Читать книгу War in Heaven - David Zindell, David Zindell - Страница 10

Life is light trapped in matter.

— saying of the gnostics

Life is the ability of matter to trap light.

— saying of the eschatologists

In mapping his pathways from Sheydveg to Neverness, Danlo had a choice between two conflicting purposes. Since his mission cried out for speed, he might have fallen from star to star by the shortest pathway, which would have taken him to Arcite, Darkmoon and Darghin, and thence to Fravashing and Silvaplana before falling on to Qallar and Neverness. But his safety – and Demothi Bede’s – was important, too; dead ambassadors stop no wars. Since the Ringists were already at war, a lone lightship falling suddenly out of the manifold near some hostile world might find itself attacked by ten others. Certainly, therefore, Danlo would best avoid such worlds, for Ringist pilots might be lying in wait along such an obvious pathway. It would be safest for him to make a great circle through the Fallaways, past the great red sun of the Elidi and then on to Flewelling, the Nave, Simoom and Catava. Safest, truly, but such a journey would take long, long. In the end, he decided upon the shorter pathway. Once, his friends and fellow pilots had called him Danlo the Wild. But he was not wild beyond the cooling draughts of reason, and so he began his journey with a falling off towards Agathange instead of Arcite and planned to approach Neverness by way of Kenshin or Tyr.

His journey across the stars was both the easiest and hardest he had ever made. Easy, because he fenestered through the most ancient and well-mapped part of the Fallaways, and the spaces he crossed were almost as familiar to him as the snowy islands of his childhood. If Arrio Verjin was right and a Danladi wave would soon rip through the Fallaways and turn the manifold into a raging black sea, Danlo saw no sign of this. The manifold before him – the emerald invariant spaces and Gallivare sets – was no more dangerous than a forest brook. He passed well-known stars, Baran Luz and Pilisi, a red giant almost as lovely to look upon as the Eye of Ursola. As always, he marvelled at the colours, the hot blue stars, the red and orange, and those loveliest of lights whose tones shone more as pale rose or golden yellow. This, he thought, was the glory of being a pilot. To behold a star with such closeness as if it were a bright red apple hanging from a tree was very different from standing on an icy world and looking up at the sky. Then, at night, the stars hung from the heavens like a million tiny jewels. And they were almost all white. From far away, the stars were like white diamonds because the human eye’s faint-light nerve cells couldn’t respond to colour, while the colour receptors couldn’t feel the faint touch of starlight. Once, as a child, he had hoped to see the stars just as they really were. And some day, he thought, he still might look out at the galaxies with his eyes truly open and naked to the universe. But now it was very good just to gaze at the colours of Cohila Luz or Tur Tupeng through the clearness of his lightship’s windows.

The hard part of this journey came from his continual surveillance of the manifold. For many days, he studied this space beneath space with the intensity of a tyard bird watching a snowfield for the slightest sign of a worm. Always, within a well-defined region about him known as a Lavi neighbourhood, the manifold rippled with undulations, most as faint as a whisper of wind upon a starlit sea. These he ignored, indeed, scarcely even noticed. What he sought – and hoped not to find – were the tells of a lightship, those violet traceries and luminous streaks made when a ship perturbed the manifold. Just as he passed by a spinning thickspace near the Valeska Double, he thought that he descried such tells. For the count of ten heartbeats, he didn’t breathe. But upon deeper scrutiny, it proved to be only the reflection of the Snowy Owl’s own tells, an unusual phenomenon when the manifold flattens out like a clear mountain lake. Four more times between Darkmoon and Silvaplana, Danlo was to detect such reflections, and each time he felt his heart in his throat and the blood pounding behind his eyes.

‘If you continue like this. Pilot, you’ll kill yourself.’

This came from Demothi Bede, who temporarily crowded into the pit of the Snowy Owl. No pilot, of course, while falling through the manifold would permit such a violation of his sacred space by another. And very few would share this sanctum of the soul at any time. But in order to rest, Danlo had fallen out into the quiet of realspace near Andulka. And because he loved company – sometimes – he didn’t mind talking with Demothi Bede. And so after he had finished sleeping, he had invited this crusty old lord inside the very brain of his ship.

‘But I have just slept … so deeply,’ Danlo said with a yawn.

‘But not for long. Six hours of sleep you’ve had in the last sixty, by my count.’

‘I did not know … that you were keeping count.’

‘There’s little else for me to do,’ Demothi said. Although his face was as old and forbidding-looking as a cratered moon, when he spoke there was a flash of good white teeth and true compassion that Danlo thought endearing.

‘I cannot sleep safely in the manifold,’ Danlo said. ‘And I cannot risk too many exits into realspace.’

In truth, the most dangerous part of their journey, as far as being detected by other ships, lay in opening windows to and from realspace. Then, when the Snowy Owl’s spacetime engines tore through the luminous tapestry of the manifold, there was always a release of light. Through telescopes or the naked human eye, other pilots could watch the blackness for flashes of light and so mark the coming or passing of a lightship.

‘But you could sleep longer,’ Demothi said.

‘If only I did not have to sleep at all.’

As Danlo said this, he glanced at the Ede hologram floating in the darkness. Nikolos Daru Ede, as a program running inside his devotionary computer, never slept. And he never kept silent, either, if he perceived any threat to his continued existence.

‘The Lord Demothi is right, you know,’ the Ede imago said. ‘If you exhaust yourself, you might map us into a collapsing torison space.’

Danlo smiled at this because the Ede program had learned enough mathematics of the manifold to speak almost as if he were a pilot or a real human being.

‘And what will you do if we cross pathways with another lightship? If you’re too tired to think?’

‘I have never been that tired,’ Danlo said. Once, as a boy out hunting in the wild, he had stood awake for three days by a hole cut into the sea’s ice – awake and waiting with his harpoon for a seal to appear.

‘This machine asks a good question, though,’ Demothi Bede said, pointing at the imago. ‘What will we do if we cross pathways with a Neverness lightship?’

‘Or ten ships?’ the Ede imago asked.

‘How … could I know?’

‘You don’t know what you’d do if ten lightships fell upon us?’

‘No, truly I do not,’ Danlo said. And then he smiled because sometimes he liked playing games with the Ede imago. ‘But part of the pilots’ art is knowing what to do … when you do not know what to do.’

‘But shouldn’t we at least agree upon a strategy?’ Demothi Bede broke in. ‘It seems that if we’re discovered, we’ll have only two choices: to flee into the stars, or to declare ourselves as ambassadors and trust we’ll be escorted to Neverness.’

‘Have you so great a trust of others, then?’ Danlo asked.

‘We’re speaking of pilots of the Order, not barbarians.’

