The Broken God (22 page)

'Spelad is a clever game,' Danlo said. 'But it is only a game.'

'Ah, ah?'

Danlo held out his hand. In the light of his templet, his fingernails glowed yellow-orange. He suddenly curled his fingers toward his palm, making a loose fist. He said, 'The Fravashi teach their students to hold any worldview lightly, as they would a butterfly, yes?'

'To hold a reality lightly is to change realities easily,' Old Father said. 'How else may one progress from the simplex to the higher stages of plexity?'

'But, sir, your students, Fayeth and Luister, the others - they hold most realities too lightly. They never really know the realities they hold.'

'Ho, ho, do you think you understand the beliefs of science more completely than Fayeth does? And the other belief systems as well?'

'No, sir.'

'Then I'm afraid that I don't understand.'

There was a half smile on Old Father's face, and Danlo thought that he was being only half truthful with him.

'There is a difference,' Danlo said, 'between knowledge and belief.'

'Ah ho, aha,' Old Father said.

Danlo turned to face the east, where the sky showed blue with the day's first light. It would be some time before the sun rose, but already the horizon was stained with tones of ochre and glowing red. Many of the Returnists were looking in this direction, too. Elianora stood up and somehow oriented herself toward the coming dawn. Like all scryers she was blind, and more, her eyepits were scooped hollows as black as space. Perhaps she was waiting to feel the heat of the sun's rays against her cheeks. If she was chagrined or shamed that her prophecy was about to prove false, she gave no sign.

'Do you see this lovely scryer?' Danlo said. He dropped his voice to a near-whisper and moved closer to Old Father. 'Before she blinded herself, she had eyes as I have. As we do. She could see all the colours of the world. But ... what if she had been born eyeless, just as she is now. What if she had been blind from birth, like the hibakusha babies? How could she know that blood is the reddest of all the reds? How could she see the colours of the sunrise? When you look at the sky, sir, do you say, "I believe in blueness"? No, you do not, not unless you are blind. You see the blessed blue, and so you know it. Don't you see? We do not need to believe ... that which we know.'

'Ah, ho, knowing,' Old Father said. 'So, it's so.'

'Fayeth may understand the beliefs of Science better than I,' Danlo said. 'But she'll never know Science ... until she has seen a snowworm sliced into a hundred segments while it is still alive.'

'Would you expect me to subject all my students to such atrocities?'

'To be truly complex ... yes. The other students play the spelad, and they think they know what it is like to move from reality to reality. But it is not really ... real to them. When they enter a new worldview ... they are like old men wading in a hot spring. Half in, half out, never completely wet or dry.'

Now the sky was flaming crimson, and the air was lighter, and the trees and boulders across the mountain were beginning to take on the colours of morning. Of all the people who had climbed Urkel during the night, only the Returnists remained. And now most of these were leaving because their belief in the return of Mallory Ringess had been broken. This, Danlo thought, was the essential difference between belief and knowledge. Knowledge could only intensify into deeper knowledge, whereas belief was as fragile as glass. Hundreds of red-eyed people muttered to themselves as they cast betrayed looks at Elianora and turned their backs to her without bidding her farewell. They left behind forty-eight men and women who knew something they did not. Danlo knew it too, but he could hardly explain this knowledge to Old Father. He knew that, in some sense, Mallory Ringess had returned to Neverness that night. There had indeed been a god upon the mountain – Danlo had only to remember the wistful looks on eighty thousand faces to know that this was so. Because of Elianora's prophecy, something in the City had changed, irrevocably, and something new had been born. Old Father was wrong to suppose that the movement she had begun would simply evaporate like dew drops under a hot sun.

Old Father, who was always adept at reading people's thought shadows, studied Danlo's face, then said, 'You never really believed Mallory Ringess would return, did you?'

'I do not want to believe anything,' Danlo said. 'I want to know ... everything.'

'Ha, ha, not an insignificant ambition. You're different from my other students – they merely desire liberation.'

'And yet they are so ... unfree.'

Old Father's eyes opened wide, and he said, 'How so?'

'Because they think they have found a system ... that will free them.'

'Haven't they?'

'The Fravashi system ... is the one reality they hold tightly. And it holds them even more tightly.'

'Do you have so little respect for our way, then?'

'Oh, no, sir, I have loved this way very well, it is only...'

