The Wild (35 page)

'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 course, 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.

'I made a mistake,' he told Danlo one day. 'Out of fear, a fundamental mistake.'

According to Ede, his mistake was to write the program encoding his personality too narrowly. Because he feared that the infinite possibilities of godhood might annihilate his sense of self, much as a sprouting plant destroys the seed from which it springs, he carefully searched the Enneagram for a personality type that might define and preserve the pattern of his selfness no matter how great a god he eventually became. And so in the very beginning he had codified all his human traits and faults and bound them into a simple form. He had then earned these faults godward. This mistake was exacerbated during his battle with the Silicon God when he had to compress himself, to prune his memory and programs down to the very simple remnants of Ede who haunted the devotionary computer. And now, three thousand years later, like a bonsai tree that had been pruned and repruned into its final, twisted shape, he was fixed in himself, was stunted and constrained and nearly dead. And this was one reason for his wanting to become human again: he wished to become unfixed. He wished to transcend his personality type, and thus finally to become what he called a true person.

'Although I can reprogram myself,' Ede told Danlo, 'there's a master program controlling which programs I can edit and which I cannot. Unfortunately, as I am now, this master program is untouchable. But once I'm in the flesh again, I shall finally discover the answer to a question that has been bothering me for a long time: just how mutable is man? I want to know, Pilot. I want to know if a man can touch any part of himself; I want to know how matter moves itself. These new programs, new minds, new life – how does it all move itself to evolve?'

Ede's need to know all manner of things ran his life. As he and Danlo fell among the brilliant Vild stars, Danlo often thought that the defining statement of Ede's life might be: I know, therefore I am. Once, after Danlo confessed that their escape from an incandescent Triolet space had been rather narrow, Ede asked to interface the ship-computer so that he might know what kinds of dangers that the Snowy Owl encountered. As a good pilot of the Order, Danlo would rather have pulled out his own eyes before letting any other person (or computer) interface the brain of his ship. But he was also a considerate man, and even for a devotionary-generated hologram he could feel a kind of compassion. And so, with the help of his ship-computer, he made a model of the manifold. Using his ship's sulki grids, he projected glittering images into the dark air of his ship's pit. This projection of the pathways and embedded spaces that they fell through was not very much like the deeply mathematical way in which Danlo himself experienced the manifold. But it was good enough for Ede, who had lost most of his mathematics during his battle and the tragic diminishing of his selfness. Like an itinerant historian first beholding the rings of Qallar, he gaped in astonishment at the colours of a fayway space, at the sparkling lights and the lovely, fractalling complexity. In this manner, viewing the models that Danlo's ship made for him, Ede came to know things that few except the Order's pilots have known. In this way, too, viewing the rippling distortions at the radius of convergence around their ship, he discovered that they were not alone.

'I believe another ship might be following us, Pilot,' he said to Danlo. 'Perhaps it's an emissary of the Silicon God sent to destroy us.'

It was then, within the silken web of the manifold, some thirty-thousand light-years out from Neverness, that Danlo finally told Ede about the warrior-poet named Malaclypse Redring. He told him of the warrior-poet's quest to find a god and destroy him.

'Then ever since your planetfall on Farfara this ship has been following you? This Red Dragon, you say?' Ede's face was a glowing mask of apprehension, and he seemed to doubt what Danlo told him. 'I don't understand, Pilot. If the warrior-poet expects you to lead him to Mallory Ringess, why didn't he follow you to my temple? After all, he couldn't have known that you would find me there and not your father.'

As it happened, Danlo had been brooding over this very question for at least a billion miles. But he had no answer for Ede (or for himself). And so he built an icy wall of disdain around his doubts, turned his face to the strange stars and fell deep into the heart of the Vild, where the darkness of space was filled with light. There were dead stars and supernovas everywhere. Falling through these blazing spaces, Danlo thought, was something like approaching a dragon. Beyond the edge of the Orion Arm, the supernovas grew more dense, and the breath of the stars grew ever hotter. As he fenestered among thousands of stellar windows that seemed almost to melt and fuse into one another like sheets of molten glass, this fiery breath built into a raging wind. Often, when he fell out into realspace for a moment, his ship was blasted by a stream of atoms, photons and high-energy particles. In a few places the radiation was so intense that it might have seared away the diamond skin of his ship if he hadn't quickly made a new mapping and taken the Snowy Owl back into the manifold. There he fell through spaces both deadly and strange.

