War in Heaven (42 page)

The door suddenly opened, and a man standing in the foyer called out, "Who are you? Remove your mask so that we can see who you are."

Danlo saw then, that this pock-faced man was pointing a laser at him. Three other men stood about him with lasers in hand guarding the doorway.

"I am Danlo wi Soli Ringess," Danlo said as he removed his mask. "And who are you?"

At the saying of Danlo's name, the man's manner almost immediately gentled. "I'm Lais Martel," he said. "But what happened to Tobias Urit and the others?"

Quickly, as the wind whooshed through the opened doorway, Danlo recounted what had happened outside the restaurant in the Bell. And then he said, "The warrior-poet pursued me for a while. But I think I lost him."

"You
think
?"

"I ... am almost certain that I did."

"Well, come in, then, Danlo wi Soli Ringess. It won't do to stand in open doorways with a warrior-poet on the loose."

With that, Lais Martel pulled Danlo inside the building and slammed the door. Then he led him down the hallway to the apartment of Benjamin Hur.

"This is it," Lais said as he paused before a black, shatterwood door. "Benjamin has been waiting for you — we've all wondered why you were late."

After another round of knocking, another man — a nervous and rather gentle ringkeeper whom Danlo remembered as Karim of Clarity — opened the door. He invited Danlo into the apartment's main fireroom. Danlo immediately bowed to Lisa Mei Hua, Poppy Panshin, the Masalina and Zenobia Alimeda, all of whom sat around the room on chairs or couches as if they had been anxiously awaiting Danlo's arrival. At the very centre of the room, pacing tracks in an expensive Fravashi carpet, was Benjamin Hur, one of the founders and the would-be warlord of the Kalla Fellowship.

"Danlo!" he cried out as he rushed forwards to embrace him. "I'm glad you're well — but where are the others?"

Again, Danlo told his story. Benjamin, with his great hooked nose and green tiger's eyes, listened with a ferocity of purpose quite terrible to behold. Moment by moment, his anger built until it exploded out of him like pus.

"Do you see?" he raged. He turned away from Danlo towards a little man sitting on a plush, velvet couch. "The only way to restrain Hanuman and all his godlings and warrior-poets is to kill them before they kill us!"

"Hello, Danlo," the little man said, standing and bowing politely. Then he too came forwards to embrace him. "As usual, my brother shows no restraint himself."

"Hello, Jonathan," Danlo said, returning his bow. He looked at his old friend, Jonathan Hur, and a flush of memories warmed him inside. "I am glad to see you. I am glad ... that you were invited today, too."

At this Jonathan exchanged glances with his brother, then said, "But I wasn't invited, I'm sorry to say. I came here straightaway only after I'd learned that Benjamin had engineered your escape."

"Well, I would have invited you," Benjamin said, staring at him. "After Danlo had arrived safely and I had a chance to speak with him."

So saying, he invited to Danlo to sit in one of the hideous velvet chairs opposite the couch. But Danlo preferred the floor instead, and so he dropped down on to the carpet facing the couch. Jonathan, quick to follow his lead, sat crosslegged near him, and Benjamin grudgingly did the same.

Poppy Panshin, a big woman bred on Yachne as a waiting womb for the aristocracy's genetic experiments, eased herself off the couch and sat as near to Danlo as she could — as did Lisa Mei Hua, the Masalina and Zenobia Alimeda. Such easy gathering together on a Fravashi carpet recalled happier times when they had passed a bowl full of kalla from hand to hand around a circle. Even Benjamin, in all his fierceness, must have felt the pull of deep memories, for he smiled as he lost himself in the deep blueness of Danlo's eyes.

"Would you like some tea?" Benjamin finally asked. "You must be cold."

"Yes, that would be good," Danlo said.

At this, Karim of Clarity abandoned his door duty for a moment, and stepped over to the tea service sitting on top of one of Benjamin's fine, inlaid tables. All around the apartment, as Danlo saw, were many fine things: Yarkonan tapestries, kevalin sets from Clarity, Mirrian vases and flame globes, Golden Age paintings, and much else. Benjamin explained that he had recently taken over the apartment — and the whole building — from a dead wormrunner who had owed the Kalla Fellowship a debt. He hadn't had the time, he said, to sell off all this pelf and to use the money to buy laser jewels, diamond steel, nall armour, matrikax poison and other weapons of war.

