Читать книгу War in Heaven - David Zindell, David Zindell - Страница 9

We call our region of the galaxy the Civilized Worlds. We believe that we seek for ourselves an ideal state of human culture beyond barbarism or war. If this be true, however, how are we to think of Summerworld, with its silver mines and slaves, as civilized? Or Catava where the Architects of the Reformed Churches use their holy cleansing computers to mutilate their own children’s minds? Or Simoom, or Urradeth, and so on, and so on? The truth is that we have come to define civilization very narrowly: we are civilized who honour and keep the Three Laws. And what is the essence of these laws? Very simply, that we agree to limit our technology. To be civilized is to make a choice to live as careful and natural human beings in harmony with our environments. The Civilized Worlds, then, are nothing more than those three thousand spheres of water and earth where man has chosen to remain as man.

— from A Requiem for Homo Sapiens by Horthy Hosthoh, Lord of the Order of Mystic Mathematicians and Other Keepers of the Ineffable Flame

And so the pilots of the New Order returned across the stars as they had come only a few years before. Although this part of their journey from Thiells to Farfara was much the shortest, in distance, as measured in time it took many days to fall even a few hundred light years between such stars as Natal and Acayib the Brilliant, for the manifold underlying the Vild was as changeable as quicksand and mappings made one moment might prove worthless the next. The Sonderval, though, led the lightships with panache and good order past Kefira and Cho Chumu, and Rhea Luz, all hot and swollen with its angry red light. Perhaps it was good chance – or only fate – that no pilots were lost during this first fenestration of window to window giving out on the treacherous stars. Once, when they fell through a Danladi fold caused by the explosion of some recent supernova, Ona Tetsu’s Ibi Ibis almost vanished into an infinite series of infoldings. But with great presence of mind characteristic of all her famous line, that wily pilot found a mapping which took her through a window to the Birdella Double, which was the next star pair in the sequence of stars that the Sonderval had set. There she waited for the two hundred lightships to rejoin her – waited with great coolness as if she hadn’t almost lost her life like a child smothered in sheets of wildly flapping plastic.

Most of the pilots, of course, would have liked to prove their virtue by finding mappings independent of the others, but accidents such as Ona’s befell few of them, and the Sonderval had ordered them to stay together. And so they moved through the Vild as one body of ships, remaining always within the same neighbourhood of stars. They passed Ishvara, Stirrit and Seio Luz, a cool yellow sun almost identical in shape and colour to the Star of Neverness. And Kalkin and Vaishnara, and others, and finally they came to Sattva Luz, a brilliant white ball of light just within the inner envelope of the Vild. From here, their mappings would carry them only a few more stars to Renenet and Akar, and thus to Shoka and Savona, where they would break free from the Vild’s outer envelope and look out on Farfara and the stars of the Civilized Worlds. It was here, just beyond Sattva Luz’s intense gravity field, that they came upon a quite deadly phase space. Or rather this menace of the manifold came upon them. Some of the surviving pilots were to describe it as like an earthquake; others spoke of boiling oil or point-set correspondences that shattered like a dropped cup. For Danlo wi Soli Ringess, caught in the worst part of the phase space, it was as if one moment he were floating on a calm blue sea and the next, a tidal wave of every colour from ruby to violet was breaking over him. He had almost no time to find a mapping to a small white dwarf near Renenet. Others, however, were not so lucky. (Or skilful.) Three pilots died that day: Ricardo Dor, Lais Blackstone and Midori Astoret in her famous Rose of Neverness. None will ever know how the manifold appeared to them in the last moment before they were crushed into oblivion. But all the survivors agreed that they had lived through one of the worst mathematical spaces ever encountered and were very glad when the Sonderval called a halt near Shoka to speak the dead pilots’ names in remembrance.

When the pilots finally reached Farfara several days later, many desired to make planetfall as they had done on their way into the Vild. They wanted to feel earth beneath their boots again, to stand in Mer Tadeo’s garden beneath the stars drinking firewine and talking of brave deeds. But the Sonderval would not allow this. They had reached the Civilized Worlds, he said, and though it might be unlikely, it was always possible that pilots from Neverness might fall out of the manifold like birds of prey at night and destroy their ships while they were on the ground.

‘We must begin to think strategically,’ he told them. ‘We must not regard ourselves as wayfarers needing a little comfort, but as warriors going to war.’

That there truly might be a war was no news to Mer Tadeo dur li Marar or any of the other merchant princes of Farfara. As Bardo had promised, his friends of the Fellowship of Free Pilots had journeyed to the most important Civilized Worlds to tell of the gathering at Sheydveg. They had called for ships, robots, water and food – and men and women armed with lasers, eye-tlolts, or even knives. The Farfarans, of course, had no experience of war. But then almost none of the peoples of the Civilized Worlds did. Farfara was a rich planet whose merchant élite opposed the spread of Ringism. And so they decided to send their own contribution to the gathering on Sheydveg: food and firewine, but also twenty deep-ships each carrying ten thousand hastily trained soldiers and secretly armed with lasers and neutron bombs. And they provided seventy-two black ships, which were really much like the Order’s lightships except that they were clumsier and duller, with hulls wrought of black nall and pilots who had only enough mathematics to take them along the well-established mappings of the Fallaways. In battle against the Order’s sleek, gleaming lightships, they might prove more of a hindrance than a help, but the Sonderval reluctantly thanked the Farfarans and quite peremptorily commanded their pilots to follow the two hundred lightships into the manifold as best they could.

From Farfara they fell on to Freeport, where they gained ten more deep-ships and thirty-eight black ships. And at Vesper their fleet increased similarly, and so at Wakanda. Their journey took them through the most ancient part of the Fallaways, through worlds colonized well before the Lost Centuries when the First Wave of the Swarming had reached its crest. Only some of these worlds supported the New Order’s mission to Farfara. Many chose to remain neutral in the coming strife. And many more favoured the Old Order out of age-long loyalties or welcomed Ringism as a force that would save them from millennia of stagnation. Some unfortunate worlds were divided against themselves, half their people embracing Ringism, while their brothers and sisters fought to oppose this wild and criminal religion. By the time the lightships passed their way, Zesiro and Redstone had nearly fallen into civil war.

