He closed his eyes, and he saw a vast array of lights that went shimmering on and on through the infinite deeps of the universe. One of these beautiful lights was the Star of Neverness. Another was the Narain's star, all red and round like a drop of blood.

'We would like to believe,' Harrah said, 'that Bertram will come to cleanse himself of his negative programs.'

'So many stars,' Danlo continued as if he hadn't really been listening to her. 'In our galaxy alone, three hundred billion stars who would have dreamed that G.o.d would make so many?'

'We have to believe this, Pilot. For Bertram to have exploded a hydrogen bomb in Montellivi this is a terrible hakr that will haunt him forever.'

The stars are the children of G.o.d alone in the night, he remembered.

And then he said, 'Bertram Jaspari, all the Iviomils they could create another Vild.'

'No, Pilot, no.' Harrah said these words with all the anguish of hope, but there was no certainty in her voice, no strength.

'He has a star-killer,' Danlo said. 'And he will enforce the rule of the old Program of Increase.'

'We're sorry, Pilot.'

'No,' Danlo said. Gently, he took her cold, trembling hands in his own. 'I am sorry. I have been lost in my own fears, and therefore ungenerous. You have risked every- thing in helping me. And lost so much. This war ... would not have been fought if I hadn't come to Tannahill. Truly. My mission the mission of my Order. To heal the Vild. This is accomplished, yes? You will send out your readers to the stars. And they will find the lost Architects of the Long Pilgrimage, and they will kill no more stars forever. I must thank you for this. For your great courage in receiving and installing the New Program.'

A sudden fear fell across Harrah's face just then. Danlo understood that her interfacing of Ede's eternal computer had been fraught with danger and difficulty. He remembered, then, something that the Solid State Ent.i.ty had told him: that the Silicon G.o.d was using the Cybernetic Universal Church to create the Vild. He wondered about the origin of the Program of Totality. Was it possible that somehow the Silicon G.o.d might be the source of this star-killing program? Had the Silicon G.o.d, centuries ago, found a way to infect Ede's eternal computer with a plan to destroy the universe, much as he had carked the killing surreality into Ede the G.o.d? He did not know. He might never know, for if such a program ran within the eternal computer, it would be too subtle for any Holy Ivi to detect, much less discuss. The instructions of the Silicon G.o.d would whisper in the mind almost like the sweet, soft voice of one's own consciousness. It would take an extraordinary mind to distinguish between the false voice and the true.

'Interfacing Ede's eternal computer is the hardest thing we've ever done,' Harrah told him. 'If Bertram knew how hard, he never would have sought to be the Holy Ivi.'

That was all she ever said concerning her experience with this holiest of artefacts.

She turned to look toward the centre of the Tomb where her programmers had finished their work. One of them, a portly old woman whose child-bearing days were long past, caught Harrah's attention and waved to her. Harrah then bowed her head as if according to some pre-arranged plan. The programmers all stepped back from the dais. Harrah's keepers and the other Architects who had business in the Tomb that night stared at the bare slab where Ede had once lain. Now, in His place, the fine, black lace-work of a sulki grid shone darkly beneath the Tomb lights. Everyone, even Harrah, seemed to be waiting for something. What this event would be, Danlo could only guess.

'Now, please,' Harrah said, again bowing her head.

Danlo also was staring at the dais, and he fairly jumped to see the sulki grid disappear. One moment it was there, and in the next moment gone. And in its place, like a lightship suddenly falling out of the manifold into real-s.p.a.ce, was the clary crypt of Nikolos Daru Ede. Or rather an illusion of this sacred object. The powerful sulki grid generated an imago of infinitely greater realism than the holograms of the devotionary computers. It would be almost impossible for the human eye to distinguish this imago from the true crypt the one that Bertram had stolen. It was long and cut with clear angles across its seemingly clary surfaces, and it glittered with colours. Soon swarms of Architects would form their queues outside Ede's tomb and pa.s.s slowly by to view the cast-off body of their G.o.d. And all of them would attest that they had looked through half an inch of clary within the crypt to see the bald head and soft, smiling face of Nikolos Daru Ede.

