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.
‘Have you had news of my father?’ Danlo asked.
The so-called first pillar of the creed of Ringism stated that one day Mallory Ringess would return to Neverness. Although Danlo now rejected the beliefs of all religions, he had always wondered at his father’s fate and waited for the moment of the Return – as had many thousands of others.
‘No, I haven’t, Little Fellow – I’m sorry. In all the journeys of all the pilots, no one has come back telling of anyone who has seen him.’
Danlo ran his fingers through the cool grass next to his crossed legs and listened to the sound of the ocean moving far below the academy. Although it was near midnight, various pilots and professionals, in twos and threes, crossed the walks leading to the dormitories all around them. Their low voices fell across the lawn where Danlo and Bardo sat, and for a moment Danlo was silent.
‘Once, before he left Neverness,’ Bardo said, ‘your father told me that he would journey yet again to the Entity. There was to be, ah, a kind of mystical union between them. Something that they must create together.’
At this, Danlo smiled strangely and said, ‘Truly, the Entity is a passionate goddess – She’s all fire and tears and dreams. It may be that She desires union with our kind.’
He did not tell Bardo that the Entity had tried to capture him on an earth that She had made. Nor that She had tried to seduce him by creating an incarnation of Tamara Ten Ashtoreth from sea water and earth elements and memories stolen from deep in his mind.
‘When the Sonderval told me that you’d spent much time with the Entity, I wondered if you might have learned anything about your father.’
‘She said only that I would find him at my journey’s end.’
‘In Neverness?’
‘I … do not know. The Entity always speaks so mysteriously.’
‘I still believe your father will return to Neverness. It’s where his fate lies, not out in the stars with some capricious goddess.’
For a moment, Danlo looked west at the strange, shimmering stars just over the rim of the sea, but he said nothing.
‘And when he does return, by God, there will be an accounting! He’ll open his eyes to every barbaric thing that Hanuman li Tosh has done in his name, and fall across the city in wrath. He’ll chastise him, perhaps even slay him – your father, despite his compassion, was always such a murderous man.’
‘But, Bardo, don’t you believe he is now a god?’
‘Do you think the gods don’t slay human beings as easily as flies – or even each other?’
Danlo thought of the Silicon God’s destruction of Ede the God, and he said, ‘I know that they do.’
For a while, beneath their tree’s silvery leaves rustling in the wind, they gazed out at the stars and talked about the galaxy’s gods – and fate and war and other cosmic things. Then Danlo turned to look at Bardo, and asked him about something closer to his heart.
‘Have you seen her, Bardo?’
‘Tamara?’
Danlo held his head still in total silence, but his eyes, gleaming in the half-light like liquid jewels, spoke for him.
‘Well, no, I haven’t seen her,’ Bardo said. ‘You know I’d heard that she had left the city – I never heard that she returned.’
‘But where did she go?’
‘I don’t know. Perhaps it’s only a rumour.’
‘Did Hanuman ever speak of what he did to her? Did he ever say that there might be a way to restore her?’
Bardo sighed and laid a heavy hand on Danlo’s shoulder. ‘Ah, Little Fellow – he never said anything, too bad. You still hate him, don’t you?’
Lightning flashed in Danlo’s eyes, then, and he said, ‘He raped her mind! He destroyed her memories, Bardo! All her memories of us together, everything blessed.’
‘Little Fellow, Little Fellow.’
Danlo chose that moment to take out his flute and press the hard ivory mouthpiece against his forehead. He drew in a deep breath, then said, ‘But I … must not hate. I try so hard not to hate.’
‘And I love you for such nobility,’ Bardo said, ‘but as for myself, I try to let all my hatred for that worm of a man fill my belly like firewine. It will make it easier to destroy him when the time comes.’
Slowly Danlo shook his head. ‘You know that I would not wish to see any harm come to him.’
‘Well, perhaps you should. Perhaps it would be best if you’d forswear your vow and find a way to move close to him. And then …’
‘Yes?’
‘And then kill him, by God! Slip a knife into his treacherous heart or squeeze the breath from his lying throat!’
At the mere invocation of such terrible images, Danlo’s own breath caught in his chest. He gripped his flute as tightly as a drowning man being offered a stick to pull him out of icy, black waters. And then, as he realized the impossibility of what Bardo had suggested, he slowly relaxed and smiled in deep amusement. ‘You know that I could never harm him,’ he said.
‘Well, I do know that, too bad. And that is why, short of war, there’s little hope of stopping him.’
‘But there is still our mission, yes? Our hope for peace.’
Bardo laughed softly, then said, ‘I remember that your Fravashi teacher once gave you the title of Peacewise. But it takes two to make a peace, you know.’
‘But all people long for peace.’
‘There speaks your hope,’ Bardo said. ‘There speaks your will to make reality conform to the dreams of your lovely heart.’
‘But Hanuman has a heart, too. He is still just a man, yes?’
‘I’m
