But he did not rise to his feet. Those memories of birth and the nearness of his death, the shocks to his nervous system caused by the several mudra and mandalas erupting into his personal infosphere, all left him curled in a ball, the foetal position.

A series of spasms racked him as his nerve-muscle balances reestablished themselves, and he coughed and shrieked in pain as his breathing cycle restarted. The numbness in his arm was replaced by a painful sensation, as if lines of ants made of fire were crawling up and down the veins and arteries in his arm.

At last, he climbed to his hands and knees.

With the eyes in his head, he saw the legs and feet of the figure who had saved him. Vigil looked up. The downwash of the dying wheels as they swooped had flung the hood aside and the thrown long cloak open, revealing what was beneath. The creature looked like a naked man made of semitransparent gold, and the black iron of his bones shone through his skin.

The organism was more complex, and more horrible, than at first it seemed.

A central creature occupied the chest cavity. It looked something like an unborn babe, with a vast naked head pulsing with blue viens and tiny malformed body dangling beneath. Bundles of filaments issued from the empty eye sockets in the skull, and tubes into the mouth and nose-holes. The infantile body was held in a metallic frame of rib bones, swimming in gold fluid. Service jacks ran down the bent baby’s spine and wired him to the exoskeleton’s spine.

The skeleton stood on two jointed metallic legs and had two skeletal hands. Power nodes coated the metal bones like beads.

The whole of the exoskeleton was coated with a semifluid gold substance that gleamed like metal where it was still and rippled like oil at the joints when the figure moved. Armored plates, translucent as amber, clung to the surface of the golden, metallic fluid, but seemed to be a solid state of the same substance.

Vigil knew from his historical lore that this transparent gold substance was Aurum Potable, the Philosopher’s Stone. It was both cognitive matter and a mass of nanomechanical tools.

This gold outer flesh was naked except for a sword belt running from shoulder to hip, and a mask. The mask was angular metal, one of those children’s puppets whose face-elements could move to form simple expressions, raise or lower the metal eyebrows in a frown, twist the metal lips to form a smile or scowl. At the moment, the expression was cold and pitiless.

Receptors shaped like eyes pinned the hood in place at the shoulders, and other input sensors ran from eye to eye like a chain of office. Here also was a step-down transformer to allow the gold creature to communicate with the Firstling-inhabited formats of the Noösphere without overwhelming their channels.

Vigil, through the many points of view motes in the air fed into his brain, saw that the juggernaut behind him did not rise nor speak. Of course. Neither human nor Swan could give lawful commands to a juggernaut. Patricians could, but they would not, for they never interfered with human life, not even to save it, unless invited.

What was he? This man might be a Fox Maiden in disguise, but, then again, anyone might be a Fox Maiden in disguise. But an intuition from the Fox laughter which still echoed in his nervous system told him clearly that this was no Kitsune.

Who, then, outranked a Megalodon? Who outranked an armored cavalryman of the Third Humans? Who else but an officer?

The gold creature in the iron mask was a Myrmidon, a Third Human. Rather, it was the Myrmidon, the sole representative of the race of which Vigil had ever heard. To see such a thing was as odd as to see a pterodactyl.

4. The Ancient of Days

“You said you were coming to kill me,” said Vigil. It would have been wiser to wait until he was addressed to speak, for Myrmidons (so legend said) were notoriously punctilious, regarding even minor lapses of courtesy or small formatting errors as being mortal crimes. “What changed your mind?”

The voice was a surprisingly rich, smooth, and melodic baritone, odd to hear issuing from a horrific metal mask. “It is no concern of mine if lesser beings misunderstand the denotation of a statement. I said I must descend the Tower to perform some killings. So I have. I told you to set your affairs in order. I meant you to assign your office to an heir. This was because you were about to be ambushed. You failed to do so, requiring me to preserve you. This was inefficient. Arise and walk!”

Vigil climbed unsteadily to his feet. “Why are you helping me?”

“The Schedule dictates that great Emancipation decelerate and come to rest and Torment come to an end. I oppose those who oppose this fate.”

“You serve the Schedule?”

“I serve the highest master, who serves nothing. Like you, he has a retaliation to fulfill and a mate to win.”

“I owe no retaliation to any man.”

“To this world, then. Do not play word games with me!”

Vigil was aghast to find his secrets known to this creature. Perhaps the Myrmidon had sent some microbe into his nervous system and hacked open his encrypted thought. One of Vigil’s internals uneasily reminded him that legend spoke of Myrmidons not so much as conquering the omniscient Swans as merely sweeping them aside. “What retaliation is yours? Your wars are long forgotten. You are the last of your kind.”

“Retaliation against the universe, which denies my master his due dignity.”

“Who is the mate you say he seeks? Myrmidons do not mate! They possess neither sex organs nor sex roles.”

“Adam in Eden possessed no office related to sex ere Eve was cloned from his side. My master is greater than he. Cease your prattle. Walk! The Table awaits. Nay, did I say walk? Run! Even so it may be too late.”

“My garb is torn! Shall I appear before the Table of Stability also panting from a herky-jerky jog?”

But the other did not answer, except to raise his hand and twist his fingers into a mudra that Vigil did not recognize. The blur of dream filled his mind …

4

The Palace of Future History

1. The Door Wardens

The mudra controlling him must have been very precise, for by the time he blinked his vision clear, an energy like fire was rippling through his muscles, making his legs and arms pump and tremble, and he saw the statue of the Sphinx loom before him. He was not just jogging. His body, without his consent, was sprinting headlong down the street.

Vigil shouted the verbal formula for uttarabodhi, the Mudra of Best Perfection; but it was too late, for he gained control of his legs a moment after he slammed into the broad, pale flanks of the gynosphinx.

Vigil was jarred and shocked by the impact with the stone buttocks. In part because his momentum carried him forward, in part because his numb limbs still moved, he found himself scrambling up across her back and sliding down her spine and stumbling and falling over her winged shoulders and plunging between her huge stone breasts.

Between the forepaws of the giant stone monster, a small fountain of fragrant water played. Of course Vigil found himself face-first in the fluid, legs kicking and jerking as excess possession-energy departing from his body danced through his muscles.

He raised his head and looked around. Something had cut him off from the local channels, and so his visual information was only coming in from his biological eyes and from the ornaments on his coat. There was no sign of the Myrmidon.

The Palace of Future History loomed before him, the dark slabs and silver columns softened in their severity by septfoil floral bunting that ran from one caryatid to the next.

Four sentries in silver helmets and dark armor, armed with pacification wands and ceremonial swords, stood at the tall glass doors, looking on in wonder. Their surcoats were emblazed with the silver spinning wheel crossed by a black spindle and black sheers. This was the heraldry of the Loyal and Self-Correctional Order of Prognostic Actuarial Cliometric Stability.