Amaris mixed to fortify me. When it came time for my vastening, I’m afraid I was still tumescent.’
Danlo was now struggling hard not to laugh. ‘You went to your vastening with your spear pointing towards the heavens, yes?’
‘Well, I wore a kimono, Pilot. It was voluminous. No one could see.’
‘But after you had died … that is, after the programmers had torn apart your brain and scanned and copied its pattern, after this vastening into what you believe is a greater life, could it be that your body returned to a less excited state?’
‘My vastening lasted only nine and a half seconds. Pilot.’
‘I had thought it took much longer.’
‘Of course, the ceremonies lasted for hours – a great event requires great pageantry, don’t you think?’
‘Yes – truly.’
‘I had ordered the cryologists to freeze me the moment that my vastening was accomplished. Nine and a half seconds – not enough time for my spear to fall.’
‘And thus the Cybernetic Universal Church has preserved you through the ages?’
‘They froze me in my kimono. It was all quite dignified.’
Now Danlo laughed openly, deep from his belly in waves of sound that filled the pit of his ship. Then he said, ‘There is something funny about religions, yes? Something strange, the way men worship other men – even a fat little bald man who went into his crypt swollen between the legs like a satyr.’
‘You insult me, Pilot.’
‘I am sorry.’
‘Of course, the Architects of the Cybernetic Churches don’t worship me as a man. They worship the miracle of my becoming a god.’
‘I see.’
‘But it would be an even greater miracle if we could recover my body and restore me to a life in the flesh.’
‘Truly, it would.’
‘You will help me recover my body, won’t you. Pilot?’
‘I have promised I would.’
‘Even if my spear no longer rises, I would still like to hold a woman again.’
Danlo closed his eyes, then, as he remembered holding Tamara Ten Ashtoreth in the morning sun and the intense fire of their love. ‘I … understand,’ he said.
The Ede imago seemed to respect this sudden silence, for it was many moments before he asked, ‘Pilot?’
‘Yes?’
‘Whatever happened with Bardo’s spear? Did he ever regain his powers?’
‘Yes, truly he did. He … found a cure. Bardo is more Bardo than ever.’
‘I’m happy for him. It’s bad to be without a woman.’
Now Danlo opened his eyes and stared at Ede’s sad, shining face. It was the first time he had ever heard this flickering hologram express any concern for a human being. ‘I would like to believe … that we will recover your body,’ he said.
Other conversations with Ede were of more immediate moment. This little ghost of a god proved to know much about war. When he computed how quickly the fleet was adding ships, he observed that the Sonderval would soon face the problem of how to coordinate and command them. And then at Skamander they received an unexpected boon of fifty-five deep-ships and ninety-two black ships, and the Sonderval’s command problem became critical. It was hard enough for the Order’s finest pilots to move through the manifold as a single, coordinated body of ships. It was harder still for the Sonderval, as the lone Lord Pilot, to aid the black ships’ pilots in mapping through the swirling spaces of the manifold. In his overweening arrogance, the Sonderval’s first impulse was simply to abandon this huge fleet and let them find their own way to Sheydveg. Time was pressing upon him like the overpressures of an approaching winter storm. And he doubted the black ships’ and deep-ships’ worthiness in battle. He might actually have left them with a few lightships as escorts, but then an event occurred that made this strategy unthinkable.
It was just after they had fallen out into realspace around a red-orange giant named Ulladulla. The lightships had kept in good order, gathering as a group near point-exits only a few million miles from Ulladulla’s flaming corona. But the black ships and deep-ships, as they fell out from the manifold’s point-exits, scattered themselves through space like hundreds of dice cast onto black felt. As always, the Sonderval, in his brilliant Cardinal Virtue, would have to wait for them to make their corrective mappings and rejoin the lightships. This always took time, and the Sonderval always counted the moments like a merchant begrudgingly fingering over golden coins to a tax collector. And this time, the regrouping was to take more than a few moments because further in towards the sun, half-concealed by Ulladulla’s fierce radiance, five lightships from the Order on Neverness waited to ambush them.
So blindingly quick was then attack that neither the Sonderval nor any other pilot save one identified the names of their ships. But it was certain that they were Neverness lightships which had journeyed to this star to terrorize the black ships and their pilots. Any ship, of course, as it opens windows in and out of realspace will perturb the manifold like a stone cast into a quiet pool of water. A skilful pilot, if she has manoeuvred close enough to another, can read these faint ripples and actually predict another ship’s mappings through the manifold. But if many ships are moving as one towards point-exits around a fixed star, it requires much less skill to make a probability mapping, for the perturbations merge like a streaming river and are easy to perceive. If the pilots of Neverness had known of the gathering on Sheydveg – as they must have known – then it would be a simple thing for them to divide their forces and lie in wait along the many probable pathways leading to Sheydveg. In time, one of their attack groups would be almost certain to detect the raging river of the Sonderval’s fleet. It would be a simple stratagem, yes, but a foolish one, or so the Sonderval had calculated when he had weighed the risks of various approaches to Sheydveg. For there were many pathways through the manifold, as many as sleekit tunnels through a forest, and whoever led the Neverness pilots would have to divide his ships too thinly.
If the purpose of this attack had been to vanquish the New Order’s fleet, then the Sonderval’s reasoning would have proved sound. But the five lightships’ purpose was only terror. In truth, the lightships of the Sonderval’s fleet were never in danger, nor were the main body of black ships and deep-ships. But a few of the most scattered of these were in deadly danger. The Old Order’s lightships fell out of the sun upon them like hawks among a flock of kitikeesha birds. Using a tactic devised in the Pilots’ War, they manoeuvred close to then target ships and fixed a point-source into the manifold. In essence, they made mappings for their victims. Death-mappings: their spacetime engines opened windows into the manifold and forced a deep-ship or black ship to fall along a pathway leading straight into the heart of the nearest star. These mappings took only moments. And so in less than nine and half seconds, the pilots from Neverness darted in and out of realspace like needles of light. They sent two deep-ships and thirteen black ships spinning to their fiery deaths inside Ulladulla. And then as quickly as they had appeared, they were gone, five wraithlike ships vanishing into the manifold towards other stars far away.
This lightning raid stunned the Sonderval’s fleet. Almost no one had expected such a disaster,
