For the twentieth time that morning, the eyes of Isas Lel and Lieswyr Ivioss and the others hardened, as of clear water freezing into cloudy white ice. And then, some moments later, they returned to full consciousness of the facing chamber and of Danlo, who was still sitting patiently before them.

'It has been decided,' Isas Lel finally said. He seemed ill at ease, almost embarra.s.sed.

Danlo waited for him to say more, then asked, 'Yes?'

'It's been decided that telling you the location of Tannahill requires a decision of all the Transcended Ones.'

'I ... see.'

'Some believe that this decision would best be made if you could enter the Field and face the Ones.'

'Truly?'

'Unfortunately, however, others do not.'

'I see.'

'The decision as to allow you to enter the Field is itself difficult. But we have decided that this decision must be made.'

'You have decided ... only this?'

'I'm sorry, Pilot. But we Narain have no single ruling lord, as does your Order. We make our decisions well but not easily.'

'No,' Danlo said. 'Not easily.'

'And so we must ask you to wait while we decide if you're to enter the Field. Will you wait a while longer, Danlo wi Soli Ringess?'

All the Transcendentals were watching Danlo, waiting to see what his decision would be. Danlo bowed his head and told them, 'Yes, if you'd like, I will wait.'

'Very well,' Isas Lel said. 'An apartment has been prepared for you. A robot will take you there.'

So saying, Isas Lel looked at the facing chamber's red plastic doors, which suddenly slid open. An empty robot wheeled into the room and stopped only inches short of where Danlo sat. Danlo understood that his meeting with the Transcendentals was over. He rose up from his cushion, slid his flute back into its pocket, and reached down to grasp the devotionary computer. He held this miraculous translating machine close to his belly. As he settled into the robot's softly-cushioned seat, his back was turned to seven very curious men and women. And so, for a moment, with his body shielding the Ede imago from their watchful eyes, he was able to look down and behold the signs that Ede was flashing him. Ede's hands and little fingers of light fluttered like flying insects. And the meaning of these cetic signs was clear: 'Beware any invitation to enter this s.p.a.ce they call the Field. Beware of Lieswyr Ivioss and her Transcended One called Shahar.''Yes?' Danlo whispered.

And Ede signed back, 'There are many who wouldn't want you to journey to Tannahill. And so they will try to trap you within the Field. Like a bee is trapped by the nectar of a fireflower. Like a moth is trapped by light.'

Danlo closed his eyes for a moment as he considered this. And then he whispered, 'Yes, I see.'

'Let's leave this place while we can, Pilot. Before it's too late.'

'No ... I will not leave yet.'

'Then let the Transcended Ones make their decision without you. Don't face them within the Field.'

Danlo smiled to himself as he rubbed the scar that marked his aching head. 'But I must face them,' he said. 'If I can, I ... will.'

After that, almost without a sound, the robot began to roll away from Isas Lel and his transcendent friends. They quickly rolled through the open doorway, into the bright, plastic corridors leading to the streets of the city of Iviunir.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Fields

There is no matter without form, and no form not dependent upon matter.

- saying of the cetics.

While awaiting the decision of the Transcendent Ones of Alumit Bridge, Danlo was given a small apartment on the city's seventeenth level overlooking a huge and busy street called Elidi Boulevard. As he would soon discover, of course, it was actually no smaller than any other apartment in Iviunir; like Scutari nymphs in their feeding boxes, the Narain required little living s.p.a.ce. His five rooms were tiny, separated from one another by thin walls of white plastic: there was a bathing room where he might cleanse his body, a multrum barely large enough to allow for squatting and voiding oneself of wastes, a facing cell almost the same size, a sleeping chamber, and barbarically a kitchen. Danlo had always regarded the private consumption of food to be a shameful and barbaric thing, but the Narain lived according to different sensibilities, preferring convenience to company; it was their way to voice their immediate hungers to their ministrant robots, to wait silently a few seconds while these semi-sentient machines lit the light ovens in the kitchen, and then to recline on soft white carpets of spun plastic in their sleeping chambers, there to swallow their meals of tasteless factory foods in solitude. It was a bad way to live, but then, as Isas Lei had warned Danlo, the Narain preferred to let their robots live for them. In Danlo's free moments he searched the city for signs of true human life, but found few instances of that warm, earthy, marvellous quality he thought of simply as livingness.

