Requiem Of Homo Sapiens - The Wild Part 44

- Bernard Shaw, Holocaust Century Eschatologist I do not know a man so bold He dare in a lonely place That awful stranger consciousness Deliberately face.

- source unknown.

The next night, in the Hall of Heaven, Danlo faced his last test. The Hall was one of the many lesser buildings surrounding the Temple, and it was unique both in its function and its shape. The House of Eternity, Ede's Tomb, the Elders' Dining Hall and the great cube of the Temple itself all these structures bespoke the symbolism of the Church with their planes and angles and their relentless rectilinearity. But the Hall of Heaven was different. Davin Iviei Iviastalir, the eighty-eighth Holy Ivi and a visionary different in many ways from all his predecessors, had ordered the Hall built as a domed amphitheatre. Unlike the windowless House of Eternity, with its dense and dreary nall plastic, a great, gossamer bubble of clary wholly enclosed the Hall, so transparent that the thousands of Architects who swarmed the Hall could look out upon all the other buildings of the New City of Ornice Olorun. And tens of thousands of their churchmates could look in. When a light-offering was being made, pilgrims and other people from all across the Temple grounds would pause and watch the flashes of colour illuminating the dome. On the day that Danlo wi Soli Ringess promised to make a light-offering to Ede the G.o.d, many Architects crowded around the Hall of Heaven in hopes of discovering if this naman pilot from Neverness might truly be the Lightbringer, and many more filled the Hall itself. When Danlo entered the Hall, he counted some twenty-eight thousand three hundred people huddled together on plastic benches, waiting for him. The rising tiers of these benches were arrayed about a circular open s.p.a.ce perhaps two hundred feet across. At the exact centre of this s.p.a.ce, the Architects had built a chair. In truth, with its ma.s.sive golden arms and strange, silvered headpiece, it looked more like some barbaric throne than a place for a mere man to sit. When Harrah's keepers led Danlo across the floor and bade him take his place before the thousands of watchful Architects, he couldn't help feeling that all these people expected great and G.o.dly things of him. But he was only a man. And more, he was a man who had always hated sitting in any kind of chair, especially one that would surround his brain with an intense logic field and display the innermost workings of his mind for all to see.

'My brothers and sisters, will you please come to silence!'

On the floor beside Danlo's chair stood a portly old man with a big nose and big, boisterous voice. His name was Javas Icolari, the Elder Javas who was one of the most prominent theologians of the Juriddik sect and one of Harrah Ivi en li Ede's closest friends. Harrah had asked him to say a few words before Danlo began his test, and the affable Javas was glad to oblige.

'Emissaries and namans from the Known Stars, pilgrims, Worthy Architects, Readers and my fellow Elders, you are welcome here today.' Javas turned and bowed deeply to Harrah Ivi en li Ede where she sat in the first tier of benches directly facing Danlo. 'My Holy Ivi, welcome, welcome you do us all great honour with your eternal presence.'

Harrah returned Javas' bow and smiled at him encouragingly. Javas then explained the importance of the marvels that everyone would soon witness and gave a rather long and boring account of the history of this strange ceremony called the light- offering. As he rambled on, Danlo held himself straight and silent in his chair. He looked across the central circle at Harrah. She had the position of honour, sitting as she did in the middle of the first bench of the Hall's western quadrant. For all other ceremonies, of course, the position of honour was located directly across the Hall opposite Harrah, on the first bench of the eastern quadrant. But because Danlo would be making a light-offering like no other, his chair had been turned to the west. And because the Holy Ivi wished to look at Danlo face to face and eye to eye at least before his test began she had seated herself at a bench normally reserved for the lesser Elders of the Koivuniemin. That morning, however, on Harrah's bench and those near to her, sat the greatest men and women of the Church. To Harrah's right were Varaza li Shehn, Pilar Narcavage and Pol Iviertes. To her left, Kyoko Ivi Iviatsui and Sul Iviercier carefully folded their white kimonos as befit the oldest Elders of the Church. Next to them waited Kissiah en li Ede, the Elidi master, the inscrutable mystic who had favoured Danlo's mission to Tannahill from the first. Ten benches toward the south, as far away as protocol would permit, the Hall's keepers had sat a few of the Iviomils. There Jedrek Iviongeon exchanged wary looks with Fe Farruco Ede and Oksana Ivi Selow while at the bench's centre, Bertram Jaspari scowled and sent darts of hatred shooting across the room at Danlo. By no accident, Malaclypse Redring had been placed next to him. The benches between Harrah and Malaclypse were full of her keepers, these quick-faced men and women who kept a fierce watch over the Iviomils and any others who might wish to harm Harrah. But everyone else in the hundreds of surrounding benches sat looking at Danlo all alone in his golden chair at the centre of the Hall. Soon, when Javas Icolari finished his speech, they would crane their necks to gaze at the lights above Danlo's head, up into the air.

'Danlo wi Soli Ringess!' Javas turned towards Danlo to address him. 'Do you desire today to make an offering to Ede the G.o.d?'

As would any worthy Architect, Danlo had brought his devotionary computer into the Hall. Upon sitting down, he had placed it on the ma.s.sive arm of his chair. There the hologram of Nikolos Daru Ede glittered in the air as did thousands of others throughout the Hall. The little glowing Ede betrayed no signs of running the remnant programs of a dead G.o.d but only smiled beatifically as did all the other Edes floating above their devotionaries.

'Danlo wi Soli Ringess will you make a light-offering today in honour of Ede's quest to write the Infinite Program?'

Danlo realized suddenly that Javas Icolari and everyone else was waiting for him to give his a.s.sent. 'Yes,' he said, finally remembering the correct response that Harrah's keepers had taught him. 'It is my desire I will make an offering.'

'He will make an offering!' Javas Icolari shouted this out even to the topmost tiers where the common Architects strained to take in what transpired on the floor below them.

'Being clean in his mind and free of negative programs,' Javas said, 'Danlo wi Soli Ringess wishes to show that he is worthy of being vastened in Ede our G.o.d.'

