War in Heaven. David Zindell
who had recently returned from the deepest part of the Vild. The last of the master pilots, of course, was Danlo wi Soli Ringess. He stood watching the sky with his deep blue eyes – and watching Lord Nikolos and all the thousands of men and women pressing up against the run from the east and west. He might have traded a few last words with Lara Jesusa and other full pilots drawn up behind him, but Lord Nikolos had called out to speak and was waiting only for the throngs to stop talking and cheering and fall into a proper silence.
Two other people standing on the run off to the side were not pilots of the Order. These were Demothi Bede, the Lord Neologician robed in ochre and, of course, Pesheval Lal, whom Danlo and everyone else always called Bardo. Once, this huge man might have stood in the Sonderval’s place, or not far behind, but no one had forgotten how he had abjured his vows and abandoned the Order. However, he was still a great pilot, if now a ronin, and his stolen ship, the Sword of Shiva, was lined up last with all the others. He too wore black, the dréadful black of nall armour and his swirling shesheen cape. If he had accomplished his purpose of the previous night, he gave no sign, for his face was as stern as any other. He traded serious looks with Demothi Bede, who would soon set forth as an ambassador and passenger in Danlo’s ship. In only a few more moments they would both leave this soft and beautiful world – Bardo to go to war and Demothi to journey to Neverness to prevent it.
‘Silence, it’s time!’ a red-robed horologe called out from a crowd of academicians waiting not far from Lord Nikolos. Others picked up the cry, and passed it voice to voice for a mile down the run: ‘Silence, it’s time.’
Then, in the sudden quiet, Lord Nikolos spoke to the pilots in his calm, clear voice. He began by discussing the meaning of being a pilot and reminding them of their vows, especially their fourth vow, that of restraint. For in the coming days, he said, they would need restraint above all other virtues, even courage and faith. ‘The Order was founded to illuminate the peoples of all worlds, not to make war upon them. We keepers of the ineffable flame are no warriors, nor shall we ever be. Nevertheless, it may be that we must act as warriors for a time. Therefore we must act in clear conscience of what is permitted and what is not.’
He then enjoined them above all else to avoid war if they could. Danlo, along with the Lord Bede, was to be given a chance to reason with Hanuman li Tosh. If a display of virtuosity and threat might bring peace, they were to use their lightships towards this end only. And if battle came to them howling on an ill-wind of fate, pilots were to fall in violence only against other pilots and ships of war. They were not to attack merchant ships, nor any world or peoples supporting Hanuman and the Way of Ringess. Specifically, Lord Nikolos charged them with upholding the Laws of the Civilized Worlds. They were not to arm their lightships with hydrogen bombs or other weapons of genocide. They were not to infect planetary communications’ systems with information viruses or disable them with logic bombs. The purpose of the war must be as clear to them as a diamond crystal: first, they were to stop Hanuman from using the Old Order to spread Ringism to the Civilized Worlds. If possible, they were to restore the Old Order to its original vision and age-old injunction against associating with any religion. And last, he said, at any cost to themselves in wounds or death, Hanuman’s Universal Computer must be destroyed. To this end, he asked them to pledge their honour and lives.
After they had made their vows, he reminded them that the meaning of the ancient word for pilot was ‘steersman’. He told them that they must always find their way between the hard rocks of pride and the whirlpool of self-deception to the truth shining always beyond. And so he led them in a prayer for the most essential of all the pilot’s arts, which was vision. And then he said, ‘I wish I could go with you, but since I cannot, I wish you well. Fall far, fall well, and return.’
He bowed to them, deeply, and the pilots returned his bow. Led by the Sonderval, they each walked up to their ships and climbed inside. It took some little time for Demothi Bede to enter the passenger room of Danlo’s ship and prepare for his journey. But when he had shut himself inside his sleeping cell and Lord Nikolos and everyone else had moved to safety, the Master of the Fields gave the signal for the pilots to depart. One by one, the lightships began rocketing down the run, where the swarms of the city formed a gauntlet on either side of them. Of course, the lightships, having no wheels, did not need to use the run to gain the blueness of the sky beyond. But the pilots wanted to make a show of their art, and so the Sonderval took his silver-black Cardinal Virtue roaring into the air. Helena Charbo, in the Infinite Pearl, followed his line of ascent only seconds behind, and then came the other ships, the Montsalvat, the Blue Rose and the Bright Moon, and the August Moon, the Sagittarius Bridge, and all the others strung out like diamonds on a necklace connecting earth to the heavens.
The Snowy Owl, with its long, graceful lines and sweeping wings, was only one ship among two hundred of these jewels. Although Danlo would soon enough leave his brother and sister pilots behind, he felt in his pounding blood the sense of shared purpose that connected him to them. And then, when the world of Thiells lay spinning beneath him like a great blue ball, the manifold opened before him. He entered into the raging deeps of the universe, and then he, like all the pilots in their two hundred lightships, had only his vision and his heart to guide him.
We call our region of the galaxy the Civilized Worlds. We believe that we seek for ourselves an ideal state of human culture beyond barbarism or war. If this be true, however, how are we to think of Summerworld, with its silver mines and slaves, as civilized? Or Catava where the Architects of the Reformed Churches use their holy cleansing computers to mutilate their own children’s minds? Or Simoom, or Urradeth, and so on, and so on? The truth is that we have come to define civilization very narrowly: we are civilized who honour and keep the Three Laws. And what is the essence of these laws? Very simply, that we agree to limit our technology. To be civilized is to make a choice to live as careful and natural human beings in harmony with our environments. The Civilized Worlds, then, are nothing more than those three thousand spheres of water and earth where man has chosen to remain as man.
— from A Requiem for Homo Sapiens by Horthy Hosthoh, Lord of the Order of Mystic Mathematicians and Other Keepers of the Ineffable Flame
And so the pilots of the New Order returned across the stars as they had come only a few years before. Although this part of their journey from Thiells to Farfara was much the shortest, in distance, as measured in time it took many days to fall even a few hundred light years between such stars as Natal and Acayib the Brilliant, for the manifold underlying the Vild was as changeable as quicksand and mappings made one moment might prove worthless the next. The Sonderval, though, led the lightships with panache and good order past Kefira and Cho Chumu, and Rhea Luz, all hot and swollen with its angry red light. Perhaps it was good chance – or only fate – that no pilots were lost during this first fenestration of window to window giving out on the treacherous stars. Once, when they fell through a Danladi fold caused by the explosion of some recent supernova, Ona Tetsu’s Ibi Ibis almost vanished into an infinite series of infoldings. But with great presence of mind characteristic of all her famous line, that wily pilot found a mapping which took her through a window to the Birdella Double, which was the next star pair in the sequence of stars that the Sonderval had set. There she waited for the two hundred lightships to rejoin her – waited with great coolness as if she hadn’t almost lost her life like a child smothered in sheets of wildly flapping plastic.
Most of the pilots, of course, would have liked to prove their virtue by finding mappings independent of the others, but accidents such as Ona’s befell few of them, and the Sonderval had ordered them to stay together. And so they moved through the Vild as one body of ships, remaining always within the same neighbourhood of stars. They passed Ishvara, Stirrit and Seio Luz, a cool yellow sun almost identical in shape and colour to the Star of Neverness. And Kalkin and Vaishnara, and others, and finally they came to Sattva Luz, a brilliant white ball of light just within the inner envelope of the Vild. From here, their mappings would carry them only a few