'I do not believe ... that G.o.d plays dice with the universe,' Danlo said, quoting the Einstein. 'All coincidences are intriguing, yes?'

'Perhaps but are they meaningful?'

'Everything is meaningful,' Danlo said.

Ede sighed in a rather mechanical way, as he was programmed to do, and asked, 'What is the meaning of finding a world named Alumit Bridge where you had hoped Tannahill would be?'

Immediately upon falling out in orbit above Alumit Bridge, according to the rules of his Order, Danlo had sent a radio signal flashing down to the world below him.

And almost immediately his greeting had been answered. The people of Alumit Bridge spoke a language apparently evolved from ancient Istwan, and Ede had little trouble translating it and ascertaining that these people who called themselves the Narain claimed to know nothing of Tannahill.

'You ... truly do not know?' Danlo asked.

'No, I don't think I do.'

'You do not remember ... that Nikolos Daru Ede was born on the planet Alumit?'

Ede was silent while he processed this. His face froze into a glittering att.i.tude of thoughtfulness and the jewelled eyes of the devotionary seemed as unfocused as a baby's. Then he said, 'I must have pruned the memory of my birth planet by accident.

But it's strange that I wasn't aware of this pruning.'

'Memory itself is strange,' Danlo said. 'Until you spoke of coincidences, I too had forgotten about Alumit.'

Ede looked straight into Danlo's eyes then, and said, 'I suppose that you've also noticed the coincidence of the Narain speaking a derivative of Istwan?'

Danlo nodded. 'Istwan was the language of the Old Church, yes?'

'This is true,' Ede admitted. 'But two hundred years after the Great Schism in 1749, at the end of the War of the Faces, there were fifty Architect sects. And all of them revered Istwan as their holy language. The Architect missionaries spread Istwan everywhere.'

'But it was the Old Church ... that established itself in the Vild.'

'Well, perhaps other churches did as well.'

'Perhaps,' Danlo said.

'Or perhaps the Old Church's missionaries taught Istwan to the ancestors of these Narain.'

Danlo smiled at the Ede hologram and said, 'We could invent a thousand hypotheses as to why the Narain seem to know nothing of Tannahill.'

'I notice,' Ede said, 'that you use the word "seem" in relation to the Narain's knowledge of Tannahill. Do you think these people have lied to us?'

'I do not know,' Danlo said. 'But there is something strange here. Something strange in the Narain naming their world Alumit Bridge. A bridge ... to what?'

'Who can say? There must be a thousand bridge-worlds in the galaxy.'

'I ... would like to explore these strangenesses,' Danlo said.

'We could speak with the Narain again. We could interface the radio.'

'I ... would like to speak with them face to face.'

'Do you mean imago to imago?'

Slowly, Danlo shook his head.

At this, Ede's program generated something like alarm, and he asked, 'Do you mean you'd make a planetfall here?'

'Yes.'

'But it's too dangerous,' Ede immediately said. After his witnessing the Sani's feast, he was most wary of placing himself in further jeopardy. 'An unknown world an unknown people.'

'Pilots must take chances. Everyone, everything ... always must.'

'Perhaps this is true,' Ede said. 'But shouldn't the risk be in proportion to the possible gain?'

'Now you are arguing like a merchant,' Danlo said. And then, ashamed of speaking so rudely, even to a computer, he said, 'I am sorry. But the Narain might know of Tannahill. Isn't this gain enough?'

Ede was silent while he considered this, and his soft, glowing face was almost unreadable. 'But there might be a hundred other peoples in the Vild who know of Tannahill. People who wouldn't hide their knowledge.'

'People ... such as the Sani?'

'Perhaps,' Ede admitted. 'If we could find another such people, somewhere among these stars, we could make precautions and preparations.'

'I ... see.'

'The Sani had practically no technology. With a little foresight, it would be rather easy to protect ourselves from such savages.'

'The Sani were not savages.'

'Still, they had no-'

'I will never arm myself, if that is what you mean,' Danlo said.

'But if you go down to this planet, how will you protect yourself? The Narain are quite sophisticated, aren't they?'

