The Broken God (82 page)

'All the living things of the world are on fire,' Hanuman said. 'The trees on the hillsides are on fire, and the bacteria which are too small to see, and the snowworms, and the sleekits, and the shagshay lambs crying for their mothers' milk. The tigers in the forests at night – they burn so brightly it wounds the eyes. You, who listen to these words tonight, are on fire. I am on fire. And with what are we all on fire? We burn with the fire of pure being; we are afire with pure consciousness, the primeval urge to be, to organize ourselves into new forms, to interconnect with other forms, to evolve. We burn with the fire of passion for life, and with pain, with fear, with birth, old age, and death. With hatred, misery, sorrow, lamentation and suffering are we on fire. What is humankind but a knot of flames burning with nostalgia for the infinite? We burn with the urge to overcome ourselves and with the terror of failing to evolve. We are afire with our possibilities, with what we might become. With dread, with longing, with despair are we on fire.'

Here Hanuman dropped his hands to his sides and paused to take a breath of air. And then he raised his hands again; he held them out toward the ice ring as if beckoning, as if conjuring some force that only he could see. Danlo could not help staring at him; all around the ring, everyone was staring, stamping their boots, breathing out their steamy breaths and coughing at the cold air. Then Hanuman's flowing robes burst into flames, and all at once the people across the ring let out a great cry. Hanuman's robes burned as if soaked with sihu oil; smokeless orange flames shot up and writhed about his body and limbs, completely enveloping him. Danlo watched to see him gasp in pain, to see his skin blacken and burst open in running red cracks. But, of course, no such thing happened. Hanuman held his hands out and smiled sadly – Danlo had exceptional eyes, and from a hundred yards away he could see this smile of twisted compassion break across his face. Hanuman remained untouched by the flames because there were no flames, just light made and shaped by the sulki grids into the image of flames. It was only an illusion, a simulation of fire, though hardly less compelling for not being real.

'All things are on fire,' Hanuman said, 'and we are each of us on fire, and everything tells us this is so. Our eyes are on fire; whatever we see is on fire; eye-consciousness is on fire; images received by the eye are on fire; and whatever sensation or thought these images engender inside us, that too is on fire.'

Suddenly, at many points across the ring, many people seemed to ignite into sheets of crimson fire. Flame tongues licked the panicked face of an autist near Danlo, and passed to a horologe, whose red robe was suddenly a shroud of fire burning around him. Danlo counted a hundred of these human torches before he gave up and concentrated on what Hanuman was saying.

'And with what are our eyes on fire? With the fire of passion for life, and with pain, with fear, with birth, old age and death. With hatred, misery, sorrow, lamentation and suffering. The whole of our being burns to behold our possibilities, and what we might become. With dread, with longing, with terror, with despair are we on fire.'

Now many thousands of people were ablaze with illusory flames. Many screamed in alarm; for a moment it seemed possible there might be a riot and a stampede. But then scores of harijan and nimspinners flung their arms above their heads and danced about ecstatically, and the mood of the manswarm segued from near-panic to mass fervour. In any large gathering of people, there is always the intoxification of the swarm, the surrendering of the individual's personality to group consciousness. The people near Danlo ached to be part of this consciousness; they longed to create this consciousness, this higher identity, this incendiary religious frenzy. And so they touched each other's garments, and they watched each other as they clapped their hands and smiled and swayed back and forth upon the hard-packed snow, and their hundred thousand voices sang out as a single voice, a long, dark roar that split the night like winter thunder. They let their separate selves burn away like so many thousands of matches, annihilating themselves in an all-consuming transcendence. The ice ring was full of this fire that Hanuman had made. And full of the other fire as well. Between Danlo and the stage where Hanuman stood was a roiling wall of chrome-red fire. Had it been a real fire of hot, glowing gases, no one could have seen through it. But the fire was only of light and evanescence, and everywhere Danlo looked, he saw men and women dancing or shaking or staring up at Hanuman. Their eyes burned with dread and longing and terror, but their faces were now blazing with an emotion that was the opposite of despair.

