Normally, it was as unwise to use mudras against oneself as it was for a surgeon to operate on himself. Nonetheless, Vigil bent his wrist in the Gesture Beyond Misery, buddhashramana. This restored his internal balance between his core thoughts, his internals, and his external channels. Next, he made the Gesture of Understanding, cincihna, where the thumb and index finger make a circle as if to grasp an object as fine and small as a grain of truth. The flux of reaction energy separated Vigil’s fear away from his main nerve paths for later assimilation.
He would be afraid later. Now he would fight.
Picking up the wand of vengeance and coming lightly to his feet, Vigil Lord Hermeticist released the chemical combinations in his bloodstream and muscles to prepare for battle.
He threw the useless mantle aside and turned on his heraldry. The crowd, despite the noise and informality of the celebrations, parted before him, and men bowed, and women curtseyed, and Fox Maidens laughed, and dogs held their paws before their eyes as if unworthy to look on him.
And everyone got out of his way.
Whistling cheerfully, twirling the deadly wand in his hand, the young Star Lord made an affable gesture to the crowd and disappeared into the many-shadowed high-walled avenue where enemies watched.
Behind him, someone shouted out, “Hurrah for the Lords that vow and recall! The Ancient Ship makes planetfall! Treasures and pleasures for us all!”
Cheers rose up. The men threw their hats in the air, and three Fox Maidens threw their three heads in the air, red mouths shrieking gaily, their long red hair streaming like comet tails.
3
The Street Which Sneaks Up On the Sphinx
1. The Soulless Ones
Vigil spread his awareness like a widening bubble, peering in every direction around him, overhead and underfoot, using his internals to notice any clues his conscious mind missed. He was amazed at the density and clarity of the images, sounds, and sensations that poured into his brain from ten thousand points of view.
In the parish called Bitter Waters in the Northwestern Hemisphere, in a land of sand dunes, swales of igneous ejecta and burned glass circling a great and lifeless crater lake, was the reservation where the Strangers had been forced to dwell after the Pilgrims overthrew them. Lesser lakes surrounded it like a pattern of birdshot against a target. There, the ratio of cognitive matter to sleeping matter or dead matter was low. There was not even one gram of self-aware logic crystal for every cubic mile of desert wasteland, and hardly one sand particle in five had memory and sensory capacity. Very little programmable matter had been used for the terraforming or pantropic efforts in this parish of dead saltwater crater lakes. Most of the sand there, oddly enough, was not dead matter that had died; it was dead matter that had never been alive. The sand dunes were simply the relics of rock that weathering had scoured into grains, and were not man-made.
Aboard the great cylindrical world of the Stranger, with canals and rice paddies overhead and stars underfoot, every object, even the smallest, was friendly and helpful. It was odd, even crippling, to any Stranger who, due to frequent slumber, was old enough to recall such a shipboard life now to live among cacti that did not speak and rock and sand that stubbornly refused any commands. On the reservation, ghosts were rare, and ancestor worship had fallen into disuse. The libraries were organized according to the racial memory formats of the Pilgrim race, so no one recalled things in the order he expected, and no one found his old thoughts precisely where he had left them.
Vigil had known no other land in his natural memory as he grew. To him, the living and talking world of the Pilgrims was the oddity.
Torment had been colonized by humans for only five thousand years, and by machines six thousand, and therefore was very young. Microscopic machine life had not had the chance to grow and coat every crater and crater lake. The winters were too harsh and the electronic conditions of the atmosphere not favorable. So the Noösphere was thin and patchy across the face of Torment, and in certain areas of the map, the Noösphere was dark, and in others, dead.
Here in the capital, in the Southwestern Hemisphere, all was different. All the matter which was not sophont, part of the thinking mind of the Principality of Torment, was sensible, and could perform simple functions of scanning the environment, taking messages, doing first order calculations, augmenting mental facilities. In this city, the number of internals Vigil could maintain was nearly double what he could among the metallic tents and walking tabernacles of his people.
Even motes in the air too small to be seen were part of the Noösphere. Therefore, his eyesight penetrated more deeply.
The ambushers were hidden cleverly. There were four of them.
The first man had disconnected his various bodily parts on the physical level, and scattered them and the bits of his weapon in a semirandom camouflage dispersion in various places in the alley. One foot was in the rain gutter, one finger in an external thought socket, and his head in a medical slops can next to an eyeless push broom which happened to have a sword blade inside, with a nanomechanically active edge along one side. Vigil noticed the dispersed man because the information shadows in the upper levels of the Noösphere did not match the information densities for the various objects his parts were hiding under. The broom was too quiet to be a broom, for example, since most of them maintained navigation maps and definitions of clean and dirty, and monitored the environment for litter. And the slops can was whispering too frequently, gathering tactical motion information from electronic microbes in the dust in the air, information a slops can would not use.
The second ambusher was invisible, his image blotted out of the Noösphere like a phantasm, replaced with computer extrapolations of what should be there had he been absent. The only thing that gave him away was the odd light from Wormwood, which was not steady and red like the light from Iota Draconis. The extrapolation had to anticipate the wavering and rippling shadows from the light reflecting from the storm layers in the upper Wormwood atmosphere, and this called on more computer time, and so a man-shaped blankness in the computer images of the alleyway had a higher computer-use rate than its profile could account for.
The third was disguised as a horse and cart, with a dog as a driver snapping a whip, and other dogs yipping and barking about the cart wheels while the horse reared and plunged and kicked. The wheels did not seem to be ordinary wheels at all, not temporary city wheels, but older, larger, wiser-looking wheels from the desert outlands, and each one had a sly and cold expression in the eye of his hub.
Vigil would not have noticed this third assassin, except that the driver, a Mastiff, was whirling and cracking his whip and uttering curses with gusto, but these curses were like something from a peddler’s story, a yarn a wandering tinker might sell to children in their dreams. The motions were fake looking, too well coordinated, for none of the unruly pack blocking the cart was being struck by the whip or flying hoof. The assassin was not really trying to hurt one of the bodies he inhabited with another. Besides, during a citywide carnival, when all street priorities were reversed, what teamster was so eager to move his dray goods that he would try to force his way through a celebrating pack of dogs?
Made nervous by how cunningly the third ambusher had disguised himself as a horse and dog pack, Vigil made a more careful inspection of the environment, both physical and electronic. Only then did a sudden disturbance in his internal creatures show him the fourth killer.
The fourth was not physical at all, but occupied a heavy-duty node in the pornography lines buried underneath the road, where the citywide information scrubbers were set to carry away records of evil thoughts and desires for psychological cleansing and recycling. It was a line that was normally shielded, and a fastidious man like Vigil normally would not paw through the nauseating garbage of other men’s discarded erotic thought-spew, but there were lines of memory and association leading into the sewer mess which looked like lines used for controlling a weapon.