Neverness

by David Zindell

  I was trembling with anticipation as I built up a new proof array. Yes, the simple Lavi could be embedded! I proved it could be embedded. I wiped sweat from my forehead, and I made a probability mapping. Instantly the trillions of branches of the tree narrowed to one. So, it was a finite tree after all. I was saved! I made another mapping to the point–exit near a blue giant star. I fell out into realspace, into the swarm of the ten thousand moon–brains of the Solid State Entity.

  You please me, my Mallory. But we will meet again when you please me more. Until then, fall far, Pilot, and farewell.

  To this day I wonder at the nature of the original tree imprisoning me. Had it really been a finite tree? Or had the Entity somehow—impossibly—changed an infinite tree into a finite one? If so, I thought, then She truly was a goddess worthy of worship. Or at least She was worthy of dread and terror. After looking out on the warm blue light of the sun, I was so full of both these emotions that I made the first of many mappings back to Neverness. Though I burned with strange feelings and unanswered questions, I had no intention of ever meeting Her again. I never again wanted to be tested or have my life depend upon chance and the whimsy of a goddess. Never again did I want to hear the godvoice violating my mind. I wanted, simply, to return home, to drink skotch with Bardo in the bars of the Farsider’s Quarter, to tell the eschatologists and Leopold Soli, and the whole city, that the secret of life was written within the oldest DNA of man.

  6

  The Image of Man

  For us, humanity was a distant goal toward which all men were moving, whose image no one knew, whose laws were nowhere written down.

  Emil Sinclair, Holocaust century Eschatologist

  My homecoming was as glorious as I hoped it would be, marred only by Leopold Soli’s absence from the City. He was off mapping the outer veil of the Vild, so he could not appreciate my triumph. He was not present in the Lightship Caverns with the other pilots, cetics, tinkers and horologes as I emerged from the pit of my ship. How I wish he had seen them lined up on the dark, steel walkway along the row of ships, to see their shocked faces and listen to their furious, excited whispers when I announced that I had spoken with a goddess! Would he have clapped his hands and bowed his head to me as even the most skeptical and jaded of the master pilots did? Would he have honored me with a handshake, as did Stephen Caraghar and Tomoth and his other friends?

  It was too bad he wasn’t there when Bardo broke from the line of pilots and stomped towards me with such reckless enthusiasm that the whole walkway shook and rang like a bell. It was quite a moment. Bardo threw out his huge arms and bellowed, “Mallory! By God, I knew you couldn’t be killed!” His voice filled the Caverns like an exploding bomb, and he suddenly whirled to address the pilots. “How many times these past days have I said it? Mallory’s the greatest pilot since Rollo Gallivare! Greater than Rollo Gallivare, by God if he isn’t!” He looked straight at Tomoth who was watching his antics with his hideous, mechanical eyes. “You say he’s lost in dreamtime? I say he’s schooning, scurfing the veils of the manifold, and he’ll return when he’s damn ready. You say he’s lost in an infinite loop, snared by that bitch of a goddess called the Solid State Entity? I say he’s kleining homeward, tunnelling with elegance and fortitude, returning to his friends with a discovery that will make him a master pilot. Tell me, was I right? Master Mallory—how I like the sound of it! By God, Little Fellow, by God!”

  He came over to me and gave me a hug that nearly cracked my ribs, all the while thumping my back and repeating, “By God, Little Fellow, by God!”

  The pilots and professionals swarmed around me, shaking hands and asking me questions. Justine, dressed sleekly in woollens and a new black fur, touched my forehead and bowed. “Look at him!” she said to my mother, who was weeping unashamedly. (I felt like weeping myself.) “If only Soli could be here!”

  My mother forced her way through the swarm, and we touched each other’s forehead. She surprised me, saying, “I’m so tired. Of these formal politenesses.” Then she kissed me on the lips and hugged me. “You’re too thin,” she said as she dried her eyes on the back of her gloves. She arched her bushy eyebrows and wrinkled her nose, sniffing. “As thin as a harijan. And you stink. Come see me. When you’ve shaved and bathed and the akashics are through with you. I’m so happy.”

