Neverness

by David Zindell

  “I know.”

  I was silent, thinking about the inherent fragility of friendship. What is friendship, I wondered, if not a double–faced mirror we hold up between ourselves reflecting those images most pleasing to behold? And when we see images diminished and hardened with the frost of time, and the mirror begins to crack, where is friendship then? There I sat like a hard, cold mirror in front of my agonizing friend, and he must have seen himself as sulky, faithless and confused. And I, through the reflecting pools of his deep–set eyes—I saw a savage man I did not like.

  I will not tell everything we talked about that night. Although the sun did not set until midnight and rose again a few hours after that, it was a long night. We sat at our little table drinking steadily until the cafe emptied of people. We made half–hearted, obligatory attempts to joke with one another, to recall and laugh at past anecdotes; we talked about every possible thing that two friends could talk about. And all the while, Bardo seemed surly, as if he were blaming me for some unstated thing. At last when morning was almost upon us, after we could drink no more, he stood up from the table and blamed me for killing his faith in his mission as a pilot.

  “It’s your fault,” he said. He banged his fist down on the table so hard that the iron top rattled and bent like the skin covering of a drum. “I’m a defeated man because of you.”

  “My fault?”

  “You and your damn quest! You wanted to know about life, and that’s what was too bad. So did I. Your dream, my dream—you’d infected me with your damned enthusiasm. Ahhh...We were the breath and soul of the quest, by God! But we killed it, didn’t we? It’s all gone now. You killed it; you killed me. Bardo is not the man he was, no, no, no, too bad.”

  He was very drunk, but I was as sober as a cetic. Perhaps the godseed in my head made me immune to drunkenness. I turned to leave but he grabbed my arm and said, “Let’s take a circle around the ring.”

  “You’re too drunk.”

  “I’m not drunk enough.”

  We left the cafe, clipped in our blades, and skated to the center of the great ring of the Hofgarten. A few yards away, a group of journeymen fresh from their beds were practising their morning figure eights. I reached out to steady Bardo, who was wobbling on his skates, grasping his beer–bloated belly. “Let go of me!” he said.

  “Listen, Bardo, you’re still a pilot, still my friend, and—”

  “Am I your friend?”

  “Listen to me! The quest isn’t over, not as long as we’re still alive, it goes on and—”

  “By God, you are a dreamer—too damn bad!”

  “And you’re afraid of—”

  “I’m afraid?” he bellowed. “I haven’t seen you in two years, I thought you were dead, and all night long you sit talking about everything but the important thing. Oh, I know you, Little Fellow, too damn well. You like to pretend you’re hard as a diamond, but inside you’re pissing afraid. Tell me you’re not! Pointedly, pointedly, you refrain from discussing Agathange. Do you think I don’t know what they did to you? Well, I know. I’ve seen how you brood, always looking inward, all night, inward through the blue diamonds, through your damn blue eyes like your damned father. Look at me! What are you afraid of? I’ll tell you: you’re afraid of losing yourself, am I right? Oh, I know you better than you’d guess. You’re afraid of losing your humanity. Well, who isn’t, tell me, who? For everyone, it all slips away, doesn’t it? It rots, cell by cell, bit by bit until it’s all gone. So they added parts to your brain, so what? I wish the goddamned gods had made me a new brain. Your brain is your brain! What does it matter if it’s made of silicon or bloody neurons or shagshay cheese? It’s your brain, by God! When we grow old and our eyes cloud up, what’s it matter if the cutter grows us new ones, or builds us jewelled eyes to see up into the ultra–violet, to see the new colors? We’re still seeing, aren’t we? We see what we want to see—and you with your brain, ah, you’ll think what you want to think. You’ll think your goddamned wild thoughts because you always have. That won’t change. Do you want to know what I’m really afraid of? I’m afraid of you because you’re wild as a madman!”

  I was furious with him, and I let go of his shoulder. I kicked the ice with my toe pick; there was a shower of snow on ice. “No, you’re afraid of yourself,” I said. Then I clamped my jaws tight because I knew I was accusing myself, not him.

