Neverness

by David Zindell

  When I finished binding his fingers, I brewed him a mug of cha tea to quicken his body against infection. He looked at his hand with disgust written across his lips. He was giddy with pain and curiously talkative. “A piece of glass lacerates my fingers, wrecking the circulation, and this is the result, isn’t it? One happening begets another, on and on, as the Timekeeper used to say. This chain of logic, as inexorable as a proof: If Justine hadn’t made me...if I hadn’t hit her, what would our lives have been? It’s hard to stop thinking about that, Pilot; there’s no help for the thoughts. She’s dead, because of me. And now, almost home, but...but, no, the Alaloi do not die from lost fingers, do they?”

  During the next few days we made slow progress while he learned to manage his sled with one hand. His fingers healed quickly, and by fortyday he could manipulate the traces between his thumb and stumps with a fair skill and without real pain. One night as I was rationing out the last of our baldo nuts, he admitted that sometimes he felt a ghost pain where his fingertips used to be. He hated these pains. “It’s too bad we didn’t bring any skotch,” he said. “Don’t look at me like that, Pilot! It’s not that the ghost pain is so hard to bear; it’s that it reminds me of the tricks our nerves and brain play on us. It’s all so uncertain, isn’t it?”

  I knew about these tricks of the brain. I, myself, as we threaded across the ice–shelf’s crevasses, was tormented by such tricks. Why do we see what we see, hear what we hear? How is it that nerves can drink in information from the outer world? How do our brains make sense of this information? Is it true, as the ancient akashic Huxley once claimed, that our brains are no more than reducing valves which limit our reality, reducing our perception of the universe so that we are not driven mad by an endless wash of sensa, data, sights, colors, smells, sounds, thoughts, feelings, heat, cold, bits and bytes, a swirling, soul–swallowing ocean of information?

  One afternoon—it was on forty–second day, I think—as I stood with my yu rod probing the snowcrust over what I believed to be a crevasse, the changes in my senses overwhelmed me. I realized that the godseed must have worked on parts of me other than my brain. Like a drillworm it had chewed its way up my optic nerve into my eye, redesigning and replacing the nerve ganglia with neurologics. My vision was different, subtly different at first, and then very different. I blinked my eyes against the metallic glare of the iceblooms. I saw new colors and strange new hues and shades embedded within the old colors of green and red and blue. I looked up the spectrum into the ultraviolet where the colors—I named them brillig and mimsy and high purp—were seething with an indescribable fire. That night, when the sun had fallen out of her golden robes, and the scarlets and pinks bled from the sky, I beheld the colors of heat, the gloze and flush of infrared. The jagged peaks of Urasalia to the south were stony crimson, much cooler than the glowing flush of the surrounding sea ice. The air was marbled with different colors: with glore and high gloze and the lava of ruby running off the warm bodies of the dogs as Soli unharnessed them. My eyes (and ears) had newly come alive to radiations of many sorts. I was afraid to look skyward, afraid I might drink in the gamma murmur and radio whisper of the distant galaxies. With difficulty I made sense of all this information. The normal eye—the human eye—reacts to a single photon, a single “ping” of radiation striking the retina, the tiniest of quantum events. But the brain ignores these reactions, reducing the noise of its own nerve cells so that it takes at least seven photons to make the brain see light. My new brain was sensitive to single photons. It was sensitive to much else, too. When the wind died and all was quiet, I heard the background hiss and rustle of individual molecules colliding, rebounding, rushing past, and colliding yet again. All about me, in my eyes, nose, and ears, was noise. It took me many days to integrate this noise; it was many days before the damping gates of my new brain cut off the noise and allowed me to lay back in my furs and think in peace.

  Despite these distractions, with each mile we sledded, we drew closer to the Timekeeper. Every day we came across one of his abandoned nightly camps, and we searched the gnawed thallow bones (evidently he had killed one of these great, elusive birds), the dog dung, and knocked–in snow blocks of his huts for signs of age. The Timekeeper’s lead—four days when we had set out—had dwindled to no more than a day. Given our average sledding speed, he was probably twenty–two miles ahead of us, out where the world curved into the sky.

