The Wild

by David Zindell

  Every morning, it seemed, after the first bell, Harrah Ivi en li Ede would make the short journey from her palace to the Temple. There, in the facing room where Ede’s eternal computer sat on the altar, surrounded by row upon row of holy heaumes and the four mirrored walls, Harrah would conduct a facing ceremony. The greatest Elders of the Church such as Bertram Jaspari would join her, as well as many lesser Architects and the lucky pilgrims who had won the day’s lottery and were deemed worthy to enter into the Church’s holiest physical place. Although the facing room was huge, it could accommodate only a few thousand people, the tiniest fraction of all the Worthy who lived on Tannahill, much less the worlds of the Known Stars. Therefore, at the very moment when Harrah Ivi en li Ede placed the holy heaume upon her head and turned to face the Ede’s eternal computer, even as all the Elders present followed her example, Architects in their billions of apartments all across the planet would take up the heaumes from their own private altars and face into cybernetic communion.

  Danlo would always remember the first time that he joined the multitudes of Tannahill in their sacred cybernetic space. He sat crosslegged on the prayer mat of his room, holding the cold, hard heaume in his hands. For a while he gazed at his reflection in the heaume’s mirrored surface. It troubled him to see how wild his eyes looked, almost as if he didn’t care if he died or fell mad with computer-induced dreams of God. He put the heaume on his head. Because he had a large head, long and well-shaped, the fit was too tight and the metal squeezed his temples. There was a moment, then, of surreality when he instantiated into a communion space. It seemed that he had suddenly fallen through a hole in the floor, and then he found himself carked out into the facing room of the great Temple. In the many rows before him and behind, thousands of Architects knelt on their prayer mats wearing holy heaumes identical to his own. At the centre of the room, near the massive, glittering altar, Harrah Ivi en Ii Ede stood by Ede’s eternal computer. She wore a flowing kimono of pure white perlon, and on her head, her white dobra stitched with intricate gold crewelwork. The simulation of this holy place, Danlo thought, was very good, though not quite perfect. Although the colours and textures of real life held true – the fiery bronzes of various sculptures of Ede the Man, the blue roses in their vases, the lovely brown pools of coffee that were Harrah’s eyes – the sounds of the men and women breathing all around him seemed ragged and strangely muted. And there were no smells. Or rather, there were no bad smells, none of the amino plastics and ketones and the stench of unhealthy bodies that Danlo had found almost everywhere on Tannahill. Instead he drank in the fragrance of lilacs and honey, of wind and waterfalls and of freshly-washed women’s hair. He sensed that the billions of Architects across the planet were simultaneously experiencing the facing ceremony just as he was. He was aware of many other people (or icons) kneeling all about him, many of whom must have instantiated in this brilliant surreality just as he had. And they were aware of him. Their eyes were wide with wonder and outrage that a naman had found his way into this forbidden space. They must have supposed that Harrah had given him a special dispensation to instantiate in their presence – either that or perhaps she had cleansed him of his negative programming and led him to utter the Profession of Faith that all newly converted Architects must make when they become children of the Cybernetic Universal Church. For none of them voiced objection to Danlo’s sudden appearance. They merely stared at his long and graceful form, his black pilot’s ring, his wild, blue eyes. And then Harrah, who was staring at Danlo, too, commanded their attention. From the altar, she grasped a holy heaume in her hands and placed it on her head as might a self-crowned king. And then she faced the Worthy Architects of the Temple and all of Tannahill, and said, ‘We all come from the Father; and to that place we shall return like a drop of rain flowing to the ocean.’

