David Zindell - Requiem of Homo Sapiens 01 - The Broken God

The Broken God

Gene Wolfe declared Zindell as 'one of the finest talents to

appear since Kim Stanley Robinson and William Gibson – perhaps

the finest'. His first novel, Neverness was published to great

acclaim. A reviewer in the New Scientist wrote of it in 1992:

'David Zindell writes of interstellar mathematics in poetic

prose that is a joy to read'.

The Broken God, Book One of A Requiem for Homo Sapiens, is a

sequel to Neverness. It has been hailed as Dune for the 1990s

and was equally well-received: 'SF as it ought to be:

challenging, imaginative, thought-provoking and well-written.

Zindell has placed himself at the forefront of literary SF'.

Times Literary Supplement

The Wild, Book Two of A Requiem for Homo Sapiens was also

published to great acclaim: 'A disturbing vision of the

impending collapse of a transgalactic society ... the ideas are

hard SF with philosophical undertones, and the story is

compelling'. New Scientist

Zindell has completed A Requiem for Homo Sapiens with War in

Heaven, available now, in hardback. He lives in Boulder,

Colorado.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Neverness

A Requiem for Homo Sapiens

The Wild

War in Heaven

Voyager

DAVID ZINDELL

The Broken God

BOOK ONE

of A Requiem of Homo Sapiens

Voyager

An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

77-85 Fulham Palace Road,

Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

The Voyager World Wide Web site address

is http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/voyager

This paperback edition 1998

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Previously published in paperback by

HarperCollins Science Fiction & Fantasy 1993

First published in Great Britain by 1993

The Author asserts the moral right to

be identified as the author of this work

ISBN 0 586 21189 6 Set in Meridien

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Caledonian International

Book Manufacturing Ltd, Glasgow

reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,

in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,

photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior

permission of the publishers.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not,

by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or

otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in

any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is

published and without a similar condition including this

condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

PART ONE

Danlo the Wild

CHAPTER ONE

Shaida

All that is not halla, is shaida.

For a man to kill what he cannot eat, that is shaida;

For a man to kill an imakla animal that is shaida, too.

It is shaida for a man to die too soon;

It is shaida for a man to die too late.

Shaida is the way of the man who kills other men;

Shaida is the cry of the world when it has lost its soul.

– from the Devaki Song of Life

This is the story of my son, Danlo wi Soli Ringess. I came

to know him very well, though it was his fate (and my own) that

he grew up wild, a lost manchild living apart from his true

people. Until he came to Neverness, he knew almost nothing of

his heritage or the civilized ways of the City of Light; in

truth, he did not really know he was a human being. He thought

of himself as an Alaloi, as one of that carked race of men and

women who live on the icy islands west of Neverness. His

adoptive brothers and sisters bore the signature of chromosomes

altered long ago; they each had strong, primal faces of jutting

browridges and deep-set eyes; their bodies were hairy and

powerful, covered with the skins of once-living animals; they

were more robust and vital, and in many ways much wiser, than

modern human beings. For a time, their world and Danlo's were

the same. It was a world of early morning hunts through frozen

forests, a world of pristine ice and wind and sea birds

flocking in white waves across the sky. A world of variety and

abundance. Above all, it was a world

7

of halla, which is the Alaloi name for the harmony and beauty

of life. It was Danlo's tragedy to have to learn of halla's

fragile nature at an early age. Had he not done so, however, he

might never have made the journey home to the city of his

origins, and to his father. Had he not made the journey all men

and women must make, his small, cold world and the universe

which contains it might have known a very different fate.

Danlo came to manhood among Alaloi's Devaki tribe, who lived

on the mountainous island of Kweitkel. It had been the Devaki's

home for untold generations, and no one remembered that their

ancestors had fled the civilized ruins of Old Earth thousands

of years before. No one remembered the long journey across the

cold, shimmering lens of the galaxy or that the lights in the

sky were stars. No one knew that civilized human beings called

their planet 'Icefall'. None of the Devaki or the other tribes

remembered these things because their ancestors had wanted to

forget the shaida of a universe gone mad with sickness and war.

