My hands were numb from squeezing the wood slats of the bench, so I rubbed them together. Around the Ring, the flame globes began to flare. The ice was shiny with hundreds of lights. The skaters were deserting in mass for the nearby cafes. Only a few groups of harijan were left near the edge of the Ring. In the dropping darkness, their shouts seemed harsh and too near.
“I think there’s a plot to kill Soli,” I half–whispered. “What do you know of it, Mother?”
“Nothing.”
From the tightness of her lips I saw that she knew everything.
“If Soli is assassinated you’ll be the first person the Timekeeper will suspect. He’ll drag you before the akashics, lay your brain bare.”
She squinted and said, “There are ways. Of fooling the akashics and their primitive computers.”
For reasons of my own I was very concerned with any limitations of the akashic computers, and I asked, “What ways?”
“Ways. Haven’t I taught you that there are always ways of outwitting your competitors?”
“You also taught me that it’s wrong to murder.”
She tilted her head and nodded. “A child must be taught certain...certainties. Otherwise the universe will engulf her. But when she is a woman, she learns what is permitted.”
“You’d murder Soli? How blithely we speak of murder, then.”
“You speak. I’ve never killed a living thing.”
“But you’d send the poet to do your killing. Is that permitted?”
“Everything is permitted. To those who see the need. Certain few people are chosen. For these few, the laws of the many don’t apply.”
“And who chooses them, Mother?”
“They’re chosen by fate. Fate marks them, and they must leave their mark.”
“Murder Soli and you’ll leave a bloody mark.”
“The great acts of history,” she said, “are written in blood.”
“You see Soli’s murder as an act of greatness?”
“Without Soli, there would be no more talk of schism. The Order would be preserved.”
“You think that?”
She smiled her disturbed, conceited smile, and the wind began to blow. It was a bitter wind carrying in the first cold of night. My mother pulled her collar tightly around her throat. Her robe was drab and ill–fitting; I realized that she habitually wore these plain garments as a kind of camouflage. People would look at the lumpy folds and conclude that here was a selfless woman caring little for style or ostentation. But appearances, I thought, lie. In truth, my mother gloried in herself as if she were still a little girl.
“How I hate Soli!” she said.
I kicked my blade into the ice and said, “And yet you chose him to be my father.”
“I chose his chromosomes to make yours,” she corrected.
I took off my glove and ran my fingers through my hair feeling for the strands of red, which were coarser and stiffer than the black hairs. But my fingers were too cold and numb to feel much of anything. “Why, Mother?” I asked suddenly.
“Don’t ask me these questions.”
“Tell me—I have to know.”
She sighed and sucked her tongue as if it were a ball of chocolate. “Men are tools,” she said. “And their chromosomes are tools. I slelled Soli’s chromosomes to make you. Lord Pilot of our Order.”
I rubbed the side of my nose and looked at her. She was squinting at me, biting her lip and pulling at the fat skin beneath her chin. I thought I saw the skeleton of her plan. She would connive to make me Lord Pilot, and then she would manipulate me from behind as if I were a phantast’s puppet. When I accused her of this, she asked me, “How could I manipulate my own son? You manipulate yourself. I have no desire to manipulate. The future Lord Pilot.”
As she laughed to herself, I thought that I had been blind to the essential conceit of her plan. I looked at her eyes, which were dark blue pools against the deeper darkness of her hood, and I saw overweening pride and ambition. I said, “But it’s the Timekeeper who rules the Order, not the Lord Pilot.”
“The Timekeeper,” she agreed.
And then I knew; then I could perceive the full flesh of her grand strategy. She said the word “Timekeeper,” and there was an unbearable stress in the syllables of that word. My mother was an ambitious woman. She would have the Timekeeper killed, too. And more—she would plot to make herself the Lord of the Order.
Vanity, vanity, vanity.
“No, Mother,” I said, reading the tells on her face, “you’ll never rule the Order.”
The air escaped her lips in a quick “whoosh.” She clasped her hands to her belly as if I’d punched her beneath her heart. “My son has powers,” she said. “You can read me, I think. Your own mother.”
