The Wild (47 page)

'And Danlo wi Soli Ringess has been trained by his Order's cetics, by these cyber-shamans who are said to be masters of the cybernetic spaces.'

This, at least, was true. Danlo was pleased that Isas Lel should champion his proposal to enter the Field. And then Lieswyr Ivioss, who had seemed antagonistic to Danlo and all his hopes, abruptly changed her manner. 'Perhaps,' she said, 'Danlo wi Soli Ringess should be allowed to face a Transcended One. If he proves worthy, perhaps we should allow him to enter the Field.'

For the twentieth time that morning, the eyes of Isas Lel and Lieswyr Ivioss and the others hardened, as of clear water freezing into cloudy white ice. And then, some moments later, they returned to full consciousness of the facing chamber and of Danlo, who was still sitting patiently before them.

'It has been decided,' Isas Lel finally said. He seemed ill at ease, almost embarrassed.

Danlo waited for him to say more, then asked, 'Yes?'

'It's been decided that telling you the location of Tannahill requires a decision of all the Transcended Ones.'

'I ... see.'

'Some believe that this decision would best be made if you could enter the Field and face the Ones.'

'Truly?'

'Unfortunately, however, others do not.'

'I see.'

'The decision as to allow you to enter the Field is itself difficult. But we have decided that this decision must be made.'

'You have decided ... only this?'

'I'm sorry, Pilot. But we Narain have no single ruling lord, as does your Order. We make our decisions well but not easily.'

'No,' Danlo said. 'Not easily.'

'And so we must ask you to wait while we decide if you're to enter the Field. Will you wait a while longer, Danlo wi Soli Ringess?'

All the Transcendentals were watching Danlo, waiting to see what his decision would be. Danlo bowed his head and told them, 'Yes, if you'd like, I will wait.'

'Very well,' Isas Lel said. 'An apartment has been prepared for you. A robot will take you there.'

So saying, Isas Lel looked at the facing chamber's red plastic doors, which suddenly slid open. An empty robot wheeled into the room and stopped only inches short of where Danlo sat. Danlo understood that his meeting with the Transcendentals was over. He rose up from his cushion, slid his flute back into its pocket, and reached down to grasp the devotionary computer. He held this miraculous translating machine close to his belly. As he settled into the robot's softly-cushioned seat, his back was turned to seven very curious men and women. And so, for a moment, with his body shielding the Ede imago from their watchful eyes, he was able to look down and behold the signs that Ede was flashing him. Ede's hands and little fingers of light fluttered like flying insects. And the meaning of these cetic signs was clear: 'Beware any invitation to enter this space they call the Field. Beware of Lieswyr Ivioss and her Transcended One called Shahar.'

'Yes?' Danlo whispered.

And Ede signed back, 'There are many who wouldn't want you to journey to Tannahill. And so they will try to trap you within the Field. Like a bee is trapped by the nectar of a fireflower. Like a moth is trapped by light.'

Danlo closed his eyes for a moment as he considered this. And then he whispered, 'Yes, I see.'

'Let's leave this place while we can, Pilot. Before it's too late.'

'No ... I will not leave yet.'

'Then let the Transcended Ones make their decision without you. Don't face them within the Field.'

Danlo smiled to himself as he rubbed the scar that marked his aching head. 'But I must face them,' he said. 'If I can, I ... will.'

After that, almost without a sound, the robot began to roll away from Isas Lel and his transcendent friends. They quickly rolled through the open doorway, into the bright, plastic corridors leading to the streets of the city of Iviunir.

There is no matter without form, and no form not dependent upon matter.

