Читать книгу The Broken God - David Zindell, David Zindell - Страница 13

The starting point of Architect – or Edic – understanding is the recognition that God is created after the image of man. This idea views man and God as joined with one another through a mysterious connection. Man, out of hubris, wanted an image formed of himself as a perfected and potentially infinite God. In that man is reflected in God, he makes himself a partner in this self-realization. Man and God belong so closely to one another that one can say that they are intended for each other. Man finds his fulfilment in God.

– Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1,754th Edition, Tenth Revised Standard Version

On the twenty-fifth day of false winter, in the year 2947 since the founding of the Order, the annual Festival of the Unfortunate Petitioners was held at Borja College. This is the first of the Order’s colleges, and it occupies much of the Academy, which is really a separate city within the city of Neverness. At the very eastern edge of Neverness, pushed up against the mountains, is a square mile of dormitories, towers, halls and narrow red glidderies crisscrossing the well-tended grounds. A high granite wall (it is called the Wounded Wall because part of its southern face was once destroyed by the blast of a hydrogen bomb) surrounds the Academy on three sides: it separates the Academy’s spacious buildings from the densely arrayed spires and apartments of the Old City. There is no wall along the eastern grounds of the Academy. Or rather, the mountains, Urkel and Attakel, rise up so steeply as to form a beautiful, natural wall of ice and rock. Some students rail at such enforced isolation from the dirty, more organic city life, but most others find comfort in the company of like minds rather than loneliness or alienation or despair.

On this crisp, clear morning, at dawn, Danlo skated through the city streets until he came to the Wounded Wall. There, outside the wall’s West Gate, on a narrow red gliddery, he waited with the other petitioners who had come to enter the Academy. Danlo was one of the first to arrive, but in little time, as the sun filled the sky, thousands of girls and boys (and quite a few of their parents) from most of the Civilized Worlds began lining up behind him. For blocks in any direction, the side streets giving onto the Wounded Wall overflowed with would-be students wearing parkas, kimonos, ponchos, fur gowns, chukkas, sweaters, babris, cowl jackets and kamelaikas, garments of every conceivable cut and material. Many of the petitioners were impatient; they grumbled and muttered obscenities as they queued up, waiting for the great iron gates to open.

‘We’re early,’ someone behind Danlo said. ‘But you’d think they would let us come in out of the cold.’

Danlo examined the wall surrounding the Academy. It was as high as three tall men, and it was seamed with cracks and covered with sheets of greyish lichen. He had always loved climbing rocks, so he wondered if he could find a handhold in the cut blocks and pull himself up and over. Why, he wondered, would anyone want to build a wall inside a city?

‘It’s cold on this damn world – my tutors never told me it would be so cold.’

At last the gates opened inward, and the petitioners slowly filed onto one of the main glidderies cutting through the Academy. Behind Danlo there was much grumbling and shouting, pushing and shoving, especially at those intersections where it was not clear how the lines should merge. In several places, fights broke out. Most of these fights were short, clumsy affairs of cursing, flailing fists and hurried apologies when the combatants were pulled apart. Inside the gate, however, there was order. Scores of Borja novices, in their official, white robes, quickly separated the girls from the boys and led them in groups to various buildings around the Academy.

Danlo – along with two thousand other boys – was led across the high professional’s college, Lara Sig, to a large hemispherical structure called the Ice Dome. Inside the Ice Dome were figure rings, sled courts, and icefields on which was played that murderously fast game known as hokkee. That morning, however, the icefields were empty of skaters; for hundreds of yards across the icefields, beneath the curving, triangular panes of the dome, the novices had stacked many bundles of worn white robes. Next to each bundle was a heap of sandals of varying sizes. The sandals were paired, left foot to right, tied together around the toe thongs with a single white ribbon. Danlo smelled old wool and the rancid thickness of leather stained with human sweat. One of the elder novices – he was actually the Head Novice, Sahale Featherstone, a tall boy with a shaved head and a serious face – directed Danlo and the others each to choose a robe and a pair of sandals. ‘Listen, now, listen,’ the novice said to a group of boys standing nearby. ‘You must remove all your clothes and put on the petitioner’s robe.’

‘But it’s too damn cold in here!’ an unhappy boy next to Danlo protested. ‘Are we supposed to stand barefoot on ice while we rummage through a bunch of stinking old shoes? Our damned feet will freeze!’

The Head Novice ignored him, as did most of the other boys; at least, they did not pay him obvious attention. Few were pleased at having to strip naked in such a chill, open place, but neither did most of them want to be singled out as complainers. The boys did as they were told. The air was suddenly full of sound: zippers being pulled open, the swish of woven fabrics, clacking skates, and the buzz of a thousand voices. It was cold enough inside the Dome to steam the breath; everywhere Danlo looked, puffs of silvery vapour escaped from trembling lips and vanished into the air. Novices went among the naked boys, collecting clothes and skates and giving each of them a number in return. ‘Your number is 729,’ a pimply novice said as he wrapped Danlo’s jacket around his skates and tied the bundle together. ‘You must remember this number to reclaim your clothes after the competition.’ He didn’t explain that new clothes would be given to those few who were admitted to Borja. Plainly, he did not expect Danlo to be among the chosen.

Soon, all the boys were naked, and many were shivering, their brown or white or black skins stippled with goose bumps. The ice around the stacks of robes was crowded, but even so, each of the boys took care to keep a space around himself and not brush against any of his fellow petitioners. As they waited their turns at the stacks, they furtively glanced from body to naked body, comparing and reflecting, silently judging.

‘Hurry, please, I’m freezing to death!’

