David Zindell - RfHS 2 - The Wild

David Zindell

The Wild

Book 2 of Requiem for Homo Sapiens

The Neverness Quartet:

Neverness (1988)

Requiem for Homo Sapiens:

The Broken God (1992)

The Wild (1995)

War in Heaven (1998)

v4.9, 2006-01-13: scanned, fully proofread and formatted against hard copy by reb; there might be lapses in

formatting, italics in particular

PART ONE

The Goddess

CHAPTER ONE

The Mission

Each man and woman is a star.

The stars are the children of God alone in the night;

The stars are the wild white seeds burning inside a woman;

The stars are the fires that women light inside men;

The stars are the eyes of all the Old Ones who have lived

and died.

Who can hold the light of the wild stars?

Gazing at the bright black sky,

You see only yourself looking for yourself.

When you look into the eyes of God,

They go on and on forever.

- from the Devaki Song of Life

It is my duty to record the events of the glorious and tragic Second Mission to the

Vild. To observe, to remember, to record only – although the fate of the galaxy's

dying stars was intimately interwoven with my own, I took little part in seeking out

that vast, stellar wasteland known as the Vild, or the Wild, or the Inferno, or whatever

ominous name that men can attach to such a wild and hellish place. This quest to save

the stars was to be for others: eminent pilots such as the Sonderval, and Aja, and

Alark of Urradeth, and some who were not yet famous such as Victoria Chu, and my

son, Danlo wi Soli Ringess. Like all quests called by the Order of Mystic

Mathematicians, the Second Vild Mission had an explicit and formal purpose: to

establish a new Order within the heart of the Vild; to find the lost planet known as

Tannahill; to establish a mission among the leaders of man's greatest religion and win

them to a new vision; and, of course, to stop the man-doomed stars from exploding

into supernovas. All seekers of the Vild took oaths toward this end. But as with all

human enterprises, there are always purposes inside purposes. Many attempted the

journey outward across the galaxy's glittering stars out of the promise of adventure,

mystery, power, or even worldly riches. Many spoke of a new phase in human

evolution, of redeeming both past and future and fulfilling the ancient prophecies.

Altogether, ten thousand women and men braved the twisted, light-ruined spaces of

the Vild, and thus they carried inside them ten thousand individual hopes and dreams.

And the deepest dream of all of them (though few acknowledged this even to

themselves) was to wrest the secrets of the universe from the wild stars. Their deepest

purpose was to heal the universe of its wound, and to this impossible end they

pledged their devotion, their energies, their genius, their very lives.

On the twenty-first of false winter in the year 2954 since the founding of

Neverness, the Vild Mission began its historic journey across the galaxy. In the black,

cold, vacuum spaces above the City of Light (or the City of Pain as Neverness is

sometimes known), in orbit around the planet of Icefall, Lord Nikolos Sar Petrosian

had called together a fleet of ships. There were ten seedships, each one the temporary

home of a thousand akashics, cetics, programmers, mechanics, biologists, and other

professionals of the Order. There were twelve deepships as round and fat as artificial

moons; the deepships contained the floating farms and factories and assemblers that

would be needed to establish a second Order within the Vild. And, of course, there

were the lightships. Their number was two hundred and fifty-four. They were the

glory of Neverness, these bright, shining slivers of spun diamond that could pierce the

space beneath space and enter the unchartered seas of the manifold where there was

neither time nor distance nor light. A single pilot guided each lightship, and together

the pilots of Vild Mission would lead the seedships and deepships across the stars. To

the thousands of Ordermen who had remained behind (and to the millions of citizens

of Neverness safe by the fires of their dwellings), the fleet that Lord Petrosian had

assembled must have seemed a grand array of men and machines. But against the

universe, it was nothing. Upon Lord Petrosian's signal, the Vild ships vanished into

the night, two hundred and seventy-six points of light lost into the billions of lights

that were the stars of the Milky Way. Lightships such as the Vivasvat and The Snowy

Owl fell from star to star, and the mission fleet followed, and they swept across the

Civilized Worlds. And wherever they went, on planets such as Orino or Valvare, the

manswarms would gather beneath the night skies in hope of bearing witness to their

passing. They would watch the bright, black heavens for the little flashes of light

released whenever a lightship tore through the shimmering fabric of the manifold.

They lived in awe of this light (and in dread as well), for the Order had been the soul

of the Civilized Worlds for a hundred generations, and now it was dividing in two.

