The Wild

by David Zindell

  ‘And now,’ Javas told the assembled Architects, ‘our Holy Ivi, Harrah Ivi en li Ede will describe the nature of today’s unusual ceremony.’

  Having completed the formalities preceding all of the most important light-offerings, Javas Icolari took his place on the bench nearest Harrah’s. And then, with Pol Iviertes holding her flowing white kimono off the floor, Harrah stood to address the throngs in the Hall of Heaven. ‘My children,’ she called out in a clear voice. She paused for a moment to look at Danlo waiting all alone in his chair, and she favoured him with a smile. ‘My children, we must remind you that we are here today not merely as viewers of an offering but as witnesses to the words of our holy Algorithm. Is it not said that one day, when you are near to despair, a man will come among you from the stars? Is it not written that he will be a man without fear who will look upon the heavenly lights within and not fall mad?’

  Danlo, sitting by himself on a golden chair before nearly thirty thousand people, tried to keep a smile of amusement from his lips. Although Harrah had implied that he was as fearless as light, he felt his heart beating up through his neck arteries with all the force of a man rhythmically hammering two rocks together. He looked at Harrah standing so solemnly in the Hall’s exact west. He remembered something about directions, then. In his tribe a man would die to the west. When his time came to make the journey to the other side of day, his sons and daughters would wrap him in furs and place him against a yu tree so that he could look out over the frozen sea and listen to the wind calling him.

  ‘We must remind you,’ Harrah continued, ‘that Danlo wi Soli Ringess is no Perfecti, and we are here today not to comment upon the beauties of his mind. We are here only as witnesses to his test. Will he look upon the heavenly lights within and live to tell us what he has seen? Is he indeed the bringer of light who will show the way toward all that is possible?’

  Again Harrah paused and let her gaze fall upon Bertram Jaspari and Malaclypse Redring of Qallar. Then she said, ‘We shall pray that he is the Lightbringer, for this is indeed a dark time for our eternal Church. We would ask you all to pray for Danlo wi Soli Ringess, for whether Lightbringer or not, he must face today the heavenly lights that even our most accomplished Perfecti dare not look upon lest they fall mad.’

  Harrah bowed her head in silence, and as robots moving to a single program, twenty-eight thousand, three hundred and forty-five women and men followed her example. But in the Hall that evening, there were twenty-eight thousand, three hundred and forty-eight people. Bertram Jaspari sat stiffly on his bench refusing to pray. And next to him Malaclypse Redring, being a warrior-poet, was permitted neither prayer nor any other observance of religious practice. And Danlo wi Soli Ringess, as he gripped his flute in his hands, kept his eyes open and his head erect. As his found-father Haidar had once taught him, a man could pray for his family, pray for his tribe, and pray for all the people of the world. In private, he could even pray to the one animal who was his other self. But it was unseemly for a full man to pray for himself in sight of others who were praying for him so fervently.

  ‘We wish you well, Danlo wi Soli Ringess of Neverness.’ Harrah had finished her prayer, and she lifted her hands toward the thousands of Architects at their benches around the Hall. ‘We all wish you well. May you behold His Infinite Light in your own.’

  With a brilliant smile revealing her infinite faith in Ede the God (and perhaps in Danlo wi Soli Ringess, the man), Harrah sat back down on her bench. Then the lights of the dome gradually dimmed. The open spaces around Danlo and over the tiers of benches grew dark, almost black. For a moment, a deep silence swept over the Hall. Danlo listened to the inward rush of his own breath. It was as if his heart and the whole world were filling up with a cold, icy wind. The metal seat and arms of his chair felt cold to the touch and he wished that he had worn a wool kamelaika instead of his formal black silks. To either side of his face, the chair’s silver headpiece flared out like the wings of a seagull enclosing his brain in a logic field so intense that he could almost feel it humming. He sat watching and waiting, counting his heartbeats as the scanning computers within the headpiece made a model of his brain.

