The Broken God

Old Father motioned toward the men and women sitting close to them, murmuring words of exhausted hope as they looked up at the sky. ‘This cult? Oh, no, no, no – when dawn comes and Mallory Ringess has failed to return, the Returnists will be no more. If I seem worried – and I must tell you that it’s nearly impossible for a Fravashi to worry – it’s only because you seem to love all cults too well.’

With his little finger Danlo touched the glowing templet tight against his forehead, and he asked, ‘But what better way … to know these ways?’

‘Well, there is the spelad, of course. Someday you may play this as well as Fayeth. Ah, ho, the whole Fravashi system.’

‘Spelad is a clever game,’ Danlo said. ‘But it is only a game.’

‘Ah, ah?’

Danlo held out his hand. In the light of his templet, his fingernails glowed yellow-orange. He suddenly curled his fingers toward his palm, making a loose fist. He said, ‘The Fravashi teach their students to hold any worldview lightly, as they would a butterfly, yes?’

‘To hold a reality lightly is to change realities easily,’ Old Father said. ‘How else may one progress from the simplex to the higher stages of plexity?’

‘But, sir, your students, Fayeth and Luister, the others – they hold most realities too lightly. They never really know the realities they hold.’

‘Ho, ho, do you think you understand the beliefs of science more completely than Fayeth does? And the other belief systems as well?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Then I’m afraid that I don’t understand.’

There was a half smile on Old Father’s face, and Danlo thought that he was being only half truthful with him.

‘There is a difference,’ Danlo said, ‘between knowledge and belief.’

‘Ah ho, aha,’ Old Father said.

Danlo turned to face the east, where the sky showed blue with the day’s first light. It would be some time before the sun rose, but already the horizon was stained with tones of ochre and glowing red. Many of the Returnists were looking in this direction, too. Elianora stood up and somehow oriented herself toward the coming dawn. Like all scryers she was blind, and more, her eyepits were scooped hollows as black as space. Perhaps she was waiting to feel the heat of the sun’s rays against her cheeks. If she was chagrined or shamed that her prophecy was about to prove false, she gave no sign.

‘Do you see this lovely scryer?’ Danlo said. He dropped his voice to a near-whisper and moved closer to Old Father. ‘Before she blinded herself, she had eyes as I have. As we do. She could see all the colours of the world. But … what if she had been born eyeless, just as she is now. What if she had been blind from birth, like the hibakusha babies? How could she know that blood is the reddest of all the reds? How could she see the colours of the sunrise? When you look at the sky, sir, do you say, “I believe in blueness”? No, you do not, not unless you are blind. You see the blessed blue, and so you know it. Don’t you see? We do not need to believe … that which we know.’

‘Ah, ho, knowing,’ Old Father said. ‘So, it’s so.’

‘Fayeth may understand the beliefs of Science better than I,’ Danlo said. ‘But she’ll never know Science … until she has seen a snowworm sliced into a hundred segments while it is still alive.’

‘Would you expect me to subject all my students to such atrocities?’

‘To be truly complex … yes. The other students play the spelad, and they think they know what it is like to move from reality to reality. But it is not really … real, to them. When they enter a new worldview … they are like old men wading in a hot spring. Half in, half out, never completely wet or dry.’

Now the sky was flaming crimson, and the air was lighter, and the trees and boulders across the mountain were beginning to take on the colours of morning. Of all the people who had climbed Urkel during the night, only the Returnists remained. And now most of these were leaving because their belief in the return of Mallory Ringess had been broken. This, Danlo thought, was the essential difference between belief and knowledge. Knowledge could only intensify into deeper knowledge, whereas belief was as fragile as glass. Hundreds of red-eyed people muttered to themselves as they cast betrayed looks at Elianora and turned their backs to her without bidding her farewell. They left behind forty-eight men and women who knew something they did not. Danlo knew it too, but he could hardly explain this knowledge to Old Father. He knew that, in some sense, Mallory Ringess had returned to Neverness that night. There had indeed been a god upon the mountain – Danlo had only to remember the wistful looks on eighty thousand faces to know that this was so. Because of Elianora’s prophecy, something in the City had changed, irrevocably, and something new had been born. Old Father was wrong to suppose that the movement she had begun would simply evaporate like dew drops under a hot sun.

Old Father, who was always adept at reading people’s thought shadows, studied Danlo’s face, then said, ‘You never really believed Mallory Ringess would return, did you?’

