'Goodbye,' Danlo said to her, and he bowed to the others.

Then he turned so that he stood facing away from the great mountain. He smiled once, and above the pool nearest him, wavering in the air, a rectangle of golden light appeared. This was his portal, his doorway back into the meeting room. Now that he knew the ways of the Field, he had no need to journey back over the endless golden plain as he had come. With a smile and a simple thought, he stepped through the doorway. There was a moment of humming, vibration, glittering lights. And then he was back, floating above the plastic floor of the meeting room. He looked down at his hands and his naked limbs and found himself still instantiated into his luminous body.

His real self his true self made of carbon and oxygen, breath and blood and wild dreams sat crosslegged on the floor. Silently, this self held a long bamboo flute to his lips, and his long black hair spilled down across the yellow shaft. For a while he floated there staring at himself. He took note of his dark blue eyes so grave and deep.

There was something strange about his eyes, the way that they were still locked open upon the infinities of the Field and yet sparkled with light and laughter as if greatly amused by the paradoxes of his dual existence. Looking at himself this way through the blue-black windows of his eyes, he beheld all the fires of his life blazing inside him. He knew then that he must always return to himself. There was a moment when he thought that the path inward would take him streaking like light through these lovely windows. And then he remembered that there was another way home. He gazed down to where his black silk robe stretched tightly over his chest. There, where his heart beat once each second with all the force of a pulsar this was the way back into life. With this thought, a circle of golden light appeared over the centre of his body. Through its shimmer he could see his heart contracting, throbbing, quickening his true self with streams of lifeblood. Through this doorway he must pa.s.s if he would become himself again, and yet he hesitated a moment while he looked at Isas Lel and Lieswyr Ivioss and the seven other pale Transcendentals who sat on their robots watching him. He looked at the meeting room's chatoy walls which still ran with the scarlets and rubies of the sunset scene. There was a curious flatness to these colours as if the essence of redness had been sucked out of them. He remembered then that he was viewing this false sunset only through the eyes of his instantiated self. If he would see the meeting room just as it really was, he must leave the computer-painted mindscape behind him and return to his own true and blessed vision.

I am the door, he remembered. Knock and be opened.

And so, at last, he stepped through the doorway into his heart. Into himself there was a moment of rushing breath, intense realness, the wild joy of life feeling itself so marvellously alive. At last he opened his eyes. That is, his eyes which had been dead to the room's curves and colours, suddenly came into full sight. He could see the seven Transcendentals watching him with all the awe that children of an artificial world might have for a real life tiger. He looked at them and smiled. Then he looked down at his fingers touching the holes of his shakuhachi. How vividly he remembered the print patterns on the palms of his hands! How good it was to feel the air currents falling across his real flesh again! With a clear and natural laugh he stood up suddenly, and strands of red showed brightly among his rippling black hair. He stretched his cramped arms, legs and back, feeling how good it was to feel the burn of muscles moving deep inside his body.

Pilot, are you back? Have you broken free of the spiders' web?

Danlo looked down at the devotionary computer that he had placed on the floor much earlier. The hologram of Nikolos Daru Ede was signing to him, frantically trying to determine his state of consciousness.

'You've broken interface, haven't you?'

This question came from Isas Lel who sat drinking from a plastic cup that his robot had given him. That he seemed unsure whether or not Danlo was still facing the Field seemed strange.

'Yes,' Danlo said with a smile. 'Now I am facing ... only you.'

At this, Lieswyr Ivioss tried to catch him with her lovely eyes. She returned his smile, and it was almost as if they could see the light of each other's thoughts.

'We'll show you Tannahill's star, if you wish,' Isas Lel said.

He was quiet for a moment, and the sunset scene glowing on the walls faded to darkness. Now, inside the meeting room, it was night, and the stars came out. There were millions of stars twinkling against the black chatoy dome. Danlo recognized Alumit Bridge's red sun and many others in the immediate neighbourhood of stars.

One of these bright lights, he supposed, must be the star of Tannahill that he had sought for so long.