  On forty–seventh day we paused to hunt seals. As once before, I was lucky. We killed three small seals. We quickly butchered them and stowed the meat in my sled.

  “The Timekeeper hasn’t been so lucky,” Soli said. “Why are you so lucky every time you hunt your doffel? How many times has the Timekeeper opened an aklia—six times? And not one seal. He’s losing time. He’s probably hungry and weak. We’ll trap him soon, won’t we?”

  But we did not trap him as soon as I would have liked. The next day it was much warmer than it had been, too damn warm. A mass of warm air had moved in from the south. The low sky was a solid, seamless expanse of white clouds hanging over the grayish–white sea ice; the hut and the dog’s gray coats and Soli’s frosted furs as he bent over to ice his sled’s runners, were lost into the enclosing whiteness. Even though I was close to his sled—perhaps ten feet away—it seemed like half a mile. In the whiteness, distances were strangely expanded or shrunken. The ice around us was dented with fissures and folds, almost like a Fravashi carpet after a journeyman pilot has walked across it wearing steel skate blades. But it was difficult to make out its individual features because there were no shadows to highlight the icescape’s undulations and sudden cleavages. I smelled tingling needles of moisture in addition to the normal morning odors of seal blood, dung and coffee. After Soli tightened the traces of his rear dog, Zorro, he came over to me and pointed at the sky. “Snow,” he said. “Before morning is over.”

  “We can go five miles before it snows.”

  “It’s too dangerous. What’s five miles?”

  “Five miles is five miles,” I said.

  “It’s impossible to see five miles ahead. The damn clouds.”

  “We’ll take the run mile by mile.”

  “It will snow before we’ve gone a mile.”

  “We’ll take it foot by foot until it snows, then.”

  “You’re a tenacious bastard, aren’t you?”

  “You should know,” I said.

  We had gone about one mile when large flakes of cotton cake began fluttering down from the sky. Soli was just ahead of me, and his playful dogs jerked this way and that, sneezing and snapping snowflakes from the air. I should have paid more attention to the dogs and called an immediate halt, but I was taken with the colors of the six–sided crystals as they tickled my nose and stung my eyes. Through the snowstorm came a bellow, as of a great white bear who had cut his paw on an ice splinter. All at once Leilani and Soli’s other dogs began a tremendous chorus of barking. And then they were off into the swirling storm, pulling their sled and a cursing Soli over the ice. I could not help thinking that these soft, city dogs had never seen a bear before, or else they would have tucked their tails between their legs, turned and fled instead of running blindly into the wind.

  My dogs needed no encouragement to follow Soli’s. Wind and ice pelted my face as Kuri and Neva and the others lunged against their harnesses. In no time at all we were whipping across the snow almost as fast as an ice schooner. I gripped the sled rails and dug my boots into the snow. This slowed us a little. In vain I whistled to the dogs. We probably would have run on top of Soli’s sled if Leilani hadn’t let loose a high, pitiful yelp. Soli’s other dogs cried out in panic as the snowbridge over a crevasse crumbled. Leilani and Zorro and Finnegan, Huchu, Samsa and Pakko along with Soli and his sled—plunged over the rim downward, one after another, pulling each other like connected stones, disappearing into a crack in the ice of the sea. My lead dog, Kuri, saw this happening, and he pulled up short before he too went over. He crouched belly low to the snow,
barking as he sniffed the open air of the crevasse.

  I jumped out of the sled and looked down. Twelve feet below me, at the bottom of the crevasse, there was the black, churning sea. The heavy sled quickly sank, pulling the frantic dogs one by one down into the water. At first I thought Soli must have caught himself up in the sled. He was dead, I thought, the great pilot dead at last. I looked for his body in the floating mound of what had been the snowbridge, but I did not see him. Then I heard him shout, “Mallory, help me!”

