'Do you know where Tannahill is, then?'

'No,' Ede said. 'Once I knew, but I have forgotten.'

'I am sorry.'

'But I know of other peoples who may know of Tannahill.'

'These peoples are human, then?'

'Mostly most of them still are.'

'And these human beings ... live where?'

'At the centre of the Vild. Where the stars are wildest, on other Earths that I once made.'

'Do you know the fixed-points of these stars?'

'I know them.'

'Will you tell me where these stars are?'

'Only if you promise to take me with you.'

'In the hold of my ship? As ... cargo in a lightship?'

'No, as a pa.s.senger. As a fellow seeker of the ineffable flame. And of other things.'

Danlo rubbed his head and sighed. 'All right if you would like, you may share the pit of my ship.'

'And you must promise one other thing,' Ede said. He was smiling now, and it seemed that he was reading the emotions from Danlo's face.

'What ... is that?'

'You must promise that if we find Tannahill, you will help me recover my body.'

'That... will be hard to do.'

'Hard to promise or a hard promise to fulfil?'

'Both.'

'I'm only asking you to help me is that so wrong?'

Danlo rubbed his aching head, remembering. 'The dead ... are so very dead when they die. It is shaida for the dead to live again.'

'But I am not dead at all,' Ede said. His eyes twinkled, and the hologram manifesting his shape flared as brightly as a flame globe. 'I am as alive as you are almost.'

'Even if you do not reveal the fixed-points of the stars that I seek, I might find them anyway,' Danlo said.

'Possibly.'

'I may find Tannahill without you, but you will never leave this lost Earth without me.''It would seem that you hold the superior negotiating position,' Ede said.

'Yes.'

Ede's eyes were now as hard to look at as black holes, and they seemed to drink in the light falling off Danlo's face. Ede said, 'But I would think that you don't like to negotiate.'

Merchants, Danlo thought, haggled over the price of a Fravashi carpet; wormrunners argued with wh.o.r.es over the cost of sharing their tattooed bodies for a night. 'Truly, I hate negotiating,' he said.

'Then help me. Please, Pilot.'

For a long time Danlo stared at Ede's face burning in its computer-generated colours, and he lost himself in Ede's sad gaze. There came a moment when Danlo's face was burning, too, his forehead and his eyes and the blood rushing beneath his skin. And then another moment, fearful and strange, when all the world was nothing but fire and pain and a wild white light shimmering through the cold s.p.a.ce between them and all around. 'If you would like,' Danlo finally said. 'If I can ... I will help you.'

'Thank you.'

'And now,' Danlo said, looking about the floor of the temple cluttered with all the cybernetica and other things, 'I must find a place to sleep.'

'Of course you must.'

'You ... never sleep?'

'I am as you see,' Ede said. 'Always. I will never say the word that will take me down.'

'Even for a night?'

'Even for a moment. Even for a millionth of a moment.'

Danlo smiled at Ede and yawned. He said, 'Then I must say goodnight now and find another room where I can lay out my furs.'

'Of course.'

'It would be hard for me to sleep ... with you watching me all night.'

'And in the morning?'

'In the morning I will explore the rest of the temple. I have always wanted to see the chambers where the Architects are vastened.'

'And then?'

'And then we will return to my ship. To the Vild. To ... the stars.'

So saying, Danlo bowed politely. It amused him to watch as the little hologram of Nikolos Daru Ede with his emaciated body and huge bony head returned his bow with an otherworldly grace, as only an imago floating in the air might accomplish.

'Goodnight, then,' Danlo said.

'Goodnight, Pilot. Sleep deeply and well.'

With another yawn (and with a strange smile that Ede could not see), Danlo turned to walk back through the temple and retrieve his pack from the entrance hall. Soon he would eat his shipbread and taste the acid tang of dried bloodfruit. Soon he would be asleep on soft furs, while in another part of the temple, the hologram of a man who had once been a G.o.d would keep a vigil all night. Danlo wondered what it would be like to be a ghost haunting the light-circuits of a simple devotionary computer; he wondered at the consciousness of a machine that was as cold and constant as the light of the oldest stars. Most of all he wondered a simple thing: if Ede never slept, how could he ever dream? And if he never dreamed deep and lucid dreams, how should he ever want to be a man again, how should he want to be marvellously and terribly alive?

CHAPTER NINE

The Sani

The longest journey begins with the first step unless you can fly.

