The Broken God

This, of course, is the pitfall of cults and religions dominated by a guru, sage, or messiah. The pattern of enslavement is ancient: a young man or woman hears the call of a deeper world than the everyday reality of education, marriage, amusement, or vying for wealth and social advantage. Perhaps this person is sick with life, while dreading that somehow, no matter every effort toward authenticity and meaning, she has failed to really live. Perhaps, like an urchin sampling forbidden candies, she will move from religion to religion, from way to way, in search of something that will satisfy her hunger. If she is lucky, eventually she will discover a way that is sweeter than the others, a system of disciplines with a pure, living centre. If she is very lucky, she will become a student of an Old Father, for the Fravashi system, despite many flaws, is the best of systems, the oldest and truest, the least corrupt. Whatever the chosen way, there will commence a period of fasting, meditation, dance forms, electronic simulation, prayer, attitudes, or word drugs – anything and everything to concentrate the student’s attention on the seeming boundaries of her selfness. The object, of course, is to smash these boundaries as a thallow chick might break its way out of an egg. This is the first accomplishment of all seekers. One’s worldview begins to crack and fall apart, and more, to appear as an arbitrary construct. The student begins to see how she herself has constructed her own reality. If she is perceptive, she will see how she has constructed her very self. Inevitably, she will ask the questions: what is a self? What is a worldview? She will see all the prejudices, delusions, memories, psychic armouring, and little lies that protect the ‘I’ from the outside world. Having gone this far, she may lose her sense of reality altogether. This is the dangerous moment. This is the time of heart flutters and flailing, of being lost in a dark room and unable to find the light key on the wall. It is a time for floating in fear, or worse, of falling alone into the cold inner ocean that pulls and chills and drowns. The student will feel herself dying; she will have a horrifying sense that every essential part of her is melting away into neverness. If she is weak, her terror of death will paralyze her or even plunge her into madness. But if she has courage, she will see that she is not really alone. Always, the Old Father remains close by her side. His smiles and his golden eyes remind her that he once made the same journey as she. His whole being is a mirror reflecting a single truth: that something great and beautiful will survive even as the student loses herself. The Old Father will help the student find this greater part of herself. This is his glory. This is his delight. He will help the student completely break through the worldview that traps her. And then, as the student cleans away the last slimy bits of eggshell, selfness, and certainty that cling to her, a vastly greater world opens before her. This world is brilliant with light and seems infinitely more real than she ever could have imagined. She, herself, is freer, vaster, profoundly alive. Intense feelings of joy and love overwhelm her. This is the eternal moment, the awakening that should set the student free on the path toward complete liberation. Only, it is here that most students fall into a subtle and deadly trap. Their joy of freedom becomes gratitude toward the Old Father for freeing them; their love of the real becomes attached to the one who made possible this experience of reality. Indeed, they cannot imagine ever making this journey again, by themselves, for themselves, and so their natural love of the Old Father becomes a needy and sickly thing. They begin to revere their Old Father, not as a mere guide or teacher, but as a mediator between themselves and the new world they have seen. And then it is but one small step to worshipping the Old Father as an incarnation of the infinite. Only through the Old Father (or through the roshi or priest or buddha) can the real reality be known. His every word is a sweet fruit bursting with truth; his system of teaching becomes the only way that this truth might be known. And so the student who has flown so high and so far comes at last to a new boundary, but nothing so well-defined and fragile as her original worldview. She looks into her Old Father’s eyes and beholds herself as vastened and holy, but sadly, this new sense of herself is something that he has created and grafted onto her. Her reality is now completely Fravashi. If she is truly aware – and truly valorous – she will try once more to break her way free. But the Fravashi worldview is sublime; escaping it is like a bird trying to break through the sky. Most students will fail to do so; in truth, most will never attempt such an act of ingratitude and rebellion. But even in failure, it is still their pride to soar above the swarms of humanity earthbound and closed in by their familiar and self-made horizons.