The Narain did not gather in restaurants to talk about the events of the day; they did not meet friends in public squares or in cafes or in shops. In the whole city, he could find no park or agora that served to focus the Narain's appreciation of one another.

Many times, on the streets, he sought to engage men or women (or womenmen) in conversation, but it seemed that no one wanted to talk with him. They hurried past him as they hurried past each other. Theirs was a cold and terrible isolation from one another, and yet Danlo never sensed that the Narain disliked each other or were fundamentally misanthropes, as were, for instance, the exemplars of Bodhi Luz. In truth, Danlo attributed the Narain's unsociability to shyness. It was almost as if they had never learned to meet each other eye to eye, to inquire as to a friend's well-being, to smile and laugh and open their hearts to the sounds of their lovers' hearts to take joy in the light of each other's soul. An alien (or a stranger), proceeding down the plastic walkway of the Elidi Boulevard, might have thought that the thousands of single-minded human beings rushing by in their plastic kimonos were not really human. He might have thought that they were not really alive, or worse, that they were more robotlike than any robot. In a way, this was true. To be in the world, sar en getik, for almost any good Narain, was to be not truly alive. In truth the Narain lived only to return to the cleanliness of their apartments, to pull their silver heaumes over their heads and lie down in their facing cells. And there, in their dark apartments, in their millions, stacked one on top of the other like corpses in a funeral ship, they would close their eyes and enter into the many glittering s.p.a.ces of the Field. There they would merge and be as one. Some pursued the bliss of cybernetic samadhi; some sought union in the integration into higher selves; a few desired little more than the exchange of information with other minds. It was only after Danlo had risked his life talking with a gang of young rebels whose tattooed faces proclaimed them the a.s.sa.s.sins of Ede that he began to understand the Narain people and to perceive the paradox of their way of life: as great as was their isolation from each other out on the streets, their sense of common purpose within the Field was even greater. This purpose remained for Danlo unclear. Once or twice, however, as he might make out the shape of a great white bear stalking him across miles of sea ice, he thought that he had caught sight of the Narain's dream. If he had been allowed to enter the Field freely like any of the common Narain, he might have entered this consensus hallucination and beheld all its hubris and horror. But in the facing cell of his apartment there was no heaume for him to place upon his head. The Transcendentals, it seemed, had allowed him every freedom in the city except the only one that really mattered, they had told him that he must wait for the decision of the Transcendent Ones, and wait he must.

And so Danlo began to study the syntax and words of modern Church Istwan. He had much time in which to learn this rather difficult language and much need to learn it. While walking the city streets and boulevards, of course, he could and did use the translating program of his devotionary computer to converse with the rare indi- viduals who consented to talk with him. But if he were to journey to Tannahill this wouldn't do. To employ the hologram of Nikolos Daru Ede as a mere translator would be sacrilege: 'You would probably be killed on sight,' Isas Lel had warned Danlo. 'The Worthy Architects would rip the devotionary from your hands and swarm upon you and tear you into pieces.' On Neverness Danlo might have acquired Istwan almost instantly by placing his brain beneath the heaume of an imprinter, but the Narain knew little of this difficult art of repatterning the neural pathways. Fortunately, he was good at learning languages. He already had his milk tongue, Alaloi, and he had mastered Moksha as well as the Language of the Civilized Worlds. He was almost fluent in Zanshin and Yarkoning, and he knew more than most humans of those impossible alien languages, Fravash and Scutaruil. To learn the long way the syntax of Istwan was no great problem as it was one of the hundreds of granddaughter languages of Ancient Anglish, which Danlo had once studied as a novice. Then too, Danlo had a phenomenal memory, and it was no great feat for him to learn a thousand new words each day. Soon he found himself able to converse with the Narain without the aid of his devotionary computer. The Ede imago warned Danlo against talking with everyday people without the benefit of his translating services. 'It's too danger- ous,' Ede told Danlo. 'These people might misunderstand you and kill you for making some casual slight. Or you might misunderstand them and gain false knowledge of this world. You might base your future actions on this knowledge and thus be destroyed.'

