The Broken God (54 page)

'Goodbye, Bardo!' he shouted.

He watched Bardo disappear down the street, and then he turned toward Perilous Hall where the other boys would be waiting for the news of what had occurred in the College of the Lords.

The man of knowledge must not only love his enemies; he also be able to hate his friends.

– Friedrich the Hammer

Danlo spent much of the next few days wandering around the Academy grounds, lost in an ice-fog of brooding and deep reflection. He did no work. He restrained his impulse to go to the library, to enter the cybernetic spaces in search of some certain knowledge or episteme which might help him think more clearly about the Alaloi's fate. Nor did he visit his tutor, nor take meals with his friends. One bright, cold afternoon however, on the 77th, he remembered that his hallmates were scheduled to skate against the first year novices of Stone Row in a game of hokkee. And so he returned to Perilous Hall, donned a kamelaika, snapped his hokkee blades into his boots, grabbed his mallet and he hurried across Borja to the Ice Dome.

In truth, it was not a good day for hokkee. The news of Bardo's abjuration had stunned most of the other boys and they seemed more interested in talking about this scandal than in slapping a hard wooden puck across a hundred and fifty yards of ice. It was now certain that Bardo would be leaving the City, perhaps for good. Madhava li Shing and Sherborn of Darkmoon – and others – pestered Danlo with questions concerning Bardo's plans. And then, just before the first chukka of the game, Hanuman li Tosh appeared at the far end of the huge arena. He made his way between the empty sled courts and the five icefields laid out in perfect, white rectangles at the Dome's centre. He skated up to Danlo and to his hallmates, whom he had not seen in many days. Only half an hour earlier the cetics had finally let him leave their tower, and he had come straightaway to the Ice Dome. Hanuman loved playing hokkee, Danlo remembered, almost as much as he loved the precise movements of his killing art.

'Hello, Madhava; hello, Lorenzo; hello, Ivar; hello, Alesar.' Hanuman greeted the boys of Perilous Hall and they swarmed around him, bowing and congratulating him on his miraculous escape from death in the library. Then Hanuman broke free and came up to Danlo, who was standing alone near the edge of the field. He looked at him for a long moment before saying, 'Hello, Danlo – it's good to see that you're well.'

'And you, Hanu – are you well? Is there still much pain?'

Hanuman laughed softly, strangely and said, 'Didn't you once tell me that pain is the awareness of life?'

'Yes, but that was before I had seen ... what the ekkana drug can do.'

'Well, pain is always pain,' Hanuman said. 'But there are ways to control it.'

'I have heard ... that many people have died from the ekkana.'

'But as you can see, I'm still alive. I owe you my life. Again,' he said this clearly, coldly, but then, seeing the hurt he was causing Danlo, he forced a smile and told him, 'You always amaze me. You faced the poet of your own will – not even my mother would have done what you did.'

Danlo touched the scar above his eye and said, 'Everyone speaks of this as if I had a choice.'

'But you did. You might have run away.'

'You know ... that I could not run away.'

'Oh, yes, I do know,' Hanuman said. He looked at Danlo and tried to smile, but something was obviously disturbing him. 'It's a miracle that you remembered the poem. There was a moment – I thought you wouldn't remember it, but you did. Didn't you? Of course you did. With your impossible memory that I shall never fathom, you remembered the poem. Which is why the poet put the knife in his eye and we're still alive to talk about it.'

While the twenty novices from Stone Row at last filed into the Dome and took their places on the opposite side of the field, Hanuman and Danlo stood talking about what had occurred in the library, and after, when the College of Lords had denied Danlo's petition. They spoke together easily, but there was a distance between them which had not been there before. Danlo wanted to know more about the healing arts of the cetics, but Hanuman was reluctant to reveal what had happened during the days that he had spent in their cold, isolated tower. Danlo asked him other questions as well, little questions concerning the sharpness of Hanuman's skate blades or their strategy for the day's game. Because of Hanuman's secret suffering and his coolness, however, Danlo avoided the deeper questions that he might have asked. In truth, there was only one question that he wanted to ask, but as friends often do, he found himself talking about everything other than this one crucial thing. And then one of the novices from Stone Row called for the game to begin. Much to Danlo's dismay, Hanuman used the excitement of the game – the flashing steel, the fear and frenzy of young bodies tearing across the ice – as a kind of shield against Danlo's concerns. Little by little, Hanuman fell reticent, and then silent. Through five chukkas of skating, he kept this awkward, hurtful silence, and he kept himself apart from Danlo. Although he played his usual lightning-fast game and wielded his black shatterwood mallet with both mindfulness and savagery, he seemed to care little about winning. And all the while, in his aloof posture and in his pale eyes, in the way he looked at Danlo (or looked away from him) his manner was full of anguish and despair.

