The Wild

by David Zindell

  ‘I made a mistake,’ he told Danlo one day. ‘Out of fear, a fundamental mistake.’

  According to Ede, his mistake was to write the program encoding his personality too narrowly. Because he feared that the infinite possibilities of godhood might annihilate his sense of self, much as a sprouting plant destroys the seed from which it springs, he carefully searched the Enneagram for a personality type that might define and preserve the pattern of his selfness no matter how great a god he eventually became. And so in the very beginning he had codified all his human traits and faults and bound them into a simple form. He had then carried these faults godward. This mistake was exacerbated during his battle with the Silicon God when he had to compress himself, to prune his memory and programs down to the very simple remnants of Ede who haunted the devotionary computer. And now, three thousand years later, like a bonsai tree that had been pruned and repruned into its final, twisted shape, he was fixed in himself, was stunted and constrained and nearly dead. And this was one reason for his wanting to become human again: he wished to become unfixed. He wished to transcend his personality type, and thus finally to become what he called a true person.

  ‘Although I can reprogram myself,’ Ede told Danlo, ‘there’s a master program controlling which programs I can edit and which I cannot. Unfortunately, as I am now, this master program is untouchable. But once I’m in the flesh again, I shall finally discover the answer to a question that has been bothering me for a long time: just how mutable is man? I want to know, Pilot. I want to know if a man can touch any part of himself; I want to know how matter moves itself. These new programs, new minds, new life – how does it all move itself to evolve?’

  Ede’s need to know all manner of things ran his life. As he and Danlo fell among the brilliant Vild stars, Danlo often thought that the defining statement of Ede’s life might be: I know, therefore I am. Once, after Danlo confessed that their escape from an incandescent Triolet space had been rather narrow, Ede asked to interface the ship-computer so that he might know what kinds of dangers that the Snowy Owl encountered. As a good pilot of the Order, Danlo would rather have pulled out his own eyes before letting any other person (or computer) interface the brain of his ship. But he was also a considerate man, and even for a devotionary-generated hologram he could feel a kind of compassion. And so, with the help of his ship-computer, he made a model of the manifold. Using his ship’s sulki grids, he projected glittering images into the dark air of his ship’s pit. This projection of the pathways and embedded spaces that they fell through was not very much like the deeply mathematical way in which Danlo himself experienced the manifold. But it was good enough for Ede, who had lost most of his mathematics during his battle and the tragic diminishing of his selfness. Like an itinerant historian first beholding the rings of Qallar, he gaped in astonishment at the colours of a fayway space, at the sparkling lights and the lovely, fractalling complexity. In this manner, viewing the models that Danlo’s ship made for him, Ede came to know things that few except the Order’s pilots have known. In this way, too, viewing the rippling distortions at the radius of convergence around their ship, he discovered that they were not alone.

  ‘I believe another ship might be following us, Pilot,’ he said to Danlo. ‘Perhaps it’s an emissary of the Silicon God sent to destroy us.’

  It was then, within the silken web of the manifold, some thirty-thousand light-years out from Neverness, that Danlo finally told Ede about the warrior-poet named Malaclypse Redring. He told him of the warrior-poet’s quest to find a god and destroy him.

  ‘Then ever since your planetfall on Farfara this ship has been following you? This Red Dragon, you say?’ Ede’s face was a glowing mask of apprehension, and he seemed to doubt what Danlo told him. ‘I don’t understand, Pilot. If the warrior-poet expects you to lead him to Mallory Ringess, why didn’t he follow you to my temple? After all, he couldn’t have known that you would find me there and not your father.’

  As it happened, Danlo had been brooding over this very question for at least a billion miles. But he had no answer for Ede (or for himself). And so he built an icy wall of disdain around his doubts, turned his face to the strange stars and fell deep into the heart of the Vild, where the darkness of space was filled with light. There were dead stars and supernovas everywhere. Falling through these blazing spaces, Danlo thought, was something like approaching a dragon. Beyond the edge of the Orion Arm, the supernovas grew more dense, and the breath of the stars grew ever hotter. As he fenestered among thousands of stellar windows that seemed almost to melt and fuse into one another like sheets of molten glass, this fiery breath built into a raging wind. Often, when he fell out into realspace for a moment, his ship was blasted by a stream of atoms, photons and high-energy particles. In a few places the radiation was so intense that it might have seared away the diamond skin of his ship if he hadn’t quickly made a new mapping and taken the Snowy Owl back into the manifold. There he fell through spaces both deadly and strange.

