The Broken God

Once, he asked Old Father about this, and Old Father stroked his furry white face in imitation of a man thinking, and he said, ‘Oh ho, soon enough you will learn about the Fifth Mentality and the Age of Simulation, but for now it’s sufficient to appreciate one thing: Every race that has evolved language is cursed – and blessed! – with this problem of filtering reality. You say that the people of Neverness are cut off from life, but you haven’t journeyed to Tria, where the tubists and merchants spend almost their entire lives inside plastic boxes breathing conditioned air and facing sense boxes. And what of the made-worlds orbiting Cipriana Luz? Aha, and what of the Alaloi? Do they not place animal furs between their skins and the coldness of ice? Oh ho! I suppose you can tell me that your Alaloi don’t have a language?’

Danlo, as a guest of an Honoured Fravashi, was beginning to appreciate how words can shape reality. He said, ‘The Alaloi have a language, yes. On the second morning of the world, the god Kweitkel kissed the frozen lips of Yelena and Manwe and the other children of Devaki. He kissed their lips to give them the gift of Song. The true Song is perfectly created so the sons and daughters of the world can know reality. Perfect words as pure and clean as soreesh snow. Not like these confusing words of the civilized language that Fayeth has been teaching me.’

‘Oh ho!’ Old Father said. ‘You’re glavering again, and you must be as wary of the glavering as a shagshay ewe is of a wolf. In time you’ll appreciate the beauty and subtlety of this language. Oh ah, there are many concepts and ways of seeing. So many realities beyond the immediacy of soreesh or the sarsara that blows and freezes the flesh. Beyond even what you call the altjiranga mitjina.’

‘You know about the dreamtime of my people?’

‘Ah, I do know about the dreamtime – I’m a Fravashi, am I not? The dreamtime occupies a certain space similar to the space of samadhi. There are many, many spaces, of course. Do you want to learn the words?’

‘But I’m already too full of words. Last night, Fayeth taught me three new words for ways of seeing the truth.’

‘And what were these words?’

Danlo closed his eyes, remembering. ‘There is hanura and nornura. And there is inura, too.’

‘And what is inura?’

‘Fayeth defines it as the superposition of two or more conflicting theories, ideas or sets of knowledge in order to see the intersection, which is called the comparative truth.’

‘Oh ho! Even seemingly opposite truths may have something in common. So, inura: you should keep this word close to your tongue, Danlo.’

Danlo ran his fingers through his hair and said, ‘Different words for truth, but the truth is the truth, isn’t it? Why slice truth into thin sections like a woman slices up a piece of shagshay liver? And space is … just space; now you say there are different spaces?’

‘So, it’s so: thoughtspace and dreamspace, realspace, and the many spaces of the computers; there is memory space and the ontic realm of pure mathematics, and of course the strangest space of all, the space that the pilots call the manifold. So many spaces, oh, so many realities.’

Danlo could not deny that the people of the City lived in a different reality from his. The spaces that their minds dwelt in – so different, so strange! He wondered if he could ever learn the language of such a strange people. In truth, he balked at learning their strange nouns and verbs because he was worried that the words of an insane people would infect him with that very insanity.

‘Ah, oh, it’s just so,’ Old Father said. ‘It’s too bad that you can’t learn the Fravashi language – then you would know what is sane and what is not.’

If it was true that Danlo, like other human beings, could not master the impossible Fravashi language, at least he could learn their system toward a sane and liberated way of being. After all, the Fravashi had taught this system across the Civilized Worlds for three thousand years. Some consider Fravism, as it is sometimes called, to be an old philosophy or even a religion, but in fact it was designed to be both anti-philosophy and anti-religion. Unlike Zanshin, Buddhism, or the Way of the Star, pure Fravism does not in itself try to lead its practitioners toward enlightenment, awakening, or rapture with God. What the first Old Fathers sought – and some still seek – is just freedom. Specifically, it is their purpose to free men and women from the various cultures, languages, worldviews, cults and religions that have enslaved human beings for untold years. The Fravashi system is a way of learning how one’s individual beliefs and worldviews are imprinted during childhood. Or rather, it is an orchestration of techniques designed to help one unlearn the many flawed and unwholesome ways of seeing the world that human beings have evolved. Many religions, of course, out of their injunction to find new adherents, deprogram the minds of those whom they would convert. They do this through the use of isolation, paradox, psychic shock, even drugs and sex – and then they reprogram these very minds, replacing old doctrines and beliefs with ones that are new. The Fravashi Old Fathers, however, have no wish to instil in their students just a new set of beliefs. What they attempt to catalyze is a total transformation in perception, in the way the eye, ear, and brain reach out to organize the chaos and reality of the world. In truth, they seek the evolution of new senses.

