'I planted flowers once,' Danlo said. He closed his eyes as he recalled a brilliant day in false winter when he had abandoned his mathematical studies to plant fireflowers with Tamara in the dirt outside her house. 'I ... never counted it as work.'

Isas Lel regarded Danlo as if he were some kind of alien insect. Then he said, 'But you used your hands, didn't you?'

'Yes how not?'

'Then it was work.'

'Then you consider everything one does with one's hands as work?'

'Almost everything.'

Danlo sat as straight as a zanshin master on the seat of the rolling robot. As de facto amba.s.sador to the Narain people, he should not have allowed himself to argue with Isas Lel. But he was a pilot first, and even more a man, and so he said, 'I ... saw a robot feeding a baby. On the street, in front of a restaurant. Surely the mother cannot consider it work to feed her baby.'

'Surely she would if this child had a mother.'

For a moment, Danlo did not breathe. All his life he had heard of worlds whose children were born out of artificial wombs and listened to the jokes about slelniks, those human abominations who had neither father nor mother. As a journeyman in Neverness, he had even met one of these unfortunate yet seemingly perfect human beings, so flawless in the flesh and haunted in the eyes. The thought that Isas Lel and everyone else in the city might be slelniks stunned Danlo. He sat in silence, and he did not know what to say.

'Surely,' Isas Lel continued, 'it's work to grow an infant inside oneself. And even more work to care for it.''But ... that is just life!' Danlo finally gasped out. 'Life itself. Truly how else are we to live?'

Isas Lel sighed as if he were arguing with a child. His face was full of disgust and scorn. And then he said, 'Live? Our robots can do that for us.'

After that, for the rest of their brief journey through the city, neither of them spoke.

Soon they came to a Urge white structure that rose seamlessly from the boulevard's plastic. Danlo would have thought that they would need to climb down from the robot in order to enter this structure, but at Isas Lel's command the robot moved into the rightmost lane of the boulevard, decelerated, and then exited neatly onto the walkway in front of the structure. Although the robot was now creeping along almost as slowly as an old man might hobble, the men and women swarming the walk were careful to avoid any kind of collision, and they hurried out of their way. For most of the Narain, walking was the single exercise they permitted themselves, but no one expected a Transcendental to stoop to this kind of labour. More than a few people cast envious glances at the clearface glittering on Isas Lel's head and bowed to him as if he were a G.o.d. Then the robot broke free from the manswarms and rolled up to the building's shiny doors. They opened, allowing the robot to move inside.

This is madness, Danlo thought. If I remain here very long, I will fall mad.

While the robot rolled down a long white corridor, Danlo used his fingers to make a sign that only the devotionary computer could detect. He looked down at the Ede hologram floating above the jewelled box on his lap. Ede's attention, it seemed, was concentrated on Isas Lel. Perhaps he was trying to read the man's unreadable face.

When Isas Lel's eyes momentarily fell vacant in some private communion with the computer he wore on his head, Ede responded to Danlo's sign. With his fingers made of light, he warned Danlo of the precariousness of their situation. 'You wished for difficulty and danger well, you should be careful of what you wish for lest you receive it in abundance.'

'I ... know,' Danlo signed.

'This man is in almost continual interface with some cybernetic field,' Ede signed back. 'Very likely everything you do and say will be scrutinized by any others who share face with this field.'

'Yes, I know,' Danlo signed. 'But what would you advise I do?'

'Look at his eyes! Kill him now while he is faced you could appropriate his skullcap and command the robot to return to our ship. Our chances of escape might never be so great.'

Danlo smiled at this impossible suggestion and then, with his hands, he asked, 'What would you advise me to do ... that I can do?'

Ede's answer came immediately. 'Be mindful, then. Guard your face guard your thoughts, Pilot.'

During their brief time in the corridors of this nameless structure, they pa.s.sed few other people, all of them Transcendentals much like Isas Lel, wearing clearfaces over their bare skulls and riding on top of wheeled robots. They all seemed intensely interested in Danlo, looking at him openly as if he were some rare alien animal that Isas Lel had brought back from the forests outside the city to amuse them. It was as if Danlo had entered some sort of private club where Transcendentals and only Transcendentals met each morning to while away the endless hours of their workless lives. Danlo wondered what pursuits might lure such a cold-eyed people, and then Isas Lel's robot rolled right up a cold little room that had been prepared for Danlo's arrival.

'Here we are,' Isas Lel said. 'We've been waiting to meet you.'

