Prologue

Listen!

This is the tale of how, at last, evil returned to the Assembly of Worlds, and how one man, Merral Stefan D’Avanos, became caught up in the fight against it.

But to tell Merral’s tale we must begin with the Seeding of the planet of Farholme in the year of our Lord 3140. Eleven hundred years have passed since the long-prophesied incoming of all the children of Abraham and the spiritual renewals of the Great Intervention ended the shadowed ages of the human race. A thousand years have slipped by since the victory at Centauri ended the Rebellion and brought a final peace to the Assembly. Nearly nine hundred years have elapsed since the first of the interstellar seeding expeditions.

The location of the Seeding is approximately three hundred and fifty light-years from humanity’s home planet, the blue world that is already becoming known as “Ancient Earth.” Here, the long, gray, glinting needle of the Remote Seeder Ship Leviathan-D comes to rest around the dazzling whiteness of the cloud-wrapped second world out from the star so far known only as Stellar Object NWQ-15AZ.

Here the vast ship hangs for months, its pitted hull bearing the faded and scarred portrayal of the Lamb Triumphant on the Field of Stars, the emblem of the Assembly of Worlds. The ship spins leisurely on its axis as it watches, analyzes, and calculates every aspect of the sterile and still-nameless world beneath it.

Three times a plate slides open on one of the needle’s six sides and ejects a probe. The first swings around the planet in a spiral orbit, mapping every boulder on its surface through the billows of gas and dust. The next two plunge down into the savage clouds and return days later, battered, charred, and corroded, but bearing samples of rock and atmosphere.

There is no haste. After all, on the timescale its makers work on, weeks are nothing. Patiently, the Leviathan-D continues to watch, listen, and gather ever more data. It measures the orbital variation of the planet to centimeters. It looks at the local sun in all the ways known to humanity and scrutinizes its output on every wavelength. It stretches out thin, sail-like extrusions to sift the dust in the space around the planet. It maps and forecasts for twenty thousand years ahead the trajectories of the largest million rock fragments within the system’s debris belts. And as they hang above the endlessly simmering cloudscape, the ship’s computers whisper and sing to each other as they process the data, predicting, discussing, and debating in learned imitation of the flesh and blood that made them.

The results are marginal. Positively, the spectrum, intensity, and variation of the radiation from NWQ-15AZ; the planet’s orbital eccentricity; and the value of its gravitational field are within acceptable limits. As these are unalterable, this is good news. Negatively, the meteorite flux is too high, the axis of rotation too tilted, and the speed of rotation too fast. Adaptable as humans are, no civilization has ever thrived on days shorter than twenty hours and here they are only sixteen. However these things, and the sterile nitrogen and carbon dioxide atmosphere, can be altered. After further debate, the circuits reach agreement. If the Everlasting wills it, another home will be made here for humanity.

Now on Leviathan-D the quiet hum of long-inactive machinery starts up again. Smoothly, the vast needle breaks into two unequal parts. From the larger segment, a hexagonal disk detaches itself from the end and slides away to one side. The two halves of the needle rejoin to form a ship now a tenth shorter. The segment formed from their splitting begins to expand outward evenly, creating a six-sided aperture at its heart. As an unshielded Below-Space Gate, this hole will be the key to the future of this new world. With it, no subsequent ship will have to make the six-hundred-year-long sublight-speed journey of the Leviathan-D. If the Seeding goes as predicted, and this savage world is tempered enough for humanity, then long millennia hence, machinery and mechanisms to build a greater Gate with a shielded opening will come through it. Through that, in turn, will come men and women.

Carried on a column of brilliant light, the needle now withdraws from the target planet and releases two small disk-shaped satellites. One descends into a low orbit of extreme precision while the other races outward to take up position six months later underneath the rings of the nearest gas giant. When both disks are in position, the Leviathan-D brings into play a Local Gate linkage between the two satellites, and the disk above the planet’s surface begins to slowly assume the mass of the planetary giant. The damping and correction of the orbit of the target planet begin immediately.

It is time to begin modifying the atmosphere. Two further Local Gates are released, one landing on the surface of the planet below and the other on one of the ammonia-sheathed moons of the gas giant. The Gate linkage is slowly brought on line, and a hissing and boiling exchange of gases begins.

Computer modeling of the planet for thousands of years ahead suggests that greater climatic stability can be achieved by sculpting the surface to allow linkages between what will become the ocean basins. For weeks, the Mass Blaster of the Leviathan-D pounds the planet with repeated energy pulses of overwhelming force, vaporizing millions of tons of rock and hewing and hammering out the channels, straits, and seaways of the future.

As the blast debris settles out of the atmosphere, the computers on the Leviathan-D decide it is time for a gentler but no less vital technology. In the sheltered core of the great needle, proteins are assembled and woven into helixes of genetic matter, each strand tuned and programmed to feed and multiply on the scalding gases below. The genes are inserted into biological cells and the cell cultures inserted into five cylindrical polymer cocoons. Then a panel on the side of the ship slides open and the five containers are propelled into space. There, in the shadow of the great ship, as dwarfed—and yet as consequential—as acorns before an oak tree, they linger, waiting for the word of command to send them to seed the planet.

