Читать книгу The Broken God - David Zindell, David Zindell - Страница 11

The minute anything – science, feminism, Buddhism, holism, whatever – starts to take on the characteristics of a cosmology, it should be discarded. How things are held in the mind is infinitely more important than what is in the mind, including this statement itself.

– Morris Berman, Holocaust Century Historian

The problem when people stop believing in God is not that they thereafter believe in nothing; it is that they believe in anything.

– G. K. Chesterton

During the days that followed, Danlo returned often to Drisana’s shop. He imprinted much besides the Language, for although the Order would not test the bulk or quality of his knowledge, he still needed the anchor stones of history, mechanics, ecology and other disciplines to support the web of associations so necessary for understanding civilization’s complexities. He learned many astonishing things. Human beings, it seemed, were fairly infested with tiny animals too small to be felt or seen. These animals were called bacteria, and they sometimes made up as much as ten percent of the body’s weight. Bacteria – and viruses and protozoa – swam in the fluids of his eyes and filled his bowels with putrid gases; sometimes they tunnelled deep into the tissues of his body. A few of these organisms were harmful and caused disease. And so the people of Neverness were afraid to touch each other for fear of infection. Most, even indoors, covered their hands with thin leather gloves and were careful not to get too close to strangers lest they breathe each other’s exhalations. This inhibition caused Danlo many pains. In the Alaloi manner, he liked to brush up against Fayeth or Luister when he greeted them in the hallways of Old Father’s house. To smell their hair or run his calloused hands over their smooth faces reassured him of their realness and essential humanity. With great difficulty he learned to restrain himself. Especially out on the narrow streets of the Fravashi District, in the midst of the manswarm, he had to skate with great care to avoid the swish of perfumed silk or sweat-stained woollens. It vexed him that casual bumping – the slightest of accidental contact – required immediate apology. Even to look purposefully at another, to touch eye to eye or let one’s gaze linger too long, was considered provocative and gauche.

Of course, he still knew nothing of slelling. He couldn’t guess that slel neckers sometimes steal another’s DNA in order to tailor specific viruses to kill in horrible and specific ways. (Or sometimes, in the unspeakable art of slel mime, a victim’s brain is replaced neuron by neuron with programmed neurologics, gradually converted to a slave unit and taken over.) Once, it occurred to him that a virus might have infected and killed his people – how else to explain his tribe’s death? He marvelled at the extension of the world’s ecology to include such tiny, parasitical beasts. Viruses, he thought, were really just another kind of animal that preyed on the cells of human beings, no more fearsome than snow tigers or lice or bears. He wondered, however, how viruses could kill his whole tribe all at once. A bear might stalk and slay a solitary hunter, but never an entire band of men bristling with spears. Such an event would be shaida, a complete unbalancing of the world’s way. He could only guess that something must have happened to ruin his tribe’s halla relationship with the world. Perhaps one of the men had forgotten to pray for the spirit of an animal he had killed; perhaps one of the women had prepared a batch of blood-tea incorrectly, and so weakened the bodies of all the Devaki people. In truth, he never suspected that a civilized virus might have found its way into Haidar and Chandra and his near-brothers and sisters; he never imagined the making of viruses as weapons because such thoughts, for him, were still unimaginable.

As winter passed into deep winter and the weather grew colder, he found himself slowly and painfully adapting to the strangeness of the City. He spent much of each day outside skating, exploring the convoluted, purple glidderies of the Bell and the other districts of the Farsider’s Quarter. Learning the Language was like opening the door to a mansion containing many fabulously decorated rooms; it enabled him to talk with wormrunners and autists and maggids, and other people he met on the streets. Despite his natural shyness, he loved to talk, especially to the Order’s pilots and academicians, who could often be found eating elaborate dinners at the Hofgarten or drinking chocolate in the many Old City cafes. Gradually, from a hundred little remarks that these people made about the Fravashi – as well as his participation in the meditations, word games and other rituals of Old Father’s house – he came to see the entire Fravashi system from a new perspective. He began to entertain doubts as to whether the Fravashi way really was a way toward true liberation. Each evening, before the usual Moksha competition, he sat with the other students around Old Father and repeated the Statement of Purpose: ‘Our system is not a simple system like other systems; it is a meta-system designed to free us from all systems. While we cannot hope to rid ourselves of all beliefs and worldviews, we can free ourselves from bondage to any particular belief or worldview.’ He listened as Old Father discussed the Three Paradoxes of Life, or the Theory of Nairatmya, or the poems of Jin Zenimura, who was one of the first human masters of Moksha. Always, Danlo listened with half a smile on his face, even as a voice whispered in his ear that the Fravashi system, itself, might bind him as surely as a fireflower’s nectar intoxicates and traps a fritillary.

In truth, he did not want to accept some of the Fravashi system’s fundamental teachings. Although it was somewhat rash of him, even presumptuous, from the very beginning he disagreed with Old Father over the ideal and practice of the art of plexure. This art – it is sometimes called ‘plexity’ – aims at moving the student through the four stages of liberation. In the first stage, that of the simplex, one is caught within the bounds of a single worldview. This is the reality of a child or an Alaloi hunter, who may not even be aware that other ways of perceiving reality exist. Most peoples of the Civilized Worlds, however, are aware of humanity’s many religions, philosophies, ways and worldviews. They suspect that adherence to their own belief system is somewhat arbitrary, that had they been born as autists or as Architects of the Infinite Life, for example, they might venerate dreams as the highest state of reality or worship artificial life as evolution’s ultimate goal. In fact, they might believe anything, but simplex people believe only one thing, whatever reality their parents and culture have imprinted into their brains. As the Fravashi say, human beings are self-satisfied creatures who love looking into the mirror for evidence that they are somehow brighter or more beautiful than they really are. It is the great and deadly vanity of human beings to convince themselves that their worldview, no matter how unlikely or bizarre, is somehow more sane, natural, pragmatic, holy, or truthful than any other. Out of choice – or cowardice – most people never break out of this simplex stage of viewing the world as through a single lens, and this is their damnation.

All of Old Father’s students, of course, by the very act of adopting the Fravashi system, had elevated themselves to the complex stage of belief. To be complex is to hold at least two different realities, perhaps at two different times of one’s life. The complex woman or man will cast away beliefs like old clothes, as they become worn or inappropriate. Using the Fravashi techniques, it is possible to progress from one belief system to another, ever growing, ever more flexible, bursting free from one worldview into another as a snake sheds an old skin. The truly complex person will move freely among these systems as the need arises. When journeying by sled across the frozen sea, he will have nineteen different words for the colours of whiteness; when studying the newtonian spectrum, she will compose wavelengths of red, green, and blue into pure white light; when visiting the Perfect on Gehenna, one will choose articles of clothing containing no white, since it is obvious that white isn’t really a colour at all, but rather the absence of all colour, and thus, the absence of light and life. The ideal of complexity, as Old Father liked to remind his students, was the ability to move from system to system – or from worldview to worldview – with the speed of thought.

‘Ah, ha,’ Old Father said one night, ‘all of you are complex, and some of you may become very complex, but who among you has the strength to be multiplex?’

