'I'm sorry, too. I had thought you would stay.'

'No, I cannot.'

'Of course you still have your quest.'

'Yes.'

'Then you still must desire the answer to your questions,' she said. 'I presume you haven't forgotten your questions.'

'No, I haven't forgotten,' he said.

'Then you may ask me what you will.'

'Now? Here?'

'Why not?'

'Shall I ... ask you, then?'

'Of course. If you've journeyed twenty thousand light-years from the Star of Neverness to ask the Ent.i.ty your questions, then please ask now before you lose the chance. But be careful of what you ask.'

At last, Danlo made himself look at her, and he was relieved to see that she was smiling. He remembered, then, that the Ent.i.ty liked to make a game of answering questions mysteriously.

'My first question is this,' he said. 'Do you know of a cure for the slow evil? The plague that has killed my people?'

Tamara closed her eyes for a moment, then replied, 'No, I really don't know. But you know the cure. You have always known. Someday, if you complete your quest, you will know it again. You will, Danlo whoever you really are.'

While he thought about this strange response, he stamped his cold feet against the sand to warm them. And then he said, 'I... do not understand.'

'I'm sorry that you don't. I really am, you know.'

'Then can you tell me what you mean ... in more simple words?'

'No, I really can't. But you may ask your second question I promise to answer it as simply as I can.'

Danlo blew on his fingers, then held his hands out to the sun. 'Where can I find my father?' he asked.

Immediately, she opened her red lovely lips to tell him what he desperately wanted to know. It amused him that her answer was simple, clear, straightforward and utterly useless. 'You will find your father,' she said, 'at your journey's end.'

'And where will that be?' he asked.

'Is this your third question?'

'No,' he said. 'I only wanted to-'

'I understand,' she said. 'But I've told you that you must take care with your questions.'

'I see ... that I must.'

'Then if you will, please ask your third question.'

He drew a breath of cold air and asked, 'Where is the planet called Tannahill?'

'I don't know.'

'You don't know? Truly?'

'I'm sorry, Danlo.'

'But I thought that you knew ... almost everything.'

'No, I'm sorry.'

He stood smiling sadly as he stared at the black, mirrored hull of his ship. He had come very far to ask these three questions, and now that he had finally asked them, he was little wiser than when he had begun his journey.

'I don't know,' she repeated. She looked at him for a long time, and her eyes were bright with compa.s.sion. 'But it might be that there's one who does.'

'The Ent.i.ty, herself? The one you call... the Mother?'

'No,' she said. 'As I have told you, I am She.'

'Who, then?'

'I am almost certain that Ede the G.o.d knew the star of Tannahill.'

'But Ede the G.o.d is dead, yes?'

'That's true. He is dead. But it may be that he is somewhat alive, too.'

'Riddles,' he said. 'You speak in paradoxes and riddles.'

'Then perhaps you should journey to Ede and find the answer to your riddle.'

This simple statement of hers amused him, and he laughed gently. 'One of the joys of being a pilot,' he said, 'is that other people are always proposing journeys almost impossible for any pilot to make.'

'You wouldn't find this an impossible journey.'

'But no one knows where Ede dwells. In a galaxy of a hundred billion stars, it is almost impossible to find a lost G.o.d who has never been found.'

'I know,' she said. 'I know where He dwells.'

She stepped over to him, then. Although she had no real need for secrecy, she cupped her hands to his ears and whispered the fixed-points of the stars where Ede might be found.

'Why have you told me this?' he asked. He grasped her hands and held them lightly between them. 'I have had my three questions, yes?'

'I wanted you to know.'

'I do not think the Ent.i.ty would have told me this,' he said.

'But I am the-'

'I do not think the person of the Ent.i.ty who is the Mother would have told me this.

The G.o.ddess Herself. She of the terrible pa.s.sions and dreams.'

'Oh, don't be too certain of this She's really a capricious G.o.ddess, you know.'

'Then why risk defying Her?'

'Because this will speed your return,' she said. 'Because I love you.'

Without realizing what he was doing, he squeezed her hands so tightly that she cried out in pain. When he saw the hurt on her face, he instantly let go. He said, 'I am sorry. I am sorry, but I ... cannot love you. I must not.'

'I know.'

'I will never return here,' he said. 'I am sorry.' He walked back up to the house, then, to retrieve his chest and stow it in his ship. With a shovel that he made of driftwood and whalebone washed up on the beach, he dug the sand away from the hull. These labours took him most of the morning. During this time, Tamara waited for him in the house. When all his preparations for the continuation of his journey were complete, she appeared on the dunes. She had bathed and washed the salt out of her long golden hair, but she was still naked as a newborn child. She came over to him where he stood by the pit of his ship; she came to give him something and say goodbye.

