War in Heaven

‘Silence, it’s time!’ a red-robed horologe called out from a crowd of academicians waiting not far from Lord Nikolos. Others picked up the cry, and passed it voice to voice for a mile down the run: ‘Silence, it’s time.’

Then, in the sudden quiet, Lord Nikolos spoke to the pilots in his calm, clear voice. He began by discussing the meaning of being a pilot and reminding them of their vows, especially their fourth vow, that of restraint. For in the coming days, he said, they would need restraint above all other virtues, even courage and faith. ‘The Order was founded to illuminate the peoples of all worlds, not to make war upon them. We keepers of the ineffable flame are no warriors, nor shall we ever be. Nevertheless, it may be that we must act as warriors for a time. Therefore we must act in clear conscience of what is permitted and what is not.’

He then enjoined them above all else to avoid war if they could. Danlo, along with the Lord Bede, was to be given a chance to reason with Hanuman li Tosh. If a display of virtuosity and threat might bring peace, they were to use their lightships towards this end only. And if battle came to them howling on an ill-wind of fate, pilots were to fall in violence only against other pilots and ships of war. They were not to attack merchant ships, nor any world or peoples supporting Hanuman and the Way of Ringess. Specifically, Lord Nikolos charged them with upholding the Laws of the Civilized Worlds. They were not to arm their lightships with hydrogen bombs or other weapons of genocide. They were not to infect planetary communications’ systems with information viruses or disable them with logic bombs. The purpose of the war must be as clear to them as a diamond crystal: first, they were to stop Hanuman from using the Old Order to spread Ringism to the Civilized Worlds. If possible, they were to restore the Old Order to its original vision and age-old injunction against associating with any religion. And last, he said, at any cost to themselves in wounds or death, Hanuman’s Universal Computer must be destroyed. To this end, he asked them to pledge their honour and lives.

After they had made their vows, he reminded them that the meaning of the ancient word for pilot was ‘steersman’. He told them that they must always find their way between the hard rocks of pride and the whirlpool of self-deception to the truth shining always beyond. And so he led them in a prayer 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.

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

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 through a window to the Birdella Double, which was the next star pair in the sequence of stars that the Sonderval had set. There she waited for the two hundred lightships to rejoin her – waited with great coolness as if she hadn’t almost lost her life like a child smothered in sheets of wildly flapping plastic.

Most of the pilots, of course, would have liked to prove their virtue by finding mappings independent of the others, but accidents such as Ona’s befell few of them, and the Sonderval had ordered them to stay together. And so they moved through the Vild as one body of ships, remaining always within the same neighbourhood of stars. They passed Ishvara, Stirrit and Seio Luz, a cool yellow sun almost identical in shape and colour to the Star of Neverness. And Kalkin and Vaishnara, and others, and finally they came to Sattva Luz, a brilliant white ball of light just within the inner envelope of the Vild. From here, their mappings would carry them only a few more stars to Renenet and Akar, and thus to Shoka and Savona, where they would break free from the Vild’s outer envelope and look out on Farfara and the stars of the Civilized Worlds. It was here, just beyond Sattva Luz’s intense gravity field, that they came upon a quite deadly phase space. Or rather this menace of the manifold came upon them. Some of the surviving pilots were to describe it as like an earthquake; others spoke of boiling oil or point-set correspondences that shattered like a dropped cup. For Danlo wi Soli Ringess, caught in the worst part of the phase space, it was as if one moment he were floating on a calm blue sea and the next, a tidal wave of every colour from ruby to violet was breaking over him. He had almost no time to find a mapping to a small white dwarf near Renenet. Others, however, were not so lucky. (Or skilful.) Three pilots died that day: Ricardo Dor, Lais Blackstone and Midori Astoret in her famous Rose of Neverness. None will ever know how the manifold appeared to them in the last moment before they were crushed into oblivion. But all the survivors agreed that they had lived through one of the worst mathematical spaces ever encountered and were very glad when the Sonderval called a halt near Shoka to speak the dead pilots’ names in remembrance.

When the pilots finally reached Farfara several days later, many desired to make planetfall as they had done on their way into the Vild. They wanted to feel earth beneath their boots again, to stand in Mer Tadeo’s garden beneath the stars drinking firewine and talking of brave deeds. But the Sonderval would not allow this. They had reached the Civilized Worlds, he said, and though it might be unlikely, it was always possible that pilots from Neverness might fall out of the manifold like birds of prey at night and destroy their ships while they were on the ground.

