Whatever his criticisms of Science (or the other sciences that he would encounter), the attempts of the Scientists to control what they defined as matter and energy fascinated him. Even after he had left the Scientists, he harboured a fierce curiosity about this control. From one of his friends who had remained in the cult, he learned the implications of the Doctrine of Entropy, that the universe was falling into disorder, all configurations of matter across the galaxies falling apart and spreading out like fat globules in a bowl of lukewarm soup, all of its energies running down and seeking an equal level, as waters run into a still lake from which they can never escape. The Scientists preached absolute control over all of material reality, and yet they were doomsayers who pleaded helplessness in face of the universe's ultimate death. It was the great discovery of this phase of Danlo's life that this disaster might not be merely words of doctrine or some impossibly distant event. The power to control matter and energy, to release the energy trapped in matter, was very immediate, very serious, very real.
One evening at twilight, just before dinner, Danlo returned to Old Father's house in a state of intense agitation. He rushed inside with news of an unbelievable thing that he had learned earlier from one of the Scientists. For most of the afternoon, he had been skating down near the dangerous Street of Smugglers, skating and skating as he breathed in the musty smell of poached shagshay furs and brooded about cosmic events. He tromped into Old Father's thinking chamber not even bothering to kick the ice from his boots. (He had remembered to eject the skate blades only after stumbling across the doorway and grinding steel, chipping the square blue tiles in the outer hallway.) 'Ni la!' he shouted, lapsing into his milk tongue. And then, 'Sir, I have learned the most shaida thing, shaida if it is true, but... O blessed God! how can it be true? About the blessed– '
'Ho, careful now! Careful you don't drip water all over my mother's carpet!' Old Father caught him with both of his eyes, looked at the snowmelt running down Danlo's boots, and shook his head. Like all Fravashi, he revered pure water and considered it somewhat sacrilegious to scatter such a holy substance over his mother's woven fur. That evening, he was engaged in a thinking session with one of his students. Across from him on his carpet (very near the spot where Danlo had once vomited) sat Fayeth, a good-looking woman with a quick smile and an even quicker tongue toward making jokes. She had come to Old Father's house after a long search, after spending years as a student of Zanshin and the Way of the Rose. She was the best of Old Father's twelve students, the kindest, and the least slavish, and Danlo was a little in love with her. But her age was more than twice his, and she had taken a vow of strict celibacy. Even so, she never resented his attentions; she didn't seem to mind at all that he had interrupted her time with Old Father.
'Danlo,' she said, 'please sit with us and tell us what is blessed.'
'You're early,' Old Father said to Danlo out of one half of his mouth. 'But, yes, please sit down. Take your boots off and sit down.' And then, from his mouth's left side, at the same time, he continued speaking to Fayeth: 'We must try something more difficult this time, perhaps something that humans know very well when thinking about it but find impossible to explain.'
They were playing with realities; specifically, they were playing a game called spelad in which Fayeth, prompted by a hint from Old Father, would name some object, idea, personage, historical movement, or phenomenon. Old Father would then choose a particular worldview, which Fayeth was required to enter. She would behold the named object through this worldview, describing its various aspects as if she had been born a tychist or a Buddhist or even an alien. Points were scored according to her knowledge, her sense of shih, and above all, her mastery of plexity.
'I'll name a concept this time,' Fayeth said. She smiled at Danlo and continued, 'And the concept is: the future.'
'Oh, but this is not precise enough,' Old Father said. 'Do you know the doctrine of the sarvam asti?'
'The Hindu doctrine or that of the scryers?'
'It's your choice,' Old Father said.
'Then I'll choose the scryers' doctrine.'
'Very well. Then let me choose a worldview. Aha, abide with me a moment.' Old Father looked at Danlo knowingly, then turned to Fayeth and said, 'I choose the view of the scientists. Aha, aha – and to make this more difficult, the ancient scientists. Before the mechanics and holists split off from them to form their own arts.'
Danlo had never heard of the sarvam asti: the doctrine that everything exists, past and future, because the mind, at the moment of conceiving all things, could not do so if they didn't exist. In truth, at that moment, he didn't care about games or doctrines because he had discovered the existence of a terrible thing that he could barely conceive of. He tried to sit patiently across from Old Father, but at last he blurted out, 'Sir, the blessed stars are exploding! Why didn't you tell me about this?'
'Ah, ah, the stars,' Old Father said. 'We must certainly consider the stars. But do you mind if I play the spelad with Fayeth? She's scored nearly enough points to be excused from cooking next season's dinners.'
So saying, Old Father continued his dual conversation, talking in two different voices at once. The first (or right-hand voice) was his usual melodious baritone; the second voice was high and raspy, as of a saw cutting through ice. Danlo struggled to separate the dual stream of words that spilled out of Old Father's adroit mouth. It was a confusing way to hold a conversation, and it demanded his intense concentration. 'Oh ho, Fayeth, you might begin by exploring the intersection of the ontic realm and platonic space. Oh, Danlo, the stars are exploding, you say? The existence arguments and suchlike. This has been known for some time. Space is space and the stars go on endlessly through space only– '
'Sir,' Danlo interrupted, 'people are killing the stars!'
'Ah, oh, oh, oh,' Old Father said. Then he lifted a finger toward Fayeth and smiled. 'You may begin.'
Fayeth hesitated a moment before saying: The sarvam asti states that the future, in every future, the possibilities are actualized through an act of will, and– '
'Oh, oh, Danlo, you've learned of the Vild, so it's so. The Vild, the far part of the galaxy where a million stars are exploding, or ten million stars – and why?'
' – because existence cannot be understood as other than quantities of matter distributed throughout a homogeneous space and– '
'Because human beings have a need to deform space,' Old Father said. 'And for other reasons.'
While Old Father had been talking with Danlo, Fayeth had transformed herself into something like a scientist (or Scientist), and was continuing to hold forth about the future: ' – can be an intersection of these two spaces only in mathematics which– '
'Shaida reasons,' Danlo said.
' – certainly the mind can conceive of things that have no existence in spacetime– '
'Oh, ho,' Old Father said to Fayeth, 'but what is mind?'
'When I was a child,' Danlo said, 'I used to think ... that the stars were the eyes of my ancestors.'
' – runs parallel programs, and reality represented by symbols– '
'The stars ... this splendid eyelight.'
' – is not reflected in the natural world, nor is the world really reflected in mind– '
At this, Old Father shut his eyes for a moment and said, 'Be careful about this word "reflect".'
'But stars are ... just hydrogen plasma and helium,' Danlo said. 'Easy to fusion into light.'
' – processing information, but macroscopic information decays to microscopic information, and therefore the future– '
Old Father said to Danlo, 'To understand the Vild, we will have to discuss the Architects and their doctrines of the future.'
' – the future is completely determined but unknowable because– '
'It is the Architects who have created the Vild, yes?'
' – the creation of information is a chaotic process and– '
'The shaida Vild.'
' – there is no way for the process to run any faster than time itself.'
Here both Danlo and Old Father paused in their conversation while Fayeth criticized the many-worlds hypothesis of the mechanics and went on to declare that there could be only one timeline, one reality, one future. The scryers' doctrine, she said, was completely false. If scryers happened to foretell the future, this was only, pure chance. The scryers were great deluders, and worse, they were firebrands who incited false hopes in the manswarms and caused the people to believe impossibilities. Scryers 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?'