Neverness

by David Zindell

  He asked me why we had come to the Devaki, and I told him. I do not know why I trusted him. The night was deepening around us, cold and bottomless as space, and I repeated the message of the Ieldra: “The secret of man’s immortality lies in our past and in our future. If we search, we will discover the secret of life and save ourselves.” I told him of my journey into the Entity. Even though I no longer believed it, I said that the secret of secrets might be found in the oldest DNA of human beings. I told him all these things as the fire burned low and the stars showered streamers of faint light into our eyes.

  “You are a pilot, then? Listen, I am an ignorant man—you know, my father taught me as best he could—you are a pilot, and you might think all the things I have said to you this past year are nonsense, hmmm? But no, you know, it is not nonsense.”

  His coughing had stopped only to be replaced by a liquid wheezing. Every word forced from his throat was gasped out in between clutching breaths. “Listen, the Devaki have their own knowledge so you must understand that everything I said to you about killing your doffel and standing apart from other men—and do you remember what I said about evil and good, hmmm?—all that I’ve told you is true.”

  “I’ve listened to everything you’ve said,” I told him truthfully.

  “Then listen to the plea of an old man. Do not trust the message of the gods. When I was born without legs here in this cave—Listen, this is the saddest story I know—because I was born a marasika without legs, in deep winter they dumped me into the snow where I froze to death. My father brought me frozen to the cutters of the City, but they could do nothing to help me. So my father, my poor father who was Goshevan, son of Jaharawal whose father was Pesheval Kulpak of Summerworid, my father brought me to Agathange. There the men—do you know this, Pilot?—the men are like gods. They brought me back to life so that I could return to the cave of my birth—how kind of them, hmmm? You know, they made me alive again, and they could easily have grown me new legs, but they did not. Why? Listen, this is the truth: The gods are tricksters, and when they remake a man, they always leave something undone. To humble him. So do not believe this message of your Ieldra about the secret of life because those gods have obviously left unsaid the simplest thing, which is this: The secret of life is more life.” And here he tried to lift his body towards the opening of the cave. I turned my head and listened to high–pitched barking and squeals of childish laughter. “Listen, do you hear the sounds of Jonath and Aida playing with the puppies? The secret of life is making children—my father told me this when I was a boy, but I did not believe him.”

  I thought about fathers and sons, and I listened to him choke for words.

  “If you ever have a son, you must be kind to him, Mallory.”

  I rubbed my nose and said, “You don’t know the rule of our Order, but I should tell you: pilots may not marry.” I thought of Katharine growing bigger day by day with someone’s child. “I’ll never have a son,” I said.

  “Oh, it is very bad to go over to the other side without sons and daughters, I should have believed my father.” He coughed and he moaned; he tried to say something that I could not understand.

  “Does it hurt?” I asked.

  He rubbed his arm weakly and said, “You know, when the Devaki go over they are never afraid because they have sons and daughters to pray for their ghosts.” He raised his eyes to the sky and spoke so softly I had to strain to hear him, “But I’m afraid, Pilot.” And then, “Oh, it hurts, here in my arm and in my throat—” He coughed hard once and grabbed his chest. “Like ice, oh, listen…” and here he began to mumble and groan. I think he said something like, “Shona los halla; halla los shona,” and then he closed his eyes and gasped for air. After a while—it was a long time, really—his breathing seemed to stop. I held the corner of his robe under his nose to see if his exhalation would move the silky white hairs. But the fur remained unruffled because he had no breath. I would have felt for the pulse in his throat, but I did not want to touch him. I was afraid he was dead.

  I stood up and drew my furs tightly around me. The air was so cold I thought my eyes would freeze. I watched him for a long time, until the skin of his old, shrivelled face began hardening like marble. And then for no good reason—for whatever he had been was gone, swallowed like a ray of light down a black hole—I raised my head to the night and prayed for his ghost: “Shanidar, mi alasharia la shantih Devaki.” His mouth and lips were frozen into a slack mask; his face seemed both too familiar and utterly alien. I could not look at him so I covered him with his fur. I turned my back to his body and went to find Yuri.

