War in Heaven

DAVID ZINDELL

War in Heaven

BOOK THREE

of A Requiem for Homo Sapiens

PRAISE

Gene Wolfe declared Zindell ‘one of the finest talents to appear since Kim Stanley Robinson and William Gibson – perhaps the finest’. His first novel, Neverness, was published to great acclaim. A reviewer in the New Scientist wrote of it in 1992: ‘David Zindell writes of interstella mathematics in poetic prose that is a joy to read.’

The Broken God, Book One of A Requiem for Homo Sapiens, is a sequel to Neverness. It has been hailed as Dune for the 1990s and was equally well-received: ‘SF as it ought to be: challenging, imaginative, thought-provoking and well-written. Zindell has placed himself at the forefront of literary SF.’

Times Literary Supplement

The Wild, Book Two of A Requiem for Homo Sapiens, was also published to great acclaim: ‘A disturbing vision of the impending collapse of a transgalactic society … the ideas are hard SF with philosophical undertones, and the story is compelling.’

New Scientist

With War in Heaven Zindell completes A Requiem for Homo Sapiens, bringing to a cataclysmic finale the most amazing journey in modern science fiction. He lives in Boulder, Colorado.

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Chapter I: In the Hall of the Lords

Chapter II: Fate

Chapter III: The Two Hundred Lightships

Chapter IV: Sheydveg

Chapter V: The Golden Ring

Chapter VI: The Lords of Neverness

Chapter VII: A Law for Gods

Chapter VIII: Pain

Chapter IX: Mora’s Star

Chapter X: The Nine Stages

Chapter XI: The Paradox of Ahimsa

Chapter XII: The First Pillar of Ringism

Chapter XIII: Hope

Chapter XIV: The Face of a Man

Chapter XV: Tamara

Chapter XVI: The Starving

Chapter XVII: A Piece of Bread

Chapter XVIII: The Hunt

Chapter XIX: The Breath of the World

Chapter XX: The Ringess

Chapter XXI: The Battle of Ten Thousand Suns

Chapter XXII: The Universal Computer

Chapter XXIII: The Face of God

Chapter XXIV: Love

Chapter XXV: The Asarya

Chapter XXVI: The Lord of the Order

Chapter XXVII: Peace

Chapter XXVIII: Halla

Keep Reading

About the Author

Other Books By

About the Publisher

CHAPTER I

In the Hall of the Lords

Everything is God.

God is the wild white thallow alone in the sky;

God is the snowworm dreaming in his icy burrow;

God is the silence out in the great loneliness of the sea;

God is the scream of a mother giving birth to her child.

Who has beheld the world through God’s shimmering eyes?

God can see all things but cannot see himself.

God is a baby blind to his own terrible beauty.

Someday God will be a man who has learned how to see.

— from the Devaki Song of Life

I know little of God, but all too much of that godly race of beings that some call man. As gods we are destined to be – so teach the scryers and prophets of religions new and old. And yet few understand what is required to be a god, much less a true man. There are those who view the gods of the galaxy – the Degula Trinity, Iamme, the Silicon God, and all the rest – as perfect beings beyond pain or strife or death. But it is not so. The gods, though they be made of a million crystalline spheres as large as a moon, can die: the murder of Ede the God gives proof of the ultimate doom awaiting all beings whether made of diamond circuitry or flesh and blood. The gods, too, make war upon each other. Two million years ago, it is said, the Ieldra defeated the Dark God and thus saved the Milky Way from the fate of Dichali and the Aud Spiral and other galaxies that have disappeared down the black hole of the gods’ lust for the infinite. It is also said that the Ieldra have fused their souls into the light streaming out of the core of our galaxy, but other gods have evolved to replace them. There is Ai and Pure Mind and the April Colonial Intelligence and the One. And, of course, the greatest god of all, the Solid State Entity, She who had once been a woman named Kalinda of the Flowers. Compared to Her love of the stars and the life born in their fiery, hydrogen wombs, the ardour of a man and a woman for each other is only as a flaming match held up to the sun. And compared to Her hatred of the Silicon God, the passion of all the human beings who have ever lived is less than a drop of water in a boiling sea. And yet the human urge to destroy is no small thing. Human beings, as well as gods, can make war. They can destroy the stars. And yet they can say yes to the unfolding of new forms throughout the universe and create, too. This is the story of a man who was both creator and destroyer, my son, Danlo wi Soli Ringess – a simple pilot wise in the ways of peace who brought war to the heavens of many worlds.

