War in Heaven (101 page)

"Look!" Bardo said, pointing to the east. "The supernova is about to rise."

Danlo turned to follow the line of Bardo's arm, and there, behind the city, a great glister of light bloomed over the lower slopes of Mount Urkel. For thirty years the people of Neverness had awaited the coming of this terrible new star, and, only nineteen days earlier, the first wave-front of light had broken across Icefall. Every night since then, in the early evening, thousands of men and women would swarm the streets to behold the miracle that lit up the sky. And now, here, on this cold, windswept beach, Danlo looked up at this same, beautiful star. As the world turned its icy face ever eastwards, the supernova rose higher in the sky. Its intense radiation streamed down through the Golden Ring. There, the little makers and other Ring organisms absorbed the supernova's violent energies through their sparkling diamond membranes and scattered a brilliant light across the arc of the heavens. Curtains of shimmering gold hung from the upper atmosphere to the iridescent ice below. No longer did Danlo, or anyone else, have to fear that the supernova would harm them. And no longer could Danlo see the place in the sky where the dark mass of the Universal Computer had once blighted out the stars.

"By God, it's cold!" Bardo said. His voiced boomed out into the black air moving across the frozen beach. He began to wrap his shesheen cape around his great body, but then he remembered that Danlo was only a man much as himself, and so he pulled this glittering black garment over Danlo's shoulders, too. "How long are we going to remain here?"

"I do not know."

"Look," Bardo said again, pointing at the sky. "Your father told me about the Ring once. He said that it would be a kind of mutual creation of his and the Solid State Entity's."

"The Entity told me much the same thing, too."

"Ah, but I never thought it would be so beautiful," Bardo said. "In a way, the Ring is as much a child of your father as are you."

At this startling thought, Danlo only smiled and continued to watch the sky.

From his furs' inner pocket, Bardo pulled out the book that Old Father had given him and thumped it with his hand. "I almost can't believe it was really he. I can't believe he's gone."

At this, Danlo turned to look at him and slowly nodded his head.

"I miss him, you know," Bardo said. "It's my goddamned fate, too bad, but I lost my best friend twice."

"I understand," Danlo said as he remembered the day when he was four years old and had said goodbye to his father on the ocean's ice just beyond Kweitkel. "Twice I have lost my father."

No — nothing is lost.

"Well, it's a cruel universe, isn't it? Sometimes I think it all just falls worse and worse."

Danlo took a breath of bitterly cold air and said, "No, it is just the opposite. It is the way that creation must always be."

"Ah, Little Fellow — do you remember almost the last thing your father said? About creation, about rings and miracles? Do you know what he meant by this?"

"Yes, I know."

"Can you tell me, then?"

"All right," Danlo said. "I will try."

He looked up through the night deep into the golden bands of light circling the world. He looked into the heart of the Ring itself, and he saw the nektons and triptons and the golden fritillaries soaring through the clouds of the little makers. And he saw something else. Great, godlike beings evolved into manifold shapes orbited the world like lightships. They lived upon starlight as they looked down towards the oceans of Icefall and up through the stars past Eta Carina towards the Vild. This is what Danlo saw, then, not with his eyes alone, but with a deeper sense that he had never named. And this is what he told Bardo:

That these Ring gods were the true children of the Solid State Entity. That they had played a part in the war that Danlo was only now beginning to see. These great, golden beings, he said, had helped the Entity in Her ancient battle with the Silicon God. Somehow, they had found a way to wield weapons of cosmic energies through light years of space directly into the centre of the Silicon God. In truth, they had created these incomprehensible weapons themselves. In the weaving of energies so tightly, they had to concentrate matter into almost infinitesimally tiny regions of space. Some of the pieces of matter — perhaps a few pounds of air or dust — made for smaller, though still terrible weapons. But when they tried to make the larger weapons, squeezing as much as twenty-five pounds of matter into a region smaller than a proton, as a kind of by-product of this terrible technology, they loosed upon the universe a miracle.

In truth, they created a universe itself. A whole universe that would eventually be filled with galaxies of bright, spinning stars. And not just one universe, but many. For these thousands of tiny concentrations of matter-energy — where they didn't simply collapse into black holes — began to expand with astonishing rapidity. Like shimmering, golden bubbles, they grew larger and larger. And every time one of these infinitesimal bubbles doubled in volume, the amount of positive matter-energy also doubled. And each of these doublings occurred exponentially and blindingly quickly, creating terrible distortions in spacetime. In much less than a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, each individual bubble pinched off and separated from real-space, becoming its own budding universe.

And then there came explosions, thousands upon thousands of explosions into fire and light. Into life. For each universe created its own space as it expanded, and created as well its own matter and energy and all the possibilities of some day evolving whole new galaxies of stars. This was the miracle of creation. It was the miracle of the universe itself. As Danlo gazed up at the blazing heavens, then, he told Bardo that the universe was not the universe. The universe, he said, had exploded into being more than ten billion years before, but
the
universe was infinite and eternal, like a great, golden circle without beginning or end.

"And in our universe alone, so many Rings, so many possibilities. Who could have dreamed the universe would bring forth so many possibilities?"

