Danlo looked down at the knife. In the uneven sunlight, it gleamed like a silver leaf. He marvelled at the perfect symmetry of the blade, the way the two edges curved up long and sharp toward an incredibly fine point. He wanted to reach his hand out and touch this deadly diamond point, but he could not.

Take up the knife, my Warrior-Pilot. You must cut out the lamb's heart and make me a burnt offering. I am hungry, and all creatures must rush into my fiery jaws like moths into a flame.

Danlo looked long and deeply at this impossible knife. Then from the sky, the late sun broke through the clouds and slanted low over the ocean to fall over the offsh.o.r.e rocks, over Danlo, over the knife. The blade caught the light, and for a moment, it glowed red as if it had just been removed from some h.e.l.lish forge. Danlo thought that if he touched the knife his skin would sizzle and blacken, and then the terrible fire would leap up his arm and into his flesh, touching every part of him with unutterable pain, consuming him, burning him alive.

Is it your wish to die? All the warriors of life must slay or be slain, and so must you.

Danlo looked down at this lovely knife that he longed to touch but dared not. He looked at the altar, at the trembling lamb, at the Cathedral Rock and the dark ocean beyond. He suddenly realized that he was facing west, and he remembered a piece of knowledge from his childhood. A man, he had been taught, must sleep with his head to the north, p.i.s.s to the south, and conduct all important ceremonies facing east. But he must die to the west. When his moment came when it was the right time to die he must turn his face to the western sky and breathe his last breath. Only then could his anima pa.s.s from his lips and rejoin with the wild wind that was the life and breath of the world.

Slay the lamb now or prepare to be slain yourself.

Danlo looked down and down at this warrior's knife. He could not pick it up. Did the Ent.i.ty truly believe that he would forsake his vow of ahimsa merely upon the threat of death? In truth, he could not break this deepest promise to himself. He would not. He would stand here upon this naked rock, for a moment or forever, watching the sunlight play like fire over the knife. His life meant everything to him and yet nothing of what value was life if he must always live in dread of losing it? He would not pick up the knife, he told himself. He would stand here as the wind rose and the dark storm clouds rolled in from the sea. He would wait for the sea itself to rise and drown him in lungfuls of icy salt water, or he would wait for a bolt of lightning to fall down from the sky and burn his bones and brain. Somehow, he supposed, the Ent.i.ty must command the lightning electrical storms of angry thoughts that flashed through Her dread brain, and so when She had at last grown vengeful and wroth, She would lift Her invisible hand against him and strike him dead.

You are prepared to die, and that is n.o.ble. But it is living that is hard are you prepared to live? If you take up the knife and slay the lamb, I will give you back your life.As Danlo stared at the knife pointing toward the lamb's heart, the wind began to rise. Now the clouds were a solid wall of grey blocking out the sun. The air was heavy with moisture and it moved from sea to sh.o.r.e. Soon the sound of the wind intensified into a howl. It tore at the seaweed carpeting the rock; it caught Danlo's rain robe and whipped his hair wildly about his head. Like a great hand, the wind pushed against the ocean tide, aiding its rush back to the land. The waters around Danlo surged and broke against the rocks. In moments the whole ocean would rise up above the edge of his rock and soak his boots. And then he must either do as the Ent.i.ty commanded or defy Her with all his will.

There was a woman whom you loved. You think she is lost to you, but nothing is lost. If you slay the lamb and make me a burnt offering, I will give you back the woman you know as Tamara Ten Ashtoreth. Slay the lamb now. If you do, I shall tell you where you may find Tamara and restore her memories.

For the ten thousandth moment of his sojourn upon this rock, Danlo looked down at the knife. He looked at his long, empty right hand. How the Ent.i.ty moved the world was a mystery that he might never comprehend, but it was an even greater mystery how anything might move anything. He himself wondered how he might move the muscles of his fingers and clasp the haft of a simple knife. Were not his sinews and his bones made of proteins and calcium and the other elements of simple matter? It should be the simplest thing in the universe to move these five aching tendrils of matter attached to his hand. He need only think the thought and exercise a moment of free will. He remembered, then, that his brain was made of matter too, all his thoughts, his memories, his dreams, all the lightning electro-chemical storms of serotonin and adrenalin that fired his blessed neurons. He remembered this simple thing about himself, and the mystery of how matter moved itself was like an endless golden snake, shimmering and coiling onto itself and finally swallowing its own tail.

This is the test of free will, Danlo wi Soli Ringess. What is it that you will?

Danlo looked down at the knife glittering darkly against the blackish seaweed of the rock. He gazed at the handle, the black shatterwood from a kind of tree that had never grown on Old Earth. He gazed and gazed, and suddenly the whole world seemed to be made of nothing but blackness. The black clouds above him threw black shadows over the inky black sea. The barnacles stuck to the rocks were black, and the rocks themselves, and the pieces of driftwood which the churning waters threw against the sh.o.r.e. Black was the colour of a pilot's kamelaika and the colour of deep s.p.a.ce. (And, he remembered, the colour of the centres of his eyes.) There was something about this strange, deep colour that had always attracted him. In blackness there was a purity and depth of pa.s.sion, both love and hate, and love of hate. Once, he remembered, he had allowed himself to hate all too freely. Once a time, his deepest friend. Hanuman li Tosh, had stolen the memories of the woman whom Danlo had loved. Hanuman had destroyed a part of Tamara's mind and thus destroyed a truly blessed and marvellous thing. Danlo had hated him for this, and ultimately, it was this wild hatred that he loved so much that had driven Tamara away and caused Danlo to lose her. And now he hated still, only he had nothing but dread of this blackest of emotions. He gazed at the black-handled knife waiting on a black rock, and he remembered that he hated Hanuman li Tosh for inflicting a wound in him that could never be healed. He ground his teeth, and made a fist, and pressed his black pilot's ring against his aching eye.