This came from a plump boy who had his arms clapped across his chest. He had dark brown skin the colour of coffee, and his eyes were full of fear; alternately, he lifted one knee high and then the other, up and down, touching the ice with his tender-soled feet as quickly and as briefly as possible. He looked silly and pathetic, like a strange insect dancing atop a blister of hot, shiny oil.

‘Please hurry!’

Ahead of Danlo was a frenzy of boys ripping through robes and sizing sandals to their feet. Everywhere, cast-off white ribbons from the sandals carpeted the ice. Danlo found that by kicking some of the ribbons together he could stand on them and not feel the ilka-hara, the burn of naked ice against flesh. He stood clutching his bamboo shakuhachi in his hand, patiently waiting his turn, watching and waiting, and all the while he was aware that many of the boys were watching him, too. They stared at his loins, at the membrum that Three-Fingered Soli had cut and marked with coloured scars. This unique mutilation riveted their stares. And Danlo stared at the other boys, or rather, he quickly surveyed the contours of the smooth, civilized bodies all around him. None of the boys had been cut; they each retained foreskins sheathing the bulbs of their membrums, and thus they were truly boys, not men. Some of the boys had yet to begin their growth; their chests were slight and narrow, and their membrums were almost as small as Danlo’s little finger. But even the older boys, with their large, fully developed membrums, were uncut. Despite his training in the perils of glavering, he could not take them as equals. (In truth, he worried at his own manhood, for how could he ever become a full man until he completed his passage and listened to the complete and whole Song of Life?) No, he was very different from all the others, and he was at once ashamed and proud of this difference. No one else seemed quite so tall, or as tough and hardy in the body. He stood calm and waiting, fairly inured to the cold. He was still too lean from his starvation the previous year; the sinews and bones stood out beneath his weathered skin, and long flat bands of muscle quivered with every breath taken and released. Most of the boys were weak-looking, as thin and white as snowworms or layered with fat like seals. Even the few athletes among them, with their carefully cultivated physiques, seemed pampered and soft. They looked at him – at the various parts of his body – with a mixture of horror, envy, and awe.

There was one other boy, however, who also stood out from the others, though mostly for different reasons. As Danlo donned a loose, scratchy wool robe and kicked on a pair of sandals, he overheard this boy talking about Ede the God and the Cybernetic Universal Church, a subject that interested him endlessly. He slipped through the crowded icefield until he came upon a short, thin boy who held the attention of others standing around him. ‘Of course, all the Cybernetic Churches worship Ede as God,’ the boy was saying. ‘But it’s the Architects of the original church who have created the Vild.’

In a low voice Danlo said a prayer, then whispered, ‘Shantih, shantih.’

The boy – his name was Hanuman li Tosh – must have overheard what Danlo said, for he turned and bowed his head politely. He had the oldest young face imaginable, smooth like new white ice and indecently unmarked even for a fifteen-year-old. At the same time, he seemed strangely jaded, as if he’d lived a thousand times before, and each life full of disappointments, boredom, anguish, madness, and desperate love. With his full, sensual lips, he smiled at Danlo; it was a beautiful smile, at once shy and compelling. In many ways, he was a beautiful boy. There was a delicateness to his finely-made face bones, an almost otherworldly grace. Danlo thought he must be either half an angel or half demon. His hair was yellow-white, the colour of an iceblink, and his skin was so white that it was almost translucent, a thin shell of flesh that could scarcely protect him from the coldness and cruelties of the world. Except for his eyes, he was really too beautiful. His eyes were a pale blue, vivid and clear like those of a sled dog. Danlo had never imagined seeing such eyes in a human being. There was too much sensitivity and suffering there, as well as passion and fury. In truth, Danlo instantly hated the sight of those hellish, shaida eyes. He thought of this strange boy as the ‘Hell-eyes’, a pale fury he should either flee from immediately or kill.

But the circle of chattering boys surrounding Hanuman pressed close and caught Danlo up in civilized conversation; he was caught, too, by Hanuman’s silver tongue and his charm.

‘I’m Hanuman li Tosh, off Catava. What does this word “shantih” mean? It’s a beautiful word, and the way you say it – beautiful and haunting.’

How could Danlo explain the peace beyond peace to a civilized boy with eyes out of his deepest nightmares? Hanuman was shivering in his sandals and his robe, looking at him expectantly. Despite the seeming frailty of his long neck and naked limbs where they stuck out of his robe, he bore the cold well. There was something about him that the other boys lacked, some inner fire or intensity of purpose. He had his fist up to his mouth coughing at the cold air, but even in his pain, he seemed very determined and very aware of Danlo looking at him.

‘Shantih,’ Danlo said, ‘is a word … my father taught me. It is really the formal ending to a prayer.’

‘And what language would that be? What religion?’

Danlo had been warned not to reveal his past so he evaded the question. ‘I have not presented myself,’ he said. ‘I am Danlo.’ He bowed his head and smiled.

‘Just … Danlo?’

He didn’t want to tell him that he was Danlo, son of Haidar, whose father was Wicent, the son of Nuri the Bear-killer. He felt the other boys staring at him, whispering, and he blurted out, ‘They call me Danlo the Wild.’

Behind Hanuman, a muscle-fat boy with a cracking voice and a pugnacious face began to laugh. His name was Konrad and he called out, ‘Danlo the Wild – what kind of name is that?’

And someone else said, ‘Danlo the Wild, the nameless child.’

