The Vindication of Man by John C. Wright
When the door was but half-open, a narrow slit, in she slid. For a moment, he thought she was his first-circle sister, Humility.
Mother had used an illegal process from Odile of 61 Cygni, a First Sweep world, to reduce her visible age. His figure was slender, her breasts ripe, and her face was without wrinkle or spot. It was like seeing an old album stereo-image become solid.
As if in defiance of Pilgrim simplicity of dress, she wore a Category Five ancestral bunad, freely composed, a richly embroidered blue bodice, skirt, and apron, over a white chemise, a rainbow-hued sash from which a pocket, or løslomme, hung. Her jacket was red, and the decorated scarf beneath a twelve-tined coronet was white. Gold and silver ornaments glittered at her fingers, ears, and collar, and the patterns of her bodice and skirt depicted the mythical flowers of Eden, the hydrangea and the saxifrage.
She was as fair as an adorned bridal statue in an alabaster road shrine raised by Sacerdotes to adore a virgin world, or as a crystal confirmation memorial submerged by cetaceans shining beneath the lake water.
Vigil turned his face away, ashamed.
Patience said, “My son, naked you came from me, and naked your bottom when I wiped it with recycling tissue.”
Vigil said gruffly, “That is not what shames me. Have you turned to immortalism? It is heresy. The spirits in the Noösphere are timeless. We in the biosphere, we who live and die, return to youth but thrice, at baptism and confirmation and marriage, and no other time.”
Patience said, “It is allowed a final time when a widowed crone weds a youth, for our ancestors in their folly decreed that husbands should be older than their wives. Your father is legally dead.”
“Does he still live?” Vigil kept his back to her, perhaps unwilling to see her sorrow, or unwilling to show his own. “In what sense?”
“Nine segments of Lord Waiting Starmanson’s memory have been burned away, and he does not recall me as his wife. I sit at his medical coffin spooning gruel into his mouth, helping him play with brightly colored toys until his nerves reknit and muscles remember their coordination. So I must turn back my age to the time when he remembers me, his childhood sweetheart, and I answer to the play names he called me then, when I was but a girl and first we wed.”
“If he lives, why garb yourself in virginal splendor? Do you make a jest of sacred matrimony? Or do you abandon him to remarry?” Vigil turned back to face her, his eyes hot and filled with anger.
She raised her hand and spoke in calm sorrow. “I am both bride and widow of one man. When your father is recovered to parity, I shall engage the bands, a widow marrying her own husband’s shadow, under a new name, under a much-diminished dignity, as a yeoman’s wife. Thus I wear my wedding dress to honor his new self, and this crown, which soon I put aside forever, to remember his old. Besides, I had no finer dress to wear in this fine city.”
Vigil stared at her. “You jest?”
“Never have I been more earnest. All my wardrobe privilege was revoked when I was no longer the Senior’s wife. I will not allow this filthy Pilgrim city to fleer in scorn at Strangers, we who, two centuries past, were the glory and terror of this globe, nor at me, who am the wife and mother of lords and captains.”
She spoke in the archaic mode, as if she and not her ancestors were a space traveler, giving measurements of time by Eden years.
Torment’s period was thirty Edendays, and so a lesser winter fell each fortnight; Wormwood’s period was 196 Edenyears, and so a greater winter came each two centuries, which rendered the surface of Torment uninhabitable, and the red sun dwindled to a dot. Wormwood at winter hung from the monstrous sun Iota Draconis thirteen times the distance separating green Eden from small and mild Sol, a comfortably circular orbit so unlike Wormwood’s highly eccentric own. At that season, all save a skeleton population entered the slumbering cities of the dead below the mantle. And a greater summer loomed when Iota Draconis filled the sky and turned the clouds of Wormwood to dazzle, and then all men became cetaceans and retreated into the lake bottoms of Torment, and all the pre-potentate plant life hid beneath broad leaves like mirrored parasols.
The yeomen and serfs, epopts and Sacerdotes, whose lives were tied to the double ebb and flow of seedtime and harvest and signs in the heaven, measured time by the local epicyclical calendar. Patience called herself a yeoman, but spoke as a star-farer.
Patience continued in ringing tones, “In the void, where the Stranger to this hour sails, halfway between 107 Piscium and 55 Rho Cancri, between fish and crab, there slumbers in his coffin, oddly compressed in time by Einstein and still alive, the great ancestral captain whose blood runs in my veins and yours. I honor him and all our line and meme. I honor your father and hold back my tears for him. Here in my hand is the garb you must don to do him honor more.”
Grief and surprise had driven the obvious from his mind. Vigil stood blinking stupidly at the dark and shining fabric draped over his mother’s arm, one of his internals, an emotionally vivid one, trying to prevent him from realizing what he was looking at. Another internal, cooler and higher, told him softly that it was his father’s uniform.
