The Broken God (103 page)

'I ... made it,' Danlo said. 'I found a piece of ivory and carved it. The Devaki fathers taught me how to carve.'

Hanuman, too, was staring at the god. He could not take his eyes from it. He turned it around and around in front of the candles that flickered in their golden stands. Tongues of flame illuminated the cool, subtle contours of the ivory as Hanuman watched the firelight dance across the god's terrible face.

'Oh, Danlo,' he said.

Danlo watched him examining the god. Did he understand that it was meant as both a peace offering and a synthesis of two ways of viewing the universe? He must know, Danlo thought. He must see that there was a connection between the passion for burning and the quest for remembrance. Ultimately, life's terrible fire and clear waters of the Elder Eddas were made of the same substance, and Hanuman must take the god in his hands and accept this final paradox of existence.

'I've never seen anything like this,' Hanuman said. His knuckles were hard and white from gripping the god so tightly. He should have smiled and bowed to Danlo, but the sight of the god struck something deep inside him, and his face fell hateful and furious as if Danlo had dropped a hot coal into his hand.

'I had hoped that it would match ... your other chess pieces.'

'Can we take this as a hopeful sign that you've returned to the Way?'

Danlo swallowed against the dryness in his throat and said, 'No, I am sorry. It is just a gift.'

'Well, it's quite beautiful.'

'I had hoped ... that you would like it.'

'It's more than beautiful, really. It's inspired work.'

Danlo saw the old madness come into Hanuman's eyes; instantly his belly muscles tightened up as if expecting a blow.

'The god looks something like your father,' Hanuman said.

'My ... father.'

'Mallory Ringess. The Ringess, whose inspiration we all must follow.'

From ten feet away, Danlo peered at the god from a new angle. He looked at the long nose, the deep-set eyes, the sensuous mouth open to both cruelty and compassion. Suddenly, he saw what Hanuman saw: The chess piece resembled Mallory Ringess as a young man, before he had been sculpted into the form of an Alaloi. Without realizing what he was doing, almost by chance, Danlo had carved this image of his father.

'I... did not know,' Danlo said. He looked down at his fingers, which were red and pocked with blisters. It was strange, he thought, that during all the days he had worked on the god, his hands might have recognized what his mind did not.

'You've been inspired,' Hanuman said. 'But your inspiration is false.'

'But, Hanu– '

'As a man,' Hanuman interrupted, 'Mallory Ringess was the most passionate of men. When he loved, he loved. When he wept, his tears would have scalded the eyes of a lesser being. We all know this. But the Ringess is far beyond such emotion. He's left all suffering behind him. Can't you see this, Danlo? You've given us the man, not the god.'

'No, no, Hanu, you do not– '

'You don't understand,' Hanuman said. 'You never have.'

They were now shouting at each other, trying to make themselves heard above the wind which fell over the cathedral like an ocean. The wind roared and shuddered and beat against the windows; at any moment, it seemed, the panes of coloured glass might slam against their casements and shatter inward. But Danlo was only distantly aware of this potential disaster. All his senses concentrated on Hanuman. Because Danlo's words were lost into the larger sound of the storm, he stopped shouting. His voice fell to a whisper. Hanuman would not be able to hear this whisper, but he might read the shape of Danlo's lips and finally understand what he was saying.

'If gods truly have the powers that you say, then restore Tamara.'

'Am I a god, Danlo?' Hanuman whispered this question so that no one could read his words except Danlo.

'But she suffers – she tries to remember herself and she cannot.'

'I know.'

'Help me,' Danlo said. 'Please.'

Hanuman's cheeks suddenly flushed red as if Danlo had slapped his face. 'Three tendays ago I asked for your help,' he said. 'But you wouldn't help me.'

'I ... could not.'

'And I can't help you.'

'You could let an imprimatur copy Tamara's memories. From your computer. There could be an imprinting, and Tamara might remember.'

'No,' Hanuman whispered. That's impossible, now.'

'But, Hanu, why?'

'Because her memories have all been destroyed. I never saved them. You know why.'

Hanuman pointed the god's head at him and shook it as if to accuse Danlo of a worse crime than slelling memories. Danlo knew then that all his hope had been false, just another way of facing the universe with dreams rather than grasping the reality of the present moment. Now, there was only the wind streaming against the fragile windows and cold, falling air. Now he hated a man. He looked at Hanuman, and Hanuman looked at him, and something dark and primeval flowed between them, back and forth, back and forth.