Although this last a.s.sertion of Javas was only a formality, it troubled Danlo. Five days earlier, in the silence of his altar room, he had placed the holy heaume upon his head and had faced one of the history pools. There, waiting cool and clear in the eternal information flows of a vast cybernetic s.p.a.ce, he had found many records concerning the evolution of the Church's most sacred ceremonies. The light-offering, it seemed, had not always been a public event. It had begun nearly three thousand years earlier, during the architetcy of Wallam Mato Iviercier long before the War of the Faces and the Old Church's flight into the Vild. Originally, in the first days of the Church, the offering had been nothing more than a visual aid to Readers hoping to free their brethren from negative aspects of themselves. A Worthy Architect would enter the Temple (the first and original Temple on Alumit) and would step into a dark cell where he would greet his Reader and submit to a cleansing. The Reader would place a silver heaume on the Worthy's head; this scanning computer would read out the brain functions and make a model of the mind. The Reader would then study the projection of this model the many-coloured hologram similar in size to the devotionary imagoes of Nikolos Daru Ede that were just becoming popular. If one believed the mythos of the Church, a well-trained Reader could descry in the glowing hologram lights the patterns and master programs of the human mind. It was the duty of every Architect, of course, to submit to cleansings that he might one day be free of the negative programs that caused man so much woe. All Worthy Architects hoped thus to purify themselves before their old age and certainly before death. Because only the pure in mind could have their pallatons vastened into an eternal computer, no one could afford to ignore his spiritual refinement. In actuality, of course, almost no one was denied this cybernetic salvation. Some said that this proved the power of the Church to rewrite people's flawed personal programs. Others, such as the Elidis, cited it as evidence of the Church's corruption, for almost all Architects to be p.r.o.nounced perfectly clean before death, they said, defied all probability and all evidence of most people's imperfection. Only seven hundred years earlier, they observed, the Readers who certified an Architect's worthiness to be vastened were themselves flawed with the most negative of programs. Many of these Readers were proud, ambitious, venal.

They traded favours with each other and with important Architects seeking an Elders.h.i.+p in the Koivuniemin. Sometimes they sold outright the much-coveted black badges of purity that the Architects of that time wore on the sleeves of their kimonos.

Their power over people's lives had grown very great. But as the Elidi master, Gabriel Mondragon, had accused, such readings were at best imprecise. In truth, it was almost impossible to read the mind's programs from a display of coloured lights, much less make judgements as to which were positive, negative, or divine. In these ancient readings of one's inner radiance, there was much sham, self-delusion, vanity, and overweening pride. It was pride, above all other things, that had led to the evolution of the modern light ceremony.

'Having meditated upon the mysteries of Ede's Infinite Mind,' Javas continued, 'Danlo wi Soli Ringess wishes to show that the glories of the human mind are only a reflection of the divine.'

Once a time, the greatest princes of the Church, upon being p.r.o.nounced free of negative programs, wished to prove their perfection to people other than their personal Readers in their private cells. And so they had invited whole conclaves of Readers to witness the glittering holograms of their minds. Because the reading cells could only accommodate a few men or women, the readings had been moved to the facing room of the Temple. But still these proud princes of the mind coveted greater glory, and so they demanded that all Worthy Architects be allowed to view the triumph of their readings. And this was done, and because the facing room was too small for the swarms of Architects who desired to behold a model of a perfectly programmed human brain, the Church built their first a.s.sembly halls exclusively devoted to this evolving ceremony. They called these cubical buildings the Houses of Heaven, and those Architects most adept at showing the divine light within were called the Perfecti. They were artists of the mind, masters of their brains' deepest programs. They were masters of moving their minds. Originally, the light-offering had been a static model of the brain, as frozen in time as coloured ice or a foto of a man's face. But the Perfecti, wis.h.i.+ng to show the mind's true beauty, had taken to composing luminous movements of pure thought akin in grandeur to man's most compelling music. Thus, over the centuries, the light-offering had evolved from a private and purely religious duty into a very public art form. While no one could ever forget that the Perfectis' glittering compositions were made in honour of Ede the G.o.d, most people attended the light-offerings not as witnesses to perfection but because they liked to be dazzled and awed.

'And now,' Javas told the a.s.sembled Architects, 'our Holy Ivi, Harrah Ivi en li Ede will describe the nature of today's unusual ceremony.'

Having completed the formalities preceding all of the most important light- offerings, Javas Icolari took his place on the bench nearest Harrah's. And then, with Pol Iviertes holding her flowing white kimono off the floor, Harrah stood to address the throngs in the Hall of Heaven. 'My children,' she called out in a clear voice. She paused for a moment to look at Danlo waiting all alone in his chair, and she favoured him with a smile. 'My children, we must remind you that we are here today not merely as viewers of an offering but as witnesses to the words of our holy Algorithm.

Is it not said that one day, when you are near to despair, a man will come among you from the stars? Is it not written that he will be a man without fear who will look upon the heavenly lights within and not fall mad?'

Danlo, sitting by himself on a golden chair before nearly thirty thousand people, tried to keep a smile of amus.e.m.e.nt from his lips. Although Harrah had implied that he was as fearless as light, he felt his heart beating up through his neck arteries with all the force of a man rhythmically hammering two rocks together. He looked at Harrah standing so solemnly in the Hall's exact west. He remembered something about directions, then. In his tribe a man would die to the west. When his time came to make the journey to the other side of day, his sons and daughters would wrap him in furs and place him against a yu tree so that he could look out over the frozen sea and listen to the wind calling him.

'We must remind you,' Harrah continued, 'that Danlo wi Soli Ringess is no Perfecti, and we are here today not to comment upon the beauties of his mind. We are here only as witnesses to his test. Will he look upon the heavenly lights within and live to tell us what he has seen? Is he indeed the bringer of light who will show the way toward all that is possible?'

Again Harrah paused and let her gaze fall upon Bertram Jaspari and Malaclypse Redring of Qallar. Then she said, 'We shall pray that he is the Lightbringer, for this is indeed a dark time for our eternal Church. We would ask you all to pray for Danlo wi Soli Ringess, for whether Lightbringer or not, he must face today the heavenly lights that even our most accomplished Perfecti dare not look upon lest they fall mad.'

Harrah bowed her head in silence, and as robots moving to a single program, twenty-eight thousand, three hundred and forty-five women and men followed her example. But in the Hall that evening, there were twenty-eight thousand, three hundred and forty-eight people. Bertram Jaspari sat stiffly on his bench refusing to pray. And next to him Malaclypse Redring, being a warrior-poet, was permitted neither prayer nor any other observance of religious practice. And Danlo wi Soli Ringess, as he gripped his flute in his hands, kept his eyes open and his head erect. As his found-father Haidar had once taught him, a man could pray for his family, pray for his tribe, and pray for all the people of the world. In private, he could even pray to the one animal who was his other self. But it was unseemly for a full man to pray for himself in sight of others who were praying for him so fervently.

'We wish you well, Danlo wi Soli Ringess of Neverness.'

