What would it mean to read the human mind? What would it mean to read any mind?

Danlo took his hand away from the fireplace and rubbed his head. Because he had been born with a playful nature (and because he believed in being wilfully playful as a matter of faith), he asked, 'Excuse me, but haven't you just answered a question with a question?'

There is no rule that I should not. But there is a rule that you should not, and you have done so again.

'I am ... sorry,' Danlo said. Then he rubbed hard above his eye for a moment as he thought about Hanuman li Tosh, who had developed a cetic's skill of reading human faces and emotions, if not their actual minds. Sometimes, Hanuman had been able to read him, but he had never been able to see into the deepest part of Danlo's soul. Nor had Danlo ever really known why Hanuman had thought the deep and terrible thoughts that had nearly destroyed both their lives. 'In answer of your question, I do not know what it would be like to read anyone's mind.'

But someday you will. And then you will understand that the real problem is not in reading the mind but in being a part of Mind.

Danlo considered this for a while. He considered that even the akashics of his Order with their scanning computers, in their neural a.n.a.lysis and simulations of neuron firing could sometimes read certain parts of one's mind. Surely, he thought, the Ent.i.ty must possess powers and technologies far greater than those of any akashic.

Because you have wished that I do not, I have not read your mind.

'But how could you know what I wished . . . unless you had read me?'

I know.

'But this house, the door outside and everything inside how could you have made these things unless you had read my memories?'

He considered the possibility that the Ent.i.ty kept spies on Neverness, either humans with photographic equipment or secret satellites above the planet or perhaps even robots the size of a bacterium that would swarm over doors and houses and every conceivable surface, thus secretly recording pictures and sounds to somehow send to the G.o.ddess. Surely the Ent.i.ty, with her almost infinitely capacious mind, would want to know everything that occurred in a city such as Neverness, and perhaps in every human and alien city across the galaxy.

Reading one's present mind is not quite the same thing as apprehending the memories.

He stared at the changing ideoplasts, and he mused that the spherical indigo glyph for 'mind' was closely related to the deep blue nested teardrops representing the phenomenon of memory. Provocatively, argumentatively, he turned to the sulki grid and said, 'I do not see the difference.'But someday it may be that you will.

'If you please,' he said, 'I wish you to read no more of my memories.'

But it pleases me to taste your memories. Your memories are as sweet as oranges and honey, and they please me well.

Danlo looked back at the glowing array, and his jaw was clamped tightly closed, and he said nothing.

However it pleases me to please you, and so I will forget all your memories all except one.

'What . . . one?'

That you will soon know. That you will see.

With his knuckle he pressed hard against his forehead, against the pain always lurking behind his eye. He said, 'But I have had too much of knowing . . . my memories. I have seen too much that I cannot forget. This world, this house, so perfect and yet ... too perfect. It is as if no one has ever lived here. As if no one ever could.'

I was forced to make this house hastily. As you have noticed, it suffers the imperfection of perfection. But how not? I am only the G.o.ddess whom you know as the Solid State Ent.i.ty I am not G.o.d.

Because Danlo was tired of communicating in this awkward manner, he looked up at the glittering violet rings of the sulki grid and considered shutting it off. In truth, he no longer doubted that he was speaking with a G.o.ddess. Somehow, the sulki computer must be interfaced with a larger computer, perhaps hidden beneath the floor of the house, or even inside the Earth itself. Perhaps the interior of this Earth was not a core of spinning iron surrounded by layers of molten and solid rock, but rather the circuitry of a vast computer interfaced with all the other computers and moon-brains of the G.o.ddess across the trillions of miles of this strange, intelligent nebula. Upon his first sight of this planet, he had supposed that the Ent.i.ty had merely engineered its surface and biosphere to hold the millions of species of earthly life spread out over the continents and oceans. After all, human beings had engineered the surfaces of planets for ten thousand years. He had supposed that the Ent.i.ty, with unknown G.o.dly technologies, had shaped entire mountain chains and deep ocean trenches with less difficulty than a cadre of ecologists. But now he was not so sure. Perhaps She had engineered more deeply than that. He wondered if somehow She might have made the entire planet from inside out. It would not be an impossible feat for such a G.o.ddess, to choose a point in s.p.a.ce some ninety million miles distance from a sunlike star, to build a computer the size of a whole world, and then to cover this monstrous machine with a twenty mile thick sh.e.l.l of basalt and granite, with great glistening pools of salt water and sheets of nitrogen and oxygen and the other gases of the atmosphere. For a moment he looked away from the sulki grid, down at the polished floor tiles that he stood upon. He could almost feel the waves of intelligence deep beneath him, inside the Earth, vibrating up through the planet's crust beneath his naked feet. There was a deepness about this Earth that disquieted him. He had a strange sense that although this world seemed more like home than any world he had ever seen he was not meant to live upon it. He spent a long time wondering why the Ent.i.ty (or any other G.o.d or G.o.ddess) would make such a world. And then he asked, 'Is it your purpose to try to make a perfect Earth?'