To be fair to the Fravashi, the Old Fathers have long recognized the dangers of guruism. They have done everything possible to discourage their students’ slavish attachments to them. But the truth is, they like being gurus. And despite every warning, their students take solace in abandoning themselves and trusting their fates to a white-furred alien. In Old Father’s house this was true of Salim and Michael and Ei Eleni, and of most of the others. It was especially true of Luister Ottah. As Old Father had said, he was a gentle man, a kind man, a living jewel among men – but he was not a man to return Old Father’s sarcasm and jokes in the spirit with which they were offered. Luister composed koans and irreverent poems in Moksha out of duty only, because he was challenged to keep up a certain level of repartee. But he was really much happier simply drinking tea at Old Father’s feet, while listening attentively and then parroting Old Father’s views or words of wisdom. And there was no arguing with Luister once these views had been pronounced. Although Danlo liked Luister as much as anyone he’d met since coming to Neverness, during the short days of deep winter, he began to find him tiresome. Luister instructed Danlo in chess and etiquette and Moksha, as well as skating, and so Danlo found himself in his company more than he would have wished. Luister was somewhat of a polymath, and he enjoyed holding forth on every subject from Lavic architecture to causal decoupling to the journeys of the Tycho – or fenestration, or free will, or the dangers of ohrworms and information viruses. Unfortunately, however, none of his opinions or insights was his own. He had the irritating habit of prefacing his remarks with the phrase: ‘Old Father says that …’ He seemed to have memorized every word that Old Father ever spoke. ‘Old Father says that buildings of organic stone tend toward the grandiloquent and have no place in human cities,’ he told Danlo one dark and snowy morning. And then later that night, ‘Old Father says that the greatest trick of religions is in saving people from infinite regresses. Consider the question: “What caused the universe?” The natural answer is that God caused the universe. Aha, but then one is tempted to ask: “But what caused God?” Ho, ho. And so on – do you see? Religions break the regress. They tell us this: God caused the universe, and God causes God, and this is all that anyone needs to know.’

The closer Danlo penetrated to the heart of the Fravashi system, ironically, the more aware he became that in the city of Neverness, there were many other systems, many other ways. He began to wonder about these ways. Although he never forgot his hope of becoming a pilot, of journeying to Camilla Luz and Nonablinka and inward to the universe’s centre, he still had a half year to wait before he might be admitted to the Order. Of course, he might not be admitted to the Order, and then he would have to remain as Old Father’s student. (Or return to one of the Alaloi tribes west of Kweitkel.) Because he couldn’t imagine becoming like Luister Ottah – and because he was as hungry for experience as a wolf pup sniffing up nosefuls of new snow – he decided to spend the next two hundred days exploring certain worldviews which he found either fascinating or utterly strange. No rule or pronouncement of Old Father’s forbade such exploration. In fact, Old Father often encouraged the donning of different realities, but only as a formal game, played out beneath the sound of chimes and chanting that echoed through his house. Danlo suspected that his method of knowing different ways would not meet the approval of the others, and so, during his daily outings, he began to visit certain parts of the City in secret.

During an unexpected lull in deep winter’s cold, when air was clear and the sky softened to a warm falu blue, Danlo began to frequent the Street of Smugglers where it narrows below the Fravashi District. There, he befriended men and women of the autist sect, and he sat with them on lice-ridden furs and spent whole days and nights lost in deep, lucid, communal dreams, which the autist dream guides claim are the real reality, much more real than the material world of snow or rocks or the ragged clothes that the autists wrap around their emaciated bodies. Likewise he joined a group of mushroom eaters who called themselves the Children of God. Deep in the Farsider’s Quarter, in secret ceremonies held inside one of the abandoned Cybernetic churches, he bowed before a golden urn heaped high with magic mushrooms and solemnly prayed before opening his mouth and taking the ‘Flesh of God’ inside himself. He prayed, as well, to the shimmering emerald aliens who came to him during the most vivid of his mushroom visions. In truth, he came to worship these delightful and beguiling entities as messengers of the One God, that is, until he tired of worship altogether and sought out more sober (and sobering) experiences.

