The Wild

by David Zindell

  It would be impossible here to chronicle all the events of the War of Terror, even as limited in time as the killing proved to be. The truly critical events of this war, at least, were the individual decisions of countless Architects and all the little acts of courage or cowardice, heartlessness or faith – for this was a fight for men’s and women’s souls, perhaps for the very soul of the Church itself. On the second day of the war, a terrible battle raged over the possession of Ornice Olorun’s light-field, but on that same day, in the distant city of Montellivi, a woman named Marta Kalinda en li Ede stood before a cadre of Iviomils and pleaded for the release of her husband, the Elder Valin Iviastalir, whom they had captured as a hostage. The cadre might have beheaded Marta or exploded open her brain with a tlolt, as they had done with dozens of others in this doomed city. Instead, through the sheer force of her faith, she shamed the Iviomils into doing as she asked, and more, into releasing the thousands of children being held for cleansing and re-education as to the literal meaning of the Algorithm. In Amaris, one of the Worthy underwent torture rather than reveal the name of a friend who had poisoned one of Bertram’s lieutenants, while his wife betrayed this very same man in exchange for food to feed her nineteen children. And from the thirteenth level of Ornice Olorun, almost right below the floor of Harrah’s palace, came the shocking story of an Iviomil who had sewn a plastic bomb into his abdomen in order to slip this barbaric weapon past the detectors in the local food factory. And then, with a quick prayer to the Holy Bertram, he had detonated the bomb, blowing up himself and the entire factory – along with at least twenty-six Worthy Architects who had sworn to keep Harrah’s army supplied with rations of beanbread and yeast.

  And so it went. The Architects, both Iviomils and the Worthy, were natural soldiers. Although their martial traditions were only a memory a thousand years past, they were disciplined and obedient and brave, but for their fear of dying the real death. At first, this fear gave the Iviomils great power. Almost immediately after claiming the architetcy, Bertram held that any man or woman who opposed him to be in abandonment of the True Church. His enemies were therefore apostates and heretics, or naraids, to use the slang word quickly becoming popular. A naraid, according to Bertram, was one who had turned away from God and was therefore unworthy of vastening. And so any Iviomil could slay any of Harrah’s followers without fear that they were committing a hakr, the crime of denying an Architect his ultimate salvation. This they did, piling up the bodies of the Worthy (or naraids) like dead fish. But, during the dark days following the fall of the Temple, the Worthy used their lasers and nerve knives against the Iviomils only with the greatest reluctance, for as Harrah reminded them, the Iviomils were their sisters and brothers, their cousins and daughters and great-grandsons. All Architects, she said, were children of Ede who would someday be vastened in Him. And then Bertram, under tremendous pressure to honour the Church’s ancient canons of war, issued an order to Cheslav Iviongeon that soon would undermine his advantage. Henceforth Cheslav – and the other programmers of the House of Eternity – would use the compiling computers to create pallatons of all Iviomils before they went into battle, much as they had done with Danlo for his Walk with the Dead. It gave the Iviomils great courage to know that even if their bodies should be vaporized in the blast of a hydrogen bomb, their souls would be forever safe on an eternal diamond disc. Ironically, however, this certainty of salvation made it easier for Harrah’s Worthy to kill them. And when Harrah invited her followers likewise to preserve their pallatons, the Worthy found it much easier to risk their lives in the suicidal attacks their Elders began asking of them. As one of the ancient generals once remarked, war is progressive. So it was with the War of Terror. By the seventh day of Bertram’s false architetcy, the people of Tannahill fell into the frenzy of killing almost as easily as sleekits starved and forced together into a cage.

