War in Heaven (82 page)

Despite himself, Danlo leaped forwards to save his son. But he was too late, for Jonathan's silken garments suddenly burst into bright orange flames as if they had been soaked in sihu oil. Danlo fell over him and bore him down to the ground, all the while trying to beat out the flames with his hands. But the fire burned only hotter and hotter; it burned Danlo's hands and face and then it began burning deep into Jonathan's flesh. He lay beneath Danlo shuddering and writhing and screaming as he pleaded, "Father, Father — please help me!" The terrible heat began to char Jonathan's skin; soon a black crust formed over his chest and across his face and began spreading over his whole body. As the fire worked deeper and deeper, his skin cracked open and red liquids leaked out before bubbling and steaming off into the air. The stench of roasting meat caused Danlo's belly to heave. "I don't want to die! Please, Father — don't let me burn to ... ahhhh! Oh, Father, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts!"

For what seemed for ever, Danlo held the burning body of his son in his arms as he felt himself burning too. And then he looked down at the twisted piece of charcoal lying motionless on his lap; he watched as what was left of Jonathan's body fell to ashes in his hands. "Jonathan, Jonathan,
mi alasharia la shantih,
" he whispered. Slowly he stood and lifted his blackened and bleeding hands towards the sky. "No!" he cried out. "No, no, no, no!"

And the sky answered him:

Your choice, Danlo. It's always been your choice.

Upon these words, the ground beneath him suddenly softened as if soaked by water and turned to mud. He felt himself being sucked downwards for a long time into warm, rotting loam. And then the sense of oozing materiality all about him dissolved into a stark, cold nothingness as he began falling into a dark cavern without light or sound, without bottom or end. He fell then; through whole universes as vacant as a dead man's eyes, through the neverness of all his dreams and hopes for life, he fell and fell, on and on. He was utterly alone like a stone spinning through space, and he fell down through the black and breathless night, and then down at last through the golden dome of Hanuman's sanctuary and back into the hell of his drugged, burning, paralysed body.

There is a war that opens the doors of heaven. Glad are the warriors whose fate is to fight such a war.

— Bhagavad Gita 2.32

When things look like a nightmare, wake up.

— Source unknown

Danlo opened his eyes to look up upon the clear, curving windows of the sanctuary's dome. He found himself still paralysed and lying on the Fravashi carpet that covered the cold stone floor. He felt the golden pillow that Hanuman had placed beneath his head; he felt cold currents of air falling across his face and a burning behind his eyes, but he still couldn't feel most of his body. For a moment he let the light of the familiar deep winter stars play across his eyes, and then he turned his head to see Hanuman standing above him.

"You should know, it's your choice," Hanuman said, looking at Danlo in all his helplessness. "It's always been your choice."

Danlo saw that the clearface moulded to Hanuman's skull had quieted to a glossy purple as if he had temporarily turned away from the Universal Computer.

"My choice," Danlo forced out. "Yes, truly it is."

Painfully, he turned his head away from Hanuman to gaze at the objects of the room. The sulki grids and the many computers glittered in the light of the flame globes; the chess set with its missing white god still stood ready for someone to play with its ivory and black shatterwood pieces. And nearby, on top of the dining table where Hanuman had left it, the devotionary computer still beamed forth the hologram of Nikolos Daru Ede.

"You have made your choices, too," Danlo said. For a while he looked closely at the chess set, and he could see a tiny crack running through one of the black squares of the board. And then he remembered the terrible thing that he had seen during his total interface with the Universal Computer. He turned back towards Hanuman and said, "I know that you murdered your father, Hanu."

With a sad, bitter smile, Hanuman bowed his head to Danlo. And then he said, "I had to kill him, you should know. It was the only way that I could keep him from violating my mind. My
self.
It was the only way I could leave Catava and come to Neverness to pursue my fate."

"I ... am sorry."

"Please don't be. For me, really, it was the beginning of everything. It opened a door that made all things possible."

