Neverness

by David Zindell

  I was deep in dreamtime when I realized I did not understand the type of the decision tree branching all about me. I was close to my proof—I needed only to show that the Lavi set was embedded in an invariant space. But I could not show this, and I did not know why. It should have been a simple thing to do. When the tree divided and split into a million and then a billion different branches, I began to sweat. Dreamtime intensified into that terrifying, nameless state I thought of as “nightmaretime.” Suddenly I proved that the Lavi set could not be embedded in an invariant space. My heart was beating like a panicked child’s. With my panic came despair, and my proof array began to crash, to shatter like ice crystals ground beneath a leather boot. There would be no proof, I knew. There would be no mapping to a point–exit in real space. I would not fall out around any star, near or distant. I was not merely lost in a hideous decision tree, I had stumbled—or been propelled—into an infinite tree. Even in the worst of decision trees, there is a probability that a pilot will find the correct branch among the billion billion branchings. But in an infinite tree, there is no correct branch, no branch leading to an exit into the warm sunlight of realspace. The tree spreads outward, one branch growing into another, and into ten centillion others, on and on, dividing and redividing into infinity. From an infinite tree there is no escape. My neurons would gradually disassociate, synapse by synapse, leaving me to play with my toes as a child plays with the beads of an abacus. I would be insane, blinded by the number storm, frozen in forever dreamtime, forever drooling into infinity. Or, if I turned away from my ship–computer and let my mind go quiet, there would be nothing, nothing but an empty black coffin carrying me into the hell of the manifold.

  I knew then that I had lied to myself utterly. I was not ready to chance everything to experience a goddess; I was not ready to face death at all. I remembered I had chosen my fate freely. I could only blame myself and my foolish pride. My last thought, as a scream formed upon my lips and I began hearing voices inside me, was: Why is man born to self–deception and lies?

  5

  The Solid State Entity

  If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn’t.

  Lyall Watson, Holocaust Century Eschatologist

  Somewhere it is recorded that the first man, Gilgamesh, heard a voice inside him and thought it was the voice of God. I heard voices reverberating through my inner ear, and I thought my fear of the infinite tree had driven me insane.

  Why?

  It is a sign of insanity when a man hears voices born not of lips but of his own loneliness and longings. Unless, of course, it is the voice of his ship stimulating his aural nerves, suffusing sounds directly into his brain.

  Why is man?

  But a ship–computer has little free will; it cannot choose what words or what tone of voice to speak within a pilot. It is possible for it to receive signals from another ship–computer and to translate these signals into voices, but it is not programmed to generate its own signals.

  Why is man born?

  I knew my ship–computer could not be receiving signals from another lightship because the propagation of signals through the manifold was impossible. It was possible, I told myself, that some of my ship’s neurologics had weakened and died. In that case, my ship was insane, and as long as I remained interfaced with it, so was I.

  Why is man born to self–deception and lies?

  If I did not like the way my ship was echoing my deepest thoughts, it terrorized me when it began speaking voices, in a hodgepodge of the dead languages of Old Earth. Some of these languages I understood from my learning to read; others were as alien to me as the scent language of the Friends of Man is to human beings.

  Shalom, Instrumentum Vocale, la ilaha li ALLAH tat tvam asi, n’est–ce pas, kodomo–ga, wakiramasu? Hai, and thereto hadde he riden, no man ferre, poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina which he called the stars of the Solid State Entity und so wir betreten, feuer–trunken—Ahnest du den Schöpfer? It is I, Mallory Ringess.

  So, I thought, this is insanity, to greet myself as a tool with a voice, to speak of entering the Entity “drunk with fire,” whatever that meant. I recognized the phrase, Ahnest du den Schöpfer. It was a line of a poem written in Old High German which meant something like, “Do you sense your creator?” I “sensed” that my ship and myself had gone completely mad, either that or it really was receiving a signal through the warped manifold of the Entity. And then I heard:

  If thou beest born to strange sights,

  Things invisible to see,

  Ride ten thousand days and nights,

  Till age snow white hairs on thee.

  So, the Entity did like ancient poetry. If any signal were being sent through the manifold, I thought, it must be coming from Her. The voices began to modulate and resonate into a single voice. In a way, it was a feminine voice, at once seductive and lonely, beatific and sad. It was a voice uncertain as to whether or not it would be understood. Hearing this lovely voice echo the dead languages of Old Earth made me guess that She was probing to discover my milk tongue. But I was mistrustful of this thought the moment it entered my mind. Perhaps I desired too ardently to speak with Her; perhaps I was only speaking with myself.

  No, Mallory, you are speaking with me.

  —But I’m not speaking at all; I’m thinking.

  Do not flatter yourself that what occurs in your mind is true thought.

  —How can you read my thoughts...my mind, then?

  You are inside of me and I am inside of you. Yin–yang, lingam–yoni, outside–inside. I am an entity, but I am not solid. Not always.

  —What are you?

  I am the frenzy; I am the lightning; I am your refining fire.

