The Broken God (27 page)

Pedar slung his toepick against the ice, kicking up flowers of snow against Danlo's face. He asked, 'What kind of things?'

Instantly, Bardo pirouetted like a master ice dancer and cuffed Pedar's ear. He could turn cruel when he was drunk, cruel and sentimental. 'What's wrong with you!' Bardo bellowed. 'Kicking snow in this poor boy's face when he can't get off his mat! I told you to watch him, not torture him.' Then he stroked his moustache and began talking to himself in a deep, melodious voice: 'Ah, too bad, Bardo, my friend – why did you leave a novice to do your work?'

Pedar, stunned by the quickness and force of Bardo's blow, stood with his hand clapped over his ear. His face was full of hate as he cowered and glared down at Danlo.

The novices surrounding Bardo seemed to shrink back as if they too were afraid of being struck. One of Pedar's friends waved his hand at the almost empty Square and asked, 'Please, Master Lal, how much longer can it go on? There are only a hundred of them left.'

Bardo squinted his shiny brown eyes against the falling snow. He looked at Danlo and frowned. 'Look at this poor, naked boy!' he exclaimed to the novices. 'He's more patient than any of you!' Then he grunted and puffed as he bent low and cupped his hands over Danlo's ear. His breath was sour with beer, and he whispered, 'Are you testing me, or am I testing you? I've never seen anyone as hard as you. Ah, that is, there's only been one other. Who are you, by God? No, no, do not answer, you may not speak. But tell me, Wild Boy – shake your head if the answer is "no" – if I let the test go on, you won't die and make me look like a barbarian, will you?'

Silently, Danlo smiled and shook his head.

'The test continues!' Bardo announced as he straightened up. 'The test will be over when it's over.'

And so Danlo and the hundred remaining petitioners waited through the long day. In the silence of the snowfall, in the whiteness of the buildings around the Square, it was hard to tell how much time had passed. Danlo knelt on his mat and watched sparkling snowflakes tumble through the air. He was afire with lotsara and with hope, but his body's tissues were burning too quickly. He was very thirsty. Quite a few of the petitioners had fallen deathly ill after eating mouthfuls of snow, but he knew better than to eat snow, even though his throat was hot and parched, even though his heart felt like a pool of lava surging against his breastbone. Soon he would collapse; soon would come crushing weakness, a stilling of eyelight, and finally, oblivion. And then he would never journey beyond the stars to find halla; his only journey would be to the other side of day where the sea is white and cold and bare, and the ice of eternity goes on and on forever.

'Danlo, Danlo.' He thought he heard Hanuman whispering to him, but in truth, Pedar and the other high novices were keeping too close a watch for anyone to risk whispering. And Hanuman was still sleeping beneath his double robes, beneath his mats and thick blanket of snow. How troubled the boy seemed, wincing and coughing in his sleep. Then, as Danlo looked on, Hanuman came gradually awake. He rose through his fever, murmuring, and he looked at Danlo. 'Danlo, Danlo,' his eyes seemed to cry out, 'I owe you my life.'

'Look,' Pedar said as he pointed at Hanuman, 'the sick boy is awake.'

Bardo the Just and hundreds of chattering novices stood around making embarrassing comments as to Danlo's and Hanuman's courage, recounting the events of the day. And then Pedar snarled at Danlo, 'It's unlikely that you'll pass the other tests even if you pass this one. But if you do, I hope you're assigned to my dormitory. It's called Perilous Hall, Wild Boy. Can you remember that name?'

Although this hazing was directed at Danlo, its effect on Hanuman was startling. Hanuman's face, already deathly white, grew cold and hard as if his skin was frozen. The only part of him that seemed alive was his eyes, which were burning with a pale fury. This fury frightened Danlo, for it seemed to come out of nowhere. Furious over Pedar's words, Hanuman tried to kick away the mats and sit up. But he was too weak to move. He lay staring at Danlo, helpless in his fury and his shame.

