The Broken God

Because Danlo’s forehead was wet and itched, he tried to force his finger up beneath the heaume, but it was too tight. He said, ‘Then you are not afraid that the words of the Language will poison me?’

‘Oh ho, all languages are poison,’ Old Father said. His eyes were bright with appreciation of Danlo’s unease. ‘But that’s why you’ve learned Moksha and the Fravashi way, as an antidote to such poisons.’

Danlo trusted nothing about the whole unnatural process of imprinting, but he trusted Old Father and trusted Drisana, too. He made a quick decision to affirm this trust. Follow your fate, he thought, and he tapped the heaume. ‘I shall learn the Language now, yes?’

The imprinting of Danlo’s brain took most of the day. It was painless, without incident or sensation. He sat quiet and still while Drisana spoke to the heaume’s computer in an artificial language that neither he nor Old Father could understand. She selected the sequence of imprinting, and, with the computer’s aid, she monitored his brain chemistry: the concentrations of the neurotransmitters, the MAP2 molecules, the synapsin and kinase and the thousands of other brain proteins. Layer by glowing layer, she laid his cortex bare and imprinted it.

Once, Danlo asked, ‘Where are the new words? Why can’t I feel the Language as it takes hold? Why can’t I hear it or think it?’ And then he had a terrifying thought: If the heaume could add memories to his brain, perhaps it could remove them just as easily. And if it did, how would he ever know?

Drisana had brought in a chair from the tea room and was sighing heavily (she had also brought in another glass of wine); she was much too old to remain standing during the entire course of an imprinting. She said, ‘The heaume shuts off the new language clusters from the rest of your brain until it’s over. You certainly wouldn’t want to be bothered thinking in a new language until a good part of it was in place, would you? Now you must think of something pleasant, perhaps a happy memory or a daydream to occupy your time.’

Usually, an imprinting required three sessions, but Drisana found that Danlo was accepting the Language quickly and well. His eyes remained bright and focused. She let the imprinting go on until he had nine tenths of the words, and then she decided that that was quite enough. She removed the heaume, took a sip of wine, and sighed.

Old Father stood up and said, ‘Thank you.’ He walked up and placed his furry hand over Danlo’s head. His black fingernails were hard against Danlo’s temple. Speaking in the Language, Old Father said, ‘Drisana is kind, very kind and very beautiful, don’t you think?’

Without thought or hesitation, Danlo replied, ‘Oh, yes, she is radiant with shibui. She is … what I mean to say, shibui …’ The words died in his mouth because he was suddenly excited and confused. He was speaking the Language! He was speaking fluently words he had never heard before. Did he understand what he had said? Yes, he did understand. Shibui: a kind of beauty that only time can reveal. Shibui was the subtle beauty of grey and brown moss on an old rock. And the taste of an old wine which recalled a ripening of grapes and the perfect balance of sun, wind and rain – that too was shibui. Drisana’s face radiated shibui – ‘radiate’ was not quite the right word – her face revealed the grain of her character and her life’s experiences as if it were a piece of ivory painstakingly and beautifully carved by time.

He rubbed his temple slowly and said, ‘What I mean is … she has her own face.’ Then, realizing that he had fallen back on an Alaloi expression, he began thinking of the many conceptions and words for beauty. There were the new words: sabi, awarei and hozhik. And wabi: the unique beauty of a flawed object, such as a teapot with a crack; the beautiful, distinctive, aesthetic flaw that distinguishes the spirit of the moment in which an object was created from all other moments in eternity. And always, there was halla. If halla was the beauty, the harmony and balance of life, then the other words for beauty were lesser words, though they were connected to halla in many ways. In truth, each of the new words revealed hidden aspects of halla and helped him to see it more clearly.

‘O, blessed beauty! I never knew … that there were so many ways of looking at beauty.’

For a while, the three of them talked about beauty. Danlo spoke haltingly because he was unsure of himself. Suddenly to have a new language inside was the strangest of feelings. It was like entering a dark cave, like climbing toward the faint sound of falling water, and all the while being possessed of an eerie sense that there were many pretty pebbles to be found but not quite knowing where to look. He had to search for the right words, and he struggled to put them together.

‘So much to … comprehend,’ he said. ‘In this blessed Language, there is so much … passion. So many powerful ideas.’

