'Thank you.'

'My first question is this,' the Ede said. 'Where were you when you intercepted my signal?'

'I was three hundred miles above this Earth. I was making my fourteenth orbit when I intercepted your signal.'

'I see. You intercepted this signal how?'

'My ship's radio is programmed to search for such signals.'

'I see. You were orbiting this Earth in a ship?'

'Did you think that I was flying through the sky like a bird?' Danlo asked, smiling.

'I see that you like to answer questions with questions.'

'And should I not answer questions with questions?'

'I see that you have a taste for playing with others' sensibilities.'

'I am sorry,' Danlo said. He looked directly into the Ede's shiny black eyes. 'I ...

have been rude, yes?'

'Well, that's the human way, isn't it?'

'Sometimes, yes,' Danlo said. 'But it is not my way. That is, I have been taught that it is unseemly for a mart to speak rudely to anyone man, woman, or child.' Or to an animal, Danlo remembered, or to a tree or a rock or even to the murderous west wind that blows in the night. A true man must speak truly and courteously to all the creations of the world, even one so strange as an imago of a man shining forth out of a computer. 'I am sorry. It is just that I am unused to speaking with artificial intelli- gences ... so deeply.'

At this, the Ede's face hardened into an unreadable mask. And yet there was a brightness about the eyes as if Ede's program, as sublime as it might be, could not conceal his interest in what Danlo had said.

'Have you spoken with many such intelligences?' Ede asked.

'No,' Danlo said, 'not many.'

'Have you spoken with any of these intelligences on your journey here?'

'Perhaps,' Danlo said. He thought of the Solid State Ent.i.ty, and he wondered what kind of intelligence really controlled Her vast moon-brains. 'But perhaps not.'

'Perhaps or perhaps not,' the Ede repeated. He smiled mechanically. 'I see that you're a most considerate man. You've remembered that I said I've little room left in my memory, and so you've chosen not to overload me with new information.'

'I am sorry,' Danlo said. Just then he did not want to tell a hologram or anyone else of his journey to the Solid State Ent.i.ty.

'Sometimes it can be difficult to determine which intelligences are artificial and which are not.'

'I suppose that is true,' Danlo said.

'But you say that you have spoken with what you call artificial intelligences before?'

'Yes, on the planet of my birth. In the city where I was educated, there were many computers. Many ai programs.'

'Excuse me?'

'Ai programs,' Danlo said. 'The cetics of my Order sometimes call them 'I'

programs. In mockery of the belief that computers could possess a sense of selfness.'

'I see. The cetics of your Order must be antiquarians.'

'That is true in a way they are. Except the cyber-shamans. They love computers.'

Danlo closed his eyes for a moment, remembering. In his mind he saw a diamond clearface moulded tightly across a white skull and pale blue eyes as cold as death.

Then he said, 'Sometimes the cyber-shamans refer to ai programs as G.o.d programs.'

'A more appropriate name, I should think.'

'Perhaps.'

'Your Order is this the Order founded in the city of Neverness?'

'Yes.'

'May I conclude that you are a pilot of this Order?'

'Yes.'

'Well, then, you've fallen far, haven't you, Pilot? In your diamond ship that falls faster than light what is that you pilots call your ships?'

'We call them lightships,' Danlo said.

'Oh, I'd forgotten,' the Ede said. 'But how is it that you were able to take your lightship into these parts of the galaxy that have been impenetrable for so long?'

'We ... have learned to penetrate these s.p.a.ces. The Vild itself. We have learned to map through the manifold beneath these wild stars.'

'I'd thought that the manifold beneath the Vild was unmappable.'

'It ... almost is.'

'Then you have fallen here twenty-thousand light-years from Neverness?'

'Yes.'

'In your lightship, by yourself? By mappings that you've made alone?'

'Yes,' Danlo said. 'Pilots always enter the manifold alone.'

'Then you've had no help in entering the manifold or piloting your ship?'

