The Wild

by David Zindell

  We will call a choche for you.

  True to his word, Honon Iviow called to life one of the sanctuary’s five old choches, which rolled right up to the stairs beneath Danlo’s apartment and opened its gull-winged doors so that Danlo might step inside. Danlo hated being inside this mobile plastic box, for it was not brightly coloured and open as were the similarly functioning robots of Iviunir, but rather made of an ugly grey plastic and wholly enclosed. The doors suddenly locked shut around him, exacerbating his sense of being imprisoned. The choche was graced with windows, however, and as Danlo sat on his soft plastic seat, inhaling molecules of silicone and nylon, he found that he could look out at the scenery passing by. At first, of course, there was little to see: only the robots and furnishings of the guest sanctuary. But then the choche rolled through an airlock and a series of doors out into a corridor that led to a gravity lift. After falling a way, they debouched onto one of Ornice Olorun’s side streets. Here there were people wearing a plain brown or white sort of kimono, and because Nikolos Daru Ede had been a devotee of the sacred jambool, a drug known to cause baldness as well as visions, all Architects shaved their heads in memory of all that Ede had sacrificed in bringing the truth to humankind. But, ironically, because too close an emulation of Ede was blasphemy, most covered their shiny pates with a little brown skullcap. It troubled Danlo that although he could see all these people in their kimonos and funny little hats, they could not see him. The windows of the choche were made of a mirrored plastic that let in the light of the world but permitted no visual information from the interior to escape into the prying eyes of gawkers or passers-by. Nor could anyone easily get at the choche’s unseen occupants: its body was moulded from one of the kevalin plastics almost impervious to laser fire, missiles or explosions. Such is the construction of any choche employed to carry an Elder Architect, ambassador or other luminary about the uncertain streets of Ornice Olorun.

  You must beware assassins.

  The Ede hologram signed this warning to Danlo as they looked at each other through the semi-darkness of the choche’s interior. Although the choche felt quite private, Danlo thought it unwise to risk verbal conversation.

  Anywhere that there are armoured robots, Ede signed, there are assassins.

  This was true, Danlo mused. But then assassins haunted the history of almost all human societies, especially one so distressed as that of Tannahill. As Danlo rolled in safety towards his appointment with the Koivuniemin, he saw signs of misery and disquiet everywhere. First and last, there were too many people. They swarmed the streets in their millions like ants through tunnels in the earth. Indeed, the streets of Ornice Olorun were dark and narrow and cut off from sunlight, very much like tunnels or underground passageways. Once, perhaps, a thousand years ago, they had been as open and airy as the broad boulevards that Danlo had seen in Iviunir. But the Architects, ever spawning great broods of babies, ever hungry for space, had been forced to make use of every cubic inch of their endless city, and, over time, had torn up commons and parks and playrings, even as they synthesized great blocks of new plastic and added on to their apartments and other buildings. Everywhere Danlo looked, the Architects had actually expanded their buildings out over the streets. There, a scant fifteen feet over the heads of Architects making their daily errands, building fused into building, filling in what should have been open space between the many levels of the city. In some parts of Tannahill – in Ivi Olorun, for example – the streets were so twisting and tunnel-like that it was impossible to gain a clear line of sight much greater than four hundred feet.

  Of all the thoroughfares in Ornice Olorun, this strip of grey plastic running between the light-field and the great Temple where the Koivuniemin met was the broadest and straightest – but still inadequate to move the manswarms of the city. Most of the Architects that Danlo saw bore this crowding bravely. Dressed in their clean white kimonos, cradling their devotionaries protectively against their bellies, they did their best to flounder through the raging river of humanity that swept them along like so many bits of protoplasm. If they made no apology at being jostled or elbowed or bumped by another, it was because the reality of living inside their arcology had forced them to abandon the normal social graces. In such a crush of people, where collisions occurred with the frequency of heated gas molecules inside a sealed jar, to say ‘excuse me’ every three seconds would quickly grow as tiresome as it was pointless. Although many Architects had accepted this necessary rudeness as their fate, others had not. The faces of many men and women were full of grievance, bitterness, and resentment.

