The Broken God by David Zindell Page B

calves. Then he crawled through the tunnel where the dogs slept, dislodged the entrance snowblock, and stepped outside.
    The sky was brilliant with stars; he had never seen so many stars. The lights in the sky were stars, and far off, falling out into space where it curved black and deep, points of light swirled together as densely as an ice-mist. The sight made him instantly sad, instantly cold and numinous with longing. Who could stare out into the vast light-distances and not feel a little holy? Who could stand alone in the starlight and not suffer the terrible nearness of infinity? Each man and woman is a star, he remembered. Many stars, such as Behira, Alaula, and Kalinda, he knew by name. To the north, he beheld the Bear, Fish, and Thallow constellations; to the west, the Lone White Wolf bared his glittering teeth. Two strange stars shined in the east, balls of white light as big as moons, whatever moons really were. (Soli had told him that the moons of the night were other worlds, icy mirrors reflecting the light of the sun, but how could this be?) Nonablinka and Shurablinka were strange indeed, supernovae that had exploded years ago in one of the galaxy's spiral arms. Danlo, of course, under-
    stood almost nothing of exploding stars. He called them simply blinkans, stars which, from time to time, would appear from nowhere, burn brightly for a while and then disappear into the blackness from which they came. In the east, too, was the strangest light in the sky. It had no name that he knew, but he thought of it as the Golden Flower, with its rings of amber-gold shimmering just beyond the dark edge of the world. Five years ago, it had been born as a speck of golden light; for five years it had slowly grown outward, opening up into space like a fireflower. The various golden hues flowed and changed colour as he watched; they rippled and seemed alive with pattern and purpose. And then he had an astonishing thought, astonishing because it happened to be true: Perhaps the Golden Flower really was alive. If men could journey past the stars, he thought, then surely other living things could as well, things that might be like flowers or birds or butterflies. Someday, if he became a pilot, he must ask these strange creatures their names and tell them his own; he must ask them if they ached when the stellar winds blew cold or longed to join the great oceans of life which must flow outward toward the end of the universe, that is, if the universe came to an end instead of going on and on forever.
    O blessed God! he prayed, how much farther was the Unreal City? What if he missed it by sledding too far north or south? Haidar had taught him to steer by the stars, and according to the stories, the Unreal City lay due east of Kweitkel. He looked off into the east, out across the starlit seascape. The drift ice and snowfields gleamed faintly; dunes of new snow rose up in sweeping, swirling shapes, half in silver-white and half lost in shadow. It was very beautiful, the cold, sad, fleeting beauty of shona-lara, the beauty that hints of death. Now the midwinter storms would blow one after the other, and snow would smother the iceblooms, which would die. And the snowworms would starve, and the sleekits – those who weren't quick enough to flee to the islands – would starve, too. The birds would fly to miurasalia and the other islands of the north, because very soon, after the storms were done, the harsh sun would come out, and there would be no more snow or ice or starvation because there would be nothing left to starve.
    Later that day, at first light, he went out to hunt seals. Each hooded seal – or ringed or grey seal – keeps many holes open in the sea ice; the ice of the sea, east and west, is everywhere pocked by their holes. But the holes are sometimes scarce and irregularly spaced. Snow always covers them, making them hard to find. Danlo leashed his best seal dog, Siegfried, and together they zigzagged this way and that across