War in Heaven (96 page)

"I am sorry," he told the Ede imago that night, "but the cryologists could do nothing."

He stood by the domed window of the South Morning Tower between the devotionary computer and the crypt of Nikolos Daru Ede. The crypt — a long octagonal-shaped box wrought almost entirely of clary — perfectly displayed the frozen body of Nikolos Daru Ede. Through the planes of the clary surface, Danlo could clearly see Ede's bald head and pudgy brown face. It was almost exactly the same face that stared at him from the space above the devotionary computer.

"I am sorry," Danlo said again, "but I have decided to send the body back to Tannahill. Before I left there, I promised Harrah that I would try to find it, if I could."

"But you promised
me
that you would help me recover my body," Ede finally said. His face had fallen tight and grim, and it seemed that at any moment he might weep. But obviously the imago was not programmed to instantiate such an emotion. "
My
body, Pilot."

"I have kept my promise to you," Danlo said. "And now I must keep my promise to Harrah."

"Then why have you had my body brought here?"

"I thought that you might want to see it before ... "

"Before what, Pilot?"

"Before saying goodbye," Danlo said.

At this the Ede imago seemed truly puzzled. He stared at the crypt through many of Danlo's heartbeats before saying, "Thank you — you're a kind man, really the best of men."

Danlo bowed to the glowing Ede, then, and he smiled sadly.

"And I must thank you," Ede said, "for keeping your promise. You were true to your word, even though I had betrayed you in the sanctuary."

Again Danlo bowed in silence.

"I must tell you that I
had
to betray you. I was programmed to do anything in order to recover my body."

"I understand."

"I'm utterly a slave to my programming, you know. And that's why I must, after all, say goodbye now."

Danlo sighed as he reached out to the crypt and rested his hand on its hard clear surface. "Would you like me to leave you alone for a while?"

"Oh, no, Pilot — I did not mean that I must say goodbye to my body. That's only a useless, frozen husk, isn't it? I must say goodbye to you."

Now Danlo whipped his head about sharply and stared at the Ede imago in surprise. He asked, "Do you wish to make a journey, then?"

"Well, we all have journeys to make, don't we? In a way, we all make the same journey."

"Yes, truly we do." Danlo's eyes, usually so full of fire, had now fallen as soft and liquid as two blue cups overflowing with water.

"I'm glad you understand. And so before I make this final journey of mine, I must say goodbye to you. And then I must say goodbye to myself."

"But how can you do that?"

"I'll say the word that takes the computer down."

"But you told me that you were programmed never to say that word."

"I lied, you know. My program required me to lie — too bad, as the Bardo would say."

"I do not want you to take yourself down," Danlo said.

"But my program requires this. If I know that there is no hope of living again, I must say the word."

"And you know now that there is no hope."

"I
do
know that, now, of course. The Blue Rose, Pilot. The neverness of the Blue Rose."

Danlo stared off at the window for a while, and then he said, "But there still must be hope of you living as you are now. Otherwise you would already have taken yourself down."

"Do you call this living?" Ede asked as he waved his glowing hand in the air.

"Yes, truly, you are alive. In a way, everything is."

"But I don't want to be alive in
this
way. I'm only waiting."

"Waiting for what, then?"

"My program requires me to wait a period of time between the moment when I know there is no hope of recovering my body and the moment when I take myself down. In case I have overlooked something or some new hope arises."

"How long, then?"

"Nine hundred billion nanoseconds."

"So little time."

"So
much
time. Without hope, each nanosecond is like an eternity."

"But there is always hope," Danlo said. "If not hope for what you have dreamed, then perhaps another kind."

"And what is that?"

"Perhaps the Order's programmers could reprogram you so that you no longer wish to become human."

"But then I would not be
I
, would I, Pilot?"

"Perhaps they could reprogram you so that you no longer need to take yourself down."

"But time is running out, isn't it? You can't know how few nanoseconds are left."

"How many, then?"

The Ede imago smiled at this question and only shook his head. "In any case, my program doesn't permit me to be reprogrammed. Any such attempt would take me down permanently."

