The Wild (58 page)

Shaida is he who kills what he cannot give back into life.

For a long while Danlo dwelt in remembrance of other peoples and other places, even as he orbited Tannahill in his lightship and studied the world below him. He might have spent many days of intime in such contemplation, but soon enough the Architects in their planetary city sent a laser-coded signal beaming up through space.

Please tell us who you are and whence you come.

To the Architects of Tannahill, it would be obvious that Danlo had his origins elsewhere than the seventy-two worlds of the Known Stars. All these worlds, as he knew, had been seeded by Architects of the Old Church, and none of them, with only their Church-sanctioned technologies, could produce anything so marvellous as a lightship.

All these stars – all these worlds so similar to Tannahill, Danlo brooded. The pressure of their population must be truly terrible.

After Danlo had explained that he was a pilot of the Order and an emissary of the Narain of Alumit Bridge, there fell a long pause in communication with the world below him. Danlo waited, as wary and watchful as a zanshin artist who slowly circles his opponent and expects any possibility.

'Surely they will invite you to make planetfall, Pilot.'

Out of the blackness in the pit of Danlo's ship there came an unholy glow, almost as of a swarm of phosphorescent kachina flies lighting up a cave. The hologram of Nikolos Daru Ede moved its mouth and spoke according to the programs of the devotionary computer that projected his familiar human form into the air. According to his master algorithm, Ede could not help but warn Danlo of danger.

'Surely the Architects cannot harm you unless you do fall down to their world.'

After a while, from an unknown voice coded into the signal that the Architects aimed toward his ship, Danlo received a request for more information concerning the Order of Mystic Mathematicians, Neverness and the Civilized Worlds. Danlo spent much time describing his journey across the Sagittarius and Orion Arms of the galaxy. He told of his stay among the Narain of Alumit Bridge and that he had come to Tannahill in order to plea for peace between the peoples of these two estranged worlds.

In the end, the voice of a man who identified himself as the Dedicated Honon en li Iviow of Ornice Olorun invited Danlo to take his ship down to a light-field near the coast of Tannahill's largest continent. Danlo homed on the signal that was provided. Although it was twilight, with the edge of the world spinning into darkness, he had no trouble piloting the Snowy Owl down through the layers of the atmosphere. Soon he saw that the zone of Tannahill known as Ornice Olorun covered a fifty-mile-wide swathe of land caught between a range of mountains and the poison sea. Once a time – a thousand years before – Ornice Olorun had been Tannahill's first city, a beautiful jewel of a city overlooking the white sand beaches of a beautiful ocean. Over the millennium, however, it had grown north and south, three hundred miles up and down the coast, and towards the west, sending out great plastic tentacles between the mountains to connect with Eshtara and Kaniuk and other cities of what used to be called the Golden Plains. It was near these white-capped mountains that Danlo found the light-field. As with the fields of Iviunir and the other cities of Alumit Bridge, it was built of composite plastics above the roof of the city almost half a mile into the sky. The Architects had called Danlo to earth during a clear evening; far off in the distance he could see other light-fields of other cities and the red flash of rocket fire. These flashes lit up the night in a shower of sparks that never stopped, for many Worthy Architects from the Known Stars tried to make the pilgrimage to Tannahill, and many more Architects fled Tannahill for new worlds around new stars. And who could blame them? Out over the sea, he saw, the air was discoloured by the hues of toluidine purple and other chloride chemicals. The mountains to the west – lit up by the setting sun – glowed a hellish orange madder.

All Danlo's life he had loved travelling to new and distant lands, and ever since he had become a pilot, it had been his joy to walk upon the earth of strange new worlds. But tonight his head throbbed with foreboding and despair, and he sensed that his feet would touch only hard grey plastic. As he was directed, he flew his ship down to a well-lit run near the centre of the field. For a while, he rocketed slowly along this run, casting his eyes left and right at the other runs, looking at the skimmers and jets and jammers – all the many craft crowding the spaces of this busy light-field. He moved straight toward a white structure that rose up from the field like an immense plastic bubble a quarter of a mile in diameter and almost half as high. The doors to this guest sanctuary, as Honon Iviow had called it, were open. As the Snowy Owl passed inside and the huge doors slammed shut behind him, Danlo wondered whether his status among the Architects was to be that of honoured guest or prisoner.

