Neverness
David Zindell

v1.0 - font & format changes made by peragwinn 2004-06-18

Chapter 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 Kalka, 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 neighborhood 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 colored jeweled ring. He
had been born 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 mustache 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'd 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
practicing zazen, ballning 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 drafty window too long. "Are you coming
with me?" I asked. "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 favor 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, Urkel 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 colored 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 colorful and strange, they are colorful 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, colored 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, colored 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 checkered 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
favorite 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 colored 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 analyze 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 pilots' 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 blonde 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 woolens 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 colored 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 miniscule 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 esc'hatologists,
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 lightyears 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 rumor 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
whiskey, 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 toward old
pilots. "It happened like this," Soli said. "A long time had passed
since my leaving Neverness. We were deep in dreamtime and fenestering
inward toward 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 mustache.

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 outward 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, 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 whiskey, 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 mustaches, 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 jeweled, 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. "Treyd."

"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 jeweled 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 Lai because he used
to piss in his bed every night."

It was true, Bardo's birth name was Pesheval Lai. 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 mustache 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 toward 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 blooddrops
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 brothers 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 fulfillment 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.

Chapter 2 - A Pilot's Vows

Strange, though alas! are the Streets of the City of pain
-Rainer Maria, Holocaust Century

We received our pilot's rings late in the afternoon of the next day. At
the center 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 colored
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 aging-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 jewelry
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 Lost 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 colored 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 gray robe of a master
cantor, those purest of pure mathematicians. Her quick gray 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 grayed 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 aging, 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 pilot's 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, 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 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
jurneymen, 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 dishonor myself"

"Better dishonor-whatever that is-than death."

"No," I said, "better death than dishonor." But I did not believe my own
words. In my heart, I was all too ready to accept dishonor 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 dishonor."

"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
somber 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 color, 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 up
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 behavior 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 mustache 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
practicing 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 practice restraint.

Our conversation was cut short when ten red-robed horologes marched out
onto 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 nights 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 fulfill 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 Dharghinni. "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 skeptics such as Bardo who did
not believe that the Ieldra possessed any great secret. But even the
most skeptical 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 crosslegged
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 fulfill 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 humor. 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 Rossette 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, abhoring 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 favored
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 the 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 checkered 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 had 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 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-skate. 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.

Chapter 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
frescoe. 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 Pilots' 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 toward 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 to 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
Callivare 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 toward 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
consciousnesses 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 millenia in 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 gray 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 in 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
practiced 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 centers 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
rumors 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 rumors 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 humor. 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 humor 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 is freedom 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 in 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 gray 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 woolens. 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 Juste- rini'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 everday 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.

Chapter 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 molds, 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 neighborhood 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 fit 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
modeled 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 centers 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 center. This thickspace is
called the Tycho's Thick and though it is not nearly so dense as the one
that lies in the neighborhood 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 probabalistic
topology built before my inner eye, 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 centers 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 favorite 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 deep ship full of nubile girls bound for the sun domes on
Heaven's Cate. 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 woman 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 tunneled 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 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
toward 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 well 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
traveling 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-teriths 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 fulfill 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 hard-wired
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
catalog 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
descendents 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 snow gulls 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 descendents 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, shriveled 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 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-" 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
Jaws 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 wooly 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 any more.

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 center 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 center of the clump because the space
there was as black as a black hole. Even though I knew it would be
chancey to fall any further, I was afire with the possibilities of new,
godly life, so I made a point-to-point mapping into the center of the
gathered moons.

Immediately, I knew that I had made a simple mistake. My ship did not
fall out into the center 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,
stretchedout instant in which to prove a particularly difficult mapping
theorem. I had to prove it quickly, as quickly as I could think. The
computer modeled 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 fibers 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 toward 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 shipcomputer 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 up on my lips
and I began hearing voices inside me, was: Why is man born to
self-deception and lies?

Chapter 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
in 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 tyam asi, n'est-ce
pas, kodomo-ga, wakiramasu? Hai, and thereto hadde he riden, no man
ferre, poi s'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 Schopfer? 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 Schopfer. It was a line of a poem
written in Old High German which meant something like, "Do you sense
your creator?"

"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 my 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, lemmu 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 luster 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 marvelous. How was it possible, I wanted to
know? Had Her consciousness really molded 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 meta-philosophies 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 infinitessimal 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 coloring 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-there 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
longdead 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 gray 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
believed 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 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 gray 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," ... 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 lamme, 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
gray, 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, releasing 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 colors. I watched the scarlets and
browns of my fur fade-to light and dark gray. 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 odors 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 odors? 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 Herwas 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
color 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 shined 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 mustache 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 rumored to ask their victims the lines of a poem
before they murdered them. I wondered why the goddess would practice the
custom of the warrior-poets? Or perhaps She had originated the custom
eons 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 Time
keeper's book. I closed my eyes, and I saw on page Dine 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, 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 varicolored 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 recreation 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 Katherine 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 favorite 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 marrow-death 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 stil: Home Is the
sailor from the se, 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 heating 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 merchantqueen
guarding her jewels, She seemed determined to guard Her precious wisdom.

Half in humor, 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 weened 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 shipcomputer. 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 modeled 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 moonbrains 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 the 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.

Chapter 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 skeptical and jaded of
the master pilots did? Would he have honored 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, tunneling 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 woolens 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 blonde 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, starblown 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 endeavors,
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 color his judgments. 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 furor 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 furtivelooking
young programmer, read the memory of the ship-computer and opened the
seated 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 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? You're 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 this 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 rumored 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 practiced 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 gray 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? Goddledygook! 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 marrow-sick 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 neandertals," 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 aprove 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 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 arcanurn 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 practiced 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,
and 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 ancesters 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 gray sky and the
cafe filled with hungry people. We ordered a huge meal of cultured meats
and the various exotic dishes favored 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 conspirationally. 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 neandertal 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
neandertal 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 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, 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
neandertals 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 toward our table. "May I present Estrella Domingo of
Darkmoon." Estrella was a brightlooking 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 neandertals 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 neandertals 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. So 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 mustache,
"that is interesting."

Estrella further observed that the difference between neandertals and
modern man was not so great as most people thought. "If you look
carefully," she said, "you can see neandertal 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 neandertals 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 neandertal 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 discs 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 toward 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 ... A 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, pulling 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, twodimensional 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 visualed
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 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 fetal 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 other's 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 rather play at a real transformation, like
you, Pilot. Are you really going to sculpt yourselp. 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 practice 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 would 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
Coshevan'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.

Toward 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 Galivare 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 center 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 center of a huge, ringlike
table. Around the table sat Tomoth, Pilar Capri ndashavill i, 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 rumored. 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.

Chapter 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 path 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 savored 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.

I offered him coffee but he refused, saying, "Coffee speeds the brain,
and there's been enough of that, hasn't there?"

"Would you like some skotch, then?"

"No thank you, Pilot," he said. "There's no joy drinking skotch in front
of a dead fireplace, is there?"

"I could light the fire, if you'd like."

"Please."

I heaped some green logs onto the grate and lit the fire, and he came to
the purpose of his visit. "It seems there will be an expedition to your
Alaloi after all."

"And you're to lead it?"

"Yes."

I ground my teeth, then said, "I understand. You want the glory."

"Is that true? No, you don't understand. The Timekeeper orders me to
lead it."

"Why?"

"Who knows what his reasons are?"

Liar, I thought, liar! "I'll speak to the Timekeeper," I said. "You'd
question him?"

"It was my discovery. The Alaloi ... my plan. It's my expedition." He
bowed his head and said, "Yes, it's clear, you want the glory."

"No, I want the knowledge."

"So you tell yourself," he said, and he sipped from the tumbler of
skotch I had handed him. "It would weaken the expedition if you come." I
looked at his long nose, the nose I had broken. "There's blood between
us," I said.

He rubbed the bridge of his nose. He said, "No, you're mistaken. There's
no blood between us."

I gulped a quarter of my own tumbler of skotch. My eyes were burning
from the piney smoke escaping into the room. I said, "If the Timekeeper
doesn't rescind his proviso, I'll withdraw from the expedition. I won't
go with you.

Soli smiled and told me, "Yes, your pride is hurt. But you don't have a
choice."

"What do you mean?"

"This is the reason for my visit; you must be told: The Timekeeper
orders you to come with me."

"Orders me?" I half-shouted. "Ten days ago, he wasn't even going to
allow an expedition!"

"The Timekeeper," Soli said, "apparently has changed his mind. Don't ask
me why." He sipped his skotch, then continued, "There will be six of us.

Justine and Bardo, your mother, too, are ordered to accompany us."

"That's only five."

His voice was unnaturally calm as he said, "The sixth will be Katharine.

The Timekeeper has ordered my daughter to grow new eyes and come with
us."

