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DAVID ZINDELL
The Wild

BOOK TWO

of A Requiem for Homo Sapiens

COPYRIGHT

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

HarperVoyager

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1995

Copyright © David Zindell 1995

David Zindell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9780006497127

Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2016 ISBN: 9780008116781

Version: 2016-09-01

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Part One: The Goddess

Chapter One: The Mission

Chapter Two The Eye of the Universe

Chapter Three: Ancestral Voices

Chapter Four: The Tiger

Chapter Five: The Miracle

Chapter Six: Recurrence

Chapter Seven: She

Part Two: The God

Chapter Eight: The Dead God

Chapter Nine: The Sani

Chapter Ten: The Feast

Chapter Eleven: Alumit Bridge

Chapter Twelve: The Transcendentals

Chapter Thirteen: The Fields

Chapter Fourteen: Heaven

Chapter Fifteen: The One

Part Three: The Chosen of God

Chapter Sixteen: Tannahill

Chapter Seventeen: The Koivuniemin

Chapter Eighteen: The Prophecy

Chapter Nineteen: In the Prophet’s Palace

Chapter Twenty: In the House of The Dead

Chapter Twenty One: Preparations

Chapter Twenty Two: The Heavenly Light

Chapter Twenty Three: The Lightbringer

Keep Reading

About the Author

Other Books By

About the Publisher

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE
The Mission

Each man and woman is a star.

The stars are the children of God alone in the night;

The stars are the wild white seeds burning inside a woman;

The stars are the fires that women light inside men;

The stars are the eyes of all the Old Ones who have lived and died.

Who can hold the light of the wild stars?

Gazing at the bright black sky,

You see only yourself looking for yourself.

When you look into the eyes of God,

They go on and on forever.

– from the Devaki Song of Life

It is my duty to record the events of the glorious and tragic Second Mission to the Vild. To observe, to remember, to record only – although the fate of the galaxy’s dying stars was intimately interwoven with my own, I took little part in seeking out that vast, stellar wasteland known as the Vild, or the Wild, or the Inferno, or whatever ominous name that men can attach to such a wild and hellish place. This quest to save the stars was to be for others: eminent pilots such as the Sonderval, and Aja, and Alark of Urradeth, and some who were not yet famous such as Victoria Chu, and my son, Danlo wi Soli Ringess. Like all quests called by the Order of Mystic Mathematicians, the Second Vild Mission had an explicit and formal purpose: to establish a new Order within the heart of the Vild; to find the lost planet known as Tannahill; to establish a mission among the leaders of man’s greatest religion and win them to a new vision; and, of course, to stop the man-doomed stars from exploding into supernovas. All seekers of the Vild took oaths toward this end. But as with all human enterprises, there are always purposes inside purposes. Many attempted the journey outward across the galaxy’s glittering stars out of the promise of adventure, mystery, power, or even worldly riches. Many spoke of a new phase in human evolution, of redeeming both past and future and fulfilling the ancient prophecies. Altogether, ten thousand women and men braved the twisted, light-ruined spaces of the Vild, and thus they carried inside them ten thousand individual hopes and dreams. And the deepest dream of all of them (though few acknowledged this even to themselves) was to wrest the secrets of the universe from the wild stars. Their deepest purpose was to heal the universe of its wound, and to this impossible end they pledged their devotion, their energies, their genius, their very lives.

On the twenty-first of false winter in the year 2954 since the founding of Neverness, the Vild Mission began its historic journey across the galaxy. In the black, cold, vacuum spaces above the City of Light (or the City of Pain as Neverness is sometimes known), in orbit around the planet of Icefall, Lord Nikolos Sar Petrosian had called together a fleet of ships. There were ten seedships, each one the temporary home of a thousand akashics, cetics, programmers, mechanics, biologists, and other professionals of the Order. There were twelve deepships as round and fat as artificial moons; the deepships contained the floating farms and factories and assemblers that would be needed to establish a second Order within the Vild. And, of course, there were the lightships. Their number was two hundred and fifty-four. They were the glory of Neverness, these bright, shining slivers of spun diamond that could pierce the space beneath space and enter the unchartered seas of the manifold where there was neither time nor distance nor light. A single pilot guided each lightship, and together the pilots of Vild Mission would lead the seedships and deepships across the stars. To the thousands of Ordermen who had remained behind (and to the millions of citizens of Neverness safe by the fires of their dwellings), the fleet that Lord Petrosian had assembled must have seemed a grand array of men and machines. But against the universe, it was nothing. Upon Lord Petrosian’s signal, the Vild ships vanished into the night, two hundred and seventy-six points of light lost into the billions of lights that were the stars of the Milky Way. Lightships such as the Vivasvat and The Snowy Owl fell from star to star, and the mission fleet followed, and they swept across the Civilized Worlds. And wherever they went, on planets such as Orino or Valvare, the manswarms would gather beneath the night skies in hope of bearing witness to their passing. They would watch the bright, black heavens for the little flashes of light released whenever a lightship tore through the shimmering fabric of the manifold. They lived in awe of this light (and in dread as well), for the Order had been the soul of the Civilized Worlds for a hundred generations, and now it was dividing in two. Some feared that the Order might be dividing against itself. No one could know what fate this future might bring. No one could know how a few thousand pilots and professionals in their fragile ships might cool the fury of the Vild, and so the peoples of the Civilized Worlds gathered on their star-flung planets to hope and wonder and pray.

