to honour the life and discoveries of his best friend, Mallory Ringess. Mallory Ringess had shown the Order – and all humankind – that any man or woman could become a god through remembrance of the Elder Eddas. Bardo had brought this teaching to Neverness, and more, in his joyances and ceremonies where the sacred remembrancers’ drug, kalla, was drunk, he had made the experience of the One Memory available to the Order’s academicians and the swarms of seekers who peopled the city. But Bardo, as Bardo said, was better at beginning great works than completing them: he was no prophet, but only a man with a few uncommon talents, a former pilot of the Order who simply wanted to help his friends and followers towards the infinite possibilities that awaited them. From almost the very beginning of the founding of Ringism, he had become involved with the cetic, Hanuman li Tosh.
‘Ah, you all know of Hanuman,’ Bardo said. He paused to exchange a quick look with Danlo. Once, before they had become enemies, Danlo and Hanuman had been the deepest of friends. ‘But how many of you really know Hanuman?’
He went on to admit that Hanuman li Tosh was a brilliant and charismatic young man – and also a religious genius who had shaped the explosive expansion of Ringism in the city of Neverness and throughout the Civilized Worlds. But Hanuman was secretly cruel and vain, Bardo said, and monstrously ambitious. Hanuman, Bardo said, had been like a cancer in the belly of his church: making secret alliances with other luminaries within the Way; devising and leading new ceremonies to control directly their followers’ minds; and worst of all, spreading lies about Bardo and undermining Bardo’s leadership in any way that he could. As Ringism spread its tentacles (this was Bardo’s word) into the halls of the Order and the cities of the Civilized Worlds, the new religion was sick at its centre, with Hanuman robbing it of true life in his terrible hunger for power. Finally, on a day that Bardo would never forget, Hanuman had challenged his authority directly and ousted him as Lord of the Way of Ringess.
‘He stole my goddamned church!’ Bardo thundered at the astonished lords. His face was purple with rage, and he stamped his black, nall-skin boot against the black diamond circle. ‘My lovely, blessed, beautiful church!’
For a moment no one spoke. Then Lord Nikolos fixed his icy eyes on Bardo and asked, ‘Do you refer to the cathedral which your cult purchased from one of the Kristian sects, or the organization of believers whom you gulled into following you?’
Bardo, who knew very well what Lord Nikolos thought about religions, decided to take no offence at this. He simply said, ‘Both. At first, it was the cathedral, and then Hanuman poisoned the Ringists’ minds against me. Ah, too bad! Too bad.’
‘And how does one steal a cathedral?’ Lord Nikolos asked.
Bardo looked straight at Lord Nikolos and sighed. ‘Do you remember how the cathedral was financed?’
‘I’m not sure I ever cared to know.’
‘Well, it was an expensive building,’ Bardo said. ‘Hideously expensive – but the grandest building in all the city. I had to have it. That is we had to have it, we Ringists who followed the Way. So we decided to buy it in condominium. The money for it came from the pockets of each Ringist. There was a problem of course, with some of the Ringists owning a share in such a building.’
‘Because these Ringists were also Ordermen?’
‘Exactly. Since the Order’s canons forbade ownership of property, they had to turn their shares over to others outside the Order who held it in trust for them. Hanuman, in secret, began to win these trustees to his confidence – and many other Ringists as well. And then one day, on the fourteenth of deep winter, he —’
‘He called for a vote setting rules as to who was permitted entrance to the cathedral,’ Lord Nikolos said.
‘How did you know that?’ Bardo called out, less suspicious than amazed.
‘It seems an obvious enough stratagem’ Lord Nikolos said. ‘How is it that you didn’t foresee it?’
‘Ah, well, at first I did. Is Bardo a stupid man? No, indeed I’m not, and I thought that I was full aware of who among the trustees was loyal to me and who was not. But I’m afraid I miscounted. I was, ah, busy with other concerns. It’s no simple thing, you know, founding a goddamned religion.’
Here Danlo looked at Bardo across the hall and smiled. It was a shameful admission for a pilot steeped in the art of mathematics to admit that he had miscounted. But Bardo, for all his cunning, could be the most careless of men. Most likely his ‘other concerns’ were the seduction and sexing of the many beautiful young women who sought to serve the Way of Ringess in any way they could.
‘It seems,’ Lord Nikolos said, ‘that Hanuman has his own concerns.’
‘He barred me from my own church, by God! He installed himself as Lord of the Way!’
‘And the Ringists followed him?’
‘Too many did, too many,’ Bardo admitted. ‘Ah, they were sheep anyway – who else would have originally followed such an ill-fated man as I? Oh, at first I tried to lead the remembrancing ceremonies from my own house. For half a year, there were two Ways of Ringess in Neverness. But I no longer had the heart for it. I saw what Hanuman was doing with my church, and it made me want to cry.’
And what Hanuman was doing, Bardo said, was the total suborning of the Order – not for the sake of remembrancing the Elder Eddas and honouring Mallory Ringess’ journey into godhood, but solely for the sake of power. Years before, Hanuman had made a secret pact with the Lord Cetic, Audric Pall, whom he had helped become Lord of the Order. Lord Pall had manoeuvred to have the Order’s canons amended, and for the first time in history, the lords and masters and academicians of Neverness were permitted formal association with a religion. Indeed, they were encouraged, even pressured, to profess their faith in the Three Pillars of Ringism and interface Hanuman’s computers, in which the remembrance of the Elder Eddas had supposedly been stored as compelling images and vivid surrealities. Lord Pall gained for the stale, old Order the energies of an explosive new religion. And Hanuman gained alliance with the Order’s many pilots who might set forth in their sparkling lightships and bring the Way of Ringess to the Civilized Worlds and to the stars beyond. Soon, Bardo said, the Way of Ringess and the Order would be as one: a single religio-scientific entity whose power would be without constraint or bound.
When Bardo had finished speaking, all the lords sat motionless in stunned silence. Then Lord Nikolos blinked his eyes in disbelief and said, ‘This is very, very bad.’
In truth neither he nor any other lord could have foreseen that Ringism like a ravenous beast would gobble up the Order and many of the Civilized Worlds in only five years.
‘I’ve always mistrusted the religious impulse,’ Lord Nikolos said, pointing his small finger at Bardo. ‘But I never understood the true nature of my mistrust. Now I do. I offer my apology to every lord, master and orderman. Had I known the danger that this man and his cult posed, I never would have allowed the Order to divide in two. We should have remained in Neverness to oppose this abomination with all our will.’
He didn’t add that Lord Pall had originally chosen many members of the Second Vild Mission precisely because they opposed the Way of Ringess. Danlo wi Soli Ringess, who had spoken out against the Way and was now Hanuman’s mortal enemy, had seen his name placed at the top of Lord Pall’s list of exiles. And as for Lord Nikolos himself, he had been only too happy to flee what he now called an ‘abomination’, to take his place as Lord of the New Order far from Neverness.
‘Ah, well, no one can know
