Neverness

by David Zindell

  And so Balusilustalu and my host of Agathanians altered my body to breathe both air and water. Somehow they sliced through my brain and managed to keep my cortex free of phytoplankton and seaworms and other muck. For my comfort, they raised up an island from the sea bed. They made the trees to grow and blossom and bear fruit, all within a few days. Other things did not happen so quickly. Inside I was changing slowly, day by day, one cell at a time. By the end of my first year on Agathange, I was spending half my time in the water, half on land. I wandered my little island, wondering who I was and why I was alone. I picked tart fruits from the trees; they tasted like snow apples. But they were more sustaining than snow apples. Indeed, the Host of Restorers had designed a single food which nourished me better than the fish swimming through the island’s lagoon would have done. Soon, however, I tired of eating fruit. I began to crave silvery fish, to crave meat, anything that twitched or swam or moved. I longed to shape a tree branch into a pronged trident, to spear a fat wingfish, to fillet it with my overgrown fingernails and suck down the salty meat. But I was forbidden to do so. Balusilustalu had pronounced that I was to enter the water only during those semiconscious moments when my brain was opened.

  “You do not understand the sea, and you do not know what you are permitted to eat, and you do not know what is permitted to eat you,” she said to me one day after she had restored the perception of the color azure to my visual cortex. (I call Balusilustalu “she” even though she was not entirely female. But she, like almost every Agathanian, was much more female than male.) She was flopped up on the beach of my island, laughing at me so hard that her long torso jiggled, rings of beautiful fat rippling beneath her glistening skin. On her flippers she had claws; she used these claws to draw figures of animals on the wet beach sand. For an Agathanian, her neck was very long and sinuous, as graceful as a swaying seasnake. I should mention that the god–men—the god–women—did not all look alike. Some took on the appearance of sea–cows while others were like dolphins, otters or even whales. They bred their children to a thousand different shapes; a City ecologist would swear they were not of a single species. But for all their differences, they shared a common feature: Their eyes were human. Balusilustalu had large brown eyes, intelligent eyes, eyes full of irony and humor. She looked at me with those eyes, all the while speaking to me in her sophisticated language of barks and grunts and clicks. I understood this language clearly. Later, after the translating biochips had been removed from my brain, it would all sound like gobbledygook.

  But she knew everything about my human speech. “Meat’s meat,” I said, not remembering then that I was a man of the City. “A man must hunt meat to live.”

  “You are a stupid man, ha, ha, not a shark—eat the fruit of the trees; the trees are for you.”

  She seemed contemptuous of me in the same way a new journeyman feels superior to a novice. Did she expect me to spend my days climbing trees as if I were a monkey? In no matter was her contempt more obvious than at my attempt to understand Agathanian society. “Even if your brain were whole,” she said, “you could not hear the sea talking to you. You are a mathematical man seeking immortality for yourself, ha, ha! What can you know of the World–soul?” But then, “Wait, wait, we must wait until you remember yourself, and then wait some more to see if you understand the simple things.”

  After a while, after I had regained the full use of my muscles, I began to remember. Whole pieces of my personal history would come to me, appearing for an instant tenuous and insubstantial, like sea foam, and then churning, vanishing into the breaking crests of memory. It was an unsettling, eerie feeling. Like a child at night, sometimes I would awaken from the sea not quite knowing who I was or how I had come to be there. I would float up and over the dark waves, rising and falling, looking up at the stars. I had dreams. Sometimes I thought I was Mallory Ringess, an innocent novice learning the Boolean algebras; I was teacher, hunter, journeyman, “Little Fellow,” father and son, and sometimes, during those lucid moments when I opened my eyes to the dark ecstasies beneath the slipping waves, I was a pilot and I was a fish—I was a pilot–fish—come to learn the secrets of the ageless sea.

  One day, when I thought I had remembered all the events of my life excepting the times when I first had murdered and had come to be murdered, and all those moments in between, one day when the sky was full of puffy, white clouds and the sea was quiet and still, Balusilustalu nudged my floating body with her nose and said, “Now we will remake your brain properly; when we are done, you will know you have a brain.”

  She led me out to the deeper waters where the others of the Host were waiting. The Agathanians enveloped me. A hundred cold noses poked every part of my naked body. Tongues licked my skin. There was a flurry of flippers beneath me and by my sides. Salty foam washed into my mouth. For a moment, Pakupakupaku and Tsatsalutsa and many others lifted me out of the water on their backs. My tiny island wavered in the distance, a speck of gold and green against the sparkling blue sea. There were whistles and barks and puckering sounds. From all around us came answering barks and yodels; the sea was suddenly alive with smooth, black gliding shapes. I counted six hundred and thirty of the Host before I was dunked beneath the water and I had to stop counting. (I later learned that there are about a thousand Agathanians to a host and some ten thousand hosts scattered across the ocean.) Balusilustalu—or perhaps it was Mumu or Siseleka—let loose a series of high–pitched squeaks and clicks. She was talking to the dolphins and whales, I thought, and soon the water rippled with massive shapes. “We are calling the deep gods to witness your rebirth,” Balusilustalu said. I marvelled that the clever Agathanians had formed their tongues and speech organs so they could articulate not only their own languages, but also whalespeak and whalesong.

