War in Heaven (99 page)

"Aha — we're finally alone," Old Father said. His sweet voice sang out like a starling's, and he motioned for Danlo and Bardo to sit by his bed. "Thank you, Danlo, for coming. And thank you, too, Bardo."

Bardo, who was sure that he had never before laid eyes upon Old Father, nervously stroked his beard as he sat facing the old alien. He couldn't understand why he had been rousted from his warm apartment to make the journey to this cold room (as always, Old Father kept his thinking chamber scarcely above freezing) unless it was to learn some vital bit of information that Danlo's old master wished to share with both of them.

"By God, it's cold in here," Bardo complained. "Does anyone mind if I don't take off my furs?"

And Danlo, sitting crosslegged next to him, shook his head even as Old Father stroked the silken white fur of his chest and laughed out, "But why should anyone mind? I might as well ask if you mind if
I
keep my fur on. Which I think I will, if only for a little while longer."

At this intimation of Old Father's approaching death, Danlo exchanged quick looks with Bardo, but neither of them spoke. And then Old Father pointed a long finger at Danlo and said, "Oho — I will, however, ask Danlo wi Soli Ringess to take off his mask. This is no way for a former student to face his old teacher, is it?"

For a moment, Danlo hesitated. He looked towards the door as if one of Old Father's students might at any moment come blundering into the room. But the door remained closed, and except for Old Father's laboured breathing, the thinking chamber remained silent. And then Danlo looked at Old Father and nodded his head.

"All right, then, sir — I will remove my mask, if you'd like."

So saying, he pulled the mask over his head and sat by Old Father's bed as still and quiet as a great white owl perched on a tree.

"Danlo — what's happened to you?" Bardo suddenly cried out. He stared at him in sheer wonder. "By God, look at you!"

But Danlo had no need to look at himself, for he could perceive his reflection in Bardo's astonished words and in the bright golden mirrors of Old Father's eyes. He saw himself even as Bardo and Old Father saw him: no longer did he wear the face and form of Mallory Ringess. During his ten days alone in the tower, he had returned almost to his old self. In truth, he looked much the same as he had before Constancio had sculpted him: he showed the long nose, bold cheekbones and fiercely handsome face of all his line. And yet there was something new about him, too, something marvellous and strange as if all the cells of his body were working to make him into some glorious new shape as yet not quite completed.

"How is it possible?" Bardo almost shouted. "Have you had a cutter brought to your rooms in secret? No, no — there's been no time. By God, Danlo! By God, by God!"

But Old Father, lying calmly in his bed, seemed not at all surprised by Danlo's miraculous transformation. As always, he beamed forth an aura of zanshin, that complete clarity and alertness of mind that the Fravashi Fathers strive to maintain at all times, even at the sight of a beloved student's new/old face — or even in the face of death itself.

"Oh, ho!" Old Father said to Danlo. "It's good to see you again — good to see the man you've become. So, it's so: I'm glad that I could see you just as you are. It's time we said goodbye, you know."

He told Danlo and Bardo that he had presents for each of them. When Bardo protested that he had never been a student of the Fravashi, much less of Old Father himself, Old Father smiled at him and said, "But all the same, I should like to give you a small gift before I make my next journey."

"But why?" Bardo asked.

"Ah, oh — still so impatient," Old Father said. "But you may understand when I give you my gift."

He reached his long, white-furred hand behind his bed and drew forth a book bound in new leather. He handed it to Bardo. Upon opening it, Bardo beheld page after page of white paper inscribed with little black symbols that Old Father himself had laboriously drawn there with pen and ink. Bardo — and Danlo as well — saw immediately that they were mathematical symbols. As Bardo's eyes pored down the first page, he muttered to himself as he shook his head. Obviously, he thought, this must be one of Old Father's famous jokes, for the Fravashi were renowned for music or the liberation that comes from practising Moksha — but never for making mathematics.

"I don't understand," Bardo said, looking up from the manuscript.

"Aha — and I had heard that you were a brilliant pilot," Old Father said. "Is it that you don't understand the mathematics, then?"