'We ask you to keep this a secret,' Harrah said to Danlo. 'We don't wish our people to know that His body is gone.'

'I will tell no one,' Danlo said.

'You see, they've already lost so much, suffered so much.'

'As have you, Blessed Harrah.'

At this, Harrah looked down at her hands and said, 'Our sister and our granddaughters so many of our family.'

'Yes.'

'All the Architects who died, even the Iviomils you see, Pilot, they were all our family.'

'I ... know.'

Harrah buried her face in her hands, then, and she began to weep. Danlo, not caring what her keepers might think, sat beside her on the bench and held her in his arms.

But he was the Lightbringer, after all, and they looked away in trust that he would not harm her.

'Blessed Harrah,' Danlo said as he felt the silent sobs tearing through her frail chest.

'Blessed Harrah.'

After a while, Harrah composed herself and sat straight upon her bench. She reminded Danlo that it was unseemly for anyone, even the Lightbringer, to touch the person of the Holy Ivi. And so Danlo moved away from her slightly. He might have smiled at her fierce will to accomplish all her duties toward life, but something in her eyes troubled him. For there was no light there, no joy, no hope: only resignation in the face of life's bitterness and pain.

'Blessed Harrah,' he said again.

When Harrah finally looked at him, her eyes were almost as full of water as dark oceans floating in the infinite deeps of s.p.a.ce. Her face was dark with grief, and her soul had fallen cold in contemplation of death. Danlo looked at her for a long time, watching and waiting waiting until he felt the hot rush of tears burning in his own eyes. Through this window to the suffering that they shared, he pa.s.sed into a clearer vision of her. He saw her pride, as hard as diamond, as well as her kindness, her n.o.bility and grace. In some ways she was the loveliest woman he had ever known.

But she wept in the silent sadness of herself, and she ached with a terrible loneliness as if she were the last star left alive in all the black void of the night. His love for her, he realized, was without bound, like life itself. He marvelled at the immense strangeness of life, its power, its mystery, its infinite possibilities. There was always a light inside light, memory of the past, dreams of the future, a flower unfolding from inside itself in colours of blue and white and gold like an infinite lotus opening out into the universe. As he looked deeper and deeper, he saw Harrah not only as an old woman wounded in her soul, but as a child full of prayers and hopes, as mother and lover, as a newborn baby trying to drink in the wonder of the world. He saw her as a devoted Reader who had great plans for her Church and as a grandmother who took her greatest delight in sending presents to her children's children. He saw her as she still might some day be. For her life was not yet over. She might live perhaps another thirty years or thirty million. She would return to her faith if only she could return to herself, and she would be a great light leading the Church into a new age. Each man and woman is a star, he remembered. But no one, not even the High Holy Ivi of the Cybernetic Universal Church, could ever be doomed to shine alone.

'Harrah, Harrah.'

Although Danlo's lips remained closed and his voice unmoving, he called to her with another, deeper part of himself. 'Harrah, Harrah,' he asked with his eyes. 'Who am I? What am I?'

And in the same silent way, Harrah answered him, 'You are the Lightbringer.'

'No, no I am only a mirror, nothing more. Look at me and you will see only yourself.'

There was a moment, then. There was a moment of memory and miracle when Danlo returned to the on-streaming light inside himself. He was a mirror for Harrah's soul, truly, but he was also something much more. His eyes shone like deep, blue liquid jewels and his heart was a blazing diamond full of fire and love. His whole being fell numinous and clear, not really like silvered gla.s.s at all, but rather like some impossible crystalline substance perfectly transparent to the light of his deepest consciousness. This light beyond light poured out of him with all the splendour of a star. It pa.s.sed from his eyes to hers. It touched her deepest self and fired her will to live. Inside Harrah, as in everyone, dwelt all the wild possibilities of life. In the intense illumination of the moment, she finally saw this. She sat there smiling at Danlo and dancing with him soul to soul in the terrible quick beauty of their eye-light.