Harrah had finished her prayer, and she lifted her hands toward the thousands of Architects at their benches around the Hall. 'We all wish you well. May you behold His Infinite Light in your own.'

With a brilliant smile revealing her infinite faith in Ede the G.o.d (and perhaps in Danlo wi Soli Ringess, the man), Harrah sat back down on her bench. Then the lights of the dome gradually dimmed. The open s.p.a.ces around Danlo and over the tiers of benches grew dark, almost black. For a moment, a deep silence swept over the Hall.

Danlo listened to the inward rush of his own breath. It was as if his heart and the whole world were filling up with a cold, icy wind. The metal seat and arms of his chair felt cold to the touch and he wished that he had worn a wool kamelaika instead of his formal black silks. To either side of his face, the chair's silver headpiece flared out like the wings of a seagull enclosing his brain in a logic field so intense that he could almost feel it humming. He sat watching and waiting, counting his heartbeats as the scanning computers within the headpiece made a model of his brain.

Ahira, Ahira, he heard himself thinking, this will be my last test.

In truth, he did not antic.i.p.ate that this light-offering would be nearly so difficult or dangerous as his Walk with the Dead. Of course no man in his sane brain would will- ingly look upon a model of his own mind. In viewing the visual cortex alone, there were possibilities for wild feedbacks, the building of intense bursts of light that could burn out the brain. And whether the offering be sham or show, it was certainly dangerous for anyone (even a master cetic) to look upon his own consciousness. But it was a danger of a lesser degree than letting a Temple keeper infuse images directly into his brain. He would not be interfaced with a computer. The scanning computers in the silver headpiece could only read the firing of his brain's neurons; they could not hurl him into a raging surreality and make him face the demons of his soul. And if the lights in his visual cortex grew too intense, he could always close his eyes, breaking the feedback. At the worst, Danlo expected his always lurking head pain might explode into a few bad moments of agony. Or, for a few moments, he might lose himself in the terror of pure consciousness. He remembered, then, what his grandfather had taught him once on a day of blizzard and terrible cold: that the whole art of journeying into the unknown was in knowing what to do when you didn't know what to do.

I will look within myself and behold myself smiling back at me. And then, after recalling a favourite old poem, he thought, I am the eye with which the universe beholds itself and knows itself divine.

Suddenly, in the black air above him, out of the empty s.p.a.ces curving beneath the dome, a great cube of light appeared. The light was immense and deep beyond the measure of his eyes, and suddenly he knew that this test would be more wildly dangerous than any he had ever faced. He sat almost frozen to his chair, holding his flute in his right hand while with his left, he touched the white owl's feather in his hair. Somewhere in front of him, in the dazzling darkness, Harrah Ivi en li Ede sat not far from Jedrek Iviongeon and Bertram Jaspari and thousands of other waiting Architects. But they were far from Danlo's field of vision and he did not see them. His eyes were only for the light above him, the manifold coloured lights that shone as one single, terrible light. He could look upon its brilliance all too easily. The cube of light floated over the western quadrant of the Hall. For excellent reasons, the golden chair beneath him was usually turned toward the darkest part of the dome in the east. Danlo wished he could gaze into the nothingness of that direction, but instead he had promised to face what the greatest Perfectis of the Cybernetic Universal Church were never permitted to behold.

It is only a hologram, he thought. In my life, I have seen ten thousand holograms.

The cube of light was only a holographic model of his brain, truly, but it was two hundred times as large in dimension. And it was not an exact model. The human brain is a curving bundle of neural structures, fissures and folds, moulded together like a ball of snowworms. But the light-offering glittered high in the Hall as a perfect cube.

It was as if Danlo's cerebral cortex, cerebellum and brainstem had been squeezed into a box. And yet no part of his brain not even the hippocampus nor the tiny, nut-like amygdala was missing. One hundred billion neurons quivered within the walls of his skull, and the offering represented each of these cells as a tiny coloured light.

Whenever one of his neurons fired, a corresponding light in the offering would flare brightly for a moment and then fade into quiescence. All through the hologram, from its centre to its eight corners, waves of lavender or aquamarine light rippled outward in hideously complex swirls almost too quick for his eyes to follow. He tried to perceive the crackles of carmine or emerald or rose marking out the various neural pathways. But nothing in this model of his brain would hold still for more than a moment. With this thought came an immediate response, a movement of maroon pulses through his cerebral cortex. (Or rather, that topmost and front part of the cube where the thinking centre of his brain glowed in colours from ruby to puce.) He observed these pulses, and this act of apprehension generated new thoughts, which boiled through the hologram with the speed of superheated steam. It occurred to him that thought was motion, and motion light. His eyes swept the cube back and forth, from side to side, up and down. He almost expected to see light reflecting off each of the six faces, everywhere filling up the cube with its brilliance. But, astonis.h.i.+ngly, much of the hologram was dark, even black. At any moment, perhaps, no more than a fifth of the individual neurons in his brain were firing. Because he knew it was dangerous to do so, almost without thinking, he looked toward the rear of the cube where his visual cortex glowed a dull red. But the very act of fixing on this disturbing colour caused many other neurons in his vision centre to fire. The offering modelled this as intense bursts of radiance, which in turn, as Danlo drank in the light with his eyes, caused yet greater bundles of neurons to flare into activity. In scarcely a moment, the whole of his visual cortex exploded into a bright violet flame. The pain of it burned like a hot knife thrust through his eye to the back of his brain. He could almost see this pain: it looked like a black tunnel surrounded by walls of fire. He might have fainted in agony, but his will toward consciousness was strong. He continued to stare at the terrible light of his own vision for a long time at least for the count of three heartbeats, which was quite long enough to make the watching Architects gasp in amazement and fear.

I will not fear. Danlo thought, gasping for breath. Fear, he knew, was like an icy water so cold that it burned inside every cell of the body. There were five ways of living with fear. Some fled from fear as they might a slavering bear, and some sought to cover it up with a blanket of false emotions and pretend to fearlessness. A Zans.h.i.+n master, fighting a duel to the death, tried to let his fear flow through him like water, neither grasping at it nor trying to dam it up, but only noticing its path as if he were looking through a clear gla.s.s. The warrior-poets, of course, were said to be beyond fear. If true, then in some important way it was impossible to think of them as still being wholly human. Likewise, the G.o.ds of the galaxy had supposedly transcended all such base programs, but the oft-quaking hologram of Nikolos Daru Ede glowing on the arm of Danlo's chair gave the lie to this conceit. Possibly, he thought, if his father had truly become a G.o.d, then he had discovered how to outlive his essential dread of death. But Danlo still lived as a man, as he always would, and to him fell the fifth way of facing fear. He dared to look upon his worst terror eye to eye and to change it much as his retina might transform the killing radiation of the sun into an inner light illuminating his brain. It was his way to feel fear as thrill. And so, even as a child playing with bear cubs, he had always sought out danger and death. Once, on the night of the three moons, his grandfather had warned him that this deep wildness would always be his most glaring weakness and his greatest strength. Harrah Ivi en li Ede might proclaim him to be a man without fear, but in truth, he was only wild wild like the wind, wild like the white thallow who dives through the air only for the joy of testing his wings.

