While Danlo explained about the region in the galaxy where the stars were exploding into supernova one by one, none of the Transcendentals moved. They seemed almost uncomfortable sitting in their plushly-cushioned robots. Patar Iviaslin, with her little gla.s.slike eyes, seemed not to be able to look at any other thing in the room except the vase of orange and purple flowers. Diverous Te was as silent as he or she ever would be, and Lieswyr Ivioss actually blushed so that her whitish-pink skin actually fell full red.

'My Order has made a mission to the Vild,' Danlo said. He did not think it necessary to explain how the Order ever rife with factionalism and competing visions of how its purpose should be fulfilled had divided in two. 'We seek the planet Tannahill. We seek the people who are called, or once called themselves, the Architects of the Infinite Intelligence of the Cybernetic Universal Church. The ... Old Church. Is it possible that anyone in this city might know of this planet or these people? Is it possible ... that anyone might know of anyone who would know?'

Isas Lel nodded his head as if deeply considering what Danlo had asked him. And then, even as Danlo himself might do, he answered his question with another question, 'Why would your order seek the Architects of this religion?'

'Because we ...' Danlo began to speak, but just then he remembered the meaning of the word naman. In Istwan, a naman was an outsider, or more literally, one who was 'unadmitted' to the graces of the Cybernetic Universal Church. It was strange, Danlo thought, that in referring to him, Isas Lel should have used this word from the sacred language of the Old Church.

'Because the stars are dying and we would ask the Architects...' Again, Danlo began to speak, but suddenly in his mind, like a new star appearing in the sky, there was a certain knowledge about these Narain people.

'What would you ask them?'

'The ... Architects of the Old Church,' Danlo said. He looked at the golden clearface glittering like a halo atop Isas Lel's head. It seemed to catch the light of clearfaces of the other Transcendentals, who sat rigidly in their robots as they stared down at Danlo and he stared steadily back at them.

'Please continue.'

'You ... are they,' Danlo said at last. 'Truly, you are but you are not, too. You, all the Narain people ... you were once Architects, yes?'

There was a moment of silence, broken only when Lieswyr Ivioss snapped out, 'Why should you think this?'

'Because ... it is the truth.'

'But how could you possibly know this?''I ... just know.'

At this, Kistur Ashtoreth exchanged looks with Isas Lel then said, 'We should tell him, shouldn't we? We shouldn't keep this information from him.'

Isas Lel stared at Danlo for a long time, and then nodded his head as if he had come to a momentous decision. He said, 'We are the Architects of the Cybernetic Church.

The true Architects. The true Universal Church.'

'I ... see,' Danlo said. He held Isas Lel's eyes as Isas Lel told him the truth about the Narain people.

In truth, the Narain were the followers of Liljana ivi Narai, a strong-willed woman who had once been a respected Elder of the Old Church on Tannahill. But she was also a visionary and a mystic and more, a revolutionary who challenged the stale doctrines and suffocating theocracy that ruled the Old Church. A scarce two hundred years before, she had called for a revival of the true spirit of Edeism. She preached the rejection of all doctrines which were outworn by time or actually damaging to the soul, and she led her many followers in secret facing orgies and other ecstatic rites designed to bring her people closer to Ede the G.o.d. Her people claimed that they were the true Architects of G.o.d; they believed that they had rediscovered the spirit of the True, Eternal and Universal Church. They were heretics, of course, and the Old Church orthodoxy had immediately persecuted them as a danger to all that was holy.

In the second year of Liljana ivi Narai's apostasy there were tortures and the deep cleansing of many heretics' minds; there were banishments, reprogrammings and even executions. Finally, in the year 2541 since the Vastening of Ede, Liljana ivi Narai negotiated an exodus. She was given ten deepships with which to leave Tannahill.

She led her people to an alien planet with turquoise oceans and landscapes of emerald and lavender, an untouched world whose sunrises and sunsets were a glory unto G.o.d only the Narain cared nothing for these natural splendours. They worshipped at the altar to a different deity, and they named their world Alumit Bridge to symbolize their hope of a spiritual return to the birthplace of Nikolos Daru Ede. They immediately set their robots to dig minerals out of the ground and build the many arcologies that dotted the continents. There, inside these great heaps of plastic, they would be safe at last to transcend themselves and draw ever closer to the eternal Ede. In them especially in their prophets and most accomplished Architects who called themselves the Transcendentals would live the true spirit of Edeism. They would make something truly holy, something truly new and yet as old as the stars.

When Isas Lel had explained all this, Danlo took a sip of his spicy tea and said, 'Then your ancestors came here from Tannahill. You must know of this world, yes?'

