To this dim world, where now we dwell!

Myriads were changed and slain

So that we few might here remain!

Myriads we changed and slew

We still remain alive, we few!

The two beyond the door now stirred. The first, a woman in boots (or so Vigil guessed based on the length and rhythm of her gait) walked rapidly toward the chamber door. The second was barefoot, and his footsteps were something longer than a man’s. He walked by putting his toes down first and then his heel. He was a Swan, or someone in a cygnean body.

The superior creature stalked after the woman many strides, but then froze in place when the Swan music played. Perhaps he was as astonished as Vigil that two Swans could be found in the same place in the same year. The woman was at the door while the Swan still lingered.

A humming note, louder than thunder, rolled through the chamber and drew the spirit of Vigil back into the room. From high above came the shivering murmur of the gong, ten thousand acres wide, named Great Patrick. It hung from the mighty edifice of the Star-Tower, greatest of the works of man on Torment. This tower was a length of black material not found in nature, gemmed with portholes and silver embrasures, running from submantle to superstratosphere. Nothing but a discharge of the battery artillery posted at the thirty-thousand-foot emplacement balcony could set the huge gong ringing.

In answer to Great Patrick’s voice, loudly came the clamor of timbrels, or, from the serfs, the banging of kettles and pans, all beaten in time to the refrain. Also came the clang of hoplons, clashed by enthusiastic Helots and by the remote-controlled gauntlets of distant Megalodons, the sole remnants of the once-great Third Humanity. Their words were harsh.

Because the lowest part of the window was high overhead, and all his exterior cameras blind, Vigil could see nothing but the newly risen Wormwood, a few high kites (aloft on artificial winds) holding antennae, and the vast uprearing bulk of the Star-Tower, huge and dark as a pillar holding up the sky. The lights at thirty thousand feet were lit, which apartments formed the fortress of the Terraformer, and, higher, at sixty thousand, the Megalodons, a form of Third Humans who had abandoned human flesh altogether, were docked, and the quays ablaze with festive lights.

Yet even these strange, reticent, and primordial beings were singing.

Lest Ancient Starships may forget

Our Lighthouse lanterns burn here yet!

Faithfully we set them burn

That Ancient Starships shall return!

Tempted thou to pass us by

Shall not outrace the lighthouse eye!

The True Myrmidons were as long vanished as the Elder Humans, but the races they created in their own image, the Helots and Megalodons, kept alive their forefathers’ inabilities. “Despite twenty-one millennia of trying,” said Vigil softly to one of his internal creatures, “the Fox Maidens have not restored a sense of rhythm to the children of Myrmidons.”

Vigil, through the chamber ghost within him, felt the finger of the woman at the door touch the printlock, and the lamp welcome lit; but because the door was sleeping, the bar would not draw back. She touched the lock again and again, and the welcome lantern flickered. Vigil asked the chamber ghost what woman had free passage of the Stranger House or in the city could walk chaperoned only by a Swan? Who was she, allowed to pass a door only the Strangerfolk’s highest officers could pass?

There was no answer. At minimum power, the ghost was sluggish, indistinct.

Vigil asked to see the fingerprint match. The ghost did not answer in words, but a wash of dark emotion, grief, and regret passed through Vigil’s reticular complex in his midbrain, eerie and unexpected as the wail of a mourner above a coffin whose readout lights at once go black.

The mystery was driven from his mind as he looked to the windows, allured by a new sound. The lutes of the Fox Maidens, the Fourth Humanity (long ago extinct on worlds lit by Sol, but here, beneath Eldsich, still thriving), now caressed the air like rippling metallic grass, and bright finger cymbals clashed, and the theme turned to playful notes, if perhaps ironic.

The soaring soprano beauty of the vixen voices enraptured Vigil so that his fingers nearly reached toward the memory wand to replay the words. But one of his internals, a sexless one, had been listening and brought it to his mind. This was no traditional part of the rhyme. It was some impromptu doggerel:

Deploy thy sail, ship! Show thy stern!

Commence deceleration burn!

In pain we who remain will learn,

How goes it when old ships return!

Vigil had that same eunuch internal thrust the alluring mesmerism of the song—negligently near to a nerve-mandala in its composition—out of his short-term memory so he could concentrate.

The lamp of welcome was still flickering. The woman in boots, whoever she was, was desperate enough to get in that she allowed decorum to slip. The Swan on his long steps had joined her. From the position of their feet, Vigil felt they were facing each other, no doubt deep in talk. Now he cursed the precision of his ancestors. Why build a door inside a dwelling under a global atmosphere rigidly as an airlock? Why depend on microphones?

His fear had ebbed, leaving behind only curiosity. Assassins? Unlikely. One was a Swan; the other, a woman. They did not do such dark crimes, not these days.

Swans did not deign to kill men singly but by tribes and phylum, by continents and worlds, and they did not use hands to do it, or any weapons men could see with eyes.

As for the other, since the return of Rania, too much respect was paid to the dignity of women of the First Humanity to equip them with onboard biological and psychological weapon systems. A woman could, perhaps, carry an energy weapon in her hand like some comical figure from the remote past, or a chemical-discharge weapon, or a sharp object, but surely any girl bent on assassination would don the body of a Hormagaunt to do the deed.

2. Song of the Fifth Humanity

His thought was interrupted. Now came such a detonation of ascending notes as made him clutch his ears and turn. The wand dropped from his hands, cutting him off from the chamber ghost and returning him to the limits of his own skin.

No instrument less noble than the harp was fit for the hands of the Patricians, the Fifth Humans. Something of the haunting terror and glamour of the antique vampire-kings of their wild and remote ancestry still clung to their bass voices. Their song issued from the lower windows of the Star-Tower, nor was amplification unlawful to them.

Perhaps it should have been. Vigil imagined he saw membranes in the Star-Tower heights throbbing with the ear-defeating noise. Such is the pride of Patricians: the high born strove to ignite their songs louder than Megalodons, even as they reached in vain to weave the glittering harmonies to match the beauty of the Foxes. The upper dome of the midnight sky was an artillery barrage of song.

Gods beneath whose stars we cower

Principality, Potentate, and Power

All bow, and yet await our hour.

All recall, and none shall fail

Nor the despair of entropy prevail

Not while lamp burns, nor ship raise sail!

Ancient Starships ply the stars

Which are not now but shall be ours!

The Patricians left all men to their own devices, save only what interfered with the basic cliometric assumptions of the planned future. Violence was allowed if it was discreet, for the death of one man or another would not deflect the torrent of history; theft, if it was not so rampant as to disrupt trade; adultery, if it did not bring marriage into public contempt; and so on.