The Broken God (88 page)

'Hello, Danlo!' his voice boomed out. 'Well Little Fellow, how do you like our little stone hut?'

Danlo skated up to him, and he bowed. Then he glided back a few yards, the better to see the changes that Bardo was carving into the cathedral. Three doorways opened out of the western front; although the centre doorway was much the largest – even Bardo seemed small standing next to the massive double doors – they were each of a similar design: they were set into huge, pointed, stone archways that opened up and out towards the street. At the centre of the main archway, above the doors, was a circular window of stained glass. This lovely, light-filled archway was really a series of nine nested arches, each arch surmounting and projecting out from the one below it. The rims of the arches had been carved with stone saints and prophets, and other personages dear to the Kristian religion. Indeed, these icons fairly festooned the entire facade, and the largest of them could be seen staring out with stony eyes from the statue niches above the archways. Bardo, of course, as the founder of Ringism, could not countenance these icons. And so he had determined to remove them. The cathedral's entire western face swarmed with robots accomplishing this program. There were thousands of robots, each the size of a furfly. They clicked and scurried over the archways like a furious moving carpet, chewing at the stone with tiny diamond chisels. The air was full of their scraping and hammering and crunching, and full as well with stone chips and dust that fell down over Bardo and powdered his curly black hair. Soon, he told Danlo, every icon in the cathedral, inside and out, would be gone. He said that other robots would lay down organic stone in the icons' place. From this stone would emerge sculptures of Katharine the Scryer, Balusilustalu, Shanidar, and others who had guided Mallory Ringess along the path to godhood.

'And we'll have to rip out the windows, too bad,' Bardo said. 'But we can't have the godlings dwelling on ancient superstitions and miracles, can we?'

'But the stained glass ... it is so beautiful.'

'Ah, but we'll replace the glass, of course. Actually, I've already begun replacing it, as you'll see when you enter the cathedral.'

They stood there for a while exchanging pleasantries and bits of gossip. Bardo, pretending to a sternness that the lines of his fat face could never quite hold, asked him why he had absented himself from all church functions since the Fire Sermon. Danlo told him that he had spent his time perfecting his lightship and making mathematics. He had to raise his voice above the whine of the robots to make himself heard. And all the while Bardo nodded his head as he snorted and coughed at the stone dust raining down upon him.

'Ah, of course,' Bardo said, 'you're a pilot and pilots must make mathematics. I, myself, once found mathematics to be the most beautiful of all creations. Your father and I used to joke that each of the theorems we made was like discovering a beautiful pearl.'

He emphasized the word 'pearl' with a plosive rush of breath, accidentally spraying droplets of spittle out into the air. He shot Danlo a pointed look, and a huge grin split his face.

'I think ... you must know every secret in the City,' Danlo finally said, and then he was smiling, too.

'Have you given your pearl to Tamara?' Bardo asked. 'By God, she's the most beautiful woman in the City! Have you promised to marry her, yet?'

'Am I so easy to read, then?' Danlo asked. 'Has Hanuman taught you face reading?'

'No, he's taught me nothing, too bad. At least, he's taught me nothing explicitly. He likes his solitude, now that he's become famous.'

'You cannot forgive him ... for what he did during the Fire Sermon?'

'Forgive him!'

'You do not trust him, I think.'

Bardo sneezed and rubbed the stone dust away from his eyes. Then he pulled Danlo deeper into the recess of the archway so they might be shielded from falling debris. 'Do you trust him, Little Fellow?'

'He is my ... deepest friend.'

'Well, he's my friend, too, or he used to be before he began posing as a goddamned prophet. Can one trust a prophet? Ah, do I really trust him? Should I? A difficult question. I trust him to attract people to the Way. I trust him to give great sermons and inspire them. I even trust him to show them something of the ineffable, these goddamned Elder Eddas that everyone thinks they want to remember. He's a religious genius, by God! and I trust him to do what all geniuses do, which is to glory in their genius and let it shine so that others can glory, too.'

With these words, Bardo might have been mocking himself, for, as he grinned at Danlo and pulled at his moustache, his eyes were full of light.

