War in Heaven (89 page)

"It is said that I have my mother's eyes."

"Your mother," Malaclypse said, "was Dama Moira Ringess, then?"

My mother
, Danlo thought,
was Chandra, daughter of Lenusya, daughter of Ellama who was a daughter of the Patwin tribe. And my blood mother was Katharine the Scryer, daughter of the world.

"Moira Ringess, the cantor," Malaclypse said again. "She who slelled Leopold Soli's DNA in order to conceive a son."

All the mothers who have lost a son in this war are my mothers
, Danlo thought.
And each mother who has ever lived or died — she is my mother, too.

"A man," Danlo said simply, looking at Malaclypse, "may have many mothers."

At this, Malaclypse glanced at the red ring encircling the little finger of his left hand. He said, "You speak poetically, and I must honour you for that. But a man comes into the world through one door only."

One door only
, Danlo remembered.

"And all men," Malaclypse added, looking at the ring on his right hand and the killing knife that he held, "must go out of life through only one glorious door as well."

One door, and one door only, opens upon the golden future that I have dreamed
, Danlo remembered. And then a sudden thought, as clear and perfectly formed as crystal of new snow:
No, there are an infinite number of doors. And they open on to infinite possibilities.

For a moment Danlo looked down at the black and white chess pieces scattered upon the floorstones. From far off came the sound of explosions. Truly, there were many doors to the universe, and opening any one of them would reveal whole galaxies of stars just as one could see the whole world in a grain of sand. And so as he stared at a tiny chip of ivory broken off one of the chess pieces, his mind's eye opened and he began to fall through space and time. Deep inside him, he felt an utter coldness and certainty of knowing. Many times before this other-sight had come over him, uncontrollable and unbidden. But now he found that he could simply will himself to see. He was like a beautiful tiger who could appear almost magically behind any of a jungle's thousands of trees; and he was like a pilot who had finally mastered the Great Theorem and could fall anywhere among the stars that he chose. The power of such willed presence astonished him and filled him with a wild joy. It was like momentarily thinking that he was lost in space and then beholding one familiar star — and instantly remembering the configuration of a thousand others. It was like opening a window to the manifold and expecting to find unmappable spaces, only to discover that even the worst chaos is underlaid by a deeper mathematics. His awareness radiated outwards across the Fallaways like expanding wavefronts of light, and he marvelled at the logic inside logic of this deep vision, the brilliant patterns, the secret order, the shimmering interconnectedness of all things.

The terrible beauty.

And so once again he watched a great blue star near Raizel Luz fall supernova. He watched the ship containing Bertram Jaspari's Iviomils and their murderous
morrashar
come close to this star — which was as close as they dared approach the Star of Neverness. And then came a terrifying explosion, gamma rays and photons and great gouts of boiling blue flames flung out into the coldness of space. A ball of light radiating in every wavelength from the infrared to the ultraviolet expanded outwards into the galaxy at a speed of almost two hundred thousand miles per second. It was this killing light that destroyed a great part of the Ringist fleet. Bardo, in his
Sword of Shiva
, having discovered the supernova only seconds before, almost instantly refined his strategy of trapping his numerically superior enemy. Using his Fifth, Sixth and Eighth battle groups as decoys, he led tens of cadres of Ringist ships into the light-ruined spaces near Raizel Luz. Those black ships and lightships not immediately incinerated in the supernova's fires were mostly destroyed when Cristobel the Bold and Alesar Estarei, commanding the Eleventh and Twelfth battle groups, led an attack against the sixteen thickspaces where any of the Ringist ships might emerge into realspace. Soon, in only a few hundreds of seconds, the whole of the Ringist fleet's right wing began to disintegrate like sand swept up in a whirlwind. This chaos spread to the Ringist centre as well, where Salmalin the Prudent led the remainder of his fleet. The Lord Pilot of the Ringists, in his glittering
Alpha Omega
, had to endure watching as cadre upon cadre of ships across hundreds of stars disappeared into their fiery centres or were swallowed up and dispersed into the manifold. The shock of this slaughter spread through the remainder of the Ringist fleet like ball lightning through a dry forest. All but a few of the Ringist pilots panicked and began to surrender to Bardo's pilots. Upon seeing that the battle was lost, Salmalin the Prudent, true to his name, signalled his cadre commanders that they should stop fighting. And so there, beneath the fierce white glare of Raizel Luz, he surrendered his entire fleet to Bardo.