The third stage of plexure is the multiplex. If complexity is the ability to suspend and adopt different beliefs as they are useful or appropriate, one after another, then multiplexity is the holding of more than one reality at the same time. These realities may be as different – or even contradictory – as the old science and the magical thinking of a child. ‘Truth is multiple,’ as the Old Fathers say. One can never become multiplex if afraid of paradox or enslaved by the god of consistency. Multiplex vision is paradoxical vision, new logics, the sudden completion of startling patterns. The mastery of multiplexity makes it possible to see the world in many dimensions; it is like peering into a jewel of a thousand different faces. When one has attained a measure of the multiplex, the world’s creation is seen as the handiwork of a god, and a fireball exploding out of the primordial neverness, and a communal dream, and the eternal crystallization of reality out of a shimmering and undifferentiated essence – all these things and many others, all at once. The multiplex man (or alien) will see all truths as interlocking parts of a greater truth. The Fravashi teach that once in every cycle of time, one is born who will evolve from multiplexity to the omniplex, which is the fourth and final stage of liberation. This completely free individual is the asarya. Only the asarya may hold all possible realities at once. Only the asarya is able to say ‘yes’ to all of creation, for one must see everything as it truly is before making the final affirmation.

This ideal is the pinnacle of all Fravashi thought and wisdom, and it was this very teaching that Danlo disputed above all others. As he maintained in his discussions with Old Father, to hold all realities and look out over the whole of the universe was a noble and necessary step, but an asarya must go beyond this. The entire logic of the Fravashi system pointed toward liberation from belief systems and beliefs – why not strive to believe nothing at all? Why not behold reality with faultless eyes, as free from worldviews as a newborn child? Wasn’t this awakening into innocence the true virtue of an asarya?

‘Oh, oh,’ Old Father said to him, ‘but everyone must believe something. Even if one must invent one’s own beliefs. It’s surprising that after half a year in my house, you haven’t come to believe this.’

Old Father was always quick to bestow his holy sadism upon his students, particularly one so strong-willed as Danlo. And Danlo, for his part, quite enjoyed the intricate dance of wits so beloved of the Fravashi. He never took hurt from any of Old Father’s jokes or calculated ridicule. And he never deluded himself that he was close to freedom from belief. Quite the opposite. Wilfully – and as mindfully as a hunter stepping into a snow tiger’s lair – he entered into the Fravashi worldview. It was indeed a strange and beautiful place. While he was always aware of the little flaws in this reality waiting to widen into cracks, he cherished the most basic of all Fravashi teachings, which was that human beings were made to be free. He believed this passionately, fiercely, completely. He kept the spirit of Fravism close to his heart, like an invisible talisman cut from pure faith. The Fravashi might misunderstand what it would mean to be an asarya, but no matter. Their system could still be used to smash the illusions and thoughtways imprisoning people. And then, once released, each human being could soar free in whatever direction called.

The Fravashi system was nobly conceived, yes, but as Danlo discovered, not all conceptions can be perfectly realized. The Fravashi had come to Neverness three thousand years earlier, and over time, the original teachings and practices of their system had become too systematic. Experiments in thinking had become reified into exercises; ideas had been squeezed into ideology; insight hardened into doctrine; and the little graces and devotions that the students delighted in tendering their Old Fathers had inevitably become onerous obligations. Quite a few students forgot that Moksha was to be used as a tool. All too often, they worshipped this language and imagined that learning ever more Moksha words and poems and koans would be sufficient to free them from themselves. Nothing dismayed Danlo more than this tendency toward worship. And no aspect of worship was so dangerous as the way that Luister and Eduardo and the others fell into fawning over Old Father and surrendered their will to him.

This, of course, is the pitfall of cults and religions dominated by a guru, sage, or messiah. The pattern of enslavement is ancient: a young man or woman hears the call of a deeper world than the everyday reality of education, marriage, amusement, or vying for wealth and social advantage. Perhaps this person is sick with life, while dreading that somehow, no matter every effort toward authenticity and meaning, she has failed to really live. Perhaps, like an urchin sampling forbidden candies, she will move from religion to religion, from way to way, in search of something that will satisfy her hunger. If she is lucky, eventually she will discover a way that is sweeter than the others, a system of disciplines with a pure, living centre. If she is very lucky, she will become a student of an Old Father, for the Fravashi system, despite many flaws, is the best of systems, the oldest and truest, the least corrupt. Whatever the chosen way, there will commence a period of fasting, meditation, dance forms, electronic simulation, prayer, attitudes, or word drugs – anything and everything to concentrate the student’s attention on the seeming boundaries of her selfness. The object, of course, is to smash these boundaries as a thallow chick might break its way out of an egg. This is the first accomplishment of all seekers. One’s worldview begins to crack and fall apart, and more, to appear as an arbitrary construct. The student begins to see how she herself has constructed her own reality. If she is perceptive, she will see how she has constructed her very self. Inevitably, she will ask the questions: what is a self? What is a worldview? She will see all the prejudices, delusions, memories, psychic armouring, and little lies that protect the ‘I’ from the outside world. Having gone this far, she may lose her sense of reality altogether. This is the dangerous moment. This is the time of heart flutters and flailing, of being lost in a dark room and unable to find the light key on the wall. It is a time for floating in fear, or worse, of falling alone into the cold inner ocean that pulls and chills and drowns. The student will feel herself dying; she will have a horrifying sense that every essential part of her is melting away into neverness. If she is weak, her terror of death will paralyze her or even plunge her into madness. But if she has courage, she will see that she is not really alone. Always, the Old Father remains close by her side. His smiles and his golden eyes remind her that he once made the same journey as she. His whole being is a mirror reflecting a single truth: that something great and beautiful will survive even as the student loses herself. The Old Father will help the student find this greater part of herself. This is his glory. This is his delight. He will help the student completely break through the worldview that traps her. And then, as the student cleans away the last slimy bits of eggshell, selfness, and certainty that cling to her, a vastly greater world opens before her. This world is brilliant with light and seems infinitely more real than she ever could have imagined. She, herself, is freer, vaster, profoundly alive. Intense feelings of joy and love overwhelm her. This is the eternal moment, the awakening that should set the student free on the path toward complete liberation. Only, it is here that most students fall into a subtle and deadly trap. Their joy of freedom becomes gratitude toward the Old Father for freeing them; their love of the real becomes attached to the one who made possible this experience of reality. Indeed, they cannot imagine ever making this journey again, by themselves, for themselves, and so their natural love of the Old Father becomes a needy and sickly thing. They begin to revere their Old Father, not as a mere guide or teacher, but as a mediator between themselves and the new world they have seen. And then it is but one small step to worshipping the Old Father as an incarnation of the infinite. Only through the Old Father (or through the roshi or priest or buddha) can the real reality be known. His every word is a sweet fruit bursting with truth; his system of teaching becomes the only way that this truth might be known. And so the student who has flown so high and so far comes at last to a new boundary, but nothing so well-defined and fragile as her original worldview. She looks into her Old Father’s eyes and beholds herself as vastened and holy, but sadly, this new sense of herself is something that he has created and grafted onto her. Her reality is now completely Fravashi. If she is truly aware – and truly valorous – she will try once more to break her way free. But the Fravashi worldview is sublime; escaping it is like a bird trying to break through the sky. Most students will fail to do so; in truth, most will never attempt such an act of ingratitude and rebellion. But even in failure, it is still their pride to soar above the swarms of humanity earthbound and closed in by their familiar and self-made horizons.

