– A man becomes a god ... and then there is war, yes? An ecology of organized murder. Who knows what ecologies will spring forth from my father's apotheosis?
– It would be foolish to blame Nikolos Daru Ede for the War of the Faces, Young Novice. Or to blame Mallory Ringess for the problems our Order now faces. The Ringess was the greatest human being our Order has ever produced, and it is not upon us to judge him or blame him.
Danlo, alone inside his cell, separated from the librarian by a wall of purple neurologics and a lifetime of different experiences, couldn't help smiling at Master Smith's admiration of his father. Since entering the Order, he had found that there were two types of academicians: those who reviled the Ringess name and those who practically worshipped his father as a god. Clearly, Master Smith belonged to this second category.
– I do not want to blame anyone. I just need to see ... the interconnectedness between act and actuality. Like a spider's web, the way everyone's fates are spun together. The web of halla. Or shaida: pull any strand, and the entire web quivers. When my father became a god he pulled at this web, and I think the universe has yet to stop its quivering.
This thought gave birth to other thoughts that competed to occupy Danlo's mind. One thought, as dark and ominous as a death cloud rolling across the sea, soon blocked out all the others: in his kithing the history of the War of the Faces, he had perhaps overlooked something vital to his life and the lives of everyone he had known. He interfaced the word storm, then, looking for this elusive fact or idea. As a snowy owl scans an icefield for a hare's bounding white form, he used his sense of shih to single out a particular event occurring near the end of the War of the Faces: a scarce one hundred years after the Architects of the Reformed Churches had defeated what they called the 'Old Church', their missionaries first reached Yarkona, and a terrible plague spread wildly across the Civilized Worlds.
The lower estimates place the numbers killed at billion people. On some planets, such as Yarkona and Simoom, the death rate was as high as 96%. Because the plague struck down whole populations simultaneously, many died of neglect rather than from the outright effects of the plague virus. With no one to care for the victims or replace the fluids which ran from their bodies, the immediate cause of death was often dehydration.
Even though Danlo was enwombed in water, he could now feel himself sweating, salt water bursting from his pores and merging with the dark waters all around him. Ever since coming to Neverness, he had known that civilized people blamed certain diseases on the worms, protozoa, bacteria and viruses that swam through each person's tissues and blood. Privately, deep in the cavern of his most secret thoughts, he had both evaded and ridiculed this notion; he had supposed that the civilized dread of disease was nothing more than a wild fear of the life living inside everyone. Now he was not so sure. When he wondered how a simple virus could kill a full man many billion times its own size, the computer engaged his sense of simulation with a sudden flood of images. He 'saw' a single plague virus tumbling among the salt ions, water molecules, amino acids, lipids and sugars suffusing a neuron cluster of a living brain. The virus was a splendid, symmetrical, terrible thing, a tiny jewel of protein encasing dark coils of DNA. It floated among the intricate, branching neurons and finally attached itself to one of them. It fit into the neuron's membrane as a knife-blade slides into a sheath. There the virus DNA passed deep into the neuron's centre, into the nucleus of human DNA evolved for billions of years from the simplest of elements.
It is known that the Architects of the Old Church, with the help of the warrior-poets, designed the plague virus from a common retro-virus. After immunizing themselves, they used this bio-weapon against the schismatic Architects. But the virus proved unstable and, by chance, it mutated into a radical DNA structure infecting all Architects and all human beings indiscriminately.
Although the structure of the plague DNA was truly new, the retro-virus from which it had been wrought was older than mankind. Human retro-viruses, he discovered, were essentially little pieces of ancient DNA broken off from human chromosomes and trying to return home. In the neurons of a human brain (or especially in liver or sex cells) the plague DNA found a perfect home; possessing the same chemical 'memory' as did a retro-virus, it stitched itself into a neuron's DNA, masquerading as human DNA, hiding. Sometimes it might hide for many years before taking over the neuron's own chemical machinery to reproduce itself. And then something astonishing and terrible would happen. As Danlo watched the computer-generated simulation inside his mind, he saw the infected neuron swell with new life until it burst, and thousands of newly made viruses swarmed into the brain's tissues. These viruses infected new neurons, which died the same way, in turn infecting others, again and again in a chain of explosive reproduction until whole segments of the brain had been killed. The death and rupturing of millions of neurons inevitably caused the brain sac to fill up with fluids until it crushed against the inside of the skull.
