Neverness

by David Zindell

  His words, along with my mother’s instincts, would prove to be curiously prophetic. (Sometimes I thought my mother was a secret scryer.) Two days after my elevation, on eighty–fifth day, a day of cold, mashy snow and deep irony, Leopold Soli returned from the Vild. He was enraged to find me alive—so it was rumored. Out of spite and revenge—Bardo told me this—he went to the Timekeeper to demand that my petition be denied. But the Timekeeper fooled him. The Timekeeper fooled everyone, and fooled me most of all. He granted my petition, but added a proviso: I could mount an expedition to the Alaloi provided I took my family, my mother and Justine and Katharine, along with me. And Soli, too. Soli, who was my uncle, must come or else there would be no expedition. And since Soli was Lord Pilot, Soli must lead the expedition—this was Timekeeper’s galling, ironic proviso. When I heard this news I could not believe it. Nor did I suspect that Bardo was right, that as a result of our expedition, the City would never be the same.

  7

  Rainer’s Sculpture

  I was an experiment on the part of Nature, a gamble within the unknown, perhaps for a new purpose, perhaps for nothing, and my only task was to allow this game on the part of primeval depths to take its course, to feel its will within me and make it wholly mine. That or nothing!

  Emil Sinclair, Holocaust Century Eschatologist

  I spent the next few days sulking about my house. I am ashamed to admit this, but the truth is the truth: I brooded like a boy upon learning of the Timekeeper’s proviso. I told Katharine to stay away; I told her I was angry with her for not warning me the Timekeeper would humble me with his proviso. (This was a lie. How could I be angry with a beautiful scryer sworn to keep her visions secret?) I read my book of poems or split firewood or set up my wooden chess pieces, replaying the games of the grandmasters, all the while cursing Soli for ruining my expedition. That Soli had persuaded the Timekeeper to allow him to steal the leadership from me, I could not doubt.

  Soon after his return, Soli came to visit me, to discuss plans for the expedition and to gloat—or so I thought. I received him in the fireroom in front of the cold, blackened fireplace. He immediately noticed the minor insult of the unlit fire, but he could not appreciate the greater insult, that I invited him to sit atop the same furs on which I had swived his daughter. I shamelessly savored the knowledge of this insult. As Bardo often reminded me, I had a cruel vein running into my heart.

  I was surprised at how much Soli had aged. He sat cross–legged on the furs, touching the new lines on his forehead, pulling at the loose flesh below his long chin. He looked twenty years older. I had heard that he had almost penetrated the inner veil of the Vild. But the price he had paid for attempting those impenetrable spaces was time, crueltime. His voice was older, deeper, cut with new inflections. “There should be congratulations on your journey,” he said. “The College did well to make you a master.”

  I had to admit he could be gracious when he wanted to be, even though he was obviously lying. I wanted to tell him not to waste his breath lying. But I remembered my manners and said, “Tell me about the Vild.”

  “Yes, the Vild. There’s little to tell, is there? The stars flare, then die. The Vild grows. And the rate that it grows, grows. What do you want to know? That it’s impossible to map those spaces? That a pilot must use slowtime almost continuously in the Vild? Look at me, then, and you’ll see that that is so.”

  We talked of our respective journeys; I thought he was bitter that I had succeeded where he had failed. And then he surprised me, congratulating me again for the mappings I had made through the Entity. “That was elegant piloting,” he said. Pointedly, however, he refrained from mentioning my discovery.

  I offered him coffee but he refused, saying, “Coffee speeds the brain, and there’s been enough of that, hasn’t there?”

  “Would you like some skotch, then?”

  “No thank you, Pilot,” he said. “There’s no joy drinking skotch in front of a dead fireplace, is there?”

  “I could light the fire, if you’d like.”

  “Please.”

  I heaped some green logs onto the grate and lit the fire, and he came to the purpose of his visit. “It seems there will be an expedition to your AlaJoi after all.”

  “And you’re to lead it?”

  “Yes.”

  I ground my teeth, then said, “I understand. You want the glory.”

  “Is that true? No, you don’t understand. The Timekeeper orders me to lead it.”

  “Why?”

  “Who knows what his reasons are?”