‘I do not want to believe anything,’ Danlo said. ‘I want to know … everything.’

‘Ha, ha, not an insignificant ambition. You’re different from my other students – they merely desire liberation.’

‘And yet they are so … unfree.’

Old Father’s eyes opened wide, and he said, ‘How so?’

‘Because they think they have found a system … that will free them.’

‘Haven’t they?’

‘The Fravashi system … is the one reality they hold tightly. And it holds them even more tightly.’

‘Do you have so little respect for our way, then?’

‘Oh, no, sir, I have loved this way very well, it is only …’

Old Father waited a moment, then said, ‘Please continue.’

Danlo looked down at the stream bubbling through the trees nearby. He said, ‘The virtue of the Fravashi system is in freeing us from systems, yes?’

‘This is true.’

‘Then shouldn’t we use this very system … to free ourselves from the Fravashi way?’

‘Ah, ah,’ Old Father said as he shut both his eyes. ‘Oh, oh, oh, oh.’

‘I must … free myself from this way,’ Danlo said.

‘Ohhh!’

‘I must leave your house before it is too late.’

‘So, then – it’s so.’

‘I am sorry, sir. You must think me ungrateful.’

Old Father opened his eyes, and his mouth broke into a smile. ‘No, I’ve never thought that. A student repays his master poorly if he always remains a student. I’ve known for some time you would leave.’

‘To enter the Order, yes?’

‘Ho, ho, even if the Order were to reject you, you still must leave. All my students leave me when they’ve learned what you’ve learned.’

‘I am … sorry,’ Danlo said.

‘Oh, ho, but I’m not sorry,’ Old Father said. ‘You’ve learned well, and you’ve pleased me well, better than I could say unless I say it in Fravash.’

Danlo looked down to see that his fellow Returnists were beginning to break their encampment, packing up their furs and baskets of food. One of them, a young horologe from Lara Sig, told Danlo that it was time to hike back to the City.

‘Perhaps we should say goodbye now,’ Old Father said.

Danlo glanced at Elianora, standing silently in the snow as she held her face to the morning sky. The other Returnists swarmed around her, talking softly, and one of them offered his arm for the journey back down the mountain.

‘In five more days,’ Danlo said, ‘I shall begin the competition. If the Order accepts me, may I still visit you, sir?’

‘No, you may not.’

Now Danlo froze into silence, and he was scarcely aware of the other Returnists leaving him behind.

‘These are not my rules, Danlo. The Order has its own way. No novice or journeyman may sit with a Fravashi. We’re no longer trusted – I’m sorry.’

‘Then –’

‘Then you may visit me after you’ve become a full pilot.’

‘But that will be years!’

‘Then we must be patient.’

‘Of course,’ Danlo said, ‘I might fail the competition.’

‘That’s possible,’ Old Father said. ‘But the real danger to you is in succeeding, not failing. Most people love the Order too completely and find it impossible to leave once they’ve entered it.’

‘But they haven’t been students of a Fravashi Old Father, I think.’

‘No, that’s true.’

‘I must know what it is to be a pilot,’ Danlo said. ‘A blessed pilot.’

‘Ho, ho, it’s said that the pilots know the strangest reality of all.’

Danlo smiled, then, and bowed to Old Father. ‘I must thank you for everything you’ve given me, sir. The Moksha language, the ideals of ahimsa and shih. And your kindness. And my shakuhachi. These are splendid gifts.’

‘You’re welcome, indeed.’ Old Father looked down the path where the last of the Returnists were disappearing into the forest. He said, ‘Will you walk back to the City with me?’

‘No,’ Danlo said. ‘I think I will stay and watch the sun rise.’

‘Ah, ho, I’m going home to bed, then.’

‘Goodbye, sir.’

‘Goodbye, Danlo the Wild. I’ll see you soon.’

Old Father reached over to touch Danlo’s head, and then he turned to walk home. It took him a long time to make his way down the mountain, and Danlo watched him as long as he could. At last, when he was alone with the wind and the loons singing their morning song, he faced east to wait for the sun. In truth, although he never told this to anyone, he was still waiting for Mallory Ringess. It was possible that this god was only late, after all, and Danlo thought that somebody should remain to greet him if he returned.