To be fair to the Fravashi, the Old Fathers have long recognized the dangers of guruism. They have done everything possible to discourage their students’ slavish attachments to them. But the truth is, they like being gurus. And despite every warning, their students take solace in abandoning themselves and trusting their fates to a white-furred alien. In Old Father’s house this was true of Salim and Michael and Ei Eleni, and of most of the others. It was especially true of Luister Ottah. As Old Father had said, he was a gentle man, a kind man, a living jewel among men – but he was not a man to return Old Father’s sarcasm and jokes in the spirit with which they were offered. Luister composed koans and irreverent poems in Moksha out of duty only, because he was challenged to keep up a certain level of repartee. But he was really much happier simply drinking tea at Old Father’s feet, while listening attentively and then parroting Old Father’s views or words of wisdom. And there was no arguing with Luister once these views had been pronounced. Although Danlo liked Luister as much as anyone he’d met since coming to Neverness, during the short days of deep winter, he began to find him tiresome. Luister instructed Danlo in chess and etiquette and Moksha, as well as skating, and so Danlo found himself in his company more than he would have wished. Luister was somewhat of a polymath, and he enjoyed holding forth on every subject from Lavic architecture to causal decoupling to the journeys of the Tycho – or fenestration, or free will, or the dangers of ohrworms and information viruses. Unfortunately, however, none of his opinions or insights was his own. He had the irritating habit of prefacing his remarks with the phrase: ‘Old Father says that …’ He seemed to have memorized every word that Old Father ever spoke. ‘Old Father says that buildings of organic stone tend toward the grandiloquent and have no place in human cities,’ he told Danlo one dark and snowy morning. And then later that night, ‘Old Father says that the greatest trick of religions is in saving people from infinite regresses. Consider the question: “What caused the universe?” The natural answer is that God caused the universe. Aha, but then one is tempted to ask: “But what caused God?” Ho, ho. And so on – do you see? Religions break the regress. They tell us this: God caused the universe, and God causes God, and this is all that anyone needs to know.’

The closer Danlo penetrated to the heart of the Fravashi system, ironically, the more aware he became that in the city of Neverness, there were many other systems, many other ways. He began to wonder about these ways. Although he never forgot his hope of becoming a pilot, of journeying to Camilla Luz and Nonablinka and inward to the universe’s centre, he still had a half year to wait before he might be admitted to the Order. Of course, he might not be admitted to the Order, and then he would have to remain as Old Father’s student. (Or return to one of the Alaloi tribes west of Kweitkel.) Because he couldn’t imagine becoming like Luister Ottah – and because he was as hungry for experience as a wolf pup sniffing up nosefuls of new snow – he decided to spend the next two hundred days exploring certain worldviews which he found either fascinating or utterly strange. No rule or pronouncement of Old Father’s forbade such exploration. In fact, Old Father often encouraged the donning of different realities, but only as a formal game, played out beneath the sound of chimes and chanting that echoed through his house. Danlo suspected that his method of knowing different ways would not meet the approval of the others, and so, during his daily outings, he began to visit certain parts of the City in secret.

During an unexpected lull in deep winter’s cold, when air was clear and the sky softened to a warm falu blue, Danlo began to frequent the Street of Smugglers where it narrows below the Fravashi District. There, he befriended men and women of the autist sect, and he sat with them on lice-ridden furs and spent whole days and nights lost in deep, lucid, communal dreams, which the autist dream guides claim are the real reality, much more real than the material world of snow or rocks or the ragged clothes that the autists wrap around their emaciated bodies. Likewise he joined a group of mushroom eaters who called themselves the Children of God. Deep in the Farsider’s Quarter, in secret ceremonies held inside one of the abandoned Cybernetic churches, he bowed before a golden urn heaped high with magic mushrooms and solemnly prayed before opening his mouth and taking the ‘Flesh of God’ inside himself. He prayed, as well, to the shimmering emerald aliens who came to him during the most vivid of his mushroom visions. In truth, he came to worship these delightful and beguiling entities as messengers of the One God, that is, until he tired of worship altogether and sought out more sober (and sobering) experiences.

Sometime in midwinter spring, after Danlo had passed his fifteenth birthday with no more ceremony than a few prayers to his dead mother, he made contact with a group of men and women who called themselves the Order of True Scientists. Of course, there are many who consider themselves as scientists, or rather, as the intellectual heirs of the Galileo and the Newton and others who began the great journey through the universe of number and reason. There are holists and logicians, complementarianists and mechanics and grammarians. There are practitioners of the Old Science and the faithful of the New Science of God. There are many, many sciences, almost as many as the hundreds of different sects of the Cybernetic Universal Church. As Danlo learned, the second greatest event in the intellectual history of the human race was the clading off of science into different schools, each with its own epistemology and set of beliefs, each one practising its own methodology, each one with its own notion as to what science really is. There were those sciences which clove to metaphysical and epistemological realism and those which treated science as a grand, but ultimately meaningless game. Some sciences continued to rely on physical experiments to validate their theories while others used computers or pure mathematical theorems to probe the nature of reality. Individual sciences might resemble each other no more than a man does a Darghinni, but they all had at least one thing in common: each science claimed a privileged status and denigrated all others as inferior or false.

This was especially the way of the Order of True Scientists. Of all the cults that Danlo was to encounter during his stay in Neverness, this was the hardest for him to penetrate, the most bizarre. As a prospective Scientist – the leaders of this quaint cult are always desperate to find new members and they will recruit almost anybody – Danlo was required to accept the doctrines of Scientism. To begin with, in front of seven master Scientists wearing their traditional white gowns, he had to make the Profession of Faith: that Science is not merely a tool for understanding or modelling reality, but the one path to truth. There was the Creed of Chance, that all phenomena in the universe are the result of bits of matter moving about and colliding, endlessly, randomly, meaninglessly. He learned the closely related Doctrine of Mechanism, that all things can be explained by reducing them to the mechanisms of pieces of matter causing other pieces to move. Danlo, of course, as a child of the Alaloi, had always regarded the world and everything in it as holy. He had the greatest trouble, at first, in seeing rocks and trees and water as being composed of nothing more than atoms or quarks, bits of interchangeable stuff that were without purpose or life. The logic of this view almost demanded a certain kind of action: if matter was fundamentally dead, then there was nothing wrong with vexing and perturbing it until it yielded its secrets. The Scientists worshipped logic, and so the first duty of any scient man was to make experiments as to the nature of things. The ancient Scientists, he learned, once built machines the size of mountains (and later whole planets) in order to smash matter into ever tinier pieces, always looking for the tiniest piece, always in hope of discovering the ultimate cause of consciousness and all creation. Because they always discovered more questions than they did answers, they designed their experiments toward understanding the ‘how’ of nature instead of the ‘why’. In one of the first of these experiments, when the Scientists transmuted matter into pure energy and exploded the first atomic bomb, they almost ignited the atmosphere of Old Earth. But their calculations told them that this would not happen, and they had faith in these calculations, and so life on Earth was spared for a few more years.

To accept experiments and experimenting as a valid way of knowing reality – to accept that only that which can be measured is real – Danlo had to turn his thinking inside-out, to whelve, as the Fravashi say. He had to learn to regard the world as an objective thing that he could understand only as an observer, studying events and phenomena from the outside looking in, much as a voyeur might peep through a window in hope of catching a man and woman engaged in love play. As he told Old Father much later, after he had whelved once again and returned to his old thoughtways: ‘The Scientists study the effects of cold on an organism with thermocouples and theories, and they say they understand everything … that can be understood. But they do not really know cold. They seem never to have experienced it. And why not? It would be a simple experiment to perform, yes? All they need do is remove their gowns and walk outside in the snow.’

