The Broken God. David Zindell

the light was blindingly, brilliantly red. The light was a red spearpoint through his eyes into his brain. The pain was quick, sharp and intense. Old Father had been wrong; there was a hideous pain. He closed his eyes and looked away. The pain fell off into a white heat and a burning, terrible pain.

      Drisana grasped his face in her withered hands and gently turned him facing forward. ‘You mustn’t look at your brain’s own model! Soon, we’ll go deeper, down to the neurons. The neuro-transmitter flow, the electricity. Your thoughts – you would be able to see your own thoughts. And that’s so dangerous. Seeing your thoughts as they form up – that itself would create another thought for you to see. The feedback, the infinities. Certainly, the process could go on to infinity, but you’d be insane or dead long before then.’

      Danlo stared straight ahead. He held himself very still. He was sweating now, beads of salt water squeezed between his forehead and the heaume. ‘Ahira, Ahira,’ he whispered. ‘O blessed Ahira!’

      ‘Now be still. Before we can make an imprinting, we must see where to imprint.’

      Even though Drisana was half drunk, she laid his brain bare as deftly and easily as he might slit open a snow hare’s belly. Before she had learned the art of imprinting, she had been an akashic. As an akashic, she had done many thousands of brain mappings. All imprimaturs are also akashics, though few akashics know much about the art of imprinting. In truth, it is easier to map and read a brain than it is to imprint it. For no good reason – and this is a bitter irony – the akashics possess a much higher status in the Order than do the lowly imprimaturs.

      ‘Close your eyes, now,’ Drisana called out softly.

      Danlo closed his eyes. Behind him, his brain’s model rippled with light waves. The language clusters in the left hemisphere were magnified and highlighted. The neural network was dense and profoundly complex. Millions of individual neurons, like tiny, glowing red spiders, were packed into a three-dimensional web. From each neuron grew thousands of dendrites, thousands of red, silken strands which sought each other out and connected at the synapses.

      ‘Danlo, ni luria la shantih,’ Drisana said, and his association cortex fairly jumped with light. And then, ‘Ti asto yujena oyu, you have eyes that see too deeply and too much.’

      ‘Oh ho, that’s true!’ Old Father broke in. ‘Yujena oyu – so, it’s so.’

      Drisana held up a hand to silence him, and she spoke other words in other languages, words that failed to bring Danlo’s association cortex to life. In a few moments, Drisana determined that Alaloi was his milk tongue, and more, that he knew no others except Moksha and a smattering of the Language. It was an extraordinary thing to discover, and she probably longed to immediately spread this news in the various cafes and bars, but as an imprimatur she was obliged to keep secrets.

      ‘Now we have the model; now we will make the actual imprinting.’

      She removed the heaume from Danlo’s head. While he brushed back his sodden hair, she walked over to the far wall behind Old Father to search for a particular heaume. She tried to explain the fundamentals of her art, though it must have been difficult to find words in the Alaloi language to convey her meaning. Danlo quickly became confused. In truth, imprinting is both simple and profound. Every child is born with a certain array of synapses connecting neuron to neuron. This array is called the primary repertoire and is determined partly by the genetic programs and partly by the self-organizing properties of the growing brain. Learning occurs, simply, when certain synapses are selected and strengthened at the expense of others. The blueness of the sky, the pain of ice against the skin – every colour, each crackling twig, smell, idea or fear burns its mark into the synapses. Gradually, event by event, the primary repertoire is transformed into the secondary repertoire. And this transformation – the flowering of a human being’s selfness and essence, one’s very soul – is evolutionary. Populations of neurons and synapses compete for sensa and thoughts. Or rather, they compete to make thoughts. The brain is its own universe and thoughts are living things which thrive or die according to natural laws.

      Drisana eased the new heaume over Danlo’s head. It was thicker than the first heaume and heavier. Above the second hologram stand, a second model of Danlo’s brain appeared. Next to it, the first model remained lit. As the imprinting progressed, Drisana would continually compare the second model to the first, down to the molecular level; she would need to see both models – as well as the tone of Danlo’s blue-black eyes – to determine when he had imprinted enough for one day.

      ‘So many synapses,’ Drisana said. ‘Ten trillion synapses in the cortex alone.’

      Danlo made a fist and asked, ‘What do the synapses look like?’

      ‘They’re modelled as points of light. Ten trillion points of light.’ She didn’t explain how neurotransmitters diffuse across the synapses, causing the individual neurons to fire. Danlo knew nothing of chemistry or electricity. Instead, she tried to give him some idea of how the heaume’s computer stored and imprinted language. ‘The computer remembers the synapse configuration of other brains, brains that hold a particular language. This memory is a simulation of that language. And then in your brain, Danlo, select synapses are excited directly and strengthened. The computer speeds up the synapses’ natural evolution.’

      Danlo tapped the bridge of his nose; his eyes were dark and intent upon a certain sequence of thought. ‘The synapses are not allowed to grow naturally, yes?’

      ‘Certainly not. Otherwise imprinting would be impossible.’

      ‘And the synapse configuration – this is really the learning, the essence of another’s mind, yes?’

      ‘Yes, Danlo.’

      ‘And not just the learning – isn’t this so? You imply that anything in the mind of another could be imprinted in my mind?’

      ‘Almost anything.’

      ‘What about dreams? Could dreams be imprinted?’

      ‘Certainly.’

      ‘And nightmares?’

      Drisana squeezed his hand and reassured him. ‘No one would imprint a nightmare into another.’

      ‘But it is possible, yes?’

      Drisana nodded her head.

      ‘And the emotions … the fears or loneliness or rage?’

      ‘Those things, too. Some imprimaturs – certainly they’re the dregs of the City – some do such things.’

      Danlo let his breath out slowly. ‘Then how can I know what is real and what is unreal? Is it possible to imprint false memories? Things or events that never happened? Insanity? Could I remember ice as hot or see red as blue? If someone else looked at the world through shaida eyes, would I be infected with this way of seeing things?’

      Drisana wrung her hands together, sighed, and looked helplessly at Old Father.

      ‘Oh ho, the boy is difficult, and his questions cut like a sarsara!’ Old Father stood up and painfully limped over to Danlo. Both his eyes were open, and he spoke clearly. ‘All ideas are infectious, Danlo. Most things learned early in life, we do not choose to learn. Ah, and much that comes later. So, it’s so: the two wisdoms. The first wisdom: as best we can, we must choose what to put into our brains. And the second wisdom: the healthy brain creates its own ecology; the vital thoughts and ideas eventually drive out the stupid, the malignant and the parasitical.’

      Because Danlo’s forehead was wet and itched, he tried to force his finger up beneath the heaume, but it was too tight. He said, ‘Then you are not afraid that the words of the Language will poison me?’

      ‘Oh ho, all languages are poison,’ Old Father said. His eyes were bright with appreciation of Danlo’s unease. ‘But that’s why you’ve learned Moksha and the Fravashi way, as an antidote to such poisons.’

      Danlo trusted nothing about the whole unnatural process of imprinting, but he trusted Old