The Wild (77 page)

'We believe that she might be ready to receive a new Program. And to install this Program as a final monument to her architetcy.'

Danlo felt a rare burst of hatred blazing through his own eyes, and he stared at Bertram until the older man looked away.

'As yet,' Bertram said, somewhat nervously, 'we believe that she lacks enough support with the Koivuniemin to dare receive a New Program. But she seeks only a sign, Pilot. Your success tomorrow as the Lightbringer would enable her to ruin the Church with this new Program.'

For the count of five heartbeats, Danlo did not move. And then he asked, 'Why did you come here tonight?'

Bertram suddenly turned his head and looked at the blue and red parrotock bird perched in its steel cage. He looked at the room's plastic door and at the flowers hanging down the wall; he looked at the altar where the hologram of Nikolos Daru Ede floated above the devotionary computer like some disembodied angel of God watching him, waiting for him to say something. Lastly, as the sweat leaked from the pores of his face, he braved looking at Danlo once more.

'You have the power to save our Church,' Bertram said. 'You, Pilot.'

'Please, go on.'

'If you were to fail your test tomorrow, you could say that you were still ill from your Walk with the Dead. You wouldn't be permitted to undergo a new test, of course, but you would still have your pride.'

Danlo closed his eyes for a moment as he slowly shook his head. He did not want to believe what Bertram was asking of him; so great was his bewilderment at these words that it seemed Bertram might have been speaking an alien language.

'You wish me deliberately to ... dishonour myself?'

'Not dishonour, Pilot. Only the pride of doing what you must. The pride of a worthy man who would submit to God's Infinite Program.'

This is his true purpose in coming here tonight, Danlo thought. All his other proposals were only as an illusionist's sleight of hand.

'Will you help us, Pilot?'

Danlo shook his head as he brought his flute to his lips. He played a long, lonely note which filled the room like the cry of the snowy owl.

'We would like so much to help you,' Bertram said. 'Perhaps we could help each other.'

Danlo stared at Bertram, and then he put down his flute. In a soft voice that was almost a whisper, he said, 'Yes, I would like your help.'

For the second time that evening, Bertram smiled. 'It's the duty of all Elders to help their children toward the truth.'

'I would like you to help me to be alone,' Danlo said. He bowed his head toward the door. 'Please go.'

Instantly, Bertram's face fell back into its cyanine scowl. Although he tried his best to force a smile, other programs inside him were doing their work. 'You misunderstand me!' he said, outraged at Danlo's request.

'No – it is just the opposite.'

'Listen to me, Pilot!'

'No – I am sorry.'

'We've asked for your help in great matters,' Bertram said. He rubbed his sweaty hands together like a Trian merchant about to propose an exchange of goods. 'And so, in return, it would be only fair for me to offer you a gift.'

'I ... desire no gifts.'

'Really?'

'I want only to be alone. It is all that I ask.'

'But it was not all you asked on the day that you addressed the Koivuniemin.'

A sudden pain blossomed inside Danlo's head with all the brilliance of a fireflower opening to the sun. 'What ... do you mean?' he said. But as Danlo sat remembering his words to the Koivuniemin on that terrible day of eye-tlolts and death, he suddenly knew very well what Bertram would say next.

'You came to our world seeking favours for your order,' Bertram said. 'But you also sought something for yourself.'

'Yes,' Danlo said. Now the pain behind his eyes swelled huge and red like a star falling nova; his throat ached with the hard knot of hope.

'You sought a cure for the Great Plague. You said that this disease was killing the tribes of Alaloi people who had adopted you.'

'Yes.'

'And you hoped that we Architects might know of a cure.'

'But there is no cure. Harrah herself believed that it wasn't the Architects of the Old Church who had engineered the Plague virus. She ... knows of no cure.'

'Our Holy Ivi doesn't know everything,' Bertram said.

For what seemed a long time, Danlo held his breath. There was a huge knot in his throat that no amount of swallowing could dislodge. It felt as if his heart itself were stuck there, throbbing in pain. 'If you will,' he finally said, 'please tell me what the Holy Ivi does not know.'