He, himself, performed the experiments required of him only with difficulty. He disavowed any use of living animals, preferring instead, for example, to immerse himself in a bath of ice water during his experiments in the survival of cold. Some of the classical experiments he would never make, such as dissecting a snowworm’s nervous system as a way of appreciating that animal’s unique consciousness. He could never wholly consent to this kind of analysis, for during his passage on the mountain with Three-Fingered Soli he had made certain promises as an Alaloi man, and the Alaloi so love the world that if they chance to kick over a rock, they will replace it in its exact position in order to restore the world to halla. The truth is, he would have made a poor Scientist, and the masters of this cult must have mistrusted him from the beginning. But then, the Scientists mistrust everyone. Most peoples and other orders regard the Method of the Scientists as an outmoded and barbarous art, and they have done everything possible to suppress this cult. Because of long persecution, the Scientists automatically suspect new members of being spies sent to report on them. And so new members are tested in many ways before they are allowed access to secret information and secret experiments. Although Danlo never witnessed any of these illegal experiments, through a friend of a friend, he heard a rumour about one of them.

It seemed that in one of their buildings in the Darghinni District, deep underground in windowless, locked rooms, the Scientists were performing experiments on the embryos of various alien species. Apparently, one of the master Scientists was trying to cark Scutari blastulas into a shape more to his liking. In most animals, alien or earth-type, the critical point in development is not the fertilization of the egg, but rather gastrulation. It is only during gastrulation, after the egg has divided and redivided many times and shaped itself into a hollow ball of cells called a blastula, that the development of organs, limbs and other body parts begins. Some of the cells on the exterior of the blastula are destined to become eyes or wings or fibrillets: the gut of most animals is typically formed in this manner: a group of cells on the blastula’s surface begins to indent and push toward the ball’s opposite side. The blastula deforms as if a finger were pushing into a balloon. Eventually, the group of cells will push completely through the other side, forming a hollow tube from a sphere. One end of the tube will be the mouth, while the other will be the anus. Most animals are formed around such a digestive tube, with sheets of cells circling and contracting and branching out to make the rest of the body’s tissues. But the Scutari are different. During the gastrulation of this species, the original group of cells never quite meets the opposite wall, and so the Scutari are shaped more like wine cups than tubes. It was an experiment of the Scientists to interfere with Scutari gastrulation, coaxing the blastulas that they had somehow acquired to develop more like sea urchins or Darghinni or even human beings. And so they had. They made many broods of doomed Scutari nymphs. While some of these nymphs, at first, were able to ingest food almost as continuously as a hungry harijan, the little monsters would eventually begin vomiting up their faeces, and all of them fell mad or died. A few master Scientists had acclaimed this experiment a great advance in knowledge, as if they had somehow explained Scutari law or the gruesome Scutari face or the inexplicable mind of the Scutari adults. But Danlo could not see it in such a light. In fact, upon hearing that certain masters were dissecting living nymphs in order to ascertain the cause of their madness, he formally abjured his Profession of Faith and quit the Scientists. Although he never abjured Science itself – he would always cherish the cold, terrible glory of Science, and he would use this lens cautiously, like a polarized glass made for looking at the sun – he had finally discovered a limit to the ideal of complexity and the holding of different worldviews.

To enter into a new reality completely is not merely to cherish this reality or to perceive things in a new way, but to remake one’s being and to act in accordance with new rules. However, not all worldviews are equal in truth, and not all acts are permissible. As to what the most truthful worldview might be, generations of philosophers and millennia of war have not decided the answer. The Fravashi teach that each worldview is true only relatively. Science gives a better picture of the universe’s mechanistic aspects than does Hinduism, but has little to say about the nature of God. Many revere this teaching, only to fall into the trap of relativism: If all worldviews are in some way true, then nothing is really true. Danlo, at this time, like many others before him, might easily have descended into nihilism and denied that there could ever be any real ground of truth. He might have concluded that all acts, even those of a criminal or madman, are permitted. But he never fell into this kind of despair. It was always his faith that a free human being, if he looked deeply enough inside himself, would find a pure burning knowledge of what was true and what was not.

Whatever his criticisms of Science (or the other sciences that he would encounter), the attempts of the Scientists to control what they defined as matter and energy fascinated him. Even after he had left the Scientists, he harboured a fierce curiosity about this control. From one of his friends who had remained in the cult, he learned the implications of the Doctrine of Entropy, that the universe was falling into disorder, all configurations of matter across the galaxies falling apart and spreading out like fat globules in a bowl of lukewarm soup, all of its energies running down and seeking an equal level, as waters run into a still lake from which they can never escape. The Scientists preached absolute control over all of material reality, and yet they were doomsayers who pleaded helplessness in face of the universe’s ultimate death. It was the great discovery of this phase of Danlo’s life that this disaster might not be merely words of doctrine or some impossibly distant event. The power to control matter and energy, to release the energy trapped in matter, was very immediate, very serious, very real.

One evening at twilight, just before dinner, Danlo returned to Old Father’s house in a state of intense agitation. He rushed inside with news of an unbelievable thing that he had learned earlier from one of the Scientists. For most of the afternoon, he had been skating down near the dangerous Street of Smugglers, skating and skating as he breathed in the musty smell of poached shagshay furs and brooded about cosmic events. He tromped into Old Father’s thinking chamber not even bothering to kick the ice from his boots. (He had remembered to eject the skate blades only after stumbling across the doorway and grinding steel, chipping the square blue tiles in the outer hallway.) ‘Ni luria la!’ he shouted, lapsing into his milk tongue. And then, ‘Sir, I have learned the most shaida thing, shaida if it is true, but … O blessed God! how can it be true? About the blessed –’

‘Ho, careful now! Careful you don’t drip water all over my mother’s carpet!’ Old Father caught him with both of his eyes, looked at the snowmelt running down Danlo’s boots, and shook his head. Like all Fravashi, he revered pure water and considered it somewhat sacrilegious to scatter such a holy substance over his mother’s woven fur. That evening, he was engaged in a thinking session with one of his students. Across from him on his carpet (very near the spot where Danlo had once vomited) sat Fayeth, a good-looking woman with a quick smile and an even quicker tongue toward making jokes. She had come to Old Father’s house after a long search, after spending years as a student of Zanshin and the Way of the Rose. She was the best of Old Father’s twelve students, the kindest, and the least slavish, and Danlo was a little in love with her. But her age was more than twice his, and she had taken a vow of strict celibacy. Even so, she never resented his attentions; she didn’t seem to mind at all that he had interrupted her time with Old Father.

‘Danlo,’ she said, ‘please sit with us and tell us what is blessed.’

‘You’re early,’ Old Father said to Danlo out of one half of his mouth. ‘But, yes, please sit down. Take your boots off and sit down.’ And then, from his mouth’s left side, at the same time, he continued speaking to Fayeth: ‘We must try something more difficult this time, perhaps something that humans know very well when thinking about it but find impossible to explain.’

They were playing with realities; specifically, they were playing a game called spelad in which Fayeth, prompted by a hint from Old Father, would name some object, idea, personage, historical movement, or phenomenon. Old Father would then choose a particular worldview, which Fayeth was required to enter. She would behold the named object through this worldview, describing its various aspects as if she had been born a tychist or a Buddhist or even an alien. Points were scored according to her knowledge, her sense of shih, and above all, her mastery of plexity.

