Читать книгу The Broken God - David Zindell, David Zindell - Страница 10

The metaphysicians of Tlon view time as being the most illusory of mental constructions. According to one school, the present is formless and undefined, while the future is just present hope, and the past is nothing more than present memory in the minds of men. One school teaches that the universe was created only moments ago (or that it is being eternally created), and all sentient creatures remember with perfect clarity a past that has never been. Still another school has as its fundamental doctrine that the whole of time has already occurred and that our lives are but vague memories in the mind of God.

– from the Second Encyclopaedia of Tlon, Vol. MXXVI, page

In truth, Danlo really didn’t know how difficult it is to enter the Order. On the planets of the Civilized Worlds, the Order maintains thousands of elite and lesser schools. The students of the lesser schools vie with one another to enter the elite schools; in the elite schools, there is a vicious struggle to be among the few chosen for the novitiate and the great Academy on Neverness. And so the chosen come to the City of Light, where there is always a sense of being at the centre of things, an immanence of cosmic events and astonishing revelations. In truth, Neverness is the spiritual centre of the most brilliant civilization man has ever known. Who would not desire a lifetime of seeking knowledge and truth in sight of her silvery spires? Who would not relish the excitement, the camaraderie, and above all, the sheer power of being a pilot or high professional of the Order? So esteemed and coveted is this life of the mind (and since the masters of the various disciplines can be brought back to their youthful bodies many times, it can be a very long life indeed) that many ordinary people come to Neverness hoping to bribe or bully their way into the Order. There is of course no hope for these venal souls, but for others, for the thousands of unfortunate girls and boys who grow up on planets too small or obscure to support an elite school, there is the slightest of hopes. As Old Father informed Danlo, each year the masters of the Order hold a competition. And it is not easy to enter the competition, much less to win a place at Borja, which is the first of the Academy’s schools. Petitions must be made. Each boy or girl (or in rare cases, each of the double-sexed) must find a sponsor willing to petition the Master of Novices at Borja. The sponsors must certify their student’s brilliance, character, and most importantly, their desire to enter the novitiate. Each year, more than fifty thousand petitions are received, but only one of seven are accepted. At the end of false winter, when the sun shines hotly and melts the sea ice, perhaps seven thousand of the luckiest youths are permitted to enter this most intense of competitions.

‘Oh ho, I have sponsored you,’ Old Father told Danlo a few days later. ‘I’ve made a petition in your behalf, and we will see what we will see.’

While Danlo awaited the doubtful results of Old Father’s petition – doubtful because Bardo the Just, Master of Novices, was said to resent the Fravashi and any others who taught outside of the Order’s dominion – he busied himself learning the thousands of skills necessary to negotiate the strange streets and even stranger ways of the city called Neverness. During the evenings, Fayeth began the painful task of teaching him the Language of the Civilized Worlds. And every morning, when the air was clean and brisk, the black man who had first dubbed him ‘Danlo the Wild’ taught him to ice skate. Luister Ottah, who was as thin and dark (and quick) as a raven, took Danlo out on the icy streets. He showed him how to stroke with his skates and hold an even edge; he showed him how to execute a hokkee stop by jumping in a tight little quarter circle and digging his steel blades into the ice. Danlo took to this exhilarating sport immediately. (Although Danlo thought it only natural that the City streets should be made of ice, the glissades and slidderies, as they are called, are the wonder – and consternation – of all who visit Neverness.) He spent long afternoons racing up and down the streets of the Fravashi District, savouring the sensations of his new life. The hot yellow sun, the cool wind, the cascade of scurfed-off ice whenever he ground to a sudden stop – he loved the touch of the world. He loved the sting of the soreesh snow that fell every third or fourth day; he loved the eave swallows who roosted atop the round houses; he loved their warbling, their shiny orange bills, even the chalky smell of their spattered white droppings. These things were real, and he grasped for the reality of the world as a baby grasps his mother’s long, flowing hair.

Other things seemed less real. The ecology of the City made no sense to him at all. Who made his furs and that remarkable device called a zipper by which he closed and fastened his parka? Where did his food come from? Old Father had said that the grains and nuts he ate for his meals grew in factories to the south of Neverness. Every morning, sleds laden with food rocketed up and down the streets. Danlo had seen these sleds. They were not, of course, real sleds pulled by dogs. They were brightly coloured clary shells mounted on steel runners. Rhythmic jets of flame and burning air pushed the sleds across the ice. The sight of these sleek, fiery monsters terrified him, at least at first. (And he was quite confused by the harijan men who operated the sleds laden with cast-off clothing, with broken vases and sulki grids and ruined furniture, and with pieces of half-eaten food. He couldn’t imagine why anyone would wish to accomplish such labour. Old Father explained this puzzle with typical Fravashi humour. He said that human beings had invented civilization in order to develop a class of people low enough to handle other people’s rubbish.) After a while, Danlo’s terror softened to wonder, and wonder became profound doubt: what if the sleds turned against their human masters and refused to bear their loads? Or what if a storm, a vicious sarsara, destroyed the factories, whatever factories really were? How would the city people eat? There could not be enough animals in the world to feed so many people – would they eat each other? Was it possible they didn’t know it was shaida for human beings to hunt one another?

Because Danlo would not eat the factories’ cultured meats but still had a taste for shagshay or silk belly or fish, sometimes he would cross to the district’s edge and steal into the woods of the City Wild. And he hunted. There, among the flowing streams and yu trees, he found a small herd of shagshay. With their fuzzy false winter antlers and their dark, trusting eyes, they were not quite civilized, but neither were they completely wild. It was too easy to kill them. He stripped the bark from a limb of black shatterwood, carved it, and mounted the long flint spearpoint that he had secreted inside his furs. (His old spear shaft he had to leave at Old Father’s house because it was illegal to carry weapons through the City.) On two different days he killed two fawns and ten sleekits before deciding that there weren’t enough animals in the City Wild for him to hunt. He froze part of the meat and ate the shagshay’s tenderloin raw. He did not want to build a fire. Too many paths wound through the woods; too many people from the surrounding districts took their exercise skating there. It was not illegal to hunt animals within the City, but Danlo didn’t know this. There was no law against hunting or cutting trees only because no one had ever thought that such a law would be necessary. He sensed, however, that the insane people would be disgusted by his killing animals for food, much as he dreaded the thought of eating shaida meat that wasn’t real. In the end, after many days of surreptitious feasting in the yu trees, he decided that he would eat neither cultured meats nor animals. He would follow Old Father’s example. Grains, nuts, pulses, and fruit – henceforth these kinds of plant life would be his only food.

