The Broken God (87 page)

'No ... never beyond.'

'The truth is, I can't risk offending him,' she said. 'He's not wooing me simply for himself.'

'For your Society, then?'

She nodded her head. 'He's sent gifts to other courtesans. Nothing so exquisite as this necklace, but he's wooing my sisters, too.'

'All this wooing must irk Bardo ... endlessly.'

'Well,' she said, 'Bardo is a jealous man.'

'It is unseemly ... to fight over women.'

'At least Bardo appreciates us for who we really are. My sisters have told me that they've never known a man who loved women as he does.'

Danlo smiled as he remembered a story he had heard about Bardo: that the huge, prepotent man had once swived nineteen women in a single night.

'Would you rather it was Bardo who sent you the pearls?'

'I'd rather not be sent gifts that I can't return.' She lifted Hanuman's necklace out of the box and held it away from her as if it were a dead snake. 'I can't return this, you know. The Mother wouldn't want me to.'

'The Mother ... is the head of your Society?'

Again, she nodded her head. 'The Mother, at this time, wishes none of us to offend either Bardo or Hanuman.'

'I see,' he said. 'The Mother is a courteous woman, yes?'

'She's the wisest woman I've ever known.'

'Then she is watching our church, yes? Watching and waiting.'

'You're not so naive about politics as you'd like everyone to think.'

'I know ... hardly anything,' he said. 'Only that Bardo has charisma and power, but Hanuman is more wilful. It is impossible to say who will prevail.'

'And whom do you wish to prevail?'

At this simple question, Danlo stood and began pacing around the room. 'I am not sure,' he said. 'I am not sure that either of them could make the Way of Ringess ... into something worthwhile. Something blessed. I am not sure that anyone could make it so.'

'We could,' she said softly.

'There speaks your pride,' he said, and he sat down next to her and kissed her forehead. 'There speaks your love.'

'Should we let Hanuman's vision sweep everyone else's aside?'

Danlo looked at the pearls dangling from Tamara's hand. They were perfect and beautiful and utterly cold, and he suddenly remembered Hanuman's universe of dolls, which had been too perfect as well.

'Hanuman has his vision,' he said. 'But we have ours, too.'

'And that's why we should preserve it while we can.'

'What do you mean?'

'Haven't you received your invitation to copy your remembrance?'

'What do you mean? How could my remembrance ... be copied?'

'Then you haven't heard? Hanuman has asked some of us to copy our remembrances into a computer that he's made.'

Now quite alarmed, Danlo was up off the cushions again, pacing back and forth, rubbing his finger along his forehead. 'But our remembrances cannot be copied! Why would Hanuman say he could do such a thing?'

Tamara replaced Hanuman's necklace in its box. She stood up and placed her hand on Danlo's chest. 'Everyone knows how hard it is to remembrance the Eddas,' she said. 'Many of the godlings have never had a clear memory, let alone an inkling of the One Memory.'

While Danlo stood staring out the window at the silvery ice of the Sound, she told him about Hanuman's plan to perfect the remembrance of the Elder Eddas. Three days ago, she said, Hanuman had begun inviting Ringists of the inner circle to copy their memories into a computer. He promised that he could record whole sequences of memories as one might record musical notes on a synthesizer. It was his plan to edit and enhance these memories, to merge them into what he called an 'essential remembrance'. A perfect remembrance – Hanuman claimed that any godling or new Ringist, upon interfacing his computer, would experience a perfectly vivid remembrance of the Elder Eddas.

'This is very bad,' Danlo said.

'Do you think so?'

'Yes.'

'Well, Bardo has consented to Hanuman's plan.'

Danlo covered his face with his hands and began rubbing his eyes. Then he looked out the window for a long time, watching the moons come out against the twilight sky. He finally said, 'Yes, Bardo has feared the remembrancing of the Eddas, too. He is the founder of a new religion – what if someone remembrances a truth that this religion calls false? What if a person of vision sees falseness ... in all that Bardo holds as true?'

'But, Danlo, what is truth?'

He smiled and said, 'I have wondered this all my life.'

'Whatever truth really is, don't you think that we should allow Hanuman to copy our remembrances? So that our truths can be incorporated into this essential remembrance?'

'Are our truths so truthful then?'

'Oh, I think they are,' she said. 'You've had a great remembrance, as everyone knows, and you've described it so beautifully, even if you always claim that you're clumsy with words. And I've seen such miraculous things, too. What are the Elder Eddas but a way of waking ourselves up? All of ourselves. To let the energy of consciousness consume us, atom by atom, cell by cell – there's an utterly ruthless force inside each of us that destroys and creates and destroys and creates, and it's all there waiting for us to let it be born, if only we could bear all the blood and the terror and the screaming. It's the most beautiful thing in the universe. I'd die to see this vision made true.'

