The Broken God (97 page)

Danlo waited a moment before saying, 'And then?'

'After that, nothing. I suppose I met you and we ... I've been told we went off together. I'm sorry, Pilot.'

'You remember nothing more of that night?'

'Only fragments. It's as if I'd drunk too much wine. Well, no, it's really not like that at all because my memories aren't at all hazy. They're clear as glass, but they're all broken apart into thousands of pieces. I remember Hanuman reading faces, little things he said. He was quite brilliant.'

'You remember him reading faces,' Danlo said this flatly, without emotion, though it surprised him to see the table changing colours to a rich aquamarine.

'Yes, I've said that I do.'

'Nothing more?'

'What do you mean?'

'You do not remember we were standing together while he did this?'

'Is that true?'

'We were holding hands,' he said.

'I'm sorry, no.'

'Do you remember Hanuman reading Surya, then?'

'Only that Surya was thinking of the Ringess. She was almost worshipping, really. And after Hanuman read her face, she practically worshipped him.'

'Strange that you should remember this much but no more.'

'I'm sorry.'

'Then you have no memory of warning me about Hanuman?'

'Why should I do such a thing?'

'Because Hanuman frightened you that night. And other times since.'

Tamara covered her face with her hands, and she pressed her fingertips against her closed eyes. She sighed and then looked at him. 'I can't imagine being frightened of Hanuman,' she said.

'You have ... no dread of him?'

'No, I don't think so. Most of my memories of him are favourable.'

Suddenly, the drumming of Danlo's fingers stopped. 'Is it possible,' he asked, 'that you have forgotten certain things about him?'

'That would be only natural,' she said. 'Since many of my memories of him must have been connected to you.'

How is memory connected to memory? he wondered. And then: Hanu, Hanu, what is this fate connecting us like two hands joined together?

Without warning, a coldness and clarity came over him, and he sat utterly still. He was distantly aware of the table's surface falling away into a deep blue colour, and then into a luminous blue-black that swallowed up his outspread hand. His field of vision widened to include many things at once: the snow-encrusted windows; the plants hanging from the ceiling in brilliant cascades of green; Tamara's lovely face, full of perplexity and pride; and the other thing that was not of fibre or flesh or material substance, but was nonetheless just as many-textured and real. This other thing was composed of plots and aspirations and jealousies (and love), of strands of fate woven together as tightly as a tapestry, and of real events that had occurred in spacetime, in chambers and houses that human beings had made, and out in the pure, frigid air that circles the world. What he saw was not a dreamscape nor of the universe of conjecture, but rather a perfect visualization of reality, whatever reality really was. It came to him in an instant, fully formed, like a jewel falling out of the night. It was faceted with ten thousand surfaces and angles; he had a sure knowledge of only a few of these parts: Tamara's loss of fear for Hanuman; a memory virus made hundreds of years ago on Catava; the cleansing ceremony of the Cybernetic Universal Church. To see the whole structure of Tamara's disfigurement from these parts astonished him. And more, it sickened him to know that what he saw so completely must be true.

The universe is like a hologram, he remembered. Every part contains information about the whole.

All his life he had sought a new way of seeing, and now, here, in a secluded room closed in by a raging blizzard, his eyes were beginning to open. In truth, he should have seen it sooner, but his love for Hanuman had blinded him. But now there was no love. Or rather, love had been joined – right hand to left – to that terrible emotion that he feared more than any other thing.

'Please, Pilot, have I said anything to anger you?'

He sat staring at his clenched fist as it trembled atop the table, which now ran with the darkest of red colours. His head hurt, and his throat, and he was afraid the blood vessels behind his eyes might burst. There came a moment when he saw that he might actually pass into unconsciousness or stroke of death. It would be an easy thing to do. He was very close, walking for the first time this particular razor's edge. He was very close, as well, to cooling this deadly rage, but he allowed himself, for a single moment, the luxury and satisfaction of pure, righteous anger. And then he fell – instantly, dizzyingly – far beyond mere physical emotion into that other place which is all nightmare and torment. Terrible images burned through his mind. There was a moment of sickening freedom in which anything was possible and all things permitted. He wanted to murder a man. He wanted to crush the breath from the throat of his best friend. He wanted this more than he wanted life, and there was a moment when he would have died to accomplish it. Then he looked down at the table reflecting a dark image of his face. The chatoy finish was now purple-black, the colour of a bruise where the blood has clotted deep in the tissues. He suddenly raised his arm and punched downward, smashing this hard surface with his fist. He gripped his damaged knuckles and watched the colours in the table die.