  “We’re all happy,” Lionel said as he bowed, slightly. Then he snapped his head suddenly, flinging his blond hair from his eyes. “And I suppose we’re fascinated with these words of your goddess. The secret of life written in the oldest DNA of man—what do you suppose She meant by that? What, after all, is the oldest DNA?”

  Even as the akashics dragged my grimy, bearded, emaciated body off to their chamber to de–program me, I had a sudden notion of what this oldest DNA might be. Like a seed it germinated inside me; the notion quickly sprouted into an idea, and the idea began growing into the wildest of plans. Had Soli been there I might have blurted out my wild plan just to see the frown on his cold face. But he was off trying to penetrate the warped, star–blown spaces of the Vild, and he probably thought I was long dead, if he thought about me at all.

  I was not dead, though, I was far from dead. I was wonderfully, joyfully alive. Despite the manifold’s ravaging my poor body, despite the separation from my ship and the return to downtime, I was full of confidence and success, as cocky as a man can be. I felt invincible, as if I were floating on a cool wind. The cetics call this feeling the testosterone high, because when a man is successful in his endeavours, his body floods with this potent hormone. They warn against the effects of testosterone. Testosterone makes men too aggressive, they say, and aggressive men grasp for success and generate ever more testosterone the more successful they become. It is a nasty cycle. They say testosterone can poison a man’s brain and color his judgements. I believe this is true. I should have paid more attention to the cetics and their teachings. If I hadn’t been so full of myself, if I hadn’t been so swollen with tight veins and racing blood and hubris, I probably would have immediately dismissed my wild plan to discover the oldest DNA of the human race. As it was, I could hardly wait to win Bardo and the rest of the Order over to my plan, to bathe myself in ever more and greater glory.

  During the next few days I had little time to think about my plan because the akashics and other professionals kept me busy. Nikolos the Elder, the Lord Akashic, examined in detail my every memory from the moment I had left Neverness. He copied the results in his computers. There were mechanics who questioned me about the black bodies and other phenomena I had encountered within the Entity. They were properly impressed—astounded is a more accurate word—when they learned that She had the power to change the shape of the manifold as She pleased. A few of the older mechanics did not believe my story, not even when the cetics and akashics agreed that my memories were not illusory but the result of events that really happened. The mechanics, of course, had known for ages that any model of reality must include consciousness as a fundamental waveform. But Marta Rutherford and Minima Jons, among others, refused to believe the Entity could create and uncreate an infinite tree at will. They fell into a vicious argument with Kolenya Mor and a couple of other eschatologists who seemed more interested that people lived within the Entity than they were in the esoterics of physics. The furore and petty antagonisms that my discoveries provoked among the professionals amused me. I was pleased that the programmers, neologicians, historians, even the holists, would have much to talk about for a long time to come.

  I was curious when the master horologe, with the aid of a furtive–looking young programmer, read the memory of the ship–computer and opened the sealed ship’s clock. Although there is a prohibition against immediately telling a returning pilot how much inner time has elapsed, it is almost always ignored. I learned that I had aged, intime, five years and forty–three days. (And eight hours, ten minutes, thirty–two seconds.) “What day is it?” I asked. And the horologe told me that it was the twenty–eighth day of midwinter spr
ing in the year of 2930. On Neverness, little more than half a year had passed. I was five years older, then, while Katharine had only aged a tenth as much. Crueltime, I thought, you can’t conquer crueltime. I hoped the differential ticking of Katharine’s and my internal clocks would not be as cruel to us as it had been to Justine and Soli.