  After many days of such journeying Danlo came across sights unknown to any man or woman of his Order. Usually a pilot delights in making such discoveries, but the things he saw caused him no joy. He found tens of dead stars and hundreds of burned-out planets. Some of these blackened spheres must have once been as beautiful as Tria or Old Earth, but now their great shimmering forests were burnt to char, their oceans vaporized, and their very soil melted to magma or fused into rock. On other planets the biospheres had not been totally destroyed, but rather purged of all life much larger than a bacterium or a worm. One of these planets – Danlo named it Moratha Galia, or World of the Dead Souls – had once sheltered an alien civilization. Clearly, in the not too distant past, the light of a supernova must have fallen upon this planet and caught the alien race unaware. On every continent were huge, golden cities as still as a winter night. And in every city, in the winding tunnels and streets, in the dens and buildings and halls, there were the corpses of billions of alien people. Or rather only their bones remained to fill the cities like broken chess pieces in a box – in one of his more onerous duties, Danlo made measurements and determined that it had been at least a century since the aliens had died and their flesh rotted away. Danlo walked among thirteen of these cities of bone. He walked and he looked and he remembered other dead people whom he had seen in other places. He marvelled at the tenacity of bone in holding its shape and enduring through the years, even these miles of alien skeletons, which were as delicate as carved ivory and as strangely jointed as a bird’s. Only bone remembers pain, he thought. He wondered then at the sheer courage of life, at its boldness in daring to exist in a universe full of pain. After saying a requiem for the spirits of all these billions of people whose names he could never know, he reflected that it was always risky to live beneath the light of a star. Starlight could either illuminate or incinerate, and it was this race’s bad luck to suffer fire and burning before falling to its fate.

  Whoever would give light must endure burning, Danlo remembered. But stars, when they died into light, burned at a temperature of ten billion degrees, and flesh was only flesh. Further into the Vild, Danlo discovered other death worlds. Many of these were covered with human remains, with bleached white bones whose shape he knew so well. For the first time, he appreciated the very human urge to go out among the stars and fill the universe with life. Few races had ever felt this driving force so deeply as Homo sapiens. In truth, no other race had swarmed the galaxy for a million years. And now human beings were safely seeded upon perhaps ten million natural or made worlds – not even the gods could count humanity’s numbers. Danlo thought it ironic that of all the living species in the galaxy, the most dispersed and secure were human beings, they who were destroying the security of the galaxy’s other races, perhaps even destroying the galaxy itself.

  ‘We’re a mad, murderous people,’ Ede confided to Danlo after he had explored his thirty-third death world. ‘We murder others so that our kind can swarm the stars like maggots on a corps
e. Why do you think I felt compelled to escape my flesh and transcend into something finer?’

  This, Danlo thought in his more contemplative moments, defined the essential tension of the human race: human beings’ genius for living life successfully versus their desire to transcend all the blood and the breathing and pain. Possibly no other species was so secure in life and yet so dissatisfied with it. Man, the eschatologists said, was a bridge between ape and god. According to their very popular philosophy, man could only be defined as a movement toward something higher. And the Fravashi aliens, too, saw this discontent of human possibilities. Thousands of years ago the Fravashi Old Fathers had developed a language called Moksha, which was designed to help human beings free themselves from themselves. In Moksha, ‘man’ is a verb, and it expresses the human urge to go beyond the purely animal. This was the meaning of man. While Danlo always appreciated this desire to be greater, he felt that man’s destiny lay not so much in a heightening or a quickening or even a vastening of the self but rather in a deepening. His own true quest, he told himself, must always take him deeper into life. He must always journey further into the heart of all things where the sound of life is long and dark and deep – as infinitely deep as the universe itself. And so he could never quite believe in the kinds of transcendence for which human beings have striven for so long. He could never quite affirm humanity’s mad and marvellous dream of becoming as gods, and perhaps something more.

  It was around a brilliant blue star named Gelasalia that he discovered evidence of a great transcendent event. When Danlo’s ship fell out into realspace streaming with light, he discovered his first rainbow star system. Like other such systems, Gelasalia was surrounded by many ringworlds. Through the blackness of empty space, these worlds encircled the star like rings of opal and silver, each world catching the starlight and reflecting it in all directions. Human beings, Danlo discovered, had made these worlds: an impressive feat of engineering. Of course, the making of even one ringworld is beyond the technology of most peoples. It is no easy thing to build the superstructure of the ring itself: a simple band of organic stone five thousand miles wide and a hundred million miles in circumference set slowly spinning around the star. And then to layer the ring’s interior with millions of miles of artificial soil, forests, lakes and atmosphere was work that not even the Order’s master ecologists would dare to undertake. Danlo marvelled that here, among some unknown star in the Vild, there spun not just one sparkling ringworld but seventeen. Despite himself he felt proud at his race’s making of this great, beautiful thing. Immediately upon beholding its brilliant colours, he wanted to meet the creators of the rainbow star system so he took his ship down to the surface of one of the ringworlds to honour these people for their prowess and craftsmanship. He accomplished an easy planetfall, bringing the Snowy Owl to rest in a grassy meadow spinning beneath the light of the star. But, in the nearby orange groves, in the villas and cities and towns, he found no one to honour. In truth, he found no one at all – not on that ringworld nor any other. Mercifully, though, he found no corpses or bones or any other sign of doom. It seemed that the whole rainbow system of made-worlds had simply been abandoned. Here was a great mystery. How could some ten trillion human beings (or perhaps more) simply flee into space? What had happened to these elusive people?

  ‘There are theories that could explain such an event,’ Ede told Danlo after insisting on exploring the rainbow system with him. ‘Unfortunately, I’ve forgotten most of them.’