And all this pa.s.sed between them wordlessly and whisperlessly, in utter silence. None of the programmers or keepers (or even the little glowing Ede imago) would ever know how Harrah Ivi en li Ede at last came into her own secret light.

'Thank you, Pilot,' she said after she wiped her eyes and found her voice. 'Thank you, Danlo of the Stars. We shall miss you.'

'Thank you, Blessed Harrah. I shall miss you, too.'

Danlo suddenly stood up, then. He himself felt as wild as any star, though not only with animajii this limitless joy of life but also with a terrible new energy. His eyes were like dark blue windows open upon all the glories of s.p.a.ce and time. Or all the terrors of the manifold. An immense strangeness as cold and clear as a deep winter night fell over him; from far away, it seemed, he could see the future approaching with all the fury of ice clouds driven by the wind. He bowed to Harrah, slowly, deeply, with infinite grace. Then he slowly walked to the side door of the Tomb where it gave out onto a wide balcony. There, as Danlo stood beside a white, plastic railing, he had a clear sight of the great dome above the city of Ornice Olorun and of the sky beyond. As with most nights on Tannahill, few stars were burning through the haze of pollution swaddling the planet. But Danlo hadn't come here to look at the stars. Or rather, not these stars shining down upon the city with their weak, old light.

While Harrah followed him out onto the balcony and leaned on the railing beside him, he gazed at the sky. As he often did while waiting for the future to unfold, he began to count his heartbeats. He watched and he waited, and with each surge of blood inside his chest, somewhere on Tannahill a child was born and an old man or woman died.

And somewhere in the universe a star died, too, in fiery clouds of hydrogen exploding outward into a sphere of light. Danlo listened to the rhythms of his heart, and he could almost hear the supernovas being born, one after another, ringing like bells, roaring like a fiery wind, throbbing and booming, in the Sculptor Group of galaxies and in the Canes Venatici, and closer to home, within the nearer stars of the Vild. He could almost see their killing light. And he could sense the terrible beauty of a different kind of light, the light of pure consciousness that shone everywhere at once upon all things.

Each man and woman is a star.

While Harrah breathed slowly by his side and his heart counted out each anguished moment of time one by one, he looked towards the east. There, some sixty-eight degrees above the horizon where the sky boiled like black ink, he looked far out into s.p.a.ce in the direction from which his lightship had come to Tannahill. He looked for the star of Alumit Bridge, so close and yet invisible to his naked eye. He began to count backward from a hundred as he thought of Isas Lel and Lieswyr Ivioss and the other Narain men and women whom he had known. One hundred ... ninety-nine ...

ninety-eight... ninety-seven ... He remembered the great city of Iviunir in its thirty levels where the Narain people lived and the glittering Field where they carked out their icons in their millions and hoped to find their way toward the divine. Sixty-six ...

sixty-five ... sixty-four ... sixty-three ... Somewhere, in a part of the Field that the Narain called Heaven, dwelled the Transcended Ones, Maralah and Tyr and Manannan, and that great composite being whom Danlo knew as Shahar. As he stared at the heavens connecting Tannahill to the star of Alumit Bridge, he remembered being absorbed into Shahar and letting wave upon wave of intense love wash through him like an ocean of light. Twenty-two ... twenty-one ... twenty ... nineteen ... Love, he remembered, was the true secret of the universe. It connected man to woman, and man to man and everyone, man, woman and child, to each other. All peoples, even those who sought to transcend their physical selves and evolve into pure, luminous beings, lived for that perfect love beyond love. Four ... three ... two ... one ...

Infinite possibilities, he thought. Infinite pain.

He waited almost forever for the light to fall upon him, and then he finally saw it.

