For a long time Danlo stared at the disc that he held in the palm of his hand. In its diamond surface, he could see little bits of colour, violets and blues and gold. ‘I will interface the virtuality that you call the alam al-mithral. This cybernetic heaven. This is the soul … of my test, yes?’
With this understanding, Danlo gave the disc to the Worthy Nikolaos, who bore it away toward one of the eternal computers. With a quick motion of his hand, he snapped it into an opening of this little black cube.
‘There, it’s done,’ Cheslav Iviongeon announced. ‘You’ve been vastened. Temporarily vastened, I should say. Even as we speak, your pallaton is experiencing wonders. Every computer in this room is linked to every other. And to all the eternal computers on Tannahill. And now, Danlo of the Stars, it’s time that you experienced this heaven, too.’
Danlo did not like the way Cheslav smiled just then, with his cracked, yellow teeth and a look of grim necessity clouding his eyes. He wondered how a mere computer program could experience anything. And then he saw Cheslav holding a new heaume in his blue-tinged hands, and he wondered what experiences the old man thought he would soon suffer.
‘This will create for you a simulation of the alam al-mithral,’ Cheslav told him. ‘May we put it on you?’
‘If you’d like, I suppose you must,’ Danlo said. And then, more purposefully: ‘Yes.’
With the Worthy Nikolaos’ help, Cheslav forced the heaume over Danlo’s head. As before the fit was too tight, and the heaume’s metal hurt him. Danlo wondered why they couldn’t find a larger heaume. Small heaumes for small heads, he remembered one of his teachers once saying. It amused him to think that thousands of years of daily facing ceremonies and the blind following the Church’s doctrines had bred human beings with brains stunted like bonsai trees, but he knew this wasn’t really true.
‘Please lie back now, and we’ll begin,’ Cheslav said.
With a painful bow of his head, Danlo lay back against his cold blankets. He pressed his wooden flute against his belly; he closed his eyes and began to pray: Ahira, guide me. Ahira, Ahira.
In truth, he did not know what to expect of this virtuality that Cheslav Iviongeon and his programmers had made for him. Once, when he was a child, his grandfather had told him to expect of life only the unexpected and he would never be disappointed. Even so, as he took a deep breath and stepped through the doorway into the cybernetic heaven called the alam al-mithral, he had expectations. Try as he might to experience the virtuality with all the freshness of a child playing in his first snowfall, the weight of a thousand journeys through one surreality or another pulled him down into old habits of the mind. Almost at once the room’s sensa – Cheslav’s raspy voice, the reek of nall plastic, the dark glitter of thousands of computers stacked one on the other – vanished. Danlo opened his eyes to find himself carked out into the unknown spaces of the otherworld. He was floating in the midst of what seemed to be dark, heavy clouds. All about him lightning bolts rent the greyness, and flashes of light illuminated the mist. He smelled ozone and sweat and the fragrance of alien flowers. Various shapes and colours flickered wherever he looked. Once or twice, he thought he saw faces. In their ghostly whiteness and shades of copper and pink, they seemed almost familiar, as if well-known images and objects were trying to take form – either that or else some quirk of the eternal computers’ master program was causing everything to break into pieces and bits of light and swirl around him like snowflakes in a winter storm. Such chaos sent waves of nausea pounding through his body. (His real body lying stricken in the House of Eternity, that is.) His belly burned with a dull, acid pain, and his head was on fire. He knew that he must make sense of these images, and soon. If he did not, he might fall mad. And so almost immediately, he began to seek the rules and methods for moving through this strange space. In every surreality into which he had ever instantiated, there was always a way to master the rules and move deeper into structure and meaning.
This is truly overwhelming, he thought. But it is not real.
As he floated through the violet clouds of chaos he was seized with a fear that in this surreality there might be no rules. Or, at least, no rules that he could discover and manipulate. The alam al-mithral, he remembered, had been created neither as an entertainment nor as a pedagogic tool for teaching the mathematics of the manifold. Perhaps he was not meant to discover how to move through this space; perhaps he was not meant to move at all.
You are here to walk with the dead, he told himself. Nothing more.