There are many peoples on the planets of man. The Civilized Worlds comprise only a tiny fraction of humanity, and yet there are some four thousand of these planets bearing the weight of at least a trillion human beings. And bearing as well strange peoples who have never been human. The Vild Mission fell from Treya to Teges to Silvaplana, and then on to Fravashing, home of that beautiful alien race whose souls are more manlike than that of any man. The lightships led the race among the stellar pathways, falling through the manifold from window to window, passing by the planet of Arcite, where once the Order had ruled before its move to Neverness at the beginning of the Sixth Mentality of Man. None of the pilots sealed inside their ships (not even the youngest or most inexperienced) had trouble with this part of their journey, for the ancient paths through the manifold had been mapped millennia before and were now well known. The pilots passed among the old red stars of the Greater Morbio and on to the Tycho’s Nebula, where the splendid stars were newly created of gravity and dust and light. Few human beings dwelt in these dangerous places, and so only the stars – such as Gloriana Luz, all huge and blood-red like a god’s blinded eye –felt the faint, rippling tremors of the lightships as they tore open windows into the manifold. The stars lit the way of Vild Mission, and the pilots steered by the stars, by Alumit and Treblinka and Agni, which burned with a brilliant blue fire and was ten thousand times brighter than Neverness’s cold yellow sun. The whole of the Fallaways was on fire, a blazing swathe of fire burning through the galaxy from Bellatrix to Star’s End. Had the pilots or others of the Order wondered how far they had fallen, they might have measured their journey in parsecs or tendays or trillions of miles. Or in light-years. The ships launched from Neverness fell five thousand light-years along the luminous Sagittarius Arm of the galaxy, outward across the great, glittering lens. They passed from Sheydveg to Jonah’s Star Far Group to Wakanda, as thus they made the perilous crossing to the Orion Arm, ten thousand light-years from the star that they had once known as home. Some of the pilots called this flight away from the core ‘the westering’, not because they fell in the direction of universal west, but because their journey carried them ever outward toward the unknown stars without fixed-points or name. But still they remained within the Fallaways, where man was still man and few of the galaxy’s gods cared to roam. They guided their lightships away from the August Cluster where the Silicon God was said to claim a million stars as his own. They fell out among the oldest of human planets, Kittery and Vesper, and they avoided the spaces of Earth, lost and lonely Old Earth which men and women were no longer permitted to behold. And so at last the Mission came to Farfara at the edge of the Vild. Here the Fallaways gave out onto the wild, mapless portions of the manifold that had killed so many of the Order’s pilots. Here the farthest of the Civilized Worlds stood looking out on the Vild’s ruined stars. Farfara was a fat, rich, pleasant world, and it was here that Lord Nikolos Sar Petrosian commanded the Mission to make a brief planetfall. He did this so that the ships might take on fresh stores of coffee, toalache and wine, so that the ten thousand men and women of the Order might take a few days of rest beneath the open sky and Farfara’s hot blue sun. From the beginning, it had been Lord Nikolos’ plan to halt at Farfara while he sent pilots into the Vild to make mappings and find a planet on which they might make a new home.

It was on the fortieth day of the Mission’s sojourn on Farfara that one of the Order’s master pilots returned from the Vild with news of a planet suitable to their purpose. The Cardinal Virtue – the lightship of the great pilot known as the Sonderval – fell out of the manifold and rendezvoused with the fleet above Farfara. The Sonderval told the professionals and pilots of a beautiful planet remarkably similar to Old Earth. As was a pilot’s right, he had named this planet ‘Thiells’ in honour of a woman whom he had once loved and lost when a comet collided with Puakea and destroyed most of the life on that unfortunate planet. According to the Sonderval, Thiells lay inside the inner veil of the Vild, and it could be reached after a journey of only thirty-one fallings. The Sonderval gave the fixed-points of Thiells’ white star to the other pilots. He told them that he would lead the way. He also told them – told everyone – of a new supernova that he had discovered. It was an old supernova, many hundreds of light-years away. But it had exploded hundreds of years ago, and the wavefront of radiation and light would soon fall upon Farfara.

Lord Nikolos, although he disapproved of the arrogant, self-loving Sonderval, approved his plan. He commanded the professionals of the Order to make ready for the rest of their journey. On the night before the Mission would finally enter the tortuous spaces of the Vild – the very night that the supernova would light Farfara’s sky – the merchants of Farfara decided to hold a reception to celebrate the pilots’ bravery. They invited the Order’s two hundred and fifty-four pilots and many important masters from among the professions. They invited musicians and artists and arhats – even warrior-poets – as well as princes and ambassadors from each of the Civilized Worlds. It would be the grandest party ever held on Farfara, and the merchants who ruled that ancient planet spared no trouble or expense in creating an air of magnificence to match the magnificent hubris of the men and women who dared to enter the Vild.

Late in the Day of the Lion in the eighteenth month of Second Summer in Year 24, as the merchants of Farfara measure time, the estate of Mer Tadeo dur li Marar began to fill with people arriving from cities and estates across the planet. Mer Tadeo’s estate was laid out over three hills overlooking the Istas River, that great sullen river which drains the equatorial mountains of the continent called Ayondela. That evening, while the forests and bottomland of the Istas River still blazed with the heat of the sun, cool mountain winds fell over Mer Tadeo’s estate, rippling through the jade trees and the orange groves, carrying down the scent of the distant glaciers which gleamed an icy white beneath the night’s first stars. Shuttles rocketed back and forth between Mer Tadeo’s starfield and the Order’s seedships in orbit above the planet; they ferried hundreds of master cetics and mechanics and other master Ordermen down to the fountains and music pools that awaited them far below. And then, in a display of the Order’s power, a light show of flashing diamond hulls and red rocket fire, the two hundred and fifty-four lightships fell down through Farfara’s atmosphere and came to earth at the mile-wide pentagon at the centre of Mer Tadeo’s starfield. Although no member of the Order was scorned or ignored in any manner, it was the pilots whom the men and women of Farfara wished to fête. In truth, the merchants adulated the pilots. Mer Tadeo himself – accompanied by twenty other great merchants from Farfara’s greatest estates – received the pilots by the Fountain of Fortune on the sculptured grounds in front of his palace. Here, on soft green grasses native to Old Earth, in the loveliest garden on Farfara, the pilots gathered to drink priceless Summerworld wines and listen to the music pools as they gazed out over the sinuous river. Here they drank each other’s health, and looked up at the unfamiliar star configurations in the sky, and waited half the night for the Sonderval’s supernova to appear.

In the Hour of Remembrance (a good hour before the exploding star would fill the heavens) a pilot stood alone by the marble border of one of the palace’s lesser fountains. His name was Danlo wi Soli Ringess; he was a tall, well-made young man, much the youngest pilot or professional to join the Mission. To any of the merchants, if any had looked his way, he might have seemed lonely or preoccupied with some great problem of the universe that had never been solved. His deep-set eyes were grave and full of light as if he could see things that others could not, or rather, as if the everyday sights of wine goblets and beautifully-dressed women amused him where it caused others only lust or envy. In truth, he had marvellous eyes, as dark and deep as the midnight sky. The irises were blue-black like liquid jewels, almost black enough to merge with the bright, black pupils, which gave them a strange intensity. Much about this pilot was strange and hinted of deep purpose: his shiny black hair shot with strands of red; the mysterious, lightning-bolt scar cut into his forehead above his left eye; the ease with which he dwelt inside his silence despite the noise and gaiety all around him. Like a creature of the wild he seemed startlingly out of place, and yet he was completely absorbed into his surroundings, as a bird is always at home wherever he flies. In truth, with his bold facial bones and long nose, he sometimes seemed utterly wild. A fellow pilot had once accused him of having a fierce and predatory look, and yet there was always a tenderness about him, an almost infinite grace. At any party or social gathering, men and women always noticed him and never left him alone for very long.

