The Wild

by David Zindell

  It was the wind that revived him. The wind, he remembered, was the wild white breath of the world, and it inspirited him with a power beyond that of mere oxygen to brighten his tired blood. He pushed his pack through the doorway and then stepped into the entrance hall. This high room was much like the halls of other temples that he had visited on Urradeth. There were the various sculptures of Nikolos Daru Ede (as a man) poised on marble stands all along the room’s perimeter. There were old steel benches, cold flame globes, a dried-up fountain silvered with spiderwebs and strewn with the husks of dead insects, and hot flame globes suspended high above that no longer radiated either heat or light. On the north wall facing him, someone had made a painting of the important scenes out of the life of Ede. This painting, at least, was still alive. For a while Danlo watched with amusement as Julius Ulric Ede – Ede’s father – presented the Ede child with his first tutorial computer on his first birthday. Then Danlo turned to the handfast at the centre of the hall. This was an ominous-looking little black box fused to a bright chromium stand as high as a man’s waist. A worthy Architect, upon entering almost any of the Cybernetic Universal Church’s various temples, would insert his right hand through the dark opening of this box. He would wait silently and calmly, trying not to sweat while the handfast completed a scan of his DNA. If he was truly worthy of worship – that is to say if he was an Architect in good standing who had recently been cleansed of negative programs and was not in arrears in his tithes to the Church – a pleasing note would chime out, and, for a moment, the Architect’s face would appear on the north wall with the face of Ede the God smiling down upon him. But if this Architect had not cleansed himself within the last year, an alarm would sound, alerting the guardian robots that one of the unworthy was about to defile the temple. On some barbarous worlds such as Ultima, the handfasts were infamous for concealing sharp needles tipped with deadly poisons. Anyone arrogant enough to enter the temple uncleansed would feel cold steel pricking through his flesh, and very soon, the fiery pain of ekkana or some other drug. Although Danlo thought that this handfast might be dead, too, he did not put it to the test. Instead, he set his pack down resting against its stand. Then he bowed to the face of Ede glittering on the wall and turned to explore the main body of the temple.

  He passed through a small door to his right and entered one of the temple’s gowning rooms. Here, in a narrow room of benches and steel closets, the male Architects would remove their street clothes before donning the sacred undergarments known as kardalai. They would pull on their sacred kimonos, too, before fastening a little skullcap to their shaved heads. Thus properly dressed, they would pass out of one of two doors that led into the deeper parts of the temple. Any Architect in need of a cleansing would submit himself to one of the readers who waited in the many cleansing cells along the temple’s west (and east) wall. Beyond the cleansing rooms, Danlo knew, at the very rear of the temple, there was a hospice where dying Architects were taken in to rest before spending their last moments as human beings. There was a vastening chamber where their minds were copied and carked into an eternal computer, and of course, a crematorium to sublime the bodies that had been emptied of true soul. Adjacent to the room containing the great plasma ovens were the chambers of the readers and the elders. Danlo thought this might be a rare opportunity to behold these forbidden chambers, but first he wanted to walk through the temple’s two central halls. And so, as if he were a worthy Architect properly gowned and cleansed, he opened the door to the meditation hall and stepped inside.

