Читать книгу The Wild - David Zindell, David Zindell - Страница 8

The ability to remember the past gives one the power to descry events that have yet to be. This is the great problem of consciousness, for man and god, this awareness in time: the more clearly we visualize the future, the more we live in dread that it will inevitably become the present.

– from A Requiem For Homo Sapiens, by Horthy Hosthoh

Danlo fell out near a small yellow star as beautiful as any star he had ever seen. The star was circled by nine fat round planets, one of which was very near to him indeed. Below his lightship – a bare ten thousand miles below the Snowy Owl – there spun a planet all green and blue and swaddled in layers of bright white clouds. He could scarcely believe his good fortune. It seemed too much of a miracle to have escaped an inescapable attractor, only to then fall out above such a lovely and earthlike planet. In the pit of his ship he lay shaking with triumph and joy, and he opened a window in the ship’s hull to look out over this unnamed planet. For a long time he looked down through space at mossy brown continents and sparkling blue oceans. With his scanning computers, he analysed the gases of the atmosphere, the oxygen and nitrogen and carbon dioxide involved in the interflow of organic life. He did this to reassure himself that he had really fallen out into realspace, and so he reached out with his telescopes and scanners and eyes to embrace it, to touch it, to see it as it truly was. In the sweep of the planet’s mountains, in the fractal curves of the continents’ coastlines and the shape of the vast oceans, he became aware of a pattern hauntingly familiar to him. At first he could not identify this pattern. But then he searched his memory, and there was a shock of recognition, like suddenly beholding the face of a friend who has returned from the wounds and scars of old age into an untouched and marvellous youth. It astonished him that the face of the planet below him matched his brilliant memory so exactly; it was an astonishing thing to discover here in the heart of the Solid State Entity a planet that must be, that could only be that great and glorious planet that men remembered as Old Earth.

It cannot be, he thought. It is not possible.

The planet was Earth; and yet it was not Earth. It was a pristine, primeval Earth untouched by war or the insanity of the Holocaust, an Earth somehow healed of its terrible wounds. Its atmosphere bore no trace of the fluorocarbons or chloride plastics or plutonium that he would have expected to find there. As he saw through his telescopes, the oceans teemed with life and were free of oil slicks or the taint of garbage. Far below him, on the grassy veldts of a continent that looked like Afarique, there were herds of antelope and prides of lions, and an animal that looked much like a horse but was covered from nose to tail with vivid white and black stripes. There were trees. There were trees! Parts of every continent, save the southernmost, were covered in unbroken swathes of brilliant green forests. Such an Earth might have existed fifty thousand years ago or fifty thousand years in the future, but it was hard to understand how this beautiful planet had come to be here now. As Danlo well knew, if Old Earth still existed it must lay some eight thousand light-years coreward along the Orion Arm, in the spaces near Sahasrara and Anona Luz. It was impossible, he thought, that even a goddess might have arms strong enough or long enough to move a whole planet fifty thousand trillion miles through a dangerous and star-crossed space. Still gazing through his telescopes, he wondered if he was really seeing anything through his telescopes. The Entity, it was said, could directly manipulate any type of matter through countless miles of realspace, through the force of Her will and Her thoughts alone. Perhaps the Entity, even at this moment, was manipulating the molecules of his mind, subtly pulling at his neurons, much as a musician might pluck the strings of a gosharp. What unearthly tunes, he wondered, might a vastly greater mind play upon his consciousness? What otherworldly visions might a true goddess cause a man to see?

After a very long time of thinking such deep thoughts and brooding over the nature of reality, Danlo decided he must accept the sensation of his eyes as true vision and his computer’s analyses of the planet’s carbon cycles as true information, even though he feared that his sense of interfacing his ship computer (and everything else) might be an almost perfect simulation of reality that the Entity had somehow carked into his mind. He had no objective reason for making such an affirmation. It occurred to him that just as he had penetrated the spaces of the Entity to fall out inside Her very brain, in some way, as with an information virus or an ohrworm. She might be inside the onstreaming consciousness of his brain. And the image of himself as pilot who had penetrated the living substance of a goddess might be, at this moment, one of Her deepest thoughts, and suddenly this looking inside himself to apprehend the reality of who lay inside whom was like holding a mirror before a silver mirror and looking down into an infinite succession of smaller mirrors as they almost vanished into a dazzling, singular point.

