The Broken God (60 page)

'Let's discuss computers some other time,' Hanuman said. 'If we don't start for the joyance soon, we'll be the last to arrive.'

They turned off the Serpentine, then, skating down narrow glidderies closed to all sled traffic. They cut across a district of cafes, imprinting shops, libraries and fine old apartment buildings wrought of black and pink granite. Rich emigrees and the professionals of the Order, mostly, lived in these apartments, each of which had its own private multrum and fireplace. The air was sweet with the smell of woodsmoke and flowers. Everywhere Danlo looked, there were flowers: snow dahlia and sapphire blossoms and fireflowers of crimson and gold. Each apartment's outer window sills were hung with flower planters, and the explosion of colours drew Danlo's sight outward and up to the sky.

The blessed Ring is growing, he thought as he gazed at the heavens. In places, the sky above Neverness was tinged with a pale golden fire, a growing cloud of gases and new life that only the brightest of stars could burn through. Five times, he remembered, he had journeyed to the stars he could not see. And he had never discussed these journeys with Hanuman. He had never talked about the torison spaces that twist like black worms through the manifold, nor the beautiful mathematics of the Great Theorem, nor his dread at being lost in an infinite loop, nor his joy at passing through the number storm and entering into dreamtime. (The computer-generated dreamtime of the pilots, that is.) He had never told Hanuman a secret that the pilots had discovered: as the Golden Ring grew and spread outward into the nearspace above their planet, it was somehow distorting that very space. Some kind of life within the Ring, perhaps some vast and marvellous god evolved from one of the myriad kinds of newly created organisms, was twisting the superluminal fabric from which the manifold is woven. Making it knottier, more complex. And it was tearing open rents in the manifold, creating new windows that pilots map their lightships through when they fall from star to star, or from point to point in the neighbourhood of a star. Someday, perhaps even the great thickspace near Neverness's yellow sun might curl onto itself. The thickspace – an infinite density of point-sources where pathways from every star in the galaxy converge – might be lost into a hideous complexity of knots impossible for pilots to map. And then Neverness would no longer be the topological nexus of the galaxy. The City of Light would be cut off from the stars, and that was a secret Danlo must not tell anyone, not even his best friend.

'Look,' Hanuman called out. He and Danlo had just crossed the Old City Glissade and had turned onto a purple street lined with yu trees and grand old houses. He stretched out an orange-gloved hand and pointed. 'Bardo's house. Hideous, isn't it?'

'Hideous,' Danlo agreed. 'But splendid, too.' The house stood on the east side of the gliddery, and it was much the largest on the block. Three thousand years earlier the Order had built the main body of the house along classic lines of laser-cut granite, long clary windows and beautifully grained woods: jewood and Japanese cherry and shatterwood beams rubbed with scented waxes. As with the other nearby houses, various ambassadors had lived there until the Order moved all such farsiders to the Street of Embassies. And then, during Ricardo Lavi's lordship, the north and south wings of the house had been added to provide rooms for journeymen unable to find dormitory space within the Academy's walls. This was at the beginning of the Order's Golden Age when women and men from the Civilized Worlds were coming to Neverness in swarms. It was a time of enthusiasms, caprice and reckless technologies. The wings of Bardo's house had, in fact, been grown organically. Tiny robots the size of bacteria had assembled its structures atom by atom, bit by bit, a seamless pattern of diamond and crewel and organic stone. Viewed from the street, the house looked something like a huge, fantastic insect: the main body of natural stone, grey and solid, and the organic stone wings stived with bits of colour, with filaments and streaks of cinnabar, orchid pink and amethyst. The two wings swept upward and out, north and south for fifty yards along the street, and they seemed as lacy and delicate as feather ice, almost impossibly delicate, as if the aretes and arches and points might crumble beneath any sudden wind. But they were strong enough, as all works of organic stone are. Originally, two hundred and fifty-six windowpanes of spun diamond had graced the rooms of either wing. Only a few of these panes remained however, the rest having been sold off over the centuries, or stolen. As Danlo stood gazing at the splendid octagonal windows, the way the low evening light fell upon the diamond sheets and broke into showers of colour, he found himself wishing that the Order hadn't abolished all assembler technology. Only a few houses in the Old City – those built between the years 620 and 694 – displayed this kind of stonework, and that was too bad.

