At the top of the steps, between two huge pillars holding up the library's frontispiece, Danlo and Hanuman bowed to the seven librarians lined-up in their formal indigo robes. One of them, a remarkably ugly woman, stopped them before they could approach the great doors. Her name was Lillith Volu. Danlo had met her and the other journeyman librarians earlier in winter. Lillith glared at them with strabismic eyes, which were of an ochre colour and fairly popping out of her head. Like the stone gargoyles set atop the famous Jacarandan temple walls, she glared at everyone who tried to pass by her.
'Please give me your names,' Lillith said. Her voice grunted deeply, as if she were a silk belly sow in rut. And she had a sow's nose: huge, hairy nostrils which she could open or close at will. Danlo could scarcely believe her claim, that the peoples out near Primula Luz had once bred for such facial deformations according to the dictates of a religious code long since forgotten.
'But Lillith, you know me, yes?'
Danlo, with his fine memory, found it only natural that Lillith should remember him after a single meeting some one hundred and eighty days earlier. In fact, he hadn't seen her since then. During his previous visits to the library, various other journeymen on duty had subjected him to these hated formalities. Of course, Lillith did recognize his voice and face, but only because a remembrancer had trained her to identify all of the Academy's novices by sight.
'Please give me your names,' she said again in her brusque, insolent manner.
On the steps behind Danlo and Hanuman, a group of people were queued up, waiting for them to speak. There was a red-faced master horologe, impatient and severe in his red robes, a haikuist who had the haggard, disoriented look of someone who had recently experienced too much computer simulation, and three high novices fresh from a game of hokkee in the Ice Dome. Danlo smelled their clean, salty sweat; they stood on the cold steps chatting, jumping up and down and blowing puffs of steam as they looked back and forth between Hanuman and him.
'I'm Hanuman li Tosh,' Hanuman said as he stepped ahead of Danlo.
'Very well, then – you may pass,' Lillith said.
Danlo smiled at Lillith before saying, 'And I am Danlo. Everyone calls me ... Danlo the Wild.'
Lillith smoothed her robe over her squat, lumpy torso and said, 'Danlo wi Soli Ringess – this is your full name, isn't it?'
At the base of the nearest pillar, sheet ice was frozen to the rounded stone fillets. Danlo kicked at the ice. A piece cracked off and went skittering down the steps. 'Yes,' he said. He was embarrassed that everyone seemed to have heard the news about his lineage. 'Danlo ... wi Soli Ringess.'
'You will please state your proper name each time before you are admitted,' Lillith said. 'Is this agreeable to you?'
'Yes,' Danlo said.
'Then you may pass.'
Lillith's formality and seriousness amused Danlo as much as it irked him, and so again he smiled at her, then bowed just a little too deeply. He turned and followed Hanuman through the great doorway into the library's main hallway. This was a huge room of polished stone, stale air and semi-darkness. Despite the circle of cold flame globes suspended above the central fountain (or perhaps because of their flickering bronze and cobalt lights) it was hard to make out the robe colours of the professionals hurrying to and fro. Danlo could not tell the eschatologists, with their blue robes, from the librarians. Still following Hanuman, he stepped past archaic scrolls and manuscripts preserved in airless clary crypts; they made their way toward the far wall, where the west wing gave out into the hallway. There they found three master librarians sitting on benches inside their little alcove. Danlo knew they must be librarians because they all looked up at them with a pallid, helpful look, as if their only purpose in life was to attend young novices.
Again Danlo gave his name, his full name, and asked if he and Hanuman could be assigned a couple of cells. One of the librarians told them to wait a moment, and they waited. The librarian's bald head and gaunt, pale features gave him the appearance of a living skull; he rubbed the back of his shiny head and went over to the table at the centre of the alcove. Quickly he studied a map of the library's west wing. The five hundred and thirty-two cells of the huge novices' wing were represented as rectangles of coloured, inlaid woods. Little white figurines – intricately carved pieces of onyx the size of a child's finger – occupied all the rectangles. The librarian continued to rub at the prominent bone beneath his scalp, and as he rubbed and pursed his lips, a new librarian appeared out of the west wing's darkness. The new librarian entered the alcove, checked the map, and removed two of the figurines from the table. 'If the young novices require cells, 212 and 213 are free,' he said.
