The Wild

by David Zindell

  ‘Please tell me you’ll stay with me,’ Tamara said.

  There was a moment when the whole world was as frozen and still as the deep winter sea, and then a moment later all was crashing waves and sunlight and seabirds crying out to each other in hunger and love.

  ‘Yes, I will stay with you’ – he was as close to saying these simple words as the beating of his heart. He wanted to say this almost as badly as he wanted to hold Tamara close to him and feel her sweet breath touching his forever. Instead, he turned to her and told her, ‘I am sorry. I … must go.’

  Because he could not bear to look at her just then, he began studying the lines of his lightship and calculating how long it would take him to dig it free of sand. The diamond hull, he saw, remained unmarked by the elements of this world, and it glistened all black and beautiful as it always had.

  ‘Oh, Danlo, Danlo,’ she said.

  He could hardly bear the immeasurable sadness with which these words were weighted, though it surprised him that her voice remained calm and unbroken.

  ‘I am sorry,’ he repeated. ‘But if my tests are done, I must go.’

  ‘I’m sorry, too. I had thought you would stay.’

  ‘No, I cannot.’

  ‘Of course – you still have your quest.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then you still must desire the answer to your questions,’ she said. ‘I presume you haven’t forgotten your questions.’

  ‘No, I haven’t forgotten,’ he said.

  ‘Then you may ask me what you will.’

  ‘Now? Here?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Shall I … ask you, then?’

  ‘Of course. If you’ve journeyed twenty thousand light-years from the Star of Neverness to ask the Entity your questions, then please ask now before you lose the chance. But be careful of what you ask.’

  At last, Danlo made himself look at her, and he was relieved to see that she was smiling. He remembered, then, that the Entity liked to make a game of answering questions mysteriously.

  ‘My first question is this,’ he said. ‘Do you know of a cure for the slow evil? The plague that has killed my people?’

  Tamara closed her eyes for a moment, then replied, ‘No, I really don’t know. But you know the cure. You have always known. Someday, if you complete your quest, you will know it again. You will, Danlo – whoever you really are.’

  While he thought about this strange response, he stamped his cold feet against the sand to warm them. And then he said, ‘I … do not understand.’

  ‘I’m sorry that you don’t. I really am, you know.’

  ‘Then can you tell me what you mean … in more simple words?’

  ‘No, I really can’t. But you may ask your second question – I promise to answer it as simply as I can.’

  Danlo blew on his fingers, then held his hands out to the sun. ‘Where can I find my father?’ he asked.

  Immediately, she opened her red lovely lips to tell him what he desperately wanted to know. It amused him that her answer was simple, clear, straightforward – and utterly useless. ‘You will find your father,’ she said, ‘at your journey’s end.’

  ‘And where will that be?’ he asked.

  ‘Is this your third question?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I only wanted to–’

  ‘I understand,’ she said. ‘But I’ve told you that you must take care with your questions.’

  ‘I see … that I must.’

  ‘Then if you will, please ask your third question.’

  He drew a breath of cold air and asked, ‘Where is the planet called Tannahill?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You don’t know? Truly?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Danlo.’

  ‘But I thought that you knew … almost everything.’

  ‘No, I’m sorry.’

  He stood smiling sadly as he stared at the black, mirrored hull of his ship. He had come very far to ask these three questions, and now that he had finally asked them, he was little wiser than when he had begun his journey.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she repeated. She looked at him for a long time, and her eyes were bright with compassion. ‘But it might be that there’s one who does.’

  ‘The Entity, herself? The one you call … the Mother?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘As I have told you, I am She.’

  ‘Who, then?’

  ‘I am almost certain that Ede the God knew the star of Tannahill.’

  ‘But Ede the God is dead, yes?’

  ‘That’s true. He is dead. But it may be that he is somewhat alive, too.’

  ‘Riddles,’ he said. ‘You speak in paradoxes and riddles.’

  ‘Then perhaps you should journey to Ede and find the answer to your riddle.’

  This simple statement of hers amused him, and he laughed gently. ‘One of the joys of being a pilot,’ he said, ‘is that other people are always proposing journeys almost impossible for any pilot to make.’

  ‘You wouldn’t find this an impossible journey.’

  ‘But no one knows where Ede dwells. In a galaxy of a hundred billion stars, it is almost impossible to find a lost god who has never been found.’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I know where He dwells.’

  She stepped over to him, then. Although she had no real need for secrecy, she cupped her hands to his ears and whispered the fixed-points of the stars where Ede might be found.

  ‘Why have you told me this?’ he asked. He grasped her hands and held them lightly between them. ‘I have had my three questions, yes?’

  ‘I wanted you to know.’

  ‘I do not think the Entity would have told me this,’ he said.

  ‘But I am the–’

  ‘I do not think the person of the Entity who is the Mother would have told me this. The goddess Herself. She of the terrible passions and dreams.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be too certain of this – She’s really a capricious goddess, you know.’

  ‘Then why risk defying Her?’

  ‘Because this will speed your return,’ she said. ‘Because I love you.’