Perhaps the most unreal thing about his new life were the people of the City themselves. With their many-coloured skins and differently shaped noses, lips, and brows, they looked much like demons out of a nightmare, and he often wondered if they had real spirits as real people do. He passed them every day on the streets, and he wondered at their peculiar stiffness and weakness of limb. They seemed so hurried and aloof, and abstract, as if their thoughts were as insubstantial as smoke. Could it be that they weren’t really there at all, not really living in the moment? Their faces were so ugly with wants and fears and urgency, so very ugly and hard to read. What must they think of him, with his white feather and his wind-whipped hair? In truth, no one bothered to notice him at all. It was as if they couldn’t see him, couldn’t perceive his curiosity, his loneliness, and his uncivilized spirit. Usually, he was dressed much as an Alaloi (in new, white furs that Old Father had given him), but so were many other people. And many were dressed much more colourfully. Autists, neurosingers, cetics, harijan and whores – people of many different sects and professions every day passed through the district. And the clothes they wore! Red robes, emerald sweaters and furs of every colour. Journeymen holists skated by in cobalt kamelaikas. He saw jewelled, satin jackets, cottons and woollens, and kimonos woven of a material called silk. Much of this clothing was beautiful, in a gaudy, overwhelming way. It was hard to continually take in such beauty. After a while, he tired of looking at fabricated things; he felt sick and too full, as if he had eaten eight bowls of overripe yu berries. He invented a word for the different beauties of the City: shona-manse, the beauty that man makes with his hands. It was not a deep beauty. Nor was it a various beauty, despite the many hues and textures of manmade things. In a single chunk of granite, with its millions of pink and black flecks of quartz, mica and silicates, there was more complexity and variety than in the loveliest kimono. It was true that most of the buildings – the glory of Neverness! – were faced with granite, basalt, and other natural rocks. When Danlo looked eastward toward the Old City, the obsidian spires glittered silver-black. And, yes, it was beautiful, but it was a dazzling, too-perfect beauty. No single spire possessed a mountain’s undulations or its intricate and subtle pattern of trees, rock, snow and ice. And the City itself was ill-balanced and unalive compared to the beauty of the world. Where, in such an unreal place, could he hope to find halla? A few times, at night, he sneaked out of Old Father’s house to gaze at the stars. But everywhere he looked the city spires were outlined black against the sky. He could see only the supernovae, Nonablinka and Shurablinka, and the enigmatic Golden Flower; the hideous glowing haze of a million city lights devoured the other stars. Oh, blessed God, he thought, why must the people of the City place so many things between themselves and the world?

Once, he asked Old Father about this, and Old Father stroked his furry white face in imitation of a man thinking, and he said, ‘Oh ho, soon enough you will learn about the Fifth Mentality and the Age of Simulation, but for now it’s sufficient to appreciate one thing: Every race that has evolved language is cursed – and blessed! – with this problem of filtering reality. You say that the people of Neverness are cut off from life, but you haven’t journeyed to Tria, where the tubists and merchants spend almost their entire lives inside plastic boxes breathing conditioned air and facing sense boxes. And what of the made-worlds orbiting Cipriana Luz? Aha, and what of the Alaloi? Do they not place animal furs between their skins and the coldness of ice? Oh ho! I suppose you can tell me that your Alaloi don’t have a language?’

Danlo, as a guest of an Honoured Fravashi, was beginning to appreciate how words can shape reality. He said, ‘The Alaloi have a language, yes. On the second morning of the world, the god Kweitkel kissed the frozen lips of Yelena and Manwe and the other children of Devaki. He kissed their lips to give them the gift of Song. The true Song is perfectly created so the sons and daughters of the world can know reality. Perfect words as pure and clean as soreesh snow. Not like these confusing words of the civilized language that Fayeth has been teaching me.’

‘Oh ho!’ Old Father said. ‘You’re glavering again, and you must be as wary of the glavering as a shagshay ewe is of a wolf. In time you’ll appreciate the beauty and subtlety of this language. Oh ah, there are many concepts and ways of seeing. So many realities beyond the immediacy of soreesh or the sarsara that blows and freezes the flesh. Beyond even what you call the altjiranga mitjina.’

‘You know about the dreamtime of my people?’

‘Ah, I do know about the dreamtime – I’m a Fravashi, am I not? The dreamtime occupies a certain space similar to the space of samadhi. There are many, many spaces, of course. Do you want to learn the words?’

‘But I’m already too full of words. Last night, Fayeth taught me three new words for ways of seeing the truth.’

‘And what were these words?’

Danlo closed his eyes, remembering. ‘There is hanura and nornura. And there is inura, too.’

‘And what is inura?’

‘Fayeth defines it as the superposition of two or more conflicting theories, ideas or sets of knowledge in order to see the intersection, which is called the comparative truth.’

‘Oh ho! Even seemingly opposite truths may have something in common. So, inura: you should keep this word close to your tongue, Danlo.’

Danlo ran his fingers through his hair and said, ‘Different words for truth, but the truth is the truth, isn’t it? Why slice truth into thin sections like a woman slices up a piece of shagshay liver? And space is … just space; now you say there are different spaces?’

‘So, it’s so: thoughtspace and dreamspace, realspace, and the many spaces of the computers; there is memory space and the ontic realm of pure mathematics, and of course the strangest space of all, the space that the pilots call the manifold. So many spaces, oh, so many realities.’

Danlo could not deny that the people of the City lived in a different reality from his. The spaces that their minds dwelt in – so different, so strange! He wondered if he could ever learn the language of such a strange people. In truth, he balked at learning their strange nouns and verbs because he was worried that the words of an insane people would infect him with that very insanity.

‘Ah, oh, it’s just so,’ Old Father said. ‘It’s too bad that you can’t learn the Fravashi language – then you would know what is sane and what is not.’

If it was true that Danlo, like other human beings, could not master the impossible Fravashi language, at least he could learn their system toward a sane and liberated way of being. After all, the Fravashi had taught this system across the Civilized Worlds for three thousand years. Some consider Fravism, as it is sometimes called, to be an old philosophy or even a religion, but in fact it was designed to be both anti-philosophy and anti-religion. Unlike Zanshin, Buddhism, or the Way of the Star, pure Fravism does not in itself try to lead its practitioners toward enlightenment, awakening, or rapture with God. What the first Old Fathers sought – and some still seek – is just freedom. Specifically, it is their purpose to free men and women from the various cultures, languages, worldviews, cults and religions that have enslaved human beings for untold years. The Fravashi system is a way of learning how one’s individual beliefs and worldviews are imprinted during childhood. Or rather, it is an orchestration of techniques designed to help one unlearn the many flawed and unwholesome ways of seeing the world that human beings have evolved. Many religions, of course, out of their injunction to find new adherents, deprogram the minds of those whom they would convert. They do this through the use of isolation, paradox, psychic shock, even drugs and sex – and then they reprogram these very minds, replacing old doctrines and beliefs with ones that are new. The Fravashi Old Fathers, however, have no wish to instil in their students just a new set of beliefs. What they attempt to catalyze is a total transformation in perception, in the way the eye, ear, and brain reach out to organize the chaos and reality of the world. In truth, they seek the evolution of new senses.

‘So, it’s so,’ Old Father said, ‘after a million years, human beings are still so human: listening, they do not hear; they have eyes but they don’t really see. Oh ho, and worse, worst of all, they have brains with which to think, and thinking – and thinking and thinking – they still do not know.’

In Old Father’s encounters with his students, he often warned against what he considered the fundamental philosophical mistake of man: the perception of the world as divided into individual and separate things. Reality, he said, at every level from photons to philosophical fancies to the consciousness of living organisms was fluid, and it flowed everywhere like a great shimmering river. To break apart and confine this reality into separate categories created by the mind was foolish and futile, much like trying to capture a ray of light inside a dark wooden box. This urge to categorize was the true fall of man, for once the process was begun, there was no easy or natural return to sanity. All too inevitably, the infinite became finite, good opposed evil, thoughts hardened into beliefs, one’s joys and discoveries became dreadful certainties, man became alienated from what he perceived as other ways and other things, and, ultimately, divided against himself, body and soul. According to the Fravashi, the misapprehension of the real world is the source of all suffering; it is bondage to illusion, and it causes human beings to grasp and hold onto life, not as it is, but as they wish it to be. Always seeking meaning, always seeking to make their lives safe and comprehensible, human beings do not truly live. This is the anguish of man which the Fravashi would alleviate.

The Fravashi use their word keys and songs and alien logic to bring human beings closer to themselves, but the first part of this program toward liberation is the teaching of the language called Moksha. As Danlo became more familiar with the ways of Old Father’s house, he immersed himself in the Fravashi system with all the passion of a seal splashing in the ocean, only to discover that he was required to learn the strange words and forms of Moksha.

‘But, sir, the Language is confusing enough,’ Danlo told Old Father. ‘Now you say that I must learn Moksha, too – and at the same time?’

