Requiem Of Homo Sapiens - The Wild Part 3

Two is a symbol of becoming as opposed to pure being; in this sense, two is life, and therefore it is death, for all life finds its conclusion in death, even as it feeds off the death of other things in order to stay alive. Although Danlo, for himself, feared dying less than did other men, he thought that he had seen enough of death to know it for what it truly is. Once, when he was nearly fourteen years old, he had buried all the eighty-eight people of the Devaki tribe which had adopted and raised him from a babe. He knew death too well, and he sensed that the warrior-poet who followed him might yet encompa.s.s the deaths of those who were beloved by him. Because he saw Malaclypse Redring as a harbinger of death (and because he thought he knew all of death that there was to know) he decided to escape this ghostly lights.h.i.+p that pursued him, much as a snowy owl might hunt a hare bounding over the snow. And so he emptied his mind of what lay behind him, and turned his inner eye to the deepest part of the manifold. There he would face the deepest part of the universe, the terrors and the joys.

At first, however, there was only joy. There was the cold beauty of the number storm, the many-faceted mathematical symbols that fell through his mind like frozen drops of light. There was the slowing of time and the consequent quickening of all his thoughts. And there was something else. Something other. It is something of a mystery that, although all pilots enter the manifold the same way and agree upon its essential nature, each man and woman will perceive it uniquely. For Danlo, as for no other pilot with whom he had ever spoken, the manifold s.h.i.+mmered with colours. Of course, in the absence of all light and s.p.a.cetime, he knew that there could be no colour but somehow, there were colours. He fell from star to star, beneath the stars of reals.p.a.ce, and entered a Kirrilian neighbourhood which glowed a deep cobalt blue, a hidden and secret blue the like of which he had never seen before. Soon he pa.s.sed on to a common invariant s.p.a.ce all pearl grey and touched with swirls of absinthe and rose. For a moment, he supposed that he might be lucky, that the rest of his journey toward the Ent.i.ty might prove no more difficult than the straightforward mapping through such s.p.a.ces. But in the Vild, piloting a lights.h.i.+p never remains easy or simple. Soon, in less than a moment, he entered a disorienting shear s.p.a.ce, the kind of topological nightmare that the pilots sometimes call a Danladi inversion. Now the veils of the manifold were a bright azure, fading almost instantly to a pale turquoise, and then brightening again to an emerald green. The s.p.a.ce all around him was like a strangely viewed painting in which figure and ground kept s.h.i.+fting into focus, forward and back, light and dark, inside and out. It was beautiful, in a way, but dangerous too, and so he was glad when this particular s.p.a.ce began to break apart and branch out into a more or less normal decision tree. All pilots would wish that the manifold held nothing more complicated than such trees, where all decisions take on the simplest form: maximize/minimize, left/right, inside/outside, yes/no. So simple was this tree that Danlo had a moment to build up a proof array of the Za.s.senhaus b.u.t.terfly Lemma of the Jordan-Holder Theorem. (That is to say, that any two composition series of a group G are isomorphic.) He took the time to reconsider this proof of ancient algebra because he had a notion of how it might be used in an escape mapping if he should ever be so unlucky as to enter an infinite tree.

It is one of life's ironies that most of what we fear never comes to pa.s.s, while many dangers even killing dangers will steal upon us by surprise. During all his time as a pilot, Danlo was to face no infinite trees. But then, just as he was leisurely defining the h.o.m.omorphism, phi, the branch of the tree holding up his lights.h.i.+p suddenly snapped this is how it seemed and he was hurled into a rare and quite deadly torison s.p.a.ce, of a kind that Lord Ricardo Lavi had once discovered on one of the first journeys toward the Vild. Suddenly, he was again very aware of colours. There were the quick violets of s.p.a.ce suddenly folding, and the r-dimensional Betti numbers appearing as ruby, auburn, and chrome red. There were flashes of scarlet, as if all the other colours might momentarily catch on fire and fall past the threshold of finite folding into an infinite and blazing crimson. s.p.a.ce itself was twisting like a snowworm in a strong man's hands, writhing and popping and twisting until it suddenly burst in an opening of violet into violet and began folding in upon itself.

Now, for Danlo, there was true peril, danger inside of danger. Now for a moment that might last no longer than half a beat of his heart he floated in the pit of his s.h.i.+p, sweating and breathing deeply, and thought as quickly as it is possible for a man to think. He had little fear of death, but even so he dreaded being trapped alive inside a collapsing torison s.p.a.ce. His dread was a red-purple colour, the colour of a blood tick squeezed between finger and thumb. He took no notice of this colour, however, nor did he give care or thought to himself. All his awareness his racing mathematical mind and every strand of his will to live spread out over the s.p.a.ce before him. There were dark tunnels that kleined back and through themselves, impossibly complex, impossible to map through. There was the very fabric of the manifold itself, lavender like a fabulist's robes, infolding upon itself through shades of amethyst, magenta, and deep purple, the one and true purple that might well be the quintessential colour that underlay all others. Everywhere, the manifold was falling in on itself like dark violet flowers blossoming backward in time, folding up petal inside petal, always infolding toward that lightless singularity where the number of folds falls off to infinity. He might never have mapped free from such a s.p.a.ce, but then he chanced to remember a certain colour. In truth, he willed himself to summon up a perfect blue-black hue that suffused his mind the way that the night fills the late evening sky. His will to live was strong, and his memory of colours, images, words, whispers and love was even stronger. His memory for such things was almost perfect, and so it happened that he willed himself to behold a deep, deep blue inside blue, the colour of his mother's eyes.

