Each man and woman is a star.
If a cynical, old Orderman could look up at the sky and burn to become something new, then what of all the others? Everywhere Danlo looked, the faces of the man-swarm were bright with wonder and hope: one hundred thousand faces afire with longing, with the overwhelming need to be released from their suffering. Hanuman had told them that if only they endured the holy fire long enough, they might be freed from burning. They might become pure fire and light, and be free to create their own possibilities.
Each man and woman is a star.
Danlo pushed closer to the stage, past musty hats and the smells of perfume, sweat and excitement. He squeezed by awestruck women staring at the sky. He, himself, had eyes only for Hanuman, and he sought him out where he stood at the edge of the stage. Hanuman, though, was still frozen like a statue with his arms raised and his head thrown back. His eyes were closed and his face twisted as if he had fallen into a deep ecstasy. Or deeper into the fire that can never be quenched.
'Hanu, Hanu,' Danlo whispered, 'why couldn't you tell them the truth?'
Each man and woman is a star.
In truth, all things burned with a unique life, and just as human beings suffered more than did the snowworms or stones, the pain of the gods was infinitely greater than any man or woman could ever know. The whole universe burned with pain, from the Pavo Indus to the Ursa Major Cloud of galaxies. No god, however brilliant or vast, could ever escape this pain, and Danlo wanted to tell Hanuman this. He wanted to tell Hanuman, and tell everyone, that, yes, they could become gods, if this was their genius, if this was their fate, but only the cool and timeless depths of Elder Eddas could ever heal them of their suffering. But he no longer had the stage, and his moment for speaking the truth was past.
After a while, Hanuman opened his eyes and smiled as the people let loose a tremendous cheer. The whole ice ring shook with the sound of it. Hanuman returned to the warming pavilion then. The moonlights were still gleaming when a furious Bardo stamped across the stage and gave his testament, and then guided the dazzled swarms through a mass (and false) kalla ceremony. Cadres of newer Ringists, acting as guides, distributed jiggers of sea water in the thousands. (It should be noted that Jonathan Hur went among the people in secret, passing out slip tubes of real kalla to anyone who sought the Elder Eddas. The kalla fellowship – and many, many others – soon gathered near the stage and lost themselves in true remembrance.) The salty water was drunk, ritually, mechanically. It was affirmed that Mallory Ringess became a real god and would one day return to Neverness. It was revealed that he had given humankind the secrets of the Elder Eddas in order to guide all the race into godhood. It was repeated that human beings could become as gods if, and only if, they would follow the Way of the Ringess. Next to the marvels that Hanuman had wrought, the ceremony seemed hollow and meaningless. The people sipped their water and made their professions of faith, and all the while they stood beneath the golden sky, and their eyes glowed with the heavenly lights, and wonder was written across their faces. When the ceremony was finally finished, they began talking among themselves, in whispers and hoarse voices and relieved laughter, tens of thousands of sudden little conversations. Many were sceptical of all they had seen during the joyance; many regretted losing their time and freezing their faces in such a cold, windy place. They left the ice ring quickly. But of all who remained to be with each other and drink hot beer that night, it was agreed that the joyance was a great success, that Hanuman li Tosh was a very great man, and most importantly, that each of the thousands of women and men spread out over the ice ring did indeed burn with the fire of the stars.
My womb is memory; in that I place the seed. all created things are born. Everything born, Arjuna, comes from the womb of memory, and I am the seed-giving father.
