War in Heaven

‘Well, Pilot?’

‘There is no pilot in Neverness the equal of Sivan wi Mawi Sarkissian,’ Danlo said.

‘Are you certain of that?’

Danlo, of course, was not certain, but to reassure the Ede imago, he said, ‘The best pilots went with the Sonderval to the Vild.’

‘And the very best of these is here before you,’ Demothi Bede said to the Ede imago. One of the old lord’s virtues was that he would defend a pilot of his Order against anyone, especially a glowing hologram projected out of a computer. ‘And isn’t it possible, Pilot, that you learned new aspects of your art in being pursued by Sivan?’

‘It is possible,’ Danlo said with a smile.

‘Then it’s clear that if the Ringists should surprise us, we’ll have to trust to your judgement and your art. But now, we should leave you alone so that you may take a few hours more sleep.’

‘No,’ Danlo said. ‘Now we must open a window and journey on – and pray that Arrio Verjin’s Danladi wave doesn’t smash through the manifold just as we are making a mapping.’

And so the Snowy Owl fell on past Aquene, all aflame like a plasma torch, and then entered into the spaces of the alien worlds of Darghin and Fravashing. During this time of haste and sleeplessness, Danlo saw no sign of an approaching Danladi wave or another lightship. But he never ceased the searching of his eyes or his deeper mathematical senses. And deeper still burned memories that lent urgency to his return to Neverness. He could never forget his people, the Alaloi, and how they were slowly dying from an incurable disease. Incurable, truly, by any known medicines or technologies, and yet it might be that Danlo carried the cure inside himself like an elixir of light. It would be terrible, he thought, if he found the secret of this cure only to arrive home too late.

Of course the shaida disease called ‘the slow evil’ was not the only threat to the Alaloi tribe’s survival, nor were they the only people on Icefall exposed to sudden doom. If war came to Neverness, the entire city – and much of the planet – might be destroyed by hydrogen bombs. And Bertram Jaspari and his fleet of Iviomil fanatics might be falling towards Neverness at that very moment. On Tannahill, this prince of the Old Church Architects had subtly threatened to end the Ringism abomination and cleanse the galaxy of all would-be gods. With their great star-killing engine called a morrashar, the Iviomils certainly wielded the means to destroy the Star of Neverness – as they already had the great red sun of the Narain people far across the Vild. The gods, too, might destroy all space itself in the stars near Neverness, by design or perhaps only by accident of the vast war that they waged across the heavens. It was said that the Silicon God’s deep programs prevented him from directly harming human beings. But Danlo took little solace from this fact. The Silicon God, like any other god, was certainly clever enough to find a thousand ways to menace humanity indirectly. And even if no god or bomb or star-killing machine ever touched Neverness, there was always the malignant light of Merripen’s Star. This supernova had exploded nearly thirty years before, and for all that time a wavefront of radiation had fallen outwards across the galaxy. Soon its terrible energies would fall upon Neverness and bathe all of Icefall in a shower of death. Or life. In truth, no one knew how intense its radiation would be, nor if the Golden Ring growing above Icefall’s atmosphere would simply absorb this cosmic light and burst into a new phase of its evolution. Sometimes, in the darkest wormholes of the manifold, Danlo prayed for this new life, just as he prayed for his people. But sometimes his words seemed only words, no more potent against the forces of the universe than a whisper cast into a winter wind.

As Danlo continued along his pathway towards Silvaplana, Tyr and then Neverness, he fell out around a worldless star named Shoshange. It was a subdwarf, small but of very high density, and hot and blue much like the central star of the Ring Nebula in Lyra. He might have spent many moments gazing at this rare star, but immediately upon exiting the manifold, he found that seven lightships were waiting for him. Through his telescopes he made out the lines of the Cantor’s Dream, with its curving diamond wings, and the Fire Drinker, and each of the others. Once, as a journeyman, Danlo had memorized the silhouette and design of every lightship of the Order; he knew the these ships’ names and those of the pilots who belonged to them. The seven pilots must have seen the Snowy Owl fall out of the manifold: Sigurd Narvarian, Timothy Wolf, the Shammara, Marja Valasquez, Femi wi Matana, Taras Moswen and Tukuli li Chu. Their names, unfortunately, were almost all that Danlo knew of these seven, for he had never met any of them. Only two – Sigurd Narvarian and Tukuli li Chu – were master pilots. And certainly Marja Valasquez deserved a mastership, but her famous evil temperament had alienated every elder pilot who might have helped to elevate her. It was said that in the Pilots’ War she had destroyed the ship of Sevilin Ordando, who had surrendered to her, but this slander had never been confirmed.