The plague sufferer, within one day following the breakout of the disease, manifested the following afflictions: fever, vomiting, diarrhoea, accompanied with the hallmark 'lightning bolt' headache. Then came convulsions, lockjaw, bleeding from the ears and inevitably –
– No!
The computer placed a picture in Danlo's visual field, a many-hued simulation of an Architect man dying of the plague. But Danlo had no need to view the plague's terrible colours: the white foam that frothed from pale lips; the crusts of red-black blood; the blackened eye hollows, and the eyes themselves, grey as lead, lightless in death. He suddenly knew that he had seen death from the plague before. Shaida is the death that takes a whole people to the other of day, he thought. Haidar and Chandra and Wemilo and eighty-five others of the Devaki tribe had died of the great plague – of this he was suddenly certain. How they had died of an ancient and extinct virus, though, he had no idea.
The plague virus is not extinct. By the end of the War of the Faces, it had infected virtually all human beings of the Civilized Worlds. The survivors carried the virus within their chromosomes and passed it to their descendants. The virus has become embroidered within the human genome as a passive, if parasitical, segment of DNA. Suppressor genes inhibit the virus DNA, in most people keeping it quiescent and inactive. Only in those few societies isolated from history's convulsions are there to be found human beings possessing little or no inheritance of these suppressor genes. Such human beings are susceptible to contact with and infection by –
'No!'
In an instant of electrified muscles, frothing water and breath exploding hot and hurtful from his lips, Danlo rose up in his tank. The submerged tiles were hard and slippery against his feet; dark waves of displaced water churned and slapped against his belly. Because he had broken interface with the tutelary computer, he could see nothing at all, neither with his mind nor with his eyes, which burned with liquid salts and ached every time his heart beat. 'No!' he cried out again, a angry sound born deep in his throat. The sound filled the blackness of the cell all around him. It struck the living, inner walls of the computer, echoed for a moment, then died. In the dank air, the cloying, protein smell of the neurologics mingled with the acridness of his sweat. 'Shaida is the man who kills other men,' he whispered.
But no one heard him recite this line from the Devaki Song of Life. The tutelary computers of the library are sensitive to the subtlest of human thoughts, but when one is faced away and speaks only the language of voiced words, the sound waves fall off neurologics which are as deaf as stone.
'Father, Father, what have you done?'
But no one answered him; the only sound was his breath streaming through his throat and water tumbling off his naked body into the warm pool below him.
'Master Smith!' he said aloud. 'You say that we should not blame my father. But... he led an expedition to the Devaki people!'
He realized, then, that no matter how loud he shouted, neither Master Smith nor anyone else could hear him. The walls of neurologics were perfect insulators of sound, and the interior of a tutelary computer could be the quietest place in the universe. Because he wished to bring Master Smith to a keener appreciation of the tragedies (and crimes) of the life of Mallory Ringess, he sank back down into the waters of his tank, and he reached out with his mind. He interfaced the tutelary computer, immediately engaging his sense of electronic telepathy.
– Master Smith? You admire my father because he sought the secret of the universe. He thought the Elder Eddas ... were coded into the Alaloi DNA. The highest gods carked this secret into the oldest DNA, yes? My father thought that the Alaloi DNA was different from that of civilized peoples. Splendid and blessed, in this way.'
He waited for Master Smith to respond, but the telepathic space that they shared was as quiet as still water. He supposed that Master Smith must be guiding Hanuman's search, or perhaps he was angry at Danlo for having broken interface so suddenly moments before. Many times, Danlo had been warned against the dangers of too abruptly breaking interface.
– Therefore my father journeyed to the Alaloi. To the blessed Devaki. And their DNA was different. It ... is. They lived on Kweitkel for five thousand years – the War of the Faces never touched them, the plague. O blessed God! They were so innocent, so untouched, so rare.
