David Zindell - The Broken God

Few come to such self-knowledge so young. Danlo applied this knowledge and began to savour not only music but the bewildering experiences of his new world. One of the women – she had golden hair and he thought her name was Fayeth – showed him how to eat with tools called chopsticks. His clumsiness and ineptitude with the wooden sticks did not embarrass him. In full sight of the curious students who often came to watch him, he would put his chopsticks aside, shovel handfuls of noodles into his mouth, and wipe his greasy hands on his face when he was done. He thought there must be something wrong with civilized people that they didn’t want to touch their food, as if they required a separation from life or things which had once been alive. And they were ignorant of the most basic knowledge. Adjacent to his room was another room, which was really more of a closet than a room. Every morning he entered this closet, squatted, and dropped his dung through a hole in the floor, dropped it into a curious-looking device called a multrum. He pissed in the multrum too, and here was the thing that frustrated him: the hole to the multrum was almost flush with the closet’s north wall; it was hard to position himself with his back to the wall without falling in the hole. But he had to stand in this cramped, awkward position in order to piss to the south. Didn’t the civilized makers of this dung closet know that a man must always piss to the south? Apparently not. And as for the dung itself, what happened to it once it fell through the hole? How was it returned to the world? Did dung beetles live in the multrum or other animals which would consume his excretions? He didn’t know.

Despite a hundred like uncertainties, he quickly put on muscle and flesh; soon he was able to walk easily again, and this amazed him for he kept waiting for his toes to blacken with the fleshrot. He was given to understand he was not welcome to leave his room, so he began pacing, pacing and pivoting when he reached the far wall, and then, because he was in many ways still just a boy, running back and forth to burn off the prodigious amounts of food he ate. Someone gave him a pair of fur slippers, and he discovered that after getting up his speed with a little running, he could slide across the polished floor almost as if it were wet ice. In this way he amused himself – when he wasn’t playing his shakuhachi – until his loneliness and curiosity became unbearable. It would be unseemly of him to ignore the wishes of his elders and leave his room, but surely, he thought, it was even more unseemly of Old Father and his family to leave a guest alone.

One night, after the others had gone to bed (or so he presumed), he set out to explore the house. He threw the blanket around his shoulders and put on his slippers; otherwise he was naked. His filthy furs, of course, had been taken away for burning, and he had been given no new ones. It didn’t occur to him that the others might believe the shame of his nakedness would be enough to confine him to his room. Indeed, there was nothing else to confine him. The Fravashi do not believe living spaces should be enclosed by doors, so Danlo had no trouble entering the narrow hallway outside his room. From one end of the curving hallway came a reverberant, rhythmic sound, as of someone chanting; from the other, silence and the smell of crushed pine needles. He followed the silence, followed the piney aroma which grew stronger with every step he took. Hexagonal granite blocks lined the hallway; they were icy to the touch and picked up the faint whisper of his furry slippers against the floor. Cold flame globes, spaced every twenty feet, gave off a many-hued light. He marvelled at the flowing blues and reds, and he might have killed himself sticking his hand inside one, but the globes were high above his head and he couldn’t reach them, not even with the probing end of his shakuhachi. In silence, he followed the flame globes down the hallway as it spiralled inward to the centre of the house.

Inevitably, he came to Old Father’s thinking chamber. Old Father was sitting on a Fravashi carpet at the room’s exact midpoint, but Danlo didn’t notice him at first because he was too busy gawking at all the extraordinary things. He had never imagined seeing so many things in one place: against the circular wall were wooden chests, gosharps, ancient books, heaumes of various computers, sulki grids, and cabinets displaying the sculpted art of fifty different races; a hundred and six different musical instruments, most of them alien, were set out on shelves. No spot of the floor was uncovered; carpets lined the room, in many places overlapping, one intricately woven pattern clashing against another. Everywhere, in huge clay pots, grew plants from other worlds. Danlo stared at this profusion of things so at odds with the rest of the house. (Or the little he had seen of it.) Many believe the Fravashi should live in the same austerity they demand of their students, but in fact, they do not. They are thingists of the most peculiar sort: they collect things not for status or out of compulsion, but rather to stimulate their thinking.

‘Danlo,’ came a melodious voice from the room’s depths, ‘ Ni luria la, ni luria manse vi Alaloi , Danlo the Wild, son of Haidar.’

Danlo’s head jerked and he looked at Old Father in surprise. Old Father didn’t seem surprised to see him. And even if he had been surprised, the Fravashi strive at all times to maintain an attitude of zanshin, a state of relaxed mental alertness in the face of danger or surprise.

‘Shantih ,’ Danlo said, automatically replying to the traditional greeting of his people. He shook his head, wondering how the man-animal had learned this greeting. ‘ Shantih , sir. Peace beyond peace. But I thought you did not know the words of human language.’

Old Father motioned for Danlo to sit across from him on the carpet. Danlo sat cross-legged and ran his fingers across the carpet’s thick pile; the tessellation of white and black birds – or animals that looked like birds – fascinated him.

‘Ah ho, while you were healing these last ten days, I learned your language.’

Danlo himself hadn’t been able to learn much of the language of the civilized people; he couldn’t understand how anyone could comprehend all the strange words of another and put them together properly. ‘Is that possible?’ he asked.

‘It’s not possible for a human being, at least not without an imprinting. But the Fathers of the Fravashi are very good at learning languages and manipulating sounds, ah ha? At the Academy, in the linguists’ archives, there are records of many archaic and lost languages.’

Danlo rubbed his stomach and blinked. Even though Old Father was speaking the human language, the only language that could aspire to true humanity in its expression of the Song of Life, he was using the words in strange, hard to understand ways. He suddenly felt nauseous, as if nothing in the world would ever make sense again. ‘What do you mean by an “imprinting”? What is this Academy? And where are the others, the black man who held me on the beach? The woman with the golden hair? Where are my clothes? My spear? Does every hut in the Unreal City possess a bathing room? How is it that hot water can run through a tube and spill out into a bowl? Where does it come from? How is it heated? And what is a Fravashi? Are you a man or an animal? And where –’

Old Father whistled softly to interrupt him. The Fravashi are the most patient of creatures, but they like to conduct conversation in an orderly manner.

‘Ahhh, you will have many questions,’ he said. ‘As I have also. Let us take the most important questions one at a time and not diverge too far with the lesser questions that will arise. Human beings, diverging modes of thought – oh no, it’s not their strength. Now, to begin, I am a Fravashi of the Faithful Thoughtplayer Clan, off the world of Fravashing, as human beings call it. I am, in fact, an animal, as you are. Of course, it’s almost universal for human languages to separate man from the rest of the animal kingdom.’