The Ringists' defeat was total. Many thousands of ships and pilots they lost that day, among them Nitara Tal and Kadar the Wise and Salome wi Maya Hastari in the
Golden Butterfly.
But many of the Fellowship's pilots had died, too. Danlo, falling from ship to ship and star to star at a speed infinitely greater than any photon, beheld the face of each dead pilot shimmering through space and time with a light inside light. He wanted to pray for each of them, for Paloma the Younger and Ivar Rey in the
Flame of God
, and for the great Veronika Menchik and Alark of Urradeth and Madhava li Shing, with whom he had shared rooms and dreams in Perilous Hall so many years before.

Yannis Helaku, Sulla Ashtoreth, shantih
, he silently prayed.
Madhava li Shing, mi alasharia la, shantih, shantih.

And all this seeing and falling and praying occurred in less than a moment as he stood in the sanctuary gazing into the centres of Malaclypse's violet eyes. And then he returned to realtime, and the tragedy of all that had occurred that day made him weep. He looked down at the corpses of Jaroslav Bulba and Hanuman and ten thousand pilots who lay burnt and broken upon the floor. He wept for all the brothers and sisters and fathers and mothers of Man — and he wept for Malaclypse of Qallar who must soon lie dead beneath his hands, as well.

No — never killing unless it is truly necessary to kill
, he thought. And then:
For in the end we choose our futures.

He watched the light of the flame globes play along the blood-stained steel of Malaclypse's killing knife; he watched as Malaclypse took yet another step closer to him.

Malaclypse Redring, mi alasheratha la, shantih, shantih ...

And then Malaclypse, beholding this compassion of Danlo's, suddenly froze like one tiger facing another. In one quick glance he took in the scattered chess pieces and overturned cybernetica as well as the body of Hanuman li Tosh and the pain that poured out of Danlo's eyes. He looked through the tears welling up there into the burning deep blueness, and he began to calculate furiously, like an artisan assembling one of the cathedral's great windows from a few scattered pieces of coloured glass. And then, after a few moments, his face lit up with sudden understanding. He looked at Danlo strangely and said, "You're not really Mallory Ringess, are you?"

And Danlo smiled sadly and shook his head. "No, truly I am not."

"You're Danlo wi Soli Ringess."

Again, Danlo shook his head. "No, I am not he, either."

"Danlo wi Soli Ringess, who was the only man in history to have defeated a warrior-poet as a child — I'm certain that that is your name."

"No," Danlo said, looking through the veil of tears that burned his eyes. He pointed down at Hanuman. "No — Danlo is dead and there he lies."

For a moment Malaclypse watched Danlo silently grieving, and then he said, almost gently, "I think I understand."

"I think that you
do
understand." Danlo suddenly clamped his teeth shut to keep his jaw from shuddering. And then, as he stared at Hanuman's silent face, he gathered in all his will and said, "You see, I created him years ago. Therefore it was upon me to destroy him."

At this Malaclypse bowed deeply and said, "On Farfara I told you that you might have been a warrior-poet. Now I'm certain that you're one of us in spirit."

"Yes," Danlo said, "truly I am."

"In your cell, when Hanuman and the ronin poets tortured you, you never cried out."

"No — I could not."

"Even though they must have injected you with the ekkana drug, you never cried out — how is that possible?"

How do you capture a beautiful bird without killing its spirit?
a voice asked Danlo. And then he remembered the answer:
By becoming the sky.

"How is it possible, Pilot?"

"Because the heart is free," Danlo said simply. Inside him, all through his body, he felt his cells making molecules that would seek out and act as an antidote to the ekkana poison that still burned in his blood. "Because men and women are free if only they would become who they truly are."

"Ten of ten men or women, even warrior-poets,
would
have cried out. Are you the Eleventh, then?"

"No, I am something else."

"What, then?"

"The asarya," Danlo said. "The Fravashi Old Father who taught me called this one the asarya."

