The Wild (36 page)

'There are theories that could explain such an event,' Ede told Danlo after insisting on exploring the rainbow system with him. 'Unfortunately, I've forgotten most of them.'

One theory that Ede had not forgotten seemed to Danlo as ominous as it did strange. It was possible, Ede said, that the rainbow system's ten trillion people comprised the greatest concentration of human beings in the galaxy. What would happen, Ede asked, if all these people were to interface a single computer network at the same time? What would happen if through the hideously complex flow of data and information, these many minds merged together into one? What would happen when ten trillion human brains – with all the intelligence and incredible computing power they contained – worked together towards the answer to some great question? According to Ede, godhood would happen. Not, of course, for any single woman or man, but rather for the network as a whole. It was possible that over the centuries, the rainbow system's computer network itself had become intelligent and self-aware. And then, like an explosively growing crystal, in a great vastening that might have taken only nanoseconds, it was possible that this network of human minds might have transcended into godhood. What kind of god, Ede asked, might such a weaving of minds produce? Quite possibly the greatest god in the galaxy. In the incredible fact of the abandoned ringworlds, in the absence of corpses or bones, there was evidence for such greatness. What had happened to the ringworlds' people? According to Ede, this had happened: their ten trillion brains had merged into a single god who finally understood the mysterious connection between matter and consciousness. This god – call it the Rainbow Deity – had miraculously transformed the matter of ten trillion bodies into patterns of pure consciousness. And then, somehow, the Deity had projected itself through millions of miles of black space into the centre of Gelasalia. There, in the heart of a beautiful blue star, in the plasma currents and intense magnetic fields, the system's ten trillion people lived on as a single, dazzling consciousness. There the Deity would be safe from the blinding light of the Vild's many supernovas – as safe as any living star could be.

'On all the ringworlds we've discovered no lightships, nor deepships,' Ede announced. 'No ships capable of anything more than journeying among the rings. In any case, how many deepships would it take to evacuate ten trillion people? Where are the factories to make these ships? Is there any evidence that such ships could ever have been made? No, there is not. And therefore, I must leave you with my hypothesis as to the fate of these people. How else to explain this mystery?'

Search though he might, Danlo could explain very little about the people of Gelasalia. In truth, he was tired of hypotheses and explanations. He remembered something that his Fravashi teacher had once said: that life was not a mystery to be explained, but rather a miracle to be lived. And so, in the end, he too abandoned this enigmatic star system. He returned to his journey, to the quest for a lost planet that had become his life. Once again he fell into the shimmering manifold, where he felt the miracle of life in the ever nearness of death. Something there, he sensed, was drawing him onward. At the heart of the manifold was a singularity dazzling in its darkness – when Danlo closed his eyes he could almost feel some force pulling at him with all the terrible gravity of a black hole. Perhaps this singularity was much like the strange attractor that had led him to the Entity's Earth and Her incarnation as Tamara; perhaps it was something wholly other. At times, when Danlo was drunk with the splendour of a light inside light, he was uncertain as to whether this attractor lay in the infinite spaces outside or – impossibly – inhered in some secret place deep inside himself. In these moments of scrying, with fate calling him on like an owl's cry in the night, he often wondered if some such attractor was drawing humanity itself into a glorious future. Was transcendence truly man's destiny? Did a great singularity lie in Homo sapiens' path, some omega point in which man's intelligence would expand more quickly than the wavefront of an exploding star? Would human consciousness (or the consciousness of those beings whom humans had become) spread out like light across the universe, eventually infusing all matter, all space, all time?

No, Danlo thought in the great loneliness between the stars, the only thing human beings will spread is death.

Toward the centre of the Vild, out near the star-shrouded Perseus Arm of the galaxy, Danlo discovered a succession of Earths that Ede the God had once made. The radiation from various supernovas had scorched two of these doomed planets, but the other nine were untouched, as pristine and wild as any planet Danlo had ever seen. It was on the eleventh Earth that Danlo made the acquaintance of a people who called themselves the Sani. The ten thousand people of the Sani lived in a rainforest at the edge of one of the northern continents; the rest of the Earth, it seemed, was uninhabited. Danlo found the Sani to be a sad, philosophical people – as well they should be considering their tragic past and uncertain future. In fact, their very name for themselves meant something like 'the Damned'.

