Читать книгу The Broken God - David Zindell, David Zindell - Страница 9

The Dark God feared that the Fravashi might one day see the universe as it really is, and so might come to challenge him. Therefore, he implanted in each one an organ called a glaver which would distort his perceptions and cause him to mistake illusion for reality.

‘How effective is the glaver?’ asks the Unfulfilled Father.

‘Go look in a mirror,’ answers the First Least Father, ‘and you will see the effectiveness of the glaver.’

– Fravashi parable

In a way, Danlo was very lucky to encounter Old Father and his students before any others. The Unreal City – its proper name is Neverness – can be a cold, harsh, inhospitable city to the many strangers who come to her seeking their fates. Neverness is roughly divided into four quarters, and the Zoo, where Danlo came to land, is the most inhospitable of them all, at least for human beings. The Darghinni District and the Fayoli Flats, the Elidi Mews – in which of the Zoo’s alien sanctuaries or strange-smelling dens could he have hoped for succour? While it is not true that the Scutari, for instance, murder men for their meat, neither are those wormlike, cannibalistic aliens famous for goodwill or aid to the wretched. Had Danlo wandered up from the Darghinni Sands into the Scutari District, he would have found a maze of cluster-cells. And in each cell, through translucent wax walls as high as a man, the many waiting eyes of a Scutari clutch staring at whatever passed by. Danlo would never have found his way out of the confusing mesh of streets; there he certainly would have died, of neglect or cold, or, if hunger further deranged his wits and he dared to break open a cluster-cell with his spear, he would have suffocated in a cloud of carbon monoxide. And then the Scutari would have eaten him, even the toenails and bones. Those peculiar aliens believe that meat must never be wasted, and more, they avow that they have a holy duty to scavenge meat whenever fate offers them the chance.

Old Father brought Danlo to his house in the Fravashi District. Or rather, he bade his students to carry Danlo. The Fathers of the Fravashi – the Least Fathers, the Unfulfilled and the Old Fathers – do not like to perform physical labour of any sort. They consider it beneath their dignity. And Old Father was in many ways a typical Fravashi. He liked to think, and he liked to teach, and mostly, he liked to teach human beings how to think. It was his reason for living, at least during this last, deep winter phase of his life. In truth, teaching was his joy. Like every Old Father, he lived with his students in one of the many sprawling, circular houses at the heart of the Farsider’s Quarter. (The Fravashi District is the only alien district not located in the Zoo. In every way it is unique. Only there do human beings and aliens live side by side. In fact, human beings have fairly taken over the district and greatly outnumber the Fravashi.) Old Father had a house just off the City Wild, which is the largest of all Neverness’s natural parks or woods. It was a one-storey, stone house: concentric, linking rooms built around a circular apartment that Old Father called his thinking chamber. In a city of densely arrayed spires and towers where space is valuable, such houses are – and were – an extravagance. But they are a necessary extravagance. The Fravashi cannot enter any dwelling where others might walk above their heads. Some say this is the Fravashi’s single superstition; others point out that all Fravashi buildings are roofed with a clear dome, and that the sight of the sky, day or night, is vital to clear thinking.

Almost no one doubts that the Fravashi themselves have played a crucial part in the vitality of Neverness, and therefore, in the vitality of the Order. Three thousand years ago, the pilots of the Order of Mystic Mathematicians and Other Seekers of the Ineffable Flame crossed over into the bright Sagittarius Arm of the galaxy and founded Neverness. Two hundred years later, the first Fravashi came to the City of Light, and they taught their alien mental arts of hallning, shih, and ostrenenie. And the Order thrived. To learn, to journey, to illuminate, to begin – that is the motto of the Order. Only, would the pilots – and the cetics, ecologists and others – ever have learned so well if the Fravashi hadn’t come to teach them? So, no one doubts that the Fravashi have given the Order the finest of mind tools, but many believe that, like a bloodfruit squeezed of its juice, their teachings are old and dry. The Age of the Fravashi is two millennia dead, the naysayers proclaim. The Fravashi District with all its squat stone houses is an anachronism, they say, and should be razed to the ground. Fortunately, for the Fravashi and for all the peoples of Neverness (and for the boy everyone was calling Danlo the Wild), the Lords of the Order who run the City cherish anachronisms.

Danlo was given a room just off Old Father’s thinking chamber. Like all of the students’ rooms, it was austere, nearly barren of furniture or decoration. No rug or fur covered the polished wood floors; the walls were hexagonal granite blocks cut with exactitude and fit together without mortar. Beneath the skylight, at one end of the curved room, there was a low, platform bed. Danlo lay in this bed for many days, recuperating from his journey. While he was still unconscious, Old Father invited a cryologist and a cutter to his house. These professionals thawed Danlo’s feet and repaired his damaged tissue, layer by layer. When the body’s water crystallizes into ice, it expands and ruptures the cells, especially the fine network of capillaries vital to the flow of the blood. Gangrene becomes inevitable. The cutter could find no gangrene, however, because Danlo’s feet had not had time to rot. The cutter, a dour little man off one of the made-worlds of Camilla Luz, took Old Father aside and told him, ‘The boy has starved – I can’t tell you why. You say he speaks a language no one can understand. Well, he’s obviously new to the City. Perhaps his parents have died and he doesn’t know that food is free here. Or perhaps he’s an autist; he wouldn’t be the first autist to wander around and starve to death. I’ve put some nutrients back into his blood. He’ll wake up soon, and then he’ll need to eat, juices at first, and then fruits and starches and anything else he wants. He should recover quickly, however …’

Old Father was standing at the foot of Danlo’s bed, listening carefully, as the Fravashi always listen. He waited for the cutter to continue, and when he did not, he said, ‘Ahhh, is there a difficulty?’

‘There’s something you should see,’ the cutter said, pointing to Danlo, who was sleeping on his back. The cutter pulled back the covers and showed Old Father the cut membrum, the brightly coloured scars running up and down the shaft. ‘This mutilation was done recently, within the last half year. Perhaps the boy is sick in his mind and has mutilated himself. Or perhaps … well, this is a city of cults and bizarre sects, isn’t it? I’ve never seen this kind of thing before, but that doesn’t mean anything. I’ve heard a story that the boy tried to kill you with an archaic weapon. What do you call it? – with a spear. Is that true? No, don’t tell me, I don’t want to have to repeat what may be only rumours. But be careful, Honoured Fravashi. I’m no cetic, but anyone could read the wildness on this boy’s face. What is it they’re calling him, Danlo the Wild?’

