Neverness

by David Zindell

  I would have buried him but the snow was too hard for digging. Down the beach, Soli whistled to his dogs, a reminder that soon the forest would be dark, that we had no time for burials. Justine, that innocent, beautiful woman who thought she could never die, said a few foolish words of consolation to me and went to join him. My mother stood over Liko, rubbed her heavy eyebrows and cocked her head. “He was only a dog,” she said. “What is left to bury? We should go back to the sleds. Before it’s too dark.” She left me there, too. I watched her unharness Tusa and put him at the lead of the sled in Liko’s place.

  “Barbarians!” Bardo shouted at them. “By God, look at this poor dog!” He lifted his head to the sky and let loose a thunderous curse. He cursed the thallow for killing Liko, and he cursed the gods for letting him die; he cursed Liko’s sire and dame for whelping him; he cursed Soli and last of all he cursed me. He bent low to the beach, cursing, and in his arms he hefted a granite boulder which he placed over Liko’s body. I lifted a rock, a smaller rock, and did the same. In this manner, working like madmen, we quickly built a cairn over the dog.

  When we were finished, Katharine came over with handfuls of fireflowers she had picked in the woods. She laid them atop Liko’s grave. “I’m sorry, Mallory,” she said.

  “You saw the thallow, didn’t you? In a dream—you knew this would happen.”

  “I saw...possibilities. I knew but I didn’t...There’s no way I can make you see it, is there?”

  I watched the flowers shrivel and lose their red fire; it only took a few moments for the light to die.

  “You should have warned me, what you saw. I could have saved him.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t think you are.”

  “I’m sorry for you.”

  There is not much left to tell of our long day’s journey to the Devaki’s cave. Our passage through the forest was as quick and easy as I had hoped. I remember that the island was beautiful. The green trees against the soft, white slopes, the white and green hills where they touched the blue sky—curiously this perfection of colors comes instantly to mind whenever I recall the tragic events of our journey. (I do not mean the death of Liko; I am referring to the tragedies which were soon to come.) Our dogs pulled us gliding over the gentle, gradually rising upland. It was not so cold as it had been out on the ice, but it was cold enough to crack trees. A few times we passed the shredded, fallen corpses of the shatterwood trees half–buried in the snow. Though we never saw one explode, the thunder of dying trees reverberated from hill to hill. There was wood–dust and long white splinters driven into the drifts; I saw that Soli was right, that the forest was no place to be at night.

  At last, as the light faded and our shadows grew almost as long as trees, we came around the curve of a small hill. Before us was a larger hill, and set into its northeast face like a black mouth was the cave of the Devaki. Above us, to the north above both hills, high above the lesser undulations of the world stood Kweitkel, vast and white and holy—or so the Devaki believe. But standing there in the half–light and stillness, looking up into the depths of the cave I did not feel holy at all; I felt tired, desecrated, and very, very profane.

  9

  Yuri the Wise

  From Man and the Bomb were born the Hibakusha, the worlds of Gaiea, Terror, Death, and the First Law of the Civilized Worlds, which was that Man was forbidden to explode hydrogen into light. And the Hibakusha fled and took to bed Law, and so were born the Aphasics, the Friends of God, the Astriers, Autists, Maggids and Arhats of Newvania. And Terror wed Death, and so were born the Vild and the great Nothingness beyond. And Terror wed Law as well and begat the Hive Peoples, who valued life less than Order, and so they surrendered their Free Will to the lesser god of Order. Of the Hive Peoples we know almost nothing.