Danlo’s neck suddenly hurt and his eyes were burning with shame. He stood there breathing deeply and evenly, as Haidar had taught him, letting the cold air enter his lungs to steal the heat from his anger. A few of the boys laughed at him and made jokes about his strange name. Most, however, hung back and kept their silence, obviously doubting the wisdom of baiting such a tough-looking boy. With a feather stuck in his hair and his deep blue eyes, Danlo did in fact look uncivilized and not a little wild.

Hanuman coughed some more, great racking coughs that tore through his chest and brought tears to his eyes. When he had caught his breath, he asked, ‘Which is your birth world?’

‘I was born here.’

‘You were? In Neverness? Then you must be used to the cold.’

Danlo rubbed his arms and blew on his fingers to warm them. A man, he thought, should not complain about things he can’t change, so he said, simply, ‘Can one ever get used to the cold?’

‘I certainly can’t,’ Hanuman said as he began coughing again. And then, ‘So cold – how do you stand it?’

Danlo watched him cough for a while, and said, ‘You are ill, yes?’

‘Ill? No, I’m not – it’s just that the air is so cold it cuts the lungs.’

After another round of coughing, Danlo decided that Hanuman was very ill. Once, when he was a young boy, he had watched his near-brother, Basham, die of a lung fever. Hanuman certainly had the pale, haunted look of someone who was contemplating going over. Perhaps a virus was eating away at his lungs. He seemed to be burning from deep inside. His eyes were sunken into dark, bruised flesh; the contrast of the light blue irises against the dark hollows made them seem more hellish by the moment. There was a fear in his eyes, a frightened, fey look almost as if he could see his fate approaching like a dark storm that would ice his heart and steal his breath away. He coughed again, and Danlo could almost feel the spasm tearing through his own chest. He was afraid for Hanuman. He was afraid, and that was seemly, for a man to fear another’s dying, but of course it was very wrong that Hanuman should be afraid for himself. Hanuman’s fear made Danlo sick. He had keen eyes, and he could see that this frail, ill boy was trying to hide his fear from all the others, perhaps even trying to hide it from himself. Someone, he thought, should feed him bowls of wolf-root tea and bathe his head with cool water. Where was his mother, to care for him? He would have placed his hand on Hanuman’s burning forehead to touch the fever away, but he remembered that he was not supposed to touch others, especially not strangers, especially not in sight of a hundred other laughing, joking boys.

Hanuman moved closer to Danlo and spoke in a low, tortured voice, ‘Please don’t tell the novices or masters I’m ill.’

He coughed so hard that he doubled over and lost his balance as his foot slipped on the ice. He would have pitched face forward, but Danlo caught him by the armpit and hand. Hanuman’s hand was hot like an oilstone and surprisingly strong. (Later Danlo would learn that Hanuman had trained in the killing arts in order to harden himself. In truth, he was much stronger than he looked.) Danlo gripped Hanuman’s hard little hand, pulling him to his feet, and suddenly they didn’t seem at all like strangers. There was something between them, some kind of correspondence and immediate understanding. Danlo had a feeling that he should pay close attention to this correspondence. Hanuman’s intenseness both attracted and repelled him. He smelled Hanuman’s fear and sensed his will to suffer that fear in silence no matter the cost. He smelled other things as well. Hanuman stank of sweat and sickness, and of coffee – obviously he had been drinking mugs of coffee to keep himself awake. With tired, feverish eyes Hanuman looked at Danlo as if they shared a secret. Hanuman shook off his hand, gathered in his pride and stood alone. Danlo thought he was being consumed from within like an overfilled oilstone burning too quickly. Who could hold such inner fire, he wondered, and not quickly go over to the other side of day?

‘You should rest in your furs and drink hot tea,’ Danlo said, ‘or else you might go over.’

‘Go over? Do you mean die?’ Hanuman spoke this word as if it were the most odious and terrifying concept that he could imagine. ‘Please, no, I hope not.’

He coughed and there was a bubbly sound of liquid breaking deep in his throat.

‘Where are your parents?’ Danlo asked as he combed back his long hair with his fingers. ‘Did you make the journey here alone?’

Hanuman coughed into his cupped hand, then wiped a fleck of blood from his lips. ‘I don’t have any parents.’

‘No father, no mother? O blessed God, how can you not have a mother?’

‘Oh, I had parents, once,’ Hanuman explained. ‘I’m not a slelnik, even though some people say I look like one.’

Danlo hadn’t yet heard of the despised, unnatural breeding strategies practised on a few of the Civilized Worlds; he knew nothing of the exemplars and slelniks born in abomination from the artificial wombs. He thought he understood a part of Hanuman’s pain and obvious loneliness; however, he understood wrongly. ‘Your parents have gone over, yes?’

Hanuman looked down at the ice and then shook his head. ‘Does it matter?’ he asked. ‘To them, I might as well be dead.’

He told Danlo something of his journey to Neverness, then. In the Ice Dome, a thousand boys were stamping their feet, slapping leather sandals against ice as they huffed out steam and complained of neglect, and Hanuman told of how he had been born into an important Architect family on Catava. His parents were Pavel and Moriah li Tosh, readers in the Cybernetic Reformed Church. (Over the millennia, the Architects of the Infinite Intelligence of the Cybernetic Universal Church have been riven into many different sub-religions. The Evolutionary Church of Ede, the Cybernetic Orthodox Churches, the Fostora Separatist Union – these are but a few of the hundreds of churches which have splintered off from the original church body, beginning with the Ianthian Heresy and the First Schism in the year 331 EV, that is to say, the 331st year since the vastening of Nikolos Daru Ede. All time, the Architects say, must begin at the moment Ede carked his consciousness into one of his mainbrain computers and thus became the first of humanity’s gods.) Like his parents, Hanuman had undergone the traditional reader training in one of the church schools. Unlike any of the respectable Architects that he knew, however, he had rebelled while still very young, begging his parents’ permission to attend the Order’s elite school in Oloruning, which is Catava’s largest and only real city.