Off in the distance – it might have been ten feet away or a mile – he thought that he saw the face of a famous Architect, Mendai Iviercier, who had been the greatest Holy Ivi to succeed Kostos Olorun in the early days of the Church. He wanted to come closer, to study this plump, pink face more closely. But he couldn’t move his arms or legs; his neck was as stiff as if he’d suffered a paralytic stroke, and even his eyes remained frozen forward, locked open upon whatever images fell before him. In little time – it might have been a second or a millionth part thereof – Mendai Iviercier’s face broke up into glasslike pieces: chin, cheeks, ears, forehead, nose, and eyes, and then even these still recognizable structures shattered into a greyish-pink dust. And then, as if touched with some terrible inner force, the dust exploded outward, a billion billion points of glittering silver dissolving into the essential nothingness of the alam al-mithral.
Ahira, where am I? Danlo wondered. Who am I – Ahira, Ahira?
He remembered, then, that he was here to experience a simulation of what was occurring to his pallaton inside the House of the Dead’s eternal computers. Only this and nothing more. The program of these computers would determine all his experiences in this dead-grey underworld. He would have no freedom to move; he would have no free will at all. Suddenly, all around him in the mist, there appeared faces. Many of these faces seemed familiar and Danlo desired to view them more closely, but he had no power to move his eyes. Once, he had witnessed men from the Order of True Scientists using chemicals to immobilize alien beings and then dissect them with lasers and glittering needle knives. Now, he himself felt as helpless as a Scutari nymph pinned to a board. Although his eyes were tightly closed (the eyes of his real body shivering beneath stacks of cold computers), Cheslav Iviongeon’s master program had pinned the eyes of his pallaton open. There was nothing he could do, he thought, except to let the program run.
If I must, I, myself, can always run. Truly, I can. I can rip the heaume from my head and run from this terrible building.
And then, to his horror, as he tried to feel the smooth bamboo of his flute, he found that he could not. He could not move the fingers of his real body, nor his arms or legs, and therefore he could not move to pull off the heaume and run away from this awful test. The heaume’s dislocation of his senses – even his deep proprioceptive sense of his own cells – was almost total. Its powerful logic field had stripped him of sight, sound and touch, and had programmed for him a powerful new reality.
I am not I, he thought. I am only a program running inside a machine. As faces appeared all around him in the cold mist, he knew that he must fight this thought with all the force of his will. That he still possessed a will both fierce and free he knew deep inside himself just as he knew that sunlight on a clear day is warm and good. The conflict between his own inner sense of selfness and freedom and the experience of existing as a pallaton caught in some dread eternal program was enough to make him fall mad. It was one of the terrible moments of his life. He wondered if even his thoughts would soon fall under the control of this program. Perhaps his memories would, too. Perhaps he would remember a life that he had never truly lived; perhaps he would fall forever into a cybernetic reality that wasn’t truly real.
I am Danlo wi Soli Ringess. I must not be afraid.
At the very moment when Danlo was wondering what kinds of interactions Cheslav might have programmed for his enlightenment, new faces appeared in the mist just before his eyes. Faces and forms: se
ven Architects with their shaven heads and white kimonos took shape seemingly from the substance of the clouds themselves. Sounds issued from their dead lips. It seemed almost like speech. Danlo caught the vowels and consonants of words and then whole segments of sentences. These seven dead souls – or rather simulations of pallatons – seemed to be holding a learned discussion. A famous theologian named Ornice Narcavage, who had been dead some five hundred years, was discussing the divine nature of the Algorithm. She spoke of the dasan, which was the practice of the Logics in everyday life. It was her belief, apparently, that the dasan was a gift providing every Architect with the means for direct contact with God. This was now a subversive belief, but once a time the Juriddik sect of the Church had preached this with all their zeal. However, over the centuries the Juriddik, having gained power as Readers and Holy Ivis, had corrupted this belief. They had complicated the understanding of the Logics so that most Architects must go through them to reach an apprehension of Ede. The Elders of the Church had censured Ornice Narcavage for teaching such historic truths. She had died in exile on the planet of Vadin Vie, but her pallaton had been returned to Tannahill. And now, somewhere in the cybernetic space of a little black computer, the pallaton of Ornice Narcavage continued this controversy. Except that her words sounded more mechanical than even the utterances of the Ede hologram of Danlo’s devotionary computer. And the responses of the other six souls were much like programmed dialogues out of some boring history lesson: long sequences of information masquerading as true conversation. This amused Danlo, and he might have laughed, but he couldn’t move his lips or open his mouth.
