The Broken God (70 page)

Oh God oh God oh God....

God is memory, Danlo thought, and he realized a truth about the Ieldra, that race of gods who had carked their memories inside human beings and carked their consciousnesses into the black hole at the centre of the galaxy. The taste of the Elder Eddas was salt on his tongue, and the sound of the universe was a great wave swelling up inside him. For a moment, he knew all there was to know. Then the memories built to a wild, white roar; they crested and broke, crushing him under an infinite weight of remembrance. He could neither see, nor hear, nor feel, nor breathe, nor even think. He was aware of himself as made up of a billion billion memories that shimmered like drops of light and dissolved into an ocean of memory, the cool, clear, single memory that lies deep inside all things. He might have died to this one memory and spent an eternity absorbed in it. But he recalled, then, that there was a place where memories are continually created out of hunger and passion and pain, a whole universe of life, and he suddenly knew he had to return there, to tell Bardo and Hanuman about the remembrance of the gods.

'Oh God, oh God, oh God!' he heard someone call out.

In stages, like a turtle pulling himself from the ocean's shallows up across a beach's frozen sands, he returned to the music room. He opened his eyes and sat up. He touched the feather in his hair, the scar above his eye, the sharp ivory mouthpiece of his flute. Although it was very late and the thirty-three candles had burned low, everything seemed ablaze with light. And everything – the shatterwood floor tiles, the flowers, the golden urn of kalla – all the material objects within his sight called up memories. Memory was written into all things, and he could not help seeing the connections, in the grain of his shakuhachi, and in the lines of Hanuman's pale, blood-flecked lips, and in his own long hands, which were hard and weathered and burned brown from the bright false winter sun. He might have fallen back into remembrance then, but Bardo was kneeling beside him, squeezing the back of his neck. Flecks of compassion danced in Bardo's eyes, and he said, 'Ah, Little Fellow, go slowly, now, and don't speak too soon.'

But Danlo had to tell him what he had remembranced, the essence of the Eddas, and he gasped out, 'Bardo, Bardo ... oni tlo justoth!'

'What did you say? It sounds like the gibberish that the Fravashi teach.'

Danlo recognized the words that flowed from his mouth as ancient Moksha, and he wondered why (and how) he had translated the Elder Eddas into such a language. Old Father, after all, had never taught him ancient Moksha. Then he thought for a moment and whispered, 'Listen, Bardo, this is important: Nothing is lost.'

'Ah, perhaps, but what do you mean?'

'The memory of all things ... is in all things. The mathematics of memory, the infinities and the paradoxes are just– '

Bardo nodded his head and announced, a little too prematurely, 'You've had a clear memory of the Eddas, eh? It's rare when anyone has a clear memory.'

A red-faced man sitting near them overheard this exchange and repeated it to a harijan woman. Danlo heard him say: 'He's had a clear memory,' and then others began talking, passing information back and forth. Almost everyone had returned to waking consciousness. Around the room women and men were sitting in ones and twos, staring off at the crystalline walls, or listening to the lovely, floating music of the Debussy, or talking together about their remembrances. All Danlo's senses were afire, and he became aware of ten different tracks of conversation, all at once. The experience of remembrancing had terrified and confused many people, but even these were caught up in a group excitement. The spirit of the moment was one of exaltation and profound accomplishment, and it hung in the air like an intoxicating drug. Many believed that they were the initiators of a new direction in humanity's evolution. Many sensed the species' possibilities within themselves, and whether this was delusion or revelation was impossible to tell. Danlo listened to the people in the music room, and this is what he heard:

'... inevitability is the only way to describe ...'

'... the feeling of total peacefulness must be the whole ...'

'... for me it was like a fire burning up my brain and ...'

'... how can anyone describe information coded into light? ...'

'... I don't think I understood anything, my experience was ...'

'... a dream, the Elder Eddas are a dream, and we're not really ...'

'... gods is what we might become, of course, and Mallory Ringess ...'

'... if the Eddas are instructions for becoming gods, then ...'

'... after that I became a ball of light pulsing out of ...'

'... the energy densities would have to be nearly infinite ...'

'... and expanding or else it would just collapse into ...'

'... a black hole at the centre of the galaxy which I fell down ...'

