How can they be sure of me, Danlo thought. That is what they truly wish to know.

'Of course,' Patar Iviaslin said, 'if the Old Church did send their children to this Academy, it's impossible that they would excel in the pilot's art as would our children.'

'To enter this manifold that Danlo wi Soli Ringess has spoken of so eloquently must be something like interfacing the Field.' This came from Yenene Iviastalir, who liked to speculate on metaphysics as well as practicalities. 'I should think our children would have an advantage here.'

They must doubt whether they should trust, Danlo thought. They must doubt that the rewards of trusting me to journey to Tannahill would be worth the risk.

'Perhaps our children would also have much to learn from the Order's cetics,' Isas Lel said. He fingered the clearface above his forehead as he smiled at Danlo. He still seemed to be somewhat awed by Danlo's display of cetic virtuosity.

But what risk? Danlo wondered. What is their true fear?

Once, years before, Hanuman li Tosh had taught Danlo the cetic's art of face reading; he had taught Danlo that the body's conditioned responses of muscle and the deeper nerves always betrayed the secret workings of the mind. An arching of an eyebrow, a pursing of the lips, a twitch of a finger any of these motions could tell the tale of what one was thinking. Thus, if a cetic knew how to interpret the tells, as these subtle body signs were called, he could read one's true fear. But Danlo was no cetic, and even for a master cetic such as the dreaded Audric Pall, these Tran- scendentals would have been hard to read.

'Our children,' Isas Lel said. 'Sometimes hard choices must be made.'

And then, suddenly, like a drop of supercooled water crystallizing into a snowflake, Danlo knew. This was no simple reading of the tells of Isas Lel's smooth and empty face, but rather a revelation out of some strange inner sense, as immediate and compelling as if he had suddenly been plunged into the icy sea.

He fears war, Danlo thought. Ever since the Narain fled to Alumit Bridge, the Old Church has threatened war.

For a moment, as Danlo wondered what it would be like to live under the threat of war, his deep blue eyes were full of light and compa.s.sion. And then he said, 'The lords of the Civilized Worlds ... have chosen to send their children to Neverness for three thousand years. And in this time, there has been no war.'

Isas Lel looked at Danlo strangely. 'Why do you speak of war?' he asked.

'Is it possible,' Danlo asked, 'that war between the Narain and the Old Church ... is possible?'

'Why would you think that?'

All the Transcendentals were trying hard not to look at Danlo, and all guarded their faces as a wormrunner might hide a firestone.

'War... happens,' Danlo said. He did not wish to explain the mysterious callings of his truth sense, and so he fell back upon the logic of human religious history.

'Whenever there is heresy or schism within a religion, war is always possible, yes?'

'Perhaps,' Isas Lel said. 'But why should you so suddenly call our attentions to this possibility?'

Danlo was silent while he stared at Isas Lel, and his eyes were like liquid, blue- black jewels.

'How do you know so much?' Isas Lel finally asked. 'How do you know what you know?'

'This pilot does know things,' Kistur Ashtoreth added. 'I think this Danlo wi Soli Ringess of the Order of Neverness knows about people.'

For a while, no one spoke. Isas Lel and Kistur Ashtoreth, Lieswyr Ivioss and Patar Iviaslin all sat on their motionless plastic robots, staring off into some other world that only they could see. Danlo sensed that they were discussing him, perhaps even deciding something of great importance. After his heart had beaten a hundred and twelve times, Isas Lel finally broke the silence. He bowed his head to Danlo and said, 'It's true, for two hundred years we've lived with the possibility of war. But it was only five years ago that the Old Church sent home our amba.s.sadors and asked theirs to return to Tannahill. They've broken off all exchange of information.'

