Indeed, the clearface fit his head like a second skin. It had been cast and moulded to conform with the bones of his skull. A glue called gimuk held it in place; the glue and the constant pressure of this profound computer had irritated his scalp, for along the rim of the clearface, across his forehead and temples, around his ears, the skin was red and inflamed.
Danlo looked at him, trying to keep his eyes fixed on Hanuman's eyes rather than on the clearface. 'I have heard that only the higher grades of the cyber-shamans wear the skullcap ... continually.'
'Are you asking if I've been initiated into the higher grades?'
'I have heard there are grades ... that even cyber-shamans of the higher grades know little about.'
'Are you speaking of secret grades?'
'Not quite ... secret,' Danlo said, and then he smiled. 'How could they be secret if I have heard of them?'
Hanuman looked at him but said nothing.
'I have heard that there are neurosingers who use the skullcap to interface other computers ... continually.'
Hanuman smiled to himself as he looked up into the dome. His eyes were bloodshot as if he had not been able to close them for a long time. His eyes were frozen open, but they seemed empty of normal sight. He stood motionless as a sleekit on the snow, and all the while his hollow eyes haunted his face. Danlo knew that he must be interfacing the skullcap, or perhaps one of the room's many computers. Which one he interfaced was impossible to determine. The skullcap – the clearface – was like a window into the cybernetic spaces of all common computers, and into many that were uncommon, as well. Hanuman stared off into space, as eyeless as any scryer; he might have been interfacing a quantum mechanical computer, or the wall tapestry, or even the very walls themselves.
'Hanu, Hanu, what are you doing?'
As if in answer, Hanuman turned his gaze to a computer in the exact centre of the room. There, resting on a plain shatterwood stand at the level of Danlo's eyes, was a black crystal sphere. It was as large as the head of a walrus, and Danlo immediately recognized it as a much larger version of Hanuman's universal computer, the one that he had used to create his universe of dolls.
'Excuse me,' Hanuman said, 'I was only completing an experiment.'
Danlo turned his head left and right, looking for the square table that Hanuman had kept in his room after his great remembrance. But Danlo saw no such display table nor any other kind of screen or monitor that might be used to display the dolls.
'I left the table at Bardo's house,' Hanuman said upon reading Danlo's puzzled expression. He tapped the diamond clearface covering his head. 'Now that I wear this, there's no need for such vulgar displays.'
Hanuman turned to look at the sulki grid against the wall. He said, 'That is, there's no need for myself. But you'll want to see how my dolls have evolved these last hundred days.'
Without waiting to see if that was indeed what Danlo really wanted, Hanuman nodded his head, and the sulki grid flared into life. Instantly, the whole chapter house from the floor to the dome above filled with glowing silver shapes the size of large seals. These images of dolls were all around Danlo, floating through the air, perching atop the cabinets, floating through the cabinets and other objects of the room as if such constructions of common matter could never impede beings made of pure light. Again, he had to remind himself that the dolls were only information structures stored in Hanuman's universal computer; the hologram projected through the room was only a representation of this artificial life.
'Please, no,' Danlo said. 'No more.'
While Hanuman stood there motionless, Danlo jumped back as one of the dolls darted through the air and hovered in front of him. In the way this great silver being oriented itself toward him, it seemed to be studying him. Although none of the dolls had eyes or faces, as humans or even seals do, there was something facelike about each of the dolls, as if each one possessed a unique personality and expression. The patterns of light composing the dolls were unique in each one, and the shifting bands of silver blue and aquamarine seemed responsive to stimuli that Danlo could only guess at. And each doll seemed responsive to every other. The dolls twisted and quivered, and Danlo imagined that he could see the very air molecules vibrating as with speech or some other kind of information wave. He had an eerie feeling that the dolls were talking with each other in strange and complex ways, perhaps even discussing him or laughing at him. Perhaps they were pitying him. Somehow, he thought, the dolls were aware of all that occurred between him and Hanuman. It horrified him to think that these dolls might manifest themselves in any part of the real universe as easily as Hanuman might enter theirs.
'Hanu ... please.'
