So, on the holiest day of the Festival of the Broken Dolls, a day in which Architects of the Infinite Life presented each other with rich gifts wrapped in coloured papers, the followers of the Way would appropriate this ancient ceremony. They would do this to symbolize the gift that Mallory Ringess had brought to humankind: this promise of becoming godly which almost no one understood. The idea of giving gifts was like a star exploding inside the depths of Danlo's mind. It immediately roused him from despair. He recalled, then, the walrus tusk which he had found on his journey to Avisalia. It had been his intention to carve this tusk into a chess piece, and then to give it to Hanuman as a gift. For thirty days this plan had remained only half-formed and uncertain; at times he had forgotten it altogether. But now he fairly leaped out of bed and laughed with the thrill of anticipation. Now, inside him, an image stood out as clearly as a yu tree against the sky. He beheld this image from many angles all at once and seared it into his memory. He decided to make this image real. Out of a simple piece of ivory, he would carve a god. It would be more than just a replacement piece for the missing god of Hanuman's chess set. He would create a tangible figure that would embody all the pain and passion of the gods. Hanuman had given him the gift of fire; in return, at the great joyance, he would give Hanuman a solution to the fundamental problem of life, a way that all burning finally might be quenched. When Hanuman held this gift in his hands, he would feel the true weight of love, and his heart would break open. He would restore Tamara's memory, and he would restore their friendship – this was Danlo's last desperate hope.
After making himself three cups of tea (he was very thirsty) he set to work. He didn't care that it was the middle of the night; his was one of Resa's few private rooms, so a little banging about would disturb no one. It was a tiny room, just big enough for his sleeping furs, drying rack, tea service and his wooden chest. Beneath the window sat the plain, deep chest that he had been given as a novice. He stepped over to it and grasped the steel handle. The top swung open on well-oiled hinges. Inside were all his possessions, which were few enough considering that he was now a journeyman pilot. Beneath his spare furs, robes, skate blades and kamelaikas, he kept the only things that he valued: his mother's diamond ball; the two books that Bardo had entrusted to him; the carving of the snowy owl he had made on his journey to Neverness; the point of his old bear spear; and sometimes, his shakuhachi. At the very bottom of the chest, inside an old seal leather bag, were his carving tools. Except for the white feather which he wore in his hair, nothing was more precious to him than these tools, for they connected him directly with his childhood, with his people, and with the world of rocks and animals and trees in which they had lived. He pulled out the bag and opened the drawstring. His tools clicked and rattled together as he rummaged about. Onto his sleeping furs, as neatly as a jeweller setting out firestones, he arrayed his scrapers and burins, his gouge, graver and adz. He lifted out his saw and ran its glittering teeth lightly across his thumb. Then he set out his chisels. He had five chisels, and they were his glories. Two of the chisels Haidar had given him on his eleventh birthday; his found-father had made them of rare diamond stones set into hafts of whalebone. Danlo had made the three other chisels himself, originally from lengths, of shatterwood and flint blades. The blades were of varying widths and could be easily sharpened or replaced as they wore out. When he had entered Resa, he had replaced two blades, not because they were chipped or worn, but because he had found a finer material for carving than flint. On the day he started to grow his beard he had taken his shaving razor (the same diamond-edged razor he had used to shave Pedar's face) and had carefully broken it into pieces. He had refit his chisels with two of these pieces and used another to make a wickedly sharp round knife. The simplest of his tools was a little mallet: a smooth river stone that fit snugly into the palm of his hand. He would accomplish much of his carving with this stone, tapping it against the hafts of his chisels. And when he had finished chiselling and scooping and graving, there would come the polishing. For this tedious work, he had many bits of fine sandstone and a rough oilskin. No piece of ivory, it was said, could come alive until it was polished as smoothly as new white ice.
When he was ready to begin the actual carving, he said a prayer to the spirit of the ivory, and removed the tusk from the chest. It was as long as his arm, with a good, dense weight and a rich smell that recalled the sea. It was old ivory, well seasoned in salt water; its colour was of dark cream streaked with amber and gold. He picked up his adz and began stripping off the tough enamel husk. The flint blade made a high-pitched rasping sound as it cut. With long, quick strokes, pulling the adz in toward his body, he worked down the length of the tusk from tip to root so as not to split the ivory. He sat crosslegged on his furs with his tools close at hand. In little time, his lap and his furs were covered with long ivory splinters. After the tusk was well cleaned, he paused to wipe the sweat from his forehead. He knocked away the splinters, careless of where they landed. Then he used his saw to cut the tusk into five sections of equal length. Although he would make only one chess piece, he had never attempted such an intricate carving. It was possible that he would ruin one or two pieces of good ivory before the god took shape.
