The Wild

For the count of twenty of his heartbeats, there was no response to this question. And then the array of ideoplasts brightened, and he had an answer that was no answer at all.

Is it my purpose that you really wish to know? Or your own purpose, Danlo wi Soli Ringess?

Danlo walked over beneath one of the hanging plants, a wandering jew whose perfect green leaves shone like living jewels, as if they had never known drought or the jaws of hungry insects. He remembered how much Tamara had liked this plant, and he said, ‘There are so many things I would like to know. That is why I have journeyed here. As my father did before me. I have merely followed his path, towards the fixed-points of a star that he told of inside the Solid State Entity. I am sorry … inside you. I was seeking this star. The fixed-points of this place in spacetime. We all were – nine other pilots fell with me as well. We hoped to talk with you as my father did twenty five years ago.’

Why?

‘Because we have hoped that you might know of the planet Tannahill. This planet lost somewhere in the Vild. It is said that the Architects of the Old Church live there, they who are destroying the stars. Our Order – the Order of my father, Mallory Ringess – would stop them, if we could. But first we must find them, their planet. This is our purpose. This is the quest we have been called to fulfil.’

He finished speaking, and he waited for the Entity to respond to him. He did not wait long.

No, my Danlo of the sweet, sweet memories, this was not the purpose of the pilots who journeyed with you. Their purpose was to die. Their deepest purpose was to journey here and die inside me, but they did not know this.

It was as if someone had punched Danlo in the solar plexus, so quickly did he clasp his hands to his belly and gasp for air. For a moment, he hoped that he had kithed the ideoplasts wrongly, and so he stared at the glittering glyphs until his eyes burned and there could be no mistaking their meaning. At last he asked, ‘Dolores Nun and Leander of Darkmoon, all the others – dead? Dead … how?’

You, Danlo wi Soli Ringess, who are the only pilot ever to have survived a chaos space, ask this?

Almost silently, in a strange voice halfway between a moan and whisper, Danlo began moving his lips, making the words of the Prayer for the Dead which he had been taught as a child long ago. ‘Ivar Sarad, mi alasharia la shantih; Li Te Mu Lan, alasharia la; Valin wi Tymon Whitestone–’

These pilots were too afraid to die. And so they died.

At last Danlo finished praying. When he closed his eyes, he could clearly see the kindly brown face of Li Te Mu Lan, with her sly smile and too-gentle spirit. Because he could see the faces of all nine pilots much too clearly, he opened his eyes and stood facing the ideoplast array. He said, ‘After falling together from Farfara, we separated. We each journeyed here as individual pilots. Our lightships, our pathways through the manifold. We were spread across fifty light-years of realspace. I think I was alone for much of my journey. And then, in the manifold, the chaos space. It was like nothing I had ever seen before. The attractor, swirling in its colours, spinning. The strange attractor – this could only exist within a well-defined neighbourhood, yes? There were no other pilots in the same neighbourhood of the manifold as I.’

He remembered, then, that in truth there was another pilot, Sivan wi Mawi Sarkissian in his ship the Red Dragon. He told the Entity this and waited for a response.

I will not speak of the ronin pilot or the warrior-poet. You may not ask this question again. I will tell you only of the pilots who accompanied you. And they all fled the same attractor that you entered. They fled and they died.

‘But … how is that possible?’

Because they each fled into another attractor deeper in the chaos. A naked singularity of the manifold, and yet not of it. Death is the strangest attractor of all. It pulls everyone and everything by different paths into a single point in time. In eternity, into the eternal moment. Even the gods must inevitably journey to this place, though some of us flee their fate. And this is why your brother and sister pilots died.

Slowly, Danlo backed away from this bewildering array of ideoplasts and sat down on one of the meditation room’s cotton cushions. He sat crosslegged and straight-spined, rubbing his eyes, rubbing his forehead and temples. And then he said, ‘I do not understand.’

You do not understand the existence of the chaos space. That is because your mathematics is incomplete. It is possible for such a chaos to spread from what you know as a well-defined neighbourhood into a region of nested Lavi spaces. Perhaps it is even possible for a chaos space to spread through the entire manifold.

‘Possible … how?’

There are many ways that the manifold might fall into chaos. Here is one way: if sufficient energy densities are created in a pocket of spacetime, then the underlying manifold would perturb itself into chaos.

Danlo closed his eyes for a moment, calculating. And then he said, ‘But if this is truly possible, the energy densities would have to be enormous, yes? What could create such impossible densities?’

The gods can.

‘What … gods?’

There are many gods, Danlo wi Soli Ringess. In this galaxy alone, too many. You must know of the Silicon God and Chimene and the April Colonial Intelligence. And someday you may know your father. And the gods called Ai, Hsi Wang Mu, Iamme, and Pure Mind. And Maralah, and the Degula Trinity, and The One. And, of course, Nikolos Daru Ede, the man who would be God, whom Cybernetic Universal Church worships as God, Ede the God, who is now very probably dead.

At this astonishing piece of news, Danlo sprang to his feet and began pacing the room again. He pressed his forehead in remembrance of others who had died, then he smiled grimly. ‘Then God is dead, yes? A god is dead. But … how is this possible?’

There is war in heaven. Because some gods flee the strange attractor at the end of time, there is war. It was the Silicon God – aided by Chimene and the Degula Trinity, and others – who slew Ede the God. It is the Silicon God who has tried to slay me. He has been trying to destroy me for three hundred years.

