War in Heaven (9 page)

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.

"When the Sonderval told me that you'd spent much time with the Entity, I wondered if you might have learned anything about your father."

"She said only that I would find him at my journey's end."

"In Neverness?"

"I ... do not know. The Entity always speaks so mysteriously."

"I still believe your father will return to Neverness. It's where his fate lies, not out in the stars with some capricious goddess."

For a moment, Danlo looked west at the strange, shimmering stars just over the rim of the sea, but he said nothing.

"And when he
does
return, by God, there will be an accounting! He'll open his eyes to every barbaric thing that Hanuman li Tosh has done in his name, and fall across the city in wrath. He'll chastise him, perhaps even slay him — your father, despite his compassion, was always such a murderous man."

"But, Bardo, don't you believe he is now a god?"

"Do you think the gods don't slay human beings as easily as flies — or even each other?"

Danlo thought of the Silicon God's destruction of Ede the God, and he said, "I know that they do."

For a while, beneath their tree's silvery leaves rustling in the wind, they gazed out at the stars and talked about the galaxy's gods — and fate and war and other cosmic things. Then Danlo turned to look at Bardo, and asked him about something closer to his heart.

"Have you seen her, Bardo?"

"Tamara?"

Danlo held his head still in total silence, but his eyes, gleaming in the half-light like liquid jewels, spoke for him.

"Well, no, I haven't seen her," Bardo said. "You know I'd heard that she had left the city — I never heard that she returned."

"But where did she go?"

"I don't know. Perhaps it's only a rumour."

"Did Hanuman ever speak of what he did to her? Did he ever say that there might be a way to restore her?"

Bardo sighed and laid a heavy hand on Danlo's shoulder. "Ah, Little Fellow — he never said anything, too bad. You still hate him, don't you?"

Lightning flashed in Danlo's eyes, then, and he said, "He raped her mind! He destroyed her memories, Bardo! All her memories of us together, everything blessed."

"Little Fellow, Little Fellow."

Danlo chose that moment to take out his flute and press the hard ivory mouthpiece against his forehead. He drew in a deep breath, then said, "But I ... must not hate. I try so hard not to hate."

"And I love you for such nobility," Bardo said, "but as for myself, I try to let all my hatred for that worm of a man fill my belly like firewine. It will make it easier to destroy him when the time comes."

Slowly Danlo shook his head. "You know that I would not wish to see any harm come to him."

"Well, perhaps you should. Perhaps it would be best if you'd forswear your vow and find a way to move close to him. And then ... "

"Yes?"

"And then kill him, by God! Slip a knife into his treacherous heart or squeeze the breath from his lying throat!"

At the mere invocation of such terrible images, Danlo's own breath caught in his chest. He gripped his flute as tightly as a drowning man being offered a stick to pull him out of icy, black waters. And then, as he realized the impossibility of what Bardo had suggested, he slowly relaxed and smiled in deep amusement. "You know that I could never harm him," he said.

"Well, I
do
know that, too bad. And that is why, short of war, there's little hope of stopping him."

"But there is still our mission, yes? Our hope for peace."

Bardo laughed softly, then said, "I remember that your Fravashi teacher once gave you the title of
Peacewise.
But it takes two to make a peace, you know."

"But all people long for peace."

"There speaks your hope," Bardo said. "There speaks your will to make reality conform to the dreams of your lovely heart."

"But Hanuman has a heart, too. He is still just a man, yes?"

"I'm not so sure. Sometimes I think he's a demon from hell."

As Danlo thought of Hanuman's hellish ice-blue eyes, he smiled gravely in remembrance. And then he said, "In a strange way, I think he was the most compassionate man I have ever met."

"Hanuman li Tosh?"

"You did not know him as I did, Bardo. Once a time, as a boy, and before, he was so innocent. Truly ... he was born with such a gentle soul."

"What changed him, then?"

"The world changed him," Danlo said. "His religion, the way his father would read negative programs in his littlest misdoings and force a cleansing heaume on his head to rape his mind — that changed him, too. And he changed himself. I have never met anyone with such a terrible will to change himself."

"Well, you never knew your father, Little Fellow."

Danlo stared down at the dark holes along the shaft of his flute, and waited for Bardo to say more.

"But your father finally found his compassion, while Hanuman has lost his. And where your father became a light for the whole damn universe, Hanuman has embraced the darkness — like a slel necker sucking at a corpse."

"I would still like to believe that, somehow, there is infinite hope for everyone."