The Broken God (67 page)

'I am glad you've come back,' Danlo said.

Bardo continued laughing without restraint, and he held his knuckles up to his watery eyes. By chance, a teardrop touched one of his rings, a platinum band implanted with a pink and blue opal. With the tip of his finger, he smeared the salt water around the opal's sparkling surface, and said, 'I've always had a fondness for jewels, though I confess I always disliked the pilots' rings. Black is such a dreary colour, no colour at all to make diamond. Ah, I've wanted to ask you about the ring – do you still have your father's ring?'

From the neck of his kamelaika, Danlo withdrew the silver chain that Bardo had given him five years earlier. Fastened to the end of the chain was a black diamond ring.

'Ah,' Bardo said, 'aha, there it is.' So saying, he plunged his hand into a pocket in his robe and removed one of his steel invitation cards. 'Do you see it, Danlo?'

Danlo looked at the card in Bardo's hand. A hologram of two interlocked rings, gold and black, jumped out from the steel and seemed to spin as Danlo examined it. The hologram of the black ring, obviously, was an imago of his diamond pilot's ring.

'People need their symbols, you see,' Bardo said.

Danlo read a strain of longing and sadness in Bardo's weepy eyes, and he said, 'Shall I return the ring to you? If you would rather keep it ... it is just a simple pilot's ring, yes?'

For a moment Bardo hesitated as he stared at the ring that Danlo held between his fingers. Then he sighed and said, 'No, no, you keep the ring. But keep it safely – I wouldn't like to see it lost.'

Danlo tucked the ring back down his kamelaika. He peered into the music room and saw that everyone had taken their seats. He said, 'They are waiting for us.'

Again, Bardo laughed, and said, 'And that's not all that's waiting there.'

'What do you mean?'

'I mean, the Elder Eddas – if you can find them. Confusion and complexity. Hideous complexity, by God.'

'I am glad you invited me tonight,' Danlo said. 'But I had hoped to find ... other things.'

'You'll find what you'll find. But be careful, Little Fellow. Most often, people find what they want to find.'

'Have you ever known me not to be careful?' Danlo asked.

'Don't make jokes,' Bardo said. 'Be careful of yourself.

And be careful of Hanuman. I don't like what he did just now, this face reading trickery, what he said about you. Ah, the way he said it. He's fallen crueller, these last five years.'

They went into the music room, then. The others had seated themselves on futons in front of a low wooden stage. From time to time, on concert nights, musicians would set their gosharps and pianos on this stage and play music for Bardo's guests, but now it was being used for other purposes. It had been laid out with various objects which might attract the eye or excite the senses. Someone had nearly covered it with vases of flowers. There were golden candelabra and long, tapering candles. At the stage's centre stood a high table holding up a golden urn and a gleaming blue bowl. And behind the table, half hidden by snow dahlias and drooping nitsa blossoms, was an instrument or robot of a kind that Danlo had never seen before. It was a glittering thing of quartz tubes and valves and gurgling chemicals and neurologics. As Danlo sat cross-legged on the futon that Hanuman had reserved for him, he nodded his head at this bizarre instrument and asked, 'What is that?'

'An odour synthesizer,' Hanuman said coldly. 'The remembrancers use them.'

They had the position of honour at the centre of the front row; on Danlo's left was Surya Surata Lal, who was sitting on her heels in a tense and formal manner. Next to her sprawled Kolenya Mor, plump and nervous inside her billowing blue robes, and all across the front row, and in the rows behind them, curving around the stage, were women and men shifting and settling into their futons, waiting for the remembrance to begin. For Danlo, who had participated in many rituals in many churches, there was something familiar about the music room. And yet there was something strange, too. There were too many people for intimacy, he thought, but too few to feed each other's fires and create a true religious passion. The windowless room was too dark, too quiet, too full of private hopes and expectations. From somewhere behind him came the sound of dripping water. He smelled wet stone and moss, the rich reek of freshly cut earth. Then Bardo glided into the room, followed by a handsome and noble-looking man wearing the silver robe of a remembrancer.

'Friends and colleagues, fellow seekers,' Bardo said as he promenaded back and forth in front of the stage, 'may I present the master remembrancer, Thomas Rane? He and I will guide tonight's remembrance.'

