War in Heaven

‘There are always risks no matter what course of action we choose,’ Lord Nikolos said. ‘But risks must be calculated. Costs must be assessed.’

‘Calculations and costs!’ the Sonderval mocked. ‘Thus do the merchant-pilots of Tria speak.’

‘Thus does any sane man speak who must accomplish difficult things with limited means.’

‘As Lord Pilot of our Order,’ the Sonderval said with great pride, ‘it’s my charge to encourage my pilots to attempt impossible things beyond what we conceive as our limitations.’

Here he bowed to Danlo, honouring him as an exemplar of the pilots’ greatest traditions. Many of the lords suddenly looked his way, and Danlo freely met their eyes even though he hated such public attention.

‘As Lord Pilot of the Order nothing more could be asked of you,’ Lord Nikolos said to the Sonderval. ‘But as Lord of the Order, I must constrain the heroics of my pilots, even such a great pilot as yourself.’

This mixture of compliment and veiled criticism momentarily flustered the Sonderval, who sat glaring at Lord Nikolos. Lord Nikolos seized this opportunity to deliver his crowning jewel of logic in avoidance of conflict. ‘I propose that we send three pilots to Neverness. Three of our finest pilots in our swiftest ships. They will warn the lords of Neverness of Bertram Jaspari’s Iviomils and this star-killer that their fleet brings with them. The Old Order has more pilots than we – let the pilots of Neverness fight this war with the Iviomils, if indeed any war is to be fought.’

Lara Jesusa traded a quick look with Alark of Urradeth, and the brilliant Aja turned her dark eyes to meet Danlo’s. Already, it seemed, the master pilots had accepted Lord Nikolos’ plan and were vying to see who might be selected to journey home to Neverness. The lords, too, could find nothing to argue with. They sat silently in their seats, looking back and forth between Lord Nikolos and the Sonderval. For a moment, it seemed that the lords would make the obvious decision and that war had thus been averted.

But the universe is a strange place, always alive with irony and cosmic dramas. Sometimes the play of chance and impossible coincidence may persuade us that we are part of a larger game whose purpose is as infinite as it is mysterious. Sometimes, in a moment, a woman may act or a man may speak and history will be changed for ever. As Lord Nikolos called for a formal vote as to his plan, such a moment came to the Hall of the Lords. The great golden door through which Danlo had passed scarcely an hour earlier swung suddenly open, and three men made their way into the hall. Two of these were novice horologes, young men in tight red robes who had volunteered to guard the hall and act as guides for any ambassador or luminary who had business there. The third was an uncommonly large man dressed all in black. He had a thick black beard and blackish eyes and purple-black skin, and his mood at the moment was pure black because the horologes were harrying him, clutching at his arms and trying to prevent him from entering the hall. ‘Let go of me, goddammit!’ he shouted as he swung his great arms and flung off the two small novices as if they were insects. ‘Let go – haven’t I explained that I’ve important news for your lords and masters that won’t wait? What’s wrong with you? I’m no assassin, by God! I’m a pilot!’

Although a score of lords had risen in alarm, Danlo smiled and his eyes filled with light because he knew this man. He was Pesheval Sarojin Vishnu-Shiva Lal, commonly known as Bardo, a former pilot of the Order and one of Danlo’s oldest friends.

‘Please restrain yourselves!’ Lord Nikolos commanded in his steely voice. ‘Please sit down.’

‘Yes, sit down before your knees buckle and you fall down,’ Bardo said as he strode to the black diamond circle at the centre of the hall. ‘I’ve much to tell, and you’ll need all your courage to hear it.’

‘You,’ Lord Nikolos said pointing at Bardo, ‘are no longer a pilot of the Order.’

Twelve years before, in the Hall of the Lords on Neverness, Lord Nikolos and many other of the lords (and Danlo) had watched as Bardo had flung his pilot’s ring against a granite pillar, shattering it and abjuring his vows as a pilot. And then, after drinking the sacred remembrancers’ drug and preaching the return of his best friend, Mallory Ringess, he had gone on to found the religion known as the Way of Ringess.

‘No,’ Bardo said. ‘I’m no longer of the Order. But I’m still a pilot, by God! And I’ve crossed half the galaxy to tell you what I must tell you.’

‘And what is that?’

