Whatever answer he might have been expecting, he seemed fairly astonished when Danlo said, 'I ... am making a quest. My people are dying of a disease, and I must find a cure.'

As Danlo told something of his people, the Alaloi, and the virus that was killing them, Old Fei Yang's whole manner began to soften. As Oldest of the Old, he had seen much suffering, and he had lost grandchildren to lung fevers and other afflictions. Then too, like any of the Sani, he could appreciate how easy it was for a whole people to be suddenly destroyed.

'I'm sorry, but I know of no medicine that could help your people,' Old Fei Yang said. 'I've never heard of such a disease.'

'I ... am sorry, too,' Danlo said.'Not even the Yasa tells of any medicine that might be useful.'

Danlo was silent while he stared at the flute in his hand.

'Nor does the Yasa speak of music as you have spoken.'

'No?'

'Do you think that I don't know the Yasa?' Now Old Fei Yang's anger was returning, and sinews along his neck stretched as tight as the strings of a gosharp. It was a dangerous moment, but still not the moment that Danlo had been waiting for.

'Does anyone know the Yasa?' Danlo asked softly.

'What do you mean?' Reina An broke in. And then, from the other elders and the rest of the Sani, as if in chorus: 'What does he mean?'

But Old Fei Yang did not ask this question. He sat very still, like a lost hunter awaiting the rising sun.

'May the Yasa always be beautiful,' Danlo chanted. He closed his eyes, then. Once, during the previous night, these words had come to him like fireflowers opening in his mind, and now he prayed that they were true. 'May we always find new beauties; may we make our sacred Yasa as G.o.d makes the world and always keep it beautiful.'

Now the whole village had fallen silent, even the noisome dogs who were busy gnawing at their feast bones. No one seemed to understand how Danlo had known these last lines of the Yasa. No one could explain how Danlo seemed to know the most basic thing about the Yasa: that the sacred law was perfect but incomplete. The whole spirit of the law was that the Sani must always strive to make new beauty.

'We drink the music of the world,' Danlo whispered. 'May all our songs be beautiful.'

He looked at his flute's beautiful ivory mouthpiece, and he remembered a line from the Song of Life that his grandfather had once taught him: Halla is the one who brings music into the world.

'My people,' he said to Old Fei Yang, 'had a Yasa, too. In spirit ... the sacred words of all people are really the same.'

Old Fei Yang held his cup of blackberry beer trembling in his right hand. What Danlo had said must have been very different from the Architects' universal condemnation of all such 'false' revelations as the Yasa.

Danlo breathed deeply a moment then continued, 'If all people were to look long enough for G.o.d's beauty ... it may be that they would discover the Yasa, too.'

'That itself is a beautiful thought,' Old Fei Yang said. He reached out, then, with his trembling left hand to touch Danlo's bamboo flute. It was obvious that he had never seen such a beautiful thing before. 'I'll always remember this thought.'

Danlo, seeing that his moment had almost come, lifted up his flute and began to play a song. Old Fei Yang and all the other Sani sat rapt on their bearskins for they had never heard such music before, only the lullabies that the Sani mothers hummed to their children on storm nights that and the natural music of wind and rain and the chirping of the songbirds. The melody that Danlo breathed into his flute recalled all these things, and more. Danlo played to the distant whales out at sea and to the stars; he played to the pain that he could see filling up Old Fei Yang's shiny eyes. Like Danlo's music, this pain was beautiful in its depth and purity. It connected the two men to the memories of their childhood and to the beauties of the living world all around them. This was the whole inspiration of Danlo's song, to open the heart to the world, to seek out the secret beauty in the depths of the human soul. Danlo played and played, and each note that fell from his flute was like a numinous golden arrow aimed at Old Fei Yang's heart. He played for a long, long time, until the moon was high in the sky and the fires had burnt low. When he was finished at last, he put down his flute and looked at Old Fei Yang. There were tears in the old man's eyes, and something more. There was the other thing, the splendid and beautiful thing that Danlo had seen when Old Fei Yang had first walked into the village.

'That was very beautiful,' Old Fei Yang said. His voice was as dry as sandstone, and he had trouble getting the words out. 'I hadn't thought such sounds were possible.'

This is the moment, Danlo thought. The forever and now.