‘My father allowed me to enter the elite school,’ Hanuman said, ‘only because it was the best school on Catava. But I had to agree to finish my reader training in the church after graduation; I had to agree not to attend the Academy on Neverness. So I agreed. But it was an impossible agreement. I never should have made it. All my friends in the elite school were planning to enter the Academy, if they could. And I’d always hoped to enter the Academy. To become a reader like my parents and grandparents – I never really wanted that. Oh, wait … please excuse my coughing. Do you know about the readers of my church? Of my parents’ church? No? I’m not supposed to tell anyone this, but I shall anyway. The second holiest ceremony in our church is the facing ceremony. You’ll have heard rumours about the facing ceremony – almost everyone has. No? Where have you spent your life? Well, in the facing ceremony, any Worthy Architect is allowed to interface with one of the church’s communal computers. The interfacing, entering into computer consciousness, the information flows, like lightning, the power. It’s like heaven, really, the only good thing about being an Architect. But before every facing ceremony, there has to be a cleansing. Of sin. We Architects … the Architects, call sin “negative programming”. So before a facing, a cleansing, because it’s blasphemy to interface a holy computer while unclean with negative programs – that’s what most of the Cybernetic Churches teach. I can’t tell you about the cleansing ceremony. It’s worse than hateful, really, it’s a violation of the soul. Oh, I’ll tell you, if you promise to keep this secret. The readers strip bare your mind with their akashic computers. Everything, every negative thought or intention, especially vanity, because that’s the worst thing, the damning sin, to think too highly of yourself or want to be more than you were born for. Almost everything – there are ways of hiding things; you have to learn to keep your thoughts secret or else the readers will rape your soul. They’ll cleanse you until there’s nothing left. Have you ever had an imprinting? The cleansing is like a reverse imprinting. The readers remove the bad memories. They reprogram the brain … by killing parts of it. Not everyone believes that, of course, or else they’d panic whenever it was time for a cleansing. But even if the readers don’t actually kill the brain cells, they kill something else when they eliminate old synaptic pathways and create new ones. Why not call it soul? I know that’s an inelegant word for an elegant, inexpressible concept, but soul … you have to keep your soul to yourself, do you see? The soul, the light. And that’s why I left my church. Because I’d rather have died than become a reader.’

In silence Danlo listened as this intense, ill boy talked and coughed. That he talked so much and so freely surprised him. Danlo was beginning to discover a talent for listening to others and winning their trust. He listened deeply, as he would listen to the west wind scrape across and articulate the ice forms of the sea. He liked the way Hanuman used words, the richness and clarity of his thought. It was a rare thing, he knew, for a boy to speak as fluently as a skilful-tongued man.

‘I wonder what it would be like … to touch minds with a computer,’ Danlo said.

‘You’ve never faced a computer?’

‘No.’

‘Well, it’s pure ecstasy,’ Hanuman said.

Danlo touched the feather dangling from his hair, and then he touched his forehead. ‘You know about computers – are computers truly alive? Life, consciousness is … even the smallest living things, even the snowworms are conscious.’

‘Is a snowworm conscious?’ Hanuman asked.

‘Yes,’ Danlo said. ‘I am not a shaman so I have never entered into snowworm consciousness. But Yuri the Wise and others of my … other men that I have known have entered the consciousness of the animals, and they know what it is like to be a snowworm.’

‘And what is it like?’

‘It is like something. It is like being a snowflake in a blizzard. It is like the beginning of drawing in a breath of new air. It is like … I do not know. Perhaps someday I will become a snowworm and I will tell you.’

Hanuman smiled as he began to cough. Then he said, ‘You’re very strange, did you know that?’

‘Thank you,’ Danlo said, returning his smile. ‘You are strange too.’

‘Oh, yes, strange – I think I was born that way.’

‘And your parents?’ Danlo asked. ‘They had no sympathy … for this strangeness?’

Hanuman was silent for a few moments as he stared down at the steaming ice. As if he had come to a grave decision, he nodded his head. He looked up suddenly and then told Danlo the rest of his story. The Cybernetic Reformed Churches, Hanuman said, did not believe in the freedom of the soul. And so, hating the life-perverting ethos and practices of his church, Hanuman had made secret plans to journey to Neverness after his graduation. That he would be accepted to the Academy, he felt certain, for all his life he had studied the disciplines with a frenzy, and he had risen to the zenith of the ranks of the chosen. But, it was said, the greater the height, the farther the drop, and so one of his friends, out of envy and spite, had betrayed him to his father just before their graduation. His father had immediately removed him from the school. He never graduated. He was locked inside the reading room of his family’s church, there to familiarize himself with the heaumes of the akashic computers, with the Edic lights of the altar, and with the burning incense and brain musics used in Architect ceremonies. His father told him to meditate on the Book of God. He was to give special attention to its sub-books: The Life Of Ede, Facings, and Iterations. In Facings, a body of so-called wisdom revealed to Kostos Olorun long after Ede had become a god, he came across the crucial passage: And so Ede faced the universe, and he was vastened, and he saw that the face of God was his own. Then the would-be-gods, who are the hakra devils of the darkest depths of space, from the farthest reaches of time, saw what Ede had done, and they were jealous. And so they turned their eyes godward in jealousy and lust for the infinite lights, but in their countenances God read hubris, and he struck them blind. For here is the oldest of teachings, here is wisdom: No god is there but God; God is one, and there can be only one God.