- saying of the cetics

While awaiting the decision of the Transcendent Ones of Alumit Bridge, Danlo was given a small apartment on the city's seventeenth level – overlooking a huge and busy street called Elidi Boulevard. As he would soon discover, of course, it was actually no smaller than any other apartment in Iviunir; like Scutari nymphs in their feeding boxes, the Narain required little living space. His five rooms were tiny, separated from one another by thin walls of white plastic: there was a bathing room where he might cleanse his body, a multrum barely large enough to allow for squatting and voiding oneself of wastes, a facing cell almost the same size, a sleeping chamber, and – barbarically – a kitchen. Danlo had always regarded the private consumption of food to be a shameful and barbaric thing, but the Narain lived according to different sensibilities, preferring convenience to company; it was their way to voice their immediate hungers to their ministrant robots, to wait silently a few seconds while these semi-sentient machines lit the light ovens in the kitchen, and then to recline on soft white carpets of spun plastic in their sleeping chambers, there to swallow their meals of tasteless factory foods in solitude. It was a bad way to live, but then, as Isas Lei had warned Danlo, the Narain preferred to let their robots live for them. In Danlo's free moments he searched the city for signs of true human life, but found few instances of that warm, earthy, marvellous quality he thought of simply as livingness. The Narain did not gather in restaurants to talk about the events of the day; they did not meet friends in public squares or in cafés or in shops. In the whole city, he could find no park or agora that served to focus the Narain's appreciation of one another. Many times, on the streets, he sought to engage men or women (or womenmen) in conversation, but it seemed that no one wanted to talk with him. They hurried past him as they hurried past each other. Theirs was a cold and terrible isolation from one another, and yet Danlo never sensed that the Narain disliked each other or were fundamentally misanthropes, as were, for instance, the exemplars of Bodhi Luz. In truth, Danlo attributed the Narain's unsociability to shyness. It was almost as if they had never learned to meet each other eye to eye, to inquire as to a friend's well-being, to smile and laugh and open their hearts to the sounds of their lovers' hearts – to take joy in the light of each other's soul. An alien (or a stranger), proceeding down the plastic walkway of the Elidi Boulevard, might have thought that the thousands of single-minded human beings rushing by in their plastic kimonos were not really human. He might have thought that they were not really alive, or worse, that they were more robotlike than any robot. In a way, this was true. To be in the world, sar en getik, for almost any good Narain, was to be not truly alive. In truth the Narain lived only to return to the cleanliness of their apartments, to pull their silver heaumes over their heads and lie down in their facing cells. And there, in their dark apartments, in their millions, stacked one on top of the other like corpses in a funeral ship, they would close their eyes and enter into the many glittering spaces of the Field. There they would merge and be as one. Some pursued the bliss of cybernetic samadhi; some sought union in the integration into higher selves; a few desired little more than the exchange of information with other minds. It was only after Danlo had risked his life talking with a gang of young rebels whose tattooed faces proclaimed them the Assassins of Ede that he began to understand the Narain people and to perceive the paradox of their way of life: as great as was their isolation from each other out on the streets, their sense of common purpose within the Field was even greater. This purpose remained for Danlo unclear. Once or twice, however, as he might make out the shape of a great white bear stalking him across miles of sea ice, he thought that he had caught sight of the Narain's dream. If he had been allowed to enter the Field freely like any of the common Narain, he might have entered this consensus hallucination and beheld all its hubris and horror. But in the facing cell of his apartment there was no heaume for him to place upon his head. The Transcendentals, it seemed, had allowed him every freedom in the city except the only one that really mattered, they had told him that he must wait for the decision of the Transcendent Ones, and wait he must.

And so Danlo began to study the syntax and words of modern Church Istwan. He had much time in which to learn this rather difficult language and much need to learn it. While walking the city streets and boulevards, of course, he could – and did – use the translating program of his devotionary computer to converse with the rare individuals who consented to talk with him. But if he were to journey to Tannahill this wouldn't do. To employ the hologram of Nikolos Daru Ede as a mere translator would be sacrilege: 'You would probably be killed on sight,' Isas Lel had warned Danlo. 'The Worthy Architects would rip the devotionary from your hands and swarm upon you and tear you into pieces.' On Neverness Danlo might have acquired Istwan almost instantly by placing his brain beneath the heaume of an imprinter, but the Narain knew little of this difficult art of repatterning the neural pathways. Fortunately, he was good at learning languages. He already had his milk tongue, Alaloi, and he had mastered Moksha as well as the Language of the Civilized Worlds. He was almost fluent in Zanshin and Yarkoning, and he knew more than most humans of those impossible alien languages, Fravash and Scutaruil. To learn the long way the syntax of Istwan was no great problem as it was one of the hundreds of granddaughter languages of Ancient Anglish, which Danlo had once studied as a novice. Then too, Danlo had a phenomenal memory, and it was no great feat for him to learn a thousand new words each day. Soon he found himself able to converse with the Narain without the aid of his devotionary computer. The Ede imago warned Danlo against talking with everyday people without the benefit of his translating services. 'It's too dangerous,' Ede told Danlo. 'These people might misunderstand you and kill you for making some casual slight. Or you might misunderstand them and gain false knowledge of this world. You might base your future actions on this knowledge and thus be destroyed.'