The first librarian took the figurines from the other librarian's hand and put one back on the number 213 rectangle while the other figurine he placed on number 212. He drummed his fingers against his skull and studied Hanuman's face. Then he turned to Danlo and asked, 'Are you both first year novices? Then you'll require a guide today, won't you? Is it agreeable that you share a guide today?'
During Danlo's previous visits to the library, he had never minded such sharing, though he knew very well that Hanuman preferred having a guide all to himself. (In truth, Hanuman would have been happiest having no guide at all.) Hanuman never liked sharing anyone's attentions, but all first year novices were encouraged to visit the library in pairs, the better to husband the library's scarce supply of librarians. This was a relatively new rule for the novices; it had been in effect only since 2934, during the Pilots' War when one hundred and ten master librarians had defected from the Order to join the Encyclopaedists of the great library on Ksandaria. In the thirteen years since that time, the librarians of Neverness – the better ones – had been forced whenever they could to take novices to their cells two at a time.
'Is this agreeable to you?' the librarian repeated.
Danlo noticed Hanuman staring at the three idle librarians who remained on their bench. Clearly, they were keeping themselves in reserve for those favoured high novices who might require a private guide.
'It is agreeable,' Hanuman said at last.
'Yes,' Danlo said. 'We have come here together before.'
'Very well,' the librarian said, 'then please follow me.'
He led Danlo and Hanuman into the west wing, up a flight of chipped and very worn stairs, and then down branching stone corridors almost devoid of light. The brightest object Danlo could see was the master librarian's skull, nodding up and down as he shuffled along. The air was warm, and it stank of mould, moisture and thirty centuries of sweating bodies. One by one, they passed doors of dark, rotting wood. There were many doors. At last they came to the door of the 212th cell, or rather, the door leading to that cell's gowning room.
'Here we are,' the master librarian said as he opened the door for Danlo. He walked on a dozen paces into the darkness until he came to the door of 213th cell, which he opened and invited Hanuman to enter. Then he turned and walked back to the auricle room built between both Danlo's and Hanuman's cells. Before he entered it he said, 'My name is Baran Smith. I wish you both a fruitful journey.'
Hanuman stepped down the dank corridor, turned and bowed to Master Baran Smith. Then he looked at Danlo and smiled. It was a strange, nervous smile, like that of a child about to enter a room of his parents' house that has been forbidden to him. With a quick head bow toward Danlo, he went inside his cell and pulled the door shut behind him.
As Danlo had done on other days, he entered his cell's steamy, semi-dark gowning room; he shut the door and performed the customary ritual: he pulled off his boots, disrobed, hung his clothes on the wall hooks, filled the hot pool with water and bathed. The room was so tiny and cramped that, by stretching out his arms like a bird, he could touch either wall. When he had finished, he stood dripping water and sweat. He faced the black cell opening at the end of the room. He touched Ahira's feather to give himself courage. He touched the scar above his eye. Quietly, he recited the librarians' mantra: 'Every act of knowing brings forth a world.' And then he whispered, 'Shantih,' and stepped into the cell.
Almost immediately the cell sealed itself behind him. The cell was even tinier than the gowning room; it consisted of nothing more than a low tank of water surrounded by a ceiling and walls of deep purple neurologics. These neurologics were a crystalline latticework of proteins, the living circuitry of the cell's tutelary computer. The cell is a computer, Danlo reminded himself. In a way, entering the novice's cell was like entering into the heart of a computer or rather, like squeezing inside the artery of a computer's brain. As he moved about the cell he was very careful not to touch the neurologics, much as one is careful not to touch another's eyeball. He eased himself into the tank and lay back. The water was as warm as blood. The water was dense and heavy with dissolved mineral salts, hundreds of pounds of carbonates and sulphates, which increased its buoyancy. As the room grew dark, he floated easily on the water's surface, bobbing up and down like a piece of driftwood on a tropical sea. Soon the tank's wavelets stilled and there was no motion at all. The blackness encompassing him was as total as deep space. There was neither sound, nor heat, nor cold, nor any other sensation to stimulate his nerves. The warm water touched every part of him except his face; it dissolved his sense of gravity and his sense of being a discrete organism cut off from his environment. In truth, he hadn't any feeling for the separateness of his skin and could scarcely tell where the membranes of his body ended and where the dark salty water began. This dissolution of his physical self into the computer's innards was at once soothing and profoundly terrifying. Twelve times before he had lain thus, with his belly trembling beneath the water, waiting for the computer to fire his quiescent nerves with information.