Until now, Danlo hadn't known what he would do when his moment came. That was the terror (and beauty) of the future, the not knowing the not seeing of that dark, unknown land of ice crystals and fire where all things are possible. Once, though, he had been taught that there was always a way to choose one's future, a way to act, flawlessly, in total affirmation when the future arrived. This way required one to be truly alive in the present moment, utterly awake and aware of every sound, every vibration, every ray of light of the shimmering interconnectedness of everything in the world. Only then was it possible to know what to do when one didn't know what to do. And now it was now, as it always would be. Now, beneath him beneath the bearskin on which he and Old Fei Yang sat there was a knife. Beneath the old black fur there was a spot where the knife lay; it was almost between the two of them but further in toward the fire-pit near the edge of the bearskin. Danlo had seen this spot in his waking dreams. He knew it from Old Fei Yang's pained looks whenever the gaze of his tired old eyes chanced to fall anywhere near it. In truth, Danlo knew this spot the way a wounded tiger knows his death spot, only now he was seeing it as if for the first time. He saw that he might easily shift his body about to forestall Old Fei Yang's reaching the knife when the time came. But suddenly he saw another thing, and so he remained sitting where he was. Slowly, as if only stretching his muscles after a long meal, he straightened out his leg. He let his heel fall onto the bearskin where the knife was secreted. As if accidentally discovering a rock beneath him, he forced a frown to his face and then bent over and grasped the edge of the bearskin and peeled it back to reveal the knife. It was a fisherman's knife: small and curved and as keenly sharpened as obsidian could be, which was very sharp indeed.

'Look!' Danlo called out. 'Someone has lost his knife.' He stood up and held the knife above his head. 'Has anybody lost a knife?' he called out.

Now the eyes of everyone in the village were focused upon the deadly little knife.

n.o.body spoke. n.o.body moved.

And then Old Fei Yang broke the silence. 'It's my knife,' he said, holding out his hand. 'I must have dropped it while making preparations for the feast.'

'Oh,' Danlo said. He looked at Old Fei Yang's outstretched hand. 'May I borrow it for a moment?'

Without waiting for a response, he sat back down on the bearskin. From a wooden bowl in front of him, he picked up a fat, red apple. He used the knife quickly to cut out a crescent-shaped wedge, which he offered to Old Fei Yang.

'Your voice is very dry,' Danlo said to Old Fei Yang. 'Here, this will help against the dryness.'

Old Fei Yang exchanged a quick and puzzled look with Reina An. And then he shrugged his shoulders, took the slice of apple and bit into it as if he feared it might be poisoned.

'My mouth is dry, too,' Danlo said. 'It is hard to play the flute when one's mouth is dry.'

Here, suddenly, he handed both the apple and the knife to Old Fei Yang. Then he picked up his flute and said, 'Would you please cut me a slice of apple while I wipe down my flute? There is a song that I would teach you, if you'd like.'

There was a moment. Old Fei Yang sat holding the apple in his left hand, the knife in his right. He stared at the knife for an uncomfortably long time. Then he stared at Danlo, at his dark, wild eyes, his beautiful smile, his naked throat. He watched as Danlo polished his golden flute against the bearskin. This was Old Fei Yang's moment of choice and fate, and it seemed to go on and on forever. And then, at last, Old Fei Yang smiled mysteriously. He cut off a section of apple. He gave it to Danlo and asked, 'You would teach me a song?'

'Yes, if you'd like.'

'You'd teach me how to play this beautiful instrument?'

'Yes.'

'Oh, I'd like that, very much,' Old Fei Yang said. 'Is it very hard to play?'

'Truly, it can be,' Danlo said. 'But why don't we begin with a song that my teacher once gave me. It is a simple song. A ... beautiful song.'

There on the bearskins by the fire of the Sani village. Danlo taught this fierce old man how to play the flute. The sight of Old Fei Yang, Oldest of the Old, blowing into a piece of bamboo amazed the Sani. Despite all the rules of decorum, they crowded around Danlo's bearskin to watch Old Fei Yang place his fingers on the shakuhachi as Danlo had shown him. Old Fei Yang played neither long nor very well, but he played quite beautifully which is to say with all the power of his breath and heart and soul.

When he was finished, he wiped off the mouthpiece and returned the flute to Danlo.

