Neverness

by David Zindell

  “It’s an atomic bomb, isn’t it?” Soli asked as he joined me by the window. He saw what I saw: All the towers of the Fields and many of the buildings in the most southern part of the City had been ruined, blown down to their foundation stones. “Why are we alive? Why wasn’t the whole City destroyed? It couldn’t be—who could believe it’s an atomic bomb?”

  But it was an atomic bomb. I somehow knew this, as indeed Soli must have known, too. There was a roaring and thunder, and the mushroom cloud seemed to glow. More, specifically, it was a hydrogen bomb, as I later learned from the tinkers and mechanics who explored the fused crater where the Lightship Caverns had been. It was a small, laser–ignited hydrogen bomb, an old, old bomb which had leaked away much of its deuterium in the thousands of years before it exploded. The fireball had been hardly hot enough to destroy the Caverns. That was why we were alive. That was why the whole City was alive, because it was a weak, old bomb, and it had exploded underground in the heart of the Caverns. But I did not know this as we watched the mushroom cloud growing over the southern part of the City. I thought of the Timekeeper’s words: “So, it was too old,” and I knew only that he had tried to destroy everything with an atomic bomb.

  “Why?” Soli asked. “Was he so bitter?”

  I bent to help Mahavira pick the glass out of Burgos’s face, but there was little I could do. I went over to the Timekeeper. Many of the lords—fortunately, few of them were badly injured—gathered around me. I touched the Timekeeper’s face, which was locked and hard from the nerve poison. I told them what Kalinda of the Flowers had told me: “He’s old,” I said, “and Horthy Hosthoh was not his birthname. He’s been Timekeeper for a long, long time.”

  “For hundreds of years,” Soli said quickly.

  “No, for thousands of years,” I said. “If the Entity is right, this Timekeeper is the very same Timekeeper who founded the Order. He’s been Timekeeper for 2934 years.”

  Soli gasped out, “Rowen Madeus? You say that this is he? There have been eighteen Lord Horologes—it used to be easy to remember all of their names. You ask me to believe that all this was faked?”

  “Faked, in truth,” I said. “The Timekeeper has faked the histories. He must have kept a slel–clone. Seventeen times, he has let one of his slel–clones die in his place. Seventeen times, he has gone to a cutter to restore the appearance of youth and begun his career anew. But there will be no eighteenth time.” The freezing wind rushed through the room, bringing in the solemn ringing of the Old City bells. I had not heard their tolling since I was a boy, when the great blizzard had buried the City and a thousand people (most of them poor harijan) died. I thought of the Entity’s solemn, rolling words, and I said, “He’s written history. And I believe he’s even older than the Order. Rowan Madeus was just one of his names.”

  “It’s impossible,” Soli said.

  I took a deep breath of air. I was full of horror and hope. I was very excited. “Soli, I believe he was of the line of Thomas Rane, the remembrancer. He’s immortal—he was immortal. His name was Kelkemesh.” I stood up and half–shouted, “Don’t you see? The quest, our expedition, it’s all been for nothing. The Timekeeper, this Kelkemesh, he’s the oldest, so damn old. We’ve journeyed across half the galaxy with our questions when the answer was here all along.”

  But the answer—the secret of life I had sought for so long—proved not to be so close at hand. During the nightmare days which followed, days of digging through the rubble of collapsed buildings for the thousands of buried corpses and sorting out the bodies for burial, the Lord Imprimatur, Nassar wi Jons, worked over the body of the Timekeeper. Nassar was a gnarled lump of a man, a man who had been born marrow–sick with so many diseased bones and deformations of flesh that the cutters and splicers had needed all their ingenuity merely to sculpt him into the bent—but brilliant—little gargoyle who attempted to uncode the Timekeeper’s secrets. I had told him: “As you did with the Alaloi plasm, as you tried to do, search along his DNA for the Ieldra’s imprimatur.”

  On eleventh day he made his disappointing and shocking pronouncement: The Timekeeper’s DNA was no different than my own, or any other man’s. (Any other man, that is, who had not been born marrow–sick.) And this Timekeeper was not really the Timekeeper.

  “He was a slel–clone,” Nassar explained to the College of Lords as we sat in an emergency session. With his mismatched eyes—his blue eye was larger than his half–closed brown eye—he glanced at me and shook his lumpy head. “A double, a fake...a robot, if you will. The pathways, excuse me, Lord Pilot, the neural pathways were etched with the imprint of new, robot programs. A double, you should know.”

