The Wild

by David Zindell

  Is it so hard to share, Danlo wi Soli Ringess?

  Danlo took the last step toward Shahar, and it was like stepping down into a clear pool of water. Or rather, it was like flying upward into a rainbow. As Danlo stepped into the blazing being called Shahar, his metaphors almost failed him. For a moment, the luminous tissues of his body melted into hers, and it was as if he had drunk from a wine bottle full of liquid light. He might have become lost in this intoxicating rush of light, but then he remembered who he really was and how he had come to be here.

  This is the trap that the Ede warned me of, Danlo thought. This golden light is the honey, and I am the bee.

  Danlo closed his eyes, then, and struggled to remember that his true self was still sitting on the little red cushion in the Transcendentals’ meeting room. And there on the seat of a bright plastic robot, the true self of Lieswyr Ivioss sat too, and as for the other Transcendentals who shared the Shahar eleven, somewhere on the planet of Alumit Bridge, they each sat in other meeting rooms or lay in their apartments’ darkened cells, thinking their individual thoughts, feeling their individual feelings. And even as Danlo had instantiated in the Field as an individual entity, so it was with them. But since they were each one of many who were One, upon carking out into this golden cybernetic space, their individuality had instantly melted away. On the great mountain above the waterfalls, they had met and melted and merged into the One called Shahar. They shared their thoughts, dreams, emotions. They completed each other’s thoughts, even as they sculpted their individual selves to complement each other’s temperaments. And so their sense of separateness vaporized like icicles under a hot sun, and they fused together into this glittering sphere of light.

  Shahar is devious, Danlo thought. But she would rather conceive of herself as subtle, brilliant, sublime.

  At last, Danlo opened his eyes. He beheld Shahar from the inside, where the light of her being appeared less brilliant and no longer blinded him. Indeed, now that he could see again, he became aware of the other beings who made up the substance and soul of Shahar. There were eleven of these Transcendental beings, each one instantiated into a form as luminous and varicoloured as his own. He recognized Lieswyr Ivioss from the blazing scarlet hues of her passion and pride. Other Transcendentals were associated with other names. These were Germana Pall, Sul Iviastalir, Ivria Tal, Maral Astroth, Adal Dei Chu, Husmahaman, Atara ivi Chimene, Duncan Iviwich, Ananda ivi Sitisat and Ordando Ede. Names, however, within the burning boundaries of Shahar’s oneness, were not important. What mattered were the higher qualities of the self, the various strands of goodness, truth and beauty which each one could bring here and weave together to create their Transcended One. This making of a higher whole from many parts was a continual work of art. In some sense, Shahar would never be finished or complete; she was an evolving entity whose soul could only grow like a Fravashi tapestry, infinitely in all directions, strand by golden strand.

  And I am here to add to this weaving, Danlo thought. For a moment or … forever.

  Lieswyr Ivioss and her ten meld-mates seemed to be weaving Shahar’s brilliance with the movements of their glittering bodies. They flitted about like butterflies; darting, whirling, diving, hovering and always flying together in a cloud of light. Theirs was an intricate dance: wingless, weightless, almost timeless. At any moment, two of them might be mating. This sharing did not occur sexually and animalistically, as of a man’s lingam entering the yoni in the heat of passion, for none of the luminous beings – including Danlo himself – seemed to bear between their legs anything so crude as sexual organs. Rather, they joined body to wraithlike body, the evanescent tissues of their beings running together as if they were amoebas who had opened their outer membranes to each other and let their cytoplasm flow together and merge into a single fluid. When a mating was successful, the two (or sometimes three) actually disappeared into one: a single womanman enlarged and deepened and blazing ever more intensely, whose iridescent hands were as long as a Bodhiworld exemplar’s, whose eyes radiated light like double suns. Thus, at any moment, within the blazing sphere called Shahar, there might exist only ten individual beings, or nine, or sometimes only eight or seven or six. When Shahar was most completely herself, her eleven separate ones would merge utterly into One – the Transcended One that called to Danlo with a voice like honeyed wine and pulled him inward, as if he were only a lost pilot falling down toward the almost infinite gravity of a blue giant star.