PART TWO

CHAPTER SIX

The Culling

The starting point of Architect – or Edic – understanding is the recognition that God is created after the image of man. This idea views man and God as joined with one another through a mysterious connection. Man, out of hubris, wanted an image formed of himself as a perfected and potentially infinite God. In that man is reflected in God, he makes himself a partner in this self-realization. Man and God belong so closely to one another that one can say that they are intended for each other. Man finds his fulfilment in God.

– Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1,754th Edition, Tenth Revised Standard Version

On the twenty-fifth day of false winter, in the year 2947 since the founding of the Order, the annual Festival of the Unfortunate Petitioners was held at Borja College. This is the first of the Order’s colleges, and it occupies much of the Academy, which is really a separate city within the city of Neverness. At the very eastern edge of Neverness, pushed up against the mountains, is a square mile of dormitories, towers, halls and narrow red glidderies crisscrossing the well-tended grounds. A high granite wall (it is called the Wounded Wall because part of its southern face was once destroyed by the blast of a hydrogen bomb) surrounds the Academy on three sides: it separates the Academy’s spacious buildings from the densely arrayed spires and apartments of the Old City. There is no wall along the eastern grounds of the Academy. Or rather, the mountains, Urkel and Attakel, rise up so steeply as to form a beautiful, natural wall of ice and rock. Some students rail at such enforced isolation from the dirty, more organic city life, but most others find comfort in the company of like minds rather than loneliness or alienation or despair.

On this crisp, clear morning, at dawn, Danlo skated through the city streets until he came to the Wounded Wall. There, outside the wall’s West Gate, on a narrow red gliddery, he waited with the other petitioners who had come to enter the Academy. Danlo was one of the first to arrive, but in little time, as the sun filled the sky, thousands of girls and boys (and quite a few of their parents) from most of the Civilized Worlds began lining up behind him. For blocks in any direction, the side streets giving onto the Wounded Wall overflowed with would-be students wearing parkas, kimonos, ponchos, fur gowns, chukkas, sweaters, babris, cowl jackets and kamelaikas, garments of every conceivable cut and material. Many of the petitioners were impatient; they grumbled and muttered obscenities as they queued up, waiting for the great iron gates to open.

‘We’re early,’ someone behind Danlo said. ‘But you’d think they would let us come in out of the cold.’

Danlo examined the wall surrounding the Academy. It was as high as three tall men, and it was seamed with cracks and covered with sheets of greyish lichen. He had always loved climbing rocks, so he wondered if he could find a handhold in the cut blocks and pull himself up and over. Why, he wondered, would anyone want to build a wall inside a city?

‘It’s cold on this damn world – my tutors never told me it would be so cold.’

At last the gates opened inward, and the petitioners slowly filed onto one of the main glidderies cutting through the Academy. Behind Danlo there was much grumbling and shouting, pushing and shoving, especially at those intersections where it was not clear how the lines should merge. In several places, fights broke out. Most of these fights were short, clumsy affairs of cursing, flailing fists and hurried apologies when the combatants were pulled apart. Inside the gate, however, there was order. Scores of Borja novices, in their official, white robes, quickly separated the girls from the boys and led them in groups to various buildings around the Academy.

Danlo – along with two thousand other boys – was led across the high professional’s college, Lara Sig, to a large hemispherical structure called the Ice Dome. Inside the Ice Dome were figure rings, sled courts, and icefields on which was played that murderously fast game known as hokkee. That morning, however, the icefields were empty of skaters; for hundreds of yards across the icefields, beneath the curving, triangular panes of the dome, the novices had stacked many bundles of worn white robes. Next to each bundle was a heap of sandals of varying sizes. The sandals were paired, left foot to right, tied together around the toe thongs with a single white ribbon. Danlo smelled old wool and the rancid thickness of leather stained with human sweat. One of the elder novices – he was actually the Head Novice, Sahale Featherstone, a tall boy with a shaved head and a serious face – directed Danlo and the others each to choose a robe and a pair of sandals. ‘Listen, now, listen,’ the novice said to a group of boys standing nearby. ‘You must remove all your clothes and put on the petitioner’s robe.’

‘But it’s too damn cold in here!’ an unhappy boy next to Danlo protested. ‘Are we supposed to stand barefoot on ice while we rummage through a bunch of stinking old shoes? Our damned feet will freeze!’