Bardo took a moment to fill his huge lungs with air. He looked at the Sonderval, with whom he had shared his journeyman years at the Pilots’ College, Resa. He looked at Lord Nikolos and Morena Sung and Sul Estarei, and lastly he looked at Danlo wi Soli Ringess. ‘There will soon be war in Neverness,’ his great voice boomed out into the hall. ‘And war among the Civilized Worlds. For the first time in two thousand years, a bloody, stupid war. I’ve journeyed twenty thousand light years to tell you how this tragedy has happened and what we must do.’

Lord Nikolos sat rigidly as if his chair had been electrified, and the eyes of every lord and master were fixed straight ahead on this huge man who commanded their attention. And so it happened that in the Hall of the Lords, a former pilot of the Order brought them news of a war that would change each of their lives and perhaps the face of the universe itself.

CHAPTER II

Fate

There is a war that opens the doors of heaven;

Glad are the warriors whose fate is to fight such a war.

— Bhagavad Gita 2.32

At the centre of the floor of the Hall of the Lords, Bardo stood in the circle of inlaid black diamond. It might be thought that Bardo, standing in this circle with his black skin and black garments, would almost disappear into this purest of colours. But Bardo was not a man to be overshadowed, not by man nor woman nor events nor the onstreaming black neverness of the universe itself. Like a hot giant star floating in the middle of the intergalactic void, he demanded attention. He had been born a prince of Summerworld, and he still thought of himself as a luminary among lesser lights, even though his innate nobility (and compassion) obliged him to help others rather than scorning them as beneath his concern, as did the Sonderval. He was a natural dramatist. His huge voice filled the hall and fired the imagination of every master and lord. His whole manner touched others deeply, and yet little of this display resulted from conscious calculation, but was rather an expression of his deepest self. For instance, his clothing that day was as eye-catching as it was strange, for he wore neither wool kamelaika nor formal black silks. A suit of spun nail, a fibre both exquisite and rare, covered his body from neck to ankle. Spun nail, of course, is harder and stronger than diamond, proof against lasers or knives or exploding projectiles. And to guard against blows, the suit’s upper piece had been reinforced with sheets of plate nall moulded to conform to his muscles. Between his legs he wore a huge nall codpiece to safeguard the most vulnerable and valuable of organs. A huge shimmering cape of shesheen, in which he might swaddle himself in the event of radiation bursts or plasma bombs, completed his raiment. And all this grandiloquent battle armour was of Bardo’s own design. Having once been killed in defence of his best friend’s life and subsequently resurrected, he placed great value on his own flesh and spared no expense in protecting it. As he told the assembled lords, he had gone off to war, and he entertained no illusions as to the terrors that he – and they – must soon face.

‘There’s already been a battle in Neverness,’ he said. ‘Oh, it was a small enough battle, and some will call it no more than a skirmish, with only three pilots killed, but it’s a harbinger of worse to come, soon enough, all too soon – I don’t have to be a goddamned scryer to tell you that.’

Bardo went on to describe the events leading up to this battle. What had occurred on Neverness since the Vild Mission departed almost five years before was complicated, of course, as all such history truly is. But here, briefly, is what Bardo told the lords: that he had originally founded the religion known as the Way of Ringess to honour the life and discoveries of his best friend, Mallory Ringess. Mallory Ringess had shown the Order – and all humankind – that any man or woman could become a god through remembrance of the Elder Eddas. Bardo had brought this teaching to Neverness, and more, in his joyances and ceremonies where the sacred remembrancers’ drug, kalla, was drunk, he had made the experience of the One Memory available to the Order’s academicians and the swarms of seekers who peopled the city. But Bardo, as Bardo said, was better at beginning great works than completing them: he was no prophet, but only a man with a few uncommon talents, a former pilot of the Order who simply wanted to help his friends and followers towards the infinite possibilities that awaited them. From almost the very beginning of the founding of Ringism, he had become involved with the cetic, Hanuman li Tosh.

‘Ah, you all know of Hanuman,’ Bardo said. He paused to exchange a quick look with Danlo. Once, before they had become enemies, Danlo and Hanuman had been the deepest of friends. ‘But how many of you really know Hanuman?’

He went on to admit that Hanuman li Tosh was a brilliant and charismatic young man – and also a religious genius who had shaped the explosive expansion of Ringism in the city of Neverness and throughout the Civilized Worlds. But Hanuman was secretly cruel and vain, Bardo said, and monstrously ambitious. Hanuman, Bardo said, had been like a cancer in the belly of his church: making secret alliances with other luminaries within the Way; devising and leading new ceremonies to control directly their followers’ minds; and worst of all, spreading lies about Bardo and undermining Bardo’s leadership in any way that he could. As Ringism spread its tentacles (this was Bardo’s word) into the halls of the Order and the cities of the Civilized Worlds, the new religion was sick at its centre, with Hanuman robbing it of true life in his terrible hunger for power. Finally, on a day that Bardo would never forget, Hanuman had challenged his authority directly and ousted him as Lord of the Way of Ringess.

