The Wild (81 page)

To live, I die. To live, to live – no, no, no, no ...

There came a moment when he did not think that he would live much longer. In truth, he did not want to live if it meant falling forever into madness. If his brain was connected along many-silvered nerves to every part of his body, then he could send messages to all his muscles and organs. If he tried hard enough, he could find the way to make his heart stop beating. In the black pathways of despair winding through his brain, he could almost see this way. Somewhere inside him, like a diamond inside a black velvet box, shone the secret of life and death. He looked and looked, deeper and deeper, and he trembled to open this box. The key was almost within his grasp; it gleamed like a golden shell buoyed on the cresting wavefront of his consciousness. For ten billion years, he had lived with this most terrible of desires. He could will himself to die. He could do this almost as easily as holding his breath. He remembered, then, Leander of Darkmoon and the eight other pilots who had died trying to find their way toward the Solid State Entity. Like him, they had sought the secret of the universe, but they had found something else. They had been too afraid to die, and so they had died – this the goddess Herself had told him. If, then, he faced his own death fearlessly with open hands and eyes, did that mean that he was fated to live? Or was there, after all, truly a choice?

For in the end we choose our futures, he remembered.

These were the words of his father, his mother, perhaps even the meaning of the wind or the snowy owl's cry on a moonlit night. It was the sound of himself, whispering, weeping, laughing. As he fell deeper into the long, dark, roaring ocean inside, he heard the calling of his consciousness. His consciousness. His will – he sensed that he still surged with a will toward life as wild and free as a thallow flying toward the sun. He knew this must always be so, and this sudden knowledge astonished him. For he had thought himself a slave to the chemicals burning through his brain. He was these chemicals, truly, this exquisitely tuned orchestration of blood, body and brain, but what did this mean? He willed himself to see himself just as he truly was. It was like looking into a mirror reflecting a mirror reflecting a million more mirrors shimmering with the far-off brilliance of his own face. In this inward gazing down through the well of darkness to the distant light, he caught a glint of blue-black; perhaps this was the colour of his eyes or the colour of infinity or even the colour of consciousness itself.

Gazing at the bright black sky, you see only yourself looking for yourself. When you look into the eyes of God, they go on and on forever.

When Danlo looked through his own eyes into his brain, he saw starfire and light. A hundred billion neurons fired in quick, deep rhythms that he was only now beginning to apprehend. The brain's inner workings, of course, consisted of much more than the firing of all these separate cells. In truth, no part of the brain existed in separation. Many neurons intertwined their synapses with ten thousand others – sometimes with as many as three hundred thousand other nerve cells. The brain as a whole organ generated an electromagnetic field that pulled at every single cell. And each one was as perfect as a diamond. Inside the clear cell walls were dense-cored vesicles, neurotubules, and mitochondria tearing apart phosphate molecules to free up life's energies – and a thousand other structures. Motilin, dopamine, taurine and many other neurotransmitters cascaded in a never-ending flood. He saw lipids and amino acids combining, glucose burning and ions swirling through the water of life in an incredibly intricate and beautiful dance. What ordered these chemicals of consciousness, he wondered? What made matter and organized it into such subtle and marvellous harmonies?

I am that I am. I am only carbon and oxygen and nitrogen and hydrogen and potassium and iron and...

He was only these elements of the earth, nothing more, nothing less. These elements of the stars. For every part of him – every atom of carbon in his eyes, every bit of iron in his heart – had been once fused together in the fire of a long-dead star. The stars, in truth, made the atoms of the universe, but what made these atoms come together in consciousness and life? What made them move? For move they did, almost quicker than he could imagine, pulsing and resonating, vibrating billions of times in a moment, seeking out other atoms with which to spin and dance and sing their cosmic songs. In one mad, marvellous moment beyond time, beneath time, he looked into the centre of a carbon atom sparkling somewhere near the centre of his brain. He needed to know the secret of matter, and he saw a fiery cloud of electrons – and protons and neutrons exchanging energies, hugging each other in a terribly compelling love beyond love, binding themselves to themselves in a single, ball-like nucleus. And deeper he looked, and saw the quarks, like infinitesimal sapphires and emeralds and rubies, all full of charm and strangeness. And deeper still, the strings and infons and the splendid noumena, which could be grasped only by the mind but never sensed – or rather sensed only in the fire of madness or in that marvellous, mystical clarity that befalls a man when he discovers his inner sense of the infinite. What was matter, truly? Matter, he saw, was magical stuff. Matter shimmered. All the matter of the universe was woven of a single, superluminal tapestry of jewels, the light of each jewel reflected in the light of every other. Matter was holy, matter was alive, matter was but consciousness frozen in time. For as far down the great chain of being as he looked, down and down through the infinities, he could see no final form or bit of matter but only light. This was not the light of the sun or stars, not the photons nor the flashing wavelengths of visible radiation by which he might behold the distant galaxies or the blueness of his own eyes. Rather it was a light inside light, purer and primeval, the light inside all things. In some ways, it seemed more like water than light, for it flowed and surged as a single, shimmering substance. It moved itself. It had will, was will itself. This deep consciousness that some called matter knew how to come together into ever more complex forms. It evolved; ultimately, as with man, it evolved to perceive itself and cry out with wonder and wild joy. This, he saw, was the essential nature of consciousness, that it was always aware of its own splendour, even as a cresting wave of water reflects the light of the entire ocean beneath itself.

