The Broken God (75 page)

Of all the horrors of civilization, Danlo thought it most horrible the way civilized people sought always to control the bodies and minds of others. This age-old struggle for control had led to untold bloody wars. He had studied enough history to know of the drug wars fought on Old Earth, and on many of the Civilized Worlds. Billions of people had died in these wars. He had thought that human beings long ago, a millennium before the Swarming's second wave began, had established the right to alter their consciousnesses at will. Danlo, himself, had always regarded this as a fundamental and inalienable human right, but now Bardo hinted that this was not so.

'Ah, war,' Bardo said as he looked out the window. 'Some wars will have to be fought again and again, till the last woman gives birth to the last poor babe.'

'Even the drug wars?'

'Listen, Little Fellow, anyone with enough power can make anything unlawful. Or worse – unobtainable.'

'But forbidding the drinking of kalla ... that would violate the covenants,' Danlo said.

'So? Do you think the covenants have never been suspended before?'

'I know ... that they have.'

'In truth,' Bardo said, 'the lords needn't forbid kalla to keep people from the Way. They've only to discourage anyone of the Order to associate with myself, or to enter my house. Or they can deny immigration to seekers of the Eddas – keep them from ever entering the City. Or they can spread rumours that kalla poisons the brain cells. Or – I admit this is utter paranoia – they could secretly release poisoned kalla to the populace to discourage the drinking of it. Or, if we force them to extremes, they could even hire warrior-poets to assassinate our leaders.'

'And therefore you would appease the Lords of the Order?'

'Appease them! By God, I'd like to forget them, if I could, the whole rotting Order. But I can't, too bad.'

Danlo brushed the long hair away from his eyes and said, 'But mightn't it be possible ... to help the lords remembrance the Elder Eddas?'

'To suborn the whole Order, eh?' Bardo laughed out. 'Well, I'd suborn the whole damn universe, if I could. The Elder Eddas are the key to everything, these goddamned memories. The memories of the future that a few of us have seen, a new way of living for our bloody kind. Ah, listen to me, I'm my own best propagandist! But the truth is the truth. The Way of Ringess is not just some cult designed to bring Bardo women, money and power, I promise you. Not just. It's the way, or, I should say, lest I appear a fanatic, it's the best damn way that humankind has ever found to fulfil its destiny.'

'And you believe ... that our destiny is to be as gods? Truly?'

'Do I believe it!' Bardo roared out. 'I've seen it, with my own eyes, your father, who became a goddamned god even as I watched.'

The universe is a womb for the genesis of gods, Danlo remembered. He looked deep into Bardo's eyes, then said, Take three sips of kalla and– '

'Your father,' Bardo interrupted, 'remembranced the Eddas more clearly than anyone, and he never in his life tasted kalla.'

'I have often wondered ... what my father remembered. What he saw.'

Bardo clasped his hands behind his back and he began strolling around the room. His steps were heavy and ponderous; he dragged his feet across the floor, obviously not caring that the rough stones were shredding his pretty silk slippers. 'Well, if he descryed the future, as I believe he did, he would have seen that kalla is a dangerous drug.'

'I think it is a blessed drug.'

'Our enemies,' Bardo said, 'are already questioning how any drug could induce such an exalted experience as the remembrance of the Elder Eddas.'

'But why should they doubt this?'

'Well, it's the old problem of chemicals and consciousness. Ah, matter and spirit. Everyone knows deep remembrance to be a spiritual experience. It's a mystery how the juice of a few goddamned plants could bring anyone closer to God.'

Danlo smiled at this and said, 'But there is no mystery, Bardo. A harpist plucks the strings of her gosharp and plays the rhapsodies of Ayondela. A simple gosharp, this instrument made of kasja wire and shatterwood ... makes the sweetest music. A man takes three sips of kalla, and he touches off the release of neurotransmitters, acetylcholine and tryptamine and serotonin. Is the music of the mind any less sweet for being made with ... these blessed molecules?'

'Has Thomas Rane taught you the chemistry of this drug? Then you'll know how dangerous it really is.'

'But danger,' Danlo said, 'is just the left hand of exaltation.'

