War in Heaven

Then he closed his eyes and whispered a prayer for Marja’s spirit, ‘Marja Evangelina wi Eshte Valasquez, mi alasharia la shantih.’

Some time later he roused Demothi Bede from the sleep of quicktime and invited him into the pit of his ship. The sleepy-eyed Demothi took a long look at the star outside the pit’s window, yawned and said, ‘It looks like the Star of Neverness – are we home, then?’

‘No,’ Danlo said, smiling despite his aching head. ‘The colour of this star is white, not yellow-white. We are still far from Neverness.’

‘How far, then? What is this star’s name?’

‘It has no name that I know,’ Danlo said. ‘But it lies close to Kalkin.’

‘Kalkin!’ Demothi exclaimed. He might have had poor eyes for stellar spectra, but he remembered his astronomy lessons. ‘Kalkin is only ten light years distance from Summerworld!’

‘Yes,’ Danlo said. ‘We … have departed from our pathway.’

After wiping away the salt crusts from the corners of his eyes, he told Demothi of Marja Valasquez and the Fire Drinker and their long pursuit through the manifold. He tried to describe the vastness of the Danladi wave, its terrible beauty, but he found that his words failed him. He said only that the wave had swept them far along the galaxy’s Sagittarius Arm almost to the stars of the Jovim Cluster.

‘Why didn’t you wake me, Pilot? Would you have had me go to my death half-asleep?’

Again Danlo smiled because he remembered something that his Fravashi teacher had once said: that the manswarms of the human race went about their whole lives half-asleep and stumbling towards death.

‘I did not want to alarm you,’ Danlo said.

‘What will we do now?’

‘Continue our journey.’

‘How much longer has our journey become, then? The wave has caused us such a vast dislocation.’

‘As measured in light years this is true,’ Danlo said. ‘But the pathways between Kalkin and Neverness are well known. The mappings are very easy. Our journey will not have grown much more difficult or timesome.’

‘But what if the wave has changed or broken the old pathways? Aren’t such permanent distortions of the manifold possible?’

‘Yes – truly this is possible.’

‘Well, then?’

‘It is possible, too, that the pathways remain unbroken.’

‘You must be eager to discover if this is so.’

‘Truly, I am,’ Danlo said, yawning. He closed his eyes for moment, and the rising swells of unconsciousness swept towards him in black, rolling waves. Then with a sudden snap of his head, he looked at Demothi and smiled. ‘But I am even more eager for sleep. I will sleep now. When my computer wakes me in two more hours, then we shall see if we can find an easy pathway towards Neverness.’

With that he closed his eyes again and fell instantly into a deep and peaceful sleep. So total was his exhaustion that when his ship’s-computer touched his brain with soft musics two hours later, he did not awaken. Nor twenty hours later. Both Demothi Bede and the Ede hologram seemed astonished to discover how long Danlo could sleep when he was really tired – in this instance, for most of three days. When he finally broke back into consciousness and looked out on the stars, he realized that he had slept too long.

‘We will fall on, now,’ he said, angry with himself though well rested. ‘I only hope that war hasn’t come to Neverness while I was dreaming.’

And so they fell. Danlo took the Snowy Owl back into the manifold, and they fell on past Kalkin and Skibbereen and the great red giant star known as Daru Luz. Although the Danladi wave had slightly flattened these familiar spaces and broken a few of the familiar Fallaways as a windstorm might snap a tree’s twigs, most of the pathways through the manifold remained untouched. He made a mapping to a little star near Summerworld, and then on past Tria, Larondissement and Avalon. All these stars lay along the rather roundabout pathway towards Neverness that he had once rejected as too lengthy. But the Danladi wave had made it so that this journey required little more time than his original and more straightforward approach. And it required much less risk. Even in the spaces near Larondissement, one of the Civilized Worlds most devoted to the new religion of Ringism, he descried no tells of any Ringist ship which might be lying in wait for him. On this last segment of his surprisingly peaceful journey, he encountered no other ships at all, not even the vast deep-ships of the Trian merchant-pilots which usually plied the Fallaways filled with cargoes of gossilk, neurologics, firestones, firewine, Gilada pearls, sulki grids, bloodfruits, jook, jambool, blacking oil, and a million other things grown or manufactured on the worlds of man. When he reached Avalon, a pretty blue star so close to the star of his birth, he made a final mapping. It was the famous Ashtoreth mapping, named for the pilot Villiama li Ashtoreth who had discovered it at the beginning of the Order’s Golden Age in the year 681. It carried the Snowy Owl across three hundred light years of space in a single fold, where it fell out in the thickspace near the Star of Neverness.

