The Broken God

The door opened and Drisana greeted Old Father and Danlo. She bowed painfully but politely and invited them inside. Without ignoring Danlo, she made it clear she was glad to see Old Father, whom she had known since he first came to Neverness. They spoke to each other in the Language, and Danlo was able to pick out only a tenth of the words. ‘Drisana Lian,’ Old Father said, ‘may I present Danlo.’

‘Just “Danlo”?’

‘He’s called Danlo the Wild.’

They proceeded slowly down the bare hallway, very slowly because Drisana was very old and very slow. She shuffled along in her brownish-grey robe, taking her time. Like Old Father, she disdained bodily rejuvenations. Danlo had never – at least in his many days in the City – seen such an old woman. Her hair was long and grey and tied back in a chignon. Hundreds of deep lines split her face, which was yellow-white like old ivory. Most people would have thought her ugly, but Danlo did not. He thought she was beautiful. She had her own face, as the Devaki say. He liked her tiny round nose, red as a yu berry. He liked her straight, white teeth, although it puzzled him that she still had teeth. All the women of his tribe, long before they grew as old as Drisana, had worn their teeth down to brown stumps chewing on skins to soften them for clothing. Most of all, he liked her eyes. Her eyes were dark brown, at once hard and soft; her eyes hinted of a tough will and love of life. Something about her face and her eyes made Danlo feel comfortable for the first time since he had left his home.

She led them into a windowless room where Danlo and Old Father sat on bare wooden chairs around a bare wooden table. ‘Mint tea for the Honoured Fravashi?’ she asked as she hovered over her lacquered tea cabinet next to the dark wall. ‘And for the boy, what would he like in his cup? He’s not old enough to drink wine, I don’t think.’

She served them two cups of mint tea, then returned to the cabinet where she opened a shiny black door and removed a crystal decanter. She poured herself a half glass of wine. ‘It’s said that alcohol makes the Fravashi crazy. Now that would be a sight, wouldn’t it – a crazy Fravashi?’

‘Oh ho! It would be quite a sight indeed.’

Drisana eased herself into a chair and asked, ‘I suppose Danlo is here for an imprinting? A language, of course.’ She turned to Danlo and said, ‘Old Father always brings his students to me to learn a language. What will it be? Anglish? Old Swahili? New Japanese? The Sanskrit, or the neurologician’s sign language they employ on Silvaplana? I’m sure you’d like to learn the abominably difficult Fravashi language but that’s impossible. No one can imprint it. Eighty years I’ve been trying and all I can manage is a few whistles.’

Danlo was silent because he didn’t understand her. He tapped his forehead and smiled.

Drisana wet her lips with wine and whistled at Old Father. In truth, she could speak more than a few whistles of Fravash, enough to make her meaning understood: ‘What is the matter with this boy?’

Old Father loved speaking his own language and he smiled. He whistled back, ‘So, it’s so: he needs to learn the Language.’

‘What? But everyone speaks the Language! Everyone of the Civilized Worlds.’

‘So, it’s so.’

‘He’s not civilized, then? Is that why you call him “Danlo the Wild”?’ Such a name – I certainly don’t approve of these kinds of names, the poor boy. But he’s not of the Japanese Worlds, certainly. And he doesn’t seem as if he’s been carked.’

In truth, one of Danlo’s ancestors had illegally carked the family chromosomes, hence his unique, hereditary black and red hair. But it was too dark in the room for Drisana to make out the spray of red in his hair; it was too dark and her eyes were too old and weak. She must have seen clearly enough, however, that he possessed none of the grosser bodily deformations of the fully carked races: blue skin, an extra thumb, feathers, fur or the ability to breathe water instead of air.

‘Ah oh, I can’t tell you where he comes from,’ Old Father whistled.

‘It’s a secret? I love secrets, you know.’

‘It’s not for me to tell you.’

‘Well, the Fravashi are famous for their secrets, it’s said.’ Drisana drank her wine and got up to pour herself another glass. ‘To imprint the Language – nothing could be easier. It’s so easy, I hesitate to ask for payment.’

Old Father closed one eye and slowly whistled, ‘I was hoping to make the usual payment.’

‘I’d like that,’ Drisana told him.

