The Broken God (37 page)

'I do not understand you,' Danlo said. He turned to Hanuman, who was standing beneath a giant old tree. 'You like people. And they like you. Yet you speak as if they have no value.'

'I love people,' Hanuman admitted. 'I love animals, too.'

'But people are not animals!'

Hanuman laughed harshly, then said, 'In one sense – and this is the only sense that really matters – most people are nihilities. Think of Pedar. Think of his friends. They have zero chance of becoming anything greater. Trillions of people, trillions of Pedars – they fill the stars across the galaxy with copies of themselves and call this the fulfilment of man's destiny. But no, it's not. It's only multiplication by zero.'

'But, Hanu, where would you be ... without the people who made you?'

'Just so,' Hanuman said. 'The only purpose of lower people is to kneel down and form a pyramid so that the higher kind of man may stand above the clouds and complete a higher task. You mustn't think our kind are just some lucky accident of civilization. We're the only reason for civilization. We're its hope and meaning.'

'Oh, Hanu!'

'It's hard, I know. To accept that people don't live their lives for themselves – this is hard. Because living as they do, they never really live.'

Like a shagshay bull, Danlo kicked at the crusty old snow. He said, 'I know about slavery. About slaves –

Master Jonath told me there used to be slaves on Summerworld.'

'Do you think it's so despicable that the higher man should live off the lower? No, it's not. It's only natural. And necessary. We should acknowledge this. They give us their lives! They're an incomplete, diminished, sick, and broken people – we should accept their sacrifice gracefully. With gratitude. With compassion, even love.'

For a moment, Danlo covered his eyes and looked down at the snow. Then he said, 'Since the Day of Submission ... I have had a taste of what slavery is like.'

'So have I,' Hanuman said. 'But this is good, not bad. Everyone should be a slave once in his life.'

'How so?'

'Because this way, we know what it's like to feel the boots on our backs. Because ever after, when we come into ourselves, we'll have the ruthlessness to be masters.'

Danlo stood leaning back against the trunk of a shih tree. His fingernails drummed the icy, broken bark; the sound they made was something like the kap, kap, kap of a mauli bird. 'I shall never like Pedar,' he said. 'Or his friends. But ... we are they. They are we. There is no real difference.'

'Ahimsa,' Hanuman said, and he shook his head. 'A noble idea that will destroy you.'

'No, it is just the opposite.'

Hanuman shifted his boots atop the snow trying to keep warm. He said, 'Our kind are animals, too, but we're also something more.'

'As is Pedar.'

'No, not really. The true juncture in evolution is not between the animals and man. It's between man and true human beings.'

Because Hanuman's overweening arrogance deeply disturbed Danlo (and because he feared that there might be some truth to what he had said), he began wandering through the grove. There was one tree he particularly liked, a gnarled, lightning-scarred tree whose twisted limbs reminded him that even the life of plants was full of pain. He paced around and around this tree, making a circle. The snow overlying the tree's roots was old and hard, and it crunched beneath his boots.

'All people,' Danlo said, 'are human beings.'

'All?'

'Yes, all. Even the carked races. Even the humans some call aliens.'

'No, Danlo. True human beings are rare. Rarer than you might think.'

'What is a human being, then?'

Hanuman stood quietly in the snow, then said, 'A seed.'

'A ... seed?'

'An acorn that is unafraid to destroy itself in growing into a tree.'

'Then– '

'"The true human being",' Hanuman quoted, '"is the meaning of the universe. He is a dancing star. He is the exploding singularity pregnant with infinite possibilities."'

'I think the possibilities of all people are ... infinite.'

'I love you for your faith,' Hanuman said. 'But, in truth, I've known only two people who might possibly be human.'

Danlo stopped suddenly and whirled around in the snow. Hanuman was looking at him intensely, as if they were the only two people who mattered in all the universe. 'But I am a man just like any other,' Danlo protested. 'You and I – how are we so different from others?'

Hanuman bowed his head and replied, 'In our consciousnesses, we are different. In our awareness of our deepest purpose. The way we see too much and too deeply.'

'But Hanu– '

'The way we feel pain.'