I will not fear. I will taste the fear inside myself, and it wilt only bring me greater life as if I had drunk the blood of a bear.

After the pain had almost blinded Danlo, he finally looked away from this part of the light cube. There was a moment when he thought that he might be truly blind, for all that he could see was blackness. And then he realized that his eyes had only fallen upon a section of the hologram representing his motor cortex. Because his body was frozen into motionlessness, the neurons here were mostly as dark as bits of black ice.

Most of the universe is dark, he remembered. But out of the darkness, light.

Upon realizing that he was neither blind nor mad, Danlo felt a sudden flush of heat spread throughout his belly. He imagined that he saw this in the light-offering as a scarlet glow suffusing all his neurons much as a drop of blood might stain a gla.s.s of water. With greater confidence now, he faced the many-coloured streams of his thoughts. Although he was no Perfecti, he had undergone disciplines of the mind that no Architect had ever dreamed possible. As a young man, he had learned difficult language philosophies and the states of plexure from a Fravas.h.i.+ Old Father. He had sat around fires with autists as they fell together into full lucidity and explored the thoughtscapes of the realreal. And with the help of Thomas Rane, the greatest of the Neverness remembrancers, he had nearly mastered the sixty-four att.i.tudes of that most difficult art. By nature he was a mathematical man, and more, a pilot of the Order of Mystic Mathematicians. He had survived the broken s.p.a.ces of the manifold by proving difficult mathematical theorems by thinking calmly and clearly in the face of death. He decided to think such thoughts now. Out of playfulness (and pride), he would look upon his mind in all its splendour of mathematical inspiration.

The greatest theorem I know is the Continuum Hypothesis.

Indeed, this was the so-called Great Theorem of Danlo's Order, and Danlo's father had proved it true: that between any pair of discrete Lavi sets of point-sources there exists a one-to-one mapping. This proved that it was possible for a pilot to fall from any star in the galaxy to any other in a single fall if only he were genius enough to discover the right mapping. Because Danlo thought that his father's proof fairly s.h.i.+mmered with the cool light of elegance, he decided to work through it in his mind.

And so he called up the crystalline diamond ideoplasts representing the theorem's general statement. He began working through the five Gadi lemmas, and he marvelled at their power and the inevitable unfolding of their logic. At last, when he showed that the Justerini subs.p.a.ce was embedded within a simple Lavi s.p.a.ce, an array of diamond and emerald ideoplasts built up within his mind's eye more lovely than even the fabled cathedrals of Vesper. And all this beauty within him was reflected in the light- offering. The whole of his cortex, it seemed, had come brilliantly alive with rings of tangerine and scarlet, with luminous cobalt spheres embedded inside those of topaz, auburn and jade. In a far part of Danlo's consciousness, he became aware that many of the Architects in the hall were gasping at the loveliness of this display. Almost certainly, he thought, they had never beheld the secret fire and order of pure mathematics.The light, the light the beautiful and terrible light.

And neither had Danlo at least not in this way. For a while he gazed at the lights of his own mind, and he played with logic and number. He flew through ancient proofs of the Za.s.senhaus b.u.t.terfly Lemma and the Fixed-Point Theorem; he spent a few long moments exploring open theorems that had never been proved. And he never let his eyes fall free of the offering's hundred billion lights, at the way the correspondences built and formed and fractured into lovely coloured patterns. Soon he began thinking new thoughts; he played with ideas for a strange, new mathematics that would incorporate paradoxical logics and a rather mystical apprehension of the orders of infinity. As he gained skill in controlling his mentations, he took delight in conjuring fantastic thought arrays and sparkling, almost iridescent sequences of concepts and abstractions. In his best moments, a powerful idea storm might rip through the light cube like lightning, dazzling Danlo and thousands of others with the shock of its brilliance. To listen to the sudden cheers of the astonished mult.i.tudes was to understand the pride of the Perfecti who had developed this subtle art. And more, it was a calling for Danlo to face his own hubris, that terrible pride beyond pride that some men carry in their hearts like ticking hydrogen bombs. In Danlo, pilot and would-be Alaloi shaman, this took the form of a wildness that would drive him to any place in the universe where it was possible to go. Wildness, as his grandfather had once warned him, would be either his path toward G.o.d or the doorway to his doom.

I am free, he thought. My mind is free. My will to move my mind is truly free.

For a few exhilarating moments, he felt the thrill of being able to summon many- splendoured thought patterns solely according to his desire to behold them. He moved about his mind creating and recreating these patterns with the ease of a painter daubing colours on a canvas. And then he noticed a terrible thing. When he concentrated on a certain area of his brain where he wished a certain pattern to unfold perhaps in the occipital lobes or in the body sensory areas just behind the central sulcus he noticed a slight delay between the time his neurons fired and the moment in which he became aware of the corresponding thought. This delay seemed to last about half as long as a heartbeat. That there should be any delay at all touched him with terror. For a while he tried to think faster than the light-offering could model his thinking. But he might as well have tried to dance faster than his own reflection in a mirror. No matter what beauties he brooded upon or where inside himself he looked, his awareness of his thoughts always lagged behind the brain processes that generated them. If this were truly so, then the storm of chemicals leading to the firing of his neurons completely determined all of his mind and memory including this despairing thought itself. Where, then, was the freedom of his will to think, to act, to move, to breathe? To hate or to love how could he ever be free to choose one deep pa.s.sion over the other? And worse, what could it mean to say he loved life or anything at all when he was nothing more than a chemical machine programmed to react according to the terrible quick fire of his brain?

I am not I. I am the light that dances faster than light. I am the light that ignites the fire.

