'Ah,' Bardo said to Danlo, 'have I told you that my cousin is a great champion of freedom? No? Did you know that she freed the slaves on Summerworld? Of course that was before the rebellion. Before our family fell and was banished. But Surya Surata Lal is still remembered, I'm sure.'
In truth, Surya Lal had been a princess of Summerworld, and she had spent her maturity fighting for the freedom of enslaved peoples and robots, just as she had spent part of her youth campaigning for the rights of dolls, those strange information ecologies that exist in computer space and are said to be alive. She was a woman who loved freedom and embraced the great movements of her time, a formidable woman now devoted to her cousin and the movement that soon would be called The Way of Ringess'.
Danlo ran his fingers through his hair. 'All peoples think they love freedom,' he said.
'Of course,' Surya said. 'But real freedom, for a human being, lies in discovering human possibilities.'
'Human possibilities,' Danlo repeated softly. He closed his eyes, vividly remembering Tamara's very human face during the moment she had cried out in her ecstasy. It had been a moment of complete freedom, and yet, paradoxically, of complete surrender to the forces of life. 'Who knows what is possible?' he asked.
He hadn't really expected an answer to this rhetorical question, so he was amused when Surya said, 'Your father gave his life to bring back the secret of human possibilities. The ways we might transcend our limitations. Our stupidity, our baseness, even our human bodies. Especially our bodies and brains – you're smiling at me, Danlo wi Soli Ringess, but that's because you're still young and beautiful. I don't think you can imagine what it's like to grow so old that you can't be brought back to youth any more. Old in the brain. Old and rotten and ugly.'
As they spoke, a circle of people crowded around them, pressing them closer together. He felt Tamara moving up against him, intertwining her fingers in his. Surya was pushed over against Bardo's great belly, and Danlo was so close to her that he smelled sihu oil and the sweet smokiness of bhang clinging to her silk kimono. Directly across from him stood Hanuman, watching and listening. Danlo read cynicism on his pale face. He saw Hanuman lift a finger to point at Surya; no one else saw this subtle, almost imperceptible movement, just as no one else understood his hand language as he signed to Danlo: This is an ugly woman. It's as I've always said: beauty is only skin deep but penetrates to the bone.
Danlo shook his head as if to reproach Hanuman for being so cruel. He turned to Surya and took note of the lines about her tiny red eyes, at the corners of her worm-hole of a mouth. He didn't need the cetics' art to read the fear there. Although she was only middling old and might last another three hundred years before her final old age, it was obvious that decrepitude and death terrified her. Not even wailing, jittery Old Irisha, during the days his tribe had gone over, had been so dehumanized by fear. There is something about civilized people that I have always wondered at,' Danlo said. 'The longer they live, the more they are afraid of dying.'
'Ah, but dying isn't so hard,' Bardo said as he rubbed his chest. Once, when he was a young man, he had taken an Alaloi spear through the chest and had died his first death. He had been frozen and thawed and healed, only to face death once again when his lightship had disappeared into the fiery heart of star. A goddess called Kalinda had resurrected him, or so he liked to tell everyone, and ever since he had waxed philosophical about all such vital matters. 'What's death but a brief moment of peace before the pieces of ourselves are reassembled and we're condemned to live again?' Bardo said. 'It's living that vexes the soul. Living fully and well.'
At this, Surya tightened her lips as if she had too often endured Bardo's musings. Then she scowled at Danlo and said, 'Everyone is afraid of dying. Human beings are in bondage to the fear of death.'
'That's very true,' Hanuman said. 'You're a perceptive woman.'
Surya, quite obviously, didn't perceive any irony in this simple utterance, for she favoured Hanuman with a smile and her face brightened. 'I've heard that the cetics claim all emotions flow from fear.'
'That's almost true,' Hanuman said. 'The propagation of life is the fundamental algorithm of life. Is the urge to propagate really the same as the fear of death? Let's suppose it is. All emotions, then, if treated as caused responses programmed into an organism, are in some way designed to preserve life so that it may propagate itself.'
'I've heard that cetics can read the emotions off people's faces.'
'It's one of our arts,' Hanuman said. 'One of the most ancient.'
In fact, as Hanuman had once told Danlo, the cetics trace the genesis of face reading at least as far back as the work of the ancient portrait artists, Titian, Dürer and the Leonardo, whose ideal was that the portrait of a person should be the mirror of the soul.
'I've also heard that cetics can read thoughts,' Surya said, 'but I've never really believed it.'
