Neverness

by David Zindell

  Do not brood so, my Pilot. It would be unpoetic if all the stars died. You won’t let them die.

  Because she was lonely, because she could read the fear and wild anticipation in my eyes, because she was at heart a compassionate goddess, this child with flowers in her hair promised to help me if only I would promise her a simple thing. Although it was reckless of me to do so, I made her this promise, a promise which I shall tell of presently.

  And now it begins.

  If I had possessed a millionth of the Entity’s powers, I think I would have stopped the murder of Gehenna Luz. But I was just a man, and there was little I could do. Kalinda twisted the ring around one of her fingers and told me to watch the swarm of worlds through my telescope. I did as she commanded. I watched one of the worlds nearest the sun open. It looked like two halves of a gigantic oyster opening to an ocean of sunlight. And inside was a pearl of a machine, a great jewel of a spacetime engine.

  It is pretty, isn’t it? See how it sparkles. Face your ship, my Pilot, and let your computer model what is to come.

  I watched human beings accelerate the natural life cycle of a star. The lords of the manswarm—or somebody, or some computer—oriented the spacetime engine on points within the plasma core of Gehenna Luz. It took fourteen hundred and fifty–four seconds for the probability waves to propagate through space to the star. At the points near the core, where the temperature was one hundred million degrees, the zero–point energy of spacetime was suddenly converted to thermal energy. In the neighborhood of the point–sources, the plasma was a molten sea, and there was a series of explosions. The core of the star grew even hotter. The hydrogen plasma began burning at an accelerated rate, faster and faster, four hydrogen atoms slamming into each other to yield each helium atom plus a bit of energy, plus a raging maelstrom of energy ripping across the red sea of hydrogen.

  Do you burn to return home, my Pilot? There is always a returning. I will descry a part of your future: One last time you will return to me.

  At an accelerating rate, zero–point energy was converted to heat. At one hundred and fifty million degrees, helium fusioned to form carbon, the element of life, and it grew hotter still. A million years of stellar evolution occurred in perhaps a tenth of a year. When the core fire reached six hundred million degrees, carbon fused into neon. And time contracted even as the star’s core contracted, pressing inward, generating temperatures greater than a billion degrees. Thus the atoms of oxygen were born, and oxygen burned to form silicon and iron, and the core of the star was very, very hot. The star—this is how I saw it through the thoughtspace of my ship—the interior of Gehenna Luz was like an onion with a core of iron plasma. Enveloping the core was a silicon shell surrounded by burning sulphur, and skins of oxygen, carbon, and helium. The core was now hot enough to finish its own evolution in a few days, and so the spacetime engine grew still, and the manswarm inside the made–worlds prepared to make their mappings.

  Life and death; death/life.

  Because iron will not fuse spontaneously into heavier elements, soon the entire core had burned itself out. The core grew too massive, too dense. Without the electron pressure of gushing energy to oppose the gravity of the star’s interior—at the Chandrasekhar limit—the core collapsed at a quarter of lightspeed. In less than a second, it fell inward like a crushed thallow’s egg. It grew hellishly hot, eight billion degrees hot. The core matter broke down into protons and neutrons and was compressed to such densities that it rebounded with a snap. An enormous shock wave ripped through the onion skins to the surface, blowing off the star’s outer layers. Gehenna Luz exploded in a fire of hydrogen plasma and gamma rays and bright, hot light.

  The secret of life.

  I did not actually see the ten thousand worlds fall in. My ship modelled the manifold, though, and I watched it twist like a roasted worm, twist and distort. I saw millions of huge, gaping windows open in the neighborhood of the worlds. Then, in a moment, the worlds were gone, flung out into the galaxy where new and virgin stars awaited.

  You have wondered at the Ieldra’s secret, but I may not tell you because I am what the greater gods would warn you against. When you return to Neverness, you must ask your Timekeeper why this is so. He is very old, and in a way, wiser than you could believe. And for now, goodbye, my Pilot.

