The Wild

by David Zindell

‘The Architects, of course, usually burn their dead after the vastening ceremony. But I believe that my body was preserved. On Tannahill, displayed in the temple there, lying frozen in a clary crypt.’

  ‘But your vastening occurred nearly three thousand years ago!’

  ‘Has it really been so long? My followers must be very faithful.’

  ‘But why?’ Danlo asked. ‘Why this … shaida burial?’

  ‘Because the Architects revered everything about me, in life and in death. Even my old and very human flesh – it serves as a perfect reminder that the body is just an empty husk without the program of the soul to animate it.’

  ‘But three thousand years!’

  ‘To me it seems like yesterday. Only a moment ago.’

  ‘But the freezing, over the centuries, the molecular drift … and then there is the process of vastening itself. The scanning of the brain, of the synapses – this destroys the brain, yes?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘In vastening, the pattern of the brain’s synapses is modelled as a computer program – but the brain itself dies. This is the price of carking one’s mind into a computer, yes?’

  Ede smiled wickedly for a while, then said, ‘It would seem so. But in any brain that has been vastened, it may be that molecular traces of the synapses remain. It may be that the synapses, and thus the brain itself, could be reconstructed.’

  ‘Do you believe this, truly?’

  ‘It’s my hope.’

  ‘Then you hope somehow to recover your body?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘To raise the dead,’ Danlo whispered. He pressed his hand to his navel as a sudden shiver ran through his belly. ‘You would cark your consciousness back into your old body, yes?’

  ‘I want to live again. Is that so wrong?’

  Danlo closed his eyes a moment before saying, ‘But you are here, on this lost earth. And your body lies on Tannahill.’

  ‘My body, Pilot,’ Ede said.

  ‘And Tannahill lies … further into the Vild.’

  ‘I would like to see my own body again. To touch it, from inside.’

  ‘Do you know where Tannahill is, then?’

  ‘No,’ Ede said. ‘Once I knew, but I have forgotten.’

  ‘I am sorry.’

  ‘But I know of other peoples who may know of Tannahill.’

  ‘These peoples are human, then?’

  ‘Mostly – most of them still are.’

  ‘And these human beings … live where?’

  ‘At the centre of the Vild. Where the stars are wildest, on other Earths that I once made.’

  ‘Do you know the fixed-points of these stars?’

  ‘I know them.’

  ‘Will you tell me where these stars are?’

  ‘Only if you promise to take me with you.’

  ‘In the hold of my ship? As … cargo in a lightship?’

  ‘No, as a passenger. As a fellow seeker of the ineffable flame. And of other things.’

  Danlo rubbed his head and sighed. ‘All right – if you would like, you may share the pit of my ship.’

  ‘And you must promise one other thing,’ Ede said. He was smiling now, and it seemed that he was reading the emotions from Danlo’s face.

  ‘What … is that?’

  ‘You must promise that if we find Tannahill, you will help me recover my body.’

  ‘That … will be hard to do.’

  ‘Hard to promise or a hard promise to fulfil?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘I’m only asking you to help me – is that so wrong?’

  Danlo rubbed his aching head, remembering. ‘The dead … are so very dead when they die. It is shaida for the dead to live again.’

  ‘But I am not dead at all,’ Ede said. His eyes twinkled, and the hologram manifesting his shape flared as brightly as a flame globe. ‘I am as alive as you are – almost.’

  ‘Even if you do not reveal the fixed-points of the stars that I seek, I might find them anyway,’ Danlo said.

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘I may find Tannahill without you, but you will never leave this lost Earth without me.’

  ‘It would seem that you hold the superior negotiating position,’ Ede said.

  ‘Yes.’

  Ede’s eyes were now as hard to look at as black holes, and they seemed to drink in the light falling off Danlo’s face. Ede said, ‘But I would think that you don’t like to negotiate.’

  Merchants, Danlo thought, haggled over the price of a Fravashi carpet; wormrunners argued with whores over the cost of sharing their tattooed bodies for a night. ‘Truly, I hate negotiating,’ he said.

  ‘Then help me. Please, Pilot.’