– from The Bhagavad Gita
Looking backward at the turbid flow of history (or looking forward into the evolution of human and artificial life within the galaxy) Hanuman's Fire Sermon can be seen as a signal event. It was the moment when the religion of Ringism announced itself to the universe. Its effect upon the Order was immediate and profound: in the early days of deep winter in the year 2953, many professionals and academicians began attending joyances inside the cathedral that Bardo had bought. Many embraced what would come to be called the three pillars of Ringism: that Mallory Ringess became a real god and would one day return to Neverness; that he had given humanity the secrets of the Elder Eddas in order to guide all the race into godhood; and that human beings could become as gods if, and only if, they would follow the Way of the Ringess. Quite a few prominent masters and lords – Kolenya Mor, Hugh wi Siri Sarkisian, Jonath Parsons, Daru Penhallegon and others – entered the nave of the cathedral and knelt on the cold stone floor as they made their professions of faith, along with hundreds of new godlings from across the City. Just thirty years previously, during the lordship of the Timekeeper, the Order never would have tolerated this kind of religiosity among its members. To keep order within the stone buildings of the Academy, lords and masters would have been debased, journeymen chastised, and novices forbidden to take vows. But the Timekeeper was nineteen years dead, and a war had been fought among the pilots; now there was divisiveness within the College of Lords. No one really ruled the Order. The four lords of the Tetrad, as a whole, never gained the kind of total power that the Timekeeper had wielded. And they never really functioned as a whole. Chanoth Chen Ciceron railed against Ringism and Ringists while the quiet-spoken Nikolos the Elder advised restraint. Mariam Erendira Vasquez, perhaps guilty at having denied Danlo's petition to save the Alaloi, was quite taken by the stories of his great remembrance. Quite openly, she championed the exploration of the Elder Eddas, if only by using the traditional techniques of the remembrancers, and not through Thomas Rane's kalla ceremonies. And as for the mysterious Lord Pall, no one could tell whether he wanted to destroy the new religion or merely subvert it.
On the 34th of deep winter, at an open convocation of the Lords' College, Chanoth Chen Ciceron scolded Lord Pall for allowing the most brilliant of his journeymen cetics to fall into collusion with the demagogue-prophet of a new religion. 'The Lord Pall must explain to us why Hanuman li Tosh hasn't been chastised for violating his ethics. The Lord Pall must explain why Hanuman li Tosh has been allowed contact with the renegade pilot known as "the Bardo".'
But, of course, Lord Pall did not have to explain anything, especially not to Chanoth Chen Ciceron, whom he must have regarded as the most obnoxious of his rivals for power. Lord Pall rubbed his pinkish, albino eyes and stood to address the lords. In his cetic's hand language, he made swift little signs that his translator interpreted to mean: The Lord Ciceron's talents are much too elevated to waste concerning himself with a journeyman cetic. I shall deal with Hanuman li Tosh as he must be dealt with. It's true that all religions are dangerous, but we shouldn't think that we can't control this little religion of Bardo's. We shouldn't worry that we'll let the Way of Ringess, whatever that is, polarize our eternal Order.'
But the Way of Ringess had already begun to polarize the Order. Or rather, its radical expansion was the final cause among many historical causes dividing the Order in two. Already, at the time Danlo had come to Neverness, hundreds of professionals had volunteered for the Vild mission because they hated the work of religions and their gods: they regarded the Vild, the light-years of exploded stars and ruined space, as the tragic work of a religious group who worshipped a god called Ede. They were sick of religiosity in all its forms, just as they were sick of the Order's omnipresent and stifling holism. They wanted to flee Neverness on a mission of freedom and deliverance, and now that their fellow Ordermen in Upplysa and Lara Sig and the other colleges were worshipping Mallory Ringess as a god, their desire to flee this madness became both a panic and a crusade. Others, those who had drunk kalla or listened to Hanuman's sermon, saw Ringism as a fresh and fiery wind that might blow away centuries of stale thoughtways and dogmas, those outworn ways of viewing the universe that, like a mechanic's equations chiselled into stone, had long been reified into the Order's most venerable institutions. They told each other that this brilliant stellar wind would breathe new life into their fellows and into their City. Although they must have worried that Ringism's growing fervour might sweep them away like so many cinders into the night, they reasoned that if only they could be a part of Ringism from its very beginning, then they might control this explosive movement. They were the elite of an elite Order, and they thought to control the malcontents and madmen who always swarm to the light of a new religion. That Hanuman li Tosh was one of this elite was their hope and pride. They listened too well to his clever words, and they didn't foresee that their adulation of him would eventually ruin the Order.
