Neverness

by David Zindell

  “The warrior–poets!” I exclaimed. “They’re murderers.”

  “Precisely. Few know this, but the warrior–poets were founded precisely to exterminate insane tribes and insane kings. Terror was their tool, and they used it well. No king could think of warring against his neighbor without fearing that a warrior–poet would assassinate him.”

  “You speak in the past tense, Timekeeper.”

  “So I do. That’s because the warrior–poets have been in decline for a thousand years. Now they’re not so concerned with preserving the peace. In the process of breeding their assassins—and it took them centuries—they developed a religion to help them face their inevitable deaths. And often, these were suicidal deaths, because kings, mad or not, are hard to kill, eh? This religion has become their reason for existing. Now they seek disciples, not peace.”

  Again, like a shark, he circled around my chair. He began to rant. Only our Order, he said, could preserve the peace. But if our Order divided in two, there would be no order. (This is my word, not the Timekeeper’s. He despised puns almost as much as punsters.) Eventually our most precious knowledge would be scattered like pearls beneath the feet of a harijan.

  I thought about his words for a long time. Because I disagreed with his fundamental elitism, and because I sensed a contradiction in his beliefs, I said, “But we can’t keep our secrets forever. Information is like a virus. It spreads.”

  “Viruses can be quarantined,” he snapped. And then, more ominously, “Viruses can be exterminated, too.”

  “But it’s the Order’s purpose to discover knowledge,” I said.

  His voice grew low and ugly like a wolf’s growl. He said, “Knowledge must be cherished and used wisely, eh? Not squandered like a foolish pilot dropping city disks into the palm of a whore.”

  Because my back was aching and I was tired, I began to reposition myself in the chair. He caught me turning towards him, and barked out, “Don’t move, now! Remain in the proper attitude.”

  I suddenly did not want to remain in the proper attitude. I was tired of him staring at me while I could not look at him. I stood up, turned my head, and caught him unguarded. The look on his face surprised me. His eyes were wide open and his lips set into a shy smile as if he were a boy looking at the firefalls for the first time. He was looking inside himself, remembering, perhaps even remembrancing. At first, I did not know how I knew this. His eyes were black pools as blind as any scryer’s. He was looking many places at once, examining future possibilities and dreaming private dreams. Only for a moment did it last, this look of acceptance, of sad innocence and wonder. Then, like a steamy breath on a winter day, it was gone, replaced by harsh vertical lines of defiance and ancient grief. His eyes glowed with dark lights and his lips turned down as he thundered, “Sit down! Restrain yourself and sit down, damn you!”

  I did not sit down. I nudged the chair with my foot and said, “I’m tired of sitting.”

  I stared at him. I could not imagine what had occasioned his lapse into the contemplative. Then I realized—and it was one of the more wrenching realizations of my life—I saw at a flash that this was no mere lapse. He was a man divided, a seeker tortured by an eternal inner war between his dreams and his bitter experience—this I had always known. But suddenly I knew more. I was sensing the minutiae about him: the tension of the little muscles above the eyes; his archaic speech habits; his harsh philosophies; his sour smell; and thousands of other things. Somehow, I was processing this rich current of information. I was sure I was reading him. Whereas most such men (and Soli, my moody father is one such) spend their moments vacillating between light and dark like a terrified child being whipped back and forth across an ice ring by two schoolmates, the Timekeeper lived within conflicting realities simultaneously. He was truly a man who lived at the top of a frozen, inner mountain above other men. For him evil and good did not exist. Or rather, they existed not as opposites but as different flavors of reality, like honey and black, acid coffee, both of which at any moment must be tasted, swallowed, and if possible, savored. In the terminology of the Entity, he was a multiplex man, part hero, part rogue, heretic, tychist, determinist, atheist and god–worshipper—all of these and a myriad of others at once. If the face he showed to the Order and the ambassadors of the Civilized Worlds was the singular, stern face of a just tyrant, it was the face he chose to wear. And more, it was the persona he chose to be. It was wrenching to realize that he had this power of choice. I had always thought of him as a man utterly divided by the reality of dying and death. Now I saw that this was not so. Like all great men, he had a vision. It was what he lived for. It was this vision, the tiny part of which I glimpsed, that terrified me.