So, I thought, Soli must have gone to the Timekeeper and asked that his
wife and daughter come with him. How gratified he must have been that
Katharine would renounce her scryer's vows and grow eyes, he who
despised scryers! I could not understand, though, why my mother and
Bardo had been included in the expedition's roster, unless it was to
appease me and keep me from doing something foolish, such as breaking my
vow of obedience and running off to the Alaloi on my own. Then, by way
of explanation Soli said, "We'll pose as distant relatives of the Devaki
tribe of the Alaloi. The Timekeeper believes we'll have a better chance
if we pretend to be an extended family. And since some of us are really
related, it should be that much easier of a deception."

Yes, I thought, Soli was indeed a deceitful man. I said, "Let me guess;
we'll pretend that Bardo is your son, and my cousin."

"No," he said, "that's not the plan. His face suddenly turned sour as if
he had swallowed gull piss, not skotch. He seemed very unhappy. "You're
to pose as my son."

"What? That's impossible!"

"As my son," he repeated quietly, "since you look so much like me.

Katharine will be your sister."

"That's insane! It won't work!" I was suddenly on my feet, fingers
clenched, shaking my fists on either side of my head. "You and I ...
we'd fight and what would the Alaloi think? The whole plan ... Katharine
my sister, insane! I'll break down the doors of the Timekeeper's tower
if I have to but I won't let him order this insane plan!"

"Again, you must be reminded, you have no choice. Sorry." Indeed, I had
no choice. I was furious because I had no choice. I was a pilot who had
taken vows-so I reminded myself while pacing through the fireroom after
Soli had left me. Later that day I called for an audience with the
Timekeeper, but he would not see me. In a bare anteroom, I waited all
afternoon playing over chess games in my head to calm myself, to keep
myself from breaking into his chambers. Finally, he sent a journeyman
horologe to inform me that he was meeting with a merchant prince from
Tria and would not be able to see anyone for a good tenday.

I did not believe him. The Timekeeper was testing my obedience, I
thought, and humbling me because he was jealous of my discovery. Bardo,
too, shared this opinion. Around midnight we met in the master pilot's
bar. He was drunk, and oddly, for him, quite subdued. His bearded head
was loose on his shoulders as he kept dipping his lips into his beer.

"It's a pity," he said. "It's a very pity. By chance you didn't ask the
Timekeeper to .. ." He belched and continued, ".. . to order me on this
mad expedition, did you? Oh, of course you didn't, stupid of me for even
suspecting. Where's my damn faith in friends? Oh, too bad, where's my
faith in anything? You're always saying success begets success but I
think not. You and your damn testosterone high! You come back famous,
full of pride and seed, ready for anything, but that's not the reality,
oh, no. Shall I speak in metaphor? I shall, I shall: We're like
thallows, you and I, the higher we soar, the greater the fall when the
wind turns against us. I have a bad feeling about this expedition,
Little Fellow."

Bardo, of course, had bad feelings about anything which put his life at
risk. He was a natural pessimist always waiting for calamity to occur,
and the greater his happiness, the greater his fear it might momentarily
be taken away from him. Thinking to soothe him (and myself), I drank
more skotch, threw my arm around him, and said, "It will be all right."

"No, no, Little Fellow, I think I'll die out on the ice, yes, I'm sure
of it."

"I didn't know you were a scryer."

"Well, it doesn't require any special vision to see I'm doomed." He
pulled a small mirror from his pocket and held it in front of his face.

With drunken fingers, he wiped beer foam from his mustache as he spoke
to himself. "Ah, Bardo, my friend, what's happened, what's to become of
you? Oh, too bad, too bad!"

Despite Bardo's foreboding and my maimed pride, despite Soli's and my
antipathy for each other, despite everything, the initial planning for
the expedition went well. Each of us, except Bardo, took on a different
task. Lionel, who was miffed at not being included in the expedition,
nevertheless helped us learn to handle the sled teams. Soli prepared his
inventories of the spears, furs, oilstones, icesaws and krydda spheres,
all the hundreds of tools and things we would need to pose as Alaloi
(and, if need be, to survive). Justine and my mother consulted the
akashic records and histories, learning as much as they could of the
culture of the Devaki tribe. It was my taskand it was clever of Soli to
assign me this crucial, delicate task, a sop to my pride-to hire and
supervise the cutter who would sculpt our bodies into the shape of
neandertals.

On the tenth day of false winter I made arrangements with a Mehtar
Hajime, whose shop was the largest and finest on the Street of Cutters.

(Which is itself one of the straightest and broadest streets in the
Farsider's Quarter.) The shop front was jacketed with sheets of rare,
blue obsidian carved with bizarre shapes, some of which were
human-though barely so-and others bearing as little resemblance to
humans as humans do to monkeys. There were grotesque bearded men whose
parts had been broadened and lengthened until their membrums hung
pendulously almost to their knees, and there were others as tall and
thin as exemplars. There seemed to be no pattern or logic to the
placement of the figures: A cluster of the double-sexed in orgy was set
next to a breastless madonna wearing the binding fiber of a Vesper
priestess around her elongated head. Bizarre, how bizarre and barbaric!

The largest of the figures, I saw, was melted into the stone above the
doorway. It advertised the type of sculpting for which Mehtar was most
famous: An Alaloi man, with his thick jaw firmly set, held a spear and
stood with his arm cocked as he sighted on the eye of an enraged,
charging mammoth. I recognized the sculpture of Goshevan, he who had
heroically killed a mammoth with a single stroke of his spear. Mehtar
took obvious pride that it had been a cutter much like himself who had
once made Goshevan into an Alaloi.

I knocked at the door, and a domestic opened it and led me through the
stone hallway into the warm, disgustingly plush tearoom, where I sat at
the single table. It served me a fair coffee that I could not quite
identify. I drummed my fingers against the table top, all the while
examining the expensive wall tapestries, the many expensive objects atop
the polished furniture. I was annoyed because this venal cutter, whoever
he was, was not there to meet me. "Many pay well to be more than they
were born to be," I heard someone say. I looked up to see a man who must
have been Mehtar standing in the doorway leading to his changing rooms.

He looked as much like a caveman as any Alaloi. He was thick and
obviously powerful, with great bunches of muscles gathering beneath his
hairy skin. His browridge jutted so far out from his forehead that I
could barely see his quick brown eyes. He looked very familiar; I was
almost certain I had seen him before, though I could not remember where.

With the flat of his palm, he thumped his chest and said, "Do you see
this magnificent body? As I've done for myself, so I can do for you. I
sipped my coffee (it was Solsken coffee, I guessed, which is treasured
more for its rarity than taste), and I asked him, "How do you know I
haven't come to have my nose shortened?"

"You're the master pilot Mallory Ringess," he said. "And I know why
you've come to me." He took the chair opposite mine and sat stroking his
heavy jaw. He looked at me as if he were appraising a piece of art.

Abruptly he said, "Look at the Fravashi tondo," and he pointed to the
wall behind me.

I turned to look at the tondo. The alien painting, a culture of
variegated, programmed bacteria pressed between two sheets of clary,
mutated and shifted colors and shape as I watched. The pretty, flowing
colors depicted the epic of Goshevan of Summerworld and the birth of his
son, Shanidar; it was an impressive display. Of course, private
possession of such technology was illegal, but I said nothing. "A famous
castrato who had lost his voice-I'm sure you know his name-gave me this
painting in trade for his restoration. Restore him I did! I cut at his
larynx until he sang like a bell, and to prove my good will, I stitched
new testes into his empty ball sacks for free. So that he could be a man
again while he sang with a young boy's voice! No, I'm not a venal man,
no matter what my enemies say."

I explained what I needed, and he closed his nostrils and said, "The
price will be six thousand city disks, a thousand for each body I sculpt
and-"

"You're joking! Six thousand city disks?"

"Have some more coffee,"

he said, pouring the pungent liquid into my mug. "The price is high
because I am who I am. Ask any cutter or splicer on the street, and
they'll tell you who is the best. Did you know I apprenticed to Rainer?

The cutter who sculpted Goshevan?"

He was lying, of course. I had consulted the City archives before
choosing a cutter. Mehtar, although he looked decently old, was really
quite young, much too young to have been Rainer's apprentice. He had
come to Neverness as a young boy having witnessed the death of his
planet, Alesar, in one of those rabidly hateful religious wars which
occasionally destroy isolated societies. His family had belonged to a
schismatic sect of spiritualists-I do not recall the exact nature or
substance of their belief-and he had watched them die the marrow-death
as he vomited blood and swore he would never again put his faith in
ideals he could not see or feel or possess. He had come to Neverness
determined to enrich himself while wreaking vengeance on any flesh that
came his way. Therefore in little time he had become the best-if
strangest-cutter in the City. "Six thousand disks!" I repeated. "Nobody
needs access to that much information. It's indecent."

"You won't buy my services by insulting me, Pilot,"

"We'll pay you a thousand disks."