It took Danlo only a moment to decide to flee. He closed his eyes, envisioning the colours and contours of the manifold in this neighbourhood of space; he listened to the whispers of his heart, and then he reached out with his mind to his ship’s-computer to make interface. And then he was gone. The Snowy Owl plunged into the manifold like a diamond needle falling into the ocean. He knew that the other ships would follow him. Very well, he thought, then let them follow him into the darkest part of the manifold, where the spaces fell deep and wild and strange. In the gentle topology of the Fallaways few such spaces existed, but there were always Flowtow bubbles and torison tubes and decision trees. And, of course, the rare but bewildering paradox tunnels. No pilot would willingly seek out such a deranged space – unless he were being pursued by seven others determined to destroy him. By chance (or fate), such a tunnel could be found beneath the blazing fires of Shoshange. From a journey that the Sonderval had once described making as a young pilot, Danlo remembered the fixed-points of this tunnel. And so he made a difficult mapping. He found the paradox tunnel all infolded among itself like a nest of snakes. His ship disappeared into the opening of the tunnel – and to any ship pursuing him it would seem as if the Snowy Owl had been swallowed by twenty dark, yawning, serpentine mouths, all at once.

‘We’re in danger, aren’t we, Pilot? We’ve been discovered, haven’t we? Shouldn’t you alert the Lord Bede?’

As always, Danlo’s devotionary computer floated in the pit of his ship near his side. And the Ede imago floated in the dark air, talking, always talking. But when Danlo was fully faced into his ship’s-computer and his mind opened to the terrors and beauties of the manifold, he scarcely noticed this noisome hologram. Only rarely, when he had need of making mathematics at lightning speed in order to survive, did he ask for complete silence. And so when the Snowy Owl began to phase in and out of existence like a single firefly winking on and off from a dozen cave mouths all at once, Danlo lifted his little finger, a sign that Ede should be quiet. Unfortunately, it was also a sign that they were in deadly danger, and Ede must have found it paradoxical that just when he needed to talk the most, he must keep as silent as a stone.

As for rousing Demothi Bede from quicktime, Danlo never considered this. He was too busy making mappings and applying Gallivare’s point theorem in order to find his way out of this bizarre space. Danlo always perceived the manifold both mathematically and sensually, as a vast tapestry of shimmering colours. Always, there was a logic and sensibility to these colours, the way that the intense carmine of a Lavi space might break apart into maroon, rose and auburn as one approached the first bounded interval. But here, in this disturbing paradox tunnel, there seemed to be little logic. One moment a deep violet might stain his entire field of vision, while in the next, a shocking yellow might spread before him like an artist’s spilled paint. And then there were moments of no colour, or colours such as smalt or chlorine which somehow seemed so drained of their essence that they appeared almost black or white. And too often white would darken to black, and black mutate into white like the figure and ground in a painting shifting back and forth, in and out. Twice Danlo thought that he had escaped into a flatter, brighter part of the manifold only to find himself falling through a part of the tunnel as dark and twisting as the bowels of a bear. How long he remained in this cavernlike place he could never say. But at last he made a mapping and fell free into a simple Lavi neighbourhood; his relief must have been as that of an oyster miraculously coughed out of a seagull’s throat.

‘We’re free, aren’t we, Pilot?’ On his journey towards Tannahill, Danlo had programmed his ship’s-computer to project a simulation of the manifold for Ede to study. With its geometric and too-literal representations of the most sublime mathematics, this hologram wasn’t really like the way that Danlo perceived this space beneath space. But it allowed Ede a certain intake of information, and more than once, Ede had pointed out dangers that Danlo himself might have overlooked. ‘We’ve lost the other ships, haven’t we? I can’t find a trace of a tell.’

At that very moment, Danlo was scanning the neighbourhood about him with all the intensity of a hunter searching a snowfield for signs of a great white bear.

‘We’re alone now, aren’t we? There’s no other ship within the radius of convergence.’

Once, Danlo had explained that past the boundaries of a Lavi neighbourhood the radius of convergence shoots off towards infinity and it becomes almost impossible to read the tells of another lightship.

