The Wild

by David Zindell

  ‘We’d heard that he was dying.’

  ‘Yes,’ Danlo said softly. ‘He is dying.’

  ‘We’d heard that the Lightbringer was caring for the dying,’ Harrah said. ‘And we allowed this only because you are who you are.’

  ‘I am sorry, Blessed Harrah. But there are so many who will die. Who could have dreamed … that there would be so many?’

  ‘But the living require our care, too.’

  ‘I … know.’

  Many lifetimes ago – perhaps eight days earlier, after the first battle for the light-field – Harrah had made one of the most difficult decisions of her architetcy, and Danlo had learned a new word, a cruel and terrible word almost as ancient as war itself: triage. Triage was a strategy for dealing with great numbers of wounded warriors when those who remained untouched were too few or hadn’t the means to care for them properly. In triage, after a battle, the wounded would be gathered together and divided into three groups. First, there were those with minor wounds such as a severed ear or shattered arm; these were the fortunate ones who would most likely survive without help. Then there were the more serious woundings, the laser burns and the blinded eyes, the blown-off legs, genitals and faces. Some of these, with the care of their wives and sisters, would live, although many would find their way into the great ovens in the cellar of Harrah’s palace. The last category was that of the doomed: those men and women whose bellies had been pierced, or heads opened, or great swatches of skin burned black in plasma fires. With medicines and means for healing the body in such short supply, the Elders who made the terrible choices of triage were forced to allocate all the Church’s resources to the second group. The slightly wounded were left to recuperate on their own, while the doomed were left to die, alone and usually in great pain.

  ‘We’d heard that you saved a man,’ Harrah said. ‘Alesar Iviunn – wasn’t that his name?’

  Danlo smiled sadly as he nodded his head. Rarely, in triage, a man damned as one of the hopeless could be saved if someone were willing to make heroic efforts to care for him. But proving wrong the Elders who made the decisions of triage was not why Danlo had stayed awake pouring water into Alesar’s mouth and playing his flute for him.

  ‘You’re the Lightbringer,’ Harrah said. ‘A man without fear who will heal the living and walk with the dead. Many people are saying that you can heal the dying, too.’

  ‘No,’ Danlo said. ‘The dying, the people … only they can heal themselves.’

  ‘It’s said that you bear light in your hands, and your touch is like that of the sun upon a flower.’

  Danlo closed his eyes in remembrance of what he had seen inside himself during the light-offering. He said, ‘We are all just light, yes? This splendid light. It is inside all things. It is all things, truly. It … knows itself. It moves itself, makes itself move. And it makes itself, from itself, onstreaming, on and on, the new patterns, the power, the purpose, I … I know that it is possible for anyone to heal himself. I can almost see it, this blessed way. I can feel it, in my hands, in my blood, and deeper – it burns in each atom of my being like fire. All of us are alive with this flame, Blessed Harrah. It burns to remake itself. And we burn to remake ourselves, and we all know how, truly we do. But we do not know … that we know.’

  For a long time after Danlo had stopped speaking, Harrah looked at him as she might a child born with his eyes fully open and laughing in delight at all the beauties of the world. Or weeping at its pain. She seemed to be listening to the sounds around them: Thomas Ivieehl’s moans spilling out of Danlo’s sleeping chamber like blood; bombs exploding in other levels of the city; the deep whoosh of their individual breaths. Near the altar, the parrotock began to squawk in its steel cage. Because the red and blue bird made so much noise, Danlo had moved it from his sleeping chamber lest it disturb the dying of the men who lay there.

  ‘You came to Tannahill with many purposes,’ Harrah finally said. Her voice was very soft, almost a whisper. ‘As an emissary of the Narain and a pilot of your Order. And, perhaps, as a man who sought his father.’

  ‘Yes,’ Danlo said, listening to the deep sound inside his chest.

  ‘And perhaps the greatest of your purposes – or at least the one nearest your heart – was to find a cure for the Plague virus.’

  ‘The Slow Evil,’ Danlo said, remembering.

  ‘A disease for which no cure is known.’

  But I know the cure, Danlo thought. Here, now, on this lost world, I have found it. The Entity was right – I have always known. And someday I will find the way to use this knowledge.