  Once, when Danlo’s choche stopped before the bombed-out front of a restaurant, an angry young man spat at his window and hurled a piece of plastic so that it went skittering over the choche’s roof. He made a crude sign in Danlo’s direction and screamed an obscenity, a slang word for a forbidden interface with one’s computer. Danlo wondered at this astonishing act. Could this man have known that the choche carried a pilot of the Order and an emissary of the Narain of Alumit Bridge? Could the Architects in the mob around him have known this as well? While many women and men (and children) regarded this rabid man warily as they might an armed plastic bomb, they made no move to rebuke him or restrain him in any way. They merely stood staring at the choche as if the fire of their eyes might melt the mirrored windows. Although they could not see him, Danlo felt his eyes touching theirs. In truth, something about their wild spirit touched him deep inside. These were a people who had suffered privation and pain. Although there had been no actual starvation on Tannahill for thirty years when a mosaic virus had exploded through the food factories, many people looked hungry and much too thin. Some were afflicted with diseases. Danlo thought that these diseases must be rare and unique to Tannahill for he had never seen such death signs before. One little boy, clinging to the folds of his mother’s kimono, had been blinded by some kind of fuzzy, alien fungus sucking at his eyes. Many men bore a blue taint to their skin as if this very same infection were only waiting to erupt and consume their bodies. Perhaps, Danlo thought, this was some mutant strain of the mehalchins that pitted and discoloured the façades of the buildings along the street. If an alien organism could eat hardened plastic, why not the flesh of men whose faces were already eaten up with dreams and despair?

  Terrible pressure, Danlo thought. Such people would make terrible enemies.

  After a long time of rolling past endless shops and endlessly zealous faces, the swarms of people grew even denser, if that were possible. Danlo sensed that they must be approaching the Temple.

  There came a moment in his journey to meet the Koivuniemin when the streets around him were dark and pressed close on either side like the walls of a crevasse. And then his choche broke free into the New City and the streets at last opened up. Here there were real buildings, as Danlo thought of buildings. These great white structures did not flow into each other, as of plastic melted together in continuous slag heaps. Rather they were laid out on well-ordered blocks, each block set off by fine, tree-lined boulevards. Danlo marvelled at these trees. He hadn’t expected to find such treasures in this dread city. Nor had he expected the brilliant light which poured down upon the triangular leaves of the alien murshim trees. He looked through his choche’s windows up at the great dome that enclosed the whole of the New City. Probably, he thought, it was made of clary or some other transparent plastic. It reminded him of the domes that enclosed the havens of Yarkona and other cities of the Civilized Worlds. Through this dome he saw the sulphur-tainted Tannahill sky, and far off, in the east, the steely glint of the ocean. Despite the discoloration of these once-splendid vistas, Danlo was grateful for any sight of the natural world.

  This is the best of a bad place, Danlo thought. Truly – this must be the soul of Tannahill.

  But even here, on the zero level of the New City, beneath the clear dome letting in the light of the sky, Danlo saw signs of discord: at the edge of a little park, he came across a statue of Kostos Olorun which som
e criminal or blasphemer must have recently scorched with a laser, melting out the eyes and deforming the bulbous nose. The terrible smells of ozone and burnt plastic still hung in the air. And in the streets there were still too many people. Most of them, of course, in their crisp white kimonos and wide-eyed wonder, were pilgrims from distant zones on Tannahill or other worlds of the Known Stars. But more than a few were Readers and Dedicated Architects and even the grim-faced Elders of the Koivuniemin who had business in the Temple. This famous building, as Danlo saw, was much the largest in the New City. It rose up from the centre of the huge square somewhere at the end of the endless boulevard down which Danlo travelled. Even at this distance, he could see it clearly. Built in the overall shape of a cube, it was all angles and points and many-faceted like a diamond cut to catch the light. The Architects, ever fearing assassins’ bombs, had ordered it made of pure, cut-white kevalin, a plastic almost as rare and hard as diamond. Other buildings of the district – with the exception of the High Architect’s Palace – were less expensive as well as less grandiose. For five miles in any direction, these buildings were constellated around the Temple like lesser heavenly bodies around a star. Here were the houses of the Dedicated Architects, the low estates, the hotels, halls, spas, villas and many offices of the ancient Church institutions. On the blocks closest to the Temple, surrounded by purple bene trees and lawns of real grass, there were the Elders’ residences, the High Estates, the House of Eternity, Ede’s Tomb and the Palace itself. This, then, as Danlo had observed, was the soul of Tannahill – as well as the seat of an ancient Church that was destroying the stars.

