Ede almost begged Danlo to accompany him on his outings into the city, and out of a strange loyalty he acquiesced. But as Danlo grew more confident of his ability to speak Istwan, he found himself ignoring Ede’s translations – and especially Ede’s never-ending and very tiresome premonitions of doom. Danlo took one of the gravity lifts down to the dangerous Trachang Estates on Iviunir’s seventh level, and he sought out the Assassins of Ede and other nihilists. These angry young men (and women), with their hideous orange facial markings, were outsiders in the most literal sense: not only did they remove themselves from the cultural life of the Narain, but they longed for life outside the Field, in truth, outside the city altogether. Danlo sat with them before illegal methane fires, drinking coffee-wine from a common cup passed around a circle. And he enchanted them with stories of his childhood, of carving ivory walrus tusks and picking berries from yu trees and skiing through great green forests all sparkling with ice and real snow. It always amused (and disturbed) Danlo that he should so readily make friends of outlaws in whatever society he encountered. Like other outlaws in other places, the Assassins – at least the most intelligent of them – shared many valuable perceptions of the culture they reviled. It was from one of these, a rather bloody-minded woman named Shatara Iviow, that Danlo began to acquire a true sense of the Narain exodus to Alumit Bridge and their brazen heresy.
For instance, most of the Narain did not in any way deny the idea of Ede as God. However, they did reject the rather narrow Ede of the Algorithm, especially its first three books, which were known as the First Trigon. (These ‘books’ are The Life of Ede, The Birth of Ede the God, and Last Things.) Actually, few of the Narain had wholly rejected the Algorithm itself; most sensible people merely ignored the legalistic interpretations of the Algorithm, even as they tried to forget the rulings of the Jurridik and the Iviomils and other sects of the Old Church orthodoxy. It was enough that they should cast off all the Algorithm’s most harmful and archaic doctrines. And it was more than enough for the boldest of them to take the final and blasphemous step of attempting to become as Ede – possibly the most dreaded idea of the Cybernetic Universal Church. It was signified by a single word, the forbidden verb hakaru. Among the Narain, especially the Transcendentals, there were many who had already hakariad, become hakras, these would-be gods whom the Old Church condemned and executed on sight. As Shatara Iviow observed, the Narain had much in common with the Free Fanyas, an ancient heretical group who had attempted to find God in rocks or trees or even in plastic spoons – in everything. The Fanyas, it seemed, had taught not that Ede would grow to absorb the entire universe, but that all people and all things may return to its divine source and be reabsorbed into God. For the Fanyas, this reabsorption occurred at death, or more rarely, during those moments of grace that they called facivi, which was the mystical melting of one’s face into the universal face of God. The Narain had personalized and mechanized this search for the divine; they not only found God in themselves but found themselves as potential gods. Indeed, when they faced the Field’s glittering electron flows and fell into those eyeless frenzies called cybernetic samadhi, they claimed to have achieved union with the godhead. One of the Narain, Tadeo Aharagni, claimed union and identity with Ede Himself. Many Narain felt this union to be the very spirit of Edeism as it was in the early days of the Church. Although they knew that even the most radical of the Church sects – the mystical Elidis – taught that man could only draw close to Ede, they scorned this doctrine. Theirs was the hubris of wanting to become as Ede, and this was a crucially – and fatally – different idea. This was heresy, blasphemy, an unforgivable sin against the ineffable and eternal phenomenon of God.
‘All they think of is God,’ Shatara Iviow said to Danlo over cups of low quality coffee-wine that tasted of plastic. She was an angry woman who had turned upon her people, the Narain, as a female mantis might devour its mate after copulation. ‘They’re worse than the Readers of the Old Church. God, God, God, God – how I hate this obsession with divinity. It kills the true human spirit, you know. It’s really He who keeps man from being man.’