His mother had been one of the finest scryers there had ever been, able to see the infinitely complex web of connections between nowness and time to come. The greatest scryers will always find their way into the future; in the end, they choose which future and fate will be. Although Danlo was no scryer, not yet, he remembered how perfectly the colour of his mother's eyes matched his own. 'You have your mother's eyes,' his grandfather, Leopold Soli had once told him. Long ago, before he was born, his mother had blinded herself as the scryers do so that she might perceive the future more clearly. Now, in the pit of his s.h.i.+p, even as he plunged downward toward the torison s.p.a.ce's hideous singularity, Danlo closed his eyes tightly and tried to behold their blueness from within. He remembered, then, an important theorem of elementary topology. He saw it instantly as a perfect jewel, like a lightstone, a deep, dark, liquid blue holding a secret light. It was the first conservation theorem, which proved that for every simplicial mapping, the image of the boundary is equal to the boundary of the image. Almost instantly, he seized upon this theorem as a starving man might grasp a gobbet of meat. He knew that he could apply it toward mapping out of the torison s.p.a.ce. And so he did. Before the lens of his mind's eye, he summoned up arrays of ideoplasts and made his proof. He was perhaps the first pilot in the history of the Order to prove that a collapsing torison s.p.a.ce might remain open.

(Even if that opening quickly fell off toward an infinitesimal.) He made a mapping, and he fell through, and suddenly there was the light of a star. The Snowy Owl fell out into reals.p.a.ce, into realtime, into the glorious golden light of a star that he named Shona Oyu, or, the Bright Eye. This was to be the first of the miraculous escapes from the manifold that he would make on his journey toward the Solid State Ent.i.ty.

In this way, falling from star to star, falling in and out of the manifold beneath the stars, he continued on his journey. Because he wished to be the first of the ten pilots to reach the Ent.i.ty (and because he hoped to elude the warrior-poet who might still be following him), he fell across the stars as quickly as a pilot may fall. As the Sonderval had said in Mer Tadeo's garden, all quests are really the same. His quest to seek out his father and find the lost planet Tannahill was connected to the great quest twenty- five years past to find that infinite store of knowledge known as the Elder Eddas. And that quest was merely a continuation of all quests throughout time and history.

Always, man had felt the urge to discover the true image of humanity, the shape and substance of what man might someday become. This is the secret of life, of human life, the true secret that men and women have sought as far back as the howling moonlit savannahs of Afarique on Old Earth. In the pilots of the Order, this urge to know the unknowable most often finds itself in a terrible restlessness, an instinct and will to fall through s.p.a.ce, to move ever outward across the universe, always seeking.

Some pilots seek black holes, or ringworlds built by ancient aliens, or strange, new stars. Some pilots still look for the hypothesized dark matter of the universe, the mysterious matter that no one has ever found. Some pilots seek G.o.d. But all pilots, if they are worthy of their pilots' rings, seek movement for the sake of movement itself. The dance of lights.h.i.+p from star to star, from the translucent windows into the manifold that give out onto the stars this urge to fall ever outward toward the farthest galaxies is sometime called the westering. Sometimes, too, the pilots refer to this manner of journey as fenestering, for to fall quickly from star to star, one must align the stellar windows artfully and with great precision. Although Danlo was not yet a master of this art of interfenestration, the westering urge was strong in him.

Westering/fenestering, fenestering/westering to a young pilot such as Danlo, the two words were the same, and so he made successive mappings through hundreds of crystal-like windows. And with every window he pa.s.sed through there was a moment of stillness and a clarity, as of starlight illuminating a perfect diamond pane. And yet there was always the antic.i.p.ation of other windows yet to come, always newness, always strangeness, always the opening outward onto the clear light of universe.

Falling through a window into reals.p.a.ce was sometimes like falling into an entirely different universe, for there was always a s.h.i.+ft in the perception of the galaxy, and thus splendid vistas of stars never seen before. Some pilots believe that if they could fenester through an infinite number of windows, then their westering flight would eventually bring them to a place where all time and s.p.a.ce folds inward upon itself.

They call this singularity h.e.l.l for there the manifold would become infinitely dense and impenetrable. Danlo thought of it simply as the Blessed Realm, the centre of the universe itself. Once, he had hoped to reach such a place. He remembered that this had been his reason for becoming a pilot, his pa.s.sion, his love, his fate. But now he had abandoned this dream, just as he had left behind many dreams of his childhood.

Now there were many windows, only they did not lead into the centre of all things but rather into the heart of a G.o.ddess. One by one, he pa.s.sed through thousands of windows. They sparkled like snowflakes in an endless field, and fenestering through them was like racing on a sled over sheets of new snow.

And so he fell across the galaxy. If his s.h.i.+p had been able to move at lightspeed through normal s.p.a.ce, his journey would have required some three thousand years.

