The Wild (57 page)

'I've never seen the stars this way,' Isas Lei said. He sat motionless in his robot looking out into the Vild. In all his life, in all the times he had greeted luminaries from other cities or worlds at the light-field, he had never been outside at night.

'The stars ... are the children of God,' Danlo whispered.

'What did you say?' Isas Lel asked. With a heavy sigh, he climbed down from his robot and walked over to Danlo. The other Transcendentals took this as a sign that they should do the same. They came over to where Danlo stood almost beneath the great sweeping wing of his ship.

'The stars are the children of God alone in the night,' Danlo said. 'It is ... a line from a song that I once learned.'

'I never thought that there could be so many stars,' Kistur Ashtoreth said.

Ananda Narcavage nodded his/her head. 'Let's show Danlo wi Soli Ringess the star that he desires to see and go back to our apartments. It's not good to be outside this late.'

The Transcendentals of Alumit Bridge stood in their separate selves like naked children and watched the beautiful stars, and they felt vulnerable and alone and completely exposed to the terrible nearness of the night.

'Shall I show you Tannahill's star?' Isas Lel asked. He stepped over by Danlo's side, and he frowned as if it had been many years since he stood so close to another human being.

'Please ... yes.'

With a trembling finger Isas Lel pointed up towards a well-known constellation in the eastern sky. There, some forty degrees above the horizon, a bright triangle of stars twinkled against an inverted triangle approximately the same size. Both triangles were nearly equilateral and configured so as to make a nearly perfect hexagon. Or a star. Danlo immediately saw that if the six points of light were connected as a child might dots in a puzzle, then they would make a six-pointed star. To himself, he immediately named this strange constellation as the Star of Stars.

'Do you see the six hex stars?' Isas Lel asked. 'We call this group the Stars of David. I'm not sure why.'

Danlo watched these splendid stars giving up their faint illumination into the night. He waited in silence for Isas Lel to say more.

'Do you see the star at the apex of the upright triangle? It seems almost blue doesn't it? That is the star of Tannahill.'

At last, after years of his journey, after falling trillions of miles across the galaxy's stars, Danlo finally laid eyes upon this brilliant blue sphere that he had sought for so long. He let all the stars in the immediate neighbourhood of stars burn their pattern into his mind. And almost immediately he understood why Reina An, in guiding him toward the Architect's star, had pointed out Alumit Bridge's star rather than that of Tannahill: as arrayed from the Earth of the Sani, the two stars lay along a straight line. Reina An had pointed truly after all. Danlo need only fall a few tens of light years further upon the infinite line made by her bony old finger, and he would fall out upon the world of Tannahill.

'You're leaving now, aren't you, Pilot?'

This question, which was not really a question, came from Lieswyr Ivioss. She stood up from her robot and came over to where Danlo and Isas Lel were watching the stars.

'Yes,' Danlo said, lowering his eyes to meet hers. 'I must complete my journey.'

'Your mission to the Old Church."

'Yes, my mission,' Danlo agreed.

'And when you've succeeded, will you return here?'

Danlo stared into her brilliant eyes, then looked at Isas Lel and the hundreds of others who were watching him. 'I will return. I will tell you what the Elders of the Old Church have said about the Narain people – and about the stars.'

'And then?'

'Then I must fall on to Thiells. I must tell the Lords of my Order about Tannahill.'

'Will you ever return to Iviunir after that?'

Danlo looked down at his hands, and he answered her question with another question. 'Who can see the future?'

'Will you ever return to Shahar?' she asked.

In her voice there was a terrible longing that called to Danlo with all the urgency of a bird lost at sea. For a moment he felt this longing, too. He brooded upon all the joys of creating a higher, cybernetic self and merging with other instantiated entities. But in the end, this joy was illusory. In the glittering mindscapes of the Field, what could it mean to know real joy or sorrow? What could it mean to be brave in the absence of real threat or to call oneself alive when totally disconnected from the pain and cold of the real world?

What does it mean to truly live? What does it mean to love?

As the stars burned in the night sky above them, Danlo stared at the sudden burning wetness that filled up Lieswyr Ivioss's eyes. He knew her secret, then. Earlier that night, in merging into the One called Shahar, he had seen the surface of her mind, but now he looked into the depths of her heart. She, this glorious creature of blood and tears and love, this very human being, would never die for Shahar. In playing the game of transcendence, she might momentarily sacrifice the lesser parts of herself to cark out as a surreal Transcended One, but in the real world, she would never lay down her life for this One. Danlo looked at the other Transcendentals and all the people standing along the run; none of them, he thought, would be willing to die for an abstract entity programmed by a computer. Someday, perhaps, when they came out of their dark apartments and their surrealities and they saw each other as they really were, then they might die for each other – for that marvellous, streaming life that they shared as a people. But until that time, they would be as Lieswyr Ivioss: forlorn and fearful and very much alone.

