War in Heaven (87 page)

As he smothered Hanuman and stole the breath of life from his body, he felt tears burning out his eyes and touching the bloody wounds of Hanuman's forehead. And as before when they had first fought in the hot pool of Perilous Hall years ago, he felt the bond between them that could never be broken. In truth, their hearts still beat as one, and the mysterious connection of their souls had grown only deeper. His whole being was in Hanuman's, and Hanuman's in his, and they had fallen together deep into the same dread fire and burned with the same infinite pain.
Tat tvam asi
, he remembered.
That thou art.
Hanuman's desperate eyes shone with the same light as did his eyes, and each atom of his blood shimmered with the same superluminal substance. He could not harm Hanuman without harming himself; if he killed Hanuman, he knew that he would die, too.

Ti-anasa daivam.

"Hanu, Hanu," he whispered, "please die. Please die."

He almost relaxed his grip upon Hanuman's mouth, then. For a moment, he lifted up his head and stared down at Hanuman as he watched his pale skin begin to fall blue. He looked at the fine lines of his face and the incredible will to life that suddenly poured into his eyes.
Terrible beauty
, he thought. In the way that Hanuman stared into himself in defiance of everything in the universe except his own glorious self, there was something utterly terrible and yet utterly beautiful, too. He didn't know how he could take this beauty away from Hanuman; he didn't know how he could take this flawed but beautiful being away from life. For to be born into the world even as the sickest hibakusha child — deformed by mutagenic radiations and doomed to die — was an infinitely precious gift. Who was he to take it away from Hanuman — or from anyone?

I am only ever I
, he thought.
I am the wild white thallow alone in the sky. I am this one who watches inside me and has waited ten billion years to be born.

Who was he? He was the fire that burned in the distant stars; he was the light inside light that shone through all things. Truly, he was the universe in all its terrible beauty — as much a part of the universe as anyone or anything. He was a marvellous, moving array of trillions of shimmering atoms that loved the being named Hanuman li Tosh. And hated him, too. At the deepest place inside him, he felt neither anger nor rage towards Hanuman, but only hate. But this was no ordinary hate. It was as wild as the wind, as deep and dark and vast as the ocean at night. It was a hate so far beyond hate that it was almost love: the love of a God who incarnates as Shiva to dance his cosmic dance and destroy all things so that infinitely many new forms might be created. Everything in the universe, he saw, must take part in this ecstatic, tragic, eternal dance. To deny this was to deny life itself. To deny
himself
and to try to escape from life. And this, if he was to say yes to his truest self and affirm all things, he would never do again. Who was he, really? He was the lightning that tore open the sky and scorched the wind-dried trees and grasses; he was the mysterious fire that burned through a man's golden robes into his flesh and soul. And he was the universe in all its infinite and terrible compassion, that part of the universe fated to destroy a man whom he had once loved as his brother.

Ti-anasa daivam.

He looked down into Hanuman's terrified eyes and tightened his grip over his mouth. "
Mi alasharia la, shantih, shantih
— go to sleep now, my brother, go to sleep."

And this, in the end, was the true way of the Ringess kind. His grandfather and father had understood this terrible need to slay and destroy, and perhaps his mother had as well.
Give; be compassionate
, she had once said. And now, as he felt Hanuman shuddering and trying to cry out beneath the relentless pressure of his hand, he had to give up all of himself in order to accomplish this murderous deed. And now he, too, finally understood the terrible requirements of this compassion.

"Please, Danlo," Hanuman pleaded with his eyes. A last light lingered there as on an ending of a long day of greyness and snow. Ever dimmer it grew, and yet there was something beautiful and bright about it, almost as if, were Danlo to watch and wait long enough, he would behold in Hanuman the rising of the morning sun. "Please, please."

True compassion, Danlo saw, could take many forms. Even as Hanuman struggled desperately to live, a part of him desperately wanted to die. It had always been so with him. He, who had always felt the fire of pure being so keenly and hated life, had always stared longingly on the dark doorway within that led down into death. He must have understood the urge of all things eventually to die, and the hell that if they did, they were condemned to rebirth and endless existence, for the infinite, burning being of the universe was eternal and could never end. And thus life — his life and all life — went on and on for ever. If he could, Hanuman would say no to this blessed life and open the door. But there was truly no way out. In the end, all things must say yes.
Must
say. And so must Danlo, too.

