The Wild (85 page)

But no longer would the Church require women to bear five – or fifty – children. As Harrah had promised, she had redefined the Programs of Increase and Totality. She had received a New Program for the Church, and she had installed it during the worst days of the war. Now, with peace ordering the life of this vast planetary city called Tannahill, the Architects accepted the New Program with gratitude and relief. Few spoke against Harrah. Fewer still opposed her openly, for only those of rare faith (or foolishness) wished to be counted as Iviomils.

When Danlo had played his last song for the last of the wounded Architects brought into his rooms (Thomas Ivieehl had died on the evening of Harrah's visit), he prepared to leave Tannahill. It took him only moments to place his few possessions in the plain wooden chest that he brought with him wherever he went. He had few people to say goodbye to. One promise that he had made, he resolved to keep: he would ask Harrah about the ultimate fate of Ede's body. And so one day he arranged to have tea with her in her rooms. As witness to his sincerity (or effrontery), he brought his devotionary computer to this meeting and smiled all along his walk down the now-empty hallways because he couldn't imagine how he might ask the Holy Ivi of the Cybernetic Universal Church for the body of the man who had become a god. But he never quite had to put this question to her. After cups of cool peppermint tea had been poured into little plastic cups, with the Ede imago glowing out of the devotionary and watching him, just as he broached the matter that he had come to discuss, Harrah was called away to attend the dying of one of her sisters in another part of the palace, and Danlo returned to his rooms bearing a little jewelled computer in his hands rather than Harrah's promise that the Lightbringer might take possession of the frozen body of Nikolos Daru Ede. But Harrah had not disregarded Danlo, nor did she like to dismiss him even for the most dire of needs. The next day, after the evening meal, she invited Danlo to meet her across Ornice Olorun at Ede's tomb.

Later that night Danlo arrived at this great, white monument to the father of the Church. Although Ede's Tomb and the glittering Temple nearby had been spared destruction, he saw signs of the war everywhere. Where once the people of Tannahill had been able to enter the Tomb freely and with ease, now a light-fence surrounded it north, west, east and south. And many keepers in stained white kimonos stood watchfully with lasers ready in front of the fence. Behind it, trees had been uprooted or burnt to char; ragged holes still pocked the lawns and walkways – the work of bombs planted into the soil, perhaps, or of heat-tlolts misfired and rocketing into the ground. As four of Harrah's keepers escorted Danlo up the steps of Ede's Tomb, he smelled burnt plastic. In many places along the building, blackened grooves scored its smooth white walls. One of the false pillars marking the entranceway apparently had been struck by a missile, for a great section the size of a man's torso had been blasted out of its centre. But the worst work of the war awaited Danlo inside. He made his way into the vast open spaces surrounding the central dais of the Tomb. Usually swarms of Architects gathered there day and night to view Ede's body in its clary crypt. But that evening, few people were present to honour Ede. Danlo stopped and stared at the dais reflecting the lights high above. The clary crypt was gone. Someone had stolen the body of Ede the God. Despite the irony of the moment, he did not smile as he looked down at the devotionary computer that he carried in his hands. Ede's imago, he saw, was staring at the place where his ancient, frozen body so recently had lain. His face, made of nothing but light, was frozen into a familiar program of despair.

'Thank you for coming, Pilot.'

The voice of Harrah Ivi en li Ede echoed in the spaces of the near-empty tomb. Danlo turned to see her approaching slowly. She wore a white dobra on her head and a long, flowing kimono embroidered with gold. The Architects who waited near the dais must have thought her resplendent and holy, for their faces beamed awe as if they looked upon Ede himself and not just His High Holy Ivi. But Danlo thought she looked very small against the blue and white tiled floor of the Tomb, as if she had shrunk during these past days, as if the sufferings of the war had caused her to pull back inside her drooping skin and step very carefully. As she came closer, she smiled at Danlo and he could see that her eyes were bright as ever. Sadder, perhaps, and yet strangely deeper. She still fairly blazed with her intense love of life, but she was tired, very tired. He knew immediately that she was getting ready to die.

'Blessed Harrah, thank you for inviting me,' Danlo said, and he bowed.