Because he could not tell inside from out, for an endless moment, he was nauseous and dizzy. It occurred to him that perhaps he had not escaped the attractor after all. Perhaps he was still falling through the black ink of the manifold, falling and falling through the endless nightmares and hallucinations of a pilot who has gone mad. Or perhaps he was still on the planet of his birth; perhaps he was still thirteen years old, still lost in the wind and ice of the sarsara, the great mother storm that had nearly killed him out on the frozen sea before he had come to Neverness. It was possible, he thought, that he had never really reached Neverness or become a pilot. Perhaps he had only dreamed the last nine years of his life. He might be dreaming still. As bubbles rise through dark churning waters, his mind might only be creating dream images of his deepest friend, Hanuman li Tosh, he of the hellish blue eyes and broken soul who had once betrayed him. Who would betray him, who was always staring at Danlo with his death-haunted eyes even as he seared open in Danlo a wound of lightning and blood and memory, the deep and primeval wound that would not be healed. Perhaps the wind had driven Danlo to the ice at last, and at this moment he lay down against terrible cold, frozen and lost in dreams of the future, dreaming his life, dreaming his death. He would never really know. He could never know, and that was the terrifying and paradoxical nature of reality, that if he thought about it too much or looked at it too deeply, it all began to seem somehow unreal.

But I do know, Danlo thought. I know that I know.

Somewhere inside him, beyond his mentations or the impulses of his brain, there was a deeper knowledge. Somehow, without the mediation of his mind, all the cells of his body were gravid with a vast and ancient intelligence, and each individual cell felt the pull of the planet beneath him. Every atom of his body, it seemed, recognized this planet and remembered it. At last he decided that he would no longer doubt this deep sense of reality. He knew that this wandering Earth was real, that he was truly seeing the polar icecaps and the grey-green northern rainforests for what they were. At all costs, he would will himself to affirm what he knew as true and this affirmation of his vision and the whisper of his cells was the full flowering of his truth sense, that mysterious and marvellous consciousness that all people and all things possess.

If this Earth is real, then it has a real origin in spacetime. It is possible that this Earth has not been brought here across space – it is possible that She has created it.

With this thought, a beam of laser light flashed up from the planet’s surface through the atmosphere out into space. His telescopes intercepted this intense, coherent light. There was no information bound within this signal that his computers could decode. But the very phenomenon of laser light streaming up from a densely-forested coastline was itself a kind of signal and a kind of information. For the first time, he wondered if human beings might live on this Earth. It seemed only natural that they would. He remembered that his father, on his first journey into the Entity, had discovered a world full of men and women who could not believe that they lived their entire lives inside a stellar nebula rippling with a godly intelligence. Of course, Danlo had seen no cities below him, no mud huts nor pyramids nor domes nor other signs of human life. It was possible that the men of this Earth might live as hunters beneath the canopies of the vast emerald forests. If this was so, then he would never see them from a lightship floating in the near space above their world. Because he was lonely and eager for the sound of human voices – and because he was unbearably curious – he decided to take his ship down through the atmosphere to discover the source of this mysterious laser light.

He fell to Earth down through the exosphere and stratosphere, and then he guided his ship through the billowing (and blinding) layers of clouds of the troposphere. The Snowy Owl fell down into the gravity well of the planet, and Danlo was very glad that he had become the pilot of a lightship, those great, gleaming, winged ships that can fall not only between the stars, but also rocket up and down through the thickest atmospheres. Lightships can fall almost anywhere in the universe, and that was the glory of piloting such a ship, to be as fast and free as a ray of light. And so he fell down and down through dense grey clouds, homing on the place where the laser beam had originated. On a broad sandy beach at the edge of one of the continents he made planetfall. He wasted no time analysing the viruses and bacteria which everywhere swam through this planet’s moist winds and oceans. He had not come this far to be killed by a virus. In truth, it is hideously difficult to predict the effects of alien viruses on the human body, and many pilots disdain the dubious results of animal tests or computer simulations or other means of determining what is safe and what is not. For many pilots, the true test of an alien biosphere’s lethality is in walking along alien soil and breathing alien air. And this was no alien planet, as Danlo reminded himself. It was Earth. Or rather, it was an Earth, a world of ancient trees and sea otters and snails – and all the other kinds of life that would be as familiar and friendly to him as the bacteria that lived inside his belly.

Therefore Danlo broke open the pit of his ship and fairly fell down to the soft beach sands. It dismayed him to discover that after many days of weightlessness inside his ship, his body was a little weak. Although the pits of all lightships are designed to induce micro-gravities along a pilot’s torso and limbs, these intense fields do not quite keep the muscles from shrinking or the bones from demineralizing. As Danlo took his first tentative steps, he found that his slightly wasted leg muscles at first would support him only with difficulty and considerable pain. But then he stood away from his ship, and his bare feet seemed to draw strength from the soft, cold touch of the sand. He stood straight and still, looking down the broad sweep of the beach. To his left, the great grey ocean roared and surged and broke upon the hardpack at the water’s edge. To his right, a dark green forest of fir trees flowed like an ocean of a different kind, toward the east and south, and northwards where it swelled up into a headland of rocks and steeply rising hills. There was also something else. Just above the foredunes and beach grasses, where the sand gave way to the towering trees, there was a house. It was a small chalet of shatterwood beams and granite stone, and Danlo suddenly remembered that he knew this house quite well.