As suddenly as they had appeared, the dolls vanished. The pretty lights that had made up the dolls were gone, and the computers and cabinets stood out plainly in the unmoving air and the chapter house suddenly seemed too dark, too quiet, too real.
'Have you ever wondered about memory?' Hanuman asked. 'These dolls have evolved a perfect memory.'
'A computer's memory of information ... is not the same as a man's.'
'Are you sure?'
Danlo rubbed his eye and said, 'I did not come here to see your dolls.'
'Are you sure?' Hanuman repeated.
'Once, we used to know each other's thoughts, almost without talking.'
'Shall I tell you what you're thinking, Danlo?'
Danlo shrugged his shoulders and said, 'If you would like.'
He was aware of Hanuman's eyes picking over his face, and he expected him to utter some witticism or piercing truth about the paradoxical nature of his quest to become an asarya. But Hanuman turned facing the centre of the room, and he said nothing. Then Danlo became aware of his own mind, of his wild, churning surface thoughts: he was praying that Hanuman would look away from him and keep his silence.
'You used to know me as a friend, not as a cetic,' Danlo said.
Hanuman stepped close to his universal computer, and he said nothing.
'And I used to know you,' Danlo continued. 'I thought I always would.'
Hanuman pressed his forehead to the gleaming black sphere, and there was a clinking sound of crystal against the diamond clearface, and still he said nothing.
'Hanu, Hanu – why did I ever come to this insane City?'
At last, Hanuman deigned to speak, saying, 'If you hadn't come to Neverness, I would have frozen to death in Lavi Square.'
'Why speak of that now?'
'Because there's a life between us. There always will be.'
'Yes... a life.'
'And now there's something more between us,' Hanuman said. 'This way of the gods that we've seen more clearly than anyone else.'
'But the Way of Ringess ... is not my way.'
'No?'
'No.'
'Would you renounce the very religion you've helped create?'
'I? But what about you and Bardo, then?'
'Let's never forget,' Hanuman said, 'that your remembrance has been the inspiration of thousands.'
'But I– '
'Soon they will be millions.'
'So many– '
'And someday, millions of millions. There's never any end to humanity's swarms, is there?'
With slow, tense steps, Danlo paced around the room. Finally, after considering his words carefully, he drew up close to Hanuman and said, 'The Way ... is not what it used to be.'
'Everything evolves, of course,' Hanuman agreed.
'But now Bardo is practically selling memberships to the godlings!'
'So?'
'You cannot buy remembrance.'
'Perhaps not,' Hanuman said. 'But if the godlings don't sacrifice something dear to themselves such as money, they won't value the privilege of becoming Ringists.'
'Privilege?' Danlo cried out. 'I thought the Way ... was supposed to be a way for everyone.'
'And it will be. It is. Only, for some of us, it will be a more glorious way than for others.'
'I see.'
Hanuman steepled his fingers beneath his chin and said, 'Some of us have been chosen to copy their remembrances; others have not.'
'Who are these chosen, then?'
'Do you want to know their names?'
'Yes.'
'Well, there's Bardo, of course. You, me, Thomas Rane. Kolenya Mor.'
'And?'
'And, as I'm sure you know, I've asked Tamara, too. And the brothers Hur and seven others of the kalla fellowship. And Surya has consented– '
'Surya Lal!'
'She's a brilliant woman, you should know.'
'But she has opposed the kalla ceremony almost from the very beginning!' Danlo said. 'I think she is afraid ... of the memories.'
'Nevertheless, it seems that she's had an important remembrance.'
'Truly?'
'Would you wish to judge, yourself, the truth of her remembrance?'
Danlo looked up into the dome, at the windows which had fallen dark and reflective of the room's little lights. He shook his head and asked, 'What ... remembrance?'
'She's remembered a simple thing, really, a truth that should be important to any who follow the Way: that someday a god would arise among human beings and lead us to our destiny. This god's name is Mallory Ringess.'
'She says that she ... remembranced this?'
'Of course.'
'But how could she?'
'She says that this is one of the racial memories of the Ieldra.'
'But the Ieldra,' Danlo said, 'abandoned this galaxy fifty thousand years ago. How could they have known the name ... of my father?'
