War in Heaven. David Zindell
halfway across the Vild. I have valued its … information.’
‘Are you asking to keep it for yourself?’
‘Yes.’
‘But a pilot may not keep any discovery to himself. You know our rule.’
‘Truly, I do. But this devotionary, this Ede, has aided me on my journey. I … have made promises to him.’
For a moment, nobody spoke. Then Lord Nikolos asked, ‘You made promises to an idol programmed out of a machine?’
‘Yes. In return for helping me find Tannahill, I promised not to take him down. I promised to help him … accomplish a thing.’
‘What thing?’
‘His … purpose.’
‘And do I dare ask what purpose you might think this machine could be programmed to achieve?’
Again, Danlo looked at the Ede hologram. He looked at Lord Nikolos and the Sonderval, and at the many other lords and masters. He felt his heart beating hard up through his throat and his face burning as if he had stood all day in the sun. He did not want to tell these cold-eyed men and women of Ede’s purpose.
‘Well, Pilot?’
‘He, this Ede, wants to …’
The Ede flashed Danlo a hand sign, and Danlo suddenly stopped talking. And then Ede addressed Lord Nikolos and the other lords, and said, ‘I want to be a man again.’
Lord Nikolos stared at the glowing hologram as if he couldn’t understand the simple sounds of human (or artificial) speech. None of the lords in the hall seemed to know what Ede might mean.
‘The pilot, Danlo wi Soli Ringess, promised to help me recover my body, if that is possible. To help me live as a man again.’
Seeing Lord Nikolos’ bewilderment, Danlo smiled and said, ‘I must tell you of his body.’
‘Please do,’ Lord Nikolos said with a sigh.
Danlo bowed his head, and then told the Lords of the Order of the body of Nikolos Daru Ede which the Architects had kept frozen in a clary crypt for three thousand years. He explained how the entire crypt had been stolen from Ede’s Tomb on Tannahill. The Ede hologram hoped that his body might someday be recovered; he prayed that the Order’s cryologists might be able to revive this body after reconfiguring the damaged neurons and synapses of its brain to instantiate the program of the devotionary computer. And thus to raise the dead. ‘We … were going to ask the Architects for the return of this body,’ Danlo said.
‘I see,’ Lord Nikolos said. ‘You didn’t by chance bear this body across the Vild in the hold of your ship?’
‘No, there were terrible events. I … was unable to recover it.’
Again Lord Nikolos sighed as if a weight had been taken from his shoulders. ‘Why don’t you finish your story, Pilot?’
And so Danlo stood within the circle of black diamond and continued his story. He told of dead worlds burnt black in the fire of supernovas and ruined alien civilizations. And stars, millions of red or yellow or blue stars burning like flame globes in the long black reaches of space. Around a star named Gelasalia he had come across a great rainbow system of seventeen ringworlds from which the resident human beings had vanished in the most mysterious of ways, seemingly transcending their bodies, perhaps to live as beings of pure information (or light) as the Ieldra had done two million years before. He had followed this trail of transcendence deeper into the Vild where the radiations of exploded stars grew thick and deadly. On the world of Alumit Bridge just inside the galaxy’s Perseus Arm, he had found a civilization of people who lived for the transcendence of the glittering cybernetic spaces inside their computers. They called themselves the Narain. They were, he said, a pale and wormlike people who wanted to be as gods. In truth, they were Architects in their lineage, heretics who had left Tannahill some two hundred years before in a bitter schism with the Church. ‘I … made friends with the Narain,’ Danlo said. ‘They feared war with the Old Church and asked me to speak for them to the Holy Ivi. To journey to Tannahill – it was the Narain who pointed out Tannahill’s star.’
And so finally after having crossed thirty thousand light years of blazing and broken stars, Danlo had come to lost Tannahill. There he had won the favour and friendship of Harrah Ivi en li Ede, the High Holy Ivi of the Cybernetic Universal Church. Because of him, she had installed new programs for her church, completely reversing the Architects’ mandate to procreate wantonly and destroy the stars. There, too, he had won the enmity of the Elder Bertram Jaspari, Harrah’s rival for the architectcy and a man who would kill for power like a mad sleekit ravening through a nest of its own family. Bertram Jaspari was also the leader of the Iviomils, a fanatical sect who preached religious purity and called for religious war. Bertram Jaspari would carry the burning torches of this facifah to other sects of Architects on Tannahill, and to the Narain on Alumit Bridge – and even out to the peoples of the Vild and beyond. ‘The Iviomils fought a war with the other Architects,’ Danlo said. ‘I … became involved in this war.’
He stared up at the brilliant colours of the dome, and he did not explain how Harrah Ivi en li Ede – and billions of other Architects across Tannahill – had come to regard him as the Lightbringer foretold by their prophecies.
Lord Morena Sung, sitting next to Lord Nikolos, turned to the Sonderval and sadly shook her head. Both these lords had known Danlo since his novice years on Neverness, and it was obvious to them that Danlo’s involvement in this war had been neither accidental nor slight. The Hall of the Lords, so bright with dancing shards of light, suddenly seemed gloomy and grim, as if the mood of one hundred and twenty women and men could darken the air itself with their dread. No one liked all this talk of war. No one liked the pain they saw on Danlo’s face or the presentiment of death burning in his deep blue eyes. Many remembered his mother, Katharine the Scryer, and they wondered if he, too, was gifted with visions of terrible moments yet to be.
‘Please tell us about this war,’ Lord Nikolos said gently.
Danlo stood at the centre of his circle as he looked out upon many faces falling heavy with fear. He remembered that once, as a young man, he had wanted to journey to the centre of the universe so that he might finally see the true nature of all things. Although he had long since abandoned this quest as hopeless, he knew that it was his fate to bring a truth to the Lords of the Order. He was like a pilot unlocking a window to the dark and depthless spaces of the manifold, except that the opening he now showed these anxious lords was into his own soul. And from the bright, black centres of his eyes and the deeper centre of himself came the memory of all that he had sensed and seen. Like the long, dark roar of a stellar wind it blew through the hall carrying the scent of hydrogen bombs and burnt flesh and stars exploding into light. And so Danlo told of how the Iviomils had slaughtered their fellow Architects, only to be utterly defeated in the end. Bertram Jaspari had assembled a fleet of the surviving Iviomils and had fled Tannahill into the stars. But before his disappearance into the galaxy’s wastelands, he had completed two acts. The first was the theft of Ede’s body. And the second was the destruction of a star.
‘The Iviomils hated the Narain people,’ Danlo said. ‘They called them heretics, apostates. They … had called for a facifah against them. A holy war to cleanse the Church of anyone who had betrayed it. So Bertram Jaspari led his Iviomils to Alumit Bridge. To the star that lights the Narain’s world. And they … destroyed it.’
Because Danlo’s mouth was dry, he stopped speaking for a moment. He bent over to place the devotionary computer on top of his wooden chest. Then, from a pocket sewn into the leg of his robe, he drew out a long bamboo flute. It was an ancient shakuhachi that his teacher had once given him. It smelled of woodsmoke and wind and wild dreams, and of all his possessions it was the most beloved. In silence he pressed its ivory mouthpiece to his lips and tongue, but he played no music. He let the soft coolness of the ivory touch off the flow of water in his mouth, and suddenly he found that he could finish his story.
‘In one of their ships, the