The usual payment was a song drug. Old Father agreed to sing for Drisana after their business was concluded. The Fravashi have the sweetest, most exquisite of voices, and to humans, their otherworldly songs are as intoxicating as any drug. Neither of them approved of money, and they disdained its use. Old Father, of course, as a Fravashi believed that money was silly. And Drisana, while she had defected from the Order years ago, still clung to most of her old values. Money was evil, and young minds must be nurtured, no matter the cost. She loved bestowing new languages on the young, but she refused to imprint wolf consciousness onto a man, or transform a shy girl into a libertine, or perform the thousand other personality alterations and memory changes so popular among the bored and desperate. And so, her shop usually remained empty.

Drisana poured herself a third glass of wine, this time from a different decanter. Danlo smiled and watched her take a sip.

‘It’s rude,’ she whistled to Old Father, ‘how very rude it is to speak in front of him in a language he doesn’t understand. In a language no one understands. When we begin the imprinting, I shall have to speak to him. I suppose you’ll have to translate. You do speak the boy’s language, don’t you?’

Old Father, who was not permitted to lie, said, ‘It’s so. Of course I do. Oh ho, but if I translate, you might recognize the language and thus determine his origins.’

Drisana stood near Danlo and rested her hand on his shoulder. Beneath the loose skin on the back of her hand, the veins twisted like thin, blue worms. ‘Such a secret you’re making of him! If you need to keep your secret, of course you must keep it. But I won’t make an imprinting unless I can talk to him.’

‘Perhaps you could speak to him in Moksha.’

‘Oh? Is he fluent?’

‘Nearly so.’

‘I’m afraid that won’t be sufficient, then.’

Old Father closed both eyes for an uncomfortably long time. He stopped whistling and started to hum. At last he looked at Danlo and said, ‘Lo ti dirasa, ah ha, I must tell you Drisana’s words as she speaks them.’

‘He speaks Alaloi!’ Drisana said.

‘You recognize the language?’

‘How could I not?’ Drisana, who spoke five hundred and twenty-three languages, was suddenly excited, so excited that she neglected to transpose her words into the Alaloi tongue. She began talking about the most important event that had happened in the Order since Neverness was founded. ‘It’s been four years since Mallory Ringess ascended to heaven, or whatever it is that his followers believe. I think the Lord Pilot left the City on another journey – the universe is immense, is it not? Who can say if he’ll ever return? Well, everyone is saying he became a god and will never return. One thing is certainly known: the Ringess once imprinted Alaloi – he was a student of bizarre and ancient languages. And now it seems that everyone wants to do the same, as young Danlo has obviously done. It’s really worship, you know. Emulation, the power of apotheosis. As if learning a particular language could bring one closer to the godhead.’

Old Father was obliged to translate this, and he did so. However, he seemed to be having trouble speaking. Alternately opening and shutting each eye, he sighed and paused and started and stopped. Danlo thought that he must be three quarters asleep, so long did it take him to get the words out.

‘Mallory Ringess was a pilot, yes?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Old Father said. ‘A brilliant pilot. He became the Lord Pilot of the Order, and then, at the end, the Lord of the Order itself. Many people hated him; some loved him. There was something about him, the way he compelled people’s love or hate. Twelve years ago, there was schism in the Order. And war. And the Ringess was a warrior, among other things. So, it’s so: a very angry, violent man. And secretive, and cruel, and vain. Oh ho, but he was also something else. An unusually complex man. A kind man. And noble, and fated, and compassionate. He loved truth – even his enemies would admit that. He devoted his life to a quest for the Elder Eddas, the secret of the gods. Some say he found this secret and became a god; some say he failed and left the City in disgrace.’

Danlo thought about this for a while. Drisana’s tea room was a good place for reflection. In some ways it reminded him of a snow hut’s interior: clean, stark and lit by natural flames. High on the granite walls, atop little wooden shelves, were ten silver candelabra. All around the room, candles burned with a familiar yellow light. The smells of hot wax and carbon mingled with pine and the sickly sweet fetor which old people exude when they are almost ready to go over. Danlo traced his finger along his forehead and wondered aloud, ‘Is it possible for a man to become a god? For a civilized man? How can such a thing be possible? Men are men; why should a man want to be a god?’

He wondered if Old Father was lying or speaking metaphorically. Or perhaps, in such a shaida place as a city, a man really could aspire to godhood. Danlo really didn’t understand civilized people, nor could he conceive of the kinds of gods they might become. And then he had a startling thought: it wasn’t necessary for him to understand everything in order to accept Drisana’s and Old Father’s story. As his first conscious act as an asarya, he would say ‘yes’ to this fantastic notion of a man’s journey godward, at least until he could see things more clearly.