‘You escaped that strange space, whatever it was, and now we’re alone.’

For a moment, Danlo thought that they had lost the other ships. With his mind’s eye and his mathematics he delved the aquamarine depths all about him searching for the slightest streak of light. He held his breath, counting his heartbeats: one, two, three … And then, in a low, soft voice, he said, ‘No, we are not alone.’

Outwards in the direction of the paradox tunnel, at the very boundary of this neighbourhood of space, two tiny sparks lit the manifold.

‘Where, Pilot? Oh, there – now I see them. Which ships are they?’

It is, of course, impossible to identify a lightship solely from tells it makes in the manifold. But when Danlo closed his eyes, he saw two ships spinning towards him like drillworms: the Cantor’s Dream and the Fire Drinker, piloted by the bloodthirsty Marja Valasquez.

‘What shall we do – shall we flee?’

Even as the Snowy Owl fell deeper into the manifold towards the core stars, Danlo searched this neighbourhood’s flickering boundary, waiting to see if any more ships pursued him. After he had counted ten more heartbeats, he said, ‘Yes, we shall flee.’

And so Danlo took his ship into other spaces, the blue-black invariant spaces and segmented spaces and klein tubes that bent back upon themselves like a snake swallowing its tail. For four days this pursuit lasted. When Danlo grew so tired that his eyes burned and his head ached as if pressed by the slow grind of glacier ice, the Ede imago reminded him that he couldn’t go for ever without sleep. Danlo’s reply, when he finally managed to force the words from his cracked, bleeding lips, was simple and to the point: ‘Neither can the other pilots.’

Somewhere beyond the double star known as the Almira Twins, Danlo lost one of the other ships. For half a day he fell through a Zeeman space as flat and green as a field of grass, and he descried the tells of only one other ship. After he had mapped through a short but particularly tortuous point-set tunnel and only a single spark emerged from its black, empty mouth, he felt certain that only a single ship followed him.

‘Must we still flee?’ the Ede imago asked Danlo. ‘You’re so tired you can scarcely keep your eyes open.’

Danlo was tired, so dreadfully tired that he felt it as a burning sickness deep in his belly. The one reason that he kept his eyes open at all was to look at the glowing Ede hologram. To pilot the Snowy Owl he need only reach out to his ship with the seeing centre of his brain, and its computer would infuse mathematical images directly into him. To pilot his ship with elegance and grace, he thus most often kept his eyes closed. In truth, when he interfaced the manifold and the beauty of the number storm swept over him like ten thousand interwoven rainbows, his eyes fell as blind to the sights around him as a newborn child’s.

‘I can lose this ship,’ Danlo said. At the boundary of this neighbourhood of space, a glimmering ripple now told of another ship. He was certain that it was the Fire Drinker. He remembered what the Sonderval had once said about her pilot, Marja Valasquez: that as ferocious and bold as she was, she had a peculiar dread of phase spaces.

For a while, as the manifold began curving into a blueness as gentle as the watery world of Agathange, Danlo searched for a phase space. But he never found one. He kept well-distanced from the Fire Drinker, however; always this other lightship remained just at the boundary of whatever neighbourhood of space Danlo passed through.

‘This Marja Valasquez,’ Ede said, ‘seems almost as good a pilot as Sivan wi Mawi Sarkissian. He, too, followed you at the boundary for almost your entire journey into the Vild.’

Danlo smiled grimly at this, and rubbed his burning, bloodshot eyes. He wiped the blood from his lips, then said, ‘Many times I tried to lose Sivan but never could. Even in the inversion spaces of the Vild. I always thought … that he could have closed the radius and caught me whenever he wanted.’

‘But not Marja Valasquez?’

‘No. I think that she follows me only with the greatest difficulty.’

‘Then you still hope to lose her?’

‘I … will lose her. Even if I must stay awake for ten days.’

‘But perhaps she was better rested than you before this ordeal began. Or perhaps she uses forbidden drugs to give her a greater wakefulness.’

‘Then I will lose her in a phase space, if I can find one,’ Danlo said. ‘Or perhaps a Soli tree.’

‘But if you enter these spaces, might not the probability mappings fall against you? Aren’t you at a terrible disadvantage in letting her pursue you?’

‘Do I have another choice?’

‘You might fall out into realspace and signal for a parlay.’

‘No, I will not do that. Floating in space, waiting in the star’s light like a dove with a broken wing … we would be so helpless.’