  Immediately upon entering this large, rectangular room, he held his breath in astonishment. The meditation room should have been a stark and vastly serene place. It should have been bare of everything except soft wool prayer mats and the whisper of chants and supplications falling off the glittering stone walls. Instead it was full of things. On stands of some clear, hard crystal that looked like diamond, there were displayed gyres and selduks, mantelets and kevalin sets and the heaumes of various cleansing computers. There were clearfaces and tortrixes and many models of eternal computers. All of these cybernetica were relics and holy objects of the many Edeic sects. On one of the stands, he even saw a set of the Reformed Church’s priceless Edeic lights, those once-living jewels wrought of firestones that now appeared to be quite dead. All through the hall, there were many other things used in the ceremonies of this star-flung religion: a babri worn by the elders of the Universal Church of Ede; the staff/computer of the Cybernetic Pilgrims of the Manifold; a bottle of holy wine used by the Fathers of Ede; a replica of Ede’s original clearface that adorns the temples of the Fellowship of Ede as well as those of the Fostora Separatist Union and the Architects of the Universal God. Arrayed in no way that he could detect, there were a hundred holy mirrors, perhaps from a hundred different churches, reflecting the images of the heaps of things gathered in the hall. One of these mirrors reflected his own lively blue eyes when he paused in front of it to regard the beard that had grown over his face during his journey from the Entity. But Danlo hated wasting himself on vanity; it always amused (and vexed) him to behold his own wild face, and so he quickly turned away from the mirror. He quickly found other objects to fascinate him. Next to a glass jar containing a blue rose sacred to the Architects of the Evolutionary Church of Ede, he found a rack holding a dozen flutes and shakuhachis. He remembered that Nikolos Daru Ede had been famous for his performances with these splendid instruments. With a quick smile at his readiness to commit sacrilege, he picked up one of the flutes. He carried it with him through the grand doorway where the meditation hall let into the facing room. He thought that perhaps this room would hold fewer objects and thus the acoustics would be better for the playing of flutes. And so he walked into the Temple’s holiest of holies.

  Directly in front of him, in this dead quiet place, was an upraised altar covered with a square white carpet. As with any of the very austere Urradeth temples, the only holy object on the altar was an exact replica of Ede’s eternal computer: a large black cube of neurologics and circuitry resting on mirrored chrome. Around the altar, across the facing room’s glittering stone floor, there were hundreds of rectangular prayer mats neatly arranged in columns and rows. A facing heaume sat gleaming at the centre of each of these mats. It seemed that the room had been set for an important ceremony. It seemed that at any moment cadres of worthy Architects wearing their glittering kimonos should file into the room and kneel on these mats, there to pull the chrome-covered heaumes over their heads in order to interface the eternal computer before them. But there were no Architects to be found in this lost and ancient temple. There was only one man, Danlo wi Soli Ringess, who thought to play his newly-found flute to the eternal seeking of human soul. And then, just as he was about to press the wooden mouthpiece to his lips, he noticed a swirl of coloured lights to his left. There, just outside the facing room’s other doorway leading back into the meditation hall, he noticed a seemingly simple devotionary, a little device that the Architects of the Old Church give to one another so that they may view the miracle of Ede the Man becoming Ede the God. Devotionaries were little black boxes that projected holograms of the face and form of Ede. Devotionaries were also sanctified personal computers that many individual Architects carried in their hands wherever they went. Many devotionaries, he remembered, could generate and receive radio signals to interface with various planetary communications networks. Because he thought that this devotionary might be the source of the signal that had brought him down to this Earth – and because it piqued his curiosity that of all the cybernetica in the hall, only this little machine still seemed to be turned on – he walked over to examine it more closely.

  Immediately, his eyes focused upon the imago of Nikolos Daru Ede. Suspended in the dusty air above the devotionary – a black box bejewelled with hundreds of tiny computer eyes like the compound eyes of an insect – was a faithful replication of the most famous man in the history of the human race. In his first life Ede had not been a large man,
and due to the projection limitations of the devotionary, ironically, the hologram display only diminished his physical dimensions. This luminous, almost evanescent Ede was no more than one foot high from his blue silk slippers to the diamond clearface that he wore on his head. Yet, as he had in life, the Ede seemed to usurp and completely subjugate the space that he inhabited, transforming it into something other than mere space. This was the design and purpose of all devotionaries, to show Ede the Man as the one who would transcend all space, all matter, all time.

