War in Heaven (67 page)

Jonathan. Jonathan.

"Father ... Father."

Danlo, upon hearing Jonathan call to him, put down his flute and knelt beside him in the cold snow. He had taken his mask off so that he could play more easily; now he drew in close to Jonathan to hear what he had to say.

"Father," he murmured. His breathing was laboured, ragged and weak. "How do you ... ?"

Jonathan's voice faded off, and Danlo knelt by his side waiting for him to finish his question. What had he wanted to ask? Was it the riddle that they had both puzzled over?

How do you capture a beautiful bird
without killing its spirit?

Had Jonathan, dwelling in that twilight land between day and night, somehow solved the riddle?

As Danlo listened to Jonathan struggling to breathe, he thought that he would never know: neither what Jonathan had wanted to ask him nor the answer to the riddle itself. For Jonathan never spoke to him again. He lay with his head pressed against Tamara's chest, all the while staring at Danlo. After few hundred heartbeats, he began staring
through
Danlo as if gazing at the brilliant stars of some faraway galaxy. His last words were for Tamara, she who had borne him and brought him into life. "Mama, Mama," he said. "Mama, Mama." And then he fell as silent as the frozen sea.

"Jonathan," Danlo said. He removed his mitten and laid his hand on Jonathan's cold forehead. "
Mi alasharia la shantih
, go to sleep, now, go to sleep."

And Jonathan closed his eyes as he breathed softly the icy air smothering the beach. Danlo watched the furs covering Jonathan's belly gently rise and fall. After a long time — two thousand and fifteen of his own heartbeats — he could no longer see the furs moving. He held his face near Jonathan's face, and he felt very faintly his son's breath touching his lips and burning over his eyes. And then, after another three hundred heartbeats, he felt nothing. Jonathan lay as still and quiet as a stone. Danlo pressed his lips to Jonathan's cold lips, waiting for him to breathe again. He waited a long time, uncountable moments of time. His heart drummed steadily and quickly inside him as it always had, and yet he could no longer feel the individual beats. There was only a single great pressure there, a swelling, a terrible red fire, like that of a star about to explode. He kissed Jonathan on the forehead, softly but fiercely. Then he stood on the snow and stared at the western sky where the stars of the Owl constellation pointed the way out into the universe.

"
Mi alasharia la shantih
, sleep in peace, my son."

He turned to lift Jonathan away from Tamara. She sat on the log by the glowing fire stunned and unable to move. Frozen tears glistened like pearls stuck to her cheeks. All she could do was to stare at Danlo as he held Jonathan in his arms and looked up into the bright black sky.

"No," Danlo whispered. He held Jonathan so that the starlight fell over his body and face. He himself let this cold, white light fill his eyes like millions of icy needles stabbing at his brain. "No, no — please, no."

Ti-anasa daivam
, he thought.
Live your life and love your fate.

But how could he live now that Jonathan had lost his life? In truth, his son had lost everything: life, love, joy, and all that he might ever have become. And he himself had lost almost everything. Now the great chain of life and being that had begun on Old Earth five billion years ago was finally broken. Danlo stood there in the near-darkness, and he thought of his father and his grandfather, and all his ancestors back to the man-apes who had walked the burning veldts of Afarique in all their splendour and pride. And he wondered at his mother and his grandmother — all his mother's mothers who had grown into young women in the womb of their Mother Earth. And none of these millions of men and women who were of his body and blood had died in childhood. What were the chances that on a planet of fierce predators, cold, hunger, disease and never-ending war, where half the children born did not see their fifth birthday, not a single one of them would have died as a boy or wailing babe?
Almost infinitely small.
It was truly a miracle that they had all lived to beget children of their own. And yet, here he stood on a windswept beach on a faraway world as a result of this miracle. Everything that moved or breathed or spread its leaves in the morning sun had been called into being despite the almost infinite odds against it, and that was the miracle of all life. It was one reason that it was so infinitely precious. The whole world, Danlo thought, should want to weep at each little piece of itself lost to life in all its marvellous possibilities. As he himself wanted to weep, but could not. All he could do was to look towards the cold sky remembering how Jonathan liked to laugh and ask him riddles. He had lost this beautiful boy for ever; he had lost a son who would have grown into a beautiful man. And thus he had lost the man who would someday have been his friend. It was all gone, now: his grandsons, his granddaughters and great-granddaughters, too — all his children's children. And more than anything else, the one child that he had ever loved as his own. For a long time he stood there beneath the blazing stars holding Jonathan in his arms, and the rage at what he had lost built inside him like all the fires of creation.

