Requiem Of Homo Sapiens - The Wild Part 31

Danlo could only think that the warrior-poet still pursued him in hope of being led to his father. He dreaded this eventual meeting as he might look with horror at two pieces of plutonium slammed together. Strangely, though, for himself he still had little fear.

And so perhaps inevitably Danlo came to Tannahill. One bright, happy day, he fell out far above this lost and fabled world. With his telescopes and his keen eyes, he looked down through s.p.a.ce, down between the patchy clouds of the atmosphere upon an unbelievable sight. Tannahill was a fat world of great oceans and bulging landma.s.ses; but the waters of the world, as Danlo saw, were nearly dead. In many places, the shallows were choked with sludges and greyish-green mats of some weedlike marine plant, while the deeper seas bore the taint of acetylene and benzene and ten thousand other man-made chemicals. So pervasive was this pollution that oceans fairly ran with ugly colours as if smeared with blacking oil: metallic greens and muddy pinks and a dark, dirty grey that reminded him of frozen skin that has fallen into necrosis. The atmosphere, too, was horribly polluted. There was too much carbon dioxide, of course, and the oxygen-nitrogen ratio was dangerously out of balance. Danlo's computer a.n.a.lyses showed much sulphur and halogens and even traces of fungicides. At first, Danlo wondered how the animals walking through Tannahill's forests could ever get their breath; but after he had painstakingly scanned the whole of the world he realized that on all the surface of Tannahill there were no forests. Neither did there live any animals at least none much larger than the worms or the insects that infested the rare patches of exposed soil. Tannahill's three large continents girdled the world's equator, and each of them had been given over wholly to the purpose of human habitation. And what dwellings these people had built! In all Danlo's journeys he had never seen anything like what the Architects had made of their world. Except for the slopes of the highest mountains and the great gorges cutting the deserts, the Architects had covered every area of earth with great plastic cities. It was as if they long ago had set out to build a few hundred arcologies similar to the cities of Alumit Bridge and then their architecture had exploded out of control, growing like cancers until their edges had met and melted together into a planet-wide smear of plastic. The transformation of Tannahill was the most total unbalancing of the natural order that Danlo had ever beheld. For such a criminal and insane act he knew only one word, and that was shaida. He remembered, then, a line from the Song of Life that his grandfather had once taught him: shaida is the cry of the world when it has lost its soul. Except that Tannahill had lost much more than its soul; it had lost trees and rivers and rocks and the fresh, clean wind that was the breath of the world. In truth, this plastic-covered habitat of twelve hundred billion human beings had lost its very life.

Shaida is he who kills what he cannot give back into life.

For a long while Danlo dwelt in remembrance of other peoples and other places, even as he orbited Tannahill in his lights.h.i.+p and studied the world below him. He might have spent many days of intime in such contemplation, but soon enough the Architects in their planetary city sent a laser-coded signal beaming up through s.p.a.ce.

Please tell us who you are and whence you come.

To the Architects of Tannahill, it would be obvious that Danlo had his origins elsewhere than the seventy-two worlds of the Known Stars. All these worlds, as he knew, had been seeded by Architects of the Old Church, and none of them, with only their Church-sanctioned technologies, could produce anything so marvellous as a lights.h.i.+p.

All these stars all these worlds so similar to Tannahill, Danlo brooded. The pressure of their population must be truly terrible.

After Danlo had explained that he was a pilot of the Order and an emissary of the Narain of Alumit Bridge, there fell a long pause in communication with the world below him. Danlo waited, as wary and watchful as a zans.h.i.+n artist who slowly circles his opponent and expects any possibility.

'Surely they will invite you to make planetfall, Pilot.'

Out of the blackness in the pit of Danlo's s.h.i.+p there came an unholy glow, almost as of a swarm of phosph.o.r.escent kachina flies lighting up a cave. The hologram of Nikolos Daru Ede moved its mouth and spoke according to the programs of the devotionary computer that projected his familiar human form into the air. According to his master algorithm, Ede could not help but warn Danlo of danger.

'Surely the Architects cannot harm you unless you do fall down to their world.'

After a while, from an unknown voice coded into the signal that the Architects aimed toward his s.h.i.+p, Danlo received a request for more information concerning the Order of Mystic Mathematicians, Neverness and the Civilized Worlds. Danlo spent much time describing his journey across the Sagittarius and Orion Arms of the galaxy. He told of his stay among the Narain of Alumit Bridge and that he had come to Tannahill in order to plea for peace between the peoples of these two estranged worlds.

In the end, the voice of a man who identified himself as the Dedicated Honon en li Iviow of Ornice Olorun invited Danlo to take his s.h.i.+p down to a light-field near the coast of Tannahill's largest continent. Danlo homed on the signal that was provided.

