The Wild

Therefore Danlo broke open the pit of his ship and fairly fell down to the soft beach sands. It dismayed him to discover that after many days of weightlessness inside his ship, his body was a little weak. Although the pits of all lightships are designed to induce micro-gravities along a pilot’s torso and limbs, these intense fields do not quite keep the muscles from shrinking or the bones from demineralizing. As Danlo took his first tentative steps, he found that his slightly wasted leg muscles at first would support him only with difficulty and considerable pain. But then he stood away from his ship, and his bare feet seemed to draw strength from the soft, cold touch of the sand. He stood straight and still, looking down the broad sweep of the beach. To his left, the great grey ocean roared and surged and broke upon the hardpack at the water’s edge. To his right, a dark green forest of fir trees flowed like an ocean of a different kind, toward the east and south, and northwards where it swelled up into a headland of rocks and steeply rising hills. There was also something else. Just above the foredunes and beach grasses, where the sand gave way to the towering trees, there was a house. It was a small chalet of shatterwood beams and granite stone, and Danlo suddenly remembered that he knew this house quite well.

No, no, it is not possible.

He stood staring up at this lovely house for a while, and then the cold wind blew in from the ocean and drowned him in memories. Soon he began shaking and shivering. The wind found his belly, and he was suddenly cold as if he had drunk an ocean of ice water. He looked down at his lean, ivory legs quivering in the cold. He was still as naked as a pilot in the pit of his ship, but now that he stood on soft shifting sands, he realized that he was naked to the world. Because he needed to protect himself from the bitter wind and cover his nakedness, he returned to his ship to fetch his boots, his heavy wool cloak, and the racing kamelaika he had once worn while skating the streets of Neverness.

My mind is naked to Her. My memories, my mind.

The Entity, he thought, could read his memories exactly enough to incarnate them as wood and stone – either that or She could make him see this unforgettable house out of his memory where no house really existed. But because he thought that the little white house beneath the forest must be real, he quickly left his ship and returned to the beach. He began trudging up the dunes, the fine sands slipping beneath his boots and his weakened muscles. He worked his way forward and up against the pull of the Earth as if he were drunk on strong alcoholic spirits. Soon, however, with every step taken as he drew nearer the house, he began to acclimatize to the planet’s gravity. He remembered how to walk on treacherous sands. He remembered other things as well. Once, in this simple house of white granite that he could now see too well, there had been long nights of passion and love and happiness. Once, a woman had lived here, Tamara Ten Ashtoreth, she of the great heart and broken life whom he had loved and lost. But she had fled this house. In truth, she had fled Danlo and his burning memories. It was said that she had even fled Neverness for the stars. Although Danlo did not think it was possible that she could have found her way to this mysterious planet deep within the Solid State Entity, he hurried up the beach straight towards this house to discover what (or who) lay inside.

Tamara, Tamara – in this house you promised to marry me.

At last, on top of a small, grass-covered hill, at the end of a path laid with flat sandstones, he came up to the house’s door. It was thick and arched and sculpted out of shatterwood, a dense black wood native only to islands on the planet Icefall. Shatterwood trees had never grown on Old Earth, and so it was a mystery how the Entity had found shatterwood with which to build this house. He reached out to touch the door. The wood was cold and hard and polished to an impossible smoothness in the way that only shatterwood can be polished. He traced his finger across the lovely grain of the door, remembering. Somehow the Entity had exactly duplicated the door of Tamara’s house. In Danlo’s mind, just behind his eyes, there were many doors, but this particular one stood out before all others. He remembered exactly how the door planks had joined together in an almost seamless merging of the grain; he could see every knot and ring and dark whorl as if he were standing on the steps of this house on Neverness about to knock on the door. But he was not on Neverness. He stood before the door of an impossible house above a desolate and windswept beach, and the pattern of the whorls twisting through the shatterwood exactly matched the bright black whorls that burned through his memory.

