David Zindell - The Broken God

‘What!’

‘In nutrient baths, cells are programmed to grow, to replicate, to –’

‘What!’

‘Ahhh, this is difficult to explain.’

Both of Old Father’s eyes were now open, twin pools of golden fire burning with fulfilment and glee. He delighted in causing Danlo psychic anguish. He was a Fravashi, and not for nothing are the Fravashi known as the ‘holy sadists’. Truth from pain – this is a common Fravashi saying. Old Father loved nothing better than to inflict the angslan, the holy pain, the pain that comes from higher understanding.

‘The meats of the Civilized Worlds are cultured almost like crystals, grown layer upon layer in a salt water bath.’

‘I do not understand.’

‘Imagine: independent, floating tissues, huge pink sheets of meat growing, growing. Ah ho, the meats are really more like plants than animal. So it’s so: no bone, no nerves, no connection to the brain of a living animal. Just meat. No animal has to die to provide this meat.’

The idea of eating meat that wasn’t really meat made Danlo sick. He rubbed his aching neck; he coughed and swallowed back his vomit. How could he pray for the spirits of the dead animals, he wondered, when no animals had died to provide his meat? Had this meat ever possessed true spirit, true life? He grabbed his stomach and moaned. Perhaps his thinking truly was bound by old ideas; perhaps, as Old Father might say, he was glavering and was too blinded by his familiar thoughtways to see things clearly. But if that were so, he asked himself, how could he know anything? Like a traveller lost in the enclosing whiteness of a morateth , he searched for some familiar custom, some memory or piece of knowledge by which he might steer his thinking. He remembered that the women of his tribe, after they had finished panting and pushing out their newborn babies, boiled and ate the bloody afterbirths which their heaving wombs expelled. (In truth, he was not supposed to know this because it was the women’s secret knowledge. But once, when he was nine years old, he had sneaked deep into the cave where the men were forbidden to go, and he had watched awestruck as his near-mother, Sanya, gave birth.) No prayers were said when this piece of human meat was eaten. No one could think that an afterbirth might have a spirit to be prayed for. He tried to think of the civilized meats as afterbirths, but he could not. The meats of the City had never been part of a living animal ! How could he forswear hunting to eat such meat? It would dishonour the animals, he thought, if he refused to hunt them and partake of their life. Something must be wrong with people who grew meat even as the sun ripens berries or snow apples or other plants. Something was terribly wrong. Surely it must be shaida to eat meat which had never been alive.

‘Oh, Danlo, you must remember, many men and women of the City live by the rule of ahimsa: never killing or hurting any animal, never, never. It is better to die oneself than to kill.’

Suddenly, the mint tea, the thousand unknown objects of the thinking chamber, Old Father’s piney body stench and his relentless music – all the strange sensa and ideas were too much for Danlo. His face fell white and grim while juices spurted in his mouth. He knelt on hands and knees, and he spewed a bellyful of sour brown meats over the carpet. ‘Oh!’ he gasped. ‘Oh, no!’

He looked about for a piece of old leather or something so he could sop up his mess. According to everything he had been taught, he should have been ashamed to waste good food, but when he thought of what he had eaten, he gasped and heaved and vomited again.

‘Aha, ho, I should thank you for decorating this carpet with the essence of your pain. And my mother would thank you, too – she wove it from the hair of her body.’

Danlo looked down at the carpet’s beautifully woven black and white birds, now swimming in his vomit. Birds shouldn’t be made to swim, he thought, and he was desperate to undo what had happened.

‘Don’t concern yourself,’ Old Father said gently. ‘As I’ve explained, Fravashi have no disgust of the body’s orifices, or of what occasionally emerges from them. We’ll leave this to dry, as a reminder.’

More insanity, Danlo thought, and he suddenly was dying to flee this insanity, to flee homeward to Kweitkel where his found-mother would make him bowls of hot blood-tea and sing to him while she plucked the lice from his hair. He wanted this journey into insanity to be over: he wanted the world to be comfortable and make sense again. He knew that he should flee immediately from the room, yet something kept him kneeling on the carpet, staring into Old Father’s beautiful face.

‘Now it begins,’ he said to Danlo, and he smiled. He was the holiest of holy sadists, but in truth he was also something else. ‘Who’ll show a man just as he is? Oh ho, the glavering, the glavering – try to behold yourself without glavering.’

Danlo touched the white feather bound to his dishevelled black and red hair. In his dark blue eyes there was curiosity and a terrible will in the face of falling madness. He felt himself becoming lost in uncertainty, into that silent morateth of the spirit that he had always looked away from with dread and despair. A sudden chill knowledge came into him: It was possible that all that he knew was false, or worse, arbitrary and quaint. Or worse still, unreal. All his knowledge of the animals and the world, unreal. In this insane City of Light, it very well might be impossible to distinguish the real from what was not. At least it might be impossible for a boy as ignorant and wild as he. He still believed, though, that there must be a way to see reality’s truth, however much it might rage, white and wild and chaotic as the worst of blizzards. Somewhere, there must be a higher truth beyond the truths that his found-father had taught him, certainly beyond what Old Father and the civilized people of the City could know. Perhaps beyond even the Song of Life. Where he would find this truth, he could not say. He knew only that he must someday look upon the truth of the world, and all the worlds of the universe, and see it for what it really was. He would live for truth – this he promised himself. When truth was finally his, he could come at last to know halla and live at peace with all things.

This sudden, revealed direction of his life’s journey was itself a part of the higher truth that he thought of as fate, and the unlooked-for connectedness between purpose and possibility delighted him. Inside, chaos was woven into the very coil of life, but inside, too, was a new delight in the possibilities of that life. All at once, he felt light and giddy, drunk with possibility. He was no longer afraid of madness; in relief (and in reaction to all the absurdities that had occurred that evening), he began to laugh. The corners of his eyes broke into tens of radiating, upraised lines, and even though he gasped and covered his mouth, he couldn’t stop laughing.

Old Father looked into his eyes, touched his forehead and intoned, ‘Only a madman or a saint could laugh in the face of this kind of personal annihilation.’

‘But … sir,’ Danlo forced out between waves of laughter, ‘you said I must look at myself … without glavering, yes?’

‘Ah ho, but I didn’t think you would succeed so well. Why aren’t you afraid of yourself, as other men are? As bound to yourself?’

‘I do not know.’

‘Did you know that laughing at oneself is the key to escaping the glavering?’

Danlo smiled at Old Father and decided to reveal the story of his birth that Chandra had often repeated. Even though Three-Fingered Soli had told him that Chandra was not his true mother, he liked to believe this story because it seemed to explain so much about himself. Probably, he thought, Chandra had witnessed his birth and altered the story slightly.