The Wild (51 page)

–Full contribution! What a dangerous, useless exercise this was!

–Dangerous ... perhaps. But not useless.

In all the millions of questions that people had asked of him, Danlo had sensed an underlying theme. If all the Narain's extraneous words could be boiled away, much as the tyfwi medicine is extracted from the sap of yu trees, he thought that a single, essential question would remain: is it really possible for human beings to transcend to godhood, or is this merely the cybernetic dream of a strange people isolated from the rest of the human race.

–Have you found a use for full contribution, Pilot?

–Perhaps.

–Please tell me.

–Perhaps I understand your people more deeply now.

–And what do you understand?

–It ... is hard to say.

–Please say it. Or think it.

–If you'd like. Your people ... want so badly to become more.

–You didn't need to experience full contribution to learn this.

–No, but....

–Please continue.

–There is this irony, then. When one lives only for the impossible, the possibilities of life become ... so finite. So hideously limited. Your people fear this finity. Deep in their bellies, beneath the Field's dazzle ... they fear that they are wasting their lives.

This observation of Danlo's, heartfelt though it might be, could not be expected to please Isas Lel. And so it did not. His words blazed in Danlo's mind like the flash of a laser cannon.

––Do you believe that transcendence into godhood is impossible?

–Perhaps the movement godward is possible. I ... truly do not know. But your people dream of something more.

–What, then?

–Transcendence itself. To be freed of their bodies, free of themselves. To live ... free from life.

–But how should anyone want to live en getik when there is so much more?

–Is there? Truly?

–You'll soon see. If you're ready, it's time you faced a Transcended One. Your request, Pilot. Unless you've changed your mind, we'll instantiate at the transcendence degree.

–No, I have not changed my mind.

–Can I assume that you've experienced full simulation before?

–Yes. Many times.

–Very well. Then I must go away now. When we next meet, I shall be only a part of the One called Abraxax.

–The ... Transcended One.

–Just so. Follow his voice. Please prepare yourself, Pilot.

Just then Danlo fell out of interface with the Field. He returned to his perception of the meeting room. He opened his eyes upon the seven dead-seeming men and women sitting in their robots, and at last he prepared to meet their higher selves, the Transcended Ones of Alumit Bridge.

Once a time, I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. Suddenly I awakened. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.

- Chuang Tzu

As before, Danlo remained seated on the cushion in the meeting room. As before he closed his eyes, and there was darkness, stillness, silence. And then, inside him along his spine, there came a faint vibrating as of electricity passing through him. It was an unfamiliar, uncomfortable sensation. Did the Narain's computers generate stronger logic fields than those of the library in Neverness? He did not know. He surmised, though, that this was the work of the neurologics behind the meeting room's smooth walls. He fell into interface with the Field then, and its powerful computers began to stimulate the nerves along his arms and legs. He felt his liver and lungs and other organs begin to tingle and burn, almost as if his body were being remade from the inside out. There was a fire in his belly, a bright light in his brain. He felt at once nauseated and exalted, almost trembling in anticipation of some great change about to take place inside him. And then the Field computers touched his brain. They infused him with shapes, colours, smells, textures, sound. He suddenly opened his eyes to look down at his hand. And what he saw astonished him. Although his hand still possessed the same structures of palm, knuckles, four fingers and a thumb, his skin seemed to have transformed itself into some bright iridescent substance as beautiful as chatoy or gossilk. He peered carefully at his fingertips to make out the familiar whorls and lines that should have been there. But there were no lines, no familiar print patterns, only streaks of amethyst and scarlet and a hundred other colours all swirling and dazzling him with their beauty. This discovery so excited him that it seemed he could no longer sit in stillness. He felt himself flying up from his cushion, standing up straight as a man should stand. Only, he did not really stand at all, but rather floated up to an erect, vertical posture. He felt as light as a thallow's feather in the wind; it was as if the Field computers had cancelled gravity, disconnecting his bones and muscles from the pull of the Earth. In truth, his body moved with such a lightness of being that it seemed far beyond the limitations of common matter. He saw that his clothes – his black pilot's robes – were gone. He was as naked as a newborn child. And as with his hand, his whole body sparkled like a diamond, from the fiery flecks of colour flashing within his feet to the deep violet hues of the hair hanging down over his forehead. To see himself transfigured in this way as a luminous being was to recall a time when he had once smoked a huge pipeful of triya seeds, one of the more visual psychedelics, except that the Field computers' recreation of himself had the power of full simulation, the power of creating a total cybernetic self (or surreality) and tricking the brain and the body's sensory organs into experiencing it as real. As a young man, Danlo had feared mistaking the unreal for reality almost more than he did death. And so he had sworn to master the complexities of computer simulation. And so once again, gladly, rashly, he dared to instantiate as a cybernetic entity, this time carking out into the degree of full transcendence and entering into an unknown world.