‘So, it’s so,’ Old Father said, ‘after a million years, human beings are still so human: listening, they do not hear; they have eyes but they don’t really see. Oh ho, and worse, worst of all, they have brains with which to think, and thinking – and thinking and thinking – they still do not know.’

In Old Father’s encounters with his students, he often warned against what he considered the fundamental philosophical mistake of man: the perception of the world as divided into individual and separate things. Reality, he said, at every level from photons to philosophical fancies to the consciousness of living organisms was fluid, and it flowed everywhere like a great shimmering river. To break apart and confine this reality into separate categories created by the mind was foolish and futile, much like trying to capture a ray of light inside a dark wooden box. This urge to categorize was the true fall of man, for once the process was begun, there was no easy or natural return to sanity. All too inevitably, the infinite became finite, good opposed evil, thoughts hardened into beliefs, one’s joys and discoveries became dreadful certainties, man became alienated from what he perceived as other ways and other things, and, ultimately, divided against himself, body and soul. According to the Fravashi, the misapprehension of the real world is the source of all suffering; it is bondage to illusion, and it causes human beings to grasp and hold onto life, not as it is, but as they wish it to be. Always seeking meaning, always seeking to make their lives safe and comprehensible, human beings do not truly live. This is the anguish of man which the Fravashi would alleviate.

The Fravashi use their word keys and songs and alien logic to bring human beings closer to themselves, but the first part of this program toward liberation is the teaching of the language called Moksha. As Danlo became more familiar with the ways of Old Father’s house, he immersed himself in the Fravashi system with all the passion of a seal splashing in the ocean, only to discover that he was required to learn the strange words and forms of Moksha.

‘But, sir, the Language is confusing enough,’ Danlo told Old Father. ‘Now you say that I must learn Moksha, too – and at the same time?’

‘Ha, ha, you are confused, just so, but the Old Fathers made Moksha solely to free human beings from their confusion,’ Old Father said. ‘Learn and learn, and you will see what you see.’

Where the Fravashi system, as a whole, was created to free people from all systems, Moksha was put together as a kind of mind shield against the great whining babble of all human languages. It is a synthetic language, rich with invented words for strange and alien concepts, and with thousands of borrowed words from Sanskrit, Anglish, Old Japanese and, of course, from the various languages of Tlon. The Fravashi Fathers regard this language family as the most sublime of all Old Earth’s languages; from the Tlonish grammar, they have borrowed elements of syntax that accommodate and support the pellucid Fravashi worldview. Some say that Moksha is as complex and difficult to learn as the Fravashi language itself, but a clever woman or man is usually able to master it once a few familiar notions are discarded. For instance, Moksha contains no verb for the concept ‘to be’, in the sense that one thing can be something else. As the Fravashi say: ‘Everything is, but nothing is anything’. In Moksha, the sentence ‘I am a pilot’ would be an impossible construction. As Danlo learned, one might try to say: ‘I act like a pilot’, or, ‘I have learned a pilot’s skills’ or even, ‘I exult in the perquisites and glory of a pilot’, but one could never proclaim, ‘I am this’ or, ‘I am that’, any more than one would say, ‘I am a bowl of noodles’.

At first this aspect of Moksha confused Danlo, for he thought that the path toward sanity lay in seeing the connectedness of all things. He was familiar with the Sanskrit equation: Tat tvam asi, that thou art. In some sense, he really was a bowl of noodles, or rather, his true essence and that of noodles (or falling snow or stone or a bird with white feathers) was one and the same. Because he thought these Sanskrit words were pure wisdom, he went to Old Father to ask why Moksha forbade such expressions.