‘Home,’ Danlo whispered as he looked out at the soft, yellow star that had lit all the days of his childhood. ‘O, Sawel, miralando mi kalabara, kareeska.’

In truth, however, he wasn’t quite home, not yet. He looked out with his telescopes across seventy million miles of vacuum where he spied the planet Icefall spinning like a white and blue jewel in the blackness of space. He might have instantly made a mapping to a point-exit only a few hundred miles above Icefall’s atmosphere, but such a rash act would have set off the planetary defence systems, and he and his ship would surely have been destroyed. As it was, his peril was still great. The Snowy Owl gleamed in the radiance of the Star of Neverness like a dove with a broken wing. Its opening of a window from the manifold had surely created tells that any lightship in this neighbourhood of stars would detect. And surely, with war so near, the Lord Pilot, Salmalin the Prudent, would have deployed many ships to protect Neverness from surprise attack. Danlo waited for the arrival of these ships. It was almost all that he could do. But first he aimed a radio signal at the city of Neverness informing the Lords of the Order of the Snowy Owl’s mission. He did not think that the Old Order’s Ringists had sunk so far into barbarism that they would simply murder two ambassadors out of hand. The danger was that one of the arriving lightships might act without waiting for instructions from Neverness. Some reckless young pilot might perceive the Snowy Owl as only the vanguard of an invasion fleet and fall immediately against him.

And so Danlo waited in the pit of the Snowy Owl, counting heartbeats as he searched for the tells of other lightships. He began counting the seven hundred and fourteen seconds that his radio signal would take to cross seventy million miles of realspace and be returned as a command to all the Order’s lightships that Danlo and Demothi Bede were not to be harmed. He waited exactly eighty-eight seconds, and then a lightship fell out of the thickspace near him, followed only a few seconds later by four more of these deathly diamond needles. He recognized these ships. There was the Infinite Dactyl, piloted by Dario of Urradeth, and the Golden Lotus and the Bell of Time. And Nicabar Blackstone’s Ark of the Angels, with its lovely, curving wings. The fifth ship he knew well because he had been at Resa with its pilot, Ciro Dalibar, as chance would fall. He had even helped Ciro design the heuristics for this uniquely pointed ship, which Ciro had named the Diamond Arrow.

Ahira, Ahira, Danlo prayed, and he beamed a radio signal to each of these ships. And now he waited for the five pilots either to accept his parlay or to destroy him. That was the true terror of war, that often one had to accept danger and simply wait to live or die.

Much later he would learn that these five pilots, floating in the dazzling void near the Star of Neverness, had held a conclave among themselves. Ciro Dalibar, with his cruel, thin lips and jealousy of Danlo, had argued that as a pilot of the Order of the Vild – and thus of the Fellowship – he should be slain as a just act of war. But Cham Estarei of the Blue Lotus had spoken against such bloodthirstiness. As had Nicabar Blackstone. Nicabar, a master pilot and eldest of the five, told the others that it would do no harm to wait to hear from the lords on Neverness. If they wished to accept Danlo’s and Demothi’s embassy, well and good. If they did not, then the Snowy Owl could be sent back to Sheydveg or wherever the Order of the Vild’s fleet might be. Or they could send Danlo into the Star of Neverness. The five ships, acting together, could open a window into this blazing star whenever they wished and send Danlo’s ship into the fires of hell.

