In any work dealing with the black science of technology, how can the scrupulous author not but begin with its chiefest purveyor?
There are those who say the race known to us as the Vau is directly responsible for the darkening of the suns, and despite myself I cannot help but wonder at this rumor. For there can be no denying that where walk the Vau, the immanent faith of humanity ebbs. How, the doubters cry, can we bear to face such as these; how can we be aught but grik-slugs before them, shivering and shriveling in the cold yet blazing light of their supremacy? Yea, the Vau do not merely wrack our bodies with their demon-science; their very presence is an affront to our souls, our wills and our destiny.
I shrink not from the Vau; from their distended, wrinkled frames and vij-fruit pates; from their lacquered clothes and lacquered countenances; from their burning lances and chilling stares. They are not the Pancreator, to humble His chosen willy-nilly; they, like all creatures, have their function and ordained role. And I aver that the Vau were placed in our cosmic sphere by the Pancreator as a challenge and a riddle to be overcome. Just as the antiquated Urth tale of the Sphinx's riddle features the "insurpassable" conundrum which is in fact a mere statement of identity, so the Vau are the inscrutable chimeras placed before us to delude us, to plague us with self-doubt, in short, to test our resolve. Foolish the person who strives to emulate them, to fathom their errant ways; for by such trials does the Pancreator weed His true children from those whose souls are merest transient fireflies.
Few heretics are more dangerous than those apostates who would have us toady to and worship the Vau; who would cast our species' manifesto as cordwood upon an alien pyre. "The Vau are older than we," they shrill. "The Vau are the chosen," they hoot. "Gaze upon their technology, upon how they brush us aside like children. We must approach them humbly, as errant pupils to the teacher, so that we might learn from them, emulate them, and become old and wise as they have become old and wise."
Old and wise? We would become another G'nesh, merest gardeners to prune the Vau's kururu-trees and keep their paths free of debris. Certes I know of no other race with whom the Vau profess equality. Recall the words of the G'nesh, before our species' first fateful meeting: "It is not allowed." So, it would seem, do the Vau truck with all who cross their path.
Most humans, awed into quiescence by the Vau's puppetry and light-shows, accept their accompanying hauteur as irrefutable proof of superiority. I view it as weakness, or shame, or perhaps worse. Certes the Church of the Celestial Sun, confident in the correctness of its doctrine, does not hide its cathedrals and priesthoods away like Madocian fruj-toks cowering in their carapaces. Yea, like the gokk-lizard of Istakhr, the Vau puff and spit and spew their iridescent saliva, lest we march into their dens and discover that the display was merest bluff.
It is evident even to the densest bureaucrat that the Vau are ill at ease with the thought of Urthkind viewing their vaunted wonders. And so, having sought to cow us with a few pyrotechnic victories against conscripted levies on backwater planets, they mark an invisible line, like children playing hop-theej, daring neither to allow us into their realm nor to cross into ours. Nothing in the Pancreator's purview is that lassitudinous, save creatures paralyzed with doubts and fear.
Or is the riddle of the Vau perhaps a darker one? Do the unchanging visages of the Vau conceal, not weakness, but strength sent from the abyssal hells? Certes the Vau do not act as overtly malignant as, shall we say, the Symbiots (of whom I shall discourse later); but the demons of the wastes come in many guises and serve many purposes. Most of learning are aware that the primal source empowering the Vau's occult artifacts manifests as a sort of radiance, and yet the Vau are manifestly not servants of the Empyrean. From whence, then, do the Vau draw their cunning flames? It is a question several of Temple Avesti have posed in the halls of the monasteries, and though I am no devotee of crusades conceived in haste, I often find my thoughts wandering down the same road.
And in truth, if the Vau are so righteous as their demeanor indicates, why then have we not been allowed to parley with their leaders? Yea, we have seen their soldiers aplenty, and felt the sting of their demon-weapons; the Guilds deal through emissaries with their lower classes; and their "mandarin" caste agrees to sully its digits with us, using specially designated "quarantine" worlds for the purpose. But what do all these blinds screen? It is a widely known secret, if I may use the expression, that the mandarins are but the merest figureheads for echelons of administrators as yet unknown to us. Perhaps, just as the Vau employ members of less advanced races as their helots, so the Vau themselves are but tools in the talons of incomprehensible powers.
I have claimed that the Vau prefer to hole themselves away from such as we, but this is not entirely so. Recently, Church agents among the Guilds have informed us of a clandestine trade whose participants are as dubious as its nature. In a gesture completely at odds with the customary policy of the Vau, certain devious (or perhaps deviant) low-caste members of the breed have entered into traffick with their noxious counterparts among the Guilders, and thereby have allowed to trickle into our realms certain relics of their infernal science, in exchange for equivalent items of Guild-craft. This trade is apparently conducted surreptitiously, on neutral worlds and always through intermediaries, and thus one is led to surmise that the Vau mandarins would not look kindly on such mercantilism.
Or is this, too, merely what they would have us think? Is the whole interdiction but another ruse, another Vau blind to make us crave their wares all the more, just as a noble brat most desires the sweetmeat her nurse has forbidden her? Who can read the Vau's nearly featureless visages, or garner meaning from those placidly staring eyes?
Wicked or weak, or perhaps both? I do not profess to understand the Vau. I do, however, understand what needs to be done. In this age of sorrow and war, when foes shamble from the stars to batten on the weakened nations, we of Terra cannot afford to let the Vau squat on our borders as they have for millennia, weaving their snares unseen just beyond the jumpgate's reach. We must address the Vau not from humility, but from strength, and bid them come to terms, our terms, the terms of the Church of the Celestial Sun.
But now, it seems, having solved half the riddle of the Vau, humanity has ceased to struggle with the rest. Now we maintain a truce, or at least a stalemate: an invisible demarcation line with the Unknown. I vow that naught but ill can come of this, and exhort my secular brethren to settle the question of succession all the more swiftly, the better that we can scrutinize this lurker without, and, should it prove cancerous, excise it from the Pancreator's demesne.