Later that afternoon Danlo awakened, and he spent most of the next tenday in his bed, eating and sleeping. The other students brought him food, rich meat soups sloshing in bowls, and fruits and breads heaped atop the mosaic plates Old Father had transported from his birth world. Although Danlo couldn’t speak to the students, he kept them very busy. Possibly no other people can eat as much as hungry Alaloi. And Danlo, while not an Alaloi by heredity, had learned to ‘eat for a season’, as they say. He devoured yu berries in cream, roasted snow apples, and bloodfruits. He had his first awkward experience with wheat noodles, and a hundred other strange foods of the Civilized Worlds. There was nothing he did not like, even the yellow-skinned, sickly sweet fruit called a banana. He liked to eat and wonder at all that had happened, to eat again and sink down with a full belly into the delicious warmth of his bed. In truth, of all the marvels of civilization, he thought his bed was the most marvellous. The mattress was soft yet resilient and had a good smell. Wonderfully soft underfurs covered him. They weren’t the kind of furs he was used to; they were something finer, millions of individual strands of shagshay silk twisted into fibres and woven together into what one of Old Father’s students called a sheet. Danlo couldn’t imagine any woman making the effort to weave such a sheet. How long would it take? And the brown and white blankets were also woven, of shagshay wool. They were not quite as soft as the sheets, but still soft enough to lay his face against while he curled up and let the heat lull him to sleep.

As the days passed, however, his contentment gave way to a hundred doubts and worries. His mind cleared, and the sheer unnaturalness of his new life made him uneasy. The ways of the students who came and went were inexplicable. How did they cook the food they brought him? What kind of meat had he eaten? What were the animals’ names – he had to know the names of the dead animals who gave him life so that he could pray for their spirits. Didn’t these people understand the simplest of things? And as for that, how many people lived in this monstrous stone hut? He had counted six other students in addition to those he had met on the beach – four of them women. He wondered if they were all near-brothers and near-sisters? How could they be? Some had faces as white as that of a fatfish; a few, like the black man on the beach, must have burned their skins in a fire. All of them seemed to be of an age with his found-parents, Haidar and Chandra, though with their strange, weak, civilized faces it was hard to determine their years. Where were the old ones of this strange tribe? Where were their children? Why hadn’t he heard the babies crying in the deeper parts of the hut?

Three times Old Father came to visit him. Again Danlo was stunned by his inability to decide if this creature were man or animal. No man, he thought, could breathe through such a tiny black nose; no man had such long graceful limbs or such a delicacy of mouth and face. But then no animal had eyes like the sun, all golden and burning with awareness. And neither animal nor man could boast the profligacy of sexual organs which dangled between Old Father’s legs. His stones were not visible (the long, white belly fur probably covered them, he thought), but his membrum was huge and unique. In truth, his membrum was not a singular organ; all Fravashi males possess hemipenes, two huge connected tubes of flesh, one atop the other. Old Father took no care to cover himself or stand so that one of his legs might obscure this remarkable sight. He was clothed only in his shiny fur and his disdain for the human emotion of shame. ‘Danlo,’ he said, and his voice was like music. ‘Danlo the Wild, let us play the shakuhachi.’

Without any more words, Old Father indicated that Danlo should remove the bamboo flute from beneath his pillow, where he always kept it. He showed him the fingering, how to place his fingers on the holes up and down the shaft; he showed him how to blow into the ivory mouthpiece. Danlo took to the instrument immediately. Soon, he too was playing music, and Old Father left him alone to see what he might discover for himself. (The Fravashi do not like to teach things. Their whole art has evolved to find a way of teaching, rather than things to teach. In fact, the untranslatable Fravashi word for learning means something like ‘The Way’.) The pure notes and little melodies that Danlo coaxed from the shakuhachi were simple and unrefined, but for all that, had a power over him hard to understand. The music was haunting and soothing at the same time. After a while, after many long evenings of watching the stars through the skylight and making music, he concluded that the shakuhachi’s sound soothed him precisely because it was haunting. Like Ahira’s lonely cry, it called to the wildness inside and made him poignantly glad to be alive. It alerted him to possibilities. Only in this heightened state could he put aside his day to day anticipations and restlessness and listen to the holy music of life singing in his blood. The Song of Life – he played the shakuhachi, and its pure tones recalled the altjiranga mitjina, the dreamtime. Often, he let the music carry him along into the dreamtime. Like a wounded bird seeking refuge on a mountain ledge, he dwelt in the dreamtime until he was whole again. It was a dangerous thing to do, dangerous because once he developed a taste for the infinite, how should he return to the everyday world of snow and frozen slush and pain? There must always be time for simply living. Somewhere, at the end of the shakuhachi’s sound where it rushed like a stream of liquid light, there must be a balance and a harmony; there must always be halla. Yes, he thought, it was dangerous to play the shakuhachi, and it was very dangerous to seek halla, but, in truth, he loved this kind of danger.

Few come to such self-knowledge so young. Danlo applied this knowledge and began to savour not only music but the bewildering experiences of his new world. One of the women – she had golden hair and he thought her name was Fayeth – showed him how to eat with tools called chopsticks. His clumsiness and ineptitude with the wooden sticks did not embarrass him. In full sight of the curious students who often came to watch him, he would put his chopsticks aside, shovel handfuls of noodles into his mouth, and wipe his greasy hands on his face when he was done. He thought there must be something wrong with civilized people that they didn’t want to touch their food, as if they required a separation from life or things which had once been alive. And they were ignorant of the most basic knowledge. Adjacent to his room was another room, which was really more of a closet than a room. Every morning he entered this closet, squatted, and dropped his dung through a hole in the floor, dropped it into a curious-looking device called a multrum. He pissed in the multrum too, and here was the thing that frustrated him: the hole to the multrum was almost flush with the closet’s north wall; it was hard to position himself with his back to the wall without falling in the hole. But he had to stand in this cramped, awkward position in order to piss to the south. Didn’t the civilized makers of this dung closet know that a man must always piss to the south? Apparently not. And as for the dung itself, what happened to it once it fell through the hole? How was it returned to the world? Did dung beetles live in the multrum or other animals which would consume his excretions? He didn’t know.

Despite a hundred like uncertainties, he quickly put on muscle and flesh; soon he was able to walk easily again, and this amazed him for he kept waiting for his toes to blacken with the fleshrot. He was given to understand he was not welcome to leave his room, so he began pacing, pacing and pivoting when he reached the far wall, and then, because he was in many ways still just a boy, running back and forth to burn off the prodigious amounts of food he ate. Someone gave him a pair of fur slippers, and he discovered that after getting up his speed with a little running, he could slide across the polished floor almost as if it were wet ice. In this way he amused himself – when he wasn’t playing his shakuhachi – until his loneliness and curiosity became unbearable. It would be unseemly of him to ignore the wishes of his elders and leave his room, but surely, he thought, it was even more unseemly of Old Father and his family to leave a guest alone.