Harrah returned his bow, painfully. She nodded at the four keepers following her. 'We will speak with the Lightbringer now,' she told them. So saying, she moved over to Danlo and took his arm. Together they walked slowly across the room. At the Tomb's southernmost part, in a little porch beneath the great windows, Harrah eased herself down upon one of the plain plastic benches where pilgrims or other Architects might sit and look upon the fleshly remains of Nikolos Daru Ede.

'He is gone,' Harrah said, pointing across the long room to the upraised dais. There, upon the bare plastic slab, a group of five men and women worked to install some lacy black machinery that looked almost like a sulki grid. 'We can't believe He is gone, but He is.'

'Yes,' Danlo said. He sat on the bench beside Harrah, and he looked at the dais and then back at her. 'I see.'

'Bertram Jaspari has desecrated the Tomb. He has stolen His body.'

'I ... see.' Danlo set his devotionary computer upon a nearby bench. The hologram of Ede filled the air with all the heaviness of a stone sculpture.

'We wanted you to know the truth of this, Pilot. We wanted you to see this sacrilege with your own eyes.'

'Thank you. But ... why?'

'Because we believe that you have a mysterious interest in Ede's body.'

Danlo glanced at the imago of Ede, but he said nothing. He wondered if Ede, now that his body was lost, would want to cark himself into an eternal computer like any other Architect; or perhaps he would wish for a more profound vastening in hoping to retrace his path toward godhood.

'And,' Harrah continued, 'because you might help us get it back.'

Here the Ede glowing out of the devotionary flashed Danlo a quick hand sign that meant, 'Yes, yes!'

'You ... would wish me to return Ede's body to you?' Danlo asked her.

Harrah slowly shook her head. 'No, only to help us to locate it so that we may ask for its return. When you leave us, as you soon will, you'll make long journeys from star to star. It may be that somewhere in the universe, someday, you'll chance to discover where the Iviomils have taken our Ede.'

'That is possible,' Danlo said, smiling. He didn't tell her that in the galaxy's vast light-distances and billions of stars, it was unlikely that he – or anyone else – would find Bertram by chance alone.

For a while Harrah watched her programmers working at the centre of the room and then turned to Danlo and asked, 'You've decided to leave us, haven't you?'

'Yes,' Danlo said. 'I ... must. I shall leave tonight.'

'Because of Bertram?'

Danlo smiled grimly and nodded his head. 'I must journey to Thiells and speak with the Lords of my Order. They must be told what has happened here.'

'We're sorry that we allowed Bertram to escape,' Harrah said.

'I am sorry, too. But some things cannot be helped.'

Harrah motioned for Danlo to lean closer to her, and he let his forehead fall down almost touching her lips. And then, in a low voice, she said, 'There's something that we must tell you. On one of the deepships that Bertram stole, he installed a morrashar.'

'I am afraid ... that I do not know this word,' Danlo said.

'A morrashar is a huge, black engine that fills an entire deepship. It generates streams of graviphotons and fires them into a sun.'

Danlo suddenly backed away from Harrah as if she had breathed fire at him instead of gentle words. He said, 'A star-killer.'

'A star-killer, Pilot.'

'How ... did Bertram acquire this shaida thing?'

'His engineers made it for him. We Architects were the first people to discover this technology.'

'I see.'

'We hope that we are the only people.'

'Do you still consider the Iviomils as your people, then?'

'Indeed we do.'

'But there is to be no more killing of stars. You have announced your New Program – will the Iviomils ever accept it?'

Harrah sighed as if she were expelling a painful breath that she had been holding inside for too many years. 'We believe that as long as Bertram leads them, they will never return to the Church.'

'No, I think not,' Danlo told her. And then, reading the look of worry in Harrah's eyes, he said, 'As long as Bertram wields a star-killer, you would not want him to return to Tannahill, would you?'

'After Bertram destroyed Montellivi,' Harrah confessed, 'there was a time when we couldn't imagine a worse crime. And then he fled into space, and we feared that he would destroy our sun.'

'There ... are other suns,' Danlo said, remembering.

He closed his eyes, and he saw a vast array of lights that went shimmering on and on through the infinite deeps of the universe. One of these beautiful lights was the Star of Neverness. Another was the Narain's star, all red and round like a drop of blood.