You may debark from your ship now.

Danlo opened the diamond doors of his ship's pit, climbed down to the smooth white plastic that made up the sanctuary's floor and sealed the ship behind him. For a while he stood quite still, squinting and pushing his palm against the pain that stabbed through the left side of his head. Somewhere above him, high up against the curving roof, incandescent globes blazed with a terrible, sick light. When his eyes had adjusted to the brightness, he turned in a slow circle to survey his surroundings. In a way, this strange guest house reminded him of a snowhut, for it was windowless and white and built into the familiar shape of a dome. But it was monstrously huge, and lacked the intimate, organic feeling of a snowhut's interior. In this soulless room, there were no sleeping furs, nor fish-pit, nor drying rack for his clothes. There were no oilstones burning with a soft yellow flame, filling up the space around him with a soft, lovely light. Instead there were machines or objects that were the fabrications of machines. There were grids and assemblers and hinun wheels. Various robots, some half as large as his ship, were rolled up near the room's circumference awaiting servicing instructions from some unseen master computer or controlling entity. The Snowy Owl, however, required no such servicing. It fairly filled the centre of the dome, a great shimmering sweep of diamond always waiting to fall back to the stars. It was Danlo's pride that of all the thousands of vessels to be dragged into such domes, in a thousand years, this was the first time that Ornice Olorun or any of Tannahill's other cities had been graced with the arrival of a lightship.

We must ask you to remain in the sanctuary for a few days while tests are being made. We hope that you are comfortable.

Danlo stood looking at the devotionary computer that he held in his hands. The familiar form of Nikolos Daru Ede had vanished temporarily, to be replaced by the imago of the Dedicated Honon en li Iviow. Honon, if this glowing imago were true to his real-life person, was a small, suspicious man but also, perhaps, urbane, proficient and shrewd. His voice was sweet and quick, and it issued out of the devotionary computer like high notes from a flute.

You will find that food and refreshment have been prepared for you. If you require conversation or information, you may call for a face-to-face with me at any time.

At the far end of the sanctuary, Danlo found a large area where the plastic of the floor rose up like a shelf overlooking the rest of the cavernous room. Here the Architects of Ornice Olorun had built something like an apartment. Set on top of this higher level was a bed, bathing chamber, sense box, dining table, and various statues of Nikolos Daru Ede sculpted out of some kind of dense black plastic. There was a golden-stringed gosharp on which one might play lovely music, and a spare devotionary to supply melodies of a more spiritual nature. And other things. Unlike the Narain, the Architects took care to maintain their physical selves, and so they had provided various ways for their guests to move their bodies. Adjoining the sleeping area was a moving walkway on which he might trudge for days without progressing more than an inch and a plastic climbing tree whose many jointed branches reached nearly to the dome's curving roof. There was also a pool. But as much as Danlo loved splashing through cool, clear water, he did not swim in it for it reeked of chlorine and other chemicals. The air in the dome was bad, too. When he concentrated on the odours assaulting his nose, he could pick up the traces of hydroxyls, propylene, styrene and various aminoplastics. There were obnoxious smells such as ketones and mercaptans, and dangerous ones such as benzene and toluene and other aromatic hydrocarbons. If it were possible, he would have held his breath for all the time that he dwelled in the cities of Tannahill. But he had to breathe as he had to live, and so he climbed the stairs to the sanctuary's apartment, and he settled in to play his flute and to eat the peculiar-tasting food that the ministrant robots served him.

After he had bathed and rested, other robots came with needles to draw his blood. As well they collected skin scrapings, saliva, ear wax, lymph, urine, even the dung that he left steaming in the dark hole of the multrum. He balked, however, at providing these noisome machines with the semen samples that they requested. And it was only with the greatest difficulty that he allowed them to cover his mouth with a piece of soft, clear plastic and procure the exhalations of his lungs. The breath, he remembered, was sacred and blessed; a man's breath shouldn't be sucked into a sealed plastic bag, but rather it should leave his lips to flow over earth and snow and be rejoined with the greater breath of the world.