  ‘But there is a cure,’ he told her. ‘Someday, I must bring it to my people. They are dying, Blessed Harrah. Dying slowly, but still dying.’

  ‘When we first told you that there was no cure, we were sad beyond the power of words to express.’ As Harrah spoke, her eyes fell moist with tears. For a moment, it was hard for Danlo to know which cure she meant: that of the doomed Architects or the great Plague or the pain of the universe itself. ‘But now, Pilot, from what you’ve said here today, it seems there might be a possibility of a cure.’

  ‘Yes … a possibility,’ Danlo said. ‘All things might be possible.’ He looked down at his hands while he thought of Tamara Ten Ashtoreth – the real Tamara whose soul had been mutilated beneath a cleansing heaume in Neverness not long before. For the ten thousandth time, he wondered if there might be a way to help her regain her lost memories.

  Harrah took a deep breath and looked at Danlo with all the love a flower might have for the sun. She said, ‘We’re glad that you’ll remain with us for a while. But we must tell you that the palace really isn’t safe.’

  ‘Is any place truly safe, Blessed Harrah?’

  ‘We believe that Bertram will attempt one last attack on the palace. We wouldn’t wish for any harm to come to you.’

  Now Harrah gazed at him as a grandmother fearing for the life of one of her children. Danlo felt the sudden wetness of water in his own eyes. Although he had seen Harrah only a few times, he realized that he had come to love her.

  ‘And I would not wish any harm for you,’ he said.

  Danlo covered his eyes, wiping them with the palm of his hand. An image of red-robed Iviomils ripping through the rooms of the palace burned in his brain. For the first time, he felt the inadequacy of ahimsa in the face of war. He had sworn never to harm another, even in defence of his own life, and this was as it should be. But if some battle-mad Iviomil were to burst into Danlo’s room at that very moment wielding a laser or a nerve knife, he didn’t know how he would protect this lovely old woman.

  ‘We’ve lived a very long time,’ Harrah said. ‘But you’re still young.’

  Danlo leaned over to pick up his flute where it rested on a table near the altar. He held it in his hands and looked at it for a long time. What power would a couple of feet of bamboo have, he wondered, against an eye-tlolt or laser cannon or the fire of a hydrogen bomb?

  ‘You’re young,’ Harrah repeated, ‘and you’ve done nothing to preserve that youth against the taking of your life.’

  ‘I … will not let the programmers make a pallaton of myself again. I am sorry.’

  ‘No, we are sorry.’ She reached out to him with open hands as if warming herself in the sun. ‘We would not wish to see this treasure that sits before us lost to death.’

  Danlo remembered the terrible beauty that he had seen as he had sat beneath the cube of lights in the Hall of Heaven; even now he could almost see the shimmering consciousness of every atom inside himself. ‘But, Blessed Harrah,’ he said, smiling, ‘there is no true death.’

  Although this might be true, there was certainly dying. At that moment, in Danlo’s sleeping chamber, Thomas Ivieehl chose to let out a particularly anguished moan. He began to call for water, for his son lost in the first battle for the light field, and then, after a while, for God.

  ‘I must go to him,’ Danlo said. He stood and bowed to Harrah. ‘He has been my friend.’
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  ‘We understand,’ Harrah said. She smiled at him, even though as Holy Ivi of the Eternal Church she was unused to anyone leaving her presence without asking her permission.

  Danlo gripped his flute in his hand and sighed. ‘I … must be with all of them for a while. No one should be left to die alone.’

  ‘We understand,’ Harrah said again. She looked down at his flute. ‘Will you play a song for them?’

  ‘Yes, a song,’ Danlo said. ‘It … is almost all that I can give them.’

  ‘We, too, believe that there is no true death,’ Harrah said. ‘We Architects – this is the teaching of the Church.’

  Danlo bowed his head in honour of the power of her faith, if not the doctrines of the Cybernetic Universal Church.

  ‘We also believe that these men will not die in vain,’ Harrah continued. She pointed into Danlo’s sleeping chamber. ‘We will win the war, Pilot. The dying will end. And a new age for our Church will begin.’

  ‘I hope you win your war … soon.’

  ‘Will you allow us to pray for Thomas Ivieehl?’ she asked him. ‘And for the other men? Sometimes there’s a great power in prayer.’

  Danlo smiled and nodded his head. ‘Yes, if you’d like – we will pray together.’