This, he thought, was a very long time. Three thousand years ago, the Order had yet to make its move from Arcite to Neverness, and the woman who would one day transform herself into the Solid State Ent.i.ty had yet to be born. Three thousand years before, somewhere in the regions that he pa.s.sed through, it was said that an insane G.o.d had killed itself in the spectacular manner of throwing itself into a star, thereby blowing it up in an incandescent funeral pyre and creating the first of the Vild's supernovae. In a galaxy as apocalyptic as the Milky Way, three thousand years was almost forever, and yet, to a pilot locked inside the pit of a lights.h.i.+p, there were other eternities of time more immediate and more oppressive. Danlo, who was a creature of wind and sun, sometimes hated the darkness in which he lay. When he faced away from the s.h.i.+p-computer and the brilliant number storm, he hated the damp, acid smell of the neurologics surrounding him, the acrid stench of his unwashed body, and the carbon-dioxide closeness of his own breath. When he faced the manifold, was all colour, fire, and light. But too much pleasure will be felt as pain, and after many days of journeying, he came to dread even these exaltations of the mind. Above all things, he longed for clean air and movement beneath the open sky. Although he fell across the stars as quickly as most pilots have ever fallen, his westering rush took much intime, the inner, subjective time of his blood, belly and brain. Sometimes, during rare moments of acceptance and affirmation, he loved being a pilot as much as any man ever has, yet he hated it, too, and he longed for a quicker way of journeying. Often, over the millions of seconds of his quest, he thought about the Great Theorem the Continuum Hypothesis which states that there exists a pair of simply connected point-sources in the neighbourhood of any two stars. His father had been the first to prove this theorem, the first pilot to fall across half the galaxy from Perdido Luz to the Star of Neverness in a single fall. Danlo knew, as all pilots now knew, that it was possible to fall between any two stars almost instantly. (Perhaps, Danlo thought, it would even be possible to fall into the very centre of the Blessed Realm, if such a heaven truly existed.) It was possible to fall anywhere in the universe, yes, but it was not always possible to find such a mapping. In truth, for most pilots, it was hideously difficult. A few pilots, such as the Sonderval and Vrenda Chu, were sometimes genius enough to discover such point-to-point mappings and use the Great Theorem as it should be used. But even they must usually journey as Danlo did now, scurfing the windows of the manifold window by window, star by star, day by endless day. The further toward the Ent.i.ty that Danlo fell sometimes down pathways as complex as a nest of writhing snakes the harder he tried to make sense of the Great Theorem and apply it toward finding an instantaneous mapping. He wished to fall out around a famous, red star inside the Ent.i.ty. He wished to make planetfall, to climb out of his s.h.i.+p and rest on the sands of a wide, sunny beach. He wished these things for the sake of his soul, with all the force of his will. And yet, there was another reason that he played with the logic and intricacies of the Great Theorem. A very practical reason.

At need, Danlo could be the most practical of men, and so, when he pa.s.sed by a neutron star very near the s.p.a.ces of the Ent.i.ty and detected once again the ghost image of Sivan wi Mawi Sarkissian's s.h.i.+p, he couldn't help dreaming of falling away instantly, falling far and finally away from the warrior-poet who pursued him. This, however, was still a dream. He could not see the simple secret of applying the Great Theorem. And so he could not lose the two men inside the lights.h.i.+p called the Red Dragon, any more than he could have left behind his shadow by fleeing away from the rising sun.

During those times when the manifold flattened out and grew becalmed like a tropical sea, two activities saved him from feeling trapped in the pit of his s.h.i.+p. From his father, he had inherited an old, leather-bound book of poems. It was one of his few treasures, and he kept it in a wooden chest that he had been given as a novice. When he faced away from the manifold and floated in darkness, he liked to read these ancient poems, to let their rhythms and sounds ring in his memory like the music of golden bells. Sometimes he would recite other poems and songs not in his book; sometimes he would compose his own songs and set them to music. For Danlo, music was as wine to other men, and he always took great joy in singing the chants of his childhood, or listening in his mind to the Taima's Hymns to the Night, or above all, in playing his shakuhachi. This bamboo flute was perhaps the greatest of the gifts anyone had given him, and he loved to lift it out of the chest and play until his lips ached and his lungs burned with fire. The songs he made were sometimes sad, but just as often they resonated with sheer joy. He played to the marvel and the mystery of the universe. And always he played with a love of life that connected him to the past, to the present, and to the golden, s.h.i.+mmering future.

On the ninety-ninth day of his journey, as his s.h.i.+p's clock measured time, he came at last to the threshold of the Solid State Ent.i.ty. The Snowy Owl fell out into reals.p.a.ce around a large white star. Danlo reached out with his great telescopes and drank in a sight that few pilots had ever seen. Before him, hanging in the blackness of s.p.a.ce, a cloud of a hundred thousand stars burned dimly through veils of glowing hydrogen gas. There was much interstellar dust, too much for him to penetrate this dark, forbidding nebula by sight alone. Soon, perhaps in moments, he would have to enter the nebula itself to see it as it was. For millennia, of course, pilots have entered the galaxy's many nebulae, but this cl.u.s.ter of stars was different from any other, for it contained the body and brain of a G.o.ddess.In a way, the entire nebula was the Ent.i.ty's brain, or rather, Her brain was spread out over this vast region of stars. It troubled Danlo to conceive of such a vast intelli- gence, woven into great clumps of matter that weren't really organic brains at all, but rather more like computers. Some of the Order's professionals the eschatologists, for example still consider the Ent.i.ty to be nothing more than a huge computer made up of component units the size of moons. Millions of perfect, s.h.i.+ning, spherical moon- brains that pulsed with information and thoughts impossible for a mere man to think.

