Neverness

by David Zindell

  “You question me?”

  “Excuse me, Timekeeper.” I was confused. Why else would Soli have released me from my oath, unless it was to shame me before all my friends and masters of the Academy?

  I confided my doubts to the Timekeeper who said, “Soli has lived three long lifetimes; don’t try to understand him.”

  “It seems there are many things I don’t understand.”

  “You’re modest today.”

  “Why did you send for me?”

  “Don’t question me, damn you! I’ve only so much patience, even for you.”

  I sat mutely in the chair looking out the window at Borja’s beautiful main spire, the one the Tycho had built a thousand years ago. The Timekeeper circled around to my side so that he could look upon my face as I stared straight ahead. It was the traditional position of politeness between master and novice that I had been taught when I first entered the Academy. The Timekeeper could search my face for truth or lies (or any other emotion) while preserving the sanctity of his own thoughts and feelings.

  “Everyone knows you intend to keep your oath,” he said.

  “Yes, Lord Horologe.”

  “It seems that Soli has tricked you.”

  “Yes, Lord Horologe.”

  “And your mother has failed you.”

  “Perhaps, Lord Horologe.”

  “Then you’ll still try to penetrate the Entity?”

  “I’ll leave tomorrow, Lord Horologe.”

  “Your ship is ready?”

  “Yes, Lord Horologe.”

  “To die among the stars is the most glorious death, is it not?”

  “Yes, Lord Horologe.”

  There was a blur from my side and the Timekeeper slapped my face. “Nonsense!” he roared. “I won’t listen to such nonsense from you!”

  He walked over to the window and rapped the glass pane with his knuckles. “Cities such as Neverness are glorious,” he said. “And the ocean at sunset, or deep winter’s firefalls—these things are glorious. Death is death; death is horror. There’s no glory when the time runs out and the ticking stops, do you hear me? There’s only blackness and the hell of everlasting nothingness. Don’t be too quick to die, do you hear me, Mallory?”

  “Yes, Lord Horologe.”

  “Good!” He crossed the room and opened a cabinet supporting a jar of pulsing, glowing red fluid. (I had always presumed that this evil–looking display was a clock of some sort, but I had never had the courage to ask him exactly what sort.) From the cabinet’s dark interior—the wood was a rare ebony and so dully black that it shed little light—he removed an object that appeared to be an old, leather–covered box. I soon saw that it was not; when he opened the “box,” that is to say, when he turned back one section of the stiffened pieces of the brown, cracked leather, there were many, many sheets of what seemed to be paper cleverly fastened to the middle section. He came closer to me; I smelled mildew and dust and centuries–old paper. As his fingers turned the yellow sheets he would occasionally let out a sigh or exclaim, “Here it is, in ancient Anglish, no less!” Or, “Ah, such music, no one does this now, it’s a dead art. Look at this, Mallory!” I looked at the sheets of paper covered line after line with squiggly black characters, all of which were alien to me. I knew that I was looking at one of those archaic artifacts in which words are represented symbolically (and redundantly) by physical ideoplasts. The ancients had called the ideoplasts “letters,” but I could not remember what the letter–covered artifact itself was called.

  “It’s a book!” the Timekeeper said. “A treasure—these are the greatest poems ever dreamed by the minds of human beings. Listen to this...,” and he translated from the dead language he called Franche as he recited a poem entitled “The Clock.” I did not like it very much; it was a poem full of dark, shuddering images and hopelessness and dread.

  “How is it that you can interpret these symbols into words?” I asked.

  “The art is called ‘reading,’ he said. “It’s an art I learned long ago.”

  I was confused for a moment because I had always used the word “read” in a different, broader context. One “reads” the weather patterns from the drifting clouds or “reads” a person’s habits and programs according to the mannerisms of his face. Then I remembered certain professionals practiced the art of reading, as did the citizens of many of the more backward worlds. I had even once seen books in a museum on Solsken. I supposed that one could read words as well as say them. But how inefficient it all seemed! I pitied the ancients who did not know how to encode information into ideoplasts and directly superscribe the various sense and cognitive centers of the brain. As Bardo would say, how barbaric!

  The Timekeeper made a fist and said, “I want you to learn the art of reading so you can read this book.”