  Ahira, Ahira, he heard himself thinking, this will be my last test.

  In truth, he did not anticipate that this light-offering would be nearly so difficult or dangerous as his Walk with the Dead. Of course no man in his sane brain would willingly look upon a model of his own mind. In viewing the visual cortex alone, there were possibilities for wild feedbacks, the building of intense bursts of light that could burn out the brain. And whether the offering be sham or show, it was certainly dangerous for anyone (even a master cetic) to look upon his own consciousness. But it was a danger of a lesser degree than letting a Temple keeper infuse images directly into his brain. He would not be interfaced with a computer. The scanning computers in the silver headpiece could only read the firing of his brain’s neurons; they could not hurl him into a raging surreality and make him face the demons of his soul. And if the lights in his visual cortex grew too intense, he could always close his eyes, breaking the feedback. At the worst, Danlo expected his always lurking head pain might explode into a few bad moments of agony. Or, for a few moments, he might lose himself in the terror of pure consciousness. He remembered, then, what his grandfather had taught him once on a day of blizzard and terrible cold: that the whole art of journeying into the unknown was in knowing what to do when you didn’t know what to do.

  I will look within myself and behold myself smiling back at me. And then, after recalling a favourite old poem, he thought, I am the eye with which the universe beholds itself and knows itself divine.

  Suddenly, in the black air above him, out of the empty spaces curving beneath the dome, a great cube of light appeared. The light was immense and deep beyond the measure of his eyes, and suddenly he knew that this test would be more wildly dangerous than any he had ever faced. He sat almost frozen to his chair, holding his flute in his right hand while with his left, he touched the white owl’s feather in his hair. Somewhere in front of him, in the dazzling darkness, Harrah Ivi en li Ede sat not far from Jedrek Iviongeon and Bertram Jaspari and thousands of other waiting Architects. But they were far from Danlo’s field of vision and he did not see them. His eyes were only for the light above him, the manifold coloured lights that shone as one single, terrible light. He could look upon its brilliance all too easily. The cube of light floated over the western quadrant of the Hall. For excellent reasons, the golden chair beneath him was usually turned toward the darkest part of the dome in the east. Danlo wished he could gaze into the nothingness of that direction, but instead he had promised to face what the greatest Perfectis of the Cybernetic Universal Church were never permitted to behold.

  It is only a hologram, he thought. In my life, I have seen ten thousand holograms.

  The cube of light was only a holographic model of his brain, truly, but it was two hundred times as large in dimension. And it was not an exact model. The human brain is a curving bundle of neural structures, fissures and folds, moulded together like a ball of snowworms. But the light-offering glittered high in the Hall as a perfect cube. It was as if Danlo’s cerebral cortex, cerebellum and brainstem had been squeezed into a box. And yet no part of his brain – not even the hippocampus nor the tiny, nut-like amygdala – was missing. One hundred billion neurons quivered within the walls of his skull, and the offering represented each of these cells as a tiny coloured light. Whenever one of his neurons fired, a corresponding light in the offering would flare brightly for a moment and then fade into quiescence. All through the hologram, from its centre to its eight corners, waves of lavender or aquamarine light rippled outward in hideously complex swirls almost too quick for his eyes to follow. He tried to perceive the crackles of carmine or emerald or rose marking out the various neural pathways. But nothing in this model of his brain would hold still for more than a moment. With this thought came an immediate response, a movement of maroon pulses through
his cerebral cortex. (Or rather, that topmost and front part of the cube where the thinking centre of his brain glowed in colours from ruby to puce.) He observed these pulses, and this act of apprehension generated new thoughts, which boiled through the hologram with the speed of superheated steam. It occurred to him that thought was motion, and motion light. His eyes swept the cube back and forth, from side to side, up and down. He almost expected to see light reflecting off each of the six faces, everywhere filling up the cube with its brilliance. But, astonishingly, much of the hologram was dark, even black. At any moment, perhaps, no more than a fifth of the individual neurons in his brain were firing. Because he knew it was dangerous to do so, almost without thinking, he looked toward the rear of the cube where his visual cortex glowed a dull red. But the very act of fixing on this disturbing colour caused many other neurons in his vision centre to fire. The offering modelled this as intense bursts of radiance, which in turn, as Danlo drank in the light with his eyes, caused yet greater bundles of neurons to flare into activity. In scarcely a moment, the whole of his visual cortex exploded into a bright violet flame. The pain of it burned like a hot knife thrust through his eye to the back of his brain. He could almost see this pain: it looked like a black tunnel surrounded by walls of fire. He might have fainted in agony, but his will toward consciousness was strong. He continued to stare at the terrible light of his own vision for a long time – at least for the count of three heartbeats, which was quite long enough to make the watching Architects gasp in amazement and fear.

