War in Heaven. David Zindell
beautiful. Once, Danlo had thought of this beauty as shonamanse, the beauty that men and woman make with their hands. But there is always beauty inside beauty, and Neverness had been built inside a half-ring of three of the most beautiful mountains in the world. Adjoining the Hollow Fields, almost so close that Danlo could have reached out his hand into the cold air and touched it, was Urkel, a great cone of basalt and granite and fir trees gleaming in the sun. And to the north, Attakel the Infinite, with its jagged, white-capped peak pointing the way towards the heavens for all to see. Just below Attakel, where the city rises up against the mountain, Danlo could make out the stunning rock formations of the Elf Garden where he had once gone to meditate as a journeyman. And far across the city to the northwest – across a narrow sound of the ocean which froze hard and fast in winter – he saw his favourite of the three mountains, Waaskel. It was Waaskel, this shining, white horn, that had guided him when he had first come to Neverness from a very different direction so many years before.
Losas shona, he thought. Shona eth halla.
Halla was the beauty of nature, and the glory of Neverness as a city was to mirror the natural beauty of Neverness Island itself. As Danlo rocketed slowly along the broad orange sliddery connecting the Hollow Fields to the academy, he marvelled at the great gleaming spires built of white granite or diamond or organic stone. There were the spires of the Old City, numerous, lovely and ancient, and the more recently-built spires such as those named for Tadeo Ashtoreth and Ada Zenimura. And the most recent of all, Soli’s Spire, named for Danlo’s grandfather. This needle of pink granite was the tallest in the city. At the end of the Pilots’ War, when a hydrogen bomb had destroyed much of the Hollow Fields and the surrounding neighbourhoods, Mallory Ringess had ordered it raised up as part of his rebuilding programme. This newly-made part of the city he called, simply, the New City, and it was these well-ordered blocks and graceful buildings through which the procession of sleds escorting Danlo now passed.
‘I was in the Timekeeper’s Tower when the bomb exploded,’ Demothi told Danlo above the wind whipping through the open sled. ‘I saw the mushroom cloud rise over this part of the city. And after, the utter ruin of streets that I had skated as a child. Every tower of the Fields broken, blown down. Almost every building. And look at it now! There’s no sign of the war, is there?’
Danlo looked out at the shopfronts and the many people coming and going from the various apartments giving out on to the street. Many of these buildings, with their pink granite and sweeping garlands of icevine flowers, reminded him of similar architecture he had seen throughout the Old City. All kinds of people thronged the sliddery itself, making travel slow. He saw wormrunners, courtesans, astriers, harijan, hibakusha and of course many Ordermen skating in the lanes to the side of them. The Academy Sliddery, as this street had been called for three thousand years, was one of the oldest in the city and usually one of the busiest. And now, on this 98th day of false winter in the year 2959 since the founding of Neverness, it seemed much as it always had at this time of day in this fairest of seasons. The air had fallen warm enough to melt the sliddery’s orange ice, and a sheen of water slickened its smooth surface. Songbirds warbled from their roosts in the elaborate stonework of the buildings while fritillaries swarmed the icevine flowers or the snow dahlia bursting from the planters in front of many restaurants. These were real fritillaries, insects with their lovely violet wings, not the organisms of the Golden Ring named for them. They added to the brightness and gaiety of the street; looking at them fluttering about in their thousands, it was almost impossible not to feel a certain peace.
And yet beneath the surface serenity of a typical false winter day, Danlo saw signs of war. Not the Pilots’ War that had befallen Neverness when he was still a child, but the coming war, the one he must stop even if it cost him his life. To begin with, too many people were wearing gold. Wormrunners and astriers and even harijan in their billowing pantaloons – many of them wore at least one garment that had been dyed a golden hue. All the courtesans, he saw, in their two- or three-piece silken pyjamas, were dressed wholly in gold, a clear sign that their Society had wholly converted to Ringism. And all the Ordermen wore bands of gold, often sewn into the very fabric of their robes. Five times he saw Ordermen actually wearing golden robes, and these were not grammarians as their colour once would have shown, but rather a horologe, a librarian, a cantor, a notationist and a holist. These five women and men wore armbands coloured red, brown, grey, maroon and cobalt to distinguish their respective professions. The most devoted of the Order’s Ringists, who called themselves godlings, prided themselves on beginning a trend which they hoped would spread throughout the halls of the academy; soon, it was said, even the Lord of the Order himself, Audric Pall, would take off his cetic’s orange robe and don one of purest gold.
