For a long time Danlo had been staring at Old Father. His eyes were dry and burning so he rubbed them. But he pressed too hard, temporarily deforming his corneas, and nothing in the room seemed to hold its colour or shape. The purple alien plants ran with streaks of silver and blue light and wavered like a mirage, like the mithral-landia of a snow-blind traveller.
After Danlo’s vision had cleared, he said, ‘The Song of Life tells about the seeing. On the second morning of the world, when Ahira opened his eyes and saw … the holy mountain named Kweitkel, and the ocean’s deep waters, unchanging and eternal, the truth of the world.’
‘Ah ha,’ Old Father said, ‘I’ve given you the gift of my favourite flute, and now I shall give you another, a simple word: epistane. This is the dependence or need to know a thing as absolutely true.’
‘But, sir, the truth is the truth, yes?’
‘And still I must give you another word, from my lips, into your mind: epistnor.’
‘And what is “epistnor”?’
‘Epistnor is the impossibility of knowing absolute truth.’
‘If that is true,’ Danlo said with a smile, ‘how are we to know which actions are seemly, and which are not?’
‘Ah, ah, a very well-made question!’ Old Father sat there humming a beguiling little melody, and for a while, his eyes were half-closed.
‘And what is the answer to the question?’ Danlo asked.
‘Oh, ho, I wish I knew. We Fravashi, sad to say, are much better at asking questions than answering them. However. However, might it be that one person’s truth is another’s insanity?’
Danlo thought about this as he listened to Old Father whistle and hum. Something about the music unsettled him and touched him inside, almost as if the sound waves were striking directly at his heart and causing it to beat more quickly. He rubbed his throat, swallowed and said, ‘On the beach, when I raised my spear to slay you, the man with the black skin looked at me as if I were insane.’
‘Ah, that was impolite of him. But Luister – that’s his name – Luister is a gentle man, the gentlest of men. He’s devoted to ahimsa, and can’t bear to see violence made.’
‘He calls me “Danlo the Wild”.’
‘Well, I think you’re very wild, still.’
‘Because I hunt animals for food? How does Luister think he could survive outside this Unreal City without hunting?’
‘And how do you think you will survive in the City without learning civilized ways?’
‘But if I learn the ways of insane men … then won’t I become insane, too?’
‘Ah, ha, but the human beings of Neverness have their own truth, Danlo, as you will see. And hear.’
Old Father’s music intensified, then, and Danlo could feel its theme in his belly. It was a music of startling new harmonies, a music pregnant with longing and uncertainty. The Fravashi Fathers are masters of using music to manipulate the emotions of body and mind. Ten million years ago, the ur-Fravashi, in their frightened, scattered herds, had evolved sound as a defensive weapon against predators; over the millennia, these primitive sounds had become elaborated into a powerful music. The frontal lobes of any Fravashi Father’s brain are wholly given over to the production and interpretation of sound, particularly the sounds of words and music. They use music as a tool to humiliate their rivals, or to soothe sick babies, or woo the unwed females of their clans. In truth, the Fravashi have come to view reality in musical terms, or rather, to ‘hear’ the music reverberating in all things. Each mind, for them, has a certain rhythm and tonal quality, idea-themes that build, embellish, and repeat themselves, like the melody of a sonata; in each mind, too, there are deeper harmonies and dissonances, and it is their joy to sing to the souls of any who would listen. Danlo, of course, understood nothing of evolution. Some part of him, however – the deep, listening part – knew that Old Father’s music was making him sick inside. He clasped his hands over his navel, suddenly nauseous. The nausea wormed its way into his mind, and he began to worry that his brief, narrow understanding of the Unreal City was somehow distorted or false. With his fist, he kneaded his belly and said, ‘Ever since I awoke in my bed, I have wondered … many things. Most of all, I have wondered why no one prays for the spirits of the dead animals.’
‘No one prays, that is so.’
‘Because they do not know any better!’
‘Praying for the animals is your truth, Danlo.’
‘Do you imply that the truth of the Prayer for the Dead is not wholly true?’
‘Aha, the truth – you’re almost ready for it,’ Old Father said as he began to sing. ‘Different peoples, different truths.’
‘But what truth could an insane people possibly possess … that they would not know the names of the animals or pray for them on their journey to the other side of day?’
Even though Danlo’s voice trembled and he had to swallow back hot stomach juices to keep from retching, even though a part of his interior world was crumbling like malku beneath a heavy boot, he was prepared to learn something fantastic, some horrible new truth or way of thinking. What this new truth might be, however, was impossible to imagine.
‘Danlo,’ Old Father said, ‘the meat you’ve eaten in my house is not the meat of animals.’
‘What!’
‘In nutrient baths, cells are programmed to grow, to replicate, to –’
‘What!’
‘Ahhh, this is difficult to explain.’
Both of Old Father’s eyes were now open, twin pools of golden fire burning with fulfilment and glee. He delighted in causing Danlo psychic anguish. He was a Fravashi, and not for nothing are the Fravashi known as the ‘holy sadists’. Truth from pain – this is a common Fravashi saying. Old Father loved nothing better than to inflict the angslan, the holy pain, the pain that comes from higher understanding.
‘The meats of the Civilized Worlds are cultured almost like crystals, grown layer upon layer in a salt water bath.’
‘I do not understand.’
‘Imagine: independent, floating tissues, huge pink sheets of meat growing, growing. Ah ho, the meats are really more like plants than animal. So it’s so: no bone, no nerves, no connection to the brain of a living animal. Just meat. No animal has to die to provide this meat.’
The idea of eating meat that wasn’t really meat made Danlo sick. He rubbed his aching neck; he coughed and swallowed back his vomit. How could he pray for the spirits of the dead animals, he wondered, when no animals had died to provide his meat? Had this meat ever possessed true spirit, true life? He grabbed his stomach and moaned. Perhaps his thinking truly was bound by old ideas; perhaps, as Old Father might say, he was glavering and was too blinded by his familiar thoughtways to see