One night, after the others had gone to bed (or so he presumed), he set out to explore the house. He threw the blanket around his shoulders and put on his slippers; otherwise he was naked. His filthy furs, of course, had been taken away for burning, and he had been given no new ones. It didn’t occur to him that the others might believe the shame of his nakedness would be enough to confine him to his room. Indeed, there was nothing else to confine him. The Fravashi do not believe living spaces should be enclosed by doors, so Danlo had no trouble entering the narrow hallway outside his room. From one end of the curving hallway came a reverberant, rhythmic sound, as of someone chanting; from the other, silence and the smell of crushed pine needles. He followed the silence, followed the piney aroma which grew stronger with every step he took. Hexagonal granite blocks lined the hallway; they were icy to the touch and picked up the faint whisper of his furry slippers against the floor. Cold flame globes, spaced every twenty feet, gave off a many-hued light. He marvelled at the flowing blues and reds, and he might have killed himself sticking his hand inside one, but the globes were high above his head and he couldn’t reach them, not even with the probing end of his shakuhachi. In silence, he followed the flame globes down the hallway as it spiralled inward to the centre of the house.

Inevitably, he came to Old Father’s thinking chamber. Old Father was sitting on a Fravashi carpet at the room’s exact midpoint, but Danlo didn’t notice him at first because he was too busy gawking at all the extraordinary things. He had never imagined seeing so many things in one place: against the circular wall were wooden chests, gosharps, ancient books, heaumes of various computers, sulki grids, and cabinets displaying the sculpted art of fifty different races; a hundred and six different musical instruments, most of them alien, were set out on shelves. No spot of the floor was uncovered; carpets lined the room, in many places overlapping, one intricately woven pattern clashing against another. Everywhere, in huge clay pots, grew plants from other worlds. Danlo stared at this profusion of things so at odds with the rest of the house. (Or the little he had seen of it.) Many believe the Fravashi should live in the same austerity they demand of their students, but in fact, they do not. They are thingists of the most peculiar sort: they collect things not for status or out of compulsion, but rather to stimulate their thinking.

‘Danlo,’ came a melodious voice from the room’s depths, ‘Ni luria la, ni luria manse vi Alaloi, Danlo the Wild, son of Haidar.’

Danlo’s head jerked and he looked at Old Father in surprise. Old Father didn’t seem surprised to see him. And even if he had been surprised, the Fravashi strive at all times to maintain an attitude of zanshin, a state of relaxed mental alertness in the face of danger or surprise.

‘Shantih,’ Danlo said, automatically replying to the traditional greeting of his people. He shook his head, wondering how the man-animal had learned this greeting. ‘Shantih, sir. Peace beyond peace. But I thought you did not know the words of human language.’

Old Father motioned for Danlo to sit across from him on the carpet. Danlo sat cross-legged and ran his fingers across the carpet’s thick pile; the tessellation of white and black birds – or animals that looked like birds – fascinated him.

‘Ah ho, while you were healing these last ten days, I learned your language.’

Danlo himself hadn’t been able to learn much of the language of the civilized people; he couldn’t understand how anyone could comprehend all the strange words of another and put them together properly. ‘Is that possible?’ he asked.

‘It’s not possible for a human being, at least not without an imprinting. But the Fathers of the Fravashi are very good at learning languages and manipulating sounds, ah ha? At the Academy, in the linguists’ archives, there are records of many archaic and lost languages.’

Danlo rubbed his stomach and blinked. Even though Old Father was speaking the human language, the only language that could aspire to true humanity in its expression of the Song of Life, he was using the words in strange, hard to understand ways. He suddenly felt nauseous, as if nothing in the world would ever make sense again. ‘What do you mean by an “imprinting”? What is this Academy? And where are the others, the black man who held me on the beach? The woman with the golden hair? Where are my clothes? My spear? Does every hut in the Unreal City possess a bathing room? How is it that hot water can run through a tube and spill out into a bowl? Where does it come from? How is it heated? And what is a Fravashi? Are you a man or an animal? And where –’

Old Father whistled softly to interrupt him. The Fravashi are the most patient of creatures, but they like to conduct conversation in an orderly manner.

‘Ahhh, you will have many questions,’ he said. ‘As I have also. Let us take the most important questions one at a time and not diverge too far with the lesser questions that will arise. Human beings, diverging modes of thought – oh no, it’s not their strength. Now, to begin, I am a Fravashi of the Faithful Thoughtplayer Clan, off the world of Fravashing, as human beings call it. I am, in fact, an animal, as you are. Of course, it’s almost universal for human languages to separate man from the rest of the animal kingdom.’

Danlo nodded his head, though he didn’t believe that Old Father really understood the only human language that mattered. Certainly man was of the animal kingdom; the essence of the Song of Life was man’s connectedness to all the things of the world. But man was that which may not be hunted, and only man could anticipate the great journey to the other side of day. Men prayed for the spirits of the animals they killed; animals didn’t pray for men. ‘You are a Fravashi? From another world? Another star? Then it is true, the lights in the sky burn with life! Life lives among the stars, yes?’

‘So, it’s so. There is life on many planets,’ Old Father corrected. ‘How is it that you weren’t certain of this?’

Danlo brushed his knuckles against the rug’s soft wool. His face was hot with shame; suddenly he hated that he seemed to know so little and everyone else so much.

‘Where do you come from, Danlo?’

In a soft voice, which broke often from the strain of remembering painful things, Danlo told of his journey across the ice. He did not tell of the slow evil and the death of his people because he was afraid for Old Father to know that the Devaki had been touched with shaida.

Old Father closed his eyes for a while as he listened. He opened them and looked up through the skylight. Danlo thought there was something strange about his consciousness. It seemed to soar like a flock of kitikeesha, to divide and regroup without warning and change directions as if pursued by a snowy owl.

‘Ahhh, that is a remarkable story,’ Old Father said at last.

‘I am sorry I rose my spear to you, sir. I might have killed you, and this would have been a very bad thing because you seem as mindful and aware as a man.’

‘Thank you,’ Old Father said. ‘Oh ho, I have the awareness of a man – this is a rare compliment indeed, thank you!’

‘You are welcome,’ Danlo said very seriously. He hadn’t yet developed an ear for Fravashi sarcasm, and in his naive way, he accepted Old Father’s words without looking for hidden meaning. ‘You seem as aware as a man,’ he repeated, ‘and yet, on the beach, you made no move to defend yourself. Nor did you seem afraid.’

‘Would you really have killed me?’

‘I was very hungry.’

