DAVID ZINDELL

Neverness

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events of localities is entirely coincidental.

HarperVoyager

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Grafton 1988

Copyright © David Zindell 1988

David Zindell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007305179

Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2016 ISBN: 9780007397952

Version: 2016-09-01

Praise

Neverness is Zindell’s highly acclaimed first novel. A reviewer in the New Scientist wrote of it in 1992: ‘David Zindell writes of interstellar mathematics in poetic prose that is a joy to read’.

His second novel, The Broken God, Book One of A Requiem for Homo Sapiens, is a sequel to Neverness. It has been hailed as Dune for the 1990s and was equally well-received: ‘SF as it ought to be: challenging, imaginative, thought-provoking and well-written. Zindell has placed himself at the forefront of literary SF’.

Times Literary Supplement

The Wild, Book Two of A Requiem for Homo Sapiens was also published to great acclaim: ‘A disturbing vision of the impending collapse of a transgalactic society … the ideas are hard SF with philosophical undertones, and the story is compelling’.

New Scientist

Zindell has completed A Requiem for Homo Sapiens with War in Heaven, available now, in hardback. He lives in Boulder, Colorado.

Dedication

For Melody

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

1 Journeymen Die

2 A Pilot’s Vows

3 The Timekeeper’s Tower

4 The Number Storm

5 The Solid State Entity

6 The Image of Man

7 Rainer’s Sculpture

8 Kweitkel

9 Yuri the Wise

10 The Aklia

11 The Old Man of the Cave

12 The Little Death

13 Hunger

14 The Radio

15 The Eyes of a Scryer

16 The Death of a Pilot

17 Agathange

18 The Tycho’s Conjecture

19 The Parable of the Mad King

20 The Rings of Qallar

21 The Eyes of a Child

22 The Hanuman-Ordando Paradox

23 Plutonium Spring

24 Deus ex Machina

25 The Great Ocean of Truth

26 Kalinda of the Flowers

27 Kelkemesh

28 Ananke

29 The Secret of Life

30 Neverness

Keep Reading

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

1
Journeymen Die

On Old Earth the ancients often wondered at the origin of life, and they created many myths to explain the mystery of mysteries. There was Mumu the mother goddess who swallowed a great snake which multiplied inside of her and whose nine billion children ate their way through her belly into the light of day and so became the animals of the land and the fishes of the sea. There was a father god, Yahweh, who created Earth and the heavens in six days and who called forth the birds and the beasts on days five and six. There was a fertility goddess and a goddess of chance named Random Mutation. And so on. And so on. The truth is, life throughout the galaxy was everywhere seeded by a race known as the Ieldra. Of course the origin of the Ieldra is unknown and perhaps unknowable; the ultimate mystery remains.

from A Requiem for Homo Sapiens by Horthy Hosthoh, Timekeeper and Lord Horologe of the Order of Mystic Mathematicians and Other Seekers of the Ineffable Flame

There is infinite hope, but not for Man.

Franz Kafka, Holocaust Century Fabulist

Long before we knew that the price of the wisdom and immortality we sought would be almost beyond our means to pay, when man – what was left of man – was still like a child playing with pebbles and shells by the seashore, in the time of the quest for the mystery known as the Elder Eddas, I heard the call of the stars and prepared to leave the city of my birth and death.

I call her Neverness. The founders of our Order, so the Timekeeper once told me, having discovered a neighbourhood of space where the pathways through the manifold twist and loop together like a hard knot of string, decided to build our city on a nearby planet named Icefall. Because such knots of space were once thought to be rare or nonexistent – the cantors now call them thickspace – our first Timekeeper declared that we could fall through the galaxy until the universe collapsed inward upon itself and never find a denser thickspace. How many billions of pathways converge around our cool yellow star no one knows. There are probably an infinite number of them. The ancient cantors, believing that their theorems proved the impossibility of an infinite thickspace, had predicted that our pilots would never find the topological nexus that they sought. So when our first Lord Pilot had fallen out of the manifold above the small, cold, mountainous island that was to shelter our beloved and doomed city, he named her Neverness, in mockery of the nay-saying academicians. Of course to this day the cantors call her the Unreal City, but few pay them much attention. I, Mallory Ringess, whose duty it is to set forth here the history of the golden age and great crisis of our Order, shall follow the tradition of the pilots who came before me. Neverness – so I knew her as a child when I entered the novitiate such a short time ago; Neverness I call her now; Neverness she will always remain.

On the fourteenth day of false winter in the year 2929 since the founding of Neverness, Leopold Soli, my uncle and Lord Pilot of our Order, returned to our city after a journey lasting twenty-five years – four years longer than I had been alive. Many pilots, my mother and Aunt Justine among them, had thought him dead, lost in the inky veils of the manifold or perhaps incinerated by the exploding stars of the Vild. But he, the famous Lord Pilot, had fooled everyone. It was the talk of the City for eighty days. As false winter hardened and the light snows deepened, I heard it everywhere whispered, in the cafes and bars of the Farsider’s Quarter as well as the towers of the Academy, that there would be a quest. A quest! For journeymen pilots such as we were then – in a few more days we would take our pilot’s vows – it was an exciting time, and more, a time of restlessness and excruciating anticipation. Within each of us stirred a dreamlike but deeply felt intimation and fear that we would be called to do impossible things, and soon. What follows, then, is a chronicle of the impossible, a story of dreams and fears and pain.

At twilight of the evening before our convocation, my fat, lazy friend Bardo and I devised a plan whereby we – I – could confront the Lord Pilot before the next day’s long, boring ceremony. It was the ninety-fourth of false winter. Outside our dormitory rooms, a soft snow had recently fallen, dusting the commons of the pilot’s college with a veil of cold white powder. Through our frosted windows, I saw the towers of Resa and the other colleges gleaming in the light of the setting sun.

‘Why do you always do what you’re not supposed to do?’ Bardo asked me as he stared mournfully at me with his large brown eyes. I had often thought that the whole of his complicated character and cunning intelligence was concentrated in his great, bulging forehead and in his deep-set, beautiful eyes. Apart from his eyes, though, he was an ugly man. He had a coarse black beard and bulbous red nose. His gaudy silk robe spilled over his mountainous chest, belly and legs, onto the seat of the immense, padded chair on which he sat, next to the window. On each of his ten fat fingers he sported a differently coloured jewelled ring. He had been born a prince on Summerworld; the rings and the chair were articles of great value he had imported from his family’s estate, reminders of the riches and glory that could have been his had he not renounced (or tried to renounce) worldly pleasures for the beauty and terror of the manifold. As he twined his long moustache between his thumb and forefinger, his rings clicked together. ‘Why do you want what you can’t have?’ he asked me. ‘By God, where’s your sense?’

‘I want to meet my uncle, what’s wrong with that?’ I said as I pulled on my black racing kamelaika.

‘Why must you answer a question with a question?’

‘And why shouldn’t I answer a question with a question?’

He sighed and rolled his eyes. He said, ‘You’ll meet him tomorrow. Isn’t that soon enough? We’ll take our vows, and then the Lord Pilot will present us our rings – I hope. We’ll be pilots, Mallory, and then we can do as we damn please. Tonight we should smoke toalache or find a couple of beautiful whores – a couple apiece, I mean – and spend the night swiving them until our blood’s dry.’

Bardo, in his own way, was wilder and more disobedient than I. What we should have been doing the night before taking our vows was to be practising zazen, hallning and fugue, some of the mental disciplines needed to enter – and survive – the manifold.

‘Last seventyday,’ I said, ‘my mother invited Soli and Justine to dinner. He didn’t have the decency to answer the invitation. I don’t think he wants to meet me.’

‘And you think to repay his rudeness with greater rudeness? If he wants to waste away drinking with his friends, well, everyone knows how Lord Soli likes to drink, and why. Leave him alone, Little Fellow.’

I reached for my skates and pushed my feet into them. They were cold and stiff from lying beneath the draughty window too long. ‘Are you coming with me?’ I said.

‘Am I coming with you? Am I coming with you? What a question!’

He belched and patted his rumbling belly as he looked out the window. I thought I saw confusion and indecision rippling in his dark, liquid eyes.

‘If Bardo doesn’t come with you, you’ll go alone, don’t tell me you won’t, goddammit!’ Like many of the princely caste on Summerworld, he had the pretentious habit of occasionally speaking of himself by his own name. ‘And what then? Bardo will be to blame if anything happens to you.’

I tightened the laces of my skates. I said, ‘I want to make friends with my uncle, if I can, and I want to see what he looks like.’

‘Who cares what he looks like?’

‘I do. You know I do.’

‘You can’t be his son, I’ve told you that a hundred times. You were born four years after he left Neverness.’

It was said that I looked enough like the Lord Pilot to be mistaken for his brother – or son. All my life I had endured the slander. My mother, so the gossips prattled, had long ago fallen in love with the great Soli. When he had spurned her in favour of my Aunt Justine – this is the lie they tell – she had searched the back streets of the Farsider’s Quarter for a man, any man, who looked enough like him to father her son. To father me. Mallory the Bastard – so the novices at Borja had whispered behind my back, and some of them, the bolder few, to my face. At least they had until the Timekeeper taught me the ancient arts of wrestling and boxing.

‘So what if you do look like him? You’re his nephew.’

‘His nephew by marriage.’

I did not want to look like the famous, arrogant Lord Pilot. I hated that the signature of his chromosomes was seemingly written upon my own. Bad enough to be his nephew. My great fear, as Bardo knew, was that Soli had returned in secret to Neverness and had used my mother for his own selfish purposes or … I did not like to think of other possibilities.

‘Aren’t you curious?’ I asked. ‘The Lord Pilot returns from the longest journey in the three thousand years of our Order, and you aren’t even curious to know what he’s discovered?’

‘No, I’m not afflicted with curiosity, thank God.’

‘It’s said that the Timekeeper will call the quest at the convocation. Don’t you even want to know?’

‘If there’s a quest,’ he said, ‘we’ll probably all die.’

‘Journeymen die,’ I said.

Journeymen Die – it was a saying we had, a warning cut into the marble archway above the entrance to Resa that is meant to terrorize young journeymen into leaving the Order before the manifold claimed them; it is a saying that is true.

‘“To die among the stars,”’ I quoted the Tycho, ‘“is the most glorious death.”’

‘Nonsense!’ Bardo shouted as he slapped the arm of the chair. He belched and said, ‘Twelve years I’ve known you, and you’re still talking nonsense.’

‘You can’t live forever,’ I said.

‘I can damn try.’

‘It would be hell,’ I said. ‘Day after day, thinking the same thoughts, the same dull stars. The same faces of friends doing and talking about the same things, the relentless apathy, trapped within our same brains, this negative eternity of our confused and painful lives.’

He shook his head back and forth so violently that drops of sweat flew off his forehead. ‘A different woman each night,’ he countered. ‘Or three very different women each night. A boy or an alien courtesan if things got too boring. Thirty thousand planets of the Civilized Worlds, and I’ve seen only fifty of them. Ah, I’ve heard the talk of our Lord Pilot and his quest. For the secret of life! Do you want to know the secret of life? Bardo will tell you the secret of life: it’s not the amount of time we have, despite what I’ve just said. No, it’s not quantity and it’s not even quality. It’s variety.’

As I usually did, I had let him blather, and he had blathered his way into a trap.

‘The variety of the bars in the Farsider’s Quarter,’ I said, ‘is nearly infinite. Are you coming with me?’

‘Damn you, Mallory! Of course I am!’

I put on my racing gloves and clipped in the blades of my skates. I walked towards the heavy mahogany door of our room. The long racing blades left dents in the alien-woven Fravashi carpet. Bardo bellowed as he stood up and followed behind me, smoothing out the dents with the balls of his black-slippered feet. ‘You’ve no respect for art,’ he said as he put on his skates. He fastened his black shagshay fur cape around his neck with a gold chain and opened the door. ‘Barbarian!’ he said, and we skated out onto the street.

We sped between Resa’s Morning Towers tucked low and tight with our arms swinging and our skates clacking mechanically against the smooth red ice. The cold wind against my face felt good. In no time at all we shot past the granite and basalt towers of the high professionals’ college, Upplysa, and passed through the marble pillars of the west gate of the Academy, and there she was.

She shimmers, my city, she shimmers. She is said to be the most beautiful of all the cities of the Civilized Worlds, more beautiful even than Parpallaix or the cathedral cities of Vesper. To the west, pushing into the green sea like a huge, jewel-studded sleeve of city, the fragile obsidian cloisters and hospices of the Farsider’s Quarter gleamed like black glass mirrors. Straight ahead as we skated, I saw the frothy churn of the Sound and the whitecaps of breakers crashing against the cliffs of North Beach, and above the entire city, veined with purple and glazed with snow and ice, Waaskel and Attakel rose up like vast pyramids against the sky. Beneath the half-ring of extinct volcanoes (Urkel, I should mention, is the southernmost peak, and though less magnificent than the others, it has a conical symmetry that some find pleasing) the towers and spires of the Academy scattered the dazzling false winter light so that the whole of the Old City sparkled. The streets, as everyone knows, are coloured ice. Throughout the city, the white shimmer is broken by strands of orange and green and blue. ‘Strange are the streets of the City of Pain,’ the Timekeeper is fond of quoting, but though indeed colourful and strange, they are colourful and strange to a purpose. The streets – the glissades and slidderies – have no names. Thus it has been since our first Timekeeper announced that young novices could prepare their brains for the pathways of the manifold by memorizing the pathways of our city. Since he understood that our city would grow and change, he devised a plan whereby returning pilots who had been away too long might still be able to negotiate the ice and not lose their way. The plan is supposed to be simple. There are two main streets: the Run, coloured blue, which twists from West Beach across the long sleeve of the peninsula where it meets the foothills of Attakel and Urkel, and the Way, which is laid straight from the Hollow Fields to the Sound. Any orange sliddery intersects – eventually – the Way. Any green glissade intersects the Run. The glidderies, coloured purple, join with glissades, and the red lesser glidderies give out onto the slidderies. I should not confuse matters by mentioning that there are two yellow streets running through the Pilot’s Quarter, but there are. No one knows how they came to be there. A joke, no doubt, on our first Timekeeper.

We turned onto the Way at an orange and white chequered intersection about a mile west of the Academy. The street was crowded with harijan and wormrunners and other farsiders. We passed and bowed to the eschatologists, cetics, akashics, horologes, the professionals and academicians of our Order. (We did not come across any other pilots. Although we pilots – some will deny this – are the very soul of our Order, we are outnumbered by the scryers, holists, historians, remembrancers and ecologists, by the programmers, neologicians and cantors. Our Order is divided into one hundred and eighteen disciplines; there are too many disciplines, more disciplines, it seems, every year.) There was excitement in the air, as well as the alien scent of a couple of Friends of Man, who had their trunks lifted as they talked to each other, spraying out their foul speech molecules. Next to us skated an expensively dressed Alaloi – or rather a man whose flesh had been sculpted into the thick, powerful, hairy body of an Alaloi. This kind of artificial return to the primitive form had been a fashion in the city for years, ever since the famous Goshevan of Summerworld had tired of his human flesh and had gone to live with the Alaloi in their caves on the islands to the west of Neverness. The false-Alaloi, who was wearing too much purple velvet and gold, pushed one of the slender, gentle harijan out of his way and shouted, ‘Watch out, stupid farsider!’ The bewildered harijan stumbled, made a sign of peace across his shiny forehead, and slunk off into the crowd like a beaten dog.

Bardo looked at me and shook his head sadly. He had always had a strange empathy for the harijan and other homeless pilgrims who come to our city seeking enlightenment. (And too often, they come seeking riches of a more mundane nature.) He smiled as he edged closer to the barbaric Alaloi. He insinuated his thick tree trunk of a leg between the purple-covered legs of the unsuspecting man. There was a ringing of steel against steel, and steel grinding against ice, and suddenly the man pitched forward to the street with a slap and a crack. Bardo shouted, ‘Excuse me!’ Then he laughed, reached back and grabbed my forearm, and pulled me through the crush of skaters who were jostling one another and vying for position in their hurry to reach their favourite cafes or kiosks for their evening meal. I looked back through the crowd, but I could not see the man whom Bardo had tripped.

‘On Summerworld,’ Bardo said to me between gasps of air, ‘we brand dung like him with red-hot steel.’

We crossed into the Farsider’s Quarter and came to the Street of the Ten Thousand Bars. I have said that the streets of Neverness have no names, but that is not entirely true. They have no official names, no names that are marked on buildings or posted on street signs. Especially in the Farsider’s Quarter, there are many nameless streets that are named according to the prevailing enterprise transpiring along its convolutions of coloured ice. Thus there is a Street of Cutters and Splicers, and a Street of Common Whores, as well as a Street of Master Courtesans. The Street of the Ten Thousand Bars is actually more of a district than a street; it is a maze of red lesser glidderies encompassing tiny bars that cater to the unique tastes of their patrons. One bar will serve only toalache while another might specialize in cilka, the pineal gland of the thallow bird which induces visions in small quantities and is lethal in larger ones. There are bars frequented only by the alien Friends of Man, and there are bars open to anyone who writes haiku (but only Simoom haiku) or plays the shakuhachi. Near the edge of the district, there is a bar where the eschatologists argue as to how long it will be before the exploding Vild destroys the last of the Civilized Worlds, and next door, a bar for the tychists who believe that absolute chance is the fundament of the universe, and that most probably some worlds will survive. I do not know if there are as many as ten thousand bars or if there are many more. Bardo often joked that if one could imagine a bar existing, it must exist. Somewhere there is a bar, he claimed, where the Fravashi analyse the anguished poetry of the Swarming Centuries and another bar where their criticisms are criticized. Somewhere – and why not? – there is a bar for those wishing to talk about what is occurring in all the other bars.

We stopped in front of the black, windowless master pilot’s bar, or, I should say, the bar for master pilots recently returned from the manifold. The sun had set, and the wind moaned as it drove flowing, ghostlike wisps of snow down the darkened gliddery. In the dim light of the street globes – when for a moment the wind suddenly pulled away the ragged, drifting snow shroud – the ice of the street was blood red.

‘This is an ugly place,’ Bardo said, his voice booming from the stone walls surrounding us. ‘I have a proposition. Since I’m in a generous mood, I’ll buy you a master courtesan for the night. You’ve never been able to afford one, have you? By God, it’s like nothing you’ve ever –’

‘No,’ I said as I shook my head.

I opened the heavy stone door, which was made of obsidian and so smooth that it felt almost greasy to the touch. For a moment, I thought the tiny room was empty. Then I saw two men standing at the dark end of the narrow bar, and I heard the shorter one say, ‘If you please, close the door, it’s cold.’

We stepped over to the bar, into the flickering light of the marble fireplace behind us. ‘Mallory,’ the man said, ‘and Bardo, what are you two doing here?’

My eyes adjusted to the dim orange light, and I saw the master pilot, Lionel Killirand. He shot me a swift look with his hard little eyes and contracted his blond eyebrows quizzically.

‘Soli,’ he said to the tall man next to him, ‘allow me to present your nephew.’

The tall man turned into the light, and I looked at my uncle, Leopold Soli, the Lord Pilot of our Order. It was like looking at myself.

He stared at me with troubled, deep-set, blue eyes. I did not like what I saw in his eyes; I remembered the stories my Aunt Justine had told me, that Soli was a man famous for his terrible, unpredictable rages. Like mine, his nose was long and broad, the mouth wide, firm. From his long neck to his skates, thick black woollens covered his lean body. He seemed intensely curious, scrutinizing me as carefully as I did him. I looked at his hair; he looked at mine. His hair was long and bound back with a silver chain, as was the custom of his birth planet, Simoom. He had unique hair, wavy black shot with red, a genetic marker of some Soli forebear who had tampered with the family chromosomes. My hair, thank God, was pure black. I looked at him; he looked at me. I wondered for the thousandth time about my chromosomes.

‘Moira’s son.’ He said my mother’s name as one says a curse word. ‘You shouldn’t be here, should you?’

‘I wanted to meet you,’ I said. ‘My mother has talked about you all my life.’

‘Your mother hates me.’

There was a long silence broken by Bardo, who said, ‘Where’s the bartender?’

The bartender, a tonsured novice who wore the white wool cap of Borja over his bald head, opened the storage room door behind the bar. He said, ‘This is the master pilot’s bar. Journeymen drink at the journeymen’s bar, which is five bars down the gliddery towards the Street of Musicians.’

‘Novices don’t tell journeymen what to do,’ Bardo said. ‘I’ll have a pipe of toalache and my friend drinks coffee – Summerworld coffee if you have it, Farfara if you don’t.’

The novice shrugged his skinny shoulders and said, ‘The master pilots don’t smoke toalache in this bar.’

‘I’ll have a tumbler of liquid toalache, then.’

‘We don’t serve toalache or coffee.’

‘Then we’ll have an amorgenic. Something strong to send the hormones gushing. We’ve a busy night ahead of us.’

Soli picked up a tumbler of a smoky coloured liquid and took a sip. Behind us a log in the fireplace popped and fell between two others, scattering glowing cinders and ashes over the tiled floor. ‘We drink liquor or beer,’ he said.

‘Barbaric.’ This came from Bardo who added, ‘I’ll have beer, then.’

I looked at my tall uncle and asked, ‘What liquor are you drinking?’

‘It’s called skotch.’

‘I’ll have skotch,’ I said to the novice, who filled two tumblers – a large one with foamy beer and a smaller one with amber skotch – and set them in front of us atop the rosewood bar.

Bardo gulped his beer, and after I had taken a sip of skotch and coughed, he asked, ‘What does it taste like?’ I handed him my tumbler, watching as he brought it up to his fat red lips. He, too, coughed at the fire of the burning liquid and announced, ‘It tastes like gull piss!’

Soli smiled at Lionel and asked me, ‘How old are you?’

‘Twenty-one, Lord Pilot. Tomorrow when we take our vows, I’ll be the youngest pilot our Order has ever had, if I may say that without sounding like I’m bragging.’

‘Well, you’re bragging,’ Lionel said.

We talked for a while about the origins of such immense and fathomless beings as the Silicon God and the Solid State Entity, and other things that pilots talk about. Soli told us of his journey to the core; he spoke of dense clusters of hot new stars and of a great ringworld that some god or other had assembled around Betti Luz. Lionel argued that the great and often insane mainbrains (he did not like to use the word ‘gods’) roaming the galaxy must be organized according to different principles than were our own minuscule minds, for how else could their brains’ separate lobes – some of which were the size of moons – intercommunicate with others across light-years of space? It was an old argument. It was one of the many bitter arguments dividing the pilots and professionals of our Order. Lionel, and many eschatologists, programmers, and mechanics as well, believed the mainbrains had mastered nearly instantaneous tachyonic information flow. He held that we should seek contact with these beings, even though such contact was very dangerous and might someday force the Order to change in ways repugnant to older and more old-fashioned pilots such as Soli.

‘Who can understand a brain encompassing a thousand cubic light-years of space?’ Soli asked. ‘And who knows about tachyons? Perhaps the mainbrains think slowly, very slowly.’

To him, the origin and technology of the gods were of little interest. In this he was as stodgy as the Timekeeper, and like the Timekeeper, he thought that there were certain things that man was not meant to know. He recited a long list of pilots, the Tycho among them, who had been lost trying to penetrate the mystery of the Solid State Entity. ‘They overreached themselves,’ he told us. ‘They should have been aware of their limits.’ I smiled because this came from the tight lips of a man who had reached farther than any other, a famous pilot whose discovery would provoke the great crisis of our Order.

It was a heady drug, to talk with master pilots as pilots, as if we had long ago taken our vows and proved our mastery of the manifold. I drank my skotch and gathered up my courage, and I said, ‘I’ve heard there will be a quest. Will there really be?’

Soli glared at me. He was a sullen man, I thought, with a sad, faraway look to his sea-blue eyes, a look that hinted of freezing mists and sleepless nights and fits of madness. Though his face was young and smooth, as young as mine, it had recently been as old and deeply seamed as a face could be. It is one of the peculiarities of the manifold that a pilot sometimes ages, intime, three years to every year on Neverness. I imagined, for a moment, that I had the powers of a cetic and that I could see the wrinkled, ancient Soli through the taut olive skin of his new body, in the same manner one envisions a fireflower drying to a brittle black, or the skull of death beneath the pink flesh of a newborn baby boy. A master horologe, whose duty it was to determine the intime of returning pilots according to complicated formulae weighting einsteinian time distortions against the unpredictable deformations of the manifold, had told me that Soli had aged one hundred and three years this last journey and would have died but for the skills of the Lord Cetic. This made my uncle, who had been brought back three times to his youth, the oldest pilot of our Order.

‘Tell us about your discovery,’ I said. I had heard a wild rumour that he had reached the galactic core, the only pilot to have done so since the Tycho, who had returned half-insane.

He took a long drink of skotch, all the while watching me through the clary bottom of the tumbler. The poorly dried firewood hissed and groaned, and from the street came the humming and steaming of a zamboni as it hovered over the gliddery, melting and smoothing the ice for the next day’s skaters.

‘Yes, the impatience of youth,’ he said. ‘You come here disrespecting the needs of a pilot for privacy and the company of his friends. In that, you’re much like your mother. Well, then, since you’ve gone to so much trouble and endured the vileness of skotch whisky, you’ll be told what happened to me, if you really want to know.’

I found it irritating that Soli could not simply say, ‘I’ll tell you what happened to me.’ Like most others from that too-mystical planet, Simoom, he usually observed their taboo against using the pronoun ‘I’.

‘Tell us,’ Bardo said.

‘Tell us,’ I said, and I listened with that strange mixture of worship and dread that journeymen feel towards old pilots.

‘It happened like this,’ Soli said. ‘A long time had passed since my leaving Neverness. We were deep in dreamtime and fenestering inwards towards the core. The stars were dense. They shined like the lights of the Farsider’s Quarter at night, yes, a great burning fan of stars disappearing into the blackness at the fan’s pivot point, at the singularity. There was the white light of dreamtime – you young pilots think instantaneity and stopping time are all there is to dreamtime, and you have much to learn – there was a sudden clarity, and voices. My ship told me it was receiving a signal, intercepting one of a billion or so laser beams streaming out of the singularity.’

He suddenly slammed his empty tumbler on the bar and his voice rose an octave. ‘Yes, that’s what was said! From the singularity! It’s impossible, but true. A billion lines of infrared light escaping the black maw of gravity.’ To the novice he said, ‘Pour some skotch in here, please.’

‘And then?’

‘The voices, the ship-computer receiving half a trillion bits per second and translating the information in the laser beams into voices. They, the voices, claimed to be – let’s call them the Ieldra. Are you familiar with that term?’

‘No, Lord Pilot.’

‘It’s what the eschatologists have named the aliens who seeded the galaxy with their DNA.’

‘The mythical race.’

‘The hitherto mythical race,’ he said. ‘They have – and many refuse to believe this – they’ve projected their collective selfness, their consciousnesses, into the singularity.’

‘Into the black hole?’ Bardo asked as he pulled at his moustache.

I looked at Soli carefully, to see if he was having a joke with us. I did not believe him. I looked down at his tense hands and saw that he was carelessly ungloved. Plainly, he was an arrogant man who had little fear of contagion or that his enemies might make use of his plasm. His knuckles were white around the curve of his refilled tumbler. The black diamond of his pilot’s ring cut into the skin of his little finger. He said, ‘The message. The white light of dreamtime hardened and crystallized. There was a stillness and a clarity, and then the message. “There is hope for Man,” they said. “Remember, the secret of Man’s immortality lies in your past and in your future” – that’s what they said. We must search for this mystery. If we search, we’ll discover the secret of life and save ourselves. So the Ieldra told me.’

I think he must have known we did not believe him. I nodded my head stupidly while Bardo stared at the bar as if the knots and whorls of the rosewood were of great interest to him. He dipped his finger into the foam of his beer, brought it to his lips, and made a rude sucking sound.

‘Young fools,’ Soli said. And then he told us of the prediction. The Ieldra, he said, understanding the cynicism and doubtfulness of human nature, had provided a surety that their communication would be well received, a prediction as to part of the sequence of supernovae in the Vild.

‘How can they possibly know what will occur according to chance?’ I asked.

‘Do the Vild stars explode at random?’ Lionel broke in.

‘Ah, of course they do,’ Bardo said.

In truth, no one knew very much about the Vild. Was the Vild a discrete, continuous region of the galaxy expanding outwards spherically in all directions? Or was it a composite of many such regions, random pockets of hellfire burning and joining, connecting in ways our astronomers had not determined? No one knew. And no one knew how long it would be before Icefall’s little star exploded, along with all the others, putting an end to such eschatological speculations.

‘How do we know what we know?’ Soli asked, and he took a sip of skotch. ‘How is it known the memory in my brain is real, that there was no hallucination, as some fools have suggested? Yes, you doubt my story, and there’s nothing to prove to you, even if you are Justine’s nephew, but this is what the Lord Akashic told me: He said that the auditory record was clear. There was a direct downloading from the ship-computer to my auditory nerve. Perhaps you think my ship was hallucinating?’

‘No, Lord Pilot.’ I began to believe him. I knew well the power and skills of the akashics. A short half-year ago, on a bitterly cold day in deep winter, having completed my first journey alone into the manifold, I had gone before the akashics. I remembered sitting in the Lord Akashic’s darkened chamber as the heaume of the deprogramming computer descended over my head, sitting and sweating and waiting for my memories and mappings of the manifold to be proved true. Though there had been no cause for fear, I had been afraid. (Long ago, in the time of the Tycho, there had been reason to be afraid. The clumsy ancient heaumes, so I understand, extruded protein filaments through one’s scalp and skull into the brain. Barbaric. The modern heaume – this is what the akashics claim – models the interconnections of the neurons’ synapses holographically, thereby ‘reading’ the memory and identity functions of the brain. It is supposed to be quite safe.)