"That's not enough."

"Two thousand." He shook his head and made a tisking sound with his
tongue. "That will buy you the services of Alvarez or Paulivik, any of
the lesser cutters. Maybe you should go to them."

"Three thousand, then."

"I don't like amounts containing the number three! It's a superstition
of mine."

"Four thousand," I said, realizing that I should have persuaded Bardo to
come with me. I had rarely paid money for anything in my life, while he
had a lifetime of experience arguing over the value of land or haggling
with whores over the price of their bodies. "I can sculpt four of you
for that price."

"Five thousand city disks. Five thousand."

"No, no, no, no, Pilot."

I slapped the table so hard that my mug rattled and coffee slopped over
the rim, I muttered, "You would think you'd sculpt us for free. Doesn't
the quest mean anything to you?"

"No, it doesn't, Pilot."

"Well, five thousand is all I can pay." I was certain that if I had
brought Bardo with me, he would never have agreed to pay the six
thousand disks that Mehtar had originally asked for. "If that is all you
have," he said, "that is all you have. But you will never know how fine
it feels to wear an Alaloi's body, how good it is to be strong." So
saying he grasped his empty mug with his hand and squeezed. It shattered
into crumbs and slivers, one of which drove through his palm. He held
his hand up so I could watch him slowly draw the bloody white sliver
from his punctured flesh. At first the wound spurted blood in rhythmic
pulses, and Mehtar said, "Clearly, I've sliced the artery." He closed
his eyes, and the muscles of his upraised hand began to tremble. The
pulses of red slowed to a steady flow and then to a trickle. When he
opened his eyes, the bleeding had stopped altogether. "I can give you
powers over your sculpted body as well as strength. There are hormones
to keep your balls overflowing with seed, or a neurotransmitter wash to
dissolve your need for sleep. And, more practically, with a little
splicing, various of your tissues can be programmed to pump out
glycopetides, to keep your flesh from freezing on your expedition. I,
Mehtar Constancio Hajime can do this. My price will be six thousand one
hundred city disks,"

"Six thousand ... one hundred?"

He pointed to the pieces of the mug scattered across the table. "I must
factor in my advertising costs. They blow these mugs on Fostora, and you
must know, it was precious."

I pounded the table with the edge of my fist and felt porcelain crumbs
grinding into thin leather of my glove. "You're a filthy, greedy
tubist," I said.

He looked at me quickly as his nostrils opened and closed. "A tubist,
you call me. Yes, it's true, I serve myself, and why not? I used to
serve my God, but He betrayed me." He pointed to the tondo and at the
case of priceless Darghinni jewelry standing next to it. "Now I collect
things. Things do not betray."

"Too many things," I said. "You're a thingist and a tubist."

"And why not? Certain things possess a luster and beauty that do not
fade with age. We arise in the morning to greet our things, a place for
each finely made thing, and each thing in its special place. We buy
things, perhaps a chair carved of fine-grained shatterwood or a
beautiful Darghinni hangnest, and we can be certain that the having of
it will increase our worth."

"I don't believe that."

He smiled and said, "Nevertheless, it's true. When we own many things,
we may trade them to acquire more things, each more beautiful, each more
precious, each containing real value against the day of disaster when
things will have to be traded to preserve that most precious thing of
all: our precious lives."

"Nobody lives forever," I said. I stared at the silvery strands of the
hangnest glittering in its case. I thought of the thousands of Darghinni
nymphs who must have died when their nest was stolen. "Maybe you value
yourself too much."

"Well, Pilot, this flesh I wear, it's all I am. What should I value
more? Six thousand one hundred city disks-a heavy sum, but there's never
enough to insure the sanctity of a man's flesh. Never, never enough."

In the end I paid the amount he asked. It was bad enough having to deal
in money; it was far worse to argue over it. The next day when I told
Bardo the details of our arrangement he was aghast. "By God, you've been
plundered! I really should have come with you. What did the Timekeeper
say? He's a miserly old wolf and ... ahhh, he doesn't know, does he?"

"He won't know unless the master bursar tells him."

"Good, good." And then, "Do you really trust this Mehtar Hajime to
sculpt us?"

Did I trust the cutter? How could one trust a man who wore smuggled
shagshay furs stolen from the flayed body of a once-living animal? "I
trust his greed," I said. "He'll do what we pay him to do on the hope
that our friends will come to him for sculpting."

Four days later I was the first to lie beneath Mehtar's lasers. I was
surprised to learn that the difference between an Alaloi and a full
human was really very little. Unfortunately, these little differences
had to be added or deleted from every part of my body. He remade me from
inside out, leaving no part of me untouched. He did the bone work first,
thickening and strengthening one hundred and eighty of my body's bones.

It was during this period, which lasted a couple of tendays, that I felt
the worst pain of the entire procedure. Whistling to himself and
occasionally telling me bad jokes, Mehtar would lay open layers of skin
and muscle and cut among the plates and spicules of a bone's honeycombed
interior as I clamped my jaws shut and sweated. He steened the walls
with new bone and strengthened the shafts and tendon attachments. "Bone
pain is deep," he said, all the while opening and closing his nostrils
as he drilled down the length of my thigh bone. "Deep and hot but it
doesn't last long."

There were a few times when my pain blocks failed and Mehtar had to
render me unconscious. I suspected he used these times to introduce
colonies of illegal, programmed bacteria into my body. The bacteria-I
was never able to prove this-found their way into those parts of my
bones Mehtar could not reach with his drills. There some of the bacteria
disassembled and ingested my natural bone while others manufactured and
spun out a webwork of collagens and mineral crystals, layer upon layer
of new bone with a tensile strength greater than steel. Once, when I
hinted how afraid I was of this technology, Mehtar laughed and said,
"You should think of the bacteria as tools, tiny machines,
infinitessimal robots programmed to a certain biochemical task. Do
machines rebel? Can a computer take charge of its own programming? No,
no, no, Pilot, there's no danger in these tools, but of course, all the
same, I would never employ them because to do so would violate your City
canons, archaic as those canons are."

I rubbed the glued skin of my arm-he had been working on the humerus
that day-and I said, "No one likes to be colonized by bacteria,
especially intelligent bacteria."

"Oh, noble Pilot, even if I was one of those cutters who ignore your
foolish laws, I would program the bacteria to die after they had
completed their task of course I would! You have my promise!"

Somehow his promises did not reassure me. I said, "And vhat of Chimene
and the April cluster, then?"

"Those names mean nothing to me."

I told him that Chimene was one of those planets where a colony of
bacteria had mutated and escaped, consuming all life in the biosphere,
disassembling and totally remaking the planet's surface into a mat of
purplishbrown, hugely intelligent bacteria-all in a matter of days. "And
the eschatologists think it only took a few years for them to infect the
whole April cluster," I said. "Ten thousand stars swarming with your
harmless bacteria." Of all the gods in the galaxy, the eschatologists
feared the April colonial intelligence the most. "Ancient history!"

Mehtar scoffed. "Such carelessness could never happen today. Who would
permit it? Again, I assure you, you have nothing to fear."

While I was healing, he worked on the others in succession. Soli was the
second to feel the marrow-pain, followed by Justine, Katharine and my
mother. Bardo, wanting to see the results of as many sculptings he
could, went last. "I've heard terrible things about these cutters," he
confided to me one day in the changing room. "Aren't I thick enough that
he could leave my bones alone? No? By God, I wish he'd avoid the
spine-so many delicate nerves there. What if he sneezes at the wrong
moment? One little slip of the laser and Bardo would never mount another
woman. I've heard of it happening. Can't you imagine: Bardo's mighty
pole rendered as limp as a soba noodle because of a sneeze?"

To help him relax and block his nerves, I massaged the heavy, fanlike
muscles at the top of his spine. I tried to reassure him, pointing out
that many people underwent cuttings much more extensive solely for the
sake of fad or fashion. I did not tell him my suspicions about Mehtar's
bacteria. "Well, this may be a minor alteration," he admitted after we
had talked about certain pilots who had found it useful to pose as one
or another species of alien. "But there's another thing. Doesn't this
cutter look like that rude Alaloi I tripped the day you broke Soli's
nose? Do you remember?"

Suddenly, I did remember. Suddenly, I knew where I had seen Mehtar
before. To reassure Bardo, I said, "I'm sure this isn't the same man."

It was a lie, but what could I do? "Ah, but what if you're wrong?

Suppose he remembers me? Suppose he dismembers me, forgive the pun, out
of vengeance, do you know what I mean?"

It seemed, though, that Mehtar did not remember him. Either that, or he
did not hold a grudge. If anything, Mehtar did his smoothest work on
him, probably because he had had all the rest of us to practice on.

Bardo, of course, was not satisfied until he had tested his virility on
his whores. Everything must have functioned properly because he claimed
he had swived twelve whores in a single evening, which was a record,
even for him.