  All this time they were touching each other and barking; information was passing from nose to nose and from throat to ear. The touching suddenly became friskier, more intimate, more urgent. There in the swirling water some of the host lay up against others, and they opened their slits to deep caresses, and the coupling began. Above me, beneath me and on all sides, many were coupling with gusto and abandon, and then more than many—I watched and listened in fascination while the water filled with their barks and groans. At first I did not understand what was happening. I thought the gods had gone crazy with their sex. But soon I became aware of a knowledge within me. A part of the miracle was revealed to me, whether by telepathy or information stored in my brain’s biochips I did not know. The godvoice whispered to me while I floated beneath the water, listening, and this is what I knew: that when an adult of a host is ready to mate, she, the First Mother, creates an egg in one of her ovaries. She finds a partner and a coupling then occurs. (All Agathanians possess membrums, huge ones with triangular red tips bigger than Bardo’s, but they do not have testes because they do not need them.) The First Mother thrusts her membrum into the slit of the Second Mother. The egg is squirted into a peculiarly crafted organ called the bakula. In the bakula the egg is partially fertilized. The Second Mother injects the egg with carefully designed strands of germ plasm in much the same manner that a virus infects a host cell with its DNA. Then she passes the egg out of her membrum to a third partner where the same process occurs again, and so on many, many times. Finally, when the egg has been passed from bakula to bakula—the Agathanians sometimes refer to this doughnut–shaped factory as the “organ of change”—when all the mothers have contributed to the egg’s heritage and the fertilization is complete, the Last Mother accepts the zygote into her womb where the fetus grows. Thus each Agathanian is the daughter of the entire host.

  “But today we are not making daughters,” Balusilustalu said to me as I watched the Host passing their plasm back and forth beneath the sea. “We are making something else, oh, ho!”

  What they were making is difficult to describe. In some ways the seed inside the Agathanian’s bakulas was like a bacterium, like a “neurophage,” since it was designed to consume and repla
ce dead, disassociated neurons. In other ways it was much more like an information virus. Each mother of the Host wove chains of carked DNA, tiny association strings, into the information virus. The mothers moved through the water, touching each other inside, reeling in ecstasy, and they passed the virus from bakula to bakula. And so the impulsive Tenth Mother added association strings according to her inspiration while the wiser Five Hundredth Mother deleted strings and added still others. When the virus was almost finished, Balusilustalu took it into her bakula where she made the final changes.

  “We will put it into your brain now,” she said. “I invite you to accept the gift of my sisters.”

  I must admit that I did not want to accept any gift. Even though I was not completely myself, I was aware enough to be very afraid. I am not sure how they opened my brain. I think they used disassemblers to gently split the collagens of my scalp, to dissolve the bone of my skull. I felt as if my whole body were being laid open and spread out tissue by tissue, layer by layer, cell by cell. The water was red and ropy with strands of blood. Parts of me floated in the warm salty sea, unfolding, unravelling slowly. They removed some of the biochips from my brain. When they put the virus inside me, I screamed. There was no pain, but I screamed because I was afraid the virus would destroy rather than heal me. The scream must have carried through the dense, rippling water out to where the circle of blunt–headed sperm whales waited. I heard a series of bubbling groans, which I interpreted as laughter. And then Balusilustalu spoke without moving her mouth, and I heard her voice inside me.

  —The deep gods are wondering why apes always scream when they are born? Ha, ha—because they are stupid, I told them.

  —No, I’m dying, you’re killing me.

  —We are restoring you to what you could be.

  —To live, I die. The virus will kill me, I know.

  —You are so simple, oh, ho! What we have made for you is not really a virus.

  —What is it?

  —We are gods, are we not, ha, ha! We have made this seed in our bodies to restore you. You may call it godseed.

  —Viruses infect, this hierarchy of DNA, the more primitive programming, killing the higher cells—the ecologists taught me this when I was a novice.

  —So stupid! The godseed will seek dead brain cells; so many parts of your brain have died.

  —Too bad, too bad, as Bardo would say.

  —The godseed is intelligent, in a way. It introduces association strings into dead neurons, revitalizing them for a short time. The godseed will take over the programming of the DNA.

  —I’m being taken over, too bad.

  —Listen, Man, this is the art of Agathange: The association strings reproduce themselves a thousand times over. Replication and life, stupid Man. The new strings organize themselves, clumping together like seaworms, forming thousands of interconnections. And when they grow, the neuron bursts and dies. And the new godseed is born, thousands of godseeds.

  —Journeymen die; why don’t you leave me alone?

  —When the millions of godseeds have migrated across your brain, we will remove the rest of the biochips. The biochips are impossibly clumsy. They are good for moving your legs or so you can wag your stupid tongue but useless for remembering mathematics and other memories that have been enfolded.