'... was so intense, the fetal stage, I had to return but ...'

'... once the DNA transcription begins, no one could remembrance ...'

'... the Ieldra coded all of it into the DNA, the memories of ...'

'... infinite possibilities, but only a god could ...'

'... remembrance too long and it's like being drunk with fire ...'

'... into madness if you stay in the memory space too long ...'

'... look, even the son of the Ringess has returned, and he's ...'

'... Danlo wi Soli Ringess, they said his name was ...'

'... wild, both of them, but only the cetic remains and he's as ...'

'... a god, listen, if he's calling for God, he's lost in ...'

'... the great remembrances, as rare as lightning striking twice ...'

'... the same place we were all trying to find but they've seen ...'

'... God, oh God, oh God ...'

Danlo looked over to see Hanuman rocking from side to side on his futon, lying back and rocking as he moved his thin lips. It was Hanuman, he realized, who had been crying out in his remembrance, calling for God. His eyes were closed so tightly that he seemed to be squinting; sweat beads rolled down his cheeks, leaving streaks of water against his white skin. Danlo leaned over to him and placed his hand over his friend's mouth. Hanuman's lips were hard and hot. 'Shhh, mi mokashu la, shantih, shantih,' Danlo said. 'Wake up, now, my brother, and be at peace.'

But Hanuman was locked into remembrance, and Bardo edged over, then. He reached down to pull Danlo's hand away from Hanuman's mouth. 'There, careful you don't smother him,' he said. 'You won't bring him back by words, too bad.'

Thomas Rane came over, and Surya Surata Lal, and others. They stood in a circle over Danlo and Hanuman. They looked down at them, and their eyes were full of candlelight and awe.

'Who remembrances deepest, remembrances longest,' Kolenya Mor said.

'Well, Danlo has had a clear memory, and deep,' Bardo said.

'It's plain that the journeymen, both of them, remembranced too deeply,' Surya said. 'We've got to control these experiences before someone dies of them.'

'Quiet now,' Thomas Rane said. His face was calm, and the silver fibres of his robe gleamed. 'No one has ever died from remembrancing.'

Surya's little face tightened up and she said, 'I think the young cetic drank too much kalla. Well, he was warned.'

'Take three sips of kalla and be God,' someone said.

'We should have controls,' Surya huffed out. 'I've said that before.'

'I've never seen anyone remembrance this deeply,' Kolenya Mor said. There was amazement in her voice. 'What must it be like?'

Thomas Rane knelt down next to Danlo and began working on Hanuman's face muscles. But the massage did little good, for Hanuman continued to cry out, and his words grew even more pained and ominous: 'Everything is God, I am God, my God, my God...'

'Of course, it's not just the kalla, it's his own memories that are eating him up,' Surya said, and she shot Danlo a quick, sour look, as if to ask him why his friend should suffer such deep memories.

Hanuman's hands were locked together over his navel, and Danlo covered them with his own hand. He looked up at a ring of concerned faces, and a truth of the Elder Eddas came to him. We are all food for God, he remembered. We are all –

'So the young cetic is God now,' Surya said to Bardo. 'Well, we've all been tempted to think that, haven't we?'

'Ah,' Bardo said. 'No one should ever interpret another's experience.'

'But Mallory Ringess didn't become a god by remembrancing the Elder Eddas,' Surya said. 'Not just by remembrancing them.'

Danlo felt for the pulse in Hanuman's wrist, and he found it, fast and quick like a bird's, rising up in fluttering waves against his fingertips. Hanuman was still drowning in a wave of memory, he thought, and he shut his eyes and let his own memories run through him.

The universe is a womb for the genesis of gods.

'We should try to bring the Ringess into our hearts,' Surya said. 'We should let his compassion guide us. Remembrancing the great knowledge means nothing with-

out the compassion to understand it. Mallory Ringess struggled his whole life to find compassion, and we must find a way to love and honour him for that, or we'll never follow his way.'

Nadero devam arcayer, Danlo remembered. By none but a god...

While the room echoed with the soothing music of flutes and gosharps, Danlo opened his eyes to smile at Surya Lal. He took a deep breath of air, and then said, 'By none but a god shall a god be worshipped.'

'No one has said anything about worship,' Surya told him.

