War in Heaven (100 page)

Now Danlo clasped Old Father's hand again, and the weakness that he felt through the soft, silken fur caused his own muscles to tremble. He stared at the wavering reflections in the mirrored surface of his ring, and he remembered the look of anguish on Jonathan's starved face even as the faces of a billion other children killed in the war began to cascade through his mind. "Was it so important that I lived, then?" he asked.

"Aha — it was important to me," Old Father said.

Danlo fell quiet and thoughtful as he tried to smile at Old Father. And then he said, "You have taught me so much. But I am afraid that I broke ahimsa in killing Hanuman."

"Oho! All rules and boundaries must some day be broken. How else can we go beyond ourselves? A thallow chick must break out of his egg, but this does not mean that the shell is without value."

"No," Danlo said, "truly it is not."

"You must remember that an oak tree is not a crime against the acorn."

"I still wish that I did not have to kill him."

"Ah, oh — of course you do," Old Father said. "But what you did was necessary. You're a great being, Danlo, and you're important to the universe."

"All beings are important, sir."

"Ah, yes, yes, they are — so, it's so. And all fathers would wish their seed to beget new seeds, infinitely, blowing like a shimmering cloud in all directions. Such a wild, beautiful seed you are, Danlo. And such a beautiful tree will remain standing when I die."

Danlo swallowed a few times against the pain in his throat and said, "But you do not
have
to die, do you? The warrior-poets have poisoned you, I know, but I might show you the way to — "

"No," Old Father said with uncharacteristic abruptness. "The Alaloi are very wise, you know: there's always a right time to die. Oho, I'm afraid that this is my time."

Yes
, Danlo thought, feeling the coolness of Old Father's hand.
Yes, yes, yes.

"You did what I never could, Danlo. I remembranced the Elder Eddas, but never completely."

Again, this great, white-furred being stopped talking for a moment to rest; his eyes clouded with pain, or perhaps remembrance — sometimes it was hard to tell the difference.

"I wanted to live," Old Father said, looking at Danlo, "only long enough to see you become the man you've become. And to know that my son's new child was safe inside Tamara."

At this piece of news, Bardo cocked his head to look at Danlo in surprise. And Danlo said, "How did you know, sir?"

But then Old Father smiled mysteriously and began to whistle a strange, otherworldly song, and Danlo knew very well how Old Father had known of the conception of his child.

"Ho, ho, ha, ha — all my children's children," Old Father said. "And all the other children like them. This is how the Silicon God will finally be destroyed. This is how the stars will be saved. All the shimmering, golden, immortal branches reaching out towards the stars."

Old Father went on then to speak not of the future but of the past. He told Danlo of his mother, Katharine, of the dreams she had dreamed and how she had lived and died. It had always been
his
dream, Old Father said, to redeem Katharine from the cold, grey ice of time and somehow bring her back into creation.

"Ah, but this isn't really possible, is it?" Old Father asked.

"No, not in the way that many would hope," Danlo said.

"Ah, do you see the other way, then?" Old Father asked. For a moment, his eyes grew impossibly bright like two great, golden suns. "Aha, oho, the way creation must always be, the branches, the rings, the miracle — do you see it, Danlo?"

As Danlo's heart beat to the rhythms he felt pulsing in Old Father's wrist, he began to fall through the universe of stars that opened inside him. He fell deep into the light that shone not only through the Golden Ring but through the Grus Cluster of galaxies and the Rainbow Supercluster and all the other galaxies throughout creation.

"Yes, I see it," he finally said.

"Ah, oh, good, good," Old Father said. "Then I must ask you a few favours before you leave."

"Of course, sir."

"Would you look after my students for me? I'm afraid that the time for human beings to be students of the Fravashi has passed."

"Yes, it has," Danlo said, nodding his head.

"And would you put a fresh flower on Katharine's grave for me?" Old Father said. "Ho, ho — I know that you plan to journey to Kweitkel to find your mother's grave."

"What kind of flower, sir?"

"Oh, oh, I think a snow dahlia, if you can find one."

"There were once many snow dahlias on the southern slopes of the mountain at this time of year," Danlo said. "I will find one, sir."

"And I'd also like you to play your flute for me," Old Father said, pointing at Danlo's shakuhachi. "Ha, ha — I appreciated your efforts on the sanura the last time you visited, but I think you were really born to play the flute."

