The Broken God

‘But, sir, the animals were made for hunting. When there is hunger, it is good to kill – even the animals know this.’

‘Is that true?’

Danlo nodded his head with certainty. ‘If there were no killing, the world would be too full of animals, and soon there would be no animals anywhere because they would all starve.’

Old Father closed both eyes then quickly opened them. He looked across the room at one of his shelves of musical instruments. As he appeared to study a collection of wooden flutes which looked similar to Danlo’s shakuhachi, he said, ‘Danlo the Wild – if you really lived among the Alaloi, you’re well named.’

‘I was born into the Devaki tribe.’

‘I’ve heard of the Devaki. They’re Alaloi, like the other tribes even further to the west, isn’t that true?’

‘Why should I lie to you?’

Old Father looked at him and smiled. ‘It’s known that when the ancestors of the Alaloi first came to this world, they carked themselves, their flesh. Ah ha, carked every part into the shape of very ancient, primitive human beings called Neanderthals.’

‘Neanderthals?’

‘The Alaloi have hairy bodies like Neanderthals, muscles and bones as thick as yu trees, faces like granite mountains, ah ho! You will forgive me if I observe that you don’t look very much like a Neanderthal.’

Danlo didn’t understand what Old Father meant by ‘cark’. How, he wondered, could anyone change the shape of his body? And weren’t the Devaki of the world? Hadn’t they emerged from the Great Womb of Time on the first morning of the world? That the Devaki looked much as Old Father said, however, he could not deny.

‘My father and mother,’ he said, ‘were of the Unreal City. They made the journey to Kweitkel where I was born. They died, and Haidar and Chandra adopted me.’

Old Father smiled and nodded politely. For the Fravashi, smiling is as easy as breathing, though they have learned the awkward custom of head nodding only with difficulty. ‘How old are you, Danlo?’

He started to tell Old Father that he was thirteen years old, but then remembered that he must have passed his fourteenth birthday at the end of deep winter, somewhere out on the ice. ‘I have lived fourteen years.’

‘Do fourteen-year-old Devaki boys leave their parents?’

Again, Danlo’s face burned with shame. He didn’t want to explain how his parents had died. He pulled back the blanket covering his groin and pointed to his membrum. ‘I have been cut, yes? You can see I am a man. A man may journey where he must.’

‘Ah ha, a man!’ Old Father repeated. ‘What is it like to be a man at such a young age?’

‘Only a man would know,’ Danlo answered playfully. And then, after a moment of reflection, he said, ‘It is hard – very hard.’

He smiled at Old Father, and in silence and understanding his smile was returned. Old Father had the kindest smile he could have imagined. Sitting with him was a comfort almost as deep as sitting in front of the flickering oilstones on a cold night. And yet, there was something else about him that he couldn’t quite define, something not so comforting at all. At times, Old Father’s awareness of him seemed almost too intense, like the hellish false winter sun. At other times, his attention wandered, or rather, hardened to include Danlo as merely one of the room’s many objects, and then his intellect seemed as cold as glacier ice.

‘Oh ho, Danlo the Wild, I should tell you something.’ Old Father laced his long fingers together and rested his chin in his hands. ‘Most people will doubt your story. You might want to be careful of what you say.’

‘Why? Why should I be careful? You think I have lied to you, but no, I have not. The truth is the truth. Am I a satinka that I would lie to others just for the sport? No, I am not a liar, and now it is time for me to thank you for your hospitality and continue my journey.’

He was attempting to stand when Old Father placed a hand on his shoulder and said, ‘Sit a while longer. Ho, ho! I can hear the truth in what you say, but others do not have this ability. And, of course, even hearing the truth is not the same as knowing it.’

‘What do you mean?’

Old Father whistled slowly, then said, ‘This will be hard for you to understand. But so, it’s so: It is possible for a human being to cast away true memories and implant new ones. False ones.’

‘But memory is memory – how can memory be cast away?’

‘Ah, oh, there are ways, Danlo.’

‘And how can memories be implanted? Who would want to remember something unreal?’

‘Oh ho, but there are many people who desire false memories, a new reality, you see. They seek the thrill of newness. To cark the mind in the same way they cark the body. Some people sculpt their bodies to resemble aliens or according to whatever shape is fashionable; some like to be aliens, to know a wholly different experience. Most people will conclude that you, Danlo the Wild, must have merely imprinted the Alaloi reality.’