  For a long time Danlo stared at Ede’s face burning in its computer-generated colours, and he lost himself in Ede’s sad gaze. There came a moment when Danlo’s face was burning, too, his forehead and his eyes and the blood rushing beneath his skin. And then another moment, fearful and strange, when all the world was nothing but fire and pain and a wild white light shimmering through the cold space between them and all around. ‘If you would like,’ Danlo finally said. ‘If I can … I will help you.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘And now,’ Danlo said, looking about the floor of the temple cluttered with all the cybernetica and other things, ‘I must find a place to sleep.’

  ‘Of course you must.’

  ‘You … never sleep?’

  ‘I am as you see,’ Ede said. ‘Always. I will never say the word that will take me down.’

  ‘Even for a night?’

  ‘Even for a moment. Even for a millionth of a moment.’

  Danlo smiled at Ede and yawned. He said, ‘Then I must say goodnight now and find another room where I can lay out my furs.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘It would be hard for me to sleep … with you watching me all night.’

  ‘And in the morning?’

  ‘In the morning I will explore the rest of the temple. I have always wanted to see the chambers where the Architects are vastened.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then we will return to my ship. To the Vild. To … the stars.’

  So saying, Danlo bowed politely. It amused him to watch as the little hologram of Nikolos Daru Ede – with his emaciated body and huge bony head – returned his bow with an otherworldly grace, as only an imago floating in the air might accomplish.

  ‘Goodnight, then,’ Danlo said.

  ‘Goodnight, Pilot. Sleep deeply and well.’

  With another yawn (and with a strange smile that Ede could not see), Danlo turned to walk back through the temple and retrieve his pack from the entrance hall. Soon he would eat his shipbread and taste the acid tang of dried bloodfruit. Soon he would be asleep on soft furs, while in another part of the temple, the hologram of a man who had once been a god would keep a vigil all night. Danlo wondered what it would be like to be a ghost haunting the light-circuits of a simple devotionary computer; he wondered at the consciousness of a machine that was as cold and constant as the light of the oldest stars. Most of all he wondered a simple thing: if Ede never slept, how could he ever dream? And if he never dreamed deep and lucid dreams, how should he ever want to be a man again, how should he want to be marvellously and terribly alive?

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Sani

  The longest journey begins with the first step – unless you can fly.

  – Justine The Wise

  To say that the universe is vast is as simple as breathing fresh air, and yet truly to comprehend its infinite deeps is another thing altogether. The Milky Way galaxy is only a tiny part of the known universe – no more than a snowflake spinning in the wind along the world’s endless wastelands of ice – and yet to a man crossing its cold fields of stars in a lightship spun of diamond and dreams, the galaxy is very large indeed. It is recorded that once a star exploded. Ninety thousand years ago, in the far part of the Perseus Arm, at the very edge of the galaxy where the stars fa
de off into the intergalactic void, a hot blue giant fell supernova and cast its blinding light to the universe. Light is almost the fastest thing there is; light is so fast that in the time it takes to affirm its fastness, in simple words, it will fall through space a million miles – and yet it took fifteen thousand years for the light from this dead star to cross only a small part of the galaxy and rain down upon the icy forests of Old Earth. Men and women, living in houses of sewn animal skins or in snow huts or dark cold caves, beheld this strange new star and marvelled at the terrible and beautiful nature of light. They wondered at the secrets of the universe, even as the radiance faded to a point and then died, even as they evolved into a race of near-gods who built pyramids and cathedrals and great shimmering lightships to fall among the faraway stars. And in all these tens of thousands of years, even as human beings swarmed outward from Old Earth and built their great stellar civilizations and dreamed of an infinitely glorious future, the light from the supernova continued falling across the galaxy. To this day, it is falling still. Soon, perhaps in a few more millennia, the light will break free from the Milky Way at last and continue its journey on to the Canes Venatici and Ursa Major Cloud and the millions of other galaxies of the universe. Bound into wavelengths of simple light will be images of a people who once wore animal skins as clothing and ate the flesh of animals for food. Someday farwhen this is the reflection of human beings that the universe will first behold. It is a primeval and somewhat savage face – but full of promise and possibilities. By the time the alien peoples of the Sakura Sen have looked upon human beings as they once were, some say that men long since will have evolved into gods who are far beyond the horrors of meat or matter. Humanity, the scryers say, will exist only as numinous beings who finally will understand the secret of light. Someday they will transcend light altogether – and then the doors to infinity will be flung open and all the universe will be theirs.

