The Wild

After long, almost endless rounds of discussion, with their ships separated by half a million miles of space, above a rosy little star that no one bothered to name, the pilots agreed that Malaclypse Redring was likely following them, hoping, maybe, that the ten other pilots might lead him to Mallory Ringess, but there were other possibilities. As Leander of Darkmoon and Dolores Nun knew too well, it was possible for pilot to fall against pilot, to use his lightship as a sword, to manoeuvre close to another ship and slice open gaping holes into the manifold into which his enemy might fall. If these holes were made precisely – if the pilot could find a precise probability mapping – it was possible to cast an enemy ship down a dark, closed tube into the fiery heart of some nearby star. In the Pilots’ War, many had died this way. Sarolta Sen, in his ship the Infinite Tree, had once almost been destroyed thus, and so he was the first to observe that Malaclypse Redring might desire all their deaths. If the warrior-poets had a rule to slay all gods, they might also have a secret rule to slay any man or woman proud enough (or foolish enough) to attempt contact with a god. It would have been the simplest thing, as a precaution, for the pilots to turn back upon their pathways, to fall upon Malaclypse Redring and the lightship of Sivan wi Mawi Sarkissian, even as a pack of wolves might discourage a great white bear from hunting them. In a moment, in a flash of light, they might easily have incinerated the warrior-poet. But this was not their way. That is, it was no longer their way. Leander of Darkmoon, although he loved war as well as any man could, was the first to propose that the pilots scatter across the Vild and approach the Solid State Entity along ten different pathways. That way Malaclypse Redring, inside Sivan’s ship, the Red Dragon, could only follow one of them. And so the pilots concluded their conclave and said their farewells. In the pit of the Snowy Owl, Danlo was once again alone. And then, upon Li Te Mu Lan’s signal (she was the oldest of the pilots and this was her right) the pilots scattered. They opened windows to the manifold and vanished like streaks of light bursting from a diamond sphere. Each pilot faced the manifold along her own chosen pathway; each pilot fell sightless and senseless of the ships of the others, and so each of them was finally and completely alone.

At first Danlo cherished this loneliness with a quiet joy, as he might have listened for the wind in a dark and silent wood. For the first time in many years he felt completely free. But it is the nature of life that no emotion is meant to last forever, and so very quickly his elation gave way to the apprehension that he was not really alone after all. In almost no time, as he plunged deeper into the dark currents of the manifold, he descried the perturbations of another ship. A second ship – two ships remaining always within the same neighbourhood of stars. The number two, he thought, was an ominous number. Two is a reflection or duplication of one, the most perfect of the natural numbers. Two is all echo and counterpoise; two is the beginning of multiplicity, the way the universal oneness differentiates itself and breaks apart into strings and quarks and photons, all the separate and component pieces of life. Two is a symbol of becoming as opposed to pure being; in this sense, two is life, and therefore it is death, for all life finds its conclusion in death, even as it feeds off the death of other things in order to stay alive. Although Danlo, for himself, feared dying less than did other men, he thought that he had seen enough of death to know it for what it truly is. Once, when he was nearly fourteen years old, he had buried all the eighty-eight people of the Devaki tribe which had adopted and raised him from a babe. He knew death too well, and he sensed that the warrior-poet who followed him might yet encompass the deaths of those who were beloved by him. Because he saw Malaclypse Redring as a harbinger of death (and because he thought he knew all of death that there was to know) he decided to escape this ghostly lightship that pursued him, much as a snowy owl might hunt a hare bounding over the snow. And so he emptied his mind of what lay behind him, and turned his inner eye to the deepest part of the manifold. There he would face the deepest part of the universe, the terrors and the joys.