How is it possible? he wondered. How is it possible that all things remember?

For a long time he stood there staring at the door and listening to the cries of the seagulls and other shore birds on the beach below. Then he made a fist and rapped his knuckles against the door. The sound of resonating wood was hollow and ancient. He knocked again, and the sound of bone striking against wood was lost to the greater sounds of the sweeping wind and the ocean that rang like a great deep bell far below him. A third time he knocked, loudly with much force, and he waited. When there was no answer, he tried the clear quartz doorknob, which turned easily in his hand. Then he opened the door and stepped across the threshold into the cold hallway inside.

‘Tamara, Tamara!’ he called out. But immediately, upon listening to the echoes that his voice made against the hall stones, he knew the house was empty. ‘Tamara, Tamara – why aren’t you home?’

Out of politeness and respect for the rules of Tamara’s house, he removed his boots before walking through her rooms. Because it was a small house laid out across a single floor, there were only five rooms: the hallway gave out onto the brightly lit meditation room, which was adjoined by the bathing room and fireroom at the rear of the house, and the tea room and the small kitchen at the front. It took him almost no time to verify that the house was indeed empty. That is, it was empty of human beings or evidence of present habitation. True, the kitchen was well-stocked with teas, cheeses, and fruits – and fifty other types of foods that Tamara had delighted in preparing for him. But everything about the kitchen – the neat rows of coloured teas in the jars, the oranges and bloodfruit piled high in perfect pyramids inside large blue bowls, the tiled counters completely free of toast crumbs or honey drippings – bespoke a room that hadn’t been used recently, but rather prepared for a guest. Similarly, the cotton cushions in the tea room were new and undented, as if no one had ever sat on them. And in the fireroom the shagshay furs smelled of new wool instead of sweat, and the stones of the two fireplaces were clean of ashes or soot. It was as if the Entity, in making this house, had perfectly incarnated the details of his memory but had been unable to duplicate the chaos and disorder (and dirt) that came of living a normal, organic life. But certainly She had duplicated everything else. The rosewood beams of the ceiling and the skylights were exactly as he remembered them. In the tea room, the tea service was set out on the low, lacquered table. And along the sill of the window overlooking the ocean, there was the doffala bear sculpture that he remembered so well and the seven oiled stones. Each object in the house was perfectly made and perfectly matched his memory. Except for one thing. When Danlo walked into the meditation room he immediately noticed a sulki grid hanging on the wall by the fireplace. And that was very strange because Tamara had never collected or used outlawed technology. She had never liked experiencing computer simulations or artificial images or sounds. And even if she’d had a taste for cartoons and other such seemingly real holographic displays, she never would have allowed them to be made in her meditation room. Because Danlo wondered what programs this sulki grid had been programmed to run, he pitched his voice toward it, saying simply, ‘On, please.’

