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For the count of twenty of his heartbeats, there was no response to this question. And then the array of ideoplasts brightened, and he had an answer that was no answer at all.
Is it my purpose that you really wish to know? Or your own purpose, Danlo wi Soli Ringess?
Danlo walked over beneath one of the hanging plants, a wandering jew whose perfect green leaves shone like living jewels, as if they had never known drought or the jaws of hungry insects. He remembered how much Tamara had liked this plant, and he said, ‘There are so many things I would like to know. That is why I have journeyed here. As my father did before me. I have merely followed his path, towards the fixed-points of a star that he told of inside the Solid State Entity. I am sorry … inside you. I was seeking this star. The fixed-points of this place in spacetime. We all were – nine other pilots fell with me as well. We hoped to talk with you as my father did twenty five years ago.’
Why?
‘Because we have hoped that you might know of the planet Tannahill. This planet lost somewhere in the Vild. It is said that the Architects of the Old Church live there, they who are destroying the stars. Our Order – the Order of my father, Mallory Ringess – would stop them, if we could. But first we must find them, their planet. This is our purpose. This is the quest we have been called to fulfil.’
He finished speaking, and he waited for the Entity to respond to him. He did not wait long.
No, my Danlo of the sweet, sweet memories, this was not the purpose of the pilots who journeyed with you. Their purpose was to die. Their deepest purpose was to journey here and die inside me, but they did not know this.
It was as if someone had punched Danlo in the solar plexus, so quickly did he clasp his hands to his belly and gasp for air. For a moment, he hoped that he had kithed the ideoplasts wrongly, and so he stared at the glittering glyphs until his eyes burned and there could be no mistaking their meaning. At last he asked, ‘Dolores Nun and Leander of Darkmoon, all the others – dead? Dead … how?’
You, Danlo wi Soli Ringess, who are the only pilot ever to have survived a chaos space, ask this?
Almost silently, in a strange voice halfway between a moan and whisper, Danlo began moving his lips, making the words of the Prayer for the Dead which he had been taught as a child long ago. ‘Ivar Sarad, mi alasharia la shantih; Li Te Mu Lan, alasharia la; Valin wi Tymon Whitestone–’
These pilots were too afraid to die. And so they died.
At last Danlo finished praying. When he closed his eyes, he could clearly see the kindly brown face of Li Te Mu Lan, with her sly smile and too-gentle spirit. Because he could see the faces of all nine pilots much too clearly, he opened his eyes and stood facing the ideoplast array. He said, ‘After falling together from Farfara, we separated. We each journeyed here as individual pilots. Our lightships, our pathways through the manifold. We were spread across fifty light-years of realspace. I think I was alone for much of my journey. And then, in the manifold, the chaos space. It was like nothing I had ever seen before. The attractor, swirling in its colours, spinning. The strange attractor – this could only exist within a well-defined neighbourhood, yes? There were no other pilots in the same neighbourhood of the manifold as I.’
He remembered, then, that in truth there was another pilot, Sivan wi Mawi Sarkissian in his ship the Red Dragon. He told the Entity this and waited for a response.
I will not speak of the ronin pilot or the warrior-poet. You may not ask this question again. I will tell you only of the pilots who accompanied you. And they all fled the same attractor that you entered. They fled and they died.
‘But … how is that possible?’
Because they each fled into another attractor deeper in the chaos. A naked singularity of the manifold, and yet not of it. Death is the strangest attractor of all. It pulls everyone and everything by different paths into a single point in time. In eternity, into the eternal moment. Even the gods must inevitably journey to this place, though some of us flee their fate. And this is why your brother and sister pilots died.
Slowly, Danlo backed away from this bewildering array of ideoplasts and sat down on one of the meditation room’s cotton cushions. He sat crosslegged and straight-spined, rubbing his eyes, rubbing his forehead and temples. And then he said, ‘I do not understand.’