At first, however, there was only joy. There was the cold beauty of the number storm, the many-faceted mathematical symbols that fell through his mind like frozen drops of light. There was the slowing of time and the consequent quickening of all his thoughts. And there was something else. Something other. It is something of a mystery that, although all pilots enter the manifold the same way and agree upon its essential nature, each man and woman will perceive it uniquely. For Danlo, as for no other pilot with whom he had ever spoken, the manifold shimmered with colours. Of course, in the absence of all light and spacetime, he knew that there could be no colour – but somehow, there were colours. He fell from star to star, beneath the stars of realspace, and entered a Kirrilian neighbourhood which glowed a deep cobalt blue, a hidden and secret blue the like of which he had never seen before. Soon he passed on to a common invariant space all pearl grey and touched with swirls of absinthe and rose. For a moment, he supposed that he might be lucky, that the rest of his journey toward the Entity might prove no more difficult than the straightforward mapping through such spaces. But in the Vild, piloting a lightship never remains easy or simple. Soon, in less than a moment, he entered a disorienting shear space, the kind of topological nightmare that the pilots sometimes call a Danladi inversion. Now the veils of the manifold were a bright azure, fading almost instantly to a pale turquoise, and then brightening again to an emerald green. The space all around him was like a strangely viewed painting in which figure and ground kept shifting into focus, forward and back, light and dark, inside and out. It was beautiful, in a way, but dangerous too, and so he was glad when this particular space began to break apart and branch out into a more or less normal decision tree. All pilots would wish that the manifold held nothing more complicated than such trees, where all decisions take on the simplest form: maximize/minimize, left/right, inside/outside, yes/no. So simple was this tree that Danlo had a moment to build up a proof array of the Zassenhaus Butterfly Lemma of the Jordan-Holder Theorem. (That is to say, that any two composition series of a group G are isomorphic.) He took the time to reconsider this proof of ancient algebra because he had a notion of how it might be used in an escape mapping if he should ever be so unlucky as to enter an infinite tree.

It is one of life’s ironies that most of what we fear never comes to pass, while many dangers – even killing dangers – will steal upon us by surprise. During all his time as a pilot, Danlo was to face no infinite trees. But then, just as he was leisurely defining the homomorphism, phi, the branch of the tree holding up his lightship suddenly snapped – this is how it seemed – and he was hurled into a rare and quite deadly torison space, of a kind that Lord Ricardo Lavi had once discovered on one of the first journeys toward the Vild. Suddenly, he was again very aware of colours. There were the quick violets of space suddenly folding, and the r-dimensional Betti numbers appearing as ruby, auburn, and chrome red. There were flashes of scarlet, as if all the other colours might momentarily catch on fire and fall past the threshold of finite folding into an infinite and blazing crimson. Space itself was twisting like a snowworm in a strong man’s hands, writhing and popping and twisting until it suddenly burst in an opening of violet into violet and began folding in upon itself. Now, for Danlo, there was true peril, danger inside of danger. Now – for a moment that might last no longer than half a beat of his heart – he floated in the pit of his ship, sweating and breathing deeply, and thought as quickly as it is possible for a man to think. He had little fear of death, but even so he dreaded being trapped alive inside a collapsing torison space. His dread was a red-purple colour, the colour of a blood tick squeezed between finger and thumb. He took no notice of this colour, however, nor did he give care or thought to himself. All his awareness – his racing mathematical mind and every strand of his will to live – spread out over the space before him. There were dark tunnels that kleined back and through themselves, impossibly complex, impossible to map through. There was the very fabric of the manifold itself, lavender like a fabulist’s robes, infolding upon itself through shades of amethyst, magenta, and deep purple, the one and true purple that might well be the quintessential colour that underlay all others. Everywhere, the manifold was falling in on itself like dark violet flowers blossoming backward in time, folding up petal inside petal, always infolding toward that lightless singularity where the number of folds falls off to infinity. He might never have mapped free from such a space, but then he chanced to remember a certain colour. In truth, he willed himself to summon up a perfect blue-black hue that suffused his mind the way that the night fills the late evening sky. His will to live was strong, and his memory of colours, images, words, whispers and love was even stronger. His memory for such things was almost perfect, and so it happened that he willed himself to behold a deep, deep blue inside blue, the colour of his mother’s eyes. His mother had been one of the finest scryers there had ever been, able to see the infinitely complex web of connections between nowness and time to come. The greatest scryers will always find their way into the future; in the end, they choose which future and fate will be. Although Danlo was no scryer, not yet, he remembered how perfectly the colour of his mother’s eyes matched his own. ‘You have your mother’s eyes,’ his grandfather, Leopold Soli had once told him. Long ago, before he was born, his mother had blinded herself as the scryers do so that she might perceive the future more clearly. Now, in the pit of his ship, even as he plunged downward toward the torison space’s hideous singularity, Danlo closed his eyes tightly and tried to behold their blueness from within. He remembered, then, an important theorem of elementary topology. He saw it instantly as a perfect jewel, like a lightstone, a deep, dark, liquid blue holding a secret light. It was the first conservation theorem, which proved that for every simplicial mapping, the image of the boundary is equal to the boundary of the image. Almost instantly, he seized upon this theorem as a starving man might grasp a gobbet of meat. He knew that he could apply it toward mapping out of the torison space. And so he did. Before the lens of his mind’s eye, he summoned up arrays of ideoplasts and made his proof. He was perhaps the first pilot in the history of the Order to prove that a collapsing torison space might remain open. (Even if that opening quickly fell off toward an infinitesimal.) He made a mapping, and he fell through, and suddenly there was the light of a star. The Snowy Owl fell out into realspace, into realtime, into the glorious golden light of a star that he named Shona Oyu, or, the Bright Eye. This was to be the first of the miraculous escapes from the manifold that he would make on his journey toward the Solid State Entity.

