Neverness

by David Zindell

  I exchanged glances with my mother. Surely not even Soli could suspect either of us of risking our lives by sabotaging our own expedition?

  In the darkness before the dawn we debated who might have killed the radio. Bardo pointed out that there were many—the merchant pilots of Tria, for instance—who would not want our Order to possess the secrets of the Ieldra, whatever those secrets might be. “And there are aliens such as the Darghinni who’d be jealous if human beings proclaimed that the Ieldra favored our race. Also the Scutari, and for the same reason. And on the planets—how many of the religious orders would murder to ensure their mysteries and secrets were not replaced by a greater secret, a higher mystery? What of Heaven’s Gate, Vesper, even Larrondissement? And the made–worlds of the Aud Binary, by God? What of—”

  “Yes, we have enemies,” Soli said. “But we don’t let them handle our private things, do we?”

  “Ah...of course not, Lord Pilot.” Bardo chewed his mustache thoughtfully, and he asked the question on everyone’s mind, “What will we do now, Lord Pilot?”

  We all looked at Soli, waiting.

  “Yes, that’s the problem,” he said, “what to do now, since Mallory has failed to restrain himself. Should we wait for the jammer, or shouldn’t we?”

  I should mention that Soli had foreseen the possibility of losing one or more of the sleds (and thus losing the radio) through different sorts of disasters. So he had arranged for a jammer to rendezvous with us at our drop–off point south of the island if we were unable to radio the City. The date for the rendezvous was the first of deep winter, some two hundred days away.

  “No, we shouldn’t wait so long,” Soli said. “We’re no longer welcome here, are we? Perhaps we should leave today. We could drive our sleds east to the Outer Islands and wait there during break–up. Then next winter, when the sea freezes, we can make the rest of the way back to the City.”

  But Bardo did not like this plan, and he said, “What if we don’t find anything to eat in the Outer Islands? What if the sea breaks up early, before false winter? What if—”

  “We’re Alaloi now, aren’t we?” Soli mocked. “We’re supposed to be able to do what AlaIoi do best—survive. Yes, that’s a fine plan, isn’t it? We’ll leave as soon as the sleds are packed.”

  “But what if a storm comes up,” Bardo protested, “what if we lose our way?”

  “We’re pilots, too,” Soli said. “We’ll steer by the stars. We won’t lose our way.”

  All this time Katharine had remained silent. She sat on her bed combing her hair with her fingers, gazing into the flames of the fire, taking little interest in our arguments. But when Soli started gathering his furs together, she went over to him and covered his fingers with her hand. It was the first time I had seen her touch him.

  “That wouldn’t be wise, Father,” she said. “To journey east when…”

  “When what?”

  “I mean to say, it might be all right for you and everyone else to journey east and go hungry, but it would be wrong for me and…”

  “Wrong? Wrong why?”

  She dug her toes into the snow and said, “Because I’m pregnant, Father.”

  The silence in the hut was nearly absolute, like the silence of deep space. Soli stared at Katharine while Justine propped her head up on the bed and opened her eyes wide. I stared at Katharine, too.

  “Whose child is it?” Soli asked at last.

  I, too, was eager to know who the father was.

  “Is it Liam’s?” Soli asked.

  “Who knows?”

  “What did you say?”

  “How should you expect me to know whose child…I’ve been with so many men, do you see?”

  Soli squeezed his bleeding fingers with his other hand and said, “But there were precautions you were supposed to take, weren’t there? Methods of...these things that women do when—”

  “I didn’t want to become pregnant, Father.”

  “How careless of you!” Soli whispered.

  She smiled and said, “What has happened will happen; what will be has been.”

  “Scryer talk,” Soli muttered, “always this scryer talk.”

  “I’m sorry, Father.”

  Again she covered his hand with her own. After a while he turned his head away and spoke into the roof of the hut, “Well, what does it matter who the father is? What matters is that we return to the City so you can bear the child properly. When will the child be born?”

  “If one were to pick the most probable day, he would be born on the seventeenth of deep winter.”

