any real doubt as to what the Fellowship would decide – if indeed they could decide anything at all. More than thirty thousand ships now orbited Sheydveg, and these held at least five million men and women representing a thousand Civilized Worlds. Many of these were princes or gurus, exemplars or elders or arhats. Many there were who might have wished to command the fleet themselves, but except for Markoman of Solsken and Prince Henrios li Ashtoreth, no one was so deluded as to imagine that he could match the skills of even the youngest of lightship pilots. Their debate, then, centred round how they should choose between the Sonderval and Cristobel as Lord Pilot of the Fellowship. (Or if they should favour Helena Charbo or some other master pilot less vainglorious.) Some held that each man and woman of the Fellowship should cast a vote for whomever he believed to be the greatest pilot. Some thought this unfair since a few worlds had sent more than fifty deep-ships carrying thousands of soldiers in each, while many worlds had sent only a few score of black ships; each individual world, it was argued, should cast a single vote.
There isn’t space here to describe the tortuous pathways by which these many people of many worlds came to a decision. It took them sixteen days to agree that each world would indeed have one vote. It took them much less time to cast these votes in favour of allowing the pilots of both Orders to lead them; as Danlo had hoped, they chose the Sonderval as Lord Pilot of the Fellowship of Free Worlds. But the Sonderval was not to be their autarch or ruler; his power was as a warlord only, to command them in battle if they should decide on war. This crucial decision – and many others relating to grand strategy – they would make for themselves. And if they should win against the Ringists and force a peace upon Neverness, it was they who would decide its terms.
The effect of allowing the Civilized Worlds a greater part in wielding power was profound. Although it limited the Sonderval’s freedom to impose his will upon those he led, it actually strengthened his leadership, for it strengthened the feeling of fellowship just beginning to flower among these many worlds like a delicate, new bud. Among those who would die together in war, between leader and led, there can never be too much fellowship. This, too, was part of Danlo’s plan. Many thanked him for his part in ending the stalemate between Cristobel and the Sonderval and playing midwife to the birth of the true Fellowship of Free Worlds. But when Lord Demothi Bede congratulated him on a fine work of diplomacy, his response was strange.
‘Truly, I have helped close the rift between our two Orders of pilots,’ he said in the quiet of his ship’s pit. As he spoke to Demothi Bede (and to the Ede imago), he touched the lightning-bolt scar cut deeply into his forehead.
‘Even Cristobel has accepted the inevitable,’ the Ede imago said with a programmed smile.
‘As well he should,’ Demothi Bede said, ‘considering the Sonderval’s graciousness.’
The Sonderval, after being chosen to lead the fleet, had invited Cristobel and the other ronin pilots to take vows as pilots of the New Order. As an incentive, he had offered to make Cristobel and Alesar Estarei pilot-captains of the newly-formed Eleventh and Twelfth battle groups – and even named Cristobel as his counsellor in all matters of tactics and strategy. Given the Sonderval’s private ways, this would prove an empty honour, but it seemed to cool the fiery Cristobel nevertheless.
‘All has fallen out as you’d hoped,’ Demothi Bede said to Danlo as he played with a mole on the side of his face. ‘Even Prince Henrios has agreed to lead his ships under Alesar Estarei’s command – a prince of Tolikna Tak under orders from a simple master pilot!’
‘Yes,’ Danlo agreed, ‘there is peace among the Fellowship, now.’
‘Then why do you seem so sad?’
Danlo stared out of his lightship’s window at the flashing lights of thirty thousand other ships spread out through near-space above Sheydveg. His eyes fell grave and deep, and he said, ‘What if I have brought a peace to the Fellowship … only to have created a better engine for the waging of war?’
‘That’s possible, Pilot. But what if you’ve helped create a stronger Fellowship dedicated to avoiding war? Isn’t it possible that there will be no war?’
But the Fellowship was already at war, or so Sabri Dur li Kadir and many others argued during the days that followed. The Ringists’ ambush and destruction of fifteen ships certainly constituted an act of war, so why should the Fellowship pretend that there still might be peace? Could they trust the Ringists not to fall against them in full strength out of the howling black forest of the manifold? Should they themselves avoid destroying the Ringists’ ships if offered such a chance?
‘We must fall against them before they fall against us,’ Sabri Dur li Kadir said in full conclave with all thirty thousand ships of the Fellowship. His face was as black as obsidian and as sharp. ‘We must lay our plans as soon as possible and then attack.’
There were, however, voices of peace as well. Danlo and Lord Bede argued that the Fellowship should use its power to discourage the Ringists from war, while Makara of Newvannia, a well-known arhat, suggested that the Ringists’ raid might be overlooked as an unfortunate accident. And one of the Vesper exemplars, Onan Nayati, who was either a coward or a very wise man, told everyone that they would be mad to make war upon the Ringists for they would be as a hawk attacking an eagle. This led to a measuring of their respective strengths. The Fellowship comprised one thousand and ninety-one worlds opposed to Ringism – and four more if the alien worlds of Darghin, Fravashing, Elidin, and Scutarix could be counted, which of course they couldn’t because they would never send ships to fight in a human war. Perhaps four hundred worlds had decided to remain neutral, and an equal number warred with themselves as to whom they would support. That left some twelve hundred and two worlds as fervently Ringist, many of them the richest and most powerful of the Civilized Worlds. Onan Nayati estimated that they could gather a fleet of at least thirty-five thousand deep-ships and black ships. And as for the lightships of Neverness, the shining swords of the night, Cristobel said that Lord Salmalin would command four hundred and fifty-one. The odds, then, had fallen against the Fellowship, especially considering that in battle one lightship would be worth at least twenty black ships. The pilots and princes of the Fellowship might very well have decided to wait upon war, but then something happened that broadened their field of vision and reminded them that stars burned with a terrible purpose far beyond their own.
On the 83rd day of false winter a single lightship fell out to join the others in orbit above Sheydveg. This was the Infinite Rose, piloted by Arrio Verjin, a master pilot of the Old Order. That is, he had been of the Order before returning to Neverness from a journey lasting several years. But when he had seen how Ringism had ruined his beloved Order and made virtual slaves out of pilots whom he had respected all his life, he had fled across the stars to the gathering at Sheydveg. And he brought with him the most astonishing news: he had witnessed with his own eyes a battle fought among the gods. In the spaces towards the core – beyond the Morbio Inferiore where the stars blaze as densely as exploding fireworks – the god known as Pure Mind had been slain. The moon-sized lobes of his great brain had been pulverized into a glowing dust. Arrio told of the destruction of a whole region of stars, impossibly intense lights erupting out of blackness, the detonation of the zero-point energies of the spacetime continuum itself. The radiations from this apocalypse were vaster than that of a hundred supernovas. Only the gods, he said, could wield such technologies. He did not know why one god would wish to slay another. When Danlo told him of the Solid State Entity and the war among the gods, Arrio said, ‘Perhaps it was the Silicon God, then, who did this terrible thing. Or perhaps one of his allies, Chimene or the Degula Trinity. How will we ever know? But the effects of what has happened will run deep.’
And the first and most terrible effect, Arrio said, was that these explosions had created huge distortions beneath spacetime, a kind of deadly bubbling known as a Danladi-set expansion. For Arrio Verjin it had been like a tidal wave sweeping towards his fragile ship.