Bardo, as was his habit when he was nervous or afraid, farted loudly, and he asked, ‘Then you think there will be a quest for this … this, uh, secret of the Ieldra, Lord Pilot?’

‘The eschatologists have named the secret the “Elder Eddas,”’ Soli said as he backed away from him. ‘And yes, there will be a quest. Tomorrow, at your convocation, the Timekeeper will issue his summons and call the quest.’

I believed him. The Lord Pilot, my uncle, said there would be a quest, and I suddenly felt my heart beating up through my throat as if it were fate’s fist knocking at the doorway to my soul. Wild plans and dreams came half-formed into my mind. I said quickly, ‘If we could prove the Continuum Hypothesis, the quest would be full of glory, and we’d find your Elder Eddas.’

‘Don’t call them my Elder Eddas,’ he said.

I should admit that I did not understand the Lord Pilot. One moment he proclaimed that there were things man was not meant to know, and the next moment he seemed proud and eager to go off seeking the greatest of secrets. And yet a moment later, he was bitter and appeared resentful of his own discovery. In truth, he was a complicated man, the second most complicated man I have ever known.

‘What Mallory meant,’ Bardo said, ‘was that he admires – as we all do – the work you’ve done on the Great Theorem.’

That was not at all what I had meant.

Soli looked at me fiercely and said, ‘Yes, the dream of proving the Continuum Hypothesis.’

The Continuum Hypothesis (or, colloquially, the Great Theorem): an unproved result of Lavi’s Fixed-Point Theorem stating that between any pair of discrete Lavi sets of point-sources, there exists a one-to-one mapping. More simply, that it is possible to map from any star to any other in a single fall. It is the greatest problem of the manifold, of our Order. Long ago, when Soli had been a pilot not much older than I, he had nearly proved the Hypothesis. But he had become distracted by an argument with Justine and had forgotten (so he claimed) his elegant proof of the theorem. The memory of it haunted him. And so he drank his poisonous skotch whisky, to forget. (The powers of a pilot’s mind, Bardo reminds me, crescendo at an early age. It is a matter of dying brain cells, he says, and the rejuvenation we pilots undergo is imperfect in this respect. We grow slowly stupider as we age, and so why not drink skotch, or smoke toalache and lie with whores?)

‘The Continuum Hypothesis,’ Soli said to me as he spun his empty tumbler on top of the bar, ‘may very well be unprovable.’

‘I understand you are bitter.’

‘As you will be if you seek the unobtainable.’

‘Forgive me, Lord Pilot, but how are we to know what is obtainable and what is not?’

‘We grow wiser as we grow older,’ he said.

I kicked the toe of my boot against the brass railing at the foot of the bar. The metal rang dully. ‘I may be young, and I don’t want to sound like –’

‘You’re bragging,’ Lionel said quickly.

‘ – but I think the Hypothesis is provable, and I intend to prove it.’

‘For the sake of wisdom,’ Soli asked me, ‘or for the glory? I’ve heard that you’d like to be Lord Pilot someday.’

‘Every journeyman dreams of being Lord Pilot.’

‘A boy’s dreams often become a man’s nightmares.’

I kicked the railing, accidentally. ‘I’m not a boy, Lord Pilot. I take my vows tomorrow; one of my vows is to discover wisdom. Have you forgotten?’

‘Have I forgotten?’ he said, breaking his taboo and flinching as he shouted out the forbidden pronoun. ‘Listen, Boy, I’ve forgotten nothing.’

The word ‘nothing’ seemed to hang in the air along with the hollow ringing of the railing as Soli stared at me and I at him. Then there came too-loud laughter from the street outside, and the door suddenly opened. Three tall, heavy men, each of them with pale yellow hair and drooping moustaches, each of them wearing light black furs dusted with snow, ejected their skate blades and stomped into the bar. They came up to Lionel and Soli and grasped each other’s hands. The largest of the three, a master pilot who had terrorized Bardo during our novice years at Borja, called for three mugs of kvass. ‘It’s spiky cold outside,’ he said.

Bardo leaned over to me and whispered, ‘Time to go, I think.’

I shook my head.

The master pilots – their names were Neith, Seth and Tomoth – were brothers. They had their backs to us, and they seemed not to have noticed us.

‘I’ll pay for six nights of master courtesans,’ Bardo mumbled.

The novice banged three mugs of steaming hot black beer down on the bar. Tomoth backed a few steps closer to the fire and shook the melting snow from his furs. Like some of the older pilots who had gone blind from old age, he wore jewelled, mechanical eyes. He had just returned from the edge of the Vild, and he said to Soli, ‘Your Ieldra were right, my friend. The Gallivare Binary and Cerise Luz have exploded. Nothing left but dirty hard dust and light.’

‘Dust and light,’ his brother Neith said, and he burned his mouth with hot kvass and cursed.

‘Dust and light,’ Seth repeated. ‘Sodervarld and her twenty millions caught in a storm of radioactive dust and light. We tried to get them off but we were too late.’

Sodervarld orbits Enola Luz, which is – had been – the star nearest the Gallivare Binary. Seth told us that the supernova had baked the surface of Sodervarld, killing off every bit of life except the ground worms. The small master pilot’s bar suddenly seemed stultifyingly tiny. The three brothers, I recalled, had been born on Sodervarld.

‘To our mother,’ Seth said as he clinked mugs with Soli, Lionel and his brothers.

‘To our father,’ Tomoth said.

‘Freyd.’ This came from Neith who inclined his head so slightly that I was not sure if he had actually nodded or if his image had wavered in the firelight. ‘To Yuleth and Elath.’

‘Time to go,’ I said to Bardo.

We made ready to leave, but Neith fell weeping against Tomoth, who turned our way as he caught his brother. His jewelled eyes gleamed in the half-light when he saw us. ‘What’s this?’ he shouted.

‘Why are there journeymen in our bar?’ Seth wanted to know.

Neith brushed yellow hair from his wet eyes and said, ‘My God, it’s the Bastard and his fat friend – what’s his name? – Burpo? Lardo?’

‘Bardo,’ Bardo said.

‘They were just about to leave,’ Soli said.

I suddenly did not feel like leaving. My mouth was dry, and there was a pressure behind my eyes.

‘Don’t call him “Bardo”,’ Neith said. ‘When we tutored him at Borja, everyone called him Piss-All Lal because he used to piss in his bed every night.’

It was true, Bardo’s birth name was Pesheval Lal. When he first came to Neverness, he had been a skinny, terrified, homesick boy who had loved to recite romantic poetry and who had pissed in his bed every night. Half of the novices and masters had called him ‘Bardo,’ and the other half, ‘Piss-All.’ But after he had begun lifting heavy weights above his head and had taken to spending the nights with bought women so that he wet his bed with the liquids of lust instead of piss, few had dared to call him anything but ‘Bardo.’

‘Well,’ Tomoth said as he clapped his hands at the novice behind the bar. ‘Piss-All and the Bastard will toast with us before they leave.’

The novice filled our mugs and tumblers. Bardo looked at me; I wondered if he could hear the blood pounding in my throat or see the tears burning in my eyes.

‘Freyd,’ Tomoth said. ‘To the dead of Sodervarld.’

I was afraid I was about to cry from rage and shame, and so, looking straight into Tomoth’s ugly metal eyes, I picked up my tumbler and tried to swallow the fiery skotch in a single gulp. It was the wrong thing to do. I gagged and coughed and spat all at once, spraying Tomoth’s face and yellow moustache with tiny globules of amber spit. He must have thought that I was mocking him and defiling the memory of his family because he came at me without thought or hesitation, came straight for my eyes with one hand and for my throat with the other. There was a ragged burning beneath my eyebrow. Suddenly there were fists and blood and elbows as Tomoth and his brothers swept me under like an avalanche. Everything was cold and hard: cold tile ground against my spine, and hard bone broke against my teeth; someone’s hard nails were gouging into my eyelid. Blindly, I pushed against Tomoth’s face. For a moment, I thought that cowardly Bardo must have slipped out the door. Then he bellowed as if he had suddenly remembered he was Bardo, not Piss-All, and there was the meaty slap of flesh on flesh, and I was free. I found my feet and punched at Tomoth’s head, a quick, vicious, hooking punch that the Timekeeper had taught me. My knuckles broke and pain burned up my arm into my shoulder joint. Tomoth grabbed his head, dropping to one knee.

Soli was behind him. ‘Moira’s son,’ he said as he bent over and reached for the collar of Tomoth’s fur to keep him from falling. Then I made a mistake, the second worst mistake, I think, of my life. I swung again at Tomoth, but I hit Soli instead, smashing his proud, long nose as if it were a ripe bloodfruit. To this day, I can see the look of astonishment and betrayal (and pain) on his face. He went mad, then. He ground his teeth and snorted blood out of his nose. He attacked me with such a fury that he got me from behind in a head hold and tried to snap my neck. If Bardo had not come between us, peeling Soli’s steely hands away from the base of my skull, he would have killed me.

‘Easy there, Lord Pilot,’ Bardo said. He massaged the back of my neck with his great, blunt hand and eased me towards the door. Everyone stood panting, looking at each other, not quite knowing what to do next.

There were apologies and explanations, then. Lionel, who had held himself away from the melee, told Tomoth and his brothers that I had never drunk skotch before and that I had certainly meant them no insult. After the novice refilled the mugs and tumblers, I said a requiem for the Sodervarld dead. Bardo toasted Tomoth, and Tomoth toasted Soli’s discovery. And all the while, our Lord Pilot stared at me as blood trickled from his broken nose down his hard lips and chin.

‘Your mother hates me, so there should be no surprise that you do too.’

‘I’m sorry, Lord Pilot. I swear it was an accident. Here, use this to wipe your nose.’

I offered him my handkerchief, but he pretended not to see my outstretched hand. I shrugged my shoulders, and I crumpled the linen to sponge the blood out of my eye. ‘To the quest for the Elder Eddas,’ I said as I raised my tumbler. ‘You’ll drink to that, won’t you, Lord Pilot?’

‘What hope does a journeyman have of finding the Eddas?’

‘Tomorrow I’ll be a pilot,’ I said. ‘I’ve as much a chance as any pilot.’

‘Yes, chance. What chance does a young fool of a pilot have of discovering the secret of life? Where will you look? In some safe place, no doubt, where you’ve no chance of finding anything at all.’

‘Perhaps I’ll search where bitter and jaded master pilots are afraid to.’

The room grew so quiet that I heard the spatter of my uncle’s blood-drops against the floor.

‘And where would that be?’ he asked. ‘Beneath the folds of your mother’s robes?’

I wanted to hit him again. Tomoth and his brother laughed as they slapped each other on the back, and I wanted to break my uncle’s bleeding, arrogant face. I have always felt the hot pus of anger too keenly and quickly. I wondered if it had been an accident that I had hit him; perhaps it was my fate (or secret desire) to have hit him. I stood there on trembling legs staring at him as I wondered about chance and fate. The heat of the glowing fire was suddenly oppressive. My head was pounding with blood and skotch, and my eye felt like molten lava, and my tongue was like syrup as I made the worst mistake of my life. ‘No, Lord Pilot,’ I blurted out. ‘I’ll journey beyond the Eta Carina nebula. I intend to penetrate and map the Solid State Entity.’

‘Don’t joke with me.’

‘I’m not joking. I don’t like your kind of jokes; I’m not joking.’

‘You are joking,’ he said as he stepped closer to me. ‘It’s just the silly brag of a foolish journeyman pilot, isn’t it?’

Through the haze of my good eye, I saw that everyone, even the young bartender, was staring at me.

‘Of course it was a joke.’ Bardo’s voice boomed as he farted. ‘Tell him it was a joke, Little Fellow, and let’s leave.’

I looked into Soli’s intense, fierce eyes and said, ‘I swear to you I’m not joking.’

He grabbed my forearm with his long fingers. ‘You swear it?’

‘Yes, Lord Pilot.’

‘You’ll swear it, formally?’

I pulled away from him and said, ‘Yes, Lord Pilot.’

‘Swear it, then. Say, “I, Mallory Ringess, by the canons and vows of our Order, in fulfilment of the Timekeeper’s summons to quest, swear to my Lord Pilot I will map the pathways of the Solid State Entity.” Swear it to me!’

I swore the formal oath in a trembling voice as Bardo looked at me, plainly horrified. Soli called for our tumblers to be filled and announced, ‘To the quest for the Elder Eddas. Yes, my young fool of a pilot, we’ll all drink to that!’

I do not remember clearly what happened next. I think that there was much laughter and drinking of skotch and beer, as well as talk about the mystery, the joy and agony of life. I remember, dimly, Tomoth and Bardo weeping, locking wrists and trying to push each other’s arm to the gleaming surface of the bar. It is true, I now know, that liquor obliterates and devours the memory. Bardo and I found other bars that night serving skotch and beer (and powerful amorgenics); we also found the Street of the Master Courtesans and beautiful Jacarandans who served our lust and pleasure. At least I think they did. Because it was my first time with a skilled woman – women – I knew very little of lust and pleasure, and I was to remember even less. I was so drunk that I even allowed a whore named Aida to touch my naked flesh. My memories are of heavy perfume and dark, burning skin, the blindly urgent pressing of body against body; my memories are murky and vague, spoiled by the guilt and fear that I had made enemies with the Lord Pilot of our Order and had sworn an oath that would surely lead to my death. ‘Journeymen die,’ Soli said as we left the master pilot’s bar. As I stumbled out onto the gliddery I remember praying that he would be wrong.

2
A Pilot’s Vows

Strange, though, alas! are the

Streets of the City of Pain …

Rainer Maria Rilke, Holocaust Century Scryer

We received our pilot’s rings late in the afternoon of the next day. At the centre of Resa, surrounded by the stone dormitories, apartments and other buildings of the college, the immense Hall of the Ancient Pilots overflowed with the men and women of our Order. From the great arched doorway to the dais where we journeymen knelt, the brightly coloured robes of the academicians and high professionals rippled like a sea of rainbow silk. Because the masters of the various professions tended to cleave to their peers, the rainbow sea was patchy: near the far pillars at the north end of the Hall stood orange-robed cetics, and next to them, a group of akashics covered from neck to ankle in yellow silk. There were cliques of scryers berobed in dazzling white, and green-robed mechanics standing close to each other, no doubt arguing as to the ultimate (and paradoxical) composition and nature of the spacetime continuum, or some other arcanum. Just below the dais was the black wavefront of the pilots and master pilots. I saw Lionel, Tomoth and his brothers, Stephen Caraghar and others that I knew. At the very front stood my mother and Justine, looking at us – I thought – proudly.

The Timekeeper, resplendent and stern in his flowing red robe, bade the thirty of us to repeat after him the vows of a pilot. It was good that we knelt close together. The warm, reassuring bulk of Bardo pressing me from the right, and my friend Quirin on my left, kept me from pitching forward to the polished marble surface of the dais. Although that morning I had been to a cutter who had melded the ragged tear of my eyelid and had taken a purgative to cleanse my body of poisonous skotch, I was ill. My head felt hot and heavy; it seemed that my brain was swollen with blood and would burst my skull from inside. My spirit, too, was burning. My life was ruined. I was sick with fear and dread. I thought of the Tycho and Erendira Ede and Ricardo Lavi, and other famous pilots who had died trying to pierce the mystery of the Solid State Entity.

Immersed as I was in my misery, I missed most of the Timekeeper’s warnings as to the deadliness of the manifold. One thing he said I remember clearly: that of the two hundred and eleven journeymen who had entered Resa with us, only we thirty remained. Journeymen Die, I said to myself, and suddenly the Timekeeper’s deep, rough voice vibrated through the haze of my wandering thoughts. ‘Pilots die too,’ he said, ‘but not as often or as easily, and they die to a greater purpose. It is to this purpose that we are gathered here today, to consecrate …’ He went on in a like manner for several minutes. Then he enjoined us to celibacy and poverty, the least in importance of our vows. (I should mention that the meaning of celibacy is taken in its narrowest sense. If it were not, Bardo could never have been a pilot. Although physical passion between man and woman is exalted, it is the rule of our Order that pilots not marry. It is a good rule, I think, a rule not without reason. When a pilot returns from the manifold years older or younger than his lover, as Soli recently had, the differential ageing – we call it crueltime – can destroy them.) ‘As you have learned and will learn, so must you teach,’ the Timekeeper said, and we took our third vow. Bardo must have heard my voice wavering because he reached over and squeezed my knee, as if to impart to me some of his great strength. The fourth vow, I thought, was the most important of all. ‘You must restrain yourselves,’ the Timekeeper told us. I knew it was true. The symbiosis between a pilot and his ship is as profound and powerful as it is deadly addictive. How many pilots, I wondered, had been lost to the manifold because they too often indulged in the power and joy of their extensional brains? Too many. I repeated the vow of obedience mechanically, with little spirit or enthusiasm. The Timekeeper paused, and I thought for a moment he was going to look at me, to chasten me or to make me repeat the fifth vow again. Then, with a voice pregnant with drama, in a ponderous cadence, he said, ‘The last vow is the holiest vow, the vow without which all your other vows would be as empty as a cup full of air.’ So it was that on the ninety-fifth day of false winter in the year 2929 since the founding of Neverness, we vowed above all else to seek wisdom and truth, even though our seeking should lead to our death and to the ruin of all that we loved and held dear.

The Timekeeper called for the rings. Leopold Soli emerged from an anteroom adjacent to the dais. A frightened-looking novice followed him carrying a velvet wand around which our thirty rings were stacked, one atop the other. We bowed our heads and extended our right hands. Soli proceeded down the line of journeymen, slipping the spun-diamond rings off the wand and sliding them onto each of our little fingers. ‘With this ring, you are a Pilot,’ he said to Alark Mandara and Chantal Astoreth. And to the brilliant Jonathan Ede and the Sonderval, ‘With this ring you are a pilot,’ on and on down the line of kneeling journeymen. His nose was so swollen that his words sounded nasal, as if he had a cold. He came to Bardo, whose fingers were bare of the jewellery he usually wore and instead encircled with rings of dead white flesh. He removed the largest ring from the wand. (Though my head was supposed to be bowed, I could not resist peeking as Soli pushed the gleaming black ring around Bardo’s mammoth finger.) Then it was my turn. Soli bent over to me, and he said, ‘With this ring you are a … pilot.’ He said the word ‘pilot’ as if it had been forced out of him, as if the word were acid to his tongue. He jammed the ring on my finger with such force that the diamond shaved a layer from my skin and bruised my knuckle tendon. Eight more times I heard ‘With this ring you are a pilot,’ and then the Timekeeper intoned the litany for the Lord Pilot, and said a requiem, and we were done.

We thirty pilots left the dais to show our new rings to our friends and masters. A few of the wealthier new pilots had family members who had paid the expensive passage to Neverness aboard a commercial deep ship, but Bardo was not one of these. (His father thought him a traitor for abandoning the family estates for the poverty of our Order.) We mingled with our fellows, and the sea of coloured silk engulfed us. There were shouts of happiness and laughter and boots stamping on the tiled floor. My mother’s friend, the eschatologist Kolenya Mor, indecently pressed her plump, wet cheek next to mine. She hugged me as she bawled, ‘Look at him, Moira.’

‘I’m looking at him,’ my mother said. She was a tall woman and strong (and beautiful), though I must admit she was slightly fat due to her love of chocolate candies. She wore the plain grey robe of a master cantor, those purest of pure mathematicians. Her quick grey eyes seemed to look everywhere at once as she tilted her head quizzically and asked me, ‘Your eyelid has been melded. Recently, hasn’t it?’ Ignoring my ring, she continued, ‘It’s well known what you said, the oath you swore. To Soli. It’s the talk of the city. “Moira’s son has sworn to penetrate the Solid State Entity,” that’s all I’ve heard today. My handsome, brilliant, reckless son.’ She began to cry. I was shocked, and I could not look at her. It was the first time I had ever seen her cry.

‘It’s a beautiful ring,’ my Aunt Justine said as she came up to me and bowed her head. She held up her own pilot’s ring for me to look at. ‘And well deserved, no matter what Soli says.’ Like my mother, Justine was tall with slightly greyed black hair pulled back in a chignon; like my mother she loved chocolates. But where my mother most often spent her days thinking and exploring the possibilities of her too-ambitious daydreams, Justine liked to socialize and skate figures and perform difficult jumps at the Ring of Fire, or the North Ring, or one of the city’s other crowded ice rings. Thus she had retained the streamlined suppleness of her first youth at the expense, I thought, of her naturally quick mind. I often wondered why she had wanted Soli for a husband, and more, why the Timekeeper had allowed these two famous pilots a special dispensation to marry.

Burgos Harsha, with his bushy eyebrows, jowls and long black hairs pushing out of his piglike nostrils, approached us and said, ‘Congratulations, Mallory. I always expected you to do something extraordinary – we all did, you know – but I never dreamed you’d break our Lord Pilot’s nose the first time you met him and swear to kill yourself in that nebula known colloquially – and, I might add, quite vulgarly – as the Solid State Entity.’ The master historian rubbed his hands together vigorously and turned to my mother. ‘Now, Moira, I’ve examined the canons and the oral history of the Tycho as well as the customaries, and it’s clear – I may be wrong, of course, but when have you known me to be wrong? – it’s clear that Mallory’s oath was a simple troth to the Lord Pilot, not a promissory oath to the Order. And certainly not a solemn oath. At the time he swore to kill himself – and this is a subtle point, but it’s clear – he hadn’t taken his vows, so he wasn’t legally a pilot, so he was not permitted to swear a promissory oath.’

‘I don’t understand,’ I said. From behind me came singing, the swish of silk against silk, and the chaotic hum of a thousand voices. ‘I swore what I swore. What difference does it make who I swore it to?’

‘The difference, Mallory, is that Soli can release you from your oath, if he wants to.’

I felt a squirt of adrenalin in my throat, and my heart fluttered in my chest like a nervous bird. I thought of all the ways pilots died: They died fenestering, their brains ruined by too-constant symbiosis with their ship, and they died of old age lost in decision trees; supernovae reduced their flesh to plasma, and dreamtime, too much dreamtime, left them forever staring vacantly at the burning stars; they were killed by aliens, and murdered by human beings, and minced by meteor swarms, and charred by the penumbras of blue giant stars, and frozen by the nothingness of deep space. I knew then that despite my foolish words about death among the stars being glorious, I did not want glory, and I desperately did not want to die.

Burgos left us, and my mother said to Justine, ‘You’ll talk to Soli, won’t you? I know he hates me. But why should he hate Mallory?’

I kicked the heel of my boot against the floor. Justine traced her index finger along her eyebrow and said, ‘Soli’s so difficult now. This last journey nearly killed him, inside, as well as out. Oh, I’ll talk to him, of course, I’ll talk on until my lips fall off as I always do, but I’m afraid he’ll just stare at me with his broody eyes and say things like “If life has meaning, how can we know if we’re meant to find it?” or, “A pilot dies best who dies young, before crueltime kills what he loves.” I can’t really talk to him when he’s like that, of course, and I think it’s possible that he thinks he’s being noble, letting Mallory swear to die heroically, or perhaps he really believes Mallory will succeed and just wants to be proud of him – I can’t tell what he thinks when he’s all full of himself, but I’ll talk to him, Moira, of course I will.’

I had little hope that Justine would be able to talk to him. Long ago, when the Timekeeper had let them marry, he had warned them, ‘Crueltime, you can’t conquer crueltime,’ and he had been right. It is commonly believed that it is differential ageing, the alder, that kills love, but I do not think this is entirely true. It is age and selfness that kill love. We grow more and more into our true selves every second that we are alive. If there is such a thing as fate it is this: the outer self seeking and awakening to the true self no matter the pain and terror – and there is always pain and terror – no matter how great the cost may be. Soli, true to his innermost desire, had returned from the core enthralled by his need to comprehend the meaning of death and the secret of life, while Justine had spent those same long years on Neverness living life and enjoying the things of life: fine foods and the smell of the sea at dusk (and, some said, her lovers’ caresses), as well as her endless quest to master her waltz jumps and perfect her figure eights.

‘I don’t want Justine to talk to him,’ I lied.

My mother tilted her head and touched my cheek with her hand as she had done when I was a boy sick with fever. ‘Don’t be foolish,’ she said.

A group of my fellow pilots, led by the immensely tall and thin Sonderval, diffused like a black cloud through the professionals around us and surrounded me. Li Tosh, Helena Charbo, and Richardess – I thought they were the finest pilots ever to come out of Resa. My old friend, Delora wi Towt, was pulling at her blonde braids as she greeted my mother. The Sonderval, who came from an exemplar family off Solsken, stretched himself straight to his eight feet of height, and said, ‘I wanted to tell you, Mallory. The whole college is proud of you. For facing the Lord Pilot – excuse me, Justine, I didn’t mean to insult – and we’re proud of what you swore to do. That took courage, we all know that. We wish you well on your journey.’

I smiled because the Sonderval and I had always been the fiercest of rivals at Resa. Along with Delora and Li Tosh (and Bardo when he wanted to be), he was the smartest of my fellow pilots. The Sonderval was a sly man, and I sensed more than a bit of reproach in his compliment. I did not think he believed I was courageous for swearing to do the impossible; more likely he knew that my anger had finally undone me. He seemed very pleased with himself, probably because he thought I would never return. But then, the exemplars of Solsken always need to be pleased with themselves, which is why they have bred themselves to such ridiculous heights.

The Sonderval and the others excused themselves and drifted off into the crowd. My mother said, ‘Mallory was always popular. With the other journeymen, if not his masters.’

I coughed as I stared at the white triangles of the floor. The singing seemed to grow louder. I recognized the melody of one of Takeko’s heroic (and romantic) madrigals. I was filled instantly with despair and false courage. Confused as I was, vacillating between bravado and a cowardly hope that Soli would dissolve my oath, I raised my voice and said, ‘Mother, I swore what I swore; it doesn’t matter what Justine says to Soli.’

‘Don’t be a fool,’ she said. ‘I won’t have you killing yourself.’

‘But you’d have me dishonour myself.’

‘Better dishonour – whatever that is – than death.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘better death than dishonour.’ But I did not believe my own words. In my heart, I was all too ready to accept dishonour rather than death.

My mother muttered something to herself – it was a habit of hers – something that sounded like, ‘Better that Soli should die. Then you’d suffer neither. Death nor dishonour.’

‘What did you say?’ I asked.

‘I didn’t say anything.’

She looked over my shoulder and frowned. I turned to see Soli, tall and sombre in his tight black robe, pushing his way through the sea of people. He was leading a beautiful, eyeless scryer by the arm. I was struck immediately by the contrast of white and black: The scryer’s black hair hung like a satin curtain over the back of her white robes, and her eyebrows were bushy and black against her white forehead. She moved slowly and too carefully, like a cold, marble statue brought to sudden – and unwelcome – life. I took little notice of her heavy breasts and dark, large nipples so obvious beneath the thin silk; it was her face that fixed my stare, the long aquiline nose and full red lips, and most of all, the dark, smoothly scarred hollows where her eyes used to be.

‘Katharine!’ Justine suddenly exclaimed as they came closer. ‘My darling daughter!’ She threw her arms around the scryer and said, ‘It’s been so long!’ They embraced for a while; then Justine wiped her moist eyes on the back of her gloves and said, ‘Mallory, may I present your cousin, Dama Katharine Ringess Soli.’

I greeted her and she turned her head in my direction. ‘Mallory,’ she said, ‘at last. It’s been so long.’

There have been moments in my life when time came to a stop, when I felt as if I were living some dimly remembered (though vital) event over again. Sometimes the sound of thallows screeching in winter or the smell of wet seaweed will take me instantly back to that clear night long ago when I stood alone on the desolate and windy beach of the Starnbergersee and gave myself over to the dream of mastering the stars; sometimes it is a colour, perhaps the sudden orange of a sliddery or a glissade’s vivid greenness, that transports me to another place and time; sometimes it is nothing at all, at least nothing more particular than a certain low slant of the sun’s rays in deep winter and the rushing of the icy sea wind. These moments are mysterious and wonderful, but they are also full of strange meaning and dread. The scryers, of course, teach the unity of nowness and thenness and times yet to be. For them, I think, future dreams and self-remembrance are two parts of a single mystery. They, those strange, holy, and self-blinded women and men of our Order, believe that if we are to have visions of our future, we must look into our past. So when Katharine smiled at me, and the calm, dulcet tones of her voice vibrated within me, I knew that I had come upon such a moment, when my past and future were as one.

Although I knew I had never seen her before, I felt as if I had known her all my life. I was instantly in love with her, not, of course, as one loves another human being, but as a wanderer might love a new ocean or a gorgeous snowy peak he has glimpsed for the first time. I was practically struck dumb by her calmness and her beauty, so I said the first stupid thing which came to mind. ‘Welcome to Neverness,’ I told her.

‘Yes, welcome,’ Soli said to his daughter. ‘Welcome to the City of Light.’ There was more than a little sarcasm and bitterness in his voice.

‘I remember the city very well, Father.’ And so she should have remembered since, like me, she was a child of the city. But when she was a girl, when Soli had gone off on his journey to the core, Justine had taken her to be raised by her grandmother on Lechoix. She had not seen her father (and I thought she would never see him again) for twenty-five years. All that time she had remained on Lechoix in the company of man-despising women. Although she had reason to be bitter, she was not. It was Soli who was bitter. He was angry at himself for having deserted his wife and daughter, and he was bitter that Justine had allowed and even encouraged Katharine to become a scryer. He hated scryers.

‘Thank you for making the journey,’ Soli said to her.

‘I heard that you had returned, Father.’

‘Yes, that’s true.’

