War in Heaven

It was just after they had fallen out into realspace around a red-orange giant named Ulladulla. The lightships had kept in good order, gathering as a group near point-exits only a few million miles from Ulladulla’s flaming corona. But the black ships and deep-ships, as they fell out from the manifold’s point-exits, scattered themselves through space like hundreds of dice cast onto black felt. As always, the Sonderval, in his brilliant Cardinal Virtue, would have to wait for them to make their corrective mappings and rejoin the lightships. This always took time, and the Sonderval always counted the moments like a merchant begrudgingly fingering over golden coins to a tax collector. And this time, the regrouping was to take more than a few moments because further in towards the sun, half-concealed by Ulladulla’s fierce radiance, five lightships from the Order on Neverness waited to ambush them.

So blindingly quick was then attack that neither the Sonderval nor any other pilot save one identified the names of their ships. But it was certain that they were Neverness lightships which had journeyed to this star to terrorize the black ships and their pilots. Any ship, of course, as it opens windows in and out of realspace will perturb the manifold like a stone cast into a quiet pool of water. A skilful pilot, if she has manoeuvred close enough to another, can read these faint ripples and actually predict another ship’s mappings through the manifold. But if many ships are moving as one towards point-exits around a fixed star, it requires much less skill to make a probability mapping, for the perturbations merge like a streaming river and are easy to perceive. If the pilots of Neverness had known of the gathering on Sheydveg – as they must have known – then it would be a simple thing for them to divide their forces and lie in wait along the many probable pathways leading to Sheydveg. In time, one of their attack groups would be almost certain to detect the raging river of the Sonderval’s fleet. It would be a simple stratagem, yes, but a foolish one, or so the Sonderval had calculated when he had weighed the risks of various approaches to Sheydveg. For there were many pathways through the manifold, as many as sleekit tunnels through a forest, and whoever led the Neverness pilots would have to divide his ships too thinly.

If the purpose of this attack had been to vanquish the New Order’s fleet, then the Sonderval’s reasoning would have proved sound. But the five lightships’ purpose was only terror. In truth, the lightships of the Sonderval’s fleet were never in danger, nor were the main body of black ships and deep-ships. But a few of the most scattered of these were in deadly danger. The Old Order’s lightships fell out of the sun upon them like hawks among a flock of kitikeesha birds. Using a tactic devised in the Pilots’ War, they manoeuvred close to then target ships and fixed a point-source into the manifold. In essence, they made mappings for their victims. Death-mappings: their spacetime engines opened windows into the manifold and forced a deep-ship or black ship to fall along a pathway leading straight into the heart of the nearest star. These mappings took only moments. And so in less than nine and half seconds, the pilots from Neverness darted in and out of realspace like needles of light. They sent two deep-ships and thirteen black ships spinning to their fiery deaths inside Ulladulla. And then as quickly as they had appeared, they were gone, five wraithlike ships vanishing into the manifold towards other stars far away.

This lightning raid stunned the Sonderval’s fleet. Almost no one had expected such a disaster, for the two Orders were not yet at war. Only one pilot had the presence of mind (or courage) to act in vengeance. This was Bardo, who had long since proved his prowess in the Pilots’ War. When he looked out into deep space and saw how easily the Neverness pilots had destroyed fifteen ships, he cried out after them ‘You’re barbarians, by God! They were as helpless as babes – oh, all the poor men and women, too bad!’

So saying, he used his Sword of Shiva to slice open a window from the black fabric of realspace, and then he and his great diamond ship fell into the burning pathways of the manifold.

When he returned to the spaces of Ulladulla three hundred seconds later, he found that the Sonderval had drawn his shaken fleet together. He gave a quick account of his pursuit of the Neverness ships. By light-radio he told the Sonderval and all the pilots of the lightships (and only these) what had happened during the brief time he had been gone. In the pit of the Snowy Owl, a glowing hologram of Bardo fairly popped out of the air, and this is what Danlo heard the huge man say: ‘Five ships, and they scattered in five different directions. So I had to choose one pathway, one ship. I was lucky, by God! I was still within a well-defined region of one of them, and was able to close the radius of convergence quickly. I came upon him by a blue hotstar five light years from Ulladulla. When I fell out into realspace, I saw that it was Marrim Masala in the Golden Rhomb. He has the ugliest little ship with its ugly straight wings and ugly tail. Had, that is – I sent him and his goddamned ship to hell inside the star, too bad. But I’ve no regrets, for he slaughtered innocents. And in the Pilots’ War he killed Lahela Shatareh, and who could forgive him for that?’