- Justine The Wise.

To say that the universe is vast is as simple as breathing fresh air, and yet truly to comprehend its infinite deeps is another thing altogether. The Milky Way galaxy is only a tiny part of the known universe no more than a snowflake spinning in the wind along the world's endless wastelands of ice and yet to a man crossing its cold fields of stars in a lightship spun of diamond and dreams, the galaxy is very large indeed. It is recorded that once a star exploded. Ninety thousand years ago, in the far part of the Perseus Arm, at the very edge of the galaxy where the stars fade off into the intergalactic void, a hot blue giant fell supernova and cast its blinding light to the universe. Light is almost the fastest thing there is; light is so fast that in the time it takes to affirm its fastness, in simple words, it will fall through s.p.a.ce a million miles and yet it took fifteen thousand years for the light from this dead star to cross only a small part of the galaxy and rain down upon the icy forests of Old Earth. Men and women, living in houses of sewn animal skins or in snow huts or dark cold caves, beheld this strange new star and marvelled at the terrible and beautiful nature of light.

They wondered at the secrets of the universe, even as the radiance faded to a point and then died, even as they evolved into a race of near-G.o.ds who built pyramids and cathedrals and great shimmering lightships to fall among the faraway stars. And in all these tens of thousands of years, even as human beings swarmed outward from Old Earth and built their great stellar civilizations and dreamed of an infinitely glorious future, the light from the supernova continued falling across the galaxy. To this day, it is falling still. Soon, perhaps in a few more millennia, the light will break free from the Milky Way at last and continue its journey on to the Canes Venatici and Ursa Major Cloud and the millions of other galaxies of the universe. Bound into wavelengths of simple light will be images of a people who once wore animal skins as clothing and ate the flesh of animals for food. Someday farwhen this is the reflection of human beings that the universe will first behold. It is a primeval and somewhat savage face but full of promise and possibilities. By the time the alien peoples of the Sakura Sen have looked upon human beings as they once were, some say that men long since will have evolved into G.o.ds who are far beyond the horrors of meat or matter. Humanity, the scryers say, will exist only as numinous beings who finally will understand the secret of light. Someday they will transcend light altogether and then the doors to infinity will be flung open and all the universe will be theirs.

In a way, of course, certain human beings had already gone beyond the limitations of lightspeed. Danlo, as a pilot of the Order in his diamond ship named the Snowy Owl, fenestered across the twinkling stellar windows of the Vild with all the speed he could command. But relative to the lifetime of simple man his journey was slow, for he had to find mappings among strange new stars, and the s.p.a.ces of the Vild are as twisted and tortuous as they are immense. Somewhere along this long journey into loneliness perhaps it was near the remnants of a supernova that he named Shonamorath he found himself welcoming the companionship of the little devotionary computer and the hologram that called itself Nikolos Daru Ede. Danlo had this computer in the pit of his ship. It floated with him in silent darkness. Or rather, the light of Ede's glowing face and the words he spoke often dispelled the darkness and the silence that are the usual companions of a pilot falling through the manifold. Other objects from the temple had also found a new home in Danlo's ship.

With a wilful and strangely reverent sacrilege, Danlo had plundered the blue rose from the meditation hall, as well as a kevalin set and five of Ede's wooden flutes. He might even have taken an eternal computer from the facing room, but he doubted the wisdom of bringing such a device anywhere near the electromagnetic field generated by the devotionary. Often, among the brilliant and deadly Vild stars, he wondered if Ede had a secret reason for wanting to join his quest to find Tannahill. He wondered if Ede might be hiding a secret program to cark his soul back into another eternal computer and thus retrace his old path toward G.o.dhood. Perhaps Ede hoped that the Architects of the Old Church would once again aid this most ancient and secret quest.

Once, in an attempt to glean some hint of Ede's true motivations, Danlo asked him if he would ever consider remaking the journey from man into G.o.d. Ede's response was immediate and direct and perhaps an evasion of the truth. With a sincere expression that the Ede hologram often programmed to hide uncertainty, he smiled at Danlo and said, 'How should any man ever want to become a G.o.d? Haven't I lost enough myself on that dream already? And if I succeed in becoming human again, how much more will I lose in regaining my body? Enough I've had enough of transcendence. If you consider the problem deeply enough, you'll see that transcendence is really death. How should I wish to die again, to die a thousand times a thousand times? No, Pilot, once I wear my own flesh again, I shall be content.'