'It is my fault,' Ede confessed to Danlo after the Snowy Owl had come to rest on the sands of a wide, windswept beach. 'I made these people as they are. I made them, you see, and perhaps it was wrong for me to experiment with human beings in this way.'

What Ede the God had once done, according to Ede's very incomplete memory, was to seed this eleventh Earth with people. He had done this many times as it was part of his experiment to grow supposedly innocent human beings from frozen zygotes, to imprint a carefully designed culture onto them, and then to watch how their society developed. And then to destroy them and begin anew. Ede told Danlo that on this eleventh Earth, there had been at least five such human societies in the last millennium. No society – no tribe, city-state, or arcology – had lasted more than two hundred years. And the Sani knew this. It was part of Ede's experiment that they should live out their lives in their rain-drenched forests, all the while knowing of the doom soon to befall them. This is why they called themselves 'the Damned' and why they looked to the starry sky in despair rather than awe, for they lived in fear of the hand of God.

Danlo had little difficulty meeting with the elders of one of the Sani's largest bands. Deep in the forest, along the banks of a fast-running river, he found an encampment some three-hundred people strong. The Sani built their houses out of great, sturdy logs and roofed them with sheets of bark; they made their living from the salmon they fished from the rivers, from the abundance of berries, roots, and pine nuts that they gathered from the forests. Theirs seemed a rich, easy life of roasted fish-feasts, thanksgiving and drinking their holy blackberry beer. But the Sani did not allow themselves to revel in their earthly paradise; displays of spontaneity or animal joy, they believed, mocked man's spiritual nature. Their way in the world was simple if exacting: they must perfect themselves and all their actions beneath the glittering eyes of God. To accomplish this, they must suffer infinite pains. As Danlo would soon learn, the thirty-two tribes of the Sani therefore suffered the harshest of spiritual lives.

'Our ways are not easy, but we must ask you to respect our law until it is time for you to leave.'

This came from an old woman named Reina An, who sat with Danlo before a blazing fire at the centre of the Sani village. Beside her were other elders: her first husband, Mato An, and old Ki Lin Shang along with his wives, Hon Su Shang, Laam Su, and toothless, white-haired Jin Joyu Minye. Because Danlo's visit was a singular event most of the tribe had abandoned their work for the day. They crowded around the fire, though taking care not to press too close lest their naked bodies inadvertently touch Danlo or the strange-looking devotionary computer that he carried. Although Danlo could not know it, upon his arrival Reina An had sent messengers to the elders of the other bands. Later that day they would make their short journeys through the dripping forest in order to meet Danlo and honour him – that is, if Reina and the others hadn't already decided to execute Danlo as a dangerous hsi tuti who might break their law and thus bring the wrath of God down upon them.

'Your law is sacred to you, yes?' Danlo looked at Reina An even as he directed his question toward the devotionary. The Sani spoke a variant of High Westerness Chinese, a language with which Danlo was unfamiliar. Once, of course, in his study of the universal syntax, he had learned the characters of Old Chinese, but this was little help in understanding the strange words that fell from Reina's mouth as easily and musically as a soft rain. Fortunately, the Ede, acting as translator, quickly made sense of what Reina and the other elders said. If the sight of a glowing, talking, foot-high hologram astonished any of the elders, they gave no sign. Even when Nikolos Daru Ede spoke in a clear if somewhat stiff Sani, they did little more than cock their heads and squint their eyes. Danlo immediately guessed that they had never seen a devotionary computer. Perhaps they had never seen Ede the God, their creator and destroyer who could never touch them again. 'Your blessed law – this was given to you by ... God?'

'No, of course not,' Reina said. She was a quick-minded and crabby woman whose soft brown eyes missed nothing. Although it was wet in the forest, with the sky grey and misting, she was naked like everyone else. She sat on a new bear fur, and the bones of her rigidly straight spine stuck out beneath her skin like the rungs of a ladder. If the fire heating her withered old chest was too hot or the rain drizzling down her back was too cold, she gave no sign. 'It is we who give our law to Him.'