‘But these pilots are also Ringists,’ Danlo said. ‘And they are at war with the Fellowship.’

Here Demothi Bede sucked in a breath with such force that his lungs fairly rattled. He said, ‘We don’t know that with certainty. It might be that the ambush near Ulladulla was an accident or only the belligerence of those five pilots who committed this massacre.’

‘No,’ Danlo said, closing his eyes. ‘It was no accident.’

‘Then you’ve decided to flee?’

‘I have decided nothing.’

‘But how will you make your decision?’

‘That will depend on many things: the configuration of the stars, how many ships we meet and who their pilots are.’ And, Danlo thought, on the pattern of the N-set waves rippling through the manifold or the whispers that he heard in the solar wind if they had fallen out near a star.

Now the Ede imago spoke again, and it was his turn to play with Danlo. ‘Do you really think you could escape ten lightships?’

‘Why not?’

‘On your journey to Tannahill, Sivan wi Mawi Sarkissian pursued you across the entire Vild.’

‘That is true,’ Danlo said. He remembered how Sivan, in his ship the Red Dragon, for a distance of twenty thousand light years, had hovered ghostlike always just at the radius of convergence in the same neighbourhood of space as the Snowy Owl. He remembered, too, Sivan’s passenger (and master), Malaclypse Redring of Qallar, the warrior-poet who hoped that Danlo would lead him to his father. The warrior-poets had a new rule, which was to kill all potential gods, and so Malaclypse had fallen halfway across the galaxy to find Mallory Ringess.

‘Well, Pilot?’

‘There is no pilot in Neverness the equal of Sivan wi Mawi Sarkissian,’ Danlo said.

‘Are you certain of that?’

Danlo, of course, was not certain, but to reassure the Ede imago, he said, ‘The best pilots went with the Sonderval to the Vild.’

‘And the very best of these is here before you,’ Demothi Bede said to the Ede imago. One of the old lord’s virtues was that he would defend a pilot of his Order against anyone, especially a glowing hologram projected out of a computer. ‘And isn’t it possible, Pilot, that you learned new aspects of your art in being pursued by Sivan?’

‘It is possible,’ Danlo said with a smile.

‘Then it’s clear that if the Ringists should surprise us, we’ll have to trust to your judgement and your art. But now, we should leave you alone so that you may take a few hours more sleep.’

‘No,’ Danlo said. ‘Now we must open a window and journey on – and pray that Arrio Verjin’s Danladi wave doesn’t smash through the manifold just as we are making a mapping.’

And so the Snowy Owl fell on past Aquene, all aflame like a plasma torch, and then entered into the spaces of the alien worlds of Darghin and Fravashing. During this time of haste and sleeplessness, Danlo saw no sign of an approaching Danladi wave or another lightship. But he never ceased the searching of his eyes or his deeper mathematical senses. And deeper still burned memories that lent urgency to his return to Neverness. He could never forget his people, the Alaloi, and how they were slowly dying from an incurable disease. Incurable, truly, by any known medicines or technologies, and yet it might be that Danlo carried the cure inside himself like an elixir of light. It would be terrible, he thought, if he found the secret of this cure only to arrive home too late.

Of course the shaida disease called ‘the slow evil’ was not the only threat to the Alaloi tribe’s survival, nor were they the only people on Icefall exposed to sudden doom. If war came to Neverness, the entire city – and much of the planet – might be destroyed by hydrogen bombs. And Bertram Jaspari and his fleet of Iviomil fanatics might be falling towards Neverness at that very moment. On Tannahill, this prince of the Old Church Architects had subtly threatened to end the Ringism abomination and cleanse the galaxy of all would-be gods. With their great star-killing engine called a morrashar, the Iviomils certainly wielded the means to destroy the Star of Neverness – as they already had the great red sun of the Narain people far across the Vild. The gods, too, might destroy all space itself in the stars near Neverness, by design or perhaps only by accident of the vast war that they waged across the heavens. It was said that the Silicon God’s deep programs prevented him from directly harming human beings. But Danlo took little solace from this fact. The Silicon God, like any other god, was certainly clever enough to find a thousand ways to menace humanity indirectly. And even if no god or bomb or star-killing machine ever touched Neverness, there was always the malignant light of Merripen’s Star. This supernova had exploded nearly thirty years before, and for all that time a wavefront of radiation had fallen outwards across the galaxy. Soon its terrible energies would fall upon Neverness and bathe all of Icefall in a shower of death. Or life. In truth, no one knew how intense its radiation would be, nor if the Golden Ring growing above Icefall’s atmosphere would simply absorb this cosmic light and burst into a new phase of its evolution. Sometimes, in the darkest wormholes of the manifold, Danlo prayed for this new life, just as he prayed for his people. But sometimes his words seemed only words, no more potent against the forces of the universe than a whisper cast into a winter wind.

As Danlo continued along his pathway towards Silvaplana, Tyr and then Neverness, he fell out around a worldless star named Shoshange. It was a subdwarf, small but of very high density, and hot and blue much like the central star of the Ring Nebula in Lyra. He might have spent many moments gazing at this rare star, but immediately upon exiting the manifold, he found that seven lightships were waiting for him. Through his telescopes he made out the lines of the Cantor’s Dream, with its curving diamond wings, and the Fire Drinker, and each of the others. Once, as a journeyman, Danlo had memorized the silhouette and design of every lightship of the Order; he knew the these ships’ names and those of the pilots who belonged to them. The seven pilots must have seen the Snowy Owl fall out of the manifold: Sigurd Narvarian, Timothy Wolf, the Shammara, Marja Valasquez, Femi wi Matana, Taras Moswen and Tukuli li Chu. Their names, unfortunately, were almost all that Danlo knew of these seven, for he had never met any of them. Only two – Sigurd Narvarian and Tukuli li Chu – were master pilots. And certainly Marja Valasquez deserved a mastership, but her famous evil temperament had alienated every elder pilot who might have helped to elevate her. It was said that in the Pilots’ War she had destroyed the ship of Sevilin Ordando, who had surrendered to her, but this slander had never been confirmed.

It took Danlo only a moment to decide to flee. He closed his eyes, envisioning the colours and contours of the manifold in this neighbourhood of space; he listened to the whispers of his heart, and then he reached out with his mind to his ship’s-computer to make interface. And then he was gone. The Snowy Owl plunged into the manifold like a diamond needle falling into the ocean. He knew that the other ships would follow him. Very well, he thought, then let them follow him into the darkest part of the manifold, where the spaces fell deep and wild and strange. In the gentle topology of the Fallaways few such spaces existed, but there were always Flowtow bubbles and torison tubes and decision trees. And, of course, the rare but bewildering paradox tunnels. No pilot would willingly seek out such a deranged space – unless he were being pursued by seven others determined to destroy him. By chance (or fate), such a tunnel could be found beneath the blazing fires of Shoshange. From a journey that the Sonderval had once described making as a young pilot, Danlo remembered the fixed-points of this tunnel. And so he made a difficult mapping. He found the paradox tunnel all infolded among itself like a nest of snakes. His ship disappeared into the opening of the tunnel – and to any ship pursuing him it would seem as if the Snowy Owl had been swallowed by twenty dark, yawning, serpentine mouths, all at once.

