Neverness (66 page)

   (Was it an accident that I had punched out and broken Soli's nose? Was the composition of my chromosomes an accident, too?)

   I remember Soli's final words to me before we ceased our communications for good and fell into real battle. "Why, Pilot?" he asked me. "Why did you make it come to this?"

   And just after Jonathan had fallen into his death, Bardo's imago appeared before me. "It's unbelievable!" he roared. "What a crime! Perfidy! Abomination! Sacrilege! By God, I'm running out of words! - Barbarity! Catastrophe! Oh, what a tragedy this is! Oh, too bad!"

   Because I was grieving over Jonathan's death, because I could not bear the thought of causing anyone else to die, because I was grieving, I was too cautious. Let me repeat that: I, Mallory Ringess, was too cautious. I led my sixty-four lightships across the stars of the Triffid nebula with the fearfulness of an old chessplayer moving his pieces across his sixty-four squares. I sought to maneuver my force from Veda Luz to Karanatha and on to the Danladi Thinspace at the edge of the Triffid. There, where the pathways were few, we might trap Soli's ships. As they fell out of the manifold and desperately sought to map one of the few point-sources, we would surround them (in a topological sense, we had to find a set of point-sources both closed and bounded, that is to say, compact) and destroy them one by one.

   But we never reached the Danladi Thin. Soli must have guessed my strategy because he surprised me. I remember well the instant I came to question caution. I - and my other pilots - had just fallen out, and the light of Veda Luz dazzled me. The interior of the nebula glowed a soft, ice-blue from the reflected light off the particles of interstellar dust. Veda Luz itself was a burning blue, a hot blue supergiant as bright as Alnilan or the First Spica. It was a huge star. So massive was Veda Luz that the manifold in its neighborhood was vulgarly distorted. I had difficulty leading my pilots through its windows in an orderly manner. There came an instant when six of my pilots had to wait while the others found their windows and fell through to Favasham, which was the next star in our sequence towards the Danladi Thin. In that instant, Soli's old friend Lionel Killirand in his
Infinite Sloop
fell out, fell upon Cristobel the Bold and destroyed him. And in that instant, thirty-two master pilots fell upon Olafson Jons and Nashira and Ali Alesar of Urradeth and Nikolos Korso and the inimitable Delora wi Towt. Probably it was Lionel who actually killed her. There was a snarling confusion as lightships slipped in and out of realspace, thirty-seven diamond needles darting at each other through blackness into starlight as if they were a pack of Alaloi dogs fighting for position close to the fire. I was aware of this battle as hundreds of quick vanishing-point deformations of the manifold, hundreds of glinting ripples on a shimmering, nighttime sea. I tried to turn our main body of lightships back kleining along our pathways, but by the time we returned to Veda Luz, the battle was over. Lionel and the others had fled. And six of our pilots were lost.

   Like a team of beaten sled dogs with their tails between their legs, we retreated across Jonah's Star Far Group almost to the edge of the Orion Nebula. I floated in the pit of my ship as I briefly talked with my pilots. Bardo especially was wounded by the battle's outcome. We touched the hulls of our ships, and his voice and thoughts propagated through my ship-computer and formed in my mind. For a moment, the neurologics of his ship were faced with my own. We shared the same thoughtspace. Because we were stunned and whipped with defeat, because we were grieving, we allowed ourselves a few moments of this forbidden electronic telepathy.

   - Little Fellow, can you hear/feel/see me?

   I could see his intelligent, brown eyes, hear his voice, smell his fear and farts as he floated within the pit of the
Blessed Harlot
. It was something of a mystery how Justine could stand to be near him inside such a tiny enclosed space.

   - Where is Justine, then? Why can't I hear her thoughts?

   - She's here asleep, next to me. When she saw what happened to Delora ... ah, well, she's faced away, for a while.

   - I've blundered, Bardo. I should never have ... tried to meet Soli that night in the bar. You remember. That's where it all started, this sequence of bad chance.

   - You should think about the pilots we've lost instead of your life's mistakes.

   - I can't
stop
thinking about them. If we ... why did Delora have to die, then? Why should anyone have to die?

   I thought about all of the billions of people who had died in wars, and I discovered one of war's many perversities and ironies: The hell of war is not multiplicative. Or rather, it is inversely multiplicative. The pain of losing someone you know is a thousand times greater than the deaths of a thousand people unknown.

