The Wild

by David Zindell

  Danlo had little difficulty meeting with the elders of one of the Sani’s largest bands. Deep in the forest, along the banks of a fast-running river, he found an encampment some three-hundred people strong. The Sani built their houses out of great, sturdy logs and roofed them with sheets of bark; they made their living from the salmon they fished from the rivers, from the abundance of berries, roots, and pine nuts that they gathered from the forests. Theirs seemed a rich, easy life of roasted fish-feasts, thanksgiving and drinking their holy blackberry beer. But the Sani did not allow themselves to revel in their earthly paradise; displays of spontaneity or animal joy, they believed, mocked man’s spiritual nature. Their way in the world was simple if exacting: they must perfect themselves and all their actions beneath the glittering eyes of God. To accomplish this, they must suffer infinite pains. As Danlo would soon learn, the thirty-two tribes of the Sani therefore suffered the harshest of spiritual lives.

  ‘Our ways are not easy, but we must ask you to respect our law until it is time for you to leave.’

  This came from an old woman named Reina An, who sat with Danlo before a blazing fire at the centre of the Sani village. Beside her were other elders: her first husband, Mato An, and old Ki Lin Shang along with his wives, Hon Su Shang, Laam Su, and toothless, white-haired Jin Joyu Minye. Because Danlo’s visit was a singular event, most of the tribe had abandoned their work for the day. They crowded around the fire, though taking care not to press too close lest their naked bodies inadvertently touch Danlo or the strange-looking devotionary computer that he carried. Although Danlo could not know it, upon his arrival Reina An had sent messengers to the elders of the other bands. Later that day they would make their short journeys through the dripping forest in order to meet Danlo and honour him – that is, if Reina and the others hadn’t already decided to execute Danlo as a dangerous hsi tuti who might break their law and thus bring the wrath of God down upon them.

  ‘Your law is sacred to you, yes?’ Danlo looked at Reina An even as he directed his question toward the devotionary. The Sani spoke a variant of High Westerness Chinese, a language with which Danlo was unfamiliar. Once, of course, in his study of the universal syntax, he had learned the characters of Old Chinese, but this was little help in understanding the strange words that fell from Reina’s mouth as easily and musically as a soft rain. Fortunately, the Ede, acting as translator, quickly made sense of what Reina and the other elders said. If the sight of a glowing, talking, foot-high hologram astonished any of the elders, they gave no sign. Even when Nikolos Daru Ede spoke in a clear if somewhat stiff Sani, they did little more than cock their heads and squint their eyes. Danlo immediately guessed that they had never seen a devotionary computer. Perhaps they had never seen Ede the God, their creator and destroyer who could never touch them again. ‘Your blessed law – this was given to you by … God?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ Reina said. She was a quick-minded and crabby woman whose soft brown eyes missed nothing. Although it was wet in the forest, with the sky grey and misting, she was naked like everyone else. She sat on a new bear fur, and the bones of her rigidly straight spine stuck out beneath her skin like the rungs of a ladder. If the fire heating her withered old chest was too hot or the rain drizzling down her back was too cold, she gave no sign. ‘It is we who give our law to Him.’

  There was a moment of silence before Ede translated this. And then Danlo asked, ‘To … God?’

  ‘To the Master of the Universe,’ Reina said. ‘To Him who makes the sun and the rain. To our creator and sustainer. He gave us life, and so we must give him every devotion of our lives, every moment. This is why we made our law. This is why no Sani must ever break the Yasa, which we give to Him with all the gladness of a mother giving her daughter to be a bride.’

  Although Reina spoke carefully and precisely, it was as if she were reciting a formula. Danlo thought that there was little real gladness in her voice.

  ‘Your law, the Yasa, is complex, yes?’

  After Ede had translated Danlo’s question, Ki Lin Shang smiled sadly and said, ‘Our law is actually quite simple – even a child knows our law.’

  At this, Ki Lin Shang turned and beckoned to a potbellied little boy who stood behind him. Ki Lin pulled the frightened boy onto his knee and asked, ‘Child, can you tell us the Yasa?’