Rather than allow God to destroy humanity, the Assassins of Ede had pledged themselves to killing God. To do this, they disfigured their faces as a symbolic protest against the Narain’s compulsion to interface the Field at every possible moment. They stood on the streets preaching the virtues of the human soul; with shards of prikit plastic broken off from computers that they vandalized, they slashed their faces or their foreheads, letting their blood flow over their white robes as a reminder that for human beings, the true life-force was liquid and red and real – not merely some insubstantial program or bits of information written into a machine. Some Assassins suspended their hatred of the unreal and dared to face the Field. There they entered into the great, glittering conversation of the Narain people, and argued before millions that man alone must be the measure of all things. Or else they turned to terror, engineering information viruses and sleeper programs that might fract the identities of the Transcended Ones, or possibly, cause the entire Field to collapse and melt down. The more ferocious Assassins – Shatara Iviow was one of these – believed in a truer terror. In gangs of two or ten, they burgled apartments, destroyed facing cells, used their big steel hammers to smash the delicate facing heaumes or any other religious artefact or item of cybernetica that they found. A few Assassins actually attempted to assassinate the Transcendentals. With knives or eye tlolts, they sought out men such as Isas Lel. Once, only a year before Danlo’s arrival, an Assassin had cooked up a bomb out of alumino plastic and had almost blown up one of the Transcendental’s sanctuaries. Danlo, who wouldn’t have harmed a single one of the tiny, plastic-eating mehalchins that plagued the city, hated this kind of violence. But he never judged the Assassins, nor did he try to convert them to his way of ahimsa. In truth, he deeply understood the passion for violence, particularly the soul-searing purification of the self that the best of the Assassins practiced. To kill the need for God in oneself only – this was a sublime idea. Although Danlo knew almost all there was to know about deep hatreds and the wilful mutilation of the self, he could never quite countenance the denial of God. That the Assassins still conceived God as Ede amused Danlo. Once or twice, he considered informing them that Ede, Himself – the great machine god who had existed saru en getika, in the real universe of planets and stars – was dead. But he did not tell them this, sensing that the whole purpose and identity of the Assassins was formed in opposition to the idea of Ede. If this idea were destroyed, they would have nothing, not even their nihilism and hate.
Similarly, the Narain, as a people, found much of their meaning in opposition to the Old Church. Some of the Transcendentals, such as Patar Iviaslin, liked to believe that their two hundred year old religious experiment on Alumit Bridge was a journey into total freedom – like an infinite lotus opening up its uncountable golden petals into space. But Danlo, as a true outsider, could not see it in this light. As with all human beings, the Narain had their myths and their unconscious beliefs that they did not know how to question. Their whole way of life – including all their most extreme practices – sprang from these beliefs. And so Danlo never told them of the life and death of Nikolos Daru Ede. He kept secret his dread of the Field; he let no one know how deeply the Narain’s faith in cybernetic salvation both amused and horrified him.
One day, the Transcendentals sent a bright yellow robot to the doors of Danlo’s apartment. It bore him through the tunnel-like streets between blocks of old buildings, back along the great Elidi Boulevard and the city’s other thoroughfares. Eventually, it brought him to the Transcendentals’ sanctuary. There, as before, the robot rolled through long hallways blighted with various strains of bluish mehalchins growing from the pitted plastic walls. It was almost as if the meeting chamber hadn’t changed in the many days since Danlo’s first audience with the Transcendentals. The domed chatoy walls still ran with the colours of Alumit Bridge’s violet-red sun that ne
ver set; at the centre of the room sat the chromium tea service and fat red cushion; the Transcendentals, with their golden clearfaces gleaming atop their hairless skulls, sat waiting eyelessly in their robots. Only the flowers were different. In the two plastic vases near the cushion, the brilliant orange and azure alien flowers had wilted and dried to a dead black. The Transcendentals – Isas Lel, Kistur Ashtoreth, Diverous Te, Yenene Iviastalir, Lieswyr Ivioss, Ananda Narcavage and Patar Iviaslin – apparently had overlooked this little death. Although they must have returned to their apartments for bathing, food and rest since meeting Danlo, they seemed not to have moved for many days.
‘Danlo wi Soli Ringess of Neverness – welcome,’ Isas Lel said. He invited Danlo to remain seated on his robot as if he had suddenly become an equal with the Transcendentals. But Danlo preferred the cushion on the floor, and so he stepped over to it and sat there crosslegged, waiting as straight and silent as a yu tree.
