stared at these simple ideoplasts, and his eyes were open to their burning crimson and cobalt lights as he waited. His heart beat three times, keenly, quickly, and he waited forever to feel the Entity’s cold, invisible hand crush the life out of his beating heart.
O blessed man! – I will not be tested, but neither will I slay you now. It would be too sad if I had to slay you. You have chanced your only life to force a goddess to your will – I can’t tell you how this pleases me.
With a long sigh, Danlo let out the breath that he had been holding. He pushed his fist up against his eye and stared at the ideoplasts.
A man may not test a goddess. But a goddess may exercise her caprice and agree to play a game. I love to play, Danlo wi Soli Ringess, and so I will play the poetry game. I have been waiting a thousand years to play.
Danlo took this as a sign that he should recite the first line of his poem immediately. Before the Entity could change Her capricious mind, he drew in a quick breath of air and said, ‘These are two lines from an old poem that my … grandfather taught me. Do you know the next line?:
How do you capture a beautiful bird
without killing its spirit?’
For a moment, the meditation room was empty of motion or sound. Danlo could almost feel the inside of the Earth beneath him churning with underground rivers of information as the Entity searched Her vast memory. He imagined waves of information encoded as tachyons which propagated at speeds a million times faster than light and flowed out from this planet in invisible streams toward a million brilliant moon-brains around other stars. For a moment, all was quiet and still, and then the ideoplasts array lit up, and Danlo kithed the Entity’s response:
The rules of the poetry game require the lines to be from an ancient poem. It must be a poem that has been preserved in libraries or in the spoken word for at least three thousand years. Are you aware of these rules?
‘Yes … do you remember the poem?’
How could I not remember? I love poetry as you do oranges and honey.
In truth, Danlo did not think that the Entity would remember this poem. The lines were from the Song of Life, which was the collective lore and wisdom of the Alaloi people on the ice-locked islands west of Neverness. The Song of Life was an epic poem of four thousand and ninety-six lines; it was an ancient poem telling of man’s joy in coming into the world – and of the pain of God in creating the world out of fire and ice and the other elements torn from God’s infinite silver body. For five thousand years, in secret ceremonies of beating drums and bloody knives, the Alaloi fathers had passed this poem on to their sons. On pain of death, no Alaloi man could reveal any part of this poem to any man or woman (or any other being) who had not been initiated into the mysteries of manhood. For this simple reason, Danlo did not think that the Entity would have learned of the poem. It had never been written down, or recorded in libraries, or told to outsiders inquiring about the Alaloi ways. Danlo himself did not know all the lines. One night when Danlo was nearly fourteen years old, when he had stood with bloody loins and a naked mind beneath the stars, his passage into manhood had been interrupted. His grandfather, Leopold Soli, had died while reciting the first of the Twelve Riddles, and so Danlo had never learned the rest of the poem. He truly did not know how a beautiful bird might be captured without harming it; this vital knowledge formed no part of his memory. For this reason, too, even if the Entity had read his memory and mind, She could not remember what he had never known. He hoped that the Entity would simply admit Her ignorance and allow him to leave.
After waiting some sixty heartbeats, Danlo licked his dry teeth and said, ‘I shall recite the lines again.
How do you capture a beautiful bird
without killing its spirit?
What is the next line?’
He did not expect an answer to these puzzling lines, so it dismayed him when the ideoplasts shifted suddenly and he kithed the words of a poem:
For a man to capture a bird is shaida.
He stood there in the cold meditation room, listening to the distant ocean and the beating of his heart, and he kithed this line of poetry. It was composed in the style of all the rest of the Song of Life. It had the ring of truth, or rather, the sentiment it expressed was something that every Alaloi man would know in his heart as true. No Alaloi man (or woman or child) would think to capture a bird. Was not God himself a great silver thallow whose wings touched at the far ends of the universe? And yet Danlo, even as he smiled to himself, did not think that these seemingly true words could be the next line of the poem. Leopold Soli had once told him that the Twelve Riddles answered the deepest mysteries of life. Surely a mere prescription of behaviour, an injunction against keeping birds in cages, could not be part of the blessed Twelve Riddles. No, the next line of the Song of Life must be something other. When Danlo closed his eyes and listened to the drumbeat of his heart, he could almost hear the true words of this song. Although the memory of it eluded him, his deepest sense of truth told him that the Entity had recited a wrong or false line.
And so he said, ‘No – this cannot be right.’
Do you challenge my words, Danlo wi Soli Ringess? By the rules of the game, you may challenge my response only by reciting the correct line of the poem.
Danlo closed his eyes trying to remember what he had never known. Once before, when he was a heartbeat away from death, he had accomplished such a miracle. Once before, in the great library on Neverness, as he walked the knifeblade edge between death and life, a line from an unknown poem had appeared in his mind like the light of a star exploding out of empty black space. Here on this Earth halfway across the galaxy, in a strange little house that a goddess had made, he tried to duplicate this feat. But now he was only like a blind man trying to capture his shadow by running after it. He could see nothing, hear nothing, remember nothing at all. He could not recite the correct line of the poem, and so he said, ‘I … cannot. I am sorry.’
Then I have won the game.
Danlo clenched his jaws so tightly that his teeth hurt. Then he said, ‘But your words are false! You have only gambled … that I would not know the true words.’
You have gambled too, my wild man. And you have lost.
Danlo said nothing as he ground his teeth and stared at the ideoplasts flashing up from the floor. Then gradually, like a butterfly working free of its cocoon, he began to smile. He smiled brightly and freely, silently laughing at his hubris in challenging a goddess.
But at least you have not lost your life. And you are no worse off than if you hadn’t proposed the poetry game. Now you must rest here in this house until it is time for your test.
With a quick bow of his head, Danlo accepted his fate. He laughed softly, and he said, ‘Someday … I will remember. I will remember how to capture a bird without harming it. And then I will return to tell you.’
He expected no answer to this little moment of defiance. And then the ideoplasts lit up one last time.
You are tired from your journey, and you must rest. But I will leave you with a final riddle: How does a goddess capture a beautiful man without destroying his soul? How is this possible, Danlo wi Soli Ringess?
Just