'You could come with me, if you would like,' he said. 'I would take you to any star, any world. Any place where there are other people.'

'No,' she said, 'I'll stay here.'

'I hate ... to leave you alone.'

'But I won't be alone,' she said. She smiled at him, and her eyes were infinitely sad and yet infinitely full of another emotion that seemed very much like wild joy. 'I have the whole world.'

'What of Sivan wi Mawi Sarkissian and the warrior-poet, then? Have they been tested as I have? Will they remain here, too?'

'I really can't tell you about them, you know.'

Danlo bowed his head once in respect for her secretive ways. Then he looked up over the beach. The sun was high in the sky, and the sky itself was a vast blue dome covering the world from horizon to horizon. In moments he must break through this beautiful dome into the roaring black emptiness of the universe, and so he looked at her and said, 'I must go.'

She stepped closer to him. In her hand, down by her side, she was gripping the pearl necklace, the replica of the one that he had made for the real Tamara. She reached out suddenly and gave it to him. She pressed the teardrop-shaped pearl and the coiled string into his hand. And then she said, 'If you ever find the woman you love, you might want to give this to her. If you find her, you might help heal her as you did me.'

'But she already has her own necklace,' he said. 'The one ... that I once made.'

'Then keep this as a token of my love for you. Please remember how I made it for you.''Tamara, Tamara,' he said. With the forefinger of the hand that held the pearl, he touched the tears falling down her cheek. 'If I had one more question left to ask, I would want to know if the universe could have been made differently. Halla, not shaida. Without evil, without suffering, without war. Without ... pain.'

Although her eyes were full of tears, they remained bright and intensely focused.

She looked at him for a long time with her dark eyes that shimmered like the night- time sea, and then she said, 'A better question would be this: Why did G.o.d create the universe at all? Why did She, Danlo?'

He shook his head slowly back and forth and then bowed to her. 'Farewell, Tamara.'

'Farewell, farewell,' she said. 'Fall far and fall well, Pilot.'

After this he went inside his ship and sealed himself into the pit. He waited for Tamara to move away before he ignited the rockets. There was a moment of thunder and fire, an intense roaring sound that seemed to well up deep from his belly and shook him to his bones. He left her standing alone on the beach down by the ocean. It took many moments for his lightship to rise up through the sky, and during this time he watched her from the pit's clear diamond window. He had excellent eyes, and he could see her staring up at his ship for a long time. At first he could even see her dark eyes watching him, but soon he had to look very hard just to make out her lovely form among the ocean rocks and the waves breaking over the sand. Very soon she was no more than a point of light as small and white as a pearl. And then, after his heart had beat an uncountable number of times, she was gone.

The whole world, he remembered. The whole universe.

He pointed his ship upward where the blue-black heavens opened onto the s.p.a.ces of the universe. And then he was gone, too, out into the great loneliness, out to the unknown stars and the infinitely bright lights of the Vild.

PART TWO

The G.o.d

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Dead G.o.d

A man who dies before he dies Does not die when he dies.

- Abraham a Santa Clara.

And so, after too many days spent planet-fallen on a lost earth, Danlo returned to the manifold. Of the ten pilots who had made the quest to engage the attention of the Solid State Ent.i.ty, only he had survived to continue his journey. Li Te Mu Lan, Dolores Nun, Sarolta Sen, Rurik Boaz, Shamir the Bold it is always fitting to honour the names of pilots who have perished seeking the secrets of the universe these brave people had been lost into the beautiful but sometimes chaotic s.p.a.ce that lies beneath the s.p.a.cetime of the night. Their lightships and bodies would never be found. And Leander of Darkmoon, the Rosaleen, Valin wi Tymon Whitestone and Ivar Sarad they too must be listed among the hundreds of pilots lost to the Vild since Dario the Bold discovered this vast region of exploding stars in the 2539th year since the founding of the Order. Unknown to Danlo, other pilots of the Second Vild Mission had been lost as well. Eric Rathborn, Alfreda Siri Serai and Lorenzo Scarlatti never completed the journey to the planet Thiells where Lord Nikolos and the hun- dreds of lords and masters laboured to found a city and second Academy that would be the seat of the new Order. And of the other pilots falling out among strange stars in their quest for lost Tannahill, who knew? Danlo himself knew that he might never set eyes on Thiells (much less again Neverness), for first he must journey to the star cl.u.s.ter where he hoped to find Ede the G.o.d. No pilot of his Order had discovered the slightest clue as to Ede's whereabouts. Many, of course, believed that no such G.o.d as Ede existed. These naysayers denied the doctrines of the Cybernetic Universal Church, believing that long ago, when the man named Nikolos Daru Ede had carked his consciousness into his eternal computer, this computer had been destroyed. There was no way, they said, that a simple computer could expand itself component by component until it had grown into a planet-sized machine that called itself a G.o.d.