  Liar, I thought, liar!

  “I’ll speak to the Timekeeper,” I said.

  “You’d question him?”

  “It was my discovery. The Alaloi...my plan. It’s my expedition.”

  He bowed his head and said, “Yes, it’s clear, you want the glory.”

  “No, I want the knowledge.”

  “So you tell yourself,” he said, and he sipped from the tumbler of skotch I had handed him.

  “It would weaken the expedition if you come.” I looked at his long nose, the nose I had broken. “There’s blood between us,” I said.

  He rubbed the bridge of his nose. He said, “No, you’re mistaken. There’s no blood between us.”

  I gulped a quarter of my own tumbler of skotch. My eyes were burning from the piney smoke escaping into the room. I said, “If the Timekeeper doesn’t rescind his proviso, I’ll withdraw from the expedition. I won’t go with you.”

  Soli smiled and told me, “Yes, your pride is hurt. But you don’t have a choice.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This is the reason for my visit; you must be told: The Timekeeper orders you to come with me.”

  “Orders me?” I half–shouted. “Ten days ago, he wasn’t even going to allow an expedition!”

  “The Timekeeper,” Soli said, “apparently has changed his mind. Don’t ask me why.” He sipped his skotch, then continued, “There will be six of us. Justine and Bardo, your mother, too, are ordered to accompany us.”

  “That’s only five.”

  His voice was unnaturally calm as he said, “The sixth will be Katharine. The Timekeeper has ordered my daughter to grow new eyes and come with us.”

  So, I thought, Soli must have gone to the Timekeeper and asked that his wife and daughter come with him. How gratified he must have been that Katharine would renounce her scryer’s vows and grow eyes, he who despised scryers! I could not understand, though, why my mother and Bardo had been included in the expedition’s roster, unless it was to appease me and keep me from doing something foolish, such as breaking my vow of obedience and running off to the Alaloi on my own. Then, by way of explanation Soli said, “We’ll pose as distant relatives of the Devaki tribe of the Alaloi. The Timekeeper believes we’ll have a better chance if we pretend to be an extended family. And since some of us are really related, it should be that much easier of a deception.”

  Yes, I thought, Soli was indeed a deceitful man.

  I said, “Let me guess; we’ll pretend that Bardo is your son, and my cousin.”

  “No,” he said, “that’s not the plan.” His face suddenly turned sour as if he had swallowed gull piss, not skotch. He seemed very unhappy. “You’re to pose as my son.”

  “What? That’s impossible!”

  “As my son,” he repeated quietly, “since you look so much like me. Katharine will be your sister.”

  “That’s insane! It won’t work!” I was suddenly on my feet, fingers clenched, shaking my fists on either side of my head. “You and I...we’d fight and what would the Alaloi think? The whole plan...Katharine my sister, insane! I’ll break down the doors of the Timekeeper’s Tower if I have to but I won’t let him order this insane plan!”

  “Again, you must be reminded, you have no choice. Sorry.”

  Indeed, I had no choice. I was furious because I had no choice. I was a pilot who had taken vows—so I reminded myself while pacing through the fireroom after Soli
had left me. Later that day I called for an audience with the Timekeeper, but he would not see me. In a bare anteroom, I waited all afternoon playing over chess games in my head to calm myself, to keep myself from breaking into his chambers. Finally, he sent a journeyman horologe to inform me that he was meeting with a merchant prince from Tria and would not be able to see anyone for a good tenday.

  I did not believe him. The Timekeeper was testing my obedience, I thought, and humbling me because he was jealous of my discovery. Bardo, too, shared this opinion. Around midnight we met in the master pilot’s bar. He was drunk, and oddly, for him, quite subdued. His bearded head was loose on his shoulders as he kept dipping his lips into his beer. “It’s a pity,” he said. “It’s a very pity. By chance you didn’t ask the Timekeeper to...” He belched and continued, “...to order me on this mad expedition, did you? Oh, of course you didn’t, stupid of me for even suspecting. Where’s my damn faith in friends? Oh, too bad, where’s my faith in anything? You’re always saying success begets success but I think not. You and your damn testosterone high! You come back famous, full of pride and seed, ready for anything, but that’s not the reality, oh, no. Shall I speak in metaphor? I shall, I shall: We’re like thallows, you and I, the higher we soar, the greater the fall when the wind turns against us. I have a bad feeling about this expedition, Little Fellow.”

  Bardo, of course, had bad feelings about anything which put his life at risk. He was a natural pessimist always waiting for calamity to occur, and the greater his happiness, the greater his fear it might momentarily be taken away from him. Thinking to soothe him (and myself), I drank more skotch, threw my arm around him, and said, “It will be all right.”

  “No, no, Little Fellow, I think I’ll die out on the ice, yes, I’m sure of it.”

  “I didn’t know you were a scryer.”

  “Well, it doesn’t require any special vision to see I’m doomed.” He pulled a small mirror from his pocket and held it in front of his face. With drunken fingers, he wiped beer foam from his mustache as he spoke to himself: “Ah, Bardo, my friend, what’s happened, what’s to become of you? Oh, too bad, too bad!”

  Despite Bardo’s foreboding and my maimed pride, despite Soli’s and my antipathy for each other, despite everything, the initial planning for the expedition went well. Each of us, except Bardo, took on a different task. Lionel, who was miffed at not being included in the expedition, nevertheless helped us learn to handle the sled teams. Soli prepared his inventories of the spears, furs, oilstones, icesaws and krydda spheres, all the hundreds of tools and things we would need to pose as Alaloi (and, if need be, to survive). Justine and my mother consulted the akashic records and histories, learning as much as they could of the culture of the Devaki tribe. It was my task—and it was clever of Soli to assign me this crucial, delicate task, a sop to my pride—to hire and supervise the cutter who would sculpt our bodies into the shape of neanderthals.

  On the tenth day of false winter I made arrangements with a Mehtar Hajime, whose shop was the largest and finest on the Street of Cutters. (Which is itself one of the straightest and broadest streets in the Farsider’s Quarter.) The shop front was jacketed with sheets of rare, blue obsidian carved with bizarre shapes, some of which were human—though barely so—and others bearing as little resemblance to humans as humans do to monkeys. There were grotesque bearded men whose parts had been broadened and lengthened until their membrums hung pendulously almost to their knees, and there were others as tall and thin as exemplars. There seemed to be no pattern or logic to the placement of the figures: A cluster of the double–sexed in orgy was set next to a breastless madonna wearing the binding fiber of a Vesper priestess around her elongated head. Bizarre, how bizarre and barbaric! The largest of the figures, 1 saw, was melted into the stone above the doorway. It advertised the type of sculpting for which Mehtar was most famous: An Alaloi man, with his thick jaw firmly set, held a spear and stood with his arm cocked as he sighted on the eye of an enraged, charging mammoth. I recognized the sculpture of Goshevan, he who had heroically killed a mammoth with a single stroke of his spear. Mehtar took obvious pride that it had been a cutter much like himself who had once made Goshevan into an AIaIoi.

  I knocked at the door, and a domestic opened it and led me through the stone hallway into the warm, disgustingly plush tearoom, where I sat at the single table. It served me a fair coffee that I could not quite identify. I drummed my fingers against the table top, all the while examining the expensive wall tapestries, the many expensive objects atop the polished furniture. I was annoyed because this venal cutter, whoever he was, was not there to meet me.

  “Many pay well to be more than they were born to be,” I heard someone say. I looked up to see a man who must have been Mehtar standing in the doorway leading to his changing rooms. He looked as much like a caveman as any Alaloi. He was thick and obviously powerful, with great bunches of muscles gathering beneath his hairy skin. His browridge jutted so far out from his forehead that I could barely see his quick brown eyes. He looked very familiar; I was almost certain I had seen him before, though I could not remember where. With the flat of his palm, he thumped his chest and said, “Do you see this magnificent body? As I’ve done for myself, so I can do for you.”

  I sipped my coffee (it was Solsken coffee, I guessed, which is treasured more for its rarity than taste), and I asked him, “How do you know I haven’t come to have my nose shortened?”

  “You’re the master pilot Mallory Ringess,” he said. “And I know why you’ve come to me.” He took the chair opposite mine and sat stroking his heavy jaw. He looked at me as if he were appraising a piece of art. Abruptly he said, “Look at the Fravashi tondo,” and he pointed to the wall behind me.