There was a moment of silence before Ede translated this. And then Danlo asked, 'To ... God?'

'To the Master of the Universe,' Reina said. 'To Him who makes the sun and the rain. To our creator and sustainer. He gave us life, and so we must give him every devotion of our lives, every moment. This is why we made our law. This is why no Sani must ever break the Yasa, which we give to Him with all the gladness of a mother giving her daughter to be a bride.'

Although Reina spoke carefully and precisely, it was as if she were reciting a formula. Danlo thought that there was little real gladness in her voice.

'Your law, the Yasa, is complex, yes?'

After Ede had translated Danlo's question, Ki Lin Shang smiled sadly and said, 'Our law is actually quite simple – even a child knows our law.'

At this, Ki Lin Shang turned and beckoned to a potbellied little boy who stood behind him. Ki Lin pulled the frightened boy onto his knee and asked, 'Child, can you tell us the Yasa?'

The boy – Ki Lin's bright-eyed grandson who could have been no more than four years old – seemed immediately to understand that he must speak to the Ede hologram if Danlo was to understand him. 'We must take pleasure in the world and in all that we do; all that we do must be pleasing to God.'

He paused a moment while Ede translated this, and then, quite shyly, he said, 'May all our thoughts be beautiful.'

Here Ki Lin Shang smiled proudly as he brought his fingertips to his temples. Slowly, gracefully, he then spread his arms outward in a gesture of giving and intoned, 'Hai!'

Emboldened by his grandfather's chanting of the sacred syllable of affirmation, the boy continued: 'May all our words be beautiful.'

As if a signal had been spoken, the elders sitting on their bearskins touched their fingers to their lips and gave their formal blessing to the world. 'Hai!' they said as they held their hands outstretched over the black, loamy earth of the forest.

Now all the people standing around them were ready to take up the chant. They held their arms crossed over their chests, waiting. Danlo, too, sitting across from the ever-watchful Reina An, placed his fingertips on either shoulder. Once a time, he had loved ritual as fiercely as he did fresh meat, and so he fell easily into this last of the Sani's prayer postures. Almost before the boy could speak, Danlo found himself reaching his hands outward to the sky and whispering, 'May all our actions be beautiful.'

And then, a moment later; along with the other three hundred men, women, and children, he chanted, 'Hai!'

After the Sani had closed their eyes in silent affirmation of their sacred law, Reina An turned to Danlo and cast him a strange, piercing look. She stared at him for quite a long time, and then said, 'You knew. While the boy recited, even before, you whispered the last verse of the Yasa.'

Danlo, who was suddenly uncomfortable in his wet woollens, looked around at all the naked people staring at him. 'It ... seemed the right thing to say.'

'You knew,' Reina An repeated. 'Without hearing first, you knew.'

In truth, Danlo had known exactly what the boy would chant. The words had suddenly appeared on his tongue like mushrooms sprouting up in a wet forest. Before any of the others had begun the blessing, he had seen their arms – and his own arms – outstretched to the sky. He did not want to ascribe this sudden foreknowledge to any special skill such as scrying or that mysterious way of seeing whole patterns from single parts that had first come over him in the library on Neverness six years before. It was logic, he thought, simple logic that had moved him to whisper the words of the Yasa.

Reina An moved her hand to her tired eyes as if to rub them, but then, thinking better of such a weak-willed action, she stroked her thick white hair and smiled instead. She looked at Danlo and told him, 'It is well that you understand the spirit of the Yasa, for it is difficult to know the law's many applications unless one is Sani.'

Here, at the end of Ede's translation, the little hologram of the man who would be God floated in the misty air and almost smiled. He caught Danlo's eye and said, 'I confess that I haven't given a full rendering of the word Sani. I should tell you that it means not only "the Damned" but "the Chosen".'

Because Ede's confession went on much too long to be a simple translation of Reina's words, she glared at the devotionary computer with dread and loathing, as if Ede's glowing hologram were some kind of poisonous snake.