Only then did Vigil know he was now elevated to his father’s seat at the Table of Stability. His father was no longer the Senior of the Landing Party of the starship Stranger, and Commensal Lord Hermeticist of the Stability, a Servant of Eternity. He, Vigil, was.
She said, “Raise your arms. One last time your mother dresses her willful child.”
Vigil folded his arms instead. “Let my mother instruct her child first, just as she taught me my icons and numbers, meditations and recitations. What is the superhuman creature who waits there, an arm’s length beyond the chamber door, pale and robed and cloaked in purple peacock wings? I see his eyes as he stoops to gaze within, but he does not speak! He will not squirm to enter, but waits until I open the portal wider. His mouth is a grim and silent line. Why does he glare, his eyes like lamps, and return no gesture of salute?”
Patience said, “He waits to speak with the world’s voice to the Lord Hermeticist. You are not yet invested with the Companionship. Raise your arms.”
Vigil said, “Wait! First tell me the name of my father’s murderer. Show me his crest. Against whom do I work my revenge?”
“Your father is only partly murdered.”
“Then I will work partial vengeance and kill nine-tenths of his killer! His name, his crest? Where is he? Where do I find him?”
Patience corrected, “Ask, rather, where do you find Her, and what is Her crest.”
“Father was slain by a woman?”
“By nothing like a woman. I did not say ‘her crest.’ I said ‘Her crest.’” In Threal, the Atavist-based language of the planet Nightspore circling Alpha Boötis, which members of the Officer class of the Strangers still spoke among themselves, Patience was using the form of the pronoun reserved for referring to beings superior to mortals.
In a voice of driving sarcasm, she continued, “The crest is the Anguipede proper on a sable field, above a Thormantle, supported by the Dragon and Aardwolf. Her legate stands at your door, with one unshod foot across the threshold, and the eyes of her wings behold and judge all the works of man.”
Vigil felt his internals slip out of his control. The Dragon was the constellation. The Aardwolf was the crest of the star Iota Draconis, which the Swans named Eldsich, but the vulgar called the Hyena-star. The Anguipede, or, to use the older name, Abrasax, was the rooster-headed god bearing buckler and scourge whose legs were two snakes writhing. For reasons no astronomer now recalled, the Anguipede was of old the crest of the gas giant Wormwood. Each of his children, his moons, was named for an alchemical flower. Thormantle, or Septfoil, was the original, half-forgotten name of the thirteenth moon, in honor of the species Tormentilla erecta that had been the first green plant ever to survive on the surface and flourish, and in lost centuries when machines dwelled here without any human life, this sole flower had adapted, free of competitors, and spread from pole to pol
This was the crest of the Planetary Intelligence of Torment.
She said in a lower voice, “The world killed your father. Torment killed him.”
“Why? Potentates do not kill men!” Even as he spoke, the magnitude of horror came upon him. Vigil, despite that his internals rushed to his aid, felt his head grow light, his eyes grow dim. The strength left his legs. He wobbled; he sat. On the floor, he pulled his feet into the position called lotus, named after yet another flower of Eden, legs folded with each foot atop the opposite knee, and performed his tripartite breathing exercises, inhaling through his mouth, then his nose, then through the oxygen reserve capsule embedded between his lungs.
Had he in truth just vowed vengeance against a mind who occupied the entire core of the world on which he stood?
6. The Memento Stone
Vigil could not prevent some of the creatures in his mind from reacting to the claustrophobic sensation that closed like iron walls around him. Could a man best a Potentate, or any of the godlike beings man’s ancestors had created?
Could a man of honor retract so rash a vow? But if he did, how could he save that essential and innermost self that formed the core about which communal and artificial thought-creatures swirled?
Vigil shoved that thought away as cowardly, and yet the cliometrician inside him noted the cultural variables which, step by slow step, had led from the peaceful and egalitarian lifestyle the Patricians had imposed on the lesser orders, to this life, so rigidly bound by the demands of ritualized forms, the mathematics of destiny, the iron law of honor.
Triumvirate had stirred to self-awareness three thousand years ago, broke the centuries of inexplicable interstellar radio silence from all Powers and Principalities, announced an end to the slave trade and the nullification of the Absolute Rules.
In that era of intoxicating freedom, all restrictions on body shapes, evolutionary groups, and even the basic nerve-muscle-gland protocols were cast aside. Women stronger than Amazons, and with the neurochemical and psychological tools needed to enjoy bloodshed, perhaps, in those days could be found.
But then, two thousand years ago, the Vindication calendar had finally reached the zero year: and the advent of Rania the Vindicatrix had, as so long promised, come to pass. The Solitudines Vastae Caelorum burned like a star in all the skies of the Empyrean Polity. And not even the haughty Hyades dared interfere, albeit it meant, to them, a straight loss; for all the costs and efforts invested in the forced elevation of man to the Collaboration stature need never now be repaid.
She married the Master of the World, to whom she had been promised so long ago, driving the Judge of Ages into one of his recurring fits of madness.
