Free The Wild by David Zindell Page A

His will to live was strong, and his memory of colours, images, words, whispers and love was even stronger. His memory for such things was almost perfect, and so it happened that he willed himself to behold a deep, deep blue inside blue, the colour of his mother's eyes. His mother had been one of the finest scryers there had ever been, able to see the infinitely complex web of connections between nowness and time to come. The greatest scryers will always find their way into the future; in the end, they choose which future and fate will be. Although Danlo was no scryer, not yet, he remembered how perfectly the colour of his mother's eyes matched his own. 'You have your mother's eyes,' his grandfather, Leopold Soli had once told him. Long ago, before he was born, his mother had blinded herself as the scryers do so that she might perceive the future more clearly. Now, in the pit of his ship, even as he plunged downward toward the torison space's hideous singularity, Danlo closed his eyes tightly and tried to behold their blueness from within. He remembered, then, an important theorem of elementary topology. He saw it instantly as a perfect jewel, like a lightstone, a deep, dark, liquid blue holding a secret light. It was the first conservation theorem, which proved that for every simplicial mapping, the image of the boundary is equal to the boundary of the image. Almost instantly, he seized upon this theorem as a starving man might grasp a gobbet of meat. He knew that he could apply it toward mapping out of the torison space. And so he did. Before the lens of his mind's eye, he summoned up arrays of ideoplasts and made his proof. He was perhaps the first pilot in the history of the Order to prove that a collapsing torison space might remain open. (Even if that opening quickly fell off toward an infinitesimal.) He made a mapping, and he fell through, and suddenly there was the light of a star. The Snowy Owl fell out into realspace, into realtime, into the glorious golden light of a star that he named Shona Oyu, or, the Bright Eye. This was to be the first of the miraculous escapes from the manifold that he would make on his journey toward the Solid State Entity.
    In this way, falling from star to star, falling in and out of the manifold beneath the stars, he continued on his journey. Because he wished to be the first of the ten pilots to reach the Entity (and because he hoped to elude the warrior-poet who might still be following him), he fell across the stars as quickly as a pilot may fall. As the Sonderval had said in Mer Tadeo's garden, all quests are really the same. His quest to seek out his father and find the lost planet Tannahill was connected to the great quest twenty-five years past to find that infinite store of knowledge known as the Elder Eddas. And that quest was merely a continuation of all quests throughout time and history. Always, man had felt the urge to discover the true image of humanity, the shape and substance of what man might someday become. This is the secret of life, of human life, the true secret that men and women have sought as far back as the howling moonlit savannahs of Afarique on Old Earth. In the pilots of the Order, this urge to know the unknowable most often finds itself in a terrible restlessness, an instinct and will to fall through space, to move ever outward across the universe, always seeking. Some pilots seek black holes, or ringworlds built by ancient aliens, or strange, new stars. Some pilots still look for the hypothesized dark matter of the universe, the mysterious matter that no one has ever found. Some pilots seek God. But all pilots, if they are worthy of their pilots' rings, seek movement for the sake of movement itself. The dance of lightship from star to star, from the translucent windows into the manifold that give out onto the stars – this urge to fall ever outward toward the farthest galaxies is sometime called the westering. Sometimes, too, the pilots refer to this manner