What followed, in this holy book of Facings, were many chapters describing the detection and cleansing of hakras. For the thousandth time in his life, Hanuman reflected on his church’s doctrine that all human beings were considered – and condemned – as potential hakras, potential gods. What kind of hateful, corrupt church, he wondered, would deny the divinity within each human being? He decided that Kostos Olorun, three thousand years ago, in his ambition to validate the authority of the nascent church and to establish himself as ‘God’s Prophet’, had lied about receiving revelations from Ede, and more, that he had invented many false doctrines. While Hanuman waited for his father to cleanse him of his sins, he had a dangerous thought: The true meaning of Ede’s vastening was that each man, woman, and child should come to apprehend the god within. Every man and woman is a star – Ede himself had written these words in his Universals. But somehow his church had corrupted and perverted this beautiful image to mean that every woman and man is a star whose light must be extinguished periodically lest it outshine that of Ede the God. Perhaps, Hanuman mused, human beings truly were as angels, or rather, as godlings who might grow into infinity, and someday, at the end of time, be united with Ede and all the other gods of the universe.

Unwittingly, Hanuman had come to formulate one of the oldest and most secret heresies of his church: the Major Hakra Heresy. One day, in front of the reading room’s altar, as he watched the jewelled, Edic lights shimmering up through the spectrum from red to violet, he voiced this heresy to his father. His father, who was a stern, handsome man, was scandalized by his son’s ideas. He told him to immediately prepare himself for a deep cleansing. There was hatred in his father’s voice, jealousy and loathing. Although Hanuman had been cleansed many times, he had never had a deep cleansing. Against the power and subtleties of the holy computers as they cleansed him deeply, the little mind tricks he had learned would be useless; a deep cleansing would disfigure his soul as surely as a hot wind melts the features of an ice sculpture. He closed his eyes to look upon the familiar, very mortal face of his soul, and he was terrified. He begged his father to relent, to subject him only to the usual, mundane cleansing. But his father was a hard man. His father, this prince of the church, hardened his heart and reviled his son as a hakra; he would not relent. His father told him to kneel beneath the heaume of the holy, cleansing computer. But instead, in his terror and pride, in a blind panic, Hanuman swept up the gold incense stand and struck his father’s forehead. It was a quick, powerful, desperate blow; his father immediately fell dying across the altar. Hanuman gasped to see the rainbow of Edic lights falling over his father’s open brains. He wept uncontrollably as long as he dared, and then he tore the Edic lights from the altar and left his father in a pool of blood. He fled to Oloruning. There he sold the priceless lights to a wormrunner. He used the money to buy a passage on a harijan prayership, where one of the filthy pilgrims infected him with a lung disease. Thus he had come to Neverness, ill in his body and burning in his soul; he had come to the City of Pain hoping to enter the Academy and forget his sinful past.

Part of this story, of course – the sad, murderous part – Danlo did not learn until years later. For good reason, Hanuman was a secretive boy, and he would grow to be a secretive man. It was a mark of his unusual trust in Danlo that he had told him as much as he had. ‘I’ve given up everything to enter the Academy,’ he said to Danlo. ‘My whole life.’

He coughed for a long time, and Danlo listened to the ragged, ripping sound. The huge Dome was full of sound: wind breaking against the clary panes high above, chattering teeth, and two thousand shivering boys grumbling and wondering how long they would be made to wait in such a frigid place. Then a deep voice called out, ‘Silence, it’s time!’ The Head Novice, with a look of command written over his narrow face, quickly made his way to the centre of the Ice Dome. ‘Silence, it’s time for the first test. Form a queue at the nearest doorway; a novice will lead you to your first test. Silence! Once the test begins, anyone caught talking will be dismissed.’

Danlo looked at Hanuman and whispered, ‘I wish you well.’

‘I wish you well, Danlo the Wild.’

They began their walk across Borja, then. Boys and girls clad in thin white robes issued forth from many of the buildings. That year, some seven thousand petitions to compete in the festival had been accepted; long lines of would-be novices filled the glidderies. The sun was now high in the southern sky, and everywhere the spires were awash in the hot, false winter light. It was much warmer than it had been inside the Ice Dome. A film of water mirrored the red ice of the lesser glidderies. It was so slippery that some of the petitioners linked arms and proceeded very carefully. Others hurried recklessly along in sudden bursts of speed, using their flat leather sandals to skid and hydroplane across the ice. Danlo stayed near Hanuman, waiting for him to slip and fall at any moment. But Hanuman kept his balance, even as they made their way toward the Tycho’s Spire. Above them – above the dormitories and lesser buildings – this giant needle marked the very centre of Borja. Danlo liked the feeling of the novices’ college; it was a place of beauty that had taken centuries to evolve and unfold. On most of the buildings, variegated lichens burned across the stonework in lovely rosettes of ochre, orange, and red. Many old yu trees had grown almost as high as the spires themselves. It was impossible to stand on any lawn of the Academy and not hear the kap, kap, kap, of mauli birds pecking at bark. The smooth, immaculate glidderies, the fireflowers, the snow loons hunting yu berries in the snow – here, Danlo thought, was a place touched by the arts of mankind, and perhaps steeped in the unutterable essence of halla.