‘Good evening, Danlo, it’s good to see you again,’ a voice called out from the hundreds in Mer Tadeo’s garden. Danlo turned away from the fountain and watched a very tall man push through the crowds of brilliantly-dressed people and make his way across the flagstones and trampled grasses. Indeed, the master pilot known as the Sonderval was the tallest of men, impossibly and intimidatingly tall. With his thin limbs and eight feet of height, he seemed more like a giant insect than a man, though in fact had been born an exemplar of Solsken and was therefore by heredity as arrogant as any god; he had been bred to tallness and intelligence much as the courtesans of Jacaranda are bred for beauty. He was dressed in a thin silk pilot’s robe of purest black, as was Danlo. In a measured and stately manner – but quite rapidly, for his stride was very long – he walked up to Danlo and bowed his head. ‘Is there something about this fountain that interests you?’ he asked. ‘I must tell you, Danlo, if you attend a party such as this, you can’t hope to avoid the manswarms all night. Though I must say I can’t blame you for wanting to avoid these merchants.’

‘Master Pilot,’ Danlo said. He had a wonderfully melodious voice, though cut with the harshness of too many memories and sorrows. With some difficulty – the requirements of etiquette demanded that he should always keep his eyes on the Sonderval’s scornful eyes high above his head – he returned the Sonderval’s bow. ‘I do not want … to avoid anyone.’

‘Is that why you stand alone by this fountain?’

Danlo turned back to the fountain to watch the lovely parabolas of water spraying up into the cool night air. The water droplets caught the light of the many flame globes illuminating the garden; the tens of thousands of individual droplets sparkled in colours of silver and violet and golden blue, and then fell splashing back into the waters of the fountain. Most of the garden’s fountains, as he saw, were filled with fine wines or liquid toalache or other rare drugs that might be drunk. The merchants of Farfara delighted in sitting by these fountains as they laughed a gaudy, raucous laughter and plunged their goblets into the dark red pools, or sometimes, in displays of greed that shocked the Order’s staid academicians, plunged their entire bodies into the fountains and stood open-mouthed as they let streams of wine run down their clutching throats.

With a quick smile, Danlo looked up at the Sonderval and said, ‘I have always loved the water.’

‘For drinking or bathing?’ the Sonderval asked.

‘For listening to,’ Danlo said. ‘For watching. Water is full of memories, yes?’

That evening, as Danlo stood by the fountain and looked out over the river Istas all silver and swollen in the light of the blazing Vild stars, he lost himself in memories of a colder sky he had known as a child years ago. Although he was only twenty-two years old – which is much too young to look backward upon the disasters of the past instead of forward into the glorious and golden future – he couldn’t help remembering the death of his people, the blessed Devaki, who had all fallen to a mysterious disease made by the hand of man. He couldn’t help remembering his journey to Neverness, where, against all chance, he had become a pilot of the Order and won the black diamond pilot’s ring that he wore on the little finger of his right hand. He couldn’t keep away these memories of his youth because he was afflicted (and blessed) with memory, much as a heavy stone is with gravity, as a blue giant star is suffused with fire and light. In every man and woman there are three phases of life more descriptive of the soul’s inner journey than are childhood, maturity and old age: It can’t happen to me; I can overcome it; I accept it. It was Danlo’s fate that although he had passed through these first two phases much more quickly than anyone should, he had nevertheless failed to find the way toward affirmation that all men seek. And yet, despite the horrors of his childhood, despite betrayals and hurts and wounds and the loss of the woman he had loved, there was something vibrant and mysterious about him, as if he had made promises to himself and had a secret convenant with life.

‘Perhaps you remember too much,’ the Sonderval said. ‘Like your father.’

‘My father,’ Danlo said. He pointed east out over the Istas, over the mountains where the first of the Vild stars were rising. As the night deepened, the planet of Farfara turned inexorably on its axis, and so turned its face to the outward reaches of the galaxy beyond the brilliant Orion Arm. Soon the entire sky would be a window to the Vild. Blue and white stars such as Yachne and the Plessis twinkled against the black stain of night, and soon the supernovas would appear, the old, weak, distant supernovas whose light shone less brightly than any of Neverness’s six moons. It was a mistake, Danlo thought, to imagine the Vild as nothing more than a vast wasteland of exploding stars. Among the millions of Vild stars, there were really only a few supernovas. A few hundred or a few hundred thousand – the greatest uncertainty of the Mission was that no one really knew the size or the true nature of the Vild. ‘My father,’ Danlo said again, ‘was one of the first pilots to penetrate the Vild. And now you, sir.’

With his long, thin finger, the Sonderval touched his long upper lip. He said, ‘I must remind you that you’re a full pilot now. It’s not necessary for you to address every master pilot as “sir”.’

‘But I do not address everyone that way.’

‘Only those who have penetrated the Vild?’

‘No,’ Danlo said, and he smiled. ‘Only those whom I cannot help calling “sir”.’

This compliment of Danlo’s seemed to please the Sonderval, who had a vast opinion of his value as a human being. So vast was his sense of himself that he looked down upon almost everyone as his inferior and was therefore wont to disregard others’ compliments as worthless. It was a measure of his respect for Danlo that he did not dismiss his words, but rather favoured him with a rare smile and bow of his head. ‘Of course you may call me “sir” if it pleases you.’

‘Did you know my father well, sir?’

‘We were journeymen together at Resa. We took our pilot’s vows together. We fought in the war together. I knew him as well as I care to know any man. He was just a man, you know, despite what everyone says.’

‘Then you do not believe … that he became a god?’

