War in Heaven (85 page)

Infinite possibilities.

And all this creation was preserved through memory. In a sense, memory
was
consciousness itself, or rather that part of the universal consciousness that preserved the manifestation of the One as matter. Matter was memory, truly, and evolution was the wild-energy dance of matter as it flowed into marvellous new forms and learned how to become more and more complex, and thus ever more alive. All matter held the memory of the evolving consciousness of the universe itself. All that had ever happened in the universe — whether the birth of a star in the Sculptor Group of galaxies or the death of a child on the sands by a frozen sea — was recorded in streams of photons or in a black diamond pilot's ring or in a snowflake spinning in the wind. The memory of all things was in all things, and there were infinite secrets locked up inside matter, inside rocks and oceans and driftglass — and even inside a single red blood cell spinning and burning inside a man's heart.

Infinite possibilities.

And so at last Danlo found the centre of the universe: the centre of himself. For in an infinite universe, every point in spacetime is the centre. And at last he saw that he could end it all whenever he chose. Just as the universe eternally asked the question yes or no at every moment and point within itself, so did he. Yes or no, no or yes — there was always a choice.
For in the end we choose our futures
, his mother had said. He could choose death, or he could choose life, here and now as he held his breath and lay motionless on the floor.

No, no — it is too hard. But I have promises to keep.

For a long time he lay silent as he listened to the voices inside him. The great orcas and the other whales who swam in the cold oceans and dived beneath the icebergs breathed only in full consciousness of life's every breath; these great gods of the deeps could simply stop breathing and die at will whenever they chose, and he knew that he could, too.

Danlo, Danlo, ti alasharu la shantih — die to yourself so that your deepest self might be born.

The wind outside the cathedral drove particles of oxygen against the windows, and, inside him, his chest burned to draw in a breath of cool, sweet air.

No, I cannot. No, no — I am afraid.

He heard voices outside, the far-off drone of Hanuman speaking with yet another of Salmalin's emissaries about the slaughter of the Ringist fleet. And even farther away (but very near), the screams of pilots dying by fire rang out through the universe. And inside him sounded still other voices, the most terrible voices of all. For an eternity, it seemed, he held his breath as he listened for the ten thousandth time to Jonathan calling him across a cold, windswept beach and the frozen sands of his soul.

Please, Father.

He wanted to die, then. He came as close as a breath of air and a single moment in time from making the journey to the other side of day. It was his son who stopped him. For, strangely, Jonathan was calling him not to die but to live. He held his breath and felt his heart thunder in his chest, once, twice, three times, and then he heard his other children calling for him to live, too. All his sons and daughters who waited to be born out of his body and being were calling him from the future to find his courage and at last open his eyes. All his children's children down through the ages and across the shimmering stars were calling for him to embrace his own terrible beauty at last and bring them into life.

Please, Father. Father. Father — please.

When he listened deeply enough to the spinning molecules of air trapped in his lungs, it seemed that all things from across space and time were speaking at once inside him. He listened to the wind and the silence of ice out in the great loneliness of the sea; he listened to the dreams of a snowworm sleeping in its frozen burrow and to the screams of a mother giving birth to her child. All the pilots falling in their lightships and all the people bleeding and starving across the Civilized Worlds were trying to tell him something if only he had the courage to understand. In the light-rent spaces far above Neverness, the little makers and the other beings of the Golden Ring were whispering to him the one thing that truly mattered, and he heard this single word as well in the fiery exhalations of the stars.

At every point and at every moment throughout creation, the whole universe was calling him to live and to cry out in his heart a clear, single sound.

Yes.

And once again he remembered himself and found himself floating inside his mother in the first moments after his conception. His whole being burned with the terrible will of the zygote, this single shimmering cell that trembled to explode into life with all the infinite possibilities that lay coiled inside itself.
Yes, I will
, he said, and the sound rippled through sparkling cytoplasm into the heart of the nucleus. And then like a ray of light he fell through space and time and relived other moments in his life: he was a child sitting on his mother's lap as she fed him bloody gobbets of meat, and he was a slightly older child kneeling in the snow over the torn body of a hare, the first animal that he had ever killed. And he was a young man brewing bowls of blood tea to preserve the lives of the dying Devaki, and then a full man pushing his spear into a bear's great roaring heart so that he might give this blessed animal's life into Jonathan's. In the Hall of Heaven he sat on a massive golden chair as he looked at the numinous lights within himself, and he sat on another chair in a cold, dark cell as a warrior-poet injected him with the hellish ekkana drug and tore the nails from his bloody fingers. And at last he stood upon the red-carpeted altar of the cathedral as Hanuman broke the ivory white god that he had carved. And then the great, shuddering stained-glass window above them suddenly caved inwards again, and he covered Hanuman's body with his own in order to save his life. And all these moments, he saw, were just the sum and substance of his own blessed life. Nothing could be added, nothing subtracted. He was the ashes from a pyre drifting in the wind and a star being born in the oceans of the night. He was Danlo the Wild, Lightbringer, son of his father — and son of Ten Thousand Suns. And his whole life was interwoven with all that had ever been and all that would ever be.

Yes.

Truly, he was the universe, and the universe was he, and there was no difference. Inside his blood, inside the fiery cells of his brain, he felt all the forces of space and time driving him to become who he truly was and whatever dread shape he had been born to be. Only, what did the universe
want
him to be? What did the universe, through him, want itself to be?
Something marvellous
, he thought.
Something bright and blazing with infinite compassion and a love beyond love.
But it was also something that dazzled the night with its terrible beauty and lived by talon and beak in all its fierce and utterly ruthless will towards life. It was utterly wild — like the
sarsara
wind that blew through the sky. God, he remembered, was a great white thallow whose wings touched at the far ends of the universe. And God was sleeping but would one day wake up and behold himself, and then all of creation would ring with his joyous cries. And it was this awakening that terrified Danlo. He feared this infinite being for nothing could be added or subtracted from it, either. It called to him from the future and across the ages even as it had called him into life long ago; it cried out for him to open his eyes and spread his wings and take his place with all the thallows and other birds soaring through the deep blue sky.