  In a way, of course, certain human beings had already gone beyond the limitations of lightspeed. Danlo, as a pilot of the Order in his diamond ship named the Snowy Owl, fenestered across the twinkling stellar windows of the Vild with all the speed he could command. But relative to the lifetime of simple man his journey was slow, for he had to find mappings among strange new stars, and the spaces of the Vild are as twisted and tortuous as they are immense. Somewhere along this long journey into loneliness – perhaps it was near the remnants of a supernova that he named Shonamorath – he found himself welcoming the companionship of the little devotionary computer and the hologram that called itself Nikolos Daru Ede. Danlo had stowed this computer in the pit of his ship. It floated with him in silent darkness. Or rather, the light of Ede’s glowing face and the words he spoke often dispelled the darkness and the silence that are the usual companions of a pilot falling through the manifold. Other objects from the temple had also found a new home in Danlo’s ship. With a wilful and strangely reverent sacrilege, Danlo had plundered the blue rose from the meditation hall, as well as a kevalin set and five of Ede’s wooden flutes. He might even have taken an eternal computer from the facing room, but he doubted the wisdom of bringing such a device anywhere near the electromagnetic field generated by the devotionary. Often, among the brilliant and deadly Vild stars, he wondered if Ede had a secret reason for wanting to join his quest to find Tannahill. He wondered if Ede might be hiding a secret program to cark his soul back into another eternal computer and thus retrace his old path toward godhood. Perhaps Ede hoped that the Architects of the Old Church would once again aid this most ancient and secret quest.

  Once, in an attempt to glean some hint of Ede’s true motivations, Danlo asked him if he would ever consider remaking the journey from man into god. Ede’s response was immediate and direct – and perhaps an evasion of the truth. With a sincere expression that the Ede hologram often programmed to hide uncertainty, he smiled at Danlo and said, ‘How should any man ever want to become a god? Haven’t I lost enough myself on that dream already? And if I succeed in becoming human again, how much more will I lose in regaining my body? Enough – I’ve had enough of transcendence. If you consider the problem deeply enough, you’ll see that transcendence is really death. How should I wish to die again, to die a thousand times a thousand times? No, Pilot, once I wear my own flesh again, I shall be content.’

  In truth, the hologram of Ede was as far from contentment as a man is from a worm. In the pit of Danlo’s ship it floated like one of the bioluminescent Ik demons who are said to haunt the forests outside the temple on Jacaranda. This Ede was always awake, always aware – and always tormented by problems of both a practical and philosophical nature. For instance, one of his confessed reasons for wanting to fall human again was so that he could remembrance the Elder Eddas. This ultimate secret of the universe was known to be encoded into human DNA. It was said that only human beings, deep in remembrance, could unveil and bring into full consciousness the ancient memories locked inside the human genome. Ede believed that the purely machine gods of the galaxy such as the Silicon God and AI Mind (and once a time, himself) could never find the Eddas. And so he would cark his consciousness back into blood and flesh and living chromosomes, but to do so he must face once again the soul-sick terror of losing all of himself, instantaneously and forever. When the time came for him to cark the pattern of his mind from the devotionary computer’s light circuits into the electro-chemical synapses of a living brain, what would it mean to say that he continued to live on in a new form? Even if he exactly duplicated the pattern of himself, in atoms of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, would he retain continuous consciousness, as a man is certain of his own marvellously continuing life from one heartbeat to the next?