He waited for Master Smith to defend the actions of Mallory Ringess, to deny that Mallory Ringess should have known that the Alaloi peoples bear no immunity to the plague. He waited for Master Smith to condemn Mallory Ringess for the crime of carelessness in not realizing that he – and all civilized humans – were carriers of a murderous plague.
– My father was a murderer!
His father, he knew, had once lain with the women of the Devaki. He had shared his seed with them. It was murder to knowingly infect others with such shaida DNA. His father must have known that someday – whether in fourteen years or in fourteen generations – the virus infecting the Devaki would come to life, and that would be the end of the Devaki.
– My father must have known this, yes? But he did not care. Why should a god care if he murders men or women?
Why should a god care if he murdered many tribes of people? Danlo remembered that Haidar and others of his tribe, when he was younger, every winter when the sea froze, had visited the Olorun, Sanura and Patwin tribes of the Alaloi. And over the years, the men of these tribes most certainly had visited many other tribes far west of Kweitkel. The plague virus had murdered the Devaki, and even as he floated in his tank and wondered why Master Smith would not answer him, the virus was secretly murdering his cousins of the Patwin tribe. Soon, someday, perhaps after next deep winter, if he did nothing to restore the halla nature of the world, the virus would murder all two hundred and twelve tribes of the Alaloi, and his people would be no more.
– A man lusts to become a god ... and then there is murder. Murder upon murder upon murder. Why is the world of men nothing but murder?
After a long while of waiting for Master Smith to answer him, Danlo began to worry. It occurred to him that the reason for Master Smith's silence was that Hanuman's journey was not going well. Perhaps, he thought, Hanuman had become lost in the word storm and could not find his way out of shih space. Perhaps he was so absorbed in cybernetic samadhi or one of the other states of computer consciousness that he had no will to return to himself. Or perhaps Hanuman had tried to penetrate the library's secret pools of information only to be struck senseless by the computer's guardian programs. It had happened to other novices before. Perhaps Hanuman lay in his tank, eyes closed and mind dead, breathing warm, heavy, salt water.
– Master Smith, please! Is Hanuman all right?
Master Smith had told Danlo that he should not inquire about the journeys of other novices, but now he was too worried to mind such prohibitions. He should have waited patiently in his cell, then. He should have delved back into the computer's lovely information flows and waited for the touch of Master Smith's thoughts, but he had no desire for more information. He might have lain back and floated in his tank, waiting for hours or moments or days, waiting endlessly as Haidar and Three-Fingered Soli and the other men of the Devaki tribe had once taught him to wait. After a long time of waiting, however, he began to smell something faint and far-off; although he could not quite identify this smell, muddied as it was with the rankness of the neurologics and salt water, it disturbed him. The smell was almost fruity, and it had a sharp, effervescent quality that penetrated his nostrils deep into his brain. This ominous smell set loose a flood of emotions and memories, and he was suddenly afraid.
Hanuman has not been the same since Pedar died, he thought. Oh, Hanu, Hanu, why haven't you been yourself?
When Danlo could bear waiting no longer, he fairly leaped out of his tank and rushed out of the cell as it opened before him. He passed into the gowning room where he worked his clothes and boots over his wet skin. He opened the door to the corridor beyond. Steam billowed out into the corridor, and suddenly the smell that had worried him was much stronger than before. He knew that he should recognize this smell. He should dread and loathe it as the smell of death, though it bothered him that he could not remember why.
Death upon death upon death.
As quickly as he could, he ran down the corridor until he reached the door to the librarian's auricle room. With his knuckles he knocked on this dark, rotten door. 'Excuse me, please, Master Smith – can you tell me if Hanuman is all right?'
He waited a moment, then knocked again, pounding and pounding against the door with his fist until he realized that Master Smith would not answer him. Up and down the dimly lit corridor, the sound of him hammering away at the shatterwood door reverberated from bare wall stones. But the auricle rooms and cells themselves were built to damp all exterior sounds, and no matter how desperate his pounding or shouting, neither Master Smith nor any other librarian or novice would ever hear him.