Although it was twilight, with the edge of the world spinning into darkness, he had no trouble piloting the Snowy Owl down through the layers of the atmosphere. Soon he saw that the zone of Tannahill known as Ornice Olorun covered a fifty-mile-wide swathe of land caught between a range of mountains and the poison sea. Once a time a thousand years before Ornice Olorun had been Tannahill's first city, a beautiful jewel of a city overlooking the white sand beaches of a beautiful ocean. Over the millennium, however, it had grown north and south, three hundred miles up and down the coast, and towards the west, sending out great plastic tentacles between the mountains to connect with Eshtara and Kaniuk and other cities of what used to be called the Golden Plains. It was near these white-capped mountains that Danlo found the light-field. As with the fields of Iviunir and the other cities of Alumit Bridge, it was built of composite plastics above the roof of the city almost half a mile into the sky. The Architects had called Danlo to earth during a clear evening; far off in the distance he could see other light-fields of other cities and the red flash of rocket fire.

These flashes lit up the night in a shower of sparks that never stopped, for many Worthy Architects from the Known Stars tried to make the pilgrimage to Tannahill, and many more Architects fled Tannahill for new worlds around new stars. And who could blame them? Out over the sea, he saw, the air was discoloured by the hues of toluidine purple and other chloride chemicals. The mountains to the west lit up by the setting sun glowed a h.e.l.lish orange madder.

All Danlo's life he had loved travelling to new and distant lands, and ever since he had become a pilot, it had been his joy to walk upon the earth of strange new worlds.

But tonight his head throbbed with foreboding and despair, and he sensed that his feet would touch only hard grey plastic. As he was directed, he flew his s.h.i.+p down to a well-lit run near the centre of the field. For a while, he rocketed slowly along this run, casting his eyes left and right at the other runs, looking at the skimmers and jets and jammers all the many craft crowding the s.p.a.ces of this busy light-field. He moved straight toward a white structure that rose up from the field like an immense plastic bubble a quarter of a mile in diameter and almost half as high. The doors to this guest sanctuary, as Honon Iviow had called it, were open. As the Snowy Owl pa.s.sed inside and the huge doors slammed shut behind him, Danlo wondered whether his status among the Architects was to be that of honoured guest or prisoner.

You may debark from your s.h.i.+p now.

Danlo opened the diamond doors of his s.h.i.+p's pit, climbed down to the smooth white plastic that made up the sanctuary's floor and sealed the s.h.i.+p behind him. For a while he stood quite still, squinting and pus.h.i.+ng his palm against the pain that stabbed through the left side of his head. Somewhere above him, high up against the curving roof, incandescent globes blazed with a terrible, sick light. When his eyes had adjusted to the brightness, he turned in a slow circle to survey his surroundings. In a way, this strange guest house reminded him of a snowhut, for it was windowless and white and built into the familiar shape of a dome. But it was monstrously huge, and lacked the intimate, organic feeling of a snowhut's interior. In this soulless room, there were no sleeping furs, nor fish-pit, nor drying rack for his clothes. There were no oilstones burning with a soft yellow flame, filling up the s.p.a.ce around him with a soft, lovely light. Instead there were machines or objects that were the fabrications of machines. There were grids and a.s.semblers and hinun wheels. Various robots, some half as large as his s.h.i.+p, were rolled up near the room's circ.u.mference awaiting servicing instructions from some unseen master computer or controlling ent.i.ty. The Snowy Owl, however, required no such servicing. It fairly filled the centre of the dome, a great s.h.i.+mmering sweep of diamond always waiting to fall back to the stars.

It was Danlo's pride that of all the thousands of vessels to be dragged into such domes, in a thousand years, this was the first time that Ornice Olorun or any of Tannahill's other cities had been graced with the arrival of a lights.h.i.+p.

We must ask you to remain in the sanctuary for a few days while tests are being made. We hope that you are comfortable.

Danlo stood looking at the devotionary computer that he held in his hands. The familiar form of Nikolos Daru Ede had vanished temporarily, to be replaced by the imago of the Dedicated Honon en li Iviow. Honon, if this glowing imago were true to his real-life person, was a small, suspicious man but also, perhaps, urbane, proficient and shrewd. His voice was sweet and quick, and it issued out of the devotionary computer like high notes from a flute.

You will find that food and refreshment have been prepared for you. If you require conversation or information, you may call for a face-to-face with me at any time.