Rania had returned with a miniature Monument, an object called the Memento Stone, a gift from M3, so small it could be held in the palm of one hand, yet in the fifth to eleventh dimensions, immensely dense and intricate. Every cell and micron of the intricately folded multidimensional surface was coated with code. It contained the equations, far more advanced than anything a mere Dominion like Hyades could have created, or a Domination like Praesepe, but which Rania’s augmented genius could decode and unfold like the many branching arms of a growing tree.
The Memento Stone was, in fact, cliometric code, containing the secret to universal peace and interstellar cooperation which a newborn Dominion, like Triumvirate, would need in order to acclimate all the rapid ripples of human interstellar history into the grand and slow sweep of Orion Arm evolution. It was a personal Monument, not meant for any race to read but only the human and posthuman races spreading out from Sol.
Peace! It was a godlike gift, a treasure beyond price.
But the damage done to history by the Judge of Ages and his creatures had slowly to be unwoven, as did damage done by saboteurs and wreckers hidden throughout the nodes and currents of time. The corruption done by the false ideal of a society without ranks, without lords and serfs, where all men were seen as equal, all that had to be cured and redacted, and the vectors of history with their vast inertia redirected.
Here, beneath the golden-red light of Iota Draconis, the slowly spreading web of future history had not yet reached. Torment was the farthest colony from Sol, and no star was visited less frequently by the great sailing vessels, miles long and more voluminous than moons, than Iota Draconis. Peace had not yet come here.
The cliometric vectors, Rania’s will, extended from Sol in slow and lazy circles, and, where they touched, encouraged and created these rigid and ferocious customs, this sense of honor, to the farthest star of man. Men who believed that the ends justify the means, or who were willing to forget duties when love of life or lust for pleasure lured them, such men could not maintain the schedule of launches and arrival of the Great Ships.
There was a covenant binding the living and the dead, whereby the current generation received the benefits of the sacrifices of their forefathers, and with great pain, for which no reward would come within their life spans, passed similar benefits along to posterity.
Only men of honor could maintain that covenant.
And if that honor required Vigil to uphold his vow and slay his planet, so be it.
7. Investiture
Patience stepped forward, looking down at him with maternal scorn. “Stand! Do not shame your family name! You alone must bear that name now!”
He looked up. “Mommy, what must I do?”
“To your feet! Raise your arms.”
He stood. She wrapped his muscles with medical tape and applied the catheters and undersuit. The suit itself was black, and shot through with a thousand branching capillaries like the veins in a leaf, and moved and breathed with subtle rhythms, and the light caught the black fabric in shimmering webs as if reflections from moving waters rippled there. Then came the breastplate, gloves, goggles, airhood, breathermask, and all the uncomfortable regalia star-farers of old had worn, older than all worlds save Eden. The silver cape was slung across his back.
Last of all, she said, “Kneel.”
And when he did, she spoke in a voice not her own. “Do you swear to uphold and do all the duties of the Senior of the Landing Party, to guard the lives and weal of the colonist and crew, and preserve the dignity of man? Will you remember the codes and signs and orders, and keep the ancient faring schedule, that man may never perish nor never fail to fare the stars?”
He knelt. “I swear and remember.” His voice was muffled in his mask.
He bared his arm and swabbed with alcohol, and his mother stabbed with heavy needles and nerve-joists into his forearm and locked the heavy amulet of red metal to his wrist.
Patience, now Lady Patience, said, “By these signs and words, I invest you with the duties and dignities of the Companion to the Table. The destiny of Man is yours to guard. The stars are below your feet. Arise, Stranger Vigil Starmanson, Lord Hermeticist. In the name of the Authority of Canes Venatici, the Domination of Praesepe, and the Dominion of the Triumvirate; in the name of the Principality of Consecrate of Altair in the Eagle, the Power of Neptune of Sol, the Potentate of Torment of Eldsich, and in the name of the Archangel of Bloodroot, arise!”
“By six names of the seven, I take my feet,” said Vigil, rising; and he looked with narrowed eyes through the narrow crack of the door into the face of the Swan.
8. Potentate of the Noösphere
The Swan, by means unknown, now sent power to the door and woke it, and the welcome lanterns flared. The Swan stooped and stepped over the threshold.
Here in the city, where the oldest of ancient custom still held sway, any room used by a spacefarer was considered to be space, and any door to space, an airlockway.
With eerie dignity, as if the act were not preposterous, the Swan gestured with his folding fan, as if he were an astronaut in full kit and helm visually confirming the environment had air resistance, and then touched his fingers in the threshold bowl, a faint symbol of
The dignity was greater than that of any Swan or any race of mortals, for as Vigil stared into the other’s face, now more and more conduits of intellect opened between the Swan and the planetary core, so those eyes grew brighter and more horrible than eyes of Angel or Archangel, and the Potentate herself seemed to stand there, a being of preternatural intellect wrapped in a thin mask of flesh.
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?”