'You call what happened tonight... a "little art"?'
She knelt in front of him, and she seemed both happy and amused. 'We haven't even touched the first things of the art,' she said. 'We haven't listened to each other's heartbeat, or synchronized our breathing, or– '
'Let's breathe together,' he said. He took her hand, which was cold from the night air pouring in through the window. His hands, too, were now cold, as was his face and the whole front of his body. But his back was still hot;
he sat with his back near the fire, and the heat of it still burned up his spine.
'It's late,' she said. She had an excellent time sense, much better than his. 'It must be near midnight.'
'Then we have three hours till dawn. Let's breathe together till the first light comes.'
'I thought you came here to attend the remembrance ceremony.'
'No,' he said, 'I came here to meet you. I just did not know it till now.'
'O beautiful man,' she said, 'there will be other nights.'
'But what of your contracts?'
'Contracts can be broken,' she said.
'Truly?'
She laughed and then kissed his hands. 'When we join the Society, we don't surrender our free will.'
He sat there for a few moments looking at her. At last he said, 'Shall we go down to the remembrance together, then?'
'I'd like that.'
'I suppose I should wish Bardo well,' he said. 'And thank him for the use of this room.'
They put their clothes on slowly, leisurely, as if time were a crushing weight that might exist for other people, but not for them. Then they kissed each other's lips and laughed together, and they went out to rejoin the party.
People were also waxen mechanical toys, part of a mechantoy process and were made of candy. People were an utter absurdity as they went about their rituals, which I contained completely and knew to be absurd in their circularity, unconstructiveness and superstitiousness. But they went about their rituals with a sense of absolute self-righteousness, hilarious zombies who failed to recognize me as the one who beneficently supported their existence.
– from the cetics' archives, source unknown
They returned to the sun room as they had come, walking through the house and holding hands. The room was now overflowing with Bardo's guests; the air was even thicker than before, a cloud of purplish-grey smoke that choked Danlo and irritated his eyes. It was very noisy. A cruel-looking wormrunner with jewelled eyes was sadistically banging away on the strings of a gosharp, and it seemed everyone was trying to talk above everyone else. Twice people bumped into Danlo and nearly spilled their goblets of wine. Despite the unpleasantness of the room, the people's mood was one of camaraderie and celebration. Danlo pulled at Tamara's hand as he stepped over the legs of a woman collapsed into stupor, who obviously had been celebrating with too much devotion. He turned his head right and left, looking among the sea of faces for Bardo.
'Danlo!' a voice boomed out. 'Tamara Ten Ashtoreth, come over here!'
In the centre of the room, surrounded by eight or nine women, stood Bardo with a plate of pepper nuts in his hand and tears running from his huge brown eyes. Since giving up beer, he had become addicted to eating hot foods which burned his mouth and made his eyes glisten with water. He was even huger than Danlo had remembered, and he seemed vaster, inside, bubbling with energy as if his belly, throat and lips were a fleshy tube channelling the plasma of the stars. His rolling, basso voice riveted the attention of those around him. And when he spoke, he moved his hands and fingers in a lovely dance of signs which reinforced his words. Danlo glanced at Bardo's fat hands, at his bearded face and gaudy robe. The huge man wore a jewelled ring on each of his fingers, and his rainbow robe was studded with emeralds, rubies, and opals. Around his neck, openly, he wore a brilliant Yarkonan firestone. Such ostentation might have diminished a lesser human being, but Bardo's truest self was as opulent as any jewel, and so his outer style served only to magnify this inner self, to deepen his pride and make him seem even larger.
Bardo set his plate atop a table laden with lacquer-ware, and he threw his arms around Danlo. 'Little Fellow!' he called out as he thumped Danlo's back. 'Little Fellow, by God, you're not so little any more!'
Indeed, he and Danlo were almost of the same height, though Bardo carried enough muscle and fat to make two men. Danlo looked at him eye to eye, and then he was smiling, embracing Bardo without restraint as the Alaloi men do, as if they were brothers of the same tribe.
'You look well,' Danlo said at last.
'Ah, but I am well. I've never been so well – sometimes I think it's impossible to be more well, but I try, as you'll see.'
He turned to Tamara and bowed as deeply as his belly would allow. 'I'm honoured that the most beautiful of the courtesans could attend another joyance,' he said. He grinned at her with an easy and obvious gladness, and with a hint of lust as well. 'I've, ah, heard that you've already made Danlo's acquaintance.'