As Danlo sat sweating in his metal chair, he heard a murmur of disquiet roll across the rows of benches. Most of the Architects present were aficionados of the mind, and in the lovely violet and gold structures of Danlo's deepest programs, they began to detect disharmonies the broken symmetries and dangerous, quicksilver reflections of a mind looking too closely at itself. Now, as Danlo sought the true source of his selfness, he began to perturb the secret rhythms of his brain. He generated new rhythms unconnected to the self-regulating mechanisms and cycles of his body. Thus he began to think with ever greater speed. And now the time between the firing of his brain and his awareness of his thoughts was no longer half a heartbeat, not because he had discovered a way to transcend the limitations of his brain, but only because his heart was beating much faster. He continued to stare at the light-offering. He began to hate the way it seemingly antic.i.p.ated his thinking. This hatred he saw modelled as a violet-black glow spreading like ink from his prefrontal lobes to his cerebellum, colouring almost every cl.u.s.ter of neurons. Almost, he could not help himself. He began to see the light-offering as more than merely a model of his mind. It was almost as if his soul had been stolen and projected out into black air for all the people in the Hall to see. In a moment of despair, he wondered how these billions of glittering lights had captured his anima that part of man's spirit that was his will and his life's quickest fire.

I am almost I. If I look deeply enough, quickly enough, I will see that I see that I ...

If Danlo had dropped his eyes away from the heavenly lights, then, his test might have been over. If he had stood up from his chair, and turned east away from the great, glowing cube, many of the Architects whispering to each other in their seats might have proclaimed him as the Lightbringer. But he had yet to bring himself to the source of his own light. Until he found the place inside himself where the energies of his consciousness broke out of his own secret heaven (or h.e.l.l), he would not will himself to look away. No one knew this except him. Where Harrah Ivi en li Ede and perhaps Kissiah en li Ede and a few others saw that he was dancing on the knifeblade's edge of madness, most others only pointed at him and exclaimed upon his courage and tenacity in looking at the light-offering longer than he needed to look.

I am the eye with which I behold myself. I am the I, the I, the I...

Danlo knew that he could look away from the light-offering any time that he chose.

But he also knew that he could not choose such a cowardly path. He both could and could not, and that was the h.e.l.l of his existence. He was like a man carefully balanced on the rocky ridge of possibility, and only the slightest puff of wind would suffice to unbalance him and cause him to fall. The paradoxical nature of choice itself drove him to discover the source of his freedom of will. (Or perhaps the iron chains of his own enslavement.) It drove him ever deeper into himself, into the most mysterious and wildest part of the universe. He became aware of many things, then. Even as he rushed into the storm of consciousness raging through his brain, his exterior senses intensified. It was as if his ears had grown arms and fingers, and he could reach out into the Hall to grasp even the faintest of whispers. And so he heard Bertram Jaspari tell Jedrek Iviongeon that the cursed naman pilot had finally fallen mad. Danlo wi Soli Ringess had crossed the threshold from which there is no return, and so they needn't fear that he would ever again walk through their holy Temple bearing a smile upon his lips and light within his hand. Harrah Ivi en li Ede, as well, was thinking of him. He could almost hear her murmuring a prayer. A great tension, like a piece of pulled steel, ran between her and Bertram Jaspari, connecting them to a shared fate.

With a new sense for which he still had no name, he could feel this force pulling at him, too. He sensed the warrior-poet; it was as if he shared a cage with a tiger.

Malaclypse of the two red rings, he who wors.h.i.+pped death and other cosmic mysteries, sat staring at him in awe, almost in love. He fairly trembled with a terrible hunger for the infinite. With his dark violet eyes he urged Danlo inward, deeper into his own marvellous consciousness toward death or ultimate triumph or perhaps both. Malaclypse's pa.s.sion, as with all his breed, was to apprehend the nature of eternity. He looked to Danlo for signs of divinity, and on his beautiful face burned the old question: was Danlo truly the son of his father? Would Danlo's pride drive him to storm the heavenly heights of G.o.dhood, as had Mallory wi Soli Ringess?

He would still slay all would-be G.o.ds, Danlo thought. With his killing knife or poisonous darts, he might slay me, here, now. Only ... can a man truly become a G.o.d?

He suddenly knew that his father had once made the same journey that he made today. All beings, whether man, snowworm or G.o.d, blaze with their own inner lights.

Each man and woman is a star, he remembered, and Mallory Ringess as a man had burned with a need to face the truth of his own soul. If Danlo willed himself to continue staring at the light-offering and complete his journey into the wild, then in a way he would not be alone. Like a star, his father would be there inside him, watching him, waiting for him and always guiding him inward toward the fiery centre of the universe.

Father, Father.

There came a moment of brilliance and burning when Danlo did not know whether he was still looking at the great cube or at the s.h.i.+mmering lights of his own mind. He felt himself falling, not as a wingless bird might plummet toward the hard ice of a planet's surface and certain terminus in time, but rather falling into infinity, endlessly falling, faster and faster, as a lights.h.i.+p pulled into the heart of a black hole. He felt this falling as a nausea in his belly and a terrible acceleration of his mind. There were tremendous time distortions. He could see his brain lights; they flickered faster, ever faster. An Architect, upon facing death, spoke in glowing words of being vastened into an eternal computer. But now, in sensing the almost palpable programs of his brain, Danlo felt himself being infinitized, being fractured into a hundred billion waves of light moving at infinitely accelerating speed. There came a shattering of himself. He looked at his mind ever more closely, as through a diamond lens increasing its power of magnification from ten times to ten thousand. The waves of his own consciousness, at first as seemingly smooth and undulant as the body of a snake, now appeared as jagged as a tiger's teeth. The closer he looked, the more the waves split apart into yet smaller waves, fracturing and fractalling down to infinity.

How delicate and beautiful they appeared! The waves were as perishable as ice crystals in a fiery wind, and he could hold them only for a moment before they broke up and vanished into the black neverness inside himself. He knew, then, that he was these waves of light, and nothing more, vibrating and s.h.i.+mmering and always dancing down into that dazzling darkness at the centre of his soul.

Father, Father I am afraid.

He remembered a time when he was ten years old and had become lost out on the sea's ice after a day of hunting seals. Just as night fell, a great white bear had leaped at him out of the darkness, rising up like a mountain over a ridge of drifted snow. The bear easily might have killed him before he could have raised his spear, but as it hap- pened, he only wanted to play with Danlo. Sometimes bears were like that. He only wanted to frighten Danlo into a desperate dance of survival, and this he had done.

