'Am I, then?'

'Don't you know?'

'How . . . would I know?'

At this, Malaclypse laughed easily, and to Danlo he said, 'I've heard that you're also famous for answering questions with questions.'

Danlo inclined his head, slightly, accepting Malaclypse's criticism as a compliment.

Then he said, 'You have come to Farfara to complete this determination about me, yes?'

Again, as he often did, Danlo began to count his heartbeats, and he waited for Malaclypse to remove his killing knife from his cloak. But Malaclypse only looked at him, strangely, deeply, drinking in the wild look that filled Danlo's eyes like an ocean. 'I don't know who you really are,' Malaclypse said. 'Not yet. In truth, I don't know who your father really is, either. Mallory Ringess, this once Lord Pilot of the Order who everyone says has become a G.o.d.'

For a moment, Danlo looked up into the sky in sudden understanding. 'You have come to find my father, yes?'

'Perhaps.'

'Not just . . . to Farfara,' Danlo said. 'You would follow our Mission to the Vild.'

Now, for the first time, Malaclypse seemed slightly surprised. He regarded Danlo coolly and said, 'I had heard that you were too perceptive for a mere pilot now I see that this is so.'

'You would follow us,' Danlo repeated. 'But follow . . . how? Warrior-poets do not pilot lightships, do they?'

The Merchant-Pilots of Tria, of course, did pilot ships: deepships and prayerships, and sometimes even lightships. They journeyed to Nwarth and Alumit and Farfara, but no Merchant-Pilot would ever think of taking a lightship into the Vild.

'There is a man,' Malaclypse said. He pointed along the curve of the retaining wall at a stand of orange trees some forty feet away. 'A former pilot of your Order. He will take me where I need to go.'

As Danlo saw, beneath an orange tree laden with bright, round fruits, there stood a silent man dressed all in grey. Danlo recognized him as the infamous renegade, Sivan wi Mawi Sarkissian, once a pilot of great promise who had deserted the Order in the time of the Quest for the Elder Eddas. None of the other pilots whom Mer Tadeo had invited would bear the shame of talking to such a faithless man, and so Sivan stood alone, sipping from his goblet of wine.

'And where is it that you need to go, then?' Danlo asked.

'Wherever I must,' Malaclypse said. 'But I've heard that Mallory Ringess has returned to the Vild. Somewhere. It may be that your Order's mission will cause him to make himself known.'

'And then?'

'And then I shall know,' Malaclypse said. 'And then I shall do what must be done.'

'You would murder my father, yes?'

'If he is truly a G.o.d, I would help him toward his moment of the possible.'

'If he is truly . . . a G.o.d?'

'If he is still a man, I would only ask him to complete a poem.'

'What . . . poem?'

'A poem that I've been composing for some time. Only a man who has refused to become a G.o.d would know how to complete it.'

Danlo looked off at the Istas River gleaming in the starlight, but he said nothing.

'I believe that you might know where your father is.' Danlo squeezed his empty wine gla.s.s between his hands, but he remained as silent as the sky.

'It may be that we share the same mission, you and I,' Malaclypse said. 'I believe that we're both seeking your father.'

Was it possible, Danlo wondered, that Malaclypse's only purpose in seeking the Vild was to lay eyes upon his father? He did not think so. The warrior-poets always had purposes within purposes and often their deepest purpose was war.

'You're very good at keeping a silence,' Malaclypse said. 'Very well, then let us listen to what our host is saying.'

As Danlo looked down at the dark forest far below the cliff face, he became aware of a voice falling through the s.p.a.ces all around him. It was the voice of Mer Tadeo, convolved and amplified by the music pools, hanging like a silver mist over the lawns of the garden. Mer Tadeo had begun his toast, and Danlo looked away from the warrior-poet to concentrate on Mer Tadeo's words: '. . . these brave women and men of the Civilized Worlds' most honoured Order, who have vowed to enter the Vild and seek . . .' Danlo became aware, just then, that his gla.s.s was empty. In his haste to seek out the warrior-poet, he hadn't had time to fill it.