  I did not remain to watch Gehenna’s wavefront of light blow across my ship. I had seen enough. I was eager to find my brother and sister pilots, wherever they might be. I was eager to do other things as well, so I found a window and made a mapping. As I fell into the manifold, into the timeless realm where the only light was the light of mathematics and dreamtime, Kalinda clapped her hands together and sang out, “But it’s so pretty!” Then she, too, was gone. However, I could still smell her flowers, and the sound of her last poem rang in the air:

  Stars, I have seen them fall,

  But when they drop and die,

  No star is lost at all,

  From all the star–sown sky.

  27

  Kelkemesh

  It may be fairly asked why animals, who live by talon and beak and their most immediate and savage impulses, do not devour each other down to the last writhing worm? And why do the gods not shatter worlds when they tremble with godly wrath? Why is man uniquely cursed with war? The answer to this question is both historic and evolutionary: We walk the brink of racial suicide because we were smart enough to make atomic bombs and stupid enough to use them.

  from A Requiem for Homo Sapiens by Horthy Hosthoh

  Deep within the Entity was a planetless star which has come to be known as the Pilot’s Star. It was a small, yellow star of no particular distinction except that it was closest—topologically closest—to Gehenna Luz. When I fell out above the Pilot’s Star I found that of all the lightships racing through the manifold, only one had arrived. It was Soli’s Vorpal Blade, shining in the starlight like an Old City spire on a winter night.

  I sent my imago into his ship’s pit, which was a warm, dark sphere much like my own pit. I talked to him. His long, hard Alaloi muscles knotted beneath his hairy belly, and he greeted me. “How far do you fall, Pilot?” and then, “Do you remember the race the day after you became a pilot? There was my lead the whole way then, too. But now neither of us will cross the finish line, will we? Your goddess’s star has fallen supernova too soon—the deformations were point to zero–point so there can’t be any doubt that it was a supernova. There’ll be no more mappings beyond this star, will there?”

  “Only mappings homeward.”

  “Yes, the race—”

  “The race is over, Soli.” I told him then that I had just witnessed the death of a star. I told him about the hundred billion homeless people who had helped cause the growth of the Vild.

  There was sweat on his forehead, sweat in his beard. He didn’t want to believe I had reached Gehenna Luz before him. “No, that’s impossible,” he said. “My mappings were tight and elegant. Yours couldn’t have been tighter.”

  “Perhaps I didn’t need to make as many mappings,” I said.

  “Why not, Pilot?”

  I wanted to shout out my proof of the Continuum Hypothesis. Would the news that I had proved what he had struggled vainly for three lifetimes to prove ruin him? Very well, let it ruin him.

  “How should I tell you, then? It’s the simplest reason: that between any pair of discrete Lavi sets of point–sources there exists a—”

  “It’s proven!”

  “—one–to–one—”

  “You’ve proved it, haven’t you?”

  “—mapping.”

  “Yes, the bastard Ringess and his reckless dreams—not entirely reckless after all.” He held his chin up proudly and asked, “What’s the proof, Pilot? Tell me your proof.”

  I told him nothing. I was tempted to blurt out my collapse of the Lavi correspondence scheme, but I said nothing. For the first time in my life, I began to truly understand the Timekeeper and his secretive ways.

  When I d
idn’t answer him, he tapped his long nose and asked, “Are you ashamed of your proof? How could you be ashamed? Ah, but was it entirely your proof? Yes, there’s a little shame, now, in your reckless, carked brain, in everything you do. You’re not to be envied, no; you should be pitied instead.”

  “It’s not your pity I want.”

  He said, surprisingly, “Pity these lost peoples of the Vild. You say they’ve lost their sense of wrong and right. Isn’t that the worst fate? To lose that which is necessary to live happily within...within the bounds of…”

  He did not finish his sentence. He closed his eyes and strained to speak. I thought he might want to tell me something about Justine, or perhaps about pity and forgiveness, but he seemed to have lost his voice. The apple of his throat jumped up and down as he swallowed empty swallows of air.

  At last he rubbed the muscles of his neck and said, “Yes, your goddess has told you secrets. When we return to the City, we’ll have to call a new quest. The Timekeeper will be spoken to. We’ll have to send a mission to the Vild, to educate the poor people in the rudiments of mathematics, the rules of civilization.”