Hanuman held his flaming hands out toward Danlo and the other people, and he motioned for silence. 'It is said that there is a way to be freed from this burning. If our eyes are afire, we should cover them with damp cloths. If our ears burn, we should stop them with wax. We should conceive an aversion for images, and sounds, and smells, and tastes, and information, and for all things that might touch our body or that we might touch. It is said that we must renounce sensations, and whatever thoughts or ideas these sensations engender in our minds. We must conceive an aversion to mind-consciousness, and to the mind itself. For all the things of the world we must conceive an aversion lest we become attached to them and to our burning for them. It is said that in this renunciation we may become divested of passion, and by the absence of passion we become free, and thus we become aware that we are free, and then there is nothing in life that can cause us to suffer and burn.'

As he said this, the flames flowing around him seemed to take on a hotter, bluer colour. He moved about the stage in an intensely kinetic manner, gesturing and twisting and beckoning as if a real fire were burning him, from without and within. At times he would stand perfectly still, posing as one possessed by a vast energy. And then he would move again and give voice to his passions, and everything about him was alive, compelling and fey.

'It is said that you should renounce all things in order to quench the fire in yourselves, but this is the way of a vegetable or a buddha or a stone, not a human being. A true human being burns to be more, and as long as you burn, you belong to life. This is also said: you must consume yourself in your own flame; how could you wish to become new unless you had first become ashes? This is what I've remembered and what I've felt and what I've seen: whoever would shine brightest must endure burning. For a true human being, there is no other way.'

Across the ice ring, fairy flames of cobalt and blue jumped from garment to garment, from person to person. Then the flames at last reached Danlo, and he too seemed to catch fire. Flames leaped from his furs, from his eyes, from his wild hair, and crackled along his white feather. Almost all the people in the ice ring were now burning with this single, deep blue fire.

Each man and woman is a star.

These words were very close to Danlo, as near as the arteries throbbing in his ears. His whole body was aflame with brilliant blue fire. He held up his blazing hands before his eyes, and he marvelled that the fire had no heat to it and could not really touch him. Despite the flames, the air surrounding him was still frigid, and his fingertips and toes burned not with fire, but with bitter cold.

'Each man and woman is a star!' Hanuman called out. The flames falling over him suddenly billowed out in a ball of cobalt fire and light. 'Starfire is the hottest fire, the pure fire, the refining fire that would burn away the weakest and most ignoble parts of ourselves. Whoever would give light must endure burning. We must burn for a higher organization of our beings, burn for more and deeper consciousness, burn for more life. We must each consume ourselves in our own flames. Only then will a vaster self be born who is a master of fire. Only then will the burning for the infinite lights be understood. Only then can a true human being become himself. Only then can a god let birth, old age and death burn away and be no more.

'I must speak to you of the god within each of us. This god is lord of fire and light. This god is fire and light, and is nothing but fire and light. Each of us is this god. Each man and woman is a star that burns on and on with infinite possibilities. I must speak tonight of becoming this star, this eternal and infinite flame. Only by becoming fire will you ever be free from burning. Only by becoming fire will you become free of pain, free of fear, free of hatred, sorrow, lamentation, suffering and despair. This is the way of the gods. This is the way of the Ringess, to burn with the fire of a new being, to shine with a new consciousness as bright as all the stars, as vast and perfect and indestructible as all the universe. This is the way of Mallory Ringess, who watches over all the people in the City where he was once as human as you and I.'

