War in Heaven (84 page)

For a long time he dwelled in the twilight world of sheer existence, unable to go forwards or back. He saw at last what Hanuman had understood long ago, after his hellish remembrance of the Elder Eddas: that there were always two ways to look at reality. And Hanuman's, he thought, must be the true way after all. Reality was really just hell, and existence was a torment of the eternal fire that licked at all things with its burning, red tongue. He himself, at his deepest level, wasn't really a man with two strong hands and blue eyes full of memories and dreams, but only endless atoms and electrons, only a tiny piece of the universe that existed always in a pure state of being. In a way, the universe devoured his selfness as a thallow might rend apart a snowworm, and thus he existed as the universe did, without plan or purpose, but only to be. But to be
what?
To be only itself and nothing more. Truly, he thought, nothing was more than itself, and everything was nothing but pure being that buzzed and hissed and burned and quivered like a dark red heart muscle to the touch of electric impulses that came from nowhere but within itself. And everything existed in itself everywhere in the black infinities of space and time, and everywhere he looked, there was nothing but things existing in vast, countless profusion. Why was there not one star in the Milky Way galaxy or a hundred, but more than a hundred
billion?
Why were there so many human beings swarming the stars like blinded insects writhing in flames when only a single man had all that he needed within himself to suffer and bleed and remember and rage at the essential agony of life?

I am not I. I am a hundred billion nerve cells writhing at the touch of the ekkana poison. I am trillions upon trillions of atoms spinning and vibrating and screaming down and down into a dazzling darkness without bottom or end.

Ultimately he was nothing but matter moving in pained and horrified consciousness of itself. Quarks and neutrinos, electrons and infons and whole atoms — it all took part in a mad, meaningless dance of matter rushing towards completion in itself that it could never quite reach. For a long time he stared into this glittering mirror of pure being; almost for ever, it seemed, he looked for his own face or some other familiar object that might reassure him that at least one thing in all the universe existed as a finished work of art, inviolate, unchanging and charged with a purpose beyond itself. But all he saw was his eyes melting like cobalt marbles and his ivory-coloured flesh decomposing and dissolving into infinitesimally tiny bits, some of them reddish-black like dried blood, some of them metallic green like a beetle's broken exoskeleton. All matter continually and eternally crumbled apart like pieces of brittle tile, green and gold and chrome red, and reassembled a moment later into fantastic glittering tessellations. And in the next moment, these pointless creations shattered into dust, which melted and flowed together and fused into brilliant crystalline structures, only to fall apart again and again, a billion times each moment. A billion times in
one
moment, he looked inside to behold his face, looked for the wavering reflection of light against silvered glass to hold still for a single moment. But it all vibrated too quickly and splintered apart like a cathedral's stained glass windows bursting inwards beneath the irresistible force of the wind. No part of the universe was imperishable because all being was in time, and time broke apart all things like a boot suddenly stamping downwards upon a thin layer of ice or a man's hands snapping apart an ivory chess piece carved into the form of a god. The deeper he looked into the quivering heart of reality, the stranger it all seemed, at once utterly ruthless and overpowering and yet utterly fragile like ice crystals fracturing and fractalling down to infinity, faster and ever faster.

The speed of his descent into matter's onstreaming consciousness terrified and sickened him. It made him almost frantic to die. Time was the great tormentor, for each moment was connected to the next, inevitably, inexorably, endless moments of time, concatenations of moments forming up like pearls on an infinite silver strand only to fall off and disappear down into a black and fathomless hole. And there was no way out; there was no way to jump off the fiery wheel of creation as it spun wildly and dizzyingly out of control. To be thus trapped in time was to be in hell, for what was hell if not the burning of matter in the moment, and one moment burning up into another, on and on without substance, meaning or end? And Hanuman had always understood this. He had always seen that the universe, in all its breaking symmetries and insane oscillations, in all its shrieking and weeping and howling and praying, was always asking a single question, yes or no. And that the answer must finally be no because the universe was truly and essentially flawed. The very act of being demanded that matter continually consume and re-create itself in a perpetual perishing of forms. At its deepest level, movement itself was the source of all suffering and pain. To move was to be and thus eventually to decay and die. To move not, to discover the still point of creation at the centre of the wheel, would be to know the peace that all things sought but could never quite find. And so Hanuman had striven to make a different kind of universe outside and beyond this insane inferno that caught innocent children in the heat of deadly fevers or in the flesh-searing rain of radiation from exploding stars. And Danlo finally understood this, too. Deep in his bones, deep in his blood, he finally understood this strange and tragic being who gazed off into infinity with his pale,
shaida
eyes. For long ago he and Hanuman had come from the same brilliant star and their souls were made of the same fiery substance, which is why they loved and hated each other so deeply.