  “Read the book?”

  “Yes,” he said as he snapped the cover shut and handed it to me. “You heard what I said.”

  “But why, Timekeeper, I don’t understand. To read with the eyes; it’s so...clumsy.”

  “You’ll learn to read, and you’ll learn the dead languages in this book.”

  “Why?”

  “So that you’ll hear these poems in your heart.”

  “Why?”

  “Question me again, damn you, and I’ll forbid you to journey for seven years! Then you’ll learn patience!”

  “Forgive me, Timekeeper.”

  “Read the book, and you may live,” he said. He reached out and patted the back of my neck. “Your life is all you have; guard it like a treasure.”

  The Timekeeper was the most complicated man I have ever known. He was a man whose selfness comprised a thousand jagged pieces of love and hate, whimsy and will; he was a man who battled himself. I stood there dumbly holding the dusty old book he had placed in my hands, and I looked into the black pools of his unfathomable eyes, and I saw hell. He paced the room like an old, white wolf who had once been caught in a wormrunner’s steel trap. He was wary of something, perhaps of giving me the book. As he paced, he rubbed the muscles of his right leg and limped, slightly. He seemed at once vicious and kind, lonely, and bitter at his loneliness. Here was a man, I thought, who had never known a single day’s (or night’s) peace, an old, old man who had been wounded in love and cut in wars and burnt by dreams turned to ashes in his hands. He possessed a tremendous vitality, and his zest and love of life had finally led him to that essential paradox of human existence. He loved the air he breathed and the beating of his heart so fully and well that he had let his natural hatred of death ruin his living of life. He brooded too much about death. It was said that he had once killed another human being with his own hands to save his own life. There were rumors that he used a nepenthe to ease the panic of lapsing time and to forget, for a little while, the pains of his past and the angry roar of pure existence. I looked at the lines of his scowling face, and I thought the rumors might be true.

  “I don’t understand,” I said, “how a book of poems could save my life.” I began to laugh.

  He stopped by the window, smiling at me without humor. His large, veined hands were clasped behind his back. “I’ll tell you something about the Entity that no one else knows. She has a fondness for many things human, and of all these things, she likes ancient poetry the best.”

  I sat quietly in my chair. I did not dare ask him why he thought the Solid State Entity liked human poetry.

  “If you learn these poems,” he said, “perhaps the Entity will be less likely to kill you like a fly.”

  I thanked him because I did not know what else to do. I would humor this somewhat deranged old man, I decided. I accepted the book. I even turned the pages, carefully, pretending to take an interest in the endless lines of black letters. Near the middle of the book, which contained thirteen hundred and forty–nine brittle pages, I saw a word that I recognized. The word reminded me that the Timekeeper was not a man to be laughed at or mocked. Once, when I was a young novice, the horologes had caught a democra
t with a laser burning written words into the white marble of the Tower. The Timekeeper—I remember his neck muscles writhing like spirali beneath his tight skin—had ordered the poor man thrown from the top of the Tower in atonement for the dual crimes of destroying beauty and inflicting his ideas on others. Barbaric. According to the canons of our Order, of course, slelling is supposedly the only crime punishable by death. (When slel−neckers are caught stealing another’s DNA they are beheaded, one of the few ancient customs both efficient and merciful.) We hold that banishment from our beautiful city is punishment enough for all other crimes, but for some reason, when the Timekeeper had seen the graffito, FREEDOM, etched into the archway above the Tower’s entrance, he had raged and had discovered an exceptionary clause in the ninety–first canon permitting him, so he claimed, to order that: “The punishment will fit the crime.” To this day, the graffito remains above the archway, a reminder not only that freedom is a dead concept, but that our lives are determined by sometimes capricious forces beyond our control.

  We talked for a while about the forces that control the universe, and we talked about the quest. When I expressed my excitement over the possibility of discovering the Elder Eddas, the Timekeeper, ever a man of contradictions, ran his fingers through his snowy hair as he grimaced and said, “I’m not so sure I want man saved. So, I’ve had enough of men—maybe it’s time the ticking stopped and the clock ran down. Let the Vild explode, every damn star from Vesper to Nwarth. Saved! Life is hell, eh? And there’s no salvation except death, no matter what the Friends of Man say.” I waited for his breath to run out as he ranted about the pervasive—and perverse—effect that the alien missionaries and alien religions had had upon the human race; I waited a long time.