For the count of twenty of his heartbeats, there was no response to this question.

And then the array of ideoplasts brightened, and he had an answer that was no answer at all.

Is it my purpose that you really wish to know? Or your own purpose, Danlo wi Soli Ringess?Danlo walked over beneath one of the hanging plants, a wandering jew whose perfect green leaves shone like living jewels, as if they had never known drought or the jaws of hungry insects. He remembered how much Tamara had liked this plant, and he said, 'There are so many things I would like to know. That is why I have journeyed here. As my father did before me. I have merely followed his path, towards the fixed-points of a star that he told of inside the Solid State Ent.i.ty. I am sorry . . .

inside you. I was seeking this star. The fixed-points of this place in s.p.a.cetime. We all were nine other pilots fell with me as well. We hoped to talk with you as my father did twenty five years ago.'

Why?

'Because we have hoped that you might know of the planet Tannahill. This planet lost somewhere in the Vild. It is said that the Architects of the Old Church live there, they who are destroying the stars. Our Order the Order of my father, Mallory Ringess would stop them, if we could. But first we must find them, their planet.

This is our purpose. This is the quest we have been called to fulfil.'

He finished speaking, and he waited for the Ent.i.ty to respond to him. He did not wait long.

No, my Danlo of the sweet, sweet memories, this was not the purpose of the pilots who journeyed with you. Their purpose was to die. Their deepest purpose was to journey here and die inside me, but they did not know this.

It was as if someone had punched Danlo in the solar plexus, so quickly did he clasp his hands to his belly and gasp for air. For a moment, he hoped that he had kithed ideoplasts wrongly, and so he stared at the glittering glyphs until his eyes burned and there could be no mistaking their meaning. At last he asked, 'Dolores Nun and Leander of Darkmoon, all the others dead? Dead ... how?'

You, Danlo wi Soli Ringess, who are the only pilot ever to have survived a chaos s.p.a.ce, ask this?

Almost silently, in a strange voice halfway between a moan and whisper, Danlo began moving his lips, making the words of the Prayer for the Dead which he had been taught as a child long ago. 'Ivar Sarad, mi alasharia la shantih; Li Te Mu Lan, alasharia la; Valin wi Tymon Whitestone-'

These pilots were too afraid to die. And so they died.

At last Danlo finished praying. When he closed his eyes, he could clearly see the kindly brown face of Li Te Mu Lan, with her sly smile and too-gentle spirit. Because he could see the faces of all nine pilots much too clearly, he opened his eyes and stood facing the ideoplast array. He said, 'After falling together from Farfara, we separated. We each journeyed here as individual pilots. Our light-ships, our pathways through the manifold. We were spread across fifty light-years of reals.p.a.ce. I think I was alone for much of my journey. And then, in the manifold, the chaos s.p.a.ce. It was like nothing I had ever seen before. The attractor, swirling in its colours, spinning.

The strange attractor this could only exist within a well-defined neighbourhood, yes? There were no other pilots in the same neighbourhood of the manifold as I.'

He remembered, then, that in truth there was another pilot, Sivan wi Mawi Sarkissian in his ship the Red Dragon. He told the Ent.i.ty this and waited for a response.

I will not speak of the ronin pilot or the warrior-poet. You may not ask this question again. I will tell you only of the pilots who accompanied you. And they all fled the same attractor that you entered. They fled and they died.

'But . . . how is that possible?'

Because they each fled into another attractor deeper in the chaos. A naked singularity of the manifold, and yet not of it. Death is the strangest attractor of all. It pulls everyone and everything by different paths into a single point in time.

