The Broken God

Hanuman moved closer to Danlo and spoke in a low, tortured voice, ‘Please don’t tell the novices or masters I’m ill.’

He coughed so hard that he doubled over and lost his balance as his foot slipped on the ice. He would have pitched face forward, but Danlo caught him by the armpit and hand. Hanuman’s hand was hot like an oilstone and surprisingly strong. (Later Danlo would learn that Hanuman had trained in the killing arts in order to harden himself. In truth, he was much stronger than he looked.) Danlo gripped Hanuman’s hard little hand, pulling him to his feet, and suddenly they didn’t seem at all like strangers. There was something between them, some kind of correspondence and immediate understanding. Danlo had a feeling that he should pay close attention to this correspondence. Hanuman’s intenseness both attracted and repelled him. He smelled Hanuman’s fear and sensed his will to suffer that fear in silence no matter the cost. He smelled other things as well. Hanuman stank of sweat and sickness, and of coffee – obviously he had been drinking mugs of coffee to keep himself awake. With tired, feverish eyes Hanuman looked at Danlo as if they shared a secret. Hanuman shook off his hand, gathered in his pride and stood alone. Danlo thought he was being consumed from within like an overfilled oilstone burning too quickly. Who could hold such inner fire, he wondered, and not quickly go over to the other side of day?

‘You should rest in your furs and drink hot tea,’ Danlo said, ‘or else you might go over.’

‘Go over? Do you mean die?’ Hanuman spoke this word as if it were the most odious and terrifying concept that he could imagine. ‘Please, no, I hope not.’

He coughed and there was a bubbly sound of liquid breaking deep in his throat.

‘Where are your parents?’ Danlo asked as he combed back his long hair with his fingers. ‘Did you make the journey here alone?’

Hanuman coughed into his cupped hand, then wiped a fleck of blood from his lips. ‘I don’t have any parents.’

‘No father, no mother? O blessed God, how can you not have a mother?’

‘Oh, I had parents, once,’ Hanuman explained. ‘I’m not a slelnik, even though some people say I look like one.’

Danlo hadn’t yet heard of the despised, unnatural breeding strategies practised on a few of the Civilized Worlds; he knew nothing of the exemplars and slelniks born in abomination from the artificial wombs. He thought he understood a part of Hanuman’s pain and obvious loneliness; however, he understood wrongly. ‘Your parents have gone over, yes?’

Hanuman looked down at the ice and then shook his head. ‘Does it matter?’ he asked. ‘To them, I might as well be dead.’

He told Danlo something of his journey to Neverness, then. In the Ice Dome, a thousand boys were stamping their feet, slapping leather sandals against ice as they huffed out steam and complained of neglect, and Hanuman told of how he had been born into an important Architect family on Catava. His parents were Pavel and Moriah li Tosh, readers in the Cybernetic Reformed Church. (Over the millennia, the Architects of the Infinite Intelligence of the Cybernetic Universal Church have been riven into many different sub-religions. The Evolutionary Church of Ede, the Cybernetic Orthodox Churches, the Fostora Separatist Union – these are but a few of the hundreds of churches which have splintered off from the original church body, beginning with the Ianthian Heresy and the First Schism in the year 331 EV, that is to say, the 331st year since the vastening of Nikolos Daru Ede. All time, the Architects say, must begin at the moment Ede carked his consciousness into one of his mainbrain computers and thus became the first of humanity’s gods.) Like his parents, Hanuman had undergone the traditional reader training in one of the church schools. Unlike any of the respectable Architects that he knew, however, he had rebelled while still very young, begging his parents’ permission to attend the Order’s elite school in Oloruning, which is Catava’s largest and only real city.