In truth, the Narain were perhaps as technologically advanced as any peoples of the Civilized Worlds. The continents of Alumit Bridge were dotted with cities, all of which were great, glittering arcologies built on many levels high into the sky. They had radio and hologram displays and a planetary communications network; from one brief conversation with some man or cybernetic ent.i.ty who called himself Abraxax, Danlo suspected that the Narain interfaced this network in very sophisticated ways.

Some of the cities were graced with light-fields that could accommodate jets and jammers and probably even shuttles capable of rocketing up to deepships and other vessels as they fell out above the planet in near s.p.a.ce. Such a people would no doubt possess a sophisticated weaponry: perhaps lasers and eye tlolts and dreammakers, as well as a thousand kinds of poisons and genotoxins. Surely, for Danlo to fall into the hands of such unknown people would be madness.

As Danlo moved about his ship's pit, dressing himself in preparation for a planetfall, he considered what Ede had said. He took his flute into his hands, and he might have held it up to the devotionary's thousand computer eyes as if to say, 'This is all the protection that I will need'. But this would have been pure arrogance, perhaps even hubris. In truth, he did not really believe that his flute could keep him from harm when his time had come. Nothing could and it was this open-eyed acceptance of his fate that vexed Ede so completely.

'You don't care about yourself,' Ede said as Danlo pulled on his black pilot's boots.

According to Ede, the preservation of one's own life was every man's fundamental program. But in Danlo, the writing of this deep program had somehow gone awry.

'You don't care about your life.'

'But ... truly I do,' Danlo said as he zipped up his formal black robe. 'Truly to live is everything.'

'You're a dangerous man,' Ede continued. 'Perhaps even a madman why should my fate be interwoven with such a mad, wild man?'

Danlo smiled at this and asked, 'How else should your fate have been woven, then?'

'Why must you always answer my questions with questions?'

For a moment Danlo was silent, and then he asked, 'Is there a better way to answer questions that have no answer?'

'Is there nothing I can say to dissuade you from going down to this planet?'

'How ... can I know the answer to that question?'

'Then you'll take your ship down to this world?'

'I ... must,' Danlo said. 'If you'd like, if you believe the risk to yourself is too great, I could make a fall to one of this star's other planets. I could leave you there and then return to this world.'

For a while, the Ede imago simply stared at Danlo, and neither of them made a sound. And then Ede said, 'If the Narain were to kill you while I was stranded on bare rock on some airless planet, what would happen to me?'

'I ... do not know.'

'Unfortunately,' Ede continued, 'my best chance for success lies in promoting your success. Thus I must translate for you and advise you; I must go wherever you go.'

'I am sorry.'

'Then, too, I must tell you that I'm growing fond of you. I feel the need to protect you from your own wildness.'

'Truly?' Danlo asked. He was now amused almost to the point of exaltation, and he couldn't help smiling.

'You don't believe me?'

'I ... do not know what to believe,' Danlo finally said.

'Well, you should believe me,' Ede said. 'You must believe me I would never lie to you.'

After this, Danlo took the Snowy Owl down to the world called Alumit Bridge. He fell down through layers of dense white clouds, straight down toward the city of Iviunir and its single light-field. He fell blindly down towards the field's landing pads and long glittering runs that he could not see. In little time, his diamond ship broke free from the lowest clouds. And there, directly below him, was a city built a quarter of a mile into the sky. It was something like the domed cities of Yarkona, only Iviunir's outer skin was not translucent and lovely like clary but rather opaque like the sh.e.l.l of a turtle and flattened at the top. Indeed, the city's superstructure seemed to be made of some kind of greyish-green plastic. Upon seeing this, Danlo's belly immediately tightened. Life inside Iviunir, he realized, would not be like wandering the Yarkonan parks beneath a great golden dome. It would be more like living inside a plastic beehive, and as soon as Danlo considered this, he felt the burn of acid in his throat and his head began to ache. He might have turned his ship back to the stars, then, but he was scarcely a thousand feet above the light-field, which occupied the city's topmost level. And then the Snowy Owl fell down to one of the many runs as gently as a b.u.t.terfly alighting on a flower, and it was too late.