'No of course not.'

'But you must have had help in finding this planet?'

Danlo was silent as he stared at the hologram of Ede.

'A hundred million stars in the Vild,' Ede said. 'Or perhaps thrice as many. Is it a miracle that brought you to this Earth?'

Danlo was aware of the Ede's eyes glowing darkly, practically drilling like lasers into his eyes. He was aware of the devotionary's hundreds of glittering computer eyes focusing on his face. He remembered, then, that cetic programs could enable computers to read truth or falseness from a man's face.

'I was given the fixed-points of a star near this Earth,' Danlo said.

'And who gave you this information?'

With a sudden release of his breath, Danlo finally told the Ede imago something of his journey to the Solid State Ent.i.ty. He made only pa.s.sing reference to his tests on the beach, and as to his encounter with the Ent.i.ty's incarnation as Tamara, he said nothing at all. Neither did he speak of his quest to find his father. But he revealed that he sought the lost planet called Tannahill. He told the Ede that he sought the Architects of the Old Church, they who were fulfilling their doctrines and prophecies by destroying the stars.

'That is an extraordinary story,' the Ede said. His face was the very embodiment of the emotion of relief. 'You must be a remarkable man to have wrested such infor- mation from the Ent.i.ty.'

Danlo looked at the hologram's steady lights and said, 'You know of the Ent.i.ty, yes?'

But the Ede, it seemed, did not wish to discuss the Ent.i.ty just then. He wished to discuss the mystery of Danlo's journey to this Earth, perhaps the mystery of Danlo himself.

'You're a remarkable man,' the Ede repeated. 'May I ask your name?'

'My name,' Danlo said. He did not know which of his names to give to this irksome hologram. Once, he had been called Danlo the Wild; once, a kindly, white-furred alien had bestowed upon him the name of Danlo Peacewise. And then there were his other names: his first name which his family would call him; the name of his anima which would play a part in the shaping of the world; and his spirit name, his secret name which he would whisper only to the wind. 'I am ... Danlo wi Soli Ringess,' he said at last.

'Very good,' the Ede said. 'Then may I present myself? I am Nikolos Daru Ede.'

Danlo smiled as he stared at Ede's blazing imago. 'Of course you are,' he said.

'I've been waiting years for someone to intercept the signal that led you here.'

With a sigh, Danlo rubbed his aching forehead. Then he reached down to rub his aching legs. He was very tired from his climb up the mountain, almost as tired as he was from speaking with this strangely programmed devotionary. He thought that he should turn away from the devotionary in order to explore the rest of the temple. And soon he must lay out his furs, eat a cold meal of kurmash, shipbread, and dried bloodfruit, and then try to sleep. But something about this ridiculous, foot-high Ede called to him. He sensed that the many-eyed black box generating the Ede might contain much valuable information. Perhaps somewhere in the devotionary's memory coded as voltages of electrons or on-off pulses of light was a clue as to the death of one of the galaxy's greatest G.o.ds. Danlo needed only to find the way to access this information. He needed only to say the perfect words, and then the devotionary's programs, according to an incredibly complex series of logical decisions, in the way of all programmed and otherwise artificial intelligences, would cause the Ede imago to tell Danlo what he needed to know.

As if the Ede could read Danlo's thoughts, he smiled provocatively. And then the Ede said, 'I am the door; knock and be opened.'

Danlo closed his eyes, listening to the sound of his breath. From the front of the temple, through the cold halls, he heard the wind whooshing faintly through the door that he had left open. And then, suddenly, another door, a door deep inside him opened. And he knew. One moment he was mystified by the presence of this hologram of Ede the G.o.d, and in the next moment, a perfect knowledge of the origin of the devotionary's programming shone like a cold, clear light in his mind.

'You are Nikolos Daru Ede,' he said. 'Truly, Ede the G.o.d what is left of him.'