  They must dream of Old Earth, Danlo thought. He looked at the grass and the violets and all the other earthly flora that had been made to grow throughout the New City. All men dream of Earth.

  The boulevard down which Danlo rolled, like eleven others, gave out onto an avenue that made a huge square around the Temple grounds. A wall made of cut-white kevalin surrounded the Temple itself. Although there were twelve gates set into this wall, to the north, west, east and south, it was not easy for any common choche or pilgrim to pass through them. But as Danlo’s choche rolled up to one of the western gates, it was not stopped, and neither was Danlo questioned by any of the robots or the quick-eyed Temple keepers that guarded it. He passed unimpeded through this outer gate and then through an inner light-fence meant to burn anyone so foolish as to try to gain entrance to the Temple grounds by force or stealth. His choche rolled down a pleasant path cutting among the lawns and the bene trees; it rolled onto a little lane that led right up to the steps of the Temple. Here it finally stopped. The doors opened, up and out, and once again Danlo was reminded of the way a seagull lifts up his ivory wings. As he stepped from the choche, setting his black boots down upon the white walkway, a cadre of keepers immediately swarmed around him. They were each strong, tall men, almost as tall as Danlo, and they each wore a flowing kimono woven of spun-white kevalin. Thus protected by these layers of laser-proof plastic and human flesh, Danlo was invited to walk up the steps into the Temple. One of the keepers, a one-eyed man whose face was a patchwork of old burn scars, introduced himself as Nikolos Sulivi. Then he said, ‘Welcome, Danlo wi Soli Ringess of Neverness. We will take you to meet the Koivuniemin now.’

  And so Danlo passed inside the great Temple of Tannahill. When he stepped inside the entrance hall, its vastness overwhelmed him. Like the entrance halls of the Urradeth temples (and the temple that he had found on the Edeic Earth), this room was filled with sculptures of Nikolos Daru Ede. There were plastic benches on which one could sit to watch the wall paintings of Ede’s glorious life; there were fountains and cold flame globes and various species of holy computers. There were many handfasts, of course, for scanning the DNA of all the Worthy Architects who sought entrance to the Temple. And there was much more: oredolos depicting the Old Church’s exodus into the Vild, hologram stands and mantelets, prayer rings and remembrance stations and holy relics of Alumit’s first temple, which were encased in huge clary vaults. Danlo’s sense of space was very keen, and he was almost certain that even the largest of the Urradeth temples could fit into this single hall. Its air of sanctity disturbed him, just as the air itself – heavy with molecules of hydroxyls and kevalins – was like a plastic blanket thrown over his face, blinding him, smothering him. He remembered, then, the cathedral that his friend Bardo had purchased on Neverness. Standing on real floorstones cut from a mountain’s granite was very different from being inside a building synthesized from plastic. Here, there was no organic feel at all, and even the sound waves of his voice fell off the angles of the walls in an unsettling manner. Once again, he was overwhelmed by a sense that he was entering a monstrously large computer. The glittering lights, the information pools, the programmed looks of awe on the white-robed Architects’ faces – it all seemed so artificial and unreal.