The work on my face began soon after this, in late false winter. Mehtar
built me a new jaw filled with larger teeth. The enamel of the molars
was thick and layered; the jaw itself was massive and jutting in order
to provide greater leverage for the toughened jaw muscles. I would be
able to crack baldo nuts or gnaw bones without trouble or pain. The work
was delicate, especially around the eyes. Because my entire face, as
seen from profile, projected at a greater angle from my skull, Mehtar
needed to sculpt great browridges to protect the vulnerable eyes. This
he did slowly, taking great care with the optic nerves. I was blind for
the better part of two days. I was afraid I would never see again, and I
wondered how Katharine made her way through the black prison surrounding
her head.

When the cutter finished this painstaking procedure and I could see
again, he held a silver mirror in front of me. "Behold," he said. "You
are magnificent, yes? Note the nose, which I broadened while you were
painblocked and blind. Note the flaring nostrils. Wiggle them for me,
please. Very good, open, now close, and open again. A protection against
the cold," he said proudly, all the while opening and closing his, own
nostrils. "This planet is so cold."

I looked at the reflection in the mirror; it was not really like looking
at myself. Or rather, it was like looking at some mutation of myself
composed of two thirds Mallory Ringess and one third beast. My face was
strong and well proportioned, at once primitive and as expressive as any
human face. My ancestors on Earth, I thought, must have looked as I did.

I could not decide if I was handsome or ugly (or neither). I placed my
fingertips on my forehead feeling the browridge; it was like the
overhang of a cliff. I was not used to seeing myself in a thick beard,
nor could I keep my tongue from probing the slippery contours of my
huge, new teeth. For a moment I was disoriented and despondent. I had a
feeling of intense depersonalization, as if I didn't know who I was, and
worse, as if I didn't really exist. Then I looked at my eyes, and though
they were set deeply into my skull, I saw that they were my same blue
eyes, the eyes I knew so well.

I must admit that no one else suffered this same sense of loss of
identity as I did. My mother and Justine, and of course, Soli, had more
than once experienced the shock of having their old bodies made new.

This is not to say they each were wholly pleased with Mehtar's
sculpting. In particular, Soli hated it that after so many drastic
alterations, we still nearly resembled each other. (Though as usual, he
kept his silence.) Justine hated everything about her new self When she
saw what Mehtar had done to her, she said, "Oh, no, look at me! They'll
laugh at me when I skate at the Hofgarten, and as for that, look how my
weight has been redistributed, I've lost my center and I'm so ungainly!"

and she sulked for three days. When Soli told her that the Alaloi would
consider her beautiful, she asked him, "And do you think I'm beautiful?"

And Soli, who liked to pretend he was a truthful man, said nothing.

Just before the first storm of midwinter spring, we underwent changes
not quite so severe. Mehtar stippled our skin, cutting away many of our
sweat glands so we would not soak our furs and freeze to death encased
in a sheath of lice. He also stimulated the individual hair follicles,
and we each of us, the women as well as the men, sprouted a forest of
hair from neck to ankle. (For some reason Mehtar could not explain,
thick sprigs of black hair erupted from between Bardo's toes and along
the tops of his feet. As Mehtar said, there are some genetic quirks
beyond the control of the finest cutters.) During this time we lifted
stones and performed vigorous exercises to stimulate muscular growth.

Mehtar took us into his weight chamber and rubbed our limbs as he
subjected us to the Fravashi deep-space method of locally inducing
supergravities along the muscles of our arms and legs. Soli hated this
as much as he hated it whenever Mehtar touched him. "If this continues,"

he said, flexing the great ball of muscle of his upper arm, "I'll be as
bulky as Bardo."

There were thought exercises as well. One by one, we visited an
imprimatur who made us visualize the coordinated firing of individual
muscle fibers. She imprinted our neural pathways with certain skills we
would need to pose as Alaloi. Thus, for instance, we learned how to
flake a blade of flint without ever touching hand to stone. And where
the Alaloi men practice for a decade before they can hit their marks
with their spears, we learned this art in a single day.

There was one minor surgery I have neglected to mention. The Alaloi, it
seems, with their sharp flakes of flint mutilate the membrums of their
male children at the onset of manhood. The tribal elder slices off the
foreskin covering the bulb of the membrum, and he makes tiny cuts in the
delicate skin along the shaft. Into these cuts he rubs ashes and salt
and colored powders. The wounds fester and sear, and the man-the boy who
has become a man-is left with rows of minute, multicolored keloids
decorating his membrum from base to bulb. Naturally, Bardo was terrified
when he learned Mehtar would have to duplicate the effects of this
barbaric ritual. (I had withheld the foreknowledge of it until the last
possible moment.) I, myself, was a little apprehensive, especially when
Mehtar grasped my membrurn and joked that if he ruined it beyond repair,
he could easily transform me into a woman, and no one I met would be the
wiser. Again, everything went smoothly, though for days afterward I
could not bear to look down when I stood up to piss.

The last thing Mehtar did, or so I thought at the time, was to make
Katharine new eyes. He implanted them in the vacant hollows beneath her
dark, enlarged brows. They were beautiful eyes, eyes that I had seen
before in dreams; they were the eyes of the Entity's Katharine imago,
deep and lovely like blue-black, liquefied jewels. I held a mirror to
her so she could see her eyes, but she pushed my hand away, saying,
"I've looked inside for so long; now I want to look at things."

Like a child gazing through a telescope for the first time, she took joy
in examining the things of Mehtar's changing room: the hard white tile,
the intricate tubular microscopes, the lasers, pessaries, and other
gleaming instruments. When I took her to the Hofgarten to watch the
skaters, she sighed and said, "Oh, it's good to see again! I'd forgotten
how deeply colored the ice is, the blueness."

The next day, in the privacy of my house, she probed my body with her
hands as well as her eyes. With her hot, dry hands, she grasped my
membrum, running her fingers over the colored bumps along the shaft. It
excited her, I think, and I wondered if the Alaloi decorate their
membrums in order to please their women. (Though my studies of their
culture indicated that little the Alaloi men did was solely for the
pleasure of their women.) Later as we panted and pushed our thickened
loins against each other with zest and abandon, at our moment of
ecstasy, she opened her eyes and looked at me as if she were seeing me
for the first time. "Your face," she said after we had separated. "It
was like the face of a rutting ... It was so bestial!"

I rubbed my beard and felt my huge jaw, and I told her that indeed I now
possessed the face of a beast.

But she said, "No, you don't understand. I've seen something I haven't
realized since I was a little girl. All men are beasts if you look at
them just right."

During the days that followed we were very busy. It was not enough, of
course, that we merely sculpt our bodies to look like Alaloi. We had to
become Alaloi, which meant learning their language and imprinting
millions of bits of specialized knowledge. The correct method of
slitting a snow hare's belly, the aligning of one's head towards north
during sleep, the words and intonations for the burial of the dead-all
must be learned before we could pose as cavemen. The language of the
Devaki, the tribe of Alaloi we planned to join, proved more difficult
than I had imagined. I do not mean that it was difficult to learn or
articulate. It was not. My mother discovered that the akashic's
computers had once laid bare the mind of the Alaloi named Rainer and had
recorded his thought, deeds and memories. It was a simple thing to
infuse our memories with his, with the words and grammatical rules of
the Devaki language. It was a simple thing to find our lips smoothly
articulating the soft, round vowels, to listen to the liquid consonants
rolling easily off our skilled tongues. To be sure, the mastering of the
tones took a little time. A few of the Devaki words were distinguishable
from each other solely by the tones of their vowels. For instance, sura
might mean either "purple" or "lonely," depending on whether the first
vowel was pronounced in a sing-songy, rising tone, or in a low, falling
tone. But in the end, everyone except Bardo found these few words simple
to memorize. What was not simple was the understanding. The morphology,
particularly of the Devaki verbs, proved to be subtle and complex. The
verbs were not inflected according to our basic notions of past, present
and future tense, because the Devaki do not understand time as we do.

(As I was to learn later, the Devaki deny the existence of past and
future.) How do the Devaki inflect their verbs? They inflect them
according to the state of consciousness of the speaker. Thus a man full
of fear might scream, Lo mora Li Tuwa, I killed the mammoth!, while a
man deep in dreamtime-what the Devaki call dreamtime-will say, Lo
morisha Li Tuwa, which means something like: I, in the ecstasy of the
eternal Nowmoment, am joined by the spirit of the mammoth who opened his
heart to my spear. There are one hundred and eight verb inflections,
each corresponding to a different emotion or state of mind. What worried
me was that at least seven of these states were alien to me and would be
incomprehensible to any woman or man of our Order. How could we choose
the correct word ,forms, how could we understand primitives who sliced
up and understood reality in ways very different from ours?

