The Wild (82 page)

Terrible beauty, Danlo thought. The terrible beauty.

Quickly, as Bertram Jaspari jerked on the sleeve of Malaclypse's kimono and cried in panic, Malaclypse turned to fight his way from the Hall. The skirmish between Harrah's keepers and the Iviomils had deepened into a full battle. The terrible sounds of hatred and rage and crunching flesh filled the air. Fanatic-eyed men cursed and shouted and flailed and kicked, and more than once, Malaclypse's killing knife slashed out to lop off a few fingers or to open some unfortunate Architect's throat. So ended the great light-offering. Through sprays of bright red blood and the chaos of men and women crying in confusion, Bertram Jaspari led a few hundred of his Iviomils from the Hall of Heaven where the swarms of Architects waited for them outside.

It has begun, Danlo thought. Truly, it is impossible to stop – like trying to put back the light into a star.

He could no longer play his flute. A dozen Architects in their white kimonos swarmed near him, clutching at his hands, his hair, his face. He felt their hands closing on him, pulling him upward, lifting him into the air. They bore him high upon their shoulders and cried out, 'Lightbringer, Lightbringer!' They never stopped shouting his name. And Danlo listened to the thunder of their voices and looked up toward the heavens in the direction of the shimmering stars. In a silence as vast as the Vild, he wept inside himself as he reflected upon the terrible and beautiful nature of light.

Who would bring light must endure burning.

- from Man's Journey, by Nikolos Daru Ede

War came to Tannahill the next day. Or rather, men brought this organized mayhem to the Architects of the Old Church, for war is never some cosmic accident descending upon a people with all the chance and inevitability of asteroids falling like fire out of the heavens, but only the will and work of man. As for the War of Terror, which it would soon be called, the Church historians laid its cause before the will of a single man: the Elder Bertram Jaspari. It was Bertram Jaspari, they said, who denounced Harrah's enchantment with the naman pilot, Danlo wi Soli Ringess. It was Bertram Jaspari who attacked Harrah herself and her architetcy, claiming that she had fallen into negative programs and was therefore unworthy to be the High Holy Ivi of the Cybernetic Universal Church. On the very night after Danlo had looked upon the heavenly lights, it was Bertram Jaspari who called together Jedrek Iviongeon and Nikos Iviercier and many Elders loyal to himself. After fleeing the Hall of Heaven, they met in secret conclave at Jedrek Iviongeon's estate. There, in Jedrek's private meditation hall these hundred rebellious Elders, most of whom had long been Iviomils, proclaimed themselves as the true Koivuniemin. In their first act as the ruling body of the True Church, they deposed Harrah Ivi en li Ede as Holy Ivi and elected Bertram Jaspari in her place. It was Bertram Jaspari – and no other – who accepted the title of the Holy Bertram Ivi Jaspari and called for Iviomils across Tannahill to follow him in a facifah that would purify the Church. All true. But it is also true that many millions of men and women did follow him. And many millions more remained faithful to Harrah and the Old Church, and only out of their willingness to oppose each other in violence and death was war truly made.

Although this latest schism of the Church had been building for centuries, neither faction was prepared for full war. Bertram, apparently, had decided upon open rebellion only on the night before Danlo's test, when he had visited him in Harrah's palace. And so his Iviomils, while very well-disciplined and organized, had little enough time to stockpile the lasers and tlolts and poisons and bombs so useful in fighting a war of terror through the many levels of a planetary city. Harrah, who loathed the very idea of war as she might some explosive alien fungus, hadn't thought that Bertram would move so quickly; perhaps she had hoped that he wouldn't dare to make war at all. She had planned to await Danlo's proclamation as Lightbringer before redefining the Programs of Increase and Totality that were destroying the Church. (And destroying the stars of the Vild.) She had planned to enter the facing room of the Temple and kneel before Ede's eternal computer where she would receive a New Program for the Church and all the universe. It was her plan, as well, to install this New Program during a planetary facing ceremony – but only after her Readers had prepared all Worthy Architects across Tannahill for a great event. She had calculated that Bertram Jaspari would wait until this ceremony was done before denouncing her. Bertram Jaspari, she supposed, would need to cite this New Program as evidence of her unworthiness before leading his Iviomils into schism and almost certain war. But she was no warrior – at least not in the sense of one experienced in warfare. In truth, she would never be a natural strategist of killing, but only a woman who loved flowers and grandchildren and God. The first fundamental of war is to strike quickly with utter ruthlessness; he who deals death upon the first blow may need no other. Bertram Jaspari, that vain and shallow man who saw so little of humankind's true possibilities, at least understood this much; and he had Malaclypse Redring of Qallar to guide his hand. With the warrior-poet's help, he struck immediately, with terror and great cruelty.