I must not hate him, Danlo thought. I must not hate.

But he did hate; it was there, inside, indestructible, surging up toward his brain with each contraction of his heart.

He'd thought that he had built a wall around this hate, but now it was breaking out of him like a wound bursting open with poisoned blood. He shook his head back and forth while his fingernails clawed deep into his palms. Bardo, who was standing nearby, looked at him strangely. He heard Bardo bellow out: 'What are you saying? By God, what's going on here?'

There was a swirl of golden silk from his side, but Danlo stared straight ahead. Even though he was aware of Bardo bearing down on him, he could not break eyelock with Hanuman.

'What have you done?' Hanuman whispered. He stood facing Danlo, and he gripped the god with both hands. He held it in front of him as if he were about to snap it in two.

'No!' Danlo cried. His voice spilled out and vanished into the hollows of the cathedral. For a moment, he felt himself falling through an emptiness as vast and black as an underground cavern. All he could hear was the murderous wind pushing through cracks and shrieking over scooped stone. Although many people crossed their arms over their chests against this bitterly cold air, Danlo was burning like a child with fever. His hands were hot and inflamed, and his belly, and his head; his eyes stung from staring at the lustrous piece of ivory that Hanuman held in his little hands.

No, no, no, no.

It appeared that Hanuman was hardening himself to break the god. His hands were tightened into fists. There were tears in his eyes, and love, and madness, as if he could not bear looking at Danlo – but neither could he look away. All his life he had tried to create around himself a perfect sphere of self-will, and he had almost succeeded. Only one connection with the universe outside himself remained.

'What are you doing?' Bardo shouted from a million miles away.

Hanu, Hanu, no.

There was an endless flow of hate and love between them, and this love beyond love was the one thing that Hanuman could not bear. For a moment, his eyes burned into Danlo's, and he saw the universe as Danlo saw it, and he willed himself to break the god. His will was very strong. If there had been a cleansing heaume at hand, he might have used it to destroy his own memories of Danlo. But there was only a simple chess piece carved out of ivory, six inches of a walrus' tusk that Hanuman held near his body as his fists clenched and trembled.

'He can't break it, can he?' someone shouted.

Danlo watched Hanuman struggling against the tough, old ivory. To Bardo and the other Ringists, it must have seemed impossible that he could gain enough leverage to break it. But Hanuman's hands were hard and strong from years of practising his killing art, and there was a flaw at the god's centre. Danlo, in his carving, had tried to hide this long, twisted crack through the ivory, but he knew it was there.

'Look!'

With a sudden jerk and snap, Hanuman broke the god in half. It divided along a jagged crack through the god's belly. Something broke inside Danlo, then. He watched tiny ivory splinters flying out from the break at the god's centre, and he stepped toward Hanuman in order to kill him. There was a roaring in his ears louder than the wind. Something was calling him to lay his hands about Hanuman's throat and squeeze until he was dead. The memory of Tamara was inside him, whispering terrible things. And then he heard the voice of his father, and his father's father – all his ancestors, male and female, back to the first bacteria which had fought their dark and desperate battles in the oceans of Old Earth. There were billions of voices inside him, screeching and crying and laughing, spread through the tissues of his heart and brain. And all these voices together were just the sound and the memory of life. The love of death. Each cell of his body burned with a will toward destruction and death. He felt this terrible will flow like molten stone into his hands; he was aware of it as a flash of lightning behind his eyes. For a moment, he was almost blind. His field of vision narrowed so that all he could see was Hanuman, grinding his teeth together, bearing down with all his strength against the ivory god as he looked at Danlo and despaired. He saw Hanuman holding the pieces of the god in his hands; Hanuman's face shone with astonishment, hatred, triumph and shame. And then other voices began calling Danlo: the scream of his young son; his daughter's quiet whimpering; the laughter and weeping of a billion billion granddaughters waiting forever to be born. This memory, too, lay inside him. It was the memory of a future that only he could create. He saw his hands circling Hanuman's throat to choke off the flow of air and blood. He saw Hanuman writhing like a fish between his hands, spitting and thrashing in his death agony. And Hanuman dead with a broken neck, and Hanuman lying on the altar, his head broken open upon the bloody golden urn that Danlo held in his hands. Danlo began to take a step toward Hanuman, and a thousand times Hanuman died with his eyes wide open, gazing at him in love and fear. It was impossible to escape these deaths, or any death, for it was all around him, frozen into an instant of time. All things, even as they quivered and swelled with life, were really quite dead. The tribes of the Alaloi were dead – he could see their twisted bodies abandoned in their snowhuts, or bleeding inside bright caverns, or spread out in their thousands and thousands across the winter ice of the world. Out toward the Vild, where the stars burned so brilliantly they were sick with light, in each second of time, a million human beings cried out and died. Soon all the stars would burn out and die, and each man and woman across the galaxy would be burnt and broken and dead. There was nothing to save them, neither medicines nor meditation nor belief in the redemptive technologies of the gods. This was the way the universe was. This is the way it always would be. And now a little piece of the universe named Hanuman li Tosh stood before him, looking at him with fury and hate. Hanuman twisted his hands, suddenly, forever, and a little piece of ivory broke in two. And so Danlo would kill him now. In an animal rage, he would rip out Hanuman's throat or break open his brains. Out of pure hatred and will to destroy, he would hurry Hanuman on to his inevitable death. It was right that he should do this. The wind was calling him to kill Hanuman, and the stars, and each atom of each living thing across the universe.