Take up the knife, my wounded warrior. I am lonely, and it is only in the pain of all the warriors of the world that I know I am not alone.

One last time, Danlo looked down at the knife. He looked and looked, and then suddenly, strangely he began to see himself. He saw himself poised on a slippery rock in the middle of the sea, and it seemed that he must be waiting for something. He watched himself standing helpless over the lamb. His fists were clenched and his eyes were locked, his bottomless dark eyes, all blue-black and full of remembrance like the colours of the sea. And then, at last, he saw himself move to pick up the knife. He could not help himself. Like a robot made of flesh and muscle and blood, he reached out and closed his fingers on the knife's haft. It was cold and clammy to the touch, though as hard as bone. He saw himself pick up the knife. Because he hated the Ent.i.ty for tempting him so cruelly, he wanted to grind the diamond point into the rock on which he stood, to thrust down and down straight into the black, beating heart of the world. Because he hated and hated himself for hating he wanted to stab the knife into his own throbbing eye. or into his chest, anywhere but into the heart of the terrified lamb. The lamb, he saw, was now looking at the knife in his hand as if he knew what was to come. With a single dark eye, the lamb was looking at him, the bleating lamb, the bleeding lamb this helpless animal whose fate it was to die in the crimson pulse and spray of his own blood. Nothing could forestall this fate. Danlo knew that the lamb was easy prey for any predator who hunted the beach. Or if he somehow escaped talon and claw, he would starve to death for want of milk. The lamb would surely die, and soon, and so why shouldn't Danlo ease the pain of his pa.s.sing with a quick thrust of the knife through the throat? It would be a simple thing to do. In the wildness of his youth, Danlo had hunted and slain a thousand such animals would it be so great a sin if he broke ahimsa this one time and sacrificed the lamb? What was the death of one doomed animal against his life, against the promise of Tamara being restored to him and a lifetime of love, joy, happiness, and playing with his children by the hearth fires of his home? How, he wondered, in the face of such life-giving possibilities could it be so wrong to kill?

You were made to kill, my tiger, my beautiful, dangerous man. G.o.d made the universe, and G.o.d made lambs, and you must ask yourself one question above all others: Did She who made the lamb make thee?

Danlo looked down to see himself holding the knife. To see is to be free, he thought. To see that I see. As he looked deeply into himself, he was overcome with a strange sense that he had perfect will over shatterwood and steel, over hate, over pain, over himself. He remembered then why he had taken his vow of ahimsa. In the most fundamental way, his life and the lamb's were one and the same. He was aware of this unity of their spirits this awareness was both an affliction and a grace. The lamb was watching him, he saw, bleating and shivering as he locked eyes with Danlo.

Killing the lamb would be like killing himself, and he was very aware that such a self- murder was the one sin that life must never commit. To kill the lamb would be to remove a marvellous thing from life, and more, to inflict great pain and terror. And this he could not do, even though the face and form of his beloved Tamara burned so dearly inside him that he wanted to cry out at the cruelty of the world. He looked at the lamb, and the animal's wild eye burned like a black coal against the whiteness of his wool. In remembrance of the fierce will to life with which he and all things had been born and in relief at freeing himself from the Ent.i.ty's terrible temptation he began to laugh, softly, grimly, wildly. Anyone would have thought him mad, standing on a half-drowned rock, laughing and weeping into the wind, but the only witnesses to this sudden outpouring of emotion were the gulls and the crabs and the lamb himself. For a long time Danlo remained nearly motionless laughing with a wild joy as be looked at the lamb. Then the sea came crashing over the rock in a surge of water and salty spray. The great wave soaked his boots and beat against his legs and belly; the shock of the icy water stole his breath away and nearly knocked him from his feet.

As the wave pulled back into the ocean, he rushed forward toward the lamb. He held the knife tightly so that the dripping haft would not slip in his hand. Quickly, he slashed out with the knife. In a moment of pure free will, he sawed the rope binding the terrified animal. This done, he stood away from the altar, raised back his arm, and cast the knife spinning far out into the sea. Instantly it sank beneath the black waves.

And then Danlo looked up past Cathedral Rock at the blackened sky, waiting for the lightning, waiting for the sound of thunder.

You have made your choice, Danlo wi Soli Ringess.

Another wave, a smaller wave, broke across Danlo's legs as he reached out his open hand toward the lamb. It occurred to him that if the G.o.ddess should suddenly strike him dead, here, now, then the lamb would still die upon this rock, or die drowning as the dark suck of the ocean's riptide pulled it beneath the waves out to sea.

You have chosen life, and so you have pa.s.sed the first test.

The lamb struggled to his feet, bleating and shuddering and pushing his nose at Danlo. He stood upon his four trembling legs, obviously terrified to jump down into the rising water. Danlo was all too ready to lead the lamb back to the safety of the beach, but he waited there a moment longer than necessary because he could scarcely believe the great booming words that fell from the sky.

