The Broken God (78 page)

How is it that a few rare people can compel the attention of others? Why should any one person, or whole swarms of people, stand in a driving snow, entranced, while they listen to another's words and feel the pounding of his passion and drink in the fire of his eyes? If it is true that Hanuman li Tosh was born with the gift of tongues, then it is equally true that all his studies and his life's experience contributed towards developing this gift. He was a cetic. No one should ever forget that he was of the Order's oldest discipline, a way of mastery reaching far back to the deserts and forests of Old Earth. To be exact, he was a cyber-shaman, and at the age of twenty-one, he had nearly mastered the different states of computer consciousness. This mastery would be of critical importance to the Order, to Neverness, to all the worlds on which human beings live and call themselves civilized. But for all his skill at interfacing the cybernetic spaces, he had not ignored the other cetic branches. From the yogin he had learned meditation, psychedelics, the body arts, rhapsody, chanting and inner theatre. And from the neurologicians: configuration, face dancing, ritual analysis, mythopoesis, charisma, and outer theatre. All the cetic branches had incorporated the Fravashi language philosophies, and Hanuman became adept at using word drugs to soothe others' suspicions. He learned to analyse belief systems and to design specific word keys that would free his listeners from their conceptual prisons. And, as Danlo soon discovered, to his horror, Hanuman began creating in those around him wholly new mental prisons that bound them to Hanuman's words, to his vision, to his burning sense of his own fate.

Ultimately, though, it was his great remembrance that bestowed upon him the mantle of prophet. He had said that the death of a god was recorded in the Elder Eddas. At first many ridiculed this remembrance. The pilots, especially, called his memory a drugged delusion: six hundred years earlier, Dario the Bold had mapped all the stars and planets of the 18th Deva Cluster, and no such god, alive or dead, had been discovered. Hanuman's prediction – or memory – might have been quickly forgotten if the Lord Pilot had not spoken so vociferously against kalla and the remembrancing ceremonies. Chanoth Chen Ciceron, one day at the Lords' College, cited Hanuman's remembrance as an example of the kind of danger that Bardo's cult posed the Order. 'We must forbid all novices and journeymen contact with Bardo's cult,' he told the assembled lords. 'Otherwise, we'll see the minds of our brightest youths destroyed.'

Now, Lord Ciceron had many enemies, not the least of whom was the maverick pilot known as the Sonderval. The Sonderval had fought side by side with Bardo in the Pilots' War against Leopold Soli and Lord Ciceron. Because the Sonderval despised Lord Ciceron and hoped to humiliate him (and because he was one of the most arrogant human beings ever born) on a whim he decided to journey to the 18th Deva Cluster. In his lightship, the Cardinal Virtue, he required only three days to reach the Cluster. He had the fixed-points of the red giant star that Hanuman had divulged to Danlo. He was perhaps the finest pilot in the City, perhaps the only one able to use the Continuum Hypothesis, the Great Theorem of the pilots, as it should be used. He journeyed across the stars of the galaxy from Neverness to the Deva Cluster in a single fall. It took him fifteen days to locate the corpse of the dead god. It was as big as a moon and had a glittering diamond skin ten miles thick; its brain was composed of neurologics of a kind the eschatologists had never seen before. As Hanuman had predicted, it orbited a red giant star which the Sonderval immediately named Hanuman's Glory. And indeed, this discovery did bring Hanuman sudden glory. It brought glory and credibility to the Way of Ringess. Upon the Sonderval's return to Neverness, within half a day, the news that a god had truly died had spread across the City.

'This will prove the power of remembrancing,' Thomas Rane said to Danlo. 'Now everyone will come to me and demand I show them the way to the Elder Eddas.'

