The Broken God. David Zindell
said.
‘Even we Fravashi,’ Old Father said. ‘But I wanted to see for myself.’
‘But, sir, how did you find me here? There are so many people.’
Old Father pointed his black claw at the circles of Returnists still sitting around Elianora Wen. Even as Danlo did, they all wore templets around their heads, and these nine hundred luminescent bands cast halos of golden light into the black air. ‘I followed the glow,’ Old Father said. ‘You can see it a long way off. And then as I came closer, I followed your scent. It’s unique and quite strong, you know.’
Danlo bent his head to sniff his clothes, and he said, ‘I did not know the Fravashi had such keen noses.’
‘Ha, ha, you smell like a wolf who has rolled in musk grass. Have you considered bathing more frequently?’
‘I … do bathe,’ Danlo said. ‘I love the water.’
‘Ah, ha, but you haven’t bathed since you began dreaming with the autists, have you?’
‘You know about the Dreamers, sir?’
Old Father said nothing but simply smiled at him.
‘Then you must know … about the Scientists as well?’
‘Oh, ho, I do know.’
‘These blessed worldviews,’ Danlo said. ‘These ways of seeing.’
‘Ah, oh, oh, ah,’ Old Father said. ‘This is a city of cults, isn’t it?’
‘But I have left the Dreamers,’ Danlo said. ‘I have left the Scientists, too.’
‘So, it’s so.’
‘You taught me, sir. How to free myself from any worldview.’
‘But now you wear the templet and sit with the Returnists?’
‘You are worried that I will become bound to this way … because it promises so much, yes?’
Old Father motioned toward the men and women sitting close to them, murmuring words of exhausted hope as they looked up at the sky. ‘This cult? Oh, no, no, no – when dawn comes and Mallory Ringess has failed to return, the Returnists will be no more. If I seem worried – and I must tell you that it’s nearly impossible for a Fravashi to worry – it’s only because you seem to love all cults too well.’
With his little finger Danlo touched the glowing templet tight against his forehead, and he asked, ‘But what better way … to know these ways?’
‘Well, there is the spelad, of course. Someday you may play this as well as Fayeth. Ah, ho, the whole Fravashi system.’
‘Spelad is a clever game,’ Danlo said. ‘But it is only a game.’
‘Ah, ah?’
Danlo held out his hand. In the light of his templet, his fingernails glowed yellow-orange. He suddenly curled his fingers toward his palm, making a loose fist. He said, ‘The Fravashi teach their students to hold any worldview lightly, as they would a butterfly, yes?’
‘To hold a reality lightly is to change realities easily,’ Old Father said. ‘How else may one progress from the simplex to the higher stages of plexity?’
‘But, sir, your students, Fayeth and Luister, the others – they hold most realities too lightly. They never really know the realities they hold.’
‘Ho, ho, do you think you understand the beliefs of science more completely than Fayeth does? And the other belief systems as well?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Then I’m afraid that I don’t understand.’
There was a half smile on Old Father’s face, and Danlo thought that he was being only half truthful with him.
‘There is a difference,’ Danlo said, ‘between knowledge and belief.’
‘Ah ho, aha,’ Old Father said.
Danlo turned to face the east, where the sky showed blue with the day’s first light. It would be some time before the sun rose, but already the horizon was stained with tones of ochre and glowing red. Many of the Returnists were looking in this direction, too. Elianora stood up and somehow oriented herself toward the coming dawn. Like all scryers she was blind, and more, her eyepits were scooped hollows as black as space. Perhaps she was waiting to feel the heat of the sun’s rays against her cheeks. If she was chagrined or shamed that her prophecy was about to prove false, she gave no sign.
‘Do you see this lovely scryer?’ Danlo said. He dropped his voice to a near-whisper and moved closer to Old Father. ‘Before she blinded herself, she had eyes as I have. As we do. She could see all the colours of the world. But … what if she had been born eyeless, just as she is now. What if she had been blind from birth, like the hibakusha babies? How could she know that blood is the reddest of all the reds? How could she see the colours of the sunrise? When you look at the sky, sir, do you say, “I believe in blueness”? No, you do not, not unless you are blind. You see the blessed blue, and so you know it. Don’t you see? We do not need to believe … that which we know.’
‘Ah, ho, knowing,’ Old Father said. ‘So, it’s so.’
‘Fayeth may understand the beliefs of Science better than I,’ Danlo said. ‘But she’ll never know Science … until she has seen a snowworm sliced into a hundred segments while it is still alive.’
‘Would you expect me to subject all my students to such atrocities?’
‘To be truly complex … yes. The other students play the spelad, and they think they know what it is like to move from reality to reality. But it is not really … real, to them. When they enter a new worldview … they are like old men wading in a hot spring. Half in, half out, never completely wet or dry.’
Now the sky was flaming crimson, and the air was lighter, and the trees and boulders across the mountain were beginning to take on the colours of morning. Of all the people who had climbed Urkel during the night, only the Returnists remained. And now most of these were leaving because their belief in the return of Mallory Ringess had been broken. This, Danlo thought, was the essential difference between belief and knowledge. Knowledge could only intensify into deeper knowledge, whereas belief was as fragile as glass. Hundreds of red-eyed people muttered to themselves as they cast betrayed looks at Elianora and turned their backs to her without bidding her farewell. They left behind forty-eight men and women who knew something they did not. Danlo knew it too, but he could hardly explain this knowledge to Old Father. He knew that, in some sense, Mallory Ringess had returned to Neverness that night. There had indeed been a god upon the mountain – Danlo had only to remember the wistful looks on eighty thousand faces to know that this was so. Because of Elianora’s prophecy, something in the City had changed, irrevocably, and something new had been born. Old Father was wrong to suppose that the movement she had begun would simply evaporate like dew drops under a hot sun.
Old Father, who was always adept at reading people’s thought shadows, studied Danlo’s face, then said, ‘You never really believed Mallory Ringess would return, did you?’
‘I do not want to believe anything,’ Danlo said. ‘I want to know … everything.’
‘Ha, ha, not an insignificant ambition. You’re different from my other students – they merely desire liberation.’
‘And yet they are so … unfree.’
Old Father’s eyes opened wide, and he said, ‘How so?’
‘Because they think they have found a system … that will free them.’
‘Haven’t they?’
‘The Fravashi system … is the one reality they hold tightly. And it holds them even more tightly.’
‘Do you have so little respect