is, of course, impossible to identify a lightship solely from tells it makes in the manifold. But when Danlo closed his eyes, he saw two ships spinning towards him like drillworms: the Cantor’s Dream and the Fire Drinker, piloted by the bloodthirsty Marja Valasquez.
‘What shall we do – shall we flee?’
Even as the Snowy Owl fell deeper into the manifold towards the core stars, Danlo searched this neighbourhood’s flickering boundary, waiting to see if any more ships pursued him. After he had counted ten more heartbeats, he said, ‘Yes, we shall flee.’
And so Danlo took his ship into other spaces, the blue-black invariant spaces and segmented spaces and klein tubes that bent back upon themselves like a snake swallowing its tail. For four days this pursuit lasted. When Danlo grew so tired that his eyes burned and his head ached as if pressed by the slow grind of glacier ice, the Ede imago reminded him that he couldn’t go for ever without sleep. Danlo’s reply, when he finally managed to force the words from his cracked, bleeding lips, was simple and to the point: ‘Neither can the other pilots.’
Somewhere beyond the double star known as the Almira Twins, Danlo lost one of the other ships. For half a day he fell through a Zeeman space as flat and green as a field of grass, and he descried the tells of only one other ship. After he had mapped through a short but particularly tortuous point-set tunnel and only a single spark emerged from its black, empty mouth, he felt certain that only a single ship followed him.
‘Must we still flee?’ the Ede imago asked Danlo. ‘You’re so tired you can scarcely keep your eyes open.’
Danlo was tired, so dreadfully tired that he felt it as a burning sickness deep in his belly. The one reason that he kept his eyes open at all was to look at the glowing Ede hologram. To pilot the Snowy Owl he need only reach out to his ship with the seeing centre of his brain, and its computer would infuse mathematical images directly into him. To pilot his ship with elegance and grace, he thus most often kept his eyes closed. In truth, when he interfaced the manifold and the beauty of the number storm swept over him like ten thousand interwoven rainbows, his eyes fell as blind to the sights around him as a newborn child’s.
‘I can lose this ship,’ Danlo said. At the boundary of this neighbourhood of space, a glimmering ripple now told of another ship. He was certain that it was the Fire Drinker. He remembered what the Sonderval had once said about her pilot, Marja Valasquez: that as ferocious and bold as she was, she had a peculiar dread of phase spaces.
For a while, as the manifold began curving into a blueness as gentle as the watery world of Agathange, Danlo searched for a phase space. But he never found one. He kept well-distanced from the Fire Drinker, however; always this other lightship remained just at the boundary of whatever neighbourhood of space Danlo passed through.
‘This Marja Valasquez,’ Ede said, ‘seems almost as good a pilot as Sivan wi Mawi Sarkissian. He, too, followed you at the boundary for almost your entire journey into the Vild.’
Danlo smiled grimly at this, and rubbed his burning, bloodshot eyes. He wiped the blood from his lips, then said, ‘Many times I tried to lose Sivan but never could. Even in the inversion spaces of the Vild. I always thought … that he could have closed the radius and caught me whenever he wanted.’
‘But not Marja Valasquez?’
‘No. I think that she follows me only with the greatest difficulty.’
‘Then you still hope to lose her?’
‘I … will lose her. Even if I must stay awake for ten days.’
‘But perhaps she was better rested than you before this ordeal began. Or perhaps she uses forbidden drugs to give her a greater wakefulness.’
‘Then I will lose her in a phase space, if I can find one,’ Danlo said. ‘Or perhaps a Soli tree.’
‘But if you enter these spaces, might not the probability mappings fall against you? Aren’t you at a terrible disadvantage in letting her pursue you?’
‘Do I have another choice?’
‘You might fall out into realspace and signal for a parlay.’
‘No, I will not do that. Floating in space, waiting in the star’s light like a dove with a broken wing … we would be so helpless.’
‘Then why not pursue her?’
At this suggestion a sudden pain stabbed through Danlo’s eye, and he asked, ‘Towards what end?’
‘Towards destroying her, of course! As you pilots do with your ships, dancing the dance of light and death.’
For a moment, Danlo’s deep blue eyes filled with a terrible radiance, and he stared at Ede in silence.
‘At least your chances would be even. Much more than even, if you’re the better pilot, as I’m sure you are.’
‘I will not fall against her,’ Danlo said.
The program running the projection of Ede must have called for persuasion, for now his dark, plump face glowed with all the craftiness of a merchant selling firestones of uncertain virtue. ‘You’ve made your vow, of course. But isn’t the spirit of this vow to serve life? You’d never harm another’s life – but consider the great harm that might come to many lives if you let Marja destroy you. Wouldn’t you best serve your vow by ensuring that you reach Neverness however you can?’
‘No,’ Danlo said.
‘But, Pilot, this one time – who would ever know?’
‘No.’
‘But think of it! You’ve let this other pilot follow you across four thousand light years. It would be so easy to take her into a klein tube. To quickly klein back across your pathway and fall against her, she might never suspect such a—’
‘No, I will not!’
‘But if you—’
‘Please do not speak of this any more.’
For a moment, the Ede program caused his countenance to fall into the appearance of contrition. And then he asked, ‘But, Pilot, what will you do?’
‘I will stay awake,’ Danlo said. ‘I … will fall on.’
And so Danlo fell, taking the Snowy Owl through the manifold as fast as he could. He made his mappings and artfully arrayed the windows upon the Fallaways, and he fenestered from star to star with a rare grace. And still Marja Valasquez in her Fire Drinker followed him. Soon, if he continued on this pathway, he must make a final sequence of mappings that would cause him to fall out near the Star of Neverness. And Marja would fall out too, and if he didn’t want to confront her ship to ship in realspace, then he must find some way to lose her before then.
He was wondering how he might accomplish this purpose when he entered an unusually flat null space. The manifold fell very calm; its colours quieted from quicksilver to emerald and then to a gentle turquoise without flaw or variegation of tone. Other than the Snowy Owl’s perturbations and the faint tells of Marja’s ship, no other ripples touched the almost deathly stillness of this space. Something was wrong here, he thought, something