  One theory that Ede had not forgotten seemed to Danlo as ominous as it did strange. It was possible, Ede said, that the rainbow system’s ten trillion people comprised the greatest concentration of human beings in the galaxy. What would happen, Ede asked, if all these people were to interface a single computer network at the same time? What would happen if through the hideously complex flow of data and information, these many minds merged together into one? What would happen when ten trillion human brains? with all the intelligence and incredible computing power they contained – worked together towards the answer to some great question? According to Ede, godhood would happen. Not, of course, for any single woman or man, but rather for the network as a whole. It was possible that over the centuries, the rainbow system’s computer network itself had become intelligent and self-aware. And then, like an explosively growing crystal, in a great vastening that might have taken only nanoseconds, it was possible that this network of human minds might have transcended into godhood. What kind of god, Ede asked, might such a weaving of minds produce? Quite possibly the greatest god in the galaxy. In the incredible fact of the abandoned ringworlds, in the absence of corpses or bones, there was evidence for such greatness. What had happened to the ringworlds’ people? According to Ede, this had happened: their ten trillion brains had merged into a single god who finally understood the mysterious connection between matter and consciousness. This god – call it the Rainbow Deity – had miraculously transformed the matter of ten trillion bodies into patterns of pure consciousness. And then, somehow, the Deity had projected itself through millions of miles of black space into the centre of Gelasalia. There, in the heart of a beautiful blue star, in the plasma currents and intense magnetic fields, the system’s ten trillion people lived on as a single, dazzling consciousness. There the Deity would be safe from the blinding light of the Vild’s many supernovas – as safe as any living star could be.

  ‘On all the ringworlds we’ve discovered no lightships, nor deepships,’ Ede announced. ‘No ships capable of anything more than journeying among the rings. In any case, how many deepships would it take to evacuate ten trillion people? Where are the factories to make these ships? Is there any evidence that such ships could ever have been made? No, there is not. And therefore, I must leave you with my hypothesis as to the fate of these people. How else to explain this mystery?’

  Search though he might, Danlo could explain very little about the people of Gelasalia. In truth, he was tired of hypotheses and explanations. He remembered something that his Fravashi teacher had once said: that life was not a mystery to be explained, but rather a miracle to be lived. And so, in the end, he too abandoned this enigmatic star system. He returned to his journey, to the quest for a lost planet that had become his life. Once again he fell into the shimmering manifold, where he felt the miracle of life in the ever nearness of death. Something there, he sensed, was drawing him onward. At the heart of the manifold was a singularity dazzling in its darkness – when Danlo closed his eyes he could almost feel some force pulling at him with all the terrible gravity of a black hole. Perhaps this singularity was much like the strange attractor that had led him to the Entity’s Earth and Her incarnation as Tamara; perhaps it was something wholly other. At times, when Danlo was drunk with the splendour of a light inside light, he was uncertain as to whether this attractor lay in the infinite spaces outside or – impossibly – inhered in some secret place deep inside himself. In these moments of scrying, with fate calling him on like an owl’s cry in the night, he often wondered if some such attractor was drawing humanity itself into a glorious future. Was transcendence truly man’s destiny? Did a great singularity lie in Homo sapiens’ path, some omega point in which man’s intelligence would expand more quickly than the wavefront of an exploding star? Would human consciousness (or the consciousness of those beings whom humans had become) spread out like light across the universe, eventually infusing all matter, all space, all time?

  No, Danlo thought in the great loneliness between the stars, the only thing human beings will spread is death.

  Toward the centre of the Vild, out near the star-shrouded Perseus Arm of the galaxy, Danlo discovered a succession of Earths that Ede the God had once made. The radiation from various supernovas had scorched two of these doomed planets, but the other nine were untouched, as pristine and wild as any planet Danlo had ever seen. It was on the eleventh Earth that Danlo made the acquaintance of a people who called themselves the Sani. The ten thousand people of the Sani lived in a
rainforest at the edge of one of the northern continents; the rest of the Earth, it seemed, was uninhabited. Danlo found the Sani to be a sad, philosophical people – as well they should be considering their tragic past and uncertain future. In fact, their very name for themselves meant something like ‘the Damned’.

  ‘It is my fault,’ Ede confessed to Danlo after the Snowy Owl had come to rest on the sands of a wide, windswept beach. ‘I made these people as they are. I made them, you see, and perhaps it was wrong for me to experiment with human beings in this way.’

  What Ede the God had once done, according to Ede’s very incomplete memory, was to seed this eleventh Earth with people. He had done this many times as it was part of his experiment to grow supposedly innocent human beings from frozen zygotes, to imprint a carefully designed culture onto them, and then to watch how their society developed. And then to destroy them and begin anew. Ede told Danlo that on this eleventh Earth, there had been at least five such human societies in the last millennium. No society – no tribe, city-state, or arcology – had lasted more than two hundred years. And the Sani knew this. It was part of Ede’s experiment that they should live out their lives in their rain-drenched forests, all the while knowing of the doom soon to befall them. This is why they called themselves ‘the Damned’ and why they looked to the starry sky in despair rather than awe, for they lived in fear of the hand of God.