‘We’ll wait for the wishes of the lords,’ Nicabar Blackstone told Danlo and Demothi. Nicabar’s imago, with its glowing green eyes and deathly white countenance, had appeared in the pit of the Snowy Owl. ‘We must ask that you attempt no motion in realspace nor open any windows into the manifold. If you do, we’ll fall against you and destroy you.’

And so, with the noses of five ships pointing at him across only a few miles of space, Danlo waited. It took more than two thousand seconds for the Lords of Neverness’s message to arrive. Neither Danlo nor Demothi Bede were to be harmed. Danlo wi Soli Ringess was instructed to make a mapping to a certain point-exit above Neverness. The five lightships were to ensure that the Snowy Owl fell out into near-space exactly where it should. Then they were to escort the ambassadors down through the atmosphere to the Hollow Fields, where a sled would carry them to an emergency session of the Lords’ College.

‘I’d advise caution,’ the Ede hologram said in the privacy of the Snowy Owl. ‘The Ringists might wish to trap you.’

‘Yes,’ Danlo said. ‘Of course they will – we will be as prisoners the moment we touch the ice of Neverness.’

Demothi Bede drew his hand across his old, wrinkled face and said, ‘Still, it will be good to see the city again. And my old friends. I never thought I would.’

‘To see old friends,’ Danlo repeated softly. His eyes were grave yet full of light. He felt a terrible burning behind his eyes, and terrible images began streaming into his mind as if he were looking far across space and time. ‘To see the city again – and what lies above.’

A few moments later, at Nicabar Blackstone’s command, Danlo made a mapping to the point-exit above Neverness. The Snowy Owl fell out exactly as arranged, and Danlo gasped at the changes that only a few years had wrought in the once-empty reaches of space encircling Icefall. To begin with, the sky above his world’s sky was swarming with ships. There were deep-ships and long-ships, fire-ships and gold ships and many, many black ships armed for war. He counted more than forty-eight thousand ships spread out below him in a vast moving carpet of steel and diamond and black nall. He counted two hundred and ten lightships, too; a much larger fleet than that of the Fellowship of Free Worlds, even though all the Ringist lightships were not present. Some of these two hundred and thirty-one missing ships would be off on raiding missions such as the one that had surprised the Sonderval’s ships near Ulladulla. Others would try to detect the movements of the Fellowship’s fleet when it finally fell away from Sheydveg on its unknown pathway towards Neverness. Surely Salmalin would have positioned more than a few lightships in a protective cordon around the Star of Neverness. And at least twenty of these lightships protected something else, something more precious to the Ringists than firestones or pearls or even the icy ground beneath their feet.

This was Hanuman li Tosh’s Universal Computer, floating many miles above Neverness like a dazzling, black moon. In a way, it was a moon, for it was huge and made from the elements of Kasotat, Vierge and Varvara, three of the six moons that Danlo had beheld shining in the sky since the year of his birth. With his ship’s telescope he looked out at these nearby moons. The surface of each one swarmed with robots and disassemblers smaller than bacteria. These infinitesimal engines of destruction were tearing apart earth and rocks even as he watched, reducing layer after layer of the moons into their constituent elements. Their once-silvery surfaces were grey and pitted as a hibakusha’s face. Truly, as Bardo had said, Hanuman and the Ringists had ordered the mining of these moons, this shaida act that was a crime against the laws of the Civilized Worlds. At any moment, from any of the three moons, there might issue a flash of light as a deep-ship filled with silicon or carbon or gold would disappear into the manifold only to fall out an instant later at a point-exit above the Universal Computer. There, in vast floating factories, its cargo would be assembled into diamond chips and neurologics and opticals – the very substance and circuitry of the Universal Computer. More robots assembled these parts into an ungodly (or perhaps just the opposite) machine. One day, if nothing were done to halt this monument to one man’s hubris, it would grow to the size of a moon.

Ahira, Ahira, ki los shaida, shaida neti shaida.