They wanted only to live as natural human beings in harmony

with life. And so they had carked their flesh and imprinted

their minds with the lore and ways of Old Earth's most ancient

peoples, and after they were done, they had destroyed their

great, silvery deepship. And now, many thousands of years

later, the Devaki women gathered baldo nuts to roast in wood

fires, and the men hunted mammoths or shagshay or even Totunye,

the great white bear. Sometimes, when the sea ice froze hard

and thick, Totunye came to land and hunted them. Like all

living things, the Devaki knew cold and pain, birth and joy and

death. Death – was it not a Devaki saying, as old as the cave

in which they lived, that death is the left hand of life? They

knew well and intimately almost everything about death: the cry

of Nunki, the seal, when the spear pierces his heart; the

wailing of an old woman's death song; the dread silence of the

child who dies in the night. They knew the natural death that

makes

8

room for more life, but about the evil that comes from nowhere

and kills even the strongest of the men, about the true nature

of shaida, they knew nothing.

'When Danlo was nearly fourteen years old, a terrible illness

called the 'slow evil' fell upon the Devaki. One day, during

deep winter, the men and women sickened all at once with a

mysterious, frothing fever. It was a fever that stole away

sense and lucidity, leaving its hosts paralysed and leaking

fluids from the ears. Of all the tribe, only Danlo and one

strange man named Three-Fingered Soli remained untouched. It

fell to them to hunt and prepare the food, to melt snow for

drinking water, to keep the oilstones burning so there might be

a little light to warm the sick inside their snow huts. Danlo

and Three-Fingered Soli loved their near-brothers and sisters

as they loved life, and for six days they worked like madmen to

perform the hundreds of little daily devotions necessary to

keep their tribe from going over too soon. But since there were

eighty-eight Devaki and only two of them, it was an impossible

task. Slowly – for the Alaloi are a tenacious, stubborn people

– slowly Danlo's tribe began to die. His near-sister, Cilehe,

was one of the first to make the journey to the other side of

day. And then his near-fathers Wemilo and Choclo died, and Old

Liluye and many others. Soon the cave was full of rotting

bodies waiting to be buried. Danlo tried to ignore them, even

though, for the Devaki, the care of the dead is nearly as

important as that of the living. He lavished his energies on

his found-father, Haidar, and on Chandra, the only woman he had

ever known as a mother. He made blood-tea and dribbled the

thick, lukewarm liquid down their throats; he rubbed hot seal

oil on their foreheads; he prayed for their spirits; he did

everything he could to keep them from going over. But to no

avail. At last, the slow evil stole them from life. Danlo

prayed and wept, and he left their hut intending to go outside

the cave to find some fireflowers to put on their grave. But he

was so exhausted that he tripped into a

9

snowdrift and fell at once into a deep, dreamless sleep. Later

that day, Three-Fingered Soli found him there, covered with

layers of fresh new snow.

'Danlo,' Soli said as he brushed the sparkling soreesh from

the boy's furs, 'wo lania-ti? Are you all right?'

'I was just sleeping, sir,' Danlo said. 'Mi talu los

wamorashu. I was so tired.' He rubbed his eyes with his

powdered mittens. Even sitting in the snow, he was tall for a

boy thirteen years old; he was taller, leaner and more angular

than any of his near-brothers. In truth, he did not look like

an Alaloi at all. He had the long nose and bold face bones of

his father. His eyes were his mother's eyes, dark blue like

liquefied jewels, and even though he was very tired, they were

full of light. In almost any city of the Civilized Worlds, his

fellow human beings would have found him fiercely handsome. But

he had never seen a true human being, and he thought of himself

as being different from his near-brothers. Not exactly ugly,

but rather strange and delicately deformed, as if he were a

thallow born into a nest of sparrowhawks.

'You should not sleep in the snow,' Soli said as he brushed

back his grey and black hair. Like most Alaloi men, he was

large and muscular. Today, he was very tired. His shoulders

were slumped, and there was a faraway, broody look about his

eyes. He seemed very worried. 'Only dogs sleep in the snow.'

'But, sir, I was only going to pick fireflowers,' Danlo

said. 'I do not know what happened.'

'You might have slept too long and never awakened.'

Soli pulled him to his feet. They were standing near the

mouth of the cave. Thirty feet away, the sled dogs of twelve

families were tied to their stakes in the snow; they were

pulling at their leashes, whining, begging for their evening

meal. Danlo couldn't remember the last time he had fed them. He

couldn't remember the last time he had fed himself. It was late

afternoon and the sun was low in the sky. The air was blue

cold, as clear as silka, the new ice. He

10

looked out over the valley below the cave. The forest was

already lost in shadows of dark green and grey – tomorrow, he

thought, he might hunt shagshay, but tonight the dogs would go

hungry again.

