The Wild

by David Zindell

  Once, he remembered, there had been a pilot returning from a long journey to his friends and family. This was more than five thousand years ago on Arcite before the Order had moved to Neverness. The pilot – Chiah Li Chen – had fallen out of the manifold around a neighbouring star. He looked across only eight trillion miles of realspace to see Arcite Luz blazing like a beacon in the distance. He was so happy that he might have wept. When he fell back into the manifold, he was certain that he would reach his star in only a second or two of realtime. Except that, by bad chance, his lightship blundered into a rare Gallivare tube that had borne him twenty thousand light-years halfway towards the galaxy’s core – like a piece of driftwood swept along by an ocean storm. It had taken Li Chen more than a hundred years to return across the dense stars of the Cygnus Arm to his home. There he had found his wife long dead and his children’s grandchildren scattered upon a dozen other worlds. It is said that the broken-hearted Chiah Li Chen was the first pilot to kill himself by willingly mapping his lightship into the centre of Arcite’s dangerous red star.

  All pilots must return home, Danlo remembered. But where is home?

  Often, during Danlo’s dangerous passage to Tannahill, he thought about the ice-glazed spires of Neverness and the woman whom he had loved. Often, he thought of returning home. In truth, it can be the easiest thing in the universe for a pilot to return to the City of Light. The cantors, in their grey robes and their mathematical arrogance, have proclaimed the Star of Neverness as the topological nexus of the galaxy. Because many billions of the manifold’s pathways converge in the thickspace near its cool yellow sun, Neverness has always been at the centre of man’s greatest stellar civilization. ‘All pathways lead to Neverness’ – this is a saying of the pilots. Deep in the black belly of his lightship, Danlo remembered this. He remembered each of the many thousands of pathways that had carried him deep into the stars of the Vild. It would be almost possible, he thought, to retrace his way along these many twisting paths. Or he might find new mappings, new pathways – or someday he might blaze with marvellous insights into the secrets of the Great Theorem, and thus he might see how he could always return to Neverness in a single fall.

  But now, as he sought a mapping through the violent and beautiful spaces that underlay the Vild, he prayed only that Chiah Li Chen and he would not share the same fate. He prayed that he would reach Tannahill’s star after only a few quick falls. And so it happened. There was one bad moment when he almost opened a window upon an infinite tree and another when his ship began slipsliding into an inverted serpentine. Apart from these near-disasters, however, his journey was easy. Ironically, as Danlo would later muse, he had a much easier time reaching Tannahill than in leaving it.

  The greatest excitement of his passage among the stars came not from danger but from mystery. Not far from Alumit Luz he came across a red giant that he named Haryatta Sawel, which meant ‘the raging sun’. It was there, just after Danlo had mapped free from the spinning thickspace associated with this star, that he once again descried signs of another ship following him. As before, in his wild flight toward the Solid State Entity, this ship remained always at the threshold of the radius of convergence. He wondered if this ship was real – if it really fell through the manifold in such an impeccable manner that it remained always at the exact boundary of the neighbourhood of stars surrounding the Snowy Owl. It seemed as insubstantial as smoke in a cold wind or an icon instantiated into some cybernetic surreality. Perhaps, Danlo thought, this mysterious second ship was only a reflection of his own. The perturbations a lightship makes in passing through the manifold are hideously difficult to read, and such mathematical mirages and illusions are always possible. Could Malaclypse Redring, in Sivan wi Mawi Sarkissian’s ship the Red Dragon, really have pursued him halfway across the galaxy? This miracle of piloting seemed truly impossible, and yet Danlo sensed that it must be so. His sense of others watching him was primal, animal, and very keen. He remembered back to a sight he had witnessed during his childhood, the way a hungry gull would sometimes follow a snowy owl in order to scavenge any leavings from the rare white bird’s inevitable kill. Danlo could only think that the warrior-poet still pursued him in hope of being led to his father. He dreaded this eventual meeting as he might look with horror at two pieces of plutonium slammed together. Strangely, though, for himself he still had little fear.