I have said that this was the test of free will. If you hadn't freely affirmed your will to ahimsa and cut loose the lamb, then I would have had to slay you for lack of faithfulness to yourself.

Once, when Danlo was a journeyman at Resa, the pilots' college, he had heard that the Solid State Ent.i.ty was the most capricious of all the G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses. The Ent.i.ty, someone had said, liked to play, and now he saw that this was so. But it was cruel to play with others' lives, especially the life of an innocent lamb. Because Danlo thought that he had finished with the Ent.i.ty's games, he bent over to coil up the golden rope lying severed and twisted against the soaking rock. He took up the rope in his hand, and then he reached out to coax the lamb closer to him.

You are free to save the animal, if you can, my warrior. You are free to save yourself, if that is your will.

Danlo reached out to touch the lamb's nose and eyes, to stroke the scratchy wet wool of his head. Curiously, the lamb allowed himself to be touched. He bleated mournfully and pressed up close to Danlo. It was no trouble for Danlo to wrap his arm around the lamb's shoulders and chest and pick him up. The animal was almost as light as a baby. With the lamb tucked beneath one arm and his walking stick dangling from his opposite hand, he made his way across the rock in the direction of the beach.

It was nearly dark now, and the sky was shrouded over with the darkest of clouds.

He felt the gravity of this Earth pulling heavily at his legs, pulling at his memories, perhaps even pulling at the sky. On the horizon, far out over the black sea, bolts of lightning lit up the sky and streaked down over the water like great glowing snakes dancing from heaven to earth. The whole beach fell dark and electric with purpose, as if the birds and the rocks and the dune gra.s.ses were awaiting a storm. Danlo smelled burnt air and the thrilling tang of the sea. Certainly, he thought, it was no time for standing beneath trees or dallying upon a wave-drenched rock. Although there was as yet no rain, there was much wind and water, which made the footing quite treacherous. In his first rush back to the beach, another wave washed over him, and he slipped on the wet seaweed; it was only his stick and his sense of balance that kept him from being swept off the rock. Enc.u.mbered as he was, his leaping along the pathway of the twelve rocks back to the beach required all his strength and grace. All the while, the lamb shuddered in his arm. Twice, he convulsed in a blind, instinctive struggle to escape. Danlo had to clasp him close, chest pressing against chest so that he could feel the lamb's heart beating against his own.In the falling darkness it was hard to see the cracks and undulations of the twelve rocks and harder still to hear, for the wind blew fiercely, and the rhythmic thunder of the waves was like a waterfall in his ears. And farther out, the long, dark roar of the sea drowned out the lesser sounds: the harsh cry of the gulls, the lamb's insistent bleating, the distant song of the whales, the mysticeti and belugas and the killers who must swim somewhere among cold, endless waves.

With every step Danlo took along this natural jetty of rocks, the lamb bleated louder and louder as if he could hardly wait to feel the sand beneath his cloven hooves and bound up the beach toward the safety of the dunes.

When they finally jumped down from the last rock and stood on the hardpack by the water's edge, Danlo decided that he couldn't let the lamb run free after all. Instead he twisted the golden rope between his fingers and fashioned a noose which he slipped over the lamb's head. Using the rope as a lead, he led the lamb up the beach.

A quarter of a mile away, his lightship was like a black diamond needle gleaming darkly against the soft dunes. And beyond his ship, where the headland rose above the beach and the dunes gave way to the deep green forest, was his little house. In the gloom of the twilight, he could just make out its clean, stark lines. He had a vague, half-formed notion of sheltering the lamb in the house's kitchen, at least for the night.

He would feed the lamb soft cheeses and cream, and then, perhaps, in the morning he would go into the forest to look for the lamb's flock. He would return the lamb to his mother and save him from the fate that the Ent.i.ty had planned for him. This was his plan, his pride, his will to affirm the life of a single animal pulling at the golden rope in his hand and bouncing happily along by his side.

It was in among the gra.s.ses of the low dunes, with the house so close he might have thrown a rock at it, that they came upon the tiger. Or rather, the tiger came upon them.

One moment Danlo and the lamb were alone together with the rippling gra.s.s and the wind-packed sand, and a moment later, upon a little ridge between them and the house, the tiger suddenly appeared. Danlo was the first to see it. His eyes were better than those of the lamb, although his sense of smell was not as keen; but with the wind blowing so fiercely from the sea, neither he nor the lamb could have caught the tiger's scent. And so Danlo had a moment to look at the tiger before the lamb noticed what he was looking at and bleated out in panic. The tiger crouched belly low to the sand, the long tail held straight out and switching back and forth through the spa.r.s.e gra.s.s.

She Danlo immediately sensed that she was female fixed her great glowing eyes on them, watching and waiting. And Danlo looked at her. Although he knew better than to stare at a big cat (or any predator), for a single moment he stared. Something about this particular tiger compelled his attention. She was a beautiful beast some nine feet in length and twice or thrice his own weight. In the tense way that she waited she seemed almost afraid of him, yet she was not at all eye-shy for she continued to stare, never breaking the electric connection of their eyes. He decided immediately that there was something elemental and electric about all tigers, as if their powerful, trembling bodies were incarnations of lightning into living flesh. In the tiger's lovely symmetry and bright eternal stare there blazed all the energies of the universe. The tiger's face was a glory of darkness and light: the broken circles of black and burning white that exploded out from a bright orange point centred between her brilliant eyes. For an endless moment, Danlo stared, falling drunk with the intoxicating fire of the tiger's eyelight. Then something strange began to happen to him. He began to see himself through the tiger's eyes. He looked deeply into the twin yellow mirrors glowing out of the twilight, and he saw himself as a strange and fearful animal. Strange because he stood on two legs and brandished a long black stick, and fearful because he stood much taller than the tiger, and more, because his dark blue eyes faced forward in a brilliant and dangerous gaze of his own. He, like all men, had the eyes of a predator, and through the coolness of the early evening air, the tiger saw this immediately. The tiger saw something else. Although it was unlikely that she had ever encountered a man before, she must have looked within her own racial memories and relived the ancient enmity between feline and man. She must have remembered that although man killed lambs and other animals for food, once a time, it was the lions and tigers and other big cats of Afarique who had hunted man.