In truth, the hologram of Ede was as far from contentment as a man is from a worm. In the pit of Danlo's ship it floated like one of the bioluminescent Ik demons who are said to haunt the forests outside the temple on Jacaranda. This Ede was always awake, always aware and always tormented by problems of both a practical and philosophical nature. For instance, one of his confessed reasons for wanting to fall human again was so that he could remembrance the Elder Eddas. This ultimate secret of the universe was known to be encoded into human DNA. It was said that only human beings, deep in remembrance, could unveil and bring into full consciousness the ancient memories locked inside the human genome. Ede believed that the purely machine G.o.ds of the galaxy such as the Silicon G.o.d and AI Mind (and once a time, himself) could never find the Eddas. And so he would cark his consciousness back into blood and flesh and living chromosomes, but to do so he must face once again the soul-sick terror of losing all of himself, instantaneously and forever. When the time came for him to cark the pattern of his mind from the devotionary computer's light circuits into the electro-chemical synapses of a living brain, what would it mean to say that he continued to live on in a new form? Even if he exactly duplicated the pattern of himself, in atoms of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, would he retain continuous consciousness, as a man is certain of his own marvellously continuing life from one heartbeat to the next?

As a thought experiment Ede was as susceptible to this kind of mental excess as the princes of Summerworld are to eating rich and sweet foods he considered the duplication of a man. Suppose that some G.o.d such as the Solid State Ent.i.ty could duplicate a man perfectly, down to the configuration of his body's every atom. Never mind the quantum uncertainties, the impossibility of ever knowing both the exact position and velocity of the electrons and other sub-atomic particles of which atoms are made. Even though some of the mechanics believe that consciousness comes into matter only at the level of the quantum and that the quantum state of any a.s.sembly of atoms (such as a worm or a s...o...b..ll or a man) must always be unique never mind such objections, for this was only a thought experiment designed to illuminate the greatest of philosophical mysteries. Suppose that the Solid State Ent.i.ty, through G.o.dly technologies that Ede no longer remembered, could exactly duplicate the substance and mind of a man. Suppose further that at the precise moment of duplication, the thoughts and feelings and fears, the very consciousness of the two men were identical.

Now, according to the logic of this dreadful and impossible experiment, let the Ent.i.ty through starfire or anti-matter or some other means, instantaneously annihilate the first and original man. Or better, let this man be asked to annihilate himself. The question must then be asked: What will be lost? If the man has been perfectly duplicated, the answer must be: Nothing will be lost. If the logic of the experiment has been true to the deeper logic of the universe of stars and atoms and living neurons, this original man should not hesitate to destroy himself. He should be secure in the knowledge that he would continue on as his second self, exactly as before. And yet, in the real world of doubts and dark dreams, of blood and pain and the neverness of the soul, the original man would hesitate. Even knowing that he somehow lived on in his double, to destroy himself would be suicide. It would feel like dying. In the truest sense, it would be dying, for the secret of life is not in its pattern or form, but only in the continuous flow of consciousness from one moment to the next.

'This is the problem,' Ede confessed to Danlo one day after they had pa.s.sed through a particularly desolate region of blown-out stars. 'If I become a man again, will I still be I? If I say the word that will take this devotionary down, what will happen to me?'

Ede, of course, as a man, as his original self before he had dared to become a G.o.d, had deeply felt the logic of the real universe. Like any man, he had felt doubt. But he had scorned his belly fears and his uncertainty as most ign.o.ble emotions. He was after all Nikolos Daru Ede, the founder of what would become man's greatest religion. He must always be a man of genius and vision, and above all, faith. It was his genius, as an architect, to find a way to model his mind in the programs of what he called his eternal computer. It was his vision, as a philosopher, to justify the carking of human consciousness from the living brain into the cold circuits of a machine. And it was his faith, as a prophet, to show other men how they could transcend the prison of their bodies and finally conquer death. He, himself, had been the first man willingly to give up the life of his body so that he might find the infinite life of the soul. He had allowed his fellow architects to destroy his brain neuron by neuron so that the pattern of synapses might be perfectly preserved. He had died the true death so that he might not die. He had committed this brave (and mad) act out of pride, out of fundamental misunderstanding, and finally, out of a misplaced belief in a rather curious idea that he had come to love. Despite all deeper logic, Ede finally convinced himself that the soul of man might live on forever as pure program inside an eternal computer and this soon came to be the fundamental doctrine of the Cybernetic Universal Church.

