Neverness

by David Zindell

  The marker–bob rose.

  I picked up my harpoon, waiting for the marker–bob to fall. As it disappeared into the aklia, with both hands I grasped the long harpoon high above my head. I drove it down into the snow. It slid easily through the crust, and then there was the sickening resistance of the harpoon’s barb piercing the seal. A deep, anguished bellow resounded beneath the snow as the seal called to me. I shouted, “Lo moras li Nunki” and I gripped the leather cord attached to the harpoon’s head. There was a violent pull which nearly jerked me off my feet. I dug my heels into the snow, leaning backwards, straining against the cord while I wrapped it around my back.

  “Mallory moras li Nunki!” I heard Bardo call out. And then, echoing across the ice from aklia to aklia, growing ever fainter, the cry: “Mallory moras li Nunki!”

  I heaved backwards trying to pull the seal from his hole. There was a stab of pain in my sore knee. I gained a few feet. And then, forward again as the seal fought me and backwards, and suddenly, beneath the snow–bridge, the seal surged with life and pulled me off my feet. I slid towards the aklia with my face and chest scraping the snow. If I did not let go, the seal would pull me down through the crumbling snowbridge, down into the killing sea. I gripped the cord more tightly. I tried to flip onto my back and rotate my heels forward, to dig them into the snow. But I fouled my legs on the cord even as the snowbridge began to buckle and collapse. I was helplessly ensnarled by the tightening cord.

  “Let go!” a voice boomed out. But I could not let go. Then the cord tightened behind me. I turned to see Bardo, with his eyes bulging and his fat red cheeks puffed out, heaving against the cord. “Pull, damn you!” he shouted.

  I found my feet and pulled at the cord. I stared down into the open aklia. From beneath the blocks of snow floating and bobbing atop the churning sea there emerged a great, black seal. High on his side, above the flipper, the base of the harpoon’s head stuck out of a bloody hole in his skin. I heaved so hard I thought the harpoon would pull free. But it held, and foot by foot we hauled the seal out of the aklia onto the snow. I was horrified because the old bull was still alive. He let loose a cough that sounded like an exhausted sigh, and bright arterial blood sprayed from his mouth onto the snow.

  “Mori–se!” I said to Bardo, “kill him!”

  But Bardo shook his head and pointed north at Yuri and Liam, who were running to help us. It was my privilege and duty to kill the seal, as cowardly Bardo reminded me. I had promised to do so, but I could not.

  “Ti Mori–te,” Bardo said, and he handed me a stone maul. “Quickly, Little Fellow, before I start crying.”

  I swung the maul in an arc down against the seal’s forehead. There was a thwack of granite against flesh and a whoosh of air as if the seal were expressing gratitude at being released from his agony. And then silence and stillness. I looked into the seal’s dark, liquid eyes but the life was gone.

  Yuri and Liam stopped at the edge of the aklia. They were puffing for air. Yuri examined the seal and immediately prayed for his spirit. “Pela Nunkiyanima,” he said, “mi alasharia la shantih Devaki.” He turned to me and said, “Look at him, Mallory! Never have I seen such a seal! He is a grandfather of a seal, a great–grandfather of a seal! It is a miracle that you and Bardo alone could pull him from his hole.”

  Soli came running to us, as did Wicent and the rest of the Manwelina family. They surrounded the seal, nudging his blubber with the toes of their boots and touching his dark skin. Liam pulled at his thick lower lip and said, “This is a four–man seal. Once, when I was a boy, my father and Wicent and Jaywe pulled up a three–man seal, and that was the largest seal I had ever seen.” He looked at Bardo and me with a mixture of envy and awe and asked, “How did two men pull up a four–man seal?”

  Yuri turned his eye to his son and explained simply, “Bardo is as strong as two men, I think, and today Mallory killed his doffel, and so you must not wonder how two men pulled a great–grandfather of a four–man seal from the sea.” But for a long time he looked at the huge carcass lying on the snow as if he wondered how we had done such a thing.

  I had killed a seal.