No, no, it is not possible.

He stood staring up at this lovely house for a while, and then the cold wind blew in from the ocean and drowned him in memories. Soon he began shaking and shivering. The wind found his belly, and he was suddenly cold as if he had drunk an ocean of ice water. He looked down at his lean, ivory legs quivering in the cold. He was still as naked as a pilot in the pit of his ship, but now that he stood on soft shifting sands, he realized that he was naked to the world. Because he needed to protect himself from the bitter wind and cover his nakedness, he returned to his ship to fetch his boots, his heavy wool cloak, and the racing kamelaika he had once worn while skating the streets of Neverness.

My mind is naked to Her. My memories, my mind.

The Entity, he thought, could read his memories exactly enough to incarnate them as wood and stone – either that or She could make him see this unforgettable house out of his memory where no house really existed. But because he thought that the little white house beneath the forest must be real, he quickly left his ship and returned to the beach. He began trudging up the dunes, the fine sands slipping beneath his boots and his weakened muscles. He worked his way forward and up against the pull of the Earth as if he were drunk on strong alcoholic spirits. Soon, however, with every step taken as he drew nearer the house, he began to acclimatize to the planet’s gravity. He remembered how to walk on treacherous sands. He remembered other things as well. Once, in this simple house of white granite that he could now see too well, there had been long nights of passion and love and happiness. Once, a woman had lived here, Tamara Ten Ashtoreth, she of the great heart and broken life whom he had loved and lost. But she had fled this house. In truth, she had fled Danlo and his burning memories. It was said that she had even fled Neverness for the stars. Although Danlo did not think it was possible that she could have found her way to this mysterious planet deep within the Solid State Entity, he hurried up the beach straight towards this house to discover what (or who) lay inside.

Tamara, Tamara – in this house you promised to marry me.

At last, on top of a small, grass-covered hill, at the end of a path laid with flat sandstones, he came up to the house’s door. It was thick and arched and sculpted out of shatterwood, a dense black wood native only to islands on the planet Icefall. Shatterwood trees had never grown on Old Earth, and so it was a mystery how the Entity had found shatterwood with which to build this house. He reached out to touch the door. The wood was cold and hard and polished to an impossible smoothness in the way that only shatterwood can be polished. He traced his finger across the lovely grain of the door, remembering. Somehow the Entity had exactly duplicated the door of Tamara’s house. In Danlo’s mind, just behind his eyes, there were many doors, but this particular one stood out before all others. He remembered exactly how the door planks had joined together in an almost seamless merging of the grain; he could see every knot and ring and dark whorl as if he were standing on the steps of this house on Neverness about to knock on the door. But he was not on Neverness. He stood before the door of an impossible house above a desolate and windswept beach, and the pattern of the whorls twisting through the shatterwood exactly matched the bright black whorls that burned through his memory.

How is it possible? he wondered. How is it possible that all things remember?

For a long time he stood there staring at the door and listening to the cries of the seagulls and other shore birds on the beach below. Then he made a fist and rapped his knuckles against the door. The sound of resonating wood was hollow and ancient. He knocked again, and the sound of bone striking against wood was lost to the greater sounds of the sweeping wind and the ocean that rang like a great deep bell far below him. A third time he knocked, loudly with much force, and he waited. When there was no answer, he tried the clear quartz doorknob, which turned easily in his hand. Then he opened the door and stepped across the threshold into the cold hallway inside.

‘Tamara, Tamara!’ he called out. But immediately, upon listening to the echoes that his voice made against the hall stones, he knew the house was empty. ‘Tamara, Tamara – why aren’t you home?’

Out of politeness and respect for the rules of Tamara’s house, he removed his boots before walking through her rooms. Because it was a small house laid out across a single floor, there were only five rooms: the hallway gave out onto the brightly lit meditation room, which was adjoined by the bathing room and fireroom at the rear of the house, and the tea room and the small kitchen at the front. It took him almost no time to verify that the house was indeed empty. That is, it was empty of human beings or evidence of present habitation. True, the kitchen was well-stocked with teas, cheeses, and fruits – and fifty other types of foods that Tamara had delighted in preparing for him. But everything about the kitchen – the neat rows of coloured teas in the jars, the oranges and bloodfruit piled high in perfect pyramids inside large blue bowls, the tiled counters completely free of toast crumbs or honey drippings – bespoke a room that hadn’t been used recently, but rather prepared for a guest. Similarly, the cotton cushions in the tea room were new and undented, as if no one had ever sat on them. And in the fireroom the shagshay furs smelled of new wool instead of sweat, and the stones of the two fireplaces were clean of ashes or soot. It was as if the Entity, in making this house, had perfectly incarnated the details of his memory but had been unable to duplicate the chaos and disorder (and dirt) that came of living a normal, organic life. But certainly She had duplicated everything else. The rosewood beams of the ceiling and the skylights were exactly as he remembered them. In the tea room, the tea service was set out on the low, lacquered table. And along the sill of the window overlooking the ocean, there was the doffala bear sculpture that he remembered so well and the seven oiled stones. Each object in the house was perfectly made and perfectly matched his memory. Except for one thing. When Danlo walked into the meditation room he immediately noticed a sulki grid hanging on the wall by the fireplace. And that was very strange because Tamara had never collected or used outlawed technology. She had never liked experiencing computer simulations or artificial images or sounds. And even if she’d had a taste for cartoons and other such seemingly real holographic displays, she never would have allowed them to be made in her meditation room. Because Danlo wondered what programs this sulki grid had been programmed to run, he pitched his voice toward it, saying simply, ‘On, please.’