My mother and I, Justine too, spent much time discussing the problem
with the semanticists, Yannis the Elder, who was taller than any man I
have ever known, as thin and fragile-looking as an icicle, suggested
that the Friends of Man might help us to duplicate these
incomprehensible states of mind. "I understand you have achieved a
partial understanding of the aliens' scent language," he said to me,
referring to my experiences within the Entity. "Now to understand alien
thinking, which I think we understand the Devaki mindsets to be, why not
approach true aliens as to their understanding of thoughtways which may,
or may not, be considered by them to be understandable to anyone who
understands that that which cannot be understood, cannot be understood
solely on account of the context of the misunderstanding." (That is how
the master semanticists, those miserable, pedantic seekers of
word-meaning often talk. I am not joking.) In the end, his suggestions
were of little help. When deep winter came and hardened, smothering the
City in a sea of almost liquid air, we were forced to break off our
research into these esoteric matters. There was only so much we could
learn of the Devaki language and customs. Some things, it seemed, would
have to be faked.

Leopold Soli, however, was not pleased with this fakery. In his own way
he was a careful, meticulous man, despite the fantastic chances he had
taken on his journeys into the manifold. As the time of our departure
drew nearer, he became increasingly critical of my planning and
preparations. We argued over a hundred little things, from the number of
dogsleds we should take to my insistence that one radio would be enough
to summon help from the City if we found ourselves stranded or otherwise
needed rescue. We argued important questions, too. It was our argument
over one vital, blindingly important question that nearly wrecked the
expedition before it began. At the very edge of the high professionals'
college, Upplyssa, is a row of buildings known as the Brain Boxes. The
pink granite buildings-there ar seven of them-are squat and low, roofed
with triangular panes of glass. On snowfree days, the interiors of the
buildings are bright with a clean, natural light. Before all such
enterprise had been moved to the factories south of Urkel, in the time
of Ricardo Ladi, the tinkers and programmers had grown the neurologics
for their computers in these seven buildings. During the winter before
our expedition, the huge, enclosed spaces were given over to journeymen
who sculpted great blocks of ice and others needing (or wanting) to
manipulate material things. In the fourth and third buildings the
fabulists created their three-dimensional tone poems while in the second
building, certain historians were reconstructing in miniature the
underground cities of Old Earth. Soli had chosen the empty seventh
building to store the equipment for our expedition. Along the bare wall
nearest the Academy's west gate were stacked long, heavy mammoth spears,
bales of silky white shagshay furs, leather straps and slats of supple
wood which could be bent into long skis or fashioned into the chassis of
our sleds. There were strips of raw, frozen meat wrapped in oilskins,
and snow goggles, oilstones, heaps of flint, and a hundred other things.

On sixtieth day, early in the morning, I was alone in the cold building
making harnesses for the dog teams. Because Soli did not trust our hasty
imprinting, he had suggested that we practice working leather or flaking
flint and other Devaki skills. I sat punching holes in a stiff piece of
leather with a bone awl. Next to me crouched a sleek beautiful sled dog
named Liko. I had made friends with this intelligent beast, and he liked
to watch me work, even as he licked and worked at the clean marrow-bone
I had given him. I was talking to Liko-and occasionally running my
fingers through the gray fur covering his broad head-when he cocked his
ears and let out a whine. There came the grinding speed-stop of a skater
from the gliddery outside. The doors opened with much creaking and
scraping against frozen snow, and the dark figure of Soli stood limned
in the soft light streaming in from the street. Despite the bitter cold,
he wore only a kamelaika and a thin wool jacket. His sculpted head was
bare. For all the weight of the new bone grafted onto his face, he held
himself rigidly erect. As he crossed the building his steps were
measured, full of grace-I will admit that-but full of a dangerous new
power as well. "It's early," he said, picking up a chisel and laying out
a mammoth tusk. He stroked his beard, which was black and thick and shot
with stiff red hairs. His eyes were deeply pouched as if he had not
slept well; he looked worn and middling old. He was too thin from having
eaten too little. He whistled at Liko and watched me as I punched a
hole, and he said, "That's no way to hold an awl. Careful you don't
punch a hole in your leg."

We worked for a while in silence. The only sounds were the scraping of
flint against wood, and the soft popping of the awl punching through
leather. (And the clack of Liko's teeth as he munched his bone.)
Occasionally Soli would shrink his neck down into his wool collar and
let out a huff of steamy air. When I told him he was foolish for
exposing his naked head to the wind, he asked, "Is it stupid to prepare
for the deep cold of the Ten Thousand Islands? To toughen ourselves, to
plan for the worst? You seem to be afraid of planning."

"What do you mean?" I ground my teeth and punched a hole in the cold
leather.

He examined my handiwork and said, "Careful you space your holes evenly.

We don't want the Devaki to think we do careless work." He shook his
head at me, then saidyour plan to collect tissue samples-it's really no
plan at all, is it?"

Again I asked, "What do you mean?" I had planned to collect Devaki nail
clippings and strands of hair and other bits of cast off tissue in the
hope of deciphering the Elder Eddes from their plasm-as circumspectly as
possible. This was the Timekeeper's ruling: The Devaki must never know
we were breaking the covenant between the founders of Neverness and the
tribes of the Alaloi; they must never know who we really were. "Your
plan is careless," Soli said. "It may not be as easy as you think to
gather up skin scrapings and the like."

"And you have a better plan, then?"

"There is a better plan. It's the women's plan; it's not my plan." He
shivered violently and rubbed his hands together. His teeth chattered as
he fitted the long bone runner to the wood chassis he held clamped in
his white hand. "Tell me about this plan," I said.

He rubbed the side of his nose and told me, "It's simple: The Devaki are
known to be promiscuous in their sex. As Justine has pointed out, it
would be a simple thing for our women to collect samples of the Devaki's
semen."

"But that would be adultery!" I shouted. "Justine and you ... and if you
think my mother will swive-"

"Neither your mother or Justine will collect the semen. No one could ask
your mother to do the impossible, and Justine, well it would be unseemly
for a married woman to do that, wouldn't it? No, as Justine reminds me,
the semen must be collected by an unmarried woman. And that's why
Katharine will collect the semen."

"Katharine!"

"Yes."

"Your daughter? You'd make your daughter into a whore?"

"It was Katharine who suggested the plan."

"I don't believe you!" He shot me a swift look, and I realized I had
protested too strenuously.

Until that moment, he probably had not suspected I had a passion for
Katharine. I clamped my jaws shut and gripped the awl tightly. The
hardness of it hurt my fingers. "My daughter?" He smiled and I wanted to
push the sharp tip of the awl into the black spot at the center of his
eye. Never had I struggled so hard to swallow my rage and restrain
myself. "Yes, she was my daughter, wasn't she?"

"I don't understand you."

He felt the sled's runner with his thumb tip; he stared at it with
unfocused eyes as if he were examining a cast-off piece of his life
rather than a material thing made of wood and bone. How I hated this
inwardness of his! I hated that he found in every person or problem or
thing an excuse to guiltily examine the scars and contours of his soul.

"It used to be," he said slowly, "when Katharine was a little girl, we
could understand each other just by looking at each other. She was wise
beyond her years, a beautiful, beautiful girl. But when she became a
scryer, not a pilot according to my will, but a damned scryer-when she
took her scryer's vows it was impossible to look at her eyes because she
had plucked them out. No, Katharine left me long ago."

I told him I could not believe that a woman of the City-my cousin,
especially-would willingly lie with the Devaki men, though in truth it
was all too easy for me to imagine her coaxing the liquids of life from
the membrums of brutal, rutting cavemen. "Perhaps she's tired of the
arms of civilized men," he said. I thought he was looking at my knotted
hands, at my trembling arms. "Or perhaps she's just curious-she was
always a curious girl." I pushed hard with the awl, careless of what I
was doing, There was a sharp, hot pain in my thigh; I yelled and looked
down to see the bone point puncturing my woolens. A dark widening circle
of blood spread out from the hole. Liko, who had been anxiously worrying
his bone, was up on his legs whining, sniffing, and looking back and
forth between Soli and me.

Soli shook his head, all the while watching me peel back the fabric from
the edge of my wound. "Do you need help, Pilot?" he asked. "So
careless," and he came over to me and reached for my leg. "Damn you!" I
shouted, I stood up and grabbed his forearms as he grabbed me. Hot
trickles of blood ran down my leg, and Liko was barking because he
didn't know what to do. "Damn you!"

We stood there for a moment, grappling. I felt the power of his new body
running along the muscles of his forearms. I fought to get a hand free
so I could dig my fingers into the soft area beneath his ear, to rip his
jaw away from his face. But he held me as tightly as I held him. I could
see in his frosty eyes a knowledge, an utter certainty, that with our
toughened ligaments and new, popping tendons, we could destroy each
other. We could pull each other apart, snap each other's bones, pulp
each other's precious brains. Strong men can quickly kill strong men-I
knew this suddenly; suddenly I was certain that he could see the
knowledge in my eyes. We let go of each other at the same moment. Never
again, I knew, could I touch him in anger unless I was prepared to kill
him.