'There speaks Danlo the Wild,' Bardo said, and he sighed. 'You've had your three sips of kalla and your exaltation. Others have had, ah, other experiences.'

'Do you mean Hanuman?'

'For a while, Little Fellow, I was afraid he'd fallen mad.'

'And you?'

Bardo puffed out his cheeks, then said, 'Did you think I'm too much a coward to have taken three sips? Well, I've done exactly that. On six different nights. And each one was a journey into heaven and hell, a sort of divine madness. I remembered myself, I think, but I wasn't really myself, I was my memories, or became them, in a hellish sort of way, but more than that, I ... ah, damn it, Little Fellow! Who can talk about these things?'

Danlo looked at Bardo and smiled. 'But if we do not talk about the Elder Eddas, who will?'

'No doubt sceptics who've never remembranced them will blather on and on, explicating in detail our drugged delusions.'

'We will have to tell people the truth, then.'

'And how do we do that?'

'By using the truest words we can find,' Danlo said.

'What words?'

'These words,' Danlo said. He closed his eyes and let his fingers touch the feather in his hair. 'We should say that the stars and rocks and dreams of men and women ... the memory of all and everything is contained in the Elder Eddas. The Eddas are full as a cup overflowing with water, yet empty like the void, infinitely empty, more empty than the nothingness out beyond the Southern Wall of galaxies. There will always be ... a space for more memory. These things we have seen: that memory is always being created and always destroyed, and that it is eternal, too, preserved like pearls floating in an urn of blacking oil. And everything is memory, yes? The universe is like an ocean roaring with memory. I am the Elder Eddas, and that is my truth, and you are, too, and that is your truth, and people forget this almost the moment they see it as it is. It is hard to remembrance the Eddas. The deepest part. It shines through everything, the light that blinds. It is like a dance of starlight, an endless photon stream, always moving, always beautiful, impossible to really see. And the colours, shimmering, dissolving into each other, the infinite points of silver and violet and living gold – all the colours, and no colours that I have ever seen before, or imagined seeing. And behind the colours and the motion, there is a total stillness, a silence more real than rocks or wind or the ice of the sea. It is just pure memory. I am that silence, truly, and nothing else. As you are, and everything is.'

Danlo ceased speaking, and he stepped over to the western quadrant of the room. There, in front of him, the dome was free of snow; through this transparent section of clary he saw the hotel district lit up with rows of cold flame globes, thousands of distinct points sparkling in their colours among the millions of lights of the City. He pressed his forehead against the dome, and the clary was so cold it hurt his skin. For a long while, he stood there motionless, looking out at the lovely, quiet lights.

'Danlo?'

'Yes?'

Bardo came over to him and laid his hand across his shoulder. With much mmming and ahhhing, he cleared his throat. When he finally spoke, his voice was almost a whisper. 'What you've just said – would you really tell people that?'

'Yes, why not?'

'Well, your words, pretty as they are, contradict each other. You say the Eddas are empty and full, silent and roaring like the goddamned sea, all at the same time. Motionless yet always moving – aren't you afraid people will laugh at you?'

Danlo smiled and said, 'I would not want to keep anyone from laughing ... if that is what he wants to do.'

'But can't we just say that this, ah, experience of the Eddas is beyond words? Shouldn't we just admit that it's ineffable and be done with it?'

'But it is not ineffable,' Danlo said.

'Well, I think it is, Little Fellow.'

'You have had your three sips of kalla,' Danlo said. 'Does my account of my journey strike you as being untrue?'

Bardo's face filled with blood then, and it was hard to tell whether he was angry, embarrassed or frustrated. 'No, not untrue,' he said. 'But, worse: absurd. We can't go around proclaiming that the deepest experience a man or woman can have is paradoxical.'

'But the deepest parts of the Elder Eddas are paradoxical,' Danlo said.

'But we can't say that, can we?'

'We can say ... whatever we have to say.'

'But what about logic, then?' Bardo roared out. 'We live in a world of goddamned logic, don't we?'

'Yes, of course ... that is true.'