The peoples of Fostora, too, were close to killing each other. The Fostorans, of course, were famous throughout the Civilized Worlds for creating the Silicon God. They well remembered this great crime against the Three Laws, and many Fostorans, in their undying shame, were ready to give their lives that such an abomination would never come into being again. But others on this dark, cold world had more ancient dreams. Like their forefathers five thousand years before, they chafed at the limitations of the Three Laws. While they were not willing to make another god-computer that might threaten the Civilized Worlds and perhaps all the galaxy’s stars, they fell into love with the idea that they might make themselves as gods. And so they became Ringists mind, body and soul. They fought to nullify the Three Laws and remake the Civilized Worlds as a paradise where men and women might move towards godhood. How this miracle of evolution might occur, no one quite knew. But they believed the words of Hanuman li Tosh’s missionaries, that for them to blaze like stars, they must be willing to endure fire, burning and, ultimately, war.

Each man and woman is a star. Even as the New Order’s fleet fell through the manifold after gathering another fifty black ships on Monteer, Danlo floated inside his ship and fell into remembrance. Once, on a long night years ago on Neverness, he had stood in the bitter cold listening to Hanuman deliver these words to thousands of cheering people. How could you wish to become new unless you had first become ashes?

He remembered that over the millennia there had been other attempts to break away from the Laws of the Civilized Worlds and shape a new face for humanity. As the Fifth Mentality of Man reached its limits, anarchists from Fostora had founded Alumit as a world where all things might be possible. It was no mistake, Danlo thought, that Nikolos Daru Ede had been born on Alumit, and there carked his consciousness into a computer that had grown to be almost the greatest of the galaxy’s gods. And the warrior-poets of Qallar, after perfecting the art of using computer neurologics to replace parts of the human brain, had begun a campaign of terror and extreme proselytization to convert others to their way. They would have rewritten the Three Laws to allow for terrible mutilations of the bodysoul, but the Order of Scientists, as the Order had then been called, under the implacable Timekeeper, had opposed them. The first war fought with the warrior-poets had nearly destroyed the Order, but the Order’s superior command of lightships and the manifold allowed them to impose a peace upon Qallar. The warrior-poets agreed to many hated limits to their technologies of the mind – and over the seven thousand years since the Third Dark Age they had broken their agreement many times.

This, Danlo thought in the quiet of his ship, had been the deepest tension on every Civilized World almost for ever: that human beings were always secretly dying to break out of their old ways and turn their faces to something new. And human beings needed newness as a hungry thallow chick does meat, but the Third Law was right to proclaim that man may not stare too long at the face of the computer and still remain as man. How then should they turn? If women and men were not to fall as cold and mechanical as silicon computers, in what direction might they look to take on a new face, one truly human and yet beyond the fearful yearning and pride that had marked man’s visage for so long? No one knew. No one had ever known, neither the first Homo sapiens who had looked up at the stars in longing for the infinite lights, nor the warrior-poets, nor the god-men of Agathange. But many were the prophets who had understood that the pressure to evolve was the deepest, most terrible of all man’s drives. Hanuman li Tosh was only the most recent of these firebrands. But he was a religious genius, and more, a man with a terrible will to fate. And perhaps most importantly, he brought his Way of Ringess to the stars at a fateful time in history when people were prepared to burn worlds and turn a whole civilization to ashes if only they might create themselves anew.

Terrible pressure, Danlo thought as he fell deeper into the Civilized Worlds. The terrible light – people do not know what is inside them.

At last the lightships – and deep-ships and black ships – came to Madeus Luz at the edge of the galaxy’s Orion Arm. This blue-white giant was like a signpost lighting their way into the darker spaces into which they soon must pass. Only a score of stars lay along their pathway now to Sheydveg, itself one of the few stars to brighten this part of the Fallaways. The pilots fell on to Jonah’s Star Far Group, where the world of Shatoreth added to their numbers, and then they made a series of mappings towards Sheydveg.

For Danlo, floating in the pit of the Snowy Owl, this was the longest and most uneventful segment of his journey. According to Lord Nikolos’ orders, at Sheydveg he would say goodbye to his fellow pilots and fall on alone to the dense stars of the Sagittarius Arm and then to Neverness, but now there was almost nothing outside his ship to occupy his attention. The manifold between these two arms of the galaxy flattened out like a sheet of burnished gold. To enlighten himself, he might have taken conversation with Demothi Bede, but this lord of the Order stayed in his passenger cell, either sleeping or interfaced into quicktime, where the ship-computer slowed his mind as cold does tree sap so that time for him passed much more quickly. Danlo did speak with his devotionary computer. The hologram of Nikolos Daru Ede, with its bald head and black, mystic’s eyes, floated like a glowing ghost in the ship’s omnipresent darkness. Danlo had long since tired of Ede’s warnings as to the manifold’s dangers and his continually-voiced desire to get his body back and incarnate again as a human being. But he did not know the word that would take this noisome computer down, and in truth, he had been alone in stars so long that he welcomed almost any form of companionship. And rarely, Ede might even amuse him. Once, when they had just fenestered past a fiery white double, Ede reminded him for the thousandth time that the fleet of Bertram Jaspari’s Iviomils was likely falling among similar stars on their way to Neverness to destroy it.

‘And they have my body, Pilot. If the Iviomils destroy the Star of Neverness and flee into the core stars, how will I ever recover my body?’

‘We will not let them destroy Neverness,’ Danlo said for the thousandth time.

‘I should like only to feel the world through my body once more.’

‘And then?’ Danlo asked yet one more time. ‘What will you do with this resurrected body?’

The expression on Ede’s face froze into a kind of mechanical wistfulness. ‘I shall drink the finest firewine; I shall bask in the sunlight on the sands of the Astaret Sea; I shall smell roses; I shall suffer and weep and play with children; I should like to fall into love with a woman.’

Usually this conversation went no further, but because Danlo was in a playful mood, he asked, ‘But what if your body no longer has the passion to be a body?’

For a moment Ede seemed lost in computation (or thought), and then he asked, ‘What do you mean?’

‘Your body has been frozen for three thousand years, yes?’

‘Only two thousand, seven hundred and forty-five years.’

Danlo smiled and said, ‘My friend Bardo once died and was frozen in preservation for only a few days. When the cryologists thawed him, he found that he had lost certain of his powers.’

‘What powers?’

‘He found it impossible … to be with a woman.’

‘But I always found it so easy to be with women.’

In truth, Nikolos Daru Ede, the man, had always been too absorbed with his computers and his journey godward to love any woman deeply. But as for swiving them, he had been the founder of humanity’s greatest religion, and as with most such charismatic leaders, his bed had rarely been empty.

