The Wild (29 page)

There is really not much to say of this part of Danlo's journey. He survived the many topological traps that opened before him. With ever growing prowess and grace, he made his mappings and his ship danced like a light beam through the many windows that gave out on the stars. Somewhere past a star that he named Kikilia, the whale, the manifold flattened out and grew much smoother. It grew much denser as well, and so his fenestration of the many stellar windows along his path was lengthened, and thus slowed down. At times, when he found himself moving as slowly as a snowworm – usually in some dead grey null space or another – he floated in the pit of his ship and played his shakuhachi. Piloting a lightship through the manifold can be much like going to war: one must suffer long periods of boredom intercut with moments of holy terror. But in falling through the universe there is always joy, too, and for Danlo, as for any true pilot, the purest and wildest of joys was in discovering new things. There was always the making of new mathematics, of course, the discovery of beautiful correspondences, the infinite rings and inverted trees and other mathematical objects never before dreamed by the mind of man. Although Danlo loved this kind of novelty as much as any pilot did, he took his keenest pleasure in laying eyes upon the sights of the real world. Some five thousand light-years outward from the Entity, out in that glowing stellar wasteland at the edge of the Orion Arm, he made an astonishing discovery. There, orbiting a common red dwarf was a blue and white planet identical to the Earth that he had so reluctantly left behind. And further outward in the direction of the galactic rim, he found a second planet cut with exactly the same configuration of continents and oceans as was that Earth. Without hesitation, he took his ship down to both these planets. In the cool green forests, on the sparkling tropical beaches, on the deserts and grassy plains, he found no human beings, but only a marvellous abundance of plants and animals growing and reproducing and living in innocence as they once had on Old Earth before the first man sharpened a stick into the first spear. He concluded that it must have been Ede the God who had made these Earths and that he was very close to the star cluster toward which the Entity had directed him.

When he looked out of his window he could see the Star of Ede as a tiny point of blue-white light burning through the dust and the drears of space. He decided to follow this star. He found a mapping to a point-exit only a hundred million miles from its fiery corona, and he entered back into the manifold to complete this simple fallaway from one window to another.

As the first man ever to lay eyes upon Ede the God, he did not know what he expected to behold. Perhaps Ede would be nothing more than a great black cube of neurologics as large as a planet floating in space. Or perhaps Ede would be configured as was the Entity: millions of gleaming moon-brains once interconnected by streams of shimmering tachyon beams that he could never have seen or even detected. Whatever shape Ede took, however, it seemed certain that the rivers of information bound up in the tachyons would have long since dried up and his neurologics would be as dead as stone. For Ede himself was dead – this was what the Entity had told him. And yet perhaps Ede was also somewhat alive, and this was the paradox that he had journeyed across so many light-years to resolve.