'Haidar and Chandra have gone over,' Danlo said. He looked at

Soli.

'Yes, they were the last.'

'Haidar and Chandra,' Danlo repeated, and he wiped a clump of

melting snow away from his forehead. And then he said a prayer

for his found-parents' spirits: 'Haidar eth Chandra, mi

alasharia la shantih Devaki.'

Soli rubbed his nose with his three-fingered hand and said,

'Shantih, shantih.'

'And Sanya,' Danlo said, 'and Mahira, they have gone over,

too.'

'Shantih,' Soli said.

'And Irisha, Yukio and Jemmu – all alasharu.'

'Shantih.'

'And Rafael, Choclo and Anevay. And Mentina, they have all

made the great journey.'

'Yes,' Soli said, 'Shantih.'

'They are all dead.'

'Yes.'

'Ten days ago, all alive and fat with life, even Old Anala,

and now– '

'Do not speak of it. Words are only words – there is no

purpose.'

Danlo took off his mittens and pressed his eyes; the hot

water there burned his cold thumbs. 'I am so tired,' he said.

And then, The blessed Devaki – the whole tribe, sir. How can

this be?'

Soli turned his face to the north, saying nothing.

Danlo followed his gaze outward, upward to where the pointed

summit of Kweitkel rose above them. It was a great shining

mountain marbled in granite and ice, a god watching over them.

Four thousand years ago the first Devaki had named the island

after the mountain forming

11

its centre. Generation upon generation of Danlo's ancestors

were buried here. He closed his eyes as the wind came up and

whipped his hair wildly about his head. There was ice in the

wind, the smell of pine needles, salt, and death. 'Kweitkel,

shantih,' he whispered. Soon he must bury his people in the

graveyard above the cave, and after that, the Devaki would be

buried on Kweitkel no longer.

'It was bad luck,' Soli said at last, rubbing the thick

brows of his forehead. 'Yes, bad luck.'

'I think it was shaida,' Danlo said. 'It is shaida for our

people to die too soon, yes?'

'No, it was just bad luck.'

Danlo held his hand over his forehead to keep his hair from

lashing into his eyes. He had thick black hair shot with

strands of red. 'In all the stories Haidar told over the

oilstones, in all your stories, too, I have never heard of a

whole tribe going over all at once. I never thought it was

possible. I... never thought. Where has this shaida come from?

What is wrong with the world that everyone could die like this?

"Shaida is the cry of the world when it has lost its soul" –

why is the world crying of shaida, sir?'

Soli put his arm around him, and touched his head. Danlo

wept freely, then, wept for a long time into Soli's stiff,

frozen furs until a cold thought sobered him. He was only

thirteen years old, but among the Devaki, thirteen is almost

old enough to be a man. He looked at Soli, whose icy blue eyes

were also full of tears. 'Why us, Soli? Why didn't the slow

evil carry us over, too?'

Soli looked down at the ground. 'It was luck,' he said. 'Just

bad luck.'

Danlo heard the pity and pain in Soli's voice, and it

carried him close to despair. Soli, too, was ready for death.

Anyone, even a child could see that. There was madness and

death in his eyes and all over his haggard, grey face. The wind

blowing through the forest and over the icy boulders all around

them was very cold, almost dead cold, and Danlo felt like dying

himself. But he couldn't let himself

12

die because he loved life too much. Wasn't it shaida to die

too soon? Hadn't he seen as much of shaida as he could bear?

He blew on his chilled, purple fingers and put his mittens

back on. Yes, he must live because it was not time for him to

go over yet, he was still young and full of life, still just a

boy who suddenly knew that he had to find an answer to shaida.

He looked into the cave, at the great, black gash in the side

of the hill where Jonath and his other near-brothers lay

entombed. 'It is strange that the slow evil did not take me,

yes? Perhaps the slow evil is afraid of wildness. I have

always been a little wild, I think. Haidar used to say I was

wild, with all my talk of driving a sled east into the

sunrise. He used to say I listened to you too much. When I was

a boy– '

'Shhh, you talk too much.'

'But I have to ask you this, sir; I must know a thing.'

'What is that?'

'When I was a boy, I wanted to find the bed of Sawel from

where he arises each morning to light the world. Pure wildness,

as Haidar always warned. Tell me, sir, you must know – was I

born with this wild face? My face is so different than the

faces of my brothers. And they were so much stronger and

hardier in their bodies; they never seemed to feel the cold.

