The Broken God (90 page)

Hanuman flashed Danlo a quick look, and he said, 'Don't let your love of truth destroy everything you love.'

'I do not know what you mean.'

There was a moment of silence as Hanuman worked his eyes over Danlo's face. 'You've already decided to speak against us, haven't you?'

'I ... do not know.'

'Please tell me the same truth you'd tell everyone else.'

'What truth?'

'The truth your face affirms and your lips deny.'

Danlo sighed, then said, 'You must know what I will say.'

'Yes, you'll keep our secrets, but you'll speak against us – you'll tell everyone that Ringism has been corrupted beyond redeeming. You're contemplating telling Tamara this half-truth tonight. But you mustn't. You mustn't speak to Tamara about what you've seen here. Please don't.'

'But we tell each other everything.'

'If you tell her, you'll destroy her,' Hanuman said. His voice had fallen deep and ragged, as it used to get after a spell of coughing.

'You think it is so easy to destroy a person, then?'

'Listen to me – Tamara is enchanted with the idea of creating a religion after her own image. It's what she lives for.'

'No, you are wrong.'

'Please believe me. I've seen what I've seen.'

'You are a cetic, and you have seen her face. But you have never seen ... anything deeper.'

'I'm a cetic,' Hanuman agreed. 'And it's as a cetic that I'll tell you this: if you malign the Way to her, you'll destroy whatever there is between you.'

Danlo did not like the faraway look that fell over Hanuman as he said this. He hated the paleness of Hanuman's eyes, the self-absorption, pity and dread there. These, he thought, were the attributes of a scryer who has seen some tragic and inevitable future, not the silent face of a cetic.

'I understand,' Danlo said. 'You would not want me to alienate a ... courtesan.'

'Don't say anything to her, please.'

'I should go now,' Danlo said again.

Hanuman smiled, and then he spoke, and his words were as cool as quicksilver, 'But we haven't recorded your memories yet.'

'I... cannot let you do that.'

'Please, Danlo.'

'How can you ask me this?'

'Because you're my friend.'

'Would a friend ask his friend ... what is impossible to do?'

'You've had a great remembrance,' Hanuman said. 'I should think you'd want to share it with others.'

'But it cannot be shared!'

'No?'

'No.'

'But if you could share your memories, would you?'

'I ... do not know.'

'Would you at least face one of our remembrancing computers? Would you face the memories we've chosen to record?'

'Why?'

'To see for yourself.'

Danlo rubbed the scar above his eye, then slowly nodded his head. 'If you would like.'

'We'll need a heaume, then.'

So saying, Hanuman crossed the room and stood in front of a deep mahogany cabinet nearly twice his height. As he swung open the doors, the hinges squeaked and groaned. Inside, at the bottom of the cabinet, as Danlo could see, were many skull-like heaumes stacked atop each other in a mound. They looked like trophies collected by some ancient warlord. Hanuman ignored these heaumes and turned his attention to the many shelves of heaumes above them. His little fingers danced along a shelf of heaumes, tapping over the silvery shells until he came to one that apparently satisfied him. He nodded his head and used both his hands to lift it up, and then he gave Danlo the heaume.

'I have never seen one like this before,' Danlo said. He ran his fingers across the heaume's curved, chromium surface. The metal was quite cold; looking into its mirror finish, he could see a distorted reflection of his face.

'What's wrong?' Hanuman asked.

Danlo looked back and forth between Hanuman and the gleaming heaume. He remembered that one of the first things a novice is taught is never to put a strange heaume on his head.

'This was made on Catava,' Hanuman told him. 'It's beautiful, don't you think?'

Just then, Danlo heard light footsteps along the corridor outside the chapter house; he thought that someone must be stalking closer to the room, perhaps to press his ear against the door and eavesdrop on their conversation. Hanuman, intent on examining the heaume's silvery striations, seemed not to notice this faint sound. Then the door suddenly banged open, and Bardo blundered inside. He wore a bright, formal, golden robe and a gold ring around the little finger of his right hand. His beard and hair had been freshly cut, combed and oiled; he smelled of sihu perfume, the kind that he wore when he wished to inspirit himself to lead some great ceremony. He glanced at Danlo, then at Hanuman, and his voice came rolling out like winter thunder: 'Haven't you copied his goddamned memories yet?'

'No,' Hanuman said. He seemed both surprised and dismayed to see Bardo looming above him like a mountain about to explode. For a moment, Danlo wondered if Hanuman had secretly summoned Bardo to reinforce his arguments, but if there was any truth written on his delicate, white face, clearly this could not be so.