As had been arranged, he was met near the end of the second run by a man named Isas Lel Abraxax. Danlo opened the pit of his ship and climbed down to the run's surface, which indeed proved to be one of the transkerine plastics. Although it was raining, slightly, the air was almost as warm as blood soup. He caught the whiff of unpleasant smells, plastics and aldehydes and ozone, certainly, but also that of fungi and decaying plant matter and perhaps some other kind of organic life that he could not quite identify. The light-field itself was strangely quiet. He had expected thunder and rocket-fire, jets and jammers and lullcraft, the usual bustle of ships being met and attended to. Instead, but for the falling rain, there was only silence. It was almost as if all such activity had been interrupted or suspended in honour of his arrival.

'Che dai so, Danlo wi Soli Ringess!' a voice called out from the rain. A good hundred feet away from Danlo's ship a thin, bald-headed man stood next to some kind of wheeled robot. The rain would have soaked his thin garments, but one of the robot's arms held out a plastic red umbrella covering the man's head. He bowed to Danlo and continued his greeting: 'Che dai sova Iviunir ji Alumii Vrarai.'

Although there was little need for translation of this, Ede faithfully rendered the words into the Language of the Civilized Worlds. Danlo carried the devotionary computer in his left hand while he strode down the wet run toward the bald-headed man. He came up close enough to see the irises of the man's eyes, and then he bowed formally and said, 'I am Danlo wi Soli Ringess. And you are Isas Lel Abraxax, yes?'

The man agreed that he was indeed Isas Lel Abraxax, though it seemed that he claimed this ident.i.ty without enthusiasm, almost as if he were unsure of his name. He had ugly blue eyes shot with flecks of orange, strange and distant eyes whose light it was difficult for Danlo to hold. In truth, Isas Lel would not meet eyes with Danlo; instead he gazed at the devotionary computer in Danlo's hand. He apologized for the inclement weather, and when the Ede hologram translated his words, he seemed amazed and perhaps a little scandalized to see the imago of Nikolos Daru Ede programmed to perform such a lowly function.

He knows of Ede, Danlo thought. He has seen such computers before.

Then, momentarily, Isas Lel's eyes fell dead to the world. Danlo guessed that he was interfacing the computer that covered his head. Like all the Narain, Isas Lel's head was as smooth as a seagull's egg; like all the Narain elite, he wore a shiny clearface moulded to the shiny skin around his skull.

'Aqavai nui harima?' Isas Lel asked. 'Shall we go inside now? It's bad to be out overlong in the world.'

He climbed onto the robot and dropped down into the single seat built above the wheels. Because a bright blue canopy covered this seat and most of the robot's hard plastic body, he had no further need for his umbrella, which the robot folded up and stowed in one of its compartments. At last Isas Lel seemed to notice his guest waiting patiently in the rain. With a wave of his hand, he invited Danlo to sit beside him.

Although Danlo had never liked entrusting himself to any kind of robot, he did as Isas bade him. And then Isas smiled faintly and spoke to the robot. 'Vato,' he said, and instantly the robot accelerated across the wet plastic of the runs. Danlo listened to the rain drumming against the plastic canopy above him; he listened to the suss of the robot's soft plastic wheels squeezing the water out of their way as they rolled on and on across the nearly silent light-field. Soon they came to a building. Or rather, they came to that part of the city where the arcology rose up like a wall around the perimeter of the field's southern half. Inside this greyish plastic wall Danlo supposed, would be the caverns where the Narain worked on the vessels that flew from city to city. (Or from the city to the stars.) There he would find programmers and tinkers and watchmen, and all the tools and machinery needed to attend the arrival of a lightship or the lesser ships of the cities of Alumit Bridge whose names Danlo did not know. He realized, then, that he was too eager for the sounds and sights of human activity.