He rubbed his eyes and then picked up his cup of blackberry beer. 'We drink the music of the world,' he said. 'May all our songs be beautiful.'

The Sani women and men needed only the slightest of reasons for drinking their sweet, purplish beer, and so together all the Sani lifted their cups and chanted, 'We drink the music of the world. May all our songs be beautiful.'

'I believe these truly are words of the Yasa,' Old Fei Yang said. 'We must thank Danlo of the Stars for bringing us these words.'

Old Fei Yang went on to promise that when the season of the rains was finished, he would take Danlo's words to the elders of even the farthest Sani bands. In the spring, they would decide whether or not to add them to the Yasa.

'Will you stay with us?' Old Fei Yang asked. He motioned to Reina An and Ki Lin Shang and Jin Joyu Minye and then to all the Sani standing about or sitting by the fires. 'We made this feast to welcome you.'

Danlo tried hard not to look at the hologram of Nikolos Daru Ede. This was the possibility that he had foreseen while silently playing his flute in the guest house.

Like a master chess player (or a warrior going into battle), he had laid his strategy and made his moves according to the requirements of the moment. And he had won. For the time, he had won his life. But he did not stop to celebrate or congratulate himself, for soon, in only another moment, there would be other possibilities and a new battle would begin.

'I would like to stay with you,' Danlo said. 'Only ... I must complete my journey.'

At this bad news, Old Fei Yang seemed sad and almost angry again. 'You could teach the children to play your sacred music. They would learn much more beautifully than a foolish old man.'

'Perhaps ... I could stay,' Danlo said. 'But only long enough to show you how to carve new flutes. Only until the children learn the notes.'

'But there are so many songs you could teach them.'

'It would be better ... if they made their own songs.'

'I had hoped you might come to my village. You might even marry my granddaughter, Sunlian she is a beautiful woman.'

'I ... am sorry,' Danlo said.

Old Fei Yang sighed, then forced a smile. 'I understand. You must find a cure for your people.''Yes.'

'Then you'll seek this cure among the stars?'

'Yes among the stars.' Danlo breathed deeply a moment, then said, 'In truth, I seek the star of the Architects. It is they who made the disease that is killing my people. It is said that they know of a cure.'

Old Fei Yang scowled and plucked at the tendons of his neck as he considered this.

He said, 'I didn't know human beings could make a disease.'

'Truly, they can.'

'The only true cure for disease is beauty. If you'd stay with us, you might find how this is so.'

'I am sorry.'

'The Architects are evil,' Old Fei Yang said. 'They know nothing of beauty.'

Danlo remembered that the Architects were destroying the stars, and he thought, shaida eth shaida.

'You should not make a journey to these people,' Old Fei Yang said.

'Nevertheless, I must.' Danlo waited a moment, then asked, 'Do you know which is their star?'

Old Fei Yang shook his head. 'No.'

'I do,' Reina An said. She pointed a bony finger upwards high above the spruce trees at the sky. 'That is their star.'

Danlo moved close to Reina An, close enough that he could smell the salmon grease in her hair as well as the essence of wild roses that she rubbed over her body in order to smell more beautiful. With his eye, Danlo followed the line of her finger where it led out to infinity. There, in the deeps of the Vild, out in the light-distances, there were fields of brilliant stars. Danlo watched as Reina An's finger described the arc of stars forming the Fish's backbone. He watched as she pointed out the three stars of the Fish's tail (Three-In-A-Row, as she called them). There was one star, brighter than the others, that she called the Eye of the Fish. This was the Architects' star, she said. This huge star shone a faint salmon-pink, and Danlo thought that it might be a red giant. He stared at it for a long time, fixing it in his mind. Later he would stare at it through his ship's telescopes and apply the theorems of probabilistic topology, and with luck he would determine its fixed-points. And then, soon, in only a few more days, he must take his lightship out into the stars and journey there.

'Do you see it, Danlo of the Stars? Do you see it?'

'I see it,' Danlo said.

