The Broken God. David Zindell

he was Danlo, son of Haidar, whose father was Wicent, the son of Nuri the Bear-killer. He felt the other boys staring at him, whispering, and he blurted out, ‘They call me Danlo the Wild.’

      Behind Hanuman, a muscle-fat boy with a cracking voice and a pugnacious face began to laugh. His name was Konrad and he called out, ‘Danlo the Wild – what kind of name is that?’

      And someone else said, ‘Danlo the Wild, the nameless child.’

      Danlo’s neck suddenly hurt and his eyes were burning with shame. He stood there breathing deeply and evenly, as Haidar had taught him, letting the cold air enter his lungs to steal the heat from his anger. A few of the boys laughed at him and made jokes about his strange name. Most, however, hung back and kept their silence, obviously doubting the wisdom of baiting such a tough-looking boy. With a feather stuck in his hair and his deep blue eyes, Danlo did in fact look uncivilized and not a little wild.

      Hanuman coughed some more, great racking coughs that tore through his chest and brought tears to his eyes. When he had caught his breath, he asked, ‘Which is your birth world?’

      ‘I was born here.’

      ‘You were? In Neverness? Then you must be used to the cold.’

      Danlo rubbed his arms and blew on his fingers to warm them. A man, he thought, should not complain about things he can’t change, so he said, simply, ‘Can one ever get used to the cold?’

      ‘I certainly can’t,’ Hanuman said as he began coughing again. And then, ‘So cold – how do you stand it?’

      Danlo watched him cough for a while, and said, ‘You are ill, yes?’

      ‘Ill? No, I’m not – it’s just that the air is so cold it cuts the lungs.’

      After another round of coughing, Danlo decided that Hanuman was very ill. Once, when he was a young boy, he had watched his near-brother, Basham, die of a lung fever. Hanuman certainly had the pale, haunted look of someone who was contemplating going over. Perhaps a virus was eating away at his lungs. He seemed to be burning from deep inside. His eyes were sunken into dark, bruised flesh; the contrast of the light blue irises against the dark hollows made them seem more hellish by the moment. There was a fear in his eyes, a frightened, fey look almost as if he could see his fate approaching like a dark storm that would ice his heart and steal his breath away. He coughed again, and Danlo could almost feel the spasm tearing through his own chest. He was afraid for Hanuman. He was afraid, and that was seemly, for a man to fear another’s dying, but of course it was very wrong that Hanuman should be afraid for himself. Hanuman’s fear made Danlo sick. He had keen eyes, and he could see that this frail, ill boy was trying to hide his fear from all the others, perhaps even trying to hide it from himself. Someone, he thought, should feed him bowls of wolf-root tea and bathe his head with cool water. Where was his mother, to care for him? He would have placed his hand on Hanuman’s burning forehead to touch the fever away, but he remembered that he was not supposed to touch others, especially not strangers, especially not in sight of a hundred other laughing, joking boys.

      Hanuman moved closer to Danlo and spoke in a low, tortured voice, ‘Please don’t tell the novices or masters I’m ill.’

      He coughed so hard that he doubled over and lost his balance as his foot slipped on the ice. He would have pitched face forward, but Danlo caught him by the armpit and hand. Hanuman’s hand was hot like an oilstone and surprisingly strong. (Later Danlo would learn that Hanuman had trained in the killing arts in order to harden himself. In truth, he was much stronger than he looked.) Danlo gripped Hanuman’s hard little hand, pulling him to his feet, and suddenly they didn’t seem at all like strangers. There was something between them, some kind of correspondence and immediate understanding. Danlo had a feeling that he should pay close attention to this correspondence. Hanuman’s intenseness both attracted and repelled him. He smelled Hanuman’s fear and sensed his will to suffer that fear in silence no matter the cost. He smelled other things as well. Hanuman stank of sweat and sickness, and of coffee – obviously he had been drinking mugs of coffee to keep himself awake. With tired, feverish eyes Hanuman looked at Danlo as if they shared a secret. Hanuman shook off his hand, gathered in his pride and stood alone. Danlo thought he was being consumed from within like an overfilled oilstone burning too quickly. Who could hold such inner fire, he wondered, and not quickly go over to the other side of day?

      ‘You should rest in your furs and drink hot tea,’ Danlo said, ‘or else you might go over.’

      ‘Go over? Do you mean die?’ Hanuman spoke this word as if it were the most odious and terrifying concept that he could imagine. ‘Please, no, I hope not.’

      He coughed and there was a bubbly sound of liquid breaking deep in his throat.

      ‘Where are your parents?’ Danlo asked as he combed back his long hair with his fingers. ‘Did you make the journey here alone?’

      Hanuman coughed into his cupped hand, then wiped a fleck of blood from his lips. ‘I don’t have any parents.’

      ‘No father, no mother? O blessed God, how can you not have a mother?’

      ‘Oh, I had parents, once,’ Hanuman explained. ‘I’m not a slelnik, even though some people say I look like one.’

      Danlo hadn’t yet heard of the despised, unnatural breeding strategies practised on a few of the Civilized Worlds; he knew nothing of the exemplars and slelniks born in abomination from the artificial wombs. He thought he understood a part of Hanuman’s pain and obvious loneliness; however, he understood wrongly. ‘Your parents have gone over, yes?’

      Hanuman looked down at the ice and then shook his head. ‘Does it matter?’ he asked. ‘To them, I might as well be dead.’

      He told Danlo something of his journey to Neverness, then. In the Ice Dome, a thousand boys were stamping their feet, slapping leather sandals against ice as they huffed out steam and complained of neglect, and Hanuman told of how he had been born into an important Architect family on Catava. His parents were Pavel and Moriah li Tosh, readers in the Cybernetic Reformed Church. (Over the millennia, the Architects of the Infinite Intelligence of the Cybernetic Universal Church have been riven into many different sub-religions. The Evolutionary Church of Ede, the Cybernetic Orthodox Churches, the Fostora Separatist Union – these are but a few of the hundreds of churches which have splintered off from the original church body, beginning with the Ianthian Heresy and the First Schism in the year 331 EV, that is to say, the 331st year since the vastening of Nikolos Daru Ede. All time, the Architects say, must begin at the moment Ede carked his consciousness into one of his mainbrain computers and thus became the first of humanity’s gods.) Like his parents, Hanuman had undergone the traditional reader training in one of the church schools. Unlike any of the respectable Architects that he knew, however, he had rebelled while still very young, begging his parents’ permission to attend the Order’s elite school in Oloruning, which is Catava’s largest and only real city.

      ‘My father allowed me to enter the elite school,’ Hanuman said, ‘only because it was the best school on Catava. But I had to agree to finish my reader training in the church after graduation; I had to agree not to attend the Academy on Neverness. So I agreed. But it was an impossible agreement. I never should have made it. All my friends in the elite school were planning to enter the Academy, if they could. And I’d always hoped to enter the Academy. To become a reader like my parents and grandparents – I never really wanted that. Oh, wait … please excuse my coughing. Do you know about the readers of my church? Of my parents’ church? No? I’m not supposed to tell anyone this, but I shall anyway. The second holiest ceremony in our church is the facing ceremony. You’ll have heard rumours about the facing ceremony – almost everyone has. No? Where have you spent your life? Well, in the facing ceremony, any Worthy Architect is allowed to interface with one of the church’s communal computers. The interfacing, entering into computer consciousness, the information flows, like lightning, the power. It’s like heaven, really, the only good thing about being an Architect. But before every facing ceremony, there has to be a cleansing. Of sin. We Architects … the Architects, call sin “negative programming”.