‘But why?’

‘To be what you want to be: isn’t this the essence of being human?’

‘I do not know,’ Danlo said truthfully.

Old Father smiled, then bowed his head politely, in respect for the seriousness of effort with which Danlo received his words. Painfully, with infinite care and slowness, he arose to make some tea. ‘Ahhh!’ he grunted, ‘ohhh!’ His hips clicked and popped with arthritis; he could have gone to any cutter in the Farsider’s Quarter and ordered new hips, but he disdained bodily rejuvenations of any sort. He crossed the room, opened a wood cabinet, and from a shiny blue pot poured steaming tea into two mugs. Danlo saw no fire or glowing oilstones; he couldn’t guess how the tea was heated. Old Father returned and handed him one of the mugs. ‘I thought you might enjoy some mint tea. You must find it cold in this room.’

Indeed, Danlo was nearly shivering. The rest of the house – his room and the hallway at least – were warmed by hot air which mysteriously gusted out of vents on the floor, but Old Father’s thinking chamber was almost as cold as a snow hut. Danlo sat with his knees pulled up to his chest and wrapped his blanket tightly around himself. He took a sip of tea. It was delicious, at once cool and hot, pungent and sweet. He sat there sipping his tea, thinking about everything Old Father had told him. From the hallway, reverberating along the winding spiral of stone, came the distant sound of voices. Old Father explained that the students were chanting in their rooms, repeating their nightly mantras, the word drugs which would soothe their minds. Danlo sipped his tea and listened to the music of the word drugs, and after a while, he began digging around in his nostril for some pieces of what the Alaloi call ‘nose ice’. According to the only customs he knew, he savoured his tea and ate the contents of his nose. The Alaloi do not like to waste food, and they will eat almost anything capable of being digested.

With a smile Old Father watched him and said, ‘There is something you should know about the men and women of the City, if you don’t know it already, ah ho, ah ha!’

‘Yes?’

‘Every society – even alien societies – prescribe behaviours which are permitted and those which are not. Do you understand?’

Danlo knew well enough what was seemly for a man to do – or so he thought. Was it possible, he asked himself, that the Song of Life told of other behaviours that the Alaloi men practised when they were not around the women and children? Behaviours that he was unaware of? Or could the men of the City have their own Song? Obviously, they did not know right from wrong, or how could they have given him food to eat and not told him the names of the eaten animals?

‘I think I understand,’ he said, as he rolled some nose ice between his fingers and popped the little green ball into his mouth.

Old Father was still for a moment, then he whistled a peculiar low tiralee out of the side of his mouth. One eye was shut, the other open, a great, golden sun shining down on Danlo. The music he made was strange, evocative, and compelling. He continued to whistle out the corner of his mouth, while his remarkably mobile lips shaped words on the other side. ‘You must understand,’ he finally said, ‘among the Civilized Worlds, in general, there is a hierarchy of disgust of orifices. So, it’s so.’ He whistled continuously, accompanying and punctuating his speech with an alien tune. ‘In sight of others, or even alone, it is less disgusting to put one’s finger in the mouth than in the ear. Ha, ha, but it is more acceptable to probe the nose than either urethra or anus. Fingernails, cut hair, callouses and such are never eaten.’

‘Civilized people do not eat nose ice, yes?’ Danlo said. He suddenly realized that the city people must be as insane as a herd of mammoths who have gorged on fermented snow apples. Insane it was to imprint false memories, if that were really possible. And to eat animals and not say a prayer for their spirits – insane. Insane people would not know halla; they might not even know it existed. He nodded his head as if all the absurdities he had seen the past days made sense.

‘And what of a woman’s yoni?’ he asked. He took a sip of tea. ‘What level does this orifice occupy in the disgust hierarchy?’

Old Father opened his eye and shut the other. He smiled and said, ‘Ahhh, that is more difficult to determine. Among some groups of humans, the yoni may never be touched with the fingers, not even in private by the woman herself. Especially not in private. Other cultures practise the art of orgy and require touching by many, in public; they may even allow one orifice, such as the mouth, to open onto the yoni.’