  At that moment, fifty-billion human beings – whether present in the Temple in the flesh or alone in their private rooms ten thousand miles away – entered the same place. They entered the same consciousness, the same apprehension of Ede the God and all that He had made. For Danlo this experience of the divine was like liquid cobalt dropped into the centre of his brain. Instantly, like an artist’s paint suffusing a glass of water, the colour spread out until it touched his mind with the deepest and loveliest blue light that he had ever beheld. There came a moment of cybernetic samadhi, then. His bliss was so intense that he could not feel his body, nor the memories behind his eyes or the beating of his heart. He was like a strange and alien being lost in an ocean of light, and then, at the end, he was light itself, all brilliant and clear and perfect within itself. Danlo would never be able to say how long this moment lasted. After what seemed an eternity, the heaume surrounding his head began to generate a different kind of field and a stream of images poured into him. There were words, too, sounds and smells, the hot, red gush of love in his throat. And so like any Architect, he entered into that holiest of holies, the cybernetic space containing all the books of Ede’s sacred Algorithm. Of course, the Algorithm’s ‘books’ were nothing like the two leather-bound volumes of paper that Danlo kept in his chest; they were more like surrealities or pictorial histories or even the lifescapes of the Narain facilah artists. Some said that the Algorithm was in reality its own space or, as an uncreated vision of God, was beyond the spaces generated by any computer. Of the Algorithm’s true nature, Danlo did not know. At the moment neither metaphysics nor theology interested him. He found that the words pouring like music through his mind were too hard to ignore, and the images of Ede called to him. That morning Harrah was guiding the multitudes through the final level of the Algorithm’s Last Things. These well-known words sounded inside him: He will fall across the stars, and he will fill the universe with Himself.

  Just then Danlo felt himself falling once more. He was like a meteor plunging through cold space or like a bird diving through the night and coming to earth by the shore of a tropical ocean. The world beneath him was like no world that he had ever seen, for he stood on an endless beach without limit or horizon. A billion Architects stood there with him. Or perhaps there were a billion billion men and women in their perfect white robes, off to his right and left, swarming the sands of this impossible beach. They were all looking up at the sky, watching and waiting. Danlo looked heavenwards, too. And there, amidst the faint stars of the universe the story of Ede’s ontogenesis from man into God exploded into light. Danlo watched as the now-familiar face of Ede – with its sensuous lips and black, blazing mystic’s eyes – appeared like a moon floating in the sky. He watched as Ede transcended himself into something new. It was like watching a museum hologram unfold, only infinitely vaster and more profound. A million miles above him, against the black wall of the night, a brilliant golden light began to shine within Ede’s coffee-coloured skin until it had totally consumed him in a dazzling sphere, and Ede the Man became Ede the God. Suddenly, however, this splendid light vanished as of a star’s radiance being sucked into a black hole. For a moment, the sky was dark. As Danlo would learn, this was symbolic of Ede’s Dark Night of the Soul, his time of supreme despair, just at the moment when he had carked his selfness into his eternal computer. It was a reminder that supreme victory may follow utter darkness. Then, at the centre of the sky, far out over the ocean, a tiny cube appeared. At first, Danlo thought, it looked something like an ancient communications satellite. After a while, though, it glittered as if faced with ten thousand jewelled lights, and Danlo instantly recognized it as an icon of Ede’s eternal computer. Quickly, it began to grow. The cube, like a seed crystal dropped into a supersaturated salt solution, instantly added to itself along each of its six faces. It grew until it filled the space around it and burst across the sky. The effect was of black space being devoured by all the brilliance and informational expanding capabilities of a holy computer. Indeed, as this scene from the Last Things neared its cosmic conclusion, the tropical air around Danlo seemed to fall full of the coldness of space itself. He realized that the beach u
pon which he stood – and the whole world – was falling through space, following Ede on his great journey out into the universe. All about him there were many stars, and then whole nebulas full of stars. Many of these, such as the Rainbow Double, Danlo recognized. With a terrible fascination, he watched as Ede’s eternal computer grew without bound until it filled nebula after nebula and its ten thousand jewelled lights outshone and obliterated the light of the stars. And then these little lights actually became the stars. Their number multiplied from ten thousand to ten million – and soon there were billions of glittering lights, and Ede the God grew to consume all the stars in the lovely spiral arms of the galaxy known as the Milky Way. The logic of the rest of Ede’s destiny was compelling and total. Danlo watched as Ede’s sacred cybernetic body grew forty million light years through space to absorb Andromeda and Draco and other galaxies in the local cluster. And then Ede gobbled up Virgo and the Canes Venatici Cloud and many other clusters, and then whole clusters of clusters. These were great, glittering spheres of stars half a billion light years in diameter, and it seemed that the universe contained an infinite number of them. But finally, at the end of history, as Ede grew ever outward through black drears of space and time, he had consumed every star, every particle of matter and bit of information in the universe. At last, as was written in the Algorithm, Ede and the universe were one. And Danlo – and many billions of Architects standing on this surreal beach outside of space and time – witnessed this ultimate miracle. He watched as the whole universe took on the form of a glittering black cube, a truly eternal and cosmic computer that was Ede the God and nothing more. He knew this must be so, for then there occurred the final transcendence. This almost infinite cube of matter began to glow with a light from inside itself. It glowed and glowed ever brighter, and then there was a terrible flash too brilliant to behold. After the dazzle had left Danlo’s eyes, he saw that the universal computer that was Ede the God was gone. Or rather, it had been transformed into a familiar form, the great, glowing face of Nikolos Daru Ede that now filled all the universe. The face that was the universe. As had been written in the Algorithm long ago: And so Ede faced the universe, and he was vastened, and he saw that the face of God was his own.

