War in Heaven

‘Then why do you seem so sad?’

Danlo stared out of his lightship’s window at the flashing lights of thirty thousand other ships spread out through near-space above Sheydveg. His eyes fell grave and deep, and he said, ‘What if I have brought a peace to the Fellowship … only to have created a better engine for the waging of war?’

‘That’s possible, Pilot. But what if you’ve helped create a stronger Fellowship dedicated to avoiding war? Isn’t it possible that there will be no war?’

But the Fellowship was already at war, or so Sabri Dur li Kadir and many others argued during the days that followed. The Ringists’ ambush and destruction of fifteen ships certainly constituted an act of war, so why should the Fellowship pretend that there still might be peace? Could they trust the Ringists not to fall against them in full strength out of the howling black forest of the manifold? Should they themselves avoid destroying the Ringists’ ships if offered such a chance?

‘We must fall against them before they fall against us,’ Sabri Dur li Kadir said in full conclave with all thirty thousand ships of the Fellowship. His face was as black as obsidian and as sharp. ‘We must lay our plans as soon as possible and then attack.’

There were, however, voices of peace as well. Danlo and Lord Bede argued that the Fellowship should use its power to discourage the Ringists from war, while Makara of Newvannia, a well-known arhat, suggested that the Ringists’ raid might be overlooked as an unfortunate accident. And one of the Vesper exemplars, Onan Nayati, who was either a coward or a very wise man, told everyone that they would be mad to make war upon the Ringists for they would be as a hawk attacking an eagle. This led to a measuring of their respective strengths. The Fellowship comprised one thousand and ninety-one worlds opposed to Ringism – and four more if the alien worlds of Darghin, Fravashing, Elidin, and Scutarix could be counted, which of course they couldn’t because they would never send ships to fight in a human war. Perhaps four hundred worlds had decided to remain neutral, and an equal number warred with themselves as to whom they would support. That left some twelve hundred and two worlds as fervently Ringist, many of them the richest and most powerful of the Civilized Worlds. Onan Nayati estimated that they could gather a fleet of at least thirty-five thousand deep-ships and black ships. And as for the lightships of Neverness, the shining swords of the night, Cristobel said that Lord Salmalin would command four hundred and fifty-one. The odds, then, had fallen against the Fellowship, especially considering that in battle one lightship would be worth at least twenty black ships. The pilots and princes of the Fellowship might very well have decided to wait upon war, but then something happened that broadened their field of vision and reminded them that stars burned with a terrible purpose far beyond their own.

On the 83rd day of false winter a single lightship fell out to join the others in orbit above Sheydveg. This was the Infinite Rose, piloted by Arrio Verjin, a master pilot of the Old Order. That is, he had been of the Order before returning to Neverness from a journey lasting several years. But when he had seen how Ringism had ruined his beloved Order and made virtual slaves out of pilots whom he had respected all his life, he had fled across the stars to the gathering at Sheydveg. And he brought with him the most astonishing news: he had witnessed with his own eyes a battle fought among the gods. In the spaces towards the core – beyond the Morbio Inferiore where the stars blaze as densely as exploding fireworks – the god known as Pure Mind had been slain. The moon-sized lobes of his great brain had been pulverized into a glowing dust. Arrio told of the destruction of a whole region of stars, impossibly intense lights erupting out of blackness, the detonation of the zero-point energies of the spacetime continuum itself. The radiations from this apocalypse were vaster than that of a hundred supernovas. Only the gods, he said, could wield such technologies. He did not know why one god would wish to slay another. When Danlo told him of the Solid State Entity and the war among the gods, Arrio said, ‘Perhaps it was the Silicon God, then, who did this terrible thing. Or perhaps one of his allies, Chimene or the Degula Trinity. How will we ever know? But the effects of what has happened will run deep.’

And the first and most terrible effect, Arrio said, was that these explosions had created huge distortions beneath spacetime, a kind of deadly bubbling known as a Danladi-set expansion. For Arrio Verjin it had been like a tidal wave sweeping towards his fragile ship. He had barely escaped, but the Danladi wave was still spreading through the manifold like a wall of white water, expanding outwards towards the stars of the Sagittarius Arm. Soon it would reach Neverness and other worlds of the Fallaways, and then the manifold there might prove as treacherous as the spaces of the Vild.

