The Wild

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.

As it happened, Danlo wasn’t the only pilot to detect an eleventh ship.

Near an unnamed star, Li Te Mu Lan’s ship fell out of the manifold into realspace. She remained beneath the light of this star for long seconds of time, a signal that the other pilots should join her, if they so pleased. It was the traditional invitation to a conclave of pilots, made in the only way a pilot can issue such an invitation. Since radio waves and other such signals will not propagate through the manifold, but only through realspace, the ten pilots fell out into the weak starlight of this weak yellow sun, and sent laser beams flashing from ship to ship. The computer of the Snowy Owl decoded the information bound into the laser light and made pictures for Danlo to see. It made faces and sounds and voices, and suddenly the pit of his ship was very crowded, for there were nine other pilots there with him. That is, the heads of his nine fellow pilots floated in the dark air around him. Watching the phased light waves of these nine holograms was almost like entering one of Neverness’s numerous cafés and sitting at table with friends over mugs of steaming coffee and the comfort of conversation. It was almost like that. In truth, it disquieted Danlo to think of his severed, glowing head appearing in the pits of nine other lightships. There was something eerie in holding a conclave in this way, here, in the black deeps of the Vild, perhaps six hundred trillion miles from any other human being. It was disturbing and strange, but when Li Te Mu Lan began speaking, Danlo concentrated on the words that she was saying:

‘I believe that there is another pilot accompanying us,’ Li Te said. She had a perfectly shaped head as round and brown and bare of hair as a baldo nut. Her body, as Danlo remembered, was round, too, though he could see nothing of her body just now, only her glowing, round head. ‘Does anyone know if there is another pilot accompanying us?’

‘Ten pilots vowed to penetrate the Entity,’ Ivar Sarad said. He was a thin-faced man with a penchant for cold abstractions and inventing paranoid (and bizarre) interpretations of reality. ‘We stood together before the Sonderval and vowed this. Perhaps the Sonderval has sent a pilot to verify that we fulfil our vows.’

A pilot whose head was as broad and hairy as that of a musk-ox could not accept this. Shamir the Bold, with his courage and optimism, his decisiveness and sense of honour, laughed and said, ‘No, the Sonderval would believe that we’ll do what we vowed to do. At least, he’ll believe that we’ll attempt to fulfil our vows.’

‘Then who pilots the eleventh ship?’ This came from the Rosaleen, a shy, anxious woman who appeared to take no notice of her worth as pilot or human being.

‘I wonder if there is an eleventh ship,’ Ivar Sarad said. ‘Can we be certain of this? I, myself, am not. The wave function can be interpreted in other ways.’

‘Do you think so?’ Shamir the Bold asked. ‘What ways?’

‘In the wake of our passing, the composition series could be inverted as a Gallivare space that would-’

‘That is unlikely,’ Li Te Mu Lan observed. ‘No one has ever proved the existence of a Gallivare space.’

Ivar Sarad regarded her coldly, suspiciously. ‘Well, then – perhaps it is a reflection? Perhaps the line wake of one of our ships is being reflected – Leopold Soli once said that, in the Vild, the manifold can flatten out as smooth and reflective as a mirror.’

Of course, Ivar Sarad was not the only pilot to doubt the existence of an eleventh ship. Sarolta Sen, Dolores Nun, and Leander of Darkmoon were wont to agree with Ivar Sarad, though for different and more common-sense reasons. But Rurik Boaz and Valin wi Tymon Whitestone sided with Li Te Mu Lan. Valin Whitestone was even selfless enough to propose that the others continue toward the Solid State Entity while he kleined backward along their pathway to seek out the eleventh ship. He would learn the identity of this mysterious eleventh pilot. If possible, he would then rejoin the others, who, by this time, would no doubt have shared in the glory of being the only pilots since Mallory Ringess to wrest great knowledge from the goddess that some called Kalinda the Wise.

Until this moment, Danlo had kept his silence. He was the youngest of the pilots, and so he thought it seemly to let the others take the lead in this conversation. Then, too, from his once and deepest friend, Hanuman li Tosh, who had remained in Neverness, he had learned the value of keeping secrets. But it was not right that he should keep important information from his fellow pilots. He couldn’t let the noble Valin Whitestone sacrifice himself for a mere secret, and so he said, ‘It is possible … that a ronin pilot guides the eleventh ship. Sivan wi Mawi Sarkissian, the ronin – you all know of him, yes? It is possible that he carries a warrior-poet into the Vild.’

In the pit of Danlo’s ship, the heads of the nine other pilots turned his way. Li Te Mu Lan and the Rosaleen, Rurik Boaz and Shamir the Bold, and the others – looked at him as if he were merely some journeyman pilot who had suffered his first intoxication with the number storm or the dreamtime. Finally, after they waited for him to explain this incredible statement, he told them of his encounter with Malaclypse Redring in Mer Tadeo’s garden.

‘It is possible,’ Leander of Darkmoon said. His massive head was flowing with the golden curls of his long hair and beard. Indeed, like his name, there was something of the lion about him, and something of the lazy (and reckless) boy, as well. But he was a man who bored too easily, and so when Danlo spoke of warrior-poets and the infamous Sivan wi Mawi Sarkissian, Leander was like a hungry man who had been fed a piece of dripping red meat. His eyes brightened, and in deep rumbling voice he said, ‘I knew Sivan before the great quest maddened him. He was a fine pilot, once a time. If anyone could follow us into the Entity, he could.’