War in Heaven (17 page)

"What do you wait for, then?"

"We will flee, but not into realspace, not yet," Danlo said. "We will flee into the Danladi wave."

"Are you mad, Pilot? Would you destroy us for the sake of your wilfulness?"

"I pray ... that I will not destroy us."

Then with a flick of his hand for Ede to be silent, he made a mapping and pointed the
Snowy Owl
towards the Danladi wave. He began falling from window to window as quickly as he could and still maintain a sense of interfenestration. Because he knew that Marja Valasquez would follow him, he spared not a moment searching for the tells of the
Fire Drinker
behind him. His whole awareness concentrated on what lay ahead. He fell through the manifold like a streak of light, and yet the Danladi wave swept towards him even more quickly. For it did not 'move' as he moved, but rather deformed the manifold almost instantaneously in all directions. In a way, it was the essence of motion itself. Danlo could scarcely believe how quickly it built. One moment it was no more significant than the hump of a snow hut on a frozen sea. But in the next, it began to brighten and swell as if a flat plain of ice had suddenly heaved itself up into the highest of mountains. Soon, in moments, it would fall upon him, and then he must make the choice either to look for a mapping and dive under this impossibly monstrous wave, or to escape into realspace as Ede had advised.

Ahira, Ahira — what shall I do?
For a moment, Danlo prayed to the name of the snowy owl, his spirit animal whom he had once believed held half his soul.
Ahira, Ahira.

By now, Danlo thought, Marja Valasquez must have descried the shape of the Danladi wave. But so fast did they race towards its boiling centre — and it towards them — that she might have had too little time to understand its true nature. Arrio Verjin, after all, would not have warned the Order's pilots of its coming. She might perceive it as only a Wimund wave or even the much simpler N-set waves of a Gallivare inversion. She must assume that he would try to use its topological complexities to escape her, perhaps diving beneath the wave into calmer regions of the manifold at the last moment. But for many moments, Danlo had been making lightning calculations and going through every known theorem pertaining to Danladi waves; he felt almost certain that there could be no escaping such a wave simply by 'diving' beneath it. Its perturbations were too powerful, and it propagated much too quickly for that. Already, as the wave began to crest, rising, rising, he descried an astonishing density of zero-points, like trillions of bacteria churned into a huge, black, sucking mass. The wave itself began to suck at him now as he crossed the last bounded interval; now, in less than a moment, he must either make a mapping into realspace or prepare to die.

Ahira, Ahira — give me me the courage to do what I must do.

He waited as long as he could, waited until the
Fire Drinker
crossed the last bounded interval, too. And then, in the terrible topological distortions of the wave that was almost upon them, all possible windows into realspace suddenly closed, and there could be no escape in that direction. There could be only pathways downwards into the swirling blackness beneath the wave. Or pathways
into
the wave. Since the moment that Danlo had first sighted the wave far across the shimmering manifold, he had contemplated this other possibility. It would be seeming-madness to take his ship into the wave itself, but all his mathematics told him that diving under it would be suicide. Marja Valasquez, however, obviously hadn't had the chance to make such calculations, for she made a mapping at the last moment and found a pathway beneath the wave. Danlo watched the
Fire Drinker
disappear like a diamond pin dropped into a cauldron of molten steel. And then he pointed the
Snowy Owl
straight into the bore of the wave, and it fell upon him with a terrible weight, breaking into colours of cobalt and rose and foaming violet.

Ahira, Ahira — give me your golden eyes that I might see.

Almost immediately he lost his mappings. Supposedly, no pilot could survive such a disaster, for without a map from point to point within the swirling complexities of the manifold, one became hopelessly lost. But once before, when he had entered the chaos space in the heart of the Entity, he had found a way out of what should have been a fatal topological trap. New mappings always existed if a pilot were artful enough to discover them. Even as the wave swept the
Snowy Owl
along at a tremendous speed, he searched for such mappings. If he had had endless time, he might have found a mapping very quickly, for the greatest of his mathematical skills lay in seeing the pattern that connects. But he had almost no time. In truth, he was fighting to stay alive. The wave broke all around him in colours of jade and virvidian; only the lightning rush of its momentum outwards balanced the almost impossible suck of its dark emerald weight. He lived in this balance. He piloted the
Snowy Owl
into a pocket along the wave front, and there he remained perfectly poised within its hideously complex dynamics. He called upon the three deepest virtues of a pilot: fearlessness, flawlessness and flowingness. If he let himself be afraid, even for a moment, he might try to flee the wave in the wrong direction and be swept under like a piece of driftwood in a raging sea. And if his piloting were anything less than flawless, he would lose the flow of his perfect balance, and the wave's terrible energies would crush his ship to pieces as if it were only a clam shell.

