Again, Danlo said a prayer for the mother he had never known, and then he looked at the foto's other images. To Hanuman he said, 'Mallory Ringess – he looks splendid as an Alaloi, yes? I wonder what it would be like, to become an Alaloi in body and face while keeping the spirit of a civilized man?'
He fell quiet and thoughtful for a moment, oblivious to the many novices discussing the scandal of his birth. And then he pointed at the foto and said to Hanuman, 'I know this man. My father, the father of my blood – I have seen him once before. I have a memory, from when I was young – I was just learning to tie the laces of my boots. In Haidar's sled. My fingers were cold and it was hard to get the knot right, but Haidar said we had to travel and that I should keep my hands out of the wind or they would freeze and fall off. Haidar and Wemilo took me down to the sea on their sled to meet my blood father. He must have visited me, once. My father, the Ringess – even sculpted as an Alaloi, he has a fierce look to his face, yes?'
'You are his son, aren't you?' Hanuman said. He was now looking at Danlo intensely; there was envy, loyalty, and fear in his stare. 'I should have known you were no common petitioner.'
Danlo rubbed the side of his nose and said, 'If Mallory Ringess is the son of Leopold Soli, then Soli must be my grandfather. Mi ur-padda. Three-Fingered Soli, my grandfather.' He drew his fingernail along the foto until he came to the image of a man he had known almost all his life. A fierce, gaunt man who brooded too much – that was Leopold Soli. Three-Fingered Soli. When the foto had mutated, the image of Leopold Soli in his black pilot's robe had changed into Three-Fingered Soli, the strange Alaloi man who had cut his membrum and helped him pass into manhood on a deep winter night now long past. Obviously, Danlo concluded, not all of the expedition members had abandoned him at his birth. Obviously, Three-Fingered Soli must have remained among the Alaloi in order to watch over Danlo, to guide him through the dangers and pains of childhood.
There was now little doubt that Pedar had correctly guessed Danlo's origins. Words of the Alaloi language had spilled from his lips, and the lineaments of the Ringess (and Soli) chromosomes were written into his face for everyone to see.
'Well, Wild Boy?' Pedar said. He snatched the foto away from Danlo and waved it above his head. He nodded at the crowd of novices, most of whom were shouting, elbowing forward, and craning their necks to get a better look. 'Well, are you the son of Mallory Ringess?'
Danlo tried to stand back, away from the many white-gloved hands grasping at the foto. 'Yes,' he said at last. 'I am his son.'
Pedar picked at his neck and smiled. There was a smugness in his smile and bloody pus staining the white leather of his glove. 'Well, then, how can you stand here facing your fellow novices? Aren't you ashamed?'
'Why should I be ashamed?'
'You really don't know?'
'No.'
Pedar addressed the novices, and there was a cruel, mocking tone to his voice, 'Why should the Wild Boy be ashamed? Who will tell him?'
When the novices all suddenly fell silent and no one would speak, Pedar turned back to Danlo. 'Why should you be ashamed? I'll tell you why – didn't you know that Katharine the Scryer was Mallory's sister?'
'No!'
Pedar smiled wickedly and pointed his finger at Danlo. 'Your mother was Mallory Ringess' sister, and he swived her – he always put himself above morality and law, so it's said.'
From the crowd surrounding them, a voice rose above the outraged murmuring. It was Rihana Brandreth Tal, and she too was outraged, not at the past indiscretions of Danlo's parents, but at Pedar's baiting Danlo. 'You speak so crudely,' she said.
'Well, it's a crude act, to swive one's sister.' Pedar handed the foto to Arpiar Pogossian, who was standing nearby. Pedar made an 'O' with his finger and thumb, and he pushed the forefinger of his other hand back and forth inside the circle, back and forth in the universal symbol (universal among human beings, that is) of copulation. 'So very crude, isn't that true, Wild Boy?'
Danlo was aware that he should probably stand there silently, stand and face Pedar and listen to whatever taunts or slurs he might hurl at him. But his knees and hips ached to move, and he could not remain standing.
Shaida is the man who lies with his sister, he remembered. Shaida is the woman who –
'Well, Wild Boy?'
There was an aching in Danlo's belly, in his throat and in his eyes; at last he understood why the slow evil had come upon his tribe and killed all his brothers and sisters.
Shaida is the child born of shaida.
