The Broken God (92 page)

Where is the lightning to lick you with its tongue? Where is the frenzy with which you should be inocu-

lated? Behold, I teach you the god within: he is this lightning, he is this frenzy.

He stumbled about blindly, afraid that he might fall over and knock into one of Hanuman's cabinets. He struggled to control his breathing, to calm the fiery waves of bliss pounding through his brain.

So this is the real electronic samadhi, he thought. The samadhi that the cyber-shamans keep for themselves.

As he grimaced and ground his teeth against the intense pleasure of the moment, he thought that nothing in the universe could be so marvellous as this samadhi. And then, as if a light had been turned off, he fell out of samadhi and stood there panting. He remembered something that he should never have forgotten. He remembered the true Elder Eddas. True remembrance was not the same as entering electronic samadhi. The sudden heaven of the cyber-shamans was like standing at the top of a mountain and looking down to see each crack and glittering fleck of mica in every pebble and stone in the world; it was seeing broadly and more intensely, the analysis of each wavelength of light reflected off all the crevasses and snowflakes and ice, out to where the world curves off into infinity. But true remembrance was like looking inside all things, into the interior light that makes all things reach out toward life. True remembrance was being lightning itself, not merely being dazzled by its flash. He remembered, for a moment, what it was like to see clearly and deeply, to be one's deepest self, and then he thought back upon something that Old Father had once said: Surfaces glitter intelligible lies; the depths inside blaze with unintelligible truths. And surely Hanuman must have known this. He must have known that it was only himself he had trapped in his glittering cybernetic heaven.

'No, Hanu, this is not the true Eddas – it is only a simulation,' Danlo said aloud. His words vibrated between the heaume and the bones of his head. To him, his voice sounded too tender, too passionate, too pained. He should have taken off the heaume immediately but instead he opened his eyes to look at Hanuman.

He saw only blackness. For a moment, he was light-headed and disoriented and sightless in his mind. He felt his brain fall electric and strange, tingling with an aura of sick anticipation. And then suddenly there was light. That is, he was blinded by a stroke of lightning that tore straight through his eyes to the back of his brain. Lightning is always just lightning, but this time he felt the heat of it rather than the illumination. Raging through his brain cells was a storm of neurotransmitters, dopamine and taurine and norepinephrine, this time of a slightly different concentration and mixture than before. This time, there were no beautiful visions; there was no sense of making connections with a mind greater than his own; there was no pleasure, but only pain. All the pain in the world.

'Hanu, Hanu!' he cried out, but no one seemed to hear him. He knew that it was only Hanuman who programmed these chemicals of consciousness; he knew that he might escape this torturous interior landscape merely by facing away from the computer. And yet he could not face away. He felt himself caught, as in a whirlwind of flames, a hideous space more akin to an epileptic fit or madness than it was to any kind of samadhi. He threw his hands to his head then and bruised his fingertips against the hard metal heaume. As if a giant hammer had smashed both his knees, he fell writhing to the floor. He cracked his elbow against the floor tiles and bit his tongue, but the agony of bruised bone was nothing against the fire inside his head. He burned with the dread and despair of utter neverness, all the neurons of his brain, all the cells of his body. He trembled to tear himself into a trillion bits and parts, to scatter every burning piece of himself in the icy sea, if only this would extinguish the terrible fire. But the fire grew hotter and hotter, and he burned in the pain of himself, a pain inside pain that would never end.

Danlo, Danlo, you must wish to consume yourself in your own flame: how could you wish to become new unless you had first become ashes?

All things, however, must finally end. Danlo managed to claw the heaume off his head, and he lay crumpled on the floor, sweating and panting. He became aware of Hanuman, who was kneeling above him. Hanuman looked down at Danlo as he grasped a folded white linen and wiped the blood from Danlo's lips. He looked into Danlo's eyes and made sure that Danlo had returned to an even consciousness, and then he helped him to sit up. He hurried to ease himself away from Danlo, to stand and keep a proper space between them. His hand was trembling, slightly, as he gave the linen into Danlo's hand and said, 'Here, you've bitten your tongue.'

'Oh,' Danlo said. He used the linen to clean his mouth. His tongue was raw and bleeding and he could hardly speak. 'Why did you do that, Hanu?'