  Another slel–clone! A double, with those too–peaceful eyes that were not the Timekeeper’s eyes—why hadn’t I perceived this immediately? No doubt he had brought this slel–clone to maturity and programmed it with enough of his own habits, speech patterns and memories to fool us. He had programmed it to murder. Not all the Timekeeper’s robots had been destroyed, then. This last robot, this scowling, breathing mockery of a man, had lived long enough to murder my mother, to almost carry out the Timekeeper’s revenge.

  “Where is the Timekeeper, then?”

  “Who can know?”

  I made a fist and rapped my knuckles against the table. “If it was a siel–clone,” I said, “its DNA should be identical to the Timekeeper’s.”

  “No, Lord Pilot,” Nassar said, confirming my fears, “if the Ieldra’s message really is imprinted in the Timekeeper’s chromosomes, if he knew this and wanted to keep the secret, if he had the services of a master splicer, then he could have carked the slel–clone’s DNA to edit out the Eddas, you should know.”

  “Goddamn him!”

  “You should know something else, and I as Lord Imprimatur am the very one to tell you. I don’t believe in your Elder Eddas. Few do. The Timekeeper made a slel–clone to do his killing while he escaped the City—not to hide a nonexistent secret. Forget the Timekeeper, Lord Ringess. You’ll never see him again.”

  But I could not forget the Timekeeper. Even as the College of Lords made plans to build a new Cavern to house the new lightships which were being designed (the bomb had destroyed every lightship, shuttle, and jammer in the City) I thought about him all the time. The Entity had not lied to me, I told myself. Why would She lie? The message of the Ieldra was buried within the Timekeeper, wherever he was. If he had fled to the stars in a lightship, the secret had fled to the stars with him. If he was hiding within the City, perhaps in some hibakusha tenement in the Farsider’s Quarter, then his secret was hiding there, too.

  Later that day we buried six thousand two hundred and six people on the Hill of Sorrows beneath Urkel. It seemed that most of the City had endured the cold to attend the funeral. On the broad, snowy south side of the gravepit huddled a mass of harijan, aliens and farsiders come to honor their dead. (Most of the victims, of course, were horologes, cetics, tinkers, and the various journeymen who attended the lightships. A few were pilots.) Across from them, where the robots had excavated a narrow plain abutting the Hill’s vertical, scooped–out walls, were the men and women of the Order. We stood in our professions, row after row, lined up on the black, frozen earth. We pilots stood nearest the grave. There were too few pilots. We—the Sonderval, Salmalin, Li Tosh and the other survivors of Perdido Luz—we were a thin, black line pressed from behind by the eschatologists in their blue furs, and from behind them, by the rows of the mechanics. Because I was Lord Pilot and Soli was Past Lord, we stood together at the very lip of the grave. It was there, even as the pit was flooded and the icy waters began to rise over the stacked bodies, that I learned of the Timekeeper’s fate.

  “He’s fled the City,” Soli said. He was wearing a black, hooded fur. He threw back his hood so I could hear his words better above the wind. How fierce he looked, with his thallow–beak of a nose, his sculpted brows and glittering eyes! How angry, how vengeful! “The night before the atomic bomb, he stole a team of dogs a
nd a sled from the kennels—the master of the kennels told me this. Like a thief in the night, he fled out to sea. Why, Pilot? Did he seek death? Or does he hope to live, among the Devaki or some other tribe? Or is it solitude and forgetfulness he wants? Yes, solitude, until a hundred or a thousand years have passed and he returns to become the Lord Horologe once again.”

  I dropped my head and looked down into the cubical pit. I looked for my mother—I had been told she was somewhere among the top layer of bodies. But the water froze quickly, and I could not find her.

  “If he returns a hundred years from now,” I said, “he may return to a dead city.” I pointed skyward in the general direction of the Abelian Star Group, where Merripen’s Star had exploded. “The supernova may soon accomplish what the Timekeeper’s bomb did not.”

  Soli nodded his head, then muttered, “Your mother should have been interred in the cantor’s mausoleum.” Soli said sadly, “She was a cantor, after all.”

  “No, she was a hibakusha. She couldn’t help herself, you see. Let her be buried as the victim she was.”