Sadly, tragically, a part of Ede always doubted this doctrine. And so for three thousand years, even as a G.o.d, his original suicide had haunted him. It haunted him still. And yet even realizing this, Ede could not escape from the flaw that had led to his tragic first death. This flaw was in his thinking; he knew very well that there was a flaw in his personality, in his mind, perhaps even in his very soul.

'For me,' he confessed in the privacy of Danlo's lightship, 'an idea has always been more beautiful than a woman, a theory of nature more sustaining than bread or wine.'

All his life he had been in love with ideas. But not, as he implied, merely because of their beauty or their power, but rather because ideas were like comfortably furnished rooms in which he could always take refuge when the universe itself, with its cold, hard edges and uncaring ways, threatened to hurt him. Although he was loath to admit it, his deepest motivation was fear. He was always searching his environment for dangers. In truth, this was his real reason for wanting to become a G.o.d. It was always his dream to control the universe in order to protect himself. And so he always sought theories that would explain the universe. He was always trying to reduce the universe's infinite complexities into simpler computer models of reality. The Holy Grail of his life was the finding of one, single theory or model that might encompa.s.s all things. This was why he had accepted the Silicon G.o.d's gift, the simulation of the future universe that had ultimately destroyed him. It was his hope to elaborate and refine this simulation and make it his own. In the time since then, a million times a million times, he had lamented his attachment to ideas and theories, which was really just an attachment to himself. Although he longed to be a true visionary, to behold the universe just as it is, this he could not do. For he could never free himself from himself from the original program that he had written when he had carked his human selfness into his eternal computer.

'I made a mistake,' he told Danlo one day. 'Out of fear, a fundamental mistake.'

According to Ede, his mistake was to write the program encoding his personality too narrowly. Because he feared that the infinite possibilities of G.o.dhood might annihilate his sense of self, much as a sprouting plant destroys the seed from which it springs, he carefully searched the Enneagram for a personality type that might define and preserve the pattern of his selfness no matter how great a G.o.d he eventually became. And so in the very beginning he had codified all his human traits and faults and bound them into a simple form. He had then earned these faults G.o.dward. This mistake was exacerbated during his battle with the Silicon G.o.d when he had to compress himself, to prune his memory and programs down to the very simple rem- nants of Ede who haunted the devotionary computer. And now, three thousand years later, like a bonsai tree that had been pruned and repruned into its final, twisted shape, he was fixed in himself, was stunted and constrained and nearly dead. And this was one reason for his wanting to become human again: he wished to become unfixed. He wished to transcend his personality type, and thus finally to become what he called a true person.

'Although I can reprogram myself,' Ede told Danlo, 'there's a master program controlling which programs I can edit and which I cannot. Unfortunately, as I am now, this master program is untouchable. But once I'm in the flesh again, I shall finally discover the answer to a question that has been bothering me for a long time: just how mutable is man? I want to know, Pilot. I want to know if a man can touch any part of himself; I want to know how matter moves itself. These new programs, new minds, new life how does it all move itself to evolve?'

Ede's need to know all manner of things ran his life. As he and Danlo fell among the brilliant Vild stars, Danlo often thought that the defining statement of Ede's life might be: I know, therefore I am. Once, after Danlo confessed that their escape from an incandescent Triolet s.p.a.ce had been rather narrow, Ede asked to interface the ship- computer so that he might know what kinds of dangers that the Snowy Owl encountered. As a good pilot of the Order, Danlo would rather have pulled out his own eyes before letting any other person (or computer) interface the brain of his ship.

But he was also a considerate man, and even for a devotionary-generated hologram he could feel a kind of compa.s.sion. And so, with the help of his ship-computer, he made a model of the manifold. Using his ship's sulki grids, he projected glittering images into the dark air of his ship's pit. This projection of the pathways and embedded s.p.a.ces that they fell through was not very much like the deeply mathematical way in which Danlo himself experienced the manifold. But it was good enough for Ede, who had lost most of his mathematics during his battle and the tragic diminishing of his selfness. Like an itinerant historian first beholding the rings of Qallar, he gaped in astonishment at the colours of a fayway s.p.a.ce, at the sparkling lights and the lovely, fractalling complexity. In this manner, viewing the models that Danlo's ship made for him, Ede came to know things that few except the Order's pilots have known. In this way, too, viewing the rippling distortions at the radius of convergence around their ship, he discovered that they were not alone.