  He was clinging to the jagged wall of the crevasse just beneath me. Somehow he must have freed his bear spear even as he went down into the crevasse. He must have jumped from his sled at the last instant and thrust his spear into the rotten, cracked ice wall, levering himself out of the water.

  “My legs...it’s so cold.”

  I threw a rope to him and heaved him up. It was harder than pulling a two–man seal from his hole. He had soaked his legs and half his torso in the killing water. His legs were so numb he couldn’t use them to kick away from the wall, to help himself up and out of the crack. My shoulders were popping in their joints, but at last I got a hand on his collar and hauled him over the edge. He nearly fell on top of me. He lay there gasping as the snow fell in waves and I stripped his sodden furs away from his skin. “It’s so cold, let me die.” I unlashed my sled’s binding straps, burying him in my unrolled sleeping furs. The snow was thick as the fur of a bear, and I turned the dogs and drove back towards our hut. Like blind lice we felt our way through the snowstorm. We were very lucky to find our hut half–buried under a mound of snow. (We were lucky, too, that we never came across the unseen bear. Perhaps Totunye had fallen into the crevasse along with Soli’s poor dogs.)

  How fragile is the life of a man! Let his core temperature drop a few degrees, and he will begin to shiver. Let it drop a little further, and he will begin to die. I dragged a dying Soli into the hut. I laid out his furs, lit the oilstones, and set the water to boil. If I could get a little hot coffee into him, I thought, I could warm him from core to skin. But I did not have time to make the coffee. His violent shivering stopped abruptly as he fell into unconsciousness, into the coma of hypothermia. His skin was blue; his breathing shallow and ragged. I touched his forehead. It was as cold as ice.

  Because he was dying, because he was, in truth, my father, I stripped to the skin and squeezed down into the sleeping furs with him. There was nothing else to do. Against my neck was the softness of shagshay fur; my naked chest pressed his hairy back. His cold, stiff legs were next to mine. I was so close to him that I did not dare open my mouth, else his long hair would have got in. I threw my arms around him. The Devaki, when they need to warm a frozen hunter, fall into just such a disgustingly intimate position. I could not bear to touch him, yet I found myself hugging him tightly, pressing him close, letting my body’s heat flow into him. For a long time I held him that way. The furs trapped the heat, and he began to shiver. That was good because he had come alive enough to make his own heat. While half inside the furs, I prepared the coffee. I held his mug to his lips, encouraging him to drink. We lay there for most of a day, and at last, when he could finally eat, I cooked seal steaks, which we dipped in liquid seal blubber. The food revived him enough so that he looked at me and said, “It wasn’t you who tried to assassinate me, was it?”

  “No, Soli.”

  “Then Justine’s death, my part in the Pilot’s War—it was all madness, wasn’t it? A stupid mistake?”

  “It was a tragedy,” I said.

  “Yes, it’s ironic.” His fingers were working the heavy brows above his eyes. “After Justine was abandoned, after I hit her, there was no going back, not for us, not for me. That was the worst moment of my life. So, this Alaloi body of mine—it could have been resculpted but it was kept to remind me. As a penance, you see. And now, if not for this thick body and your help, well, the water would have killed me.”

  Although each of us had slid towards the opposite edges of the furs, we were still very close. I smelled his breath, which was rank with coffee and ketones, the stinking result of our all–meat diet, of our bodies burning protein for glucose. I smelled other things about him, mainly anger, fear, and resentment. “You shouldn’t have helped me,” he said, “but you couldn’t help helping me, could you? It’s your revenge.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Yes, you love feeling holy about yourself, don’t you?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, though I knew exactly what he meant.

  “Even before you had the slightest reason...Do you remember that night in the bar? When Tomoth called you a bastard? You couldn’t help your temper, could you?”

  “I had no self–restraint, then.”

  “Heredity is destiny,” he quoted.

  “I don’t believe that,” I said as I held a spitted sweetbread over the fire.

  “What do you believe?”

  “I think we can change ourselves, rewrite our programs. Ultimately, we’re free.”