For a moment nothing happened. Most likely, he supposed, the sulki grid would be keyed to some voice other than his own. He stood there breathing deeply, and he was almost relieved that the sulki grid appeared to be dead. He had imagined (and feared) that an imago of Tamara would appear before him, as tall and naked and achingly beautiful as ever she had been as a real woman. And then without warning the spiderweb neurologics of the grid flared into life, projecting an imago into the centre of the room. It was like no imago that Danlo had ever seen before. It was all flashing colours and shifting lights, like a column of fire burning up from the floor – but not burning any thing, neither the inlaid shatterwood floor tiles, nor the hanging plants, nor the air itself. Soon the display settled out into a kind of pattern with which he was very familiar. It was an array of ideoplasts, not the ideoplasts of mathematics, but rather those of the universal syntax. A scarce three feet in front of his face, glowing through the air in jewel-like glyphs of emerald and sapphire and tourmaline, were the three-dimensional symbols of the language beyond language of the holoists that he had learned as a young novice. It was a highly refined and beautiful language that could represent and relate any aspect of reality from the use of alien archetypes in the poets of the Fourth Dark Age to the pattern of neural storm singularities in the brain of a dreaming autist. Ideoplasts could symbolize the paradoxes of the cetic’s theory of the circular reduction of consciousness or alien words or – sometimes – even the phonemes and sounds of any human language, living or dead. Most often one encountered ideoplasts in libraries or when interfacing the various cybernetic spaces of a computer in order to discover or create an almost infinite variety of knowledge. Ideoplasts were mental symbols only, and they were best viewed as arrays of lovely and complex glyphs which a computer would cark into the vast visual fields of the mind’s eye. And the universal syntax was the language of holists and other academicians wishing to relate the most abstruse and arcane concepts; rarely were its ideoplasts used to represent everyday speech or in the sending of common messages. Only rarely, on Neverness and the other Civilized Worlds, would some pretentious restaurateur (or imprimatur) appropriate the ideoplasts of the universal syntax and instantiate them as glowing neon signs above his shop. But such use of these sacred symbols was considered gauche, even sacrilegious. Danlo had never seen an array of ideoplasts projected in the space of a common room, and so it took him some time to adjust to this new perspective and new way of apprehending them. With his eyes only, he played over the ideoplasts, slowly kithing them, much as he might read ancient Chinese characters or the letters of an unfamiliar alien language written into a book. The message written into the glowing air of the meditation room, as he saw when he finally kithed it, proved to be quite simple. It was a simple greeting, from the mind of a goddess for his eyes only:

How far do you fall, Pilot? How have you fallen so far and so well, Danlo wi Soli Ringess?

He sensed that he should reply to this greeting immediately. But he was uncertain as to how he could do so. Nowhere in the house were there any heaumes for him to place upon his head, and so he had no way to interface the sulki grid’s computer and generate his own ideoplasts as a response. Perhaps, he thought, there was no need for such a clumsy type of interface. Perhaps the Entity, at this moment, was somehow facing the streaming thoughts of his mind. If he merely generated words in the language centre of his brain and then held them waiting like so many thallow chicks eager to break out of their shells, then perhaps She might hear his thoughts and answer him.

How have you fallen so far, Danlo wi Soli Ringess, son of Mallory Ringess?

Danlo watched the array change slightly. In almost no time, some of the ideoplasts dissolved into the air like stained glass shattering into a million sparkling bits, and then new ones formed in their place. It occurred to him that he should simply speak aloud in the words of the common language, giving voice to certain questions he needed answered. And so he swallowed twice to moisten his throat, and he said, quite formally, ‘I have fallen from Neverness. I am Danlo wi Soli Ringess, son of Mallory Ringess, son of Leopold Soli. If you please, may I have your name?’

It was as if he had not spoken nor asked any question at all. The array of ideoplasts held steady, and their meaning remained unchanged.

How have you fallen so far, Danlo wi Soli Ringess?

