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 was based not on her generosity but upon a series of visions that had come to her on the 99th night of deep winter of the preceding year. In her reading of her own future, in a moment of blinding revelation, she had come at last into her calling, which was to prepare the people for the god-hood of Mallory Ringess. This she had done, with all her considerable powers. The Returnists soon numbered in the hundreds, and they all believed – and preached – that Mallory Ringess would return to Neverness. He would save the Order from corruption and divisiveness, just as he would save the City from the panic over the coming supernova. It was the glory of the Ringess to cause the quickening of the Golden Ring, to watch over its growth, and thus to save the planet from the fury of the Vild. Someday, according to the Returnists, Mallory Ringess would stop the stars from exploding and save the universe from its ultimate fate.
During the long, sunny days of false winter, Danlo frequented the cafes along the Old City Glissade, drinking toalache tea with the Returnists who gathered there each afternoon for refreshment and conversation. The Returnists were mostly young Ordermen, joined by a few wealthy farsiders who wore rich clothes and golden bands around their heads as a token of their devotion. They liked to talk about the life of Mallory Ringess, and they liked to speculate as to the changes that a god might bring to their city. It was their hope that the Ringess would recognize them as true seekers and explain to them the mystery of the Elder Eddas and other secrets that only a god might understand. One day, while talking with a woman named Sarah Turkmanian and various of her friends, Danlo learned that Mallory Ringess had once journeyed to the Alaloi tribe known as the Devaki. Nearly seventeen years previously, he had made this journey in the hope of discovering the secret of the Elder Eddas embroidered into the primitive Alaloi chromosomes. This news astonished Danlo. He immediately guessed that he was Mallory Ringess' son. Three-Fingered Soli had told him that his blood father was a pilot of the City, but he had never suspected that his father might also be a god. And his mother was surely one of the women who had accompanied Mallory Ringess on his ill-fated expedition, perhaps even Katharine the Scryer, and Danlo wanted to share this astonishing hypothesis with the other Returnists, but he was unsure if it was really true. Perhaps, he thought, Three-Fingered Soli had told him a polite lie concerning his true parentage. Perhaps his mother and father were really wormrunners, common criminals poaching shagshay furs from Kweitkel's forests. Perhaps his mother had given birth to him far from the City, only to abandon him to die on some snowy ledge near the Devaki cave. It was possible that Haidar and Chandra had found him and adopted him, and it was very possible that Soli had told him a false story to spare him the shame of such an ignoble birth. Because Danlo had a keen desire to learn the truth about himself – and because he loved hearing any story told about the mysterious Mallory Ringess – Danlo joined the Returnists for tea and companionship and wild speculations, and he sat with them as often as he could.
It is hard to know what the future of this cult would have been if Elianora Wen hadn't delivered her famous prophecy of the 11th of false winter. In the great circle outside the Hofgarten, she stood serene and grave in her immaculate white robe and announced to the City that the return of Mallory Ringess was imminent. He would return to Neverness in nine more days, on 20th night. The wounded hibakusha in their tenements should rejoice, for Mallory Ringess would restore them to health. The worm-runners and other criminals should flee the City or else Mallory Ringess would judge them and execute them for their crimes. Above all, she said, the lords and masters of the Order should humble themselves, for Mallory Ringess would return as Lord of Lords, and he would remake the Order into an army of spiritual warriors who would restore the galaxy to its splendour.
Given the mistrust of people towards scryers and their secret art, the effect of Elianora's prophecy was somewhat amazing. Many wormrunners did in fact leave Neverness at this time; not a few merchants gave all their wealth and worldly possessions to the hibakusha and went to live together as dedicated Returnists in the free hostels of the Old City; and most amazing of all, six lords of the Academy renounced their positions to protest the political manoeuvring that had so weakened the Order. At dusk on 20th night, Elianora led nine hundred women and men of her cult up the lower slopes of Urkel to await the return of Mallory Ringess. 'He will appear this night,' Elianora had told everyone. Not only Returnists but many others came to see if this prophecy proved true. To Danlo, sitting in a meadow with the other Returnists, it seemed that half the City had turned out. Before it fell dark and the stars came out, he counted some eighty thousand people spread out on Urkel's slopes. From the eastern edge of the Academy down around to the Hollow Fields, where the hills flattened out just south of the mountain, they laid out their furs on the snowy rocks and passed around bottles of toalache or wine. The Returnists, of course, held a central position slightly higher than everyone else. Below them the city of Neverness sparkled with a million lights; above their encampment on the mountain, the dark icefields and ridgelines gave way to the blackness of nearspace, and the sky was brilliant with starlight. Elianora had not said how Mallory Ringess would return from the stars. Some hoped that he would fall to earth like a meteor, or even materialize out of the air and walk among them. But most expected that his famous lightship, the Immanent Carnation, would appear in the heavens like a flash of silver and glide down to the waiting runs of the Hollow Fields. Then Mallory Ringess would climb out of his ship and ascend the mountain like any other man, though in truth, no one knew if he would still look like a man. No one knew what a god was supposed to look like, and so the swarms of people drank their toalache and talked about the purposes of evolution, and they waited.