Malaclypse touched his lips to the dried blood coating the blade of his knife, and he said, "I know that word. The asarya is one who would say yes to all things. What would you say yes to, then?"

"I would say yes to
you,
" Danlo said, smiling. "I would say yes even to the warrior-poets, to the spirit in which your Order was founded."

Malaclypse took a step backwards then, and looked down at the gash on Danlo's hand. He looked at Danlo's cheek where the glass from the shattered window had cut him almost down to the bone. Already, in the little time since he had entered the sanctuary, these wounds had closed and scabbed over and had begun to form their healing scars. "
What
are you?" he asked softly. "An asarya, you have said, but what is that? Is an asarya a god, then?"

"No, I am a man, even as you are," Danlo said. "I am only what all women and men were born to be."

Malaclypse's knife wavered a moment as he found himself caught in the brilliance of Danlo's gaze. And then he said, "You frighten me, Pilot. In all the universe, nothing has ever frightened me as you do."

Fear is the left hand of love
, Danlo remembered. And then he asked, "Must you try to kill what you fear, then?"

"But what else should I do?"

"Join me and become an asarya, too."

There came a moment then when the whole world stopped spinning and hung perfectly balanced on the knifeblade's edge between two words, yes and no. Danlo saw the uncertainty that darkened Malaclypse's violet eyes, the terrible angels that sang inside his soul. He thought that Malaclypse still might try to kill him, if only to learn the final secret of death. But Danlo, who had buried his brothers and sisters and burned the body of his son, who had walked with the dead on Tannahill and died a million times himself in killing his best friend, knew all that could be known about this greatest of mysteries. And he knew the secret of life, as well, for at the still point of creation, at the centre of the great circle of the world, life and death were but the right hand and left joined together as one. And all this Danlo told to Malaclypse not in words but in the terrible beauty of his eyes. He told it to him in fire and light and in all the wild joy that poured out of him like an ocean. He felt something infinitely bright burst open inside him, then, and in utter silence he spoke of the sheer magnificence of life. Truly, he said, life's torments and suffering could never end, but life could never end, either. It went on and on into a glorious and golden future, ever evolving, ever seeking out every particle of matter and corner of space in which to flower, growing ever vaster, ever deeper, ever more splendid and aware. And nothing was ever lost. Nothing
could
ever be lost, not even through desolation or death, and all this Danlo told Malaclypse even as he watched him begin to melt into the light inside light and vanish into the secret blue behind the blueness of the sky.

Yes.

And then Malaclypse suddenly shook his head and looked away from Danlo. He tightened his grip on his killing knife and said, "I've pursued you across the stars and aided murderers in waging war, all to keep you from achieving your purpose."

"Yes," Danlo said, smiling sadly, "I remember."

"I have murdered in order to get close to you."

"Yes, I know."

"And yet you would still ask me to join you?"

"Yes," Danlo said. And then he caught Malaclypse's eyes again, and said, "Yes, I would."

Malaclypse stood there blinking in indecision, like a man who loves light but fears coming too close to the sun. Finally he said, "My Order still has a rule to slay all gods."

"All
gods
, perhaps," Danlo said. "But not human beings. Your Order was founded to realize the possibilities of humankind."

Infinite possibilities.

"But what is a god, then?" Malaclypse asked. "What is a human being?"

"A true human being is the glory of the world," Danlo said. "A true human being is only a part of the world, and yet the whole of it, too."

"You speak in paradoxes, Pilot."

"A true human accepts his death because he knows he can never die."

"You speak in mysteries, too."

"A true human being lives her life in fullness and contentment because she knows that she lives all lives everywhere."

"I confess that you make definitions and distinctions that the lord of my Order wouldn't want to understand."

For a moment, Danlo looked off through the sanctuary's windows and fell through space a thousand light years to the planet Qallar. There, in the redness of Qallar's bloody sun and iron soil, he saw a man supervising a training exercise between two young warrior-poets. The man was called Lord Korudon, and he wore his flame-orange poet's ring around the little finger of his left hand. His warrior's ring, pure red like Malaclypse's, shone from the fist that he made with his right hand. As Danlo looked through this terrible man's eyes into his soul, he saw that long since Lord Korudon had allowed the Order of warrior-poets to be used as a tool of the Silicon God.