War in Heaven (95 page)

"Ah," Bardo said, "all I've ever really wanted is to live and laugh and love as many beautiful women as possible. And yet something more, always something more. There were always the stars, Little Fellow. It's like the lights of the whole galaxy hanging all white and brilliant in the sky. It seems so near but only a pilot in the finest of lightships who has mastered the Great Theorem could ever hope to reach it, even after a journey lasting a lifetime of years. Bardo will always have to be Bardo, do you understand? But Bardo has always been becoming Bardo, and that's a journey he began even before coming to Perilous Hall where the fourth-year novices ridiculed him for pissing in his bed every night. If you were to ask me who I thought Bardo
really
is, I suppose I should say that he's a man who wants to evolve as much as any other man."

At this, Danlo bowed his head and said, simply, "Then evolve."

"All right," Bardo said, "I think I will. But now, if we've finished discussing the fate of the universe, I'd like to order some food for us and drink a few glasses of wine. Did you know that along with the grain shipments, Summerworld has sent us a hundred cases of firewine? By god, I haven't tasted firewine since before the war, and that's too, too long a time!"

So saying, he clapped Danlo's shoulder and smiled at him with a deep understanding, and he turned to find the novice who would serve them their midday meal.

There is a door that opens upon a light inside light and a peace inside peace. I have returned to show you the key that unlocks the door.

— Mallory wi Soli Ringess, Lord of the Order of Mystic Mathematicians and Other Keepers of the Ineffable Flame

As war will come from the essential tension within all peace, so peace with come from the exhaustion of war. War brings forth from human beings their highest possibilities and prepares the way for new life as day illuminates night and this is why men and women love it as they do. But as night devours the day war also cancels the possibilities of precious lives, and so mothers and warriors and young children staring at hydrogen fireballs burning the sky rightly hate it as the greatest of evils.

There will probably never be a count of all those who died in the War of the Gods. The thousands of pilots lost in the flashing battles across the Fallaways and the many fallen ringkeepers and godlings composed only the tiniest fraction of the many people of the Civilized Worlds who made the journey to the other side of day. Some historians, such as Lord Burgos Harsha, estimated the dead at forty-five billion, while others were to settle upon a figure greater by at least five billion. Who could ever say how many men and women were incinerated when Helaku High's star fell supernova? The Helakists had never taken a census of their swarming population, believing as they did that human beings should never be numbered like gold coins kept in a vault. And what of Iwaloon where three billion citizens died of a mysterious plague in the days preceeding the Battle of the Ten Thousand Suns? Was this the work of careless engineers manufacturing yet another horror weapon of war or only a mutant virus of a kind that would erupt and decimate isolated peoples from time to time? It was hard even to determine exactly when the war ended — and when it had begun. Did the mass murders on Azur Baytay, for example, truly result from the Ringists' bid for power against the arhats there, or was this only a continuation of the endless cycle of internecine strife that had ravaged that unfortunate planet for ten thousand years?

Nevertheless, most of the Order's historians were to single out the 47th of deep winter in year 2959 as the correct date, for on that night Lord Salmalin the Prudent surrendered the Ringist fleet to Bardo, and on that morning it was said that Mallory Ringess returned to Neverness to put an end to war. Danlo, however, even wearing the body and face of his father, did not find it so simple to stop the violent movements of a trillion people across three thousand worlds, all at once. Can one stop a large blue star from exploding once it has begun its collapse into all the violent potential of its terrible, crushing gravities? As he had told Benjamin Hur in the cathedral, he couldn't stop men and women from killing each other, if that is what they truly wished to do. But of course they wished for other things as well, and so in the days following Danlo's near-collapse in the cathedral, he devoted himself to helping the people of the Civilized Worlds find the way towards peace.

And so much of what Danlo had discussed with Bardo in the Morning Towers came to pass. Even as the days of deep winter darkened towards Year's End, Danlo sent Demothi Bede back to Thiells aboard Helena Charbo's ship, the
Infinite Pearl.
Sabri Dur li Kadir and Aja and other pilots of the New Order accompanied them in a sparkling array of lightships, along with quite a few pilots of the Old Order, who, in the wake of the war, had discovered within themselves a vocation to stop the Vild stars from exploding. On Year's End itself — the shortest day of the year but also the turning of the world in which each succeeding day grew longer and ever lighter — the Fellowship fleet began to break up, as Danlo had foretold. The surviving thousands of black ships, gold ships and deep-ships fell away from the near-space above Icefall in a brilliant twinkling of windows to the manifold flashing open. In tens and twenties they vanished into the night and returned to Silvaplana, Simoom and the Rainbow Double; and hundreds of other worlds. Only the Tenth Battle Group remained, hanging around Icefall's five moons like a gleaming net of nall and black diamond. Before dispersing itself some time the following winter, this small but powerful force would ensure that the Order really returned to order and that the Universal Computer was really destroyed.

The unmaking of this moon-sized machine began on the seventh day of midwinter spring in the year 2960. Against the objections of many of the Order's more conservative masters and lords, Danlo suspended the Law of the Civilized Worlds and ordered the building of many hundreds of hydrogen bombs. The ships of the Tenth Battle Group ferried these monstrous weapons up through the Golden Ring to the point above Icefall where the Computer spun silently in the night and perpetually turned its gleaming dark face to the universe. There robots implanted the bombs deep beneath the Computer's glaze of black diamond skin. In a series of brilliant explosions the bombs fused hydrogen into great bursts of hellish white light that blew apart the Computer's outer layers of circuitry. It was not enough, of course, to destroy such a vast structure, but in the days that followed, other explosions would further reduce the Computer to great pieces of floating rubble. And then the same microscopic robots that had disassembled and dissolved Icefall's sixth moon would be released upon the Computer's remnant parts in a great glittering cloud. These programmed bacteria would begin to digest bits of optical circuitry, tearing the Computer apart into its constituent elements. A rain of carbon, silicon, oxygen and other atoms would fall down towards Icefall's atmosphere where the little makers and other Ring organisms would begin to feast upon these rich nutrients. And then the Ring would complete the first stage of its evolution in a brilliant, golden envelope of life, thus protecting Icefall from the radiations of the Vild.

Many people celebrated the Universal Computer's destruction as the true end of the war. For many days in early midwinter spring — even in the coldness of the storms that clotted the streets with mounds of thick, soggy snow — harijan, autists, arhats and exemplars as well as the masters of the Order took to meeting at the city's ice rings and greens to skate and talk and exchange hopes that never again would ship fall against ship or hydrogen bombs explode above their planet. But not everyone was overjoyed at the display of fireworks that lit up the sky. The godlings who had taken in each of Hanuman's words as a blind man might grab up a pocketful of counterfeit coins, truly lamented the fate of the Computer. For them the great blossoms of light that flowered in the heavens through the nights and days marked the passing of their dream. They hadn't yet quite understood that it was impossible to remembrance the Elder Eddas through interfacing any computer, no matter how cleverly programmed or vast. Nor did they yet share Danlo's vision of how a new Ringism might awaken them to their true possibilities.

But there are always new ways and new dreams. As the heavy weather of midwinter spring gave way to the cool, clear, sunny days of false winter, the godlings began to see how Lord Mallory Ringess intended to transform the religion that had sprung up around his name. Each day in the early evening, Danlo made the short journey from the academy through the Old City's narrow red streets to the cathedral. There, in the sanctuary where once Hanuman had gazed out through the dome at the farthest galaxies of the universe, Danlo called Thomas Rane, the Brothers Hur, Bardo, Poppy Panshin, Kiyoshi Telek, Malaclypse of Qallar and a few others to sit with him in a circle beneath the stars. They drank cups of sweet peppermint tea together, and they laughed together, and together they made their way deep into remembrance towards that secret place where the fires of creation burn as one. Soon those of the circle would begin to pass this ineffable flame of awakening to other hands, and in this way Ringists throughout Neverness and across the stars would make the same journey as had Danlo.

