'Please do not worry about me.'
'Well, I have to,' Bardo said. 'Because of who you are. You may not like it, but you're an exemplar, now. As is Hanuman. Both of you – the Lords of the Order are watching what we do, and we can't have our best young Ringists annihilating themselves with kalla, can we?'
Danlo slipped his shakuhachi out of his pocket and held it cupped in his fingers. 'If we are forbidden to drink deeply of the kalla,' he said, 'how can you think we will remembrance the deepest part of the Eddas?'
'Ah, the Eddas,' Bardo said as he rubbed his eyes. 'I must confess a thing to you. I, for myself, don't care if I ever remembrance them again. There, I've said it. I've had my three sips of kalla, and I've seen the burning oceans of hell – or heaven – and it's nearly driven me mad. In truth, no one needs to remembrance the Eddas so deeply. At least, not more than once. The goddamned paradoxes. The Way of Ringess can't be just for a few prophets and prodigies. I've a responsibility to the spirit of Ringism, to anyone who wants to follow the Way. Even those who'd drown in the Eddas, if we let them. The goddamned Elder Eddas – yes, I admit there's truth there, the truth of how we can become gods. And that's the way of Ringess. The only way. The great memories can lead us toward that truth, but it's madness to become lost in them.'
Out of respect for Bardo's thinking and his passion, Danlo bowed his head. He put the flute to his lips, then, and began to play a song that he had spent the last few days composing.
'Am I wrong, then? Do you think I'm wrong?'
Danlo looked at Bardo, and he felt all his gladness for the huge man concentrating in his eyes. He said nothing and continued to play.
'By God, is it wrong to protect our friends? I'm afraid for you, Little Fellow.'
An intensely melodic music spilled out around Danlo, but the acoustics of the room were dead and only accentuated his shakuhachi's shrillness. The sound of it was high and harsh and cold, and he listened as it broke in waves against the snow-covered dome. It suddenly came to him that Bardo was right, that he must renounce the drinking of large dosages of kalla. In truth, he must renounce kalla altogether, but not because of the danger of madness. For him, if not for all seekers of remembrance, there were other dangers more insidious and subtle. Kalla was truly a blessed drug, truly a window to the world within. As with all windows to deep reality, however, he thought that the kalla might actually limit his experience of the Elder Eddas; it might stain or blur his vision in a vital way, thus keeping him from the deepest apprehension of the One Memory.
After he had finished his song, Danlo slid his flute back into his pocket. He said, 'Do not be afraid, Bardo. I ... will drink no more kalla.'
'What!' Bardo stood next to him, and his eyes were wide open with puzzlement. 'What did you say?'
'The kalla,' Danlo said, 'its very blessedness ... is a force that I must not come to rely on.'
'And so you'd renounce it?'
'Yes.'
'Completely?'
'Yes.'
'How can you stand there, after all that's been said, and tell me with a smile on your goddamned face that you'll give up kalla so easily?'
Danlo held his hand up to his mouth, then said, 'Not ... easily.' As he scratched the thick beard covering his chin and neck, he explained to Bardo his reasons for renouncing kalla.
'Ahhh,' Bardo said, 'are you certain that you're not merely angry with me? I'm afraid my restricting the kalla has made you bitter.'
Danlo laughed and shook his head. 'I am not angry with you.'
'But you'll have no more remembrances!'
'I did not say that.'
'But you won't be able to share the kalla at the ceremonies, will you?'
'That is true,' Danlo admitted. 'But there are other paths ... toward the great memories. If I am still welcome in your house, I would like to ask Master Rane to teach me the remembrancing attitudes.'
'But there are sixty-four attitudes!' Bardo roared out. 'Most people spend a lifetime learning them.'
'Perhaps I will have a short life and learn them quickly.'
'Some people never learn them,' Bardo said, obviously not amused by Danlo's little joke. 'But even supposing that you're a prodigy, or even a prophet, and that you accomplish all that you dream of, by natural means, what then? You can't spend the rest of your life absorbed into a goddamned memory.'
For a little while, they discussed the art of remembrancing, and then Danlo said, 'You look to the Eddas for clues and directions toward personal godhood. That is your way, and perhaps it is a true and splendid way. But I think that my way is ... something other.'
'Ah, do I dare ask what this way might be?'
'I am not sure,' Danlo said. 'But someday, if I remembrance deeply enough, then I shall know.'