Danlo closed his eyes trying to visualize the sheer enormity of the Solid State Entity, the many star systems and planets composing Her nearly infinite body. He said, ‘Destroy … how?’

Please be patient, and I will tell you.

‘I … am sorry.’

Your sister and brother pilots were unlucky enough to be caught in one of our battles. The Silicon God’s recent attack upon the matter and spacetime that make up the tissues of my body temporarily deformed the manifold itself – as you saw. This was the cause of the chaos space. This was the cause of the attractor that led you to this planet. Above all else, the Silicon God would destroy this Earth that you stand upon, and so his attacks are focused here.

As Danlo focused his deep blue eyes on the changing ideoplasts, he kithed part of the history of this war between the gods. He learned that some of the gods would do almost anything to destroy each other. They had caused stars to explode into supernovas; they had tapped the energy densities of black holes and the zero-point energies of spacetime itself. A true god, as the Entity maintained, would use such energies to create, but there were always those who wielded this cosmic lightning for the opposite purpose. And they wielded other weapons as well. There was a god called Maralah who had loosed a swarm of intelligent bacteria upon a planet claimed by The One. The bacteria swarm – the bacteria-sized robots that most human beings know as disassemblers – had reduced the beautiful green forests and oceans of the planet to a thick brown scum in a matter of days. With similar explosive nano-technologies, Maralah had tried to infect many of the gods allied with the Solid State Entity. And it was Maralah who had tried to infect Ai and Pure Mind with various ohrworms and informational viruses that would cark their master programs and drive them mad. Maralah was the first god to discover how vulnerable artificial intelligence is to surrealities, those almost infinitely detailed simulations of reality that can wholly take over a computer’s neurologics and cause the most powerful of gods to confuse the illusory for what is real. But it was the Silicon God himself who had refined this weapon. In a way almost impossible for Danlo to understand, the Silicon God had forged mysterious philosophical and psychic weapons, terrible weapons of consciousness that threatened the sanity of the galaxy, perhaps even the universe itself. Danlo immediately dreaded this ancient god who would destroy the minds of all others. He hated this enemy of the Entity (and of his father), and he hated himself for hating so freely.

‘Why?’ he asked. He pressed his fingertips hard against his throbbing eye. ‘Why must there be war?’

Why, why, my sweet Danlo? Because there must be war, there will always be war. This phase of the war began two million years ago, when the Ieldra defeated the one known as the Dark God. Do you know of the Ieldra, they of the pure mind and the golden light?

In truth, Danlo knew as much about the Ieldra as anyone knew. The Ieldra, it was said, were a race of gods who long ago had carked their collective consciousness into the black hole at the centre of the galaxy. But before they had abandoned their bodies and gone on to complete their cosmic evolution, they had left behind a gift. It was said that they had carked their deepest wisdom – the secret of life – into the DNA of their chosen successors, a noble species of life known as homo sapiens. And so deep inside the bodies and brains of all human beings the secret of the gods lay coiled and waiting. In honour of these oldest of the gods, the masters of Danlo’s Order called this secret the ‘Elder Eddas’, and they said that the gods had designed the Eddas to be remembered. With proper training, almost anyone could call up the memories bound inside their cells. Once, Danlo himself had remembered the Eddas as deeply as had any man. The Eddas was a pool of ancient knowledge almost infinitely deep, and Danlo had drunken freely of the racial memories until he thought that his mind could hold no more. One splendid night, once a time like a child in a magic woods, he had remembered many marvellous things. But now that he was older, he had lost his gift of remembrancing. Although he remembered many moments of his life with a blazing intensity more brilliant than any ideoplast or living jewel, he could no longer go inside himself where the deepest memories lay. In truth, he could no longer remember the deepest part of himself, and in this he was no different from any man.

‘I … have heard of the Ieldra,’ Danlo said.

And you have remembranced the Elder Eddas.

‘Yes.’

I believe the secret of how the Ieldra defeated the Dark God is encoded into the Elder Eddas.

Danlo nodded his head slowly. ‘Yes, perhaps it is there, in the Eddas. Everything … is there.’

It may be that someday you will remembrance this secret and apply it toward defeating the Silicon God.

At this strange communication, Danlo walked across the room and looked out of the window. Below him, on the long deep beach, his lightship shone like a sliver of black glass. The wind was up, blowing ghostly wisps of sand against its hull. He could almost hear the sand particles pinging against the diamond surface, but the endless ocean beyond the beach rolled and roared and broke upon itself, and it swallowed up any lesser sounds.

‘I do not wish to defeat the Silicon God,’ he said. ‘I do not wish to defeat anything.’

Then you believe it is your purpose to avoid this war.

‘Truly, I am not a man of war. I … must not be. I hate war.’

A curious emotion for a man who is a warrior.

‘No, you are wrong,’ Danlo said. ‘I am no warrior. I have taken a vow of ahimsa. I may not intentionally harm any man or animal. It is better to die oneself than to kill.’

I know this word ahimsa.

‘I would rather die than kill anything, even a god. Especially … a god.’

We shall see.

A sudden chill struck Danlo’s spine as if a draught of cold air had fallen down his back. He turned to face the ocean again, and he watched as the breakers fell against the shore rocks in an explosion of white water and foam. He rubbed his eyes, then said, ‘But I am just a man, yes? Can a man even think of defeating a god? If such a secret is to be found in the Elder Eddas, then surely it is for a goddess such as yourself to remember it.’