man and woman is a star. Even as the New Order’s fleet fell through the manifold after gathering another fifty black ships on Monteer, Danlo floated inside his ship and fell into remembrance. Once, on a long night years ago on Neverness, he had stood in the bitter cold listening to Hanuman deliver these words to thousands of cheering people. How could you wish to become new unless you had first become ashes?
He remembered that over the millennia there had been other attempts to break away from the Laws of the Civilized Worlds and shape a new face for humanity. As the Fifth Mentality of Man reached its limits, anarchists from Fostora had founded Alumit as a world where all things might be possible. It was no mistake, Danlo thought, that Nikolos Daru Ede had been born on Alumit, and there carked his consciousness into a computer that had grown to be almost the greatest of the galaxy’s gods. And the warrior-poets of Qallar, after perfecting the art of using computer neurologics to replace parts of the human brain, had begun a campaign of terror and extreme proselytization to convert others to their way. They would have rewritten the Three Laws to allow for terrible mutilations of the bodysoul, but the Order of Scientists, as the Order had then been called, under the implacable Timekeeper, had opposed them. The first war fought with the warrior-poets had nearly destroyed the Order, but the Order’s superior command of lightships and the manifold allowed them to impose a peace upon Qallar. The warrior-poets agreed to many hated limits to their technologies of the mind – and over the seven thousand years since the Third Dark Age they had broken their agreement many times.
This, Danlo thought in the quiet of his ship, had been the deepest tension on every Civilized World almost for ever: that human beings were always secretly dying to break out of their old ways and turn their faces to something new. And human beings needed newness as a hungry thallow chick does meat, but the Third Law was right to proclaim that man may not stare too long at the face of the computer and still remain as man. How then should they turn? If women and men were not to fall as cold and mechanical as silicon computers, in what direction might they look to take on a new face, one truly human and yet beyond the fearful yearning and pride that had marked man’s visage for so long? No one knew. No one had ever known, neither the first Homo sapiens who had looked up at the stars in longing for the infinite lights, nor the warrior-poets, nor the god-men of Agathange. But many were the prophets who had understood that the pressure to evolve was the deepest, most terrible of all man’s drives. Hanuman li Tosh was only the most recent of these firebrands. But he was a religious genius, and more, a man with a terrible will to fate. And perhaps most importantly, he brought his Way of Ringess to the stars at a fateful time in history when people were prepared to burn worlds and turn a whole civilization to ashes if only they might create themselves anew.
Terrible pressure, Danlo thought as he fell deeper into the Civilized Worlds. The terrible light – people do not know what is inside them.
At last the lightships – and deep-ships and black ships – came to Madeus Luz at the edge of the galaxy’s Orion Arm. This blue-white giant was like a signpost lighting their way into the darker spaces into which they soon must pass. Only a score of stars lay along their pathway now to Sheydveg, itself one of the few stars to brighten this part of the Fallaways. The pilots fell on to Jonah’s Star Far Group, where the world of Shatoreth added to their numbers, and then they made a series of mappings towards Sheydveg.
For Danlo, floating in the pit of the Snowy Owl, this was the longest and most uneventful segment of his journey. According to Lord Nikolos’ orders, at Sheydveg he would say goodbye to his fellow pilots and fall on alone to the dense stars of the Sagittarius Arm and then to Neverness, but now there was almost nothing outside his ship to occupy his attention. The manifold between these two arms of the galaxy flattened out like a sheet of burnished gold. To enlighten himself, he might have taken conversation with Demothi Bede, but this lord of the Order stayed in his passenger cell, either sleeping or interfaced into quicktime, where the ship-computer slowed his mind as cold does tree sap so that time for him passed much more quickly. Danlo did speak with his devotionary computer. The hologram of Nikolos Daru Ede, with its bald head and black, mystic’s eyes, floated like a glowing ghost in the ship’s omnipresent darkness. Danlo had long since tired of Ede’s warnings as to the manifold’s dangers and his continually-voiced desire to get his body back and incarnate again as a human being. But he did not know the word that would take this noisome computer down, and in truth, he had been alone in stars so long that he welcomed almost any form of companionship. And rarely, Ede might even amuse him. Once, when they had just fenestered past a fiery white double, Ede reminded him for the thousandth time that the fleet of Bertram Jaspari’s Iviomils was likely falling among similar stars on their way to Neverness to destroy it.
‘And they have my body, Pilot. If the Iviomils destroy the Star of Neverness and flee into the core stars, how will I ever recover my body?’
‘We will not let them destroy Neverness,’ Danlo said for the thousandth time.
‘I should like only to feel the world through my body once more.’
‘And then?’ Danlo asked yet one more time. ‘What will you do with this resurrected body?’
The expression on Ede’s face froze into a kind of mechanical wistfulness. ‘I shall drink the finest firewine; I shall bask in the sunlight on the sands of the Astaret Sea; I shall smell roses; I shall suffer and weep and play with children; I should like to fall into love with a woman.’
Usually this conversation went no further, but because Danlo was in a playful mood, he asked, ‘But what if your body no longer has the passion to be a body?’
For a moment Ede seemed lost in computation (or thought), and then he asked, ‘What do you mean?’
‘Your body has been frozen for three thousand years, yes?’
‘Only two thousand, seven hundred and forty-five years.’
Danlo smiled and said, ‘My friend Bardo once died and was frozen in preservation for only a few days. When the cryologists thawed him, he found that he had lost certain of his powers.’
‘What powers?’
‘He found it impossible … to be with a woman.’
‘But I always found it so easy to be with women.’
In truth, Nikolos Daru Ede, the man, had always been too absorbed with his computers and his journey godward to love any woman deeply. But as for swiving them, he had been the founder of humanity’s greatest religion, and as with most such charismatic leaders, his bed had rarely been empty.
‘Bardo always had an easy way with women, too,’ Danlo said. ‘But after he was restored to himself, his spear would not rise.’
‘Then in the thawing of my body, I shall have to take precautions that my spear remains risen.’
‘Remains?’
‘Have I never told you the story of my vastening?’ Ede asked.
‘Yes, truly you have – you told me that after your brain had been copied in an eternal computer, your body was frozen.’
‘Of course, but what was I doing in the hours before I carked my consciousness into the computer and became a god?’
‘How … would I know?’ Danlo asked. But then he immediately smiled because a vivid image came flashing into his mind: the plump, naked Nikolos Daru Ede sexing with three beautiful women whom he had married that morning in honour of the great vastening to occur that afternoon.
‘Before I was vastened,