I am not I. I am Hanuman li Tosh. I am he, and he is I and there is no difference. Oh, Hanu, Hanu — I never truly saw you. I never knew who you truly are.

At last, as he lay like a corpse on the floor of the sanctuary, he saw how desperately Hanuman wanted to die. But Hanuman couldn't die,
wouldn't
die, because even as he suffered in the hell of his own being, he retained a crucial sense of his own selfness. He grasped on to this like a child clutching his father's hand at the edge of a cliff while a lake of fire opened below him. He was terrified to let go and perish in the flames and yet he couldn't find the courage to climb up to where his father waited in the sun.

For an eternity, it seemed, Danlo hung suspended in the same hellspace with Hanuman. He fell and fell while burning atoms of consciousness swirled all about him and through him, and yet it seemed that he didn't move at all. He, too, wanted to die. He must die, he would
will
himself to die because there was no reason that he should live. To end his life would be to disappear utterly into the neverness of pure being, and he had never feared this kind of personal extinction as did Hanuman.

He was as Hanuman li Tosh, truly, but he was also Danlo the Wild, lightbringer, son of the sun — and son of Mallory wi Soli Ringess. Death itself held no terror for him. But he was afraid of something else, something that he could feel beginning to move inside him but couldn't quite see. All brilliantly white like a star it shone, and it waited for him in all its infinite wildness and terrible beauty. It waited inside behind the same closed door as did death, and he knew that he would have to face it if he were to join Jonathan and all the fathers and mothers of his tribe on the other side of day.

One door and one door only opens upon the death that I long for. Why, then, can't I find the key to open it? What is it that I truly fear?

In the red chaos that swirled and crackled all around him like the flames from his son's funeral pyre, a golden door appeared. It floated just beyond his reach limned around its four edges with brilliant white light. It was the doorway to his deepest self, he knew, and if he wished to find the ultimate key to consciousness and will his heart to stop beating, he must open it and go all the way inside.

Danlo, Danlo, ti alasharu la shantih — make the journey and find peace on the other side of day.

Except for the rising of his belly with every involuntary breath that kept him alive, he lay motionless beneath the long windows of the sanctuary. The wind howled outside the cathedral, and he heard voices calling him. But, strangely, when he listened with his deepest senses, the cries and whispers that pulled at his heart came not from outside but from within. Haidar and Chandra and all his brothers and sisters were calling him to go over and join his tribe in death. His father was calling him, and his mother, too. And Jonathan. They were all calling him to remember how they had suffered that he might live even as they called for him to find a way out of the fear that had captured him so totally.

Danlo, Danlo — the only way out is in.

One voice rose above all the others on the cold wind that blew through his soul. It was a high, harsh voice, a terrible and beautiful voice, and it belonged to
Ahira
, the great snowy owl who was his other-self.
Ahira
called him to find his courage and find the way out of the fiery cage of his being; he called him to remember who he truly was and thus to remember the one thing that truly mattered.

Danlo, Danlo — the only way out is in towards the centre of yourself. But to go there you must first remember the answer to the riddle.

Lightning flashed inside him then, and for a moment he thought that some great secret had been revealed to him. But it was only the working of his other-sight; it was only the radiance of another window to the manifold flashing open and capturing a lightship within the fires of a fierce blue giant star. He lay stunned and shaking at the sufferings of all who had died before him, and he couldn't remember the first of the Twelve Riddles let alone the answer to it.