  I had never before seen a dead human being.

  I hurried through the cave, stumbling across the pitted, uneven floor. The oilstones had burned low, and the huts were dim globes lost in darkness. I came to the lava pendant in the middle of the cave. It was the Old Man of the Cave, smiling his dark smile into the cave’s black depths. For no reason, I slapped the rock sculpture on its face. The slap cracked through the air. I struck the Old Man of the Cave again, all the while thinking about Shanidar. I wondered if everyone felt as I did upon seeing a dead human being for the first time: I was terrified of dying myself and ecstatic because I was still alive. Later would come mourning and melancholy, but at the moment I was glad that it was he who was dead, and not I. I felt intensely alive; possibly at no moment in my life had I ever tasted life so poignantly. I slapped the sculpture, and my hand stung. I thought the secret of life must be feeling intensely alive.

  I woke Yuri in his hut and told him that his near– cousin had died. While he roused the rest of his family—for no event among the Devaki is as important as a death—I went to get Soli and the others. We gathered in the open area behind the Manwelina huts. Wicent and Yuri laid Shanidar’s body on a newl skin, and Liam and Seif built six small stacks of aromatic pela wood around him and lit the mourning fires. The warm light bathed Shanidar’s naked skin, which Anala and Liluye rubbed from heel to brow with hot seal oil. (The Devaki believe that a man—or a woman—must make the journey to the other side naked, as when he first comes into the world. But since he must journey past the frozen sea, his body must be properly greased against the cold.) The red streaks of light reflected off Shanidar’s white body were both ghastly and beautiful. As the women covered him with blue snow dahlia and arctic poppies, I covered my eyes with my hand. The sweet smell of broken flowers stung my nose. Then Yuri, who was Shanidar’s nearest near–cousin, picked up a flint knife and sliced the right ear from the corpse’s head. Someone wrapped it in feather moss, and Yuri said, “We preserve the ear of Shanidar, and he will always hear the prayers of our tribe. I, Yuri, son of Nuri, will pray for Shanidar’s ghost because he had no sons or daughters to pray for him. And my son Liam and his sons, we will all pray for Shanidar, mi alasharia la shantih Devaki. Even though it is easy to blame him for waiting so long to go over, we must not blame him because a man must go over free from blame.”

  When the mourning fires had burnt low and most of our throats were sore from praying and weeping—most of the men were able to weep on command while the women remained dry–eyed and somber—we wrapped Shanidar in the newl skin and carried him outside to the graveyard above the cave. The ground was frozen hard as stone and buried in snow, so we built a pyramid of granite boulders over his body. The boulders were heavy; our stomach muscles strained and our biceps popped, but soon, under the watchful eyes of the stars, we finished our work. Yuri said another requiem and the Devaki yawned and returned to their beds. My mother and the rest of my family, even Bardo, left me there, too.

  I stood alone above the grave. The wind spilled down between the black tree trunks, drowning me in cold, muddled thoughts. I stood there all night until the blackness began to soften. How tragic, I thought, that Shanidar had died leaving no particle of himself to grow and taste the bittersweet liquor of life! How I pitied him, pitied myself, pitied anyone who had to die childless and alone! Shanidar was right: To be a link in the eternal
, unbroken chain of life—this was the secret of life. There was nothing else, no other immortality, no deeper meaning. I turned away from the wind and slapped some life back into my freezing face. Suddenly, the begetting of children seemed the most important thing in the universe. A son, I thought, could there be anything better than having a son?

  I ran back to the cave to find Katharine. I crept through the tunnel of our hut, went to her bed, and I covered her mouth with my hand. I woke her. I whispered in her ear; I told her that I had to talk to her. In silence she dressed, and in silence we sneaked out into the open air. Down into the forest I led her, down to the stream cutting through the hills below the cave. During the night some clouds had come up; it was warmer but the moisture made everything feel cold as slush. The woods were submerged in the rolling gray of twilight, and snow was falling. The air was marbled with patterns of light and dark. I could barely see my boots slipping against the rounded rocks of the stream bank. At last I stopped and began to talk to her. My words were nearly lost to the gurgling of the stream beneath the ice, but at least no one would be able to overhear what we said.