‘We’re in danger, aren’t we, Pilot? We’ve been discovered, haven’t we? Shouldn’t you alert the Lord Bede?’

As always, Danlo’s devotionary computer floated in the pit of his ship near his side. And the Ede imago floated in the dark air, talking, always talking. But when Danlo was fully faced into his ship’s-computer and his mind opened to the terrors and beauties of the manifold, he scarcely noticed this noisome hologram. Only rarely, when he had need of making mathematics at lightning speed in order to survive, did he ask for complete silence. And so when the Snowy Owl began to phase in and out of existence like a single firefly winking on and off from a dozen cave mouths all at once, Danlo lifted his little finger, a sign that Ede should be quiet. Unfortunately, it was also a sign that they were in deadly danger, and Ede must have found it paradoxical that just when he needed to talk the most, he must keep as silent as a stone.

As for rousing Demothi Bede from quicktime, Danlo never considered this. He was too busy making mappings and applying Gallivare’s point theorem in order to find his way out of this bizarre space. Danlo always perceived the manifold both mathematically and sensually, as a vast tapestry of shimmering colours. Always, there was a logic and sensibility to these colours, the way that the intense carmine of a Lavi space might break apart into maroon, rose and auburn as one approached the first bounded interval. But here, in this disturbing paradox tunnel, there seemed to be little logic. One moment a deep violet might stain his entire field of vision, while in the next, a shocking yellow might spread before him like an artist’s spilled paint. And then there were moments of no colour, or colours such as smalt or chlorine which somehow seemed so drained of their essence that they appeared almost black or white. And too often white would darken to black, and black mutate into white like the figure and ground in a painting shifting back and forth, in and out. Twice Danlo thought that he had escaped into a flatter, brighter part of the manifold only to find himself falling through a part of the tunnel as dark and twisting as the bowels of a bear. How long he remained in this cavernlike place he could never say. But at last he made a mapping and fell free into a simple Lavi neighbourhood; his relief must have been as that of an oyster miraculously coughed out of a seagull’s throat.

‘We’re free, aren’t we, Pilot?’ On his journey towards Tannahill, Danlo had programmed his ship’s-computer to project a simulation of the manifold for Ede to study. With its geometric and too-literal representations of the most sublime mathematics, this hologram wasn’t really like the way that Danlo perceived this space beneath space. But it allowed Ede a certain intake of information, and more than once, Ede had pointed out dangers that Danlo himself might have overlooked. ‘We’ve lost the other ships, haven’t we? I can’t find a trace of a tell.’

At that very moment, Danlo was scanning the neighbourhood about him with all the intensity of a hunter searching a snowfield for signs of a great white bear.

‘We’re alone now, aren’t we? There’s no other ship within the radius of convergence.’

Once, Danlo had explained that past the boundaries of a Lavi neighbourhood the radius of convergence shoots off towards infinity and it becomes almost impossible to read the tells of another lightship.

‘You escaped that strange space, whatever it was, and now we’re alone.’

For a moment, Danlo thought that they had lost the other ships. With his mind’s eye and his mathematics he delved the aquamarine depths all about him searching for the slightest streak of light. He held his breath, counting his heartbeats: one, two, three … And then, in a low, soft voice, he said, ‘No, we are not alone.’

Outwards in the direction of the paradox tunnel, at the very boundary of this neighbourhood of space, two tiny sparks lit the manifold.

‘Where, Pilot? Oh, there – now I see them. Which ships are they?’

It is, of course, impossible to identify a lightship solely from tells it makes in the manifold. But when Danlo closed his eyes, he saw two ships spinning towards him like drillworms: the Cantor’s Dream and the Fire Drinker, piloted by the bloodthirsty Marja Valasquez.

‘What shall we do – shall we flee?’

Even as the Snowy Owl fell deeper into the manifold towards the core stars, Danlo searched this neighbourhood’s flickering boundary, waiting to see if any more ships pursued him. After he had counted ten more heartbeats, he said, ‘Yes, we shall flee.’

And so Danlo took his ship into other spaces, the blue-black invariant spaces and segmented spaces and klein tubes that bent back upon themselves like a snake swallowing its tail. For four days this pursuit lasted. When Danlo grew so tired that his eyes burned and his head ached as if pressed by the slow grind of glacier ice, the Ede imago reminded him that he couldn’t go for ever without sleep. Danlo’s reply, when he finally managed to force the words from his cracked, bleeding lips, was simple and to the point: ‘Neither can the other pilots.’

Somewhere beyond the double star known as the Almira Twins, Danlo lost one of the other ships. For half a day he fell through a Zeeman space as flat and green as a field of grass, and he descried the tells of only one other ship. After he had mapped through a short but particularly tortuous point-set tunnel and only a single spark emerged from its black, empty mouth, he felt certain that only a single ship followed him.

‘Must we still flee?’ the Ede imago asked Danlo. ‘You’re so tired you can scarcely keep your eyes open.’

Danlo was tired, so dreadfully tired that he felt it as a burning sickness deep in his belly. The one reason that he kept his eyes open at all was to look at the glowing Ede hologram. To pilot the Snowy Owl he need only reach out to his ship with the seeing centre of his brain, and its computer would infuse mathematical images directly into him. To pilot his ship with elegance and grace, he thus most often kept his eyes closed. In truth, when he interfaced the manifold and the beauty of the number storm swept over him like ten thousand interwoven rainbows, his eyes fell as blind to the sights around him as a newborn child’s.

‘I can lose this ship,’ Danlo said. At the boundary of this neighbourhood of space, a glimmering ripple now told of another ship. He was certain that it was the Fire Drinker. He remembered what the Sonderval had once said about her pilot, Marja Valasquez: that as ferocious and bold as she was, she had a peculiar dread of phase spaces.

For a while, as the manifold began curving into a blueness as gentle as the watery world of Agathange, Danlo searched for a phase space. But he never found one. He kept well-distanced from the Fire Drinker, however; always this other lightship remained just at the boundary of whatever neighbourhood of space Danlo passed through.

‘This Marja Valasquez,’ Ede said, ‘seems almost as good a pilot as Sivan wi Mawi Sarkissian. He, too, followed you at the boundary for almost your entire journey into the Vild.’