The way we feel pain. Danlo took in a quick gasp of air and held it until his lungs burned with the urge to breathe. Then everything escaped from him at once, his exploding breath and his fundamental hatred of Hanuman's elitism. (And, most of all, his anguish at his own unique qualities and origins which separated him from all other peoples of the Civilized Worlds.) 'What do you know about pain?' he cried out.

'Not enough, it seems,' Hanuman said. He was standing in front of Danlo with his arms folded across his chest, shivering. He was also smiling. There was something both wicked and profound in his smile. 'But I know that human beings suffer as others do not. There's no help for it. To become greater one must be completely ruthless toward oneself. If the eye gives offence, it must be plucked out – do you understand? If something is hard to do, if it is hateful, even what others call evil – one must do that very thing precisely because it's hateful. One must hold a red-hot fire iron to the weaker parts of one's soul. This continual mutilation of the self – this is pain inside pain without end.'

Although Danlo nodded his head at Hanuman's words, he was not really listening. Usually he listened to others with all the concentration of an owl trying to detect sleekit scratchings beneath the snow, but now he was staring off into the darkening sky, remembering.

'Without end,' Hanuman said. 'The pain of self-overcoming is just the beginning. Then, for our kind, if we're strong enough, if our souls are great and deep – then comes the real pain. What's real pain, you ask? The power to choose what we will. Having to choose. This terrible freedom. These infinite possibilities. The taste for the infinite spoiled by the possibility of evolutionary failure. Real pain is knowing that you're going to die, all the while knowing that you don't have to die.'

'But, Hanu, everything dies,' Danlo said softly. He turned to face the scarred, old shih tree, and he pressed his forehead against it. When he looked up, he felt the zig-zag mark where the tree's icy bark had cut into his skin.

Hanuman shook his head and continued, 'But why die at all, Danlo? Mightn't there be a new phase of evolution? A new kind of being? Can't you understand? I'm trying to delineate an emergent quality of the brain. New synapses. New connections. A constellation of qualities and abilities, of new levels of existence. Consciousness heightened and exalted in itself, purified. This pure consciousness that we really are. That we struggle to be. For our kind, there's always the burning to be more. The eternal longing. And this is why true human beings feel more pain. Because we are more, but it's never quite enough – never. And we are aware of this neverness inside our souls. And aware of being aware. There is a feedback. Can you understand what this is like? Pain is magnified, infinitely. Each moment of time. Reality becomes almost too real. It blazes. All the universe afire with the possibilities of light, and madness, too. Real pain is the burning that never stops, the frenzy, the lightning.'

Standing so long in the cold had exhausted Danlo so he leaned back against his tree. His fingers found the charred wound where a bolt of rare winter lightning had split the tree's bark. Frenzy and lightning, he thought. He stood there remembering the frenzied, frothing disease that had killed his people. The wind came up, then, carrying down the rich, ageless smell of the mountains. It was a smell of life and death. Danlo thought the best thing about the shih grove was the variety of its smells: steamy sleekit droppings dotting the snow, ice, spindrift, crushed yu berries, and the pungence of hot sap when the wind occasionally tore the shih leaves from their branches. Somewhere, in the rising green forests above him, a pack of wolves must have killed a shagshay bull, or perhaps a doe. The wind was keen with blood-scent, and it touched his nostrils with the faint, ferny smell of a shagshay's opened entrails. Most wolves, he remembered, liked to lick out the fermenting, vegetable contents of a shagshay's stomach before tearing into the liver.

'Danlo, have you heard anything I've said?'

In truth, Danlo was almost beyond listening. He had his hand up underneath his cap, rubbing his stubbly scalp as he recalled a certain custom of the Devaki tribe: A man, when he had unwittingly caused another injury, would make a blood-offering to atone for the pain.

'Danlo?'

Anaslia, he remembered, was the Devaki word for the sharing of pain.

'Please, Danlo. Look at me.'

But Danlo was now looking down, searching with his eyes for stones. Surrounding them was a circle of footprints broken through layers of snow. In a few places, his boots had exposed the ground. He dropped to the snow, and with his cold, stiff fingers he prised loose a roundish white stone and chunk of granite. Quickly, precisely, he hammered the stone against the edge of the granite. A sharp piece of granite the size of a shih leaf flaked off. It was poor quality stone to cut with, but since he didn't have any flint or obsidian to make a proper knife, he shrugged his shoulders, grasped the flake between his fingers and brought the point of it up against his forehead. He slashed himself from his stubbly hairline to his eyebrow. He cut deeply, diagonally across his forehead, down to the bone. He cut skin and veins, and his blood flowed over his eyebrows and fell in streams to the snow.

