The Wild

by David Zindell

  ‘And I am not just a computer, either,’ the Ede said, and his face was brilliant with self-satisfaction.

  ‘What are you, then?’

  At this the Ede smiled wickedly and said, ‘Ishq Allah maboud lillah: I am program, programmer, and that which is programmed.’

  Danlo, who had once memorized many poems composed in ancient Arabic, smiled at this obvious mistranslation. He said, ‘God is love, lover, and beloved. Only … you are not God.’

  ‘Am I not? Am I not Ede the God?’

  Just then the Ede’s face fell through the usual divine emotions of wisdom, serenity, joy, and of course, love. And then his eyes flashed with light, and his whole face seemed to melt into a golden brilliance like that of the sun. It was hard for Danlo to look upon this splendid face. The intense light of it hurt his eyes; the sudden pain that stabbed through his forehead caused him to throw his arm across his burning eyes.

  ‘You are only an imago of Ede as he was as a man,’ Danlo said at last. ‘And Ede himself, even as a god … was no more God than the dust beneath my boots. No more, no … less.’

  The Ede’s face was now a mask of worry. ‘I notice that you use the past tense in referring to the god.’

  ‘For a simple devotionary, you seem to notice many things.’

  ‘As I’ve said, I have many eyes.’

  ‘You seem to know many things.’

  ‘Well, I really know very little,’ the Ede said. ‘And tragically, there is space in my memory for very little more information.’

  ‘But you know that you are programmed to send a signal out toward the stars, yes?’

  ‘I’ve said that I know this.’

  ‘Excuse me. I am sorry … that I have bored you.’

  ‘To answer your question, again, it’s part of my programming that I am aware of my own programming.’

  ‘Then you must know why you are programmed this way.’

  ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘Why this signal, then?’ Danlo asked. He held his hand out toward the meditation hall, pointing at a selduk gleaming on its stand. ‘Why this temple, as it is? Why should you be programmed to lead people here?’

  Danlo rubbed his aching forehead as he struggled to breathe the thin, sunless air. Being inside an Architect temple, he thought, was as stifling as being inside a computer. An old, dusty computer.

  ‘Who programmed you, then?’ Danlo asked. He turned to look at the imago’s almost metallic-seeming face. ‘Was it Ede the God? The … true Ede?’

  ‘You ask difficult questions to answer.’

  ‘I am sorry.’

  ‘It’s not that I don’t know the answers, of course. But my programming forces me to exercise a certain caution.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘If I could ask you certain questions,’ the Ede said, ‘it might be that the answers to your questions would become clear as we proceeded.’

  Danlo was now smiling despite his annoyance. He said, ‘Then please proceed.’

  ‘Very well – you are a most reasonable man.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘My first question is this,’ the Ede said. ‘Where were you when you intercepted my signal?’

  ‘I was three hundred miles above this Earth. I was making my fourteenth orbit when I intercepted your signal.’

  ‘I see. You intercepted this signal – how?’

  ‘My ship’s radio is programmed to search for such signals.’

  ‘I see. You were orbiting this Earth in a ship?’

  ‘Did you think that I was flying through the sky like a bird?’ Danlo asked, smiling.

  ‘I see that you like to answer questions with questions.’

  ‘And should I not answer questions with questions?’

  ‘I see that you have a taste for playing with others’ sensibilities.’

  ‘I am sorry,’ Danlo said. He looked directly into the Ede’s shiny black eyes. ‘I … have been rude, yes?’

  ‘Well, that’s the human way, isn’t it?’

  ‘Sometimes, yes,’ Danlo said. ‘But it is not my way. That is, I have been taught that it is unseemly for a man to speak rudely to anyone – man, woman, or child.’ Or to an animal, Danlo remembered, or to a tree or a rock or even to the murderous west wind that blows in the night. A true man must speak truly and courteously to all the creations of the world, even one so strange as an imago of a man shining forth out of a computer. ‘I am sorry. It is just that I am unused to speaking with artificial intelligences … so deeply.’