  How can I be with so many? Danlo wondered. How can I be one with so many who are already One?

  Indeed, it is always hard to join with others. The Narain Transcendentals laboured for a lifetime to achieve their desired unities. In the sculpting of the soul – in the complementarities of goodness, truth and beauty – the complexities of union increased almost exponentially with each new being who came into a One. Thus the difficulty increased, too, but so did the joy. And joy, he thought, was what the Narain really lived for.

  They will try to trap me with joy, Danlo thought.

  Because Shahar and other Transcended Ones did not trust him to journey to the Architects of the Old Church, they would try to keep him on Alumit Bridge (or rather, seduced within its glittering Field) in the only way that they could.

  But what kind of joy?

  Almost certainly, he thought, there was the joy of the meeting room’s very real logic fields pulling at his brain. Its computers would be programmed to stimulate his neurons, to trigger the release of endorphins, epinephrine, serotonin and the other manifold chemicals of consciousness. Soon, perhaps, would come a moment of neurotransmitter storms and mind-lightning and that wholly artificial bliss that he knew as electronic samadhi. Or perhaps the Narain would not need to rely on such crude and mechanical techniques. Danlo sensed that the telepathy they shared through Shahar would be intoxicating and profound and would induce the most melting of ecstasies.

  –Danlo of the stars, you must let us in.

  –I have … nothing that I would hide.

  –You must let yourself into us.

  –Like this?

  –Almost. But first you must let go of yourself.

  –My … self?

  –You must let go of your fear. Your deep hatreds and your pull toward despair. All your negative emotions – you must let these go.

  –But aren’t these passions … part of myself?

  –They’re only part of Danlo of Neverness. They must never be part of Danlo of Shahar.

  –Truly not?

  –We must keep Shahar pure. Only when goodness, truth and beauty are perfectly integrated may we achieve the highest quality.

  –This quality … is just pure joy, yes?

  –Almost. But joy is really part of beauty; it’s only one of the higher qualities.

  –Then you seek a transcendent quality. Higher than joy.

  –Infinitely higher.

  –The quality … that is beyond all qualities?

  –You almost understand.

  –You seek the quality that is …

  – … beyond itself and all things that are …

  – … perfect in itself and reflects …

  – … worldly things for it is …

  – … love …

  – … only pure love …

  – … within itself like a mirror …

  – … that is beyond love …

  – … held up to itself and reflecting only love …

  – … love love love …

  For a moment, as Danlo lost himself in electronic telepathy with the One called Shahar, he became aware of someone swimming in the same stream of consciousness as he. This other – or others – added to his thoughts and sometimes completed them. Likewise, he touched her thoughts as well. And yet, while his thoughts remained his thoughts even as those of the other could only be other, together they created a unity of mind beyond their separate selves. This fusion of their mentations reminded him of a Fravashi fugue, in which many Old Fathers would gather to sing their
beautiful songs, continuously interweaving melodies as they might the golden and silver threads of a tapestry. And what would emerge – almost miraculously – was a single, splendid song, rich in individual colours and motifs, and yet complete in itself, in its movement toward one overarching and transcendent theme.

  Love is the secret of the universe, Danlo thought. At least, he thought that he thought this, all of himself, of his own mind. Though, in truth, with the consciousness of eleven others pouring into him like streams of golden light, it was growing almost impossible to know which thoughts were truly his own.

  Love is the purpose of life.