As Danlo stood with his hand held over his eyes, he looked through himself to events which had occurred long before he had been born. With a cold and terrible awareness, he looked through the doorway of the memory that lies inside memory.

And what he saw was only endless war. It was a war of exploding stars and hydrogen bombs, bullets and information viruses, programmed surrealities and b.l.o.o.d.y knives and weapons of pure consciousness that not even the G.o.ds could truly comprehend.

The war had begun at least fifteen billion years ago, when the first galaxies had exploded outward from the primeval fireball that the astronomers called the beginning of the universe. Or perhaps the war had no true beginning nor possible end, and was as eternal as purposes and pa.s.sions in the mind of G.o.d. Whatever the genesis of this universal conflagration, the phase of the war that would eventually consume much of Danlo's life (and the lives of a hundred billion human beings from the Civilized Worlds to the Vild) could be traced back to a single flash-point occurring some eight thousand years earlier at the end of the Lost Centuries. This great event was the fabrication of the Silicon G.o.d on Fostora.

The architects and scientists of Fostora built their would-be G.o.d on a tiny, airless moon and mined this speck of ice and rock with hydrogen bombs should it become necessary to destroy their n.o.ble creation. And then they waited. They wanted to see how a computer, initially programmed to seek knowledge and control of the material universe, would evolve if given almost complete freedom from human mores and ethical constraints. It was their hypothesis that this unholy machine would develop an ethic all his own and a moral imperative beyond what most human beings understood as simple good or evil. It was their dream to create an ent.i.ty that understood deep reality, a G.o.d, a new form of life as far beyond themselves as they were from worms.

They hoped to learn from this G.o.d the secrets of the universe and perhaps the purpose of that tragicomic race of hairless apes who had begun their galactic adventure on Old Earth some two million years before. But the Silicon G.o.d was not to be the teacher of humankind. As the first flash of light streamed through the optical filaments of his brain, within the first twenty billionths of a second after he had come into an awareness of himself (if indeed a computer can be truly aware), the Silicon G.o.d came to hate the human beings who had made him. He would have made war upon the scientists of Fostora and all human beings everywhere, but this, according to his deep programming, was the one thing that he could never do. And so instead he found a way to escape from his creators. In secret, far below the rocky surface of the moon on which he was imprisoned, he built s.p.a.cetime engines a thousand times as large as those that are the heart of a lightship. And then he opened a window to the manifold. The Fostoran astronomers, looking out through their telescopes across black s.p.a.ce, were astonished to behold the silvery gleam of a window opening, and then, an instant later, to watch as the Silicon G.o.d and the moon that contained him vanished from their neighbourhood of s.p.a.ce. It would be another fifty centuries before a master pilot of the Order, Ananda wi Suso, discovered that the Silicon G.o.d had fallen out and occupied a stellar nebula some six thousand light-years away.

There, in the unexplored regions of the Orion Arm beyond the Sun and beyond even the Rainbow Double the Silicon G.o.d had absorbed whole planets and the light of many stars, and grown into a true G.o.d. There, over five thousand years, he had made war upon the many G.o.ds that had sprung from the human race and many G.o.ds such as Solid State Ent.i.ty and the April Colonial Intelligence had made war upon him.

All this Danlo saw as he closed his eyes and looked deep into that bright and marvellous place that was neither s.p.a.ce nor time nor materiality but rather contained all these things, and everything everything that had ever been or might possibly ever be. He saw the great battle fought between the Silicon G.o.d and the G.o.d called Ede.

This battle itself could be divided into three distinct phases or acts. In the first act, lasting more than a millennia, the two G.o.ds discovered each other across an ocean of stars. Each G.o.d, in his program to control the material universe and evolve, was really much like the other, and so it was only natural that each should seek the means of controlling (and destroying) his rival. For a thousand years of human time, they vied for knowledge of each other. They sent out secret spy ships to infiltrate each other's brains and tap the streams of tachyons by which each communicated with himself.