"Here we are," Benjamin said as Karim laid the tea service at the centre of the carpet.

While Karim returned to his post by the door, Benjamin poured a golden tea into little blue cups and passed them round the circle. The symbolism of this ceremony was not lost on Danlo — or any of the others. They each remembered the cool and slightly bitter essence of kalla, as well as the rising stream of racial memories known as the Elder Eddas. But the tea was only tea: hot, tannic and much too sweet.

"We must count Tobias and Kantu, all the others, as dead," Benjamin said as he took a sip of tea. "I'm sorry, Danlo — but at least you're here."

"I ... am sorry, too."

"We're all sorry," Jonathan said. And then he looked at Benjamin. "And we'll continue with our sorrow until you put a stop to this madness."

Benjamin scowled, then, and Danlo thought that the differences between the two brothers couldn't have been more striking. There sat Benjamin with his flashing green eyes and all his rage at the injustices of life. And only four feet away, Jonathan Hur, he of the gentle soul and bright brown eyes as soft and sweet as melting chocolate. He was an urbane young man with a mischievous turn to his face suggesting that he liked to play at the important activities of life rather than taking things too seriously. But his demeanour was deceptive; he was really the most purposeful of men. Before the war, he had been a master holist of no little reputation — one of the youngest masters at the academy — and he still wore the brilliant cobalt robe of his profession. From their first meeting in Bardo's house years ago, Danlo had instantly liked him. As he had Benjamin. Both brothers, he thought, despite their surface dissimilarities shared a great love of life. They both had hearts of fire, and they both burned to bring forth the beauty and truth inside everyone willing to drink kalla with them.

"This isn't the time," Benjamin told Jonathan, "to begin our old argument."

"But what better time could there be?" Jonathan asked quietly. "Since here sits Danlo as a result of our desire that he lead us against Hanuman."

Benjamin's face fell heavy with anger, and he said, "Danlo is here as a result of careful planning and the sacrifice of too many good men. If we had relied on your desire and your methods only, he'd still be rotting in his cell."

"But your methods have only brought Hanuman's wrath down upon us. And now the whole city faces starvation because of what your man did."

"Igasho acted without my knowledge. Do you really think I would have allowed him to build a
hydrogen bomb
, much less use one?"

"I don't know what to think any more."

"Jonathan!"

Jonathan's eyes grew even softer, and for a moment it seemed that he might weep for his brother, for all that he had become and all that he would never be. And then he said, "Even if you didn't command Igasho, he still acted to please you. He must have thought the bombing was consistent with this madness you've already brought to the city. And who can blame him?"

"It's Igasho who was mad, not I," Benjamin said. "He made a choice — as we all must do."

"You've made your choices, too."

"I've only chosen to make the truths of the Elder Eddas known to all people everywhere — is this so wrong?"

"And you would do this by murdering them?"

"I'd execute Hanuman li Tosh and all his kind," Benjamin said, "if they keep
our
kind from the One Memory."

"But no one can keep anyone from this," Jonathan said softly. He looked down at the blue cup in his hands, and then smiled at Zenobia Alimeda and Lisa Mei Hua who had followed him to Benjamin's apartment. Finally he looked across the circle at Benjamin. "Has Hanuman kept
you
from our ceremonies?"

"No, but he — "

"No," Jonathan interrupted, "only your desire to oppose him in violence has kept you from drinking kalla with us."

Now Benjamin touched eyes with Poppy Panshin and the Masalina, a rather fleshy-faced man who had once been a famous neurosinger on Silvaplana. Benjamin then glanced at Karim of Clarity standing patiently by the door. Once, they had met almost every night in Jonathan's apartment in the Old City to drink kalla with Jonathan, Zenobia and Lisa Mei — and others. But as Hanuman had grown ever more powerful, they had followed Benjamin down cold and corpse-strewn streets into this lonely part of the Farsider's Quarter.

"We've all vowed," Benjamin said, "to abstain from drinking kalla until Neverness is safe for everyone to do so."

Jonathan smiled sadly, then, and said, "But until it
is
safe, shouldn't we be as lights for those who have never drunk the kalla? Shouldn't we be as diamond windows transparent to the Eddas so that all people can see their own possibilities?"