‘Bardo always had an easy way with women, too,’ Danlo said. ‘But after he was restored to himself, his spear would not rise.’

‘Then in the thawing of my body, I shall have to take precautions that my spear remains risen.’

‘Remains?’

‘Have I never told you the story of my vastening?’ Ede asked.

‘Yes, truly you have – you told me that after your brain had been copied in an eternal computer, your body was frozen.’

‘Of course, but what was I doing in the hours before I carked my consciousness into the computer and became a god?’

‘How … would I know?’ Danlo asked. But then he immediately smiled because a vivid image came flashing into his mind: the plump, naked Nikolos Daru Ede sexing with three beautiful women whom he had married that morning in honour of the great vastening to occur that afternoon.

‘Before I was vastened, I wanted to be a man one last time,’ Ede said. ‘So I took my three new wives to bed for the day. But I became overstimulated – I think due to the kuri drink that Amaris mixed to fortify me. When it came time for my vastening, I’m afraid I was still tumescent.’

Danlo was now struggling hard not to laugh. ‘You went to your vastening with your spear pointing towards the heavens, yes?’

‘Well, I wore a kimono, Pilot. It was voluminous. No one could see.’

‘But after you had died … that is, after the programmers had torn apart your brain and scanned and copied its pattern, after this vastening into what you believe is a greater life, could it be that your body returned to a less excited state?’

‘My vastening lasted only nine and a half seconds. Pilot.’

‘I had thought it took much longer.’

‘Of course, the ceremonies lasted for hours – a great event requires great pageantry, don’t you think?’

‘Yes – truly.’

‘I had ordered the cryologists to freeze me the moment that my vastening was accomplished. Nine and a half seconds – not enough time for my spear to fall.’

‘And thus the Cybernetic Universal Church has preserved you through the ages?’

‘They froze me in my kimono. It was all quite dignified.’

Now Danlo laughed openly, deep from his belly in waves of sound that filled the pit of his ship. Then he said, ‘There is something funny about religions, yes? Something strange, the way men worship other men – even a fat little bald man who went into his crypt swollen between the legs like a satyr.’

‘You insult me, Pilot.’

‘I am sorry.’

‘Of course, the Architects of the Cybernetic Churches don’t worship me as a man. They worship the miracle of my becoming a god.’

‘I see.’

‘But it would be an even greater miracle if we could recover my body and restore me to a life in the flesh.’

‘Truly, it would.’

‘You will help me recover my body, won’t you. Pilot?’

‘I have promised I would.’

‘Even if my spear no longer rises, I would still like to hold a woman again.’

Danlo closed his eyes, then, as he remembered holding Tamara Ten Ashtoreth in the morning sun and the intense fire of their love. ‘I … understand,’ he said.

The Ede imago seemed to respect this sudden silence, for it was many moments before he asked, ‘Pilot?’

‘Yes?’

‘Whatever happened with Bardo’s spear? Did he ever regain his powers?’

‘Yes, truly he did. He … found a cure. Bardo is more Bardo than ever.’

‘I’m happy for him. It’s bad to be without a woman.’

Now Danlo opened his eyes and stared at Ede’s sad, shining face. It was the first time he had ever heard this flickering hologram express any concern for a human being. ‘I would like to believe … that we will recover your body,’ he said.

Other conversations with Ede were of more immediate moment. This little ghost of a god proved to know much about war. When he computed how quickly the fleet was adding ships, he observed that the Sonderval would soon face the problem of how to coordinate and command them. And then at Skamander they received an unexpected boon of fifty-five deep-ships and ninety-two black ships, and the Sonderval’s command problem became critical. It was hard enough for the Order’s finest pilots to move through the manifold as a single, coordinated body of ships. It was harder still for the Sonderval, as the lone Lord Pilot, to aid the black ships’ pilots in mapping through the swirling spaces of the manifold. In his overweening arrogance, the Sonderval’s first impulse was simply to abandon this huge fleet and let them find their own way to Sheydveg. Time was pressing upon him like the overpressures of an approaching winter storm. And he doubted the black ships’ and deep-ships’ worthiness in battle. He might actually have left them with a few lightships as escorts, but then an event occurred that made this strategy unthinkable.

It was just after they had fallen out into realspace around a red-orange giant named Ulladulla. The lightships had kept in good order, gathering as a group near point-exits only a few million miles from Ulladulla’s flaming corona. But the black ships and deep-ships, as they fell out from the manifold’s point-exits, scattered themselves through space like hundreds of dice cast onto black felt. As always, the Sonderval, in his brilliant Cardinal Virtue, would have to wait for them to make their corrective mappings and rejoin the lightships. This always took time, and the Sonderval always counted the moments like a merchant begrudgingly fingering over golden coins to a tax collector. And this time, the regrouping was to take more than a few moments because further in towards the sun, half-concealed by Ulladulla’s fierce radiance, five lightships from the Order on Neverness waited to ambush them.

So blindingly quick was then attack that neither the Sonderval nor any other pilot save one identified the names of their ships. But it was certain that they were Neverness lightships which had journeyed to this star to terrorize the black ships and their pilots. Any ship, of course, as it opens windows in and out of realspace will perturb the manifold like a stone cast into a quiet pool of water. A skilful pilot, if she has manoeuvred close enough to another, can read these faint ripples and actually predict another ship’s mappings through the manifold. But if many ships are moving as one towards point-exits around a fixed star, it requires much less skill to make a probability mapping, for the perturbations merge like a streaming river and are easy to perceive. If the pilots of Neverness had known of the gathering on Sheydveg – as they must have known – then it would be a simple thing for them to divide their forces and lie in wait along the many probable pathways leading to Sheydveg. In time, one of their attack groups would be almost certain to detect the raging river of the Sonderval’s fleet. It would be a simple stratagem, yes, but a foolish one, or so the Sonderval had calculated when he had weighed the risks of various approaches to Sheydveg. For there were many pathways through the manifold, as many as sleekit tunnels through a forest, and whoever led the Neverness pilots would have to divide his ships too thinly.