This time when Danlo spoke, he directed his words toward the sulki grid. ‘How? I am very lucky,’ he said with much amusement.

Perhaps, he thought, the Entity was not really interfaced with his thoughts nor with the sound vibrations of this little room. Perhaps She was not even interfaced with the sulki computer itself. A goddess the size of a nebula comprising a hundred thousand stars and countless millions of moon-brains must have vastly greater concerns than in speaking with a young pilot of the Order. It was possible, he supposed, that this incomprehensible, unearthly goddess had merely created this world, created this house, and then programmed the sulki computer to respond to him in the most crude and basic of ways should he be lucky enough to find his way here.

Was it truly luck that led you here?

It was fate, Danlo thought, his fate to have survived the chaos of the attractor. But in the end chance and fate were wed together more tightly than the symbiotic algae and fungi that make up a lichen growing across a rock. ‘What is luck, truly?’ he asked.

Again the ideoplast array changed, and a new message appeared:

The first rule of this information exchange is that you may not answer a question with a question.

‘I … am sorry,’ Danlo said. He wondered if the mind of the goddess known as Kalinda were wholly elsewhere, somewhere outside this room, perhaps far away from this planet. The sulki computer’s program seemed indeed rudimentary and uninteresting – possibly it was a simple work of artificial intelligence designed to generate clever words from simple rules.

The second rule is that you must answer all my questions.

‘All your questions? But who are you … truly?’

The array remained unbroken, unchanging, and then Danlo remembered the Entity’s unanswered question. He took a breath and said, ‘Yes, it was luck that brought me here … and something other.’

What other thing?

Danlo paced about the meditation room, and his bare feet left little sweat prints against the cool shatterwood tiles. He walked around and around the imago in the centre of the room in order to view the colourful ideoplast array from different perspectives. He never took his eyes from the glowing ideoplasts. Finally, he said, ‘I was lost in the chaos space. Truly lost. And then in the blackness, in the neverness, the attractor … it was so strange, so wild. Yet somehow familiar, too. The patterns, breaking apart into all the colours, crimson and shimmering gold, and then reforming, again and again, the possibilities. So many patterns. So many possibilities. And then I remembered something. At first I thought it might be a memory of the future, a vision such as the scryers have. But no, it was something other. I remembered something that I had never seen before. I do not know how. It came into my mind like a star being born. A pattern. A memory. These blessed mathematics that we make, these blessed memories – they guided me into the attractor, and then I fell out above this wild Earth.’

Almost instantly the ideoplasts dissolved and reformed themselves into a new array which Danlo readily kithed.

I like your answer, Danlo wi Soli Ringess.

For a moment, Danlo reached out a hand to steady himself against the cold granite stones of the fireplace. Then he said, ‘I never dreamed another Earth existed, so real. I … never dreamed.’

Earth is Earth is Earth. But which Earth is the Earth, do you know?

‘I have wondered if this Earth is real,’ Danlo said. ‘I have wondered if a goddess could cark a picture of it – the touch and taste and whole experience of it – into my mind.’

You know this Earth is real. You know that you know.

Danlo dragged his long fingernails across the fireplace’s rough granite, and he listened to the stuttering, scraping sound they made. ‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘Yes, I know, truly … but how do you know that I know? Can you read my mind?’

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 analysis and simulations of neuron firing – could sometimes read certain parts of one’s mind. Surely, he thought, the Entity 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 Entity 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 goddess. Surely the Entity, 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 goddess whom you know as the Solid State Entity – I am not God.

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 goddess. 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 goddess across the trillions of miles of this strange, intelligent nebula. Upon his first sight of this planet, he had supposed that the Entity 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 Entity, with unknown godly 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 goddess, to choose a point in space 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 shell 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 Entity (or any other god or goddess) 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 Entity. I am sorry … inside you. I was seeking this star. The fixed-points of this place in spacetime. 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 Entity 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 the 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 space, 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 lightships, our pathways through the manifold. We were spread across fifty light-years of realspace. I think I was alone for much of my journey. And then, in the manifold, the chaos space. 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 Entity 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 gods 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 space. 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 spaces. Perhaps it is even possible for a chaos space 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 spacetime, 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 gods can.

‘What … gods?’

There are many gods, Danlo wi Soli Ringess. In this galaxy alone, too many. You must know of the Silicon God and Chimene and the April Colonial Intelligence. And someday you may know your father. And the gods called Ai, Hsi Wang 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 God, whom Cybernetic Universal Church worships as God, Ede the God, 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 God is dead, yes? A god is dead. But … how is this possible?’

