War in Heaven (29 page)

I will not scream
, Danlo thought. He clamped his jaws shut with such force that his cheek muscles cramped up hard as knots of wood and the pain of his teeth was like thirty-two spears being driven through his gums deep into the bone beneath.

"You're so damned strong, aren't you? But please consider that it takes approximately four hundred seconds for the ekkana to build to its full effect. And it builds quite slowly. What you are experiencing now is like the burning of a match compared to starfire."

What Hanuman said filled Danlo with yet more pain, but not because of the content of his words. As the vibrations of Hanuman's voice disturbed the cell's dank air, each booming vowel and plosive consonant sent waves of sound pounding against Danlo's eardrums. Once, Danlo thought, Hanuman's voice had been as sweet as honey, as beautiful as polished silver. But now it filled his head like the sudden roar of ten thousand tigers.

"Are you counting time?" Hanuman asked. He stood in front of Danlo, looking at him strangely, almost with compassion, and the reflected light off his pale, anguished face hurt Danlo's eyes. "We won't really begin until the ekkana has waxed to its fullest effect. And then we'll have at least six hours before it wanes. Six hours — can you imagine that? In the universe as experienced through the fire of ekkana, even six seconds is an eternity."

Danlo drew in a quick breath, hoping to ease the fierce pain tearing him apart. But the coldness of the air only seared his lungs as if he had breathed fire. He smiled, then, at this thought that suddenly came to him:

The nerves are the reason that man does not easily mistake himself for a god.

"I see you still amuse yourself," Hanuman said. "Savour your will to smile — it won't last."

Danlo tried to speak, to open his mouth in order to tell Hanuman that his will would always be as free as a thallow in the sky, if only he had the courage to follow it. But the pain of moving his jaws, his tongue and lips, caused him to lock into silence.

"It's getting worse, isn't it? Can you feel it in your belly yet? Can you feel it in your cells?"

As Danlo struggled not to cry out or lunge against the acid wire, movements that would only bring him further agony, he felt a spike of pain driving through his belly. Although it had been many hours since his last meal, he could feel the peristaltic waves of his belly muscles squeezing the now-liquid food through his intestines. The squirting of his digestive juices burned him inside in sprays of hot acid. Even the absorption of proteins and fats into his cells hurt him; the very streaming of nutrients into his tissues felt as if he would fill up cell by cell and then burst. It came to him then that every part of his body that quickened his life — from his belly to his blood to his brain — was in continual motion. And the more it moved, the more it hurt.

Pain is the awareness of life
, he remembered.

Life, he marvelled, in his last moment of clear thought before pain swept him away, was essentially the movement of matter in highly patterned and organized ways. And it was sheer movement, the continual changing from one state to another, that was the ultimate source of all pain. The greater the movement — as in a man's flesh parting at the rip of a knife or a woman giving birth to her child — the greater the pain. Strange, he thought, that he had never quite seen this until now. Strange that movement itself was pain, for the universe was nothing but matter in motion, from the spinning of electrons in a carbon atom of his blood to the fire of photons streaming out of the heart of the farthest star.

Pain is life, and life is pain, is pain — pain, pain, pain, pain ...

Ironically, the warrior-poets had designed their ekkana drug not simply to cause pain but to free their victims to their greatest possibilities. For pain is like a doorway opening from the dark cavern of one's own being out on to the infinite lights of the universe. But it is a door that few can open. Few can reach their moment of the possible and move through pain into that golden land where one's will flows as wild and free as a waterfall. The greater the pain, the warrior-poets say, the greater the possibilities of the will in overcoming it and moving towards the truly human. A true human being would be one who could hold all the pain of his body and soul — and still smile upon the infinitely greater pain of the universe.

It hurts, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts
...

"It hurts, doesn't it, Danlo?"

Hanuman's voice exploded like a bomb out of the room's blinding light. Danlo couldn't bear the heat of it.

"It all hurts so terribly much, doesn't it?"

Yes, it hurts
, Danlo thought.
Yes, yes, yes
...

"Danlo?"

Danlo heard his name, and the fire of it burned his brain and made him sweat.