'No,' Danlo said as his eyes flicked from one light to another. 'Please ... not this way.'

'What do you mean?' Isas Lel asked. He looked at Diverous Te then Patar Iviaslin and Kistur Ashtoreth, and it was clear that the Transcendentals were puzzled by Danlo's refusal to accept this immediate information.

That is, all save Lieswyr Ivioss were puzzled. Danlo saw that this elegant woman was still smiling at him. She bowed her head as she waited for him to say the words that she knew he would say.

'I ... would ask you a favour,' Danlo said. He bowed to Lieswyr Ivioss, and then in turn to Isas Lel and each of the Transcendentals.

'Very well,' Isas Lel said. 'And what would you ask?'

Danlo held his breath for a moment and listened to the sound of his heart. 'Outside this meeting room ... outside the walls of the city, it is night, yes?'

Isas Lel, who could instantly dive down into the Field's deepest pool in order to retrieve the daily weather records on Alumit three thousand years ago and other arcane bits of information, seemed almost stymied by this question. He closed his eyes, taking a long time to answer it.

'It is night,' he finally said. 'It's actually close to middle night.'

'And is it a cloudy night or clear?' Danlo asked. 'Are the stars out, then?'

'It's a clear night. But why would you ask?'

'I would like to return to the light-field now. To return to my ship.'

Danlo looked at the Ede hologram, which was busy making signs with its luminous fingers: Yes, yes let's leave here while we still can!

'But why?' Isas Lel asked, genuinely puzzled.

'I ... would like to stand beneath the stars again. I was hoping that you could stand with me and point the way to Tannahill's star.'

'I suppose I could do that,' Isas Lel said, frowning. 'But what then?'

'Then I must complete my journey.'

'So soon?'

'I must take my lightship back into the stars.'

'You'd leave in the middle of the night before you've slept or rested?'

'Yes.'

Isas Lel paused a moment to look at the other Transcendentals. Information pa.s.sed eye to eye and from brain to brain via the pathways of unseen cybernetic s.p.a.ces. After Isas Lel had spent an unusually long time staring at Lieswyr Ivioss, he said, 'Very well, if that's your wish, we'll accompany you to the light-field.'

With this p.r.o.nouncement he called for another robot to carry Danlo in comfort on their short journey to the roof of the city. Moments later, the doors to the meeting room slid open, and a bright yellow robot rolled through the room. It came to a stop directly in front of Danlo, who returned his flute to its pocket in his pants leg before bending to pick up his devotionary computer. 'Thank you,' he said, bowing politely.

Then he sat down on the robot's red plastic seat, and was very glad to leave the meeting room behind him.

Their journey through the streets of Iviunir was short and memorable. Word of Danlo's departure had immediately spread through the Field's a.s.sociation s.p.a.ce and men and women had broken interface to bid Danlo farewell. They had taken off their heaumes and left their thousands of separate apartments to swarm the city streets.

There, along the broad boulevards, they lined up to watch Danlo and the Transcendentals in their shiny robots roll past them. The sound of their many voices cheering him along was almost deafening. They stood ten deep in their shiny white plastic garments, and Danlo counted ten thousand well-wishers before he gave up counting. It was then, looking out at these swarms of hopeful Narain, that he felt the full weight of being chosen as their emissary.

I must speak for all these people, Danlo thought. Truly, then, I must speak well.

At last, after many streets, corridors, and the crushing weight of the gravity lifts, they returned to the light-field. There Danlo found even more people on either side of the long run where his ship lay like a silver-winged bird waiting in the night. The robots rolled down the run between these rows of people, right up to his ship, before stopping suddenly. Because Danlo was very glad to see the Snowy Owl once again, he fairly jumped out of his robot. He stood looking over his ship's lovely lines, the way her diamond skin shimmered in the starlight. As Isas Lel had said, it was full night and there were many stars. For a moment, Danlo gazed up into the heavens. He drank in the radiance of Medearis and the Trao Double and Valda Luz and many other stars that he knew. He drank in as well the clear, natural air and all the scents of the forest far below the city. For the first time in many days he became aware how good it was just to stand beneath the sky breathing deeply the dreams of the night.