‘We must prepare ourselves for tremendous distortions,’ Arrio told the assembled fleet. ‘The Danladi wave will perturb the entire manifold until it dies out towards the edge stars.’

The second effect of Pure Mind’s destruction was to quicken the Fellowship’s move towards war. It reminded even the lightship pilots that their power was nothing compared to the fire and lightning of the gods, who could destroy whole constellations of stars as easily as the Architects of the Old Church could blow up a single sun. If the gods were provoked, their wrath might fall upon any of the Civilized Worlds: Summerworld or Clarity or Lechoix or Larondissement. Or Neverness. As Cristobel pointed out, the gods might regard Hanuman li Tosh’s building of his Universal Computer as a bid for godhood. The eschatologists have a word for this kind of break-out from human being into something much vaster: hakariad. Throughout the galaxy over the past ten thousand years, there had been many hakariads, and perhaps many wars fought to stop such transcendent events. The gods, it is said, are jealous and do not like company. If the Silicon God saw Hanuman’s acts as a hakariad, then he might destroy the Star of Neverness – and a hundred others nearby. Therefore, Cristobel said, the Fellowship must destroy Hanuman’s Universal Computer before the gods did. This must be the first of their purposes, and to accomplish it, they must fall against Neverness in full war.

Almost all the warriors of the worlds represented in the Sonderval’s fleet saw the logic of Cristobel’s argument. It took the Fellowship, casting votes world by world, only two days to make a formal declaration of war. And so on the 85th of false winter in the year 2959 since the founding of Neverness, the War of the Gods, as it would be called, began.

That night, as Danlo prepared the Snowy Owl for his journey to Neverness, the Sonderval summoned him to a meeting. While their ships orbited Sheydveg, they manoeuvred these sleek diamond needles so that they touched side to side. And then Danlo broke the seal of his ship and entered the Cardinal Virtue, the first pilot that the privacy-loving Lord Pilot had honoured in this way. Danlo floated in the darkness, and he looked about the rather large interior of the Sonderval’s lightship, taking note of the design of the neurologics which surrounded both the Sonderval and himself like a soft, purple cocoon. The Sonderval, stern and serious in his formal black robe, waited in his ship’s pit. He greeted Danlo warmly. ‘Welcome, Pilot,’ he said, ‘I’m glad you could join me.’

‘Thank you for asking me here tonight.’

‘It is I who should thank you,’ the Sonderval said. He began to play with a large diamond brooch pinned to his black silk robe just over his heart. ‘If not for your foresight, we might have lost Cristobel and the others. And I might have been Lord Pilot over a much smaller fleet.’

Here Danlo smiled and said, ‘But no one could have known how the Fellowship would decide. There was always a chance … that Cristobel would have been chosen Lord Pilot, and not you.’

‘Chance favours the bold – as you’ve proved, Danlo wi Soli Ringess.’

Danlo bowed his head quickly, then studied the Sonderval’s wide smile and the wide, white, perfect teeth. He said, ‘Your fleet … is small enough as it is.’

‘We’ve slightly fewer deep-ships and black ships than the Ringists,’ the Sonderval said. ‘But I believe that we’ll have a more coherent command of them.’

‘And the lightships?’

‘True, they’ve half again as many as we,’ the Sonderval said. ‘But don’t forget that the best pilots went with us to the Vild. The best and the boldest, Pilot.’

‘You seem so confident,’ Danlo said.

‘Well, I was born for war – I think it’s my fate.’

‘But in war … there are so many terrible chances.’

‘This is also true, which is why I would still stop this war if I could.’

‘There … must be a way to stop it,’ Danlo said.

‘Unfortunately,’ the Sonderval said, ‘it’s easier to forestall a war than to stop one once it’s begun. Your mission won’t be easy.’

‘No.’

‘It might be difficult for you even to reach Neverness.’

Danlo nodded his head that this was so, then said, ‘But I will return there. I … will speak with Hanuman once again. My fate, Lord Pilot. Only I must ask you for time. Hanuman burns like a thallow flying too close to the sun, and it will take time to cool his soul.’

‘I can’t promise that. We’ll fall against Neverness as soon as possible.’

‘How … soon?’

‘I’m not sure,’ the Sonderval said. ‘We won’t be able to approach Neverness directly, and the ships will require some time before they’re able to perform the manoeuvres I’ll require of them. But soon enough, Pilot. You must make your journey as quickly as you can.’