'But you speak of my father ... and there is worship in each of your words. He was just a man. Now he is a god, it is said. We may become gods, truly, but for a man or woman to worship anything, that is the greatest sin.'

'Is it a sin to follow the way that the Ringess showed humanity?'

'But there are many ways,' Danlo said. 'As many ways as there are human beings.'

'We only know one way of becoming gods, Young Pilot.'

'But would you rather become a god ... or God?'

Surya glanced at Bardo, and she said, 'As my cousin has repeatedly emphasized, we're not here to start a religion. I don't know anything about God. I do know about one man's immortality. The development of great powers, growth without end. The Ringess spoke about this often, the possibilities of humankind.'

Infinite possibilities.

Danlo still held his hand over Hanuman's hands, and he felt his friend's belly rise and fall with every breath. The rhythm of it carried him back into remembrance, and as he stared at the bloody flecks on Hanuman's lips, he thought about infinite possibilities. With difficulty he spoke, half to Surya, half to himself: 'It is possible to develop ... a new way of seeing. Possible for anyone, man or god. I did not know this earlier today, but I know it now. That is, I have always known it, but tonight, in the Eddas ... this new sense. Call it yugen, that is the best word for it I know. Yugen is ... a way of seeing behind surfaces, pine needles or ice or words, the fragility even of the universe. Everything is so fragile, our eyes, our breath, our mathematics, our stars. Yet tough as diamond, eternal. The paradoxes. You cannot see anything unless you can see how it is not a thing. Yugen is seeing the connectedness of all things. The folding through time, past into present, thereness into nowness. Matter is memory, and DNA, and life, and in everyone it is all folded up, the memories of the future. To see it, waiting ten billion years to be created, the possibilities of evolution – you cannot even begin to imagine the possibilities.'

For a while, Danlo sat cross-legged and talked about the Elder Eddas, or rather, told Surya and the others about his experience of them. It was hard for him to describe the indescribable, but quite a few people in the room had remembranced the Eddas themselves, however shallowly, and they seemed to understand much of what he said. At last Bardo stood up and rested his hand atop Danlo's head. He looked down at Hanuman, and then addressed the people gathered around him. Their faces were written with excitement and expectancy. 'Danlo wi Soli Ringess has had a great remembrance,' Bardo said. 'That's clear, isn't it? Perhaps his friend has too. Few of us have remembranced so deeply as the young cetic.'

Just then Hanuman began to speak again, and his words were cold knives ripping open the veils of time. For an instant, Danlo saw the future fall open in a cascade of images, and the vision of it cut him with dread and despair. 'I am God,' Hanuman murmured, 'I am God, my God, I'm one, I'm the one, my God, my God.' And then, after a space of silence, he cried out, 'No, no, no, no!'

Danlo let go of Hanuman. He stood up, cupped his hands, and whispered in Bardo's ear, 'What shall we do?

'Ah, Little Fellow, it will be all right,' Bardo said softly.

And then, so that the others could hear him, in his most reassuring voice, he said, The young cetic is not the first to become lost in the memories. I, myself, and Thomas Rane, and the other guides – we've all journeyed deeply. But there are always ways back, techniques the remembrancers can apply, at need. We'll take the young cetic to the Well, now. While we're bringing him back, please remain here and review your memories. It's been a night of great remembrance, by God!'

So saying, he squatted down and lifted Hanuman up against his belly. Bardo was endlessly strong and had no trouble carrying him. Danlo thought Hanuman looked as small as a young boy in his arms, small and fragile and sick with memories.

'Thomas Rane!' Bardo called out. 'If you will, please accompany us.'

Thomas Rane and Bardo bowed their heads toward the urn of kalla on the stage, and they bowed to the circle of people still standing around Danlo. They bore Hanuman away to the Well, which was a room of dark tanks and healing waters in the deepest part of the house. Everyone returned to their futons, then. Because the music room was now too quiet, Danlo put his shakuhachi to his lips and began to play the long, deep notes of a song Old Father had taught him, and the memories consumed him.

We are all food for God.

He knew this as part of a true remembrance, but whether or not it was a great one, he could not yet say. He looked up at the stage, at the urn gleaming golden against the black lacquer table. The next time he was called to a rite of remembrance, he promised himself he would again take three sips of kalla.