"Danlo, Danlo."

As Danlo pressed his bleeding hand over Hanuman's mouth, he felt the molecules of Hanuman's stifled breath burning into his wound. Hanuman, he thought, was a tiny piece of the universe that was literally dying to return to itself. And Danlo was only another tiny piece who must hasten this journey. "No, I cannot," he whispered. And then, a moment later, "Yes, I must. Yes, I will." Hanuman, upon hearing this, murmured something deep in his throat. He shuddered and whimpered and tried to cry out in all his terrible pain. And Danlo shook his head against the tears blinding him and wanted to cry out, too.

"Hanu, Hanu," he whispered, as he watched the light dying in Hanuman's eyes, "please forgive me."

For an endless moment, Hanuman looked at him with his pale, anguished eyes, and then the universe opened again. A pain greater than any Danlo had ever known swept him down into darkness as if he had been caught in a maelstrom in the sea. He felt his own breath suddenly choke off and his heart stop beating. Thus deprived of oxygen, soon his cells would begin to die, and his whole body would lie stiff and still. Soon, he knew, he would let go of Hanuman. Perhaps this was only the last of his flickering mentations and awareness as a human being, his final vision before death. Or perhaps it truly
was
death itself. He felt something vast and irresistible grinding him, burning him, melting the tissues of his being, and then suddenly his consciousness and all his life began to flow outward into the world. He became the frost sparkling on the window-panes and the steaming blood caught in the cracks of the cold stone floor. He felt himself swinging through space as a spider suspended on a strand of silk in the corner of the room. And further out, like water flowing down to the sea, he felt himself as a young godling lying helpless near the altar in the nave of the cathedral below. His body was an agony of broken and burnt parts, and he wept like a child as he tried to stuff his bloody intestines back into the wound that some bit of bursting metal had opened in his belly. He died then, and he melted and moved into the hundreds of ringkeepers' bodies frozen to the icy streets outside. He flowed and spread out and seeped into the earth itself; he froze into ice crystals and evaporated into the wind, and he became: rocks and trees and bits of yellowed ivory washed up upon a lonely beach — and dreams and whispers and howls and cries of passion in the night. He felt himself as a killer whale swimming through the cold currents of the ocean and as a snowworm curled up with its mate beneath many layers of ice and snow. And at last he understood the answer to a question that had puzzled him all his life: what was it like to be a snowworm? Truly, it was like
something
to be such a simple and marvellous creature. It was like the warmth of algae being digested in the segments of his belly and the deep glow of his cells' consciousness that it was good to be alive. It was like something to be anything, even a virus or a particle of dust, and that was the deepest mystery of the universe.

Yes.

And so he became all these things, and much else as well, and he fell like a ray of light through the universe. His consciousness flowed and moved through the asteroids and comets, and blazed through Icefall's silvery moons. He was the shimmering matter of which the Universal Computer was wrought and the goswhales of the Golden Ring that basked in the brilliant light pouring out of the heart of the Star of Neverness. He lived as a pilot mapping a lightship through the great spinning thickspace on the far side of the sun, and he died screaming as another pilot as his black ship vanished into starfire and light. He saw — sensed/lived/became — six entire cadres of Ringist ships as Bardo's First, Eleventh and Twelfth battle groups trapped them near the Sitala Thin and began to annihilate them. In a sudden flash, he saw Bardo's strategy of ordered chaos unfold like a brilliant jewel-studded tapestry. He saw the entire right wing of Salmalin's fleet collapse and fly apart like diamonds spinning into the night. He became a carbon atom in the retina of Bardo's eye and in the hull of his ship, the
Sword of Shiva
, and he felt himself spinning off into the rainbow-coloured space beneath space.

Yes.