‘Oh ho!’ Old Father said. ‘The Language is sick with ideas.’

Danlo looked at the many rows of heaumes and tapped the heaume that Drisana was still holding in her hand. ‘The whole of the Language is inside here, yes?’

‘Certainly,’ she said, and she nodded at him.

‘And other languages, you say? How many … languages?’

Drisana, who was bad with numbers, said, ‘More than ten thousand but certainly less than fifty thousand.’

‘So many,’ he mused. His eyes took on a faraway look, as of ice glazing over the dark blue sea. ‘So many … how could human beings ever learn so many?’

‘He’s beginning to see it,’ Old Father said.

Drisana put the heaume down atop the inactive hologram stand and smiled at Danlo. Her face was warm and kind. ‘I think you’ve had enough conversation for one day. Now you should go home and sleep. Then you’ll dream of what you’ve learned and tomorrow your speech will come more easily.’

‘No,’ Old Father said sharply. He directed a few quick whistles at her, then said, ‘Imprinting is like giving a newborn the ability to walk without strengthening the leg muscles. Let him use the Language a little more, lest he stumble later when he can least afford to.’

‘But he’s too tired!’

‘No, look at his eyes, look how he sees; now he is liminal, oh ho!’

Liminal, Danlo thought, to be on the threshold of a new concept or way of viewing things. Yes, he was certainly liminal; his heart pounded and his eyes ached because he was beginning to see too much. He stood up and began pacing around the room. To Drisana, he said, ‘Besides languages, there are many … categories of knowledge, yes? History, and what Fayeth calls eschatology, and many others. And all may be imprinted?’

‘Most of them.’

‘How many?’

Drisana was silent as she looked at Old Father. He gave forth a long, low whistle, then said, ‘Oh, oh, if you learned all of a heaume’s forty thousand languages, it would be like standing alone on a beach with a drop of water in your hand while an ocean roared beyond you.’

‘That’s quite enough!’ Drisana snapped. ‘Such a sadist you are.’

‘Oh ho!’

Danlo threw his hand over his eyes and rubbed them. Then he stared up at the ceiling for a long time. At last he was seeing the great ocean of knowledge and truth as it opened before him. The ocean was as deep and bottomless as space, and he could see no end to the depths. He was drowning in deepness; the air in the room was so thick and close that he could hardly catch his breath. If he must learn all the truths of the universe, then he would never know halla. ‘Never,’ he said. And then, cursing for the first time in his life: ‘There is … too damn much to know!’

Drisana sat him down in the velvet chair and pressed her wine glass into his hand. ‘Here, take a sip of wine. It will calm you. Certainly, no one can know everything. But why would you want to?’

With a humming sound that was two thirds of a laugh, Old Father said, ‘There’s a word that will help you. You must know what this word is.’

‘A word?’

Old Father began whistling in fugue, and he said, ‘A word. Think of it as a culling word. So, it’s so: those who grasp the intricacies and implications of this word are culled, chosen to swim in a sea of knowledge where others must drown. Search your memory; you know this word.’

Danlo closed his eyes, and there in the darkness, like a star falling out of the night, was the word. ‘Do you mean “shih”, sir?’ he asked. ‘I must learn shih, yes?’

Shih was the opposite of facts and raw information; shih was the elegance of knowledge, the insight and skill to organize knowledge into meaningful patterns. As an artist chooses colours of paint or light to make her pictures, so a master of shih chooses textures of knowledge – various ideas, myths, abstractions, and theories – to create a way of seeing the world. The aesthetics and beauty of knowledge – this was shih.

‘Just so, shih,’ Old Father said. ‘An old word for an old, old art.’

He explained that the etymon of shih was a simple word in Old Chinese; the Fravashi had fallen in love with this word, and they had borrowed and adapted it when they invented Moksha. From Moksha, the concept of shih had entered into the Language – along with thousands of other concepts and words. Those who fear the Fravashi regard this invasion of the Language with alien (or ancient) words as the most subtle of stratagems to conquer the human race.

Danlo rubbed his eyes as he listened. ‘You say that shih … is a word of Moksha, yes?’

‘So, it’s so: In Moksha, shih is used only as a verb. In the Language, shih becomes corrupted as a noun.’