  And so perhaps inevitably Danlo came to Tannahill. One bright, happy day, he fell out far above this lost and fabled world. With his telescopes and his keen eyes, he looked down through space, down between the patchy clouds of the atmosphere upon an unbelievable sight. Tannahill was a fat world of great oceans and bulging landmasses; but the waters of the world, as Danlo saw, were nearly dead. In many places, the shallows were choked with sludges and greyish-green mats of some weedlike marine plant, while the deeper seas bore the taint of acetylene and benzene and ten thousand other man-made chemicals. So pervasive was this pollution that oceans fairly ran with ugly colours as if smeared with blacking oil: metallic greens and muddy pinks and a dark, dirty grey that reminded him of frozen skin that has fallen into necrosis. The atmosphere, too, was horribly polluted. There was too much carbon dioxide, of course, and the oxygen-nitrogen ratio was dangerously out of balance. Danlo’s computer analyses showed much sulphur and halogens and even traces of fungicides. At first, Danlo wondered how the animals walking through Tannahill’s forests could ever get their breath; but after he had painstakingly scanned the whole of the world he realized that on all the surface of Tannahill there were no forests. Neither did there live any animals – at least none much larger than the worms or the insects that infested the rare patches of exposed soil. Tannahill’s three large continents girdled the world’s equator, and each of them had been given over wholly to the purpose of human habitation. And what dwellings these people had built! In all Danlo’s journeys he had never seen anything like what the Architects had made of their world. Except for the slopes of the highest mountains and the great gorges cutting the deserts, the Architects had covered every area of earth with great plastic cities. It was as if they long ago had set out to build a few hundred arcologies similar to the cities of Alumit Bridge – and then their architecture had exploded out of control, growing like cancers until their edges had met and melted together into a planet-wide smear of plastic. The transformation of Tannahill was the most total unbalancing of the natural order that Danlo had ever beheld. For such a criminal and insane act he knew only one word, and that was shaida. He remembered, then, a line from the Song of Life that his grandfather had once taught him: shaida is the cry of the world when it has lost its soul. Except that Tannahill had lost much more than its soul; it had lost trees and rivers and rocks and the fresh, clean wind that was the breath of the world. In truth, this plastic-covered habitat of twelve hundred billion human beings had lost its very life.

  Shaida is he who kills what he cannot give back into life.

  For a long while Danlo dwelt in remembrance of other peoples and other places, even as he orbited Tannahill in his lightship and studied the world below him. He might have spent many days of intime in such contemplation, but soon enough the Architects in their planetary city sent a laser-coded signal beaming up through space.

  Please tell us who you are and whence you come.

  To the Architects of Tannahill, it would be obvious that Danlo had his origins elsewhere than the seventy-two worlds of the Known Stars. All these worlds, as he knew, had been seeded by Architects of the Old Church, and none of them, with only their Church-sanctioned technologies, could produce anything so marvellous as a lightship.

  All these stars – all these worlds so similar to Tannahill, Danlo brooded. The pressure of their population must be truly terrible.

  After Danlo had explained that he was a pilot of the Order and an emissary of the Narain of Alumit Bridge, there fell a long pause in communication with the world below him. Danlo waited, as wary and watchful as a zanshin artist who slowly circl
es his opponent and expects any possibility.

  ‘Surely they will invite you to make planetfall, Pilot.’

  Out of the blackness in the pit of Danlo’s ship there came an unholy glow, almost as of a swarm of phosphorescent kachina flies lighting up a cave. The hologram of Nikolos Daru Ede moved its mouth and spoke according to the programs of the devotionary computer that projected his familiar human form into the air. According to his master algorithm, Ede could not help but warn Danlo of danger.

  ‘Surely the Architects cannot harm you unless you do fall down to their world.’