  —I don’t understand.

  You are a man. Verily, a polluted stream is man. What have you done to purify yourself?

  So, I thought, I had longed to experience a greater being, and she spoke to me in riddles. Quickly I turned my mind away from the manifold and the infinite tree. I tested the ship’s neurologics. But they were healthy and sound, and nowhere could I find the source of the Entity’s signal.

  There is no signal, as you think of signal. There is only perception and touch: I look into the electric field of your ship’s logics and reach out and jiggle the electrons to change the hologram. And so your computer runs my thoughts and suffuses my voice into your brain. I would touch your brain directly but that would frighten you.

  Yes, yes, it would have. I was already frightened enough. I did not want anything alien to “jiggle” the electrons in my brain, to fill me with its images and sounds, to make me see and hear and touch and smell things which did not exist, to change my very perception of reality. With this thought came a much more disturbing thought: What if the Entity already were jiggling my brain’s electrons? Perhaps She only wanted me to think that the voice I heard came from the computer. I did not know what to think. Was I really thinking my own thoughts? Or was the Entity playing with me, making me doubt that I was thinking my own thoughts? Or worse still, what if it all was a nightmare of madness? Maybe the ship had disintegrated; maybe I was experiencing a final moment before death, and the Entity—for whatever reasons—had reached into my brain to create an illusion of sane existence. Maybe I was dead or just dreaming; maybe I, whatever “I” was—was entirely the Entity’s dream creation. Everyone, of course, has these thoughts and fears, but very few have had a goddess speak to them. When I thought of Her being inside my mind, I was dizzy with a sense of losing my self. My stomach churned with a sick feeling that I had no free will. It was an awful moment. I thought that the universe was a terribly uncertain place where I could be certain of only a single thing: that in the realm of my mind, I wanted no thoughts other than my own to alter my thinking.

  Because I was full of fear and doubt, the Entity explained how she manipulated matter through the layers of the manifold. But I understood only the smallest part of the physics, the simplest of ideas. She
had created a new mathematics to describe the warp and woof of spacetime. Her theory of interconnectedness was as beyond me as a demonstration of the different orders of infinities would be to a worm. Ages ago, of course, the mechanics had explored the paradoxes of quantum mechanics. For example, they had shown that both photons in a pair of photons are connected in fundamental ways no matter how far the two particles are separated in realspace. If two photons fly away from a light source towards the opposite ends of the universe, each will “know” certain of its twin’s attributes, such as spin or polarization, no matter how far apart they are. And they will know it instantaneously, as if each instantly “remembered” it should be polarized horizontally, not up and down. From this discovery the mechanics theorized that it is possible to transmit information faster than light, though to their disgrace they have never succeeded in doing so. But their brains are small where the Entity’s is measureless. It seemed She had found a way not only to communicate but to instantaneously touch and manipulate particles across and through the reaches of space. How She did so, I still do not understand.

  —I don’t understand your definition of a correspondence space; is it isomorphic to what we call a Lavi space? I can’t see...if only there was more time!

  At the beginning of time all the particles of the universe were crushed together into a single point; all the particles were as one, in the singularity.

  —And I don’t remember the derivation of your field equation. It must be—

  Memory is everything. All particles remember the instant the singularity exploded and the universe was born. In a way, the universe is nothing but memory.

  —The correspondences are superluminal, then? The correspondence scheme collapses? I’ve tried to prove that a hundred times but—

  Everything in the universe is woven of a single superluminal fabric. Tat tvam asi, that thou art.

  —I don’t understand.

  You are not here to understand.

  —Why do you think I’ve crossed half the galaxy, then?

  You are here to kneel.

  —What?

  You are here to kneel—these are words from an old poem. Do you know the poem?

  —No, of course not.

  Ahhh, that is a shame. Then perhaps you are here to die as well as kneel.

  —I’ll die in the infinite tree; there’s no mapping out of an infinite tree.

  Others have come before you; others are lost in the tree.

  —Others?

  Suddenly the voice of the goddess grew as high and sweet as a little girl’s. Like the piping of a flute, the following words spilled into my brain:

  They are all gone into a world of light!

  And I alone sit lingering here;

  Their very memory is fair and bright,

  And my sad thoughts doth clear.

  You must die. Deep inside you know this. Don’t be afraid.

  —Well, pilots die—or so they say. I’m not afraid.

  I am sorry you are afraid. It was that way with the others.

  —What others?

  Eight pilots of your Order have tried to penetrate my brains: Wicent li Towt, Erendira Ede and Alexandravondila; Ishi Mokku, Ricardo Lavi, Jemmu Flowtow and Atara of Darkmoon. And John Penhallegon, the one you call the Tycho.

  —Then you killed them?

  What do you know about killing? As an oyster, to protect itself, encapsulates an irritant grain of sand with layer upon layer of pearl, so I have confined all but one of these pilots to the branchings of a decision tree.

  —What’s an oyster?

