War in Heaven (53 page)

As deep winter approached, even the tychists were praying for an end to the war. On the 82nd came news that cheered almost everyone: it seemed that Ringists had managed to engage the whole Fellowship fleet out near the Alohir Double. Everyone expected that this would be the war's final battle. But then the following day, Salmalin the Prudent sent a pilot in a lightship to tell the College of Lords that they had fought only a skirmish and had destroyed only a handful of their enemy while losing ten lightships and forty-two black ships of their own. And on the same day, Benjamin Hur delivered another blow.

Deciding on a test of strength, he led a team of his ringkeepers against an Old City apartment block housing two full cadres of godlings. The raid was a complete surprise and a complete success: his ringkeepers had captured hundreds of lasers and heat-tlolts and killed at least fifty of Hanuman's most devoted followers. And they captured something else as well. In one of the apartments, fairly carpeted with dead bodies and blood, Poppy Panshin discovered machinery for making viruses and other bio-weapons. Although none of the blue vials or needle darts was found to contain a single live virus, two of Poppy's ringkeepers had panicked and spread the news to their friends. Soon the whole city burned with the rumour that Hanuman li Tosh had developed a slel virus that would eat holes in the volition centres of his enemies' brains, thereby rendering them helpless to resist conversion to the Way of Ringess.

This rumour lent an even greater urgency to Danlo's plan to unseat Hanuman as Lord of the Way of Ringess. During the dark days of that darkest of seasons, no one seemed to know what to believe, not even Danlo. And so he resolved to complete his change as quickly as possible. In one of Constancio's large sleeping chambers filled with robots, strange-looking machinery, stinking chemicals, drugs and gleaming tools, he lay on a hard steel table and gritted his teeth as the cutter opened almost every part of him. The deep bone work came first. Almost every bone in his body from his toes to his skull had to be steened with layers of new bone, the tendon attachments built up and strengthened. The pain of such procedures almost killed him. Once, as Constancio was drilling through his elbow, one of the pain blocks suddenly failed. (Constancio later explained that he had bought the glittering nerve machine from an undependable wormrunner.) Despite the shama meditation which Danlo practised continually throughout his surgeries, he had cried out and jerked his arm, as chance would have it, straight
into
Constancio's drill. The diamond bit had torn down the length of Danlo's forearm, chewing up muscles and ripping through nerves, arteries and veins. The blood from this accident sprayed over both of them so they resembled two wormrunners trying to butcher a still-living mammoth. Constancio had to spend the rest of the morning repairing the damage. "It's fortunate that I've had the foresight to clone spare nerves," Constancio explained as he teased apart two of Danlo's tendons with his scalpel. "Otherwise it would be quite a few days before you could use your arm."

"I ... am sorry that I moved," Danlo gasped.

"But it wasn't your fault," Constancio said. "I should have acquired the blocking machine from one of the shops along the Old City Glissade. And I
would
have, but all the best shops have been emptied of the best machines. How many poor people have been burnt by lasers or heat-tlolts in this war that Benjamin Hur fights against the Ringists? Too many, and I'm afraid that the pain of burns is almost too terrible to bear.
Much
worse than bone pain, which is hot and deep but doesn't last long."

Just then Danlo lay flexing his fingers and grimacing at the astonishing pain shooting down the length of his radius bone. Again he gasped, "It lasts ... long enough."

As Constancio adjusted the level of a new blocking machine and injected Danlo's arm with a numbing drug, he whistled a bright little tune as if he were very happy once again to be sculpting human flesh. "I've observed that you feel pain more acutely than my other clients," he said. "But you seem also to have a remarkable ability to control it."

Danlo explained, then, how an encounter with a warrior-poet had left him permanently poisoned with the ekkana drug.

"Remarkable — truly remarkable that you are even able to skate outside in the cold, much less lie beneath my lasers without screaming. Pain blocks or not, you must still feel the touch of them like fire."

"Truly, I do," Danlo said.

"Then perhaps it would be better if I took you into unconsciousness."

"But if you did this, you would have to work more slowly, yes?"

