'All scryers,' Bardo said, 'when they take their vows – they're given these spheres. After Katharine died, your father kept it instead of returning it to the Lord Scryer, as he should have.'
Because Danlo had smeared the diamond with his skin oils, he breathed over the cool stone to condense a layer of mist and then rubbed his sleeve around its surface until it shone cleanly. 'Bardo,' he suddenly asked, 'do you know how my mother died?'
With a toss of his head and a few hard gulps, Bardo finished the last of his beer. He used a silk handkerchief to wipe his lips, and he said, 'Ah, Little Fellow, she died in the Devaki cave, too bad. Giving birth to you – it was a hard birth, you see, and she lost too much blood.'
Danlo was looking at Bardo as he said this. He saw the blood drain from his huge face, watched his eyes fall hard and shiny as diamonds. He knew then (or thought he knew) that this sad, passionate man could not be telling him the full truth.
'Here,' Bardo said, too quickly, 'take the ring, and we'll be done.'
Again, Danlo reached into the box. He found the ring nestled against thick velvet, and he grasped it tightly.
'Let's see it, now,' Bardo said.
Danlo withdrew his arm and opened his fist. There, in the centre of his palm was a ring of black diamond. It was a pilot's ring, he knew, spun diamond stived with a unique configuration of impurities, an atomic signature written in iridium and iron that would distinguish it from all other rings. He slipped it over his little finger, but it was slightly too big.
'Your father's ring, by God! You'd better not be seen wearing it, or the other pilots will rip your finger off.'
'But someday I'll be a pilot, yes?'
'We can only hope so.'
'Can I wear the ring then?'
'This ring? No, no, Little Fellow, even if you grow into it, you may not wear it. Each pilot must have his own ring – you'll be given yours when you take your pilot's vows.'
With a grunt and a sigh, Bardo pulled off one of his silver chains and eased it over Danlo's head. 'But you may keep it on your person,' he said. 'Put the ring on the chain around your neck. There, clasp the chain like so, and keep it beneath your robes where no one will see it.'
'You are a generous man,' Danlo said as he tucked the ring down into his kamelaika. The ring was cold, and he felt it pressing the skin over his breastbone. 'Thank you.'
'You're welcome.'
'My father entrusted this ring to you before he left Neverness?'
'He did, and it was the saddest moment of my life.'
'Where is my father, do you know?'
Bardo rubbed his eyes and sighed. 'All I know is what everyone knows: Mallory Ringess disappeared with his ship six years ago. There's evidence he went into the Solid State Entity. He'd prophesied once that he would join with that goddamned goddess, but I never really believed him. And now he's gone.'
For a long time Danlo stared into the fire as he held his fist pressing the ring over his heart. And then he asked, 'Bardo, what is he? Do you know what my blessed father is?'
'He's a god!' Bardo suddenly called out. 'A goddamned god.'
'But what does it mean ... to be a god?'
'Only a god would know.'
'Then– '
'Your father,' Bardo interrupted, 'was the first to remembrance the Elder Eddas. And perhaps the only one to remembrance them deeply. He looked inside himself and found the secret of life – the secrets of the gods. I believe he's found the secret of immortality. Great power, these powers of mind that the gods must love above all things.'
While listening carefully, Danlo never let his eyes fall away from the fire, and he said, 'To be a god must be ... nothing but pain.'
'Eh? Why do you think that?'
'I... do not know.'
'Well, certainly your father has paid a heavy price for his godhood. He's carked his goddamned brain! Two-thirds of it has been replaced by neurologics, by these bio-computers that the Agathanians made for him when they brought him back from his death.'
'But part of him is still human, yes?'
'Perhaps.'
'And this human part, the man that he still is – does he exist in his body? Of his body? Is he a being of blood and bone, just as you or I?'
'Ah,' Bardo said, 'the crucial question. But the truth is, I don't know.'
'But if his brain is still partly human,' Danlo insisted, 'if his heart beats as a man's heart, then he must exist ... somewhere. Somewhere in spacetime.'
'Perhaps.'
'Then, does he still dwell in the Immanent Carnation? Around which star does his lightship circle?'
'How should I know, by God!'
'But you were his best friend!'
'I believe,' Bardo said as he moved back over to the window, 'I believe that he's been lost into the Entity. Absorbed, in his mind, if not body.'
'My father ... has gone over, then?'