This is not so bad. I can survive this.
Almost with this thought, the face of Ornice Narcavage turned toward him and seemed almost surprised at his black robes and wild hair. She herself was as bald as a stone, and her eyes were a dead black like slate. ‘We have a visitor,’ she said to the others. ‘He knows little of the Juriddik.’
‘Or the Iviomils,’ a pallaton named Burgos Iviow said.
‘But he must know about yarkonah,’ a third one said.
‘Let’s ask him about yarkonah.’
Danlo wanted to tell them that Yarkona was a harsh but beautiful world a hundred light-years coreward from Neverness, near Simoom and Urradeth. But to his astonishment, he found his mouth suddenly moving and strange words pouring out like wine from a cracked vat. ‘The Fravashi teach the truth of ananke, which is a universal fate to which even the gods must submit. This idea has been used in support of the Church’s Program of the Halting, which states that …’
For quite some time, against Danlo’s volition, his pallaton went on lecturing about the various doctrines and programs of the Cybernetic Universal Church. At the same time, he lay remembering that Yarkona was not only the name of a planet (and the name of one of the Order’s great pilots who had discovered it), but also a term for the theological attempt in the three hundreds to interpret Edeism in terms of Holism and Fravashi philosophy. In truth, Danlo knew little of this other ‘yarkonah’, but he had once been a student of a Fravashi Old Father, and so it wasn’t too difficult for him to extend pure and simple Fravashi concepts to the incredible muddle of thought that passed as Church theology. That is, it wasn’t difficult for his pallaton to do this. Danlo listened in awe (and dread) as he felt his mouth moving in ways that he couldn’t control. He listened to the words of his pallaton, this clever but ultimately unalive computer program, and he knew that he himself would never say such clever but lifeless things.
They have tried to make me a robot. But I am not. I am only I. And I know that I know that I …
As Danlo’s pallaton lectured on and on about the Fravashi reconciliation between free will and fate, he noticed that this glittering projection of a computer program was talking faster and faster. Now words began to spill from his mouth like marbles from a wooden box. He could scarcely understand what he was saying. And the pallatons of Ornice Narcavage and the others floating in the clouds spoke in response, and it was as if a recording of voices had been speeded up into a high-pitched babble. In any cybernetic space, of course, accelerations of information were always possible. Indeed, in the simulation of the alam al-mithral that Cheslav Iviongeon had made, he must have programmed tremendous time decelerations so that Danlo could grasp the lightning-quick information exchanges taking place between the pallatons. What if, Danlo suddenly wondered, these time decelerations were relaxed? What if he were made to view the pallatons’ heaven in real time – in the real nanoseconds in which the eternal computers generated the space of the alam al-mithral?
It would be like hell, he thought. The quick fires of computer time would burn my mind.
Danlo wanted to cry out, ‘No, no, I will not let it happen!’ But he could not speak, and the sound of his pallaton’s voice was like the shriek of a rocket plummeting to Earth. When the other pallatons answered him, the collective noise they generated was so intense that it felt more like heat than sound. The clouds in which he was floating began to move, not slowly as clouds might in a warm false winter wind, but violently, furiously, as a mushroom cloud might boil up over a sleeping city at night. Bursts of carmine and pink and puce coloured the air in great glittering bands. There was too much light. The intense illumination hurt Danlo’s eyes. But he could not turn his head or shut his eyes; he could only gasp at the terrible fire lancing through his brain. And all the while his pallaton talked on and on, and he looked out upon the many other pallatons who were now carking out to speak with this pilot named Danlo wi Soli Ringess.
It hurts, it hurts! Oh, Ahira, Ahira, how it hurts!
As the program accelerated, thousands of faces flickered before his eyes, one face following another with all the speed of a wormrunner using his thumb to rifle a pack of pornographic Tantra cards. The effect of viewing so many silver-grey mirrors of the human soul was almost blinding. In truth, just then Danlo wished that he were as eyeless as a scryer. But even if he were blind, he realized, it would have been of no help. The heaume crushing his head like an iron fist would still infuse images directly into his brain. He could no more stop this image storm than he could contain a supernova explosion inside his cupped hands.
They will try to kill me with images. Or make me fall mad.