There, in the falling snow, Hanuman and Danlo waited together locked eye to eye; neither of them wanted to be the first to look away. While many people stood above them commenting on the unseasonable snowfall, a silent communication flowed between them, secrets that both of them knew they must never reveal. Danlo was aware of Hanuman's intense powers of concentration, his devotion to friendship and fate; they were both very aware of each other. Thus they waited all afternoon, and Danlo wanted to say, 'Hanu, Hanu, you are as dangerous as Ayeye, the thallow.' Then from a distance came the faint ringing of Resa's evening bells. The crowd around them stirred. Among the weary novices who had been patrolling Lavi Square since dawn, there were grumblings, quick arguments, a rippling wave of concern for Danlo and Hanuman, and for the others. Then Bardo the Just rubbed his eyes, shot Danlo a curious, admiring look, and he clapped his hands.

'Silence, it's time!' he said. He was speaking to the novices and to the crowd of onlookers; the miserable petitioners were as silent as they had been since the first morning of their competition. 'Silence, it's time, by God! It's time that the Test of Patience came to an end. You petitioners,' he began, and then he shut his mouth abruptly. One of his novices, breathless from a quick trip through the Square, chose that moment to tell him something. And Bardo went on, 'You seventy-two petitioners have survived the first test. We welcome you to continue with the second test, which will begin five days hence. There are hot baths, coffee and food waiting for you in the dormitories. The novices will escort you there. Congratulations – you may now leave your places and speak as you wish.'

Instantly, there were shouts of relief; petitioners were arising from their mats shivering as they slapped blood back into their limbs and rushed to follow the novices inside.

'Danlo the Wild!' a novice in the crowd suddenly called out. 'Someone get a fur for Danlo the Wild!'

Still on his mat, Danlo knocked snow from his dishevelled hair and tried to stand. He could not. He no longer cared if Pedar and the others beheld his cut membrum. In truth, he could not stand because his joints were stiff and locked, shooting with pain. There was agony in his loins convulsing up his spine to his neck. As the snow and air found his exposed belly, as the fire of lotsara left him, he began shivering again. Even though someone threw a thick shagshay fur over his naked shoulders, he couldn't stop shivering. 'Hanu, Hanu,' he said as he staggered in a half-crouch over to his friend. 'Hanu, it's over.'

Hanuman, of all the petitioners (except five unfortunate boys who were found dead), remained motionless on his mat. Indeed, many thought that he too had died, but Danlo could still see the life inside him. A novice arrived carrying a bulky shagshay fur, and Danlo helped him lay it over Hanuman's body.

'Danlo, are you all right?' Hanuman asked softly. He was breathing as rapidly as a snow hare, and he had stopped coughing. 'I was afraid you were going to die.'

After that the novices carried Hanuman away. Danlo was left to fend off the congratulations of the curious crowd. Someone eased into his hand a mug of hot coffee, which he gulped down gratefully. He stood closely pressed by a hundred cheering strangers, surrounded yet alone with his thoughts.

And then Pedar came up to him; his pimply face was red and inflamed from the cold. 'We'll take care of him,' he said.

'What will you do ... with my friend?' Danlo asked.

'Your friend?' Pedar asked. 'Listen, Wild Boy, there's an old saying you should know: "Save a person's life, make an enemy for life". I don't think that boy will ever be your friend.'

Danlo covered his eyes against the falling snow, and he wondered about Hanuman. As he began walking with the other novices toward the warmth of the waiting dormitories, he hoped that Pedar would be wrong.

The Universal Syntax: invented by Omar Narayama on Arcite twenty years before the founding of Neverness. The emergence of holism during the Fifth Mentality was fully realized in the development of the universal syntax. It is perhaps an accident of history that where the invention of science depended upon a mathematics as old as the civilizations of Babylonia and Ur, the universal syntax was discovered long after holism began to permeate and even supersede science. How human knowledge of the universe might have evolved had the reverse been the case is arguable, but without the development of the universal syntax, the full articulation of holism certainly would have been impossible.