'We know of Tannahill,' Kistur Ashtoreth admitted. He was clearly ashamed of the deception that the Transcendentals had put forth, and it seemed almost as if his delicate face was about to break into tears. 'Some of our eldest remember Tannahill they were born there.'

Danlo nodded his head slowly, saying nothing as he shuddered inwardly at the idea of men and women living more than two hundred years. And then he asked, 'Can you tell me where Tannahill is? Can you tell me which of the Known Stars ... is its star?'

'Perhaps we can,' Isas Lel said. 'But why would you wish to journey there? As you've been told, Alumit Bridge is the home of the true Church. Why not make your mission here?'

In the time it took for the Ede hologram to translate this question, Danlo thought quickly. He did not wish to insult these people and so he let the truth work his will for him. 'You have said that Liljana ivi Narai spoke against all of the Old Church's harmful doctrines, yes?'

'This is true,' Isas Lel said in a guarded voice. 'Over the centuries, the Church had formulated many false doctrines we call them programs that mocked the spirit of Edeism.'

'And the Narain, your people, when you founded Alumit Bridge you cast off these ... programs, yes?'

Isas Lel smiled almost for the first time, and said quite proudly (but not altogether accurately), 'We freed ourselves of all programs. No one should circ.u.mscribe another's path toward G.o.d. Nothing should we should all be free to enter the Field and find G.o.d where we may.'

Danlo returned his smile, for he was now truly amused at Isas Lel's hidden a.s.sumption that G.o.d could be found in some cybernetic s.p.a.ce and only there. But then, for a moment, his face fell serious, and he said, 'Then it must also be true that the Narain have been freed from the Program of Totality, yes?'

For the count of ten of Danlo's heartbeats, Isas Lel only stared at him. The Program of Totality, according to the Order's historians, was the ancient imperative that the Architects should expand into the universe and fill it with their offspring. And more, that they should ensoul as much human life as possible. It was their dream to cathect dead matter with consciousness. To do this they should regard all the material elements of the universe as food. They should fall through the galaxy and find lush, untouched planets; they should farm these worlds and convert their carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen into protein to nourish their children's growing bodies. And when they had stripped the biospheres clean, they should destroy these worlds. They should set their robots to pulverizing them into dust and minerals, down to their very atoms in order to free all their elements to nourish ever more human life. World upon world they should dismantle in this way, and then, ultimately, they should destroy the stars. For it was the supernovas themselves that were the galaxy's greatest creative force. The supernovas were like vast, brilliant G.o.ds who made new elements oxygen, silicon, iron, gold in the incredible heat of their dying bodies. Someday, farwhen, all the galaxies of the universe would be full of nothing but these freed elements and an uncountable number of human beings whose souls had been carked into eternal computers. And, of course, with Ede the G.o.d. Ultimately, at the end of time, Ede would feast upon these elements and absorb the entire universe into His infinite body. He would incorporate the trillions of eternal computers into the Universal Computer that was only Himself and nothing more. The minds and memories of all the Architects who had ever lived would at last be at one in Him. And then would come the miracle that every Architect dreamed of with all the fervour of lovers who have been apart too long. Beyond the end of time when time and beingness began again there would be a new creation, a second creation: out of His infinite love for man, Ede would sacrifice himself and remake the universe from the material elements of his body. He would make trillions of new Earths, perfect worlds whose lovely green gardens and blue oceans knew neither suffering nor evil nor death. He would fill these worlds with human beings. He would make new bodies for all the faithful who had ever suffered in his name. And then he would then cark their consciousnesses from his computer's memory s.p.a.ces back into living flesh, incarnating their purified souls into these golden, perfect, immortal forms. Some of the Old Church theologians held that this golden state of man reunited with G.o.d would last through eternity; others claimed that each man and woman (and child) would live forever, and someday, far beyond farwhen, even as Nikolos Daru Ede had once done, would go on to become G.o.d creator of his or her own universe. But all the most orthodox theologians believed that the universe of rocks and comets and stars was fundamentally flawed and must therefore totally be remade. And it was man's glory his purpose in life to be a partner in G.o.d in this holy remaking of the cosmos.

'It's the madmen of Tannahill who are destroying the stars, not we,' Isas Lel finally said. 'But how is it that a pilot of Neverness has heard of the Program of Totality?'

Danlo looked up to see that Kistur Ashtoreth and the other Transcendentals were curious about this, too.

'The Old Church had its beginning on Alumit,' Danlo said. 'And Alumit lies near the s.p.a.ces of the Civilized Worlds.'