  “What kind of a man are you? I took a spear through my heart for you, by God! Because I knew your secret, because I knew you were afraid of dying, pissing afraid!” His voice dropped and he blinked his eyes, staring at me. “And because I—”

  “No,” I said, “I don’t believe you. You stepped in front of the spear by accident. You’re just a limp, drunken coward.”

  I regretted the words the moment they sprang from my lips. They were terrible words, words that a friend should never speak to another, no matter if they were true. Especially since they were true. I moved my lips silently, seeking words to negate the words I had so cruelly spoken. But the words were too slow in coming: “Well, you’re a bastard,” he said. “And your mother is a filthy slel–necker. You’re a wild, dangerous, slelled bastard.”

  I felt as if he had pounded my face with a block of ice. My muscles trembled, yet I could not move. Bardo disappeared from my sight, as did the other skaters in their colorful kamelaikas. There was only the steely glare of the ice puncturing my eyes with hard, white stabs of light. An ocean of far–off voices engulfed me; I heard skates clacking against ice; there was a dull wind and the hundred other sounds of the ice ring, yet I could not see. How long I passed in my blind rage I did not know. When the reds, blues and greens returned to my eyes suddenly as flowers come to a snowfield in false winter, I was standing alone in the middle of the noisy ice ring. Bardo, my cowardly friend, my oldest friend, was gone.

  * * * * *

  I left the Hofgarten determined to stop Bardo before he found another bar, before he drank himself into a stupor and collapsed in some dark alley deep in the Farsider’s Quarter. I skated towards the Street of the Ten Thousand Bars. The early light was streaming through the fragile obsidian hospices and other buildings. The cross streets were deserted, and to the east, the lesser glidderies were pools of fire. From the hatch of a hospice, a few Fravashi emerged looking tired and hungry. They rubbed the nictating membranes from their eyes and whistled to each other with such a high pitch that I could only make out a tenth of their words. When they passed a group of sleepy novices, they pitched their whistles lower so their fluting, piping prayers might be felt and understood. The novices whistled back with clumsy, inexpert notes, thanking the aliens. They clapped their hands and laughed as they hurried off to practice their thought primaries. In their clean white robes, with their white– gloved hands shielding their eyes against the glare, they looked like immaculate toy dolls saluting the rising sun.

  Down the middle of the street, bright yellow sleds filled to the rails with foodstuffs, woollens and other goods rocketed continually past. The sleds, burning hydrogen and oxygen in well–spaced, measured blasts, spewed out an exhaust of water vapor. It was this fine spray from sleds across the City that everywhere settled on cold stone, freezing and silvering the buildings with verglas. I remembered Master Jonath—the historian who had tutored Bardo and me in our second year at Borja—saying that on Old Earth during the Holocaust Century, the sleds in many cities had been mounted on greased wheels and had burned hydrocarbons inside a steel engine. The resultant fumes, he claimed, had been invisible to the eye and not at all harmful. He, a hater of the cold mists that so often steal over our City, held that we should tear up our beautiful streets and copy the example of the ancients. I remembered him saying this, remembered as clearly as I remembered my multiplication tables. Kindly Master Jonath with his warts and his long, stringy black hair lecturing patiently as Bardo and I traded punches on the ugly gray rug of his apartment—what trick of memory is it that permits us to see our younger selves so clearly? Why are events that h
appened later in time—important events such as the time Bardo claims I lost my temper and nearly murdered Marek Kesse—why are these memories so often muddy and dim?

