The Broken God (59 page)

'May you be enlightened tonight,' a sarcastic young pilot named Orah Bey said to Danlo as he stopped him on the well-tended ice of Resa Commons. Danlo was eager to see Bardo again and he impatiently slid his racing blades back and forth across the ice as he listened to Orah lecture him. This will likely be your only journey to Bardo's house – if the lords don't issue an injunction against attending his parties, I'll be much surprised.'

As it happened, that very same morning, Hanuman li Tosh had also received an invitation. When Danlo discovered this during lunch (the two of them had remained friends and frequently took meals together), he arranged to accompany Hanuman to Bardo's joyance. At sunset they met outside the Academy's West Gate, whose scorched, steel doors always stood open to the lights of the City. Hanuman was waiting near the door, beneath the granite blocks of the Wounded Wall, and he greeted Danlo as he always did, with a smile and a quick head bow. 'Hello, Danlo,' he said.

'Hanu, Hanu, are you ready?' Danlo said. 'This is a splendid night.'

It was an evening of songbirds and sweet smells, the kind of restless evening that drives the citizens of Neverness out into the streets seeking uncertain delights. Thousands of fritillaries, their wings violet and blue with the season's colours, fluttered among the snow dahlia and other flowers that lined the Wounded Wall. The slidderies of the Old City shone with melted water, here and there gathered into shallow puddles, or spread out like a silvery lens over the crimson ice. It would be hours yet before the air fell to freezing and the streets glazed over. Despite the warmth, however, Hanuman was dressed in a formal cetic's robe, with a thick fur stola draped around his shoulders. His clothes were of a cetic's orange madder, a hideous colour for any human being to wear. In truth, Hanuman, with his pale eyes and pale yellow hair, looked ghastly all swaddled up in orange. His milk-white skin had a sickly, translucent cast to it, like that of a paper lampshade inadequately covering the inner fire which kept him living. He stood coughing into his gloved hands, catching and coughing at the cancers in his lungs that he had been unable to cure himself of. Although he had attained his full growth – he and Danlo were both twenty-one years old – he was still slight of stature, and still too thin.

'Let's skate down the Serpentine,' Danlo said. 'The most beautiful women promenade there, this time of night.'

The contrast Danlo made with Hanuman was striking. He, too, was lean, but his was the leanness of an animal of the wild who loves wind and sky and movement, who takes nothing more from the world than is needed to live. Over the past five years he had grown even stronger and quite tall; he had grown the beard of a full Alaloi man, and his black hair, long and wild as tundra weed, rippled about his neck and shoulders. He still kept Ahira's white feather fastened in his hair. Gone was the white cap of Borja, and gone too was his deference to rules and the expectations of others. He wore a black racing kamelaika tight around his body and limbs. It was a garment one might choose for a game of hokkee or bump-and-skate, but hardly appropriate for a party attended by Neverness's illuminati. When Hanuman chided him for his indecorous attire, he smiled and said nothing. He flung himself down the Old City streets, and he moved as lightly as a sea bird skating along cold currents of air.

They picked their way among the crowds of the Serpentine, that longest of slidderies which sinuously twists throughout the entire City, from the Elf Gardens to West Beach. Once or twice they paused to admire the beautiful women. These were mostly young astriers whose families forced them to promenade in fetching fur gowns or kimonos, in the hope of soliciting marriage contracts from the wealthy astrier men who swarm the upper segments of the Serpentine each night.

'They are each ... so lovely,' Danlo said. He caught the eye of a woman on the far side of the sliddery. She was dressed in a kimono of Japanese green, and her arms were laced through the arms of two other women who were probably her sisters. Although astriers shun others outside their sect, especially pilots of the Order forbidden by their vows to marry, when Danlo smiled at her she bowed her head coyly and smiled back at him.

'Your love of women will be your death,' Hanuman said.

'But, Hanu, you have said that about other things, and here I am, still alive.'

'And alive you'll always be – until you're not.'

Danlo drank in the sensations of the street: the lowing voices, the swish of expensive fabrics brushing him as the swarms of humanity passed by, the polished boots and gleaming skates, the smells of wet ice and rare perfumes and sweat. He turned to Hanuman and said, 'I have already admitted that Bardo is a dangerous man. Dangerous ... to me, at least. Must we dwell on those dangers?'

'Why shouldn't we? Since you love any kind of danger.'

Danlo rubbed the livid, lightning-shaped scar above his eye and smiled. 'I think Bardo is attempting something new. 'Truly. To attempt to remember the Elder Eddas – this is a noble thing, yes? The Order should be leading the way in recovering and delineating this knowledge. The remembrancers should be. Instead, there is talk of imposing an injunction against Bardo's joyances.'