No one knew how many of these moon-brains there were. As many as a thousand spheres spun in their orbits around some of the larger stars. The moon-brains fed on photons and absorbed gamma and X-rays and radiation the very exhalation and breath of the stars. The Ent.i.ty, if she possessed such sentiments, must have regarded every part of the nebula as an extension of Her G.o.dly body. At the least, She must have claimed all the nebula's matter the millions of planets, asteroids, dust particles, clouds of gas, and stars as food to live on, nourishment to sustain Her tremendous energies and to enable Her to grow. During the last three millennia, it was said, this G.o.ddess had grown from a simple human being into an Ent.i.ty that nearly filled a nebula one hundred light-years in diameter. No one knew if the Ent.i.ty was still growing, but it was almost certain that Her use of energy was growing exponentially.

Much of this energy, it was thought, She applied to the manipulation of matter and s.p.a.cetime, the reaching out of Her G.o.dly hand to cark Her designs upon the universe.

Much energy was needed simply so that She could organize Her mind and communi- cate with Herself. The moon-brains were grouped around the nebula's stars, and these stars were sometimes separated by many light-years of s.p.a.ce. Any signal, such as a radio or a light wave propagated through reals.p.a.ce, would have taken years to fall from brain-lobe to brain-lobe. To connect the millions of lobes would mean millions of years of glacial, lightspeed signal exchange; for the Ent.i.ty to complete a single thought might have required a billion years. And so the Ent.i.ty employed no such signals to integrate Her mind. The mechanics hypothesize that She generates tachyons, these ghostly, theoretical panicles whose slowest velocity approaches the speed of light. This, the mechanics say, must be the reason why She seeks such great energies. Impossible energies. The trillions of miles of black s.p.a.ce between the Ent.i.ty's many stars must have burned with streams of tachyons, information streams infinitely faster than light, impossible to detect, but almost possible to imagine: when Danlo closed his eyes, he could almost see all s.p.a.cetime lit up with numinous ruby rays, s.h.i.+mmering with a great, golden consciousness. Somewhere before him, in this dark, strange nebula that he hesitated to enter, there must be interconnecting beams of tachyons carrying the codes of mysterious information, linking up the moon-brains almost instantaneously, weaving through empty s.p.a.ce an unseen but vast and glorious web of pure intelligence.

At last, when Danlo could stand it no longer, he made a mapping, and began falling among the stars of the Ent.i.ty. Almost immediately upon entering these forbidden s.p.a.ces after he had pa.s.sed a great b.l.o.o.d.y sun twice as large as Scutarix he sensed that in some deep way, the Ent.i.ty was aware of him. Perhaps She wrought trillions of telescopes out of carbon and common matter and connected these to each of her moon-brains. Perhaps she continually swept the drears of s.p.a.ce for anything that moved, much as a peshwi bird watches the forests near Neverness for furflies. Almost certainly, She, too, could read the perturbations that a lights.h.i.+p makes upon the manifold. Danlo thought of this as he segued in and out of complex decision trees, star after star, scudding through s.p.a.ces fouled with too many zero-points, which were like drops of blacking oil carelessly spilled into a gla.s.s of wine. As he fell deeper into the Ent.i.ty he saw evidence of Her control of s.p.a.cetime and matter everywhere.He saw, too, signs of war. At least, the pulverized planets and ionized dust that he fell through seemed as if it could have been the flotsam and debris of some G.o.dly war.

Perhaps the Ent.i.ty was at war with Herself. Perhaps She was destroying Herself, tearing Herself apart, planet by planet, atom by atom, always a.s.sembling and rea.s.sembling these elements into something new. With his s.h.i.+p's radio telescopes and scanning computers, Danlo searched through many solar systems. He searched for the familiar matter of the natural world: omnipresent hydrogen, poisonous oxygen, friendly carbon. Floating in the blackness around the stars were other elements, too, giddy helium, quick and treacherous mercury, n.o.ble gold. All these elements and others he catalogued, as well as the compounds of silicates and salts and ice made from them. He noticed immediately that there were too many transuranic elements, from plutonium and fermium on up through the actinide series into the wildly unstable atoms that none of the Order's physicists had ever managed to synthesize.

And there was something else. Some other kind of matter. Near the coronas of certain stars usually medium-sized singlets...o...b..ted by five or more gas giant planets there were s.h.i.+mmering curtains of matter atomically no denser than platinum or gold.

Danlo could not tell if this matter was solid or liquid. (Or perhaps even some kind of rare plasma gas.) At times, as seen from across ten million miles of s.p.a.ce, it took on the flowing brilliance of quicksilver and all the colours of gold. Some of this matter was as light as lithium; indeed, it astonished Danlo to discover various elements whose atomic weights seemed to be less than that of hydrogen. This, he knew, was impossible. That is, it was impossible for any atoms that the physicists had ever hypothesized to betray such properties. Danlo immediately sensed that the Ent.i.ty was creating new types of matter that had never before existed in the universe. Neither his telescopes nor his computers nor all his physical theories could understand such G.o.dly stuff. He guessed that the Ent.i.ty must have discovered the secret of completely decomposing matter and rebuilding it from the most fundamental units, from the infons and strings that some mechanics say all protons and neutrons are ultimately made of. Perhaps She was trying to create a better material for the neurologics of Her brains, and thus, a better substrate for pure mind. It amused Danlo to think that She might merely be planning for the future. The very far future. All protons will eventually decay into positrons and pions, and thus it is said that the entire universe will evaporate away into light in only some ten thousand trillion trillion trillion more years. Perhaps the Ent.i.ty had crafted a finer kind of matter more stable than protons, much as clary and other plastics will withstand the rot of a dark forest much longer than mere wood. If G.o.ds or G.o.ddesses possessed the same will to live as did human beings, then surely they would create for themselves golden, immortal bodies that would never decay or die.