I am this blessed light.

Knowing this, Danlo suddenly realized that he could move himself. His selfness, he saw, consisted of more than the firing of his neurons, and his consciousness was much more than the patterns or programs of his brain. For he could feel it flowing through every blood cell and atom of his body – his heart and hands and every part of himself ablaze with nothing but this pure light. At last he understood how the Solid State Entity and other gods might possibly manipulate matter through consciousness alone. (And how they might create terrible weapons of consciousness with which to destroy each other and rip open gaping holes in the fabric of the spacetime continuum.) This was the true nature of consciousness and the meaning of matter, that ultimately both were one substance without cause or control outside itself. Although he was no god, and he couldn't directly touch Bertram Jaspari or any of the other Architects watching him, he could move his own mind. His will – truly, it was as free as the wind, as free as his desire to say yes or no to the madness devouring him. He could live as a blind man wandering forever through the black caverns of his mind, or he could see himself just as he was: a luminous being who might bring the light of pure consciousness to himself and show thirty thousand watching Architects that they, too, could blaze like stars.

Yes – I will.

There was a moment. From the dark rows of benches facing Danlo, he heard Bertram Jaspari calling in his whiny voice for the offering to be concluded. He heard Bertram Jaspari calling for Harrah's physicians to take Danlo away. For Danlo wi Soli Ringess had fallen mad, Bertram said, as any aficionado of the light-offerings could see by looking at the hologram floating high in the Hall of Heaven. As Danlo himself could see – if only he would look at himself as a vast cubical array of coloured lights and nothing more. Now the light cube had mostly fallen dark, with a few glowing clusters of ochre and puce signalling the disturbed brain patterns of a madman. From time to time, bursts of sapphire and smalt rippled from Danlo's cerebral cortex to his brainstem, but other than these seemingly random movements, his mind appeared to be lost in its own blackness. Danlo heard a sigh of disappointment and dread whoosh from thousands of lips almost as a single sound. He heard Harrah Ivi en li Ede praying softly for him – and for herself, for her grandchildren, and possibly even for the future of her Holy Church. Even the imago of Nikolos Daru Ede, glowing from the devotionary computer upon the arm of his golden chair, betrayed its concern. Subtly, quickly, so that almost no one could see, the Ede flashed desperate finger signs in front of Danlo's face, but to no avail. The Ede kept staring at Danlo, and almost no one noticed that his usually beatific countenance had darkened in despair. Of all the men and women in the Hall save Danlo himself, perhaps only Malaclypse Redring of Qallar understood that the light-offering might not be finished. Although Malaclypse was almost as silent as a tiger crouching in the snow, Danlo could hear his breath moving in a slow, steady rhythm strangely synchronized with his own. He could almost feel the warrior-poet's eyes burning across his face, watching and waiting, searching in Danlo's blue-black eyes for any sign of life – or that tragic death-in-life that Bertram Jaspari acclaimed as Danlo's fate. Danlo might have looked through the dark Hall for the warrior-poet then, but he could not move his head. He still stared at the glowing cube of lights; in all the time he had sat motionless in his chair he had willed his eyes to remain open upon them. And now there came a moment when these lights began to quicken and change colour. From his frontal lobes to his vision centre to the brainstem, all at once, points of dark blue light flared into life and spread their deep fire from one corner of the cube to another. Soon the entire cube shone with a single, blue-black light quickly brightening to cobalt. For a moment Danlo looked upon this lovely blueness, this marvellous blue light growing ever more brilliant and wild. As from far away, he heard thirty-thousand Architects gasp in astonishment. Through their urgent whispers and sudden cries, he heard Harrah Ivi en li Ede's voice choke with emotion and Bertram Jaspari cursing with bewilderment and disbelief. It seemed that Malaclypse Redring had stopped breathing; Danlo could almost feel the paralysis of the warrior-poet's belly as a deep pain in his own. A deep joy. For now Danlo moved his mind with all the gladness of a thallow soaring into the sky. Then the great offering that he made to Ede the God and all the Architects of the Cybernetic Universal Church leaped into light. All fiery and splendid it shone, like the blue-white light of the brightest stars. In Danlo's splendid brain, a hundred billion neurons blazed with their own beautiful fire, and for a moment each of the corresponding lights in the great cube came alive in the most intense illumination. This dazzled the eyes of all the men and women sitting on their benches. (And created an unprecedented show of lights for the tens of thousands of Architects still waiting on the Temple grounds outside the Hall's flashing dome.) It was as if Tannahill's sun had exploded in their faces for all to behold. But now many people threw their hands over their eyes and turned away, and no one in the Hall could look upon this beautiful and terrible light, and that was the hell of it. But that was the heaven, too. For in all the thousands of years since the Church had instituted this ceremony, in all the thousands of thousands of offerings made by the Church's most accomplished Perfecti, no one had ever succeeded in lighting up more than a fraction of his brain. In truth, no one had ever thought it possible. For a man to look upon the heavenly lights within and not fall mad was miracle enough. But for Danlo to come into such a wild and glorious consciousness meant that he truly must be the Lightbringer foretold in their prophesies, and possibly something more.