In eternity, into the eternal moment. Even the G.o.ds must inevitably journey to this place, though some of us flee their fate. And this is why your brother and sister pilots died.

Slowly, Danlo backed away from this bewildering array of ideoplasts and sat down on one of the meditation room's cotton cushions. He sat crosslegged and straight- spined, rubbing his eyes, rubbing his forehead and temples. And then he said, 'I do not understand.'

You do not understand the existence of the chaos s.p.a.ce. That is because your mathematics is incomplete. It is possible for such a chaos to spread from what you know as a well-defined neighbourhood into a region of nested Lavi s.p.a.ces.

Perhaps it is even possible for a chaos s.p.a.ce to spread through the entire manifold.

'Possible . . . how?'

There are many ways that the manifold might fall into chaos. Here is one way: if sufficient energy densities are created in a pocket of s.p.a.cetime, then the underlying manifold would perturb itself into chaos.

Danlo closed his eyes for a moment, calculating. And then he said, 'But if this is truly possible, the energy densities would have to be enormous, yes? What could create such impossible densities?'

The G.o.ds can.

'What . . . G.o.ds?'

There are many G.o.ds, Danlo wi Soli Ringess. In this galaxy alone, too many.

You must know of the Silicon G.o.d and Chimene and the April Colonial Intelligence. And someday you may know your father. And the G.o.ds called Ai, Hsi w.a.n.g Mu, Iamme, and Pure Mind. And Maralah, and the Degula Trinity, and The One. And, of course, Nikolos Daru Ede, the man who would be G.o.d, whom Cybernetic Universal Church worships as G.o.d, Ede the G.o.d, who is now very probably dead.

At this astonishing piece of news, Danlo sprang to his feet and began pacing the room again. He pressed his forehead in remembrance of others who had died, then he smiled grimly. 'Then G.o.d is dead, yes? A G.o.d is dead. But ... how is this possible?'

There is war in heaven. Because some G.o.ds flee the strange attractor at the end of time, there is war. It was the Silicon G.o.d aided by Chimene and the Degula Trinity, and others who slew Ede the G.o.d. It is the Silicon G.o.d who has tried to slay me. He has been trying to destroy me for three hundred years.

Danlo closed his eyes trying to visualize the sheer enormity of the Solid State Ent.i.ty, the many star systems and planets composing Her nearly infinite body. He said, 'Destroy . . . how?'

Please be patient, and I will tell you.

'I . . . am sorry.'

Your sister and brother pilots were unlucky enough to be caught in one of our battles. The Silicon G.o.d's recent attack upon the matter and s.p.a.cetime that make up the tissues of my body temporarily deformed the manifold itself as you saw.

This was the cause of the chaos s.p.a.ce. This was the cause of the attractor that led you to this planet. Above all else, the Silicon G.o.d would destroy this Earth that you stand upon, and so his attacks are focused here.

As Danlo focused his deep blue eyes on the changing ideoplasts, he kithed part of the history of this war between the G.o.ds. He learned that some of the G.o.ds would do almost anything to destroy each other. They had caused stars to explode into supernovas; they had tapped the energy densities of black holes and the zero-point energies of s.p.a.cetime itself. A true G.o.d, as the Ent.i.ty maintained, would use such energies to create, but there were always those who wielded this cosmic lightning for the opposite purpose. And they wielded other weapons as well. There was a G.o.d called Maralah who had loosed a swarm of intelligent bacteria upon a planet claimed by The One. The bacteria swarm the bacteria-sized robots that most human beings know as disa.s.semblers had reduced the beautiful green forests and oceans of the planet to a thick brown sc.u.m in a matter of days. With similar explosive nano- technologies, Maralah had tried to infect many of the G.o.ds allied with the Solid State Ent.i.ty. And it was Maralah who had tried to infect Ai and Pure Mind with various ohrworms and informational viruses that would cark their master programs and drive them mad. Maralah was the first G.o.d to discover how vulnerable artificial intelligence is to surrealities, those almost infinitely detailed simulations of reality that can wholly take over a computer's neurologics and cause the most powerful of G.o.ds to confuse the illusory for what is real. But it was the Silicon G.o.d himself who had refined this weapon. In a way almost impossible for Danlo to understand, the Silicon G.o.d had forged mysterious philosophical and psychic weapons, terrible weapons of consciousness that threatened the sanity of the galaxy, perhaps even the universe itself. Danlo immediately dreaded this ancient G.o.d who would destroy the minds of all others. He hated this enemy of the Ent.i.ty (and of his father), and he hated himself for hating so freely.

