The Wild

by David Zindell

  I am not I. I am the light that dances faster than light. I am the light that ignites the fire.

  As Danlo sat sweating in his metal chair, he heard a murmur of disquiet roll across the rows of benches. Most of the Architects present were aficionados of the mind, and in the lovely violet and gold structures of Danlo’s deepest programs, they began to detect disharmonies – the broken symmetries and dangerous, quicksilver reflections of a mind looking too closely at itself. Now, as Danlo sought the true source of his selfness, he began to perturb the secret rhythms of his brain. He generated new rhythms unconnected to the self-regulating mechanisms and cycles of his body. Thus he began to think with ever greater speed. And now the time between the firing of his brain and his awareness of his thoughts was no longer half a heartbeat, not because he had discovered a way to transcend the limitations of his brain, but only because his heart was beating much faster. He continued to stare at the light-offering. He began to hate the way it seemingly anticipated his thinking. This hatred he saw modelled as a violet-black glow spreading like ink from his prefrontal lobes to his cerebellum, colouring almost every cluster of neurons. Almost, he could not help himself. He began to see the light-offering as more than merely a model of his mind. It was almost as if his soul had been stolen and projected out into black air for all the people in the Hall to see. In a moment of despair, he wondered how these billions of glittering lights had captured his anima – that part of man’s spirit that was his will and his life’s quickest fire.

  I am almost I. If I look deeply enough, quickly enough, I will see that I see that I …

  If Danlo had dropped his eyes away from the heavenly lights, then, his test might have been over. If he had stood up from his chair, and turned east away from the great, glowing cube, many of the Architects whispering to each other in their seats might have proclaimed him as the Lightbringer. But he had yet to bring himself to the source of his own light. Until he found the place inside himself where the energies of his consciousness broke out of his own secret heaven (or hell), he would not will himself to look away. No one knew this except him. Where Harrah Ivi en li Ede and perhaps Kissiah en li Ede and a few others saw that he was dancing on the knifeblade’s edge of madness, most others only pointed at him and exclaimed upon his courage and tenacity in looking at the light-offering longer than he needed to look.

  I am the eye with which I behold myself. I am the I, the I, the I …

  Danlo knew that he could look away from the light-offering any time that he chose. But he also knew that he could not choose such a cowardly path. He both could and could not, and that was the hell of his existence. He was like a man carefully balanced on the rocky ridge of possibility, and only the slightest puff of wind would suffice to unbalance him and cause him to fall. The paradoxical nature of choice itself drove him to discover the source of his freedom of will. (Or perhaps the iron chains of his own enslavement.) It drove him ever deeper into himself, into the most mysterious and wildest part of the universe. He became aware of many things, then. Even as he rushed into the storm of consciousness raging through his brain, his exterior senses intensified. It was as if his ears had grown arms and fingers, and he could reach out into the Hall to grasp even the faintest of whispers. And so he heard Bertram Jaspari tell Jedrek Iviongeon that the cursed naman pilot had finally fallen mad. Danlo wi Soli Ringess had crossed the threshold from which there is no return, and so they needn’t fear that he would ever again walk through their holy Temple bearing a smile upon his lips and light within his hand. Harrah Ivi en li Ede, as well, was thinking of him. He could almost hear her murmuring a prayer. A great tension, like a piece of pulled steel, ran between her and Bertram Jaspari, connecting them to a shared fate. With a new sense for which he still had no name, he could feel this force pulling at him, too. He sensed the warrior-poet; it was as if he shared a cage with a tiger. Malaclypse of the two red rings, he who worshipped death and other cosmic mysteries, sat staring at him in awe, almost in love. He fairly trembled with a terrible hunger for the infinite. With his dark violet eyes he urged Danlo inward, deeper into his own marvellous consciousness toward death or ultimate triumph – or perhaps both. Malaclypse’s passion, as with all his breed, was to apprehend the nature of eternity. He looked to Danlo for signs of divinity, and on his beautiful face burned the old question: was Danlo truly the son of his father? Would Danlo’s pride drive him to storm the heavenly heights of godhood, as had Mallory wi Soli Ringess?