‘Ha, ha, you are confused, just so, but the Old Fathers made Moksha solely to free human beings from their confusion,’ Old Father said. ‘Learn and learn, and you will see what you see.’

Where the Fravashi system, as a whole, was created to free people from all systems, Moksha was put together as a kind of mind shield against the great whining babble of all human languages. It is a synthetic language, rich with invented words for strange and alien concepts, and with thousands of borrowed words from Sanskrit, Anglish, Old Japanese and, of course, from the various languages of Tlon. The Fravashi Fathers regard this language family as the most sublime of all Old Earth’s languages; from the Tlonish grammar, they have borrowed elements of syntax that accommodate and support the pellucid Fravashi worldview. Some say that Moksha is as complex and difficult to learn as the Fravashi language itself, but a clever woman or man is usually able to master it once a few familiar notions are discarded. For instance, Moksha contains no verb for the concept ‘to be’, in the sense that one thing can be something else. As the Fravashi say: ‘Everything is, but nothing is anything’. In Moksha, the sentence ‘I am a pilot’ would be an impossible construction. As Danlo learned, one might try to say: ‘I act like a pilot’, or, ‘I have learned a pilot’s skills’ or even, ‘I exult in the perquisites and glory of a pilot’, but one could never proclaim, ‘I am this’ or, ‘I am that’, any more than one would say, ‘I am a bowl of noodles’.

At first this aspect of Moksha confused Danlo, for he thought that the path toward sanity lay in seeing the connectedness of all things. He was familiar with the Sanskrit equation: Tat tvam asi, that thou art. In some sense, he really was a bowl of noodles, or rather, his true essence and that of noodles (or falling snow or stone or a bird with white feathers) was one and the same. Because he thought these Sanskrit words were pure wisdom, he went to Old Father to ask why Moksha forbade such expressions.

‘Ah, ah,’ Old Father said, ‘but the problem is not with Moksha, but with the natural human languages. Oh, even with the Sanskrit. Does Sanskrit have a word for “you”? Yes. A word for “I”? Indeed it does, and sadly so. And so. And so, having such words, such poisonous concepts, they are forced into paradox to detoxify and break down these concepts. Tat tvam asi – a deep statement, no? That thou art. Lovely, succinct, and profound – but an unnecessary way of expressing a universal truth. Is there a better way? Oh, ho, I teach you Moksha. If you will learn this glorious tongue, then you will learn truth not just in one immortal statement, but in every sentence you speak.’

And so Danlo applied himself to learning Moksha, and he soon discovered another reason why it was impossible to simply say, ‘I am a pilot’. Moksha, it seemed, had completely freed itself of the bondage of pronouns, particularly from the most poisonous pronoun of all.

‘Why do you think Moksha has banished this word “I”?’ Old Father asked one day. ‘What is this “I” that human beings are so attached to? It’s pure romance, the greatest of fictions and confabulations. Can you hold it or taste it? Can you define it or even see it? “What am I?” asks a man. Oh, ho, a better question might be, “What am I not?” How often have you heard someone say, “I’m not myself today?” Or, “I didn’t mean to say that?” No? Ha, ha, here I am dancing, dancing – am I the movement and genius of my whole organism or merely the sense of selfness that occupies the body, like a beggar in a grand hotel room? Am I only the part of myself that is noble, kind, mindful and strong? Which disapproves and disavows the “me” that is lustful, selfish, and wild? Who am I? Ah, ah, “I am” says the man. I am despairing, I am wild, I do not accept that I am desperate and wild. Who does not accept these things? I am a boy, I am a man, I am father, hunter, hero, lover, coward, pilot, asarya and fool. Which “I” are you – Danlo the Wild? Where is your “I” that changes from mood to mood, from childhood to old age? Is there more to this “I” than continuity of memory and love of eating what you call nose ice? Does it vanish when you fall asleep? Does it multiply by two during sexual bliss? Does it die when you die – or multiply infinitely? How will you ever know? So, it’s so, you will try to watch out for yourself lest you lose your selfness. “But how do I watch?” you ask. Aha – if I am watching myself, what is the “I” that watches the watcher? Can the eye see itself? Then how can the “I” see itself? Peel away the skin of an onion and you will find only more skins. Go look for your “I”. Who will look? You will look. Oh, ho, Danlo, but who will look for you?’

As Danlo came to appreciate, not only had Moksha done away with pronouns, but with the class of nouns in general. The Fravashi loathe nouns as human beings do disease. Nouns, according to Old Father, are like linguistic iceboxes that freeze a flowing, liquid reality. In using nouns to designate and delimit all the aspects of the world, it is all too easy to confuse a symbol for the reality that it represents. This is the second great philosophical mistake, which the Fravashi refer to as the ‘little maya’. When speaking Moksha, it is difficult to make this mistake, for the function of nouns has largely been replaced by process verbs, as well as by the temporary and flexible juxtaposition of adjectives. For instance, the expression for star might be ‘bright-white-continuing’, while one might think of a supernova as ‘radiant-splendid-dying’. There is no rule specifying the choice or number of these adjectives; indeed, one can form incredibly long and precise (and beautiful) concepts by skilful agglutination, sticking adjectives one after another like beads on a string. Aficionados of Moksha, in their descriptions of the world, are limited only by their powers of perception and poetic virtue. It is said that one of the first Old Fathers in Neverness, as an exercise, once invented ten thousand words for the common snow apple. But one does not need the Fravashi flair with words to speak Moksha well. By the beginning of winter, when the first of that season’s light snows dusted the streets, Danlo had learned enough of this language to make such simple statements as: Chena bokageladesanga faras, which would mean something like: Now this ambitious-bright-wild-becoming pilots. Given enough time in Old Father’s house – and given Danlo’s phenomenal memory – he might have become a master of Moksha rather than a pilot. But even as he composed poems to the animals and amused Old Father with his attempts to describe the Alaloi dreamtime, his brilliant fate was approaching, swiftly, inevitably, like the light of an exploding star.

On the ninety-third day of winter, after Danlo had begun to think in Moksha – and after he had put on pounds of new muscle and burned his face brown in the bright sun – Old Father called him into his chamber. He informed him that his petition had been accepted after all. ‘I have good news for you,’ Old Father said. ‘Bardo the Just does not like Fravashi, but other masters and lords do. Oh ho, Nikolos Petrosian, the Lord Akashic, is in love with the Fravashi. He’s my friend. And he has persuaded Master Bardo to accept my petition. A favour to me, a favour to you.’

Danlo understood nothing of politics or trading favours, and he said, ‘I would like to meet Lord Nikolos – he must be a kind man.’

‘Ah, but someday – if you survive the competition – you may be required to do more than merely acknowledge his kindness. For the time, though, it’s enough that you compete with the other petitioners. And if you are to compete with any hope of winning, I’m afraid that you must learn the Language.’

‘But I am learning it, sir.’

‘Yes,’ Old Father said, ‘you spend ten hours each day making up songs in Moksha, while you give Fayeth half an hour in the evening toward your study of the Language.’

‘But the Language is so ugly,’ Danlo said. ‘So … clumsy.’

‘Aha, but few in the Order speak Moksha any more. It’s almost a dead art. In the Academy’s halls and towers, there is only the Language.’

Danlo touched the feather in his hair and said, ‘Fayeth believes that in another year I shall be fluent.’

‘But you don’t have another year. The competition begins on the 20th of false winter.’

‘Well,’ Danlo said, ‘that’s more than a half year away.’

‘Aha, very true. But you’ll need more than the Language to enter the Academy. The Language is only a door to other knowledge, Danlo.’

‘And you think I should open this door now, yes?’

‘Oh ho, surely it’s upon you to decide this. If you’d like, we could withdraw the petition and wait until the following year.’