In fact, he ruined four pieces before going to work on the last one. The first two pieces split apart, almost as soon as he put a chisel to them. Ivory is the loveliest of all materials to carve; it has a quality of aliveness that only improves with age, but as it ages it hardens, and the flaws inherent in all living things often grow into deep cracks. The trick of carving is to work around these flaws, not excising them, but cutting so that the natural strength of the ivory can support them. It might have been better if he had found a tusk of new ivory, all soft and white and easy to work. New ivory, after a year or so exposed to the air, will develop veins of colour which grow and merge until the whole surface gleams like seal milk spread over ice. It was just this pure coloration, however, that Danlo did not want. His task was to make a chess piece to match the rest of Hanuman's set. The other pieces – the pilot, the alien, and the cetic – were ancient; they were lined and cracked and seamed with subtle golden hues. His god must resemble these pieces, not only with regard to weathering and proportion, but according to style, as well. It would be hard enough to duplicate the Yarkonan style: detailed but not ornate, realistic but with a transcendence of emotion that hinted at the ideal. The sculptor of the original set was quite accomplished; she had endowed the black god and both goddesses with various combinations of serenity, compassion, joy and power. The black goddess was particularly striking, for her face was cut with both wrath and rapture and she seemed all-wise, like the statues of Nikolos Daru Ede that stand outside most of the Cybernetic churches. While Danlo could find no fault with this beautiful work, he was seeking something more, a rendering of a face inside him that might be impossible to bring to life. Certainly, after ruining the third and fourth pieces of ivory, he began to despair of ever creating his god. These pieces did not split; he solved the splitting problem by roughing out their shapes, not with mallet and chisel, but with the rasp and whine of his skate file. When it came time to begin the fine carving, however, he gouged the god's eyes too quickly and too deeply, and so twice he had to abandon the work. He picked up the last piece of ivory, then. He promised its spirit that he would cut more slowly. He would visualize the exact shape and size of each particle of ivory before removing it – either that or he would not cut at all.
Thus he began to carve his final god, and the carving seemed to have no end. Moments flowed into moments and accumulated until whole days had passed, and Danlo took no notice of time. Occasionally, when his eyes burned with fatigue and his hands began trembling, he lay back against his furs and dozed, holding the ivory close as a child does a doll. Once every day, perhaps, he left his room to eat a large meal. And then he would return refreshed and strengthened for more carving. For long periods, he would sit hunched over with his naked feet clamped like a vise around the motionless god as he cut and trimmed. Using one of his chisels, he chipped away at the ivory bit by bit until his back knotted in pain and his feet were blue with cold. During his worst moments, he thought of abandoning the carving as hopeless. The sheer effrontery of what he was attempting to create daunted him. Sometimes, it amused him. But always, it astonished him, and so he kept carving, on and on. He knew that if the image inside him were true, if he could see it exactly, then he could make it be. It was only a matter of freeing the god from his ivory prison. Somewhere within the shrinking block of ivory dwelt his god. Indeed, all gods and goddesses dwelt there, and all species of humankind, every child, woman and man who would ever live. He could see them all with a carver's eye, nestled inside each other, the way the dour body of an Architect matron contained the smiling, newlywed woman, and countless younger versions of herself. All men, if you looked at them just right, were much like each other. One might have curly hair, a bellyful of sorrows and believe that Ede was the sole God of the universe; another might possess the otherworldly beauty of the Elidi birdmen, but between the two there was a commonality and connection. And how simple it was to make one man into another. How hauntingly easy the transformation of a thoughtful child into one who was sad. With a press of his graver, he could cut grief into a contented face. He would scrape away a creamy white fleck, scarcely larger than a nail clipping, and a billion trillion atoms of ivory would tumble to the floor, thus changing the face of his god, subtly, irrevocably. If he could carve with some finer tool, removing a single atom with each stroke, might not all possible forms and things inevitably be revealed?
He thought about this as he marvelled over the mystery of identity and consciousness. As the lights in his room burned on and on through many nights, he wondered many strange things: what if some great god such as the Solid State Entity, with technologies known only to the gods, could carve him, atom by atom? What if she could slowly alter the pigmentation of his hair, the length of his bones, the contour of his teeth against his tongue? Would he still be he? Why wouldn't he? Yes, but suppose she could cark his mind with a new memory: what if the sensa of his eating kurmash at his last meal were replaced with the aftertaste of saffron rice and garlic – would this change anything significant about him? No, he was certain it would not. But suppose she could replace all of his memories, one by one, as minerals migrate through a fallen log to create petrified wood. Suppose he remembered eating cultured kid and wearing a clearface over his head. If, with divine subtlety, the goddess could transfigure his flesh and mind through an almost infinite succession of forms, perhaps into someone more wilful and self-contained, then couldn't she cark Danlo the Wild into an entirely different person? What, after all, was the essential difference between himself and a man such as Hanuman li Tosh? In his darkest nightmares, he had dreaded becoming more like Hanuman; he had long suspected that Hanuman's pale, anguished face was somehow a reflection of his own. Now, as he hammered a thin blade of diamond against ivory, he could see how this might be so. He could see the truly marvellous thing about mind: that if he were to become Hanuman or some other being, gradually, an atom of consciousness at a time, then at no point would he ever feel very different or that anything important about himself had perished. But one day he would wake up and behold himself against the mirror of the universe, and he would not be he. What, then, could have happened to his true self, his deepest self that could not die? Would it still live, somehow, inside whatever dread shape he had become? Inside an alien, or a crab, or a worm twisting through lightless tunnels beneath the snow? Inside all things? What was the true, unchanging essence of anyone? And more to the point, what was the soul and fate of this godly animal that some called man?