At this, Danlo exchanged finger signs with the Ede hologram, promising to guard the face of his being. Then he smiled at the danger before him, and he gazed at the doors to the room where the Transcendentals of Alumit Bridge were waiting for him.

CHAPTER TWELVE.

The Transcendentals.

The central paradox of Edeism is this: that G.o.d is eternal, infinite, transcendent, ineffable, formless, faceless, omnipotent, and omnipresent, but He is also Nikolos Daru Ede, the Mahaman, the man-who-will-become-G.o.d. All Edeic theology and the doctrines of the different sects derive from the attempt to explain this mystery.

- Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1,754th Edition. Tenth Revised Standard Version.

The doors to the room slid open, and as the robot rolled forward, Danlo found himself in what Isas Lel called a meeting chamber. The floor of this windowless room was a dull white plastic unadorned by rug or carpet; its walls and ceiling were a single half dome of pure chatoy or some l.u.s.trous material very like it. Upon Danlo's entrance, the dome's chatoy surface flared into colours. Streaks of crimson, ochre, jade and orchid- pink flowed all around him, and then, as he watched, the colours began to mutate and form up into a recognizable scene. It was a sunset, he saw. Here, deep in the belly of the city, in the middle of the morning, he watched Alumit Bridge's huge sun drop behind hills glowing with a bright emerald light. The sky was ablaze with bands of violet and rose, and it was all very beautiful, if wholly unreal. That the Narain preferred such simulated sunsets over beholding the world directly troubled Danlo.

He was troubled, too, by the vases of freshly-cut flowers and by a gleaming chromium tea service that a ministrant robot had apparently rolled into the room. It was as if Isas Lel, from little things that Danlo had said during their brief journey from the light-field, had somehow ordered this room prepared for his comfort. At the room's exact centre, some robot had set down a plump red cushion. Isas Lel invited Danlo to sit on this cushion. He himself remained seated in his robot, as did the other Transcendentals, who were sitting on top of their robots, watching and waiting as the light of the false sunset reflected off their golden clearfaces. There were six of them, and they had arrayed their robots in a half circle around Danlo's cushion. As Danlo sat crosslegged before them beneath them their gla.s.sy eyes fell upon him like cold blue stones that crushed his heart.

'May I present Lieswyr Ivioss?' Isas Lel asked, holding out his hand toward a thin woman whose cla.s.sically-formed face was almost as smooth as a baby's. Lieswyr Ivioss seemed almost as young as Danlo, though in truth she had been born in the city ninety years before.

'And may I present Kistur Ashtoreth?' This was a man or a woman whose pale, pink skin and fine features bespoke a fragility common to the people of Iviunir. At being presented, Kistur Ashtoreth bowed his head and smiled at Danlo, which surprised him greatly. Of all the Transcendentals, he was the only one to favour Danlo in this way.

'And Patar Iviaslin, and this is Yenene Iviastalir,' Isas Lel continued as he waved his hand around the semi-circle. With the exception of Kistur Ashtoreth, Danlo found the Narain's names to be strange, especially of the last two women (or men) that Isas Lel presented. These were Diverous Te, a frail-faced being who seemed wholly absorbed in some other world, and Ananda Narcavage, she of the trembling lips and half-closed eyes that would not quite look straight at Danlo. These, then, were the n.o.bility of the city, the princes and lords and maharinis. Danlo supposed that they might also be the masters of the world of Alumit Bridge, and in this he was almost right.

'May we offer you tea?' Isas Lel asked.

With a wave of his hand, he beckoned to a plastic ministrant robot who poured out seven steaming cups of tea. The robot served these cups to the Transcendentals and to Danlo. He sat holding this cup near his nose, drinking in the tea's strange and spicy aroma. On the floor by the cushion, where he had set down the devotionary computer, the Ede hologram surrept.i.tiously made signs for Danlo to see. 'Beware of poison!'

Ede signed. 'Beware of truth drugs these Narain will want to read your mind!'

Smiling at this, Danlo took a long sip of tea. There was nothing else he could do.

The inquisition that he had been awaiting began at once. Isas Lel said brusquely, 'You claim to be a pilot of an Order on a world named Neverness. What Order is this?

Which star lights your world?'

Danlo set his tea cup down against the floor. He let his hand fall against the trousers of his robe where he kept his flute tucked into the long pocket. Through a thin layer of black silk, he gripped the flute tightly, drew in a breath of air, and said, 'In truth, Neverness is the name of the city where I was educated. The planet's name is actually Icefall though many call it by the city's name also. The star is known as the Star of Neverness.'