What Danlo saw when he fell out above the Star of Ede – a pretty blue-white star as hot as Durriken Luz – was utter ruin. Spread out before him across millions of miles of space was nothing but flotsam and jetsam, the remnants of a structure that must have been Ede the God himself. Danlo spent much time with his telescopes scanning this debris, which formed a dark and ugly ring around the whole of the star. At various points, he even risked his ship by rocketing near the ring's outer rim to scoop up bits of matter for analysis. In the samples he took, he found fused neurologics, diamond chips, molecular clary, broken protein chains sometimes pulverized to dust, silicon, germanium, dead assemblers, microscopic rods of spun diamond, and many, many pieces of demolished robots, none of which was greater than two microns in diameter. The ring itself was pocked in many places with glowing clouds of hydrogen, with various ionized gases, and with iron particles polarizing the star's strong blue-white light. In all this vast wreckage, however, he found no sign of transuranic elements or any kind of manufactured matter. He felt sure that the ring was all that remained of what must have been a vast computer. This black and purple ring around the star was a good two million miles deep and fifty million miles across. After calculating the average density of all this blasted-out matter, he determined that this computer called Ede must have been the largest man-made (or god-made) structure ever fabricated. In truth, the bits of destroyed circuitry that floated beyond his lightship quite possibly represented the greatest and densest collection of matter in the galaxy outside the black hole of the core itself. Ede's eternal computer must have been millions of times as large as any of the Entity's moon-brains, as large, in mass, as a large-sized star. Somehow, in a way beyond Danlo's understanding of the energy requirements of moving matter through the manifold, in order to make the components for his computer, Ede must have swept whole star clusters clean of planets, asteroids, comets – even wisps of hydrogen and other gases blown out from the many Vild stars that had fallen into supernova. Quite probably he had used disassemblers to break all this matter down to its elements, and then, over centuries of realtime, he had used other microscopic robots to build up and fold together the neurologics of his great brain. How this monstrously vast machine had been destroyed he might never know. Possibly the Silicon God had triggered the spacetime continuum's zero-point energies in millions of separate loci inside Ede and so exploded him into trillions of pieces. Or possibly he had undermined the fabric of spacetime itself. Danlo well remembered how the Silicon God's attack upon the Solid State Entity had deformed the manifold beneath and inside Her. It was possible, he thought, that if such deformations were great enough, the black silk of spacetime would unravel into an almost infinite number of strands, thus pulling apart any kind of matter folded inside. However Ede had been killed, it seemed that he must be truly dead. Search though he might, Danlo could find no piece of circuitry or other component alive to the touch of flowing electrons or streams of coherent light. He could not understand how Ede could also be somewhat alive – unless, of course, this ring of cybernetic wreckage three hundred million miles in circumference was only part of Ede the God. If the moon-brains of the Entity were spread across many stars, why not the units of Ede's eternal computer? Because Danlo wanted to know more about this god of gods – and because he still hoped to ask Ede the whereabouts of Tannahill – he set out into the nearby stars to find him.

In the deep light-distances surrounding the Star of Ede, as he formally named it, he found more wreckage. It seemed that a ring of dead computer parts circled each of the stars he explored, though no ring was nearly so large as the first ring he had encountered. As Danlo's ship fell in a huge spiral through this strange neighbourhood of stars, the rings became ever smaller. Some stars shone forth upon no rings at all, but on only dark blooms of floating debris that must have once been no larger than small moons. And some blooms – orbiting stars twenty light-years distant from the Star of Ede – were as tiny as granite boulders that one might stumble over while walking down a mountain path. But there were very many of them. In the star cluster that was Ede the God, Danlo counted some six hundred and seventy million rings or pockets of demolished computer circuitry. In a way, Danlo thought, Ede the God must have been something like a starflower opening onto space: the purple-black petals of his brain growing ever smaller and more numerous the farther away from the centre. And all of these parts were quite dead. It seemed that the Silicon God's destruction of his enemy was total. In only one respect had the Silicon God's attack upon Ede been less than completely ferocious: apparently he had spared the many different Earths that Ede must have made. Beginning at a radius of twenty-three light-years outward from the Star of Ede, almost every star was accompanied by a fat, round, blue and white, water-swollen Earth. This discovery astonished Danlo. He could not imagine why Ede would want to create so many copies of Old Earth. Just gazing at even one of these splendid worlds touched him with marvel and mystery. He thought that these god-made spheres of rock and water and air might somehow hold the secret to Ede's death (or life), and so he turned his lightship to the nearest stars to seek out these Earths one by one.

It was as he was surveying the sixty-sixth of these Earths that he made a thrilling discovery. The Snowy Owl was circling the Earth in a low orbit, no more than three hundred miles above the level of the sea. Below him, straight down through layers of ozone and atmosphere, was the great mother continent that had once been called Urasia. Through the breaks in the puffy clouds, he could just see the brown and white folds of the famous Hindu Kush – the mountains of death. And soon, in seconds, his lightship passed over the first peaks of the Himalaya range. Through one of his telescopes he studied the Icefalls of Sagarmatha, the highest mountain and mother goddess of the world. If Ede truly had created this world, then he had reproduced it almost exactly as Old Earth had been some ten thousand years before the Swarming. In its configuration of glaciers, in its snow-cut ridges and south-facing col, this holy mountain appeared almost exactly as the picture of the ancient and historic Sagarmatha that his computer called up from memory and painted for him with electrons and light. And the surrounding mountains of Pumori and Khumbutse precisely matched this computer-generated map as well. Below him to the northwest was a shining peak called Kailas – also known as Kang Rimpoche to the ancient Buddhists who had regarded this mountain as holy above all others. He easily identified it by the nearby lake, Manasarowar. It was as he was looking down upon this beautiful lake that his ship intercepted a signal. Surprisingly, it was a simple (and weak) burst of radio waves pulsing once each second like the beating of man's heart. His computer could decode no information written into these slow, steady waves, and so he concluded that it was nothing more than a beacon, much like the flashing lights on Neverness's Mount Urkel that warn the windjammers and lightships away from the dark and icy rocks below. But why should there be a radio beacon on a pristine Earth where the only flying things were the eagles and the owls and the winged insects that the lesser birds occasionally fed upon? Danlo fired his rockets and turned his ship through the cold, blue-black space above the mountains. He homed in on the source of the signal; one of the lesser peaks of the Himalaya to the west. He decided to explore this peak, and so took his elegant, diamond-hulled ship down through the atmosphere, the ions, the clouds and the wind, down to a high valley bare of little other than rocks and snow.

