LITMIR.BIZ

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the next few days, Lord Nikolos and the College of Lords made many decisions. All the pilots on Thiells were told to prepare their lightships and make their farewells. Thomas Sonderval, the Lord Pilot, in his gleaming ship the Cardinal Virtue, would lead two hundred others across the Vild’s dangerous stars to Sheydveg. Should death befall this great pilot – if a supernova should catch him in a wild blast of photons or the manifold devour his ship – Helena Charbo would act as Lord Pilot in his place. And if Helena and her Infinite Pearl were to meet a similar fate, Sabri Dur li Kadir would succeed her, and then Aja, Charl Rappaporth and Veronika Menchik, all masters of great renown who had once fought with Mallory Ringess in the Pilots’ War.

      Two hundred pilots seemed almost too few to send to the gathering on Sheydveg, but in truth the Order was lucky to muster so many. The pilots had journeyed twenty thousand light years from Neverness not to wait planet-bound for war, but to make great quests into the Vild. Almost fifty pilots still fell among the wild stars towards the galaxy’s Perseus Arm, searching for Tannahill or exploring rainbow star systems or discovering dead, burnt-out alien worlds. Peter Eyota, in his Akashara, Henrios li Radman, Paloma the Elder – none could say when these pilots might return. By sheer good chance (or perhaps ill), on the day before the pilots were to set forth to the stars, Edreiya Chu did return, falling down to Thiell’s only light-field and bringing her ship to rest along with all the others. There, on a long, broad run, the Golden Lotus joined the August Moon, the Flame of God, the Ibi Ibis and other needles of black diamond formed up in twenty rows. There too gleamed the Sword of Shiva, which Bardo had stolen in Neverness, and Danlo’s ship, the Snowy Owl, she of the long, sweeping hull and graceful wings. In less time than it took for Old Earth to turn its face in revolution once to the sun, the pilots would climb inside these two hundred ships and point their way towards Sheydveg’s great red sun. In preparation for this journey, they were supposed to be resting or practising the pilots’ mental art of hallning or praying or saying goodbye to beloved friends.

      At least two pilots, however, on this long night of cool sea winds and blazing stars, did not spend their time with goodbyes. Rather they arranged a rendezvous to say hello. Because Danlo had been very busy the last few days describing his discoveries to the cetics and eschatologists (and talking in private with Lord Nikolos), he hadn’t had the chance to greet Bardo properly. And so when they had broken free from their duties, these two old friends met on a grassy lawn outside the glittering stone halls of the Pilots’ College. Beneath tall, alien trees overlooking the sea, they called out in gladness and hurried to embrace each other.

      ‘Little Fellow, Little Fellow!’ Bardo said as he threw his arms around Danlo and thumped his back. ‘I thought I’d never have the chance to talk with you.’

      Although Danlo was taller and stronger than most men, embracing Bardo was like trying clasp a mountain to himself. With a gasp of air (Bardo’s huge arms had nearly cracked his ribs), Danlo stepped away and smiled at Bardo. He said, simply, ‘I … missed you.’

      ‘Did you? Did you? Well, I missed you, too. It’s been too, too long.’

      Bardo turned his huge head right and left, looking for a chair or bench. But Danlo, who had always hated sitting on any kind of furniture, had already dropped down to the soft grass. With a sigh and much groaning, Bardo carefully lowered his huge body until he sat face to face with Danlo. Although there was no need for such precautions within the safety of the academy, Bardo still wore his suit of battle armour, and the stiff plates reinforcing his garments impeded his motions.

      ‘By God, it’s a miracle to find you here!’ Bardo said, wiping drops of water from his forehead. Despite the coolness of the night, he was sweating in his layers of black nall. ‘To find that you and I have fallen out of the goddamned stars almost at the same hour – the same fateful hour – after having crossed the galaxy from opposite ends!’

      As ever, Danlo smiled at Bardo’s enthusiasm, no less his choice of words. ‘Some might call it only an extraordinary coincidence.’

      ‘A miracle, I said! A goddamned miracle! What more proof do we need that you and I share a miraculous fate?’

      ‘These last few days … I have often thought about fate.’

      ‘Can you feel it, Little Fellow?’ Bardo’s eyes, in the light of the flame globes around the lawn, were pools of burning ink. ‘It’s like a star pulling at a comet. It’s like a beautiful woman calling to her man. It’s like … ah, well, it’s each cell in your body coming awake and singing the same song, and that song roaring outwards until it touches every rock on every planet and sets the whole goddamned universe humming.’

      ‘I have always loved listening to you speak,’ Danlo said, as amused as he was truly delighted.

      ‘Can you doubt it? You and I – we’ve been chosen to do great things, and this is the moment for the doing.’

      ‘Perhaps. Or perhaps it is only that we have chosen. Out of all the chances life offers, and out of our pride, Bardo … perhaps we have only chosen the most desperate of chances.’

      Bardo shook his head so hard that drops of sweat spun off his thick, black beard into the night. He said, ‘There’s a line from a poem your father once told me: Fate and chance, the same glad dance.’

      For a long moment, Danlo sat gazing at Bardo. He thought that he had never seen this huge man so animated, not even during the first breathtaking days of false winter six years ago when he (and Danlo and Hanuman li Tosh) had been busy founding the Way of Ringess and all things seemed possible. Danlo reflected on all that Bardo had said in the Hall of the Lords concerning the corruption of the church and Hanuman’s ousting him as Lord of the Way. Although Bardo was the most sincere of men, the full truth of his life often escaped him because he was wont to fool himself. He liked to believe that he acted from the purest of purposes, usually to serve others, but all too often Bardo served only Bardo. Danlo thought that his true motive in journeying to Thiells was not to save the Civilized Worlds from the cancerous new religion that he had made, but rather revenge and glory. Bardo had always had a sense of his own inborn greatness, and he knew that great men must do great things. But it was the tragedy of his life that he’d never quite found the way to realize his deepest possibilities. At various periods he had sought exaltation through mathematics, women, wealth, drugs and religion. And now war was to be the vessel carrying him towards his glorious fate, and this was perhaps the greatest tragedy of all.

      ‘Did you know,’ Danlo finally mused, ‘that the Architects of the Old Church – at least the Iviomils – believe that Ede himself has written the program for the universe? And that all we do is part of this program?’

      ‘Ah, no, I didn’t know that.’

      ‘Truly, on Tannahill, the very mention of chance is a talaw punishable by a cleansing of the mind.’

      ‘Barbarians!’ Bardo muttered. ‘It’s a miracle you survived your mission there.’

      ‘Yes, I know.’

      ‘It’s a miracle, of course, but something much more. I’ve heard the full story of your journey from the Sonderval. How you walked with the dead and went deeper into your own mind than any cetic. There’s something about you now that I’ve never seen before. A fire and light: it’s as if your goddamned eyes are windows to the stars.’

      Danlo looked up at the heavens, and a strange look fell over his face. And then Bardo continued to extol his accomplishments. ‘And how you plunged into the chaos space in the heart of the Entity! You’re a braver pilot than the Sonderval, Little Fellow, and a finer. You’re the finest since Mallory Ringess, and he was a goddamned god!’

      ‘Was, Bardo?’

      ‘Ah, I mean he was a divine pilot, a god of a pilot who could take his ship anywhere in the universe.’

      Danlo smiled at this exaggeration, for no pilot, not even Mallory Ringess who had proved it was possible for a lightship to fenester instantly between any two stars, had ever fallen from the Milky Way to one of the universe’s other galaxies.

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