'I believe another ship might be following us, Pilot,' he said to Danlo. 'Perhaps it's an emissary of the Silicon G.o.d sent to destroy us.'

It was then, within the silken web of the manifold, some thirty-thousand light-years out from Neverness, that Danlo finally told Ede about the warrior-poet named Malaclypse Redring. He told him of the warrior-poet's quest to find a G.o.d and destroy him.

'Then ever since your planetfall on Farfara this ship has been following you? This Red Dragon, you say?' Ede's face was a glowing mask of apprehension, and he seemed to doubt what Danlo told him. 'I don't understand, Pilot. If the warrior-poet expects you to lead him to Mallory Ringess, why didn't he follow you to my temple?

After all, he couldn't have known that you would find me there and not your father.'

As it happened, Danlo had been brooding over this very question for at least a billion miles. But he had no answer for Ede (or for himself). And so he built an icy wall of disdain around his doubts, turned his face to the strange stars and fell deep into the heart of the Vild, where the darkness of s.p.a.ce was filled with light. There were dead stars and supernovas everywhere. Falling through these blazing s.p.a.ces, Danlo thought, was something like approaching a dragon. Beyond the edge of the Orion Arm, the supernovas grew more dense, and the breath of the stars grew ever hotter. As he fenestered among thousands of stellar windows that seemed almost to melt and fuse into one another like sheets of molten gla.s.s, this fiery breath built into a raging wind. Often, when he fell out into reals.p.a.ce for a moment, his ship was blasted by a stream of atoms, photons and high-energy particles. In a few places the radiation was so intense that it might have seared away the diamond skin of his ship if he hadn't quickly made a new mapping and taken the Snowy Owl back into the manifold. There he fell through s.p.a.ces both deadly and strange.

After many days of such journeying Danlo came across sights unknown to any man or woman of his Order. Usually a pilot delights in making such discoveries, but the things he saw caused him no joy. He found tens of dead stars and hundreds of burned- out planets. Some of these blackened spheres must have once been as beautiful as Tria or Old Earth, but now their great shimmering forests were burnt to char, their oceans vaporized, and their very soil melted to magma or fused into rock. On other planets the biospheres had not been totally destroyed, but rather purged of all life much larger than a bacterium or a worm. One of these planets Danlo named it Moratha Galia, or World of the Dead Souls had once sheltered an alien civilization.

Clearly, in the not too distant past, the light of a supernova must have fallen upon this planet and caught the alien race unaware. On every continent were huge, golden cities as still as a winter night. And in every city, in the winding tunnels and streets, in the dens and buildings and halls, there were the corpses of billions of alien people. Or rather only their bones remained to fill the cities like broken chess pieces in a box in one of his more onerous duties, Danlo made measurements and determined that it had been at least a century since the aliens had died and their flesh rotted away. Danlo walked among thirteen of these cities of bone. He walked and he looked and he remembered other dead people whom he had seen in other places. He marvelled at the tenacity of bone in holding its shape and enduring through the years, even these miles of alien skeletons, which were as delicate as carved ivory and as strangely jointed as a bird's. Only bone remembers pain, he thought. He wondered then at the sheer courage of life, at its boldness in daring to exist in a universe full of pain. After saying a requiem for the spirits of all these billions of people whose names he could never know, he reflected that it was always risky to live beneath the light of a star. Starlight could either illuminate or incinerate, and it was this race's bad luck to suffer fire and burning before falling to its fate.

Whoever would give light must endure burning, Danlo remembered. But stars, when they died into light, burned at a temperature of ten billion degrees, and flesh was only flesh. Further into the Vild, Danlo discovered other death worlds. Many of these were covered with human remains, with bleached white bones whose shape he knew so well. For the first time, he appreciated the very human urge to go out among the stars and fill the universe with life. Few races had ever felt this driving force so deeply as h.o.m.o sapiens. In truth, no other race had swarmed the galaxy for a million years. And now human beings were safely seeded upon perhaps ten million natural or made worlds not even the G.o.ds could count humanity's numbers. Danlo thought it ironic that of all the living species in the galaxy, the most dispersed and secure were human beings, they who were destroying the security of the galaxy's other races, perhaps even destroying the galaxy itself.