Danlo smiled grimly at this, and rubbed his burning, bloodshot eyes. He wiped the blood from his lips, then said, ‘Many times I tried to lose Sivan but never could. Even in the inversion spaces of the Vild. I always thought … that he could have closed the radius and caught me whenever he wanted.’

‘But not Marja Valasquez?’

‘No. I think that she follows me only with the greatest difficulty.’

‘Then you still hope to lose her?’

‘I … will lose her. Even if I must stay awake for ten days.’

‘But perhaps she was better rested than you before this ordeal began. Or perhaps she uses forbidden drugs to give her a greater wakefulness.’

‘Then I will lose her in a phase space, if I can find one,’ Danlo said. ‘Or perhaps a Soli tree.’

‘But if you enter these spaces, might not the probability mappings fall against you? Aren’t you at a terrible disadvantage in letting her pursue you?’

‘Do I have another choice?’

‘You might fall out into realspace and signal for a parlay.’

‘No, I will not do that. Floating in space, waiting in the star’s light like a dove with a broken wing … we would be so helpless.’

‘Then why not pursue her?’

At this suggestion a sudden pain stabbed through Danlo’s eye, and he asked, ‘Towards what end?’

‘Towards destroying her, of course! As you pilots do with your ships, dancing the dance of light and death.’

For a moment, Danlo’s deep blue eyes filled with a terrible radiance, and he stared at Ede in silence.

‘At least your chances would be even. Much more than even, if you’re the better pilot, as I’m sure you are.’

‘I will not fall against her,’ Danlo said.

The program running the projection of Ede must have called for persuasion, for now his dark, plump face glowed with all the craftiness of a merchant selling firestones of uncertain virtue. ‘You’ve made your vow, of course. But isn’t the spirit of this vow to serve life? You’d never harm another’s life – but consider the great harm that might come to many lives if you let Marja destroy you. Wouldn’t you best serve your vow by ensuring that you reach Neverness however you can?’

‘No,’ Danlo said.

‘But, Pilot, this one time – who would ever know?’

‘No.’

‘But think of it! You’ve let this other pilot follow you across four thousand light years. It would be so easy to take her into a klein tube. To quickly klein back across your pathway and fall against her, she might never suspect such a—’

‘No, I will not!’

‘But if you—’

‘Please do not speak of this any more.’

For a moment, the Ede program caused his countenance to fall into the appearance of contrition. And then he asked, ‘But, Pilot, what will you do?’

‘I will stay awake,’ Danlo said. ‘I … will fall on.’

And so Danlo fell, taking the Snowy Owl through the manifold as fast as he could. He made his mappings and artfully arrayed the windows upon the Fallaways, and he fenestered from star to star with a rare grace. And still Marja Valasquez in her Fire Drinker followed him. Soon, if he continued on this pathway, he must make a final sequence of mappings that would cause him to fall out near the Star of Neverness. And Marja would fall out too, and if he didn’t want to confront her ship to ship in realspace, then he must find some way to lose her before then.

He was wondering how he might accomplish this purpose when he entered an unusually flat null space. The manifold fell very calm; its colours quieted from quicksilver to emerald and then to a gentle turquoise without flaw or variegation of tone. Other than the Snowy Owl’s perturbations and the faint tells of Marja’s ship, no other ripples touched the almost deathly stillness of this space. Something was wrong here, he thought, something that he had never encountered before, not even in the endless null spaces of the Vild. There was a strangeness all about him and inside him, a waiting for some terrible event to occur; it was almost like standing on the sea’s ice on a clear winter day and watching the horizon for the whitish-blue clouds of a storm. He sensed such a storm. How this could be he did not know, for his mathematics told him that the manifold was peaceful – even if he extended his search outside the boundary of this neighbourhood to other neighbourhoods within a rather vast and ill-defined region. He might have sought the tells of this topological event for ever, for outside the radius of convergence, the perturbations of the manifold become infinitely faint. But he was keen of vision, both in his eyes and in his deeper mathematical senses; something like a shimmer of light caused him to look deep into the manifold, inward towards the fixed-points of the Morbio Inferiore. And then, from far away, after his heart had beat nineteen times, he saw it. There was, in truth, a swelling whiteness like that of a storm. Or a wave – a tidal wave of the manifold. As his heart beat more quickly, he knew that the Danladi wave told of by Arrio Verjin would soon sweep through the manifold and fall over any ship caught in its path.

‘Pilot, what is it?’ the Ede imago asked. ‘What do you see – my simulation shows nothing.’

‘I see a wave, far off, towards the core singularity. It … builds. It is a Danladi wave.’

‘A Danladi wave! Are you sure? Then soon it will sweep through this neighbourhood and twist the toplogy beyond calculation.’

‘Yes.’

‘If we’re caught here, it will sweep us under and destroy us.’

‘Possibly.’

‘Then we must flee immediately! We must fall out into realspace where we’ll be safe.’

‘We will flee,’ Danlo said strangely. His voice was low and yet strong like a building wind; suddenly the weariness seemed to melt from him, and his eyes grew as bright as double stars.

‘What do you wait for, then?’

‘We will flee, but not into realspace, not yet,’ Danlo said. ‘We will flee into the Danladi wave.’

‘Are you mad, Pilot? Would you destroy us for the sake of your wilfulness?’

‘I pray … that I will not destroy us.’

Then with a flick of his hand for Ede to be silent, he made a mapping and pointed the Snowy Owl towards the Danladi wave. He began falling from window to window as quickly as he could and still maintain a sense of interfenestration. Because he knew that Marja Valasquez would follow him, he spared not a moment searching for the tells of the Fire Drinker behind him. His whole awareness concentrated on what lay ahead. He fell through the manifold like a streak of light, and yet the Danladi wave swept towards him even more quickly. For it did not ‘move’ as he moved, but rather deformed the manifold almost instantaneously in all directions. In a way, it was the essence of motion itself. Danlo could scarcely believe how quickly it built. One moment it was no more significant than the hump of a snow hut on a frozen sea. But in the next, it began to brighten and swell as if a flat plain of ice had suddenly heaved itself up into the highest of mountains. Soon, in moments, it would fall upon him, and then he must make the choice either to look for a mapping and dive under this impossibly monstrous wave, or to escape into realspace as Ede had advised.

Ahira, Ahira – what shall I do? For a moment, Danlo prayed to the name of the snowy owl, his spirit animal whom he had once believed held half his soul. Ahira, Ahira.