After many days of such journeying Danlo came across sights unknown to any man or woman of his Order. Usually a pilot delights in making such discoveries, but the things he saw caused him no joy. He found tens of dead stars and hundreds of burned-out planets. Some of these blackened spheres must have once been as beautiful as Tria or Old Earth, but now their great shimmering forests were burnt to char, their oceans vaporized, and their very soil melted to magma or fused into rock. On other planets the biospheres had not been totally destroyed, but rather purged of all life much larger than a bacterium or a worm. One of these planets – Danlo named it Moratha Galia, or World of the Dead Souls – had once sheltered an alien civilization. Clearly, in the not too distant past, the light of a supernova must have fallen upon this planet and caught the alien race unaware. On every continent were huge, golden cities as still as a winter night. And in every city, in the winding tunnels and streets, in the dens and buildings and halls, there were the corpses of billions of alien people. Or rather only their bones remained to fill the cities like broken chess pieces in a box – in one of his more onerous duties, Danlo made measurements and determined that it had been at least a century since the aliens had died and their flesh rotted away. Danlo walked among thirteen of these cities of bone. He walked and he looked and he remembered other dead people whom he had seen in other places. He marvelled at the tenacity of bone in holding its shape and enduring through the years, even these miles of alien skeletons, which were as delicate as carved ivory and as strangely jointed as a bird's. Only bone remembers pain, he thought. He wondered then at the sheer courage of life, at its boldness in daring to exist in a universe full of pain. After saying a requiem for the spirits of all these billions of people whose names he could never know, he reflected that it was always risky to live beneath the light of a star. Starlight could either illuminate or incinerate, and it was this race's bad luck to suffer fire and burning before falling to its fate.

Whoever would give light must endure burning, Danlo remembered. But stars, when they died into light, burned at a temperature of ten billion degrees, and flesh was only flesh. Further into the Vild, Danlo discovered other death worlds. Many of these were covered with human remains, with bleached white bones whose shape he knew so well. For the first time, he appreciated the very human urge to go out among the stars and fill the universe with life. Few races had ever felt this driving force so deeply as Homo sapiens. In truth, no other race had swarmed the galaxy for a million years. And now human beings were safely seeded upon perhaps ten million natural or made worlds – not even the gods could count humanity's numbers. Danlo thought it ironic that of all the living species in the galaxy, the most dispersed and secure were human beings, they who were destroying the security of the galaxy's other races, perhaps even destroying the galaxy itself.

'We're a mad, murderous people,' Ede confided to Danlo after he had explored his thirty-third death world. 'We murder others so that our kind can swarm the stars like maggots on a corpse. Why do you think I felt compelled to escape my flesh and transcend into something finer?'

This, Danlo thought in his more contemplative moments, defined the essential tension of the human race: human beings' genius for living life successfully versus their desire to transcend all the blood and the breathing and pain. Possibly no other species was so secure in life and yet so dissatisfied with it. Man, the eschatologists said, was a bridge between ape and god. According to their very popular philosophy, man could only be defined as a movement toward something higher. And the Fravashi aliens, too, saw this discontent of human possibilities. Thousands of years ago the Fravashi Old Fathers had developed a language called Moksha, which was designed to help human beings free themselves from themselves. In Moksha, 'man' is a verb, and it expresses the human urge to go beyond the purely animal. This was the meaning of man. While Danlo always appreciated this desire to be greater, he felt that man's destiny lay not so much in a heightening or a quickening or even a vastening of the self but rather in a deepening. His own true quest, he told himself, must always take him deeper into life. He must always journey further into the heart of all things where the sound of life is long and dark and deep – as infinitely deep as the universe itself. And so he could never quite believe in the kinds of transcendence for which human beings have striven for so long. He could never quite affirm humanity's mad and marvellous dream of becoming as gods, and perhaps something more.

It was around a brilliant blue star named Gelasalia that he discovered evidence of a great transcendent event. When Danlo's ship fell out into realspace streaming with light, he discovered his first rainbow star system. Like other such systems, Gelasalia was surrounded by many ringworlds. Through the blackness of empty space, these worlds encircled the star like rings of opal and silver, each world catching the starlight and reflecting it in all directions. Human beings, Danlo discovered, had made these worlds: an impressive feat of engineering. Of course, the making of even one ringworld is beyond the technology of most peoples. It is no easy thing to build the superstructure of the ring itself: a simple band of organic stone five thousand miles wide and a hundred million miles in circumference set slowly spinning around the star. And then to layer the ring's interior with millions of miles of artificial soil, forests, lakes and atmosphere was work that not even the Order's master ecologists would dare to undertake. Danlo marvelled that here, among some unknown star in the Vild, there spun not just one sparkling ringworld but seventeen. Despite himself he felt proud at his race's making of this great, beautiful thing. Immediately upon beholding its brilliant colours, he wanted to meet the creators of the rainbow star system so he took his ship down to the surface of one of the ringworlds to honour these people for their prowess and craftsmanship. He accomplished an easy planetfall, bringing the Snowy Owl to rest in a grassy meadow spinning beneath the light of the star. But, in the nearby orange groves, in the villas and cities and towns, he found no one to honour. In truth, he found no one at all – not on that ringworld nor any other. Mercifully, though, he found no corpses or bones or any other sign of doom. It seemed that the whole rainbow system of made-worlds had simply been abandoned. Here was a great mystery. How could some ten trillion human beings (or perhaps more) simply flee into space? What had happened to these elusive people?