  Without realizing what he was doing, he squeezed her hands so tightly that she cried out in pain. When he saw the hurt on her face, he instantly let go. He said, ‘I am sorry. I am sorry, but I … cannot love you. I must not.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I will never return here,’ he said. ‘I am sorry.’ He walked back up to the house, then, to retrieve his chest and stow it in his ship. With a shovel that he made of driftwood and whalebone washed up on the beach, he dug the sand away from the hull. These labours took him most of the morning. During this time, Tamara waited for him in the house. When all his preparations for the continuation of his journey were complete, she appeared on the dunes. She had bathed and washed the salt out of her long golden hair, but she was still naked as a newborn child. She came over to him where he stood by the pit of his ship; she came to give him something and say goodbye.

  ‘You could come with me, if you would like,’ he said. I would take you to any star, any world. Any place where there are other people.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ll stay here.’

  ‘I hate … to leave you alone.’

  ‘But I won’t be alone,’ she said. She smiled at him, and her eyes were infinitely sad and yet infinitely full of another emotion that seemed very much like wild joy. ‘I have the whole world.’

  ‘What of Sivan wi Mawi Sarkissian and the warrior-poet, then? Have they been tested as I have? Will they remain here, too?’

  ‘I really can’t tell you about them, you know.’

  Danlo bowed his head once in respect for her secretive ways. Then he looked up over the beach. The sun was high in the sky, and the sky itself was a vast blue dome covering the world from horizon to horizon. In moments he must break through this beautiful dome into the roaring black emptiness of the universe, and so he looked at her and said, ‘I must go.’

  She stepped c
loser to him. In her hand, down by her side, she was gripping the pearl necklace, the replica of the one that he had made for the real Tamara. She reached out suddenly and gave it to him. She pressed the teardrop-shaped pearl and the coiled string into his hand. And then she said, ‘If you ever find the woman you love, you might want to give this to her. If you find her, you might help heal her as you did me.’

  ‘But she already has her own necklace,’ he said. ‘The one … that I once made.’

  ‘Then keep this as a token of my love for you. Please remember how I made it for you.’

  ‘Tamara, Tamara,’ he said. With the forefinger of the hand that held the pearl, he touched the tears falling down her cheek. ‘If I had one more question left to ask, I would want to know if the universe could have been made differently. Halla, not shaida. Without evil, without suffering, without war. Without … pain.’

  Although her eyes were full of tears, they remained bright and intensely focused. She looked at him for a long time with her dark eyes that shimmered like the night-time sea, and then she said, ‘A better question would be this: Why did God create the universe at all? Why did She, Danlo?’

  He shook his head slowly back and forth and then bowed to her. ‘Farewell, Tamara.’

  ‘Farewell, farewell,’ she said. ‘Fall far and fall well, Pilot.’

  After this he went inside his ship and sealed himself into the pit. He waited for Tamara to move away before he ignited the rockets. There was a moment of thunder and fire, an intense roaring sound that seemed to well up deep from his belly and shook him to his bones. He left her standing alone on the beach down by the ocean. It took many moments for his lightship to rise up through the sky, and during this time he watched her from the pit’s clear diamond window. He had excellent eyes, and he could see her staring up at his ship for a long time. At first he could even see her dark eyes watching him, but soon he had to look very hard just to make out her lovely form among the ocean rocks and the waves breaking over the sand. Very soon she was no more than a point of light as small and white as a pearl. And then, after his heart had beat an uncountable number of times, she was gone.

  The whole world, he remembered. The whole universe.

  He pointed his ship upward where the blue-black heavens opened onto the spaces of the universe. And then he was gone, too, out into the great loneliness, out to the unknown stars and the infinitely bright lights of the Vild.

  PART TWO

  The God

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Dead God

  A man who dies before he dies

  Does not die when he dies.