He turned to Old Father and asked, ‘What are the Elder Eddas?’

‘Oh ho, the Elder Eddas! No one is quite sure. Once there was a race of gods, the Ieldra, once, once, three million years ago. When human beings lived in trees; when the Fravashi still warred with each other, clan against clan. The Ieldra, it’s said, discovered the secret of the universe. The Philosopher’s Stone. The One Tree, the Burning Bush, Pure Information, the Pearl of Great Price. Aha, the River of Light, the Ring of Scutarix, the Universal Program, the Eschaton. And the Golden Key, the Word, even the Wheel of Law. So, it’s so: the Elder Eddas. God. In a way, the Ieldra became God, or became as one with God. It’s said that they carked their minds – ah, ah, their very consciousness – into the singularity at the galaxy’s core. Into a spinning black hole. But before their final evolution, a gift. A bequest from the Ieldra to their chosen successors. Not the Fravashi, it’s said. Not the Darghinni. Nor the Scutari, nor the Farahim, nor the Friends of Man. It’s said that the Ieldra carked their secrets into human beings only; long ago they encoded the Elder Eddas into the human genome. Wisdom, madness, infinite knowledge, racial memory – all of these and more. It’s thought that certain segments of human DNA code the Elder Eddas as pure memory. And so, inside all human beings, a way of becoming gods.’

While Danlo stared at the flame shadows dancing atop the floor, he smiled with curiosity and amusement. Finally, he asked, ‘And what is DNA?’

‘Ah, so much to learn, but you needn’t learn it just now. The main point is this: The Ringess showed the way to remember the Elder Eddas, and people hated him for that. Why? All is one, you say, and man shall be as gods? Creation and memory – God is memory? So, it’s so: there’s a way for anyone to remember the Elder Eddas, but here is the most ironic of ironies: many can hear the Eddas within themselves but few can understand.’

Danlo closed his eyes, listening. The only sound inside was the beating of his heart. ‘I do not hear anything,’ he said.

Old Father smiled, and as Danlo had, closed both his eyes.

Drisana was savouring her fourth glass of wine, and she finally spoke to Danlo in his language, ‘Kareeska, Danlo, grace beyond grace. It’s been a long time since I spoke Alaloi; please forgive me if I make mistakes.’ After a long sip of wine, she continued, ‘There are techniques of remembering, of listening. You chose an exciting time to enter the Order. Everyone is trying to learn the remembrancing art, certainly they are. If you’re accepted into Borja, perhaps you’ll learn it, too.’

Her voice was slurry with wine and bitterness. Once, at the beginning of the Great Schism, because she had believed the Order was corrupt and doomed, she had renounced her position as master imprimatur. And now, twelve years later, there was a renewal of spirit and vision in the towers of the Academy, and the Order was more vital than it had been in a thousand years. If given the chance, she would have rejoined the Order, but for those who abjure their vows, there is never a second chance.

Danlo, who was quite unafraid to touch old people, took Drisana’s hand and held it as he would his grandmother’s. He liked the acceptance he saw in her sad, lovely eyes, though he wondered why she would be so bitter. ‘The gods have imprinted human beings with the Elder Eddas, yes?’

‘No, certainly not!’ Drisana did not explain that it was she, herself, who had once imprinted Mallory Ringess, and therefore she was partly responsible for creating the Ringess and all the chaos of the war. ‘The memory of the Eddas lies deeper than the brain. When we speak of an imprinting, we speak merely of changing the metabolic pathways and the neural network. It’s all a matter of redefining the synapses of the brain.’

‘Fixing the synapses like strands of silk in glacier ice?’

Drisana stared at him as she took a sip of wine. Then she started laughing, and the bitterness suddenly left her. ‘Dear Danlo, you don’t understand anything about what we’re going to do here today, do you?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I always thought the brain was just a store of pink fat.’

Drisana laughed nicely and pulled at his hand. ‘Come,’ she said. ‘Danlo, and my Honoured Fravashi – you’ll have to help me because I’ve drunk too much wine.’