Thomas Rane stood almost on top of Danlo, and he bowed deeply. He had a fine head of black hair which had run to silver around his temples; he was a proud man, Danlo thought, and slightly arrogant, but also a man whose eyes were bright and sad with a deep understanding of human beings. He stepped up to the stage and began to light the candles. There were three candelabra, thirty-three candles to light, and Danlo couldn't help thinking that his father had been thirty-three years old when he supposedly had ascended to heaven.

Just then Bardo sat down at the edge of the stage, and he steepled his fingers beneath his chin as he rested his elbows atop his huge belly. He leaned toward Hanuman and Danlo. 'Everyone asks me how the Ringess became a god. Did he become a god, they ask? A real god? How is it possible for a human being to become a god, eh?'

'Perhaps it is not possible,' Danlo said. He was suddenly aware that Surya, and others, were looking at him as if they regretted his invitation to the remembrance.

'Oh?' Bardo said. 'Please explain yourself.'

'The Cybernetic Churches,' Danlo said, 'teach that human beings may not become gods. Cannot. Except for Nikolos Daru Ede. They say Ede carked his selfness into a computer and became the only true god but... none may follow his path.'

Bardo stroked his beard and nodded his head before calling out, 'Are there any Architects here tonight? Do any of you accept the basic doctrines of Edeism? No? Ah, that's just as well, else what I'm about to say might get me assassinated.'

Upon the utterance of this word, Danlo and Hanuman exchanged a quick, meaningful look. It had been five years since the deaths of Pedar Sadi Sanat and the warrior-poet who had been sent to assassinate Hanuman. In all that time, neither of them had discussed this tragedy, nor had a day passed in which the memory of it had left their minds.

Hanuman turned to Bardo and laughed harshly. He said, 'I was born into a Cybernetic Church – you should know, you've already said enough for an elder to order your assassination.'

'Well, let me say more, then.' Bardo smiled as he held up two fat fingers. 'The Architects are wrong in at least two ways. You can't become a god by carking your goddamned soul into a computer. But there's a way that you can become a god, anyone. And that's the way of the Ringess.'

Someone behind Danlo, a sceptical old hibakusha who had lived too long, asked, 'How are you defining this concept of godhood?'

'I'm not here to define anything,' Bardo said. 'I didn't invite you here tonight to argue theology. As I've stated, again and again until my lips are numb, it's not our task to correct the doctrines of Edeism, as false and pernicious as they are, nor are we here to start a new religion. By God, hasn't humanity had its bellyful of religions? No, we're here, together, to remembrance the Elder Eddas. A simple but deep experience, this remembrancing. The great secret. It's inside each of us, coded into our goddamned chromosomes, a way toward immortality. A way to develop new senses. A way that the body and brain can continue to grow, vaster, toward the infinite things. That's the way of Mallory Ringess. I was his friend, and I know. Someday – this is a promise he made to me – someday he'll return to Neverness, and then you'll see what it's like to be a god and follow the Way of Ringess.'

He looked across the stage at Thomas Rane, whose face glowed with the light of thirty-three flickering candles. 'Master Rane will introduce you to a few, ah, simple techniques,' Bardo said. 'And then we'll begin our remembrance.'

Thomas Rane walked across the stage and sat down by Bardo's side. He had a sensitive, serious face, and when he spoke, it was with a grave and serious voice. There are sixty-four attitudes to remembrancing,' he said. 'Although it will be impossible for you to learn all these attitudes tonight, I will say something about each of them.'

He proceeded, then, to deliver a serious and fascinating exposition of the remembrancer's art. He quickly dispensed with the more basic attitudes such as association memory, imaging, sequencing and logic memory. These attitudes are fundamental to many professions, and he didn't want to bore his audience. As the room filled with the whisperlike sounds of a Fravashi song drug, he talked about mnemonics, mythopoesis and gestalt. He talked for a long while. It was obvious, from the way he spoke, that he had a reverence for his art. Danlo thought he was a reverent man, at least in the surface calmness of his face and in his cool grey eyes. 'We believe that the Elder Eddas are coded into our chromosomes,' he said. 'It's possible to use the recurrence attitude as a doorway to DNA memory. We've developed a simplified technique to accomplish this.'

Kolenya Mor, squirming about on her futon, looked up at him and said, 'A difficult technique.'

'Difficult for some people, at first,' Surya Surata Lal said.

