David Zindell - War in Heaven

‘That’s possible, Pilot. But what if you’ve helped create a stronger Fellowship dedicated to avoiding war? Isn’t it possible that there will be no war?’

But the Fellowship was already at war, or so Sabri Dur li Kadir and many others argued during the days that followed. The Ringists’ ambush and destruction of fifteen ships certainly constituted an act of war, so why should the Fellowship pretend that there still might be peace? Could they trust the Ringists not to fall against them in full strength out of the howling black forest of the manifold? Should they themselves avoid destroying the Ringists’ ships if offered such a chance?

‘We must fall against them before they fall against us,’ Sabri Dur li Kadir said in full conclave with all thirty thousand ships of the Fellowship. His face was as black as obsidian and as sharp. ‘We must lay our plans as soon as possible and then attack.’

There were, however, voices of peace as well. Danlo and Lord Bede argued that the Fellowship should use its power to discourage the Ringists from war, while Makara of Newvannia, a well-known arhat, suggested that the Ringists’ raid might be overlooked as an unfortunate accident. And one of the Vesper exemplars, Onan Nayati, who was either a coward or a very wise man, told everyone that they would be mad to make war upon the Ringists for they would be as a hawk attacking an eagle. This led to a measuring of their respective strengths. The Fellowship comprised one thousand and ninety-one worlds opposed to Ringism – and four more if the alien worlds of Darghin, Fravashing, Elidin, and Scutarix could be counted, which of course they couldn’t because they would never send ships to fight in a human war. Perhaps four hundred worlds had decided to remain neutral, and an equal number warred with themselves as to whom they would support. That left some twelve hundred and two worlds as fervently Ringist, many of them the richest and most powerful of the Civilized Worlds. Onan Nayati estimated that they could gather a fleet of at least thirty-five thousand deep-ships and black ships. And as for the lightships of Neverness, the shining swords of the night, Cristobel said that Lord Salmalin would command four hundred and fifty-one. The odds, then, had fallen against the Fellowship, especially considering that in battle one lightship would be worth at least twenty black ships. The pilots and princes of the Fellowship might very well have decided to wait upon war, but then something happened that broadened their field of vision and reminded them that stars burned with a terrible purpose far beyond their own.

On the 83rd day of false winter a single lightship fell out to join the others in orbit above Sheydveg. This was the Infinite Rose , piloted by Arrio Verjin, a master pilot of the Old Order. That is, he had been of the Order before returning to Neverness from a journey lasting several years. But when he had seen how Ringism had ruined his beloved Order and made virtual slaves out of pilots whom he had respected all his life, he had fled across the stars to the gathering at Sheydveg. And he brought with him the most astonishing news: he had witnessed with his own eyes a battle fought among the gods. In the spaces towards the core – beyond the Morbio Inferiore where the stars blaze as densely as exploding fireworks – the god known as Pure Mind had been slain. The moon-sized lobes of his great brain had been pulverized into a glowing dust. Arrio told of the destruction of a whole region of stars, impossibly intense lights erupting out of blackness, the detonation of the zero-point energies of the spacetime continuum itself. The radiations from this apocalypse were vaster than that of a hundred supernovas. Only the gods, he said, could wield such technologies. He did not know why one god would wish to slay another. When Danlo told him of the Solid State Entity and the war among the gods, Arrio said, ‘Perhaps it was the Silicon God, then, who did this terrible thing. Or perhaps one of his allies, Chimene or the Degula Trinity. How will we ever know? But the effects of what has happened will run deep.’

And the first and most terrible effect, Arrio said, was that these explosions had created huge distortions beneath spacetime, a kind of deadly bubbling known as a Danladi-set expansion. For Arrio Verjin it had been like a tidal wave sweeping towards his fragile ship. He had barely escaped, but the Danladi wave was still spreading through the manifold like a wall of white water, expanding outwards towards the stars of the Sagittarius Arm. Soon it would reach Neverness and other worlds of the Fallaways, and then the manifold there might prove as treacherous as the spaces of the Vild.

‘We must prepare ourselves for tremendous distortions,’ Arrio told the assembled fleet. ‘The Danladi wave will perturb the entire manifold until it dies out towards the edge stars.’

The second effect of Pure Mind’s destruction was to quicken the Fellowship’s move towards war. It reminded even the lightship pilots that their power was nothing compared to the fire and lightning of the gods, who could destroy whole constellations of stars as easily as the Architects of the Old Church could blow up a single sun. If the gods were provoked, their wrath might fall upon any of the Civilized Worlds: Summerworld or Clarity or Lechoix or Larondissement. Or Neverness. As Cristobel pointed out, the gods might regard Hanuman li Tosh’s building of his Universal Computer as a bid for godhood. The eschatologists have a word for this kind of break-out from human being into something much vaster: hakariad . Throughout the galaxy over the past ten thousand years, there had been many hakariads , and perhaps many wars fought to stop such transcendent events. The gods, it is said, are jealous and do not like company. If the Silicon God saw Hanuman’s acts as a hakariad , then he might destroy the Star of Neverness – and a hundred others nearby. Therefore, Cristobel said, the Fellowship must destroy Hanuman’s Universal Computer before the gods did. This must be the first of their purposes, and to accomplish it, they must fall against Neverness in full war.

Almost all the warriors of the worlds represented in the Sonderval’s fleet saw the logic of Cristobel’s argument. It took the Fellowship, casting votes world by world, only two days to make a formal declaration of war. And so on the 85th of false winter in the year 2959 since the founding of Neverness, the War of the Gods, as it would be called, began.

That night, as Danlo prepared the Snowy Owl for his journey to Neverness, the Sonderval summoned him to a meeting. While their ships orbited Sheydveg, they manoeuvred these sleek diamond needles so that they touched side to side. And then Danlo broke the seal of his ship and entered the Cardinal Virtue , the first pilot that the privacy-loving Lord Pilot had honoured in this way. Danlo floated in the darkness, and he looked about the rather large interior of the Sonderval’s lightship, taking note of the design of the neurologics which surrounded both the Sonderval and himself like a soft, purple cocoon. The Sonderval, stern and serious in his formal black robe, waited in his ship’s pit. He greeted Danlo warmly. ‘Welcome, Pilot,’ he said, ‘I’m glad you could join me.’

‘Thank you for asking me here tonight.’

‘It is I who should thank you,’ the Sonderval said. He began to play with a large diamond brooch pinned to his black silk robe just over his heart. ‘If not for your foresight, we might have lost Cristobel and the others. And I might have been Lord Pilot over a much smaller fleet.’

Here Danlo smiled and said, ‘But no one could have known how the Fellowship would decide. There was always a chance … that Cristobel would have been chosen Lord Pilot, and not you.’