We are all bringers of light, he thought as he listened to the cries of acclamation ringing through the Hall. I am only the spark that ignites the flame.

At last Danlo looked away from the light-offering. He let his eyes fall upon the bamboo flute that he had held in his hands all during the time of his test. In the intense illumination pouring down from above, it gleamed like gold. He smiled as a thought came to him. Almost instantly, the lights of the offering flickered to reflect this thought, but he did not look upon them. Instead he suddenly stood away from his chair. With his mind's connection to the computer's field suddenly broken, the light-offering indeed had come to an end. The great cube instantly fell dark and quiet. The whole of the Hall, for a moment, seemed as black as the ocean at night. Then Danlo smiled again and laughed softly, almost sadly. He stood alone on the floor of the darkened dome, and he listened to thirty thousand Architects calling his name. 'Lightbringer!' they shouted. They were clapping their hands together, jumping down from their benches to the floor of the Hall. 'Danlo of Neverness is the Lightbringer!'

Truly, I am the spark, but what flame have I lit? Oh, Ahira, Ahira – what have I begun?

As the lights of the Hall came back on (the common clary plasma lights, that is), Danlo stood scrying and letting visions of the future blow through him like a fiery wind. He beheld a splendour brighter than the brightest star and colours inside colours and a terrible beauty. A single sound ripped him out of his reverie. It was the quick suss of a knife being drawn from its sheath. He turned to look across the few tens of feet separating him from the first row of benches. There Bertram Jaspari stood shouting at Danlo, shaking his little fist at him and shrieking out that Danlo was not the Lightbringer, after all, but only a filthy naman cetic sent from Neverness to trick them and to destroy their Holy Church. Next to him Malaclypse Redring waited calmly with his long killing knife held up high for anyone to see. The steel blade caught the glare of the dome lights and reflected their burning rays into Danlo's eyes. Danlo couldn't guess how the warrior-poet had smuggled this knife into the Hall. And neither could the keepers protecting Harrah, for upon seeing that Malaclypse was armed, these grim-faced men cried out in dismay and fell over the Holy Ivi to shield her. A few of the keepers rushed the warrior-poet, but these were met by Jedrek Iviongeon and Lensar Narcavage and many other Iviomils loyal to Bertram Jaspari. They formed a wall of living flesh between Harrah and the warrior-poet, and for the moment it seemed impossible that he could harm her, much less assassinate her. And it was far from certain that this was his purpose. He gazed across the floor of the Hall, and his violet eyes met Danlo's. Death was as near as the eyelight reflected back and forth between them, as near as a steel knife that at any moment might be hurled spinning through the air. For a moment, Danlo held this gaze while he listened to the roaring voices and the stamp of thousands of feet coming closer. He knew, then, that even if the knife were to find his throat, he would die as a martyr, for the people still would proclaim him as the Lightbringer, and Harrah Ivi en li Ede would then install the new programs that would forever change the Church. If the warrior-poet killed him, it must be for the other reason, because Danlo was truly the son of his father, and he had dared to shine more brightly than any human being ever should. And so with a smile on his lips, Danlo picked up his flute and began to play. He never stopped looking at Malaclypse, and he aimed a song like a golden arrow straight at Malaclypse's heart. For only a moment, Malaclypse hesitated. But this was enough time for a sea of jubilant Architects to close in around Danlo – to reach out toward him with their hands as if warming themselves by a fire or beckoning to the sun. When Malaclypse saw that it would be impossible for him to harm Danlo, he too smiled. He kissed the haft of his knife as he touched the long, steel blade to his forehead. Then he held up the knife to salute Danlo, and quickly bowed his head.