I withdrew the awl from my thigh and threw it at the bale of shagshay
furs. It bounced twice across the topmost fur, leaving red skidmarks on
the stretched, white leather. I tried to stop the flow of blood much as
Mehtar had stanched his bleeding hand. The mind can control the body, I
thought; how wonderful that brain is the master of muscle. I was trying
to remember this, trying hard to quiet my raging muscles when Soli
patted Liko on his head, nodded at me and said, "It must hurt you bad."

I did not know if he was referring to my wounded leg or to my outrage at
Katharine's planned infidelities. He never said another word about
either. (Nor would Katharine answer me when I demanded to know if she
had really volunteered to collect the semen samples.) Ten days later,
before dawn on the first of deep winter's dead days, Bardo and the
members of my unhappy family drove our three loaded sleds out of the
building. We paraded through the streets of the Academy down to the
Hollow Fields where a windjammer was waiting to carry us six hundred
miles over the western ice.

Chapter 8 - Kweitkel

And so Man dropped his seed into the Test Tube, and from the artificial
wombs came many races of men, and races that were men no longer: the
Elidi grew wings and the Agathanians carked their bodies into the shape
of seals and dove beneath the waters of their planet; the Hoshi learned
the difficult art of breathing methane while the Alaloi rediscovered
arts ancient and ageless. On the Civilized Worlds there were many who
sought to improve their racial inheritance in some small way. The
exemplars of Bodhi Luz, for example, desired children of greater stature
and so, inch by inch, generation by generation, they bred human beings
ten feet tall. Chaos reined as human beings from different planets found
that they were unable to mate and bear children in the natural manner.

Thus Man formulated the third and greatest of his laws, which came to be
called the Law of the Civilized Worlds: A man may do with his flesh as
he pleases but his DNA belongs to his species.

-from A Requiem for Homo Sapiens, by Horthy Hosthoh

The Thousand Islands is a vast archipelago scattered across four
thousand miles of ocean. In a broad crescent the islands reach from
Landasalia in the uttermost west, to Neverness in the southeast.

Although there are many more than a thousand islands, many, many more,
most of them are small, volcanic upspillings worn almost flat by wind
and ice and the pull of gravity; they are barren wastes of tundra and
sedge and wind-packed snow. (In fact, the name
"The Thousand Islands" is
a mistranslation of the Devaki, helahelasalia, which means
"The Many,
Many Islands." The Devaki, indeed all the tribes of the Alaloi, have no
expression other than hela for quantities greater than twenty.) It is on
the larger islands that the thirty-three tribes of the Alaloi make their
homes. The islands of the southern group, which are called the
Aligelstei (or
"God's Glittering jewels"), teem with life. They are very
beautiful. There the Alaloi hunt shagshay and trumpeting mammoths
through the evergreen forests; there they shield their eyes from the
colors and brightness of the snowfields, and at night, they huddle in
their snowhuts and caves drinking their blood tea and wondering at the
light of the stars.

The sixteenth island is called Kweitkel, named for its great white peak
rising fifteen thousand feet above the sea. According to my mother, who
had imprinted the more relevant of the Alaloi Rainer's memories, we
would find the Devaki gathered in a cave below the southern foothills of
Kweitkel. Every winter, when the sea freezes fast, the scattered
families of the tribe drive their dog teams across the open ice. They
come from nearby islands such as Waasalia and Jalkel and Alisalia, and
other islands, Sawelsalia and Aurunia, which are not so near. They come
together to find wives for their sons and to perform their ceremonies of
initiation into manhood; they come to tell stories and give gifts to
each other, and they come because the dark of deep winter, when the air
is so cold it sucks the soul from your breath, is a terrible time to be
alone.

Our plan was to approach Kweitkel from the south, a single family group
seeking our ancestral home. Here was the ruse toward which all our
fakery had been aimed: We would pretend to be the descendants of Senwe,
a brave man who had left the Devaki four generations ago to found a
tribe his own. (I hoped that the memory of Rainer was clean and true,
that there had actually been a man named Senwe. Had be really ventured
across the southern ice seeking Pelasalia, the fabled Blessed Islands?

There are, of course, no islands to the south of Kweitkel, blessed or
otherwise. Senwe, if he had really set out to the south, had no doubt
died long ago when the pack ice broke up under false winter's harsh sun;
he and his doomed family had most likely been sucked down into the cold,
fathomless sea.) Under the shroud of darkness we would set down ten
miles from the southern shore of Kweitkel. There, where the wind roars
unceasingly and unhindered over thousands of miles of ice, we would
harness our dogs and fasten our furs and make the short journey to our
new home.

We left the City in the hold of a silvery windjammer, and we rocketed
across the six hundred miles separating Neverness from the first of the
Outer Islands. Two generations ago Coshevan had come this way, alone on
the ice miles below us. Our journey was far easier and much quicker than
his had been. In little time we passed over the fifteen Outer Islands, a
famous poaching ground for wormrunners who risk death by laserfire in
their lust to smuggle priceless, real furs to the tubists of the City.

Below us, covered by the ink of night, were forested mountains and herds
of white shagshay. Below us-again I had to rely on Rainer's memory-was
the ancestral home of the Yelenalina and Reinalina, two of the largest
families of the Devaki tribe.

We landed to the south of Kweitkel, according to our plan. At least, I
believed we landed there. We had to rely on the navigation skills of a
Markov Ling, a journeyman pilot fresh out of Borja. (It is ironic that
we pilots, who easily journey from Urradeth to the Gelid Luz, are
notoriously inept at the much simpler task of flying a windjammer.) In
near silence we unloaded our three sleds and our fifteen whining dogs.

We worked quickly so Markov could be off before the sun rose to expose
our fakery to anyone who might be watching from the distant shore.

It was cold and black as I fumbled with the harness traces; the
starlight was too faint to fully illumine my snarling dogs. But I could
hear them growling and snapping at each other, biting at the freezing
leather straps binding them. The wind blew dark, flowing sheets of
spindrift over them, and they began to snort and sneeze and shiver. Next
to me Bardo cuffed his lead dog, Alisha, with his open hand. With the
hood of his shagshay fur pulled tightly around his head, he looked like
a great white bear. He cursed and spoke to Justine; I could not make out
what he said because the wind rose like a howl and blew his words out
across the ice. Soli, who seemed immune from the wind, harnessed his
dogs and bent low to check his load. The women, according to the Alaloi
custom, helped where they could. But Justine grew careless. She pulled
the harness too tightly around my third dog, Tusa's, chest. He slashed
at her, nearly tearing her mitten from her hand. Instantly my mother
fell upon the vicious dog with a leather whip. She lashed his
hindquarters until he yelped and pushed his belly down against the snow.

"That Tusa is a beast," she said into the whistling wind. She turned to
me. "Didn't I tell you? That we should have used bitches instead of
males?"

All this time Soli was staring at her, although it was too dark to see
the expression on his face. He said simply, "Males are stronger," and he
signaled to Markov that we were ready to be off. Markov, who never left
the warmth of the ship, made a sign to Soli and fired the rockets. With
a roar, the windjammer shot forward and angled upward into the dark
eastern sky. The thunder echoed across the ice, then died.

I did not remember ever having felt so alone as I did that morning upon
the sea. I, who had journeyed far into the manifold, billions of miles
from another human being, stood to the east watching the red rocket
tailings of the windjammer. To be alone inside a lightship-or any
ship-was to be not really alone. There was the security of the womblike
pit, the reassuring and familiar touch of the neurologics, the safety of
human design. On the ice there was only bitter wind and cold so thick it
was like liquid in my eyes and nose; on the ice there were things that
kill, no matter the help of family or friends. For the first time in my
life I would be intimately close with the things of life. I would kill
animals for food and make my clothes from their bloody skins; I would
fashion blocks of hard-packed snow into a house to keep from freezing to
death. The wind cut beneath my parka, and I suddenly knew, in a
tangible, immediate way, just how delicate my skin really was, despite
its coverings of black hair and white fur. Ice-powder stung my greased
face, and I listened to the moaning wind; I listened to the wind moaning
from my chilled lungs and felt tiny needles of ice fracturing and
reforming inside my nose with every breath taken and released, I
wondered, neither for the first nor last time, if what I would find on
the island of Kweitkel would be worth the price of aching teeth and
frozen flesh. After a while, Soli whistled to his lead dog, and I
realized it was time to go. Since I was pretending to be an Alaloi, I
thought I should practice their rituals. I turned to the four points of
the world, giving thanks for the morning. In the east there was a low,
red light the color of glowing blood where the ice joined the sky. Wisps
of pink and gray hung from the blue-black dome, illuminated by the sun
beyond the curve of the world. To the south, gray mist and endless ice.