When Danlo had done all that he must do to begin his mission to Tannahill, the imago of Honon en li Iviow appeared out of his devotionary to thank him:

You will understand that we must be careful of strangers, Danlo wi Soli Ringess. We must be careful of contamination.

A few days later, when the biologicals had determined that Danlo harboured no bacteria, viruses or DNA fracts harmful to the people of Tannahill, the Dedicated Honon en li Iviow invited him to address the Koivuniemin, or Assembly of Elders, the ruling body of the Cybernetic Universal Church. In preparation for this long-awaited moment, Danlo trimmed his beard and combed out his thick black hair, which had grown long and wild during his journey into the Vild. Then he dressed in the black pilot's robe that his Order required upon all formal occasions. He polished his black leather boots until they shone like mirrors, and he cleaned his black diamond ring of oils and dirt until it shone brightly, too. Because he disliked going anywhere without his shakuhachi, he secreted the long flute in an inner pocket of his robe's flowing pantaloons. Thus armed to face these unknown men and women who might hold sway over his fate, he took the devotionary computer into his hands. Like any other Architect of Tannahill, he would carry this little jewelled box with him wherever he went.

We will call a choche for you.

True to his word, Honon Iviow called to life one of the sanctuary's five old choches, which rolled right up to the stairs beneath Danlo's apartment and opened its gull-winged doors so that Danlo might step inside. Danlo hated being inside this mobile plastic box, for it was not brightly coloured and open as were the similarly functioning robots of Iviunir, but rather made of an ugly grey plastic and wholly enclosed. The doors suddenly locked shut around him, exacerbating his sense of being imprisoned. The choche was graced with windows, however, and as Danlo sat on his soft plastic seat, inhaling molecules of silicone and nylon, he found that he could look out at the scenery passing by. At first, of course, there was little to see: only the robots and furnishings of the guest sanctuary. But then the choche rolled through an airlock and a series of doors out into a corridor that led to a gravity lift. After falling a way, they debouched onto one of Ornice Olorun's side streets. Here there were people wearing a plain brown or white sort of kimono, and because Nikolos Daru Ede had been a devotee of the sacred jambool, a drug known to cause baldness as well as visions, all Architects shaved their heads in memory of all that Ede had sacrificed in bringing the truth to humankind. But, ironically, because too close an emulation of Ede was blasphemy, most covered their shiny pates with a little brown skullcap. It troubled Danlo that although he could see all these people in their kimonos and funny little hats, they could not see him. The windows of the choche were made of a mirrored plastic that let in the light of the world but permitted no visual information from the interior to escape into the prying eyes of gawkers or passers-by. Nor could anyone easily get at the choche's unseen occupants: its body was moulded from one of the kevalin plastics almost impervious to laser fire, missiles or explosions. Such is the construction of any choche employed to carry an Elder Architect, ambassador or other luminary about the uncertain streets of Ornice Olorun.

You must beware assassins.

The Ede hologram signed this warning to Danlo as they looked at each other through the semi-darkness of the choche's interior. Although the choche felt quite private, Danlo thought it unwise to risk verbal conversation.

Anywhere that there are armoured robots, Ede signed, there are assassins.

This was true, Danlo mused. But then assassins haunted the history of almost all human societies, especially one so distressed as that of Tannahill. As Danlo rolled in safety towards his appointment with the Koivuniemin, he saw signs of misery and disquiet everywhere. First and last, there were too many people. They swarmed the streets in their millions like ants through tunnels in the earth. Indeed, the streets of Ornice Olorun were dark and narrow and cut off from sunlight, very much like tunnels or underground passageways. Once, perhaps, a thousand years ago, they had been as open and airy as the broad boulevards that Danlo had seen in Iviunir. But the Architects, ever spawning great broods of babies, ever hungry for space, had been forced to make use of every cubic inch of their endless city, and, over time, had torn up commons and parks and playrings, even as they synthesized great blocks of new plastic and added on to their apartments and other buildings. Everywhere Danlo looked, the Architects had actually expanded their buildings out over the streets. There, a scant fifteen feet over the heads of Architects making their daily errands, building fused into building, filling in what should have been open space between the many levels of the city. In some parts of Tannahill – in Ivi Olorun, for example – the streets were so twisting and tunnel-like that it was impossible to gain a clear line of sight much greater than four hundred feet.