Beneath the Tycho’s Tower, surrounded by eight buildings which house the various computers used in the novices’ education, is the beloved Lavi Square. That is to say, it is beloved by the novices who gather there to gossip and greet new friends, and to enjoy a few moments (or hours) of open sky. The petitioners rarely come to love Lavi Square. Every year, the Test of Patience is held there. This is the first test of the Festival of Unfortunate Petitioners, and every year it takes a different form. Every year, the Master of Novices delights in designing trials to cull the most patient of petitioners. Sometimes the unfortunate boys and girls are made to recite poetry until their voices are hoarse, and the weak among them beg to be allowed surcease from the torment of speaking; one time, ten years before, they were required to stay awake and attentive while an historian lectured about the manifold horrors of the Fifth Mentality and the Second Dark Age. Only those few boys and girls who had remained awake after three days had been allowed to take the second test. Along with Hanuman – and seven thousand other boys and girls – Danlo was herded into the Square. For a hundred and fifty yards along the length and breadth of the Square, seven thousand straw mats were laid out in a neat array. Each mat was a rectangle three feet wide and four feet long. The mats were jammed close together, their frayed edges separated by only a few inches of white ice. A novice bade the petitioners each to kneel on a mat. Danlo took his place on a mat next to Hanuman. The sharp, ragged ends of the straw pricked his knees, and the mat was so worn and full of holes that the wet ice beneath bathed him with waves of cold.

‘Silence, it’s time!’ the Head Novice cried out again.

The petitioners fell silent as they looked up expectantly, eager to learn the nature of that year’s test. Except for a few yu trees laden with red fruit and some ice sculptures (and twelve precious shih trees from Simoom), the Square was entirely stived with row upon row of nervous girls and boys. Danlo smelled clean, childish sweat and the ferment of overripe berries. From the buildings towering over them came the plip, plip of melting icicles. There was anxiety in the air, a chill intensity of anticipation.

‘Silence, it’s time to present the Master of Novices, Pesheval Lal!’

From the building behind the novice, an ugly, bearded man emerged from the doorway and made his way down a flight of steps. His birth name was Pesheval Lal, and the novices and journeymen called him ‘Master Lal’, but everywhere else he was famous simply as ‘Bardo’. (Or, as ‘Bardo the Just’.) Bardo’s formal black robe was tight across his immense chest and belly. White is the colour of Borja, and all novices wear white, but Bardo the Just had been a pilot before assuming the office of Master of Novices; like the other pilots he was properly dressed, in colour. ‘Yes, silence!’ his voice boomed out, echoing the novice’s injunction. He was a huge man, and he had a huge voice. He sternly looked from petitioner to petitioner. He had cunning, superb eyes that didn’t miss very much when it came to judging human character. Occasionally he would favour one of the petitioners with a smile and a slight head bow. He strolled about with a ponderous, heavy gait, as if he were hugely bored with himself and the impromptu judgements he had to make.

‘Silence!’ he shouted, and his voice vibrated from building to building across the Square. ‘You’ll be silent while I explain the rules of this year’s test. The rules are simple. No one will be allowed off his mat except to relieve himself. Ah … or herself. There will be no eating or drinking. Anyone caught talking will be immediately dismissed. Anything not forbidden is permitted. It’s a simple test, by God! You’re here to wait.’

And so they waited. Seven thousand children, not one of whom was older than fifteen years, waited in the warmth of the false winter sun. Mostly they waited in silence. Hanuman, of course, couldn’t help coughing, but none of the officious novices patrolling up and down the rows of petitioners seemed to bear him any ill feelings. Danlo listened to this coughing, and he worried how Hanuman would stand the bite of the evening air. He thought to distract Hanuman’s ailing spirit with a little music, to take him out of himself. He removed the shakuhachi from beneath his robe and began to play. The low, breathy melody he composed caught the attention of everyone around him. Most of the petitioners seemed to enjoy the music; the novices, though, were not pleased. They shot Danlo poisonous looks, as if they were insulted that he had found a clever way around Bardo’s injunction to silence. To be sure, he was not talking, but in many ways the music he made was a purer communication than mere words.

In this manner, kneeling on his straw mat, blowing continuously down his long bamboo flute, Danlo whiled away the endless afternoon. It was a beautiful day, really, a day of warmth and pungent air wafting down from the mountains. The shih trees beneath the buildings were snowy with white blossoms, and clouds of newly hatched fritillaries sipped nectar and filled the air with an explosion of bright violet wings. It wasn’t hard for him to wait, with the sun burning hot against the clear sky. A million needles of light stung his neck and face. He closed his eyes and played on and on, taking little notice of the sun as it grew large and crimson in the west. When twilight fell, the first chill of evening stole over the petitioners, but he was still warm and fluid inside with the music of dreamtime. Then the stars came out, and it was cold. The cold touched him, gently at first, and then more urgently. He opened his eyes to darkness and cold air. There, above the City’s eastern edge, the sky was almost clear of light pollution; the sky was black and full of stars. In unseen waves, heat escaped the City and radiated upward into the sky. There were no clouds or moisture in the air to hold in the heat.

‘It’s cold! I can’t stand this cold!’

Danlo noticed the boy named Konrad sitting ten yards in front of him, sitting and cursing as he beat his legs to keep warm. A cadre of novices converged on him and grasped his robe. ‘Your face!’ Konrad shouted. ‘Your rotting face!’ But the novices took no notice of his bad manners or profanity; they immediately escorted him from the Square.

If Konrad was the first to forget his patience and hope, he was not the last. As if a signal had been given, children in ones and twos began standing and leaving the Square. And then groups of ten or a hundred gave up en masse, abandoning their fellows, and so abandoned their quest to enter the Order. By the time night had grown full and deep, only some three thousand petitioners remained.