‘Then why not pursue her?’

At this suggestion a sudden pain stabbed through Danlo’s eye, and he asked, ‘Towards what end?’

‘Towards destroying her, of course! As you pilots do with your ships, dancing the dance of light and death.’

For a moment, Danlo’s deep blue eyes filled with a terrible radiance, and he stared at Ede in silence.

‘At least your chances would be even. Much more than even, if you’re the better pilot, as I’m sure you are.’

‘I will not fall against her,’ Danlo said.

The program running the projection of Ede must have called for persuasion, for now his dark, plump face glowed with all the craftiness of a merchant selling firestones of uncertain virtue. ‘You’ve made your vow, of course. But isn’t the spirit of this vow to serve life? You’d never harm another’s life – but consider the great harm that might come to many lives if you let Marja destroy you. Wouldn’t you best serve your vow by ensuring that you reach Neverness however you can?’

‘No,’ Danlo said.

‘But, Pilot, this one time – who would ever know?’

‘No.’

‘But think of it! You’ve let this other pilot follow you across four thousand light years. It would be so easy to take her into a klein tube. To quickly klein back across your pathway and fall against her, she might never suspect such a—’

‘No, I will not!’

‘But if you—’

‘Please do not speak of this any more.’

For a moment, the Ede program caused his countenance to fall into the appearance of contrition. And then he asked, ‘But, Pilot, what will you do?’

‘I will stay awake,’ Danlo said. ‘I … will fall on.’

And so Danlo fell, taking the Snowy Owl through the manifold as fast as he could. He made his mappings and artfully arrayed the windows upon the Fallaways, and he fenestered from star to star with a rare grace. And still Marja Valasquez in her Fire Drinker followed him. Soon, if he continued on this pathway, he must make a final sequence of mappings that would cause him to fall out near the Star of Neverness. And Marja would fall out too, and if he didn’t want to confront her ship to ship in realspace, then he must find some way to lose her before then.

He was wondering how he might accomplish this purpose when he entered an unusually flat null space. The manifold fell very calm; its colours quieted from quicksilver to emerald and then to a gentle turquoise without flaw or variegation of tone. Other than the Snowy Owl’s perturbations and the faint tells of Marja’s ship, no other ripples touched the almost deathly stillness of this space. Something was wrong here, he thought, something that he had never encountered before, not even in the endless null spaces of the Vild. There was a strangeness all about him and inside him, a waiting for some terrible event to occur; it was almost like standing on the sea’s ice on a clear winter day and watching the horizon for the whitish-blue clouds of a storm. He sensed such a storm. How this could be he did not know, for his mathematics told him that the manifold was peaceful – even if he extended his search outside the boundary of this neighbourhood to other neighbourhoods within a rather vast and ill-defined region. He might have sought the tells of this topological event for ever, for outside the radius of convergence, the perturbations of the manifold become infinitely faint. But he was keen of vision, both in his eyes and in his deeper mathematical senses; something like a shimmer of light caused him to look deep into the manifold, inward towards the fixed-points of the Morbio Inferiore. And then, from far away, after his heart had beat nineteen times, he saw it. There was, in truth, a swelling whiteness like that of a storm. Or a wave – a tidal wave of the manifold. As his heart beat more quickly, he knew that the Danladi wave told of by Arrio Verjin would soon sweep through the manifold and fall over any ship caught in its path.

‘Pilot, what is it?’ the Ede imago asked. ‘What do you see – my simulation shows nothing.’

‘I see a wave, far off, towards the core singularity. It … builds. It is a Danladi wave.’

‘A Danladi wave! Are you sure? Then soon it will sweep through this neighbourhood and twist the toplogy beyond calculation.’

‘Yes.’

‘If we’re caught here, it will sweep us under and destroy us.’

‘Possibly.’

‘Then we must flee immediately! We must fall out into realspace where we’ll be safe.’

‘We will flee,’ Danlo said strangely. His voice was low and yet strong like a building wind; suddenly the weariness seemed to melt from him, and his eyes grew as bright as double stars.

‘What do you wait for, then?’

‘We will flee, but not into realspace, not yet,’ Danlo said. ‘We will flee into the Danladi wave.’

‘Are you mad, Pilot? Would you destroy us for the sake of your wilfulness?’

‘I pray … that I will not destroy us.’

