The Broken God (32 page)

'You eat worms?' Madhava had asked him. His little face was screwed up with disgust and horror. And awe – he was awestruck that Danlo could eat living meat. He had come from one of the made-worlds of Enola Luz, where the only living things are human beings and the bacteria grown to feed them; he couldn't see the difference between an insect and a worm.

'No,' Danlo said. 'I mean to say, yes, I used to eat them, before I knew how terrible it is to kill, but today I was so hungry and I forgot. I ... forgot.' And then his voice fell low as he whispered a prayer for the larval fritillaries' spirits, 'Liliji, mi alasharia la shantih.'

But Madhava didn't understand, and to the horror of all present, he exclaimed, 'Danlo the Wild eats worms!'

Ironically, this insect eating was to gain for Danlo a reputation as a man of peace. To Madhava – and to the other boys – Danlo was forced to confess what he had so far kept to himself: that he had made a vow of ahimsa. Many, of course, knew about the Fravashi and their doctrines; Sherborn of Darkmoon asked Danlo outright if he had been a student of the Fravashi. Danlo, who did not like to lie, could not answer this question directly. Instead he talked about the nature of beliefs and belief systems in general. While admitting that he had adopted one of the Fravashi's crucial beliefs, he said that ahimsa was no mere doctrine, but rather a perception of the universe that had been interpreted and stated as a belief. 'This perception is what matters,' Danlo said. The interconnectedness of all things. Ahimsa is seeing this connection. But sometimes ... one forgets to see.'

Soon after this, all the first year novices were informed as to whom they would serve beginning on 65th day, the dreaded Day of Submission. As Danlo had feared, it would be his 'pleasure' to serve Pedar Sadi Sanat. Pedar, it was said, was on friendly terms with the Head Novice, who normally made such assignations; Pedar must have persuaded him that he was the novice most qualified to teach Danlo the ideals of obedience and submission. Surprisingly, however, Hanuman had been called to serve the Master of Novices himself, Bardo the Just. Such service was not without precedent, but it was unusual: first year novices most often are required to serve the older novices, just as the second and third year novices serve journeymen, and high novices look after the needs of the masters. (Many of the high novices escape servitude to an individual master by volunteering to work in cafes and bars throughout the City, but, because of their age, this was not yet a path open to either Hanuman or Danlo.) Hanuman had heard that Master Bardo was not an easy man to serve, and he wondered why he had been so honoured. He didn't know – then – that Bardo liked beautiful boys, and more, that Bardo felt guilty for nearly causing Hanuman's death in Lavi Square and was moved to protect him from high novices such as Pedar. From the first, Danlo worried over Hanuman's assignation to Master Bardo, just as he worried over and hated the whole system of submission. Nothing Hanuman said could relieve Danlo of this hatred. After Hanuman wryly observed that all societies are based on reciprocity, on an exchange of duties, information, and favours, Danlo said, 'A mother suckles her child, and a father must bring blood-tea to the old grandfathers who have lost their teeth, but it is wrong for a man to serve another who is whole and strong. That is worse than parasitism; that is shaida.'

As Danlo counted the days until the Day of Submission, he began his formal studies. In accord with Master Bardo's advice, Danlo began to learn the universal syntax, and he soon found that his days were busy. In the early morning, after breakfast and his thought primaries were completed, he did his hardest work. He went to a notationist to study the three-dimensional mental symbols called ideoplasts. Late mornings were spent in memorization: there were twenty-three thousand basic ideoplasts, and he had to be able to visualize their shapes, colours, and configurations. He might have imprinted much of this knowledge, but after his experience in Drisana's shop, he had come to mistrust the unnatural act of imprinting, if not imprimaturs themselves. Then too, imprinting had its dangers, not the least of which was the temptation to stive the brain full of too many data and facts. Indeed, the women and men of the Order disdain either memorizing or imprinting more than is needful; the ideal is to acquire a certain repertoire of basics before learning the skilful use of computers as extensional minds and memories. And so Danlo acquired this basic repertoire the long way, passing endless strings of ideoplasts before his mind's eye, burning the pretty symbols into his brain at a truly prodigious rate. After this gruelling memory work came a quick meal of fruit, bread and pulses, and then, for most of the afternoon until it was time to play hokkee or skate figures in the Ice Dome, he returned to the universal syntax, learning representation theory, formalization, modelling, and applications. Only during the evenings did he have time to talk and laugh with the other boys, to play chess with Hanuman or lie back on the rough white blankets of his bed and play the shakuhachi.