'And you were born in this city?'

'I was born ... near it.'

'An open city, you said when we talked by radio Neverness is open to the light of its star, is that true?'

'Yes.'

'And where is this Star of Neverness, then?'

Almost instantly, Danlo reached out and pointed at a steep angle upward slightly to the right of Ananda Narcavage's head. It was Danlo's pride that no matter where in the universe he might fall, no matter the eccentricities of orbit or spin of any planet on which he found himself, no matter which way he might turn in the artificially-lit tunnels of a soulless city no matter how he was spatially oriented, he could always find his way home. 'It is there,' he said simply. 'My star ... is there.'

For a moment, Isas Lel seemed confused. As were the other Transcendentals. They sat on the reclined seats of their robots, and their eyes were so vacant they seemed almost to disappear from their heads.

'I meant,' Isas Lel said, 'where is this Star of Neverness in relation to the Known Stars?'

Danlo smiled to himself as he considered the implications of this question. He wondered how many stars these hive-dwelling humans might truly know. As for himself, he knew ten thousand stars by name, and perhaps a million more by sight by their constellation within the galaxy's billions of jewelled lights.

'And which are the ... Known Stars?' Danlo asked.

'Is it possible that you don't know?'

'Truly ... I do not know.'

Isas Lel shut his eyes then. A moment later, the sunset scene died from the room's walls, its pretty colours sucked away like paint down a dark drain. For a while the meeting room was almost as black as s.p.a.ce. And then there were stars or rather thousands of points of white light that appeared as stars, glittering out from the chatoy walls around Danlo. He almost instantly recognized the Sani's pale blue star and the Eye of the Fish and Medearis Luz, and all the other stars in this neighbourhood.

'Can you tell us which of these stars is the Star of Neverness?''None of them,' Danlo said.

'But these are the Known Stars,' Isas Lel emphasized as if Danlo might be either deaf or blind.

'The Star of Neverness ... burns elsewhere.'

'But these are all the stars within a radius of fifty light-years!' Isas Lel said this word, light-year, lignia-toh, as if it represented an unimaginable distance. As indeed six trillion miles almost is.

'The Star of Neverness ... burns far away.'

'Farther than a hundred light-years?'

'Yes.'

'How far, then?'

'Far ... very far,' Danlo said. He shut his eyes for a moment, then continued, 'If one were to measure a straight light distance from your star to mine, it would be perhaps thirty thousand light-years.'

Although Danlo had spoken softly, as he usually spoke, this number fell out into the room like a thunderclap. For a long time, no one said anything, and there was deep silence.

'That's impossible!' Diverous Te blurted out. His (her?) voice was almost as low as the lowest tone of Danlo's shakuhachi, and it was the only time that morning he would be graced with hearing it.

'Thirty thousand light-years, impossible,' Ananda Narcavage agreed.

'No, no,' Lieswyr Ivioss said in her dulcet voice, 'that can't be true.'

But of course it was true. Danlo had fallen far across the lens of the galaxy, perhaps farther than any other pilot in the history of his Order. Thirty thousand light-years was indeed a far, far way so far that even the master pilots of Neverness, safe by the fires of their houses, would have been fairly astonished had they known of this feat.

Suddenly, there in the twinkling darkness of the meeting room, the eyes of Patar Iviaslin and Kistur Ashtoreth and all the other Transcendentals focused on Isas Lel as if he had spoken to them. And then Isas Lel actually did speak, in words, in waves of dark air that could be heard as sound.

'It may be,' he said, 'that this Danlo wi Soli Ringess of Neverness actually is telling the truth. Or that he believes that he is.'

Just then the sunset scene returned in a torrent of blinding colours, and Danlo suddenly knew the truth about this 'meeting' room. Behind the chatoy finish of the domed walls would be purple neurologics or some other kind of scanning element sensitive to the electro-chemical events of his brain. Sensitive, perhaps, to his slightest thoughts. The whole room was like a computer like the clearface skullcaps that the Transcendentals wore on their heads. Even more, the room was like the pit of Danlo's ship. Only it had not been built as an interface between a pilot's brain and the logics of a lightship, but rather as a place where the Transcendentals might examine the minds of the lesser Narain, who needed help in entering into the cybernetic s.p.a.ce of the Field. In the literal sense, the room was a facing chamber where one's mind might be peeled apart like the layers of an onion. Danlo had heard of such places before: the Yarkonan truth chambers, the blacking cells of Qallar as well as the secret null rooms in the cetics' tower on Neverness.

