brother and sister pilots behind, he felt in his pounding blood the sense of shared purpose that connected him to them. And then, when the world of Thiells lay spinning beneath him like a great blue ball, the manifold opened before him. He entered into the raging deeps of the universe, and then he, like all the pilots in their two hundred lightships, had only his vision and his heart to guide him.
We call our region of the galaxy the Civilized Worlds. We believe that we seek for ourselves an ideal state of human culture beyond barbarism or war. If this be true, however, how are we to think of Summerworld, with its silver mines and slaves, as civilized? Or Catava where the Architects of the Reformed Churches use their holy cleansing computers to mutilate their own children’s minds? Or Simoom, or Urradeth, and so on, and so on? The truth is that we have come to define civilization very narrowly: we are civilized who honour and keep the Three Laws. And what is the essence of these laws? Very simply, that we agree to limit our technology. To be civilized is to make a choice to live as careful and natural human beings in harmony with our environments. The Civilized Worlds, then, are nothing more than those three thousand spheres of water and earth where man has chosen to remain as man.
— from A Requiem for Homo Sapiens by Horthy Hosthoh, Lord of the Order of Mystic Mathematicians and Other Keepers of the Ineffable Flame
And so the pilots of the New Order returned across the stars as they had come only a few years before. Although this part of their journey from Thiells to Farfara was much the shortest, in distance, as measured in time it took many days to fall even a few hundred light years between such stars as Natal and Acayib the Brilliant, for the manifold underlying the Vild was as changeable as quicksand and mappings made one moment might prove worthless the next. The Sonderval, though, led the lightships with panache and good order past Kefira and Cho Chumu, and Rhea Luz, all hot and swollen with its angry red light. Perhaps it was good chance – or only fate – that no pilots were lost during this first fenestration of window to window giving out on the treacherous stars. Once, when they fell through a Danladi fold caused by the explosion of some recent supernova, Ona Tetsu’s Ibi Ibis almost vanished into an infinite series of infoldings. But with great presence of mind characteristic of all her famous line, that wily pilot found a mapping which took her through a window to the Birdella Double, which was the next star pair in the sequence of stars that the Sonderval had set. There she waited for the two hundred lightships to rejoin her – waited with great coolness as if she hadn’t almost lost her life like a child smothered in sheets of wildly flapping plastic.
Most of the pilots, of course, would have liked to prove their virtue by finding mappings independent of the others, but accidents such as Ona’s befell few of them, and the Sonderval had ordered them to stay together. And so they moved through the Vild as one body of ships, remaining always within the same neighbourhood of stars. They passed Ishvara, Stirrit and Seio Luz, a cool yellow sun almost identical in shape and colour to the Star of Neverness. And Kalkin and Vaishnara, and others, and finally they came to Sattva Luz, a brilliant white ball of light just within the inner envelope of the Vild. From here, their mappings would carry them only a few more stars to Renenet and Akar, and thus to Shoka and Savona, where they would break free from the Vild’s outer envelope and look out on Farfara and the stars of the Civilized Worlds. It was here, just beyond Sattva Luz’s intense gravity field, that they came upon a quite deadly phase space. Or rather this menace of the manifold came upon them. Some of the surviving pilots were to describe it as like an earthquake; others spoke of boiling oil or point-set correspondences that shattered like a dropped cup. For Danlo wi Soli Ringess, caught in the worst part of the phase space, it was as if one moment he were floating on a calm blue sea and the next, a tidal wave of every colour from ruby to violet was breaking over him. He had almost no time to find a mapping to a small white dwarf near Renenet. Others, however, were not so lucky. (Or skilful.) Three pilots died that day: Ricardo Dor, Lais Blackstone and Midori Astoret in her famous Rose of Neverness. None will ever know how the manifold appeared to them in the last moment before they were crushed into oblivion. But all the survivors agreed that they had lived through one of the worst mathematical spaces ever encountered and were very glad when the Sonderval called a halt near Shoka to speak the dead pilots’ names in remembrance.
When the pilots finally reached Farfara several days later, many desired to make planetfall as they had done on their way into the Vild. They wanted to feel earth beneath their boots again, to stand in Mer Tadeo’s garden beneath the stars drinking firewine and talking of brave deeds. But the Sonderval would not allow this. They had reached the Civilized Worlds, he said, and though it might be unlikely, it was always possible that pilots from Neverness might fall out of the manifold like birds of prey at night and destroy their ships while they were on the ground.
‘We must begin to think strategically,’ he told them. ‘We must not regard ourselves as wayfarers needing a little comfort, but as warriors going to war.’
That there truly might be a war was no news to Mer Tadeo dur li Marar or any of the other merchant princes of Farfara. As Bardo had promised, his friends of the Fellowship of Free Pilots had journeyed to the most important Civilized Worlds to tell of the gathering at Sheydveg. They had called for ships, robots, water and food – and men and women armed with lasers, eye-tlolts, or even knives. The Farfarans, of course, had no experience of war. But then almost none of the peoples of the Civilized Worlds did. Farfara was a rich planet whose merchant élite opposed the spread of Ringism. And so they decided to send their own contribution to the gathering on Sheydveg: food and firewine, but also twenty deep-ships each carrying ten thousand hastily trained soldiers and secretly armed with lasers and neutron bombs. And they provided seventy-two black ships, which were really much like the Order’s lightships except that they were clumsier and duller, with hulls wrought of black nall and pilots who had only enough mathematics to take them along the well-established mappings of the Fallaways. In battle against the Order’s sleek, gleaming lightships, they might prove more of a hindrance than a help, but the Sonderval reluctantly thanked the Farfarans and quite peremptorily commanded their pilots to follow the two hundred lightships into the manifold as best they could.
From Farfara they fell on to Freeport, where they gained ten more deep-ships and thirty-eight black ships. And at Vesper their fleet increased similarly, and so at Wakanda. Their journey took them through the most ancient part of the Fallaways, through worlds colonized well before the Lost Centuries when the First Wave of the Swarming had reached its crest. Only some of these worlds supported the New Order’s mission to Farfara. Many chose to remain neutral in the coming strife. And many more favoured the Old Order out of age-long loyalties or welcomed Ringism as a force that would save them from millennia of stagnation. Some unfortunate worlds were divided against themselves, half their people embracing Ringism, while their brothers and sisters fought to oppose this wild and criminal religion. By the time the lightships passed their way, Zesiro and Redstone had nearly fallen into civil war.
The peoples of Fostora, too, were close to killing each other. The Fostorans, of course, were famous throughout the Civilized Worlds for creating the Silicon God. They well remembered this great crime against the Three Laws, and many Fostorans, in their undying shame, were ready to give their lives that such an abomination would never come into being again. But others on this dark, cold world had more ancient dreams. Like their forefathers five thousand years before, they chafed at the limitations of the Three Laws. While they were not willing to make another god-computer that might threaten the Civilized Worlds and perhaps all the galaxy’s stars, they fell into love with the idea that they might make themselves as gods. And so they became Ringists mind, body and soul. They fought to nullify the Three Laws and remake the Civilized Worlds as a paradise where men and women might move towards godhood. How this miracle of evolution might occur, no one quite knew. But they believed the words of Hanuman li Tosh’s missionaries, that for