Danlo made a sour face. Ever since he was eleven years old, he had enjoyed love play with the girls and young women of his tribe. Even among the wanton Devaki, certain practices were uncommon. Some men liked to lick women’s slits, and they were scorned and called ‘fish eaters’, though no one would think to tell them what they should and should not eat. Of course, no one would lick a woman while she was bleeding or after she had given birth, nor would they touch her at these times. In truth, a man may not look a woman in the eyes when she is passing blood or tissue of any sort – could it be that the people of the Civilized Worlds were insane and did not know this?

‘Danlo, are you all right?’ Old Father asked. ‘You look ill.’

Danlo was not ill, but he was not quite all right. He was suddenly afraid that Fayeth and the other women of Old Father’s house would not know to turn their eyes away during their thirtyday bleedings. What if their eyes touched his and the blood of their menses coloured his vision with the power of the women’s mysteries? And then a more despairing thought: how could a sane man ever hope to live in an insane world?

‘You seem to understand these … people,’ he said to Old Father. He rubbed his belly and then stared at Old Father’s belly, or rather stared below it at his furry double membrum. And then he suddenly asked, ‘Do the Fravashi women have two yonis? Do the Fravashi also have a hierarchy of disgust of orifices?’

‘No,’ Old Father said. He finished the last of his tea and set the mug down on the carpet. ‘The answer is “no” to both of your questions.’

‘Then why do you have two membrums?’

‘Ah ha, so impatient! You see, the top membrum,’ and here he reached between his legs, hefted his membrum in his cupped fingers, and pulled the foreskin back to reveal the moist, red bulb, ‘is used only for sex. The lower membrum is for pissing.’

‘Oh.’

Old Father continued whistling and said, ‘There is no disgust hierarchy. But, oh ho, the younger Fravashi, some of them, are disgusted that human males use the same tube for both pissing and sex, much as everyone is disgusted that the Scutari use the same end of the tube for both eating and excreting.’

Danlo stared at Old Father’s membrum. He wondered how he could claim to be a man – or rather an elder of his tribe – if his membrum were uncut. He listened to Old Father’s beautiful, disturbing music for a long while before asking him about this.

‘Ahhh, different peoples,’ Old Father said. He stopped whistling and opened both eyes fully. ‘Different brains, different self-definitions, different ways, aha, aha, oh ho! A man is a man is a man – a Fravashi: so, it’s so, do you see it, Danlo, the way the mirror reflects everything you think you know, the way you think? The mirror: it binds you into the glavering.’

‘I do not understand, sir.’

‘Haven’t you wondered yet why civilized ways are so different from those of your Alaloi?’

At that moment, Danlo was wondering that very thing. He held his breath for a moment because he was afraid that this unfathomably strange alien animal could reach into his mind and pull out his thoughts one by one. Finally, he gathered his courage and looked straight at sun-eyed Old Father. ‘Can you enter my head like a man walks into a cave? Can you see my thoughts?’

‘Ahhh, of course not. But I can see your thought shadows.’

‘Thought shadows?’

Old Father lifted his face toward the wall where the colours inside the cold flame globe flickered up through the spectrum, from red to orange, orange-yellow through violet. He held his tea cup above the carpet, blocking some of the flame globe’s light. ‘As real objects cast shadows by which their shapes may be determined, so with thoughts. So, it’s so: thought shadows. Your thought shadows are as distinct as the shadow of this cup. You think that the people of the City – the Fravashi too! – must be insane.’

‘You are looking at my thoughts!’

Old Father smiled at him then, a smile of reassurance and pity, but also one of provocation and pain. ‘And you are glavering, ah ho! Glavering, and human beings are the masters of the glavering. Glavering: being deceitfully kind to yourself, needlessly flattering the prettiness of your worldview. Oh, Danlo, you assume your assumptions about the world are true solely according to your conditioning. What conditioning, what experience, what uncommon art of living? Behold the cuts in your membrum. The trees and rocks of the forest are alive, you say? All life is sacred! Your mother spoke many words to you, did she not? How do you know what you know? How did your mother know, and her mother before her? The Alaloi have two hundred words for ice, so I’ve learned. What would you see if you only had one word? What can you see? The people of Neverness: they have many words for what you know as simply “thought”. Wouldn’t you like to learn these words? You see! When you look out over an ice field, you put on your goggles lest the light blind you. And so, when you look at the world, you put on the goggles of custom, habit, and tribal wisdoms lest the truth make you insane. Ahhh, truth – who wouldn’t want to see the world just as it is? But instead, you see the world reflected in your own image; you see yourself reflected in the image of the world. Always. The mirror – it’s always there. Glavering, glavering, glavering. This is what the glavering does: it fixes our minds in a particular place, in a traditional knowledge or thoughtway, in a limited conception of ourselves. And so it binds us to ourselves. And if we are self-bound, how can we ever see the truths beyond? How can we ever truly see?’