If the purpose of this attack had been to vanquish the New Order’s fleet, then the Sonderval’s reasoning would have proved sound. But the five lightships’ purpose was only terror. In truth, the lightships of the Sonderval’s fleet were never in danger, nor were the main body of black ships and deep-ships. But a few of the most scattered of these were in deadly danger. The Old Order’s lightships fell out of the sun upon them like hawks among a flock of kitikeesha birds. Using a tactic devised in the Pilots’ War, they manoeuvred close to then target ships and fixed a point-source into the manifold. In essence, they made mappings for their victims. Death-mappings: their spacetime engines opened windows into the manifold and forced a deep-ship or black ship to fall along a pathway leading straight into the heart of the nearest star. These mappings took only moments. And so in less than nine and half seconds, the pilots from Neverness darted in and out of realspace like needles of light. They sent two deep-ships and thirteen black ships spinning to their fiery deaths inside Ulladulla. And then as quickly as they had appeared, they were gone, five wraithlike ships vanishing into the manifold towards other stars far away.

This lightning raid stunned the Sonderval’s fleet. Almost no one had expected such a disaster, for the two Orders were not yet at war. Only one pilot had the presence of mind (or courage) to act in vengeance. This was Bardo, who had long since proved his prowess in the Pilots’ War. When he looked out into deep space and saw how easily the Neverness pilots had destroyed fifteen ships, he cried out after them ‘You’re barbarians, by God! They were as helpless as babes – oh, all the poor men and women, too bad!’

So saying, he used his Sword of Shiva to slice open a window from the black fabric of realspace, and then he and his great diamond ship fell into the burning pathways of the manifold.

When he returned to the spaces of Ulladulla three hundred seconds later, he found that the Sonderval had drawn his shaken fleet together. He gave a quick account of his pursuit of the Neverness ships. By light-radio he told the Sonderval and all the pilots of the lightships (and only these) what had happened during the brief time he had been gone. In the pit of the Snowy Owl, a glowing hologram of Bardo fairly popped out of the air, and this is what Danlo heard the huge man say: ‘Five ships, and they scattered in five different directions. So I had to choose one pathway, one ship. I was lucky, by God! I was still within a well-defined region of one of them, and was able to close the radius of convergence quickly. I came upon him by a blue hotstar five light years from Ulladulla. When I fell out into realspace, I saw that it was Marrim Masala in the Golden Rhomb. He has the ugliest little ship with its ugly straight wings and ugly tail. Had, that is – I sent him and his goddamned ship to hell inside the star, too bad. But I’ve no regrets, for he slaughtered innocents. And in the Pilots’ War he killed Lahela Shatareh, and who could forgive him for that?’

The battle that Bardo had fought with Marrim Masala had been much like any contest between two lightships: nerve-shattering, fierce and quick. Like two swords flashing in the night, Bardo’s and Marrim’s ships slipped in and out of the manifold seeking an advantageous probability mapping. Bardo, the more mathematical and cunning of the two pilots, in some hundred and ten seconds of these lightning manoeuvres, had finally prevailed. He predicted which point-exit the Golden Rhomb would take into realspace, and he made a forced mapping. And then the Sword of Shiva swept forwards and sliced open a window into the manifold. And the Golden Rhomb instantly fell through this window into the hotstar’s terrible fires.

And so one pilot of the Old Order had been slain against fifteen pilots of the Civilized Worlds – and twenty thousand soldiers helpless in the holds of the two deep-ships. Helpless, yes, but they were not innocents as Bardo had said, but rather full men and women armed for war. Still, no one had thought war would come to them so soon. With the loss of the Kaliska and the Ellama Tueth, both deep-ships from Vesper, terror spread among the Sonderval’s fleet. The fifty-five deep-ships and ninety-two black ships recently gained at Skamander might have immediately deserted for that rich world, but their pilots were afraid that the Neverness lightships might intercept them on their way home. To quell the fears of these soft, over-civilized pilots – and to protect them – the Sonderval immediately reorganized his command. Henceforth the lightships would not move as a separate body from the hundreds of deep-ships and black ships. (After the Old Order’s ambush, there were now some twelve hundred and sixty-eight of these.) The Sonderval divided his two hundred lightships into ten battle groups, each to be led by a master pilot who would act as captain and commander of the twenty pilots beneath him – as well as the tens of black ship and deep-ship pilots assigned to his group. In effect, the lightship pilots would act as shepherd dogs keeping the deep-ships and black ships together and protecting them against wolves.

For these ten pilot-captains the Sonderval chose masters who had fought with him in the Pilots’ War: Helena Charbo and Aja, of course, and Charl Rappaporth and Veronika Menchik. He elevated as well Richardess, Edreiya Chu, Ona Tetsu, Sabri Dur li Kadir, and Alark of Urradeth in his famous ship, the Crossing Maker. For the tenth pilot-captain, the Sonderval might have favoured Matteth Jons or Paloma the Younger or a score of others. But he astonished almost everyone by naming Bardo to command the Tenth Battle Group. By light-radio, he told the assembled pilots of his reasons for this strange decision: although no longer of the Order, Bardo was perhaps the master pilot with the most talent for war. And next to the Sonderval, as the Sonderval said, he was the finest of tacticians, and quick-minded and valorous as his recent pursuit of the five Neverness lightships had proved. Although no one disputed Bardo’s prowess as a pilot, Peter Eyota and and Zapata Karek doubted his ability to lead other pilots and their ships to war. And Dario Ashtoreth stridently denied a ronin pilot’s right even to associate with other pilots, much less command them. But the Sonderval was a practical and imperious man. He brooked no argument with his decisions. He had said that Bardo would act as pilot-captain of the Tenth Battle Group, and so it came to be.

After this the Sonderval’s fleet fell on without incident to Sheydveg. This was the name of a cool, orange star shining almost exactly halfway between two arms of the galaxy. Its name meant ‘crossing of the roads’, not only for its physical location at the centre of the Civilized Worlds but because of its famous thickspace where millions of pathways through the manifold converged. Before Rolli Gallivare had discovered the great thickspace near the Star of Neverness, it had been the topological nexus of the Fallaways, the one star to which pilots might fall and easily find a series of pathways leading to any other. Sheydveg was also the star’s single world, a fat blue-white sphere of deep oceans and broad, mountainous continents. It was an old world well-settled by its two billion human beings. With its many light-fields and vast robot factories, it was the perfect world to host the gathering that Bardo had spoken of so many days before in the Hall of the Lords.

‘Well, Pilot, it seems that there really will be war after all,’ the Ede imago said in the darkness of the Snowy Owl. ‘I’ve never seen so many ships.’