By now, Danlo thought, Marja Valasquez must have descried the shape of the Danladi wave. But so fast did they race towards its boiling centre – and it towards them – that she might have had too little time to understand its true nature. Arrio Verjin, after all, would not have warned the Order’s pilots of its coming. She might perceive it as only a Wimund wave or even the much simpler N-set waves of a Gallivare inversion. She must assume that he would try to use its topological complexities to escape her, perhaps diving beneath the wave into calmer regions of the manifold at the last moment. But for many moments, Danlo had been making lightning calculations and going through every known theorem pertaining to Danladi waves; he felt almost certain that there could be no escaping such a wave simply by ‘diving’ beneath it. Its perturbations were too powerful, and it propagated much too quickly for that. Already, as the wave began to crest, rising, rising, he descried an astonishing density of zero-points, like trillions of bacteria churned into a huge, black, sucking mass. The wave itself began to suck at him now as he crossed the last bounded interval; now, in less than a moment, he must either make a mapping into realspace or prepare to die.

Ahira, Ahira – give me me the courage to do what I must do.

He waited as long as he could, waited until the Fire Drinker crossed the last bounded interval, too. And then, in the terrible topological distortions of the wave that was almost upon them, all possible windows into realspace suddenly closed, and there could be no escape in that direction. There could be only pathways downwards into the swirling blackness beneath the wave. Or pathways into the wave. Since the moment that Danlo had first sighted the wave far across the shimmering manifold, he had contemplated this other possibility. It would be seeming-madness to take his ship into the wave itself, but all his mathematics told him that diving under it would be suicide. Marja Valasquez, however, obviously hadn’t had the chance to make such calculations, for she made a mapping at the last moment and found a pathway beneath the wave. Danlo watched the Fire Drinker disappear like a diamond pin dropped into a cauldron of molten steel. And then he pointed the Snowy Owl straight into the bore of the wave, and it fell upon him with a terrible weight, breaking into colours of cobalt and rose and foaming violet.

Ahira, Ahira – give me your golden eyes that I might see.

Almost immediately he lost his mappings. Supposedly, no pilot could survive such a disaster, for without a map from point to point within the swirling complexities of the manifold, one became hopelessly lost. But once before, when he had entered the chaos space in the heart of the Entity, he had found a way out of what should have been a fatal topological trap. New mappings always existed if a pilot were artful enough to discover them. Even as the wave swept the Snowy Owl along at a tremendous speed, he searched for such mappings. If he had had endless time, he might have found a mapping very quickly, for the greatest of his mathematical skills lay in seeing the pattern that connects. But he had almost no time. In truth, he was fighting to stay alive. The wave broke all around him in colours of jade and virvidian; only the lightning rush of its momentum outwards balanced the almost impossible suck of its dark emerald weight. He lived in this balance. He piloted the Snowy Owl into a pocket along the wave front, and there he remained perfectly poised within its hideously complex dynamics. He called upon the three deepest virtues of a pilot: fearlessness, flawlessness and flowingness. If he let himself be afraid, even for a moment, he might try to flee the wave in the wrong direction and be swept under like a piece of driftwood in a raging sea. And if his piloting were anything less than flawless, he would lose the flow of his perfect balance, and the wave’s terrible energies would crush his ship to pieces as if it were only a clam shell.

Ahira, Ahira – I must not be afraid.

There was a moment. For Danlo in his Snowy Owl riding the crest of an almost impossible topological wave far beneath space and time, as for everyone, always only a moment between life and death. It was a moment of intense awareness. Colours swirled all around him and broke into bands of magenta and brilliant blue, into flaming scarlet traceries and thousands of other patterns. There were always patterns, always a hidden order beneath the surface chaos. As the Danladi wave propagated through the manifold, Danlo perceived subtle, silvered reflections at each encounter with the various topological structures it swept across. There were refractions, too, the way that the wave continually broke upon itself in intense showers of light and re-formed into a vast moving mountain only a moment later. The wave orthogonals appeared as parallel lines of silver-blue. After a while he noticed something about these orthogonals: although they changed direction from moment to moment as the wave distorted the very substance of the manifold, making the discovery of a mapping into realspace almost impossible, there was a pattern to these changes. He tried to find a mathematical model to fit this pattern. He tried Q-sets and Gallivare fields and a hundred others before he found that orthogonals’ spinning motions could be best represented by a simple Soli set. If his timing were almost perfect, he might predict the exact moment when the orthogonals would line up away from the wave and point towards an exit into realspace. If his piloting were flawless, he might make a mapping in this moment and accomplish what only the maddest (or wildest) of pilots would ever have dared to attempt.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven …

At exactly halfway through the seventh beat of his heart, he made a mapping. And instantaneously, the vast Danladi wave disappeared, and the Snowy Owl fell out around a cool white star. In the emptiness of space, it was quiet around this star. It showered the Snowy Owl with its lovely white light. Danlo floated in the quiet, looking out at the star as he gasped for breath and continued counting his heartbeats: thirteen, fourteen, fifteen …

‘Pilot, we’re free!’ This came from the Ede imago, floating near Danlo who was looking out the ship’s diamond window. ‘We’re free, and we’ve lost the other ship, haven’t we?’

‘Yes,’ Danlo said. He pressed his hand against the scar above his eye and grimaced in pain. ‘We … have lost her.’

‘How did you lose her, then? I’m afraid that in the distortions of the wave, my simulation showed little.’

Danlo felt his heartbeats in the throbbing of his eye, and then he told Ede exactly how he had lost Marja Valasquez and the Fire Drinker.

‘That was very clever of you,’ Ede said. ‘To slay her that way.’

‘I did not slay her!’

‘You lured her to her death.’

‘No, she had choices. Before she crossed the last interval, she might have escaped into realspace.’

‘But you knew that she would follow you.’

‘I knew … only that she would want to follow me.’

‘And you knew that she would dive beneath the wave and be destroyed, didn’t you?’

‘How could I truly know which pathway she would choose?’

‘How could you not know?’

‘But she might have tried to ride the wave out, as I did.’

‘Oh, Pilot.’

‘Truly, she always had a choice. And she dived beneath the wave. Her will, not mine.’

The Ede imago glowed softly as it regarded Danlo. Then it said, ‘How was it that you once defined this vow of ahimsa that you’ve made? Never harming another, not even in one’s own thoughts.’

‘I … never wished Marja dead. I only wanted to lose her.’

‘And yet you led her to lose her life.’

‘Yes.’

‘It would seem that the practice of ahimsa can be difficult subtle.’

‘Yes.’

Ede continued staring at Danlo, then said, ‘I’m sorry – this must be hard for you.’

At this, a sudden pain shot through Danlo’s eye and filled his head like an explosive tlolt. His eyes began to water and he blinked hard against the cool but hurtful light of the star outside his ship.

‘I … am sorry, too,’ he said.