They infected each other with billions of bacteria-sized robots that might bore through computer circuitry and reveal the architecture of their logics and their burned-in programming. For a thousand years they fought a war of information viruses and disinformation as each tried to gain control over the other's programming, but neither could prevail over the other. And then the Silicon G.o.d called for a truce and proposed an alliance with his deadly enemy. He presented Ede the G.o.d with a plan for each of them to divide up the galaxy, and then, ten billion years farwhen, to divide up all the galaxies of the local cl.u.s.ter of galaxies, and the supercl.u.s.ters, and someday, the whole of the universe itself. He offered this plan in the form of a surreality: perhaps the most complete and detailed simulation of future events that any G.o.d or computer in the Milky Way galaxy had ever run. Ede the G.o.d should have been very wary of this surreality, this gift of his rival G.o.d. In truth, as a man might spurn a goblet of wine offered by his enemy, he should have rejected it out of hand.

But Ede was flawed by the very hubris that had originally impelled him to transcend from human being into something more, and so he decided to accept the Silicon G.o.d's gift. After placing safeguards against poison programs and suchlike, he opened the gates of his light circuits to this seductive surreality that the Silicon G.o.d had made.

But he underestimated the cleverness of this ancient machine G.o.d. As Ede's star-sized brain glittered with simulations of an endlessly vast and glorious future, the Silicon G.o.d treacherously renewed his attack. He had copied parts of himself and camouflaged these duplicitous programs as G.o.d-algorithms hidden within the code of the surreality that he gave to Ede. When Ede opened himself to visions of himself as G.o.d of all G.o.ds, perhaps even as the one and only G.o.d of the universe, he found most of his master systems infiltrated by alien programs of what he called the Other. This was the second act of their battle. In less than a thousand seconds an eternity in the life of a computer one by one each of Ede's guardian programs were fracted and then failed. The Other began to seize control of Ede's operating systems. Soon, his last defences would go down, and then Ede would lose control over the material components of his body and brain, and worse, he would lose control over his mind.

Thus began their battle's third and final act. Because none of Ede's own simulations of the future had ever hinted that such a disaster was possible, he was ill-prepared for what he must do next. But he was neither helpless nor hopeless. Even before his vastening as a G.o.d, he had always been the master of computational origami, the folding together of many computer parts into a synergistic whole. And now he proved to be a master of the unfolding. With his mainbrain lost, he decided to abandon it. The Other was chewing through millions of layers of circuitry, converting him to a slave unit, eating him alive. But Ede would not leave the largest and most glorious lobe of his brain to be incorporated into the brain of this treacherous machine G.o.d. After pruning his programs and memories and then encoding them as an intense tachyon pulse, he set loose the zero-point energies of the s.p.a.cetime within his great brain and exploded himself into the pieces of flotsam that Danlo had discovered orbiting the Star of Ede. He had hoped to destroy the Other and leave not the tiniest diamond circuit for the Silicon G.o.d to feed upon. He split the tachyon signal into a million separate beams aimed at a million smaller lobes of his brain orbiting nearby stars.

Almost instantly in less than a thousand nanoseconds he found his master programs installed in these millions of moon-sized brains. But the Other had followed him. In truth, like a leech attached to a man's eyeball (or rather, like a retro-virus st.i.tching itself into its host's DNA), the Other had carked itself into Ede's master programs, into his memory, into his very soul. Again Ede pruned his programs, coded them as pure signal, and in a flash of tachyons infinitely faster than light, made the almost instantaneous unfolding of his self to smaller lobes of his brain farther out among the stars. Again he destroyed the computer circuitry that he left behind. But he could not wholly free his programs from the Other, and so he repeated this pruning of himself many times. Many, many times. Bit by bit, Ede's soul his very self diminished even as his consciousness was blown like the seeds of a dried-out dan- delion flower across twenty light-years of s.p.a.ce. At last, when he had pruned himself from a great galactic being into something that could barely be called a G.o.d, he found himself installed in millions of separate computer lobes, some of which were as tiny as rocks. And still the Other remained with him. Only now, like a sleekit fleeing a fox into its deepest burrow, Ede was trapped. Ninety-nine point nine per cent of his great and beautiful brain was destroyed, and no spare circuitry or piece of machinery survived to run his programs or store his memories. And so Ede, the G.o.d what was left of him made the hardest decision of his life. He destroyed all but one of his brain parts, and then he made a final pruning. In truth, the soul-surgery that he performed on himself might better be called an amputation, but it was really more, much more than even the agony of an animal who gnaws off its leg to escape a trap.

