The Broken God. David Zindell

Cybernetic Churches teach. I can’t tell you about the cleansing ceremony. It’s worse than hateful, really, it’s a violation of the soul. Oh, I’ll tell you, if you promise to keep this secret. The readers strip bare your mind with their akashic computers. Everything, every negative thought or intention, especially vanity, because that’s the worst thing, the damning sin, to think too highly of yourself or want to be more than you were born for. Almost everything – there are ways of hiding things; you have to learn to keep your thoughts secret or else the readers will rape your soul. They’ll cleanse you until there’s nothing left. Have you ever had an imprinting? The cleansing is like a reverse imprinting. The readers remove the bad memories. They reprogram the brain … by killing parts of it. Not everyone believes that, of course, or else they’d panic whenever it was time for a cleansing. But even if the readers don’t actually kill the brain cells, they kill something else when they eliminate old synaptic pathways and create new ones. Why not call it soul? I know that’s an inelegant word for an elegant, inexpressible concept, but soul … you have to keep your soul to yourself, do you see? The soul, the light. And that’s why I left my church. Because I’d rather have died than become a reader.’

      In silence Danlo listened as this intense, ill boy talked and coughed. That he talked so much and so freely surprised him. Danlo was beginning to discover a talent for listening to others and winning their trust. He listened deeply, as he would listen to the west wind scrape across and articulate the ice forms of the sea. He liked the way Hanuman used words, the richness and clarity of his thought. It was a rare thing, he knew, for a boy to speak as fluently as a skilful-tongued man.

      ‘I wonder what it would be like … to touch minds with a computer,’ Danlo said.

      ‘You’ve never faced a computer?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘Well, it’s pure ecstasy,’ Hanuman said.

      Danlo touched the feather dangling from his hair, and then he touched his forehead. ‘You know about computers – are computers truly alive? Life, consciousness is … even the smallest living things, even the snowworms are conscious.’

      ‘Is a snowworm conscious?’ Hanuman asked.

      ‘Yes,’ Danlo said. ‘I am not a shaman so I have never entered into snowworm consciousness. But Yuri the Wise and others of my … other men that I have known have entered the consciousness of the animals, and they know what it is like to be a snowworm.’

      ‘And what is it like?’

      ‘It is like something. It is like being a snowflake in a blizzard. It is like the beginning of drawing in a breath of new air. It is like … I do not know. Perhaps someday I will become a snowworm and I will tell you.’

      Hanuman smiled as he began to cough. Then he said, ‘You’re very strange, did you know that?’

      ‘Thank you,’ Danlo said, returning his smile. ‘You are strange too.’

      ‘Oh, yes, strange – I think I was born that way.’

      ‘And your parents?’ Danlo asked. ‘They had no sympathy … for this strangeness?’

      Hanuman was silent for a few moments as he stared down at the steaming ice. As if he had come to a grave decision, he nodded his head. He looked up suddenly and then told Danlo the rest of his story. The Cybernetic Reformed Churches, Hanuman said, did not believe in the freedom of the soul. And so, hating the life-perverting ethos and practices of his church, Hanuman had made secret plans to journey to Neverness after his graduation. That he would be accepted to the Academy, he felt certain, for all his life he had studied the disciplines with a frenzy, and he had risen to the zenith of the ranks of the chosen. But, it was said, the greater the height, the farther the drop, and so one of his friends, out of envy and spite, had betrayed him to his father just before their graduation. His father had immediately removed him from the school. He never graduated. He was locked inside the reading room of his family’s church, there to familiarize himself with the heaumes of the akashic computers, with the Edic lights of the altar, and with the burning incense and brain musics used in Architect ceremonies. His father told him to meditate on the Book of God. He was to give special attention to its sub-books: The Life Of Ede, Facings, and Iterations. In Facings, a body of so-called wisdom revealed to Kostos Olorun long after Ede had become a god, he came across the crucial passage: And so Ede faced the universe, and he was vastened, and he saw that the face of God was his own. Then the would-be-gods, who are the hakra devils of the darkest depths of space, from the farthest reaches of time, saw what Ede had done, and they were jealous. And so they turned their eyes godward in jealousy and lust for the infinite lights, but in their countenances God read hubris, and he struck them blind. For here is the oldest of teachings, here is wisdom: No god is there but God; God is one, and there can be only one God.

      What followed, in this holy book of Facings, were many chapters describing the detection and cleansing of hakras. For the thousandth time in his life, Hanuman reflected on his church’s doctrine that all human beings were considered – and condemned – as potential hakras, potential gods. What kind of hateful, corrupt church, he wondered, would deny the divinity within each human being? He decided that Kostos Olorun, three thousand years ago, in his ambition to validate the authority of the nascent church and to establish himself as ‘God’s Prophet’, had lied about receiving revelations from Ede, and more, that he had invented many false doctrines. While Hanuman waited for his father to cleanse him of his sins, he had a dangerous thought: The true meaning of Ede’s vastening was that each man, woman, and child should come to apprehend the god within. Every man and woman is a star – Ede himself had written these words in his Universals. But somehow his church had corrupted and perverted this beautiful image to mean that every woman and man is a star whose light must be extinguished periodically lest it outshine that of Ede the God. Perhaps, Hanuman mused, human beings truly were as angels, or rather, as godlings who might grow into infinity, and someday, at the end of time, be united with Ede and all the other gods of the universe.

      Unwittingly, Hanuman had come to formulate one of the oldest and most secret heresies of his church: the Major Hakra Heresy. One day, in front of the reading room’s altar, as he watched the jewelled, Edic lights shimmering up through the spectrum from red to violet, he voiced this heresy to his father. His father, who was a stern, handsome man, was scandalized by his son’s ideas. He told him to immediately prepare himself for a deep cleansing. There was hatred in his father’s voice, jealousy and loathing. Although Hanuman had been cleansed many times, he had never had a deep cleansing. Against the power and subtleties of the holy computers as they cleansed him deeply, the little mind tricks he had learned would be useless; a deep cleansing would disfigure his soul as surely as a hot wind melts the features of an ice sculpture. He closed his eyes to look upon the familiar, very mortal face of his soul, and he was terrified. He begged his father to relent, to subject him only to the usual, mundane cleansing. But his father was a hard man. His father, this prince of the church, hardened his heart and reviled his son as a hakra; he would not relent. His father told him to kneel beneath the heaume of the holy, cleansing computer. But instead, in his terror and pride, in a blind panic, Hanuman swept up the gold incense stand and struck his father’s forehead. It was a quick, powerful, desperate blow; his father immediately fell dying across the altar. Hanuman gasped to see the rainbow of Edic lights falling over his father’s open brains. He wept uncontrollably as long as he dared, and then he tore the Edic lights from the altar and left his father in a pool of blood. He fled to Oloruning. There he sold the priceless lights to a wormrunner. He used the money to buy a passage on a harijan prayership, where one of the filthy pilgrims infected him with a lung disease. Thus he had come to Neverness, ill in his body and burning in his soul; he had come to the City of Pain hoping to enter the Academy and forget his sinful past.

      Part of this story, of course – the sad, murderous part – Danlo did not learn until years later. For good reason, Hanuman was a secretive boy, and he would grow to be a secretive man. It was a mark of his unusual trust in Danlo that he had told him as much as he had. ‘I’ve given up everything to enter the Academy,’ he said to Danlo. ‘My whole life.’

      He