  Somewhere above the pools and the waterfalls cascading down the great mountain, the shining sphere called Shahar floated in the air. And inside Shahar, Danlo floated, too, and eleven other beings of light flew all around him and near him (and through him), touching his arms and chest, slipping their luminous fingers across the pearly smoothness of his body, his neck, his face. It was hard for him to see these beings just as they were, for the colours of their flesh flowed in iridescent pulses, red into violet, orange into gold, and nothing about their tone or form held still for very long. One of them he thought he recognized as Lieswyr Ivioss. But as for the others, as he drank in the radiance of their subtle, quicksilver shapes, it was impossible to tell what they looked like in real life. Of course, in the real world, in the lesser world of rocks and trees and plastic rooms, this embarrassment of eating and excreting and breathing that they called the getik, how they looked scarcely mattered. They might be young or old, thin or fat, ugly or fair – but here, in the Field, in this glittering cybernetic space called Heaven, they would instantiate only as brilliant and beautiful beings.

  As perfect cybernetic beings. They were perfect in their forms, yes, but more importantly, they had pruned and purged themselves so that only the purest inner qualities remained. It was only these qualities, these refined selves that they allowed to instantiate into the Field. And so in a sense, the Lieswyr Ivioss who floated near Danlo touching his sable and scarlet hair was not the same hard, angry, scornful Transcendental of the meeting room. She was something less, but also something more. Gone was her diffidence, her penchant toward violence of feeling. She, as her cybernetic self, had transcended these baser emotions. Anger had become wilfulness, and scorn elevated to discernment. Her hardness of character had deepened into strength. These last were the positive, approved qualities. In the ancient downs system of organizing the positive aspects of the self, there were many, many qualities. All could be located on a great wheel divided into thirds. One section (this was usually colour-coded as yellow or gold) was given over to those qualities related to goodness, while the other trisections arranged the component qualities of beauty and truth. The wheel was a metaphor for the perfecting of the self. Looking inside the fiery emotions and genius of one’s own soul was like moving within this wheel. The further out on the wheel one drifted, the further away from the quintessential qualities that all the Narain strove for. But as one moved inward, various sub-qualities such as responsibility and authenticity would fuse into full qualities such as trustworthiness. And trustworthiness, fairness and integrity would in turn come together into the higher quality of honesty. And honesty, along with wisdom, courage, faith and freeness, was only one element of truth. Goodness, beauty, truth – these were the three highest qualities, and together they encircled the wheel’s core like the coils of a serpent winding around a tree. Or a heart. At the wheel’s mystical centre, as red as blood, was just pure love. Love was the one quality beyond all qualities, the pure essence of being that all the Narain hoped to realize within themselves.

  Love is the purpose of love.

  As Danlo floated near the centre of Shahar, the fingers of Lieswyr Ivioss and the others brushed his body like so many fronds of seaweed. He touched their minds, and waves of love swept through him. He couldn’t tell whether this powerful emotion was the result of merging minds or its cause. He couldn’t tell if it was real or only the effect of the meeting room’s computers manipulating the chemicals of ecstasy within his brain. He almost didn’t care. So intense was his feeling for Germana Pall and Ivria Tal and all the others of Shahar that his body burned as if he had been plunged into a vat of molten gold and his brain was afire as with starlight. He was very close to letting go of himself, to merging completely with Shahar, even as a block of ice melts into a warm tropical sea.

  Love beyond love beyond …

  –Danlo of the Stars, let yourself in.

  Deep in the throes of a love beyond human love, Danlo realized a thing. If he were to win Shahar to his mission of journeying to Tannahill, he must let himself into her utterly, to let his dream become one with hers. But in so doing, the pleasure and the temptation to remain forever would be too great. Like the ancient lotus eaters of Old Earth, he would lose his will towards his fate; he would lose his very purpose.

  I will lose my dream, he thought. I will lose myself.

  He realized another thing, then. Lieswyr Ivioss and Husmahaman and Adal Dei Chu and all the other Transcendentals of Shahar (and of Alumit Bridge) were afraid of becoming lost, too. The surrender of their separate selves was their greatest joy but also their greatest terror. And so in merging into a Transcended One, like a Summerworld merchant holding back a handful of gold coins from the tax collector, each Transcendental would always secrete some vital part of herself. This was the failing of their ideal of perfection. Goodness, truth, and beauty all women (and men) sensed within their souls, but they were also full of flaws, and they lived the worst of lies, and sometimes it was a terrible beauty which called to them from deep inside. In truth, it was almost impossible to rid oneself of only the negative qualities. The very act of the self slashing at the self and willing itself to go away only reinforced it, redefined it, made it stronger. This was why no group of Transcendentals had ever merged completely.