'We're a mad, murderous people,' Ede confided to Danlo after he had explored his thirty-third death world. 'We murder others so that our kind can swarm the stars like maggots on a corpse. Why do you think I felt compelled to escape my flesh and transcend into something finer?'

This, Danlo thought in his more contemplative moments, defined the essential tension of the human race: human beings' genius for living life successfully versus their desire to transcend all the blood and the breathing and pain. Possibly no other species was so secure in life and yet so dissatisfied with it. Man, the eschatologists said, was a bridge between ape and G.o.d. According to their very popular philosophy, man could only be defined as a movement toward something higher. And the Fravashi aliens, too, saw this discontent of human possibilities. Thousands of years ago the Fravashi Old Fathers had developed a language called Moksha, which was designed to help human beings free themselves from themselves. In Moksha, 'man' is a verb, and it expresses the human urge to go beyond the purely animal. This was the meaning of man. While Danlo always appreciated this desire to be greater, he felt that man's destiny lay not so much in a heightening or a quickening or even a vastening of the self but rather in a deepening. His own true quest, he told himself, must always take him deeper into life. He must always journey further into the heart of all things where the sound of life is long and dark and deep as infinitely deep as the universe itself. And so he could never quite believe in the kinds of transcendence for which human beings have striven for so long. He could never quite affirm humanity's mad and marvellous dream of becoming as G.o.ds, and perhaps something more.

It was around a brilliant blue star named Gelasalia that he discovered evidence of a great transcendent event. When Danlo's ship fell out into reals.p.a.ce streaming with light, he discovered his first rainbow star system. Like other such systems, Gelasalia was surrounded by many ringworlds. Through the blackness of empty s.p.a.ce, these worlds encircled the star like rings of opal and silver, each world catching the starlight and reflecting it in all directions. Human beings, Danlo discovered, had made these worlds: an impressive feat of engineering. Of course, the making of even one ringworld is beyond the technology of most peoples. It is no easy thing to build the superstructure of the ring itself: a simple band of organic stone five thousand miles wide and a hundred million miles in circ.u.mference set slowly spinning around the star. And then to layer the ring's interior with millions of miles of artificial soil, forests, lakes and atmosphere was work that not even the Order's master ecologists would dare to undertake. Danlo marvelled that here, among some unknown star in the Vild, there spun not just one sparkling ringworld but seventeen. Despite himself he felt proud at his race's making of this great, beautiful thing. Immediately upon beholding its brilliant colours, he wanted to meet the creators of the rainbow star system so he took his ship down to the surface of one of the ringworlds to honour these people for their prowess and craftsmanship. He accomplished an easy planetfall, bringing the Snowy Owl to rest in a gra.s.sy meadow spinning beneath the light of the star. But, in the nearby orange groves, in the villas and cities and towns, he found no one to honour. In truth, he found no one at all not on that ringworld nor any other.

Mercifully, though, he found no corpses or bones or any other sign of doom. It seemed that the whole rainbow system of made-worlds had simply been abandoned.

Here was a great mystery. How could some ten trillion human beings (or perhaps more) simply flee into s.p.a.ce? What had happened to these elusive people?

'There are theories that could explain such an event,' Ede told Danlo after insisting on exploring the rainbow system with him. 'Unfortunately, I've forgotten most of them.'

One theory that Ede had not forgotten seemed to Danlo as ominous as it did strange. It was possible, Ede said, that the rainbow system's ten trillion people comprised the greatest concentration of human beings in the galaxy. What would happen, Ede asked, if all these people were to interface a single computer network at the same time? What would happen if through the hideously complex flow of data and information, these many minds merged together into one? What would happen when ten trillion human brains with all the intelligence and incredible computing power they contained worked together towards the answer to some great question?