‘I’ll name a concept this time,’ Fayeth said. She smiled at Danlo and continued, ‘And the concept is: the future.’

‘Oh, but this is not precise enough,’ Old Father said. ‘Do you know the doctrine of the sarvam asti?’

‘The Hindu doctrine or that of the scryers?’

‘It’s your choice,’ Old Father said.

‘Then I’ll choose the scryers’ doctrine.’

‘Very well. Then let me choose a worldview. Aha, abide with me a moment.’ Old Father looked at Danlo knowingly, then turned to Fayeth and said, ‘I choose the view of the scientists. Aha, aha – and to make this more difficult, the ancient scientists. Before the mechanics and holists split off from them to form their own arts.’

Danlo had never heard of the sarvam asti: the doctrine that everything exists, past and future, because the mind, at the moment of conceiving all things, could not do so if they didn’t exist. In truth, at that moment, he didn’t care about games or doctrines because he had discovered the existence of a terrible thing that he could barely conceive of. He tried to sit patiently across from Old Father, but at last he blurted out, ‘Sir, the blessed stars are exploding! Why didn’t you tell me about this?’

‘Ah, ah, the stars,’ Old Father said. ‘We must certainly consider the stars. But do you mind if I play the spelad with Fayeth? She’s scored nearly enough points to be excused from cooking next season’s dinners.’

So saying, Old Father continued his dual conversation, talking in two different voices at once. The first (or right-hand voice) was his usual melodious baritone; the second voice was high and raspy, as of a saw cutting through ice. Danlo struggled to separate the dual stream of words that spilled out of Old Father’s adroit mouth. It was a confusing way to hold a conversation, and it demanded his intense concentration. ‘Oh ho, Fayeth, you might begin by exploring the intersection of the ontic realm and platonic space. Oh, Danlo, the stars are exploding, you say? The existence arguments and suchlike. This has been known for some time. Space is space and the stars go on endlessly through space only –’

‘Sir,’ Danlo interrupted, ‘people are killing the stars!’

‘Ah, oh, oh, oh,’ Old Father said. Then he lifted a finger toward Fayeth and smiled. ‘You may begin.’

Fayeth hesitated a moment before saying: ‘The sarvam asti states that the future, in every future, the possibilities are actualized through an act of will, and –’

‘Oh, oh, Danlo, you’ve learned of the Vild, so it’s so. The Vild, the far part of the galaxy where a million stars are exploding, or ten million stars – and why?’

‘– because existence cannot be understood as other than quantities of matter distributed throughout a homogeneous space and –’

‘Because human beings have a need to deform space,’ Old Father said. ‘And for other reasons.’

While Old Father had been talking with Danlo, Fayeth had transformed herself into something like a scientist (or Scientist), and was continuing to hold forth about the future: ‘– can be an intersection of these two spaces only in mathematics which –’

‘Shaida reasons,’ Danlo said.

‘– certainly the mind can conceive of things that have no existence in spacetime –’

‘Oh, ho,’ Old Father said to Fayeth, ‘but what is mind?’

‘When I was a child,’ Danlo said, ‘I used to think … that the stars were the eyes of my ancestors.’

‘– runs parallel programs, and reality represented by symbols –’

‘The stars … this splendid eyelight.’

‘– is not reflected in the natural world, nor is the world really reflected in mind –’

At this, Old Father shut his eyes for a moment and said, ‘Be careful about this word “reflect”.’

‘But stars are … just hydrogen plasma and helium,’ Danlo said. ‘Easy to fusion into light.’

‘– processing information, but macroscopic information decays to microscopic information, and therefore the future –’

Old Father said to Danlo, ‘To understand the Vild, we will have to discuss the Architects and their doctrines of the future.’

‘– the future is completely determined but unknowable because –’

‘It is the Architects who have created the Vild, yes?’

‘– the creation of information is a chaotic process and –’

‘The shaida Vild.’

‘– there is no way for the process to run any faster than time itself.’

Here both Danlo and Old Father paused in their conversation while Fayeth criticized the many-worlds hypothesis of the mechanics and went on to declare that there could be only one timeline, one reality, one future. The scryers’ doctrine, she said, was completely false. If scryers happened to foretell the future, this was only pure chance. The scryers were great deluders, and worse, they were firebrands who incited false hopes in the manswarms and caused the people to believe impossibilities. Scrvers should be silenced for their violations of truth. ‘They should be collared or banished,’ Fayeth said. Her face was hard and grim, and she seemed utterly serious. ‘Or their brains should be cleansed of their delusions, as was done on Arcite before the Order interfered. All scryers who –’

‘Ho, ho, that will be enough!’ Old Father said. ‘A scientist, indeed.’

At this, Fayeth breathed deeply and relaxed as she returned to her usual good humour. She folded her hands on her lap, waiting for Old Father’s approval.

‘You’ve done well – forty points at least. Ha, ho, there will be no kitchen work for you until next false winter.’

‘Thank you,’ she said.

‘And now,’ Old Father said, as he turned to Danlo, ‘we must discuss the Vild. And what better place to begin than the Doctrine of Totality. Ah, ho, Fayeth, you might want to hear this, too.’

Because it was cold in the thinking chamber, Danlo zipped his collar tight around his throat and sat next to Fayeth as he listened to Old Father’s remarkable story. Old Father told them of Nikolos Daru Ede, the first human being to become a god by carking his mind into a computer. The idea that a man could transfer into a machine the pattern of his brain – his personality, memories, consciousness, his very soul – astonished Danlo. Try as he may, he could never quite believe that one’s selfness could be encoded as a computer program. It amused him to think of someone incarnating as a machine, even a godly computing machine that could think a billion times faster than any man. Who could ever know what had really happened to Nikolos Daru Ede when he had become vastened in this impossible way? Of course, many billions of people believed they knew quite well. As Old Father explained, humanity’s largest religion had arisen from this singular event. Followers of Ede worshipped this god as God, and they called themselves the Architects of God. Two thousand years earlier, the Architects had fought a great war among themselves, but few knew that the defeated sect, the Architects of the Infinite Intelligence of the Cybernetic Universal Church, after their defeat, had fled into the unknown spaces of the galaxy that would someday become the Vild. According to Old Father, these Architects had a plan for totally remaking the universe according to the design of Ede the God, and so they were demolishing the planets and the stars, one by one. ‘Eleven years ago, Mallory Ringess sent a mission to the Vild. Oh, oh, but the mission failed. It’s the talk of the City: why the Vild mission failed and how to organize another.’

Old Father went on to speak of the Doctrine of Totality and other eschatological doctrines of the Edic religion. He tried to elucidate the Architect view of free will and the fate of the universe. Danlo was so enthralled by this story that he almost forgot he was sitting next to Fayeth. His thoughts fell deep and troubled, and he looked up at the dome covering the thinking chamber. Two days ago it had snowed, and lovely, white feathers of spindrift were frozen around the dome’s western quadrant; but to the north and east, where the dome was clear, there were stars. His heart beat a hundred times as he studied the milky glare of the blinkans, Nonablinka and Shurablinka. ‘These strange stars,’ he said. ‘I have always wondered about these stars. They are supernovae, yes?’

‘Oh, yes, supernovae, indeed,’ Old Father said.

‘But they were once stars … just like other stars.’

‘This is true.’

‘Stars like … our sun.’

‘Yes, Danlo.’