The west was dark, the outline of Sawelsalia still lost into the fold of
night. I bowed to the north, and there was Kweitkel rising in the
distance like a massive, white god. (The word "kel," which means
mountain, is also the Devaki word for god.) Its lower slopes were green
and dark white, almost slaty against the sky, but the snowfields of the
upper cone glared orange in the streaming light. "Kweitkel, nu la
lurishia," I whispered, hoping no one would overhear me greeting the
mountain. "Shantih, shantih."

We pointed our sleds north and whistled four short low notes followed by
a long, keening, high note, that peculiar tiralee by which the Devaki
urge their dogs forward when they wish to spare the lash. The dogs, with
their black noses and lolling pink tongues, leapt at their harnesses and
dug their feet into the snow. Soli drove the lead sled followed by
Bardo. Most of the time the women rode in the beds of the sleds. At
least twice that morning, though, my mother pestered me to take the
rails of my sled. But I would not let her. Devaki women, I told her to
her annoyance, do not drive sleds. I had the rear sled, which was the
easiest to handle for two reasons: firstly, my lead dog, Liko, was by
far the smartest and strongest of the dogs, and secondly because I had
only to follow the track already broken by Soli and Bardo. The snow
itself was hard-packed and clean; the iced runners of our sleds glided
smoothly in their parallel grooves. The Devaki call such snow safel,
fast snow, and fast it was. By midmorning we had covered most of the
distance to the island, and we would have gone even further but for the
ragged and pitiful condition of the dogs, I must admit here that I was
to blame for starving the dogs. From the first, this cruelty was my
plan. Of all the hurtful things I have done in my life -and there have
been many things, many-in some ways I regret this torture of innocent
beasts most of all. It was necessary, so I told myself and the others,
necessary that we put forth the appearance of having traveled a great
distance. If we had really crossed a thousand miles of ice, as we were
pretending we had, our dogs would be thin with toil and hungry from
eating half rations for too many days. To this end, against Soli's
wishes, I had demanded that the dogs be fed very little.

Furthermore, I had-I myself did this-before we left the City I had
rubbed salty, frozen slush into their paws until they bled and froze. As
they whined and looked at me with their trusting eyes, I had starved and
maimed them; I did this so the Devaki would accept us as brothers, and
we might discover the secret of life. (I am not, I know, forgiven this
barbarity merely because I starved myself The others did the same. What
is man but that being who can stand any barbarity, misery or pain?)

It was a pity, too, that Bardo and I had to whip the dogs. All the way
to the island, Bardo used his whip freely. He shouted and cursed and
flailed at the hindquarters of his rear dog. Curiously, Soli, whose dogs
had the task of breaking trail, did not use his whip. He had learned
another trick from Lionel, learned it better than Lionel himself I
remember how Soli's clear whistle pierced the morning air. It was a
beautiful whistle, full of music; to this day I can hear the keening of
his whistle. There was an urgency in the clean, high notes and also an
understanding, as if Soli well knew the agony of shrunken bellies and
freezing, bleeding paws. He whistled over and over the short tiralee,
and his dogs panted and pulled hard at their traces. Soon, I hoped, if
our luck held, they would be rewarded with a roaring -fire and bloody
hunks of fresh-killed meat.

Thus we approached the rocky shore of the island. There was a thrilling
spray of wind, the scrape and glide of the sled over the snow. My face
was so numb from the cold I could barely speak. But there was little to
say and much to listen to: the yelping of the dogs and Bardo's
blustering voice; the screams of the thallows as they dove from the
cliffs beyond us and beat their wings against the wind; the ice
particles etching the rock promontories rising out of the sea; and when
the wind died and the living things were quiet for a moment, the sudden
rush of silence, vast and profound.

About'a mile from the shore, I saw that there would be difficulty wit
our landfall. The southern coast of Kweitkel was broken with high
cliffs; spires of volcanic rock pushed out of the coastal waters like
great, ragged, black fingers eaten away by a disease of salt and snow.

At the high strand, the sea was frozen upon the rocks, the ice crusty
and folded and thick glazed ripples running across the beach in uneven
bands of white and blue. I thought we would do better to circle the
island and drive our sleds up the gentle slope of the western coast.

When we stopped for our midday meal of baldo nuts and cold water, Soli
disagreed, saying, "If we pretend we're of the far south, we must be
seen to approach from the south."

"But the western slope would be quicker," I said in a voice slurry with
cold. "You're always hurrying, aren't you?"

"Perhaps the Devaki have been watching us approach," I said. "They've
had the whole morning to watch us." I looked at the stark southern
cliffs, and I felt a rawness in my throat, a presentiment of disaster
and doom. But I was no scryer, so all I said was, "I don't like these
cliffs."

I wondered how our three sleds would have appeared as seen from the
ridge above the Devaki cave. There could be nothing as tiny and
insignificant as men and the artifacts of men moving against the spread
of the endless ice. Three tiny lines strung out across infinite
whiteness, creeping more slowly than a snow worm-that, I imagined, is
what anyone would have seen looking out to sea.

Soli tightened his lips, which were shiny with grease. "The universe
doesn't turn around Mallory Ringess or any of us." As if to reassure
himself, he looked at Justine, who was sitting on his sled's bed. "Why
should the Devaki be watching us?"

I rubbed the side of my nose; the hardened grease was sticky and cold. I
said, "If we take our dogs up through the cliffs, they'll think we're
stupid."

"No, that's not so." He held his hand over his brows, squinting as he
picked apart sections of the beach with his hard eyes. He pointed at a
break in the sea cliffs where the beach rose up to meet the forest.

"There," he said, speaking the Devaki language as if born to it. "We
will drive our sleds along the tongue of ice where it licks the edge of
the forest."

"It will be hard going."

"Yes, that is true," he said.

That afternoon we performed the hardest work of our lives. Near the
island, the sea was frozen into a patchwork of green and blue ice
blocks, a jungle of crystals the size of a house, of cracks and humps
and jagged spears of ice which snagged the harnesses, almost impaling
the dogs. There were moments when the sleds jammed against the fissures
and folds of the ice ridges, or worse, dangled over the edge while the
dogs howled in frustration and fear. At least three times we had to
unharness the dogs and stand at the top of a ridge, pulling hand over
hand at the leather traces, hauling our loads up and over. Once we had
to unload the sleds completely. Bardo, of course, hated effort of any
sort which did not occur in bed, and at every opportunity he bellowed
and cursed the instance of his birth. Each of us, in his or her own way,
reacted according to type: Justine sang a cheerful little tune and
laughed at every difficulty just because she loved being outside in the
snow next to her husband; Katharine, distracted and disassociated from
her labor, was fascinated by the ice's glitter and the texture of the
distant forest, and she could not stop looking all around at the things
of the world; Soli seemed to relish problems of any sort, probably as a
test of his cleverness and ability to endure pain. Only my mother-and
here was one of the great surprises of my life-seemed at ease with the
muscle-popping work. She moved across the dangerous ice crusts lithely
and surely; she seemed to relish the strength of her new, Alaloi body.

This newfound pleasure of being was apparent in the relaxed way she
pulled at the harness traces and leaned into the wind, driving forward
with her hips as she set her boots against the slippery ice; it was
apparent in the set of her sculpted face, which, for all its thickness
of nose and jaw, was very beautiful.

It was late afternoon when we reached the edge of the forest. The
muscles along my forearms were swollen and burning. I had strained my
knee when Katharine lost her footing and slipped, and the whole weight
of the near-dangling sled had fallen upon me. I had slipped too,
twisting the joint with a ligament-tearing force. I owed it to Mehtar, I
knew, that the ligaments had held. I limped along the snowline where the
beach gave way to the dark forest, and I found myself-absurdly-giving
thanks to the tubist cutter that I was not a cripple.

Bardo, who pretended to be crippled with exhaustion, sat on a rock
holding his head in his hands as he moaned, "By God, I'm tired! See my
hands? Why can't I close them? This is madness. Ah ... but it's cold,
cold enough to freeze your piss before it hits the ground as I'd show
you if I weren't too tired to stand. Goddamn Shiva Lai and goddamn
Drisana Lai for spreading her legs and having him and having me. Damn
Govinda Lai and damn Timur, too, and Hanif and .. ." He went on in this
manner cursing his ancestors for inflicting upon him the pain of living;
he went on for quite a while. The princes of Summerworld, I knew too
well, had an excellent memory of their lineage. He cursed his
great-grandfather's grandfather, and he cursed the unreasonableness of
water for permitting itself to freeze into the greenish-white icicles
hanging down his mustache. At that moment I did not pity him, even
though I knew that before coming to Neverness he had never seen snow or
ice.