When Danlo looked out of the diamond-paned windows of his lightship, out into the black swirls of space, he saw what others saw: the Sonderval’s thousand ships merging with the vast fleet already gathered there. There were deep-ships from Darkmoon and Silvaplana, and black ships from nearly a thousand worlds. Solsken had sent twenty long-ships, and these glorious, monstrous engines of destruction spun slowly in the silence of the night. From Ultima had come a hundred fire-ships, and the Rainbow Double had contributed sixty similar vessels. Even as Danlo watched, more ships arrived, falling out of the manifold like snowflakes from a shaken cloak. These thousands of ships came from Fiesole and Avalon, as well as the carked worlds of Anya, Hoshi and Newvannia, and many others. Altogether, Danlo counted some thirty thousand ships gathered above Sheydveg in a vast, shimmering swathe of diamond and black nall.

Only a few of these, however, were lightships. Two hundred lightships had set forth from Thiells, and these (less the five already lost) were now joined by a hundred and ten others rebelling against the madness on Neverness. The Fellowship of Free Pilots, they called themselves – and some of these were the very pilots whom Bardo had led in the storming of the Lightship Caverns and thereafter sent to the Civilized Worlds to call them to war. Cristobel, in his beautiful Diamond Lotus, commanded them, along with the master pilots Alesar Estarei and Salome wu wei Chu. Although they politely greeted their brother and sister pilots of the New Order, there was an immediate coolness between these two groups. Cristobel, a quick-eyed lion of a man, told the Sonderval that the Fellowship of Free Pilots was the soul of the opposition to the Old Order and the Way of Ringess.

‘It is we of the Fellowship who have suffered to watch the evils of Ringism spread across the stars,’ Cristobel explained when the pilots of both Neverness and Thiells held a conclave by light-radio. ‘It is we who have journeyed far among the Civilized Worlds, and we who have called all these ships and warriors here today. And we have given our name to those who would fight against Hanuman li Tosh and the Ringists: we have gathered here the Fellowship of Free Worlds, and it is we who should lead them.’

And as to who should lead the Fellowship of Free Pilots, Cristobel didn’t hesitate to put forth himself, although it had been Bardo who had organized the Fellowship. Upon hearing Cristobel speak thus, Bardo fell wroth.

‘By God, you’re a treacherous little worm of a man!’ Bardo’s voice thundered in the pits of three hundred lightships as he instantiated as a blazing hologram. His face was purple-black, his fist like a club pounding against his hand. Although Cristobel was in truth a large man, next to Bardo, whether by hologram or actual presence in the body, he did seem rather small. ‘Who was it who called the Fellowship of Free Pilots together at his house when everyone was quaking at Lord Pall’s goddamned edicts against assemblage? Who gave them then name? Who led the attack on the Lightship Caverns? It was Bardo, by God!’ Bardo said. ‘It was Bardo, too bad.’

‘We honour you for your efforts,’ Cristobel said with a sneer. ‘But it seems you’ve already found your place beneath the Sonderval.’

Here the Sonderval’s hologram appeared in the pits of the lightships. His handsome face had fallen as hard as the granite of Icefall’s mountains. To Cristobel, he said, ‘He is pilot-captain of twenty lightships and a hundred and twenty other vessels beneath the Lord Pilot of the New Order.’

‘But he’s still only a ronin pilot, after all,’ Cristobel said.

Now, as if regarding a wormrunner or some loathsome species of alien, the Sonderval slowly shook his head. ‘When you speak to me, Cristobel, you may address me as “Lord Pilot”.’

‘But you are not my Lord Pilot, after all.’

‘No – is that Salmalin the Prudent, then?’ the Sonderval asked, naming the Old Order’s present Lord Pilot.

‘I have no Lord Pilot.’

‘Then if you’ve left the Order and are without a Lord Pilot, you are as much of a ronin as Bardo.’

‘Not so,’ Cristobel said. ‘We of the Fellowship carry the spirit of the Order with us. The true Order, before Ringism corrupted it.’

‘And I honour your spirit,’ the Sonderval said. ‘But is it your intention to appoint yourself Lord Pilot of the Fellowship?’

Here several pilots of the Fellowship began to speak in favour of Cristobel becoming Lord Pilot of the Fellowship. It was obvious to Danlo, as it must have been to others, that they had planned this power play immediately upon learning that Bardo had been successful in reaching the New Order on Thiells.

‘By God, if anyone is to be Lord Pilot of the Fellowship, it’s Bardo!’ Bardo roared.

‘Why should the Fellowship have a Lord Pilot at all?’ Richardess quietly asked when Bardo’s voice had faded to a hum. In his body and face, he was as delicate as Yarkona glass, but he was the only pilot ever to have dared the deadly spaces of Chimene. ‘We already have a great Lord Pilot in the Sonderval. Why don’t you pilots of the Fellowship simply join us?’

‘Why don’t you pilots of the New Order join us?’ Cristobel countered.

‘Because you’re ronins!’ Zapata Karek said.

‘And you’re ignorant of what is really occurring in Neverness,’ Vadin Steele said.

‘Ignorant! Well, you’re as power-hungry as a Scutari shahzadi.’

For a long time, the pilots argued among themselves like novices unable to choose captains for a game of hokkee. Danlo listened to then words grow wilder and more belligerent with every pilot who spoke. Their childishness might have amused him, but a great many lives hung on the slender thread of then reaching an understanding. Although Danlo felt time slipping away like sands on a windswept beach and was eager to complete his journey, he felt that he should be sure of who led the Fellowship of Free Worlds before acting on their behalf as an ambassador to Neverness. And Demothi Bede, when Danlo roused him from the half-sleep of quicktime, agreed with him. Lord Bede seemed particularly shocked at the unforeseen play of events.

‘But this is madness!’ the thin, reedy Demothi Bede said in his thin, old voice. He crowded with Danlo into the pit of the Snowy Owl. ‘If we don’t do something, we’ll be at war with each other instead of the Ringists.’

‘Truly, we should do something,’ Danlo said as he floated in his formal black robes. ‘Since we’re supposed to be ambassadors and peacemakers.’

‘It’s obvious that the ronin pilots must join us,’ Lord Bede said. He was very much a traditionalist, and his face fell dour and smug. ‘They should take vows to the New Order.’