‘No,’ Danlo said. About most things, he had the patience of an Alaloi, which is to say, the patience of a rock, but whenever he thought of the journey he had to complete, he was overcome with a sense of urgency. ‘I can’t wait that long.’

‘There is another possibility.’

‘Yes?’

‘So, it’s so: a language – any human language – can be learned almost overnight. There are techniques, ways of directly imprinting the brain with language.’

Danlo knew that the fount of intelligence lay inside the head, in the pineal gland which he called the third eye. Brains were a kind of pink fat which merely insulated this gland from the cold. Brains – animal brains, that is – were mainly good for eating or mashing up with wood ash in order to cure raw furs. ‘How can coils of fat hold language?’ he wanted to know.

Old Father whistled a few low notes and then delivered a short lecture about the structures of the human brain. He pressed his long fingers down against Danlo’s skull, roughly indicating the location deep in his brain of the hippocampus and almond-shaped amygdala, which mediated memory and the other mental functions. ‘Like a baldo nut, your brain is divided into two hemispheres, right and left. Oh ho, two halves – it’s as if you had two brains. Why do you think human beings are divided against themselves, one half saying “no”, while the other half continually whispers, “yes”?’

Danlo rubbed his eyes. From time to time, he tired of Old Father’s air of superiority. He had stayed long enough in Old Father’s house to relish the art of sarcasm, so he said, ‘And the Fravashi have an undivided brain? Is this why your consciousness wriggles about like a speared fatfish and never holds still?’

Old Father smiled nicely. ‘You’re perceptive,’ he said. ‘The Fravashi brain, aha! So, it’s so: our brains are divided into quarters. The frontal lobes,’ and here he touched his head above his golden eyes and whistled softly, ‘the front brain is given over almost wholly to language and the composition of the songlines. The other parts, other functions. Four quarters: and the Fravashi sleep by quarters, you should know. Because we think more, because we are better able to compose, edit and sing the song of ourselves, so we sleep more, much more. So, to dream. The Fravashi sleep by quarters: at any time, one, two or three quarters of our brain are sleeping. Rarely are we wholly awake. And never – never, never, never, never! – must we allow ourselves to be four quarters asleep.’

It was hard for Danlo to imagine such a consciousness, and he shook his head. He smiled at Old Father. ‘Then your brain, the four quarters – does it whisper “yes”, “no”, “maybe” and “maybe not”?’

‘Ho, ho, a human being making jokes about the Fravashi brain!’

Danlo laughed along with Old Father before falling serious. He asked, ‘Does your brain hold language like mine?’

‘Ah, oh, it would be better to think of the Fravashi brain absorbing language like cotton cloth sucks up water. There are deep structures, universal grammars for words, music or any sound – we hear a language one time, and we cannot forget.’

‘But I am a man, and I can forget, yes?’

‘Oh ho, and that’s why you must undergo an imprinting, if you are to learn the Language quickly and completely.’

Danlo thought of all the things he had learned quickly and completely during the night of his initiation. He asked, ‘Will it hurt very much?’

Old Father smiled his sadistic smile, then, and his eyes were like golden mirrors. ‘Ah, the pain. The brain, the pain, the brain. On your outings with Ottah, skating on the streets, have you ever seen a Jacaradan whore?’

Danlo, who would have been shocked that certain women trade sex for money, that is, if he had known about money, said, ‘I am not sure.’

‘Women who leave their bellies bare, the better to display their tattoos. Tattoos: red and purple pictures of naked women, green and blue advertisements of their trade.’

‘Oh, those women.’ Danlo had come to appreciate the subtleties and delicateness of civilized females, and he said, ‘They are very lovely, yes? – I wondered what they were called.’

Old Father whistled a little tune indicating his disapproval of whores. But the meaning was lost on Danlo. ‘An imprinting is like a tattoo of the brain. Indelible sounds and pictures fixed into the synapses – the brain’s synapses themselves are fixed like strands of silk in ice. There is no physical pain because the brain has no nerves. Ah, but the pain! Sudden new concepts, reference points, relationships among words – you can’t imagine the possible associations. Oh ho, there is pain!, the angslan of suddenly being more than you were. The pain of knowing. Oh, the pain, the pain, the pain, the pain.’

The next day, Old Father took Danlo to the imprimatur’s shop. They left the district via the infamous Fravashi sliddery, a long orange street which flows down past the Street of the Common Whores and the Street of Smugglers, and winds deep into the heart of the Farsider’s Quarter. Old Father was fairly clumsy on his skates. His hips were not as loosely jointed as a human’s, and they creaked with disease. Often, when rounding a curve he had to lean on Danlo to keep from falling. Often, he had to stop to catch his breath. They made a strange pair: Danlo with his open face and deeply curious eyes, and kindly, inscrutable Old Father towering over him like a furry mountain. Because it was warm, Danlo wore only a white cotton shirt, wool trousers and a black wool jacket. (And, of course, Ahira’s white feather fluttering in his hair.) It was one of those perfect winter days. The sky was as deep blue as a thallow’s eggshell, and a fresh salt wind was blowing off the ocean. On either side of the street, the outdoor restaurants and cafes were crowded with people watching the continuous promenade of people stream by. And there was much to watch. As they penetrated deeper into the Quarter, the mix of people began to change and grow ever more colourful, seedier, more dangerous. There were many more whores and many master courtesans dressed in diamonds and the finest of real silks. There were hibakusha in rags, barefoot autists, harijan, tubists, merchants, wormrunners, and even a few ronin warrior-poets who had deserted their order for the pleasures of Neverness. The air heaved with the sounds and smells of teeming humanity. Fresh bread, sausages and roasted coffee, ozone, woodsmoke, toalache, wet wool and floral perfumes, kana oil and sweat, and the faint, ferny essence of sex – there was no end to the smells of the City. These smells excited Danlo, although it was difficult to sort one from the other to track its source. Once, when they were caught in the crush at the intersection of the Street of Imprimaturs, a plump little whore pressed up against him and ran her fingers through his hair. ‘Such thick, pretty hair,’ she said. ‘All black and red – is it real? I’ve never seen such hair before.’ While Old Father whistled furiously to shoo her away, Danlo drank in the fragrance of rose perfume which her sweaty hand had left in his hair. He had never encountered such a flower before, and he relished the smell, even though he wished that the whore had noticed he was not a boy, but a man.

Of the many shops on the Street of Imprimaturs, Drisana Lian’s was one of the smallest. It sat on the middle of the block squeezed between a noisy cafe and the fabulously decorated shop of Baghaim the Imprimatur. Where Baghaim’s shop was large and fronted with stained-glass windows, Drisana’s was nothing more than a hole through an unobtrusive granite doorway; where many rich and fashionably dressed people queued up to apply for the services of Baghaim and his assistants, Drisana’s shop was very often empty. ‘Drisana is not popular,’ Old Father explained as he knocked at the iron door. ‘That’s because she refuses most imprintings requested of her. Ah, but there isn’t a better imprimatur in the City.’

The door opened and Drisana greeted Old Father and Danlo. She bowed painfully but politely and invited them inside. Without ignoring Danlo, she made it clear she was glad to see Old Father, whom she had known since he first came to Neverness. They spoke to each other in the Language, and Danlo was able to pick out only a tenth of the words. ‘Drisana Lian,’ Old Father said, ‘may I present Danlo.’

‘Just “Danlo”?’

‘He’s called Danlo the Wild.’

