War in Heaven (25 page)

On the evening after the meeting of the Lords' College, Hanuman summoned Danlo to a private audience in his tower room. Earlier that day Danlo had been given a room — a cell — in the chapter house, one of the smaller buildings that adjoined the cathedral on its northern side. For many hours he had waited alone in his cold stone room, playing his shakuhachi and occasionally exchanging a few words with the hologram of Nikolos Daru Ede. When night fell, with the last of the day's sunlight suffusing his cell's thick clary windows with a pale yellow glow, Jaroslav Bulba and another ronin warrior-poet came to escort him to Hanuman's chambers. They used a sound key to open the massive steel door, and they positioned Danlo between them as they walked down a long, gloomy passageway, in the closeness of the dead air, Danlo smelled the kana oil perfumes that both these former warrior-poets wore; it was a pungent, pepperminty scent that drove up his nose like a spear and almost obliterated the more organic reek of insect husks and spiderwebs spread across the dusty old wall stones. It had been a long time, Danlo thought, since this lowest level of the chapter house had been used. And even now, when godlings from a thousand worlds might welcome such austere dwellings, only two of the twenty cells were occupied: his and Malaclypse Redring's. They passed by this cell — guarded by two more ronin warrior-poets outside the door — on their way to the stairs at the end of the passageway. It occurred to Danlo that Hanuman kept the other cells empty should they ever be needed for other prisoners.

That he was Hanuman's prisoner, Danlo never doubted. He might still be an ambassador from the Fellowship to Neverness, and Hanuman might keep his promise to allow Danlo to journey to the academy to join Demothi Bede in the daily negotiations. Nevertheless, it was Hanuman who would order his comings and goings.

After Jaroslav Bulba and the other warrior-poet had escorted him up a flight of stairs and through a maze of roofed passageways, they entered the cathedral itself. The long glass windows still glowed with the day's last light. Each window depicted a different scene from the life of Mallory Ringess. In one of these scenes — in which the Agathanian god-men healed Mallory Ringess of the terrible wound that had killed him — the colour of red showed brightly against the black hair, a reminder of how close each man and woman was to blood and pain and death. But in the adjacent window, a resurrected Mallory Ringess emerged from the aquamarine waters of Agathange, and his face was as golden as the sun; his eyes were like brilliant blue windows inviting any onlooker into that inner world of starlight and dreams — or out into the universe to follow the way of the gods.

In preparation for the evening's joyance, golden-robed godlings hurried through the cathedral's chancel as if theirs was the most important work in the world. Some lit candles or carried bunches of fireflowers up the red-carpeted steps of the altar where they set them in vases of blue glass. Others polished the heaumes used to interface what Hanuman li Tosh told them were recordings of the Elder Eddas. In neat rows fairly covering the cathedral's entire floor, the godlings positioned these glittering heaumes at the exact centre of the thousand small red rugs. Soon Ringists from across the city would swarm the cathedral and take their places on these rugs; they would pull these heaumes over their heads and disappear into the cybernetic spaces generated therein. They would see visions of ancient stars and a lovely, numinous light; they would hear golden voices whispering secrets inside their brains. Later, after they had faced away from these 'memories' of the gods, they would tell their friends that they had perceived the deepest truths of the universe.

Danlo, who had once refused to let Hanuman counterfeit his experience of the One Memory, looked at the many heaumes which would run such deceitful simulations. He looked at the godlings all proud and golden in their belief that they were leading humanity to a new phase of evolution. And they looked at him. The news that the son of Mallory Ringess had returned to Neverness had spread among the Ringists like fire in dry grass. Many said that this event heralded one far greater: the return of Mallory Ringess himself. They looked at Danlo dressed in his black pilot's robe, and their faces showed hope for the future as well as hurt that in the past Danlo had betrayed them. What he might discuss with Hanuman they could only imagine. But they must have wondered if Hanuman would try to win Danlo back to the Way of Ringess. If anyone could lead such a wild and dangerous man as Danlo to the truth, it was the Lord of the Way, Hanuman li Tosh.