"Is there something that you wish to ask me?"

Yes
, Danlo thought.
Yes, yes, yes.

"Of course, you may ask me anything you wish."

"How ... " Danlo finally said.

Forcing this single word from his lips hurt more than the time that he'd had to pull free the barbed point of a harpoon accidentally impaled in his leg.

"How much pain can you bear?" Hanuman asked. He stood there in front of Danlo, his blue eyes shining like ice and his robe blazing like golden flames all around him. "Is that what you wish to know, how much pain you can bear before you start screaming and biting your tongue? Sometimes I think it's the only really interesting question: how much pain can we hold before we fall insane like the rest of the universe?"

"No," Danlo gasped, "not how much. How ... long?"

For a long time now, Danlo had abandoned the counting of his heartbeats. Although whole days had seemed to pass — in truth, whole years — he knew that the night could not yet be over, for the clary window showed no trace of light. Perhaps it had been two or three hours since Jaroslav had injected him with the ekkana poison. Certainly, he thought, he had long since reached the moment when the ekkana would touch him with its greatest fire.

"It's been only two hundred seconds," Hanuman said. He closed his eyes as the clearface computer lit up like purple glowworms swarming about his head. "Two hundred and ten seconds — scarcely more than half the time until we can really begin. And you should know, only a hundredth of the pain. The effects of the ekkana build exponentially. We could hardly call the pain you're experiencing now real pain."

Not real pain ... two hundred seconds ... no, impossible, no, no ...

Danlo hurt so fiercely that he had to exert the whole force of his will solely to keep from crying out. He didn't see how the pain could get any worse. And then, unbelievably, the pain grew worse. Infinitely worse. Seconds passed, and days and whole eons, and it seemed to take for ever for his heart to complete one beat and fill with his burning blood in readiness for the next contraction. So intolerable had his pain become that he wanted to be anywhere else in the universe, even if it meant freezing naked in a snowstorm or being cut with a stone knife or repeating the most agonizing experiences of his life over and over again until the end of time. To his shame, then, he screamed like a child caught in a tiger's claws, screamed and screamed until he thought his lungs would tear away from his ribs and his heart burst. And then he realized that the only sounds in the room came from the breathing of Hanuman and the two warrior-poets — and the rocket-like whoosh of his own tortured breaths. The scream had been only inside him, inside his mind. His jaw remained locked, and he wouldn't allow his lips to open.

"It's been more than five hundred seconds," Jaroslav Bulba said in a voice that cracked out of the air like a whip. "I don't understand."

The other ronin warrior-poet, a quick young man named Arrio Kell, said, "Perhaps the ekkana was old and had lost its potency."

"No," Jaroslav said. "I prepared it from the binaries only three days ago."

"Then he should have reached his moment by now."

"Much before now — I don't understand." Hanuman, then, stepped closer to Danlo and touched the sweat off his forehead. Even the gentleness of Hanuman's hand hurt him. He willed himself to look straight at Hanuman as he felt Hanuman's fingers test the locked muscles along his face and neck. And then Hanuman looked deeply into his eyes and said, "He
has
reached his moment — I'm sure the ekkana has waxed to its full effect."

"But no one," Jaroslav said, "has ever reached his moment without screaming."

"Well, Danlo isn't like other men."

"You speak of him almost as if he's a god."

"Almost," Hanuman said, softly, strangely. "Well, his father
is
Mallory Ringess. Even when he was a man, he wasn't like other men either."

"Even warrior-poets," Jaroslav said, "cry out when touched with the ekkana. Has he no nerves? Is there something wrong with his brain?"

"No, he has nerves," Hanuman said. "Watch this."

He drew his fingernail across the scar on Danlo's forehead and watched as he jumped forwards in his chair; to Danlo, this light touch felt as though his old wound were being reopened with a red-hot knife.

"Do you see the eyes?" Hanuman asked. "How he cries out inside?"

"I would rather hear him cry out
outside
until the walls shake and the air hisses and he burns away his voice."

"Then we should begin," Hanuman said.

"It's past time," Jaroslav Bulba agreed. He drew his long, killing knife from his cloak and pointed it at Danlo.

