War in Heaven

Two hundred pilots seemed almost too few to send to the gathering on Sheydveg, but in truth the Order was lucky to muster so many. The pilots had journeyed twenty thousand light years from Neverness not to wait planet-bound for war, but to make great quests into the Vild. Almost fifty pilots still fell among the wild stars towards the galaxy’s Perseus Arm, searching for Tannahill or exploring rainbow star systems or discovering dead, burnt-out alien worlds. Peter Eyota, in his Akashara, Henrios li Radman, Paloma the Elder – none could say when these pilots might return. By sheer good chance (or perhaps ill), on the day before the pilots were to set forth to the stars, Edreiya Chu did return, falling down to Thiell’s only light-field and bringing her ship to rest along with all the others. There, on a long, broad run, the Golden Lotus joined the August Moon, the Flame of God, the Ibi Ibis and other needles of black diamond formed up in twenty rows. There too gleamed the Sword of Shiva, which Bardo had stolen in Neverness, and Danlo’s ship, the Snowy Owl, she of the long, sweeping hull and graceful wings. In less time than it took for Old Earth to turn its face in revolution once to the sun, the pilots would climb inside these two hundred ships and point their way towards Sheydveg’s great red sun. In preparation for this journey, they were supposed to be resting or practising the pilots’ mental art of hallning or praying or saying goodbye to beloved friends.

At least two pilots, however, on this long night of cool sea winds and blazing stars, did not spend their time with goodbyes. Rather they arranged a rendezvous to say hello. Because Danlo had been very busy the last few days describing his discoveries to the cetics and eschatologists (and talking in private with Lord Nikolos), he hadn’t had the chance to greet Bardo properly. And so when they had broken free from their duties, these two old friends met on a grassy lawn outside the glittering stone halls of the Pilots’ College. Beneath tall, alien trees overlooking the sea, they called out in gladness and hurried to embrace each other.

‘Little Fellow, Little Fellow!’ Bardo said as he threw his arms around Danlo and thumped his back. ‘I thought I’d never have the chance to talk with you.’

Although Danlo was taller and stronger than most men, embracing Bardo was like trying clasp a mountain to himself. With a gasp of air (Bardo’s huge arms had nearly cracked his ribs), Danlo stepped away and smiled at Bardo. He said, simply, ‘I … missed you.’

‘Did you? Did you? Well, I missed you, too. It’s been too, too long.’

Bardo turned his huge head right and left, looking for a chair or bench. But Danlo, who had always hated sitting on any kind of furniture, had already dropped down to the soft grass. With a sigh and much groaning, Bardo carefully lowered his huge body until he sat face to face with Danlo. Although there was no need for such precautions within the safety of the academy, Bardo still wore his suit of battle armour, and the stiff plates reinforcing his garments impeded his motions.

‘By God, it’s a miracle to find you here!’ Bardo said, wiping drops of water from his forehead. Despite the coolness of the night, he was sweating in his layers of black nall. ‘To find that you and I have fallen out of the goddamned stars almost at the same hour – the same fateful hour – after having crossed the galaxy from opposite ends!’

As ever, Danlo smiled at Bardo’s enthusiasm, no less his choice of words. ‘Some might call it only an extraordinary coincidence.’

‘A miracle, I said! A goddamned miracle! What more proof do we need that you and I share a miraculous fate?’

‘These last few days … I have often thought about fate.’

‘Can you feel it, Little Fellow?’ Bardo’s eyes, in the light of the flame globes around the lawn, were pools of burning ink. ‘It’s like a star pulling at a comet. It’s like a beautiful woman calling to her man. It’s like … ah, well, it’s each cell in your body coming awake and singing the same song, and that song roaring outwards until it touches every rock on every planet and sets the whole goddamned universe humming.’

‘I have always loved listening to you speak,’ Danlo said, as amused as he was truly delighted.

‘Can you doubt it? You and I – we’ve been chosen to do great things, and this is the moment for the doing.’

‘Perhaps. Or perhaps it is only that we have chosen. Out of all the chances life offers, and out of our pride, Bardo … perhaps we have only chosen the most desperate of chances.’

Bardo shook his head so hard that drops of sweat spun off his thick, black beard into the night. He said, ‘There’s a line from a poem your father once told me: Fate and chance, the same glad dance.’