'We would like to believe,' Harrah said, 'that Bertram will come to cleanse himself of his negative programs.'

'So many stars,' Danlo continued as if he hadn't really been listening to her. 'In our galaxy alone, three hundred billion stars – who would have dreamed that God would make so many?'

'We have to believe this, Pilot. For Bertram to have exploded a hydrogen bomb in Montellivi – this is a terrible hakr that will haunt him forever.'

The stars are the children of God alone in the night, he remembered.

And then he said, 'Bertram Jaspari, all the Iviomils – they could create another Vild.'

'No, Pilot, no.' Harrah said these words with all the anguish of hope, but there was no certainty in her voice, no strength.

'He has a star-killer,' Danlo said. 'And he will enforce the rule of the old Program of Increase.'

'We're sorry, Pilot.'

'No,' Danlo said. Gently, he took her cold, trembling hands in his own. 'I am sorry. I have been lost in my own fears, and therefore ungenerous. You have risked everything in helping me. And lost so much. This war ... would not have been fought if I hadn't come to Tannahill. Truly. My mission – the mission of my Order. To heal the Vild. This is accomplished, yes? You will send out your readers to the stars. And they will find the lost Architects of the Long Pilgrimage, and they will kill no more stars forever. I must thank you for this. For your great courage in receiving and installing the New Program.'

A sudden fear fell across Harrah's face just then. Danlo understood that her interfacing of Ede's eternal computer had been fraught with danger and difficulty. He remembered, then, something that the Solid State Entity had told him: that the Silicon God was using the Cybernetic Universal Church to create the Vild. He wondered about the origin of the Program of Totality. Was it possible that somehow the Silicon God might be the source of this star-killing program? Had the Silicon God, centuries ago, found a way to infect Ede's eternal computer with a plan to destroy the universe, much as he had carked the killing surreality into Ede the God? He did not know. He might never know, for if such a program ran within the eternal computer, it would be too subtle for any Holy Ivi to detect, much less discuss. The instructions of the Silicon God would whisper in the mind almost like the sweet, soft voice of one's own consciousness. It would take an extraordinary mind to distinguish between the false voice and the true.

'Interfacing Ede's eternal computer is the hardest thing we've ever done,' Harrah told him. 'If Bertram knew how hard, he never would have sought to be the Holy Ivi.'

That was all she ever said concerning her experience with this holiest of artefacts. She turned to look toward the centre of the Tomb where her programmers had finished their work. One of them, a portly old woman whose child-bearing days were long past, caught Harrah's attention and waved to her. Harrah then bowed her head as if according to some pre-arranged plan. The programmers all stepped back from the dais. Harrah's keepers and the other Architects who had business in the Tomb that night stared at the bare slab where Ede had once lain. Now, in His place, the fine, black lace-work of a sulki grid shone darkly beneath the Tomb lights. Everyone, even Harrah, seemed to be waiting for something. What this event would be, Danlo could only guess.

'Now, please,' Harrah said, again bowing her head.

Danlo also was staring at the dais, and he fairly jumped to see the sulki grid disappear. One moment it was there, and in the next moment gone. And in its place, like a lightship suddenly falling out of the manifold into real-space, was the clary crypt of Nikolos Daru Ede. Or rather an illusion of this sacred object. The powerful sulki grid generated an imago of infinitely greater realism than the holograms of the devotionary computers. It would be almost impossible for the human eye to distinguish this imago from the true crypt – the one that Bertram had stolen. It was long and cut with clear angles across its seemingly clary surfaces, and it glittered with colours. Soon swarms of Architects would form their queues outside Ede's tomb and pass slowly by to view the cast-off body of their God. And all of them would attest that they had looked through half an inch of clary within the crypt to see the bald head and soft, smiling face of Nikolos Daru Ede.

'We ask you to keep this a secret,' Harrah said to Danlo. 'We don't wish our people to know that His body is gone.'

'I will tell no one,' Danlo said.

'You see, they've already lost so much, suffered so much.'

'As have you, Blessed Harrah.'

At this, Harrah looked down at her hands and said, 'Our sister and our granddaughters – so many of our family.'