Again, Bardo looked down at the swirling black flowers that Old Father had penned on to the first sheet of paper. He tapped his finger down the page and nodded in appreciation of what seemed a rather elegant definition of Justerini's omega function. Apparently, Old Father had used a Danladi transform to convert the three-dimensional ideoplasts with which the pilots made their mathematics into two-dimensional symbols written in black ink.

"Well, I think the mathematics are clear enough," Bardo said rather proudly. "It appears to be an exposition of the Great Theorem."

"Oh, ho, but appearances can deceive, as I've taught Danlo and my other students," Old Father said. "But not this time. So, it's so: the book is exactly as it appears. I've had some thoughts about the Great Theorem lately. It's always possible to make a mapping between any two stars, of course, but almost always difficult to find such a mapping. Ah, ha, hideously, hideously difficult. This is an attempt at a constructive proof of the theorem. So that any pilot will be able to construct a mapping between any two stars — even the stars of our galaxy and those of the Canes Venatici. All the stars of the universe."

At this astonishing claim, Bardo looked at Old Father as if the old alien's illness had completely deranged his mind. A constructive proof of the Great Theorem had been the dream of the pilots for three thousand years. Not even Mallory Ringess, who had indeed proved the Theorem in a general way, had ever made a constructive proof.

"Ah, thank you," Bardo growled out to Old Father, not knowing what else to say. Again, he looked at him with an almost open pity. He must have thought that it would be well if Old Father simply died before anyone discovered that he had wasted the last days of his life dabbling at mathematics.

But Danlo was looking at Old Father strangely and deeply, as if there was much more to this mysterious old alien than he had ever dreamed. He placed his hand on Bardo's book, then, even as he lost himself in the terrible beauty of Old Father's eyes.

"Thank you," Bardo said again in his impatience to be finished with this onerous visit. "But what present do you have for Danlo, then?"

"Ah, oh, aha," Old Father said. "But Danlo already has my present. It's something that was once very dear to me."

"His flute," Bardo said. He nodded his head in remembrance of the story of how Old Father had given Danlo his shakuhachi at their first meeting on Far North Beach years before. "His goddamned flute."

He watched as Danlo now drew his flute from a pocket of his furs and held the long, golden piece of bamboo lightly in his hands.

"No,
not
his flute," Old Father said. "He's been given something even dearer to me — so, it's so."

"What, then?" Bardo wanted to know.

And without a word, in the utter stillness between the beats of Danlo's heart, Old Father reached out with his trembling, furry finger and touched the black diamond pilot's ring that encircled the little finger of Danlo's hand.

"What? You've fallen mad!" Bardo cried out. And then, upon considering why they had been summoned to this cold, stone-lined room that day, he remembered his compassion (and his manners), and said, "Ah, I'm sorry, Old Father, but you must be confused. Surely you must know that the ring belonged to Mallory Ringess. I, myself, kept it for years after the Ringess went away. I gave it to Danlo when it was time for him to take possession of it."

"Thank you for being the guardian of my ring," Old Father said.

Again Bardo shook his head sadly and said, "But, Old Father, you can't really believe that — "

"I am Mallory Ringess," Old Father said softly, cutting him off. "Oho, I am also Old Father, as you see, but first I was Mallory Ringess."

At this second great shock of the day, Bardo's eyes opened wide in wonder and disbelief. He listened in utter silence as Old Father explained how he had never really left Neverness, after all, but had only transformed himself into the shape of a Fravashi Old Father. Concerning the nature of this transformation itself he had little to tell. Bardo, like Danlo, must have wondered if Mallory Ringess had found a cutter who specialized in sculpting alien features out of human clay. But Old Father hinted only that much as the Entity had brought forth a double of Tamara on the earth far away in the Vild, She had somehow helped create this incarnation of white fur, red blood and anguished golden eyes that lay speaking with all the marvellous and musical fluidity of a Fravashi.

"I don't believe it," Bardo said. Old Father, with his mutable alien consciousness, had always been famous for saying strange things, but what he had just told Bardo and Danlo was the strangest thing that Bardo had ever heard. "Ah, but I
can't
believe it, too bad."

"Oho, but you were always such a doubting man," Old Father said.

