I have been to the City of Reason, and there is no place there for Men.

So spake Elgani Bariarch, Viridian poet and statesman, after his famous tour of the Galactic Core. His speech and later writings tapped into a growing sentiment that the Parliament of Worlds, with its emphasis on the commonality of sentient minds, was incompatible with the richness and diversity of Viridian culture (remarkable even among other Old Worlds of Mankind). Almnetic Decay, he claimed (though without much in the way of evidence), was a model of the fate reserved for all societies which sought unity above identity.

Bariarch engaged in a series of widely-viewed debates with Praetor Valcosa, the parliamentary administrator for the region, who argued that “Viridia is a textbook example of a pre-crisis apex civilization with acyclic tendencies. Proper external control during this sensitive time is essential if its social trajectory is to avoid any of several looming terminal or quasiterminal attractors.”

Valcosa’s rhetoric failed to capture the public imagination, and, led by Bariarch’s movement, Viridia was duly recognized as a Sovereign Star.

—Heichner Kzolknov