War in Heaven. David Zindell
region about him known as a Lavi neighbourhood, the manifold rippled with undulations, most as faint as a whisper of wind upon a starlit sea. These he ignored, indeed, scarcely even noticed. What he sought – and hoped not to find – were the tells of a lightship, those violet traceries and luminous streaks made when a ship perturbed the manifold. Just as he passed by a spinning thickspace near the Valeska Double, he thought that he descried such tells. For the count of ten heartbeats, he didn’t breathe. But upon deeper scrutiny, it proved to be only the reflection of the Snowy Owl’s own tells, an unusual phenomenon when the manifold flattens out like a clear mountain lake. Four more times between Darkmoon and Silvaplana, Danlo was to detect such reflections, and each time he felt his heart in his throat and the blood pounding behind his eyes.
‘If you continue like this. Pilot, you’ll kill yourself.’
This came from Demothi Bede, who temporarily crowded into the pit of the Snowy Owl. No pilot, of course, while falling through the manifold would permit such a violation of his sacred space by another. And very few would share this sanctum of the soul at any time. But in order to rest, Danlo had fallen out into the quiet of realspace near Andulka. And because he loved company – sometimes – he didn’t mind talking with Demothi Bede. And so after he had finished sleeping, he had invited this crusty old lord inside the very brain of his ship.
‘But I have just slept … so deeply,’ Danlo said with a yawn.
‘But not for long. Six hours of sleep you’ve had in the last sixty, by my count.’
‘I did not know … that you were keeping count.’
‘There’s little else for me to do,’ Demothi said. Although his face was as old and forbidding-looking as a cratered moon, when he spoke there was a flash of good white teeth and true compassion that Danlo thought endearing.
‘I cannot sleep safely in the manifold,’ Danlo said. ‘And I cannot risk too many exits into realspace.’
In truth, the most dangerous part of their journey, as far as being detected by other ships, lay in opening windows to and from realspace. Then, when the Snowy Owl’s spacetime engines tore through the luminous tapestry of the manifold, there was always a release of light. Through telescopes or the naked human eye, other pilots could watch the blackness for flashes of light and so mark the coming or passing of a lightship.
‘But you could sleep longer,’ Demothi said.
‘If only I did not have to sleep at all.’
As Danlo said this, he glanced at the Ede hologram floating in the darkness. Nikolos Daru Ede, as a program running inside his devotionary computer, never slept. And he never kept silent, either, if he perceived any threat to his continued existence.
‘The Lord Demothi is right, you know,’ the Ede imago said. ‘If you exhaust yourself, you might map us into a collapsing torison space.’
Danlo smiled at this because the Ede program had learned enough mathematics of the manifold to speak almost as if he were a pilot or a real human being.
‘And what will you do if we cross pathways with another lightship? If you’re too tired to think?’
‘I have never been that tired,’ Danlo said. Once, as a boy out hunting in the wild, he had stood awake for three days by a hole cut into the sea’s ice – awake and waiting with his harpoon for a seal to appear.
‘This machine asks a good question, though,’ Demothi Bede said, pointing at the imago. ‘What will we do if we cross pathways with a Neverness lightship?’
‘Or ten ships?’ the Ede imago asked.
‘How … could I know?’
‘You don’t know what you’d do if ten lightships fell upon us?’
‘No, truly I do not,’ Danlo said. And then he smiled because sometimes he liked playing games with the Ede imago. ‘But part of the pilots’ art is knowing what to do … when you do not know what to do.’
‘But shouldn’t we at least agree upon a strategy?’ Demothi Bede broke in. ‘It seems that if we’re discovered, we’ll have only two choices: to flee into the stars, or to declare ourselves as ambassadors and trust we’ll be escorted to Neverness.’
‘Have you so great a trust of others, then?’ Danlo asked.
‘We’re speaking of pilots of the Order, not barbarians.’
‘But these pilots are also Ringists,’ Danlo said. ‘And they are at war with the Fellowship.’
Here Demothi Bede sucked in a breath with such force that his lungs fairly rattled. He said, ‘We don’t know that with certainty. It might be that the ambush near Ulladulla was an accident or only the belligerence of those five pilots who committed this massacre.’
‘No,’ Danlo said, closing his eyes. ‘It was no accident.’
‘Then you’ve decided to flee?’
‘I have decided nothing.’
‘But how will you make your decision?’
‘That will depend on many things: the configuration of the stars, how many ships we meet and who their pilots are.’ And, Danlo thought, on the pattern of the N-set waves rippling through the manifold or the whispers that he heard in the solar wind if they had fallen out near a star.
Now the Ede imago spoke again, and it was his turn to play with Danlo. ‘Do you really think you could escape ten lightships?’
‘Why not?’
‘On your journey to Tannahill, Sivan wi Mawi Sarkissian pursued you across the entire Vild.’
‘That is true,’ Danlo said. He remembered how Sivan, in his ship the Red Dragon, for a distance of twenty thousand light years, had hovered ghostlike always just at the radius of convergence in the same neighbourhood of space as the Snowy Owl. He remembered, too, Sivan’s passenger (and master), Malaclypse Redring of Qallar, the warrior-poet who hoped that Danlo would lead him to his father. The warrior-poets had a new rule, which was to kill all potential gods, and so Malaclypse had fallen halfway across the galaxy to find Mallory Ringess.
‘Well, Pilot?’
‘There is no pilot in Neverness the equal of Sivan wi Mawi Sarkissian,’ Danlo said.
‘Are you certain of that?’
Danlo, of course, was not certain, but to reassure the Ede imago, he said, ‘The best pilots went with the Sonderval to the Vild.’
‘And the very best of these is here before you,’ Demothi Bede said to the Ede imago. One of the old lord’s virtues was that he would defend a pilot of his Order against anyone, especially a glowing hologram projected out of a computer. ‘And isn’t it possible, Pilot, that you learned new aspects of your art in being pursued by Sivan?’
‘It is possible,’ Danlo said with a smile.
‘Then it’s clear that if the Ringists should surprise us, we’ll have to trust to your judgement and your art. But now, we should leave you alone so that you may take a few hours more sleep.’
‘No,’ Danlo said. ‘Now we must open a window and journey on – and pray that Arrio Verjin’s Danladi wave doesn’t smash through the manifold just as we are making a mapping.’
And so the Snowy Owl fell on past Aquene, all aflame like a plasma torch, and then entered into the spaces of the alien worlds of Darghin and Fravashing. During this time of haste and sleeplessness, Danlo saw no sign of an approaching Danladi wave or another lightship. But he never ceased the searching of his eyes or his deeper mathematical senses. And deeper still burned memories that lent urgency to his return to Neverness. He could never forget his people, the Alaloi, and how they were slowly dying from an incurable disease. Incurable, truly, by any known medicines or technologies, and yet it might be that Danlo carried the cure inside himself like