  As a thought experiment – Ede was as susceptible to this kind of mental excess as the princes of Summerworld are to eating rich and sweet foods – he considered the duplication of a man. Suppose that some god such as the Solid State Entity could duplicate a man perfectly, down to the configuration of his body’s every atom. Never mind the quantum uncertainties, the impossibility of ever knowing both the exact position and velocity of the electrons and other sub-atomic particles of which atoms are made. Even though some of the mechanics believe that consciousness comes into matter only at the level of the quantum and that the quantum state of any assembly of atoms (such as a worm or a snowball or a man) must always be unique – never mind such objections, for this was only a thought experiment designed to illuminate the greatest of philosophical mysteries. Suppose that the Solid State Entity, through godly technologies that Ede no longer remembered, could exactly duplicate the substance and mind of a man. Suppose further that at the precise moment of duplication, the thoughts and feelings and fears, the very consciousness of the two men were identical. Now, according to the logic of this dreadful and impossible experiment, let the Entity through starfire or anti-matter or some other means, instantaneously annihilate the first and original man. Or better, let this man be asked to annihilate himself. The question must then be asked: What will be lost? If the man has been perfectly duplicated, the answer must be: Nothing will be lost. If the logic of the experiment has been true to the deeper logic of the universe of stars and atoms and living neurons, this original man should not hesitate to destroy himself. He should be secure in the knowledge that he would continue on as his second self, exactly as before. And yet, in the real world of doubts and dark dreams, of blood and pain and the neverness of the soul, the original man would hesitate. Even knowing that he somehow lived on in his double, to destroy himself would be suicide. It would feel like dying. In the truest sense, it would be dying, for the secret of life is not in its pattern or form, but only in the continuous flow of consciousness from one moment to the next.

  ‘This is the problem,’ Ede confessed to Danlo one day after they had passed through a particularly desolate region of blown-out stars. ‘If I become a man again, will I still be I? If I say the word that will take this devotionary down, what will happen to me?’

  Ede, of cour
se, as a man, as his original self before he had dared to become a god, had deeply felt the logic of the real universe. Like any man, he had felt doubt. But he had scorned his belly fears and his uncertainty as most ignoble emotions. He was after all Nikolos Daru Ede, the founder of what would become man’s greatest religion. He must always be a man of genius and vision, and above all, faith. It was his genius, as an architect, to find a way to model his mind in the programs of what he called his eternal computer. It was his vision, as a philosopher, to justify the carking of human consciousness from the living brain into the cold circuits of a machine. And it was his faith, as a prophet, to show other men how they could transcend the prison of their bodies and finally conquer death. He, himself, had been the first man willingly to give up the life of his body so that he might find the infinite life of the soul. He had allowed his fellow architects to destroy his brain neuron by neuron so that the pattern of synapses might be perfectly preserved. He had died the true death so that he might not die. He had committed this brave (and mad) act out of pride, out of fundamental misunderstanding, and finally, out of a misplaced belief in a rather curious idea that he had come to love. Despite all deeper logic, Ede finally convinced himself that the soul of man might live on forever as pure program inside an eternal computer – and this soon came to be the fundamental doctrine of the Cybernetic Universal Church. Sadly, tragically, a part of Ede always doubted this doctrine. And so for three thousand years, even as a god, his original suicide had haunted him. It haunted him still. And yet even realizing this, Ede could not escape from the flaw that had led to his tragic first death. This flaw was in his thinking; he knew very well that there was a flaw in his personality, in his mind, perhaps even in his very soul.

  ‘For me,’ he confessed in the privacy of Danlo’s lightship, ‘an idea has always been more beautiful than a woman, a theory of nature more sustaining than bread or wine.’

  All his life he had been in love with ideas. But not, as he implied, merely because of their beauty or their power, but rather because ideas were like comfortably furnished rooms in which he could always take refuge when the universe itself, with its cold, hard edges and uncaring ways, threatened to hurt him. Although he was loath to admit it, his deepest motivation was fear. He was always searching his environment for dangers. In truth, this was his real reason for wanting to become a god. It was always his dream to control the universe in order to protect himself. And so he always sought theories that would explain the universe. He was always trying to reduce the universe’s infinite complexities into simpler computer models of reality. The Holy Grail of his life was the finding of one, single theory or model that might encompass all things. This was why he had accepted the Silicon God’s gift, the simulation of the future universe that had ultimately destroyed him. It was his hope to elaborate and refine this simulation and make it his own. In the time since then, a million times a million times, he had lamented his attachment to ideas and theories, which was really just an attachment to himself. Although he longed to be a true visionary, to behold the universe just as it is, this he could not do. For he could never free himself from himself – from the original program that he had written when he had carked his human selfness into his eternal computer.