There was an awkward silence as my strange family stood mute in the middle of a thousand babbling people. Soli was glowering at Justine, and she at him, while my mother stole furtive, ugly glances at Katharine. I could tell that she did not like her, probably because it was obvious that I did. Katharine smiled at me again, and said, ‘Congratulations, Mallory, on your … To go off exploring the Entity, that was a brave … we’re all very proud.’ I was a little irritated at her scryer’s habit of not completing her sentences, as if the person she was talking to could ‘see’ what was left unsaid and skip ahead to the crest of her rushing thoughts.

‘Yes, congratulations,’ Soli said. ‘But the pilot’s ring seems a little small for your finger. Let’s hope your pilot’s vows aren’t too great for your spirit.’

My mother cocked her head as she pointed at Soli’s chest and said, ‘What spirit remains? Within the Lord Pilot? A tired, bitter spirit. Don’t speak to my son of spirit.’

‘Shall we speak of life, then? Yes, we shall speak of life: Let’s hope Mallory lives long enough to enjoy the life of a new pilot. If there was a tumbler of skotch at hand we’d toast to the glorious but too short lives of foolish young pilots.’

‘The Lord Pilot,’ my mother said quickly, ‘is too proud of his own long life.’

Justine grasped Soli’s arm while she brought her full, pouting lips to his ear and began whispering. He broke away and said to me, ‘You were probably drunk when you swore your oath. And your Lord Pilot was certainly drunk. Therefore, my lovely wife informs me, we’ve only to announce that the whole thing was a joke, and we are both finished with this foolishness.’

Beneath the silk of my robe, I felt hot sweat running down my sides in rivulets as I asked, ‘You would do that, Lord Pilot?’

‘Who knows? Who knows his fate?’ He turned to Katharine and asked, ‘Have you seen his future? What will be done with Mallory? Should he be kept from his fate? “To die among the stars is the most glorious death” – that’s what the Tycho said before he disappeared into the Solid State Entity. Maybe Mallory will succeed where our greatest pilot failed. Should he be kept from fate and glory? Tell me, my lovely scryer.’

Everyone looked at Katharine as she stood there calmly listening to Soli. She must have sensed their stares because she put her hand into the side pocket of her robe, ‘the pocket of concealment,’ where the scryers keep their tub of blacking oil. When she removed her hand, her forefinger was covered with a cream so black that it shed no light; it was as if she had no finger, as if a miniature black hole existed in the space that her finger occupied. According to the custom of the scryers she daubed the oil into the hollows of her eyepits, coating the scars with concealing blackness. I looked at the hollows above her high cheekbones; it was like looking down two dark, mysterious tunnels into her soul where windows should have been. I looked at her for only a moment before I had to look away.

I was about to tell my sarcastic, arrogant uncle that I would do as I had sworn no matter what he decided when Katharine let out a clear, girlish laugh and said, ‘Mallory’s fate is his fate, and nothing can change … Except, Father, that you have changed it and always will have …’ And here she laughed again, and continued, ‘But in the end we choose our futures, do you see?’

Soli did not see, and neither did I nor anyone else. Who could understand the paradoxical, irritating sayings of the scryers?

Just then Bardo ambled over and thumped me on the back. He bowed to Justine and smiled before quickly looking away. Bardo – he had always tried to keep it a secret, but he could not – lusted for my aunt. I did not think that she lusted for him, nor did she quite approve of his brazen sexuality, though in truth, they were alike in one certain way: They both loved physical pleasure, and cared little for the past, nothing at all for the future. After being introduced to Katharine, he bowed to Soli and said, ‘Lord Pilot, has Mallory apologized for his barbaric behaviour last night? No? Well, I’ll apologize for him because he’s much too proud to apologize, and only I know how sorry he really is.’

‘Pride kills,’ Soli said.

‘“Pride kills,”’ Bardo repeated as he smoothed his black moustache with the side of his thumb. ‘Of course it does! But where does Mallory get his pride from? I’ve been his roommate for twelve years, and I know. “Soli is mapping the core stars,” he used to say. “Soli almost proved the Great Theorem.” Soli this, and Soli that – do you know what he says when I tell him he’s insane for wasting time practising his speed strokes? He says, “When Soli became a pilot, he won the pilot’s race, and so shall I.”’

He was referring, of course, to the race between the new pilots and the older ones held every year just after the convocation. For many, it is the high point of the Tycho’s Festival.

I was sure that my face was red. I could hardly bear to look at my uncle as he said, ‘Then tomorrow’s race should be challenging. No one has beaten me for …’ His eyes suddenly clouded, and his voice trembled, slightly, and he continued, ‘for a long time.’

We spent a short while debating the aerodynamics of racing. I held that a low tuck was more efficient, but Soli pointed out that in a long race – as tomorrow’s race would be – a low tuck quickly burned out the muscles of the thigh, and that one must practise restraint.

Our conversation was cut short when ten red-robed horologes marched out on to the dais and took their places by the Timekeeper, five to either side. In unison they sang out, ‘Silence, it is time! Silence, it is time!’ and there was a sudden silence in the Hall. Then the Timekeeper stepped forward, and he announced his summons and called the quest for the Elder Eddas. ‘The secret of Man’s immortality,’ he told us, ‘lies in our past and in our future.’ I felt Katharine’s shoulder brush my own, and I was shocked (and excited) to feel her long fingers quickly and secretly squeeze my hand. I listened to the Timekeeper repeat the message that Soli had brought back from the core; I listened and for a moment I was enraptured with dreams of discovering great things. Then I happened to look at Soli’s brooding eyes, and I did not care if I did great things. In my single-minded way I cared about only a single thing: that I should beat Soli in the pilot’s race. ‘We must search for the mystery,’ the Timekeeper continued. ‘If we search, we will discover the secret of life and save ourselves.’ At that moment I did not care about secrets or salvation. What I wanted, simply, was to defeat a proud, arrogant man.

I had resolved to return to my room and to sleep until the sun was high above the slopes of Urkel, but I had not counted on the excitement that the Timekeeper’s summons would arouse. The halls of our dormitory – and indeed, all of Resa – rang from the happy cries and shouts of pilots and journeymen and masters. Against my wishes, our rooms became a nexus for the night’s celebrations. Chantal Astoreth and Delora wi Towt arrived with three of their neologician friends from Lara Sig. Bardo distributed pipefuls of toalache, and the revelry began. It was a wild, magic night; it was a night of tremulously announced plans to reach Old Earth or to map the Tycho’s nebula, to fulfil our vow to seek wisdom as befitted our individual talents and dreams. Soon our two adjoining rooms were thick with blue smoke and carpeted from wall to wall with excited pilots and various other professionals who had heard about the party. Li Tosh, who was a gentle man with bright, quick almond eyes, announced his plan to reach the homeworld of the trickster aliens, the Darghinni. ‘It’s said that they’ve studied the history of the nebular brains,’ he told us. ‘Perhaps when I return, I’ll have enough courage to penetrate the Entity, too.’ Hideki Smith would sculpt his body into the weird, cruel shape of the Fayoli; he would journey to one of their planets and try to pose as one of them in hope of learning their secrets. Not to be outdone, red-haired Quirin proposed to journey to Agathange, where he would ask the porpoise-like men – who had long ago broken the law of the Civilized Worlds and had carked their DNA so that they were now more than men – he would ask the wise Agathanians about the secret of human life. I must admit that there were many sceptics such as Bardo who did not believe that the Ieldra possessed any great secret. But even the most sceptical of these pilots – Richardess and the Sonderval came immediately to mind – were eager to be off into the manifold. To them the quest was a wonderful excuse to seek fame and glory.

Around midnight my cousin Katharine appeared in our outer room’s open doorway. How she had found her way blind and alone across the confusing streets of the Academy she would not say. She sat next to me cross-legged on the floor. She flirted with me in her secretive, scryer’s way. I was intrigued that an older, wiser woman paid me such attention, and I think she must have realized that I found her tantalizing. I told myself that she, too, was a little in love with me, although I knew that scryers often act not to satisfy their passions but to fulfil some tenuous and private vision. In many barbaric places, of course, where the art of genotyping is primitive, cousin marriage (and mating) is forbidden. One never knows what sort of monsters the mingling of the germ plasm will produce. But Neverness was not one of those places. That we were so closely related seemed only slightly incestuous and very exciting.

We talked about what she had said earlier to Soli about fate, in particular about my fate. She laughed at me as she stripped the black leather glove from my right hand. She slowly stroked the lines of my naked palm and foresaw that the span of my years would be ‘measureless to man.’ I thought that she had a keen sense of humour. When I asked if her words meant that my life would be very long or absurdly short, she turned to me with that beautiful, mysterious smile the scryers affect, and she said, ‘A moment to a photino is infinite, and to a god, our universe has lived but a moment. You must learn to love the moments you have, Mallory.’ (Towards the early part of morning, she taught me that moments of sexual ecstasy and love can indeed be made to last nearly forever. At the time I did not know whether to ascribe this miracle to the time-annihilating training of the scryers, or if all women had such power.)

It was a night of sorrowful goodbyes, as well. At one point Bardo, his weepy eyes electric with toalache, pulled me away from Katharine and said, ‘You’re the finest friend I’ve ever had. The finest friend anyone has ever had. And now Bardo must lose you because of a stupid oath. It’s not fair! Why is this cold, empty universe, which has bestowed upon us what we so laughingly call life, why is it so barbarically unfair? I, Bardo, will shout it across the room, shout it to the Rosette Nebula and to Eta Carina and to Regal Luz: It’s unfair! Unfair it is, and that’s why we were given brains, to cozen and plan, to circumvent and cheat. It’s to cheat death that I’m going to tell you what I’ll tell you. You won’t like this, my brave, noble friend, but here it is: You’ve got to let Soli win the race tomorrow. He’s like my father, he’s proud and vain, and he hates for anyone to beat him. I’m a keen judge of character, and I know. Let him win the race and he’ll let you take back your oath. Please, Mallory, as you love me, let him win the stupid race!’

Late the next morning, I pulled on my racing kamelaika and met my mother for breakfast at one of the cafes that line the Run opposite the flowing Hyacinth Gardens. ‘You’re racing Soli today, and you didn’t sleep last night, did you? Here, drink this coffee. It’s Farfara prime. I’ve taught you strategy since you were four years old, and you didn’t sleep last night?’

‘Bardo thinks I should let Soli win the race.’

‘He’s a fat fool. Haven’t I told you that for twelve years? He thinks he’s clever. Clever he’s not. I could have taught him cleverness. When I was four years old.’

From a delicate blue pot, she poured coffee into a marble cup and slid it across the table. I sipped the hot, black coffee, totally unprepared for what she said next. ‘We can leave the Order,’ she whispered, tilting her head as she quickly glanced at the two master mechanics sitting at the table next to us. ‘The new academy, the one on Tria, you know what I’m saying, don’t you? They need pilots, good ones like you. Why should our Order tyrannize the fallaways?’

I was so shocked that I spilled coffee on my lap, burning my leg. The Merchant Pilots of Tria – those wily, unethical thingists and tubists – for a long time had tried to break the power of our Order. ‘What are you saying, Mother? That we should be traitors?’

‘Traitors to the Order, yes. Better for you to betray a few hastily given vows, than to betray the life I gave you.’

‘You always hoped I’d be Lord Pilot someday.’

‘You could be a merchant prince. Of Tria.’

‘No, Mother, never that.’

‘It would surprise you. That certain pilots have been offered middle estates on Tria. Certain programmers and cantors, too.’

‘But no one has accepted, have they?’

‘Not yet,’ she said, and she began drumming her fingers against the table top. ‘But there is more dissension among the professionals than you know. Some of the historians like Burgos Harsha think the Order is stagnating. And the pilots. The rule against marriage is almost as hated as marriage is hateful.’ Here she paused to laugh at her little joke, then continued, ‘There is more disorder in the Order than you’d dream.’ She laughed again as if she knew something I didn’t, and she sat back in her chair, waiting.

‘I’d rather die than go to Tria.’

‘Then we’ll flee to Lechoix. Your grandmother will welcome us, even if you are a bull.’

‘I don’t think she will.’

My grandmother whom I had never met, Dama Oriana Ringess, had brought up Justine and my mother – and Katharine – properly. ‘Properly’ in the Lechoix Matriarchy meant an early introduction into the feminine mysteries and severe language rules. Thus men are despised and are referred to as ‘bulls,’ or ‘gamecocks,’ or sometimes ‘mules.’ Desire between man and woman is called ‘the sick heat,’ and marriage, heterosexual marriage, that is, is ‘the living hell.’ The High Damen, of which my grandmother is one of the highest, abhorring the belief that men make better pilots than women, support the largest and best of the Order’s elite schools. So it was that when my mother and Justine arrived at Borja long ago having never seen a man, they were shocked – and in my mother’s case, hateful – that such young beasts as Lionel and Soli could be better mathematicians than they were.

‘Dama Oriana,’ I said, ‘would do nothing that would shame the Matriarchy, would she?’

‘Listen to me. Listen! I won’t let Soli kill my son!’ She said the word ‘son’ with such a wrenching desperation that I felt compelled to look at her, even as she burst into tears and sobbed. She nervously pulled her hair from the chignon’s binding leather and used the shiny strands to dry her face. ‘Listen, listen,’ she said. ‘Brilliant Soli returns from the manifold. Brilliant as always, but not so brilliant. I used to beat him. At chess. Three games out of four before he quit playing me.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’ve ordered you bread,’ she said as she held up her hand and motioned to the domestic. It rolled to the table where it placed before me a basket of hot, crusty black bread. ‘Eat your bread and drink your coffee.’

‘You’re not eating?’

Usually she had bread at breakfast; like her sisters on Lechoix she would eat no foods of animal origin, not even the cultured meats favoured by almost everyone in our city.

I reached for one of the small, oblong loaves. I bit into it; it was delicious. As I chewed the hard bread, she removed a ball of chocolate from the blue bowl in front of her and popped it into her mouth.

‘What if I succeed, Mother?’ I asked. She stuffed three more balls of chocolate into her mouth, staring at me.

Her reply was barely comprehensible, a burble of words forced through a mouthful of sticky, melting chocolate: ‘Sometimes I think Soli’s right. My son is a fool.’

‘You’ve always said you have faith in me.’

‘Faith I have; blind faith I have not.’

‘Why should it be impossible? The Entity is a nebula much like any other: hot gases, interstellar dust, a few million stars. Perhaps it’s mere chance that the Tycho and the others were lost.’

‘Heresy!’ she said as she picked apart a chocolate ball with her long fingernails. ‘Haven’t I taught you better? I won’t have you saying that word. It’s not chance. That killed the Tycho. It’s She.’

‘She?’

‘The Entity. She’s a web of a million meshing biocomputers the size of moons. She manipulates matter. And She plies energy. And She twists space to Her liking. The manifold inside Her is known to be strange, hideously complex.’

‘Why do you call her “She”?’

My mother smiled and said, ‘Should I call the greatest intelligence, the holiest life in our universe, “he”?’

‘What of the Silicon God, then?’

‘Misnamed. By certain of the older eschatologists who divide essences into male and female. She should be called the “Silicon Goddess.” The universe gives birth to life; the essence of the universe is female.’

‘And what of men?’

‘They are repositories for sperm. Have you studied the dead languages of Old Earth as I’ve asked you to do? No? Well, there was a Romance expression: instrumenta vocalia. Men are tools with voices. Magnificent tools they are. And sometimes their voices are sublime. But without women, they’re nothing.’

‘And women without men?’

‘The Lechoix Matriarchy was founded five thousand years ago. There are no patriarchies.’

I sometimes think my mother should have been an historian or a remembrancer. She always seemed to know too much of ancient peoples, languages and customs, or at least enough to turn arguments her way.

‘I’m a man, Mother. Why did you choose to have a son?’

‘You’re a foolish boy.’

I took a long sip of coffee, and I wondered aloud, ‘What would it be like for a man to talk with a goddess?’

‘More foolishness,’ she said. And then, ‘I’ve made our decision. We’ll go to Lechoix.’

‘No, Mother. I won’t be the only man among eight million women who prize cunning above faith.’

She banged her coffee cup down on the table. ‘Then go to your race. With Soli. And be thankful your mother’s mother taught me cunning.’

I stared as she stared at me. We stared at each other for a long time. As a master cetic might, I tried to read the truth from the flickers of light reflecting from her bright irises and from the set of her wide mouth. But the only truth that came to me was an old truth: I could no more read her face than I could descry the future.

I sucked the last drops of coffee from my cup and touched my mother’s forehead. And then I went out to race Soli.

The race of the Thousand Pilots is not supposed to be a serious affair. (Neither do as many as a thousand pilots ever take part in the festivities.) It is, essentially, a somewhat farcical pitting of old pilots against the new, a symbolic rite of passage. The master pilots – usually there are about a hundred or so – gather in front of the Hall of the Ancient Pilots, and, as is their wont, they drink mugs of steaming kvass or other such beverages, all the while slapping shoulders and hands to give each other encouragement while they shout and jeer at the smaller group of new pilots. That afternoon there were mobs of brightly furred academicians, high professionals and novices crowding the ice of Resa Commons. There were wind chimes tinkling and journeymen whistling to the wormrunners as they held up their gloved hands to place their illegal bets. From the steps of the Hall came the piping of the clarinas and shakuhachis. The high, keening notes seemed to me like an anguished plea full of desperation and foreboding, at odds with the gaiety all around us. Bardo, too, must have felt the music inappropriate because he came up to me as I tested the edges of my skates with my thumbnail, and he said, ‘I detest mystical music. It makes me feel pity for the universe and arouses certain other feelings I’d rather not have aroused. Give me horns and drums, and by the way, Little Fellow, could I offer you a pinch of fireweed to get the blood singing?’

I refused his red crystals, as he must have known I would. The race master – I saw to my surprise that it was Burgos Harsha, wobbling on his skates because he had no doubt been drinking kvass since the morning’s preparations – called the two groups to our starting places. We crowded along the red chequered line where the lesser glidderies gave out onto the white ice at the edge of the Commons. ‘I had something important to tell you, but I’ve forgotten what it was,’ he cried out. ‘And when have you ever known me to forget anything? Now what was I saying? Does it matter? Well, then, may you pilots not lose your way and may you return soon.’ He reached for the white starting flag that a novice held out to him and managed to entangle his forearm in the cotton fabric. The novice pressed the short, wooden staff into his grasping fingers, and he waved the flag back and forth in front of his face, and the race began.

I shall mention only a few details of what happened on the streets of my city that day, because due to the peculiar nature and rules of the race, that is all a single pilot can do. The rules are simple: A pilot may choose any path through the four quarters of the city so long as she or he passes in sequence through one of the various checkpoints such as Rollo’s Ring in the Farsider’s Quarter, or the Hofgarten between the Zoo and the Pilot’s Quarter. The theory is that the smartest and most cunning pilot will win, the pilot who has best memorized the streets and shortcuts of our city. In practice, though, speed is at least as important as brains.

Bardo bellowed and stroked as he pushed between a cluster of master pilots who were blocking his way. (Such shoving, I should add, is permitted if the pilot first shouts out a warning.) Blond-haired Tomoth, who stroked furiously in a high tuck, almost fell as Bardo’s elbow caught him on the shoulder. Then Bardo shouted out, ‘First among equals!’ and he disappeared around the curve of the gliddery.

We caught up to him at the Rose Womb Cloisters, that jumble of squat buildings at Resa’s western edge housing the tanks in which we had floated for a considerable portion of our journeyman years. He was skating raggedly as we passed him. He had pulled the hood of his kamelaika away from his dripping head. ‘First among … equals,’ he said, wheezing and gasping for air. ‘At least … for a … quarter mile.’

At the west gate of the Academy we dispersed. Fifteen pilots turned onto the southernmost of the orange glidderies that lead to the Way while eight master pilots and six pilots – Soli and myself among them – chose a lesser gliddery through the gleaming Old City in order to avoid the arterial’s heavier traffic. And so it went. The sky above us was deep blue, the air dense and cold. In front of me Soli’s steel skates striking smoothly against the ice and the shouts and laughter of the onlookers lining the narrow street were like a racy music. I tucked low and turned as I cradled my right arm against the small of my back, and suddenly I was alone.

I saw other pilots only a few times during the rest of the race. I did not want to make a false analogy between the streets of Neverness and the pathways through the manifold, yet I could not help thinking about the similarities: to suddenly pass from the cold, shadowed, red lesser glidderies onto a sliddery and then to the brilliantly illuminated Way was like fenestering, falling from the manifold into the bright light surrounding a star. As a pilot far from our city segues into a decision tree where he must choose the correct pathway or perish, so we racers had to match our memories of the branching streets against the reality of the tangled knots of glissades and glidderies, or lose. And if dreamtime can be said to be the most important and pleasurable of a pilot’s mindsets, then the ecstasy of cool wind and intensely focused vision was what we felt, at least for the first five miles or so. Thus when I entered the checkpoint of the Winter Ring deep within the Farsider’s Quarter, and I saw Soli and Lionel ten yards in front of me and other racers skating onto the opening of ice behind me, I had enough breath and enthusiasm to call out, ‘Five miles alone on the city streets, and here we gather, as if we were stived around the fixed-points of a star!’

As Soli turned to answer me, the features of his face narrowed into a mask of fierce concentration. He was breathing deeply, and he said, ‘Beware exploding stars!’ And then he was gone, speeding down one of the lesser glidderies connecting to the dangerous Street of Smugglers.

I did not catch up to him until near the end of the race. I circled the spouting Silver Spume in the Zoo, where Friends of Man and Fravashi and two races of aliens I had never seen before looked on at the curious spectacle that we provided them. At North Ring the race officer shouted, ‘Soli first followed by Killirand a hundred yards followed by Ringess one hundred and fifty yards followed … ,’ and at the great circle outside the Hofgarten, where the Run intersects the Way, I heard, ‘Soli first followed by Ringess fifty yards followed by Killirand three hundred … ,’ and so it went. At the last checkpoint, which was in the Pilot’s Quarter, I saw my uncle a mere twenty yards ahead. I knew I would not see him again until I crossed first into the Commons and Burgos Harsha pronounced me the winner.

I was wrong.

I was skating west on the Run, cleverly – or so I thought – doubling back along the northern edge of the Old City so that I could cut along a little gliddery I knew of that led straight to the Academy’s north gate. The blue ice was crowded with novices and others who had somehow guessed that a few of the racers might choose this unlikely route. As I was congratulating myself and envisioning Burgos pinning the diamond victory medal to my chest, I glimpsed a streak of black through the press of skaters in front of me. The crowd shifted, and there was Soli calmly stroking close to the red stripe separating the skating lane from the sled lane. I was considering shouting out a challenge when I heard raucous laughter behind my back. I turned my head midstroke and saw two black-bearded men – wormrunners I guessed from the flamboyant cut of their furs – elbowing each other, clasping hands, and alternately whipping each other ahead by snapping their arms. They were much too old, of course, and the street was much too crowded for a game of bump-and-stake. I should have perceived this immediately. Instead, I completed my stroke because I was determined to give Soli no warning as I passed him. All at once the larger wormrunner smacked into Soli’s back, propelling him across the warning stripe into the sled lane. There came the sudden thunder of a large red sled as he stutter-stepped on his skates with his arms outstretched. He performed a desperate dance to avoid the sled’s hard, pointed nose, and suddenly he was down. The sled rocketed over him in a tenth of a second. (Though it seemed like a year.) I crossed the warning stripe and pulled him to the skating lane. He pushed me away with an astonishing force for someone who so nearly had been impaled. ‘Assassin,’ he said to me. He grunted and tried to stand.

I told him that it was a wormrunner who had pushed him, but he said, ‘If not you, then your mother’s hirelings. She hates me because she thinks you’ll be held to your oath. And for other reasons.’

I looked at the circle of people standing over us. Nowhere could I see the two black-bearded wormrunners.

‘But she’s wrong, Moira is.’

He held his side and coughed. Blood trickled from his long nose and open mouth. He beckoned to a nearby novice who approached nervously. ‘Your name?’ he asked.

‘Sophie Dean, from The Nave, Lord Pilot,’ the pretty girl answered.

‘Then,’ he said, ‘your Lord Pilot in the presence of the witness Sophie Dean releases Mallory Ringess from his oath to penetrate the Solid State Entity.’

He coughed again, spraying tiny red droplets over Sophie’s white jacket.

‘I think your ribs must be broken,’ I said. ‘The race is over for you, Lord Pilot.’

He grabbed my arm and pulled me closer to him. ‘Is it?’ he asked. Then he coughed as he pushed me away and began skating towards the Academy.

I stood there for a moment staring at the drops of blood burning tiny holes into the blue ice. I did not want to believe that my mother had sent assassins to murder Soli. I could not understand why he had released me from my oath.

‘Are you all right, Pilot?’ Sophie asked.

I was not all right. Though my life was saved, I felt sick to my stomach, utterly wretched. I coughed suddenly and vomited up a chyme of black bread and black coffee and bile.

‘Pilot?’

Sophie blinked her clear blue eyes against the sudden wind cutting beneath my garments, and in my mind was a knowledge, a complete and utter certainty that I would keep my oath to Soli and my vows to the Order no matter the cost. Each of us, I realized, must ultimately face death and ruin. It was merely my fate to have to face them sooner than most.

‘Pilot, shall I call for a sled?’

‘No, I’ll finish the race,’ I said.

‘You’re letting him get a lead.’

It was true. I looked down the Run as Soli turned onto the yellow street leading to my secret shortcut to the west gate.

‘Don’t worry, child,’ I said as I pushed off. ‘He’s injured and full of pain, and he’s coughing blood. I’ll catch him before we get halfway to Borja.’

I was again wrong. Though I struck the ice with my skates as fast as I could, I did not catch him as we passed the spires of Borja, and I did not catch him as we circled the Timekeeper’s Tower; I did not catch him at all.

The wind against my ears was like a winter storm as we entered Resa Commons. The multitudes cheered, and Burgos Harsha waved the green victory flag, and Leopold Soli, barely conscious and leaking so much blood from his torn lungs that a cutter later had to pump plasma into his veins, beat me by ten feet.

It might as well have been ten light-years.

3
The Timekeeper’s Tower

The goal of my theory is to establish once and for all the certitude of mathematical methods … The present state of affairs where we run up against the paradoxes is intolerable. Just think, the definitions and deductive methods which everyone learns, teaches and uses in mathematics, lead to absurdities! If mathematical thinking is defective, where are we to find truth and certitude?

David Hilbert, Machine Century Cantor, from On the Infinite

The days following the pilot’s race and Leopold Soli’s near-murder passed quickly. The clear, dry, sunny weather gave way to winter’s deep powder snows that continually fell on the glissades and kept the zambonies busy. Soli’s would-be assassins were never caught. Though he made full use of the Order’s resources, and the Timekeeper set his spies to listening at doorways and peeking in windows (or whatever it is that spies do), our Lord Pilot could do little more than rage and demand that my mother be brought before the akashics. ‘Lay her brain bare,’ he thundered at the pilot’s conclave, ‘expose her plots and lies!’ It was a measure of his vast reputation that the pilots, many of whom had grown to adulthood and had taken their vows during his long journey, voted to try my mother.

On fourthday she submitted to the review of Nikolos the Elder. With his computers he painted pictures of her brain as vivid as a Fravashi fresco. But the plump, little Lord Akashic pronounced that he could find no memory inside her of a plot to kill Soli.

That night, in her little brick house in the Pilot’s Quarter, she said to me, ‘Soli goes too far! Nikolos proclaims my innocence. What does Soli say? He says, “It’s well known that the matriarchs of Lechoix keep drugs that destroy specific memories.” Destroy! As if I’d destroy part of my brain!’

I knew how my mother treasured the hundred billion neurons that made up her brain. I did not believe that she, as those of the aphasic sect often did, had taken an aphagenic to destroy her memory; neither could I trust that she was innocent, not after what she had said to me the day of the race. (Even supposing she had used such a drug, I could not very well ask her if she had. Such is the nature of the induced micro-brain lesions that she would have no memory of her crime, nor of having dissolved the memory of her crime.) I was angry and my voice quavered as I asked, ‘How did you fool the Lord Akashic?’

‘My son doubts me?’ she said as she slumped against the bare brick wall of her sleeping room. ‘How I hate Soli! The Lord Pilot returns. To take away what I love most. And so I went to the Timekeeper. And lied, yes, I admit I lied. I begged him to ask Soli. To release you from your oath.’

‘And the Timekeeper listened to you?’

‘The Timekeeper thinks he’s cunning. But I told him we would go to Tria. To become merchant pilots, if he didn’t talk to Soli. The Timekeeper thinks he’s fearless, but he fears such a scandal.’

‘You told him that? He must think I’m the worst kind of coward.’

‘Who cares what he thinks? At least I’ve saved you. From a stupid death.’

‘You’ve saved me from nothing,’ I said as I walked towards the door. ‘Don’t ever lie on my behalf again, Mother.’

I told her I had resolved to keep my oath, and she began to cry. ‘How I hate Soli!’ she said as I opened the door to the street. ‘I’ll teach him about hate.’

I spent the next few days in final preparation for my journey. I consulted eschatologists and other professionals, hoping to glean some bit of information as to the nature and purpose of the impossible being known as the Solid State Entity. Burgos Harsha told me that Rollo Gallivare had discovered the first of the mainbrains, and that he believed them to be aliens from another galaxy. ‘It is recorded in the apocrypha of the first Timekeeper that the Silicon God appeared within the Eta Carina Nebula towards the end of the Swarming Centuries. And in the chronicles of Tisander the Wary, we find a similar assertation. But when have those sources ever been accurate, I ask you? In the history of the Tycho, Reina Ede holds that the brains evolved from the seed of the Ieldra, as did Homo Sapiens. What do I believe? I don’t know what I believe.’