He was too eager to leave the desolation of the light-field behind him although in truth his dread of entering such a soulless city was worse than that of a child who stares at the dark opening to a snow tiger's lair. For a moment a long moment he looked down at the misty hills below the city, at the lovely alien forest shimmering purple and green in the morning light. And then, perhaps at some silent signal of the robot's, a door in the great wall before them slid open. In hardly any time at all they rolled through this doorway into the city of Iviunir.

'We'll proceed to another level,' Isas Lel said. 'The others are waiting for us there.'

'The ... others?'

'The other Transcendentals. And the other, oh, others. You'll soon see. Please be patient.'

Whatever Danlo had been expecting of this great, squat city, the reality of it was worse than he had feared. The robot bore them down endless empty corridors, turning this way or that according to its program. No natural light illuminated these corridors.

The walls, while not the ugly green of the city's exterior, were composed of some unusual plastic glowing with various muddy colours. In many places, some kind of bluish, alien fungus had infected these walls, spreading out over the plastic like mould on bread. The air that Danlo breathed was dank and dead and reeked of toluene and sulphur and other kinds of chemical pollution. Somewhere below him, in the bowels of the city, there dwelt perhaps twenty million people. He could almost feel the echoes of their voices vibrating up from the bare, plastic floor. Danlo could never understand why human beings would choose to live inside such structures unless they did so purely for the sake of protection. Iviunir, like other arcologies that Danlo had seen, was built as st.u.r.dily as the castle worlds of the Astaaret. Its tough, composite plastics could withstand the blast of a hydrogen bomb, as well as shielding against the radiations of distant supernovas. For a people living in the centre of the Vild, this last consideration must have been the critical one.

At last the robot came to one of the city's great gravity lifts. It stopped and waited while Isas Lel spoke of little things such as Danlo's unique diamond pilot's ring and the strangeness of the black silk robes that Danlo wore. The lift's double doors opened and the robot wheeled them into the lift, where they were its only pa.s.sengers. With a sickening jolt, the lift began to fall. Down and down into the arcology it fell for many moments. Danlo could not guess how many levels they had descended. Somewhere outside this plummeting plastic chamber would be apartments and restaurants full of people. There would be shops and libraries and dream parks as well as factories fabricating everything from the Narain's plastic clothing to the food that they ate. In most arcologies, the food factories are spread out across the topmost level to take advantage of whatever natural sunlight might fall upon the various plants growing in their vats. But in Iviunir, it seemed, these floating farms must be located on some level deep inside. Danlo supposed that the Narain must employ artificial light to trigger the photosynthesis upon which most life ultimately depended. Perhaps this light would be generated by hot fusion cells, or even by dirty fission reactors. Once, on Treblinka Luz, Danlo had come across such barbarisms. Once, too, as a wild young man, Danlo had loathed eating any food grown by such unnatural means. And now, falling into the bowels of this unholy city, he smiled at his childhood inhibitions, which in truth were still as much a part of him as the scars of his thigh and forehead.

For the thousandth time, he reminded himself that light was only light, that 'artificial'

light was as real as the radiance of any star. This light was not at all like other manmade and artificial things which were truly unreal.

'We won't be long,' Isas Lel said to Danlo. Now the lift was falling so fast that Danlo almost felt the uneasy freedom of weightlessness in his limbs and belly. He remained seated on the robot, holding the devotionary computer tightly against him for fear that it might fly away. 'We're almost there.'

The lift pulled to a stop at the fifteenth level. Again the robot signalled for the lift's doors to open. Then it wheeled them down several empty corridors, the last of which gave out onto a narrow street. Actually, this plastic-paved way through the city was more of a tunnel than a street. On either side of their rapidly rolling robot were shops displaying everything from clothing to selduks to holograms of imprinting services.

Above them, stacked like unseen blocks, where the street's ceiling practically pressed against their heads, there would be apartments where people lived. According to Isas Lel, most of the levels in the city were divided into sub-levels sometimes as many as three or four. s.p.a.ce was precious, he said. On the fifteenth level, only the great boulevards allowed an un.o.bstructed view from level to level. Because Danlo was sweating in the stale, conditioned air, he was very eager for a more open s.p.a.ce, however closely bounded it might really be. And then the robot suddenly debouched onto Boulevard Nine, as it was called, and his wish was granted. Almost immediately he forgot about his sweaty silks or the dull pain in his head. Indeed, he almost forgot to breathe the city's lifeless air, which he shared with twenty million other people.

