The Broken God (93 page)

He burns and he burns, but he hates burning alone.

Danlo suddenly understood Hanuman's deeper reasons for taking him into such a hellish simulation of remembrance; he felt too keenly the twisted compassion that Hanuman bore for him and bound them to a single fate. He closed his eyes then, remembering something that Tamara had said to him: that Hanuman would always destroy the object of his compassion before losing himself in bondage to it.

When he could stand it no longer, Danlo sprang to his feet and said, 'I should go.'

Hanuman stood up, too, and he faced Danlo. In his left hand, he gripped the remembrancing heaume. He bowed to it and asked, 'Will you help me?'

Something in Hanuman's voice made Danlo suspect that he was being asked to do much more than merely record his memories. In Hanuman's eyes, there was a dread of some great event or crime yet to be committed, and so Danlo shook his head and whispered, 'No ... I cannot.'

'Please, Danlo.'

'No,' Danlo said, and his own voice was full of dread too.

Hanuman's face emptied of all hope, but one more time he looked at Danlo and asked, 'Will you help me do what must be done?'

'No,' Danlo said, and after he had spoken there was a silence almost without end.

'You should go now,' Hanuman finally said. His face was drained of all emotion, as dead as a moon. 'Please, go.'

Danlo hesitated a moment, then said, 'Goodbye, Hanu. I wish you well.'

He almost ran to the door, but before he could open it, Hanuman called out, 'You should be careful of the truth, you know. Bad things always happen to those who think they must bring the truth.'

Without plan or destination, Danlo left the chapter house and walked back through the long corridors into the cathedral. He passed several godlings who were busy making errands for Bardo. They were dressed in formal robes, and the golden cloth they wore in devotion to the ideals of Ringism creased and crinkled as they bowed low to Danlo and hastened out of his way. When Danlo entered the cathedral proper and stood inside the nave, many more godlings were completing the preparations for the night's ceremony: setting up candelabra stands; lighting candles; laying out many rows of little red rugs for people to kneel upon. Because Danlo was grieving over what had just occurred between him and Hanuman – and because he was curious – he decided to watch the remembrance. He walked through the nave and passed through a great archway where he found the stairwell leading up through the central tower. The doors to the stairwell however, were guarded by a surly-looking godling whom Danlo did not know. But the godling knew him, and he allowed him to pass without explanation. Danlo would have raced up the stairs three at a time, as he had learned to do in Perilous Hall, but every time he tensed his arm muscles, a wicked pain shot through his injured elbow, and so he climbed the worn steps carefully, as if he were a farsider from some made-world who had never negotiated steps before. His footsteps echoed through the empty stairwell, and he made his way up to the mezzanine level. Much further above him, he had heard, at the top of the tower was Bardo's sanctum, a room of great arched windows which looked out on the four points of the City. He wondered if Bardo was in his sanctum now, perhaps rehearsing a sermon for the ceremony, perhaps swiving some bright-eyed godling whom he was personally instructing in the delights of submitting to the Way. He smiled and shrugged his shoulders then, and entered a dark corridor that smelled of ashes and old stone. Soon he found the central loggia overlooking the nave. He stepped out onto a narrow balcony; it was as if he were stepping out into space. The cathedral's glorious interior opened up before him. On either side of him, and above, great pillars flared outward into the granite ribs that made up the cathedral's vault. Below was the main body of the nave, which was now golden in the light of thousands of candles. He placed his hands on the balcony's railing and leaned out to get a better view. The fine stonework on the outside of the balcony's parapet, he noticed, was carved with Kristian angels and other godlike beings.

He could clearly see every detail of the windows and walls around him. He looked across the nave at the pinnacles and pretty wall ornaments where Bardo had cunningly hid his sulki grids. He looked straight down below him. There, godlings scurried about the chancel, arranging vases of fireflowers around the altar. One godling, a devout-seeming woman with a gold ring in her ear, approached the altar table and filled the familiar golden urn with what looked like plain sea water. From the aisles behind the nave, other godlings appeared pushing steel cans over the bumpy floorstones. Each cart was stacked full with remembrancing heaumes. The godlings laid these out in front of the altar, one silvery heaume precisely placed in the centre of each red rug. When they were done, Danlo quickly counted the heaumes. There were a thousand of them arrayed in rows between the altar and the cathedral's great double doors.

Oh Hanu, Hanu, why have you done what you have done?

