War in Heaven (37 page)

"A god, at least, wouldn't have to fear hunger."

"What do you mean?"

"A god would never be hungry."

"Even if he had no food?"

"But a god wouldn't have to eat food," Kiyoshi said. And then he smiled at himself. Although he was as devout as any Ringist, he liked to step back even in the middle of his most serious debates and regard his beliefs with a bit of humour. "What's the point of being a god if you have to eat?"

"I see," Danlo said. "And how would a god acquire the energy with which to move, then?"

"Well, the universe is full of energy, isn't it? A god would be able to draw energy directly from the universal source."

"I ... see," Danlo said, looking deep into Kiyoshi's eyes.

But, in truth, Danlo didn't really understand the newer doctrines of Ringism because he had been gone from Neverness too long. And so Kiyoshi explained how each man and woman could become a god. As they sat in Danlo's cold cell sipping tea (Danlo was glad to share his cup), Kiyoshi began with the fundaments of the Three Pillars, stressing the importance of a clear remembrance of the Elder Eddas. For most people, he said, these remembrances would be perfected only when the Universal Computer was complete and each godling could interface a nearly perfect simulation of the Elder Eddas. Only then would this vast knowledge of the gods work its miracle upon those who could apprehend it. Touched with this godfire, as Hanuman called it, women and men would begin to feel a burning deep inside their bodies' cells. And then the 'Sleeping God' would awaken, and they would begin their great transformation towards the divine.

"I know of the Sleeping God," Danlo said. "This is just the potential of our DNA, yes? I know that the courtesans have a theory about this. They dream of waking up the cells, the whole bodymind. This is the whole purpose of their art, to wake human beings up."

He didn't add that Bardo had incorporated this doctrine into the Ringist canon largely as a sop to the Society of Courtesans, which he had hoped to convert. Kiyoshi, who had come to the Way of Ringess long after Danlo had left it, seemed unaware of the history of the very religion that he embraced. As Danlo gazed at Kiyoshi's golden, trusting face, he saw no point in relating how well Bardo's manipulations had worked.

"If you know about the Sleeping God," Kiyoshi said, "then you know almost everything. What else is the Way but a way of awakening our potential to become gods?"

He went on to tell of the Nine Stages, which Hanuman had set as a formal doctrine only within the last year. All human beings, he said, on their great journey from child to god had to pass through each of these stages; none could be skipped. The first three stages — the basic biological, emotional-sexual and intellectual competencies — most people managed well enough if nurtured with compassion and care. But many there were who grew to adulthood in the most barbarous of conditions; often they fell victim to disease, neglect, hunger, rape, slel neckers, mind masters or even war. They were like flowers given too little water and sun, like bonsai trees growing to a stunted maturity in tiny pots. And so they would have difficulty evolving into the fourth stage, which was that of the devotional. Almost all godlings, Kiyoshi said, had reached the devotional stage of psychic sensitivity, compassion, love, selfless service and a mystical sense that their lives were interwoven with the greater life of the universe. Such devotion was necessary before they could move on to the next stage of full mysticism.

"The fifth stage is critical to all the higher ones," Kiyoshi said. "This is the complete development of the mystical sense. The ability to fall into samadhi, to experience the oneness and interconnectedness of everything and integrate it — this is very difficult."

Danlo reached out to the teapot to refill their cups. "Are you speaking now of the samadhi of the yogin or of cybernetic samadhi?"

"Well, samadhi is just samadhi, isn't it? It varies only according to its intensity, to the degree that one can surrender and become vastened in the greater One."

Here Kiyoshi paused to see if Danlo agreed with what he had said.

"Please go on," Danlo said, and he burned his lips sipping his too-hot tea.

"Well, nothing could be vaster than the cybernetic spaces," Kiyoshi said. "Potentially, with a computer vast enough, with a perfectly realized simulation, our entire universe would be only as a grain of sand on a beach falling off to infinity."

"I see," Danlo said, burning his mouth again.

"And so the cybernetic samadhis are the most intense, the most total. The way information fields open out into infinity in all directions, the electric connections, the flowing out of the self into the vastness — I'm sorry, but I'm really not describing this well."

"No, it is just the opposite," Danlo said smiling. "Please go on."

"The flowing
into
the self of pure Self, all possible universes concentrated in a single moment like lightning that grows ever more brilliant — the integration of this mystical experience can take years to master."

"Truly," Danlo said.

"But such mastery," Kiyoshi said, "prepares the way for the sixth stage, that of remembrancing. It's only in the sixth stage that one can fully apprehend the Elder Eddas and attain a clear vision of the One Memory."

Danlo closed his eyes as he returned to a moment of deep, clear light. He was aware of the way that this light inside light eternally differentiated itself, falling into form, willing and whirling and becoming and evolving. All memory was locked up inside this light. In a way, matter and memory and pure consciousness were all one and the same thing, and he was aware of himself as a billion billion burning drops of light that flowed together into a single, shimmering ocean.

"Everyone knows that you had a clear vision of the One Memory," Kiyoshi said when Danlo opened his eyes and looked at him. "A great remembrance — as so few have had."

Danlo took a sip of tea and continued to look at Kiyoshi, but he said nothing.

"You and Lord Hanuman, Nirvelli, Thomas Rane — we're fortunate that all of you have copied your memories of the Elder Eddas for the rest of us to interface. It helps to open us to the possibilities of the sixth stage."

"But my remembrance was never copied," Danlo said.

"No? But why?"

"Because I would not allow it to be."

"You wouldn't? But why not?"

"Because such an experience is
experience,
" Danlo said. "It can be lived but not copied."

At this, Kiyoshi's face fell into disappointment and doubt. He said, "Well, perhaps it can't be copied
perfectly
, but I can't see the real difference between Thomas Rane's remembrances of the Elder Eddas and my experience of them when I interface a remembrancing computer."

"There is all the difference in the world," Danlo said. "It is the difference between lightning and ... a lightning bug. Between what is real and that which is only a pale imitation."

Kiyoshi frowned again, even as Danlo smiled and passed the cup of tea into his hand. Unlike most people in Neverness, Kiyoshi had little fear of contagion or disease, and so he gladly pressed the cup to his lips and took a sip. "Since I've never had a great remembrance of my own," he said, "I wouldn't know about this difference that you speak of. But still, I must be grateful for what I've seen of the Elder Eddas. It gives me hope that someday I might move into the sixth stage or even beyond."

"I did not mean to dampen your hope," Danlo said. He reached out and squeezed Kiyoshi's ungloved hand. "Please tell me about these other stages that lie ... beyond."

And so Kiyoshi went on to describe how remembrancing prepared the way for enlightenment. In this, the seventh stage, a man or woman who followed the Way of Ringess would experience the possibilities of the god within. There would be a living of the Elder Eddas, a heightened and permanent new awareness of the numinous fire that animated all things. One who attained this exalted seventh stage would himself blaze with a transcendental radiance in and through the body. The eyes would overflow with light like jewelled cups trying to contain an ocean. Wherever the seventh stage master walked, he would leave luminous streamers of love and joy in his wake.

And then, if he could endure the burning pain of it, would come the penultimate stage, which Hanuman called transfiguration. As the aspiring godling came finally and fully awake, the Sleeping God inside would cry out in a great, golden voice that rang from the depths of each atom of his being to the farthest reaches of the universe. Each cell of the body would sing at a higher pitch and resonate with every other. The DNA would awaken to its infinite possibilities and begin to work permanent biochemical changes in the body and brain. As the eighth stage master adapted to this higher energy state, his whole being would literally radiate light like a star. This was the end of two million years of human evolution — but only the beginning of endless billions of years of movement into godhood, the ninth and final stage. At some point in this infinite ninth stage, some said, a god would leave his body behind, vanishing in a blaze of light. Others held that a god would choose to remain human in form while helping all other godlings to their final transfiguration. But almost everyone agreed that a god would be able to transform and transcend his being at will; as Kiyoshi told Danlo, what was the point of becoming a god if not to be a master of matter and energy, a lord of fire and light?

"After enduring the refining fire of transfiguration comes the release into light," Kiyoshi said. "A god shines like a star, but a god can also drink in the light of the sun."