He rubbed his head and sighed. 'Then you have decided to copy your memories into Hanuman's computer?'

'Won't you?'

'No,' he said.

'Of course not – you're not afflicted with pride as I am.' She turned away from him and stared at the polished stones lining her window sill.

'Tamara,' he said. He looked at the blonde hair hanging down her long, lithe back. He touched her shoulder and said, 'I love this pride of yours.'

'You do?'

'As I love the wind.'

She turned to face him, then, and she locked eyes with him. 'Didn't you tell me that the wind almost killed you once?'

'Yes, that is true,' he said. 'But it is also true that the wind is the breath of the world. Just as your pride is your strength and your life.'

'Do you really think so?'

'Yes,' he said.

'I was told once that my pride was an ugly program that would destroy me.'

'No, it is a blessed thing.'

'When I was a child,' she said, 'the readers in my church tried to cleanse me of pride and other sins but they never really succeeded.'

'If they had, then you would not be who you are.'

'No, of course not,' she said, and she laughed nervously. 'I've often wondered if all the efforts to cleanse my pride only made me more vain.'

'What is it that the Architects teach? – "Vanity is insanity"?'

'I suppose you must hate me for being so vain.'

'No, it is just the opposite,' he said softly. 'Each of your vainglories is like a pearl – unique, splendid, blessed. And beautiful.'

'It's you who are beautiful,' she said. She gazed at him for a long time. 'I've never known anyone like you before.'

He bowed his head once, then looked at her.

'No one has ever really seen me as you have,' she said. 'I don't think anyone ever could.'

He searched her dark eyes, then, looking for the deepest of all her vainglories. At last, he thought he saw it, gleaming like a natural pearl, this vision that she had of herself as a goddess of terrible beauty, the embodiment of all life's energies as well as the urge to death. She is terrible beauty, he thought. Ever after, he would love her for this deep, primeval beauty, and he would cherish this quality above all others.

'Yugena los anasa,' he said.

'What does that mean?'

'It means,' he said, ' "To see deeply is to love deeply".'

She smiled as if she were a little girl again, then she stepped over to the table. She picked up the box containing the string of Gilada pearls. With a flip of her hand, she snapped shut the box. The sound of wood against wood resonated through the room. 'I suppose I should keep these,' she said. 'I really wouldn't wish to offend Hanuman. But I'll never wear them, I could never wear them, now.'

She scooped up the pendant that Danlo had made, and she let it dangle from her fingers. The tear-shaped black pearl caught the colours of the night as it swung back and forth in the air. 'Men have given me many things, but no one has ever given me anything like this,' she said.

'I made it ... for you to wear,' he said.

'I wish I could wear it,' she said.

'I wish that as well.'

'If I did wear it,' she said, 'I suppose there would be a meaning to my wearing it?'

'Only the meaning we would give it.'

'But don't the Alaloi view the giving of a pearl as a promise to marry?'

'You could wear this as a troth, if you would like.'

'A troth between both of us?'

'Your promise to marry me, and mine to marry you.'

'But what would I give you?'

'The pleasure of seeing this pearl close to your heart.'

'But would we have to appoint a time for the fulfilment of this troth? I still have my calling, you know. You still have your quest.'

'Any troth we made would be ... timeless. We have all the time in the universe.'

She looked down at the pearl, and she said, 'I've never seen anything so beautiful before.'

Seeing his moment, he stepped forward to take the pendant from her. Although his whole body vibrated with excitement and he could scarcely breathe, he moved quickly, deftly. With his fingers, he spread out the pendant's black string and slipped it over her head. This trapped her long hair against her neck and shoulders. As he pulled her hair free, the pearl fell into place between her breasts.

'Oh,' she said, 'I hadn't expected it would be so heavy.'

'The pearls of the palpulve are very large,' he said.

'I didn't think I'd like wearing it so much.'

'You were made to wear it,' he said.

'I didn't think I'd ever marry anyone.'

'I have always hoped ... that I might marry you.'

'Well, I think I'd love to marry you,' she said.

'I have dreamed that someday, this will be our greatest joy.'

'Oh, but we'll always have joy,' she said. 'We were made for joy.'

He looked at her, and in her eyes there was nothing but joy, a pure, golden joy that spread out like light and warmed him inside. She kissed him then, and she led him into the fire room. That evening they practised none of the exercises of her art, nor did they take care who lay atop whom or for how long. They fell into an easy and natural love play that went on and on until they cried out in joy and clasped each other in exhaustion. For a long time, he lay next to her, holding her so tightly that his chest was crushed against hers. He felt the hardness of the pearl pressing his breastbone, cutting into the skin above his heart. The entire universe, for him, had narrowed to the immediacy of deep breathing and the thick salty scent of her neck and this little pain that gave him so much joy. He was full of joy, full of pride in finding a wife who would someday bear his children; although he feared this fierce pride more than he feared death, he could not remember having ever been so happy.

