Every time consciousness contemplates itself, it must fall into an infinite regress. At the end of this spiral into neverness is God – or Hell. Hell was created when God gave human beings the power to behold themselves, just as they are.
– from A Requiem For Homo Sapiens, by Horthy Hosthoh
It was two full days before Danlo saw Hanuman again. As Tamara had foretold, after the night of the joyance Danlo found himself craving solitude, and he avoided talking to people. He spent most of each day and night skating the streets, or drinking chocolate alone in cafes, or sitting on the cold rocks of North Beach, watching the waves roll in from the ocean and burst against the icy shore. Although he was exhausted, he could not sleep, nor did he really wish to. The memory of the Elder Eddas was too sharp in his mind, and he remained in a wild, open state all this time. He remembranced frequently. As the aftershocks of an earthquake unsettle a city, the great memories trembled inside him and only gradually died away. He contemplated these memories, trying to find a way to interpret them to himself. Finally, on the evening of the 90th, he returned to Bardo's house. The gatekeeper admitted him to the nightly festivities, even though he had no invitation. After greeting various guests (Bardo was obviously quite proud of Danlo's accomplishment and wanted to introduce him to all his friends), he excused himself. He made his way into the north wing. There, in a luxurious room smelling of Fravashi carpets, scent sculptures and freshly cut flowers, he found Hanuman recuperating from his remembrance.
'Hanu, Hanu,' he said.
Hanuman sat in an immense chair upholstered with seal leather. He had positioned it directly in front of the blazing fireplace. He was entirely naked, without even an undergown covering him. He, too, looked as if he had not slept since the remembrance. His fine hair was a tangle of greasy blond clumps, here pressed and matted, and in other places irregularly parted to reveal his white scalp. When he turned to face Danlo, he seemed not to see him. His eyes, usually so colourless and cold, were like pools of pale blue fire. He appeared to be gazing into himself, through himself into a place of utter darkness and pain. Danlo thought that he had the haunted, unhappy look of a man who had been brought back to his youth once too often. A stranger, meeting him for the first time, might have guessed he was a thousand years old.
'I'm glad you've come,' Hanuman said.
Danlo noticed, then, that Hanuman was holding a black crystal sphere the size of a thallow egg. He cupped it in his left hand for a moment, then he squeezed it and let it roll into his other hand. It looked much like a satori stone which the aficionados of Zanshin use to strengthen their hands.
'Are you well?' Danlo finally asked.
'As you see,' Hanuman said.
'Have you been able to remove yourself from ... the memories?' Danlo stood beside Hanuman's chair and pressed his fingertips against Hanuman's forehead. His skin was oily and hot; the whole of his body seemed twisted with an intense inner fire.
'Perhaps it would be wisest,' Hanuman said, 'if we didn't talk about the remembrance.'
'I was afraid ... the kalla had taken you too deep.'
'Kalla,' Hanuman said. There was bitterness and despair in the way he spoke the word. 'Take three sips and be God. I wonder, of all the things we've been told, could there be a greater lie?'
'I think kalla is a blessed drug.'
'And perhaps it is – for you.'
Danlo slowly rubbed his eyes. 'Surya Lal has said that the kalla nearly poisoned you. That three sips is too much, a poison for human beings.'
'Kalla is a window,' Hanuman said. 'Nothing more. It's looking through the window too long that burns the eyes and poisons the soul.'
'Everyone is saying you have had a great remembrance.'
Hanuman was silent for a moment, and then in his secretive way, he said, 'I've seen what I've seen; I've remembered what I've remembered.'
'Have you seen ... the interconnectedness of the ecologies? Did you understand the rules for embedding, the way each quark, each cell, each organism, even the gods, building on each other, the ecologies spreading out across– '
'I've seen too much, Danlo.'
'Truly? Is it possible to see too much?'
'I've seen too clearly.'
'The One memory,' Danlo said, 'to see it, shimmering, the way memory is connected to matter, to our minds, to ourselves. I have spent the last two days trying to see it, to keep the memory clear.'
Hanuman smiled quickly, then said, 'I'm glad your remembrance was so exalted. I've never seen you so happy.'
'I have never really seen before ... so many possibilities.'
