War in Heaven (80 page)

"If we
did
choose to remain here," he called up to Jonathan, "where would you want to live?"

"On our own world, Father. Couldn't we have a world all of our own?"

"I suppose that we could."

"Couldn't we
create
a world of our own? You and I, Mama, too? Couldn't we make it as we wished it to be?"

Just then Jonathan, biting hard on a fat red apple to leave his hands free for climbing, came down from the tree. He jumped on to the grass in front of Danlo and handed him the apple. And then he pointed to the mountains north of them and said, "I'd always want mountains like these, only with more snow like Mount Attakel and Mount Urkel. I'd miss the great white bears if our world was too warm. I'd miss the shagshay herds and the ice hawks."

Yes, Danlo thought, looking northwards, he too would want great, towering mountains whose slopes were shagged with many layers of ice and snow. He would want white foxes and shatterwood trees, wolves and wolverines and thallows who nested high up in the rocky crags. In a universe of his own creation, anything would be possible.

The whole universe.

Far out over the sea, many miles to the west, he at last caught sight of a brilliant white bird soaring into the sky. It was
Ahira
, he saw, the snowy owl — the wisest and wildest of all animals. When he looked very hard, he could see
Ahira
's mysterious orange and black eyes looking back at him. A shock of recognition burned through his brain and leapt along his spine like a lightning bolt; it touched every part of him with its electric fire. This splendid bird
seemed
almost as real as anything he had ever beheld. Just as Jonathan, pressing up against his side, felt almost as real as a real child. He wondered, then, at the true nature of reality. There was something utterly strange about it that he could approach but never quite apprehend. It was as if in looking at reality too closely — like examining the grains of light and darkness in a foto of a familiar face — it became ever less real. Wasn't reality, like the perception of a foto, merely a construct of his mind? Didn't he, after all, in the firing of his brain's neurons in precise ways, create his own universe? And if this were so, if the reality of this electronic universe were truly as real as the one that he had left behind, raging in war and exploding its stars, then why not remain here for ever?

The whole universe.

For an endless moment, Danlo stared west at the glittering waters of the sea. It came to him then that he had reached the last of his courage and will. His great journey to reach the centre of the universe that had taken up most of his life was finally over, for he had no more strength to go on. As a boy he had buried all eighty-eight members of his tribe and then buried his grandfather, as well. Soon after that, he himself had nearly died trying to find the fabled city of Neverness. Starving, frostbitten and alone on the ice of the sea, he had had to eat his best sled dog in order to stay alive. And then, after the regeneration of his flesh, and all his hopes and dreams, as a young man he had lost Tamara to the rape of her memories and had lost Hanuman as a friend. How much loss could one man bear? How much suffering could the universe inflict upon a man before he shook his head in utter denial and turned away from it? Suffering had no end, he thought, and infinite were the streets of the City of Pain. Still a young man, he alone had survived a chaos space inside the manifold where ten other fellow pilots had become lost; he had lived to journey on into the heart of the Vild and become witness (and catalyst) of the death of the Narain people and their entire world. And then he had returned to Neverness, only to be imprisoned and tortured with knives and the hideous ekkana drug. And as terrible as this torture of his flesh, it had been as nothing next to the anguish of watching Jonathan starve and scream as the cutter had taken off his feet. O blessed God! he wondered, how much suffering could one universe hold?
Jonathan, Jonathan, mi alasharia la shantih, you are dead — I felt your dying breath upon my lips and burned your body down by the sea.
But now Jonathan lived again and pressed his head up against Danlo's hand. All the dead and the dying could be redeemed, healed, made almost real. Even those friends and fellow pilots who were dying in this moment in the battle for the Star of Neverness. He himself, as creator of his own universe, could accomplish this miracle. All that he needed to do was to surrender, to give in to his desire to escape the senseless suffering of life. Truly, he thought, there was always a time to admit defeat and simply give up.

No, I must not
, Danlo thought.
I have promised Old Father that I would never give up.

Not defeat, Danlo, but victory. The victory of a man who has the courage to become a god.

"No, no," Danlo said, "I never wanted to become a god."

No, you always wanted even more. Well, then, look up away from this world and you shall know the full power of interfacing the Universal Computer.