For a long time Danlo had been staring at Old Father. His eyes were dry and burning so he rubbed them. But he pressed too hard, temporarily deforming his corneas, and nothing in the room seemed to hold its colour or shape. The purple alien plants ran with streaks of silver and blue light and wavered like a mirage, like the mithral-landia of a snow-blind traveller.

After Danlo’s vision had cleared, he said, ‘The Song of Life tells about the seeing. On the second morning of the world, when Ahira opened his eyes and saw … the holy mountain named Kweitkel, and the ocean’s deep waters, unchanging and eternal, the truth of the world.’

‘Ah ha,’ Old Father said, ‘I’ve given you the gift of my favourite flute, and now I shall give you another, a simple word: epistane. This is the dependence or need to know a thing as absolutely true.’

‘But, sir, the truth is the truth, yes?’

‘And still I must give you another word, from my lips, into your mind: epistnor.’

‘And what is “epistnor”?’

‘Epistnor is the impossibility of knowing absolute truth.’

‘If that is true,’ Danlo said with a smile, ‘how are we to know which actions are seemly, and which are not?’

‘Ah, ah, a very well-made question!’ Old Father sat there humming a beguiling little melody, and for a while, his eyes were half-closed.

‘And what is the answer to the question?’ Danlo asked.

‘Oh, ho, I wish I knew. We Fravashi, sad to say, are much better at asking questions than answering them. However. However, might it be that one person’s truth is another’s insanity?’

Danlo thought about this as he listened to Old Father whistle and hum. Something about the music unsettled him and touched him inside, almost as if the sound waves were striking directly at his heart and causing it to beat more quickly. He rubbed his throat, swallowed and said, ‘On the beach, when I raised my spear to slay you, the man with the black skin looked at me as if I were insane.’

‘Ah, that was impolite of him. But Luister – that’s his name – Luister is a gentle man, the gentlest of men. He’s devoted to ahimsa, and can’t bear to see violence made.’

‘He calls me “Danlo the Wild”.’

‘Well, I think you’re very wild, still.’

‘Because I hunt animals for food? How does Luister think he could survive outside this Unreal City without hunting?’

‘And how do you think you will survive in the City without learning civilized ways?’

‘But if I learn the ways of insane men … then won’t I become insane, too?’

‘Ah, ha, but the human beings of Neverness have their own truth, Danlo, as you will see. And hear.’

Old Father’s music intensified, then, and Danlo could feel its theme in his belly. It was a music of startling new harmonies, a music pregnant with longing and uncertainty. The Fravashi Fathers are masters of using music to manipulate the emotions of body and mind. Ten million years ago, the ur-Fravashi, in their frightened, scattered herds, had evolved sound as a defensive weapon against predators; over the millennia, these primitive sounds had become elaborated into a powerful music. The frontal lobes of any Fravashi Father’s brain are wholly given over to the production and interpretation of sound, particularly the sounds of words and music. They use music as a tool to humiliate their rivals, or to soothe sick babies, or woo the unwed females of their clans. In truth, the Fravashi have come to view reality in musical terms, or rather, to ‘hear’ the music reverberating in all things. Each mind, for them, has a certain rhythm and tonal quality, idea-themes that build, embellish, and repeat themselves, like the melody of a sonata; in each mind, too, there are deeper harmonies and dissonances, and it is their joy to sing to the souls of any who would listen. Danlo, of course, understood nothing of evolution. Some part of him, however – the deep, listening part – knew that Old Father’s music was making him sick inside. He clasped his hands over his navel, suddenly nauseous. The nausea wormed its way into his mind, and he began to worry that his brief, narrow understanding of the Unreal City was somehow distorted or false. With his fist, he kneaded his belly and said, ‘Ever since I awoke in my bed, I have wondered … many things. Most of all, I have wondered why no one prays for the spirits of the dead animals.’