Kolenya Mor thought that the Ieldra, before they melded their consciousness with the bizarrely tortured spacetime of the core singularity, must have closely resembled the Solid State Entity. ‘As to the Entity’s purpose, why, it’s the purpose of all life, to awaken to itself.’ We talked for a long time, and I told her that many of the younger pilots denied that life had a purpose. She looked at me with her horrified little eyes and exclaimed, ‘Heresy! That ancient heresy!’

I was not the only one, of course, called to quest. The whole of our Order seemed afire with the dream of finding Soli’s Elder Eddas. What indeed was the secret of man’s immortality? ‘Find out why the goddamned stars are exploding,’ Bardo said, ‘and you’ll find your secret.’ Of course, he was a pragmatist whose mind did not often turn towards esoteric problems. Others believed that the secret of the exploding Vild would be only the first part of the Elder Eddas. (Albeit a vital part.) Where should we look for this secret? Why hadn’t we discovered it long ago? Phantasts and tinkers and pilots – many of us felt that despite the three millennia which our Order had spent accumulating knowledge, we might have overlooked an important, perhaps vital thing. Historians begged the Timekeeper for permission to leave Neverness, to raid the library on Ksandaria for clues to the mystery. Neologicians and semanticists locked themselves in their cold towers as they set to creating and discovering new languages, lost in their certitude that the secret of the Elder Eddas – and every other kind of wisdom – was to be found in words. The fabulists spun their fictions, which they claimed were as real as any reality, and declared that the Elder Eddas is that which we create. And who was to say they were wrong? And the pilots! My brave, fellow pilots, Richardess and the Sonderval, went forth into the manifold, seeking lost planets and strange new alien races. Tomoth and a hundred other master pilots would try to map the Vild. Soli himself would attempt to penetrate the inner veil of the Vild, while Lionel devised yet another plan to find Old Earth. Even cowardly Bardo would make a journey, even if he proposed nothing more daring than his own, private expedition to Ksandaria. Although a few cynical professionals like my mother had no intention of chancing their lives on such a dream, it was an exciting time, and more, a glorious time we would never see again.

The day before my departure, a day of fierce, sudden gales and stinging ice-powder, the Timekeeper summoned me to his Tower. As I skated between the dark grey buildings separating Resa from the great Tower, I shivered beneath my too-thin kamelaika. I wished that I had either greased my face or worn a mask against the freezing wind. It would be an insult, I thought, to appear before the Timekeeper with patches of white, frostbitten skin blighting my face. It was good to enter the warm Tower, good, even, to stand impatiently in an anteroom below the top of the Tower as I stamped my boots on the red carpet and waited for the master horologe to announce my arrival.

‘He is waiting for you,’ the horologe said in a voice almost breathless from his climbing up and down the stairs into the Timekeeper’s chambers. ‘Be careful,’ he said, ‘he’s in an ugly mood today,’ and then he ushered me up the winding stairs into the circular sanctum of the tower where the Timekeeper stood waiting.

‘So, Mallory,’ he said, ‘the pilot’s ring looks good on your hand, eh?’

The Timekeeper was a grim-faced man with a mane of thick white hair erupting from his taut skin. Most of the time he seemed very old, though no one knew just how old he was. When he frowned, which he often did, the muscles of his jaws stood out like knots of wood. His neck was thick and popping with tendons, as was the rest of his tense, large-boned body. I stood in the spacious, well-lighted room, and he stared at me as he always did when I came to see him. His eyes were black and fathomless like chunks of barely cooled obsidian hammered into his skull; his eyes were hot, restless, angry and pained.

‘What would it take to kill you?’ he asked me.

The muscles of his bare forearms tensed and relaxed, tensed and relaxed. Once, when I was a novice, when he had taught me leverage grips and killing holds and other wrestling skills, I had had occasion to view the powerful body beneath the long red robe he always wore. His torso and legs were etched with scars; a fine network of hard, white cicatrices more intricate and convoluted than the glidderies of the Farsider’s Quarter began at his neck, twisted through his dense, white, body hair, and ran down his groin and muscular legs to his feet. When I had asked him about the scars, he had said, ‘It takes a lot to kill me, you see.’

He motioned for me to sit in an ornate, wooden chair facing the southern window. The Tower, a monolith of white marble imported from Urradeth at extraordinary cost, overlooked the whole of the Academy. To the west were the granite and basalt arches of the professionals’ colleges, Upplyssa and Lara Sig; to the north, the densely clumped spires of Borja, and looking south towards Urkel, I saw my beloved Resa. (I should mention that the tower windows are made of fused silica, and calcium and sodium oxides, a substance the Timekeeper calls glass. It is a brittle substance given to shattering when the gales of midwinter spring come roaring across the Starnbergersee. Nevertheless, the Timekeeper, who is fond of archaisms, claims that glass allows in a cleaner light than does the clary used in all the buildings of the Civilized Worlds.)

‘Do you hear the ticking, Mallory, my brave, foolish, young pilot? Time – it ticks, it runs, it twists, it dilates, shrinks, and kills, and one day for each of us, no matter what we do, it stops. Stops, do you hear me?’

He pulled up a chair identical to mine and rested his red-slippered foot on the seat. The Timekeeper – afraid perhaps that if he ceased his restless motions, his internal clock might stop – did not like to sit. ‘You’re the youngest pilot in history. Twenty-one years old – a nano in the life of a star, but it’s all the time you’ve had. And the clock beats; the clock tolls; the clock ticks; do you hear it ticking?’

I heard it ticking. All around us, in the Timekeeper’s circular Tower, were clocks ticking. Interspersed with the curved panes of glass around the circumference of the room, from the fur-covered floor to the white plaster ceiling, were wooden shelves upon which sat the clocks. Clocks of every conceivable design. There were archaic weight-driven clocks and spring clocks encased in plastic; there were wood-covered pendulum clocks, electric clocks and quartz crystal clocks; there were bio-clocks powered by the disembodied heart muscles of various organisms; there were quantum clocks and hourglasses filled with cobalt and vermilion sands; I saw three water clocks and even a Fravashi driftglass, which measured the time since the drifting super-galactic clusters had erupted from the primeval singularity. As far as I could determine, no two of the clocks told the same time. On top of the highest shelf was the Seal of our Order. It was a small glass and steel atomic clock which had been set on Old Earth the day the Order was founded. (The largest clock, of course, was – is – the Tower itself. Far below, set into the circle of ice surrounding it, twenty rows of granite radiate outward and mark the passing of the sun’s shadow. This giant sundial, inaccurate though it may be, is theoretically the only clock in the city by which we citizens can direct our activities. The Timekeeper abhorred the tyranny of time, and so he long ago ordered all clocks banned. This prohibition has proved a boon to the wormrunners who make fortunes smuggling in Yarkona pocket watches and other contraband.)

A clock gonged, and he gripped his forearms, one in either hand. He said, ‘I’ve heard that Soli has dissolved your oath.’

‘That’s true, Timekeeper. And I wish to apologize for my mother. She had no right to come to you, asking you to talk to Soli on my behalf.’

With his foot he pushed back the chair as he kneaded the tight muscles of his forearms. ‘So, you think I ordered Soli to release you from your oath?’

‘Didn’t you?’

‘No.’

‘My mother seems to think –’

‘Your mother – forgive me, Pilot – your mother often thinks wrongly. I’ve known you all your life. Do you think I’m stupid enough to believe you’d desert the Order to become a merchant pilot? Ha!’

‘Then you didn’t speak to Soli?’

‘You question me?’

‘Excuse me, Timekeeper.’ I was confused. Why else would Soli have released me from my oath, unless it was to shame me before all my friends and masters of the Academy?

I confided my doubts to the Timekeeper who said, ‘Soli has lived three long lifetimes; don’t try to understand him.’

‘It seems there are many things I don’t understand.’

‘You’re modest today.’

‘Why did you send for me?’

‘Don’t question me, damn you! I’ve only so much patience, even for you.’

I sat mutely in the chair looking out the window at Borja’s beautiful main spire, the one the Tycho had built a thousand years ago. The Timekeeper circled around to my side so that he could look upon my face as I stared straight ahead. It was the traditional position of politeness between master and novice that I had been taught when I first entered the Academy. The Timekeeper could search my face for truth or lies (or any other emotion) while preserving the sanctity of his own thoughts and feelings.

‘Everyone knows you intend to keep your oath,’ he said.

‘Yes, Lord Horologe.’

‘It seems that Soli has tricked you.’

‘Yes, Lord Horologe.’

‘And your mother has failed you.’

‘Perhaps, Lord Horologe.’

‘Then you’ll still try to penetrate the Entity?’

‘I’ll leave tomorrow, Lord Horologe.’

‘Your ship is ready?’

‘Yes, Lord Horologe.’

‘“To die among the stars is the most glorious death,” is it not?’

‘Yes, Lord Horologe.’

There was a blur from my side and the Timekeeper slapped my face. ‘Nonsense!’ he roared. ‘I won’t listen to such nonsense from you!’

He walked over to the window and rapped the glass pane with his knuckles. ‘Cities such as Neverness are glorious,’ he said. ‘And the ocean at sunset, or deep winter’s firefalls – these things are glorious. Death is death; death is horror. There’s no glory when the time runs out and the ticking stops, do you hear me? There’s only blackness and the hell of everlasting nothingness. Don’t be too quick to die, do you hear me, Mallory?’

‘Yes, Lord Horologe.’

‘Good!’ He crossed the room and opened a cabinet supporting a jar of pulsing, glowing red fluid. (I had always presumed that this evil-looking display was a clock of some sort, but I had never had the courage to ask him exactly what sort.) From the cabinet’s dark interior – the wood was a rare ebony and so dully black that it shed little light – he removed an object that appeared to be an old, leather-covered box. I soon saw that it was not; when he opened the ‘box,’ that is to say, when he turned back one section of the stiffened pieces of the brown, cracked leather, there were many, many sheets of what seemed to be paper cleverly fastened to the middle section. He came closer to me; I smelled mildew and dust and centuries-old paper. As his fingers turned the yellow sheets he would occasionally let out a sigh or exclaim, ‘Here it is, in ancient Anglish, no less!’ Or, ‘Ah, such music, no one does this now, it’s a dead art. Look at this, Mallory!’ I looked at the sheets of paper covered line after line with squiggly black characters, all of which were alien to me. I knew that I was looking at one of those archaic artifacts in which words are represented symbolically (and redundantly) by physical ideoplasts. The ancients had called the ideoplasts ‘letters,’ but I could not remember what the letter-covered artifact itself was called.

‘It’s a book!’ the Timekeeper said. ‘A treasure – these are the greatest poems ever dreamed by the minds of human beings. Listen to this … ,’ and he translated from the dead language he called Franche as he recited a poem entitled ‘The Clock.’ I did not like it very much; it was a poem full of dark, shuddering images and hopelessness and dread.

‘How is it that you can interpret these symbols into words?’ I asked.

‘The art is called “reading,”’ he said, ‘It’s an art I learned long ago.’

I was confused for a moment because I had always used the word ‘read’ in a different, broader context. One ‘reads’ the weather patterns from the drifting clouds or ‘reads’ a person’s habits and programs according to the mannerisms of his face. Then I remembered certain professionals practised the art of reading, as did the citizens of many of the more backward worlds. I had even once seen books in a museum on Solsken. I supposed that one could read words as well as say them. But how inefficient it all seemed! I pitied the ancients who did not know how to encode information into ideoplasts and directly superscribe the various sense and cognitive centres of the brain. As Bardo would say, how barbaric!

The Timekeeper made a fist and said, ‘I want you to learn the art of reading so you can read this book.’

‘Read the book?’

‘Yes,’ he said as he snapped the cover shut and handed it to me. ‘You heard what I said.’

‘But why, Timekeeper, I don’t understand. To read with the eyes; it’s so … clumsy.’

‘You’ll learn to read, and you’ll learn the dead languages in this book.’

‘Why?’

‘So that you’ll hear these poems in your heart.’

‘Why?’

‘Question me again, damn you, and I’ll forbid you to journey for seven years! Then you’ll learn patience!’

‘Forgive me, Timekeeper.’

‘Read the book, and you may live,’ he said. He reached out and patted the back of my neck. ‘Your life is all you have; guard it like a treasure.’

The Timekeeper was the most complicated man I have ever known. He was a man whose selfness comprised a thousand jagged pieces of love and hate, whimsy and will; he was a man who battled himself. I stood there dumbly holding the dusty old book he had placed in my hands, and I looked into the black pools of his unfathomable eyes, and I saw hell. He paced the room like an old, white wolf who had once been caught in a wormrunner’s steel trap. He was wary of something, perhaps of giving me the book. As he paced, he rubbed the muscles of his right leg and limped, slightly. He seemed at once vicious and kind, lonely, and bitter at his loneliness. Here was a man, I thought, who had never known a single day’s (or night’s) peace, an old, old man who had been wounded in love and cut in wars and burnt by dreams turned to ashes in his hands. He possessed a tremendous vitality, and his zest and love of life had finally led him to that essential paradox of human existence. He loved the air he breathed and the beating of his heart so fully and well that he had let his natural hatred of death ruin his living of life. He brooded too much about death. It was said that he had once killed another human being with his own hands to save his own life. There were rumours that he used a nepenthe to ease the panic of lapsing time and to forget, for a little while, the pains of his past and the angry roar of pure existence. I looked at the lines of his scowling face, and I thought the rumours might be true.

‘I don’t understand,’ I said, ‘how a book of poems could save my life.’ I began to laugh.

He stopped by the window, smiling at me without humour. His large, veined hands were clasped behind his back. ‘I’ll tell you something about the Entity that no one else knows. She has a fondness for many things human, and of all these things, she likes ancient poetry the best.’

I sat quietly in my chair. I did not dare ask him why he thought the Solid State Entity liked human poetry.

‘If you learn these poems,’ he said, ‘perhaps the Entity will be less likely to kill you like a fly.’

I thanked him because I did not know what else to do. I would humour this somewhat deranged old man, I decided. I accepted the book. I even turned the pages, carefully, pretending to take an interest in the endless lines of black letters. Near the middle of the book, which contained thirteen hundred and forty-nine brittle pages, I saw a word that I recognized. The word reminded me that the Timekeeper was not a man to be laughed at or mocked. Once, when I was a young novice, the horologes had caught a democrat with a laser burning written words into the white marble of the Tower. The Timekeeper – I remember his neck muscles writhing like spirali beneath his tight skin – had ordered the poor man thrown from the top of the Tower in atonement for the dual crimes of destroying beauty and inflicting his ideas on others. Barbaric. According to the canons of our Order, of course, slelling is supposedly the only crime punishable by death. (When slel-neckers are caught stealing another’s DNA they are beheaded, one of the few ancient customs both efficient and merciful.) We hold that banishment from our beautiful city is punishment enough for all other crimes, but for some reason, when the Timekeeper had seen the graffito, FREEDOM, etched into the archway above the Tower’s entrance, he had raged and had discovered an exceptionary clause in the ninety-first canon permitting him, so he claimed, to order that: ‘The punishment will fit the crime.’ To this day, the graffito remains above the archway, a reminder not only that freedom is a dead concept, but that our lives are determined by sometimes capricious forces beyond our control.

We talked for a while about the forces that control the universe, and we talked about the quest. When I expressed my excitement over the possibility of discovering the Elder Eddas, the Timekeeper, ever a man of contradictions, ran his fingers through his snowy hair as he grimaced and said, ‘I’m not so sure I want man saved. So, I’ve had enough of men – maybe it’s time the ticking stopped and the clock ran down. Let the Vild explode, every damn star from Vesper to Nwarth. Saved! Life is hell, eh? And there’s no salvation except death, no matter what the Friends of Man say.’ I waited for his breath to run out as he ranted about the pervasive – and perverse – effect that the alien missionaries and alien religions had had upon the human race; I waited a long time.

The sky had long since grown dark and blackened when he hammered the edge of his fist against his thigh and growled out, ‘Piss on the Ieldra! So they made themselves into gods and carked themselves into the core? They should leave us alone, eh? Man’s man, and gods are gods, each to his own purpose. But you’ve sworn your silly oath, so you go find them or their Eddas or anything else you think you can find.’

Then he sighed and added, ‘But go carefully.’

It is strange how often the smallest of events, the most trivial of decisions, can utterly change our lives. Having said goodbye to the Timekeeper, I reached the ice beneath the tower, and I stole another look at the book he had given me. Poems! A simple book of clumsy, ancient poems! There on the gliddery, which was dark and bare, I stood for a long time wondering if I shouldn’t throw the book into our dormitory room’s fireplace; I stood there brooding over the meaning of chance and fate. Then the icy, damp wind off the Sound began to blow, carrying into my bones the chill of death – whose death I did not then know. The wind drove hard snowflakes across the ice, stinging my face and scouring the windows of the Tower. The soft sound of ice brushing against glass was almost lost to the tinkling of the wind chimes hanging from the Tower’s window ledges. Shrugging my shoulders, I pulled the hood of my kamelaika over my head. The Timekeeper wanted me to read the book. Very well, I would read the book.

My hands were numb as I slipped it into the pack I wore at the small of my back. I struck off down the gliddery in a hurry. Bardo and my other friends would be waiting dinner for me, and I was hungry and cold.

I spent most of my last night in the City making my various goodbyes. There was a dinner on my behalf in one of the smaller, more elegant restaurants of the Hofgarten. As was the custom of the scryers, Katharine refused to wish me well because, as she said, ‘my destiny was written in my history,’ whatever that meant. Bardo, of course, alternately wept and cursed and blustered. He had, perversely, taken a liking to heated beer, and he drank copious amounts of the foamy yellow liquid to ease his fear of the uncertain future. He made toasts and speeches to our friends, reciting sentimental verses he had composed. He lapsed into song, until Chantal Astoreth, that wry, dainty lover of music, pointed out that his voice was slurry with drink and not up to its usual fine quality. Finally, he fell stupefied into his chair, took my hand in his, and announced, ‘This is the saddest day of my damned life,’ And then he fell asleep.

My mother said a similar thing, and she barely kept herself from crying. (Though the corner of her mouth twitched uncontrollably as it did when she was full of strong emotion.) She looked at me, with her crooked, dark eyebrows and her nervous eyes, and she said, ‘Soli severs your oath because your mother went begging to the Timekeeper. And how do you repay me? You cut my heart.’

I did not tell her what the Timekeeper had said to me earlier that day in the Tower. She would not want to know how easily he had seen through her lies. She drew on her drab fur, which was shiny grey in patches where the fine shagshay hairs had worn off. She laughed in a low, disturbing manner as if she had a private joke with herself. I thought she would leave then without saying another word. But she turned to me, kissed my forehead, and whispered, ‘Come back. To your mother who bleeds for you, who loves you.’

I left the restaurant before dawn (I didn’t sleep that night), and I skated down the deserted Way to the Hollow Fields. There, at the foot of Urkel, even in the coldest part of morning, its acres of runs and pads were busy with sleds and windjammers and other craft. Thunder shook the ice of the slidderies, and the air was full of red rocket tailings and sonic booms. High above, the feathery lines of contrails glowed pink against the early blue sky. It was very beautiful. Although I had come here often on duties at this time of day, it occurred to me that I had always taken such beauty for granted.

Beneath the Fields, the Cavern of the Thousand Light Ships opened through a half-mile of melted rock. Although there were not nearly so many as a thousand ships – and have not been since the Tycho’s time – there were many more than the eye could take in at a glance. Near the middle of the eighth row of ships, I stood chatting with an olive-robed programmer beside my ship, the Immanent Carnation. While we debated a minor augmentation in the ship’s heuristics and paradox logics, someone called out my name. I looked down the walkway where the row of sleek, diamond hulls disappeared into the depths. I saw a long shape limned by the faint light of the luminescent lichen covering the Cavern’s walls. ‘Mallory,’ the voice rang out, echoing from the dark, curving ceiling above us. ‘It’s time to say goodbye, isn’t it?’ The walkway sang with the slap of heavy boots against reverberating steel, and then I saw him clearly, tall and severe in his black woollens. It was Soli.

The programmer, Master Rafael, who was a shy, quiet-loving man with skin as smooth and black as basalt, greeted him and hastily made an excuse for leaving us alone together.

‘She’s beautiful,’ Soli said, scrutinizing the lines of my ship, the narrow nose and the swept-forward wings. ‘That has to be admitted. Outside she’s lithe and balanced and beautiful. But it’s the inside that is the soul of a lightship, isn’t it? The Lord Programmer told me you’ve played with the Hilbert logics to an unusual degree. Why so, Pilot?’

For a while we talked about the things that pilots talk about. We debated the paradoxes and discussed my choosing of Master Jafar’s ideoplasts. ‘He was a great notationist,’ he said, ‘but his representation of Justerini’s omega function is redundant, isn’t it?’

He suggested certain substitutions of symbols that seemed to make great sense, and I could not keep the note of surprise from my voice as I asked, ‘Why are you helping me, Lord Pilot?’

‘It’s my duty to help new pilots.’

‘I thought you wanted me to fail.’

‘How could you know what was wanted?’ He rubbed his temples as he looked into the open pit of my ship. He seemed agitated and ill at ease.

‘But you tricked me into swearing the oath.’

‘Did I? Did I?’

‘And then you released me. Why?’

He reached out and touched the hull of my ship, almost as one would stroke a woman. He did not answer my question. Instead he pressed his lips together, and he asked me, ‘Then you really will journey into the Entity?’

‘Yes, Lord Pilot, I’ve said I would.’

‘You’ll do it freely, of your own will?’

‘Yes, Lord Pilot.’

‘Is that possible? You think you can bend yourself to your own will, that you’re free? Such arrogance!’

I had no idea of what he was leading up to, so I recited the usual evasion, ‘The holists teach that the apparent dichotomy between free will and forced action is a false dichotomy.’

He pulled at his chin and said, ‘Holists and their useless teachings! Who listens to holists? The question is this: Does your will impel you to your death, or will it be blamed on your Lord Pilot?’

Of course I blamed him; I blamed him so fiercely I felt the bile souring my stomach and spreading hotly through my veins. I wanted badly to tell him how much I blamed him, but instead I stared at his dull reflection in the hull of my ship. I looked at his black-gloved hand resting against my ship. I said nothing.

He removed his hand, rubbed his nose, and said, ‘When your time comes, when you’re close to it and have the choice between blaming me or not, please remember you tricked yourself into failure.’

My muscles were hot and tight, and without really thinking about it, I punched the hull of my ship where his face wavered in the gleaming blackness. I nearly broke my knuckles. ‘I … won’t … fail.’ I let the words out slowly, to keep from screaming in pain. I could hardly bear to look at him, with his long nose and his shiny black hair shot full of red.

He bowed his head quickly and said, ‘All men fail in the end, don’t they? Well, then. Goodbye, Pilot, we wish you well.’ He turned his back abruptly and walked away, into the depths of the Cavern.

There is not much more I wish to tell of that unhappy morning. Master Rafael returned accompanied by the usual cadre of professionals, journeymen and novices that attend a pilot’s departure. There was an orange-robed cetic who pressed his thumbs against my temples and examined my face for illness. There were journeymen tinkers who lifted me into the darkened pit of my ship, and a horologe to seal the ship’s clock. And others. After what seemed like days (already the distortions were working on my time sense), I ‘faced my ship,’ as the master pilots say; I interfaced with the deep, profound neurologics that are the soul of a lightship. My brain was now two brains, or rather, a single brain of blood and neurons which had been extended and melded into the brain of my ship. Reality, the lesser reality of sights and sounds and other sensual impressions, gave way to the vastly greater reality of the manifold. I plunged into the cold ocean of pure mathematics, into the realm of order and meaning underlying the chaos of everyday space, and the Cavern of the Thousand Light Ships was no more.

There was, of course, a brief moment of impatience as my ship was lifted to a surface run, the boredom of rocketing through the atmosphere and falling into the thickspace above our icy planet. I made a mapping, and a window into the manifold opened to me. Then our star, the little yellow sun, was gone, and there were an infinite number of lights and beauty and terror, and I left Neverness and my youth far behind me.

4
The Number Storm

In the beginning, of course, there was God. And from God arose the Elder Ieldra, beings of pure light who were like God except that there was a time before their existence, and a time would come when they would exist no more. And from the Elder Ieldra arose the Ieldra, who were like the elder race except they had substance and flesh. The Ieldra seeded the galaxy, and perhaps many galaxies, with their DNA. On Old Earth, from this godseed evolved the primitive algae and bacteria, the plankton, slime moulds, worms, fishes, and so on until ape-Man stood away from the trees of the mother continent. And ape-Man gave birth to cave-Men, who were like Men except that they did not have the power to end their own existence.

And from cave-Men at last arose Man, and Man, who was at once clever and stupid took to bed four wives: The Bomb; The Computer; The Test Tube; and Woman.

from A Requiem for Homo Sapiens, by Horthy Hosthoh

It is impossible to describe the indescribable. Words, being words, are inadequate to represent that for which there are no words. Having said this, I shall attempt an explanation of what occurred next, of my journey into the nameless pathways of the manifold.

I made my way along the glittering, spiral Sagittarius arm of the galaxy. I progressed outward in good style across the lens of the Milky Way, though there were of course times when I was forced to loop back across my pathways, kleining coreward towards the hellishly bright and dense stars of the central bulge. This part of my journey, I knew, would be easy. I followed pathways that the Tycho and Jemmu Flowtow had long ago discovered. To fall from a red giant such as Gloriana Luz to one of the hot blue stars of the Lesser Morbio is easy when the mapping of the respective point-sources in the neighbourhood of the two stars has long ago been made (and proved to be simply connected). So easy is it that the cantors have given these known pathways a special name: They call them the stellar fallaways to distinguish them from that part of the manifold that is unmapped, and quite often, unmappable. Thus, to be precise I should say I began my journey through the fallaways, fenestering at speed from window to window, from star to star in my hurry to reach the Solid State Entity.

I spent most of this time floating freely within the darkened pit of my ship. For some fearful pilots – such as the failed ones who guide the deep ships and long ships that ply the trade routes of the fallaways – the ship’s pit can be more of a trap than a sanctuary in which to experience the profounder states of mind; for them the pit is a black metallic coffin. For me, the pit of the Immanent Carnation was like a gentle, comfortable heaume surrounding my whole body rather than just my head. (Indeed, in the Tycho’s time the ship’s computer fitted tightly over the pilot’s head and extruded protein filaments into the brain, in the manner of the ancient heaumes.) As I journeyed through the near stars, the neurologics woven into the black shell of the pit holographically modelled my brain and body functions. And more, the information-rich logics infused images, impulses and symbols directly into my brain. Thus I passed the stars of the Nashira Triple, and I faced my ship’s computer and ‘talked’ to it. And it talked to me. I listened to the soundless roar of the ship’s spacetime devouring engines opening windows to the manifold, and I watched the fire of the more distant nebulae as I proved my theorems – all through the filter of the computer and its neurologics. This melding of my brain with my ship was powerful but not perfect. At times the information flooding within the various centres of my brain became mixed up and confused: I smelled the stars of the Sarolta being born and listened to the purple sound of equations being solved and other like absurdities. It is to integrate this crosstalk of the mind’s senses that the holists evolved the discipline of hallning; of a pilot’s mental disciplines I shall later have much to say.

I entered the Trifid Nebula, where the young, hot stars pulsed with wavelengths of blue light. At those times when my ship fell out into realspace around a star, it seemed that the whole of the nebula’s interior was aglow with red clouds of hydrogen gas. Because I needed to pass to the nearby Lagoon Nebula, I crossed the Trifid at speed, fenestering from window to window so quickly that I had to hurry my brain with many moments of slowtime. For me, with my metabolism and my mind speeding from the electric touch of the computer, since I could think much faster, time paradoxically seemed to slow down. In my mind, time dilated and stretched out like a sheet of rubber, seconds becoming hours, and hours like years. This slowing of time was necessary, for otherwise the flickering rush of stars would have left me too little time to establish my isomorphisms and mappings, to prove my theorems. Or I would have dropped into the photosphere of a blue giant, or fallen into an infinite tree, or died some other way.

At last I passed into the Lagoon. I was dazzled by the intense lights, some of which are among the brightest objects in the galaxy. Around a cluster of stars called the Blastula Luz, I prepared my long passage to the Rosette Nebula in the Orion Arm. I penetrated the Blastula and segued to the thickspace at its nearly hollow centre. This thickspace is called the Tycho’s Thick, and though it is not nearly so dense as the one that lies in the neighbourhood of Neverness, there are many point-sources connecting to point-exits within the Rosette Nebula.

I found one such point-source, and the theorems of probabilistic topology built before my inner eyes, and I made a mapping. The manifold opened. The star I orbited, an ugly red giant I named Bloody Bal, disappeared. I floated in the pit of my ship, wondering how long I would fall along the way from the Lagoon to the Rosette; I wondered – and not for the last time – at the very peculiar nature of this thing we call time.

In the manifold there is no space, and therefore there is no time. That is to say there is no outtime. For me, inside my lightship, there was only shiptime or slowtime, or dreamtime, or sometimes quicktime – but never the realtime of the outer universe. Because my passage to the Rosette would probably be long and uneventful, I often quieted my brain with quicktime. I did this to ward off boredom. My mentations slowed to a glacial pace, and time passed more quickly. Years became hours while long segments of tedious nothingness were shrunken into the moment it took my heart to beat a single time.

After a while I tired of quicktime. I thought I might as well drug my mind with sleep, or drug it with drugs. I spent most of my passage in the more or less normally alert state of shiptime examining the book that the Timekeeper had given me. I learned to read. It was a painful thing to do. The ancient way of representing the sounds of speech by individual letters was an inefficient means of encoding information. Barbaric. I learned the cursive glyphs of that array known as the alphabet, and I learned how to string them together linearly – linearly! – to form words. Since the book contained poems written in several of the ancient Old Earth languages, I had to learn these languages as well. This, of course, was the easier of my tasks since I could infuse and superscribe the language and memory centres of my brain directly from the computer’s store of arcana. (Though few of these poems were composed in ancient Anglish, I learned that oldest of tongues because my mother had long nagged me to do so.)