'Why are you ... so inward today?' Danlo finally asked as they rested before the sixth and final chukka. They were sitting together near the end of a long shiny bench, which had been painted blue earlier that season. Some of their hallmates, at the opposite end of the bench, sat slumped over their knees. Others stood about gasping for breath, or spitting blood, or talking, or fingering crude signs at the Stone Row novices across the ice field seventy yards away. Through the fog steaming off the ice, Danlo could see the opposing team, twenty loud-faced boys, each of them kicking their boots against their red bench and holding erect two fingers. This was a sign – depending on how interpreted – that either there was some doubt as to Danlo's hallmates having been born of real wombs in the natural manner, or that they were losing by two goals. Certainly, Danlo thought, they were losing by two goals. His own skating for most of the game had been distracted, erratic, mechanical. He and Hanuman usually scored most of Perilous Hall's goals, but between them that afternoon there had been no halla, no interplay of thought and act. Hanuman was as cold as the white ice of the polo field, while Danlo was haunted by the memory of murder and death.

'In some ways you're more inward than I,' Hanuman said.

'That may be true ... but neither of us was meant for inwardness.'

Hanuman looked up and squinted at the light streaming through the Dome's thousands of triangular window panes. 'How do you know what I was meant for?'

'Ever since Pedar fell down the steps,' Danlo said, evading his question, 'you have fallen in on yourself. Why? You hated him ... almost as much as I did.'

Hanuman, still staring up at the Dome, closed his eyes and winced, as if in pain. He said, 'Because he's dead. Isn't that enough? How do you think you seem now that you've discovered the fate of the Alaloi tribes?'

'But they are my people!'

'I'm sorry, Danlo. Perhaps a cure for the plague will be found. Perhaps you'll even find it. But even if you do, we're all dead, aren't we? Eventually. All people, living their lives so quickly – and why?'

Here Hanuman looked at Danlo and quoted one of the passages in the Book of God which Nikolos Daru Ede had plagiarized from an ancient body of mystic writings, the False Bhagavad Gita: 'The world of the living burns the flesh, and all creatures rush to their destruction like moths into aflame.'

'You think about death too much,' Danlo said.

'I?'

'There is no cure for it. Death is a disease ... that has no cure.'

'The Cybernetic Churches,' Hanuman said, 'teach otherwise.'

Danlo touched Ahira's feather and said, 'Even if it were possible, I would not want myself, my soul – my purusha – carked into a computer.'

'But there are other ways. There is the path godward that your father chose. Bardo used to talk about this all the time. Once he said that anyone who was willing to suffer as the Ringess did could become a god.'

'Bardo ... liked to talk to you, yes?'

'Especially when he was drunk. He took an interest in my career – he always insisted I should become a pilot.'

'You will be the most blessed of pilots,' Danlo said.

'Do you think so? I'm not so sure. Yesterday the Lord Cetic invited me to have tea with him in the tower. He suggested I should apply to Lara Sig and learn the cetic arts.'

'The Lord Cetic!'

'You seem surprised.'

'But you must not become a cetic!'

'And why mustn't I?'

'Because ... cetics are too inward,' Danlo explained.

'Once again we're arguing in circles.'

'Cetics are ... too withdrawn from life,' Danlo said. Due to a collision with someone's mallet during the fourth chukka, his chin was slightly cut; he wiped the blood away with the sleeve of his kamelaika, which left a long red streak against the clean wool. 'Cetics,' he said, 'seek the truth about consciousness, yes, and I understand this attracts many novices. Samadhi and fugue and simultaneity, all the states of computer consciousness. But you cannot know ... about real consciousness by facing a computer.'