Then he closed his eyes and whispered a prayer for Marja’s spirit, ‘Marja Evangelina wi Eshte Valasquez, mi alasharia la shantih.’

Some time later he roused Demothi Bede from the sleep of quicktime and invited him into the pit of his ship. The sleepy-eyed Demothi took a long look at the star outside the pit’s window, yawned and said, ‘It looks like the Star of Neverness – are we home, then?’

‘No,’ Danlo said, smiling despite his aching head. ‘The colour of this star is white, not yellow-white. We are still far from Neverness.’

‘How far, then? What is this star’s name?’

‘It has no name that I know,’ Danlo said. ‘But it lies close to Kalkin.’

‘Kalkin!’ Demothi exclaimed. He might have had poor eyes for stellar spectra, but he remembered his astronomy lessons. ‘Kalkin is only ten light years distance from Summerworld!’

‘Yes,’ Danlo said. ‘We … have departed from our pathway.’

After wiping away the salt crusts from the corners of his eyes, he told Demothi of Marja Valasquez and the Fire Drinker and their long pursuit through the manifold. He tried to describe the vastness of the Danladi wave, its terrible beauty, but he found that his words failed him. He said only that the wave had swept them far along the galaxy’s Sagittarius Arm almost to the stars of the Jovim Cluster.

‘Why didn’t you wake me, Pilot? Would you have had me go to my death half-asleep?’

Again Danlo smiled because he remembered something that his Fravashi teacher had once said: that the manswarms of the human race went about their whole lives half-asleep and stumbling towards death.

‘I did not want to alarm you,’ Danlo said.

‘What will we do now?’

‘Continue our journey.’

‘How much longer has our journey become, then? The wave has caused us such a vast dislocation.’

‘As measured in light years this is true,’ Danlo said. ‘But the pathways between Kalkin and Neverness are well known. The mappings are very easy. Our journey will not have grown much more difficult or timesome.’

‘But what if the wave has changed or broken the old pathways? Aren’t such permanent distortions of the manifold possible?’

‘Yes – truly this is possible.’

‘Well, then?’

‘It is possible, too, that the pathways remain unbroken.’

‘You must be eager to discover if this is so.’

‘Truly, I am,’ Danlo said, yawning. He closed his eyes for moment, and the rising swells of unconsciousness swept towards him in black, rolling waves. Then with a sudden snap of his head, he looked at Demothi and smiled. ‘But I am even more eager for sleep. I will sleep now. When my computer wakes me in two more hours, then we shall see if we can find an easy pathway towards Neverness.’

With that he closed his eyes again and fell instantly into a deep and peaceful sleep. So total was his exhaustion that when his ship’s-computer touched his brain with soft musics two hours later, he did not awaken. Nor twenty hours later. Both Demothi Bede and the Ede hologram seemed astonished to discover how long Danlo could sleep when he was really tired – in this instance, for most of three days. When he finally broke back into consciousness and looked out on the stars, he realized that he had slept too long.

‘We will fall on, now,’ he said, angry with himself though well rested. ‘I only hope that war hasn’t come to Neverness while I was dreaming.’

And so they fell. Danlo took the Snowy Owl back into the manifold, and they fell on past Kalkin and Skibbereen and the great red giant star known as Daru Luz. Although the Danladi wave had slightly flattened these familiar spaces and broken a few of the familiar Fallaways as a windstorm might snap a tree’s twigs, most of the pathways through the manifold remained untouched. He made a mapping to a little star near Summerworld, and then on past Tria, Larondissement and Avalon. All these stars lay along the rather roundabout pathway towards Neverness that he had once rejected as too lengthy. But the Danladi wave had made it so that this journey required little more time than his original and more straightforward approach. And it required much less risk. Even in the spaces near Larondissement, one of the Civilized Worlds most devoted to the new religion of Ringism, he descried no tells of any Ringist ship which might be lying in wait for him. On this last segment of his surprisingly peaceful journey, he encountered no other ships at all, not even the vast deep-ships of the Trian merchant-pilots which usually plied the Fallaways filled with cargoes of gossilk, neurologics, firestones, firewine, Gilada pearls, sulki grids, bloodfruits, jook, jambool, blacking oil, and a million other things grown or manufactured on the worlds of man. When he reached Avalon, a pretty blue star so close to the star of his birth, he made a final mapping. It was the famous Ashtoreth mapping, named for the pilot Villiama li Ashtoreth who had discovered it at the beginning of the Order’s Golden Age in the year 681. It carried the Snowy Owl across three hundred light years of space in a single fold, where it fell out in the thickspace near the Star of Neverness.

‘Home,’ Danlo whispered as he looked out at the soft, yellow star that had lit all the days of his childhood. ‘O, Sawel, miralando mi kalabara, kareeska.’

In truth, however, he wasn’t quite home, not yet. He looked out with his telescopes across seventy million miles of vacuum where he spied the planet Icefall spinning like a white and blue jewel in the blackness of space. He might have instantly made a mapping to a point-exit only a few hundred miles above Icefall’s atmosphere, but such a rash act would have set off the planetary defence systems, and he and his ship would surely have been destroyed. As it was, his peril was still great. The Snowy Owl gleamed in the radiance of the Star of Neverness like a dove with a broken wing. Its opening of a window from the manifold had surely created tells that any lightship in this neighbourhood of stars would detect. And surely, with war so near, the Lord Pilot, Salmalin the Prudent, would have deployed many ships to protect Neverness from surprise attack. Danlo waited for the arrival of these ships. It was almost all that he could do. But first he aimed a radio signal at the city of Neverness informing the Lords of the Order of the Snowy Owl’s mission. He did not think that the Old Order’s Ringists had sunk so far into barbarism that they would simply murder two ambassadors out of hand. The danger was that one of the arriving lightships might act without waiting for instructions from Neverness. Some reckless young pilot might perceive the Snowy Owl as only the vanguard of an invasion fleet and fall immediately against him.

And so Danlo waited in the pit of the Snowy Owl, counting heartbeats as he searched for the tells of other lightships. He began counting the seven hundred and fourteen seconds that his radio signal would take to cross seventy million miles of realspace and be returned as a command to all the Order’s lightships that Danlo and Demothi Bede were not to be harmed. He waited exactly eighty-eight seconds, and then a lightship fell out of the thickspace near him, followed only a few seconds later by four more of these deathly diamond needles. He recognized these ships. There was the Infinite Dactyl, piloted by Dario of Urradeth, and the Golden Lotus and the Bell of Time. And Nicabar Blackstone’s Ark of the Angels, with its lovely, curving wings. The fifth ship he knew well because he had been at Resa with its pilot, Ciro Dalibar, as chance would fall. He had even helped Ciro design the heuristics for this uniquely pointed ship, which Ciro had named the Diamond Arrow.