Sometime in midwinter spring, after Danlo had passed his fifteenth birthday with no more ceremony than a few prayers to his dead mother, he made contact with a group of men and women who called themselves the Order of True Scientists. Of course, there are many who consider themselves as scientists, or rather, as the intellectual heirs of the Galileo and the Newton and others who began the great journey through the universe of number and reason. There are holists and logicians, complementarianists and mechanics and grammarians. There are practitioners of the Old Science and the faithful of the New Science of God. There are many, many sciences, almost as many as the hundreds of different sects of the Cybernetic Universal Church. As Danlo learned, the second greatest event in the intellectual history of the human race was the clading off of science into different schools, each with its own epistemology and set of beliefs, each one practising its own methodology, each one with its own notion as to what science really is. There were those sciences which clove to metaphysical and epistemological realism and those which treated science as a grand, but ultimately meaningless game. Some sciences continued to rely on physical experiments to validate their theories while others used computers or pure mathematical theorems to probe the nature of reality. Individual sciences might resemble each other no more than a man does a Darghinni, but they all had at least one thing in common: each science claimed a privileged status and denigrated all others as inferior or false.

This was especially the way of the Order of True Scientists. Of all the cults that Danlo was to encounter during his stay in Neverness, this was the hardest for him to penetrate, the most bizarre. As a prospective Scientist – the leaders of this quaint cult are always desperate to find new members and they will recruit almost anybody – Danlo was required to accept the doctrines of Scientism. To begin with, in front of seven master Scientists wearing their traditional white gowns, he had to make the Profession of Faith: that Science is not merely a tool for understanding or modelling reality, but the one path to truth. There was the Creed of Chance, that all phenomena in the universe are the result of bits of matter moving about and colliding, endlessly, randomly, meaninglessly. He learned the closely related Doctrine of Mechanism, that all things can be explained by reducing them to the mechanisms of pieces of matter causing other pieces to move. Danlo, of course, as a child of the Alaloi, had always regarded the world and everything in it as holy. He had the greatest trouble, at first, in seeing rocks and trees and water as being composed of nothing more than atoms or quarks, bits of interchangeable stuff that were without purpose or life. The logic of this view almost demanded a certain kind of action: if matter was fundamentally dead, then there was nothing wrong with vexing and perturbing it until it yielded its secrets. The Scientists worshipped logic, and so the first duty of any scient man was to make experiments as to the nature of things. The ancient Scientists, he learned, once built machines the size of mountains (and later whole planets) in order to smash matter into ever tinier pieces, always looking for the tiniest piece, always in hope of discovering the ultimate cause of consciousness and all creation. Because they always discovered more questions than they did answers, they designed their experiments toward understanding the ‘how’ of nature instead of the ‘why’. In one of the first of these experiments, when the Scientists transmuted matter into pure energy and exploded the first atomic bomb, they almost ignited the atmosphere of Old Earth. But their calculations told them that this would not happen, and they had faith in these calculations, and so life on Earth was spared for a few more years.

To accept experiments and experimenting as a valid way of knowing reality – to accept that only that which can be measured is real – Danlo had to turn his thinking inside-out, to whelve, as the Fravashi say. He had to learn to regard the world as an objective thing that he could understand only as an observer, studying events and phenomena from the outside looking in, much as a voyeur might peep through a window in hope of catching a man and woman engaged in love play. As he told Old Father much later, after he had whelved once again and returned to his old thoughtways: ‘The Scientists study the effects of cold on an organism with thermocouples and theories, and they say they understand everything … that can be understood. But they do not really know cold. They seem never to have experienced it. And why not? It would be a simple experiment to perform, yes? All they need do is remove their gowns and walk outside in the snow.’