'Pilot, you've no wine to drink,' Malaclypse said. Quickly, easily, he moved over to Danlo and held up his wine gla.s.s as if he were showing Danlo some secret elixir. He tinked it against Danlo's gla.s.s, and a clear note rang out. Then he quickly poured a stream of ruby wine into Danlo's gla.s.s, halfway to the rim, spilling not a drop. 'Won't you drink to the fulfilment of the Mission?' he asked.

Danlo brought his gla.s.s close to his lips, but did not drink. He breathed in deeply, smelling the wine. It had an effervescent scent that was almost hot and peppery. He wondered if Malaclypse would dare poison him in clear sight of ten thousand people.

The warrior-poets, he knew, were notorious for their poisons: a thousand years ago at the end of the War of the Faces, they had engineered the virus that had poisoned the Civilized Worlds, and ultimately, had infected the Devaki people on Danlo's world and killed everyone in his tribe except Danlo.

'Have you ever tasted firewine?' Malaclypse asked.

Danlo remembered, then, that the warrior-poets' poisons are not always meant to kill. He remembered that a warrior-poet had once poisoned his grandmother, Dama Moira Ringess. This infamous warrior-poet had jabbed little needles into her neck, filling her blood with programmed bacteria called slel cells. These cells, like manmade cancers, had metastasized into her brain, where they had destroyed millions of neurons and neuron cl.u.s.ters. The slel cells had layered down microscopic sheets of protein neurologics, living computers that might be grafted onto human brains. And so his grandmother, who was also the mother of Mallory Ringess, had been slelled, her marvellous human brain replaced almost entirely by a warrior-poet's programmed computer circuitry. As Danlo drank in the firewine's heady aroma, he could not forget how the mother of his father had suffered such a death-in-life.

'I cannot drink with you,' Danlo said at last.

'No?'

'I am sorry.'

Malaclypse looked deeply at Danlo but said nothing.

'As a pilot, I may not drink with my Order's enemies.'

Malaclypse smiled, then, sadly, beautifully, and he asked, 'Are you so sure that we're enemies?'

'Truly . . . we are.'

'Then don't drink with me,' Malaclypse said. 'But do drink. Tonight, everyone will drink to the glory of the Vild Mission, and so should you.'

Now Mer Tadeo had finished his toast, and the sudden sound of ten thousand gla.s.ses clinking together rang out through the garden. Danlo, who had once sought affirmation above all other things, listened deeply to this tremendous sound of ringing gla.s.s. It was like a pure, crystal music recalling a time in his life when he had trusted the truth that his eyes might behold. Now he looked at Malaclypse's deep violet eyes, smiling at him, beckoning him to drink, and he could see that the wine was only wine, that it was infused with neither virus nor slel cells nor other poisons. Because Danlo needed to affirm this truth of his eyes at any cost, he touched his wine gla.s.s to his lips and took a deep drink. Instantly, the smooth tissues of his tongue and throat were on fire. For a moment he worried that the wine was indeed tainted with a poison, perhaps even with the electric ekkana drug that would never leave his body and would make an agony of all the moments of his life. But then the burning along his tongue gave way to an intriguing tingling sensation, which in turn softened into a wonderful coolness almost reminiscent of peppermint. Truly, the wine was only wine, the delicious firewine that merchants and aficionados across the Civilized Worlds are always eager to seek.

'Congratulations,' Malaclypse said. Then he raised his gla.s.s and bowed to Danlo.

'To our mission. To the eternal moment when all things are possible.'

Malaclypse took a sip of wine, then, even as Danlo lowered his goblet and poured the remnants of his priceless firewine over the gra.s.s beneath his feet. He had said that he may not drink with a warrior-poet, and drink he would not.

'I am . . . sorry,' he said.

'I'm sorry, too. I'm sorry that it isn't you who will be piloting my ship into the Vild.'