"One moment," Hanuman said. Then he turned to Danlo. "Tell me the fixed-points of the stars along the Sonderval's pathway."

Danlo felt his heart beat once, twice, three times with the force of tidal waves crashing against a rocky coast. And then he said, "No."

"No?"

"No."

Although it hurt his chest and throat to utter this single word, it hurt even more
not
to let its iron-cold sounds force open his lips. It took all his will to say it, simply, quietly, without the taint of pain or hatred discolouring his voice.

"Damn you, Danlo!" Hanuman shook with rage, his fine jaw trembling, and his belly, and his hands — and he couldn't stop looking at Danlo with his pale, tear-haunted eyes. "If there were a God in this universe, He would damn someone as cruel as you. But there isn't, so I must.
I
must, do you understand? I really must."

Then he nodded at Jaroslav Bulba, and said, "Begin with the fingers."

Hanuman must have previously orchestrated the course of Danlo's torture and discussed it with the warrior-poets, for Jaroslav and Arrio Kell knew exactly what to do. With Danlo's forearms bound fast to the arms of his chair, his hands and fingers remained free to move. For most of the time since the ekkana had touched him, he had clenched the fingers of either hand into a hard fist. Now Arrio Kell stepped closer to Danlo and used his own hard fingers to pry Danlo's open. He bore down on the knuckles of Danlo's little finger, the one encircled by his black, diamond pilot's ring. He pressed this appendage of muscle and bone flat against the chair's hard arm. The ivory tone of Danlo's skin stood out in contrast against the black shatterwood; in the light of the flame globes, his little fingernail sparkled like a jewel.

I will not cry out
, Danlo promised himself.
On pain of death, I will not cry out.

He willed himself to watch as Jaroslav touched the point of his knife against the tip of his finger. And then Jaroslav drove this diamond-steel point beneath his fingernail; he jiggled it to the right and left, working up deeper towards the quick of his nail. It seemed that he was trying slowly to lift away the whole nail as he might shell a nut. Blood spurted and Danlo's throat clutched — and his belly seized up with agony in his urge to cry out. He tried to jerk his arm away from the killing knife, but could not. Acid wire cut his arm. He tried to move his whole being away from the fire burning up his arm, but he could not escape the knife, the blood, the terrible nearness of pain.

Oh, God; oh, God; oh, God; oh, God. Oh, God — I want to die.

As Jaroslav finally cut the nail entirely away from Danlo's bleeding finger and held it up with glee as if he had found a ruby, Danlo ground his teeth together and lunged against the wire imprisoning him. Almost every muscle in his body convulsed at once; he felt his spine pop with the strain of it and an intense urge to vomit. It was then that he began to think about death. There was nothing clear or ordered about these thoughts; so overwhelming had his pain become that he could no longer apprehend the truths of the universe in words, concepts, or reasoned ponderings. All he knew was pain, the fire of pain and the endlessness of pain. And the terrible logic of pain: that pain must end but only when he died. If pain was life, which was only the movement of blood down towards the open veins of his fingertip and nerve signals burning up his arm towards his brain, then it could all stop so easily. Stop the moving of his cells, and he would die. At death, he knew, there would be no lifting of his soul away from the flesh, no encoding of his selfness as a program in a computer or other such fancies. There would be nothing but the cessation of movement, the quieting of consciousness and life. Peace, stillness, silence. To move not would be the end of pain, and he longed for this neverness of existence with every breath that came tearing like a knife down his throat. He wanted to will his heart not to move, to die from the terrible pain of life with all the inevitability with which he had been born.

To die, to die, to die, to die — oh, God; oh, God; oh, God; oh, God!

"Damn you, Danlo!"

This was Hanuman's voice, falling somewhere out of the blinding light inside Danlo. But so great was the confusion of Danlo's pain that he heard this voice as his own.

"Damn you, Danlo — why don't you cry?"

And Danlo heard this as, "Why don't you die?" And he wanted to open his bleeding lips to give Hanuman (or himself) the answer to his question, but he was afraid that if he did, he would scream so hard that the shock waves of sound would tear through his chest and stop his heart from beating.