'Sometimes we can do something like reading thoughts.'
'But thoughts aren't programmed into us like emotions,' she said. 'Aren't they?'
Here Bardo rubbed his hands together, and to Surya he said, 'Did you know that Mallory Ringess learned something of the cetics' powers? He could look at you and tell you what you were thinking, by God. He could lay your soul bare, and that's why people were afraid of him. And more, he could look at a stranger and tell what he was about to do and say before he said and did it.'
'Can you tell these things?' Surya asked Hanuman.
Hanuman bowed his head and looked at her. 'Sometimes I can read the tells,' he said. 'But this is a trivial use of the art. It's really rather silly, don't you think?'
'Could you do it now?' she asked. She was obviously enchanted with this notion of face reading, and enchanted with Hanuman as well. She suddenly held up a small, bony finger and pointed across the room. 'There, do you see the tall man in the brown robe?'
'The historian? The one who's bald?'
'I suppose he's an historian,' Surya said. 'I really haven't had the opportunity to learn which academicians wear which colours. Can you tell me what he's thinking?'
Hanuman stood very straight as he looked across the room. His intensity of concentration caused Surya and the others to look at him, instead of the historian. Despite Hanuman's words making little of the face reading art, he secretly relished exhibiting his talents.
'He's thinking of danger,' he said. 'He's thinking that Bardo's house is full of dangerous people, and now, it's in his eyes, the extension of slight danger to life-threatening peril – people always do this – he's thinking of fleeing the City. And now, the guilt at his own cowardice. He would like to believe that the Golden Ring will shield the City from the Vild's radiation. But he's a cynical man, and half a coward, even though he would describe himself as a prudent man, a "Man for all time" or some other such conceit. He's an historian – he pays attention to the emigration figures. But he's also aware that twice as many people are swarming into Neverness as are leaving her, and he can't quite understand it. He's really a bit befuddled. Which is why he's attending this joyance. He has questions of universal moment, or so he thinks. He's looking for answers. The greater the doubt, the greater the need for faith. Faith – what is this emotion but a desperate attempt to escape from mind-burning fear?'
Surya nodded her head, obviously amazed by Hanuman's performance. And then Danlo, who was also looking toward the historian with a certain concentration of senses, broke into laughter. It began as a slight flutter in his belly and then spread out so quickly that he was shaking and laughing like a young man giddy from his first taste of magic mushrooms.
'By God, is there a joke here?' Bardo wanted to know.
'No, not... a joke,' Danlo said, after he had caught his breath.
'What then?'
Danlo closed his eyes for a moment, listening. His sense of hearing had been quickened by a lifetime of identifying the smallest sounds of the world. Tonight, this sense was extraordinarily keen. He could hear, very faintly, the historian talking about the Way of Ringess and other religions. Even though they stood across the room from each other, he could pick out the historian's high voice and frightened words from the words of all those around him. He opened his eyes, then, and he said to Hanuman, 'I think the historian has just been discussing the very things you have revealed to us.'
'Are you saying he's been cheating?' Bardo asked.
'I have heard that the cetics can read lips,' Danlo said, and he smiled at Hanuman. 'This is part of your art, yes?'
'Of course it is. The lips are part of the face, are they not? What better way to read a face?'
'Then you have been cheating?' Surya asked. 'I didn't think it was possible to read someone's thoughts.'
Again, Hanuman bowed to her, and he then looked her up and down, and his eyes were shiny and hard. He said, 'It's impossible to cheat if there aren't any rules to cheat against. However. Do you see the woman slumped over against the far wall?'
Surya turned to look at a woman standing alone in front of one of Bardo's wall paintings. Danlo and the others looked at her, too. She was dressed in a distinctive cowl jacket, complete with the baggy hood and braided strings, the kind the aphasics wear.
'She's an aphasic,' Hanuman said. 'Do you know about the aphasics, Princess Lal? The sect is probably unique to Neverness. They have voices, but no language. They can hear words but they can't understand them. They disfigure the brains of their children to destroy the language centres. Don't look so shocked – they're not the monsters most people think. They do what they do because they think words interfere with the direct apprehension of reality. And distort reality. Which is why I've chosen her. She can't have spoken to anyone because she can't speak. She's come here tonight in the hope that you illuminati, those who have been touched by Mallory Ringess, will have found a way of communicating directly, heart to heart, without words. But she's disappointed. She's lonely. She's bored. She's been unable to connect with anyone here. She's thinking – people can think, you should know, even when the words have been stolen from their minds – she's thinking of leaving the party.'