Ahira, Ahira — I must not be afraid.

There was a moment. For Danlo in his
Snowy Owl
riding the crest of an almost impossible topological wave far beneath space and time, as for everyone, always only a moment between life and death. It was a moment of intense awareness. Colours swirled all around him and broke into bands of magenta and brilliant blue, into flaming scarlet traceries and thousands of other patterns. There were always patterns, always a hidden order beneath the surface chaos. As the Danladi wave propagated through the manifold, Danlo perceived subtle, silvered reflections at each encounter with the various topological structures it swept across. There were refractions, too, the way that the wave continually broke upon itself in intense showers of light and re-formed into a vast moving mountain only a moment later. The wave orthogonals appeared as parallel lines of silver-blue. After a while he noticed something about these orthogonals: although they changed direction from moment to moment as the wave distorted the very substance of the manifold, making the discovery of a mapping into realspace almost impossible, there was a pattern to these changes. He tried to find a mathematical model to fit this pattern. He tried Q-sets and Gallivare fields and a hundred others before he found that orthogonals' spinning motions could be best represented by a simple Soli set. If his timing were almost perfect, he might predict the exact moment when the orthogonals would line up away from the wave and point towards an exit into realspace. If his piloting were flawless, he might make a mapping in this moment and accomplish what only the maddest (or wildest) of pilots would ever have dared to attempt.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven
...

At exactly halfway through the seventh beat of his heart, he made a mapping. And instantaneously, the vast Danladi wave disappeared, and the
Snowy Owl
fell out around a cool white star. In the emptiness of space, it was quiet around this star. It showered the
Snowy Owl
with its lovely white light. Danlo floated in the quiet, looking out at the star as he gasped for breath and continued counting his heartbeats:
thirteen, fourteen, fifteen
...

"Pilot, we're free!" This came from the Ede imago, floating near Danlo who was looking out the ship's diamond window. "We're free, and we've lost the other ship, haven't we?"

"Yes," Danlo said. He pressed his hand against the scar above his eye and grimaced in pain. "We ... have lost her."

"How did you lose her, then? I'm afraid that in the distortions of the wave, my simulation showed little."

Danlo felt his heartbeats in the throbbing of his eye, and then he told Ede exactly how he had lost Marja Valasquez and the
Fire Drinker.

"That was very clever of you," Ede said. "To slay her that way."

"I did not slay her!"

"You lured her to her death."

"No, she had choices. Before she crossed the last interval, she might have escaped into realspace."

"But you knew that she would follow you."

"I knew ... only that she would want to follow me."

"And you knew that she would dive beneath the wave and be destroyed, didn't you?"

"How could I truly know which pathway she would choose?"

"How could you
not
know?"

"But she might have tried to ride the wave out, as I did."

"Oh, Pilot."

"Truly, she always had a choice. And she dived beneath the wave.
Her
will, not mine."

The Ede imago glowed softly as it regarded Danlo. Then it said, "How was it that you once defined this vow of ahimsa that you've made? Never harming another, not even in one's own thoughts."

"I ... never wished Marja dead. I only wanted to lose her."

"And yet you led her to lose her life."

"Yes."

"It would seem that the practice of ahimsa can be difficult and subtle."

"Yes."

Ede continued staring at Danlo, then said, "I'm sorry — this must be hard for you."

At this, a sudden pain shot through Danlo's eye and filled his head like an explosive tlolt. His eyes began to water and he blinked hard against the cool but hurtful light of the star outside his ship.

"I ... am sorry, too," he said.

Then he closed his eyes and whispered a prayer for Marja's spirit, "Marja Evangelina wi Eshte Valasquez,
mi alasharia la shantih.
"

Some time later he roused Demothi Bede from the sleep of quicktime and invited him into the pit of his ship. The sleepy-eyed Demothi took a long look at the star outside the pit's window, yawned and said, "It looks like the Star of Neverness — are we home, then?"