Danlo wondered if She might use this G.o.dstuff to create more highly organized types of matter: complex molecules, cells, life itself. He did not think so. Because Danlo did not know what this matter could be (and because no mechanic of the Order had ever had the pleasure of a.n.a.lysing such bizarre stuff), he decided to collect some to show to his friends.

It should have been a simple thing, this collection of artificial matter. It was simple to send out robots from his s.h.i.+p to scoop up litres of G.o.dstuff, but it was also quite dangerous. For first there would come the difficult and dangerous manoeuvring of his s.h.i.+p close to a nearby white star. He named this star Kalinda's Glory. He would have to make difficult mappings to point-exits almost within the white-blue corona of Kalinda's Glory. He would have to enter the manifold in the s.p.a.ces very near a large star. And then he must fall out into temperatures almost hot enough to melt the diamond hull of his s.h.i.+p. And still he must then rocket through reals.p.a.ce until he came upon a pocket of artificial matter. Only then could he stow the G.o.dstuff safely within the hold of his s.h.i.+p. Only then could he fall back into the cool and timeless flow of the manifold and continue on his journey.

From the instant that he opened a window to the manifold in order to complete this minor mission, he knew something was wrong. Instantly, the Snowy Owl was sucked into a grey-black chaos s.p.a.ce wholly unfamiliar to him. This s.p.a.ce should not have been where it was. Perhaps it should not have existed at all. He should have opened a window that led to another window directly to a third window giving out into the blazing blue corona of Kalinda's Glory. Instead, his s.h.i.+p plunged into a whirlpool of what almost looked like a Lavi s.p.a.ce, only darker, blacker, and too dense with zero- points, like sediments in an old wine. Almost immediately, his mappings began to waver like a mirage over a frozen sea, and then unbelievably he lost the correspondences altogether. He lost his mapping. This was one of the most dangerous of misfortunes that might befall a pilot. He began tunnelling through a mapless s.p.a.ce seemingly without beginning or end. For a while, as he sweated and prayed and told himself lies, he hoped that this might prove no more complex than a normal Moebius s.p.a.ce. But the further he fell from any point-exit near Kalinda's Glory, the nearer he came to despair. For almost certainly he had never escaped from such a chaos.

Perhaps no pilot had, he was lost in chaos. No pilot, as far as he knew, had ever faced pure chaos before; Danlo had always been taught that a fundamental mathematical order underlay all the seeming bifurcations and turbulence of the manifold. Now he was not so sure. Now, all about him almost crus.h.i.+ng his s.h.i.+p, the chaos s.p.a.ce began folding and squeezing him toward a zero-point. It was almost like being caught on a Koch snowflake, the crystal points within points, fractalling down to zero. For a while, even as he lost himself (and his s.h.i.+p) in a cloud of billions of such snowflakes, he marvelled at the infinite self-embedding of complexity. He might easily have lost himself in these infinities altogether if his will to escape hadn't been so strong.

Although it might prove hopeless, he tried to model the chaos and thus make a map through this impossible part of the manifold.

For his first model, he tried a simple generation of the Mandelbrot set, the iteration in the complex plane of the mapping z into z2 + c, where c is a complex number.

When this proved futile, he generated other sets, Lavi sets and Julia sets and even Soli sets of quaternion-fields on a mutated thicks.p.a.ce. All to no avail. After a while, as his s.h.i.+p spun endlessly and fell through an almost impenetrable iron grey, he abandoned such mathematics and fell back upon the metaphors and words for chaos that he had learned as a child. He was certain that he would soon die, and so why not take a moment's comfort where he could? He emptied his mind, then, of ideoplasts and other mathematical symbols. He remembered a word for coldness, eesha-kaleth, the coldness before snow. Now that he had finished sweating, as he waited for the chaos storm to intensify and kill him, his whole body felt cold and strange. In the pit of his s.h.i.+p, he lay naked, s.h.i.+vering, and he remembered the moratetha, the death clouds of his childhood that would steal across the sea and swallow up entire islands in an ice- fog of whiteness where there was no up or down, inside or out, yesterday or tomorrow. The chaos surrounding him was something like such a morateth. But even more, in its fierce turbulence, in its whorls, eddies, and vortices of fractured s.p.a.ces breaking at his s.h.i.+p, it was like a sarsara. the Serpent's Breath: the death wind that had killed so many of his people. It would be an easy thing, he knew, to let the chaos storm overcome him, even as the overpressures of a sarsara might fall upon a solitary hunter and drive him down into the ice. Then he could finally join his tribe in death.

But the oldest teaching of his people was that a man should die at the right time, and something inside him whispered that he mustn't die, not yet. As he lay in the icy darkness of his s.h.i.+p, as he touched the lightning bolt scar on his forehead, all the while s.h.i.+vering and remembering, something was calling him to life. It was a long, dark, terrible sound, perhaps the very sound and fury of chaos itself. And then, in the centre of the chaos, there was a blackness as bright as the pupil of his eye. There were secret colours, bands of brilliant orange encircling the blackness, and then white, a pure snowy whiteness. All the colours of chaos were inside him, and out, and so again he faced his s.h.i.+p's computer and turned his inner eye toward the manifold.