Since Danlo had been given the fixed-points of Ede's star by the Ent.i.ty Herself, he never doubted Ede's existence. He never doubted that he could fall out around this distant star and behold this G.o.d of G.o.ds if he could find a sequence of mappings among the strange stars of the Vild that would lead him to Ede, if he could survive the manifold's twisted s.p.a.ces and the killing radiation of nearby stars that had exploded into supernovas. Many times, while he floated naked in the pit of his ship, he thought of the soft-faced Li Te Mu Lan and fearless Leander of Darkmoon and his other fellow pilots; many times he whispered a requiem for their spirits. As Danlo fell from star to star, pa.s.sing through the many brilliant windows of the manifold, he wondered if anyone would ever know if he blundered into an infinite tree or a Soli-Ringess s.p.a.ce, thus never again to pa.s.s back through a window into the world of flowers and starlight and the golden shimmer of a woman's hair. During many long moments of memory and desperate dreams, he wondered if anyone would ever pray for him at his inevitable death.

For one pilot who had journeyed with him into the Ent.i.ty, he said neither requiem nor prayer. This was the renegade, Sivan wi Mawi Sarkissian. Danlo was certain that Sivan and the warrior-poet known as Malaclypse Redring had somehow survived the chaos s.p.a.ce that had killed Leander and the others. And he was almost certain that Sivan had survived whatever tests that the Ent.i.ty had put to him: as before on his journey from Farfara as Danlo moved further and further from the fading stars of the Ent.i.ty he detected the composition waves of another lightship falling through the manifold. Mysteriously, this ship remained always at the boundary of whatever neighbourhood of stars in which he found himself. It followed him from star to star toward the star of Ede. Certainly, Danlo thought, this ghostlike ship must be the Red Dragon, bearing its precious cargo of a ronin pilot and a murderous warrior-poet.

Certainly the warrior-poet must still hope that Danlo would inevitably lead him to his father, and then Malaclypse of the red ring and killing knife might finally put an end to the ambitious career of Mallory Ringess. But Danlo did not intend to lead the warrior-poet to his father. He tried many times to elude Sivan's ship. Outside his window were ten billion stars as ancient and luminous as thoughts in the mind of G.o.d. He fled into these glorious stars. Once he fell out near the corona of a hot blue subdwarf that nearly resembled the central star of the Ring Nebula in Lyra; once he fenestered through a sequence of a hundred fallaways with such a wild and reckless speed that no sane pilot would want to follow him; once he segued off the plane of the galaxy altogether and pa.s.sed into a globular cl.u.s.ter of eight hundred million stars that was almost a small satellite galaxy of its own. But all to no avail. Sivan's ship remained always close to him, wavering like a mirage just at the radius of conver- gence. Danlo decided that Sivan was a better pilot than he, and so with a smile and a silent bowing of his head in acknowledgement of Sivan's skill, he resigned himself to this relentless and rather eerie pursuit and turned back toward the distant lights of Ede the G.o.d. He tried not to think about Sivan and his ghostlike ship, any more than a man takes notice of his shadow behind him as he races toward the sun. As he plied his art of mathematics and faced his ship-computer's brilliant number storm, he tried to accept the Red Dragon's presence with all the nonchalance of an Alaloi father disregarding the lice attached to his hairy body. He fell on and on past countless stars, and after a time, as all pilots do in the dazzling black neverness of the manifold, he felt very much alone.

In this way he crossed the bright Orion Arm. He journeyed ever outward away from the core stars, deeper into the Vild. He fell out around many stars, the yellow and orange and red giants, and the glowering red supergiants as huge and h.e.l.lish as Antares. There were the blue and white stars and the common yellow stars much like Old Earth's steady, golden sun. Many of these stars he named after the animals that he had known as a child. Berura, the hooded seal, Gauri, the ivory gull, Ahira he left these names behind him like splendid jewels spinning in the night. Other stars he would never name. These were the remnants of supernovas, the light and dust and elemental matter blasted into s.p.a.ce when the great stars died. The whole Vild was sick with this radiation and matter. Many regions of s.p.a.ce were cloudy and opaque to his telescopes. More than once he fell out too near the expanding wavefront of a recently destroyed star, and was almost destroyed by fiery blasts of X-rays and gamma and onstreaming photons. Like a dolphin diving beneath the sea to avoid storm waves, he immediately fell through a random window into the manifold in his instinct to escape this killing light. But he found no peaceful waters there. Beneath the stars of the Vild, the manifold is deadly and strange. He took the Snowy Owl through the rare Loudon s.p.a.ces that slowly melted before him like a scryer's blacking oil spread across deep eye hollows; he fell through the violet, fractalling crystals of the much rarer M-set s.p.a.ces that possibly no other pilot had encountered before. All these s.p.a.ces were difficult and dangerous, though none proved so terrible to map through asthe almost impossibly chaotic chaos s.p.a.ce that he had finessed inside the Ent.i.ty.