Old Father waited a moment, then said, 'Please continue.'

Danlo looked down at the stream bubbling through the trees nearby. He said, 'The virtue of the Fravashi system is in freeing us from systems, yes?'

'This is true.'

'Then shouldn't we use this very system ... to free ourselves from the Fravashi way?'

'Ah, ah,' Old Father said as he shut both his eyes. 'Oh, oh, oh, oh.'

'I must ... free myself from this way,' Danlo said.

'Ohhh!'

'I must leave your house before it is too late.'

'So, then – it's so.'

'I am sorry, sir. You must think me ungrateful.'

Old Father opened his eyes, and his mouth broke into a smile. 'No, I've never thought that. A student repays his master poorly if he always remains a student. I've known for some time you would leave.'

'To enter the Order, yes?'

'Ho, ho, even if the Order were to reject you, you still must leave. All my students leave me when they've learned what you've learned.'

'I am ... sorry,' Danlo said.

'Oh, ho, but I'm not sorry,' Old Father said. 'You've learned well, and you've pleased me well, better than I could say unless I say it in Fravash.'

Danlo looked down to see that his fellow Returnists were beginning to break their encampment, packing up their furs and baskets of food. One of them, a young horologe from Lara Sig, told Danlo that it was time to hike back to the City.

'Perhaps we should say goodbye now,' Old Father said.

Danlo glanced at Elianora, standing silently in the snow as she held her face to the morning sky. The other Returnists swarmed around her, talking softly, and one of them offered his arm for the journey back down the mountain.

'In five more days,' Danlo said, 'I shall begin the competition. If the Order accepts me, may I still visit you, sir?'

'No, you may not.'

Now Danlo froze into silence, and he was scarcely aware of the other Returnists leaving him behind.

'These are not my rules, Danlo. The Order has its own way. No novice or journeyman may sit with a Fravashi. We're no longer trusted – I'm sorry.'

'Then– '

'Then you may visit me after you've become a full pilot.'

'But that will be years!'

'Then we must be patient.'

'Of course,' Danlo said, 'I might fail the competition.'

'That's possible,' Old Father said. 'But the real danger to you is in succeeding, not failing. Most people love the Order too completely and find it impossible to leave once they've entered it.'

'But they haven't been students of a Fravashi Old Father, I think.'

'No, that's true.'

'I must know what it is to be a pilot,' Danlo said. 'A blessed pilot.'

'Ho, ho, it's said that the pilots know the strangest reality of all.'

Danlo smiled, then, and bowed to Old Father. 'I must thank you for everything you've given me, sir. The Moksha language, the ideals of ahimsa and shih. And your kindness. And my shakuhachi. These are splendid gifts.'

'You're welcome, indeed.' Old Father looked down the path where the last of the Returnists were disappearing into the forest. He said, 'Will you walk back to the City with me?'

'No,' Danlo said. 'I think I will stay and watch the sun rise.'

'Ah, ho, I'm going home to bed, then.'

'Goodbye, sir.'

'Goodbye, Danlo the Wild. I'll see you soon.'

Old Father reached over to touch Danlo's head, and then he turned to walk home. It took him a long time to make his way down the mountain, and Danlo watched him as long as he could. At last, when he was alone with the wind and the loons singing their morning song, he faced east to wait for the sun. In truth, although he never told this to anyone, he was still waiting for Mallory Ringess. It was possible that this god was only late, after all, and Danlo thought that somebody should remain to greet him if he returned.

The starting point of Architect – or Edic – understanding is the recognition that God is created after the image of man. idea views man and God as joined with one another through a mysterious connection. Man, out of hubris, wanted an image formed of himself as a perfected and potentially infinite God. In that man is reflected in God, he makes himself a partner in this self-realization. Man and God belong so closely to one another that one can say that they are intended for each other. Man finds his fulfilment in God.

– Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1,754th Edition, Tenth Revised Standard Version

On the twenty-fifth day of false winter, in the year 2947 since the founding of the Order, the annual Festival of the Unfortunate Petitioners was held at Borja College. This is the first of the Order's colleges, and it occupies much of the Academy, which is really a separate city within the city of Neverness. At the very eastern edge of Neverness, pushed up against the mountains, is a square mile of dormitories, towers, halls and narrow red glidderies crisscrossing the well-tended grounds. A high granite wall (it is called the Wounded Wall because part of its southern face was once destroyed by the blast of a hydrogen bomb) surrounds the Academy on three sides: it separates the Academy's spacious buildings from the densely arrayed spires and apartments of the Old City. There is no wall along the eastern grounds of the Academy. Or rather, the mountains, Urkel and Attakel, rise up so steeply as to form a beautiful, natural wall of ice and rock. Some students rail at such enforced isolation from the dirty, more organic city life, but most others find comfort in the company of like minds rather than loneliness or alienation or despair.

On this crisp, clear morning, at dawn, Danlo skated through the city streets until he came to the Wounded Wall. There, outside the wall's West Gate, on a narrow red gliddery, he waited with the other petitioners who had come to enter the Academy. Danlo was one of the first to arrive, but in little time, as the sun filled the sky, thousands of girls and boys (and quite a few of their parents) from most of the Civilized Worlds began lining up behind him. For blocks in any direction, the side streets giving onto the Wounded Wall overflowed with would-be students wearing parkas, kimonos, ponchos, fur gowns, chukkas, sweaters, babris, cowl jackets and kamelaikas, garments of every conceivable cut and material. Many of the petitioners were impatient; they grumbled and muttered obscenities as they queued up, waiting for the great iron gates to open.

'We're early,' someone behind Danlo said. 'But you'd think they would let us come in out of the cold.'

Danlo examined the wall surrounding the Academy. It was as high as three tall men, and it was seamed with cracks and covered with sheets of greyish lichen. He had always loved climbing rocks, so he wondered if he could find a handhold in the cut blocks and pull himself up and over. Why, he wondered, would anyone want to build a wall inside a city?

'It's cold on this damn world – my tutors never told me it would be so cold.'

At last the gates opened inward, and the petitioners slowly filed onto one of the main glidderies cutting through the Academy. Behind Danlo there was much grumbling and shouting, pushing and shoving, especially at those intersections where it was not clear how the lines should merge. In several places, fights broke out. Most of these fights were short, clumsy affairs of cursing, flailing fists and hurried apologies when the combatants were pulled apart. Inside the gate, however, there was order. Scores of Borja novices, in their official, white robes, quickly separated the girls from the boys and led them in groups to various buildings around the Academy.

Danlo – along with two thousand other boys – was led across the high professional's college, Lara Sig, to a large hemispherical structure called the Ice Dome. Inside the Ice Dome were figure rings, sled courts, and icefields on which was played that murderously fast game known as hokkee. That morning, however, the icefields were empty of skaters; for hundreds of yards across the icefields, beneath the curving, triangular panes of the dome, the novices had stacked many bundles of worn white robes. Next to each bundle was a heap of sandals of varying sizes. The sandals were paired, left foot to right, tied together around the toe thongs with a single white ribbon. Danlo smelled old wool and the rancid thickness of leather stained with human sweat. One of the elder novices – he was actually the Head Novice, Sahale Featherstone, a tall boy with a shaved head and a serious face – directed Danlo and the others each to choose a robe and a pair of sandals. 'Listen, now, listen,' the novice said to a group of boys standing nearby. 'You must remove all your clothes and put on the petitioner's robe.'

'But it's too damn cold in here!' an unhappy boy next to Danlo protested. 'Are we supposed to stand barefoot on ice while we rummage through a bunch of stinking old shoes? Our damned feet will freeze!'

The Head Novice ignored him, as did most of the other boys; at least, they did not pay him obvious attention. Few were pleased at having to strip naked in such a chill, open place, but neither did most of them want to be singled out as complainers. The boys did as they were told. The air was suddenly full of sound: zippers being pulled open, the swish of woven fabrics, clacking skates, and the buzz of a thousand voices. It was cold enough inside the Dome to steam the breath; everywhere Danlo looked, puffs of silvery vapour escaped from trembling lips and vanished into the air. Novices went among the naked boys, collecting clothes and skates and giving each of them a number in return. 'Your number is 729,' a pimply novice said as he wrapped Danlo's jacket around his skates and tied the bundle together. 'You must remember this number to reclaim your clothes after the competition,' he didn't explain that new clothes would be given to those few who were admitted to Borja. Plainly, he did not expect Danlo to be among the chosen.