The Wild (41 page)

'Do you see it, Danlo of the Stars? Do you see it?'

'I see it,' Danlo said.

Ever since coming to the Sani village, Danlo had wondered if he should tell these people about the stars. Although Ede the God was truly dead, the Sani could never be safe from sudden destruction, for they lived in the light of the Vild stars which the Architects were destroying one by one. No people anywhere could ever be safe, and that was a truth of the universe almost too terrible to face. Even if the Order's mission to the Old Church succeeded and the Architects finally saw the light of reason, the deadly light of once-killed stars might at any moment fall upon the Sani and annihilate them. Danlo stared and stared at the Eye of the Fish, and he thought that even this magnificent star could explode as suddenly as any other. It was to stop this massacre of the stars, Danlo remembered, that the Order of Neverness had made a mission to the Vild. This was why he had journeyed to the Earth of the Sani. And this was why he must say goodbye to these tragic people and leave them to their fate.

'The stars,' Danlo said at last, 'are the children of God alone in the night.'

He sat on his bearskin with Reina An and Old Fei Yang, and they both complimented him on the beauty of his words. Danlo silently prayed that one day the Golden Ring would grow around this Earth and protect the Sani from the Vild's fury. The Sani drank their blackberry beer and asked Danlo for more words and more songs. And so far into the night he chanted from the Song of Life, and he played his flute to the wild and beautiful stars.

The computer is the bridge that will carry man on his journey from animal to god.

-from Man's Journey, by Nikolos Daru Ede

Every journey must have its end. Even the purest of pilots – they whose only gladness is the luminous falling from moment to moment and star to star – will look forward to their homecoming. And so they lay their plans and go out into the stellar wastelands of the universe; they think always of great treasures to be won, secret knowledge, triumph, the glorious completion of their dreams, their quests, their lives. Sometimes, their longing to fulfil their purpose is so deep and terrible that they will tremble to seize the joy of victory prematurely only to find empty air trapped in their hands. This is the moment of broken hope, the moment for doubt, disillusionment, even despair. For Danlo it came when he fell out of the manifold near the star that the Sani had named the Eye of the Fish. There he found an alien world all emerald and violet with some of the strangest plant life that he had ever seen. He had hoped that this lovely world would be Tannahill, for the finding of lost Tannahill, if not the end of his journey, would be the beginning of his achieving various goals. He would make a mission to the Architects and tell them of the Order and the Civilized Worlds; he would ask if they possessed a cure for the disease that was killing the Alaloi people; and lastly, if fate presented the opportunity, he might keep his promise to the ghost of Nikolos Daru Ede and recover his frozen, three thousand year old body. All these things (and more) he might accomplish if only his luck and courage ran true. Although in reality he knew that his chances of success were not great, after his feast with the Sani, he was as drunk with optimism as a seagull that has gorged on fermented blackberries. He thought that anything might be possible. And so when he learned that this long-sought world was not Tannahill after all but Alumit Bridge, he fell so swiftly into hopelessness that all the colours of the world below him darkened to black and he could hardly breathe.

'Pilot – are you all right?'

Ede's powerful voice spoke out of the stale air in the pit of Danlo's ship. Except for the glowing hologram of Nikolos Daru Ede, this mostly empty space would have been as lightless as a cetic's box. Danlo, floating naked as a babe in his mother's womb, was stricken with the lightlessness of the universe. For the moment, he was wholly unaware of the devotionary computer that he always kept near him.

'Pilot? Pilot?'

'I ... am too tired,' Danlo finally said. 'I have been away from home too long.'

'Perhaps you've miscalculated this star's fixed-points,' Ede said.

Danlo smiled at this, amused despite his dark mood. Even a journeyman pilot, having been shown the Eye of the Fish, could not have failed to find its fixed-points.

'Perhaps,' Ede said, 'you misunderstood which star the Sani woman was pointing to.'

'No, this is the star.'

'Then perhaps the Sani misunderstood which was the Architects' star. Before they killed the missionaries at their feast.'

'Perhaps,' Danlo said.

'Of course, it is a coincidence that this star is circled by such a rich world.'

'A ... coincidence,' Danlo said.

'And to find this world peopled with human beings – surely this is a coincidence, too.'