Near the middle of false winter a new excitement began to blow through the city like a warming wind. Those who had died in the war had long since been buried or cremated, and the streets had almost returned to the exuberance of happier years. On the 30th of false winter, the new food factories delivered their first major harvest to the city's restaurants, both private and free. Once again it was possible to skate along the Serpentine and drink in the smells of coffee, cilka and roasting garlic that wafted out among the crowds seeking a meal. As too many had starved during the war, the still-hungry peoples of the city often ate five or six full meals each day, at any hour, day or night. Spiced kurmash, chinquapin stew, Yarkonan cheeses melted on flatbread, cultured shagshay cooked with takenyats in firewine, pastries and cakes, bloodfruit in cream and mangoes and flaming bananas — there seemed no end to the rich foods that one might find from a little cafe near the Ashtoreth District to the famous dining rooms of the Hofgarten. Beneath the bright sky, there came golden days of new hope and birds returning to the trees of the Fravashi Green once again to sing their strange, sweet songs. Even the most sceptical of naysayers — those who might wait many more years before daring to join any Ringist in remembrance of the Elder Eddas — admitted to each other that Mallory Ringess had brought a rule of peace to the city.

Some people, however, did not so readily bow to the wishes of the Lord of the Order and the Way of Ringess. On the 35th of false winter, when the Iviomils' deep-ship had finally been made ready for the long journey to Tannahill, a young man named Samsa Armadan slipped past the godlings guarding Bertram Jaspari and fired an exploding mercury-tlolt into the would-be High Holy Ivi's brain. This murderous missile killed him instantly. And his guards in turn might have instantly executed Samsa Armadan as an assassin, but they discovered that he was one of them, both a godling and a holist of the Order. He had been born on Helaku High and had lost all his friends and family when the Iviomils destroyed their star. And so he had killed Bertram Jaspari purely out of vengeance. In former times, the Lord of the Order would have banished him to his home world for his crime, but since Helaku no longer existed, Danlo couldn't pronounce such a sentence. In truth, he couldn't bring himself to banish Samsa at all, to any world, because in looking at Samsa's death-haunted eyes when he was brought before him, he took pity upon him and merely chastised him instead.

"We must never kill unless it is truly necessary to kill," he told Samsa in the privacy of the Morning Tower. "It was not upon you to kill Bertram Jaspari for his crimes. No matter that you think he was a monster, no matter that I think that, too, he might yet have been something more. I wish I could show you the jewel within the lotus within the human heart. The incredible value of each person's life, even Bertram Jaspari's. He was only what the universe made him and what he made himself. And he was about to make a journey to a place where he would never harm anyone again. Truly, he would have been judged and punished — he would have spent the rest of his life serving others. And now so must you. This is my sentence, then: there are many children in Neverness who have lost their families even as you have. You will find one of these and be as a father to him. You will teach him that out of hate can come something as rare and beautiful as a thallow breaking free from an egg and flying off into the sky."

When Danlo finished speaking, Samsa Armadan bowed to him at last, and with a sad smile, Danlo returned his bow. He knew that in sentencing Samsa thus, he was only sentencing himself.

Hanu, Hanu
, he silently prayed for the ten thousandth time since the end of the war,
mi alasharia la, shantih, shantih — please forgive me.

Later that day he ordered that Bertram Jaspari's body be preserved in krydda and returned to Tannahill where the Architects could dispose of it according to their rituals. And he ordered Nikolos Daru Ede's body to be returned there as well. To fulfil his promise to the Ede imago that he had made in the Vild, he had asked the city's cryologists if they could revive his three-thousand-year-old frozen corpse. But even the finest of the cryologists pronounced this task hopeless. Although the tissues of Ede's body might be returned to life, they said, Ede's brain had long since been completely destroyed. At Ede's historic vastening as Ede the God, the process of modelling the synapses and copying this pattern into one of the Old Church's eternal computers had utterly reduced these same synapses to a red jelly. Truly, it was as if a mercury-tlolt had exploded inside Ede's blessed brain. As Danlo had feared, Ede had for ever given up his humanity in a fruitless quest to become something infinitely more. And now Ede — what was left of him — must give up his last hope of ever becoming human again.