‘Ah, ah,’ Old Father said, ‘but the problem is not with Moksha, but with the natural human languages. Oh, even with the Sanskrit. Does Sanskrit have a word for “you”? Yes. A word for “I”? Indeed it does, and sadly so. And so. And so, having such words, such poisonous concepts, they are forced into paradox to detoxify and break down these concepts. Tat tvam asi – a deep statement, no? That thou art. Lovely, succinct, and profound – but an unnecessary way of expressing a universal truth. Is there a better way? Oh, ho, I teach you Moksha. If you will learn this glorious tongue, then you will learn truth not just in one immortal statement, but in every sentence you speak.’

And so Danlo applied himself to learning Moksha, and he soon discovered another reason why it was impossible to simply say, ‘I am a pilot’. Moksha, it seemed, had completely freed itself of the bondage of pronouns, particularly from the most poisonous pronoun of all.

‘Why do you think Moksha has banished this word “I”?’ Old Father asked one day. ‘What is this “I” that human beings are so attached to? It’s pure romance, the greatest of fictions and confabulations. Can you hold it or taste it? Can you define it or even see it? “What am I?” asks a man. Oh, ho, a better question might be, “What am I not?” How often have you heard someone say, “I’m not myself today?” Or, “I didn’t mean to say that?” No? Ha, ha, here I am dancing, dancing – am I the movement and genius of my whole organism or merely the sense of selfness that occupies the body, like a beggar in a grand hotel room? Am I only the part of myself that is noble, kind, mindful and strong? Which disapproves and disavows the “me” that is lustful, selfish, and wild? Who am I? Ah, ah, “I am” says the man. I am despairing, I am wild, I do not accept that I am desperate and wild. Who does not accept these things? I am a boy, I am a man, I am father, hunter, hero, lover, coward, pilot, asarya and fool. Which “I” are you – Danlo the Wild? Where is your “I” that changes from mood to mood, from childhood to old age? Is there more to this “I” than continuity of memory and love of eating what you call nose ice? Does it vanish when you fall asleep? Does it multiply by two during sexual bliss? Does it die when you die – or multiply infinitely? How will you ever know? So, it’s so, you will try to watch out for yourself lest you lose your selfness. “But how do I watch?” you ask. Aha – if I am watching myself, what is the “I” that watches the watcher? Can the eye see itself? Then how can the “I” see itself? Peel away the skin of an onion and you will find only more skins. Go look for your “I”. Who will look? You will look. Oh, ho, Danlo, but who will look for you?’

As Danlo came to appreciate, not only had Moksha done away with pronouns, but with the class of nouns in general. The Fravashi loathe nouns as human beings do disease. Nouns, according to Old Father, are like linguistic iceboxes that freeze a flowing, liquid reality. In using nouns to designate and delimit all the aspects of the world, it is all too easy to confuse a symbol for the reality that it represents. This is the second great philosophical mistake, which the Fravashi refer to as the ‘little maya’. When speaking Moksha, it is difficult to make this mistake, for the function of nouns has largely been replaced by process verbs, as well as by the temporary and flexible juxtaposition of adjectives. For instance, the expression for star might be ‘bright-white-continuing’, while one might think of a supernova as ‘radiant-splendid-dying’. There is no rule specifying the choice or number of these adjectives; indeed, one can form incredibly long and precise (and beautiful) concepts by skilful agglutination, sticking adjectives one after another like beads on a string. Aficionados of Moksha, in their descriptions of the world, are limited only by their powers of perception and poetic virtue. It is said that one of the first Old Fathers in Neverness, as an exercise, once invented ten thousand words for the common snow apple. But one does not need the Fravashi flair with words to speak Moksha well. By the beginning of winter, when the first of that season’s light snows dusted the streets, Danlo had learned enough of this language to make such simple statements as: Chena bokageladesanga faras, which would mean something like: Now this ambitious-bright-wild-becoming pilots. Given enough time in Old Father’s house – and given Danlo’s phenomenal memory – he might have become a master of Moksha rather than a pilot. But even as he composed poems to the animals and amused Old Father with his attempts to describe the Alaloi dreamtime, his brilliant fate was approaching, swiftly, inevitably, like the light of an exploding star.

On the ninety-third day of winter, after Danlo had begun to think in Moksha – and after he had put on pounds of new muscle and burned his face brown in the bright sun – Old Father called him into his chamber. He informed him that his petition had been accepted after all. ‘I have good news for you,’ Old Father said. ‘Bardo the Just does not like Fravashi, but other masters and lords do. Oh ho, Nikolos Petrosian, the Lord Akashic, is in love with the Fravashi. He’s my friend. And he has persuaded Master Bardo to accept my petition. A favour to me, a favour to you.’