There is really not much to say of this part of Danlo's journey. He survived the many topological traps that opened before him. With ever growing prowess and grace, he made his mappings and his ship danced like a light beam through the many windows that gave out on the stars. Somewhere past a star that he named Kikilia, the whale, the manifold flattened out and grew much smoother. It grew much denser as well, and so his fenestration of the many stellar windows along his path was leng- thened, and thus slowed down. At times, when he found himself moving as slowly as a snowworm usually in some dead grey null s.p.a.ce or another he floated in the pit of his ship and played his shakuhachi. Piloting a lightship through the manifold can be much like going to war: one must suffer long periods of boredom intercut with moments of holy terror. But in falling through the universe there is always joy, too, and for Danlo, as for any true pilot, the purest and wildest of joys was in discovering new things. There was always the making of new mathematics, of course, the discovery of beautiful correspondences, the infinite rings and inverted trees and other mathematical objects never before dreamed by the mind of man. Although Danlo loved this kind of novelty as much as any pilot did, he took his keenest pleasure in laying eyes upon the sights of the real world. Some five thousand light-years outward from the Ent.i.ty, out in that glowing stellar wasteland at the edge of the Orion Arm, he made an astonishing discovery. There, orbiting a common red dwarf was a blue and white planet identical to the Earth that he had so reluctantly left behind. And further outward in the direction of the galactic rim, he found a second planet cut with exactly the same configuration of continents and oceans as was that Earth. Without hesitation, he took his ship down to both these planets. In the cool green forests, on the sparkling tropical beaches, on the deserts and gra.s.sy plains, he found no human beings, but only a marvellous abundance of plants and animals growing and reproducing and living in innocence as they once had on Old Earth before the first man sharpened a stick into the first spear. He concluded that it must have been Ede the G.o.d who had made these Earths and that he was very close to the star cl.u.s.ter toward which the Ent.i.ty had directed him.

When he looked out of his window he could see the Star of Ede as a tiny point of blue-white light burning through the dust and the drears of s.p.a.ce. He decided to follow this star. He found a mapping to a point-exit only a hundred million miles from its fiery corona, and he entered back into the manifold to complete this simple fallaway from one window to another.

As the first man ever to lay eyes upon Ede the G.o.d, he did not know what he expected to behold. Perhaps Ede would be nothing more than a great black cube of neurologics as large as a planet floating in s.p.a.ce. Or perhaps Ede would be configured as was the Ent.i.ty: millions of gleaming moon-brains once interconnected by streams of shimmering tachyon beams that he could never have seen or even detected. Whatever shape Ede took, however, it seemed certain that the rivers of information bound up in the tachyons would have long since dried up and his neurologics would be as dead as stone. For Ede himself was dead this was what the Ent.i.ty had told him. And yet perhaps Ede was also somewhat alive, and this was the paradox that he had journeyed across so many light-years to resolve.

What Danlo saw when he fell out above the Star of Ede a pretty blue-white star as hot as Durriken Luz was utter ruin. Spread out before him across millions of miles of s.p.a.ce was nothing but flotsam and jetsam, the remnants of a structure that must have been Ede the G.o.d himself. Danlo spent much time with his telescopes scanning this debris, which formed a dark and ugly ring around the whole of the star. At various points, he even risked his ship by rocketing near the ring's outer rim to scoop up bits of matter for a.n.a.lysis. In the samples he took, he found fused neurologics, diamond chips, molecular clary, broken protein chains sometimes pulverized to dust, silicon, germanium, dead a.s.semblers, microscopic rods of spun diamond, and many, many pieces of demolished robots, none of which was greater than two microns in diameter. The ring itself was pocked in many places with glowing clouds of hydrogen, with various ionized gases, and with iron particles polarizing the star's strong blue-white light. In all this vast wreckage, however, he found no sign of trans- uranic elements or any kind of manufactured matter. He felt sure that the ring was all that remained of what must have been a vast computer. This black and purple ring around the star was a good two million miles deep and fifty million miles across.