When Hanuman had finished speaking, he stood with his hands held out over the peoples' heads, as in a formal blessing, then he swept his arms up toward the sky. He was at once exhausted and exultant, panting and sweating and shivering in the cold. He burned and twisted inside a sphere of blue fire that filled the whole of the ice ring. The kiosks were on fire, and the food tables, and the mugs of foamy black beer, and the toalache pipes, and the multrum stalls, and the warming pavilions, and the ice beneath the people's boots – all and everything blazed with bluish flames. The air itself was on fire. And then this fireball exploded upward into the night. Hanuman looked up, and Danlo, and all at once a hundred thousand heads snapped back upon their necks. Flames of violet and indigo shot high above the ice ring. A column of fire swelled and blazed and streamed from ice to sky. Flames of crimson, copper and orchid pink leaped from man to woman and fed the vast fiery column pushing its way upward above them. All at once, the people near Danlo gasped and cried out with a single, great, bellowing voice. Danlo, too, was caught up in the brilliance of the moment, swept up with topaz flames, connected to this spectacular event despite all his doubts. He hadn't known that Hanuman had programmed his computers to generate such a compelling illusion; he had never guessed such a thing was possible. He held his hand shielding his eyes as he looked up. The flame column was now a quarter mile wide and seemed almost as high as the peaks of the mountains. Blazing streamers of orange and green and iron red – and every other colour – disappeared into the sky. It seemed that there was no limit to this upward rush of fire, that it might burn hotter and brighter and ignite all the atmosphere. But there was indeed a limit. The sulki grids, which Bardo had leased from a renegade phantast, could cast their illusions only so far. Ten thousand feet above the City the flames died into the night, a limit to this sophisticated technology that Hanuman li Tosh apparently could not accept. As all would soon see, he sought to manufacture an even greater illusion, or rather, a mass illumination that no one would ever forget. Suddenly, the flames went out. There was only darkness in the sky. To Danlo's eyes, and to a hundred thousand pairs of eyes dazzled by fire, the people and the bright pavilions and all the other features of the ice ring were suddenly lost in a sea of vibrating blackness. And then there was light, again, an instant surge of blinding lights that stabbed into Danlo's brain and made him fling his arm over his face. Around the rim of the ice ring, the moonlights had come on. Hanuman had ordered this so, and the moonlights and the lasers beamed great rivers of light up over the ice ring and high above the City. The hundreds of incandescent beams touched and wove together in a luminous dome that filled the sky. Photons burned through the air and were scattered and reflected by tiny ice crystals high in the atmosphere. Through the atmosphere, above all ice and air. The moonlights blazed up fifty miles above the planet and illuminated the microorganisms and ionized gases of the Golden Ring. A shower of light fell across the sky; it framed the ice ring and much of the heavens above the City, this shimmering, golden cathedral of light.

Hanu, Hanu, why have you betrayed yourself?

Danlo stood gazing upward at the splendid lights as he wondered about everything that Hanuman had said and done. In truth, Hanuman had betrayed Bardo and the Way of Ringess, for they had planned to loom the moonlights only at the end of the joyance, when Bardo led the kalla ceremony.

Only by becoming fire will you ever be free from burning.

Danlo was suddenly very aware of his hot breath stifling him beneath his wind mask, so he pulled the sodden piece of leather away from his face. No one noticed him, or recognized him as the son of Mallory Ringess. The eyes of all around him were held up toward the lights in the sky. Thousands of boots crunched against snow; the air was broken with moans and coughs and muffled cries. A gasp deeper than the wind rushed from ten thousand lips all at once and blew across the ice ring. How many people, Danlo wondered, would believe what Hanuman had told them? How many would look up at the golden sky and open themselves to what Hanuman had said was the truth?

Each man and woman is a star.

There was a man, standing near Danlo, an itinerant cantor of the Order dressed all in grey. His face was as thin as cut ice, and it bore the tired and wary look of one who has seen all there is to see. The collar of his travelling robe was embroidered with the blazons of many planets: Yarkona, Solsken, Alumit, Arcite and other places where he had taught his art of pure mathematics. Clearly, he was a gypsy scholar who had never attained his mastership; like all his kind, he was doomed to wander the planets of the Civilized Worlds, teaching at the Order's elite schools and dreaming of the day when he might return to Neverness. And at last he had returned, not in triumph as a master, but as a pilgrim on sabbatical seeking the holy city of his youth. At first sight, he seemed still a youth, with his creamy, unlined skin and his aching awareness of his muscular pose. But he was far from being young, as Danlo could clearly see. His eyes glowed bright purple with the light of luminescent bacteria colonies implanted in his irises. This was a look fashionable a hundred years ago, but now considered quite gauche. This poor, outworn man's flesh had recently been restored, his bulky new muscles regrown under the pull of artificially induced gravities. He was clumsy and uneasy in his new body and everything about his posture bespoke old habits, hardened reflexes, the armouring of body and mind built up over two lifetimes of suffering. That he suffered, anyone might have noticed. He suffered from his bitterness and disappointment with life. He was afire with every kind of sorrow, lamentation and despair. His was the agony of lost love and broken dreams and hatred of all the hurts and inanities of all the worlds he had known. And yet, even this empty, eggshell of a man stood beneath the lights that Hanuman made, and his face came alive with a golden radiance. He was far too proud to fall into exaltation, and yet the lights in the sky touched him and quickened his whole being, and perhaps caused him to wonder if all the secrets and possibilities of the universe might still be within his grasp.