Ede. Ede, he said, had fought a terrible war with the Silicon God. In the last moments of their last battle, Ede had encoded the program of his selfness into a radio signal that had been received by this very devotionary computer. Now the program ran the circuitry of this little jewelled box instead of a vast machine the size of many star systems.
‘Liar!’ Bertram Jaspari suddenly called out. His usually blue face had reddened to a livid purple. Whatever Malaclypse thought of Danlo’s story, the effects of this news on Bertram were immediate and profound. ‘Naman, liar – all namans are liars because they don’t accept the truth of Ede’s divinity. But I must tell you, Pilot, that Ede is God. The only God, the Infinite, the Inevitable, the Eternal. Whatever god you found dead in the galaxy’s wastelands must have been a hakra slain by Ede for his hubris.’
He believes his Church’s myths literally, Danlo suddenly realized. Until this moment, he had supposed that Bertram had only played at devoutness, mostly for the purpose of gaining power. This is his true danger, that he truly believes.
‘And if your father ever does return,’ Bertram said, ‘it won’t be necessary for the warrior-poets to slay him. Ede, Himself, will slay him.’
He stared straight at Danlo, then, and quoted from one of the books of the Algorithm: ‘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 them blind. For here is the oldest of teachings, here is wisdom: No god is there but God; God is one, and there can be only one God.’
As Bertram Jaspari finished speaking with a flourish of pomposity and false reverence, Danlo looked down at the Ede hologram floating above the devotionary computer. Ede’s large sensuous lips were set with determination, and his black eyes shone brightly. He flashed Danlo the cetics’ finger signs that Danlo had taught him. Many of the lords in the room, of course, knew how to read such signs, but they sat too far away and their eyes were too old to descry what passed between Danlo and Ede. Hanuman, though, sat close and his vision was nearly as keen as Danlo’s. So it must have mystified him to read Ede’s secret communication: ‘I suppose this isn’t the best moment to tell Bertram Jaspari that Ede, the Infinite, the Inevitable, the Eternal, asks for the return of his human body.’
Danlo smiled as he stared at this representation of Nikolos Daru Ede. Ede’s coffee-coloured skin fairly glowed with hope and humour; once again Danlo wondered if a bit of a program running a box-like computer could possibly be conscious in the same way as a man.
Finally, for the first time that day in the College of the Lords, Hanuman li Tosh spoke to the lords. He had a silver tongue and a beautiful, golden voice; his voice was his sword, and through his cetic’s art he had polished and honed it until it cut to the heart of people’s dreams and deepest fears.
‘Of course Mallory Ringess will return to Neverness,’ he said. He closed his eyes suddenly, and the clearface covering his head glowed and glittered for all to see. When he turned to stare at Bertram Jaspari a moment later, he seem to blaze with renewed energy. ‘Of course Mallory Ringess won’t let a warrior-poet slay him. He, the greatest pilot in the history of the Order, will return to lead our ships to victory. Or he will return after Salmalin has destroyed the Fellowship’s fleet. But return he will, as he promised before he left Neverness to become a god.’
He turned to address Lord Pall with his hypnotic voice while his face flickered with eye shadings and little movements that only Lord Pall would understand. There were two cetic sign languages, as Danlo knew. There was the secret language of the hands and fingers, and then there was the truly secret system in which a tightening of the jaw muscles combined with a slight pause in breathing, for example, might convey light-streams of information. But only from one cetic to another. And only some cetics, those of the higher grades, ever learned this second sign system, and so it was something of a mystery how Hanuman li Tosh had acquired this knowledge. But Danlo saw that he truly had – just as he saw Hanuman’s subtle and sinister power over Lord Pall.
‘My Lord Cetic,’ he said to his former teacher and master, ‘something should be done with the warrior-poet.’
‘What do you mean?’ Lord Pall asked, although he knew precisely what Hanuman meant.
‘We shouldn’t live in fear that he’ll try to assassinate Mallory Ringess when he returns.’
‘No,’ Lord Pall agreed.
‘We shouldn’t live in fear of him, now, as he sits before us free to move as a tiger.’
Malaclypse sat lightly in his chair and stared at Hanuman and the muscles beneath his rainbow robe fairly trembled with tension as if he might at any moment spring into motion.
‘But he is restrained,’ Burgos Harsha observed, bowing to the horologe behind Malaclypse. The horologe, whose red robe showed dark sweat-stains beneath his arms, still pointed his laser at the back of Malaclypse’s neck.
‘It’s impossible to restrain a warrior-poet thus,’ Hanuman said. ‘Having no fear of death, the warrior-poet could slay as he wishes. You should know, he could stick a poison needle in one of our ambassadors’ necks before the horologe even realized that he had moved.’
Danlo, who remembered how blindingly quick a warrior-poet could move, simply sat next to Malaclypse looking at him deeply. Demothi Bede looked at him, too; but his were the eyes of a hunted animal, and he nervously fingered the collar of his robe as if he suddenly found it too tight.
‘And how would you restrain him, then?’ Burgos Harsha asked Hanuman. ‘Since you think our Order’s precautions insufficient?’
Hanuman smiled then, and turned to Lord Pall. He said, ‘With my lord’s permission, I’ve arranged other precautions.’
Lord Pall, caught in the freeze of Hanuman’s ice-blue eyes, fluttered his fingers for a moment and said, ‘We can’t be too cautious with the warrior-poets. What arrangements have you made, Lord Hanuman?’
This was the first time that Danlo had heard Hanuman addressed as ‘lord’, and he saw that Hanuman accepted this title as a warlord might tribute from a defeated enemy.
‘These arrangements,’ Hanuman said in his golden voice that filled the Lords’ College like sunlight. He nodded to another horologe who stood outside the door to one of the room’s antechambers. The horologe opened the door, carved with the figures of some of the Order’s most famous lords. And then a cadre of Ringists – six strong-looking men wearing the golden robes identical to Hanuman’s – strode across the black floor and surrounded the chair where Malaclypse sat waiting for them.
‘This is uncalled for!’ Burgos Harsha protested. ‘These men aren’t of the Order, and they have no place here!’
‘No, it’s just the opposite,’ Hanuman said. ‘I have called them here – they’re my personal guard. My godlings. And their place is by my side.’
So saying, he nodded at the first of the Ringists, a hard and cruel-looking man who had once been a warrior-poet before he had deserted his Order to turn ronin. His own eyes, perhaps destroyed in some private war or torture among his violent kind, had been replaced with jewelled eyes: cold, glittering, mechanical orbs that were horrible to look upon. And yet Malaclypse Redring, who sat so close to where this fearsome man stood, looked at him