  He would still slay all would-be gods, Danlo thought. With his killing knife or poisonous darts, he might slay me, here, now. Only … can a man truly become a god?

  He suddenly knew that his father had once made the same journey that he made today. All beings, whether man, snowworm or god, blaze with their own inner lights. Each man and woman is a star, he remembered, and Mallory Ringess as a man had burned with a need to face the truth of his own soul. If Danlo willed himself to continue staring at the light-offering and complete his journey into the wild, then in a way he would not be alone. Like a star, his father would be there inside him, watching him, waiting for him – and always guiding him inward toward the fiery centre of the universe.

  Father, Father.

  There came a moment of brilliance and burning when Danlo did not know whether he was still looking at the great cube or at the shimmering lights of his own mind. He felt himself falling, not as a wingless bird might plummet toward the hard ice of a planet’s surface and certain terminus in time, but rather falling into infinity, endlessly falling, faster and faster, as a lightship pulled into the heart of a black hole. He felt this falling as a nausea in his belly and a terrible acceleration of his mind. There were tremendous time distortions. He could see his brain lights; they flickered faster, ever faster. An Architect, upon facing death, spoke in glowing words of being vastened into an eternal computer. But now, in sensing the almost palpable programs of his brain, Danlo felt himself being infinitized, being fractured into a hundred billion waves of light moving at infinitely accelerating speed. There came a shattering of himself. He looked at his mind ever more closely, as through a diamond lens increasing its power of magnification from ten times to ten thousand. The waves of his own consciousness, at first as seemingly smooth and undulant as the body of a snake, now appeared as jagged as a tiger’s teeth. The closer he looked, the more the waves split apart into yet smaller waves, fracturing and fractalling down to infinity. How delicate and beautiful they appeared! The waves were as perishable as ice crystals in a fiery wind, and he could hold them only for a moment before they broke up and vanished into the black neverness inside himself. He knew, then, that he was these waves of light, and nothing more, vibrating and shimmering and always dancing down into that dazzling darkness at the centre of his soul.

  Father, Father – I am afraid.

  He remembered a time when he was ten years old and had become lost out on the sea’s ice after a day of hunting seals. Just as night fell, a great white bear had leaped at him out of the darkness, rising up like a mountain over a ridge of drifted snow. The bear easily might have killed him before he could have raised his spear, but as it happened, he only wanted to play with Danlo. Sometimes bears were like that. He only wanted to frighten Danlo into a desperate dance of survival, and this he had done. Danlo still remembered his shocked surprise as a clutching of his belly and a scream that had had no time to form upon his lips. It had been a moment of supreme fear for his life, and yet the terror he felt now at falling into himself was infinitely greater. For it seemed that he could never escape. He felt himself losing control of his thoughts; each burst of mentation raced by him with a heart-stopping speed. It was as if he were strapped into a rocket-sled and forced to view the flickering reflections of the stars in the glossy ice beneath him. The reflections of his mind appeared with all the suddenness of a man discovering fire. There were mathematical concepts and worries and old faces; there were attitudes toward fear and counter ideas and countless memories. Many of his thoughts, he
noticed, came in pairs. One moment he might think that life sang with joy, while in the next infinitesimal of time the opposing idea would tear through him like a flash of lightning. Such thoughts flashed inside him, the affirmative and the negative, his need to affirm all things and say ‘yes’ (even this terrible opposition driving him mad) coupled with the terror and the great ‘no’ of existence itself. In the time it took to draw a breath, ten thoughts might form, oppose each other, shatter and reform into new thoughts. One thought might call up a thousand others, and each of these a thousand more. Like a seed ice crystal dropped into a supercooled cloud, the simplest thought might touch off a chain reaction of thinking, thoughts crystallizing thoughts a billion billion times over in a quickly building storm. There was no end to these thoughts. There was no following them, beholding them, or controlling them, for they exploded outward (or inward) infinitely in all directions.