Ahira, Ahira, Danlo prayed, and he beamed a radio signal to each of these ships. And now he waited for the five pilots either to accept his parlay or to destroy him. That was the true terror of war, that often one had to accept danger and simply wait to live or die.

Much later he would learn that these five pilots, floating in the dazzling void near the Star of Neverness, had held a conclave among themselves. Ciro Dalibar, with his cruel, thin lips and jealousy of Danlo, had argued that as a pilot of the Order of the Vild – and thus of the Fellowship – he should be slain as a just act of war. But Cham Estarei of the Blue Lotus had spoken against such bloodthirstiness. As had Nicabar Blackstone. Nicabar, a master pilot and eldest of the five, told the others that it would do no harm to wait to hear from the lords on Neverness. If they wished to accept Danlo’s and Demothi’s embassy, well and good. If they did not, then the Snowy Owl could be sent back to Sheydveg or wherever the Order of the Vild’s fleet might be. Or they could send Danlo into the Star of Neverness. The five ships, acting together, could open a window into this blazing star whenever they wished and send Danlo’s ship into the fires of hell.

‘We’ll wait for the wishes of the lords,’ Nicabar Blackstone told Danlo and Demothi. Nicabar’s imago, with its glowing green eyes and deathly white countenance, had appeared in the pit of the Snowy Owl. ‘We must ask that you attempt no motion in realspace nor open any windows into the manifold. If you do, we’ll fall against you and destroy you.’

And so, with the noses of five ships pointing at him across only a few miles of space, Danlo waited. It took more than two thousand seconds for the Lords of Neverness’s message to arrive. Neither Danlo nor Demothi Bede were to be harmed. Danlo wi Soli Ringess was instructed to make a mapping to a certain point-exit above Neverness. The five lightships were to ensure that the Snowy Owl fell out into near-space exactly where it should. Then they were to escort the ambassadors down through the atmosphere to the Hollow Fields, where a sled would carry them to an emergency session of the Lords’ College.

‘I’d advise caution,’ the Ede hologram said in the privacy of the Snowy Owl. ‘The Ringists might wish to trap you.’

‘Yes,’ Danlo said. ‘Of course they will – we will be as prisoners the moment we touch the ice of Neverness.’

Demothi Bede drew his hand across his old, wrinkled face and said, ‘Still, it will be good to see the city again. And my old friends. I never thought I would.’

‘To see old friends,’ Danlo repeated softly. His eyes were grave yet full of light. He felt a terrible burning behind his eyes, and terrible images began streaming into his mind as if he were looking far across space and time. ‘To see the city again – and what lies above.’

A few moments later, at Nicabar Blackstone’s command, Danlo made a mapping to the point-exit above Neverness. The Snowy Owl fell out exactly as arranged, and Danlo gasped at the changes that only a few years had wrought in the once-empty reaches of space encircling Icefall. To begin with, the sky above his world’s sky was swarming with ships. There were deep-ships and long-ships, fire-ships and gold ships and many, many black ships armed for war. He counted more than forty-eight thousand ships spread out below him in a vast moving carpet of steel and diamond and black nall. He counted two hundred and ten lightships, too; a much larger fleet than that of the Fellowship of Free Worlds, even though all the Ringist lightships were not present. Some of these two hundred and thirty-one missing ships would be off on raiding missions such as the one that had surprised the Sonderval’s ships near Ulladulla. Others would try to detect the movements of the Fellowship’s fleet when it finally fell away from Sheydveg on its unknown pathway towards Neverness. Surely Salmalin would have positioned more than a few lightships in a protective cordon around the Star of Neverness. And at least twenty of these lightships protected something else, something more precious to the Ringists than firestones or pearls or even the icy ground beneath their feet.

This was Hanuman li Tosh’s Universal Computer, floating many miles above Neverness like a dazzling, black moon. In a way, it was a moon, for it was huge and made from the elements of Kasotat, Vierge and Varvara, three of the six moons that Danlo had beheld shining in the sky since the year of his birth. With his ship’s telescope he looked out at these nearby moons. The surface of each one swarmed with robots and disassemblers smaller than bacteria. These infinitesimal engines of destruction were tearing apart earth and rocks even as he watched, reducing layer after layer of the moons into their constituent elements. Their once-silvery surfaces were grey and pitted as a hibakusha’s face. Truly, as Bardo had said, Hanuman and the Ringists had ordered the mining of these moons, this shaida act that was a crime against the laws of the Civilized Worlds. At any moment, from any of the three moons, there might issue a flash of light as a deep-ship filled with silicon or carbon or gold would disappear into the manifold only to fall out an instant later at a point-exit above the Universal Computer. There, in vast floating factories, its cargo would be assembled into diamond chips and neurologics and opticals – the very substance and circuitry of the Universal Computer. More robots assembled these parts into an ungodly (or perhaps just the opposite) machine. One day, if nothing were done to halt this monument to one man’s hubris, it would grow to the size of a moon.

Ahira, Ahira, ki los shaida, shaida neti shaida.

‘If you’re ready, Pilot, we’ll make our planetfall now.’ This was Nicabar Blackstone’s voice, spilling into the pit of the Snowy Owl like an overturned goblet of honey-wine. He was a master pilot whose sweet-rich voice almost belied his innate ruthlessness. ‘We’ll make a straight fall for the Fields. I’ll lead the way, and you must follow – and then Dario of Urradeth, Cham Estarei, Ciro Dalibar and the Visolela will follow you.’

With that, the Ark of the Angels dipped its diamond nose towards the planet below them, followed in line by the Snowy Owl, the Infinite Dactyl, the Blue Lotus, the Diamond Arrow and the Bell of Time. The six ships slowly fell towards Icefall. And now, even as they passed through the ships of the fleet like needles through a thick carpet, Danlo had a moment to gaze upon the most profound of the changes that had come to his world. This was the Golden Ring. Ahead of him, and below, enveloping all of Icefall in a sphere of living gold, was this miracle of evolution that had taken root in the uppermost atmospheres of many worlds throughout the galaxy. Many believed the Ring to be the Entity’s handiwork, or rather the child of her vast stellar womb. For the Ring was life itself, newly created to flourish in the harsh environment of near-space. A few hundred miles below Danlo’s ship floated the Ring organisms, the nektons and triptons and sestons, the vacuum flowers and pipal trees and fritillaries. And of course, the little makers. These were the fundament of the Ring, the trillions of trillions of single-celled plants drifting in the faint solar wind that blew down upon Icefall. Each of the little makers was a tiny sphere of thin diamond membranes encasing the cellular machinery of enzymes and acids and red chlorophyll. The little makers would breathe the exhalations of the stars, absorbing light and transforming this most universal of energies into food that would feed the other life of the Ring. It was the red chlorophyll that gave the Ring its colour, for when the light of the sun fell through the tissues of the uncountable little makers and refracted from diamond sphere to diamond sphere, it appeared to the naked eye in hues of ruby-amber and gold. The whole of the world below was swathed in a tapestry shimmering gold as lovely and diaphanous as a courtesan’s silks. Through this living veil, Danlo could make out the jagged coastline of Neverness Island far below him and the deep blue sheen of the sea. Someday, perhaps, the Ring would grow more opaque to light, and it might grow difficult to see the mountains of Neverness from near-space or the six moons of Icefall from the surface of the planet. But it would be sad beyond tears, Danlo thought, if the Ring ever grew to obscure the light of the stars themselves.

