War in Heaven (56 page)

By the next morning, the whole district around the Merripen Green had erupted in a pogrom against the meat-sellers; by nightfall, the riots had spread all the way to the Old City. Over the next few days, gangs of armed harijan and others killed hundreds of wormrunners, even those selling nothing worse than diamonds or stolen firestones. They shut down hundreds of meat shops, even those selling real muskox hams and shagshay steaks. Much of this meat they blindly cast into great bonfires ignited from faggots of shatterwood. They cast the bodies of the dead wormrunners and their poor butchered victims into these infernos as well. All through the earliest part of deep winter, a dark, greasy smoke filled the air, and the streets of the city from the Hofgarten to the Ashtoreth District reeked with the smell of burning flesh. Only later, as the starvation worsened, would the people of Neverness realize how much good food had gone up in flames.

It was during this time of fire and midnight executions that Danlo began the final sculpting of his face. Constancio implanted huge, new teeth into Danlo's jawbone, and he thickened the bone all around Danlo's eyes. He flattened out his nose, paying special attention to the muscles of the nostrils so that Danlo might be able to close his airways against the cold at will. By the 15th of deep winter, Danlo no longer recognized himself. And then Constancio did the delicate work on his vocal cords and eyes. Mallory Ringess had spoken in a bright, bold baritone not easy to duplicate. Three times Constancio had to cut and recut all through Danlo's larynx to get the timbre of his voice just right. The eyes proved even more difficult to sculpt. Constancio had considered three options for transforming these windows to Danlo's soul: first, he might have implanted bacterial colonies into Danlo's irises to change their colour; second, he might have cloned and grown for Danlo whole new organs of sight; and third, he might simply have shaped artificial corneas to cover Danlo's eyes and brighten them from a deep and liquid blue to the piercing blue eyes of Mallory Ringess. It was this last option that Constancio chose, but he kept having trouble with the colour. No matter how carefully he matched the blue to the hologram of Mallory Ringess, every time he lifted the artificial corneas on to Danlo's eyes he looked at Danlo in frustration and cursed.

"There's something strange about your eyes," he told Danlo after he had tried on the fourteenth pair of corneas. "The light — too bright, always too bright. Mallory Ringess had eyes that pierced like a laser, but no matter what I do, yours blaze like a star."

Constancio, who was not usually given to mysticism, attributed this brightness to some inner quality of Danlo's soul that shone through his eyes. He looked down at the gleaming artificial corneas that he held in the palm of his hand, and shook his head.

"You're a strange man," he said. "And I — I am who I am because I've always achieved perfection in my sculptings. Perhaps we should grow you new eyes and see what you look like after they're implanted."

"But that would take many days, yes?"

"Of course — but I've promised that you shall look exactly like Mallory Ringess."

"Perhaps Mallory Ringess, if he were to return to the city today, would not look exactly as he did when you made your holograms of him."

Danlo, of course, was by now very familiar with the holograms of his father, for he had been studying them the last thirty days in order to be able to mime the patterns of his speech, as well as his facial expressions and mannerisms.

"It's your choice, you know," Constancio said, shrugging his shoulders.

Danlo reached out to touch the artificial corneas, which looked like tiny blue cups and were almost as soft as the tissues of his own tongue. He said, "I have decided, then."

"Very well," Constancio said. "I'll seal them today."

And so Constancio performed the last of the surgeries for which Danlo had contracted. The artificial corneas covering Danlo's eyes could easily be removed by another cutter — or just as easily be left in place for the rest of Danlo's life. When Constancio had finished sealing the artificial tissues to the real corneas curving over Danlo's pupils and irises, he invited Danlo to remove his clothes and to stand naked before a mirror that he brought into his cutting chamber.

"
Ecce homo,
" he said. "Behold the man that I have made."

