The Broken God (81 page)

'Your testament,' Hanuman said, 'will be incorporated as part of the kalla ceremony. There should be five others.'

'Danlo's testament, of course,' Bardo said after smiling at Danlo. He held up a huge finger gloved in gold leather. 'And my cousin's. And we mustn't overlook Thomas Rane. And I suppose we should also include Jonathan Hur.'

Hanuman shook his head. 'I would alternate the sexes. Thomas Rane should speak first, and then Surya, followed by Danlo. And then we should let Nirvelli give her testament. Have you heard it yet? She has an elegant style, a powerful voice – as many of the courtesans do.'

'I wish that Tamara could have spoken,' Bardo said. 'But she told me that she had an engagement tonight, too bad.'

Just then, Danlo and Hanuman exchanged glances. They both knew that Tamara had declined to attend the joyance because she disliked Hanuman.

'Someday we'll persuade Tamara to share her remembrances,' Hanuman said. 'But tonight, Nirvelli will have to speak for the courtesans.'

'You'll go last?' Bardo asked.

'That would be best.'

'By God, I wish we could just follow the original schedule.'

Hanuman smiled and said, 'When we composed the schedule, we did so knowing we'd likely have to change it.'

Bardo frowned again, and it was obvious that he was uneasy with allowing Hanuman to help orchestrate the joyance. In truth, Hanuman was the real architect of all that occurred that evening. It was he who had suggested giving away drugs to the people; he had arranged the Fravashi chants, the tone poems and body musics that would open the manswarm to their words. He was a master of nada yoga, the yoga of sound, and he had carefully placed the sulki grids that filled the ice ring with symphonies and drumsongs and whispers, with mystic tones that worked upon the body and brain. He had ordered the lasers and the dish-like moon lights and had overseen their installation around the ring's circumference. He had interfaced all this machinery with a master computer hidden under the stage, and then he himself had interfaced this computer in order to control things. As a cetic, he was sensitive to the slightest changes in people's consciousness, and he could read their mood as easily as an Alaloi hunter identifies bear tracks in the snow. He could change this mood and consciousness. This manipulation of masses of people was an unforgivable violation of his cetic ethics. Danlo hated this skill of Hanuman's, even as he was fascinated by it. He watched Hanuman smiling sweetly at Bardo, and he suddenly knew that Hanuman was planning to betray him.

'I'm worried,' Bardo said to Hanuman. He puffed out his fat cheeks and let a lungful of steamy breath escape into the air. 'I'm worried that you'll compromise yourself. There are other cetics out there. Surely they'll discern your hand in all this.'

'Perhaps,' Hanuman said.

'Well, you'll be banished from the Order.'

'Is that the worst fate that might befall me?'

'Are you ready to leave the Order, then?'

'Should I give my allegiance to the Order?' Hanuman asked. 'Or to the Way of Ringess?'

'By God, I hope you don't blame me for forcing you to such a decision!'

'But I haven't been forced to do anything,' Hanuman said.

'You know it's my hope,' Bardo said, 'that no one should have to make this choice.'

'And it's not an ignoble hope. I share it, too. Tonight's joyance should bring the Order and the Way closer together.'

'Either that or it will ruin us,' Bardo said.

'No,' Hanuman reassured him, 'there's no chance of that.'

'Well, ruin or no, I'd hope that the people would never forget the Way of Ringess.'

'After tonight, they won't forget,' Hanuman said.

He turned his head to let his eyes meet Danlo's. His face, Danlo saw, was cold and white and set with anticipation.

Then Hanuman smiled and said, 'A hundred thousand people, and none of them will forget what they hear and see tonight.'

They went back into the warming pavilion while nine concertists in heated clothing took the stage. The concertists stood in a half-circle facing the dark swarm of people below them and fingered the keys of their pralltrillers. A long, low, thunderous music vibrated the ice ring. It was terrible to hear. It emptied the mind of all thought and set the hearts of thousands booming up through their brains. The trance concerto continued for exactly a quarter of an hour. Then the concertists put down their instruments and left the stage.