What Isas Lel told of, then, was a common enough story, repeated countless times since the rise of humankind's first religion millennia ago on Old Earth: a group of once-faithful believers, having grown alienated by their mother church's suffocating ways, come to doubt its doctrines and authority. There is then schism, exodus, a founding of a new church, new beliefs, new rituals an intensely new religious experience of the bodysoul that is thought to be only a return to the church's original spirit. If these heretics possess enough vision and fervour, they will gain converts, even as an avalanche gains power on its explosion down a mountainside. They will gain confidence, too, casting off all doctrines and taboos, creating new theologies, feeling divine joy rush through their veins as if they had drunk the sacred wine of the G.o.ds. They have taken the first steps upon a path for which there is no return, and thus their heresy intensifies. The old church is at first tolerant of these heretics even if they call themselves Transcendentals. After all, they are the church's sons and daughters, and it would be an act of grace to bring them back to the true way toward G.o.d. But no heretic, having tasted the sweet liquor of infinity, will be satisfied with holding only an empty cup in his hands. And so there is no going back to the old church, and as with a woman whose love is spurned, the church grows angry and hateful. Relations between the church and its heretics deteriorate; perhaps they even break off altogether. If this break happens to coincide with the rise to power of the church's extreme orthodoxy, then the threat of war becomes very real. It is the dark side of all religions that there is always a blindly intolerant orthodoxy. With the ancient Kristianity it was the Inquisitors of Seville; with Holism, the Greens; with Zanshin, the Hatoi and with the Edeism of the Cybernetic Universal Church, there was a corps of 'true' Architects known as the Iviomils.

'The Iviomils have called for a facifah,' Isas Lel said. 'A holy war to return us to the Eight Duties either that or to return us to Ede.'

As Danlo would appreciate in the days that followed, the calling to 'return one to Ede' was a euphemism for Church-sanctioned murder.

'It ... is difficult to reason with these Iviomils, yes?'

'It's impossible,' Isas Lel said. 'They despise reason.'

Danlo let his hand rest against the bamboo flute in his leg pocket, and then he sat very still. At last, sensing that Isas Lel and the others hoped that he might help them, he said, 'But there are Architects other than the Iviomils it is possible to reason with these people, yes?'

'Faith without reason is blind,' Isas Lel said. 'The Elders of the Church have appreciated this for three thousand years.'

No, for at least thirty thousand years, Danlo thought. Faith and reason; reason and faith the right and left hands that make all religions what they are.

'The Church Elders ... are open to reason?' Danlo asked.

'Some of them are,' Isas Lel said. 'The High Architect, Harrah Ivi en li Ede, is an exceptionally reasonable woman.'

'But since you no longer have an emba.s.sy on Tannahill, it is no longer possible to reason with her, yes?'

'That is the way things are.'

Danlo looked deeply into Isas Lel's pale, wavering eyes. He thought that there was the beginning of an understanding between them. 'If I were to journey to Tannahill,'

Danlo said, 'it is possible that I might be presented to Harrah Ivi en li Ede, yes?'

'It's more than possible.'

'I might gain her confidence,' Danlo said. 'I might ... reason with her, yes?'

Isas Lel almost smiled, then, though his eyes were still wary. 'Harrah has many enemies, and it wouldn't be easy to converse with her openly.'

'I see.'

'And she has a brilliant mind like the diamond of your lightship, Pilot, it's clear and almost perfectly ordered but not easily penetrated.'

Here Danlo smiled as he thought of his lightship abandoned on the uppermost level of the city somewhere high above him. If the Narain had tried to open it or scan its contents, they almost certainly would have failed. Nothing much less than the blast of a hydrogen bomb (or a supernova) could open a sealed lightship.

'If one knows the right words,' Danlo said, 'it is always possible to open another's mind.'

He remembered, then, something that his Fravashi teacher had once said to him: The human mind is made with words. And that which is made with words, with words can be unmade.

'You're truthful in your words, and you speak with grace, too,' Isas Lel said.

Again, Danlo smiled. Although his found-father, Haidar, had taught him always to speak the truth, he attributed any grace with words only to the translating skills of the devotionary computer's Ede program.

'It's possible,' Isas Lel said, 'that you could find new words to open Harrah Ivi en li Ede's mind. You have a way of opening people to themselves, Pilot. I think we've all seen that.'

Danlo, sitting straight on his cushion, looked up at the half-circle of Transcendentals safe in their robots. Each man and woman (and manwoman), he saw, was now smiling at him.