Danlo met his gaze and said, 'But you trust Hanuman ... to cark our remembrances into a computer?'

'Ah, I wondered if you would ask me about this.'

'Is it true, Bardo?'

'Seven years I've known you now, and you're still questioning me!'

'But why shouldn't I question you?' Danlo said, and there was a smile on his lips. 'If I desisted, I would ruin your pleasure of delivering your answers.'

'True, true,' Bardo said. 'Then let me answer this one question, and we'll both be content. You know I've said before that the kalla is a dangerous drug. It's too, too dangerous, and therefore we've decided to disband the kalla ceremony. No one is to drink the kalla anymore. At least, no one is to drink it publicly. But the godlings must have their remembrances, and so we've instituted another ceremony. That is, tonight we'll institute it. We'll hold a special joyance – I'll guide the ceremony, and Hanuman will be seen to assist me, do you understand?'

'I think I do,' Danlo said.

'There will be a thousand people in the nave tonight,' Bardo said. 'And each of them will have remembrances they've never had before. My remembrances, some of them. Thomas Rane's. And yours, too, I hope.'

'My ... remembrances,' Danlo said, closing his eyes.

'You did receive Hanuman's invitation?'

Danlo said nothing, and then he nodded his head.

'Excellent! I'm glad you've agreed to record your remembrances.'

Danlo, who had agreed to no such thing, opened his eyes and looked inside the cathedral. He felt Bardo's gaze burning his cheeks, and he said, 'Hanuman has promised me that my first remembrance ... can be perfectly preserved.'

'Like a firefly preserved in ice,' Bardo said. 'And we've little enough time to preserve it. I'd like to, ah, incorporate your great remembrance with the others and use it for tonight's ceremony.'

'You would use my memories ... so soon?'

'We have to move quickly,' Bardo said. 'Ah, but that's the hell of guiding the manswarm into the mystic pools of enlightenment: if we don't move quickly enough, events will rise up like an ocean and sweep us away.'

He proceeded to give Danlo directions to the computer room, then he excused himself and returned to supervizing the renovation of his cathedral.

When Danlo passed through the doorway into the great nave, he was immediately swept away by memories that welled up within him. He had never been inside a cathedral before, neither this one nor any other. He knew this as surely as he knew that he had never climbed the ice mountains of Agathange's moon, yet, as he stood looking off into the fountains of light pouring through the windows, he felt as though he had stood there a thousand times before. Despite the robots swarming over the outside walls, inside all was calm and quiet. Cold currents of air sifted through the deserted nave, and through the transepts that gave out onto the crossing. On either side of him, the walls and the windows and the multiple columns supporting the ceiling vault rose up in uninterrupted vertical lines. High above him, great fingers of stone splayed out from these columns in long, graceful arches that met each other along the centre line of the vault. It seemed that these sweeps of stone had been flung up and magically suspended in space. The whole design of the cathedral bespoke a desire to cancel gravity and elevate matter toward the heavens. Everywhere Danlo looked, it was as if the fundamental religious feeling of man had been frozen into stone and coloured glass. The pillars and the pinnacles, even the ornaments of stone, he thought, bore memories of ten thousand years of chants and incantations. The windows – the long mosaics of stained glass that were the cathedral's glory – bore scenes of miracles that Kristoman the God was said to have worked. Already, ten of these windows had been knocked out and replaced with bits of new glass. A little drama cut in colours of blue, green, yellow, and deep red had been set into the arched mosaics high above: the low afternoon sunlight illuminated the great figure of Bardo as he opened his mouth in a silent scream and shook his fist at the sky. A long spear stuck out from his chest, and blood spattered his white furs. It was one of the great moments in Bardo's life, when he had died his first death. As Bardo never tired of telling people, he had given his life so that Mallory Ringess might live, and now he had worked the truth of this moment into stained glass for all to see. He had plans for replacing all the old stained glass with new glass depicting great moments in the life of Mallory Ringess. (It never seemed to embarrass Bardo that he confused his best friend's greatness with his own.) As Danlo walked deeper into the nave, he looked from window to window, and he wondered what these moments might be. He marvelled at the play of light through the windows, the way the colours deepened or brightened at the passing of every cloud. The whole cathedral was brilliant with blue and golden light, and everywhere he looked, he was reminded of all life's aspiration toward light. It amused him that this light was everywhere dazzling and lovely, no matter that it streamed through windows new or old.

