The Wild by David Zindell

time. In the bright nebulae such as the Rudra and the Rosette, out of gravity and heat and interstellar dust, the new stars continually formed and flared into light. A hundred generations of stars had lived and died in the eons before the Star of Neverness, among others, ever came into being. Stars, like people, were always dying. Sometimes, as Danlo looked out over the vast light-distances he marvelled that so many human beings could arise from stardust and the fundamental urge of all matter toward life. Scattered among all the galaxy's far-flung stars were perhaps fifty million billion people. On the Civilized Worlds alone every second some three million women, men, and children would die, were dying, will always be passing from life into death. It was only right and natural, Danlo thought, that human beings should create themselves in their vast and hungry swarms, but it was not right that they should seek a greater life by killing the stars. This was all sacrilege and sin, or even shaida, a word that Danlo sometimes used to describe the evil of a universe that, like a top failing to spin or a cracked teapot, had lost its harmony and balance. All matter craved transformation into light, and this Danlo understood deep inside his belly and brain. But already, in this infinite universe from which he had been born, there was too much light. The stars of the Vild were sick with light, swelling and bursting into the hellish lightstorms that men called supernovas. Soon, someday, perhaps farwhen, the vastness of the Vild would be a blinding white cloud full of photons and hard radiation, and then this tiny pocket of the universe would no longer be transparent to light. No longer would men such as Danlo be able to look at the stars and see the universe just as it is, for all space would be light, and all time would be light, always and forever, nothing but light and ever more dazzling light.
    It was toward the light of Thiells that the pilots steered, there to build a city and a new Order. The rest of the pilots, including Danlo, would accompany the Mission as far as Sattva Luz, a magnificent white star well within the inner envelope of the Vild. And so it happened. The journey to Sattva Luz was uneventful, for the Sonderval had already mapped the pathways that led from star to star; he had told the pilots the fixed-points of every star along their path, and so Danlo and the Snowy Owl fell from Savona to Shokan and then on to Sattva Luz as smoothly as corpuscles of blood streaming through a man's veins. This segment of the journey was much the same as fenestering through the Fallaways, only fraught with dangers that few pilots had ever faced. In any part of the Vild – even along the pathways well mapped and well known – at any moment the spacetime distortions of an exploding star might fracture a pathway into a thousand individual decomposition strands thereby destroying any ship so unfortunate as to be caught in the wrong strand. Around Sattva Luz, where the many millions of pathways through the manifold converged into a thickspace as dark and dense as a ball of lead, the pilots dispersed. The main body of Mission ships guided by the Sonderval was the first to fall away. Danlo, whose ship had fallen out of the manifold into realspace for a few moments, watched them go. Below him – ten million miles below the Snowy Owl – was the boiling white corona of Sattva Luz. Above him there wavered a sea of blackness and many nameless stars. He waited as the Sonderval's ship, the Cardinal Virtue, fell into the bright black manifold and disappeared. He was aware of this event as a little flash of light; soon there came many more flashes of light as the soundless engines of the Mission ships ripped open rents in spacetime and fell into the manifold. The pilots in their glorious lightships – and the pilots in the deepships and in the seedships – opened windows upon the universe, and they fell in, and they were gone. Then the remaining