Danlo remembered this too. He remembered it with a gasp of cold air and the hot shock of adrenalin and the sudden quick pounding of his heart; in a stream of dark and b.l.o.o.d.y images called up from his deepest memories he remembered the essential paradox of his kind: that man was a predatory animal who had once been mostly prey.

He remembered that he should have feared this tiger. On the burning veldts of Afarique, two million years ago in the primeval home of man, the fiercest predators on the planet had been everywhere: in the tall gra.s.ses and in caves and hiding behind the swaying acacia trees, always watching, always waiting. The tiger was the true Beast of humankind, the avatar of h.e.l.l out of the dark past. The tiger was a killer but also something else. For it was the big cats, in part, that had driven human beings to evolve. For millions of years the tiger and the leopard had chased men and women across the gra.s.slands, forcing them to stand upright and pick up sticks and stones as weapons of self-defence. Out of fear of darkness and bright pointed teeth, man had found fire and had made blazing torches with which to frighten these meat-eaters and keep them at bay. The constant evolutionary pressure to escape nature and its most powerful beasts had driven human beings to create spears and baby slings and stone huts, ultimately to build cities and lightships and sail out to the stars. Looking out across the darkening dunes at the tiger, Danlo marvelled at the courage with which his far fathers and mothers and all his ancestors had come down from the trees and faced the big cats, thus turning the possibility of extinction into evolution, death into life. In the short moment that he met the tiger eye to eye while the innocent lamb still pawed the sand and trotted along unaware Danlo saw the entire history of the human race unfold. And the deeper he looked into the black, b.l.o.o.d.y pools of the past, and into himself, the more clearly he saw the tiger's burning face staring back at him.

The darkness falling slowly over the beach did little to obliterate this vision. As the light failed over the dunes and the dark forest disappeared into the night, still he could see the tiger watching him. He remembered how tigers loved the night, how they loved to roam and roar and hunt at night. It came to him suddenly that in this love of walking alone beneath the stars, tigers were the true architects of man's fear of the dark. All history, all philosophy had sprung from this fear. Darkness, for man, was death whether the endless death of being enclosed in a wood coffin or the sudden death that came flashing out of the night in an explosion of hot breath and tearing claws. Man had always dreaded darkness and thus worshipped light; the ancient philosophers of the human race, in their beards and their fear, had made a war between light and dark, good and evil, spirit and matter, life and death. This urge to separate form from function, the sacred from the profane, was the fundamental philosophical mistake of mankind. Human beings, in their mathematics and their lightships, in their evolution into the universe, had only carried this mistake across the stars. And human beings, though they might explode the stars themselves into billions of brilliant supernovas, would never vanquish darkness or the terrible creations hidden in the folds of the night.

As Danlo stared forever at the tiger across a hundred feet of darkening beach, these thoughts blazed through his brain. The wind roared in from the sea, carrying in the sound of thunder, and he fell into a keen awareness of the night-time world. Above him were black clouds, black sky, the omnipresent blackness of the universe. Danlo realized then how much he had always hated (and loved) dark places. Yet strangely, like any man, he had always felt the urge to open the door to the darkest of rooms and see what lay inside. Or open the door to his house and see what is outside, in the night. And here, now, on this desolate beach, there was only a tiger. He looked at the tiger's bright golden eyes blazing out of the darkness, and he remembered a line from the Second Hymn to the Night: You are the messenger who opens mysteries that unfold forever. He knew that the tiger would always be a mystery to him, as he was to himself.

And now the night was opening this mystery, beginning to reveal it in all its glory.

Now, over the ocean, the storm was beginning to break. In sudden crackling bolts appearing out of nowhere, lightning played in the sky, connecting heaven to earth. It illuminated the beach in flashes of light. For a moment, the tiger and the lamb and the other features of the world were revealed in all their splendour, and then the dunes and the rocks and the sand vanished back into the night. During this brief moment of illumination, while tiger's orange and black stripes burned with a strange numinous fire, reality was charged with such a terrible intensity that it seemed almost too real.

With each stroke of lightning there was a moment of dazzle and then darkness. Danlo had a deep sense of knowing that there was something behind this darkness, all vivid and white like the lamb's snowy fleece, but he could not quite see it. The lightning broke upon the beach, suddenly, mysteriously, and he marvelled at the way light came from darkness and darkness devoured light. In one blinding moment he saw that although tigers were truly creatures of darkness, this lovely tiger who waited for him on the darkling dunes had everything to teach him about the true nature of light.