Besides the universal syntax, of course, the novices are required to learn a varied curriculum: history of the Order, Order etiquette, mathematics, science, history, skating, body yoga, languages, library arts, and the Fravashi thought exercises. And the cetic arts: hallning, zazen, meditation, fugue and the interface with the cybernetic spaces. Toward the end of his Borja years, a novice will also study the fundamentals of the more important disciplines such as scrying, remembrancing, mechanics and eschatology. These disciplines are studied intensely, and never are more than two of them pursued at a single time. Within these bounds, the novice is free to structure his own education. In fact, he – or she – is expected to follow the tree of knowledge down its many branchings, choosing the most fascinating arts and disciplines for special study. How well the novice chooses is a measure of his intellectual worth – and of his shih. Although each novice will have many tutors who offer advice and wisdom, ultimately, the novice alone is responsible for his education. At the end of his novitiate, when each novice is tested for admission to one of the colleges, he himself must bear the shame if he fails to become a journeyman and is dismissed from the Order.

Danlo's first tutor, as it happened, was the esteemed Master Jonath Haas, an old, old man with a warty face and a great mind and a passion for bestowing intellectual gifts upon his favourite students. Master Jonath was a classical holist of the school that had absorbed the old science, and like many of his fellow academicians, he had a love of theory and abstraction. It was his joy to compose models of the universe, to represent the incredibly complex processes of the cosmos with symbols of the universal syntax. There was great power, Master Jonath claimed, in such formal systems: the power of generalization and the discovery of universal patterns and metaphors. One day, on the 51st of false winter, over mugs of cinnamon coffee that he served Danlo in his little apartment near the Academy, he delivered one of his many lectures:

'And so you may think of holism as the formal study of interconnectedness – does that interest you, Young Danlo? I thought it might. Connections: what is language but an expression of connections? Relations? Metaphors? I am sitting on this chair. The sun pours down like gold on that peculiar feather you wear in your hair. It is impossible to map two co-ordinate spaces of different dimensions onto one another in a one-to-one and bicontinuous fashion. Map! Spaces! Dimensions! Fashion! What are the definitions of mathematics but metaphors? Torison spaces, embedding, paths and points – metaphors, all. Nature moves by metaphor. This is what mathematics is: a system of crystallized, highly refined metaphors. And more so with the universal syntax. What is the universal syntax if not a generalization of mathematics into a truly universal language? With mathematics, we may represent the distortions of the manifold or model the chaos of a cloud; with the universal syntax, we may relate the Dragon opening of chess to the use of colour in the Scutari body change to the pattern of supernovae in the Vild. All possible relationships. All connections. The better models we make, the more connections are revealed. How else but through holism to really see the overarching patterns of the universe?'

Danlo soon found that there was a great beauty in this ruling intellectual system of Civilized Worlds. Although he never forgot Old Father's warning that holism was the most seductive of all worldviews and systems precisely because it was the most universal, he devoured Master Jonath's lessons with a voraciousness toward knowing that pleased the old man. Every morning Danlo reported to Master Jonath's apartment at the appointed time, and together they studied the masterworks of the greatest holists such as Moriah Ede and Li Tao Cirlot. And every morning Master Jonath would assign Danlo the various exercises, problems, and compositions that are the bones of the holists' art. Master Jonath, ever bemused and suspicious of the snowy owl's feather that Danlo sported, inevitably discovered Danlo's attachment to the Alaloi totem system. Master Jonath seemed to know almost everything about this system, as he did about most everything else. As an exercise – a demonstration of holism's infinite subtlety – he suggested to Danlo that they begin a formal representation of the Alaloi system. It was his pride to demonstrate how holism could encompass any and all systems, even one so bizarre as that of primitive humans who anoint their newborn babies with menstrual blood out of the observation that this life-giving substance is permeated with the World-spirit in much the same way that a magnetic field surrounds a lodestone. And so, over the endless mugs of coffee greasy with sweet cream, they worked together encoding the two classes of animals, or the three aspects of the self, or the four elements of the world – blood, fire, ice, and wind – into the symbols of the universal syntax. (In the latter example, Master Jonath suggested selecting a quaternion often used to encode the four suits of the Japanese Tarot and the four circuits of the human brain – as well as the four Scutari sexes and the four movements of Beethoven's Last Symphony.) Danlo loved this difficult work, and he often wished that he could stop time for a year so that he might master the intricacies of holism, uninterrupted by other concerns.