Fara gelstei, he whispered, speaking the name of the Golden Ring that he had learned as a child. Loshisha shona, loshisha halla – sawisha halla neti shaida.

Soon the Snowy Owl entered the Ring with less moment than if it had fallen through a cloud. The Ring itself was much more tenuous than any cloud, and Danlo had no trouble seeing his way through the faint tinge of gold staining the sky. He looked for the largest Ring organisms, the predatory goswhales whose nerves were woven of neurologics, a kind of biological lightship that could swim through the cold currents of space. The Order’s eschatologists believed the goswhales to be more intelligent than human beings; some called them godwhales in honour of their considerable powers. But however one named them, they were very rare; in all his life, Danlo would never lay eyes upon one. But through his diamond window he did see a swarm of fritillaries, with their huge silver wings like solar sails to catch the light of the sun and drive them across space. They were lovely creatures but also strange; they had telescopic eyes which could pick out a vacuum flower across two hundred miles of space, and long, graceful metallic antennae for receiving and transmitting radio signals. Once, as a boy looking up from the sea’s ice to the gold-streaked sky, Danlo had wondered about the rapidly evolving life of the Ring. He had wanted to journey to the heavens, to ask such creatures as the fritillary their true names and to give them his own. ‘Ahira, Ahira,’ he said, whispering the name of his other-self, the Snowy Owl. He would have liked to stay here falling slowly through this ocean of gold for a long time, but the Ark of the Angels pointed down towards Neverness, and he had to follow her. Lokelani miralando la shantih.

As the lightships fell down towards the white-capped mountains of Neverness Island, the Ring began to thicken. The little makers fed on sunlight like any plant, but they also breathed carbon dioxide, hydrogen and nitrogen, and other nutrients of Icefall’s upper atmosphere. Some eschatologists believed that the rarity of these gases would place a severe upper limit on the Ring’s potential for growth. Others thought that the sestons and nektons would eventually evolve into something like robot disassemblers and learn how to mine the six moons for their vast store of elements. It might be thought that the Ring would simply grow lower through the troposphere and begin colonizing Icefall’s islands and oceans like some alien invasion of wild, new life. But it seemed that this would never happen. On no known world had the Ring grown in this direction. Indeed, the Ring seemed designed to grow outwards like a sunflower opening into darkness, perhaps into the deep space as far as the Star of Neverness’s ten other planets. Already a goswhale had been sighted orbiting Berural as if in contemplation of the brilliant swirling reds and violets of that gaseous world. Someday, perhaps, the Ring would find a way to thrive in interstellar vacuum or even in the great loneliness between the galaxies themselves.

‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it, Pilot?’ Demothi Bede, still sharing the pit of Danlo’s ship, gazed out of the window at the Ring shimmering like gold dust in the light of the sun. ‘Who would have thought I’d live to see such miracles?’

Truly, Danlo thought, the Ring was a miracle – but perhaps no more miraculous than snowworms or human beings or any other kind of life. The miraculous thing was life itself, the way that matter had moved itself from the beginning of time, moved and evolved and reached out into ever more complex and conscious forms. And now life everywhere was moving off planets made of water and rocks out towards the stars. In a way, this astonishing event should have astonished no one. For space is cold, and low temperatures favour order. And what was life except matter organized into the highest degrees of order? As Danlo looked out at the little makers of the Ring, he remembered something that a master biologist had once told him:

The rate of metabolism of energy varies according to the square of the temperature.

This was true for the fritillaries and jewel-like nektons floating above Icefall no less than the bears he had once hunted as a child or the mosquitoes that had drunk his blood. In the vast coldness of deep space, a pipal tree or a golden, glittering goswhale could be very thrifty in its use of energy. That was a grace of the Ring, its thriftiness. The little makers, for example, utilized almost every molecule of carbon dioxide and other nutrients that floated up from the lower atmosphere. As with a tropical ecosystem, the Ring concentrated these nutrients within the individual plants and organisms themselves. They excreted little waste into the stratosphere, mostly oxygen in its diatomic state which would quickly react with the sun, break down and then recombine into ozone. It was this building blanket of pale blue ozone miles above Icefall that would shield its forests and oceans from the worst of the Vild’s radiations. Soon, in less than two years, the light of the supernova that had once been Merripen’s Star would fall over Danlo’s world with a terrible intensity of illumination. Whether or not this wavefront of hard light would be mostly reflected or absorbed by the Ring and its life-protecting ozone, not even the eschatologists could say.

The Ring is not growing as it should, Danlo thought. How he knew this was a mystery, but he was as certain of its truth as his next breath of air. It is Hanuman’s Universal Computer – it is keeping the Ring from growing.

‘It’s a miracle,’ Demothi Bede repeated. ‘A miracle that this creation of the gods will keep Neverness safe from the supernova.’

For a moment Danlo closed his eyes and listened to the silence of the deep sky. It was almost as if he could hear the ping of each of the millions of diamond-like little makers striking the diamond hull of his ship and spinning off into the air like tiny, ringing bells. Almost as if the Golden Ring itself could speak to him. It was possible, he knew, that this miracle of new life would protect his world from the supernova. But which one? There was the radiation of Merripen’s Star which had crossed some thirty light years of space on its journey towards Neverness. Perhaps if the Universal Computer were unmade, through war or the grace of Hanuman himself, the Ring would shield against this killing light. But if Bertram Jaspari and his Iviomils ever succeeded in exploding the Star of Neverness, neither the Ring nor the greatest god of the galaxy could save his world from being vaporized.

‘Don’t you think it’s a miracle, Pilot?’

‘A miracle – yes,’ Danlo said.

With that he pointed his ship down a steep angle of descent, following the Ark of the Angels into the thick air of the lower atmosphere. He fell down towards Neverness, the City of Light, where he sensed that the greatest of miracles still awaited him.