2. The Executioner

Vigil’s eyes were locked on the blade, unable to blink.

He whispered, “May I do this?”

Something like a mudra, but infinitely more delicate, flickered from the reflections of the sword blade into his eye, from the optic nerve into his brain, and the auditory segments of his brain interpreted the jarring force as if a vast and inhuman voice had spoken.

There is sufficient testimony and evidence to permit a verdict. The human segments of the Noösphere are identified. The command channel is open and the angels of execution are standing by. A verbal command is insufficient. To slay the world, smite the table before you forcefully; and we will break the table in two, which otherwise is invulnerable to human force.

The things about him slowed oddly as he used a military internal to raise his nerve-rate, speeding up his thoughts.

“If I condemn the world but am wrong, can the execution be stayed? Is there truly no appeal?”

There is no appeal. Your voice is final.

“Why not? The work of the angels is to protect man from our own folly!”

Once the sentence passed, the execution is instantaneous. The loss of economic and intellectual continuity is unrecoverable. Human civilization on this sphere will not last two centuries once all ghostly infrastructure and electronic mentality is obliterated, nor will peace and civic order last two hours. It is not the place of the angels to destroy you: that you will do on your own, unassisted.

Vigil’s head was beginning to throb with pain from the impact of the superhuman clarity of thought being thrust into his brain. He had never before known the mudra-system to be manipulated in so fine and delicate a way as to provoke specific words and concepts from a man’s nervous system, rather than a gross physical-neural reaction.

But he whispered again, this time on a private channel, not moving his lips.

“And if I do not act?”

We cannot condemn the world nor perform the execution without direct human command, nor would we if we could. The Covenant of Rania protects the lower orders of being from our influence.

Vigil wondered darkly why this covenant had not served to protect his father.

“Am I justified in condemning this corrupt order?”

If you were to abuse this great and terrible authority given you, or if you were incompetent to render the verdict, we would overrule you. But you are fit to decide: the judgment is yours alone.

“How can I? I am but a man, a mere youth!”

You have the authority to compel testimony. You have the authority to condemn or to forgive. It is not individuals you judge but ages.

“You are wise! Are they truly evil? And if they are, should I kill the human world in retaliation? Where is the justice in that?”

It is not permitted that we should advise you.

The pain in his head was now pounding like a drum. Even had he wished it, he could hear no more. Drawing a deep breath, he returned his perception of passing time back to its natural rate.

He found, to his surprise, no uncertainty in him. The duty was clear. “Gentlemen, my Lords, Commensals, and Companions! I find the Table in dereliction of its duty!”

3. The Hermeticist

Vigil Lord Hermeticist stood for a moment, unswaying, eyes upward, unable to continue. He commanded an internal to steel his resolve.

In a voice like a glacier of ice, implacable, unstoppable, he spoke:

“We of the Table are all selected from different constituents by different methods. Some are elected, some appointed, some commissioned, some must pass trials of combat or tests put by electors. My office is selected by two criteria. First, we must have passed to us from the commanding officer of the previous vessel her command codes intact, including the code that arms the self-destruction. Second, there is a psychological qualification, that the Lord Hermeticist must be willing to burn a planet just in the same fashion as the First Lord Hermeticist, Ximen the Black, commanding the first starship, was willing to do when the barbaric rulers of Eden in those days, before the Stability arose, refused to welcome the inbound star-faring vessel. My race and my line were accused of abridging that qualification, because we Strangers have the ability to carry an internal creature within us, which can be passed from father to son, hence our ability to pass the psychological test is inherited. You Pilgrims wanted this office under your control so that yours would be the last ship to reach Torment and so that your race would never be displaced by any later generations of immigrants.

“But none of your candidates could pass the crucial test, and all of my father’s house could pass. None of you are willing to destroy a world to preserve your honor. I am. I open the floor to any man who is willing to answer. Does anyone here doubt my intent?

“This Table must here and now, before I lower my arm, vote to direct the Lighthouse crew to direct the gravitic-nucleonic distortion pool in the photosphere of Iota Draconis to direct the proper percentage of the solar output of our star into the sails of the Emancipation.

“Delay, deny, or refuse, and I smite the table, which no other force in the universe can crack. Return to your duty, and I sheathe the sword with nothing further said.”

4. The Terraformer

The Terraformer raised a finger. “Allow me to be the first to answer. Sir, I do indeed doubt your willingness to smite the world with vengeance, if you knew all the facts!”

“Speak. The verdict of dereliction is entered, but I am permitted to execute or pardon.”

“My Lord Hermeticist, know you that the Great Ship Emancipation is from Sol and her manifest, beamed to us by orbital radio laser, reports the vast majority of the millions aboard are Melusine-based Myrmidon hybrids called Scolopendra who were ousted from the seas of Eden by the Patricians of that world. This is a race new to us. Before you entered the Chamber, I reported to the Table that it is impossible that deep-sea-based life could dwell here without replacing all our lowlands with ocean, destroying all our major cities and the most productive regions of our farmlands. The effect on surface life of this migration would be catastrophic. The pressure on subsurface machine life during our Great Winter, when the atmosphere cools, is difficult to estimate, but the Intercessor reports certain hints, dreams, and visions recovered from survivors plunged into the depth of the Torment mind.”

5. The Intercessor

The Intercessor, who was seated as Companion of the Theosophist, indicated that he affirmed the remark by opening a fan of reflective membrane. “The hostility of Torment to the starfall of the Emancipation was observed in several of the thought-torrents, thought-streams, and thought-oceans into which mediators submerged themselves. The agitation of the thought-forms of the Potentate can be assessed by the high rate of fatality and madness that ensured. Six of the mediators returned from intercession quite mad.”

Vigil said, “Irrelevant. If the Strangers were fated by the Great Schedule to be overthrown by the Pilgrims—an event, I take it, no man here regrets—how is it that, now that your turn to suffer the iron cruelty of history is at hand, you are no longer historians? When the cliometry predicts the loss of your prestige and fortunes, do you foreswear your oaths as cliometricians? Will you unhinge the wheel of time from its axis merely because your clan is no longer in the ascending arc? For shame! All these things are unfolding as Rania’s cliometry has foreseen! If the sins of the children of the Pilgrimage decree the downfall of their power, if that is the price of universal peace, then I say to you: grow gills, gentlemen, and webs between your finger bones, and fawn upon your new aquatic overlords with meekness!”