After the Holocaust, on Old Earth and across the Civilized , there arose universal religions seeking to unlock and explain the mysteries of life. There were Logism and The Passion and the Science of God. And Edeism, and Zanshin, and the Way of the Serpent. And so on. All told, during the Fifth and Sixth Mentalities of humankind, there have been 223 such religions. And all of them, in order to unleash the so-called spiritual energies, have institutionalized the use of drugs: sex, music or word drugs, or plant drugs such as the sacred teonancatl, or synthetic drugs, or the most potent drug of all, which is the interface of the human mind with the cybernetic spaces of the accursed computer.

– from A Requiem For Homo Sapiens by Horthy Hosthoh

The next day Hanuman li Tosh invited Danlo to meet him in the computer room of Bardo's cathedral. To call it 'Bardo's cathedral' was misleading, for although Bardo oversaw everything that happened within that great heap of stones, he did not own the building, nor did the Way of Ringess. The Timekeeper, remembering too well the history of Old Earth, long ago had delimited the power of all organizations within the City. (Excepting the Order, of course.) The Timekeeper had decreed that the societies, cartels, associations and religions seeking to establish themselves in Neverness should have no legal status nor should they be able to own property. In keeping with the covenants between the Order and the City, Bardo's cathedral was owned in condominium by the many Ringists who had paid for its purchase. These Ringists, toward the latter third of deep winter in the year 2953, numbered at least four thousand. And there were more of them every day. Since Hanuman's Fire Sermon, the evening joyances inside the cathedral were packed with men and women wishing to begin the great journey toward godhood. There were so many new Ringists that Surya Lal, who had become Bardo's confidante and administrator, had to use a computer to enrol their names.

'If this growth continues, we'll have to hold two joyances daily,' Bardo was heard to tell Surya. There are so many of these new godlings. Too many to know by name and face, too bad. Even for one with a memory such as mine. And if they don't know Bardo, by God, why should they be loyal to Bardo? It's my thought that we should require the new Ringists to take an oath, along with their profession of the Three Pillars. An oath of loyalty and obedience to me.'

On a cold day, late in the afternoon of the 66th, Danlo made the short journey through the streets of the Old City to the cathedral. The Old City is full of fine old buildings, some of them quite tall, some of them graceful, glittering sweeps of organic stone. Bardo's cathedral stood out among them not because of its height or its splendour, but because of its quaintness (as well as its beauty). It occupied most of a block just south of Danladi Square. Because most of the streets in that part of the City parallel the Old City Glissade, which runs straight from the Hollow Fields to North Beach, the blocks around Danladi Square are oriented from northwest to southeast. But Bardo's cathedral had been built on an exact east-west axis; thus, unlike any of the hotels or towers nearby, it sat on the block obliquely, at an odd angle. The makers of the cathedral – they were Kristians of the Society of Kristoman the God – had built it that way because the cathedrals of Old Earth that were the glory of their religion had each been laid out east to west. Bardo's cathedral followed this ancient design; as seen from deep space, it was laid out as a cross, a shape and symbol known to be sacred to all sects of Kristians. The head of the cross pointed east toward the Academy; the foot of the cross was practically planted in the heart of the Old City. In between was eight hundred feet of graceful stonework, long windows, and great flying buttresses made of granite blocks. Where the arms of the cathedral met the building's main body, above the crossing, a magnificent tower had been built. This central tower rose up a hundred and fifty feet above the rest of the cathedral, and it could be seen from the Academy. With its intricate traceries that seemed to drip across the granite facing like icicles, with its arched windows and delicate aretes pointing toward the heavens, it was considered one of the most beautiful structures in the City. Bardo, however, thought that the tower's sharp angles and rectilinearity made for the wrong shape with which to surmount his cathedral. (Curiously, he did not mind holding his joyances in a building shaped like a cross. As a student of symbols who had once considered becoming a notationist, he knew that the cross was one of the oldest of symbols, much older than any church or religion. The cross – according to the notationists – is the great Tree of Life which stands at the centre of the universe. It is the bridge over which the soul makes its crossing in order to reach God. The most ancient meaning of the cross is that of life's suffering. Two kindling sticks crossed together and rubbed, as a man rubs against a woman, will ignite the terrible fire that is all life.) And so Bardo had plans to pull down the tower and to replace it with a golden clary dome. He wanted to open the cathedral's ceiling vault, so that from inside, the heavens could be seen in all their glory. Bardo had other plans as well, as Danlo discovered that day when he skated off the gliddery and approached the cathedral's western portal. There, Bardo stood beneath the great centre archway. Although he was busy directing the refurbishing of the cathedral's facade, he noticed Danlo skating up the ice and called to him.