"It helps me avoid nerve damage if you consciously move the various muscle groups and limbs at my request," Constancio admitted. "And the nerves take the longest to repair."

"Then I should remain conscious, yes?"

"Only if you can bear it."

"I think I must."

"There
will
of course be times when you'll have to be unconscious. As when we begin working on your spine."

"I ... see."

"You don't fully trust me, do you?"

"Do I trust you?" Danlo asked. "I think I must trust you. In the end, between men, trust is all there is, yes?"

In truth, however, he had once heard a story about Mehtar Hajime that caused him to doubt. It seemed that Bardo, years ago in a chance encounter on the street, had pushed Mehtar sprawling to the ice for being rude to a harijan man. In revenge — this is how Bardo always told the story — when it came time for Bardo to be sculpted and accompany Mallory Ringess on his journey to the Alaloi, Mehtar had played a cruel trick on him. Unknown to Bardo, he had implanted in his flesh timed hormones that later caused Bardo's membrum to harden into a permanent state of tumescence. Much later, when Bardo had returned from the quest, he had found another cutter to undo the work that Mehtar had done. But for a long while thereafter Bardo had suffered the opposite and quite unbelievable problem (for him) of softness in his mightiest of parts. In hope of exacting a little revenge of his own, he had searched for Mehtar in the cutting shops up and down the streets of the Farsider's Quarter but had been unable to find him.

But for all Danlo's misgivings as to Constancio's essential purity of intention, the work went smoothly enough. Only in one respect did Constancio disappoint him — and this had nothing to do with his profession of sculpting human beings into strange and sometimes powerful new shapes. As Danlo had hoped, on those days when he had to spend both morning and night in Constancio's converted sleeping chamber, Constancio fed him rich meals of kurmash, pulses, nuts and fruit so that he might keep his strength and heal quickly and well. But when Danlo had asked for a little extra kurmash to take home to Jonathan and Tamara, Constancio had refused to help. "That wasn't part of our contract," Constancio reminded him coldly. "You traded a scryer's sphere for your sculpting. Well, I'm sculpting you, and much more as well. It's not every cutter who would fete you with the finest of foods as if you were an exemplar."

Danlo hated to argue or to bargain like a merchant. But then he thought of Jonathan chewing on mint sticks to ease the pain of his empty belly, and he told Constancio, "Surely the sphere is worth much more than my sculpting."

"What is anything's true worth?" Constancio said. "If this war doesn't end soon, I might not be able to trade your sphere for a single baldo nut."

"But surely you would not need to. You have hoarded much food, yes?
Years'
worth, I think."

Constancio, who must have feared anyone spreading a rumour that he kept large stores of food, lied to Danlo, saying, "No, no — I've barely enough to feed my servants and myself for a few more days. And you. I've given you the best of what I have, and still you ask for more."

"Only a little kurmash for my wife and son."

"And I've told you, that's impossible."

"Have you ever been truly hungry?" Danlo asked. "Have you held a child in your arms and felt the emptiness of his belly in your own?"

"No, of course I haven't. It's been precisely to avoid such barbarisms that I chose the career that I did."

"I see."

"But if it's any satisfaction to you, soon enough I'll be starving along with everyone else. And so will you when your sculpting is completed."

It was later that day that Danlo began his brief career as a thief. Although he had always been the most honest and trustworthy of men, he took to hiding a little of each meal in the folds of his napkin. This food — rice, almonds, ming beans or dried bloodfruit — he surreptitiously emptied into the great pockets of his furs at the first chance. And then, after the day's cuttings, he would smuggle it out of Constancio's house, past his guard at the front gate and out into the streets. As often as he could, far after dusk, he would knock at the door to Tamara's apartment and then hurry inside to provide a little midnight feast. When Constancio remarked Danlo's rare appetite, the way that food almost magically disappeared from his plate, Danlo admitted that he had always been able to eat enough for two men. It was a matter of a quickened metabolism, he said, the way that his body's fires burned hot and deep.

"Strange," Constancio said. "But it must be true. I've never seen anyone heal as quickly as you have — even with the benefit of drugs or the form-field machines. I cut you and glue you shut, and three days later there isn't even a scar."