He, himself, performed the experiments required of him only with difficulty. He disavowed any use of living animals, preferring instead, for example, to immerse himself in a bath of ice water during his experiments in the survival of cold. Some of the classical experiments he would never make, such as dissecting a snowworm’s nervous system as a way of appreciating that animal’s unique consciousness. He could never wholly consent to this kind of analysis, for during his passage on the mountain with Three-Fingered Soli he had made certain promises as an Alaloi man, and the Alaloi so love the world that if they chance to kick over a rock, they will replace it in its exact position in order to restore the world to halla. The truth is, he would have made a poor Scientist, and the masters of this cult must have mistrusted him from the beginning. But then, the Scientists mistrust everyone. Most peoples and other orders regard the Method of the Scientists as an outmoded and barbarous art, and they have done everything possible to suppress this cult. Because of long persecution, the Scientists automatically suspect new members of being spies sent to report on them. And so new members are tested in many ways before they are allowed access to secret information and secret experiments. Although Danlo never witnessed any of these illegal experiments, through a friend of a friend, he heard a rumour about one of them.

It seemed that in one of their buildings in the Darghinni District, deep underground in windowless, locked rooms, the Scientists were performing experiments on the embryos of various alien species. Apparently, one of the master Scientists was trying to cark Scutari blastulas into a shape more to his liking. In most animals, alien or earth-type, the critical point in development is not the fertilization of the egg, but rather gastrulation. It is only during gastrulation, after the egg has divided and redivided many times and shaped itself into a hollow ball of cells called a blastula, that the development of organs, limbs and other body parts begins. Some of the cells on the exterior of the blastula are destined to become eyes or wings or fibrillets: the gut of most animals is typically formed in this manner: a group of cells on the blastula’s surface begins to indent and push toward the ball’s opposite side. The blastula deforms as if a finger were pushing into a balloon. Eventually, the group of cells will push completely through the other side, forming a hollow tube from a sphere. One end of the tube will be the mouth, while the other will be the anus. Most animals are formed around such a digestive tube, with sheets of cells circling and contracting and branching out to make the rest of the body’s tissues. But the Scutari are different. During the gastrulation of this species, the original group of cells never quite meets the opposite wall, and so the Scutari are shaped more like wine cups than tubes. It was an experiment of the Scientists to interfere with Scutari gastrulation, coaxing the blastulas that they had somehow acquired to develop more like sea urchins or Darghinni or even human beings. And so they had. They made many broods of doomed Scutari nymphs. While some of these nymphs, at first, were able to ingest food almost as continuously as a hungry harijan, the little monsters would eventually begin vomiting up their faeces, and all of them fell mad or died. A few master Scientists had acclaimed this experiment a great advance in knowledge, as if they had somehow explained Scutari law or the gruesome Scutari face or the inexplicable mind of the Scutari adults. But Danlo could not see it in such a light. In fact, upon hearing that certain masters were dissecting living nymphs in order to ascertain the cause of their madness, he formally abjured his Profession of Faith and quit the Scientists. Although he never abjured Science itself – he would always cherish the cold, terrible glory of Science, and he would use this lens cautiously, like a polarized glass made for looking at the sun – he had finally discovered a limit to the ideal of complexity and the holding of different worldviews.

To enter into a new reality completely is not merely to cherish this reality or to perceive things in a new way, but to remake one’s being and to act in accordance with new rules. However, not all worldviews are equal in truth, and not all acts are permissible. As to what the most truthful worldview might be, generations of philosophers and millennia of war have not decided the answer. The Fravashi teach that each worldview is true only relatively. Science gives a better picture of the universe’s mechanistic aspects than does Hinduism, but has little to say about the nature of God. Many revere this teaching, only to fall into the trap of relativism: If all worldviews are in some way true, then nothing is really true. Danlo, at this time, like many others before him, might easily have descended into nihilism and denied that there could ever be any real ground of truth. He might have concluded that all acts, even those of a criminal or madman, are permitted. But he never fell into this kind of despair. It was always his faith that a free human being, if he looked deeply enough inside himself, would find a pure burning knowledge of what was true and what was not.