  “So, young Mallory, what are you looking at; what do you see?”

  “What should I see? Am I a cetic, then, to read your programs as I would the poems in your book?”

  “I, myself, have often wondered what you are, what you might become.”

  I rubbed the side of my nose, then said, “I see a man seemingly torn apart by contradictions. But there is a fundamental unity, isn’t there? You won’t allow farsiders the simplest of our secrets, and you were and are suspicious of the secrets of the Ieldra. I see—”

  “No man has ever talked to me like this before! No man!”

  “I see this passion of yours to protect, at the same time you—”

  “Quiet now! I can’t have my pilots—or anyone else—reading me, can I? You see too damn much.”

  “I see what I see.”

  “It’s dangerous to see too much,” he said. “The scryers know this. What’s their little saying?—‘Eyes once blinded by the light are now truly blind’?”

  His eyes were burning stones as he said this, and then he bowed his head and rubbed his snowy temples. I had always supposed that he had a sort of grandfatherly affection for me, but now I saw that the requirements of his private vision would always submerge and drown his kindness. When it had suited his purpose to rescue me from my own impetuousness, he had given me a book of poems and saved my life. If my death would serve his dreams or plans—well, as he had said, viruses can be exterminated.

  “Why did you summon me?” I asked him.

  “Why must you question me, damn you!” He clenched his fists and the muscles along his neck tensed. It was as if he were hardening himself to make an agonizing decision he did not want to make. I thought that since he had little compassion for himself, he would finally make the harshest of choices. He must have feared that compassion towards another might weaken him and eat away at the steely coil of his being as rust slowly devours the interior mechanism of a clock.

  “Why am I here?” I repeated.

  He paced to the window and swiped at the glass with his fingernails as if he were a bear digging at a sheet of ice. The nails dragged and scraped, leaving sharp, clear streaks cutting the white frost. He was quiet for a moment, and then the breath rushed out of him all at once.

  “It would be the greatest of catastrophes,” he said, “if one of my pilots were to solve the Continuum Hypothesis only to have the secret spread like a virus. To fall from any star instantly to any other—so, you understand, only my pilots must have the knowledge.”

  “The Hypothesis may be unprovable,” I said.

  “It would be better if that were so.”

  “In any case, I haven’t proven it. The Tycho and Dov Danladi, Soli too—they struggled all their lives to prove the Great Theorem. Who am I to prove it, then?”

  “Ha, you’ve changed!” he mocked. “Who are you?—this I would like to know. What have the damn gods done to you? We’d all like to know this, eh? You return like a ghost from Agathange, and, suddenly, seemingly, you’ve gained modesty…and other things.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know, Mallory, you know. Ten days ago your Bardo ruined part of the Tycho’s Monument, didn’t he? Tell me, what happened that day?”

  “Bardo drank himself into a stupor and broke one of
the crystals.”

  “My novices tell me that you fell into slowtime—is this true?”

  “How could it be true? How is it possible to enter slowtime without the aid of a computer?”

  He pounded his fist against the window sill and snarled out, “Why must you answer a question with a question, damn you! Tell me, did you enter into slowtime?”

  “Some say I did,” I admitted. “But the truth is, I stopped time.”

  “Stopped time? Ha, I hadn’t thought it possible! But you are a truthful man, aren’t you? You wouldn’t lie to your Lord Horologe. Why, Mallory, why are you so taken with this holy notion of truth?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Struth! There’s truth and there’s truth. Truth’s as mutable as time.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  He rubbed his eyes and looked at me. “You must promise me a thing, young Mallory. If you should ever discover the proof of the Great Theorem, you must not inform the cetics nor akashics nor the cantors nor your fellow pilots. You must tell no one except me.”