'If this is the truth,' Lieswyr Ivioss said, 'then we should like to know how it can be true.'

Danlo sat very straight, feeling the holes of his flute beneath his silk robe. Silently, almost casually, he moved his fingers against these holes. And in his mind, a deep music played, and it was this intensely melodic inner music that would help to confuse the scanners of these Transcendentals' mind machine. Since Danlo first had entered the room, he had been listening to this secret song, and now he began to employ certain other techniques that his cetic friend, Hanuman li Tosh, had once taught him. Hallning, an art invented to integrate the crosstalk of the mind's senses, was like a laser light that could cut in many directions. A master cetic could also use hallning to confuse these senses so that one could 'hear' the colour red as a ripping of wool cloth, or 'smell' a fireflower's essence as lovely traceries cut into the stonework of a cathedral. With hallning, a cetic might even use one's brain in unusual ways, for instance, shifting the making of words from the language centres in the brain's left hemisphere to unconditioned synapses in the right. Although Danlo was no cetic, he had learned the fundamentals of hallning, as well as the arts of simultaneity, fractality and fugue. And others. To thwart the mind-reading efforts of Isas Lel and his compatriots, Danlo called upon almost every art that he knew. He closed his eyes and listened to the beating of his heart; he recalled a time once as a very young child when he lay between his mother's milk-stained b.r.e.a.s.t.s listening to the slower beating of her strong and lovely heart.

'Danlo wi Soli Ringess,' a voice called out of the darkness all about him, 'can you tell us how to find this Star of Neverness?'

But, of course, Danlo could not tell Isas Lel this. As a pilot, he was forbidden to reveal the fixed-points of this star or of any star.

'Can you tell us how you piloted a ship across thirty thousand light-years of s.p.a.ce?'

'I ... can,' Danlo finally forced out. In his mind, the notes to a song that he had once made for his teacher appeared like drops of flaming crimson and chrome. It was very hard for him to speak. 'But ... I ... must ... not ... tell ... you. I ... will not.'

'Can you tell us more about your ship that carried you such an impossible distance?

This ship that you call a lightship?'

The words in Danlo's mind were like the reek of cinofila and skrix and all the other smells of an alien zoo. He moved his lips, but the only sound to emerge was like an expanding blue-black balloon. 'No.' At last he heard himself say this, as a recognizable sound made with his tongue almost pressed against his teeth. 'No,' he said, but with his senses confused as they were, in a moment of time, this simple utterance sounded almost like 'yes'.

'This is enough,' he heard someone say. He opened his eyes to see the lavender gush of sound waves falling from Kistur Ashtoreth's mouth. 'We should never have brought him here.'

For a moment, all the Transcendentals seemed to disappear like dry ice evaporating into air. Danlo thought that they must be interfacing simultaneously with each other.

And then, a moment later, Isas Lel and the others fell out of the s.p.a.ce above their robots like lightships from the manifold. They all looked at each other, and Isas Lel turned to Danlo and said, 'There's something very strange about you, Danlo wi Soli Ringess of Neverness. You seem almost as naive as any naman, and yet you have such extraordinary skills.'

The word naman Ede translated as 'unadmitted'. Danlo knew that he should know this word its significance but for the moment it escaped his mind.

'If you wish to relax your mind,' Isas Lel said, 'I promise that there will be no more interface with this room unless you desire it.'

Danlo looked down at the hologram of Ede, who was furiously signing to him, 'It's a trick! Don't let them see your face! Don't let them see you!'

But Danlo had heard the truth in Isas Lel's voice, and he trusted this truth. Slowly, he smiled and said, 'I do not desire interface.'

'Please relax, then.'

Danlo nodded his head. 'If you'd like.' Very slowly he drew a breath of air and let it out.

Isas Lel continued looking at him and asked, 'Where did you learn these mind skills of yours?'

'From a friend,' Danlo said. 'From a cetic.'

'And what is a cetic?'

While Danlo explained something of the cetic arts and the Order's quest for knowledge about the nature of mind in the universe, Isas Lel's cold blue eyes seemed to melt and flow until they were almost human.

After Danlo had finished speaking, Kistur Ashtoreth said, 'We've never heard of this Order. No one has.'

'I ... am perhaps the first pilot to have journeyed this far into the Vild.'

There was a moment of confusion among the Transcendentals because the word 'Vild' did not translate into their language.

'And what is this Vild?' Kistur Ashtoreth asked.