"I like to think Bardo is rather a discerning man," Bardo said.

"I remember that you liked to say this about yourself."

"You remember, do you?"

"Ha, ha — I remember more about you than you'd want to remember yourself."

"I really don't see how you could."

Now Old Father's eyes fell soft and compassionate for a moment as he said, "I remember how the fourth-year novices called you Piss-All Lai and forced you to sleep in your wet blankets every night."

"Ah, well, everyone knows that," Bardo said. "Everyone who was with me in Perilous Hall. They tell many stories about Bardo, now."

"So, it's so — I'm sure they do." For a moment Old Father paused and stared through Bardo almost as if he were dreaming. And then his eyes leapt with orange flames as he smiled at Bardo and asked, "But do they tell the story of how young Pesheval Lai, who called himself Bardo, pissed in the fourth-year novices' beer and served it to them in revenge?"

At this unexpected revelation out of the past, Bardo's face fell purple with shame. He stared at Old Father as if completely stunned. And then he muttered, "No, no — besides myself, only Mallory ever knew what I did."

All this time Danlo had sat in silence looking deeply at Old Father. And now Old Father looked away from Bardo to turn the full light of his consciousness upon Danlo. As Danlo counted out ten beats of his heart, he gazed into the golden eyes of this strange, alien being whom he had loved since their first meeting on the sands by the frozen sea. And now he reached out to join hands with Old Father in a way that the Fravashi always avoided. He clasped Old Father's white-furred fingers with his own naked hand, freely and firmly, as man greeting man had done for a million years.

Yes, yes, yes.

"By God, it's really true, then! He really is Mallory Ringess!"

"Yes, truly he is," Danlo said. And then, even as he looked deep into the frozen waters of space and time, his voice dropped low and respectful as he directed his words towards Old Father. "Truly you are."

"But why?" Bardo wanted to know. He leaned closer to Old Father as if he might fall against him and bury his face against Old Father's furry chest. But then he restrained himself. "Mallory, if it's really you, please tell me why you left us as you did and turned yourself into a goddamned Fravashi?"

"Yes — that I would also like to know, sir," Danlo said.

Old Father let go of Danlo's hand then and whistled out a long, low note that might have been the Fravashi equivalent of a sigh. (Or it might have meant that even as Danlo had done as a young man, he was again asking questions almost impossible for Old Father to answer.) When Old Father closed his eyes for a few moments, Danlo feared that the strain of all that had occurred that morning might send him on his final journey. But then Old Father laughed softly and he looked first at Bardo and then at Danlo. He said, "Ah, aha, this will be hard to explain."

As the sounds of music and mourning seeped into the room from the deeper parts of the house, Old Father tried to tell them what it was like to be a scryer. The universe, he said, was like an infinite, golden tree that branched ever outwards into the future. Like any tree, a shin tree or an oak, the whole of it grew in one direction only, towards the light. But any of its billion upon billions of tiny branches might be eclipsed by greater limbs of the tree or cut off altogether. And while the tree itself could never die, parts of it might succumb to disease and fall stunted and misshapen.

"Ah, ah, ah," Old Father said, "Bardo must be thinking that if only I had never left the Order or had returned at the right time, much as Danlo did, I might have stopped the war before it began. And so it's so: I might have done this seemingly compassionate thing. And a branch of the tree would have been preserved in all its flowering greenness — for a time. But oh, oh, oh, the price, the terrible price. To stop one war and cause a greater war to be. To save one branch and lose a whole limb of a thousand branches. The whole galaxy, Danlo. The choice, for all beings everywhere, there's always the terrible choice. But the
beautiful
choice, too. Isn't this the glory of being conscious and alive? In the end, we choose our futures. And so like anyone else, I tried to look into the future and choose the best one that I could."

Here he paused a while to catch his breath. And then he touched his finger to Danlo's ring again, smiled sadly and said, "Danlo, Danlo — I'm sorry that you hardly ever knew me as anyone other than Old Father. I'm sorry that you had to come to Neverness alone, that everything had to happen as it did. So much suffering, so much death. But of all the billions of possibilities branching out into the future, I saw only one slender path in which you lived."