It was no mistake, he realized, that the program encoding his pallaton had suddenly accelerated. A rage of images was as dangerous as a lightning storm, and it would be possible to destroy a man’s mind in this way. And this was Cheslav Iviongeon’s design. Somehow, Danlo knew that this was true. Harrah had warned him that Cheslav was an Iviomil, perhaps even one of Bertram Jaspari’s most faithful followers. He had accepted the risk that Cheslav might try to harm him. It would have been simpler, of course, for Cheslav to assassinate Danlo by directly destroying his brain. All heaumes are dangerous, and it is all too easy to burn out the neurons and synapses with an overpowered logic field. But Harrah’s inquisitors would easily have discovered such a crude and murderous strategem, and therefore Cheslav and his programmers had been forced into more subtle means for disposing of such a dangerous naman as Danlo. It is written that whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad. Although Cheslav Iviongeon dwelt far from the godhead, with his shiny heaume and black eternal computers, no less his mind-killing program, he truly possessed the means to move Danlo into madness.
I am flesh I am not I am I – I am I am I am …
Danlo was almost helpless before the images blazing in his mind’s eye. He must have beheld the pallatons of a million dead Architects in a moment. Or perhaps a million times a million. After a while – as the pain in his head grew white-hot like heated steel – the faces of these dead souls began to change. In truth, they mutated into shapes that were at once heart-breakingly familiar and utterly strange. Long brown hair exploded like feather moss from their bald heads. Their jaws lengthened and broadened, while their face-bones grew stronger, bolder. Everything about them seemed strong, especially the heavily muscled limbs of their bodies
, which also sprouted a dense matting of hair. But it was their eyes that drew him inward with all the force of the sun capturing a comet. Their eyes shone like golden pools of light. Each pair of eyes was deeply set beneath prominent browridges; they were watchful, soulful eyes that he had seen in dreams. And eyes that he had once beheld in real life, too. He marvelled at the primeval beauty of these new forms. And he marvelled that the dead, in his mind, could come so suddenly to life.
Haidar eth Chandra eth Anevay eth Choclo eth – no, no, no, no!
Danlo, floating in the blazing nothingness of the alam al-mithral, blinded by the light, could no longer make-out the faces of dead Architects. Instead he beheld the shimmering forms of men, women and children whom he remembered too well. They stood in a great circle all around him, holding out their hands, beckoning. He knew without counting that there were eighty-eight of these blessed people. He remembered, then, the cold and terrible day when he had buried the eighty-eight members of his tribe, the mothers and fathers and sons of the Devaki, whom he had loved more than life itself.
Oh, God, please, no! No, no, no, no.
At first Danlo wondered if these eighty-eight people weren’t just images stolen from his mind and counterfeited as pallatons in the program that Cheslav had written. Such a rape of one’s selfness would be a small matter for any reader of the Church, especially for an Iviomil fanatically loyal to Bertram Jaspari. To Danlo, however, still lost in the dazzling image storm, the men and women of his tribe seemed utterly real. And they seemed to watch him as would people in the real world, soulfully and knowingly, and not with the dizzying time distortions of a computer-generated surreality. Was it possible, he wondered, for his people to be truly alive in the way that all life lives even after death? When he was thirteen years old, as a part of his passage into manhood, he had memorized many couplets from the Song of Life. This great poem was the collective wisdom of his people, and, among other things, it spoke of the journey that all men must make to the other side of day. All Danlo’s grandmothers and far-grandfathers had made this journey into the shimmering night. Was it not written that the stars are the eyes of all the Old Ones who have lived and died? Did not their eyelight shine down forever upon all the children of the Devaki? Danlo wondered, then, if his tribe’s deepest myths might not encode a more universal truth. Perhaps, as the remembrancers believed, there truly was a universal memory. Perhaps the universe itself, in its endless unfolding into new forms, recorded every event occurring in every particle of space and time. Was it possible that in the One memory, there truly was no time? Was there only the eternal Now-moment where all things and people who had ever looked upon the glories of the world still lived? If this were so, then Danlo’s people might still be watching him, now and forever. Perhaps the shock of the images had somehow unlocked a secret door in his brain. Perhaps, at last, in the fever of near-madness, he had somehow stepped through the doorway into this blessed universal memory where life and death are as one.
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