"Yes, I will," he whispered. He moved his lips, slightly, and the breath came rushing out of him. "Yes, I will."

And with this almost silent affirmation, the heavens opened. Time stopped, and something impossibly bright spread out like an exploding star across the inner sky of his being. It streaked down like a bolt of lightning and struck straight into his head, heart, belly and loins, and every other particle of him, all in a moment beyond time. This holy lightning wrapped itself around his spine as it crackled and writhed and electrified all his nerves out to his fingertips and toes. It burned into his muscles and bones with a fire so infinitely hot that he felt neither pain nor fear but only joy, sheer joy. "Yes," he said, and he felt this ecstatic golden fire touch each one of his body's four trillion cells, all at once. It was as if a single, shimmering substance were flowing into each individual cell, filling it to bursting with the essence of love and light so that the whole of his bodysoul came alive in a single moment of pure, singing light. The brilliance of it utterly consumed him. Like a snowflake beneath a blazing sun, he vanished into the sky. He died to his little self and came whirling, spinning, dancing, shimmering into the infinite light inside light that illuminated all things.

"Yes, yes, yes!"

And the longer he dwelled within this One light, the brighter it grew. It expanded outwards in all directions in an infinite, luminous sphere that blazed like ten billion suns. Its numinous fire touched everything around him: the marble floorstones, the ivory and shatterwood chess pieces, the long glass windows sparkling and opening upon the night-time sky. Not
touched;
the light came from inside these things as if every bit of the world were emptying itself out into its own blazing glory. Every atom of creation sang out at once in its own ecstatic, shimmering dance, for each atom held all the infinite possibilities of life, and something truly marvellous was being born, in each moment of time, always and for ever being born.

"Yes, yes, yes!"

And here was deepest marvel of this One light: he was only an infinitesimal part of it, melting into it with a perfect joy, and yet he was the whole of it, too. His entire being cried out in completion and utter triumph, for all memory was his, all matter, all space, all time. All the power and possibilities of the universe waited within for him to shine his consciousness in a single direction. He felt the universe remaking itself inside his blood and bones, in fire and light, with a love beyond love, but it was really he who shaped himself. "Yes," he whispered, and his consciousness spread out and moved deep into him like honey soaking into hot bread, and suffused each of his cells in a golden light. He willed himself to be and become, and he had never felt so perfectly and totally alive.

"Yes — I will."

He wanted to move, then. He wanted to jump up off the carpet and raise his hands to the heavens as he cried out in all the wild joy of life. Except that he could not move his body because the warrior-poet's drug still paralysed him. But his onstreaming consciousness moved with his own will, and that was the final secret of all matter and being. And now this consciousness was waking up all the cells in his body. He could feel it tingling and burning, in the neurons of his brain and spine, of course, but also in his skin cells and the cells that lined his guts, and in the bone cells that spun out collagen proteins and layed down mineral crystals that sparkled in lovely patterns and gave structure to his deepest tissues. He felt it singing through his sex cells and in his blood as his whole body began to vibrate at a higher frequency. And deeper still, in each cell's nucleus, the long, dark strands of DNA were uncoiling and vibrating a billion times each moment as chromosomal segments that had never been active turned on and came alive to their true purpose. Once, according to the theories of the Society of Courtesans, Tamara had called this DNA the 'sleeping god'. It was the dream of her Society that some day men and women would find a way to awaken this god and embrace the secret of life. And then all the possibilities of evolution would be theirs, and they would move into the future in full consciousness and will to become true human beings — or perhaps something more.

Infinite possibilities.

Inside the cells of Danlo's muscles and bones, he felt the mitochondria pulsing out energy like tiny stars; in the cells of his pituitary gland he felt the DNA begin to sing and dance and move in strange new ways. It moved, too, in his hypothalamus and pancreatic islets and especially in his pineal gland behind his third eye. Millions of double helixes of DNA were unravelling and exposing the chains of adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine molecules that coded for the production of proteins. In human beings, twenty amino acids from serine to tryptophan could be woven like multi-coloured threads in almost countless ways to form tapestries of proteins of astonishing complexity. The cells of his body could make cortisol and melatonin and enzymes and endorphins that would act upon his nervous system like drugs. And his cells could make antagonist proteins to neutralize these chemical compounds. Somewhere along the millions of miles of DNA strands that quivered inside his cells must lie the secret of making an antidote for the drug that still paralysed him.

Yes, the secret
, he thought.
Matter, memory, mind.

With his mind's eye and the consciousness of his deepest self, he looked down into the matter that shimmered at the centre of his cells, and then he felt long chains of polypeptides and sparkling new proteins beginning to burn through his blood.

Yes, yes, the secret: moving, making, metabolizing.

The burning spread out through his arms and into his fingers with every beat of his heart. Once, twice, three times his heart beat — a hundred times, two hundred. And the flush of sensation swelled hotter and hotter and touched every part of him. After a while it grew so intense that he felt as if a new dose of ekkana had been injected into his veins.

Pain is the awareness of life
, he remembered.

And then he surrendered utterly to this blessed pain and felt it fade into the total awareness of his being. He shuddered as the fire of life swept through his nerves and tendons deep into his cells. He felt his arms begin to tremble, and beneath the black silk of his kamelaika, the muscles of his thighs quivered and burned to move.

The secret is always in movement
, he thought.
To move is to be.