Why did they go over and not I?'

Soli looked at him and said, 'It was fate. Just blind fate.'

Danlo was disturbed by the way Soli spoke of fate. There was

galia, he knew, the World-soul, and one could certainly speak

of the wilu-galia, the intention of the World-soul, but how

could the World-soul be blind? No, he thought, only people or

animals (or God, himself) could be blind. As Haidar had taught

him, he shut his eyes again and breathed frigid air to clear

his inner sight. He tried to askeerawa wilu-galia, to see the

intention of the World-soul, but he could not. There was only

darkness in front of him, as deep and black as a cave without

light. He opened his eyes; the cold needles of wind made him

blink. Could it

13

be that Haidar had told him and the other children false

stories about the animals, about the birth and life of the

World? Could it be that everything he knew was wrong? Perhaps

only full men were able to see that the World-sours intention

was shaida; perhaps this was what Soli meant by blind fate.

'It is cold,' Soli said, stamping his feet. 'It is cold and

I am tired.'

He turned to step toward the cave and Danlo followed him. He,

too, was tired, so tired that his tendons ached up and down his

limbs and he felt sick in his belly, as if he had eaten bad

meat. For thirteen years of his life, ever since he could

remember, entering the cave from the outside world had always

been a moment full of warmth, certitude, and quiet joy. But now

nothing would ever be the same again, and even the familiar

stones of the entranceway – the circular, holy stones of white

granite that his ancestors had set there – were no comfort to

him. The cave itself was just as it had been for a million

years: a vast lava tube opening into the side of the mountain;

it was a natural cathedral of gleaming obsidian, flowing rock

pendants hanging from ceiling to floor, and deep silences. Now,

in the cave of his ancestors, there was too much silence and

too much light. While Danlo had slept in the snow, Soli had

gathered faggots of bonewood and placed them at fifty-foot

intervals around the cave walls. He had set them afire. The

whole of the cave was awash with light, flickering orange and

ruby lights falling off the animal paintings on the walls,

falling deep into the cave's dark womb where the cold floor

rose up to meet the ceiling. Danlo smelled woodsmoke, pungent

and sweet, and the firelight itself was so intense it seemed to

have a fragrance all its own. And then he smelled something

else layered beneath the smells of wood, fur, and snow.

Touching every rock and crack of the cave, all around him and

through him, was the stench of death. Though he breathed

through his mouth and sometimes held his breath, he could not

14

escape this terrible stench. The bodies of the dead were

everywhere. All across the snow-packed floor, his near-brothers

and sisters lay together in no particular order or pattern, a

heap of bent arms, hair, furs, rotting blood, thick Mack

beards, and dead eyes. They reminded Danlo of a shagshay herd

driven off a cliff. Leaving them inside their snowhuts until

burial would have been less work, but Soli had decided to move

them. The huts, the fifteen domes built of shaped snow blocks

in the belly of the cave, had kept the bodies too warm. The

smell of rotting flesh was driving the dogs mad and howling

with hunger, and so Soli had dragged the bodies one by one to

the cave's centre where they might freeze. Danlo worried that

Soli, tired as he was, might have left someone inside one of

the snowhuts by mistake. He told Soli of this worry, and Soli

quickly counted the bodies; there were eighty-eight of them,

the whole of the Devaki tribe. Danlo thought it was wrong to

count his kin one by one, to assign abstract numerals to human

beings who had so recently breathed air and walked over the

brilliant icefields of the world. He knew that each of them had

a proper name (except, of course, for the babies and very

little children who were known simply as 'son of Choclo' or

'Mentina's Second Daughter'), and he knew the names of each of

them, and he stood over the dead calling their names. 'Sanya,'

he said, 'Yukio, Choclo, Jemmu ... ' After a while his voice

grew thin and dry, and he began to whisper. Finally, he grew as

silent as Soli, who was standing beside him. He couldn't see

the faces of everyone to say their names. Some of the dead lay

face down, half buried in the snow. Others – usually they were

babies – were covered by the bodies of their mothers. Danlo

walked among the dead, looking for the man he called his

father. He found Haidar next to Chandra, the woman who had

adopted him when he was a newborn only a few moments old. They

were lying together, surrounded by Cilehe, Choclo and Old

Liluye, and others of their family. Haidar was a short man,

though

15

remarkably broad and muscular; he had always been remarkably

patient, canny and kind, and Danlo could not understand how

such a great man had so inexorably died. In death, with his

anima passed from his lips, Haidar seemed smaller and

diminished. Danlo knelt beside him, between him and Chandra.