The warrior-poet's sense of time was impeccable. Upon his utterance of the word 'Vild', the manswarms spread throughout the garden began calling out numbers. One hundred . . . ninety-nine . . . ninety-eight . . . ninety-seven . . . Following Mer Tadeo's example, men and women all around Danlo began crying out in unison, and their indi- vidual voices merged into a single, long, dark roar. Now many faces were turned eastward, up toward the sky. Merchants in their silver kimonos, pilots and Ordermen in their formal robes all lifted their faces to the stars as they called down the numbers and pointed at the patch of s.p.a.ce where the Sonderval had promised the supernova would appear. Sixty-six . . . sixty-five . . . sixty-four . . . sixty-three . . . The warrior-poet, too, aimed his long, graceful finger toward the heavens. In his clear, strong voice, he called down the numbers along with everyone else, counting ever backwards toward zero. Twenty-two . .. twenty-one . . . twenty . . . nineteen . . . At last, Danlo looked up at stars of the Vild, waiting. It amused (and awed) him to think that these uncountable, nameless stars might somehow be waiting for him, even as he waited for their wild light to fill his eyes. Once, when he was a child, he had thought that stars were the eyes of his ancestors watching him, waiting for him to realize that he, too, in his deepest self, was really a wild white star who would always belong to the night. The stars, he knew, could wait almost forever for a man to be born into his true nature, and that was the great mystery of the stars. Four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . .

There was a moment. For a moment the sky was just the sky, and the stars went on twinkling forever. Danlo thought that perhaps the Sonderval's calculations had been wrong, that no new star would appear that night. And then this endless moment, which lasted much less than a second, finally ended. Above the eastern horizon, above the dark mountains, a point of light broke out of the blackness and quickly blossomed into dazzling white sphere. Its radiance swirled about an infinitely bright centre, and flecks of fire spun out into the farthest reaches of s.p.a.ce. It was almost impossible to look at, this wildflower of light that hurt Danlo's eyes, and so he turned to see ten thousand people squinting, grimacing, standing with their hands pushing outward above their eyes as if to shield themselves from this terrible new star. It almost seemed that there should have been a great noise to accompany this event, as with a fireworks display, some searing hiss of burnt air or cosmic thunder. But the sky was strangely silent, as ever, and the only sounds in the garden were the inrush of many people's breaths, the chirping of the evening birds, the splash of water and wine falling in the many fountains. The merchants of Farfara (and even the many ungloved servants) were obviously hushed and awed by what they saw, as if they were witnessing the birth of a new child. Danlo remembered, then, that this supernova was no new star being born, but rather a doomed star that attains its most brilliant moment in dying into light. It was all light, this beautiful star. It was all alpha and gamma and waves of hard radiation that men had freed from matter in their frenzy to remake the universe. It was photons breaking through the night, burning the sky, onstreaming through the universe without end. Although Danlo had waited only a moment for this light to fall upon the garden, men on other worlds would have to wait millennia to see it. At the speed of light through vacuum, it would be some twenty thousand years before the supernova's light crossed the galaxy and rained down upon the city of Neverness. But there were other stars, nearer and more deadly, and Danlo remembered very well that twenty years ago, one named Merripen's Star had exploded very near the Star of Neverness. Almost all his life, a wavefront of light and death had been advancing through the black drears of s.p.a.ce upon Neverness, and soon, in only six more years, the people of Neverness would see the Vild for what it truly was. And this was the true reason that the Order had sent a Mission to the Vild.

The Vild, Danlo thought, was an inferno of murderous light and broken s.p.a.cetime that existed wherever human beings were so mad as to destroy the stars. And so the men and women of the Order must go to the Vild before the Vild came to them.

'I must go now,' Danlo said. He bowed to Malaclypse and then looked down at his empty wine gla.s.s. 'Farewell, Poet.'

'Until we meet again,' Malaclypse said. 'Fall far and farewell, Pilot.'