At the far end of the sanctuary, Danlo found a large area where the plastic of the floor rose up like a shelf overlooking the rest of the cavernous room. Here the Architects of Ornice Olorun had built something like an apartment. Set on top of this higher level was a bed, bathing chamber, sense box, dining table, and various statues of Nikolos Daru Ede sculpted out of some kind of dense black plastic. There was a golden-stringed gosharp on which one might play lovely music, and a spare devotionary to supply melodies of a more spiritual nature. And other things. Unlike the Narain, the Architects took care to maintain their physical selves, and so they had provided various ways for their guests to move their bodies. Adjoining the sleeping area was a moving walkway on which he might trudge for days without progressing more than an inch and a plastic climbing tree whose many jointed branches reached nearly to the dome's curving roof. There was also a pool. But as much as Danlo loved splas.h.i.+ng through cool, clear water, he did not swim in it for it reeked of chlorine and other chemicals. The air in the dome was bad, too. When he concentrated on the odours a.s.saulting his nose, he could pick up the traces of hydroxyls, propylene, styrene and various aminoplastics. There were obnoxious smells such as ketones and mercaptans, and dangerous ones such as benzene and toluene and other aromatic hydrocarbons. If it were possible, he would have held his breath for all the time that he dwelled in the cities of Tannahill. But he had to breathe as he had to live, and so he climbed the stairs to the sanctuary's apartment, and he settled in to play his flute and to eat the peculiar-tasting food that the ministrant robots served him.

After he had bathed and rested, other robots came with needles to draw his blood.

As well they collected skin sc.r.a.pings, saliva, ear wax, lymph, urine, even the dung that he left steaming in the dark hole of the multrum. He balked, however, at providing these noisome machines with the s.e.m.e.n samples that they requested. And it was only with the greatest difficulty that he allowed them to cover his mouth with a piece of soft, clear plastic and procure the exhalations of his lungs. The breath, he remembered, was sacred and blessed; a man's breath shouldn't be sucked into a sealed plastic bag, but rather it should leave his lips to flow over earth and snow and be rejoined with the greater breath of the world.

When Danlo had done all that he must do to begin his mission to Tannahill, the imago of Honon en li Iviow appeared out of his devotionary to thank him:You will understand that we must be careful of strangers, Danlo wi Soli Ringess. We must be careful of contamination.

A few days later, when the biologicals had determined that Danlo harboured no bacteria, viruses or DNA fracts harmful to the people of Tannahill, the Dedicated Honon en li Iviow invited him to address the Koivuniemin, or a.s.sembly of Elders, the ruling body of the Cybernetic Universal Church. In preparation for this long- awaited moment, Danlo trimmed his beard and combed out his thick black hair, which had grown long and wild during his journey into the Vild. Then he dressed in the black pilot's robe that his Order required upon all formal occasions. He polished his black leather boots until they shone like mirrors, and he cleaned his black diamond ring of oils and dirt until it shone brightly, too. Because he disliked going anywhere without his shakuhachi, he secreted the long flute in an inner pocket of his robe's flowing pantaloons. Thus armed to face these unknown men and women who might hold sway over his fate, he took the devotionary computer into his hands. Like any other Architect of Tannahill, he would carry this little jewelled box with him wherever he went.

We will call a choche for you.

True to his word, Honon Iviow called to life one of the sanctuary's five old choches, which rolled right up to the stairs beneath Danlo's apartment and opened its gull-winged doors so that Danlo might step inside. Danlo hated being inside this mobile plastic box, for it was not brightly coloured and open as were the similarly functioning robots of Iviunir, but rather made of an ugly grey plastic and wholly enclosed. The doors suddenly locked shut around him, exacerbating his sense of being imprisoned. The choche was graced with windows, however, and as Danlo sat on his soft plastic seat, inhaling molecules of silicone and nylon, he found that he could look out at the scenery pa.s.sing by. At first, of course, there was little to see: only the robots and furnis.h.i.+ngs of the guest sanctuary. But then the choche rolled through an airlock and a series of doors out into a corridor that led to a gravity lift. After falling a way, they debouched onto one of Ornice Olorun's side streets. Here there were people wearing a plain brown or white sort of kimono, and because Nikolos Daru Ede had been a devotee of the sacred jambool, a drug known to cause baldness as well as visions, all Architects shaved their heads in memory of all that Ede had sacrificed in bringing the truth to humankind. But, ironically, because too close an emulation of Ede was blasphemy, most covered their s.h.i.+ny pates with a little brown skullcap. It troubled Danlo that although he could see all these people in their kimonos and funny little hats, they could not see him. The windows of the choche were made of a mirrored plastic that let in the light of the world but permitted no visual information from the interior to escape into the prying eyes of gawkers or pa.s.sers-by. Nor could anyone easily get at the choche's unseen occupants: its body was moulded from one of the kevalin plastics almost impervious to laser fire, missiles or explosions. Such is the construction of any choche employed to carry an Elder Architect, amba.s.sador or other luminary about the uncertain streets of Ornice Olorun.

You must beware a.s.sa.s.sins.