When I had learned to scan the lines of letters printed across – and, sometimes, down – the old, fibrous pages of yellowed paper, learned so well that I had no need to sound out the individual letters in the inner ear of my brain but could perceive the units of meaning word by word, I found to my astonishment that this thing called reading was pleasurable. There was pleasure in handling the cracked leather of the cover, pleasure too in the quiet stimulation of my eyes with black symbols representing words as they had once been spoken. How simple a thing reading really was! How strange I would have appeared to another pilot, had she been able to watch me reading! There, in the illuminated pit of my ship, I floated and held the Timekeeper’s book in front of me as I did nothing more than move my eyes from left to right, left to right, down the time-stiffened pages of the book.

But it was the poems themselves that gave me the greatest pleasure. It was wonderful to discover that the ancients, in all their stupendous ignorance of the immensity of spacetime and the endless profusion of life that fills our universe, knew as much of the great secret of life – or as little – as we know now. Though their perceptions were simple and bold, it seemed to me they often perceived more deeply that part of reality directly apprehensible to a mere man. Their poems were like hard diamonds crudely cut from some primal stone; their poems were full of a pounding, sensual, barbaric music; their poems sent the blood rushing and made the eyes focus on vistas of untouchable stars and cold, distant, northern seas. There were short, clever poems designed to capture one of life’s brief and sad (but beautiful) moments as one might capture and preserve a butterfly in glacier ice. There were poems that ran on for pages, recounting man’s lust for killing and blood and those pure and timeless moments of heroism when one feels that the life inside must be rejoined with the greater life without.

My favourite poem was one that the Timekeeper had read to me the day before my departure. I remembered him pacing through the Tower as he clenched his fists and recited:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

‘It is important,’ he had told me, ‘to rhyme “symmetry” with “eye.”’

I read the poems over and over; after a time, I could repeat some of them without looking at the book. I said the poems out loud until they echoed inside, and I could hear them in my heart.

And so I fell out in the Rosette Nebula, which lies at the edge of the expanding star-blown region known as the Vild. I looked out into the glowing hell of hard light and ruined stars and dust, and I heard myself say:

Stars, I have seen them fall

But when they drop and die

No star is lost at all

From all the star-sown sky.

(When I say I ‘looked out’ at the Vild, I mean, of course, that my ship illuminated my brain with models of the Vild that it had made. So far away was the Rosette from the Vild in realspace – in light-years – that the light from most of the exploding stars had not yet reached the Rosette.)

In contrast to the ugliness of the dying Vild, the Rosette was beautiful. It was a giant star-making womb whose newborn suns flashed and pulsed with such violent energies that the shock waves and pressures of light had swept away the whole of its interior, leaving the nebula hollow like a ruby- and diamond-studded eggshell. It was around the famous Siva Luz, brightest of that splendid, rosy sphere of lights, that I began the first of the mappings that would lead me to the doorway of Eta Carina and the Solid State Entity.

I continued my journey along the most ancient route of the manswarm. I fell out around stars whose planets were thick with human beings (and beings who were less and more than human). Rollo’s Rock, Wakanda and Vesper – these old planets I passed by as quickly as I could. And Nwarth and Ocher, Farfara and Fostora, where, it was said, the men had long ago learned the art of carking their selfnesses into their computers. (It was also said that the Fostora women, disdaining the transfer of human mind into ‘machine,’ had ventured forth in long ships until they came to the planet they called Lechoix. Whereupon they founded the oldest of the matriarchies. The historian Burgos Harsha, however, gives a different explanation of their origin. He holds that Lechoix was colonized by a renegade deepship full of nubile girls bound for the sun domes on Heaven’s Gate. Who really knows?)

After a long time, I passed into that portion of the fallaways little touched by either the second or third waves of the Swarming. Here were planets so old – Freeport and New Earth and Kaarta among others – that they had been peopled long before man had come to formulate the laws of civilization. Here were women and men who had carked their DNA, tampered with their chromosomes and changed their flesh in many horrible ways to fit their new habitats as a drillworm fits the hole it chews into a living skull.

Darrein Luz was a yellow star, beyond which lay others for which there existed no known mappings. It was my task, as a pilot, to discover new mappings, to set up the isomorphisms and prove my theorems, that or die. And though as a journeyman I had made such mappings of the manifold near our city’s little sun, I had never made so many nor journeyed so far.

At first it was easy. With zazen I emptied my mind of everything except mathematical thoughts. I was alert and open to the manifold’s undulations and sudden deformations. Various spaces folded and re-folded around me. I was afraid as I entered a torison space, but I found a little theorem that let me make sense of the writhing tunnels threatening to devour me. ‘The faithful mathematician must use his will to achieve insight from pattern’ – so the cantors say. My will was strong at first, and with each successful mapping I made, it grew stronger still. Sixty-eight stars beyond Darrein Luz, I was so puffed-up with pride I plunged into what I thought would be a rather simple thickspace.

It was nothing of the sort. The point-sources were indeed stived as densely as lice on the head of a harijan, but I could find no mappings to the point-exits in the nebula which lay before me, the nebula called the Solid State Entity. I wondered why. It seemed beyond all chance that there should be no mappings. Because I could go no further, I fell out into realspace above a ringed planet. I felt alone and lost, and so I named the faint, yellow star nearest the thickspace ‘Perdido Luz.’ I vowed I would master the thickspace even if it took me forty days of realtime.

I do not know how long I spent, intime, scurfing the windows of the thickspace. Certainly it was much longer than forty days. It was truly a bizarre thickspace, riddled with too many zero-points and embedded spaces. Often I had trouble fixing points; often I tunnelled from one dark window to another only to find the windows fixed in a closed ring. The usual rules of interfenestration seemed not to hold. I must have mapped sixty-four thousand point-sources, and not one of them could I prove to be simply connected with any other among the stars of the Entity. Once, I laughed so hard my jaws almost popped out of joint; then in despair I bit my lip until I tasted the hot salt of blood. The very existence of this impossible thickspace mocked my faith in the trueness of the Great Theorem. I was almost certain that no mapping from Perdido Luz to the Entity could be found. I was ready to give up when I stumbled upon a beautiful, discrete set of point-sources, all of which connected to a single white star in the outer envelope of the Entity. I had only to make the mapping, open a window, and I would be the first pilot in five hundred years to dare the fickle, whirlpool spaces of a living nebula.

I made the mapping and fell out around the star. So, I thought, this is the group of stars that has terrorized the pilots of my Order; well, it is not so terrible after all. I told myself there was no reason for fear. Then I looked out on the glowing hydrogen clouds, and I was not so sure. The whole nebula seemed dark and strange. There were fewer stars than I had thought there would be, perhaps as few as a hundred thousand. The interstellar dust was too dense, scattering and obscuring the light of even the nearer stars. Grains of graphite and silicates and ices, and iron particles, too, reddened and polarized the dim starlight. Some of the individual dust particles were so gigantic that they seemed not to be dust at all but rather the fragments of planets which had been pulverized and torn apart. Why, I wondered, would the Entity need to tear the planets apart? To gather the mass – the food – for Her fabled moon-sized brains? Or perhaps it wasn’t She who had stripped of planets almost every star I came across; perhaps it was some other natural, if deadly, phenomenon?

The mechanics say that intelligence can warp and shape the fabric of spacetime. I now know this is true. As I set out and fenestered inward towards the heart of the Entity, the manifold within the nebula changed in subtle ways. I found myself too often kleining back upon my pathways. Once, like a worm swallowing its tail, I thought I was caught in an infinite loop; I worried that I would die of old age or lose my mind among the incomprehensible pathways that bunched and writhed and led onwards and back, and through and in, into the twisting of this unknown portion of the manifold. Another time I lost the theme of a theorem I was proving. Usually such a trifling, momentary distraction would not have mattered, but I was in the middle of a wildly segmented space the like of which I had never seen before. I began slipsliding off my normal fenestering sequence. I had the strangest feeling that the Entity Herself was perturbing the spaces before me, measuring my mathematical abilities, testing me as pilot and man.

Suddenly the segmented space snapped like a twig, and I fell out into realspace. I nearly scudded into the gravity wall of a neutron star. There was blackness all around me. There were unusual black globules of matter half a mile in diameter floating in the blackness of space. These black bodies – there were millions of them – must have been the handiwork of the Entity. I could only guess what they were. Because they were so black that they did not reflect any of the milky starlight or any other radiation, I had to deduce their presence from their gravity fields. They had crushingly powerful gravity fields, though not so powerful as the neutron star they orbited. Why they were not sucked down the star’s gravity well I could not say.

Were these black bodies pieces of manufactured matter which somehow regulated the flow of information within the Entity? Were they tachyon machines or some other unnatural engine for producing particles travelling faster than light? Or were they perhaps cancerous growths, some type of wild, unstable matter left over from the Entity’s experiments in shaping the universe to Her whims? I did not know. I wondered if the eschatologists were wrong after all; perhaps the Entity’s brain was composed of black bodies much smaller than moons. Could it be that I was looking at the fount of intelligence of a goddess?

I had no time to explore this fascinating discovery because the intense magnetic field of the star – it was a thousand billion times stronger than that of Icefall’s – was ruining my ship. The star’s densely packed neutrons, probably the core remnants of an ancient supernova, were spinning rapidly, and they had conserved the magnetic field of the original star. I had to make an instant mapping, but at least I escaped being crushed and pulled apart like a seashell. I fell at random into the manifold, and I was lucky I did not fall into an infinite decision tree.

There were other dangers and escapes I will not mention. And wonders, too. I discovered the first of the Entity’s brain lobes in a region of the nebula where the underlying manifold was rich with tunnels and point-sources winding through and connecting with every other part. There was a star pumping out light in measured, intense bursts every nine-tenths of a second. It was a little pulsar which reminded me of the beacon atop Mount Attakel warning the windjammers away from its dark, frozen rocks. But it was much, much brighter. In time with the beating of my heart, it pulsed with the energy of a thousand suns. With every pulse, it illuminated the silver moon orbiting it half a billion miles away. I saw this through my ship’s telescopes, which were my ears and eyes. I watched the fabled moon-brain of the Solid State Entity as it absorbed energy and spun on its axis and thought its unfathomable, infinite thoughts, or whatever it was that a goddess did to fulfil her existence.

Of course, it was a mystery what the Entity did with all this energy. I saw that She used energy faster than a starving hibakusha could swallow a bowl of milk. And, as long as I am speaking of my ignorance, I should mention that I did not really know if the Entity’s brain was solid state or if it was put together of some bizarre type of manufactured matter. (I thought of the black bodies I had seen near the neutron star, and I wondered.) Certainly Her brain was not solid state in the sense that it was composed of silicon crystals or germanium or other such semiconductors. Long ago, during the lordship of Tisander the Wary, the eschatologists had found a single, dead mainbrain out near the stars of the Aud Binary. When they dissected the moon-brain – it was really only the size of a large asteroid – they discovered billions of layers of ultra-thin organic crystals, a vast latticework of interconnecting proteins which jumped to the touch of an electric current. The latticework was much like the neurologics that the tinkers grow inside the lightships – but infinitely more complex. It was so complex that the programmers had never decoded a single one of the mainbrain’s programs, not even the simple survival programs which must have been hardwired into the protein circuits. They had remained as ignorant of the mainbrain’s purpose (and cause of death) as I was of the living brain orbiting the pulsar.

I found a point-to-point mapping and fell to within half a million miles of the moon. Though I made such analyses and tests as I could, I discovered little about its composition. That it really was a brain and not a natural moon I did not doubt. I had never seen a natural moon so featureless and uncratered. Its surface was as smooth and satiny as the skin of a Jacarandan whore. And as I have said, the manifold nearby was distorted in ways explicable only by the presence of a huge intelligence. But what was the nature of this intelligence? However desperately I wanted to know, I could not seriously consider landing on the moon’s surface to drill a core sample for analysis. It would have been a crude, barbaric thing to do, and futile, like drilling into the pink brain of an autist in an attempt to map his inner world of fantasy. And it would have been dangerous beyond thinking. Already, I knew, I had been lucky to survive the dangers of the manifold. If I were stupid enough to perturb the Entity, as She perturbed the manifold by Her mere presence, I did not think I would be lucky much longer.

I should have fled homeward immediately. I had fulfilled my vow to penetrate the Entity, and I had mapped at least a part of Her. I probably should not have tried to communicate with Her. Who is man to talk with a goddess? It was foolish – so I thought – to bombard the moon with information written into laser beams, to bathe her silvery surface with radio waves carrying my inquisitive voice and the coded greeting of the ship-computer. But I did it anyway. Once in a lifetime a man must chance everything to experience something greater than himself.

The Entity, however, did not seem to be aware of my existence. To Her my laser beams must have been as unfelt and unheeded as is the ‘ping’ of a single photon striking a man’s calloused palm. My radio waves were like drops of water in the ocean of radio waves emitted by the pulsar. I was nothing to Her, I thought, and why should I despair that I was nothing? Was I aware of a single virus tumbling through the capillaries of my brain? Ah, I told myself, but a virus has almost no consciousness, whereas I was a man aware of my own awareness. Shouldn’t a goddess, in some small way, take notice of that awareness? Shouldn’t she be aware of me?

Of course it was vain of me to think this way, but I have never been a humble man. It is one of my worst flaws. Vain as I was, though, I knew there was nothing I could do to apprehend this fantastic, glistening, alien intelligence. I was in awe of Her – there is no other word. With lasers I measured the diameter of her moon-brain and found that it was a thousand and forty miles from pole to pole. If I could reproduce my brain a trillion times over, I thought, and a billion times again, and glue the sticky, pink mass all together, it would still not be as great as hers. I realized that any bit of her neurologics was a million times faster than my own sluggishly firing neurons, and that within the nebula, around bright stars tens of light-years distant, there floated probably millions of moon-sized brain lobes, each pulsing with intense intelligence, each interconnected in unknown ways with every other across and through the rippling tides of space.

Because I was curious and as convinced of my own immortality as all young men are, I set off to map the Entity more completely. I fell out around hot red giant stars and discovered many more moon-brains. As many as a hundred moons orbited some of the stars. There the manifold was warped and hideously complex. There I segued into dangerous decision trees and segmented spaces even wilder than the one I had first encountered. It was during this long journey inward through the Entity’s brain that I first felt confident of my pilot’s skills, that I really became a pilot. Sometimes I was overly confident, even cocky. Where was another pilot, I wondered, who had had to learn so much so quickly? Could Tomoth or Lionel – or any other master pilot – have threaded the torison spaces as elegantly as I did?

I wish I had room here to catalogue all the wonders of that unique nebula, for they would fascinate many, not just our Order’s astronomers. Most wondrous of my discoveries, other than the wonder of the nebula Herself, was the planet I found orbiting a red star named Kamilusa, named not by me but by the people living on the planet. People! How had they come to be there, I wondered? Had they fallen through the manifold as I had? Were they perhaps the descendants of the Tycho and Erendira Ede or other pilots lost in the Entity? I was astonished that people could live inside the brain of a goddess. Somehow it did not seem right. I thought of them as parasites living off the light of their bloody sun, or as drillworms who had somehow chewed their way into the brain of an incomprehensibly greater being.

After greeting the people by radio, I made planetfall on one of the broad, western beaches of the island continent called Sendai. It was very warm so I opened the pit of my ship. The sun was a hot, red plate above me, and birds resembling snowgulls swooped and sloshed along the currents of the moist wind, which stank of seaweed and other vegetation. Everything, even the air itself, was too green.

To the naked people lining the dunes of the beach, I must have looked very alien as I stood on the packed, wet sand, sweating in my black boots and kamelaika. My beard had grown out during the long days of my journey, and my body was slightly wasted from too little exercise. When I bowed to the people, my back muscles quivered with the strain. Naturally I had asked to speak to the lord of the planet. But the people had no lord – nor masters, sensei, matriarchs, kings, protectors or anyone else to direct their day-to-day activities. They were anarchists. As I learned, they were probably the descendants of hibakusha who centuries ago had fled the oppressive hierarchies of the Japanese Worlds. However, they seemed to have only the sketchiest memories of their passage through the Entity. No one could tell me how they had once piloted their deep ships and scurfed the windows of the manifold because no one remembered. And no one cared. They had lost the noblest of arts, and most other arts as well. The planet’s few hundred thousand people were barbarians who spent their long days eating, swimming, copulating and roasting their bodies brown in the sun’s red oven. The society of Kamilusa was one of those stale utopias where robots did the work of man’s hands and made more robots to do ever more work. And worse, they had programmed their computers to direct their robots, and worse still, they had let their computers do all their thinking for them. I spent five hundred-hour days there, and not once did I find a woman or man who cared where life had come from or where it was going to. (Though many of the children possessed a natural, soon-to-be-crushed curiosity.) Remarkably, no one – except perhaps the computers – seemed to realize that Kamilusa lay within the brain of a goddess. I record the following conversation because it is representative of others that I had during those stifling, hot nights and days.

One evening, on the veranda of one of the villas built on the beach dunes, I sat in a plush chair across from an old woman named Takara. I had learned a dialect of New West Japanese just to talk to her. She was a tiny, shrivelled woman with wispy strands of hair growing in patches from her round head. Like everyone else, she was as naked as an animal. When I asked her why no one wanted to know about such wonders as the construction of my ship, she said, ‘Our computers could design a lightship, if that was our desire.’

‘But could they train pilots?’

‘Hai, I suppose.’ She took a drink of a clear blue liquid one of her domestic robots had brought her. ‘But why should we want to train pilots?’

‘To fall among the stars. There are glories that only pilots –’

‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ she interrupted. ‘One star is much like any other, isn’t it? Stars give us their warmth, isn’t that enough? And also, as you admit, your travel from star to star is too dangerous.’

‘You can’t live forever.’

‘Hai, but you can live a long time,’ she said. ‘I, myself, have lived …’ and here she spoke at one of the computers built into the sandstone veranda. It spoke back, and she said, ‘I’ve lived five hundred of your Neverness years. I’ve been a young woman, oh, perhaps …’ and she spoke to the computer again. ‘I’ve been young ten times; it’s wonderful to be young. Maybe I’ll be young ten more times. But not if I do dangerous things. Swimming is dangerous enough, and I don’t do that anymore even though the robots keep the sharks away. Hai, I could always take a cramp, you know. It’s well known how the dangers build over the years. There is a word for it, oh … what is it?’ When her computer had supplied her with the word, she said, ‘If there is a certain probability that I will die in any year, then the probability grows greater every year. It multiplies, I think. The tiniest risk becomes riskier as time goes on. In time, if there is the slightest risk of death, then death will occur. And that is why I do not leave my villa. Oh, I used to love to swim, but my fourteenth husband died when a bird dropped a conch shell on his head. Ashira – he was a beautiful man – he used to shave his head. He was bald as a rock. The bird must have thought his head was a rock. The conch shell broke his skull, and he died.’

As if she were ever wary of bizarre accidents, she looked up into the starry sky to look for birds. She pointed to the robot lasers lining the veranda’s high walls, aimed at the dark sky, and she said, ‘But I’m not afraid of birds any longer.’

What she had said was of course true. Life is dangerous. Because of the laws of antichance, pilots – and everyone else in our Order – almost never lived as long as Soli had. Which explains why the younger pilots called him ‘Soli The Lucky.’

‘It’s a dangerous universe,’ I said. ‘And mysterious, but there are beauties – you admit you’re a student of beauty.’

‘What do you mean by beauty?’ she wanted to know as she placed her hand between her breasts, which were brown and withered as old leather bags. She sniffed the air in my direction and wrinkled her tiny nose. Plainly, she did not like the woolly smell of my sweat-stained kamelaika. It was annoying that she looked at me as if I were the barbarian, not she.

I pointed to the moon shining above us. I told her that the moon was really a huge bio-computer, the brain and substance of a goddess. ‘It shines like silver, and that’s beautiful,’ I said. ‘But it shares its shining intelligence with a million other moons, and just to imagine the possibilities … that’s a different, higher kind of beauty.’

She looked at me as a logician looks at a babbling autist and said, ‘I don’t think the moon is a computer. Why should you lie to me? Computers aren’t beautiful, I don’t think.’

I said, ‘I wouldn’t lie to you.’

‘And what do you mean by goddess?’

When I had explained to her about higher intelligences and the classifications of the eschatologists, she laughed at me and said, ‘Oh, there’s God, I suppose. Or there used to be – I can’t remember anymore. But to think the moon thinks, well, that is insane!’

Suddenly she glared at me with her old, old eyes and shook like a tent in the wind. It must have occurred to her that if I were insane, I might do something risky and was therefore a threat to her longevity. When she looked at me again, I noticed that the robots were pointing their lasers at me. She spoke to her computer and said, ‘The moon is made of … of elements: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen.’

‘The elements of protein,’ I said. ‘The neurologics of computers are often made of protein.’

‘Oh, who cares what things are made of? What matters is peace and harmony. And you are dangerous to our harmony, I think.’

‘I’ll leave, if that’s what you want.’

In truth, I couldn’t wait to leave that hot, stifling planet.

‘Hai, you must leave. The longer you stay, the more dangerous you become. Please, tomorrow will you leave? And please, do not talk to the children anymore. They would be frightened if they thought the moon was alive.’

I abandoned the people to their pleasures and their decadent harmonies. In the middle of the long night, I rocketed away and fell again into the manifold. Again I fenestered inward towards the centre of the Entity’s brain. I was more determined than ever to seek the nexus of her intelligence, if indeed such a nexus existed. The further I fell, the more moon-brains I discovered. Near one hot, blue giant star, there must have been ten thousand moons clumped together like the cells of an embryo. I had an intense feeling that I was witnessing something I was not meant to see, as if I had caught my mother naked in her morning bath. Were the moons somehow reproducing themselves, I wondered? I could not tell. I could not see into the centre of the clump because the space there was as black as a black hole. Even though I knew it would be chancy to fall any further, I was afire with the possibilities of new, godly life, so I made a point-to-point mapping into the centre of the gathered moons.

Immediately, I knew that I had made a simple mistake. My ship did not fall out into the centre of the moons. Instead, I segued into a junglelike decision tree. A hundred different pathways opened before me, dividing and branching into ten thousand others. I was sick with fear because I had only instants to decide upon the correct branching, or I would be lost.

I reached out with my mind to my ship, and slowtime overcame me. My brain rushed with thoughts, as snowflakes swirl in a cold wind. As my mentations accelerated, time seemed to slow down. I had a long, stretched-out instant in which to prove a particularly difficult mapping theorem. I had to prove it quickly, as quickly as I could think. The computer modelled my thoughts and began infusing my visual cortex with ideoplasts that I summoned up from memory. These crystal-like symbols glittered before my inner eye; they formed and joined and assembled into the proof array of my theorem. Each individual ideoplast was lovely and unique. The representation of the fixed-point theorem, for instance, was like a coiled ruby necklace. As I built my proof, the coil joined with feathery, diamond fibres of the first Lavi mapping lemma. I was thinking furiously, and the ideoplasts froze into place. The intricate emerald glyphs of the statement of invariance, the wedgelike runes of the sentential connectives, and all the other characters – they formed a three-dimensional array ordered by logic and inspiration. The quicker I thought, the quicker the ideoplasts appeared as if from nothingness and found their place in the proof array. This mental manipulation of symbol into proof has a special name: We call it the number storm because the rush of pure mathematical thinking is overwhelming, like a blizzard in midwinter spring.

With the number storm carrying me along towards the moment of proof, I passed into dreamtime. There was an indescribable perception of orderedness; there was beauty and terror as the manifold opened before me. The number storm intensified, nearly blinding me with the white light of dreamtime. I wondered, as I had always wondered, at the nature of dreamtime and that wonderful mental space we call the manifold. Was the manifold truly deep reality, the reality ordering the shape and texture of the outer universe? Some cantors believe this (my mother is not one of these), and it is their faith that when mathematics is perfectly realized, the universe will be perfectly understood. But they are pure mathematicians, and we pilots are not. In the manifold there is no perfection. There is much that we do not understand.

I was deep in dreamtime when I realized I did not understand the type of the decision tree branching all about me. I was close to my proof – I needed only to show that the Lavi set was embedded in an invariant space. But I could not show this, and I did not know why. It should have been a simple thing to do. When the tree divided and split into a million and then a billion different branches, I began to sweat. Dreamtime intensified into that terrifying, nameless state I thought of as ‘nightmaretime.’ Suddenly I proved that the Lavi set could not be embedded in an invariant space. My heart was beating like a panicked child’s. With my panic came despair, and my proof array began to crash, to shatter like ice crystals ground beneath a leather boot. There would be no proof, I knew. There would be no mapping to a point-exit in real space. I would not fall out around any star, near or distant. I was not merely lost in a hideous decision tree, I had stumbled – or been propelled – into an infinite tree. Even in the worst of decision trees, there is a probability that a pilot will find the correct branch among the billion billion branchings. But in an infinite tree, there is no correct branch, no branch leading to an exit into the warm sunlight of realspace. The tree spreads outward, one branch growing into another, and into ten centillion others, on and on, dividing and redividing into infinity. From an infinite tree there is no escape. My neurons would gradually disassociate, synapse by synapse, leaving me to play with my toes as a child plays with the beads of an abacus. I would be insane, blinded by the number storm, frozen in forever dreamtime, forever drooling into infinity. Or, if I turned away from my ship-computer and let my mind go quiet, there would be nothing, nothing but an empty black coffin carrying me into the hell of the manifold.

I knew then that I had lied to myself utterly. I was not ready to chance everything to experience a goddess; I was not ready to face death at all. I remembered I had chosen my fate freely. I could only blame myself and my foolish pride. My last thought, as a scream formed upon my lips and I began hearing voices inside me, was: Why is man born to self-deception and lies?

5
The Solid State Entity

If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn’t.

Lyall Watson, Holocaust Century Eschatologist

Somewhere it is recorded that the first man, Gilgamesh, heard a voice inside him and thought it was the voice of God. I heard voices reverberating through my inner ear, and I thought my fear of the infinite tree had driven me insane.

Why?

It is a sign of insanity when a man hears voices born not of lips but of his own loneliness and longings. Unless, of course, it is the voice of his ship stimulating his aural nerves, suffusing sounds directly into his brain.

Why is man?

But a ship-computer has little free will; it cannot choose what words or what tone of voice to speak within a pilot. It is possible for it to receive signals from another ship-computer and to translate these signals into voices, but it is not programmed to generate its own signals.

Why is man born?

I knew my ship-computer could not be receiving signals from another lightship because the propagation of signals through the manifold was impossible. It was possible, I told myself, that some of my ship’s neurologics had weakened and died. In that case, my ship was insane, and as long as I remained interfaced with it, so was I.

Why is man born to self-deception and lies?

If I did not like the way my ship was echoing my deepest thoughts, it terrorized me when it began speaking voices, in a hodgepodge of the dead languages of Old Earth. Some of these languages I understood from my learning to read; others were as alien to me as the scent language of the Friends of Man is to human beings.

Shalom, Instrumentum Vocale, la ilaha il ALLAH tat tvam asi, n’est-ce pas, kodomo-ga, wakiramasu? Hai, and thereto hadde he riden, no man ferre, poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina which he called the stars of the Solid State Entity und so wir betreten, feuer-trunken – Ahnest du den Schöpfer? It is I. Mallory Ringess.

So, I thought, this is insanity, to greet myself as a tool with a voice, to speak of entering the Entity ‘drunk with fire,’ whatever that meant. I recognized the phrase, Ahnest du den Schöpfer. It was a line of a poem written in Old High German which meant something like, ‘Do you sense your creator?’ I ‘sensed’ that my ship and myself had gone completely mad, either that or it really was receiving a signal through the warped manifold of the Entity. And then I heard:

If thou beest born to strange sights,

Things invisible to see,

Ride ten thousand days and nights,

Till age snow white hairs on thee.

So, the Entity did like ancient poetry. If any signal were being sent through the manifold, I thought, it must be coming from Her. The voices began to modulate and resonate into a single voice. In a way, it was a feminine voice, at once seductive and lonely, beatific and sad. It was a voice uncertain as to whether or not it would be understood. Hearing this lovely voice echo the dead languages of Old Earth made me guess that She was probing to discover my milk tongue. But I was mistrustful of this thought the moment it entered my mind. Perhaps I desired too ardently to speak with Her; perhaps I was only speaking with myself.

No, Mallory, you are speaking with me.

– But I’m not speaking at all; I’m thinking.

Do not flatter yourself that what occurs in your mind is true thought.

– How can you read my thoughts … my mind, then?

You are inside of me and I am inside of you. Yin-yang, lingam-yoni, outside-inside. I am an entity, but I am not solid. Not always.

– What are you?

I am the frenzy; I am the lightning; I am your refining fire.

– I don’t understand.

You are a man. Verily, a polluted stream is man. What have you done to purify yourself?

So, I thought, I had longed to experience a greater being, and she spoke to me in riddles. Quickly I turned my mind away from the manifold and the infinite tree. I tested the ship’s neurologics. But they were healthy and sound, and nowhere could I find the source of the Entity’s signal.

There is no signal, as you think of signal. There is only perception and touch: I look into the electric field of your ship’s logics and reach out and jiggle the electrons to change the hologram. And so your computer runs my thoughts and suffuses my voice into your brain. I would touch your brain directly but that would frighten you.