One day as the galaxy turned slowly about its celestial centre, a lightship fell out into the near-space above a watery world named Thiells. The Snowy Owl was a long, graceful sweep of spun diamond, and it had carried Danlo across the galaxy from the Star of Neverness to lost Tannahill. His journey across the stars, and through the wild spaces of the manifold that lies beneath the stars, had been dangerous and long. Nine other pilots in their individual ships had set out on his quest to talk with a goddess, but only he had survived to fall on to the far reaches of the galaxy’s Perseus Arm. He had crossed the entire Vild, that hellish region of fractured space and dust and stars blown into dazzling supernovas. And then he had returned coreward across many light years to Thiells at the other edge of the Vild. Although he had fallen farther than any pilot in history, he was not the only one to have made a great journey. His Order – the Order of Mystic Mathematicians – had begun the great Second Vild Mission to save the stars. Other pilots on other quests had flung their lightships into the Vild like so many grains of sand cast into a raging sea. They were Peter Eyota and Henrios li Radman and the great Edreiya Chu, she of the Golden Lotus and the golden eyes that could see deeper into the manifold than could most pilots. Still others – Helena Charbo, Aja, and Alark of Urradeth – had already found their way back to Thiells or were returning to the safety of the Order only now, even as Danlo returned. Of course, no place in the Vild (or the universe) was truly safe, for even such a peaceful world as Thiells must turn its soft, round face to the killing radiation of the stars. These great white blisters of light erupted from the black heavens all about Danlo’s ship. All were old supernovas, and distant – too weak to burn the trees or birds or flowers of Thiells. But no one knew when a more murderous light might suddenly devour the sky and put an end to the new academy that the Lords of Danlo’s Order had decided to build on this world. It was, in part, to tell of one such supernova that Danlo had come to Thiells.

And so he took his shimmering ship down through the sky’s cold ozone into the lower and warmer layers of the atmosphere. It was a perfect, blue inside blue day of sunlight and clarity. Flying was a joy – falling and gliding down through space on wings of diamond towards the Order’s new city, which the Lord Pilot had named, simply, Lightstone. As with Neverness, whom the pilots and other ordermen had abandoned a few years before, this was to be a City of Light – a great, gleaming city upon a hill that would bring the Order’s cold enlightenment to all the peoples of the Vild. Actually, Lightstone was built across three hills on the peninsula of a large island surrounded by ocean. It shimmered in the noonday sun, for all its buildings were wrought of white granite or organic stone. As Danlo fell down to earth, he looked out of the windows of the Snowy Owl and caught the glint of rose and amethyst and a thousand other colours scattered from street to street and hill to hill. Soon his ship swooped down to one of the many runs crossing the city’s light-field. There, a mile from a neighbourhood of little stone cottages, out on a plain covered with flowering bushes and rocks, the Snowy Owl at last came to rest. And for the first time in many days, Danlo felt the long, heavy pull of gravity deep within his bones. It took him little time to gather his things together into the plain wooden chest that he had been given as a novice years ago. He dressed himself in his formal, black pilot’s robe before breaking the seal to the pit of his ship. And then he climbed down to the run’s hard surface. For the first time in more than a year, he stood squinting at the bright light of a real and open sky.

‘Hello, Pilot,’ a voice called out to him. ‘You’ve fallen far and well, haven’t you?’

Danlo stood holding his wooden chest while he turned to look towards the end of the run and the great sweeping buildings beyond. There waited the usual cadre of programmers, tinkers and other professionals who attended the arrival of any lightship. He recognized a red-robed horologe named Ian Hedeon, but it was a pilot who had spoken to him. This was the Sonderval, an impossibly tall man dressed in black silks, as was Danlo. He was as straight and imposing as a yu tree, and as proud – in truth he was prouder of his brilliance than any other man whom Danlo had ever known.

‘Master Pilot,’ Danlo said, ‘it is good to see you again.’

‘You may address me as “Lord Pilot”,’ the Sonderval said, stepping closer. ‘I’ve been elevated since last we met.’

‘Lord … Pilot, then,’ Danlo said. He remembered very well the evening when he and the Sonderval had talked beneath the twilight sky of Farfara some few years ago. It had been a night of the new supernova – the last night before the Second Vild Mission had left the last of the Civilized Worlds for Thiells. ‘Lord Pilot … can you tell me the date?’

‘The date on this planet or on Neverness?’

‘The date on Neverness, if you please.’

The Sonderval looked off at the sky, making a quick calculation. ‘It’s the 65th of midwinter spring.’

‘Yes,’ Danlo said, ‘but what year is it?’

‘The year is 2959,’ the Sonderval said. ‘Almost three thousand years since the founding of the Old Order.’

Danlo closed his eyes for a moment in remembrance. It had been almost five years since he had set out with the Second Vild Mission from Neverness, and he suddenly realized that he must be twenty-seven years old.

‘So long,’ Danlo said. Then he opened his eyes and smiled at the Sonderval. ‘But you look well, sir.’

‘You look well, too,’ the Sonderval said. ‘But there’s something strange about you – you look different, I think. Gentler, almost. Wiser and even wilder, if that can be believed.’