After calculating the average density of all this blasted-out matter, he determined that this computer called Ede must have been the largest man-made (or G.o.d-made) structure ever fabricated. In truth, the bits of destroyed circuitry that floated beyond his lightship quite possibly represented the greatest and densest collection of matter in the galaxy outside the black hole of the core itself. Ede's eternal computer must have been millions of times as large as any of the Ent.i.ty's moon-brains, as large, in ma.s.s, as a large-sized star. Somehow, in a way beyond Danlo's understanding of the energy requirements of moving matter through the manifold, in order to make the components for his computer, Ede must have swept whole star cl.u.s.ters clean of planets, asteroids, comets even wisps of hydrogen and other gases blown out from the many Vild stars that had fallen into supernova. Quite probably he had used disa.s.semblers to break all this matter down to its elements, and then, over centuries of realtime, he had used other microscopic robots to build up and fold together the neurologics of his great brain. How this monstrously vast machine had been destroyed he might never know. Possibly the Silicon G.o.d had triggered the s.p.a.cetime continuum's zero-point energies in millions of separate loci inside Ede and so exploded him into trillions of pieces. Or possibly he had undermined the fabric of s.p.a.cetime itself. Danlo well remembered how the Silicon G.o.d's attack upon the Solid State Ent.i.ty had deformed the manifold beneath and inside Her. It was possible, he thought, that if such deformations were great enough, the black silk of s.p.a.cetime would unravel into an almost infinite number of strands, thus pulling apart any kind of matter folded inside.

However Ede had been killed, it seemed that he must be truly dead. Search though he might, Danlo could find no piece of circuitry or other component alive to the touch of flowing electrons or streams of coherent light. He could not understand how Ede could also be somewhat alive unless, of course, this ring of cybernetic wreckage three hundred million miles in circ.u.mference was only part of Ede the G.o.d. If the moon-brains of the Ent.i.ty were spread across many stars, why not the units of Ede's eternal computer? Because Danlo wanted to know more about this G.o.d of G.o.ds and because he still hoped to ask Ede the whereabouts of Tannahill he set out into the nearby stars to find him.

In the deep light-distances surrounding the Star of Ede, as he formally named it, he found more wreckage. It seemed that a ring of dead computer parts circled each of the stars he explored, though no ring was nearly so large as the first ring he had encountered. As Danlo's ship fell in a huge spiral through this strange neighbourhood of stars, the rings became ever smaller. Some stars shone forth upon no rings at all, but on only dark blooms of floating debris that must have once been no larger than small moons. And some blooms...o...b..ting stars twenty light-years distant from the Star of Ede were as tiny as granite boulders that one might stumble over while walking down a mountain path. But there were very many of them. In the star cl.u.s.ter that was Ede the G.o.d, Danlo counted some six hundred and seventy million rings or pockets of demolished computer circuitry. In a way, Danlo thought, Ede the G.o.d must have been something like a starflower opening onto s.p.a.ce: the purple-black petals of his brain growing ever smaller and more numerous the farther away from the centre. And all of these parts were quite dead. It seemed that the Silicon G.o.d's destruction of his enemy was total. In only one respect had the Silicon G.o.d's attack upon Ede been less than completely ferocious: apparently he had spared the many different Earths that Ede must have made. Beginning at a radius of twenty-three light-years outward from the Star of Ede, almost every star was accompanied by a fat, round, blue and white, water-swollen Earth. This discovery astonished Danlo. He could not imagine why Ede would want to create so many copies of Old Earth. Just gazing at even one of these splendid worlds touched him with marvel and mystery. He thought that these G.o.d-made spheres of rock and water and air might somehow hold the secret to Ede's death (or life), and so he turned his lightship to the nearest stars to seek out these Earths one by one.

It was as he was surveying the sixty-sixth of these Earths that he made a thrilling discovery. The Snowy Owl was circling the Earth in a low orbit, no more than three hundred miles above the level of the sea. Below him, straight down through layers of ozone and atmosphere, was the great mother continent that had once been called Urasia. Through the breaks in the puffy clouds, he could just see the brown and white folds of the famous Hindu Kush the mountains of death. And soon, in seconds, his lightship pa.s.sed over the first peaks of the Himalaya range. Through one of his telescopes he studied the Icefalls of Sagarmatha, the highest mountain and mother G.o.ddess of the world. If Ede truly had created this world, then he had reproduced it almost exactly as Old Earth had been some ten thousand years before the Swarming.