‘A god,’ the Sonderval said. ‘No, I don’t want to believe in such fables. You must know that I discovered a so-called god not very long ago when I made my journey to the eighteenth Deva Cluster. A dead god – it was bigger than East Moon and made of diamond neurologics. A god, a huge computer of diamond circuitry. The gods are nothing more than sophisticated computers. Or the grafting of a computer onto the mind of man, the interface between man and computers. Few will admit this, but it’s so. Mallory Ringess journeyed to Agathange and carked his brain, replaced half the neurons with protein neurologics. Your father did this. Does this make him a god? If so, then I’m a god, too. Any of us, the few pilots who have really mastered a lightship. Whenever I face my ship-computer, when the stars fall into my eyes and the whole galaxy is mine, I’m as godly as any god.’

For a while Danlo listened to the water falling into the fountain, the humming and click of the evening insects, the low roar of a thousand human voices. Then he looked at the Sonderval and said, ‘Who can know what it is to be a god? Can a computer be a god … truly? I think my father is something other. Something more.’

‘What, then?’

‘He discovered the Elder Eddas. Inside himself, the deep memories – he found a way of listening to them.’

‘The wisdom of the gods?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘The memories of the Iedra and other gods written into human DNA? The so-called racial memories?’

‘Some would characterize the Eddas thus, sir.’ Danlo smiled, then continued, ‘But the Eddas, too, are something other, something more.’

‘Oh, yes,’ the Sonderval said. ‘The secret of life. The secret of the universe, and Mallory Ringess whom I used to tutor in topology, whom I used to beat at chess nine games out of ten, was clever enough to discover it.’

Danlo suddenly cupped his hand and dipped it into the fountain. He brought his hand up to his lips, taking a quick drink of water. And then another. The water was cool and good, and he drank deeply. ‘But, sir,’ he finally said, ‘what of the Timekeeper’s quest? My father and you were seekers together, yes?’

The Sonderval shot Danlo a cold, suspicious look and said, ‘It’s true, two years before you were born, the Timekeeper called his quest. I, your father, we pilots – fell across half the galaxy from Neverness to the Helvorgorsee seeking the so-called Elder Eddas. This Holy Grail that everyone believed in. The Eschaton, the transcendental object at the end of time. But I could never believe in such myths.’

‘But, sir, the Eddas aren’t myths to believe in. The Eddas are memories … to be remembered.’

‘So it’s been said. I must tell you that I tried to remember them once. This was after the Timekeeper’s fall, when your father first announced that the quest had been fulfilled. Because I was curious, I engaged the services of a remembrancer and drank the kalla drug that they use to unfold the memory sequences. And there was nothing. Nothing but my own memories, the memories of myself.’

‘But others have had … other memories.’

‘Myths about themselves that they extend into universals and believe are true.’

Danlo slowly took another drink of water. Then he slowly shook his head. ‘No, not myths, sir.’

The Sonderval stood stiff as a tree above Danlo, looking down at him for a long time. ‘I must tell you that there is no kind of mental accomplishment that has ever eluded me. If the Elder Eddas exist as memory, I would have been able to remember them.’

‘To remembrance deeply … is hard,’ Danlo said. ‘The hardest thing in the universe.’

‘I’ve heard a rumour that you drank the kalla, too. That you fell into a so-called great remembrance. Perhaps you should have become a remembrancer instead of a pilot.’

‘I have … lost the talent for remembrancing,’ Danlo said. ‘I am just a pilot, now.’

‘A pilot must pilot and fall among the stars, or else he is nothing.’

‘I journeyed to Neverness so that I might become a pilot.’

The Sonderval sighed and ran his fingers through his golden hair. He said, ‘These last years I’ve been away from Neverness much too much. But I’ve taken notice of what has happened there. I can’t say I’m pleased. Mallory Ringess is proclaimed a god, and his best friend founds a church to worship his godhood. And his son joins this church, this “Way of Ringess”, as it’s called. And suddenly half of Neverness is attempting to remembrance the Elder Eddas and cark themselves into gods.’

‘But I have left the Way,’ Danlo said. ‘I have never wanted to become … a god.’

‘Then you do not seek the Elder Eddas?’

Danlo looked down into the water and said, ‘No, not any more.’

‘But you’re still a seeker, aren’t you?’

‘I … have taken a vow to go to the Vild,’ Danlo said. ‘I have pledged my life toward the fulfilment of the new quest.’

The Sonderval waved his hand as if to slap an insect away from his face. ‘In the end, all quests are really the same. What matters is that pilots such as you and I may distinguish ourselves in seeking; what matters not at all is that which is sought.’

‘You speak as if there is little hope of stopping the supernovas.’

‘Perhaps there might have been more hope if I had been chosen Lord of the Mission instead of Lord Nikolos. But in the end it doesn’t matter. Stars will die, and people will die, too. But do you really think it’s possible that our kind could destroy the entire galaxy?’

With his fingers, Danlo pressed the scar over his left eye, trying to rid himself of the fierce head pain that often afflicted him. After a long time of considering the Sonderval’s words, he said, ‘I believe that what we do … does matter.’

‘Why have you been following me?’ Danlo finally asked.

Malaclypse smiled nicely; he had a beautiful smile that spread out over the golden lines of his face. ‘But as you see, I haven’t been following you – here I stand appreciating this fine view, these strange, alien stars. It’s you who have followed me. And that’s very strange, don’t you think? Most men flee our kind rather than seeking us out.’

‘It seems to be my fate … to seek out warrior-poets.’

‘A strange fate,’ Malaclypse said. ‘It would seem more natural for me to seek you.’

‘To seek me … why?’

‘You don’t know?’

‘I do not know … if I want to know.’

Malaclypse held his wine goblet up to his nose and inhaled deeply. He said, ‘On Qallar, you’re famous. For two reasons. You’re one of the few ever to have defeated a warrior-poet – and the only one to have done so as a boy.’

‘I was sixteen when I met Marek in the library. I did not think of myself … as a boy.’

‘Still, a remarkable feat. If only you had been born on Qallar, you might have become warrior among warriors, a poet among poets.’

At this startling thought, Danlo looked straight at Malaclypse. He looked deep into his marvellous, violet eyes, which were so dark that he could almost see his reflection gleaming in their black centres. ‘I could never have become … a warrior-poet,’ he said.

‘No?’

Danlo let this question hang in the air, even as the gonging sound of Mer Tadeo’s music pools hung low and urgent over the lawns and fountains of the garden. He kept his eyes on Malaclypse’s eyes, and he said, ‘Have you come here tonight to avenge Marek’s death, then?’

‘You ask this question so blithely.’

‘How should I ask, then?’

‘Most men would not ask at all. They would flee. Why aren’t you afraid of our kind?’

