What ship did not promise wealth, new technologies, new mudras, and new gene lines to its host world? And were it not for the Stability Lords, how many ships would have kept that promise?

Opposite the Observatory rose the massive black façade of the Second Landing Hall. Above the hall, in letters of eternal flame, which no man living now knew how to make, burned the Schedule of Launchings and Arrivals. For 6,600 years, the unchanging Schedule had hung there, lit with curving lines of light, and bright with images of stars in the Local Interstellar Cloud.

One shining line showed the promised orbit of the Emancipation. From Sol to 70 Ophiuchito 41 Arae to Xi Boötis to Arcturus the wandering path reached. Eight hundred years ago, the Emancipation had departed the solitary planet Nightspore, home of Vigil’s ancestors, and spread her sails to catch the beams of light from Arcturus to carry her to waiting Iota Draconis.

The dancers circling the statue raised their voices in a song. The crowds, all swaying, sang as well, a great hushed roar of words. Let memories of Earth endure, nor ever be forgot! Stable Lords will keep the signals sure, and all recall what we shall not …

Earth was the poetic name for Eden. Two hundred Edenyear ago, which was but one year of Wormwood’s long circuit around Iota Draconis, the Stranger had soared on wide-flung sails from Torment to Sciritaea of 55 Rho Cancri. Cousins of his, relations whose names he would never know, had been born and died aboard that vessel. The Schedule promised that the Stranger was now somewhere between Sciritaea and Eurotas of 107 Piscium, having departed Sciritaea some fifty years ago.

Vigil’s eye was drawn against his will to another line of light eternally burning on the Schedule: the orbit of the Argosy. This mad ship was due in the same generation as the Emancipation, a rare double-starfall, only a few decades hence.

In the square crowds all laughed and called. The dancers threw their baskets in the air. Coins and sweets and tiny singing gifts rained down through the cheering crowd, which knew not how false their hopes had grown.

Normally, it was as unwise to use mudras against oneself as it was for a surgeon to operate on himself. Nonetheless, Vigil bent his wrist in the Gesture Beyond Misery, buddhashramana. This restored his internal balance between his core thoughts, his internals, and his external channels. Next, he made the Gesture of Understanding, cincihna, where the thumb and index finger make a circle as if to grasp an object as fine and small as a grain of truth. The flux of reaction energy separated Vigil’s fear away from his main nerve paths for later assimilation.

He would be afraid later. Now he would fight.

Picking up the wand of vengeance and coming lightly to his feet, Vigil Lord Hermeticist released the chemical combinations in his bloodstream and muscles to prepare for battle.

He threw the useless mantle aside and turned on his heraldry. The crowd, despite the noise and informality of the celebrations, parted before him, and men bowed, and women curtseyed, and Fox Maidens laughed, and dogs held their paws before their eyes as if unworthy to look on him.

And everyone got out of his way.

Whistling cheerfully, twirling the deadly wand in his hand, the young Star Lord made an affable gesture to the crowd and disappeared into the many-shadowed high-walled avenue where enemies watched.

Behind him, someone shouted out, “Hurrah for the Lords that vow and recall! The Ancient Ship makes planetfall! Treasures and pleasures for us all!”

Cheers rose up. The men threw their hats in the air, and three Fox Maidens threw their three heads in the air, red mouths shrieking gaily, their long red hair streaming like comet tails.

3

The Street Which Sneaks Up On the Sphinx

1. The Soulless Ones

Vigil spread his awareness like a widening bubble, peering in every direction around him, overhead and underfoot, using his internals to notice any clues his conscious mind missed. He was amazed at the density and clarity of the images, sounds, and sensations that poured into his brain from ten thousand points of view.

In the parish called Bitter Waters in the Northwestern Hemisphere, in a land of sand dunes, swales of igneous ejecta and burned glass circling a great and lifeless crater lake, was the reservation where the Strangers had been forced to dwell after the Pilgrims overthrew them. Lesser lakes surrounded it like a pattern of birdshot against a target. There, the ratio of cognitive matter to sleeping matter or dead matter was low. There was not even one gram of self-aware logic crystal for every cubic mile of desert wasteland, and hardly one sand particle in five had memory and sensory capacity. Very little programmable matter had been used for the terraforming or pantropic efforts in this parish of dead saltwater crater lakes. Most of the sand there, oddly enough, was not dead matter that had died; it was dead matter that had never been alive. The sand dunes were simply the relics of rock that weathering had scoured into grains, and were not man-made.

Aboard the great cylindrical world of the Stranger, with canals and rice paddies overhead and stars underfoot, every object, even the smallest, was friendly and helpful. It was odd, even crippling, to any Stranger who, due to frequent slumber, was old enough to recall such a shipboard life now to live among cacti that did not speak and rock and sand that stubbornly refused any commands. On the reservation, ghosts were rare, and ancestor worship had fallen into disuse. The libraries were organized according to the racial memory formats of the Pilgrim race, so no one recalled things in the order he expected, and no one found his old thoughts precisely where he had left them.

Vigil had known no other land in his natural memory as he grew. To him, the living and talking world of the Pilgrims was the oddity.

Torment had been colonized by humans for only five thousand years, and by machines six thousand, and therefore was very young. Microscopic machine life had not had the chance to grow and coat every crater and crater lake. The winters were too harsh and the electronic conditions of the atmosphere not favorable. So the Noösphere was thin and patchy across the face of Torment, and in certain areas of the map, the Noösphere was dark, and in others, dead.

Here in the capital, in the Southwestern Hemisphere, all was different. All the matter which was not sophont, part of the thinking mind of the Principality of Torment, was sensible, and could perform simple functions of scanning the environment, taking messages, doing first order calculations, augmenting mental facilities. In this city, the number of internals Vigil could maintain was nearly double what he could among the metallic tents and walking tabernacles of his people.

Even motes in the air too small to be seen were part of the Noösphere. Therefore, his eyesight penetrated more deeply.

The ambushers were hidden cleverly. There were four of them.

The first man had disconnected his various bodily parts on the physical level, and scattered them and the bits of his weapon in a semirandom camouflage dispersion in various places in the alley. One foot was in the rain gutter, one finger in an external thought socket, and his head in a medical slops can next to an eyeless push broom which happened to have a sword blade inside, with a nanomechanically active edge along one side. Vigil noticed the dispersed man because the information shadows in the upper levels of the Noösphere did not match the information densities for the various objects his parts were hiding under. The broom was too quiet to be a broom, for example, since most of them maintained navigation maps and definitions of clean and dirty, and monitored the environment for litter. And the slops can was whispering too frequently, gathering tactical motion information from electronic microbes in the dust in the air, information a slops can would not use.