War in Heaven (83 page)

White bright light shimmering blazing becoming all that is I am Danlo son of Haidar and Chandra and Katharine and Mallory Ringess my father myself floating in a dark and sunless sea of burning salt and streaming blood of my mother my life myself connected heart to beating heart wordless and whisperless in love always in love beyond love beyond
...

He began to remember himself, then. Even as Hanuman consulted with Krishnan Kadir and war raged across the heavens, Danlo remembered many beautiful and terrible things about his life. It was strange, he thought, that falling into himself towards extinction was also a falling into memory. And stranger still that the end of his journey was also his beginning. For even as he had on the night in Bardo's house when he had first drunk the blessed kalla, he found himself reliving the moments in his mother's womb just before his birth. Once again he tasted the salt of amniotic fluid in his mouth and felt his mother's heart beating through the soft, warm tissues of her belly that surrounded him; once again he felt wave upon wave of love pour through him every time his mother drew in a breath and her expanding diaphragm pressed down upon him like a soft, gentle hand. He remembered the story that the women of his tribe had told of his first moments of life, of how he had been born laughing. Well, then, now it was time that he laughed no more. Now, as he lay deep in remembrance on the carpet upon the sanctuary's cold stone floor, he once again awaited his birth even as he sought a way to die.

No, it is too hard. No, no, no, no ...

He fell deep into remembrance, not just of himself but of things other and outside himself. In truth, throughout the spinning wheel of creation, at its deepest level, there was neither inside nor outside, but only an intricate shimmering web of memory that connected all things. He began to see the way that the universe recorded all events and preserved and remembered itself. If matter was just memory frozen in time like sparkling drops of light, as the remembrancers believed, then memory was matter moving
through
time, always forming and reforming itself like waves upon the sea, always experiencing and evolving and carrying within all that has occurred to each living atom. And so he finally began to understand the marvellous way of seeing things far away in space and time that had first overcome him in the library so many years before; he understood the art of scrying as well as the beautiful and terrible vision that had built inside him as he had lain in his cell recovering from his torture. For all events occurred in the always cresting wave-front of the Now-moment where the future becomes the past. And matter, whether it be a spinning atom of carbon inside his brain or in the diamond hull of a lightship a billion miles away, preserved these waves. In truth, matter
was
these shimmering waves of memory, and the memory of all things was in all things.

Sunlight flashing off diamond hulls and black nall as hard as Bardo's battle armour covering his heart of the battle are lightships and thousands of black ships falling out of the manifold streaking through black space between the stars of the
...

Once again, Danlo found himself staring inside at a battle that occurred far away from him even as he closed his eyes and tried to stop himself from breathing. He saw the violence as it unfolded through spacetime, centred at a nearby star named Lidiya Luz. Around this flaming blue giant, Bardo had assembled the two hundred and forty lightships and twenty-five thousand other ships of his fleet. During the many days since the slaughter around Mara's Star, he had reorganized the pilots whom he led into twenty-five battle groups. Each group of approximately one thousand ships he had divided into ten sets; a single lightship pilot commanded the hundred other pilots of each set. Against this swarm of black nall hulls and gleaming diamond ships were arrayed the thirty-four thousand ships of the Ringist fleet. Salmalin the Prudent, in the
Alpha Omega
, had finally brought Bardo to battle in the spaces of this hot blue star so near to the Star of Neverness. In his stolid and unimaginative way, he probably hoped that as the Sonderval had done around Mara's Star, Bardo would mass his ships and try to force a conclusion almost within light seconds of the corona of Lidiya Luz. But Bardo would not see his beautiful ships and pilots so easily destroyed. As the new Lord Pilot of the Fellowship fleet, he had devised for this final battle a radically new and fluid strategy. He intended to attack Salmalin's fleet across a broad, bright swathe of stars. And so he had ordered three of his battle groups — the First, Second and Twelfth — to fall immediately to the Star of Neverness to capture the great thickspace there and threaten the destruction of the Universal Computer. Cristobel the Bold, in the lovely
Diamond Lotus
, was to lead this daring manoeuvre while Bardo himself and his other battle groups tried to confuse and harry the rest of the Ringist fleet. Ultimately, he hoped to trap them and destroy them, perhaps even near the thickspace of the Star of Neverness itself. It was a desperate hope, and only Helena Charbo and a few other of his pilot-captains believed that his strategy had even the slightest chance of succeeding.