Yes, yes, it would have. I was already frightened enough. I did not want anything alien to ‘jiggle’ the electrons in my brain, to fill me with its images and sounds, to make me see and hear and touch and smell things which did not exist, to change my very perception of reality. With this thought came a much more disturbing thought: What if the Entity already were jiggling my brain’s electrons? Perhaps She only wanted me to think that the voice I heard came from the computer. I did not know what to think. Was I really thinking my own thoughts? Or was the Entity playing with me, making me doubt that I was thinking my own thoughts? Or worse still, what if it all was a nightmare of madness? Maybe the ship had disintegrated; maybe I was experiencing a final moment before death, and the Entity – for whatever reasons – had reached into my brain to create an illusion of sane existence. Maybe I was dead or just dreaming; maybe I, whatever ‘I’ was – was entirely the Entity’s dream creation. Everyone, of course, has these thoughts and fears, but very few have had a goddess speak to them. When I thought of Her being inside my mind, I was dizzy with a sense of losing my self. My stomach churned with a sick feeling that I had no free will. It was an awful moment. I thought that the universe was a terribly uncertain place where I could be certain of only a single thing: that in the realm of my mind, I wanted no thoughts other than my own to alter my thinking.

Because I was full of fear and doubt, the Entity explained how she manipulated matter through the layers of the manifold. But I understood only the smallest part of the physics, the simplest of ideas. She had created a new mathematics to describe the warp and woof of spacetime. Her theory of interconnectedness was as beyond me as a demonstration of the different orders of infinities would be to a worm. Ages ago, of course, the mechanics had explored the paradoxes of quantum mechanics. For example, they had shown that both photons in a pair of photons are connected in fundamental ways no matter how far the two particles are separated in realspace. If two photons fly away from a light source towards the opposite ends of the universe, each will ‘know’ certain of its twin’s attributes, such as spin or polarization, no matter how far apart they are. And they will know it instantaneously, as if each instantly ‘remembered’ it should be polarized horizontally, not up and down. From this discovery the mechanics theorized that it is possible to transmit information faster than light, though to their disgrace they have never succeeded in doing so. But their brains are small where the Entity’s is measureless. It seemed She had found a way not only to communicate but to instantaneously touch and manipulate particles across and through the reaches of space. How She did so, I still do not understand.

– I don’t understand your definition of a correspondence space; is it isomorphic to what we call a Lavi space? I can’t see … if only there was more time!

At the beginning of time all the particles of the universe were crushed together into a single point; all the particles were as one, in the singularity.

– And I don’t remember the derivation of your field equation. It must be –

Memory is everything. All particles remember the instant the singularity exploded and the universe was born. In a way, the universe is nothing but memory.

– The correspondences are superluminal, then? The correspondence scheme collapses? I’ve tried to prove that a hundred times but –

Everything in the universe is woven of a single superluminal fabric. Tat tvam asi, that thou art.

– I don’t understand.

You are not here to understand.

– Why do you think I’ve crossed half the galaxy, then?

You are here to kneel.

– What?

You are here to kneel – these are words from an old poem. Do you know the poem?

– No, of course not.

Ahhh, that is a shame. Then perhaps you are here to die as well as kneel.

– I’ll die in the infinite tree; there’s no mapping out of an infinite tree.

Others have come before you; others are lost in the tree.

– Others?

Suddenly the voice of the goddess grew as high and sweet as a little girl’s. Like the piping of a flute, the following words spilled into my brain:

They are all gone into a world of light!

And I alone sit lingering here;

Their very memory is fair and bright,

And my sad thoughts doth clear.

You must die. Deep inside you know this. Don’t be afraid.

– Well, pilots die – or so they say. I’m not afraid.

I am sorry you are afraid. It was that way with the others.

– What others?

Eight pilots of your Order have tried to penetrate my brains: Wicent li Towt, Erendira Ede and Alexandravondila; Ishi Mokku, Ricardo Lavi, Jemmu Flowtow and Atara of Darkmoon. And John Penhallegon, the one you call the Tycho.

– Then you killed them?

What do you know about killing? As an oyster, to protect itself, encapsulates an irritant grain of sand with layer upon layer of pearl, so I have confined all but one of these pilots to the branchings of a decision tree.

– What’s an oyster?

The Entity reached into my computer’s thoughtspace and placed there an image etched in light and touch and smell. By means of this forbidden telepathy – forbidden to us pilots – I experienced Her conception of oyster. In my mind I saw a soft, squishy creature which protected itself with a hinged shell that it could open or close at will. My fingers closed almost against my will, and in my hand I felt gritty sand against a scoop-shaped, hard, wet shell. My jaws moved of their own, moved my teeth against a tender meat which suddenly ruptured, filling my mouth with living fluids and salt and the taste of the sea. I smelled the thick, cloying perfume of naked proteins and heard a sucking sound as I swallowed the gobbet of raw, living flesh.

That is oyster.

– It’s wrong to kill animals for their meat.

And you, my innocent man, are a pretty pearl in the necklace of time. Do you understand the time distortions? The other pilots are alive, as a pearl is alive with lustre and beauty, yet they do not live. They have died, yet they remain undead.

– Again, you speak in riddles.

The universe is a riddle.

– You’re playing with me.

I like to play.

Before my mind’s eye, a transparent, glowing cube appeared. The cube was segmented into eight other stacked cubes, each of which flickered with confusing images. I looked inward at the cubes, and the images began to coalesce and harden. In each cube, except the one on the lower right, a disembodied head floated within its prison, as a pilot floats within his ship’s pit. Each face was scarred with the rictus of terror and insanity. Each face stared open-mouthed at me – stared through me – as if I were air. I recognized the faces, then. The historians had taught me well. They were the faces of Wicent li Towt, Ishi Mokku and the others who had come before me.

What is death, Mallory? The pilots are each lost in a dividing branch of the decision tree. They are as lost and forgotten as poems of the Aeschylus. But someday, I will remember them.

I wondered how she had encapsulated the pilots (and myself) in the infinite tree. There are ways, of course, to open a window into the manifold at random, to send a pilot unmapped and unprepared into an infinite tree. But She had used none of these ways. She had done something else, something marvellous. How was it possible? I wanted to know. Had Her consciousness really moulded the shape of the manifold, twisted the very strands of deep reality, much as a child braids together ropes of clay?

I did not know. I could not know. I had seen less than a millionth part of her, and She had probably needed only the tiniest portion of that part to speak with me mind to mind. I was like a grain of sand trying to understand an ocean from a few eddies and currents sweeping it along; I was like a flower trying to deduce space travel from the faint tickle of starlight upon its delicate petals. To this day I search for words describing my impression of the Entity’s power, but there are no words. I learned – if that is the right word for knowledge which comes in a sudden flash of insight – I was given to understand that She manipulated whole sciences and thought systems as I might string words into a sentence. But Her ‘sentences’ were as huge and profound as the utterances of the universe itself. She had reached truths and ways of knowing far beyond even the metaphilosophies of the alien Fravashi. She, a goddess, played with concepts which could remake the universe, concepts unthinkable to the mind of Man. While most of my race lived out their days muddled and confused in darkness, She had solved problems and found new directions of thought which we had never dreamed of, and worse, She had done so as easily as I might multiply two times one.

The mechanics often bemoan their oldest paradox, which is this: The strings weaving the fabric of the universe are so infinitesimal that any attempt to study them will change their properties. The very act of observation perturbs that which is observed. On Old Earth, it is said, there was a king who carked the atoms of everything around him so that all he touched turned into gold. The fabled king could neither eat nor drink because his food and wine tasted of nothing but gold. The mechanics are like this king: Everything they ‘touch’ turns into ugly lumps of matter, into electrons, quarks, or zeta-neutrinos. There is no way for them to perceive deep reality except through the golden, distorting lenses of their instruments or through the touch of their golden equations. In some unfathomable way, the Entity had transcended this prison of matter. To see reality directly, as it really is – this, I thought, must be the privilege of a godly intellect.

Do you see the pilots, Mallory Ringess?

I saw insanity and chaos. I stared into the cube containing the undead pilots. The black, sharp face of Jemmu Flowtow was leaking drool from its narrow lips.

– You trapped the pilots; then you could free them. And me.

But they are free. Or will be free when the universe has remade itself. What has been will be.

– That’s scryer talk.

The time distortions: When the universe has expanded outward so that the closest two stars are as far apart as the Grus Cloud of galaxies is now from the Canes Venatici, after billions of your years, the pilots will be as you see them, frozen into forever nowness. It is easier to stop time, is it not, than to restart it? To kill than create? But creation is timeless; creation is everything.

– The pilots … in the tree where the infinities branch into insanity, have you seen their insane frozen faces, then?

There is no help for insanity. It is the price that some must pay.

– I feel like I’m going insane now down the branching of this tree where it splits into two and two into for insanity you say there’s no helping me escape from infinity and stop playing games with my mind!

You, Mallory, my wild man, we will play together, and I will teach you all there is to know of instantaneity, and perhaps insanity, too. Will you join the other pilots? Watch carefully, the empty cube is for you.

I noticed then what I should have seen immediately: that eight pilots had been lost within the Entity, but only seven of the ghastly death’s-heads floated within the cubes. In none of them did I see the huge, walruslike head of the Tycho.

– What happened to the Tycho?

I am the Tycho; the Tycho is me, part of me.

– I don’t understand.

The Tycho exists in a memory space.

Inside my mind the little girl’s voice returned, only it was no longer quite so sweet, no longer quite the voice of a little girl. There were sultry, dark notes colouring the innocent fluting and I heard:

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted

Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!

A savage place! as holy and enchanted

As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted

By woman wailing for her demon lover!

He was a savage man beneath his silken robes, a lovely man, a demon lover of a man. When I saw what a wild intelligence he had, I severed his brain from his body, and I copied it synapse by synapse into a tiny pocket of one of my lesser brains. Behold John Penhallegon.

Suddenly, within the pit of my ship, an image of the Tycho appeared. He was so close to me that I could have touched his swollen red nose as one reaches for a snow apple. He was – had been – a thick-faced man with yellowish incisors too long for his blubbery lips. He had a mass of shiny black hair hanging in clumps halfway down his back; his jowls hung from his bristly chin halfway to his chest. ‘How far do you fall, Pilot?’ he asked in a voice thick with age, repeating the traditional greeting of pilots who meet in faraway places. His voice rang like a bell through the pit of my ship. Apparently the Entity could generate holograms and sound waves as easily as She could jiggle electrons. ‘Shalom,’ he said. With his red, sweaty fingers he made the secret sign that only a pilot of our Order would know.

‘You can’t be the Tycho,’ I said aloud. The sound of my own voice startled me. ‘The Tycho is dead.’

‘I’m John Penhallegon,’ the imago said, ‘I’m as alive as you are. More alive, really, because I can’t be killed so easily.’

‘You’re the voice of the Entity,’ I said as I wiped the sweat from my forehead.

‘I’m both.’

‘That’s impossible.’

‘Don’t be so certain of what’s possible and what’s not. Certainty can kill, as I know.’

I rubbed the side of my nose and said, ‘Then the Entity has absorbed the Tycho’s memories and thoughtways – I can believe that. But the Tycho can’t be alive, he can’t have free will, can he? … can you? If you’re part of the whole … Entity?’

The Tycho – or the imago of the Tycho, as I reminded myself – laughed so hard that spit bubbled from his lips. ‘Nay, my Pilot, I’m like you, like all men. Sometimes I have free will, and sometimes I don’t.’

‘Then you’re not like me,’ I said too quickly. ‘I’ve freedom of choice, everyone does.’

‘Nay, was it freedom of choice made you break your Lord Pilot’s nose?’

It scared and angered me that the Entity could pull this memory from my mind, so I angrily said, ‘Soli goaded me. I lost my temper.’

The Tycho wiped the spit from his lips and rubbed his hands together. I heard the swish of skin against skin. ‘Okay. Soli goaded you. Then Soli was in control, not you.’

‘You’re twisting my words. He made me so mad I wanted to hit him.’

‘Okay. He made you.’

‘I could have controlled myself.’

‘Is that so?’ he asked.

I was angry, and I huffed out, ‘Of course it is. I was just so mad I didn’t care if I hit him.’

‘You must like being mad.’

‘No, I hate it. I always have. But then that’s the way I am.’

‘You must like the way you are.’

I closed my eyes and shook my head. ‘No, you don’t understand. I’ve tried … I try, but when I get mad, it’s … well, it’s part of me, do you see? People aren’t perfect.’

‘And people don’t have free will, either,’ he said.

My cheeks were hot and my tongue was dry. It seemed that the Tycho, too, was trying to goad me into losing my temper. As I breathed rhythmically, struggling for control, I looked at the phased light waves composing the imago of the Tycho. His robe was like glowing smoke in the black air.

I asked, ‘Does a goddess, then? Have free will?’

Again the Tycho laughed, and he said, ‘Does a dog have Buddha nature? You’re quick, my Pilot, but you’re not here to test the goddess. You’re here to be tested.’

‘To be tested … how?’

‘To be tested for possibilities.’

As I was soon to learn, the Entity had been testing me since I first crossed the threshold of her immense brain. The torison spaces and the ugly segmented spaces that had almost defeated me – they were her handiwork, as was the infinite tree imprisoning me. She had tested my mathematical prowess, and – this is what the Tycho told me – She had tested my courage. Not the least of my tests had been my ability to listen to Her godvoice and not lose myself in terror. I had no idea why She would want to test me at all, unless it was just another of Her games. And why should She use the Tycho to test me when She could look into my brain to see all of me there was to see? No sooner had I thought this when the godvoice rolled through my head like thunder:

Thousands of years ago your eschatologists mapped the DNA molecule down to the last carbon atom. But they still search for the rules by which DNA unfolds life and codes for new forms of life. They are still learning DNA’s grammar. As with DNA, so it is with the unfolded brain. Imagine a baby who has learned the alphabet but who has no idea what words mean or the rules for putting them together. To understand the brain from its trillions of synapses would be like trying to appreciate a poem from the arbitrary twistings of individual letters. You are that poem. There are infinite possibilities. You, my Mallory, will always be a mystery to me.

– I don’t want to be tested.

Life is a test.

– If I succeed, will you free me from the tree?

Like an ape, you are free at this moment to escape your tree.

– Free? I don’t know how.

That is too bad. If you succeed, you are free to ask me three questions, any questions. It is an old, old game.

– And if I fail?

Then the light goes out. Oh, where does the light go when the light goes out?

I tightened my fists until my fingernails cut my palms. I did not want to be tested.

‘Well, my Pilot, shall we begin?’ It was the Tycho speaking as he scratched his jowls.

‘I don’t know.’

I will not record here in detail the many tests that the Tycho – the Entity – put to me. Some of the tests, such as the Test of Knowledge, as he called it, were long, meticulous and boring. The nature of other tests, such as the Test of Chaos, I hardly understood at all. There was a Test of Reason and a Test of Paradox, followed, I think, by the Test of Reality in which I was made to question my every assumption, habit and belief while the Tycho bombarded me with alien ideas that I had never thought before. This test nearly drove me mad. I never understood the need to be tested at all, not even when the Tycho explained: ‘Someday, my angry Pilot, you may have great power, perhaps as Lord Pilot, and you’ll need to see things through multiplex eyes.’

‘I’m rather fond of my own eyes.’

‘Nevertheless,’ he said, ‘nevertheless …’

Suddenly, within my head, echoed the teachings of the famous cantor, Alexandar of Simoom, Alexandar Diego Soli, who was Leopold Soli’s long-dead father. I was immersed body, mind and soul in the belief system of the strange Friends of God. I saw the universe through Alexandar’s dark, grey eyes. It was a cold universe in which nothing was certain except the creation of mathematics. Other forms of creation did not really exist. Yes, there was man, but what was man, after all? Was man the creation of the Ieldra, who had in turn been created by the Elder Ieldra? And if so, who had created them? The Very Elder Ieldra?

And so I learned this strange theology of Alexandar Diego Soli: It was known that the first Lord Cantor, the great Georg Cantor, with an ingenious proof array had demonstrated that the infinity of integers – what he called aleph null – is embedded within the higher infinity of real numbers. And he had proved that that infinity is embedded within the greater infinity of aleph two, and so on, a whole hierarchy of infinities, an infinity of infinities. The Simoom cantors believe that as it is with numbers, so it is with the hierarchies of the gods. Truly, as Alexandar had taught his son, Leopold, if a god existed, who or what had created him (or her)? If there is a higher god, call him god², there must be a god³ and a god⁴, and so on. There is an aleph million and an aleph centillion, but there is no final, no highest infinity, and therefore there is no God. No, there could be no true God, and so there could be no true creation. The logic was as harsh and merciless as Alexandar of Simoom himself: If there is no true creation then there is no true reality. If nothing is real, then man is not real; man in some fundamental sense does not exist. Reality is all a dream, and worse, it is less than a dream because even a dream must have a dreamer to dream it. To assert otherwise is nonsense. And to assert the existence of the self is therefore a sin, the worst of sins; therefore it is better to cut out one’s tongue than to speak the word ‘I.’

As this reality gripped me, I was transported in space and time. I shivered and opened my eyes to the mountain mists settling over Alexandar’s stone house on Simoom. I was in a tiny, bare, immaculate room with grey slate walls, and I looked at a young boy kneeling in front of me. I was Alexandar of Simoom, and the boy was Soli.

‘Do you see?’ the Tycho asked me. And he placed in my mind Alexandar’s memory of his son’s austere, bitter education:

‘Do you understand, Leopold? You must never say that word again.’

‘What word, Father?’

‘Don’t play games, do you understand?’

‘Yes, Father, but please don’t slap me again.’

‘And who do you think you are to be worthy of punishment?’

‘Nobody, Father … nothing.’

‘That is true, and since it is true, there is no reason for you to be spoken to, is there?’

‘The silence is terrible, Father, worse than being punished. Please, how can you teach me in silence?’

‘And why should you be taught anything at all?’

‘Because mathematics is the only true reality, but … but how can that be? If we are really nothing, we cannot create mathematics, can we?’

‘You have been told, haven’t you? Mathematics is not created; it is not a thing like a tree or a ray of light; nor is it a creation of mind. Mathematics is. It is all that is. You may think of God as the timeless, eternal universe of mathematics.’

‘But how can it … if it is … I just don’t under –’

‘What did you say?’

‘I don’t understand!’

‘And still you profane. You won’t be spoken to again.’

‘I, I, I, I, I … Father? Please.’

I did not understand how the Entity had acquired the memories of Alexandar of Simoom. (Or perhaps they were Soli’s memories?) Nor did I learn how She knew so much of the even stranger realities of the autists and the brain-maiming aphasics. Strange as these realities were, however – and it was very strange to enter the internal, self-painted thoughtscapes of an autist – they were human realities. Human thought is really all the same. Thoughts may differ from person to person and from group to group, but the way we think is limited by the deep structures of our all too human brains. This is both a curse and a blessing. We are all trapped within the bone coffins of our same brains, imprisoned in thoughtways evolved over a million years. But it is a comfortable prison of familiar white walls, whose air, however stale, we can breathe. If we would escape our prison only for an instant, our new way of seeing, of knowing, would leave us gasping. There would be glories and excruciating beauty and – as I was soon to learn – madness.

‘Okay,’ the Tycho said to me, ‘you grasp Alexandar of Simoom and Iamme, the solipsist. And now, the alien realities.’

The Tycho – or rather the phased light waves that were the Tycho – began to blur. The redness of his round nose deepened into violet as the nose itself broadened into a bristly snout. Like a piece of pulled clay, the snout stretched out into a long, supple trunk. His forehead bulged like a bloodfruit swollen with rotten gases, and his chin and jowls hardened into a boxlike organ lined with dozens of narrow, pinkish slits. Suddenly, his robe vanished like smoke. His naked body began to change. Balls of round muscle and brown and scarlet fur replaced the Tycho’s grey, sagging flesh. His ponderous testes and membrum withered like seaweed and shrunk, vanishing within the red fold of skin between the thick legs. I waited and stared at the alien thing being born within the pit of my ship. Soon I recognized her for what she was: an imago of one of that gentle (if cunning) race known as the Friends of Man.

The alien raised her trunk, and the pink slits of her speech organ vibrated and quivered, released a rank spray of molecules. I smelled esthers and ketones and flowers, the stench of rotting meat mingled with the sweetness of snow dahlia. In a way, with her trunk entwined with the blue helix of a master courtesan, she reminded me of Soli’s friend (and, some said, mistress) Jasmine Orange.

Behold Jasmine Orange.

I beheld Jasmine Orange through her own eyes: I became Jasmine Orange. I was at once Jasmine Orange and Mallory Ringess, looking at an alien through human eyes and, through my trunk, smelling the essence of a human being. Suddenly, my consciousness left my human body altogether, and there were no colours. I watched the scarlets and browns of my fur fade to light and dark grey. I looked across the pit of my ship and saw a bearded, young, human pilot staring at me; I saw myself. I listened for the sound of the Entity’s voice, but there was no sound inside or out because I was as deaf as ice. I did not really know what sound was. I knew only smell, the wonderful, mutable world of free-floating scent molecules. There was jasmine and the tang of crushed oranges as I spoke my lovely name. I curled my trunk, sucking in the fragrance of garlic and ice-wine as I greeted the human, Mallory Ringess, and he greeted me. How alien, how bizarre, how hopelessly stupid seemed his way of representing single units of meaning by a discrete progression of linear sounds, whatever sounds really were! How limited to put sounds together, like beads on a string! How could human beings think at all when they had to progress from sound to sound and thought to thought one word at a time like a bug crawling along the beads of a necklace? How very slow!

Because I wanted to speak with the pilot Ringess, I raised my trunk and released a cloud of pungent odours that was to a human sentence what I supposed a symphony must be to a child’s jingle. But he had no nose and he understood so little. Yes, Ringess, I told him, the scent-symbols are not fixed as, for example, the sounds in the word ‘purple’ are fixed; they do not always mean the same thing. Isn’t meaning as mutable as the smells of the sea? Can you sense the configuration of the minute pyramids of mint and vanilla bean and musk in this cloud of odours? And the meanings – do you know that the smells of jasmine and olathe and orange might mean, ‘I am Jasmine Orange, the lover of Man,’ or, ‘The sea is calm tonight,’ depending on the arrangement and the proximity of the unit pyramids to the other molecules of scent? Can you grasp meaning as a whole? And the logic of structure? Do you understand the complexities of language, my Ringess?

Ideas blossom outward like arctic poppies in the sun growing into other ideas crosslinked and connected by pungent association links, and link to link the smells of roasting meat and wet fur flow outward and sideways and down, and blend into fields redolent with the sweet perfume of strange new logic structures and new truths that you must inhale like cool mint to overwhelm and obliterate your bitter, straightforward ideas of logic and causality and time. Time is not a line; the events of your life are rather like a jungle of smells forever preserved in a bottle. One sniff and you’ll sense instantly the entire jungle rather than the fragrances of individual flowers. Do you understand the subtleties? Do you dare open the bottle? No, you have no nose, and you don’t understand.

He understands all that the structure of his brain will let him understand.

I understood that a man who dwelt too long inside an alien brain would go mad. I closed my eyes and shook my head as I pinched my nostrils shut against the mind-twisting smells flooding the pit of my ship. My eyes, my nostrils! – when I opened them, I was human again. The alien imago was gone, though the aftersmells of vanilla bean and wormwood remained. I was alone inside my sweaty, hairy, human body, inside my old brain which I thought I knew so well.

– Their logic, the truth structures … it’s so different; I never knew.

The deep structure of their brain is different. But at a deeper level still, the logic is the same.

– I can’t understand this logic.

Few of your Order have understood the Friends of Man.

Like everyone else, I had always been suspicious of these exotic, alien whores. I had supposed they seduced men with their powerful, aphrodisiacal scents in order to proselytize them when they were drugged with sex, to slyly persuade them to the truth of their mysterious alien religion. Now I saw – ‘saw’ is not the right word – I perceived that their purpose was much deeper than merely changing mankind’s beliefs; they desired to change mankind itself.

But it is the hardest thing to change the mind of a man. You have such a small sense of yourselves.

– A man must know who he is, as Bardo says.

And what is a Bardo?

While I snorted and tried to rid my nose and mind of disturbing smells, I thought about Bardo and how he had always had a clear, if flamboyant, sense of who he was: a man determined to experience pleasure as no other man ever had or ever would.

Your Bardo defines himself too narrowly. Even he may have possibilities.

During the tests which followed, by implication and deduction, I learned much about the Entity’s sense of Herself. Each moon-brain, it seemed, was at once an island of consciousness and part of the greater whole. And each moon could subdivide and compartmentalize at need into smaller and smaller units, trillions of units of intelligence gathering and shifting like clouds of sand. I supposed only the tiniest part of one of her lesser moons was occupied with testing me. And yet I was given to understand that, paradoxically, all of Her was in some small way inside my brain, as I was inside hers. When I joked about the strange topologies involved in this paradox, Her thoughts drowned out my own:

You are like the Tycho, but you are playful where he is savage.

– Am I? Sometimes I don’t know who I am.

You are that you are. You are a man open to possibilities.

– Others used to say I thought too many things were possible. A wise man knows his limits, they said.

Others have not survived the Test of Realities.

I was delighted that I would have to suffer no more alien realities and more than a little pleased with myself, a pleasure lasting no longer than it took for me to draw in a breath of air.

There will be one last test.

– What test?

Call it the Test of Fate.

The air in front of me flickered, and there appeared an imago of a tall woman wearing a white robe. Her straight black hair shined and smelled of snow dahlia. When she turned to me, I could not take my eyes off her face. It was a face I knew well, the aquiline nose and high cheeks and most of all, the dark, smoothly scarred hollows where the eyes should have been; it was the face of my beautiful Katharine.

I was angry that the Entity would pull this most private memory from my mind. When Katharine smiled at me and bowed her head slightly, I hoped that the Entity would not overhear the words to an ancient poem which formed unspoken on my lips:

I love, pale one, your lifted eyebrows bridging

Twin darknesses of flowing depth.

But however deep they are, they carry me

Another way than that of death.

In a voice mysterious and deep, a voice which was a weird blend of Katharine’s compassionate forebodings and the calculated words of the Entity, the imago tensed her lips and said, ‘There is another way, my Mallory, than that of death. I’m glad you like poetry.’

‘What is the Test of Fate?’ I asked aloud.

As I stared into the caverns beneath her black eyebrows, flickers of colour brightened the twin darknesses. At first I thought it was merely an aberration of the imago’s phased light waves. Then the wavering blueness coalesced and stilled, filling her vacant eyepits as water fills a cup. She blinked her newly grown eyes, which were large and deep and shone like liquefied jewels. She looked at me with those lovely, blue-black eyes and said, ‘Because of you, I renounce the greater vision for … Do you see your fate? Now I have eyes again I’m blind, and I truly can’t see what will … Your face, you’re splendid! I’d preserve you if I could! If only … the Test of Fate; the Test of Whimsy or Caprice. I will recite words from three ancient poems. If you can complete the unfinished stanzas, then the light burns on.’

‘But that’s absurd! Should my life depend on my knowing a stupid poem, then?’

I chewed the edges of the moustache that had grown over my lip during my long journey. I was furious that my fate – my life, my death – should be decided by so arbitrary a test. It made no sense. Then I remembered that the warrior-poets, that sect of assassins which infect certain of the Civilized Worlds, were rumoured to ask their victims the lines of a poem before they murdered them. I wondered why the goddess would practise the custom of the warrior-poets? Or perhaps She had originated the custom aeons ago, and the warrior-poets worshipped Her and all Her practices? How could I know?

‘And the Tycho,’ I said. I ground my teeth. ‘He didn’t know any of your poems, did he?’

Katharine smiled the mysterious smile of the scryers as she shook her head. ‘Oh, no, he knew each poem but the last, of course. He chose his fate, do you see?’

I did not see. I was rubbing my dry, hot eyes, trying to understand when she sighed and said in a sad voice:

The many men, so beautiful!

And they all dead did lie:

She looked at me as if she expected me to immediately complete the stanza. I could not. My chest was suddenly tight, my breathing ragged and uneven. Like a snowfield, my mind was barren.

The many men, so beautiful!

And they all dead did lie:

I was empty and sick because I knew I had ‘read’ those words before. They were from a long poem three-quarters of the way through the Timekeeper’s book. I closed my eyes, and I saw on page nine hundred and ten the title of the poem. It was called, ‘The Rhyme of the Ancient Pilot.’ It was a poem of life and death and redemption. I tried to summon from my memory the long sequences of black letters, to superimpose them against the white snowfield of my mind, even as the poet had once written them across white sheets of paper. I failed. Although at Borja, along with the other novices, I had cross-trained in the remembrancers’ art (and various others), I was no remembrancer. I lamented, and not for the first time, that I did not possess that perfect ‘memory of pictures’ in which any image beheld by the living eye can be summoned at will and displayed before the mind’s eye, there to be viewed and studied in vivid and varicoloured detail.

Katharine’s skin took on the texture of Urradeth marble as she said, ‘I shall repeat the line one more time. You must answer or …’ She put her hand to her throat, and in a voice as clear as Resa’s evening bell, she recited:

The many men, so beautiful!

And they all dead did lie:

I remembered then that the Timekeeper had told me I should read his book until I could hear the poems in my heart. I closed my mind’s eye to the confusion of twisting black letters I was struggling to see. The remembrancers teach that there are many ways to memory. All is recorded, they say; nothing is forgotten. I listened to the music and rhyme of Katharine’s poem fragment. Immediately distinct words sounded within, and I repeated what my heart had heard:

The many men, so beautiful!

And they all dead did lie:

And a thousand slimy things

Lived on; and so did I.

