The Wild (71 page)

When Danlo stepped outside his choche, he was greeted with an immense cheer issuing from hundreds of thousands of throats. Twelve keepers from the House of Eternity greeted him as well. Two hundred grim temple keepers formed a cordon around Danlo and Harrah and escorted them up the House's long, black steps. The fear of assassination hung in the air, as heavy as the smells of death and disease that Danlo found wherever he went in this endless city. It seemed that not everyone welcomed his arrival. Almost drowning out the voices of acclamation (and the sound of his own pulsing heart) were catcalls and jeers and demands that he should leave Tannahill forever: 'Naman go home! Death to namans! Pilot man, die the real death in the House of the Dead!'

Along either side of the House's steps, the keepers had set up a light-fence of blazing ruby lasers designed to keep back anyone so foolish as to attack the Holy Ivi. Behind this fence, at the very edge of the black, nall steps, stood Bertram Jaspari and Jedrek Iviongeon – and Fe Farruco Ede and Honon en li Iviow and many other Elders. Although Bertram, with his sour little face and pointed head, remained deathly silent, he did not discourage any of the swarms of Iviomils standing behind him from casting threats at Danlo. Some of these desperate men even cast at Danlo rotten fruit or wads of spittle, which burnt up in the laser light in quick hisses of steam. Their blue-tinged faces were ugly, their mood bellicose, perhaps even rebellious. Danlo thought that in proposing his tests, Harrah skated a dangerous path along thin ice. While his survival today truly might empower her to make sweeping changes in the Church, the very act of suggesting that he might be the Lightbringer could give the Iviomils a cause for schism. Danlo well remembered how many billions of people had died when the Cybernetic Universal Church had last fallen into schism and war; he could never forget that as a result of this war, his people, the Alaloi tribes in the wilds west of Neverness, were dying still.

At the top of the nall steps, on a portico too narrow to accommodate very many people, the keepers had set up Harrah's reading table – a massive thing of ironwood, inlaid with gold – from the Hall of the Koivuniemin. With slow, studied motions, Harrah took her place in the chair behind this table. Danlo stood before her clutching his shakuhachi in his left hand; on his right hand, around his little finger, his diamond pilot's ring shone with a fierce, dark light. He wore his formal black pilot's robes, black leather boots, and around his neck the little black cube of a devotionary computer that Harrah had given him. And he wore something else as well. Once a time, years ago during his passage into manhood, he had won the right to display the wing feather of the snowy owl. Once he had thought of this rare, white bird as his other-self, the magic animal which held half his soul. Now he was far from such primitive beliefs, but strangely, even so, he sensed the rightness of wearing this relic from the past. And so that morning while dressing he had fastened Ahira's white feather in his long, wild hair. As he readied himself to enter the dark building before him, he reached up to touch the imakla feather. Silently he called to that part of himself that he had turned away from for too long. Ahira, Ahira, he whispered inside himself. Lo los barado. He stood before Harrah's golden desk listening for the answer that he had sought for so long. There were no owls on the planet of Tannahill, nor even any wild birds, but even so there was a moment when he heard a high, deep cry. And then, coming to his senses, he realized that this sound was only the screeching of a hundred thousand voices calling his name. Or perhaps be was scrying, turning his face toward the future and hearing himself scream in madness and pain.

Ahira, Ahira, he prayed. Ahira, Ahira.

Just then Harrah nodded at one of the keepers and the man called out for silence. Such were the programs and the discipline that the Church wrote into one's spirit and flesh that the manswarms crowding the Temple grounds obediently fell silent. Not even Bertram Jaspari or any other Iviomil dared to shout down the Holy Ivi when she wished to speak. And speak Harrah Ivi en li Ede certainly did. In truth, she chose this occasion to make a rather long speech. In her clear and compassionate voice, she reminded all the assembled Architects of their duty toward God, as well as their dream of a future in which the universe would be remade and all worthy men and women redeemed from the black and bottomless deeps of time. 'This is a time of great changes in our Holy Church,' Harrah told the multitudes gathered below her. 'Perhaps this is even the beginning of the Last Days when all the universe will be new. We Architects must always be ready for the future, even for such astonishing and unforeseen events as a naman pilot falling out of the stars. We are met here today to determine if this man, Danlo wi Soli Ringess of Neverness, is truly the bringer of the future. Is he the bringer of light who will show the way towards what is possible? Is he the man without fear who will walk with the dead? We shall see.'