‘Oh ho!’ Old Father said, ‘there is an old, old rule: even though you would kill me, I may not kill you. The rule of ahimsa. It is better to die oneself than to kill. So, it’s so: never killing, never. Never killing or hurting another, not even in your thoughts.’

‘But, sir, the animals were made for hunting. When there is hunger, it is good to kill – even the animals know this.’

‘Is that true?’

Danlo nodded his head with certainty. ‘If there were no killing, the world would be too full of animals, and soon there would be no animals anywhere because they would all starve.’

Old Father closed both eyes then quickly opened them. He looked across the room at one of his shelves of musical instruments. As he appeared to study a collection of wooden flutes which looked similar to Danlo’s shakuhachi, he said, ‘Danlo the Wild – if you really lived among the Alaloi, you’re well named.’

‘I was born into the Devaki tribe.’

‘I’ve heard of the Devaki. They’re Alaloi, like the other tribes even further to the west, isn’t that true?’

‘Why should I lie to you?’

Old Father looked at him and smiled. ‘It’s known that when the ancestors of the Alaloi first came to this world, they carked themselves, their flesh. Ah ha, carked every part into the shape of very ancient, primitive human beings called Neanderthals.’

‘Neanderthals?’

‘The Alaloi have hairy bodies like Neanderthals, muscles and bones as thick as yu trees, faces like granite mountains, ah ho! You will forgive me if I observe that you don’t look very much like a Neanderthal.’

Danlo didn’t understand what Old Father meant by ‘cark’. How, he wondered, could anyone change the shape of his body? And weren’t the Devaki of the world? Hadn’t they emerged from the Great Womb of Time on the first morning of the world? That the Devaki looked much as Old Father said, however, he could not deny.

‘My father and mother,’ he said, ‘were of the Unreal City. They made the journey to Kweitkel where I was born. They died, and Haidar and Chandra adopted me.’

Old Father smiled and nodded politely. For the Fravashi, smiling is as easy as breathing, though they have learned the awkward custom of head nodding only with difficulty. ‘How old are you, Danlo?’

He started to tell Old Father that he was thirteen years old, but then remembered that he must have passed his fourteenth birthday at the end of deep winter, somewhere out on the ice. ‘I have lived fourteen years.’

‘Do fourteen-year-old Devaki boys leave their parents?’

Again, Danlo’s face burned with shame. He didn’t want to explain how his parents had died. He pulled back the blanket covering his groin and pointed to his membrum. ‘I have been cut, yes? You can see I am a man. A man may journey where he must.’

‘Ah ha, a man!’ Old Father repeated. ‘What is it like to be a man at such a young age?’

‘Only a man would know,’ Danlo answered playfully. And then, after a moment of reflection, he said, ‘It is hard – very hard.’

He smiled at Old Father, and in silence and understanding his smile was returned. Old Father had the kindest smile he could have imagined. Sitting with him was a comfort almost as deep as sitting in front of the flickering oilstones on a cold night. And yet, there was something else about him that he couldn’t quite define, something not so comforting at all. At times, Old Father’s awareness of him seemed almost too intense, like the hellish false winter sun. At other times, his attention wandered, or rather, hardened to include Danlo as merely one of the room’s many objects, and then his intellect seemed as cold as glacier ice.

‘Oh ho, Danlo the Wild, I should tell you something.’ Old Father laced his long fingers together and rested his chin in his hands. ‘Most people will doubt your story. You might want to be careful of what you say.’

‘Why? Why should I be careful? You think I have lied to you, but no, I have not. The truth is the truth. Am I a satinka that I would lie to others just for the sport? No, I am not a liar, and now it is time for me to thank you for your hospitality and continue my journey.’

He was attempting to stand when Old Father placed a hand on his shoulder and said, ‘Sit a while longer. Ho, ho! I can hear the truth in what you say, but others do not have this ability. And, of course, even hearing the truth is not the same as knowing it.’

‘What do you mean?’

Old Father whistled slowly, then said, ‘This will be hard for you to understand. But so, it’s so: It is possible for a human being to cast away true memories and implant new ones. False ones.’

‘But memory is memory – how can memory be cast away?’

‘Ah, oh, there are ways, Danlo.’

‘And how can memories be implanted? Who would want to remember something unreal?’

‘Oh ho, but there are many people who desire false memories, a new reality, you see. They seek the thrill of newness. To cark the mind in the same way they cark the body. Some people sculpt their bodies to resemble aliens or according to whatever shape is fashionable; some like to be aliens, to know a wholly different experience. Most people will conclude that you, Danlo the Wild, must have merely imprinted the Alaloi reality.’

‘But why?’

‘To be what you want to be: isn’t this the essence of being human?’

‘I do not know,’ Danlo said truthfully.

Old Father smiled, then bowed his head politely, in respect for the seriousness of effort with which Danlo received his words. Painfully, with infinite care and slowness, he arose to make some tea. ‘Ahhh!’ he grunted, ‘ohhh!’ His hips clicked and popped with arthritis; he could have gone to any cutter in the Farsider’s Quarter and ordered new hips, but he disdained bodily rejuvenations of any sort. He crossed the room, opened a wood cabinet, and from a shiny blue pot poured steaming tea into two mugs. Danlo saw no fire or glowing oilstones; he couldn’t guess how the tea was heated. Old Father returned and handed him one of the mugs. ‘I thought you might enjoy some mint tea. You must find it cold in this room.’

Indeed, Danlo was nearly shivering. The rest of the house – his room and the hallway at least – were warmed by hot air which mysteriously gusted out of vents on the floor, but Old Father’s thinking chamber was almost as cold as a snow hut. Danlo sat with his knees pulled up to his chest and wrapped his blanket tightly around himself. He took a sip of tea. It was delicious, at once cool and hot, pungent and sweet. He sat there sipping his tea, thinking about everything Old Father had told him. From the hallway, reverberating along the winding spiral of stone, came the distant sound of voices. Old Father explained that the students were chanting in their rooms, repeating their nightly mantras, the word drugs which would soothe their minds. Danlo sipped his tea and listened to the music of the word drugs, and after a while, he began digging around in his nostril for some pieces of what the Alaloi call ‘nose ice’. According to the only customs he knew, he savoured his tea and ate the contents of his nose. The Alaloi do not like to waste food, and they will eat almost anything capable of being digested.

With a smile Old Father watched him and said, ‘There is something you should know about the men and women of the City, if you don’t know it already, ah ho, ah ha!’

‘Yes?’

‘Every society – even alien societies – prescribe behaviours which are permitted and those which are not. Do you understand?’

Danlo knew well enough what was seemly for a man to do – or so he thought. Was it possible, he asked himself, that the Song of Life told of other behaviours that the Alaloi men practised when they were not around the women and children? Behaviours that he was unaware of? Or could the men of the City have their own Song? Obviously, they did not know right from wrong, or how could they have given him food to eat and not told him the names of the eaten animals?