  Only two people refused to have pallatons made in counterfeit of their true selfness. The first, of course, was Malaclypse Redring of Qallar – he who sought the very opposite of cheating death. And Danlo wi Soli Ringess, too, only smiled when one of Harrah’s readers invited him into the vastening chamber that they had hastily constructed in the west wing of the palace. It vexed him to consider his fate should one of the Iviomils’ missiles evade the palace lasers and explode in his face: one of Harrah’s programmers would cark his pallaton into an eternal computer, and the Architects would say that the Lightbringer at last had become a part of the eternal Church, as all men and women must someday do. Although there was no chance of Danlo changing his mind, the Ede hologram glowing out of Danlo’s devotionary computer constantly spoke in favour of salvation. Whenever Danlo was alone with this glittering machine, the Ede reminded him just how desperate their existence truly was. On the first day of the War, when the bombs began exploding and Harrah had taken refuge along with two hundred Elders and Danlo inside the palace, the Ede had calculated that one of Bertram’s first moves would be to attack Ornice Olorun’s light-field and to capture Danlo’s lightship. Bertram certainly would try to capture Danlo himself, to torture him or to cleanse him into acting as a mouthpiece for the Iviomil cause.

  ‘It would be best if you’d let the programmers make a pallaton of your selfness,’ the Ede told Danlo after a particularly bad day of bloodshed. It was the ninth day of the War, with the third battle for the light field just beginning. And, according to the rumour passing around the city, Malaclypse of Qallar had managed the assassination of Sul Iviercier and Pilar Narcavage and two other Elders who had been unable to take refuge in Harrah’s palace. ‘As I know only too well, preserving part of one’s program is better than nothing.’

  Danlo, who had spent most of the day tending the wounded Architects who filled the rooms and halls of the palace, was almost too tired to respond. He did not want to tell this little hologram that the very survival of Nikolos Daru Ede as a bit of program carked into a devotionary computer was reason enough to discourage him from seeking a similar fate.

  ‘Of course,’ the Ede continued, ‘if Harrah’s people succeed in winning the light-field, it might be possible for us to escape.’

  In the privacy of his altar room, Danlo rubbed his eyes which still burned from all the horrors that he had seen that day. To the imago of Nikolos Daru Ede, he said, ‘For us to leave Tannahill … this might be possible, yes? We might flee to the stars. Across the Vild to Thiells. Is this what you would choose?’

  ‘Would I choose to flee?’ Ede wondered aloud. It seemed almost that he was talking to himself, computing risks and probabilities. ‘Where is the greater danger, to stay here in the palace or to chance the streets between here and the light-field?’

  ‘I … do not know. Truly, it is impossible to know.’

  ‘And if we did reach the light field,’ Ede continued, ‘if we fled to the stars, we would have to leave my body behind.’

  Just then an explosion shook the windows of the palace, and Danlo slowly nodded his head. He hadn’t forgotten Ede’s purpose in helping him seek Tannahill nor his promise to help Ede recover his frozen body.

  ‘Yes,’ Danlo said. ‘But some day we might return. Some day … if Harrah defeats Bertram and the Iviomils are constrained.’

  ‘But as well we might never return,’ the Ede said. ‘The Lord of your Order might forbid you to return here, or an exploding star might catch your lightship in its blast, or–’

  ‘Yes, this is true,’ Danlo said. Then he sighed because he hated interrupting anyone, even the programmed imago of a man who had once been a god. ‘Who can see his own fate?’

  ‘If we might never return, then I choose to remain.’

  ‘But the choice is not yours to make,’ Danlo said, smiling.

  ‘Of course not – I have no power to move your lightship, do I, Pilot?’

  ‘The choice is not mine, either,’ Danlo said. ‘The battle for the light-field is not yet won.’

  Two days later, however, Harrah Ivi en li Ede knocked at Danlo’s door to tell
him of a great victory. For the Holy Ivi to pay him a visit with the whole world fairly falling apart around them surprised Danlo; it was the first time he had spoken with her face to face since the day before his Walk with the Dead.

  ‘Please come in,’ Danlo said as he held the door open.