Whatever his criticisms of Science (or the other sciences that he would encounter), the attempts of the Scientists to control what they defined as matter and energy fascinated him. Even after he had left the Scientists, he harboured a fierce curiosity about this control. From one of his friends who had remained in the cult, he learned the implications of the Doctrine of Entropy, that the universe was falling into disorder, all configurations of matter across the galaxies falling apart and spreading out like fat globules in a bowl of lukewarm soup, all of its energies running down and seeking an equal level, as waters run into a still lake from which they can never escape. The Scientists preached absolute control over all of material reality, and yet they were doomsayers who pleaded helplessness in face of the universe’s ultimate death. It was the great discovery of this phase of Danlo’s life that this disaster might not be merely words of doctrine or some impossibly distant event. The power to control matter and energy, to release the energy trapped in matter, was very immediate, very serious, very real.

One evening at twilight, just before dinner, Danlo returned to Old Father’s house in a state of intense agitation. He rushed inside with news of an unbelievable thing that he had learned earlier from one of the Scientists. For most of the afternoon, he had been skating down near the dangerous Street of Smugglers, skating and skating as he breathed in the musty smell of poached shagshay furs and brooded about cosmic events. He tromped into Old Father’s thinking chamber not even bothering to kick the ice from his boots. (He had remembered to eject the skate blades only after stumbling across the doorway and grinding steel, chipping the square blue tiles in the outer hallway.) ‘Ni luria la!’ he shouted, lapsing into his milk tongue. And then, ‘Sir, I have learned the most shaida thing, shaida if it is true, but … O blessed God! how can it be true? About the blessed –’

‘Ho, careful now! Careful you don’t drip water all over my mother’s carpet!’ Old Father caught him with both of his eyes, looked at the snowmelt running down Danlo’s boots, and shook his head. Like all Fravashi, he revered pure water and considered it somewhat sacrilegious to scatter such a holy substance over his mother’s woven fur. That evening, he was engaged in a thinking session with one of his students. Across from him on his carpet (very near the spot where Danlo had once vomited) sat Fayeth, a good-looking woman with a quick smile and an even quicker tongue toward making jokes. She had come to Old Father’s house after a long search, after spending years as a student of Zanshin and the Way of the Rose. She was the best of Old Father’s twelve students, the kindest, and the least slavish, and Danlo was a little in love with her. But her age was more than twice his, and she had taken a vow of strict celibacy. Even so, she never resented his attentions; she didn’t seem to mind at all that he had interrupted her time with Old Father.

‘Danlo,’ she said, ‘please sit with us and tell us what is blessed.’

‘You’re early,’ Old Father said to Danlo out of one half of his mouth. ‘But, yes, please sit down. Take your boots off and sit down.’ And then, from his mouth’s left side, at the same time, he continued speaking to Fayeth: ‘We must try something more difficult this time, perhaps something that humans know very well when thinking about it but find impossible to explain.’

They were playing with realities; specifically, they were playing a game called spelad in which Fayeth, prompted by a hint from Old Father, would name some object, idea, personage, historical movement, or phenomenon. Old Father would then choose a particular worldview, which Fayeth was required to enter. She would behold the named object through this worldview, describing its various aspects as if she had been born a tychist or a Buddhist or even an alien. Points were scored according to her knowledge, her sense of shih, and above all, her mastery of plexity.

‘I’ll name a concept this time,’ Fayeth said. She smiled at Danlo and continued, ‘And the concept is: the future.’

‘Oh, but this is not precise enough,’ Old Father said. ‘Do you know the doctrine of the sarvam asti?’

‘The Hindu doctrine or that of the scryers?’

‘It’s your choice,’ Old Father said.

‘Then I’ll choose the scryers’ doctrine.’