And then
Ahira's
high, terrible cry came clear inside him:
How do you capture a beautiful bird without killing its spirit?

And suddenly he knew that he must know the proper response to this question and he always had. The answer was in the snow and wind and in the blood-stained rocks of the cave where he had been born. It was in the earth of the burial ground of the Devaki tribe and in a single cell of algae in the belly of a snowworm and in a flake of ivory from a broken god.
The memory of all things is in all things.
To solve the riddle he must look within the carbon atoms of his mother's diamond sphere and in the diamond ring of his father that he now wore upon the little finger of his hand. And he must look inside himself. In his deep blue eyes he would see shimmering the riddle's second line, and he would hear its music in his blood; he would feel it streaming through his heart in a molecule of oxygen that had formed a part of Jonathan's dying breath. The answer lay buried deep inside him like four perfect diamonds. All he had to do was to reach inside the inferno of his being and wrest these beautiful jewels from the fire. Four words, four simple words that his grandfather had been unable to utter because he had died during Danlo's passage to manhood just before he could tell him the answer — and now Danlo must remember these terrible words that he had never heard. Could he do it? He
must
do it; he must will himself to remember or he would never complete the journey that he had begun so long ago.

How do you capture a beautiful bird without killing its spirit?

And the answer came to him:

By becoming the sky.

And then at last the door opened. A blast of fire fell over him and suffused him with its terrible energies, and he crossed the threshold into the source of life and death. At last he let go of Danlo the Child and Danlo the Pilot and Danlo Peacewise and Lightbringer — and all the other many selves who had imprisoned his deepest and truest self. He looked towards the sky and the stars and all the shimmering heavens, and he burned to hold the terrible and beautiful being who he truly was.

Blue inside blue inside ...

Only, could he truly hold it? The oneness that underlay all consciousness and material reality burned so brightly that it blinded him and melted away his body, mind and soul. It blazed with a light inside light that was infinitely brilliant, infinitely clear, infinitely deep. This marvellous unity was paradoxical in its essential nature, for it dwelled within itself beyond time and the multiplicity of the outer universe. It moved continually in patterns more beautiful than the rose windows of the cathedral, and yet at every point was as still and silent as the new-fallen snow. It was more empty than the black void between the galaxies and yet utterly full like a blue porcelain bowl overflowing with kalla. It was the neverness between moments of time, truly and yet it contained the possibilities of all things. It was everywhere the same, like water in an infinite ocean, and, like water, indivisible, in the sense that dividing water into litres, drams or drops would only ever yield more water. And even more it was like liquefied jewels, as if uncountable trillions of diamonds and emeralds and fire-stones had melted into a single, superluminal substance whose every point and part reflected the light of every other. The One shone with infinite points of silver and violet and living gold and yet was as clear as winter air beneath the deep blue dome of the sky.

Infinite possibilities.

All things had their source and being in this numinous oneness; all things came out of it like a thallow chick from an egg. At the still point of creation, the One waited in eternal and utter motionlessness and yet also burned to move and be. And here was the ultimate paradox: the One was all bliss and peace, the very essence of peace, and yet it was at utter war with itself. Out of a fundamental polarity and opposition of identical parts, it was always asking a single question, yes or no? And the answer everywhere in all its shimmering infinity was always yes, for only out of this eternal war in heaven could things come to be. And so the undifferentiated oneness differentiated itself into all things. This essential tension gave birth to movement, the great cosmic dance, the dance of Shiva, creator and destroyer. In the violence and pain of falling into time, the One flowed like liquid light, for ever onstreaming, for ever swirling and forming itself into sparkling vortices more beautiful than any firestone or diamond. In the same way that plasma vortices built up larger and larger structures inside a star, so these vortices of ur-consciousness whirled and danced and spun together into infons and strings and the many-coloured quarks and all other aspects of material reality.