  For a moment, Harrah stood in the hallway, sighing as she looked down at a sleeping man who had recently been wounded in the battle for the light-field. The entire hallway was filled with the wounded lying in makeshift beds of foam cushions and plastic sheets. The air stank with the usual hydroxyls and sulphates and aldehydes – and with the terrible new smells of blood and pus and burnt flesh. Women and children, their white kimonos stained with red, hurried among the groaning Architects, bringing them food, water, and for the fortunate few, cups of alaqua tea to take away a little of their pain. Although Harrah had recently changed into a fresh kimono for her visit with Danlo, streaks of blood smeared the silk where a man with a bandaged face had reached out to touch her. For the Holy Ivi – or for anyone – to walk through the hallways of the palace was no easy feat.

  ‘Please sit with me a while, if you’d like,’ Danlo said. ‘Please sit, Blessed Ivi – you must be very tired.’

  Again Harrah sighed and rubbed the loose skin around her eyes. She looked deathly tired, with her soft brown eyes sunken in sadness and her whole face haggard and pale. For the first time in her life, she seemed almost as old as her years – all one hundred and twenty-eight of them, as Danlo recalled.

  ‘Thank you,’ Harrah said. Her once-clear voice sounded hoarse and weak as if she’d been talking continually for many days. ‘We would love to sit with you.’

  Danlo invited her into his altar room where he helped her down onto the white cushions on the floor. In her trembling hands she carried a devotionary similar to Danlo’s; not even the Holy Ivi of the Cybernetic Universal Church liked to leave her rooms without her familiar computer. With a smile, Danlo took it from her and set it beside his devotionary on the altar. Then he sat crosslegged facing her.

  ‘I have no tea to offer you, Blessed Ivi. I am sorry.’

  ‘Please don’t be,’ Harrah said. ‘We’ve drunk too much tea today already.’

  Danlo smiled sadly as he looked into her eyes. Although Harrah was usually as honest as she was kind, he did not think that she was telling the truth. With tea being reserved mostly for the wounded, Danlo thought it unlikely that she had drunk more than one thin cup of mint tea since the morning facing ceremony. He himself had had nothing except water.

  ‘You look tired, Pilot,’ Harrah said as she looked at Danlo.

  ‘We are all tired, aren’t we?’

  ‘We’ve heard that you haven’t slept since the third battle for the light-field began. Three days, Pilot.’

  ‘It … is hard to sleep with the people crying out for water to drink.’

  As if in response to the pain burning in Danlo’s eyes, a soft moan came through the open doors to Danlo’s adjoining sleeping chamber. There, amid the flowers and luxurious furnishings pushed to the edge of the room, four men lay dying on the floor. One of them was the palace keeper, Thomas Ivieehl. Danlo had spent most of the day preparing tea for him (and the others), as well as changing bandages and emptying bowls of blood or bile – or any of the other fluids that leaked from a man’s body when it has been burned and broken.

  ‘How can you go three days without sleeping?’ Harrah asked.

  Danlo smiled, then rubbed his eyes. ‘And in that time, Blessed Harrah, how much sleep have you taken?’

  ‘But we are the Holy Ivi of our people,’ she said. ‘Despite Bertram Jaspari’s claim to the contrary.’

  ‘I will sleep when I must,’ Danlo said. ‘When I … can.’

  Harrah sighed at Danlo’s stubbornness, which was nearly as great as her own. She said, ‘We’re sorry that we haven’t been able to congratulate you since your tests. To see you, face to face. But we’ve been preoccupied.’

  ‘I … understand.’

  ‘Congratulations, indeed, Danlo wi Soli Ringess. You are the Lightbringer, aren’t you?’

  Despite his exhaustion, this question amused Danlo. In truth, with each new horror he beheld and with each hour of sleep lost, he found himself often taking refuge in humour – sometimes the black humour of those forced to deal every day with death, but more often in his keen sense of irony in the universe’s essential strangeness. And so as he often did, he smiled and answered her question with a question: ‘I do not know – am I the Lightbringer?’