One door and one door only opens upon the golden future that I have seen
, Danlo thought. But now, as he looked at Hanuman's icy blue eyes shot with blood and the pain of his terrible fate, he saw that this single iron door remained bolted and closed for ever more.
One door only ...

Through the cold dark windows of the sanctuary, Danlo stared out upon the night-time stars. In places the yellowish haze of the Golden Ring obscured their brilliance while directly above him in near-space the looming vastness of the Universal Computer devoured the stars altogether. It was as if the hand of God had smeared a great circle of black paint against the shimmering heavens. And yet even in the darkness near this growing machine, many lights flashed out into the night as various ships of the Fellowship Fleet manoeuvred with those of the Ringists for position above Icefall. In and out of the manifold these lightships darted like silver needles stitching long, luminescent threads through the fabric of realspace. The pattern that they wove blazed across the sky in a stunning complexity.

There was much other radiance, too: the silvery glister of the moons and the satellites of the planetary defence system that shot out bursts of laser light in thousands of quick, measured bursts. Originally they had been designed to destroy incoming missiles or even small asteroids, but now their intense ruby fire had been turned towards the ships of the Fellowship's fleet. It bespoke the art of the Fellowship's pilots that only a few black ships disintegrated beneath this fire into showers of scintillating white sparks.

It is too late
, Danlo thought.
I cannot stop the battle.

He rolled his head off the pillow and tried to press his ear to the floor. He could no longer hear the shouts of the thousands of men and women echoing in the cathedral below him or sounding through the streets outside. It had fallen late, he knew, and not even the most devoted of godlings would wish to stand beneath the naked sky while war raged across the heavens.

I cannot stop the war.

Just then one of the sulki grids flickered into life, and a hologram of a man appeared near the shatterwood table. Hanuman immediately turned his attention towards this hologram of the pilot, Krishnan Kadir. They began to speak together in hushed, hurried tones. Although Danlo could not hear much of what they said, he understood that Krishnan was reporting on the progress of the battle. And more, he (or rather his lightship's computer) was communicating to Hanuman the disposition of many thousands of the Fellowship and Ringist ships almost as they fell from fixed-point to fixed-point and from star to star. Danlo watched as the clearface surrounding Hanuman's head flared into a brilliant purple and began to fill his brain with streams of vital information. Hanuman would use this information to enable the Universal Computer to make a model of the battle almost moment by moment; he would use its vast computing power to predict how Cristobel the Bold and Helena Charbo and the other Fellowship pilot-captains would deploy their ships. And thus he would attempt to run the battle itself even as it spread among the stars above Neverness.

"Go back to Lord Salmalin," Hanuman told Krishnan Kadir whose ship had fallen out into near-space above Icefall. "Go find the Lord Pilot and tell him that Cristobel the Bold has led the Twelfth Battle Group away from Lidiya Luz. Therefore he should order six cadres to lay a trap near the stars of the Primula Double and the ... "

Danlo, still lying helpless on the floor, didn't hear anything more of what Hanuman said. Nor did he wish to, for he had no need of such useless information.

It is over, then
, he thought.
Hanuman's advantage is too great, and surely he will win the battle.

For a moment he stared at the hellish light that now streamed out of the clearface and coloured Hanuman's face a hideous, glowing violet. And then he shut his eyes as a sudden thought swept through him with all the terrible heat of a firestorm:

I wish he were dead.
As Danlo's heart beat hard up through his throat and into his throbbing head, he waited for this astonishing thought itself to weaken and die. But it did not. Each moment, with every new beat of his heart and breath that he took, it grew only stronger. Something sharp and terrible like a black iron spearpoint heated to a glowing red drove through his eye straight into his brain.
Please die, Hanu. I want you to die. Please die, now, please die and die and die ...

