The Broken God (91 page)
The images, when they came, were much like those of any other surreality or simulation. Interfacing the memories that Hanuman had recorded was something like entering a library's cybernetic spaces – even more like being part of a fabulist's drama. In fact, in the design of the remembrancing program, Hanuman had solicited the aid of both a cartoonist and a master fabulist. It amazed Danlo to witness the great events from his father's life. As if he were a jellyfish floating in a tropical sea, he 'followed' his father and 'watched' as the Agathanians touched Mallory Ringess' proud and noble face and disassembled his ruined brain, neuron by bloody neuron, and healed him, and remade him into a man who might become a god; he 'listened' to private conversations between Mallory Ringess and Bardo; he 'walked' across a cold beach noisy with barking seals, and he listened to these two great men speak of programming the self, of mastering the biological programs that lead to rage, hatred, and ultimately, death. Everything about the life of the Ringess, according to the memories that Danlo reviewed, was a way of escaping the meaninglessness of death.
The highest art is self-creation.
The heaume infused remembered words into Danlo's inner ear, and he marvelled that his father's voice was much like his own, or rather, like his voice might someday become: deep, rich, tender, passionate, and pained. The irony in this voice amused him; its wilful, fated quality brought to mind remembrances of faraway stars and galactic wonders (and tragedies) he had never seen. The image of his father inside him spoke of compassion, with compassion, and each of his noble words was an inspiration and a pleasure to hear. It was Danlo's way to cherish pleasure as an indicator of good and blessed things, but this pleasure he mistrusted as he did the morasha, the deadly, crumbling snow that covers an invisible crevasse. He knew too much about cetics and their arts. He knew too well how the cyber-shamans use computers to control the brain. And now, when he looked away from the dark, compelling image of his father – when he looked into his own shimmering awareness – he could almost see the heaume's manipulation of his mind. He could feel it, as exaltation and quick euphoria, the spray of endorphins through his brain's neurons. Timed to each of his father's perfect words (and at each mention of the name 'Ringess') he experienced a moment of opiate intoxication. The heaume stimulated the release of peptides and other twisted-up proteins specific to certain moods. Standing beneath this hard shell of metal that cut against his spinal cord, he fell through a quick succession of moods: wonder, awe, curiosity, even joy. He astonished himself laughing out with joy so hard that tears came to his eyes and he could hardly keep his feet. Then came other, deeper moods: the mystic upwelling of the serotonin flows, cool, quick, and sublime; and the rush of noradrenalin that brought a marvellous clarity and concentration, opening him to new ways of seeing things, speeding up his mind.
The image of God is found essentially and personally in all humankind. Each possesses it whole, entire and undivided, and all together not more than one alone.
It came to him, suddenly, that he could understand great things. Godly things. There was no lack of things to be understood and remembered. Hanuman and Bardo had recorded many images, words, ancient writings, musics, and simulated miracles – as well as doctrines they had invented to explain how one man had become a god, and how others might join him in godhood. Danlo should have absorbed this information easily, as dry snow sucks up water. His brain had been beautifully prepared for such veneration and false remembrance. Even now, the heaume was pulling at his neurons, programming his brain stem to pump out ever more noradrenaline and other chemicals that would enhance his memory. Only, his memory needed no enhancement. In truth, because he had been born with such a clear and deep memory, it was always easier for him to remember than to forget. To purge from his mind anything at all, even such minutiae as the pattern of pimples on Pedar's face the night that he had been killed, always required from him a tremendous act of will. (As well as the use of certain techniques that Thomas Rane had taught him.) It was this will and these mental tricks that now inoculated him against the stream of images pouring into his brain. Thus, with smiling lips and tightly closed eyes, he faced the remembrancing heaume gladly, and he was not afraid of falling into the trap that Hanuman had prepared for him.
Man is a rope, tied between beast and god – a rope over a bottomless crevasse.