When the tiger finally sprang, it was as if she had been waiting a million years to be released from a secret and unbearable tension. She flew forward in an explosion of colours, all orange-gold and black and streaked with white, and attacked in a series of violent leaps that carried her hurtling across the beach. Her paws hardly touched the sand. Although Danlo had had almost forever to decide how to meet the tiger, when she finally struck he had little time to move. In truth, he had nowhere to run, for there was nothing but gra.s.s and sand all around him, and even if the tiger hadn't blocked the way to the house, he could never have reached its safety before the tiger reached him. Still, he thought that he should try to run, if only to lead the tiger away from the lamb. He should save the lamb; if he and the lamb ran in opposite directions, then the tiger might catch only one of them in her claws. It didn't occur to him, at first, that the lamb was the tiger's intended prey, not he. But when he decided to drop the rope and the lamb screamed out in terror, he knew. The tiger, in her astonishing dash across the beach, was no longer looking at Danlo. Her golden eyes were now fixed straight ahead on the lamb. Danlo immediately moved to place his body in front of the lamb, but it ruined his plan by springing suddenly to the left and thus entangling Danlo's legs in the rope. His feet slipped on the soft sand even as the tiger bolted toward them.

For a moment, as he stared at the tiger's wild eyes and the powerful, rippling muscles that flowed like rivers beneath her fur, he remembered how, as a boy, he had once stood beneath an icy forest and watched as his near-father, the great Wemilo, had slain a snow tiger with nothing more than a simple spear. He remembered this clearly: the silence of the winter woods, the clean white snow, the tremendous power of Wemilo's thrust as his spear found the heart place and let loose a waterfall of blood.

But he had no knife, no spear, no time. In a second, the tiger would be upon him.

There was nothing he could do. All his instincts cried out for him to devise some clever plan to flee or fight, and it nearly killed him to wait there in the sand as helpless as a frozen snow hare. But then it came to him that there was always a time to just stand and die, and he was afraid that his time had finally come. For surely the tiger would kill him in her l.u.s.t to get at the lamb. He thought to raise his walking stick as a last defence, but against the power and ferocity of her attack, it would be worse than useless. The most he might accomplish and only with perfect timing would be to ram the sandy point of the stick into her lovely yellow eye. But this would not discourage her; it would only enrage her and cause her to fall into a killing frenzy, thereby dooming both him and the lamb. And more, such an injury could blind the tiger on one side. The wound might bleed and fester; ultimately, it might cause the tiger to sicken and die. He knew that he could never do such a deed. He remembered his vow of ahimsa then, and he realized that even if he had hated the tiger, he could never have harmed such a marvellous beast.

The tiger sprang through the air directly at the lamb, and he loved her: her rare grace, her vitality, her wild joy at following the terrible angels of her nature. The tiger, in her moment of killing, was nothing but energy and joy, animajii the joy of life, the joy of death.

Even the lamb, he saw, knew a kind of joy. Or rather, the lamb was wholly alive with the utter terror to save his own life, and this sudden nearness of mortality was really the left hand of joy. As the tiger fell upon him, the lamb screamed and shuddered and jerked in the direction of the ocean in his blind urge to run away.

Danlo, who had finally fought free of the rope binding them, tried to come to his aid.

He too leaped toward the lamb. But the explosive force of the tiger's strike knocked him aside as he collided with her. There was a shock of bunched muscles and bone, a rage of orange and black fur and slashing claws. Danlo smelled the tiger's fermy cat scent and caught wind of her hot b.l.o.o.d.y breath. Her glorious face, all open with fury and gleaming white fangs, flashed in front of his. The lamb screamed and screamed and tried to leap away dragging the golden rope behind him. Then the tiger sank her claws into his side as she pulled him to the ground, and the terrible screaming suddenly stopped. The lamb fell into a gla.s.sy-eyed motionlessness, offering no more resistance. Again, Danlo leaped at the tiger, grabbing the loose skin at the back of her neck and trying to pull her off the lamb. He sank his fingers into her thick fur, and he pulled and pulled. The tiger's deep-throated growls vibrated through her chest; Danlo felt the great power that vibrated through her entire body. Through the brilliance of another flash of lightning, he saw the tiger open her jaws to bite the lamb's neck. He remembered then how Wemilo had once been mauled by a snow tiger. Once in deep winter, Danlo's found-father, Haidar, had brought Wemilo all broken and b.l.o.o.d.y back to their cave, and Wemilo had told an incredible story. Even as Haidar had held a burning brand to Wemilo's face to cauterize his wounds, this great hunter had claimed that at the supreme moment of his ordeal, with the tiger tearing at him, he had felt neither fear nor pain. He said that he had fallen into a kind of dreaminess in which he was aware of the tiger biting open his shoulder but did not really care. The laying bare of his shoulder bones, he said, seemed almost as if it were happening to someone other than himself. And now, above the beach as the lightning flashed, as Danlo pulled vainly at two handfuls of quivering flesh, this tiger was about to make her kill, and Danlo could only hope that the lamb had entered into the final dreamtime before death. All his life he had wondered what lay beyond the threshold of that particular doorway. Perhaps there was joy in being released from life, a deep and brilliant joy that lasted forever. Perhaps there was only blackness, nothingness, neverness. Danlo wondered if he himself might be very close to following the lamb upon her journey to the other side, and then at last the tiger struck down with her long fangs. Her teeth were like knives which she used with great precision. She bit through the lamb's neck, tearing open the throat with such force that Danlo felt the shock of tooth upon bone run down the whole length of the tiger's body. Blood sprayed over the tiger's face and chest, and over Danlo who still clung desperately to the back of the tiger's neck. The lamb lay crushed beneath the tiger's paws, and his dark eye was lightless as a stone.