So saying, Harrah nodded at two old keepers who opened the nall doors behind her reading desk. Danlo looked into the building where he would spend the next few hours – or perhaps the rest of his life. It was dark inside, almost as black as the air deep within a hole in the ground. As had been arranged, Harrah would keep a vigil at her reading desk while Danlo underwent his test inside the building. One last time, Danlo bowed his head to Harrah, then smiled. He looked out into the huge crowd below him. There, just to the side of the nall steps, standing next to Bertram Jaspari, he saw Malaclypse Redring staring up at him. Malaclypse wore a bright, rainbow kimono around his body and an intense curiosity on his face. Danlo stared into his deep, violet eyes, and it seemed as if the warrior-poet was telling him that to prepare for death, he must first learn how to live. Danlo remembered a saying of his father, then. To live, I die. He touched the feather in his hair, touched his pilot's ring and grasped his bamboo flute tightly in his hand – and with these little affirmations of life, he turned away from the city of Ornice Olorun and walked into the House of the Dead.

When the doors banged shut behind him, Danlo found himself in a space that seemed as black and vast as the Greater Morbio. But of course it wasn't. In truth, the interior of the House of Eternity was not at all expansive and open, but rather packed full of many stacks of eternal computers. There were thousands of these little black boxes, each built exactly into the shape of a cube and no larger than the devotionary computers that all Architects carried with them wherever they went. So dense were these stacks of computers that there was little room for walking about the black floor. The House of Eternity was the one Church building closed to most Worthy Architects and the millions of pilgrims who swarmed into Ornice Olorun each year; it was a cold, dark place constructed more for the care of computers than the comfort of human beings. Indeed, it was so cold that one of the House keepers met Danlo at the door and gave him a babri, or cloak, of soft, quilted plastic, probably some kind of furine or ester, to wear. After Danlo had swaddled himself up like a new-born babe, the keeper led him through the stacks of computers deeper into the building. It was very quiet in this strange place. Although he tried to step softly, the slap of his leather boots against the floor seemed almost as loud as the crack of an iceberg breaking away from a glacier. Once again he heard the beating of his heart and smelled cold sweat and ketones and dust, as well as the close, oily reek of nall. At the centre of the building was a square area almost completely enclosed by four walls of computers. Entering this area was like stepping into a little room. There the keepers had thrown together a thin, old mat and a few babris and had prepared a kind of bed upon the floor. One of these keepers – an old man who introduced himself as Cheslav Iviongeon – bade Danlo to lie down on this bed. Any other man would have been insulted at these mean preparations for such an important test. But Danlo was only estranged. As he settled himself down on the hard floor, he knew immediately that he did not want to be there. Although he tried to lay as still as a corpse, the coldness of the nall floor below him instantly penetrated his body and caused him to shiver violently.

'Would you please bring another babri?' Cheslav Iviongeon said to one of the other keepers. 'We don't want the pilot to be too uncomfortable.'

It was dark in this little room, and Danlo could almost feel the dark blue irises of his eyes dilating to let in more light. He stared up at Cheslav Iviongeon and considered Cheslav's last name; he remembered Harrah warning him that he was Jedrek Iviongeon's brother and one of the city's most prominent Iviomils. It seemed that the old man suffered from the mehalis for his skin betrayed the telltale cyanine colour of that disease. He was cadaverously thin, and his shaved head gleamed like a skull. In truth, he was nothing but loose flesh and bones; when he motioned with his hands and spoke to Danlo, it was as if a skeleton had come to life and was clacking around above him.

'Welcome, Danlo wi Soli Ringess,' he said. His voice was strained and hoarse as if he'd been coughing at the cold air. He was a grim man with a grim and gruesome sense of humour. 'Most people only enter the House of Eternity after they've died, but we haven't quite reached that glorious state, have we? Soon enough, though, we'll leave the blood and bones behind. You even sooner than I, Pilot.'

Here he shook his old hand at Danlo and laughed, and so loud was the creaking of his joints, it was almost as if he were shaking a rattle.