‘My father allowed me to enter the elite school,’ Hanuman said, ‘only because it was the best school on Catava. But I had to agree to finish my reader training in the church after graduation; I had to agree not to attend the Academy on Neverness. So I agreed. But it was an impossible agreement. I never should have made it. All my friends in the elite school were planning to enter the Academy, if they could. And I’d always hoped to enter the Academy. To become a reader like my parents and grandparents – I never really wanted that. Oh, wait … please excuse my coughing. Do you know about the readers of my church? Of my parents’ church? No? I’m not supposed to tell anyone this, but I shall anyway. The second holiest ceremony in our church is the facing ceremony. You’ll have heard rumours about the facing ceremony – almost everyone has. No? Where have you spent your life? Well, in the facing ceremony, any Worthy Architect is allowed to interface with one of the church’s communal computers. The interfacing, entering into computer consciousness, the information flows, like lightning, the power. It’s like heaven, really, the only good thing about being an Architect. But before every facing ceremony, there has to be a cleansing. Of sin. We Architects … the Architects, call sin “negative programming”. So before a facing, a cleansing, because it’s blasphemy to interface a holy computer while unclean with negative programs – that’s what most of the Cybernetic Churches teach. I can’t tell you about the cleansing ceremony. It’s worse than hateful, really, it’s a violation of the soul. Oh, I’ll tell you, if you promise to keep this secret. The readers strip bare your mind with their akashic computers. Everything, every negative thought or intention, especially vanity, because that’s the worst thing, the damning sin, to think too highly of yourself or want to be more than you were born for. Almost everything – there are ways of hiding things; you have to learn to keep your thoughts secret or else the readers will rape your soul. They’ll cleanse you until there’s nothing left. Have you ever had an imprinting? The cleansing is like a reverse imprinting. The readers remove the bad memories. They reprogram the brain … by killing parts of it. Not everyone believes that, of course, or else they’d panic whenever it was time for a cleansing. But even if the readers don’t actually kill the brain cells, they kill something else when they eliminate old synaptic pathways and create new ones. Why not call it soul? I know that’s an inelegant word for an elegant, inexpressible concept, but soul … you have to keep your soul to yourself, do you see? The soul, the light. And that’s why I left my church. Because I’d rather have died than become a reader.’

In silence Danlo listened as this intense, ill boy talked and coughed. That he talked so much and so freely surprised him. Danlo was beginning to discover a talent for listening to others and winning their trust. He listened deeply, as he would listen to the west wind scrape across and articulate the ice forms of the sea. He liked the way Hanuman used words, the richness and clarity of his thought. It was a rare thing, he knew, for a boy to speak as fluently as a skilful-tongued man.

‘I wonder what it would be like … to touch minds with a computer,’ Danlo said.

‘You’ve never faced a computer?’

‘No.’

‘Well, it’s pure ecstasy,’ Hanuman said.

Danlo touched the feather dangling from his hair, and then he touched his forehead. ‘You know about computers – are computers truly alive? Life, consciousness is … even the smallest living things, even the snowworms are conscious.’

‘Is a snowworm conscious?’ Hanuman asked.

‘Yes,’ Danlo said. ‘I am not a shaman so I have never entered into snowworm consciousness. But Yuri the Wise and others of my … other men that I have known have entered the consciousness of the animals, and they know what it is like to be a snowworm.’

‘And what is it like?’

‘It is like something. It is like being a snowflake in a blizzard. It is like the beginning of drawing in a breath of new air. It is like … I do not know. Perhaps someday I will become a snowworm and I will tell you.’

Hanuman smiled as he began to cough. Then he said, ‘You’re very strange, did you know that?’

‘Thank you,’ Danlo said, returning his smile. ‘You are strange too.’

‘Oh, yes, strange – I think I was born that way.’

‘And your parents?’ Danlo asked. ‘They had no sympathy … for this strangeness?’

Hanuman was silent for a few moments as he stared down at the steaming ice. As if he had come to a grave decision, he nodded his head. He looked up suddenly and then told Danlo the rest of his story. The Cybernetic Reformed Churches, Hanuman said, did not believe in the freedom of the soul. And so, hating the life-perverting ethos and practices of his church, Hanuman had made secret plans to journey to Neverness after his graduation. That he would be accepted to the Academy, he felt certain, for all his life he had studied the disciplines with a frenzy, and he had risen to the zenith of the ranks of the chosen. But, it was said, the greater the height, the farther the drop, and so one of his friends, out of envy and spite, had betrayed him to his father just before their graduation. His father had immediately removed him from the school. He never graduated. He was locked inside the reading room of his family’s church, there to familiarize himself with the heaumes of the akashic computers, with the Edic lights of the altar, and with the burning incense and brain musics used in Architect ceremonies. His father told him to meditate on the Book of God. He was to give special attention to its sub-books: The Life Of Ede, Facings, and Iterations. In Facings, a body of so-called wisdom revealed to Kostos Olorun long after Ede had become a god, he came across the crucial passage: And so Ede faced the universe, and he was vastened, and he saw that the face of God was his own. Then the would-be-gods, who are the hakra devils of the darkest depths of space, from the farthest reaches of time, saw what Ede had done, and they were jealous. And so they turned their eyes godward in jealousy and lust for the infinite lights, but in their countenances God read hubris, and he struck them blind. For here is the oldest of teachings, here is wisdom: No god is there but God; God is one, and there can be only one God.