‘But why haven’t I been taught this word, sir?’

‘Ah, ah, I’ve been saving it for the proper time,’ Old Father said. ‘In the Language, shih is elegance in using one’s knowledge. But in Moksha, this broader meaning: Shih is recognizing and making sense of different kinds of knowledge. It’s the most brilliant art, this ability to gauge the beauties and weaknesses of different worldviews. Oh ho, now that you have the Language in your head, you will badly need this art. If you are to keep the civilized worldview from overwhelming you, you must become a man of shih.’

In a gulp, Danlo downed the rest of the wine. The tartness and the sugars tasted good. As Drisana had said it would, it calmed him. He talked with Drisana and Old Father about shih, or rather, he listened while they talked. After a while the wine made him drowsy. He shifted about, resting his head on the chair’s soft velvet arm with his legs flopped over the other arm. He listened until the words of the Language lost their meaning, and all the sounds of the room – Old Father’s whistling, Drisana’s heavy sighs, and the faint clamour of the cafe next door – melted into a chaotic hum.

‘Look, he’s falling asleep,’ Drisana said. ‘That’s certainly enough for today. You’ll bring him back tomorrow to complete the imprinting?’

‘Tomorrow or the day after.’

Old Father roused Danlo, then, and they said their goodbyes. Drisana rumpled his hair and warned him about the dangers of drinking too much wine. All the way home, skating along the noisy evening streets, Danlo overheard stray bits and snatches of conversation. Most of the talk seemed muddled, insipid and meaningless. He wondered how many of these chattering, confused people understood shih?

Old Father read the look on his face and scolded, ‘Oh ho, you must not judge others according to what you think you know. Do not glaver, Danlo, not tonight, and not ever.’

By the time they reached Old Father’s house, Danlo was very tired. He fairly fell into his bed. That night he slept with his clothes on, and he had strange dreams. He dreamed in the words of the Language; his dreams were chaotic, without theme or pattern or the slightest sense of shih.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Returnists

The minute anything – science, feminism, Buddhism, holism, whatever – starts to take on the characteristics of a cosmology, it should be discarded. How things are held in the mind is infinitely more important than what is in the mind, including this statement itself.

– Morris Berman, Holocaust Century Historian

The problem when people stop believing in God is not that they thereafter believe in nothing; it is that they believe in anything.

– G. K. Chesterton

During the days that followed, Danlo returned often to Drisana’s shop. He imprinted much besides the Language, for although the Order would not test the bulk or quality of his knowledge, he still needed the anchor stones of history, mechanics, ecology and other disciplines to support the web of associations so necessary for understanding civilization’s complexities. He learned many astonishing things. Human beings, it seemed, were fairly infested with tiny animals too small to be felt or seen. These animals were called bacteria, and they sometimes made up as much as ten percent of the body’s weight. Bacteria – and viruses and protozoa – swam in the fluids of his eyes and filled his bowels with putrid gases; sometimes they tunnelled deep into the tissues of his body. A few of these organisms were harmful and caused disease. And so the people of Neverness were afraid to touch each other for fear of infection. Most, even indoors, covered their hands with thin leather gloves and were careful not to get too close to strangers lest they breathe each other’s exhalations. This inhibition caused Danlo many pains. In the Alaloi manner, he liked to brush up against Fayeth or Luister when he greeted them in the hallways of Old Father’s house. To smell their hair or run his calloused hands over their smooth faces reassured him of their realness and essential humanity. With great difficulty he learned to restrain himself. Especially out on the narrow streets of the Fravashi District, in the midst of the manswarm, he had to skate with great care to avoid the swish of perfumed silk or sweat-stained woollens. It vexed him that casual bumping – the slightest of accidental contact – required immediate apology. Even to look purposefully at another, to touch eye to eye or let one’s gaze linger too long, was considered provocative and gauche.