Then, although there is no one other than God and the angels to hear, the ship speaks. In a dozen frequencies, as programmed by men and women now long dead, the solemn charge rings forth.

In the Name of the High King of heaven,

We name this star Alahir

and this world Farholme.

We of the Assembly of Worlds now command you:

Go forth and multiply.

Redeem this waste world.

Bring air and water, land and sea, day and night.

Produce a home for the Lord’s people,

to the praise and glory of the Messiah,

the Lamb who was slain.

Amen.

The response is the faint, silent flickering of lights on the ends of the cylinders as, one by one, they propel themselves away, onward and down into the swirling gases below.

For a final time, a port on the ship opens and a last satellite emerges to take up a high orbit above the newly christened Farholme. This Overseer satellite is to superintend the Seeding and to attend the planet in lonely vigil for the centuries that the work will take.

The needle now begins to move. The decision has been made that what is now known as the Alahir System will be the last target on the mission schedule. The systems scanned ahead by the Leviathan-D show little promise. After six centuries between the stars, the survey of fifteen worlds and the seeding of six, it is time for the Leviathan-D to return to port. But the homeward journey will be far swifter. Using the trail of Below-Space Gates it has left behind, its journey back will take a millionth of the time and energy of the outward journey.

The ship adjusts itself delicately in space on pulses of light until one end is perfectly aligned above the axis of the Gate. In a movement of slowly gathering swiftness, the needle’s tip stabs into the strangely star-free blackness at the Gate’s heart. Nothing comes out of the other side. Vanishing from view, the ship slips through the hexagonal aperture with a handbreadth of space to spare on every side. A second after the tail torch nozzle disappears there is the brief, ghostly gleam of a blue aurora around the hexagon and the Gate is empty.

As the long years roll by, the Overseer satellite high above Farholme watches, without emotion, the spreading smear of green in the cloud systems as the cells begin to absorb and break down the gases. In time new types replace these, each successive generation pushing the atmosphere closer to that in which oxygen-breathing life can live without being choked, boiled, or burned.

And as life grows and increases on the new world of Farholme, the echo of the commissioning charge radiates outward through the Alahir System and beyond into the silent, unvisited spaces between the stars.

. . . To the praise and glory of the Messiah, the Lamb who was slain. Amen.

And time passes, not just in those petty quantities that we call days, weeks, and years, but in long centuries, and even multiples of centuries. It is now the year of our Lord 13851, and the Seeding of Farholme is ancient history to its thirty million human inhabitants; as primeval and distant to them as the final waning of the ice sheets was for the first space travelers. More precisely, using the language of a long-dead calendar, it is December 22. In short, the Feast of the Nativity is just over two days away, and on over sixteen hundred inhabited planets the nearly one trillion citizens of the Assembly are preparing to celebrate the Incarnation.

The Assembly of Worlds now occupies a zone of space exceeding a hundred million cubic light-years; its farthest inhabited system toward the galactic edge is still Alahir with its single Made World, Farholme. Farholme retains the status that it had at its Seeding of being the farthest world, so that its thirty million inhabitants sometimes refer to their home, with a mixture of affection and gentle pride, as “Worlds’ End.” With the exception of its extreme position and low population, if there is a typical Made World (and only Ancient Earth is not a Made World), it is Farholme. Here the ancient, crater-pitted landscape vigorously erodes under the new regimes of water and oxygen. On it infant seas gnaw away at old impact scars, lava fields bubble and smoke sulkily as they cool under the novelty of rainstorms, barren dusty plains are slowly buried under the timorous advance of greenery, and rivers and sea and air currents are reluctantly coerced into stable and predictable courses.

But if the landscapes of the Assembly worlds remain restless this eve of the festival, its peoples, with their mutual tongue of Communal and their many dialects and historic languages, know only peace. It is, though, a peace of activity rather than a peace of rest. The Assembly is as vigorous as ever. There are always new worlds to be subdued and older ones to be stewarded. Nevertheless, this day—as every other day in the Lord’s Peace that has lasted over eleven thousand years—sees no wars or strife within the Assembly worlds. And as the banners of the Assembly are brought out and checked in readiness for their grateful unfurling on the Day of the Nativity, there seems no reason why the emblem of the Lamb Triumphant on the Field of Stars may not fly at peace over an ever larger Assembly for another eleven—or eleven hundred—millennia.

Hanging high over Farholme this day, as it has for three thousand years, is the gigantic, beacon-framed hexagon of the shielded Below-Space Gate, the only link to the other worlds of the Assembly. Two thousand kilometers away from it, a dozen shuttlecraft drift gently around the Gate Station as their cargo is unloaded from the latest inbound inter-system liner. And far below their activity, night sweeps silently westward across Farholme, and as it does, the lights of a hundred human settlements flicker on.

But ultimately the Assembly is not Gates and worlds, still less banners and emblems. It is people: men and women, flesh and blood, bodies and souls. And as planets swing in their orbits, as the fabric of space is pierced at the Gates, and as atoms are broken in the forges of rocket fires, down on the surface of Farholme, a lone figure rides a horse northward into the gathering twilight of a winter’s day.