  “The Timekeeper killed her, didn’t he? His clone? You should want the Timekeeper dead.”

  “I hope he lives,” I said, trying to be compassionate for once in my life. “If he does, the secret will live with him.”

  Soli bowed his head and said, unexpectedly, “It was the Timekeeper who murdered our radio. It’s all so clear, now. He wanted our expedition to fail, didn’t he? Yes, and therefore he murdered Katharine. If we had been able to radio the City before...But no, we had no radio and Katharine is dead.”

  “I loved her, Soli. Oh, God, I loved her!”

  “The dead,” he whispered. I had never seen anyone look so bitter. “So many.”

  I began to grieve openly for my mother, then, and I covered my eyes because I was ashamed for Soli to see me weeping.

  “There’s nothing left for me in Neverness,” Soli told me. “No, nothing, and therefore my vows must be renounced. It’s time for me to leave the Order.”

  “Where will you go?” I asked. Despite myself, I was curious to know his plans.

  “I’m weary of the stars,” he said. “And I hate this city. There is a sled and dogs waiting for me at the Quay. I’m going out on the ice, possibly past Kweitkel. I’ll track the Timekeeper—it shouldn’t be hard. When I find him, I’ll spear him like a fish. For what he’s done to the Order.” A little clod of dirt, disturbed by his boot, plummeted outward and down, into the grave. When it struck the ice, it broke into pieces. “I’ll never come back,” he said.

  “The Timekeeper’s body must be returned, then.”

  “No, I’ll go on to the Devaki. Perhaps Yuri will honor his word and still welcome me.”

  “If you live as a Devaki,” I said, “there will be no cutters and cetics to bring you back to your youth. In the end, you’ll die.”

  “Yes.”

  His entire body stiffened up, then. He worked his mouth against the cold, trying to say something. At last he forced the words out. “You could come with me,” he whispered. It must have been the hardest thing he had ever said. “We could take two sleds. You could bring his body back to the Lord Imprimatur. You’ll have your secret, and I’ll have...I’ll have what I have.”

  I caught him staring beyond the City to the west. His face was long and dark in the shadow of the Hill of Sorrows, but I saw there an unmistakable glimmer of reverence. He did not hate Neverness; he loved her. He felt driven by bad chance from the Order and from his city. If he had to leave—I read this in his eyes, and he later told me so—he wanted to send back what he thought of as a gift. Perhaps the Lord Imprimatur would decode the secret from the Timekeeper’s frozen body. Perhaps the secret would save man from the Vild and from other dangers. Because he loved the Order, and in the end because he loved life more than he hated me, he restrained his anger and his spite, and he told me, “The Timekeeper has a lead, but we both still wear our Alaloi bodies. And two can travel faster than one, the Devaki say. We’ll catch him, won’t we? Out there...” He pointed west where the edge of the sea sparkled beneath Attakel’s glaciers.

  It took me only moments to decide. As the pilots and professionals bowed their heads to say a requiem for the dead, I lifted my head up. To the west lay open air and hard, endless ice.

  “I’ll come with you,” I said into the wind that cut between us. “To find the Timekeeper.”

  The memory of the last and holiest of my pilot’s vows was more chilling than the wind, which was dead cold, cold enough to harden the grave ice into an opaque, blueish–white crypt around my mother’s body. I listened to the wind blowing down through the City and across the miles of the empty sea. Once, long ago, I had vowed to seek wisdom and truth even though the seeking should lead to my death and the ruin of all that I loved and held dear. Very well, I told myself, out on the sea, within the body of an old, old man, was wisdom. Out there I would find truth at last.

  28

  Ananke

  It lies not in our power to love or hate,

  For will in us is over–ruled by fate.