  ‘We believe that you are,’ Harrah said. She, too, was smiling, though not in amusement but rather in all the brilliance of her faith. And in awe. Although she knew that Danlo was just a man, even as he always said, she could see his luminous self as clearly as if Ede the God had set a star to shine at the centre of his forehead. ‘Everyone believes this, Pilot. Even Bertram and all the Iviomils fear that you are – although they won’t permit themselves to see what they really believe.’

  ‘So many people … have died over these beliefs.’ Danlo listened to one of the men, Timur Hastivi, coughing in his sleeping chamber. ‘So many beliefs, so much death.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Harrah said. ‘But we’ve won a great battle. The light-field is ours. At least, Ornice Olorun’s light-field – the Iviomils still hold those of Amaris, Elimat and Karkut, and a hundred other smaller cities. We’ve come to tell you this.’

  ‘I … had already heard.’

  ‘We’ve come to tell you that your ship is unharmed. The Iviomils tried to open it, but they were killed before they could find their way in.’

  Danlo shut his eyes for a moment. He envisioned a cadre of red-kimonoed Iviomils swarming over his lightship with lasers and drills. He saw them cursing at the hardness of black diamond, cursing and dying as circles of the Worthy in their white kimonos closed-in around them and killed them with plasma flames and heat-tlolts.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it is almost impossible … for anyone other than a pilot to open a lightship.’

  ‘You’re free to leave, Pilot. We hold all the streets, all the lifts between the palace and the light-field.’

  ‘Free … to leave.’ Danlo said these few words as if their sounds made no sense.

  ‘Your mission to our Church has been accomplished,’ Harrah told him.

  ‘Truly?’

  ‘This morning we interfaced Ede’s eternal computer. And we received a New Program to replace the Programs of Increase and Totality. We’ll install the New Program tomorrow morning.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Never again, we pray, will it be part of the Program of the Church to destroy the stars.’

  Danlo said nothing but only bowed his head in giving thanks to this kindly woman.

  ‘You may bring the news of your accomplishment to the Lords of your Order.’

  Again, Danlo bowed his head.

  ‘And to the Narain heretics – as their emissary, you may tell them that there will be peace between us.’

  ‘If you’d like, Blessed Harrah.’

  ‘We had supposed that you’d be overjoyed to leave Tannahill.’

  Danlo looked at the altar where his devotionary sat next to hers. He looked at her imago of Nikolos Daru Ede beaming joy into the room, and then at his Ede who kept an identical expression on his glowing face should Harrah chance to look that way.

  ‘But I cannot leave yet,’ Danlo said. ‘I … have promises to keep.’

  ‘Promises to whom?’

  ‘To your people. As you say, they believe that I am the Lightbringer.’

  ‘Indeed they do.’

  ‘I am a symbol, yes? If I were to flee to the stars now, many of your people would not understand.’

  ‘Indeed they wouldn’t.’

  ‘Such an act, at this time, might even weaken your cause.’

  ‘We might still lose the war, we’re afraid.’

  ‘I will stay until the war is decided, then.’ Here he smiled at himself and said, ‘What good is a Lig
htbringer if he leaves only darkness in his passing?’

  ‘We were hoping you’d stay,’ Harrah admitted. ‘Just as we hope that when you leave, some day you’ll return.’

  Danlo wanted to tell her that, yes, someday he would return, and soon, but just then a soft cry from his sleeping chamber caught his attention. He heard plastic sheets crinkling, then panting and moaning. Suddenly, he said, ‘Please excuse me for a moment, Blessed Harrah.’

  With astonishing energy for one who had denied himself sleep, he sprang to his feet and went into the other room. Sometime later – in truth, after a long time – he returned and sat back down.

  ‘It is Thomas Ivieehl,’ he said. ‘He … has much pain.’

  ‘We’d heard that he’d been burned in the battle for the light-field.’

  ‘Yes,’ Danlo said. Now he was as far from amusement or humour as a man could be. He looked down at his hands as if he could almost feel his ivory skin burning and blackening into char.