  I stood motionless while I thought at great speed. If I ever solved the Hypothesis and confided in the Timekeeper, the knowledge would disappear like light down a black hole.

  “I’ve vowed to seek truth,” I said.

  “You’ve vowed to seek truth, not to disseminate it and spray it all about like an old man’s piss.”

  “In front of you in the Pilot’s Hall, four years ago, I took this vow, to seek wisdom and truth even though the seeking might lead to ruin and death.”

  “Ruin and death! Whose death, damn you! Is it wisdom to let truth ruin the Order?”

  “All my life, I’ve dreamed of proving the Great Theorem.”

  “Dreams, what are dreams? Why are you so damn stubborn? Why? Why are you?” And then he groaned out, “Whose death? Whose death will it be?”

  “All my life, and to this day, I’ve dreamed of an Order, a whole universe, where wisdom and truth are one.”

  “Noble words; naïve words—how weary I am of words!” There was an almost unbearable tension in his voice, in each of his steely words. “Either give me your promise or do not.”

  “I can’t give you my promise.”

  “So.”

  He spoke this final word mournfully, regretfully, as if he could not bear to shape his lips around the simple consonant and vowel. The sound hung in the air like the low ringing of a bell. For a while he looked at me. And in his eyes, love and hate and another passion I thought of as will, or will towards fate, his fate and perhaps a universal fate, which he must have known was the most terrible and lonely fate of all. Then he scowled and pushed his palms at me and turned away, looking out of the window. He dismissed me. Before leaving his Tower for what I thought would be the last time, I looked out, too, down to the novices who skated by, oblivious of the judgement that had just occurred high above their snow–speckled heads.

  20

  The Rings of Qallar

  If ever I spread tranquil skies over myself and soared on my own wings into my own skies; if I swam playfully in the deep light–distances and the bird–wisdom of my freedom came—but bird–wisdom speaks thus: “Behold, there is no above, no below! Throw yourself around, out, back, you who are light! Sing! Speak no more! Are not all words heavy and made to die? Are not all words lies to those who are light? Sing! Speak no more!” Oh, how should I not lust after eternity and after the nuptial ring of rings, the ring of recurrence?

  Never yet have I found the woman from whom I wanted children, unless it be this woman I love: for I love you, O eternity.

  For I love you, O eternity!

  seventh death meditation of the warrior–poets

  The historians believe that near the end of the second Swarming Century, the warrior–poets perfected the art of using bio–computer bits to replace parts of the brain. Unlike the Agathanians, however, the warrior–poets applied their art to different ends. Slel–mime, that unspeakable crime in which a poet’s cunningly crafted programs run the brain of his victim, is only one application. The poets are also known to cark parts of their own brains. They do this to give themselves power over their time sense, so that they can slow time without the aid of an exterior computer. And for other reasons. It is said that they alter their own brains’ profoundest programs in order to erase their fear of death. Indeed, the cetics believe they are utterly devoid of fear. In this respect, the poets are unnatural beings, for fear is as natural to humans as breathing air. To live, to feel the starlight in our eyes and the joy of the deep light–distances, to be—this is all we know. To be not is unimaginable and therefore terrifying. The birds who spread their wings to the sun, the silvery bottom fish gliding through their world of dark, silent joys, and even the sentient computers, in their ecstatic inward crackling of electricity and lightning information flows—all living things, in some tiniest particle of their beings, must fear the final mystery.

  When I began seeking out various of the City’s warrior–poets, seeking in the bars, hospices, ice rings and cafes that they frequented, Bardo alternately accused me of being fearless and of having a will to suffer this mystery. “Are you mad?” he said to me a few days after my meeting with the Timekeeper. “Oh, you are mad—I’ve always known you are. These poets kill because they like death, don’t you know?”

  “That’s true,” I said. “They worship death. But I’d like to find my mother—it’s worrisome the way she’s disappeared.”

  I was very worried about her plotting with warrior–poets. I planned to find the warrior–poet with whom she had been keeping company these past days. But because I was a novice in the seeking of human beings, he found me instead.