  “The Timekeeper,” I said, “will call no more quests.”

  “Do you speak as a scryer, or as a criminal afraid to pay for his crimes?”

  “Soli, I have to tell you about the Timekeeper.”

  “Yes, you’ll tell me the words of your goddess.”

  “Words of truth. In truth—”

  “Tell me the truth, not lies,” he said.

  “I’ll tell you what I know, what I’ve deduced. And what I’ve seen. I’ll tell you everything.”

  He opened his eyes, and they were as wet and blue as the icy sea. “Tell me how to make love last. Isn’t that the secret of the universe?”

  Soon after this—it was actually many days of realtime—the other lightships began to fall out near us. Li Tosh, the Sonderval and Alark of Urradeth—at least some of my old friends had survived. And Soli’s pilots, Salmalin, and Chanoth Chen Ciceron in his segmented Nimspinner, fell out as well, and we waited some more. Of the one hundred and twelve who had set out for Gehenna Luz, forty–one fell out around the Pilot’s Star. The others, we presumed, must be dead, killed in battle or lost in the manifold. (At the time, of course, no one knew that not all the pilots had tried to reach Gehenna Luz. Five pilots—Kerry Blackstone, Gaylord Noy, Tonya Sam, the Katya and Sabri Dur li Kadir—for mad reasons of their own, had fallen back to Perdido Luz and had continued to war until only Sabri Dur was left. And later I discovered that at least twenty–eight pilots had abandoned the quest for Gehenna Luz at the outset. They had beheld the freakish manifold within the Entity, and, to their shame, they had fled back to Neverness.)

  We held another conclave. Soli surprised me by quickly spreading the news that the Great Theorem had been solved. I think this must have excited my fellow pilots more than the discovery about the Vild. “This will change everything,” Li Tosh said to the imagos of the other pilots. He brushed his lank brown hair out of his eyes, and I read the beginnings of awe there. “We should honor the Ringess for his brilliant discoveries.”

  “Yes, and how should the Ringess be honored?” Soli asked the forty pilots gathered together in his ship’s pit. And again he surprised me, saying, “Never again should pilot fall against pilot. War demeans us, doesn’t it? If, to end this war, my time as Lord Pilot must end, then none of you should call me Lord Pilot again.” He turned to his old friend Salmalin. Salmalin was fingering his warty skin along the edge of his jaw, looking from Soli back to me. There was awe in his eyes, too. “You may call the Ringess ‘Lord Pilot,’ if that is what you decide,” Soli said.

  Salmalin puffed out his old, withered cheeks in surprise, in awe that Soli would abandon his lordship to me. And then, like a wave, the awe washed the faces of the other pilots. It swept the reason from them. I have never understood this virus of servitude that infects human beings. Most of them idolized me a little and I hated that. They projected their own dreams and desires onto me. Somehow I was to be a vehicle for their collective wills. I saw—and this realization sickened me—I suddenly knew that to them I was no longer just a man. I was something else, or rather, many things at once: dream–maker, pathfinder, a leader of men. They bowed their heads to me, and thirty–five of them, even Soli, voted that I should be Lord Pilot. I looked at their awe–stamped faces with that uneasy mixture of emotions all leaders must feel towards those they lead: love, contempt, irony and pride.

  Later, when we were alone together in the pit of my ship, Soli said to me, “Congratulations...Lord Pilot. It’s what you’ve always wanted, isn’t it?”

  “Why, Soli? I don’t understand you. Why this sudden humility, then?”

  He looked at me, but there was little awe in his eyes; there was only sadness and exhaustion. “The race is over, but the race goes on,” he said. “Yes, you are Lord Pilot now, and you wonder why. Should you be told why? Yes, you’ll be told because soon enough you’ll know on your own: To stand like a god above your fellow pilots—there’s no glory there. There’s only the continual temptation of arrogance. And arrogance demeans us, doesn’t it? All my life, fooling myself that...but now, after all this, there is a certain—it is hard to use this word—enlightenment. Yes, arrogance is the worst crime. And that is why my vote was for your lordship. It’s my revenge.”