Ede almost begged Danlo to accompany him on his outings into the city, and out of a strange loyalty he acquiesced. But as Danlo grew more confident of his ability to speak Istwan, he found himself ignoring Ede's translations and especially Ede's never-ending and very tiresome premonitions of doom. Danlo took one of the gravity lifts down to the dangerous Trachang Estates on Iviunir's seventh level, and he sought out the a.s.sa.s.sins of Ede and other nihilists. These angry young men (and women), with their hideous orange facial markings, were outsiders in the most literal sense: not only did they remove themselves from the cultural life of the Narain, but they longed for life outside the Field, in truth, outside the city altogether. Danlo sat with them before illegal methane fires, drinking coffee-wine from a common cup pa.s.sed around a circle. And he enchanted them with stories of his childhood, of carving ivory walrus tusks and picking berries from yu trees and skiing through great green forests all sparkling with ice and real snow. It always amused (and disturbed) Danlo that he should so readily make friends of outlaws in whatever society he encountered. Like other outlaws in other places, the a.s.sa.s.sins at least the most intelligent of them shared many valuable perceptions of the culture they reviled. It was from one of these, a rather b.l.o.o.d.y-minded woman named Shatara Iviow, that Danlo began to acquire a true sense of the Narain exodus to Alumit Bridge and their brazen heresy.

For instance, most of the Narain did not in any way deny the idea of Ede as G.o.d.

However, they did reject the rather narrow Ede of the Algorithm, especially its first three books, which were known as the First Trigon. (These 'books' are The Life of Ede, The Birth of Ede the G.o.d, and Last Things.) Actually, few of the Narain had wholly rejected the Algorithm itself; most sensible people merely ignored the legalistic interpretations of the Algorithm, even as they tried to forget the rulings of the Jurridik and the Iviomils and other sects of the Old Church orthodoxy. It was enough that they should cast off all the Algorithm's most harmful and archaic doctrines. And it was more than enough for the boldest of them to take the final and blasphemous step of attempting to become as Ede possibly the most dreaded idea of the Cybernetic Universal Church. It was signified by a single word, the forbidden verb hakaru. Among the Narain, especially the Transcendentals, there were many who had already hakariad, become hakras, these would-be G.o.ds whom the Old Church condemned and executed on sight. As Shatara Iviow observed, the Narain had much in common with the Free Fanyas, an ancient heretical group who had attempted to find G.o.d in rocks or trees or even in plastic spoons in everything. The Fanyas, it seemed, had taught not that Ede would grow to absorb the entire universe, but that all people and all things may return to its divine source and be reabsorbed into G.o.d. For the Fanyas, this reabsorption occurred at death, or more rarely, during those moments of grace that they called facivi, which was the mystical melting of one's face into the universal face of G.o.d. The Narain had personalized and mechanized this search for the divine; they not only found G.o.d in themselves but found themselves as potential G.o.ds. Indeed, when they faced the Field's glittering electron flows and fell into those eyeless frenzies called cybernetic samadhi, they claimed to have achieved union with the G.o.dhead. One of the Narain, Tadeo Aharagni, claimed union and ident.i.ty with Ede Himself. Many Narain felt this union to be the very spirit of Edeism as it was in the early days of the Church. Although they knew that even the most radical of the Church sects the mystical Elidis taught that man could only draw close to Ede, they scorned this doctrine. Theirs was the hubris of wanting to become as Ede, and this was a crucially and fatally different idea. This was heresy, blasphemy, an unforgivable sin against the ineffable and eternal phenomenon of G.o.d.

'All they think of is G.o.d,' Shatara Iviow said to Danlo over cups of low quality coffee-wine that tasted of plastic. She was an angry woman who had turned upon her people, the Narain, as a female mantis might devour its mate after copulation. 'They're worse than the Readers of the Old Church. G.o.d, G.o.d, G.o.d, G.o.d how I hate this obsession with divinity. It kills the true human spirit, you know. It's really He who keeps man from being man.'