He had no final answer to these questions, or rather, no neat aphorism that he cared to formulate as a philosophical truth. He had often argued with Hanuman over such conundrums, ultimately to no end. Now he must present his friend with a different kind of argument, cut out of ivory instead of words, which would appeal to the hands and eyes and heart. And so he worked his hard, sharp tools against a cold chunk of ivory. He worked for seven days with the sound of ice particles pinging against the windows, knocking away invisible molecules of glass. By the eighth day, his god was almost finished. It was a noble creature arising out of a pedestal of flames; so skilfully had he carved the base of the chess piece that it was difficult to tell whether the tongues of flame wrapped around the god's legs or flowed into them, becoming flesh, animating the god with the essence of fire. The whole pose and expression of his carving was directed toward one question: what survives when a man becomes a god? The answer was cut into the knotted muscles of the god's body, from the open hands to the tormented, twisted neck. It was an answer that Hanuman would understand in each cell of his body. Pain is the awareness of life, Danlo thought, and gods were the most completely aware creatures that the universe had ever known.
All of history had pointed toward this awareness. In the beginning, at the birth of the universe, all things were concentrated into a single point, infinitely heavy, infinitely hot. There was neither joy nor pain nor darkness nor light. And then, in less than a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, there was everything. The fundamental particles of matter – the strings and infons and other noumena – fell out of the primeval cosmic energy like snowflakes crystallizing from a cloud. Very quickly, in an ageless, eternal second, as the universe exploded outward at the speed of light, the plasma of matter cooled and combined into larger units, into quarks, into electrons, photons and neutrinos. But it would be a half million years before the first stable atoms evolved, and billions of years more before these atoms learned how to join into the molecules of life. It was the most astonishing phenomenon that randomly moving atoms of hydrogen could eventually come together to make a creature who would love and laugh and suffer. Who might laugh at his own suffering, or suffer the love of life. All of history was the cooling of matter and the falling away from the fiery primal unity, but history was also the rise of the consciousness of life. And now the number of galaxies was uncountable, and in the Milky Way galaxy alone, there were five hundred billion stars blazing in the stillness of the night. And now there were human beings. How many, no one really knew. Each man and woman was a cold island of consciousness adrift in space. Each was afflicted with the alienation from other life, with despair, with loneliness and the keen knowledge that his sufferings could end only with death. This was the doom of self-awareness, the disease of man. Animals – a wolf or an owl absorbed into the sounds of snow-covered forest – might enjoy a simple health and ease with life, but never a man looking toward the future for hope of joy. It was thought that gods had transcended all human suffering. Gods, it was said, possessed minds as vast and perfect as computers, and they could not fall mad over hunger or jealousy or the shame of watching their bodies decay with age. Danlo was sure that he had never seen a god, in the flesh, but he could see their predicament in a way that others could not. Gods could die – the Sonderval's discovery of the dead god out near the star named Hanuman's Glory had proved this beyond dispute, but even the eschatologists had not understood what this might mean. With all the universe beckoning, gods must fear death more than any human ever could. To a being who might live a million years, death is the supreme tragedy, to be avoided at any cost. Gods dread death as mere nothingness, the annihilation of the infinite possibilities that lay before them. This was the meaning of becoming a god: immortality, power, the vastening of the self. No living being has a greater sense of selfness than does a god, nor understands better what it is like to be truly alone. Some might imagine that the gods, in their quest for life without boundary or end, are the closest to God of all creatures. But it is just the opposite. A snowworm is closer, a grain of ice crunched beneath a harijan's boot is closer. All of history is the flight from death, and none flee more quickly than the gods. They flee outward toward the Virgo group of galaxies and the Ayondela Cluster, and beyond, where the stars surge like an ocean against the universe's cold, shimmering edge. But no god has ever found a way out of suffering in this direction. And none, though many try, has ever completely abandoned the body or escaped the pull of matter. For gods, too, are made of atoms, and each atom inside them once experienced the splendour and ecstasy of the universe's birth, and they never forget. Inside all gods is a burning for the infinite, for the moment of creation where death and life are as one. This is the pain of the gods. This is their eternal longing and torment. It is the burning awareness of life that grows and grows, without limit, on and on without end.