   - By God, I loved her once, did you know that, Little Fellow? Delora was my first lover, and she was patient with me. At Borja. I needed patience back then.

   - She was a brilliant pilot.

   - Ah, you don't understand. She was a
woman
. And now she's gone.

   - War is hell, the hibakusha say.

   - "War is hell!" - what a thing to think! "War is hell,"
you
say with ice in your damn cold breath, but I know how you really feel, so don't think you can hide it, because you can't.

   It was true. I was trying to turn a diamond face to the deaths of Ali Alesar and Cristobel and Delora, but it was not working. Bardo, who was listening to my thoughts almost as they formed, reminded me that I should be full of hot rage; I should ball my fists and curse and swear vengeance against Lionel Killirand. Aloof compassion, he whispered in my mind, was the emotion of a saint. And bitter self-doubt was childish.

   - You're not a child and you're no saint.

   - What am I, then?

   - You're a man, by God! I loved you better when you used to rage like a man. You almost snapped Kesse's head off his goddamned neck, by God you did! I can't forget that.

   - Neither can I, Bardo. I can't forget anything.

   - Ah, too bad.

   - I'm changing, now ... so fast.

   - I know, Little Fellow, I know. Sometimes I don't understand you anymore.

   - If I could make you see the probabilities ... the possibilities. Soon, there will be a battle, the beginning of the end. I can see it coming. I'm-

   - What's wrong?

   - I'm afraid. I'm afraid of losing everything. Sometimes I'm even afraid of losing you.

   - But you can never lose your friends, Little Fellow. Haven't I told you that before?

   - Will we still be friends, then, after it is finished?

   - By God, I swear we will!

   Bardo was still my friend, and as we entered the Orion Nebula, he began to examine the tactical implications of his infamous Boomerang Theorem. We fell among the stars of the Trapezium, which glowed with the lovely green of interstellar ionized oxygen. We fell among stars so young that they had been born when man was still half an ape roaming the grasslands of Old Earth's mother continent. Near the Chu Binary we fought a skirmish with Soli's main force. Bardo and Justine - and Charl Rappaporth and Li Tosh - discovered they could fall instantly back along their pathways to a window and thereby surprise any pilot who might have followed them. In this way they sent eight of Soli's pilots into stars. It was a clever trick, but it could not be so easily duplicated. To defeat Soli, who copied and used our tactics against us as quickly as RNA copies and spits our protein, we would need more than tricks.

   At last we made our way past the Tycho's Thick into the Rosette. Surrounding us was that glorious star-making machine I had passed through on my journey into the Entity. Here were stars and mappings I knew well. We were close to the Vild - perilously close - and I could not help wondering what it would be like to fall out among the ashes and degraded light of that star-blown hell. As we passed through the spaces of Rollo's Rock and Farfara and Nwarth, we lost Duncaness and his
Riggersworm
. To be sure, in revenge we destroyed Alhena Ede. (This huge, sardonic pilot was Jonathan Ede's older sister. Of all the tragedies of our tragic war that might have occurred, I am at least glad that brother never killed sister. But both Edes died, and that is too bad. They were the last of their famous line, and their talents disappeared along with their bodies, chromosomes, and lightships.) For every pilot we lost we took one of Soli's. But we could not keep on this way forever. Every pilot we lost increased the odds against us, and Soli had more pilots to lose than we did. When three of my pilots vanished into the Northwest Thick, I knew I had to close with Soli in one, final, decisive battle.

   It was wholly my decision to lead my pilots into the spaces surrounding Perdido Luz. I cannot apologize for that. Having failed to use time and intelligence successfully, I had only the element of space left to offset Soli's greater force. We fenestered past Kaarta and New Earth on to the stars of the Fayoli because I was familiar with those mappings and those spaces. Because I was seeking a particular thickspace in which to trap Soli, we segued into the manifold near Darrein Luz. There the stars are small and burn with yellow and orange lights; there time is a little strange; there the Entity has distorted the manifold beyond probability. According to our star maps, Perdido Luz was not a part of the Entity. Had it been, no pilot (except perhaps Bardo and Justine, and Li Tosh) would have followed me there. But star maps are sometimes out of date and just plain wrong. Star maps take little account of a nebular brain's rapid growth. I guided my pilots through the thickspace I had mastered years ago, and we fell out near Perdido Luz. None of us - not even I - guessed we were perturbing the space, the very essence of the Solid State Entity.