  “Then we’ll stay here until ninety–third day in winter. We’ll meet the jammer on the first of deep winter. Mallory will apologize for his little crimes. We’ll make our peace and live here as peacefully as we can.” He turned his back to the radio, dripping blood over the components as he touched them. “Yes, Mallory will apologize and restrain himself so we can live here in peace.”

  Later that day I found Liam and apologized for raising my spear to him. It was a hard thing to do because he would not look at me eye to eye. I apologized to Yuri; I apologized to Anala, Wicent, Seif and Liluye, all the women and men of the Manwelina. Lastly, I apologized to Soli but I don’t think he listened to what I said. He sat in the hut with the radio in his lap, and he whispered, “When we return to the City we’ll do a genotyping. We’ll find out who the father of the child is.”

  I tried to sleep after that but I couldn’t; I lay awake all that day listening to the storm howl outside, wondering if the child growing in Katharine’s belly was my child, too.

  15

  The Eyes of a Scryer

  If you can look into the seeds of time,

  And say which grain will grow and which will not,

  Speak then to me, who neither beg nor fear

  Your favors nor your hate.

  from Macbeth, by The Shakespeare,

  Century of Exploration Fabulist

  And so we lived peacefully among the Devaki, even though it was often an uneasy peace. Time passed quickly. The storms of midwinter spring ended, and the clear, dry days of false winter began. When the ice of the sea broke up and melted, we hunted migrating cod and coho in the waters by the beach. We hunted shagshay across the land. We drove a small herd of them off a cliff, and after that there was no more hunger. Our life became settled, our days so filled with food and sunshine and warmth that I paid little attention to the sullen stares Liam shot me every time our paths crossed, in the cave or forest. I tried not to worry; I tried to ignore the feeling of impending doom that gripped me whenever I looked at Katharine. Each day I watched her belly swell, and I thought about the seed growing within. A thousand times I wondered whose child she carried. A thousand times I looked forward to the day when I could return to the City, deliver the child to the master splicer and say, “Tell me if I am a father.”

  I was not the only one concerned with fatherhood. Liam, and not a few of the Devaki men, must have wondered who the child’s father would be. But their wonder was different than mine. They had little knowledge of genetics, and they did not very much care who the genetic parents of their children were. The Devaki shared so many of their chromosomes that they rightly regarded all the children of the tribe as their near–sons and daughters. To be sure, they acknowledged that only one man could be a child’s blood–father, but what really mattered to them was marriage. What everyone wanted to know was: when Katharine’s time came, who would marry her and thus become the father of the newborn child? Everyone thought it would be Liam. Many times during those long days, Yuri came to Soli to arrange a marriage between our two families.

  “It is not good for a child to have no father,” he said one day after a successful hunt. “Have you seen how Katharine and Liam laugh together? And who can blame them? Katharine is a beautiful woman, and my son is a beautiful man, and they will have many beautiful children, if they are married.”

  And Soli said, as he said every other time, “Yes, marriage. We
ll, perhaps; we’ll wait and see.”

  This talk worried Soli so much that he avoided Yuri’s shambling approach whenever he could. He spent many nights with the radio, trying to remember how it worked. Often, he would watch Katharine sleeping; he would brood and think his solemn thoughts. One night my mother caught him staring, and she completely misread his look. I was sitting by the oilstones when she came up to Soli and said, “Katharine should abort the fetus. That’s what you were thinking. That’s what all of us think. Who knows who the father is? She should cleanse herself. There are ways, Alaloi ways. The root of wolf bush—it’s a natural abortifacient.”

  Soli was very quiet then and he did not move. He did not look at my mother. “Go away,” he whispered. “Go away.”

  I think it would have been better for my mother if he had spat on her. Above all things she hated to be scorned. (In this respect, she was exactly like Soli.) I cannot describe how her face contorted when he said this. Usually she made a religion of self–control, but that night her face betrayed shame, rage, fear and other dark emotions that I could not quite name. Her eyes began twitching, and to Soli she mysteriously said, “The Lord Pilot thinks he’s holy. But you can’t know. You’ve never known.”