At the end of the third act of his battle with the Silicon G.o.d, which lasted no more than a millionth of a second, Ede simply erased every program and operating system, every algorithm, virtual, pathway, language and memory that was not essential to his ident.i.ty as Ede. In this last and most desperate of prunings, he thought that he had finally edited out every bit of the Other. And so Ede wrote one final program. He compressed the essence of himself as pictures in a fractal code; in his panic to survive in any way that he could, he carked this core program into a simple radio signal and cast his soul to the black and empty s.p.a.ces of the universe. It was a hideously crude thing for him to do. But he had no machinery left that might generate tachyons, nor even the high frequency laser light that could hold much more information than any radio signal. In this way, after thousands of years of personal evolution and his ontogenesis into one of the galaxy's greatest G.o.ds, after hopes and visions and dreams of infinity, Ede found himself reduced to nothing more than invisible radio waves spreading out through a cold vacuum at the torturously slow speed of light, a cry in the night, a lost soul seeking home, the last gasp of breath of a dying man. It was something of a miracle that this weakened radio signal, after years of crossing the vast interstellar deeps, had fallen down upon the Earth where Danlo now stood. It was a miracle that for centuries, in the lost temple that Ede had once built, the devotionary's radio receiver had remained always turned on, always open to the music and songs of the stars. And so it was a miracle that the program encoding Nikolos Daru Ede, the man, found itself received and installed in the very primitive circuitry of what was little more than a religious toy. It was a miracle, yes, but then all life is a miracle, even the life of a G.o.d who is dead and yet remains somehow mysteriously alive.

'You ... are he,' Danlo repeated. He stared at the hologram of Ede, which was staring back at him with an expression of astonishment written across his glowing face. 'The core program that survived the battle.'

'You know, then,' Ede said, reading the strange light in Danlo's eyes. 'But how do you know? How could you possibly know?'

Danlo looked down at the dusty temple floor. Six years before, in a dark corridor of the library on Neverness, he had looked into his deepest memory, and this marvellous way of seeing wholes from the tiniest of fragments had first flowered into consciousness. But how could he ever explain such a strange and mysterious sense to a computer?

'How ... does anything know?' Danlo asked. 'How do we know that we know?'

'Do you really wish an answer to this question, Danlo wi Soli Ringess? My program contains the answers to all the famous philosophical conundrums of man.'

Amused by this impossible offer, Danlo slowly shook his head and smiled. 'I have often wondered what a computer can know. What it truly means when the Architects and programmers say that a computer can know.'

'Then you are not of the school that believes ai programs can render a computer self-aware?'

'I do not like ... to believe things,' Danlo said. 'I would rather know.'

'Then you must doubt that I am as conscious as yourself.'

'I ... do doubt. I am sorry.'

'You doubt and yet here you have stood for a long time conversing with me as if my consciousness were the same as any man's.'

'Yes, that is true.'

Ede smiled his wicked smile, and then asked, 'If you had closed your eyes, would you have known that you were talking with a computer?'

'Is this to be the only test of consciousness, then?'

'Well, it's a time-honoured test, isn't it? The ancient Turing test.'

'That is true but there are other tests, yes?'

'What tests?'