  Whatever the flaws in my memory, I shall always remember the miracle that happened that morning. I was skating down the Promenade of the Thousand Monuments when my time sense began to dilate. The sliddery divided into two broad bands of orange even as my mind began dividing segments of time into endlessly long infinitesimals. Separating the north and south lanes of the street was a mile–long Promenade of statues, obelisks and other testaments to glories past and glories yet to be. As I passed the immense, mushroom–shaped hibakusha memorial, the nearby novices seemed to be moving with exquisite precision, slowly, slowly, so slowly, as if their limbs were immersed in the slushy, freezing waters of the Starnbergersee. Suddenly, there was a dazzling array of colors. Ahead of me The Tycho’s Vanity cut the air with knives of amethyst and diamond and ruby. The monstrous gemstones—some were as tall as a spruce tree—grew out of the Promenade’s ice. They joined with one another, red to blue, gold fusing with purple, at strange, twisting angles. To many of our city’s pilgrims, the long display must have seemed a bewildering jumble of carelessly assembled jewels, a fantastically expensive jungle of colors thrown together at random. To a pilot, the monument had a different meaning. The thick emerald blocks and graceful sapphire strands were a physical representation of the ideoplasts the Tycho had used in the formulation of his famous conjecture. He had commanded that the finest inspiration of his mind should be made manifest, and so for seventy yards up and down the Promenade, the first of the twenty–three lemmas needed to prove the conjecture was captured in hard, flowing columns of diamond meant to last forever. (The Tycho had originally called for all twenty–three lemmas to be so arrayed, one after the other for a mile and a half down the Promenade. Such a plan, however, had proven too grandiose. The cost of importing the jewels had nearly ruined the Order, then much wealthier and more powerful than now.) I was skating next to the ruby coiled glyphs representing the proof of the fixed–point theorem, when the moment of slowtime hardened and time came almost to a standstill. Never before had I experienced such a profound instantaneity away from the time–warping neurologics of my lightship; I did not believe that it was possible for the unaided brain to stop time. Engraved on my retina were the images of openmouthed novices frozen midstroke like white statues. The thunder of the sleds and the click–clack of steel skates broadened, drew out long and slow and deep, solidified into a single sound. With my one arm thrown straight backward and the other forward, the toe of my skate motionless and pointed, I must have borne a curious resemblance to the Tycho’s frozen glyphs. It was in that moment, with the snow loons suspended low and gracefully in midflight, with my City stopped all around me, that I found Bardo.

  He was hanging from one of the glyphs. His great hands were wrapped around a connecting ruby crystal; the bulk of his body was pitched forward, stretching his long arms, pulling at his gripped hands. His face was frozen into a mask. He seemed at once terrified and excited, ashamed and mischievous like a disobedient boy.

  How can mind exist outside of time? How can thoughts be completed and stratagems devised when the brain’s neurotransmitters are quiet and still as blue ice in deep winter? Is it possible to completely stop time? (Katharine believed that mind creates time. She believed that lovers, in their moment of joy, exist together in a timeless realm of mind. Once, she taught me a kind of pure instantaneity, but in one way or another, I have been trapped in time for most of my life.) Does time stop—or does it merely dilate so that it seems to stop, a nanosecond into a year, an infinitesimal into an eternity? Most of my brain was still human, I thought, blood and neurons, but parts of me were phased into computer time; the godseed within was electric, processing information in ways I did not understand. The ridiculous image of Bardo swinging like an ape from the ruby spear was fixed in my mind, and I wondered how I could rescue him—and our friendship—from the black amber of time. It came to me, then, all at once what he was trying to do. There, on the ice, as the moment of instantaneity failed and the world came alive around me and rushed in, I knew that Bardo had come here to kill himself.

  To my dilated time sense what happened next proceeded as slowly as a seaworm building its shell: Bardo swung back and forth, snapping the crystal with his pendulous weight. The crack of the splintering crystal for a long time hung in the cold morning air. As if he were a slowly deflating balloon, he fell to the ice. In his bleeding hands he clasped the sharp ruby spear. He planted the spear into a mound of frozen slush. The sharp, ragged tip projected upward towards his chest. He looked at me. Slowly, sadly, slowly—and a sad comprehension slowly stole over the tortured features of his face. His eyes moved. He clenched his teeth. A silver drop of water floated from his cheek. He dragged his bloody hands across his black robes. Slowly he smiled. A thin film of beery saliva stretched between his upper and lower teeth. The film bubbled and expanded. It filled with air. At last, as I watched, it popped. He placed his reddened hands on the folds of his robes where they gathered at the neck. He pulled open the layered folds. Red soaked into black. He bared his chest. I saw olive skin covered with thousands of curled, black hairs. He laughed. The low boom took hours to reach my straining ears. Like a mountain of ice slowly breaking away from a glacier, he began to topple towards the jagged ruby spear. Clearly, if he completed his trajectory, the spear would enter the skin of his chest. The spear would slowly make its way through the tightening muscles. Perhaps the spear would push apart the ribs. There would be a moment of eternal pain. It would be cruel. The spear would touch the great heart as it paused between beats. It would go in. And Bardo would cry out, and there would be a sea of blood, and Bardo would be endlessly afraid.