'Not really. Ah, there's been a kind of marriage. It's a mystical notion, and I detest mysticism, but I'm coming to believe it's true.'
'Why?'
Bardo rapped his rings against the window pane and pointed up at the sky. 'How else can one explain the timely appearance of the Golden Ring? I believe that it's the child of your father's mind. And of the Entity's.'
Danlo looked out the window, then, and he saw that the snow had stopped. The sky was like a sodden grey blanket, heavy and too low. He thought of the Golden Ring growing far above the clouds of the atmosphere, and he vowed that if ever he became a pilot, he would journey there to see what kind of creatures his father had designed. He unzipped his kamelaika, touched the ring Bardo had given him, then asked, 'Do you think the Golden Ring will shield the animals of the world from the Vild's radiation? Truly?'
'That was your father's plan – he always had a plan.'
'Then the life of this world ... will continue to live?'
'By God, I hope so, since I'm still alive on this god-frozen place!'
'Then my father has slain a people ... and saved a world.'
'Well, he was always a man of irony, your father.'
Danlo pressed his knuckles against his forehead and softly recited,' "Halla is the way of the man who cherishes the world".'
'Eh? Halla?'
'I should leave now,' Danlo said. He stood up and squeezed the diamond sphere in his hand. He was sweating, and his eyes hurt from staring too long at the sky. He thought of his father, who had once murdered Liam of the Devaki tribe and many others, and he whispered, 'Shaida is the way of the man who kills other men.'
Bardo, whose hearing had always been acute, shook his head at these words. He said, 'You shouldn't judge him, Little Fellow. Even when he was a man, he wasn't like other men.'
'Truly?'
'No, he was fated to become a god. I see that now,' Bardo reached down to grab the empty pitcher of beer from the window sill. He was smiling to himself now, and his moist brown eyes seemed full of memories and dreams. 'Can you imagine what it's like to become a god?'
With his free hand, Danlo touched Bardo's sweaty forehead, and then scooped up the two old books sitting atop the tea table. He worked them up beneath his arm, and said again, 'I should leave.'
'Wait! You've too much to carry – you should have at least one arm free, else you'll fall and split your face on the ice.' Bardo picked up his jewelled box and handed it to Danlo. 'Put the books in here. The ball, too. And keep the box, if you please.'
'Thank you,' Danlo said.
'Where are you going in such a hurry?'
'To the cetics' tower,' Danlo said. 'Perhaps Master Javier will allow me to visit Hanuman today. There is a question ... that I must ask him.'
'Ah, well, I'll send for you in a few days, then. The College of Lords will have to give us a decision about the Alaloi, and I want you to be there.'
Danlo pulled his furs on and bowed. 'Thank you, Bardo,' he said.
He left the Sanctuary then, and as he struck out across the slick glidderies of Borja to ask Hanuman a simple question, he was very careful not to drop the box that the Master of Novices had given him.
I am not interested in things getting better; what I want is more: more human beings, more dreams, more history, more consciousness, more suffering, more joy, more disease, more agony, more rapture, more evolution, more life.
– from the Meditations of Jin Zenimura
It did not take very long for Bardo to provoke a decision from the Lords' College concerning the plight of the Alaloi people. While Hanuman remained sequestered with the cetics (during which time the master cetic still refused to let Danlo visit him) Bardo petitioned the Lords' College on behalf of Danlo and all two hundred and twelve tribes of the Alaloi. As it happened, the lords were eager to dispose of this troublesome petition, just as they were fairly frantic to clear up the harijan problem and the mystery of why a warrior-poet would try to assassinate a mere novice. In truth, many of the lords were eager to dispose of Bardo altogether. These enemies of Bardo, serious men and women thrice his age, dismissed Bardo as merely a young pilot of braggadocio and bombast. Some said he was too careless (and brutal) to be Master of Novices. Nassar wi Jons, the Lord Imprimatur, had decried his sloppy inquest of Pedar's murder; quite a few others blamed him for instigating the cruel competition in which too many petitioners had died in Lavi Square. As Bardo discovered in the days after he had given Danlo his father's ring, few lords seemed worried over the fate of the Alaloi tribes. And no one wanted to suspend the covenants at a time when the whole Order was overwhelmed with more cosmic concerns.
'By God, they're fools!' Bardo said to Danlo one night when he paid a visit to Perilous Hall. 'Cowards and fools – they think only of the doomed, man-cursed stars!'