‘He stole my goddamned church!’ Bardo thundered at the astonished lords. His face was purple with rage, and he stamped his black, nall-skin boot against the black diamond circle. ‘My lovely, blessed, beautiful church!’

For a moment no one spoke. Then Lord Nikolos fixed his icy eyes on Bardo and asked, ‘Do you refer to the cathedral which your cult purchased from one of the Kristian sects, or the organization of believers whom you gulled into following you?’

Bardo, who knew very well what Lord Nikolos thought about religions, decided to take no offence at this. He simply said, ‘Both. At first, it was the cathedral, and then Hanuman poisoned the Ringists’ minds against me. Ah, too bad! Too bad.’

‘And how does one steal a cathedral?’ Lord Nikolos asked.

Bardo looked straight at Lord Nikolos and sighed. ‘Do you remember how the cathedral was financed?’

‘I’m not sure I ever cared to know.’

‘Well, it was an expensive building,’ Bardo said. ‘Hideously expensive – but the grandest building in all the city. I had to have it. That is we had to have it, we Ringists who followed the Way. So we decided to buy it in condominium. The money for it came from the pockets of each Ringist. There was a problem of course, with some of the Ringists owning a share in such a building.’

‘Because these Ringists were also Ordermen?’

‘Exactly. Since the Order’s canons forbade ownership of property, they had to turn their shares over to others outside the Order who held it in trust for them. Hanuman, in secret, began to win these trustees to his confidence – and many other Ringists as well. And then one day, on the fourteenth of deep winter, he —’

‘He called for a vote setting rules as to who was permitted entrance to the cathedral,’ Lord Nikolos said.

‘How did you know that?’ Bardo called out, less suspicious than amazed.

‘It seems an obvious enough stratagem’ Lord Nikolos said. ‘How is it that you didn’t foresee it?’

‘Ah, well, at first I did. Is Bardo a stupid man? No, indeed I’m not, and I thought that I was full aware of who among the trustees was loyal to me and who was not. But I’m afraid I miscounted. I was, ah, busy with other concerns. It’s no simple thing, you know, founding a goddamned religion.’

Here Danlo looked at Bardo across the hall and smiled. It was a shameful admission for a pilot steeped in the art of mathematics to admit that he had miscounted. But Bardo, for all his cunning, could be the most careless of men. Most likely his ‘other concerns’ were the seduction and sexing of the many beautiful young women who sought to serve the Way of Ringess in any way they could.

‘It seems,’ Lord Nikolos said, ‘that Hanuman has his own concerns.’

‘He barred me from my own church, by God! He installed himself as Lord of the Way!’

‘And the Ringists followed him?’

‘Too many did, too many,’ Bardo admitted. ‘Ah, they were sheep anyway – who else would have originally followed such an ill-fated man as I? Oh, at first I tried to lead the remembrancing ceremonies from my own house. For half a year, there were two Ways of Ringess in Neverness. But I no longer had the heart for it. I saw what Hanuman was doing with my church, and it made me want to cry.’

And what Hanuman was doing, Bardo said, was the total suborning of the Order – not for the sake of remembrancing the Elder Eddas and honouring Mallory Ringess’ journey into godhood, but solely for the sake of power. Years before, Hanuman had made a secret pact with the Lord Cetic, Audric Pall, whom he had helped become Lord of the Order. Lord Pall had manoeuvred to have the Order’s canons amended, and for the first time in history, the lords and masters and academicians of Neverness were permitted formal association with a religion. Indeed, they were encouraged, even pressured, to profess their faith in the Three Pillars of Ringism and interface Hanuman’s computers, in which the remembrance of the Elder Eddas had supposedly been stored as compelling images and vivid surrealities. Lord Pall gained for the stale, old Order the energies of an explosive new religion. And Hanuman gained alliance with the Order’s many pilots who might set forth in their sparkling lightships and bring the Way of Ringess to the Civilized Worlds and to the stars beyond. Soon, Bardo said, the Way of Ringess and the Order would be as one: a single religio-scientific entity whose power would be without constraint or bound.

When Bardo had finished speaking, all the lords sat motionless in stunned silence. Then Lord Nikolos blinked his eyes in disbelief and said, ‘This is very, very bad.’