'It's difficult, I admit,' Thomas Rane said. 'But the memories are always there. All the memories of one's life. And the other memories, too. Memory can be occulted but never destroyed. Can you remember this?'

'I will try,' Kolenya said, wryly.

'Just so,' Thomas Rane replied. 'Then let's remember down the DNA.'

He stood up and joined Bardo by the table at the centre of the stage. He gave Bardo a slight head bow.

'Let's remember down the DNA,' Bardo said in his melodious voice, and the people in the room picked up this saying as if it were a chant, repeating, 'Let's remember down the DNA.' The music room had been made to reflect and deepen sounds, and the sound of thirty-eight human voices, for a few moments, drowned out the quieter Fravashi song drug. Then Bardo clapped his hands, once. The room filled with a Japanese tone poem, which seemed to float in the air like a strand of pearls. The lovely, murmuring music instantly brought Danlo back to the time in Old Father's house when he had learned to play the shakuhachi and he had entered into the dreamtime of his people. He sat there on his futon, remembering other musics of his childhood: Haidar's skin-covered drum beating to the howl of the west wind; his found-mother singing lullabies over the light of the oilstones; the sacred chant of the Song of Life that he had learned only incompletely. Music surrounded him and beat inside his chest. He stared up past Hanuman, looking for the source of this music. The walls, he saw, were sheets of vibrating organic crystals. But the music seemed not to emanate from the walls, nor from any other point in space or time; rather it sounded everywhere at once, as if each air particle carried whole tones, and progressions of tones. He dwelt in this music for a long time, remembering. He could not have said how long he listened, for it seemed that the whole of the tone poem was bound up inside each silvery note, and each note was beautiful, deep, and eternal.

'Let's remember,' a deep voice called out. Danlo looked up at the stage to see Bardo bending over the table. The huge man reached forward and grasped the handles of a golden urn. Then Thomas Rane moved forward and picked up the blue bowl from the table. He held it in his open hands, waiting. Into the bowl Bardo poured a clear liquid that looked like water. But it was not water; it was kalla, the remembrancers' drug. The remembrancers had spent five thousand years developing it from such sources as the sacred mushrooms of Old Earth, alien plants, and synthetics modelled after the information molecules which are grown inside the cybernetic spaces. Drinking kalla, the remembrancers say, is like clearing a window of frost in Order to see another world, the forgotten realms of experience buried beneath the snowdrifts of memory.

'Let's form a circle,' Bardo said. Thomas Rane handed the bowl of kalla back to him, and he stepped off the stage. Danlo stood up, and Hanuman, and then everyone in the room was standing, making a circle over and around the futons. Thomas Rane and Bardo made their way to the circle's centre. 'This is kalla,' Bardo said as he held the blue bowl up for everyone to see. He caught Danlo's eye and began to chuckle. 'Take one sip, and flee God. Two sips to see God. Three sips and you'll be God.'

So saying he lifted the bowl to his mouth and drank the kalla. He wiped his lips on the back of his hand. 'Please, take two sips,' he warned. 'No more, no less.'

He passed the bowl to Thomas Rane, who took two quick sips before passing it on to Surya. She received the bowl into her hands as if it were made of eggshell and might break at the slightest touch. Her little red eyes were lit up like wood coals, and she held the bowl's blue edge up to her little lips. In this way, passing from lip to lip and hand to hand, the bowl made its way around the circle. By chance, Hanuman was the next to last person to drink the kalla. He held the bowl in his cupped hands as he turned to his left and looked at Danlo, who was standing close to him.

'Drink!' Bardo said. 'It's not poison, you know. Drink and let's be done.'

Hanuman's fingers slid up around the side of the bowl. He performed this subtle movement so that only Danlo could see it, the three orange-gloved fingers held against the gleaming blue porcelain. It was a signal, Danlo realized, a challenge. There was challenge in the stiffness of Hanuman's body, in the way he threw his chin back and took three large swallows of the kalla. Danlo watched his neck tense up three times, just as he watched the hard knot of his Adam's apple jumping up and down in his throat as if it were an animal trying to escape a trap. And all the while, Hanuman's hellish eyes never left his own; he gazed at Danlo in a silent challenge that might have said: 'You're bold enough when playing hokkee and risking all kinds of physical death, but can you face the wilderness of perils that devours the mind?'