  At this, the Ede’s face hardened into an unreadable mask. And yet there was a brightness about the eyes as if Ede’s program, as sublime as it might be, could not conceal his interest in what Danlo had said.

  ‘Have you spoken with many such intelligences?’ Ede asked.

  ‘No,’ Danlo said, ‘not many.’

  ‘Have you spoken with any of these intelligences on your journey here?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Danlo said. He thought of the Solid State Entity, and he wondered what kind of intelligence really controlled Her vast moon-brains. ‘But perhaps not.’

  ‘Perhaps or perhaps not,’ the Ede repeated. He smiled mechanically. ‘I see that you’re a most considerate man. You’ve remembered that I said I’ve little room left in my memory, and so you’ve chosen not to overload me with new information.’

  ‘I am sorry,’ Danlo said. Just then he did not want to tell a hologram – or anyone else – of his journey to the Solid State Entity.

  ‘Sometimes it can be difficult to determine which intelligences are artificial and which are not.’

  ‘I suppose that is true,’ Danlo said.

  ‘But you say that you have spoken with what you call artificial intelligences before?’

  ‘Yes, on the planet of my birth. In the city where I was educated, there were many computers. Many ai programs.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Ai programs,’ Danlo said. ‘The cetics of my Order sometimes call them ‘I’ programs. In mockery of the belief that computers could possess a sense of selfness.’

  ‘I see. The cetics of your Order must be antiquarians.’

  ‘That is true – in a way they are. Except the cyber-shamans. They love computers.’ Danlo closed his eyes for a moment, remembering. In his mind he saw a diamond clearface moulded tightly across a white skull and pale blue eyes as cold as death. Then he said, ‘Sometimes the cyber-shamans refer to ai programs as god programs.’

  ‘A more appropriate name, I should think.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Your Order – is this the Order founded in the city of Neverness?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘May I conclude that you are a pilot of this Order?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, then, you’ve fallen far, haven’t you, Pilot? In your diamond ship that falls faster than light – what is that you pilots call your ships?’

  ‘We call them lightships,’ Danlo said.

  ‘Oh, I’d forgotten,’ the Ede said. ‘But how is it that you were able to take your lightship into these parts of the galaxy that have been impenetrable for so long?’

  ‘We … have learned to penetrate these spaces. The Vild itself. We have learned to map through the manifold beneath these wild stars.’

  ‘I’d thought that the manifold beneath the Vild was unmappable.’

  ‘It … almost is.’

  ‘Then you have fallen here twenty-thousand light-years from Neverness?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In your lightship, by yourself? By mappings that you’ve made alone?’

  ‘Yes,’ Danlo said. ‘Pilots always enter the manifold alone.’

  ‘Then you’ve had no help in entering the manifold or piloting your ship?’

  ‘No – of course not.’

  ‘But you must have had help in finding this planet?’

  Danlo was silent as he stared at the hologram of Ede.

  ‘A hundred million stars in the Vild,’ Ede said. ‘Or perhaps thrice as
many. Is it a miracle that brought you to this Earth?’

  Danlo was aware of the Ede’s eyes glowing darkly, practically drilling like lasers into his eyes. He was aware of the devotionary’s hundreds of glittering computer eyes focusing on his face. He remembered, then, that cetic programs could enable computers to read truth or falseness from a man’s face.

  ‘I was given the fixed-points of a star near this Earth,’ Danlo said.

  ‘And who gave you this information?’

  With a sudden release of his breath, Danlo finally told the Ede imago something of his journey to the Solid State Entity. He made only passing reference to his tests on the beach, and as to his encounter with the Entity’s incarnation as Tamara, he said nothing at all. Neither did he speak of his quest to find his father. But he revealed that he sought the lost planet called Tannahill. He told the Ede that he sought the Architects of the Old Church, they who were fulfilling their doctrines and prophecies by destroying the stars.

  ‘That is an extraordinary story,’ the Ede said. His face was the very embodiment of the emotion of relief. ‘You must be a remarkable man to have wrested such information from the Entity.’