  —Enfolded?

  —The brain is like a hologram; the whole is enfolded with the part.

  —No.

  —Let me explain.

  —No, no, I’m dying and I’m afraid.

  For a long time I floated in the water, bobbing up and down in the undulations of the gentle current. Somehow I was fed. In my mouth were the tastes of salt and blood, the rank flavor of sealskin and piss. (The Agathanians gave as little thought to their excretions as does a baby in a tub of warm water. But the ocean was very large so the clouds of dark, orange piss dissipated quickly.) Long days gradually faded into long nights, and night became day, and the rhythms of the light and dark were lost into the deeper rhythms of the sea. And always, the sound of the Host barking and moaning and talking, and the piping of the dolphins as they chattered among themselves, and the huge sound of the sperm whales merging with the long, black roar of the sea—all these sounds surrounded me, beating at my skin in endless waves of sound. I felt the sound in my bones. I felt as if I were swallowing sound, as if the sound of the sea nourished and sustained me. Dark rhythms raced along my blood, and again there was sound in my brain. The Host glided through the water, passing the song and substance of created life back and forth, back and forth as they touched and sang and emptied themselves into one another. Again they opened my brain, and again they touched the deep parts of me with their virus, with their godseed. And again, many times. The Agathanians sang of the stupidity of human beings, and they sang of humans’ cleverness, too. They sang of the World–soul and of darkness and light. As the virus did its work, I floated in an expanding ocean of sound. The song of the Host gradually grew clearer. I began to understand things. Sad, mournful notes sounded inside, and I remembered that I had once murdered a seal. Then there was a single high–pitched tone, like the anguished shriek of a shakuhachi. I remembered murdering a man called Liam, and I lived again the moment of my death. The sound of death, the sounds of life: Waves broke over my head, and a seagull beat the air with his wings and cried out above the distant beach, and I remembered things which should have remained obliterated; I remembered learning to count as a child; I remembered elegant theorems and how to knap a blade of flint; I remembered that Leopold Soli was my father; perhaps for an instant I remembered all the events of my life. I remembered things I had never known. Strange, new memories came to me. I knew these memories were the work of the virus inside me. I listened to the song of the sea, the song of the Host of Restorers and all the other hosts. The song of life.

  —Why?

  —Because it is fun! And too, we restore you because of who you are, Mallory Ringess, the pilot who will never die, ha, ha! We give you our memories because you must know.

  —I don’t want to know anything.

  —Oh, ho, listen, Man, and we’ll tell you everything! Do you hear the waves whispering the secret? We know you know, Man. The secret of life is just sheer joy, and joy is everywhere. Joy is what we were made for. It is in the rush of the nighttime surf and in the beach rocks and in the salt and the air and in the water we breathe and deep, deep within the blood. And the sifting ocean sands and the wriggling silverfish and the hooded greens of the shallows and the purple deeps and in the oyster’s crusty shell and the pink reefs and even in the muck of the ocean’s floor, joy, joy, joy!

  —No, life is pain, I know. There’s a poem; I remember some of it: “We’re born in our mother’s pain and perish in our own.”

  —Life will not perish. We give you these memories so life will not perish.

  —I remember the song of the Host of Restorers.

  —All of the hosts are restorers. That is what we are; that is what we do.

  —I don’t want to be restored like this.

  —It is a great song, isn’t it? Do you hear the song?

  —I’m afraid.

  —Ha, ha!

  The song of Agathange is a great song, but it is not a song most human beings would care to hear. Some parts, of course, given the wholly human heritage of that mysterious race, are understandable. Humans and god–men (or even most gods, I think) share the knowledge that matter and consciousness are inseparable. The knowledge is old; ages ago the mechanics found that it was impossible to describe the behavior of subatomic particles without considering the effects of consciousness on the objects they were studying, just as it was impossible to explain the disastrous thermodynamics and poisoning of the Earth, all the while ignoring the conscious and criminal actions of billions of human beings. (This was, of course, before most mechanics gave up their silly notion of searching for an ultimate particle. It is an unbelievable fact that the ancients had “discovered,” described and catalogued thirty thousand t
hree hundred and eight discrete particles—leptons, gluons, photinos, charms, gravitons, quons, quarks, upside–down quiffs and other figments of their equations—before they abandoned their hopeless quest.) So, the Agathanians revere the unity of consciousness and matter, and they have pushed their belief to the logical end. The ten thousand hosts of restorers were trying to awaken the whole of their planet to greater consciousness. The song tells of the great restoration: The first ecologists had not trusted their minuscule consciousnesses. Had man’s consciousness saved Old Earth? No, and neither would Agathange be saved, because man was man, and someday—even though they made themselves like seals and took to the sea—the natural harmonies would be broken. Only by creating a consciousness far beyond their own, a World–soul, could they sing a song of total joy, which, after all, is what they sought to do.