They proceeded slowly down the bare hallway, very slowly because Drisana was very old and very slow. She shuffled along in her brownish-grey robe, taking her time. Like Old Father, she disdained bodily rejuvenations. Danlo had never – at least in his many days in the City – seen such an old woman. Her hair was long and grey and tied back in a chignon. Hundreds of deep lines split her face, which was yellow-white like old ivory. Most people would have thought her ugly, but Danlo did not. He thought she was beautiful. She had her own face, as the Devaki say. He liked her tiny round nose, red as a yu berry. He liked her straight, white teeth, although it puzzled him that she still had teeth. All the women of his tribe, long before they grew as old as Drisana, had worn their teeth down to brown stumps chewing on skins to soften them for clothing. Most of all, he liked her eyes. Her eyes were dark brown, at once hard and soft; her eyes hinted of a tough will and love of life. Something about her face and her eyes made Danlo feel comfortable for the first time since he had left his home.

She led them into a windowless room where Danlo and Old Father sat on bare wooden chairs around a bare wooden table. ‘Mint tea for the Honoured Fravashi?’ she asked as she hovered over her lacquered tea cabinet next to the dark wall. ‘And for the boy, what would he like in his cup? He’s not old enough to drink wine, I don’t think.’

She served them two cups of mint tea, then returned to the cabinet where she opened a shiny black door and removed a crystal decanter. She poured herself a half glass of wine. ‘It’s said that alcohol makes the Fravashi crazy. Now that would be a sight, wouldn’t it – a crazy Fravashi?’

‘Oh ho! It would be quite a sight indeed.’

Drisana eased herself into a chair and asked, ‘I suppose Danlo is here for an imprinting? A language, of course.’ She turned to Danlo and said, ‘Old Father always brings his students to me to learn a language. What will it be? Anglish? Old Swahili? New Japanese? The Sanskrit, or the neurologician’s sign language they employ on Silvaplana? I’m sure you’d like to learn the abominably difficult Fravashi language but that’s impossible. No one can imprint it. Eighty years I’ve been trying and all I can manage is a few whistles.’

Danlo was silent because he didn’t understand her. He tapped his forehead and smiled.

Drisana wet her lips with wine and whistled at Old Father. In truth, she could speak more than a few whistles of Fravash, enough to make her meaning understood: ‘What is the matter with this boy?’

Old Father loved speaking his own language and he smiled. He whistled back, ‘So, it’s so: he needs to learn the Language.’

‘What? But everyone speaks the Language! Everyone of the Civilized Worlds.’

‘So, it’s so.’

‘He’s not civilized, then? Is that why you call him “Danlo the Wild”?’ Such a name – I certainly don’t approve of these kinds of names, the poor boy. But he’s not of the Japanese Worlds, certainly. And he doesn’t seem as if he’s been carked.’

In truth, one of Danlo’s ancestors had illegally carked the family chromosomes, hence his unique, hereditary black and red hair. But it was too dark in the room for Drisana to make out the spray of red in his hair; it was too dark and her eyes were too old and weak. She must have seen clearly enough, however, that he possessed none of the grosser bodily deformations of the fully carked races: blue skin, an extra thumb, feathers, fur or the ability to breathe water instead of air.

‘Ah oh, I can’t tell you where he comes from,’ Old Father whistled.

‘It’s a secret? I love secrets, you know.’

‘It’s not for me to tell you.’

‘Well, the Fravashi are famous for their secrets, it’s said.’ Drisana drank her wine and got up to pour herself another glass. ‘To imprint the Language – nothing could be easier. It’s so easy, I hesitate to ask for payment.’

Old Father closed one eye and slowly whistled, ‘I was hoping to make the usual payment.’

‘I’d like that,’ Drisana told him.

The usual payment was a song drug. Old Father agreed to sing for Drisana after their business was concluded. The Fravashi have the sweetest, most exquisite of voices, and to humans, their otherworldly songs are as intoxicating as any drug. Neither of them approved of money, and they disdained its use. Old Father, of course, as a Fravashi believed that money was silly. And Drisana, while she had defected from the Order years ago, still clung to most of her old values. Money was evil, and young minds must be nurtured, no matter the cost. She loved bestowing new languages on the young, but she refused to imprint wolf consciousness onto a man, or transform a shy girl into a libertine, or perform the thousand other personality alterations and memory changes so popular among the bored and desperate. And so, her shop usually remained empty.

Drisana poured herself a third glass of wine, this time from a different decanter. Danlo smiled and watched her take a sip.

‘It’s rude,’ she whistled to Old Father, ‘how very rude it is to speak in front of him in a language he doesn’t understand. In a language no one understands. When we begin the imprinting, I shall have to speak to him. I suppose you’ll have to translate. You do speak the boy’s language, don’t you?’

Old Father, who was not permitted to lie, said, ‘It’s so. Of course I do. Oh ho, but if I translate, you might recognize the language and thus determine his origins.’

Drisana stood near Danlo and rested her hand on his shoulder. Beneath the loose skin on the back of her hand, the veins twisted like thin, blue worms. ‘Such a secret you’re making of him! If you need to keep your secret, of course you must keep it. But I won’t make an imprinting unless I can talk to him.’

‘Perhaps you could speak to him in Moksha.’

‘Oh? Is he fluent?’

‘Nearly so.’

‘I’m afraid that won’t be sufficient, then.’

Old Father closed both eyes for an uncomfortably long time. He stopped whistling and started to hum. At last he looked at Danlo and said, ‘Lo ti dirasa, ah ha, I must tell you Drisana’s words as she speaks them.’

‘He speaks Alaloi!’ Drisana said.

‘You recognize the language?’

‘How could I not?’ Drisana, who spoke five hundred and twenty-three languages, was suddenly excited, so excited that she neglected to transpose her words into the Alaloi tongue. She began talking about the most important event that had happened in the Order since Neverness was founded. ‘It’s been four years since Mallory Ringess ascended to heaven, or whatever it is that his followers believe. I think the Lord Pilot left the City on another journey – the universe is immense, is it not? Who can say if he’ll ever return? Well, everyone is saying he became a god and will never return. One thing is certainly known: the Ringess once imprinted Alaloi – he was a student of bizarre and ancient languages. And now it seems that everyone wants to do the same, as young Danlo has obviously done. It’s really worship, you know. Emulation, the power of apotheosis. As if learning a particular language could bring one closer to the godhead.’

Old Father was obliged to translate this, and he did so. However, he seemed to be having trouble speaking. Alternately opening and shutting each eye, he sighed and paused and started and stopped. Danlo thought that he must be three quarters asleep, so long did it take him to get the words out.

‘Mallory Ringess was a pilot, yes?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Old Father said. ‘A brilliant pilot. He became the Lord Pilot of the Order, and then, at the end, the Lord of the Order itself. Many people hated him; some loved him. There was something about him, the way he compelled people’s love or hate. Twelve years ago, there was schism in the Order. And war. And the Ringess was a warrior, among other things. So, it’s so: a very angry, violent man. And secretive, and cruel, and vain. Oh ho, but he was also something else. An unusually complex man. A kind man. And noble, and fated, and compassionate. He loved truth – even his enemies would admit that. He devoted his life to a quest for the Elder Eddas, the secret of the gods. Some say he found this secret and became a god; some say he failed and left the City in disgrace.’

Danlo thought about this for a while. Drisana’s tea room was a good place for reflection. In some ways it reminded him of a snow hut’s interior: clean, stark and lit by natural flames. High on the granite walls, atop little wooden shelves, were ten silver candelabra. All around the room, candles burned with a familiar yellow light. The smells of hot wax and carbon mingled with pine and the sickly sweet fetor which old people exude when they are almost ready to go over. Danlo traced his finger along his forehead and wondered aloud, ‘Is it possible for a man to become a god? For a civilized man? How can such a thing be possible? Men are men; why should a man want to be a god?’

He wondered if Old Father was lying or speaking metaphorically. Or perhaps, in such a shaida place as a city, a man really could aspire to godhood. Danlo really didn’t understand civilized people, nor could he conceive of the kinds of gods they might become. And then he had a startling thought: it wasn’t necessary for him to understand everything in order to accept Drisana’s and Old Father’s story. As his first conscious act as an asarya, he would say ‘yes’ to this fantastic notion of a man’s journey godward, at least until he could see things more clearly.