Before him, beneath the stars of the Solid State Ent.i.ty, within the dark, twisting tunnels of a phase s.p.a.ce, there was an attractor. It was a strange attractor, he decided: stable, non-periodic, low-dimensional. Its loops and spirals would weave infinitely deep, infinitely many fractal pathways inside a finite s.p.a.ce. No path would ever cross or touch any other. Strange attractors, it was hypothesized, were the black holes of the manifold. Nothing that approached one too closely could escape its infinities. For a pilot to enter a strange attractor would mean spiralling down endless pathways into blackness and neverness. Any sane pilot would have fled such an attractor. Danlo considered such a course, but where would he flee to and into what dread s.p.a.ce might he flee? Strangely, he felt the attractor pulling him, almost calling him, in the way that the future called all life into its glorious destiny. He couldn't deny this call. And so there came a moment when he faced the attractor and piloted his s.h.i.+p into the last place in the universe he would ever have thought to go. With this wordless affirmation made in the dark of his s.h.i.+p, a wild-ness came over him. His body began to warm as if he had somehow drunk the light of the sun. He felt his heart beating strong and fast. His blood surged quickly inside him, thousands upon thousands of unseen turbulent streams, flowing, bifurcating, surging, but always returning to the chambers of his heart. If chaos was anywhere, he thought, it was inside himself. And order was there, too. Chaos/order; order/chaos for the first time in his life, he began to see the deep connection between these seemingly opposite forces. Chaos, he thought, was not the enemy of order, but rather the cataclysm that gave it birth. A supernova was a most violent, chaotic event, but out of this explosion into light were born carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, and all the other elements of life. There was always a place where order might emerge from chaos. Danlo looked for this place within himself; and then he looked within the attractor which coiled before him like an infinite snake swallowing its tail and drew him ever onward. Suddenly he knew a thing. To find the hidden order inside, he must first become himself pure chaos. This was his genius, his joy, his fate. This was his magical thinking approach to mathematics, nurtured by the shamans of his tribe, crystallized and polished in the cold halls of the Academy on Neverness. He must will himself to see where pattern is born of formlessness, that pattern that connects. All his life he had been trained to see such patterns. There was always a choice, to see or not see. Now, inside the attractor that pulled him into its writhing coils, there were patterns. There were ripples and billowings and depthless fractal boundaries like the wall clouds around the eye of a hurricane. The attractor itself swirled with the colours of orange madder and a pale, icy blue. For the first time, he marvelled at the attractor's strange and terrible beauty.

There was something haunting in the self-referential aspect of the chaos functions, the way that the functions lay embedded inside one another, watching and waiting and making patterns down to infinity. There were always an infinite number of patterns to choose from, always the infinite possibilities. There was always a possible future; it was only a matter of finding the right pattern, of sorting, inverting, mapping, and making the correspondences, and then comparing the patterns to a million other patterns that he had seen. Now, as the patterns before him fractured into lovely crimson traceries and then coalesced a moment later into a clear blue-black pool that pulled him ever inward, he must choose one pattern and only one. In less than a second of time, in a fraction of a fraction of a moment that would always be the eternal Now, he would have to make his choice. There could be no putting it off once it came. His choice: he could be pulled screaming into his fate, or he could say yes to the chaos inside himself and choose his future. This, he remembered, is what the scryers do. This is what his mother must have done in finding the terrible courage to give birth to him. And so at last, when his moment came and time was now and always and forever, he chose a simple pattern. He made a mapping into this strange, strange attractor, and then he fell alone into the eye of chaos where all was stillness, silence, and beautiful, blessed light.

CHAPTER THREE.

Ancestral Voices.

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

- from A Requiem For h.o.m.o Sapiens, by Horthy Hosthoh.

Danlo fell out near a small yellow star as beautiful as any star he had ever seen. The star was circled by nine fat round planets, one of which was very near to him indeed.

Below his lights.h.i.+p a bare ten thousand miles below the Snowy Owl there spun a planet all green and blue and swaddled in layers of bright white clouds. He could scarcely believe his good fortune. It seemed too much of a miracle to have escaped an inescapable attractor, only to then fall out above such a lovely and earthlike planet. In the pit of his s.h.i.+p he lay shaking with triumph and joy, and he opened a window in the s.h.i.+p's hull to look out over this unnamed planet. For a long time he looked down through s.p.a.ce at mossy brown continents and sparkling blue oceans. With his scanning computers, he a.n.a.lysed the gases of the atmosphere, the oxygen and nitrogen and carbon dioxide involved in the interflow of organic life. He did this to rea.s.sure himself that he had really fallen out into reals.p.a.ce, and so he reached out with his telescopes and scanners and eyes to embrace it, to touch it, to see it as it truly was. In the sweep of the planet's mountains, in the fractal curves of the continents'

coastlines and the shape of the vast oceans, he became aware of a pattern hauntingly familiar to him. At first he could not identify this pattern. But then he searched his memory, and there was a shock of recognition, like suddenly beholding the face of a friend who has returned from the wounds and scars of old age into an untouched and marvellous youth. It astonished him that the face of the planet below him matched his brilliant memory so exactly; it was an astonis.h.i.+ng thing to discover here in the heart of the Solid State Ent.i.ty a planet that must be, that could only be that great and glorious planet that men remembered as Old Earth.