"No," Danlo said, smiling despite his aching head. "The colour of this star is white, not yellow-white. We are still far from Neverness."

"How far, then? What is this star's name?"

"It has no name that I know," Danlo said. "But it lies close to Kalkin."

"Kalkin!" Demothi exclaimed. He might have had poor eyes for stellar spectra, but he remembered his astronomy lessons. "Kalkin is only ten light years distance from Summerworld!"

"Yes," Danlo said. "We ... have departed from our pathway."

After wiping away the salt crusts from the corners of his eyes, he told Demothi of Marja Valasquez and the
Fire Drinker
and their long pursuit through the manifold. He tried to describe the vastness of the Danladi wave, its terrible beauty, but he found that his words failed him. He said only that the wave had swept them far along the galaxy's Sagittarius Arm almost to the stars of the Jovim Cluster.

"Why didn't you wake me, Pilot? Would you have had me go to my death half-asleep?"

Again Danlo smiled because he remembered something that his Fravashi teacher had once said: that the man-swarms of the human race went about their whole lives half-asleep and stumbling towards death.

"I did not want to alarm you," Danlo said.

"What will we do now?"

"Continue our journey."

"How much longer has our journey become, then? The wave has caused us such a vast dislocation."

"As measured in light years this is true," Danlo said. "But the pathways between Kalkin and Neverness are well known. The mappings are very easy. Our journey will not have grown much more difficult or timesome."

"But what if the wave has changed or broken the old pathways? Aren't such permanent distortions of the manifold possible?"

"Yes — truly this is possible."

"Well then?"

"It is possible, too, that the pathways remain unbroken."

"You must be eager to discover if this is so."

"Truly, I am," Danlo said, yawning. He closed his eyes for moment, and the rising swells of unconsciousness swept towards him in black, rolling waves. Then with a sudden snap of his head, he looked at Demothi and smiled. "But I am even more eager for sleep. I will sleep now. When my computer wakes me in two more hours, then we shall see if we can find an easy pathway towards Neverness."

With that he closed his eyes again and fell instantly into a deep and peaceful sleep. So total was his exhaustion that when his ship's-computer touched his brain with soft musics two hours later, he did not awaken. Nor twenty hours later. Both Demothi Bede and the Ede hologram seemed astonished to discover how long Danlo could sleep when he was really tired — in this instance, for most of three days. When he finally broke back into consciousness and looked out on the stars, he realized that he had slept too long.

"We will fall on, now," he said, angry with himself though well rested. "I only hope that war hasn't come to Neverness while I was dreaming."

And so they fell. Danlo took the
Snowy Owl
back into the manifold, and they fell on past Kalkin and Skibbereen and the great red giant star known as Daru Luz. Although the Danladi wave had slightly flattened these familiar spaces and broken a few of the familiar Fallaways as a windstorm might snap a tree's twigs, most of the pathways through the manifold remained untouched. He made a mapping to a little star near Summerworld, and then on past Tria, Larondissement and Avalon. All these stars lay along the rather roundabout pathway towards Neverness that he had once rejected as too lengthy. But the Danladi wave had made it so that this journey required little more time than his original and more straightforward approach. And it required much less risk. Even in the spaces near Larondissement, one of the Civilized Worlds most devoted to the new religion of Ringism, he descried no tells of any Ringist ship which might be lying in wait for him. On this last segment of his surprisingly peaceful journey, he encountered no other ships at all, not even the vast deep-ships of the Trian merchant-pilots which usually plied the Fallaways filled with cargoes of gossilk, neurologics, fire-stones, firewine, Gilada pearls, sulki grids, bloodfruits, jook, jambool, blacking oil, and a million other things grown or manufactured on the worlds of man. When he reached Avalon, a pretty blue star so close to the star of his birth, he made a final mapping. It was the famous Ashtoreth mapping, named for the pilot Villiama li Ashtoreth who had discovered it at the beginning of the Order's Golden Age in the year 681. It carried the
Snowy Owl
across three hundred light years of space in a single fold, where it fell but in the thickspace near the Star of Neverness.