Just before midnight, a wicked round of coughing alerted Danlo as to the gravity of Hanuman’s illness. It wasn’t very cold – at least it was no colder than the interior of a snow hut – but Hanuman was shivering as he coughed, bent low with his face pressing his mat, shivering beyond control. If he didn’t give up and seek shelter soon he would surely die. But Hanuman didn’t look as if he were ready to give up. The hard straw had cut parallel marks into his forehead and cheek; his eyes were open to the light of the flame globes shining at the edge of the Square. Such eyes he had, a pale blue burning as the hellish blinkans in the sky burned, strangely and with terrible intensity. Something terrible and beautiful inside Hanuman was holding him to his mat, keeping him coughing in the cold. Danlo could almost see this thing, this pure, luminous will of Hanuman’s beyond even the will to life. Each man and woman is a star, he remembered, and something brilliant and beautiful about Hanuman’s spirit attracted him, just as a fritillary is compelled to seek a woodfire’s fatal light.

‘Hanuman!’ he whispered. He couldn’t help himself. The urge to speak to this wilful boy before he died was greater than his fear of being dismissed as a petitioner. He had a strange, overwhelming feeling that if he could somehow see the true Hanuman, he would learn everything about shaida and halla. Waiting until none of the novices was near, he whispered again, ‘Hanuman, it is best not to touch your head to the ice. The ice, even through the mat – it is very cold. Colder than the air, yes?’

Through his chattering teeth, Hanuman forced out, ‘I’ve … never … been so cold.’

Danlo looked around him. Most of the nearby mats were empty, and those few petitioners who were within listening distance were curled up like dogs and seemed to be asleep. He pitched his voice low and said, ‘I have seen too many people go over. And you, you will go over soon, I think, unless you –’

‘No, I won’t quit!’

‘But your life,’ Danlo whispered, ‘to keep it warm and quick, your life is –’

‘My life’s worth nothing unless I can live it as I must!’

‘But you do not know how to live … in the cold.’

‘I’ll have to learn, then, won’t I?’

Danlo smiled into the darkness. He squeezed the cold bamboo shaft of the shakuhachi and said, ‘Can you wait a little longer? It will be morning soon. False winter nights are short.’

‘Why are you talking to me?’ Hanuman suddenly wanted to know. ‘Aren’t you afraid of being caught?’

‘Yes,’ Danlo said in a soft voice. ‘I know we should not be talking.’

‘You’re different from the others.’ Hanuman swept his arm in an arc, waving at the motionless petitioners slumped down on their mats. ‘Look at them, asleep on the most important night of their lives. None of them would take such a chance – you’re not like them at all.’

Danlo touched Ahira’s feather and thought back to the night of his passage into manhood. ‘It is hard to be different, yes?’

‘It’s hard to have a sense of yourself. Most people don’t know who they are.’

‘It is as if they were lost in a sarsara,’ Danlo agreed. ‘But it is hard to see yourself, the truth. Who am I, after all? Who is anyone?’

Hanuman coughed wickedly, then laughed. ‘If you can ask that question, you already know.’

‘But I do not really know anything.’

‘And that’s the deepest knowledge of all.’

They looked at each other knowingly and broke into soft laughter. Immediately, though, their laughter died when a novice clacked across the Square ten rows behind them. As they waited for him to pass, Hanuman blew on his hands and began shivering again.

When it seemed safe, Danlo asked, ‘You would risk your life to enter the Academy?’

‘My life?’ Hanuman rasped out. ‘No, I’m not as ready to die as you seem to think.’

He coughed for a while, then Danlo asked, ‘Did you journey here to become a pilot? It is my fate to be a pilot, I think.’

‘Your fate?’

‘I have dreamed of being …’ Danlo began, and then fell silent. ‘I … I have always wanted to be a pilot.’

‘I also,’ Hanuman said. ‘To be a pilot, to interface with the ship’s computer, this continual vastening the pilots are allowed – that’s the beginning of everything.’

‘I had not thought of it that way.’ Danlo looked up at the Wolf and Thallow constellations and the other stars, and said, simply, ‘I will become a pilot so I can journey to the centre of the Great Circle, to see if the universe is halla or shaida.’

He closed his eyes and pressed his cold thumbs against his eyelids. To see the universe as it really is and say ‘yes’ to that truth, as man and as asarya – how could he explain his dream to anyone? In truth, the Alaloi are forbidden to reveal their nighttime dreams or visions, so how could he tell Hanuman that he had dreamed of becoming an asarya?

‘What is this word “halla” that you keep using?’ Hanuman asked.

Danlo listened to the wind rise and whoosh between the buildings. It fell over him, and he began to shiver. Despite his discomfort, he loved the chill of the wind against his face, the way it carried in the sea smells and a feeling of freedom. How exhilarating it was to talk long past midnight with such an aware, new friend! How reckless to talk beneath the novice’s ears with only the wind for cover! Suddenly, the utter strangeness of kneeling on a scratchy mat and waiting with three thousand other freezing boys and girls was too much. He found himself telling Hanuman about the death of his parents and his journey to Neverness. He tried to tell him about the harmony and beauty of life, then, but he found that the simple Alaloi concepts he had been taught sounded trite and naive when translated into civilized language. ‘Halla is the cry of the wolf when he calls to his brothers and sisters,’ he said. ‘And it is halla that the stars should shine at night when the sun falls beneath the mountains. Halla is the way … the way false winter takes away the cold, and the way false winter dies into the colder seasons so the animals do not become too many and crowd the ice. Halla is … oh, blessed halla! It is so fragile when you try to define it, like crossing morilka, the death ice. The greater weight you give it, the more likely it is to break. Halla is. Sometimes, lately, I think of it as pure isness. A way of simply being.’