He walked through the nave and past the chancel, where red-carpeted steps led up to a simple altar. In preparation for the night's remembrance, the altar had been set with golden candelabra, the golden urn and blue bowl used in a hundred kalla ceremonies, and with one thousand and eighty-nine freshly cut fireflowers. Past the altar, down a quiet aisle lined with statues and columns, he came to a door that led into a passageway. The computer room, Bardo had told him, lay outside the cathedral proper. Adjacent to the cathedral's north side was a collection of small buildings connected by a maze of roofed passageways, walled gardens, and cloisters. Down this dim passageway Danlo walked, past the sacristy and the library until he came to the doors of the chapter house. Once, this lovely building had been used as a meeting place for the luminaries of the Kristian church on Neverness, but now it had been converted into a workplace and a storeroom. He knocked on the door, and it opened, and there stood Hanuman straight and proud in his cetic's robe.

'Hello, Danlo,' he said.

'Hello, Hanuman.'

He invited Danlo inside, and to thaw the instant chill that fell between them, Hanuman talked about the various objects of the room. It was a large room full of many objects, most of them computers of one sort or another. The upper half of the chapter house was a granite dome cut with long windows between the stone ceiling ribs; it was all open space and light, but the lower half was all clutter. Scalloped arches and false pillars formed a stone panelling around the room's perimeter. Originally, circles of chairs had been set beneath this panelling, but they had been ripped out and replaced with tall wooden cabinets. Between the cabinets and the room's centre, set out on tables above the chequered floor, were computers, and the neurologics of computers, and tools used to disassemble, heal, or grow new computers. There were mantelets and sulki grids and hologram stands. Hanuman had recently become a collector of archaic and unusual computers, which he had put into display cases as if they were jewels. (In fact, one of these computers was a jewel, an antique Yarkonan firestone whose lights had long since dimmed.) Danlo walked around the display cases, looking inside. He saw electronic computers, and an optical computer, and computer cubes, chips, disks and even a computer whose graphics were projected inside a clear diamond ball. Hanuman, it seemed, was especially fond of his various mechanical computers. One whole case was taken up with a difference engine of brass gears and gleaming chromium switches. He opened another case and removed a Japanese abacus, and he began snapping wooden beads along various wires with a blur of his little fingers. He showed Danlo two kinds of quantum computers, and a glowing gas computer, and then he pointed at a brilliant Yarkonan tapestry hanging on the wall, and he said, 'This is the showiest of computers, of course. The Yarkonans embroider the logics and circuitry directly into the fabric.'

They chatted for a while about Bardo's refurbishing of the cathedral and other things of little matter. Although Danlo wanted to tell him of the pearl that he had discovered and of his promise to marry Tamara, he could not. Their mutual wooing of Tamara was like an open wound between them. It was like a canker on an autist's face: out of politeness and embarrassment, they refused to look at this festering hurt or to comment on it, but they could not forget it for a moment.

'You look well,' Hanuman said at last.

'You ... you have shaved your head,' Danlo said softly. 'You have sworn to wear the skullcap, yes?'

Hanuman snapped his finger and began spinning red beads around the wires of the abacus. He looked off above him, and Danlo thought that he was not really looking into the sunlit, open space of the dome, but rather into other spaces which burned with a different kind of light. Covering most of Hanuman's naked head was a gleaming skullcap, the kind the cyber-shamans wear. It was a shell of clear diamond, inside of which the purple neurologics had been woven to simulate the branchings and wispy sub-branchings of human nerves. Hanuman's entire head seemed to be wrapped in a network of electric nerves. It was a showy thing, this master computer, and many cyber-shamans loved displaying it, even though of all the cetics, they have always been the most secretive.

'We call it the clearface,' Hanuman said. He smiled, and his face seemed to be all glittering teeth inside a ghastly, glittering skull. 'Some people think it's silly for a man to shave his head like a novice, but that's the only way it will fit tightly enough.'