  But what is real? Danlo wondered. He looked into the eyes of the Temple keepers who escorted him through this unbelievably large room. There was a grimness in the way they continually scanned the manswarms for signs of danger, as well as duty and determination in the face of death. Truly, life is real. Life and death.

  At last, the keepers bore him into the main gallery that served as a waiting area for anyone invited to witness the deliberations of the Church’s ruling body. Here Danlo paused to wait like any of the pilgrims or readers called before the Koivuniemin. He stood enduring the stares of the various Architects who waited with him, and then he looked down to see the Ede hologram staring at him, too. As he might have guessed, the little Ede was fingering a cetic sign at him, which he read as, ‘Beware, Pilot, beware.’ Danlo smiled at his devotionary computer. And then he began to count his heartbeats as he turned to look at the doors to the room before him and waited for them to open.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The Koivuniemin

  They call themselves the Iviomils, the chosen of God. We call them the Faceless because they scorn the truth that we can come face to face with Ede our God. They would excoriate all mystics and anyone who does not share their beliefs. They preach a return to the purity of Edeism’s beginnings. They would abolish the facing ceremony as blasphemy, for they say that we can only interface an image of Ede, but never the essence of God Himself. We must be very wary of these Faceless. I believe that in the years to come, they will be the greatest danger to our Eternal Church.

  – from the letters of Liljana ivi Narai

  It did not take long for Danlo’s escort to speak with the temple keepers who guarded the doors of the Hall of the Koivuniemin. These six wary men had expected Danlo’s arrival. They asked him for his name, and then bowed to him. Without bothering to scan him for weapons (Danlo presumed that the choche’s computers had already performed this vexing function), they opened the doors and ushered him inside.

  This is a place of death.

  Immediately upon entering the Hall of the Koivuniemin, Danlo felt the eyes of thousands of people fall upon him. The northern third of the room, through which Danlo now passed, was a kind of loggia built on three levels. This viewing area swarmed with pilgrims standing shoulder to shoulder so that they might be privileged to witness the great events occurring in the rest of the Hall below them. There, laid out in many concentric arches, were the long, curving devotional tables where the Elder Architects sat and decided the Church’s fate. The tables all faced south, encircling a red-carpeted dais at the very end of the Hall. The whole design of this vast room was calculated to draw one’s eyes towards this dais – towards the reading desk of the High Architect that sat there like some holy relic on display. In truth, this glittering piece of furniture was really more of a throne than a desk. It was wrought of cut-white kevalin and etched around its sides and arms with purple neurologics; it was a colourful, eye-catching thing, and the faces of all the Elder Architects should have been lifted up toward it, waiting. But as Danlo entered the Hall, each of the thousand Elders sitting at their tables turned in their chairs towar
d the north to study this naman of an unknown Order beyond their neighbourhood of stars. Down the central aisle through the devotional tables Danlo walked, and as he passed by row upon row of Elders, they pointed their old fingers at him and shook their heads and voiced their outrage at his long, black hair and his otherworldly black pilot’s robe. Many of them, with their shaved heads and ugly brown skullcaps, were plainly jealous when the keepers escorted Danlo almost to the very front of the Hall. The keepers held out his chair while he moved up to a little white table almost within whispering distance of the High Architect’s reading desk. This was one of two tables to hold the position of honour at the front of all the many rows of tables in the room. Across the aisle separating the Hall, east and west, the other table of honour faced Danlo’s. Here, in their shining white kimonos, sat twenty men and women, the highest ranking of all the Elders: Bertram Jaspari, Jedrek Iviongeon, Fe Farruco Ede, Kyoko Ivi Iviatsui, Sul Iviercier and others whom Danlo would come to know. They each stared at Danlo as he set his devotionary computer on the table and took his place in a hard plastic chair facing them. All his life, he remembered, he had hated sitting in chairs. And even more, he hated sitting at a long, white table whose nineteen other chairs remained empty. There, in the vast uncertainty of the great hall, beneath the reading desk of the High Architect – and beneath the stares of two thousand hostile strangers – Danlo felt almost naked and very much alone.