Of course, most of those who lionized Hanuman were not of the Order. They were hibakusha or harijan or autists from the poorest streets of the City. They were arhats and infolaters and princesses: Surya Surata Lal, after Hanuman's sermon, began calling him 'The Agni', which means The Burning One' or 'Lord of Fire', and other devoted Ringists addressed him in that manner, too. His popularity waxed so quickly that it amazed everyone, especially Bardo, who was very jealous of Hanuman's rising star. He was more than jealous; he was wounded and wrath with Hanuman for betraying him at the great joyance. 'By God I'll never invite him to another joyance!' a swollen-faced Bardo said to Danlo a few days later. 'I'll banish him from our goddamn church!' He might have done just that, but for all his bluster, he found Hanuman much too valuable to cast aside like a bloodfruit that had been sucked dry. Thousands of godlings flocked to Bardo's newly opened cathedral, and Bardo was sober enough – if outraged – to perceive that they came to listen to Hanuman and not to him.
Most of those who followed the Way hoped to gain something for themselves, whether godhood, enlightenment, mass communion or remembrance. A few people, however, became Ringists solely because they wanted to give of their talents and themselves. Tamara Ten Ashtoreth was one of these few. It was her conceit to infuse the Way of Ringess with the ancient secrets of the Tantra that she knew so well. She clearly saw, after the night that Hanuman delivered his Fire Sermon, that the religion of Ringism was like a sacred, golden tree that might grow in any one of several different directions. As Hanuman had prophesied, it might indeed grow toward the fire of the stars, out into the universe's infinite lights. Tamara also saw that this tree of humanity would be made up of millions of people in their all-too-human bodies. She believed – this was her heart's great passion – that human bodies must be nourished as often as possible with the elixir of pure sexual energy, or else they would never come truly alive. And so her purity of heart impelled her to give herself to the Way of Ringess. However, as Danlo discovered during the coldest days of deep winter, she was a complex woman who had many reasons for doing the things that she did. It was Danlo's pleasure to spend as many evenings and nights with Tamara as he could. These nights were always too few. Usually, in fulfilment of her professional duties, Tamara would sally out on a bitterly cold night to keep her appointments with other men (or women), quite often with the most prominent lords and masters of the Order. Danlo might have been jealous of this time lost to him, but he was not by nature a jealous man. Then, too, his early experience among the Devaki had trained him away from jealousy. The Devaki – all the Alaloi – are the most promiscuous and tolerant of peoples, at least until they make their marriages. Danlo still believed that it was unseemly for an unmarried man to be jealous of an unmarried woman. Therefore, on those nights Tamara kept free, he would visit her at her house in the Pilots' Quarter, and he was always glad for the marvellous gifts that she gave him. He loved being alone with her in her house, which stood on a quiet street on the cliffs above North Beach. It was a small chalet of stone and naked shatterwood floors, quite austere – not at all the kind of house he would have imagined a courtesan would keep. But Tamara always met her appointments down in the Farsider's Quarter, where her Society maintained the grandest of the City's pleasure domes. Because she never invited men to her house, she had no need to please anyone but herself, and what pleased her was not dark luxuries or rich furnishings but open windows and flowering plants and floors of rare inlaid woods that she liked to dance upon, barefoot, in the style of the best Sufi dancers. Indeed, she liked to go about her house bare of any clothing at all. She could do this without fear of tantalizing her neighbours because the houses on either side of hers were kept by pilots who had been off exploring the Vild for as long as she had lived there. In her meditation room, on plain cotton cushions, she would sit naked in front of the sliding windows, looking out at the sea cliffs and the frozen waters of Neverness Sound far below. To accommodate her need for nakedness, she usually kept her house rather warm. On those nights Danlo came to visit, it was always more than warm. Tamara's fireroom had two fireplaces, one on either side of the room, and she would set logs blazing in both of them before inviting Danlo to lie with her on a shagshay fur on the middle of the floor. There, in the light of the fires, she would take him through the positions of her sexual yoga. Quite often, they would begin with him sitting crosslegged on the fur in the Tortoise or Lotus position while she sat astride him. They would breathe together as they joined, muscles straining, skin gleaming, and sweating, always sweating in salty, pungent rivers that ran down the hollows of their backs. As she had told him, more than once, it was important to raise the body's heat so that he sweated freely.