It had been agreed that the speakers that evening might talk about any aspect of Ringism, so long as they spoke from their hearts and kept their testaments short. Thomas Rane, sleek and serious in his silver furs, was the first to take the stage. As at any joyance, he delivered an account of the remembrancing art, and he speculated upon the nature of the Elder Eddas. He slighted the dangers of kalla while extolling its virtues. Surya Surata Lal quickly followed him. From the warming pavilion, Danlo watched her walk out almost to the edge of the stage. The tiny woman coolly faced the people spread out over the ice below her and talked of the essence of humanness, and of her love and hate for her all-too-human body. She spoke with a brutal honesty. All people, she said, lived their entire lives in bondage to hunger, pain and lust. And above all, to the fear of death. But there was a way to transcend the body and achieve immortality. This was the Way of Ringess: to sacrifice body and self in order to grow into godhood. All people, she said, should open their hearts to Mallory Ringess' tremendous and miraculous sacrifice; all people must die to themselves if they would truly live; all people must take the image of Mallory Ringess inside themselves, and cherish it as a revelation of what they might become. When she was finished, it was Danlo's turn. He walked out across the creaking stage, out to where he could feel the roar of a hundred thousand voices engulf him. Foolishly, he wore only his racing kamelaika and a pair of black gloves. The wind whipped through his hair, and he heard someone down in front of him shout out, 'It's Danlo the Wild!' In truth, he was unaware of how wild he looked; his senses and mind were concentrated upon what lay before him: the dark air gushing over him in cold waves that shocked him down to the bone; the hundred thousand pairs of eyes burning to meet his eyes; the words that spilled from his lips and were carried outward to each point within the ice ring and far beyond. As he had told Bardo in his observatory, he had considered these words well. He had polished them as clearly as words could be polished. He spoke with a rare devotion to truth, though if anyone had asked him, he probably would have said that he spoke too freely, with much more playfulness and passion than a civilized man should betray. When he had finished telling of his great remembrance of the Elder Eddas, he was sweating despite the cold. Sweating and shivering and smiling as the people stamped their boots and cheered him. This cheering grew to a roar that vibrated his groin and shocked his lungs and drove burning needles of pain inside his ears. He had never heard such an exhilarating and terrible sound before; he had never imagined human beings could make such a sound.

'You spoke well,' Bardo said to him when he returned to the warming pavilion.

Danlo nodded to him and then grabbed up his parka, fur hat and a wind mask. He wanted to listen to the remaining testaments as one of the people, and so he silently bowed to Bardo and to Thomas Rane, and left the warming pavilion. He ran down the steps at the rear of the stage. He walked along the rim of the ice ring, into the edge of the manswarm. With a black wind mask covering his face, no one recognized him as the man who had just spoken to them of remembrance and the One Memory. Slowly, brushing fur to fur past hundreds of people, he made his way toward the centre of the ring. All about him were the smells of bubbling cheeses, sweetmeats and bread mingled with the thrilling aroma of toalache. And everywhere, the triya seeds burning and popping, and the pungent skin greases worn against the cold and the vapours of hot beer. Everyone seemed excited. A few nimspinners, in their heated silks, danced about ecstatically, but most people stood in their places, shifting from boot to boot atop the packed, squeaking snow. They stood facing the southern segment of the ring. Danlo could not help thinking that no important ceremony should be made facing south. One hundred thousand people faced the wrong way as they chatted and conferred with each other and craned their necks toward the stage. Danlo was taller than most of them, and he could clearly see Nirvelli as she stretched her arms wide like a bird and spoke of the joy of remembrancing the Elder Eddas. She was a lithe and beautiful woman with skin as black as space, and she spoke of joy as a force that could transform each individual, and whole civilizations, and someday, farwhen, perhaps the entire universe. Her words fell out of the night like pearls into blacking oil; they floated in the air, these indestructible words that seemed to have neither source nor direction. Danlo gazed at the stage, at Nirvelli's distant figure, and the sound of her voice spilled out behind him, below him, and all around.

Everything is alive with joy, just sheer joy; creating joy is the purpose of the universe.

When it was Hanuman's turn to speak, the people near Danlo, and all over the ice ring, fell silent. They could not have known what was to come. Yet, they must have had some presentiment of a great event, for when Hanuman took the stage, every mouth was still and every eye rigid. Danlo, too, watched in fascination as Hanuman stepped out to the stage's very edge. In his flapping orange robes and intense manner, from a hundred yards away, he seemed like a single flame alone against the dark horizon. And then he threw back his head and lifted his face to the heavens; he held his hands above him, and his voice blazed out: 'He is watching us, now, at this moment, as we stand beneath the stars he knew so well.'

