War in Heaven

He closed his eyes and listened to the wind beating against the hall’s crystal dome and to the sound of his own deep breath. Fate, he thought, was calling him to the future with all the force of a star pulling a lightship towards its fiery centre. All people had a fate – or at least a golden path towards the realization of life’s deepest possibilities. Some refused to hear the call or ignored it when it cried out within them. Some fled their fate like a snowhare leaping in zigs and zags away from a diving thallow. Too often a man or a woman lived in a dull, defeated acceptance of the inevitable, all the while hating themselves and bewailing the unfairness of the universe. Only a few rare beings embraced the terrible beauty of life. And only the rarest of the rare loved their fate whether or not their lives were drenched in sunshine and honey or filled with fire, flashing swords, nightmare and death. In all of Danlo’s journeys, he thought that he had found only one such, and that was his onetime friend, Hanuman li Tosh. And now it seemed that Hanuman had made an irreversible crossing of some dark, inner ocean, perhaps towards godly power, perhaps only towards madness – it was hard to know. And now Hanuman waited for him in the icy, shimmering City of Light, just as across the room, Bardo and Lord Nikolos and a hundred other lords watched his face for signs of weakness and waited to see which path he might choose.

For in the end we choose our futures, he remembered.

He closed his eyes tightly then, and time opened like a window on to a deep blue sky, and he beheld the shape and shimmer of moments yet to be. Everything waited for him in Neverness. High in the tower of a great cathedral, beneath a clear dome, a pale and beautiful man stood watching the stars for Danlo’s lightship to fall out of the night. On the ice-locked islands hundreds of miles from Neverness, men and women in white furs looked for Danlo to bring them a cure for a disease that lay coiled in their blood waiting to explode into life. A child waited for him, too. He saw this child lying in his arms, helpless, trusting, gazing up at him with eyes as wild and deeply blue as his own. He saw himself waiting for himself: his future self who was fiercer, wiser, nobler and marked down to his soul with a terrible love of life. The universe itself, from the Edge galaxies to the stars of the Vild, waited for him – waited for him to decide if he would go to Neverness, yes or no.

That is always the deepest question, the only true question – yes or no.

Once, the goddess known as the Solid State Entity had told him that he would someday go to war, and he saw that that terror awaited him in Neverness as well. But what kind of war? Would it be battles of lasers and exploding bombs or a struggle of a deeper and more universal nature? This he could not see. But he knew that even if war should sweep him away in the manoeuvres of lightships, armies and men firing eye-tlolts at each other, even if his own flesh was opened with a nerve knife, he would keep his vow of ahimsa; always he would keep true to the calling of his own soul.

I would never kill another, even though I and everyone I love must die.

When he opened his eyes, it was as if he had only blinked and almost no time had passed. Lord Nikolos and everyone else still waited for his answer. Danlo sat gripping his flute, and he remembered another thing that the Entity had once told him: that he would find his father at his journey’s end. Perhaps his father, too, waited for him in Neverness. He could almost hear his father’s voice carrying along the stellar winds from far across the galaxy, calling him home to his fate.

‘I … will go to Neverness,’ he finally said. He looked at Lord Nikolos and tried to smile as a fierce pain stabbed through his left eye.

‘Very well, then,’ Lord Nikolos said. ‘And now I must decide who the other ambassadors will be. There’s much to be decided, for all of us, but not now. Since the hour is late, we’ll adjourn for dinner, and tomorrow meet again.’

Lord Nikolos suddenly stood away from his table. The other lords followed his lead, and some began talking in groups of two or ten, while others filed out of the hall. Bardo and the master pilots sitting at Danlo’s table immediately began to discuss the forcing of an enemy’s lightship into the fiery centre of a star and other battle stratagems, and for the moment Danlo was left sitting alone to marvel at the terrible energies unleashed by the mere talk of war. He rubbed his aching eye, all the while breathing deeply against the terrible soaring anticipation in the centre of his belly.

I, too, love my fate, he thought. My terrible, beautiful fate.

And then he stood up to greet Bardo and tell the other pilots of new stratagems of mastering the manifold, and the first waves of war swept him under as well.

CHAPTER III (#ulink_eb147707-10b4-5df4-a1e5-0b793c14879d)

The Two Hundred Lightships (#ulink_eb147707-10b4-5df4-a1e5-0b793c14879d)

Only the dead have seen an end to war.

— Plato

During the next few days, Lord Nikolos and the College of Lords made many decisions. All the pilots on Thiells were told to prepare their lightships and make their farewells. Thomas Sonderval, the Lord Pilot, in his gleaming ship the Cardinal Virtue, would lead two hundred others across the Vild’s dangerous stars to Sheydveg. Should death befall this great pilot – if a supernova should catch him in a wild blast of photons or the manifold devour his ship – Helena Charbo would act as Lord Pilot in his place. And if Helena and her Infinite Pearl were to meet a similar fate, Sabri Dur li Kadir would succeed her, and then Aja, Charl Rappaporth and Veronika Menchik, all masters of great renown who had once fought with Mallory Ringess in the Pilots’ War.

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.