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said.
    "The Entity believes that the Silicon God is using both the warrior-poets and the Architects in His war," Danlo said. "She believes that the Silicon God would destroy the whole galaxy, if He could."
    Or possibly the whole universe , Danlo thought.
    He went on to speak of Bertram Jaspari's dream of establishing his Iviomils in a new church somewhere among the stars coreward from Neverness. Like the fanatical Architects they were, they would continue destroying the stars in their God-given program to remake the universe.
    "I am afraid ... that they could eventually create another Vild," Danlo said. "Or worse."
    And what could possibly be worse than the creation of a new region of dead and dying stars? As Ti Sen Sarojin, the Lord Astronomer, observed, if the Iviomils began destroying stars among the densely-packed stars of the core, they might possibly set off a chain-reaction of supernovas that would explode outward star by star and consume the galaxy in a vast ball of fire and light.
    "This is very bad," Lord Nikolos said quietly. Throughout the hall the lords sat at their tables in deathly silence. Never in living memory had the calm and cool Lord Nikolos used the words 'very' and 'bad' together.
    "I am sorry," Danlo said.
    "Religious fanatics and facifahs and star-killers and renegade pilots and gods! What a story you bring us, Pilot! Well, we can do nothing about the wars of gods, but it is upon us to — "
    "Lord Nikolos," Danlo interrupted.
    Lord Nikolos took a quick breath and said, "What is it, then?"
    "There is something that the Entity told me about the Silicon God. About all the gods."
    "Please, do tell us as well."
    "The Entity believes that we ourselves hold the secret of defeating the Silicon God. We human beings."
    "But how can this be?" Morena Sung, the Lord Eschatologist broke in.
    "Because this secret is part of the Elder Eddas," Danlo said. "And the Eddas are believed to be encoded only in human DNA."
    In truth, no one knew what the Elder Eddas really were. Supposedly, some fifty thousand years ago on Old Earth, the mythical Ieldra had written all their godly wisdom into the human genome. Now, millennia later, trillions of men and women on countless worlds carried these sleeping memories in every cell of their bodies. And it was through the art of remembrancing alone (or so the remembrancers claimed) that the Elder Eddas could be awakened and called up before the mind's eye like living paintings and understood. Some experienced the Eddas as a clear and mystical light. Some believed that this wisdom was nothing less than instructions on becoming gods — and possibly much more. Danlo, who had once had a great remembrance and apprehension of the One Memory, sensed that the Eddas might contain all consciousness, perhaps even all possible memory itself. If true, then it would certainly be possible for a man — or perhaps even a child — to remember how the Ieldra long ago had defeated the Dark God and saved the Milky Way from annihilation. This was the grail that the Solid State Entity sought in Her war against the Silicon God, and it was possible that Danlo and the Sonderval and Lord Nikolos in his bright yellow robe — and everyone else sitting in the hall that day — carried this secret inside them.
    "I haven't heard our remembrancers speak of any war secrets contained in the Elder Eddas," Lord Nikolos said. Here he turned to exchange looks with Mensah Ashtoreth, the silver-robed Lord Remembrancer who sat at a table nearby shaking his head. "As for the Neverness remembrancers, who knows what they have discovered in the years since the Order divided and our mission came here to Thiells?"
    He did not add that the many thousands of converts to the new religion of Ringism sought remembrance of the Elder Eddas as well. Lord Nikolos could scarcely countenance an information so mysterious as the Elder Eddas, much less the possibility that some wild-eyed religionary on Neverness might uncover secrets unknown