And so one last time, Danlo pressed his flute to his lips and played a song for Old Father. He played softly, for he did not wish Old Father's students to hear the music that he made and somehow, perhaps in the pattern of his breath or the sadness of the melody, recognize its maker. For a long time he played his beautiful song, and he never noticed the tears pouring out of Bardo's eyes or burning like drops of light in his own. But then Old Father's eyes began to grow dim as oilstones almost empty of fuel, and he weakly held up his furry hand for Danlo to stop.

"Ah, ah, thank you, thank you," he told Danlo. "That was very good, but it's time now for silence."

"Yes," Danlo said softly.

"You may ask my students to come back in, then. They'll want to be here while I go to sleep."

While Danlo put away his flute and stood up to carry out Old Father's wishes, Bardo finally found his voice again and said, "What's all this talk of sleeping, then? I thought the Fravashi never sleep."

Because Old Father had now fallen almost too weak for further conversation, Danlo explained to Bardo how the Fravashi do, in fact, sleep. Where the human brain, he said, is divided into two hemispheres, the Fravashi carry four separate lobes of grey matter behind their shimmering eyes. At any time, one, two or three of these lobes might be asleep. Only rarely, perhaps in enlightenment, are all four lobes at once fully awake. And only in death are they all asleep.

"But Mallory, you can't leave me again!" Bardo said. He wrapped his huge fist around Old Father's arm and shook it gently. "Ah, no, no, no — too bad, too, too bad."

"I'm sorry," Old Father whispered. He grasped Bardo's hand for as long as he could. And then he looked at Danlo and smiled. "Ho, ho — it's time, it's time!"

"By God, Little Fellow, you can't just die like this!"

But Old Father truly could. After Danlo had donned his leather mask once more, he opened the doors to the thinking chamber and went to find Luister Ottah and the other students. The twelve of them returned, then, and knelt around Old Father's bed. Already, Old Father had closed his eyes and fallen asleep. To make room for the students, Bardo rose up and moved off next to a shelf of musical instruments; he stood like a mountain looking down upon Old Father. And Danlo stood next to him, shoulder to shoulder as he watched and waited. After many, many moments (for almost the first time in his life, Danlo had lost count of his heartbeats), Old Father stopped breathing. It was as simple as that; in all the universe, nothing could be simpler.

Yes, yes, yes.

Danlo bowed his head a moment in remembrance and then looked down at Old Father so silent and serene in death. So that only Bardo could hear him, he whispered a prayer for his spirit: "Mallory wi Soli Ringess,
mi alasharia la, mi padda, shantih, shantih.
Sleep in peace, my father."

He turned to Bardo and grasped the huge man's arm. "Come," he said. "Let's skate the streets for a while."

And Bardo, who was weeping like child, nodded his head and followed Danlo out of Old Father's house.

They skated restlessly around the red streets of the Fravashi District, and neither of them wanted to pause for rest or speak of what had occurred that day in Old Father's thinking chamber. And then Danlo felt strangely pulled to turn towards the west. Without warning, he struck off down the main orange sliddery leading into the City Wild.

They followed it through the snow-shagged yu trees of the forest, and Danlo skated so quickly and with such determination that Bardo gasped to keep close to him. Danlo didn't quite know where his sudden new quest would take him, but after a while, he broke free from the trees and made his way through the slate-jacketed houses of the Grey District straight towards West Beach. He might have thought that he wished to visit the beach where he had sent Jonathan's ashes sparking up into the wind. But then, upon pausing to listen to a voice that cried out as from far away (or perhaps only inside himself), he turned south along the Long Glissade and made his way to a little beach at the edge of the Ashtoreth District. In truth, it was a narrow, rocky beach whose broken sands quickly gave way to the frozen sea that opened to the west. Few people, Danlo thought, would want to visit such a wild place, for it was windy and cold and the great shatterwood trees rose up above the rocks like a green and white wall.

"Where are we going?" Bardo asked as Danlo led them through a break in the forest and down across the icy rocks. "Careful you don't slip and break your head, Little Fellow! If we died here, no one would ever find us."

Because Danlo did not want to distress the huge man puffing along behind him, he quickly found a large, flat rock covered with bright green feather moss and sat facing the sea. Bardo joined him and pressed his massive body closer to Danlo's for whatever warmth he might find there.

"By God, it's cold! Why are we here, then?"

"I wanted to be alone," Danlo said.

But even as he gazed at the frozen ice-forms that spread out in a great circle towards the blue horizon, he knew that something else had drawn him to this deserted beach. He looked directly into the west where the sun was beginning its plunge towards the edge of the world like a great, fiery, orange ball. He looked over the white, frozen ocean towards the Ten Thousand Islands of his birth, watching and waiting.