For a long moment, Danlo sat gazing at Bardo. He thought that he had never seen this huge man so animated, not even during the first breathtaking days of false winter six years ago when he (and Danlo and Hanuman li Tosh) had been busy founding the Way of Ringess and all things seemed possible. Danlo reflected on all that Bardo had said in the Hall of the Lords concerning the corruption of the church and Hanuman’s ousting him as Lord of the Way. Although Bardo was the most sincere of men, the full truth of his life often escaped him because he was wont to fool himself. He liked to believe that he acted from the purest of purposes, usually to serve others, but all too often Bardo served only Bardo. Danlo thought that his true motive in journeying to Thiells was not to save the Civilized Worlds from the cancerous new religion that he had made, but rather revenge and glory. Bardo had always had a sense of his own inborn greatness, and he knew that great men must do great things. But it was the tragedy of his life that he’d never quite found the way to realize his deepest possibilities. At various periods he had sought exaltation through mathematics, women, wealth, drugs and religion. And now war was to be the vessel carrying him towards his glorious fate, and this was perhaps the greatest tragedy of all.

‘Did you know,’ Danlo finally mused, ‘that the Architects of the Old Church – at least the Iviomils – believe that Ede himself has written the program for the universe? And that all we do is part of this program?’

‘Ah, no, I didn’t know that.’

‘Truly, on Tannahill, the very mention of chance is a talaw punishable by a cleansing of the mind.’

‘Barbarians!’ Bardo muttered. ‘It’s a miracle you survived your mission there.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘It’s a miracle, of course, but something much more. I’ve heard the full story of your journey from the Sonderval. How you walked with the dead and went deeper into your own mind than any cetic. There’s something about you now that I’ve never seen before. A fire and light: it’s as if your goddamned eyes are windows to the stars.’

Danlo looked up at the heavens, and a strange look fell over his face. And then Bardo continued to extol his accomplishments. ‘And how you plunged into the chaos space in the heart of the Entity! You’re a braver pilot than the Sonderval, Little Fellow, and a finer. You’re the finest since Mallory Ringess, and he was a goddamned god!’

‘Was, Bardo?’

‘Ah, I mean he was a divine pilot, a god of a pilot who could take his ship anywhere in the universe.’

Danlo smiled at this exaggeration, for no pilot, not even Mallory Ringess who had proved it was possible for a lightship to fenester instantly between any two stars, had ever fallen from the Milky Way to one of the universe’s other galaxies.

‘Have you had news of my father?’ Danlo asked.

The so-called first pillar of the creed of Ringism stated that one day Mallory Ringess would return to Neverness. Although Danlo now rejected the beliefs of all religions, he had always wondered at his father’s fate and waited for the moment of the Return – as had many thousands of others.

‘No, I haven’t, Little Fellow – I’m sorry. In all the journeys of all the pilots, no one has come back telling of anyone who has seen him.’

Danlo ran his fingers through the cool grass next to his crossed legs and listened to the sound of the ocean moving far below the academy. Although it was near midnight, various pilots and professionals, in twos and threes, crossed the walks leading to the dormitories all around them. Their low voices fell across the lawn where Danlo and Bardo sat, and for a moment Danlo was silent.

‘Once, before he left Neverness,’ Bardo said, ‘your father told me that he would journey yet again to the Entity. There was to be, ah, a kind of mystical union between them. Something that they must create together.’

At this, Danlo smiled strangely and said, ‘Truly, the Entity is a passionate goddess – She’s all fire and tears and dreams. It may be that She desires union with our kind.’

He did not tell Bardo that the Entity had tried to capture him on an earth that She had made. Nor that She had tried to seduce him by creating an incarnation of Tamara Ten Ashtoreth from sea water and earth elements and memories stolen from deep in his mind.

‘When the Sonderval told me that you’d spent much time with the Entity, I wondered if you might have learned anything about your father.’

‘She said only that I would find him at my journey’s end.’

‘In Neverness?’

‘I … do not know. The Entity always speaks so mysteriously.’

‘I still believe your father will return to Neverness. It’s where his fate lies, not out in the stars with some capricious goddess.’

For a moment, Danlo looked west at the strange, shimmering stars just over the rim of the sea, but he said nothing.

