Neverness

by David Zindell

  On the tenth day of midwinter spring, I discovered just how serious the slander against me was. It was a day of ice flurries and moist, heavy air. The snow was gray and leaden, and the trees were grayish green beneath the dark gray sky. The wind, blowing in fits and stops, smelled like wet slate. The few men who had gone hunting the day before—they were all Sharailina—returned to the cave in the closing grayness of twilight when the snow and the shadowed slopes and the low, dark sky seemed to merge into an impenetrable sea of gray. They had found meat, they said. Ouray and his son, Vishne, beat the snow from their gray furs as they stomped into the cave. They were followed by Olin the Ugly, a surly man with a great swatch of scar running down his forehead to his jaw. Olin was grasping the tail of a half–eaten animal, dragging the carcass towards the Sharailina’s huts. “Sabra meat!” he announced, and his ugly wife, Jelina, and the rest of his family came out of the huts smiling and eagerly sniffing the air.

  I looked up from the shaft of a new spear I was carving—I was standing on the snow–packed cave floor outside our hut—and I saw at once that Olin had little meat to share. I was wondering how Olin had found the wolf carrion when he began telling the story of their hunt.

  The day before, it seemed, the Sharailina men had tracked Totunye, the bear, through the southern forests down to the sea. When the snow began to fall, young Vishne wanted to return to the cave, but Olin led them down to the beach where, he said, he had heard rocks cracking and a distant roar. Ouray, though, thought the cracking was the sound of the heavy limbs snapping off the trees and the roar was only the roar of the wind. When they emerged from the forest they saw a white bear clawing a wolf apart against a mound of rocks. They rushed the bear, but Totunye, with his long, black claws and cowardly eyes, saw the scars on Olin’s face (this is the story as Olin told it), and he fled into the storm because he could see that Olin had long ago been scarred by another bear and was therefore invulnerable. And so they returned with the meat of the wolf which, as Ouray put it while staring at the face of his brother, “is leaner and tougher than bear meat but not as costly to take.”

  Several of the Manwelina had gathered around to listen to this story. Wicent’s son, Wemilo, and the ever–mischievous Choclo began making jokes. Seif, who looked much like his brother, Liam, except that he was not quite so handsome or large, covered his eyes and laughed at Olin. Then Liam came out of his hut and joined in the fun. “Are you certain that it is Sabra, the wolf?” Liam taunted Olin. He licked his red lips and flung back his long, blond hair. “I would want to be certain before I ate him, wouldn’t you?”

  Olin cursed and he ripped the tail from the base of the wolf’s carcass. He threw it at Liam, who was laughing and rubbing tears from his eyes.

  “Do I know Sabra when I see Sabra?” Olin shouted.

  Liam licked his lips again and cruelly joked, “Do I know Devaki when I see Devaki?” And then he laughed harder.

  He was referring to the unfortunate abomination which had fractured the honor of the Sharailina family. Once, years ago in false winter, Olin’s great grandfather had cached some shagshay meat for eating the following midwinter spring. When the time came, he and his family had dug up what they thought was shagshay thigh and they had eaten it. The next day Lokni, who was Liam’s great–grandfather, had discovered the meat was in reality part of a human corpse that a bear had uncovered from the graveyard above the cave. Apparently, the bear had dragged the human remains down to the snowfield below the cave where the Devaki sometimes store their meat. It was an understandable mistake, but ever after, for three generations the sons of Lokni had made a tradition of ridiculing the eating habits of the Sharailina family.

  Liam laughed and licked his lips and rubbed his belly, and he picked up the tail Olin had flung at him. He held it to his open mouth as if he intended to eat it. He made a gagging sound and said, “How I love Sabra’s furry tail, there is so much meat!” And then, “It makes me happy that you are certain this is wolf meat. But I must ask you one thing.” And here he turned to Seif and shook his head with fake sadness. He looked back at Olin, all the while running his finger through the shredded gray fur. “Does a wolf have gray fur?” he asked. “I myself have only seen white wolves; perhaps the Sharailina know a different kind?”

  Olin bent to the carcass and kicked it with his foot. “The fur is white,” he said. “It is only the lack of light that makes it seem gray.”

  “It is as gray as the fur of a dog,” Liam taunted.