Some feared that the Order might be dividing against itself. No one could know what

fate this future might bring. No one could know how a few thousand pilots and pro-

fessionals in their fragile ships might cool the fury of the Vild, and so the peoples of

the Civilized Worlds gathered on their star-flung planets to hope and wonder and

pray.

There are many peoples on the planets of man. The Civilized Worlds comprise only

a tiny fraction of humanity, and yet there are some four thousand of these planets

bearing the weight of at least a trillion human beings. And bearing as well strange

peoples who have never been human. The Vild Mission fell from Treya to Teges to

Silvaplana, and then on to Fravashing, home of that beautiful alien race whose souls

are more manlike than that of any man. The lightships led the race among the stellar

pathways, falling through the manifold from window to window, passing by the

planet of Arcite, where once the Order had ruled before its move to Neverness at the

beginning of the Sixth Mentality of Man. None of the pilots sealed inside their ships

(not even the youngest or most inexperienced) had trouble with this part of their

journey, for the ancient paths through the manifold had been mapped millennia before

and were now well known. The pilots passed among the old red stars of the Greater

Morbio and on to the Tycho's Nebula, where the splendid stars were newly created of

gravity and dust and light. Few human beings dwelt in these dangerous places, and so

only the stars – such as Gloriana Luz, all huge and blood-red like a god's blinded eye

– felt the faint, rippling tremors of the lightships as they tore open windows into the

manifold. The stars lit the way of the Vild Mission, and the pilots steered by the stars,

by Alumit and Treblinka and Agni, which burned with a brilliant blue fire and was ten

thousand times brighter than Neverness's cold yellow sun. The whole of the

Fallaways was on fire, a blazing swathe of fire burning through the galaxy from

Bellatrix to Star's End. Had the pilots or others of the Order wondered how far they

had fallen, they might have measured their journey in parsecs or tendays or trillions of

miles. Or in light-years. The ships launched from Neverness fell five thousand light-

years along the luminous Sagittarius Arm of the galaxy, outward across the great,

glittering lens. They passed from Sheydveg to Jonah's Star Far Group to Wakanda, as

thus they made the perilous crossing to the Orion Arm, ten thousand light-years from

the star that they had once known as home. Some of the pilots called this flight away

from the core 'the westering', not because they fell in the direction of universal west,

but because their journey carried them ever outward toward the unknown stars

without fixed-points or name. But still they remained within the Fallaways, where

man was still man and few of the galaxy's gods cared to roam. They guided their

lightships away from the August Cluster where the Silicon God was said to claim a

million stars as his own. They fell out among the oldest of human planets, Kittery and

Vesper, and they avoided the spaces of Earth, lost and lonely Old Earth which men

and women were no longer permitted to behold. And so at last the Mission came to

Farfara at the edge of the Vild. Here the Fallaways gave out onto the wild, mapless

portions of the manifold that had killed so many of the Order's pilots. Here the

farthest of the Civilized Worlds stood looking out on the Vild's ruined stars. Farfara

was a fat, rich, pleasant world, and it was here that Lord Nikolos Sar Petrosian

commanded the Mission to make a brief planetfall. He did this so that the ships might

take on fresh stores of coffee, toalache and wine, so that the ten thousand men and

women of the Order might take a few days of rest beneath the open sky and Farfara's

hot blue sun. From the beginning, it had been Lord Nikolos' plan to halt at Farfara

while he sent pilots into the Vild to make mappings and find a planet on which they

might make a new home.

It was on the fortieth day of the Mission's sojourn on Farfara that one of the Order's

master pilots returned from the Vild with news of a planet suitable to their purpose.

The Cardinal Virtue – the lightship of the great pilot known as the Sonderval – fell

out of the manifold and rendezvoused with the fleet above Farfara. The Sonderval

told the professionals and pilots of a beautiful planet remarkably similar to Old Earth.

As was a pilot's right, he had named this planet Thiells' in honour of a woman whom

he had once loved and lost when a comet collided with Puakea and destroyed most of

the life on that unfortunate planet. According to the Sonderval, Thiells lay inside the

inner veil of the Vild, and it could be reached after a journey of only thirty-one

fallings. The Sonderval gave the fixed-points of Thiells' white star to the other pilots.

He told them that he would lead the way. He also told them – told everyone – of a

new supernova that he had discovered. It was an old supernova, many hundreds of

light-years away. But it had exploded hundreds of years ago, and the wavefront of

radiation and light would soon fall upon Farfara.