The Katharine imago smiled as if she were pleased. I had to remind myself that she wasn’t really Katharine at all, but only the Entity’s re-creation of Katharine. Or rather, she was my imperfect memory sucked from my mind. I realized that I knew only a hundredth part of the real Katharine. I knew her long, hard hands and the depths between her legs, and that she had a submerged, burning need for beauty and pleasure (to her, I think, they were the same thing); I knew the sound of her dulcet voice as she sang her sad, fey songs, but I could not look into her soul. Like all scryers she had been taught to smother her passions and fears within a wet blanket of outer calm. I did not know what lay beneath, and even if I had known, who was I to think I could hold the soul of a woman within me? I could not, and because I could not, the imago of Katharine created from my memory was subtly wrong. Where the real Katharine was provocative, her imago was playful; where Katharine loved poems and visions of the future for their own sake, her imago used them for other purposes. At the core of the imago was a vast but not quite omniscient entity playing with the flesh and personality of a human being: at the core of Katharine was … well, Katharine.

I was still angry, so I angrily said, ‘I don’t want to play this riddle game.’

Katharine smiled again and said, ‘Oh, but there are two more poems.’

‘You must know which poems I’ll know and which I won’t.’

‘No,’ she said, ‘I can’t see … I don’t know.’

‘You must know,’ I repeated.

‘Can’t I choose to know what I want to know and what I don’t? I love suspense, my Mallory.’

‘It’s foreordained, isn’t it?’

‘Everything is foreordained. What has been will be.’

‘Scryer talk.’

‘I’m a scryer, you know.’

‘You’re a goddess, and you’ve already determined the outcome of this game.’

‘Nothing is determined; in the end we choose our futures.’

I made a fist and said, ‘How I hate scryer talk and your seemingly profound paradoxes!’

‘Yet you revel in your mathematical paradoxes.’

‘That’s different.’

She held her flattened hand over her luminous eyes for a long moment as if their own interior light burned her. Then she said, ‘We continue. This simple poem was written by an ancient scryer who could not have known the Vild would explode.’

Stars, I have seen them fall,

But when they drop and die …

And I replied:

No star is lost at all,

From all the star-sown sky.

‘But the stars are lost, aren’t they?’ I said. ‘The Vild grows, and no one knows why.’

‘Something,’ she said, ‘must be done to stop the Vild from exploding. How unpoetic it would be if all the stars died!’

I brushed my hair out of my eyes and asked the question occupying some of the finest minds of our Order, ‘Why is the Vild exploding?’

Katharine’s imago smiled and said, ‘If you know the lines to this next poem, you may ask me why, or ask me anything you’d like … Oh, the poem! It’s so pretty!’ She clapped her hands together like a little girl delighted to give her friend a birthday gift. And words I knew well filled the air:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,

I was free! The Solid State Entity, through the lips of a simple hologram, had spoken the first two lines of my favourite poem, and I was free. I had only to repeat the next line, and I would be free to ask Her how a pilot could escape from an infinite tree. (I never doubted She would keep Her promise to answer my questions; why this is so I cannot say.) I laughed as beads of sweat formed up on my forehead. I recited:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

‘It is important,’ I said, ‘to rhyme “symmetry” with “eye.”’ I laughed because I was as happy as I had ever been before. (It is strange how release from the immediate threat of death can produce such euphoria. I have this advice to offer our Order’s old, jaded academicians so bored with their daily routines: Place your lives at risk for a single night, and every moment of the next day will vibrate with the sweet music of life.)

Katharine’s imago was watching me. There was something infinitely appealing about her, something almost impossible to describe. I thought that this Katharine was at peace with herself and her universe in a way that the real Katharine could never be.

And then she closed her eyes and said, ‘No, that is wrong. I gave you the lines to the poem’s last stanza, not the first.’

It is possible that my heart stopped beating for a few moments. In a panic, I said, ‘But the first stanza is identical to the last.’

‘No, it is not. The first three lines of either stanza are identical. The fourth lines differ by a single word.’

‘In that case, then,’ I asked, ‘how was I to know which stanza you were reciting? Since, if the first three lines are identical, so are the first two?’

‘This is not the Test of Knowledge,’ she said. ‘It is the Test of Caprice, as I have said. However, it is my caprice,’ and here she smiled, ‘that you be given another chance.’ And, as her eyes radiated from burning cobalt to bright indigo, she repeated:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,

I was lost. I clearly – very clearly, as clearly as if I did possess the memory of pictures – I remembered every letter and word of this strange poem. I had recited correctly; the first and last stanza were identical. And I heard again:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye …

‘What is the last line, Mallory? The one the poet wrote, not the one printed in your book.’

I wondered if the ancient academicians, in their transcribing the poem from book to book (or from book to computer), had made a mistake? Perhaps the mistake had occurred during the last days of the holocaust century. It seemed likely that some ancient historian, in her hurry to preserve such a treasure before the marrowdeath rotted her bones, had carelessly altered a single (though vital) word. Or perhaps the mistake had been made during the confusion of the swarming centuries; perhaps some revisionist, for whatever reason, had objected to the single word and had changed it.

However the mistake had been made, I needed desperately to discover – or remember – what the original word had been. I tried my little trick of listening for the words in my heart, but there was nothing. I applied other remembrancing techniques – all in vain. Far better that I should guess which word had been changed and pick at random a word – any word – to replace it. At least there would be a probability, a tiny probability, that I might pick the right word.

Katharine, with her eyes tightly closed, licked her lips then asked, ‘What is the last line, Mallory? Tell me now, or must I prepare a pocket of my brain in which to copy yours?’

It was the Timekeeper who saved me from the Entity’s caprice. In my frustration and despair, as I ground my teeth, I happened to think of him, perhaps to revile him for giving me a book full of mistakes. I remembered him reciting the poem. At last, I heard the words in my heart. Had the Timekeeper spoken the true poem? And if he had, how had he known the more ancient version? There was something very suspicious, even mysterious, about the Timekeeper. How had he even chanced to speak the same poem as the goddess? Had he, as a young man, journeyed into the heart of the Entity and been asked the very same poem? The poem, which had passed from his mouth like a growl, was indeed different from the poem in the book, and it differed by a single word.

I clasped my hands together, took a deep breath, and said:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

‘Dare frame,’ I repeated. ‘That’s the altered word, isn’t it? Dare frame.’

The imago of Katharine remained silent as she opened her eyes.

‘Isn’t it?’

And then she smiled and whispered:

’Tis evening on the moorland free,

The starlit wave is still:

Home is the sailor from the sea,

The hunter from the hill.

‘Goodbye, my Mallory. Who dares frame thy fearful symmetry? Not I.’

As soon as she said this her hologram vanished from the pit of my ship, and I was alone. Oh, where, oh, where, I wondered, does the light go when the light goes out?

You are almost home, my sailor, my hunter of knowledge.

– The poem … I remembered it correctly, then?

You may ask me three questions.

I had passed Her tests and I was free. Free! – this time I was certain I was free! In my mind, one hundred questions danced, like the tease of a troupe of scantily dressed Jacarandan courtesans: Is the universe open or closed? What was the origin of the primeval singularity? Can any natural number be expressed as the sum of two prime numbers? Had my mother really tried to kill Soli? How old was the Timekeeper, really? Why was the Vild exploding? Where does the light go when … ?

The light goes out.

– That was not my question. I was just thinking … wondering how –

Ask your questions.

It seemed I had to be very careful in asking my questions, else the Entity might play games with me. I thought for a long time before asking a question whose answer might hint at many other mysteries. I licked my dry teeth and asked aloud a question which had bothered me since I was a boy: ‘Why is there a universe at all; why is there something rather than nothing?’

That I would like to know, too.

I was angry that She hadn’t answered my question, so without thinking very carefully I blurted out, ‘Why is the Vild exploding?’

Are you certain this is what you really want to know? What would it profit you to discover the ‘why,’ if you do not know how to stop the Vild from exploding? Perhaps you should recast your question.

– All right, how can I – can anyone – stop the Vild from exploding?

Presently, you cannot. The secret of healing the Vild is part of the higher secret. You must discover this higher secret by yourself.

More riddles! More games! Would She answer any of my questions simply, without posing riddles? I did not think so. Like a Trian merchant-queen guarding her jewels, She seemed determined to guard Her precious wisdom. Half in humour, half in despair, I said, ‘The message of the Ieldra – they spoke in riddles, too. They said the secret of man’s immortality lay in the past and in the future. What did they mean? Exactly where can this secret be found?’

I did not really expect an answer, at least not an intelligible answer, so I was shaken to my bones when the godvoice sounded within me.

The secret is written within the oldest DNA of the human species.

– The oldest DNA of … what is that, then? And how can the secret be decoded? And why should it be –

You have asked your three questions.

– But you’ve answered with riddles!

Then you must solve your riddles.

– Solve them? To what end? I’ll die with my solutions. There’s no escaping an infinite tree, is there? How can I escape?

You should have thought to ask me that as your last question.

– Damn you and your games!

There is no escape from an infinite tree. But are you sure the tree is not finite?

Of course I was sure! Wasn’t a pilot weaned on the Gallivare mapping theorems? Hadn’t I proved that the Lavi set could not be embedded in an invariant space? Didn’t I know an infinite tree from a finite one?

Have you examined your proof?

I had not examined my proof. I did not like to think that there could be a flaw in my proof. But neither did I want to die, so I faced my ship-computer. I entered the thoughtspace of the manifold. Instantly there was a rush of crystal ideoplasts in my mind, and I began building the symbols into a proof array. While the number storm swirled, I made a mathematical model of the manifold. The manifold opened before me. Deep in dreamtime, I reconstructed my proof. It was true, the Lavi set could not be embedded in an invariant space. Then a thought occurred to me as if from nowhere: Was the Lavi set the correct set to model the branchings of the tree? What if the tree could be modelled by a simple Lavi set? Could the simple Lavi set be embedded in an invariant space?

I was trembling with anticipation as I built up a new proof array. Yes, the simple Lavi could be embedded! I proved it could be embedded. I wiped sweat from my forehead, and I made a probability mapping. Instantly the trillions of branches of the tree narrowed to one. So, it was a finite tree after all. I was saved! I made another mapping to the point-exit near a blue giant star. I fell out into realspace, into the swarm of the ten thousand moon-brains of the Solid State Entity.

You please me, my Mallory. But we will meet again when you please me more. Until then, fall far, Pilot, and farewell.

To this day I wonder at the nature of the original tree imprisoning me. Had it really been a finite tree? Or had the Entity somehow – impossibly – changed an infinite tree into a finite one? If so, I thought, then She truly was a goddess worthy of worship. Or at least She was worthy of dread and terror. After looking out on the warm blue light of the sun, I was so full of both these emotions that I made the first of many mappings back to Neverness. Though I burned with strange feelings and unanswered questions, I had no intention of ever meeting Her again. I never again wanted to be tested or have my life depend upon chance and the whimsy of a goddess. Never again did I want to hear the godvoice violating my mind. I wanted, simply, to return home, to drink skotch with Bardo in the bars of the Farsider’s Quarter, to tell the eschatologists and Leopold Soli, and the whole city, that the secret of life was written within the oldest DNA of man.

6
The Image of Man

For us, humanity was a distant goal toward which all men were moving, whose image no one knew, whose laws were nowhere written down.

Emil Sinclair, Holocaust Century Eschatologist

My homecoming was as glorious as I hoped it would be, marred only by Leopold Soli’s absence from the City. He was off mapping the outer veil of the Vild, so he could not appreciate my triumph. He was not present in the Lightship Caverns with the other pilots, cetics, tinkers and horologes as I emerged from the pit of my ship. How I wish he had seen them lined up on the dark, steel walkway along the row of ships, to see their shocked faces and listen to their furious, excited whispers when I announced that I had spoken with a goddess! Would he have clapped his hands and bowed his head to me as even the most sceptical and jaded of the master pilots did? Would he have honoured me with a handshake, as did Stephen Caraghar and Tomoth and his other friends?

It was too bad he wasn’t there when Bardo broke from the line of pilots and stomped towards me with such reckless enthusiasm that the whole walkway shook and rang like a bell. It was quite a moment. Bardo threw out his huge arms and bellowed, ‘Mallory! By God, I knew you couldn’t be killed!’ His voice filled the Caverns like an exploding bomb, and he suddenly whirled to address the pilots. ‘How many times these past days have I said it? Mallory’s the greatest pilot since Rollo Gallivare! Greater than Rollo Gallivare, by God if he isn’t!’ He looked straight at Tomoth who was watching his antics with his hideous, mechanical eyes. ‘You say he’s lost in dreamtime? I say he’s schooning, scurfing the veils of the manifold, and he’ll return when he’s damn ready. You say he’s lost in an infinite loop, snared by that bitch of a goddess called the Solid State Entity? I say he’s kleining homeward, tunnelling with elegance and fortitude, returning to his friends with a discovery that will make him a master pilot. Tell me, was I right? Master Mallory – how I like the sound of it! By God, Little Fellow, by God!’

He came over to me and gave me a hug that nearly cracked my ribs, all the while thumping my back and repeating, ‘By God, Little Fellow, by God!’

The pilots and professionals swarmed around me, shaking hands and asking me questions. Justine, dressed sleekly in woollens and a new black fur, touched my forehead and bowed. ‘Look at him!’ she said to my mother, who was weeping unashamedly. (I felt like weeping myself.) ‘If only Soli could be here!’

My mother forced her way through the swarm, and we touched each other’s forehead. She surprised me, saying, ‘I’m so tired. Of these formal politenesses.’ Then she kissed me on the lips and hugged me. ‘You’re too thin,’ she said as she dried her eyes on the back of her gloves. She arched her bushy eyebrows and wrinkled her nose, sniffing. ‘As thin as a harijan. And you stink. Come see me. When you’ve shaved and bathed and the akashics are through with you. I’m so happy.’

‘We’re all happy,’ Lionel said as he bowed, slightly. Then he snapped his head suddenly, flinging his blond hair from his eyes. ‘And I suppose we’re fascinated with these words of your goddess. The secret of life written in the oldest DNA of man – what do you suppose She meant by that? What, after all, is the oldest DNA?’

Even as the akashics dragged my grimy, bearded, emaciated body off to their chamber to de-program me, I had a sudden notion of what this oldest DNA might be. Like a seed it germinated inside me; the notion quickly sprouted into an idea, and the idea began growing into the wildest of plans. Had Soli been there I might have blurted out my wild plan just to see the frown on his cold face. But he was off trying to penetrate the warped, star-blown spaces of the Vild, and he probably thought I was long dead, if he thought about me at all.

I was not dead, though, I was far from dead. I was wonderfully, joyfully alive. Despite the manifold’s ravaging my poor body, despite the separation from my ship and the return to downtime, I was full of confidence and success, as cocky as a man can be. I felt invincible, as if I were floating on a cool wind. The cetics call this feeling the testosterone high, because when a man is successful in his endeavours, his body floods with this potent hormone. They warn against the effects of testosterone. Testosterone makes men too aggressive, they say, and aggressive men grasp for success and generate ever more testosterone the more successful they become. It is a nasty cycle. They say testosterone can poison a man’s brain and colour his judgements. I believe this is true. I should have paid more attention to the cetics and their teachings. If I hadn’t been so full of myself, if I hadn’t been so swollen with tight veins and racing blood and hubris, I probably would have immediately dismissed my wild plan to discover the oldest DNA of the human race. As it was, I could hardly wait to win Bardo and the rest of the Order over to my plan, to bathe myself in ever more and greater glory.

During the next few days I had little time to think about my plan because the akashics and other professionals kept me busy. Nikolos the Elder, the Lord Akashic, examined in detail my every memory from the moment I had left Neverness. He copied the results in his computers. There were mechanics who questioned me about the black bodies and other phenomena I had encountered within the Entity. They were properly impressed – astounded is a more accurate word – when they learned that She had the power to change the shape of the manifold as She pleased. A few of the older mechanics did not believe my story, not even when the cetics and akashics agreed that my memories were not illusory but the result of events that really happened. The mechanics, of course, had known for ages that any model of reality must include consciousness as a fundamental waveform. But Marta Rutherford and Minima Jons, among others, refused to believe the Entity could create and uncreate an infinite tree at will. They fell into a vicious argument with Kolenya Mor and a couple of other eschatologists who seemed more interested that people lived within the Entity than they were in the esoterics of physics. The furore and petty antagonisms that my discoveries provoked among the professionals amused me. I was pleased that the programmers, neologicians, historians, even the holists, would have much to talk about for a long time to come.

I was curious when the master horologe, with the aid of a furtive-looking young programmer, read the memory of the ship-computer and opened the sealed ship’s clock. Although there is a prohibition against immediately telling a returning pilot how much inner time has elapsed, it is almost always ignored. I learned that I had aged, intime, five years and forty-three days. (And eight hours, ten minutes, thirty-two seconds.) ‘What day is it?’ I asked. And the horologe told me that it was the twenty-eighth day of midwinter spring in the year of 2930. On Neverness, little more than half a year had passed. I was five years older, then, while Katharine had only aged a tenth as much. Crueltime, I thought, you can’t conquer crueltime. I hoped the differential ticking of Katharine’s and my internal clocks would not be as cruel to us as it had been to Justine and Soli.

Later that day – it was the day after my return – I was summoned to the Timekeeper’s Tower. The Timekeeper, who seemed not to have aged at all, bade me sit in the ornate chair near the glass windows. He paced about the bright room, digging his red slippers into the white fur of his rugs, all the while looking me over as I listened to the ticking of his clocks. ‘You’re so thin,’ he said. ‘My horologes tell me there was much slowtime, too damn much slowtime. How many times have I warned you against the slowtime?’

‘There were many bad moments,’ I said. ‘I had to think like light, as you say. If I hadn’t used slowtime, I’d be dead.’

‘The accelerations have wasted your body.’

‘I’ll spend the rest of the season skating, then. And eating. My body will recover.’

‘I’m thinking of your mind, not your body,’ he said. He made a fist and massaged the knuckles. ‘So, your mind, your brain, is five years older.’

‘Cells can always be made young again,’ I said.

‘You think so?’

I did not want to argue the effects of the manifold’s time distortions with him so I fidgeted in my hard chair and said, ‘Well, it’s good to be home.’

He rubbed his wrinkled neck and said, ‘I’m proud of you, Mallory. You’re famous now, eh? Your career is made. There’s talk of making you a master pilot, did you know that?’

In truth, my fellow pilots such as Bardo and the Sonderval had talked of little else since my return. Even Lionel, who had once despised my impulsive bragging, confided to me that my elevation to the College of Masters was almost certain.

‘A great discovery,’ the Timekeeper said. He ran his fingers back through his thick white hair. ‘I’m very pleased.’

In truth, I did not think he was pleased at all. Oh, perhaps he was pleased to see me again, to rumple my hair as he had when I was a boy, but I did not think he was at all pleased with my sudden fame and popularity. He was a jealous man, a man who would suffer no challenge to his preeminence among the women and men of our Order.

‘Without your book of poems,’ I said, ‘I would be worse than dead.’ I told him, then, everything that had happened to me on my journey. He did not seem at all impressed with the powers of the Entity.

‘So, the poems. You learned them well?’

‘Yes, Timekeeper.’

‘Ahhh.’ He smiled, resting his scarred hand on my shoulder. His face was fierce, hard to read. He seemed at once kindly and aggrieved, as if he could not decide whether giving me the book of poems had been the right thing to do.

He stood above me and I looked at my reflection in his black eyes. I asked the question burning in my mind. ‘How could you know the Entity would ask me to recite the poems? And the poems She asked – two of them were poems you had recited to me!’

He grimaced and said, ‘So, I couldn’t know. I guessed.’

‘But you must have known the Entity plays riddle games with ancient poetry. How could you possibly know that?’

He squeezed my shoulder hard; his fingers were like clutching, wooden roots. ‘Don’t question me, damn you! Have you forgotten your manners?’

‘I’m not the only one who has questions. The akashics and others, everyone will wonder how you knew.’

‘Let them wonder.’

Once, when I was twelve years old, the Timekeeper had taught me that secret knowledge is power. He was a man who kept secrets. During the hours of our talk, he secretively moved about the room giving me no opportunity to ask him questions about his past or anything else. He ordered coffee and drank it standing as he shifted from foot to foot. Frequently, he would pace to the window and stare out at the buildings of the Academy, all the while shaking his head and clenching his jaws. Perhaps he longed to confide his secrets with me (or with anybody) – I do not know. He looked like a strong, vital animal confined within a trap. Indeed, there were some who said that he never left his Tower because he feared the world of rocketing sleds and fast ice and murderous men. But I did not believe this. I had heard other gossip: a drunken horologe who claimed the Timekeeper kept a double to attend to the affairs of the Order while he took to the streets at night, hunting like a lone wolf down the glissades for anyone so foolish as to plot against him. It was even rumoured that he left the City for long periods of time; some said he kept his own lightship hidden within the Caverns. Had he duplicated my discoveries a lifetime ago and kept the secrets to himself? I thought it was possible. He was a fearless man too full of life not to have needed fresh wind against his face, the glittering crystals of the number storm, the cold, stark beauty of the stars at midnight. He, a lover of life, had once told me that the moments of a man’s life were too precious to waste sleeping. Thus he practised his discipline of sleeplessness, and he paced as his muscles knotted and relaxed, knotted and relaxed; he paced during the bright hours of the day, and he paced all the long night driven by adrenalin and caffeinated blood and by his need to see and hear and be.

I felt a rare pang of pity for him (and for myself for having to endure his petty inquisitions), and I said, ‘You look worried.’

It was the wrong thing to say. The Timekeeper hated pity, and more, he despised pitiers, especially when they pitied themselves. ‘Worry! What do you know of worry! After you’ve listened to the mechanics petition me to send an expedition into the Entity’s nebula, then you may speak to me of worry, damn you!’

‘What do you mean?’

‘So, I mean Marta Rutherford and her faction would have me mount a major expedition! She wants me to send a deepship into the Entity! As if I can afford to lose a deepship and a thousand professionals! They think that because you were lucky, they’ll be, too. And already, the eschatologists are demanding that if there is an expedition, they should lead it.’

I squeezed the arms of the chair and said, ‘I’m sorry my discovery has caused so many problems.’ I was not sorry at all, really. I was delighted that my discovery – along with Soli’s – had provoked the usually staid professionals of our Order into action.

‘Discovery?’ he growled out. ‘What discovery?’ He walked over to the window and silently shook his fist at the grey storm clouds drifting over the City from the south. He didn’t like the cold, I remembered, and he hated snow.

‘The Entity … She said the secret of life –’

‘The secret of life! You believe the lying words of that lying mainbrain? Gobbledygook! There’s no secret to be found in “man’s oldest DNA,” whatever that might be. There’s no secret, do you understand? The secret of life is life: It goes on and on, and that’s all there is.’

As if to punctuate his pessimism, just then the low, hollow bell of one of his clocks chimed, and he said, ‘It’s New Year on Urradeth. They’ll be killing all the marrowsick babies born this past year, and they’ll drink, and they’ll couple all day and all night until the wombs of all the women are full again. On and on it goes, on and on.’

I told him I thought the Entity had spoken the truth.

He laughed harshly, causing the weathered skin around his eyes to crack like sheets of broken ice. ‘Struth!’ he said bitterly, a word I took to be one of his archaisms. ‘A god’s truth, a god’s lies – what’s the difference?’

I told him I had a plan to discover man’s oldest DNA.

He laughed again; he laughed so hard his lips pulled back over his long white teeth and tears flowed from his eyes. ‘So, a plan. Even as a boy, you always had plans. Do you remember when I taught you slowtime? When I said that one must be patient and wait for the first waves of adagio to overtake the mind, you told me there had to be a way to slow time by skipping the normal sequence of attitudes. You even had a plan to enter slowtime without the aid of your ship-computer! And why? You had a problem with patience. And you still do. Can’t you wait to see if the splicers and imprimaturs – or the eschatologists, historians or cetics – can discover this oldest DNA? Isn’t it enough you’ll probably be made a master pilot?’

I rubbed the side of my nose and said, ‘If I petition you to mount a small expedition of my own, would you approve it?’

‘Petition me?’ he asked. ‘Why so formal? Why not just ask me?’

‘Because,’ I said slowly, ‘I’d have to break one of the covenants.’

‘So.’

There was a long silence during which he stood as still as an ice sculpture.

‘Well, Timekeeper?’

‘Which covenant do you want to break?’

‘The eighth covenant,’ I said.

‘So,’ he said again, staring out the window to the west. The eighth covenant was the agreement made three thousand years ago between the founders of Neverness and the primitive Alaloi who lived in their caves six hundred miles to the west of the City.

‘They’re neanderthals,’ I said. ‘Cavemen. Their culture, their bodies … so old.’

‘You’d petition me to journey to the Alaloi, to collect tissues from their living bodies?’

‘The oldest DNA of man,’ I said. ‘Isn’t it ironic that I might find it so close to home?’

When I told him the exact nature of my plan, he leaned over and gripped my wrists, resting his weight on the arms of the chair. His massive head was too close to mine; I smelled coffee and blood on his breath. He said, ‘It’s a damn dangerous plan, for you and for the Alaloi, too.’

‘Not so dangerous,’ I said too confidently. ‘I’ll take precautions. I’ll be careful.’

‘Dangerous, I say! Damn dangerous.’

‘Will you approve my petition?’ I asked.

He looked at me painfully, as if he were making the most difficult decision of his life. I did not like the look on his face.

‘Timekeeper?’

‘I’ll consider your plan,’ he said coldly. ‘I’ll inform you of my decision.’

I looked away from him and turned my head to the side. It was not like him to be so indecisive. I guessed that he agonized between breaking the covenant and fulfilling his own summons to quest; I guessed wrongly. It would be years, however, before I discovered the secret of his indecision.

He dismissed me abruptly. When I stood up, I discovered the edge of the chair had cut off my circulation; my legs were tingly and numb. As I rubbed the life back into my muscles, he stood by the window talking to himself. He seemed not to notice I was still there. ‘On and on it goes,’ he said in a low voice. ‘On and on and on.’

I left his chamber feeling as I always did: exhausted, elated and confused.

The days (and nights) that followed were the happiest of my life. I spent my mornings out on the broad glissades watching the farsiders fight the thick, midwinter snows. It was a pleasure to breathe fresh air again, to smell pine needles and baking bread and alien scents, to skate down the familiar streets of the City. There were long afternoons of coffee and conversation with my friends in the cafes lining the white ice of the Way. During the first of these afternoons, Bardo and I sat at a little table by the steamed-over window, watching the swarms of humanity pass while we traded stories of our journeys. I sipped my cinnamon coffee and asked for the news of Delora wi Towt and Quirin and Li Tosh and our other fellow pilots. Most of them, Bardo told me, were spread through the galaxy like a handful of diamonds cast into the nighttime sea. Only Li Tosh and the Sonderval and a few others had returned from their journeys.

‘Haven’t you heard?’ he asked, and he ordered a plate of cookies. ‘Li Tosh has discovered the homeworld of the Darghinni. In another age it would have been a notable discovery, a great discovery, even. Ah, but it was his bad luck to take his vows at the same time as Mallory Ringess.’ He dunked his cookie in his coffee. ‘And,’ Bardo said, ‘it was Bardo’s bad luck to take them then, too.’

‘What do you mean?’

As he munched his cookies, he told me the story of his journey: After fenestering to the edge of the Rosette Nebula, he had tried to bribe the encyclopaedists on Ksandaria to allow him into their holy sanctum. Because the secretive encyclopaedists were known to be jealous of their vast and precious pools of knowledge, and because they hated and feared the power of the Order, he had disguised himself as a prince of Summerworld, for him not a very difficult thing to do.

‘One hundred maunds of Yarkona bluestars I paid those filthy tubists to enter their sanctum,’ he said. ‘And even at that skin price – you’ll forgive me, my friend, if I admit that, despite our vow of poverty, I had hoarded a part, just a small part of my inheritance – ah, now where was I? Yes, the encyclopaedists. Even though they gouged a fortune from me, they kept me from their sanctum, thinking that an ignorant buffoon such as I would be content to fill my head from one of their lesser pools of esoterica. Well, it did take me a good twentyday before I realized the information I was swallowing was as shallow as a melt puddle, but I’m not stupid, am I? No, I’m not stupid, so I told the wily master encyclopaedist I’d hire a warrior-poet to poison him if he didn’t open the gates to the inner sanctum. He believed me, the fool, and so I dipped my brain into their forbidden pool where they keep the ancient histories and Old Earth’s oldest commentaries. And …’

Here he paused to sip his coffee and munch a few more cookies.

‘And I’m tired of telling this story because I’ve had my brains sucked dry by our akashics and librarians, but since you’re my best friend, well, you should know I found an arcanum in the forbidden pool that led right to the guts of the past, or so I thought. On Old Earth just before the Swarming, I think, there was a curious religious order called arkaeologists. They practised a bizarre ritual known as ‘The Diggings.’ Shall I tell you more? Well, the priests and priestesses of this order employed armies of slave-acolytes to painstakingly sift layers of dirt for buried fragments of clay and other relics of the past. Arkaeologists – and this was the prime datum from the forbidden pool – were, I quote: “Those followers of Henrilsheman believing in ancestor veneration. They believed that communion with the spirit world could be made by collecting objects which their ancestors had touched and in some cases, by collecting the corpses of the ancestors themselves.” Ah, would you like more coffee? No? Well, the arkaeologists, like all orders, I suppose, had been riven into many different factions and sects. One sect – I think they were called aigyptologists – followed the teachings of one Flinders Petr and the Champollion. Another sect dug up corpses preserved with bitumen. Then they pounded the corpses to a powder. This powder – would you believe it? – they consumed it as a sacrament, believing as they did that the life essence of their ancestors would strengthen their own. When generation had passed into generation, on and on, as the Timekeeper would say, well, they thought eventually man would be purified and they’d be immortal. Am I boring you? I hope not because I must tell you of this one sect whose high priests called themselves kurators. Just before the third exchange of the holocaust, the kurators, and their underlings, the daters, sorters and the lowly acolytes, they loaded a museum ship with old stones and bones and the preserved corpses of their ancestors that they called mumiyah. It was their ship – they named it the Vishnu – which landed on one of the Darghinni worlds. Of course, the kurators were too ignorant to recognize intelligent aliens when they saw them. Sad to say, they began delving into the dirt of that ancient civilization. They couldn’t have known the Darghinni have a horror of their own past – as well they should. And that, my friend, is how the first of the Man-Darghinni wars really began.’