No, I won't.

'Pilot, Pilot.'

When he looked up, Tamara was standing next to him, resting her hand on his shoulder. She touched his face, slowly, carefully, as a zoologist might touch a sleeping cobra.

'No, I will not,' he whispered to himself. 'Never again.'

'Pilot, I'm sorry. I'm sorry.'

Never hurting another, not even in one's thoughts.

He rubbed the knuckle of his ring finger. It was bleeding and already swollen; probably it was broken. He promised himself, then, that he would never again allow his hatred for Hanuman to overcome him. If he could not purge this ugliness from himself, he would bury it deep inside and build a wall around it. As an oyster surrounds an irritant grain of sand with layers of pearl, he would build walls and walls around his urge to kill, only each wall would be as pure and adamantine as diamond. 'I've never seen anyone so angry,' Tamara said.

'I am ... sorry,' he said. The coolness of her hand against his temple was a marvellous thing. He covered her hand with his hand, then he smiled. 'But I have never had any anger for you.'

'No?'

'No, never.'

He wondered if he should tell her what he had seen. How could she believe the accusations he would direct at Hanuman? That Hanuman was both a murderer of minds and a slel necker? How could he believe this himself?

These are things that I cannot know, but nevertheless I know them.

Later, with logic, with knowledge, with all the resources of the Order, he would analyse the events leading up to Tamara's memory disfigurement. But now there was only the certainty of this new way of seeing.

'Your face,' she said. 'There was so much hatred there.'

'Yes, hatred,' he said. He peeled her hand away from his cheek and looked at her.

'I've never seen anything like it before. At least, I don't remember.'

'Anyone can hate,' he said. 'A child can hate.'

'From what the others told me about you, I'd never have imagined that you could hate anything.'

'I was ... thinking,' he said. 'Thinking about what happened to you.'

Even now, as he squeezed her hand tightly and clenched his teeth against the popping of his knuckle, he was brooding over Hanuman's manoeuvres to ruin her, seeing the whole of this scheme from beginning to end. In the beginning, there was pride, pain and immense ambition. In the beginning, in secret, in a locked room deep within the cetics' tower, Hanuman had approached his Lord cetic the very private and unapproachable Audric Pall. The two men had conspired to gain power over the Order. And over the Way of Ringess. Hanuman had promised to aid Lord Pall's ascendancy within the Tetrad, if only the Lord Pall would promise to use his position to stop the Order's harassment of the Way, and eventually, to support the growth of Bardo's church. And so, promises had been made. Never saying a word, Lord Pall made signs with his fingers and face, and he came to an understanding with Hanuman. Only, Hanuman understood much more than did Lord Pall. Hanuman could see that Lord Pall was entranced with the temptation to manipulate and make a new religion. Lord Pall would use his – and Hanuman's – immense cetic skills to accomplish this. He, the powerful and wise Lord of cetics, would impose his will upon Ring-ism, and he would use its wild, religious energy to revitalize the Order. He told himself that he would do all this unselfishly, legally, if secretly. He would become Lord of the Order and the secret master of a new, universal religion. And he would continue to guide and control Hanuman li Tosh – or so he thought.

Oh Hanu, Hanu, how clearly you understand that the whole question of power always turns upon who has fear of whom.