While Hanuman listened, Danlo talked about evolution and the possibilities of life within the universe. He spoke of human beings, of their freedom to grow into godhood, or to remain gloriously human, to become truly human for the first time. As Danlo conceived it (a vision shaped by his remembrance of the Elder Eddas) true humanity was neither a tragedy nor a doom to flee from, but rather, a marvellous, golden, never-before-realized possibility that each person might someday create. He spoke for a long time, trying to elicit some comment or response from Hanuman. But Hanuman just sat in his leather chair squeezing his black sphere, and he was as silent and mysterious as a cetic.
And then he looked straight at Danlo and said, 'No,' he pronounced this single word with great authority, and then, like a tortoise pulling back into his shell, he returned to his silence.
'No? What do you mean?'
With a great force, Hanuman pushed himself out of his chair. He paced quickly back and forth across the carpets in front of the fireplace. The muscles along his pallid thighs quivered like the strings of a gosharp; his whole body shook with the tremors of exhaustion. Danlo thought that he might have been pacing thus for most of two days. Hanuman took no care for his nakedness, or rather, he flaunted it as if he wanted the world to view him just as he was. For a moment, he paused in front of the fireplace and held his arms outspread to warm himself. The light of the fire licked across his hard shiny body, red flame tongues against white skin, then he turned and stepped closer to Danlo. It seemed that he was stepping out of the fire, like some ancient piece of metalwork come to life. Danlo could see that he was a changed man, that the blaze of his remembrance at last must have fused together his will and his sense of fate. Hanuman's face and his artful body and his newly forged awareness of himself – everything about him shone with a terrible beauty. And yet, for all his seeming vitality and the brilliance of his eyes, there was a darkness about him, inside him, as if a great part of his soul had cracked and broken. He smiled at Danlo, sadly, knowingly, and he said, 'No, for the universe, and therefore for human beings, there is only one possibility.'
He told Danlo a part of his remembrance then. It was the only time he ever spoke of this experience to anybody. But his single revelation – his remembrance of the Elder Eddas – would soon make him famous and would cause Danlo the greatest of anguish.
'There is war in heaven,' Hanuman said. He stood close to Danlo with his arms crossed over his chest. 'The gods throughout this galaxy, and in every galaxy, the gods are at war. There are many gods. So many, even from the alien races. You can't guess how many. Your father is one, you should know. That is, he was one – who knows if he's still alive? They're killing each other. They've been killing each other for a million years. This is the ecology I've seen: survival of the fiercest and the vastest. And, of course, Ede the God was not the first, as the Architects teach. Not nearly the first. You say human beings can evolve into gods, but that's not enough. It's never been sufficient. There are three requisites for growth without bound, and only three: the will to remake oneself; the genius to survive; and the strength to suffer.'
He proceeded to expand upon a specific part of his remembrance: He told Danlo of a great battle that two gods had fought out near the edge of the Sagittarius Arm of the galaxy. Beyond the 18th Deva Cluster, where the stars grow thin as a handful of snow cast into the wind, sixty thousand years previously, some god of war had destroyed another. The corpse of this unknown god – Hanuman said it was the size of a small planet – circled a red giant star. In a low, steady voice, he divulged the fixed points of this star. This was knowledge only a pilot could have. It was of a rarefied, purely mathematical nature, and either Hanuman had learned it from a pilot of the Order, or he had indeed remembered it as a part of the Elder Eddas. Since pilots were forbidden to betray such knowledge to outsiders (and since any pilot fortunate enough to have discovered a dead god would surely have made his name in announcing this discovery), Danlo concluded that Hanuman was telling the truth. Truth was written across Hanuman's tormented face: the truth of a man who has beheld a force too terrible ever to forget.
' "For here is the oldest of teachings",' Hanuman said as he smiled at Danlo. He rarely quoted from the Book of God any more; in fact, he did so only in moments of distress. ' "Here is wisdom: no god is there but God; God is one, and there can be only one God".'
He said no more of his remembrance of the Elder Eddas. He never spoke of the One memory, as others did, nor did he ever hint that he had been enlightened. But everyone who encountered him during the days that followed was to comment on the way his whole being seemed to glow. Danlo, himself, had seen this the moment he had entered the room. And now he stood face to face with Hanuman, looking for the source of the light, trying to understand the change that had come over him. He decided that 'enlightenment' was a poor word for the descent into the darkest parts of oneself. He thought of Hanuman's great remembrance as a bedarkening, a kind of negative enlightenment that had led him only deeper into pride and love of his fate. He might have described Hanuman, with his burning eyes and broken soul, as being utterly awakened, but that was not quite right, either.
