The Broken God (23 page)

Soon, all the boys were naked, and many were shivering, their brown or white or black skins stippled with goose bumps. The ice around the stacks of robes was crowded, but even so, each of the boys took care to keep a space around himself and not brush against any of his fellow petitioners. As they waited their turns at the stacks, they furtively glanced from body to naked body, comparing and reflecting, silently judging.

'Hurry, please, I'm freezing to death!'

This came from a plump boy who had his arms clapped across his chest. He had dark brown skin the colour of coffee, and his eyes were full of fear; alternately, he lifted one knee high and then the other, up and down, touching the ice with his tender-soled feet as quickly and as briefly as possible. He looked silly and pathetic, like a strange insect dancing atop a blister of hot, shiny oil.

'Please hurry!'

Ahead of Danlo was a frenzy of boys ripping through robes and sizing sandals to their feet. Everywhere, cast-off white ribbons from the sandals carpeted the ice. Danlo found that by kicking some of the ribbons together he could stand on them and not feel the ilka-hara, the burn of naked ice against flesh. He stood clutching his bamboo shakuhachi in his hand, patiently waiting his turn, watching and waiting, and all the while he was aware that many of the boys were watching him, too. They stared at his loins, at the membrum that Three-Fingered Soli had cut and marked with coloured scars. This unique mutilation riveted their stares. And Danlo stared at the other boys, or rather, he quickly surveyed the contours of the smooth, civilized bodies all around him. None of the boys had been cut; they each retained foreskins sheathing the bulbs of their membrums, and thus they were truly boys, not men. Some of the boys had yet to begin their growth; their chests were slight and narrow, and their membrums were almost as small as Danlo's little finger. But even the older boys, with their large, fully developed membrums, were uncut. Despite his training in the perils of glavering, he could not take them as equals. (In truth, he worried at his own manhood, for how could he ever become a full man until he completed his passage and listened to the complete and whole Song of Life?) No, he was very different from all the others, and he was at once ashamed and proud of this difference. No one else seemed quite so tall, or as tough and hardy in the body. He stood calm and waiting, fairly inured to the cold. He was still too lean from his starvation the previous year; the sinews and bones stood out beneath his weathered skin, and long flat bands of muscle quivered with every breath taken and released. Most of the boys were weak-looking, as thin and white as snowworms or layered with fat like seals. Even the few athletes among them, with their carefully cultivated physiques, seemed pampered and soft. They looked at him – at the various parts of his body – with a mixture of horror, envy, and awe.

There was one other boy, however, who also stood out from the others, though mostly for different reasons. As Danlo donned a loose, scratchy wool robe and kicked on a pair of sandals, he overheard this boy talking about Ede the God and the Cybernetic Universal Church, a subject that interested him endlessly. He slipped through the crowded icefield until he came upon a short, thin boy who held the attention of others standing around him. 'Of course, all the Cybernetic Churches worship Ede as God,' the boy was saying. 'But it's the Architects of the original church who have created the Vild.'

In a low voice Danlo said a prayer, then whispered, 'Shantih, shantih.'

The boy – his name was Hanuman li Tosh – must have overheard what Danlo said, for he turned and bowed his head politely. He had the oldest young face imaginable, smooth like new white ice and indecently unmarked even for a fifteen-year-old. At the same time, he seemed strangely jaded, as if he'd lived a thousand times before, and each life full of disappointments, boredom, anguish, madness, and desperate love. With his full, sensual lips, he smiled at Danlo; it was a beautiful smile, at once shy and compelling. In many ways, he was a beautiful boy. There was a delicateness to his finely-made face bones, an almost otherworldly grace. Danlo thought he must be either half an angel or half demon. His hair was yellow-white, the colour of an iceblink, and his skin was so white that it was almost translucent, a thin shell of flesh that could scarcely protect him from the coldness and cruelties of the world. Except for his eyes, he was really too beautiful. His eyes were a pale blue, vivid and clear like those of a sled dog. Danlo had never imagined seeing such eyes in a human being. There was too much sensitivity and suffering there, as well as passion and fury. In truth, Danlo instantly hated the sight of those hellish, shaida eyes. He thought of this strange boy as the 'Hell-eyes', a pale fury he should either flee from immediately or kill.

But the circle of chattering boys surrounding Hanuman pressed close and caught Danlo up in civilized conversation; he was caught, too, by Hanuman's silver tongue and his charm.

'I'm Hanuman li Tosh, off Catava. What does this word "shantih" mean? It's a beautiful word, and the way you say it – beautiful and haunting.'