Even the bustle of the street heralded the opposite of peace. Danlo saw too many sleds laden with furs or foodstuffs or other goods that people might hoard if the times grew violent. With the sliddery so crowded, it was the slowest journey he ever remembered making between the Fields and the academy. At the intersection of the great East–West Sliddery, the second longest street in the city, a sled had run out of hydrogen and stood blocking traffic. There was a snarl of stalled sleds and frustrated skaters backed up along both slidderies; many people were shouting and pushing their way through the manswarms as if they had forgotten every social grace. A fight broke out between two wormrunners. One of these, a large, black-bearded man bedecked in black sable furs and diamonds, whipped out a laser from a hidden holster and fairly shoved it in the other wormrunners’s face. He threatened to burn through his eyes and boil his brains. And then, realizing that the penalty for the crime of keeping a laser would be banishment from the city, he put away this vicious weapon and quickly skulked off into the crowd. That wormrunners might now carry lasers instead of their usual knives alarmed Danlo; that no one tried to chastise the wormrunner or seemed to regard his open display of outlawed technology as unusual alarmed him even more.
But they traversed the remaining seven long blocks to the academy without further incident. And then they came to the scorched steel doors of the Wounded Wall, which surrounded the academy to the south, west and north. The gates to this high granite barrier stood open awaiting their arrival. Danlo remembered that when he had been a journeyman, they always closed at night, making it necessary for him and Hanuman li Tosh and other friends to climb its rough stone blocks in then forbidden forays into the Farsider’s Quarter. Now, Yemon Astoret said, the gates were often closed during the day – for the first time since the Dark Year when the Order’s schools on eight hundred worlds had been burned in the Architect religious riots and the Great Plague had come to Neverness. Now, Yemon said, as if addressing two novices, the Lords of the Order feared that the astrier and harijan sects might riot under intense pressure to convert to Ringism. Or warrior-poets might try to storm through the gates on a mission of assassination. There were too many warrior-poets in the city; over the last year, these bringers of death in their rainbow robes had flocked to Neverness like goshawks gathering for a killing frenzy.
As the procession of sleds passed through the South Gate and threaded through the academy’s narrow red glidderies, Danlo filled with memories as if he were drinking an ocean. He gazed at the beloved Morning Towers of Resa, the Pilots’ College where he had spent his early manhood learning the mathematics of the manifold. Almost in the shadow of these twin pillars of the sun were the Rose Womb Cloisters, the buildings housing the salt water tanks where he had floated and practised his arts of hallning, adagio and zazen. He saw many journeyman pilots in their black kamelaikas skating the glidderies leading to the Cloisters or to Resa Commons. He couldn’t help but feel a camaraderie and compassion for them; many of them, he supposed, would be pressed into piloting lightships in the coming war before they had quite mastered their art. He wanted to stop his sled, to skate over to a group of these young pilots and tell them that he, too, had been elevated to a full pilotship at a very young age and had taken a lightship into the Vild before he was quite ready. But in their flashing eyes and anxious faces, he saw no welcome. They well knew who he was and why he had returned to Neverness. One of them, a burly man who was said to be the secret son of Lord Burgos Harsha, actually spat at the ice as Danlo’s sled moved past, and in a rather loud, braying voice called out, ‘The wayless return.’ Several of his friends, who all wore golden armbands, picked up the cue and cried out the newly popular saying, ‘Wayless, godless, hopeless.’
As they passed