  Suddenly, I moved. Around me the world moved with exquisite slowness even as I must have moved with the speed and frenzy of a diving thallow. I am the frenzy, I am the lightning, I thought, all the while repeating mentally the saying of the warrior–poets. And instantly I knew the fiery ecstasy of electric neurons and fast– burning muscles and accelerated motion. Like a warrior–poet in his rush towards his victim’s death, I rushed at Bardo, crossing the long stretch of ice between us in a shrivelled second, a frozen nothing of realtime. I caught his armpit with my shoulder, throwing him, and myself, to the ice. The red spear missed his chest by an inch.

  We lay there stunned, disoriented, gasping for air. I returned to realtime with a wrenching mental snap, and Bardo said, “By God, it’s impossible to move so fast!”

  I tried to sit up, but the tissues of my body burned and would not move me. “If I hadn’t, you’d have killed yourself.”

  He stood in a half–crouch, leaning with his forearms against his thighs. He looked at me coyly and said, “Well, I wouldn’t have, not really. Bardo is too much of a coward to kill Bardo. I saw you skating down the sliddery. I thought you might, ah...well, I hoped you’d call out for me to stop.”

  “It would have been simpler, that’s true.”

  “Well, once again, you’ve saved me,” he said. “Like the time you kicked Marek Kesse in the head when he was choking me, do you remember?”

  With his help, I stood up but my shoulder would not work right. There was a fire in the joint as if the bones had pulled apart. “I have...a memory of a memory.”

  He rubbed his bloody hands together and coughed. “There is no way I can unsay what I said, is there, Little Fellow?”

  “No.”

  From behind us came the voices of the novices and the Fravashi. They crowded around us, plainly appalled at Bardo’s desecration of the great monument. (And no less appalled, I thought, that I had moved as fast as a warrior–poet.)

  “What are you staring at?” Bardo shouted at them.

  I tried to raise my arm to steady myself against him, but I could barely move it. “There is no way I can unsay my words either,” I told him. “But I’ll say it anyway: You’re not a coward.”

 
; He looked at the ruby spear which had so nearly impaled him. He gave it such a hard kick that it fell over and clattered to the ice. A thin, freckled novice gasped. Apparently he did not know that, although the huge crystals of The Tycho’s Vanity had been ruinously expensive to fabricate, as jewels that might be cut and sold they were worthless. The Tycho, that vain and cunning man, had thought to prevent just such a desecration and theft by ordering that the jewels be impregnated with various impurities and stived with flaws.

  “Of course I’m a coward,” Bardo said. “But when we were younger, you had the grace never to call me a coward. Even when I was a coward.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He kicked the broken jewel again and then looked at my drooping shoulder. He said, “You fell into slowtime, didn’t you?”

  “It’s worse than that.”

  “Without facing your goddamned ship—you slowed time?”

  “I stopped time.”

  “That’s impossible,” he said. “No one can stop time.”

  “I can.”

  “By God, it’s a miracle!”

  “Inside, what the Agathanians call their godseed—it’s remaking my neurons, and maybe my nerves. Even now, as I speak, the changes...how can I know what the changes will be? I seem to still be myself, I believe I am, but—”

  “You are yourself. Wouldn’t I know if Mallory was no longer Mallory?”

  “I’m sorry for what I said, Bardo. I’m wild and impulsive, and I have no self–restraint.”

  “By God, that’s the Mallory that I know!”

  I clasped my hand to my injured shoulder and said, “And I’m afraid.”

  “Ah, there’s nothing worse than fear, is there?”

  “I’m afraid of losing myself.”

  He put his arm around my back and half–lifted, half–carried me to the sliddery. “Little Fellow,” he said, “you can never lose yourself. And you can never lose your friends, at least not such a friend as I.”