'So many,' he said to Isas Lel. 'So many people. So many ... robots.'

As precisely as the hands of a clock coming together at midnight, the robot merged with a great stream of other robots rushing down the centre of the boulevard. All these robots were made of blue or yellow plastic or pink, magenta, flame-red, or a hundred other bright colours. All the robots bore human beings on their single seats, and they all rolled at dangerous speeds packed too closely together. Although Danlo loved speed as he did fresh wind, he couldn't keep from wondering how long it would be before one of the robots stopped too abruptly or veered into another robot too close beside it. But of course, none of them did. Danlo marvelled at the perfect co- ordination of so many ugly machines. He could only suppose that they were all interfaced with some master computer that controlled their movements. Likewise with the people of Iviunir. On the boulevard's bright white walks between the rolling robots in the middle of the street and the shops at the edge swarms of human beings moved as with great purpose. They pa.s.sed to and fro at a fast walk, issuing from the many side streets as if some unseen master clock were calling them to their individual appointments. There was something machinelike in their motions, and yet something very human, too, an excitement as if they were marching to war or being called to some great religious event. High above them sixty feet above their hairless heads the blue plastic of the next level hung like an artificial sky, but no one seemed to mind that he lived inside such a stifling place. Hardly anyone even noticed Danlo, who was the only human being on this vast street dressed in black almost everyone else wore white kimonos or robes of glittering chatoy. The Narain appeared to be a soft people whose thin bodies and ageless faces had never known the touch of wind or sun. Their skin was a pinkish-white, an unusual mutation suiting its sufferers to live in cold, rainy climes such as once had existed in the far western forests of Urasia on Old Earth or perhaps to a life inside the plastic worm-mounds of the worlds of the Vild. With their shaved heads and shapeless bodies, they seemed androgynous, as s.e.xless as freshly-hatched Scutari nymphs.

'Are there no robots on your world?' Isas Lel asked. He fingered the water droplets still clinging to the umbrella by his side. With the wind whipping at their faces and the unbelievable noise of the street he had to talk very loud for Danlo to hear him.

'Is it possible that the people of Neverness don't use robots?'

Here Isas Lel called for a bit more comfort, and their seat began to recline. Then he called for the robot's wind windows to be raised, and suddenly they were enclosed in what seemed a clear plastic bubble. Danlo looked out through this bubble. Among the manswarms on the street, he saw many personal robots accompanying their human masters. There were robots washing the windows of the shops and robots sticking plastic blocks together as they fabricated new additions to the many high apartments which lined Boulevard Nine. One robot a fearsome construction of wheels, tubes and mechanical ba.s.sinet attended a newborn baby, one of the few children Danlo was to see in Iviunir. Everywhere, it seemed, robots of every possible design crawled and crept and rolled. Even outside the restaurants, where ministrant robots served iced drinks and various strange-looking dishes, other insect-like robots were digging in the soil of the pretty flower fields. When Danlo remarked that this work would be better accomplished by a man or woman, Isas Lel seemed confused.

'Perhaps there is a problem with your robot,' he said as he pointed to Danlo's devotionary.

Although Ede's expression did not change, his hologram lifted its little finger slightly and traced out a half-moon for Danlo's keen eyes and his eyes only to interpret. After their experience with the Sani, both he and Danlo had deemed it wise for them to have a secret language between them, and so Danlo had taught Ede the cetic's language of signs.

'What ... problem?' Danlo asked.

'A problem in translating. You can't really believe that people should plant flowers.'

'But ... why not?'

'Oh, because it is work,' Isas Lel said. He spoke this word, falke, as if it were dirt in his mouth as if its meaning should be obvious to anyone. Work was work; work was a worldly affair. Only robots (or madmen) worked. For evolved human beings such as Isas Lel or any of the Narain, no matter how low their rank, their time was to be spent on more transcendental pursuits.