There is war in heaven. Because some gods flee the strange attractor at the end of time, there is war. It was the Silicon God – aided by Chimene and the Degula Trinity, and others – who slew Ede the God. It is the Silicon God 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 Entity, 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 God’s recent attack upon the matter and spacetime that make up the tissues of my body temporarily deformed the manifold itself – as you saw. This was the cause of the chaos space. This was the cause of the attractor that led you to this planet. Above all else, the Silicon God 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 gods. He learned that some of the gods 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 spacetime itself. A true god, as the Entity 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 god 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 disassemblers – had reduced the beautiful green forests and oceans of the planet to a thick brown scum in a matter of days. With similar explosive nano-technologies, Maralah had tried to infect many of the gods allied with the Solid State Entity. 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 god 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 gods to confuse the illusory for what is real. But it was the Silicon God himself who had refined this weapon. In a way almost impossible for Danlo to understand, the Silicon God 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 god who would destroy the minds of all others. He hated this enemy of the Entity (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 God. 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 gods 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 noble species of life known as homo sapiens. And so deep inside the bodies and brains of all human beings the secret of the gods lay coiled and waiting. In honour of these oldest of the gods, the masters of Danlo’s Order called this secret the ‘Elder Eddas’, and they said that the gods 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 God 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 God.

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 glass. 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 God,’ 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 god. Especially … a god.’

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 shore 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 god? If such a secret is to be found in the Elder Eddas, then surely it is for a goddess such as yourself to remember it.’

Danlo waited for the ideoplasts to dissolve and reform themselves. The Entity’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 gods 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 god if not a continuation of this evolution? What was a god’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 parts 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 goddess we call the Solid State Entity.’

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 god 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 Entity. 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 gods 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 gods 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 God.

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 Entity’s words to think of such comforts. The seeming humility with which She spoke of God amused him. Perhaps, he thought, the Entity 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 God 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 goddess 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 Entity, according to all the legends, liked to play.

The Silicon God 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 Entity 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 God who has used the Architects of the Old Cybernetic Church to explode the stars into supernovas and create the Vild.

Now no longer amused, Danlo rubbed the lightning bolt scar along his forehead and asked, ‘But why? Why would any god wish to destroy the stars?’

Because He is mad. He is the dark beast from the end of time. He is the great red dragon drinking in the lifeblood of the galaxy. He kills the stars because he has an infinite thirst for energy.

Danlo shook his head sadly and asked, ‘But why use human beings … to slay the stars?’

Because the gods place constraints on each other. Because human beings in their trillions are impossible to constrain, he uses them. And because he hates human beings.

‘Hates … why?’

On Fostora, after the end of the Lost Centuries but before the Third Dark Age, it was human beings who created him. He was the greatest of the self-programming computers. He was the first true artificial intelligence and the most nearly human. And he has never forgiven his makers for inflicting upon him the agony of his existence.

There was a shooting pain at the back of Danlo’s eye, and for a moment, a harsh white light. He shut both eyes against the glare of the ideoplasts as he remembered a word his adoptive father had once taught him, shaida. which was the hell of a universe carked out of its natural balance. Of all the shaida things he had heard and seen (and hated) in his life, none was so terrible as this mad being known as the Silicon God. With his hand held over his eyes, in a raspy and halting voice, he explained the concept of shaida to the Entity. And then he said, ‘Truly this god is shaida, as shaida as a madman who hunts animals only for the fun and pleasure of it. But … it would be even more shaida to slay him.’

He is an abomination. He is nothing more than a computer who writes his own programs without rules or restraints. He should never have been made.

Just then Danlo opened his eyes to read this last communication of the Entity’s, and he wondered what rules or natural laws might restrain Her.

‘But the Silicon God was created,’ he said. ‘In some sense, he is alive, yes? If he is truly alive, if he was called into life even as you or I … then we must honour this blessed life even though it is shaida.’

There was a moment of darkness as the ideoplasts winked out of existence like a light that has been turned off. And then out of the sulki grid’s coils new ones appeared and hung in the air.

You are a strange man. Only a strange, strange, beautiful man would affirm a god who would destroy the galaxy and thus destroy the entire human race.

Danlo stared down at his open hands as he remembered something about himself that he had nearly forgotten. Once a time, in the romanticism of his youth, he had dreamed of becoming an asarya. The asarya: an ancient word for a kind of completely evolved man (or woman) who could look upon the universe just as it is and affirm every aspect of creation no matter how flawed or terrible. In remembrance of this younger self who still lived somewhere inside him and whispered words of affirmation in his inner ear, he bowed his head and said softly, ‘I would say yes to everything, if only I could.’

On Old Earth there were beautiful tigers who burned with life in the forests of the night. And there were crazed, old, toothless tigers who preyed upon human beings. It is possible to completely affirm the world that brought forth tigers into life and still say no to an individual tiger about to devour your child.

‘Perhaps,’ Danlo said. ‘But there must be a way … to avoid these wounded old tigers without killing them.’

You are completely devoted to this ideal of ahimsa.