  Danlo looked at the hologram’s steady lights and said, ‘You know of the Entity, yes?’

  But the Ede, it seemed, did not wish to discuss the Entity just then. He wished to discuss the mystery of Danlo’s journey to this Earth, perhaps the mystery of Danlo himself.

  ‘You’re a remarkable man,’ the Ede repeated. ‘May I ask your name?’

  ‘My name,’ Danlo said. He did not know which of his names to give to this irksome hologram. Once, he had been called Danlo the Wild; once, a kindly, white-furred alien had bestowed upon him the name of Danlo Peacewise. And then there were his other names: his first name which his family would call him; the name of his anima which would play a part in the shaping of the world; and his spirit name, his secret name which he would whisper only to the wind. ‘I am … Danlo wi Soli Ringess,’ he said at last.

  ‘Very good,’ the Ede said. ‘Then may I present myself? I am Nikolos Daru Ede.’

  Danlo smiled as he stared at Ede’s blazing imago. ‘Of course you are,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve been waiting years for someone to intercept the signal that led you here.’

  With a sigh, Danlo rubbed his aching forehead. Then he reached down to rub his aching legs. He was very tired from his climb up the mountain, almost as tired as he was from speaking with this strangely programmed devotionary. He thought that he should turn away from the devotionary in order to explore the rest of the temple. And soon he must lay out his furs, eat a cold meal of kurmash, shipbread, and dried bloodfruit, and then try to sleep. But something about this ridiculous, foot-high Ede called to him. He sensed that the many-eyed black box generating the Ede might contain much valuable information. Perhaps somewhere in the devotionary’s memory – coded as voltages of electrons or on-off pulses of light – was a clue as to the death of one of the galaxy’s greatest gods. Danlo needed only to find the way to access this information. He needed only to say the perfect words, and then the devotionary’s programs, according to an incredibly complex series of logical decisions, in the way of all programmed and otherwise artificial intelligences, would cause the Ede imago to tell Danlo what he needed to know.

  As if the Ede could read Danlo’s thoughts, he smiled provocatively. And then the Ede said, ‘I am the door; knock and be opened.’

  Danlo closed his eyes, listening to the sound of his breath. From the front of the temple, through the cold halls, he heard the wind whooshing faintly through the door that he had left open. And then, suddenly, another door, a door deep inside him opened. And he knew. One moment he was mystified by the presence of this hologram of Ede the God, and in the next moment, a perfect knowledge of the origin of the devotionary’s programming shone like a cold, clear light in his mind.

  ‘You are Nikolos Daru Ede,’ he said. ‘Truly, Ede the God – what is left of him.’

  As Danlo stood with his hand held over his eyes, he looked through himself to events which had occurred long before he had been born. With a cold and terrible awareness, he looked through the doorway of the memory that lies inside memory. And what he saw was only endless war. It was a war of exploding stars and hydrogen bombs, bullets and information viruses, programmed surrealities and bloody knives and weapons of pure consciousness that not even the gods could truly comprehend. The war had begun at least fifteen billion years ago, when the first galaxies had exploded outward from the primeval fireball that the astronomers called the beginning of the universe. Or perhaps the war had no true beginning nor possible end, and was as eternal as purposes and passions in the mind of God. Whatever the genesis of this universal conflagration, the phase of the war that would eventually consume much of Danlo’s life (and the lives of a hundred billion human beings from the Civilized Worlds to the Vild) could be traced back to a single flash-point occurring some eight thousand years earlier at the end of the Lost Centuries. This great event was the fabrication of the Silicon God on Fostora.