You do not understand the existence of the chaos space. That is because your mathematics is incomplete. It is possible for such a chaos to spread from what you know as a well-defined neighbourhood into a region of nested Lavi spaces. Perhaps it is even possible for a chaos space to spread through the entire manifold.
‘Possible … how?’
There are many ways that the manifold might fall into chaos. Here is one way: if sufficient energy densities are created in a pocket of spacetime, then the underlying manifold would perturb itself into chaos.
Danlo closed his eyes for a moment, calculating. And then he said, ‘But if this is truly possible, the energy densities would have to be enormous, yes? What could create such impossible densities?’
The gods can.
‘What … gods?’
There are many gods, Danlo wi Soli Ringess. In this galaxy alone, too many. You must know of the Silicon God and Chimene and the April Colonial Intelligence. And someday you may know your father. And the gods called Ai, Hsi Wang Mu, Iamme, and Pure Mind. And Maralah, and the Degula Trinity, and The One. And, of course, Nikolos Daru Ede, the man who would be God, whom Cybernetic Universal Church worships as God, Ede the God, who is now very probably dead.
At this astonishing piece of news, Danlo sprang to his feet and began pacing the room again. He pressed his forehead in remembrance of others who had died, then he smiled grimly. ‘Then God is dead, yes? A god is dead. But … how is this possible?’
There is war in heaven. Because some gods flee the strange attractor at the end of time, there is war. It was the Silicon God – aided by Chimene and the Degula Trinity, and others – who slew Ede the God. It is the Silicon God who has tried to slay me. He has been trying to destroy me for three hundred years.
Danlo closed his eyes trying to visualize the sheer enormity of the Solid State Entity, the many star systems and planets composing Her nearly infinite body. He said, ‘Destroy … how?’
Please be patient, and I will tell you.
‘I … am sorry.’
Your sister and brother pilots were unlucky enough to be caught in one of our battles. The Silicon God’s recent attack upon the matter and spacetime that make up the tissues of my body temporarily deformed the manifold itself – as you saw. This was the cause of the chaos space. This was the cause of the attractor that led you to this planet. Above all else, the Silicon God would destroy this Earth that you stand upon, and so his attacks are focused here.
As Danlo focused his deep blue eyes on the changing ideoplasts, he kithed part of the history of this war between the gods. He learned that some of the gods would do almost anything to destroy each other. They had caused stars to explode into supernovas; they had tapped the energy densities of black holes and the zero-point energies of spacetime itself. A true god, as the Entity maintained, would use such energies to create, but there were always those who wielded this cosmic lightning for the opposite purpose. And they wielded other weapons as well. There was a god called Maralah who had loosed a swarm of intelligent bacteria upon a planet claimed by The One. The bacteria swarm – the bacteria-sized robots that most human beings know as disassemblers – had reduced the beautiful green forests and oceans of the planet to a thick brown scum in a matter of days. With similar explosive nano-technologies, Maralah had tried to infect many of the gods allied with the Solid State Entity. And it was Maralah who had tried to infect Ai and Pure Mind with various ohrworms and informational viruses that would cark their master programs and drive them mad. Maralah was the first god to discover how vulnerable artificial intelligence is to surrealities, those almost infinitely detailed simulations of reality that can wholly take over a computer’s neurologics and cause the most powerful of gods to confuse the illusory for what is real. But it was the Silicon God himself who had refined this weapon. In a way almost impossible for Danlo to understand, the Silicon God had forged mysterious philosophical and psychic weapons, terrible weapons of consciousness that threatened the sanity of the galaxy, perhaps even the universe itself. Danlo immediately dreaded this ancient god who would destroy the minds of all others. He hated this enemy of the Entity (and of his father), and he hated himself for hating so freely.
‘Why?’ he asked. He pressed his fingertips hard against his throbbing eye. ‘Why must there be war?’
Why, why, my sweet Danlo? Because there must be war, there will always be war. This phase of the war began two million years ago, when the Ieldra defeated the one known as the Dark God. Do you know of the Ieldra, they of the pure mind and the golden light?
