The Broken God by David Zindell Page A

them the way of ostrenenie, which is the art of making the familiar seem strange in order to reveal its essence, to reveal hidden relationships, and above all, truth. And Danlo, of course, understood none of this. Even if he had known the language of the Civilized Worlds, its cultural intricacies would have escaped him. He knew only that Old Father must be very kind and very wise. He knew it suddenly deep in his aching throat, knew it with a direct, intuitive knowledge that Old Father would call buddhi. As Danlo was to learn in the coming days, Old Father placed great value on buddhi.
    'Lo los sibaru,' Danlo said. Unintentionally, he groaned in pain. All the way up to his groin, his legs felt as cold as ice. 'I'm so hungry – do you have any food?' He sighed and slumped against the arms of the men still holding him. Speech was useless, he thought. 'Old Father' – whatever the incomprehensible syllables of that name really meant – couldn't understand the simplest of questions.
    Danlo was beginning to fall into the exhausted stupor of starvation when Old Father brought his stick up to his furry mouth and opened his lips. The stick was really a kind of long bamboo flute called a shakuhachi. He blew into the shakuhachi's ivory mouthpiece. And then a beautiful, haunting music spread out over the beach. It was the same music Danlo had followed earlier, a piercing, numinous music at once infinitely sad yet full of infinite possibilities. The music overwhelmed him. And then everything – the music, the alien's strange new words, the pain of his frozen feet – became unbearable. He fainted.
    After a while, he began to rise through the cold, snowy layers of consciousness where all world's sensa are as hazy and inchoate as an ice-fog. He was too ravished with hunger to gain full lucidity, but one thing he would always remember: astonishingly, with infinite gentleness, Old Father reached out to open his clenched fist and then pressed the shakuhachi's long, cool shaft into his hand. He gave it to him as a gift.
    Why? Danlo wondered. Why had he almost killed that which may not be killed?
    For an eternity he wondered about all the things that he knew, wondered about shaida and the sheer strangeness of the world. Then he clutched the shakuhachi in his hand, closed his eyes, and the cold dark tide of unknowing swept him under.

CHAPTER THREE
The Glavering
The Dark God feared that the Fravashi might one day see the universe as it really is, and so might come to challenge him. Therefore, he implanted in each one an organ called a glaver which would distort his perceptions and cause him to mistake illusion for reality.
'How effective is the glaver?' asks the Unfulfilled Father.
'Go look in a mirror,' answers the First Least Father, 'and you will see the effectiveness of the glaver.'
    – Fravashi parable
    In a way, Danlo was very lucky to encounter Old Father and his students before any others. The Unreal City – its proper name is Neverness – can be a cold, harsh, inhospitable city to the many strangers who come to her seeking their fates. Neverness is roughly divided into four quarters, and the Zoo, where Danlo came to land, is the most inhospitable of them all, at least for human beings. The Darghinni District and the Fayoli Flats, the Elidi Mews – in which of the Zoo's alien sanctuaries or strange-smelling dens could he have hoped for succour? While it is not true that the Scutari, for instance, murder men for their meat, neither are those wormlike, cannibalistic aliens famous for goodwill or aid to the wretched. Had Danlo wandered up from the Darghinni Sands into the Scutari District, he would have found a maze of cluster-cells. And in each cell, through translucent wax walls as high as a man, the many waiting eyes of a Scutari clutch staring at whatever passed by. Danlo would never have found his way out of the confusing mesh of streets; there he certainly would have died, of neglect or cold, or, if hunger further deranged his