'When do we begin?' Danlo asked, looking up at the black ceiling.

'Soon, soon,' Cheslav said. 'But first we must make a copy of your soul.'

As Danlo watched the various keepers moving about the building intent on their various duties, he thought about the Architect word for 'soul'. In modern Church Istwan, this was the pallaton, that almost indestructible form of the self that could be preserved in an eternal computer. The pallaton was pure program and information; the pallaton was a model of the mind encoded as bits of ones and zeros and stored as perfectly arrayed electrons frozen onto diamond discs. When a man – or woman – died, he would enter into a vastening chamber, a cold room full of computers and robots, drills and lasers and microscopes and needle knives. There his brain would be pulled apart, neuron by bloody neuron down to the webwork of once-living wires called dendrites and axons. Scanning computers would then make a model of the brain's trillions of interconnections. After this model had been stored on a diamond disc (and after the body had been consigned to the crematorium's plasma fires), the disc would be taken to the vaults of the House of Eternity. Danlo, lying in his makeshift bed, turned to watch the many keepers scurrying about, tending to these very diamond discs. Each disc was the size of a shih leaf, though perfectly round in shape. It was the keepers' task to bear the glittering discs from the vastening chamber to their place of permanent storage inside the black, eternal computers. Although the discs were mostly made of diamond, the keepers carried them as if they held living eyeballs in their hands. In truth, a single disc could hold the pallatons of thousands of dead Architects, and so the keepers bore the discs as if they were the most precious objects in all the universe.

'A copy of my soul,' Danlo said. 'My selfness, my ... pallaton, you say.'

One of the keepers – another unhealthy old man – brought Cheslav Iviongeon a glittering silver heaume. Cheslav, who was a master programmer as well as Elder Keeper of the House of Eternity, looked at Danlo and smiled coldly. He said, 'We'll try to create a temporary pallaton. Unless, of course, you're willing to make the Profession of Faith, be cleansed, and die the real death?'

'No,' Danlo said, smiling. 'Not yet.'

Cheslav rattled his knuckles across the heaume's metallic surface. 'Then will you allow me to place this computer on your head? It will scan your brain while still alive.'

Danlo considered as his heart beat ten times, then finally said, 'Yes.'

For a moment, Danlo sat up to allow Cheslav to perform his dreaded task of enclosing his head inside a computer. With much puffing and grunting, Cheslav managed to force the heaume down over Danlo's thick black hair. In the closeness of the room, Danlo smelled the old man's fetid breath coming in huffs and spurts.

'Ah, there – you've a large head and long,' Cheslav said. 'You may lie back, now.'

As if a signal had been given, five of the other keepers gathered around Danlo's bed and stood staring down at him. Their faces were as pale as the flesh of snowworms; their unfriendly eyes were like black holes sucking at his soul. These men (and one woman named Ramona Iviessa Ede) were all programmers who believed in the teachings of their Church. They were curious to see what would happen when the workings of Danlo's living mind were modelled and copied by their scanning computer. If they had been permitted to gamble, they might have made wagers as to whether Danlo would live or die right then. Three of them thought that nothing would happen. Because Danlo was not truly dead and this scanning computer could only paint a rudimentary picture of his mind – at least when compared to the eternal pallatons written by the much more powerful scanning computers of the vastening chambers – they argued that a temporary pallaton was not a true pallaton, and therefore this procedure posed Danlo no risk at all. But the others, including Cheslav Iviongeon, were not so sure. They looked down at Danlo, three death's-heads fairly floating in the dim light, and a terrible uncertainty marked their grim faces. It was almost as if they were afraid that the mere modelling of Danlo's mind would somehow 'steal' his soul and render his flesh lifeless and cold. If a man's very selfness could truly be copied onto a diamond disc, then what life of the body could remain? Could a man have two souls? Or two times ten thousand – as many copies as a machine could make? Could a man simultaneously exist both as mind in the flesh and as informational bits and pulses of light inside an eternal computer? Surely, Danlo thought, these were questions for the theologians. But even as he lay back on his mat and felt the hard heaume crushing his head, he wondered for the ten thousandth time in his life about the nature of consciousness. He wondered about himself, about his own soul and the coldness of these thoughts, no less the icy chill of the floor, sent waves of fear shivering through his body.