As Constancio said this to him, Danlo smiled and closed his eyes. He remembered well that once he had healed much as any other man. But something had changed inside him, something that his torture had begun and his sculpting had only accelerated. It was as if the shock of hunger, drugs and pain had quickened his whole being. Now, deep inside himself, inside the cells of his heart and brain, he felt something beginning to move. Perhaps it was his DNA itself, uncoiling like trillions of tiny snakes; but it felt more like fire, like a countless number of infinitesimal flames swirling and spinning and burning into him new possibilities of life. In truth, he felt more alive than he had ever been before. He felt stronger and hungrier, like a great, beautiful tiger, so burning and insatiably hungry that he could have eaten enough for
three
men.

"I suppose we should finish your sculpting quickly," Constancio said. "Otherwise you
will
eat the last of what little food I've stored."

In the next few days, Constancio watched Danlo more carefully, making sure to keep him company at each of his meals. Part of this was only fascination with Danlo's remarkable metabolism and powers of healing. But partly, too, he must have suspected Danlo's thievery, for under the guise of scientific curiosity, he began to measure every ounce of kurmash and count every almond that went on to Danlo's plate. Danlo wished that he might do as a mother wolf or father thallow and bring home in his stomach food that might be regurgitated many hours later and eaten. But he was still human, after all. And so he took his stealing to its next level. Rather than surprise Tamara and Jonathan every evening with his purloined tidbits, he began returning straightaway to his house in the City Wild. There, early in the morning beneath the towering shatterwood trees, he hunted out sleekit mounds buried beneath layers of snow. With a hand axe made from a piece of good flint, he chopped into the mounds, robbing them of the baldo nuts that the sleekits had stored against the coldest days of winter. Although he was careful to take only a few dozen nuts from any mound, he realized that he was bending his vow of ahimsa, if not breaking it altogether. But he consoled himself with the fact that he didn't really
know
that he was causing the sleekits any harm. And it warmed him inside whenever he opened the door to Jonathan's apartment and saw his eyes light up at the round, brown baldo nuts, which he gobbled down roasted or raw or simmered in one of Tamara's makeshift (but delicious) soups.

Even so, it was not enough food. Never again, it seemed, would the people of Neverness know the comfort of one meal following the next, as day follows night. On the 5th of deep winter, a shipment of wheat berries from Darkmoon arrived at the Hollow Fields. For a few days the free restaurants opened and doled out the grain in carefully measured rations. Although Tamara gave her son as much of her ration as she could, he always seemed to want more — even if he always pretended to fullness before he had finished half his bowl and seemed more concerned with Tamara's hunger than his own. By the 12th, the flesh began melting from his small body like a candle slowly burning itself down. Sometimes he would sit on Danlo's lap for a long time listening to stories; but just as often he would lie listlessly on one of the carpets holding his empty belly and staring at the paintings on the wall.

One night, soon after Constancio had begun the first work on Danlo's face, Tamara took Danlo aside and told him, "I'm worried about Jonathan."

They were sitting together by the stove in Tamara's fire-room, all the while listening to Jonathan tossing and turning beneath the furs in the sleeping chamber. Danlo had his mask off, and he ran his fingers across his sore, reddened jaw. He looked at Tamara, at her gaunt but still beautiful face. "I am worried about him, too," he said. "And I am worried about you."

"I'm so hungry, Danlo. I never thought it could be so bad."

"I am sorry."

"I never really thought about it, food, you know — I always took it for granted, like water or air."

"Perhaps we should be thankful, then. It is said that thirst is even more terrible than hunger."

"How could anything be more terrible? Have you really looked at Jonathan these past few days? I'm afraid he's
dying.
"

Danlo, who was only too familiar with starvation, took Tamara's hand and said, "No, he is far from that. He is a strong child still with much life in him."

Somewhat irritably, for she was very hungry, Tamara pulled her hand away from him and waved it towards the other room. "What you really mean is that there's still a little something of him left to starve. But it's so little, really — sometimes it seems he's nothing but bright eyes and bones."