“I can read some of your programs.”
“What have they done to you?” She looked at me as if she were seeing me for the first time, with horror tightening her anxious squint. (And what is horror if not a blending of hate and fear?)
“What has the poet done to you, Mother?”
“Don’t answer a question with a question! Why were you always so disobedient? I thought I’d taught you obedience long ago.”
I did not like the turn of our conversation. I hated the way she pronounced the word “obedience.” It was an ugly word; the way she said it, it was a word rife with strange connotations and terrible meaning. I remembered that the warrior–poets were infamous for instilling in their victims an irreversible and total obedience. What poisons had Dawud planted in her brain? Genotoxins to combine with her chromosomes and to subtly alter her deepest programs? Had he introduced into her blood a slel–virus that would devour her brain and replace it, bit by bit, with preprogrammed neurologics? With obedient neurologics? Had he slel–mimed her brain? My mother stared at the dark circle of the Ring, and I wondered what portion of her free will had already been dissolved and replaced by the will of the warrior–poet.
“This poet is very dangerous,” I said. “He’d kill you like a flea, if he wanted.”
“Everyone dies.”
“He’d kill your soul.”
“I’m not afraid of dying.”
“I always thought you were afraid, Mother.”
“No, I’m not afraid. Doesn’t the acceptance of death free us from fear? And if we’re free, isn’t everything possible? No, I’m not afraid.”
I rubbed the ice from my mustache and said, “Those are the poet’s words, I think, not yours.”
She pulled her hood more tightly around her head. She began speaking in a slow, even voice, as if she were explaining ring theory to a novice. Even though she kept her voice calm, I could hear the rhythms of new programs in her voice. Her words, the ways she emphasized and articulated certain sounds (she overaspirated the consonants made by stopping the flow of air with the tongue), the choppy phrasing of her sentences and thoughts—everything about her was the same yet slightly different. I could read her, but I could not tell if the new programs originated merely from Dawud’s ideas and beliefs, or if he had in fact mimed her brain. I trembled when she said, “You think Dawud manipulates me? No, it is I. Who manipulates him. He thinks he has found a way. To eventually control my programs. Call it slel–mime or call it what you will. He thinks this. But from where did this thought come? I gave him these thoughts. It’s the most subtle kind of manipulation; my mother taught me about manipulation.”
Had Dawud rewritten her software or carked the hardware?—I trembled to know this.
“Perhaps the akashics could help you,” I said.
“I think not.”
“I could take you to them. But you must tell me how I can find you.”
“Haven’t your friends told you? That I’ve become a student of the warrior–poets?”
“Where can I find the poet?”
“And why would my son want to find a warrior–poet?”
“Perhaps I want to warn him that he’s being manipulated.” In truth, I wanted to trap him before he
had a chance to mime my mother’s brain, if he already hadn’t. I wanted to kill him.
“It’s the nature of my manipulation,” she said, “that to inform him he’s being manipulated will only work to manipulate him into believing he can manipulate the manipulation by manipulating me into believing I’m manipulating him. It’s a complicated thing. Do as you will.” She smiled and nodded her head, turning into the light. Her shadow lengthened into a black spear, then shortened, back and forth across the glossy ice. “After all, no one is manipulating you.”
“Oh God!”
“Haven’t I taught you not to blaspheme?”
“Where is the poet, Mother?”
“Am I my master’s keeper?”
“Where, Mother?”
“If you can read me, then you tell me.”
“You’ve sent him to murder Soli,” I said.
“Soli,” she repeated. She closed her eyes because it must have been finally clear to her that I could read her.
“Why would the poet murder for you, then?”
“It’s an exchange, of course. Of devotion. The warrior–poets seek converts, don’t they? Therefore, I devote myself to becoming. Like a warrior–poet. And in exchange, Dawud will—”
“When, Mother? Oh, God, it’s too late, isn’t it?”
“How I hate Soli!”
“Mother!”
“Don’t look for a warrior–poet,” she said, “you might find him.”
“I’ll kill him.”
