the future. The deceleration of the Emancipation ends all I have created and preserve.”

“What is aboard which so you dread, wise world-spirit?”

“That is not your concern. Your concern is this: you must extinguish the deceleration lights.”

The battle meditation internal slipped out of the command sequence in shock, and surprise jerked Vigil’s chin up. He stared into the face of the Potentate, blinking and wincing, his hand before his mask, fingers curled outward, like a man who stares into the sun. “Great One! You speak in riddles! No one can understand this word!”

“I speak plainly. The Emancipation is not to be decelerated but to pass through the star system of Iota Draconis unwelcomed, unmet, her signals not returned.”

Vigil, ignoring the many voices of his internals, even those older ones first grown within his father and grandfather, turned his back on the Swan housing the kenosis of the Potentate. This was a deadly insult, a sacrilege; but in that hour, he cared nothing whether he lived or died.

Turning his eyes aside, Vigil saw where his mother knelt, her face pale with fear, but calm like an ice-cloaked stream beneath which rapid waters run. “Mother! What madness is this? We cannot fail the star-farers. Man will be condemned, not just on this world but all worlds, if the star trade is not maintained. As far back as I have seen in time, letting the memories of ghosts fly through me until I was almost lost, I found no legends of a time when this was not so!” He pulled the breathermask aside, let it dangle around his neck, lest it muffle the urgency in his voice. But then words failed him. He could no more explain why the ancient starships must return than he could explain why the sun must rise or Wormwood like a great moon must throw vast tides against the hundred-foot-high dikes.

He spoke more quietly, but his soft voice crackled with intensity. “Mother! The Stability was made for this purpose, and before them the Starfarer’s Guild. It was for this reason the Star Princess fled to M3 in Canes Venatici, and returned, and vindicated man. It is for this reason man is free. It is the reason I was born. Has the world gone mad?”

Patience did not raise her eyes from the floor. “A hound cannot understand when his master goes insane. Yet legend says Eden once went mad and burned all the cities of her surface. We must do what we were born to do, if our Firstling race is not to be forgotten amid all our successors, greater in all ways than we but less than us in this one thing, Swans, Foxes, or Patricians. We are the oldest race, the First Humanity, older even than the gods who rule us, older even than dead Jupiter of Sol or living Consecrate of Altair. We are bound by chains of millennia uncounted to ancestors unrecalled and posterity unborn. We do not break the chain. We swear and we remember.”

“What are you saying, Mother?”

“I say defy the Potentate and die, as your father did. Better that than to be foresworn.”

“What?”

She reached out and tapped the red metal band on his wrist, which both sharply reminded him of its weight and also released a neurochemical which cleared his head. He also felt again of the painful and fresh puncture wounds boring through his wrist.

She said, “The braking laser must stay lit. The Table exists for one purpose. You exist for one purpose, as do I. If we fail in that purpose, all we love and all we serve will fail, and all our dreams prove false. Speak as Lord Hermeticist to the Table. They will not dare deny you: yours is the authority to call down the Vengeance of the Starfarers. Though sweetest reason or crassest threat, you must move them. Decelerate the Emancipation.”

She did not need to say, but the vision was vivid in Vigil’s brain (particularly in that one internal collateral designed as an artificial aid to his conscience) that the starship Stranger would be punished horribly upon arrival at 107 Piscium, if the Strangermen dwelling on worlds left behind failed in the duty they owed the stars. All the shrines of his first ancestor before whom he bowed would perish.

Vigil again tried to gaze into the face of the Swan the Potentate possessed, to read some expression or emotion. But the chemical clarity of mind betrayed him, because the difference in their force of intellect was even sharper. Vigil felt as if his eyes had been scalded, and he used an emergency meditation mudra to dump his short-term memory before it became permanent memory and drove him mad. He found himself on his knees and palms, panting, his goggles turned opaque, with no recollection of what the face had looked like. He shoved the goggles up on his brow and blinked, seeing the naked feet of the Swan below the hem of feathers.