‘I … do not know.’

‘It’s the greatest gift, not to fear,’ Malaclypse said. ‘But, of course, you needn’t have feared that we would avenge Marek. He died according to our forms, which we thank you for observing so impeccably.’

‘I did not want him to die.’

‘And that is the most remarkable thing of all. It’s said that you have taken a vow of ahimsa to harm no living thing – and yet you were able to help Marek on to his moment of the possible.’

Danlo remembered too well how Marek of Qallar had plunged his killing knife into his own brain and so reached his moment of the possible, where life is death, and death is life. He remembered that Marek, just before he had accomplished this noble act, had confessed that the warrior-poets had a new rule for their bloody order: to kill all gods, even all women and men who might become as gods. For six years, Danlo had shared this secret with only two other people, but now he said, ‘I know why Marek came to Neverness. The true reason. He told me about your rule before he died.’

Malaclypse smiled at this piece of news, which – strangely – seemed not to surprise him. ‘I’ve said that you’re famous on my world for two reasons. The second reason, of course, is because you’re the son of Mallory Ringess. Marek was sent to Neverness to determine if you’re truly the son of the father.’

‘Am I, then?’

‘Don’t you know?’

‘How … would I know?’

At this, Malaclypse laughed easily, and to Danlo he said, ‘I’ve heard that you’re also famous for answering questions with questions.’

Danlo inclined his head, slightly, accepting Malaclypse’s criticism as a compliment. Then he said, ‘You have come to Farfara to complete this determination about me, yes?’

Again, as he often did, Danlo began to count his heartbeats, and he waited for Malaclypse to remove his killing knife from his cloak. But Malaclypse only looked at him, strangely, deeply, drinking in the wild look that filled Danlo’s eyes like an ocean. ‘I don’t know who you really are,’ Malaclypse said. ‘Not yet. In truth, I don’t know who your father really is, either. Mallory Ringess, this once Lord Pilot of the Order who everyone says has become a god.’

For a moment, Danlo looked up into the sky in sudden understanding. ‘You have come to find my father, yes?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Not just … to Farfara,’ Danlo said. ‘You would follow our Mission to the Vild.’

Now, for the first time, Malaclypse seemed slightly surprised. He regarded Danlo coolly and said, ‘I had heard that you were too perceptive for a mere pilot – now I see that this is so.’

‘You would follow us,’ Danlo repeated. ‘But follow … how? Warrior-poets do not pilot lightships, do they?’

The Merchant-Pilots of Tria, of course, did pilot ships: deepships and prayerships, and sometimes even lightships. They journeyed to Nwarth and Alumit and Farfara, but no Merchant-Pilot would ever think of taking a lightship into the Vild.

‘There is a man,’ Malaclypse said. He pointed along the curve of the retaining wall at a stand of orange trees some forty feet away. ‘A former pilot of your Order. He will take me where I need to go.’

As Danlo saw, beneath an orange tree laden with bright, round fruits, there stood a silent man dressed all in grey. Danlo recognized him as the infamous renegade, Sivan wi Mawi Sarkissian, once a pilot of great promise who had deserted the Order in the time of the Quest for the Elder Eddas. None of the other pilots whom Mer Tadeo had invited would bear the shame of talking to such a faithless man, and so Sivan stood alone, sipping from his goblet of wine.

‘And where is it that you need to go, then?’ Danlo asked.

‘Wherever I must,’ Malaclypse said. ‘But I’ve heard that Mallory Ringess has returned to the Vild. Somewhere. It may be that your Order’s mission will cause him to make himself known.’

‘And then?’

‘And then I shall know,’ Malaclypse said. ‘And then I shall do what must be done.’

‘You would murder my father, yes?’

‘If he is truly a god, I would help him toward his moment of the possible.’

‘If he is truly … a god?’

‘If he is still a man, I would only ask him to complete a poem.’

‘What … poem?’

‘A poem that I’ve been composing for some time. Only a man who has refused to become a god would know how to complete it.’

Danlo looked off at the Istas River gleaming in the starlight, but he said nothing.

‘I believe that you might know where your father is.’ Danlo squeezed his empty wine glass between his hands, but he remained as silent as the sky.

‘It may be that we share the same mission, you and I,’ Malaclypse said. ‘I believe that we’re both seeking your father.’

Was it possible, Danlo wondered, that Malaclypse’s only purpose in seeking the Vild was to lay eyes upon his father? He did not think so. The warrior-poets always had purposes within purposes – and often their deepest purpose was war.

‘You’re very good at keeping a silence,’ Malaclypse said. ‘Very well, then – let us listen to what our host is saying.’

As Danlo looked down at the dark forest far below the cliff face, he became aware of a voice falling through the spaces all around him. It was the voice of Mer Tadeo, convolved and amplified by the music pools, hanging like a silver mist over the lawns of the garden. Mer Tadeo had begun his toast, and Danlo looked away from the warrior-poet to concentrate on Mer Tadeo’s words: ‘… these brave women and men of the Civilized Worlds’ most honoured Order, who have vowed to enter the Vild and seek …’ Danlo became aware, just then, that his glass was empty. In his haste to seek out the warrior-poet, he hadn’t had time to fill it.

‘Pilot, you’ve no wine to drink,’ Malaclypse said. Quickly, easily, he moved over to Danlo and held up his wine glass as if he were showing Danlo some secret elixir. He tinked it against Danlo’s glass, and a clear note rang out. Then he quickly poured a stream of ruby wine into Danlo’s glass, halfway to the rim, spilling not a drop. ‘Won’t you drink to the fulfilment of the Mission?’ he asked.

Danlo brought his glass close to his lips, but did not drink. He breathed in deeply, smelling the wine. It had an effervescent scent that was almost hot and peppery. He wondered if Malaclypse would dare poison him in clear sight of ten thousand people. The warrior-poets, he knew, were notorious for their poisons: a thousand years ago at the end of the War of the Faces, they had engineered the virus that had poisoned the Civilized Worlds, and ultimately, had infected the Devaki people on Danlo’s world and killed everyone in his tribe except Danlo.

‘Have you ever tasted firewine?’ Malaclypse asked.