  So saying, he took Harrah’s arm in his, and they walked into the other room.

  In Harrah’s hopes for a favourable outcome to the war, she would be both right and wrong. As she had foretold, the armies and bands of Architects who followed her did indeed triumph over Bertram Jaspari’s Iviomils. Bertram, gambling on winning an empire of many worlds and the souls of countless Architects, staked everything on the shock of terror and quick attack. But his armies had failed to capture most of his critical objectives, and even the campaign of assassination and terror that Malaclypse of Qallar unleashed upon the Architects did not move them from their purpose. The Architects are a tough and tenacious people, much used to hunger, suffering and self-sacrifice. It was Bertram’s great mistake that where he counted on these traits in his Iviomils, he had supposed that the Architects of the Juriddik and Danladi sects (and especially the peace-loving Elidis) had grown soft in their souls and weak in faith. But he did not truly know his own people. He had supposed that when he clothed his Iviomils in the ancient red kimonos told of in the Commentaries and led them in a glorious facifah to purify the Church, many Architects would wish to join them in glory. And those who did not, he planned to terrorize into accepting his rule. But terror is the wrong weapon with which to touch people’s hearts. Bertram should have known this. Malaclypse Redring did know this, and it must be recorded here that after the first shocks of violence had failed to kill Harrah or to cow her, Malaclypse advised Bertram against the senseless slaughters that marked the last days of the war, not because he wished to avoid more killing, but only because the terror was alienating the great mass of Architects and driving them into the ranks of Harrah’s armies. It was simply bad strategy. But Bertram did not listen to him. Day by day, in a thousand cities across Tannahill, as Harrah’s Worthy began to recapture the light-fields and food factories, Bertram grew desperate. Since the Worthy so badly outnumbered his Iviomils, he reasoned that if he could strike without mercy at Harrah’s strength in such cities as Tlon and Yevivi where almost the entire populace had remained loyal to her, he might reduce the odds against him. This he soon did. One of his armies seized Tlon’s air factories and cut off the oxygen to nine levels of that city. A million people died blue-faced and gasping for breath. But this massive murder only rallied millions of previously peaceful Architects against Bertram. Everywhere, on every level of every city in Tannahill, the Worthy fell against Bertram’s armies with outrage and wrath. By the war’s twenty-ninth day, a quarter of the Iviomils had been killed or captured, and Bertram began to lose light-fields and tube nexi almost by the hour. And so inevitably he came to his critical hour as the false Ivi, or rather his moment of choice. He chose badly. It must have been obvious to him that he had lost the war. He might have surrendered to Harrah, abased himself, and admitted that he had fallen into the worst of negative programs. He might have begged her forgiveness. Harrah, who was always too kind to her enemies, might have forgiven him, for was it not written in Man’s Journey that even the most vile hakra could cleanse himself of his negative programs and turn his face toward God? But Bertram’s was the face of vanity and cruelty, and he wished for revenge. And so this zealous man so lacking in true grace once again chose murder and death.

  On the thirty-third day of the war, a cadre of Iviomils managed to smuggle a bomb into an apartment block in the heart of Montellivi. This was the city of Harrah’s birth, and the number of her sisters, cousins, grandnieces and other relatives who still lived there could be numbered in hundreds of thousands. Montellivi had always been a stronghold of the Juriddik sect, and the few Iviomil cadres that banded together there had been broken and swept from its streets like so many shards of glass. And so, wishing for revenge, at Bertram’s command, one of the surviving cadres exploded a bomb. But this was no ordinary plastic bomb that might have melted out a few levels of the city and killed a few tens of thousands of people. It was a hydrogen bomb. One of the many factories that the Iviomils had captured in Amaris began to make such bombs out of lasers and the heavier isotopes of hydrogen. The bomb’s explosion vaporized ten million Architects in a flash of a moment. Millions more died during the next few days of seared lungs and burns blackening much of their bodies. Many men and women were blinded in the initial blast. Many Iviomils – those who hadn’t received the alarm to flee the city – were wounded or died as well. The shock of this tragedy was felt almost immediately in the Hall of the Koivuniemin half a world away. When even the bloody-minded Jedrek Iviongeon pointed out that the bomb must have killed innocent Iviomil children whose pallatons had never been preserved onto diamond discs, Bertram’s response stunned the assembled Elders. His infamous words must be recorded here as a warning to all those who kill out of principle or belief: ‘It’s true that Iviomils have died today. We know that some of these must have been children who never should have been touched by horrors of battle. We had no time to make pallatons of their young minds; this is unfortunate, but only one of the many necessary tragedies of war. The Elder Iviongeon has observed that it will be impossible for these children to be vastened in Ede in the usual way. So it must be. We can’t tell you how this distresses us. But in war, people die, even children. But we must remember that they were Iviomils. And we must remember that we Iviomils fight our facifah to the greater glory of God’s Infinite Program for the Universe. Because God will not forget his children. And we Iviomils must never forget the power of God. At the end of time, at the omega point, there will be a Second Creation. Is this not written in the Last Things? Some may doubt this promise, but we Iviomils are those chosen few who must believe the truth: God will absorb all things and all information into His infinite body. Our children who died in Montellivi will be vastened in Ede someday. We must not worry over the fate of those who died there. Our task was only to destroy this city of naraids and heretics; let God be judge and preserve those Iviomils who never turned their faces from Him.’

