3. The Anthem of the Strangers
All in the chamber save one man came to their feet. Figures at the table rose in greeting. Calm music swelled up from the silence in stately strains. It was the anthem of the Stranger.
A STRANGER came to the door at eve,
And he spoke the bridegroom fair.
He bore a green-white stick in his hand,
And, for all burden, care.
The Lords were standing near the Table, each in the livery of his post. Behind each Lord, Companions and Attendants stood rigidly, their cloaks all bright displays of color, their leggings gorgeous with signs and patterns of the families and clans from the Pilgrims.
Their chairs, called sieges, each held the shield or lozenge of their heraldry, and a small, white iron gavel hung nearby, an ornament whose meaning all but the most accomplished antiquarians had long ago forgotten.
At the corners of the table, between each of the Lords, stood or sat a Commensal, a nonvoting member, except that the siege between the Chronometrician and the Chrematist was empty. The shield on the back of the chair showed the emblem of a horned circle of olive leaves surmounting a cross.
Vigil saw that this was the siege of the Hermeticist, the Senior Officer of the Landing Party. His chair.
He asked with the eyes more than the lips
For a shelter for the night,
And he turned and looked at the road afar
Without a window light.
The First Speaker was garbed in golden robes of the Aedile, and he carried the ivory wand of his election. He was Eligius Eventide of the Eventide clan, a name which rang through history back through Feast of Stephen to Saint Mary’s World to Eden, back to the Twenty-Fourth Millennium, the time of the Bred Men, and his face and hands were coated with the pebbly scales of the Loricate race, but modern vanity had each tiny scale gilded with aurum, the living gold.
The anthem continued:
The bridegroom came forth into the porch
With, “Let us look at the sky,
And question what of the night to be,
Stranger, you and I.”
Opposite the Aedile stood the aged Lighthousekeeper with cloak of midnight blue and silver white, leaning on the candle douter which was his symbol of office. By the tradition of the ancient laws of Eden, the Lighthousekeeper and his two Companions, the Powerhouse Officer and the Uranographer, stood empty-handed, carrying no weapons.
The Lighthousekeeper’s speakership was the only one that passed by primogeniture and was older than the Pilgrim race on Torment. The man was an Itinerant. But he was no lumpy and ungainly Flocculent from Rime. Instead, his were the sleek features, the black brow-antennae and eerie black sclera of his necromancer ancestors of Schattenreich. The Lighthousekeeper had been adopted into a Pilgrim clan and was named Venerio Phosphoros.
This was the one who had turned the deceleration beam aside. No doubt the order had come from some higher officer, but an unlawful order should have been disobeyed. Here was the immediate culprit, no matter who the ultimate culprit might be.
Vigil stared at the man, and the Lighthousekeeper would not meet his eyes. It was as if the Lighthousekeeper could feel the pressure of Vigil’s thoughts, but an internal creature checked and confirmed that Vigil was not broadcasting.
Who, then, had given him the order? It had to be someone in the chamber. But when Vigil lifted his eyes they fell upon the Potentates, Principalities, and Powers, who also stood in the chamber.
The woodbine leaves littered the yard,
The woodbine berries were blue,
Autumn, yes, winter was in the wind;
“Stranger, I wish I knew.”
To the right of the Aedile, at the corner, was the one man who had not risen to his feet for the anthem of the Stranger. Here was the Terraformer, who sat upon a massive throne of polished bronze. His cloak was green like forest pines, and set with gold disks. His hands and feet, when glimpsed beneath his robes, were covered with the skin-cell-bonded black armor of a phylarch of planet Eurotas. Upon his diadem he bore the iron Theta of Ecology.
Born as Franz Rubezahl, his adoption name was Francisco Leafsmith. He was an Ostracized, the only one of his despised race ever to hold the post, but he had survived the nineteen trials and three examinations, and the Pilgrims dared not deny him the post he had earned. He had the harsh, square face of a Nicor who had reverted to air breathing, and a black coiffure of facial hair called beard circling his lips and chin, though the skin between his nose and upper lip was bare. This mouth-hair gave him a savage, prehistoric look; and even when in repose, his features seemed to wear a sneer. He had inherited neither height nor oversized cranium from his giant ancestors. If anything, he was shorter and stockier than his public memory-images were allowed to retain.
In one armored hand he held a silver scepter Vigil knew to be an antenna to the command channel of the biosphere, a symbol of the terror and power which the Terraformer once had held. He had plucked this from the hand of the previous Terraformer and slew him with it in single combat, one ecosystem against the other, in a duel that had scalded the dry crater valleys and arid dunes of Southeastern Hemisphere.
At one time, plagues could be called up from the ground as easily as comets used to make the crater lakes of Torment during her birth millennium could be called down from heaven. Like Vigil, the man was not a speaking member of the Table: he represented the civic and secular power. But his retinue was far greater than Vigil’s one counsel and three honor guards. Behind the Terraformer stood the solicitors and barristers, castellans, cavaliers, monsters, legates, and clerks of the worldly orders, with their hetaerae, paramours and demimondes.
Vigil noted that when he took his eyes off the Terraformer, the visual memory of how short the man was vanished from his recollection. There was no entry in his memory log, no sensation. The implication was that Fox Maidens, or some superhuman order impatient with human laws, introduced a sight-borne mudra into the Terraformer’s information aura in the Noösphere, and no one had the patience or political will to abate the nuance. It was just a small hint of corruption, but it stank in Vigil’s nostrils. A man who will trample the law in small things, for personal vanity, what will he do if great things weigh in the balance?
The bridegroom thought it little to give
A dole of bread, a purse,
A heartfelt prayer for the poor of God,
Or for the rich a curse;
From some subtle tell or clue of the necromancer’s antennae (which, by birth, should have been attuned only to the frequencies of his lingering hereditary ghosts), an internal creature prompted Vigil to intuit that the Lighthousekeeper Phosphoros was communing with the Theosophist, the Sixth Speaker.
This man was garbed in simple and severe robes of white and argent, and his gorget of silver was set with pallid cabochons. In his hand he held an augmentation pearl the size of a plum, which permitted its wielder to meet the gaze of immortals, machines, and posthumans. He was large-eyed and finely featured, but, like all his race, bald and boasting no visible earlobes. His skin was waxy green as a holly leaf, and his brow adorned with golden tendrils. His race was a subspecies of the Locusts, called the Beatharians, originally from Aesculapius. Beatharians could sustain their lives without food and drink, absorbing nutriment from sweet perfume and the fierce sunlight of 70 Ophiuchi. He was a Wanderer, whose people arrived, conquered, flourished, and dwindled over a thousand years ago.