War in Heaven (18 page)

"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' 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' 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?"