  from A Requiem for Homo Sapiens, by Horthy Hosthoh

  Our entrance to the cave was a confusion of barking dogs and shouts and children running between our sleds. With their little hands they peeled back the sled covers to see if we had brought with us mammoth tongues or shagshay liver or any other of the Devaki’s favored delicacies. They rapped the leather barrels of baldo nuts and shook their heads, disappointed that our only remaining food was so meager and poor. They seemed not to suspect that we were not their distant cousins but civilized people come to steal their plasm. We stood near our sleds waiting as their parents emerged from the mouth of the cave. I turned my face to the entrance fires and let the heat melt the ice from my beard. There were babies crying, the smell of roasting meats as well as the stench of wet fur and rotting blood. I was unready for this stench, and it made me sick. The cloying thickness of old piss sprayed on rocks, the woodsmoke and cut pine, the reek of skin oils and baby vomit wafting from the furs of the curious Devaki women—though Rainer’s memory had proven accurate it seemed that it was also incomplete; I had no memory in my mind of these terrible smells. (This, I believe, is a flaw in the workings of the akashic computers. The memory of smells is captured deep within the limbic brain, sometimes too deep for the akashics to reach.) The area between the firepits was strewn with gnawed bones and pieces of hide and flesh; I had to step carefully lest I squash one of the numerous, half–frozen piles of dog dung atop the snow. The men of the Devaki—thick, rude men dressed as we were in shagshay furs—surrounded us, touching our furs, touching our sleds, touching each other as they spoke their words of welcome, ni luria la Devaki, ni luria la. Then Soli, who was patting the head of one of the children, said, “I am Soli, son of Mauli who was the son of Wilanu, the Whalekiller, whose father was Rudolf, son of Senwe who left the Devaki many years ago to seek the Blessed Isles.” He turned to me and put his arm around my shoulders. “This is my son Mallory; we are the people of Senwe, who was the son of Jamaliel the Fierce.”

  I hated the touch of Soli’s hand on my shoulder; I hated having to pose as his son. I hated the stench of the cave and the running wounds on the blunt hands of the men, and I hated the crush of stinking bodies pressing me, the odor and intimations of disease and death. I hated all these things and more, but I had little time to savor my hatreds because Soli’s recitation of our fake lineage had aroused great excitement. There were laughs and shouts and gasps of astonishment. A huge, one–eyed man limped forward and cupped his hand around the back of Soli’s neck. He did the same to me and said, “I am Yuri son of Nuri who was the son of Lokni the Unlucky.” Yuri, with his bristly gray beard and weathered skin, was past middling old and taller than any of the forty men of the cave except Bardo. He had a huge, high nose cutting between his prominent cheekbones. While he spoke to us, he turned his head back and forth like a thallow, his single eye scrutinizing our sleds and our gaunt, growling dogs. He seemed to be searching for something he could not find. He continued, “Lokni’s father was Jyasi, son of Omar son of Payat, who was Senwe’s older brother and Jamaliel’s son.” He threw his arms around Soli, pummelling his back with his fists. “We are near–brothers,” he said, and his great brown eye glistened in the light of the fires. “Ni luria, ni luria, Soli wi Senwelina.”

  He led us inside the entrance to the cave. Thirty feet from the fires there were two snow–huts, small domes made of cut snow blocks carefully trimmed and fitted together. The small hut nearest the rear of the cave had a hole in the wall big enough to stick a head through. The other hut, which was pitted with the shallow pockmarks of dripping water, was even smaller. After Soli introduced my mother and Bardo as his sister–by–marriage and nephew (this, too, was part of our deception), Yuri stared at them with his eye and told them that they were welcome to share the smaller hut. He came up to Bardo and he squeezed his upper arm and felt the muscles of his chest. He said, “Bardo is a strange name, and you are a strange man, I think, strange but very strong.” He looked my mother up and down as if doubting that she was Bardo’s mother, and told her, “You should have named him Tuwa, the mammoth.” He indicated that Soli and I, and Justine and Katharine, were to share the larger hut. I thought I ha
d misheard him. Surely he could not really expect all of us to cram into such a tiny space? I looked through the hole in the wall but it was too dark to see anything. The smells of rotting fish and piss made me want to kick the hut in. “You may lay your sleeping furs and patch the hole, and you will be warm,” Yuri said. “Now, I will show you the cave of Jamaliel son of Ian whose father was Malmo the Lucky, son of...” and as we went deeper into the cave, he recited our line of ancestry halfway back to the mythical Manwe, who was the son of Devaki, mother of the people. (According to the myth, the god Kweitkel thrust the tip of his cone inside Devaki where it erupted, thus filling her womb with Yelena and Reina and Manwe, and the other sons and daughters of the world.)

