These wands were older still, from before the days when Torment woke to self-awareness as a Potentate and suffered the tortures from which the world took its name. These wands were old when the Expulsion fared from the hell called the World of Willows and Flowers, where plants lured the unwary into their vines and throats with hypnotic songs and nerve-indication perfumes, the only peoples who ever rejoiced to behold the arid, earthquake-torn and cratered landscape of Torment, blissfully free of lurid plant life and the false lure of immortality. The world before then had been called by another name, one forgotten save only by Swans, scholars, and poets.

Such wands had been commissioned in the Sixty-Ninth Millennium, as exemplars of the new technologies retrieved from M3 by the Swan Princess, Rania, on the occasion of her marriage to the Master of the Empyrean, Ximen del Azarchel the First, called Ximen the Black. That same year saw the spread of the New History begin from Sol, reaching slowly outward toward the colony stars.

An antiquarian, Vigil knew the meaning of the pattern of gems jacketing the wands and saw which one would summon energy, or thought, or memory, or vengeance.

He went to the jasper-decorated thinking wand, and took it in his hand, and felt the chamber ghost possess him, and the Stranger House became his skin to him.

The ghost slept. Municipal power was cut. External cameras were blind. The chamber door hinges still were awake, but Vigil did not open the door. In the corridor beyond, like insects crawling on his skin, his carpet could feel two sets of footsteps approaching; and no heraldry was revealed, no names given.

The Stranger House was bisected by the city wall so that one portal opened onto the crooked streets of the Landing City and the opposite portal opened directly onto the sands outside. There was no suburb, were no outbuildings. The two were coming down that passage from that outer portal, from the unwatched wilderness.

Assassins? A natural thought. A blind house whose ghost slept was fit for dark deeds. Alarmed, Vigil looked up, seeking escape. He was young and fit; it would be easy to vault to those high and narrow windows. He flourished the thinking wand. Those windows that were part of him that, like a man who yawns, Vigil now opened wide, admitting air, which, strangely, still smelled of night.

Through the tall, now-open slits along the wall high above came roars.

(This was a sign of how old the Stranger House must be. Such airtight, perfect seals on portal and pane betrayed that Starfarers built this place, with precision modern mortals could not match.)

For a space of time less than it needed for a thought to reach Bloodroot and touch the Archangel of the Library there, Vigil stood appalled. He wondered if a mob had come to pierce his flesh with darts and bury him alive, a form of execution still called airlocking even though it was cold soil, not argent hull, which cut the victim off from air.

Without his knowing it, his hands had plucked up the power wand and screwed its head into the heel of the thinking wand, making a long, tingling staff, half onyx and jasper half Vigil felt ashamed at his own fear, which evidently had allowed certain of the intellectual creatures living in his lower nervous system to escape their discipline and act, in this case wisely, but without instructions. And why had not his hands sought the vendetta wand, for use against this angry riot?

But, no, not anger. The return signal from the Archangel of Bloodroot induced him to take a calming breath, to restore fatigued connections in the thalamus and hypothalamus of his brain. It focused his auditory sense and cleared his head with a jolt of surprise sharper than any smelling salts.

Bloodroot was a ghost world orbiting Wormwood inferior to Torment, appearing only as a morning or evening crescent. Here an earlier migration of Strangers, millennia ago, had abandoned their botched attempt at terraforming, leaving blind, weeping, and windowless mansions behind, but the library there remained loyal to Vigil’s people and aided them with sage counsel or, as now, insights as sudden as a dash of cold water.

As if with keener ear or wit, now he heard the roars were roars of gladness, not unmixed with song. He heard the trumpet, timbrel, flute and lute and harp, as if all five humanities were playing, and the tumult of vast laughter common to them all.

He felt the footsteps in the corridor outside pause and halt. The two who approached him perhaps were startled by the sudden ingress of sound.

He recognized from the sustained sound of the trumpet notes that these were wielded by the hominids and whales of the First Humanity, both land-going and lake-dwelling. Naturally, the whales could hold their notes longer, and the thunder of cornets rising from cetacean blowholes emerged from the lakeshore and walked across the night sky.

The Lighthouse Crew recalled the day!

The Braking Laser burns! Hurray!

Vigil wondered why archaic turns of phrase would linger in children’s rhymes longer than in nobler poems. What, for example, was an hurray?

But he found himself first grinning, and then laughing, as the clamor of his internal creatures, their mirth, rippled through his internal dialogue matrix and overflowed into his spirit.

Many generations his fathers had kept watch. For this purpose he was born, for this duty he was named. He threw back his head in exaltation, raising his hands on high in triumph, and sang the words the other Firstlings sang, as was his right, and joy. Intuitively, he knew what it was to say hurray!

Ancient Starships, hear our cries!

Descend from upper, outer skies!

Do you copy? Please reply!

We beg you not to pass us by!

Of old our fathers bold did learn,

That Ancient Starships shall return!

From beyond the windows, more roars came, and clamor, a harmony of noise. A choir of ghosts sang out from statues in the several walled squares and great houses of the Landing City. Vigil felt the chamber ghost join in, yodeling with more gusto than skill through the lares and gargoyles adorning the outer façade of the Stranger House. And perhaps he joined his voice as well, for he was often more at home in the Noösphere of memory and old lore than in the biosphere of life and current time. The ghosts sang this:

Long eons passed; we steadfast stayed,

Changeless, ageless, undismayed

Our duties shall not pass away

The hour is come, we mark the day

True shall we stay as suns grow cold

As ever as we were of old.

We do not live, but shall not fail

Nor entropy, our foe, prevail

Lest ever from our oaths we turn

Ancient Starships shall return

The silvery flute of an Eremite of the Swans trilled in shrill reply, joyous despite the mournful harmony which hung beneath all the music of the Second Humanity.

The flute penetrated the noise of the crowd, astonishingly loud, and the crowd laughed, and Vigil smiled, too, when he realized what he was hearing. It was not electronic amplification—that would have been a violation of the strictures Sacerdotes placed on any Swans sojourning among the primate or cetacean first race of man—but the Eremite had won or seduced from some cunning Fox Maiden a wedge of echoing songbirds, who repeated the flute song note for note as they winged overhead.

The Eremite, in a voice of gold, echoed by his imitative avian flock, sang a counterrefrain that was usually forgotten.

In myriads our fathers fell

From Eden fair, bade faretheewell

Our heaven lost, to reign in hell