‘I see.’

For a long time the Sonderval regarded Danlo with his hard, calm eyes. Then he said, ‘I don’t envy you your mission, you know. I wouldn’t like to be there when you tell Hanuman that he must dismantle his Universal Computer.’

At this Danlo smiled gravely but said nothing.

‘Perhaps,’ the Sonderval said, ‘it would be best if Lord Bede presented the Fellowship’s demands.’

‘If you’d like. Lord Pilot.’

‘And if by some miracle you’re successful and Hanuman sees the light of reason, you must bring me word as soon as you can.’

‘But once the fleet has left Sheydveg, how will I find you?’

‘That’s a problem isn’t it?’ Again the Sonderval fingered the brooch that adorned his robe, then sighed. ‘I could give you the fixed-points of the stars along the pathway I’ve chosen towards Neverness.’

Danlo waited silently through the count of ten heartbeats for the Sonderval to say more.

‘I could do that, Pilot, but it might not prove wise. The chances of war might cause us to choose different pathways. Then, too …’

‘Yes?’

‘Well, the chances of your reasoning with Hanuman aren’t very great. Why should I burden you with information you’ll probably never need?’

‘I … see.’

‘Vital information,’ the Sonderval said. ‘If Lord Salmalin knew our pathway, he could lie in wait for our fleet and destroy it.’

Danlo watched the Sonderval squeezing the diamond brooch between his long fingers; he watched and waited, saying nothing.

‘Nevertheless, I’ve decided to give you this information – it might possibly keep us from a battle for which there’s no need. And I must give you something else as well.’

So saying, the Sonderval unpinned the brooch with infinite care and closed it safely before giving it to Danlo. For the count of twenty heartbeats, Danlo stared at this piece of jewellery waiting like a scorpion in his open hand.

‘Thank you, Lord Pilot,’ Danlo said politely. But his voice was full of irony and amusement – and with dread.

‘If your mission fails and you’re imprisoned, you mustn’t let the Akashics read your mind. And you mustn’t let the Ringists torture you.’

‘Do you truly think that Hanuman would—’

‘Some chances would be foolish to take,’ the Sonderval said. ‘The brooch’s pin is tipped with matrikax. If pushed into a vein, it kills instantly.’

‘I see.’

‘Your vow of ahimsa doesn’t prevent you from taking your own life, does it?’

Never killing or harming another, not even in one’s own thoughts, Danlo remembered. And then he said, ‘Some would say that it does.’

‘And what do you say, then?’

‘I … will never tell anyone the stars along your pathway.’

‘Very well,’ the Sonderval said.

He moved closer to Danlo and bent his long neck down as might a swan. For a few moments, he whispered in Danlo’s ear. Then he backed away as if he couldn’t bear such closeness with another human being.

‘Before you leave, I’ll meet with Lord Bede by imago,’ the Sonderval said. ‘But I won’t tell him what I’ve just told you.’

‘But is he not a lord of the New Order?’

‘He is not a pilot. There are some things only pilots should know.’

Danlo bowed, then fixed his burning eyes on the Sonderval. For a time, in the deep silence of space, the two men held each other’s gaze and looked into each other’s heart. And then finally the Sonderval had to turn away.

‘I was both wrong and right about you,’ the Sonderval said. ‘Wrong, because you’ll serve us very well as an ambassador. But you would have made a great warrior, too. As I know you secretly are. The fire, Pilot, the light. Hanuman would do well to fear you.’

‘But it is I … who will be at his mercy.’

‘Perhaps, perhaps.’

For a moment, the Sonderval looked at Danlo strangely before bowing to him. Perhaps some presentiment of doom came flooding into him like an ocean wave then, for his eyes misted and his perfectly shaped chin trembled slightly. Considering that he was the Sonderval, the most perfect and aloof of all men, this was one of the most remarkable things Danlo had ever seen.

‘I wish you well, Lord Pilot.’

‘And I wish you well. I hope I shall see you again.’

Danlo smiled and said, ‘When we have stopped the war – when the war is over.’

‘When the war is over,’ the Sonderval repeated. And then he said, ‘Fall far and fall well, Pilot.’