One thousand spun diamond needles sparkling opening windows into flashing light streaking through black space inside space and outside sixty-thousand black ships falling into the heart of brightness inside stars exploding hydrogen oxygen and beautiful brains dying into brilliant blue-white light ...

For a time Danlo watched as the battle opened within the brilliant visual field inside him. It had taken only a few thousand seconds for the ships of both fleets to spread out from Lidiya Luz to Ninsun and the Aud Binary and other stars around the Star of Neverness. It was hard for him to apprehend this flashing violence of ship falling against ship, for the twenty-five battle groups of the Fellowship's fleet and the hundreds of cadres of the Ringists had begun to fight each other across a huge volume of space many light years across and encompassing more than ten thousand stars. Although only a few of these stars — those possessing thickspaces of great enough density — would play any part in the manoeuvres of the two fleets, the massive murder of human beings by their fellow human beings on the 47th day of deep winter in the year 2959 would come to be called the Battle of the Ten Thousand Suns.

Streaming photons spinning carbon melting vaporizing fusing into white bright light ...

Many fine pilots died that day in this terrible battle. And too many of them were pilots whom Danlo had known and loved. Danlo clenched his teeth in despair as Ivar Rey, in the
Flame of God
, fell against Nitara Tal and was destroyed when a chance explosion of a hydrogen bomb melted open his ship; he saw hundreds of black ships and too many lightships flare into incandescence as they burned up in the fire of Lidiya Luz or Catabelli or even the Star of Neverness. Nicolo li Sung died this way, as did Matteth Jons and Ibrahim Fynn and the great Veronika Menchik in the
August Moon.
Danlo watched as this steely-eyed woman fought off three attacking lightships in blinding flashes of windows to the manifold opening and closing. And then one of the Ringist pilots caught her in a mapping and forced her into the violent, blazing heart of the Star of Neverness. He watched as carbon atoms of her diamond-hulled ship vaporized and the hydrogen atoms of her brain exploded into light. And then he could watch no more. He didn't want to see any more pilots die; he didn't want to witness what seemed the Fellowship's inevitable defeat. Only one pilot, he thought, truly deserved death that day, and that was himself.

I have not gone deep enough; I have not yet remembered myself.

And so he returned from memory of the present to memory of the past. He fell deep into remembrance and found himself again floating in his mother's warm, dark womb. Salt water flowed all around him and pulsed inside him in dark, urgent streams with every beat of his little heart. He sensed that the secret of what he sought lay concealed at his life's very beginning like a diamond buried miles beneath the ocean's sands. All his awareness concentrated on these vital moments just before his birth. And then he felt a hot, trembling fear burning through his belly as he realized that he wasn't really ready to be born. And this peaceful time before he would be forced outside his mother's body into the blinding light of the world wasn't really his true beginning. That marvellous moment had occurred many days earlier in shimmering streams of plasma and interlocking DNA as his father's and mother's sex cells had joined in ecstatic union. In truth, it had occurred long before. For if he had finally become himself in all the dreams of this unborn manchild curled up in darkness, waiting to discover light, then surely he had been almost equally himself a day before. And a day before
that
day, and ten days, and twenty. Surely at all the stages of his life going backwards from his foetushood to a quivering ball of explosively dividing cells, he had always been himself, for what else could he ever be? As a bluestar diamond was always a diamond, flawless and hard and sparkling brilliantly no matter how its many facets were cut, so his essential selfness shone from whatever form he took on or came from. Even as a zygote, all his selfness was in this single fertilized cell. And it was in the two cells from which the zygote had formed and even in the cells that made the blessed sperm and egg: in some sense his selfness was in his father and mother, and in the fathers and mothers who made them. If he looked deeply enough and dared to journey far back towards his true origin, he would find himself in the sand and in the salty waters of the world that had made all his father's fathers and the mothers of his mother. And even as he had emerged into the world all bloody and laughing out of the torn tissues of his mother's body, so the world had been born out of the shining dust that swirled between the stars. If he went far, far back into the past and into himself, his beginning must lie with the beginning of the universe itself. All his being was in the universe, and nowhere else. All his selfness was in this greater Self in which he lived and moved and dreamed of death.