  I scooped a handful of snow into my mouth. I leaned over and opened the seal’s mouth. His smell was fermy and strong. From my lips, I let a stream of cold water trickle into his mouth, giving him a drink so he would not be thirsty on his journey to the other side.

  Soli caught my attention and gave me a slight nod. Among the Alaloi it is a given, the most basic thing, that hunters who have taken an animal will immediately eat their fill. Since I had killed the seal, it was my privilege to begin the butchering. But I hesitated so long I could almost feel Soli’s eyes drilling into me. Then I picked up my knife. I split the seal’s belly open, and I cut around the liver. It was bloody, horrifying work. To Liam, as I had promised, I handed the purple, steaming liver. He sullenly cut it into strips and distributed them among the other hunters. “Mallory was lucky,” he said.

  I ate a piece of liver. The taste was rich and steely and good. I could hardly believe I had killed a seal.

  “Mallory Sealkiller has brought us luck,” Yuri said. “Bardo the Strong and Mallory Sealkiller, they have brought us luck. Tomorrow, I think, there will be many seals.”

  Almost everyone was smiling and seemed happy. There was one man, however, Yuri’s cousin’s son, who was not happy. His name was Jinje, and he was a stocky, ugly man with a crooked leg. He had frozen his feet waiting for his nonexistent seal. Yuri helped him get his boots off, then held him while he stuck his ugly, hairy, white, frozen feet into the seal’s carcass to thaw them. Then Liam cut him a piece of liver which he gulped as if he were a dog.

  The men fell on the seal with their knives, hacking out choice organs and cuts of meat. Wicent’s youngest son, Choclo, opened the stomach and found it full of notothins and ice perch and other fish. With his impish, beardless face and his small hands, he was really more of a boy than a man, but he was an expert with his fish knife. In no time at all he scaled an ice perch, gutted it and found yet a smaller fish in its stomach. After cutting off its head and scales he swallowed it whole. All around me the other men were busy cutting and swallowing. The snow near the seal was slippery with fat and spattered blood. It was a terrible thing, this hunger of men. Their bellies groaned and rumbled while their teeth tore at huge chunks of meat. It was astonishing how much meat a single man could eat. I myself ate most of the heart because that is where the AlaIoi believe the soul dwells. We fifteen hunters, our bellies bloated and our beards crusty with frozen blood, must have eaten a hundred pounds of meat. It was a serious business, this devouring of ready flesh, and we ate without pause or conversation. The only sounds were the cracking of our jaws and smacking lips, and the fatty belches of Bardo and Choclo competing to see who could let loose the loudest. Like beasts we first ate the choicer cuts of meat and then put our teeth to less desirable tidbits. Liam, perhaps impatient with the pace of the feast, tore out a rib which he broke apart with his fine teeth. He sucked down the marrow as a baby does milk. We ate for a long time, stopping only because dusk was approaching and it would be deadly to be caught in the open after dark.

  The men of the Manwelina returned to their aklias to build snow–huts for the night. After moving our sleds and dogs closer, we fed the whining beasts a slop of intestines, blubber and lungs. Then Soli and I built ourselves a hut near the aklia. I cut blocks of snow which Soli stacked one atop the other, filling in the chinks with ice–powder. Bardo held his belly and belched, watching us work. “Oh, my poor stomach,” he moaned, “what have I done to you!” To Soli he said, “It’s selfish of me, I know, to watch while you work, but you’re doing so well without me.”

  Indeed, Soli was doing well, trimming out the hut and fitting the key block as expertly as any Alaloi. Soon the hut was done and we flopped our sleeping furs inside. The north wind blew a continuous sheet of spindrift across the darkening sea. In silence we each turned to the south and performed our “piss–before
–sleeping.” Bardo went to bed while Soli and I staked Tusa near the tunnel of the hut. We hoped he would let out a howl or bark in case a bear sniffed out the seal’s carcass and came to explore.

  For a while we watched the stars wink into brightness in the sky. Soli drew the hood of his parka tightly over his head. “You were lucky to kill the seal—such extraordinary luck.”

  So, I was lucky to have killed a great, noble animal.

  “You can’t always count on luck,” he said. “One day the weight of antichance will fall against you. You’ll be standing under a building at the wrong time or perhaps one night on a back gliddery you’ll cross paths with a poor harijan only to find he’s a slel necker come to steal your plasm. Or perhaps you’ll try to pierce the Vild’s inner veil and lose yourself—”

  “I don’t believe in chance,” I said.

  “Yes, how forgetful of me, Mallory must pursue his fate.”

  “Don’t you think it’s strange beyond coincidence that the seal chose my aklia?”

  “Yes,” he mocked, “the seal’s anima sought your hole so you could grasp your fate. Well, how does it feel to be a killer?”

  I wiped the water from my nose and said, “It feels…natural.” In truth, it did feel natural, although I did not tell him how I dreaded taking my place in the natural order of things.

  “Is that true?” he asked me.

  I placed my mittens over my face to warm the muscles. Talking was difficult and my words were coming out like slush. I did not want to discuss my fears with him so I said, “You’re a tychist, aren’t you?”

  “You think so?”

  “It’s the creed of older pilots, I’ve heard.”

  He rubbed his temples and said, “Yes. Those pilots who rely on possessing a fate grow careless and do not grow old.”

  “But you’ve taken greater chances than I have. ‘Soli the Lucky’ the journeymen used to call you when I was at Resa.”

  “Calculated chances, every one.”

  “But chances, nevertheless.”

  I think he smiled then, but it was already so dark I could not be sure. He stomped his boots against the snow, trying to keep warm. “One day the weight of antichance will fall against me, too.” And again he mocked me, saying, “It’s my fate.”

  I worked my jaws silently before asking him, “You don’t believe it could be a man’s fate to be lucky, then?”

  “No,” he said, “not forever.”

  Then he yawned, knocked the spindrift from his furs, and entered the hut to sleep for the night. I stood looking at the purple–black mountains of Alisalia outlined against the glowing horizon.

  It was my fate to have killed a great, noble seal.

  At last the wind found me beneath my furs, and I began to shiver. I crowded into the small hut and collapsed next to Bardo, who was snoring loudly. I lay stiffly awake for a long time before the warmth of my furs lulled me and I slept. But I did not sleep soundly. It was a night of twisting and sweating, a night of dreams. One of my dreams I remember well: I dreamed I killed a great seal; I dreamed that the seal’s sons and daughters, not wanting to be alone, leapt to our spears so they could join their father on the other side of the day.

  The next morning we killed nine seals, and Soli said that we were very lucky.

  11

  The Old Man of the Cave

  Live? Our servants can do that for us.

  from Axel, by Villiers de Lisle Adam,

  Machine Century Fabulist

  The Devaki say the firefalls is the most beautiful sight in the world. It is a wall of light created by the excitation and discharge of oxygen atoms high in the atmosphere. (The Devaki, of course, do not know this. They believe the pale, ghostly fire is alive with the spirits of their ancestors. Sometimes they whistle to the cold lights, hoping to draw them nearer.) On certain nights in deep winter the firefalls hangs from the northern sky like a luminous curtain of green and rose. It has a delicate, almost other–worldly beauty. But there is beauty and there is beauty. The Devaki have two words for beauty: shona, which they use to describe sunsets and mountains and trees fresh with snow, and halla, which has a different meaning altogether. In essence a thing—or event—is halla if it is in harmony with nature; more precisely, if it “sees the intention of the World–soul.” Thus it is halla for the Devaki not to slaughter sick mammoths, just as it is halla to die at the right time. Almost anything can be halla. A spear, if properly balanced and well–made, is also halla. The Devaki have come to call halla many things that would not at first thought seem to possess beauty of any kind. Being human, they often confuse the World–soul’s intention with their most basic desires. Even though the scooped–out carcass of a seal is the ugliest of sights, I have heard Yuri declare it halla. Does not a single seal feed the entire Manwelina family for three days? And is it not the World–soul’s intention that the Devaki nourish themselves and thrive? So a gutted seal is halla, and ten seals laid out on the sleds of returning hunters are hallahalla because in reality nothing is more beautiful to the Devaki than the sight of fresh meat. The night of our lucky hunt we unloaded our sleds near the entrance fires, and the whole cave emptied of women, men and children, each of them touching the seals and crying out, “Losna halla! Li pela Nunki losna–nu hallahalla!” Only one of them, an old woman named Lorelei, happened to notice the firefalls shimmering in the north. “Loshisha shona,” she said, looking at the lights, which that evening were like an evanescent, scarlet robe. “Lo morisha wi shona gelstei.”

  While we were dividing up the beautiful seals, Yuri came up to me and said, “I must find someone to take a meat offering to the Old Man of the Cave.”

  I looked deeply into the cave, at the lava pendant almost lost in the shadows. I was confused because I thought the Devaki did not make offerings to idols or to natural rock formations accidentally shaped in the image of an old man. “I do not understand,” I said.

  He rubbed his forehead with his bloody fingers. He said, “There is one of the Devaki who lives alone in a chamber off the side of the cave. He is your great near–uncle, and I must ask you, since you killed the first seal and it is your privilege, will you do the honor?”

  “Why does he live alone?”

  “He lives alone,” Yuri said, “because he committed a great crime long ago, and no one wishes to live with him. He is the other ‘Old Man of the Cave.’”

  “Did he murder someone?” I asked.

  “No, it is worse than that. He lived when he should have died. When it was time for him to make the great journey, his father became filled with the volcano spirit and saved him from the death–by–ice. And is it not said that many try to die too late but few too soon? We are obliged, are we not, to die at the right time? Well, this man did not die at the right time. He was born a marasika without legs, and when the midwife tried to smother him, his father beat her and stole his son back to life.”

  Yuri’s story seemed achingly familiar. I tried to ignore the shouts of all the happy people kicking up the snow and swarming around the meat, and I asked, “What is this man’s name?”

  And he covered his eye with his scarred hand as he said, “His name is Shanidar, son of Goshevan. Goshevan, who killed my grandfather, Lokni, for trying to prevent this crime. Goshevan came to the Devaki to live, but when his son was born without legs, he stole Shanidar away across the eastern ice to the Unreal City where the shadow–men made him new legs. And when Shanidar had grown to be a man, he returned and said, “I am Shanidar, and I have come to live with my people.” But everyone knew it was too late for him to live, and so my father, Nun, told him he could spend the rest of his days in the chamber off the side of the cave.”

  We walked into the cave and he pointed at a long dark gash in the cave’s wall behind the huts of the Sharailina family. I assumed it was a side vent leading to Shanidar’s chamber. He blinked his eye and said, “Now he is an old man who cannot kill his own meat. And who can blame him? He is a little crazy from the hell of the living–de
ath, this poor, lonely man named Shanidar.”

  I nodded my head as if it all made sense.

  “Meat must be taken to Shanidar so that he does not make the double crime of dying too soon.”

  I nodded my head that this was so.

  “Shanidar would be eager to hear the story of your journey across the southern ice because he himself has made a long journey.”

  I nodded my head very slowly and asked, “There is no one else to fetch his meat?” I did not want to see this old man who had once known the cutting shops—and other sights—of the City.

  Yuri sighed. “The honor usually falls to Choclo. But tonight, I must ask you: Will you take Shanidar his portion of this beautiful meat?”

  I tried looking through the side vent into Shanidar’s chamber, but I saw nothing except blackness. “Yes,” I said, “I will take Shanidar his meat.”

  I piled some hunks of meat together and wrapped them in a skin. Through the side vent of the cave I climbed, stumbling against blocks of rock projecting from the upward–sloping, black floor. The walls were cold and close around me. I bumped my head on a blade of rock and cursed. Ahead of me and above was a faint yellow glow, as of coldflame lighting a distant window. Somewhere water was dripping; the pup–plop was too loud and very near. I smelled wet rock and a sickly, sweet aroma that made my throat gag and clutch. From the walls of rock surrounding me reverberated a moaning that was at once full of irony and sorrow, pity and pain. Occasionally the moaning would break into a high–pitched ululation and then soften to a sing–song gurgle. I drove myself upward towards this pitiful, demented wailing, dreading what I would find. I wondered that the fabulous Shanidar should still be alive. He must be very old, I thought, very old.