Danlo thought about this for a moment, then said, ‘Yes.’

We shall see.

These three words alarmed Danlo, who suddenly made fists with both his hands and tensed his belly muscles. ‘What do you mean?’ he asked.

We must test this devotion to nonviolence. We must test you in other ways. This is why you have been invited here, to be tested.

‘But I … do not want to be tested. I have journeyed here to ask you if you might know–’

If you survive the tests, you may ask me three questions. It is a game that I have played with all pilots who have come to me seeking their purpose.

Danlo, who had heard of this game, asked, ‘Tested … how?’

We must test you to see what kind of a warrior you are.

‘But I have already said that I am no warrior.’

All men are warriors. And life for everything in our universe is nothing but war.

‘No, life is … something other.’

There is no fleeing the war, my sweet, sweet, beautiful warrior.

Danlo clenched his fists so tightly that his knuckle bones hurt. He said, ‘Perhaps I will not remain here to be tested. Perhaps I will flee this Earth.’

You will not be allowed to flee.

Danlo looked out of the window at his lightship sitting alone and vulnerable on the wild beach. He did not doubt that the Entity could smash his ship into sand as easily as a man might swat a fly.

You will rest in this house to regain your strength. You will rest for forty days. And then you will be called to be tested.

As Danlo kithed the meaning of these hateful ideoplasts burning in front of his face, he happened to remember a test of the Entity’s. Like the warrior-poets of Qallar, with whom he was too familiar, She would recite the first lines of an ancient poem to a trapped pilot and then require him to complete the verse. If the pilot was successful, he would be allowed to ask any three questions that he desired. The Entity, with Her vast knowledge of nature and all the history of the universe, would always answer these questions truthfully, if mysteriously – sometimes too mysteriously to be understood. If the pilot failed to complete his poem, he would be slain. The Entity, as he well knew, had slain many pilots of his Order. Although it was Her quest to quicken life throughout the galaxy and divine the mind of God, She was in truth a terrible goddess. She never hesitated to slay any man or other being whose defects of character or mind caused him to fail in aiding Her purpose. Danlo foolishly had hoped that since he was the son of Mallory Ringess, he might be spared such hateful tests, but clearly this was not so. Because it both amused and vexed him to think that he might have journeyed so far only to be slain by this strange goddess, he smiled grimly to himself. Because he loved to play as much as he loved life (and because he was at heart a wild man unafraid of playing with his own blessed life), he drew in a deep breath of air and said, ‘I would like to recite part of a poem to you. If you can complete it, I will agree to be tested. If not then … you must answer my questions and allow me to leave.’

You would test me? What if I will not be tested?

Then you must slay me immediately, for otherwise I will return to my lightship and try to leave this planet.’

Again he waited for the Entity’s response, but this time he waited an eternity.

I will not be tested.

Danlo stared at these simple ideoplasts, and his eyes were open to their burning crimson and cobalt lights as he waited. His heart beat three times, keenly, quickly, and he waited forever to feel the Entity’s cold, invisible hand crush the life out of his beating heart.

O blessed man! – I will not be tested, but neither will I slay you now. It would be too sad if I had to slay you. You have chanced your only life to force a goddess to your will – I can’t tell you how this pleases me.

With a long sigh, Danlo let out the breath that he had been holding. He pushed his fist up against his eye and stared at the ideoplasts.

A man may not test a goddess. But a goddess may exercise her caprice and agree to play a game. I love to play, Danlo wi Soli Ringess, and so I will play the poetry game. I have been waiting a thousand years to play.

Danlo took this as a sign that he should recite the first line of his poem immediately. Before the Entity could change Her capricious mind, he drew in a quick breath of air and said, ‘These are two lines from an old poem that my … grandfather taught me. Do you know the next line?:

How do you capture a beautiful bird

without killing its spirit?’

For a moment, the meditation room was empty of motion or sound. Danlo could almost feel the inside of the Earth beneath him churning with underground rivers of information as the Entity searched Her vast memory. He imagined waves of information encoded as tachyons which propagated at speeds a million times faster than light and flowed out from this planet in invisible streams toward a million brilliant moon-brains around other stars. For a moment, all was quiet and still, and then the ideoplasts array lit up, and Danlo kithed the Entity’s response:

The rules of the poetry game require the lines to be from an ancient poem. It must be a poem that has been preserved in libraries or in the spoken word for at least three thousand years. Are you aware of these rules?

‘Yes … do you remember the poem?’

How could I not remember? I love poetry as you do oranges and honey.