Now Danlo did smile, for although a thousand Civilized Worlds were represented in the ships sailing through space all around them, Cristobel and the Sonderval – and the Lord Bede – acted as if only the pilots of the two Orders mattered. But what right did they have, Danlo wondered, to choose the fates of thirty thousand ships and millions of men and women? These lords and masters of his Order obviously assumed that after they had decided upon a Lord Pilot, they would parcel out the other ships to their command like colourfully-wrapped presents given at Year’s End – or rather as the Sonderval had already done with the black ships and deep-ships he had escorted to Sheydveg. Or if the Sonderval and Cristobel could not decide who should lead whom, then the two hundred pilots from Thiells and the Fellowship of Free Pilots might fight independently of each other – after first fighting each other for the prize of the vast fleet waiting in the light of a cool, orange star.

‘I must speak to the pilots,’ Danlo told Demothi Bede. For the moment, he was faced away from his fellow pilots’ arguments, and the pit of his lightship was quiet. ‘This fighting among ourselves, this arrogance of ours … is shaida.’

‘Do you have a plan, then, Pilot?’ Demothi Bede asked.

Danlo nodded his head, then told him his plan.

‘Very well,’ Demothi said, smiling his approval. ‘If you’re to try to stop a war, you might as well begin now.’

And so Danlo added his voice to the cacophony filling the pits of three hundred and five lightships. As a master pilot he had as much right to speak as anyone, and he too instantiated as a hologram among them. Because of his renown at mastering a chaos space and crossing the entire Vild – or perhaps because of his blazing blue eyes – the other pilots fell silent and listened to him.

‘We pilots,’ he said, ‘have thought of ourselves as the spirit of the Civilized Worlds. But we have never been their rulers. The Fellowship of Free Worlds – but where is our fellowship when we call each other names like barbarians? And where is the freedom of these worlds if they must simply wait for us to order them to war? Do they, who have homes and children, risk less than we? If we cannot stop this war, they will die like snowworms caught in the sun, perhaps a thousand or a million of them for every pilot who loses his ship. Truly. Where is their freedom, then, to choose their own fate? We are pilots of three hundred and five lightships. Outside my window I have counted … a hundred times as many other ships. Shouldn’t we let their pilots choose who will lead them to war?’

Most of the lightship pilots, upon listening to Danlo, immediately saw the sense of what he said. In truth, few of them really wanted to wage war as two separate Orders of ships, and they dreaded the uncertainties of Cristobel’s dispute with the Sonderval. The Sonderval, for his part, was loath to surrender any important decision to such inferior beings as the pilots and peoples of the Civilized Worlds. But he was at heart a shrewd man whose farsightedness overshadowed even his arrogance. And so, with carefully feigned reluctance, after trading knowing looks with Danlo, he approved this proposal. Only Cristobel, really, and a few of his closest friends such as Alesar Estarei, argued against Danlo. But the tide of passion – the tide of history – had already turned against him. In the pits of their ships, two hundred and fifty pilots struck their diamond rings against whatever hard surface they could find, and called out that the Fellowship of Free Worlds should decide its own fate.

Of course, there was never any real doubt as to what the Fellowship would decide – if indeed they could decide anything at all. More than thirty thousand ships now orbited Sheydveg, and these held at least five million men and women representing a thousand Civilized Worlds. Many of these were princes or gurus, exemplars or elders or arhats. Many there were who might have wished to command the fleet themselves, but except for Markoman of Solsken and Prince Henrios li Ashtoreth, no one was so deluded as to imagine that he could match the skills of even the youngest of lightship pilots. Their debate, then, centred round how they should choose between the Sonderval and Cristobel as Lord Pilot of the Fellowship. (Or if they should favour Helena Charbo or some other master pilot less vainglorious.) Some held that each man and woman of the Fellowship should cast a vote for whomever he believed to be the greatest pilot. Some thought this unfair since a few worlds had sent more than fifty deep-ships carrying thousands of soldiers in each, while many worlds had sent only a few score of black ships; each individual world, it was argued, should cast a single vote.

There isn’t space here to describe the tortuous pathways by which these many people of many worlds came to a decision. It took them sixteen days to agree that each world would indeed have one vote. It took them much less time to cast these votes in favour of allowing the pilots of both Orders to lead them; as Danlo had hoped, they chose the Sonderval as Lord Pilot of the Fellowship of Free Worlds. But the Sonderval was not to be their autarch or ruler; his power was as a warlord only, to command them in battle if they should decide on war. This crucial decision – and many others relating to grand strategy – they would make for themselves. And if they should win against the Ringists and force a peace upon Neverness, it was they who would decide its terms.

The effect of allowing the Civilized Worlds a greater part in wielding power was profound. Although it limited the Sonderval’s freedom to impose his will upon those he led, it actually strengthened his leadership, for it strengthened the feeling of fellowship just beginning to flower among these many worlds like a delicate, new bud. Among those who would die together in war, between leader and led, there can never be too much fellowship. This, too, was part of Danlo’s plan. Many thanked him for his part in ending the stalemate between Cristobel and the Sonderval and playing midwife to the birth of the true Fellowship of Free Worlds. But when Lord Demothi Bede congratulated him on a fine work of diplomacy, his response was strange.

‘Truly, I have helped close the rift between our two Orders of pilots,’ he said in the quiet of his ship’s pit. As he spoke to Demothi Bede (and to the Ede imago), he touched the lightning-bolt scar cut deeply into his forehead.

‘Even Cristobel has accepted the inevitable,’ the Ede imago said with a programmed smile.

‘As well he should,’ Demothi Bede said, ‘considering the Sonderval’s graciousness.’

The Sonderval, after being chosen to lead the fleet, had invited Cristobel and the other ronin pilots to take vows as pilots of the New Order. As an incentive, he had offered to make Cristobel and Alesar Estarei pilot-captains of the newly-formed Eleventh and Twelfth battle groups – and even named Cristobel as his counsellor in all matters of tactics and strategy. Given the Sonderval’s private ways, this would prove an empty honour, but it seemed to cool the fiery Cristobel nevertheless.

‘All has fallen out as you’d hoped,’ Demothi Bede said to Danlo as he played with a mole on the side of his face. ‘Even Prince Henrios has agreed to lead his ships under Alesar Estarei’s command – a prince of Tolikna Tak under orders from a simple master pilot!’

‘Yes,’ Danlo agreed, ‘there is peace among the Fellowship, now.’

‘Then why do you seem so sad?’

Danlo stared out of his lightship’s window at the flashing lights of thirty thousand other ships spread out through near-space above Sheydveg. His eyes fell grave and deep, and he said, ‘What if I have brought a peace to the Fellowship … only to have created a better engine for the waging of war?’