He turned to Old Father and asked, ‘What are the Elder Eddas?’

‘Oh ho, the Elder Eddas! No one is quite sure. Once there was a race of gods, the Ieldra, once, once, three million years ago. When human beings lived in trees; when the Fravashi still warred with each other, clan against clan. The Ieldra, it’s said, discovered the secret of the universe. The Philosopher’s Stone. The One Tree, the Burning Bush, Pure Information, the Pearl of Great Price. Aha, the River of Light, the Ring of Scutarix, the Universal Program, the Eschaton. And the Golden Key, the Word, even the Wheel of Law. So, it’s so: the Elder Eddas. God. In a way, the Ieldra became God, or became as one with God. It’s said that they carked their minds – ah, ah, their very consciousness – into the singularity at the galaxy’s core. Into a spinning black hole. But before their final evolution, a gift. A bequest from the Ieldra to their chosen successors. Not the Fravashi, it’s said. Not the Darghinni. Nor the Scutari, nor the Farahim, nor the Friends of Man. It’s said that the Ieldra carked their secrets into human beings only; long ago they encoded the Elder Eddas into the human genome. Wisdom, madness, infinite knowledge, racial memory – all of these and more. It’s thought that certain segments of human DNA code the Elder Eddas as pure memory. And so, inside all human beings, a way of becoming gods.’

While Danlo stared at the flame shadows dancing atop the floor, he smiled with curiosity and amusement. Finally, he asked, ‘And what is DNA?’

‘Ah, so much to learn, but you needn’t learn it just now. The main point is this: The Ringess showed the way to remember the Elder Eddas, and people hated him for that. Why? All is one, you say, and man shall be as gods? Creation and memory – God is memory? So, it’s so: there’s a way for anyone to remember the Elder Eddas, but here is the most ironic of ironies: many can hear the Eddas within themselves but few can understand.’

Danlo closed his eyes, listening. The only sound inside was the beating of his heart. ‘I do not hear anything,’ he said.

Old Father smiled, and as Danlo had, closed both his eyes.

Drisana was savouring her fourth glass of wine, and she finally spoke to Danlo in his language, ‘Kareeska, Danlo, grace beyond grace. It’s been a long time since I spoke Alaloi; please forgive me if I make mistakes.’ After a long sip of wine, she continued, ‘There are techniques of remembering, of listening. You chose an exciting time to enter the Order. Everyone is trying to learn the remembrancing art, certainly they are. If you’re accepted into Borja, perhaps you’ll learn it, too.’

Her voice was slurry with wine and bitterness. Once, at the beginning of the Great Schism, because she had believed the Order was corrupt and doomed, she had renounced her position as master imprimatur. And now, twelve years later, there was a renewal of spirit and vision in the towers of the Academy, and the Order was more vital than it had been in a thousand years. If given the chance, she would have rejoined the Order, but for those who abjure their vows, there is never a second chance.

Danlo, who was quite unafraid to touch old people, took Drisana’s hand and held it as he would his grandmother’s. He liked the acceptance he saw in her sad, lovely eyes, though he wondered why she would be so bitter. ‘The gods have imprinted human beings with the Elder Eddas, yes?’

‘No, certainly not!’ Drisana did not explain that it was she, herself, who had once imprinted Mallory Ringess, and therefore she was partly responsible for creating the Ringess and all the chaos of the war. ‘The memory of the Eddas lies deeper than the brain. When we speak of an imprinting, we speak merely of changing the metabolic pathways and the neural network. It’s all a matter of redefining the synapses of the brain.’

‘Fixing the synapses like strands of silk in glacier ice?’

Drisana stared at him as she took a sip of wine. Then she started laughing, and the bitterness suddenly left her. ‘Dear Danlo, you don’t understand anything about what we’re going to do here today, do you?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I always thought the brain was just a store of pink fat.’

Drisana laughed nicely and pulled at his hand. ‘Come,’ she said. ‘Danlo, and my Honoured Fravashi – you’ll have to help me because I’ve drunk too much wine.’

She led them through a wooden door into the imprinting room, or her chamber of impressions, as she liked to call it. In the centre of the imprinting room, atop the Fravashi carpet that Old Father had once given her, was a padded chair covered with green velvet. Aside from a couple of hologram stands behind the chair, it was the only article of furniture in the room. On each of the six walls, from ceiling to floor, were polished shelves holding up what looked like gleaming, metal skulls. There were six hundred and twenty-two of these skulls, arrayed neatly in their rows. ‘These are the heaumes,’ Drisana explained as she sat Danlo down on this chair. ‘You’ve certainly seen a heaume before?’

Danlo sat stiffly in the chair, craning his neck, looking at the heaumes. Ahira, Ahira, he silently called, why would anyone collect metal skulls?

Drisana wobbled on her feet as she ran her hands through his hair, roughly sizing his head. He had a large head for a boy fourteen years old, large and broad, and she turned to select a heaume from the third row from the top. ‘First, we have to make a model of your brain,’ she said.

‘A model?’

‘A picture. Like a painting.’

While Old Father sat down on the rug in the Fravashi fashion to watch, she fit the heaume over Danlo’s head. Danlo held his breath, then slowly let it out. The heaume was cold, even through his thick hair. The heaume was hard and cold, and it tightly squeezed his skull. Something important was about to happen, he thought, though he couldn’t quite tell what. Through the dark hallways of Drisana’s shop, he had kept his sense of direction. He was sure he was facing east. One must piss to the south, sleep with one’s head to the north, but all important ceremonies must occur facing east. How could Drisana know this?

‘A painting of your brain,’ Drisana slurred out. Her breath was heavy over his face and smelled of wine. ‘We’ll paint it with light.’

Directly behind Danlo’s chair, one of the hologram stands suddenly lit up with a model of his brain. There, seemingly floating above the stand, were the glowing folds of his cerebral cortex, the cerebellum and medulla and the vivid chasm splitting the brain into halves. Danlo felt nothing, but he sensed a gleam of light from his side and turned to look.

‘Stop!’ Drisana cried out.

It was too late. Danlo had been blindly obedient only once in his life, during his passage into manhood, on pain of death. How could he help looking at a painting of his brain? He looked, and in the back of the model of his brain, the visual cortex flared with orange light. He looked at his own visual cortex, painted bright with orange and orange-red, and the very art of looking caused the neurons within the cortex to fire. As he looked and looked, suddenly the light was blindingly, brilliantly red. The light was a red spearpoint through his eyes into his brain. The pain was quick, sharp and intense. Old Father had been wrong; there was a hideous pain. He closed his eyes and looked away. The pain fell off into a white heat and a burning, terrible pain.

Drisana grasped his face in her withered hands and gently turned him facing forward. ‘You mustn’t look at your brain’s own model! Soon, we’ll go deeper, down to the neurons. The neuro-transmitter flow, the electricity. Your thoughts – you would be able to see your own thoughts. And that’s so dangerous. Seeing your thoughts as they form up – that itself would create another thought for you to see. The feedback, the infinities. Certainly, the process could go on to infinity, but you’d be insane or dead long before then.’

Danlo stared straight ahead. He held himself very still. He was sweating now, beads of salt water squeezed between his forehead and the heaume. ‘Ahira, Ahira,’ he whispered. ‘O blessed Ahira!’

‘Now be still. Before we can make an imprinting, we must see where to imprint.’