The battle that Bardo had fought with Marrim Masala had been much like any contest between two lightships: nerve-shattering, fierce and quick. Like two swords flashing in the night, Bardo’s and Marrim’s ships slipped in and out of the manifold seeking an advantageous probability mapping. Bardo, the more mathematical and cunning of the two pilots, in some hundred and ten seconds of these lightning manoeuvres, had finally prevailed. He predicted which point-exit the Golden Rhomb would take into realspace, and he made a forced mapping. And then the Sword of Shiva swept forwards and sliced open a window into the manifold. And the Golden Rhomb instantly fell through this window into the hotstar’s terrible fires.

And so one pilot of the Old Order had been slain against fifteen pilots of the Civilized Worlds – and twenty thousand soldiers helpless in the holds of the two deep-ships. Helpless, yes, but they were not innocents as Bardo had said, but rather full men and women armed for war. Still, no one had thought war would come to them so soon. With the loss of the Kaliska and the Ellama Tueth, both deep-ships from Vesper, terror spread among the Sonderval’s fleet. The fifty-five deep-ships and ninety-two black ships recently gained at Skamander might have immediately deserted for that rich world, but their pilots were afraid that the Neverness lightships might intercept them on their way home. To quell the fears of these soft, over-civilized pilots – and to protect them – the Sonderval immediately reorganized his command. Henceforth the lightships would not move as a separate body from the hundreds of deep-ships and black ships. (After the Old Order’s ambush, there were now some twelve hundred and sixty-eight of these.) The Sonderval divided his two hundred lightships into ten battle groups, each to be led by a master pilot who would act as captain and commander of the twenty pilots beneath him – as well as the tens of black ship and deep-ship pilots assigned to his group. In effect, the lightship pilots would act as shepherd dogs keeping the deep-ships and black ships together and protecting them against wolves.

For these ten pilot-captains the Sonderval chose masters who had fought with him in the Pilots’ War: Helena Charbo and Aja, of course, and Charl Rappaporth and Veronika Menchik. He elevated as well Richardess, Edreiya Chu, Ona Tetsu, Sabri Dur li Kadir, and Alark of Urradeth in his famous ship, the Crossing Maker. For the tenth pilot-captain, the Sonderval might have favoured Matteth Jons or Paloma the Younger or a score of others. But he astonished almost everyone by naming Bardo to command the Tenth Battle Group. By light-radio, he told the assembled pilots of his reasons for this strange decision: although no longer of the Order, Bardo was perhaps the master pilot with the most talent for war. And next to the Sonderval, as the Sonderval said, he was the finest of tacticians, and quick-minded and valorous as his recent pursuit of the five Neverness lightships had proved. Although no one disputed Bardo’s prowess as a pilot, Peter Eyota and and Zapata Karek doubted his ability to lead other pilots and their ships to war. And Dario Ashtoreth stridently denied a ronin pilot’s right even to associate with other pilots, much less command them. But the Sonderval was a practical and imperious man. He brooked no argument with his decisions. He had said that Bardo would act as pilot-captain of the Tenth Battle Group, and so it came to be.

After this the Sonderval’s fleet fell on without incident to Sheydveg. This was the name of a cool, orange star shining almost exactly halfway between two arms of the galaxy. Its name meant ‘crossing of the roads’, not only for its physical location at the centre of the Civilized Worlds but because of its famous thickspace where millions of pathways through the manifold converged. Before Rolli Gallivare had discovered the great thickspace near the Star of Neverness, it had been the topological nexus of the Fallaways, the one star to which pilots might fall and easily find a series of pathways leading to any other. Sheydveg was also the star’s single world, a fat blue-white sphere of deep oceans and broad, mountainous continents. It was an old world well-settled by its two billion human beings. With its many light-fields and vast robot factories, it was the perfect world to host the gathering that Bardo had spoken of so many days before in the Hall of the Lords.

‘Well, Pilot, it seems that there really will be war after all,’ the Ede imago said in the darkness of the Snowy Owl. ‘I’ve never seen so many ships.’

