Vigil said, “How can I be a trespasser when I am commanded by summons to appear? It cannot be unlawful for me to be here when it is unlawful for me to fail to come.”

The seneschal said, “There is an antechamber where ambiguous cases can be confined, until I can consult with my superiors—”

“Superiors seated even now at the Table of Stability, where you must seat me? Your plan is to delay until after the vote to discover whether I may be present to vote? What criminal nonsense is this?” Vigil roared.

He had powerful lungs. The seneschal flinched and stepped back, his absurdly tall shoes clattering.

Vigil stepped forward and lowered his voice, speaking in a tone that was soft but could be clearly heard. “Were you also ordered to obstruct my path like those bravos I slew outside your doors? I will work a vengeance on you, and on him in whose name you act, if I find…”

The reaction was astonishing. The seneschal backed away and fell to the ground, crouching like an improperly elevated dog Moreau on hands and knees, and banging his head to the ground. His tall, conical hat, taken by surprise, rolled a foot away from this head across the floor, before it recovered its wits, righted itself, and scurried back to replace itself fastidiously on the man’s balding crown.

The sight of the man kneeling so surprised him that Vigil was without speech. Vigil raised his hands, tempted to perform that august and sometimes dangerous mudra called vajramudra, the Fist of Knowledge, which compelled any nearby systems to render up their information and which cleared the mind of delusion and narcotic. He fought back the temptation with an internal creature, telling himself he was awake and in his right wits. But what did it mean?

Another internal reminded him of what the Third Human had said—But I, like you, have a retaliation to fulfill. Why had he spoken of fulfilling a retaliation? Surely it was more natural to speak of committing retaliation, or exacting, or executing. The word fulfillment was usually used for ritual obligations, or primal appetites, or dooms long predicted.

And the Thirdling had chided Vigil for not attending to the nuances of words. It was commonly known that posthumans spoke in riddles because to speak literally and clearly occupied too many seconds of their high-speed minds. But what was the meaning of this clue?

Without turning his head, Vigil had his internals pull in images from camera spots in the corridors and walls, so he could see the door sentries behind him. They also had reacted with exaggerated gesture at the mention of retaliation. Each one had sunk to one knee and hidden his face behind hand or elbow, as if in grief or awe. What the gesture implied Vigil did not know. But the gesture of kneeling was not a spaceman’s gesture. Kneeling was not something done in zero gee. The Pilgrims did not evolve it aboard the Pilgrimage.

Pilgrims had formalities from a tradition different from the Strangers, dating back to the Loricate race of the Feast of Stephen of the star Vindemiatrix. This kindly planet ironically had been colonized from the cruel merchant-czars of the ice planet Yule in the Tau Ceti system. The Cetians were a peculiar people, who always terraformed their worlds to keep a median temperature below freezing, in order, so tradition ran, to keep bugs and nanomachines in torpor on the surface of any world. The Yule predominantly were Firstlings called Hibernals, who came from Mars, a planet so old that there was no thought-records of a time before it was terraformed. Many scholars held it to be the original home of man, not Eden, as tradition claimed. Hence Pilgrim gestures tended to be rigid, stiff, formulaic.

But this hiding of the eyes was something more primal: it spoke of something ancient, of weapons older than mudra, older than disease. It was a gesture to ward off the deadly shekinah of atomic or coherent-light weapons that could blind the non-Patrician eye.

Sacerdotes never bowed so low, nor hid their eyes in their elbows, and their traditions were older than mind-recordings in the most ancient archives, and some said, older than the printing press, which had been invented on the planet Splendor of Delta Pavonis.

Vigil concluded that this gesture came from the somatic tradition of Eden, the home of Man, since it clearly was a gesture that would never develop during shipborne evolution. This meant that it was a gesture peculiar to the Order of Stability Lords.

But, if so, it was part of the tradition his father had kept from him, or had not known to pass along. That implied an interruption of transmissions from the older generations: there was no more fearsome crime among the First Human Race than for one faction, or order, or nation, or race to redact the past of another, or interfere with their memory.

What had his father not told him?

His battle internal noted that everyone in arm’s reach was hiding their eyes or exposing the backs of their necks. Better yet, no one was in a good position to block his path down the corridor leading to the interior of the Palace of Future History.

Vigil turned sideways, sidled past the seneschal, and walked briskly down the hall, then trotted, and then started running, before anyone could put out a hand to halt him. Over his shoulder, he called as he sped ever more quickly, “Sentries, as you were! Return to your posts! Well done! I will commend you to your superiors for your zeal and precision in the execution of your duties!”

Away he fled.

3. The Mandala of the Hermetic Door

It took a long moment for the seneschal to struggle to his feet, and, tottering on his tall shoes, to come trotting after him, trying to keep up. The distance between them increased as Vigil ran lightly past the bemused siren. The seneschal was puffing and blowing, unable to draw breath to speak, signaling via an internal creature-to-creature envoy, but Vigil’s internals recoiled wryly and did not answer the signal.

At the end of the far corridor was a vestry booth, with racks for air-lances and armor and trees for shoes and helmets, as well as ceremonial valves and fonts for functions no longer performed, but which mocked long-forgotten airlock procedures. Three steps beyond the booth loomed the azure-and-black doors leading into the six-sided Presence Chamber, flanked to either side by golden pillars.

He knew from his father’s instructions that there were twelve doors leading into the chamber from twelve different anterooms, each with its own set of apartments, archives ceremonies, life support, scents, and musical score.

Somewhere behind the walls nearby, from six other directions, other doors of other hues and heraldries hung under other mandalas admitted the Six Speaking Lords of the Table of Stability: the Aedile, the Chronometrician, the Chrematist, the Lighthousekeeper, the Portreeve, and the Theosophist. And each had his Companions or Attendants who entered with him.

Interspersed were five further doors, slightly smaller in dignity, for the Commensal Lords, also called the Silent Lords, who could not speak until addressed: the Castigator, the Vatic Essomenic Officer, the Onomastician, the Anthroponomist, the Terraformer.

His door here was one of those of second dignity. It was inscribed with a winged globe, two apple trees guarded by dragons, and the image of Icarus. This was the door reserved for the use of his office, the Darwinian Corrective Officer, also called by its ancient title, the Hermeticist. His position was that of a Commensal, a member who could only speak when called upon.

Vigil made the mistake, as he ran toward the door, of looking up to admire the nocturnal ebony and celestial silver ornaments of the architrave and doorposts. Unfortunately, above the door, half-hidden in a set of eye-dazzling mirrors and lenses lodged between capitals of the pillars, stood an ancient mandala. No mere heirloom, this: it was fully charged and correctly established, and the image jumped into his eyes like the gaze of a basilisk.