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

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

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

Because he could not tell inside from out, for an endless moment, he was nauseous and dizzy. It occurred to him that perhaps he had not escaped the attractor after all.

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

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

If this Earth is real, then it has a real origin in s.p.a.cetime. It is possible that this Earth has not been brought here across s.p.a.ce it is possible that She has created it.

With this thought, a beam of laser light flashed up from the planet's surface through the atmosphere out into s.p.a.ce. His telescopes intercepted this intense, coherent light.

There was no information bound within this signal that his computers could decode.

But the very phenomenon of laser light streaming up from a densely-forested coastline was itself a kind of signal and a kind of information. For the first time, he wondered if human beings might live on this Earth. It seemed only natural that they would. He remembered that his father, on his first journey into the Ent.i.ty, had discovered a world full of men and women who could not believe that they lived their entire lives inside a stellar nebula rippling with a G.o.dly intelligence. Of course, Danlo had seen no cities below him, no mud huts nor pyramids nor domes nor other signs of human life. It was possible that the men of this Earth might live as hunters beneath the canopies of the vast emerald forests. If this was so, then he would never see them from a lights.h.i.+p floating in the near s.p.a.ce above their world. Because he was lonely and eager for the sound of human voices and because he was unbearably curious he decided to take his s.h.i.+p down through the atmosphere to discover the source of this mysterious laser light.

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

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

No, no, it is not possible.

He stood staring up at this lovely house for a while, and then the cold wind blew in from the ocean and drowned him in memories. Soon he began shaking and s.h.i.+vering.

The wind found his belly, and he was suddenly cold as if he had drunk an ocean of ice water. He looked down at his lean, ivory legs quivering in the cold. He was still as naked as a pilot in the pit of his s.h.i.+p, but now that he stood on soft s.h.i.+fting sands, he realized that he was naked to the world. Because he needed to protect himself from the bitter wind and cover his nakedness, he returned to his s.h.i.+p to fetch his boots, his heavy wool cloak, and the racing kamelaika he had once worn while skating the streets of Neverness.

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

The Ent.i.ty, he thought, could read his memories exactly enough to incarnate them as wood and stone either that or She could make him see this unforgettable house out of his memory where no house really existed. But because he thought that the little white house beneath the forest must be real, he quickly left his s.h.i.+p and returned to the beach. He began trudging up the dunes, the fine sands slipping beneath his boots and his weakened muscles. He worked his way forward and up against the pull of the Earth as if he were drunk on strong alcoholic spirits. Soon, however, with every step taken as he drew nearer the house, he began to acclimatize to the planet's gravity.

He remembered how to walk on treacherous sands. He remembered other things as well. Once, in this simple house of white granite that he could now see too well, there had been long nights of pa.s.sion and love and happiness. Once, a woman had lived here, Tamara Ten Ashtoreth, she of the great heart and broken life whom he had loved and lost. But she had fled this house. In truth, she had fled Danlo and his burning memories. It was said that she had even fled Neverness for the stars.

Although Danlo did not think it was possible that she could have found her way to this mysterious planet deep within the Solid State Ent.i.ty, he hurried up the beach straight towards this house to discover what (or who) lay inside.

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

At last, on top of a small, gra.s.s-covered hill, at the end of a path laid with flat sandstones, he came up to the house's door. It was thick and arched and sculpted out of shatterwood, a dense black wood native only to islands on the planet Icefall.

Shatterwood trees had never grown on Old Earth, and so it was a mystery how the Ent.i.ty had found shatterwood with which to build this house. He reached out to touch the door. The wood was cold and hard and polished to an impossible smoothness in the way that only shatterwood can be polished. He traced his finger across the lovely grain of the door, remembering. Somehow the Ent.i.ty had exactly duplicated the door of Tamara's house. In Danlo's mind, just behind his eyes, there were many doors, but this particular one stood out before all others. He remembered exactly how the door planks had joined together in an almost seamless merging of the grain; he could see every knot and ring and dark whorl as if he were standing on the steps of this house on Neverness about to knock on the door. But he was not on Neverness. He stood before the door of an impossible house above a desolate and windswept beach, and the pattern of the whorls twisting through the shatterwood exactly matched the bright black whorls that burned through his memory.

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

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

Then he opened the door and stepped across the threshold into the cold hallway inside.

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

Out of politeness and respect for the rules of Tamara's house, he removed his boots before walking through her rooms. Because it was a small house laid out across a single floor, there were only five rooms: the hallway gave out onto the brightly lit meditation room, which was adjoined by the bathing room and fireroom at the rear of the house, and the tea room and the small kitchen at the front. It took him almost no time to verify that the house was indeed empty. That is, it was empty of human beings or evidence of present habitation. True, the kitchen was well-stocked with teas, cheeses, and fruits and fifty other types of foods that Tamara had delighted in preparing for him. But everything about the kitchen the neat rows of coloured teas in the jars, the oranges and bloodfruit piled high in perfect pyramids inside large blue bowls, the tiled counters completely free of toast crumbs or honey drippings bespoke a room that hadn't been used recently, but rather prepared for a guest.