  The cave was a lava tube opening seventy yards into the depths of the hill. It had been formed, no doubt, when some gigantic bubble of gas was trapped within a pocket of molten lava flowing from one of Kweitkel’s erupting vents. (The real Kweitkel, I mean, not the god.) The lava had cooled and the gases had bled away through cracks in the hardened rock. At some time in the distant past, a quake had fractured the end of the tube, opening the cave to wind and snow, and to the tiny band of Alaloi who had made it their home. Opposite our two snow–huts, but deeper inside the nearly cylindrical cave, were the huts of one of the smaller families of the tribe, the Sharailina. Midway into the cave—it was difficult to see very much—a pendant of cooled lava hung from the ceiling to the cave floor. The lava, perhaps molded and shaped by the pressures of the wild, primal gases, had cooled unevenly; if one looked at the pendant from behind, facing the entrance fires, the bulges of rock and shadowy indentations took on the profile of an old man smiling.

  “He is the Old Man of the Cave,” Yuri told us, “and he is smiling because deep winter has come and all his children have returned to him.” We went deeper into the cave, past the huts of the Reinalina and Yelenalina families, until we came to the Manwelina’s six huts, as deep as I thought we could go. Then I heard a baby squalling, and Yuri pointed into the darkness. “Deeper still are the birthing huts; it is my granddaughter you hear crying.”

  We sat on the dirty furs laid between the huts of the Manwelina family. Strictly speaking we were not of the Manwelina because our pretend ancestor, Senwe, had left the family to form one of his own. Nevertheless, Yuri welcomed us as family. He motioned for Liam and Seif, his two huge sons, to sit with us while his wife served us bowls of hot soup. Her name was Anala, which means “lifefire,” and she was a stout, well–formed woman with gray hair hanging to her waist. She smiled too readily and too much, and I did not like it when she immediately befriended my mother. I was suspicious of the way they hugged each other and alternately cupped their hands and whispered in each other’s ear. My mother, I thought, had become a Devaki woman a little too quickly.

  Yuri said, “My wife is happy to meet her near–sister, and who can blame her?” Then he looked into the sick yellow glow of the burning oilstones as if he were not happy at all. Plainly, he did not like my mother. To Soli he said, “Tell us of your journey, tell us of Pelasalia, the Blessed Isles.”

  While Soli told the carefully forged lies, the fake story of our “miraculous” journey, the people of the Devaki gathered around us. Where they could not sit, they stood with necks stretched and ears turned towards Soli, hoping to hear his memorable words. When he had finished, there were surprised gasps and cries of woe. Wicent, who was Yuri’s younger, shaggy brother, said, “It was a great tell. A sad tell, but a great tell. We will pray for the spirits of our near–mothers and fathers and children who died on the frozen sea.”

  What Soli had told them was that Senwe had not found the Blessed Isles, that he had found instead a frozen, barren waste where the living was hard and grim. Soli’s ancestors, he lied, had neither prospered nor multiplied. When his father, Mauli, had died, Soli said he had determined to return the survivors of the family to their ancestral home. “But Mallory’s wife, Helena, and my three grandchildren took a fever and died on the journey. And Bardo’s wife died in childbirth before we ever set out.”

  I rubbed the side of my nose in embarrassment because it was hard to listen to such a fraudulent story. To my surprise (and, I suppose, satisfaction), the Devaki seemed to believe every word of it.

  “We will pray for the children especially,” Yuri said. “When you arrived without your children I was afraid to ask you what had happened.”

  With feigned bitterness Soli rubbed his temples and said, “The Blessed Isles are a dream. To the south there is nothing but bare rocks and ice; the ice goes on forever.” He told them this, as we had planned, so that none of the Devaki would kill themselves journeying south, seeking a dream.

  But Liam, whose blue eyes were wild with bravery and dreams, said, “You should have gone farther south instead of returning to Kweitkel. South, where the ice is not endless but gives way to the Blessed Isles. The air is so warm, snow falls as water from the sky.”

  “There is only ice and death to the south,” Soli said.

  Liam looked at Katharine as she threw back the hood of her furs, and he mumbled, “Perhaps it is good that you came north.”

  I did not like the pugnacity of his strong face; I did not like the way he looked at Katharine as she brought the bowl of soup to her lips and blew on the steaming broth. Even by civilized standards of beauty he was too handsome a man, with his straight nose and long, pretty eyelashes. His hair and his luxurious beard were golden, a color I never liked to see on a human being. I suppose he had a charming smile—everyone said he did—but when he opened his mouth to smile at Katharine, all I could think was that his teeth were too large and fine, his lips too red, too full, too sensual.

  “To the south,” I said, for once agreeing with Soli, “there is only ice and death. Only a fool would seek death by ice.”

  “It is said, what is foolishness to a weak man, a strong man does bravely.”

  “After you’ve crossed a thousand miles of ice,” I said, “and had to kill your lead dog, then you may speak of bravery.”

  Liam looked at me quickly, as if realizing he could achieve more with flattery than insults. “Of course all the Senwelina were strong and brave to cross the frozen sea. To survive the storms, the cold of the Serpent’s Breath. My near–brother, Mallory, is very brave, and my near–sister is very brave and beautiful. It is good you have returned home so that such a beautiful woman does not have to marry Bardo, her brave cousin.”

  I hated the way Katharine smiled at him as he said this. It was a bold smile, an intimate smile laden with curiosity. I hated having to pose as her brother. I wanted to grab Liam by the collar, to shake him, to tell him that I was Katharine’s cousin, not Bardo. I wanted to tell him, to tell everybody that as soon as we returned to the City, Katharine would marry her cousin, her real cousin. Instead I clamped my jaws shut and said nothing.

  Yuri got up and walked to the front of the cave. He removed several ropes of meat hanging from the spit above the fire. He carried these back to us slung over his arm, careless of the juices leaking from the cracks in the blackened flesh. One of these ropes he presented to Soli, while he kept one and handed the remaining one to his brother.

  “We watched you coming from the south,” Yuri said. “It has been a poor year; the shagshay and the silk belly have fled to the Outer Islands, and Tuwa is so sick with mouthrot and his numbers so diminished that we may not hunt him.” He brought the charcoaled meat to his nose and sniffed. “We’ve had to hunt Nunki, the seal. But his numbers too are diminished because the fish do not swim as they used to. Nunki does not leap to our spears. This seal meat is the last of our meat. Liam would have eaten it for breakfast, and who could blame him? But we saw you coming from the south, and we knew that if you were men, not spirits as Wicent said you must be, you would have a hunger for meat.”

  So saying he threw back his head and opened his mouth. He dipped the meat rope in and severed a section of it with his strong, white teeth. The meat, I saw to my horror, was raw beneath the black
crust. Yuri bit and chewed quickly and swallowed and bit again; he swallowed and chewed and blood from the near–living meat ran over his red lips. As he chewed he made a sucking, slobbering sound as of wetness being slapped against wetness. He chewed with his mouth open, gustily pulping the tough meat.

  Soli watched him carefully and then did as the old man did, devouring the meat like a beast. Yuri ate a few more mouthfuls of meat, and he passed what was left to his oldest son, Liam. Soli, with his face held rigidly impassive as his jaws worked, offered me the disgusting, mutilated rope of meat. But I could not touch it. I, who had so eagerly planned this romantic quest for the secret of life—I was sickened and frozen by the piece of life dangling from Soli’s greasy fingers.