Quickly, because Bertram still had need of great hurry, he told Danlo of a quest that he himself had completed. As an Elder, he said, he was permitted entrance to certain Church archives forbidden to mere Readers or any of the Worthy Architects. And in one of these ancient information pools, he had discovered many records from the War of the Faces. Of particular interest was the testament of Radomil Ivi Illanes, one of the Holy Ivis who had led the Old Church through the final phases of the War. Although this testament was incomplete, its information having been lost or expurgated over the last thousand years, a few of his words drew Bertram's attention as a new star captures the eyes of all who behold her: 'We have done a terrible thing. It was a great error for my predecessors to ally the Church with the Warrior-Poets. And it was madness for them to accede in the making of the virus. It has slain our enemies in their billions as the engineers foretold, but now this virus has mutated. It afflicts even the Worthy, they who remain faithful to the Program and to our eternal Church. Our engineers have made a cure, but it already may be too late to save many of my children from a terrible death.'

Bertram sighed as he fingered the dobra covering his head, and he finished telling his story. 'Ivi Radomil ordered his engineers to build an anti-virus. He saved the Church. But so many of our Architects did indeed die that we were forced to flee into the darkest part of the galaxy. Here, on Tannahill, we live on, Pilot. And here, in our holy archives, lives the information that you seek. It seems that the anti-virus is complex and hard to assemble, but I've already spoken to several engineers who are certain they could synthesize a cure.'

'Truly?' Danlo asked. Because his eyes burned with the water of his terrible hope, he covered them and stared out the window. Then, after a while, he turned to see Bertram staring at him. The Elder's face was tight with impatience and guile. 'I ... do not believe you,' Danlo said.

'To lie deliberately is a hakr,' Bertram smugly said. 'We Elders have been cleansed of such programs. We don't lie.'

And that itself is a lie, Danlo thought. And then, Could it be that he tells the truth? Ahira, Ahira – what should I believe?

'You've come so far, Pilot. You've waited so long. And now the cure that you seek is almost in your hands.'

Danlo squeezed his flute so tightly that he feared it might break. He said, 'Out of compassion for the fate of my people, then, you have come here tonight to offer me this cure?'

'We are an Elder of the Church,' Bertram said. 'And so we must have compassion for many people. All our Architects, here on Tannahill, and those lost among the stars. All namans who would be Architects.'

'I see.'

'You desire to save your people. And we desire to save ours.'

'I see.'

'Will you help us, Pilot? Will you let our engineers synthesize a cure?'

'No – I do not believe you know of a cure. I do not want ... to believe you.'

'Pilot!'

After taking in a deep breath and feeling his heart beat five times, Danlo said, 'Yes?'

'Can you afford to doubt the existence of this cure? Are you really willing to disbelieve me?'

Truly, do I have the will? Danlo wondered. Oh, God – do I have the will to do what I must?

Danlo shifted on his cushion so that he could look out the window at the stars. There should have been millions of these brilliant lights, but because the sky that evening was particularly heavy with pollution, he counted only ten stars – and nine of these supernovas from the far reaches of the Vild.

'Please, Pilot – it grows late. We must have an answer.'

Danlo closed his eyes, remembering the faces of Haidar and Choclo and Chandra. They had each bled from the ears before dying, and Choclo, late one desperate night with the fever burning his skin like fire, in a terrible screaming pain, had bitten off most of his tongue. This, then, was the fate awaiting the other tribes of the Alaloi. In Danlo's youth he had set off with dog sleds to visit the Patwin and Olorun tribes, but further to the west of Neverness Island lived whole tribes of his far-cousins whom he had never met. He knew their names, however: the Honovi and Raini, the Wemilat and the Paushan and Turi. And all the others. So many tribes; so many of the blessed People. But even as he tried to recall the stories of the very distant Jyasi tribe of the Fifty Islands of Uttermost West, the eyes of all his ancestors blazed in his mind like stars. In truth, inside him there were many stars, those of the galaxy's Orion Arm, of course, and all the countless stars he had left behind him on his journey into the Vild. He knew their names, too: Saralta and Munsin and Kalanit and Kamala Luz – and perhaps ten thousand others. How many of these splendid spheres of light would die if the Cybernetic Universal Church did not redefine its Program of Totality and stop blowing up the stars? How many billions of human beings from Ihle Luz to the Morbio Inferiore would be lost if Danlo did not give Harrah Ivi en li Ede the sign that she so desperately sought?