  The sky had long since grown dark and blackened when he hammered the edge of his fist against his thigh and growled out, “Piss on the Ieldra! So they made themselves into gods and carked themselves into the core? They should leave us alone, eh? Man’s man, and gods are gods, each to his own purpose. But you’ve sworn your silly oath, so you go find them or their Eddas or anything else you think you can find.”

  Then he sighed and added, “But go carefully.”

  It is strange how often the smallest of events, the most trivial of decisions, can utterly change our lives. Having said goodbye to the Timekeeper, I reached the ice beneath the tower, and I stole another look at the book he had given me. Poems! A simple book of clumsy, ancient poems! There on the gliddery, which was dark and bare, I stood for a long time wondering if I shouldn’t throw the book into our dormitory room’s fireplace; I stood there brooding over the meaning of chance and fate. Then the icy, damp wind off the Sound began to blow, carrying into my bones the chill of death—whose death I did not then know. The wind drove hard snowflakes across the ice, stinging my face and scouring the windows of the Tower. The soft sound of ice brushing against glass was almost lost to the tinkling of the wind chimes hanging from the Tower’s window ledges. Shrugging my shoulders, I pulled the hood of my kamelaika over my head. The Timekeeper wanted me to read the book. Very well, I would read the book.

  My hands were numb as I slipped it into the pack I wore at the small of my back. I struck off down the gliddery in a hurry. Bardo and my other friends would be waiting dinner for me, and I was hungry and cold.

  * * * * *

  I spent most of my last night in the City making my various goodbyes. There was a dinner on my behalf in one of the smaller, more elegant restaurants of the Hofgarten. As was the custom of the scryers, Katharine refused to wish me well because, as she said, “my destiny was written in my history,” whatever that meant. Bardo, of course, alternately wept and cursed and blustered. He had, perversely, taken a liking to heated beer, and he drank copious amounts of the foamy yellow liquid to ease his fear of the uncertain future. He made toasts and speeches to our friends, reciting sentimental verses he had composed. He lapsed into song, until Chantal Astoreth, that wry, dainty lover of music, pointed out that his voice was slurry with drink and not up to its usual fine quality. Finally, he fell stupefied into his chair, took my hand in his, and announced, “This is the saddest day of my damned life.” And then he fell asleep.

  My mother said a similar thing, and she barely kept herself from crying. (Though the corner of her mouth twitched uncontrollably as it did when she was full of strong emotion.) She looked at me, with her crooked, dark eyebrows and her nervous eyes, and she said, “Soli severs your oath because your mother went begging to the Timekeeper. And how do you repay me? You cut my heart.”

  I did not tell her what the Timekeeper had said to me earlier that day in the Tower. She would not want to know how easily he had seen through her lies. She drew on her drab fur, which was shiny gray in patches where the fine shagshay hairs had worn off. She laughed in a low, disturbing manner as if she had a private joke with herself. I thought she would leave then without saying another word. But she turned to me, kissed my forehead, and whispered, “Come back. To your mother who bleeds for you, who loves you.”

  I left the restaurant before dawn (I didn’t sleep that night), and I skated down the deserted Way to the Hollow Fields. There, at the foot of Urkel, even in the coldest part of morning, its acres of runs and pads were busy with sleds and windjammers and other craft. Thunder shook the ice of the slidderies, and the air was full of red rocket tailings and sonic booms. High above, the feathery lines of contrails glowed pink against the early blue sky. It was very beautiful. Although I had come here often on duties at this time of day, it occurred to me that I had always taken such beauty for granted.

  Beneath the Fields, the Cavern of the Thousand Light Ships opened through a half–mile of melted rock. Although there were not nearly so many as a thousand ships—and have not been since the Tycho’s time—there were many more than the eye could take in at a glance. Near the middle of the eighth row of ships, I stood chatting with an olive–robed programmer beside my ship, the Immanent Carnation. While we debated a minor augmentation in the ship’s heuristics and paradox logics, someone called out my name. I looked down the walkway where the row of sleek, diamond hulls disappeared into the depths. I saw a long shape limned by the faint light of the luminescent lichen covering the Cavern’s walls. “Mallory,” the voice rang out, echoing from the dark, curving ceiling above us. “It’s time to say goodbye, isn’t it?” The walkway sang with the slap of heavy boots against reverberating steel, and then I saw him clearly, tall and severe in his black woollens. It was Soli.