NO!

Danlo took a step across the altar, and he became aware of himself as a bringer of death. He wondered, then, how he could hate so deeply and completely, yet see himself hating so clearly.

I am not I. I am the one who sees myself, who sees that he sees.

With this thought, his field of vision opened as if he were a bird breaking through a layer of clouds below the sky. He saw Hanuman trying with all his might to break the god; and Hanuman, beholding the wildness in Danlo as he stared at him with his love of fate; and Hanuman, hardening himself to kill Danlo the moment that the god snapped and Danlo rushed upon him. He saw many things at once: now Bardo sighed and moved toward him, and the fat along Bardo's belly rippled like the waves upon the ocean. Now, in the vase nearest Hanuman, a petal from one of the flowers separated from the stem and fell in a scarlet flutter through the air. Now there was light everywhere, photons from the thousands of candles pinging against stone pillars, reflecting into dark corners, falling upward in golden streams toward the cathedral's windows. He was suddenly very aware of these windows. There were eighty-two windows spaced evenly around the nave, but one window in particular called to him. It was the scene of Mallory Ringess saying farewell to Bardo before his leaving Neverness and ascent to the heavens. His hand was laid across Bardo's forehead and tear-streaked cheeks, and his eyes, cut of grey-blue glass, bathed Bardo in a silent blessing of light. The body of the Ringess was made of bits of glass of every colour, and each time the wind gusted, the glass fragments strained against each other, and the whole window bowed inward.

No!

At last the god that Hanuman was holding snapped. At the same moment, a blast of wind blew in the great window, ripping the casement entirely away from the stone wall. At first no one was aware of this disaster except Danlo. High above the chancel, he saw bits of violet and blue and gold burst into a shower of glass. Many of these bits were still glued together and fell in glittering shards and sheets. The heavy steel casement, still supporting whole sections of the scene between Bardo and Mallory Ringess, fell like a giant hammer directly toward the altar. Danlo watched as the wind destroyed the window; this took only a moment. But it would be a tenth of a second before the sound of breaking glass and the sudden storm reached the ears of the people below, and longer still before their nerves fired and caused them to lift their faces upward.

'No!' Danlo cried out.

He took a step toward Hanuman. He saw the window break, and he waited an eternity to hear the sound of it. He saw himself standing on the altar, lost into his hatred, raging like a bird of prey. It was as if his centre – the seeing part of himself – was no longer located behind his eyes or in his belly, but rather inside the stone wall ornaments, or along the ribs of the vault, or circling through the cold space of the nave itself. Ten thousand bits of glass fell through the air, describing lovely parabolas of sapphire and rose. The window casement dropped in a perfect parabola toward the altar; Danlo did not need mathematics to see that this rectangle of heavy metal would exactly bisect the space occupied by Hanuman's head. In twenty-seven tenths of a second, it would crush Hanuman's brain into jelly and he would die.