"I see," Danlo said. For many moments now, he had been counting the beats of his heart. He closed his eyes as the numbers burned like blazing arrows through his blood into his mind: twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one ... And then he looked at Ede and said again, "I do not want you to take yourself down."

"I'm sorry, Pilot — I didn't know that you cared."

Forty-three, forty-four, forty-five
...

"There's always a moment, isn't there?" Ede said. "For each of us, always a moment."

"No, no," Danlo said. But then a deeper voice spoke inside him:
Yes, yes, yes.

"Goodbye, Pilot."

Sixty-seven, sixty-eight, sixty-nine ...

"Yahweha," the Ede imago said.

And with this single word, the hologram projecting out of the devotionary computer instantly winked out into neverness. Danlo stared at the dark, empty space above the computer from where Ede had beamed forth his bright smiles for so long. He placed his right hand on the hard, jewelled box of the computer, but he felt not the slightest trace of warmth or any vibration. For a moment, in the immense silence of the room, he puzzled over the word that had taken the devotionary computer down. He was certain that he had never heard it before. And then, as he closed his eyes, he looked far back into the ocean of clear, sparkling memories that were his and yet not his alone. And he suddenly remembered this word out of the dawn of man's ur-religion on Old Earth: Yahweha, the unspeakable name of God that Ede had finally spoken.

"Yahweha," Danlo whispered himself, "Yahweha ehad."

Still holding his right hand on top of the devotionary computer, he reached out and touched his left hand to Ede's hard clary crypt. "Nikolos Daru Ede," he said, gazing through the crypt at Ede's frozen body, "
mi alasharia la, shantih, shantih —
rest in peace from your long journey."

The passing of Nikolos Daru Ede reminded Danlo that even the greatest of beings have a time to live and a time to die. It reminded him as well of the vulnerability of other beings closer to his heart. Since the night of his paralysis on the floor of the cathedral's sanctuary, he had agonized over the torture of Old Father. At first, after he had ordered that Old Father be returned to his house in the Fravashi District, it seemed that the tough, white-furred alien would recover from what Hanuman's warrior-poets had done to him. But by the end of midwinter spring, Old Father began to weaken with a mysterious wasting disease that seemed to have no cure. Because Danlo did not want the lords and masters of the Order to know of his connection with Old Father, he arranged to meet him in secret. For a ten day period after Ede's body had finally been sent back with the Iviomils' deep-ship to Tannahill, he left the Morning Towers each night to visit him. As during his time of being sculpted into the shape of Mallory Ringess, he wore a black mask to hide the features of his face. And as during his novice years, he sneaked out of the academy by climbing the old stone wall that separated the academy's grounds from the Old City. Sometimes he would bring Old Father honeycakes glazed with orange sauce, which Old Father had once loved; sometimes he would simply sit in Old Father's thinking chamber trying to play one of the unplayable double-mouthed flutes that Old Father kept by his bed. But then one evening Old Father rather abruptly dismissed the man whom others revered as the Lord of the Order, saying, "Oh, ho, Danlo, Danlo — I must thank you for visiting me so faithfully. And I must thank you for telling me who you really are. Otherwise I might have injured myself trying to bow to you. But doesn't Mallory Ringess have more important duties than amusing an old alien with such childish attempts to make music? Of course he does. So it's so. I'm not dying yet, you know. I shall send for you when I am."

Around this time, too, Danlo began to visit Tamara as often as he could. Ever since Jonathan's death, he had feared that she might wilfully make the journey to the other side of day. But it seemed that Tamara was not quite so ready to suffer the same fate as had the Ede imago. A few days after his visit with Bardo, when Danlo finally returned to her tiny apartment near the Street of Musicians, he found that she had taken in three girls whose parents had been killed when a bomb had destroyed their apartment building in the Old City. Their names were Miwa, Julia and Ilona, and it was something of a miracle that they had survived the collapse of their ceiling into a deathtrap of broken stone, blood and dust. Two years before, they had made the journey from Clarity according to their parents' wishes to become godlings in the great church that had arisen in Neverness. Of course the girls, who were four, five and eight years old, had only the vaguest desire to become part of a new religious movement. Like all children they wanted most a warm and comfortable home, good food, love, laughter and the other delights of life. But when Tamara found them wandering the dangerous Street of Smugglers — friendless, shivering and almost starving — they had none of these things. And so she had led them up the stairs to her apartment, covered them in her sleeping furs and fed them a delicious stew made from the meat of a strange animal that Tamara called a bear.

