The Wild
The awe-inspiring sequel to The Broken GodDanlo the Wild has started his quest into the stars, beyond the limits of the known universe to search for three things: his father, half god, half hero, Mallory Ringess; the lost city of Tannahill, home to the Architects; where he also hopes to discover the cure to the plague that is destroying his people.
Читать The Wild онлайн беплатно
DAVID ZINDELL
The Wild
BOOK TWO
of A Requiem for Homo Sapiens
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
HarperVoyager
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1995
Copyright © David Zindell 1995
David Zindell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780006497127
Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2016 ISBN: 9780008116781
Version: 2016-09-01
Contents
Chapter Two The Eye of the Universe
Chapter Three: Ancestral Voices
Chapter Twelve: The Transcendentals
Chapter Seventeen: The Koivuniemin
Chapter Eighteen: The Prophecy
Chapter Nineteen: In the Prophet’s Palace
Chapter Twenty: In the House of The Dead
Chapter Twenty One: Preparations
Chapter Twenty Two: The Heavenly Light
Each man and woman is a star.
The stars are the children of God alone in the night;
The stars are the wild white seeds burning inside a woman;
The stars are the fires that women light inside men;
The stars are the eyes of all the Old Ones who have lived and died.
Who can hold the light of the wild stars?
Gazing at the bright black sky,
You see only yourself looking for yourself.
When you look into the eyes of God,
They go on and on forever.
– from the Devaki Song of Life
It is my duty to record the events of the glorious and tragic Second Mission to the Vild. To observe, to remember, to record only – although the fate of the galaxy’s dying stars was intimately interwoven with my own, I took little part in seeking out that vast, stellar wasteland known as the Vild, or the Wild, or the Inferno, or whatever ominous name that men can attach to such a wild and hellish place. This quest to save the stars was to be for others: eminent pilots such as the Sonderval, and Aja, and Alark of Urradeth, and some who were not yet famous such as Victoria Chu, and my son, Danlo wi Soli Ringess. Like all quests called by the Order of Mystic Mathematicians, the Second Vild Mission had an explicit and formal purpose: to establish a new Order within the heart of the Vild; to find the lost planet known as Tannahill; to establish a mission among the leaders of man’s greatest religion and win them to a new vision; and, of course, to stop the man-doomed stars from exploding into supernovas. All seekers of the Vild took oaths toward this end. But as with all human enterprises, there are always purposes inside purposes. Many attempted the journey outward across the galaxy’s glittering stars out of the promise of adventure, mystery, power, or even worldly riches. Many spoke of a new phase in human evolution, of redeeming both past and future and fulfilling the ancient prophecies. Altogether, ten thousand women and men braved the twisted, light-ruined spaces of the Vild, and thus they carried inside them ten thousand individual hopes and dreams. And the deepest dream of all of them (though few acknowledged this even to themselves) was to wrest the secrets of the universe from the wild stars. Their deepest purpose was to heal the universe of its wound, and to this impossible end they pledged their devotion, their energies, their genius, their very lives.
On the twenty-first of false winter in the year 2954 since the founding of Neverness, the Vild Mission began its historic journey across the galaxy. In the black, cold, vacuum spaces above the City of Light (or the City of Pain as Neverness is sometimes known), in orbit around the planet of Icefall, Lord Nikolos Sar Petrosian had called together a fleet of ships. There were ten seedships, each one the temporary home of a thousand akashics, cetics, programmers, mechanics, biologists, and other professionals of the Order. There were twelve deepships as round and fat as artificial moons; the deepships contained the floating farms and factories and assemblers that would be needed to establish a second Order within the Vild. And, of course, there were the lightships. Their number was two hundred and fifty-four. They were the glory of Neverness, these bright, shining slivers of spun diamond that could pierce the space beneath space and enter the unchartered seas of the manifold where there was neither time nor distance nor light. A single pilot guided each lightship, and together the pilots of Vild Mission would lead the seedships and deepships across the stars. To the thousands of Ordermen who had remained behind (and to the millions of citizens of Neverness safe by the fires of their dwellings), the fleet that Lord Petrosian had assembled must have seemed a grand array of men and machines. But against the universe, it was nothing. Upon Lord Petrosian’s signal, the Vild ships vanished into the night, two hundred and seventy-six points of light lost into the billions of lights that were the stars of the Milky Way. Lightships such as the