Just then, there was a flash of orange behind Bardo, and Hanuman stepped into view. He sipped from a tumbler of water as he looked back and forth between Danlo and Tamara. He seemed relaxed and nonchalant, but he kept looking at them as if he were drinking in information that only a cetic could make use of.
'Hanuman li Tosh!' Bardo said. 'I didn't see you standing there – why didn't you announce yourself sooner?'
Hanuman bowed to him and smiled. 'Hello, Bardo,' was all he said.
'As silent as a cetic, I see. Ah, but you've done well for yourself, too. I'd hoped you'd become a pilot, but the cetic's robe suits you, Young Hanuman. Did you know there's talk among your masters that you're destined to be Lord Cetic someday?'
Hanuman flashed Bardo a quick, piercing look that spoke of an old tension and an instant understanding between the two of them. Danlo watched the way Hanuman bowed his head very slightly, the way his eyes hooded over and his breath quickened. He saw the faintest lineaments of the subtle and sinister relationship existing between Hanuman and Bardo. But he could not, then and there, descry any deeper pattern to this relationship; he could only listen as Hanuman enunciated each of his words with great precision and clarity: 'But I'm not even a full cetic yet, much less a master. Of all the professions, we take the longest to train masters. You should know, there's never been a journeyman who has proceeded up the grades to master cetic in less than fifteen years.'
'Well, fifteen years is a long time,' Bardo said. He swept his arm out and nodded to the many people standing about. 'Especially during these times. Fifteen years ago, Mallory Ringess was still a man, and I was just a drunken fool.'
As he spoke, a tiny woman with red eyes and purple-black skin the same colour as Bardo's edged her way to his side and said, 'You were never a fool. Would Mallory Ringess have chosen you as a friend if you were a fool?'
'Ah,' Bardo said, 'may I present my cousin, the Princess Surya Surata Lal of Summerworld? These are my friends. Firstly, Tamara Ten Ashtoreth, Voluptuary in the Society of Courtesans.'
Surya bowed to Tamara, quickly and coldly, as if she disapproved of her title and way of life. Tamara returned her bow and smiled nicely, and her natural grace and graciousness seemed only to irritate Surya and cause her to turn away.
'And may I present Hanuman li Tosh and Danlo wi Soli Ringess – they've been inseparable since their novitiate.'
Upon the pronouncement of his name, all the people in the immediate area of the room looked at Danlo. A horologe in her bright red robe, a merchant-prince sipping from a tumbler of skotch, a dreamy-eyed autist, a harijan boy carrying plates of sizzling food from the kitchen – they all paused to examine Danlo, to bow politely and stand attentively as if they were waiting for him to say something of moment. But Danlo could think of nothing to say. He was too aware of the smells of curry and capsicum burning in his nostrils, too aware of his own acrid sweat. Tamara pressed close to him, and the marvellous, thick smell of sex was like a drug waking up all his senses. He heard someone across the room whisper: 'He's the son of Mallory Ringess!' From other parts of the house came waves of distracting sounds: the melodies of the improvisatori plucking at gosharps and making up verses, the irritating hum of mantra musicians, and three hundred voices buzzing and braying and hissing at him. He was suddenly aware that everyone was aware of him. Or rather, they were aware of him only as the son of his father. And thus they truly could not see him, as man or human being, and this lack of mindfulness and vision on their behalf shamed him.
It was a shame he would feel burning up his throat every time he entered Bardo's house.
Surya bowed to Danlo and said, 'I'm honoured to make your acquaintance. My cousin tells me you hope to leave Neverness soon. You're to be a pilot, like the Ringess, and you hope to be chosen to make the journey to the Vild, do I remember correctly?'
'Yes, that's true,' Danlo said. He glanced at Tamara, whose face fell sad with disappointment. This sudden look wounded him. He had meant to tell her of his plan to join the Vild mission, but in the excitement of their evening together, he had forgotten.
'It's a pity that the Order is training pilots for this mission,' Surya said. 'The Order can't really stop the stars from exploding, do you think? No, of course not. It would be better if the Order trained remembrancers instead of pilots.'
