‘I … know that he is,’ Danlo said. He glanced over at the ghostly flames flickering in the fireplace, and he remembered how Sivan in his lightship had followed him from Farfara into the Vild. ‘If he has mastered the Great Theorem, then he is the greatest of all pilots, renegade or not.’
Tamara smiled at him as if she could look through the dark blue windows of his eyes into his mind. ‘You don’t want him to have such knowledge, do you? Such skill – even genius?’
‘No,’ Danlo said. He thought of Malaclypse Redring, the warrior-poet of the two red rings who journeyed with Sivan, and he softly said, ‘No, not a renegade pilot.’
‘Perhaps the Entity found the mapping for him. From the star of this Earth to Solsken. Mightn’t a goddess know the fixed-points of every star in the galaxy?’
‘It is possible,’ Danlo said. ‘It is … just possible.’
Tamara set down her tea cup then reached out to take his hand. She stroked his long fingers with hers, and said, ‘You’ve always doubted so much, but you can’t doubt that I’m here, now, can you?’
‘No,’ Danlo said. He smiled, then kissed her fingers. ‘I do not doubt that.’
In truth, he did not want to doubt anything about her. It was only with difficulty that he forced himself to play the inquisitor, to ask her troublesome questions and prompt her to fill in the details of her story. She told of how she had said farewell to the exemplars of Solsken, who, in appreciation of her services, had presented her with a golden robe woven from the impossibly fine goss strings of one of the harps that she had played. She had then sealed herself in the passenger cell of Sivan’s lightship. While Sivan found a mapping between the stars, she was alone with the silent roar of deep space and her memory of music. She could not say how long the journey lasted. But finally they had fallen out of the manifold above the Earth that the Entity had made. Tamara looked out at the blue and white world spinning through space and she was stunned by its beauty. They fell down through the Earth’s atmosphere to a beach of powdery white sands on a tropical island somewhere in the great western ocean. There Sivan had left her. There, on the beach between the jungle and a lovely blue lagoon, was a house. It was her house, she said, the little chalet of stone and shatterwood which she had left behind on Neverness. Only now it had mysteriously been moved across twenty-thousand light years of realspace – either that or somehow exactly replicated. However the house had come to be there, she regarded its very existence as a miracle. And inside was the true miracle, the greatest miracle of all. Inside the house, in the tearoom on top of the low table, she found a golden urn and simple cup made of blue quartz glass. Then, as she was rejoicing in finally returning home, a voice had spoken to her. She heard this voice as a whisper in her ears, or perhaps only as a murmur of memory inside her mind. The voice was cool and sweet, and it bade her to take up the urn and pour a clear liquid into the blue cup. This she did immediately. The voice told her to drink, and so she did, deeply and with great purpose until the cup was empty. The liquid tasted cool and bittersweet, not unlike the kalla that she had once partaken of in Bardo’s music room on Neverness. But it was not kalla, not quite. It was a medicine for her mind, she thought, some kind of elixir as clear and pure as water. The drinking of it sent her into a deep reverie, and then into sleep. She could not say how long she slept. But she had dreams, strange and, beautiful dreams of lying naked with Danlo by a blazing fire. In her long and endless dreams, she felt the heat of this fire wrapped around her skin like a flaming golden robe, or sometimes, entering her belly like a long, golden snake which ate its way in sinuous waves up her spine. And then she dreamed of Danlo’s deep blue eyes and his golden voice and his long, scarred hands; she had dreamed that Danlo was holding her, and playing his flute for her, and talking softly to her, always speaking to her most fundamental desire, which was to come truly alive and awaken all things into a deeper life. When she herself had finally awoken – after untold hours or days – she found herself lying naked on the furs of her fireroom. She was cold and shivering on the outside, in the hardness of her white skin, but inside all was fire and memory, a haunting memory of all the moments she had ever spent with Danlo, and more, much more, a secret knowledge of who she really was and why she had come to be. She leapt to her feet to dance, then, to rejoice at this miracle of herself and give thanks for the long awaited healing of her soul.
Soon after this, a lightship landed outside her house on the beach. She was bidden to take passage on this ship. She couldn’t say for truth if it was Sivan’s ship for she was not allowed to see its pilot. After entering the guest cell, unmet and alone, there was a quick journey across the blue, peaceful ocean. The ship then fell to earth on the beach just north of Danlo’s house. While Danlo was taking his walk some five miles to the south, Tamara had left this mysterious ship and walked across the beach. She had found Danlo’s lightship, the Snowy Owl, half-buried in the dune sands. She had found the house. There, in the cold meditation room, she had waited for Danlo to return. She had stood by the dark window all during twilight, watching and waiting and remembering the lightning flash of recognition in Danlo’s eyes the night that they had first seen each other so long ago.
All this she recounted for Danlo as he sat before a different fire and drank three cups of peppermint tea. Although he waited quietly with all the concentration of a kittakee-sha bird listening for a worm deep beneath the snow, many things about her story disturbed him. For every question that she answered concerning her miraculous appearance in the house, two more questions arose to twist their way into his mind. For instance, not once did Tamara mention the warrior-poet who journeyed with Sivan. What had happened to Malaclypse of Qallar, he of the two red rings? Had the Entity separated the two men to test them, each according to his own strength and purpose? Had the Entity recited poems to Malaclypse or perhaps trapped him on a different beach to face a ravening tiger with nothing more than his killing knife? It worried Danlo to think of the warrior-poet loose somewhere upon the planet. And even more he worried that Sivan might survive the Entity’s tests and ask a question that he himself wanted answered. For surely Sivan would ask where he might find Mallory Ringess. Tamara had hinted that Sivan had his own reasons for seeking Mallory Ringess, perhaps no more than the simple hope of learning how to apply the Great Theorem and thus to fall through the galaxy at will. Or perhaps he had other reasons, deeper reasons. Sometimes, when Danlo descried the future and beheld the terrible beauty behind the pattern of their lives, he feared for his father. Sometimes this was his greatest concern, although it struck him as absurd that he should worry over the fate of a god. Because if Mallory Ringess were truly a god, then would he not keep his distance from pilots and warrior-poets and other human beings? Why else had he left Neverness at a time when his fame and glory outshone the very sun? No, Danlo thought, surely his father would never allow himself to be touched – especially not by a warrior-poet who had come to kill him. The gods could not countenance any violation of their godly selves. They might laugh at the conceits of women and men, or they might love them or slay them, or sometimes, as with Tamara, they might even lay their invisible hands on human flesh and heal them of their hurts. The goddess known as the Solid State Entity, it seemed, liked to test people – with knives or poems or promises of a happier life. As Tamara squeezed her empty teacup between her hands, she hinted that the Entity tested people in order to discover the possibilities of humankind. But who could really know? How could Danlo know why he was being tested, if he was being tested, here, now, while he enjoyed a cup of sweet mint tea with this blessed woman whom the Entity had restored to him?
‘I … am glad that the Entity has brought you here,’ Danlo finally said. He put down his cup and smiled. ‘You seem so alive again. So happy.’
‘I am happy. Aren’t you?’
‘Yes, of course – but I am puzzled, too.’
‘Why?’
‘On the beach,’ Danlo said, ‘on the rocks when the Entity wanted me to kill the lamb, She promised to tell me how I could find you.