After this conclave – recorded neither by machine nor the minds of men, save the two cetics – Hanuman had gone down into the Farsider's Quarter where he knew many people: wormrunners, warrior-poets, even a few slel neckers were among the more dangerous of his acquaintances. He solicited the services of an outlaw splicer, a smug little man with drooping moustaches and ugly, jewelled eyes. For a huge sum of money, the splicer procured for Hanuman a vial of viruses made six hundred years previously on Catava. Like a bottle of Summerworld wine, it had been passed from collector to collector, gaining value at each passing. Hanuman was the first of its owners to make use of the virus. With sweet ruthlessness, he seduced one of Lord Ciceron's lovers, a young man named Yang li Yang. He infected him with this virus. And Yang li Yang had passed this virus to Chanoth Chen Ciceron, and on to three other academicians who immediately had commenced the forgetting of themselves. Hanuman had done this in fulfilment of his promise to aid Lord Pall; as well, he had done this to unnerve and warn his Lord cetic, and for deeper reasons.

Danlo suddenly stood up, and he asked, 'Tamara, do you remember going to Hanuman ... to record your memories?'

She looked at him sadly as she shook her head. 'No, of course not.'

'It would have been ... just before you began to forget things.'

'If I'd gone to Hanuman, I suppose he'd remember that I'd visited him.'

'Yes, that is true.'

'Well, he's your friend – presumably, when you discovered I was missing, he would have told you that I'd recently been to see him.'

'It is possible ... that you presume too much.'

'What do you mean?'

Danlo came closer and laid his hands atop her shoulders. He said, 'We are not the same friends ... that we used to be.'

'I'm sorry, Pilot, but why should it matter if I went to Hanuman just before this virus destroyed my memories? Are you afraid that I've somehow infected him?'

'No,' he said, 'I am not afraid of that.'

'What, then?'

'Do you remember resolving to record your memories? Your experience of the One Memory?'

She backed away from him unexpectedly and said, 'I suppose it's possible I would have wanted to record whatever understanding I had of the One Memory. Do you think that's too vain of me? Well, I'm told that I used to be afflicted with this sin of vanity.'

Yes, he thought, she was vain and proud, and Hanuman knew this as well as he did. Hanuman, ever a man of multiple purposes, had kept this vanity in mind even as he designed his remembrancing computers. He had schemed to lure her into the chapter house where he kept his gleaming heaumes. He had issued an invitation to her – and to the best minds in the City. How could she resist such a compliment to her talents and accomplishments? She could not, and so late one night she had gone to Hanuman, out of will and pride, knowing that she was doing a dangerous thing. When Danlo closed his eyes, he could see this encounter with a perfect clarity: Tamara, stepping through the doorway into the cavernous chapter house, standing nervously in her snow-dappled furs as Hanuman politely bowed and offered her a cup of hot tea. Her face was all curiosity and resolution as she forced herself to trust Hanuman. And with his sweet, silver words, Hanuman flattered her, and she betrayed an instant delight at this good news of herself, though she was instantly embarrassed at being so easily manipulated. And then there occurred the crime that no one in the universe knew of except Hanuman and Danlo. Danlo watched this crime as it unfolded; he might have been a bird perched on a window sill high inside the chapter house. This image burned in his eyes: Hanuman, lowering a mirrored, metallic sphere over Tamara's head as she fairly trembled with anticipation. Hanuman told her that it was a remembrancing heaume, but it was not. It was a cleansing heaume, stamped with the seal of the Cybernetic Reformed Churches. With this unholy machine meant to free the sinful of their negative programs, Hanuman laid bare her memories and her mind. He painted a computer portrait of a woman's selfness and soul, and when he was done, no part of her remained a secret to him. It was an easy thing for him to remove her memories, as easy as editing an erotic cartoon of unwanted scenes. The heaume's invisible field propagated through her brain, ripping electrons away from their mother atoms, dissolving dendrites, erasing the pattern of synapses that was uniquely her own. It was the opposite of an imprinting, and it did not take very long. Several times, she cried out, 'Danlo, Danlo!' – he could hear this as closely as if her lips were pressed to his ear. She called to him as she remembered many moments for a last time, and then she was silent in unconsciousness, and only the air molecules and wall stones carried the memory of the words she had spoken. When Hanuman faced away from the ruins of her mind, he was horrified with himself, yet pleased that he had finished a nearly impossible task. It only remained for him to slip a tiny needle into the back of her neck. He did this smoothly, injecting killed viruses into her blood. Then he helped her walk through the deserted chapter house into the main body of Bardo's church. He left her there, in the cold nave, wounded and groping for consciousness and completely alone.