Of course, Hanuman was not the first to use mind-machines to wash the brain with religious sentiments and dogma. Nearly three thousand years earlier, Nikolos Daru Ede had authored the first four books of The Algorithms, and in many ways, Hanuman's interpretation of the Elder Eddas copied the architecture of this monumental work. Hanuman's 'Eddas' as he called them, were structured even more tightly than the Visions or the Iterations or any of the later books of The Algorithms. In putting on a remembrancing heaume, as Danlo found, there was little freedom of movement among the recorded memories. In this respect, it was nearly the opposite of facing a library's cybernetic space: there was no soaring among the lovely information storms and crystalline knowledge structures, no true sense of fractality or fugue or sudden discoveries that the librarians call gestalt. He did not need his shih sense to find his way among the images that Hanuman had assembled into movements and transhuman dramas, because a way had already been prepared for him. Programmed for him. It was being programmed now, as he smiled and sweated beneath the hard silver heaume.
You have made your way from worm to man, and in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now, man is more ape than any ape.
He opened his eyes, and he faced away from the remembrancing heaume. It was a difficult thing to do. Near him stood Hanuman with his tight lips and unseeing eyes. Around Hanuman's shaved head, the clearface was lit up, thousands of strands of neurologics glowing bright purple. Danlo realized that Hanuman had chosen certain Eddas to infuse into his brain; very probably Hanuman was editing these memories moment by moment. It occurred to Danlo that the program calling up the memories, whether in private sessions such as this or in mass public ceremonies, would be rewritten to provide each person's 'remembrance'. And it would always be Hanuman (or Bardo or some other cyber-shaman) who wrote these programs.
The universe is a machine for the production of .
The memories that came to him then were not quite like the Elder Eddas, not like true remembrance as he had experienced it. They were other people's memories. They were words and pictures that a fabulist had put together. All these memories had come from people whom Danlo knew very well, and he found that Bardo and Surya Lal and others had stamped them with their individual concerns and conceits, much as a tiger leaves distinctive prints in the snow. There was one 'Edda', cold and hard and clear, that he was sure Thomas Rane must have remembered. Danlo could see this memory as an image just behind his closed eyelids, where points of red and blue light sparkled across his visual field. There, an image of an organism appeared. It was as vast and beautiful as a whale, only it lived far above the seas of any planet, and its skin shone like gold against the blackness of space. Mathematical formulae appeared, then, indicating that for evolving organisms adapting themselves to new environments, the rate of energy metabolism varies according to the square of the temperature. .
Because low temperature favours order, the coldest climates are potentially the most hospitable for complex forms of life.
Whole sequences of memories came quickly now: Old Earth before the agricultural holocaust, Bardo's vision of a world of primeval green forests, blue oceans, and white clouds as pure as snow; Hanuman's prophecy of the dead god in the 18th Deva Cluster and his account of the great war that the gods waged across the stars; there was even something from Danlo's first remembrance, words that he had spoken immediately afterward: 'By none but a god shall a god be worshipped, and we are all potentially gods.' He laughed silently to himself because he knew he had never uttered the phrase: 'and we are all potentially gods'. He thought that Bardo or Hanuman must have added on this bit of doctrine, as a virus adds new information to a computer program, or to a living cell. He laughed to see his memory of the Elder Eddas embroidered so easily, and then he shook his head and ground his teeth in despair.
It was the Agathanians who first recognized Mallory Ringess as a potential god. They healed him of his mortal wound and showed him the path toward the infinite things. The Ringess made himself into a god, and then he went out to heal the universe. Someday, he will return to Neverness.
Danlo might have thrown off the heaume and fled from the room, then, but a sudden image compelled his attention: his father as a noble-looking young man, with his black and red hair, the strong, predatory face, the cold blue eyes that seemed to grow larger as they fixed on the stars above Neverness. It was a famous, noble pose out of the mind of some fabulist, only now this glittering image filled Danlo's mind, and it transformed itself into something vast and glorious, even as Danlo clamped his teeth together so that his jaw muscles popped in sudden pain. He looked behind his eyes, inside himself where his father's image was becoming his own; it was the image he might see reflected in a common silvered mirror. Hanuman, he guessed, was playing with the heaume's program, morphing and melding Danlo's bearded face with that of his father, much as a cartoonist blends together different visages to invent new characters. The eyes of this new image were dark blue like liquid jewels; soon they had grown huge and mysterious as moons. His eyes were blue-black windows full of stars, opening outward in every direction, drinking in all the universe.