Danlo still remembered his shocked surprise as a clutching of his belly and a scream that had had no time to form upon his lips. It had been a moment of supreme fear for his life, and yet the terror he felt now at falling into himself was infinitely greater. For it seemed that he could never escape. He felt himself losing control of his thoughts; each burst of mentation raced by him with a heart-stopping speed. It was as if he were strapped into a rocket-sled and forced to view the flickering reflections of the stars in the glossy ice beneath him. The reflections of his mind appeared with all the suddenness of a man discovering fire. There were mathematical concepts and worries and old faces; there were att.i.tudes toward fear and counter ideas and countless memories. Many of his thoughts, he noticed, came in pairs. One moment he might think that life sang with joy, while in the next infinitesimal of time the opposing idea would tear through him like a flash of lightning. Such thoughts flashed inside him, the affirmative and the negative, his need to affirm all things and say 'yes' (even this terrible opposition driving him mad) coupled with the terror and the great 'no' of existence itself. In the time it took to draw a breath, ten thoughts might form, oppose each other, shatter and reform into new thoughts. One thought might call up a thousand others, and each of these a thousand more. Like a seed ice crystal dropped into a supercooled cloud, the simplest thought might touch off a chain reaction of thinking, thoughts crystallizing thoughts a billion billion times over in a quickly building storm. There was no end to these thoughts. There was no following them, beholding them, or controlling them, for they exploded outward (or inward) infinitely in all directions.

I know that I know that I know that yes is yes and no is no and there is no yes without a no and no no but that yes follows no as day follows night and darkness light is yes and no is not nothing but only the neverness from which comes selfness and light bright sight and seeing all myself I know that I will say no but no I mustn't say no, I know, no, no, no no...

Like a thallow flying into a sarsara, he was caught in the thoughtstorms raging through his brain. There was whiteness, wildness. Here, as ice crystals swirled together into clouds, waves of consciousness s.h.i.+mmered and flowed together, always moving and dancing, always forming patterns that were both terrible and beautiful to behold. He saw bright bands of violet and flaming streamers of scarlet and gold all the colours of the spectrum and others which were wholly new. A Perfecti, viewing these lights from the safety of one of the Hall's many benches, might have said that Danlo at last was apprehending the deep programs of his own mind. But this would have implied a detachment and freedom of will that Danlo no longer felt. In some sense he wasn't apprehending himself at all but only simply being existing as the chemical storms of tryptamine and serotonin causing his neurons to fire. He was this fire. He burned and he burned, and he couldn't keep himself from burning. At last he understood the pain of his friend, Hanuman li Tosh, the cetic who once had gone inside himself and returned to recount the nature of h.e.l.l. This was the pain of pure existence, matter forming and rus.h.i.+ng and combining, endlessly, decaying and shattering and recombining without meaning or purpose, on and on until the end of eternity. It was the pain of the G.o.ds, those tragic beings who felt themselves cut off from this onstreaming flow of atoms and photons and yet caught up in a fire that they could never quite control. Perhaps it was even the pain of G.o.d, terrible and deep, for if G.o.d was being in itself and the substance of all things, then this infinite body was continually ageing, dying, decomposing and separating from itself, on every world and piece of dust in the universe, on and on throughout s.p.a.ce and time. G.o.d, he thought, consumed G.o.d in this eternal flame. The burning could never stop. Knowing this, Danlo felt a terrible fear of being trapped forever in his own fire. He hated himself for fearing at all, and he hated his own hatred with such wrath that he might have destroyed himself then if only he could have willed himself to die. But now, in this moment, he was nothing but a red, raging flame, and he had neither desire nor will, but only despair. This terrible emotion was more absolute than that of a pilot returning from the stars to discover his birth world blackened by the killing light of some supernova. It was greater than that of a G.o.d who watches a whole galaxy of stars dying and collapsing into a singularity made by one of his enemies. Danlo, himself, now began collapsing into himself, into the darkest depths and the burning cold neverness of his soul. He fell like a stone dropped into a bottomless pool. He fell and fell, and all his being was in this endless falling and endless time, the infinities downward, fire inside fire, pain inside pain, the blackness deepening into an ever more vast and total blackness. In the time of a single heartbeat in only a moment he lived ten thousand years.To live, I die. To live, to live no, no, no, no ...

There came a moment when he did not think that he would live much longer. In truth, he did not want to live if it meant falling forever into madness. If his brain was connected along many-silvered nerves to every part of his body, then he could send messages to all his muscles and organs. If he tried hard enough, he could find the way to make his heart stop beating. In the black pathways of despair winding through his brain, he could almost see this way. Somewhere inside him, like a diamond inside a black velvet box, shone the secret of life and death. He looked and looked, deeper and deeper, and he trembled to open this box. The key was almost within his grasp; it gleamed like a golden sh.e.l.l buoyed on the cresting wavefront of his consciousness.

For ten billion years, he had lived with this most terrible of desires. He could will himself to die. He could do this almost as easily as holding his breath. He remembered, then, Leander of Darkmoon and the eight other pilots who had died trying to find their way toward the Solid State Ent.i.ty. Like him, they had sought the secret of the universe, but they had found something else. They had been too afraid to die, and so they had died this the G.o.ddess Herself had told him. If, then, he faced his own death fearlessly with open hands and eyes, did that mean that he was fated to live? Or was there, after all, truly a choice?

For in the end we choose our futures, he remembered.

These were the words of his father, his mother, perhaps even the meaning of the wind or the snowy owl's cry on a moonlit night. It was the sound of himself, whispering, weeping, laughing. As he fell deeper into the long, dark, roaring ocean inside, he heard the calling of his consciousness. His consciousness. His will he sensed that he still surged with a will toward life as wild and free as a thallow flying toward the sun. He knew this must always be so, and this sudden knowledge astonished him. For he had thought himself a slave to the chemicals burning through his brain. He was these chemicals, truly, this exquisitely tuned orchestration of blood, body and brain, but what did this mean? He willed himself to see himself just as he truly was. It was like looking into a mirror reflecting a mirror reflecting a million more mirrors s.h.i.+mmering with the far-off brilliance of his own face. In this inward gazing down through the well of darkness to the distant light, he caught a glint of blue-black; perhaps this was the colour of his eyes or the colour of infinity or even the colour of consciousness itself.

Gazing at the bright black sky, you see only yourself looking for yourself. When you look into the eyes of G.o.d, they go on and on forever.

When Danlo looked through his own eyes into his brain, he saw starfire and light.