Rather than allow G.o.d to destroy humanity, the a.s.sa.s.sins of Ede had pledged themselves to killing G.o.d. To do this, they disfigured their faces as a symbolic protest against the Narain's compulsion to interface the Field at every possible moment. They stood on the streets preaching the virtues of the human soul; with shards of prikit plastic broken off from computers that they vandalized, they slashed their faces or their foreheads, letting their blood flow over their white robes as a reminder that for human beings, the true life-force was liquid and red and real not merely some insubstantial program or bits of information written into a machine. Some a.s.sa.s.sins suspended their hatred of the unreal and dared to face the Field. There they entered into the great, glittering conversation of the Narain people, and argued before millions that man alone must be the measure of all things. Or else they turned to terror, engineering information viruses and sleeper programs that might fract the ident.i.ties of the Transcended Ones, or possibly, cause the entire Field to collapse and melt down.

The more ferocious a.s.sa.s.sins Shatara Iviow was one of these believed in a truer terror. In gangs of two or ten, they burgled apartments, destroyed facing cells, used their big steel hammers to smash the delicate facing heaumes or any other religious artefact or item of cybernetica that they found. A few a.s.sa.s.sins actually attempted to a.s.sa.s.sinate the Transcendentals. With knives or eye tlolts, they sought out men such as Isas Lel. Once, only a year before Danlo's arrival, an a.s.sa.s.sin had cooked up a bomb out of alumino plastic and had almost blown up one of the Transcendental's sanctuaries. Danlo, who wouldn't have harmed a single one of the tiny, plastic-eating mehalchins that plagued the city, hated this kind of violence. But he never judged the a.s.sa.s.sins, nor did he try to convert them to his way of ahimsa. In truth, he deeply understood the pa.s.sion for violence, particularly the soul-searing purification of the self that the best of the a.s.sa.s.sins practiced. To kill the need for G.o.d in oneself only this was a sublime idea. Although Danlo knew almost all there was to know about deep hatreds and the wilful mutilation of the self, he could never quite countenance the denial of G.o.d. That the a.s.sa.s.sins still conceived G.o.d as Ede amused Danlo. Once or twice, he considered informing them that Ede, Himself the great machine G.o.d who had existed saru en getika. in the real universe of planets and stars was dead.

But he did not tell them this, sensing that the whole purpose and ident.i.ty of the a.s.sa.s.sins was formed in opposition to the idea of Ede. If this idea were destroyed, they would have nothing, not even their nihilism and hate.

Similarly, the Narain, as a people, found much of their meaning in opposition to the Old Church. Some of the Transcendentals, such as Patar Iviaslin, liked to believe that their two hundred year old religious experiment on Alumit Bridge was a journey into total freedom like an infinite lotus opening up its uncountable golden petals into s.p.a.ce. But Danlo, as a true outsider, could not see it in this light. As with all human beings, the Narain had their myths and their unconscious beliefs that they did not know how to question. Their whole way of life including all their most extreme practices sprang from these beliefs. And so Danlo never told them of the life and death of Nikolos Daru Ede. He kept secret his dread of the Field; he let no one know how deeply the Narain's faith in cybernetic salvation both amused and horrified him.

One day, the Transcendentals sent a bright yellow robot to the doors of Danlo's apartment. It bore him through the tunnel-like streets between blocks of old buildings, back along the great Elidi Boulevard and the city's other thoroughfares. Eventually, it brought him to the Transcendentals' sanctuary. There, as before, the robot rolled through long hallways blighted with various strains of bluish mehalchins growing from the pitted plastic walls. It was almost as if the meeting chamber hadn't changed in the many days since Danlo's first audience with the Transcendentals. The domed chatoy walls still ran with the colours of Alumit Bridge's violet-red sun that never set; at the centre of the room sat the chromium tea service and fat red cushion; the Transcendentals, with their golden clearfaces gleaming atop their hairless skulls, sat waiting eyelessly in their robots. Only the flowers were different. In the two plastic vases near the cushion, the brilliant orange and azure alien flowers had wilted and dried to a dead black. The Transcendentals Isas Lel, Kistur Ashtoreth, Diverous Te, Yenene Iviastalir, Lieswyr Ivioss, Ananda Narcavage and Patar Iviaslin apparently had overlooked this little death. Although they must have returned to their apartments for bathing, food and rest since meeting Danlo, they seemed not to have moved for many days.