And Danlo, gazing out through eyes that were the same deep blue eyes he had always known and yet appeared quite differently, beheld an astonishing sight. There stood a great bear of a man, an Alaloi hunter covered in thick black hair almost as dense as fur. His arms were as thick as clubs; his legs were like tree trunks drawing strength from the earth. And his face. His massive jaw and great jutting browridges suggested granite cut from mountains; his eyes were twin chunks of blue ice reflecting the light of the sun. In truth, it was a savage, primitive face out of memory and time, and frightening to look upon, but it bore also a great sensitivity and intelligence. Once, Mallory Ringess had worn such a face. And now Danlo, staring into the mirror, marvelled that the face of his father had become his own.

"I am he," Danlo said in a voice that sounded strange to him. "Truly, I look almost exactly like him, don't I?"

"There's not another cutter in the city that could have done what I've done," Constancio said. And then he pointed between Danlo's legs at his membrum, at the blue and red scars running along the shaft. "Of course, the cutter who made these sculpted clumsily — if you'd like, I could redo them so that the pattern is more evenly spaced."

"Thank you, no," Danlo said. He didn't tell him that it was his own grandfather, Leopold Soli himself, who had cut these scars during his passage to manhood. Nor did he recount how the great Soli had died before Danlo had completed his passage.

"Then we are finished, aren't we?" Constancio said. "I believe the contract has been completed."

"Yes," Danlo said, putting on his clothes. Although the white shagshay fur still fitted him, he had had to acquire a new kamelaika and boots to accommodate his thick new limbs.

"Very well," Constancio said, and he led him downstairs through his richly decorated house to the door. "Then we should say farewell. I don't expect I'll see you again — unless you wish to be changed back into your old self or some other form."

"I ... am happy with this one," Danlo said, making a fist and feeling the great strength of his forearm flow down into his hand.

"I understand. Though I confess it's still a mystery why you should choose to look precisely like Mallory Ringess."

"But you will keep the wondering about this mystery to yourself, yes?"

"Of course, of course. You're entitled to your secrets — you've paid me almost enough to glue my own lips closed."

"And do you remember that this payment is forfeit if you should tell anyone about the sculpting?"

"Of course I remember." Constancio pointed into his sun room, which opened off the hallway. There set on a black shatterwood stand gleamed the diamond scryer's sphere that had once belonged to Danlo's mother. "It's a beautiful thing, isn't it? Beautiful, beautiful."

"Yes, truly it is."

"Farewell, then, Danlo of Kweitkel."

"Farewell, Constancio of Alesar."

The two men bowed to each other, and then Danlo made his way down Constancio's walk, through his gate and out into the street. As always he kept his mask securely fastened. In truth, he skated the streets with every nerve fibre of every sense burning for signs of danger. He prayed that he might finish the last of his preparations before some inevitable encounter exposed him as a mime of Mallory wi Soli Ringess.

And then later that night something happened that threatened to undo his entire plan — and all that was most precious to him in life. As he sat with Tamara and Jonathan in their fireroom, drinking a weak green tea and telling stories, he tried to think how he might say goodbye to them. According to his habit, Jonathan had nestled comfortably on his lap; Tamara knelt by the stove roasting a single skewer of baldo nuts, which was all they had to eat. With his dark, sad eyes, Jonathan stared at these nine nuts as if nothing else in all the world could possibly interest him. But when Danlo finished telling of the hunter who talked with the thallow, Jonathan looked up towards his facemask and said, "I like that story, Father."

Danlo smiled because it pleased him to be addressed this way. Ten days ago, all of his own, Jonathan had begun calling him Father, and neither Danlo nor Tamara had the heart to continue the fiction that his father was a pilot lost among the stars. "I like that story, too," Danlo said.

"And I like the way you tell it — the way you make the sound of a thallow. How do you do that?"

"By listening to the thallows speaking to each other," Danlo said. "And by trying to speak to them."

"Your voice sounds different," Jonathan observed. "Is that from calling out like a thallow?"

"My voice, my blessed voice," Danlo said, trading looks with Tamara.

And then, as Tamara's haggard eyes captured all of Danlo's attention, Jonathan did an astonishing thing. Although he was terribly weak with hunger, he reached out with all the speed of a striking serpent and pulled the mask up over Danlo's head. But where Tamara gasped to see the changes cut into Danlo's flesh and almost dropped her skewer of nuts, Jonathan only stared at him and asked, "Why are you wearing a new face, Father?"