  To this day I believe we might have avoided disaster, if we had had the foresight to leave as soon as we discovered the radio was dead, or if certain of us had practiced restraint. (Though Katharine would certainly disagree with me: What happened had always happened; as she might say, the seeds of disaster had been planted before either of us was born, perhaps before the stars were born.) How is it that we have an almost infinite ability to delude ourselves, to see truth before our eyes and proclaim it untrue? Why did I fool myself that the Devaki were a kind, forgiving people, a people who loved peace and harmony above all else? Or rather, why did I think they were only that (for they truly were kind, and their forgiveness would one day surprise me to tears)? Why did I conceive of them so simply? Why didn’t I see them as they really were?

  To believe our own feelings and thoughtways must be universally shared by others is the commonest of mistakes, made by aliens and human beings alike. Despite my experiences inside the Entity—perhaps because of them—I made this mistake. Once, I had entered the reality and smellspace of the alien, Jasmine Orange. How much simpler it should have been to understand a primitive people I had lived close to for half a year. I thought I did understand them. I lived as an Alaloi, and I thought my appreciation of the Alaloi life must be close to theirs. Did they perceive beauty as I did? Surely when hunting through the forest they loved, as I loved, the crunch of cotton cake beneath their skis, the cool air, the barking of the dogs, and everywhere, the spruce trees frozen with white and green, singing with snow loons, swaying in the wind. Certainly they lived closer to life than civilized people; in many ways they were happier, more alive, somehow more fully human. (I, too, found a kind of happiness in the mountains, despite the little evils of lice and dirt and blood tea. It still puzzles me how I became used to these things.) There were moments in the forest, or on the beach by the cold ocean, when I felt alive for the first time in my life. How ironic, I thought, that I had come to the island seeking the secret of life in the tissues of women and men only to find it in the rushing waves, in the cries of the eider and snow geese, in all the wild things of the world. How remote, how meaningless the quest seemed then! What was a god’s knowledge embroidered into a man’s chromosomes next to the infinitely greater wisdom of the world? I discovered within myself a profound will to live life as completely as I could. I took joy in most things I did, in building a fire and watching the snowflakes melt, joy in eating and coupling, joy even in hunting the animals. I came to believe the Devaki shared this joy; sheer joy, I thought, was what they lived for. Harmony, peace, joy—these were the elements of life lived naturally in a natural world.

  But there is more to life than joy. The Devaki knew this. In my bones and in my heart, I knew it too, though knowledge and acceptance are different things. This was the essence of my arrogance, my shortsightedness, my mistake: I had forgotten that nature was not only full of joy, but was tragic and violent, too. I did not understand how the Devaki could accept—could even love and embrace—life’s violence and tragedies. I underestimated their love of harmony, the true understanding of the World–soul’s intention that they call halla. I thought that in the forests of the Thousand Islands, peace and forgiveness were the essence of a people’s relations with others. In truth, I knew nothing of the sometimes terrible nature of halla.

  The supreme tragedy of life, I have always thought, is that it must end in death. Even for those who die too late, death must one day come. Although it is unpleasant to do so, I must here tell of Shanidar’s death because it was this event, and the events that followed, which led to my discovery of what the Devaki would do to preserve their halla relation with the world.

  The beginning of winter is usually a time of cool, bright days and spiky cold nights. There is snow perhaps every third day; the light powder falls softly and builds into sparkling, fluffy drifts. But sometimes, once every ten years, winter arrives suddenly, with teeth. The mornings dawn blue cold, with the air so harsh and dry that it does not snow. When we had lived among the Devaki for some two hundred days, the weather turned very cold, and everyone said it would be a long, ten–year winter. The Devaki were happy because there was a great harvest of baldo nuts, which they stored in leather barrels. There was frozen coho and sheefish; there was smoked shagshay and eider eggs and roasted silk belly, an abundance of food. The old people who had gone hungry the winter before were very happy, all except Shanidar whose tired body could not hold any more food. On fifty–third day, he began complaining of a hot pain in his belly. During the days that followed, I visited his chamber and tried to feed him soft–cooked eggs, but it did no good. His flesh fell inward; his old yellow skin tightened around his bones. Days passed and I marvelled that he remained alive. Often he joked that some men could suck their nourishment from the very air. At other times he coughed for air and could not speak. I wondered what sustained him, what inner fire kept him living long past his time.

  The end did not come quickly. On eighty–second day he began vomiting blood. For two days he drank no water, and when the third day dawned it was clear it would be his last. He called for me to carry him from his chamber to the front of the cave. I did as he asked; even swaddled in thick furs he was as light as a child, so light that I thought a good part of him had already gone over to the other side. As I set him down in front of the fires, only his eyes moved, perhaps trying to take in the wisps of clouds high in the sky.

  “Mallory Sealkiller is kind,” he said, and he coughed.

  I threw a few sticks on the fire and asked, “Are you warm enough?”

  “You know, I cannot feel my body, so how can I know if I am cold, hmmm?” And then, “Listen, yes, I am cold—so cold. I feel like I’ve fallen through a hole into the sea.”

  I built the fire up until it roared. Orange tongues of fire flickered outward, licking the rocky cavefront and melting a circle of snow four feet wide around the firepit. The heat burned my face. With our backs to the warm rock, we sat looking out over the long, snowy slope leading to the forest below.

  “That is better, it is good to be warm—Listen, how long will it be before the stars light the sky?”

  “Not long,” I lied.

  We sat there throughout the agonizingly long afternoon, talking of Katharine’s pregnancy and other concerns of the tribe. Shanidar loved to talk, even when he was so weak and ill that his breath rattled. He had to pause for long periods in between his words. The Devaki came and went. When they passed, they gave us a wide berth. The women especially, bent low beneath huge blocks of drinking snow, looked at us suspiciously, as if we were wolves intent upon stealing their children. Often during the past days, they had whispered and shaken their heads at my visits to Shanidar, perhaps wondering why I would choose to be with a man who had not died at the
right time. As I fed the fire and watched Shanidar’s shrunken lips struggle to shape his words, I wondered the same thing.

  Darkness fell at last and the stars came out, ten thousand glittering particles of ice against the black fur of night. “Losas shona,” he said, struggling to look at them with his half–blind eyes. He coughed for a while before gasping, “How I love these lights!—Could you throw some more wood on the fire, it is cold, hmmm? Listen, I think this deep winter will be dead cold early. It is still winter, isn’t it?—and already it is so cold. Listen, Mallory, my eyelashes are freezing from my breath. Could you wipe the ice from my eyes?”

  I wiped his eyes, and a fit of coughing racked his entire body. When it was over, he was silent and still. I thought he had died, but no, he gripped my hand suddenly, keeping me there while he grasped at life as a falling climber grasps at the rocks of a mountain. “It hurts,” he said. And then, “The lights in the sky are stars, you know. Burning hydrogen fuses into light—my father taught me that when I was a boy.”

  For a moment I was shocked at his use of the word “hydrogen.” I was not, of course, shocked because he knew the word—I remembered that he had journeyed to the stars in his youth—but because he had spoken the word to me as if I would know it, too. “Ydroogene?” I said, feigning puzzlement. “You use strange words, Old Man.”

  He clutched the edge of my fur, and he said, “You have fooled the others, but you have not fooled me, Man of the City. When I was younger—” And he coughed for a while. “You know...I remember what it was like to have strong muscles as you have—when I was a young man who had no legs, I went to the cutter named Rainer, and he grew me new legs, there in his cutting shop in the Farsider’s Quarter of the Unreal City. You see, I know a man of the City when I see one.”

  After much evasiveness and outright lying on my part, after I had looked around to make sure no one was near, I finally admitted that I was indeed a man of the City. “But how did you know?”

  “You can wear real shagshay furs and you can learn The Language and you can change your body—You know, I used to have a fine strong body, even though I had no legs—Listen, you can change everything but the way you think, hmmm? You cannot change your thoughtways—otherwise I would not be an outcast among my own people.”