Suddenly, as a beast who has been brought to bay and wounded, he knew he had to flee. He flung his hand over his eyes, gasped for air and pushed away from the warming pavilion. Blindly, he pushed aside several novices. He struck off onto the dazzling whiteness of Lavi Square. His skates struck the ice in a quick, violent staccato, flashing steel sending up sprays of ice-powder. So quickly did he gain speed and so wild his stroking that he knocked into the shoulder of a journeyman pilot. He scarcely felt the jolt; he was only dimly aware of a blackness before him, the furry blackness of the journeyman recoiling from him, arms windmilling, falling to the ice. Danlo didn't pause to see if the journeyman was hurt. He shot down the gliddery into cold, hard air, and in moments he had left Lavi Square behind him.
O mighty Arjuna, even if you believe the Self to be subject to birth and death, you should not grieve. Death is inevitable for the living; birth is inevitable for the dead. Since these are unavoidable, you should not sorrow. Every creature is unmanifested at first and then attains manifestation. When its end has come, it once again becomes unmanifested. What is there to lament in this?
– Lord Krishna to Arjuna, before the battle of Kunikshetra
Without plan or destination Danlo skated east through the buildings of Borja. Just below the Hill of Sorrows, where the flat, frozen Academy grounds give way to the icefalls and lower slopes of the mountains, he came to a grove of trees renowned for its beauty. It was called the shih grove; it was a well-tended stand of one hundred and twelve shih trees imported from Urradeth. On a stone bench beneath the silver trees, he sat playing his shakuhachi and looking for sign of Ahira in the deep winter sky.
I am that which should not be born, he thought.
A short while later there came the click-clack of skates against the grove's single gliddery. Danlo looked up to see Hanuman gliding toward his bench. 'I had to follow you,' he gasped out. 'But you're too quick. I thought I'd lost you. And then I heard you playing your flute. Through the trees – the sound of it carries, you know.'
'Yes, I know,' Danlo said. And then he asked, 'Is it true ... what Pedar said? Were Katharine and Mallory Ringess truly brother and sister?'
Hanuman rested the toe of his boot on the bench. The wind and his exertions had brought his usually bone-white skin to a scarlet flush. He nodded his head. 'Everyone knows they were.'
'Then I am an abomination.'
'Oh, Danlo.'
'I am that which should not have come into life,' he said.
Danlo looked off into the shadowed depths of the grove for a long time. The shih trees were truly unique, truly beautiful. Unlike shatterwood or yu trees, with their conical symmetry and pointed crowns, the limbs of each shih tree branched out from a main trunk without apparent pattern, dividing and redividing into thousands of sub-branches. And at the end of every twig, veined with silver and fluttering in the wind, were the shimmering leaves, ten thousand silver-green leaves seeking out the sun high above the ground. 'Why?' he asked. 'Why would the Ringess lie with his own sister?'
Hanuman shrugged his shoulders and said, 'I don't know.'
'Shaida eth shaida,' Danlo said. And he thought, Shaida is the man who touches his sister beneath the furs of night.
'Danlo, you are– '
'No!' Danlo suddenly cried out. He was up on his skates, and he smacked the shakuhachi against his thigh four times in syncopation with each of the four terrible words he forced out: 'I ... am ... shaida ... too!'
'Danlo, you can't– '
'No, no, no, no!'
Without care or consideration of ahimsa, Danlo reached up to the lowest branch of the tree above the bench, and he plucked off a single leaf. He clenched his fist, then, crushing the leaf. Silver sap as warm as blood ran beneath his fingers. It pained him, the sight of the tree's lifeblood spilled so carelessly, and he closed his eyes in order to weep for the dead leaf.
'Danlo, Danlo,' he heard Hanuman's voice tighten with emotion and die off. And then he felt Hanuman's cold fingers against his forehead, and he opened his eyes. Hanuman quickly jerked his hand away. He was plainly embarrassed to be caught offering the simplest of kindnesses. (In truth, it was the first time he had initiated such a gesture since he was five years old, when his mother had told him he was too old to touch others in friendship.) Danlo and Hanuman looked at each other in silent understanding, and the only sound in the shih grove was the whoosh and murmur of the wind through the trees.
And then Hanuman quoted from Man's Journey: '"I love all those who are as heavy raindrops, falling one by one out of the dark cloud that hangs over men: they herald the advent of lightning, and, as heralds, they suffer and perish."'