A hundred billion neurons fired in quick, deep rhythms that he was only now beginning to apprehend. The brain's inner workings, of course, consisted of much more than the firing of all these separate cells. In truth, no part of the brain existed in separation. Many neurons intertwined their synapses with ten thousand others sometimes with as many as three hundred thousand other nerve cells. The brain as a whole organ generated an electromagnetic field that pulled at every single cell. And each one was as perfect as a diamond. Inside the clear cell walls were dense-cored vesicles, neurotubules, and mitochondria tearing apart phosphate molecules to free up life's energies and a thousand other structures. Motilin, dopamine, taurine and many other neurotransmitters cascaded in a never-ending flood. He saw lipids and amino acids combining, glucose burning and ions swirling through the water of life in an incredibly intricate and beautiful dance. What ordered these chemicals of consciousness, he wondered? What made matter and organized it into such subtle and marvellous harmonies?

I am that I am. I am only carbon and oxygen and nitrogen and hydrogen and pota.s.sium and iron and...

He was only these elements of the earth, nothing more, nothing less. These elements of the stars. For every part of him every atom of carbon in his eyes, every bit of iron in his heart had been once fused together in the fire of a long-dead star.

The stars, in truth, made the atoms of the universe, but what made these atoms come together in consciousness and life? What made them move? For move they did, almost quicker than he could imagine, pulsing and resonating, vibrating billions of times in a moment, seeking out other atoms with which to spin and dance and sing their cosmic songs. In one mad, marvellous moment beyond time, beneath time, he looked into the centre of a carbon atom sparkling somewhere near the centre of his brain. He needed to know the secret of matter, and he saw a fiery cloud of electrons and protons and neutrons exchanging energies, hugging each other in a terribly compelling love beyond love, binding themselves to themselves in a single, ball-like nucleus. And deeper he looked, and saw the quarks, like infinitesimal sapphires and emeralds and rubies, all full of charm and strangeness. And deeper still, the strings and infons and the splendid noumena, which could be grasped only by the mind but never sensed or rather sensed only in the fire of madness or in that marvellous, mystical clarity that befalls a man when he discovers his inner sense of the infinite.

What was matter, truly? Matter, he saw, was magical stuff. Matter s.h.i.+mmered. All the matter of the universe was woven of a single, superluminal tapestry of jewels, the light of each jewel reflected in the light of every other. Matter was holy, matter was alive, matter was but consciousness frozen in time. For as far down the great chain of being as he looked, down and down through the infinities, he could see no final form or bit of matter but only light. This was not the light of the sun or stars, not the photons nor the flas.h.i.+ng wavelengths of visible radiation by which he might behold the distant galaxies or the blueness of his own eyes. Rather it was a light inside light, purer and primeval, the light inside all things. In some ways, it seemed more like water than light, for it flowed and surged as a single, s.h.i.+mmering substance. It moved itself. It had will, was will itself. This deep consciousness that some called matter knew how to come together into ever more complex forms. It evolved; ultimately, as with man, it evolved to perceive itself and cry out with wonder and wild joy. This, he saw, was the essential nature of consciousness, that it was always aware of its own splendour, even as a cresting wave of water reflects the light of the entire ocean beneath itself.

I am this blessed light.

Knowing this, Danlo suddenly realized that he could move himself. His selfness, he saw, consisted of more than the firing of his neurons, and his consciousness was much more than the patterns or programs of his brain. For he could feel it flowing through every blood cell and atom of his body his heart and hands and every part of himself ablaze with nothing but this pure light. At last he understood how the Solid State Ent.i.ty and other G.o.ds might possibly manipulate matter through consciousness alone.

(And how they might create terrible weapons of consciousness with which to destroy each other and rip open gaping holes in the fabric of the s.p.a.cetime continuum.) This was the true nature of consciousness and the meaning of matter, that ultimately both were one substance without cause or control outside itself. Although he was no G.o.d, and he couldn't directly touch Bertram Jaspari or any of the other Architects watching him, he could move his own mind. His will truly, it was as free as the wind, as free as his desire to say yes or no to the madness devouring him. He could live as a blind man wandering forever through the black caverns of his mind, or he could see himself just as he was: a luminous being who might bring the light of pure consciousness to himself and show thirty thousand watching Architects that they, too, could blaze like stars.

Yes I will.

There was a moment. From the dark rows of benches facing Danlo, he heard Bertram Jaspari calling in his whiny voice for the offering to be concluded. He heard Bertram Jaspari calling for Harrah's physicians to take Danlo away. For Danlo wi Soli Ringess had fallen mad, Bertram said, as any aficionado of the light-offerings could see by looking at the hologram floating high in the Hall of Heaven. As Danlo himself could see if only he would look at himself as a vast cubical array of coloured lights and nothing more. Now the light cube had mostly fallen dark, with a few glowing cl.u.s.ters of ochre and puce signalling the disturbed brain patterns of a madman. From time to time, bursts of sapphire and smalt rippled from Danlo's cerebral cortex to his brainstem, but other than these seemingly random movements, his mind appeared to be lost in its own blackness. Danlo heard a sigh of disappointment and dread whoosh from thousands of lips almost as a single sound. He heard Harrah Ivi en li Ede praying softly for him and for herself, for her grandchildren, and possibly even for the future of her Holy Church. Even the imago of Nikolos Daru Ede, glowing from the devotionary computer upon the arm of his golden chair, betrayed its concern.

Subtly, quickly, so that almost no one could see, the Ede flashed desperate finger signs in front of Danlo's face, but to no avail. The Ede kept staring at Danlo, and almost no one noticed that his usually beatific countenance had darkened in despair.