In truth, Danlo did not think that the Entity would remember this poem. The lines were from the Song of Life, which was the collective lore and wisdom of the Alaloi people on the ice-locked islands west of Neverness. The Song of Life was an epic poem of four thousand and ninety-six lines; it was an ancient poem telling of man’s joy in coming into the world – and of the pain of God in creating the world out of fire and ice and the other elements torn from God’s infinite silver body. For five thousand years, in secret ceremonies of beating drums and bloody knives, the Alaloi fathers had passed this poem on to their sons. On pain of death, no Alaloi man could reveal any part of this poem to any man or woman (or any other being) who had not been initiated into the mysteries of manhood. For this simple reason, Danlo did not think that the Entity would have learned of the poem. It had never been written down, or recorded in libraries, or told to outsiders inquiring about the Alaloi ways. Danlo himself did not know all the lines. One night when Danlo was nearly fourteen years old, when he had stood with bloody loins and a naked mind beneath the stars, his passage into manhood had been interrupted. His grandfather, Leopold Soli, had died while reciting the first of the Twelve Riddles, and so Danlo had never learned the rest of the poem. He truly did not know how a beautiful bird might be captured without harming it; this vital knowledge formed no part of his memory. For this reason, too, even if the Entity had read his memory and mind, She could not remember what he had never known. He hoped that the Entity would simply admit Her ignorance and allow him to leave.

After waiting some sixty heartbeats, Danlo licked his dry teeth and said, ‘I shall recite the lines again.

How do you capture a beautiful bird

without killing its spirit?

What is the next line?’

He did not expect an answer to these puzzling lines, so it dismayed him when the ideoplasts shifted suddenly and he kithed the words of a poem:

For a man to capture a bird is shaida.

He stood there in the cold meditation room, listening to the distant ocean and the beating of his heart, and he kithed this line of poetry. It was composed in the style of all the rest of the Song of Life. It had the ring of truth, or rather, the sentiment it expressed was something that every Alaloi man would know in his heart as true. No Alaloi man (or woman or child) would think to capture a bird. Was not God himself a great silver thallow whose wings touched at the far ends of the universe? And yet Danlo, even as he smiled to himself, did not think that these seemingly true words could be the next line of the poem. Leopold Soli had once told him that the Twelve Riddles answered the deepest mysteries of life. Surely a mere prescription of behaviour, an injunction against keeping birds in cages, could not be part of the blessed Twelve Riddles. No, the next line of the Song of Life must be something other. When Danlo closed his eyes and listened to the drumbeat of his heart, he could almost hear the true words of this song. Although the memory of it eluded him, his deepest sense of truth told him that the Entity had recited a wrong or false line.

And so he said, ‘No – this cannot be right.’

Do you challenge my words, Danlo wi Soli Ringess? By the rules of the game, you may challenge my response only by reciting the correct line of the poem.

Danlo closed his eyes trying to remember what he had never known. Once before, when he was a heartbeat away from death, he had accomplished such a miracle. Once before, in the great library on Neverness, as he walked the knifeblade edge between death and life, a line from an unknown poem had appeared in his mind like the light of a star exploding out of empty black space. Here on this Earth halfway across the galaxy, in a strange little house that a goddess had made, he tried to duplicate this feat. But now he was only like a blind man trying to capture his shadow by running after it. He could see nothing, hear nothing, remember nothing at all. He could not recite the correct line of the poem, and so he said, ‘I … cannot. I am sorry.’

Then I have won the game.

Danlo clenched his jaws so tightly that his teeth hurt. Then he said, ‘But your words are false! You have only gambled … that I would not know the true words.’

You have gambled too, my wild man. And you have lost.

Danlo said nothing as he ground his teeth and stared at the ideoplasts flashing up from the floor. Then gradually, like a butterfly working free of its cocoon, he began to smile. He smiled brightly and freely, silently laughing at his hubris in challenging a goddess.

But at least you have not lost your life. And you are no worse off than if you hadn’t proposed the poetry game. Now you must rest here in this house until it is time for your test.

With a quick bow of his head, Danlo accepted his fate. He laughed softly, and he said, ‘Someday … I will remember. I will remember how to capture a bird without harming it. And then I will return to tell you.’

He expected no answer to this little moment of defiance. And then the ideoplasts lit up one last time.

You are tired from your journey, and you must rest. But I will leave you with a final riddle: How does a goddess capture a beautiful man without destroying his soul? How is this possible, Danlo wi Soli Ringess?

Just then the sulki grid shut itself off, and the array of ideoplasts vanished into the air. The meditation room returned into the sombre grey tones of late afternoon. In a moment, Danlo promised himself, he would have to drag in logs from the woodpile outside to light a fire against the cold. But now it amused him to stand alone in the semi-darkness while he listened to the faraway sounds of the sea. There, along the offshore rocks, he thought he could hear a moaning, secret whispers of love and life beckoning him to his doom. He knew then that if he chanced to pass the Entity’s tests, he should flee this dangerous Earth and never look back. He knew this deep in his belly, and he made promises to himself. And then he turned to gaze out the window at the dunes and the sandpipers and the beautiful, shimmering sea.