Abstract of Main Line Information: Omar Narayama was a linguist in the Order of Scientists; ironically his life's work was to spell the demise of that ancient order and forever change man's approach to science. Narayama, like other scientists at the end of the Age of Simulation, had come to realize the limitations of computer modellings of the phenomena and laws of spacetime. He sought a universalization of science – it was the Holy Grail of his times. A century earlier, the Fravashi language philosophies had profoundly influenced the intellectual climate of the Civilized Worlds. Narayama was a student of the Fravashi, and he began his career with a solution to the essential problem of formalistic cognition: what is it we see when we see? Narayama hypothesized that we see a bunch of glued-together sticks as a chair; we see a latticework of carbon atoms fixed into platinum as a diamond ring. It was with the formalization of the concept 'as' that Narayama laid the foundations for the universal syntax. His life's work – and the work of those followed him – was to utilize the structures of language in order to model those aspects of reality too complex to be represented by a strictly science-oriented mathematics.

Branching Information Lines, more at Holism:

Omar Narayama, biography; History of Science; Causality; Causal Decoupling; Backward Causality and the Theory of Scrying; Arcite; History of the Order of Cetics; the Order of New Scientists; the Order of New Scientists – Schism and War; The Age of Simulation; the Fifth Mentality; the Fravashi Songlines; Fravashi Philosophy; Fravashi Theories of Language.

– Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1,754th Edition, Tenth Revised

Standard Version

During the days of his recuperation Danlo saw nothing of Hanuman li Tosh. By making inquiries of several high novices whom he befriended, he discovered that Hanuman had been taken to Borja's main hospice, there to be healed – if that was his fate – or to begin his journey to the other side of day. For Danlo this period of waiting before the next test was full of both pleasure and uncertainty. He worried about Hanuman; at times, when he fell back into the easy, familiar ways of childhood and forgot that he was a man (or almost a man) he worried about himself. But, in truth, it was not in Danlo's nature to worry overlong. Life is lived in the Now-moment, as the Alaloi say, and he took a joy in the simple and most immediate activities of life: in drinking hot, mint teas, sleeping and eating, awakening every morning to coffee, bread and hot baths, and before each morning was ended, sleeping some more. After his ordeal in the snow, his keenest joy was in simply being warm. He, like each of the other seventy petitioners, had been given a tiny private room in the Farsider's dormitory just west of Lavi Square. He spent whole days sitting in front of his room's fireplace. While spruce logs crackled on the grate and flames danced against blackened stones, he liked to turn his face to the fire, to bask naked in the rippling red waves of heat, and play his shakuhachi. At the end of each day he would eat a sumptuous meal of wild rice and almonds, snowberries in cream, egg flower soup, nutcakes or other rich foods, and he would walk through the dormitory greeting his fellow petitioners. Sometimes various novices – boys and girls whom he did not know – would come to visit him in order to satisfy their curiosity. Once, on the third day following his ordeal, a tall, dour novice named Kiril Burian walked into Danlo's room and told him, 'I saw what you did in the Square. How did you keep from freezing to death? Where is your home? If you get past the next tests, I hope you're assigned to my dormitory – Isabel Hall, it's called. You'd be welcomed there, even if you are an outsider.'

Danlo found his instant fame and popularity strange. He didn't really understand popularity. He was familiar, of course, with prowess, veneration, and friendship – these were good Alaloi concepts. But the novices who sought his company did not really seem to want him as a friend, not at first, nor did they venerate what little wisdom he had acquired during his quest to find halla. His popularity, as far as he could see, stemmed from a single deed of friendship toward Hanuman and from a prowess of lotsara that all full men should possess. And how he hated the infectious nature of popularity! That people would wish to associate with him not for the qualities of his face – that is, for his self-awareness, character, and mind – but simply because they perceived a social utility in being seen with someone who was temporarily the centre of attention, he found silly and perverse. He hated, too, the way the petitioners were maltreated and scorned. Petitioners – a very few of them – could become novices, but it seemed that since they had not attended the Order's elite schools, they would always be regarded as outsiders. This elitism and vanity of novices such as Pedar, he hated deeply. But because he regarded hatred as the vilest of emotions, a black, churning rent in the ocean of his being which might swallow him whole at any time, he did not allow himself to hate. Instead, as a discipline, he tried to make friends with as many novices as he could. In almost everyone, even in Pedar, he found some aspect of face, spirit or anima which he could revere. Many years later, Hanuman li Tosh would say to him: 'I've never known anyone who liked as many things as you do.' Ironically, Danlo's unrestrained love of life wherever he found it was to win him many friends and bring him even greater popularity.