Then with a flick of his hand for Ede to be silent, he made a mapping and pointed the Snowy Owl towards the Danladi wave. He began falling from window to window as quickly as he could and still maintain a sense of interfenestration. Because he knew that Marja Valasquez would follow him, he spared not a moment searching for the tells of the Fire Drinker behind him. His whole awareness concentrated on what lay ahead. He fell through the manifold like a streak of light, and yet the Danladi wave swept towards him even more quickly. For it did not ‘move’ as he moved, but rather deformed the manifold almost instantaneously in all directions. In a way, it was the essence of motion itself. Danlo could scarcely believe how quickly it built. One moment it was no more significant than the hump of a snow hut on a frozen sea. But in the next, it began to brighten and swell as if a flat plain of ice had suddenly heaved itself up into the highest of mountains. Soon, in moments, it would fall upon him, and then he must make the choice either to look for a mapping and dive under this impossibly monstrous wave, or to escape into realspace as Ede had advised.

Ahira, Ahira – what shall I do? For a moment, Danlo prayed to the name of the snowy owl, his spirit animal whom he had once believed held half his soul. Ahira, Ahira.

By now, Danlo thought, Marja Valasquez must have descried the shape of the Danladi wave. But so fast did they race towards its boiling centre – and it towards them – that she might have had too little time to understand its true nature. Arrio Verjin, after all, would not have warned the Order’s pilots of its coming. She might perceive it as only a Wimund wave or even the much simpler N-set waves of a Gallivare inversion. She must assume that he would try to use its topological complexities to escape her, perhaps diving beneath the wave into calmer regions of the manifold at the last moment. But for many moments, Danlo had been making lightning calculations and going through every known theorem pertaining to Danladi waves; he felt almost certain that there could be no escaping such a wave simply by ‘diving’ beneath it. Its perturbations were too powerful, and it propagated much too quickly for that. Already, as the wave began to crest, rising, rising, he descried an astonishing density of zero-points, like trillions of bacteria churned into a huge, black, sucking mass. The wave itself began to suck at him now as he crossed the last bounded interval; now, in less than a moment, he must either make a mapping into realspace or prepare to die.

Ahira, Ahira – give me me the courage to do what I must do.

He waited as long as he could, waited until the Fire Drinker crossed the last bounded interval, too. And then, in the terrible topological distortions of the wave that was almost upon them, all possible windows into realspace suddenly closed, and there could be no escape in that direction. There could be only pathways downwards into the swirling blackness beneath the wave. Or pathways into the wave. Since the moment that Danlo had first sighted the wave far across the shimmering manifold, he had contemplated this other possibility. It would be seeming-madness to take his ship into the wave itself, but all his mathematics told him that diving under it would be suicide. Marja Valasquez, however, obviously hadn’t had the chance to make such calculations, for she made a mapping at the last moment and found a pathway beneath the wave. Danlo watched the Fire Drinker disappear like a diamond pin dropped into a cauldron of molten steel. And then he pointed the Snowy Owl straight into the bore of the wave, and it fell upon him with a terrible weight, breaking into colours of cobalt and rose and foaming violet.

Ahira, Ahira – give me your golden eyes that I might see.

Almost immediately he lost his mappings. Supposedly, no pilot could survive such a disaster, for without a map from point to point within the swirling complexities of the manifold, one became hopelessly lost. But once before, when he had entered the chaos space in the heart of the Entity, he had found a way out of what should have been a fatal topological trap. New mappings always existed if a pilot were artful enough to discover them. Even as the wave swept the Snowy Owl along at a tremendous speed, he searched for such mappings. If he had had endless time, he might have found a mapping very quickly, for the greatest of his mathematical skills lay in seeing the pattern that connects. But he had almost no time. In truth, he was fighting to stay alive. The wave broke all around him in colours of jade and virvidian; only the lightning rush of its momentum outwards balanced the almost impossible suck of its dark emerald weight. He lived in this balance. He piloted the Snowy Owl into a pocket along the wave front, and there he remained perfectly poised within its hideously complex dynamics. He called upon the three deepest virtues of a pilot: fearlessness, flawlessness and flowingness. If he let himself be afraid, even for a moment, he might try to flee the wave in the wrong direction and be swept under like a piece of driftwood in a raging sea. And if his piloting were anything less than flawless, he would lose the flow of his perfect balance, and the wave’s terrible energies would crush his ship to pieces as if it were only a clam shell.