As Danlo went on to explain, in the year 1749 since the founding of Neverness, there had been a schism within the Cybernetic Universal Church. The Old Church had waged war with the heretical Reformed Church, and this War of the Faces grew to become the longest and greatest war that human beings had ever suffered. In the end after two hundred years of b.l.o.o.d.y slaughter the Old Church had been defeated. Its surviving Architects had fled into the s.p.a.ces that were to become the Vild, while the Reformed Church went on to expand and make missions to Yarkona, Neverness and a thousand other Civilized Worlds. In truth, Edeism had nearly become the Civilized Worlds' universal religion. If not for the resistance of the Order's infamous and implacable Timekeeper (and the Order itself), the youths of Neverness might have grown up making the Eight Duties of an Architect rather than dreaming of becoming cetics or scryers or pilots.

'It's long been forgotten which star shines upon Alumit,' Isas Lel said. 'But, of course, we remember the War of the Faces.'

Danlo reached down to grasp the flute in his leg pocket. He gulped in a huge breath of air and said, 'During this war ... a virus was made. A bio-weapon. It is known that the Old Church Architects, with the help of the warrior-poets, engineered a virus that killed billions of people.'

That killed my people, Danlo thought. Haidar and Chandra and Cilehe and...

'And who were these warrior-poets?' Yenene Iviastalir asked.

After Danlo had explained about the Order of the Warrior-Poets, he stopped breathing almost forever and then asked, 'Is it possible ... that any Architect of the Old Church might know of a cure for this virus? Might any of the Narain have heard of a cure?'

Isas Lel slowly shook his head, and then suddenly, in Danlo's own head, on the left side, there was a deep and terrible pain as if someone had driven a knife into his eye.

'The Plague has no cure,' Isas Lel said, and these words fell upon Danlo with all the force of a great stone crushing the air from his chest.

'The Plague has no cure of which we know,' Kistur Ashtoreth corrected. 'We Narain are not biologists.'

'I ... see.'

'I've never heard of a cure,' Ananda Narcavage said.

'Nor have I.' This came from Lieswyr Ivioss, who tapped the clearface on her head as if it held all possible information in the universe. 'But why would you seek the cure for a disease that has killed n.o.body for a thousand years?'

'Not ... a thousand years,' Danlo said. He pressed his fist hard against the lightning bolt scar cut above his left eye. 'The Plague has killed, is killing ... so many.'

Haltingly, in between breaths of stale air reeking of carbon dioxide and plastic, he told the Transcendentals of the death of the Devaki people. The Plague virus was not extinct, but rather, like an a.s.sa.s.sin's siriwa thread woven into a death robe, it had become embroidered in the human genome as a pa.s.sive segment of DNA. That is, in human beings possessing the appropriate suppresser genes it was pa.s.sive. In others, in isolated peoples such as the Alaloi, the virus at any moment might explode into billions of lethal bullets of protein and DNA that would fract the neurons of the victim's brain into a warm red jelly.

'The Devaki ... were only one tribe of Alaloi,' Danlo said. 'But there are many others.'

'And you would bring them a cure for this dormant Plague virus?' Isas Lel asked.

'If I can. Truly, I ... must.'

Isas Lel looked at Kistur Ashtoreth, and then said, 'We would help you find this cure, if we could. We would gladly give you this information. Also, you ask the location of Tannahill's star. We would like to give you this information, too, however ...'.

'Yes?'

'It's difficult to give information to one who doesn't give freely in return.'

Danlo clenched his jaws together so tightly that his teeth hurt. The Narain, it seemed, despite their pretensions toward transcendence, were really just as acquisitive and stingy with their possessions as merchants.

'All that I could give to you ... I would give,' Danlo said.

'But we've already asked you where the Star of Neverness lies, and you haven't given us this information.'

'But it is not mine to give!' Danlo almost shouted. For a moment, he almost considered telling Isas Lel the star's fixed-points, which would have been completely useless information to anyone except a pilot trained in the mathematics of probabilistic topology. But he could not reveal this secret, and so he said nothing. 'I ...

have taken vows.'

'Oh, you've taken vows, of course,' Isas Lel chided.

'I do not see ... why you would wish to know where Neverness lies.'

'Oh, we don't really care where your world lies. But we would like to know how you've fallen so far across the stars.'

'I ... have been lucky,' Danlo said truthfully as he thought of the manifold's many twisting s.p.a.ces that he had barely escaped. 'I have had such rare good chance fall upon me.'

'Oh, luck, perhaps but there's also a great deal of skill in being a pilot, isn't there?

If you would give us anything, we would ask for these skills.'

'It ... is not easy to be a pilot,' Danlo said.

'But would you teach us what you know?'