'Well, then,' Bardo said, as he rubbed his hands together, 'I wish you well. And I wish I could remain here chatting with you, but someone must guide tonight's remembrance, eh?'
So saying he ambled off toward the stairway, but just before he went down to the party below, he pirouetted and said, 'Oh, Little Fellow, of course you're always welcome in my house.'
Danlo stood there alone, then, and he stared out through the curving windows at the streets of the Old City. Snow was falling now, and off toward the East-West Sliddery, the ice and the trees and the houses were covered with a new layer of soreesh snow. The quiet and the whiteness recalled the forests of his childhood, where he had first caught a glimpse of the rare white thallow. It had been a long time since he had thought of Ahira, and longer still since he had prayed to his other-self. He did not like to think that he continued to see the world through the symbols of a primitive totem system, but in truth, whenever he was most troubled and walked alone through a grove of trees or through the deserted City cemeteries, a part of him always listened for Ahira's wild cry. He listened for it now, and strangely, even though he was encased in a dome of synthetic glass and cut off from the night, he heard a bird scream out in his killing ecstasy. The scream was inside him, he suddenly realized; it was only a memory of Ahira digging its talons into a sleekit's neck. And then a deeper memory came, a truth of the Elder Eddas: That thou art. The thallow's cry shrilled out and filled the universe inside him, and he remembered, I that sound.
He knew then that his way toward the godhead, if such a way really existed, would be both marvellous and terrible. He stood there pressing his forehead against the cold clary dome, and he gladly would have told Bardo this – or Hanuman – but no one was there to listen.
Once, when he was a young man, thirteen yean before his Completion, The Perfect One became drunk on wine and gambled away his family estates on a single throw of dice. And Sarojin Garuda, who was his brother and chief disciple, said to him, 'You have thrown away our lives, for now we shall have neither money to spend, food to eat, nor a roof over us to keep us dry when the rains come.'
And The Perfect One replied, 'All life is a gamble into the unknown. Now the sky must be our roof, and we must spend our lives Perfecting ourselves. And when we are Complete, we shall never be hungry again.'
'Do you mean,' Sarojin Garuda asked, 'that we shall nourish our souls with the wind and sun, and that the union with the Whole will fill us with joy?'
And The Perfect One, who is also called The Laughing , replied, 'Of course, but I also mean that when we achieve Completion, our followers will give us their bread, their clothes, their very lives.'
'But how will you attract followers when it is discovered you were so foolish as to drink wine and gamble away our estates?'
And The Perfect One replied, 'As you will see, the people love no one so much as a perfect sinner who repents and becomes a perfect saint.'
'Then you are ready to repent and give up all vice?' Garuda asked.
And The Perfect One laughed and replied, 'No, not yet.'
After that The Perfect One went down to the South Lands, and he seduced the daughters of the vintners and drank their wine, and he danced the forbidden dances, and he ate the magic mushrooms that grew in the forests. He wandered for thirteen years before coming to the Holy City. There, at the Pool of Eternity, he renounced the world and achieved Completion, and all that he had prophesied came to pass.
Many years later, The Perfect One acquired palaces for each of the six seasons, and he filled them with priceless sculptures and fine wines; he took for himself 313 concubines and fathered four times as many children; he began to dance and eat mushrooms and throw dice again. Sarojin Garuda came to him and said, 'Once again you've fallen into vice.'
And The Perfect One replied, 'In Completion all distincare as One, and there is neither vice nor virtue. The advantage of being Perfected is that one can see this clearly.'
'But the people,' Sarojin Garuda said, after considering , 'are far from Perfection and do not see what you see.'
And The Perfect One replied, 'And that is why they love me as they do. They know that a Perfect One is beyond the good or evil of the world, and thus nothing can touch him.'
Then The Perfect One began to laugh, and in listening this holy laughter, the mind of Sarojin Garuda was freed of all doubt and imperfection, and he finally achieved what he had been seeking all his life. They both laughed together for a very long time, and they died very old, very rich, and very Complete.