‘We’ve good news for you,’ Isas Lel said. ‘A decision as to your request to face the Transcended Ones has been reached.’
Danlo removed his flute from its pocket and sat holding it in his hands. He looked from Isas Lel to the vacant-eyed Diverous Te, from Transcendental to Transcendental, face to face. Already, it seemed, most of these seven had entered the Field to interface their higher selves.
‘Yes?’ Danlo asked at last.
‘You will be allowed to enter the Field,’ Isas Lel said. Of all the Transcendentals present, he seemed the only one even half-aware of Danlo. ‘It has been decided – you may plea your mission with the Transcended Ones.’
‘Thank you,’ Danlo said.
He looked down at the many jewelled eyes of the devotionary computer that he had set upon the floor and wondered about the optics of these glittering, insect-like eyes, how the shapes and colours of the world must appear to this programmable machine. He might have wondered, too, how the Transcendentals appeared to the hologram of Nikolos Daru Ede, but of this non-mystery there could be little doubt. Don’t do it! the Ede hologram signed to Danlo. Don’t let these spiders trap you in their cybernetic webs and suck away your mind!
Danlo smiled at this very organic metaphor. And then he looked at Isas Lel and asked, ‘When may I face the … Transcended Ones?’
‘Now,’ Isas Lel said. ‘This is why we’ve brought you here. But first we must acquaint you with the Field’s topography. We will guide you where you must go.’
They can’t allow themselves to trust you, Ede signed. There is much that they would hide from you, and so you mustn’t trust them.
As if Danlo were a child or a cripple (or a spy), Isas Lel would guide Danlo through the Field’s information pools. All that Danlo saw, Isas Lel would see, too; no word that Danlo spoke would fall unnoticed upon Isas Lel’s inner ear.
‘You … will share thoughtspace with me, yes?’ Danlo asked.
‘Well, I will be able to exchange thoughts with you,’ Isas Lel said. ‘But only those thoughts that you – and I – encode as words.’
‘I see.’
‘Shall we begin now, then?’ Isas Lel asked.
‘If you’d like.’
‘Very well. Then if you’ll close your eyes, I’ll take you to the Transcended Ones.’
Just then the room began to darken, and Danlo closed his eyes. As a novice in Neverness, in the dark, steamy cells of the library, Danlo had often immersed himself in tanks of warm salt water as he reached out with his mind to interface the Order’s great information pools. He had lain naked beneath the deep purple neurologic scanners that read the electrochemical events of his brain. In many ways, sitting on the floor of the meeting room was similar in experience. There was the darkness and the quiet – though this was not nearly so profound as the almost total suspension of the body’s outer senses that one felt while floating in one of the library’s cells. Danlo supposed that the computers behind the meeting room’s chatoy walls must generate a much more powerful logic field than did the library’s little, organic cells. In truth, the whole meeting room was much like a librarian’s cell, and even more like a cetic’s heaume that encased one’s head – only much, much larger. This was an evolved technology that the Order could scarcely afford, except perhaps in the null rooms of the cetic’s tower. But it was not a wholly unfamiliar technology. Already, a moment after Danlo closed his eyes, the computers of the meeting room infused images directly into the visual cortex at the back of Danlo’s brain. In the meeting room, around his face and eyes, all was darkness. But inside him, behind his eyes, suddenly, there was light. There was sound and shape, direction and colour, and the cybernetic space of the Field opened before him.
–Are you all right, Pilot? Is this comfortable for you?
The meeting room’s scanning computers read the words of Isas Lel, formed up in the language centres of his brain. Other computers encoded these words as electrical impulses and stimulated the nerves of Danlo’s inner ear. And so Danlo ‘heard’ Isas Lel’s raspy voice whispering inside his head.
–Yes, thank you … I am all right.
–Can you move? If you can, why don’t you begin with an information pool. Any one will do.
In the silent meeting room, sitting on his cushion with his eyes tightly closed, Danlo realized that he was being tested. He smiled to himself, for the movement through information pools was the most fundamental of cybernetic skills. The cetics of his Order called this sense of motion ‘seeking’. Even a child, he thought, knew how to face a data space and seek for information.