  The programmer, Master Rafael, who was a shy, quiet−loving man with skin as smooth and black as basalt, greeted him and hastily made an excuse for leaving us alone together.

  “She’s beautiful,” Soli said, scrutinizing the lines of my ship, the narrow nose and the swept–forward wings. “That has to be admitted. Outside she’s lithe and balanced and beautiful. But it’s the inside that is the soul of a lightship, isn’t it? The Lord Programmer told me you’ve played with the Hilbert logics to an unusual degree. Why so, Pilot?”

  For a while we talked about the things that pilots talk about. We debated the paradoxes and discussed my choosing of Master Jafar’s ideoplasts. “He was a great notationist,” he said, “but his representation of Justerini’s omega function is redundant, isn’t it?”

  He suggested certain substitutions of symbols that seemed to make great sense, and I could not keep the note of surprise from my voice as I asked, “Why are you helping me, Lord Pilot?”

  “It’s my duty to help new pilots.”

  “I thought you wanted me to fail.”

  “How could you know what was wanted?” He rubbed his temples as he looked into the open pit of my ship. He seemed agitated and ill at ease.

  “But you tricked me into swearing the oath.”

  “Did I? Did I?”

  “And then you released me. Why?”

  He reached out and touched the hull of my ship, almost as one would stroke a woman. He did not answer my question. Instead he pressed his lips together
, and he asked me, “Then you really will journey into the Entity?”

  “Yes, Lord Pilot, I’ve said I would.”

  “You’ll do it freely, of your own will?”

  “Yes, Lord Pilot.”

  “Is that possible? You think you can bend yourself to your own will, that you’re free? Such arrogance!”

  I had no idea of what he was leading up to, so I recited the usual evasion, “The holists teach that the apparent dichotomy between free will and forced action is a false dichotomy.”

  He pulled at his chin and said, “Holists and their useless teachings! Who listens to holists? The question is this: Does your will impel you to your death, or will it be blamed on your Lord Pilot?”

  Of course I blamed him; I blamed him so fiercely I felt the bile souring my stomach and spreading hotly through my veins. I wanted badly to tell him how much I blamed him, but instead I stared at his dull reflection in the hull of my ship. I looked at his black–gloved hand resting against my ship. I said nothing.

  He removed his hand, rubbed his nose, and said, “When your time comes, when you’re close to it and have the choice between blaming me or not, please remember you tricked yourself into failure.”

  My muscles were hot and tight, and without really thinking about it, I punched the hull of my ship where his face wavered in the gleaming blackness. I nearly broke my knuckles. “I...won’t...fail.” I let the words out slowly, to keep from screaming in pain. I could hardly bear to look at him, with his long nose and his shiny black hair shot full of red.

  He bowed his head quickly and said, “All men fail in the end, don’t they? Well, then. Goodbye, Pilot, we wish you well.” He turned his back abruptly and walked away, into the depths of the Cavern.

  There is not much more I wish to tell of that unhappy morning. Master Rafael returned accompanied by the usual cadre of professionals, journeymen and novices that attend a pilot’s departure. There was an orange–robed cetic who pressed his thumbs against my temples and examined my face for illness. There were journeymen tinkers who lifted me into the darkened pit of my ship, and a horologe to seal the ship’s clock. And others. After what seemed like days (already the distortions were working on my time sense), I “faced my ship,” as the master pilots say; I interfaced with the deep, profound neurologics that are the soul of a lightship. My brain was now two brains, or rather, a single brain of blood and neurons which had been extended and melded into the brain of my ship. Reality, the lesser reality of sights and sounds and other sensual impressions, gave way to the vastly greater reality of the manifold. I plunged into the cold ocean of pure mathematics, into the realm of order and meaning underlying the chaos of everyday space, and the Cavern of the Thousand Light Ships was no more.