Because he did not wish to be seen, Danlo moved back into the loggia's shadows. He waited there while the cathedral began to reverberate with a lovely, godly music. He stood listening to the music that the sulki grids made, listening and remembering. After a while, the doors were opened and people submitted their steel invitation cards as they poured inside and took their places by each of the rugs. There were a thousand people, many of whom were godlings wearing golden formals or other gold-coloured articles of clothing. Many were newcomers attending their first remembrance. Bardo had even invited a few masters and lords of the Order who had hitherto been scornful of Ringism: the Sonderval, Elia li Chu, Mahavira Netis, and most surprisingly, Lord Mariam Erendira Vasquez, the fourth lord of the Tetrad. They knelt on their rugs like everyone else and sat holding the gleaming heaumes in their laps. Then, from a doorway behind the chancel, Bardo stepped out into the light and took his place at the centre of the altar. He was splendid in his golden robe, to which he had fastened a great, flowing cape of black velvet. He was all magnanimity and grandness, and he cleared his throat and delivered a great sermon that boomed like thunder through the nave. After he had finished, he directed Surya Lal and other highly placed Ringists in pouring water from the golden urn into blue cups. There were many of these cups, which were passed up and down the rows of godlings kneeling on their rugs. Danlo watched the thousand people place their lips to the cups, and he lamented that this ritual drinking of water was all that remained of the kalla ceremony. He listened with regret as Bardo sipped from his own gleaming cup and then announced: 'It's known that Mallory Ringess became a god and will return among us. Soon, sooner than you might expect. If you would follow his way toward the infinite things, you must renounce your old ways of thinking and remembrance the Elder Eddas.'

Upon these portentous words the sulki grids bent and twisted the light waves streaming through the cathedral and on the altar next to Bardo an imago of Mallory Ringess appeared. Many had never seen a sulki-made imago and there were gasps of amazement. Although the imago's eyes were too bright a blue and it wore a formal pilot's robe (which Mallory Ringess had rarely worn) it seemed very real. The imago looked out over the people kneeling before him, and it smiled. It stepped down from the altar. Among the people it walked, smiling, beaming peacefulness and great power, and speaking in a wonderfully rich voice of the joy of becoming a god. At last it paused and held out its finely made hands, beckoning to the heaumes that almost all of them were clutching. It invited the people to put on the heaumes and remembrance the Elder Eddas. Danlo watched as a thousand people lifted up their heaumes and a thousand heads disappeared into these glittering metal shells. He looked through the rails of the balcony to the altar below, and he watched Hanuman emerge from the chancel's doors. That night Hanuman wore no toque or hat of any kind; the clearface covering his head was lit up brilliantly and a ghastly purple light spilled down over his face. He bowed to Bardo, to the imago of Mallory Ringess, and he bowed to the thousand seekers whose eyelight had disappeared into a world that Danlo had come to know too well. There were rows of seekers kneeling dead-eyed and motionless. The polished heaumes along one row reflected the empty faces in the row behind, row upon row all through the nave. Hanuman looked up toward the loggia and smiled as if he knew Danlo was watching, and he bowed deeply without mockery or shame. Then he turned his attention to directing the remembrance. He faced himself into the computer that he wore, and his eyes turned inward upon himself, and then he was gone, too.

We classify disease as error, which nothing but Truth of Mind can heal.

– from Science and Health by the Eddy, founder of Kristian Science

And so Danlo, true to his word, spoke out against the Way of Ringess. During the darkest days of the year, when the first sarsaras blow white and deadly out of the north and sweep the citizens of Neverness off the streets, he went about the colleges of the Academy, speaking to friends, explaining to masters and his fellow journeymen why he had decided to renounce Ringism. He spoke passionately, lucidly and sincerely. But, as Old Father was fond of saying: Truth disappears the moment it is told – like steamy breath into air.' Thus Danlo discovered that for every academician he persuaded against attending a remembrance, three more were excited to apprehend the Elder Eddas in any way they could, and they were all too eager to kneel beneath Hanuman's heaumes. To counteract this mass religious fervour, Danlo began to speak cleverly, even cunningly, in a way that was not natural for him to speak. He gave tongue to the verbal razors of the logicians in order to cut away at unreason wherever he found it; he used secret cetic techniques to play upon others' doubts and alarms; into the tender ears of his listeners he even injected Fravashi word drugs, carefully designed memes and phrases that would inoculate them against the temptations of an explosive new religion. In a little time, people began to listen to him. To all devoted Ringists, he became a nuisance, and then more than a nuisance. He was, after all, Danlo wi Soli Ringess, he of the great remembrance, son of a god. Everyone knew that Hanuman and Bardo were his friends; why, they wondered, would a friend speak against the way of his friends, unless that way were indeed tainted and twisted with lies? Ironically, Danlo's growing influence upon the members of the Order won the approval of Chanoth Chen Ciceron, whom Danlo detested as the most insincere of men. When Lord Ciceron made overtures of friendship – or rather alliance – Danlo politely demurred, citing his mathematical and remembrancing studies as reason for rejecting numerous dinner invitations. For a young pilot who had not yet taken vows to rebuff his Lord Pilot was unheard of. Danlo worried that Lord Ciceron might find a way to deny him his full pilotship, but this was a vague and distant worry, as nothing next to his despair over Hanuman.