At the same minute, at the end of the morning facing ceremony, in every city across Tannahill, cadres of armed Iviomils moved to seize power. Some fell against such obvious targets as light-fields, food factories, tube trains and the many light-nexi connecting the planet's billions of computers into a single entity. Some contented themselves merely with controlling their fellow Architects with the threat of death: from every corner of Tannahill came reports of Architects denouncing Architects as agents of the Order or of the Narain heretics, followed swiftly by beatings, unauthorized cleansings and even summary executions. These murders shocked everyone from child to elder, for they were public, bloody and final, in the sense that those put to death had no hope of ever being vastened in an eternal computer. Some cadres, as in Niave and Karkut, occupied local temples which were of little strategic importance but of immense value as symbols of the majesty of the Eternal Church. In Ornice Olorun, too, the Iviomils concentrated their attacks upon the great Temple itself. For Bertram's followers to capture this ugly cubical building would be not just a symbolic victory but a direct blow to Harrah's power. From the first, it must have been Bertram's plan to cleanse the Temple of all Architects loyal to Harrah. He must have hoped to fill the Koivuniemin's Hall with Elders such as Jedrek Iviongeon and thus to enter the Hall in triumph and acclamation as the Church's true Holy Ivi. More critically, he must have dreamed of entering the holy Facing Room and taking his place before the altar on which rested Ede's eternal computer. From this holiest of holies, he would lead the Architects of Tannahill in a restored facing ceremony truer to the Church's most venerable traditions and the strictures of the Algorithm. Thus the people would have no choice but to accept him as the one and only Architect empowered to interpret Ede's Program for the Universe.

Bertram might have succeeded in usurping the architetcy from Harrah if he had captured Ede's eternal computer, and more, had captured or killed Harrah herself. But Harrah, who had little taste for attacking her enemies, proved to be very good at defence. From the first moment of the schism after the morning facing ceremony, she showed a diamond-hard will and a coolness of decision in the face of crisis. Upon seeing that Bertram had begun to mass an army of Iviomils on the streets and grounds outside the Temple, she quickly chose to abandon this very central building. She re-entered the facing room, and much to the shock of all the Worthy gathered there that day, she lifted Ede's glittering eternal computer from the altar and fled into a choche waiting outside the Temple. While her keepers fought to hold back the swarms of Iviomils surging through the streets – while they fought hand to hand with tlolts and knives, and quickly died – Harrah fled across Ornice Olorun to her palace at the edge of the city. There she gathered together keepers summoned from every level of the city, and from the adjacent cities of Astaret and Dariveesh. She called for all Worthy Architects to join her in facifah, this holy war that they tragically must fight against their brothers and sisters. Within the hour, all those who could find or fight their way to the Holy Ivi's palace formed themselves into the army. Harrah herself would have led these Worthy of God, but she was too old, too valuable as the High Holy Ivi, and the Elders Kyoko Ivi Iviatsui and Pol Iviertes begged her to remain in the palace. From her altar room she might face Ede's eternal computer, and thus reverently face Tannahill's billions of Architects who would need all her courage and faith in the days to come. And so Harrah left the Iviomils to occupy many important Church buildings, including the House of Eternity, the Hall of Heaven, the Temple and Ede's Tomb. Bertram Jaspari counted the capture of this last as a great victory. The sacred, frozen body of Nikolos Daru Ede, the man, he announced, lay safely in his hands. But if Harrah had abandoned much of the city to the Iviomils in their newly-dyed red kimonos (Bertram himself had donned the first of these dreadful garments as a symbol of his willingness to shed blood), she never abandoned her people. And although Bertram might possess Ede's ice-hard body, Harrah guarded the computer that had been a vehicle for the vastening of His eternal soul.