  After a while, from an unknown voice coded into the signal that the Architects aimed toward his ship, Danlo received a request for more information concerning the Order of Mystic Mathematicians, Neverness and the Civilized Worlds. Danlo spent much time describing his journey across the Sagittarius and Orion Arms of the galaxy. He told of his stay among the Narain of Alumit Bridge and that he had come to Tannahill in order to plea for peace between the peoples of these two estranged worlds.

  In the end, the voice of a man who identified himself as the Dedicated Honon en li Iviow of Ornice Olorun invited Danlo to take his ship down to a light-field near the coast of Tannahill’s largest continent. Danlo homed on the signal that was provided. Although it was twilight, with the edge of the world spinning into darkness, he had no trouble piloting the Snowy Owl down through the layers of the atmosphere. Soon he saw that the zone of Tannahill known as Ornice Olorun covered a fifty-mile-wide swathe of land caught between a range of mountains and the poison sea. Once a time – a thousand years before – Ornice Olorun had been Tannahill’s first city, a beautiful jewel of a city overlooking the white sand beaches of a beautiful ocean. Over the millennium, however, it had grown north and south, three hundred miles up and down the coast, and towards the west, sending out great plastic tentacles between the mountains to connect with Eshtara and Kaniuk and other cities of what used to be called the Golden Plains. It was near these white-capped mountains that Danlo found the light-field. As with the fields of Iviunir and the other cities of Alumit Bridge, it was built of composite plastics above the roof of the city almost half a mile into the sky. The Architects had called Danlo to earth during a clear evening; far off in the distance he could see other light-fields of other cities and the red flash of rocket fire. These flashes lit up the night in a shower of sparks that never stopped, for many Worthy Architects from the Known Stars tried to make the pilgrimage to Tannahill, and many more Architects fled Tannahill for new worlds around new stars. And who could blame them? Out over the sea, he saw, the air was discoloured by the hues of toluidine purple and other chloride chemicals. The mountains to the west – lit up by the setting sun – glowed a hellish orange madder.

  All Danlo’s life he had loved travelling to new and distant lands, and ever since he had become a pilot, it had been his joy to walk upon the earth of strange new worlds. But tonight his head throbbed with foreboding and despair, and he sensed that his feet would touch only hard grey plastic. As he was directed, he flew his ship down to a well-lit run near the centre of the field. For a while, he rocketed slowly along this run, casting his eyes left and right at the other runs, looking at the skimmers and jets and jammers – all the many craft crowding the spaces of this busy light-field. He moved straight toward a white structure that rose up from the field like an immense plastic bubble a quarter of a mile in diameter and almost half as high. The doors to this guest sanctuary, as Honon Iviow had called it, were open. As the Snowy Owl passed inside and the huge doors slammed shut behind him, Danlo wondered whether his status among the Architects was to be that of honoured guest or prisoner.

  You may debark from your ship now.

  Danlo opened the diamond doors of his ship’s pit, climbed down to the smooth white plastic that made up the sanctuary’s floor and sealed the ship behind him. For a while he stood quite still, squinting and pushing his palm against the pain that stabbed through the left side of his head. Somewhere above him, high up against the curving roof, incandescent globes blazed with a terrible, sick light. When his eyes had adjusted to the brightness, he turned in a slow circle to survey his surroundings. In a way, this strange guest house reminded him of a snowhut, for it was windowless and white and built into the familiar shape of a dome. But it was monstrously huge, and lacked the intimate, organic feeling of a snowhut’s interior. In this soulless room, there were no sleeping furs, nor fish-pit, nor drying rack for his clothes. There were no oilstones burning with a soft yellow flame, filling up the space around him with a soft, lovely light. Instead there were machines or objects that were the fabrications of machines. There were grids and assemblers and hinun wheels. Various robots, some half as large as his ship, were rolled up near the room’s circumference awaiting servicing instructions from some unseen master computer or controlling entity. The Snowy Owl, however, required no such servicing. It fairly filled the centre of the dome, a great shimmering sweep of diamond always waiting to fall back to the stars. It was Danlo’s pride that of all the thousands of vessels to be dragged into such domes, in a thousand years, this was the first time that Ornice Olorun or any of Tannahill’s other cities had been graced with the arrival of a lightship.