‘We must begin to think strategically,’ he told them. ‘We must not regard ourselves as wayfarers needing a little comfort, but as warriors going to war.’

That there truly might be a war was no news to Mer Tadeo dur li Marar or any of the other merchant princes of Farfara. As Bardo had promised, his friends of the Fellowship of Free Pilots had journeyed to the most important Civilized Worlds to tell of the gathering at Sheydveg. They had called for ships, robots, water and food – and men and women armed with lasers, eye-tlolts, or even knives. The Farfarans, of course, had no experience of war. But then almost none of the peoples of the Civilized Worlds did. Farfara was a rich planet whose merchant élite opposed the spread of Ringism. And so they decided to send their own contribution to the gathering on Sheydveg: food and firewine, but also twenty deep-ships each carrying ten thousand hastily trained soldiers and secretly armed with lasers and neutron bombs. And they provided seventy-two black ships, which were really much like the Order’s lightships except that they were clumsier and duller, with hulls wrought of black nall and pilots who had only enough mathematics to take them along the well-established mappings of the Fallaways. In battle against the Order’s sleek, gleaming lightships, they might prove more of a hindrance than a help, but the Sonderval reluctantly thanked the Farfarans and quite peremptorily commanded their pilots to follow the two hundred lightships into the manifold as best they could.

From Farfara they fell on to Freeport, where they gained ten more deep-ships and thirty-eight black ships. And at Vesper their fleet increased similarly, and so at Wakanda. Their journey took them through the most ancient part of the Fallaways, through worlds colonized well before the Lost Centuries when the First Wave of the Swarming had reached its crest. Only some of these worlds supported the New Order’s mission to Farfara. Many chose to remain neutral in the coming strife. And many more favoured the Old Order out of age-long loyalties or welcomed Ringism as a force that would save them from millennia of stagnation. Some unfortunate worlds were divided against themselves, half their people embracing Ringism, while their brothers and sisters fought to oppose this wild and criminal religion. By the time the lightships passed their way, Zesiro and Redstone had nearly fallen into civil war.

The peoples of Fostora, too, were close to killing each other. The Fostorans, of course, were famous throughout the Civilized Worlds for creating the Silicon God. They well remembered this great crime against the Three Laws, and many Fostorans, in their undying shame, were ready to give their lives that such an abomination would never come into being again. But others on this dark, cold world had more ancient dreams. Like their forefathers five thousand years before, they chafed at the limitations of the Three Laws. While they were not willing to make another god-computer that might threaten the Civilized Worlds and perhaps all the galaxy’s stars, they fell into love with the idea that they might make themselves as gods. And so they became Ringists mind, body and soul. They fought to nullify the Three Laws and remake the Civilized Worlds as a paradise where men and women might move towards godhood. How this miracle of evolution might occur, no one quite knew. But they believed the words of Hanuman li Tosh’s missionaries, that for them to blaze like stars, they must be willing to endure fire, burning and, ultimately, war.

Each man and woman is a star. Even as the New Order’s fleet fell through the manifold after gathering another fifty black ships on Monteer, Danlo floated inside his ship and fell into remembrance. Once, on a long night years ago on Neverness, he had stood in the bitter cold listening to Hanuman deliver these words to thousands of cheering people. How could you wish to become new unless you had first become ashes?

He remembered that over the millennia there had been other attempts to break away from the Laws of the Civilized Worlds and shape a new face for humanity. As the Fifth Mentality of Man reached its limits, anarchists from Fostora had founded Alumit as a world where all things might be possible. It was no mistake, Danlo thought, that Nikolos Daru Ede had been born on Alumit, and there carked his consciousness into a computer that had grown to be almost the greatest of the galaxy’s gods. And the warrior-poets of Qallar, after perfecting the art of using computer neurologics to replace parts of the human brain, had begun a campaign of terror and extreme proselytization to convert others to their way. They would have rewritten the Three Laws to allow for terrible mutilations of the bodysoul, but the Order of Scientists, as the Order had then been called, under the implacable Timekeeper, had opposed them. The first war fought with the warrior-poets had nearly destroyed the Order, but the Order’s superior command of lightships and the manifold allowed them to impose a peace upon Qallar. The warrior-poets agreed to many hated limits to their technologies of the mind – and over the seven thousand years since the Third Dark Age they had broken their agreement many times.

This, Danlo thought in the quiet of his ship, had been the deepest tension on every Civilized World almost for ever: that human beings were always secretly dying to break out of their old ways and turn their faces to something new. And human beings needed newness as a hungry thallow chick does meat, but the Third Law was right to proclaim that man may not stare too long at the face of the computer and still remain as man. How then should they turn? If women and men were not to fall as cold and mechanical as silicon computers, in what direction might they look to take on a new face, one truly human and yet beyond the fearful yearning and pride that had marked man’s visage for so long? No one knew. No one had ever known, neither the first Homo sapiens who had looked up at the stars in longing for the infinite lights, nor the warrior-poets, nor the god-men of Agathange. But many were the prophets who had understood that the pressure to evolve was the deepest, most terrible of all man’s drives. Hanuman li Tosh was only the most recent of these firebrands. But he was a religious genius, and more, a man with a terrible will to fate. And perhaps most importantly, he brought his Way of Ringess to the stars at a fateful time in history when people were prepared to burn worlds and turn a whole civilization to ashes if only they might create themselves anew.

Terrible pressure, Danlo thought as he fell deeper into the Civilized Worlds. The terrible light – people do not know what is inside them.

At last the lightships – and deep-ships and black ships – came to Madeus Luz at the edge of the galaxy’s Orion Arm. This blue-white giant was like a signpost lighting their way into the darker spaces into which they soon must pass. Only a score of stars lay along their pathway now to Sheydveg, itself one of the few stars to brighten this part of the Fallaways. The pilots fell on to Jonah’s Star Far Group, where the world of Shatoreth added to their numbers, and then they made a series of mappings towards Sheydveg.

For Danlo, floating in the pit of the Snowy Owl, this was the longest and most uneventful segment of his journey. According to Lord Nikolos’ orders, at Sheydveg he would say goodbye to his fellow pilots and fall on alone to the dense stars of the Sagittarius Arm and then to Neverness, but now there was almost nothing outside his ship to occupy his attention. The manifold between these two arms of the galaxy flattened out like a sheet of burnished gold. To enlighten himself, he might have taken conversation with Demothi Bede, but this lord of the Order stayed in his passenger cell, either sleeping or interfaced into quicktime, where the ship-computer slowed his mind as cold does tree sap so that time for him passed much more quickly. Danlo did speak with his devotionary computer. The hologram of Nikolos Daru Ede, with its bald head and black, mystic’s eyes, floated like a glowing ghost in the ship’s omnipresent darkness. Danlo had long since tired of Ede’s warnings as to the manifold’s dangers and his continually-voiced desire to get his body back and incarnate again as a human being. But he did not know the word that would take this noisome computer down, and in truth, he had been alone in stars so long that he welcomed almost any form of companionship. And rarely, Ede might even amuse him. Once, when they had just fenestered past a fiery white double, Ede reminded him for the thousandth time that the fleet of Bertram Jaspari’s Iviomils was likely falling among similar stars on their way to Neverness to destroy it.

‘And they have my body, Pilot. If the Iviomils destroy the Star of Neverness and flee into the core stars, how will I ever recover my body?’

‘We will not let them destroy Neverness,’ Danlo said for the thousandth time.

‘I should like only to feel the world through my body once more.’

‘And then?’ Danlo asked yet one more time. ‘What will you do with this resurrected body?’

The expression on Ede’s face froze into a kind of mechanical wistfulness. ‘I shall drink the finest firewine; I shall bask in the sunlight on the sands of the Astaret Sea; I shall smell roses; I shall suffer and weep and play with children; I should like to fall into love with a woman.’

Usually this conversation went no further, but because Danlo was in a playful mood, he asked, ‘But what if your body no longer has the passion to be a body?’

For a moment Ede seemed lost in computation (or thought), and then he asked, ‘What do you mean?’

‘Your body has been frozen for three thousand years, yes?’

‘Only two thousand, seven hundred and forty-five years.’

Danlo smiled and said, ‘My friend Bardo once died and was frozen in preservation for only a few days. When the cryologists thawed him, he found that he had lost certain of his powers.’

‘What powers?’

‘He found it impossible … to be with a woman.’

‘But I always found it so easy to be with women.’

In truth, Nikolos Daru Ede, the man, had always been too absorbed with his computers and his journey godward to love any woman deeply. But as for swiving them, he had been the founder of humanity’s greatest religion, and as with most such charismatic leaders, his bed had rarely been empty.

‘Bardo always had an easy way with women, too,’ Danlo said. ‘But after he was restored to himself, his spear would not rise.’

‘Then in the thawing of my body, I shall have to take precautions that my spear remains risen.’

‘Remains?’

‘Have I never told you the story of my vastening?’ Ede asked.

‘Yes, truly you have – you told me that after your brain had been copied in an eternal computer, your body was frozen.’

‘Of course, but what was I doing in the hours before I carked my consciousness into the computer and became a god?’

‘How … would I know?’ Danlo asked. But then he immediately smiled because a vivid image came flashing into his mind: the plump, naked Nikolos Daru Ede sexing with three beautiful women whom he had married that morning in honour of the great vastening to occur that afternoon.

‘Before I was vastened, I wanted to be a man one last time,’ Ede said. ‘So I took my three new wives to bed for the day. But I became overstimulated – I think due to the kuri drink that Amaris mixed to fortify me. When it came time for my vastening, I’m afraid I was still tumescent.’

Danlo was now struggling hard not to laugh. ‘You went to your vastening with your spear pointing towards the heavens, yes?’

‘Well, I wore a kimono, Pilot. It was voluminous. No one could see.’

‘But after you had died … that is, after the programmers had torn apart your brain and scanned and copied its pattern, after this vastening into what you believe is a greater life, could it be that your body returned to a less excited state?’

‘My vastening lasted only nine and a half seconds. Pilot.’

‘I had thought it took much longer.’

‘Of course, the ceremonies lasted for hours – a great event requires great pageantry, don’t you think?’

‘Yes – truly.’

‘I had ordered the cryologists to freeze me the moment that my vastening was accomplished. Nine and a half seconds – not enough time for my spear to fall.’

‘And thus the Cybernetic Universal Church has preserved you through the ages?’

‘They froze me in my kimono. It was all quite dignified.’

Now Danlo laughed openly, deep from his belly in waves of sound that filled the pit of his ship. Then he said, ‘There is something funny about religions, yes? Something strange, the way men worship other men – even a fat little bald man who went into his crypt swollen between the legs like a satyr.’

‘You insult me, Pilot.’

‘I am sorry.’

‘Of course, the Architects of the Cybernetic Churches don’t worship me as a man. They worship the miracle of my becoming a god.’

‘I see.’

‘But it would be an even greater miracle if we could recover my body and restore me to a life in the flesh.’

‘Truly, it would.’

‘You will help me recover my body, won’t you. Pilot?’

‘I have promised I would.’

‘Even if my spear no longer rises, I would still like to hold a woman again.’

Danlo closed his eyes, then, as he remembered holding Tamara Ten Ashtoreth in the morning sun and the intense fire of their love. ‘I … understand,’ he said.

The Ede imago seemed to respect this sudden silence, for it was many moments before he asked, ‘Pilot?’

‘Yes?’

‘Whatever happened with Bardo’s spear? Did he ever regain his powers?’

‘Yes, truly he did. He … found a cure. Bardo is more Bardo than ever.’

‘I’m happy for him. It’s bad to be without a woman.’

Now Danlo opened his eyes and stared at Ede’s sad, shining face. It was the first time he had ever heard this flickering hologram express any concern for a human being. ‘I would like to believe … that we will recover your body,’ he said.

Other conversations with Ede were of more immediate moment. This little ghost of a god proved to know much about war. When he computed how quickly the fleet was adding ships, he observed that the Sonderval would soon face the problem of how to coordinate and command them. And then at Skamander they received an unexpected boon of fifty-five deep-ships and ninety-two black ships, and the Sonderval’s command problem became critical. It was hard enough for the Order’s finest pilots to move through the manifold as a single, coordinated body of ships. It was harder still for the Sonderval, as the lone Lord Pilot, to aid the black ships’ pilots in mapping through the swirling spaces of the manifold. In his overweening arrogance, the Sonderval’s first impulse was simply to abandon this huge fleet and let them find their own way to Sheydveg. Time was pressing upon him like the overpressures of an approaching winter storm. And he doubted the black ships’ and deep-ships’ worthiness in battle. He might actually have left them with a few lightships as escorts, but then an event occurred that made this strategy unthinkable.