'Danlo wi Soli Ringess!'

He heard a voice calling him. He turned his head to determine its source. The radiance of his lovely new body was so intense that it illuminated the meeting room. He could see all of its surfaces quite clearly. The chatoy walls were now glowing a dull red, and the desiccated flowers in the vase were as black as dried blood. The seven Transcendentals sat in their robots with their eyes tightly closed. Their skin was as white as marble, and they seemed almost dead. No sound could have escaped their motionless lips. 'Danlo wi Soli Ringess!' the voice called again. Danlo turned to see that the door of the meeting room was suddenly – and mysteriously – open. A golden light streamed through this doorway. It was so beautiful that he began to walk toward the light – and toward the many voices that he heard whispering and calling from just beyond its threshold. He stepped closer, and then he realized that he was not really stepping with his legs at all, but rather moving in some weightless manner as a man drifting through space. Just as he was about to pass through the doorway, he felt something move deep inside him. It was almost like the rushing of his blood, almost like the intense connectedness of tissue pulling against living tissue that he remembered feeling as a child growing in his mother's womb so long ago. And even more it was like music: deep, rhythmic, melodious, sacred, as if each cell in his body were harmonizing in a marvellous, inner song. He knew then that he was not really floating toward the open doorway, but was still seated in the meeting room on the cushion that he could almost feel beneath his knees. The powerful surreality generated by the Field computers had almost completely seized all his senses. He was blind to all but computer-painted colours, deaf to all but the sound of voices that sophisticated programs simulated and poured into his open head. With his tactile senses, he should have been able to feel only what the Narain's powerful computers programmed him to feel. And this was almost so, for his fingers tingled with intense luminosity, outstretched to the brilliant light pouring through the doorway.

But it was not really so. In reality, he sat holding his bamboo flute tightly against his thigh; his fingers made of flesh that he could not quite feel were wrapped around the flute's hard, round finger holes. He sensed the truth of this. Deeper than his senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch lay his proprioceptive sense, the inner body knowing of its own existence in space and time. Proprioception was the way the body sensed its own internal stimuli, the firing of nerves, the movement of its cells, the deep feeling of its own reality. In many ways it was the very sense of the self, the deeply physical self of blood and bones which lay far below the awareness of the mind. Of all the senses, it was the most difficult to confuse. But the Narain were masters of simulation, and they had found ways to perturb even this marvellous inner sense. Only because Danlo had honed his proprioceptive powers as he would a diamond chisel was his sense of reality so strong and keen. Many of his fellow Ordermen, upon entering the salt-water cells of the library, had lost themselves in magnificent surrealities, floating through these unreal cybernetic spaces as if sucked into a dream. It was Danlo's pride, however, always to know where in spacetime he was (and who he really was), always to keep sight of the bright inner stars that guided his way. And so now, here, in the meeting room of the Transcendentals, he moved toward the open door, but he did not really move at all. In truth, he was aware of existing in two ways of being at the same time; he fell into the dual consciousness of a hunter who enters the dreamtime of the altjiranga mitgina and sends his other self (his dreaming self) seeking seals or other animals across the frozen sea.

'Danlo wi Soli Ringess – this is where we really live.'