How could Danlo explain the peace beyond peace to a civilized boy with eyes out of his deepest nightmares? Hanuman was shivering in his sandals and his robe, looking at him expectantly. Despite the seeming frailty of his long neck and naked limbs where they stuck out of his robe, he bore the cold well. There was something about him that the other boys lacked, some inner fire or intensity of purpose. He had his fist up to his mouth coughing at the cold air, but even in his pain, he seemed very determined and very aware of Danlo looking at him.

'Shantih,' Danlo said, 'is a word ... my father taught me. It is really the formal ending to a prayer.'

'And what language would that be? What religion?'

Danlo had been warned not to reveal his past so he evaded the question. 'I have not presented myself,' he said. 'I am Danlo,' he bowed his head and smiled.

'Just ... Danlo?'

He didn't want to tell him that he was Danlo, son of Haidar, whose father was Wicent, the son of Nuri the Bear-killer. He felt the other boys staring at him, whispering, and he blurted out, 'They call me Danlo the Wild.'

Behind Hanuman, a muscle-fat boy with a cracking voice and a pugnacious face began to laugh. His name was Konrad and he called out, 'Danlo the Wild – what kind of name is that?'

And someone else said, 'Danlo the Wild, the nameless child.'

Danlo's neck suddenly hurt and his eyes were burning with shame. He stood there breathing deeply and evenly, as Haidar had taught him, letting the cold air enter his lungs to steal the heat from his anger. A few of the boys laughed at him and made jokes about his strange name. Most, however, hung back and kept their silence, obviously doubting the wisdom of baiting such a tough-looking boy. With a feather stuck in his hair and his deep blue eyes, Danlo did in fact look uncivilized and not a little wild.

Hanuman coughed some more, great racking coughs that tore through his chest and brought tears to his eyes. When he had caught his breath, he asked, 'Which is your birth world?'

'I was born here.'

'You were? In Neverness? Then you must be used to the cold.'

Danlo rubbed his arms and blew on his fingers to warm them. A man, he thought, should not complain about things he can't change, so he said, simply, 'Can one ever get used to the cold?'

'I certainly can't,' Hanuman said as he began coughing again. And then, 'So cold – how do you stand it?'

Danlo watched him cough for a while, and said, 'You are ill, yes?'

'Ill? No, I'm not – it's just that the air is so cold it cuts the lungs.'

After another round of coughing, Danlo decided that Hanuman was very ill. Once, when he was a young boy, he had watched his near-brother, Basham, die of a lung fever. Hanuman certainly had the pale, haunted look of someone who was contemplating going over. Perhaps a virus was eating away at his lungs. He seemed to be burning from deep inside. His eyes were sunken into dark, bruised flesh; the contrast of the light blue irises against the dark hollows made them seem more hellish by the moment. There was a fear in his eyes, a frightened, fey look almost as if he could see his fate approaching like a dark storm that would ice his heart and steal his breath away. He coughed again, and Danlo could almost feel the spasm tearing through his own chest. He was afraid for Hanuman. He was afraid, and that was seemly, for a man to fear another's dying, but of course it was very wrong that Hanuman should be afraid for himself. Hanuman's fear made Danlo sick. He had keen eyes, and he could see that this frail, ill boy was trying to hide his fear from all the others, perhaps even trying to hide it from himself. Someone, he thought, should feed him bowls of wolf-root tea and bathe his head with cool water. Where was his mother, to care for him? He would have placed his hand on Hanuman's burning forehead to touch the fever away, but he remembered that he was not supposed to touch others, especially not strangers, especially not in sight of a hundred other laughing, joking boys.

Hanuman moved closer to Danlo and spoke in a low, tortured voice, 'Please don't tell the novices or masters I'm ill.'

He coughed so hard that he doubled over and lost his balance as his foot slipped on the ice. He would have pitched face forward, but Danlo caught him by the armpit and hand. Hanuman's hand was hot like an oilstone and surprisingly strong. (Later Danlo would learn that Hanuman had trained in the killing arts in order to harden himself. In truth, he was much stronger than he looked.) Danlo gripped Hanuman's hard little hand, pulling him to his feet, and suddenly they didn't seem at all like strangers. There was something between them, some kind of correspondence and immediate understanding. Danlo had a feeling that he should pay close attention to this correspondence. Hanuman's intenseness both attracted and repelled him. He smelled Hanuman's fear and sensed his will to suffer that fear in silence no matter the cost. He smelled other things as well. Hanuman stank of sweat and sickness, and of coffee – obviously he had been drinking mugs of coffee to keep himself awake. With tired, feverish eyes Hanuman looked at Danlo as if they shared a secret. Hanuman shook off his hand, gathered in his pride and stood alone. Danlo thought he was being consumed from within like an overfilled oilstone burning too quickly. Who could hold such inner fire, he wondered, and not quickly go over to the other side of day?