But time – in the towers and apartments of the Academy, in the cold imperatives of civilization – moves in one direction only and is difficult to stop. Inevitably, the 65th of false winter arrived, the Day of Submission, and Danlo was forced to put aside his play with abstraction and symbol. After breakfast that day, all the new novices across Borja waited in their sleeping chambers as they exchanged bits of nervous conversation and doubts. Danlo was the first boy in Perilous Hall to be called down to the first floor where the high novices were waiting, lined up in front of their beds. They each bowed when Danlo came into their chamber. Pedar stepped forward, handed him a broom and said, 'Well, it's the Boy of Ice – welcome to Perilous Hall!'

Pedar Sadi Sanat stood red-eyed and irritable, picking his face. Although Danlo didn't know it, Pedar was addicted to jook, a squalid drug whose effects include inflamed eyes and irritability – as well as bleeding gums, pimples, and even hallucinations. As people do, Pedar used it only to enhance his intelligence. It is known that the human brain, at puberty, releases a hormone that dissolves any unused synapses laid down during one's childhood. This enables adult human beings, with their adult, hardwired brains, to concentrate and apply the lessons they have learned earlier in life – but at the cost of flexibility and new insights. Jook, when snorted through the nostrils or dissolved in one's drink, inhibits the release of this hormone while stimulating new synaptic growth. It is said that jook can make a bright boy brighter; in delaying the onset of terminal adulthood, it can sometimes transform a dullard into a genius. There are always many who pursue this miracle, even though they sacrifice their sociability, their health, even their very sanity.

'Will you make my bed, Danlo the Wild, the Nameless Child?' Pedar scratched at his eyes and directed Danlo toward his rumpled, bloodstained sheets. 'You may change my sheets every third day.'

That morning Danlo did indeed make his bed, and in the mornings that followed he fetched Pedar's robes to and from the laundry, swept the floor around his bed, and sharpened his skates with a long, sparkling diamond file. The most onerous of his duties was the nightly shaving of Pedar's head. Each evening after supper he ran down the spiral stairway and reported to the first floor bathing room; each evening he gagged on steam as he grasped the diamond-edged straight razor and drew it in short, deft strokes across Pedar's skull. A few times, Danlo considered how easy it would be to let the gleaming razor slip down Pedar's neck, to guide it across the great artery which pulsed in his throat. Such thoughts, however, were even more repulsive to Danlo than the reality of his servitude. Never killing or hurting another, even in one's thoughts – this was the spirit of ahimsa. Danlo tried ferociously to gentle his thoughts. In truth, he was not a violent man (or boy), and so each evening, in the Fravashi way, he tried to remake his consciousness into a mirror that would reflect the best parts of Pedar's spirit. He shaved Pedar's head until it was a gleaming white, with neither scrapes nor nicks to betray a lack of mindfulness and good will. Danlo was adept with cutting tools; in fact, his instant skill with the razor angered Pedar. The high novices like to haze the newer boys, but to do so, they need to find an excuse. It was a tradition in Perilous Hall for a high novice to wait until his head was cut shaving (and given the inexperience most boys had with the barbaric, anachronistic straight razors, cuts were inevitable) before beginning this hazing. Danlo's natural nobility and his adamantine resolve not to hate seemed only to frustrate Pedar. Obviously, Pedar did not want to behold the better parts of himself, for he would not look at Danlo eye to eye or return his bow when the shaving was completed. In truth, Pedar revelled in his meanness. Some people are like that. Because he was cruel, vindictive and blind to his own fundamental nobility, however stifled and sullied, one evening he ordered Danlo to do the unthinkable.