The Aedile signaled with his finger lamp, asking for the floor. “My exulted fellow Lord and Commensal of the Stability! You have mistaken our intent! You have mistaken all! We do not seek to betray the ship for the sake of self or clan, nor even to preserve the world! We seek to preserve the Stability itself.”

6. The Aedile

Vigil snapped, “Nonsense, sir! The coming of the Emancipation has been foreknown millennia in advance! And you—you seek to preserve only yourself!”

The sword in his hand was beginning to tremble, and so Vigil asked an internal creature to adjust the muscle tension and chemical balances in his upraised arm, until it grew steady as a statue.

The Aedile said swiftly, earnestly, “Not so. This ship may be the hull of the Emancipation, but when she last saw port at Eden, all was changed. She is a warship.

“The sunless planet Acheron, which was between Iota Draconis and Sol, fell silent when she put to port, as did the several worlds along her route, Nepenthe for Woe, Aerecura, and Nightspore!

“A millennium ago, 70 Ophiuchi emitted a rush of signals signifying the fall of civilizations and the collapse of the world-mind! 41 Arae, three centuries ago, reported fire from the sail of Emancipation, like a second sun, and half a world burning! A century ago, Kappa Coronae Borealis blinked, and agitations in her photosphere were seen! Arcturus, the star of your own people, four centuries ago reported Myrmidons, a folk thought long extinct, a nightmare race from ages past, falling from your storm-tossed, strangely hued ancestral skies as countless as the flakes of snow!”

7. The Theosophist

Vigil said, “If this were known for so many centuries of erenow … why was nothing announced?” But he was secretly wondering why his father had said nothing.

The Theosophist signaled and was recognized and said in a voice as calm as a glacier, “We chained ourselves with oaths inflicted by mudra and surgery so that the matter was forgotten when we stepped forth from this Chamber. Had we not, and the world learned of the evil overtaking the stars, the charge and charter of this Table of Stability would vanish. If the Schedule has been broken on four worlds or five, then it is broken for all the stars of Man.”

The counselor standing at his back, Cricket, muttered, “Cancers and cankers! That means, in the damn eyes of the damn law, the old Guild takes over. That was the deal, way back when.”

Vigil lowered the sword and stared at its bright blade and the terrible shapes of dragons, the terrible message of the words. “Then the Stability was dissolved many hundreds of years ago. My life is a sham, as was my father’s life before mine, and all yours, your predecessors and ancestors…” He tried to grasp when the news meant. A thousand years ago, one of the Great Ships had become a vessel of interstellar war?

That was so long ago that the Exile was still in orbit about Torment. The Exile had been the stronghold and capital of the Nymph-Patrician hybrids of the planet Vital Delectation. Their race had been entirely overwhelmed and absorbed by the superior numbers and mental organization of the Nomads. Almost no trace of the Delectables remained, except for some names in old songs and the five-sided pyramids of unknown alloy half-buried in the arid Northern sands which no antiquarian dared approach. So long ago was that time.

Vigil said, “How do you expect to survive if these worlds, older and greater than ours, did not?”

The Theosophist said, “Because the orbital radio arrays and lighthouse beams of Iota Draconis are more sensitive and farther reaching than those of any other star in the Empyrean. The Beast called Achaiah, during the last years when men were unfree, did this thing, gifted our star with these technologies, we know not why. Unlike the other worlds where the disguise and peaceful pretense of Emancipation was successful before her approach, we are forewarned.”

Vigil looked down. Perhaps he was staring at the designs and marks of the future gleaming in the metal table surface, or at his reflection behind them, or at nothing. The sword was in his nerveless hand, neither upraised nor in its sheath.

The Chronometrician said, “My Lord Hermeticist, now that you have seen all that we hid, is it nevertheless your will to force this Table to a duty that will destroy us? This warship is not part of Rania’s Plan for Universal Peace. The warship which comes in the place of the Emancipation bears her name but is a different ship—her arrival is no part of the Great Schedule. Therefore, there is no duty of this Table to instruct the Lighthousekeeper to correctly present the beam. This warship is not part of our Stability, our Schedule, or the duty we carry from generation to generation faithfully.”

Vigil raised his eyes without moving his head and said slowly, “Who sent the ruffians to kill me in the alley?” But he knew, since all the men there looked surprised or puzzled, and only the Aedile looked stony faced. But now that he knew the reason for their fear, Vigil in his heart could condemn none of them. They sought, as he did, to serve the Stability and preserve civilization. It was what civilized men did.

The Chronometrician did not look guilty, but neither did he look surprised. An accomplice, no doubt. He said in his placid and earnest voice, “Sir, you may not use your prerogative merely for personal vendetta. It is your mission to avenge the race if we who allow the bonds of civilization, delicate as a spiderweb stretching from star to star, to fail. But we have not let it fail.”

Vigil said, “The ship will fall past us, blind, and into the eternal night.”

But the Chronometrician said, “That warship is not part of our civilization, no, no more than a cuckoo’s egg holds the true child of the mother bird who unknowingly sacrifices her own to feed the intruder.”

Vigil said, “Your tale is impossible! There was a clear library transmission from Nightspore in my mother’s time and again when my grandmother was a girl!”

“Falsified, edited, hoaxed,” said the Theosophist serenely.

Vigil said, “One cannot fight an interstellar war and keep the matter secret!”

8. The Signalmaster

The Master of Signals, in his traditional ear-cups of gold, raised his finger for permission to speak. “My Lord, it is very simple to mask the events of one star from another. One need only suborn or replace the radio house crew. How many million-acre radio parabolas do you think a colony can maintain in orbit, or during how many years of prosperity have the resources and political will to ignite their array and emit their gathered years of history, poetry, lore, and gossip? I need not remind this Chamber how many scheduled radio emissions to various stars were delayed or aborted due to lack of resources.

“The Scolopendra of the Emancipation, after years or decades, rebuilt the civilization of each broken world to their liking, and heated up the radio lasers, and sent any signal, any news, any delusions it tickled their fancy to send. War marches from star to star, and none the wiser.

“The great multigeneration ship of war then is launched on schedule to the next world, which, lulled by false signals, ignited their deceleration beam to welcome the destruction to their bosom. During the conquest, some radio noise or frantic signals escape, but the later broadcasts soothe all suspicions away. Who does not expect at least some commotion when a Great Ship lands?”

Vigil said, “What could be the motive? What insult, or fear, or lust for gain could provoke combat across so wide an abyss?”