‘But Lord Nikolos,’ Morena Sung said, ‘surely that is the point? The greatest part of our mission to Tannahill is already accomplished. Thanks to Danlo. Wouldn’t his talents be better used elsewhere?’
‘And his greatest talent,’ the Sonderval said, ‘is as a pilot. I’ll need all my pilots if war comes and we fall against the Ringists.’
At this mention of war, Danlo continued to hold his breath, and he felt his heart beating like a drum at the centre of his chest.
‘To send Danlo to Sheydveg would be cruel,’ Lord Nikolos said to the Sonderval. ‘Have you forgotten his vow of ahimsa? How can one sworn to peace go to war?’
Never to kill, Danlo thought. Never to harm any living being.
‘If I thought about it at all,’ the Sonderval said, staring at Danlo, ‘I had supposed his duty to the Order would overcome his commitment to some private and unworkable ideal.’
Lord Nikolos slowly shook his head, then turned slightly so that his words carried more forcefully. ‘We mustn’t forget that Danlo’s vow preceded the vows he made when he entered the Order. At the time, no one foresaw that such a vow might ever pose a conflict. I don’t believe we should ask him to abjure this vow simply because the circumstances have changed.’
Danlo looked down at his hands which had once held the bloody head of a dying friend named Thomas Ivieehl, and he thought, But I would never abandon ahimsa.
‘Even to send Danlo to Neverness on a mission of peace might prove problematic,’ Lord Nikolos continued. ‘If this embassy fails and war falls upon the Civilized Worlds, bad chance might pose him terrible conflicts. The waves of war might overcome him and sweep him away.’
‘But killing always poses conflicts, and war might sweep any of us away,’ the Sonderval countered. ‘Who among us can escape his own fate?’
‘And who can make another’s journey towards his own fate?’ Lord Nikolos asked. ‘I won’t make Danlo journey to Sheydveg.’
At this news, Danlo sighed and looked at Lord Nikolos eye to eye.
‘I believe,’ Lord Nikolos said, ‘that it would best suit Danlo to be sent back to Tannahill. But it would best suit the Order for him to be one of our ambassadors to Neverness.’
Now Danlo held his flute tightly in his hands and held his breath in his lungs. Lord Nikolos’ gaze was cold but not unkind, and it seemed that he was searching Danlo’s face for some sign of what the future might unfold.
‘It’s unusual for the Lord of the Order to leave such a decision to a pilot,’ Lord Nikolos said. ‘But this is an unusual situation.’
All the lords in the hall looked at Danlo. Bardo smiled at him, and a part of his great strength seemed to flow out of his soft brown eyes and into Danlo.
‘I would ask you to choose between the ambassadorships to Tannahill or Neverness,’ Lord Nikolos said to Danlo. ‘If you need more time to—’
‘No,’ Danlo suddenly said, letting go his breath. ‘I will choose now.’
He closed his eyes and listened to the wind beating against the hall’s crystal dome and to the sound of his own deep breath. Fate, he thought, was calling him to the future with all the force of a star pulling a lightship towards its fiery centre. All people had a fate – or at least a golden path towards the realization of life’s deepest possibilities. Some refused to hear the call or ignored it when it cried out within them. Some fled their fate like a snowhare leaping in zigs and zags away from a diving thallow. Too often a man or a woman lived in a dull, defeated acceptance of the inevitable, all the while hating themselves and bewailing the unfairness of the universe. Only a few rare beings embraced the terrible beauty of life. And only the rarest of the rare loved their fate whether or not their lives were drenched in sunshine and honey or filled with fire, flashing swords, nightmare and death. In all of Danlo’s journeys, he thought that he had found only one such, and that was his onetime friend, Hanuman li Tosh. And now it seemed that Hanuman had made an irreversible crossing of some dark, inner ocean, perhaps towards godly power, perhaps only towards madness – it was hard to know. And now Hanuman waited for him in the icy, shimmering City of Light, just as across the room, Bardo and Lord Nikolos and a hundred other lords watched his face for signs of weakness and waited to see which path he might choose.
For in the end we choose our futures, he remembered.
He closed his eyes tightly then, and time opened like a window on to a deep blue sky, and he beheld the shape and shimmer of moments yet to be. Everything waited for him in Neverness. High in the tower of a great cathedral, beneath a clear dome, a pale and beautiful man stood watching the stars for Danlo’s lightship to fall out of the night. On the ice-locked islands hundreds of miles from Neverness, men and women in white furs looked for Danlo to bring them a cure for a disease that lay coiled in their blood waiting to explode into life. A child waited for him, too. He saw this child lying in his arms, helpless, trusting, gazing up at him with eyes as wild and deeply blue as his own. He saw himself waiting for himself: his future self who was fiercer, wiser, nobler and marked down to his soul with a terrible love of life. The universe itself, from the Edge galaxies to the stars of the Vild, waited for him – waited for him to decide if he would go to Neverness, yes or no.
That is always the deepest question, the only true question – yes or no.
Once, the goddess known as the Solid State Entity had told him that he would someday go to war, and he saw that that terror awaited him in Neverness as well. But what kind of war? Would it be battles of lasers and exploding bombs or a struggle of a deeper and more universal nature? This he could not see. But he knew that even if war should sweep him away in the manoeuvres of lightships, armies and men firing eye-tlolts at each other, even if his own flesh was opened with a nerve knife, he would keep his vow of ahimsa; always he would keep true to the calling of his own soul.
I would never kill another, even though I and everyone I love must die.
When he opened his eyes, it was as if he had only blinked and almost no time had passed. Lord Nikolos and everyone else still waited for his answer. Danlo sat gripping his flute, and he remembered another thing that the Entity had once told him: that he would find his father at his journey’s end. Perhaps his father, too, waited for him in Neverness. He could almost hear his father’s voice carrying along the stellar winds from far across the galaxy, calling him home to his fate.
‘I … will go to Neverness,’ he finally said. He looked at Lord Nikolos and tried to smile as a fierce pain stabbed through his left eye.
‘Very well, then,’ Lord Nikolos said. ‘And now I must decide who the other ambassadors will be. There’s much to be decided, for all of us, but not now. Since the hour is late, we’ll adjourn for dinner, and tomorrow meet again.’
Lord Nikolos suddenly stood away from his table. The other lords followed his lead, and some began talking in groups of two or ten, while others filed out of the hall. Bardo and the master pilots sitting at Danlo’s table immediately began to discuss the forcing of an enemy’s lightship into the fiery centre of a star and other battle stratagems, and for the moment Danlo was left sitting alone to marvel at the terrible energies unleashed by the mere talk of war. He rubbed his aching eye, all the while breathing deeply against the terrible soaring anticipation in the centre of his belly.
I, too, love my fate, he thought. My terrible, beautiful fate.
And then he stood up to greet Bardo and tell the other pilots of new stratagems of mastering the manifold, and the first waves of war swept him under as well.