‘If you’re ready, Pilot, we’ll make our planetfall now.’ This was Nicabar Blackstone’s voice, spilling into the pit of the Snowy Owl like an overturned goblet of honey-wine. He was a master pilot whose sweet-rich voice almost belied his innate ruthlessness. ‘We’ll make a straight fall for the Fields. I’ll lead the way, and you must follow – and then Dario of Urradeth, Cham Estarei, Ciro Dalibar and the Visolela will follow you.’

With that, the Ark of the Angels dipped its diamond nose towards the planet below them, followed in line by the Snowy Owl, the Infinite Dactyl, the Blue Lotus, the Diamond Arrow and the Bell of Time. The six ships slowly fell towards Icefall. And now, even as they passed through the ships of the fleet like needles through a thick carpet, Danlo had a moment to gaze upon the most profound of the changes that had come to his world. This was the Golden Ring. Ahead of him, and below, enveloping all of Icefall in a sphere of living gold, was this miracle of evolution that had taken root in the uppermost atmospheres of many worlds throughout the galaxy. Many believed the Ring to be the Entity’s handiwork, or rather the child of her vast stellar womb. For the Ring was life itself, newly created to flourish in the harsh environment of near-space. A few hundred miles below Danlo’s ship floated the Ring organisms, the nektons and triptons and sestons, the vacuum flowers and pipal trees and fritillaries. And of course, the little makers. These were the fundament of the Ring, the trillions of trillions of single-celled plants drifting in the faint solar wind that blew down upon Icefall. Each of the little makers was a tiny sphere of thin diamond membranes encasing the cellular machinery of enzymes and acids and red chlorophyll. The little makers would breathe the exhalations of the stars, absorbing light and transforming this most universal of energies into food that would feed the other life of the Ring. It was the red chlorophyll that gave the Ring its colour, for when the light of the sun fell through the tissues of the uncountable little makers and refracted from diamond sphere to diamond sphere, it appeared to the naked eye in hues of ruby-amber and gold. The whole of the world below was swathed in a tapestry shimmering gold as lovely and diaphanous as a courtesan’s silks. Through this living veil, Danlo could make out the jagged coastline of Neverness Island far below him and the deep blue sheen of the sea. Someday, perhaps, the Ring would grow more opaque to light, and it might grow difficult to see the mountains of Neverness from near-space or the six moons of Icefall from the surface of the planet. But it would be sad beyond tears, Danlo thought, if the Ring ever grew to obscure the light of the stars themselves.

Fara gelstei, he whispered, speaking the name of the Golden Ring that he had learned as a child. Loshisha shona, loshisha halla – sawisha halla neti shaida.

Soon the Snowy Owl entered the Ring with less moment than if it had fallen through a cloud. The Ring itself was much more tenuous than any cloud, and Danlo had no trouble seeing his way through the faint tinge of gold staining the sky. He looked for the largest Ring organisms, the predatory goswhales whose nerves were woven of neurologics, a kind of biological lightship that could swim through the cold currents of space. The Order’s eschatologists believed the goswhales to be more intelligent than human beings; some called them godwhales in honour of their considerable powers. But however one named them, they were very rare; in all his life, Danlo would never lay eyes upon one. But through his diamond window he did see a swarm of fritillaries, with their huge silver wings like solar sails to catch the light of the sun and drive them across space. They were lovely creatures but also strange; they had telescopic eyes which could pick out a vacuum flower across two hundred miles of space, and long, graceful metallic antennae for receiving and transmitting radio signals. Once, as a boy looking up from the sea’s ice to the gold-streaked sky, Danlo had wondered about the rapidly evolving life of the Ring. He had wanted to journey to the heavens, to ask such creatures as the fritillary their true names and to give them his own. ‘Ahira, Ahira,’ he said, whispering the name of his other-self, the Snowy Owl. He would have liked to stay here falling slowly through this ocean of gold for a long time, but the Ark of the Angels pointed down towards Neverness, and he had to follow her. Lokelani miralando la shantih.