For a long time Danlo lay beneath the sanctuary's dome in utter silence as he let all his hatred for Hanuman well up inside him. Never, in all his life, had he broken his vow of ahimsa so completely and wilfully. He felt this violation of his promise never to harm any living thing as a betrayal of his deepest self; he felt it as a sickening heat deep in his belly that spread out to poison his heart and lungs and every other part of him. In utter despair he ground his teeth together as he slowly shook his head back and forth across the carpet.

And then a new thought that filled every cell of his body with liquid fire came over him:
I want to die.

He felt his heart beat once, twice and then three times. For much of his life he had counted the beats of his heart, and now he wished for the silence of this most central and alive of all his body's organs; now and for ever more he wished the number of his heart's beats to fall to zero.

"I want to die," he whispered. "
Ahira, Ahira —
please let me die."

There was no longer any reason for him to live. Truly, he thought, it would be much better for everyone if he simply died. If he could find his way to the other side of day, then Hanuman would have no reason to hunt down Tamara and threaten her with torture. And thus Hanuman would be unable to use him, as Mallory Ringess, to further his plans.

I want to die
, he thought.
I have come here today to die.

He looked around the room at all the glittering cybernetica and the devotionary computer sitting on the black shatterwood table; he looked at Hanuman, at his sad and tormented face. His sunken skin glowed a ghastly violet in the light of the computer that he wore moulded to his skull; all his bones stuck out as if time had reduced his once-beautiful countenance to a hideous death's-head. It reminded him that Hanuman — and everyone else — would be always only a heartbeat away from death.

Please let me die; please let me die, now, here, in this cold room.

Ever since he had been born, it seemed, he had tried to face life with with all the terrible courage of life. But now Jonathan was dead beyond the dream of resurrection, and soon Tamara might be lost to him, too. And all the Alaloi tribes, without him to find a cure for the virus that infected them, would certainly die, frothing at the lips and leaking blood from their ears even as the Devaki tribe had died years ago. As he gazed at the black squares of Hanuman's chess set, he finally understood an important thing about himself. Many times since his childhood — on the ice of the frozen sea, in the library staring at a warrior-poet's gleaming killing knife, in the House of the Dead on Tannahill — he had faced death with an equanimity that others had regarded as almost superhuman. But it was all a lie. He knew what no one else did: that he was really the worst of cowards. True courage was the ability to live with fear while acting according to the deeper purposes of life; it was a love beyond the love of the self that took one into a deeper and truer self. He realized then that he did not fear death as others did; perhaps he never had. In truth he longed for it with a terrible desire that pulled at his heart and touched every cell of his body with a bittersweet pain. Ever since that terrible day fourteen years before when the slow evil had befallen the Devaki tribe, he had longed to journey with Haidar and Chandra and Choclo and all the other blessed members of his family to the other side of day where the stars sear the sky with their bright and ageless eyelight. And now, with the last breaths of those whom he had loved most calling to him in the wind outside the cathedral, he would finally find a way to join them.

To die and die and die and ...

And so once again he fell into the dark, cold cavern that opens inside everyone's soul. He felt a force greater and more ancient than gravity pulling at every atom of his being; inside his heart and belly and brain, a terrible spinning blackness nauseated him even as it dazzled his mind's eye with its dark, glittering lights and sucked him downwards. He knew that he could will himself to die, if only he could find the way. There were secrets to life, and thus to death. Many of the yogin branch of the cetics, in their quest for ultimate control over the bodymind, had developed techniques to still the breath and stop the heart from beating. As little more than a child, he himself had remembered the Alaloi art of
lotsara
in which the body's last reserves of fat could be burned in a sudden blaze of heat that might keep one from freezing to death. And on Tannahill, in the Hall of Heaven, he had looked deep inside himself to find the source of his will and the secret of his self. He had fallen ever deeper into the void where pure consciousness wells up out of the blackness like a stream of shimmering lights, thence to coalesce and become the elements that moved the thoughts through his brain. Almost, he had found this blessed place. And he had almost died. And now, like a lightship falling through the luminous layers of the manifold towards the centre of the universe, he must finally go on to the very end of his journey.