And then he fell further outwards through space and time. He was ten trillion rays of light streaking through the Milky Way, out past Eta Carina and Tannahill and the ruined stars of the Vild. He became a bluebird singing the sunrise in a forest on Old Earth and a woman on Samuru burying her newborn child. He lived the lives of a billion Architects who had peopled the High Holy Ivi Planets, and he died the deaths of the entire race of alien Kalkinet caught in the explosion of a super blue giant star. He vastened then, and he spread out and fell ever faster like uncountable streams of tachyons burning across the Magellanic Clouds into Draco, Fornax, Andromeda and the other nearer galaxies. And then he flowed into the Canes Venatici Cloud of galaxies and filled the whole of the Virgo Cluster with his blazing awareness. On a strange, alien beach a million light years away, he dwelled within himself as a grain of sand sparkling beneath a crimson sky. And further out, past the Perseus and Coma Superclusters, he fell upon an entire galaxy taken over by an alien god who resembled Hanuman in his infinite hubris if not his form. Every star and planet there had been converted into a vast computer similar to the Universal Computer in design. And in nearby galaxies that had no name that Danlo knew, he saw other gods fighting this insane god. He became these great gods of the stellar deeps whose beings were spread out over whole nebulae. They were like the Solid State Entity and Pure Mind and the April Colonial Intelligence, and they were creating weapons of incredible energy densities in order to destroy this alien god — and the entire galaxy that it had claimed as its own. Ever outwards across the stars Danlo fell, on and on past the ring galaxies and the lovely spirals shimmering like billions of diamonds in the night. And he melted and moved and shimmered ever vaster, and became infinite in his being. For the universe itself was truly infinite, and there was no part of it — not the tiniest particle of dust or a hydrogen atom floating alone in space — into which his consciousness didn't flow and become one.

Yes.

And so at last he stood before the universe naked in his soul and saw it as it really was. He saw that if consciousness was just the flow of matter within his brain (or the vibrations of atoms within a rock), then the consciousness of the universe was just the flow of everything: rocks and photons and starfire and blood. And everywhere — in the Grus Cluster of galaxies no less than in a cathedral on a small, ice-bound planet — this flow grew ever more complex. This infinite organism that was the universe brought forth endless new planets and peoples and stars blazing with possibilities. It was immeasurably old, and the number of years that it would continue to exist were immeasurable, too. Was the universe afraid to die? No more than it was to be born. This marvellous being evolved in utter ruthlessness towards itself, and yet also in utter love. How did a man, caught in the wind-whipped snow of a
sarsara
out on the icy sea, regard his frozen fingers? Lovingly but ruthlessly: he would cut them off in order to save his life. And so the universe would cut off the life of a man — or ten billion women and men — so that their children might grow and seize their glorious fate. Did a man mourn a half billion of his sex cells dying into the dark cavern inside a woman? No, he couldn't wait to rid himself of them so that he might rejoice as a single cell found its mate and blossomed like a fireflower into new life. And so the universe was always making, using and discarding parts of itself as it shed life like old skin and stretched its arms out to the morning sun all smooth and golden and new. The universe always beheld itself from countless viewpoints; it was like a great spinning diamond cut with infinitely many facets that shimmered with a clear and perfect light. And in every moment of time, new facets were chiselled over the old so that the universe's vision of itself grew ever vaster, ever clearer and forever new.

Yes.

And now the tiny piece of protoplasm and pain who was Danlo wi Soli Ringess gazed into each of these mirrored facets, and he beheld, and he became. That was the miracle of the universe, that it was like a vast hologram in which the whole was reflected in every part. And in every part that he looked, he saw being everywhere, and beings, in all their uncountable trillions, filling the stars out to the ends of the universe. And he lived the lives of all of them. He became a Scutari seneschal, wise in his thousand years of life and fat from eating thousands of his offspring, and an Elidi birdman mating in freefall ecstasy with his wife as they soared together through a turquoise sky. And he felt the joy and the sadness of one of the last of the Ieldra, that noble race of gods who had died a million years ago; he lived again, and he felt the diaphanous, golden tissues of his body singing like lightsails in the solar wind as he moved from star to star to seed the galaxy with life.
Nothing is lost
, he marvelled.
The memory of all things is in all things.
And this, he saw, was a far deeper salvation than that of the Architects' cybernetic heaven or the Alaloi's primitive otherworld of spirits who dwelt in the sky. For the universe preserved not only one's final self at the time of death, but each self from conception onwards, the infant child and full man, every moment of life.