Hanuman stood close by, fingering the diamond clearface on his head. He bent down to pick up the heaume that Danlo had taken off. He looked into its shiny chromium surface, which was now scratched and dented. Then he dropped his eyes and smiled at Danlo coldly. 'This was only a simulation, too,' he said. 'Would you give the people the true Eddas?'

Danlo looked up at Hanuman, and the muscles along the back of his neck were stiff and aching. For the first time, he could almost see Hanuman's real pain. Just as electronic samadhi was only a glittering reflection upon the surface of the One Memory, the fiery simulation that had raged through Danlo's brain was only a shadow of what Hanuman must have felt the night of his first remembrance.

Oh Hanu, Hanu, I truly did not know.

Danlo inclined his head toward the heaume that Hanuman was holding. He said, 'I did not know the memories ... would be so consuming.'

Hanuman was still smiling, but there was no humour in him. 'It's a clever program. Lord Pall helped design the heaumes, you should know.'

'But he has been against the Way from the very beginning!'

'That's true,' Hanuman said.

'You have made an accommodation with him? With the Order?'

'We've reasoned with him,' Hanuman said. 'We've shown him that it would be silly to continue this ill feeling between the Order and the Way.'

'I ... see.'

'Lord Pall is the greatest of cetics. He's taught me much of what I know.'

'Have you suborned him or has he suborned you?'

'No one has suborned anyone,' Hanuman said. 'We've merely reasoned with the greatest lord of the Tetrad.'

Danlo rubbed his elbow and asked, 'But what of Lord Ciceron, then?'

'I'm sure that Lord Pall will reason with Lord Ciceron. They're both reasonable men.'

'I see.'

'It's quite reasonable, don't you think, that all Ordermen should be allowed remembrance?'

After rubbing his neck, Danlo pointed at the heaume. 'That is no remembrance,' he said.

'No? But we've given the people the best of the Elder Eddas.'

'Your Eddas,' Danlo said. 'Your interpretation of them.'

'In truth, it's Bardo who's authored most of our doctrines. I've merely edited the memories to fit these doctrines.'

'But what about your remembrance, Hanu?'

Hanuman drew his finger along the inflamed skin of his forehead that edged the clearface and said, 'We'll give them my words from the Fire Sermon. That should be enough. There's no need to torture the poor people.'

'As you tortured me?'

'I only wanted to show you that the memories we copy into the heaume must be selected carefully. I'm sorry if I caused you any pain.'

Danlo looked at him and said, 'It does not matter.'

'We must give the godlings the best memories, not the worst.'

'And you would sweeten these memories with electronic samadhi, yes?'

'It would give them something of the mystical.'

'Yes, something,' Danlo said.

'Please don't look at me that way,' Hanuman said. 'You should know, too great a pleasure is as dangerous as too much pain.'

'Dangerous ... to whom?'

'Dangerous to us, of course. Dangerous to the godlings. Which is why we must control these remembrances.'

'But you are not just controlling, Hanu. You are making a counterfeit of true remembrance.'

'What's true, then?' Hanuman asked. 'Do you mean your vision of what you call the One Memory? How can we make people see that? Not everyone has your talent for miracles, you should know.'

Danlo touched the feather dangling from his hair, and he said, 'I believe ... that everyone does.'

'No, they don't, which is why we must give them your words, your memories, your understanding. We'll even give them a little cybernetic samadhi – we'll give them a taste for the miraculous.'

'No,' Danlo said, 'you will give them sweetness instead of honey; glitter instead of gold. Your simulation of the Eddas ... will never be real.'

Now Hanuman's smile was no longer empty; now his face was full of cold, cruel amusement. 'But no one wants reality,' he said. 'Reality is much too real – why else do you think people always hate anyone who'd show them the truth?'