'I am the herald of death,' Danlo said.
'What do you mean?'
'I am shaida, and that is why the shaida death came upon the Devaki.' Danlo sat back down on the bench. Even through the fur of his pants the stone's coldness stung his skin. He confided to Hanuman the secret he had never thought to tell anyone: of how the whole Devaki tribe had perished of a mysterious, shaida fever.
'But it must have been a virus that killed your people,' Hanuman said. 'You didn't make this virus, Danlo.'
'No, but my ... coming into my tribe must have weakened them. It must have touched their spirits with shaida.'
'Oh, no, that's silly,' Hanuman said. 'You mustn't think such thoughts.'
'The truth is the truth.'
With a long sigh, Hanuman shook his head and murmured, 'I don't like to see you like this.'
'I am sorry.'
'I'm sorry about your people,' Hanuman said. 'But you have your life and your dream. Your fate.'
Without warning, Danlo knelt down next to the gliddery. With his naked finger, which was still cracked and blackened from the labours Pedar had forced on him, he began drawing circles in the snow. And then he said, 'O Hanu! How can I ever become an asarya, now? How can I? To see it, dancing, quickening, all life – how can I affirm anything if I cannot even say "yes" to my own existence?'
'Danlo, you– '
'I was a fool, to think I could be an asarya.'
Hanuman looked at him and shook his head. 'You – if you're a fool, you're a splendid fool. Perhaps you're even foolish enough to become an asarya.'
'No, that is not possible, not now.'
'But for our kind,' Hanuman said, 'all things are possible.'
Danlo busied himself with drawing lines in his circles. The snow crystals were gritty and cold beneath his fingernails. In truth, it was much too cold to be solving mathematical theorems in the snow. He finally abandoned his effort; he looked at Hanuman and asked, 'Do you think we are so different from others?'
'You know that we are.'
'But Hanu, we are still people.'
'There are people,' Hanuman said, 'and there are people.'
'The blessed ... people. All people are blessed.'
'But few are chosen,' Hanuman said. 'All through history, there have always been a few people destined to be something more.'
'More ... than what?'
'More than they are. More than anybody is.'
Danlo smiled at this and said, 'I think you are a natural aristocrat.'
'How not? It's only we, aristocrats in our souls, who can know what is possible.'
'But what about the others?'
'Others are other. You mustn't think about them too much. All human society is a hierarchy. All life, this living pyramid. It's only natural that a few human beings should stand at the top.'
'You mean, stand on top of others.'
'I didn't make the universe,' Hanuman said. 'I just live in it.'
Danlo knelt in the snow, listening to the wind fall off the Hill of Sorrows and the icy mountains above. 'But it is hard to live ... with the boots of others kicking at your face.'
'Oh, yes, life is cruel,' Hanuman said. 'And to stand at the top, one has to be a little cruel. Cruel to others – and even crueller to oneself.'
'Cruel? You? I?'
'Oh, yes. You'll see it, if you look hard enough.'
'But, Hanu, why?'
'Because that's the only way for people such as you and me to become more. We look down at the others, beneath our boots. They seem so close – but there's a vast distance between us. Most of these people are quite content to bear us up. You might even say our weight is a comfort to them. All they see is our boots in their faces, and sometimes they think they hate that. But if we were to step off them only for a moment, what then? Then they would stand on the pyramid's apex. And the view of all the living flesh beneath would make them sick and dizzy, even mad. The greater the height, the greater the fall. That's why they're glad to leave the apex to our kind. And so this vast distance: the light-distances between the stars aren't greater than the distance between those who love their fate and those who fear it. Our kind are those who crave such distances. Because it creates in us a longing for the distances within our own souls. This is what we should live for, Danlo: the heightening of our sensibilities, the rarefying of our desire, the deepening of our purpose, the vastening of our selves. The power to overcome ourselves. To be more. Or rather, to become more. Who hasn't dreamed of such becoming?
But who could think to distance himself from his lower parts without an act of cruelty?'
Just then a blast of cold air blew through the shih grove, rattling the tree leaves against each other. Danlo arose from the snow and looked up through the silvery canopy above him. The sky to the west, he saw, was no longer blue. A bank of ice-clouds as grey as lead was moving across the sea, closing in toward the City. Ilka-tetha, he thought, the death clouds.