The Broken God (42 page)

Danlo agreed that this was so, and he began thinking precisely in order to pose his questions. In the cybernetic visual space, which was as clear as a blue sky and seemed to open in all directions just behind his eyes, he conjured up various ideoplasts. One by one, their intricate, crystal-

line shapes appeared as out of nothingness. He stacked the ideoplasts together into an array. Or, to use the precise terminology of the cetics, he pleached the ideoplasts, weaving together ideas and ancient paradoxes, much as a Fravashi Father weaves golden threads into a tapestry. To 'pleach' is the verb form of the art and sense known as plexure; literally, it means 'to weave together simplex thoughts in order to reveal complex truths'. Deep in plexure, with care and precision, he applied the rules of the universal syntax to pleach the ideoplasts into a unique question-array. For the hundredth time since beginning his novitiate, he marvelled at the power and beauty of the universal syntax. He began to see it as a profound language that he might use to ask questions, not only of the tutelary computer, but of the universe itself. The syntax rules, he knew, derived from the logic and relationships of natural language; as language encoded concepts into words, the universal syntax was an organic language symbolizing and interrelating the knowledge of all the arts, particularly the art of mathematics. In fact, mathematics could be regarded as a highly abstract, formal language which was merely a part of the universal syntax. Or – and this, he had learned, was one of the many disagreements dividing the cantors and the grammarians – it was possible to argue that the universal syntax was really just a branch on the infinite tree of mathematics. In both arts, ideoplasts were pleached into arrays, whether to make discoveries about natural law, or to create beautiful new philosophies, or elegant mathematical theorems – for Danlo, what did it matter which art contained which, so long as he mastered plexure and learned to speak the secret language of the universe?

– It is hard to formalize ... concepts about gods or God, yes? About the universe? There is always the problem of self-reference. Russell's paradox, the paradoxes.

– Danlo? Young Novice, can you understand me? Please face away from your sense of plexure, for a moment.

– Like this? Shall I face into telepathy?

– That's good.

– It is hard for a human being ... for me, to think about God.

– But you have indeed formalized this difficulty, haven't you?

– Do you mean the expression: 'By none but a god shall a god be worshipped?'

– That is correct. The expression is implicate in your question-array. Did you know that you have rediscovered a saying of the ancient Sanskrit: Nadero devam arcayer?

– No, I did not know that, sir.

– And your formalization of the scholastics' attempted reconciliation of human free will and God's providence is as precise as it could be.

– Thank you.

– However, your relating this reconciliation with the modern cybernetic Doctrine of the Halting is not precise. The correspondences are weak and unsupported by historical fact.

– But, haven't I shown that ... there is no universal algorithm for deciding whether or not a computer will reach its halt state?

– Your proof of this is elegant, Young Novice. Perhaps even brilliant. However, you've only re-established what was known millennia ago.

– But if God, the cyberneticists' conception of a god, or a first cause, outside this universe, if this god programmed the universe to get an answer ... to some almost impossible question, then there is no way to know what this answer will be. If there is an answer, or solution, it would be impossible to know it without letting the universe-as-computer run until it has reached its halt state and ...

– Please continue.

– And therefore Ede-as-God ... could not really be God, or could not be proclaimed as becoming God, since the future ... since the universe is creating the future moment by moment in the only way it can be created. Or known.

There is no way to foresee Ede's destiny. Or the destiny of anyone. And therefore the reconciliation of free will and determinism must ... have a correspondence with the Doctrine of the Halting.

– Of course, that is so. But you'll never find the correct correspondences unless you kithe the history of the Cybernetic Universal Church.

– And which part of this history shall I kithe?

– That is for you to discover, Young Novice.

– But I ...

– You must kithe now, Young Danlo. Please excuse me while you kithe.

This time, when Danlo returned to the word storm, he kithed the arrays of ideoplasts more quickly and with a clearer mental vision. He struggled to illuminate the sometimes dark and subtle relationship between the Cybernetic Universal Church's doctrines and the history of the Civilized Worlds. Information appeared before him in arrays of ideoplasts, and then in arrays of arrays. Concerning Nikolos Daru Ede and the founding of the Church there was more information than he ever had imagined, glittering, vast, frozen seas of information. Information is not know, he told himself. And knowledge is not wisdom. Even though he knew this saying of the librarians was certainly true, in the word storm building inside him he found both knowledge and wisdom aplenty. The work and wisdom of five hundred generations of the best human (and Fravashi) minds was crystallized into the ideoplasts; as he kithed discoveries, facts and concepts tested and re-tested over the millennia, he felt himself touching these minds. He called into play the most generalized of the cybernetic senses, his sense of shih. Shih was the aesthetics of knowledge, or more precisely, the relationship between wisdom and knowledge. In many ways, shih was both a sense and a sensibility, the sense of realness, beauty and truth which guided him among the mountains and flowing glaciers of information. This information was built up of many layers linked together, interconnected and crosslinked in subtle ways. There was a fractal intricate quality to this information; kithing it was almost like following the icy points of a snowflake as they divided and redivided out from its dazzling centre. It was possible to view the information arrays as beautiful wholes which synthesized the conclusions of various philosophical systems, or to examine the meaning of each frozen point, or the many branching sub-points: crystallized knowledge within crystals within yet smaller crystals. Each layer was structured with the same complexity as the next layer, lower or higher. Delving deeply through the information layers for a specific fact and then reascending quickly to perceive certain historical trends and patterns left him dizzy in his mind. Without shih to help him appreciate the elegance of these patterns and facts – and to help him choose which pathways through the richly textured knowledge were worth pursuing and which were not – the arrays of ideoplasts would soon have overwhelmed him.

According to the Doctrine of the Halting, the universe will reach its halt state when and only when Ede-as-God has absorbed and become co-extensive with that universe. Those who believe that it is impossible to foreknow the universe's halt state must also believe that Ede is not destined to become God, that he must face the same evolutionary pressures as any other organism or god. These unbelievers are said to be guilty of the Evolution Heresy.

For many moments of computer time, Danlo learned about the religion known as Edeism. Here is a part of what he learned: that almost three thousand years ago, on the planet of Alumit, there had lived a simple computer architect named Nikolos Daru Ede. That is, Ede was simple in the sense that the whole of his life was given over to a single idea: it was his dream to make computers that would illuminate, vasten and preserve human consciousness. In other ways Ede was a complex man, at once a master architect and a rebel against all architect ethics, a pragmatist and a mystic, a plagiarist of ancient writings and an author capable of creating such brilliant literature as Man's Journey and Universals. Above all, he was both a man of acts and a dreamer, and toward the end of his long, turbulent life (it is a matter of historical fact that he lived 213 years) he succeeded where all other architects of his time had failed. He designed and created a computer, a work of art and genius which he called his eternal computer. And more, he discovered a way to copy and preserve human consciousness into this computer, supposedly without disfiguring that consciousness. And then, while he was still keen of mind and healthy in his body, he defied the Third Law of Civilization. He – this is what his followers have believed and preached for three millennia – this extraordinary, visionary, defiant man bade his journeymen architects farewell and carked his consciousness into his computer. The process of scanning and downloading the information in his brain destroyed it; a few faithless scoffers said that Ede had merely found an ingenious way toward suicide, but most others testified that the memories and algorithms comprising his very essence had been exactly duplicated in his eternal computer. Ede had been vastened, they said, made into something much vaster than a mere man. From this singular, tremendous event, the religion of Edeism sprang forth almost overnight. Ede's faithful student, the architect Kostos Olorun, proclaimed that the ancient prophecies and the purpose of man's evolution had at last been fulfilled: Man had created God, or rather, had downloaded his essence into a computer destined to become as one with the universal godhead. Over the next few years, Ede's eternal computer – Ede himself, as God – rapidly continued his ontogenesis toward the infinite. Many times, Ede copied and recopied his expanding consciousness into a succession of larger and more sophisticated computers which he himself designed and assembled, and then into whole arrays of robots and computers of various functions. (Where Ede-as-man had been a master of computational origami, Ede the God perfected this art of interconnecting and 'folding' together many computer units so that they functioned as an integrated whole.) One day, it came time for Ede to leave Alumit and go out into the universe. He ascended to heaven, into the deep space above the planet that could no longer be his home. Using his power as a god, with the help of tiny, self-replicating robots the size of a bacterium, he disassembled asteroids, comets and other heavenly debris into their elements; he used these elements to fabricate new circuitry and neurologics. He feasted on the elements of material reality, and he grew. According to the Doctrine of the Halting, which Kostos Olorun hastily formulated to prevent other architects from following his path, Ede the God was destined to grow until he had absorbed the entire universe.

And so Ede faced the universe, and he was vastened, and he saw that the face of God was his own. Then the would-be-gods, who are the hakra devils of the darkest depths of space, from the farthest reaches of time, saw what Ede had done, and they were jealous.

Danlo, floating in his tank and faced into the dark tapestry of the tutelary computer's neurologics, began thinking of the details of his father's own ontogenesis. Mallory Ringess, he remembered, had never wholly abandoned his human flesh; he had begun his journey into godhood in a very different way than had Ede. But as the Fravashi say, all paths lead toward the same place.

And they turned their eyes godward in jealousy and lust for the infinite lights, but in their countenances God read hubris, and he struck them blind. For here is the oldest of teachings, here is wisdom: No god is there but God; God is one, and there can only be one God.

There could only be one god, and, as Danlo learned, in the Cybernetic Universal Church that formed around the creed of Edeism, there could be only a single architect – or Architect – blessed with the power to talk with him. Kostos Olorun, a vain and cunning man possessed of great energy, was the first of these Architects; he named himself 'God's Architect' because Ede himself had supposedly entrusted him with his eternal computer, the very one into which he had first carked his godly soul. As God's Architect, Kostos Olorun was guardian of this holy computer, and more, it was said that only he of all Worthy Architects could interface it; only he could read out Ede's instructions to mankind or receive the new revelations commonly known as 'algorithms'. This supreme vanity of Olorun's became reified in the Doctrine of Singularity: that henceforth and for all time, Ede's power over man would be embodied in the singular person of God's Architect. Over the next fifteen hundred years, there were sixty-three of these God's Architects. Many of them were gifted individuals who led an expansion of the Church unequalled in zeal since the rise of Islam or Holism on Old Earth. And so Edeism spread across the galaxy, riding the crest of the Swarming's third wave. It might well have become the universal religion of humanity, but in the year 1536 since Ede's vastening, a schism almost ruined the Church. The Elder Architect, Olaf Harsha, who was guided by a heartfelt (and heretical) ambition to directly face and speak with Ede the God, led a majority of Architects to rebel against the Doctrine of Singularity. Thus began the War of the Faces, which grew to be the greatest war ever fought by human beings and lasted for over two hundred years.

The atrocities committed by Architects against Architects became more numerous and savage as the war continued. With victory almost certain, the Elders of the Reformed Church inevitably turned this war inward and began a purge of their own members, those millions of Architects suspected of various heresies or impure thoughts toward the Church. It was at this time that the Cleansing Ceremony became a weapon used to disfigure the brains of anyone who dared to think of dissent. There is evidence that a few Elders even hired warrior-poets to assassinate their enemies. Almost certainly, the rule of the warrior-poets to kill all hakras sprang from a secret pact made between the warrior-poets and the Elders of the Church.

As Danlo learned about the War of the Faces, he squirmed and shifted in his tank. The water suddenly felt too hot, too thick with dissolved mineral salts. He remembered too well what Hanuman had said to him in the shih grove the afternoon before Pedar's death. For an Architect to voice a desire to be more than a mere man was the worst of sins, and so the Elders of Hanuman's church would certainly have regarded him as both heretic and hakra, that is, if they had ever been able to read his innermost thoughts. In another age, the warrior-poets might have pursued him across the stars and slain him. Danlo was very glad that they lived in gentler times, though he could never understand the attitude of his friends who believed that such wars were now unthinkable. His father, after all, had led pilots to war against their fellow pilots, and if this kind of tragedy could occur within the Order, then anything was possible. He thought about his father for a long time as he brooded over the nature of war within the universe.