'I've never seen the stars this way,' Isas Lei said. He sat motionless in his robot looking out into the Vild. In all his life, in all the times he had greeted luminaries from other cities or worlds at the light-field, he had never been outside at night.

'The stars ... are the children of G.o.d,' Danlo whispered.

'What did you say?' Isas Lel asked. With a heavy sigh, he climbed down from his robot and walked over to Danlo. The other Transcendentals took this as a sign that they should do the same. They came over to where Danlo stood almost beneath the great sweeping wing of his ship.

'The stars are the children of G.o.d alone in the night,' Danlo said. 'It is ... a line from a song that I once learned.'

'I never thought that there could be so many stars,' Kistur Ashtoreth said.

Ananda Narcavage nodded his/her head. 'Let's show Danlo wi Soli Ringess the star that he desires to see and go back to our apartments. It's not good to be outside this late.'

The Transcendentals of Alumit Bridge stood in their separate selves like naked children and watched the beautiful stars, and they felt vulnerable and alone and completely exposed to the terrible nearness of the night.

'Shall I show you Tannahill's star?' Isas Lel asked. He stepped over by Danlo's side, and he frowned as if it had been many years since he stood so close to another human being.

'Please ... yes.'

With a trembling finger Isas Lel pointed up towards a well-known constellation in the eastern sky. There, some forty degrees above the horizon, a bright triangle of stars twinkled against an inverted triangle approximately the same size. Both triangles were nearly equilateral and configured so as to make a nearly perfect hexagon. Or a star. Danlo immediately saw that if the six points of light were connected as a child might dots in a puzzle, then they would make a six-pointed star. To himself, he immediately named this strange constellation as the Star of Stars.

'Do you see the six hex stars?' Isas Lel asked. 'We call this group the Stars of David. I'm not sure why.'

Danlo watched these splendid stars giving up their faint illumination into the night.

He waited in silence for Isas Lel to say more.

'Do you see the star at the apex of the upright triangle? It seems almost blue doesn't it? That is the star of Tannahill.'

At last, after years of his journey, after falling trillions of miles across the galaxy's stars, Danlo finally laid eyes upon this brilliant blue sphere that he had sought for so long. He let all the stars in the immediate neighbourhood of stars burn their pattern into his mind. And almost immediately he understood why Reina An, in guiding him toward the Architect's star, had pointed out Alumit Bridge's star rather than that of Tannahill: as arrayed from the Earth of the Sani, the two stars lay along a straight line. Reina An had pointed truly after all. Danlo need only fall a few tens of light years further upon the infinite line made by her bony old finger, and he would fall out upon the world of Tannahill.

'You're leaving now, aren't you, Pilot?'

This question, which was not really a question, came from Lieswyr Ivioss. She stood up from her robot and came over to where Danlo and Isas Lel were watching the stars.

'Yes,' Danlo said, lowering his eyes to meet hers. 'I must complete my journey.'

'Your mission to the Old Church."

'Yes, my mission,' Danlo agreed.'And when you've succeeded, will you return here?'

Danlo stared into her brilliant eyes, then looked at Isas Lel and the hundreds of others who were watching him. 'I will return. I will tell you what the Elders of the Old Church have said about the Narain people and about the stars.'

'And then?'

'Then I must fall on to Thiells. I must tell the Lords of my Order about Tannahill.'

'Will you ever return to Iviunir after that?'

Danlo looked down at his hands, and he answered her question with another question. 'Who can see the future?'

'Will you ever return to Shahar?' she asked.

In her voice there was a terrible longing that called to Danlo with all the urgency of a bird lost at sea. For a moment he felt this longing, too. He brooded upon all the joys of creating a higher, cybernetic self and merging with other instantiated ent.i.ties. But in the end, this joy was illusory. In the glittering mindscapes of the Field, what could it mean to know real joy or sorrow? What could it mean to be brave in the absence of real threat or to call oneself alive when totally disconnected from the pain and cold of the real world?