Danlo understood nothing of politics or trading favours, and he said, ‘I would like to meet Lord Nikolos – he must be a kind man.’

‘Ah, but someday – if you survive the competition – you may be required to do more than merely acknowledge his kindness. For the time, though, it’s enough that you compete with the other petitioners. And if you are to compete with any hope of winning, I’m afraid that you must learn the Language.’

‘But I am learning it, sir.’

‘Yes,’ Old Father said, ‘you spend ten hours each day making up songs in Moksha, while you give Fayeth half an hour in the evening toward your study of the Language.’

‘But the Language is so ugly,’ Danlo said. ‘So … clumsy.’

‘Aha, but few in the Order speak Moksha any more. It’s almost a dead art. In the Academy’s halls and towers, there is only the Language.’

Danlo touched the feather in his hair and said, ‘Fayeth believes that in another year I shall be fluent.’

‘But you don’t have another year. The competition begins on the 20th of false winter.’

‘Well,’ Danlo said, ‘that’s more than a half year away.’

‘Aha, very true. But you’ll need more than the Language to enter the Academy. The Language is only a door to other knowledge, Danlo.’

‘And you think I should open this door now, yes?’

‘Oh ho, surely it’s upon you to decide this. If you’d like, we could withdraw the petition and wait until the following year.’

‘No,’ Danlo said. About most things, he had the patience of an Alaloi, which is to say, the patience of a rock, but whenever he thought of the journey he had to complete, he was overcome with a sense of urgency. ‘I can’t wait that long.’

‘There is another possibility.’

‘Yes?’

‘So, it’s so: a language – any human language – can be learned almost overnight. There are techniques, ways of directly imprinting the brain with language.’

Danlo knew that the fount of intelligence lay inside the head, in the pineal gland which he called the third eye. Brains were a kind of pink fat which merely insulated this gland from the cold. Brains – animal brains, that is – were mainly good for eating or mashing up with wood ash in order to cure raw furs. ‘How can coils of fat hold language?’ he wanted to know.

Old Father whistled a few low notes and then delivered a short lecture about the structures of the human brain. He pressed his long fingers down against Danlo’s skull, roughly indicating the location deep in his brain of the hippocampus and almond-shaped amygdala, which mediated memory and the other mental functions. ‘Like a baldo nut, your brain is divided into two hemispheres, right and left. Oh ho, two halves – it’s as if you had two brains. Why do you think human beings are divided against themselves, one half saying “no”, while the other half continually whispers, “yes”?’

Danlo rubbed his eyes. From time to time, he tired of Old Father’s air of superiority. He had stayed long enough in Old Father’s house to relish the art of sarcasm, so he said, ‘And the Fravashi have an undivided brain? Is this why your consciousness wriggles about like a speared fatfish and never holds still?’

Old Father smiled nicely. ‘You’re perceptive,’ he said. ‘The Fravashi brain, aha! So, it’s so: our brains are divided into quarters. The frontal lobes,’ and here he touched his head above his golden eyes and whistled softly, ‘the front brain is given over almost wholly to language and the composition of the songlines. The other parts, other functions. Four quarters: and the Fravashi sleep by quarters, you should know. Because we think more, because we are better able to compose, edit and sing the song of ourselves, so we sleep more, much more. So, to dream. The Fravashi sleep by quarters: at any time, one, two or three quarters of our brain are sleeping. Rarely are we wholly awake. And never – never, never, never, never! – must we allow ourselves to be four quarters asleep.’

It was hard for Danlo to imagine such a consciousness, and he shook his head. He smiled at Old Father. ‘Then your brain, the four quarters – does it whisper “yes”, “no”, “maybe” and “maybe not”?’

‘Ho, ho, a human being making jokes about the Fravashi brain!’

Danlo laughed along with Old Father before falling serious. He asked, ‘Does your brain hold language like mine?’

‘Ah, oh, it would be better to think of the Fravashi brain absorbing language like cotton cloth sucks up water. There are deep structures, universal grammars for words, music or any sound – we hear a language one time, and we cannot forget.’