  The Entity reached into my computer’s thoughtspace and placed there an image etched in light and touch and smell. By means of this forbidden telepathy—forbidden to us pilots—I experienced Her conception of oyster. In my mind I saw a soft, squishy creature which protected itself with a hinged shell that it could open or close at will. My fingers closed almost against my will, and in my hand I felt gritty sand against a scoop–shaped, hard, wet shell. My jaws moved of their own, moved my teeth against a tender meat which suddenly ruptured, filling my mouth with living fluids and salt and the taste of the sea. I smelled the thick, cloying perfume of naked proteins and heard a sucking sound as I swallowed the gobbet of raw, living flesh.

  That is oyster.

  —It’s wrong to kill animals for their meat.

  And you, my innocent man, are a pretty pearl in the necklace of time. Do you understand the time distortions? The other pilots are alive, as a pearl is alive with luster and beauty, yet they do not live. They have died, yet they remain undead.

  —Again, you speak in riddles.

  The universe is a riddle.

  —You’re playing with me.

  I like to play.

  Before my mind’s eye, a transparent, glowing cube appeared. The cube was segmented into eight other stacked cubes, each of which flickered with confusing images. I looked inward at the cubes, and the images began to coalesce and harden. In each cube, except the one on the lower right, a disembodied head floated within its prison, as a pilot floats within his ship’s pit. Each face was scarred with the rictus of terror and insanity. Each face stared open−mouthed at me—stared through me—as if I were air. I recognized the faces, then. The historians had taught me well. They were the faces of Wicent li Towt, Ishi Mokku and the others who had come before me.

  What is death, Mallory? The pilots are each lost in a dividing branch of the decision tree. They are as lost and forgotten as poems of the Aeschylus. But someday, I will remember them.

  I wondered how she had encapsulated the pilots (and myself) in the infinite tree. There are ways, of course, to open a window into the manifold at random, to send a pilot unmapped and unprepared into an infinite tree. But She had used none of these ways. She had done something else, something marvellous. How was it possible? I wanted to know. Had Her consciousness really molded the shape of the manifold, twisted the very strands of deep reality, much as a child braids together ropes of clay?

  I did not know. I could not know. I had seen less than a millionth part of her, and She had probably needed only the tiniest portion of that part to speak with me mind to mind. I was like a grain of sand trying to understand an ocean from a few eddies and currents sweeping it along; I was like a flower trying to deduce space travel from the faint tickle of starlight upon its delicate petals. To this day I search for words describing my impression of the Entity’s power, but there are no words. I learned—if that is the right word for knowledge which comes in a sudden flash of insight—I was given to understand that She manipulated whole sciences and thought systems as I might string words into a sentence. But Her “sentences” were as huge and profound as the utterances of the universe itself. She had reached truths and ways of knowing far beyond even the meta−philosophies of the alien Fravashi. She, a goddess, played with concepts which could remake the universe, concepts unthinkable to the mind of Man. While most of my race lived out their days muddled and confused in darkness, She had solved problems and found new directions of thought which we had never dreamed of, and worse, She had done so as easily as I might multiply two times one.

  The mechanics often bemoan their oldest paradox, which is this: The strings weaving the fabric of the universe are so infinitesimal that any attempt to study them will change their properties. The very act of observation perturbs that which is observed. On Old Earth, it is said, there was a king who carked the atoms of everything around him so that all he touched turned into gold. The fabled king could neither eat nor drink because his food and wine tasted of nothing but gold. The mechanics are like this king: Everything they “touch” turns into ugly lumps of matter, into electrons, quarks, or zeta–neutrinos. There is no way for them to perceive deep reality except through the golden, distorting lenses of their instruments or through the touch of their golden equations. In some unfathomable way, the Entity had transcended this prison of matter. To see reality directly, as it really is—this, I thought, must be the privilege of a godl
y intellect.

  Do you see the pilots, Mallory Ringess?

  I saw insanity and chaos. I stared into the cube containing the undead pilots. The black, sharp face of Jemmu Flowtow was leaking drool from its narrow lips.

  —You trapped the pilots; then you could free them. And me.

  But they are free. Or will be free when the universe has remade itself. What has been will be.

  —That’s scryer talk.

  The time distortions: When the universe has expanded outward so that the closest two stars are as far apart as the Grus Cloud of galaxies is now from the Canes Venatici, after billions of your years, the pilots will be as you see them, frozen into forever nowness. It is easier to stop time, is it not, than to restart it? To kill than create? But creation is timeless; creation is everything.

  —The pilots...in the tree where the infinities branch into insanity, have you seen their insane frozen faces, then?

  There is no help for insanity, it is the price that some must pay.

  —I feel like I’m going insane now down the branching of this tree where it splits into two and two into for insanity you say there’s no helping me escape from infinity and stop playing games with my mind!

  You, Mallory, my wild man, we will play together, and I will teach you all there is to know of instantaneity, and perhaps insanity, too. Will you join the other pilots? Watch carefully, the empty cube is for you.