  The rest of the facing ceremony was brief. Harrah guided Tannahill’s Architects through other readings from the Algorithm, though none so profound as the one that Danlo had just experienced. Soon Danlo returned to the Temple’s facing room, and he (or rather his icon) resumed his posture of kneeling among the rows of the Worthy in their clean white kimonos. Then Harrah, in her strong, clear voice, discussed the Eight Duties of an Architect, which were devotion, obedience, meditation, mission, pilgrimage, cleansing, facing and vastening. She reminded them of the Four Great Truths that Ede had discovered: the truth of evil and suffering; the truth that evil arises from the negative programs inherent in the nature of the universe; the truth that this evil can be overcome through writing new programs; the truth that these programs can be written only through an Architect’s completing the Eight Duties, and thus through Ede Himself. The last part of the facing ceremony consisted of nothing more than a repetition of the vow of obedience and the profession of faith. These words, of course, Danlo did not speak. But he joined the others as Harrah guided them in a prayer for peace and a moment of silent meditation. And then the ceremony was over, and he once again found himself sitting crosslegged on the prayer mat of his room. With interface finally broken, he pulled the heaume from his head and sat wondering at the terrible power of this religion known as Edeism.

  It was early the next day, after the facing ceremony, that Harrah Ivi en li Ede summoned Danlo to join her for breakfast in what she called her morning room. Two kind-eyed keepers who might have been Harrah’s grandsons appeared at Danlo’s door and escorted him down various hallways to a lovely room full of flowers and sunlight. Harrah, still dressed in her formal kimono, greeted him with a nice smile just inside the doorway. After they honoured each other with deep bows, she led him over to the eastern windows where a small plastic table had been set for a light meal. Harrah dismissed the keepers, then, telling them that she wished to dine with Danlo alone. The keepers looked at Danlo as if they might have invited in a tiger from the wild, but at last they bowed politely and left the room. Danlo pulled out Harrah’s chair while she sat down and then joined her at the table.

  ‘We love this time of morning,’ Harrah said.

  Danlo looked out of the window, down at the ocean. Except for the ever-present pollution, the day was clear and bright. The waters just beyond the beach shimmered in a river of light that led straight out to where the blazing sun hung low in the sky.

  ‘It … is splendid,’ Danlo agreed.

  ‘Would you care for some juice?’ she asked. Politely she waited for him to say ‘yes’, and then with her steady old hands, picked up a plastic pitcher and poured a strange green juice into two plastic cups. She moved in a precise yet smooth manner, as if she were watching herself and judging her gracefulness – or lack thereof – according to the most exacting of measures.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘those nice young men have left us alone, but we are in no danger, are we?’

  Danlo did not know if the ‘we’ to which she referred included both of them or only herself as the Holy Ivi. So he smiled and asked, ‘Can one ever truly be free from danger?’

  ‘We notice,’ Harrah said, smiling, too, ‘that you have answered our question with a question.’

  ‘I am sorry, Blessed Ivi,’ Danlo said.

  ‘“Blessed Ivi”,’ Harrah said thoughtfully. ‘All the children of the Church address us as “Holy Ivi” or “Ivi Harrah”, but we like the way you say “blessed”.’

  ‘Truly?’

  ‘How not? You say it with your heart while your eyes sing. If you would like, you may address us this way – but only when we’re alone.’

  ‘Then are we to be alone more than this once, Blessed Ivi?’

  ‘Why shouldn’t we be? Are you as dangerous as some of my counsellors fear?’

  ‘I think that you, too, Blessed Ivi, like to answer questions with questions.’

  At this, Harrah laughed softly, then closed her eyes for a moment before taking a sip of juice. It seemed that she might be saying a silent prayer. ‘That may be true. But we notice that you still have managed to avoid our original question.’

  ‘Am I dangerous?’

  ‘Yes – that we would all wish to know.’