'Do you expect the Order to encourage the conceits of a new cult?'

'A cult?' Danlo said as he brushed back the hair from his forehead. 'But Bardo has denied he has any religious aspirations.'

'And the louder he denies it,' Hanuman said, 'the more surely he condemns himself.'

'Sometimes I think that civilized people ... need a new religion. They are so unhappy. So dead inside, so lost.'

'I'll never understand your passion for religions.'

'That is because your sole religious experience has been with Edeism.'

'Which is all the experience I desire.'

'And here I stand,' Danlo said, and he laughed softly, 'both tychist and holist, and Architect, and Sufi, and Zen Buddhist, and a Fravashi adept, and perhaps even ... a would-be Alaloi shaman. I must vex you, sometimes.'

Hanuman led Danlo into a vacant warming pavilion at the edge of the street where they might have a space of privacy. He said, 'You do vex me. Which is why you're my friend.'

'If Bardo has truly found a way to remember the Elder Eddas,' Danlo said, 'this is not religion. It is experience.'

'Oh, there's no doubt that Bardo and his circle have remembered something. But the Elder Eddas? Do you really believe a race of aliens – or gods – encoded their secrets into human chromosomes?'

'Why not?' Danlo said, and he smiled.

'I thought you didn't like to believe anything. Don't your Fravashi teach that "beliefs are the eyelids of the mind"? That one should put aside all beliefs?'

'Yes,' Danlo said, still smiling, 'including the belief that one should put aside all beliefs.'

'You amaze me,' Hanuman coughed out as he shook his head back and forth. 'Amaze me. Can I conclude that you will therefore embrace this experience of Ringism that Bardo claims to offer everyone?'

Danlo now was laughing openly, and laid his hand on Hanuman's shoulder. His black leather glove sank into the orange fur of Hanuman's stola. 'Yes, I will embrace it. But only for a while. Perhaps only for tonight.'

For a moment, Hanuman smiled at Danlo, but then his face fell tight and secretive. 'I'm afraid that Bardo will want to use you,' he said.

'Oh, but Bardo uses everyone. He would not be Bardo if he didn't.'

'But you're the son of Mallory Ringess. Your very presence validates his joyances, you should know.'

'That is true,' Danlo said. 'And I accept that. But can you accept that Bardo ... might want to use you?'

'As a cetic? Because I've become a cetic?'

'Yes.'

'Well,' Hanuman said, 'we cetics have our skills, and we aren't as corruptible as you might think. Perhaps a little cetic neurologic might keep Bardo from gulling his followers. It might keep them sane.'

'I cannot forget ... that Bardo never wanted you to become a cetic.'

Hanuman coughed suddenly and then looked over his shoulder at the diners sitting at the edge of the street. Two of them were master eschatologists, bright-eyed and fat as seals, but they seemed aware only of their wine and plates of cultured meats. 'That's true, he didn't, but you don't have to inform the whole world.'

'I am sorry,' Danlo said.

'I must pose a dilemma for him,' Hanuman said. 'He'll be dying to make use of me at the same time he's afraid to. Like beer, Danlo. To him, I must be as dangerous as his dreaded beer.'

'But surely he knows other cetics.'

'You should know,' Hanuman said in a low voice, 'Lord Pall has issued an injunction, for the cetics only. He's forbidden us to attend Bardo's joyances.'

'Then you are in violation of your Lord's orders, yes?'

'Yes and no,' Hanuman said. His eyes seemed to cloud over like old, opaque glass, and Danlo remembered how he had always hated his friend's hellish eyes. 'Lord Pall must be an exemplar of our ethics,' Hanuman continued, 'and so, obviously, he's had to forbid us contact with Bardo's cult. But secretly – and you mustn't tell anyone this – secretly he requires information as to what Bardo is doing.'

'Why? Has he become a seeker of the Elder Eddas? Lord Pall?'

'Lord Pall,' Hanuman said, 'is a complicated man.'

'It is said that he wants to dissolve the Tetrad. That he would like to be Lord of the Order.'

'Perhaps.'

'Are you his spy, then?'

'Danlo!'

'I am sorry. May my tongue freeze to my teeth – I did not mean to insult you.'

'You're forgiven,' Hanuman said.