The Head Novice ignored him, as did most of the other boys; at least, they did not pay him obvious attention. Few were pleased at having to strip naked in such a chill, open place, but neither did most of them want to be singled out as complainers. The boys did as they were told. The air was suddenly full of sound: zippers being pulled open, the swish of woven fabrics, clacking skates, and the buzz of a thousand voices. It was cold enough inside the Dome to steam the breath; everywhere Danlo looked, puffs of silvery vapour escaped from trembling lips and vanished into the air. Novices went among the naked boys, collecting clothes and skates and giving each of them a number in return. ‘Your number is 729,’ a pimply novice said as he wrapped Danlo’s jacket around his skates and tied the bundle together. ‘You must remember this number to reclaim your clothes after the competition.’ He didn’t explain that new clothes would be given to those few who were admitted to Borja. Plainly, he did not expect Danlo to be among the chosen.

Soon, all the boys were naked, and many were shivering, their brown or white or black skins stippled with goose bumps. The ice around the stacks of robes was crowded, but even so, each of the boys took care to keep a space around himself and not brush against any of his fellow petitioners. As they waited their turns at the stacks, they furtively glanced from body to naked body, comparing and reflecting, silently judging.

‘Hurry, please, I’m freezing to death!’

This came from a plump boy who had his arms clapped across his chest. He had dark brown skin the colour of coffee, and his eyes were full of fear; alternately, he lifted one knee high and then the other, up and down, touching the ice with his tender-soled feet as quickly and as briefly as possible. He looked silly and pathetic, like a strange insect dancing atop a blister of hot, shiny oil.

‘Please hurry!’

Ahead of Danlo was a frenzy of boys ripping through robes and sizing sandals to their feet. Everywhere, cast-off white ribbons from the sandals carpeted the ice. Danlo found that by kicking some of the ribbons together he could stand on them and not feel the ilka-hara, the burn of naked ice against flesh. He stood clutching his bamboo shakuhachi in his hand, patiently waiting his turn, watching and waiting, and all the while he was aware that many of the boys were watching him, too. They stared at his loins, at the membrum that Three-Fingered Soli had cut and marked with coloured scars. This unique mutilation riveted their stares. And Danlo stared at the other boys, or rather, he quickly surveyed the contours of the smooth, civilized bodies all around him. None of the boys had been cut; they each retained foreskins sheathing the bulbs of their membrums, and thus they were truly boys, not men. Some of the boys had yet to begin their growth; their chests were slight and narrow, and their membrums were almost as small as Danlo’s little finger. But even the older boys, with their large, fully developed membrums, were uncut. Despite his training in the perils of glavering, he could not take them as equals. (In truth, he worried at his own manhood, for how could he ever become a full man until he completed his passage and listened to the complete and whole Song of Life?) No, he was very different from all the others, and he was at once ashamed and proud of this difference. No one else seemed quite so tall, or as tough and hardy in the body. He stood calm and waiting, fairly inured to the cold. He was still too lean from his starvation the previous year; the sinews and bones stood out beneath his weathered skin, and long flat bands of muscle quivered with every breath taken and released. Most of the boys were weak-looking, as thin and white as snowworms or layered with fat like seals. Even the few athletes among them, with their carefully cultivated physiques, seemed pampered and soft. They looked at him – at the various parts of his body – with a mixture of horror, envy, and awe.

There was one other boy, however, who also stood out from the others, though mostly for different reasons. As Danlo donned a loose, scratchy wool robe and kicked on a pair of sandals, he overheard this boy talking about Ede the God and the Cybernetic Universal Church, a subject that interested him endlessly. He slipped through the crowded icefield until he came upon a short, thin boy who held the attention of others standing around him. ‘Of course, all the Cybernetic Churches worship Ede as God,’ the boy was saying. ‘But it’s the Architects of the original church who have created the Vild.’

In a low voice Danlo said a prayer, then whispered, ‘Shantih, shantih.’

The boy – his name was Hanuman li Tosh – must have overheard what Danlo said, for he turned and bowed his head politely. He had the oldest young face imaginable, smooth like new white ice and indecently unmarked even for a fifteen-year-old. At the same time, he seemed strangely jaded, as if he’d lived a thousand times before, and each life full of disappointments, boredom, anguish, madness, and desperate love. With his full, sensual lips, he smiled at Danlo; it was a beautiful smile, at once shy and compelling. In many ways, he was a beautiful boy. There was a delicateness to his finely-made face bones, an almost otherworldly grace. Danlo thought he must be either half an angel or half demon. His hair was yellow-white, the colour of an iceblink, and his skin was so white that it was almost translucent, a thin shell of flesh that could scarcely protect him from the coldness and cruelties of the world. Except for his eyes, he was really too beautiful. His eyes were a pale blue, vivid and clear like those of a sled dog. Danlo had never imagined seeing such eyes in a human being. There was too much sensitivity and suffering there, as well as passion and fury. In truth, Danlo instantly hated the sight of those hellish, shaida eyes. He thought of this strange boy as the ‘Hell-eyes’, a pale fury he should either flee from immediately or kill.