Having finished the last of the tea, Danlo sat on his bed holding the empty blue cup in his hands. "Drink in ... how?" he asked.

"Through the cells — every cell of his body."

"Would a god's DNA code for chlorophyll, then?" Danlo smiled playfully and provocatively, but also with a rare feeling for Kiyoshi's ability to examine his beliefs with a good humour. "Would the cells of his skin begin to turn green like a kesava leaf as he stood naked in the sun?"

At this, Kiyoshi smiled as well and said, "How could I know? Only one human being has attained true godhood, and he left Neverness years ago."

He went on to tell of the attainments of history's sages, past and present. According to Lord Hanuman, he said, Jesus the Kristoman, Lao Tzu, the Narmada and numerous godlings had risen to the fifth stage. Fewer had mastered the sixth stage of remembrancing: of the ancients, only Jin Zenimura, and of the Ringists, only Thomas Rane and Surya Surata Lai. (Once, Hanuman had counted Jonathan Hur as a sixth stage adept, but as time passed and the Kalla Fellowship became ever more estranged from the main body of the church, Hanuman had demoted Jonathan to the fifth stage. And Bardo had been demoted even further; if one believed Lord Hanuman, Bardo had barely the soul and wit to have completed the intellectual development of a rather precocious child.) The seventh stage occupied the heights of a lofty mountain, and there only Gautama the Buddha and Nirvelli sat. And at the mountain's very peak, listening to the divine wind of the world roaring like a billion rockets, Lord Hanuman himself shone like a star all alone. He looked down at all the other godlings struggling to fly up to the eighth stage, and he drew them on like a beacon in the night. And, because he was after all still a man, he looked up towards the heavens, too. He searched the bright constellations of stars for signs of Mallory Ringess, who was the only one ever to have become a real god.

As Kiyoshi fell silent with a look of intense longing in his eyes, Danlo smiled sadly. He stepped over to the chess table and took up the empty rice bowl in his hands. And then, one by one, he began to pick off the rice grains still stuck to the bowl and eat them.

"And what of Nikolos Daru Ede?" Danlo asked. He glanced at the imago of Ede beaming out of the devotionary computer upon the chess table. A program of curiosity seemed to freeze Ede's soft, round face. "There are countless people in the galaxy who believe that Ede became the greatest and only real God."

Here Kiyoshi frowned and squeezed his hands together anxiously. "Lord Hanuman has said that Ede was the greatest charlatan in history. And that the Architects who believe in his godhood are the worst of the wayless."

He didn't add that many Ringists, led by Surya Surata Lai, were calling for the war to be extended and waged upon the Architects of all the Cybernetic Churches, who bitterly opposed the rise of Ringism. Surya Lai claimed that the Architects were degraded human beings wilfully and hopelessly stuck in the lowest of the stages. They should be rounded up and quarantined on prison planets, she said; they should be injected with slel viruses that would eat away the blockages in their brains and open them to the truth of the Way. But even then it would be doubtful if they could ever ascend through the nine stages. One of the godlings had overheard Surya telling Hanuman that perhaps it would be best simply to euthanize them and spare them the torment of their low and hopelessly human lives.

Because Danlo didn't like what he saw in Kiyoshi's eyes, he frowned, too. But then, upon noticing that the Ede imago was looking at him with insult written upon his glowing face, he almost smiled. It occurred to him that here was one god, at least, who would never have to eat again — unless he somehow managed to revive his frozen body and cark himself back into his old and hopelessly human form.

"Do you believe, then," Danlo asked, "that my father became the first god in the history of the universe?"

"Well, certainly the first to have arisen out of the human race."

"And that he would have transcended the need for food and drink?"

"I think I believe that he transcended much more than this. Have you heard the testament of Masalina Raizel?"

"No," Danlo admitted, shaking his head.

"Well, everyone knows that Mallory Ringess left Neverness on Year's End in 2941. Masalina was meditating among the rocks of the Elf Garden that day. She said that as she was looking up at the stars, she saw a tremendous flash of light — so bright that it dazzled her. But she was certain that the light came from the peak of Mount Attakel, and not the sky. Others saw this light on the mountain that night, too."