"Lights can be snuffed out," Benjamin said. "Windows can be broken."

"But one light can ignite ten others. And each of those ten, ten more."

"Oh, Jonathan, you're such a dreamer! And dreamers so easily die."

"I'm not afraid to die."

Just then all the fierceness melted out of Benjamin's hard green eyes, and it seemed that he might weep. Then he said, "I've never doubted your courage — only the wisdom of your way."

"And I've never doubted your compassion — only your ability to find it."

For a while, as the afternoon wore on and they drank tea, the two brothers argued their old argument. Danlo learned how the two factions of the Kalla Fellowship had split apart, and how each hoped to reconcile the other to its way. He learned other things as well. According to Benjamin, that very morning Igasho Hod had been found dead in an alley off the East-West Sliddery. His ring had been broken open, and his lips were blue from the effects of the matrikax poison: apparently he had killed himself in remorse for destroying the food factories and incinerating so many helpless people. Benjamin made it seem that Igasho's death somehow atoned for his terrible act, but Jonathan found this argument absurd. Jonathan brought news of his own, then. He told of five deep-ships full of Yarkonan grain that had been lost as the Fellowship and Ringist fleets manoeuvred through the Fallaways. Everyone was expecting another battle soon, he said. And now that there would be no shipments of grain for at least another ten days, everyone was expecting the first pangs of hunger.

"What will you say about the wisdom of your way when you hear children crying because they have nothing to eat?" Jonathan asked his brother.

But Benjamin chose not to answer this unanswerable question; instead he stirred his tepid tea with his finger and looked at Danlo. "You see, we've been fighting this way since we both could speak. But Jonathan is older and cleverer than I, so he always wins."

All this time, Danlo had kept his silence as he listened. And now he smiled gravely and said, "I do not think that either of you has won anything."

At this, Benjamin's eyes flashed angrily, and he squeezed his cup so hard that his hand trembled, causing tea to spill over the dead wormrunner's carpet. "Damn you, Jonathan!" he said. "I should never have let you in the door. With all your damn compassion, you've softened Danlo so that he has no will to resist what Hanuman has done."

Now it was Danlo's turn for anger. "What do you know of will?" he asked, rubbing the old scar on his forehead. And then, as the shooting pain behind his eyes quieted for a moment, his voice dropped almost to a whisper. "What do you know of compassion?"

Benjamin glanced down at the tea stain on the carpet, then, and said, "I didn't mean to insult you, but I see now that there's little hope you'll lead us against Hanuman."

"I
would
lead you," Danlo said.

At this Benjamin suddenly looked up hopefully.

"I would lead you, but only if we could find a way to oppose Hanuman's works with
satyagraha.
"

"I'm unfamiliar with this word," Benjamin said.

"It means 'soul force'," Danlo said. He explained that the Fravashi, in their making of the language of Moksha, had borrowed it from the ancient Sanskrit. "There must be a way ... to oppose Hanuman in nonviolence with all the force of our souls."

"But that's no opposition at all — only a deepening of Jonathan's dream!"

Danlo closed his eyes a moment as he remembered a beautiful and terrible light inside light. "It is much more than that," he said.

"Did this soul force of yours keep the warrior-poet from slaughtering my men?"

"No," Danlo admitted. "But you cannot even dream how great the force of our souls truly could be."

"I didn't bring you here today to listen to this."

"Did you think that I would simply abandon my vow of ahimsa, then?"

Benjamin motioned towards Karim of Clarity with his laser, and he said, "Did you think that you could just walk in here and persuade us to lay down our arms?"

"I had hoped that I might," Danlo said, smiling sadly.

"Your vow of ahimsa caused at least one of my men to die. You say you grabbed Makan's arm, allowing the warrior-poet to strike with his dart?"

"That ... was not my intention," Danlo said. "I only wanted to prevent him from harming the warrior-poet. And more, from firing his bullets into the crowd."

"Well, you succeeded, didn't you? And now Makan is dead."

Danlo looked down at his hand that had grabbed the barrel of Makan's gun. He could still feel the cold metal burning his fingers, burning like a bolt of lightning up the nerves of his arm and neck into his head. "I am sorry that he is," he finally said.

"And what if Makan
had
killed the warrior-poet?" Benjamin demanded. "Then Tobias and the others might still be alive."