Through the tall, now-open slits along the wall high above came roars.
(This was a sign of how old the Stranger House must be. Such airtight, perfect seals on portal and pane betrayed that Starfarers built this place, with precision modern mortals could not match.)
For a space of time less than it needed for a thought to reach Bloodroot and touch the Archangel of the Library there, Vigil stood appalled. He wondered if a mob had come to pierce his flesh with darts and bury him alive, a form of execution still called airlocking even though it was cold soil, not argent hull, which cut the victim off from air.
Without his knowing it, his hands had plucked up the power wand and screwed its head into the heel of the thinking wand, making a long, tingling staff, half onyx and jasper half Vigil felt ashamed at his own fear, which evidently had allowed certain of the intellectual creatures living in his lower nervous system to escape their discipline and act, in this case wisely, but without instructions. And why had not his hands sought the vendetta wand, for use against this angry riot?
But, no, not anger. The return signal from the Archangel of Bloodroot induced him to take a calming breath, to restore fatigued connections in the thalamus and hypothalamus of his brain. It focused his auditory sense and cleared his head with a jolt of surprise sharper than any smelling salts.
Bloodroot was a ghost world orbiting Wormwood inferior to Torment, appearing only as a morning or evening crescent. Here an earlier migration of Strangers, millennia ago, had abandoned their botched attempt at terraforming, leaving blind, weeping, and windowless mansions behind, but the library there remained loyal to Vigil’s people and aided them with sage counsel or, as now, insights as sudden as a dash of cold water.
As if with keener ear or wit, now he heard the roars were roars of gladness, not unmixed with song. He heard the trumpet, timbrel, flute and lute and harp, as if all five humanities were playing, and the tumult of vast laughter common to them all.
He felt the footsteps in the corridor outside pause and halt. The two who approached him perhaps were startled by the sudden ingress of sound.
He recognized from the sustained sound of the trumpet notes that these were wielded by the hominids and whales of the First Humanity, both land-going and lake-dwelling. Naturally, the whales could hold their notes longer, and the thunder of cornets rising from cetacean blowholes emerged from the lakeshore and walked across the night sky.
The Lighthouse Crew recalled the day!
The Braking Laser burns! Hurray!
Vigil wondered why archaic turns of phrase would linger in children’s rhymes longer than in nobler poems. What, for example, was an hurray?
But he found himself first grinning, and then laughing, as the clamor of his internal creatures, their mirth, rippled through his internal dialogue matrix and overflowed into his spirit.
Many generations his fathers had kept watch. For this purpose he was born, for this duty he was named. He threw back his head in exaltation, raising his hands on high in triumph, and sang the words the other Firstlings sang, as was his right, and joy. Intuitively, he knew what it was to say hurray!
Ancient Starships, hear our cries!
Descend from upper, outer skies!
Do you copy? Please reply!
We beg you not to pass us by!
Of old our fathers bold did learn,
That Ancient Starships shall return!
From beyond the windows, more roars came, and clamor, a harmony of noise. A choir of ghosts sang out from statues in the several walled squares and great houses of the Landing City. Vigil felt the chamber ghost join in, yodeling with more gusto than skill through the lares and gargoyles adorning the outer façade of the Stranger House. And perhaps he joined his voice as well, for he was often more at home in the Noösphere of memory and old lore than in the biosphere of life and current time. The ghosts sang this:
Long eons passed; we steadfast stayed,
Changeless, ageless, undismayed
Our duties shall not pass away
The hour is come, we mark the day
True shall we stay as suns grow cold
As ever as we were of old.
We do not live, but shall not fail
Nor entropy, our foe, prevail
Lest ever from our oaths we turn
Ancient Starships shall return
The silvery flute of an Eremite of the Swans trilled in shrill reply, joyous despite the mournful harmony which hung beneath all the music of the Second Humanity.
The flute penetrated the noise of the crowd, astonishingly loud, and the crowd laughed, and Vigil smiled, too, when he realized what he was hearing. It was not electronic amplification—that would have been a violation of the strictures Sacerdotes placed on any Swans sojourning among the primate or cetacean first race of man—but the Eremite had won or seduced from some cunning Fox Maiden a wedge of echoing songbirds, who repeated the flute song note for note as they winged overhead.
The Eremite, in a voice of gold, echoed by his imitative avian flock, sang a counterrefrain that was usually forgotten.
In myriads our fathers fell
From Eden fair, bade faretheewell
Our heaven lost, to reign in hell
To this dim world, where now we dwell!
Myriads were changed and slain
So that we few might here remain!
Myriads we changed and slew
We still remain alive, we few!
The two beyond the door now stirred. The first, a woman in boots (or so Vigil guessed based on the length and rhythm of her gait) walked rapidly toward the chamber door. The second was barefoot, and his footsteps were something longer than a man’s. He walked by putting his toes down first and then his heel. He was a Swan, or someone in a cygnean body.
The superior creature stalked after the woman many strides, but then froze in place when the Swan music played. Perhaps he was as astonished as Vigil that two Swans could be found in the same place in the same year. The woman was at the door while the Swan still lingered.
A humming note, louder than thunder, rolled through the chamber and drew the spirit of Vigil back into the room. From high above came the shivering murmur of the gong, ten thousand acres wide, named Great Patrick. It hung from the mighty edifice of the Star-Tower, greatest of the works of man on Torment. This tower was a length of black material not found in nature, gemmed with portholes and silver embrasures, running from submantle to superstratosphere. Nothing but a discharge of the battery artillery posted at the thirty-thousand-foot emplacement balcony could set the huge gong ringing.
In answer to Great Patrick’s voice, loudly came the clamor of timbrels, or, from the serfs, the banging of kettles and pans, all beaten in time to the refrain. Also came the clang of hoplons, clashed by enthusiastic Helots and by the remote-controlled gauntlets of distant Megalodons, the sole remnants of the once-great Third Humanity. Their words were harsh.