This despair was almost total. Not since the Devaki had died (not even when he had learned that it was his father who had brought the slow evil to his tribe) had he suffered such abandonment of hope for another human being. Despair coloured all his words and each of his acts, and its colour was as black as the oil that the scryers rub into their empty eye sockets. His face bore the stark lines of sleepless nights and forgotten meals; his body fell gaunt like that of a wolf at the end of midwinter spring. He had a presentiment of disaster, and all his visions of the future revolved around the image of Hanuman li Tosh, with his diamond skullcap and his lifeless eyes. He tried to communicate something of his foreboding to Tamara. One night, over a late meal of bloodfruit and cheese, he talked about Hanuman's love of power and asked her not to record her memories. With clear, calm words she promised to reconsider her appointment with Hanuman. But then she laughed, as if to say, I'll do whatever it pleases me to do, and her laughter was full of dark music and pride. When he left her house the next morning, a blizzard was beginning to blow, a great mother storm of furious winds and blinding panicles of ice. He hoped this bitter weather might keep her inside next to her fireplace where she would be comfortable and safe from harm.

It is an historical curiosity that the sarsara of 2953 raged for sixty-six days, more or less continuously, far into midwinter spring of the succeeding year. It was the longest storm ever recorded in Neverness, and in many ways it was the worst. Considering that it was very cold, there was a good deal of snow, and the wind blew at a deadly speed of a hundred feet per second, instantly icing the flesh of anyone foolish enough to expose her face. The cold wind killed people: hibakusha huddled over their street fires; harijan beggars without family or shelter; autists, of course, and even a few farsiders who lost their way along the paths and the snowdrifts of the Gallivare Green and froze to death only fifty yards from the Yarkonan embassy. It was a grim, dark time, made all the darker by the blowing spindrift and the endless snow clouds that lay over the streets blocking out the sun. And then, on the 74th of deep winter, there came news that numbed the people of the City and made them eye their neighbours with suspicion and loathing: Chanoth Chen Ciceron and two other members of the Order fell ill with a disease that seemed to mimic the depredations of the Catava Fever. When a master virologist examined Lord Ciceron's brain tissues for evidence of infection, it was discovered that he had indeed contracted a rare form of the Catava virus. It was a memory virus, a bio-weapon made on Catava long ago and long thought to be extinct, and no one could guess how it had found its way into the grey matter of Lord Ciceron's brain. But it had, and shortly after falling down into a screaming, foaming fever, Lord Ciceron began to forget things: the first part of his memory to be lost was his mathematics, followed by his grasp of the universal syntax and other huge blocks of knowledge. He forgot his history, just as he forgot all about the politics of the Order. Then he forgot his name, the name of his father and mother, the names of such common items as razors, bars of soap, or mantelets. After three days of spitting at the novices who attended him and changed his bed linen, he completely forgot how to control his bladder and bowels. When the virus attacked the stem of his brain, the virologists said, he would forget how to breathe, and that would be the end of Lord Ciceron. The other infected professionals – Angela Nain and Yang li Yang – did not forget so much so quickly. There was hope for their lives, even for part of their memories, if not their professions. As there was neither an immediate vaccine against the virus nor a cure, they were kept isolated in the Academy's hospice in comfortable little rooms next to Lord Ciceron's. Much to everyone's horror, the virologists singled out semen and vaginal secretions as the vectors of infection. This determination sent the staid academicians into a panic. It was discovered that the crusty Lord Ciceron had had many lovers: Angela Nain and Yang li Yang were only two of the young women and men he had taken to his bed. After a quick inquisition in which all members of the Order were made to reveal their sexual liaisons, the virologists constructed complicated trees diagramming who had swived whom. At least half of all the Ordermen, of course, had kept vows of celibacy, but of the remaining half, almost all were connected by unbroken chains of sexual fluids to Lord Ciceron.