The Wild (66 page)

And so Danlo dwelt in Harrah's house while he waited for the next phase in his embassy to the Architects to begin. After three days of being confined to his room while Harrah conducted an inquest as to Elder Janegg's bizarre death, he concluded that he was something less than a guest though perhaps more than a prisoner. No necessity of life nor luxury of whim was denied him. His room was a marvel of rich furnishings, sacred art, cybernetica, and most surprisingly, flowers and green potted plants. Unlike the Narain, who were content to live within the surrealities of the Field, the Architects of Tannahill dreamed of Old Earth as it was thousands of years ago, before the Swarming Centuries – as it would be again at the end of time when Ede the God recreated countless pristine and unsullied Earths for his chosen people to inhabit. It was the great paradox of the Architects that even as they destroyed nature they longed for it and came to love it the more they were denied its glories. Thus they had graced his room with hanging ananda blossoms, all white and splendid and shining like stars, and most marvellously, a parrotock bird whose feathers fairly exploded with reds and blues and other brilliant colours. It saddened Danlo to see this lively animal kept in a little steel cage, though he supposed it was no worse off than most of the people who lived in the apartments of Ornice Olorun. He remembered a riddle that his grandfather had once posed him: How do you capture a beautiful bird without killing its spirit? After many years of contemplation, he still could not answer this question, but even so he took delight in tossing the bird fat mawi nuts and seeing its spirit soar whenever he approached its cage to look into its bright golden eyes. Often he would play his flute, giving it music from deep inside him, and the bird would return this gift by warbling and whistling and singing the loveliest of songs, so that he wondered if the parrotock was imakla, a magic animal possessing great powers.

One day, as he voiced his doubt in words, he was astonished to hear the bird answer him. 'Are you imakla?' the bird squawked, answering his question with a question. 'How can a magic being live inside a cage?'

At first he wondered if the bird could truly talk, but in little time he discovered that it was only a clever mimic repeating and permuting his words with less sophistication than even the most basic computer ai program. If Danlo wished for conversation, he would do better to spend his time listening to the imago of Nikolos Daru Ede that floated above his devotionary computer and mechanically sounded out warnings such as, 'Be careful of the bird. Its eyes might be soft-wired to spy on you'. It was at such moments, in painful awareness of the limitations of the devotionary's program, that Danlo despaired of ever communicating with this glowing Ede. In addition, he found that the palace keepers who came every day to clean his room and bring him hot meals would not talk to him. After restocking the cage's feeder with fresh mawi nuts and disposing of Danlo's bed linen as if they dreaded touching any object that had come in contact with a naman, they silently collected the dishes from his previous meal. With eyes cast downward (but stealing glances at this strange man from the stars who might be the Lightbringer), they hurried from his presence, leaving him very much alone.

Inevitably, out of curiosity and loneliness, Danlo turned to the holy heaume that sat gleaming on the altar in his middle room. When he pulled it over his head, he found that he could interface various cybernetic spaces. None of these were so profound or well-articulated as the Field generated by the Narain's computers on Alumit Bridge. There were no free information pools nor was there anything like an association space where the Architects of Tannahill might come together in a single planetary conversation. And with one important exception, there were no surrealities and no degrees of instantiation higher than that of voice or facement. The Elders of the Church believed in restricting both information and communications; they saw themselves as protectors of the people and thought that it was their duty to keep dangerous technologies out of their hands. Indeed, in this district of Ornice Olorun – the New City – among the Temple buildings, palace and high estates, there were whole institutions where hard-eyed men and women met to determine which technologies were in harmony with the Church doctrines, with the Logics and the holy Algorithm. It was their belief that they should change the conditions of life to fit the human soul rather than mutilate human nature in service of arbitrary new technologies. And so as Danlo sat crosslegged beneath the glittering holy heaume, he found that he could not communicate with the Architects as he wished. But he could commune with them. One day as he closed his eyes and attempted various degrees of instantiation, he came across a space known as cybernetic communion, and this discovery both amused and alarmed him. 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 li 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 upon 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.