According to Ede, G.o.dhood would happen. Not, of course, for any single woman or man, but rather for the network as a whole. It was possible that over the centuries, the rainbow system's computer network itself had become intelligent and self-aware. And then, like an explosively growing crystal, in a great vastening that might have taken only nanoseconds, it was possible that this network of human minds might have transcended into G.o.dhood. What kind of G.o.d, Ede asked, might such a weaving of minds produce? Quite possibly the greatest G.o.d in the galaxy. In the incredible fact of the abandoned ringworlds, in the absence of corpses or bones, there was evidence for such greatness. What had happened to the ringworlds' people? According to Ede, this had happened: their ten trillion brains had merged into a single G.o.d who finally understood the mysterious connection between matter and consciousness. This G.o.d call it the Rainbow Deity had miraculously transformed the matter of ten trillion bodies into patterns of pure consciousness. And then, somehow, the Deity had projected itself through millions of miles of black s.p.a.ce into the centre of Gelasalia.

There, in the heart of a beautiful blue star, in the plasma currents and intense magnetic fields, the system's ten trillion people lived on as a single, dazzling consciousness. There the Deity would be safe from the blinding light of the Vild's many supernovas as safe as any living star could be.

'On all the ringworlds we've discovered no lightships, nor deepships,' Ede announced. 'No ships capable of anything more than journeying among the rings. In any case, how many deepships would it take to evacuate ten trillion people? Where are the factories to make these ships? Is there any evidence that such ships could ever have been made? No, there is not. And therefore, I must leave you with my hypothesis as to the fate of these people. How else to explain this mystery?'

Search though he might, Danlo could explain very little about the people of Gelasalia. In truth, he was tired of hypotheses and explanations. He remembered something that his Fravashi teacher had once said: that life was not a mystery to be explained, but rather a miracle to be lived. And so, in the end, he too abandoned this enigmatic star system. He returned to his journey, to the quest for a lost planet that had become his life. Once again he fell into the shimmering manifold, where he felt the miracle of life in the ever nearness of death. Something there, he sensed, was drawing him onward. At the heart of the manifold was a singularity dazzling in its darkness when Danlo closed his eyes he could almost feel some force pulling at him with all the terrible gravity of a black hole. Perhaps this singularity was much like the strange attractor that had led him to the Ent.i.ty's Earth and Her incarnation as Tamara; perhaps it was something wholly other. At times, when Danlo was drunk with the splendour of a light inside light, he was uncertain as to whether this attractor lay in the infinite s.p.a.ces outside or impossibly inhered in some secret place deep inside himself. In these moments of scrying, with fate calling him on like an owl's cry in the night, he often wondered if some such attractor was drawing humanity itself into a glorious future. Was transcendence truly man's destiny? Did a great singularity lie in h.o.m.o sapiens' path, some omega point in which man's intelligence would expand more quickly than the wavefront of an exploding star? Would human consciousness (or the consciousness of those beings whom humans had become) spread out like light across the universe, eventually infusing all matter, all s.p.a.ce, all time?

No, Danlo thought in the great loneliness between the stars, the only thing human beings will spread is death.

Toward the centre of the Vild, out near the star-shrouded Perseus Arm of the galaxy, Danlo discovered a succession of Earths that Ede the G.o.d had once made.

The radiation from various supernovas had scorched two of these doomed planets, but the other nine were untouched, as pristine and wild as any planet Danlo had ever seen.

It was on the eleventh Earth that Danlo made the acquaintance of a people who called themselves the Sani. The ten thousand people of the Sani lived in a rainforest at the edge of one of the northern continents; the rest of the Earth, it seemed, was uninhabited. Danlo found the Sani to be a sad, philosophical people as well they should be considering their tragic past and uncertain future. In fact, their very name for themselves meant something like 'the d.a.m.ned'.

'It is my fault,' Ede confessed to Danlo after the Snowy Owl had come to rest on the sands of a wide, windswept beach. 'I made these people as they are. I made them, you see, and perhaps it was wrong for me to experiment with human beings in this way.'

What Ede the G.o.d had once done, according to Ede's very incomplete memory, was to seed this eleventh Earth with people. He had done this many times as it was part of his experiment to grow supposedly innocent human beings from frozen zygotes, to imprint a carefully designed culture onto them, and then to watch how their society developed. And then to destroy them and begin anew. Ede told Danlo that on this eleventh Earth, there had been at least five such human societies in the last millennium. No society no tribe, city-state, or arcology had lasted more than two hundred years. And the Sani knew this. It was part of Ede's experiment that they should live out their lives in their rain-drenched forests, all the while knowing of the doom soon to befall them. This is why they called themselves 'the d.a.m.ned' and why they looked to the starry sky in despair rather than awe, for they lived in fear of the hand of G.o.d.