'Danlo wi Soli Ringess of Neverness welcome,' Isas Lel said. He invited Danlo to remain seated on his robot as if he had suddenly become an equal with the Transcen- dentals. But Danlo preferred the cushion on the floor, and so he stepped over to it and sat there crosslegged, waiting as straight and silent as a yu tree.

'We've good news for you,' Isas Lel said. 'A decision as to your request to face the Transcended Ones has been reached.'

Danlo removed his flute from its pocket and sat holding it in his hands. He looked from Isas Lel to the vacant-eyed Diverous Te, from Transcendental to Transcendental, face to face. Already, it seemed, most of these seven had entered the Field to interface their higher selves.

'Yes?' Danlo asked at last.

'You will be allowed to enter the Field,' Isas Lel said. Of all the Transcendentals present, he seemed the only one even half-aware of Danlo. 'It has been decided you may plea your mission with the Transcended Ones.'

'Thank you,' Danlo said.

He looked down at the many jewelled eyes of the devotionary computer that he had set upon the floor and wondered about the optics of these glittering, insect-like eyes, how the shapes and colours of the world must appear to this programmable machine.

He might have wondered, too, how the Transcendentals appeared to the hologram of Nikolos Daru Ede, but of this non-mystery there could be little doubt. Don't do it! the Ede hologram signed to Danlo. Don't let these spiders trap you in their cybernetic webs and suck away your mind!

Danlo smiled at this very organic metaphor. And then he looked at Isas Lel and asked. 'When may I face the ... Transcended Ones?'

'Now,' Isas Lel said. 'This is why we've brought you here. But first we must acquaint you with the Field's topography. We will guide you where you must go.'

They can't allow themselves to trust you, Ede signed. There is much that they would hide from you, and so you mustn't trust them.

As if Danlo were a child or a cripple (or a spy), Isas Lel would guide Danlo through the Field's information pools. All that Danlo saw, Isas Lel would see, too; no word that Danlo spoke would fall unnoticed upon Isas Lel's inner ear.

'You ... will share thoughts.p.a.ce with me, yes?' Danlo asked.

'Well, I will be able to exchange thoughts with you,' Isas Lel said. 'But only those thoughts that you and I encode as words.'

'I see.'

'Shall we begin now, then?' Isas Lel asked.

'If you'd like.'

'Very well. Then if you'll close your eyes, I'll take you to the Transcended Ones.'

Just then the room began to darken, and Danlo closed his eyes. As a novice in Neverness, in the dark, steamy cells of the library, Danlo had often immersed himself in tanks of warm salt water as he reached out with his mind to interface the Order's great information pools. He had lain naked beneath the deep purple neurologic scanners that read the electrochemical events of his brain. In many ways, sitting on the floor of the meeting room was similar in experience. There was the darkness and the quiet though this was not nearly so profound as the almost total suspension of the body's outer senses that one felt while floating in one of the library's cells. Danlo supposed that the computers behind the meeting room's chatoy walls must generate a much more powerful logic field than did the library's little, organic cells. In truth, the whole meeting room was much like a librarian's cell, and even more like a cetic's heaume that encased one's head only much, much larger. This was an evolved technology that the Order could scarcely afford, except perhaps in the null rooms of the cetic's tower. But it was not a wholly unfamiliar technology. Already, a moment after Danlo closed his eyes, the computers of the meeting room infused images directly into the visual cortex at the back of Danlo's brain. In the meeting room, around his face and eyes, all was darkness. But inside him, behind his eyes, suddenly, there was light. There was sound and shape, direction and colour, and the cybernetic s.p.a.ce of the Field opened before him.

Are you all right, Pilot? Is this comfortable for you?