Thus bidden, Danlo circled Jonathan's body with in arms as he pulled his head back and looked up through the sky to the universe beyond. The glaring blueness suddenly gave way to a pure black, and there in the yawning void a million other earths appeared. He stared at these spinning blue and white jewels for a while and then his vision exploded outwards in an expanding sphere as it had before. A million more worlds burst into view, and then ten million. Soon he found himself able to look upon all twenty-five billion worlds of the universe, all at once. And not just to study them, as an astronomer through a telescope, but to dive down hawklike with his mind's eyes through layers of atmosphere and instantiate at will in whatever city or forest that he chose. On one earth he watched as a race of blond-haired giants danced around a crackling woodfire in a clearing and howled out their praises to a god named Hanuman. And on another earth, he saw a pygmy-like people building a tower of white marble straight up into the sky. He saw earths whose people had evolved so far towards perfection that the air above their cities fairly flickered with the lights of many men and women returning to their god. Other newly created earths were spectacular with virgin forests and clear, tropical waters teeming with thousands of species of fish; they but awaited the coming of human beings to fulfil their purpose. And all this — and million times a million times more — he saw all at once, all in the same moment. And the miracle of it was that he understood all that he saw, and that he could truly
see
each person on each separate earth, not collectively as a colourful smear of humanity, but one by one like pearls upon an infinitely unravelling strand. He could see rocks and trees and shells along countless white sand beaches — anything that he wished to see anywhere.

And the power and pleasure of such vision made him want to melt away into the lightning information storms of the Universal Computer. This great machine, floating in the space of another universe almost infinitely far away, seemed as near as the vivid field of vision just behind his eyes. In truth, it was as if a new lobe had been miraculously grafted on to his brain — a lobe as vast as a moon. He felt no separation from it. He
was
the Universal Computer, and it was him. He sensed its programs and information flows in almost the same way that he did any other part of his mind. Crystal-like complexes of ideas and patterns of thought formed up and flashed through him at tremendous speed. He found himself able to apprehend these patterns at a glance; it was like understanding, in a nanosecond, all the words that human beings had ever uttered, or written down, or thought. He could
feel
his intelligence expanding out towards infinity in a great, electric rush that thrilled him with a sense of his vast power. He watched a hundred people on a hundred worlds going about the business of their artificial lives, and he perceived the programs that animated each of them. And then he looked upon the faces of a million people, and then all ten billion trillion people on all the twenty-five billion earths. He saw the men and women (and children) dissolve into glittering bits of information, each one into its own unique pattern. And he saw how each of the individual programs encoding their selfnesses sprang from a single master program that ran the Universal Computer itself. That ran him, that
was
him, at least in this moment when he shared total interface with Hanuman. He himself was nothing but information rushing at the speed of light and forming itself into patterns. Off and on, off
or
on, a trillion trillion light pulses flashed through the computer's optical circuitry every ten trillionth of a nanosecond. This godlike radiance filled all the interior of the dark, moon-sized Universal Computer; it filled all the interior of Danlo's mind like ten thousand supernovas exploding into light. In a moment of time, he became this light that filled an entire universe; he became the light that
created
the universe itself.

White bright light glittering blazing becoming all that is I am God my God I am one alone so always totally alone like a seed buried beneath black rotting earth I am the one who creates roses burst forth out of dreams inside dreams like perfect diamond crystals without pain fear suffering no disease no death no flaw no life as life as it has been has been so terrible while the acorn dies in becoming the oak spreading out infinitely beneath the sun whose son kills the father kills the sun all suns within that universe because life is the disease that has no cure except in creation of this universe out of dreams of infinities of worlds and stars all matter energy spacetime information collapsing coalescing folding into the one perfect universal computing God out of nothing but pure information like white bright light ...

For what seemed an eternity, Danlo dwelled at the centre of this brilliant white sphere of cybernetic samadhi. All reality seemed to dissolve into swirling, glittering bits of information that might be tessellated like tiny diamond tiles into an infinite number of possibilities. If his mind had had lips and a voice, it would have gasped in pure pleasure at the temptation to remain here for ever and create his own universe. But at last he returned to the meadow below the city. He found himself holding tightly on to Jonathan and marvelling at the soft, woody smell of his hair.

The whole universe, Danlo. The whole universe.

"It ... is almost perfect," Danlo said as he stroked Jonathan's hair and looked off at the seagulls gliding over the ocean. The interface with the Universal Computer had almost unnerved him, causing him to stand unsteadily and gasp for air.

Remain here with me and we shall make it perfect.

