Through the main square, called Herefolkfirstfell, he pressed and pushed his way. None paid heed to the tall Firstling in the dark long cloak and buglike mask who paced toward the Tower, hood pulled low.
A line of slowly moving celebrants wove like a serpent through the crowds. The dancers brandished fireworks and flares. The lead of the line was a giant dressed in silver, prancing on stiff elephantine legs, and strange, gold eyes filled with eerie wisdom. The giant led his dance line to the Observatory at the center of the city square and wove the line back and forward up the stair.
The Observatory doors clashed open. The scientists and acolytes came out to be met by cheers. The scientists fired harmless lasers in the air, and brushed the fumes of incense lingering there, and lit the square with lines of thin light.
The acolytes were dressed in masquerade as Powers, walking on stilts, surrounded by colored shadows taller than giants. Here was lordly Neptune, the friend of man, bearing a trident; here was warlike Cerulean of 82 Eridani tall blue helm frowning and fiery spear aloft, and a firework ignited at each step; many-colored Peacock of Delta Pavonis danced after, waving a thyrsus that dripped wafts of incense, adoring himself in his looking glass. Next came Immaculate of Altair, famed for prophecy and poetry, armed with a golden crossbow and carrying the Sacred Infant on his shoulder. After, cruelest Twelve of Tau Ceti, wearing a helmet of black glass moved silently, in one hand the divining rod, crawling with serpents, used to summon up souls, and in the other the clanking black bag of gold wherewith he bought them. Behind him was Vonrothbarth of 61 Cygni, in his eerie owl mask and peaked hat, brandishing the many-branching spear of history. Above the head of each of these huge heraldic puppets made of shadow hung a balloon image of the jovian or superjovian gas giant, swirled with cloud or bright with ice, which formed the real appearance of these brains larger than worlds.
Behind the Powers, moving with huge steps, came the walking statue of the Principality of Torment, dressed in welcome-robes of gold and green, gold for her endless cold deserts, green for her many crater lakes.
2. Fox Maidens
Vigil pushed toward the edges of the crowd, seeking a route. Nervously, he called on ghosts imbedded in nearby house stones, or floating as midges in the air nearby, and used their vision to look behind him, above, and to either side to see footfall patterns or “tells” of body language which might have indicated he was being followed. But no camera eyes, neither mites nor midges, gathered or peered at him, or at anyone in particular, aside from the gem-twinkling clouds that always followed pretty girls around, or gynomorphs of the Fourth Humans.
He saw a trio of these Kitsune (as the Fourthlings were properly called), incarnated in their base shapes as maidens, walking with mincing steps through the crowds, slender and graceful in clinging pink kimonos woven of their own silk, hair falling like fragrant cascades of dark red-gold hanging nearly to their ruby-crusted slippers. Their unearthly faces, large-eyed and high-cheeked and pointed of chin, were hidden beneath the wide crimson parasols called karakasa. The parasols were usually bellicose, their ribs tipped with stings, but now, instead of bellowing for underlings to make way for the Fourth People, the parasols bawled raucous songs.
Pearls of misty fire hung weightlessly above the Fox Maidens, half-unseen in the bright light shed from Wormwood, shedding benevolent influences on the crowd nearby, indications of long life, protection from mental lapses, or thought-forms of enlightenment and laughter.
The eerie thing about the Kitsune is that they seemed to be phantasms, despite that a greater volume of the Noösphere flowed around and through them than through any Firstling node.
Vigil’s goggles picked up no private information about them, not even a name or rank, nor—even though he saw them with him mortal eyes and local cameras—location and ranging information. As far as the Noösphere was concerned, the three maidens were not there, except on the visual level. Vigil had seen such things in dreams or heard of them from tutorials, but never seen the effect before. It was like seeing a girl with no reflection in mirror or a man with no shadow. Even eerier, he could not play the sensation of seeing them back in memory, not with any internal creature, or with any of the several appliances that were psychologically proximate to him in the Noösphere.
When Vigil tried to force the memory to surface using a mudra technique called jnana, the Gesture of Knowing, the nearest of the three Fox Maidens, whose pink kimono was decorated with a pattern of purple kudzu flowers and white rice stalks, raised her living parasol to reveal her piquant face and gave him a cryptic glance.
Her lids were half-lowered, with eyelashes thick and dark enough to hide from him the shock of eyesight no First Human could meet. Lady Kuzu-no-Ha half smiled at Vigil, inclined her head, turned, and glided away, while the single eye at the hub of her karakasa parasol glared over her shoulder at him balefully. Her two half-clone sisters, Lady Koi-no-Inari and Lady Tamamo-no-Mae, gave off little yips of silly laughter that sounded like barks, covering their red-lipped mouths with slender white hands, and hurried after her.
It was not until many moments later, after he had crossed to the far side of the square, that Vigil realized that he could not possibly know Lady Kuzu-no-Ha’s name. When he queried his internals frantically to trace the associational nerve-path of that memory back to its origin, his internal creatures responded with strange yapping giggles.
A few steps away were unlit houses with white seals upon their windows, doors, and ports. Unnerved, even frightened, by how casually a Fourth Human had been able, apparently as a jest, to penetrate his primary and secondary minds, Vigil took refuge in a deep doorway of one of these houses, putting his back to the sealed door.
It was a ghost house, marked to show the owners had been downloaded into the Noösphere, abandoning physical existence. There were a startling number of such houses here near the Observatory. The door was neutral on the signal channels, and no stray thoughts from the Noösphere would be able to pass through the house, if seeking an access channel to Vigil. He hoped the security protocols were relaxed sufficiently during the carnival to allow him to steal some unused channels from the house.
He set down the vendetta wand, assumed the lotus position. He raised both hands, crossed his wrists, and curled his fingers in the trailokyavijaya or Awe-Inspiring Mudra, which was also called the Apotropaic Imposition of Warding.
Vigil discovered no trace of the Fox Maiden meddling with his nervous system. The log check of buried memory and the security readings on nerve-path correlations both told him that the name Lady Kuzu-no-Ha was one he had made up himself, from his own imagination. But the logs smirked with suppressed laughter when they said it, so Vigil knew he was still snared in the Kitsune imposition. He could only hope it was a time in the Fox menstrual cycle when the maidens were inclined to benevolence. But since the cycles matched the rhythms of Eden, not any astronomical periods of the Iota Draconis system, how could anyone know?
He made the gesture for fearlessness and calmed his nerves by self-imposition. Mudras were not gentle things. Vigil’s mind cleared as if a bucket of ice water drenched him.
From his position in the doorway of the ghost house, Vigil saw an opportunity to learn the lay of the land. The ghost house was sufficiently impressed with his rank as a Lord of the Stability to allow him to use the horns on the roof to reach with his mind toward the Star-Tower itself, bypassing seven circles of ward and security.