– from A Requiem For Homo Sapiens by Horthy Hosthoh
To a young man, even a student of the most fabulous and powerful school on the Civilized Worlds, the times during which he comes to maturity always seem normal no matter how extraordinary, how turbulent with change they really are. Imminent change and danger act as drugs upon the human brain, or rather, as rich foods that nourish the urge toward more life. And how easily one becomes used to such nourishment. Those who survive the signal events of history – the wars, plagues, alien contacts, vastenings, speciations and religious awakenings – develop a taste for ferment and evolution next to which all the moments of 'normal' existence will seem dull, flat, meaningless. (Indeed, viewed from a godly coign of vantage across more than two million years, nothing about humankind's astonishing journey from the grassy veldts of Afarique to the galaxy's cold, numinous stars can be seen as normal.) If the career of Danlo wi Soli Ringess was truly remarkable, truly pregnant with wild moments, tragedy, historic decisions and acts, it is nevertheless also true that he rarely thought of himself as a remarkable man, nor did he regard the universe into which he had been born as a hostile or an essentially tragic place. It was a hard place, certainly, full of capriciously exploding supernovae, terrible gods and new ecologies of life. A universe out of balance. The world around him was steeped in vice, injustice, lies, slelled diseases, all the manifestations of human evil. All the worlds around the stars were tainted with shaida, perhaps flawed to their fiery, molten cores. Possibly there was no help for the universe's evil; possibly he (along with all of humanity) might find a way to restore the primeval balance of life and bring all things into that state of correctness and natural order that he called halla. But not even a halla universe, he knew, could ever be peaceful. Like a winter storm, the universe would always roar with violence, chaos and change. It was this essential chaos of his times that he had come to relish. It never occurred to him – as it did to Hanuman li Tosh – that the universe might be transformed in fundamental and horrible new ways.
There is not a great deal to tell of Danlo's passage from Borja and his early years as a journeyman at the Pilots' College, Resa. He was a brilliant student, though brilliant in a natural, offhand manner that never aroused his fellow journeymen's envy or ire. Mathematics, fugue, fenestration and hallning – the disciplines that he learned to become a full pilot required much of his time but did not mark him deeply, at least, not until the end of this exciting period. To be sure, he had to master the interface with his ship computer, and in doing so, he became enraptured with the different states of cybernetic consciousness. All journeymen pilots must suffer through this love-addiction with their computers. Danlo quickly became an aficionado and adept of that marvellous state known as samadhi vastening. Unlike the first and lowest samadhi state – that of savikalpa samadhi – in the vastening through the computer, there is no awareness of one's mind as distinct from the computer's lightning number flows. The sense of oneself dissolves, as of electrons rushing and spreading out through the microscopic filaments of a computer's neurologics. There is an experience of oneness, a unity with the cybernetic space of the manifold. Time nearly stops. In entering the onstreaming realm of pure mathematics, a pilot has a giddy and joyous sense of thinking faster, making connections, of being a vaster mind. This intense depersonalization and vastening of the self is a marvel to some, a nightmare to a few, and a peril to all who face their computers deeply. Many are the pilots who have been lost into the number storm's cold and terrible beauty. Pilots die in a thousand ways, and the foremost of these deaths is into their computers. Although Danlo did not design the computer that was the brain and soul of his lightship, he soon learned to meld his mind with it totally and comfortably – but never too comfortably. His ship itself – a beautiful sweep of spun diamond which he named The Owl – he did design and make, with the help of a cadre of tinkers, architects, programmers, and robots. He took his ship out into space to the nearby planets, Ninsun and Silvaplana, and then into that brilliant, eternal mathematical space that lies beyond and beneath the space of the visible universe. It was Danlo's talent and strength not only to survive his first tentative entries into the manifold, but to gain from these journeys knowledge that he might apply to his own peculiar problems, and to the basic problem of the great civilization spread out all around him, above the icy streets and glittering towers of Neverness and out across the stars.