With a final bow, Danlo returned to his ship. It took only moments for the two pilots to disengage the Cardinal Virtue and the Snowy Owl. These beautiful lightships orbited above Sheydveg like a pair of silver thallows while Lord Demothi Bede spoke with the Sonderval and received his final instructions. And then the Snowy Owl rocketed away from the thirty thousand other ships towards Sheydveg’s orange-red sun. Danlo opened a window into the manifold, and so he began the last part of his journey to return home and to bring an end to war.

CHAPTER V

The Golden Ring

Life is light trapped in matter.

— saying of the gnostics

Life is the ability of matter to trap light.

— saying of the eschatologists

In mapping his pathways from Sheydveg to Neverness, Danlo had a choice between two conflicting purposes. Since his mission cried out for speed, he might have fallen from star to star by the shortest pathway, which would have taken him to Arcite, Darkmoon and Darghin, and thence to Fravashing and Silvaplana before falling on to Qallar and Neverness. But his safety – and Demothi Bede’s – was important, too; dead ambassadors stop no wars. Since the Ringists were already at war, a lone lightship falling suddenly out of the manifold near some hostile world might find itself attacked by ten others. Certainly, therefore, Danlo would best avoid such worlds, for Ringist pilots might be lying in wait along such an obvious pathway. It would be safest for him to make a great circle through the Fallaways, past the great red sun of the Elidi and then on to Flewelling, the Nave, Simoom and Catava. Safest, truly, but such a journey would take long, long. In the end, he decided upon the shorter pathway. Once, his friends and fellow pilots had called him Danlo the Wild. But he was not wild beyond the cooling draughts of reason, and so he began his journey with a falling off towards Agathange instead of Arcite and planned to approach Neverness by way of Kenshin or Tyr.

His journey across the stars was both the easiest and hardest he had ever made. Easy, because he fenestered through the most ancient and well-mapped part of the Fallaways, and the spaces he crossed were almost as familiar to him as the snowy islands of his childhood. If Arrio Verjin was right and a Danladi wave would soon rip through the Fallaways and turn the manifold into a raging black sea, Danlo saw no sign of this. The manifold before him – the emerald invariant spaces and Gallivare sets – was no more dangerous than a forest brook. He passed well-known stars, Baran Luz and Pilisi, a red giant almost as lovely to look upon as the Eye of Ursola. As always, he marvelled at the colours, the hot blue stars, the red and orange, and those loveliest of lights whose tones shone more as pale rose or golden yellow. This, he thought, was the glory of being a pilot. To behold a star with such closeness as if it were a bright red apple hanging from a tree was very different from standing on an icy world and looking up at the sky. Then, at night, the stars hung from the heavens like a million tiny jewels. And they were almost all white. From far away, the stars were like white diamonds because the human eye’s faint-light nerve cells couldn’t respond to colour, while the colour receptors couldn’t feel the faint touch of starlight. Once, as a child, he had hoped to see the stars just as they really were. And some day, he thought, he still might look out at the galaxies with his eyes truly open and naked to the universe. But now it was very good just to gaze at the colours of Cohila Luz or Tur Tupeng through the clearness of his lightship’s windows.

The hard part of this journey came from his continual surveillance of the manifold. For many days, he studied this space beneath space with the intensity of a tyard bird watching a snowfield for the slightest sign of a worm. Always, within a well-defined region about him known as a Lavi neighbourhood, the manifold rippled with undulations, most as faint as a whisper of wind upon a starlit sea. These he ignored, indeed, scarcely even noticed. What he sought – and hoped not to find – were the tells of a lightship, those violet traceries and luminous streaks made when a ship perturbed the manifold. Just as he passed by a spinning thickspace near the Valeska Double, he thought that he descried such tells. For the count of ten heartbeats, he didn’t breathe. But upon deeper scrutiny, it proved to be only the reflection of the Snowy Owl’s own tells, an unusual phenomenon when the manifold flattens out like a clear mountain lake. Four more times between Darkmoon and Silvaplana, Danlo was to detect such reflections, and each time he felt his heart in his throat and the blood pounding behind his eyes.

‘If you continue like this. Pilot, you’ll kill yourself.’