'Why?' he asked. He pressed his fingertips hard against his throbbing eye. 'Why must there be war?'

Why, why, my sweet Danlo? Because there must be war, there will always be war. This phase of the war began two million years ago, when the Ieldra defeated the one known as the Dark G.o.d. Do you know of the Ieldra, they of the pure mind and the golden light?

In truth, Danlo knew as much about the Ieldra as anyone knew. The Ieldra, it was said, were a race of G.o.ds who long ago had carked their collective consciousness into the black hole at the centre of the galaxy. But before they had abandoned their bodies and gone on to complete their cosmic evolution, they had left behind a gift. It was said that they had carked their deepest wisdom the secret of life into the DNA of their chosen successors, a n.o.ble species of life known as h.o.m.o sapiens. And so deep inside the bodies and brains of all human beings the secret of the G.o.ds lay coiled and waiting. In honour of these oldest of the G.o.ds, the masters of Danlo's Order called this secret the 'Elder Eddas', and they said that the G.o.ds had designed the Eddas to be remembered. With proper training, almost anyone could call up the memories bound inside their cells. Once, Danlo himself had remembered the Eddas as deeply as had any man. The Eddas was a pool of ancient knowledge almost infinitely deep, and Danlo had drunken freely of the racial memories until he thought that his mind could hold no more. One splendid night, once a time like a child in a magic woods, he had remembered many marvellous things. But now that he was older, he had lost his gift of remembrancing. Although he remembered many moments of his life with a blazing intensity more brilliant than any ideoplast or living jewel, he could no longer go inside himself where the deepest memories lay. In truth, he could no longer remember the deepest part of himself, and in this he was no different from any man.

'I . . . have heard of the Ieldra,' Danlo said.

And you have remembranced the Elder Eddas.

'Yes.'

I believe the secret of how the Ieldra defeated the Dark G.o.d is encoded into the Elder Eddas.

Danlo nodded his head slowly. 'Yes, perhaps it is there, in the Eddas. Everything . . . is there.'

It may be that someday you will remembrance this secret and apply it toward defeating the Silicon G.o.d.

At this strange communication, Danlo walked across the room and looked out of the window. Below him, on the long deep beach, his lightship shone like a sliver of black gla.s.s. The wind was up, blowing ghostly wisps of sand against its hull. He could almost hear the sand particles pinging against the diamond surface, but the endless ocean beyond the beach rolled and roared and broke upon itself and it swallowed up any lesser sounds.

'I do not wish to defeat the Silicon G.o.d,' he said. 'I do not wish to defeat anything.'

Then you believe it is your purpose to avoid this war.

'Truly, I am not a man of war. I . . . must not be. I hate war.'

A curious emotion for a man who is a warrior.

'No, you are wrong,' Danlo said. 'I am no warrior. I have taken a vow of ahimsa. I may not intentionally harm any man or animal. It is better to die oneself than to kill.'

I know this word ahimsa.

'I would rather die than kill anything, even a G.o.d. Especially . . . a G.o.d.'

We shall see.

A sudden chill struck Danlo's spine as if a draught of cold air had fallen down his back. He turned to face the ocean again, and he watched as the breakers fell against the sh.o.r.e rocks in an explosion of white water and foam. He rubbed his eyes, then said, 'But I am just a man, yes? Can a man even think of defeating a G.o.d? If such a secret is to be found in the Elder Eddas, then surely it is for a G.o.ddess such as yourself to remember it.'

Danlo waited for the ideoplasts to dissolve and reform themselves. The Ent.i.ty's response, when it came, astonished him: I do not have your power of remembrance. I have never been able to apprehend these memories you call the Elder Eddas.

'But how is that possible? Your brain, your whole being, so vast, so powerful in its-'

The size and power of a brain can be a hindrance to true remembrance. I have made myself as others have. Most of the G.o.ds of the galaxy are computers or a grafting of computer neurologics onto the human brain. Computers have a kind of memory, but no computer nor any artificial intelligence has ever known true remembrance.