Danlo had wondered if Hanuman would recount his great remembrance, and it soon became clear that he would speak of nothing else, but only indirectly. His voice fell over Danlo like a silvery, three-dimensional net of sound. The twenty-three great, gleaming sulki grids around the ring convolved echoes, reverberations and acoustic cues, rolling these components together to produce a perfect holophonic sound. Danlo perceived Hanuman's words as if Hanuman were standing close by, whispering them in his ear. Or shouting them at his heart. That is the nature of this abused technology, to make it impossible to distinguish simulated sounds and images from events occurring in the real world. Each person in the ice ring that night experienced Hanuman's words in a similar manner. And almost each of them experienced his words uniquely. Around the ring, mounted unobtrusively, were hundreds of computer eyes that fixed on the people's faces and read them as they smiled and gesticulated and moved about. The emotions and mindsets of a hundred thousand people, moment by moment, were sorted and coded into information. Hanuman had smuggled in a cetic computer that made use of this information; he had been the sole architect of a hideously complex program that tailored his words according to the configuration of each person's face. Or rather, it coloured his voice and intonation and stress syllables, and coded these sounds into the sulki grids so that each person was touched in a unique way. Thus everyone heard the same sermon, yet for everyone it was slightly different. This was a triumph of the cetic art. Danlo marvelled that Hanuman could manipulate so many people in so many different ways. (And it appalled him that Hanuman would do such a thing.) He stood behind a fat wormrunner listening as Hanuman spoke of the suffering and evil of the world, and he wondered what murmurs and lamentations those around him were hearing. He stepped closer to the stage, the better to listen, but Hanuman's dreadful voice surrounded and followed him like a cloud of buzzing flies, and did not change: 'And what is the first thing that Mallory Ringess would see when he looks at us? He would see, and he does see, that each of us is suffering; each of us burns with the pain of pure being.'

It occurred to Danlo that with the leather wind mask covering his face, the computer eyes could not read him, and therefore Hanuman's computer could not find the specific sound keys to manipulate his mood. Perhaps he, of all the maskless people around him, was the only one to hear Hanuman's silver voice just as it really was.

'All things are on fire,' Hanuman said, and his voice sizzled in the air. 'Atoms are on fire, and electrons, and nuclei stripped to plasma are on fire. The rocks in the mountains are on fire. The air is on fire, and the ice of the sea, and the stars, all the stars in all the galaxies across the sky are on fire. The Vild stars are exploding into fire one by one. And with what are these things on fire? They burn with the fire of pure being; they are afire with pure consciousness, the primeval urge to be, to organize into forms, to interconnect with other forms, to evolve.'

Danlo closed his eyes, the better to hear Hanuman's voice more clearly. It was a marvellous voice, a powerful voice cut with the inflections of thousands of other voices from other times and other places. In this one, beautiful voice, he heard the joy and menace of the warrior-poet, as well as the dreamy tones of an autist. There was the nobility and command and cruelty of Old Earth's war kings, the whining and the solemnity of the priest, the singsong grandeur of a rabbi saying kaddish for the dead. And farther back, to the forests and steppes of Urasia, in Hanuman's pulsating vocal cords, he heard the chanting and the drumbeat of the shaman. Every wisdom, artifice and discovery of philosophy seemed to flow into Hanuman's voice and strengthen it, charging it with an electric energy. There was infinite subtlety in his words, the refinements of century upon century of man communicating his visions to others. Yet, despite all the evolution and art of the cetics, in the deepest part of Hanuman's voice there vibrated a singular, primeval sound. It was the howl of an animal crying out in hunger or pain or sheer longing at the sight of the winter moon. It broke from Hanuman's throat as it must have broken upon the grassy veldt of Afarique a million years ago. All of history was only an elaboration upon this single howl. Danlo listened as Hanuman spoke on and on, and the howl intensified and deepened and wound back upon itself until it drew out high and insistent, like the repetitive sob of a child crying for his mother. This cry was buried in each of Hanuman's words; perhaps it was buried in the chests and cells and atoms of a hundred thousand people standing in the snow, and in all women and men who had ever lived, or who ever would live, across all the galaxies' stars and worlds. This long, dark, endless cry from Hanuman's heart was terrible to hear, and the sound of it burned like fire in Danlo's ears.