'Will you return to us?' she asked again.

Danlo, who did not like to tell untruths, smiled sadly and shook his head. 'No,' he forced out. 'I am sorry.'

'I'm sorry, too,' she said. Then she called up her courage and smiled at him. 'Nevertheless, I wish you well. We all do.'

At this, she bowed to him, as did the other Transcendentals still sitting in their robots. And all the men and women waiting along the run bowed deeply, and they called out, 'We wish you well!'

The last of the Narain to say goodbye was Isas Lel. He bowed and said, 'We all wish you a safe journey, Danlo wi Soli Ringess. You are our emissary as well as our friend.'

After that, Danlo called for the doors to his lightship to open. As he climbed up to the dark pit where he would once again face all the perils of the manifold, he felt a terrible dread of the future. He looked down at the dark plastic of the run, down through the city of Iviunir and the soil and rock of the darkened planet below. He looked down through the sands of time, and there he saw the bloody star of Alumit Bridge burning brightly among all the stars of the Vild.

'I ... wish you well, too,' he said looking at Isas Lel. 'All of your blessed people.'

Then he stepped inside, and the doors of his ship enclosed him in a shell of black diamond, and he could look at the Narain people no more.

And so Ede faced the universe, and he was vastened, and he saw that the face of God was his own. Then the would-be gods, who are the hakra devils of the darkest depths of space, from the farthest reaches of time, saw what Ede had done, and they were jealous. And so they turned their eyes godward in jealousy and lust for the infinite lights, but in their countenances God read hubris, and he struck them blind. For here is the oldest of teachings, here is wisdom: no god is there but God; God is one, and there can be only one God.

- from the Facings of the Algorithm

In the vast distances of the galaxy, two stars separated by only three dozen light years of space are almost as close as two stars can be, and yet to pass from one blazing orb to another is often a difficult feat. In a ship travelling through realspace at half the speed of light, this journey would eat up some seventy years of a man's life. To a pilot mapping almost instantaneously from star to star, however, such a fallaway might take only a moment – or forever. As Danlo lay inside the lightless pit of his ship, the Snowy Owl, he thought about this problem. He fell through the shimmering manifold, making his mathematics and searching for a mapping that would enable him to open a window upon Tannahill's not-too-distant star. Often he thought about the Great Theorem of the pilots. Years ago his father had proved that it is always possible to fall from one of the galaxy's stars to any other in a single fall. It is always possible, yes, but it is always difficult to find such mappings. Distance alone is no determiner of this difficulty. The topology of the manifold is strange, and it can be easier to map across ten thousand light years of space, from the Detheshaloon to the Rainbow Double, than to fall on to a nearby sun so close that it is like a blue-white flame globe alight in a neighbour's window. Although Tannahill's star was almost close enough to touch, Danlo might reach out with his hands (and his mind) for a very long time before he closed in upon it.

Once, he remembered, there had been a pilot returning from a long journey to his friends and family. This was more than five thousand years ago on Arcite before the Order had moved to Neverness. The pilot – Chiah Li Chen – had fallen out of the manifold around a neighbouring star. He looked across only eight trillion miles of realspace to see Arcite Luz blazing like a beacon in the distance. He was so happy that he might have wept. When he fell back into the manifold, he was certain that he would reach his star in only a second or two of realtime. Except that, by bad chance, his lightship blundered into a rare Gallivare tube that had borne him twenty thousand light-years halfway towards the galaxy's core – like a piece of driftwood swept along by an ocean storm. It had taken Li Chen more than a hundred years to return across the dense stars of the Cygnus Arm to his home. There he had found his wife long dead and his children's grandchildren scattered upon a dozen other worlds. It is said that the broken-hearted Chiah Li Chen was the first pilot to kill himself by willingly mapping his lightship into the centre of Arcite's dangerous red star.

All pilots must return home, Danlo remembered. But where is home?

Often, during Danlo's dangerous passage to Tannahill, he thought about the ice-glazed spires of Neverness and the woman whom he had loved. Often, he thought of returning home. In truth, it can be the easiest thing in the universe for a pilot to return to the City of Light. The cantors, in their grey robes and their mathematical arrogance, have proclaimed the Star of Neverness as the topological nexus of the galaxy. Because many billions of the manifold's pathways converge in the thickspace near its cool yellow sun, Neverness has always been at the centre of man's greatest stellar civilization. 'All pathways lead to Neverness' – this is a saying of the pilots. Deep in the black belly of his lightship, Danlo remembered this. He remembered each of the many thousands of pathways that had carried him deep into the stars of the Vild. It would be almost possible, he thought, to retrace his way along these many twisting paths. Or he might find new mappings, new pathways – or someday he might blaze with marvellous insights into the secrets of the Great Theorem, and thus he might see how he could always return to Neverness in a single fall.