Lord Nikolos, although he disapproved of the arrogant, self-loving Sonderval,

approved his plan. He commanded the professionals of the Order to make ready for

the rest of their journey. On the night before the Mission would finally enter the

tortuous spaces of the Vild – the very night that the supernova would light Farfara's

sky – the merchants of Farfara decided to hold a reception to celebrate the pilots'

bravery. They invited the Order's two hundred and fifty-four pilots and many

important masters from among the professions. They invited musicians and artists and

arhats – even warrior-poets – as well as princes and ambassadors from each of the

Civilized Worlds. It would be the grandest party ever held on Farfara, and the mer-

chants who ruled that ancient planet spared no trouble or expense in creating an air of

magnificence to match the magnificent hubris of the men and women who dared to

enter the Vild.

Late in the Day of the Lion in the eighteenth month of Second Summer in Year 24,

as the merchants of Farfara measure time, the estate of Mer Tadeo dur li Marar began

to fill with people arriving from cities and estates across the planet. Mer Tadeo's

estate was laid out over three hills overlooking the Istas River, that great sullen river

which drains the equatorial mountains of the continent called Ayondela. That

evening, while the forests and bottomland of the Istas River still blazed with the heat

of the sun, cool mountain winds fell over Mer Tadeo's estate, rippling through the

jade trees and the orange groves, carrying down the scent of the distant glaciers which

gleamed an icy white beneath the night's first stars. Shuttles rocketed back and forth

between Mer Tadeo's starfield and the Order's seedships in orbit above the planet;

they ferried hundreds of master cetics and mechanics and other master Ordermen

down to the fountains and music pools that awaited them far below. And then, in a

display of the Order's power, a light show of flashing diamond hulls and red rocket

fire, the two hundred and fifty-four lightships fell down through Farfara's atmosphere

and came to earth at the mile-wide pentagon at the centre of Mer Tadeo's starfield.

Although no member of the Order was scorned or ignored in any manner, it was the

pilots whom the men and women of Farfara wished to fete. In truth, the merchants

adulated the pilots. Mer Tadeo himself – accompanied by twenty other great

merchants from Farfara's greatest estates – received the pilots by the Fountain of

Fortune on the sculptured grounds in front of his palace. Here, on soft green grasses

native to Old Earth, in the loveliest garden on Farfara, the pilots gathered to drink

priceless Summerworld wines and listen to the music pools as they gazed out over the

sinuous river. Here they drank each other's health, and looked up at the unfamiliar star

configurations in the sky, and waited half the night for the Sonderval's supernova to

appear.

In the Hour of Remembrance (a good hour before the exploding star would fill the

heavens) a pilot stood alone by the marble border of one of the palace's lesser

fountains. His name was Danlo wi Soli Ringess; he was a tall, well-made young man,

much the youngest pilot or professional to join the Mission. To any of the merchants,

if any had looked his way, he might have seemed lonely or preoccupied with some

great problem of the universe that had never been solved. His deep-set eyes were

grave and full of light as if he could see things that others could not, or rather, as if

the everyday sights of wine goblets and beautifully-dressed women amused him

where it caused others only lust or envy. In truth, he had marvellous eyes, as dark and

deep as the midnight sky. The irises were blue-black like liquid jewels, almost black

enough to merge with the bright, black pupils, which gave them a strange intensity.

Much about this pilot was strange and hinted of deep purpose: his shiny black hair

shot with strands of red; the mysterious, lightning-bolt scar cut into his forehead

above his left eye; the ease with which he dwelt inside his silence despite the noise

and gaiety all around him. Like a creature of the wild he seemed startlingly out of

place, and yet he was completely absorbed into his surroundings, as a bird is always

at home wherever he flies. In truth, with his bold facial bones and long nose, he

sometimes seemed utterly wild. A fellow pilot had once accused him of having a

fierce and predatory look, and yet there was always a tenderness about him, an almost

infinite grace. At any party or social gathering, men and women always noticed him

and never left him alone for very long.

'Good evening, Danlo, it's good to see you again,' a voice called out from the

hundreds in Mer Tadeo's garden. Danlo turned away from the fountain and watched a

very tall man push through the crowds of brilliantly-dressed people and make his way

across the flagstones and trampled grasses. Indeed, the master pilot known as the

Sonderval was the tallest of men, impossibly and intimidatingly tall. With his thin

limbs and eight feet of height, he seemed more like a giant insect than a man, though

in fact had been born an exemplar of Solsken and was therefore by heredity as

arrogant as any god; he had been bred to tall-ness and intelligence much as the

courtesans of Jacaranda are bred for beauty. He was dressed in a thin silk pilot's robe

of purest black, as was Danlo. In a measured and stately manner – but quite rapidly,

for his stride was very long – he walked up to Danlo and bowed his head. 'Is there

something about this fountain that interests you?' he asked. 'I must tell you, Danlo, if

you attend a party such as this, you can't hope to avoid the manswarms all night.