"Well, it's falling late," Bardo said. "I think we spent most of the day with Old Father."

"Yes," Danlo said, nodding his head.

Bardo's unease at the approach of night touched off a deeper nervousness, and he turned to Danlo and said, "Ah, Little Fellow, I hope what Old Father said doesn't make you think less of me. I hope you won't tell anyone about my pissing in the fourth-year novices' beer."

Because it was late and they were alone (and because Danlo wanted to feel the wind against his face), he pulled off his mask. Then he smiled at Bardo and said, "The novices tormented me, too. If I had thought of it, I might have wanted to piss in their beer myself."

For a while, as the wind blew tiny particles of spindrift skittering over the frozen beach, Bardo stared at Danlo's face. He shook his head slowly back and forth and muttered, "By God, it really is a miracle, you know. But then, you always were a mystical man, so I shouldn't really be surprised at these mystical changes."

Danlo reached out to squeeze Bardo's knee then, and tried to explain that the great changes rippling through his being had little to do with mysticism, in the sense of being magical or mystifying. "Truly, it is just pure technology, yes? This is what technology is: just consciousness reflected upon itself, gaining ever more control of itself and creating new forms."

"Well, have you considered this new form that you've shaped for yourself, Little Fellow? You look almost like your old self — what will the Alaloi think of you?"

"They will think that I am a man, even as they are men and women."

"But what of the covenant, then? Surely if you take your lightship to the Ten Thousand Islands, the Alaloi will learn more of Neverness than they ever wanted to learn."

"Yes, they will," Danlo said. He looked out at the frozen waves curving in long, lovely rippling patterns over the sea, and his eyes fell cold and clear as new blue ice. "But it is time, then. The way for humankind is not back, after all. There is no return to simplicity this way. No true
halla.
I used to think of
halla
as a kind of perfect harmony of flowers and sunlight and good clean life and death out on the sparkling new snow. A perfect balance that all life might some day achieve — without war, without disease, without madness, without asteroids and wild stars that can annihilate ten thousand species of animals almost overnight. But no. The universe is not made this way. True
halla
is the vastening of life. The deepening into new forms and possibilities that we call evolution. It is time, I think, that the Alaloi evolve into a new race along with the rest of our bloody, blessed kind."

As the sun fell even closer to the edge of the icy ocean, Bardo drank in Danlo's words even as he continued to stare at his strange new face. He seemed almost trapped between his awe of Danlo and his driving desire towards his own glorious fate. At last he cleared his throat and said, "Well, we all hope to evolve, don't we? Are you a god, then?"

Danlo smiled then, at all the love and fear he saw pouring out of Bardo, smiled with a fierce, wild joy and said, "No, I am a man. At last, truly a man. It is all I ever wanted to be."

They sat in silence watching the snow gulls picking for food beneath wreaths of frozen red seaweed. Along the line of the motionless surf,
kitikeesha
birds swooped low over the white drifts listening for snowworms in their icy burrows. Soon it began to grow dark. The colours began to bleed away from the trees and the ice, and the sky fell to a luminous deep blue almost the shade of Danlo's eyes. Across the sky to the east, the first stars came out. Danlo looked up at the five curving stars that formed the tail of the Dolphin Constellation, and he stared at them strangely for a long time. Once, these familiar stars had appeared as tiny points of white light against the black sea of space. All his life, almost all stars as seen from the icy surface of the world had appeared as a pure, twinkling white. He remembered that there were two kinds of light receptors on the retina of the human eye: the cones, which could drink in colours but were blind to faint illuminations, and the rods which sensed well enough the dimmest light but could not sort one hue from another. It was the rods that did most of the seeing in darkness, and so the stars usually shimmered as white as the snow. But now a new kind of cell combining the virtues of both rods and cones had evolved inside Danlo's eyes. And now, suddenly, there were colours in the night. Danlo looked up to see Gilada Luz blazing all hot and blue, and the pale orange Migina Double, and Kalakina which was tinted as red as a drop of blood. As it grew darker, more stars fell out of the folds of night, and Danlo marvelled at the faint yellows and violets and greens, and all the other colours of the rainbow. How strange it was simply to be alive! How astonishing that he could see anything at all, let alone this splendid radiance that had fallen across much of the universe in order to dazzle him with its beauty. And so he sat on his cold rock next to Bardo wondering at the immense mystery of life. There was a fire in his eyes, and a fire in the sky, and so brightly did everything burn with this glorious, new light that he wanted to go on gazing at the stars for ever.