Because Danlo did not want to think that they would meet again, he smiled grimly as he turned and walked back through the crowds. Between the hot, packed bodies of the many awestruck people, beneath the light of the new star, he walked back toward the Fountain of Fortune. There, the Sonderval had gathered together the pilots of the Order. Lara Jesusa, Richardess, Zapata Karek, Leander of Darkmoon they were all there, even the fabulous Aja, who was sometimes a woman, sometimes a man, and who was said to be the purest pilot ever to have come out of the Academy on Neverness. Without a care for soiling the sleeve of his robe, Danlo plunged his wine gla.s.s into the fountain, and he stood there drinking with his fellow pilots, clinking gla.s.ses and drinking and letting drops of bright red firewine run down over his naked hand. The pilots spoke of their sacred Mission, and the Sonderval called out the names of the hundred pilots who would follow him and guide the deepships and seedships to the Order's new home on Thiells. The rest of the pilots including Danlo would seek the lost planet called Tannahill. Each of these pilots, according to his genius and fate, would enter the pathless, unknown Vild, there to seek signs and secrets that might lead them to their journey's end. Danlo, himself, would go where the stars were the wildest. He would find his father among all the bright, dying stars and ask him a simple question. That Malaclypse Redring might follow him in the renegade's lightship was of no matter. He could not fear that a warrior-poet might murder his father. For if his father was really a G.o.d, how could even the most murderous of men harm him? As Danlo drank his wine and gazed up at the blazing new star in the sky, he wondered how anything could ever harm those beautiful and terrible beings that men knew as G.o.ds.

CHAPTER TWO

The Eye of the Universe

I am the eye with which the Universe Beholds itself and knows itself divine.

- Percy Bysshe Sh.e.l.ley.

The next day, Danlo took his lightship into the Vild. The Snowy Owl was a long and graceful ship, a beautiful sweep of spun diamond some two hundred feet from tip to tail; as it fell across the galaxy it was like a needle of light st.i.tching in and out of the manifold, that marvellous, shimmering fabric of deep reality that folds between the stars and underlies the s.p.a.cetime of all the universe. The ships of the Vild Mission fell from star to star, and there were many stars along their way toward the star and planet named as Thiells. As ever, Danlo was awestruck by the numbers of the stars, the cool red and orange stars, the hot blue giants that were the galaxy's jewels, the thousands upon thousands of yellow stars burning as steadily and faithfully as Old Earth's sun. No one knew how many stars lit the lens of the Milky Way. The Order's astronomers had said that there were at least five hundred billion stars in the galaxy, blazing in dense cl.u.s.ters at the core, spinning ever outward in brilliant spirals along the arms of the galactic plane. And more stars were being born all the time. In the bright nebulae such as the Rudra and the Rosette, out of gravity and heat and interstellar dust, the new stars continually formed and flared into light. A hundred generations of stars had lived and died in the eons before the Star of Neverness, among others, ever came into being. Stars, like people, were always dying.

Sometimes, as Danlo looked out over the vast light-distances he marvelled that so many human beings could arise from stardust and the fundamental urge of all matter toward life. Scattered among all the galaxy's far-flung stars were perhaps fifty million billion people. On the Civilized Worlds alone every second some three million women, men, and children would die, were dying, will always be pa.s.sing from life into death. It was only right and natural, Danlo thought, that human beings should create themselves in their vast and hungry swarms, but it was not right that they should seek a greater life by killing the stars. This was all sacrilege and sin, or even shaida, a word that Danlo sometimes used to describe the evil of a universe that, like a top failing to spin or a cracked teapot, had lost its harmony and balance. All matter craved transformation into light, and this Danlo understood deep inside his belly and brain. But already, in this infinite universe from which he had been born, there was too much light. The stars of the Vild were sick with light, swelling and bursting into the h.e.l.lish lightstorms that men called supernovas. Soon, someday, perhaps farwhen, the vastness of the Vild would be a blinding white cloud full of photons and hard radiation, and then this tiny pocket of the universe would no longer be transparent to light. No longer would men such as Danlo be able to look at the stars and see the universe just as it is, for all s.p.a.ce would be light, and all time would be light, always and forever, nothing but light and ever more dazzling light.

It was toward the light of Thiells that the pilots steered, there to build a city and a new Order. The rest of the pilots, including Danlo, would accompany the Mission as far as Sattva Luz, a magnificent white star well within the inner envelope of the Vild.