‘And when he does return, by God, there will be an accounting! He’ll open his eyes to every barbaric thing that Hanuman li Tosh has done in his name, and fall across the city in wrath. He’ll chastise him, perhaps even slay him – your father, despite his compassion, was always such a murderous man.’

‘But, Bardo, don’t you believe he is now a god?’

‘Do you think the gods don’t slay human beings as easily as flies – or even each other?’

Danlo thought of the Silicon God’s destruction of Ede the God, and he said, ‘I know that they do.’

For a while, beneath their tree’s silvery leaves rustling in the wind, they gazed out at the stars and talked about the galaxy’s gods – and fate and war and other cosmic things. Then Danlo turned to look at Bardo, and asked him about something closer to his heart.

‘Have you seen her, Bardo?’

‘Tamara?’

Danlo held his head still in total silence, but his eyes, gleaming in the half-light like liquid jewels, spoke for him.

‘Well, no, I haven’t seen her,’ Bardo said. ‘You know I’d heard that she had left the city – I never heard that she returned.’

‘But where did she go?’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps it’s only a rumour.’

‘Did Hanuman ever speak of what he did to her? Did he ever say that there might be a way to restore her?’

Bardo sighed and laid a heavy hand on Danlo’s shoulder. ‘Ah, Little Fellow – he never said anything, too bad. You still hate him, don’t you?’

Lightning flashed in Danlo’s eyes, then, and he said, ‘He raped her mind! He destroyed her memories, Bardo! All her memories of us together, everything blessed.’

‘Little Fellow, Little Fellow.’

Danlo chose that moment to take out his flute and press the hard ivory mouthpiece against his forehead. He drew in a deep breath, then said, ‘But I … must not hate. I try so hard not to hate.’

‘And I love you for such nobility,’ Bardo said, ‘but as for myself, I try to let all my hatred for that worm of a man fill my belly like firewine. It will make it easier to destroy him when the time comes.’

Slowly Danlo shook his head. ‘You know that I would not wish to see any harm come to him.’

‘Well, perhaps you should. Perhaps it would be best if you’d forswear your vow and find a way to move close to him. And then …’

‘Yes?’

‘And then kill him, by God! Slip a knife into his treacherous heart or squeeze the breath from his lying throat!’

At the mere invocation of such terrible images, Danlo’s own breath caught in his chest. He gripped his flute as tightly as a drowning man being offered a stick to pull him out of icy, black waters. And then, as he realized the impossibility of what Bardo had suggested, he slowly relaxed and smiled in deep amusement. ‘You know that I could never harm him,’ he said.

‘Well, I do know that, too bad. And that is why, short of war, there’s little hope of stopping him.’

‘But there is still our mission, yes? Our hope for peace.’

Bardo laughed softly, then said, ‘I remember that your Fravashi teacher once gave you the title of Peacewise. But it takes two to make a peace, you know.’

‘But all people long for peace.’

‘There speaks your hope,’ Bardo said. ‘There speaks your will to make reality conform to the dreams of your lovely heart.’

‘But Hanuman has a heart, too. He is still just a man, yes?’

‘I’m not so sure. Sometimes I think he’s a demon from hell.’

As Danlo thought of Hanuman’s hellish ice-blue eyes, he smiled gravely in remembrance. And then he said, ‘In a strange way, I think he was the most compassionate man I have ever met.’

‘Hanuman li Tosh?’

‘You did not know him as I did, Bardo. Once a time, as a boy, and before, he was so innocent. Truly … he was born with such a gentle soul.’

‘What changed him, then?’

‘The world changed him,’ Danlo said. ‘His religion, the way his father would read negative programs in his littlest misdoings and force a cleansing heaume on his head to rape his mind – that changed him, too. And he changed himself. I have never met anyone with such a terrible will to change himself.’

‘Well, you never knew your father, Little Fellow.’

Danlo stared down at the dark holes along the shaft of his flute, and waited for Bardo to say more.

‘But your father finally found his compassion, while Hanuman has lost his. And where your father became a light for the whole damn universe, Hanuman has embraced the darkness – like a slel necker sucking at a corpse.’

‘I would still like to believe that, somehow, there is infinite hope for everyone.’

Infinite possibilities, Danlo remembered as he closed his eyes. Inside everyone, everything, this infinite light.

‘Well,’ Bardo said, ‘Hanuman’s hope for himself is certainly infinite.’