Danlo's mind was almost as murky as an abandoned cave, but when Ede said this, he suddenly remembered something – and it was as if a torch had been lit inside him. 'A rare coincidence ... yes.'

'You don't believe in pure chance, do you?' Ede asked. As a man – as a good programmer and cybernetic architect – Ede had always reviled tychism, the school of philosophy teaching that absolute chance underlay all of reality. But now, as the remnant of a ghost of a god, he was not so sure.

'I do not believe ... that God plays dice with the universe,' Danlo said, quoting the Einstein. 'All coincidences are intriguing, yes?'

'Perhaps – but are they meaningful?'

'Everything is meaningful,' Danlo said.

Ede sighed in a rather mechanical way, as he was programmed to do, and asked, 'What is the meaning of finding a world named Alumit Bridge where you had hoped Tannahill would be?'

Immediately upon falling out in orbit above Alumit Bridge, according to the rules of his Order, Danlo had sent a radio signal flashing down to the world below him. And almost immediately his greeting had been answered. The people of Alumit Bridge spoke a language apparently evolved from ancient Istwan, and Ede had little trouble translating it and ascertaining that these people – who called themselves the Narain – claimed to know nothing of Tannahill.

'You ... truly do not know?' Danlo asked.

'No, I don't think I do.'

'You do not remember ... that Nikolos Daru Ede was born on the planet Alumit?'

Ede was silent while he processed this. His face froze into a glittering attitude of thoughtfulness and the jewelled eyes of the devotionary seemed as unfocused as a baby's. Then he said, 'I must have pruned the memory of my birth planet by accident. But it's strange that I wasn't aware of this pruning.'

'Memory itself is strange,' Danlo said. 'Until you spoke of coincidences, I too had forgotten about Alumit.'

Ede looked straight into Danlo's eyes then, and said, 'I suppose that you've also noticed the coincidence of the Narain speaking a derivative of Istwan?'

Danlo nodded. 'Istwan was the language of the Old Church, yes?'

'This is true,' Ede admitted. 'But two hundred years after the Great Schism in 1749, at the end of the War of the Faces, there were fifty Architect sects. And all of them revered Istwan as their holy language. The Architect missionaries spread Istwan everywhere.'

'But it was the Old Church ... that established itself in the Vild.'

'Well, perhaps other churches did as well.'

'Perhaps,' Danlo said.

'Or perhaps the Old Church's missionaries taught Istwan to the ancestors of these Narain.'

Danlo smiled at the Ede hologram and said, 'We could invent a thousand hypotheses as to why the Narain seem to know nothing of Tannahill.'

'I notice,' Ede said, 'that you use the word "seem" in relation to the Narain's knowledge of Tannahill. Do you think these people have lied to us?'

'I do not know,' Danlo said. 'But there is something strange here. Something strange in the Narain naming their world Alumit Bridge. A bridge ... to what?'

'Who can say? There must be a thousand bridge-worlds in the galaxy.'

'I ... would like to explore these strangenesses,' Danlo said.

'We could speak with the Narain again. We could interface the radio.'

'I ... would like to speak with them face to face.'

'Do you mean imago to imago?'

Slowly, Danlo shook his head.

At this, Ede's program generated something like alarm, and he asked, 'Do you mean you'd make a planetfall here?'

'Yes.'

'But it's too dangerous,' Ede immediately said. After his witnessing the Sani's feast, he was most wary of placing himself in further jeopardy. 'An unknown world – an unknown people.'

'Pilots must take chances. Everyone, everything ... always must.'

'Perhaps this is true,' Ede said. 'But shouldn't the risk be in proportion to the possible gain?'

'Now you are arguing like a merchant,' Danlo said. And then, ashamed of speaking so rudely, even to a computer, he said, 'I am sorry. But the Narain might know of Tannahill. Isn't this gain enough?'

Ede was silent while he considered this, and his soft, glowing face was almost unreadable. 'But there might be a hundred other peoples in the Vild who know of Tannahill. People who wouldn't hide their knowledge.'

'People ... such as the Sani?'

'Perhaps,' Ede admitted. 'If we could find another such people, somewhere among these stars, we could make precautions and preparations.'

'I ... see.'

'The Sani had practically no technology. With a little foresight, it would be rather easy to protect ourselves from such savages.'

'The Sani were not savages.'