'Well? Would you throw away the rules of logic like a madman casting pearls down a multrum?' Danlo smiled at this earthy image, and he said, 'The world, as we normally see it – as we speak of it – it is all multiple, yes? All the buildings of the City, the individual people, their possessions and plans, everything they do – every thing or act must be distinguishable from all others. What is logic, if not the rules keeping all objects and events distinct? A bird is a bird, we think, and thus it cannot be a man. A man either exists ... or he does not exist, but not both, simultaneously. And we exclude any middle possibility, and we live by this law. And rightly so. If we did not, we could never properly speak of things, or say that one event causes another. Or even that there occurred separate events. The blessed laws of logic ... define what we mean by multiplicity.'

Bardo, who had devoted half his lifetime to the study of mathematics and logic, suddenly belched, releasing vapours of garlic and goatroot into the air. He belched once more and said, 'I've never thought about the matter in quite that way before. I suppose you're about to conclude that logic cannot be applied to the experience of the Eddas because of the, ah, unity of memory?'

Danlo nodded his head and smiled. 'The words I have spoken... I have tried to consider them, to polish them like a mirror. I believe they reflect the experience of remembrance truly, as much as words can reflect any experience. But remembrance itself is beyond logic. In the deepest part of the Eddas, there are no distinctions between things. In the way the universe remembers them. The memory of all things is in all things – the remembrancers say this. I have seen ... that this is true. There is a oneness of all memory, yes? A blessed oneness.'

'And so you intend to skate up and down the streets blithely speaking in paradoxes about this – ah, I can scarcely force my lips to make these goddamned mystical words – this oneness?'

'As you have said,' Danlo reminded him, 'the truth is the truth.'

'And if you go telling it everywhere, we'll have every hibakusha and seeker in the City knocking at my doors for an invitation to a joyance.'

'But ... isn't that what you want?'

'Ah, is that indeed what Bardo wants?' Bardo asked himself as he glanced down at the floor. The huge man's lips cracked with the beginning of a smile, and Danlo immediately knew that Bardo, all along, had been plotting the radical expansion of Ringism. Danlo smiled too, and then they were smiling at each other in sudden understanding.

'Of course,' Bardo said, 'even true words can only draw people to the Way. We'll still have to show them the truth.'

'It would be better ... if they showed themselves.'

'Take two sips of kalla and see God, ' Bardo said. 'We'll have to teach the people how to see.'

'No, Bardo. One teaches oneself to see.'

'Well, we have to control these goddamned remembrances, don't we?'

'If you control it ... then you will destroy it, the great memory.'

'I'm sorry, we've no choice but to ration the kalla.'

'Let the people drink the kalla as they will.'

'No, it's too dangerous.'

'Living is dangerous, too,' Danlo said. 'Would you ration out and control the moments of your life?'

'Again, there speaks Danlo the Wild.'

Danlo ran his finger along the hard, cold scar above his eye and said, 'All of us, every time we drink the kalla, we are all plunged into the same blessed sea. Some will swim where others drown.'

'And if you continue gulping kalla as if it were water,' Bardo said, 'eventually you'll drown, too. Even you.'

'That is possible.'

'Well, I can't allow you to go plunging yourself into madness, can I?'

We are all food for God, Danlo remembered. Somewhere inside his ears the Elder Eddas roared, and he knew that this great memory might someday consume him; it might digest the tissues of his soul so totally there would be neither escape nor recrystallization into that image he knew as himself. But that moment, he thought, if it ever came, lay far in the future. Now was the time for boldness and journeys into the dark currents of the self. It was his faith that will and wisdom would always guide him back to the world of living things.

'But, Bardo, when I spoke of drowning ... this was only a metaphor. It is always possible to lose yourself in the sea of memory. But then, there will always be another journey, yes?'

'Perhaps this is true – for the remembrancers,' Bardo said. 'But they discipline themselves for years before drinking the kalla. Why do you think they restrict it so?'

'But Thomas Rane has said– '

Bardo suddenly stamped his foot against the floorstones and laughed out, Thomas Rane! By God, he's as wild at heart as you. But even he must know that if we go spraying our kalla into the mouths of humanity, then some poor people will be lost in a very unmetaphorical insanity and die very real deaths.'

Danlo looked down at his empty hands and said, To live, I die.'

'Still speaking in your goddamned metaphors, eh? Well, listen, Little Fellow, I can't let you lose yourself in the kalla.'