‘Because he speaks of becoming a god?’

The second pillar of Ringism was that each man and woman could become a god by following the way of Mallory Ringess, and in this ambition, Hanuman was no different from a million others.

‘But he has done much more than speak of this,’ Bardo said. ‘Why do you think he has torn apart most of a moon to build that goddamned computer that floats in space like a death mask?’

‘But you yourself once taught that the way to godhood was only in remembrance of the Elder Eddas.’

‘I did? Ah, I suppose I did. Well, there are different ways of becoming gods, aren’t there?’

‘I … would not know.’

‘When his universal computer is finally assembled and Hanuman interfaces it, he’ll have power as godly as any god. He’ll be like the Entity, only smaller – for a while.’

‘He would not be the first to attempt such a thing.’

‘But he’d be the first in the history of the Civilized Worlds!’ Bardo said. ‘And the last. I think he wouldn’t care if he destroyed every world from Solsken to Farfara.’

Danlo brought his flute closer to his lips as he brooded over everything Bardo had told him. Truly, he thought, the danger of Ringism corrupting the Civilized Worlds was the least of what Hanuman might accomplish.

‘Hanuman always had a dream,’ Danlo said softly. ‘A beautiful and terrible dream.’

‘What kind of dream?’

‘I … do not know. Not wholly. Once, like city lights glittering through a snowstorm, I thought I saw the shape of it. The colours. He has dreams of a better universe, truly. And something more. I am afraid … that he would become more than a god, if he could.’

‘Ha! What could be more than a goddamned god?’

But now Danlo closed his eyes and played a long, low note upon his flute as he lost himself in memories of the past and future. In the centre of some inner darkness bloomed a tiny flower of light that grew and grew until it filled all possible space within the universe of his mind.

‘Well, I say he’ll never even become a god,’ Bardo growled. ‘We won’t let that happen.’

Danlo suddenly put aside his flute and looked at Bardo. ‘No?’

‘We’ll stop him. Of course, it’s really too bad that the Ringists themselves won’t stop him, but they’ve been gulled into believing that the Universal Computer is only a tool to help them remembrance the Eddas.’

Danlo sighed, then breathed deeply of the cool night air. He said, ‘You believe in the power of war to change the face of the universe. And truly, war is a refining fire that can touch almost anything. But what if it is our own faces that are burnt to char, Bardo? What if we lose this war?’

‘Lose? By God, we won’t lose, what are you saying?’

‘But along with the Old Order, the Ringists will have more lightships than we.’

‘Well, even if chance spat on us and we did lose, Hanuman would still be stopped, eventually. Do you think the Entity and Chimene and all the galaxy’s other gods would just let Hanuman’s computer gobble up the Civilized Worlds?’

‘But the gods have their own war,’ Danlo said. ‘Do they note our actions any more than we would worms in the belly of a dog?’

‘Ah, I suppose you’re right not to hope for the help of the gods. Now is the time for rocket fire and lasers, boldness and valour.’

‘Bardo, Bardo, no, there must be a—’

‘Do you think you’ll stop Hanuman with that?’ Bardo blurted out as he pointed to Danlo’s flute. ‘He always hated the mystical music that you played, didn’t he?’

Danlo made no reply to this, but simply sat watching the starlight play upon his flute’s golden length.

‘You’re really a prideful man, like your father,’ Bardo said. ‘You still hope to touch Hanuman’s heart, don’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘And Tamara, if she could be found – you still believe there’s a way to restore her to her memories.’

To heal the wound that cannot be healed, Danlo thought. To light the light that never goes out.

And then he said, ‘The remembrancers say that memory can be created but not destroyed.’

Bardo looked at Danlo with his big brown eyes and sighed. Then he said, ‘It’s dangerous for you to return to Neverness, Little Fellow. I think the Sonderval is right: you should abjure your vow and come with us to Sheydveg. You’ll be safer in battle than in the tower of Hanuman’s goddamned cathedral. Fight with us! Your father was such a formidable fighter, and his father – all your bloody line. Can’t you feel it inside yourself, the holy fire? By God, why don’t you do what you were born to do?’

‘I … will go to Neverness,’ Danlo finally said.

‘Ah, well, I think I knew you would.’ Bardo yawned hugely and turned to watch the stars setting over the ocean to the west.