In truth, Danlo wi Soli Ringess was the wildest of men. In the time since Neverness his hair had grown long and free so that it fell almost to his waist. In this thick black hair, shot with a strand of red, he had fastened a white feather that his grandfather had given him years before. Once, as a young man, he had made a blood-offering to the spirits of his dead family, and he had slashed his forehead with a sharp stone. A lightning-bolt scar still marked him to remind others that here was an uncommon man, a fierce man of deep purposes who would listen for his fate calling in the wind or look inside the secret fires of his heart. It was his greatest joy to gaze without fear upon the terrible beauties of the world. His marvellous eyes were like the deepest, bluest cobalt glass, and they held light as a chalice does water. And more, they shone like stars, and it was this mysterious deepening of his gaze that the Sonderval had remarked, the way that light seemed to pour out of him as if fed by some wild and infinite source.

‘You look sadder, too,’ the Sonderval continued. ‘And yet you’ve returned to your Order as a pilot should, having made discoveries.’

‘Yes, truly, I have made … discoveries.’

Danlo looked past the field’s other runs, noisy with the rocket fire of lightships and jammers and other craft. Towards the ocean to the west, the city of Lightstone spread out over its three hills in lovely crystalline buildings, each house or tower giving shelter to human beings who had risked their lives to come to the Vild. Whenever Danlo pondered the fate of his bloody but blessed race, his face fell full of sadness. He always felt the pain of others too easily, just as the men and women whom he met almost always sensed his essential gentleness. Once, when he was only fourteen, he had taken a vow of ahimsa never to kill or harm any animal or man. And yet he was not only kind and compassionate, but strong and fierce as a thallow. With his quick, bold, wild face, he even looked something like that most noble of all creatures. Like the thallows of Icefall – the blue and the silver and the rare white thallows – his long, graceful body fairly rippled with animajii, a wild joy of life. That was his gift (and curse), that like a man holding fire in one hand and black ice in the other, he could always contain the most violent of opposites within himself. Even when he was saddest, he could hear the golden notes of a deeper and more universal song. Once, he had been told that he had been born laughing, and even now, as a man who had witnessed the death of stars and people whom he loved, he liked to laugh whenever he could.

‘Important discoveries, I think,’ the Sonderval said. ‘You’ve called for the entire College of Lords to convene – no pilot has done that since your father returned from the Solid State Entity.’

‘Yes, I have much to tell of, sir.’

‘Have you succeeded in your quest to speak to the Entity?’

Danlo smiled as he looked up at the Sonderval’s long, stern face. Although Danlo was a tall man, the Sonderval stood more than a foot and a half taller.

‘Can any man truly speak with a goddess?’ Danlo asked, remembering.

‘It’s been some years since we last met, and still you like to answer my questions with questions.’

‘I … am sorry, Lord Pilot.’

‘At least you’re not wholly changed,’ the Sonderval said.

Danlo laughed and said, ‘I am still always I – who else could I be?’

‘Your father asked the same question – and arrived at a different answer.’

‘Because he was fated to become a god?’

‘I still won’t believe that Mallory Ringess became a god,’ the Sonderval said. ‘He was Lord Pilot of the Order, a powerful and brilliant man – I’ll allow that. But a god? Simply because half his brain was replaced with biological computers and he could think faster than most other men? No, no – I think not.’

‘It … can be hard to know who is a god and who is not.’

‘Have you found your father?’ the Sonderval demanded. ‘Is this why you’ve asked the Lords’ College to convene?’

‘Well, I’ve found a god,’ Danlo said, almost laughing. ‘Shall I show you, sir?’

Without waiting for the Lord Pilot’s response, Danlo set down his wooden chest. He bent and opened the heavy lid. A moment later he drew out a cubical box covered along its six faces with many jewelled computer eyes. In the bright sunlight, they glittered like hundreds of diamonds. Just above the box, in truth projected out of it into the clear air, floated a ghostlike hologram of a little dark-skinned man.

‘This is a devotionary computer,’ Danlo said. ‘The Architects of some of the Cybernetic Churches carry them about wherever they go.’

‘I’ve seen suchlike before,’ the Sonderval said as he pointed his long finger at the hologram. ‘And this is the likeness of Nikolos Daru Ede, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ Danlo said, smiling with amusement. ‘His … likeness.’

The Sonderval studied Ede’s soft lips and sensuous black eyes, and he declared, ‘I’ve never understood why the Architects worshipped such a small man. He looks like merchant, doesn’t he?’

‘But Ede the Man became Ede the God, and it is upon this miracle that the Architects have built their church.’

‘Have you found Ede the God, then? Is this what you’ve discovered?’

‘This is Ede the God,’ Danlo said. ‘What is left of him.’

