nearly lost herself in one of the arhats’ famous meditation schools. Finally, she said, she had made her way to Solsken, that bright and happy planet which lies near the end of the Fallaways. Of all the Civilized Worlds, Solsken is the nearest the galactic core, just as Farfara is the farthest. The stars in the night sky of Solsken are as dense and brilliant as grains of sand along a tropical beach, which is perhaps why the men and women of Solsken worship the night as do no other people. On Solsken, during the season called Midsummer’s Dream, there are always festivals and religious rites lasting from dusk until dawn. And there is always a need for musicians to beat the drums and play the flutes and pluck the strings of the gosharps which sanctify the Dance of the Night. Tamara, of course, in her training as a courtesan had gained proficiency with many musical instruments. In fact, she had played with some of the best harpists in Neverness: with Zohra Iviatsui, Ramona Chu and once, even with the great Ivaranan. Although her talent for sexual ecstasy had vanished with the rape of her memories, strangely her musical gifts had only deepened. And so the exemplars and ritual masters of Solsken were very glad to have such an accomplished woman play for them, and Tamara spent many nights singing the holy songs, using her perfect golden voice as a precise instrument that vibrated through the sacred groves and resonated-with the strings of the great golden gosharps. In this way, she sang to her lost soul, and with her voice alone plucked the ten thousand strings and made an unearthly music – the mystic chords of the sacred canticles which the faithful believed to be perfectly tuned to the wavelengths of starlight falling over the world. She might have spent the rest of her life there beneath the brilliant stars of Solsken, dancing and remembering and singing her sad, beautiful songs. But then one night, during the Night of the Long Dance, a man dressed all in grey had come out of the multitudes on the hillside and approached her. His name was Sivan wi Mawi Sarkis-sian, and he said that he had been sent to find her.
‘I can’t tell you how surprised I was,’ Tamara said as she stirred a tiny spoonful of honey into her second cup of tea. She would have preferred adding more, much more, but she avoided sweets the way a speed skater might potholes in the ice. ‘I had told no one my travel plans. Before I began my journey, I didn’t know them myself. I never dreamed I’d come to Solsken – that was something of an accident. Or a miracle – I’m not sure which. Oh, I do know, really, but this is hard to say. You see, I’ve come to believe in miracles. I’ve had to. It’s a miracle, I think, when a goddess takes pity on a soul-sick woman and promises to heal her.’
At this, Danlo sipped his tea and nodded his head. He looked at her strangely and asked, ‘Do you know where we are, then?’
‘Of course I do. We’re on a planet made by the goddess – the Solid State Entity. We’re in the centre of this Entity, I think. This planet is there. Here – this Earth. Sivan told me that after he introduced himself. He said that he’d nearly died in the manifold, inside the nebula of the Entity where the stars are strange. In what you pilots call a chaos storm, I think. He was very open with me. He said the Entity had saved him. And in return, the Entity asked him if he would agree to save me. As a mission of pity, of course, but I believe it was also supposed to be some sort of test. Sivan said the Entity was testing him, as She did all pilots who come to Her.’
Danlo let a few drops of cool-hot tea roll across his tongue before swallowing. And then he asked, ‘And you believed this renegade pilot?’
‘He prefers to be known as a ronin pilot. And yes, I did believe him.’
‘But his story must have sounded … utterly fantastic. Impossible.’
‘Well, there was something about him.’
After waiting a moment, Danlo said, ‘Yes?’
‘There was something in his voice. In his eyes – I trusted him immediately.’
Danlo thought that Tamara, beneath her surface worldliness and charm, was one of the most trusting people he had ever known. In a way she still had much of the innocence and open-eyed joy of a little girl. He loved this quality about her. Despite the mischances and sorrows of her life, she still deeply trusted people, and this made people want to trust her in return. Danlo, too, was glad to trust most women and men for the fundamental goodness of their hearts, though he often doubted much of what they might say or believe. And so he might have doubted what Tamara told him because there was something about her story that struck him as almost unreal. But he could not doubt Tamara herself. She sat in front of the fire with her dark brown eyes open to his, and there was something deep and soulful about her. He decided that as an act of affirmation of the one woman whom he could ever truly love, he would wilfully say yes to her judgement to trust the renegade pilot called Sivan wi Mawi Sarkissian. He would say yes to the logic of her heart, though he still might doubt the logic of her story.
‘Then Sivan must have somehow known that you had journeyed to Solsken,’ Danlo finally said. ‘The Entity must have known this to tell him.’
Tamara nodded her head and took a sip of tea. ‘Well, during my stay with the exemplars, I attracted a good deal of attention. As a harpist, if not a courtesan. And that’s part of the miracle, you know. It’s a miracle that I should have become slightly famous at a time when the Entity was searching for me. I believe the Entity watches all human beings on all the Civilized Worlds, but most especially, She watches for famous men, famous women.’
‘She watches,’ he agreed. ‘She waits and watches – that is what the gods do.’
‘Of course, but it seems that this goddess does much more.’
‘Yes, She heals human beings of their wounds. But I … thought that you wanted to heal yourself.’
‘Oh, at first I did,’ she said. ‘But the truth is, I was never really happy on Solsken.’
‘Then you journeyed here as a passenger on Sivan’s ship?’
‘Of course – how could I not?’
‘Then Sivan found you on Solsken and you journeyed together – and all this in less than fifty days?’
‘I wasn’t counting the days, Danlo. Who counts time in the manifold?’
‘Solsken must lie … at least twenty thousand light-years from the stars of the Entity.’
‘So far?’
‘Twenty-thousand light-years inward, coreward,’ Danlo repeated. ‘And as far in return. An entire journey of forty-thousand light-years – all in less than fifty days of out-time.’
‘Well, it’s possible to fall between any two stars in the galaxy in a single fall, isn’t it? In almost no time? Isn’t this the result of the Continuum Hypothesis that your father proved?’
Tamara’s knowledge of mathematics (and many other disciplines) had always pleased Danlo, and so he bowed his head in appreciation of her erudition and then smiled. He watched as the light from the fireplace illuminated the right half of her face, and said, ‘It is true, my father proved the Great Theorem. It is possible to fall point-to-point between any two stars – but only if a mapping can be found. Only if the fixed-points of both stars are known and the pilot is genius enough to construct a one-to-one mapping.’
‘It’s very hard to make these mappings, isn’t it?’
‘Hard? I … cannot tell you. My father, it is said, was always able to construct a mapping. And sometimes, the Sonderval. But for me, for almost all other pilots, the correspondences, always shimmering point-to-point, the lights, the stars – truly, for any two stars, there is an almost infinite number of possible mappings.’