‘It is far past midnight,’ Danlo said. ‘Perhaps we should sleep before tomorrow.’

‘Sleep? I’ll sleep when I die. There’s still too much to do tonight to waste time sleeping.’

Danlo caught a strange, sad gleam in Bardo’s eyes, and he said, ‘Yes?’

‘Well, I’ve sworn not to drink beer any more, so I suppose I should find a woman. Someone plump and fertile – it’s been too, too long, and who knows if this will be the last time.’

Danlo waited for Bardo to stand up, but the huge man remained like a rock almost stuck to the earth.

‘Ah, the truth is, I don’t want to leave you now, Little Fellow. Who knows if this will be the last time I see you?’

As tears began to flow freely in Bardo’s eyes, Danlo smiled and laughed softly. He jumped up, then pulled Bardo to his feet. ‘I shall miss you,’ he said as he embraced him.

‘Ah, Little Fellow, Little Fellow.’

‘But of course we’ll see each other again,’ Danlo said. ‘Even though a million stars and all the lightships of Neverness lie between us.’

‘Do you really think so?’

‘Yes. It … is our fate.’

With that, Bardo thumped Danlo’s back one last time, bowed, and ambled off towards the academicians’ apartments to find his woman – probably some young journeyman whom he had met during the last few days. Danlo watched him disappear into the shadows; then he turned and waited for the sun to rise over the plains and the light-field to the east.

That morning most of the New Order on Thiells assembled at the light-field to bid the pilots farewell. Some nine thousand Ordermen lined the field’s main run for a mile on either side. Their formal silk robes, in amber, red, indigo, cobalt and violet, rippled like banners in the wind. Akashics, horologes, historians, cetics and remembrancers – it was their pride to honour the two hundred pilots who would risk war to protect them. And to protect the Order’s ancient dream of awakening a star-flung humanity to the light of reason and truth’s bright, ineffable flame. No one knew when these brave pilots might return. No one knew what might befall them – and the New Order – if they never returned, but it was also their pride to match the pilots’ bravery with their own, and so almost every face was smiling and bright with cheer.

Much of the city of Lightstone, as well, turned out to watch the spectacle of the pilots’ departure. There were some eighty-nine thousand of these people jostling and vying for position, craning their necks for a better view of the two hundred lightships shimmering in the early sun.

At precisely the first hour after first light, Lord Nikolos arrived at the field in a gleaming red sled and took his place on the middle of the run. There, in front of their ships, the pilots had been called together to receive his final charge and blessing. The Sonderval, as Lord Pilot, stood foremost among them, a great tree of a man nearly eight feet tall dressed in his formal black robe. The master pilots waited near him in order of precedence of the date on which they had taken vows. Helena Charbo, with her great shock of silver hair and her fearless face, was the first of these, followed by Charl Rappaporth, Aja and Sabri Dur li Kadir. Fifty other masters were arrayed in line, Veronika Menchik, Ona Tetsu, Edreiya Chu, Richardess, and others, as well as Peter Eyota and Henrios li Radman who had recently returned from the deepest part of the Vild. The last of the master pilots, of course, was Danlo wi Soli Ringess. He stood watching the sky with his deep blue eyes – and watching Lord Nikolos and all the thousands of men and women pressing up against the run from the east and west. He might have traded a few last words with Lara Jesusa and other full pilots drawn up behind him, but Lord Nikolos had called out to speak and was waiting only for the throngs to stop talking and cheering and fall into a proper silence.

Two other people standing on the run off to the side were not pilots of the Order. These were Demothi Bede, the Lord Neologician robed in ochre and, of course, Pesheval Lal, whom Danlo and everyone else always called Bardo. Once, this huge man might have stood in the Sonderval’s place, or not far behind, but no one had forgotten how he had abjured his vows and abandoned the Order. However, he was still a great pilot, if now a ronin, and his stolen ship, the Sword of Shiva, was lined up last with all the others. He too wore black, the dréadful black of nall armour and his swirling shesheen cape. If he had accomplished his purpose of the previous night, he gave no sign, for his face was as stern as any other. He traded serious looks with Demothi Bede, who would soon set forth as an ambassador and passenger in Danlo’s ship. In only a few more moments they would both leave this soft and beautiful world – Bardo to go to war and Demothi to journey to Neverness to prevent it.