  I know that I know that I know that yes is yes and no is no and there is no yes without a no and no no but that yes follows no as day follows night and darkness light is yes and no is not nothing but only the neverness from which comes selfness and light bright sight and seeing all myself I know that I will say no but no I mustn’t say no, I know, no, no, no no …

  Like a thallow flying into a sarsara, he was caught in the thoughtstorms raging through his brain. There was whiteness, wildness. Here, as ice crystals swirled together into clouds, waves of consciousness shimmered and flowed together, always moving and dancing, always forming patterns that were both terrible and beautiful to behold. He saw bright bands of violet and flaming streamers of scarlet and gold – all the colours of the spectrum and others which were wholly new. A Perfecti, viewing these lights from the safety of one of the Hall’s many benches, might have said that Danlo at last was apprehending the deep programs of his own mind. But this would have implied a detachment and freedom of will that Danlo no longer felt. In some sense he wasn’t apprehending himself at all but only simply being – existing as the chemical storms of tryptamine and serotonin causing his neurons to fire. He was this fire. He burned and he burned, and he couldn’t keep himself from burning. At last he understood the pain of his friend, Hanuman li Tosh, the cetic who once had gone inside himself and returned to recount the nature of hell. This was the pain of pure existence, matter forming and rushing and combining, endlessly, decaying and shattering and recombining without meaning or purpose, on and on until the end of eternity. It was the pain of the gods, those tragic beings who felt themselves cut off from this onstreaming flow of atoms and photons and yet caught up in a fire that they could never quite control. Perhaps it was even the pain of God, terrible and deep, for if God was being in itself and the substance of all things, then this infinite body was continually ageing, dying, decomposing and separating from itself, on every world and piece of dust in the universe, on and on throughout space and time. God, he thought, consumed God in this eternal flame. The burning could never stop. Knowing this, Danlo felt a terrible fear of being trapped forever in his own fire. He hated himself for fearing at all, and he hated his own hatred with such wrath that he might have destroyed himself then if only he could have willed himself to die. But now, in this moment, he was nothing but a red, raging flame, and he had neither desire nor will, but only despair. This terrible emotion was more absolute than that of a pilot returning from the stars to discover his birth world blackened by the killing light of some supernova. It was greater than that of a god who watches a whole galaxy of stars dying and collapsing into a singularity made by one of his enemies. Danlo, himself, now began collapsing into himself, into the darkest depths and the burning cold neverness of his soul. He fell like a stone dropped into a bottomless pool. He fell and fell, and all his being was in this endless falling and endless time, the infinities downward, fire inside fire, pain inside pain, the blackness deepening into an ever more vast and total blackness. In the time of a single heartbeat – in only a moment – he lived ten thousand years.

  To live, I die. To live, to live – no, no, no, no …

  There came a moment when he did not think that he would live much longer. In truth, he did not want to live if it meant falling forever into madness. If his brain was connected along many-silvered nerves to every part of his body, then he could send messages to all his muscles and organs. If he tried hard enough, he could find the way to make his heart stop beating. In the black pathways of despair winding through his brain, he could almost see this way. Somewhere inside him, like a diamond inside a black velvet box, shone the secret of life and death. He looked and looked, deeper and deeper, and he trembled to open this box. The key was almost within his grasp; it gleamed like a golden shell buoyed on the cresting wavefront of his consciousness. For ten billion years, he had lived with this most terrible of desires. He could will himself to die. He could do this almost as easily as holding his breath. He remembered, then, Leander of Darkmoon and the eight other pilots who had died trying to find their way toward the Solid State Entity. Like him, they had sought the secret of the universe, but they had found something else. They had been too afraid to die, and so they had died – this the goddess Herself had told him. If, then, he faced his own death fearlessly with open hands and eyes, did that mean that he was fated to live? Or was there, after all, truly a choice?

  For in the end we choose our futures, he remembered.

