too easy to kill them. He stripped the bark from a limb of black shatterwood, carved it, and mounted the long flint spearpoint that he had secreted inside his furs. (His old spear shaft he had to leave at Old Father’s house because it was illegal to carry weapons through the City.) On two different days he killed two fawns and ten sleekits before deciding that there weren’t enough animals in the City Wild for him to hunt. He froze part of the meat and ate the shagshay’s tenderloin raw. He did not want to build a fire. Too many paths wound through the woods; too many people from the surrounding districts took their exercise skating there. It was not illegal to hunt animals within the City, but Danlo didn’t know this. There was no law against hunting or cutting trees only because no one had ever thought that such a law would be necessary. He sensed, however, that the insane people would be disgusted by his killing animals for food, much as he dreaded the thought of eating shaida meat that wasn’t real. In the end, after many days of surreptitious feasting in the yu trees, he decided that he would eat neither cultured meats nor animals. He would follow Old Father’s example. Grains, nuts, pulses, and fruit – henceforth these kinds of plant life would be his only food.
Perhaps the most unreal thing about his new life were the people of the City themselves. With their many-coloured skins and differently shaped noses, lips, and brows, they looked much like demons out of a nightmare, and he often wondered if they had real spirits as real people do. He passed them every day on the streets, and he wondered at their peculiar stiffness and weakness of limb. They seemed so hurried and aloof, and abstract, as if their thoughts were as insubstantial as smoke. Could it be that they weren’t really there at all, not really living in the moment? Their faces were so ugly with wants and fears and urgency, so very ugly and hard to read. What must they think of him, with his white feather and his wind-whipped hair? In truth, no one bothered to notice him at all. It was as if they couldn’t see him, couldn’t perceive his curiosity, his loneliness, and his uncivilized spirit. Usually, he was dressed much as an Alaloi (in new, white furs that Old Father had given him), but so were many other people. And many were dressed much more colourfully. Autists, neurosingers, cetics, harijan and whores – people of many different sects and professions every day passed through the district. And the clothes they wore! Red robes, emerald sweaters and furs of every colour. Journeymen holists skated by in cobalt kamelaikas. He saw jewelled, satin jackets, cottons and woollens, and kimonos woven of a material called silk. Much of this clothing was beautiful, in a gaudy, overwhelming way. It was hard to continually take in such beauty. After a while, he tired of looking at fabricated things; he felt sick and too full, as if he had eaten eight bowls of overripe yu berries. He invented a word for the different beauties of the City: shona-manse, the beauty that man makes with his hands. It was not a deep beauty. Nor was it a various beauty, despite the many hues and textures of manmade things. In a single chunk of granite, with its millions of pink and black flecks of quartz, mica and silicates, there was more complexity and variety than in the loveliest kimono. It was true that most of the buildings – the glory of Neverness! – were faced with granite, basalt, and other natural rocks. When Danlo looked eastward toward the Old City, the obsidian spires glittered silver-black. And, yes, it was beautiful, but it was a dazzling, too-perfect beauty. No single spire possessed a mountain’s undulations or its intricate and subtle pattern of trees, rock, snow and ice. And the City itself was ill-balanced and unalive compared to the beauty of the world. Where, in such an unreal place, could he hope to find halla? A few times, at night, he sneaked out of Old Father’s house to gaze at the stars. But everywhere he looked the city spires were outlined black against the sky. He could see only the supernovae, Nonablinka and Shurablinka, and the enigmatic Golden Flower; the hideous glowing haze of a million city lights devoured the other stars. Oh, blessed God, he thought, why must the people of the City place so many things between themselves and the world?
Once, he asked Old Father about this, and Old Father stroked his furry white face in imitation of a man thinking, and he said, ‘Oh ho, soon enough you will learn about the Fifth Mentality and the Age of Simulation, but for now it’s sufficient to appreciate one thing: Every race that has evolved language is cursed – and blessed! – with this problem of filtering reality. You say that the people of Neverness are cut off from life, but you haven’t journeyed to Tria, where the tubists and merchants spend almost their entire lives inside plastic boxes breathing conditioned air and facing sense boxes. And what of the made-worlds orbiting Cipriana Luz? Aha, and what of the Alaloi? Do they not place animal furs between their skins and the coldness of ice? Oh ho! I suppose you can tell me that your Alaloi don’t have a language?’
Danlo, as a guest of an Honoured Fravashi, was beginning to appreciate how words can shape reality. He said, ‘The Alaloi have a language, yes. On the second morning of the world, the god Kweitkel kissed the frozen lips of Yelena and Manwe and the other children of Devaki. He kissed their lips to give them the gift of Song. The true Song is perfectly created so the sons and daughters of the world can know reality. Perfect words as pure and clean as soreesh snow. Not like these confusing words of the civilized language that Fayeth has been teaching me.’
‘Oh ho!’ Old Father said. ‘You’re glavering again, and you must be as wary of the glavering as a shagshay ewe is of a wolf. In time you’ll appreciate the beauty and subtlety of this language. Oh ah, there are many concepts and ways of seeing. So many realities beyond the immediacy of soreesh or the sarsara that blows and freezes the flesh. Beyond even what you call the altjiranga mitjina.’
‘You know about the dreamtime of my people?’
‘Ah, I do know about the dreamtime – I’m a Fravashi, am I not? The dreamtime occupies a certain space similar to the space of samadhi. There are many, many spaces, of course. Do you want to learn the words?’
‘But I’m already too full of words. Last night, Fayeth taught me three new words for ways of seeing the truth.’
‘And what were these words?’
Danlo closed his eyes, remembering. ‘There is hanura and nornura. And there is inura, too.’
‘And what is inura?’
‘Fayeth defines it as the superposition of two or more conflicting theories, ideas or sets of knowledge in order to see the intersection, which is called the comparative truth.’
‘Oh ho! Even seemingly opposite truths may have something in common. So, inura: you should keep this word close to your tongue, Danlo.’
Danlo ran his fingers through his hair and said, ‘Different words for truth, but the truth is the truth, isn’t it? Why slice truth into thin sections like a woman slices up a piece of shagshay liver? And space is … just space; now you say there are different spaces?’
‘So, it’s so: thoughtspace and dreamspace, realspace, and the many spaces of the computers; there is memory space and the ontic realm of pure mathematics, and of course the strangest space of all, the space that the pilots call the manifold. So many spaces, oh, so many realities.’
Danlo could not deny that the people of the City lived in a different reality from his. The spaces that their minds dwelt in – so different, so strange! He wondered if he could ever learn the language of such a strange people. In truth, he balked at learning their strange nouns and verbs because he was worried that the words of an insane people would infect him with that very insanity.
‘Ah, oh, it’s just so,’ Old Father said. ‘It’s too bad that you can’t learn the Fravashi language – then you would know what is sane and what is not.’
If it was true that Danlo, like other human beings, could not master the impossible Fravashi language, at least he could learn their system toward a sane and liberated way of being. After all, the Fravashi had taught this system across the Civilized Worlds for three thousand years. Some consider Fravism, as it is sometimes called, to be an old philosophy or even a religion, but in fact
