The Wild (72 page)

'This will take some time,' Cheslav Iviongeon told him. 'From time to time, I may ask you questions, and you must please tell me what you feel.'

In truth, during this part of Danlo's test he felt almost nothing. He lay against the hard floor trying to control the violent tremors tearing through his body. After some time had passed – perhaps two tenths of an hour, he thought – he succeeded. There were bad smells in the air, ketones and sweat, the faint reek of the mehalis disease as well as the black thickness of nall, but he tried not to concentrate on these. He lay with his eyes closed, clutching his flute against his belly. He breathed steadily and deeply as he tried to remember all the songs for the shakuhachi that he had ever composed. Thus engaged, time seemed to flow swiftly but invisibly, like water rushing through a glass tube. He waited for Cheslav Iviongeon to ask him questions, and he was surprised when the first words out of Cheslav's mouth were a request to sit up.

'Would you please let us remove the heaume now, Pilot? It is done.'

Danlo sat up straight and two of the keepers grasped the heaume with their bony fingers and pulled it from his head. With great relief Danlo felt the cold air as it found his sweaty, matted hair.

'So soon?' Danlo asked. 'Then your attempt to model my mind was a failure, yes?'

Cheslav shook his head as he smiled grimly. 'We've been here two hours, Pilot. And no, I don't believe our attempt was a failure. We'll soon see, however.'

With this, he nodded to one of the keepers, a thin man who bore the heaume away into the darkness of the building. Danlo was given to understand that this keeper would entrust the heaume to a cadre of programmers in the vastening chamber. There its information would be downloaded into a great compiling computer. There, in this huge black machine almost the size of a house, a model of his soul would be encoded and put together. His pallaton – or rather a temporary realization of his selfness, which would then be copied onto a diamond disc.

'How long must we wait?' Danlo asked. Usually he was as patient as stone, but he dreaded the next phase of his test, and he wanted to begin it as soon as possible.

'Soon, soon,' Cheslav told him. His creaky old voice fell off the banks of computers like metal against metal. He turned suddenly and looked over his shoulder. 'Well then, the Worthy Nikolaos returns now.'

Danlo looked up to see the same gaunt-faced keeper make his way toward them down the dark aisle. Soon, the Worthy Nikolaos approached Cheslav Iviongeon, and into his outstretched hand he placed a diamond disc.

'Here we are,' Cheslav said, holding up the disc. 'Or should I say, here you are?'

With a tight, unreadable smile, he held the disc toward Danlo. Danlo put down his flute and took the disc carefully.

'We made this just for your test. Yours is the only pallaton on it.'

'I see,' Danlo said. The little slice of diamond in the palm of his hand was cold and glittering and hard, and he stared at it for a long time. In its gleaming surface he could see – faintly – the reflection of his own face.

'As far as I know, no Architect has ever held what you hold, Pilot. Or seen what you see.'

'I ... see,' Danlo said again.

'Of all the acts of our Holy Ivi's architetcy, this has been the strangest. And the most dangerous.'

'Truly?'

'You can't imagine the feelings that your test has aroused.'

'Many people ... have objected to this test, yes?'

'Many times many, Pilot. To be vastened while one is still alive – I can't tell you how offensive such covetousness is to any Architect.'

'I see.'

'Such an act is really unthinkable – the Algorithm explicitly warns against such acts.'

'I am sorry.'

'Of course, there is one exception to this rule.'

'Yes?'

'The Algorithm permits such a vastening in times of facifah when the Worthy might be killed in battle. As a safeguard against one dying the real death.'

'Have I truly been vastened, then?'

Cheslav Iviongeon looked at Danlo sharply, coldly. 'Some will say that you have. But I think not. We've only made you a temporary pallaton.'

Danlo looked away from Cheslav and stared back at the mirror in his hand. His reflection was so faint that he could not see his own eyes, the deep blue inside blue colour that had always astonished him. 'But you believe that my selfness ... has been carked onto this disc, yes?'

'Many people believe many things,' Cheslav said evasively. 'But those most faithful to our Holy Ivi will distinguish between a temporary pallaton and one which is eternal. Indeed, they'll leap to grasp at the difference. They'll split words like the theologians. Thus they'll argue that no abomination has been created here today; they'll proclaim that the spirit of the Algorithm has been observed. This, I believe, is what our Holy Ivi will hope. This is her gamble, her plan.'