It was almost time for the sixth chukka, and Danlo's hallmates were busy sharpening their skates and wrapping their mallets with black tape, not because their blades were really dull or the shatterwood shafts needed reinforcing, but because this was a game-ending ritual almost as old as Perilous Hall itself. The air whined with the sound of diamond files cutting across steel, and Hanuman raised his voice, saying, 'But there's more to the cetic arts than facing a computer.'

Someone handed Danlo a roll of sticky black tape, and he used his strong white teeth to bite off a piece. He said, 'There is mastery, yes? Mastery over the mind; mastery over others' minds.'

'There are dangers, I know,' Hanuman said. 'Which is why, of all the Order, the cetic vows are the strictest. "Cetic ethics" and all that.'

'But the cetics are hermetics,' Danlo said, supplying a saying commonly bandied about the Academy. 'They are mystics who keep secrets ... about the mastery of consciousness.'

'But this is part of their ethics. Most people, if shown the secrets of their consciousness – they're like children playing with hydrogen bombs.'

'Hanu, Hanu, this is just what I am afraid of.'

'You're afraid of me?'

'I am afraid for you.'

Hanuman finished taping his mallet and said, 'Is that true?'

'Have you seen the master cetics?' Danlo asked. 'Have you looked at their faces? The old ones? I have ... three days ago, in the Lords' College. The Lord Cetic. Lord Pall. He is like the others. He is corrupt and horrible, too conscious ... of himself. He is mad, I think, barely human. Do not become a cetic, Hanu.'

'Most cetics live too long,' Hanuman said. 'Probably it's my fate to die young – but even if I don't, I'll never grow old like that.'

Danlo looked at his best friend and said, softly, 'But there are other reasons for not becoming.... Why do you think Lord Pall wants you to apply to the cetics?'

'Well, the cetics and pilots are always competing for the best novices. I'm sure the Lord Cetic will invite you to tea before the year's end, too.'

'But I could never become a cetic!' Danlo said.

'No?'

'No.' Danlo ejected the blades from his boots and ran his thumbnail across the edges. With a file that Madhava tossed to him, he began sharpening them. 'Before I entered the Academy I was ... involved with the Returnists. And the autists. These sects and religions – the cetics. This makes for a dangerous combination, yes?'

'Which is why cetics are forbidden any kind of religiosity.'

'Then you have no interest in the new religions?'

'No, none.'

Danlo looked down at the ice around the bench. In its milky smoothness, he caught sight of Hanuman's reflection. Something about this ghostlike image, so delicate and pale, hinted at a secret passion. It was as if the ice, in distorting the clean lines of Hanuman's face, were acting as a lens to a deeper, truer self. There was an intensity and devoutness in his friend's pale blue eyes; for the first time, he could see that Hanuman burned with an intense religiousness. Never mind the boy's scorn of the Cybernetic Universal Church, the hatred and ridicule of his parents' faith which had informed his childhood; never mind that he had often referred to Edeism as the 'slave religion'. The real problem, Danlo thought, was that Edeism and other religions, for one such as Hanuman, were not really religious enough.

'It is known that the cetics, some of them, practise almost continual interface with their computers,' Danlo said. He looked up from the ice at Hanuman, and continued speaking in a clear, pained voice. 'In violation of the canons ... and the law of Civilization. You have heard this, yes?'

'If one believes the rumours, there's a grade of cyber-shamans called neurosingers who misuse their computers – I think this is true.'

'And they seek interface ... with the godspace, yes?'

'Perhaps they do, Danlo. Who knows what the neurosingers seek?'

'But what do you seek?'

'I don't really know.'

Danlo, glimpsing the light that came into Hanuman's eyes as he said this, thought that he knew precisely what he sought. 'Have you decided to become a cetic, then?'

'Possibly,' Hanuman said.

'But we were to be pilots together!'

'You'll be the pilot – it's what you were born for.'

'But to journey to the stars –'

'I'm sorry, but these last days I've lost any desire to see the stars.'

'But a cetic? No, that would be so wrong ... for you.'

'How do you know what's wrong?'

'I can see it. Anybody could.'

'You can see it,' Hanuman said, and he rammed a diamond file back and forth across his skate blade. 'You're a scryer, then, and you can see it.'