Danlo thought about this for a while. Drisana’s tea room was a good place for reflection. In some ways it reminded him of a snow hut’s interior: clean, stark and lit by natural flames. High on the granite walls, atop little wooden shelves, were ten silver candelabra. All around the room, candles burned with a familiar yellow light. The smells of hot wax and carbon mingled with pine and the sickly sweet fetor which old people exude when they are almost ready to go over. Danlo traced his finger along his forehead and wondered aloud, ‘Is it possible for a man to become a god? For a civilized man? How can such a thing be possible? Men are men; why should a man want to be a god?’
He wondered if Old Father was lying or speaking metaphorically. Or perhaps, in such a shaida place as a city, a man really could aspire to godhood. Danlo really didn’t understand civilized people, nor could he conceive of the kinds of gods they might become. And then he had a startling thought: it wasn’t necessary for him to understand everything in order to accept Drisana’s and Old Father’s story. As his first conscious act as an asarya, he would say ‘yes’ to this fantastic notion of a man’s journey godward, at least until he could see things more clearly.
He turned to Old Father and asked, ‘What are the Elder Eddas?’
‘Oh ho, the Elder Eddas! No one is quite sure. Once there was a race of gods, the Ieldra, once, once, three million years ago. When human beings lived in trees; when the Fravashi still warred with each other, clan against clan. The Ieldra, it’s said, discovered the secret of the universe. The Philosopher’s Stone. The One Tree, the Burning Bush, Pure Information, the Pearl of Great Price. Aha, the River of Light, the Ring of Scutarix, the Universal Program, the Eschaton. And the Golden Key, the Word, even the Wheel of Law. So, it’s so: the Elder Eddas. God. In a way, the Ieldra became God, or became as one with God. It’s said that they carked their minds – ah, ah, their very consciousness – into the singularity at the galaxy’s core. Into a spinning black hole. But before their final evolution, a gift. A bequest from the Ieldra to their chosen successors. Not the Fravashi, it’s said. Not the Darghinni. Nor the Scutari, nor the Farahim, nor the Friends of Man. It’s said that the Ieldra carked their secrets into human beings only; long ago they encoded the Elder Eddas into the human genome. Wisdom, madness, infinite knowledge, racial memory – all of these and more. It’s thought that certain segments of human DNA code the Elder Eddas as pure memory. And so, inside all human beings, a way of becoming gods.’
While Danlo stared at the flame shadows dancing atop the floor, he smiled with curiosity and amusement. Finally, he asked, ‘And what is DNA?’
‘Ah, so much to learn, but you needn’t learn it just now. The main point is this: The Ringess showed the way to remember the Elder Eddas, and people hated him for that. Why? All is one, you say, and man shall be as gods? Creation and memory – God is memory? So, it’s so: there’s a way for anyone to remember the Elder Eddas, but here is the most ironic of ironies: many can hear the Eddas within themselves but few can understand.’
Danlo closed his eyes, listening. The only sound inside was the beating of his heart. ‘I do not hear anything,’ he said.
Old Father smiled, and as Danlo had, closed both his eyes.
Drisana was savouring her fourth glass of wine, and she finally spoke to Danlo in his language, ‘Kareeska, Danlo, grace beyond grace. It’s been a long time since I spoke Alaloi; please forgive me if I make mistakes.’ After a long sip of wine, she continued, ‘There are techniques of remembering, of listening. You chose an exciting time to enter the Order. Everyone is trying to learn the remembrancing art, certainly they are. If you’re accepted into Borja, perhaps you’ll learn it, too.’
Her voice was slurry with wine and bitterness. Once, at the beginning of the Great Schism, because she had believed the Order was corrupt and doomed, she had renounced her position as master imprimatur. And now, twelve years later, there was a renewal of spirit and vision in the towers of the Academy, and the Order was more vital than it had been in a thousand years. If given the chance, she would have rejoined the Order, but for those who abjure their vows, there is never a second chance.
Danlo, who was quite unafraid to touch old people, took Drisana’s hand and held it as he would his grandmother’s. He liked the acceptance he saw in her sad, lovely eyes, though he wondered why she would be so bitter. ‘The gods have imprinted human beings with the Elder Eddas, yes?’
‘No, certainly not!’ Drisana did not explain that it was she, herself, who had once imprinted Mallory Ringess, and therefore she was partly responsible for creating the Ringess and all the chaos of the war. ‘The memory of the Eddas lies deeper than the brain. When we speak of an imprinting, we speak merely of changing the metabolic pathways and the neural network. It’s all a matter of redefining the synapses of the brain.’
‘Fixing the synapses like strands of silk in glacier ice?’
Drisana stared at him as she took a sip of wine. Then she started laughing, and the bitterness suddenly left her. ‘Dear Danlo, you don’t understand anything about what we’re going to do here today, do you?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I always thought the brain was just a store of pink fat.’
Drisana laughed nicely and pulled at his hand. ‘Come,’ she said. ‘Danlo, and my Honoured Fravashi – you’ll have to help me because I’ve drunk too much wine.’
She led them through a wooden door into the imprinting room, or her chamber of impressions, as she liked to call it. In the centre of the imprinting room, atop the Fravashi carpet that Old Father had once given her, was a padded chair covered with green velvet. Aside from a couple of hologram stands behind the chair, it was the only article of furniture in the room. On each of the six walls, from ceiling to floor, were polished shelves holding up what looked like gleaming, metal skulls. There were six hundred and twenty-two of these skulls, arrayed neatly in their rows. ‘These are the heaumes,’ Drisana explained as she sat Danlo down on this chair. ‘You’ve certainly seen a heaume before?’
Danlo sat stiffly in the chair, craning his neck, looking at the heaumes. Ahira, Ahira, he silently called, why would anyone collect metal skulls?
Drisana wobbled on her feet as she ran her hands through his hair, roughly sizing his head. He had a large head for a boy fourteen years old, large and broad, and she turned to select a heaume from the third row from the top. ‘First, we have to make a model of your brain,’ she said.
‘A model?’
‘A picture. Like a painting.’
While Old Father sat down on the rug in the Fravashi fashion to watch, she fit the heaume over Danlo’s head. Danlo held his breath, then slowly let it out. The heaume was cold, even through his thick hair. The heaume was hard and cold, and it tightly squeezed his skull. Something important was about to happen, he thought, though he couldn’t quite tell what. Through the dark hallways of Drisana’s shop, he had kept his sense of direction. He was sure he was facing east. One must piss to the south, sleep with one’s head to the north, but all important ceremonies must occur facing east. How could Drisana know this?
‘A painting of your brain,’ Drisana slurred out. Her breath was heavy over his face and smelled of wine. ‘We’ll paint it with light.’
Directly behind Danlo’s chair, one of the hologram stands suddenly lit up with a model of his brain. There, seemingly floating above the stand, were the glowing folds of his cerebral cortex, the cerebellum and medulla and the vivid chasm splitting the brain into halves. Danlo felt nothing, but he sensed a gleam of light from his side and turned to look.
‘Stop!’ Drisana cried out.
It was too late. Danlo had been blindly obedient only once in his life, during his passage into manhood, on pain of death. How could he help looking at a painting of his brain? He looked, and in the back of the model of his brain, the visual