Though I must say I can't blame you for wanting to avoid these merchants.'

'Master Pilot,' Danlo said. He had a wonderfully melodious voice, though cut with

the harshness of too many memories and sorrows. With some difficulty – the require-

ments of etiquette demanded that he should always keep his eyes on the Sonderval's

scornful eyes high above his head – he returned the Sonderval's bow. 'I do not want . .

. to avoid anyone.'

'Is that why you stand alone by this fountain?'

Danlo turned back to the fountain to watch the lovely parabolas of water spraying

up into the cool night air. The water droplets caught the light of the many flame

globes illuminating the garden; the tens of thousands of individual droplets sparkled

in colours of silver and violet and golden blue, and then fell splashing back into the

waters of the fountain. Most of the garden's fountains, as he saw, were filled with fine

wines or liquid toalache or other rare drugs that might be drunk. The merchants of

Farfara delighted in sitting by these fountains as they laughed a gaudy, raucous

laughter and plunged their goblets into the dark red pools, or sometimes, in displays

of greed that shocked the Order's staid academicians, plunged their entire bodies into

the fountains and stood open-mouthed as they let streams of wine run down their

clutching throats.

With a quick smile, Danlo looked up at the Sonderval and said, 'I have always

loved the water.'

'For drinking or bathing?' the Sonderval asked.

'For listening to,' Danlo said. 'For watching. Water is full of memories, yes?'

That evening, as Danlo stood by the fountain and looked out over the river Istas all

silver and swollen in the light of the blazing Vild stars, he lost himself in memories of

a colder sky he had known as a child years ago. Although he was only twenty-two

years old – which is much too young to look backward upon the disasters of the past

instead of forward into the glorious and golden future – he couldn't help remembering

the death of his people, the blessed Devaki, who had all fallen to a mysterious disease

made by the hand of man. He couldn't help remembering his journey to Neverness,

where, against all chance, he had become a pilot of the Order and won the black dia-

mond pilot's ring that he wore on the little finger of his right hand. He couldn't keep

away these memories of his youth because he was afflicted (and blessed) with

memory, much as a heavy stone is with gravity, as a blue giant star is suffused with

fire and light. In every man and woman there are three phases of life more descriptive

of the soul's inner journey than are childhood, maturity and old age: It can't happen to

me; I can overcome it; I accept it. It was Danlo's fate that although he had passed

through these first two phases much more quickly than anyone should, he had

nevertheless failed to find the way toward affirmation that all men seek. And yet,

despite the horrors of his childhood, despite betrayals and hurts and wounds and the

loss of the woman he had loved, there was something vibrant and mysterious about

him, as if he had made promises to himself and had a secret covenant with life.

'Perhaps you remember too much,' the Sonderval said. 'Like your father.'

'My father,' Danlo said. He pointed east out over the Istas, over the mountains

where the first of the Vild stars were rising. As the night deepened, the planet of

Farfara turned inexorably on its axis, and so turned its face to the outward reaches of

the galaxy beyond the brilliant Orion Arm. Soon the entire sky would be a window to

the Vild. Blue and white stars such as Yachne and the Plessis twinkled against the

black stain of night, and soon the supernovas would appear, the old, weak, distant

supernovas whose light shone less brightly than any of Neverness's six moons. It was

a mistake, Danlo thought, to imagine the Vild as nothing more than a vast wasteland

of exploding stars. Among the millions of Vild stars, there were really only a few

supernovas. A few hundred or a few hundred thousand – the greatest uncertainty of

the Mission was that no one really knew the size or the true nature of the Vild. 'My

father,' Danlo said again, 'was one of the first pilots to penetrate the Vild. And now

you, sir.'

With his long, thin finger, the Sonderval touched his long upper lip. He said, 'I must

remind you that you're a full pilot now. It's not necessary for you to address every master

pilot as "sir".'

'But I do not address everyone that way.'

'Only those who have penetrated the Vild?'

'No,' Danlo said, and he smiled. 'Only those whom I cannot help calling "sir".'

