Montrose said, “Wait a sec. A minute ago, I was the only one in the room who knew what was going on. Have you all figured out what my plan is, that quick?”

Vigil said, “I am descended from Narcís D’Aragó and share something of the sense of honor he wished planted in his creatures, the Chimerae, which in turn formed the first templates for the Myrmidons, the Third Human Race. Of the Five Races of Man, only that race, of which I count myself a cousin, traveled to the Second Empyrean in Sagittarius and looked on the legendary beauty and strength of the lost worlds of Aachen and of Avalon, of Trethevy and of Trevena, and Tintagel the Fair, whose name hangs in song like a bell of silver. Do you forget that the man who was master of that Empyrean is here?”

Montrose said, “Sorry. What am I missing?”

Vigil said, “You have sailcloth but no vessel, no launching laser. But you are patient, and you served aboard the Hermetic, whose laser was merely an orbital platform, not something drawing power from the core of a sun.”

Del Azarchel said, “I had to tear out most of the interior of my vessel, the Emancipation—”

“My vessel, you skunk!”

“—to make room for cisterns to hold my migrant population, who are aquatic. The ship is not suited to make the voyage to M3. She may not make it to Ain without an entire redesign from the axis keel outward. I was planning on looting this entire planet to get the provisions I needed, but you seem to have a better plan, Cowhand. I do not know what it is, but I know this youth here deduced it, and that tells me enough. Lord Hermeticist! The orbit of your primary is highly elliptical, is it not? How do you survive the summers hotter than Mercury and atmosphere-freezing winters colder than Pluto?”

Vigil said, “There are hibernation cities at the planetary core, with tombs enough for ten times the surface population. And I seek the return of the Strangers to their proper place. We will stay and man the acceleration beam for all the ages you may require. At long last—finally at long last!—the projects of terraforming Hellebore and Bloodroot, Sainfoin, Mandrake, and Nightshade, and the other wasted moons of Wormwood, which we of Torment abandoned only due to our racial hatred and pride and strife, will no more be neglected.” Vigil turned to Montrose. “Have I guessed correctly? You meant to take Hellebore with you.”

Montrose nodded. “You got it. It would have been a slow, slow voyage, but I am used to slow. But now here is Blackie, who needs my help to sail my wife’s ship. As I recall, the alien ship anchored its sails to her hull with impalpable strings of force. I am assuming they can pass through solid matter without harm, without being noticed. The cities at the core are solid enough to serve as anchors. And I know how big the sails of Rania’s supership are. So we just anchor the ship at the core of Torment, erect the sails as large as the orbit of Venus, and the payload to surface area is still so huge it don’t matter, not with the amount of power the Iota Draconis beam can put out. We take the whole planet with us.”

Vigil said, “It will be but a very short while, decades only, until the Argosy arrives with populations of Sinners from 61 Ursae Majoris and Delectables from 47 Ursae Majoris. They will bring enough peoples to overswarm Bloodroot and will complete the terraformation. However tenuously and thin the thread might stretch, it will not be broken, and a next Table of Stability be seated, and ensure the continuation of mankind as a star-faring race, resisting forever the thousand temptations of each planet to make herself isolated, autarchic, and alone.”

“Sounds like everyone takes a cut of the kitty, then. Winners all round, eh? But what makes anything think I am willing to make another truce with Blackie? I did it once before and hated every minute. ’Sides, he means to kill me.”

“If I may.” Del Azarchel leaned forward and pointed a finger at the black surface of the table and then, very lightly, tapped it. “This here is the cliometric design of the future of what happens as Triumvirate, carrying out the plans of False Rania. That is what becomes of the human race. Now, if you can do the calculus just in your head, or perhaps we should ask the Stranger boy, who seems to be something of a math prodigy, if he can do the calculus just in his head: What basic cliometric vector is introduced if this world-sized moon, the huge body called Torment, sails grandly across the sky? Suppose we use the mirrored sails of the Emancipation to deflect part of the acceleration beam from Iota Draconis into the sails of smaller vessels and send them out laterally to other stars between here and there? Suppose we form a Sixth Sweep all of our own? I understand the slumbering population here outnumbers the living considerably, due to wretched surface conditions. What happens then to the spirit of man?”

But Montrose did not need to do any calculations. He merely laughed. “Well, you might call this world a hellhole, but damn my eyes if it don’t remind me of Texas in some ways. If we sail the whole planet with us, we spread the pioneer spirit. And your idea of a medieval hierarchy gets forgotten forever!”

Blackie smiled, and there was a darkness and a cold, cold hatred in his eyes, but he laughed and pretended to smile. “What do I care if the lowest of the low, the mortal creatures, imagine themselves equal to each other? This whole galaxy vindicates my view, for everything is ranked and placed from humblest to highest, Principalities and Hosts, then Dominions, then Dominations, Authorities and Archons, Thrones and Cherubim and Seraphim. Besides, egalitarian societies always eventually break down as a natural aristocracy emerges. Come! If I depart the hundred-lightyear-wide bubble of stars called the Empyrean of Man, then no more wars nor mischief will proceed, not from my hands. Is there anything on Earth, or any world behind us, that you crave more than this?”

Montrose smiled back, and the fire in his deep-set, unwinking, blue-white eyes was just as terrifying to behold, and there was some joy in his toothy grin, the joy of a man who imagines an enemy dead. “It is a deal, then, Blackie!”

Vigil said, “I will keep my faith with you gentlemen, and prevent any interruption of the launching beam.”

The Chronometrician cackled, and by the intuition of one of his internal creatures, Vigil knew exactly why Montrose, the Judge of Ages, had agreed once more to sail with Ximen the Black.

Had the Judge of Ages not agreed, Ximen would have gone his separate route, in a vessel of different design and origin, and therefore, risk was too great, in all the endless infinity of space, the appalling abyss of eternity, that the separation between them would grow, one day becoming too vast to overcome; hence they would never again meet; hence never walk onto the field of honor together, that only one would walk away from it.

Vigil Starmanson, the Lord Hermeticist, understood then that there were things as strong as honor, which would keep men chained to their fates for longer, far longer, than a normal human life span. Love was one such thing. Hate was another.

He shivered.

And the Aedile called to adjourn and disband. The Table surface grew dull and plain, and the mind within the metal slept, not to wake again until it was moved to Bloodroot, to empty buildings haunting that world and would once again house the Lords of Cliometry, decades or centuries hence.

The statue of Torment shivered and grew still. What the mind at the core of this planet thought, no one could say, but apparently the world consented to depart human civilization forever, to be torn from her orbit and to be sailed across the stars.

Outside the hall, very dimly, one of Vigil’s internal creatures picked up the sound of the bells, still ringing, and voices still singing out a welcome to a ship which now, as it so happened, actually was coming under friendly colors, with gifts and new sciences to bestow, much plenty, and new populations.