'You should rest in your furs and drink hot tea,' Danlo said, 'or else you might go over.'

'Go over? Do you mean die?' Hanuman spoke this word as if it were the most odious and terrifying concept that he could imagine. 'Please, no, I hope not.'

He coughed and there was a bubbly sound of liquid breaking deep in his throat.

'Where are your parents?' Danlo asked as he combed back his long hair with his fingers. 'Did you make the journey here alone?'

Hanuman coughed into his cupped hand, then wiped a fleck of blood from his lips. 'I don't have any parents.'

'No father, no mother? O blessed God, how can you not have a mother?'

'Oh, I had parents, once,' Hanuman explained. 'I'm not a slelnik, even though some people say I look like one.'

Danlo hadn't yet heard of the despised, unnatural breeding strategies practised on a few of the Civilized Worlds; he knew nothing of the exemplars and slelniks born in abomination from the artificial wombs. He thought he understood a part of Hanuman's pain and obvious loneliness; however, he understood wrongly. 'Your parents have gone over, yes?'

Hanuman looked down at the ice and then shook his head. 'Does it matter?' he asked. 'To them, I might as well be dead.'

He told Danlo something of his journey to Neverness, then. In the Ice Dome, a thousand boys were stamping their feet, slapping leather sandals against ice as they huffed out steam and complained of neglect, and Hanuman told of how he had been born into an important Architect family on Catava. His parents were Pavel and Moriah li Tosh, readers in the Cybernetic Reformed Church. (Over the millennia, the Architects of the Infinite Intelligence of the Cybernetic Universal Church have been riven into many different sub-religions. The Evolutionary Church of Ede, the Cybernetic Orthodox Churches, the Fostora Separatist Union – these are but a few of the hundreds of churches which have splintered off from the original church body, beginning with the Ianthian Heresy and the First Schism in the year 331 EV, that is to say, the 331st year since the vastening of Nikolos Daru Ede. All time, the Architects say, must begin at the moment Ede carked his consciousness into one of his mainbrain computers and thus became the first of humanity's gods.) Like his parents, Hanuman had undergone the traditional reader training in one of the church schools. Unlike any of the respectable Architects that he knew, however, he had rebelled while still very young, begging his parents' permission to attend the Order's elite school in Oloruning, which is Catava's largest and only real city.

'My father allowed me to enter the elite school,' Hanuman said, 'only because it was the best school on Catava. But I had to agree to finish my reader training in the church after graduation; I had to agree not to attend the Academy on Neverness. So I agreed. But it was an impossible agreement. I never should have made it. All my friends in the elite school were planning to enter the Academy, if they could. And I'd always hoped to enter the Academy. To become a reader like my parents and grandparents – I never really wanted that. Oh, wait ... please excuse my coughing. Do you know about the readers of my church? Of my parents' church? No? I'm not supposed to tell anyone this, but I shall anyway. The second holiest ceremony in our church is the facing ceremony. You'll have heard rumours about the facing ceremony – almost everyone has. No? Where have you spent your life? Well, in the facing ceremony, any Worthy Architect is allowed to interface with one of the church's communal computers. The interfacing, entering into computer consciousness, the information flows, like lightning, the power. It's like heaven, really, the only good thing about being an Architect. But before every facing ceremony, there has to be a cleansing. Of sin. We Architects ... the Architects, call sin "negative programming". So before a facing, a cleansing, because it's blasphemy to interface a holy computer while unclean with negative programs – that's what most of the Cybernetic Churches teach. I can't tell you about the cleansing ceremony. It's worse than hateful, really, it's a violation of the soul. Oh, I'll tell you, if you promise to keep this secret. The readers strip bare your mind with their akashic computers. Everything, every negative thought or intention, especially vanity, because that's the worst thing, the damning sin, to think too highly of yourself or want to be more than you were born for. Almost everything – there are ways of hiding things; you have to learn to keep your thoughts secret or else the readers will rape your soul. They'll cleanse you until there's nothing left. Have you ever had an imprinting? The cleansing is like a reverse imprinting. The readers remove the bad memories. They reprogram the brain ... by killing parts of it. Not everyone believes that, of course, or else they'd panic whenever it was time for a cleansing. But even if the readers don't actually kill the brain cells, they kill something else when they eliminate old synaptic pathways and create new ones. Why not call it soul? I know that's an inelegant word for an elegant, inexpressible concept, but soul ... you have to keep your soul to yourself, do you see? The soul, the light. And that's why I left my church. Because I'd rather have died than become a reader.'