Danlo should have let go then and tried to run, but the tiger suddenly jumped up from her kill and whirled about. With a single great convulsion of muscles, she whirled and rolled and roared, trying to shake Danlo loose. She drove him straight back to the sand. The force of their fall knocked his breath away. If the sand hadn't been so soft, the tiger might have broken his back. For a moment, Danlo was pinned beneath her.

The tiger's arching spine drove back into his belly and chest nearly crushing him.

There was blood and fur in his mouth, and he could feel the tiger's powerful rumblings vibrate deeply in his own throat. And all the while the tiger roared and snapped her jaws and clawed the air. She continued to roll, spinning along the beach until she pulled Danlo off and found her feet. She crouched in the sand scarce three feet away. Her breath fell over Danlo's face. He, too, was now crouching, up on one knee as he held the bruised ribs above his belly and gasped for air. He waited for the tiger to spring. But the tiger did not move. During a flash of lightning, she found his eyes and stared at him. It lasted only a moment, this intense, knowing look, but in that time something pa.s.sed between them. She stared at him, strangely, deeply, and at last she found her fear of the mysterious fire that she saw blazing in Danlo's eyes. She turned her head away from him, then. She stood and turned back toward the lamb who lay crumpled in the sand. With her teeth, she took him up by his broken neck as gently as she might have carried one of her cubs. The lamb dangled from her teeth, swaying in the wind. Without a backward glance, she padded off up the dunes toward the dark forest beyond, and then she was gone.

For a while Danlo knelt on the beach and watched the heavens. He faced west, looking up at the black sky, listening to the wind and decided to say a prayer for the lamb's spirit. But he did not know the true name of the lamb; on the islands west of Neverness there are no lambs, nor any animals very much like lambs. Without a true name to tell the world, Danlo could not pray properly, but he could still pray, and so he said, 'Ki anima pela makala mi alasharia la shantih'. He touched his fingers to his lips, then. His hands were wet with the lamb's fresh blood, and he opened his mouth to touch his tongue. It had been a long time since he had tasted the blood of an animal. The lamb's blood was warm and sweet, full of life. Danlo swallowed this dark, red elixir, and thanked the lamb for his life, for giving him his blessed life. Soon after this it began to rain. The sky finally opened and founts of water fell down upon the beach in endless waves. Danlo turned his face to the sky, letting this fierce cold rain wash the blood from his lips, from his beard and hair, from his forehead and aching eyes. He scooped up some wet sand and used it to scour the blood off his hands. As lightning flashed all around him and the storm intensified, he watched the lamb's blood run off him and wash into the earth. He thought the rain would wash the blood through the sand, ultimately down to the sea. He thought that even now the lamb's spirit had rejoined with the wind blowing out of the west, the wild wind that cried in the sky and circled the world forever.

That night, when Danlo returned to his house, he had dreams. He lay sweating on a soft fur before a blazing fire, and he dreamed that a tall grey man was cutting at his flesh, sculpting his body into some dread new form. There was a knife, and pain and blood. With a sculptor's art, the tall grey man cut at Danlo's nerves and twisted his sinews and hammered at the bones around his brain. And when the sculptor was done with this excruciating surgery and Danlo looked into his little silver mirror, he could not quite recognize himself, for he no longer wore the body of a man. All through this terrible dream that wouldn't end, Danlo stared and stared at the mirror. And always staring back at him, burning brightly with a fearful fire, was the face of a beautiful and blessed tiger.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Miracle.

Memory can be created but not destroyed.

saying of the remembrancers.

Danlo might have hoped that this encounter on the beach would have been his last test, but it was not to be so. In arrays of ideoplasts glittering through the house's medi- tation room or sometimes in words whispered in his ear the Ent.i.ty said that he must prepare himself for many difficult moments still to come. But She gave him not the slightest inkling of the difficulties he might face, hinting only that, as with the test of his faithfulness to ahimsa, part of the test would be his ability to discover the true nature of the test and why he was being tested.

At first, after several days of walking the beach and looking for animal prints or blood in the sand, he wondered if the Ent.i.ty might not be testing him to see how much loneliness he could endure. As much as he loved being alone with the turtles and the pretty white gulls along the water's edge, he was a gregarious man who also loved human company. With no one to say his name with no one to remind him that he was a pilot of a great Order who had once drunk cinnamon coffee in the cafes of Neverness and conversed with other journeymen who dreamed of going to the stars he began to develop a strange sense of himself. In many ways it was a deeper and truer self, a secret consciousness articulated only in the cries of the seabirds or in the immense sound of the ocean beating rhythmically against the land. Once or twice, as he stood in the waters near the offsh.o.r.e rocks, he felt himself very close to this memory of who he really was. It was as if the ocean itself were somehow melting away the golden face of his being, dissolving all his cares, his emotions, his ideals, the very way in which he saw himself as both human being and a man. With the wind in his hair and the salty spray stinging his eyes, he felt himself awakening to a strange new world inside himself. At these times, he didn't mind that he had nearly forgotten his hatred of Hanuman li Tosh for disfiguring Tamara's soul. But at other times he felt otherwise. Very often he stared out at the endless blue horizon, and dreaded that he might forget his vow to find the planet called Tannahill; possibly he might even forget his promise to cure the Alaloi tribes of the virus that had doomed them. Such thoughts brought him immediately back to the world of purposes and plans, of black silk and lightships and great stone cathedrals shimmering beneath the stars. He remembered, then, his burning need to take part in the purpose of his race. He remembered that although human beings would always need the wild, they would always need each other, too, or else they could not be truly human.