The Ede hologram signed this warning to Danlo as they looked at each other through the semi-darkness of the choche's interior. Although the choche felt quite private, Danlo thought it unwise to risk verbal conversation.

Anywhere that there are armoured robots, Ede signed, there are a.s.sa.s.sins.

This was true, Danlo mused. But then a.s.sa.s.sins haunted the history of almost all human societies, especially one so distressed as that of Tannahill. As Danlo rolled in safety towards his appointment with the Koivuniemin, he saw signs of misery and disquiet everywhere. First and last, there were too many people. They swarmed the streets in their millions like ants through tunnels in the earth. Indeed, the streets of Ornice Olorun were dark and narrow and cut off from sunlight, very much like tunnels or underground pa.s.sageways. Once, perhaps, a thousand years ago, they had been as open and airy as the broad boulevards that Danlo had seen in Iviunir. But the Architects, ever sp.a.w.ning great broods of babies, ever hungry for s.p.a.ce, had been forced to make use of every cubic inch of their endless city, and, over time, had torn up commons and parks and playrings, even as they synthesized great blocks of new plastic and added on to their apartments and other buildings. Everywhere Danlo looked, the Architects had actually expanded their buildings out over the streets.

There, a scant fifteen feet over the heads of Architects making their daily errands, building fused into building, filling in what should have been open s.p.a.ce between the many levels of the city. In some parts of Tannahill in Ivi Olorun, for example the streets were so twisting and tunnel-like that it was impossible to gain a clear line of sight much greater than four hundred feet.

Of all the thoroughfares in Ornice Olorun, this strip of grey plastic running between the light-field and the great Temple where the Koivuniemin met was the broadest and straightest but still inadequate to move the manswarms of the city. Most of the Architects that Danlo saw bore this crowding bravely. Dressed in their clean white kimonos, cradling their devotionaries protectively against their bellies, they did their best to flounder through the raging river of humanity that swept them along like so many bits of protoplasm. If they made no apology at being jostled or elbowed or b.u.mped by another, it was because the reality of living inside their arcology had forced them to abandon the normal social graces. In such a crush of people, where collisions occurred with the frequency of heated gas molecules inside a sealed jar, to say 'excuse me' every three seconds would quickly grow as tiresome as it was pointless. Although many Architects had accepted this necessary rudeness as their fate, others had not. The faces of many men and women were full of grievance, bitterness, and resentment.

Once, when Danlo's choche stopped before the bombed-out front of a restaurant, an angry young man spat at his window and hurled a piece of plastic so that it went skit- tering over the choche's roof. He made a crude sign in Danlo's direction and screamed an obscenity, a slang word for a forbidden interface with one's computer. Danlo won- dered at this astonis.h.i.+ng act. Could this man have known that the choche carried a pilot of the Order and an emissary of the Narain of Alumit Bridge? Could the Architects in the mob around him have known this as well? While many women and men (and children) regarded this rabid man warily as they might an armed plastic bomb, they made no move to rebuke him or restrain him in any way. They merely stood staring at the choche as if the fire of their eyes might melt the mirrored windows. Although they could not see him, Danlo felt his eyes touching theirs. In truth, something about their wild spirit touched him deep inside. These were a people who had suffered privation and pain. Although there had been no actual starvation on Tannahill for thirty years when a mosaic virus had exploded through the food factories, many people looked hungry and much too thin. Some were afflicted with diseases. Danlo thought that these diseases must be rare and unique to Tannahill for he had never seen such death signs before. One little boy, clinging to the folds of his mother's kimono, had been blinded by some kind of fuzzy, alien fungus sucking at his eyes. Many men bore a blue taint to their skin as if this very same infection were only waiting to erupt and consume their bodies. Perhaps, Danlo thought, this was some mutant strain of the mehalchins that pitted and discoloured the facades of the buildings along the street. If an alien organism could eat hardened plastic why not the flesh of men whose faces were already eaten up with dreams and despair?Terrible pressure, Danlo thought. Such people would make terrible enemies.

After a long time of rolling past endless shops and endlessly zealous faces, the swarms of people grew even denser, if that were possible. Danlo sensed that they must be approaching the Temple.

There came a moment in his journey to meet the Koivuniemin when the streets around him were dark and pressed close on either side like the walls of a creva.s.se.

And then his choche broke free into the New City and the streets at last opened up.

Here there were real buildings, as Danlo thought of buildings. These great white structures did not flow into each other, as of plastic melted together in continuous slag heaps. Rather they were laid out on well-ordered blocks, each block set off by fine, tree-lined boulevards. Danlo marvelled at these trees. He hadn't expected to find such treasures in this dread city. Nor had he expected the brilliant light which poured down upon the triangular leaves of the alien murs.h.i.+m trees. He looked through his choche's windows up at the great dome that enclosed the whole of the New City. Probably, he thought, it was made of clary or some other transparent plastic. It reminded him of the domes that enclosed the havens of Yarkona and other cities of the Civilized Worlds.

Through this dome he saw the sulphur-tainted Tannahill sky, and far off, in the east, the steely glint of the ocean. Despite the discoloration of these once-splendid vistas, Danlo was grateful for any sight of the natural world.

This is the best of a bad place, Danlo thought. Truly this must be the soul of Tannahill.

But even here, on the zero level of the New City, beneath the clear dome letting in the light of the sky, Danlo saw signs of discord: at the edge of a little park, he came across a statue of Kostos Olorun which some criminal or blasphemer must have recently scorched with a laser, melting out the eyes and deforming the bulbous nose.

The terrible smells of ozone and burnt plastic still hung in the air. And in the streets there were still too many people. Most of them, of course, in their crisp white kimonos and wide-eyed wonder, were pilgrims from distant zones on Tannahill or other worlds of the Known Stars. But more than a few were Readers and Dedicated Architects and even the grim-faced Elders of the Koivuniemin who had business in the Temple. This famous building, as Danlo saw, was much the largest in the New City. It rose up from the centre of the huge square somewhere at the end of the endless boulevard down which Danlo travelled. Even at this distance, he could see it clearly. Built in the overall shape of a cube, it was all angles and points and many- faceted like a diamond cut to catch the light. The Architects, ever fearing a.s.sa.s.sins'

bombs, had ordered it made of pure, cut-white kevalin, a plastic almost as rare and hard as diamond. Other buildings of the district with the exception of the High Architect's Palace were less expensive as well as less grandiose. For five miles in any direction, these buildings were constellated around the Temple like lesser heavenly bodies around a star. Here were the houses of the Dedicated Architects, the low estates, the hotels, halls, spas, villas and many offices of the ancient Church inst.i.tutions. On the blocks closest to the Temple, surrounded by purple bene trees and lawns of real gra.s.s, there were the Elders' residences, the High Estates, the House of Eternity, Ede's Tomb and the Palace itself. This, then, as Danlo had observed, was the soul of Tannahill as well as the seat of an ancient Church that was destroying the stars.

They must dream of Old Earth, Danlo thought. He looked at the gra.s.s and the violets and all the other earthly flora that had been made to grow throughout the New City. All men dream of Earth.

The boulevard down which Danlo rolled, like eleven others, gave out onto an avenue that made a huge square around the Temple grounds. A wall made of cut-white kevalin surrounded the Temple itself. Although there were twelve gates set into this wall, to the north, west, east and south, it was not easy for any common choche or pilgrim to pa.s.s through them. But as Danlo's choche rolled up to one of the western gates, it was not stopped, and neither was Danlo questioned by any of the robots or the quick-eyed Temple keepers that guarded it. He pa.s.sed unimpeded through this outer gate and then through an inner light-fence meant to burn anyone so foolish as to try to gain entrance to the Temple grounds by force or stealth. His choche rolled down a pleasant path cutting among the lawns and the bene trees; it rolled onto a little lane that led right up to the steps of the Temple. Here it finally stopped. The doors opened, up and out, and once again Danlo was reminded of the way a seagull lifts up his ivory wings. As he stepped from the choche, setting his black boots down upon the white walkway, a cadre of keepers immediately swarmed around him. They were each strong, tall men, almost as tall as Danlo, and they each wore a flowing kimono woven of spun-white kevalin. Thus protected by these layers of laser-proof plastic and human flesh, Danlo was invited to walk up the steps into the Temple. One of the keepers, a one-eyed man whose face was a patchwork of old burn scars, introduced himself as Nikolos Sulivi. Then he said, 'Welcome, Danlo wi Soli Ringess of Neverness. We will take you to meet the Koivuniemin now.'

And so Danlo pa.s.sed inside the great Temple of Tannahill. When he stepped inside the entrance hall, its vastness overwhelmed him. Like the entrance halls of the Urradeth temples (and the temple that he had found on the Edeic Earth), this room was filled with sculptures of Nikolos Daru Ede. There were plastic benches on which one could sit to watch the wall paintings of Ede's glorious life; there were fountains and cold flame globes and various species of holy computers. There were many handfasts, of course, for scanning the DNA of all the Worthy Architects who sought entrance to the Temple. And there was much more: oredolos depicting the Old Church's exodus into the Vild, hologram stands and mantelets, prayer rings and remembrance stations and holy relics of Alumit's first temple, which were encased in huge clary vaults. Danlo's sense of s.p.a.ce was very keen, and he was almost certain that even the largest of the Urradeth temples could fit into this single hall. Its air of sanct.i.ty disturbed him, just as the air itself heavy with molecules of hydroxyls and kevalins was like a plastic blanket thrown over his face, blinding him, smothering him. He remembered, then, the cathedral that his friend Bardo had purchased on Neverness. Standing on real floorstones cut from a mountain's granite was very different from being inside a building synthesized from plastic. Here, there was no organic feel at all, and even the sound waves of his voice fell off the angles of the walls in an unsettling manner. Once again, he was overwhelmed by a sense that he was entering a monstrously large computer. The glittering lights, the information pools, the programmed looks of awe on the white-robed Architects' faces it all seemed so artificial and unreal.

But what is real? Danlo wondered. He looked into the eyes of the Temple keepers who escorted him through this unbelievably large room. There was a grimness in the way they continually scanned the manswarms for signs of danger, as well as duty and determination in the face of death. Truly, life is real. Life and death.

At last, the keepers bore him into the main gallery that served as a waiting area for anyone invited to witness the deliberations of the Church's ruling body. Here Danlo paused to wait like any of the pilgrims or readers called before the Koivuniemin. He stood enduring the stares of the various Architects who waited with him, and then he looked down to see the Ede hologram staring at him, too. As he might have guessed, the little Ede was fingering a cetic sign at him, which he read as, 'Beware, Pilot, beware.' Danlo smiled at his devotionary computer. And then he began to count his heartbeats as he turned to look at the doors to the room before him and waited for them to open.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The Koivuniemin

They call themselves the Iviomils, the chosen of G.o.d. We call them the Faceless because they scorn the truth that we can come face to face with Ede our G.o.d. They would excoriate all mystics and anyone who does not share their beliefs. They preach a return to the purity of Edeism's beginnings. They would abolish the facing ceremony as blasphemy, for they say that we can only interface an image of Ede, but never the essence of G.o.d Himself. We must be very wary of these Faceless. I believe that in the years to come, they will be the greatest danger to our Eternal Church.

- from the letters of Liljana ivi Narai.

It did not take long for Danlo's escort to speak with the temple keepers who guarded the doors of the Hall of the Koivuniemin. These six wary men had expected Danlo's arrival. They asked him for his name, and then bowed to him. Without bothering to scan him for weapons (Danlo presumed that the choche's computers had already per- formed this vexing function), they opened the doors and ushered him inside.

This is a place of death.

Immediately upon entering the Hall of the Koivuniemin, Danlo felt the eyes of thousands of people fall upon him. The northern third of the room, through which Danlo now pa.s.sed, was a kind of loggia built on three levels. This viewing area swarmed with pilgrims standing shoulder to shoulder so that they might be privileged to witness the great events occurring in the rest of the Hall below them. There, laid out in many concentric arches, were the long, curving devotional tables where the Elder Architects sat and decided the Church's fate. The tables all faced south, encircling a red-carpeted dais at the very end of the Hall. The whole design of this vast room was calculated to draw one's eyes towards this dais towards the reading desk of the High Architect that sat there like some holy relic on display. In truth, this glittering piece of furniture was really more of a throne than a desk. It was wrought of cut-white kevalin and etched around its sides and arms with purple neurologics; it was a colourful, eye-catching thing, and the faces of all the Elder Architects should have been lifted up toward it, waiting. But as Danlo entered the Hall, each of the thousand Elders sitting at their tables turned in their chairs toward the north to study this naman of an unknown Order beyond their neighbourhood of stars. Down the central aisle through the devotional tables Danlo walked, and as he pa.s.sed by row upon row of Elders, they pointed their old fingers at him and shook their heads and voiced their outrage at his long, black hair and his otherworldly black pilot's robe. Many of them, with their shaved heads and ugly brown skullcaps, were plainly jealous when the keepers escorted Danlo almost to the very front of the Hall. The keepers held out his chair while he moved up to a little white table almost within whispering distance of the High Architect's reading desk. This was one of two tables to hold the position of honour at the front of all the many rows of tables in the room. Across the aisle separating the Hall, east and west, the other table of honour faced Danlo's. Here, in their s.h.i.+ning white kimonos, sat twenty men and women, the highest ranking of all the Elders: Bertram Jaspari, Jedrek Iviongeon, Fe Farruco Ede, Kyoko Ivi Iviatsui, Sul Iviercier and others whom Danlo would come to know. They each stared at Danlo as he set his devotionary computer on the table and took his place in a hard plastic chair facing them. All his life, he remembered, he had hated sitting in chairs. And even more, he hated sitting at a long, white table whose nineteen other chairs remained empty. There, in the vast uncertainty of the great hall beneath the reading desk of the High Architect and beneath the stares of two thousand hostile strangers Danlo felt almost naked and very much alone.

There are those here who would murder me as I once would have speared a tiger who stepped into my tribe's cave. With this thought came a memory of a poem that he had once spoken as a prayer: Only when I am alone am I not alone.

When the thousand Elders of the Koivuniemin at last had turned back in their chairs to face Danlo (and thus to face the reading desk of the High Architect) at the front of the Hall, one of the Temple keepers moved over to the front of the dais and called for silence. 'You will all please stand,' he announced suddenly. At each of the devotional tables, the Elders rose to their feet almost as a single body moving against the pull of gravity. Then, from behind the dais, on the south wall of the Hall, a door opened. Ten keepers escorted an old woman into the Koivuniemin's presence; they led her a short distance across the white plastic tiles right up to the steps of the dais. With their help, she climbed up the red carpet and took her place at the holy reading desk. Of all the men and women present she wore the only white skullcap and hers was the only kimono embroidered with gold crewelwork. 'We welcome our highest Architect,' the first keeper announced. 'G.o.d's Architect, Keeper of the Eternal, our Eternal Ivi, Harrah Ivi en li Ede.'

As one, all the Architects in the hall clasped their fingers beneath their chins in a prayer mudra and bowed to the High Architect of the Cybernetic Universal Church.

Danlo bowed too, but according to the protocols of his Order he kept his hands down by his side and dipped his head only so far as it was still possible to keep his eyes fixed on the woman whom he honoured. And Harrah Ivi en li Ede, he saw to his delight, kept her eyes fixed on him. She had big, soft, brown eyes, lovely eyes that betrayed a deep vulnerability. Danlo stared at this beautiful old woman across twenty feet of s.p.a.ce, and instantly he loved the boldness of her gaze, sensing that she possessed the rare strength to live within her vulnerability and turn it to her advantage. She was a proud woman, he thought, proud and powerful and yet almost selfless in her devotion to what she conceived of as the truth. Although Danlo instantly trusted her insofar as he could trust any religionary bent on blowing up the stars he did not look forward to matching his reason against her will.

'My Elder Architects of the Koivuniemin!' Harrah suddenly said. Her voice was as old and dry as the strings of a Yarkonan gosharp and as sweet-sounding and profound. Even though she remained seated, her words needed no amplification, and they carried out clearly into the Hall, even to the loggia's upper level. 'My Dedicated Architects and all the Worthy from the cities of Tannahill and the worlds of the Known Stars, we are met here today to welcome Danlo wi Soli Ringess of Neverness.

He is-' Here, Harrah paused to push the fingertips of either hand against her temples.

She was one hundred and twenty-eight years old, and she couldn't call her memories to mind as quickly as she once had done. 'He is a Pilot of the Order of Mystic Mathematicians and Other Keepers of the Ineffable Flame, Emissary of what he calls the Civilized Worlds and strangely, an emissary of the Narain heretics of Alumit Bridge. A heavy burden for one so young to carry. He has come far to give us his words and salutations of distant peoples. We must decide if we should accept his gifts.'

For the count of five of Danlo's heartbeats, no one spoke. Danlo turned to look at the thousand Elders sitting silently in their rows. The Elders had set their devotionary computers in their proper places on the tables in front of them. A thousand imagoes of Nikolos Daru Ede beamed their holy countenances upon the Elders and cast shades of brown, violet or ochre upon their old faces. A vast tension vibrated through the Hall, and Danlo smelled a bitterness of old sweat and fear that made his belly clutch.

'Holy Ivi!' one of the Elders finally called out. Across the aisle, at the other table of honour, a little man stood up with great force as if his chair suddenly had been electri- fied. Although at sixty-one he was very young for an Elder, he was so humourless and grim that he might have been born with the dead. His face was cut with the deep lines of some terrible inner discord and was all edges and angles. Indeed, Danlo thought that he had never seen a face so sharp and narrow, like an axe-head chipped out of a piece of flint. Unlike a well-made tool, however, there was an asymmetry about this man that hinted of inherited deformity or perhaps the exposure to some teratogenic chemical while he had been a babe developing in his mother's womb. The bones of his bald head seemed misshapen and slightly out of joint; this caused the crown of the skull to swell out like the point of a volcano. To cover this disfigurement, he wore a padded dobra embroidered with much gold thread and much larger than the skullcaps of the other Architects. His name was Bertram Jaspari, and Danlo immediately sensed that he was a shrewd and implacable man as well as devious, fervent, tireless and utterly lacking in grace.

'My Holy Ivi,' Bertram repeated when he had gained the attention of all the Elders of the Koivuniemin. 'My views on this question are well shared. This Danlo wi Soli Ringess is a naman of an unknown Order. And worse, he is an emissary of the Narain heretics. Do not the Logics say that "as a husband picks flowers for his bride, a man should choose which thoughts will best adorn his mind"? We say that the Pilot should not be allowed to speak. Who knows what negative programs run his naman's mind?

When a naman speaks, his words may be as viruses that will infect all our minds. He is unadmitted; he sits here uncleansed before the eternal face of Ede; he should not have been brought into the Temple, much less allowed to address the Koivuniemin and our Holy Ivi.'

Having completed this diatribe, the Elder Bertram Jaspari looked at Danlo as if to say, 'We will pull the teeth from your voice before you even open your mouth.'

For a moment, Harrah looked at Bertram carefully, and then she turned her piercing gaze towards his confederates who sat with him at the table of honour. 'We must thank you for sharing your doubts,' she said.

Danlo looked up at the south wall behind Harrah where a great icon of Ede the G.o.d gleamed from its chatoyant surface. He understood that when Harrah used the pro- noun 'we', she spoke for the eternal Church as well as for the spirit of Nikolos Daru Ede.

'Holy Ivi,' Bertram said. 'Doubt implies uncertainty, but the Logics are quite clear as to the danger of namans such as this pilot.'

'How certain you seem of this,' Harrah said.

'We are certain,' Bertram said. He looked over at Jedrek Iviongeon, a fierce old man with bristling white eyebrows and bloodshot blue eyes, and at the cunning Oksana Ivi Selow and then turned to look in the rows behind him for those many Elders who supported him. At last he looked back at Harrah. 'Aren't you?'

While Harrah sat at her reading desk unperturbed (or perhaps stunned) by the insolence of Bertram's question. Danlo smiled at Bertram as he remembered the words of an old admonition: I wish that I could be as certain of anything as he seems to be of everything.

'We are certain of only one thing,' Harrah said as she looked down at Bertram. 'And that is, that for man, in this universe, all must always be uncertain. The truth is in Ede and only in Ede.'

'That is certainly true, Holy Ivi,' Bertram said. 'And that is why Ede has given us His holy Algorithm, that we might be certain of his truth.''We have always looked to the Algorithm for truth.'

'As have we, Holy Ivi.'

At this, Harrah beamed a smile at Bertram. There was neither irony nor condescension on her face; to Danlo, this benediction seemed utterly sincere. 'If we look with a pure mind and love in our hearts,' Harrah said, 'the truth s.h.i.+nes from Ede's words like light from the sun.'

'The truth is the truth, Holy Ivi.'

'If we open our ears and listen, the truth will sing inside us as a holy song.'

'We must once again disagree,' Bertram said. 'The truth does not s.h.i.+ne from what Ede has said; His words, themselves, are the truth, and we must simply obey His Algorithm and live by the Law.'

'We would not wish to live any other way.'

'But do not the Logics say: A naman is as dangerous as an exploding star?'

'Indeed they do,' Harrah said. 'But do they not also tell us that we must be masters of the stars and lords of light?'

Here Bertram stepped into the aisle almost over to Danlo's table. He pointed a finger at Danlo, and Danlo saw that Bertram's ugly little hands sweated in times of duress. 'But this man is a naman! And you have brought him into G.o.d's temple uncleansed!'

'We have brought him into the Hall of the Koivuniemin.'

'Do not the Logics say that a man must be cleansed before he may face Ede in His holy house?'

Harrah looked at Bertram for a long time. Again she smiled at him, this time as if he were only one of her many grandchildren who wasn't quite old enough to understand the true spirit of Edeism. She asked, 'And is it not said in the Facings: Whoever truly looks upon Ede's face, and looks truly, he shall be cleansed of all that is negative in his deepest programming and dwell in the eternal house of Ede until the end of time?'

'But he is a naman! Has he, for one moment of his unclean, naman's life, ever given any thought to Ede or turned his eyes toward an image of His glorious face?'

At this, Danlo, sitting straight in his hard, plastic chair, couldn't help thinking about the ruin of the great G.o.d called Ede that he had discovered out in the galaxy's wastelands. He looked down at the hologram of Nikolos Daru Ede floating in the air, and suddenly but very slightly so that only Danlo could see the Ede hologram winked at him and called up a smile to play across his sensuous, ruby-coloured lips.

Strangely, Harrah chose that moment to smile at Danlo. Then she said, 'Who can know what this pilot has thought or seen if we will not let him speak?'

'There are other ways of knowing,' Bertram said.

Danlo thought that he had a sharp, irritating voice full of spikes like a Yarkonan thornbush and full of threat as well and he suddenly knew that this prince of the Church took great pleasure in causing others pain.

Again, Harrah stared at Bertram. 'We should suppose that you would welcome the opportunity to hear the pilot's words,' she said.

'How so, Holy Ivi? We have Ede's words do we need others? Why should we pay heed to what a naman has to say about his journey across the universe?'