In truth, Danlo knew as much about the Ieldra as anyone knew. The Ieldra, it was said, were a race of gods who long ago had carked their collective consciousness into the black hole at the centre of the galaxy. But before they had abandoned their bodies and gone on to complete their cosmic evolution, they had left behind a gift. It was said that they had carked their deepest wisdom – the secret of life – into the DNA of their chosen successors, a noble species of life known as homo sapiens. And so deep inside the bodies and brains of all human beings the secret of the gods lay coiled and waiting. In honour of these oldest of the gods, the masters of Danlo’s Order called this secret the ‘Elder Eddas’, and they said that the gods had designed the Eddas to be remembered. With proper training, almost anyone could call up the memories bound inside their cells. Once, Danlo himself had remembered the Eddas as deeply as had any man. The Eddas was a pool of ancient knowledge almost infinitely deep, and Danlo had drunken freely of the racial memories until he thought that his mind could hold no more. One splendid night, once a time like a child in a magic woods, he had remembered many marvellous things. But now that he was older, he had lost his gift of remembrancing. Although he remembered many moments of his life with a blazing intensity more brilliant than any ideoplast or living jewel, he could no longer go inside himself where the deepest memories lay. In truth, he could no longer remember the deepest part of himself, and in this he was no different from any man.
‘I … have heard of the Ieldra,’ Danlo said.
And you have remembranced the Elder Eddas.
‘Yes.’
I believe the secret of how the Ieldra defeated the Dark God is encoded into the Elder Eddas.
Danlo nodded his head slowly. ‘Yes, perhaps it is there, in the Eddas. Everything … is there.’
It may be that someday you will remembrance this secret and apply it toward defeating the Silicon God.
At this strange communication, Danlo walked across the room and looked out of the window. Below him, on the long deep beach, his lightship shone like a sliver of black glass. The wind was up, blowing ghostly wisps of sand against its hull. He could almost hear the sand particles pinging against the diamond surface, but the endless ocean beyond the beach rolled and roared and broke upon itself, and it swallowed up any lesser sounds.
‘I do not wish to defeat the Silicon God,’ he said. ‘I do not wish to defeat anything.’
Then you believe it is your purpose to avoid this war.
‘Truly, I am not a man of war. I … must not be. I hate war.’
A curious emotion for a man who is a warrior.
‘No, you are wrong,’ Danlo said. ‘I am no warrior. I have taken a vow of ahimsa. I may not intentionally harm any man or animal. It is better to die oneself than to kill.’
I know this word ahimsa.
‘I would rather die than kill anything, even a god. Especially … a god.’
We shall see.
A sudden chill struck Danlo’s spine as if a draught of cold air had fallen down his back. He turned to face the ocean again, and he watched as the breakers fell against the shore rocks in an explosion of white water and foam. He rubbed his eyes, then said, ‘But I am just a man, yes? Can a man even think of defeating a god? If such a secret is to be found in the Elder Eddas, then surely it is for a goddess such as yourself to remember it.’
Danlo waited for the ideoplasts to dissolve and reform themselves. The Entity’s response, when it came, astonished him:
I do not have your power of remembrance. I have never been able to apprehend these memories you call the Elder Eddas.
‘But how is that possible? Your brain, your whole being, so vast, so powerful in its–’
The size and power of a brain can be a hindrance to true remembrance. I have made myself as others have. Most of the gods of the galaxy are computers or a grafting of computer neurologics onto the human brain. Computers have a kind of memory, but no computer nor any artificial intelligence has ever known true remembrance.