He went on to admit his fear that the College of Lords might not give their petition the deep consideration it deserved. The Lords of the Order, he said, were too eager to return to their debate concerning whether a second mission should be sent to the Vild.
There's even talk of establishing a second academy within the Vild,' Bardo said. 'A fissioning of the Order, a legal schism to extend our power. And to prevent the Cybernetic Universal Church from exploding more goddamn stars. Talk is what it is, the old lords love to talk, to blather on and on. Did you know that they've been talking about this question for six years, since the First Vild Mission returned in failure? Listen to what I say, Little Fellow: you'll have grown into your manhood and taken your pilot's vows before the lords ever stop talking and act. Ah, why did your father abandon us to be run by a barbaric council? It's beyond understanding! When your father was Lord of the Order – and the Timekeeper before him! – things were accomplished.'
It is a sad truth that rule by council is the most inefficient and corruptible means of government. At the time Bardo petitioned to suspend the covenants, the College of Lords was a testament to the evolution of both inefficiency and corruption. Six years previously, after Mallory Ringess so unexpectedly had left the City, the Lords of Neverness had been empowered to decide the Order's future. For as long as anyone could remember, the imperious, fierce old Timekeeper had ruled the Order, and then, for a brief moment in history, so had Mallory Ringess. And so the Lords had grown weary and fearful of rule by a single Lord, and so they had decided that there would never be another Timekeeper or single Lord of the Order. During the year of 2942, the College of Lords – the 121 lords of the various disciplines – had tried to rule by consensus. It was a noble experiment in democracy, an attempt to reform the Order's most venerable institutions, but it had failed. Of course it had failed. The very nature of the Order, its soul and name, implies an ordering of each individual's passions, conceits and dreams. Those who give themselves to the quest to discover the universe's ineffable truths, if they take vows and join with others who share a calling, must find their place within a hierarchy organized around a singular vision. If they do not, there will be chaos; in time, they will discover a hundred or a thousand individual truths which will destroy all order, pulling apart human-made structures as surely as a flock of hungry gulls dismantles a whale's corpse. So, there must be a unifying vision, and vision is the glory of a single living organism, whether woman or man, or an animal finding its way across the icefields of the world. In truth, a council of human beings has less vision than a snowworm burrowed into a drift. The Lords of the Order, in the first year of their ascendency, found themselves squabbling endlessly over rules of order, protocol, religious and political definitions, and over creationism or cybernetic gnosticism or other ideologies. The old lords never agreed about anything, or rather, the only consensus they reached was that consensus democracy could not work. And so they had reorganized. Thereafter, the College would decide all important questions by a vote of two-thirds majority; they appointed four of the most prominent lords to set agenda, to make administrative decisions and break deadlocks when the vote in the College was tied. These four lords – they called themselves the Tetrad – had gradually gained power. On the third day of midwinter spring in the year 2944 since the founding of Neverness, the Tetrad proposed a new canon giving themselves the authority to decide which matters were important enough to submit to the College, and to 'dispose' of those which were not. Most lords, to their everlasting shame, were glad to be relieved of the petty decisions that consumed so much of their time, and they had voted to instate this canon. In the three and a half years since then, the Tetrad had deemed few matters worthy of the other lords' trouble. (The debate over the second mission to the Vild was almost the single issue the College kept to itself.) In effect, the four lords of the Tetrad had become the real rulers of the Order. Although Bardo despised the entire College of Lords as blind fools, he reserved the most acid part of his anger for the Tetrad.
'They call themselves the Tetrad,' Bardo said. 'I call them the Four Barbarians, all of them. Especially Chanoth Chen Ciceron. He told me the Tetrad had no power to suspend the covenants. And that's a damn lie, the Tetrad does what it damn pleases. Lord Ciceron said that only the entire Lords' College could suspend the covenants – and then he told me that the Tetrad would not burden the College with a request to make such a decision at this time! By God, these old lords gall me! They don't like to listen. Ah, but I finally gained the Lord Akashic's ear, otherwise it would be too bad for us, and worse for the poor Alaloi. Nikolos the Elder – he used to be your father's friend, and mine. His powers have spoiled him, too bad, but at least he still honours friendship. He persuaded Lords Ciceron, Pall and Vasquez to put the question to the College. They're convening on the 74th, the entire College of Lords, and so we'll have our answer then.'