‘No one prays, that is so.’

‘Because they do not know any better!’

‘Praying for the animals is your truth, Danlo.’

‘Do you imply that the truth of the Prayer for the Dead is not wholly true?’

‘Aha, the truth – you’re almost ready for it,’ Old Father said as he began to sing. ‘Different peoples, different truths.’

‘But what truth could an insane people possibly possess … that they would not know the names of the animals or pray for them on their journey to the other side of day?’

Even though Danlo’s voice trembled and he had to swallow back hot stomach juices to keep from retching, even though a part of his interior world was crumbling like malku beneath a heavy boot, he was prepared to learn something fantastic, some horrible new truth or way of thinking. What this new truth might be, however, was impossible to imagine.

‘Danlo,’ Old Father said, ‘the meat you’ve eaten in my house is not the meat of animals.’

‘What!’

‘In nutrient baths, cells are programmed to grow, to replicate, to –’

‘What!’

‘Ahhh, this is difficult to explain.’

Both of Old Father’s eyes were now open, twin pools of golden fire burning with fulfilment and glee. He delighted in causing Danlo psychic anguish. He was a Fravashi, and not for nothing are the Fravashi known as the ‘holy sadists’. Truth from pain – this is a common Fravashi saying. Old Father loved nothing better than to inflict the angslan, the holy pain, the pain that comes from higher understanding.

‘The meats of the Civilized Worlds are cultured almost like crystals, grown layer upon layer in a salt water bath.’

‘I do not understand.’

‘Imagine: independent, floating tissues, huge pink sheets of meat growing, growing. Ah ho, the meats are really more like plants than animal. So it’s so: no bone, no nerves, no connection to the brain of a living animal. Just meat. No animal has to die to provide this meat.’

The idea of eating meat that wasn’t really meat made Danlo sick. He rubbed his aching neck; he coughed and swallowed back his vomit. How could he pray for the spirits of the dead animals, he wondered, when no animals had died to provide his meat? Had this meat ever possessed true spirit, true life? He grabbed his stomach and moaned. Perhaps his thinking truly was bound by old ideas; perhaps, as Old Father might say, he was glavering and was too blinded by his familiar thoughtways to see things clearly. But if that were so, he asked himself, how could he know anything? Like a traveller lost in the enclosing whiteness of a morateth, he searched for some familiar custom, some memory or piece of knowledge by which he might steer his thinking. He remembered that the women of his tribe, after they had finished panting and pushing out their newborn babies, boiled and ate the bloody afterbirths which their heaving wombs expelled. (In truth, he was not supposed to know this because it was the women’s secret knowledge. But once, when he was nine years old, he had sneaked deep into the cave where the men were forbidden to go, and he had watched awestruck as his near-mother, Sanya, gave birth.) No prayers were said when this piece of human meat was eaten. No one could think that an afterbirth might have a spirit to be prayed for. He tried to think of the civilized meats as afterbirths, but he could not. The meats of the City had never been part of a living animal! How could he forswear hunting to eat such meat? It would dishonour the animals, he thought, if he refused to hunt them and partake of their life. Something must be wrong with people who grew meat even as the sun ripens berries or snow apples or other plants. Something was terribly wrong. Surely it must be shaida to eat meat which had never been alive.

‘Oh, Danlo, you must remember, many men and women of the City live by the rule of ahimsa: never killing or hurting any animal, never, never. It is better to die oneself than to kill.’

Suddenly, the mint tea, the thousand unknown objects of the thinking chamber, Old Father’s piney body stench and his relentless music – all the strange sensa and ideas were too much for Danlo. His face fell white and grim while juices spurted in his mouth. He knelt on hands and knees, and he spewed a bellyful of sour brown meats over the carpet. ‘Oh!’ he gasped. ‘Oh, no!’

He looked about for a piece of old leather or something so he could sop up his mess. According to everything he had been taught, he should have been ashamed to waste good food, but when he thought of what he had eaten, he gasped and heaved and vomited again.