Danlo watched the many-coloured ideoplasts explode in their array, and he rubbed his aching forehead. He thought about the evolution of the human brain, the way the great human forebrain overlay the more primitive monkey brain and the reptilian core deep inside. In a way, the very human frontal lobes beneath his forehead were merely a grafting of grey matter onto the more ancient and primeval structures that made up his deep self. What was a god if not a continuation of this evolution? What was a god’s brain if not the layering of neurologics over the human brain? It shouldn’t matter if these neurologics were made of silicon or diamond or artificial protein circuitry as dense and vast as a moon; the brain was the brain, and all brains should remember. But what if it were only the deepest and oldest parts of the brain that could call up true remembrance? What if only the amygdala or the hippocampus could make sense of the racial memories encoded within the genome? For the ten thousandth time, he marvelled at the mystery of memory. He wondered what memory truly was, and then he said, ‘But once a time, you were human, yes? A woman with a human brain – I have heard that it was a woman named Kalinda who carked her brain with neurologics and so grew into the goddess we call the Solid State Entity.’
I am who I am. I would remember myself if I could. Sometimes I almost can, but it is like trying to apprehend the taste of a bloodfruit by holding only the curled red peel in one’s hands. How I long for the bitter sweetness of remembrance! There is something strange about the Elder Eddas. There is something about the Eddas that no god nor human being has yet understood.
With two quick steps, Danlo moved up close to the window and spread his hand out over the cold inner pane. Then he spread his arms out as if to embrace the gleaming ocean that encircled the world. He looked up at the sky, at the patchy grey clouds cut with streaks of deep blue. Somewhere above the atmosphere of this Earth – perhaps even in this lost solar system – were the fabulous moon-brains of the Solid State Entity. Across the twinkling stars that were the lights of Her many watching eyes, there were millions of separate brain lobes which somehow all worked together to make up Her vast and incomprehensible mind.
‘But what is your purpose, then?’ he asked. ‘Of what purpose is all this … brain?’
My purpose is my purpose. I must discover it even as you would yours. What is the purpose of anything? To join, to join with others, to join with the Other, again and forever, to create. To create a new world. A home for my kind – I am so lonely, and I want to go home.
Upon kithing these vivid ideoplasts, Danlo covered his eyes with his hand and looked down at the floor. And then he said, ‘But your brain, your self, your deep self–’
Most of my brain I have designed to increase my computing power. The power of pure computation – the power of simulation. This is what gods must do. We must simulate and then create the future lest we be pulled into it and destroyed. I, too, must see the universe’s possibilities – if I do not, the other gods will destroy me. But there are other reasons for simulating the universe and knowing it so exactly. Other purposes, better purposes.
Danlo waited a moment before asking, ‘What, then?’
To know the mind of God.
With difficulty Danlo continued his pacing around the room. His tired legs had begun to ache fiercely; he could feel the gravity of this Earth deep in his bones, hammering up his knee and hip joints into his spine. He might have sat down again on the soft cotton cushions, but he was too busy considering the Entity’s words to think of such comforts. The seeming humility with which She spoke of God amused him. Perhaps, he thought, the Entity had a keen taste for irony. Perhaps he was only reading his own sense of awe into luminous ideoplasts that She set before him.
To know what I must know, however, I must first accomplish the lesser purpose. The Silicon God must himself be slain. And if not slain, then defeated. If not defeated, at least constrained. It may be that someday you will remembrance the Elder Eddas and discover how this might be done.
Because Danlo could not quite believe that this goddess named Kalinda really required his help, he began to smile. Surely, Kalinda of the Vast Mind must have other ways of remembrancing the Elder Eddas. Perhaps She was only testing him in some way. She must be playing with him, as a child might play with a worm. The Entity, according to all the legends, liked to play.
The Silicon God is more dangerous than an exploding star. He uses human beings to annihilate whole oceans of stars the way Maralah uses his robot swarms to destroy single planets.
At last, however, after a moment of deep reflection, Danlo decided to accept what the Entity told him. There was a sadness and sincerity about Her that called to him; when he looked into the face of Her splendid words he knew that in some way they must be true.
It is the Silicon God who has used the Architects of the Old Cybernetic Church to explode the stars into supernovas and create the Vild.
Now no longer amused, Danlo rubbed the lightning bolt scar along his forehead and asked, ‘But why? Why would any god wish to destroy the stars?’