We drank our coffee and talked about this shameful, unique war – the only war there had ever been between mankind and an alien race. When I congratulated him on making a fine discovery, he banged the table with his fat hand and said, ‘I haven’t finished my story! I hope you’re not bored because I was just about to tell you the climax of my little adventure. Well, after my success with the encyclopaedists – yes, yes, I admit I was successful – I was filled with joy. “The secret of man’s immortality lies in our past and in our future” – that was the Ieldra’s message, wasn’t it? Well, I’m not a scryer, so what can I say about the future? But the past, ah, well, I thought I’d discovered a vital link with the past. And as it happens, I have. My mumiyah may prove to contain some very old DNA, what do you think? Anyway, the climax: I was so full of joy, I rushed home to Neverness. I wanted to be the first to return with a significant discovery, you see. You must visualize it: I would have been famous. The novices would have stumbled over each other for the privilege of touching my robes. Master courtesans would have paid me for the pleasure of discovering what kind of man lives beneath these robes. How pungent my life would have been! But Bardo grew careless! In my hurry through the windows, I grew careless.’

I will not record all of my friend’s words here. In short, while fenestering through the dangerous Danladi thinspace he made a mistake that would have made the youngest of journeymen blush. In his mapping of the decision-group onto itself, he neglected to show the function was one-to-one, so he fell into a loop. Now any other pilot would have laboriously searched for a sequence of mappings to extricate himself from the loop. But Bardo was lazy and did not want to spend a hundred or more days of intime searching for such a mapping. He had an idea as to how he might instantly escape the loop, this lazy but brilliant man, and he played with his idea. After a mere seven hours of intime, he tasted the pungent fruit of genius. He proved that a mapping of points present to points past always exists, that a pilot could always return to any point along his immediate path. Moreover, it was a constructive proof; that is to say, not only did he prove such a mapping existed, he showed how such a mapping could be constructed. Thus he made a mapping with the star just beyond Ksandaria’s. He fell out into the fallaways, into the familiar spaces he had recently passed through. And then he journeyed homeward to Neverness.

‘I’m sought after, now,’ he laughed out. ‘It’s ironic: I, in my stupidity, I stumbled into a loop but I’ve proved the greatest of the lesser unproved theorems. Bardo’s Boomerang Theorem – that’s what the journeymen have named my little mapping theorem. There’s even talk of elevating me to a mastership, did you know that? I, Bardo, master pilot! Yes, I’m sought after now, by Kolenya and others with their luscious lips and beautiful, fat thighs. My seed flows like magma, my friend. I’m famous! Ah, but not as famous as you, eh?’

We talked all afternoon until the light died from the grey sky and the cafe filled with hungry people. We ordered a huge meal of cultured meats and the various exotic dishes favoured by Bardo. He poked his finger into my ribs and said, ‘You’ve no meat on your skinny bones!’ He praised me again for my discovery, and then I told him about my new plan.

‘You want to do what?’ he said, wiping meat jelly from his lips with a cloth. ‘To journey to the Alaloi and steal their DNA? That’s slelling, isn’t it?’ Realizing he had spoken that awful word too loudly, he looked around at the other diners and lowered his voice conspiratorially. He leaned across the table, ‘We can’t go slelling the Alaloi’s DNA, can we?’

‘It’s not really slelling,’ I said. ‘It’s not as if we’d use their DNA to tailor poisons or clone them or –’

‘Slelling is slelling,’ he interrupted. ‘And what about the covenants? The Timekeeper would never allow it, thank God!’

‘He might.’

I told him about my petition, and he grew sullen and argumentative.

‘By God, we can’t just take a windjammer and land on one of their islands and ask them to drop their seed in a test tube, can we?’

‘I have a different plan,’ I said.

‘Oh, no, I don’t think I want to hear this.’ He ate a few more cookies, wiped his lips and farted.

‘We’ll go to the Alaloi in disguise. It shouldn’t be too hard to learn their customs and to scrape a few skin cells from the palms of their hands.’

‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘Oh, too bad for Bardo, and too bad for you if you insist on this mad plan. And how do you think we could disguise ourselves? Oh no, please don’t tell me, I’ve had enough of your plans.’

I said, ‘There’s a way. Do you remember the story of Goshevan? We’ll do as he did. We’ll go to a cutter and have our bodies sculpted. The Alaloi will think we are their cousins.’

He farted again and belched. ‘That’s insane! Please, Mallory, look at me and admit you know it’s insane. By God, we can’t become Alaloi, can we? And why should you think the Alaloi’s DNA is older than any other? Shouldn’t we concentrate our efforts on the main chance? Since I’ve discovered mumiyah from three thousand years before the Swarming, why don’t we – you, I and Li Tosh, mount an expedition back to the Darghinni? After all, we know there are the remains of a museum ship on one of their worlds.’

I coughed and I rubbed the side of my nose. I did not want to point out that as of yet, we had no idea where to look for the wreckage of the museum ship. I said, ‘The Alaloi DNA is probably fifty thousand years old.’

‘Is that true? We don’t know anything about the Alaloi except that they’re so stupid they don’t even have a language!’

I smiled because he was being deliberately fatuous. I told him everything known about the Alaloi, those dreamers who had carked their humanness into neanderthal flesh. According to the historians, the Alaloi’s ancestors had hated the rot and vice of civilization, any civilization. Therefore, they had fled Old Earth in long ships. Because they wanted to live what they thought of as a natural life, they back-mutated some of their chromosomes, the better to grow strong, primitive children to live on the pristine worlds they hoped to discover. In one of their long ships, they carried the frozen body of a neanderthal boy recovered from the ice of Tsibera, which was the northernmost continent of Old Earth. They had spliced strands of frozen DNA; with the boy’s replicated DNA they performed their rituals and carked their germ cells with ancient chromosomes. Generations later, generations of experiment and breeding, the cavemen – to use the ancient, vulgar term – landed on Icefall. They destroyed their ships, fastened their hooded furs, and they went to live in the frozen forests of the Ten Thousand Islands.

‘That’s interesting,’ Bardo said. ‘But I’m bothered by one thing. Well, I’m bothered by everything you’ve said, of course, but there is one thing that bothers me stupendously about this whole scheme of searching for man’s oldest DNA.’

He ordered some coffee and drank it. He looked across the cafe at a pretty journeyman historian, and he began flirting with his eyes.

‘Tell me, then,’ I said.

He reluctantly looked away, looked at me, and said, ‘What did the goddess mean that the secret of life is written in the oldest DNA of the human species? We must think very carefully about this. What did She mean by “old”?’

‘What do you mean, “what did She mean by old?”’

He puffed his cheeks out and swore, ‘Damn you, why do you still answer my questions with questions? Old – what’s old? Does one race of man have older DNA than another? How can one living human have older DNA than another?’

‘You’re splitting words like a semanticist,’ I said.

‘No, I don’t think I am.’ He removed his glove, fingered his greasy nose and said, ‘The DNA in my skin is very old stuff, by God! Parts of the genome have been evolving for four billion years. Now that’s old, I think, and if you want me to split words, I shall. What of the atoms that make up my DNA? Older still, I think, because they were made in the heart of stars ten billion years ago.’

He scraped along the side of his nose and held out his finger. Beneath the long nail was a smear of grease and dead, yellow skin cells. ‘Here’s your secret of life,’ he said. He seemed very pleased with himself, and he went back to flirting with the historian.

I knocked his hand aside and said, ‘I admit the Entity’s words are something of a riddle. We’ll have to solve the riddle, then.’

‘Ah, but I was never fond of riddles.’

I caught his eyes and told him, ‘As you say, the genome has been evolving for billions of years. And therefore any of our ancestors’ DNA is older than ours. This is how I’ll define old, then. We’ll have to start somewhere. The Alaloi have spliced DNA from a body fifty thousand years old into their own bodies. We can hope this DNA – and the message in the DNA – hasn’t mutated or degraded.’

‘But the Alaloi are not our ancestors,’ he said.

‘Yes, but the neanderthals of Old Earth were.’

‘No, by God, they weren’t even members of the human species! They were slack-jawed, stoop-shouldered brutes as dumb as dodos.’

‘You’re wrong,’ I said. ‘Their brains were larger than those of modern man.’

‘Larger than your brain, perhaps,’ he said. He tapped his bulging forehead. ‘Not larger than Bardo’s, no, I can’t believe that.’

‘We evolved from them.’

‘Now there’s a revolting thought. But I don’t believe you. Does Bardo know his history? Yes, I think I do. But why should pilots argue history?’ He held his head up, stroked his beard and looked at the historian. ‘Why not let an historian settle an historical argument?’

So saying, he excused himself, belched, stood up, brushed cookie crumbs from his beard and squeezed by the crowded tables. He approached the historian and said something to her. She laughed; she took his hand as he guided her back towards our table.

‘May I present Estrella Domingo of Darkmoon.’ Estrella was a bright-looking journeyman and nicely fat, the way Bardo liked his women to be. He introduced me, then said, ‘Estrella has consented to resolve our argument.’ He pulled up a chair so she could sit down. He poured her a cup of coffee. ‘Now tell us, my young Estrella,’ he said. ‘Were neanderthals really our ancestors?’

In truth, I do not think Bardo had any hope of winning his argument. After a while, it became obvious that he had invited this pretty, impressionable girl from Darkmoon to our table not to listen to a history lesson, but to seduce her. After she had patiently explained that there were different theories as to man’s recent evolution and told him, yes, it was most likely that the neanderthals were our direct ancestors, he exclaimed, ‘Ah, so my friend is right once again! But you must admit, it’s too bad that man once looked like cavemen. They’re so ugly, don’t you agree?’

Estrella did not agree. She coyly observed that many women liked thick, muscular, hairy men. Which was one of the reasons it had become fashionable years ago for certain professionals to sculpt their bodies into the shape of Alaloi.

‘Hmmm,’ Bardo said as he twisted his moustache, ‘that is interesting.’

Estrella further observed that the difference between neanderthals and modern man was not so great as most people thought. ‘If you look carefully,’ she said, ‘you can see neanderthal genes in the faces of certain people on any street in any city on any planet of the Civilized Worlds.’ (As I have said, she was a nice, intelligent young woman, even if she had the irritating habit of stringing together too many prepositional phrases when she spoke.) ‘Even you, Master Bardo, with your thick browridges above your deepset eyes surrounded by such a fine beard – have you ever thought about this?’

‘Ah, no, actually I never have. But it would be interesting to discuss the matter in greater detail, wouldn’t it? We could scrutinize various parts of my anatomy and determine those parts which are the most primitive.’

After Bardo and she had made plans ‘to discuss the matter in greater detail,’ she returned to her table and whispered something in her friend’s ear.

‘What a lovely girl!’ he said. ‘Isn’t it wonderful how these journeymen acquiesce to established pilots?’ And then, ‘Ah, perhaps the neanderthals were our ancestors … or perhaps not. That’s still no reason to sculpt our bodies and live among cavemen. I have a better plan. We could bribe a wormrunner to capture an Alaloi. They poach shagshay, don’t they? Well, let them poach a caveman and bring him back to the City.’

I took a sip of coffee and tapped the bridge of my nose. ‘You know we can’t do that,’ I said.

‘Of course, all the wormrunner would really need is a little blood. He could render a caveman unconscious, bleed him a little, and return with a sample of his blood.’

I sloshed the coffee around in my mouth. It had grown cold and acidy. I said, ‘You’ve always accused me of being too innocent, but I’ll admit that I’ve thought about doing what you suggest.’

‘Well?’

I ordered a fresh pot of coffee and said, ‘One man’s blood would not be enough. The neanderthal genes are spread among the Alaloi families. We have to be sure of getting a large enough statistical sample.’

He belched and rolled his eyes. ‘Ah, you always have these reasons, Little Fellow. But I think the real reason you want to make this mad expedition is that you like the idea of sculpting your body and living among savages. Such a romantic notion. But then, you always were a romantic man.’

I said, ‘If the Timekeeper grants my petition, I’ll go to the Alaloi. Will you come with me?’

‘Will I come with you? Will I come with you? What a question!’ He took a bite of bread and belched. ‘If I don’t come with you, they’ll say Bardo is afraid, by God! Well, too bad. I don’t care. My friend, I’d follow you across the galaxy, but this, to go among savages and slel their plasm, well … it’s insane!’

I was not able to persuade Bardo to my plan. I was so full of optimism, however, so happy to be home that it didn’t matter. As a returning pilot, I was entitled to take a house in the Pilot’s Quarter. I chose a small, steeply roofed chalet heated by piped-in water from the geyser at the foot of Attakel. Into the chalet I moved my leather-bound book of poems, my furs and kamelaikas and my three pairs of skates, my chessboard and pieces, the mandolin I had never learned to play, and the few other possessions I had accumulated during my years at Resa. (As novices at Borja, of course, we were allowed no possessions other than our clothes.) I considered ordering a bed and perhaps a few wooden tables and chairs, such minor tubist indulgences being at that time quite popular. But I disliked sleeping in beds, and it seemed to me that chairs and tables were only appropriate in bars or cafes, where many could make use of their convenience. Too, I had another reason for not wanting my house cluttered with things: Katharine had begun spending her nights with me. I did not want her, in her world of eternal night, tripping over a misplaced chair and perhaps fracturing her beautiful face.

We kept our nightly trysts a secret from my mother and my aunt, and from everyone else, even Bardo. Of course I longed to confide in him; I wanted to tell him how happy Katharine made me with her hands and tongue and rolling hips, with her passionate (if anticipated) whispered words and moans. But Bardo could no more keep a secret than he could hold his farts after consuming too much bread and beer. Soon after our conversation in the cafe, half the Order, it seemed – everyone except my cowardly friend – wanted to accompany me on what would come to be called the great journey.

Even Katharine, who had seen enough of the future not to be excited, was excited. Long after midnight on fiftieth night, after a night of slow, intense coupling (she seemed always to want to devour time slowly, sensuously, as a snake swallows its prey), she surprised me with her excitement. She lay naked in front of the stone fireplace, flickers of orange and red playing across her sweating, white skin. She smelled of perfume and woodsmoke and sex. With her arms stretched back behind her head, her heavy breasts were spread like perfect disks against her chest. Eyeless as she was, she had no body shame, nor any appreciation of her beauty. At my leisure I stared at the dark, thick triangle of hair below her rounded belly, the long, crossed legs and deeply arched feet. She stared upward at the stars, scrying. That is, she would have stared at the stars if she had had eyes, and if the skylight between the ceiling beams hadn’t been covered with snow. Who knows what she saw gazing down the dark tunnels to the future? And if she had suddenly been able to see again, I wondered, could the sparkle of the milky, midwinter stars ever have pleased her as much as her own interior visions?

‘Oh, Mallory!’ she said. ‘What a thing I’ve … I must come with you to your Alaloi, do you see?’

I smiled but she could not see my smile. I sat cross-legged by her side, a fur thrown over my shoulders. With my fingers, I combed her long, black hair away from her eyepits and said, ‘If only Bardo had your enthusiasm.’

‘Don’t be too hard on Bardo. In the end, he’ll come, too.’

‘Come too? Come where?’ I wasn’t sure which disturbed me more: her descrying the future or her insistence I take her with me to the Alaloi. ‘What have you seen?’

‘Bardo, in the cave with his big … he’s so very funny!’

‘You can’t come with me,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘But I must come with you! I will come because I have … Oh, Mallory?’

Of course, it was impossible for her to come with me. I told her it was impossible. I said, ‘The Alaloi leave their crippled and blind out on the ice when it blizzards. They kill them.’ I had no idea, really, if this were true.

She turned towards me and smiled. ‘You’re not a very good liar,’ she said.

‘No, I’m not, am I? But I don’t understand why you would want to come with me.’

‘It’s hard to explain.’

‘Tell me.’

‘I’m sorry, Mallory, but I can’t tell you.’

‘Because of your vows?’

‘Of course, but … but more because the words don’t exist to describe the future.’

‘I thought you scryers had invented a special vocabulary.’

‘I wish I could find the words to tell you what I’ve seen.’

‘Try,’ I said.

‘I want to grow eyes again so I can see the faces of your … it’s there, on the ice in deep winter you’ll find your … Oh, what should I call it, this thing I see, this image, the image of man? I’ll break my vows, and I’ll grow eyes to see it again for a while before I … before I see.’

Silently I rubbed the bridge of my nose while I sat sweating in front of the crackling fire. Grow eyes indeed! It was a shocking thing for a scryer to say.

‘There,’ she sighed. ‘You see, I’ve said it so badly.’

‘Why can’t you just say which events will occur and which will not?’

‘Sweet Mallory, suppose I had seen the only event which really matters. If I told you that you must die at a certain time, every moment of your life would be agony because … you see, you’d always dwell on the moment of … it would rob every other moment of your life of happiness. If you knew.’

I kissed her mouth and said, ‘There’s another possibility. If I knew I had a hundred years before I died, I’d never be afraid of anything my whole life. I could enjoy every instant of living.’

‘Of course, that’s true,’ she said.

‘But that’s a paradox.’

She laughed for a while before admitting, ‘We scryers are known for our paradoxes, aren’t we?’

‘Do you see the future? Or do you see possible futures? That’s something I’ve always wanted to know.’

Indeed, most pilots – and everyone else in our Order – were curious to know the secrets of the scryers.

‘And seeing the future,’ I said, ‘why not change it if you wish?’

She laughed again. At times, such as when she was relaxed in front of the fire, she had a beautiful laugh. ‘Oh, you’ve just stated the first paradox, did you know? Seeing the future of … if we then act to change it, and do change it … if it’s changeable, then we haven’t really seen the future, have we?’

‘And you would refuse to act, then, merely to preserve this vision of what you’d seen?’

She took my hand and stroked my palm. ‘You don’t understand.’

I said, ‘In some fundamental sense, I’ve never really believed you scryers could see anything but possibilities.’

She dragged her fingernail down my lifeline. ‘Of course … possibilities.’

Because I was frustrated, I laughed and said, ‘I think it’s easier to understand a mechanic than a scryer. At least their beliefs are quantifiable.’

‘Some mechanics,’ she said, ‘believe that each quantum event occurring in the universe changes the … They’ve quantified the possibilities. With each event, a different future. Spacetime divides and redivides, like the branches of one of your infinite trees. An infinity of futures, these parallel futures, they call them, all occurring simultaneously. And so, an infinity of parallel nows, don’t you see? But the mechanics are wrong. Nowness is … there is a unity of immanence … oh, Mallory, only one future can ever be.’

‘The future is unchangeable, then?’

‘We have a saying,’ she told me. ‘“We don’t change the future; we choose the future.”’

‘Scryer talk.’

She reached up to me. She ran her fingers through my chest hair and made a sudden, tight fist above my heart, pulled at me as she said, ‘I will have gone to a cutter named … He’ll grow me new eyes. I want to see your face when you … one time, just the one time, is that okay?’

‘Would you really do that?’ I wondered aloud. ‘Break your vows? Why?’

‘Because I love … ,’ she said, ‘I love you, do you see?’

During the next few days I could think of little else except this strange conversation. As a returning pilot I was required to teach, so I agreed to tutor two novices in the arts of hallning. I must admit I did not perform my teaching duties with as much attention as I should have. Early one morning in the classroom of my chalet, as I was supposedly demonstrating simple geometric transformations to little Rafi and Geord, I found myself thinking back to my journey to the Entity, remembering how the imago of Katharine had grown eyes and looked at me. I wondered: Had She known what Katharine would one day say to me? I was mulling over the implications of this while I showed the novices how it is impossible to rotate a paper, two-dimensional tracing of a right-handed glove to match and fit the tracing of a left-handed glove, if the motion was restricted to rotations within a plane. I failed to notice they were bored. I picked up one of the glove tracings from the wooden floor, flipped it over and placed it on top of the other tracing. I said, ‘But if we lift it off the plane like so and rotate it through space, it’s trivial to match the two tracings. Similarly –’

And here the gangly, impatient Rafi interrupted me, calling out, ‘Similarly, it’s impossible to rotate a three-dimensional left glove into a right-handed glove. But if we rotate the glove through four-space, it’s simple to superimpose the two gloves. We know that, Pilot. Are we done now? You promised to tell us about your journey to the Alaloi – remember? Are you really going to drive dogsleds across the ice and eat living meat?’

My distractions, I saw to my dismay, had apparently infected even the novices. I was a little annoyed at Rafi, who was too quick for his own good. I said, ‘True, the gloves can be superimposed, but can you visualize the rotation through four-space? No? I didn’t think so.’

Two days later I took them to a cutter who modified their lungs, and then down to the Rose Womb Cloisters. I put them into the hexagonal attitude chamber, which occupied most of the rose-tiled tank room. There they floated and breathed the super-oxygenated water while performing the day’s exercises. With their sense of right and left, and up and down, dissolved by the dark, warm, salty water, they visualized four-space; they rotated the image of their own bodies around the imaginary plane cutting through their noses, navels and spines. They were trying to rotate themselves into their own mirror images. Even though it is really a simple exercise, akin to reversing the line diagram of a cube by staring at it until it ‘pops,’ I should have paid them close attention. But again, I let my mind wander. I was wondering if Katharine would be able to find a cutter to make her new eyes when I happened to look through the wine dark water at the novices. Rafi, I noticed, had his arms wrapped around his knees, and his eyes were tightly closed as he breathed water. How long had I left him like this? If I left him too long in the foetal attitude, he would build a dependency on sightlessness and closure. I reminded myself that he was to be a pilot, not a scryer, so I removed him from the tank.

‘The exercise was … too easy,’ Rafi said. He stood there naked, beads of water dripping off him. Due to his altered lungs, he was having trouble breathing. ‘Once one sees one transformation, the others are easy.’

‘That’s true with geometric transformations,’ I said. ‘But the topological transformations are harder. I remember when Lionel Killirand made me reverse the tube of my body, inside out. Now that was a horrible exercise. Since you’ve found today’s exercise so easy, perhaps you’d like to play with the topological transformations, then?’

He smiled a haughty smile and said, ‘I’d rather play at a real transformation, like you, Pilot. Are you really going to sculpt yourself? Is that as severe a transformation as altering one’s lungs? Would you take a novice with you, to the Alaloi? Could I come?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘you’re just a boy. Now, shall we practise motions through five-space? I don’t think you’ll be able to visualize five-space so easily.’

The excitement that my proposed journey provoked throughout the Order was not wholly surprising. Man is man, and even civilized man – especially civilized women and men – will sometimes long for simplicity. In each of us, there is the lure of the primitive, an atavistic desire to experience life in its rawest form; there is a need to be tested, to prove our worth as natural (and ferocious) animals in a natural world. Some said the Alaloi led a truer, more purely human life than could any modern man. Too, the story of Goshevan and his marrow-sick son, Shanidar, had fired the imagination of an entire generation. To return to nature as strong, powerful, natural men – what could be more romantic than that? No day passed that some semanticist didn’t offer advice as to the complexities of the Alaloi language or a fabulist recite the epic of Goshevan’s doomed journey to live among the cavemen; no night ended without one pilot or another drugging himself with toalache and begging to accompany me to the Alaloi.

Towards the end of that brilliant, happy season of romance and deep snows and plans, I was elevated to my mastership. Strangely enough, although I was by far the youngest pilot ever to become a master, I no longer took pride in my relative youth. Having aged five years intime on my journey, I suddenly felt ageless, or rather, old – as old as the glazed ledges of the Hall of Ancient Pilots where the master pilots welcomed me to their college. I remember waiting for their decision at the far side of the Hall, near the dais where Bardo and I had received our rings. I tapped my boot against the cold floor, listening to the sound vanish into the arched vault above me. I examined the conclave room’s long, black doors, which were made of shatterwood and carved in bas-relief with the faces of Rollo Gallivare and Tisander the Wary, the Tycho and Yoshi, all three hundred and eighty-five of our Lord Pilots since the founding of our Order. Near the centre of the left door, I found Soli’s hard profile, with the long, broad nose, the hard chin and the combed hair bound in its silver chain. I wondered if my own profile would ever be carved in the old, brittle wood, and if it were, I wondered if anyone would be able to distinguish it from Soli’s. Then the doors opened, and the ancient Salmalin, who was the oldest pilot next to Soli, pulled his white beard and invited me into the circular conclave room, and I no longer felt very old. I sat on a stool at the centre of a huge, ringlike table. Around the table sat Tomoth, Pilar Gaprindashavilli, the dour Stephen Caraghar, as well as Lionel and Justine and the other master pilots. When Salmalin stood up to welcome me to the master’s college, all the pilots stood and removed the gloves from their right hands. In that simplest and most touching of all our Order’s ceremonies, I went around the table shaking hands. When I took Justine’s long, elegant hand in my own, she said, ‘If only Soli had been here to see this, I’m sure he would have been as proud as I am.’

I did not remind her that if Soli had been present, he would probably have vetoed my elevation.

After she and Lionel (and others) congratulated me, my mother met me outside the conclave room. We walked through the almost deserted Hall together. ‘You’re a master now,’ she said. ‘The Timekeeper will have to pay more attention to your petition. And if he approves it, we’ll sculpt our bodies. And go to the Alaloi where there will be fame and glory. No matter what we find or don’t.’

I thought it was funny that even my mother had been infected with the general excitement. I bit my lip, then said, ‘You can’t seriously think of coming with me, Mother.’

‘Can’t I? I’m your mother. Together we’re a family. The Alaloi would regard us as a family – what could be more natural?’

‘Well, you can’t come.’

‘I’ve heard that, to the Alaloi, family is everything.’

‘The Timekeeper,’ I said, ‘will probably deny my petition.’

She cocked her head and laughed, almost to herself. ‘Can the Timekeeper deny you this chance? I feel not. We’ll see, we’ll see.’

Later there was feasting and drinking. Bardo was so happy for me that he practically cried. ‘By God!’ he said. ‘We’ll celebrate! The City will never be the same!’

His words, along with my mother’s instincts, would prove to be curiously prophetic. (Sometimes I thought my mother was a secret scryer.) Two days after my elevation, on eighty-fifth day, a day of cold, mashy snow and deep irony, Leopold Soli returned from the Vild. He was enraged to find me alive – so it was rumoured. Out of spite and revenge – Bardo told me this – he went to the Timekeeper to demand that my petition be denied. But the Timekeeper fooled him. The Timekeeper fooled everyone, and fooled me most of all. He granted my petition, but added a proviso: I could mount an expedition to the Alaloi provided I took my family, my mother and Justine and Katharine, along with me. And Soli, too. Soli, who was my uncle, must come or else there would be no expedition. And since Soli was Lord Pilot, Soli must lead the expedition – this was Timekeeper’s galling, ironic proviso. When I heard this news I could not believe it. Nor did I suspect that Bardo was right, that as a result of our expedition, the City would never be the same.

7
Rainer’s Sculpture

I was an experiment on the part of Nature, a gamble within the unknown, perhaps for a new purpose, perhaps for nothing, and my only task was to allow this game on the part of primeval depths to take its course, to feel its will within me and make it wholly mine. That or nothing!

Emil Sinclair, Holocaust Century Eschatologist

I spent the next few days sulking about my house. I am ashamed to admit this, but the truth is the truth: I brooded like a boy upon learning of the Timekeeper’s proviso. I told Katharine to stay away; I told her I was angry with her for not warning me the Timekeeper would humble me with his proviso. (This was a lie. How could I be angry with a beautiful scryer sworn to keep her visions secret?) I read my book of poems or split firewood or set up my wooden chess pieces, replaying the games of the grandmasters, all the while cursing Soli for ruining my expedition. That Soli had persuaded the Timekeeper to allow him to steal the leadership from me, I could not doubt.

Soon after his return, Soli came to visit me, to discuss plans for the expedition and to gloat – or so I thought. I received him in the fireroom in front of the cold, blackened fireplace. He immediately noticed the minor insult of the unlit fire, but he could not appreciate the greater insult, that I invited him to sit atop the same furs on which I had swived his daughter. I shamelessly savoured the knowledge of this insult. As Bardo often reminded me, I had a cruel vein running into my heart.

I was surprised at how much Soli had aged. He sat cross-legged on the furs, touching the new lines on his forehead, pulling at the loose flesh below his long chin. He looked twenty years older. I had heard that he had almost penetrated the inner veil of the Vild. But the price he had paid for attempting those impenetrable spaces was time, crueltime. His voice was older, deeper, cut with new inflections. There should be congratulations on your journey,’ he said. ‘The College did well to make you a master.’

I had to admit he could be gracious when he wanted to be, even though he was obviously lying. I wanted to tell him not to waste his breath lying. But I remembered my manners and said, ‘Tell me about the Vild.’

‘Yes, the Vild. There’s little to tell, is there? The stars flare, then die. The Vild grows. And the rate that it grows, grows. What do you want to know? That it’s impossible to map those spaces? That a pilot must use slowtime almost continuously in the Vild? Look at me, then, and you’ll see that that is so.’

We talked of our respective journeys; I thought he was bitter that I had succeeded where he had failed. And then he surprised me, congratulating me again for the mappings I had made through the Entity. ‘That was elegant piloting,’ he said. Pointedly, however, he refrained from mentioning my discovery.

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