I must move myself
, he thought.
Movement is the great secret.

For a long time Danlo lay paralysed on the cold floor almost completely unaware of Hanuman as he consulted with the Ede imago and interfaced the Universal Computer in order to slaughter as many pilots of the Fellowship fleet as possible. Once or twice, breaking upon his interior visual field like rocket fire in a dark night, images of pilots' faces being blasted with laser light flashed before him. He saw flesh falling away from bone in burning, bloody hunks and lightships falling uncontrollably through the black bowels of the manifold. He saw black ships spinning helplessly in space and windows opening upon the interior hell of blue giant stars, and he wanted to scream at the sheer horror of it all. But at last he closed himself to the terrible vision that opened inside him and out, and he managed to concentrate on the task that lay before him:

But how do I move so that it all falls silent and still and I move no more?

How did his heart move? What moved his belly so that he could draw in breath after breath of harsh, cold air? At first, with all a child's naive hopefulness (or black despair), he had thought that he might simply will his heart to stop beating. In his mind, he would form an image of a bunched, red muscle the size of his fist seizing up and dying, and never again would he feel the surge of blood exploding through his chest. But when he looked deep down the moist, lightless corridors inside himself now, he saw that his heart did not move according to the commands of his brain or mind. Or rather not
only
this way. For the heart's measured beat, he saw, originated from centres inside itself. There was a place near the juncture of a great blood vessel and the right atrium where a small mass of specialized muscle cells formed his heart's primary pacemaker. According to their design, moment by moment, the cells would fire and emit electrical impulses that excited the firing of other cells. And then this shock of biochemical fireworks would spread through the muscles of the atria and both ventricles in smooth, rhythmic waves, and thus the heart would pulse with life. The brain connected to the heart and influenced it through the vagus nerve, but even if this long bundle of fibres were cut, the heart would go on beating. And so if he were to die as he wanted to die, he would have to find the way out not through thought alone but rather through the deeper consciousness of his body. He would have to descend through all the dark and bloody layers of himself until he grasped the onstreaming consciousness of his very cells.

I am not I. I am salt and iron and carbon atoms spinning in the haemoglobin of my blood. I am neutrons and protons and leptons and quarks and strings and noumena down and down the chain of being into pure consciousness itself.

Once before, on Tannahill, he had made this journey. He had seen how all the matter of his body's cells was marvellously and indestructibly alive and burned in eternal awareness of itself. He had fallen deep into the heart of pure consciousness where all matter moved as a single, shimmering substance. Where matter
moved
itself, for ultimately all consciousness was in matter, and all matter blazed with the bright, numinous flame of consciousness, and there was no difference. And so he had found the way to will his mind to move and to look upon the heavenly lights within himself without falling mad. He had opened the door to a light inside light, the pure and primeval light inside all things. Only he had not been able to pass very far within. Although his great feat had won for him the title of Lightbringer, he had not been able to remain in the presence of this blessed light for it was too bright and it consumed all the tissues of his being as a star would burn up the wings of a butterfly. And now once again he stood at the threshold of all the infinite possibilities of life and death, but the golden door remained closed.

I am not I. I am the blood circulating endlessly throughout my body. I am hydrogen and nitrogen and oxygen that fill my lungs over and over, again and again. I am carbon atoms spinning inside my brain without end, without purpose, on and on and ...