What does it mean to truly live? What does it mean to love?

As the stars burned in the night sky above them, Danlo stared at the sudden burning wetness that filled up Lieswyr Ivioss's eyes. He knew her secret, then. Earlier that night, in merging into the One called Shahar, he had seen the surface of her mind, but now he looked into the depths of her heart. She, this glorious creature of blood and tears and love, this very human being, would never die for Shahar. In playing the game of transcendence, she might momentarily sacrifice the lesser parts of herself to cark out as a surreal Transcended One, but in the real world, she would never lay down her life for this One. Danlo looked at the other Transcendentals and all the people standing along the run; none of them, he thought, would be willing to die for an abstract ent.i.ty programmed by a computer. Someday, perhaps, when they came out of their dark apartments and their surrealities and they saw each other as they really were, then they might die for each other for that marvellous, streaming life that they shared as a people. But until that time, they would be as Lieswyr Ivioss: forlorn and fearful and very much alone.

'Will you return to us?' she asked again.

Danlo, who did not like to tell untruths, smiled sadly and shook his head. 'No,' he forced out. 'I am sorry.'

'I'm sorry, too,' she said. Then she called up her courage and smiled at him.

'Nevertheless, I wish you well. We all do.'

At this, she bowed to him, as did the other Transcendentals still sitting in their robots. And all the men and women waiting along the run bowed deeply, and they called out, 'We wish you well!'

The last of the Narain to say goodbye was Isas Lel. He bowed and said, 'We all wish you a safe journey, Danlo wi Soli Ringess. You are our emissary as well as our friend.'

After that, Danlo called for the doors to his lightship to open. As he climbed up to the dark pit where he would once again face all the perils of the manifold, he felt a terrible dread of the future. He looked down at the dark plastic of the run, down through the city of Iviunir and the soil and rock of the darkened planet below. He looked down through the sands of time, and there he saw the b.l.o.o.d.y star of Alumit Bridge burning brightly among all the stars of the Vild.

'I ... wish you well, too,' he said looking at Isas Lel. 'All of your blessed people.'

Then he stepped inside, and the doors of his ship enclosed him in a sh.e.l.l of black diamond, and he could look at the Narain people no more.

PART THREE

The Chosen of G.o.d

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Tannahill

And so Ede faced the universe, and he was vastened, and he saw that the face of G.o.d was his own. Then the would-be G.o.ds, who are the hakra devils of the darkest depths of s.p.a.ce, from the farthest reaches of time, saw what Ede had done, and they were jealous. And so they turned their eyes G.o.dward in jealousy and l.u.s.t for the infinite lights, but in their countenances G.o.d read hubris, and he struck them blind.

For here is the oldest of teachings, here is wisdom: no G.o.d is there but G.o.d; G.o.d is one, and there can be only one G.o.d.

- from the Facings of the Algorithm.

In the vast distances of the galaxy, two stars separated by only three dozen light years of s.p.a.ce are almost as close as two stars can be, and yet to pa.s.s from one blazing orb to another is often a difficult feat. In a ship travelling through reals.p.a.ce at half the speed of light, this journey would eat up some seventy years of a man's life. To a pilot mapping almost instantaneously from star to star, however, such a fallaway might take only a moment or forever. As Danlo lay inside the lightless pit of his ship, the Snowy Owl, he thought about this problem. He fell through the shimmering manifold, making his mathematics and searching for a mapping that would enable him to open a window upon Tannahill's not-too-distant star. Often he thought about the Great Theorem of the pilots. Years ago his father had proved that it is always possible to fall from one of the galaxy's stars to any other in a single fall. It is always possible, yes, but it is always difficult to find such mappings. Distance alone is no determiner of this difficulty. The topology of the manifold is strange, and it can be easier to map across ten thousand light years of s.p.a.ce, from the Detheshaloon to the Rainbow Double, than to fall on to a nearby sun so close that it is like a blue-white flame globe alight in a neighbour's window. Although Tannahill's star was almost close enough to touch, Danlo might reach out with his hands (and his mind) for a very long time before he closed in upon it.