In this way, falling from star to star, falling in and out of the manifold beneath the stars, he continued on his journey. Because he wished to be the first of the ten pilots to reach the Entity (and because he hoped to elude the warrior-poet who might still be following him), he fell across the stars as quickly as a pilot may fall. As the Sonderval had said in Mer Tadeo’s garden, all quests are really the same. His quest to seek out his father and find the lost planet Tannahill was connected to the great quest twenty-five years past to find that infinite store of knowledge known as the Elder Eddas. And that quest was merely a continuation of all quests throughout time and history. Always, man had felt the urge to discover the true image of humanity, the shape and substance of what man might someday become. This is the secret of life, of human life, the true secret that men and women have sought as far back as the howling moonlit savannahs of Afarique on Old Earth. In the pilots of the Order, this urge to know the unknowable most often finds itself in a terrible restlessness, an instinct and will to fall through space, to move ever outward across the universe, always seeking. Some pilots seek black holes, or ringworlds built by ancient aliens, or strange, new stars. Some pilots still look for the hypothesized dark matter of the universe, the mysterious matter that no one has ever found. Some pilots seek God. But all pilots, if they are worthy of their pilots’ rings, seek movement for the sake of movement itself. The dance of lightship from star to star, from the translucent windows into the manifold that give out onto the stars – this urge to fall ever outward toward the farthest galaxies is sometimes called the westering. Sometimes, too, the pilots refer to this manner of journey as fenestering, for to fall quickly from star to star, one must align the stellar windows artfully and with great precision. Although Danlo was not yet a master of this art of interfenestration, the westering urge was strong in him. Westering/fenestering, fenestering/westering – to a young pilot such as Danlo, the two words were the same, and so he made successive mappings through hundreds of crystal-like windows. And with every window he passed through there was a moment of stillness and a clarity, as of starlight illuminating a perfect diamond pane. And yet there was always the anticipation of other windows yet to come, always newness, always strangeness, always the opening outward onto the clear light of universe. Falling through a window into realspace was sometimes like falling into an entirely different universe, for there was always a shift in the perception of the galaxy, and thus splendid vistas of stars never seen before. Some pilots believe that if they could fenester through an infinite number of windows, then their westering flight would eventually bring them to a place where all time and space folds inward upon itself. They call this singularity Hell, for there the manifold would become infinitely dense and impenetrable. Danlo thought of it simply as the Blessed Realm, the centre of the universe itself. Once, he had hoped to reach such a place. He remembered that this had been his reason for becoming a pilot, his passion, his love, his fate. But now he had abandoned this dream, just as he had left behind many dreams of his childhood. Now there were many windows, only they did not lead into the centre of all things but rather into the heart of a goddess. One by one, he passed through thousands of windows. They sparkled like snowflakes in an endless field, and fenestering through them was like racing on a sled over sheets of new snow.