Danlo remembered, then, that the warrior-poets’ poisons are not always meant to kill. He remembered that a warrior-poet had once poisoned his grandmother, Dama Moira Ringess. This infamous warrior-poet had jabbed little needles into her neck, filling her blood with programmed bacteria called slel cells. These cells, like manmade cancers, had metastasized into her brain, where they had destroyed millions of neurons and neuron clusters. The slel cells had layered down microscopic sheets of protein neurologics, living computers that might be grafted onto human brains. And so his grandmother, who was also the mother of Mallory Ringess, had been slelled, her marvellous human brain replaced almost entirely by a warrior-poet’s programmed computer circuitry. As Danlo drank in the firewine’s heady aroma, he could not forget how the mother of his father had suffered such a death-in-life.

‘I cannot drink with you,’ Danlo said at last.

‘No?’

‘I am sorry.’

Malaclypse looked deeply at Danlo but said nothing.

‘As a pilot, I may not drink with my Order’s enemies.’

Malaclypse smiled, then, sadly, beautifully, and he asked, ‘Are you so sure that we’re enemies?’

‘Truly … we are.’

‘Then don’t drink with me,’ Malaclypse said. ‘But do drink. Tonight, everyone will drink to the glory of the Vild Mission, and so should you.’

Now Mer Tadeo had finished his toast, and the sudden sound of ten thousand glasses clinking together rang out through the garden. Danlo, who had once sought affirmation above all other things, listened deeply to this tremendous sound of ringing glass. It was like a pure, crystal music recalling a time in his life when he had trusted the truth that his eyes might behold. Now he looked at Malaclypse’s deep violet eyes, smiling at him, beckoning him to drink, and he could see that the wine was only wine, that it was infused with neither virus nor slel cells nor other poisons. Because Danlo needed to affirm this truth of his eyes at any cost, he touched his wine glass to his lips and took a deep drink. Instantly, the smooth tissues of his tongue and throat were on fire. For a moment he worried that the wine was indeed tainted with a poison, perhaps even with the electric ekkana drug that would never leave his body and would make an agony of all the moments of his life. But then the burning along his tongue gave way to an intriguing tingling sensation, which in turn softened into a wonderful coolness almost reminiscent of peppermint. Truly, the wine was only wine, the delicious firewine that merchants and aficionados across, the Civilized Worlds are always eager to seek.

‘Congratulations,’ Malaclypse said. Then he raised his glass and bowed to Danlo. ‘To our mission. To the eternal moment when all things are possible.’

Malaclypse took a sip of wine, then, even as Danlo lowered his goblet and poured the remnants of his priceless firewine over the grass beneath his feet. He had said that he may not drink with a warrior-poet, and drink he would not.

‘I am … sorry,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry, too. I’m sorry that it isn’t you who will be piloting my ship into the Vild.’

The warrior-poet’s sense of time was impeccable. Upon his utterance of the word ‘Vild’, the manswarms spread throughout the garden began calling out numbers. One hundred … ninety-nine … ninety-eight … ninety-seven … Following Mer Tadeo’s example, men and women all around Danlo began crying out in unison, and their individual voices merged into a single, long, dark roar. Now many faces were turned eastward, up toward the sky. Merchants in their silver kimonos, pilots and Ordermen in their formal robes – all lifted their faces to the stars as they called down the numbers and pointed at the patch of space where the Sonderval had promised the supernova would appear. Sixty-six … sixty-five … sixty-four … sixty-three … The warrior-poet, too, aimed his long, graceful finger toward the heavens. In his clear, strong voice, he called down the numbers along with everyone else, counting ever backwards toward zero. Twenty-two … twenty-one … twenty … nineteen … At last, Danlo looked up at stars of the Vild, waiting. It amused (and awed) him to think that these uncountable, nameless stars might somehow be waiting for him, even as he waited for their wild light to fill his eyes. Once, when he was a child, he had thought that stars were the eyes of his ancestors watching him, waiting for him to realize that he, too, in his deepest self, was really a wild white star who would always belong to the night. The stars, he knew, could wait almost forever for a man to be born into his true nature, and that was the great mystery of the stars. Four … three … two … one …

There was a moment. For a moment the sky was just the sky, and the stars went on twinkling forever. Danlo thought that perhaps the Sonderval’s calculations had been wrong, that no new star would appear that night. And then this endless moment, which lasted much less than a second, finally ended. Above the eastern horizon, above the dark mountains, a point of light broke out of the blackness and quickly blossomed into dazzling white sphere. Its radiance swirled about an infinitely bright centre, and flecks of fire spun out into the farthest reaches of space. It was almost impossible to look at, this wildflower of light that hurt Danlo’s eyes, and so he turned to see ten thousand people squinting, grimacing, standing with their hands pushing outward above their eyes as if to shield themselves from this terrible new star. It almost seemed that there should have been a great noise to accompany this event, as with a fireworks display, some searing hiss of burnt air or cosmic thunder. But the sky was strangely silent, as ever, and the only sounds in the garden were the inrush of many people’s breaths, the chirping of the evening birds, the splash of water and wine falling in the many fountains. The merchants of Farfara (and even the many ungloved servants) were obviously hushed and awed by what they saw, as if they were witnessing the birth of a new child. Danlo remembered, then, that this supernova was no new star being born, but rather a doomed star that attains its most brilliant moment in dying into light. It was all light, this beautiful star. It was all alpha and gamma and waves of hard radiation that men had freed from matter in their frenzy to remake the universe. It was photons breaking through the night, burning the sky, onstreaming through the universe without end. Although Danlo had waited only a moment for this light to fall upon the garden, men on other worlds would have to wait millennia to see it. At the speed of light through vacuum, it would be some twenty thousand years before the supernova’s light crossed the galaxy and rained down upon the city of Neverness. But there were other stars, nearer and more deadly, and Danlo remembered very well that twenty years ago, one named Merripen’s Star had exploded very near the Star of Neverness. Almost all his life, a wavefront of light and death had been advancing through the black drears of space upon Neverness, and soon, in only six more years, the people of Neverness would see the Vild for what it truly was. And this was the true reason that the Order had sent a Mission to the Vild. The Vild, Danlo thought, was an inferno of murderous light and broken spacetime that existed wherever human beings were so mad as to destroy the stars. And so the men and women of the Order must go to the Vild before the Vild came to them.

‘I must go now,’ Danlo said. He bowed to Malaclypse and then looked down at his empty wine glass. ‘Farewell, Poet.’

‘Until we meet again,’ Malaclypse said. ‘Fall far and farewell. Pilot.’