Danlo watched the many-coloured ideoplasts explode in their array, and he rubbed his aching forehead. He thought about the evolution of the human brain, the way the great human forebrain overlay the more primitive monkey brain and the reptilian core deep inside. In a way, the very human frontal lobes beneath his forehead were merely a grafting of grey matter onto the more ancient and primeval structures that made up his deep self. What was a G.o.d if not a continuation of this evolution? What was a G.o.d's brain if not the layering of neurologics over the human brain? It shouldn't matter if these neurologics were made of silicon or diamond or artificial protein circuitry as dense and vast as a moon; the brain was the brain, and all brains should remember.

But what if it were only the deepest and oldest pans of the brain that could call up true remembrance? What if only the amygdala or the hippocampus could make sense of the racial memories encoded within the genome? For the ten thousandth time, he marvelled at the mystery of memory. He wondered what memory truly was, and then he said, 'But once a time, you were human, yes? A woman with a human brain I have heard that it was a woman named Kalinda who carked her brain with neurologics and so grew into the G.o.ddess we call the Solid State Ent.i.ty.'I am who I am. I would remember myself if I could. Sometimes I almost can, but it is like trying to apprehend the taste of a bloodfruit by holding only the curled red peel in one's hands. How I long for the bitter sweetness of remembrance! There is something strange about the Elder Eddas. There is something about the Eddas that no G.o.d nor human being has yet understood.

With two quick steps, Danlo moved up close to the window and spread his hand out over the cold inner pane. Then he spread his arms out as if to embrace the gleaming ocean that encircled the world. He looked up at the sky, at the patchy grey clouds cut with streaks of deep blue. Somewhere above the atmosphere of this Earth perhaps even in this lost solar system were the fabulous moon-brains of the Solid State Ent.i.ty. Across the twinkling stars that were the lights of Her many watching eyes, there were millions of separate brain lobes which somehow all worked together to make up Her vast and incomprehensible mind.

'But what is your purpose, then?' he asked. 'Of what purpose is all this . . . brain?'

My purpose is my purpose. I must discover it even as you would yours. What is the purpose of anything? To join, to join with others, to join with the Other, again and forever, to create. To create a new world. A home for my kind I am so lonely, and I want to go home.

Upon kithing these vivid ideoplasts, Danlo covered his eyes with his hand and looked down at the floor. And then he said, 'But your brain, your self, your deep self-'

Most of my brain I have designed to increase my computing power. The power of pure computation the power of simulation. This is what G.o.ds must do. We must simulate and then create the future lest we be pulled into it and destroyed.

I, too, must see the universe's possibilities if I do not, the other G.o.ds will destroy me. But there are other reasons for simulating the universe and knowing it so exactly. Other purposes, better purposes.

Danlo waited a moment before asking, 'What, then?'

To know the mind of G.o.d.

With difficulty Danlo continued his pacing around the room. His tired legs had begun to ache fiercely; he could feel the gravity of this Earth deep in his bones, hammering up his knee and hip joints into his spine. He might have sat down again on the soft cotton cushions, but he was too busy considering the Ent.i.ty's words to think of such comforts. The seeming humility with which She spoke of G.o.d amused him.

Perhaps, he thought, the Ent.i.ty had a keen taste for irony. Perhaps he was only reading his own sense of awe into luminous ideoplasts that She set before him.

To know what I must know, however, I must first accomplish the lesser purpose. The Silicon G.o.d must himself be slain. And if not slain, then defeated.

If not defeated, at least constrained. It may be that someday you will remembrance the Elder Eddas and discover how this might be done.

Because Danlo could not quite believe that this G.o.ddess named Kalinda really required his help, he began to smile. Surely, Kalinda of the Vast Mind must have other ways of remembrancing the Elder Eddas. Perhaps She was only testing him in some way. She must be playing with him, as a child might play with a worm. The Ent.i.ty, according to all the legends, liked to play.

The Silicon G.o.d is more dangerous than an exploding star. He uses human beings to annihilate whole oceans of stars the way Maralah uses his robot swarms to destroy single planets.

At last, however, after a moment of deep reflection, Danlo decided to accept what the Ent.i.ty told him. There was a sadness and sincerity about Her that called to him; when he looked into the face of Her splendid words he knew that in some way they must be true.

It is the Silicon G.o.d who has used the Architects of the Old Cybernetic Church to explode the stars into supernovas and create the Vild.