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  ‘So many,’ he said to Isas Lel. ‘So many people. So many … robots.’

  As precisely as the hands of a clock coming together at midnight, the robot merged with a great stream of other robots rushing down the centre of the boulevard. All these robots were made of blue or yellow plastic – or pink, magenta, flame-red, or a hundred other bright colours. All the robots bore human beings on their single seats, and they all rolled at dangerous speeds packed too closely together. Although Danlo loved speed as he did fresh wind, he couldn’t keep from wondering how long it would be before one of the robots stopped too abruptly or veered into another robot too close beside it. But of course, none of them did. Danlo marvelled at the perfect co-ordination of so many ugly machines. He could only suppose that they were all interfaced with some master computer that controlled their movements. Likewise with the people of Iviunir. On the boulevard’s bright white walks – between the rolling robots in the middle of the street and the shops at the edge – swarms of human beings moved as with great purpose. They passed to and fro at a fast walk, issuing from the many side streets as if some unseen master clock were calling them to their individual appointments. There was something machinelike in their motions, and yet something very human, too, an excitement as if they were marching to war or being called to some great religious event. High above them – sixty feet above their hairless heads – the blue plastic of the next level hung like an artificial sky, but no one seemed to mind that he lived inside such a stifling place. Hardly anyone even noticed Danlo, who was the only human being on this vast street dressed in black – almost everyone else wore white kimonos or robes of glittering chatoy. The Narain appeared to be a soft people whose thin bodies and ageless faces had never known the touch of wind or sun. Their skin was a pinkish-white, an unusual mutation suiting its sufferers to live in cold, rainy climes such as once had existed in the far western forests of Urasia on Old Earth – or perhaps to a life inside the plastic worm-mounds of the worlds of the Vild. With their shaved heads and shapeless bodies, they seemed androgynous, as sexless as freshly-hatched Scutari nymphs.

  ‘Are there no robots on your world?’ Isas Lel asked. He fingered the water droplets still clinging to the umbrella by his side. With the wind whipping at their faces – and the unbelievable noise of the street – he had to talk very loud for Danlo to hear him. ‘Is it possible that the people of Neverness don’t use robots?’

  Here Isas Lel called for a bit more comfort, and their seat began to recline. Then he called for the robot’s wind windows to be raised, and suddenly they were enclosed in what seemed a clear plastic bubble. Danlo looked out through this bubble. Among the manswarms on the street, he saw many personal robots accompanying their human masters. There were robots washing the windows of the shops and robots sticking plastic blocks together as they fabricated new additions to the many high apartments which lined Boulevard Nine. One robot – a fearsome construction of wheels, tubes and mechanical bassinet – attended a newborn baby, one of the few children Danlo was to see in Iviunir. Everywhere, it seemed, robots of every possible design crawled and crept and rolled. Even outside the restaurants, where ministrant robots served iced drinks and various strange-looking dishes, other insect-like robots were digging in the soil of the pretty flower fields. When Danlo remarked that this work would be better accomplished by a man or woman, Isas Lel seemed confused.

  ‘Perhaps there is a problem with your robot,’ he said as he pointed to Danlo’s devotionary.

  Although Ede’s expression did not change, his hologram lifted its little finger slightly and traced out a half-moon for Danlo’s keen eyes – and his eyes only – to interpret. After their experience with the Sani, both he and Danlo had deemed it wise for them to have a secret language between them, and so Danlo had taught Ede the cetic’s language of signs.

  ‘What … problem?’ Danlo asked.

  ‘A problem in translating. You can’t really believe that people should plant flowers.’

  ‘But … why not?’

  ‘Oh, because it is work,’ Isas Lel said. He spoke this word, falke, as if it were dirt in his mouth – as if its meaning should be obvious to anyone. Work was work; work was a worldly affair. Only robots (or madmen) worked. For evolved human beings such as Isas Lel or any of the Narain, no matter how low their rank, their time was to be spent on more transcendental pursuits.