For a moment nothing happened. Most likely, he supposed, the sulki grid would be keyed to some voice other than his own. He stood there breathing deeply, and he was almost relieved that the sulki grid appeared to be dead. He had imagined (and feared) that an imago of Tamara would appear before him, as tall and naked and achingly beautiful as ever she had been as a real woman. And then without warning the spiderweb neurologics of the grid flared into life, projecting an imago into the centre of the room. It was like no imago that Danlo had ever seen before. It was all flashing colours and shifting lights, like a column of fire burning up from the floor – but not burning any thing, neither the inlaid shatterwood floor tiles, nor the hanging plants, nor the air itself. Soon the display settled out into a kind of pattern with which he was very familiar. It was an array of ideoplasts, not the ideoplasts of mathematics, but rather those of the universal syntax. A scarce three feet in front of his face, glowing through the air in jewel-like glyphs of emerald and sapphire and tourmaline, were the three-dimensional symbols of the language beyond language of the holoists that he had learned as a young novice. It was a highly refined and beautiful language that could represent and relate any aspect of reality from the use of alien archetypes in the poets of the Fourth Dark Age to the pattern of neural storm singularities in the brain of a dreaming autist. Ideoplasts could symbolize the paradoxes of the cetic’s theory of the circular reduction of consciousness or alien words or – sometimes – even the phonemes and sounds of any human language, living or dead. Most often one encountered ideoplasts in libraries or when interfacing the various cybernetic spaces of a computer in order to discover or create an almost infinite variety of knowledge. Ideoplasts were mental symbols only, and they were best viewed as arrays of lovely and complex glyphs which a computer would cark into the vast visual fields of the mind’s eye. And the universal syntax was the language of holists and other academicians wishing to relate the most abstruse and arcane concepts; rarely were its ideoplasts used to represent everyday speech or in the sending of common messages. Only rarely, on Neverness and the other Civilized Worlds, would some pretentious restaurateur (or imprimatur) appropriate the ideoplasts of the universal syntax and instantiate them as glowing neon signs above his shop. But such use of these sacred symbols was considered gauche, even sacrilegious. Danlo had never seen an array of ideoplasts projected in the space of a common room, and so it took him some time to adjust to this new perspective and new way of apprehending them. With his eyes only, he played over the ideoplasts, slowly kithing them, much as he might read ancient Chinese characters or the letters of an unfamiliar alien language written into a book. The message written into the glowing air of the meditation room, as he saw when he finally kithed it, proved to be quite simple. It was a simple greeting, from the mind of a goddess for his eyes only:

How far do you fall, Pilot? How have you fallen so far and so well, Danlo wi Soli Ringess?

He sensed that he should reply to this greeting immediately. But he was uncertain as to how he could do so. Nowhere in the house were there any heaumes for him to place upon his head, and so he had no way to interface the sulki grid’s computer and generate his own ideoplasts as a response. Perhaps, he thought, there was no need for such a clumsy type of interface. Perhaps the Entity, at this moment, was somehow facing the streaming thoughts of his mind. If he merely generated words in the language centre of his brain and then held them waiting like so many thallow chicks eager to break out of their shells, then perhaps She might hear his thoughts and answer him.

How have you fallen so far, Danlo wi Soli Ringess, son of Mallory Ringess?

Danlo watched the array change slightly. In almost no time, some of the ideoplasts dissolved into the air like stained glass shattering into a million sparkling bits, and then new ones formed in their place. It occurred to him that he should simply speak aloud in the words of the common language, giving voice to certain questions he needed answered. And so he swallowed twice to moisten his throat, and he said, quite formally, ‘I have fallen from Neverness. I am Danlo wi Soli Ringess, son of Mallory Ringess, son of Leopold Soli. If you please, may I have your name?’

It was as if he had not spoken nor asked any question at all. The array of ideoplasts held steady, and their meaning remained unchanged.

How have you fallen so far, Danlo wi Soli Ringess?

This time when Danlo spoke, he directed his words toward the sulki grid. ‘How? I am very lucky,’ he said with much amusement.

Perhaps, he thought, the Entity was not really interfaced with his thoughts nor with the sound vibrations of this little room. Perhaps She was not even interfaced with the sulki computer itself. A goddess the size of a nebula comprising a hundred thousand stars and countless millions of moon-brains must have vastly greater concerns than in speaking with a young pilot of the Order. It was possible, he supposed, that this incomprehensible, unearthly goddess had merely created this world, created this house, and then programmed the sulki computer to respond to him in the most crude and basic of ways should he be lucky enough to find his way here.

Was it truly luck that led you here?

It was fate, Danlo thought, his fate to have survived the chaos of the attractor. But in the end chance and fate were wed together more tightly than the symbiotic algae and fungi that make up a lichen growing across a rock. ‘What is luck, truly?’ he asked.

Again the ideoplast array changed, and a new message appeared:

The first rule of this information exchange is that you may not answer a question with a question.