As the lightships fell down towards the white-capped mountains of Neverness Island, the Ring began to thicken. The little makers fed on sunlight like any plant, but they also breathed carbon dioxide, hydrogen and nitrogen, and other nutrients of Icefall’s upper atmosphere. Some eschatologists believed that the rarity of these gases would place a severe upper limit on the Ring’s potential for growth. Others thought that the sestons and nektons would eventually evolve into something like robot disassemblers and learn how to mine the six moons for their vast store of elements. It might be thought that the Ring would simply grow lower through the troposphere and begin colonizing Icefall’s islands and oceans like some alien invasion of wild, new life. But it seemed that this would never happen. On no known world had the Ring grown in this direction. Indeed, the Ring seemed designed to grow outwards like a sunflower opening into darkness, perhaps into the deep space as far as the Star of Neverness’s ten other planets. Already a goswhale had been sighted orbiting Berural as if in contemplation of the brilliant swirling reds and violets of that gaseous world. Someday, perhaps, the Ring would find a way to thrive in interstellar vacuum or even in the great loneliness between the galaxies themselves.

‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it, Pilot?’ Demothi Bede, still sharing the pit of Danlo’s ship, gazed out of the window at the Ring shimmering like gold dust in the light of the sun. ‘Who would have thought I’d live to see such miracles?’

Truly, Danlo thought, the Ring was a miracle – but perhaps no more miraculous than snowworms or human beings or any other kind of life. The miraculous thing was life itself, the way that matter had moved itself from the beginning of time, moved and evolved and reached out into ever more complex and conscious forms. And now life everywhere was moving off planets made of water and rocks out towards the stars. In a way, this astonishing event should have astonished no one. For space is cold, and low temperatures favour order. And what was life except matter organized into the highest degrees of order? As Danlo looked out at the little makers of the Ring, he remembered something that a master biologist had once told him:

The rate of metabolism of energy varies according to the square of the temperature.

This was true for the fritillaries and jewel-like nektons floating above Icefall no less than the bears he had once hunted as a child or the mosquitoes that had drunk his blood. In the vast coldness of deep space, a pipal tree or a golden, glittering goswhale could be very thrifty in its use of energy. That was a grace of the Ring, its thriftiness. The little makers, for example, utilized almost every molecule of carbon dioxide and other nutrients that floated up from the lower atmosphere. As with a tropical ecosystem, the Ring concentrated these nutrients within the individual plants and organisms themselves. They excreted little waste into the stratosphere, mostly oxygen in its diatomic state which would quickly react with the sun, break down and then recombine into ozone. It was this building blanket of pale blue ozone miles above Icefall that would shield its forests and oceans from the worst of the Vild’s radiations. Soon, in less than two years, the light of the supernova that had once been Merripen’s Star would fall over Danlo’s world with a terrible intensity of illumination. Whether or not this wavefront of hard light would be mostly reflected or absorbed by the Ring and its life-protecting ozone, not even the eschatologists could say.

The Ring is not growing as it should, Danlo thought. How he knew this was a mystery, but he was as certain of its truth as his next breath of air. It is Hanuman’s Universal Computer – it is keeping the Ring from growing.

‘It’s a miracle,’ Demothi Bede repeated. ‘A miracle that this creation of the gods will keep Neverness safe from the supernova.’

For a moment Danlo closed his eyes and listened to the silence of the deep sky. It was almost as if he could hear the ping of each of the millions of diamond-like little makers striking the diamond hull of his ship and spinning off into the air like tiny, ringing bells. Almost as if the Golden Ring itself could speak to him. It was possible, he knew, that this miracle of new life would protect his world from the supernova. But which one? There was the radiation of Merripen’s Star which had crossed some thirty light years of space on its journey towards Neverness. Perhaps if the Universal Computer were unmade, through war or the grace of Hanuman himself, the Ring would shield against this killing light. But if Bertram Jaspari and his Iviomils ever succeeded in exploding the Star of Neverness, neither the Ring nor the greatest god of the galaxy could save his world from being vaporized.