But Thomas Rane, who understood so much about remembrance and the individual human mind, was quite ignorant of mass religious fervour. Most of the would-be converts to Ringism that winter did not come to Bardo's house to be guided by Thomas Rane. They came to behold such phenomenons as Bardo and Danlo wi Soli Ringess, and most of all, they came because they were curious about Hanuman's great remembrance. They wanted to be close to him, to hear his voice, to touch the silken sleeve of his robe as they stood drinking ice-wine with him or eating spicy little meats in Bardo's sunroom. Although Hanuman never spoke of kalla, never again delivered another prophecy, his very silence created about him an air of mystery and power. He would listen attentively as strange women and men confessed their dreams to him, and all the while, he would look into their eyes and hidden fears as if peering into the very heart of the Elder Eddas. Almost everyone remarked upon his compassion, his rare and unique understanding of others' pain. He, himself, burned with memories; his face shone with the awareness of a terrible and primeval force buried deep within. People sensed this about him. Such awareness cannot be created at will, nor can it be faked using the techniques of charisma or outer theatre. It is as real and compelling as an electric storm at night; it's like the smell of ozone in the air after a lightning bolt has struck. People swarmed around Hanuman li Tosh because he was connected to the deepest of forces, and through him they felt the pulse-beat of a universe that was more poignant and intense than they had ever known, and infinitely more real.

Soon after his great remembrance, after he had recuperated and begun counselling Ringists at Bardo's parties, he set out to strengthen this dark connection. Because he wanted to understand everything about pain and suffering, he began to cultivate for himself a secret life. Unknown to his fellow cetics or to Danlo, he began climbing the icy cliffs of Mt Attakel, where they loomed like a gleaming white wall above the Elf Gardens. He would don a heated kamelaika, pull on a pair of friction boots and force his way up the crumbly, rotten rock faces. He always climbed alone, without the aid of a rope or net. Many times he suffered frostbite of fingers and face, and twice he lost toes, which had to be regenerated in secret at the cloning shop. Many times he was close to the pain and terror of falling. But alone, he could only know his terror and his pain, and so he turned to other pursuits. He sought out and entered zanshin tournaments. He fought with fists and elbows and feet until both he and his partners were broken and bloody. He fought bravely, never betraying the slightest tension or anxiety, and he earned many points for demonstrating a perfectly relaxed and alert posture in the face of maiming, and rarely, even brain disfiguration and death. Other passions of his were less dangerous, though no less cruel. At night he would journey deep into the Farsider's Quarter and purchase otherworldly delights from the alien Friends of Man. He solicited male whores, and he mistreated them, not because it gave him pleasure but because it brought them pain. In truth, the act of coupling with alien females and graceless, sculpted young men sickened him, and he did so only to discover how much sickness he could endure. This descent into darkness went on all during the deep, dry snows of winter, even as he delivered little sermons about the virtue of gods to Bardo's guests, and once, when Bardo was ill from eating too many chocolate cookies, conducted the nightly ceremony himself in Bardo's music room. It was only by chance (or perhaps it was fate) that Danlo discovered his friend's secret life.

One evening, after Danlo had spent the day studying the mathematics of the manifold, he was out in the Old City looking for a cafe in which to take his evening meal. He was very hungry; he had become lost in the intricacies and elegance of the Great Theorem, and he hadn't eaten anything since the previous night. He was contemplating a rich dinner of kurmash, peas and saffron rice when he espied Hanuman ahead of him, weaving his way among the skaters filling the street. Hanuman was dressed out of colour, in a formal kamelaika and a gleaming brown fur; he might have been mistaken for a rich pilgrim or a farsider. Danlo thought to call to him, to ask him if he wanted to share a grand bowl of kurmash, but Hanuman's dress and secretive manner bade him keep his distance. He decided, out of sheer caprice, to follow him. For two blocks he kept a good distance between them, watching Hanuman stroke his distinctive and skilled strokes. And then Hanuman turned onto the Serpentine, and the crowds of people thickened up. The snowploughs had heaped glittering white drifts to the sides of the street, closing the slow lanes. Skaters were all forced onto a ribbon of ice between this wall of snow and the sleds rocketing down the centre of the street. Danlo had to stay close behind Hanuman lest he lose him. Self-important men and women in expensive furs jostled him, blocked his way, and shot him anxious looks as he darted among them. The skating was quite treacherous. A fresh layer of snow covered the street and muffled the hard striking sound of Danlo's skates. He couldn't see his skate blades cutting the ice, couldn't make out the divots, rills and bumps that one usually avoids. With difficulty he followed Hanuman down the Serpentine where it curves west into the Farsider's Quarter. At the edge of the Diamond District, Hanuman turned off onto a lesser sliddery. Snow completely obscured the redness of the ice, and at first Danlo did not realize that they were making their way up Strawberry Street. Then he noticed the brothels lining the street on both sides: cold stone row houses without lights or windows. The street was dark and peopled with worm-runners, wealthy men and middling-old women, avid and nervous in their hooded furs. Outside the brothel doors were beautiful boys and young men wearing tight silk kamelaikas; among them stood dangerous-looking procurers who rudely whistled at the passers-by. Danlo had a strong sense that he was in a place he shouldn't be, that many eyes were watching him, appraising him, wondering what a young pilot should be seeking in such a district. He himself wondered that Hanuman could make his way down the street with so great an ease, as if the smells of incense, perfume and burning jambool were quite familiar to him. It amused and alarmed him to think that Hanuman might have a taste for young men. He expected that Hanuman would stop momentarily before one of the brothels' luridly carved doors, but then Hanuman suddenly turned down a dark alley and vanished.