“No, Mallory, don’t leave me. Let him do his work. Why would you want to save Soli? As we speak, the poet is most likely climbing Soli’s tower. Or sending Soli’s guards over. Or asking Soli the poem.”
I kicked my skate against the ice in an attempt to knock some blood back into my numb feet. I was cold and confused, and I asked, “What poem?”
“It’s a tradition of the warrior–poets,” she said. “They trap and immobilize their victims. And then they recite part of an ancient poem. If the victim can complete it, he’s spared. Of course, no one ever knows the poem.”
I pushed away from her and began stroking across the Ring. I could not believe her. She was mocking me. Surely a warrior–poet would not risk failure by taking the time to ask his victim a poem.
“Where are you going?” she called out before I had skated a dozen yards.
“To warn Soli of a madman!” I shouted.
“Don’t leave me! Please!”
“Goodbye, Mother.”
She tilted her head from side to side and shouted back:
Because I could not stop for Death—
He kindly stopped for me.
The tower held but just Ourselves
And Immortality.
“That’s the poem,” she said. “If the warrior–poet traps you, too.”
I bent low and drew in deep breaths of air as I waved goodbye and pushed against the ice. I did not intend to let a murderer—a master of slel–mime, a madman—trap me. It was my intention to trap him.
22
The Hanuman–Ordando Paradox
To be fully alive is to be fully aware.
To be fully aware is to be full of fear.
To fear is to die.
saying of the warrior–poets
I raced eastward through the nighttime city streets. I took a shortcut through the heart of the Farsider’s Quarter. The poet had a lead on me, but he could not know the City as I did. Neither, I hoped, could he skate as fast or as far without rest. The dimmed colors of the glissades and lesser glidderies seemed to flow and blend, red into orange, purple into green. The pretty buildings lining the extremely narrow Street of the Neurosingers, with their balconies and lacy stone grillework, were hung with dripping icicles. Directly below, the drips had frozen into a jungle of icy bumps, tubercles and miniature volcanoes. The skating was treacherous so I turned down the Street of Fumes. There the ice was not quite so irregular, but there were dangers of a different kind. A myriad of odors wafted out of the half–open doorways of the remembrancer dens. The air was redolent with the bubble of hot tar, with the fragrance of hair oils and new woollens and a thousand other smells and smell–drugs. Instantly I recalled sprinting down the street the day of the pilot’s race. (It did not seem possible that three years had passed since that day.) Memories consumed me. I could almost see Soli smoothly stroking fifty yards ahead; I could almost hear the click–clack of his long, shiny racing blades. I was passing one of the larger dens when a couple of common whores opened the door. Their lips were stained red and their breath stank of alcohol. They stood holding hands beneath the cold flame globe, which was one of the clear types, with the plasma crackling along its colors within. They blocked my way and immediately sidled up next to me. The taller of the two—her hair was like dark, red wine—flung open her furs. She wasn’t wearing any under–robes; her skin was naked and white. She offered to take me down one of the alleys off the street, to spread her furs and lie back in the snow, to perform an immediate coupling without charge. She was very drunk. No doubt she was remembering previous, impulsive pleasures she had experienced while under the hot wash of alcohol. That is the limitation of that particular drug: It brings clear memories of other times passed while drunk, but little else. I smelled the heady esters of skotch and remembered the night in the master pilot’s bar when I had first met Soli. I hated Soli, I remembered, so why should I hurry to push the two whores aside, to rush halfway across the City to warn him? Why not stay to take my pleasure with the whore? (She was quite beautiful—one of those rare whores who loved whoring because she loved men.) Why not let Soli die?
