The Wild

by David Zindell

  Later, as they lay in silence before the dying fire, as Danlo watched the light of the flames reflecting from her sweat-streaked face, he remembered a saying that he had once been taught: The surfaces outside glitter with intelligible lies; the depths inside blaze with the unintelligible truths. He touched the scar on his pounding forehead, then. He rubbed the salt water from his burning eyes, and he marvelled that the search for the truth could leave him so empty and saddened and utterly alone.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Recurrence

  Simulations cannot become realizations.

  – Nils Ordando, founder of the Order of Cetics

  Simulations must not become realizations.

  – Horthy Hosthoh, founder of the Order of

  Mystic Mathematicians and

  Other Seekers of the Ineffable Flame

  During the following days there were other ecstasy-making sessions in front of the fire, sometimes as many as five in one day (or night). Sometimes they would spend whole nights locked and sweating in the lotus position while Tamara lightly raked his eyelids and face with her fingernails and, like a tigress, bit softly at his neck. Despite the intensity of these dangerous pleasures – and despite a hundred other techniques for smashing the icy inner walls that separate two lovers – there never came the moment of breaking through into that golden realm of oneness and true bliss that Danlo had always cherished. And neither could they penetrate each other’s deepest self with mere words. In the morning, they liked to sit by the window in the tearoom sipping coffee and talking as they watched the gulls fetch their meaty breakfasts from the ocean. They talked while taking their stroll at low tide along the beach, and in the fireroom before sleeping they talked in hushed and intimate tones. They talked endlessly and sincerely about everything from the Entity’s capriciousness in keeping them prisoners on an unknown Earth to the universal nature of love; they opened their hearts to each other, or tried to, but in some mysterious way they were as strangers to each other.

  In those dreadful moments of doubt when Danlo was alone in the house or down by the ocean’s lapping waves, he found that all his thoughts of her had come to involve conflicting images and paradoxes: she was still the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, but all too often her golden face fell dark and deep as space and was terrible to look upon; she loved him with the same burning passion as she always had, and yet sometimes when she touched him in her great need for love, her fingers were like icicles stabbing into his heart. And then there was the deepest paradox of all. In some way that he could not yet apprehend, Tamara was truly herself, and yet she was not. She is not she, he thought. She was not quite the same Tamara that he remembered. Little things about her disturbed him. To begin with, there was the matter of her solitary, nocturnal walks along the beach. As they waited day after day for the Entity to speak to them again and reveal the nature of their respective tests, it became Tamara’s habit to leave the house after midnight and wander the moonlit dunes by herself. On Neverness, of course, her profession had required her to make many journeys alone across the city’s icy night-time streets. Danlo knew that Tamara was as brave as any courtesan – as brave as anyone – and yet he had never suspected that she liked skating along the Serpentine where it narrows down in the darkest part of the Farsider’s Quarter, where the wormrunners and other dangerous men (and sometimes aliens) wait in the shadows of the brothels and whistle at any woman who passes by. Tamara, he was beginning to see, liked dangerous situations, not for the sake of danger itself, but rather for the sense of personal power that she gained in overcoming her natural fears of the world. Tamara, on Never-ness’s sometimes deadly slidderies and glissades, had always worn a little finger-gun, a spikhaxo, that murderous weapon favoured by warrior-poets and other assassins. In fact, in another age, the warrior-poets and the Society of Courtesans had once been the closest of allies, and it was the warrior-poets who had taught women such as Tamara about ekkana and naittare and other secret poisons. Like many of her sisters, when Tamara was out on an assignation, her spikhaxo was always loaded with several poison darts that she might fire into the flesh of any man so foolish as to think he might accost a beautiful courtesan and wrest a little grunting pleasure from her for free. And Tamara’s darts were always impregnated with the black ink of naittare, a poison so poisonous that within seconds it would penetrate the blood-brain barrier and set off electrochemical storms in the cortex akin to an epileptic fit. Except that, the chaos of the brain that naittare caused was worse than any epilepsy; for it always killed, almost instantly, a horrible, hideous death of popping eyes and foaming lips and limbs jerking to the whip of randomly firing nerves. The agony caused by this drug was said to be even worse than that of ekkana, and for the victim the dying lasted nearly forever. Tamara’s willingness to use naittare against men had never surprised Danlo because he understood the deterrent effect of such a poison; over the last thousand years only a few courtesans had ever fired a naittare-tipped dart at anyone, and these few instances were well-remembered in the stories that the wormrunners told in the cafés and had caused even the most depraved criminals to treat the courtesans with respect. But, on the first night that Tamara walked alone by the ocean’s edge, Danlo was astonished to see her loading these deadly, black darts into her spikhaxo. And Tamara was astonished at his astonishment. She cited the tigers that hunted the beach at dark as reason enough for such precautions; who knew better than Danlo, she asked, about the tigers who preyed on innocent lambs? And Danlo did know about tigers, of course, but he could not understand why Tamara didn’t carry a sheshat or some other kind of tranquillizer dart that would instantly immobilize a large predator and render it unconscious but would not kill. After all, there was no deterring one tiger by causing the hissing, screaming death of another. After all, Tamara loved animals, especially cats, whom she regarded as the most graceful and beautiful of all animals. Danlo would have thought that Tamara would do almost anything to preserve an animal’s blessed life.