'Well?'

'Danlo doesn't want his memories copied.'

'By God, why not?'

'You should ask him that,' Hanuman said.

Bardo pulled at his beard and looked at Danlo. His eyes were soft and sad, and he asked, somewhat rhetorically, 'Why should I have to stand here dreading you're about to tell me bad things?'

While Danlo explained his reasons for deciding to leave the Way, taking care to choose words that would not give too much offence or lay too much blame on others, Bardo walked over to Hanuman and plucked the heaume away from him. He held it cupped, upside-down, in one of his huge hands. The heaume's smooth metal seemed welded to his fingers. 'You,' he said to Danlo, 'every Ringess I've known – why do you have to be so wilful?'

'I am sorry,' Danlo said.

'Ah, I should have seen your disillusionment,' Bardo sighed. 'But I've been too damn busy.'

'I am sorry,' Danlo repeated.

'Well, you can't simply abandon us. How can I persuade you of the, ah, advantages of being a prophet among godlings?'

'I do not think you can,' Danlo said.

'But have I explicated how great these advantages might become?' Bardo turned the heaume around and around slowly between his fingers. 'Have I ... By God, what's this?'

His great voice suddenly filled the room as he stabbed his finger against the base of the heaume. There, stamped into the curved band of metal that would have fit over the back of Danlo's neck, was the seal of the Cybernetic Reformed Churches: a simple string of Edic lights twisted once so as to resemble a figure eight lying on its side.

'This isn't one of our heaumes!' Bardo shouted.

Hanuman smiled, then said, 'No, it's a cleansing heaume.'

'A cleansing heaume! Why do you have a cleansing heaume?'

'It's silly of me, but I collect such things,' Hanuman said smoothly. He moved over to a row of ten steel cabinets. He opened the door of the first cabinet. Inside were ten shelves and ten heaumes lined up on each shelf. Each heaume appeared identical to the cleansing heaume that Hanuman held in his hands.

'But these are our remembrancing heaumes!' Bardo said, pointing.

'They do look alike,' Hanuman said. He lifted out one of the remembrancing heaumes and tucked it into the crook of his right arm. He carried it over to Danlo and Bardo. 'But of course there's no insignia on the remembrancing heaumes.'

Bardo grabbed the remembrancing heaume away from Hanuman. He chewed his moustache as he held the heaume up to the light of the flame globe, and he traced his finger over its base. As Danlo could see, the smooth metal bore neither stamp nor seal of any Cybernetic church.

'We bought a thousand of these from the Catavan Architects,' Bardo admitted to Danlo. 'And we've ordered ten thousand more.'

Danlo looked back and forth between the two heaumes in Bardo's hands; they seemed more alike each other than any two thallow eggs taken from the same nest. He looked at Hanuman, smiling his empty smile, and he thought of the old saying: 'Catava makes the holiest computers.'

'The damn Architects like to mark everything they make, but we've bribed them to leave their seal off these computers,' Bardo said. 'Naturally, it would be best if the godlings didn't suspect they were wearing Architect heaumes.'

Danlo paid scant attention to his words. He was staring at Hanuman now, and Hanuman was staring at him; while Bardo cleared his throat and muttered something to himself about the high cost of dealing with Architects, Danlo and Hanuman locked eyes together in a way they had not done for a long time.

Then Bardo pointed his chin at Hanuman and demanded, 'Why did you design these heaumes thusly?'

'As a joke, of course,' Hanuman said. His eyes were as pale as chalk ice. As pale, Danlo thought, and as cold and clouded.

'A joke!'

'Well, the Architects use the cleansing heaumes to mutilate people's memories. I thought it would be ironic to design a similar-seeming computer. In order to give the people the deepest memories in the universe.'

In the time it took for Danlo's heart to beat nine times, nobody spoke. Then Hanuman continued, 'I was only going to show Danlo the difference between these heaumes.'

Hanu, Hanu, are you telling the truth?

Danlo watched Hanuman watching him, and his eyes ached at the coldness he saw there, and he did not know the answer to this question. A voice inside him cried that Hanuman would never harm him, that it was unthinkable Hanuman should ever place a cleansing heaume upon his head. No friend could do this to another, no matter if their friendship were cracking like old sea ice which has borne a heavy weight too long.

Oh, Hanu, Hanu.