  And then, when Bertram and his Koivuniemin began to debate similar attacks against other cities and Jedrek Iviongeon voiced a similar objection, Bertram was more blunt. Concerning the fate of the Architects in Raizel, Bertram was heard to say, ‘Kill them all! Let God sort the souls of those who have remained faithful to him!’

  This remark signalled the end of Bertram’s false architetcy on Tannahill. Jedrek Iviongeon, along with ten other Elders, immediately stood up, smoothed out the folds of their red kimonos and left the Hall of the Koivuniemin. Within three days, Iviomils everywhere began to desert Bertram and surrender to Harrah’s keepers and readers. Bertram lost all but his most fanatical followers – which, considering his next move, was perhaps just what he wanted. For he had decided to flee the planet. His Iviomils (those remaining loyal to him) still held many of Tannahi
ll’s light-fields. And so he called his faithful to gather at the greatest of these, in the cities of Amaris, Elimat and Karkut. On these three fields he had assembled a great fleet of shuttles that would ferry his armies to the deepships and seedships waiting in nearspace above Tannahill. Bertram Jaspari was a shallow man but he was not stupid; he had prepared well for retreat. The captains of the ships were Iviomils sworn to bring missionaries to the far stars of the Vild. Now they would bring Bertram’s armies – and his facifah – to whatever star in the galaxy he commanded them to fall. For these captains would not be left alone to pilot almost blindly through the manifold’s strange, dark spaces, as the Architects had been doomed to do for so long. Sivan wi Mawi Sarkissian, the renegade pilot of Neverness, in his Red Dragon, would lead the Iviomils on their Great Pilgrimage, as they called it. Malaclypse Redring of Qallar would accompany Bertram in his seedship named the Glory of God and help him found a new Church (which Bertram called the True Church) somewhere among the stars as far from Tannahill as they could find.

  And so it happened. So ended the War of Terror, if not the War – and certainly not war itself. Because Bertram had only fifty-three ships filled with foodstuffs and the factories needed to build new cities on alien worlds, he had to leave many Iviomils behind. Most of these devout men and women – there were millions of them – despaired upon seeing Bertram’s fleet vanish into the night. Rather than surrender to the deep cleansings that awaited them should they rejoin the Old Church, they chose to fight to the death. It took Harrah’s Worthy many days to track them into their apartments, or into bombed-out temples, or into the dark, wet tunnels below the deepest levels of Ornice Olorun and other cities. The Worthy slayed them one by one and took their red-swathed bodies away to be burned in the great plasma ovens. During this time of hunger and chaos, there was much burning of bodies, for the dead lay everywhere, on the light-fields and the streets, or rotting in the hospices, hotels, or even on the estates of the Elder Architects. Quickly, however, Harrah reestablished her authority, even in the far cities of Iviennet and Bavoll and other former Iviomil strongholds. The dead were cared for as the Algorithm prescribed, and their pallatons were brought to Ornice Olorun and loaded into the many computers in the House of Eternity. Altogether, perhaps some thirty-four million Architects died in the war. Given the incredible fertility of the Architects, however, the surviving populations might expect to make up these losses in much less than a year.