  Her response to Danlo’s bewilderment was strange. As he watched her carefully slide a black sliver of death into the finger-gun’s chamber, her face fell lovely and ruthless in intense concentration at the task at hand. When she had finished, she pulled the black spikhaxo glove over her fingers, looked up at Danlo and said, almost jubilantly, ‘I’ve always loved your faithfulness to ahimsa, you know, but I’ve never quite been able to share it. If a tiger hunts me, should I be afraid of killing him? I’ve always dreaded being afraid. I’ve always dreaded killing anything, but there’s always killing, isn’t there? Oh, dear Danlo – sometimes it seems that life is nothing but killing and death.’

  In the fire of her dark brown eyes and the beautifully controlled passion of her voice, it almost seemed that she sought the chance to slay a tiger, to experience deeply the extreme peril of life. In a way, this was consistent with her purpose as both courtesan and woman. As long as she could remember, she had sought to live more deeply, more truly, and thus to awaken herself to a new way of being. Unfortunately, her inborn temperament and love of life often worked against this goal. Tamara loved all the things of life, and she could never get enough of it, whether it be sex or food, music, drugs, wine, or dance, or conversation, maithuna, rock collecting or intellectual gourmandizing. So keenly did she love the tastes, colours, sounds, and textures of the world that when she was younger, she had often found herself moving from one pleasure to another with all the restlessness and energy of a bee flitting among a field of wildflowers. It was her natural tendency to abandon any activity precisely at the moment when she began to feel tired or bored. Her meditation masters, appreciating her almost bodily hunger for excitement and ecstasy, had warned her that she possessed something of a ‘monkey mind’, a talent for leaping agilely from, one branch of experience to another – but never holding any one experience very tightly or very long. They meant this as no insult, but rather an appreciation of the strengths and weaknesses of her wonderful vitality. Their criticisms, however, had de
vastated Tamara. From the very beginning of her novitiate as a courtesan, when she was a shy and nervous girl only twelve years old, she had vowed to overcome the flightiness of her mind. She found within herself immense desires for love and ever more life, and yet she found as well an immense will to control those very desires. All through her novice years and even into her time as a voluptuary, with a ferocious discipline that impressed the elder sisters of her Society, she cultivated for herself a new mind, a ‘dolphin mind’ as she called it, a way of diving deeply beneath the waves of her life’s experience in order to drink in the essence of whatever task or pleasure engaged her. Whether dancing or washing dishes or memorizing the formulae for the methyl-tryptamine series of poisons, she learned the art of concentration, the ecstasy of details. She learned to pay attention to things. And most of all, she learned to enter into any new experience with all her natural verve and zest coupled with a marvellously intense awareness of the world. And so it shouldn’t have surprised Danlo to see her strap the spikhaxo onto her lovely hand and step out beneath the full moon onto the beach, but nevertheless he was surprised. The logic of Tamara’s life demanded that she experience everything possible as deeply as possible – but human beings are nowise consistent, and their lives are patchwork robes sewn together from various incongruities, whimsies and passions. And compassion. The real Tamara, Danlo thought, the blessed woman whom he remembered so well, would fight like a fury to save her own life. She would fight a tiger – fight all the demons of hell – to protect those she loved. In truth, she could kill, would kill, at need, but she would never seek out fighting or killing for its own sake merely to know what it was like to kill. The real Tamara, he felt certain, in this one instance would hold illogic and compassion closely to herself as tightly as she had grasped his body at their first mating.