And so he fell across the galaxy. If his ship had been able to move at lightspeed through normal space, his journey would have required some three thousand years. This, he thought, was a very long time. Three thousand years ago, the Order had yet to make its move from Arcite to Neverness, and the woman who would one day transform herself into the Solid State Entity had yet to be born. Three thousand years before, somewhere in the regions that he passed through, it was said that an insane god had killed itself in the spectacular manner of throwing itself into a star, thereby blowing it up in an incandescent funeral pyre and creating the first of the Vild’s supernovae. In a galaxy as apocalyptic as the Milky Way, three thousand years was almost forever, and yet, to a pilot locked inside the pit of a lightship, there were other eternities of time more immediate and more oppressive. Danlo, who was a creature of wind and sun, sometimes hated the darkness in which he lay. When he faced away from the ship-computer and the brilliant number storm, he hated the damp, acid smell of the neurologics surrounding him, the acrid stench of his unwashed body, and the carbon-dioxide closeness of his own breath. When he faced the manifold, was all colour, fire, and light. But too much pleasure will be felt as pain, and after many days of journeying, he came to dread even these exaltations of the mind. Above all things, he longed for clean air and movement beneath the open sky. Although he fell across the stars as quickly as most pilots have ever fallen, his westering rush took much intime, the inner, subjective time of his blood, belly and brain. Sometimes, during rare moments of acceptance and affirmation, he loved being a pilot as much as any man ever has, yet he hated it, too, and he longed for a quicker way of journeying. Often, over the millions of seconds of his quest, he thought about the Great Theorem – the Continuum Hypothesis – which states that there exists a pair of simply connected point-sources in the neighbourhood of any two stars. His father had been the first to prove this theorem, the first pilot to fall across half the galaxy from Perdido Luz to the Star of Neverness in a single fall. Danlo knew, as all pilots now knew, that it was possible to fall between any two stars almost instantly. (Perhaps, Danlo thought, it would even be possible to fall into the very centre of the Blessed Realm, if such a heaven truly existed.) It was possible to fall anywhere in the universe, yes, but it was not always possible to find such a mapping. In truth, for most pilots, it was hideously difficult. A few pilots, such as the Sonderval and Vrenda Chu, were sometimes genius enough to discover such point-to-point mappings and use the Great Theorem as it should be used. But even they must usually journey as Danlo did now, scurfing the windows of the manifold window by window, star by star, day by endless day. The further toward the Entity that Danlo fell – sometimes down pathways as complex as a nest of writhing snakes – the harder he tried to make sense of the Great Theorem and apply it toward finding an instantaneous mapping. He wished to fall out around a famous, red star inside the Entity. He wished to make planetfall, to climb out of his ship and rest on the sands of a wide, sunny beach. He wished these things for the sake of his soul, with all the force of his will. And yet, there was another reason that he played with the logic and intricacies of the Great Theorem. A very practical reason. At need, Danlo could be the most practical of men, and so, when he passed by a neutron star very near the spaces of the Entity and detected once again the ghost image of Sivan wi Mawi Sarkissian’s ship, he couldn’t help dreaming of falling away instantly, falling far and finally away from the warrior-poet who pursued him. This, however, was still a dream. He could not see the simple secret of applying the Great Theorem. And so he could not lose the two men inside the lightship called the Red Dragon, any more than he could have left behind his shadow by fleeing away from the rising sun.