‘I … am sorry,’ Danlo said. He wondered if the mind of the goddess known as Kalinda were wholly elsewhere, somewhere outside this room, perhaps far away from this planet. The sulki computer’s program seemed indeed rudimentary and uninteresting – possibly it was a simple work of artificial intelligence designed to generate clever words from simple rules.

The second rule is that you must answer all my questions.

‘All your questions? But who are you … truly?’

The array remained unbroken, unchanging, and then Danlo remembered the Entity’s unanswered question. He took a breath and said, ‘Yes, it was luck that brought me here … and something other.’

What other thing?

Danlo paced about the meditation room, and his bare feet left little sweat prints against the cool shatterwood tiles. He walked around and around the imago in the centre of the room in order to view the colourful ideoplast array from different perspectives. He never took his eyes from the glowing ideoplasts. Finally, he said, ‘I was lost in the chaos space. Truly lost. And then in the blackness, in the neverness, the attractor … it was so strange, so wild. Yet somehow familiar, too. The patterns, breaking apart into all the colours, crimson and shimmering gold, and then reforming, again and again, the possibilities. So many patterns. So many possibilities. And then I remembered something. At first I thought it might be a memory of the future, a vision such as the scryers have. But no, it was something other. I remembered something that I had never seen before. I do not know how. It came into my mind like a star being born. A pattern. A memory. These blessed mathematics that we make, these blessed memories – they guided me into the attractor, and then I fell out above this wild Earth.’

Almost instantly the ideoplasts dissolved and reformed themselves into a new array which Danlo readily kithed.

I like your answer, Danlo wi Soli Ringess.

For a moment, Danlo reached out a hand to steady himself against the cold granite stones of the fireplace. Then he said, ‘I never dreamed another Earth existed, so real. I … never dreamed.’

Earth is Earth is Earth. But which Earth is the Earth, do you know?

‘I have wondered if this Earth is real,’ Danlo said. ‘I have wondered if a goddess could cark a picture of it – the touch and taste and whole experience of it – into my mind.’

You know this Earth is real. You know that you know.

Danlo dragged his long fingernails across the fireplace’s rough granite, and he listened to the stuttering, scraping sound they made. ‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘Yes, I know, truly … but how do you know that I know? Can you read my mind?’

What would it mean to read the human mind? What would it mean to read any mind?

Danlo took his hand away from the fireplace and rubbed his head. Because he had been born with a playful nature (and because he believed in being wilfully playful as a matter of faith), he asked, ‘Excuse me, but haven’t you just answered a question with a question?’

There is no rule that I should not. But there is a rule that you should not, and you have done so again.

‘I am … sorry,’ Danlo said. Then he rubbed hard above his eye for a moment as he thought about Hanuman li Tosh, who had developed a cetic’s skill of reading human faces and emotions, if not their actual minds. Sometimes, Hanuman had been able to read him, but he had never been able to see into the deepest part of Danlo’s soul. Nor had Danlo ever really known why Hanuman had thought the deep and terrible thoughts that had nearly destroyed both their lives. ‘In answer of your question, I do not know what it would be like to read anyone’s mind.’

But someday you will. And then you will understand that the real problem is not in reading the mind but in being a part of Mind.

Danlo considered this for a while. He considered that even the akashics of his Order – with their scanning computers, in their neural analysis and simulations of neuron firing – could sometimes read certain parts of one’s mind. Surely, he thought, the Entity must possess powers and technologies far greater than those of any akashic.

Because you have wished that I do not, I have not read your mind.

‘But how could you know what I wished … unless you had read me?’

I know.

‘But this house, the door outside and everything inside – how could you have made these things unless you had read my memories?’

He considered the possibility that the Entity kept spies on Neverness, either humans with photographic equipment or secret satellites above the planet or perhaps even robots the size of a bacterium that would swarm over doors and houses and every conceivable surface, thus secretly recording pictures and sounds to somehow send to the goddess. Surely the Entity, with her almost infinitely capacious mind, would want to know everything that occurred in a city such as Neverness, and perhaps in every human and alien city across the galaxy.

