memories, psychic armouring, and little lies that protect the ‘I’ from the outside world. Having gone this far, she may lose her sense of reality altogether. This is the dangerous moment. This is the time of heart flutters and flailing, of being lost in a dark room and unable to find the light key on the wall. It is a time for floating in fear, or worse, of falling alone into the cold inner ocean that pulls and chills and drowns. The student will feel herself dying; she will have a horrifying sense that every essential part of her is melting away into neverness. If she is weak, her terror of death will paralyze her or even plunge her into madness. But if she has courage, she will see that she is not really alone. Always, the Old Father remains close by her side. His smiles and his golden eyes remind her that he once made the same journey as she. His whole being is a mirror reflecting a single truth: that something great and beautiful will survive even as the student loses herself. The Old Father will help the student find this greater part of herself. This is his glory. This is his delight. He will help the student completely break through the worldview that traps her. And then, as the student cleans away the last slimy bits of eggshell, selfness, and certainty that cling to her, a vastly greater world opens before her. This world is brilliant with light and seems infinitely more real than she ever could have imagined. She, herself, is freer, vaster, profoundly alive. Intense feelings of joy and love overwhelm her. This is the eternal moment, the awakening that should set the student free on the path toward complete liberation. Only, it is here that most students fall into a subtle and deadly trap. Their joy of freedom becomes gratitude toward the Old Father for freeing them; their love of the real becomes attached to the one who made possible this experience of reality. Indeed, they cannot imagine ever making this journey again, by themselves, for themselves, and so their natural love of the Old Father becomes a needy and sickly thing. They begin to revere their Old Father, not as a mere guide or teacher, but as a mediator between themselves and the new world they have seen. And then it is but one small step to worshipping the Old Father as an incarnation of the infinite. Only through the Old Father (or through the roshi or priest or buddha) can the real reality be known. His every word is a sweet fruit bursting with truth; his system of teaching becomes the only way that this truth might be known. And so the student who has flown so high and so far comes at last to a new boundary, but nothing so well-defined and fragile as her original worldview. She looks into her Old Father’s eyes and beholds herself as vastened and holy, but sadly, this new sense of herself is something that he has created and grafted onto her. Her reality is now completely Fravashi. If she is truly aware – and truly valorous – she will try once more to break her way free. But the Fravashi worldview is sublime; escaping it is like a bird trying to break through the sky. Most students will fail to do so; in truth, most will never attempt such an act of ingratitude and rebellion. But even in failure, it is still their pride to soar above the swarms of humanity earthbound and closed in by their familiar and self-made horizons.
To be fair to the Fravashi, the Old Fathers have long recognized the dangers of guruism. They have done everything possible to discourage their students’ slavish attachments to them. But the truth is, they like being gurus. And despite every warning, their students take solace in abandoning themselves and trusting their fates to a white-furred alien. In Old Father’s house this was true of Salim and Michael and Ei Eleni, and of most of the others. It was especially true of Luister Ottah. As Old Father had said, he was a gentle man, a kind man, a living jewel among men – but he was not a man to return Old Father’s sarcasm and jokes in the spirit with which they were offered. Luister composed koans and irreverent poems in Moksha out of duty only, because he was challenged to keep up a certain level of repartee. But he was really much happier simply drinking tea at Old Father’s feet, while listening attentively and then parroting Old Father’s views or words of wisdom. And there was no arguing with Luister once these views had been pronounced. Although Danlo liked Luister as much as anyone he’d met since coming to Neverness, during the short days of deep winter, he began to find him tiresome. Luister instructed Danlo in chess and etiquette and Moksha, as well as skating, and so Danlo found himself in his company more than he would have wished. Luister was somewhat of a polymath, and he enjoyed holding forth on every subject from Lavic architecture to causal decoupling to the journeys of the Tycho – or fenestration, or free will, or the dangers of ohrworms and information viruses. Unfortunately, however, none of his opinions or insights was his own. He had the irritating habit of prefacing his remarks with the phrase: ‘Old Father says that …’ He seemed to have memorized every word that Old Father ever spoke. ‘Old Father says that buildings of organic stone tend toward the grandiloquent and have no place in human cities,’ he told Danlo one dark and snowy morning. And then later that night, ‘Old Father says that the greatest trick of religions is in saving people from infinite regresses. Consider the question: “What caused the universe?” The natural answer is that God caused the universe. Aha, but then one is tempted to ask: “But what caused God?” Ho, ho. And so on – do you see? Religions break the regress. They tell us this: God caused the universe, and God causes God, and this is all that anyone needs to know.’
The closer Danlo penetrated to the heart of the Fravashi system, ironically, the more aware he became that in the city of Neverness, there were many other systems, many other ways. He began to wonder about these ways. Although he never forgot his hope of becoming a pilot, of journeying to Camilla Luz and Nonablinka and inward to the universe’s centre, he still had a half year to wait before he might be admitted to the Order. Of course, he might not be admitted to the Order, and then he would have to remain as Old Father’s student. (Or return to one of the Alaloi tribes west of Kweitkel.) Because he couldn’t imagine becoming like Luister Ottah – and because he was as hungry for experience as a wolf pup sniffing up nosefuls of new snow – he decided to spend the next two hundred days exploring certain worldviews which he found either fascinating or utterly strange. No rule or pronouncement of Old Father’s forbade such exploration. In fact, Old Father often encouraged the donning of different realities, but only as a formal game, played out beneath the sound of chimes and chanting that echoed through his house. Danlo suspected that his method of knowing different ways would not meet the approval of the others, and so, during his daily outings, he began to visit certain parts of the City in secret.
During an unexpected lull in deep winter’s cold, when air was clear and the sky softened to a warm falu blue, Danlo began to frequent the Street of Smugglers where it narrows below the Fravashi District. There, he befriended men and women of the autist sect, and he sat with them on lice-ridden furs and spent whole days and nights lost in deep, lucid, communal dreams, which the autist dream guides claim are the real reality, much more real than the material world of snow or rocks or the ragged clothes that the autists wrap around their emaciated bodies. Likewise he joined a group of mushroom eaters who called themselves the Children of God. Deep in the Farsider’s Quarter, in secret ceremonies held inside one of the abandoned Cybernetic churches, he bowed before a golden urn heaped high with magic mushrooms and solemnly prayed before opening his mouth and taking the ‘Flesh of God’ inside himself. He prayed, as well, to the shimmering emerald aliens who came to him during the most vivid of his mushroom visions. In truth, he came to worship these delightful and beguiling entities as messengers of the One God, that is, until he tired of worship altogether and sought out more sober (and sobering) experiences.
Sometime in midwinter spring, after Danlo had passed his fifteenth birthday with no more ceremony than a few prayers to his dead mother, he made contact with a group of men and women who called themselves the Order of True Scientists. Of course, there are many who consider themselves as scientists, or rather, as the intellectual heirs of the Galileo and the Newton and others who began the great journey through the universe of number and reason. There are holists and logicians, complementarianists and mechanics and grammarians. There are practitioners of the Old Science and the faithful of the New Science of God. There are many, many sciences, almost as many as the hundreds of different sects of the Cybernetic Universal Church. As Danlo learned, the second greatest event in the intellectual history of the human race was the clading off of science into different schools, each with its own epistemology and set of beliefs, each one practising its own methodology, each one with its own notion as to what science really is. There were those sciences which clove to metaphysical and epistemological realism and those which treated science as a grand, but ultimately meaningless game. Some sciences continued to rely on physical experiments to validate their