Now very much alarmed, Danlo followed him down the icy gap between two brothels, which were built so close together that two men could not have squeezed between them shoulder to shoulder. He was very near the district's edge. In front of him, gleaming out of the darkness, was a snowy embankment separating the line of brothels from crumbling old buildings that might have been flung up three thousand years earlier. He thought these ugly buildings must be restaurants, for the air smelled of baked breads and pastries, cheese and cilka, garlic and meats roasting over an open fire. Strawberry Street runs near the Bell District, so-called because its network of streets, as seen from the air, takes on the shape of a great purple bell. It seemed that Hanuman was skating toward the Bell and intended somehow to enter it. For a moment, Danlo did not understand how this could be so. Strawberry Street is a red gliddery, whereas all the streets in the Bell except the main one are of purple. In Neverness, red glidderies connect only with the major orange glidderies, or with each other; the purple glidderies intersect green glissades. Red streets never flow into those that are purple. Thus the City is something of a topological nightmare, and travel between the districts is often circuitous and difficult. Long ago, the Timekeeper had ordered the City built this way. He had wanted to isolate the various sects and alien races should it ever be necessary to close off the streets in case of rebellion or war. From almost the very beginning, however, the people had undermined his plan. In many places throughout the City, the harijan and other peoples had built illegal white streets connecting the red and purple glidderies, and thus connecting the City's many districts. When Danlo reached the end of the alley, behind the brothels vibrating with strange musics and muffled cries, he surmised that he had discovered one of these illegal streets, for the alley did not dead-end as it should have. Rather, it cut through the embankment, through a black tunnel hung with hollow sounds, and gave out onto a narrow walkway of ice leading into the Bell. He cheerfully followed Hanuman onto this walkway. He followed him onto a well-lit purple gliddery lined with apartments and various shops. He saw him enter a windowless restaurant, a dingy old building of flaking sandstone that it would have been easy to ignore. Danlo stood across the street leaning on his knees, watching the restaurant door and wondering what he should do.

For a long while he waited, wearing grooves in the ice as he slid his skate blades back and forth. It was very cold, the kind of cold that Danlo once would have called haradu. It had begun snowing again. Millions of delicate snow-flakes danced violet and rose in the light of the flame globes. The smells of delicious foods floated all around him. He remembered, then, that he planned to meet Tamara later that night. He would need to eat very soon, to fortify himself for that meeting. At last he decided to join Hanuman inside the restaurant, even though he could see it was a private one and he had no money. Since coming to Neverness, he had eaten only in free restaurants, and he was quite ignorant of the etiquette of exchanging money for food.

Upon opening the outer doors, in a foyer full of coat closets, alien artifacts and jets of hot air, he was immediately greeted by a jaded-looking hostess wearing a red kimono. She took his furs from him and asked if he required a fry table.

'I am not sure,' Danlo said. 'I had thought to meet... a friend.'

'Would your friend already have arrived?'

'Oh, yes, I am sure he is here.'

'Can you tell me his name?'

Danlo, who still retained his Alaloi inhibition against the telling of true names, said, 'Most likely he would not have given his name.'