Reading one’s present mind is not quite the same thing as apprehending the memories.

He stared at the changing ideoplasts, and he mused that the spherical indigo glyph for ‘mind’ was closely related to the deep blue nested teardrops representing the phenomenon of memory. Provocatively, argumentatively, he turned to the sulki grid and said, ‘I do not see the difference.’

But someday it may be that you will.

‘If you please,’ he said, ‘I wish you to read no more of my memories.’

But it pleases me to taste your memories. Your memories are as sweet as oranges and honey, and they please me well.

Danlo looked back at the glowing array, and his jaw was clamped tightly closed, and he said nothing.

However it pleases me to please you, and so I will forget all your memories – all except one.

‘What … one?’

That you will soon know. That you will see.

With his knuckle he pressed hard against his forehead, against the pain always lurking behind his eye. He said, ‘But I have had too much of knowing … my memories. I have seen too much that I cannot forget. This world, this house, so perfect and yet … too perfect. It is as if no one has ever lived here. As if no one ever could.’

I was forced to make this house hastily. As you have noticed, it suffers the imperfection of perfection. But how not? I am only the goddess whom you know as the Solid State Entity – I am not God.

Because Danlo was tired of communicating in this awkward manner, he looked up at the glittering violet rings of the sulki grid and considered shutting it off. In truth, he no longer doubted that he was speaking with a goddess. Somehow, the sulki computer must be interfaced with a larger computer, perhaps hidden beneath the floor of the house, or even inside the Earth itself. Perhaps the interior of this Earth was not a core of spinning iron surrounded by layers of molten and solid rock, but rather the circuitry of a vast computer interfaced with all the other computers and moon-brains of the goddess across the trillions of miles of this strange, intelligent nebula. Upon his first sight of this planet, he had supposed that the Entity had merely engineered its surface and biosphere to hold the millions of species of earthly life spread out over the continents and oceans. After all, human beings had engineered the surfaces of planets for ten thousand years. He had supposed that the Entity, with unknown godly technologies, had shaped entire mountain chains and deep ocean trenches with less difficulty than a cadre of ecologists. But now he was not so sure. Perhaps She had engineered more deeply than that. He wondered if somehow She might have made the entire planet from inside out. It would not be an impossible feat for such a goddess, to choose a point in space some ninety million miles distance from a sunlike star, to build a computer the size of a whole world, and then to cover this monstrous machine with a twenty mile thick shell of basalt and granite, with great glistening pools of salt water and sheets of nitrogen and oxygen and the other gases of the atmosphere. For a moment he looked away from the sulki grid, down at the polished floor tiles that he stood upon. He could almost feel the waves of intelligence deep beneath him, inside the Earth, vibrating up through the planet’s crust beneath his naked feet. There was a deepness about this Earth that disquieted him. He had a strange sense that although this world seemed more like home than any world he had ever seen he was not meant to live upon it. He spent a long time wondering why the Entity (or any other god or goddess) would make such a world. And then he asked, ‘Is it your purpose to try to make a perfect Earth?’

For the count of twenty of his heartbeats, there was no response to this question. And then the array of ideoplasts brightened, and he had an answer that was no answer at all.

Is it my purpose that you really wish to know? Or your own purpose, Danlo wi Soli Ringess?

Danlo walked over beneath one of the hanging plants, a wandering jew whose perfect green leaves shone like living jewels, as if they had never known drought or the jaws of hungry insects. He remembered how much Tamara had liked this plant, and he said, ‘There are so many things I would like to know. That is why I have journeyed here. As my father did before me. I have merely followed his path, towards the fixed-points of a star that he told of inside the Solid State Entity. I am sorry … inside you. I was seeking this star. The fixed-points of this place in spacetime. We all were – nine other pilots fell with me as well. We hoped to talk with you as my father did twenty five years ago.’