Of course, he still knew nothing of slelling. He couldn’t guess that slel neckers sometimes steal another’s DNA in order to tailor specific viruses to kill in horrible and specific ways. (Or sometimes, in the unspeakable art of slel mime, a victim’s brain is replaced neuron by neuron with programmed neurologics, gradually converted to a slave unit and taken over.) Once, it occurred to him that a virus might have infected and killed his people – how else to explain his tribe’s death? He marvelled at the extension of the world’s ecology to include such tiny, parasitical beasts. Viruses, he thought, were really just another kind of animal that preyed on the cells of human beings, no more fearsome than snow tigers or lice or bears. He wondered, however, how viruses could kill his whole tribe all at once. A bear might stalk and slay a solitary hunter, but never an entire band of men bristling with spears. Such an event would be shaida, a complete unbalancing of the world’s way. He could only guess that something must have happened to ruin his tribe’s halla relationship with the world. Perhaps one of the men had forgotten to pray for the spirit of an animal he had killed; perhaps one of the women had prepared a batch of blood-tea incorrectly, and so weakened the bodies of all the Devaki people. In truth, he never suspected that a civilized virus might have found its way into Haidar and Chandra and his near-brothers and sisters; he never imagined the making of viruses as weapons because such thoughts, for him, were still unimaginable.

As winter passed into deep winter and the weather grew colder, he found himself slowly and painfully adapting to the strangeness of the City. He spent much of each day outside skating, exploring the convoluted, purple glidderies of the Bell and the other districts of the Farsider’s Quarter. Learning the Language was like opening the door to a mansion containing many fabulously decorated rooms; it enabled him to talk with wormrunners and autists and maggids, and other people he met on the streets. Despite his natural shyness, he loved to talk, especially to the Order’s pilots and academicians, who could often be found eating elaborate dinners at the Hofgarten or drinking chocolate in the many Old City cafes. Gradually, from a hundred little remarks that these people made about the Fravashi – as well as his participation in the meditations, word games and other rituals of Old Father’s house – he came to see the entire Fravashi system from a new perspective. He began to entertain doubts as to whether the Fravashi way really was a way toward true liberation. Each evening, before the usual Moksha competition, he sat with the other students around Old Father and repeated the Statement of Purpose: ‘Our system is not a simple system like other systems; it is a meta-system designed to free us from all systems. While we cannot hope to rid ourselves of all beliefs and worldviews, we can free ourselves from bondage to any particular belief or worldview.’ He listened as Old Father discussed the Three Paradoxes of Life, or the Theory of Nairatmya, or the poems of Jin Zenimura, who was one of the first human masters of Moksha. Always, Danlo listened with half a smile on his face, even as a voice whispered in his ear that the Fravashi system, itself, might bind him as surely as a fireflower’s nectar intoxicates and traps a fritillary.

In truth, he did not want to accept some of the Fravashi system’s fundamental teachings. Although it was somewhat rash of him, even presumptuous, from the very beginning he disagreed with Old Father over the ideal and practice of the art of plexure. This art – it is sometimes called ‘plexity’ – aims at moving the student through the four stages of liberation. In the first stage, that of the simplex, one is caught within the bounds of a single worldview. This is the reality of a child or an Alaloi hunter, who may not even be aware that other ways of perceiving reality exist. Most peoples of the Civilized Worlds, however, are aware of humanity’s many religions, philosophies, ways and worldviews. They suspect that adherence to their own belief system is somewhat arbitrary, that had they been born as autists or as Architects of the Infinite Life, for example, they might venerate dreams as the highest state of reality or worship artificial life as evolution’s ultimate goal. In fact, they might believe anything, but simplex people believe only one thing, whatever reality their parents and culture have imprinted into their brains. As the Fravashi say, human beings are self-satisfied creatures who love looking into the mirror for evidence that they are somehow brighter or more beautiful than they really are. It is the great and deadly vanity of human beings to convince themselves that their worldview, no matter how unlikely or bizarre, is somehow more sane, natural, pragmatic, holy, or truthful than any other. Out of choice – or cowardice – most people never break out of this simplex stage of viewing the world as through a single lens, and this is their damnation.

All of Old Father’s students, of course, by the very act of adopting the Fravashi system, had elevated themselves to the complex stage of belief. To be complex is to hold at least two different realities, perhaps at two different times of one’s life. The complex woman or man will cast away beliefs like old clothes, as they become worn or inappropriate. Using the Fravashi techniques, it is possible to progress from one belief system to another, ever growing, ever more flexible, bursting free from one worldview into another as a snake sheds an old skin. The truly complex person will move freely among these systems as the need arises. When journeying by sled across the frozen sea, he will have nineteen different words for the colours of whiteness; when studying the newtonian spectrum, she will compose wavelengths of red, green, and blue into pure white light; when visiting the Perfect on Gehenna, one will choose articles of clothing containing no white, since it is obvious that white isn’t really a colour at all, but rather the absence of all colour, and thus, the absence of light and life. The ideal of complexity, as Old Father liked to remind his students, was the ability to move from system to system – or from worldview to worldview – with the speed of thought.