Ever since coming to the Sani village, Danlo had wondered if he should tell these people about the stars. Although Ede the G.o.d was truly dead, the Sani could never be safe from sudden destruction, for they lived in the light of the Vild stars which the Architects were destroying one by one. No people anywhere could ever be safe, and that was a truth of the universe almost too terrible to face. Even if the Order's mission to the Old Church succeeded and the Architects finally saw the light of reason, the deadly light of once-killed stars might at any moment fall upon the Sani and annihilate them. Danlo stared and stared at the Eye of the Fish, and he thought that even this magnificent star could explode as suddenly as any other. It was to stop this ma.s.sacre of the stars, Danlo remembered, that the Order of Neverness had made a mission to the Vild. This was why he had journeyed to the Earth of the Sani. And this was why he must say goodbye to these tragic people and leave them to their fate.

'The stars,' Danlo said at last, 'are the children of G.o.d alone in the night.'

He sat on his bearskin with Reina An and Old Fei Yang, and they both complimented him on the beauty of his words. Danlo silently prayed that one day the Golden Ring would grow around this Earth and protect the Sani from the Vild's fury. The Sani drank their blackberry beer and asked Danlo for more words and more songs. And so far into the night he chanted from the Song of Life, and he played his flute to the wild and beautiful stars.

CHAPTER ELEVEN.

Alumit Bridge.

The computer is the bridge that will carry man on his journey from animal to G.o.d.

-from Man's Journey, by Nikolos Daru Ede.

Every journey must have its end. Even the purest of pilots they whose only gladness is the luminous falling from moment to moment and star to star will look forward to their homecoming. And so they lay their plans and go out into the stellar wastelands of the universe; they think always of great treasures to be won, secret knowledge, triumph, the glorious completion of their dreams, their quests, their lives. Sometimes, their longing to fulfil their purpose is so deep and terrible that they will tremble to seize the joy of victory prematurely only to find empty air trapped in their hands. This is the moment of broken hope, the moment for doubt, disillusionment, even despair.

For Danlo it came when he fell out of the manifold near the star that the Sani had named the Eye of the Fish. There he found an alien world all emerald and violet with some of the strangest plant life that he had ever seen. He had hoped that this lovely world would be Tannahill, for the finding of lost Tannahill, if not the end of his journey, would be the beginning of his achieving various goals. He would make a mission to the Architects and tell them of the Order and the Civilized Worlds; he would ask if they possessed a cure for the disease that was killing the Alaloi people; and lastly, if fate presented the opportunity, he might keep his promise to the ghost of Nikolos Daru Ede and recover his frozen, three thousand year old body. All these things (and more) he might accomplish if only his luck and courage ran true.

Although in reality he knew that his chances of success were not great, after his feast with the Sani, he was as drunk with optimism as a seagull that has gorged on fermented blackberries. He thought that anything might be possible. And so when he learned that this long-sought world was not Tannahill after all but Alumit Bridge, he fell so swiftly into hopelessness that all the colours of the world below him darkened to black and he could hardly breathe.

'Pilot are you all right?'

Ede's powerful voice spoke out of the stale air in the pit of Danlo's ship. Except for the glowing hologram of Nikolos Daru Ede, this mostly empty s.p.a.ce would have been as lightless as a cetic's box. Danlo, floating naked as a babe in his mother's womb, was stricken with the lightlessness of the universe. For the moment, he was wholly unaware of the devotionary computer that he always kept near him.

'Pilot? Pilot?'

'I ... am too tired,' Danlo finally said. 'I have been away from home too long.'

'Perhaps you've miscalculated this star's fixed-points,' Ede said.

Danlo smiled at this, amused despite his dark mood. Even a journeyman pilot, having been shown the Eye of the Fish, could not have failed to find its fixed-points.

'Perhaps,' Ede said, 'you misunderstood which star the Sani woman was pointing to.'

'No, this is the star.'

'Then perhaps the Sani misunderstood which was the Architects' star. Before they killed the missionaries at their feast.''Perhaps,' Danlo said.

'Of course, it is a coincidence that this star is circled by such a rich world.'

'A ... coincidence,' Danlo said.

'And to find this world peopled with human beings surely this is a coincidence, too.'

Danlo's mind was almost as murky as an abandoned cave, but when Ede said this, he suddenly remembered something and it was as if a torch had been lit inside him.

'A rare coincidence ... yes.'

'You don't believe in pure chance, do you?' Ede asked. As a man as a good programmer and cybernetic architect Ede had always reviled tychism, the school of philosophy teaching that absolute chance underlay all of reality. But now, as the remnant of a ghost of a G.o.d, he was not so sure.