  “No,” Ouray said, defending his brother, “it is white. It has been stained gray by dirt and sea–salt.”

  Liam, who thought he was a funny man, suddenly dropped down on his hands and knees, and he pulled his golden head back and let loose a series of barks. “It is a dog,” he said as he flopped over and rolled about in his mocking imitation of a dog scratching his back. “You eat the meat of a dog.”

  I watched this ridiculous scene as I twirled my spear beneath my carving flints. I realized what should have been obvious all along: Olin and his brother had found the cairn of stones that Bardo and I had built over the body of my lead sled dog. The torn carcass lying by Olin’s hut was what remained of Liko.

  “Dog meat!” Liam said. “The Sharailina hunt dogs!”

  Olin protested again that it was indeed a wolf. He moved to flay it with his knife, and I crossed the cave as quickly as I could. “It is a dog,” I said. I explained how the thallow had killed Liko, how Bardo and I had buried him. “Don’t cut him—he was brave and loyal, and it is not right to eat him.”

  By this time the whole Devaki tribe had emerged from their huts. They encircled us. The voluptuous Sanya, who was suckling her newborn girl, said, “It is not right for the mothers to grow so hungry their milk dries like puddle–melt in the sun. Mallory forgets that meat is meat; meat is neither brave nor loyal.”

  All this time Liam was rolling on his back, laughing in between his derisive dog sounds. “Rart, rart, rart,” he barked. “Rart, rart, rart, rart.” And then he looked up at Olin and said, “I hope the shagshay leap to our spears soon. Or else we will be meat for the hungry Sharailina.”

  This proved too much for Olin. He shook his long, flint knife in the air, cursed and fell upon Liam. Olin’s knees crushed the wind from Liam’s chest—I heard the whumph of air escape from Liam’s lips. Someone called out, “Watch the knife!” and for some reason which made no sense to me at the time, Olin dropped the knife. They wrestled, then. On the hard snow, they grappled and heaved and rolled. Liam managed to trap one of Olin’s arms between their bodies. He used this momentary advantage to jab at Olin’s eyes with his long fingernails. I was sure that he intended to gouge his fingers into the sockets, to feel for the eyestrings, to blind him. Olin had been mauled by a bear once; it made me sick to see the bearlike Liam mauling him again. “Not his eyes!” I yelled, and I stepped forward, planted my foot, and whacked Liam’s temple with the butt end of my spear. He tumbled away from Olin, stunned, holding the side of his head. The blow had cut him; blood flowed from between his splayed fingers, trickling down his thick, golden beard.

  He cursed me and spat at my legs. He shouted, “What is wrong with you that you cannot tell sport from killing? Your brains have softened like seal fat—but that is the way with sister–seducers. Did Katharine suck out your brains along with your seed?”

  I think I tried to kill him, then. As Olin and Yuri and all the people of the families looked on, I raised my spear back behind my head. I clutched the shaft’s leather grip, dimly aware that Bardo and Justine and my trembling mother were watching me from behind a wall of astonished Devaki. “No!” I cried, and straight ahead of me as I sighted on Liam’s throat, there was Katharine standing between two Manwelina women. She was staring at me unashamedly as if she knew I would not kill him. “No!” I cried again, and I began to whip my arm forward. But there was a sudden resistance; I could no more cast the spear than I could uproot a shatterwood tree. All at once I felt other hands on the shaft, and someone r
ipped the spear from my grip. I turned and there was Soli holding the spear as he would a dead fish. His lips were hard against each other, as white as ice. He was holding his breath; beneath his forehead’s white skin pulsed a thick vein.

  Yuri came forward and grabbed the spear from Soli. He broke it across his knee. His eye flashed on me like a rocket beacon, and he said simply, “Strange you forget we are not hunters of men.” Then he turned away from me, leading the rest of his family back to their huts.

  Olin came over to me and scratched his scarred face. “It was only a game,” he said. “Why do you think I dropped my knife? Do you think Liam would have blinded me, his near–brother?”

  He looked at the halves of the spear lying crooked on the snow, laughed nervously and walked away, repeating, “It was only a game.”

  Soli stood there glaring at me, stiff and cold as a tree. Katharine bowed her head to us and went into our hut. After a few moments Bardo, Justine and my mother went inside, too. Soli and I were alone in the middle of the darkening cave. I thought he might never move or speak again. Then he whispered, “Why, Pilot? Why are you so reckless? Tell me, please.” With his heel he ground the spear into the snow. “Why do you do what you do?”

  I stared down at the spear, biting my lip.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” I said truthfully.

  “You’re dangerous, Pilot. It’s been said before. And now, this...this situation, the expedition, everything we do here—it’s all become too dangerous, hasn’t it?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Yes, too dangerous to stay here any longer. Let’s hope Katharine has most of her samples because it’s too dangerous for her to collect anymore. Tomorrow we’ll radio the City for a jammer. We’ll say our goodbyes and that will be the end.”

  “Do you think that’s necessary?” I asked. “To slink back to the City like whipped dogs, then?” I do not know why I said this—probably just to be contrary. In truth, I was dying to return to the City, to immerse myself in the beautiful but meaningless study of mathematics.

  He grew very angry after I said this. I thought the blood vessels in his eye might rupture, leaving him blind. “Yes, it’s necessary,” he whispered. And then he said the forbidden word, “I’ve decided. We’ll leave tomorrow.”

  He rubbed his eyes, whirled and left me. I stood alone wondering why I was so reckless, wondering why I did the things I did.

  14

  The Radio

  Preserve art above artifact; preserve memory above all.

  saying of the remembrancers

  At dawn the next day the Reinalina, Yelenalina and Sharailina families packed their long travelling sleds. Ouray and Julitha of the Sharailina, and their children, Vishne, Namiley and Emily the Younger, tied the binding lashes and harnessed the dogs reluctantly, as if they were uncertain that driving into the storms of midwinter spring would be a wise thing to do. But Olin and the heads of the other families were adamant in their decision to leave. They cited hunger and the scarcity of the animals as their reason for seeking the islands of the west. They cited other reasons, too. “We will journey to Sawelsalia,” Olin announced. “There the Patwin will share mammoth steaks dripping with fat. There the men do not raise their spears to one another.”

  Yuri, who stood there in his worn underfurs shaking his head sadly, said, “This is a bad day for the Devaki. Why do you think our far–cousins on Sawelsalia will have meat to share? Perhaps they will not welcome you with mammoth steaks; perhaps they will not welcome Devaki with the same love Devaki welcome Devaki.”

  But Olin replied, “Perhaps the Devaki have grown too many to live in this small cave. And if the mammoth herds of our far–cousins are sick and there is not enough meat, we will eat tripe until the sea thaws. Then we will build boats and hunt Kikilia when he comes up to breathe.” He turned to me and said, “Goodbye, Man of the Southern Ice. Perhaps you, too, should return to your home.” So saying he slapped his son, Yasha, on the back of his neck, whistled to his dogs, and then he and his family disappeared into the forest. A little while later, the other families were gone, too.

  Yuri scolded his little grandson, Jonath, away from the crackling fire at the mouth of the cave. He said, “It is sad to speak of killing whales. Better to sacrifice the mammoth herds than to hunt Kikilia, who is wiser than we and strong as God. But Olin’s family is hungry so who can blame him?”

  “It is wrong to kill whales,” I agreed. I turned to the east where the distant snowfields were flowing with the blood of the rising sun, and I was full of blame and other emotions.

  Yuri squinted his eye and mumbled, “Red sky at morning, travellers are mourning—it is a bad day for travel, I think.” And then, “I must tell you that there are those among my family—Liluye, Seif, Jaywe, and of course Liam—who say that you and your family should leave, too. I, myself, and Wicent and Old Ilona, believe you should stay, but the others...after you raised your spear to Liam, well, who can blame them?”

  I looked at Yuri, with the rancid grease shiny on his face, and I was suddenly sick of him and his little saying: “Who can blame them?” I felt an urge to stumble against him, to “accidentally” push him down into one of the puddles that the fire had melted from the snow, to watch as he splashed in icy water and say, “Who could blame me?” I did not want to hear any more words of wisdom from his thick, chapped, greasy lips.

  “Soli has decided we will leave,” I said. “So we will leave, tomorrow or the day after.”

  “Well, Soli is a wilful man, and Soli has decided you will leave, and who can blame him?”

  But our departure from the Devaki tribe was not to be so simple. Early that morning Soli freed the radio from its hiding place in his sled, and he went out into the woods to find a space of privacy. He tried to radio the City. He failed. He tried all morning and half the afternoon until a fierce storm began covering the trees in sheet ice, forcing him inside the cave. When evening came, we all crowded inside our hut around the oilstones. On the white furs at the center of the hut Soli placed a glossy black box the size of a large man’s forearm. He pointed at it and told us, “The radio is dead.”

  “That’s impossible,” Bardo said as he toyed with the hairs of his beard. He was half–lying on my bed, eating some nuts he had found. “The radio dead? No, no, that can’t be.”

  My mother and Justine were busy on the far side of the hut adjusting the furs atop the drying rack. The hut was warm, so warm that the curved walls were gleaming with a glaze of water and ice. My mother brushed drops of water from the silky shagshay fur. Her strong face was yellow in the yellow light, and she tilted her head to the side and asked, “How do you know the radio is dead?”

  “If it were dead, that would be too bad,” Bardo added, as he watched Justine shake out a fur. Much to Soli’s annoyance, he liked to watch her whenever he had the chance, and worse, he liked to talk to her, as one friend talks to another. “But whoever heard of a dead radio?” He nonchalantly popped a nut into his mouth, but I could tell he was nervous and worried.

  “Of course the radio can’t be dead,” Justine said. She looked at Bardo and smiled her beautiful smile. “That’s quite a thought, isn’t it? You might just as well imagine that the sun won’t rise tomorrow! It’s impossible for these things to die, it really is. The Lord Tinker made the radio himself. How could the radio be dead?”

  Bardo grabbed his stomach and let out a long groan, which was answered by a whining from the tunneiway. Because two of our dogs were sick, we had brought them inside the hut, sheltering them from the storm. “Tusa,” Bardo called out, “Lola...do you think the radio is dead? Bark three times if you think it is dead.” He waited for a moment, but the dogs were silent in their snow holes, so he said, “You see, everyone agrees, the radio can’t be dead.”

  “Quiet!” Soli hissed, kneeling over the radio. “Restrain yourself, if you can.”

  “Have you wondered if the radio is only ill?” Katharine asked. She had the crypt beneath h
er bed open; I could barely watch her sorting her samples. Bent over as she was, her body seemed fuller than usual, and her hair fell in a lustrous black curtain down her shoulders and breasts to the floor. She held up one of the spheres and emptied it. Frothing blue krydda the color of her eyes spilled out over the snow, melting it into indigo slush. I smelled the preservative’s pungent, peppermintlike aroma, and she covered the slush with handfuls of fresh snow. “Now that the families are gone, these samples are all...” As she counted her samples one by one, she showed Justine the most precious of them.

  Justine said, “If these samples are all we have, well, I’m sure they’ll be enough; they’ll have to be enough because they must have been difficult to collect, and there are no men left to collect samples from, except the Manwelina men, of course, and you’ve... and you’ve been with most of them, haven’t you, Katharine?”

  I did not want to look at the spheres, at the thick, white glue of the Devaki men. I went to the center of the hut and picked up the radio. To Soli I said, “Perhaps Katharine is right. Perhaps the radio is only ill.”

  Soli watched me turn the radio over and over in my hands.

  “Ah, but if the radio were only ill,” Bardo pointed out, “why doesn’t it heal itself? Lord Pilot? Have you asked the radio if it is ill, Lord Pilot?”

  “Yes, that was the first question asked,” Soli said. “But the radio is silent; therefore the radio is dead.”

  “It’s this damn cold,” Bardo said, playing with his mustache. “It could freeze the bowels of anything.”

  “Have we considered everything?” my mother asked. “All the possibilities?”

  “What possibilities?” Soli asked.

  For a while, we debated possibilities: Perhaps the Lord Tinker had forgotten to monitor his radio for our signal; perhaps a sunspot or pulse of radiation from the Vild had at last reached Neverness, distorting the propagation of radio waves through the atmosphere; perhaps the Order had at last fallen into schism and civil war—what if the Tinker’s Tower had been thrown down and all the wonderful devices of the tinkers had been destroyed?