  The architects and scientists of Fostora built their would-be god on a tiny, airless moon and mined this speck of ice and rock with hydrogen bombs should it become necessary to destroy their noble creation. And then they waited. They wanted to see how a computer, initially programmed to seek knowledge and control of the material universe, would evolve if given almost complete freedom from human mores and ethical constraints. It was their hypothesis that this unholy machine would develop an ethic all his own and a moral imperative beyond what most human beings understood as simple good or evil. It was their dream to create an entity that understood deep reality, a god, a new form of life as far beyond themselves as they were from worms. They hoped to learn from this god the secrets of the universe – and perhaps the purpose of that tragicomic race of hairless apes who had begun their galactic adventure on Old Earth some two million years before. But the Silicon God was not to be the teacher of humankind. As the first flash of light streamed through the optical filaments of his brain, within the first twenty billionths of a second after he had come into an awareness of himself (if indeed a computer can be truly aware), the Silicon God came to hate the human beings who had made him. He would have made war upon the scientists of Fostora and all human beings everywhere, but this, according to his deep programming, was the one thing that he could never do. And so instead he found a way to escape from his creators. In secret, far below the rocky surface of the moon on which he was imprisoned, he built spacetime engines a thousand times as large as those that are the heart of a lightship. And then he opened a window to the manifold. The Fostoran astronomers, looking out through their telescopes across black space, were astonished to behold the silvery gleam of a window opening, and then, an instant later, to watch as the Silicon God and the moon that contained him vanished from their neighbourhood of space. It would be another fifty centuries before a master pilot of the Order, Ananda wi Suso, discovered that the Silicon God had fallen out and occupied a stellar nebula some six thousand light-years away. There, in the unexplored regions of the Orion Arm beyond the Sun – and beyond even the Rainbow Double – the Silicon God had absorbed whole planets and the light of many stars, and grown into a true god. There, over five thousand years, he had made war upon the many gods that had sprung from the human race – and many gods such as Solid State Entity and the April Colonial Intelligence had made war upon him.

  All this Danlo saw as he closed his eyes and looked deep into that bright and marvellous place that was neither space nor time nor materiality but rather contained all these things, and everything – everything that had ever been or might possibly ever be. He saw the great battle fought between the Silicon God and the god called Ede. This battle itself could be divided into three distinct phases or acts. In the first act, lasting more than a millennia, the two gods discovered each other across an ocean of stars. Each god, in his program to control the material universe and evolve, was really much like the
other, and so it was only natural that each should seek the means of controlling (and destroying) his rival. For a thousand years of human time, they vied for knowledge of each other. They sent out secret spy ships to infiltrate each other’s brains and tap the streams of tachyons by which each communicated with himself. They infected each other with billions of bacteria-sized robots that might bore through computer circuitry and reveal the architecture of their logics and their burned-in programming. For a thousand years they fought a war of information viruses and disinformation as each tried to gain control over the other’s programming, but neither could prevail over the other. And then the Silicon God called for a truce and proposed an alliance with his deadly enemy. He presented Ede the God with a plan for each of them to divide up the galaxy, and then, ten billion years farwhen, to divide up all the galaxies of the local cluster of galaxies, and the superclusters, and someday, the whole of the universe itself. He offered this plan in the form of a surreality: perhaps the most complete and detailed simulation of future events that any god or computer in the Milky Way galaxy had ever run. Ede the God should have been very wary of this surreality, this gift of his rival god. In truth, as a man might spurn a goblet of wine offered by his enemy, he should have rejected it out of hand. But Ede was flawed by the very hubris that had originally impelled him to transcend from human being into something more, and so he decided to accept the Silicon God’s gift. After placing safeguards against poison programs and suchlike, he opened the gates of his light circuits to this seductive surreality that the Silicon God had made. But he underestimated the cleverness of this ancient machine god. As Ede’s star-sized brain glittered with simulations of an endlessly vast and glorious future, the Silicon God treacherously renewed his attack. He had copied parts of himself and camouflaged these duplicitous programs as God-algorithms hidden within the code of the surreality that he gave to Ede. When Ede opened himself to visions of himself as god of all gods, perhaps even as the one and only God of the universe, he found most of his master systems infiltrated by alien programs of what he called the Other. This was the second act of their battle. In less than a thousand seconds – an eternity in the life of a computer – one by one each of Ede’s guardian programs were fracted and then failed. The Other began to seize control of Ede’s operating systems. Soon, his last defences would go down, and then Ede would lose control over the material components of his body and brain, and worse, he would lose control over his mind.