One day, when he returned from a long walk around the rocky headland to the north, he discovered that he was no longer alone. As was his habit, at dusk, he opened the door to the house, pulled off his boots, and touched the second highest of the doorway's stones, the white granite stone whose flecks of black mica and fine cracks reminded him of one of the sacred stones set into the entrance of the cave in which he had been born. Immediately, he knew that there was someone in the house. Although the hallway looked exactly as it always did just a short corridor of bare wall stones and a red wool carpet leading to the meditation room he sensed a subtle change in the movements of the air, possibly a warmness of breath emanating from somewhere inside. With a few quick steps, he hurried past the doorways of the empty kitchen, the empty tearoom and the fireroom. He came into the meditation room. And there, wearing a travelling robe of Summerworld silk, standing by the windows overlooking the sea, was the only woman whom he had ever truly loved.

'Tamara!' he cried out. 'It is not possible!'

In the half-light of the dusk, in a room whose fireplace was cold and black, he could not be certain at first of her ident.i.ty. But when she turned to him and he caught sight of her lovely dark eyes, he could scarcely breathe. He could not see how this mysterious woman could be anyone other than Tamara. She had Tamara's long, strong nose and quick smile. Her hair, long and golden and flowing freely, was Tamara's as were the high cheekbones, the unlined forehead, each downy lobe of her little ears.

He thought he remembered perfectly well her sensuous red lips and the sinuous muscles of her neck. She beckoned him closer, and he suddenly remembered that she had once been a courtesan whose lovely hand gestures flowed like water. In truth, he had always loved watching her move. Her limbs were long and lithe; when she stepped toward him quickly and almost too easily, it was with all the grace of a tiger.

With more than a little irony, he remembered how he had always thought of her as very like the snow tigers of his home: impulsive and playful and full of a primeval vitality. She was a woman of rare powers, he remembered, and he ached to feel once more the silken clasp and urgent strength of her body. He moved forward to embrace her, then. And she moved toward him. Because their last meeting had been full of sorrow and a great distance between their souls, he was afraid to touch her. And she seemed almost afraid to touch him. But then, in less than a moment, they were hugging each other fiercely, enfolding each other, touching lips and each other's face with the heat of their breath. He kissed her forehead and her eyes, and she kissed him.

Now, despite all his hatred and despair, despite light years of empty black s.p.a.ce and the bitter memories that burned inside his brain, it seemed the day had finally come for kisses and caresses and other miracles.

'Tamara, Tamara,' he said. He brushed his fingers lightly over her forehead. He touched her temples, her eyes, her cheek, the pulsing artery along her throat. While she stood very still, almost like a statue, he circled around her and cupped his hand over the hollow at the back of her neck. He stroked her long golden hair and touched her face, circling and looking at her deeply and always touching as if to make sure it was really she.

'Danlo, Danlo,' she replied at last, and her voice was dulcet and low, just as he remembered it. She pulled back to look at him and then smiled nicely. She had a lovely smile, wide and sparkling and open, although slightly too full of pride. He wondered why the outrages she had endured hadn't tempered her terrible pride, but apparently the deeper parts of herself (and perhaps her surface happiness as well) remained untouched by her misfortunes. She seemed as sweet as he had known her at their first meeting, as warm and charming and full of life.

'I ... did not see you,' he said. 'When I came up the beach, I should have seen you standing by the window.'

'Well, it's dark in this room. Through the gla.s.s, darkly, the reflections you couldn't have seen very much.'

'But I did not even think ... to look inside the house.'

'But how should you have? You're not omniscient, you know.'

He smiled at this and said, 'We used to joke that we were like magnets who could always sense each other's presence.'

'We did, didn't we? Oh yes and once you said that when we were together, we completed something. A cosmic field of joy, of love, like a magnetic field I the south pole and you the north. I think you're the most romantic man I've ever known.'

Danlo stood close to her holding both her hands between his. He looked deeply into her eyes and said, 'You ... remember this?'She nodded her head then smiled. 'I have so much to tell you. So much has happened and I-'

'But how did you come to be here? In this house, on this planet, now, here how is this possible?'

'Please,' she said. 'It's cold in this room would you mind if we light a fire before we talk? I've always loathed being cold.'

While Danlo stacked a few logs on the grate inside the fireplace, Tamara went into the kitchen to prepare a pot of tea. She was familiar with the house, of course, much more familiar than he. It did not take her long to return carrying a tray laden with a teapot, honey bowl, silver spoons and two little blue cups. She set the tray down before the blazing fire that Danlo had lit, then pulled up two cushions and set them on the hard wooden floor in front of the fireplace, one cushion on either side of the tea service. Because the meditation room was heating up rather quickly, she removed her travelling robe and sat on one of the cushions. She invited Danlo to do the same. In this way, sitting crosslegged on the soft cushions with the tea service between them, they could look into each other's eyes as the fire warmed the sides of their faces.