  Cristopher Marlowe, Sailing Century Poet

  So we went out onto the sea. Early the next morning I went down through the Farsider’s Quarter and met Soli at the Quay, where the eastern edge of the City meets the ice. There was really nothing else to do. Every jammer in the City—even the wormrunners’—had been destroyed; therefore we could not pursue the Timekeeper from the air. In the dark and quiet we loaded our sleds. We did our work quickly. Onto their wooden frames we heaped skins full of baldo nuts and our sleeping furs, and the icesaws, harpoons, bear spears, hide–scrapers, oilstones and other tools we would need to survive the air–shattering cold. Much of this equipment was familiar, leftovers from our first expedition. In my old sealskin boots I trudged along the wooden boardwalk set into the snow of the beach. I smelled the dry, cold, salt wind blowing off the Sound. When I hefted my old harpoon, memories began to ripple. The icy stiffness of the leather harnesses, the clouds of spindrift swirling low across the dark ice, the eager whines of the dogs as the sledmaster led them on leashes down from the kennels—it all seemed so familiar, so natural, so achingly real. I harnessed my seven dogs to my sled, all the while filled with a sense of urgency and longing to be off. The sledmaster, a burly farsider from Yarkona, worked his smooth jaws furiously as he chewed a wad of feverroot to keep warm. In between his spitting gouts of fiery juice into the snow, he lectured us about the dogs: “Your lead is Kuri,” he said to me, “and your second is Arne, and that’s Hisu, Dela, Bela, Neva and Matsu,” he said, pointing down the line of the harness. He spoke the names of the other dog team to Soli, who was bent over stroking the snout of his lead dog, Leilani. “You’d better be gentle with them. They’re not used to long runs. And watch out for the ice schooners, please, because they like to chase them.”

  I smiled as I peered through the darkness at the mooring slips where the bare–masted ice schooners vibrated and groaned in the wind. It was much too early for anyone to hoist a bright–colored sail and go schooning about the Sound. (Too, with part of the City in ruins, it was not a day for recreation.) My dogs were biting their traces and sniffing each other, and I couldn’t help wondering if Soli and I wouldn’t do better to sail off west in a schooner. But of course that would have been disastrous. Out on the deep sea, the ice would be cracked and fissured, shagged with ice pocks and crevasses. A team of dogs, even such soft, playful dogs as these, was our only hope. I wished we had more time to train real sled dogs, like Liko and our other old dogs. But we had no time. Already the Timekeeper was days ahead of us somewhere to the west.

  At first light we drove down the sled runs to the sea. The ice of the Starnbergersee glowed golden orange before us. We looked for the Timekeeper’s tracks in the wind–packed snow, and we found them. Patches of spindrift partially covered the pawprints and runner grooves, but there had been no snow for the past ten days, so the tracks were straight and easy to see. We followed them out
around the lip of Attakel, out where the ice is naked and white, where everything the eye can see is either snow or sky or ice, and the colors are the colors of ice or the reflected wavelengths of light off the ice: the distant purples of the iceblooms growing in ever widening circles around us; the milk–glazed, turquoise icebergs frozen fast into hundreds of motionless pyramids; the iceblink’s yellowish glare flung up into the cobalt sky.

  We traveled fast the whole day. By late afternoon the mountains of Neverness were a blue and white haze behind us. They wavered in the air, seeming more insubstantial than the air itself. With every mile we crossed, as I breathed through my frozen mustache and listened to the scrape and glide of the sled runners and the dogs’ panting, my memories of the City became more insubstantial, too. I was taken with the world and the sensations of the world. How I loved the silky, musty smell of my shagshay furs, the stinging salt air against my greased face, even the ache of cold fingertips inside cold mittens! The slow, steady west wind murmured its music in my ear, and I was once again full of fear and fate. In truth, I was a driven man, as driven as the poor dogs yelping at the crack of my whip. But I was also being pulled by something, something that was as outside myself and separate as the light of the stars. This something I thought of as fate, not my own fate in particular, but a higher fate, the fate to which all things in the universe must submit. I felt this fate—and it was the fate of Soli and the Timekeeper and my City, the fate, too, of the flint tip of Soli’s bear spear—I felt the long, urgent sound of ananke roaring in my blood. I kept my eyes fixed on the vibrating circle of the western horizon. Even as darkness fell over us, I wanted to go on. I was exhilarated, breathless with the thrill of our first day’s run. I felt I could go on into the night, on and on westward following the Timekeeper’s tracks by starlight. But the dogs were tired and hungry; their paws were chafed and crusted with ice. We could not go on. Far from the City, and still too far from our fate, we stopped to build a snow–hut on the sea. In the dark we cut blocks of snow with our saws and shaped them into a hut. Into the hut went our oilstones, food and sleeping gear. We fed the dogs chunks of cultured fat steak; we fed ourselves and sipped our coffee and slipped down into our furs to think our private thoughts and dream our dreams.