–Are all your pools open to me, then? Or are any of them forbidden?
–All are open, Pilot. We believe in free information.
–I see.
–But I must ask you not to enter any of the astronomy pools.
–I … see. If you ask this, then I will not.
–Otherwise, you may choose whichever pool you wish.
–I see. I may drink of any pool … but only those that I can find.
–What do you mean?
–The easiest way to hide a pool … is by locating it inside an ocean.
–You’re clever, Pilot.
–No, it is just the opposite.
–Very clever. But are you clever enough to find whatever you might seek? We shall see, Pilot. We shall see.
With his mind, Danlo moved forth toward the information that he sought like a thirsty man crossing the desert who hoped to find a pool of clear, cool water; but the information flowing before him was less like a pool than a raging ocean. And the water was turbid with sediments, salty and undrinkable.
–Well, Pilot?
No one – no human being – can absorb very much information. Can a man drink the sea? No, and neither can he find his way across it unless he has a compass or bright stars to light his way. Even a master cetic would be helpless and blind if cast adrift on a chaotic information space. However, no human society has ever gathered up trillions of random bits of information and simply dumped them into one, huge collective pool. Information, to be useful, is always selected, interpreted, weighted, encoded, processed, organized. And human beings, with their very human brains that are much the same from the exemplars of Bodhi Luz to the Ihrie Nebula god-men, all seem to organize information in only a few basic ways. As the master librarian, Elia Jesaitis, had once taught Danlo, all information systems have their own logic. Being a pilot of the Order, Danlo was nothing if not a logical man. (Except, of course, when he fled from logic as a newly-hatched bird breaks free from its egg.) Logic was the key to unlocking whatever informational secrets one sought – logic and also the various cybernetic senses that Danlo’s masters had helped him to develop when he first came to Neverness as a wild young man so many years before.
–You hesitate, Pilot. It’s overwhelming, isn’t it?
For a moment, Danlo did hesitate. Before him were endless information flows encoded in various ways. Some of this information had been organized to be accessed by the physical senses. With his eyes still closed, Danlo saw the
building of the first arcology on Tannahill and countless other images out of history; he saw a face painting of Liljana Narai as well as molecular fotos of deadly Trachang viruses. There were sounds of people praying in swarm inside an Architect temple. He heard voices, a cacophony of hundreds of voices crying out as of prisoners chained into a dark cave. These voices were each trying to explain something, from the engineering of information viruses to the Program of Transcendence. There were smells, too, the scent of roses and garlic and burning plastics. These were the simulated sensa of a surreality, and Danlo had long since learned how to apprehend this kind of information. He had learned, too, that immersing himself too deeply in simulation was a very slow and inefficient means of seeking knowledge. To move quickly among the data pools, one must be able to kithe information encoded as symbols. Perhaps the greatest glory of the Order was the development of the Universal Syntax, a way of representing all possible knowledge by arrays of three-dimensional mental symbols that the grammarians called ideoplasts. But the Narain, it seemed, had no such art. In the Field of Alumit Bridge, symbolic information appeared as words strung together in sentences, in truth, as whole sets of sentences falling one after another linearly much as an orator might speak. And each word was represented not by its own beautiful ideoplast but rather by symbols encoding the word’s different sounds. These symbols were called letters. It was a simple way to convey words and ideas, but primitive, barbaric. Danlo, of course, in his study of the Universal Syntax, had acquainted himself with such systems of encoding information. To decode the information bound in words, one must be able to pass the ugly, wormlike letters before one’s inner eye and compose (or sound out) each word one by one. And then to let the words fall one by one into recognizable statements, to use one’s inner ear to make sense of whatever information each statement contained. This skill was called reading, and as a way of seeking through pools of information, it was slow, slow. Compared to the sublime art of kithing ideoplasts, it was like trudging along on snowshoes across the frozen sea when one might sail a hundred miles per hour in an ice schooner. But it was also quite easy; if one could see, even a child or a cybernetic cripple could still read information written this way.
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