At last Danlo stepped through the doorway. Before him, beneath him, a vast plain glittered like an endless sheet of gold. He gazed outward, looking for the horizon of this brilliant new world. But there was no horizon. Neither was there a sky above him, only a harsh white light glaring like a cold flame globe that has been turned on too high. The plain seemed to open into infinity. Arbitrarily, he called the direction that he was facing north, while behind him – where the doorway opened into the meeting room – was south. The east was off to his right, and his left hand was held out against the glare of the western plain. As a child he had often prayed to the world's four points and now he thought to turn slowly in a circle to reverence this world, no matter how surreal and strange it seemed. He began to face east, but in turning he noticed that the doorway behind his back was suddenly gone. He turned more quickly now, looking for this lost doorway, turning south, west, north and east again in his urge to orient himself. And again he turned, and yet again, and now he was whirling about almost like a Sufi dancer, turning and seeking the way back to the meeting room where his real body lived and dwelt inside itself. But he could not find the doorway. At last, breathless and dizzy, he stopped his spinning. He had lost his sense of direction and the golden, featureless plain before him gave him no clue as to how he should proceed.

'Danlo wi Soli Ringess, we are waiting for you. You know the way.'

From out of the east (or perhaps the west, north or south) came a low, serene voice. Danlo decided to follow this voice. He turned to face the sound of it, and he began walking forward, step by step. Soon he grew impatient with his progress for he seemed not to be drawing any closer to the voice, which had now been joined by many others: 'Danlo, Danlo, come, come – we are waiting for you.' Wishing to move more quickly, Danlo wished for skis to slide across the nearly frictionless golden substance beneath his feet. He wished for any means to reach the source of the lovely voices reverberating in the distance, and with this wish he found himself suddenly fluttering like a butterfly above what he called the ground. He began to fly, slowly at first, but then faster and faster as a goshawk might race through the sky. The wind blew fiercely at his face, whipping his long black hair behind him. If not for this cool wind, he could not have sensed that he was moving, for the plain below him was only an endless plate of gold and it bore no features by which he could measure the distance he traversed. Although he had no way to determine his true speed, he felt that he was still flying too slowly. And suddenly he began to accelerate. He shot across the golden plain like a rocket. The wind was now almost like a solid wall slamming against his face; he had to cup his hands over his nose and mouth in order to breathe. He remembered his first journey to Neverness then, calling to mind how the wind called the Serpent's Breath had frozen his face and almost killed him and found himself wishing that there was no wind to impede his progress and steal his breath away. And suddenly there was no wind. All around him was only coldness and silence as if he were high in a planet's stratosphere. He thought that he must be soaring ten miles above the golden plain, but since it was as smooth as clary and as endless as the Great Morbio, he might have been a million miles high – or only a few hundred feet.

After a while – perhaps it was an hour or only a few seconds – far off in the distance he noticed a slight swelling in the golden surface of the world. It was as if the intense light of the sky (or what he called the sky) had caused the ground to melt and buckle and heave itself upwards. Soon, in less time than it took to draw in a breath, he flew over this swelling. And now beneath him, there were other swellings, low and round like the domes of snow huts. As he flew, the swellings rose higher and there were many more of them. Hundreds of mounds pushed up above the glittering plain. Some were conical in shape like volcanoes; some were great heaps of gold cut with crags and cols, and these seemed to be almost as jagged as the snow-capped mountains of his childhood. He flew over broad valleys flowing with silver-gold glaciers. He flew and he flew, and the golden mountains grew higher and higher. It came into his mind that each of these mountains was at least as high as Aconcagua on Old Earth; if this were so, then from peak to pointed peak was a distance of perhaps twenty miles. In the time it took for his heart to beat three times, he passed over some six hundred mountains in a straight line, and so he calculated that he was flying at least four thousand miles per second. And still he heard voices calling him from far off in the hazy distance, and so he wished for yet more speed, and he moved faster still. Now the mountains melted into a golden blur below him. There were so many that he could not count them. He thought that he was moving quickly, very quickly, perhaps even faster than light. His body was all streaks of violet and maroon and flaming red. He felt limitless and marvellously quick, as light as light. In some sense, he could scarcely feel his body at all, for it was almost as numinous and insubstantial as a prayer in the mind of a saint. He might have continued this impossible flight forever, but then he remembered that his purpose in entering this cybernetic space was something other than pure, soaring ecstasy.