  They do not truly expect me to lose all of myself, he thought. Only enough so that I become love-drunk and lost within the One.

  It was clear that if Shahar had her way, he would be like a foolish young man who opens the door and stumbles into a room stocked with an infinite number of wine bottles. And helplessly he would drink bottle after bottle, remaining always drunk (and always a fool) forever.

  If a fool would persist in his folly, he remembered, he would become wise.

  He closed his eyes, then, and a perfect picture of the downs wheel in all its colours came into his mind. He could clearly see that foolishness was not one of the positive qualities. Nor was wildness. Once, he remembered, his friends had called him Danlo the Wild for they supposed that he lived without fear and would dare almost any act no matter how reckless or dangerous. But his friends had been wrong. He had his fears as did any sane man. And of these fears the deepest and perhaps only true fear was that of mistaking the unreal for the real. Thus his prowess in entering any computer-generated surreality and never becoming lost. Thus his pride that he of all men always knew exactly where he was and who he was – and what he really was.

  Truly, I am afraid, he thought.

  But a true wild man, he told himself, would feel his way through this fear by facing it to see what was there. A true man must always face himself, must always look fearlessly on the wildness that blazed inside. This he promised himself he would always do. And so at last he opened his eyes. Out of pure wildness, he let go of himself. He watched the luminous tissues of his body pulling apart and separating into colours, as of light shined through a prism. He felt himself as ten thousand strands of light, unravelling, spinning away from himself, onstreaming, interfusing with the brilliant inner illumination of Shahar. The pleasure was indescribable. And so was the terror. He was breathing hard and sweating, and somewhere, inside his chest, he could feel his heart pounding like a fist upon an iron door. He was dying and willing himself to die, but worst of all, when he was reborn, it would be as a glittering, cybernetic being who might or might not be real.

 
; To live, I die – even as he began to dissolve utterly into the light of Shahar, he remembered these words of his father. To become himself he must first lose himself. This was the paradox of his existence. This was foolishness or deep wisdom, he couldn’t tell which.

  I am not I.

  There was a moment when he was less than a steamy breath of air vanishing into the wind – and yet almost infinitely more. All that he was as pilot and man he brought into Shahar. He brought his honesty, his courage, his playfulness, his verve. He brought goodness, truth and beauty; he brought his love. In utter wildness he brought his darker emotions, even as an owl might clutch a writhing snowworm in its talons. He brought his memories. Of course all Transcendentals, when they merge into a One, carry with them the record of all that has happened to them as instantiated entities within the Field. It is considered bad form, however, to burden one’s merge mates with memories of their other life of the getik. And more, all the occurrences of this mundane life are thought to be irrelevant to the much vaster life of a Transcended One. But Danlo did not know this, and so he brought to Shahar diamonds and rubies and firestones and pearls. Freely, he gave her his memory of the first time that he had seen snow; he gave her his memory of loving fire and wind and sky and the woman named Tamara Ten Ashtoreth whom he thought was forever lost. He gave her his hatred of Hanuman li Tosh, too, along with his hatred of himself in falling into hate at all. Once a time – it seemed long ago – he had dived deeply down inside himself into a clear remembrance of the Elder Eddas, and he gave these genetic memories to Shahar as well. And when he had given all this emotion, mind and memory, there was nothing left of him. He could no longer feel his body, neither his luminous instantiated form nor his real body seated on the red cushion in the meeting room. He no longer knew what was real. He no longer cared. All about him was a dazzling white light which floated motionless like snowflakes frozen in spacetime. And then he realized that this light was not outside him at all, but rather inside, where he and all the terrible radiance of Shahar were finally one.