"You ... know that it is I, then?"

"But who else could you be?"

"But you said that my voice sounds different."

"Well,
all
of you is really different, but you're still you, aren't you?"

"Truly I am."

"All of you looks different except your eyes."

"My ... eyes?"

"Well, they look different, too — they're too blue, like thallow eggs. But they
look
the same. I mean, the way you look at me, the way you look at Mother, at everything — it's all the same."

"I see."

"You once told me that the stars were the eyes of the Old Ones who died. Your eyes are like that, like stars."

"Truly?"

"You know, the way it doesn't matter if it's a hazy night or the Golden Ring colours the sky gold, the stars shine through always just the same."

Again Danlo smiled because Jonathan always said the most astonishing things.

"You have beautiful eyes, Father."

"Thank you. So do you."

"But the rest of your face — why do you want to look like an Alaloi?"

"You know about the Alaloi, then?"

"Of course I do — haven't you been telling me stories about them?"

"Yes, but I have not
told
you that they were Alaloi stories."

"What's it like to be an Alaloi?" Jonathan wondered. "Pilar said that they live in caves and hunt real animals for meat. They must be like animals, to kill animals."

While Tamara brought over the roasted nuts on a plate, Danlo explained to Jonathan about the Alaloi. He told him that the Alaloi were truly human beings — in some ways more human than the men and women who dwelt safely in their heated apartments in cities such as Neverness and never even thought about the great chain of being upon which their very lives depended. All life, Danlo said, lived off other life. The krill of the oceans ate the plankton, and the whales ate the krill, but over time all life evolved and grew stronger.

"If you look at it deeply enough, life is always savage and cruel," Danlo said. "What makes the Alaloi different from us is only that they have chosen to live closer to the cruelty and not look away."

"Then they aren't really like animals, are they?"

"Truly, they
are
animals, as are we. But they are also something more. What makes human beings truly human is this moreness."

"You told me that you would never kill or harm an animal just to eat," Jonathan said. "Is this what it means to be more?"

"Yes, partly — I believe that it is," Danlo said.

"Then are you more human than the Alaloi?"

"No, not more human. Only more ... civilized."

Despite his great hunger, Jonathan slowly chewed a baldo nut as he had been taught, then observed, "But you eat baldo nuts."

In truth, that evening Danlo had given all his nuts to Jonathan, as had Tamara.

"Well, I still have to eat something, don't I?"

"But you're
not
eating, Father." Jonathan looked at Tamara kneeling beside him and said, "Aren't you hungry, Mother?"

"I had something earlier while you were with Pilar," Tamara lied. "Now, please eat before your food grows cold."

For a while, Jonathan ate his nuts even as he remained sitting on Danlo's lap. To Danlo, brushing the hair away from Jonathan's face, it seemed that his head was too large for his body, even with his belly ballooning out below the sunken chest in starvation. His skin felt too hot, too, as if he had another fever. But for all Jonathan's privation, Danlo told himself that his son was still strong. And then Jonathan said something that changed his mind and almost caused him to abandon his plan to impersonate Mallory Ringess.

"I'm still hungry," Jonathan admitted after finishing the last nut. He looked at Danlo as if in contemplation of all that he had told him that night. "I can feel my body eating itself. And it hurts, Father — why does it have to hurt so much?"

There came a moment, looking into Jonathan's dark, trusting eyes, when protecting his life became infinitely more important than his plan to bring down Hanuman, more important even than saving the lives of everyone in the world or on the many worlds of the universe itself.

He might truly die
, Danlo thought.
He still might die.

Even if Danlo were to unmask himself that very night, perhaps announcing himself like God at the door to Hanuman's cathedral, Jonathan might continue to grow weaker as he starved. Danlo, as Mallory Ringess, might indeed cast down Hanuman as Lord of the Way of Ringess and bring an end to the war — only to find that it might take several tendays to restore the food shipments to the city. And in that time, Jonathan might very well sicken beyond hope and go over to the other side of day.