Haidar's hand was stretched out, resting across Chandra's

forehead. Danlo took Haidar's hand in his own. It was a huge

hand, but there was no strength there, no tone or vitality. It

was as cold as meat, almost cold enough to begin hardening up

like ice. Chandra's face was cold, too. The hair around her

ears was crusted with layers of a pale red fluid. Some of this

fluid had dried days before; the freshest, the blood of her

death agony scarcely hours old, was now beginning to freeze.

Danlo combed the thick hair away from her forehead and looked

at her lovely brown eyes, which were open and nearly as hard as

stones. There was nothing in her eyes, neither joy nor light

nor pain. That was the remarkable thing about death, Danlo

thought, how quickly pain fled the body along with its anima.

He turned and touched Haidar's cold forehead, then, and he

closed his own eyes against the tears burning there. He wanted

to ask Haidar the simplest of questions: why, if death was so

peaceful and painless, did all living things prefer life to

death?

'Danlo, it is time to ice the sleds.' This came from Soli,

who was standing above him, speaking gently.

'No,' Danlo said, 'not yet.'

'Please help me with the sleds – we still have much to do.'

'No.' Danlo sat down on the cave floor, and he rested one

hand over Haidar's eyes, the other over Chandra's. 'Haidar,

alasharia la shantih,' he said. And then, 'Chandra, my Mother,

go over now in peace.'

'Quiet now,' Soli said, and he ruffled Danlo's hair. There

will be time for praying later.'

'No.'

'Danlo!'

16

'No!'

Soli shrugged his shoulders and stared into the depths of

the cave where the firelight reflected off the shiny black

walls. His voice sounded low and hollow as he said, The sleds

have to be iced. Join me outside when you are done, and we will

bury the Devaki.'

That evening, they began burying their tribe. They worked as

quickly as they could, stripping the bodies naked and rubbing

them with seal grease from toe to forehead. Danlo knew that it

would be cold on their spirits' journey to the other side of

day, and the grease would help against the cold. Loading the

bodies on the sleds and hauling them up to the burial grounds

above the cave was gruesome, exhausting work. Some of his

near-sisters had died many days earlier, and their flesh had

run dark and soft as rotten bloodfruit. It would have been less

horrible to remove the bodies all at once and place them in the

snowdrifts where they would freeze hard and fast. But there

were bears in the forest and packs of wolves; as it was, they

had to gather bunches of dead wood to keep the cave's entrance

fires burning, to keep the wild animals at bay. Of course the

sled dogs were familiar with fire, and they had little fear of

it. And so Danlo and Soli decided to spend a couple of days

hunting shagshay while most of their people awaited burial.

They had to flay the great, white, fleecy animals and cut them

up for food, or else the starving dogs might have gnawed off

their leashes and gone sniffing for carrion in the cave. After

that, they returned to work. One by one, they placed the bodies

on the icy, treeless burial field. They oriented them with

their heads to the north.

They heaped boulders atop each body; they built many stone

pyramids to keep the animals away and to remind them that each

living thing must return to the earth from which it is born.

Their labour took ten days. There were too few boulders close

to the cave, so they had to tie the dogs to their traces and

drive sleds down through the forest to an icy stream where they

found many smooth, rounded

17

rocks. And then back up to the burial ground again with sleds

full of rocks, back and forth for many trips. When they were

finished at last, they found some anda bushes and picked orange

and red fireflowers to place atop the graves. And then they

prayed for the dead, prayed until their voices fell hoarse and

their tears were frozen sheets over their cheeks; they prayed

far into the night until the cold off the sea ice chilled their

bones.

'Mi alasharia,' Danlo said one last time, and he turned to

Soli. 'It is done, yes?'

They began walking down through the dark graves, down

through the snowdrifts and the swaying yu trees. There were

stars in the sky, and everywhere snow covered the forest. After

a while they came to the stream where they had built a little

snowhut to live in while they did their work. Never again would

they sleep in the cave. 'What will we do now?' Danlo asked.

'Tomorrow, we will hunt again,' Soli said. 'We will hunt and

David Zindell - Requiem of Homo Sapiens 01 - The Broken God

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: