The Broken God (58 page)

For example, the holists have canonized the infamous bell theorem of ancient quantum mechanics. They exalt the sublime properties of light, teaching that each photon in a pair of photons will 'remember' the polarity of its mate no matter how far in spacetime the two are separated. Matter is memory, the holists say. They teach that each person's body-mind is wholly connected, electron to electron, to the whole fabric of the universe. Each quantum event, each of the trillions of times reality's particles interact with each other every instant, is like a note that rings and resonates throughout the great bell of creation. And the sound of the ringing propagates instantaneously, everywhere at once, interconnecting all things. This is a truth of our universe. It is a mystical truth, that reality at its deepest level is an undivided wholeness. It has been formalized and canonized, and taught to the swarms of humanity searching for a fundamental unity. Only, human beings have learned it as a theory and a doctrine, not as an experience. A true holism should embrace not only the theory of living systems, but also the reality of the belly, of wind, hunger, and snowworms roasting over a fire on a cold winter night. A man or woman (or child) to be fully human, should always marvel at the mystery of life. We each should be able to face the universe and drink in the stream of photons shimmering across the light-distances, to listen to the ringing of the farthest galaxies, to feel the electrons of each haemoglobin molecule spinning and vibrating deep inside the blood. No one should ever feel cut off from the ocean of mind and memory surging all around; no one should ever stare up at the icy stars and feel abandoned or alone. It was partly the fault of holism that a whole civilization had suffered the abandonment of its finest senses, ten thousand trillion islands of consciousness born into the pain and promise of neverness, awaiting death with glassy eyes and murmured abstractions upon their lips, always fearing life, always longing for a deeper and truer experience of living.

And yet there have always been those little interested in the tenets of holism (or science, or any ism), those who have turned inward to listen to the exquisite rhythms of mind and blood. Holism, some say, is a failed mysticism, a mysticism without a heart, and so the ancient quest for a tao, or way of life, continues. Throughout all of history, dating back past Old Earth's ur-civilizations to the primitive shamans of the forests and deserts, seekers of this way have carried on an unbroken, hidden tradition, an evolutionary journey deeper into life. These remarkable women and men are the founts of energy that each society of humankind calls upon when its vitality has weakened and dimmed. The Order itself has always depended upon its seekers of the ineffable and the immanent: the secret grades of cyber-shamans, a few maverick pilots, the yogin branch among the cetics, of course, and the best of the scryers and remembrancers. This is ironic, perhaps even tragic. For this brilliant minority has always sought to transform the Order, while the Order – the old orthodox masters and lords with their cold hearts and stony faces –has appropriated its finest discoveries, sucked the life out of the most vital knowledge, and reworked its remains into the theories and formal systems of holism. The Order, grown rigid and ossified as old bone, in many ways has exacerbated the basic fault of human consciousness. The people of the Civilized Worlds have always looked to the Order for truth and, too often, they have been given instead the symbols of the universal syntax, artificial intelligence, computer simulations of reality, form over essence, formalizations of the infinite in exchange for life. And thus the great stellar civilization of Danlo's time, after three thousand years, had grown as worn and brittle as old glass, All around him, in Neverness and in a million other lesser cities, were men and women who lived too long and became strangers to their bodies, who feared the organic, who dwelt too long in dreams, or in their computers' tantalizing surrealities, or in cold libraries of stone. And yet everywhere, in the pretty streets and cafes, he saw people who longed for something more, even if they were unaware of their desire. All human beings desire deep in themselves to feel the lifefire quickening along their blood, to be awakened to this ancient and holy burning inside others. Civilized human beings, Danlo thought in his more cynical moments, were like trillions of lumps of dead matter awaiting an intense light to ignite them. Inevitably, some remarkable and brilliant man (or woman) would return from the drears of space with starlight in his hand and fire in his eyes, and then the burning would jump from lip to lip and brow to brow as human beings came alive to their possibilities. Then there would be chaos. Then humanity would fuse together and explode across the stars, either into true awakening, or into something else, perhaps some horrible mechanism for destruction the shape of which Danlo could only glimpse. That he had been born into such times and might live to see this explosion never surprised him. But he never guessed the initial flash would originate from an astonishing source so close to him, or that he would be caught up in its fervour from almost the very beginning.

On the 12th of false winter in the year 2953 since the founding of Neverness, a deepship fell out into the near-space above the City. Its name was the Ring of Glory, and it was owned by a renegade pilot of the Order, Pesheval Sarojin Vishnu-Shiva Lal, whom everyone knew as Bardo. For three days and nights, ferries rocketed up through the atmosphere. Their thunder and fire split the air above the Hollow Fields, making a fine show for the inevitable swarms of people who line the pads and runs while awaiting a deepship's arrival. One by one, the ferries glided planetward, fetching the contents of the deepship's holds. Bardo had brought back with him riches and many, many things, the pelf of a hundred worlds: gosharps and sihu oil, furniture, bonsai plants, sacred jewellery from Vesper, blacking oil, tondos, paintings and Darghinni sculpture, many kinds of sense boxes including dreammakers and other exotic toys, and Yarkona diamonds, and Darkmoon rubies, emeralds, opals, firestones, and pearls from the ocean floors of New Earth, Fravashi carpets, of course, and drugs such as jook, jambool, toalache, beer and skotch. How he had acquired this vast wealth in only five years was the talk of the City. Some said that he had broken his vow of poverty as long ago as his novitiate, that he had inherited a part of his family's estates (he was born a prince of Summerworld) and had kept money in secret. He had parlayed this minor fortune, some of his old friends said, into a very great one. Others were not so kind. His enemies among the lords and masters accused him of trafficking in women, or running outlawed technology. A few – the Lord Pilot Chanoth Chen Ciceron was one of these – hinted that he had betrayed the Order. 'It's always tempting for a pilot to sell his skills to the Merchant Pilots of Tria,' he was heard to say. 'Or to teach the way of our mathematics, which we must always keep secret.'

There was some truth to these rumours, but only some. In truth, Bardo had traded secrets for money, but not the secrets of the Order. Years ago, on his infamous journey to Ksandaria, he had penetrated the forbidden knowledge pools of the great library and had illicitly copied much information. This information – topological mappings of lost worlds, outlawed technology, historical facts that might be used to discredit the doctrines of major religions, and antique music, fantasies and tone poems of incalculable value – he had stored in a firestone that he kept always on his person, usually on a silver chain about his neck. Except for this single firestone, he was a poor man, for he had long since spent the remnants of his family fortune. After abjuring his vows and being stripped of his lightship, he sold all his other possessions for eight thousand City disks. He used this money to buy a passage on a prayer ship bound for Vesper, Larondissement, and Tria. On Tria, at first, he was taken for just another wormrunner with a firestone to sell. He was treated poorly. But when the merchant-princes and merchant-pilots discovered that he was Bardo, a former master pilot of the Order, they feted him. They provided him with a low estate, women, the finest of drugs, musics and foods. They offered him a high estate and the title of merchant-king, if only he would join them and teach them the Order's ineffable art of mathematics. It would be wrong to suppose that Bardo wasn't tempted by this offer. He was very tempted. He wouldn't have been the first pilot to defect to Tria, but he would have been the greatest pilot, the only master pilot ever to so betray the Order. In the end, he declined to become a merchant-king, not because he loved the Order, but because he was possessed of a larger vision and purpose. And so he sold the Trians his firestone and all the information it contained. He bought a vast, silvery deepship. And he left Tria without regret, entering into the twisted space of the manifold that lies beneath the stars. He fenestered from window to window as he journeyed through the fallaways into the heart of the Civilized Worlds.