   Of course I knew it was a wild risk to seek battle within that thickspace. But what choice did I have? Ages ago Hannibal Barka had shocked a nation called Rome by driving his army of men and hairless mammoths across a range of mountains. All the mammoths and many of his men had frozen to death in the snow-drenched passes, but his army had survived to destroy the Romans at Lake Trasimene. I was no Hannibal, but I could still choose my space for battle. Soli would know nothing of the Perdido Thickspace, and if he followed us there, I would surprise him as Hannibal had the Romans.

   In Neverness, journeymen, and novices were trudging through slushy streets on their way to dinner; and in the heart of the Entity, She was thinking Her great thoughts; and the killing radiations of Merripen's Star and other Vild stars were rushing towards Neverness, always rushing; and Leopold Soli and a hundred lightships fell out of the manifold. They hovered above Perdido Luz's fourth planet, a gas giant encircled by ghostly rings of ice. We caught them at a point-exit near the silvery center ring. My pilots used the prepared mappings I had shown them, and we fell upon Soli through the thickspace as if we were a pack of hungry wolves.

   I now understand what the ancient warlords meant by "the fog of war." Although I could not place each of my pilots as I would stones upon the interstices of a ko board, I had hoped at least to observe and control the tide of the battle. I found I could control nothing, not even my sweating palms nor the throbbing of my heart. I fell out into realspace for less than an instant, and the sparkling center ring of the fourth planet hung like a glacier above me. I made an instant mapping. My ship-engines opened the manifold near Gregorik Smith's
Rose of Earth
. I made another mapping and again my ship-engines opened the manifold. Blackness split, like a rent in a pilot's kamelaika. And then we were both gone, he into the heart of Perdido Luz, and I into the point-rich pathways of the thickspace. There was a rush of theorems, the sparkling ideoplasts of the number-storm. I flowed through the dense mesh of the thickspace as if my lightship were an information virus finding its way through the dark red veins of a man's brain. There was a branching and then a joining of tunnels. The manifold opened again. There was light, the weak yellow light of Perdido Luz. One of Soli's pilots - it was Neith of Thorskalle in his distinctive, wingless ship - was waiting for me. But I had fixed a sequence of mappings. Before he could drive me into the star, I escaped, back into the throbbing arteries of the manifold. In and out of the manifold we danced until Neith made a mistake. He entered a pathway which, in its looping through the manifold, intersected with only one other. For him and his
Time Future
, there could be only two possible point-exits into the realspace near Perdido Luz. I calculated the probabilities, and I was waiting for him when his ship silvered the blackness. Waiting to murder him. He never had a chance.

   _Be compassionate_, Katharine had said to me.

   But what place could compassion have when it came time to make war? No, sometimes there could be only cold, murderous
passions
, and so all around me like a winter storm at night the battle raged. The lightships were glittering ice slivers, and they tore through the dark of realspace and disappeared into the manifold. The complexities of the battle overwhelmed me. There was slowtime, rushing time, theorems to prove, mappings of point to point, and the ever-present acid of pure terror. At first the burning yellow point of Perdido Luz was below me, and then it was above. (And by above, I mean that it was between me and the Canes Venatici cloud of galaxies. The stars of the Canes Venatici, by ancient convention, are said to be above all the stars of our galaxy.) As I made a mapping and eluded Lionel's
Infinite Sloop
, I realized I had fallen out on the far side of Perdido Luz opposite the fourth planet. I was a mere billion miles from the battle. And then the manifold engulfed me, and I mapped through to the thickspace beneath the planet's rings, and there was a haze of light, as of the sun through a dense ice-fog in Neverness. There were a hundred dancing lightships. I had no idea who was winning the battle. I tried to talk ship to ship with my pilots but there was no time. I escaped one of Soli's pilots only by making a desperate mapping through a finite tree. I escaped into the manifold, but I could not immediately return because the tree's branchings were numerous and complex. I seemed to fall forever. Time flowed as slowly as glacier ice. For a while I was sick with battle lust; I was sick with myself. How easily I had again become a murderer! How easily the virus of war had infected us all! Even as I proved a minor result of the Inclusion Theorem, pilots were murdering pilots. It was unbelievable, really. This is what battle is, I thought. Battle is not merely a word; it is organized murder. I balled my fists then in the darkness of my ship, and I cursed. I remembered a thing which should have been on all our minds before we ever decided to schism and fall against our fellow pilots: War is the worst thing that human beings do. To think of it abstractly or treat it as a game is worse than barbaric.