  ‘I planted flowers once,’ Danlo said. He closed his eyes as he recalled a brilliant day in false winter when he had abandoned his mathematical studies to plant fireflowers with Tamara in the dirt outside her house. ‘I … never counted it as work.’

  Isas Lel regarded Danlo as if he were some kind of alien insect. Then he said, ‘But you used your hands, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes – how not?’

  ‘Then it was work.’

  ‘Then you consider everything one does with one’s hands as work?’

  ‘Almost everything.’

  Danlo sat as straight as a zanshin master on the seat of the rolling robot. As de facto ambassador to the Narain people, he should not have allowed himself to argue with Isas Lel. But he was a pilot first, and even more a man, and so he said, ‘I … saw a robot feeding a baby. On the street, in front of a restaurant. Surely the mother cannot consider it work to feed her baby.’

  ‘Surely she would – if this child had a mother.’

  For a moment, Danlo did not breathe. All his life he had heard of worlds whose children were born out of artificial wombs and listened to the jokes about slelniks, those human abominations who had neither father nor mother. As a journeyman in Neverness, he had even met one of these unfortunate yet seemingly perfect human beings, so flawless in the flesh and haunted in the eyes. The thought that Isas Lel – and everyone else in the city – might be slelniks stunned Danlo. He sat in silence, and he did not know what to say.

  ‘Surely,’ Isas Lel continued, ‘it’s work to grow an infant inside oneself. And even more work to care for it.’

  ‘But … that is just life!’ Danlo finally gasped out. ‘Life itself. Truly – how else are we to live?’

  Isas Lel sighed as if he were arguing with a child. His face was full of disgust and scorn. And then he said, ‘Live? Our robots can do that for us.’

  After that, for the rest of their brief journey through the city, neither of them spoke. Soon they came to a large white structure that rose seamlessly from the boulevard’s plastic. Danlo would have thought that they would need to climb down from the robot in order to enter this structure, but at Isas Lel’s command the robot moved into the rightmost lane of the boulevard, decelerated, and then exited neatly onto the walkway in front of the structure. Although the robot was now creeping along almost as slowly as an old man might hobble, the men and women swarming the walk were careful to avoid any kind of collision, and they hurried out of their way. For most of the Narain, walking was the single exercise they permitted themselves, but no one expected a Transcendental to stoop to this kind of labour. More than a few people cast envious glances at the clearface glittering on Isas Lel’s head and bowed to him as if he were a god. Then the robot broke free from the manswarms and rolled up to the building’s shiny doors. They opened, allowing the robot to move inside.

  This is madness, Danlo thought. If I remain here very long, I will fall mad.

  While the robot rolled down a long white corridor, Danlo used his fingers to make a sign that only the devotionary computer could detect. He looked down at the Ede hologram floating above the jewelled box on his lap. Ede’s attention, it seemed, was concentrated on Isas Lel. Perhaps he was trying to read the man’s unreadable face. When Isas Lel’s eyes momentarily fell vacant in some private communion with the computer he wore on his head, Ede responded to Danlo’s sign. With his fingers made of light, he warned Danlo of the precariousness of their situation. ‘You wished for difficulty and danger – well, you should be careful of what you wish for lest you receive it in abundance.’

  ‘I … know,’ Danlo signed
.

  ‘This man is in almost continual interface with some cybernetic field,’ Ede signed back. ‘Very likely everything you do and say will be scrutinized by any others who share face with this field.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ Danlo signed. ‘But what would you advise I do?’

  ‘Look at his eyes! Kill him now while he is faced – you could appropriate his skullcap and command the robot to return to our ship. Our chances of escape might never be so great.’

  Danlo smiled at this impossible suggestion and then, with his hands, he asked, ‘What would you advise me to do … that I can do?’

  Ede’s answer came immediately. ‘Be mindful, then. Guard your face – guard your thoughts, Pilot.’

  During their brief time in the corridors of this nameless structure, they passed few other people, all of them Transcendentals much like Isas Lel, wearing clearfaces over their bare skulls and riding on top of wheeled robots. They all seemed intensely interested in Danlo, looking at him openly as if he were some rare alien animal that Isas Lel had brought back from the forests outside the city to amuse them. It was as if Danlo had entered some sort of private club where Transcendentals – and only Transcendentals – met each morning to while away the endless hours of their workless lives. Danlo wondered what pursuits might lure such a cold-eyed people, and then Isas Lel’s robot rolled right up a cold little room that had been prepared for Danlo’s arrival.

  ‘Here we are,’ Isas Lel said. ‘We’ve been waiting to meet you.’

  At this, Danlo exchanged finger signs with the Ede hologram, promising to guard the face of his being. Then he smiled at the danger before him, and he gazed at the doors to the room where the Transcendentals of Alumit Bridge were waiting for him.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Transcendentals

  The central paradox of Edeism is this: that God is eternal, infinite, transcendent, ineffable, formless, faceless, omnipotent, and omnipresent, but He is also Nikolos Daru Ede, the Mahaman, the man-who-will-become-God. All Edeic theology and the doctrines of the different sects derive from the attempt to explain this mystery.

  – Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1,754th Edition,

  Tenth Revised Standard Version

  The doors to the room slid open, and as the robot rolled forward, Danlo found himself in what Isas Lel called a meeting chamber. The floor of this windowless room was a dull white plastic unadorned by rug or carpet; its walls and ceiling were a single half dome of pure chatoy or some lustrous material very like it. Upon Danlo’s entrance, the dome’s chatoy surface flared into colours. Streaks of crimson, ochre, jade and orchid-pink flowed all around him, and then, as he watched, the colours began to mutate and form up into a recognizable scene. It was a sunset, he saw. Here, deep in the belly of the city, in the middle of the morning, he watched Alumit Bridge’s huge sun drop behind hills glowing with a bright emerald light. The sky was ablaze with bands of violet and rose, and it was all very beautiful, if wholly unreal. That the Narain preferred such simulated sunsets over beholding the world directly troubled Danlo. He was troubled, too, by the vases of freshly-cut flowers and by a gleaming chromium tea service that a ministrant robot had apparently rolled into the room. It was as if Isas Lel, from little things that Danlo had said during their brief journey from the light-field, had somehow ordered this room prepared for his comfort. At the room’s exact centre, some robot had set down a plump red cushion. Isas Lel invited Danlo to sit on this cushion. He himself remained seated in his robot, as did the other Transcendentals, who were sitting on top of their robots, watching and waiting as the light of the false sunset reflected off their golden clearfaces. There were six of them, and they had arrayed their robots in a half circle around Danlo’s cushion. As Danlo sat crosslegged before them – beneath them – their glassy eyes fell upon him like cold blue stones that crushed his heart.

  ‘May I present Lieswyr Ivioss?’ Isas Lel asked, holding out his hand toward a thin woman whose classically-formed face was almost as smooth as a baby’s. Lieswyr Ivioss seemed almost as young as Danlo, though in truth she had been born in the city ninety years before.

  ‘And may I present Kistur Ashtoreth?’ This was a man – or a woman – whose pale, pink skin and fine features bespoke a fragility common to the people of Iviunir. At being presented, Kistur Ashtoreth bowed his head and smiled at Danlo, which surprised him greatly. Of all the Transcendentals, he was the only one to favour Danlo in this way.

  ‘And Patar Iviaslin, and this is Yenene Iviastalir,’ Isas Lel continued as he waved his hand around the semi-circle. With the exception of Kistur Ashtoreth, Danlo found the Narain’s names to be strange, especially of the last two women (or men) that Isas Lel presented. These were Diverous Te, a frail-faced being who seemed wholly absorbed in some other world, and Ananda Narcavage, she of the trembling lips and half-closed eyes that would not quite look straight at Danlo. These, then, were the nobility of the city, the princes and lords and maharinis. Danlo supposed that they might also be the masters of the world of Alumit Bridge, and in this he was almost right.

  ‘May we offer you tea?’ Isas Lel asked.