  I took her arm and looked at her. “You told Soli that you didn’t know who the father of the child would be. Is that true?”

  “Did I say that? I don’t think I said...you should search your memory, Mallory, what were my exact words?”

  I did not remember her exact words, though I remembered that one must listen with exactitude to everything a scryer said. I tried to read the truth from her face, but I could not see the shape of her mouth. It was dark and her lips were hidden beneath the ruff of her hood. She stood with her hands over her belly. She could not hide the shape of her belly. Unlike some women who carried their babies low, as if they had a ball tucked beneath their furs, Katharine’s belly was long and ovoid like a bloodfruit.

  “Who is the father, then?” I asked. “Do you know?”

  “The father is...who he is; he is who he will be. The mother...the father.”

  I was desperate to know if I would be a father. I could not bear the thought that Liam might be the father. What would the child look like? Would he have blond hair and thick browridges? Would he be half–Alaloi and half–human? Or—since Mehtar had sculpted our flesh but not our germ cells—would he be wholly human, wholly the fusion of Katharine’s and my seed, wholly mine to call “son”? I took her mittened hand in mine and asked her, “Is it our child, Katharine?”

  “Is it possible I don’t know?”

  “But you’re a scryer; scryers know these things, don’t they? What is the first training of a scryer?—to ‘think like DNA,’ isn’t that it?”

  “You’re a pilot, you should know,” she mocked. Her laughter bubbled out of her in a clear stream. “Mallory, Mallory, sweet Mallory.”

  “Listen to me,” I said. “It’s a humiliating thing for a child to be called a bastard.” (I should mention that although on many planets the word “bastard” simply means one who is born out of wedlock, I use the word in its broader sense to identify those unfortunates who do not know who their parents or grandparents are. What does it matter if the mother and father are married or not? What matters is knowing one’s genetic endowment, the heritage of fine chromosomes, the tracing of one’s abilities—and liabilities—back through the generations.)

  I think she smiled at me, then. “The child won’t be a bastard. I promise you.”

  Because I thought of myself as a bastard, I took this to mean that I was not the child’s father. I was disappointed and my head suddenly seemed as heavy as a stone. Next to me the stream ran darkly through a white pipe of ice. In places the pipe had cracked and fallen inward. I stared down through feathery layers of ice to the rushing black water below. “If I’m not the father then who is?”

  “Did I say you weren’t the father of the…?”

  “Don’t play games with me, Katharine.”

  “I’m not playing; it’s just that if I told you, oh, the possibilities, the...the pain...do you see?”

  The wind rose and she drew her hood tightly around her face and crossed her arms over her chest. She began to shudder so I put my arms around her and touched my head to hers. I realized a thing about the scryers then: They do not play games for the love of play; they play to distract themselves and others from the terrible truths they have seen.

  “Who is the father?” I whispered in her ear. “Tell me.”

  “If I told you, it would kill you, don’t you see?”

  “He’s Liam’s son, then?”

  She began to speak but her voice cracked, revealing an inner core of fear. Her blue eyes were cold with terror. I was aware of this core only for an instant. Then her scryer training took hold and her eyes closed, and her face was as smooth and white as a scryer’s robes. She laughed for a little while as she touched her belly. “He’s your son, Mallory. Our son. He’ll be a beautiful boy; he is a beautiful, compassionate...a dreamer like his father.”

  A son! Katharine had told me we would have a son, and true to her words, the news had killed me; I was dying with pride and happiness. I was so happy that I threw my head back and shouted out: “My son! A goddamned son!”