'All of history is humanity's attempt to increase its wealth,' Bardo once said, and the next few years of his life were to prove the poignancy of this saying. To chronicle the exact sequence of Bardo's journeys from star to star and his acquisition of wealth would be pointless. He visited many worlds, buying and selling many things. He was a brilliant and cunning man with a talent for trade, and his inherent laziness had evaporated before the blaze of his purpose. He prospered. He enjoyed an exponential increase of wealth. A large part of his fortune he gained in a triangular trade among the worlds of Simoom, Yarkona and Catava. The trade worked like this: on Simoom he would fill the holds of his ship with thousands of astrier families. These were all Architects of one kind or another; at that time, the Simoom hierocracy was persecuting all the Cybernetic churches and any Architect who could afford a passage was fleeing to Yarkona and other open worlds. The richest Architects paid Bardo fabulous amounts of money for their passages. They did this because Bardo was a master of the pilot's art and his Ring of Glory could make the run between Simoom and Yarkona with fewer falls and much more quickly than any deepship of the Trian merchants. With every arrival of families desperate to establish themselves, the price of property on Yarkona increased, hence the Architects' panic to reach that rich planet before the next wave of refugees drove the prices up still further. (Then, too, the Architects could never be sure when Yarkona would close its cities to them and they would be isolated on Simoom, perhaps to suffer pogroms and genocide.) On Yarkona, Bardo would unload this human cargo. He would relax in the most luxurious of brothels, eating spiced, fiery foods and losing himself in the silky clasp of the Yarkonan women while he awaited the yearly opening of the Yarkonan gem market. On the first hour of the market, he would use the Architects' passage money to buy up the best of the bluestar diamonds and firestones. He always outbid his competitors. He would load the gems onto the Ring of Glory, collect a few thousand pilgrims and make the long journey to Catava. Again, because he had once been a pilot of the Order, one of the finest there had ever been, he made this long journey in only a few falls. He was always the first of the gem merchants to arrive each year. Catava, of course, is the seat of the Cybernetic Reformed Churches; it is the only place on the Civilized Worlds to fabricate the priceless Edic lights that grace the altar of every Cybernetic church across the galaxy. And the Edic lights, according to the revised version of Nikolos Daru Ede's Principles of Cybernetic Architecture, must always be made of true Yarkonan firestones. The Catavan Architects can never get enough good firestones, and so Bardo always sold these jewelled, living computers at enormous profit. After which he would fill his ship with facing computers, and with cleansing and vastening computers. 'Catava makes the holiest computers,' as the saying goes. He would then complete the third segment of his journey. On Simoom he would sell these holy computers to the many Cybernetic churches there. The manufacture of computers on that austere world, naturally, has always been illegal, but the Architects must have computers for their ceremonies. And so Bardo paid huge bribes to his Simoom agents and the wormrunners who smuggled his wares; he emptied his holds, added to his fortune and began anew selling passages to refugees bound for Yarkona. Five times he made this triangular journey. When he returned to Neverness, he was perhaps the richest man in the City. He astonished everyone by buying a famous house in the Old City and announcing that he would spend the rest of his days (and fortune) pursuing a deeper way of life.

On the 69th of false winter, after remodelling his house and installing it with many beautiful things, he opened his doors to the artistic elite, the seekers, outsiders and brightest malcontents in the City. Each night, beginning at dusk, Bardo held a joyance, a feast of life, a quickening of all the senses that was supposed to be a celebration and remembrance of the secret of life. 'Mallory Ringess sacrificed himself seeking the Elder Eddas,' Bardo was fond of telling everyone as he served them rare foods, wine and pipes glowing with toalache. The Elder Eddas, the secrets of the gods – it's inside each of us, coiled like trillions of sacred snakes into our very cells, coded into our goddamned chromosomes. To try to remember the secret of life – that's the way of the Ringess.' Bardo's parties quickly became very popular; he gathered around himself a circle of spelists, courtesans, neurosingers and old friends. And others: most nights his rooms overflowed with ronin warrior-poets, wormrunners, hibakusha and many uninvited guests. These seekers of the earthy and very effable delights of his house quickly became a nuisance, and Bardo had to begin issuing invitations to his joyances. Only those bearing a steel card engraved with the hologram of two interlinked rings – a black diamond ring and a ring of gold – were admitted through his outer doors. Throughout the City, a card to Bardo's house became a much coveted thing. By the end of false winter, even many of the Order's professionals and academicians had grown curious about Bardo's strange and exciting celebrations, and they schemed to acquire an invitation, often badgering Bardo or one of his circle until a card was forthcoming. But not everyone was so lucky; a desperate few demeaned themselves buying the much-traded cards that the worm-runners sold on open market outside the Hofgarten, or they bribed other masters to surrender theirs. So when, on the 88th of false winter, a messenger arrived at one of Resa's dormitories bearing a gleaming steel card for Danlo wi Soli Ringess, his fellow journeymen and master pilots were envious indeed.