In the beginning, at the moment of creation when the energies of eternity burst forth into time, the whole of the universe was immanent in a single point. The universe was infinitely hot, infinitely compact and pregnant with infinite possibilities.
Suddenly, inside Danlo's head, there was light. Or rather, there was the perception of light, the shapes and textures of shimmering images, the blues, golds and reds by which light is known as light. As the tutelary computer – the vibrating neurologics surrounding him – came awake to the touch of his thoughts, it scanned his brain for chemical and electrical events; to use the akashic's terminology, it began to 'read' his mind. And in turn, the computer directly excited the horizontal, bipolar, and anacrine cells inside the retinas of his wide-open eyes. These cells began to process information, the images and symbols flowing out of the computer. And then other cells began to fire, the ganglion cells whose very long axons formed the optic nerve leading up into his brain.
I am the eye with which the universe beholds itself and knows itself divine – he suddenly remembered Hanuman saying this once, just as he remembered that the eye's retinal cells are the most efficient and highly evolved of all neurons. Indeed, the retina is really an extension of the brain tunnelling through the tissues and bone of the eye sockets, reaching out to the world of light. The retina is the seeing part of the eye, the knowing part; without the coding of light into exquisitely timed, varying voltages, it would be impossible to see.
There are many ways of thinking about the evolof the universe. Most of the Order's eschatologists teach a fusion of the old science's strong anthropic principle and the theology of the cybernetic religions: The universe is regarded as God, an evolving being trying to create new information and complete its self-organization. Historically, this is known as a Socinian universe, a universe that is trying to wake up and behold itself in order to attain perfection.
Without eyes – or without the photocells and webwork of neurons lining the back of the eyes – it would be impossible to receive and interpret the light of the universe. And yet he knew there were other ways of seeing. A pilot, it was said, could interface his ship's computer even if he were as eyeless and blind as a scryer. While Danlo floated in the warm water and faced the cybernetic space of the tutelary computer, he couldn't help wondering what terrors he must endure if ever he became a pilot. Someday, he thought, he would be sealed inside the pit of his own lightship, and it would be very like floating in a salt water tank. Only, the ship computer would infuse images directly into his visual cortex, directly into the neurons at the back of his brain. Seeing is an act of will accomplished by the brain.
he remembered. What would it be like to see the splendid stars as a pilot sees, melded directly into the information flows of a lightship's computer?
'You'll have to wait until you become a pilot to know this,' Master Jonath had told him some days before. Total interface between computer and brain is too profound for a novice to experience properly. And safely.'
As Danlo entered into the most apprehensible of all the cybernetic spaces – into that universe of knowledge the cetics call 'shih space' – he wondered how any interface could be more total. The tutelary computer read the stream of his questing, chaotic thoughts and infused him with images, sounds and other sensa. The computer touched his optic nerve, touched the auditory nerve leading from his inner ear into his brain. It touched the nerves of his nose, mouth, throat and heart, all the nerves of his body. In this way, he saw the first spinning galaxies form and coalesce out of creation's brilliant light; through his skin burned the gamma and the beta and other radiations of a hundred billion stars; he felt the hot lava seas of Old Earth heave and flow and harden, and then fracture suddenly, only to melt again and be reabsorbed in itself, over and over for an aeon until vast floating continents formed, islands of primal basalt that trembled beneath his bare feet and vibrated up through his bones into his skull; he tasted salt water in his mouth and listened to the long, dark roar of the first oceans, the ageless oceans out of which had emerged the first living things; he smelled life: it was a rich scent of chlorophyll and blood, strong, vital and urgent; following the marvellous smell of life as it drifted, branched out and spread over the black soil, all across Old Earth and a million other worlds much like Earth, he sought to understand the evolution of the bacteria and protists, the fungi, plants, animals and all the alien kingdoms of life. Always, life was a reaching out into diversity and strangeness, into new forms of organization. He felt this life all about him, and inside, pulsing, touching, tasting, eating, dividing and redividing; he felt himself as a green-veined leaf breathing cool, sweet carbon dioxide and cell by cell growing outwards and up to taste the sun, and as a volvox, a hollow sphere of cells rotating like a tiny world inside a water droplet, and as an ancient calymene, and as a jewfish, and as a snowworm writhing in the belly of a bird, and as a man, and suddenly the possibilities of evolution were too many and the sea of life's infinite sensations overwhelmed him.