Still pressed between the two ronin warrior-poets, Danlo walked through a great archway leading to the tower's stairwell. The four godlings guarding the stairwell's door bowed to Jaroslav Bulba and allowed them to pass. For what seemed a long time, Danlo and the warrior-poets climbed the turning flights of stairs. No one spoke. Danlo smelled dust, kana oil and the electrical tang of hot plasma. Flame globes, set into the walls at each landing, cast crimson and blue colours across Jaroslav's face and lent an even deeper glow to his hideous mechanical eyes. He looked at Danlo, silently, strangely.

At the top of the tower the stairs gave out on to a narrow foyer. There two more golden-robed Ringists guarded a black shatterwood door. After they greeted Danlo politely and bowed to him, one of them, a large young man with the pimply face of one who used jook, knocked at this great door. After Danlo's heart had beat five times, it opened. A tiny woman with red eyes and a suspicious face stood in the doorway. There was something unpleasant about her, almost as if one could have broken through her purple-black skin, the sweet-rotting smell of old fruit would have escaped like a cloud. Despite her size, she had an air of command. Her name, as Danlo well knew, was Surya Surata Lai. Before her famous family had been cast down (she was Bardo's second cousin), she had been a princess on Summerworld. Now, in her devotion to Hanuman li Tosh, it was her vanity to play the princess once again. When she saw that the warrior-poets might have entered Hanuman's sanctum, she imperiously held up her clawlike hand and told them, "Just the pilot, please. Our Lord has said that Danlo wi Soli Ringess is no danger to him. You may wait outside."

So saying, she pushed the door shut and, with great presumption, took Danlo's arm. Except for the small foyer beyond the door and an adjoining kitchen, the room filled the entire top of the tower. A dome rose up around Danlo to form the walls and the roof. But the dome was not wrought of clary as he might have expected but rather some opaque substance of a purplish hue. Along its entire circumference, from the floor to a height of eight feet, curving windows had been set to let in the city lights. But this evening the windows were shuttered as if Hanuman wished to shut out all distractions. Raimented in his golden robe and all the furious power of his will, he stood by the western windows, waiting. As Danlo and Surya walked in, he bowed deeply. "Hello, Danlo," he said.

"Hello, Hanuman," Danlo replied. He looked around the room, once occupied by Bardo when he had been Lord of the Way. Then he locked eyes with Hanuman and said, "I see ... that you have made changes."

Indeed, since deposing Bardo and driving him from Neverness, Hanuman had stripped his sanctum of any reminder of Bardo or his things. Gone were the bonsai trees and all the flowering plants so beloved by Bardo. In their place, Hanuman had moved in Fravashi carpets and flame globes and his old chess pieces set out on a black and white board. And, of course, much cybernetica. There were the usual mantelets and hologram stands, but also many sulki grids, once banned as a forbidden technology. And then there were computers. Hanuman collected computers as some men do art or old wines. Electronic computers, optical computers, a gas computer, and computing machines made of brass gears and chromium switches — all these Hanuman had prominently displayed somewhere in the room. Danlo noticed the quantum computers, too, and, hanging over one of the windows, a Yarkonan tapestry whose fabric was woven of neurologics and other computer circuitry. In truth, although the chamber was large, little room remained for much other than all these museum pieces. Danlo noticed a single shatterwood dining table that might have sat eight or ten people; he saw no other furniture, no clothing cabinets or any bed or other obvious place for sleeping. In looking at Hanuman, at the gleaming clearface that covered his shaved head, he thought that he no longer slept as did other men. It was possible for such personal computers to touch one's brain with theta waves and induce periods of micro-sleep lasting no more than five seconds at any time. From time to time, as Danlo saw — almost from moment to moment — Hanuman's pale blue eyes would fall as empty as an ice-field before returning to their hellishly cold intensity.

"We've come a long way since Lavi Square," Hanuman said. He referred to the day of cold and patience years before when he and Danlo had first met in their test to be admitted to the Order. "And I see I've kept you waiting too long — I'm sorry. I thought you might be hungry, so I've ordered us a meal. Will you sit with me a while?"

With a wave of his graceful hand, he motioned towards the window where the shatterwood table had been set with two plates and accompanying napkins and chopsticks. Danlo remembered too well the last meal that he had shared with Hanuman: when he closed his eyes, he could still smell the char of a snowworm roasted alive and feel the pain of his burned hands. Despite the hurt of that long-gone night, however, he nodded his head.

"I'm glad, you know," Hanuman said. And then, turning to Surya Lai, he told her, "But I'm sorry that we must dine alone. If you don't mind, will you tell Sadira that we're ready?"