Of all the men and women in the Hall save Danlo himself, perhaps only Malaclypse Redring of Qallar understood that the light-offering might not be finished. Although Malaclypse was almost as silent as a tiger crouching in the snow, Danlo could hear his breath moving in a slow, steady rhythm strangely synchronized with his own. He could almost feel the warrior-poet's eyes burning across his face, watching and waiting, searching in Danlo's blue-black eyes for any sign of life or that tragic death-in-life that Bertram Jaspari acclaimed as Danlo's fate. Danlo might have looked through the dark Hall for the warrior-poet then, but he could not move his head. He still stared at the glowing cube of lights; in all the time he had sat motionless in his chair he had willed his eyes to remain open upon them. And now there came a moment when these lights began to quicken and change colour. From his frontal lobes to his vision centre to the brainstem, all at once, points of dark blue light flared into life and spread their deep fire from one corner of the cube to another. Soon the entire cube shone with a single, blue-black light quickly brightening to cobalt. For a moment Danlo looked upon this lovely blueness, this marvellous blue light growing ever more brilliant and wild. As from far away, he heard thirty-thousand Architects gasp in astonishment. Through their urgent whispers and sudden cries, he heard Harrah Ivi en li Ede's voice choke with emotion and Bertram Jaspari cursing with bewilderment and disbelief. It seemed that Malaclypse Redring had stopped breathing; Danlo could almost feel the paralysis of the warrior-poet's belly as a deep pain in his own. A deep joy. For now Danlo moved his mind with all the gladness of a thallow soaring into the sky. Then the great offering that he made to Ede the G.o.d and all the Architects of the Cybernetic Universal Church leaped into light. All fiery and splendid it shone, like the blue-white light of the brightest stars. In Danlo's splendid brain, a hundred billion neurons blazed with their own beautiful fire, and for a moment each of the corresponding lights in the great cube came alive in the most intense illumination. This dazzled the eyes of all the men and women sitting on their benches. (And created an unprecedented show of lights for the tens of thousands of Architects still waiting on the Temple grounds outside the Hall's flas.h.i.+ng dome.) It was as if Tannahill's sun had exploded in their faces for all to behold. But now many people threw their hands over their eyes and turned away, and no one in the Hall could look upon this beautiful and terrible light, and that was the h.e.l.l of it. But that was the heaven, too. For in all the thousands of years since the Church had inst.i.tuted this ceremony, in all the thousands of thousands of offerings made by the Church's most accomplished Perfecti, no one had ever succeeded in lighting up more than a fraction of his brain. In truth, no one had ever thought it possible. For a man to look upon the heavenly lights within and not fall mad was miracle enough. But for Danlo to come into such a wild and glorious consciousness meant that he truly must be the Lightbringer foretold in their prophesies, and possibly something more.

We are all bringers of light, he thought as he listened to the cries of acclamation ringing through the Hall. I am only the spark that ignites the flame.

At last Danlo looked away from the light-offering. He let his eyes fall upon the bamboo flute that he had held in his hands all during the time of his test. In the intense illumination pouring down from above, it gleamed like gold. He smiled as a thought came to him. Almost instantly, the lights of the offering flickered to reflect this thought, but he did not look upon them. Instead he suddenly stood away from his chair. With his mind's connection to the computer's field suddenly broken, the light- offering indeed had come to an end. The great cube instantly fell dark and quiet. The whole of the Hall, for a moment, seemed as black as the ocean at night. Then Danlo smiled again and laughed softly, almost sadly. He stood alone on the floor of the darkened dome, and he listened to thirty thousand Architects calling his name.

'Lightbringer!' they shouted. They were clapping their hands together, jumping down from their benches to the floor of the Hall. 'Danlo of Neverness is the Lightbringer!'

Truly, I am the spark, but what flame have I lit? Oh, Ahira, Ahira what have I begun?

As the lights of the Hall came back on (the common clary plasma lights, that is), Danlo stood scrying and letting visions of the future blow through him like a fiery wind. He beheld a splendour brighter than the brightest star and colours inside colours and a terrible beauty. A single sound ripped him out of his reverie. It was the quick suss of a knife being drawn from its sheath. He turned to look across the few tens of feet separating him from the first row of benches. There Bertram Jaspari stood shouting at Danlo, shaking his little fist at him and shrieking out that Danlo was not the Lightbringer, after all, but only a filthy naman cetic sent from Neverness to trick them and to destroy their Holy Church. Next to him Malaclypse Redring waited calmly with his long killing knife held up high for anyone to see. The steel blade caught the glare of the dome lights and reflected their burning rays into Danlo's eyes.

Danlo couldn't guess how the warrior-poet had smuggled this knife into the Hall. And neither could the keepers protecting Harrah, for upon seeing that Malaclypse was armed, these grim-faced men cried out in dismay and fell over the Holy Ivi to s.h.i.+eld her. A few of the keepers rushed the warrior-poet, but these were met by Jedrek Iviongeon and Lensar Narcavage and many other Iviomils loyal to Bertram Jaspari.

They formed a wall of living flesh between Harrah and the warrior-poet, and for the moment it seemed impossible that he could harm her, much less a.s.sa.s.sinate her. And it was far from certain that this was his purpose. He gazed across the floor of the Hall, and his violet eyes met Danlo's. Death was as near as the eyelight reflected back and forth between them, as near as a steel knife that at any moment might be hurled spinning through the air. For a moment, Danlo held this gaze while he listened to the roaring voices and the stamp of thousands of feet coming closer. He knew, then, that even if the knife were to find his throat, he would die as a martyr, for the people still would proclaim him as the Lightbringer, and Harrah Ivi en li Ede would then install the new programs that would forever change the Church. If the warrior-poet killed him, it must be for the other reason, because Danlo was truly the son of his father, and he had dared to s.h.i.+ne more brightly than any human being ever should. And so with a smile on his lips, Danlo picked up his flute and began to play. He never stopped looking at Malaclypse, and he aimed a song like a golden arrow straight at Malaclypse's heart. For only a moment, Malaclypse hesitated. But this was enough time for a sea of jubilant Architects to close in around Danlo to reach out toward him with their hands as if warming themselves by a fire or beckoning to the sun.

When Malaclypse saw that it would be impossible for him to harm Danlo, he too smiled. He kissed the haft of his knife as he touched the long, steel blade to his forehead. Then he held up the knife to salute Danlo, and quickly bowed his head.

Terrible beauty, Danlo thought. The terrible beauty.

Quickly, as Bertram Jaspari jerked on the sleeve of Malaclypse's kimono and cried in panic, Malaclypse turned to fight his way from the Hall. The skirmish between Harrah's keepers and the Iviomils had deepened into a full battle. The terrible sounds of hatred and rage and crunching flesh filled the air. Fanatic-eyed men cursed and shouted and flailed and kicked, and more than once, Malaclypse's killing knife slashed out to lop off a few fingers or to open some unfortunate Architect's throat. So ended the great light-offering. Through sprays of bright red blood and the chaos of men and women crying in confusion, Bertram Jaspari led a few hundred of his Iviomils from the Hall of Heaven where the swarms of Architects waited for them outside.

It has begun, Danlo thought. Truly, it is impossible to stop like trying to put back the light into a star.

He could no longer play his flute. A dozen Architects in their white kimonos swarmed near him, clutching at his hands, his hair, his face. He felt their hands closing on him, pulling him upward, lifting him into the air. They bore him high upon their shoulders and cried out, 'Lightbringer, Lightbringer!' They never stopped shouting his name. And Danlo listened to the thunder of their voices and looked up toward the heavens in the direction of the s.h.i.+mmering stars. In a silence as vast as the Vild, he wept inside himself as he reflected upon the terrible and beautiful nature of light.