As Danlo spoke with Isas Lel and the other Transcendentals, it became clear that the piloting skills of the Narain and the Architects of the Old Church were quite crude. It had taken years for Liljana ivi Narai's deepships to cross the few light-years from Tannahill to Alumit; in the last ten centuries, the Old Church's pilots had barely managed to establish pathways among the seventy-two worlds of what they called the Known Stars. In part, this was because they had the bad luck to live within the Vild, where the manifold was as dangerous and deranged as a Scutari shahzadix in heat.

But Danlo attributed most of their ignorance to the Old Church's age-old contempt (and fear) of pure mathematics. In this, of course, they were not alone. In truth, of all the peoples among the stars of whom Danlo had ever known, only the cantors and pilots of Neverness had loved mathematics so fiercely that they freely gave their lives to their art. In the icy spires and towers (and lightships) of Neverness alone, of all the cities of man, mathematics had reached its fullest and most beautiful flowering. This love and deep knowledge was the Order's true power, and as with all power, it was not easily acquired nor given away.

'To become a pilot takes many years,' Danlo said.

'We Narain are a patient people,' Isas Lel said as he stared at Danlo.

'In this becoming ... there are many dangers,' Danlo said.Pilots die this was a saying that Danlo had learned when he had first walked through the stone archway to the pilots' college, Resa.

'On our journey to Alumit Bridge, we Narain have known many dangers.'

'I ... am no teacher,' Danlo said.

'But you could teach what you know, couldn't you?'

'No my Order allows only master pilots and other masters to teach.' Danlo neglected to tell Isas Lel that after the accomplishments of his journey into the Vild stars, upon returning to the new Academy on Thiells, he would almost certainly be elevated to his mastership.

'Your Order lives by its rules, doesn't it?'

'Yes,' Danlo admitted.

And then, when he saw Isas Lel's face begin its fall into defeat and anger, he knew that he might have a rare chance to win this difficult man's goodwill.

'If you truly desire your people to be pilots ... there might be a way.'

Now Isas Lel's eyes fell upon Danlo like laser lights.

'Please tell us,' Isas Lel said.

'My Order has always made new pilots,' Danlo said. And cetics and eschatologists and historians and- 'Of course, from your people on Neverness, you've trained pilots.'

'No, from many peoples. Many peoples of the Civilized Worlds send their children to Neverness ... to complete their education.'

For a while Isas Lel played with the plastic fabric of his robot's seat while he thought about this. Then he said, 'Are you saying that we should send our children thirty thousand light-years across s.p.a.ce to this Star of Neverness?'

'No,' Danlo said with a sad smile. 'That would not be possible. But on the planet Thiells, very soon, there will be a new Academy. You ... could send your children there.'

This, too, was the power of the Order. For a long time, the elite of the Civilized Worlds had sent their brightest children to Neverness to be educated. They always hoped that their daughters and sons would return bearing jewels of knowledge wrested from the Academy's cold stone halls. And sometimes they did return. But the spires of Neverness and the Order's ineffable spirit almost always worked a deep magic upon them. The once-parochial children of the Civilized Worlds returned as Ordermen, in their hearts, and not as Yarkonans or Silvaplanaians or Thorskallers. In its way, the Order had always been as subversive as it was sublime. However, Danlo neglected to tell Isas Lel this. As an emissary to the Narain, it was Danlo's duty to practice diplomacy, even if he hated the hidden lies that this required of him.

'To send our children to your new Academy that is a great opportunity,' Isas Lel said.

'Yes,' Danlo agreed. 'Many have found it so.'

Isas Lel's face fell rigid with control, and his eyes were now as hard as sapphires.

'And if we were to tell you the location of Tannahill's star and you were to journey there would you also offer this opportunity to the Old Church?'

'I ... might have to.'

He fears the Old Church, Danlo thought. And even more he fears letting his fear be seen.

'It's not possible that the Church Elders would ever allow their children to be educated by namans of some unknown Order,' Lieswyr Ivioss pointed out, acidly.

'I agree,' Isas Lel said, after some thought. 'But that does not imply that they would be uninterested in this young pilot's art.'

He fears that the Architects will torture me for this knowledge, Danlo thought. For a moment, he sat perfectly still, feeling what it would be like for some Elder Architect or master torturer to twist a needle knife up the optic nerve of his eye into his brain.

But why should he fear this so?

'But clearly,' Kistur Ashtoreth added, 'it would be almost impossible for the Elders to learn much of this art unless they did send their children to this Academy on Thiells wherever Thiells actually lies.'

'Can we be sure of this?' Ananda Narcavage asked.

'Can we be sure of anything?' Kistur Ashtoreth replied.

Although Danlo appreciated the Transcendentals speaking so freely, with him sitting there on a little red cushion before them, he knew that much remained unsaid.

'How can we be sure?' Isas Lel added. 'That's a difficult question.'