Even though Drisana was half drunk, she laid his brain bare as deftly and easily as he might slit open a snow hare’s belly. Before she had learned the art of imprinting, she had been an akashic. As an akashic, she had done many thousands of brain mappings. All imprimaturs are also akashics, though few akashics know much about the art of imprinting. In truth, it is easier to map and read a brain than it is to imprint it. For no good reason – and this is a bitter irony – the akashics possess a much higher status in the Order than do the lowly imprimaturs.

‘Close your eyes, now,’ Drisana called out softly.

Danlo closed his eyes. Behind him, his brain’s model rippled with light waves. The language clusters in the left hemisphere were magnified and highlighted. The neural network was dense and profoundly complex. Millions of individual neurons, like tiny, glowing red spiders, were packed into a three-dimensional web. From each neuron grew thousands of dendrites, thousands of red, silken strands which sought each other out and connected at the synapses.

‘Danlo, ni luria la shantih,’ Drisana said, and his association cortex fairly jumped with light. And then, ‘Ti asto yujena oyu, you have eyes that see too deeply and too much.’

‘Oh ho, that’s true!’ Old Father broke in. ‘Yujena oyu – so, it’s so.’

Drisana held up a hand to silence him, and she spoke other words in other languages, words that failed to bring Danlo’s association cortex to life. In a few moments, Drisana determined that Alaloi was his milk tongue, and more, that he knew no others except Moksha and a smattering of the Language. It was an extraordinary thing to discover, and she probably longed to immediately spread this news in the various cafes and bars, but as an imprimatur she was obliged to keep secrets.

‘Now we have the model; now we will make the actual imprinting.’

She removed the heaume from Danlo’s head. While he brushed back his sodden hair, she walked over to the far wall behind Old Father to search for a particular heaume. She tried to explain the fundamentals of her art, though it must have been difficult to find words in the Alaloi language to convey her meaning. Danlo quickly became confused. In truth, imprinting is both simple and profound. Every child is born with a certain array of synapses connecting neuron to neuron. This array is called the primary repertoire and is determined partly by the genetic programs and partly by the self-organizing properties of the growing brain. Learning occurs, simply, when certain synapses are selected and strengthened at the expense of others. The blueness of the sky, the pain of ice against the skin – every colour, each crackling twig, smell, idea or fear burns its mark into the synapses. Gradually, event by event, the primary repertoire is transformed into the secondary repertoire. And this transformation – the flowering of a human being’s selfness and essence, one’s very soul – is evolutionary. Populations of neurons and synapses compete for sensa and thoughts. Or rather, they compete to make thoughts. The brain is its own universe and thoughts are living things which thrive or die according to natural laws.

Drisana eased the new heaume over Danlo’s head. It was thicker than the first heaume and heavier. Above the second hologram stand, a second model of Danlo’s brain appeared. Next to it, the first model remained lit. As the imprinting progressed, Drisana would continually compare the second model to the first, down to the molecular level; she would need to see both models – as well as the tone of Danlo’s blue-black eyes – to determine when he had imprinted enough for one day.

‘So many synapses,’ Drisana said. ‘Ten trillion synapses in the cortex alone.’

Danlo made a fist and asked, ‘What do the synapses look like?’

‘They’re modelled as points of light. Ten trillion points of light.’ She didn’t explain how neurotransmitters diffuse across the synapses, causing the individual neurons to fire. Danlo knew nothing of chemistry or electricity. Instead, she tried to give him some idea of how the heaume’s computer stored and imprinted language. ‘The computer remembers the synapse configuration of other brains, brains that hold a particular language. This memory is a simulation of that language. And then in your brain, Danlo, select synapses are excited directly and strengthened. The computer speeds up the synapses’ natural evolution.’

Danlo tapped the bridge of his nose; his eyes were dark and intent upon a certain sequence of thought. ‘The synapses are not allowed to grow naturally, yes?’

‘Certainly not. Otherwise imprinting would be impossible.’

‘And the synapse configuration – this is really the learning, the essence of another’s mind, yes?’

‘Yes, Danlo.’

‘And not just the learning – isn’t this so? You imply that anything in the mind of another could be imprinted in my mind?’

‘Almost anything.’

‘What about dreams? Could dreams be imprinted?’

‘Certainly.’

‘And nightmares?’

Drisana squeezed his hand and reassured him. ‘No one would imprint a nightmare into another.’

‘But it is possible, yes?’

Drisana nodded her head.

‘And the emotions … the fears or loneliness or rage?’

‘Those things, too. Some imprimaturs – certainly they’re the dregs of the City – some do such things.’

Danlo let his breath out slowly. ‘Then how can I know what is real and what is unreal? Is it possible to imprint false memories? Things or events that never happened? Insanity? Could I remember ice as hot or see red as blue? If someone else looked at the world through shaida eyes, would I be infected with this way of seeing things?’

Drisana wrung her hands together, sighed, and looked helplessly at Old Father.

‘Oh ho, the boy is difficult, and his questions cut like a sarsara!’ Old Father stood up and painfully limped over to Danlo. Both his eyes were open, and he spoke clearly. ‘All ideas are infectious, Danlo. Most things learned early in life, we do not choose to learn. Ah, and much that comes later. So, it’s so: the two wisdoms. The first wisdom: as best we can, we must choose what to put into our brains. And the second wisdom: the healthy brain creates its own ecology; the vital thoughts and ideas eventually drive out the stupid, the malignant and the parasitical.’

Because Danlo’s forehead was wet and itched, he tried to force his finger up beneath the heaume, but it was too tight. He said, ‘Then you are not afraid that the words of the Language will poison me?’

‘Oh ho, all languages are poison,’ Old Father said. His eyes were bright with appreciation of Danlo’s unease. ‘But that’s why you’ve learned Moksha and the Fravashi way, as an antidote to such poisons.’

Danlo trusted nothing about the whole unnatural process of imprinting, but he trusted Old Father and trusted Drisana, too. He made a quick decision to affirm this trust. Follow your fate, he thought, and he tapped the heaume. ‘I shall learn the Language now, yes?’

The imprinting of Danlo’s brain took most of the day. It was painless, without incident or sensation. He sat quiet and still while Drisana spoke to the heaume’s computer in an artificial language that neither he nor Old Father could understand. She selected the sequence of imprinting, and, with the computer’s aid, she monitored his brain chemistry: the concentrations of the neurotransmitters, the MAP2 molecules, the synapsin and kinase and the thousands of other brain proteins. Layer by glowing layer, she laid his cortex bare and imprinted it.

Once, Danlo asked, ‘Where are the new words? Why can’t I feel the Language as it takes hold? Why can’t I hear it or think it?’ And then he had a terrifying thought: If the heaume could add memories to his brain, perhaps it could remove them just as easily. And if it did, how would he ever know?

Drisana had brought in a chair from the tea room and was sighing heavily (she had also brought in another glass of wine); she was much too old to remain standing during the entire course of an imprinting. She said, ‘The heaume shuts off the new language clusters from the rest of your brain until it’s over. You certainly wouldn’t want to be bothered thinking in a new language until a good part of it was in place, would you? Now you must think of something pleasant, perhaps a happy memory or a daydream to occupy your time.’

Usually, an imprinting required three sessions, but Drisana found that Danlo was accepting the Language quickly and well. His eyes remained bright and focused. She let the imprinting go on until he had nine tenths of the words, and then she decided that that was quite enough. She removed the heaume, took a sip of wine, and sighed.

Old Father stood up and said, ‘Thank you.’ He walked up and placed his furry hand over Danlo’s head. His black fingernails were hard against Danlo’s temple. Speaking in the Language, Old Father said, ‘Drisana is kind, very kind and very beautiful, don’t you think?’