'I never thought Bardo would return,' Hanuman said.

'I always ... hoped he would.'

'Do you have your invitation?'

'Yes, right here.' Danlo held the steel invitation in the palm of his hand, and he flashed it at Hanuman.

'Please promise me,' Hanuman said, 'that you'll think carefully before embracing any of the joys of Bardo's house.'

'Only if you will promise to forget you are a cetic for tonight and enjoy yourself.'

'Oh, very well,' Hanuman said. 'I promise.'

'Then so do I.'

'Then let's go inside. There's supposed to be a gatekeeper to take our invitations.'

So saying, they skated off the street and up the walkway to Bardo's new house.

This brings us to the Yoga concept of the Kundalini or the snake as an image of inner strength. Kundalini is represented symbolically as a snake coiled up upon itself in the form of a ring (kundala), in that subtle part of the organism corresponding to the lower extremity of the spinal column; this, at any rate, is the case with ordinary man. But, as a result of exercises directed toward his spiritualization – Hatha Yoga, for instance – the snake uncoils and stretches up through wheels corresponding to the various plexuses of the body until it reaches the area of the forehead corresponding to the third eye of Shiva. It is then, according to Hindu belief, that man recovers his sense of the eternal.

– from A Dictionary of Symbols, by Juan Eduardo Cirlot

Around the grounds of Bardo's house was a metal fence, a cruel construction of iron spears set upright into a stone border. Danlo had heard a rumour that Bardo sometimes kept an inner, light fence around his house; but since the possession of lasers was reason for banishment from the City, he thought the rumour must be untrue. The gate of the fence was open, and Danlo and Hanuman stopped to hand their invitations to the gatekeeper, a bouncy little man with happy eyes and the aggressively ragged look of an autist. He said, 'You're late, honoured journeymen, but welcome, welcome – the remembrance will soon begin.' They bowed and continued up the walkway, past intricate ice sculptures, shih trees and lawns of snow blooms. Despite the gatekeeper's words, Danlo skated slowly and easily, enjoying the fall of evening. The air smelled of flowers and had a quality of lightness that aroused in him feelings both of anticipation and dread. The sounds of laughter, clinking glasses and strange musics spilled out around him. Attached to the front of the house, where the shatterwood doors of the entranceway opened to the outside, was a large veranda, or rather, a stone and mortar warming pavilion packed with people. Danlo and Hanuman ejected their skate blades and pushed into the throng. They bowed to various masters of the Order and to hibakusha, and to spelists, and even to the merchant-princes in their gem-studded jackets. Everywhere Danlo looked, he saw people drinking ice wine or skotch or jambool, or smoking toalache. All kinds of people: wormrunners and harijan, poets and phantasts, and even two beautiful courtesans who were highly placed in the Society of Courtesans. It seemed that Bardo had invited a third of the City to his joyance, but it was not so. Other than Hanuman, there were no cetics to be seen; there were few astriers and very few Architects. One might have thought that scryers would attend any celebration of memory (these eyeless prophets sometimes call their visions 'memories of the future') but Bardo mistrusted scryers and kept them away.

Because it was almost too noisy to talk, Danlo lightly touched the sleeve of Hanuman's robe to draw his attention. Using the cetic hand language that Hanuman had taught him, he signed: Let's find Bardo and wish him well.

They went into the house, following a stream of people through the entrance hall and into a large, richly decorated sun room. Bardo had returned from his journeys with the finest of gosharps, Yarkona furniture, Darghinni sculptures, tondos and paintings and crewel work. And Fravashi carpets, of course, and too many sense boxes. Danlo was surprised that mantelets, fones, sulki grids and other kinds of forbidden technology were so openly displayed, hanging from the walls or sitting atop shiny lacquered tables. But then, Bardo was an open, expansive man who liked to flaunt his way of living, however excessive or careless. It amused Danlo to see twenty-three bonsai trees lined up in front of the sun room's diamond windows. The leaves of the trees looked sickly and yellowish-green, as if Bardo were still giving them too much water.

Hanuman caught Danlo's eye and said, 'I've heard that sometimes Bardo doesn't greet his guests until just before the midnight remembrance.'

