“I do not understand.”

“If that is your preference…,” the Swan said dismissively.

“Tell me what you mean!”

“I mean the purpose of the Swan Princess was surely greater, perhaps greater than even I imagine. I mean that that all of history has been driven by the conflict between the Judge of Ages and the Master of the Worlds. Their creations carried on the war for them, Swans against Myrmidons among posthumans, Pellucid against Exarchel among Angels, Jupiter against Neptune among Powers, Catallactic of Tau Ceti against Consecrate of Altair among Principalities. When Rania returned, that conflict was done. The verdict of M3 was that the human race would no longer be slaves of the Hyades Dominion.”

“Therefore, we are free.”

“Are we?” Scorn marred the inhuman beauty of the features of the Swan.

Vigil said, “Triumvirate is a very small for a Dominion, in the intelligence range upward of fifty billion. But he is legally equal to Hyades. That equality makes Man free.”

“Triumvirate is a Hyades of three stars instead of threescore.” Again, there was bitter grimace to all the words of the Swan.

Vigil felt a stirring of pride. The pyramid on whose bottom step he stood rose high indeed. It rose beyond all thought and estimation, until it reached the invisible and unimaginable pinnacle of Triumvirate. But Vigil had no inkling of envy in his soul. Rather, he felt the pride of even the lowest foot soldier who knows himself of one uniform and one banner and one purpose with the loftiest general. He smiled and spoke as one who mocks a beloved king. “No doubt by Hyades standards, our Triumvirate is an idiot. But Triumvirate is the Dominion of Man. Triumvirate is Man. He is us and we are him.”

“No,” said the Swan, and the word was like a blow. “An idiotic Hyades is what Triumvirate is; a mere mockery, but a Hyades nonetheless; a god we forged and made and to whose altar we have chained our necks. Triumvirate is nothing of ours.”

“Then what are we?”

“You and I, and all living ships, Angels small as gems or large as arctic oceans, Archangels and moon-sized intellects, Potentates and Earth-sized brains, Powers of gas giants, the failed and incomplete Dyson object called Beid, or that odd self-aware Oort cloud Epsilon Eridani shed, what are we indeed? All of us are like the sperm that come too late to penetrate the egg. We are by-product. We are mere waste.”

Vigil was appalled. It was as if the desolation of outer space, the immensity of eternity, had entered into this chamber and rendered it uninhabitable, a vastness intolerable for man.

The Swan said, or sang, “What First or Second or any race of mortal men do or fail to do from here is of no account: the cliometry of human action is but a surface ripple while the mighty Powers we have made command tides to rise, and the Principalities sink continents or raise ocean beds to mountaintops.”

Vigil drew a breath. “A man goes mad thinking in Swan magnitudes! Acts within my time-horizon to me have meaning. Within human history, human action—”

The other being interrupted him sharply. “What we humans have done is history. It is over. Triumvirate now determines the ultimate destiny of the race: What Triumvirate shall do is evolution. It begins.”

Vigil said, “No one has ever seen a talkative Swan erenow. I believe the final day of history is come, just as you say.”

“You mock,” intoned the Swan solemnly, in a lower key, “yet I impart my wisdom but seldom—wine poured into the sand heap of your mind.”

“Impart your wisdom to what concerns us now and here. Torment commands the Lighthouse doused and let the Emancipation sail away into eternal darkness and death. What say you?”

“Why ask? You are as bound by the chain of your nature as I am by mine. I cannot cease to struggle against Hyades even when the Hyades troubles us no more: for now, I strive with Triumvirate, an idiot and ersatz Hyades. Alas! Alas for me, and for the Second Humans, who waste our lives in vanity! Must I be in rebellion against all the gods of the universe, aye, until the universe itself breaks?”

“There is no answer a human can give a Swan. Your sorrows are not our sorrows. I do not understand what grieves you.”

“The universe grieves me! Is there nothing beyond?”

“I am lost in the depth of your thought, Great One. I comprehend nothing of what you speak. Are you insane?”

“Far too sane! I envy you your delusions and the claustrophobic, petty universe in which you live. No mole is dazed by visions of far horizons. Hear me: you must go at once to the Table of Stability, which meets in secret in the Palace of Future History, and plead, hoping your voice will be heard. You could not do otherwise even if you wished, and you cannot wish otherwise. Such is your nature. You would not have been born and raised to be Vigil of the Strangers otherwise.

“Despite your voice,” the Swan continued in words terrible to hear, “you will not be heard, and the Emancipation will fly through the system and be swallowed by infinity. For the Lords of Stability are as bound by their fate as are you. If they were such men as to abide by their duty despite what Emancipation holds, they would not have been men ambitious enough to seek the predominance of the Table of Stability, vain enough to think it worth enduring across millennia.”

The Swan threw back his fine head, and his voice was like a horn. “And even if the Table could be persuaded, Torment herself would find a way to undo your work and make vain your labor, for Torment cannot be other than she is, a world trapped in hopeless devotion to the past. Therefore, your mother knows you will fail. Therefore, I call her life one lived in vain.”

Vigil said, “How can you speak such rank despair? The braking laser is already lit! Just the backscatter from contributory energy stations buried in the liquid atmosphere of Wormwood is power enough to ignite the whole cloudscape of a superjovian gas giant to blinding light!”

The Swan laughed that beautiful and haunting laugh which only Swans can utter. “It is deception. The beam is not presented properly. It shoots wide of the target and does not strike the Emancipation’s ample sails.”

Vigil stood astonished and amazed a moment. In a hollow voice, he asked, “What, then, can be done?”

“As First Men see the world, nothing.”

“Then as you see the world?”

The Swan said, “I am of a race so fiercely proud that we die ere we ask alms. We harmonize our affairs by a subcliometric mathematics in the same way the many instruments are harmonized in song, or separate voices. This song-lore is to Swans what the Cold Equations are to stars. My song-lore shows that were there any beings of my order or of any higher order of man, a Fox Maiden, for example, or Patrician, who had any will to discover the key to set the Lighthouse to rights, or the ancient word to command it, that higher being must go the Table this very hour, or send proxy, for only there and there only are the threads of fate all gathered. And if such a thing would come to pass, that higher being—whoever or whatever be he—needs must seek you, for you alone control the word of vengeance.”

This was more bewildering than what had come before. Vigil said, “Who seeks me?”

The Swan said, “How much does a shadow weigh? The question is meaningless.”

“Who is this shadow, then? How do you know there is one? Have you seen something?”

“Firstling men live by their eyes, and therefore, they are blind. I am of the Second People, the well-made folk. We live by the song, the harmony inherent in all rational action. We hear and we know. Go! Find whose word is older than the Table of Stability, older than the world, whose command the Lighthouse Mind itself cannot begin to disobey. Whoever this is, supposing he exists, him you must persuade. There is none other.”