‘I think I understand,’ he said, as he rolled some nose ice between his fingers and popped the little green ball into his mouth.

Old Father was still for a moment, then he whistled a peculiar low tiralee out of the side of his mouth. One eye was shut, the other open, a great, golden sun shining down on Danlo. The music he made was strange, evocative, and compelling. He continued to whistle out the corner of his mouth, while his remarkably mobile lips shaped words on the other side. ‘You must understand,’ he finally said, ‘among the Civilized Worlds, in general, there is a hierarchy of disgust of orifices. So, it’s so.’ He whistled continuously, accompanying and punctuating his speech with an alien tune. ‘In sight of others, or even alone, it is less disgusting to put one’s finger in the mouth than in the ear. Ha, ha, but it is more acceptable to probe the nose than either urethra or anus. Fingernails, cut hair, callouses and such are never eaten.’

‘Civilized people do not eat nose ice, yes?’ Danlo said. He suddenly realized that the city people must be as insane as a herd of mammoths who have gorged on fermented snow apples. Insane it was to imprint false memories, if that were really possible. And to eat animals and not say a prayer for their spirits – insane. Insane people would not know halla; they might not even know it existed. He nodded his head as if all the absurdities he had seen the past days made sense.

‘And what of a woman’s yoni?’ he asked. He took a sip of tea. ‘What level does this orifice occupy in the disgust hierarchy?’

Old Father opened his eye and shut the other. He smiled and said, ‘Ahhh, that is more difficult to determine. Among some groups of humans, the yoni may never be touched with the fingers, not even in private by the woman herself. Especially not in private. Other cultures practise the art of orgy and require touching by many, in public; they may even allow one orifice, such as the mouth, to open onto the yoni.’

Danlo made a sour face. Ever since he was eleven years old, he had enjoyed love play with the girls and young women of his tribe. Even among the wanton Devaki, certain practices were uncommon. Some men liked to lick women’s slits, and they were scorned and called ‘fish eaters’, though no one would think to tell them what they should and should not eat. Of course, no one would lick a woman while she was bleeding or after she had given birth, nor would they touch her at these times. In truth, a man may not look a woman in the eyes when she is passing blood or tissue of any sort – could it be that the people of the Civilized Worlds were insane and did not know this?

‘Danlo, are you all right?’ Old Father asked. ‘You look ill.’

Danlo was not ill, but he was not quite all right. He was suddenly afraid that Fayeth and the other women of Old Father’s house would not know to turn their eyes away during their thirtyday bleedings. What if their eyes touched his and the blood of their menses coloured his vision with the power of the women’s mysteries? And then a more despairing thought: how could a sane man ever hope to live in an insane world?

‘You seem to understand these … people,’ he said to Old Father. He rubbed his belly and then stared at Old Father’s belly, or rather stared below it at his furry double membrum. And then he suddenly asked, ‘Do the Fravashi women have two yonis? Do the Fravashi also have a hierarchy of disgust of orifices?’

‘No,’ Old Father said. He finished the last of his tea and set the mug down on the carpet. ‘The answer is “no” to both of your questions.’

‘Then why do you have two membrums?’

‘Ah ha, so impatient! You see, the top membrum,’ and here he reached between his legs, hefted his membrum in his cupped fingers, and pulled the foreskin back to reveal the moist, red bulb, ‘is used only for sex. The lower membrum is for pissing.’

‘Oh.’

Old Father continued whistling and said, ‘There is no disgust hierarchy. But, oh ho, the younger Fravashi, some of them, are disgusted that human males use the same tube for both pissing and sex, much as everyone is disgusted that the Scutari use the same end of the tube for both eating and excreting.’

Danlo stared at Old Father’s membrum. He wondered how he could claim to be a man – or rather an elder of his tribe – if his membrum were uncut. He listened to Old Father’s beautiful, disturbing music for a long while before asking him about this.

‘Ahhh, different peoples,’ Old Father said. He stopped whistling and opened both eyes fully. ‘Different brains, different self-definitions, different ways, aha, aha, oh ho! A man is a man is a man – a Fravashi: so, it’s so, do you see it, Danlo, the way the mirror reflects everything you think you know, the way you think? The mirror: it binds you into the glavering.’

‘I do not understand, sir.’

‘Haven’t you wondered yet why civilized ways are so different from those of your Alaloi?’

At that moment, Danlo was wondering that very thing. He held his breath for a moment because he was afraid that this unfathomably strange alien animal could reach into his mind and pull out his thoughts one by one. Finally, he gathered his courage and looked straight at sun-eyed Old Father. ‘Can you enter my head like a man walks into a cave? Can you see my thoughts?’

‘Ahhh, of course not. But I can see your thought shadows.’

‘Thought shadows?’

Old Father lifted his face toward the wall where the colours inside the cold flame globe flickered up through the spectrum, from red to orange, orange-yellow through violet. He held his tea cup above the carpet, blocking some of the flame globe’s light. ‘As real objects cast shadows by which their shapes may be determined, so with thoughts. So, it’s so: thought shadows. Your thought shadows are as distinct as the shadow of this cup. You think that the people of the City – the Fravashi too! – must be insane.’

‘You are looking at my thoughts!’

Old Father smiled at him then, a smile of reassurance and pity, but also one of provocation and pain. ‘And you are glavering, ah ho! Glavering, and human beings are the masters of the glavering. Glavering: being deceitfully kind to yourself, needlessly flattering the prettiness of your worldview. Oh, Danlo, you assume your assumptions about the world are true solely according to your conditioning. What conditioning, what experience, what uncommon art of living? Behold the cuts in your membrum. The trees and rocks of the forest are alive, you say? All life is sacred! Your mother spoke many words to you, did she not? How do you know what you know? How did your mother know, and her mother before her? The Alaloi have two hundred words for ice, so I’ve learned. What would you see if you only had one word? What can you see? The people of Neverness: they have many words for what you know as simply “thought”. Wouldn’t you like to learn these words? You see! When you look out over an ice field, you put on your goggles lest the light blind you. And so, when you look at the world, you put on the goggles of custom, habit, and tribal wisdoms lest the truth make you insane. Ahhh, truth – who wouldn’t want to see the world just as it is? But instead, you see the world reflected in your own image; you see yourself reflected in the image of the world. Always. The mirror – it’s always there. Glavering, glavering, glavering. This is what the glavering does: it fixes our minds in a particular place, in a traditional knowledge or thoughtway, in a limited conception of ourselves. And so it binds us to ourselves. And if we are self-bound, how can we ever see the truths beyond? How can we ever truly see?’