Although I made fast progress, crossing the broad, milky ice of the Way before the nightly swarms rushed into the Quarter, I worried that Dawud would reach Soli’s tower ahead of me. In truth, I did not want Soli to die. He was my Lord Pilot, my uncle, my father; it would have been wrong to let a warrior–poet kill him. Also—and this was wholly selfish of me—I thought I might earn his gratitude. If I could soften his heart, he might forgive Bardo and Justine (and me), and I might stop the schism before it really began. I considered calling for a sled. However, on the narrow, twisting streets of the Old City through which I had to pass, a sled would only have been a hindrance. It was one of the few times in my life when I wished for the convenience of a fone. Then I could simply, and instantly, warn him that Death was on his way. But, as the Timekeeper would say, if we permitted fones people would forever be foning each other with their most immediate and frivolous thoughts. They would make appointments to meet each other at a certain place and time, and they would demand the use of timepieces, and of private sleds to carry them at whim about the City. The streets would fill with explosive, noisy machines and other noisome things, because once the technology beast was uncaged, people would want squawking private radios and private sense boxes and a host of other things. When I was a novice, I had often sniggered at this domino theory of technology, but later, when I had seen Tria and Gehenna and other hellish planets which chose not to limit their technology, I decided that in this one matter the Timekeeper’s edicts were justified.
And yet when I reached the entrance of the Danladi Tower, I cursed the Timekeeper and his edicts. The wind spilled down from Urkel’s ghostly foothills, down over the deserted Hall of the Ancient Pilots and the Chess Pavilion, whistling through the dormitories and lesser buildings at the edge of Resa. It whipped clouds of ice– powder into the Tower’s open doorway. There was a dreadful sucking sound as of air being forced through a tube. The rectangular wooden door, which was as plain and severe as the illustrious Lord Danladi had been, creaked as it swung back and forth, and it was smeared with blood. There was blood everywhere. Inside the doorway, corpses littered the hallway. There were six of them. A journeyman lay crumpled with her throat cut open like a second red mouth; next to her—half on top of her—slumped the corpse of Tymon the Equivocator, a pilot who had graduated the year before Bardo and I. The line of corpses progressed down the cold, quiet hallway to the
stairwell. Clearly, the pilots and journeymen had tried to stop the warrior–poet, and he must have fallen on them with his quick, killing knife like a madman among children. The fresh–scrubbed body of a novice blocked the stairwell, hugging the first few steps; his pink lips pushed against the stone lip of the fourth step. I had to jump over him. His once–immaculate woollens were stained. There was a red circle above his heart. It looked like a sign above a cutting shop. There was a fresh, soapy smell in the air, as well as the smells of blood and fear.
I climbed the winding stairs as silently as I could. And then through the short hallway to Soli’s chambers, and all the while my boots slapped against the stone and my breath exploded from my lungs like rocket gases. I was afraid my noise would have warned the warrior–poet, if indeed it wasn’t already too late for warnings. The white furs of the inner chamber were drenched with the blood of Soli’s journeyman, Markoman li Towt, who was kneeling backwards on dead legs with his arms splayed out and his head thrown back like a doll’s. The neck was cut and broken, and his thin lips were pulled back against his fine, white teeth. The rest of the room—the tapestries on the wall, the low couches and tables, the prayer books, chess set and the coffee service—was undisturbed. The door to Soli’s inner chamber was ajar so I pushed it and stepped inside. Into chaos. I had never been inside his sanctum before, and I was surprised to see that Soli kept plants. Green plants and flowers were everywhere; there were potted plants, plants on shelves, plants hanging from the slanting, black slab of the obsidian ceiling. (The Danladi Tower, I think, is the only building in the City made entirely of that glassy substance.) Everywhere there was wreckage. Plants and pots had been smashed into the fireplace; a stringy mass of charred vegetable matter was roasting, entangled between the andirons and the crackling logs. Loose black dirt and shards of clay ground beneath my boots. I smelled the perfume of crushed shira flowers. And then, through the foliage of a half–overturned bush I saw them. Near the window the poet had bound Soli to the bole of a spinnaker tree. A cocoon of sticky, steely protein filaments, the kind they grow on Qallar, was wrapped around Soli’s chest, biting into the bark of the tree behind him. He was struggling as furiously as a netted fish, pulling at the cocoon, jumping from side to side, trying to overturn the tree. But the tree was huge. It grew from a huge pot set into a recess in the floor. Its branches spread out beneath the skylight twenty feet above us. Leaves shook and rattled, and a few of the tree’s triangular yellow flowers spiralled lazily to the floor.
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