and caused the people to believe impossibilities. Scrvers should be silenced for their violations of truth. ‘They should be collared or banished,’ Fayeth said. Her face was hard and grim, and she seemed utterly serious. ‘Or their brains should be cleansed of their delusions, as was done on Arcite before the Order interfered. All scryers who –’
‘Ho, ho, that will be enough!’ Old Father said. ‘A scientist, indeed.’
At this, Fayeth breathed deeply and relaxed as she returned to her usual good humour. She folded her hands on her lap, waiting for Old Father’s approval.
‘You’ve done well – forty points at least. Ha, ho, there will be no kitchen work for you until next false winter.’
‘Thank you,’ she said.
‘And now,’ Old Father said, as he turned to Danlo, ‘we must discuss the Vild. And what better place to begin than the Doctrine of Totality. Ah, ho, Fayeth, you might want to hear this, too.’
Because it was cold in the thinking chamber, Danlo zipped his collar tight around his throat and sat next to Fayeth as he listened to Old Father’s remarkable story. Old Father told them of Nikolos Daru Ede, the first human being to become a god by carking his mind into a computer. The idea that a man could transfer into a machine the pattern of his brain – his personality, memories, consciousness, his very soul – astonished Danlo. Try as he may, he could never quite believe that one’s selfness could be encoded as a computer program. It amused him to think of someone incarnating as a machine, even a godly computing machine that could think a billion times faster than any man. Who could ever know what had really happened to Nikolos Daru Ede when he had become vastened in this impossible way? Of course, many billions of people believed they knew quite well. As Old Father explained, humanity’s largest religion had arisen from this singular event. Followers of Ede worshipped this god as God, and they called themselves the Architects of God. Two thousand years earlier, the Architects had fought a great war among themselves, but few knew that the defeated sect, the Architects of the Infinite Intelligence of the Cybernetic Universal Church, after their defeat, had fled into the unknown spaces of the galaxy that would someday become the Vild. According to Old Father, these Architects had a plan for totally remaking the universe according to the design of Ede the God, and so they were demolishing the planets and the stars, one by one. ‘Eleven years ago, Mallory Ringess sent a mission to the Vild. Oh, oh, but the mission failed. It’s the talk of the City: why the Vild mission failed and how to organize another.’
Old Father went on to speak of the Doctrine of Totality and other eschatological doctrines of the Edic religion. He tried to elucidate the Architect view of free will and the fate of the universe. Danlo was so enthralled by this story that he almost forgot he was sitting next to Fayeth. His thoughts fell deep and troubled, and he looked up at the dome covering the thinking chamber. Two days ago it had snowed, and lovely, white feathers of spindrift were frozen around the dome’s western quadrant; but to the north and east, where the dome was clear, there were stars. His heart beat a hundred times as he studied the milky glare of the blinkans, Nonablinka and Shurablinka. ‘These strange stars,’ he said. ‘I have always wondered about these stars. They are supernovae, yes?’
‘Oh, yes, supernovae, indeed,’ Old Father said.
‘But they were once stars … just like other stars.’
‘This is true.’
‘Stars like … our sun.’
‘Yes, Danlo.’
‘But … how is it possible to kill the stars, sir?’
For a while Old Father spoke of the Architects and their strange technologies, machines that could generate streams of invisible graviphotons and shoot them into the sun. He talked about ways to deform the smooth black tissues of spacetime, to collapse the core of a star into a ball of plasma so hot and so dense that it instantly rebounded in a cosmic explosion of light. Danlo, with his hands pressed together beneath his chin, listened raptly. Then, without warning, he sprang to his feet and flung his arms upward toward the night sky. ‘Light is faster than a diving goshawk – this I have learned. Faster than the wind. The light from the blinkans, from the supernovae that the Architects have made, this shaida light races across the galaxy, yes? The killing light. It races, eleven million miles each minute, but … relatively, it creeps like a snowworm across the endless ice. Because the blessed galaxy is so vast. There is a blinkan – Merripen’s Star, it is called. A supernova recently born. Soon, its light will reach this world, I think, and we will all burn. Then I and you and everyone will go over.’
Slowly, painfully, puffing with caution and care, Old Father stood up. He rested a heavy hand on Danlo’s shoulders, and his black claws clicked together. He pointed at a starless patch of sky east of Shurablinka. There, glowing circles of light rippled deep in their changing colours of tangerine and gold. ‘Do you see it?’ he asked.
‘The Fara Gelastei,’ Danlo said. ‘The Golden Flower – it has grown recently, yes?’
‘We call it the Golden Ring. And yes, it has grown. So, it’s so: six years ago, Mallory Ringess becomes a god, and the Golden Ring mysteriously appears in the heavens. Ah, ah – and not just in the heavens above our cold world. Above many worlds, all through the galaxy, there are rings of gold. It’s life, of course! An extension of the biosphere. New life floating along the currents of space, feeding off light. Exhaling photoreflective gases. A hundred billion rings of life – like seeds! – growing. There’s hope that these rings will shield Neverness from the light of the supernovae. Like a golden umbrella, it will shield us so that minds like yours might remain alive to ask: When will I be devoured by light?’
Fayeth, who was still sitting on the carpet, let loose a long, low whistle, the kind of disapproving sound that the Fravashi emit when they have caught one of their students falling into a belief system. She seemed delighted to point out Old Father’s error, and she said, ‘It’s not really known if the Golden Ring will protect us.’
‘Ah, ha, very good, this is true,’ Old Father said. ‘Not even the biologists have been able to project the Ring’s rate of growth.’
‘I’ve heard many people talking of abandoning our planet,’ Fayeth said.
‘Ah, oh, but the light from the supernova won’t reach Neverness for thirteen more years. There’s time enough to wait and see.’
A bell rang then, the dinner bell summoning them to a typically simple meal of bread, cheese, and a fruit, probably fresh snow apples or icy cold Yarkona plums. Old Father and Fayeth made ready to leave the thinking chamber, but Danlo remained near its centre, staring up at the sky.
‘What do you see?’ Old Father asked.
For a moment, Danlo kept his silence, and then he said, ‘The blessed stars. The … shaida stars. I never thought that anything could kill the stars.’
Soon after this, Danlo began associating himself with a cult known as the Returnists. This was the newest of the City’s cults, founded by a renegade scryer named Elianora Wen. She was a remarkable woman who had been born into one of the musical clans on Yarkona. When she was ten years old, her family brought her to Neverness, where she had thrilled the aficionados of Golden Age music with her mastery of the gosharp, flute, and other instruments. She might have had a long career as a music master, but she had stunned her family by renouncing everything to join the Order. She was strong-willed, thoughtful, provocative, quirky, and possessed of immaculate sensibilities, and so she had managed to win a position as a novice at Borja. Eventually, she had blinded herself and become a scryer, one of the finest, only to quit the Order at the time of the Pilots’ War. For thirteen years, she had frequented the better hotels and cafes near the Street of Embassies, drinking Summerworld coffees and eating kurmash, and making friends with everyone she could. By the time Danlo came to the City, she knew ten thousand people by name and twenty thousand more by the sound of their voices. She became quite popular as a reader of futures, though she scandalized the traditionalists by accepting money for her services. It was said that she gave all her money to the hibakusha hospices, but her fame and influence