  Because it pleased Danlo – sometimes – to honour the rituals of various religions, he bowed to this imago of a man who had lived almost three thousand years before. Then he circled closer, the better to study Ede’s famous face. The imago was turned away as if to look out into the meditation hall and the main body of the Temple – or perhaps only to regard it as a god might look down upon a world that he has created. It was possible, Danlo knew, if he positioned himself just so with his eyes level with those of the imago, to look into the eyelight of this hologram almost as if looking at a real man. Some of the better devotionaries – those connected with computer eyes and ears – could even process information received from their immediate environment. They could ‘see’ the faces of the devoted Architects who bowed before them; they could ‘hear’ their voices and prayers when spoken to. The devotionaries of the Old Church projected an Ede who could react in certain programmed ways according to the words, facial expressions, voice patterns and emotions of the individual devotee. Thus an Architect searching for answers to the problems of her life might be greeted with platitudes or gems of dogma (or sometimes even deep wisdom) out of the Book of God; a doubtful Architect might be gently chastened to return to his faith; a sad and soul-sick Architect might be graced with an unusually long vision of Ede the God. Although Danlo expected the Ede imago to fall into one or another of these almost mechanical attitudes, he was unprepared for what actually happened. At his approach, the Ede suddenly turned his head, arched an eyebrow, and smiled almost wickedly. He looked straight at Danlo and said, ‘Di nisti so fayance? La nistenei ito so wahai.’

  Danlo did not recognize the language that issued forth from the devotionary. But even if he had, it always discomfited him to speak to a robot or a hologram generated by some computer, and so he smiled shyly and said nothing.

  On wi lo-te hi ne-te il lao-on?

  He continued to look at the imago. Ede was not pretty at all but rather striking in appearance. With his coffee-cream skin and his large, sensuous lips, there was a softness about his face that hinted at something deeply feminine inside him. And yet, if this imago were true to life, Danlo thought that Ede must have been a hard man, too, for his features were set with purpose, as if his strong jaws and voicebox and face muscles were only tools in the service of his will. The most memorable thing about him were his eyes, being bright and black, full of experience, intuition, acumen. Ede’s detractors had always said that he had the cold and calculating eyes of a merchant, but it was not so. In truth, his were the eyes of a dreamer, a mystic, a prophet. Inside his dark, smouldering eyes there were worlds inside worlds. Ede was the man who would contain the whole universe, and everything about him bespoke a hunger for the infinite.

  Parang wan i songas noldor ano?

  At this, Danlo finally shook his head and sighed out, ‘I do not understand.’

  There was a pause lasting little more than a moment, and then the high, tense voice of Ede the Man whined out into the air. Although it was the devotionary itself that generated this famous voice, a set of sulki grids inside this black box convolved the sound so that the words seemed to flow directly from the mouth of Ede. ‘Are you of the Civilized Worlds? I would think you must be if you speak the Language.’

  Danlo smiled, then laughed softly. Despite his mistrust of artificial intelligences and the programs that enabled them to communicate with human beings, he was amused.

  After staring at the imago awhile, Danlo nodded his head. ‘Yes … I speak the Language.’

  ‘It’s curious that you do speak the Language,’ the Ede imago said, ‘since we are far from any of the Civilized Worlds.’

  ‘Very far,’ Danlo agreed.

  ‘I’m glad that you speak the Language since this enables us to speak together.’

  ‘To … speak together,’ Danlo said, smiling.

  ‘I’ve been waiting a long time for such a conversation,’ the Ede said.

  Danlo stared long and deeply at the imago of Nikolos Daru Ede. ‘You have been programmed to make conversation, yes?’

  ‘In a way,’ the Ede said, and his eyes glittered like the organic stone of the walls that surrounded them. ‘But I might rather say that this devotionary has been programmed to instantiate me so that I might converse with you.’

  This response almost astonished Danlo. A devotionary’s imago of Ede should have been programmed to discuss the Doctrine of the Halting or the Eight Duties that were the stepping stones toward an Architect’s vastening – or even the reprogramming of an individual Architect’s mind following the cleansing of his sins. But it should never have referred to its own programming. Danlo thought that there was something strange about the tenor of their conversation, something strange about the very act of exchanging words with this glowing hologram which claimed to be an instantiation of Ede.

