his verve and optimism, his rare gift for life. But the Fravashi are never content merely to reflect all that is holiest in another. There must always be a place inside for the angslan, the holy pain. ‘I’ll help you, only you must always remember one thing.’
Danlo rubbed his eyes slowly. ‘What thing?’ he asked.
‘It’s not enough to look for the truth, however noble a journey that might be. Oh ho, the truth, it’s never enough, never, never! If you become a pilot, if you journey to the centre of the universe and look out on the stars and the secret truths, if by some miracle you should see the universe for what it is, that is not enough. You must be able to say “yes” to what you see. To all truths. No matter the dread or anguish, to say “yes”. What kind of man or woman could say “yes” in the face of the truth? So, it’s so: I teach you the asarya. He is the yeasayer who could look upon evil, disease and suffering, all the worst incarnations of the Eternal No, and not fall insane. He is the great-souled one who can affirm the truth of the universe. Ah, but by what art, what brilliance, what purity of vision? Oh, Danlo, who has the will to become an asarya?’
Old Father began to sing, then, a poignant, rapturous song that made Danlo brood upon fear and fate. After saying good-night, Danlo returned to his room, returned down the long stone hallway to the softness and warmth of his bed, but he could not sleep. He lay awake playing his shakuhachi, thinking of everything that had happened in Old Father’s chamber. To be an asarya, to say ‘yes’ to shaida and halla and the other truths of life – no other idea had ever excited him so much. Ahira, Ahira, he silently called, did he, Danlo the Wild, have the will to become an asarya? All night long he played his shakuhachi, and in the breathy strangeness of the music, he thought he could hear the answer, ‘yes’.
Shih
The metaphysicians of Tlon view time as being the most illusory of mental constructions. According to one school, the present is formless and undefined, while the future is just present hope, and the past is nothing more than present memory in the minds of men. One school teaches that the universe was created only moments ago (or that it is being eternally created), and all sentient creatures remember with perfect clarity a past that has never been. Still another school has as its fundamental doctrine that the whole of time has already occurred and that our lives are but vague memories in the mind of God.
– from the Second Encyclopaedia of Tlon, Vol. MXXVI, page
In truth, Danlo really didn’t know how difficult it is to enter the Order. On the planets of the Civilized Worlds, the Order maintains thousands of elite and lesser schools. The students of the lesser schools vie with one another to enter the elite schools; in the elite schools, there is a vicious struggle to be among the few chosen for the novitiate and the great Academy on Neverness. And so the chosen come to the City of Light, where there is always a sense of being at the centre of things, an immanence of cosmic events and astonishing revelations. In truth, Neverness is the spiritual centre of the most brilliant civilization man has ever known. Who would not desire a lifetime of seeking knowledge and truth in sight of her silvery spires? Who would not relish the excitement, the camaraderie, and above all, the sheer power of being a pilot or high professional of the Order? So esteemed and coveted is this life of the mind (and since the masters of the various disciplines can be brought back to their youthful bodies many times, it can be a very long life indeed) that many ordinary people come to Neverness hoping to bribe or bully their way into the Order. There is of course no hope for these venal souls, but for others, for the thousands of unfortunate girls and boys who grow up on planets too small or obscure to support an elite school, there is the slightest of hopes. As Old Father informed Danlo, each year the masters of the Order hold a competition. And it is not easy to enter the competition, much less to win a place at Borja, which is the first of the Academy’s schools. Petitions must be made. Each boy or girl (or in rare cases, each of the double-sexed) must find a sponsor willing to petition the Master of Novices at Borja. The sponsors must certify their student’s brilliance, character, and most importantly, their desire to enter the novitiate. Each year, more than fifty thousand petitions are received, but only one of seven are accepted. At the end of false winter, when the sun shines hotly and melts the sea ice, perhaps seven thousand of the luckiest youths are permitted to enter this most intense of competitions.
‘Oh ho, I have sponsored you,’ Old Father told Danlo a few days later. ‘I’ve made a petition in your behalf, and we will see what we will see.’
While Danlo awaited the doubtful results of Old Father’s petition – doubtful because Bardo the Just, Master of Novices, was said to resent the Fravashi and any others who taught outside of the Order’s dominion – he busied himself learning the thousands of skills necessary to negotiate the strange streets and even stranger ways of the city called Neverness. During the evenings, Fayeth began the painful task of teaching him the Language of the Civilized Worlds. And every morning, when the air was clean and brisk, the black man who had first dubbed him ‘Danlo the Wild’ taught him to ice skate. Luister Ottah, who was as thin and dark (and quick) as a raven, took Danlo out on the icy streets. He showed him how to stroke with his skates and hold an even edge; he showed him how to execute a hokkee stop by jumping in a tight little quarter circle and digging his steel blades into the ice. Danlo took to this exhilarating sport immediately. (Although Danlo thought it only natural that the City streets should be made of ice, the glissades and slidderies, as they are called, are the wonder – and consternation – of all who visit Neverness.) He spent long afternoons racing up and down the streets of the Fravashi District, savouring the sensations of his new life. The hot yellow sun, the cool wind, the cascade of scurfed-off ice whenever he ground to a sudden stop – he loved the touch of the world. He loved the sting of the soreesh snow that fell every third or fourth day; he loved the eave swallows who roosted atop the round houses; he loved their warbling, their shiny orange bills, even the chalky smell of their spattered white droppings. These things were real, and he grasped for the reality of the world as a baby grasps his mother’s long, flowing hair.
Other things seemed less real. The ecology of the City made no sense to him at all. Who made his furs and that remarkable device called a zipper by which he closed and fastened his parka? Where did his food come from? Old Father had said that the grains and nuts he ate for his meals grew in factories to the south of Neverness. Every morning, sleds laden with food rocketed up and down the streets. Danlo had seen these sleds. They were not, of course, real sleds pulled by dogs. They were brightly coloured clary shells mounted on steel runners. Rhythmic jets of flame and burning air pushed the sleds across the ice. The sight of these sleek, fiery monsters terrified him, at least at first. (And he was quite confused by the harijan men who operated the sleds laden with cast-off clothing, with broken vases and sulki grids and ruined furniture, and with pieces of half-eaten food. He couldn’t imagine why anyone would wish to accomplish such labour. Old Father explained this puzzle with typical Fravashi humour. He said that human beings had invented civilization in order to develop a class of people low enough to handle other people’s rubbish.) After a while, Danlo’s terror softened to wonder, and wonder became profound doubt: what if the sleds turned against their human masters and refused to bear their loads? Or what if a storm, a vicious sarsara, destroyed the factories, whatever factories really were? How would the city people eat? There could not be enough animals in the world to feed so many people – would they eat each other? Was it possible they didn’t know it was shaida for human beings to hunt one another?
Because Danlo would not eat the factories’ cultured meats but still had a taste for shagshay or silk belly or fish, sometimes he would cross to the district’s edge and steal into the woods of the City Wild. And he hunted. There, among the flowing streams and yu trees, he found a small herd of shagshay. With their fuzzy
