The speed of the approach of the vessel was beyond astonishing. Montrose calculated that the vessel would take minutes, rather than months, to cross the distance between Earth and the moon, but that the vessel would be moving with too great a velocity to make orbit.
Indeed, extrapolating the path in his mind, he saw that the vessel meant to speed past Earth, her flightpath bent by Earth’s gravity well to send her sunward, and thereafter assume a long, elliptical orbit around the sun, a braking orbit; but it would be months before the rendezvous maneuver would be accomplished and Earth and the vessel would be at rest with respect to each other.
An agony of impatience seized Montrose. Having waited over seventy thousand years, to wait a day more, or an hour, was beyond what he could bear.
Rania evidently felt the same way. Before the hour was passed, the vessel payload itself, the mile-wide golden ring, changed aspect as it came into apogee of its orbit and was seen edge on. The centrifuge slung a small white object from the outer hull of the ring toward Earth like a slingstone. From Montrose’s point of vantage, it looked like the white object was shooting straight down toward him. His eye could not at first resolve the image, because he was weeping. It seemed like a white bird, stooping, or a slender figure in a veiled dress of long and trailing skirts.
It was Rania.
5. Swan Dive
Montrose cried aloud in fear, not understanding how it was she was not burned instantly to a crisp in the upper airs, moving at such speed. She wore a long silver-white garment, or himation. Bits of the himation peeled away under the reentry heat, which formed a rose-white hemisphere beneath her leading edge, where she had her elbow before her veiled face. But the aliens must have given the fabric unearthly and almost supernatural properties, for Rania dived surrounded by fire, wrapped in fire, kissed by fire, and was utterly unharmed.
Down, down, through stratosphere and troposphere she raced, bright as the morning star, bright as a new moon, a line of condensation like the tail of a comet behind her.
The himation changed shape and sprouted backswept delta wings, and then, as she slowed to below the speed of sound, grew wider, the wings of a jay, then a swan, then a butterfly.
She plunged into the waters of the sea of wine the earthly sphere had prepared to receive her, and the tree in whose top branches Montrose stood, hallooing and waving his hat, now bent in two like a sapling formed into a snare and lowered him to the ground so swiftly that the impulse to jump down was stillborn.
He ran to the edge of the cliffs, and, this time, before any helpful wonder of the latter-day Earth could aid him, he leaped headlong toward the waters where his bride was waiting.
Whether his miraculous new body suffered injury or not in that dive he did not know then nor ever later recalled, but he swam toward her, calling out her name with each third arm stroke.
She was waiting for him in the middle of the sea, with singing birds and whistling fish conjured by the world to rejoice for them circle upon circle in air and sea around her, while she stood upright, a giant clamshell which had risen from the deep to support her, and the upper shell was open and formed a crenulated pink half circle behind her. The himation was still steaming from reentry heat, but she was hale and whole and laughing. Her eyes were sparkling, and her arms reached yearningly toward him.
Lest they burn him, with no pause for thought, she threw the white and white-hot garments from her and stood clothed in the splendor of her nakedness, more regal than a queen in all her state, prouder than a lioness, more innocent than a child, more voluptuous than a pagan goddess. With her slender yet strong hands, she helped him up onto the living raft of the ventral shell.
There was not even the scent of fire in her hair. He saw that her hair and body were drenched with the wine of the sea. Little sparkles, caught in her eyelashes, glittered like gems when the planet Pyriphlegethon released the sun, as did her tears of joy, as did her teeth flashing in her smile for her lover and husband, and the whole world around them was filled with light.
The gold light from the sun and rose-pink light from the second sun reflected in the sky-vast sails sent double shadows from her feet, and touched the curves and contours of her figure and face with double highlights, and emphasized her blush of joy.
“Welcome back. Miss me?”
“Long ages have I burned for you! Never once doubted I your fidelity nor ceased to know that death itself could not keep you from me! I wish you had not gone out to fight with Blackie.”
“Well, ain’t that just like a woman? Your first words telling me I done something wrong! You gotta take me as I am. I am your man.”
“Ah! Well, then, man. Take me.”
Then they were in each other’s arms, their lips embraced and shared a breath, and when he dipped the laughing and breathless girl down to lie upon the unexpectedly soft and warm interior, the upper shell of the clam demurely closed and granted them the privacy to consummate their reunion.
PART NINE
Ancient Starships Shall Return
1
Aardwolf Star in the Constellation of the Dragon
1. Vigil of the Strangers
A.D. 71200
The moon of Torment rose at midnight and lit the town square bright as day. The cold light struck the Stranger House, and lit on Vigil Starmanson, and woke him where he lay. Confused, he rose, his eyes half-closed, stood gazing at the blazing moon and thinking it was day.
The square of softness where he slept grew firm beneath his foot, becoming floor. The zone of warm air that was his blanket popped and was no more. Nude and cold, he called for robes, but no robe came; he spoke into his finger ring, but no ghost answered to its name.