Each man, woman, and child is a star, and all human beings can shine with the light of gods.
Now it comes, Danlo thought. Now he will use all his skills to spring the trap he has prepared.
The path toward godhood lies in remembrancing the Elder Eddas and following the Way of the Ringess.
The memories flickered inside so quickly that they would have overwhelmed him if he hadn't used his time sense to speed up his mind. As if he were floating in the pit of a lightship in deep space, almost by instinct, he fell into slowtime and he reached out with his thoughts to enter the computer's electron flows. Single moments of time seemed to come apart and last forever, as a silken strand from a worm's cocoon unravels endlessly. He entered into electronic samadhi, and the computer's memories became his memories, and his mind raced along strands of endless circuitry all frenzied and electric with information. He should not have been able to do this. No heaume should have been programmed to allow this kind of dangerous merging. Many were the pilots who had lost themselves into their computers. (Almost as many as the poor harijan who put illegal mind machines on their heads and die forever to the outside world.) Danlo loved mystical states of consciousness – even those induced by computers – and there had been a time in his life when he had sought such ecstasies wherever he could. He thought he understood the nature of Hanuman's trap; he thought that Hanuman was tempting him with the promise of easy electronic samadhi, as if to say: Behold, each time you go beneath my heaumes, all memory and mind will be yours. For an endless moment of time, this seemed to be true. His mind seemed to extend itself, to become one with that of the computer. To become the computer. He, himself, whoever he really was, made no effort to run the computer's programs. He let himself be swept away by the ecstasy of pure computation. His awareness spread out into a nearly infinite field of on-or-off voltages, trillions of sparks of light twinkling in total blackness. Brilliant patterns formed themselves up momentarily only to be broken apart an instant later and replaced with others just as beautiful. All computation was the asking of a single, eternal question: yes or no? This question was asked about every aspect of shape, colour, sound, number, idea or emotion. He asked himself this question a million million times each second, yes or no, and his computational self coded information into memories, the pattern of yeses and noes making the pictures that were memories. Mechanically, something inside moved these memories from one place to another, sorting, comparing, negating, adding memory to memory so quickly that they filled an entire memory space. Thus he could see Hanuman's Eddas from a coign of vantage which was wholly new; he gazed at these bright memories as if he were a god peering through a microscope at all the features of the world, all at once, and he let his vast, new mind make sense of all that he beheld. It came to him that he had never understood so many things. He wondered if the heaume were faced with some larger computer, or perhaps whole arrays of computers that Hanuman had hidden from view. As he had done many times before, he wondered at the nature of the mind-computer interface, the very nature of mind itself.
Hanu, Hanu, how is it possible that the mind can know more than itself?
He felt the blood racing through the arteries of his throat, and he knew much about other people's memories that he had thought it was impossible to know. He wondered, then, if he truly might copy something of his great remembrance into Hanuman's heaume; he wondered if together they might create a remarkable likeness of the Elder Eddas.
Gods create; creation is everything, and you are God.
This calling to create, he thought, was the whole of his temptation; he thought he could reach out and touch the icy, translucent walls of Hanuman's trap, and if necessary, break his way out at will. He thought he had seen all there was to see. And then the heaume looked through his mind and touched it with a pale fire. There was a sudden frenzy of neurotransmitters that made his brain cells rush with wild, electro-chemical storms. It was a pleasure beyond pleasure, a greater ecstasy of the mind than anything he had ever known. He stood there swaying, drunk with this mind fire, and there came a moment of illumination so intense it seemed his interior world had been lit up by a flash of lightning.