  I will not fear, Danlo thought, gasping for breath. Fear, he knew, was like an icy water so cold that it burned inside every cell of the body. There were five ways of living with fear. Some fled from fear as they might a slavering bear, and some sought to cover it up with a blanket of false emotions and pretend to fearlessness. A Zanshin master, fighting a duel to the death, tried to let his fear flow through him like water, neither grasping at it nor trying to dam it up, but only noticing its path as if he were looking through a clear glass. The warrior-poets, of course, were said to be beyond fear. If true, then in some important way it was impossible to think of them as still being wholly human. Likewise, the gods of the galaxy had supposedly transcended all such base programs, but the oft-quaking hologram of Nikolos Daru Ede glowing on the arm of Danlo’s chair gave the lie to this conceit. Possibly, he thought, if his father had truly become a god, then he had discovered how to outlive his essential dread of death. But Danlo still lived as a man, as he always would, and to him fell the fifth way of facing fear. He dared to look upon his worst terror eye to eye and to change it – much as his retina might transform the killing radiation of the sun into an inner light illuminating his brain. It was his way to feel fear as thrill. And so, even as a child playing with bear cubs, he had always sought out danger and death. Once, on the night of the three moons, his grandfather had warned him that this deep wildness would always be his most glaring weakness and his greatest strength. Harrah Ivi en li Ede might proclaim him to be a man without fear, but in truth, he was only wild – wild like the wind, wild like the white thallow who dives through the air only for the joy of testing his wings.

  I will not fear. I will taste the fear inside myself, and it will only bring me greater life as if I had drunk the blood of a bear. After the pain had almost blinded Danlo, he finally looked away from this part of the light cube. There was a moment when he thought that he might be truly blind, for all that he could see was blackness. And then he realized that his eyes had only fallen upon a section of the hologram representing his motor cortex. Because his body was frozen into motionlessness, the neurons here were mostly as dark as bits of black ice.

  Most of the universe is dark, he remembered. But out of the darkness, light.

  Upon realizing that he was neither blind nor mad, Danlo felt a sudden flush of heat spread throughout his belly. He imagined that he saw this in the light-offering as a scarlet glow suffusing all his neurons – much as a drop of blood might stain a glass of water. With greater confidence now, he faced the many-coloured streams of his thoughts. Although he was no Perfecti, he had undergone disciplines of the mind that no Architect had ever dreamed possible. As a young man, he had learned difficult language philosophies and the states of plexure from a Fravashi Old Father. He had sat around fires with autists as they fell together into full lucidity and explored the thoughtscapes of the realreal. And with the help of Thomas Rane, the greatest of the Neverness remembrancers, he had nearly mastered the sixty-four attitudes of that most difficult art. By nature he was a mathematical man, and more, a pilot of the Order of Mystic Mathematicians. He had survived the broken spaces of the manifold by proving difficult mathematical theorems – by thinking calmly and clearly in the face of death. He decided to think such thoughts now. Out of playfulness (and pride), he would look upon his mind in all its splendour of mathematical inspiration.