  After much contemplation and discussion – and the delicate probing of the extreme facility with which Tamara recalled her past – Danlo decided that there must be something wrong with her memory after all. It was not that her memory was not good. In a way, it was much too good. At times, her memory of the moments they had shared was as clear and pure as glacier water, and it was this very purity of memory that disturbed him. For Tamara, unlike himself, had never possessed anything like a perfect memory, and even if she had, her clear recollection of their first meeting or their last all-night dance session bore none of the depth nor murkiness nor hidden currents of real memory. When he looked into her quick, dark eyes, he saw a vast distance between the things she remembered and her most intimate feelings for those things. She seemed to have all the memories that she should have had, but they somehow failed to connect her with her deepest self or with the most vital and beautiful moments of her life. It was almost as if she wore her memory too lightly, as if it were nothing more than a glittering golden robe that she might remove at any time and replace with something more pleasing. But real memory, Danlo thought, was more like naked skin inextricably fused with the body, or rather, it was all deeper tissues and bone and nerves connecting every part of one’s bodymind. He decided, then, that the Entity had healed her poorly, or at least incompletely. Perhaps it was part of his test that he discover this. Perhaps this strange goddess was testing the depths of his perception and compassion. But test or no, he must find a way to restore Tamara so that she was truly herself again. He had known this since the moment that he first learned her memories had been destroyed. Somehow he must help heal her – and if this was no part of the Entity’s test of him, then it must be his test of himself, of his faith, of his prowess, of his ability to love unconditionally and completely despite the flawed nature of Tamara’s soul.

  One night, as they were sitting by a driftwood fire down on the beach not far from Danlo’s lightship, as Tamara stared into the dancing flames and held his hand beneath the thick red blanket that covered them, Danlo looked at her and asked, ‘Would you … like to practice some of the remembrancing attitudes with me?’

  Instantly, her hand tightened in his, the same convulsive squeezing of her finger muscles that would have triggered the spikhaxo glove to fire a dart if she hadn’t taken it off before sitting with him. She turned to him in puzzlement. ‘It’s been a long time, hasn’t it? But why would you want to remembrance now?’

  In the light of the fire, her eyes were dark liquid pools full of doubt and hurt. He thought that he should be careful of what he said. He thought that he should remind her of why she had once taken an interest in the remembrancer’s art. Perhaps he should speak of the courtesans’ dream of waking up the cells of the human body, of awakening the whole bodymind so that a new kind of human being might be born. In this way, he might ease her into the attitudes of gestalt and imaging and so trick her into remembrancing herself. And thus into healing herself. As he looked into her soft, trusting eyes, he saw that he easily might have accomplished this little deceit. But he could not bring himself to lie to her. His was the guile of guilelessness, and so after a long time of looking at her, he finally said, ‘Because it would be a way … toward the union that we’ve always talked about.’

  ‘One soul,’ she said. ‘One soul in two separate bodies.’

  ‘Do you remember the night we first breathed each other’s soul?’

  She nodded her head and smiled. Once, on a brilliant night of snow and starlight after they had promised to marry each other, he had held his mouth over her nose and lips, breathing out while she breathed in. And then she had held her mouth over his. In this way, which was the way of Danlo’s brothers and sisters among the Alaloi tribes, their spirits had passed into each other and interfused to become one. ‘I remember,’ she said. ‘But why should we seek backward in remembrance for this union?’

  ‘Because we were … so close.’

  Tamara squeezed his hand more tightly. ‘I’ve never been as happy as I am now.’

  ‘I think you would remain here forever, if you could.’

  ‘In our house,’ she said. ‘With you, here, forever – I’d love that.’

  ‘Then you would never return to Neverness?’

  ‘No, never,’ she said.

  ‘Have you forgotten your calling, then? Once a time, you wanted to wake people up, their cells, their … souls. You wanted to wake up the whole universe.’

  At this, she laughed beautifully and looked down toward the ocean shimmering in the moonlight. She breathed in long breaths of salt air and listened to the pounding waves for a moment before saying, ‘That was before I came here. There’s something about this Earth just as it is – it’s already awakened, don’t you see? And while I’m here, by the forest, by the water, I feel as awake as I’ve ever been, perhaps as I ever could be. I don’t care about the rest of the universe, Danlo. How should I care?’

  Danlo looked down the beach where his lightship gleamed darkly beneath the stars. During the time since his planetfall, the wind had driven sheets of sand up against the diamond hull, half-burying it in a new dune that built a little higher every day. And every day, upon awakening at first light, he promised himself he would dig his ship free in preparation for the moment when the Entity permitted him to continue on his journey. But he always found other things with which to occupy himself, whether it be cooking elaborate meals with Tamara in her kitchen, or dancing with her in the meditation room, or joining on the floor of the fireroom to work their way through the many hundreds of positions of the sexual yogas. Sometimes his lack of mindfulness and his fading sense of duty alarmed him. Sometimes, on those bittersweet nights when Tamara fed him bloodfruit and tea and cried out in a strange voice during their love play, he forgot about his mission to the Vild, even forgot that the dying Vild stars were part of a greater universe whose boundaries were measureless to man.