  Adjacent to the Hyacinth Gardens, along the Run where it dips south towards the Old City, is a collection of twelve buildings made entirely of exotic woods. Some of the buildings are cavernous structures housing the historians’ artifacts and relics; a few are somewhat smaller. Their elegant, polished rosewood rooms are given over solely to the display of art, alien and human, ancient and modern. Although all twelve buildings are called the Art Museum, it is the smaller buildings that hold the Fravashi frescoes and tone poems, the Urradeth ice sculptures and other treasures. The smallest building, a classic rectangular hall faced with shatterwood pillars, is the House of Remembrance. Its four sections are filled with many rooms, but the most famous of them is the Hibakusha Gallery. There reside some of the oldest frescoes depicting unbelievable scenes of chaos and war. There the tone poems build and swirl and fuse, unfolding the epic battles of the Holocaust Century. I had come to view the famous fresco, “Humanity Rising,” which ran along the north wall for a hundred feet. When I was worried, or when I was tired and cold from skating the streets of the City, I liked to sit on one of the Gallery’s benches, to breathe in the smells of warm wood and flowers; I liked to watch the fresco move, the pretty colors. It was one of my favorite things to do.

  It was late afternoon, and I was not alone. Next to me, near the center of the long room, there were a couple of fabulists, no doubt seeking inspirations for work of their own. And at the edge of the carpet behind my bench, near the bubbling fountain, were a group of Friends of God off Simoom. They were each very tall and very thin, and they stank of garlic and goatroot and other exotic spices. They had a habit of twisting the silver chains binding their long, black hair. The habit annoyed me, as did their hissing. As they whispered, they hissed, the sibilant sounds rushing out of their mouths in quick, choked–off breezes. One of them said, “See? Here is evidence the Swarming began during the Holocaust Century, not after. It is as was thought.” I looked at the painting’s bubbling blues and greens and whites. I watched silvery rockets rising from Old Earth’s oceans, but whether or not the rockets were ships launched towards the stars or missiles carrying fusion weapons was difficult to tell. Then one of the rockets divided into two, the two into four and so on, and suddenly there were the bright stars of Eta Carina Nebula, and the four ships had become fo
ur thousand streamers of light. The light spread outward in great, glowing balls. In a flash it filled the nebula with a luminous white. For a moment the entire center section of the painting was brilliantly white, and then splotches of gray appeared at random to mar the brilliance. The white darkened to sky–blue as the blotches began to take shape, and a thousand black, mushroom clouds began rising up from Old Earth’s atmosphere. I was not at all certain that the painting was the “evidence” that the Friends of God sought. It seemed more likely that for the Fravashi who had made the fresco, the Swarming was the Holocaust.

  After a while I became aware of subtle changes in the muffled sounds and odors of the room. The stink of goatroot and garlic had subsided; disturbed voices and the quick rustle of fabric had replaced the whispering. Then there was silence, and I smelled the sudden aroma of kana oil. Warrior–poets, I knew, were famous for wearing effervescent kana oil perfumes. I turned my head, and there stood a deep–chested man of medium height who was plainly not interested in watching the painting. He was watching me. He studied my face as a master player might a chessboard, with an intense, almost fanatic concentration. Immediately I knew that he was a warrior–poet; all warrior–poets are cut from the same cells. He had the curly black hair, the coppery skin and sinuous neck of his kind. He was beautiful, as the highly bred races often are. How well–proportioned his fine nose and broad cheek planes seemed, how balanced his sculptured jaw, what a beautiful, fearful symmetry! But it was his unique poet’s eyes that possessed the most compelling beauty: His eyes were deep indigo, almost purple; his eyes were vivid, clear, soulful, utterly aware—and utterly without fear. Although he looked young, I thought he must be very old, for only a man who had been brought back to youth many times could have such eyes. But no, I remembered, warrior–poets do not restore themselves to youth. Worshipping death as they do, they believe it is the greatest sin—indeed the only sin—to prolong one’s life past “the moment of the possible.” The warrior–poet, then, was as young as I.