  We must ask you to remain in the sanctuary for a few days while tests are being made. We hope that you are comfortable.

  Danlo stood looking at the devotionary computer that he held in his hands. The familiar form of Nikolos Daru Ede had vanished temporarily, to be replaced by the imago of the Dedicated Honon en li Iviow. Honon, if this glowing imago were true to his real-life person, was a small, suspicious man but also, perhaps, urbane, proficient and shrewd. His voice was sweet and quick, and it issued out of the devotionary computer like high notes from a flute.

  You will find that food and refreshment have been prepared for you. If you require conversation or information, you may call for a face-to-face with me at any time.

  At the far end of the sanctuary, Danlo found a large area where the plastic of the floor rose up like a shelf overlooking the rest of the cavernous room. Here the Architects of Ornice Olorun had built something like an apartment. Set on top of this higher level was a bed, bathing chamber, sense box, dining table, and various statues of Nikolos Daru Ede sculpted out of some kind of dense black plastic. There was a golden-stringed gosharp on which one might play lovely music, and a spare devotionary to supply melodies of a more spiritual nature. And other things. Unlike the Narain, the Architects took care to maintain their physical selves, and so they had provided various ways for their guests to move their bodies. Adjoining the sleeping area was a moving walkway on which he might trudge for days without progressing more than an inch and a plastic climbing tree whose many jointed branches reached nearly to the dome’s curving roof. There was also a pool. But as much as Danlo loved splashing through cool, clear water, he did not swim in it for it reeked of chlorine and other chemicals. The air in the dome was bad, too. When he concentrated on the odours assaulting his nose, he could pick up the traces of hydroxyls, propylene, styrene and various aminoplastics. There were obnoxious smells such as ketones and mercaptans, and dangerous ones such as benzene and toluene and other aromatic hydrocarbons. If it were possible, he would have held his breath for all the time that he dwelled in the cities of Tannahill. But he had to breathe as he had to live, and so he climbed the stairs to the sanctuary’s apartment, and he settled in to play his flute and to eat the peculiar-tasting food that the ministrant robots served him.

  After he had bathed and rested, other robots came with needles to draw his blood. As well they collected skin scrapings, saliva, ear wax, lymph, urine, even the dung that he left steaming in the dark hole of the multrum. He balked, however, at providing these noisome machines with the semen samples that they requested. And it was only with the greatest difficulty that he allowed them to cover his mouth with a piece of soft, clear plastic and procure the exhalations of his lungs. The breath, he remembered, was sacred and blessed; a man’s breath sh
ouldn’t be sucked into a sealed plastic bag, but rather it should leave his lips to flow over earth and snow and be rejoined with the greater breath of the world.

  When Danlo had done all that he must do to begin his mission to Tannahill, the imago of Honon en li Iviow appeared out of his devotionary to thank him:

  You will understand that we must be careful of strangers, Danlo wi Soli Ringess. We must be careful of contamination.

  A few days later, when the biologicals had determined that Danlo harboured no bacteria, viruses or DNA fracts harmful to the people of Tannahill, the Dedicated Honon en li Iviow invited him to address the Koivuniemin, or Assembly of Elders, the ruling body of the Cybernetic Universal Church. In preparation for this long-awaited moment, Danlo trimmed his beard and combed out his thick black hair, which had grown long and wild during his journey into the Vild. Then he dressed in the black pilot’s robe that his Order required upon all formal occasions. He polished his black leather boots until they shone like mirrors, and he cleaned his black diamond ring of oils and dirt until it shone brightly, too. Because he disliked going anywhere without his shakuhachi, he secreted the long flute in an inner pocket of his robe’s flowing pantaloons. Thus armed to face these unknown men and women who might hold sway over his fate, he took the devotionary computer into his hands. Like any other Architect of Tannahill, he would carry this little jewelled box with him wherever he went.