'Still, they had no—'

'I will never arm myself, if that is what you mean,' Danlo said.

'But if you go down to this planet, how will you protect yourself? The Narain are quite sophisticated, aren't they?'

In truth, the Narain were perhaps as technologically advanced as any peoples of the Civilized Worlds. The continents of Alumit Bridge were dotted with cities, all of which were great, glittering arcologies built on many levels high into the sky. They had radio and hologram displays and a planetary communications network; from one brief conversation with some man or cybernetic entity who called himself Abraxax, Danlo suspected that the Narain interfaced this network in very sophisticated ways. Some of the cities were graced with light-fields that could accommodate jets and jammers – and probably even shuttles capable of rocketing up to deepships and other vessels as they fell out above the planet in near space. Such a people would no doubt possess a sophisticated weaponry: perhaps lasers and eye tlolts and dreammakers, as well as a thousand kinds of poisons and genotoxins. Surely, for Danlo to fall into the hands of such unknown people would be madness.

As Danlo moved about his ship's pit, dressing himself in preparation for a planetfall, he considered what Ede had said. He took his flute into his hands, and he might have held it up to the devotionary's thousand computer eyes as if to say, 'This is all the protection that I will need'. But this would have been pure arrogance, perhaps even hubris. In truth, he did not really believe that his flute could keep him from harm when his time had come. Nothing could – and it was this open-eyed acceptance of his fate that vexed Ede so completely.

'You don't care about yourself,' Ede said as Danlo pulled on his black pilot's boots. According to Ede, the preservation of one's own life was every man's fundamental program. But in Danlo, the writing of this deep program had somehow gone awry. 'You don't care about your life.'

'But ... truly I do,' Danlo said as he zipped up his formal black robe. 'Truly to live is everything.'

'You're a dangerous man,' Ede continued. 'Perhaps even a madman – why should my fate be interwoven with such a mad, wild man?'

Danlo smiled at this and asked, 'How else should your fate have been woven, then?'

'Why must you always answer my questions with questions?'

For a moment Danlo was silent, and then he asked, 'Is there a better way to answer questions that have no answer?'

'Is there nothing I can say to dissuade you from going down to this planet?'

'How ... can I know the answer to that question?'

'Then you'll take your ship down to this world?'

'I ... must,' Danlo said. 'If you'd like, if you believe the risk to yourself is too great, I could make a fall to one of this star's other planets. I could leave you there and then return to this world.'

For a while, the Ede imago simply stared at Danlo, and neither of them made a sound. And then Ede said, 'If the Narain were to kill you while I was stranded on bare rock on some airless planet, what would happen to me?'

'I ... do not know.'

'Unfortunately,' Ede continued, 'my best chance for success lies in promoting your success. Thus I must translate for you and advise you; I must go wherever you go.'

'I am sorry.'

'Then, too, I must tell you that I'm growing fond of you. I feel the need to protect you from your own wildness.'

'Truly?' Danlo asked. He was now amused almost to the point of exaltation, and he couldn't help smiling.

'You don't believe me?'

'I ... do not know what to believe,' Danlo finally said.

'Well, you should believe me,' Ede said. 'You must believe me – I would never lie to you.'

After this, Danlo took the Snowy Owl down to the world called Alumit Bridge. He fell down through layers of dense white clouds, straight down toward the city of Iviunir and its single light-field. He fell blindly down towards the field's landing pads and long glittering runs that he could not see. In little time, his diamond ship broke free from the lowest clouds. And there, directly below him, was a city built a quarter of a mile into the sky. It was something like the domed cities of Yarkona, only Iviunir's outer skin was not translucent and lovely like clary but rather opaque like the shell of a turtle and flattened at the top. Indeed, the city's superstructure seemed to be made of some kind of greyish-green plastic. Upon seeing this, Danlo's belly immediately tightened. Life inside Iviunir, he realized, would not be like wandering the Yarkonan parks beneath a great golden dome. It would be more like living inside a plastic beehive, and as soon as Danlo considered this, he felt the burn of acid in his throat and his head began to ache. He might have turned his ship back to the stars, then, but he was scarcely a thousand feet above the light-field, which occupied the city's topmost level. And then the Snowy Owl fell down to one of the many runs as gently as a butterfly alighting on a flower, and it was too late.