  In this manner, far above the saffron, hydrogen bomb that was the Pilot’s Star, I became the Lord Pilot of our Order. It should have been a happy moment, a moment full of pride and exultation, the greatest moment of my life. But it was a bitter moment, as bitter as the pit of a yu fruit. I was truly Lord Pilot at last, but Bardo was gone, and I had promises to keep.

  * * * * *

  I returned to Neverness on the second day of deep winter in the year 2934. It had been nearly a year since my escape from the Timekeeper’s cell. Intime, I must have aged ten years; I felt older, deepened by my crimes, changed. I half–expected my City to have changed as well. But she greeted me with the same, eternal, cold face that I had always known. It was the face of stone frozen with snow–swirls, a white, icy face veined with red and purple streets. It was cold that year, even the historians admitted it was cold. Some of them jokingly dubbed it the Year of the Dead because—they said—the dead days of deep winter had begun so early. But we all knew their real reason: On sixday, the Pilot’s College made plans to chisel the names of the lost and dead pilots onto the Tomb of the Lost Pilot, which stood beneath the foothills of Attakel near that lovely, granite outcropping known as Our Lady of the Rocks.

  One thing in the City had changed. The Timekeeper was no longer preeminent. Even as we pilots had fought our battle around Perdido Luz, the lords of the Order had waged a battle of a different sort within the Academy’s cold towers and halls. Nikolos the Elder had finally persuaded the College of Lords to place restrictions on the Timekeeper’s powers. As the days passed, the lords had changed certain of our Order’s oldest canons. With the replacement of the seventh canon some thirty days before my return, the Timekeeper must have guessed that he might himself soon be replaced. The lords had broken with a millennia–old tradition. They had decided that the Lord of the Order could be retired while still alive, and more, that any lord, even one such as the lowly Lord Phantast, could be Lord of the Order. There were other changes, too. For instance: The Timekeeper would not be allowed to ground a pilot, nor to strip any master of his or her rank; never again would the Timekeeper—or any Lord of the Order—be allowed to keep a private army of tutelary robots.

  When we surviving pilots dropped our ships down into the Lightship Caverns, the whole Academy (and many farsiders and aliens) turned out to welcome us. There was a parade as if it were a festival day; there were horns blaring away, and eiswein and kvass, and gossilk streamers blowing in the wind. The schismatic professionals in the deepship returned with us, and they immediately skated forth to heal the wounds of our Order. We endured a few wild, anxious days as the various colleges h
eld their conclaves. Old rivalries and disputes still rumbled within the bowels of a few of the professions, particularly those of the eschatologists and mechanics. But when the professionals and academicians learned the outcome of Perdido Luz, they were horrified. And when the news of the Vild’s origin spread, they were filled with raw terror. They made their peace. They agreed to let the College of Lords convene, to decide a new “order for the Order,” as the historian Burgos Harsha joked. In truth, the Timekeeper had gambled sending Soli to capture or kill the schismatic pilots, and he had lost his gamble. Instead of gaining time in which to win over the lords, he had alienated them. Nikolos the Elder called for an inquest into Soli’s near assassination, and into the causes of the Pilot’s War, and then he called for the Timekeeper’s abasement.

  By the time tenday dawned clear and deep cold, even the most cantankerous and crusty masters and lords realized that great changes were imminent. We lords (and it felt strange for me to include myself among them) met inside the College of the Lords, a stately, square building made of slabs of white–grained granite. From a distance it looked like a shining white box neatly placed down into the blue and white folds of land beneath the Elf Garden, almost like a huge, square snow–hut. And it was as cold as a snow–hut. The lords of the Order huddled inside the drafty sanctum, and we shivered in our formal robes. Lord Kolenya with her moon face, and Lord Nikolos, the Lord Akashic and the Lord Cetic—all the lords except the Lord Horologe were there. We sat at a cold table devoid of decoration or veneer. It is curious how great a part climate and discomfort can play in the affairs of human beings. We drank our steaming mugs of coffee and rubbed our hands together. We made a quick, cold decision. We decided that the Timekeeper would no longer be Timekeeper. For the time, there would be no Lord of the Order. And then we adjourned and went out on the streets of the Academy to tell the waiting masters, journeymen and novices the news.