Lord Pilot of our Order,’ the Sonderval said with great pride, ‘it’s my charge to encourage my pilots to attempt impossible things beyond what we conceive as our limitations.’
Here he bowed to Danlo, honouring him as an exemplar of the pilots’ greatest traditions. Many of the lords suddenly looked his way, and Danlo freely met their eyes even though he hated such public attention.
‘As Lord Pilot of the Order nothing more could be asked of you,’ Lord Nikolos said to the Sonderval. ‘But as Lord of the Order, I must constrain the heroics of my pilots, even such a great pilot as yourself.’
This mixture of compliment and veiled criticism momentarily flustered the Sonderval, who sat glaring at Lord Nikolos. Lord Nikolos seized this opportunity to deliver his crowning jewel of logic in avoidance of conflict. ‘I propose that we send three pilots to Neverness. Three of our finest pilots in our swiftest ships. They will warn the lords of Neverness of Bertram Jaspari’s Iviomils and this star-killer that their fleet brings with them. The Old Order has more pilots than we – let the pilots of Neverness fight this war with the Iviomils, if indeed any war is to be fought.’
Lara Jesusa traded a quick look with Alark of Urradeth, and the brilliant Aja turned her dark eyes to meet Danlo’s. Already, it seemed, the master pilots had accepted Lord Nikolos’ plan and were vying to see who might be selected to journey home to Neverness. The lords, too, could find nothing to argue with. They sat silently in their seats, looking back and forth between Lord Nikolos and the Sonderval. For a moment, it seemed that the lords would make the obvious decision and that war had thus been averted.
But the universe is a strange place, always alive with irony and cosmic dramas. Sometimes the play of chance and impossible coincidence may persuade us that we are part of a larger game whose purpose is as infinite as it is mysterious. Sometimes, in a moment, a woman may act or a man may speak and history will be changed for ever. As Lord Nikolos called for a formal vote as to his plan, such a moment came to the Hall of the Lords. The great golden door through which Danlo had passed scarcely an hour earlier swung suddenly open, and three men made their way into the hall. Two of these were novice horologes, young men in tight red robes who had volunteered to guard the hall and act as guides for any ambassador or luminary who had business there. The third was an uncommonly large man dressed all in black. He had a thick black beard and blackish eyes and purple-black skin, and his mood at the moment was pure black because the horologes were harrying him, clutching at his arms and trying to prevent him from entering the hall. ‘Let go of me, goddammit!’ he shouted as he swung his great arms and flung off the two small novices as if they were insects. ‘Let go – haven’t I explained that I’ve important news for your lords and masters that won’t wait? What’s wrong with you? I’m no assassin, by God! I’m a pilot!’
Although a score of lords had risen in alarm, Danlo smiled and his eyes filled with light because he knew this man. He was Pesheval Sarojin Vishnu-Shiva Lal, commonly known as Bardo, a former pilot of the Order and one of Danlo’s oldest friends.
‘Please restrain yourselves!’ Lord Nikolos commanded in his steely voice. ‘Please sit down.’
‘Yes, sit down before your knees buckle and you fall down,’ Bardo said as he strode to the black diamond circle at the centre of the hall. ‘I’ve much to tell, and you’ll need all your courage to hear it.’
‘You,’ Lord Nikolos said pointing at Bardo, ‘are no longer a pilot of the Order.’
Twelve years before, in the Hall of the Lords on Neverness, Lord Nikolos and many other of the lords (and Danlo) had watched as Bardo had flung his pilot’s ring against a granite pillar, shattering it and abjuring his vows as a pilot. And then, after drinking the sacred remembrancers’ drug and preaching the return of his best friend, Mallory Ringess, he had gone on to found the religion known as the Way of Ringess.
‘No,’ Bardo said. ‘I’m no longer of the Order. But I’m still a pilot, by God! And I’ve crossed half the galaxy to tell you what I must tell you.’
‘And what is that?’
Bardo took a moment to fill his huge lungs with air. He looked at the Sonderval, with whom he had shared his journeyman years at the Pilots’ College, Resa. He looked at Lord Nikolos and Morena Sung and Sul Estarei, and lastly he looked at Danlo wi Soli Ringess. ‘There will soon be war in Neverness,’ his great voice boomed out into the hall. ‘And war among the Civilized Worlds. For the first time in two thousand years, a bloody, stupid war. I’ve journeyed twenty thousand light years to tell you how this tragedy has happened and what we must do.’
Lord Nikolos sat rigidly as if his chair had been electrified, and the eyes of every lord and master were fixed straight ahead on this huge man who commanded their attention. And so it happened that in the Hall of the Lords, a former pilot of the Order brought them news of a war that would change each of their lives and perhaps the face of the universe itself.
There is a war that opens the doors of heaven;
Glad are the warriors whose fate is to fight such a war.
— Bhagavad Gita 2.32
At the centre of the floor of the Hall of the Lords, Bardo stood in the circle of inlaid black diamond. It might be thought that Bardo, standing in this circle with his black skin and black garments, would almost disappear into this purest of colours. But Bardo was not a man to be overshadowed, not by man nor woman nor events nor the onstreaming black neverness of the universe itself. Like a hot giant star floating in the middle of the intergalactic void, he demanded attention. He had been born a prince of Summerworld, and he still thought of himself as a luminary among lesser lights, even though his innate nobility (and compassion) obliged him to help others rather than scorning them as beneath his concern, as 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