What followed, in this holy book of Facings, were many chapters describing the detection and cleansing of hakras. For the thousandth time in his life, Hanuman reflected on his church’s doctrine that all human beings were considered – and condemned – as potential hakras, potential gods. What kind of hateful, corrupt church, he wondered, would deny the divinity within each human being? He decided that Kostos Olorun, three thousand years ago, in his ambition to validate the authority of the nascent church and to establish himself as ‘God’s Prophet’, had lied about receiving revelations from Ede, and more, that he had invented many false doctrines. While Hanuman waited for his father to cleanse him of his sins, he had a dangerous thought: The true meaning of Ede’s vastening was that each man, woman, and child should come to apprehend the god within. Every man and woman is a star – Ede himself had written these words in his Universals. But somehow his church had corrupted and perverted this beautiful image to mean that every woman and man is a star whose light must be extinguished periodically lest it outshine that of Ede the God. Perhaps, Hanuman mused, human beings truly were as angels, or rather, as godlings who might grow into infinity, and someday, at the end of time, be united with Ede and all the other gods of the universe.

Unwittingly, Hanuman had come to formulate one of the oldest and most secret heresies of his church: the Major Hakra Heresy. One day, in front of the reading room’s altar, as he watched the jewelled, Edic lights shimmering up through the spectrum from red to violet, he voiced this heresy to his father. His father, who was a stern, handsome man, was scandalized by his son’s ideas. He told him to immediately prepare himself for a deep cleansing. There was hatred in his father’s voice, jealousy and loathing. Although Hanuman had been cleansed many times, he had never had a deep cleansing. Against the power and subtleties of the holy computers as they cleansed him deeply, the little mind tricks he had learned would be useless; a deep cleansing would disfigure his soul as surely as a hot wind melts the features of an ice sculpture. He closed his eyes to look upon the familiar, very mortal face of his soul, and he was terrified. He begged his father to relent, to subject him only to the usual, mundane cleansing. But his father was a hard man. His father, this prince of the church, hardened his heart and reviled his son as a hakra; he would not relent. His father told him to kneel beneath the heaume of the holy, cleansing computer. But instead, in his terror and pride, in a blind panic, Hanuman swept up the gold incense stand and struck his father’s forehead. It was a quick, powerful, desperate blow; his father immediately fell dying across the altar. Hanuman gasped to see the rainbow of Edic lights falling over his father’s open brains. He wept uncontrollably as long as he dared, and then he tore the Edic lights from the altar and left his father in a pool of blood. He fled to Oloruning. There he sold the priceless lights to a wormrunner. He used the money to buy a passage on a harijan prayership, where one of the filthy pilgrims infected him with a lung disease. Thus he had come to Neverness, ill in his body and burning in his soul; he had come to the City of Pain hoping to enter the Academy and forget his sinful past.

Part of this story, of course – the sad, murderous part – Danlo did not learn until years later. For good reason, Hanuman was a secretive boy, and he would grow to be a secretive man. It was a mark of his unusual trust in Danlo that he had told him as much as he had. ‘I’ve given up everything to enter the Academy,’ he said to Danlo. ‘My whole life.’

He coughed for a long time, and Danlo listened to the ragged, ripping sound. The huge Dome was full of sound: wind breaking against the clary panes high above, chattering teeth, and two thousand shivering boys grumbling and wondering how long they would be made to wait in such a frigid place. Then a deep voice called out, ‘Silence, it’s time!’ The Head Novice, with a look of command written over his narrow face, quickly made his way to the centre of the Ice Dome. ‘Silence, it’s time for the first test. Form a queue at the nearest doorway; a novice will lead you to your first test. Silence! Once the test begins, anyone caught talking will be dismissed.’

