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

their way. Leander of Darkmoon, although he loved war as well as any man could, was the first to propose that the pilots scatter across the Vild and approach the Solid State Entity along ten different pathways. That way Malaclypse Redring, inside Sivan's ship, the Red Dragon, could only follow one of them. And so the pilots concluded their conclave and said their farewells. In the pit of the Snowy Owl, Danlo was once again alone. And then, upon Li Te Mu Lan's signal (she was the oldest of the pilots and this was her right) the pilots scattered. They opened windows to the manifold and vanished like streaks of light bursting from a diamond sphere. Each pilot faced the manifold along her own chosen pathway; each pilot fell sightless and senseless of the ships of the others, and so each of them was finally and completely alone.
    At first Danlo cherished this loneliness with a quiet joy, as he might have listened for the wind in a dark and silent wood. For the first time in many years he felt completely free. But it is the nature of life that no emotion is meant to last forever, and so very quickly his elation gave way to the apprehension that he was not really alone after all. In almost no time, as he plunged deeper into the dark currents of the manifold, he descried the perturbations of another ship. A second ship – two ships remaining always within the same neighbourhood of stars. The number two, he thought, was an ominous number. Two is a reflection or duplication of one, the most perfect of the natural numbers. Two is all echo and counterpoise; two is the beginning of multiplicity, the way the universal oneness differentiates itself and breaks apart into strings and quarks and photons, all the separate and component pieces of life. Two is a symbol of becoming as opposed to pure being; in this sense, two is life, and therefore it is death, for all life finds its conclusion in death, even as it feeds off the death of other things in order to stay alive. Although Danlo, for himself, feared dying less than did other men, he thought that he had seen enough of death to know it for what it truly is. Once, when he was nearly fourteen years old, he had buried all the eighty-eight people of the Devaki tribe which had adopted and raised him from a babe. He knew death too well, and he sensed that the warrior-poet who followed him might yet encompass the deaths of those who were beloved by him. Because he saw Malaclypse Redring as a harbinger of death (and because he thought he knew all of death that there was to know) he decided to escape this ghostly lightship that pursued him, much as a snowy owl might hunt a hare bounding over the snow. And so he emptied his mind of what lay behind him, and turned his inner eye to the deepest part of the manifold. There he would face the deepest part of the universe, the terrors and the joys.
    At first, however, there was only joy. There was the cold beauty of the number storm, the many-faceted mathematical symbols that fell through his mind like frozen drops of light. There was the slowing of time and the consequent quickening of all his thoughts. And there was something else. Something other. It is something of a mystery that, although all pilots enter the manifold the same way and agree upon its essential nature, each man and woman will perceive it uniquely. For Danlo, as for no other pilot with whom he had ever spoken, the manifold shimmered with colours. Of course, in the absence of all light and spacetime, he knew that there could be no colour – but somehow, there were colours. He fell from star to star, beneath the stars of realspace, and entered a Kirrilian neighbourhood which glowed a deep cobalt blue, a hidden and secret blue the like of which he had never seen before. Soon he passed on to a common invariant space all pearl grey and touched with swirls of absinthe and rose. For a moment, he supposed that he might be lucky, that the rest of his journey toward the Entity might prove no more