For a long time Danlo had been staring at Old Father. His eyes were dry and burning so he rubbed them. But he pressed too hard, temporarily deforming his corneas, and nothing in the room seemed to hold its colour or shape. The purple alien plants ran with streaks of silver and blue light and wavered like a mirage, like the mithral-landia of a snow-blind traveller.

After Danlo’s vision had cleared, he said, ‘The Song of Life tells about the seeing. On the second morning of the world, when Ahira opened his eyes and saw … the holy mountain named Kweitkel, and the ocean’s deep waters, unchanging and eternal, the truth of the world.’

‘Ah ha,’ Old Father said, ‘I’ve given you the gift of my favourite flute, and now I shall give you another, a simple word: epistane. This is the dependence or need to know a thing as absolutely true.’

‘But, sir, the truth is the truth, yes?’

‘And still I must give you another word, from my lips, into your mind: epistnor.’

‘And what is “epistnor”?’

‘Epistnor is the impossibility of knowing absolute truth.’

‘If that is true,’ Danlo said with a smile, ‘how are we to know which actions are seemly, and which are not?’

‘Ah, ah, a very well-made question!’ Old Father sat there humming a beguiling little melody, and for a while, his eyes were half-closed.

‘And what is the answer to the question?’ Danlo asked.

‘Oh, ho, I wish I knew. We Fravashi, sad to say, are much better at asking questions than answering them. However. However, might it be that one person’s truth is another’s insanity?’

Danlo thought about this as he listened to Old Father whistle and hum. Something about the music unsettled him and touched him inside, almost as if the sound waves were striking directly at his heart and causing it to beat more quickly. He rubbed his throat, swallowed and said, ‘On the beach, when I raised my spear to slay you, the man with the black skin looked at me as if I were insane.’

‘Ah, that was impolite of him. But Luister – that’s his name – Luister is a gentle man, the gentlest of men. He’s devoted to ahimsa, and can’t bear to see violence made.’

‘He calls me “Danlo the Wild”.’

‘Well, I think you’re very wild, still.’

‘Because I hunt animals for food? How does Luister think he could survive outside this Unreal City without hunting?’

‘And how do you think you will survive in the City without learning civilized ways?’

‘But if I learn the ways of insane men … then won’t I become insane, too?’

‘Ah, ha, but the human beings of Neverness have their own truth, Danlo, as you will see. And hear.’

Old Father’s music intensified, then, and Danlo could feel its theme in his belly. It was a music of startling new harmonies, a music pregnant with longing and uncertainty. The Fravashi Fathers are masters of using music to manipulate the emotions of body and mind. Ten million years ago, the ur-Fravashi, in their frightened, scattered herds, had evolved sound as a defensive weapon against predators; over the millennia, these primitive sounds had become elaborated into a powerful music. The frontal lobes of any Fravashi Father’s brain are wholly given over to the production and interpretation of sound, particularly the sounds of words and music. They use music as a tool to humiliate their rivals, or to soothe sick babies, or woo the unwed females of their clans. In truth, the Fravashi have come to view reality in musical terms, or rather, to ‘hear’ the music reverberating in all things. Each mind, for them, has a certain rhythm and tonal quality, idea-themes that build, embellish, and repeat themselves, like the melody of a sonata; in each mind, too, there are deeper harmonies and dissonances, and it is their joy to sing to the souls of any who would listen. Danlo, of course, understood nothing of evolution. Some part of him, however – the deep, listening part – knew that Old Father’s music was making him sick inside. He clasped his hands over his navel, suddenly nauseous. The nausea wormed its way into his mind, and he began to worry that his brief, narrow understanding of the Unreal City was somehow distorted or false. With his fist, he kneaded his belly and said, ‘Ever since I awoke in my bed, I have wondered … many things. Most of all, I have wondered why no one prays for the spirits of the dead animals.’

‘No one prays, that is so.’

‘Because they do not know any better!’

‘Praying for the animals is your truth, Danlo.’

‘Do you imply that the truth of the Prayer for the Dead is not wholly true?’

‘Aha, the truth – you’re almost ready for it,’ Old Father said as he began to sing. ‘Different peoples, different truths.’

‘But what truth could an insane people possibly possess … that they would not know the names of the animals or pray for them on their journey to the other side of day?’

Even though Danlo’s voice trembled and he had to swallow back hot stomach juices to keep from retching, even though a part of his interior world was crumbling like malku beneath a heavy boot, he was prepared to learn something fantastic, some horrible new truth or way of thinking. What this new truth might be, however, was impossible to imagine.

‘Danlo,’ Old Father said, ‘the meat you’ve eaten in my house is not the meat of animals.’

‘What!’

‘In nutrient baths, cells are programmed to grow, to replicate, to –’

‘What!’

‘Ahhh, this is difficult to explain.’

Both of Old Father’s eyes were now open, twin pools of golden fire burning with fulfilment and glee. He delighted in causing Danlo psychic anguish. He was a Fravashi, and not for nothing are the Fravashi known as the ‘holy sadists’. Truth from pain – this is a common Fravashi saying. Old Father loved nothing better than to inflict the angslan, the holy pain, the pain that comes from higher understanding.

‘The meats of the Civilized Worlds are cultured almost like crystals, grown layer upon layer in a salt water bath.’

‘I do not understand.’

‘Imagine: independent, floating tissues, huge pink sheets of meat growing, growing. Ah ho, the meats are really more like plants than animal. So it’s so: no bone, no nerves, no connection to the brain of a living animal. Just meat. No animal has to die to provide this meat.’

The idea of eating meat that wasn’t really meat made Danlo sick. He rubbed his aching neck; he coughed and swallowed back his vomit. How could he pray for the spirits of the dead animals, he wondered, when no animals had died to provide his meat? Had this meat ever possessed true spirit, true life? He grabbed his stomach and moaned. Perhaps his thinking truly was bound by old ideas; perhaps, as Old Father might say, he was glavering and was too blinded by his familiar thoughtways to see things clearly. But if that were so, he asked himself, how could he know anything? Like a traveller lost in the enclosing whiteness of a morateth, he searched for some familiar custom, some memory or piece of knowledge by which he might steer his thinking. He remembered that the women of his tribe, after they had finished panting and pushing out their newborn babies, boiled and ate the bloody afterbirths which their heaving wombs expelled. (In truth, he was not supposed to know this because it was the women’s secret knowledge. But once, when he was nine years old, he had sneaked deep into the cave where the men were forbidden to go, and he had watched awestruck as his near-mother, Sanya, gave birth.) No prayers were said when this piece of human meat was eaten. No one could think that an afterbirth might have a spirit to be prayed for. He tried to think of the civilized meats as afterbirths, but he could not. The meats of the City had never been part of a living animal! How could he forswear hunting to eat such meat? It would dishonour the animals, he thought, if he refused to hunt them and partake of their life. Something must be wrong with people who grew meat even as the sun ripens berries or snow apples or other plants. Something was terribly wrong. Surely it must be shaida to eat meat which had never been alive.