"No," he whispered again. And then something inside him broke. It came from within him, this terrible and deep wrath that shook him down to his bones. He drew in a deep breath and pulled back his head — and then he called out to the heavens like a wounded animal: "NO!"

His voice built louder and louder. It startled Tamara and shook the air; it thundered across the beach, pounding in wave upon wave against the ice crusts and shimmering snow dunes. In truth it wasn't the cry of an animal at all, but of a very powerful man, and perhaps even more. His was a deeper and finer voice, the voice of his father cut by Constancio of Alesar, and cut now with all the pain and passion in the world. The voice of a god: he wanted all the world to hear him; he wanted his protest against the insane cruelty of life to carry up into the sky and ring out across the stars. He wanted the gods of the Cataract galaxies to know that Jonathan had suffered torment and death to no purpose; he wanted the whole universe to know. And God. Especially God, who had betrayed him and his son and all that he had ever dreamed. He cried out a single word, long and terrible and deep, that God at last might wake up and behold the horror of creation and the futility of all life.

"Noooooooo!"

At last, he thought that he understood Hanuman li Tosh. The great tree of life, spreading its many-flowered branches towards the heavens, reaching with its roots back to the beginning of time, was rotten at its very heart. The universe itself was flawed. And worse, misbegotten, blighted, diseased, utterly
shaida
in its essential nature. And Hanuman had always known this. And thus he pitted himself against existence itself, and desired with all his soul that the universe should be made differently. What courage this required of him, to shake his fist at the heavens and demand redress for all the pointless sufferings of life! What genius, what will, what strength! As Danlo stood on the frozen snow holding Jonathan and calling out to the stars, he doubted whether he himself would ever possess such a terrible strength. In truth, he wanted only to die. And more, he wanted never to have been born, so that he would have been spared the pain of life, and thus sparing Jonathan, too.

NO!

Even as he was pushing this cry outwards to the sky with his mind and belly and every beat of his heart, Tamara came over to him. She waited until he ran out of breath, then laid her head on Jonathan's chest and began to sob. He saw that as terrible as was his own pain, Tamara's was infinitely worse. That was the truly unbearable thing about pain, that it had no limit or end. In realizing this, in feeling Tamara's wracking sobs as they shook Jonathan's little body, he laid his head gently upon Tamara's head and sobbed, too. After a while he looked up again at the stars. And Tamara stood away from Jonathan as she sought out Danlo's eyes in the light of the dying fire.

"It is all right," he croaked out, trying desperately to find something to say. "Nothing is lost."

"What? Oh, Danlo, what do you mean?"

"Nothing is truly lost," he said again, although he did not believe anything of what he told her.