During those times when the manifold flattened out and grew becalmed like a tropical sea, two activities saved him from feeling trapped in the pit of his ship. From his father, he had inherited an old, leather-bound book of poems. It was one of his few treasures, and he kept it in a wooden chest that he had been given as a novice. When he faced away from the manifold and floated in darkness, he liked to read these ancient poems, to let their rhythms and sounds ring in his memory like the music of golden bells. Sometimes he would recite other poems and songs not in his book; sometimes he would compose his own songs and set them to music. For Danlo, music was as wine to other men, and he always took great joy in singing the chants of his childhood, or listening in his mind to the Taima’s Hymns to the Night, or above all, in playing his skauhachi. This bamboo flute was perhaps the greatest of the gifts anyone had given him, and he loved to lift it out of the chest and play until his lips ached and his lungs burned with fire. The songs he made were sometimes sad, but just as often they resonated with sheer joy. He played to the marvel and the mystery of the universe. And always he played with a love of life that connected him to the past, to the present, and to the golden, shimmering future.

On the ninety-ninth day of his journey, as his ship’s clock measured time, he came at last to the threshold of the Solid State Entity. The Snowy Owl fell out into realspace around a large white star. Danlo reached out with his great telescopes and drank in a sight that few pilots had ever seen. Before him, hanging in the blackness of space, a cloud of a hundred thousand stars burned dimly through veils of glowing hydrogen gas. There was much interstellar dust, too much for him to penetrate this dark, forbidding nebula by sight alone. Soon, perhaps in moments, he would have to enter the nebula itself to see it as it was. For millennia, of course, pilots have entered the galaxy’s many nebulae, but this cluster of stars was different from any other, for it contained the body and brain of a goddess.

In a way, the entire nebula was the Entity’s brain, or rather, Her brain was spread out over this vast region of stars. It troubled Danlo to conceive of such a vast intelligence, woven into great clumps of matter that weren’t really organic brains at all, but rather more like computers. Some of the Order’s professionals – the eschatologists, for example – still consider the Entity to be nothing more than a huge computer made up of component units the size of moons. Millions of perfect, shining, spherical moon-brains that pulsed with information and thoughts impossible for a mere man to think. No one knew how many of these moon-brains there were. As many as a thousand spheres spun in their orbits around some of the larger stars. The moon-brains fed on photons and absorbed gamma and X-rays and radiation – the very exhalation and breath of the stars. The Entity, if she possessed such sentiments, must have regarded every part of the nebula as an extension of Her godly body. At the least, She must have claimed all the nebula’s matter – the millions of planets, asteroids, dust particles, clouds of gas, and stars – as food to live on, nourishment to sustain Her tremendous energies and to enable Her to grow. During the last three millennia, it was said, this goddess had grown from a simple human being into an Entity that nearly filled a nebula one hundred light-years in diameter. No one knew if the Entity was still growing, but it was almost certain that Her use of energy was growing exponentially. Much of this energy, it was thought, She applied to the manipulation of matter and spacetime, the reaching out of Her godly hand to cark Her designs upon the universe. Much energy was needed simply so that She could organize Her mind and communicate with Herself. The moon-brains were grouped around the nebula’s stars, and these stars were sometimes separated by many light-years of space. Any signal, such as a radio or a light wave propagated through realspace, would have taken years to fall from brain-lobe to brain-lobe. To connect the millions of lobes would mean millions of years of glacial, lightspeed signal exchange; for the Entity to complete a single thought might have required a billion years. And so the Entity employed no such signals to integrate Her mind. The mechanics hypothesize that She generates tachyons, these ghostly, theoretical particles whose slowest velocity approaches the speed of light. This, the mechanics say, must be the reason why She seeks such great energies. Impossible energies. The trillions of miles of black space between the Entity’s many stars must have burned with streams of tachyons, information streams infinitely faster than light, impossible to detect, but almost possible to imagine: when Danlo closed his eyes, he could almost see all spacetime lit up with numinous ruby rays, shimmering with a great, golden consciousness. Somewhere before him, in this dark, strange nebula that he hesitated to enter, there must be interconnecting beams of tachyons carrying the codes of mysterious information, linking up the moon-brains almost instantaneously, weaving through empty space an unseen but vast and glorious web of pure intelligence.