The meeting room's scanning computers read the words of Isas Lel, formed up in the language centres of his brain. Other computers encoded these words as electrical impulses and stimulated the nerves of Danlo's inner ear. And so Danlo 'heard' Isas Lel's raspy voice whispering inside his head.

Yes, thank you ... I am all right.

Can you move? If you can, why don't you begin with an information pool. Any one will do.

In the silent meeting room, sitting on his cushion with his eyes tightly closed, Danlo realized that he was being tested. He smiled to himself, for the movement through information pools was the most fundamental of cybernetic skills. The cetics of his Order called this sense of motion 'seeking'. Even a child, he thought, knew how to face a data s.p.a.ce and seek for information.

Are all your pools open to me, then? Or are any of them forbidden?

All are open, Pilot. We believe in free information.

I see.

But I must ask you not to enter any of the astronomy pools.

I ... see. If you ask this, then I will not.

Otherwise, you may choose whichever pool you wish.

I see. I may drink of any pool ... but only those that I can find.

What do you mean?

The easiest way to hide a pool ... is by locating it inside an ocean.

You're clever, Pilot.

No, it is just the opposite.

Very clever. But are you clever enough to find whatever you might seek? We shall see, Pilot. We shall see.

With his mind, Danlo moved forth toward the information that he sought like a thirsty man crossing the desert who hoped to find a pool of clear, cool water; but the information flowing before him was less like a pool than a raging ocean. And the water was turbid with sediments, salty and undrinkable.

Well, Pilot?

No one no human being can absorb very much information. Can a man drink the sea? No, and neither can he find his way across it unless he has a compa.s.s or bright stars to light his way. Even a master cetic would be helpless and blind if cast adrift on a chaotic information s.p.a.ce. However, no human society has ever gathered up trillions of random bits of information and simply dumped them into one, huge collective pool. Information, to be useful, is always selected, interpreted, weighted, encoded, processed, organized. And human beings, with their very human brains that are much the same from the exemplars of Bodhi Luz to the Ihrie Nebula G.o.d-men, all seem to organize information in only a few basic ways. As the master librarian, Elia Jesaitis, had once taught Danlo, all information systems have their own logic. Being a pilot of the Order, Danlo was nothing if not a logical man. (Except, of course, when he fled from logic as a newly-hatched bird breaks free from its egg.) Logic was the key to unlocking whatever informational secrets one sought logic and also the various cybernetic senses that Danlo's masters had helped him to develop when he first came to Neverness as a wild young man so many years before.You hesitate, Pilot. It's overwhelming, isn't it?

For a moment, Danlo did hesitate. Before him were endless information flows encoded in various ways. Some of this information had been organized to be accessed by the physical senses. With his eyes still closed, Danlo saw the building of the first arcology on Tannahill and countless other images out of history; he saw a face painting of Liljana Narai as well as molecular fotos of deadly Trachang viruses. There were sounds of people praying in swarm inside an Architect temple. He heard voices, a cacophony of hundreds of voices crying out as of prisoners chained into a dark cave.

These voices were each trying to explain something, from the engineering of information viruses to the Program of Transcendence. There were smells, too, the scent of roses and garlic and burning plastics. These were the simulated sensa of a surreality, and Danlo had long since learned how to apprehend this kind of information. He had learned, too, that immersing himself too deeply in simulation was a very slow and inefficient means of seeking knowledge. To move quickly among the data pools, one must be able to kithe information encoded as symbols.

Perhaps the greatest glory of the Order was the development of the Universal Syntax, a way of representing all possible knowledge by arrays of three-dimensional mental symbols that the grammarians called ideoplasts. But the Narain, it seemed, had no such art. In the Field of Alumit Bridge, symbolic information appeared as words strung together in sentences, in truth, as whole sets of sentences falling one after another linearly much as an orator might speak. And each word was represented not by its own beautiful ideoplast but rather by symbols encoding the word's different sounds. These symbols were called letters. It was a simple way to convey words and ideas, but primitive, barbaric. Danlo, of course, in his study of the Universal Syntax, had acquainted himself with such systems of encoding information. To decode the information bound in words, one must be able to pa.s.s the ugly, wormlike letters before one's inner eye and compose (or sound out) each word one by one. And then to let the words fall one by one into recognizable statements, to use one's inner ear to make sense of whatever information each statement contained. This skill was called reading, and as a way of seeking through pools of information, it was slow, slow.