In the Milky Way galaxy, he said, the Entity had seeded a million worlds with Rings of their own. And soon the Rings would begin to seed their own life on other worlds until the stars shone down upon billions of flaming, golden spheres. Some day, perhaps farwhen, the Ring would spread out to other galaxies, perhaps to the very end of the universe itself. And all these billions of billions of Rings would give birth to new universes like so many golden pods bursting open and scattering their seeds to the wind. Some day, in one of these universes, some would-be god like Hanuman might succeed in converting all the stars and dark matter into a Universal Computer. But the wars that would arise from such a cosmic event would generate a billion billion universes for the one that was destroyed. And all these universes would evolve stars and planets and life of their own. All universes everywhere, Danlo said, even the uncountable trillions that existed alongside our own that we could never see, were filled with nothing but life. For all things, even the burning dust of the Awendela Nebula, even the ice crystals blowing against Danlo's face, were alive. Always, life supplied life to itself and grew ever vaster and more complex. Living things created burrows beneath the snow and songs sailing out to the stars; they made lightships and honey, pearls and poems and computers that generated entire universes of their own kind of life. Life swirled and pulsed and blazed in terribly beautiful patterns across the stellar deeps. The sun and the moons spun ecstatically with life's wild fire, and the photons danced along the rivers of light that streamed from star to star. Life, like an infinite flower, opened everywhere out into the universe, and into all possible universes, touching all matter, all space, all time with its perfect golden petals and sweet fragrance. And it all grew deeper and deeper, and brighter and brighter like a star swelling to an impossible brilliance that could have no limit or end.

Yes, yes, yes.

And this is what Danlo told Bardo beneath the blazing stars and the silence of the sea. Because the night had now fallen almost dead cold, Bardo pressed himself closer to Danlo to stop from shivering. He must have marvelled at the astonishing amount of heat that poured from Danlo's body almost like sunshine, for he suddenly rubbed his hands together and said, "By God, you're not cold at all, are you? Ah, well, I'm almost blue cold — this little petal of your infinite flower is freezing, I'm afraid, and I'll die soon if we don't get off this beach. Why don't we find a restaurant that serves coffee and some good, hot food?"

"If you'd like," Danlo said, smiling. And then he suddenly cocked his head and looked out at the starlit ice of the sea. "But only a moment longer, please."

From far out over the ice to the west came a faint sound that he had been waiting almost all his life to hear. It was the cry of the snowy owl: high and haunting and utterly wild. Danlo had never hoped to catch wind of this strange but deeply familiar sound so close to the city for it had been a thousand years since the snowy owls had nested on Neverness Island. Again, the unseen bird called out and, astonishingly, he was answered by another much nearer to the beach. Danlo sprang lightly to his feet, then, and turned to look past the rocks and frozen sands to the thicket of shatterwood trees that rose up just above the beach. There, gripping a dark green branch with her strong talons, a female owl cried out into the night. The light of the moons spilled down over her shimmering white feathers and her great orange eyes looked far out to sea. And now Danlo looked in that direction, too. He remembered that snowy owls mate in the darkest part of deep winter, and so along with this beautiful white bird perched in a tree a hundred feet away, he turned to face the sea as he watched and waited.

Ahira, Ahira
, he called out silently to the sky.
Ahira, Ahira.

And then at last,
Ahira
answered him. While Bardo sat completely still like a huge, black, frozen rock and Danlo's heart beat as quickly as any bird's, a great, male owl swooped down out of the moon-silvered darkness and soared over the icy sea. His cry was high and harsh and urgent with life, and he took no notice of the two men waiting on the snow-covered sands below, but flew straight towards his mate at the edge of the beach. He landed softly on the branch beside her. And then the two owls turned to gaze upon each other, and, as mirrors reflecting the light of mirrors, their great, golden-orange eyes shone with their fierce love for each other.

Danlo, Danlo.

After a while, the female owl sprang into the air and flew away, perhaps to find her nest deeper in the forest. The male remained perched on his branch only for a moment longer. And in that moment, while Danlo's breath steamed out into the freezing air and the world spun slowly beneath the stars, the owl turned and looked at him strangely. And then suddenly he opened his beak and called out to the stars, to the sea, to the wind — and perhaps even to Danlo himself standing so silent and still in the night. It was a cry of victory and all the wild joy of life. Everything went into this one terrible and beautiful sound. And here, Danlo thought, was the ultimate paradox of life, the final mystery. Life moved ever outwards into infinite possibilities and yet all things were perfect and finished in every single moment, their end attained. For everything had gone into this one, blessed bird, too. All the stars of all the universes that had ever been blazed in his bright orange eyes, and all the universes that would ever be, waited to break out of the many white eggs that he would quicken inside his mate. It was that way with Bardo, and with Danlo himself, and every other bit of creation. Nothing that had ever taken its breath from the world had been without value, and no one ever lived life in vain. Danlo would always remember the terrible suffering of Jonathan's last days, but when he closed his eyes and looked deep inside himself, he would always see the terrible beauty of his face as well. If he could bring Jonathan back to this cold, lonely beach smiling and dancing with life, as Jonathan would always live in his memory and somewhere in time, he knew that Jonathan would say it was good to have been alive. And now this beautiful white bird who was his other-self affirmed that this was so. He stretched out his great curving wings and cried out to the night. The wind off the ocean picked up this wild sound and swept it high up into space towards the starry heavens. Truly, the wind was the wild white breath of the world, and as it whipped bits of broken ice against Danlo's naked face, it carried the voices of Jonathan and Old Father, and Katharine and Hanuman and all the Devaki tribe, too, and all these voices together with all the voices that had ever been or would ever be joined
Ahira
in crying out, "Yes, yes, yes."

And then the snowy owl flew away and was gone. "All right," Danlo finally said to Bardo. "I am ready." He pulled Bardo to his feet and breathed on the huge man's fingers to help warm them. And so with one small affirmation, this man who had finally learned how to see smiled at his oldest friend, and together they walked back up the beach towards the city that shimmered beneath the stars.