Because Danlo did not want to think that they would meet again, he smiled grimly as he turned and walked back through the crowds. Between the hot, packed bodies of the many awestruck people, beneath the light of the new star, he walked back toward the Fountain of Fortune. There, the Sonderval had gathered together the pilots of the Order. Lara Jesusa, Richardess, Zapata Karek, Leander of Darkmoon – they were all there, even the fabulous Aja, who was sometimes a woman, sometimes a man, and who was said to be the purest pilot ever to have come out of the Academy on Neverness. Without a care for soiling the sleeve of his robe, Danlo plunged his wine glass into the fountain, and he stood there drinking with his fellow pilots, clinking glasses and drinking and letting drops of bright red firewine run down over his naked hand. The pilots spoke of their sacred Mission, and the Sonderval called out the names of the hundred pilots who would follow him and guide the deepships and seedships to the Order’s new home on Thiells. The rest of the pilots – including Danlo – would seek the lost planet called Tannahill. Each of these pilots, according to his genius and fate, would enter the pathless, unknown Vild, there to seek signs and secrets that might lead them to their journey’s end. Danlo, himself, would go where the stars were the wildest. He would find his father among all the bright, dying stars and ask him a simple question. That Malaclypse Redring might follow him in the renegade’s lightship was of no matter. He could not fear that a warrior-poet might murder his father. For if his father was really a god, how could even the most murderous of men harm him? As Danlo drank his wine and gazed up at the blazing new star in the sky, he wondered how anything could ever harm those beautiful and terrible beings that men knew as gods.

CHAPTER TWO
The Eye of the Universe

I am the eye with which the Universe

Beholds itself and knows itself divine.

– Percy Bysshe Shelley

The next day, Danlo took his lightship into the Vild. The Snowy Owl was a long and graceful ship, a beautiful sweep of spun diamond some two hundred feet from tip to tail; as it fell across the galaxy it was like a needle of light stitching in and out of the manifold, that marvellous, shimmering fabric of deep reality that folds between the stars and underlies the spacetime of all the universe. The ships of the Vild Mission fell from star to star, and there were many stars along their way toward the star and planet named as Thiells. As ever, Danlo was awestruck by the numbers of the stars, the cool red and orange stars, the hot blue giants that were the galaxy’s jewels, the thousands upon thousands of yellow stars burning as steadily and faithfully as Old Earth’s sun. No one knew how many stars lit the lens of the Milky Way. The Order’s astronomers had said that there were at least five hundred billion stars in the galaxy, blazing in dense clusters at the core, spinning ever outward in brilliant spirals along the arms of the galactic plane. And more stars were being born all the time. In the bright nebulae such as the Rudra and the Rosette, out of gravity and heat and interstellar dust, the new stars continually formed and flared into light. A hundred generations of stars had lived and died in the eons before the Star of Neverness, among others, ever came into being. Stars, like people, were always dying. Sometimes, as Danlo looked out over the vast light-distances he marvelled that so many human beings could arise from stardust and the fundamental urge of all matter toward life. Scattered among all the galaxy’s far-flung stars were perhaps fifty million billion people. On the Civilized Worlds alone every second some three million women, men, and children would die, were dying, will always be passing from life into death. It was only right and natural, Danlo thought, that human beings should create themselves in their vast and hungry swarms, but it was not right that they should seek a greater life by killing the stars. This was all sacrilege and sin, or even shaida, a word that Danlo sometimes used to describe the evil of a universe that, like a top failing to spin or a cracked teapot, had lost its harmony and balance. All matter craved transformation into light, and this Danlo understood deep inside his belly and brain. But already, in this infinite universe from which he had been born, there was too much light. The stars of the Vild were sick with light, swelling and bursting into the hellish lightstorms that men called supernovas. Soon, someday, perhaps farwhen, the vastness of the Vild would be a blinding white cloud full of photons and hard radiation, and then this tiny pocket of the universe would no longer be transparent to light. No longer would men such as Danlo be able to look at the stars and see the universe just as it is, for all space would be light, and all time would be light, always and forever, nothing but light and ever more dazzling light.

It was toward the light of Thiells that the pilots steered, there to build a city and a new Order. The rest of the pilots, including Danlo, would accompany the Mission as far as Sattva Luz, a magnificent white star well within the inner envelope of the Vild. And so it happened. The journey to Sattva Luz was uneventful, for the Sonderval had already mapped the pathways that led from star to star; he had told the pilots the fixed-points of every star along their path, and so Danlo and the Snowy Owl fell from Savona to Shokan and then on to Sattva Luz as smoothly as corpuscles of blood streaming through a man’s veins. This segment of the journey was much the same as fenestering through the Fallaways, only fraught with dangers that few pilots had ever faced. In any part of the Vild – even along the pathways well mapped and well known – at any moment the spacetime distortions of an exploding star might fracture a pathway into a thousand individual decomposition strands thereby destroying any ship so unfortunate as to be caught in the wrong strand. Around Sattva Luz, where the many millions of pathways through the manifold converged into a thickspace as dark and dense as a ball of lead, the pilots dispersed. The main body of Mission ships guided by the Sonderval was the first to fall away. Danlo, whose ship had fallen out of the manifold into realspace for a few moments, watched them go. Below him – ten million miles below the Snowy Owl – was the boiling white corona of Sattva Luz. Above him there wavered a sea of blackness and many nameless stars. He waited as the Sonderval’s ship, the Cardinal Virtue, fell into the bright black manifold and disappeared. He was aware of this event as a little flash of light; soon there came many more flashes of light as the soundless engines of the Mission ships ripped open rents in spacetime and fell into the manifold. The pilots in their glorious lightships – and the pilots in the deepships and in the seedships – opened windows upon the universe, and they fell in, and they were gone. Then the remaining pilots fell in, too. The Snowy Owl and the Neurosinger, the Deus ex Machina and the Rose of Armageddon – two hundred and fifty-four ships and pilots sought their fates and vanished into the deepest part of the Vild.