‘But … how is it possible to kill the stars, sir?’

For a while Old Father spoke of the Architects and their strange technologies, machines that could generate streams of invisible graviphotons and shoot them into the sun. He talked about ways to deform the smooth black tissues of spacetime, to collapse the core of a star into a ball of plasma so hot and so dense that it instantly rebounded in a cosmic explosion of light. Danlo, with his hands pressed together beneath his chin, listened raptly. Then, without warning, he sprang to his feet and flung his arms upward toward the night sky. ‘Light is faster than a diving goshawk – this I have learned. Faster than the wind. The light from the blinkans, from the supernovae that the Architects have made, this shaida light races across the galaxy, yes? The killing light. It races, eleven million miles each minute, but … relatively, it creeps like a snowworm across the endless ice. Because the blessed galaxy is so vast. There is a blinkan – Merripen’s Star, it is called. A supernova recently born. Soon, its light will reach this world, I think, and we will all burn. Then I and you and everyone will go over.’

Slowly, painfully, puffing with caution and care, Old Father stood up. He rested a heavy hand on Danlo’s shoulders, and his black claws clicked together. He pointed at a starless patch of sky east of Shurablinka. There, glowing circles of light rippled deep in their changing colours of tangerine and gold. ‘Do you see it?’ he asked.

‘The Fara Gelastei,’ Danlo said. ‘The Golden Flower – it has grown recently, yes?’

‘We call it the Golden Ring. And yes, it has grown. So, it’s so: six years ago, Mallory Ringess becomes a god, and the Golden Ring mysteriously appears in the heavens. Ah, ah – and not just in the heavens above our cold world. Above many worlds, all through the galaxy, there are rings of gold. It’s life, of course! An extension of the biosphere. New life floating along the currents of space, feeding off light. Exhaling photoreflective gases. A hundred billion rings of life – like seeds! – growing. There’s hope that these rings will shield Neverness from the light of the supernovae. Like a golden umbrella, it will shield us so that minds like yours might remain alive to ask: When will I be devoured by light?’

Fayeth, who was still sitting on the carpet, let loose a long, low whistle, the kind of disapproving sound that the Fravashi emit when they have caught one of their students falling into a belief system. She seemed delighted to point out Old Father’s error, and she said, ‘It’s not really known if the Golden Ring will protect us.’

‘Ah, ha, very good, this is true,’ Old Father said. ‘Not even the biologists have been able to project the Ring’s rate of growth.’

‘I’ve heard many people talking of abandoning our planet,’ Fayeth said.

‘Ah, oh, but the light from the supernova won’t reach Neverness for thirteen more years. There’s time enough to wait and see.’

A bell rang then, the dinner bell summoning them to a typically simple meal of bread, cheese, and a fruit, probably fresh snow apples or icy cold Yarkona plums. Old Father and Fayeth made ready to leave the thinking chamber, but Danlo remained near its centre, staring up at the sky.

‘What do you see?’ Old Father asked.

For a moment, Danlo kept his silence, and then he said, ‘The blessed stars. The … shaida stars. I never thought that anything could kill the stars.’

Soon after this, Danlo began associating himself with a cult known as the Returnists. This was the newest of the City’s cults, founded by a renegade scryer named Elianora Wen. She was a remarkable woman who had been born into one of the musical clans on Yarkona. When she was ten years old, her family brought her to Neverness, where she had thrilled the aficionados of Golden Age music with her mastery of the gosharp, flute, and other instruments. She might have had a long career as a music master, but she had stunned her family by renouncing everything to join the Order. She was strong-willed, thoughtful, provocative, quirky, and possessed of immaculate sensibilities, and so she had managed to win a position as a novice at Borja. Eventually, she had blinded herself and become a scryer, one of the finest, only to quit the Order at the time of the Pilots’ War. For thirteen years, she had frequented the better hotels and cafes near the Street of Embassies, drinking Summerworld coffees and eating kurmash, and making friends with everyone she could. By the time Danlo came to the City, she knew ten thousand people by name and twenty thousand more by the sound of their voices. She became quite popular as a reader of futures, though she scandalized the traditionalists by accepting money for her services. It was said that she gave all her money to the hibakusha hospices, but her fame and influence was based not on her generosity but upon a series of visions that had come to her on the 99th night of deep winter of the preceding year. In her reading of her own future, in a moment of blinding revelation, she had come at last into her calling, which was to prepare the people for the godhood of Mallory Ringess. This she had done, with all her considerable powers. The Returnists soon numbered in the hundreds, and they all believed – and preached – that Mallory Ringess would return to Neverness. He would save the Order from corruption and divisiveness, just as he would save the City from the panic over the coming supernova. It was the glory of the Ringess to cause the quickening of the Golden Ring, to watch over its growth, and thus to save the planet from the fury of the Vild. Someday, according to the Returnists, Mallory Ringess would stop the stars from exploding and save the universe from its ultimate fate.

During the long, sunny days of false winter, Danlo frequented the cafes along the Old City Glissade, drinking toalache tea with the Returnists who gathered there each afternoon for refreshment and conversation. The Returnists were mostly young Ordermen, joined by a few wealthy farsiders who wore rich clothes and golden bands around their heads as a token of their devotion. They liked to talk about the life of Mallory Ringess, and they liked to speculate as to the changes that a god might bring to their city. It was their hope that the Ringess would recognize them as true seekers and explain to them the mystery of the Elder Eddas and other secrets that only a god might understand. One day, while talking with a woman named Sarah Turkmanian and various of her friends, Danlo learned that Mallory Ringess had once journeyed to the Alaloi tribe known as the Devaki. Nearly seventeen years previously, he had made this journey in the hope of discovering the secret of the Elder Eddas embroidered into the primitive Alaloi chromosomes. This news astonished Danlo. He immediately guessed that he was Mallory Ringess’ son. Three-Fingered Soli had told him that his blood father was a pilot of the City, but he had never suspected that his father might also be a god. And his mother was surely one of the women who had accompanied Mallory Ringess on his ill-fated expedition, perhaps even Katharine the Scryer, and Danlo wanted to share this astonishing hypothesis with the other Returnists, but he was unsure if it was really true. Perhaps, he thought, Three-Fingered Soli had told him a polite lie concerning his true parentage. Perhaps his mother and father were really wormrunners, common criminals poaching shagshay furs from Kweitkel’s forests. Perhaps his mother had given birth to him far from the City, only to abandon him to die on some snowy ledge near the Devaki cave. It was possible that Haidar and Chandra had found him and adopted him, and it was very possible that Soli had told him a false story to spare him the shame of such an ignoble birth. Because Danlo had a keen desire to learn the truth about himself – and because he loved hearing any story told about the mysterious Mallory Ringess – Danlo joined the Returnists for tea and companionship and wild speculations, and he sat with them as often as he could.

It is hard to know what the future of this cult would have been if Elianora Wen hadn’t delivered her famous prophecy of the 11th of false winter. In the great circle outside the Hofgarten, she stood serene and grave in her immaculate white robe and announced to the City that the return of Mallory Ringess was imminent. He would return to Neverness in nine more days, on 20th night. The wounded hibakusha in their tenements should rejoice, for Mallory Ringess would restore them to health. The wormrunners and other criminals should flee the City or else Mallory Ringess would judge them and execute them for their crimes. Above all, she said, the lords and masters of the Order should humble themselves, for Mallory Ringess would return as Lord of Lords, and he would remake the Order into an army of spiritual warriors who would restore the galaxy to its splendour.