In truth neither he nor any other lord could have foreseen that Ringism like a ravenous beast would gobble up the Order and many of the Civilized Worlds in only five years.

‘I’ve always mistrusted the religious impulse,’ Lord Nikolos said, pointing his small finger at Bardo. ‘But I never understood the true nature of my mistrust. Now I do. I offer my apology to every lord, master and orderman. Had I known the danger that this man and his cult posed, I never would have allowed the Order to divide in two. We should have remained in Neverness to oppose this abomination with all our will.’

He didn’t add that Lord Pall had originally chosen many members of the Second Vild Mission precisely because they opposed the Way of Ringess. Danlo wi Soli Ringess, who had spoken out against the Way and was now Hanuman’s mortal enemy, had seen his name placed at the top of Lord Pall’s list of exiles. And as for Lord Nikolos himself, he had been only too happy to flee what he now called an ‘abomination’, to take his place as Lord of the New Order far from Neverness.

‘Ah, well, no one can know how the future will unfold,’ Bardo told him. ‘If I had known that a little worm of a cetic named Hanuman li Tosh would steal my church and pervert my golden teachings into sleekit dung, I never would have held my first remembrancing ceremony.’

‘But like any prophet,’ Lord Nikolos said, ‘you thought you had seen the secret of the universe and had to share it with everyone.’

This snide remark wounded and angered Bardo, who said, ‘I’ve seen what I’ve seen, by God! I’ve remembranced what I’ve remembranced. The Elder Eddas are real. I’m not the only one here today who has apprehended this knowledge. Morena has drunk kalla with me in my house, and Sul Estarei, and Alark of Urradeth. The Lord Remembrancer himself has had his own experience of the Eddas, and Danlo wi Soli Ringess is famous for his remembrance of the One Memory. The truth is the truth! You can’t fault the religious impulse that drives us towards it. It’s only what we make of our religions that is so wrong. Somehow, whenever men organize the pursuit of the divine, all that’s most blessed and numinous is ruined like picked apples rotting in the sun. As I, Bardo, of all men should know.’

And I, too, Danlo thought as he sat staring at Bardo and remembering his own involvement with the Way of Ringess.

‘I won’t argue with you,’ Lord Nikolos said, and his voice was cold steel.

‘Ah, well, I didn’t fall across the stars to argue.’

‘Whatever the impulse that initially drove you, the Way of Ringess is what it is. And you’ve made what you’ve made.’

‘By God, do you think I don’t know that!’ Bardo roared. ‘Why do you think I’ve risked my goddamned life to tell you what’s happened on Neverness?’

‘Why, indeed? We’d all like to know that, wouldn’t we?’

‘I must undo what I have done.’

‘I see.’

‘I’ve helped create a wildly growing cancer. Now I would ask for help in cutting it out before it’s too late.’

With a bow towards Lord Nikolos then, Bardo finished his story. After losing his beautiful cathedral and abandoning his attempt to run an opposing church from his house, Bardo had fallen into a terrible melancholy. For five days he shut himself in his room, amazingly (for Bardo) refusing the food and drink that his many loyal friends tried to bring him. He sat alone in an immense bejewelled chair as he contemplated killing himself. But Bardo was no suicide. Even as the days of deep winter darkened and the weather grew as cold as death, his rage turned outwards. It was Hanuman li Tosh whom he should kill, he thought, or Lord Pall, or even his cousin, Surya Surata Lal, an ugly little woman who had once been his most faithful confidante before Hanuman had charmed her into betraying Bardo. He should kill somebody, and in the dark and wild days of deep winter the year before, such murderous intentions were not impossible to fulfil, for the entire city of Neverness had fallen into evil times. At least ten of the Order’s lords and masters died mysteriously, some said of poison or unknown and undetectable viruses. The Order issued oppressive new laws and regulations. For the first time since the Dark Year when the Great Plague had ravaged Neverness, there was a nightly curfew in the city. The sacred drug, kalla, was forbidden to everyone except the remembrancers – and even these silver-robed masters of the mind had to apply to Lord Pall for permission to hold their time-honoured ceremonies in the confinement of the remembrancers’ tower. Various sects such as the autists found themselves suddenly persecuted. Lord Pall himself announced his intention to break the harijan sect, which had challenged the Order’s authority for at least three centuries. During the almost lightless days of midwinter spring, the Order had begun a programme of great works, building new churches across the city and even planning a great new cathedral within the walls of the academy itself. Lord Pall planned to compel all Ordermen to make daily attendance at these churches’ remembrancing ceremonies. There they would place the sacred remembrancing heaumes upon their heads, and open themselves to visions of the Elder Eddas – or so it was said. But in truth, they would open themselves, their very brains, only to whatever dogma, images, secret messages or propaganda that Hanuman li Tosh or Lord Pall wished them to believe.

