‘I’m not a slelnik, even though some people say I look like one.’
Danlo hadn’t yet heard of the despised, unnatural breeding strategies practised on a few of the Civilized Worlds; he knew nothing of the exemplars and slelniks born in abomination from the artificial wombs. He thought he understood a part of Hanuman’s pain and obvious loneliness; however, he understood wrongly. ‘Your parents have gone over, yes?’
Hanuman looked down at the ice and then shook his head. ‘Does it matter?’ he asked. ‘To them, I might as well be dead.’
He told Danlo something of his journey to Neverness, then. In the Ice Dome, a thousand boys were stamping their feet, slapping leather sandals against ice as they huffed out steam and complained of neglect, and Hanuman told of how he had been born into an important Architect family on Catava. His parents were Pavel and Moriah li Tosh, readers in the Cybernetic Reformed Church. (Over the millennia, the Architects of the Infinite Intelligence of the Cybernetic Universal Church have been riven into many different sub-religions. The Evolutionary Church of Ede, the Cybernetic Orthodox Churches, the Fostora Separatist Union – these are but a few of the hundreds of churches which have splintered off from the original church body, beginning with the Ianthian Heresy and the First Schism in the year 331 EV, that is to say, the 331st year since the vastening of Nikolos Daru Ede. All time, the Architects say, must begin at the moment Ede carked his consciousness into one of his mainbrain computers and thus became the first of humanity’s gods.) Like his parents, Hanuman had undergone the traditional reader training in one of the church schools. Unlike any of the respectable Architects that he knew, however, he had rebelled while still very young, begging his parents’ permission to attend the Order’s elite school in Oloruning, which is Catava’s largest and only real city.
‘My father allowed me to enter the elite school,’ Hanuman said, ‘only because it was the best school on Catava. But I had to agree to finish my reader training in the church after graduation; I had to agree not to attend the Academy on Neverness. So I agreed. But it was an impossible agreement. I never should have made it. All my friends in the elite school were planning to enter the Academy, if they could. And I’d always hoped to enter the Academy. To become a reader like my parents and grandparents – I never really wanted that. Oh, wait … please excuse my coughing. Do you know about the readers of my church? Of my parents’ church? No? I’m not supposed to tell anyone this, but I shall anyway. The second holiest ceremony in our church is the facing ceremony. You’ll have heard rumours about the facing ceremony – almost everyone has. No? Where have you spent your life? Well, in the facing ceremony, any Worthy Architect is allowed to interface with one of the church’s communal computers. The interfacing, entering into computer consciousness, the information flows, like lightning, the power. It’s like heaven, really, the only good thing about being an Architect. But before every facing ceremony, there has to be a cleansing. Of sin. We Architects … the Architects, call sin “negative programming”. So before a facing, a cleansing, because it’s blasphemy to interface a holy computer while unclean with negative programs – that’s what most of the 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
