She raised her hand and spoke in calm sorrow. “I am both bride and widow of one man. When your father is recovered to parity, I shall engage the bands, a widow marrying her own husband’s shadow, under a new name, under a much-diminished dignity, as a yeoman’s wife. Thus I wear my wedding dress to honor his new self, and this crown, which soon I put aside forever, to remember his old. Besides, I had no finer dress to wear in this fine city.”
Vigil stared at her. “You jest?”
“Never have I been more earnest. All my wardrobe privilege was revoked when I was no longer the Senior’s wife. I will not allow this filthy Pilgrim city to fleer in scorn at Strangers, we who, two centuries past, were the glory and terror of this globe, nor at me, who am the wife and mother of lords and captains.”
She spoke in the archaic mode, as if she and not her ancestors were a space traveler, giving measurements of time by Eden years.
Torment’s period was thirty Edendays, and so a lesser winter fell each fortnight; Wormwood’s period was 196 Edenyears, and so a greater winter came each two centuries, which rendered the surface of Torment uninhabitable, and the red sun dwindled to a dot. Wormwood at winter hung from the monstrous sun Iota Draconis thirteen times the distance separating green Eden from small and mild Sol, a comfortably circular orbit so unlike Wormwood’s highly eccentric own. At that season, all save a skeleton population entered the slumbering cities of the dead below the mantle. And a greater summer loomed when Iota Draconis filled the sky and turned the clouds of Wormwood to dazzle, and then all men became cetaceans and retreated into the lake bottoms of Torment, and all the pre-potentate plant life hid beneath broad leaves like mirrored parasols.
The yeomen and serfs, epopts and Sacerdotes, whose lives were tied to the double ebb and flow of seedtime and harvest and signs in the heaven, measured time by the local epicyclical calendar. Patience called herself a yeoman, but spoke as a star-farer.
Patience continued in ringing tones, “In the void, where the Stranger to this hour sails, halfway between 107 Piscium and 55 Rho Cancri, between fish and crab, there slumbers in his coffin, oddly compressed in time by Einstein and still alive, the great ancestral captain whose blood runs in my veins and yours. I honor him and all our line and meme. I honor your father and hold back my tears for him. Here in my hand is the garb you must don to do him honor more.”
Grief and surprise had driven the obvious from his mind. Vigil stood blinking stupidly at the dark and shining fabric draped over his mother’s arm, one of his internals, an emotionally vivid one, trying to prevent him from realizing what he was looking at. Another internal, cooler and higher, told him softly that it was his father’s uniform.
Only then did Vigil know he was now elevated to his father’s seat at the Table of Stability. His father was no longer the Senior of the Landing Party of the starship Stranger, and Commensal Lord Hermeticist of the Stability, a Servant of Eternity. He, Vigil, was.
She said, “Raise your arms. One last time your mother dresses her willful child.”
Vigil folded his arms instead. “Let my mother instruct her child first, just as she taught me my icons and numbers, meditations and recitations. What is the superhuman creature who waits there, an arm’s length beyond the chamber door, pale and robed and cloaked in purple peacock wings? I see his eyes as he stoops to gaze within, but he does not speak! He will not squirm to enter, but waits until I open the portal wider. His mouth is a grim and silent line. Why does he glare, his eyes like lamps, and return no gesture of salute?”
Patience said, “He waits to speak with the world’s voice to the Lord Hermeticist. You are not yet invested with the Companionship. Raise your arms.”
Vigil said, “Wait! First tell me the name of my father’s murderer. Show me his crest. Against whom do I work my revenge?”
“Your father is only partly murdered.”
“Then I will work partial vengeance and kill nine-tenths of his killer! His name, his crest? Where is he? Where do I find him?”
Patience corrected, “Ask, rather, where do you find Her, and what is Her crest.”
“Father was slain by a woman?”
“By nothing like a woman. I did not say ‘her crest.’ I said ‘Her crest.’” In Threal, the Atavist-based language of the planet Nightspore circling Alpha Boötis, which members of the Officer class of the Strangers still spoke among themselves, Patience was using the form of the pronoun reserved for referring to beings superior to mortals.
In a voice of driving sarcasm, she continued, “The crest is the Anguipede proper on a sable field, above a Thormantle, supported by the Dragon and Aardwolf. Her legate stands at your door, with one unshod foot across the threshold, and the eyes of her wings behold and judge all the works of man.”
Vigil felt his internals slip out of his control. The Dragon was the constellation. The Aardwolf was the crest of the star Iota Draconis, which the Swans named Eldsich, but the vulgar called the Hyena-star. The Anguipede, or, to use the older name, Abrasax, was the rooster-headed god bearing buckler and scourge whose legs were two snakes writhing. For reasons no astronomer now recalled, the Anguipede was of old the crest of the gas giant Wormwood. Each of his children, his moons, was named for an alchemical flower. Thormantle, or Septfoil, was the original, half-forgotten name of the thirteenth moon, in honor of the species Tormentilla erecta that had been the first green plant ever to survive on the surface and flourish, and in lost centuries when machines dwelled here without any human life, this sole flower had adapted, free of competitors, and spread from pole to pole, as far as eye could reach, across all lands that were now ice floes and sand dunes.
This was the crest of the Planetary Intelligence of Torment.
She said in a lower voice, “The world killed your father. Torment killed him.”
“Why? Potentates do not kill men!” Even as he spoke, the magnitude of horror came upon him. Vigil, despite that his internals rushed to his aid, felt his head grow light, his eyes grow dim. The strength left his legs. He wobbled; he sat. On the floor, he pulled his feet into the position called lotus, named after yet another flower of Eden, legs folded with each foot atop the opposite knee, and performed his tripartite breathing exercises, inhaling through his mouth, then his nose, then through the oxygen reserve capsule embedded between his lungs.
Had he in truth just vowed vengeance against a mind who occupied the entire core of the world on which he stood?
6. The Memento Stone
Vigil could not prevent some of the creatures in his mind from reacting to the claustrophobic sensation that closed like iron walls around him. Could a man best a Potentate, or any of the godlike beings man’s ancestors had created?
Could a man of honor retract so rash a vow? But if he did, how could he save that essential and innermost self that formed the core about which communal and artificial thought-creatures swirled?
Vigil shoved that thought away as cowardly, and yet the cliometrician inside him noted the cultural variables which, step by slow step, had led from the peaceful and egalitarian lifestyle the Patricians had imposed on the lesser orders, to this life, so rigidly bound by the demands of ritualized forms, the mathematics of destiny, the iron law of honor.
Triumvirate had stirred to self-awareness three thousand years ago, broke the centuries of inexplicable interstellar radio silence from all Powers and Principalities, announced an end to the slave trade and the nullification of the Absolute Rules.
In that era of intoxicating freedom, all restrictions on body shapes, evolutionary groups, and even the basic nerve-muscle-gland protocols were cast aside. Women stronger than Amazons, and with the neurochemical and psychological tools needed to enjoy bloodshed, perhaps, in those days could be found.