‘How did you lose her, then? I’m afraid that in the distortions of the wave, my simulation showed little.’
Danlo felt his heartbeats in the throbbing of his eye, and then he told Ede exactly how he had lost Marja Valasquez and the Fire Drinker.
‘That was very clever of you,’ Ede said. ‘To slay her that way.’
‘I did not slay her!’
‘You lured her to her death.’
‘No, she had choices. Before she crossed the last interval, she might have escaped into realspace.’
‘But you knew that she would follow you.’
‘I knew … only that she would want to follow me.’
‘And you knew that she would dive beneath the wave and be destroyed, didn’t you?’
‘How could I truly know which pathway she would choose?’
‘How could you not know?’
‘But she might have tried to ride the wave out, as I did.’
‘Oh, Pilot.’
‘Truly, she always had a choice. And she dived beneath the wave. Her will, not mine.’
The Ede imago glowed softly as it regarded Danlo. Then it said, ‘How was it that you once defined this vow of ahimsa that you’ve made? Never harming another, not even in one’s own thoughts.’
‘I … never wished Marja dead. I only wanted to lose her.’
‘And yet you led her to lose her life.’
‘Yes.’
‘It would seem that the practice of ahimsa can be difficult subtle.’
‘Yes.’
Ede continued staring at Danlo, then said, ‘I’m sorry – this must be hard for you.’
At this, a sudden pain shot through Danlo’s eye and filled his head like an explosive tlolt. His eyes began to water and he blinked hard against the cool but hurtful light of the star outside his ship.
‘I … am sorry, too,’ he said.
Then he closed his eyes and whispered a prayer for Marja’s spirit, ‘Marja Evangelina wi Eshte Valasquez, mi alasharia la shantih.’
Some time later he roused Demothi Bede from the sleep of quicktime and invited him into the pit of his ship. The sleepy-eyed Demothi took a long look at the star outside the pit’s window, yawned and said, ‘It looks like the Star of Neverness – are we home, then?’
‘No,’ Danlo said, smiling despite his aching head. ‘The colour of this star is white, not yellow-white. We are still far from Neverness.’
‘How far, then? What is this star’s name?’
‘It has no name that I know,’ Danlo said. ‘But it lies close to Kalkin.’
‘Kalkin!’ Demothi exclaimed. He might have had poor eyes for stellar spectra, but he remembered his astronomy lessons. ‘Kalkin is only ten light years distance from Summerworld!’
‘Yes,’ Danlo said. ‘We … have departed from our pathway.’
After wiping away the salt crusts from the corners of his eyes, he told Demothi of Marja Valasquez and the Fire Drinker and their long pursuit through the manifold. He tried to describe the vastness of the Danladi wave, its terrible beauty, but he found that his words failed him. He said only that the wave had swept them far along the galaxy’s Sagittarius Arm almost to the stars of the Jovim Cluster.
‘Why didn’t you wake me, Pilot? Would you have had me go to my death half-asleep?’
Again Danlo smiled because he remembered something that his Fravashi teacher had once said: that the manswarms of the human race went about their whole lives half-asleep and stumbling towards death.
‘I did not want to alarm you,’ Danlo said.
‘What will we do now?’
‘Continue our journey.’
‘How much longer has our journey become, then? The wave has caused us such a vast dislocation.’
‘As measured in light years this is true,’ Danlo said. ‘But the pathways between Kalkin and Neverness are well known. The mappings are very easy. Our journey will not have grown much more difficult or timesome.’
‘But what if the wave has changed or broken the old pathways? Aren’t such permanent distortions of the manifold possible?’
‘Yes – truly this is possible.’
‘Well, then?’
‘It is possible, too, that the pathways remain unbroken.’
‘You must be eager to discover if this is so.’
‘Truly, I am,’ Danlo said, yawning. He closed his eyes for moment, and the rising swells of unconsciousness swept towards him in black, rolling waves. Then with a sudden snap of his head, he looked at Demothi and smiled. ‘But I am even more eager for sleep. I will sleep now. When my computer wakes me in two more hours, then we shall see if we can find an easy pathway towards Neverness.’
With that he closed his eyes again and fell instantly into a deep and peaceful sleep. So total was his exhaustion that when his ship’s-computer touched his brain with soft musics two hours later, he did not awaken. Nor twenty hours later. Both Demothi Bede and the Ede hologram seemed astonished to discover how long Danlo could sleep when he was really tired – in this instance, for most of three days. When he finally broke back into consciousness and looked out on the stars, he realized that he had slept too long.
‘We will fall on, now,’ he said, angry with himself though well rested. ‘I only hope that war hasn’t come to Neverness while I was dreaming.’
And so they fell. Danlo took the Snowy Owl back into the manifold, and they fell on past Kalkin and Skibbereen and the great red giant star known as Daru Luz. Although the Danladi wave had slightly flattened these familiar spaces and broken a few of the familiar Fallaways as a windstorm might snap a tree’s twigs, most of the pathways through the manifold remained untouched. He made a mapping to a little star near Summerworld, and then on past Tria, Larondissement and Avalon. All these stars lay along the rather roundabout pathway towards Neverness that he had once rejected as too lengthy. But the Danladi wave had made it so that this journey required little more time than his original and more straightforward approach. And it required much less risk. Even in the spaces near Larondissement, one of the Civilized Worlds most devoted to the new religion of Ringism, he descried no tells of any Ringist ship which might be lying in wait for him. On this last segment of his surprisingly peaceful journey, he encountered no other ships at all, not even the vast deep-ships of the Trian merchant-pilots which usually plied the Fallaways filled with cargoes of gossilk, neurologics, firestones, firewine, Gilada pearls, sulki grids, bloodfruits, jook, jambool, blacking oil, and a million other things grown or manufactured on the worlds of man. When he reached Avalon, a pretty blue star so close to the star of his birth, he made a final mapping. It was the famous Ashtoreth mapping, named for the pilot Villiama li Ashtoreth who had discovered it at the beginning of the Order’s Golden Age in the year 681. It carried the Snowy Owl across three hundred light years of space in a single fold, where it fell out in the thickspace near the Star of Neverness.
‘Home,’ Danlo whispered as he looked out at the soft, yellow star that had lit all the days of his childhood. ‘O, Sawel, miralando mi kalabara, kareeska.’
In truth, however, he wasn’t quite home, not yet. He looked out with his telescopes across seventy million miles of vacuum where he spied the planet Icefall spinning like a white and blue jewel in the blackness of space. He might have instantly made a mapping to a point-exit only