But the circle of chattering boys surrounding Hanuman pressed close and caught Danlo up in civilized conversation; he was caught, too, by Hanuman’s silver tongue and his charm.

‘I’m Hanuman li Tosh, off Catava. What does this word “shantih” mean? It’s a beautiful word, and the way you say it – beautiful and haunting.’

How could Danlo explain the peace beyond peace to a civilized boy with eyes out of his deepest nightmares? Hanuman was shivering in his sandals and his robe, looking at him expectantly. Despite the seeming frailty of his long neck and naked limbs where they stuck out of his robe, he bore the cold well. There was something about him that the other boys lacked, some inner fire or intensity of purpose. He had his fist up to his mouth coughing at the cold air, but even in his pain, he seemed very determined and very aware of Danlo looking at him.

‘Shantih,’ Danlo said, ‘is a word … my father taught me. It is really the formal ending to a prayer.’

‘And what language would that be? What religion?’

Danlo had been warned not to reveal his past so he evaded the question. ‘I have not presented myself,’ he said. ‘I am Danlo.’ He bowed his head and smiled.

‘Just … Danlo?’

He didn’t want to tell him that he was Danlo, son of Haidar, whose father was Wicent, the son of Nuri the Bear-killer. He felt the other boys staring at him, whispering, and he blurted out, ‘They call me Danlo the Wild.’

Behind Hanuman, a muscle-fat boy with a cracking voice and a pugnacious face began to laugh. His name was Konrad and he called out, ‘Danlo the Wild – what kind of name is that?’

And someone else said, ‘Danlo the Wild, the nameless child.’

Danlo’s neck suddenly hurt and his eyes were burning with shame. He stood there breathing deeply and evenly, as Haidar had taught him, letting the cold air enter his lungs to steal the heat from his anger. A few of the boys laughed at him and made jokes about his strange name. Most, however, hung back and kept their silence, obviously doubting the wisdom of baiting such a tough-looking boy. With a feather stuck in his hair and his deep blue eyes, Danlo did in fact look uncivilized and not a little wild.

Hanuman coughed some more, great racking coughs that tore through his chest and brought tears to his eyes. When he had caught his breath, he asked, ‘Which is your birth world?’

‘I was born here.’

‘You were? In Neverness? Then you must be used to the cold.’

Danlo rubbed his arms and blew on his fingers to warm them. A man, he thought, should not complain about things he can’t change, so he said, simply, ‘Can one ever get used to the cold?’

‘I certainly can’t,’ Hanuman said as he began coughing again. And then, ‘So cold – how do you stand it?’

Danlo watched him cough for a while, and said, ‘You are ill, yes?’

‘Ill? No, I’m not – it’s just that the air is so cold it cuts the lungs.’

After another round of coughing, Danlo decided that Hanuman was very ill. Once, when he was a young boy, he had watched his near-brother, Basham, die of a lung fever. Hanuman certainly had the pale, haunted look of someone who was contemplating going over. Perhaps a virus was eating away at his lungs. He seemed to be burning from deep inside. His eyes were sunken into dark, bruised flesh; the contrast of the light blue irises against the dark hollows made them seem more hellish by the moment. There was a fear in his eyes, a frightened, fey look almost as if he could see his fate approaching like a dark storm that would ice his heart and steal his breath away. He coughed again, and Danlo could almost feel the spasm tearing through his own chest. He was afraid for Hanuman. He was afraid, and that was seemly, for a man to fear another’s dying, but of course it was very wrong that Hanuman should be afraid for himself. Hanuman’s fear made Danlo sick. He had keen eyes, and he could see that this frail, ill boy was trying to hide his fear from all the others, perhaps even trying to hide it from himself. Someone, he thought, should feed him bowls of wolf-root tea and bathe his head with cool water. Where was his mother, to care for him? He would have placed his hand on Hanuman’s burning forehead to touch the fever away, but he remembered that he was not supposed to touch others, especially not strangers, especially not in sight of a hundred other laughing, joking boys.