As Danlo gazed at his best and deepest friend, he thought it was possible that Hanuman, himself, did not know what he had intended to do.

'Ahhh,' Bardo said. He tossed the cleansing heaume directly at Hanuman's face, and he seemed startled at the quickness of Hanuman's hands jerking up to catch it. 'You should lock this away with your other collectibles. It wouldn't do for some poor godling to put this on her head by mistake.'

While Hanuman locked the cleansing heaume in one of his cabinets, Danlo glanced at Bardo. His fat cheeks were puffed out into something resembling a smile. Clearly, Bardo accepted Hanuman's explanation, though it was also very clear that Hanuman's 'joke' had disturbed him. He is afraid of Hanuman, Danlo thought Afraid for himself.

'Now,' Bardo said to Danlo as he drummed his fingers along the crown of the remembrancing heaume, 'what we would like from you is your sense of the Eddas. We'd especially like to preserve the, ah, mystical element of your remembrance.'

Danlo noticed that Hanuman was standing next to his universal computer; his head was rigid as if he were deep in thought. Danlo turned back to Bardo and said, 'Even if you could copy the exact state of my mind, now, here ... it would not help you. Tonight I am far from any of the remembrancing attitudes.'

'Well, I don't suppose that really matters,' Bardo said.

'But only in the One Memory, in the experience of it, in the now-moment when time comes to a stop ... it is only during remembrance that there is any mystical element worth preserving.'

'So you think you know what's worth preserving and what's not?'

'All I have now,' Danlo said, 'is a memory of the Eddas. A memory ... of the One Memory.'

'Ah, but who has a finer memory of this state than you?'

Danlo looked over at Hanuman, and he thought that he had a fiercer memory of his remembrance, if not a finer one. 'Nothing in my memory can bring anyone closer to the Eddas,' Danlo said.

'Then why have you spoken so freely of your remembrance?'

'I ... do not know.'

Bardo rubbed his beard and said, 'You've spoken so eloquently, too – it's because you have this habit of telling the truth, even to those who don't deserve it. Will you listen to a friend who's only slightly less eloquent than yourself? Words are like jewels in the night. Words are like constellations of stars pointing the way when one is lost. Words can evoke the mystical feeling, as I well know from listening too attentively to your goddamned words. I, myself, mistrust this feeling, as you must know, but others crave it. For them, your words are golden. It's your words we want, Little Fellow. Hanuman tells me you have a nearly perfect memory for every word you've ever spoken.'

From a pocket in his robe Bardo removed a golden clock studded with twenty-five diamonds, a little piece of forbidden technology of a kind that had proliferated in the City since the Timekeeper's demise. He held up his hand and motioned Hanuman nearer. He gave Hanuman the remembrancing heaume and said to him, 'We've a ceremony to lead in less than two hours. I haven't time to persuade Danlo to copy his memories. You persuade him. Please.'

He turned to Danlo, reached out and rumpled his hair. 'And if he fails to illuminate you as to the advantages of doing what you should do, I'll have to speak with you privately. Do you understand? Good. Well, now, I must attend the placement of the sulki grids. With all the harassment the Order has been inflicting upon us, we'll have to hide them – or at least be more discreet.'

So saying, he bowed perfunctorily and then sauntered out of the room. After the door had banged shut, Danlo and Hanuman were left alone with each other.

Hanuman held the remembrancing heaume out to Danlo; although he spoke not a word, his eyes beckoned as if to say: Don't you trust me? Or more pointedly: Can it be that Danlo the Wild is afraid of a computer?

In truth, Danlo was afraid of computers, and it was precisely because of this fear (and out of his friendship for Hanuman) that he forced himself to take the heaume. With a quick motion, he pulled the heaume over his head, trying to smooth his hair out of the way as the chromium ear pieces squeezed over his temples. The fit was not good. His hair, though swept back behind his neck, was too thick and unruly to allow a tight fit between the logic silk and his skull. Hanuman told him that it did not really matter, that the silks lining the remembrancing heaumes generated a more powerful field than did common silks. Danlo, who had always had misgivings about encasing his brain in any kind of logic field, powerful or weak, was not comforted by this news. Indeed, in what he was doing, there was no comfort at all. The base of the heaume cut against the back of his neck, compressing the muscles and arteries there, aggravating the pain in his head. Even though the interior of his eyes throbbed so sharply he could hardly see, he looked at Hanuman and smiled. He nodded once, then shut his eyes as he waited for the computer to fill him with remembrance.