Danlo looked at Hanuman and whispered, ‘I wish you well.’

‘I wish you well, Danlo the Wild.’

They began their walk across Borja, then. Boys and girls clad in thin white robes issued forth from many of the buildings. That year, some seven thousand petitions to compete in the festival had been accepted; long lines of would-be novices filled the glidderies. The sun was now high in the southern sky, and everywhere the spires were awash in the hot, false winter light. It was much warmer than it had been inside the Ice Dome. A film of water mirrored the red ice of the lesser glidderies. It was so slippery that some of the petitioners linked arms and proceeded very carefully. Others hurried recklessly along in sudden bursts of speed, using their flat leather sandals to skid and hydroplane across the ice. Danlo stayed near Hanuman, waiting for him to slip and fall at any moment. But Hanuman kept his balance, even as they made their way toward the Tycho’s Spire. Above them – above the dormitories and lesser buildings – this giant needle marked the very centre of Borja. Danlo liked the feeling of the novices’ college; it was a place of beauty that had taken centuries to evolve and unfold. On most of the buildings, variegated lichens burned across the stonework in lovely rosettes of ochre, orange, and red. Many old yu trees had grown almost as high as the spires themselves. It was impossible to stand on any lawn of the Academy and not hear the kap, kap, kap, of mauli birds pecking at bark. The smooth, immaculate glidderies, the fireflowers, the snow loons hunting yu berries in the snow – here, Danlo thought, was a place touched by the arts of mankind, and perhaps steeped in the unutterable essence of halla.

Beneath the Tycho’s Tower, surrounded by eight buildings which house the various computers used in the novices’ education, is the beloved Lavi Square. That is to say, it is beloved by the novices who gather there to gossip and greet new friends, and to enjoy a few moments (or hours) of open sky. The petitioners rarely come to love Lavi Square. Every year, the Test of Patience is held there. This is the first test of the Festival of Unfortunate Petitioners, and every year it takes a different form. Every year, the Master of Novices delights in designing trials to cull the most patient of petitioners. Sometimes the unfortunate boys and girls are made to recite poetry until their voices are hoarse, and the weak among them beg to be allowed surcease from the torment of speaking; one time, ten years before, they were required to stay awake and attentive while an historian lectured about the manifold horrors of the Fifth Mentality and the Second Dark Age. Only those few boys and girls who had remained awake after three days had been allowed to take the second test. Along with Hanuman – and seven thousand other boys and girls – Danlo was herded into the Square. For a hundred and fifty yards along the length and breadth of the Square, seven thousand straw mats were laid out in a neat array. Each mat was a rectangle three feet wide and four feet long. The mats were jammed close together, their frayed edges separated by only a few inches of white ice. A novice bade the petitioners each to kneel on a mat. Danlo took his place on a mat next to Hanuman. The sharp, ragged ends of the straw pricked his knees, and the mat was so worn and full of holes that the wet ice beneath bathed him with waves of cold.

‘Silence, it’s time!’ the Head Novice cried out again.

The petitioners fell silent as they looked up expectantly, eager to learn the nature of that year’s test. Except for a few yu trees laden with red fruit and some ice sculptures (and twelve precious shih trees from Simoom), the Square was entirely stived with row upon row of nervous girls and boys. Danlo smelled clean, childish sweat and the ferment of overripe berries. From the buildings towering over them came the plip, plip of melting icicles. There was anxiety in the air, a chill intensity of anticipation.

‘Silence, it’s time to present the Master of Novices, Pesheval Lal!’

From the building behind the novice, an ugly, bearded man emerged from the doorway and made his way down a flight of steps. His birth name was Pesheval Lal, and the novices and journeymen called him ‘Master Lal’, but everywhere else he was famous simply as ‘Bardo’. (Or, as ‘Bardo the Just’.) Bardo’s formal black robe was tight across his immense chest and belly. White is the colour of Borja, and all novices wear white, but Bardo the Just had been a pilot before assuming the office of Master of Novices; like the other pilots he was properly dressed, in colour. ‘Yes, silence!’ his voice boomed out, echoing the novice’s injunction. He was a huge man, and he had a huge voice. He sternly looked from petitioner to petitioner. He had cunning, superb eyes that didn’t miss very much when it came to judging human character. Occasionally he would favour one of the petitioners with a smile and a slight head bow. He strolled about with a ponderous, heavy gait, as if he were hugely bored with himself and the impromptu judgements he had to make.