‘Oh, Danlo, you must remember, many men and women of the City live by the rule of ahimsa: never killing or hurting any animal, never, never. It is better to die oneself than to kill.’

Suddenly, the mint tea, the thousand unknown objects of the thinking chamber, Old Father’s piney body stench and his relentless music – all the strange sensa and ideas were too much for Danlo. His face fell white and grim while juices spurted in his mouth. He knelt on hands and knees, and he spewed a bellyful of sour brown meats over the carpet. ‘Oh!’ he gasped. ‘Oh, no!’

He looked about for a piece of old leather or something so he could sop up his mess. According to everything he had been taught, he should have been ashamed to waste good food, but when he thought of what he had eaten, he gasped and heaved and vomited again.

‘Aha, ho, I should thank you for decorating this carpet with the essence of your pain. And my mother would thank you, too – she wove it from the hair of her body.’

Danlo looked down at the carpet’s beautifully woven black and white birds, now swimming in his vomit. Birds shouldn’t be made to swim, he thought, and he was desperate to undo what had happened.

‘Don’t concern yourself,’ Old Father said gently. ‘As I’ve explained, Fravashi have no disgust of the body’s orifices, or of what occasionally emerges from them. We’ll leave this to dry, as a reminder.’

More insanity, Danlo thought, and he suddenly was dying to flee this insanity, to flee homeward to Kweitkel where his found-mother would make him bowls of hot blood-tea and sing to him while she plucked the lice from his hair. He wanted this journey into insanity to be over: he wanted the world to be comfortable and make sense again. He knew that he should flee immediately from the room, yet something kept him kneeling on the carpet, staring into Old Father’s beautiful face.

‘Now it begins,’ he said to Danlo, and he smiled. He was the holiest of holy sadists, but in truth he was also something else. ‘Who’ll show a man just as he is? Oh ho, the glavering, the glavering – try to behold yourself without glavering.’

Danlo touched the white feather bound to his dishevelled black and red hair. In his dark blue eyes there was curiosity and a terrible will in the face of falling madness. He felt himself becoming lost in uncertainty, into that silent morateth of the spirit that he had always looked away from with dread and despair. A sudden chill knowledge came into him: It was possible that all that he knew was false, or worse, arbitrary and quaint. Or worse still, unreal. All his knowledge of the animals and the world, unreal. In this insane City of Light, it very well might be impossible to distinguish the real from what was not. At least it might be impossible for a boy as ignorant and wild as he. He still believed, though, that there must be a way to see reality’s truth, however much it might rage, white and wild and chaotic as the worst of blizzards. Somewhere, there must be a higher truth beyond the truths that his found-father had taught him, certainly beyond what Old Father and the civilized people of the City could know. Perhaps beyond even the Song of Life. Where he would find this truth, he could not say. He knew only that he must someday look upon the truth of the world, and all the worlds of the universe, and see it for what it really was. He would live for truth – this he promised himself. When truth was finally his, he could come at last to know halla and live at peace with all things.

This sudden, revealed direction of his life’s journey was itself a part of the higher truth that he thought of as fate, and the unlooked-for connectedness between purpose and possibility delighted him. Inside, chaos was woven into the very coil of life, but inside, too, was a new delight in the possibilities of that life. All at once, he felt light and giddy, drunk with possibility. He was no longer afraid of madness; in relief (and in reaction to all the absurdities that had occurred that evening), he began to laugh. The corners of his eyes broke into tens of radiating, upraised lines, and even though he gasped and covered his mouth, he couldn’t stop laughing.

Old Father looked into his eyes, touched his forehead and intoned, ‘Only a madman or a saint could laugh in the face of this kind of personal annihilation.’

‘But … sir,’ Danlo forced out between waves of laughter, ‘you said I must look at myself … without glavering, yes?’

‘Ah ho, but I didn’t think you would succeed so well. Why aren’t you afraid of yourself, as other men are? As bound to yourself?’

‘I do not know.’

‘Did you know that laughing at oneself is the key to escaping the glavering?’

Danlo smiled at Old Father and decided to reveal the story of his birth that Chandra had often repeated. Even though Three-Fingered Soli had told him that Chandra was not his true mother, he liked to believe this story because it seemed to explain so much about himself. Probably, he thought, Chandra had witnessed his birth and altered the story slightly.

‘They say I was born laughing,’ Danlo told Old Father. ‘At my first breath of air, laughing at the cold and the light, instead of crying. I was not I then, I was just a baby, but the natural state, the laughing … if laughter is the sound of my first self, then when I laugh, I return there and everything is possible, yes?’

With one eye closed, Old Father nodded his head painfully. And then he asked, ‘Why did you come to Neverness?’

‘I came to become a pilot,’ Danlo said simply. ‘To make a boat and sail the frozen sea where the stars shine. To find halla. Only at the centre of the Great Circle will I be able to see … the truth of the world.’

Next to Old Father, atop a low, black lacquer table, was a bowl of shraddha seeds, each of which was brownish-red and as large as a man’s knuckle. Old Father reached out to lift the bowl onto his lap. He scooped up a handful of seeds and began eating them one by one.

‘Ah,’ he said as he crunched a seed between his large jaws. ‘You want to make another journey. And such a dangerous one – may I tell you the parable of the Unfulfilled Father’s journey? I think you’ll enjoy this, oh ho! Are you comfortable? Would you like a pillow to sit on?’

‘No, thank you,’ Danlo said.

‘Well, then, ah … long, long ago, on the island of Fravashing’s greatest ocean, it came time for the Unfulfilled Father to leave the place of his birth. All Unfulfilled Fathers, of course, must leave their birth clan and seek the acceptance of a different one, on another island – else the clans would become inbred and it would be impossible for the Fravashi Fathers to learn the wisdom of faraway places. In preparation for his journey, the Unfulfilled Father began to gather up all the shraddha seeds on the island. The First Least Father saw him doing this and took him aside. “Why are you gathering so many seeds?” he asked. “Don’t you know that the Fravashi won’t invent boats for another five million years? Don’t you know that you will have to swim to the island of your new life? How can you swim with ten thousand pounds of seeds?” And the Unfulfilled Father replied, “These shraddha seeds are the only food I know, and I’ll need every one of them when I get to the new island.” At this, the First Least Father whistled at him and said, “Don’t you suppose you will find food on your new island?” And the Unfulfilled Father argued, “But shraddha seeds grow only on this island, and I will starve without them.” Whereupon the First Least Father laughed and said, “But what if this turned out to be a parable and your shraddha seeds were not seeds at all, but rather your basic beliefs?” The Unfulfilled Father told him, “I don’t understand,” and he swam out into the ocean with all his seeds. There he drowned, and sad to say, he never came within sight of his new island.’