When Danlo looked out of the diamond-paned windows of his lightship, out into the black swirls of space, he saw what others saw: the Sonderval’s thousand ships merging with the vast fleet already gathered there. There were deep-ships from Darkmoon and Silvaplana, and black ships from nearly a thousand worlds. Solsken had sent twenty long-ships, and these glorious, monstrous engines of destruction spun slowly in the silence of the night. From Ultima had come a hundred fire-ships, and the Rainbow Double had contributed sixty similar vessels. Even as Danlo watched, more ships arrived, falling out of the manifold like snowflakes from a shaken cloak. These thousands of ships came from Fiesole and Avalon, as well as the carked worlds of Anya, Hoshi and Newvannia, and many others. Altogether, Danlo counted some thirty thousand ships gathered above Sheydveg in a vast, shimmering swathe of diamond and black nall.

Only a few of these, however, were lightships. Two hundred lightships had set forth from Thiells, and these (less the five already lost) were now joined by a hundred and ten others rebelling against the madness on Neverness. The Fellowship of Free Pilots, they called themselves – and some of these were the very pilots whom Bardo had led in the storming of the Lightship Caverns and thereafter sent to the Civilized Worlds to call them to war. Cristobel, in his beautiful Diamond Lotus, commanded them, along with the master pilots Alesar Estarei and Salome wu wei Chu. Although they politely greeted their brother and sister pilots of the New Order, there was an immediate coolness between these two groups. Cristobel, a quick-eyed lion of a man, told the Sonderval that the Fellowship of Free Pilots was the soul of the opposition to the Old Order and the Way of Ringess.

‘It is we of the Fellowship who have suffered to watch the evils of Ringism spread across the stars,’ Cristobel explained when the pilots of both Neverness and Thiells held a conclave by light-radio. ‘It is we who have journeyed far among the Civilized Worlds, and we who have called all these ships and warriors here today. And we have given our name to those who would fight against Hanuman li Tosh and the Ringists: we have gathered here the Fellowship of Free Worlds, and it is we who should lead them.’

And as to who should lead the Fellowship of Free Pilots, Cristobel didn’t hesitate to put forth himself, although it had been Bardo who had organized the Fellowship. Upon hearing Cristobel speak thus, Bardo fell wroth.

‘By God, you’re a treacherous little worm of a man!’ Bardo’s voice thundered in the pits of three hundred lightships as he instantiated as a blazing hologram. His face was purple-black, his fist like a club pounding against his hand. Although Cristobel was in truth a large man, next to Bardo, whether by hologram or actual presence in the body, he did seem rather small. ‘Who was it who called the Fellowship of Free Pilots together at his house when everyone was quaking at Lord Pall’s goddamned edicts against assemblage? Who gave them then name? Who led the attack on the Lightship Caverns? It was Bardo, by God!’ Bardo said. ‘It was Bardo, too bad.’

‘We honour you for your efforts,’ Cristobel said with a sneer. ‘But it seems you’ve already found your place beneath the Sonderval.’

Here the Sonderval’s hologram appeared in the pits of the lightships. His handsome face had fallen as hard as the granite of Icefall’s mountains. To Cristobel, he said, ‘He is pilot-captain of twenty lightships and a hundred and twenty other vessels beneath the Lord Pilot of the New Order.’

‘But he’s still only a ronin pilot, after all,’ Cristobel said.

Now, as if regarding a wormrunner or some loathsome species of alien, the Sonderval slowly shook his head. ‘When you speak to me, Cristobel, you may address me as “Lord Pilot”.’

‘But you are not my Lord Pilot, after all.’

‘No – is that Salmalin the Prudent, then?’ the Sonderval asked, naming the Old Order’s present Lord Pilot.

‘I have no Lord Pilot.’

‘Then if you’ve left the Order and are without a Lord Pilot, you are as much of a ronin as Bardo.’

‘Not so,’ Cristobel said. ‘We of the Fellowship carry the spirit of the Order with us. The true Order, before Ringism corrupted it.’

‘And I honour your spirit,’ the Sonderval said. ‘But is it your intention to appoint yourself Lord Pilot of the Fellowship?’

Here several pilots of the Fellowship began to speak in favour of Cristobel becoming Lord Pilot of the Fellowship. It was obvious to Danlo, as it must have been to others, that they had planned this power play immediately upon learning that Bardo had been successful in reaching the New Order on Thiells.

‘By God, if anyone is to be Lord Pilot of the Fellowship, it’s Bardo!’ Bardo roared.

‘Why should the Fellowship have a Lord Pilot at all?’ Richardess quietly asked when Bardo’s voice had faded to a hum. In his body and face, he was as delicate as Yarkona glass, but he was the only pilot ever to have dared the deadly spaces of Chimene. ‘We already have a great Lord Pilot in the Sonderval. Why don’t you pilots of the Fellowship simply join us?’

‘Why don’t you pilots of the New Order join us?’ Cristobel countered.

‘Because you’re ronins!’ Zapata Karek said.

‘And you’re ignorant of what is really occurring in Neverness,’ Vadin Steele said.

‘Ignorant! Well, you’re as power-hungry as a Scutari shahzadi.’

For a long time, the pilots argued among themselves like novices unable to choose captains for a game of hokkee. Danlo listened to then words grow wilder and more belligerent with every pilot who spoke. Their childishness might have amused him, but a great many lives hung on the slender thread of then reaching an understanding. Although Danlo felt time slipping away like sands on a windswept beach and was eager to complete his journey, he felt that he should be sure of who led the Fellowship of Free Worlds before acting on their behalf as an ambassador to Neverness. And Demothi Bede, when Danlo roused him from the half-sleep of quicktime, agreed with him. Lord Bede seemed particularly shocked at the unforeseen play of events.

‘But this is madness!’ the thin, reedy Demothi Bede said in his thin, old voice. He crowded with Danlo into the pit of the Snowy Owl. ‘If we don’t do something, we’ll be at war with each other instead of the Ringists.’

‘Truly, we should do something,’ Danlo said as he floated in his formal black robes. ‘Since we’re supposed to be ambassadors and peacemakers.’

‘It’s obvious that the ronin pilots must join us,’ Lord Bede said. He was very much a traditionalist, and his face fell dour and smug. ‘They should take vows to the New Order.’

Now Danlo did smile, for although a thousand Civilized Worlds were represented in the ships sailing through space all around them, Cristobel and the Sonderval – and the Lord Bede – acted as if only the pilots of the two Orders mattered. But what right did they have, Danlo wondered, to choose the fates of thirty thousand ships and millions of men and women? These lords and masters of his Order obviously assumed that after they had decided upon a Lord Pilot, they would parcel out the other ships to their command like colourfully-wrapped presents given at Year’s End – or rather as the Sonderval had already done with the black ships and deep-ships he had escorted to Sheydveg. Or if the Sonderval and Cristobel could not decide who should lead whom, then the two hundred pilots from Thiells and the Fellowship of Free Pilots might fight independently of each other – after first fighting each other for the prize of the vast fleet waiting in the light of a cool, orange star.

‘I must speak to the pilots,’ Danlo told Demothi Bede. For the moment, he was faced away from his fellow pilots’ arguments, and the pit of his lightship was quiet. ‘This fighting among ourselves, this arrogance of ours … is shaida.’

‘Do you have a plan, then, Pilot?’ Demothi Bede asked.

Danlo nodded his head, then told him his plan.

‘Very well,’ Demothi said, smiling his approval. ‘If you’re to try to stop a war, you might as well begin now.’

And so Danlo added his voice to the cacophony filling the pits of three hundred and five lightships. As a master pilot he had as much right to speak as anyone, and he too instantiated as a hologram among them. Because of his renown at mastering a chaos space and crossing the entire Vild – or perhaps because of his blazing blue eyes – the other pilots fell silent and listened to him.

‘We pilots,’ he said, ‘have thought of ourselves as the spirit of the Civilized Worlds. But we have never been their rulers. The Fellowship of Free Worlds – but where is our fellowship when we call each other names like barbarians? And where is the freedom of these worlds if they must simply wait for us to order them to war? Do they, who have homes and children, risk less than we? If we cannot stop this war, they will die like snowworms caught in the sun, perhaps a thousand or a million of them for every pilot who loses his ship. Truly. Where is their freedom, then, to choose their own fate? We are pilots of three hundred and five lightships. Outside my window I have counted … a hundred times as many other ships. Shouldn’t we let their pilots choose who will lead them to war?’