'Kistur Ashtoreth was right,' Isas Lel said. 'You know about people. And you know things that should be impossible for you to know perhaps you might know how to help us avoid this war.'

Danlo's heart was now beating quick and light, like a sparrowhawk's.

'If we were to tell you of Tannahill's star,' Isas Lel said, 'would you speak for us with the Church Elders?'

'Yes,' Danlo said.

'You have your mission, your calling to your Order, too,' Isas Lel said. 'We wouldn't ask you to compromise this but if you journeyed to Tannahill, would you also be our emissary?'

'Yes.' Danlo said. And then he thought, I have almost accomplished what I must accomplish.

'An emissary of peace,' Isas Lel repeated. 'All we want is peace.'

Danlo bowed his head in silence for a moment. He remembered, then, that his Fravashi teacher had once bestowed upon him the name of Danlo Peacewise.

'We'd like to point out Tannahill's star for you to see,' Isas Lel said.

With the warm flush of triumph spreading like coffee-wine through his veins, Danlo looked up at the dome beyond the Transcendentals. He expected to see the star scene return in a flash of brilliant lights, but this did not happen.

'We'd like to show you this star, but unfortunately, we can't.'

'You ... cannot,' Danlo said. He drew in a breath of air and held it until his lungs began to burn.

'It's not our decision to make.'

The scene on the chatoy walls, Danlo saw, was still that of the sunset. In all the time they had spent talking, the b.l.o.o.d.y red sun of Alumit Bridge had dropped scarcely an inch below the glowing horizon.

'I ... do not understand,' Danlo said. He looked at Lieswyr Ivioss, all haughty and self-willed beneath her glittering clearface, and the shy, quiet Diverous Te, and all the others. 'You ... call yourselves the Transcendentals, yes? Of all the Narain, are you not the ones to make this decision?'

'We are the ones,' Isas Lel said, 'but we are not.'

'You are ... and you are not,' Danlo said. 'You-'

'I,' Isas Lel said, interrupting, 'am only one of many. As with the others.'

Danlo looked at the pretty sunset, the streaks of amethyst and carmine burning across the low sky. He said, 'Yes, one of many. I had thought that all of you, together, speaking together within the interface of what you call the Field ... would make this decision.'

Isas Lel shook his head. 'I must explain myself more dearly. I am one of many who are one. But none of the others whom you have met today are of this one.'

'What ... one?'

'My name, our name, is Abraxax. Only Abraxax is the Transcended One.'

Just then Danlo remembered their initial conversation by light radio, with Danlo and his lightship floating in s.p.a.ce some three hundred miles above the planet. This proud Transcendental had first identified himself by the full name of Isas Lel Abraxax.

'And my name,' Kistur Ashtoreth said, 'is Manannan.' As Isas Lel then explained, each Transcendental was part of a group self, and each of these selves had a name.

For instance, Isas Lel's transcended self, as he called it, was a sevenplex: across Alumit Bridge, in Megina and Kelkarq and other cities, there lived six other Transcendentals with whom he shared selfness. In the cybernetic s.p.a.ce of the Field, which was as timeless and locationless as a dream, they would choose a moment to meet and merge. From their many talents and personalities Isas Lel's sense of purpose, Omar Iviorvan's kindness, Duscha li Lan's imperturbability, and so on they would a.s.semble a single cybernetic ent.i.ty. Thus each Transcendental was one of many who were one a Transcended One. Lieswyr Ivioss was one of a triad named Shahar; Diverous Te shared selfness with the famous Maralah quad. Although a few maverick Transcendentals in the other cities of Alumit Bridge entered the Field as only singletons, this was uncommon. The ideal, as Isas Lel explained, was to go beyond and transcend the single self. And so the Transcendentals claimed to have done. If Isas Lel could be believed, these higher cybernetic selves were as real and complete as ordinary human beings limited by existence in the everyday world only they were almost as powerful and intelligent as G.o.ds.'It is the Transcended Ones who are the lords of the Narain,' Isas Lel explained. 'We may meet with you in this facing chamber to tell you what they decide, but it is we as they who must meet within the Field to come to a decision.'