  These were the words of his father, his mother, perhaps even the meaning of the wind or the snowy owl’s cry on a moonlit night. It was the sound of himself, whispering, weeping, laughing. As he fell deeper into the long, dark, roaring ocean inside, he heard the calling of his consciousness. His consciousness. His will – he sensed that he still surged with a will toward life as wild and free as a thallow flying toward the sun. He knew this must always be so, and this sudden knowledge astonished him. For he had thought himself a slave to the chemicals burning through his brain. He was these chemicals, truly, this exquisitely tuned orchestration of blood, body and brain, but what did this mean? He willed himself to see himself just as he truly was. It was like looking into a mirror reflecting a mirror reflecting a million more mirrors shimmering with the far-off brilliance of his own face. In this inward gazing down through the well of darkness to the distant light, he caught a glint of blue-black; perhaps this was the colour of his eyes or the colour of infinity or even the colour of consciousness itself.

  Gazing at the bright black sky, you see only yourself looking for yourself. When you look into the eyes of God, they go on and on forever.

  When Danlo looked through his own eyes into his brain, he saw starfire and light. A hundred billion neurons fired in quick, deep rhythms that he was only now beginning to apprehend. The brain’s inner workings, of course, consisted of much more than the firing of all these separate cells. In truth, no part of the brain existed in separation. Many neurons intertwined their synapses with ten thousand others – sometimes with as many as three hundred thousand other nerve cells. The brain as a whole organ generated an electromagnetic field that pulled at every single cell. And each one was as perfect as a diamond. Inside the clear cell walls were dense-cored vesicles, neurotubules, and mitochondria tearing apart phosphate molecules to free up life’s energies – and a thousand other structures. Motilin, dopamine, taurine and many other neurotransmitters cascaded in a never-ending flood. He saw lipids and amino acids combining, glucose burning and ions swirling through the water of life in an incredibly intricate and beautiful dance. What ordered these chemicals of consciousness, he wondered? What made matter and organized it into such subtle and marvellous harmonies?

  I am that I am. I am only carbon and oxygen and nitrogen and hydrogen and potassium and iron and …

  He was only these elements of the earth, nothing more, nothing less. These elements of the stars. For every part of him – every atom of carbon in his eyes, every bit of iron in his heart – had been once fused together in the fire of a long-dead star. The stars, in truth, made the atoms of the universe, but what made these ato
ms come together in consciousness and life? What made them move? For move they did, almost quicker than he could imagine, pulsing and resonating, vibrating billions of times in a moment, seeking out other atoms with which to spin and dance and sing their cosmic songs. In one mad, marvellous moment beyond time, beneath time, he looked into the centre of a carbon atom sparkling somewhere near the centre of his brain. He needed to know the secret of matter, and he saw a fiery cloud of electrons – and protons and neutrons exchanging energies, hugging each other in a terribly compelling love beyond love, binding themselves to themselves in a single, ball-like nucleus. And deeper he looked, and saw the quarks, like infinitesimal sapphires and emeralds and rubies, all full of charm and strangeness. And deeper still, the strings and infons and the splendid noumena, which could be grasped only by the mind but never sensed – or rather sensed only in the fire of madness or in that marvellous, mystical clarity that befalls a man when he discovers his inner sense of the infinite. What was matter, truly? Matter, he saw, was magical stuff. Matter shimmered. All the matter of the universe was woven of a single, superluminal tapestry of jewels, the light of each jewel reflected in the light of every other. Matter was holy, matter was alive, matter was but consciousness frozen in time. For as far down the great chain of being as he looked, down and down through the infinities, he could see no final form or bit of matter but only light. This was not the light of the sun or stars, not the photons nor the flashing wavelengths of visible radiation by which he might behold the distant galaxies or the blueness of his own eyes. Rather it was a light inside light, purer and primeval, the light inside all things. In some ways, it seemed more like water than light, for it flowed and surged as a single, shimmering substance. It moved itself. It had will, was will itself. This deep consciousness that some called matter knew how to come together into ever more complex forms. It evolved; ultimately, as with man, it evolved to perceive itself and cry out with wonder and wild joy. This, he saw, was the essential nature of consciousness, that it was always aware of its own splendour, even as a cresting wave of water reflects the light of the entire ocean beneath itself.