  “No,” he said. “You’re wrong. Life is a trap. There’s no way out.”

  He was quiet while he sat up munching the crusted organ meat. He was deep in thought. His lean, hairy stomach rose and fell, rose and fell, as he sucked in the relatively warm air of the hut. He swallowed and said, “Let’s talk about the Fravashi, this favored alien race of yours. The Timekeeper would have banished all of them from the City, if he could. Their alien teachings, this notion of ultimate fate, of—what do you call it?—of ananke. You’ve listened to them more than a man should, haven’t you?”

  I had never heard Soli wax so philosophical before, so I let him continue: “Free will? Have you thought about that term, the way the Fravashi use it. It’s an oxymoron, as self–contradictory as a ‘cheerful pessimist’ or a ‘happy fate.’ If the universe is alive and conscious, as you believe, if it moves itself toward...if it has a purpose, then we’re all slaves because it moves us towards that purpose as if we were pieces on a chessboard. And we don’t know anything of the higher game, do we? Yes, and so where is the freedom? It’s fine to talk of ananke, of this merging of our individual wills with the higher—is that what you believe?—but for human beings, ananke means hate, desperate love, despair, death.”

  “No,” I said, “you don’t understand.”

  He spat a piece of gristle against the packed–snow floor and said, “Enlighten me.”

  “We’re ultimately free, not totally free. We’re free within certain bounds. In the end, our individual wills are a part of the will of the universe.”

  “And you believe that?”

  “It’s what the Fravashi teach.”

  “And what is the will of the universe?” he asked as he dumped a handful of snow into the coffee pot.

  Outside, the storm was drowning the hut in snow. The north wall, the only uncovered wall, glowed grayly with the light sifting through the snow blocks. “I don’t know,” I said.

  “But you think you can discover what it is?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That’s an arrogant thought, isn’t it?” he said.

  “Why else are we here? Discovery or creation—in the end it’s the same thing.”

  “Yes, why are we here?—the cardinal trivial question. We’re here to suffer and die. We’re here because we’re here.”

  “That’s pure nihilism.”

  “You’re so arrogant,” he said, and he shut his eyes and ground his teeth together, almost as if he were asleep. “You think there is a way out for yourself, don’t you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, there is no way out. Life is a trap, no matter at what level you live it. There is always a crescendoing series of traps. The Timekeeper was right: Life is hell.”

  “We’re creators of our hells.”

  He jumped up off the snow bed and stood naked on the floor. Beneath his skin his muscles were long and flat, like leather straps wrapped around wood. His lean shadow cut the curving, white walls. “Yes,”
he said slowly. “Half my hell was created by me, and the other half you created for me.”

  My lips and cheeks were burning in the warm air, and I mocked him, saying, “Heredity is destiny.”

  “Damn you!”

  “We’re creators of our heavens,” I said softly. “We can create ourselves.”

  “No, it’s too late.”

  “Never too late,” I said.

  “For me it’s too late.” He rubbed some seal fat on the red scar tissue of his finger stumps. He said, “Arrogance, everywhere such arrogance—it makes me ill. But soon there will be no more of this arrogance.” Here he shot me a look of resentment, of awe, of hate. “In the whole Devaki tribe, there’s not one man who is tired or ashamed of being a man, who wants to be more than he is. And that’s why I’ll never go back to the City.”

  That night I had dreams of the future, of Soli’s future and my own. I scryed until dawn, and I drank some coffee and scryed halfway through the snowy day. I wanted to show him what I had seen, to tell him that life is not a trap, at least no more of a trap than we make from the sharpened ends of our cold bones and the sinews of our twisted hearts. I wanted to tell him the simplest of things. Instead I stood up and began pulling on my furs. “It will stop snowing soon,” I said. “Before nightfall.”

  Soli sat inside his furs as he fitted his spear with a new blade of flint. (The old point had snapped in the wall of the crevasse.) He looked at me with the loathing he held for scryers and said nothing.