He is the opposite of awakened, Danlo suddenly realized.
In truth, the opposite of awakening is not sleep but rather the coming into full consciousness of the great 'No'. Danlo could see that Hanuman was too aware of life's ultimate negation and was suffering a vast unhappiness behind his smiles and his silence. He knew then that Hanuman would never have the strength for such suffering. If he were not healed of his basic fault, as he fell farther into neverness and the pursuit of personal godhood, the weakest part of him, like a crack in the sea ice under a hot sun, would open up and destroy him.
'In eight more days,' Danlo said, 'we shall be invited to another joyance.'
'Perhaps,' Hanuman said.
'The kalla is a wild drug, I think,' Danlo said. 'Wild like the sea. It is always easy to become lost. But you could learn ... to go wherever you will.'
'You're the pilot, not I.'
'But you are a cetic!'
'A cetic,' Hanuman agreed, and he stared off into the air.
'Cetics are masters of consciousness, yes?'
Hanuman glanced down at the sphere in his hand. 'Are we?' he asked.
'Kalla is a blessed drug. A doorway ... to the deepest consciousness.'
'You really think so, don't you?'
'I have seen it. Truly. I have been ... this consciousness. Only for a moment, and never perfectly – but I have only tasted the kalla one time.'
Hanuman stared straight at Danlo, then, and his words poured out of him like molten rock bubbling from a rent in the earth: 'You've seen it. I shouldn't dispute your vision, should I? You know what you know. However, I wish you could see, just one time, what I've seen. But that's an impossibility, I know. It's silly of me to wish such a thing. You have your blessed consciousness – never the fear of annihilation, never panic, never hatred, never pure retching despair.'
For a while, Danlo stood staring at Hanuman, trying to quell the despair forming up hard inside his throat. Then he swallowed and said, 'But, Hanu, to remember yourself, the Elder Eddas, to become conscious of the One memory – everything is there, yes? All occurrences, all light, all time, all possibilities.'
'You'd like to believe that. But in fact, this consciousness, this God-memory of yours is like a trap. Think of it as a lava pool covered with a crust of rock. Step carelessly, take your three sips of kalla, and then you break the crust and fall through. And then there's drowning, burning, annihilation, nothingness.'
'No, it is just the opposite,' Danlo said. 'To remember yourself is to become whole again. To become completely yourself, your deep self, then there is joy. Just pure joy.'
'No, memory is pure fire.'
'No, memory is just– '
'Danlo, listen to me!' Hanuman's belly quivered as every muscle in his body seemed to jump and come alive at once. He seemed intensely alive, Danlo thought. Curiously, for the first time since they had become friends, he was not coughing. Yet he was far from being well. He was sick with a strange and horrible disease that moment by moment was consuming him. He fairly jumped over to the flower table beside his bed and reached out his finger. Earlier that day, one of Bardo's underlings had placed a vase of sunflowers there. Seven sunflowers pulled ominously at their thin green stems. Each one was a perfect hemisphere of hundreds of orange-gold petals exploding outward toward the eye. Hanuman stabbed his finger into the centre of one of the sunflowers, and he said, 'Look at these glorious flowers! Do you see what I see? Not the alienness, not even the beauty, but the burning. They burn my eyes. I look at them, straining to find the sun in this ugly little room without windows, and my eyes are on fire. I can see the leaves, the individual cells, the molecules of chlorophyll burning for the sun. The memory of the sun – everything remembers. Do you think the stem cells don't remember being cut away from the stem this morning? Do you think they don't convulse at the pain of the knife? Do you think they don't burn to be rejoined with the main body of the sunflower plant? Yes, they convulse; yes, they remember; yes, they burn. Everything burns. The leather in that ugly chair in which I've sat for two days burns with memory of every hurt and every pain the seal felt during her life. The air passing my lips as I say these words: it burns. I breathe, and in each lungful of air, I inhale a molecule from the dying breath of every animal and bird that's ever lived on this planet. The remembrancers are right, you should know. The memory of everything is in everything. And it's all burning, and it never stops. This is what memory is. This is what I am. And no, I'm not telling you this because I desire your compassion. That's the last thing I'd wish of you. But you've always said you wanted to see things as they are. If that's really true, then open your eyes and look.'