And what did he learn during these years as a journeyman pilot? He learned no startling new truths about his world, but rather refined his way of seeing it. This was a continuation of a quest for vision that had begun early in his childhood, only to intensify during his stay in Old Father's house and his entrance into the Order. It was his admitted purpose to 'see the universe just as it is'. To behold it, clearly, deeply and truly, and to say 'yes' to all he could see. Ironically though, the more keen his vision grew and the more adept he became in seeing into the wasting soul of humanity, the more he was tempted to say 'no'. As he grew into a full and free manhood, he became ever more critical of civilized people and their strange beliefs, cultures and institutions. He donned the black racing kamelaika of a journeyman pilot, and he skated alone down forbidden city streets, roaming the dim glidderies of the Farsider's Quarter, making friends in all classes and sects of people wherever he went. And almost always, in almost everyone, he found something wanting. (Though, because he was a compassionate man who still honoured the Fravashi ideal, he took care never to reflect or remind others of this want; even in the lowliest of wormrunners, he always found qualities he could like, or even love, and thus he was always loved in return.) He would go among the harijan, whores, exemplars, autists, and arhats, looking in their hurried eyes for the light of consciousness. All too often – especially in the Lords of the Order – the light was sickly and fragile, like an oilstone's naked flame wavering about in the wind. Watching the way people watched each other, always judging or desiring or dismissing, always in fear of themselves, he came to realize that the basic fault of everyday human consciousness was that it was cut off from the rest of the universe. All human beings in all places had suffered the pain and loneliness of living as separate beings, but over the millennia, this pain had deepened to a racial agony. As humankind had evolved from bands of primitive fruit gatherers to sophisticates dwelling in a star-flung civilization, the split between the self and the other parts of creation had grown as vast as the great emptiness between the galaxies. Human beings, he learned, had sought to heal or overcome this split in different ways. Some became nature mystics and lost themselves in their rapture with earth, wind and sky; some used drugs; some dreamed deep and lucid dreams; some disciplined themselves to be mystics of the computer: the neurosinger grade of the cetics, some of the cyber-shamans, his fellow Pilots of the Order of Mystic Mathematicians, and others. The men and women of a few sects, such as the astriers, ignored the deeper problems of existence. They did this by spawning large broods of children. Sometimes one woman, over her hundred-year fertility, would give birth once every year. Astriers wholly surrendered themselves to the animal activities of life: the getting of food, water, clothing, money, jewellery and often dreammakers and other devices with which to dull the brain and soul. Other human beings had denied the fault of their consciousnesses; many – during the Age of Science – had even gloried in the separation of man from nature, subject from object, fact from meaning, mind from matter. But the most universal human method of bridging the Void has always been the invention of religion. It was Danlo's fate to become a student of religions, as well as of mathematics; during his first and second year at Resa, he spent many moments trying to understand the fundamental passion that lay at the core of all religions: the urge of the self to embrace the universe's cold, mysterious otherness.
If animistic totem systems, alien philosophies, holism, the Creed of Chance and the beliefs of various disciplines as different as cantorian mathematics and scrying are all seen as springing from this fundamental urge, then it is fair to say that Danlo experienced forty religions by the time he was twenty years old. At least forty religions. Much has already been said of his initiation into the Alaloi dreamtime, of the altjiranga mitjina, the Old Ones and the Song Of Life. Since coming to Neverness, he had absorbed a good deal of the Fravashi language philosophy, flirted with tychism and learned something of the autists' dream system of reconstructing reality. He won friends among the scryers and inveigled them to teach him the secret doctrine of the sarvam asti. He dabbled with the ancient kabalah and number mysticism. In order to understand Hanuman's hatred of Edeism, he sought out various sects of the Cybernetic Universal Church which were still prominent on Neverness: the Architects of the Universal God, The Church of Ede and the Cybernetic Pilgrims of the Manifold. Once or twice he even participated in their rituals, including the ecstatic facing ceremony. This exotic and arcane experience of Danlo's – Hanuman cynically referred to it as religious gourmandizing – was a necessary phase in his life's journey to become both visionary and asarya. Entering into the passion and beliefs of any particular religion was like viewing reality through a crystal lens. Always, like a child's prism held up to one's eye, the lens of ritual and belief distorted reality and coloured it in strange (and sometimes beautiful) ways. But in each religion, cult, or faith, Danlo hoped to find a universal centre, a jewel of truth as pure and clear as a diamond. It was his task and destiny, as he conceived it, to grasp each religion he could find, to apprehend the world through its beliefs, and with the hammerstone of his will, to shatter the lens. Only then might the diamond centre be revealed; only then could he see things clearly. And someday he might look at the universe through his own eyes only, free of even diamond lenses, free to behold the infinite stellar fires and humanity's burning pain through the consciousness of his deepest self. 'Seeking freedom through religion,' Hanuman said to Danlo one day after they had passed on from Borja and become journeymen, 'is like trying to understand aliens by offering oneself as a Scutari's dinner.'