Hanuman looked at Danlo and smiled. 'Perhaps the Ieldra were the greatest scryers of all time. Their memories: memories of the future. You, yourself, have said that in deep remembrance, there is no time.'
'That is true.'
'Then the Ieldra must have carked all their memories, future and past, into the human genome. It's there, coiled up in our chromosomes, these brilliant memories. You've seen them, as have I. What else are the Elder Eddas, if not the memories of the gods?'
Danlo walked past a few cabinets and rickety tables until he came to the room's curved wall, which was thick and ornate with granite panelling. He leaned against one of the false pillars there. High above his head, the wind drove through the cracks along the iron window frame and fell down over him like an icy waterfall. The dense air had chilled the wall so thoroughly that he instantly felt the coldness of it pierce the layers of his kamelaika and his undergarments. He looked at Hanuman and said, 'I think the Elder Eddas are something more than genetic memory. The Eddas are ... something other.'
'What, then?'
'The One Memory, this life shimmering in all– '
'The One Memory! Oh, Danlo, I think you're the only truly religious person I know.'
Because his head was beginning to throb, Danlo rubbed his eyes and temples. 'It is ironic you should say that. I think I have finished ... with all religions.'
Hanuman walked over to Danlo and stood facing him. 'Even Ringism?'
'Especially Ringism. There is no joy in it any more ... for me.'
'No joy? You, of the great remembrance?'
'The kalla ceremony,' Danlo said. 'It is empty ... of true remembrance. It is like a thallow egg whose yolk has been sucked out.'
'Which is why it has been disbanded.'
'Is that really why, Hanu?'
'Well, tonight we'll have a new ceremony of remembrance.'
'Yes ... another ceremony.'
Hanuman looked up suddenly, as if he had just seen a dagger suspended above his head, and he told Danlo, 'It would be a tragedy for you to leave the Way.'
'But I must.'
'Are you sure?'
'Yes.'
'And when did you make this silly decision?'
Danlo did not want to speak, but his pride cried out that truth was blessed and must be told, and so he said, 'Before I came here tonight, I was not sure. I did not know ... what I would do.'
'And now you know?'
'Yes.'
'And what will Danlo the Wild do then?' Hanuman looked straight into Danlo's face, but his eyes were far away. 'A cetic wants to know.'
With his hand pressed against his aching head, Danlo told Hanuman that he would never attend another joyance nor any kind of religious ceremony. However, each evening he would practise the remembrancing art, privately, under Thomas Rane's guidance. He would spend his days studying mathematics. It was still his intention, he said, to join the second Vild mission and find a cure for the great plague that had killed his people.
'You've accounted for all your time except your nights.'
'You must know where I spend my nights,' Danlo said softly. Then, because he had fallen so deeply into truth that evening, he told Hanuman of the pearl and his betrothal to Tamara.
This happy news did not seem to surprise Hanuman. He just stood there, his eyes full of mockery, and full of pity, too. 'She'll never marry you, of course. Please believe me – I know about these whores.'
Neither Danlo nor Hanuman moved; the silence in the chapter house was now oppressive and ominous, and it seemed that it would never end.
'I should go now,' Danlo finally said. The pressure inside his head was sharp and intense; when he looked suddenly toward the door, a quick pain sliced through his eye, deep into his head.
'Now I've offended you,' Hanuman said. 'I'm sorry – please don't leave yet.'
Danlo rubbed the scar along his forehead, saying nothing. Then he started toward the door.
'You can't just betray your friends like this!' Hanuman said.
As if his muscles had been touched with an electric current, Danlo whirled about and pointed his finger at Hanuman. 'You say that?'
'If you leave the Way, you harm all of us.'
Out of pure frustration, Danlo clawed the air, then clenched his fists.
'Well, whatever you do, please don't betray our secrets to anyone.'
'A secret is a secret,' Danlo said.
'Of course, but please don't speak to anyone about the Way. Please don't tell anyone you've left us.'
'You want me to keep ... a silence?'
'Is that so hard to do?'
'Not so hard. So ... wrong.'