‘Ah, ha,’ Old Father said one night, ‘all of you are complex, and some of you may become very complex, but who among you has the strength to be multiplex?’

The third stage of plexure is the multiplex. If complexity is the ability to suspend and adopt different beliefs as they are useful or appropriate, one after another, then multiplexity is the holding of more than one reality at the same time. These realities may be as different – or even contradictory – as the old science and the magical thinking of a child. ‘Truth is multiple,’ as the Old Fathers say. One can never become multiplex if afraid of paradox or enslaved by the god of consistency. Multiplex vision is paradoxical vision, new logics, the sudden completion of startling patterns. The mastery of multiplexity makes it possible to see the world in many dimensions; it is like peering into a jewel of a thousand different faces. When one has attained a measure of the multiplex, the world’s creation is seen as the handiwork of a god, and a fireball exploding out of the primordial neverness, and a communal dream, and the eternal crystallization of reality out of a shimmering and undifferentiated essence – all these things and many others, all at once. The multiplex man (or alien) will see all truths as interlocking parts of a greater truth. The Fravashi teach that once in every cycle of time, one is born who will evolve from multiplexity to the omniplex, which is the fourth and final stage of liberation. This completely free individual is the asarya. Only the asarya may hold all possible realities at once. Only the asarya is able to say ‘yes’ to all of creation, for one must see everything as it truly is before making the final affirmation.

This ideal is the pinnacle of all Fravashi thought and wisdom, and it was this very teaching that Danlo disputed above all others. As he maintained in his discussions with Old Father, to hold all realities and look out over the whole of the universe was a noble and necessary step, but an asarya must go beyond this. The entire logic of the Fravashi system pointed toward liberation from belief systems and beliefs – why not strive to believe nothing at all? Why not behold reality with faultless eyes, as free from worldviews as a newborn child? Wasn’t this awakening into innocence the true virtue of an asarya?

‘Oh, oh,’ Old Father said to him, ‘but everyone must believe something. Even if one must invent one’s own beliefs. It’s surprising that after half a year in my house, you haven’t come to believe this.’

Old Father was always quick to bestow his holy sadism upon his students, particularly one so strong-willed as Danlo. And Danlo, for his part, quite enjoyed the intricate dance of wits so beloved of the Fravashi. He never took hurt from any of Old Father’s jokes or calculated ridicule. And he never deluded himself that he was close to freedom from belief. Quite the opposite. Wilfully – and as mindfully as a hunter stepping into a snow tiger’s lair – he entered into the Fravashi worldview. It was indeed a strange and beautiful place. While he was always aware of the little flaws in this reality waiting to widen into cracks, he cherished the most basic of all Fravashi teachings, which was that human beings were made to be free. He believed this passionately, fiercely, completely. He kept the spirit of Fravism close to his heart, like an invisible talisman cut from pure faith. The Fravashi might misunderstand what it would mean to be an asarya, but no matter. Their system could still be used to smash the illusions and thoughtways imprisoning people. And then, once released, each human being could soar free in whatever direction called.

The Fravashi system was nobly conceived, yes, but as Danlo discovered, not all conceptions can be perfectly realized. The Fravashi had come to Neverness three thousand years earlier, and over time, the original teachings and practices of their system had become too systematic. Experiments in thinking had become reified into exercises; ideas had been squeezed into ideology; insight hardened into doctrine; and the little graces and devotions that the students delighted in tendering their Old Fathers had inevitably become onerous obligations. Quite a few students forgot that Moksha was to be used as a tool. All too often, they worshipped this language and imagined that learning ever more Moksha words and poems and koans would be sufficient to free them from themselves. Nothing dismayed Danlo more than this tendency toward worship. And no aspect of worship was so dangerous as the way that Luister and Eduardo and the others fell into fawning over Old Father and surrendered their will to him.