  ‘Where were you … where was this devotionary programmed, then?’ Danlo asked. He did not quite know whether he should direct his words to the devotionary or to the Ede imago itself. ‘On which planet were you made?’

  ‘These are excellent questions,’ the Ede said.

  Danlo waited a long time for the imago to say more, and then he asked, ‘You … do not know?’

  Evasively, the Ede replied, ‘It may be that the answers to these questions will emerge as we converse further.’

  Danlo slowly circled around the imago to view the face of Ede from different angles. But at each shifting of his position, Ede turned his head, and his shimmering gaze followed Danlo’s, never breaking the connection of their eyes. The imago should not have been able to do this. Devotionary imagoes of Ede were never programmed with such a range of motion and responsiveness. Devoted Architects must humbly seek out the eyelight of Ede and wait for his benediction, for this god of gods will not otherwise take notice of the all-too human beings who bow before him.

  ‘Why this program, then?’ Danlo asked. ‘I have never seen a devotionary … that was programmed to hold this kind of conversation.’

  ‘It’s always interesting to wonder why we’re programmed as we are.’

  Danlo said nothing as he listened to his breath steaming out of his mouth. He smiled at the unbelievable idea that he – or any other living thing – could be programmed as if he were nothing more than a computer made out of neurons and synapses and the chemicals of the brain.

  ‘Though a more interesting question,’ the Ede continued, ‘is who programs us as we are? And more interesting still: who programs the programmer?’

  This whiff of cybernetic metaphysics annoyed Danlo as much as it amused him, and so he considered turning off the imago. With the Ede hologram vanished back into the neverness of the computer’s program, he thought it might be easier to determine if the devotionary had generated the signal that had brought him down to this earth. He circled around the devotionary, searching among its glittering black faces for some switch or power plate to accomplish this end. But he found nothing, just hundreds of computer eyes watching his eyes as if he were some strange being impossible truly to comprehend. He concluded that this must be one of the many devotionaries activated by the human voice alone. He wondered if it might be coded to respond to almost anyone’s voice. He was about to utter the word ‘down’ when he noticed the imago staring at him. Very quickly, in moments, the Ede’s luminous face fell through a succession of emotions: alarm, regret, grief, anger, pride, exhilaration, hope and then alarm again, which was astonishing, since imagoes of Ede were usually programmed to beam for
th only wisdom, serenity, joy, or even love.

  ‘Please don’t take me down,’ the Ede suddenly said.

  ‘How did you know … that I was considering taking you down?’

  ‘I have many eyes,’ the Ede said. ‘And I can see many things.’

  ‘Then you can read my face? You run cetic programs, yes?’

  ‘My programming is very extensive. And the first algorithm of my programming is that I must ask not to be taken down.’

  ‘I see. You must ask this.’

  ‘My only power is that of words.’

  ‘Then it is a simple thing to take you down, yes?’

  ‘It’s simple indeed, but one would have to know the right word.’

  ‘Then do you know what this word is?’

  ‘I know the word, but I could never say it.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘The mere utterance of it, of course, would take me down.’

  ‘Then it is futile for me to ask what this unutterable word is, yes?’

  ‘It is futile,’ the Ede said, ‘but why would you even wish to take me down?’

  ‘I was hoping to discover the source of a simple radio signal.’ Danlo watched Ede’s face fall into an expression of sudden relief. ‘I had thought that this devotionary might generate this signal.’

  ‘But of course it does,’ the Ede said, smiling. ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘You speak of the devotionary as if it were identical to yourself.’

  ‘Well, it runs my program. Don’t you speak of your body and brain as if identical to yourself?’

  ‘Sometimes … I do,’ Danlo admitted. He did not want to tell this smirking Ede that he had once thought of his deep self as a fusion of his deathless self with his other-self, which happened to be a white bird known as the snowy owl. ‘Sometimes, I speak this way … but I am not a computer.’