Danlo waited too, no less excited than any Returnist. Like the others, he wore a glowing golden band around his head; he wore his best racing kamelaika, and on his face, he wore the lively, longing look of one who expected to be touched by the infinite. He sat not within the first circle of Elianora's followers, nor even in the second, but on the outer edge of this group, by a little stream running fast and full with melted snow. It was a warm, clear night of mountain winds and ageless dreams, and it would be a short night as false winter nights always are. But measured by the minds of the manswarm eager to behold a miracle, the night was long indeed. Danlo lay back against the cold earth, counting his heartbeats as he tried to count the thousands of stars burning through the night. It was a game he liked to play, but a game he could never win because there were too many stars and the sky never held still. Always the world turned into the east, turning its cold face to the deeps of the galaxy and to the greater universe beyond. Always, above the curve of the eastern horizon, new lights appeared, the blinkans and the constellations and the lone, blue giant stars. He lay there waiting and sometimes dreaming, listening to random bits of conversation that fell out of the mouths of the people nearby. All through the night, people made their way up from the City, and the crowds around him began to thicken. Near midnight, a few of the weary ones folded up their furs and abandoned their vigil. With every hour that passed, the people's mood shifted from anticipation to grim faith to uneasiness, and then into an ugly suspicion that somehow they had been fooled. When the great Swan constellation rose above Urkel's dark ridgeline, Danlo knew that the sun could not be far behind. He, too, had begun to doubt Elianora's prophecy – at least he doubted the wisdom of taking her words literally. He was searching the tired faces of his fellow Returnists for despair when, one by one, everyone stopped talking and looked down the narrow, rocky path that wound up the mountain. For a moment, there was a vast, unnerving silence, and then someone cried out: 'Look, it is he!'
Danlo looked down into the dark path to see a tall figure making his way across the stunt spruce and the snowfields. Like everyone else, he hoped that it was Mallory Ringess, but his eyes were used to looking for animals in dark forests, and he could see what others could not. Immediately, he recognized this latecomer as a Fravashi alien, and then moments later, from the tufts of fur below the ears and his arthritic gait, he saw that it was Old Father. As Old Father climbed higher up the path, this sobering fact became apparent to everyone else. There were many groans of disappointment; this sound broke from the lips of a thousand people with the suddenness of ice cracking from a glacier and falling into the sea. As if they had come to a sudden understanding, people began standing up and leaving. They brushed past Old Father without a glance, not even bothering to notice his strange smile or his golden eyes burning through the darkness. Old Father walked through the manswarm straight toward the spot where Danlo sat. He greeted Danlo politely, and then, in his most playful and sadistic voice, he asked, 'Ho, am I too late?'
Danlo looked at the sudden flood of people going down the mountain, and he said, 'Perhaps.'
'Ah, oh, it's nearly dawn. I'd heard that Mallory Ringess would appear before dawn.'
'The whole city must have heard of Elianora's vision,' Danlo said.
'Even we Fravashi,' Old Father said. 'But I wanted to see for myself.'
'But, sir, how did you find me here? There are so many people.'
Old Father pointed his black claw at the circles of Returnists still sitting around Elianora Wen. Even as Danlo did, they all wore templets around their heads, and these nine hundred luminescent bands cast halos of golden light into the black air. 'I followed the glow,' Old Father said. 'You can see it a long way off. And then as I came closer, I followed your scent. It's unique and quite strong, you know.'
Danlo bent his head to sniff his clothes, and he said, 'I did not know the Fravashi had such keen noses.'
'Ha, ha, you smell like a wolf who has rolled in musk grass. Have you considered bathing more frequently?'
'I ... do bathe,' Danlo said. 'I love the water.'
'Ah, ha, but you haven't bathed since you began dreaming with the autists, have you?'
'You know about the Dreamers, sir?'
Old Father said nothing but simply smiled at him.
'Then you must know ... about the Scientists as well?'
'Oh, ho, I do know.'
'These blessed worldviews,' Danlo said. 'These ways of seeing.'
'Ah, oh, oh, ah,' Old Father said. 'This is a city of cults, isn't it?'
'But I have left the Dreamers,' Danlo said. 'I have left the Scientists, too.'
'So, it's so.'
'You taught me, sir. How to free myself from any world view.'
'But now you wear the templet and sit with the Returnists?'
'You are worried that I will become bound to this way ... because it promises so much, yes?'
Old Father motioned toward the men and women sitting close to them, murmuring words of exhausted hope as they looked up at the sky. 'This cult? Oh, no, no, no – when dawn comes and Mallory Ringess has failed to return, the Returnists will be no more. If I seem worried – and I must tell you that it's nearly impossible for a Fravashi to worry – it's only because you seem to love all cults too well.'
With his little finger Danlo touched the glowing templet tight against his forehead, and he asked, 'But what better way ... to know these ways?'
'Well, there is the spelad, of course. Someday you may play this as well as Fayeth. Ah, ho, the whole Fravashi system.'