Surya, who fancied herself as protector and advisor of the Lord of the Way of Ringess, fell instantly sullen. Her little wormhole of a mouth tightened as she looked at Danlo mistrustfully. Clearly, she was loath to leave her Lord alone with him. And even more, she hated being used as a mere messenger. But because she made a virtue of obedience (and because she loved the power that accrued to her in executing Hanuman's orders), she bowed politely and said, "As my Lord wishes." Then she walked quickly across the room, opened the door, and left Danlo alone with Hanuman.

"An ugly woman," Hanuman said, repeating the observation he had once made upon meeting her for the first time. "But her devotion to the Way has touched her soul with a certain beauty, don't you think?"

Danlo stood holding his devotionary computer in his left hand while with his right he touched the shakuhachi sheathed in the long pocket of his robe's black trousers. "I think ... that she is devoted to you. I think that she would do anything that you asked of her."

"But how not, since I am the Lord of the Way of Ringess? She's very faithful."

"But faithful to what and to whom?" Danlo asked. "Bardo was Lord before you and she betrayed him. Her own cousin."

Hanuman's cold eyes flashed with anger and old hurts.

He looked at Danlo for a long time, then said, "You, who abandoned the Way of your own father, speak of betrayal?"

"I ... would not speak to you at all if I did not have to."

"I'm sorry that you must," Hanuman said. "And I'm sorry to hear so much hatred in your voice."

"I ... am sorry, too."

"And yet yesterday, before the entire College of Lords, you spoke of still loving me. What is the truth, Danlo?"

Hate is the left hand of love
, Danlo remembered as he closed his eyes. Then he looked at Hanuman openly, deeply, and he said, "I think you know."

For a long time they looked into each other's eyes, and an old knowledge passed back and forth between them. Then Hanuman asked Danlo to sit at the table. He well knew how much Danlo hated sitting in chairs; Danlo's obvious discomfort both disturbed and pleased him.

"I see that you've brought one of the Architects' devotionary computers," Hanuman said, gazing at the imago of Nikolos Daru Ede. "Is this a gift for me to add to my collection?"

Danlo looked across the room at Hanuman's chess set, at the white ivory pieces. The god, he saw, was still missing. Once, as a gift at Year's End, Danlo had carved a replacement god from a walrus tusk that he had found, but Hanuman had broken it and had given it back to him.

"No," Danlo said. "I have no more gifts to give you."

"Well, it was silly of me to suppose that you did."

"This," Danlo said, pointing at Ede's hologram, "is all that remains of another god."

Hanuman nodded his head. "I've heard the story. Is this supposed to remind me of the dangers of reaching towards the heavens?"

"Do you need reminding?"

"I see that you still like to answer questions with questions," Hanuman said. And with that, he stepped across the room, picked up a folded silver blanket, and returned to throw it over the devotionary computer that Danlo had set upon the table. Having obliterated and silenced the Ede imago, he looked at Danlo strangely for a long time. And then he said, "You're still the same Danlo, aren't you? Underneath all the accomplishment and brilliance, still the same."

"I ... am still I," Danlo said. "Truly. And you are still you."

"Fate," Hanuman said. "Yours and mine, so different — and yet once I thought we might share the same fate."

"And yet here we sit, about to take a meal together as we did as novices."

"Fate," Hanuman said, this time almost whispering. "Strange, strange."

"You ... always loved your fate, yes? No matter how beautiful or terrible."

Hanuman made no reply to this, but only closed his eyes as if in some private vision of the future. Danlo watched the glittering purple lights of the clearface that covered his shaved head; for the thousandth time, he marvelled at the terrible beauty of Hanuman's face.

"I should think you must be hungry," Hanuman said as he opened his eyes. "I remember how you were always so hungry."

As if a signal had been given — and perhaps in Hanuman's momentary interface with the computer that he wore, it had — the door to the kitchen suddenly opened. A courtesan dressed in gold silk pyjamas bore a platter laden with steaming foods. With her golden hair and lovely form she reminded Danlo of Tamara Ten Ashtoreth. Hanuman formally presented her as the diva, Sadira of Darkmoon. Sadira told them that it would be her pleasure to serve them that evening, and she came over to their table and began to ladle a hot ming soup into two blue bowls.