  – Abraham a Santa Clara

  And so, after too many days spent planet-fallen on a lost earth, Danlo returned to the manifold. Of the ten pilots who had made the quest to engage the attention of the Solid State Entity, only he had survived to continue his journey. Li Te Mu Lan, Dolores Nun, Sarolta Sen, Rurik Boaz, Shamir the Bold – it is always fitting to honour the names of pilots who have perished seeking the secrets of the universe – these brave people had been lost into the beautiful but sometimes chaotic space that lies beneath the spacetime of the night. Their lightships and bodies would never be found. And Leander of Darkmoon, the Rosaleen, Valin wi Tymon Whitestone and Ivar Sarad – they too must be listed among the hundreds of pilots lost to the Vild since Dario the Bold discovered this vast region of exploding stars in the 2539th year since the founding of the Order. Unknown to Danlo, other pilots of the Second Vild Mission had been lost as well. Eric Rathborn, Alfreda Siri Serai and Lorenzo Scarlatti never completed the journey to the planet Thiells where Lord Nikolos and the hundreds of lords and masters laboured to found a city and second Academy that would be the seat of the new Order. And of the other pilots falling out among strange stars in their quest for lost Tannahill, who knew? Danlo himself knew that he might never set eyes on Thiells (much less again Neverness), for first he must journey to the star cluster where he hoped to find Ede the God. No pilot of his Order had discovered the slightest clue as to Ede’s whereabouts. Many, of course, believed that no such god as Ede existed. These naysayers denied the doctrines of the Cybernetic Universal Church, believing that long ago, when the man named Nikolos Daru Ede had carked his consciousness into his eternal computer, this computer had been destroyed. There was no way, they said, that a simple computer could expand itself – component by component – until it had grown into a planet-sized machine that called itself a god. Since Danlo had been given the fixed-points of Ede’s star by the Entity Herself, he never doubted Ede’s existence. He never doubted that he could fall out around this distant star and behold this god of gods – if he could find a sequence of mappings among the strange stars of the Vild that would lead him to Ede, if he could survive the manifold’s twisted spaces and the killing radiation of nearby stars that had exploded into supernovas. Many times, while he floated naked in the pit of his ship, he thought of the soft-faced Li Te Mu Lan and fearless Leander of Darkmoon and his other fellow pilots; many times he whispered a requiem for their spirits. As Danlo fell from star to star, passing through the many brilliant windows of the manifold, he wondered if anyone would ever know if he blundered into an infinite tree or a Soli-Ringess space, thus never again to pass back through a window into the world of flowers and starlight and the golden shimmer of a woman’s hair. During many long moments of memory and desperate dreams, he wondered if anyone would ever pray for him at his inevitable death.

  For one pilot who had journeyed with him into the Entity, he said neither requiem nor prayer. This was the renegade, Sivan wi Mawi Sarkissian. Danlo was certain that Sivan and the warrior-poet known as Malaclypse Redring had somehow survived the chaos space that had killed Leander and the others. And he was almost certain that Sivan had survived whatever tests that the Entity had put to him: as before on his journey from Farfara – as Danlo moved further and further from the fading stars of the Entity – he detected the composition waves of another lightship falling through the manifold. Mysteriously, this ship remained always at the boundary of whatever neighbourhood of stars in which he found himself. It followed him from star to star toward the star of Ede. Certainly, Danlo thought, this ghostlike ship must be the Red Dragon, bearing its precious cargo of a ronin pilot and a murderous warrior-poet. Certainly the warrior-poet must still hope that Danlo would inevitably lead him to his father, and then Malaclypse of the red ring and killing knife might finally put an end to the ambitious career of Mallory Ringess. But Danlo did not intend to lead the warrior-poet to his father. He tried many times to elude Sivan’s ship. Outside his window were ten billion stars as ancient and luminous as thoughts in the mind of God. He fled into these glorious stars. Once he fell out near the corona of a hot blue subdwarf that nearly resembled the central star of the Ring Nebula in Lyra; once he fenestered through a sequence of a hundred fallaways with such a wild and reckless speed that no sane pilot would want to follow him; once he segued off the plane of the galaxy altogether and passed into a globular cluster of eight hundred million stars that was almost a small satellite galaxy of its own. But all to no avail. Sivan’s ship remained always close to him, wavering like a mirage just at the radius of convergence. Danlo decided that Sivan was a better pilot than he, and so with a smile and a silent bowing of his head in acknowledgement of Sivan’s skill, he resigned himself to this relentless and rather eerie pursuit and turned back toward the distant lights of Ede the God. He tried not to think about Sivan and his ghostlike ship, any more than a man takes notice of his shadow behind him as he races toward the sun. As he plied his art of mathematics and faced his ship-computer’s brilliant number storm, he tried to accept the Red Dragon’s presence with all the nonchalance of an Alaloi father disregarding the lice attached to his hairy body. He fell on and on past countless stars, and after a time, as all pilots do in the dazzling black neverness of the manifold, he felt very much alone.

  In this way he crossed the bright Orion Arm. He journeyed ever outward away from the core stars, deepe
r into the Vild. He fell out around many stars, the yellow and orange and red giants, and the glowering red supergiants as huge and hellish as Antares. There were the blue and white stars and the common yellow stars much like Old Earth’s steady, golden sun. Many of these stars he named after the animals that he had known as a child. Berura, the hooded seal, Gauri, the ivory gull, Ahira – he left these names behind him like splendid jewels spinning in the night. Other stars he would never name. These were the remnants of supernovas, the light and dust and elemental matter blasted into space when the great stars died. The whole Vild was sick with this radiation and matter. Many regions of space were cloudy and opaque to his telescopes. More than once he fell out too near the expanding wavefront of a recently destroyed star, and was almost destroyed by fiery blasts of X-rays and gamma and on-streaming photons. Like a dolphin diving beneath the sea to avoid storm waves, he immediately fell through a random window into the manifold in his instinct to escape this killing light. But he found no peaceful waters there. Beneath the stars of the Vild, the manifold is deadly and strange. He took the Snowy Owl through the rare Loudon spaces that slowly melted before him like a scryer’s blacking oil spread across deep eye hollows; he fell through the violet, fractalling crystals of the much rarer M-set spaces that possibly no other pilot had encountered before. All these spaces were difficult and dangerous, though none proved so terrible to map through as the almost impossibly chaotic chaos space that he had finessed inside the Entity.