'Well, Pilot?' Bertram's voice fell out into the room like a glass ornament dropped against a rock. 'We must have an answer tonight.'

How many thousands of his Alaloi sisters and brothers, Danlo wondered, still lived to the west of Neverness? He didn't know, for no one had ever counted them. But certainly, somewhere in the Vild, billions of men, women and children dwelt and built their great cities to the glory of God – perhaps five million billions against only thousands of the Alaloi. Looking out the window at the stars, a terrible thought came over Danlo: the value of a human life was not simply multiplicative. The pain of losing someone you loved was a million times greater than hearing of the deaths of a million unknown souls. Knowing this, feeling this truth as a blinding flash of pain that tore like lightning through his head, how could he refuse the gift that Bertram offered him? If there was the slightest chance that Bertram truly had discovered a cure for the slow evil, how could he deny the blessed Alaloi the gift of life?

'We must go now,' Bertram said. 'We've much to do before midnight. Please say that you'll help us, and then you will leave Tannahill with the cure for the Plague. But we can only offer you this gift now – tomorrow will be too late.'

'No.'

'No, Pilot?'

'My answer is no, then.' Danlo pressed his flute against his aching forehead, but his eyes fell clear and cold upon Bertram, and they didn't move. 'I cannot help you. I ... will not.'

'Consider well what you're saying!'

'Tomorrow I will submit to the last test.'

'But you mustn't!'

'I will look upon the heavenly lights within and—'

'God damn you, Pilot!'

'And I will not fail.'

'God damn all you faithless, filthy namans!'

Very quickly, considering his age, Bertram pushed himself to his feet, and he stood clutching his cushion in front of him as if it were a shield.

'The stars, themselves, are alive,' Danlo whispered. 'They are the eyes of God, the blessed stars.'

'You're mad!' Bertram shrieked. He waved his hand at the expanse of plastic above the altar. 'But your madness won't save you tomorrow. And neither will Harrah. You may think these palace walls protect you, but your program is already written, and it halts, Pilot – how very suddenly and soon it halts!'

'Please go,' Danlo said softly. 'Please go away.'

Bertram cursed again and shook his cushion in Danlo's face. Then he screamed in frustration and rage and turned to hurl the cushion at the parrotock's cage across the room. But his old arms were feeble and his aim poor. The cushion missed the cage entirely, and it was only by bad chance that one of its corners caught the steel stand and unbalanced it. With a terrible squawking of the parrotock and an explosion of brightly coloured feathers, the cage crashed to the floor. Although Danlo leaped to catch it, he was too late. For a moment, he feared that the beautiful bird was either injured or dead. But then the parrotock squawked with life, and he hopped about in his overturned cage as if he were only glad to attract Danlo's attention. He called out for a nut as he always did when he hoped to be fed.

'Why did you do that?' Danlo asked, looking at Bertram.

'We didn't like the way it looked at us.'

'He ... is only a bird. A blessed bird.'

'You're more concerned about a filthy bird than you are your own people!'

Something almost broke inside of Danlo then. Despite his vow never to harm another living being, he grabbed up the steel cage stand in his hand. With the hatred that he feared above all other things almost blinding him, he wanted to swing the heavy steel rod against Bertram's head.

'You're a murderer, aren't you, Pilot? Like all your filthy family – the warrior-poet told me about your father. We see that that program is written for you, too.'

'Go away!' Danlo stood with the steel rod in his right hand and his shakuhachi in his other. He used the flute to point toward the door. 'Please go.'

'This all is upon you, you know,' Bertram said. His face was full of hurt – the very wilful hurt that he loved to inflict upon others. 'You think you came to our world seeking peace. You think you bring light, and you hope to stop the stars from exploding. But no star is untouchable. Not even the Narain's. Not even the star of Neverness.'

Because Danlo did not want to believe what he was hearing, he dropped the steel stand and put his flute to his mouth where he blew a long and terrible sound.

'Goodbye, Pilot. We'll see you in the Hall of Heaven tomorrow.'