the stars of the Entity. Almost immediately upon entering these forbidden spaces – after he had passed a great bloody sun twice as large as Scutarix – he sensed that in some deep way, the Entity was aware of him. Perhaps She wrought trillions of telescopes out of carbon and common matter and connected these to each of her moon-brains. Perhaps she continually swept the drears of space for anything that moved, much as a peshwi bird watches the forests near Neverness for furflies. Almost certainly. She, too, could read the perturbations that a lightship makes upon the manifold. Danlo thought of this as he segued in and out of complex decision trees, star after star, scudding through spaces fouled with too many zero-points, which were like drops of blacking oil carelessly spilled into a glass of wine. As he fell deeper into the Entity he saw evidence of Her control of spacetime and matter everywhere.
He saw, too, signs of war. At least, the pulverized planets and ionized dust that he fell through seemed as if it could have been the flotsam and debris of some godly war. Perhaps the Entity was at war with Herself. Perhaps She was destroying Herself, tearing Herself apart, planet by planet, atom by atom, always assembling and reassembling these elements into something new. With his ship’s radio telescopes and scanning computers, Danlo searched through many solar systems. He searched for the familiar matter of the natural world: omnipresent hydrogen, poisonous oxygen, friendly carbon. Floating in the blackness around the stars were other elements, too, giddy helium, quick and treacherous mercury, noble gold. All these elements – and others – he catalogued, as well as the compounds of silicates and salts and ice made from them. He noticed immediately that there were too many transuranic elements, from plutonium and fermium on up through the actinide series into the wildly unstable atoms that none of the Order’s physicists had ever managed to synthesize. And there was something else. Some other kind of matter. Near the coronas of certain stars – usually medium-sized singlets orbited by five or more gas giant planets – there were shimmering curtains of matter atomically no denser than platinum or gold. Danlo could not tell if this matter was solid or liquid. (Or perhaps even some kind of rare plasma gas.) At times, as seen from across ten million miles of space, it took on the flowing brilliance of quicksilver and all the colours of gold. Some of this matter was as light as lithium; indeed, it astonished Danlo to discover various elements whose atomic weights seemed to be less than that of hydrogen. This, he knew, was impossible. That is, it was impossible for any atoms that the physicists had ever hypothesized to betray such properties. Danlo immediately sensed that the Entity was creating new types of matter that had never before existed in the universe. Neither his telescopes nor his computers nor all his physical theories could understand such godly stuff. He guessed that the Entity must have discovered the secret of completely decomposing matter and rebuilding it from the most fundamental units, from the infons and strings that some mechanics say all protons and neutrons are ultimately made of. Perhaps She was trying to create a better material for the neurologics of Her brains, and thus, a better substrate for pure mind. It amused Danlo to think that She might merely be planning for the future. The very far future. All protons will eventually decay into positrons and pions, and thus it is said that the entire universe will evaporate away into light in only some ten thousand trillion trillion trillion more years. Perhaps the Entity had crafted a finer kind of matter more stable than protons, much as clary and other plastics will withstand the rot of a dark forest much longer than mere wood. If gods or goddesses possessed the same will to live as did human beings, then surely they would create for themselves golden, immortal bodies that would never decay or die.
Danlo wondered if She might use this godstuff to create more highly organized types of matter: complex molecules, cells, life itself. He did not think so. Because Danlo did not know what this matter could be (and because no mechanic of the Order had ever had the pleasure of analysing such bizarre stuff), he decided to collect some to show to his friends.
It should have been a simple thing, this collection of artificial matter. It was simple to send out robots from his ship to scoop up litres of godstuff, but it was also quite dangerous. For first there would come the difficult and dangerous manoeuvring of his ship close to a nearby white star. He named this star Kalinda’s Glory. He would have to make difficult mappings to point-exits almost within the white-blue corona of Kalinda’s Glory. He would have to enter the manifold in the spaces very near a large star. And then he must fall out into temperatures almost hot enough to melt the diamond hull of his ship. And still he must then rocket through realspace until he came upon a pocket of artificial matter. Only then could he stow the godstuff safely within the hold of his ship. Only then could he fall back into the cool and timeless flow of the manifold and continue on his journey.
From the instant that he opened a window to the manifold in order to complete this minor mission, he knew something was wrong. Instantly, the Snowy Owl was sucked into a grey-black chaos space wholly unfamiliar to him. This space should not have been where it was. Perhaps it should not have existed at all. He should have opened a window that led to another window directly to a third window giving out into the blazing blue corona of Kalinda’s Glory. Instead, his ship plunged into a whirlpool of what almost looked like a Lavi space, only darker, blacker, and too dense with zero-points, like sediments in an old wine. Almost immediately, his mappings began to waver like a mirage over a frozen sea, and then – unbelievably – he lost the correspondences altogether. He lost his mapping. This was one of the most dangerous of misfortunes that might befall a pilot. He began tunnelling through a mapless space seemingly without beginning or end. For a while, as he sweated and prayed and told himself lies, he hoped that this might prove no more complex than a normal Moebius space. But the further he fell from any point-exit near Kalinda’s Glory, the nearer he came to despair. For almost certainly he had never escaped from such a chaos. Perhaps no pilot had, he was lost in chaos. No pilot, as far as he knew, had ever faced pure chaos before; Danlo had always been taught that a fundamental mathematical order underlay all the seeming bifurcations and turbulence of the manifold. Now he was not so sure. Now, all about him almost crushing his ship, the chaos space began folding and squeezing him toward a zero-point. It was almost like being caught on a Koch snowflake, the crystal points within points, fractalling down to zero. For a while, even as he lost himself (and his ship) in a cloud of billions of such snowflakes, he marvelled at the infinite self-embedding of complexity. He might easily have lost himself in these infinities altogether if his will to escape hadn’t been so strong. Although it might prove hopeless, he tried to model the chaos and thus make a map through this impossible part of the manifold.
For his first model, he tried a simple generation of the Mandelbrot set, the iteration in the complex plane of the mapping z into z2 + c, where c is a complex number. When this proved futile, he generated other sets, Lavi sets and Julia sets and even Soli sets of quaternion-fields on a mutated thickspace. All to no avail. After a while, as his ship spun endlessly and fell through an almost impenetrable iron grey, he abandoned such mathematics and fell back upon the metaphors and words for chaos that he had learned as a child. He was certain that he would soon die, and so why not take a moment’s comfort where he could? He emptied his mind, then, of ideoplasts and other mathematical symbols. He remembered a word for coldness, eesha-kaleth, the coldness before snow. Now that he had finished sweating, as he waited for the chaos storm to intensify and kill him, his whole body felt cold and strange. In the pit of his ship, he lay naked, shivering, and he remembered the moratetha, the death clouds of his childhood that would steal across the sea and swallow up entire islands in an ice-fog of whiteness where there was no up or down, inside or out, yesterday or tomorrow. The chaos surrounding him was something like such a morateth. But even more, in its fierce turbulence, in its whorls, eddies, and vortices of fractured spaces breaking at his ship, it was like a sarsara, the Serpent’s Breath: the death wind that had killed so many of his people. It would be an easy thing, he knew, to let the chaos storm overcome him, even as the overpressures of a sarsara might fall upon a solitary hunter and drive him down into the ice. Then he could finally join his tribe in death. But the oldest teaching of his people was that a man should die at the right time, and something inside him whispered that he mustn’t die, not yet. As he lay in the icy darkness of his ship, as he touched the lightning bolt scar on his forehead, all the while shivering and remembering, something was calling him to life. It was a long, dark, terrible sound, perhaps the very sound and fury of