It would be impossible here to chronicle all the events of the War of Terror, even as limited in time as the killing proved to be. The truly critical events of this war, at least, were the individual decisions of countless Architects and all the little acts of courage or cowardice, heartlessness or faith – for this was a fight for men's and women's souls, perhaps for the very soul of the Church itself. On the second day of the war, a terrible battle raged over the possession of Ornice Olorun's light-field, but on that same day, in the distant city of Montellivi, a woman named Marta Kalinda en li Ede stood before a cadre of Iviomils and pleaded for the release of her husband, the Elder Valin Iviastalir, whom they had captured as a hostage. The cadre might have beheaded Marta or exploded open her brain with a tlolt, as they had done with dozens of others in this doomed city. Instead, through the sheer force of her faith, she shamed the Iviomils into doing as she asked, and more, into releasing the thousands of children being held for cleansing and re-education as to the literal meaning of the Algorithm. In Amaris, one of the Worthy underwent torture rather than reveal the name of a friend who had poisoned one of Bertram's lieutenants, while his wife betrayed this very same man in exchange for food to feed her nineteen children. And from the thirteenth level of Ornice Olorun, almost right below the floor of Harrah's palace, came the shocking story of an Iviomil who had sewn a plastic bomb into his abdomen in order to slip this barbaric weapon past the detectors in the local food factory. And then, with a quick prayer to the Holy Bertram, he had detonated the bomb, blowing up himself and the entire factory – along with at least twenty-six Worthy Architects who had sworn to keep Harrah's army supplied with rations of beanbread and yeast.

And so it went. The Architects, both Iviomils and the Worthy, were natural soldiers. Although their martial traditions were only a memory a thousand years past, they were disciplined and obedient and brave, but for their fear of dying the real death. At first, this fear gave the Iviomils great power. Almost immediately after claiming the architetcy, Bertram held that any man or woman who opposed him to be in abandonment of the True Church. His enemies were therefore apostates and heretics, or naraids, to use the slang word quickly becoming popular. A naraid, according to Bertram, was one who had turned away from God and was therefore unworthy of vastening. And so any Iviomil could slay any of Harrah's followers without fear that they were committing a hakr, the crime of denying an Architect his ultimate salvation. This they did, piling up the bodies of the Worthy (or naraids) like dead fish. But, during the dark days following the fall of the Temple, the Worthy used their lasers and nerve knives against the Iviomils only with the greatest reluctance, for as Harrah reminded them, the Iviomils were their sisters and brothers, their cousins and daughters and great-grandsons. All Architects, she said, were children of Ede who would someday be vastened in Him. And then Bertram, under tremendous pressure to honour the Church's ancient canons of war, issued an order to Cheslav Iviongeon that soon would undermine his advantage. Henceforth Cheslav – and the other programmers of the House of Eternity – would use the compiling computers to create pallatons of all Iviomils before they went into battle, much as they had done with Danlo for his Walk with the Dead. It gave the Iviomils great courage to know that even if their bodies should be vaporized in the blast of a hydrogen bomb, their souls would be forever safe on an eternal diamond disc. Ironically, however, this certainty of salvation made it easier for Harrah's Worthy to kill them. And when Harrah invited her followers likewise to preserve their pallatons, the Worthy found it much easier to risk their lives in the suicidal attacks their Elders began asking of them. As one of the ancient generals once remarked, war is progressive. So it was with the War of Terror. By the seventh day of Bertram's false architetcy, the people of Tannahill fell into the frenzy of killing almost as easily as sleekits starved and forced together into a cage.

Only two people refused to have pallatons made in counterfeit of their true selfness. The first, of course, was Malaclypse Redring of Qallar – he who sought the very opposite of cheating death. And Danlo wi Soli Ringess, too, only smiled when one of Harrah's readers invited him into the vastening chamber that they had hastily constructed in the west wing of the palace. It vexed him to consider his fate should one of the Iviomils' missiles evade the palace lasers and explode in his face: one of Harrah's programmers would cark his pallaton into an eternal computer, and the Architects would say that the Lightbringer at last had become a part of the eternal Church, as all men and women must someday do. Although there was no chance of Danlo changing his mind, the Ede hologram glowing out of Danlo's devotionary computer constantly spoke in favour of salvation. Whenever Danlo was alone with this glittering machine, the Ede reminded him just how desperate their existence truly was. On the first day of the War, when the bombs began exploding and Harrah had taken refuge along with two hundred Elders and Danlo inside the palace, the Ede had calculated that one of Bertram's first moves would be to attack Ornice Olorun's light-field and to capture Danlo's lightship. Bertram certainly would try to capture Danlo himself, to torture him or to cleanse him into acting as a mouthpiece for the Iviomil cause.