The star of the Narain people appeared as a single, silver point piercing the blackness of the universe. And then it exploded outward into infinity in all directions. He looked up into Tannahill's dark sky, and when the brilliant light blinded him, he grabbed his head and fell down to one knee gasping for breath. It almost surprised him that Harrah did not scream at the burning pain of it and throw her hands across her face. In truth, she only stared into the east where he had stared as if awaiting nothing more than the rising of the sun. She seemed mystified at Danlo's sudden anguish, as if she couldn't understand that Bertram Jaspari had just killed a star with a manmade machine called a morrashar. She seemed not to grasp the terrible meaning of a moment when an exploding star killed many millions of people and Danlo clutched his chest as if his own heart had suddenly burst. But then he remembered something. Harrah could not possibly see this new supernova, at least not with her eyes. In a single moment of time so recently past, the sun of Alumit Bridge had died into light, but it would be some forty years before this light crossed the s.p.a.ces of the Vild and lit up Tannahill's sky. In truth, with Alumit Bridge orbiting the Narain's star at a distance of a hundred million miles, it would be many moments yet before the light fell upon Iviunir and her sister cities and incinerated every living thing on the planet.

'Pilot, are you well? Do you need to sit down?'

Harrah's soft, gentle words floated like pearls out into the night. Slowly Danlo stood up with his hand pressing his left eye. He wondered if he should tell her of this new supernova and the death of a people who had once been of the Eternal Church.

He decided that it would be best if he did not. Even a great soul such as Harrah could only bear so much pain at one time. And what did he truly know? He might only be dreaming or scrying, beholding colours and contours of a reality that might never come to be. Soon he would take his lightship out into the Vild to confirm or belie this terrible vision that took his breath away. But then, in letting the star's almost infinite illumination touch his consciousness and burn through every atom of his being, he knew the truth of what he saw beyond any hope of doubt.

They helped me find Tannahill so that they might have peace. But I have brought them only war. And worse, total annihilation. Oh, Ahira, Ahira what have I done?

'Pilot?'

Someday, Danlo knew, he or other pilots of his Order would have to hunt down Bertram Jaspari and restrain him perhaps even destroy him. Someday soon there would be battles fought among the stars and war in the heavens, and he would come at last to his journey's end.

'Pilot, Pilot what do you see?'

'I see light,' Danlo answered truthfully. He turned to look at Harrah. 'Only light. It ... is everywhere, yes?'

Perhaps Harrah thought that he was speaking of hope, for she touched her hand to his face and smiled. And in a strange way, perhaps there truly was hope, not for the Narain who would finally get their wish of vanishing into a ball of light, but for all people who still lived in their very human bodies breathing the cool night air and listening to the music of the voices of family and friends. Perhaps the Architects were right to worship the death of the stars, for out of the dying, new elements of life were always being born. Perhaps there was even hope for him. Strangely, during his moment of greatest despair, he had found his father inside himself, and inside too, the possibility of curing a disease that had no cure. Although he had brought war to two worlds and perhaps out into the stars, he had brought peace as well, for his mission to Tannahill had accomplished the greatest of his purposes, which was to heal the Vild of its sickness. And he had brought something else. Harrah Ivi en li Ede named him as the Lightbringer but what was this mysterious light that he had brought? He looked at Harrah's deeply lined face, now bright in the flawlessness of her rare and splendid spirit. He looked once again at the furious radiance of the supernova beyond the sky and within the darkness of his own soul. There were, he decided, many ways of bringing light. Which was the most powerful? Someday he might know. Someday he might plunge once again into the shimmering ocean of consciousness inside himself and remain there until all the light of creation was his to behold. Then he would at last be a true human being a true Lightbringer who might look upon the wounds of the world with smiling eyes and bear the greatest force in the universe in his hands.

But now he was only a man. He was only a pilot who longed to return home. And so he looked strangely at Harrah and offered her his arm. Together they would walk back through Ede's Tomb and perhaps linger a moment to appreciate the tragedy of a man who had tried to become as G.o.d. He would gather up his devotionary computer, his bamboo flute and his wooden chest containing all the worldly things that mattered to him. He would say farewell to Harrah Ivi en li Ede, this blessed woman whom he loved like the mother he had never known. And then he would take his lightship out into the galaxy where the stars were always bright and beautiful and the light of the universe went on and on forever into the wild.