This compliment of Danlo's seemed to please the Sonderval, who had a vast

opinion of his value as a human being. So vast was his sense of himself that he looked

down upon almost everyone as his inferior and was therefore wont to disregard

others' compliments as worthless. It was a measure of his respect for Danlo that he did

not dismiss his words, but rather favoured him with a rare smile and bow of his head.

'Of course you may call me "sir" if it pleases you.'

'Did you know my father well, sir?'

'We were journeymen together at Resa. We took our pilot's vows together. We

fought in the war together. I knew him as well as I care to know any man. He was just

a man, you know, despite what everyone says.'

'Then you do not believe . . . that he became a god?'

'A god,' the Sonderval said. 'No, I don't want to believe in such fables. You must

know that I discovered a so-called god not very long ago when I made my journey to

the eighteenth Deva Cluster. A dead god – it was bigger than East Moon and made of

diamond neurologics. A god, a huge computer of diamond circuitry. The gods are

nothing more than sophisticated computers. Or the grafting of a computer onto the

mind of man, the interface between man and computers. Few will admit this, but it's

so. Mallory Ringess journeyed to Agathange and carked his brain, replaced half the

neurons with protein neurologics. Your father did this. Does this make him a god? If

so, then I'm a god, too. Any of us, the few pilots who have really mastered a lightship.

Whenever I face my ship-computer, when the stars fall into my eyes and the whole

galaxy is mine, I'm as godly as any god.'

For a while Danlo listened to the water falling into the fountain, the humming and

click of the evening insects, the low roar of a thousand human voices. Then he looked

at the Sonderval and said, 'Who can know what it is to be a god? Can a computer be a

god . . . truly? I think my father is something other. Something more.'

'What, then?'

'He discovered the Elder Eddas. Inside himself, the deep memories – he found a

way of listening to them.'

'The wisdom of the gods?'

'Perhaps.'

'The memories of the Ieldra and other gods written into human DNA? The so-called

racial memories?'

'Some would characterize the Eddas thus, sir.' Danlo smiled, then continued, 'But

the Eddas, too, are something other, something more.'

'Oh, yes,' the Sonderval said. 'The secret of life. The secret of the universe, and

Mallory Ringess whom I used to tutor in topology, whom I used to beat at chess nine

games out of ten, was clever enough to discover it.'

Danlo suddenly cupped his hand and dipped it into the fountain. He brought his

hand up to his lips, taking a quick drink of water. And then another. The water was

cool and good, and he drank deeply. 'But, sir,' he finally said, 'what of the

Timekeeper's quest? My father and you were seekers together, yes?'

The Sonderval shot Danlo a cold, suspicious look and said, 'It's true, two years

before you were born, the Timekeeper called his quest. I, your father, we pilots – fell

across half the galaxy from Neverness to the Helvorgorsee seeking the so-called Elder

Eddas. This Holy Grail that everyone believed in. The Eschaton, the transcendental

object at the end of time. But I could never believe in such myths.'

'But, sir, the Eddas aren't myths to believe in. The Eddas are memories . . . to be

remembered.'

'So it's been said. I must tell you that I tried to remember them once. This was after the

Timekeeper's fall, when your father first announced that the quest had been fulfilled.

Because I was curious, I engaged the services of a remembrancer and drank the kalla

drug that they use to unfold the memory sequences. And there was nothing. Nothing

but my own memories, the memories of myself.'

'But others have had . . . other memories.'

'Myths about themselves that they extend into universals and believe are true.'

Danlo slowly took another drink of water. Then he slowly shook his head. 'No, not

myths, sir.'

The Sonderval stood stiff as a tree above Danlo, looking down at him for a long

time. 'I must tell you that there is no kind of mental accomplishment that has ever

eluded me. If the Elder Eddas exist as memory, I would have been able to remember

them.'

'To remembrance deeply . . . is hard,' Danlo said. 'The hardest thing in the universe.'

'I've heard a rumour that you drank the kalla, too. That you fell into a so-called

great remembrance. Perhaps you should have become a remembrancer instead of a

pilot.'

'I have . . . lost the talent for remembrancing,' Danlo said. 'I am just a pilot, now.'

'A pilot must pilot and fall among the stars, or else he is nothing.'

'I journeyed to Neverness so that I might become a pilot.'