And so it happened. The journey to Sattva Luz was uneventful, for the Sonderval had already mapped the pathways that led from star to star; he had told the pilots the fixed-points of every star along their path, and so Danlo and the Snowy Owl fell from Savona to Shokan and then on to Sattva Luz as smoothly as corpuscles of blood streaming through a man's veins. This segment of the journey was much the same as fenestering through the Fallaways, only fraught with dangers that few pilots had ever faced. In any part of the Vild even along the pathways well mapped and well known at any moment the s.p.a.cetime distortions of an exploding star might fracture a pathway into a thousand individual decomposition strands thereby destroying any ship so unfortunate as to be caught in the wrong strand. Around Sattva Luz, where the many millions of pathways through the manifold converged into a thicks.p.a.ce as dark and dense as a ball of lead, the pilots dispersed. The main body of Mission ships guided by the Sonderval was the first to fall away. Danlo, whose ship had fallen out of the manifold into reals.p.a.ce for a few moments, watched them go. Below him ten million miles below the Snowy Owl was the boiling white corona of Sattva Luz.

Above him there wavered a sea of blackness and many nameless stars. He waited as the Sonderval's ship, the Cardinal Virtue, fell into the bright black manifold and disappeared. He was aware of this event as a little flash of light; soon there came many more flashes of light as the soundless engines of the Mission ships ripped open rents in s.p.a.cetime and fell into the manifold. The pilots in their glorious lightships and the pilots in the deepships and in the seedships opened windows upon the universe, and they fell in, and they were gone. Then the remaining pilots fell in, too.

The Snowy Owl and the Neurosinger, the Deus ex Machina and the Rose of Armageddon two hundred and fifty-four ships and pilots sought their fates and vanished into the deepest part of the Vild.

For Danlo, as for any pilot, mathematics was the key that opened the many windows through which his lightship pa.s.sed. Mathematics was like a bright, magic sword that sliced open the veils of the manifold and illuminated the dark caverns of neverness waiting for him there. The Snowy Owl fell far and deep, and in the pit of his ship Danlo floated and proved the theorems that let him see his way through the chaos all around him. He floated because there was no gravity; in the manifold, there is neither s.p.a.ce nor force nor time, and so, in the very centre of his ship, he floated and dreamed mathematics in vivid, waking dreams, and fell on and on. Immersed as he was in the realm of pure number, in that marvellous interior s.p.a.ce that the pilots know as the dreamtime, he had little sense of himself. He could scarcely feel his weightless arms and legs, or his empty hands, or even the familiar ivory skin that enveloped his long, lean body. He needed neither heat nor clothing, and so he floated naked as a newborn child. In many ways, at times, the pit of a lightship is like a womb. In truth, the pit's interior is a living computer, the very mind and soul of a lightship; it is a sphere of neurologics woven of protein circuitry, rich and soft as purple velvet.

Sometimes it is all darkness and comfort and steamy air as dense-seeming as sea water. When a pilot faces away from his ship for instance, during those rare moments when he is safe inside a null s.p.a.ce and he breaks interface with the logic field enveloping him there is no sight and very little engagement of the other physical senses. But at other times, the pit is something other. When a pilot faces the manifold and his mind becomes as one with the ship's computer, then there is the cold, clear light of pure mathematics. Then the pit is like a brilliantly-lit crystal cave lined with sapphires and firestones and other precious jewels. The pilot's mind fills with the crystal-like symbols of probabilistic topology: the emerald snowflake representing the Jordan-Holder Theorem; the diamond glyphs of the mapping lemmas; the amethyst curlicues of the statement of Invariance of Dimension; and all the other thousands of sparkling mental symbols that the pilots call ideoplasts. Only then will a pilot perceive the torison s.p.a.ces and Flow-tow bubbles and infinite trees that undermine the manifold, much as a sleekit's twisting tunnels lie hidden beneath crusts of snow. Only when a pilot opens his mind to the manifold will the manifold open before him so that he may see this strange reality just as it is and make his mappings from star to star.