  The boy – Ki Lin’s bright-eyed grandson who could have been no more than four years old – seemed immediately to understand that he must speak to the Ede hologram if Danlo was to understand him. ‘We must take pleasure in the world and in all that we do; all that we do must be pleasing to God.’

  He paused a moment while Ede translated this, and then, quite shyly, he said, ‘May all our thoughts be beautiful.’

  Here Ki Lin Shang smiled proudly as he brought his fingertips to his temples. Slowly, gracefully, he then spread his arms outward in a gesture of giving and intoned, ‘Hai!’

  Emboldened by his grandfather’s chanting of the sacred syllable of affirmation, the boy continued: ‘May all our words be beautiful.’

  As if a signal had been spoken, the elders sitting on their bearskins touched their fingers to their lips and gave their formal blessing to the world. ‘Hai!’ they said as they held their hands outstretched over the black, loamy earth of the forest.

  Now all the people standing around them were ready to take up the chant. They held their arms crossed over their chests, waiting. Danlo, too, sitting across from the ever-watchful Reina An, placed his fingertips on either shoulder. Once a time, he had loved ritual as fiercely as he did fresh meat, and so he fell easily into this last of the Sani’s prayer postures. Almost before the boy could speak, Danlo found himself reaching his hands outward to the sky and whispering, ‘May all our actions be beautiful.’

  And then, a moment later, along with the other three hundred men, women, and children, he chanted, ‘Hai!’

  After the Sani had closed their eyes in silent affirmation of their sacred law, Reina An turned to Danlo and cast him a strange, piercing look. She stared at him for quite a long time, and then said, ‘You knew. While the boy recited, even before, you whispered the last verse of the Yasa.’

  Danlo, who was suddenly uncomfortable in his wet woollens, looked around at all the naked people staring at him. ‘It … seemed the right thing to say.’

  ‘You knew,’ Reina An repeated. ‘Without hearing first, you knew.’

  In truth, Danlo had known exactly what the boy would chant. The words had suddenly appeared on his tongue like mushrooms sprouting up in a wet forest. Before any of the others had begun the blessing, he had seen their arms – and his own arms – outstretched to the sky. He did not want to ascribe this sudden foreknowledge to any special skill such as scrying or that mysterious way of seeing whole patterns from single parts that had first come over him in the library on Neverness six years before. It was logic, he thought, simple logic that had moved him to whisper the words of the Yasa.

  Reina An moved her hand to her tired eyes as if to rub them, but then, thinking better of such a weak-willed action, she stroked her thick white hair and smiled instead. She looked at Danlo and told him, ‘It is well that you understand the spirit of the Yasa, for it is difficult to know the law’s many applications unless one is Sani.’

  Here, at the end of Ede’s translation, the little hologram of the man who would be God floated in the misty air and almost smiled. He caught Danlo’s eye and said, ‘I confess that I haven’t given a full rendering of the word Sani. I should tell you that it means not only “the Damned” but “the Chosen”.’

  Because Ede’s confession went on much too long to be a simple translation of Reina’s words, she glared at the devotionary computer with dread and loathing, as if Ede’s glowing hologram were some kind of poisonous snake.

  ‘It is always difficult for strangers,’ Reina An said, ‘to understand that everything must be given to God.’

  Ede, in his translation of this simple sentence, hesitated a moment because the Sani w
ord for ‘stranger’ was the same as ‘enemy’. It was this way with many of what he called the primitive languages. Indeed, since the Sani had come into existence only two hundred years before as an isolated people on a lost Earth, it was curious that they should even have a word for ‘stranger’.

  Ki Lin Shang nodded his head in agreement with Reina An. ‘Once,’ he said, ‘my beautiful wife, Laam Su, found a blue rose growing in the forest. She wanted to pick it for me, but instead she left it on its stem as a gift to God.’