  With a wave of his hand, he beckoned to a plastic ministrant robot who poured out seven steaming cups of tea. The robot served these cups to the Transcendentals and to Danlo. He sat holding this cup near his nose, drinking in the tea’s strange and spicy aroma. On the floor by the cushion, where he had set down the devotionary computer, the Ede hologram surreptitiously made signs for Danlo to see. ‘Beware of poison!’ Ede signed. ‘Beware of truth drugs – these Narain will want to read your mind!’

  Smiling at this, Danlo took a long sip of tea. There was nothing else he could do.

  The inquisition that he had been awaiting began at once. Isas Lel said brusquely, ‘You claim to be a pilot of an Order on a world named Neverness. What Order is this? Which star lights your world?’

  Danlo set his tea cup down against the floor. He let his hand fall against the trousers of his robe where he kept his flute tucked into the long pocket. Through a thin layer of black silk, he gripped the flute tightly, drew in a breath of air, and said, ‘In truth, Neverness is the name of the city where I was educated. The planet’s name is actually Icefall – though many call it by the city’s name also. The star is known as the Star of Neverness.’

  ‘And you were born in this city?’

  ‘I was born … near it.’

  ‘An open city, you said when we talked by radio – Neverness is open to the light of its star, is that true?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And where is this Star of Neverness, then?’

  Almost instantly, Danlo reached out and pointed at a steep angle upward slightly to the right of Ananda Narcavage’s head. It was Danlo’s pride that no matter where in the universe he might fall, no matter the eccentricities of orbit or spin of any planet on which he found himself, no matter which way he might turn in the artificially-lit tunnels of a soulless city – no matter how he was spatially oriented, he could always find his way home. ‘It is there,’ he said simply. ‘My star … is there.’

  For a moment, Isas Lel seemed confused. As were the other Transcendentals. They sat on the reclined seats of their robots, and their eyes were so vacant they seemed almost to disappear from their heads.

  ‘I meant,’ Isas Lel said, ‘where is this Star of Neverness in relation to the Known Stars?’

  Danlo smiled to himself as he considered the implications of this question. He wondered how many stars these hive-dwelling humans might truly know. As for himself, he knew ten thousand stars by name, and perhaps a million more by sight – by their constellation within the galaxy’s billions of jewelled lights.

  ‘And which are the … Known Stars?’ Danlo asked.

  ‘Is it possible that you don’t know?’

  ‘Truly … I do not know.’

  Isas Lel shut his eyes then. A moment later, the sunset scene died from the room’s walls, its pretty colours sucked away like paint down a dark drain. For a while
the meeting room was almost as black as space. And then there were stars – or rather thousands of points of white light that appeared as stars, glittering out from the chatoy walls around Danlo. He almost instantly recognized the Sani’s pale blue star and the Eye of the Fish and Medearis Luz, and all the other stars in this neighbourhood.

  ‘Can you tell us which of these stars is the Star of Neverness?’

  ‘None of them,’ Danlo said.

  ‘But these are the Known Stars,’ Isas Lel emphasized as if Danlo might be either deaf or blind.

  ‘The Star of Neverness … burns elsewhere.’

  ‘But these are all the stars within a radius of fifty light-years!’ Isas Lel said this word, light-year, lignia-toh, as if it represented an unimaginable distance. As indeed six trillion miles almost is.

  ‘The Star of Neverness … burns far away.’

  ‘Farther than a hundred light-years?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How far, then?’

  ‘Far … very far,’ Danlo said. He shut his eyes for a moment, then continued, ‘If one were to measure a straight light distance from your star to mine, it would be perhaps thirty thousand light-years.’

  Although Danlo had spoken softly, as he usually spoke, this number fell out into the room like a thunderclap. For a long time, no one said anything, and there was deep silence.

  ‘That’s impossible!’ Diverous Te blurted out. His (her?) voice was almost as low as the lowest tone of Danlo’s shakuhachi, and it was the only time that morning he would be graced with hearing it.

  ‘Thirty thousand light-years, impossible,’ Ananda Narcavage agreed.

  ‘No, no,’ Lieswyr Ivioss said in her dulcet voice, ‘that can’t be true.’