A seneschal, perhaps in response to the siren’s singing, the flashing of the lanterns, and the lamentation from the sobbing and broken hinges, came scurrying forward.
He was wearing kothornoi of wood from a sacred tree from a world of Proxima to give him extra height, and a towering kamilavka on his head. From the roundness of his features and the almost triangular squint of his eyes, he was not of the Pilgrim lineage but an Itinerant, one of the most neglected races on Torment. The Itinerant were as baseline First Men in all ways with this one oddity which they inherited from the Flocculents of 44 Boötis, that they could survive without water almost indefinitely, and, even nude, withstand any degree of cold. Their water-retaining and recycling tissues unfortunately gathered at their bellies and buttocks, giving them a portly and comical appearance. Successive generations of meddling with the aesthetic perceptual complexes and midbrains of the other races of man so far had not succeeded in making the Itinerants appear comely in the eyes of Nomads, Strangers, or Pilgrims.
“What commotion is this?” he demanded portentously.
The doorkeep shouted, “Lock-breaking and intrusion! Felonies have been committed!”
Vigil knelt and touched the golden floor of the corridor, using the mudra of bhumisparsha, which indicates Faithful Witness. “No locks were broken!”
The hinges groaned but dared not contradict him.
The doorkeep said, “Does the Strangerman deny that he stove in the ancient and honest doors which it is my charge to keep? I am reduced to absurdity! That, at least, is a misdemeanor!” The delicate pangolin scales of his face now rippled and flexed, which revealed a pink flush in the cracks between them, a sign of anger.
Vigil said to the seneschal, “Hear me: I am summoned to the Table by the Loyal and Self-Correctional Order of Prognostic Actuarial Cliometric Stability, whose charge it is to deter chaos and unpredicted anomalies in the smooth evolution of future history. The approach of an Interstellar Sailing Vessel introduces the unknowns of other worlds into our prediction matrix and heralds enormous events. Hence it is the protocol, once the Lighthouse is lit, to call the last starman aloft to report of signs and wonders seen in other spheres and heavens. I am the descendent and representative of that starman, have inherited his internal creatures and memory chains, and therefore speak with his voice.”
The seneschal said, “Yet clearly the doors are marred; this is desecration and violence against the integrity of the palace walls.”
“If someone standing on the portico committed so outrageous and uncouth an act, clearly the civic authorities of the Landing City of Torment have cause to apprehend him and demand recompense. However, that crime, if it were a crime, ceased to be of concern once I stepped across the threshold, for I have passed from the jurisdiction of the local planetary law and into the laws of the universe.”
The seneschal made a long face, stroking his chin. “The door is property of the Order and is wounded.”
Vigil said, “Admittedly the inside panels of the door are within the palace, and hence are part of interstellar law, under control of the Order. But the force was applied to the outside panels of the door, and if this was a crime, you must apply to the Sergeants of the Mayor of Landing City: to do otherwise affronts on his authority.”
“Pettifoggery!” cried the doorkeep. “Equivocation! The portico is manned by Officers of the Order. By courtesy of the law, any acts committed before the threshold impinge on our jurisdiction!”
Vigil said, “While the point is a significant one, its resolution must await until after I have presented myself. Which is higher in priority, Seneschal, according to standing command and protocols: to officiate a jurisdictional dispute, or to prevent all hindrance to a Lord of the Order when the summons looms? The resolution one way or the other of a criminal charge of lock-breaking cannot have a cliometric influence beyond a life span or two; whereas the Table of Stability determines the fate of millennia.”
The seneschal nodded warily, his unhappiness clearly visible on his face. “I do not have the competence to make a rash decision. The matter has various aspects.”
“Master Seneschal, do not be swayed!” cried out the doorkeep in frustrated rage. “You cannot admit this trespasser!”
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.