The Sonderval thought that Danlo was making a joke, for he laughed impatiently and waved his long hand at the Ede hologram as if he wanted to sweep it back into its box. And because the Sonderval was staring at Danlo, he didn’t see the Ede hologram wink at Danlo and flash him a quick burst of finger signs.

‘A god, indeed!’ the Sonderval said. ‘But you have spoken to a goddess, I’m sure. At least, that monstrous computer floating in space that men call a goddess. The son of Mallory Ringess wouldn’t return to call the Lords together if he hadn’t completed his quest to find the Entity.’

‘Truly? Would he not?’ Danlo asked. For the first time, he was more vexed than amused by the Sonderval’s overweening manner.

‘Please, Pilot – questions I have in abundance; it’s answers that I desire.’

‘I … am sorry,’ Danlo said. He supposed that he should have been honoured that the Lord Pilot himself had chosen to meet him at the light-field. But the Sonderval was always a man of multiple purposes.

‘It might help us prepare for the Lords’ conclave if you would tell me what you’ve discovered.’

Yes, Danlo thought, and it would certainly help the Sonderval if he were privy to information in advance of Lord Nikolos. Everyone knew that the Sonderval thought that he should have been made Lord of the Order on Thiells in Lord Nikolos’ place.

‘Have you found a cure for the Great Plague?’ the Sonderval asked. ‘Have you found a group of lost Architects who knew the cure?’

Danlo closed his eyes as he remembered the faces of Haidar and Chandra and Choclo and others of his adoptive tribe who had died of a shaida disease that he called the slow evil. For the ten thousandth time, he beheld the terrible colours of the plague: the white froth upon their screaming lips, the red blood pouring from their ears, the flesh around their eyes blackened in death. The many other tribes of Alaloi on Icefall were also infected with this plague virus, which might yet wait many years before falling into its active phase – or might be killing his whole people at that very moment.

‘I … almost found a cure,’ Danlo said as he clasped his hand to his forehead.

‘Well, what have you discovered, Pilot?’

Danlo waited a moment as he breathed deeply the scent of flowers and rocket fire filling the air. He swallowed to moisten his throat; he had a warm and melodious voice but he was unused to speaking. ‘If you’d like, I will tell you a thing,’ he said.

‘Well, then?’

‘I have found Tannahill, sir. I … have been with the Architects of the Old Church.’

At this astonishing news, the Sonderval stood as still as a tree and stared at Danlo. The Lord Pilot was the coolest of men and seldom betrayed any emotions other than pride in himself or loathing for his fellow man. But on that day, under the hot, high sun, with a crowd of people watching him from the end of the run, he punched his fist into his open hand and shouted out in envy, joy and disbelief, ‘It can’t be true!’

And then, noticing that a couple of olive-robed programmers were staring at him, he motioned for Danlo to follow him away from the run. He led him down a little walkway leading to one of the run’s access streets. Danlo looked over his shoulder to see the cadre of professionals converge upon his ship like hungry wolves around a beached seal. Then he walked with the Sonderval up to the gleaming black sled which would take them into the city of Lightstone.

‘We’ll talk as we ride,’ the Sonderval said. He opened the sled’s doors and invited Danlo to sit inside. He explained that this long, wheeled vehicle should have been named differently but for the Lord Akashic’s nostalgia for Neverness and the sleek sleds that rocket down her icy streets.

‘On Tannahill, I have been inside such vehicles before,’ Danlo said. ‘They call them choches.’

While the Sonderval piloted the sled along the streets leading from the field into Lightstone, Danlo told of another city far across the Vild – and of hard plastic choches armoured against bombs and ancient religious disputes and war.

‘You amaze me,’ the Sonderval said. ‘We’ve sent two hundred pilots into the Vild. And no one has returned with even a breath of a hint as to where Tannahill might be found.’

‘Truly?’

‘I, myself, have searched for this world. From Perdido Luz to the Shatarei Void. I, myself. Pilot.’

‘I … am sorry.’

‘Why is it that some men have so much luck? You and your father – both born under the same lucky star.’

Just then, as Danlo gazed at the colours of the city looming up beyond him, an old pain stabbed through his head. He thought of the sudden death of the entire Devaki tribe: his found-father and mother and sisters who had raised him until he was fourteen years old; he remembered the betrayal of his deepest friend, Hanuman li Tosh, and the loss of Tamara Ten Ashtoreth, she of the golden hair and golden soul – the woman whom he had loved almost more than life itself. With the hurt of his head pressing deeply into him like an iron fist, he recalled the very recent War of Terror on Tannahill, the eye-tlolts and burning lasers and hydrogen bombs. In a way, he himself had brought this war upon the Architects of the Old Church. In a way, although a kind of victory had been achieved, this war was not yet over.