She had a sharp, presumptuous way of speaking that amused and annoyed Danlo. As she looked him over, she rubbed at her eyes, which were bloodshot from smoking the potent bhang they grow on Summerworld. She was addicted to bhang, although she would never admit it, citing instead allergies to Icefall's strange flora as the cause of her red eyes. Danlo thought that she was an ambitious woman who would too easily lie, and he immediately mistrusted her.
'There must be a way ... to keep the blessed stars from dying,' Danlo said softly. 'If the stars die, we shall die, too. The animals, the birds, even the iceblooms and snowworms – everything will die.'
'Oh, Young Danlo, you should have more faith in life,' Surya said.
'Life,' Danlo said, 'it is blessed, truly ... but fragile. Nothing is so blessed and fragile.'
With a tiny, claw-like hand, Surya caressed the sleeve of her blue kimono, and said, 'But what of the Golden Ring? Your father created it to shield your planet from the Vild's radiation. All life, didn't you know? Soon all the Civilized Worlds will see such rings growing around them. Mallory Ringess, himself, spoke of these things before he left Neverness. Isn't that so, Bardo?'
Bardo patted his rumbling belly and touched the shoulder of a rather fat woman standing off behind him. She looked at him with dark, fawning eyes, as if she were only waiting to fetch a tumbler of toalache or another plate of food. 'Ah,' Bardo said, 'the Ringess never stated this explicitly. But that was the intention of what he told me on the beach, before he left, certainly.'
Danlo gazed out of the window, thinking of the galaxy's vast light-distances, the cold and almost endless spaces filled with photons, neutrinos, and gamma rays. Nearly twenty years before, when he was still a baby in his milk-stained furs, a star in the Abelian Group had exploded into a supernova. With each breath that he had taken since then, this star's killing radiation had expanded outward through deep space half a million miles. Even as he listened to a hundred murmuring voices and watched Surya Surata Lal's face fall cold with smugness and sanctimony, the supernova's wavefront was only forty thousand billion miles from Neverness, and soon, in only eight more years, it would fall over the City of Pain in a lightshower of death. Or of life. Perhaps, he thought, the Golden Ring would absorb this deadly light, shielding Neverness and continuing to grow across the heavens.
'Who knows what the Golden Ring truly is?' Danlo half-whispered. 'What it will be?'
'Don't you believe what your own father said?' Surya asked him.
Here Hanuman, who was standing across from Danlo, let out a rare burst of laughter. And then, in his clear cetic's voice – an intensely ironic voice – he said, 'Well, you should know that Danlo doesn't like to believe anything. You might say he's the world's greatest believer in unbelief.'
Everyone laughed at this little joke, even Tamara, who eyed Hanuman as if he were a beautiful but venomous snake that one had to handle with great care.
Bardo reached out a massive hand and rumpled Danlo's hair. His voice rolled out, 'Beliefs are the eyelids of the mind, isn't that so?'
'The mind has many eyelids,' Danlo said. After Bardo was done mauling his head, Danlo touched Ahira's white feather to make sure that it was still fastened to his hair. And then he looked at Hanuman in reproof as if to say: 'What is wrong with you tonight?'
After a brief silence, Surya asked him, 'Were you a student of the Fravashi? Bardo invited a Fravashi Old Father to our joyance but he refused to come.'
'In fact,' Bardo said as he rubbed his belly, 'I invited your Old Father, the one who taught you when you came to Neverness. By God, I wish these Fravashi had real names! Ah, I wanted to demonstrate to an Honoured Fravashi the power of our remembrancing techniques, but he turned me down, too bad.'
'Why?' Danlo asked.
'He gave me the silliest of excuses. He said that he couldn't enter my house, that the Fravashi have a superstition against entering buildings taller than one storey.'
Danlo laughed and said, 'But this is true!'
'Really?'
'They believe that dwelling in large buildings will cause them to sicken and die,' Danlo said.
'Doesn't it ever disturb you,' Surya asked Danlo, 'that a race of superstitious old aliens still have a power in your City? In your Order?'
Bardo suddenly rolled his eyes and let loose a sigh. 'You see, Danlo, my cousin believes that alien thoughtways are, ah, inappropriate for humans.'
'The Fravashi,' Surya said, 'Supposedly teach methods for freeing the individual from all systems of belief. All systems of thought, even their own – I understand this goal. What could be more seductive than total freedom?'