She led them through a wooden door into the imprinting room, or her chamber of impressions, as she liked to call it. In the centre of the imprinting room, atop the Fravashi carpet that Old Father had once given her, was a padded chair covered with green velvet. Aside from a couple of hologram stands behind the chair, it was the only article of furniture in the room. On each of the six walls, from ceiling to floor, were polished shelves holding up what looked like gleaming, metal skulls. There were six hundred and twenty-two of these skulls, arrayed neatly in their rows. ‘These are the heaumes,’ Drisana explained as she sat Danlo down on this chair. ‘You’ve certainly seen a heaume before?’

Danlo sat stiffly in the chair, craning his neck, looking at the heaumes. Ahira, Ahira, he silently called, why would anyone collect metal skulls?

Drisana wobbled on her feet as she ran her hands through his hair, roughly sizing his head. He had a large head for a boy fourteen years old, large and broad, and she turned to select a heaume from the third row from the top. ‘First, we have to make a model of your brain,’ she said.

‘A model?’

‘A picture. Like a painting.’

While Old Father sat down on the rug in the Fravashi fashion to watch, she fit the heaume over Danlo’s head. Danlo held his breath, then slowly let it out. The heaume was cold, even through his thick hair. The heaume was hard and cold, and it tightly squeezed his skull. Something important was about to happen, he thought, though he couldn’t quite tell what. Through the dark hallways of Drisana’s shop, he had kept his sense of direction. He was sure he was facing east. One must piss to the south, sleep with one’s head to the north, but all important ceremonies must occur facing east. How could Drisana know this?

‘A painting of your brain,’ Drisana slurred out. Her breath was heavy over his face and smelled of wine. ‘We’ll paint it with light.’

Directly behind Danlo’s chair, one of the hologram stands suddenly lit up with a model of his brain. There, seemingly floating above the stand, were the glowing folds of his cerebral cortex, the cerebellum and medulla and the vivid chasm splitting the brain into halves. Danlo felt nothing, but he sensed a gleam of light from his side and turned to look.

‘Stop!’ Drisana cried out.

It was too late. Danlo had been blindly obedient only once in his life, during his passage into manhood, on pain of death. How could he help looking at a painting of his brain? He looked, and in the back of the model of his brain, the visual cortex flared with orange light. He looked at his own visual cortex, painted bright with orange and orange-red, and the very art of looking caused the neurons within the cortex to fire. As he looked and looked, suddenly the light was blindingly, brilliantly red. The light was a red spearpoint through his eyes into his brain. The pain was quick, sharp and intense. Old Father had been wrong; there was a hideous pain. He closed his eyes and looked away. The pain fell off into a white heat and a burning, terrible pain.

Drisana grasped his face in her withered hands and gently turned him facing forward. ‘You mustn’t look at your brain’s own model! Soon, we’ll go deeper, down to the neurons. The neuro-transmitter flow, the electricity. Your thoughts – you would be able to see your own thoughts. And that’s so dangerous. Seeing your thoughts as they form up – that itself would create another thought for you to see. The feedback, the infinities. Certainly, the process could go on to infinity, but you’d be insane or dead long before then.’

Danlo stared straight ahead. He held himself very still. He was sweating now, beads of salt water squeezed between his forehead and the heaume. ‘Ahira, Ahira,’ he whispered. ‘O blessed Ahira!’

‘Now be still. Before we can make an imprinting, we must see where to imprint.’

Even though Drisana was half drunk, she laid his brain bare as deftly and easily as he might slit open a snow hare’s belly. Before she had learned the art of imprinting, she had been an akashic. As an akashic, she had done many thousands of brain mappings. All imprimaturs are also akashics, though few akashics know much about the art of imprinting. In truth, it is easier to map and read a brain than it is to imprint it. For no good reason – and this is a bitter irony – the akashics possess a much higher status in the Order than do the lowly imprimaturs.

‘Close your eyes, now,’ Drisana called out softly.

Danlo closed his eyes. Behind him, his brain’s model rippled with light waves. The language clusters in the left hemisphere were magnified and highlighted. The neural network was dense and profoundly complex. Millions of individual neurons, like tiny, glowing red spiders, were packed into a three-dimensional web. From each neuron grew thousands of dendrites, thousands of red, silken strands which sought each other out and connected at the synapses.

‘Danlo, ni luria la shantih,’ Drisana said, and his association cortex fairly jumped with light. And then, ‘Ti asto yujena oyu, you have eyes that see too deeply and too much.’