Most of the lightship pilots, upon listening to Danlo, immediately saw the sense of what he said. In truth, few of them really wanted to wage war as two separate Orders of ships, and they dreaded the uncertainties of Cristobel’s dispute with the Sonderval. The Sonderval, for his part, was loath to surrender any important decision to such inferior beings as the pilots and peoples of the Civilized Worlds. But he was at heart a shrewd man whose farsightedness overshadowed even his arrogance. And so, with carefully feigned reluctance, after trading knowing looks with Danlo, he approved this proposal. Only Cristobel, really, and a few of his closest friends such as Alesar Estarei, argued against Danlo. But the tide of passion – the tide of history – had already turned against him. In the pits of their ships, two hundred and fifty pilots struck their diamond rings against whatever hard surface they could find, and called out that the Fellowship of Free Worlds should decide its own fate.

Of course, there was never any real doubt as to what the Fellowship would decide – if indeed they could decide anything at all. More than thirty thousand ships now orbited Sheydveg, and these held at least five million men and women representing a thousand Civilized Worlds. Many of these were princes or gurus, exemplars or elders or arhats. Many there were who might have wished to command the fleet themselves, but except for Markoman of Solsken and Prince Henrios li Ashtoreth, no one was so deluded as to imagine that he could match the skills of even the youngest of lightship pilots. Their debate, then, centred round how they should choose between the Sonderval and Cristobel as Lord Pilot of the Fellowship. (Or if they should favour Helena Charbo or some other master pilot less vainglorious.) Some held that each man and woman of the Fellowship should cast a vote for whomever he believed to be the greatest pilot. Some thought this unfair since a few worlds had sent more than fifty deep-ships carrying thousands of soldiers in each, while many worlds had sent only a few score of black ships; each individual world, it was argued, should cast a single vote.

There isn’t space here to describe the tortuous pathways by which these many people of many worlds came to a decision. It took them sixteen days to agree that each world would indeed have one vote. It took them much less time to cast these votes in favour of allowing the pilots of both Orders to lead them; as Danlo had hoped, they chose the Sonderval as Lord Pilot of the Fellowship of Free Worlds. But the Sonderval was not to be their autarch or ruler; his power was as a warlord only, to command them in battle if they should decide on war. This crucial decision – and many others relating to grand strategy – they would make for themselves. And if they should win against the Ringists and force a peace upon Neverness, it was they who would decide its terms.

The effect of allowing the Civilized Worlds a greater part in wielding power was profound. Although it limited the Sonderval’s freedom to impose his will upon those he led, it actually strengthened his leadership, for it strengthened the feeling of fellowship just beginning to flower among these many worlds like a delicate, new bud. Among those who would die together in war, between leader and led, there can never be too much fellowship. This, too, was part of Danlo’s plan. Many thanked him for his part in ending the stalemate between Cristobel and the Sonderval and playing midwife to the birth of the true Fellowship of Free Worlds. But when Lord Demothi Bede congratulated him on a fine work of diplomacy, his response was strange.

‘Truly, I have helped close the rift between our two Orders of pilots,’ he said in the quiet of his ship’s pit. As he spoke to Demothi Bede (and to the Ede imago), he touched the lightning-bolt scar cut deeply into his forehead.

‘Even Cristobel has accepted the inevitable,’ the Ede imago said with a programmed smile.

‘As well he should,’ Demothi Bede said, ‘considering the Sonderval’s graciousness.’

The Sonderval, after being chosen to lead the fleet, had invited Cristobel and the other ronin pilots to take vows as pilots of the New Order. As an incentive, he had offered to make Cristobel and Alesar Estarei pilot-captains of the newly-formed Eleventh and Twelfth battle groups – and even named Cristobel as his counsellor in all matters of tactics and strategy. Given the Sonderval’s private ways, this would prove an empty honour, but it seemed to cool the fiery Cristobel nevertheless.

‘All has fallen out as you’d hoped,’ Demothi Bede said to Danlo as he played with a mole on the side of his face. ‘Even Prince Henrios has agreed to lead his ships under Alesar Estarei’s command – a prince of Tolikna Tak under orders from a simple master pilot!’

‘Yes,’ Danlo agreed, ‘there is peace among the Fellowship, now.’