And yet. And yet. As he stood there in the wind letting his breath out in puffs of silver-black steam, he remembered something that he had once learned. Each breath of his body contained some one thousand billion trillion atoms, mostly of nitrogen and oxygen and carbon dioxide. And the entire atmosphere of the world held about the same number of breaths. Thus every time he drew in a lungful of icy air, he inhaled an average of one atom from each of the breaths swirling about the world. And with each exhalation, he returned an atom to each breath, over and over as his belly rose and fell. And Tamara did, too, and Benjamin Hur, and Hanuman li Tosh, and all the other millions of people who lived in Neverness. And not just they, but the mothers of the Patwin tribe, and the fathers of the faraway Wuyi tribe in the west of the Ten Thousand Islands — all the people on all the oceans' islands. And the bears and birds and snowworms and whales, and all the other animals of the world who lived and breathed, also contributed their own breaths to the breath of the world. Between the rising of the bloody sun and its setting over the sea, a man might take ten thousand breaths, and each one would vibrate with thousands of atoms breathed at some time by each living being. And not just the living. In the movements of the clouds and wind, the world's air continually circled Icefall day after day, year after year, millennium after millennium. The atoms of life evaporated and condensed and diffused and swirled everywhere in an everlasting global metabolism, and none of them was ever lost. And so Danlo stood on the starlit snow, and he breathed in air that had once filled the lungs of Rollo Gallivare, the great Lord Pilot who had founded Neverness three thousand years before. And before
that
historic event, thousands of years before, the ancestors of the Alaloi had come to Icefall in their long silver ships. And before they had destroyed those ships and carked their human forms into the shape of primitive men (even as Mallory Ringess and Danlo had done), they had looked out upon Icefall's fir-covered islands and deep blue sky, and they had sighed at the immense beauty of the world. And with each sigh they had sent into the cold, clear air atoms carried in their ships and in their bodies. Once, they or their ancestors had breathed these bits of oxygen on Silvaplana, Darkmoon, Arcite, Sheydveg and Sahasara — and every other world going back to Old Earth. Thus they had carried with them the cries of ecstasy of Danlo's far-great-grandparents mating beneath an acacia tree in Afarique, as well as the Newton's cry of triumph when he discovered that everything in the universe pulled at everything else no matter how infinitesimal its mass or how great the separation in space. As Danlo let a little air flow past his lips, he let in ten thousand atoms from the breath of the Buddha delivering the Fire Sermon in Uruvela and ten thousand more from the last despairing words of Jesus dying on a wooden cross and surrendering up his spirit to the heavens. It was all inside him now, the breaths of the ancients and the breaths of the dead members of his tribe, too. And the dying breath of Jonathan: it burned inside Danlo's throat and chest with each draught of cold air as if he had breathed in starfire. As long as he lived, he would feel the heat of it touching his eyes and searing the soft tissues around his heart.

Nothing is lost.

He stood on the beach facing the wind, which was nothing more (and nothing less) than the wild white breath of the world. Even as he continued to hold Jonathan against his chest, he watched the wind blow shimmering crystals of spindrift snow across the frozen sea. And then he looked up at the sky. There, the vacant spaces between the stars drew his gaze as if sucking him down a black and infinitely deep crack in the universe. Most of the universe was as empty as a cup drained of blood tea. Everywhere he looked, it seemed that there was only darkness and nothingness, the utter neverness of light, love and life. And yet he knew that even the most barren patch of space contained a few atoms of hydrogen or helium spinning in the dark. These tiny bits of matter were just the exhalations of the stars; as with all matter everywhere, they might pass from star to star and eventually fuse together into light. But they could never be destroyed. Nothing in the universe or of the universe could ever truly be destroyed, and that was the miracle of creation. The universe preserved all things, atoms and X-rays and photons, dying plaints and hopeless cries — and even the silent prayer of a silent, heartbroken man.

Nothing is lost.

With the setting of the Wolf moon in the west, Danlo remembered how Jonathan liked to watch the world's six moons rise at night and make their way across the sky. He remembered many things about Jonathan: his intelligence, his curiosity, his courage, his great love for his mother that had always lit up his deep, blue eyes like sunshine. He promised himself, then, that he would do everything possible to remember Jonathan, in his dreams and in his heart, with all his will and every atom of his being.

Nothing is lost.

Somehow, he thought, the universe itself must have a way of remembering Jonathan and all those who had ever lived and died. He stood staring at the shimmering stars, and he wondered at this strange idea that had taken root in his mind. Did he truly believe it? He
had
to believe it, or at least act as if he did. After all, he had made promises to Old Father, and to himself. Some day he might look God in the face and learn the truth of how the universe (or anything at all) remembered anything. But for now it would have to be enough that he and Tamara looked inside themselves to behold the bright, lovely child that they had made.

Nothing is lost.

"Tamara," he said, stepping nearer to her. "We must say goodbye to him now."