So it was that Danlo became aware of his fellow pilots as they set out on their journeys. As did the Snowy Owl, their ships perturbed the manifold like so many stones dropped into a pool of water. Danlo perceived these perturbations as ripples of light, a purely mathematical light which he had been trained to descry and fathom.

For a while, as the lightships remained within a well-defined region known as a Lavi neighbourhood, with his mind's eye he followed the luminous pathways of the lightships as they fell outward toward the galaxy's many stars. And then, one by one, as the pilots fell away from each other and the radius of convergence shot off toward infinity, even these ships were lost to his sight. Only nine other ships remained within the same neighbourhood as the Snowy Owl. These nine ships and their pilots he knew very well, for they each had vowed to penetrate the same s.p.a.ces of the Vild. A few of them were already distinguished for their part in the Pilots' War: Sarolta Sen and Dolore Nun, and the impossibly brave Leander of Darkmoon who craved danger as other men do women or wine. Then was Rurik Boaz in the Lamb of G.o.d, and the sly Li Te Mu Lan who piloted the Diamond Lotus. There was another lotus ship as well, the Thousand Petalled Lotus, which belonged to Valin wi Tymon Whitestone, of the Simoom Whitestones. (It is something of a curiosity that many pilots still name their ships after the lotus flower. Once a time, of course, a thousand years ago when the Tycho was Lord Pilot, one in every ten ships was so called. The Tycho, an imperious and whimsical man, so wearied of this custom that he forbade his pilots to name their ships after any flower. But in a quiet rebellion led by Veronika Ede in her Lotus of Lotuses, the pilots had defied him. Over the centuries there have always been famous lotus ships: the Golden Lotus; the Lotus of Neverness; the Infinite Lotus; and many, many others.) Three other pilots had set out towards a certain cl.u.s.ter of stars beyond the Eta Carina Nebula; they were the Rosaleen and Ivar Sarad, in a ship curiously named the Bottomless Cup. And finally, of course, Shamir the Bold, he who had once journeyed further toward the galactic core than any other pilot since Leopold Soli. All these pilots, in Mer Tadeo's garden on the night of the supernova, had vowed to enter that dark, strange nebula known as the Solid State Ent.i.ty. Like Mallory Ringess before them, they had vowed to fall among the most dangerous of stars in the hope that they might speak with one of the galaxy's greatest G.o.ds.

Even before Danlo had left Neverness, on a night of omens as he stood on a windswept beach looking up at the stars, he had planned to penetrate the Ent.i.ty, too.

That other pilots had made similar plans did not surprise him. Ten pilots were few enough to search a volume of s.p.a.ce some ten thousand cubic light-years in volume.

Ten pilots could easily lose themselves in such a nebula, like grains of sand scattered upon an ocean. Even so, Danlo took comfort in the company of his fellow pilots, and he continually watched the manifold for the perturbations that their ships made.

Including the Snowy Owl, ten ships fell among the stars. Many times, he counted the ships; he wanted to be sure that their number was ten, a comforting and complete number. Ten was the number of fingers on his hands, and on the hands of all natural human beings. Ten, in decimal systems of counting, symbolizes the totality of the universe in the way all things return to unity. Ten was the perfect number, he thought, and so it dismayed him that at times he couldn't be sure if there were really ten ships after all. More than once, usually after they had pa.s.sed through a spinning thicks.p.a.ce around some red giant star, his count of the ships yielded a different number. This should not have been so. Counting is the most fundamental of the mathematical arts, as natural as the natural numbers that fall off from one to infinity. Danlo, who had been born with a rare mathematical gift, had been able to count almost before he could talk, and so it should have been the simplest thing for him to know whether the number of ships in the neighbourhood near him was ten or five or fifty. Certainly, by the time they had pa.s.sed a fierce white star that Danlo impulsively named The Wolf', he knew that there were at least ten ships but no more than eleven. At times, as he peered into the dark heart of the manifold, he thought that he could make out the composition wave of a mysterious eleventh ship. Looking for this ship was like looking at a unique pattern of light reflected from a pool of water. At times he was almost certain of this pattern, but at other times, as when a rock is thrown into a quiet pool, the pattern would break apart only to reform a moment later reflecting nothing.

