Read Online The Wild by David Zindell - Free Book Online Page A

were wont to agree with Ivar Sarad, though for different and more common-sense reasons. But Rurik Boaz and Valin wi Tymon Whitestone sided with Li Te Mu Lan. Valin Whitestone was even selfless enough to propose that the others continue toward the Solid State Entity while he kleined backward along their pathway to seek out the eleventh ship. He would learn the identity of this mysterious eleventh pilot. If possible, he would then rejoin the others, who, by this time, would no doubt have shared in the glory of being the only pilots since Mallory Ringess to wrest great knowledge from the goddess that some called Kalinda the Wise.
    Until this moment, Danlo had kept his silence. He was the youngest of the pilots, and so he thought it seemly to let the others take the lead in this conversation. Then, too, from his once and deepest friend, Hanuman li Tosh, who had remained in Neverness, he had learned the value of keeping secrets. But it was not right that he should keep important information from his fellow pilots. He couldn't let the noble Valin Whitestone sacrifice himself for a mere secret, and so he said, 'It is possible . . . that a ronin pilot guides the eleventh ship. Sivan wi Mawi Sarkissian, the ronin – you all know of him, yes? It is possible that he carries a warrior-poet into the Vild.'
    In the pit of Danlo's ship, the heads of the nine other pilots turned his way. Li Te Mu Lan and the Rosaleen, Rurik Boaz and Shamir the Bold, and the others – looked at him as if he were merely some journeyman pilot who had suffered his first intoxication with the number storm or the dreamtime. Finally, after they waited for him to explain this incredible statement, he told them of his encounter with Malaclypse Redring in Mer Tadeo's garden.
    'It is possible,' Leander of Darkmoon said. His massive head was flowing with the golden curls of his long hair and beard. Indeed, like his name, there was something of the lion about him, and something of the lazy (and reckless) boy, as well. But he was a man who bored too easily, and so when Danlo spoke of warrior-poets and the infamous Sivan wi Mawi Sarkissian, Leander was like a hungry man who had been fed a piece of dripping red meat. His eyes brightened, and in deep rumbling voice he said, 'I knew Sivan before the great quest maddened him. He was a fine pilot, once a time. If anyone could follow us into the Entity, he could.'
    After long, almost endless rounds of discussion, with their ships separated by half a million miles of space, above a rosy little star that no one bothered to name, the pilots agreed that Malaclypse Redring was likely following them, hoping, maybe, that the ten other pilots might lead him to Mallory Ringess, but there were other possibilities. As Leander of Darkmoon and Dolores Nun knew too well, it was possible for pilot to fall against pilot, to use his lightship as a sword, to manoeuvre close to another ship and slice open gaping holes into the manifold into which his enemy might fall. If these holes were made precisely – if the pilot could find a precise probability mapping – it was possible to cast an enemy ship down a dark, closed tube into the fiery heart of some nearby star. In the Pilots' War, many had died this way. Sarolta Sen, in his ship the Infinite Tree, had once almost been destroyed thus, and so he was the first to observe that Malaclypse Redring might desire all their deaths. If the warrior-poets had a rule to slay all gods, they might also have a secret rule to slay any man or woman proud enough (or foolish enough) to attempt contact with a god. It would have been the simplest thing, as a precaution, for the pilots to turn back upon their path-ways, to fall upon Malaclypse Redring and the lightship of Sivan wi Mawi Sarkissian, even as a pack of wolves might discourage a great white bear from hunting them. In a moment, in a flash of light, they might easily have incinerated the warrior-poet. But this was not their way. That is, it was no longer