  ‘But Blessed Harrah, how should I answer a question when you already know the answer?’

  ‘We do?’

  ‘Truly, from the moment we first met eyes in the Temple … we have trusted each other.’

  ‘And isn’t that strange?’ Harrah mused as she nodded her head. ‘We have trusted you, but now we must decide if we should trust our initial instinct.’

  ‘I am no danger to your physical self,’ Danlo said.

  ‘No, we think not.’

  ‘But I am probably a danger to your public self. To your architetcy.’

  ‘How clearly you see things no naman should see!’

  ‘And I am certainly a danger to your religious self. In this, Bertram Jaspari spoke the truth.’

  Harrah took another sip of juice and smiled at Danlo. ‘We have sensed this, too. Your beliefs are very different from ours.’

  ‘But, truly,’ Danlo said. ‘I have no beliefs. One should be able to face the universe naked in the mind without beliefs, yes?’

  ‘And that,’ Harrah said, ‘is perhaps the most dangerous belief of all.’

  ‘But that is not a simple belief. It is a belief … about the nature of belief itself.’

  ‘Oh, indeed, yes – you are a dangerous man,’ Harrah said, almost laughing. ‘Perhaps that is why we have invited you here.’

  ‘To test your beliefs?’

  ‘How clearly you understand! How fragile faith in one’s religion must be if it breaks at the first testing.’

  ‘I do not believe … that y
our faith is fragile.’

  ‘We shall see,’ Harrah said.

  And then, noticing that Danlo’s cup of juice remained untouched, she encouraged him to drink. She was the High Architect and God’s Prophet of the Cybernetic Universal Church, but she was first a grandmother who liked to see that all her children were well fed.

  ‘It’s juice from the tasida fruit,’ Harrah said. ‘Do you like it?’

  ‘Yes, very much,’ Danlo said, after taking a sip from his cup. The juice was sharp and acidic and very sweet.

  ‘Shall we also send for some tea?’

  ‘Yes, if you’d like.’

  ‘But what would you like?’

  Danlo considered this for a moment. And then, naming perhaps his only vice, he asked, ‘Have you any coffee?’

  ‘We’re sorry, but we can’t serve coffee in our house.’

  ‘You Architects do not drink coffee, then?’

  ‘Some people do.’

  ‘Is coffee illegal, then?’

  ‘We are not sure what you mean by “illegal”. The Logics tell us that it’s vexing to the body to drink hot drinks. Isn’t this all we need to know?’

  ‘But … are there penalties for drinking coffee?’

  ‘There are always penalties for ignoring the teachings of Ede.’

  ‘Imprisonment? Shunning? Public … humiliations?’

  Harrah smiled grimly, then said, ‘Only Iviomils such as Bertram Jaspari would advocate such punishments. Isn’t it punishment enough that when we don’t listen to Ede’s voice, we are cut off from His holy music?’

  While Danlo drank his juice and thought about this, a robot bearing a platter of food rolled into the room. It set various bowls and dishes on the table and refilled Harrah’s juice cup before rolling away. Almost as if she was preparing a plate for one of her great-grandchildren, Harrah used a pair of tongs to serve him slices of a hot bread called jinsych. She spread the bread with a black, protein paste made from one of the plants native to Tannahill. Aside from a thin, cool herb soup and a few sections of some scarlet-fleshed fruit, this was all they had. The Logics prescribed a spare breakfast, and in any case, Harrah did not like to eat much better than her fellow Architects, many of whom had only bread for their morning meal. Although Danlo was relieved to discover that no one of Tannahill ate meat or any substance that came from an animal, he had noticed that many Architects were too poor to afford the variety of plant foods necessary to good health. This sad estate of her people obviously distressed Harrah. No matter how many new food factories the robots constructed, she said, no matter how deeply into the earth the robots mined for minerals and new space to grow green plants, there never seemed to be quite enough for her children to eat. Danlo never doubted Harrah’s sincerity. He loved the kindness he saw in her soft, dark eyes, her rare grace and vulnerability. As he would learn, she had advanced to the architetcy not only because she possessed a superior intellect and strength of spirit, but out of her great reverence towards Ede and her willingness to care for others, even those who scorned her and treated her as an enemy. Possibly no other High Architect since Edeism’s beginnings would have tolerated Bertram Jaspari’s open disrespect. But Harrah regarded him, as she did all her people, as a child of the Church – and therefore a child of Ede, a child of God.