The Sonderval sighed and ran his fingers through his golden hair. He said, 'These

last years I've been away from Neverness much too much. But I've taken notice of

what has happened there. I can't say I'm pleased. Mallory Ringess is proclaimed a

god, and his best friend founds a church to worship his godhood. And his son joins

this church, this "Way of Ringess", as it's called. And suddenly half of Neverness is

attempting to remembrance the Elder Eddas and cark themselves into gods.'

'But I have left the Way,' Danlo said. 'I have never wanted to become . . . a god.'

'Then you do not seek the Elder Eddas?'

Danlo looked down into the water and said, 'No, not any more.'

'But you're still a seeker, aren't you?'

'I . . . have taken a vow to go to the Vild,' Danlo said. 'I have pledged my life

toward the fulfilment of the new quest.'

The Sonderval waved his hand as if to slap an insect away from his face. 'In the

end, all quests are really the same. What matters is that pilots such as you and I may

distinguish ourselves in seeking; what matters not at all is that which is sought.'

'You speak as if there is little hope of stopping the supernovas.'

'Perhaps there might have been more hope if I had been chosen Lord of the Mission

instead of Lord Nikolos. But in the end it doesn't matter. Stars will die, and people

will die, too. But do you really think it's possible that our kind could destroy the entire

galaxy?'

With his fingers, Danlo pressed the scar over his left eye, trying to rid himself of

the fierce head pain that often afflicted him. After a long time of considering the

Sonderval's words, he said, 'I believe that what we do ... does matter.'

'That is because you are young and still full of passion.'

'Perhaps.'

'I have heard,' the Sonderval said, 'that you have your own reason for seeking the

Vild. Your own private quest.'

Danlo pressed harder against his forehead before saying, 'Long before the

Architects began destroying the stars, they destroyed each other. In the War of the

Faces – you must know this, yes? The Architects made a virus to kill each other. This

virus that killed my people. I would seek the planet they call Tannahill and hope that

the Architects might know of a cure for this disease.'

'I have heard that there is no cure.'

'There . . . must be.' Danlo scooped up a handful of water and held it against his

eye. The water slowly leaked away from the gap between the palm of his hand and his

cheek and then fell back into the fountain.

'Your father always believed in miracles, too.'

Danlo stood away from the fountain, then, and pointed up at the sky. 'My father, it

is said, always hoped to save the stars. He is out there, somewhere, perhaps lost

around some doomed star. This is why he went to the Vild. He always dreamed that

the universe could be healed of its wound.'

'Your father, when I knew him, could not even heal himself of his own wound. He

was always a tormented man.'

'Truly? Then perhaps some wounds can never be healed.'

'But you don't believe that?'

Danlo smiled and said, 'No.'

'Is it your intention, Pilot, to try to find your father?'

Danlo listened to the sound of the water falling into the fountain and asked, 'How

could I just abandon him?'

'Then you have your own quest within the quest?'

'As you say, sir, all quests are really the same.'

The Sonderval came up close to Danlo and pointed up at the sky. 'The stars of the

Vild are nearly impenetrable. How could you hope to find one man among a billion

stars?'

'I ... do not know,' Danlo said. 'But I have dreamed that in the Vild, all things would

be possible.'

At this, the Sonderval quietly shook his head. 'Look at the stars, Pilot. Have you

ever seen such wild stars?'

Danlo looked up along the line made by the Sonderval's arm and his long, pointing

finger. He looked up past the orange trees and the fountains and the ice-capped peaks.

Now it was full night, and the sky was ablaze from horizon to horizon. Now, among

the strange constellations and nameless stars, there were half a hundred supernova,

great blisters of hot white light breaking through the universe's blackness. For a long

time, Danlo thought about the origins of these ruined stars, and he said, 'But sir, who

knows what the Vild really is? We cannot see the stars, not ... truly. All these stars, all this

starlight – it was made so long ago.'

Low over the horizon, in the cleft between two double supernova that Danlo

thought of as the 'Two Friends', he saw a bit of starlight that he recognized. It was

light from the Owl Cluster of galaxies some fifty million light-years away. Fifty

million years ago this light had begun its journey across the universe to break through

the heavens above Farfara and find its home within the depths of Danlo's eyes. It was

the strangest thing, he thought, that to look across space was to look back through

time. He could see the Owl Cluster only as it existed long ago, some forty-eight

million years before the rise of man. He wondered if perhaps these galaxies had long

since been annihilated by chains of supernovas or the workings of some terrible alien

god. He wondered about his own galaxy. Did Vishnu Luz still burn like a signpost in

David Zindell - RfHS 2 - The Wild

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: