LITMIR.BIZ

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did the Sonderval. He was a natural dramatist. His huge voice filled the hall and fired the imagination of every master and lord. His whole manner touched others deeply, and yet little of this display resulted from conscious calculation, but was rather an expression of his deepest self. For instance, his clothing that day was as eye-catching as it was strange, for he wore neither wool kamelaika nor formal black silks. A suit of spun nail, a fibre both exquisite and rare, covered his body from neck to ankle. Spun nail, of course, is harder and stronger than diamond, proof against lasers or knives or exploding projectiles. And to guard against blows, the suit’s upper piece had been reinforced with sheets of plate nall moulded to conform to his muscles. Between his legs he wore a huge nall codpiece to safeguard the most vulnerable and valuable of organs. A huge shimmering cape of shesheen, in which he might swaddle himself in the event of radiation bursts or plasma bombs, completed his raiment. And all this grandiloquent battle armour was of Bardo’s own design. Having once been killed in defence of his best friend’s life and subsequently resurrected, he placed great value on his own flesh and spared no expense in protecting it. As he told the assembled lords, he had gone off to war, and he entertained no illusions as to the terrors that he – and they – must soon face.

      ‘There’s already been a battle in Neverness,’ he said. ‘Oh, it was a small enough battle, and some will call it no more than a skirmish, with only three pilots killed, but it’s a harbinger of worse to come, soon enough, all too soon – I don’t have to be a goddamned scryer to tell you that.’

      Bardo went on to describe the events leading up to this battle. What had occurred on Neverness since the Vild Mission departed almost five years before was complicated, of course, as all such history truly is. But here, briefly, is what Bardo told the lords: that he had originally founded the religion known as the Way of Ringess to honour the life and discoveries of his best friend, Mallory Ringess. Mallory Ringess had shown the Order – and all humankind – that any man or woman could become a god through remembrance of the Elder Eddas. Bardo had brought this teaching to Neverness, and more, in his joyances and ceremonies where the sacred remembrancers’ drug, kalla, was drunk, he had made the experience of the One Memory available to the Order’s academicians and the swarms of seekers who peopled the city. But Bardo, as Bardo said, was better at beginning great works than completing them: he was no prophet, but only a man with a few uncommon talents, a former pilot of the Order who simply wanted to help his friends and followers towards the infinite possibilities that awaited them. From almost the very beginning of the founding of Ringism, he had become involved with the cetic, Hanuman li Tosh.

      ‘Ah, you all know of Hanuman,’ Bardo said. He paused to exchange a quick look with Danlo. Once, before they had become enemies, Danlo and Hanuman had been the deepest of friends. ‘But how many of you really know Hanuman?’

      He went on to admit that Hanuman li Tosh was a brilliant and charismatic young man – and also a religious genius who had shaped the explosive expansion of Ringism in the city of Neverness and throughout the Civilized Worlds. But Hanuman was secretly cruel and vain, Bardo said, and monstrously ambitious. Hanuman, Bardo said, had been like a cancer in the belly of his church: making secret alliances with other luminaries within the Way; devising and leading new ceremonies to control directly their followers’ minds; and worst of all, spreading lies about Bardo and undermining Bardo’s leadership in any way that he could. As Ringism spread its tentacles (this was Bardo’s word) into the halls of the Order and the cities of the Civilized Worlds, the new religion was sick at its centre, with Hanuman robbing it of true life in his terrible hunger for power. Finally, on a day that Bardo would never forget, Hanuman had challenged his authority directly and ousted him as Lord of the Way of Ringess.

      ‘He stole my goddamned church!’ Bardo thundered at the astonished lords. His face was purple with rage, and he stamped his black, nall-skin boot against the black diamond circle. ‘My lovely, blessed, beautiful church!’

      For a moment no one spoke. Then Lord Nikolos fixed his icy eyes on Bardo and asked, ‘Do you refer to the cathedral which your cult purchased from one of the Kristian sects, or the organization of believers whom you gulled into following you?’

      Bardo, who knew very well what Lord Nikolos thought about religions, decided to take no offence at this. He simply said, ‘Both. At first, it was the cathedral, and then Hanuman poisoned the Ringists’ minds against me. Ah, too bad! Too bad.’

      ‘And how does one steal a cathedral?’ Lord Nikolos asked.

      Bardo looked straight at Lord Nikolos and sighed. ‘Do you remember how the cathedral was financed?’

      ‘I’m not sure I ever cared to know.’

      ‘Well, it was an expensive building,’ Bardo said. ‘Hideously expensive – but the grandest building in all the city. I had to have it. That is we had to have it, we Ringists who followed the Way. So we decided to buy it in condominium. The money for it came from the pockets of each Ringist. There was a problem of course, with some of the Ringists owning a share in such a building.’

      ‘Because these Ringists were also Ordermen?’

      ‘Exactly. Since the Order’s canons forbade ownership of property, they had to turn their shares over to others outside the Order who held it in trust for them. Hanuman, in secret, began to win these trustees to his confidence – and many other Ringists as well. And then one day, on the fourteenth of deep winter, he —’

      ‘He called for a vote setting rules as to who was permitted entrance to the cathedral,’ Lord Nikolos said.

      ‘How did you know that?’ Bardo called out, less suspicious than amazed.

      ‘It seems an obvious enough stratagem’ Lord Nikolos said. ‘How is it that you didn’t foresee it?’

      ‘Ah, well, at first I did. Is Bardo a stupid man? No, indeed I’m not, and I thought that I was full aware of who among the trustees was loyal to me and who was not. But I’m afraid I miscounted. I was, ah, busy with other concerns. It’s no simple thing, you know, founding a goddamned religion.’

      Here Danlo looked at Bardo across the hall and smiled. It was a shameful admission for a pilot steeped in the art of mathematics to admit that he had miscounted. But Bardo, for all his cunning, could be the most careless of men. Most likely his ‘other concerns’ were the seduction and sexing of the many beautiful young women who sought to serve the Way of Ringess in any way they could.

      ‘It seems,’ Lord Nikolos said, ‘that Hanuman has his own concerns.’

      ‘He barred me from my own church, by God! He installed himself as Lord of the Way!’

      ‘And the Ringists followed him?’

      ‘Too many did, too many,’ Bardo admitted. ‘Ah, they were sheep anyway – who else would have originally followed such an ill-fated man as I? Oh, at first I tried to lead the remembrancing ceremonies from my own house. For half a year, there were two Ways of Ringess in Neverness. But I no longer had the heart for it. I saw what Hanuman was doing with my church, and it made me want to cry.’

      And what Hanuman was doing, Bardo said, was the total suborning of the Order – not for the sake of remembrancing the Elder Eddas and honouring Mallory Ringess’ journey into godhood, but solely for the sake of power. Years before, Hanuman had made a secret pact with the Lord Cetic, Audric Pall, whom he had helped become Lord of the Order. Lord Pall had manoeuvred to have the Order’s canons amended, and for the first time in history, the lords and masters and academicians of Neverness were permitted formal association with a religion. Indeed, they were encouraged, even pressured, to profess their faith in the Three Pillars of Ringism and interface Hanuman’s computers, in which the remembrance of the Elder Eddas had supposedly been stored as compelling images and vivid surrealities. Lord Pall gained for the stale, old Order the energies of an explosive new religion. And Hanuman gained alliance with the Order’s many pilots who might set forth in their sparkling lightships and bring the Way of Ringess to the Civilized Worlds and to the stars beyond. Soon, Bardo said, the Way of Ringess and the Order would be as one: a single religio-scientific entity whose power would be without constraint or bound.

      When

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