Hanuman pressed his lips together as he turned his face away from the wind and tried not to cough. ‘I’ve never known anyone like you before,’ he marvelled. ‘To cross a thousand miles of ice looking for something you call halla – and to do it alone!’

‘Old Father warned me that if I told anyone, they might not believe me. You will not … tell anyone else?’

‘Of course I won’t. But you should know, I believe you.’

‘Yes?’

Hanuman stared at the feather in Danlo’s hair, then coughed and said, ‘Danlo the Wild – you look a little wild. And the way you see things, so wild. I’ll have to think about what you’ve said. Especially about being. Can it be enough just to be? I’ve always dreamed of becoming.’

‘Becoming … what?’

‘Becoming more,’ Hanuman said.

While Hanuman bent low with another coughing fit, Danlo touched the shakuhachi’s ivory mouthpiece with his lips. ‘But Hanu,’ he said, impulsively inventing a diminutive form of his name. He reached over and touched the boy’s forehead. It was burning hot. ‘Hanu, Hanu, you are not becoming. You are dying.’

‘No, that’s silly,’ Hanuman said hoarsely. ‘Please don’t say that.’

After that, he lost his voice and began coughing in great breaking waves. Danlo wondered why the novices or Bardo the Just, who strolled among the petitioners from time to time, didn’t take this unfortunate, dying boy inside somewhere to heal him. He decided that entering the Order must be a kind of passage. And like all passages into new levels of being, there must always be danger and the possibility of death.

‘Will you play your flute now?’ Hanuman whispered. ‘I can’t talk anymore.’

Danlo wet his lips and smiled. ‘It is soothing, yes?’

‘Soothing? No, it’s haunting, really. Haunting. There’s something about the way you play, the music. Something I can’t bear to hear. But something I have to hear. Do you understand?’

Danlo played his music, then, even though his mouth was so dry that the playing was difficult. He licked his lips for the hundredth time. He was very thirsty. Since the morning coffee, he had drunk nothing, and his tongue was dry against his teeth, as dry as old seal leather. Of course he was hungry, too, with his belly tightening up empty and aching, but the hunger wasn’t as bad as his need for water. And, in truth, he was colder than he was thirsty. Soon, perhaps, the thirst would grow angry and all-consuming, but now, as he played, the cold was more immediate, like a stiff, frozen fur touching every part of him. The wind blew down his neck, and the mat was icy against his legs. It was hard to move his fingers, especially the two smallest ones on his right hand: as a child, he had burned them in the oilstones, and they were stiff with scar over the knuckles and now almost numb. Somewhat clumsily, he played his music while Hanuman watched and listened. And on Hanuman’s delicate face, in his eyes, there was a look of anguish, whether from the music or cold it was hard to tell. Danlo played to the anguish, all the time thinking of Old Father and the ‘holy pain’ that he delighted in causing others. Danlo took no joy in others’ suffering, but he could appreciate the need for pain as a stimulant. Pain is the awareness of life – that was a saying of the Alaloi tribes. Life was pain, and in Hanuman’s pain, there was still an urge to life. This miracle of living, though, was such a delicate thing liable to end at any moment. He could see that Hanuman was dying – how much longer could his will and inner fury keep him alive? Death is the left hand of life, he thought, and death is halla, but suddenly he did not want Hanuman to die.

He set down the shakuhachi and whispered, ‘Hanu, Hanu, keep your hands inside your robe. Do not blow on them. Fingers claw the cold from the air – do you understand?’

Hanuman nodded and thrust his hands into either of his loose sleeves. He said nothing as he began to cough and shiver even more violently.

‘Hanu, Hanu, you were not made for the cold, were you?’

Danlo rolled the thin wool of his robe between his fingers and smiled grimly. The wind rose up and drove particles of ice across the Square. It seemed that everyone was shivering, even the tired novices in their white jackets. For a long time, as the wind continued to blow, he looked at Hanuman. Hanuman had spoken sophisticated words, and he had courage, but in truth he was still just a boy, uncut and unseasoned against the world’s bitterness. He was frail and sick, and he would go over soon. Danlo watched and waited for him to go over. He waited, all the while wondering what dread, mysterious affinity connected his life with Hanuman’s. He studied Hanuman’s fevered face, and, somewhat worried at the turn of his thoughts, he decided that he and Hanuman must share the same doffel. Surely Hanuman’s spirit animal must be the snowy owl or perhaps one of the other kinds of thallow. Then, in the deepest, coldest part of night with the wind dying and the world fallen silent, just before dawn, Danlo heard Ahira calling him. ‘Danlo, Danlo,’ his other-self said, ‘Hanuman is your brother spirit and you must not let him die.’ Rashly, almost without thought, Danlo shrugged off his robe. There was a smile on his lips, grim necessity in his eyes. Then he leaned closer to Hanuman and worked the rough wool over his head, down over his trembling body. He knelt back down on his own mat, freezing and naked, astonished at what he had done.

Hanuman stared at him and smiled faintly. After a while he closed his eyes in exhaustion. Danlo scooped up a few of the nearby mats and built a half-pyramid over him. The overlapping mats – and his robe – might keep the wind from killing him.

‘Danlo, Danlo, there is no pain as terrible as cold,’ Ahira whispered to him.

While Danlo clenched his fists to keep from shivering, Hanuman fell into unconsciousness and began to dream. It was obvious he was dreaming: his eyelids fluttered like the wings of a fritillary, and he moved his cracked, bleeding lips silently. Then he began to murmur in his sleep, to call out for his father. ‘No, no, Father,’ he said. ‘No, no.’