For Danlo, as for any pilot, mathematics was the key that opened the many windows through which his lightship passed. Mathematics was like a bright, magic sword that sliced open the veils of the manifold and illuminated the dark caverns of neverness waiting for him there. The Snowy Owl fell far and deep, and in the pit of his ship Danlo floated and proved the theorems that let him see his way through the chaos all around him. He floated because there was no gravity; in the manifold, there is neither space nor force nor time, and so, in the very centre of his ship, he floated and dreamed mathematics in vivid, waking dreams, and fell on and on. Immersed as he was in the realm of pure number, in that marvellous interior space that the pilots know as the dreamtime, he had little sense of himself. He could scarcely feel his weightless arms and legs, or his empty hands, or even the familiar ivory skin that enveloped his long, lean body. He needed neither heat nor clothing, and so he floated naked as a newborn child. In many ways, at times, the pit of a lightship is like a womb. In truth, the pit’s interior is a living computer, the very mind and soul of a lightship; it is a sphere of neurologics woven of protein circuitry, rich and soft as purple velvet. Sometimes it is all darkness and comfort and steamy air as dense-seeming as sea water. When a pilot faces away from his ship – for instance, during those rare moments when he is safe inside a null space and he breaks interface with the logic field enveloping him – there is no sight and very little engagement of the other physical senses. But at other times, the pit is something other. When a pilot faces the manifold and his mind becomes as one with the ship’s computer, then there is the cold, clear light of pure mathematics. Then the pit is like a brilliantly-lit crystal cave lined with sapphires and firestones and other precious jewels. The pilot’s mind fills with the crystal-like symbols of probabilistic topology: the emerald snowflake representing the Jordan-Holder Theorem; the diamond glyphs of the mapping lemmas; the amethyst curlicues of the statement of Invariance of Dimension; and all the other thousands of sparkling mental symbols that the pilots call ideoplasts. Only then will a pilot perceive the torison spaces and Flow-tow bubbles and infinite trees that undermine the manifold, much as a sleekit’s twisting tunnels lie hidden beneath crusts of snow. Only when a pilot opens his mind to the manifold will the manifold open before him so that he may see this strange reality just as it is and make his mappings from star to star.

So it was that Danlo became aware of his fellow pilots as they set out on their journeys. As did the Snowy Owl, their ships perturbed the manifold like so many stones dropped into a pool of water. Danlo perceived these perturbations as ripples of light, a purely mathematical light which he had been trained to descry and fathom. For a while, as the lightships remained within a well-defined region known as a Lavi neighbourhood, with his mind’s eye he followed the luminous pathways of the lightships as they fell outward toward the galaxy’s many stars. And then, one by one, as the pilots fell away from each other and the radius of convergence shot off toward infinity, even these ships were lost to his sight. Only nine other ships remained within the same neighbourhood as the Snowy Owl. These nine ships and their pilots he knew very well, for they each had vowed to penetrate the same spaces of the Vild. A few of them were already distinguished for their part in the Pilots’ War: Sarolta Sen and Dolore Nun, and the impossibly brave Leander of Darkmoo who craved danger as other men do women or wine. Ther was Rurik Boaz in the Lamb of God, and the sly Li Te Mu Lan who piloted the Diamond Lotus. There was another lotus ship as well, the Thousand Petalled Lotus, which belonged to Valin wi Tymon Whitestone, of the Simoom Whitestones. (It is something of a curiosity that many pilots still name their ships after the lotus flower. Once a time, of course, a thousand years ago when the Tycho was Lord Pilot, one in every ten ships was so called. The Tycho, an imperious and whimsical man, so wearied of this custom that he forbade his pilots to name their ships after any flower. But in a quiet rebellion led by Veronika Ede in her Lotus of Lotuses, the pilots had defied him. Over the centuries there have always been famous lotus ships: the Golden Lotus; the Lotus of Neverness; the Infinite Lotus; and many, many others.) Three other pilots had set out towards a certain cluster of stars beyond the Eta Carina Nebula; they were the Rosaleen and Ivar Sarad, in a ship curiously named the Bottomless Cup. And finally, of course, Shamir the Bold, he who had once journeyed further toward the galactic core than any other pilot since Leopold Soli. All these pilots, in Mer Tadeo’s garden on the night of the supernova, had vowed to enter that dark, strange nebula known as the Solid State Entity. Like Mallory Ringess before them, they had vowed to fall among the most dangerous of stars in the hope that they might speak with one of the galaxy’s greatest gods.

Even before Danlo had left Neverness, on a night of omens as he stood on a windswept beach looking up at the stars, he had planned to penetrate the Entity, too. That other pilots had made similar plans did not surprise him. Ten pilots were few enough to search a volume of space some ten thousand cubic light-years in volume. Ten pilots could easily lose themselves in such a nebula, like grains of sand scattered upon an ocean. Even so, Danlo took comfort in the company of his fellow pilots, and he continually watched the manifold for the perturbations that their ships made. Including the Snowy Owl, ten ships fell among the stars. Many times, he counted the ships; he wanted to be sure that their number was ten, a comforting and complete number. Ten was the number of fingers on his hands, and on the hands of all natural human beings. Ten, in decimal systems of counting, symbolizes the totality of the universe in the way all things return to unity. Ten was the perfect number, he thought, and so it dismayed him that at times he couldn’t be sure if there were really ten ships after all. More than once, usually after they had passed through a spinning thickspace around some red giant star, his count of the ships yielded a different number. This should not have been so. Counting is the most fundamental of the mathematical arts, as natural as the natural numbers that fall off from one to infinity. Danlo, who had been born with a rare mathematical gift, had been able to count almost before he could talk, and so it should have been the simplest thing for him to know whether the number of ships in the neighbourhood near him was ten or five or fifty. Certainly, by the time they had passed a fierce white star that Danlo impulsively named ‘The Wolf’, he knew that there were at least ten ships but no more than eleven. At times, as he peered into the dark heart of the manifold, he thought that he could make out the composition wave of a mysterious eleventh ship. Looking for this ship was like looking at a unique pattern of light reflected from a pool of water. At times he was almost certain of this pattern, but at other times, as when a rock is thrown into a quiet pool, the pattern would break apart only to reform a moment later reflecting nothing. The eleventh ship, if indeed there really were an eleventh ship, appeared to hover ghostlike at the very threshold of the radius of convergence. It was impossible to say it was really there, impossible to say it was not. Even as the ten pilots kleined coreward toward the Solid State Entity, this ghost ship haunted the mappings of the others, remaining always at the exact boundary of their neighbourhood of stars. Danlo had never dreamed that anyone could pilot a ship so flawlessly. In truth, he hoped that there was no eleventh pilot, no matter how skilled or prescient he might be. Eleven, as he knew, was a most perilous number. It was the number of excess and transition, of conflict, martyrdom, even war.