He focused the entire intensity of his being on the Upper World, casting his soul skyward into the dark terrible gulfs between the galaxies. It was a willed feat of the imagination for him: with conscious effort he pictured himself roving the stars, a disembodied attenuated intelligence gliding like a bright needle through the black airless infinities.
The Warder often felt as though there once had been a time when making that leap had not required an effort of wilclass="underline" that in the days when he was new to his priestly office he had simply stepped forth and looked upward, and everything else had followed as a matter of course. The light of the Pole Star had penetrated his soul and he had gone out easily, effortlessly, on a direct course toward the star of the Three. Was it so? He couldn’t remember. He had been Warder for so long. He had performed the evening invocation some ten thousand times at least. Everything was formula and rote by now. It was difficult now to believe that his mind had ever been capable of ascending in one joyous bound into those blazing depths of endless night, or that he had ever seriously thought that looking at the stars and dumping good wine into a stone channel might have some real and undeniable redemptive power. The best he could hope for these days was some flicker—some quivering little stab—of the old ecstasy, while he stood each night beneath the heavens in all their glory. And even that flicker, that tiny stab, was suspect, a probable counterfeit, an act of willful self-delusion.
The stars were beautiful, at any rate. He was grateful for that one blessing. His faith in the literal existence of the Visitants and their onetime presence on the Earth might be gone, but not his awareness of the immensity of the universe, the smallness of Man, the majesty of the great vault of night.
Standing poised and steady, head thrust back, face turned toward the heavens, he began to swing the thurible, sending a cloud of pungent incense swirling into the sky. He elevated the sleek green porcelain vessel, offering it to the three cardinal points, east and west and zenith. The reflexes of his professionalism had hold of him now: he was fully into the ceremony, as deeply as his skepticism would allow him ever to get. In the grasp of the moment he would let no doubts intrude. They would come back to him quickly enough, just afterward.
Solemnly now he spoke the Holy Names:
“Oberith … Aulimiath … Vonubius.”
He allowed himself to believe that he had made contact.
He summoned up the image of the Three before him, the angular alien figures shimmering with spectral light. He told them, as he had told them so many times before, how grateful the world was for all that they had done for the people of Earth long ago, and how eager Earth was for their swift return from their present sojourn in the distant heavens.
For the moment the Warder’s mind actually did seem free of all questions of belief and unbelief. Had the Three in fact existed? Had they truly come to Earth in its time of need? Did they rise up to the stars again in a fiery chariot when their work was done, vowing to return some day and gather up all the peoples of the world in their great benevolence? The Warder had no idea. When he was young he believed every word of the Scriptures, like everyone else; then, he was not sure exactly when, he stopped believing. But that made no conspicuous difference to the daily conduct of his life. He was the Warder of the high temple; he had certain functions to perform; he was a servant of the people. That was all that mattered.
The ritual was the same every evening. According to generally accepted belief it hadn’t changed in thousands of years, going back to the very night of the Visitants’ departure from Earth, though the Warder was privately skeptical of that, as he was of so many other matters. Things change with time; distortions enter any system of belief; of that he was certain. Even so, he outwardly maintained the fiction that there had been no alterations in any aspect of the liturgy, because he was aware that the people preferred to think that that was the case. The people were profoundly conservative in their ways; and he was here to serve the people. That was the family tradition: we are Warders, and that means we serve.
The invocation was at its climax, the moment of the offering. Softly the Warder spoke the prayer of the Second Advent, the point of the entire exercise, expressing the hope that the Three would not long delay their return to the world. The words rolled from him quickly, perfunctorily, as though they were syllables in some lost language, holding no meaning for him. Then he called the Names a second time, with the same theatrical solemnity as before. He lifted the porcelain vessel high, inverted it, and allowed the golden wine that it contained to pour into the stone channel that ran down the hill toward the temple pond. That was the last of it, the finale of the rite. Behind him, at that moment, the temple’s hydraulus-player, a thin hatchet-faced man sitting patiently in the darkness beside the stream, struck from his instrument the three great thunderous chords that concluded the service.
At this point any worshipers who had happened to have remained at the temple this late would have fallen to their knees and cried out in joy and hope while making the sign of the Second Advent. But there were no worshipers on hand this evening, only a few members of the temple staff, who, like the Warder, were going about the business of shutting the place down for the night. In the moment of the breaking of the contact the Warder stood by himself, very much conscious of the solitude of his spirit and the futility of his profession as he felt the crashing wave of his unbelief come sweeping back in upon him. The pain lasted only an instant; and then he was himself again.
Out of the shadows then came Mericalis once more, broad-shouldered, insistent, rising before the Warder like a specter he had conjured up himself.
“You’re done? Ready to go?”
The Warder glared at him. “Why are you in such a hurry? Do you mind if I put the sacred implements away first?”
“Go right ahead,” the custodian said, shrugging. “Take all the time you want, Diriente.” There was an unfamiliar edge on his voice.
The Warder chose to ignore it. He re-entered the temple and placed the thurible and the porcelain wine-vessel in their niche just within the door. He closed the wrought-iron grillwork cover of the niche and locked it, and quickly muttered the prayer that ended his day’s duties. He put aside his tall hat and hung his cassock on its peg. Underneath it he wore a simple linen surplice, belted with a worn strip of leather.
He stepped back outside. The members of the temple staff were drifting off into the night, heading down by torchlight to their cottages along the temple’s northern side. Their laughter rose on the soft air. The Warder envied them their youth, their gaiety, their assurance that the world was as they thought it was.
Mericalis, still waiting for him beside a flowering bayerno bush just below the thick marble rim of the portico, beckoned to him.
“Where are we going?” The Warder asked, as they set out briskly together across the lawn.
“You’ll see.”
“You’re being very damned mysterious.”
“Yes. I suppose I am.”
Mericalis was leading him around the temple’s northwestern corner to the back of the building, where the rough road began that by a series of steep switchbacks ascended the face of the hill against which the temple had been built. He carried a small automatic torch, a mere wand of amber light. On this moonless evening the torch seemed more powerful than it really was.