'I'm not convinced,' Surya said. 'If I had known about these poor aphasics, just looking at her, I might have guessed everything you've said.'
Hanuman flashed Surya a dangerous look, then continued, 'When I move my finger like this, the aphasic will leave the room.' He waited a moment and then raised his finger slightly. As if a signal had been given, as if an invisible string connected the aphasic with Hanuman's gloved finger, she jerked herself erect and turned her back on Bardo's guests. With a heavy, shuffling gait, she walked out of the room.
'By God, how did you know? How did you do that?' Bardo asked.
'I'm beginning to be convinced,' Surya said. 'But are you certain you're not still cheating? This aphasic isn't an acquaintance of yours, is she?'
In answer, Hanuman smiled his secretive smile. Then he singled out various men and women across the room. 'Do you see the old phantast with the huge Adam's apple?
When I signal, he will cough.' And Hanuman lifted his finger, and the phantast did indeed cough, and so it went, around the room, Hanuman pointing at people and descrying the moment they would cough, rub their eyes, laugh, dance, frown, speak, or drink from their goblets of wine. He would lift his finger, and people would move in the appointed ways, as if he were a doll master pulling at their heartstrings. It was an eerie, almost sinister demonstration of the cetic's art. It convinced Surya that Hanuman was a man of rare power, but she wasn't quite ready to admit that he could have any power over her.
'These people,' she said, 'they don't suspect you're watching them. It's hard to believe you could read the face of someone who has composed herself.'
'Such as yourself, Princess?'
'What am I thinking, right now?' she asked. Her face tightened up like a piece of dried bloodfruit. She was almost squinting with the effort of keeping her face empty. 'Can you tell me?'
'No, Hanu, don't,' Danlo said softly. He looked at Hanuman and shook his head. He hated this game of Hanuman's; he hated everything about treating human beings as robots whose very lives were programmed into them. Most of all he hated what he saw in Hanuman, the pride and the sudden fury flashing in his eyes.
'Should I be silent merely because my best friend so implores me?' Hanuman asked. He stepped forward so that Danlo, Tamara, Bardo and Surya surrounded him. Clearly, he relished being at the centre of things, just as he exulted in the practice of his powers. He looked at Surya and said, 'Or should I be silent because my ethics discourage reading someone's thoughts to her face? Should I be silent at all? Isn't there a time for rashness and truth? I believe that Danlo would admit there is. Tamara, too. Let me be rash, then. Let me be truthful. No, Danlo, please don't look at me that way – this is a rare chance for you to find out what others are thinking of you. To see yourself just as others do. Oh, I know you've no care for yourself. Which is why everyone loves you. And is afraid of you. It's your wildness, your childlike qualities: you're too absorbed in the things of the world to worry about yourself. But others worry. The Princess Lal – she worries. She'd like to believe in this silly art of reading faces because she'd like to read you. She's been thinking about you ever since Bardo announced your name. You disturb her. Your very name offends her.'
He turned from Danlo to Surya with an intensity of motion, whirling about as if he were executing a movement from his killing art. His face was as hard and sharp as a knife, and he said to her, 'Everyone calls him "Danlo the Wild". You're wondering, Princess, if he's really as wild as his name. I assure you that he is. He's even wilder than you'd want to imagine. Where will all this wildness lead, you ask yourself. Is he truly the son of his father? Danlo wi Soli Ringess – I've said that his name offends you, but not which name. I'll say it now: Danlo is a Ringess, if not the Ringess. Does the universe need another? Or is one Ringess one too many? You doubt. You're full of doubts. Do you know about instantaneity? Stopping time? Stop! In this instant, stop your thoughts and fix them, as if they were ants in amber. That's the way. Your face, if only you could see it now, now that you truly believe. You're thinking of Mallory Ringess and all the things he wrought. The Golden Ring. You wonder how this specific thought, this golden image could be written across your face. And another thought, which you dread more than death: am I making you think these things? Am I? Are thoughts programmed into us, or are we masters of our will? Please, don't turn your eyes away! If you do, you'll only wonder if that's what I wanted you to do. You wonder about human freedom. You're agonizing over this right now. What is possible for human beings? Mallory Ringess gave his life to discover his own possibilities. Who is so fearless? Is Danlo, whom we all love like we love the sunlight, made of the