  Later that day—it was the day after my return—I was summoned to the Timekeeper’s Tower. The Timekeeper, who seemed not to have aged at all, bade me sit in the ornate chair near the glass windows. He paced about the bright room, digging his red slippers into the white fur of his rugs, all the while looking me over as I listened to the ticking of his clocks. “You’re so thin,” he said. “My horologes tell me there was much slowtime, too damn much slowtime. How many times have I warned you against the slowtime?”

  “There were many bad moments,” I said. “I had to think like light, as you say. If I hadn’t used slowtime, I’d be dead.”

  “The accelerations have wasted your body.”

  “I’ll spend the rest of the season skating, then. And eating. My body will recover.”

  “I’m thinking of your mind, not your body,” he said. He made a fist and massaged the knuckles. “So, your mind, your brain, is five years older.”

  “Cells can always be made young again,” I said.

  “You think so?”

  I did not want to argue the effects of the manifold’s time distortions with him so I fidgeted in my hard chair and said, “Well, it’s good to be home.”

  He rubbed his wrinkled neck and said, “I’m proud of you, Mallory. You’re famous now, eh? Your career is made. There’s talk of making you a master pilot, did you know that?”

  In truth, my fellow pilots such as Bardo and the Sonderval had talked of little else since my return. Even Lionel, who had once despised my impulsive bragging, confided to me that my elevation to the College of Masters was almost certain.

  “A great discovery,” the Timekeeper said. He ran his fingers back through his thick white hair. “I’m very pleased.”

  In truth, I did not think he was pleased at all. Oh, perhaps he was pleased to see me again, to rumple my hair as he had when I was a boy, but I did not think he was at all pleased with my sudden fame and popularity. He was a jealous man, a man who would suffer no challenge to his preeminence among the women and men of our Order.

  “Without your book of poems,” I said, “I would be worse than dead.” I told him, then, everything that had happened to me on my journey. He did not seem at all impressed with the powers of the Entity.

  “So, the poems. You learned them well?”

  “Yes, Timekeeper.”

  “Ahhh.” He smiled, resting his scarred hand on my shoulder. His face was fierce, hard to read. He seemed at once kindly and aggrieved, as if he could not decide whether giving me the book of poems had been the right thing to do.

  He stood above me and I looked at my reflection in his black eyes. I asked the question burning in my mind. “How could you know the Entity would ask me to recite the poems? And the poems She asked—two of them were poems you had recited to me!”

  He grimaced and said, “So, I couldn’t know. I guessed.”

  “But you must have known the Entity plays riddle games with ancient poetry. How could you possibly know that?”

  He squeezed my shoulder hard; his fingers were like clutching, wooden roots. “Don’t question me, damn you! Have you forgotten your manners?”

  “I’m not the only one who has questions. The akashics and others, everyone will wonder how you knew.”

  “Let them wonder.”

  Once, when I was twelve years old, the Timekeeper had taught me that secret knowledge is power. He was a man who kept secrets. During the hours of our talk, he secretively moved about the room giving me no opportunity to ask him questions about his past or anything else. He ordered coffee and drank it standing as he shifted from foot to foot. Frequently, he would pace to the window and stare out at the buildings of the Academy, all the while shaking his head and clenching his jaws. Perhaps he longed to confide his secrets with me (or with anybody)—I do not know. He looked like a strong, vital animal confined within a trap. Indeed, there were some who said that he never left his Tower because he feared the world of rocketing sleds and fast ice and murderous men. But I did not believe this. I had heard other gossip: a drunken horologe who claimed the Timekeeper kept a double to attend to the affairs of the Order while he took to the streets at night, hunting like a lone wolf down the glissades for anyone so foolish as to plot against him. It was even rumored that he left the City for long periods of time; some said he kept his own lightship hidden within the Caverns. Had he duplicated my discoveries a lifetime ago and kept the secrets to himself? I thought it was possible. He was a fearless man too full of life not to have needed fresh wind against his face, the glittering crystals of the number storm, the cold, stark beauty of the stars at midnight. He, a lover of life, had once told me that the moments of a man’s life were too precious to waste sleeping. Thus he practiced his discipline of sleeplessness, and he paced as his muscles knotted and relaxed, knotted and relaxed; he paced during the bright hours of the day, and he paced all the long night driven by adrenalin and caffeinated blood and by his need to see and hear and be.