‘That’s possible, Pilot. But what if you’ve helped create a stronger Fellowship dedicated to avoiding war? Isn’t it possible that there will be no war?’

But the Fellowship was already at war, or so Sabri Dur li Kadir and many others argued during the days that followed. The Ringists’ ambush and destruction of fifteen ships certainly constituted an act of war, so why should the Fellowship pretend that there still might be peace? Could they trust the Ringists not to fall against them in full strength out of the howling black forest of the manifold? Should they themselves avoid destroying the Ringists’ ships if offered such a chance?

‘We must fall against them before they fall against us,’ Sabri Dur li Kadir said in full conclave with all thirty thousand ships of the Fellowship. His face was as black as obsidian and as sharp. ‘We must lay our plans as soon as possible and then attack.’

There were, however, voices of peace as well. Danlo and Lord Bede argued that the Fellowship should use its power to discourage the Ringists from war, while Makara of Newvannia, a well-known arhat, suggested that the Ringists’ raid might be overlooked as an unfortunate accident. And one of the Vesper exemplars, Onan Nayati, who was either a coward or a very wise man, told everyone that they would be mad to make war upon the Ringists for they would be as a hawk attacking an eagle. This led to a measuring of their respective strengths. The Fellowship comprised one thousand and ninety-one worlds opposed to Ringism – and four more if the alien worlds of Darghin, Fravashing, Elidin, and Scutarix could be counted, which of course they couldn’t because they would never send ships to fight in a human war. Perhaps four hundred worlds had decided to remain neutral, and an equal number warred with themselves as to whom they would support. That left some twelve hundred and two worlds as fervently Ringist, many of them the richest and most powerful of the Civilized Worlds. Onan Nayati estimated that they could gather a fleet of at least thirty-five thousand deep-ships and black ships. And as for the lightships of Neverness, the shining swords of the night, Cristobel said that Lord Salmalin would command four hundred and fifty-one. The odds, then, had fallen against the Fellowship, especially considering that in battle one lightship would be worth at least twenty black ships. The pilots and princes of the Fellowship might very well have decided to wait upon war, but then something happened that broadened their field of vision and reminded them that stars burned with a terrible purpose far beyond their own.

On the 83rd day of false winter a single lightship fell out to join the others in orbit above Sheydveg. This was the Infinite Rose, piloted by Arrio Verjin, a master pilot of the Old Order. That is, he had been of the Order before returning to Neverness from a journey lasting several years. But when he had seen how Ringism had ruined his beloved Order and made virtual slaves out of pilots whom he had respected all his life, he had fled across the stars to the gathering at Sheydveg. And he brought with him the most astonishing news: he had witnessed with his own eyes a battle fought among the gods. In the spaces towards the core – beyond the Morbio Inferiore where the stars blaze as densely as exploding fireworks – the god known as Pure Mind had been slain. The moon-sized lobes of his great brain had been pulverized into a glowing dust. Arrio told of the destruction of a whole region of stars, impossibly intense lights erupting out of blackness, the detonation of the zero-point energies of the spacetime continuum itself. The radiations from this apocalypse were vaster than that of a hundred supernovas. Only the gods, he said, could wield such technologies. He did not know why one god would wish to slay another. When Danlo told him of the Solid State Entity and the war among the gods, Arrio said, ‘Perhaps it was the Silicon God, then, who did this terrible thing. Or perhaps one of his allies, Chimene or the Degula Trinity. How will we ever know? But the effects of what has happened will run deep.’

And the first and most terrible effect, Arrio said, was that these explosions had created huge distortions beneath spacetime, a kind of deadly bubbling known as a Danladi-set expansion. For Arrio Verjin it had been like a tidal wave sweeping towards his fragile ship. He had barely escaped, but the Danladi wave was still spreading through the manifold like a wall of white water, expanding outwards towards the stars of the Sagittarius Arm. Soon it would reach Neverness and other worlds of the Fallaways, and then the manifold there might prove as treacherous as the spaces of the Vild.

‘We must prepare ourselves for tremendous distortions,’ Arrio told the assembled fleet. ‘The Danladi wave will perturb the entire manifold until it dies out towards the edge stars.’

The second effect of Pure Mind’s destruction was to quicken the Fellowship’s move towards war. It reminded even the lightship pilots that their power was nothing compared to the fire and lightning of the gods, who could destroy whole constellations of stars as easily as the Architects of the Old Church could blow up a single sun. If the gods were provoked, their wrath might fall upon any of the Civilized Worlds: Summerworld or Clarity or Lechoix or Larondissement. Or Neverness. As Cristobel pointed out, the gods might regard Hanuman li Tosh’s building of his Universal Computer as a bid for godhood. The eschatologists have a word for this kind of break-out from human being into something much vaster: hakariad. Throughout the galaxy over the past ten thousand years, there had been many hakariads, and perhaps many wars fought to stop such transcendent events. The gods, it is said, are jealous and do not like company. If the Silicon God saw Hanuman’s acts as a hakariad, then he might destroy the Star of Neverness – and a hundred others nearby. Therefore, Cristobel said, the Fellowship must destroy Hanuman’s Universal Computer before the gods did. This must be the first of their purposes, and to accomplish it, they must fall against Neverness in full war.

Almost all the warriors of the worlds represented in the Sonderval’s fleet saw the logic of Cristobel’s argument. It took the Fellowship, casting votes world by world, only two days to make a formal declaration of war. And so on the 85th of false winter in the year 2959 since the founding of Neverness, the War of the Gods, as it would be called, began.

That night, as Danlo prepared the Snowy Owl for his journey to Neverness, the Sonderval summoned him to a meeting. While their ships orbited Sheydveg, they manoeuvred these sleek diamond needles so that they touched side to side. And then Danlo broke the seal of his ship and entered the Cardinal Virtue, the first pilot that the privacy-loving Lord Pilot had honoured in this way. Danlo floated in the darkness, and he looked about the rather large interior of the Sonderval’s lightship, taking note of the design of the neurologics which surrounded both the Sonderval and himself like a soft, purple cocoon. The Sonderval, stern and serious in his formal black robe, waited in his ship’s pit. He greeted Danlo warmly. ‘Welcome, Pilot,’ he said, ‘I’m glad you could join me.’

‘Thank you for asking me here tonight.’

‘It is I who should thank you,’ the Sonderval said. He began to play with a large diamond brooch pinned to his black silk robe just over his heart. ‘If not for your foresight, we might have lost Cristobel and the others. And I might have been Lord Pilot over a much smaller fleet.’

Here Danlo smiled and said, ‘But no one could have known how the Fellowship would decide. There was always a chance … that Cristobel would have been chosen Lord Pilot, and not you.’

‘Chance favours the bold – as you’ve proved, Danlo wi Soli Ringess.’

Danlo bowed his head quickly, then studied the Sonderval’s wide smile and the wide, white, perfect teeth. He said, ‘Your fleet … is small enough as it is.’

‘We’ve slightly fewer deep-ships and black ships than the Ringists,’ the Sonderval said. ‘But I believe that we’ll have a more coherent command of them.’

‘And the lightships?’

‘True, they’ve half again as many as we,’ the Sonderval said. ‘But don’t forget that the best pilots went with us to the Vild. The best and the boldest, Pilot.’

‘You seem so confident,’ Danlo said.

‘Well, I was born for war – I think it’s my fate.’

‘But in war … there are so many terrible chances.’

‘This is also true, which is why I would still stop this war if I could.’

‘There … must be a way to stop it,’ Danlo said.

‘Unfortunately,’ the Sonderval said, ‘it’s easier to forestall a war than to stop one once it’s begun. Your mission won’t be easy.’

‘No.’

‘It might be difficult for you even to reach Neverness.’

Danlo nodded his head that this was so, then said, ‘But I will return there. I … will speak with Hanuman once again. My fate, Lord Pilot. Only I must ask you for time. Hanuman burns like a thallow flying too close to the sun, and it will take time to cool his soul.’

‘I can’t promise that. We’ll fall against Neverness as soon as possible.’

‘How … soon?’

‘I’m not sure,’ the Sonderval said. ‘We won’t be able to approach Neverness directly, and the ships will require some time before they’re able to perform the manoeuvres I’ll require of them. But soon enough, Pilot. You must make your journey as quickly as you can.’

‘I see.’

For a long time the Sonderval regarded Danlo with his hard, calm eyes. Then he said, ‘I don’t envy you your mission, you know. I wouldn’t like to be there when you tell Hanuman that he must dismantle his Universal Computer.’

At this Danlo smiled gravely but said nothing.

‘Perhaps,’ the Sonderval said, ‘it would be best if Lord Bede presented the Fellowship’s demands.’

‘If you’d like. Lord Pilot.’

‘And if by some miracle you’re successful and Hanuman sees the light of reason, you must bring me word as soon as you can.’

‘But once the fleet has left Sheydveg, how will I find you?’

‘That’s a problem isn’t it?’ Again the Sonderval fingered the brooch that adorned his robe, then sighed. ‘I could give you the fixed-points of the stars along the pathway I’ve chosen towards Neverness.’

Danlo waited silently through the count of ten heartbeats for the Sonderval to say more.

‘I could do that, Pilot, but it might not prove wise. The chances of war might cause us to choose different pathways. Then, too …’

‘Yes?’

‘Well, the chances of your reasoning with Hanuman aren’t very great. Why should I burden you with information you’ll probably never need?’

‘I … see.’

‘Vital information,’ the Sonderval said. ‘If Lord Salmalin knew our pathway, he could lie in wait for our fleet and destroy it.’

Danlo watched the Sonderval squeezing the diamond brooch between his long fingers; he watched and waited, saying nothing.

‘Nevertheless, I’ve decided to give you this information – it might possibly keep us from a battle for which there’s no need. And I must give you something else as well.’

So saying, the Sonderval unpinned the brooch with infinite care and closed it safely before giving it to Danlo. For the count of twenty heartbeats, Danlo stared at this piece of jewellery waiting like a scorpion in his open hand.

‘Thank you, Lord Pilot,’ Danlo said politely. But his voice was full of irony and amusement – and with dread.

‘If your mission fails and you’re imprisoned, you mustn’t let the Akashics read your mind. And you mustn’t let the Ringists torture you.’

‘Do you truly think that Hanuman would—’

‘Some chances would be foolish to take,’ the Sonderval said. ‘The brooch’s pin is tipped with matrikax. If pushed into a vein, it kills instantly.’

‘I see.’

‘Your vow of ahimsa doesn’t prevent you from taking your own life, does it?’

Never killing or harming another, not even in one’s own thoughts, Danlo remembered. And then he said, ‘Some would say that it does.’

‘And what do you say, then?’

‘I … will never tell anyone the stars along your pathway.’

‘Very well,’ the Sonderval said.

He moved closer to Danlo and bent his long neck down as might a swan. For a few moments, he whispered in Danlo’s ear. Then he backed away as if he couldn’t bear such closeness with another human being.

‘Before you leave, I’ll meet with Lord Bede by imago,’ the Sonderval said. ‘But I won’t tell him what I’ve just told you.’

‘But is he not a lord of the New Order?’

‘He is not a pilot. There are some things only pilots should know.’

Danlo bowed, then fixed his burning eyes on the Sonderval. For a time, in the deep silence of space, the two men held each other’s gaze and looked into each other’s heart. And then finally the Sonderval had to turn away.

‘I was both wrong and right about you,’ the Sonderval said. ‘Wrong, because you’ll serve us very well as an ambassador. But you would have made a great warrior, too. As I know you secretly are. The fire, Pilot, the light. Hanuman would do well to fear you.’

‘But it is I … who will be at his mercy.’

‘Perhaps, perhaps.’

For a moment, the Sonderval looked at Danlo strangely before bowing to him. Perhaps some presentiment of doom came flooding into him like an ocean wave then, for his eyes misted and his perfectly shaped chin trembled slightly. Considering that he was the Sonderval, the most perfect and aloof of all men, this was one of the most remarkable things Danlo had ever seen.

‘I wish you well, Lord Pilot.’

‘And I wish you well. I hope I shall see you again.’

Danlo smiled and said, ‘When we have stopped the war – when the war is over.’

‘When the war is over,’ the Sonderval repeated. And then he said, ‘Fall far and fall well, Pilot.’

With a final bow, Danlo returned to his ship. It took only moments for the two pilots to disengage the Cardinal Virtue and the Snowy Owl. These beautiful lightships orbited above Sheydveg like a pair of silver thallows while Lord Demothi Bede spoke with the Sonderval and received his final instructions. And then the Snowy Owl rocketed away from the thirty thousand other ships towards Sheydveg’s orange-red sun. Danlo opened a window into the manifold, and so he began the last part of his journey to return home and to bring an end to war.