  This statement of Ki Lin’s piqued Danlo’s curiosity for two reasons. First, because of Ki Lin’s assertion that blue roses grew wild on this Earth. And second, because Ki Lin had referred to Laam Su as beautiful. Certainly, it was hard for even Danlo to see much beauty in Laam Su. Like Reina An, she tried to sit straight before the fire, but due to some bone disease (or perhaps just old age) her spine was bent and deformed. She huddled at her husband’s side, hunched over and squinting at Danlo with her good eye. Her other eye, he saw, had been mostly destroyed in some kind of accident. Indeed, the whole left side of her face was twisted with a patchwork of scars as if she had been burnt by a lightning stroke or had perhaps stumbled into an open fire-pit as a child. She sat in the drizzling rain, shivering like a dog and silent in her concentration upon her own miseries. She would not meet Danlo’s eyes, nor did she look at any of the other Sani surrounding her. She seemed to hate the necessity of sitting in council on such a cold and ugly day; in truth, she seemed to hate everything about her life. And most of all, she hated the requirement of the law that she hate absolutely nothing in the world – or at least that she hide these forbidden hates from other people and the eyes of God.

  Beauty is only skin deep, but ugliness penetrates to the bone – Danlo remembered his friend, Hanuman li Tosh, saying this about another woman they had known in Neverness years before. And then, while Danlo stared through the dead grey air at poor Laam Su, her husband turned to see what Danlo might be looking at so intently. Suddenly, as if someone had thrown a heap of dry sticks into the fire, there was a flash of light. Laam Su’s tired old face suddenly came alive and shone with a deep and lovely light. Danlo finally saw her, then, as her husband saw her, perhaps as she really was: she was beautiful because she loved Ki Lin and he loved her, and more, because she had survived some seventy years of a hard and uncertain life. In truth, she was beautiful simply because she existed at all, as one shining part of God’s marvellous and infinitely various creation. All things, in their secret nature, shimmered with a terrible beauty, and the beholding of this truth was the essential part of the Sani’s sacred law.

  The way to look at all things is with a naked eye, Danlo remembered. With the mind’s eye naked to the universe.

  Danlo’s eyes played over the weathered old skin of Laam Su’s body, and he suddenly understood why the Sani went about their lives unclothed in such cold and rainy clime. The only way to look at the human form – and everything – was in nakedness. To clothe oneself was to hide one’s beauty, and thus to scorn God’s loveliest handiwork.

  ‘There is nothing we must not surrender up to God,’ Ki Lin Shang affirmed. ‘Especially pride and the layers of the self that separate us from Him.’

  Without further pause, Danlo bent low to pull off his leather boots. Then he rose up and removed his glittering black rain robe; he dropped this rather sophisticated garment on the steaming earth below him. Lastly, he freed himself from his black, wool kamelaika and the undersilks that he always wore close to the skin. When he was finished divesting himself of his layers of clothing, he stood naked in front of the fire. His skin shimmered with a golden light, and he felt the heat of the flames licking at him. At the same time, though, it was cold – a wet, drizzly cold pinging at his heated flesh and rolling down his back in long, snakelike tracks.

  ‘May all the Sani be beautiful’ – he heard a young woman say this even as Reina An nodded her head in approval of his act of disrobing. The Sani, then, crowded closer to get a better look at Danlo’s body. He had a truly beautiful body: long, lean, graceful, and yet quickened with a terrible power like that of a young tiger. Now, at last, some of the bolder Sani dared to touch him. Two boys and an old woman pressed close and ran their fishy-smelling fingers over his shoulders. All the Sani, he suddenly noticed, seemed to smell of old salmon. The smell wafted from the smoke pits and pervaded the village; it called his memory to similar smells that had comforted him as a child. It was the smell of life, a good, pungent, organic smell, though somewhat hard to take if one were unused to it. Although Danlo had vowed never to eat meat again, he never minded its smell, not even when a young woman rubbed her hand over him, thus rubbing her greasy fish essence into the fine black hair covering his chest and belly. That hair of any sort grew from Danlo’s body seemed to astonish the Sani, who were as smooth in the flesh as dolphins. They were astonished, too, by Danlo’s scars. The young woman – her name was Kameko Luan – boldly ran her finger up the long, white scar on his thigh where the silk-belly boar had once wounded him. Others were looking at his burnt knuckles and the chin scar he had earned during a particularly vicious game of hokkee. For a moment, Reina An caught his eyes and then stared at him strangely, at the lightning bolt scar that he had once cut into his own forehead. Most of the Sani, however, were staring between his legs. They obviously wanted to know how (and why) Danlo’s membrum had come to be circumcized and decorated with tiny, coloured scars. If they found this sign of Danlo’s passage into manhood to be beautiful, they did not say. For a long time everyone stood there in silence, and the only sounds were the rushing of the river, the hiss of the fire, and the soft silvery music of the falling rain.