'I ... see,' Danlo said. Though, in truth, he could not understand what it might mean to merge with another as a higher cybernetic ent.i.ty. 'Then you are interfacing your higher self, this Transcended One ... almost continually.'

For a moment, Isas Lel's little eyes seemed almost to disappear from his head. And then he told Danlo, 'Yes, almost.'

'Then this meeting of selves, this conclave of your higher ones this also is occurring almost continually, yes?'

'Even as we speak, Danlo wi Soli Ringess.'

'You must decide if you can trust me, yes? Are you ... close to a decision, then?'

'No, we are not close. There are many Transcendentals, many Ones.'

According to Isas Lel, in all the cities of Alumit Bridge, there were exactly sixteen thousand, six hundred and nine Transcendentals who had surrendered themselves to merge into four thousand and eighty-four higher ent.i.ties. Of these, the most prominent were Abraxax, Manannan, Tyr, Shahar, Maralah, El and Kane. That the Transcendentals in the facing chamber shared selfness with one or other of these ent.i.ties was no accident. Iviunir was the first and most prominent city on the planet, the city to which all Transcendentals aspired to live if they were worthy.

'How could I ... help you to your decision?' Danlo asked.

'I'm sorry, Pilot, there's nothing you can do now.'

'Nothing ... truly?'

Isas Lel Abraxax, who had come to suspect something of Danlo's wild spirit during their brief time together, looked at him sharply and asked, 'What are you thinking?'

Almost casually, Danlo drew his shakuhachi out of its pocket in his robe. He held it lightly between his hands, but he did not play it. 'If I could speak with Abraxax and Manannan, these Transcended Ones ... perhaps I could help them make their decision.'

'But you are speaking to them,' Lieswyr Ivioss reminded him. 'Now, through us, the Ones hear your every word.'

'Yes, but if I could speak with them face to face, I might give them more than just words.'

'Face to face?' Patar Iviaslin choked out in a high, outraged voice. 'What do you think you mean by this?'

And then Ananda Narcavage, she of the El twelve, looked at him and demanded, 'Are you asking to enter the Field and interface the Transcended Ones?'

'Yes,' Danlo said, quickly, boldly, wildly. 'I would face them if I could.'

In the dead silence that followed Danlo's astonishing proposal, all the Transcendentals could only stare at him. He might as well have suggested taking part in the warrior-poets' knife ceremony or helping a Scutari shahzadix with her multiple matings and the ritual cannibalism that concluded this sacred blood orgy.

And then Isas Lel cleared his throat and sucked some water from a clear plastic tube that his robot dangled in front of him. He said, 'Well, sometimes the common people may face with Transcended Ones. We must never become unapproachable.'

'Yes, of course,' Ananda Narcavage said. 'But this Danlo wi Soli Ringess, a pilot of an unknown star, a naman-'

'A naman, enter the Field and face a Transcended One?' Lieswyr Ivioss exclaimed.

'No, no that would be impossible.'

But, of course, it was possible, and Isas Lel reminded the others that this was so.

'To pilot his ship across the stars, Danlo wi Soli Ringess must enter the field that he calls the manifold.'

At this Danlo almost smiled, but the pain above his eye, where his headaches came, drove all amus.e.m.e.nt from his face. He thought that Isas Lel couldn't truly understand about the manifold. In truth, the manifold wasn't merely just another cybernetic s.p.a.ce or surreality; it was something much, much deeper perhaps even deep reality itself.

'And Danlo wi Soli Ringess has been trained by his Order's cetics, by these cyber- shamans who are said to be masters of the cybernetic s.p.a.ces.'

This, at least, was true. Danlo was pleased that Isas Lel should champion his proposal to enter the Field. And then Lieswyr Ivioss, who had seemed antagonistic to Danlo and all his hopes, abruptly changed her manner. 'Perhaps,' she said, 'Danlo wi Soli Ringess should be allowed to face a Transcended One. If he proves worthy, perhaps we should allow him to enter the Field.'