Without thought or hesitation, Danlo replied, ‘Oh, yes, she is radiant with shibui. She is … what I mean to say, shibui …’ The words died in his mouth because he was suddenly excited and confused. He was speaking the Language! He was speaking fluently words he had never heard before. Did he understand what he had said? Yes, he did understand. Shibui: a kind of beauty that only time can reveal. Shibui was the subtle beauty of grey and brown moss on an old rock. And the taste of an old wine which recalled a ripening of grapes and the perfect balance of sun, wind and rain – that too was shibui. Drisana’s face radiated shibui – ‘radiate’ was not quite the right word – her face revealed the grain of her character and her life’s experiences as if it were a piece of ivory painstakingly and beautifully carved by time.

He rubbed his temple slowly and said, ‘What I mean is … she has her own face.’ Then, realizing that he had fallen back on an Alaloi expression, he began thinking of the many conceptions and words for beauty. There were the new words: sabi, awarei and hozhik. And wabi: the unique beauty of a flawed object, such as a teapot with a crack; the beautiful, distinctive, aesthetic flaw that distinguishes the spirit of the moment in which an object was created from all other moments in eternity. And always, there was halla. If halla was the beauty, the harmony and balance of life, then the other words for beauty were lesser words, though they were connected to halla in many ways. In truth, each of the new words revealed hidden aspects of halla and helped him to see it more clearly.

‘O, blessed beauty! I never knew … that there were so many ways of looking at beauty.’

For a while, the three of them talked about beauty. Danlo spoke haltingly because he was unsure of himself. Suddenly to have a new language inside was the strangest of feelings. It was like entering a dark cave, like climbing toward the faint sound of falling water, and all the while being possessed of an eerie sense that there were many pretty pebbles to be found but not quite knowing where to look. He had to search for the right words, and he struggled to put them together.

‘So much to … comprehend,’ he said. ‘In this blessed Language, there is so much … passion. So many powerful ideas.’

‘Oh ho!’ Old Father said. ‘The Language is sick with ideas.’

Danlo looked at the many rows of heaumes and tapped the heaume that Drisana was still holding in her hand. ‘The whole of the Language is inside here, yes?’

‘Certainly,’ she said, and she nodded at him.

‘And other languages, you say? How many … languages?’

Drisana, who was bad with numbers, said, ‘More than ten thousand but certainly less than fifty thousand.’

‘So many,’ he mused. His eyes took on a faraway look, as of ice glazing over the dark blue sea. ‘So many … how could human beings ever learn so many?’

‘He’s beginning to see it,’ Old Father said.

Drisana put the heaume down atop the inactive hologram stand and smiled at Danlo. Her face was warm and kind. ‘I think you’ve had enough conversation for one day. Now you should go home and sleep. Then you’ll dream of what you’ve learned and tomorrow your speech will come more easily.’

‘No,’ Old Father said sharply. He directed a few quick whistles at her, then said, ‘Imprinting is like giving a newborn the ability to walk without strengthening the leg muscles. Let him use the Language a little more, lest he stumble later when he can least afford to.’

‘But he’s too tired!’

‘No, look at his eyes, look how he sees; now he is liminal, oh ho!’

Liminal, Danlo thought, to be on the threshold of a new concept or way of viewing things. Yes, he was certainly liminal; his heart pounded and his eyes ached because he was beginning to see too much. He stood up and began pacing around the room. To Drisana, he said, ‘Besides languages, there are many … categories of knowledge, yes? History, and what Fayeth calls eschatology, and many others. And all may be imprinted?’

‘Most of them.’

‘How many?’

Drisana was silent as she looked at Old Father. He gave forth a long, low whistle, then said, ‘Oh, oh, if you learned all of a heaume’s forty thousand languages, it would be like standing alone on a beach with a drop of water in your hand while an ocean roared beyond you.’

‘That’s quite enough!’ Drisana snapped. ‘Such a sadist you are.’

‘Oh ho!’

Danlo threw his hand over his eyes and rubbed them. Then he stared up at the ceiling for a long time. At last he was seeing the great ocean of knowledge and truth as it opened before him. The ocean was as deep and bottomless as space, and he could see no end to the depths. He was drowning in deepness; the air in the room was so thick and close that he could hardly catch his breath. If he must learn all the truths of the universe, then he would never know halla. ‘Never,’ he said. And then, cursing for the first time in his life: ‘There is … too damn much to know!’

Drisana sat him down in the velvet chair and pressed her wine glass into his hand. ‘Here, take a sip of wine. It will calm you. Certainly, no one can know everything. But why would you want to?’

With a humming sound that was two thirds of a laugh, Old Father said, ‘There’s a word that will help you. You must know what this word is.’

‘A word?’

Old Father began whistling in fugue, and he said, ‘A word. Think of it as a culling word. So, it’s so: those who grasp the intricacies and implications of this word are culled, chosen to swim in a sea of knowledge where others must drown. Search your memory; you know this word.’

Danlo closed his eyes, and there in the darkness, like a star falling out of the night, was the word. ‘Do you mean “shih”, sir?’ he asked. ‘I must learn shih, yes?’

Shih was the opposite of facts and raw information; shih was the elegance of knowledge, the insight and skill to organize knowledge into meaningful patterns. As an artist chooses colours of paint or light to make her pictures, so a master of shih chooses textures of knowledge – various ideas, myths, abstractions, and theories – to create a way of seeing the world. The aesthetics and beauty of knowledge – this was shih.

‘Just so, shih,’ Old Father said. ‘An old word for an old, old art.’

He explained that the etymon of shih was a simple word in Old Chinese; the Fravashi had fallen in love with this word, and they had borrowed and adapted it when they invented Moksha. From Moksha, the concept of shih had entered into the Language – along with thousands of other concepts and words. Those who fear the Fravashi regard this invasion of the Language with alien (or ancient) words as the most subtle of stratagems to conquer the human race.

Danlo rubbed his eyes as he listened. ‘You say that shih … is a word of Moksha, yes?’

‘So, it’s so: In Moksha, shih is used only as a verb. In the Language, shih becomes corrupted as a noun.’

‘But why haven’t I been taught this word, sir?’

‘Ah, ah, I’ve been saving it for the proper time,’ Old Father said. ‘In the Language, shih is elegance in using one’s knowledge. But in Moksha, this broader meaning: Shih is recognizing and making sense of different kinds of knowledge. It’s the most brilliant art, this ability to gauge the beauties and weaknesses of different worldviews. Oh ho, now that you have the Language in your head, you will badly need this art. If you are to keep the civilized worldview from overwhelming you, you must become a man of shih.’

In a gulp, Danlo downed the rest of the wine. The tartness and the sugars tasted good. As Drisana had said it would, it calmed him. He talked with Drisana and Old Father about shih, or rather, he listened while they talked. After a while the wine made him drowsy. He shifted about, resting his head on the chair’s soft velvet arm with his legs flopped over the other arm. He listened until the words of the Language lost their meaning, and all the sounds of the room – Old Father’s whistling, Drisana’s heavy sighs, and the faint clamour of the cafe next door – melted into a chaotic hum.

‘Look, he’s falling asleep,’ Drisana said. ‘That’s certainly enough for today. You’ll bring him back tomorrow to complete the imprinting?’

‘Tomorrow or the day after.’

Old Father roused Danlo, then, and they said their goodbyes. Drisana rumpled his hair and warned him about the dangers of drinking too much wine. All the way home, skating along the noisy evening streets, Danlo overheard stray bits and snatches of conversation. Most of the talk seemed muddled, insipid and meaningless. He wondered how many of these chattering, confused people understood shih?

Old Father read the look on his face and scolded, ‘Oh ho, you must not judge others according to what you think you know. Do not glaver, Danlo, not tonight, and not ever.’

By the time they reached Old Father’s house, Danlo was very tired. He fairly fell into his bed. That night he slept with his clothes on, and he had strange dreams. He dreamed in the words of the Language; his dreams were chaotic, without theme or pattern or the slightest sense of shih.