But now, as he sought a mapping through the violent and beautiful spaces that underlay the Vild, he prayed only that Chiah Li Chen and he would not share the same fate. He prayed that he would reach Tannahill's star after only a few quick falls. And so it happened. There was one bad moment when he almost opened a window upon an infinite tree and another when his ship began slipsliding into an inverted serpentine. Apart from these near-disasters, however, his journey was easy. Ironically, as Danlo would later muse, he had a much easier time reaching Tannahill than in leaving it.

The greatest excitement of his passage among the stars came not from danger but from mystery. Not far from Alumit Luz he came across a red giant that he named Haryatta Sawel, which meant 'the raging sun'. It was there, just after Danlo had mapped free from the spinning thickspace associated with this star, that he once again descried signs of another ship following him. As before, in his wild flight toward the Solid State Entity, this ship remained always at the threshold of the radius of convergence. He wondered if this ship was real – if it really fell through the manifold in such an impeccable manner that it remained always at the exact boundary of the neighbourhood of stars surrounding the Snowy Owl. It seemed as insubstantial as smoke in a cold wind or an icon instantiated into some cybernetic surreality. Perhaps, Danlo thought, this mysterious second ship was only a reflection of his own. The perturbations a lightship makes in passing through the manifold are hideously difficult to read, and such mathematical mirages and illusions are always possible. Could Malaclypse Redring, in Sivan wi Mawi Sarkissian's ship the Red Dragon, really have pursued him halfway across the galaxy? This miracle of piloting seemed truly impossible, and yet Danlo sensed that it must be so. His sense of others watching him was primal, animal, and very keen. He remembered back to a sight he had witnessed during his childhood, the way a hungry gull would sometimes follow a snowy owl in order to scavenge any leavings from the rare white bird's inevitable kill. Danlo could only think that the warrior-poet still pursued him in hope of being led to his father. He dreaded this eventual meeting as he might look with horror at two pieces of plutonium slammed together. Strangely, though, for himself he still had little fear.

And so perhaps inevitably Danlo came to Tannahill. One bright, happy day, he fell out far above this lost and fabled world. With his telescopes and his keen eyes, he looked down through space, down between the patchy clouds of the atmosphere upon an unbelievable sight. Tannahill was a fat world of great oceans and bulging landmasses; but the waters of the world, as Danlo saw, were nearly dead. In many places, the shallows were choked with sludges and greyish-green mats of some weedlike marine plant, while the deeper seas bore the taint of acetylene and benzene and ten thousand other man-made chemicals. So pervasive was this pollution that oceans fairly ran with ugly colours as if smeared with blacking oil: metallic greens and muddy pinks and a dark, dirty grey that reminded him of frozen skin that has fallen into necrosis. The atmosphere, too, was horribly polluted. There was too much carbon dioxide, of course, and the oxygen-nitrogen ratio was dangerously out of balance. Danlo's computer analyses showed much sulphur and halogens and even traces of fungicides. At first, Danlo wondered how the animals walking through Tannahill's forests could ever get their breath; but after he had painstakingly scanned the whole of the world he realized that on all the surface of Tannahill there were no forests. Neither did there live any animals – at least none much larger than the worms or the insects that infested the rare patches of exposed soil. Tannahill's three large continents girdled the world's equator, and each of them had been given over wholly to the purpose of human habitation. And what dwellings these people had built! In all Danlo's journeys he had never seen anything like what the Architects had made of their world. Except for the slopes of the highest mountains and the great gorges cutting the deserts, the Architects had covered every area of earth with great plastic cities. It was as if they long ago had set out to build a few hundred arcologies similar to the cities of Alumit Bridge – and then their architecture had exploded out of control, growing like cancers until their edges had met and melted together into a planet-wide smear of plastic. The transformation of Tannahill was the most total unbalancing of the natural order that Danlo had ever beheld. For such a criminal and insane act he knew only one word, and that was shaida. He remembered, then, a line from the Song of Life that his grandfather had once taught him: shaida is the cry of the world when it has lost its soul. Except that Tannahill had lost much more than its soul; it had lost trees and rivers and rocks and the fresh, clean wind that was the breath of the world. In truth, this plastic-covered habitat of twelve hundred billion human beings had lost its very life.