Similarly, the cotton cus.h.i.+ons in the tea room were new and undented, as if no one had ever sat on them. And in the fireroom the s.h.a.gshay furs smelled of new wool instead of sweat, and the stones of the two fireplaces were clean of ashes or soot. It was as if the Ent.i.ty, in making this house, had perfectly incarnated the details of his memory but had been unable to duplicate the chaos and disorder (and dirt) that came of living a normal, organic life. But certainly She had duplicated everything else. The rosewood beams of the ceiling and the skylights were exactly as he remembered them. In the tea room, the tea service was set out on the low, lacquered table. And along the sill of the window overlooking the ocean, there was the doffala bear sculpture that he remembered so well and the seven oiled stones. Each object in the house was perfectly made and perfectly matched his memory. Except for one thing.

When Danlo walked into the meditation room he immediately noticed a sulki grid hanging on the wall by the fireplace. And that was very strange because Tamara had never collected or used outlawed technology. She had never liked experiencing computer simulations or artificial images or sounds. And even if she'd had a taste for cartoons and other such seemingly real holographic displays, she never would have allowed them to be made in her meditation room. Because Danlo wondered what programs this sulki grid had been programmed to run, he pitched his voice toward it, saying simply, 'On, please.'

For a moment nothing happened. Most likely, he supposed, the sulki grid would be keyed to some voice other than his own. He stood there breathing deeply, and he was almost relieved that the sulki grid appeared to be dead. He had imagined (and feared) that an imago of Tamara would appear before him, as tall and naked and achingly beautiful as ever she had been as a real woman. And then without warning the spiderweb neurologics of the grid flared into life, projecting an imago into the centre of the room. It was like no imago that Danlo had ever seen before. It was all flas.h.i.+ng colours and s.h.i.+fting lights, like a column of fire burning up from the floor but not burning any thing, neither the inlaid shatterwood floor tiles, nor the hanging plants, nor the air itself. Soon the display settled out into a kind of pattern with which he was very familiar. It was an array of ideoplasts, not the ideoplasts of mathematics, but rather those of the Universal syntax. A scarce three feet in front of his face, glowing through the air in jewel-like glyphs of emerald and sapphire and tourmaline, were the three-dimensional symbols of the language beyond language of the holoists that he had learned as a young novice. It was a highly refined and beautiful language that could represent and relate any aspect of reality from the use of alien archetypes in the poets of the Fourth Dark Age to the pattern of neural storm singularities in the brain of a dreaming autist. Ideoplasts could symbolize the paradoxes of the cetic's theory of the circular reduction of consciousness or alien words or sometimes even the phonemes and sounds of any human language, living or dead. Most often one encountered ideoplasts in libraries or when interfacing the various cybernetic s.p.a.ces of a computer in order to discover or create an almost infinite variety of knowledge.

Ideoplasts were mental symbols only, and they were best viewed as arrays of lovely and complex glyphs which a computer would cark into the vast visual fields of the mind's eye. And the universal syntax was the language of holists and other academicians wis.h.i.+ng to relate the most abstruse and arcane concepts; rarely were its ideoplasts used to represent everyday speech or in the sending of common messages.

Only rarely, on Neverness and the other Civilized Worlds, would some pretentious restaurateur (or imprimatur) appropriate the ideoplasts of the universal syntax and instantiate them as glowing neon signs above his shop. But such use of these sacred symbols was considered gauche, even sacrilegious. Danlo had never seen an array of ideoplasts projected in the s.p.a.ce of a common room, and so it took him some time to adjust to this new perspective and new way of apprehending them. With his eyes only, he played over the ideoplasts, slowly kithing them, much as he might read ancient Chinese characters or the letters of an unfamiliar alien language written into a book. The message written into the glowing air of the meditation room, as he saw when he finally kithed it, proved to be quite simple. It was a simple greeting, from the mind of a G.o.ddess for his eyes only: How far do you fall, Pilot? How have you fallen so far and so well, Danlo wi Soli Ringess?

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

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

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

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

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

This time when Danlo spoke, he directed his words toward the sulki grid. 'How? I am very lucky,' he said with much amus.e.m.e.nt.

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

Was it truly luck that led you here?

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

Again the ideoplast array changed, and a new message appeared: The first rule of this information exchange is that you may not answer a question with a question.

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

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

'All your questions? But who are you . . . truly?'

The array remained unbroken, unchanging, and then Danlo remembered the Ent.i.ty's unanswered question. He took a breath and said, 'Yes, it was luck that brought me here . . . and something other.'

What other thing?

Danlo paced about the meditation room, and his bare feet left little sweat prints against the cool shatterwood tiles. He walked around and around the imago in the centre of the room in order to view the colourful ideoplast array from different perspectives. He never took his eyes from the glowing ideoplasts. Finally, he said, 'I was lost in the chaos s.p.a.ce. Truly lost. And then in the blackness, in the neverness, the attractor . . . it was so strange, so wild. Yet somehow familiar, too. The patterns, breaking apart into all the colours, crimson and s.h.i.+mmering gold, and then reforming, again and again, the possibilities. So many pat-terns. So many possibilities. And then I remembered something. At first I thought it might be a memory of the future, a vision such as the scryers have. But no, it was something other. I remembered something that I had never seen before. I do not know how. It came into my mind like a star being born.

A pattern. A memory. These blessed mathematics that we make, these blessed memories they guided me into the attractor, and then I fell out above this wild Earth.'

Almost instantly the ideoplasts dissolved and reformed themselves into a new array which Danlo readily kithed.I like your answer, Danlo wi Soli Ringess.

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

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

'I have wondered if this Earth is real,' Danlo said. 'I have wondered if a G.o.ddess could cark a picture of it the touch and taste and whole experience of it into my mind.'

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

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