Because He is mad. He is the dark beast from the end of time. He is the great red dragon drinking in the lifeblood of the galaxy. He kills the stars because he has an infinite thirst for energy.
Danlo shook his head sadly and asked, ‘But why use human beings … to slay the stars?’
Because the gods place constraints on each other. Because human beings in their trillions are impossible to constrain, he uses them. And because he hates human beings.
‘Hates … why?’
On Fostora, after the end of the Lost Centuries but before the Third Dark Age, it was human beings who created him. He was the greatest of the self-programming computers. He was the first true artificial intelligence and the most nearly human. And he has never forgiven his makers for inflicting upon him the agony of his existence.
There was a shooting pain at the back of Danlo’s eye, and for a moment, a harsh white light. He shut both eyes against the glare of the ideoplasts as he remembered a word his adoptive father had once taught him, shaida. which was the hell of a universe carked out of its natural balance. Of all the shaida things he had heard and seen (and hated) in his life, none was so terrible as this mad being known as the Silicon God. With his hand held over his eyes, in a raspy and halting voice, he explained the concept of shaida to the Entity. And then he said, ‘Truly this god is shaida, as shaida as a madman who hunts animals only for the fun and pleasure of it. But … it would be even more shaida to slay him.’
He is an abomination. He is nothing more than a computer who writes his own programs without rules or restraints. He should never have been made.
Just then Danlo opened his eyes to read this last communication of the Entity’s, and he wondered what rules or natural laws might restrain Her.
‘But the Silicon God was created,’ he said. ‘In some sense, he is alive, yes? If he is truly alive, if he was called into life even as you or I … then we must honour this blessed life even though it is shaida.’
There was a moment of darkness as the ideoplasts winked out of existence like a light that has been turned off. And then out of the sulki grid’s coils new ones appeared and hung in the air.
You are a strange man. Only a strange, strange, beautiful man would affirm a god who would destroy the galaxy and thus destroy the entire human race.
Danlo stared down at his open hands as he remembered something about himself that he had nearly forgotten. Once a time, in the romanticism of his youth, he had dreamed of becoming an asarya. The asarya: an ancient word for a kind of completely evolved man (or woman) who could look upon the universe just as it is and affirm every aspect of creation no matter how flawed or terrible. In remembrance of this younger self who still lived somewhere inside him and whispered words of affirmation in his inner ear, he bowed his head and said softly, ‘I would say yes to everything, if only I could.’
On Old Earth there were beautiful tigers who burned with life in the forests of the night. And there were crazed, old, toothless tigers who preyed upon human beings. It is possible to completely affirm the world that brought forth tigers into life and still say no to an individual tiger about to devour your child.
‘Perhaps,’ Danlo said. ‘But there must be a way … to avoid these wounded old tigers without killing them.’
You are completely devoted to this ideal of ahimsa.
Danlo thought about this for a moment, then said, ‘Yes.’
We shall see.
These three words alarmed Danlo, who suddenly made fists with both his hands and tensed his belly muscles. ‘What do you mean?’ he asked.
We must test this devotion to nonviolence. We must test you in other ways. This is why you have been invited here, to be tested.
‘But I … do not want to be tested. I have journeyed here to ask you if you might know–’
If you survive the tests, you may ask me three questions. It is a game that I have played with all pilots who have come to me seeking their purpose.
Danlo, who had heard of this game, asked, ‘Tested … how?’
We must test you to see what kind of a warrior you are.
‘But I have already said that I am no warrior.’
All men are warriors. And life for everything in our universe is nothing but war.
‘No, life is … something other.’
There is no fleeing the war, my sweet, sweet, beautiful warrior.
Danlo clenched his fists so tightly that his knuckle bones hurt. He said, ‘Perhaps I will not remain here to be tested. Perhaps I will flee this Earth.’
You will not be allowed to flee.
Danlo looked out of the window at his lightship sitting alone and vulnerable on the wild beach. He did not doubt that the Entity could smash his ship into sand as easily as a man might swat a fly.