Of course, the rise of this tyranny in such a historically free and illuminated city as Neverness did not go unopposed. All the aliens – led by the Fravashi – spoke out against the Order favouring this potentially totalitarian new religion. Ambassadors from the worlds of Larondissement and Yarkona made formal objections and threatened to sever relations with the Order. The numerous astriers, most of whom counted themselves as members of one of the Cybernetic Universal Churches, shunned Ringism as they might poisoned wine, and kept to their houses and churches in the Farsider’s Quarter. At this time perhaps no more than a tenth of the city’s residents outside the Order were willing to embrace the Three Pillars of Ringism. But in the fierce struggle for power occurring in Neverness, it was the lords and masters and adepts within the Order who really mattered. Many there were who would never countenance Ringism or their Order’s association with it. Lord Pall had not managed to banish all his potential enemies to the Vild. Especially among the returning pilots – and in Neverness there were always pilots returning in their lightships from years-long journeys to the stars – there were brave men and women inured to the terrors of the manifold. They were far too proud to allow themselves terror of Lord Pall or the cetic assassins which he was rumoured to command. Indeed, some of them such as Alesar Estarei and Cristobel, had fought with Mallory Ringess and distinguished themselves in the Pilots’ War years before. Inevitably, as Bardo told the story, Bardo had made connection with these pilots. They formed a cadre perhaps fifty strong, and they began meeting nightly at Bardo’s grand house in the Old City. Calling themselves the Fellowship of Free Pilots, they planned to form a nucleus round which anyone who opposed Ringism, inside the Order or out, might gather to talk and encourage each other. And to plot revolt.

For Bardo, it was his fifth career. Having begun life as a Summerworld prince, he had journeyed to Neverness to become a famous pilot, and later, Master of Novices. Then, after abjuring his, vows and leaving the Order, he had gained fabulous wealth as a merchant, before returning to Neverness as the prophet of a new religion. And now at last, as he told the Lords of the New Order, after having been rich and poor, famous and scorned, enlightened and despairing (and alive and dead), he had come into his true calling as a warrior.

‘We must fight them, by God!’ Bardo said. ‘What else can we do?’

Bardo told of how Lord Pall – or perhaps Hanuman – had sent an assassin to kill him. The assassin had caught Bardo on the street one evening returning home, and it was only because of the incredible courage of a man named Minowara ni Kei, who was one of Bardo’s followers, that Bardo was still alive. Just as the black-robed assassin had fired a spikhaxo at Bardo, Minowara had thrown his body in front of Bardo, taking the naitarre-poisoned dart in his shoulder and dying a hideous, spasming death. This had given Bardo time to overpower the assassin, in truth to club him to death with his huge hand as a bear might slay a child. Upon realizing how vulnerable his flesh was to such deadly needles, he had gone down to the Farsider’s Quarter the next day and ordered his suit of nall armour.

After this naked attempt to murder Bardo, the Fellowship of Free Pilots decided that their continued existence in Neverness was doubtful. Cristobel believed that their best hope to oppose the Ringists would be for each pilot to journey to as many of the Civilized Worlds as possible and bring the blazing torch of resistance to all who loved their freedom. Bardo himself was to make the perilous journey to Thiells. The only problem with this plan was that Lord Pall knew the names of every pilot in the Fellowship. He forbade them to leave the city. And so one gloomy day near the beginning of midwinter spring, Bardo and his fellow pilots stormed the Cavern of the Thousand Lightships, surprising the Ringists that Lord Pall had set to guard the Order’s most glorious vessels. This was the battle that Bardo had spoken of earlier. In the flash of laser fire and fierce fighting along the steel walkways deep below the earth, Vamana Chu, Marrim Danladi and Oriana of Dark-moon had been killed. But the rest of the pilots escaped with their ships. Since Bardo was no longer formally a pilot of the Order, he of course had no ship. But this lack did not daunt him. After obtaining the entrance codes from a terrified programmer whose jaw Bardo threatened to tear off with his naked hands, Bardo appropriated Lord Pilot’s very own ship: a stately expanse of black diamond named the Silver Lotus. Upon breaking free into deep space above Neverness and falling into the shimmering manifold that underlies all space and time, Bardo had immediately renamed his ship the Sword of Shiva.