Once, he remembered, there had been a pilot returning from a long journey to his friends and family. This was more than five thousand years ago on Arcite before the Order had moved to Neverness. The pilot Chiah Li Chen had fallen out of the manifold around a neighbouring star. He looked across only eight trillion miles of reals.p.a.ce to see Arcite Luz blazing like a beacon in the distance. He was so happy that he might have wept. When he fell back into the manifold, he was certain that he would reach his star in only a second or two of realtime. Except that, by bad chance, his lightship blundered into a rare Gallivare tube that had borne him twenty thousand light-years halfway towards the galaxy's core like a piece of driftwood swept along by an ocean storm. It had taken Li Chen more than a hundred years to return across the dense stars of the Cygnus Arm to his home. There he had found his wife long dead and his children's grandchildren scattered upon a dozen other worlds. It is said that the broken-hearted Chiah Li Chen was the first pilot to kill himself by willingly mapping his lightship into the centre of Arcite's dangerous red star.

All pilots must return home, Danlo remembered. But where is home?

Often, during Danlo's dangerous pa.s.sage to Tannahill, he thought about the ice- glazed spires of Neverness and the woman whom he had loved. Often, he thought of returning home. In truth, it can be the easiest thing in the universe for a pilot to return to the City of Light. The cantors, in their grey robes and their mathematical arro- gance, have proclaimed the Star of Neverness as the topological nexus of the galaxy. Because many billions of the manifold's pathways converge in the thicks.p.a.ce near its cool yellow sun, Neverness has always been at the centre of man's greatest stellar civilization. 'All pathways lead to Neverness' this is a saying of the pilots. Deep in the black belly of his lightship, Danlo remembered this. He remembered each of the many thousands of pathways that had carried him deep into the stars of the Vild. It would be almost possible, he thought, to retrace his way along these many twisting paths. Or he might find new mappings, new pathways or someday he might blaze with marvellous insights into the secrets of the Great Theorem, and thus he might see how he could always return to Neverness in a single fall.

But now, as he sought a mapping through the violent and beautiful s.p.a.ces that underlay the Vild, he prayed only that Chiah Li Chen and he would not share the same fate. He prayed that he would reach Tannahill's star after only a few quick falls.

And so it happened. There was one bad moment when he almost opened a window upon an infinite tree and another when his ship began slipsliding into an inverted serpentine. Apart from these near-disasters, however, his journey was easy. Ironically, as Danlo would later muse, he had a much easier time reaching Tannahill than in leaving it.

The greatest excitement of his pa.s.sage among the stars came not from danger but from mystery. Not far from Alumit Luz he came across a red giant that he named Haryatta Sawel, which meant 'the raging sun'. It was there, just after Danlo had mapped free from the spinning thicks.p.a.ce a.s.sociated with this star, that he once again descried signs of another ship following him. As before, in his wild flight toward the Solid State Ent.i.ty, this ship remained always at the threshold of the radius of conver- gence. He wondered if this ship was real if it really fell through the manifold in such an impeccable manner that it remained always at the exact boundary of the neighbourhood of stars surrounding the Snowy Owl. It seemed as insubstantial as smoke in a cold wind or an icon instantiated into some cybernetic surreality. Perhaps, Danlo thought, this mysterious second ship was only a reflection of his own. The perturbations a lightship makes in pa.s.sing through the manifold are hideously difficult to read, and such mathematical mirages and illusions are always possible.

Could Malaclypse Redring, in Sivan wi Mawi Sarkissian's ship the Red Dragon, really have pursued him halfway across the galaxy? This miracle of piloting seemed truly impossible, and yet Danlo sensed that it must be so. His sense of others watching him was primal, animal, and very keen. He remembered back to a sight he had witnessed during his childhood, the way a hungry gull would sometimes follow a snowy owl in order to scavenge any leavings from the rare white bird's inevitable kill.