Given the mistrust of people towards scryers and their secret art, the effect of Elianora’s prophecy was somewhat amazing. Many wormrunners did in fact leave Neverness at this time; not a few merchants gave all their wealth and worldly possessions to the hibakusha and went to live together as dedicated Returnists in the free hostels of the Old City; and most amazing of all, six lords of the Academy renounced their positions to protest the political manoeuvring that had so weakened the Order. At dusk on 20th night, Elianora led nine hundred women and men of her cult up the lower slopes of Urkel to await the return of Mallory Ringess. ‘He will appear this night,’ Elianora had told everyone. Not only Returnists but many others came to see if this prophecy proved true. To Danlo, sitting in a meadow with the other Returnists, it seemed that half the City had turned out. Before it fell dark and the stars came out, he counted some eighty thousand people spread out on Urkel’s slopes. From the eastern edge of the Academy down around to the Hollow Fields, where the hills flattened out just south of the mountain, they laid out their furs on the snowy rocks and passed around bottles of toalache or wine. The Returnists, of course, held a central position slightly higher than everyone else. Below them the city of Neverness sparkled with a million lights; above their encampment on the mountain, the dark icefields and ridgelines gave way to the blackness of nearspace, and the sky was brilliant with starlight. Elianora had not said how Mallory Ringess would return from the stars. Some hoped that he would fall to earth like a meteor, or even materialize out of the air and walk among them. But most expected that his famous lightship, the Immanent Carnation, would appear in the heavens like a flash of silver and glide down to the waiting runs of the Hollow Fields. Then Mallory Ringess would climb out of his ship and ascend the mountain like any other man, though in truth, no one knew if he would still look like a man. No one knew what a god was supposed to look like, and so the swarms of people drank their toalache and talked about the purposes of evolution, and they waited.

Danlo waited too, no less excited than any Returnist. Like the others, he wore a glowing golden band around his head; he wore his best racing kamelaika, and on his face, he wore the lively, longing look of one who expected to be touched by the infinite. He sat not within the first circle of Elianora’s followers, nor even in the second, but on the outer edge of this group, by a little stream running fast and full with melted snow. It was a warm, clear night of mountain winds and ageless dreams, and it would be a short night as false winter nights always are. But measured by the minds of the manswarm eager to behold a miracle, the night was long indeed. Danlo lay back against the cold earth, counting his heartbeats as he tried to count the thousands of stars burning through the night. It was a game he liked to play, but a game he could never win because there were too many stars and the sky never held still. Always the world turned into the east, turning its cold face to the deeps of the galaxy and to the greater universe beyond. Always, above the curve of the eastern horizon, new lights appeared, the blinkans and the constellations and the lone, blue giant stars. He lay there waiting and sometimes dreaming, listening to random bits of conversation that fell out of the mouths of the people nearby. All through the night, people made their way up from the City, and the crowds around him began to thicken. Near midnight, a few of the weary ones folded up their furs and abandoned their vigil. With every hour that passed, the people’s mood shifted from anticipation to grim faith to uneasiness, and then into an ugly suspicion that somehow they had been fooled. When the great Swan constellation rose above Urkel’s dark ridgeline, Danlo knew that the sun could not be far behind. He, too, had begun to doubt Elianora’s prophecy – at least he doubted the wisdom of taking her words literally. He was searching the tired faces of his fellow Returnists for despair when, one by one, everyone stopped talking and looked down the narrow, rocky path that wound up the mountain. For a moment, there was a vast, unnerving silence, and then someone cried out: ‘Look, it is he!’

Danlo looked down into the dark path to see a tall figure making his way across the stunt spruce and the snowfields. Like everyone else, he hoped that it was Mallory Ringess, but his eyes were used to looking for animals in dark forests, and he could see what others could not. Immediately, he recognized this latecomer as a Fravashi alien, and then moments later, from the tufts of fur below the ears and his arthritic gait, he saw that it was Old Father. As Old Father climbed higher up the path, this sobering fact became apparent to everyone else. There were many groans of disappointment; this sound broke from the lips of a thousand people with the suddenness of ice cracking from a glacier and falling into the sea. As if they had come to a sudden understanding, people began standing up and leaving. They brushed past Old Father without a glance, not even bothering to notice his strange smile or his golden eyes burning through the darkness. Old Father walked through the manswarm straight toward the spot where Danlo sat. He greeted Danlo politely, and then, in his most playful and sadistic voice, he asked, ‘Ho, am I too late?’

Danlo looked at the sudden flood of people going down the mountain, and he said, ‘Perhaps.’

‘Ah, oh, it’s nearly dawn. I’d heard that Mallory Ringess would appear before dawn.’

‘The whole city must have heard of Elianora’s vision,’ Danlo said.

‘Even we Fravashi,’ Old Father said. ‘But I wanted to see for myself.’

‘But, sir, how did you find me here? There are so many people.’

Old Father pointed his black claw at the circles of Returnists still sitting around Elianora Wen. Even as Danlo did, they all wore templets around their heads, and these nine hundred luminescent bands cast halos of golden light into the black air. ‘I followed the glow,’ Old Father said. ‘You can see it a long way off. And then as I came closer, I followed your scent. It’s unique and quite strong, you know.’

Danlo bent his head to sniff his clothes, and he said, ‘I did not know the Fravashi had such keen noses.’

‘Ha, ha, you smell like a wolf who has rolled in musk grass. Have you considered bathing more frequently?’

‘I … do bathe,’ Danlo said. ‘I love the water.’

‘Ah, ha, but you haven’t bathed since you began dreaming with the autists, have you?’

‘You know about the Dreamers, sir?’

Old Father said nothing but simply smiled at him.

‘Then you must know … about the Scientists as well?’

‘Oh, ho, I do know.’

‘These blessed worldviews,’ Danlo said. ‘These ways of seeing.’

‘Ah, oh, oh, ah,’ Old Father said. ‘This is a city of cults, isn’t it?’

‘But I have left the Dreamers,’ Danlo said. ‘I have left the Scientists, too.’

‘So, it’s so.’

‘You taught me, sir. How to free myself from any worldview.’

‘But now you wear the templet and sit with the Returnists?’

‘You are worried that I will become bound to this way … because it promises so much, yes?’

Old Father motioned toward the men and women sitting close to them, murmuring words of exhausted hope as they looked up at the sky. ‘This cult? Oh, no, no, no – when dawn comes and Mallory Ringess has failed to return, the Returnists will be no more. If I seem worried – and I must tell you that it’s nearly impossible for a Fravashi to worry – it’s only because you seem to love all cults too well.’

With his little finger Danlo touched the glowing templet tight against his forehead, and he asked, ‘But what better way … to know these ways?’

‘Well, there is the spelad, of course. Someday you may play this as well as Fayeth. Ah, ho, the whole Fravashi system.’

‘Spelad is a clever game,’ Danlo said. ‘But it is only a game.’

‘Ah, ah?’

Danlo held out his hand. In the light of his templet, his fingernails glowed yellow-orange. He suddenly curled his fingers toward his palm, making a loose fist. He said, ‘The Fravashi teach their students to hold any worldview lightly, as they would a butterfly, yes?’

‘To hold a reality lightly is to change realities easily,’ Old Father said. ‘How else may one progress from the simplex to the higher stages of plexity?’

‘But, sir, your students, Fayeth and Luister, the others – they hold most realities too lightly. They never really know the realities they hold.’

‘Ho, ho, do you think you understand the beliefs of science more completely than Fayeth does? And the other belief systems as well?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Then I’m afraid that I don’t understand.’

There was a half smile on Old Father’s face, and Danlo thought that he was being only half truthful with him.

‘There is a difference,’ Danlo said, ‘between knowledge and belief.’

‘Ah ho, aha,’ Old Father said.

Danlo turned to face the east, where the sky showed blue with the day’s first light. It would be some time before the sun rose, but already the horizon was stained with tones of ochre and glowing red. Many of the Returnists were looking in this direction, too. Elianora stood up and somehow oriented herself toward the coming dawn. Like all scryers she was blind, and more, her eyepits were scooped hollows as black as space. Perhaps she was waiting to feel the heat of the sun’s rays against her cheeks. If she was chagrined or shamed that her prophecy was about to prove false, she gave no sign.

‘Do you see this lovely scryer?’ Danlo said. He dropped his voice to a near-whisper and moved closer to Old Father. ‘Before she blinded herself, she had eyes as I have. As we do. She could see all the colours of the world. But … what if she had been born eyeless, just as she is now. What if she had been blind from birth, like the hibakusha babies? How could she know that blood is the reddest of all the reds? How could she see the colours of the sunrise? When you look at the sky, sir, do you say, “I believe in blueness”? No, you do not, not unless you are blind. You see the blessed blue, and so you know it. Don’t you see? We do not need to believe … that which we know.’

‘Ah, ho, knowing,’ Old Father said. ‘So, it’s so.’

‘Fayeth may understand the beliefs of Science better than I,’ Danlo said. ‘But she’ll never know Science … until she has seen a snowworm sliced into a hundred segments while it is still alive.’

‘Would you expect me to subject all my students to such atrocities?’

‘To be truly complex … yes. The other students play the spelad, and they think they know what it is like to move from reality to reality. But it is not really … real, to them. When they enter a new worldview … they are like old men wading in a hot spring. Half in, half out, never completely wet or dry.’

Now the sky was flaming crimson, and the air was lighter, and the trees and boulders across the mountain were beginning to take on the colours of morning. Of all the people who had climbed Urkel during the night, only the Returnists remained. And now most of these were leaving because their belief in the return of Mallory Ringess had been broken. This, Danlo thought, was the essential difference between belief and knowledge. Knowledge could only intensify into deeper knowledge, whereas belief was as fragile as glass. Hundreds of red-eyed people muttered to themselves as they cast betrayed looks at Elianora and turned their backs to her without bidding her farewell. They left behind forty-eight men and women who knew something they did not. Danlo knew it too, but he could hardly explain this knowledge to Old Father. He knew that, in some sense, Mallory Ringess had returned to Neverness that night. There had indeed been a god upon the mountain – Danlo had only to remember the wistful looks on eighty thousand faces to know that this was so. Because of Elianora’s prophecy, something in the City had changed, irrevocably, and something new had been born. Old Father was wrong to suppose that the movement she had begun would simply evaporate like dew drops under a hot sun.

Old Father, who was always adept at reading people’s thought shadows, studied Danlo’s face, then said, ‘You never really believed Mallory Ringess would return, did you?’

‘I do not want to believe anything,’ Danlo said. ‘I want to know … everything.’

‘Ha, ha, not an insignificant ambition. You’re different from my other students – they merely desire liberation.’

‘And yet they are so … unfree.’

Old Father’s eyes opened wide, and he said, ‘How so?’

‘Because they think they have found a system … that will free them.’

‘Haven’t they?’

‘The Fravashi system … is the one reality they hold tightly. And it holds them even more tightly.’

‘Do you have so little respect for our way, then?’

‘Oh, no, sir, I have loved this way very well, it is only …’

Old Father waited a moment, then said, ‘Please continue.’

Danlo looked down at the stream bubbling through the trees nearby. He said, ‘The virtue of the Fravashi system is in freeing us from systems, yes?’

‘This is true.’

‘Then shouldn’t we use this very system … to free ourselves from the Fravashi way?’

‘Ah, ah,’ Old Father said as he shut both his eyes. ‘Oh, oh, oh, oh.’

‘I must … free myself from this way,’ Danlo said.

‘Ohhh!’

‘I must leave your house before it is too late.’

‘So, then – it’s so.’

‘I am sorry, sir. You must think me ungrateful.’

Old Father opened his eyes, and his mouth broke into a smile. ‘No, I’ve never thought that. A student repays his master poorly if he always remains a student. I’ve known for some time you would leave.’

‘To enter the Order, yes?’

‘Ho, ho, even if the Order were to reject you, you still must leave. All my students leave me when they’ve learned what you’ve learned.’

‘I am … sorry,’ Danlo said.

‘Oh, ho, but I’m not sorry,’ Old Father said. ‘You’ve learned well, and you’ve pleased me well, better than I could say unless I say it in Fravash.’

Danlo looked down to see that his fellow Returnists were beginning to break their encampment, packing up their furs and baskets of food. One of them, a young horologe from Lara Sig, told Danlo that it was time to hike back to the City.

‘Perhaps we should say goodbye now,’ Old Father said.

Danlo glanced at Elianora, standing silently in the snow as she held her face to the morning sky. The other Returnists swarmed around her, talking softly, and one of them offered his arm for the journey back down the mountain.

‘In five more days,’ Danlo said, ‘I shall begin the competition. If the Order accepts me, may I still visit you, sir?’

‘No, you may not.’

Now Danlo froze into silence, and he was scarcely aware of the other Returnists leaving him behind.

‘These are not my rules, Danlo. The Order has its own way. No novice or journeyman may sit with a Fravashi. We’re no longer trusted – I’m sorry.’

‘Then –’

‘Then you may visit me after you’ve become a full pilot.’

‘But that will be years!’

‘Then we must be patient.’

‘Of course,’ Danlo said, ‘I might fail the competition.’

‘That’s possible,’ Old Father said. ‘But the real danger to you is in succeeding, not failing. Most people love the Order too completely and find it impossible to leave once they’ve entered it.’

‘But they haven’t been students of a Fravashi Old Father, I think.’

‘No, that’s true.’

‘I must know what it is to be a pilot,’ Danlo said. ‘A blessed pilot.’

‘Ho, ho, it’s said that the pilots know the strangest reality of all.’

Danlo smiled, then, and bowed to Old Father. ‘I must thank you for everything you’ve given me, sir. The Moksha language, the ideals of ahimsa and shih. And your kindness. And my shakuhachi. These are splendid gifts.’

‘You’re welcome, indeed.’ Old Father looked down the path where the last of the Returnists were disappearing into the forest. He said, ‘Will you walk back to the City with me?’

‘No,’ Danlo said. ‘I think I will stay and watch the sun rise.’

‘Ah, ho, I’m going home to bed, then.’

‘Goodbye, sir.’

‘Goodbye, Danlo the Wild. I’ll see you soon.’

Old Father reached over to touch Danlo’s head, and then he turned to walk home. It took him a long time to make his way down the mountain, and Danlo watched him as long as he could. At last, when he was alone with the wind and the loons singing their morning song, he faced east to wait for the sun. In truth, although he never told this to anyone, he was still waiting for Mallory Ringess. It was possible that this god was only late, after all, and Danlo thought that somebody should remain to greet him if he returned.