Indeed, the whole of Danlo's life journey was perilous, like crossing over a narrow, icy bridge. It is hard to see one's way through the ice-fog of different belief systems. He who seeks easily gets lost. Or falls. Of all the religions he encountered, the most treacherous and difficult to break free from was the Order's omnipresent holism. Of course, most masters of the Order would have denied that holism was anything like a religion. They would have pointed out that becoming a novice in the Order required no profession of faith, no theology, no adherence to doctrine or sacred beliefs. And at first glance this was true. Thus it was all the more difficult for Danlo to swing the hammer of his insight and smash this subtle, evanescent lens. Holism lay at the very soul of his civilization; people took the holistic worldview for granted and did not ques-
tion its beliefs, any more than they thought about the air they breathed. Few remembered the origins of holism; few realized (or cared) that humanity had once conceived the universe in a very different way.
'Holism,' Master Jonath once said to Danlo, 'defines the Sixth Mentality of man. Some call it the Last Mentality –how could there be a more evolved way of modelling reality, can you tell me?'
Historically, holism had been a break from the reductionist methods of science. Holism – some call it the 'second science' – is a way of viewing the universe as a web of interactions and relationships. Whole systems (and the universe can be seen as an overarching system of systems) have properties beyond those of their parts. All things are, in some sense, alive, or a part of a living system; the real world of mind and matter, body and consciousness, cannot be understood by reducing it to pieces and parts. 'Matter is mind' – this is perhaps the holists' quintessential belief. The founding theories of holism had tried to explain how mind emerges from the material universe, how the consciousness of all things is interconnected.
The first science, of course, had failed utterly to do this. The first science had resigned human beings to acting as objective observers of a mechanistic and meaningless universe. A dead universe. The human mind, according to the determinists, was merely the by-product of brain chemistry. Chemical laws, the way the elements combine and interact, were formulated as complete and immutable truths. The elements themselves were seen as indivisible lumps of matter, devoid of consciousness, untouched and unaffected by the very consciousnesses seeking to understand how living minds can be assembled from dead matter. The logical conclusion of these assumptions and conceptions was that people are like chemical robots possessing no free will. No wonder the human race, during the Holocaust Century, had fallen into insanity and despair.
Holism had been an attempt to restore life to this universe and to reconnect human beings with it. To heal the split between self and other. But ultimately, over the centuries, holism too had failed. Over the three thousand years since the founding of Neverness, the professionals and academicians of the Order had mostly forgotten that holism should be a merging of theory and personal experience. They dwelt too deeply in abstraction and theory. The new theories that had given birth to holism – quantum mechanics, batesonian epistemology, general systems theory, cybernetics and information theory – had grown into elaborate, intricate systems representing reality with the language and symbols of the universal syntax. From the very beginning of holism, some viewed this reality as a cybernetic reality. Nature was seen as a network of programmable entities exchanging information, life as an information flow that terminated when the flow was cut off. The computer became a model for the mind and a metaphor of the universe. Indeed, the most dogmatic of the cybernetic holists regarded the universe as an actual computer, the mind as a set of programs run by this computer, or by its component units. Using Omar Narayama's universal syntax, the holists of the Order constructed a formal system, or science, that treated the individual mind as sub-programs of a universal algorithm. It was a brilliant, but ultimately alienating, way of conceiving the universe. Alienating because it resolved the self/other split in form only.