  Katharine was dead quiet, staring into the gray, morning woods. I paid her little attention. I listened to the wind sighing through the trees, carrying in from the hills the howl of a wolf. It was a long, low sound full of loneliness and yearning. The wind blew across the snowy white ridges and valleys, and an absurd notion came to me: The wolf’s howl was Shanidar’s other–soul calling to me, whispering that I should be kind to my son. The wolf howled for a long time. Then Katharine began to cry, and I remembered that Shanidar’s doffel had been the seal, not the wolf. I listened to the howling, and I knew the sound for what it really was: just a rush of breath through the throat of a cold, lonely beast. I held Katharine and she sobbed in my arms. With my fingers I touched her wet cheeks. I kissed her eyelids. I asked her why she was so sad, but she could not tell me what was wrong. “A son,” she said, and her voice was raw and burning. That was all she could say. “A son, a beautiful boy, do you see?”

  * * * * *

  To tell of the ruin of our expedition, to give a proper account of the plots and murders leading to the great crisis of our Order and the war that followed, I must here relate events which I did not directly witness. There are those who would doubt such a second–tongue knowledge—I am thinking of the epistemologists—but I myself am sure that Justine’s testimony of that day is a close approximation of the truth. After all, what is truth? I can, of course, offer no episteme, for in the affairs of our race, no intellectually certain knowledge can exist. If what I say here sometimes seems illogical, sometimes tainted with chaos and a touch of madness, that is because human life is so tainted and touched.

  Two days after Shanidar’s burial, on eighty–fifth day in winter, all of the men and most of the boys left the cave early in the morning to hunt shagshay in one of Kweitkel’s western valleys. It was a cold day; it dawned blue cold and became colder throughout the day. The air was like a steel mask covering the island. It was so cold that the trees cracked and thundered, spraying splinters into the blue air. Because of the cold, the women and children kept to the cave, gathering around the fires and oilstones wherever they could. Everyone was cold, shivering cold, miserably cold, everyone except my mother. My mother was burning with a fever. But she was not sick. Or rather, she was not sick with disease; she was sick with jealousy and hatred because two days before she had followed Katharine and me down to the stream. She was a good spy, my mother was. She had hidden behind a yu tree and heard me shout with joy. The knowledge of my fatherhood had wounded her, and for two days she kept to herself, and her hatred rankled and festered.

  When she could stand the burning no longer, on the afternoon of the hunt, she found Katharine alone in our hut. There was a fight, spitting words of poison from my mother and Katharine’s infuriating (to my mother) near–silence. I will never know everything that was said, but Justin
e and the other women overheard bad things, terrible things. My mother called Katharine a witch. “What have you done?” my mother accused. “You’ve bewitched my son. With your secret ways. Trapped him with sympathy and sex.”

  These were serious words, so Anala, Sanya and Muliya forced their way into the hut. Justine was out helping one of the dogs deliver her puppies, and when she heard the commotion she ran to join the others inside. In the tight, round space, the four women crowded around my mother and Katharine, keeping them apart.

  “Why did you call Katharine a witch?” Anala asked my mother.

  At the sound of the word “witch,” cross–eyed Muliya mumbled a hasty prayer. Her fat arms jiggled as she rubbed ashes over her eyelids so that the other–soul of the witch would have difficulty seeing her. (I have forgotten to mention that Muliya was an extremely ugly woman. As Justine reminded me, she had a broken nose, and she looked something like a muskox. It is curious that women are often more sensitive to a woman’s beauty—or lack of beauty—than are men.)

  Sanya nervously rubbed her skinny hands together while she looked from Anala to Muliya. She was a small, intelligent woman with a narrow face like a fox. She licked her stumpy, yellow teeth and said, “We have all wondered why Mallory acts so strange. But witchcraft? Why would Katharine bewitch him?” She smiled at Katharine because she liked her. She clearly did not believe Katharine could be a witch.

  “Some women like the shape of their brother’s arms,” Muliya said. “And they like the touch of their spears even more. Everyone knows Katharine and Mallory were alone together grinding snow.”

  My mother was aghast at what had happened. She said, “I spoke hastily. Because I was angry. Of course Katharine is not a witch.”