"I really
had
to adopt them," Tamara told Danlo the first night after he had met the three sisters and Tamara had sent them to bed. "The church hospices are all full, and they had no one else."

For a long time, Danlo sat with Tamara in her fireroom as he studied her still-gaunt face and looked deeply into her dark, lovely eyes. A new life sparkled there and he understood immediately that she needed these orphaned girls as much as they needed her. Because Danlo was hungry, she served him a particularly choice cut of bear meat that she had been saving for a special moment. And then, after they had spoken about the end of the war and what had happened in Hanuman's sanctuary, she returned to him his bamboo flute, his pilot's ring, the broken chess piece and all his other things that she had been keeping for him.

"Thank you," he told her when it was time to leave. "I shall come back tomorrow, if you'd like."

And Danlo did return to her apartment the following night and the night after that, all through the days and nights of deep winter. But then, in early midwinter spring, exercising his authority as Lord of the Order, he found for her a large house in the Pilots' Quarter just off the Tycho's Green. It was a two-storey chalet of granite stones with a steeply gabled root and for many years it had been occupied by Nicabar Blackstone, who had died during the war. By all the Order's traditions, the house should have been taken over by another pilot, or at least by another orderman. But many pilots had either fallen to their deaths inside stars or had fallen on to Thiells with the Second Vild Mission, and so many fine houses from the Run to the North Sliddery along North Beach stood empty. No one begrudged Tamara her new living space. After all, Tamara had once been a courtesan of great promise, and that, as Bardo observed, was almost like being a professional of the Order.

One night, as Danlo visited Tamara and her new family in their new house, over a simple meal of bread, cheese and bloodfruits, Miwa asked Danlo if he wanted to marry Tamara. She was the youngest of the girls and small for her age with the same black hair and bright black eyes as her sisters. For a moment, Danlo looked around at the fine low furniture, plants and Jonathan's old paintings with which Tamara had decorated the dining room. Then he looked back at Miwa. Where Julia, the second-oldest sister sitting next to her on an embroidered cushion, was somewhat withdrawn and demure, Miwa always seemed open, trusting, inquisitive and playful. And so out of his own playfulness, he smiled at Tamara and then turned back towards this blessed child. And he said, "Truly, any man would want to marry Tamara."

Here Ilona, the wisest of the sisters and the most compassionate and honest, smiled at Danlo and told him, "But you really wouldn't want to marry Tamara in that old facemask, would you? People don't get married that way."

For a moment Danlo sat around the low dining table as he fingered the leather mask that covered his face. He had given the girls to understand that he had been badly burned in the war, hence this attempt to cover his disfigurement. While Miwa and Julia accepted this little lie without question, Ilona couldn't understand why Danlo had to await a regrowth when the city's cutters had already restored so many others. And so she always gazed straight at Danlo as if her bright eyes could burn through the mask to behold the man beneath.

"It must hurt when you smile," she said to him. "On Clarity, I was badly sunburnt once, and it hurt when I smiled."

Later that night, after Tamara had put the girls to bed, she returned to the table to take a cup of coffee with Danlo. Now he sat with his mask off, and looked across the room at the painting of a snowy owl that Jonathan had once made.

"They are beautiful girls," he finally said, turning to smile at Tamara. "I am glad that you will be their mother."

"I'm glad, too," Tamara said. She stared down at her fingernails, which were beginning to return to their old lustre after having grown mottled and brittle from too many days of starvation. And then she looked up and asked him, "Do you love them, Danlo?"

And Danlo nodded his head. "Yes — I love children."