Behind it stood a cluster of shadowy guardsmen, and beside it a helmetless officer whose insignia and virtually invisible armor marked him as the chiliarch of the Praetorians, though he was not, of course, the chiliarch who had held the post during my reign, nor the one whom I had carried down from the upright timber in an epoch now unimaginably distant.

Before the throne and thus almost out of my field of view, a ragged woman leaned upon a carven staff. She spoke just as I realized that she was there, saying, “They ring to welcome the New Sun, Autarch. The whole of Urth prepares for his coming.”

“In our childhood,” the old woman on the throne muttered, “we had little to do but read history. Thus we know that there have been a thousand prophets such as you, my poor sister — no, say a hundred thousand. A hundred thousand crazed paupers who fancied themselves great rhetors and sought to make themselves great rulers as well.”

“Autarch,” answered the ragged woman, “won’t you hear me? You speak of thousands and hundreds of thousands. A thousand times at least I have heard objections such as you bring, but you have not yet heard what I will say.”

“Go on,” the woman on the throne told her. “You may speak as long as you amuse us.”

“I haven’t come to amuse you, but to tell you that the New Sun has come often before, seen perhaps by only a single person, or a few. You must recall the Claw of the Conciliator, for it vanished in our time.”

“It was stolen,” muttered the old woman who sat the throne. “We never saw it.”

“But I did,” the ragged woman with the staff said. “I saw it in the hands of an angel, when I was just a girl and very ill. Tonight as I was coming here I saw it again, in the sky. So did your soldiers, although they are afraid to tell you. So did this giant who has come as I have to warn you and has been savaged for it. So would you see it, Autarch, if you would quit this tomb.”

“There have been such portents before. They have portended nothing. It would take more than the sight of a bearded star to change our mind.”

I thought of stepping onto the stage then to end the play, if I could; and yet I remained where I was, wondering for whose entertainment such plays are staged. For it was a play, and in fact a play I had seen before, though never from the audience. It was Dr. Tabs’s play, with the old woman on the throne in a role the doctor had taken for himself, and the woman with the staff in one of the roles that had been mine.

I have just written that I chose not to step forth, and it is true. But in the very act of making my decision, I must have moved a trifle. The little bells laughed again, and the larger bell from whose tongue they depended struck once, though ever so softly.

“Bells!” the old woman exclaimed again. “You, sister, you witch or whatever you call yourself. Go out! There’s a guard at our door. Tell their lochage we wish to know why the bells ring.”

“I will not leave this place at your command,” the woman said. “I have answered your question already.”

The giant looked up at that, parting his lank hair with blood-smeared hands. “If bells ring, they’re ringing because a New Sun is coming,” he rumbled in a voice almost too deep to be understood. “I do not hear them, but I do not need to hear them.” Though I doubted my eyes, it was Baldanders himself.

“Are you saying we are mad?”

“My hearing is not acute. Once I studied sound, and the more one learns of that, the less one hears it. Then too, my tympanic membranes have grown too wide and thick. But I have heard the currents that scour the black trenches and the crash of the waves upon your shore.”

“Silence!” the old woman commanded.

“You can’t order the waves to be silent, madame,” Baldanders told her. “They are coming, and they are bitter with salt.”

One of the Praetorians struck the side of his head with the butt of his fusil; it was like the blow of a mallet.

Baldanders seemed unaffected. “The armies of Erebus follow the waves,” he said, “and all the defeats they suffered at your husband’s hands will be avenged.”

From those words I knew the identity of the Autarch, and the shock of seeing Baldanders once more was as nothing to that. I must have started, because the small bells rang loudly, and a larger one spoke twice.

“Listen!” Valeria exclaimed in her cracked voice.

The chiliarch looked stricken. “I heard them, Autarch.” Baldanders rumbled, “I can explain them. Will you hear also what I say?”

“And I,” the woman with the staff told Valeria. “They ring for the New Sun, as the giant has already announced to you.”

Valeria muttered, “Speak, giant.”

“What I am about to say is not important. But I will say it in order that you will listen to what is important afterward. Our universe is neither the highest nor the lowest. Let matter become overdense here, and it bursts into the higher. We see nothing of that because everything runs from us. Then we talk of a black hole. When matter grows overdense in the universe below us, it explodes into ours. We see a burst of motion and energy, and we speak of a white fountain. What this prophetess calls the New Sun is such a fountain.”

Valeria murmured, “We have a fountain in our garden that foretells, and I heard someone call it the White Fountain many years ago. But what has any of this to do with the bells?”

“Be patient,” the giant told her. “You learn in a breath what I learned in a lifetime.”

The woman with the staff said, “That’s well. Only breaths remain to us. A thousand or so, it may be.”

The giant glared at her before he spoke again to Valeria. “Things opposite unite and appear to disappear. The potential for both remains. That is one of the greatest principles of the causes of things. Our sun has such a black hole as I described to you at its core. To fill it, a white fountain has been drawn across the void for millennia. It spins as it flies, and in its motion emits waves of gravitation.”

Valeria exclaimed, “What! Waves of dignity? You’re mad, just as this chiliarch has told us.”

The giant ignored her interruption. “These waves are too slight to render us giddy. Yet Ocean feels them and breeds new tides and fresh currents. I heard them, as I have already told you. They brought me here.”

The chiliarch snarled, “And if the Autarch orders it, we’ll toss you back.”

“Bells feel them in the same way. Like Ocean, their mass is delicately poised. Thus they ring, just as this woman says, pealing tbe coming of the New Sun.”

I was about to step out, but I saw that Baldanders was not yet finished.

“If you know anything of science, madame, you must know that water is but ice given energy”

I could not see her head from my vantage point, but Valeria must have nodded.

“The legend of the mountains of fire is more than a legend. In ages when men were only higher beasts, there were indeed such mountains. Their spew of fire was rock rendered incandescent by energy, as water is ice made fluid. A world below this, charged with too much energy, flared into our own — as with universes, so with worlds. In those ages, the young Urth was little more than a falling drop of that watery rock; men and women lived upon its floating scum and thought themselves secure.”

I heard Valeria sigh. “When we were ourselves young, we nodded over such prosy stuff for endless days, having nothing better to do. But when our Autarch came for us and we woke to life, we found no agnation in all that we had studied.”

“It has arrived at last, madame. The force that made your bells sound has warmed the cold heart of Urth once more. Now they toll the death of continents.”

“Is that the news you have come to tell us, giant? If the continents die, who will live?”

“Those on ships, possibly. Those whose ships are in the air or in the void, certainly. Those who live under the sea already, as I have now for fifty years. But it matters nothing. What—”