  ‘May God behold our beauty and smile always upon us,’ Reina An said. She beckoned for Danlo to rejoin her on her bearskin, where he had left the devotionary computer silently flickering in its colours.

  ‘Will you tell me more about … God?’ Danlo asked. He sat back down on his heels with his spine straight, in the position of formal politeness that his masters had taught him as a novice in Neverness.

  ‘I could tell more about God,’ Reina An admitted as she nodded her head. ‘About the Master of the Universe, there is always more to tell.’

  ‘The Master of the Universe,’ Danlo said softly. ‘Then you believe that the universe was created by God, yes?’

  Reina An shook her head. ‘No, the stars and all that we see on a clear night have always been and will always be. How is it that you, a man from the stars, do not know this?’

  It surprised Danlo to hear Reina An speak so easily of his origins among the stars. He had wondered if the Sani would even know of other stars and other worlds – and the many other human beings who lived elsewhere.

  ‘I do not know why …’ Danlo said. ‘It is hard to know about the universe, yes?’

  Danlo was uncertain as to what the words ‘stars’ and ‘universe’ actually meant to Reina An. After all, as a child, he had once thought that the stars were the eyes of his ancestors watching over him.

  ‘It is God,’ Reina An said, ‘who was created by the universe.’

  ‘And yet you refer to Him as the creator of the world.’

  ‘Of course – God created our world.’

  ‘Your … world,’ Danlo said.

  ‘Our beautiful Earth that spins around our star.’

  At first, Danlo had supposed that the Sani might use a single word for both ‘universe’ and ‘world’, that Ede was merely translating in context for his benefit. But clearly, Reina An understood these celestial concepts in quite a sophisticated way.

  ‘It must be a difficult thing to create a world,’ Danlo said. Here he looked at the Ede imago, whose glittering face was as silent as stone.

  ‘Well, God is God,’ Reina An said. ‘He is the Master of the Universe.’

  ‘Has God created other worlds, then?’

  Reina An bent her head over to confer with Ki Lin Shang. They whispered furiously back and forth to each other for a whi
le, then Reina An straightened up and said, ‘God has created many Earths. Twelve times twelve is their number. Someday He will create new stars, whole oceans of stars. At the end of time, when all the universe acknowledges Him as Master, he will create other universes – twelve billion times twelve billion in number.’

  ‘Your creator must be almost impossibly powerful,’ Danlo said. He continued to look at the hologram of Ede, who translated his words mechanically, as if he were nothing more than a simple language program running the circuitry of a common computer. He did not look at Danlo, nor did he betray any emotion – nor any sign that his computer-generated face was even capable of displaying such a human trait. ‘Your God – he is splendid, yes?’

  ‘God is beauty,’ Reina An recited. ‘All that He creates is beautiful, and yet …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘God is our Creator and Sustainer, but God is the Destroyer, too.’

  At this, Ki Lin Shang nodded his head and intoned, ‘May all that is not beautiful perish from the Earth.’

  Although most of the men and women near Danlo immediately repeated this line from the Yasa, he thought that there was little enthusiasm in their voices. Indeed many of the Sani – particularly the children – seemed fearful and disturbed.