‘Oh ho, surely it’s upon you to decide this. If you’d like, we could withdraw the petition and wait until the following year.’
‘No,’ Danlo said. About most things, he had the patience of an Alaloi, which is to say, the patience of a rock, but whenever he thought of the journey he had to complete, he was overcome with a sense of urgency. ‘I can’t wait that long.’
‘There is another possibility.’
‘Yes?’
‘So, it’s so: a language – any human language – can be learned almost overnight. There are techniques, ways of directly imprinting the brain with language.’
Danlo knew that the fount of intelligence lay inside the head, in the pineal gland which he called the third eye. Brains were a kind of pink fat which merely insulated this gland from the cold. Brains – animal brains, that is – were mainly good for eating or mashing up with wood ash in order to cure raw furs. ‘How can coils of fat hold language?’ he wanted to know.
Old Father whistled a few low notes and then delivered a short lecture about the structures of the human brain. He pressed his long fingers down against Danlo’s skull, roughly indicating the location deep in his brain of the hippocampus and almond-shaped amygdala, which mediated memory and the other mental functions. ‘Like a baldo nut, your brain is divided into two hemispheres, right and left. Oh ho, two halves – it’s as if you had two brains. Why do you think human beings are divided against themselves, one half saying “no”, while the other half continually whispers, “yes”?’
Danlo rubbed his eyes. From time to time, he tired of Old Father’s air of superiority. He had stayed long enough in Old Father’s house to relish the art of sarcasm, so he said, ‘And the Fravashi have an undivided brain? Is this why your consciousness wriggles about like a speared fatfish and never holds still?’
Old Father smiled nicely. ‘You’re perceptive,’ he said. ‘The Fravashi brain, aha! So, it’s so: our brains are divided into quarters. The frontal lobes,’ and here he touched his head above his golden eyes and whistled softly, ‘the front brain is given over almost wholly to language and the composition of the songlines. The other parts, other functions. Four quarters: and the Fravashi sleep by quarters, you should know. Because we think more, because we are better able to compose, edit and sing the song of ourselves, so we sleep more, much more. So, to dream. The Fravashi sleep by quarters: at any time, one, two or three quarters of our brain are sleeping. Rarely are we wholly awake. And never – never, never, never, never! – must we allow ourselves to be four quarters asleep.’
It was hard for Danlo to imagine such a consciousness, and he shook his head. He smiled at Old Father. ‘Then your brain, the four quarters – does it whisper “yes”, “no”, “maybe” and “maybe not”?’
‘Ho, ho, a human being making jokes about the Fravashi brain!’
Danlo laughed along with Old Father before falling serious. He asked, ‘Does your brain hold language like mine?’
‘Ah, oh, it would be better to think of the Fravashi brain absorbing language like cotton cloth sucks up water. There are deep structures, universal grammars for words, music or any sound – we hear a language one time, and we cannot forget.’
‘But I am a man, and I can forget, yes?’
‘Oh ho, and that’s why you must undergo an imprinting, if you are to learn the Language quickly and completely.’
Danlo thought of all the things he had learned quickly and completely during the night of his initiation. He asked, ‘Will it hurt very much?’
Old Father smiled his sadistic smile, then, and his eyes were like golden mirrors. ‘Ah, the pain. The brain, the pain, the brain. On your outings with Ottah, skating on the streets, have you ever seen a Jacaradan whore?’
Danlo, who would have been shocked that certain women trade sex for money, that is, if he had known about money, said, ‘I am not sure.’
‘Women who leave their bellies bare, the better to display their tattoos. Tattoos: red and purple pictures of naked women, green and blue advertisements of their trade.’
‘Oh, those women.’ Danlo had come to appreciate the subtleties and delicateness of civilized females, and he said, ‘They are very lovely, yes? – I wondered what they were called.’
Old Father whistled a little tune indicating his disapproval of whores. But the meaning was lost on Danlo. ‘An imprinting is like a tattoo of the brain. Indelible sounds and pictures fixed into the synapses – the brain’s synapses themselves are fixed like strands of silk in ice. There is no physical pain because the brain has no nerves. Ah, but the pain! Sudden new concepts, reference points, relationships among words – you can’t imagine the possible associations. Oh ho, there is pain!, the angslan of suddenly being more than you were. The pain of knowing. Oh, the pain, the pain, the pain, the pain.’
The next day, Old Father took Danlo to the imprimatur’s shop. They left the district via the infamous Fravashi sliddery, a long orange street which flows down past the Street of the Common Whores and the Street of Smugglers, and winds deep into the heart of the Farsider’s Quarter. Old Father was fairly clumsy on his skates. His hips were not as loosely jointed as a human’s, and they creaked with disease. Often, when rounding a curve he had to lean on Danlo to keep from falling. Often, he had to stop to catch his breath. They made a strange pair: Danlo with his open face and deeply curious eyes, and kindly, inscrutable Old Father towering over him like a furry mountain. Because it was warm, Danlo wore only a white cotton shirt, wool trousers and a black wool jacket. (And, of course, Ahira’s white feather fluttering in his hair.) It was one of those perfect winter days. The sky was as deep blue as a thallow’s eggshell, and a fresh salt wind was blowing off the ocean. On either side of the street, the outdoor restaurants and cafes were crowded with people watching the continuous promenade of people stream by. And there was much to watch. As they penetrated deeper into the Quarter, the mix of people began to change and grow ever more colourful, seedier, more dangerous. There were many more whores and many master courtesans dressed in diamonds and the finest of real silks. There were hibakusha in rags, barefoot autists, harijan, tubists, merchants, wormrunners, and even a few ronin warrior-poets who had deserted their order for the pleasures of Neverness. The air heaved with the sounds and smells of teeming humanity. Fresh bread, sausages and roasted coffee, ozone, woodsmoke, toalache, wet wool and floral perfumes, kana oil and sweat, and the faint, ferny essence of sex – there was no end to the smells of the City. These smells excited Danlo, although it was difficult to sort one from the other to track its source. Once, when they were caught in the crush at the intersection of the Street of Imprimaturs, a plump little whore pressed up against him and ran her fingers through his hair. ‘Such thick, pretty hair,’ she said. ‘All black and red – is it real? I’ve never seen such hair before.’ While Old Father whistled furiously to shoo her away, Danlo drank in the fragrance of rose perfume which her sweaty hand had left in his hair. He had never encountered such a flower before, and he relished the smell, even though he wished that the whore had noticed he was not a boy, but a man.
Of the many shops on the Street of Imprimaturs, Drisana Lian’s was one of the smallest. It sat on the middle of the block squeezed between a noisy cafe and the fabulously decorated shop of Baghaim the Imprimatur. Where Baghaim’s shop was large and fronted with stained-glass windows, Drisana’s was nothing more than a hole through an unobtrusive granite doorway; where many rich and fashionably dressed people queued up to apply for the services of Baghaim and his assistants, Drisana’s shop was very often empty. ‘Drisana is not popular,’ Old Father explained as he knocked at the iron door. ‘That’s because she refuses most imprintings requested of her. Ah, but there isn’t a better imprimatur in the City.’
The door opened and Drisana greeted Old Father and Danlo. She bowed painfully but politely and invited them inside. Without ignoring Danlo, she made it clear she was glad to see Old Father, whom she had known since he first came to Neverness. They spoke to each other