‘But I am a man, and I can forget, yes?’

‘Oh ho, and that’s why you must undergo an imprinting, if you are to learn the Language quickly and completely.’

Danlo thought of all the things he had learned quickly and completely during the night of his initiation. He asked, ‘Will it hurt very much?’

Old Father smiled his sadistic smile, then, and his eyes were like golden mirrors. ‘Ah, the pain. The brain, the pain, the brain. On your outings with Ottah, skating on the streets, have you ever seen a Jacaradan whore?’

Danlo, who would have been shocked that certain women trade sex for money, that is, if he had known about money, said, ‘I am not sure.’

‘Women who leave their bellies bare, the better to display their tattoos. Tattoos: red and purple pictures of naked women, green and blue advertisements of their trade.’

‘Oh, those women.’ Danlo had come to appreciate the subtleties and delicateness of civilized females, and he said, ‘They are very lovely, yes? – I wondered what they were called.’

Old Father whistled a little tune indicating his disapproval of whores. But the meaning was lost on Danlo. ‘An imprinting is like a tattoo of the brain. Indelible sounds and pictures fixed into the synapses – the brain’s synapses themselves are fixed like strands of silk in ice. There is no physical pain because the brain has no nerves. Ah, but the pain! Sudden new concepts, reference points, relationships among words – you can’t imagine the possible associations. Oh ho, there is pain!, the angslan of suddenly being more than you were. The pain of knowing. Oh, the pain, the pain, the pain, the pain.’

The next day, Old Father took Danlo to the imprimatur’s shop. They left the district via the infamous Fravashi sliddery, a long orange street which flows down past the Street of the Common Whores and the Street of Smugglers, and winds deep into the heart of the Farsider’s Quarter. Old Father was fairly clumsy on his skates. His hips were not as loosely jointed as a human’s, and they creaked with disease. Often, when rounding a curve he had to lean on Danlo to keep from falling. Often, he had to stop to catch his breath. They made a strange pair: Danlo with his open face and deeply curious eyes, and kindly, inscrutable Old Father towering over him like a furry mountain. Because it was warm, Danlo wore only a white cotton shirt, wool trousers and a black wool jacket. (And, of course, Ahira’s white feather fluttering in his hair.) It was one of those perfect winter days. The sky was as deep blue as a thallow’s eggshell, and a fresh salt wind was blowing off the ocean. On either side of the street, the outdoor restaurants and cafes were crowded with people watching the continuous promenade of people stream by. And there was much to watch. As they penetrated deeper into the Quarter, the mix of people began to change and grow ever more colourful, seedier, more dangerous. There were many more whores and many master courtesans dressed in diamonds and the finest of real silks. There were hibakusha in rags, barefoot autists, harijan, tubists, merchants, wormrunners, and even a few ronin warrior-poets who had deserted their order for the pleasures of Neverness. The air heaved with the sounds and smells of teeming humanity. Fresh bread, sausages and roasted coffee, ozone, woodsmoke, toalache, wet wool and floral perfumes, kana oil and sweat, and the faint, ferny essence of sex – there was no end to the smells of the City. These smells excited Danlo, although it was difficult to sort one from the other to track its source. Once, when they were caught in the crush at the intersection of the Street of Imprimaturs, a plump little whore pressed up against him and ran her fingers through his hair. ‘Such thick, pretty hair,’ she said. ‘All black and red – is it real? I’ve never seen such hair before.’ While Old Father whistled furiously to shoo her away, Danlo drank in the fragrance of rose perfume which her sweaty hand had left in his hair. He had never encountered such a flower before, and he relished the smell, even though he wished that the whore had noticed he was not a boy, but a man.

Of the many shops on the Street of Imprimaturs, Drisana Lian’s was one of the smallest. It sat on the middle of the block squeezed between a noisy cafe and the fabulously decorated shop of Baghaim the Imprimatur. Where Baghaim’s shop was large and fronted with stained-glass windows, Drisana’s was nothing more than a hole through an unobtrusive granite doorway; where many rich and fashionably dressed people queued up to apply for the services of Baghaim and his assistants, Drisana’s shop was very often empty. ‘Drisana is not popular,’ Old Father explained as he knocked at the iron door. ‘That’s because she refuses most imprintings requested of her. Ah, but there isn’t a better imprimatur in the City.’