  I felt a rare pang of pity for him (and for myself for having to endure his petty inquisitions), and I said, “You look worried.”

  It was the wrong thing to say. The Timekeeper hated pity, and more, he despised pitiers, especially when they pitied themselves. “Worry! What do you know of worry! After you’ve listened to the mechanics petition me to send an expedition into the Entity’s nebula, then you may speak to me of worry, damn you!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “So, I mean Marta Rutherford and her faction would have me mount a major expedition! She wants me to send a deepship into the Entity! As if I can afford to lose a deepship and a thousand professionals! They think that because you were lucky, they’ll be, too. And already, the eschatologists are demanding that if there is an expedition, they should lead it.”

  I squeezed the arms of the chair and said, “I’m sorry my discovery has caused so many problems.” I was not sorry at all, really. I was delighted that my discovery—along with Soli’s—had provoked the usually staid professionals of our Order into action.

  “Discovery?” he growled out. “What discovery?” He walked over to the window and silently shook his fist at the gray storm clouds drifting over the City from the south. He didn’t like the cold, I remembered, and he hated snow.

  “The Entity...She said the secret of life—”

  “The secret of life! You believe the lying words of that lying mainbrain? Gobbledygook! There’s no secret to be found in ‘man’s oldest DNA,’ whatever that might be. There’s no secret, do you understand? The secret of life is life: It goes on and on, and that’s all there is.”

  As if to punctuate his pessimism, just then the low, hollow bell of one of his clocks chimed, and he said, “It’s New Year on Urradeth. They’ll be killing all the marrow–sick babies born this past year, and they’ll drink, and they’ll couple all day and all night until the wombs of all the women are full again. On and on it goes, on and on.”

  I told him I thought the Entity had spoken the truth.

  He laughed harshly, causing the weathered skin around his eyes to crack like sheets of broken ice. “Struth!” he said bitterly, a word I took to be one of his archaisms. “A god’s truth, a god’s lies—what’s the difference?”

  I told him I had a plan to discover man’s oldest DNA.

  He laughed again; he laughed so hard his lips pulled back over his long white teeth and tears flowed from his eyes. “So, a plan. Even as a boy, you always had plans. Do you remember when I taught you slowtime? When I said that one must be patient and wait for the first waves of adagio to overtake the mind, you told me there had to be a way to slow time by skipping the normal sequence of attitudes. You even had a plan to enter slowtime
without the aid of your ship–computer! And why? You had a problem with patience. And you still do. Can’t you wait to see if the splicers and imprimaturs—or the eschatologists, historians or cetics—can discover this oldest DNA? Isn’t it enough you’ll probably be made a master pilot?”

  I rubbed the side of my nose and said, “If I petition you to mount a small expedition of my own, would you approve it?”

  “Petition me?” he asked. “Why so formal? Why not just ask me?”

  “Because,” I said slowly, “I’d have to break one of the covenants.”

  “So.”

  There was a long silence during which he stood as still as an ice sculpture.

  “Well, Timekeeper?”

  “Which covenant do you want to break?”

  “The eighth covenant,” I said.

  “So,” he said again, staring out the window to the west. The eighth covenant was the agreement made three thousand years ago between the founders of Neverness and the primitive Alaloi who lived in their caves six hundred miles to the west of the City.

  “They’re neanderthals,” I said. “Cavemen. Their culture, their bodies...so old.”

  “You’d petition me to journey to the Alaloi, to collect tissues from their living bodies?”

  “The oldest DNA of man,” I said. “Isn’t it ironic that I might find it so close to home?”