This came from Demothi Bede, who temporarily crowded into the pit of the Snowy Owl. No pilot, of course, while falling through the manifold would permit such a violation of his sacred space by another. And very few would share this sanctum of the soul at any time. But in order to rest, Danlo had fallen out into the quiet of realspace near Andulka. And because he loved company – sometimes – he didn’t mind talking with Demothi Bede. And so after he had finished sleeping, he had invited this crusty old lord inside the very brain of his ship.

‘But I have just slept … so deeply,’ Danlo said with a yawn.

‘But not for long. Six hours of sleep you’ve had in the last sixty, by my count.’

‘I did not know … that you were keeping count.’

‘There’s little else for me to do,’ Demothi said. Although his face was as old and forbidding-looking as a cratered moon, when he spoke there was a flash of good white teeth and true compassion that Danlo thought endearing.

‘I cannot sleep safely in the manifold,’ Danlo said. ‘And I cannot risk too many exits into realspace.’

In truth, the most dangerous part of their journey, as far as being detected by other ships, lay in opening windows to and from realspace. Then, when the Snowy Owl’s spacetime engines tore through the luminous tapestry of the manifold, there was always a release of light. Through telescopes or the naked human eye, other pilots could watch the blackness for flashes of light and so mark the coming or passing of a lightship.

‘But you could sleep longer,’ Demothi said.

‘If only I did not have to sleep at all.’

As Danlo said this, he glanced at the Ede hologram floating in the darkness. Nikolos Daru Ede, as a program running inside his devotionary computer, never slept. And he never kept silent, either, if he perceived any threat to his continued existence.

‘The Lord Demothi is right, you know,’ the Ede imago said. ‘If you exhaust yourself, you might map us into a collapsing torison space.’

Danlo smiled at this because the Ede program had learned enough mathematics of the manifold to speak almost as if he were a pilot or a real human being.

‘And what will you do if we cross pathways with another lightship? If you’re too tired to think?’

‘I have never been that tired,’ Danlo said. Once, as a boy out hunting in the wild, he had stood awake for three days by a hole cut into the sea’s ice – awake and waiting with his harpoon for a seal to appear.

‘This machine asks a good question, though,’ Demothi Bede said, pointing at the imago. ‘What will we do if we cross pathways with a Neverness lightship?’

‘Or ten ships?’ the Ede imago asked.

‘How … could I know?’

‘You don’t know what you’d do if ten lightships fell upon us?’

‘No, truly I do not,’ Danlo said. And then he smiled because sometimes he liked playing games with the Ede imago. ‘But part of the pilots’ art is knowing what to do … when you do not know what to do.’

‘But shouldn’t we at least agree upon a strategy?’ Demothi Bede broke in. ‘It seems that if we’re discovered, we’ll have only two choices: to flee into the stars, or to declare ourselves as ambassadors and trust we’ll be escorted to Neverness.’

‘Have you so great a trust of others, then?’ Danlo asked.

‘We’re speaking of pilots of the Order, not barbarians.’

‘But these pilots are also Ringists,’ Danlo said. ‘And they are at war with the Fellowship.’

Here Demothi Bede sucked in a breath with such force that his lungs fairly rattled. He said, ‘We don’t know that with certainty. It might be that the ambush near Ulladulla was an accident or only the belligerence of those five pilots who committed this massacre.’

‘No,’ Danlo said, closing his eyes. ‘It was no accident.’

‘Then you’ve decided to flee?’

‘I have decided nothing.’

‘But how will you make your decision?’

‘That will depend on many things: the configuration of the stars, how many ships we meet and who their pilots are.’ And, Danlo thought, on the pattern of the N-set waves rippling through the manifold or the whispers that he heard in the solar wind if they had fallen out near a star.

Now the Ede imago spoke again, and it was his turn to play with Danlo. ‘Do you really think you could escape ten lightships?’

‘Why not?’

‘On your journey to Tannahill, Sivan wi Mawi Sarkissian pursued you across the entire Vild.’

‘That is true,’ Danlo said. He remembered how Sivan, in his ship the Red Dragon, for a distance of twenty thousand light years, had hovered ghostlike always just at the radius of convergence in the same neighbourhood of space as the Snowy Owl. He remembered, too, Sivan’s passenger (and master), Malaclypse Redring of Qallar, the warrior-poet who hoped that Danlo would lead him to his father. The warrior-poets had a new rule, which was to kill all potential gods, and so Malaclypse had fallen halfway across the galaxy to find Mallory Ringess.