'What are you doing!' Hanuman cried out as he rushed through the snow and knelt at Danlo's side. 'Oh, what have you done?'

Danlo tried to turn away from Hanuman. With rigid fingers he held open the wound, the better to let as much blood as possible touch the world. It would require many heartbeats of blood to atone for the deaths of Haidar, Chandra and his near-brothers. Of course, he knew it was impossible to share the death-agony of a whole tribe of people – no one had that much blood inside. Shaida is the who brings death to his people. No, he could never undo the Devaki's death; he could not even undo his own shaida life, for he knew it was not the right time to die. But he could give his blood to the dead. He could give them his pain. Across Danlo's bleeding forehead and behind his eyes was a whole universe of pain.

'Danlo, Danlo!' Hanuman began scooping up handfuls of snow and holding the frozen white mounds against Danlo's forehead to sop up the blood. There was too much blood, however, and the snow quickly turned to red slush in his hands. 'Oh, God!' he repeated again and again. 'Oh, God, my God!'

Danlo's head wound must have recalled terrible images of his own father's death – his murder – in the family reading room, because Hanuman was suddenly frantic with fear. 'Danlo, Danlo!' he said. 'What have you done?' He fumbled with the zipper of his furs, prised the stone flake from Danlo's bloody fingers, and used it to hack a piece of cloth from his woollens. This cloth he bound around Danlo's head beneath the ruff of his blood-spattered cap.

'I was just giving blood to the dead,' Danlo explained.

'Oh, no, not now!' Hanuman said. He grasped at Danlo's shoulder. 'Come, quickly; we've got to get you to a cutter before you bleed to death!'

'Wait,' Danlo said. Even though the pain above his eye was hot and intense, even though blood was soaking the makeshift bandage so quickly that it wouldn't freeze, he knew that scalp wounds were rarely as serious as they appeared. 'Wait,' he repeated, looking at Hanuman. 'Your face – your blessed face!'

It is astonishing that the look on a person's face can change the universe. Or rather, what is behind that look. In the pull of Hanuman's elegant brow muscles, in the trembling of the too-sensitive lips, there was something new, something Danlo had never expected to see. Terrible , he thought. All across Hanuman's face were the terrible and beautiful marks of compassion. Of anaslia. Anaslia was the Devaki word for compassion: it meant literally, 'suffering with'. And how Hanuman suffered! In truth, Danlo could not bear to look at him just then, with his silent, anguished face and his hooded eyes. There was something involuted and heartbreaking in his friend's compassion for him. Something twisted.

Danlo lifted his head, then, looking away, looking up at the black, infinite depths behind the blueness of the sky. He was suddenly afraid of something. Although he could not quite articulate this fear, could not bring it to mind as a concept made up of words, deep in his belly was an acid dread that he had awakened (or created) in Hanuman a twisted compassion far more terrible than beautiful.

'What are you looking at?' Hanuman asked. His eyes were watery with tears; they were like twin, pale mirrors quavering in the cold.

Anashaida – this is what Danlo's deepest self called to him; beware the twisted compassion that would change both their lives and perhaps the future of all living things.

'Danlo? Oh, God, my God, why won't the bleeding stop!'

Again Hanuman cut a cloth strip from his shirt and replaced Danlo's sodden red bandage.

'Push it against my head.' Danlo grunted as he met Hanuman's eyes with his own. 'Tightly – the pressure will stop the bleeding.'

'Like this?' Hanuman asked as he pressed his palm to Danlo's forehead.

'Yes, that is good.'

'It's still bleeding!' Hanuman called out. His furs were open to the wind; his woollens had been hacked into rags, and he was shivering violently. His teeth began to chatter, making a tecka, tecka, tecka sound. 'My ... God I've never ... seen so much ... blood!'

He was standing close to Danlo, and his little hand was hard against Danlo's forehead. Danlo felt his carbon dioxide breath, in ragged hot jets, fall over his face. He said, 'That is good. Thank you.'