War in Heaven

And so Danlo fell, taking the Snowy Owl through the manifold as fast as he could. He made his mappings and artfully arrayed the windows upon the Fallaways, and he fenestered from star to star with a rare grace. And still Marja Valasquez in her Fire Drinker followed him. Soon, if he continued on this pathway, he must make a final sequence of mappings that would cause him to fall out near the Star of Neverness. And Marja would fall out too, and if he didn’t want to confront her ship to ship in realspace, then he must find some way to lose her before then.

He was wondering how he might accomplish this purpose when he entered an unusually flat null space. The manifold fell very calm; its colours quieted from quicksilver to emerald and then to a gentle turquoise without flaw or variegation of tone. Other than the Snowy Owl’s perturbations and the faint tells of Marja’s ship, no other ripples touched the almost deathly stillness of this space. Something was wrong here, he thought, something that he had never encountered before, not even in the endless null spaces of the Vild. There was a strangeness all about him and inside him, a waiting for some terrible event to occur; it was almost like standing on the sea’s ice on a clear winter day and watching the horizon for the whitish-blue clouds of a storm. He sensed such a storm. How this could be he did not know, for his mathematics told him that the manifold was peaceful – even if he extended his search outside the boundary of this neighbourhood to other neighbourhoods within a rather vast and ill-defined region. He might have sought the tells of this topological event for ever, for outside the radius of convergence, the perturbations of the manifold become infinitely faint. But he was keen of vision, both in his eyes and in his deeper mathematical senses; something like a shimmer of light caused him to look deep into the manifold, inward towards the fixed-points of the Morbio Inferiore. And then, from far away, after his heart had beat nineteen times, he saw it. There was, in truth, a swelling whiteness like that of a storm. Or a wave – a tidal wave of the manifold. As his heart beat more quickly, he knew that the Danladi wave told of by Arrio Verjin would soon sweep through the manifold and fall over any ship caught in its path.

‘Pilot, what is it?’ the Ede imago asked. ‘What do you see – my simulation shows nothing.’

‘I see a wave, far off, towards the core singularity. It … builds. It is a Danladi wave.’

‘A Danladi wave! Are you sure? Then soon it will sweep through this neighbourhood and twist the toplogy beyond calculation.’

‘Yes.’

‘If we’re caught here, it will sweep us under and destroy us.’

‘Possibly.’

‘Then we must flee immediately! We must fall out into realspace where we’ll be safe.’

‘We will flee,’ Danlo said strangely. His voice was low and yet strong like a building wind; suddenly the weariness seemed to melt from him, and his eyes grew as bright as double stars.

‘What do you wait for, then?’

‘We will flee, but not into realspace, not yet,’ Danlo said. ‘We will flee into the Danladi wave.’

‘Are you mad, Pilot? Would you destroy us for the sake of your wilfulness?’

‘I pray … that I will not destroy us.’

Then with a flick of his hand for Ede to be silent, he made a mapping and pointed the Snowy Owl towards the Danladi wave. He began falling from window to window as quickly as he could and still maintain a sense of interfenestration. Because he knew that Marja Valasquez would follow him, he spared not a moment searching for the tells of the Fire Drinker behind him. His whole awareness concentrated on what lay ahead. He fell through the manifold like a streak of light, and yet the Danladi wave swept towards him even more quickly. For it did not ‘move’ as he moved, but rather deformed the manifold almost instantaneously in all directions. In a way, it was the essence of motion itself. Danlo could scarcely believe how quickly it built. One moment it was no more significant than the hump of a snow hut on a frozen sea. But in the next, it began to brighten and swell as if a flat plain of ice had suddenly heaved itself up into the highest of mountains. Soon, in moments, it would fall upon him, and then he must make the choice either to look for a mapping and dive under this impossibly monstrous wave, or to escape into realspace as Ede had advised.

Ahira, Ahira – what shall I do? For a moment, Danlo prayed to the name of the snowy owl, his spirit animal whom he had once believed held half his soul. Ahira, Ahira.

By now, Danlo thought, Marja Valasquez must have descried the shape of the Danladi wave. But so fast did they race towards its boiling centre – and it towards them – that she might have had too little time to understand its true nature. Arrio Verjin, after all, would not have warned the Order’s pilots of its coming. She might perceive it as only a Wimund wave or even the much simpler N-set waves of a Gallivare inversion. She must assume that he would try to use its topological complexities to escape her, perhaps diving beneath the wave into calmer regions of the manifold at the last moment. But for many moments, Danlo had been making lightning calculations and going through every known theorem pertaining to Danladi waves; he felt almost certain that there could be no escaping such a wave simply by ‘diving’ beneath it. Its perturbations were too powerful, and it propagated much too quickly for that. Already, as the wave began to crest, rising, rising, he descried an astonishing density of zero-points, like trillions of bacteria churned into a huge, black, sucking mass. The wave itself began to suck at him now as he crossed the last bounded interval; now, in less than a moment, he must either make a mapping into realspace or prepare to die.

Ahira, Ahira – give me me the courage to do what I must do.