'Then you believe that I have been vastened only temporarily, yes?'

'We do not speak of vastening as merely the creation of a pallaton.'

'No?'

'One is not vastened, properly, until the disc containing the pallaton is loaded into an eternal computer. And then, when the program runs, the pallaton comes virtually alive. It's said that heaven opens up, and there is lightning and light and all information, and ... and it's really impossible to speak of such things, Pilot, because only the dead know what it's like to be dead.'

'How am I, then, to know ... what only the dead truly know?'

At this, Cheslav Iviongeon smiled grimly and said, 'Because you'll behold the alam al-mithral. That is, we will create a simulation of our cybernetic heaven. And you will interface this holy space.'

Cheslav stroked his bony head, and then he explained that the alam al-mithral space of the dead Architect souls was cut off from realspace and that there was no way to enter it easily. But there was a way. He, Cheslav Iviongeon, master programmer and Keeper of the House of Eternity, had discovered how a mortal man such as Danlo might walk with the dead. All that Danlo was – his curiosity, his recklessness, his playfulness, his verve and valour, and his love of truth – all of these traits and much else had been carked into computer code. His essence had been transformed and transcribed into a program called a pallaton. Soon, very soon, his pallaton would be downloaded into one of the building's eternal computers. There it would join the pallatons of all the trillions of Architects who had ever died and been vastened. In this way, the essence of Danlo's mind and soul would enter the pallatons' universe as burning bits of information. The other pallatons would perceive him as one of their own; they would exchange information and interact with him as if he were just another pallaton.

'Who are you, really, Danlo wi Soli Ringess?' Cheslav Iviongeon pointed at the diamond disc in Danlo's hand. 'We'll see if we haven't captured your real essence. Your deepest programs. We'll cark them into an eternal computer. The pallatons of all the vastened will interact with the pallaton of Danlo of Neverness. If you'll consent to entering a virtuality, well make you a simulation of these interactions.'

For a long time Danlo stared at the disc that he held in the palm of his hand. In its diamond surface, he could see little bits of colour, violets and blues and gold. 'I will interface the virtuality that you call the alam al-mithral. This cybernetic heaven. This is the soul ... of my test, yes?'

With this understanding, Danlo gave the disc to the Worthy Nikolaos, who bore it away toward one of the eternal computers. With a quick motion of his hand, he snapped it into an opening of this little black cube.

'There, it's done,' Cheslav Iviongeon announced. 'You've been vastened. Temporarily vastened, I should say. Even as we speak, your pallaton is experiencing wonders. Every computer in this room is linked to every other. And to all the eternal computers on Tannahill. And now, Danlo of the Stars, it's time that you experienced this heaven, too.'

Danlo did not like the way Cheslav smiled just then, with his cracked, yellow teeth and a look of grim necessity clouding his eyes. He wondered how a mere computer program could experience anything. And then he saw Cheslav holding a new heaume in his blue-tinged hands, and he wondered what experiences the old man thought he would soon suffer.

'This will create for you a simulation of the alam al-mithral.' Cheslav told him. 'May we put it on you?'

'If you'd like, I suppose you must,' Danlo said. And then, more purposefully: 'Yes.'

With the Worthy Nikolaos' help, Cheslav forced the heaume over Danlo's head. As before the fit was too tight, and the heaume's metal hurt him. Danlo wondered why they couldn't find a larger heaume. Small heaumes for small heads, he remembered one of his teachers once saying. It amused him to think that thousands of years of daily facing ceremonies and the blind following the Church's doctrines had bred human beings with brains stunted like bonsai trees, but he knew this wasn't really true.

'Please lie back now, and we'll begin,' Cheslav said.

With a painful bow of his head, Danlo lay back against his cold blankets. He pressed his wooden flute against his belly; he closed his eyes and began to pray: Ahira, guide me. Ahira, Ahira.