‘Oh ho, that’s true!’ Old Father broke in. ‘Yujena oyu – so, it’s so.’

Drisana held up a hand to silence him, and she spoke other words in other languages, words that failed to bring Danlo’s association cortex to life. In a few moments, Drisana determined that Alaloi was his milk tongue, and more, that he knew no others except Moksha and a smattering of the Language. It was an extraordinary thing to discover, and she probably longed to immediately spread this news in the various cafes and bars, but as an imprimatur she was obliged to keep secrets.

‘Now we have the model; now we will make the actual imprinting.’

She removed the heaume from Danlo’s head. While he brushed back his sodden hair, she walked over to the far wall behind Old Father to search for a particular heaume. She tried to explain the fundamentals of her art, though it must have been difficult to find words in the Alaloi language to convey her meaning. Danlo quickly became confused. In truth, imprinting is both simple and profound. Every child is born with a certain array of synapses connecting neuron to neuron. This array is called the primary repertoire and is determined partly by the genetic programs and partly by the self-organizing properties of the growing brain. Learning occurs, simply, when certain synapses are selected and strengthened at the expense of others. The blueness of the sky, the pain of ice against the skin – every colour, each crackling twig, smell, idea or fear burns its mark into the synapses. Gradually, event by event, the primary repertoire is transformed into the secondary repertoire. And this transformation – the flowering of a human being’s selfness and essence, one’s very soul – is evolutionary. Populations of neurons and synapses compete for sensa and thoughts. Or rather, they compete to make thoughts. The brain is its own universe and thoughts are living things which thrive or die according to natural laws.

Drisana eased the new heaume over Danlo’s head. It was thicker than the first heaume and heavier. Above the second hologram stand, a second model of Danlo’s brain appeared. Next to it, the first model remained lit. As the imprinting progressed, Drisana would continually compare the second model to the first, down to the molecular level; she would need to see both models – as well as the tone of Danlo’s blue-black eyes – to determine when he had imprinted enough for one day.

‘So many synapses,’ Drisana said. ‘Ten trillion synapses in the cortex alone.’

Danlo made a fist and asked, ‘What do the synapses look like?’

‘They’re modelled as points of light. Ten trillion points of light.’ She didn’t explain how neurotransmitters diffuse across the synapses, causing the individual neurons to fire. Danlo knew nothing of chemistry or electricity. Instead, she tried to give him some idea of how the heaume’s computer stored and imprinted language. ‘The computer remembers the synapse configuration of other brains, brains that hold a particular language. This memory is a simulation of that language. And then in your brain, Danlo, select synapses are excited directly and strengthened. The computer speeds up the synapses’ natural evolution.’

Danlo tapped the bridge of his nose; his eyes were dark and intent upon a certain sequence of thought. ‘The synapses are not allowed to grow naturally, yes?’

‘Certainly not. Otherwise imprinting would be impossible.’

‘And the synapse configuration – this is really the learning, the essence of another’s mind, yes?’

‘Yes, Danlo.’

‘And not just the learning – isn’t this so? You imply that anything in the mind of another could be imprinted in my mind?’

‘Almost anything.’

‘What about dreams? Could dreams be imprinted?’

‘Certainly.’

‘And nightmares?’

Drisana squeezed his hand and reassured him. ‘No one would imprint a nightmare into another.’

‘But it is possible, yes?’

Drisana nodded her head.

‘And the emotions … the fears or loneliness or rage?’

‘Those things, too. Some imprimaturs – certainly they’re the dregs of the City – some do such things.’

Danlo let his breath out slowly. ‘Then how can I know what is real and what is unreal? Is it possible to imprint false memories? Things or events that never happened? Insanity? Could I remember ice as hot or see red as blue? If someone else looked at the world through shaida eyes, would I be infected with this way of seeing things?’

Drisana wrung her hands together, sighed, and looked helplessly at Old Father.

‘Oh ho, the boy is difficult, and his questions cut like a sarsara!’ Old Father stood up and painfully limped over to Danlo. Both his eyes were open, and he spoke clearly. ‘All ideas are infectious, Danlo. Most things learned early in life, we do not choose to learn. Ah, and much that comes later. So, it’s so: the two wisdoms. The first wisdom: as best we can, we must choose what to put into our brains. And the second wisdom: the healthy brain creates its own ecology; the vital thoughts and ideas eventually drive out the stupid, the malignant and the parasitical.’