  I turned to look at the tondo. The alien painting, a culture of variegated, programmed bacteria pressed between two sheets of clary, mutated and shifted colors and shape as I watched. The pretty, flowing colors depicted the epic of Goshevan of Summerworld and the birth of his son, Shanidar; it was an impressive display. Of course, private possession of such technology was illegal, but I said nothing.

  “A famous castrato who had lost his voice—I’m sure you know his name—gave me this painting in trade for his restoration. Restore him I did! I cut at his larynx until he sang like a bell, and to prove my good will, I stitched new testes into his empty ball sacks for free. So that he could be a man again while he sang with a young boy’s voice! No, I’m not a venal man, no matter what my enemies say.”

  I explained what I needed, and he closed his nostrils and said, “The price will be six thousand city disks, a thousand for each body I sculpt and—”

  “You’re joking! Six thousand city disks?”

  “Have some more coffee,” he said, pouring the pungent liquid into my mug. “The price is high because I am who I am. Ask any cutter or splicer on the street, and they’ll tell you who is the best. Did you know I apprenticed to Rainer? The cutter who sculpted Goshevan?”

  He was lying, of course. I had consulted the city archives before choosing a cutter. Mehtar, although he looked decently old, was really quite young, much too young to have been Rainer’s apprentice. He had come to Neverness as a young boy having witnessed the death of his planet, Alesar, in one of those rabidly hateful religious wars which occasionally destroy isolated societies. His family had belonged to a schismatic sect of spiritualists—I do not recall the exact nature or substance of their belief—and he had watched them die the marrow–death as he vomited blood and swore he would never again put his faith in ideals he could not see or feel or possess. He had come to Neverness determined to enrich himself while wreaking vengeance on any flesh that came his way. Therefore in little time he had become the best—if strangest—cutter in the City.

  “Six thousand disks!” I repeated. “Nobody needs access to that much information. It’s indecent.”

  “You won’t buy my services by insulting me, Pilot.”

  “We’ll pay you a thousand disks.”

&n
bsp; “That’s not enough.”

  “Two thousand.”

  He shook his head and made a tisking sound with his tongue. “That will buy you the services of Alvarez or Paulivik, any of the lesser cutters. Maybe you should go to them.”

  “Three thousand, then.”

  “I don’t like amounts containing the number ‘three.’ It’s a superstition of mine.”

  “Four thousand,” I said, realizing that I should have persuaded Bardo to come with me. I had rarely paid money for anything in my life, while he had a lifetime of experience arguing over the value of land or haggling with whores over the price of their bodies.

  “I can sculpt four of you for that price.”

  “Five thousand city disks. Five thousand.”

  “No, no, no, no, Pilot.”

  I slapped the table so hard that my mug rattled and coffee slopped over the rim. I muttered, “You would think you’d sculpt us for free. Doesn’t the quest mean anything to you?”

  “No, it doesn’t, Pilot.”

  “Well, five thousand is all I can pay.” I was certain that if I had brought Bardo with me, he would never have agreed to pay the six thousand disks that Mehtar had originally asked for.

  “If that is all you have,” he said, “that is all you have. But you will never know how fine it feels to wear an Alaloi’s body, how good it is to be strong.” So saying he grasped his empty mug with his hand and squeezed. It shattered into crumbs and slivers, one of which drove through his palm. He held his hand up so I could watch him slowly draw the bloody white sliver from his punctured flesh. At first the wound spurted blood in rhythmic pulses, and Mehtar said, “Clearly, I’ve sliced the artery.” He closed his eyes, and the muscles of his upraised hand began to tremble. The pulses of red slowed to a steady flow and then to a trickle. When he opened his eyes, the bleeding had stopped altogether. “I can give you powers over your sculpted body as well as strength. There are hormones to keep your balls overflowing with seed, or a neurotransmitter wash to dissolve your need for sleep. And, more practically, with a little splicing, various of your tissues can be programmed to pump out glycopetides, to keep your flesh from freezing on your expedition. I, Mehtar Constancio Hajime, can do this. My price will be six thousand one hundred city disks.”