Having finished his story, Old Father rather smugly reached into the bowl and placed a shraddha seed into his mouth. And then another, and another after that. He ground up and ate the seeds slowly, though continually, almost without pause. The cracked seeds gave off a bitter, soapy smell that Danlo found repulsive. Old Father told him that it was dangerous for human beings to eat the seeds, which is why he did not offer him any. He told him other things as well. Subtly, choosing his words with care, he began to woo Danlo into the difficult way of the Fravashi philosophy. This was his purpose as a Fravashi Old Father, to seek new students and free them from the crushing, smothering weight of their belief systems. For a good part of the evening, he had listened to Danlo speak, listened for the rhythms, stress syllables, nuances and key words that would betray his mind’s basic prejudices. Each person, of course, as the Fravashi have long ago discovered, acquires a unique repertoire of habits, customs, conceits and beliefs; these conceptual prisons delimit and hold the mind as surely as quick-freezing ice captures a butterfly. It was Old Father’s talent and calling to find the particular word keys that might unlock his students’ mental prisons. ‘That which is made with words, with words can be unmade’ – this was an old Fravashi saying, almost as old as their complex and powerful language, which was very old indeed.

‘Beliefs are the eyelids of the mind,’ Old Father told Danlo. ‘How we hold things in our minds is infinitely more important than what we hold there.’

‘How, then, should I hold the truths of the Song of Life?’

‘That is for you to decide.’

‘You hint that Ayeye, Gauri and Nunki, all the animals of the dreamtime – you hint that they are only symbols of consciousness, yes? The way consciousness inheres in all things?’

‘So, it’s so: it’s possible to see the animals as archetypes or symbols.’

‘But Ahira is my other-self. Truly. When I close my eyes, I can hear him calling me.’

Danlo said this with a smile on his lips. Even though he himself now doubted everything he had ever learned, in the wisdom of his ancestors he still saw many truths. Because he was not quite ready to face the universal chaos with a wholly naked mind (and because he was too strong-willed simply to replace the Alaloi totem system with Old Father’s alien philosophy), he decided to give up no part of this wisdom without cause and contemplation. In some way deeper than that of mere symbol, Ahira was still his other-self; Ahira still called to him when he listened, called him to journey to the stars where he might at last find halla.

‘So many strange words and strange ideas,’ he said. ‘Everything that has happened tonight, so strange.’

‘Aha.’

‘But I must thank you for giving me these strangenesses.’

‘You’re welcome.’

‘And I must thank you for taking me into your home and feeding me, although of course I cannot thank you for feeding me shaida meat.’

‘Oh ho! Again you’re welcome – the Alaloi are very polite.’

Danlo brushed his thick hair away from his eyes and asked, ‘Do you know how I might become a pilot and sail from star to star?’

Old Father picked up his empty teacup and held it between his furry hands. ‘To become a pilot you would have to enter the Order. So, it’s so: Neverness, this Unreal City of ours, exists solely to educate an elite of human beings, to initiate them into the Order.’

‘There is a … passage into this Order, yes?’

‘A passage, just so. Boys and girls come from many, many worlds to be pilots. And cetics, programmers, holists and scryers – you can’t yet imagine the varieties of wisdom which exist. Oh ho, but it’s difficult to enter the Order, Danlo. It might be easier to fill an empty cup with tea merely by wishing it so.’

The Fravashi do not like to say a thing is impossible, so he smiled at Danlo and whistled sadly.

‘I must continue my journey,’ Danlo said.

‘There are many journeys one can make. All paths lead to the same place, so the Old Fathers say. If you’d like, you may stay here and study with the other students.’

In the thinking chamber, there was no sound other than the crunching of Old Father’s seeds. While they had talked, the chanting coming from the house’s other rooms had faded out and died.

‘Thank you,’ Danlo said, and he touched the white feather in his hair. ‘Kareeska, grace beyond grace, you’ve been so kind, but I must continue my journey. Is there any way you can help me?’

Old Father whistled a while before saying, ‘In another age, I might have invited you into the Order. Now, the Fravashi have no formal relationship – none! – with the lords and masters who decide who will become pilots and who will not. Still, I have friends in the Order. I have friends, and there is the smallest of chances.’

‘Yes?’

‘Every year, at the end of false winter, there is a competition of sorts. Oh ho, a test! Fifty thousand farsiders come to Neverness in hope of entering the Order. Perhaps sixty of them are chosen for the novitiate. The smallest of chances, Danlo, such a small chance.’

‘But you will help me with this test?’

‘I’ll help you, only …’ Old Father’s eyes were now twin mirrors reflecting Danlo’s courage in the face of blind fate, his verve and optimism, his rare gift for life. But the Fravashi are never content merely to reflect all that is holiest in another. There must always be a place inside for the angslan, the holy pain. ‘I’ll help you, only you must always remember one thing.’

Danlo rubbed his eyes slowly. ‘What thing?’ he asked.

‘It’s not enough to look for the truth, however noble a journey that might be. Oh ho, the truth, it’s never enough, never, never! If you become a pilot, if you journey to the centre of the universe and look out on the stars and the secret truths, if by some miracle you should see the universe for what it is, that is not enough. You must be able to say “yes” to what you see. To all truths. No matter the dread or anguish, to say “yes”. What kind of man or woman could say “yes” in the face of the truth? So, it’s so: I teach you the asarya. He is the yeasayer who could look upon evil, disease and suffering, all the worst incarnations of the Eternal No, and not fall insane. He is the great-souled one who can affirm the truth of the universe. Ah, but by what art, what brilliance, what purity of vision? Oh, Danlo, who has the will to become an asarya?’

Old Father began to sing, then, a poignant, rapturous song that made Danlo brood upon fear and fate. After saying good-night, Danlo returned to his room, returned down the long stone hallway to the softness and warmth of his bed, but he could not sleep. He lay awake playing his shakuhachi, thinking of everything that had happened in Old Father’s chamber. To be an asarya, to say ‘yes’ to shaida and halla and the other truths of life – no other idea had ever excited him so much. Ahira, Ahira, he silently called, did he, Danlo the Wild, have the will to become an asarya? All night long he played his shakuhachi, and in the breathy strangeness of the music, he thought he could hear the answer, ‘yes’.