Up he looked, surprised his eyes could see the sun undazed. Iota Draconis was a young star, and the bands of her accretion disk surrounded her, not yet formed into inner planets. But now it seemed the sun had lost these many rings and that her face, no longer red gold, was swept by bands of storm cloud.
Only then Vigil saw that this was titanic Wormwood, which the common people called a moon. In truth, Wormwood was the solitary world of the system, a superjovian giant, which smaller Torment circled. The storm-clad globe was lit as if by inner fire, and around it were the nineteen sister satellites of Torment, shining crescents large as terran worlds, their horns all turned away from Wormwood’s blinding face.
Vigil looked across the wide, pale, unfurnished dormitory to where, in an ivory rack beneath the window-slits, the emergency wands hung, bright as swords.
These were antiques, from the days before the noble Errantry brought a race of Swan-Patrician hybrids from Penance, or hated Itinerancy brought hither undying ghosts and their necromantic archivists from Schattenreich; from before quarrelsome Argosy descended with its warlike tribes of graceful and feline Sinners; older even than Expatriate of the million woes, who arrived from Alpha Mensae with nine-tenths her populations dead.
These wands were older still, from before the days when Torment woke to self-awareness as a Potentate and suffered the tortures from which the world took its name. These wands were old when the Expulsion fared from the hell called the World of Willows and Flowers, where plants lured the unwary into their vines and throats with hypnotic songs and nerve-indication perfumes, the only peoples who ever rejoiced to behold the arid, earthquake-torn and cratered landscape of Torment, blissfully free of lurid plant life and the false lure of immortality. The world before then had been called by another name, one forgotten save only by Swans, scholars, and poets.
Such wands had been commissioned in the Sixty-Ninth Millennium, as exemplars of the new technologies retrieved from M3 by the Swan Princess, Rania, on the occasion of her marriage to the Master of the Empyrean, Ximen del Azarchel the First, called Ximen the Black. That same year saw the spread of the New History begin from Sol, reaching slowly outward toward the colony stars.
An antiquarian, Vigil knew the meaning of the pattern of gems jacketing the wands and saw which one would summon energ
y, or thought, or memory, or vengeance.
He went to the jasper-decorated thinking wand, and took it in his hand, and felt the chamber ghost possess him, and the Stranger House became his skin to him.
The ghost slept. Municipal power was cut. External cameras were blind. The chamber door hinges still were awake, but Vigil did not open the door. In the corridor beyond, like insects crawling on his skin, his carpet could feel two sets of footsteps approaching; and no heraldry was revealed, no names given.
The Stranger House was bisected by the city wall so that one portal opened onto the crooked streets of the Landing City and the opposite portal opened directly onto the sands outside. There was no suburb, were no outbuildings. The two were coming down that passage from that outer portal, from the unwatched wilderness.
Assassins? A natural thought. A blind house whose ghost slept was fit for dark deeds. Alarmed, Vigil looked up, seeking escape. He was young and fit; it would be easy to vault to those high and narrow windows. He flourished the thinking wand. Those windows that were part of him that, like a man who yawns, Vigil now opened wide, admitting air, which, strangely, still smelled of night.
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 Megalodo
ns, the sole remnants of the once-great Third Humanity. Their words were harsh.
Because the lowest part of the window was high overhead, and all his exterior cameras blind, Vigil could see nothing but the newly risen Wormwood, a few high kites (aloft on artificial winds) holding antennae, and the vast uprearing bulk of the Star-Tower, huge and dark as a pillar holding up the sky. The lights at thirty thousand feet were lit, which apartments formed the fortress of the Terraformer, and, higher, at sixty thousand, the Megalodons, a form of Third Humans who had abandoned human flesh altogether, were docked, and the quays ablaze with festive lights.
Yet even these strange, reticent, and primordial beings were singing.
Lest Ancient Starships may forget
Our Lighthouse lanterns burn here yet!
Faithfully we set them burn
That Ancient Starships shall return!
Tempted thou to pass us by
Shall not outrace the lighthouse eye!
The True Myrmidons were as long vanished as the Elder Humans, but the races they created in their own image, the Helots and Megalodons, kept alive their forefathers’ inabilities. “Despite twenty-one millennia of trying,” said Vigil softly to one of his internal creatures, “the Fox Maidens have not restored a sense of rhythm to the children of Myrmidons.”
Vigil, through the chamber ghost within him, felt the finger of the woman at the door touch the printlock, and the lamp welcome lit; but because the door was sleeping, the bar would not draw back. She touched the lock again and again, and the welcome lantern flickered. Vigil asked the chamber ghost what woman had free passage of the Stranger House or in the city could walk chaperoned only by a Swan? Who was she, allowed to pass a door only the Strangerfolk’s highest officers could pass?
There was no answer. At minimum power, the ghost was sluggish, indistinct.