He came to Earth on a flat snowfield no wider than the beach outside the Hofgarten on Neverness, opened the pit of his ship and stepped out onto layers of crunching, old snow. Because he knew it would be cold, he wore his wool kamelaika, his boots and the black sable furs that he had been given when he first became a journeyman pilot. He also wore a pair of polarized goggles against the dazzling mountain light. The air around him was thin and clear and brilliant with light reflected off the ridges and glaciers all around him. Above him, just to the north, was the peak that he sought. As he squinted at this shining mountain, he made out the unmistakable lines of a building perched on one of its ledges. It was a small building, he thought a rather simple construction of dark wooden beams contrasted with glittering walls of organic stone. It looked much like the old Architect temples he had once seen on Urradeth. Why Ede would have built such a temple on a high mountain col on a lost Earth deep inside the Vild he couldn't imagine. He was certain, though, that the radio beacon had originated from some source inside the temple. For no good reason he hoped that this beacon – or the temple itself – might hold the secret of how Ede the God had died. Standing in the cold, rarefied air he was full of hopes and dreams (and memories), and so without further thought, he pulled his goggles tight over his eyes and began the long trek up the mountain.

It took him most of the day to complete this journey. A day, in the manifold, in the superluminal fenestration of a lightship, can carry a pilot six hundred trillion miles through the stars. But to a pilot carrying his own weight up a broken mountain slope, bearing a heavy pack full of food, tent, extra clothing and bottles of oxygen, a day is little enough time to cover more than a dozen miles. Although the terrain itself was not very difficult, too many days spent floating in the pit of his ship had weakened Danlo's muscles. He was unaccustomed to exercise of any sort, and this hard hiking in the thin, cold air quickly exhausted him. More than once he stopped to gasp in great lungfuls of oxygen from one of his five little blue bottles. Since many full men had climbed much higher than this without sucking on the nipple of a plastic bottle, he thought it was slightly childish to pamper himself this way. (He remembered that the first man to climb Sagarmatha, the great Li Mallory, had ascended the holy mountain breathing only natural air. Of course Mallory had died on his descent from heavenly heights, and although his ice-axe was recovered years later, his body had never been found.) Danlo, though, was high in the highest mountain range on a planet identical to Old Earth. Two thirds of the atmosphere lay below him, blanketing the green jungles and the oceans and the far-off dusty plains. Without sufficient oxygen he might have thrown a blood-clot and so suffered a collapsed lung or the stroke of death. As it was, his head ached savagely, and as he stepped higher and higher up a sparkling snow-ridge, it felt as though a sliver of rock had lodged itself through his eye socket. If he had been prudent, of course, he might have waited several days to acclimatize himself to the thinner air before beginning this excruciating climb. But it was his will and pride to hate prudence as a man who has been buried alive might hate the cold, clary walls of a crypt. In his blood he could almost feel the signal of the beacon above him beating like a drum clock, and so he panted and pushed his way up the mountain. His path took him across sunny slopes covered with rhododendrons and other flowering plants. As he plodded higher, there were only mosses and rocks shagged with green and orange lichens. And higher still, there was only bare rock, ice and snow. By the time he crested the last ridge and stepped onto the broad col on which the temple was built, the snowfields around him were growing grey and cold with the falling twilight. He might have paused to pitch his tent on the freezing snow, but it was his intention to gain entrance to the temple as soon as he could and to spend the night inside.