'You must know I left Neverness,' she said. She took in a breath of air and then hesitated a moment as if she was unsure of herself, or perhaps unsure of what she could allow herself to tell him. 'After our last meeting, I couldn't bear being in a city where I had so many memories and where so many of the memories most important to me were gone. The truth is, I think I was afraid of meeting you somewhere, on the street or buying a plate of kurmash or even skating circles at one of the ice rings. I'm sorry, Danlo. You must know why it was impossible for me to see you. You'd been so much a part of my old life, before the fever burned my memories away but my old life was gone. I had to have a new life. To make a new life somewhere other than Neverness. Sometimes, after I realized what I'd lost when I lost you, I wanted to die.

But even more, I suppose, I wanted to live. To love, to live and live and live and live until I was myself again. Oh, I don't mean I hoped I could get my memories back.

I never hoped that. But my sanity, my soul I had to remember who I really was, if I remembered anything. I was afraid I'd lost my soul, don't you see? So I left Neverness to find it. That sounds so romantic, I know. So vain. Because you can never lose your soul. It's always there if you look deeply enough. The love. The life. Even the memories, too they're always there, waiting, like pearls in a dark drawer. You were right, after all. The master remembrancers were right, too. It's so strange that I had to leave Neverness to learn that. It's so strange how my life led me here, halfway across the galaxy, to you. I never thought I'd see you again. I never thought I'd love you again, I never dared hope that. But love, to love and love without restraint, to be loved it's what we were born for, don't you think? It's what I was born for, Danlo. I never really doubted that.'

While Tamara poured the golden peppermint tea into their cups, Danlo listened. He did not interrupt or try to correct her when she ascribed her memory loss to the Catavan Fever. He had never told of his discovery that it was Hanuman li Tosh who had really destroyed her memories, not some manufactured mind virus from Catava.

He decided not to tell her now. This was her time for telling, not his. And so he sat straight and quiet on his cotton cushion, sipping sweet tea from a little blue cup. He listened to her tell of her journey from Neverness to Avalon and then on to Larondiss.e.m.e.nt, Simoom, Summerworld and Urradeth, where she had nearly lost herself in one of the arhats' famous meditation schools. Finally, she said, she had made her way to Solsken, that bright and happy planet which lies near the end of the Fallaways. Of all the Civilized Worlds, Solsken is the nearest the galactic core, just as Farfara is the farthest. The stars in the night sky of Solsken are as dense and brilliant as grains of sand along a tropical beach, which is perhaps why the men and women of Solsken worship the night as do no other people. On Solsken, during the season called Midsummer's Dream, there are always festivals and religious rites lasting from dusk until dawn. And there is always a need for musicians to beat the drums and play the flutes and pluck the strings of the gosharps which sanctify the Dance of the Night.

Tamara, of course, in her training as a courtesan had gained proficiency with many musical instruments. In fact, she had played with some of the best harpists in Neverness: with Zohra Iviatsui, Ramona Chu and once, even with the great Ivaranan.

Although her talent for s.e.xual ecstasy had vanished with the rape of her memories, strangely her musical gifts had only deepened. And so the exemplars and ritual masters of Solsken were very glad to have such an accomplished woman play for them, and Tamara spent many nights singing the holy songs, using her perfect golden voice as a precise instrument that vibrated through the sacred groves and resonated with the strings of the great golden gosharps. In this way, she sang to her lost soul, and with her voice alone plucked the ten thousand strings and made an unearthly music the mystic chords of the sacred canticles which the faithful believed to be perfectly tuned to the wavelengths of starlight falling over the world. She might have spent the rest of her life there beneath the brilliant stars of Solsken, dancing and remembering and singing her sad, beautiful songs. But then one night, during the Night of the Long Dance, a man dressed all in grey had come out of the mult.i.tudes on the hillside and approached her. His name was Sivan wi Mawi Sarkissian, and he said that he had been sent to find her.

'I can't tell you how surprised I was,' Tamara said as she stirred a tiny spoonful of honey into her second cup of tea. She would have preferred adding more, much more, but she avoided sweets the way a speed skater might potholes in the ice. 'I had told no one my travel plans. Before I began my journey, I didn't know them myself. I never dreamed I'd come to Solsken that was something of an accident. Or a miracle I'm not sure which. Oh, I do know, really, but this is hard to say. You see, I've come to believe in miracles. I've had to. It's a miracle, I think, when a G.o.ddess takes pity on a soul-sick woman and promises to heal her.'

At this, Danlo sipped his tea and nodded his head. He looked at her strangely and asked, 'Do you know where we are, then?'

'Of course I do. We're on a planet made by the G.o.ddess the Solid State Ent.i.ty.

We're in the centre of this Ent.i.ty, I think. This planet is there. Here this Earth. Sivan told me that after he introduced himself. He said that he'd nearly died in the manifold, inside the nebula of the Ent.i.ty where the stars are strange. In what you pilots call a chaos storm, I think. He was very open with me. He said the Ent.i.ty had saved him.

And in return, the Ent.i.ty asked him if he would agree to save me. As a mission of pity, of course, but I believe it was also supposed to be some sort of test. Sivan said the Ent.i.ty was testing him, as She did all pilots who come to Her.'

Danlo let a few drops of cool-hot tea roll across his tongue before swallowing. And then he asked, 'And you believed this renegade pilot?'

'He prefers to be known as a ronin pilot. And yes, I did believe him.'

'But his story must have sounded ... utterly fantastic. Impossible.'

'Well, there was something about him.'

After waiting a moment, Danlo said, 'Yes?'