Neverness

by David Zindell

  “But the Vild’s radiation—it propagates, does it not? And what about Merripen’s Star? And all the others? Eventually, the light will scar the entire galaxy.”

  “No, we won’t allow that future to be.” I closed my eyes and said, “We’ll make new life forms that live on light. Half–bacterium, half–computer, half–photoelectric cell—a swarm of new life throughout the galaxy, feeding on photons, shielding, becoming a part of the ecology. Such an intelligence—you can’t imagine.”

  “And then?” Bardo asked.

  We were standing on the beach, looking out at the Sound. There was the smell of salt and old snow, the rich, ageless ferment of the sea. The sea ice had mostly melted; waves were swelling up, cresting and crashing against the rocky shore. In the air above us, a couple of snowgulls were screaming. They dived and swooped and skimmed across the foamy shallows.

  “Someday,” I said, “too soon, I’ll leave the City. I’ll go to Her, as I’ve promised. And then I’ll grow. There will be a...a union, of sorts. A marriage, if you will. If I will. She’s lonely and a little insane and therefore: this new ecology of information. We’ll make something new, something that has never been before, never within this universe. And there is something else. This—it is hard to explain—this becoming that I’ve been afraid of for so long, now no longer. Because of you, I see it now. We are what we are. Everything, every woman, man, child, seal, rock, thought, theorem, and speck of dirt—it’s all preserved, all created. That’s what gods do, Bardo.”

  We picked our way across the rocks and sand, trying not to step on the pretty pebbles and smooth shells washed up along the high tide line. Bardo was puffing and panting; he leaned over with his hands on his knees. His face had gone as pale as an autist’s. I thought that he was about to be sick. “Oh, my poor belly,” he groaned. “I’ve drunk too much beer.” Then he remembered his dignity, straightened up and leaned on my shoulder. His weight was very great, very comforting, very familiar.

  He stared out at the water mournfully, then turned and examined my face. “Look at you! A man wearing a caveman’s body, and two–thirds a god inside your head!”

  Give; be compassionate, Katharine had told me.

  “No god is there but God, and we’re all a part,” I said.

  He was quiet for a moment, and then he picked up a stone and whipped it out into the water. As boys, we had often played this game of skipping stones. “Three skips,” he said. He dropped a gritty, wet stone into my hand. “We’ll see if you can get four.”

  “No, Bardo, I didn’t come here to skip stones.”

  His face flushed into anger, and he scooped up a pink spirali shell and dashed it against a rock. It broke into pieces. “Why do you always do what you shouldn’t do?” he shouted. “Where’s your sense? Oh, too goddamned bad!”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No, you’re a god, and gods aren’t sorry, I don’t think.”

  “I’m your friend.”

  He glanced up and down the beach, first at a couple of novices holding hands by the water’s edge, and then out at the seals on their rock. There were nine gray seals, and they were basking in the sun with their black noses pointed straight up towards the sky. He dropped his voice low, as if he were telling me a secret. There were vapors on his breath, the sour–sweet smell of beer. “No, Little Fellow,” he said. “Can a man be friends with a goddamned god?”

  I looked out at the waves washing the shore rocks. There was light off the sparkling water, colors that he could not see. “To live, I die,” I whispered.

  I thought that he hadn’t heard me because he was petulantly kicking at the wet sand. His chin was dropped down into his neck, and he would not look at me. And then, “No, you’ll never die—isn’t that what Katharine prophesied?” He smoothed the folds of his kamelaika over his belly. “But, I, Bardo—I’m just a man, and if I don’t feed this fine body of mine soon, I will shrink away and die. Let’s forget these painful eschatologies for the moment and dine like men before we evanesce completely. I’m going back up to the Hofgarten to order a meal. And then I’m going to become not just a little drunk, but gloriously drunk. Are you coming with me, Little Fellow?”

  For in the end we choose our futures, the scryers say.

  “Perhaps later,” I told him. “I’m not hungry right now.”

  He shrugged his shoulders, bowed his head formally, and began the hike back up to the Hofgarten. I watched my best friend—this messenger of the gods, this miracle of creation—stumbling among the black, sea–sculpted rocks.

  It is true, I now know, that creation is everything. Kalinda had sent Bardo to remind me of that. She had created him from memory, and someday, I, too, would learn the art. Someday, I would remembrance Katharine and bring her back into being, because creation is what gods do. That is what we all do. Each of us—gods, men, or worms in the belly of a bird, in our every thought, feeling and action no matter how trivial or base—we create this strange universe in which we live. We create God. At the end of time, when the universe has awakened to itself, the past will be remembranced, and everything and everyone who has suffered the pain of life will be redeemed. This is my hope; this is my dream; this is my design.

  I stood upon the beach dreaming, with the cold ocean in front of me. I squeezed the flat, smooth stone Bardo had given me and hurled it side–armed at the waves. It hit the water spinning, and then skipped four times. There was only a moment between the last two skips, before it sank beneath the water, and in that moment, the spinning lens of the galaxy took me a thousand miles through space. And the galaxy itself continued its journey outward from the still point of creation, and I fell through the universe. To this day I continue to fall, not into that negative eternity of neverness and despair, but through that other universe where the stars are bright and uncountable, and the quest for life, if not the secret of life, goes on.

  Each moment, I believe, we die, but each moment too, we are reborn into infinite possibilities. And so on a lovely day in false winter, I paid the final price and turned my face to the wind. As it usually did, the salty spray off the water made me hungry. I walked back up the beach towards my shimmering city to join Bardo for dinner, to be gloriously human again for a little while.

  About the Author

  After majoring in, at various times, philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, and physics, David Zindell graduated in 1984 from the University of Colorado with a degree in mathematics. An early story, “Shanidar,” won first prize in the Writers of the Future contest, and he was nominated for a Hugo award for best new writer of the year. His bestselling Neverness was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clark award for the best science fiction novel published in the United Kingdom. A successor trilogy, A Requiem for Homo Sapiens, came next, followed by the four−book Ea Cycle, which is a Grail quest to end all Grail quests. He lives in Denver, Colorado.

  His website is http://davidzindell.com/