Compared to the sublime art of kithing ideoplasts, it was like trudging along on snowshoes across the frozen sea when one might sail a hundred miles per hour in an ice schooner. But it was also quite easy; if one could see, even a child or a cybernetic cripple could still read information written this way.

Pilot?

Like a thallow perched on his mountain eyrie, waiting, Danlo exulted in his powerful sense of sight. Before him, below him, the collective knowledge of the Narain people and a hundred generations of the Cybernetic Universal Church lay glittering with all the depth and clarity of a frozen seascape. Not any longer like a wine-dark ocean or even a pool. For that is the beauty of organization, that when one reaches out to logically arranged data with the proper senses, the flowing information pools fall into form and become more like snowflakes, frozen waterfalls, crystal mountains. And in Danlo, these inner, cybernetic senses were deep and keen. There was his sense of shih, a sort of master sense allowing him to perceive the relationship between information and knowledge, between knowledge and wisdom. With shih he might drink in the information crystals and know by the tastes of sweetness or bitterness which paths through the Field's data s.p.a.ce that he should seek. There were his senses of iconicity and syntaxis, and gestalt, where information would just 'pop'

into his mind with all the suddenness of a soap bubble swelling into its colours. And, of course, the senses of fractality and fugue, and above all, fenestration. In the Field, as in all cybernetic s.p.a.ces, there would be windows to pa.s.s through, clear arrays of information opening onto ever new arrays, window after window, layer upon crystalline layer sometimes hundreds of panes deep. A cetic or even any Orderman whom the cetics had trained might fenester through these windows with all the speed of a pilot falling through the manifold.

Perhaps you aren't ready to face the Transcended Ones.

Suddenly, then, Danlo moved. In truth, he almost flew along the frozen rivers of information, swooping here or there as a snowy owl might follow an elusive kitikeesha chick. In clumps of two or ten, the thirty-one different letters of the Narain alphabet pa.s.sed before his inner eye at a blinding speed, like millions of bright sh.e.l.ls strung along the tide line of a frozen beach. And so he raced above the field of biological history, reading, looking, seeking. He ached to cry out in discovery, to close the talons of his mind around a single fact or clue that might lead to a cure for the plague virus that had killed his people. But he found nothing. He fenestered through many windows, seeking in such unlikely areas as heuristics and biographies, and still the knowledge he sought escaped him. Perhaps, he thought, a cure did not exist. Or rather, perhaps Isas Lel had told the truth in saying that the Narain knew nothing of such a cure. Although it is impossible to prove the absence of information until every window of every sub-sub-field of knowledge has been opened and all the data searched as carefully as a kitikeesha picking through snow for a worm, with every reference to the plague virus' aetiology that Danlo read, he became more and more certain that the Narain were as baffled by this terrible disease as were the Order's biologists. Perhaps some outlaw virologist had once recorded a description of the effects of an array of alien drugs on the virus' embroidery within the human genome. Perhaps this knowledge existed in some lost informational pocket in some far field within the greater Field itself. If so, then Danlo might search for years and never find it. Even a master librarian might be pressed to uncover such esoterica.

With this in mind, after a long time of soaring across icy mountains of information, Danlo abandoned his search. He came to rest on a branch of a decision tree high above the fields and streams of brilliantly-formed information below him.

Oh, Pilot, there you are.

Isas Lel's voice rang inside Danlo's mind. Although the sound of it was only a computer simulation unaffected by the workings of Isas Lel's heart and lungs, there was almost a breathless quality to this disembodied voice as if he had found much trouble in following Danlo on his wild flight.

Are you lost, Pilot? It seemed that you were falling uncontrollably through the windows.

I ... was falling. But I am not lost.

No? Are you sure? It's impossible for anyone to read so quickly.

If your people know of a cure for the plague, I could not find it.

Danlo went on to describe the many pools to which his seeking had taken him.