Just then a group of journeyman horologes in bright red robes clacked down the gliddery in front of the warming pavilion. They skated tightly together in a pack, bumping shoulders, laughing lewdly, intent upon themselves. Their lips were purple from smoked toalache and their faces were set with eagerness and guilt (and fear) as if they were on their way to spend the night in one of the alien brothels in the Farsider's Quarter. Danlo gave them a quick head bow, but they didn't notice him. Then he turned to Hanuman, and at the same instant, upon the same breath of air, in unison they each exclaimed the word, 'Whoremongers!' They laughed together for a while. It was a game they liked to play, this discernment of others' secrets, motivations and plans. Hanuman had taught Danlo the cetic's art of reading faces, and he had become adept at interpreting the tightened muscles, the eye movements, the stress patterns of the vocal cords – all the tells that betray the workings of one's mind. In fact, Danlo's sensitivity to faces was so great that he could sometimes read even Hanuman's exquisitely controlled face.

'I think,' Danlo said, 'that you yourself are a seeker ... of the Elder Eddas. Is this true?'

Hanuman gazed at Danlo, and his eyes were like old blue ice; his face was like a frozen and featureless seascape. All emotions, Danlo remembered, were embedded in the body's muscle fibres; all one's thoughts were coded in the firing of the nerves, the electro-chemical signals with which the nerves touch the muscles into rigidity. The way Hanuman held his eyes unblinking bespoke a deep disdain of many things, and yet prefigured a passion for power over himself and his love of fate.

'It is true!' Danlo said. 'But not ... wholly true, I do not think. Since you do not believe in the blessed Eddas, it must be that you are taken with the search for them. The search for the sake of seeking, itself, yes?'

Hanuman laughed softly and said, 'Can't I keep any secrets from you? I should never have taught you figuration and reading, you know. That was a violation of my ethics.'

'But then I would never know ... what you truly think about things. You have been so inward these last years.'

' "As silent as a cetic",' Hanuman said, quoting the old saying.

'As silent, yes,' Danlo said. 'And as troubled, as ... otherworldly.'

'Well, let me dwell in your world for a moment,' Hanuman said. He coughed into his orange-gloved hand then, and with a ferocious force for a man so slight, snapped his wrist and sent a glob of cancerous phlegm splattering against the wet orange ice. 'Certainly I'd like to learn the technique of remembering the Eddas. The remembrancers' techniques. It's said that Bardo has won over a master remembrancer who's giving away his professional secrets like a madman casting pearls before swine.'

Danlo looked boldly into Hanuman's eyes and asked, 'And you want to gather up a few of these pearls and bring them back to your tower?'

'Well, as long as I'm to be the Lord Cetic's spy, I should receive some sort of payment, don't you think?'

As the street filled with yet more people flashing past on promenade, and the smells of roasting coffee, kurmash, garlic and sweetmeats wafted out of the cafes, they talked briefly of the ancient rivalry between the cetics and the remembrancers. Hanuman, who had studied more history than had Danlo, told him how the cetics, five thousand years previously on Simoom, had once been their own order. And the remembrancers had been a branch within the cetics, as devoted to understanding the secrets of consciousness as any neurologician, cyber-shaman or yogin. But when the cetics had merged with the holists of Arcite and the Order of Mystic Mathematicians was born, the remembrancers had insisted on reorganizing themselves as a separate profession – as did the scryers. Long before the move to Neverness, the remembrancers had kept the secrets of their art from the cetics, whom they regarded either as stultified by the ancient, orthodox mental arts or corrupted by their use of computers. And the cetics had guarded their secrets from everybody. Even from their best friends.

'I have always wondered what you do in your tower,' Danlo said. 'Everyone wonders about the Cetics' Tower. It is said that you use akashic computers ... to recover lost memories, is this true?'

Hanuman allowed a smile to break across his delicate lips, and now his face was truly silent, truly impossible to read. Danlo rarely discussed with him the arts of their respective disciplines. He knew, of course, that Hanuman had elected to become a cyber-shaman; and so his best friend certainly had mastered electronic telepathy, gestalt, fenestration, and the other states of computer consciousness. Hanuman's eyes were always fragile with the hollow, haunted look of someone who has experienced too much computer interface, who has journeyed deep into his computers' shih space, or into thoughtspace, memory space or meta space, perhaps even into the mythical godspace that the cyber-shamans were said to seek with an almost religious devotion. In truth, Danlo was afraid that Hanuman's essential religiousness had been transfigured into his love of computers. Perhaps, Danlo thought, he would soon be initiated into the secret grades of the cyber-shamans; perhaps Hanuman's masters would implant biochips in his brain and he would face his computers continually, and thus become an outlawed neurosinger.