In truth, he did not know what to expect of this virtuality that Cheslav Iviongeon and his programmers had made for him. Once, when he was a child, his grandfather had told him to expect of life only the unexpected and he would never be disappointed. Even so, as he took a deep breath and stepped through the doorway into the cybernetic heaven called the alam al-mithral, he had expectations. Try as he might to experience the virtuality with all the freshness of a child playing in his first snowfall, the weight of a thousand journeys through one surreality or another pulled him down into old habits of the mind. Almost at once the room's sensa – Cheslav's raspy voice, the reek of nall plastic, the dark glitter of thousands of computers stacked one on the other – vanished. Danlo opened his eyes to find himself carked out into the unknown spaces of the otherworld. He was floating in the midst of what seemed to be dark, heavy clouds. All about him lightning bolts rent the greyness, and flashes of light illuminated the mist. He smelled ozone and sweat and the fragrance of alien flowers. Various shapes and colours flickered wherever he looked. Once or twice, he thought he saw faces. In their ghostly whiteness and shades of copper and pink, they seemed almost familiar, as if well-known images and objects were trying to take form – either that or else some quirk of the eternal computers' master program was causing everything to break into pieces and bits of light and swirl around him like snowflakes in a winter storm. Such chaos sent waves of nausea pounding through his body. (His real body lying stricken in the House of Eternity, that is.) His belly burned with a dull, acid pain, and his head was on fire. He knew that he must make sense of these images, and soon. If he did not, he might fall mad. And so almost immediately, he began to seek the rules and methods for moving through this strange space. In every surreality into which he had ever instantiated, there was always a way to master the rules and move deeper into structure and meaning.

This is truly overwhelming, he thought. But it is not real.

As he floated through the violet clouds of chaos he was seized with a fear that in this surreality there might be no rules. Or, at least, no rules that he could discover and manipulate. The alam al-mithral, he remembered, had been created neither as an entertainment nor as a pedagogic tool for teaching the mathematics of the manifold. Perhaps he was not meant to discover how to move through this space; perhaps he was not meant to move at all.

You are here to walk with the dead, he told himself. Nothing more.

Off in the distance – it might have been ten feet away or a mile – he thought that he saw the face of a famous Architect, Mendai Iviercier, who had been the greatest Holy Ivi to succeed Kostos Olorun in the early days of the Church. He wanted to come closer, to study this plump, pink face more closely. But he couldn't move his arms or legs; his neck was as stiff as if he'd suffered a paralytic stroke, and even his eyes remained frozen forward, locked open upon whatever images fell before him. In little time – it might have been a second or a millionth part thereof – Mendai Iviercier's face broke up into glasslike pieces: chin, cheeks, ears, forehead, nose, and eyes, and then even these still recognizable structures shattered into a greyish-pink dust. And then, as if touched with some terrible inner force, the dust exploded outward, a billion billion points of glittering silver dissolving into the essential nothingness of the alam al-mithral.

Ahira, where am I? Danlo wondered. Who am I – Ahira, Ahira?

He remembered, then, that he was here to experience a simulation of what was occurring to his pallaton inside the House of the Dead's eternal computers. Only this and nothing more. The program of these computers would determine all his experiences in this dead-grey underworld. He would have no freedom to move; he would have no free will at all. Suddenly, all around him in the mist, there appeared faces. Many of these faces seemed familiar and Danlo desired to view them more closely, but he had no power to move his eyes. Once, he had witnessed men from the Order of True Scientists using chemicals to immobilize alien beings and then dissect them with lasers and glittering needle knives. Now, he himself felt as helpless as a Scutari nymph pinned to a board. Although his eyes were tightly closed (the eyes of his real body shivering beneath stacks of cold computers), Cheslav Iviongeon's master program had pinned the eyes of his pallaton open. There was nothing he could do, he thought, except to let the program run.

If I must, I, myself, can always run. Truly, I can. I can rip the heaume from my head and run from this terrible building.

And then, to his horror, as he tried to feel the smooth bamboo of his flute, he found that he could not. He could not move the fingers of his real body, nor his arms or legs, and therefore he could not move to pull off the heaume and run away from this awful test. The heaume's dislocation of his senses – even his deep proprioceptive sense of his own cells – was almost total. Its powerful logic field had stripped him of sight, sound and touch, and had programmed for him a powerful new reality.