Seeing that Danlo made no move to stand up, Hanuman knelt down in front of him and sat back on his heels, politely and quite formally. He held his little hands folded in his lap as he talked of people's need to enter deeper modes of consciousness and go beyond themselves – but not too deep or too far beyond. He told Danlo that most people, when they knelt beneath the remembrancing heaumes, would be satisfied with only the slightest taste of cybernetic samadhi. It was his duty, he said, to measure out this bliss, much as a chef carefully adds garlic essence to a tableful of frying kurmash. Danlo thought he was both cynical and sincere, too aware of the darkness that everywhere permeated the universe and yet strangely innocent, almost like a bright-eyed altar boy who stands before the Edic lights at a vastening ceremony and is forced to ponder mysteries he is too young to comprehend. Danlo sat there listening, and the floor beneath him was cold as ice. There was something eerie and foreboding about them sitting together on uncovered floorstones, while the wind blew sheets of spindrift against the windows and screamed through the cathedral's spires. These sounds sifted through stone walls into the open spaces of the chapter house; there were other sounds, too: quick steps up and down the hallway outside the door; excited, muffled voices; swishing silk. In the distance, far above the cathedral and the City, the thunder of rockets fell deep and smothered out of the night. Listening to the lightships leaving Neverness for the stars near the Vild, Danlo fell into remembrance. After a while, he pulled out his shakuhachi and held it lightly in his hands. He held it to his lips, but he did not play it. Hanuman eyed this length of bamboo with longing and fear, and hatred, too. He hated Danlo's ease with mystical music, just as he obviously hated it when Danlo told him that the imminent remembrancing ceremony was a betrayal of everything natural and blessed. Danlo regretted the rebuke in his own voice, for he still clove to the Fravashi ideal of becoming a perfect mirror of all things, and he would have liked to have reflected the best part of Hanuman's selfness, not the worst. But his higher duty was to truth, or so he thought, and thus he spoke of the great wrong that Hanuman and Bardo were about to inflict upon the people of the City. He spoke of electronic samadhi, of how the yogin had coined this expression – derisively – to refer to an artificial state that merely imitated true samadhi. Because he wanted to lay open his heart, he admitted that he cherished electronic samadhi, for what it was, but he also warned that using it to facilitate the veneration of Hanuman's Eddas was the worst kind of manipulation, akin to sidling someone's DNA and fashioning viruses with which to infect the brain.

'It is shaida to give children sweet things,' Danlo said, 'ail the while knowing ... that it will ruin their hunger for what is truly blessed.'

And what was most blessed, according to Danlo, was the One Memory, this marvellous shimmering consciousness that could never be simulated because it was not an experience of the senses, nor a mentation, nor any emotion; it was neither a subjective ecstasy of the mind nor the vistas of the objective universe which the gods observe when they open their vast, ancient eyes. The One Memory, Danlo said, was the natural state where every atom of one's body 'remembers' its connection with all the elements of the universe. Thus reality (and truth) is something created between the universe and each living thing.

For what seemed a long while, Danlo sat there in the shadow of a computer cabinet, talking about the mystery of memory. Hanuman's eyes were like pools of pale blue fire burning out of the darkness; he watched Danlo with an intensity that annihilated all time, and yet they were both aware that time was passing too quickly, that the appointed hour of the new remembrancing ceremony was drawing nearer. Everything about this exchange of urgent words had the bittersweet thrill of a last conversation. Danlo saw that the more he spoke of the One Memory, the more uneasy and desperate Hanuman became. Soon the fire in Hanuman's eyes quickened to a terrible apprehension. There was a falling away of years from his face. His fine cheeks, usually so pale and hollow, were now bright with blood. He squinted in pain as if he were coming into the moment when he had first beheld the sun. He might have been a child again reliving his fear and love of light. His mouth opened in what was almost a scream; he threw his hand up against his tightened brows, shielding his eyes from Danlo's eyes, from the look of compassion that Danlo flashed him. How he hates to be loved, Danlo thought. In truth, Hanuman hated Danlo's love of remembrance, his love of life, this rare and wild love that Danlo himself called anasala. Above all other things, Hanuman hated the naturalness with which Danlo opened himself to the One Memory. And so, because he had found the part of Danlo that he could hate, sincerely and utterly, he suddenly turned away from Danlo. He sat like a statue of a neurosinger, still and remote, staring into himself. Around his head, the clearface was all glittering lights and hard, reflective surfaces. This diamond shell cut him off from any words or compassion that Danlo might have given him. Hanuman retreated into the private universe that only he could know, and Danlo hated him for isolating himself this way. Danlo looked at Hanuman's smooth, silent face, and now he could see only their hatred for each other. Since the day of their first meeting, these hatreds had always been present and growing, but now, like drillworms chewing free of the body when an infected hibakusha has died, their darker passions emerged into the light for them both to see.