‘Silence!’ he shouted, and his voice vibrated from building to building across the Square. ‘You’ll be silent while I explain the rules of this year’s test. The rules are simple. No one will be allowed off his mat except to relieve himself. Ah … or herself. There will be no eating or drinking. Anyone caught talking will be immediately dismissed. Anything not forbidden is permitted. It’s a simple test, by God! You’re here to wait.’

And so they waited. Seven thousand children, not one of whom was older than fifteen years, waited in the warmth of the false winter sun. Mostly they waited in silence. Hanuman, of course, couldn’t help coughing, but none of the officious novices patrolling up and down the rows of petitioners seemed to bear him any ill feelings. Danlo listened to this coughing, and he worried how Hanuman would stand the bite of the evening air. He thought to distract Hanuman’s ailing spirit with a little music, to take him out of himself. He removed the shakuhachi from beneath his robe and began to play. The low, breathy melody he composed caught the attention of everyone around him. Most of the petitioners seemed to enjoy the music; the novices, though, were not pleased. They shot Danlo poisonous looks, as if they were insulted that he had found a clever way around Bardo’s injunction to silence. To be sure, he was not talking, but in many ways the music he made was a purer communication than mere words.

In this manner, kneeling on his straw mat, blowing continuously down his long bamboo flute, Danlo whiled away the endless afternoon. It was a beautiful day, really, a day of warmth and pungent air wafting down from the mountains. The shih trees beneath the buildings were snowy with white blossoms, and clouds of newly hatched fritillaries sipped nectar and filled the air with an explosion of bright violet wings. It wasn’t hard for him to wait, with the sun burning hot against the clear sky. A million needles of light stung his neck and face. He closed his eyes and played on and on, taking little notice of the sun as it grew large and crimson in the west. When twilight fell, the first chill of evening stole over the petitioners, but he was still warm and fluid inside with the music of dreamtime. Then the stars came out, and it was cold. The cold touched him, gently at first, and then more urgently. He opened his eyes to darkness and cold air. There, above the City’s eastern edge, the sky was almost clear of light pollution; the sky was black and full of stars. In unseen waves, heat escaped the City and radiated upward into the sky. There were no clouds or moisture in the air to hold in the heat.

‘It’s cold! I can’t stand this cold!’

Danlo noticed the boy named Konrad sitting ten yards in front of him, sitting and cursing as he beat his legs to keep warm. A cadre of novices converged on him and grasped his robe. ‘Your face!’ Konrad shouted. ‘Your rotting face!’ But the novices took no notice of his bad manners or profanity; they immediately escorted him from the Square.

If Konrad was the first to forget his patience and hope, he was not the last. As if a signal had been given, children in ones and twos began standing and leaving the Square. And then groups of ten or a hundred gave up en masse, abandoning their fellows, and so abandoned their quest to enter the Order. By the time night had grown full and deep, only some three thousand petitioners remained.

Just before midnight, a wicked round of coughing alerted Danlo as to the gravity of Hanuman’s illness. It wasn’t very cold – at least it was no colder than the interior of a snow hut – but Hanuman was shivering as he coughed, bent low with his face pressing his mat, shivering beyond control. If he didn’t give up and seek shelter soon he would surely die. But Hanuman didn’t look as if he were ready to give up. The hard straw had cut parallel marks into his forehead and cheek; his eyes were open to the light of the flame globes shining at the edge of the Square. Such eyes he had, a pale blue burning as the hellish blinkans in the sky burned, strangely and with terrible intensity. Something terrible and beautiful inside Hanuman was holding him to his mat, keeping him coughing in the cold. Danlo could almost see this thing, this pure, luminous will of Hanuman’s beyond even the will to life. Each man and woman is a star, he remembered, and something brilliant and beautiful about Hanuman’s spirit attracted him, just as a fritillary is compelled to seek a woodfire’s fatal light.