Danlo's whole bodymind still crackled with the lightning-like ecstasy with which Hanuman's computer had touched him. He knew then that in sharing interface so deeply, Hanuman had shared his great dream and perhaps even something of his soul. And it all lay before Danlo like an endless ocean streaming outwards in all directions. He wanted to drink in the totality of this dream in one huge swallow, but because he had now returned to the limitations of his human self, he had to be content with apprehending it sip by sip. He saw that Hanuman
needed
to share his great vision with one other person; only then might the pain of his terrrible aloneness go away. And so Hanuman was trying to capture him as a flower does a bee with the sweetness of its nectar.

...
falling down upon fields of flowers melting golden into honeysuckle sweetness goodness truth beauty love love love ...

There was a moment. Danlo stood breathing in the heavenly fragrance of the fruits and flowers bursting out of the world all around him, and he wanted to remain there for ever. He wanted to say, "All right, then, Hanu — if you'd like." These words were as close to his lips as the taste of honey on his teeth. But then he looked off into the deep blue sky behind his eyes, and he began to remember.

"If I
did
remain here," he said, "I would be betraying those I left behind."

Upon hearing the pain and indecision in Danlo's voice, Jonathan broke free from his embrace and turned to look at him. "Who, then, Father?" he asked.

And Danlo replied, "Your mother — the
real
Tamara. She ... who would give her last piece of bread to the children who are still starving in the streets of the city. And the Alaloi tribes. All the people who have suffered in this
shaida
war. All people everywhere."

"But why can't we just bring them all here?"

"Because it would be — "

"Why can't we bring
everything
here?"

Danlo smiled at his son's naivete and said, "The whole universe? Every suffering bit of creation? Would you bring every rock and tree and tiger and snowworm and star of the other universe into this one, then?"

"Why not?"

"It ... is not possible."

"But why, Father?"

"Because in order for the Universal Computer to completely simulate the real universe, it would have to be infinitely large itself."

At this Jonathan only smiled, mysteriously and knowingly, and yet hopefully, too. It occurred to Danlo that Hanuman would have smiled thus as a child before he had lost his innocence. And then he remembered something that he had seen during his total interface with the Universal Computer, a terrible and tragic thing that Hanuman had done when he had been little more than a child. And he remembered something else as well. Suddenly, like a light being turned to full power inside a dimly lit room, his inner sight illuminated the totality of Hanuman's dream. The utter horror and hubris of it caused him to gasp as if struck between the ribs with a hokkee stick and to drop to one knee. "My God," he cried out, "it is not possible!"

But it
was
truly possible; at least it was possible that Hanuman would attempt to accomplish what even gods such as the Solid State Entity or the April Colonial Intelligence must have regarded as insane. For he truly dreamed of making his Universal Computer infinitely large. All his plans were designed towards this great purpose. After he had led the Ringists to destroy the Fellowship of Free Worlds in the battle that Danlo could almost feel flashing and pulsing all about him, he would begin consolidating his victory. The Ringists, they who served him in bringing forth a golden future, would complete the first phase of the construction of the Universal Computer. Then Hanuman would use its vast computing power to discover the secret of manufacturing and manipulating tachyons, those glittering and almost imaginary particles that could travel through spacetime infinitely faster than light. He would exult in possessing this technology that the gods themselves used to communicate information across thousands of light years in a moment; then in triumph he would initiate the Universal Computer's second phase. All across the three thousand Civilized Worlds — and in ten thousand times as many star systems containing dead, unpeopled worlds — his Ringists would carry in the holds of their deep-ships the disassemblers and other robots used to tear apart matter into its constituent elements. Asteroids, comets, interstellar dust, even whole planets — all would be food for the maw of his galaxy-wrecking machines. And then, from the holds of the deep-ships his faithful godlings would release other self-replicating robots. Assemblers tinier than a blood cell would use the clouds of elements to remake themselves explosively a trillion times over; it would be like dropping a bacteria colony into an ocean of sugar. And they would fabricate millions of miles of neurologics and optical circuitry as they built other black, moon-sized lobes identical to the Universal Computer. Hanuman calculated that the stars of the Fallaways alone contained enough matter to make a billion of them. And just as Ede the God, master of computational origami, had folded together the many millions of component parts of his nebula-sized brain, Hanuman would begin connecting the lobes into a single computer that spanned twenty thousand light years of realspace from Ultima to New Earth.