War in Heaven by David Zindell Page B

for the most essential of all the pilot's arts, which was vision. And then he said, "I wish I could go with you, but since I cannot, I wish you well. Fall far, fall well, and return."
    He bowed to them, deeply, and the pilots returned his bow. Led by the Sonderval, they each walked up to their ships and climbed inside. It took some little time for Demothi Bede to enter the passenger room of Danlo's ship and prepare for his journey. But when he had shut himself inside his sleeping cell and Lord Nikolos and everyone else had moved to safety, the Master of the Fields gave the signal for the pilots to depart. One by one, the lightships began rocketing down the run, where the swarms of the city formed a gauntlet on either side of them. Of course, the lightships, having no wheels, did not need to use the run to gain the blueness of the sky beyond. But the pilots wanted to make a show of their art, and so the Sonderval took his silver-black Cardinal Virtue roaring into the air. Helena Charbo, in the Infinite Pearl , followed his line of ascent only seconds behind, and then came the other ships, the Montsalvat , the Blue Rose and the Bright Moon , and the August Moon , the Sagittarius Bridge , and all the others strung out like diamonds on a necklace connecting earth to the heavens.
    The Snowy Owl , with its long, graceful lines and sweeping wings, was only one ship among two hundred of these jewels. Although Danlo would soon enough leave his brother and sister pilots behind, he felt in his pounding blood the sense of shared purpose that connected him to them. And then, when the world of Thiells lay spinning beneath him like a great blue ball, the manifold opened before him. He entered into the raging deeps of the universe, and then he, like all the pilots in their two hundred lightships, had only his vision and his heart to guide him.

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    CHAPTER IV
    Sheydveg
We call our region of the galaxy the Civilized Worlds. We believe that we seek for ourselves an ideal state of human culture beyond barbarism or war. If this be true, however, how are we to think of Summerworld, with its silver mines and slaves, as civilized? Or Catava where the Architects of the Reformed Churches use their holy cleansing computers to mutilate their own children's minds? Or Simoom, or Urradeth, and so on, and so on? The truth is that we have come to define civilization very narrowly: we are civilized who honour and keep the Three Laws. And what is the essence of these laws? Very simply, that we agree to limit our technology. To be civilized is to make a choice to live as careful and natural human beings in harmony with our environments. The Civilized Worlds, then, are nothing more than those three thousand spheres of water and earth where man has chosen to remain as man.
— from A Requiem for Homo Sapiens by Horthy Hosthoh, Lord of the Order of Mystic Mathematicians and Other Keepers of the Ineffable Flame
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    And so the pilots of the New Order returned across the stars as they had come only a few years before. Although this part of their journey from Thiells to Farfara was much the shortest, in distance, as measured in time it took many days to fall even a few hundred light years between such stars as Natal and Acayib the Brilliant, for the manifold underlying the Vild was as changeable as quicksand and mappings made one moment might prove worthless the next. The Sonderval, though, led the lightships with panache and good order past Kefira and Cho Chumu, and Rhea Luz, all hot and swollen with its angry red light. Perhaps it was good chance — or only fate — that no pilots were lost during this first fenestration of window to window giving out on the treacherous stars. Once, when they fell through a Danladi fold caused by the explosion of some recent supernova, Ona Tetsu's Ibi Ibis almost vanished into an infinite series of infoldings. But with great presence of mind characteristic of all her famous line, that wily pilot found a mapping which took her