grace. It’s been a long time since I spoke Alaloi; please forgive me if I make mistakes.’ After a long sip of wine, she continued, ‘There are techniques of remembering, of listening. You chose an exciting time to enter the Order. Everyone is trying to learn the remembrancing art, certainly they are. If you’re accepted into Borja, perhaps you’ll learn it, too.’
Her voice was slurry with wine and bitterness. Once, at the beginning of the Great Schism, because she had believed the Order was corrupt and doomed, she had renounced her position as master imprimatur. And now, twelve years later, there was a renewal of spirit and vision in the towers of the Academy, and the Order was more vital than it had been in a thousand years. If given the chance, she would have rejoined the Order, but for those who abjure their vows, there is never a second chance.
Danlo, who was quite unafraid to touch old people, took Drisana’s hand and held it as he would his grandmother’s. He liked the acceptance he saw in her sad, lovely eyes, though he wondered why she would be so bitter. ‘The gods have imprinted human beings with the Elder Eddas, yes?’
‘No, certainly not!’ Drisana did not explain that it was she, herself, who had once imprinted Mallory Ringess, and therefore she was partly responsible for creating the Ringess and all the chaos of the war. ‘The memory of the Eddas lies deeper than the brain. When we speak of an imprinting, we speak merely of changing the metabolic pathways and the neural network. It’s all a matter of redefining the synapses of the brain.’
‘Fixing the synapses like strands of silk in glacier ice?’
Drisana stared at him as she took a sip of wine. Then she started laughing, and the bitterness suddenly left her. ‘Dear Danlo, you don’t understand anything about what we’re going to do here today, do you?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I always thought the brain was just a store of pink fat.’
Drisana laughed nicely and pulled at his hand. ‘Come,’ she said. ‘Danlo, and my Honoured Fravashi – you’ll have to help me because I’ve drunk too much wine.’
She led them through a wooden door into the imprinting room, or her chamber of impressions, as she liked to call it. In the centre of the imprinting room, atop the Fravashi carpet that Old Father had once given her, was a padded chair covered with green velvet. Aside from a couple of hologram stands behind the chair, it was the only article of furniture in the room. On each of the six walls, from ceiling to floor, were polished shelves holding up what looked like gleaming, metal skulls. There were six hundred and twenty-two of these skulls, arrayed neatly in their rows. ‘These are the heaumes,’ Drisana explained as she sat Danlo down on this chair. ‘You’ve certainly seen a heaume before?’
Danlo sat stiffly in the chair, craning his neck, looking at the heaumes. Ahira, Ahira, he silently called, why would anyone collect metal skulls?
Drisana wobbled on her feet as she ran her hands through his hair, roughly sizing his head. He had a large head for a boy fourteen years old, large and broad, and she turned to select a heaume from the third row from the top. ‘First, we have to make a model of your brain,’ she said.
‘A model?’
‘A picture. Like a painting.’
While Old Father sat down on the rug in the Fravashi fashion to watch, she fit the heaume over Danlo’s head. Danlo held his breath, then slowly let it out. The heaume was cold, even through his thick hair. The heaume was hard and cold, and it tightly squeezed his skull. Something important was about to happen, he thought, though he couldn’t quite tell what. Through the dark hallways of Drisana’s shop, he had kept his sense of direction. He was sure he was facing east. One must piss to the south, sleep with one’s head to the north, but all important ceremonies must occur facing east. How could Drisana know this?
‘A painting of your brain,’ Drisana slurred out. Her breath was heavy over his face and smelled of wine. ‘We’ll paint it with light.’
Directly behind Danlo’s chair, one of the hologram stands suddenly lit up with a model of his brain. There, seemingly floating above the stand, were the glowing folds of his cerebral cortex, the cerebellum and medulla and the vivid chasm splitting the brain into halves. Danlo felt nothing, but he sensed a gleam of light from his side and turned to look.
‘Stop!’ Drisana cried out.
It was too late. Danlo had been blindly obedient only once in his life, during his passage into manhood, on pain of death. How could he help looking at a painting of his brain? He looked, and in the back of the model of his brain, the visual cortex flared with orange light. He looked at his own visual cortex, painted bright with orange and orange-red, and the very art of looking caused the neurons within the cortex to fire. As he looked and looked, suddenly the light was blindingly, brilliantly red. The light was a red spearpoint through his eyes into his brain. The pain was quick, sharp and intense. Old Father had been wrong; there was a hideous pain. He closed his eyes and looked away. The pain fell off into a white heat and a burning, terrible pain.
Drisana grasped his face in her withered hands and gently turned him facing forward. ‘You mustn’t look at your brain’s own model! Soon, we’ll go deeper, down to the neurons. The neuro-transmitter flow, the electricity. Your thoughts – you would be able to see your own thoughts. And that’s so dangerous. Seeing your thoughts as they form up – that itself would create another thought for you to see. The feedback, the infinities. Certainly, the process could go on to infinity, but you’d be insane or dead long before then.’
Danlo stared straight ahead. He held himself very still. He was sweating now, beads of salt water squeezed between his forehead and the heaume. ‘Ahira, Ahira,’ he whispered. ‘O blessed Ahira!’
‘Now be still. Before we can make an imprinting, we must see where to imprint.’
Even though Drisana was half drunk, she laid his brain bare as deftly and easily as he might slit open a snow hare’s belly. Before she had learned the art of imprinting, she had been an akashic. As an akashic, she had done many thousands of brain mappings. All imprimaturs are also akashics, though few akashics know much about the art of imprinting. In truth, it is easier to map and read a brain than it is to imprint it. For no good reason – and this is a bitter irony – the akashics possess a much higher status in the Order than do the lowly imprimaturs.
‘Close your eyes, now,’ Drisana called out softly.
Danlo closed his eyes. Behind him, his brain’s model rippled with light waves. The language clusters in the left hemisphere were magnified and highlighted. The neural network was dense and profoundly complex. Millions of individual neurons, like tiny, glowing red spiders, were packed into a three-dimensional web. From each neuron grew thousands of dendrites, thousands of red, silken strands which sought each other out and connected at the synapses.
‘Danlo, ni luria la shantih,’ Drisana said, and his association cortex fairly jumped with light. And then, ‘Ti asto yujena oyu, you have eyes that see too deeply and too much.’
‘Oh ho, that’s true!’ Old Father broke in. ‘Yujena oyu – so, it’s so.’
Drisana held up a hand to silence him, and she spoke other words in other languages, words that failed to bring Danlo’s association cortex to life. In a few moments, Drisana determined that Alaloi was his milk tongue, and more, that he knew no others except Moksha and a smattering of the Language. It was an extraordinary thing to discover, and she probably longed to immediately spread this news in the various cafes and bars, but as an imprimatur she was obliged to keep secrets.
‘Now