The eleventh ship, if indeed there really were an eleventh ship, appeared to hover ghostlike at the very threshold of the radius of convergence. It was impossible to say it was really there, impossible to say it was not. Even as the ten pilots kleined coreward toward the Solid State Ent.i.ty, this ghost ship haunted the mappings of the others, remaining always at the exact boundary of their neighbourhood of stars. Danlo had never dreamed that anyone could pilot a ship so flawlessly. In truth, he hoped that there was no eleventh pilot, no matter how skilled or prescient he might be. Eleven, as he knew, was a most perilous number. It was the number of excess and transition, of conflict, martyrdom, even war.

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

Near an unnamed star, Li Te Mu Lan's ship fell out of the manifold into reals.p.a.ce.

She remained beneath the light of this star for long seconds of time, a signal that the other pilots should join her, if they so pleased. It was the traditional invitation to a conclave of pilots, made in the only way a pilot can issue such an invitation. Since radio waves and other such signals will not propagate through the manifold, but only through reals.p.a.ce, the ten pilots fell out into the weak starlight of this weak yellow sun, and sent laser beams flashing from ship to ship. The computer of the Snowy Owl decoded the information bound into the laser light and made pictures for Danlo to see.

It made faces and sounds and voices, and suddenly the pit of his ship was very crowded, for there were nine other pilots there with him. That is, the heads of his nine fellow pilots floated in the dark air around him. Watching the phased light waves of these nine holograms was almost like entering one of Neverness's numerous cafes and sitting at table with friends over mugs of steaming coffee and the comfort of conversation. It was almost like that. In truth, it disquieted Danlo to think of his severed, glowing head appearing in the pits of nine other lightships. There was something eerie in holding a conclave in this way, here, in the black deeps of the Vild, perhaps six hundred trillion miles from any other human being. It was disturbing and strange, but when Li Te Mu Lan began speaking, Danlo concentrated on the words that she was saying: 'I believe that there is another pilot accompanying us,' Li Te said. She had a perfectly shaped head as round and brown and bare of hair as a baldo nut. Her body, as Danlo remembered, was round, too, though he could see nothing of her body just now, only her glowing, round head. 'Does anyone know if there is another pilot accompanying us?'

'Ten pilots vowed to penetrate the Ent.i.ty,' Ivar Sarad said. He was a thin-faced man with a penchant for cold abstractions and inventing paranoid (and bizarre) interpretations of reality. 'We stood together before the Sonderval and vowed this.

Perhaps the Sonderval has sent a pilot to verify that we fulfil our vows.'

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

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

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

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

'In the wake of our pa.s.sing, the composition series could be inverted as a Gallivare s.p.a.ce that would-'

'That is unlikely,' Li Te Mu Lan observed. 'No one has ever proved the existence of a Gallivare s.p.a.ce.'

Ivar Sarad regarded her coldly, suspiciously. 'Well, then perhaps it is a reflection?

Perhaps the line wake of one of our ships is being reflected Leopold Soli once said that, in the Vild, the manifold can flatten out as smooth and reflective as a mirror.'

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

Until this moment, Danlo had kept his silence. He was the youngest of the pilots, and so he thought it seemly to let the others take the lead in this conversation. Then, too, from his once and deepest friend, Hanuman li Tosh, who had remained in Neverness, he had learned the value of keeping secrets. But it was not right that he should keep important information from his fellow pilots. He couldn't let the n.o.ble Valin Whitestone sacrifice himself for a mere secret, and so he said, 'It is possible . . .

that a ronin pilot guides the eleventh ship. Sivan wi Mawi Sarkissian, the ronin you all know of him, yes? It is possible that he carries a warrior-poet into the Vild.'

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

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

After long, almost endless rounds of discussion, with their ships separated by half a million miles of s.p.a.ce, 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 G.o.ds, they might also have a secret rule to slay any man or woman proud enough (or foolish enough) to attempt contact with a G.o.d. It would have been the simplest thing, as a precaution, for the pilots to turn back upon their path-ways, 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 Ent.i.ty 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.