– from The Life of The Perfect One
During the early days of winter, as Danlo studied the remembrancing attitudes under Master Thomas Rane or spent long, lascivious hours with Tamara in front of a blazing wood fire learning a very different art, he kept his promise to renounce kalla. But his single, great remembrance could be neither renounced nor forgotten. Bardo had warned him that he (and Hanuman, too) would become an exemplar for others, and so he did: ironically, the radical Ringists, those who would drink kalla freely, regarded Danlo as something of a hero, and they sought to emulate his wildness and his deed, if not his renunciation. This clique, though never large, included Ringists who were close to Bardo, such as the diva, Nirvelli, and Dario Chu. And at least two of Thomas Rane's memory guides fell into the secret worship of kalla. The brothers Jonathan and Benjamin Hur (of the infamous Darkmoon Hurs) embezzled a large quantity of kalla from Bardo's storeroom, and they let it flow in rivers among their friends and confederates. Unknown to Bardo, they held secret remembrances in various apartments throughout the City, and sometimes, when they were feeling especially bold, within the very rooms of Bardo's house. Jonathan Hur, himself, spent much time alone in the Well, floating in a saltwater pool as the kalla rushed through him in cold, lucent streams and carried him down into the deep memories. He contrived it so that his friends were allowed free use of the Well. And then, in secret, he served them kalla and abandoned them, each to his own wisdom, will, and vision. It was the glory and conceit of these radical Ringists that, at any moment, one of their number should always occupy a tank in the Well. When one of their fellowship was finished journeying through the world inside, another would drink three sips of kalla and take her place, and in this way, working in shifts, they sought to remembrance the Elder Eddas continuously. This wild and clandestine worship might have gone on for a long time, but inevitably, the weight of antichance fell against them. A wormrunner named Isas Nikitovich managed to drown himself in one of the tanks, and worse (from Bardo's very selfish point of view) a brilliant journeyman akashic swallowed at least fifteen sips of kalla and did not return from her journey. Or rather, she returned in madness, emptier in the eye than any autist. When Bardo heard the news that one of his favourite lovers had been disfigured in the mind, he wept, then flew into a rage and smashed nine priceless Agathanian alaya shells before Surya Lal calmed him. He was heard to shout out, 'By God, if I can't trust my guides with the goddamned kalla, who can I trust?'
This remark was to prove most ominous. It heralded the great changes about to take place within the Way of Ringess. The cult, at this time, was splitting into three factions, none of which trusted the others completely. There was Jonathan Hur's kalla fellowship, of course, and also the main body of Ringists, the seekers who were glad to attend the ceremonies of remembrance and receive their two sips of kalla. They were less interested in the Elder Eddas, as an experience of its own, than in discovering how they each might grow into godhood. The third faction was an offshoot from this main body. From the very beginning quite a few Ringists were unable to remembrance the Eddas – either that or they could not make sense of their memories. In truth, they were too stupid or lazy to learn the techniques of remembrancing, and above all, they were too afraid. They avoided or renounced the drinking of kalla, not because they sought a clearer way of seeing things, but because the journey into themselves terrified them. They were drawn to Ringism for the most basic of reasons: they sensed that Bardo and his inner circle had discovered a way toward something vast and important, something beyond their individual concerns, and they desperately wanted to be a part of this movement. If they could not know the light dance of pure remembrance, in themselves, then at least the satisfaction of intense religiousness could still be theirs. Bardo's house, day and night, seemed aglow with intensity and a sense of possibilities. It was enough for some people to bask in the golden radiance of luminaries such as Danlo, or the beautiful and accomplished Nirvelli, or even Thomas Rane, for it is always easier to stand beneath the light of another than to shine with one's own. Many spoke of new directions in evolution, of the infinite possibilities of the human race, but few were willing to make even the slightest of changes in themselves. They dreamed of transforming their bodies and minds into something new, something vast and marvellous, but they lacked the courage to create their own fate. They thought they wanted to become as gods, and some of them wanted to want a path towards the godly, but they were as insincere as rich astriers who profess compassion for the poor, and all the while hoard diamonds and firestones and other precious jewels. And so they gave up kalla and substituted excitement as their drug; they mistook zeal for true ecstasy; they satisfied their longings for transcendence with promises and hopes, even as they neglected the dangerous work of going over themselves. In this way, they betrayed themselves, and they fomented revolution instead of the evolution of humankind. They were a nervous and desperate people, all too eager to believe that the Golden Ring would protect them from the fury of the Vild, or that if they tried to follow the way of a man who had become a god, a little of his divinity might cling to their grasping hands. These were the failed and false seekers, and other Ringists derisively referred to them as 'godlings' or 'godchildren'. In the early days of winter in the year 2953 since the founding of Neverness, this faction of godchildren still composed only a tenth of the membership of Bardo's cult.