David Zindell - War in Heaven

And I, too , Danlo thought as he sat staring at Bardo and remembering his own involvement with the Way of Ringess.

‘I won’t argue with you,’ Lord Nikolos said, and his voice was cold steel.

‘Ah, well, I didn’t fall across the stars to argue.’

‘Whatever the impulse that initially drove you, the Way of Ringess is what it is. And you’ve made what you’ve made.’

‘By God, do you think I don’t know that!’ Bardo roared. ‘Why do you think I’ve risked my goddamned life to tell you what’s happened on Neverness?’

‘Why, indeed? We’d all like to know that, wouldn’t we?’

‘I must undo what I have done.’

‘I see.’

‘I’ve helped create a wildly growing cancer. Now I would ask for help in cutting it out before it’s too late.’

With a bow towards Lord Nikolos then, Bardo finished his story. After losing his beautiful cathedral and abandoning his attempt to run an opposing church from his house, Bardo had fallen into a terrible melancholy. For five days he shut himself in his room, amazingly (for Bardo) refusing the food and drink that his many loyal friends tried to bring him. He sat alone in an immense bejewelled chair as he contemplated killing himself. But Bardo was no suicide. Even as the days of deep winter darkened and the weather grew as cold as death, his rage turned outwards. It was Hanuman li Tosh whom he should kill, he thought, or Lord Pall, or even his cousin, Surya Surata Lal, an ugly little woman who had once been his most faithful confidante before Hanuman had charmed her into betraying Bardo. He should kill somebody , and in the dark and wild days of deep winter the year before, such murderous intentions were not impossible to fulfil, for the entire city of Neverness had fallen into evil times. At least ten of the Order’s lords and masters died mysteriously, some said of poison or unknown and undetectable viruses. The Order issued oppressive new laws and regulations. For the first time since the Dark Year when the Great Plague had ravaged Neverness, there was a nightly curfew in the city. The sacred drug, kalla, was forbidden to everyone except the remembrancers – and even these silver-robed masters of the mind had to apply to Lord Pall for permission to hold their time-honoured ceremonies in the confinement of the remembrancers’ tower. Various sects such as the autists found themselves suddenly persecuted. Lord Pall himself announced his intention to break the harijan sect, which had challenged the Order’s authority for at least three centuries. During the almost lightless days of midwinter spring, the Order had begun a programme of great works, building new churches across the city and even planning a great new cathedral within the walls of the academy itself. Lord Pall planned to compel all Ordermen to make daily attendance at these churches’ remembrancing ceremonies. There they would place the sacred remembrancing heaumes upon their heads, and open themselves to visions of the Elder Eddas – or so it was said. But in truth, they would open themselves, their very brains, only to whatever dogma, images, secret messages or propaganda that Hanuman li Tosh or Lord Pall wished them to believe.

Of course, the rise of this tyranny in such a historically free and illuminated city as Neverness did not go unopposed. All the aliens – led by the Fravashi – spoke out against the Order favouring this potentially totalitarian new religion. Ambassadors from the worlds of Larondissement and Yarkona made formal objections and threatened to sever relations with the Order. The numerous astriers, most of whom counted themselves as members of one of the Cybernetic Universal Churches, shunned Ringism as they might poisoned wine, and kept to their houses and churches in the Farsider’s Quarter. At this time perhaps no more than a tenth of the city’s residents outside the Order were willing to embrace the Three Pillars of Ringism. But in the fierce struggle for power occurring in Neverness, it was the lords and masters and adepts within the Order who really mattered. Many there were who would never countenance Ringism or their Order’s association with it. Lord Pall had not managed to banish all his potential enemies to the Vild. Especially among the returning pilots – and in Neverness there were always pilots returning in their lightships from years-long journeys to the stars – there were brave men and women inured to the terrors of the manifold. They were far too proud to allow themselves terror of Lord Pall or the cetic assassins which he was rumoured to command. Indeed, some of them such as Alesar Estarei and Cristobel, had fought with Mallory Ringess and distinguished themselves in the Pilots’ War years before. Inevitably, as Bardo told the story, Bardo had made connection with these pilots. They formed a cadre perhaps fifty strong, and they began meeting nightly at Bardo’s grand house in the Old City. Calling themselves the Fellowship of Free Pilots, they planned to form a nucleus round which anyone who opposed Ringism, inside the Order or out, might gather to talk and encourage each other. And to plot revolt.

For Bardo, it was his fifth career. Having begun life as a Summerworld prince, he had journeyed to Neverness to become a famous pilot, and later, Master of Novices. Then, after abjuring his, vows and leaving the Order, he had gained fabulous wealth as a merchant, before returning to Neverness as the prophet of a new religion. And now at last, as he told the Lords of the New Order, after having been rich and poor, famous and scorned, enlightened and despairing (and alive and dead), he had come into his true calling as a warrior.

‘We must fight them, by God!’ Bardo said. ‘What else can we do?’

Bardo told of how Lord Pall – or perhaps Hanuman – had sent an assassin to kill him. The assassin had caught Bardo on the street one evening returning home, and it was only because of the incredible courage of a man named Minowara ni Kei, who was one of Bardo’s followers, that Bardo was still alive. Just as the black-robed assassin had fired a spikhaxo at Bardo, Minowara had thrown his body in front of Bardo, taking the naitarre-poisoned dart in his shoulder and dying a hideous, spasming death. This had given Bardo time to overpower the assassin, in truth to club him to death with his huge hand as a bear might slay a child. Upon realizing how vulnerable his flesh was to such deadly needles, he had gone down to the Farsider’s Quarter the next day and ordered his suit of nall armour.

After this naked attempt to murder Bardo, the Fellowship of Free Pilots decided that their continued existence in Neverness was doubtful. Cristobel believed that their best hope to oppose the Ringists would be for each pilot to journey to as many of the Civilized Worlds as possible and bring the blazing torch of resistance to all who loved their freedom. Bardo himself was to make the perilous journey to Thiells. The only problem with this plan was that Lord Pall knew the names of every pilot in the Fellowship. He forbade them to leave the city. And so one gloomy day near the beginning of midwinter spring, Bardo and his fellow pilots stormed the Cavern of the Thousand Lightships, surprising the Ringists that Lord Pall had set to guard the Order’s most glorious vessels. This was the battle that Bardo had spoken of earlier. In the flash of laser fire and fierce fighting along the steel walkways deep below the earth, Vamana Chu, Marrim Danladi and Oriana of Dark-moon had been killed. But the rest of the pilots escaped with their ships. Since Bardo was no longer formally a pilot of the Order, he of course had no ship. But this lack did not daunt him. After obtaining the entrance codes from a terrified programmer whose jaw Bardo threatened to tear off with his naked hands, Bardo appropriated Lord Pilot’s very own ship: a stately expanse of black diamond named the Silver Lotus . Upon breaking free into deep space above Neverness and falling into the shimmering manifold that underlies all space and time, Bardo had immediately renamed his ship the Sword of Shiva.