Ede almost begged Danlo to accompany him on his outings into the city, and out of a strange loyalty he acquiesced. But as Danlo grew more confident of his ability to speak Istwan, he found himself ignoring Ede's translations – and especially Ede's never-ending and very tiresome premonitions of doom. Danlo took one of the gravity lifts down to the dangerous Trachang Estates on Iviunir's seventh level, and he sought out the Assassins of Ede and other nihilists. These angry young men (and women), with their hideous orange facial markings, were outsiders in the most literal sense: not only did they remove themselves from the cultural life of the Narain, but they longed for life outside the Field, in truth, outside the city altogether. Danlo sat with them before illegal methane fires, drinking coffee-wine from a common cup passed around a circle. And he enchanted them with stories of his childhood, of carving ivory walrus tusks and picking berries from yu trees and skiing through great green forests all sparkling with ice and real snow. It always amused (and disturbed) Danlo that he should so readily make friends of outlaws in whatever society he encountered. Like other outlaws in other places, the Assassins – at least the most intelligent of them – shared many valuable perceptions of the culture they reviled. It was from one of these, a rather bloody-minded woman named Shatara Iviow, that Danlo began to acquire a true sense of the Narain exodus to Alumit Bridge and their brazen heresy.

For instance, most of the Narain did not in any way deny the idea of Ede as God. However, they did reject the rather narrow Ede of the Algorithm, especially its first three books, which were known as the First Trigon. (These 'books' are The Life of Ede, The Birth of Ede the God, and Last Things.) Actually, few of the Narain had wholly rejected the Algorithm itself; most sensible people merely ignored the legalistic interpretations of the Algorithm, even as they tried to forget the rulings of the Jurridik and the Iviomils and other sects of the Old Church orthodoxy. It was enough that they should cast off all the Algorithm's most harmful and archaic doctrines. And it was more than enough for the boldest of them to take the final and blasphemous step of attempting to become as Ede – possibly the most dreaded idea of the Cybernetic Universal Church. It was signified by a single word, the forbidden verb hakaru. Among the Narain, especially the Transcendentals, there were many who had already hakariad, become hakras, these would-be gods whom the Old Church condemned and executed on sight. As Shatara Iviow observed, the Narain had much in common with the Free Fanyas, an ancient heretical group who had attempted to find God in rocks or trees or even in plastic spoons – in everything. The Fanyas, it seemed, had taught not that Ede would grow to absorb the entire universe, but that all people and all things may return to its divine source and be reabsorbed into God. For the Fanyas, this reabsorption occurred at death, or more rarely, during those moments of grace that they called facivi, which was the mystical melting of one's face into the universal face of God. The Narain had personalized and mechanized this search for the divine; they not only found God in themselves but found themselves as potential gods. Indeed, when they faced the Field's glittering electron flows and fell into those eyeless frenzies called cybernetic samadhi, they claimed to have achieved union with the godhead. One of the Narain, Tadeo Aharagni, claimed union and identity with Ede Himself. Many Narain felt this union to be the very spirit of Edeism as it was in the early days of the Church. Although they knew that even the most radical of the Church sects – the mystical Elidis – taught that man could only draw close to Ede, they scorned this doctrine. Theirs was the hubris of wanting to become as Ede, and this was a crucially – and fatally – different idea. This was heresy, blasphemy, an unforgivable sin against the ineffable and eternal phenomenon of God.

'All they think of is God,' Shatara Iviow said to Danlo over cups of low quality coffee-wine that tasted of plastic. She was an angry woman who had turned upon her people, the Narain, as a female mantis might devour its mate after copulation. 'They're worse than the Readers of the Old Church. God, God, God, God – how I hate this obsession with divinity. It kills the true human spirit, you know. It's really He who keeps man from being man.'