nose and said, ‘Then the Entity has absorbed the Tycho’s memories and thoughtways – I can believe that. But the Tycho can’t be alive, he can’t have free will, can he? … can you? If you’re part of the whole … Entity?’
The Tycho – or the imago of the Tycho, as I reminded myself – laughed so hard that spit bubbled from his lips. ‘Nay, my Pilot, I’m like you, like all men. Sometimes I have free will, and sometimes I don’t.’
‘Then you’re not like me,’ I said too quickly. ‘I’ve freedom of choice, everyone does.’
‘Nay, was it freedom of choice made you break your Lord Pilot’s nose?’
It scared and angered me that the Entity could pull this memory from my mind, so I angrily said, ‘Soli goaded me. I lost my temper.’
The Tycho wiped the spit from his lips and rubbed his hands together. I heard the swish of skin against skin. ‘Okay. Soli goaded you. Then Soli was in control, not you.’
‘You’re twisting my words. He made me so mad I wanted to hit him.’
‘Okay. He made you.’
‘I could have controlled myself.’
‘Is that so?’ he asked.
I was angry, and I huffed out, ‘Of course it is. I was just so mad I didn’t care if I hit him.’
‘You must like being mad.’
‘No, I hate it. I always have. But then that’s the way I am.’
‘You must like the way you are.’
I closed my eyes and shook my head. ‘No, you don’t understand. I’ve tried … I try, but when I get mad, it’s … well, it’s part of me, do you see? People aren’t perfect.’
‘And people don’t have free will, either,’ he said.
My cheeks were hot and my tongue was dry. It seemed that the Tycho, too, was trying to goad me into losing my temper. As I breathed rhythmically, struggling for control, I looked at the phased light waves composing the imago of the Tycho. His robe was like glowing smoke in the black air.
I asked, ‘Does a goddess, then? Have free will?’
Again the Tycho laughed, and he said, ‘Does a dog have Buddha nature? You’re quick, my Pilot, but you’re not here to test the goddess. You’re here to be tested.’
‘To be tested … how?’
‘To be tested for possibilities.’
As I was soon to learn, the Entity had been testing me since I first crossed the threshold of her immense brain. The torison spaces and the ugly segmented spaces that had almost defeated me – they were her handiwork, as was the infinite tree imprisoning me. She had tested my mathematical prowess, and – this is what the Tycho told me – She had tested my courage. Not the least of my tests had been my ability to listen to Her godvoice and not lose myself in terror. I had no idea why She would want to test me at all, unless it was just another of Her games. And why should She use the Tycho to test me when She could look into my brain to see all of me there was to see? No sooner had I thought this when the godvoice rolled through my head like thunder:
Thousands of years ago your eschatologists mapped the DNA molecule down to the last carbon atom. But they still search for the rules by which DNA unfolds life and codes for new forms of life. They are still learning DNA’s grammar. As with DNA, so it is with the unfolded brain. Imagine a baby who has learned the alphabet but who has no idea what words mean or the rules for putting them together. To understand the brain from its trillions of synapses would be like trying to appreciate a poem from the arbitrary twistings of individual letters. You are that poem. There are infinite possibilities. You, my Mallory, will always be a mystery to me.
– I don’t want to be tested.
Life is a test.
– If I succeed, will you free me from the tree?
Like an ape, you are free at this moment to escape your tree.
– Free? I don’t know how.
That is too bad. If you succeed, you are free to ask me three questions, any questions. It is an old, old game.
– And if I fail?
Then the light goes out. Oh, where does the light go when the light goes out?
I tightened my fists until my fingernails cut my palms. I did not want to be tested.
‘Well, my Pilot, shall we begin?’ It was the Tycho speaking as he scratched his jowls.
‘I don’t know.’
I will not record here in detail the many tests that the Tycho – the Entity – put to me. Some of the tests, such as the Test of Knowledge, as he called it, were long, meticulous and boring. The nature of other tests, such as the Test of Chaos, I hardly understood at all. There was a Test of Reason and a Test of Paradox, followed, I think, by the Test of Reality in which I was made to question my every assumption, habit and belief while the Tycho bombarded me with alien ideas that I had never thought before. This test nearly drove me mad. I never understood the need to be tested at all, not even when the Tycho explained: ‘Someday, my angry Pilot, you may have great power, perhaps as Lord Pilot, and you’ll need to see things through multiplex eyes.’
‘I’m rather fond of my own eyes.’
‘Nevertheless,’ he said, ‘nevertheless …’
Suddenly, within my head, echoed the teachings of the famous cantor, Alexandar of Simoom, Alexandar Diego Soli, who was Leopold Soli’s long-dead father. I was immersed body, mind and soul in the belief system of the strange Friends of God. I saw the universe through Alexandar’s dark, grey eyes. It was a cold universe in which nothing was certain except the creation of mathematics. Other forms of creation did not really exist. Yes, there was man, but what was man, after all? Was man the creation of the Ieldra, who had in turn been created by the Elder Ieldra? And if so, who had created them? The Very Elder Ieldra?
And so I learned this strange theology of Alexandar Diego Soli: It was known that the first Lord Cantor, the great Georg Cantor, with an ingenious proof array had demonstrated that the infinity of integers – what he called aleph null – is embedded within the higher infinity of real numbers. And he had proved that that infinity is embedded within the greater infinity of aleph two, and so on, a whole hierarchy of infinities, an infinity of infinities. The Simoom cantors believe that as it is with numbers, so it is with the hierarchies of the gods. Truly, as Alexandar had taught his son, Leopold, if a god existed, who or what had created him (or her)? If there is a higher god, call him god2, there must be a god3 and a god4, and so on. There is an aleph million and an aleph centillion, but there is no final, no highest infinity, and therefore there is no God. No, there could be no true God, and so there could be no true creation. The logic was as harsh and merciless as Alexandar of Simoom himself: If there is no true creation then there is no true reality. If nothing is real, then man is not real; man in some fundamental sense does not exist. Reality is all a dream, and worse, it is less than a