  The greatest theorem I know is the Continuum Hypothesis.

  Indeed, this was the so-called Great Theorem of Danlo’s Order, and Danlo’s father had proved it true: that between any pair of discrete Lavi sets of point-sources there exists a one-to-one mapping. This proved that it was possible for a pilot to fall from any star in the galaxy to any other in a single fall – if only he were genius enough to discover the right mapping. Because Danlo thought that his father’s proof fairly shimmered with the cool light of elegance, he decided to work through it in his mind. And so he called up the crystalline diamond ideoplasts representing the theorem’s general statement. He began working through the five Gadi lemmas, and he marvelled at their power and the inevitable unfolding of their logic. At last, when he showed that the Justerini subspace was embedded within a simple Lavi space, an array of diamond and emerald ideoplasts built up within his mind’s eye more lovely than even the fabled cathedrals of Vesper. And all this beauty within him was reflected in the light-offering. The whole of his cortex, it seemed, had come brilliantly alive with rings of tangerine and scarlet, with luminous cobalt spheres embedded inside those of topaz, auburn and jade. In a far part of Danlo’s consciousness, he became aware that many of the Architects in the hall were gasping at the loveliness of this display. Almost certainly, he thought, they had never beheld the secret fire and order of pure mathematics.

  The light, the light – the beautiful and terrible light.

  And neither had Danlo – at least not in this way. For a while he gazed at the lights of his own mind, and he played with logic and number. He flew through ancient proofs of the Zassenhaus Butterfly Lemma and the Fixed-Point Theorem; he spent a few long moments exploring open theorems that had never been proved. And he never let his eyes fall free of the offering’s hundred billion lights, at the way the correspondences built and formed and fractured into lovely coloured patterns. Soon he began thinking new thoughts; he played with ideas for a strange, new mathematics that would incorporate paradoxical logics and a rather mystical apprehension of the orders of infinity. As he gained skill in controlling his mentations, he took delight in conjuring fantastic thought arrays and sparkling, almost iridescent sequences of concepts and abstractions. In his best moments, a powerful idea storm might rip through the light cube like lightning, dazzling Danlo and thousands of others with the shock of its brilliance. To listen to the sudden cheers of the astonished multitudes was to understand the pride of the Perfecti who had developed this subtle art. And more, it was a calling for Danlo to face his own hubris, that terrible pride beyond pride that some men carry in their hearts like ticking hydrogen bombs. In Danlo, pilot and would-be Alaloi shaman, this took the form of a wildness that would drive him to any place in the universe where it was possible to go. Wildness, as his grandfather had once warned him, would be either his path toward God or the doorway to his doom.

  I am free, he thought. My mind is free. My will to move my mind is truly free.

  For a few exhilarating moments, he felt the thrill of being able to summon many-splendoured thought patterns solely according to his desir
e to behold them. He moved about his mind creating and recreating these patterns with the ease of a painter daubing colours on a canvas. And then he noticed a terrible thing. When he concentrated on a certain area of his brain where he wished a certain pattern to unfold – perhaps in the occipital lobes or in the body sensory areas just behind the central sulcus – he noticed a slight delay between the time his neurons fired and the moment in which he became aware of the corresponding thought. This delay seemed to last about half as long as a heartbeat. That there should be any delay at all touched him with terror. For a while he tried to think faster than the light-offering could model his thinking. But he might as well have tried to dance faster than his own reflection in a mirror. No matter what beauties he brooded upon or where inside himself he looked, his awareness of his thoughts always lagged behind the brain processes that generated them. If this were truly so, then the storm of chemicals leading to the firing of his neurons completely determined all of his mind and memory – including this despairing thought itself. Where, then, was the freedom of his will to think, to act, to move, to breathe? To hate or to love – how could he ever be free to choose one deep passion over the other? And worse, what could it mean to say he loved life or anything at all when he was nothing more than a chemical machine programmed to react according to the terrible quick fire of his brain?