'Then perhaps we should take our supper,' Danlo said. 'Have you eaten?'

'I'm not hungry,' Hanuman said.

'Will you excuse me, then? I cannot bear the smells of all these foods.'

Danlo, who was always hungry and always ate enough for three men, wandered off to see what delicacies he might discover. At the far end of the room, a long table had been set with stacks of clary plates, chopsticks, wine goblets and many platters of food. There were pepper nuts, curried vegetables, cheeses, grilled tombu, mounds of glittering red salmon roe and cultured meats. And baldo nuts, sliced snow apples, bloodfruit in cream, breads and a dozen kinds of fairy food. Danlo squeezed between a shivering autist and a beautiful, black-skinned woman whom he recognized as the diva, Nirvelli. He helped himself to a plate of steaming kurmash. He stood there gobbling these exquisitely hot nut grains as he looked about the room. Nirvelli wasn't the only famous person there. He saw Zohra Bey, and Moriah li Chen, and Thomas Sonderval, the Sonderval, raimented in a rather dandyish robe (which he had designed himself) and in his vast and brilliant arrogance. Danlo was wondering if he should introduce himself to this pilot of pilots when something caused him to look back across the room. There, standing next to Hanuman, wearing the silk pyjamas of a courtesan, was the most beautiful woman that he had ever seen.

'Losharu shona!' Danlo whispered to himself. 'Losharu halla!'

He stared at her, much too openly, and his eyes burned because he could not blink them, and his heart pounded with the thrill of shooting adrenalin. For much too long he remained frozen there, like an animal of the forest watching another. He forgot that he was holding a plate of kurmash in his hand. He let the plate tilt and little yellow-brown kernels rolled off, fell and bounced against the marble floor. His hunger – the empty, contracting hunger in his belly for food – was suddenly gone. The loveliness of this young courtesan struck like a lightning bolt to his core and burned him inside. He loved, all in a moment, everything about her: the graceful way she moved her hands when she talked; her easy, natural smile; and above all, her pure animal vitality. She was tall and voluptuous and smoothly-muscled like an ice dancer. Her face was unique and memorable, though he was dimly aware that no single feature seemed to go very well with any other. Her lips were a shade too red, too full, too sensuous against the creaminess of her skin. She had a long, imperious nose set between high cheekbones and thick blonde hair, and Japanesque eyes, intelligent and lively, as dark and liquid as coffee. Her entire face stood out prominently, almost prognathously, an atavism that hinted of something deeply primitive in her. Danlo found this primitive quality instantly compelling. A part of him wondered if he would later see her in a different light, but now other parts were burning with a need far beyond wonder. His chest was hot and tight, his eyes were afire with the sight of her and his hands ached to touch her splendid face.

Halla is the woman who shines like the sun, he thought.

She looked at him, then. She turned her head and looked past all the bright, chattering people standing between them. She looked straight at him, boldly and openly. Their eyes met and locked together, and there was a shock of instant recognition, as if they had known each other for a billion years. Danlo felt himself falling into her eyes, and the world about him narrowed, intensified and stopped altogether. He knew he had never seen her before, yet his eyes burned with this electric and ancient connection. His lips burned, and his fingers, and his blood; everything about him was afire with a sudden knowingness that swept his breath away and astonished him.

'Excuse me,' he said when he had finally recovered his voice. Next to him stood a thin, amused-looking woman dressed in a gaudy silver gown. He had spilled his kurmash over her silver slippers. Without taking his eyes away from his lovely courtesan, he mumbled, 'Excuse me, would you mind holding my plate ... for a moment?'

He pushed the plate into the woman's hands, bowed perfunctorily, and walked off. He fairly flew across the room. He came right up to Hanuman and the courtesan, and all the while his eyes never left hers.

Hanuman smiled at him, but he scarcely noticed. He scarcely heard Hanuman say, 'Danlo, may I present Tamara Ten Ashtoreth? Tamara, this is the friend I was telling you about, Danlo wi Soli Ringess.'

Danlo bowed to her, and then he forgot all his manners. He reached out and grasped her hand, which was gloved in blue silk. He held her hand gently and he immediately wished he could pull off his black leather gloves, the better to touch her long fingers with his own. 'You are beautiful!' he gasped out. 'I have never seen anyone ... so beautiful.'