He waited as long as he could, waited until the Fire Drinker crossed the last bounded interval, too. And then, in the terrible topological distortions of the wave that was almost upon them, all possible windows into realspace suddenly closed, and there could be no escape in that direction. There could be only pathways downwards into the swirling blackness beneath the wave. Or pathways into the wave. Since the moment that Danlo had first sighted the wave far across the shimmering manifold, he had contemplated this other possibility. It would be seeming-madness to take his ship into the wave itself, but all his mathematics told him that diving under it would be suicide. Marja Valasquez, however, obviously hadn’t had the chance to make such calculations, for she made a mapping at the last moment and found a pathway beneath the wave. Danlo watched the Fire Drinker disappear like a diamond pin dropped into a cauldron of molten steel. And then he pointed the Snowy Owl straight into the bore of the wave, and it fell upon him with a terrible weight, breaking into colours of cobalt and rose and foaming violet.

Ahira, Ahira – give me your golden eyes that I might see.

Almost immediately he lost his mappings. Supposedly, no pilot could survive such a disaster, for without a map from point to point within the swirling complexities of the manifold, one became hopelessly lost. But once before, when he had entered the chaos space in the heart of the Entity, he had found a way out of what should have been a fatal topological trap. New mappings always existed if a pilot were artful enough to discover them. Even as the wave swept the Snowy Owl along at a tremendous speed, he searched for such mappings. If he had had endless time, he might have found a mapping very quickly, for the greatest of his mathematical skills lay in seeing the pattern that connects. But he had almost no time. In truth, he was fighting to stay alive. The wave broke all around him in colours of jade and virvidian; only the lightning rush of its momentum outwards balanced the almost impossible suck of its dark emerald weight. He lived in this balance. He piloted the Snowy Owl into a pocket along the wave front, and there he remained perfectly poised within its hideously complex dynamics. He called upon the three deepest virtues of a pilot: fearlessness, flawlessness and flowingness. If he let himself be afraid, even for a moment, he might try to flee the wave in the wrong direction and be swept under like a piece of driftwood in a raging sea. And if his piloting were anything less than flawless, he would lose the flow of his perfect balance, and the wave’s terrible energies would crush his ship to pieces as if it were only a clam shell.

Ahira, Ahira – I must not be afraid.

There was a moment. For Danlo in his Snowy Owl riding the crest of an almost impossible topological wave far beneath space and time, as for everyone, always only a moment between life and death. It was a moment of intense awareness. Colours swirled all around him and broke into bands of magenta and brilliant blue, into flaming scarlet traceries and thousands of other patterns. There were always patterns, always a hidden order beneath the surface chaos. As the Danladi wave propagated through the manifold, Danlo perceived subtle, silvered reflections at each encounter with the various topological structures it swept across. There were refractions, too, the way that the wave continually broke upon itself in intense showers of light and re-formed into a vast moving mountain only a moment later. The wave orthogonals appeared as parallel lines of silver-blue. After a while he noticed something about these orthogonals: although they changed direction from moment to moment as the wave distorted the very substance of the manifold, making the discovery of a mapping into realspace almost impossible, there was a pattern to these changes. He tried to find a mathematical model to fit this pattern. He tried Q-sets and Gallivare fields and a hundred others before he found that orthogonals’ spinning motions could be best represented by a simple Soli set. If his timing were almost perfect, he might predict the exact moment when the orthogonals would line up away from the wave and point towards an exit into realspace. If his piloting were flawless, he might make a mapping in this moment and accomplish what only the maddest (or wildest) of pilots would ever have dared to attempt.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven …

At exactly halfway through the seventh beat of his heart, he made a mapping. And instantaneously, the vast Danladi wave disappeared, and the Snowy Owl fell out around a cool white star. In the emptiness of space, it was quiet around this star. It showered the Snowy Owl with its lovely white light. Danlo floated in the quiet, looking out at the star as he gasped for breath and continued counting his heartbeats: thirteen, fourteen, fifteen …

‘Pilot, we’re free!’ This came from the Ede imago, floating near Danlo who was looking out the ship’s diamond window. ‘We’re free, and we’ve lost the other ship, haven’t we?’

‘Yes,’ Danlo said. He pressed his hand against the scar above his eye and grimaced in pain. ‘We … have lost her.’

‘How did you lose her, then? I’m afraid that in the distortions of the wave, my simulation showed little.’

Danlo felt his heartbeats in the throbbing of his eye, and then he told Ede exactly how he had lost Marja Valasquez and the Fire Drinker.

‘That was very clever of you,’ Ede said. ‘To slay her that way.’

‘I did not slay her!’

‘You lured her to her death.’

‘No, she had choices. Before she crossed the last interval, she might have escaped into realspace.’

‘But you knew that she would follow you.’

‘I knew … only that she would want to follow me.’

‘And you knew that she would dive beneath the wave and be destroyed, didn’t you?’

‘How could I truly know which pathway she would choose?’

‘How could you not know?’

‘But she might have tried to ride the wave out, as I did.’

‘Oh, Pilot.’

‘Truly, she always had a choice. And she dived beneath the wave. Her will, not mine.’

The Ede imago glowed softly as it regarded Danlo. Then it said, ‘How was it that you once defined this vow of ahimsa that you’ve made? Never harming another, not even in one’s own thoughts.’

‘I … never wished Marja dead. I only wanted to lose her.’

‘And yet you led her to lose her life.’

‘Yes.’

‘It would seem that the practice of ahimsa can be difficult subtle.’

‘Yes.’

Ede continued staring at Danlo, then said, ‘I’m sorry – this must be hard for you.’

At this, a sudden pain shot through Danlo’s eye and filled his head like an explosive tlolt. His eyes began to water and he blinked hard against the cool but hurtful light of the star outside his ship.

‘I … am sorry, too,’ he said.