While my mother took one of the dogs and went into the woods on skis to
survey the terrain, Justine began wrapping skins around the other dogs'
bloody paws. Katharine, I noticed with a mixture of annoyance and
wonder, bent over a bristly bush, holding her naked hands spread above
the petals of a fireflower. "It's warm," she said. "The colors, look how
they change, red into burning carmine, carmine into .. ."

Soli crunched up the beach over to me, and we immediately started to
argue. I was eager to drive on to the Devaki's cave, but he shook his
head and said, "It's late. The forest is no place to be at night."

"By nightfall," I said, "we'll be in the Devaki's cave. There's only
four miles of easy forest ahead."

"Yes, if Rainer's memory is true."

"Don't you have faith?" I asked him slyly. "Faith!" he said, and he
knocked the snow from his boots. "We've two hours before twilight."

"Do we, Pilot?"

I looked to the west but we were too near the base of the cliff to see
the position of the sun. I wished we had brought a clock with us. It
would have been an easy thing to do. I remembered seeing in the
Timekeeper's Tower a clock no bigger than the nail of my little finger.

(The nail of my little finger, that is, before Mehtar carved my hands.)
The clock was a wafer of some alive substance which glowed and shifted
colors to mark the passing of the seconds and hours, much as Katharine's
flowers mutated from magenta to flame-purple. If I had hidden one of
these wafers in my furs, I could have predicted the moment when the
turning edge of the world would obliterate the sun. "We could have had
the tinker attach a clock to the radio," I said, reopening the old
argument. "But you wouldn't break the Timekeeper's edict."

The radio itself was hidden inside the false bottom of Soli's sled along
with the spheres of krydda we would need to preserve the culled Devaki
tissues. Of course, it was not easy to get at the radio; we would use it
only to signal the windjammer when we had finished this dangerous
business of posing as cavemen.

It seemed that Soli regretted he had not broken the Timekeeper's edict
against clocks. It must be difficult, I thought, to be the Lord Pilot.

He stared at the base of the cliff, at the banded layers of rock; it was
as if he were staring through ancient marls and sediments down to the
heart of the world. "The Timekeeper is right, isn't he, to hate time?

Why should we care what time it is? Why do we need a clock when we have
Mallory Ringess to reassure us we have two hours before the light dies?"

When my mother returned to report that the way through the woods was
clear and not very steep, our decision was made. "There's deep snow,"

she said. "But the crust is thick. Look at Ivar. With his hard, little
paws-he didn't break through the crust."

It was while we were harnessing the dogs for our final run through the
forest that a terrible thing happened. I should have been forewarned
because Katharine suddenly dropped the traces, stood erect and gazed off
into the sky as if she were looking at a painting. But I was tired, too
busy with Liko to realize she was gazing at the reenactment of a past
vision. I was pulling the harness around Liko's deep chest when there
came a flurry from behind a rock near the edge of the forest. A snow
hare, its ears laid back flat, bounded across the snow in a wild
zig-zag. Liko let out a tremendous bark, and before I could grab hold,
he bolted after the hare.

What happened next is difficult to tell. Difficult not only because my
memory is disturbed and opaque but because the telling of it hurts.

Liko, sprinted across the snow, a blur of near-white against white
pursuing a bounding ball of white. Bardo was up off his rock, looking
skyward, shouting, "By God, look at it!" There came another blur from
over the lip of the cliff The hare hopped nearer to the forest, and I
looked up to see a great blue shape spread against the blueness of the
sky. It was a thallow with its talons pointed, diving toward the hare,
diving toward Liko, diving toward one or the other-I did not know
which-but diving fast and true, its rear talon pointed like a falling
spear. It drove the talon into Liko's neck. There was a terrible high
cry. Or perhaps it was the mingling of two cries: the victorious cry of
the great bird joining Liko's terrified yelp-I do not know. The dog
dropped to the snow, squealing, working his jaws. I was running toward
him, and I wondered why he didn't try to escape the thallow. I was
running toward him, too blind from the dazzling snow and fear to realize
that the thallow had probably broken his neck. While I was running
toward him, intent on pulling the wings from the thallow and breaking
its neck, the bird looked at me with its bright eye as it dug its talons
into Liko's side. It turned its head as if puzzled, and then it dipped
its hooked beak into Liko's frothy mouth. There was another terrible
scream, and then silence. The thallow held its head up-and all this
time, which was almost no time, I was running-the thallow held Liko's
pink tongue in its beak. It snapped its head suddenly, swallowing the
bloody tidbit, and it fixed me with its eye. It dipped its beak again,
as if it had endless time to perform this violation. I heard myself
scream, and the tip of the beak tore into Liko's eye, which all the time
had been open and alive with terror. I beat the air with my fists; the
thallow threw back its head and opened its throat, and then, looking
almost leisurely at me, it sprang into the air with a cry and a thunder
of wings and soared off into the sky.

I stood over Liko, opening and closing my hands, helpless. Soli came
over to me, and Bardo, and the others came too. Soli looked at Liko, who
was whimpering, and he said, "Can't you see he's dying?"

I was silent, staring at the red stains on the snow. "Your dog, Pilot,
he's your dog." The bloody slush froze while I watched, and Soli said,
"You'll have to kill him."

No, I thought, I can't kill Liko, my lead dog, my friend. "Do it now,
Pilot. Quickly."

"No," I said. "I can't." Soli, who rarely cursed, shouted, "Damn you!"

and he bent quickly as he whipped his balled fist with a terrible force
against Liko's head. I heard the skull crack, and Liko was still, a
piece of fur and meat lying dead against the snow.

Soli cursed again, and he bowed his head and pressed the flat of his
hand against his temple as he walked away.

Bardo came over to me, and I said, "Liko's dead." He draped his heavy
arm around my shoulders and squeezed. "Little Fellow," he said.

I tried to look at Liko but I could not. "He was alive," I whispered,
"and now he's dead."

Bardo dropped to his knees. He removed his mitten and felt beneath
Liko's fur for a heartbeat. "Too bad," he muttered as he shook his head.

"Too bad."

I wanted to throw my arms around Liko to touch his fur, to hold my hand
against his freezing nose. But I could not touch him. He was not an
alive being to be touched; he was a thing of fur and hardening blood and
bone, and soon, when the thallow returned or the wolves worked at his
meat, he would be nothing more than a stain on the snow. "He was so
pretty," Justine said. And then, so softly her words were nearly lost to
the wind, she said, "Liko, mi alasharia la shantih," which is the Devaki
prayer for the dead.

I tried to repeat the prayer, but, I could not make my lips form the
words. I had never before seen an animal die. I did not believe that
Liko's spirit would rest in peace on the other side of day. "There's no
glory when the ticking stops," the Timekeeper had told me. "There's only
blackness and the hell of everlasting nothingness." I looked at the
dog's body, and I saw nothingness. The wind roared in my ear and rippled
through his fur like waves upon false winter's sea, and I remembered I
had seen death before. Once, when I was a boy on the beach outside the
Hofgarten, I had seen a seagull pecking the corpse of one of his
brothers. I remembered this first vision of death very well: the torn,
oily feathers dirty with seafoam and sand, the bright red jewels of meat
holding my fascinated stare. And later that same day, the day I had
ended my solitary walks on the beach, I had seen the skeleton of a
beached whale revealed by the ebb-tide as it withdrew into the sea. I
remembered the great fingers of white bone curving upward from the wet
sand as if to grasp the wind's breath from the sky. Yes, I had seen
death before, but never the dying, never. The broken, seagull's wings,
the whale's naked ribs-these were things capriciously cast upon the
beach, bone reminders that there was a horror and final mystery to be
avoided at any cost. I looked at Liko's fine body, the thick neck, the
deep chest, and I saw that he was at once a thing and something more; he
was a unique being I had watched pass from life into death. It was this
passage that terrified me. It was the dying that made my teeth ache and
robbed my muscles of will. I looked at Liko and felt tears freezing in
my eyes; I looked at Liko and I despised myself because I realized he
was far beyond my pity or pain.

I would have buried him but the snow was too hard for digging. Down the
beach, Soli whistled to his dogs, a reminder that soon the forest would
be dark, that we had no time for burials. Justine, that innocent,
beautiful woman who thought she could never die, said a few foolish
words of consolation to me and went to join him. My mother stood over
Liko, rubbed her heavy eyebrows and cocked her head. "He was only a
dog," she said. "What is left to bury? We should go back to the sleds.

Before it's too dark." She left me there, too. I watched her unharness
Tusa and put him at the lead of the sled in Liko's place. "Barbarians!"

Bardo shouted at them. "By God, look at this poor dog!" He lifted his
head to the sky and let loose a thunderous curse. He cursed the thallow
for killing Liko, and he cursed the gods for letting him die; he cursed
Liko's sire and dame for whelping him; he cursed Soli and last of all he
cursed me. He bent low to the beach, cursing, and in his arms he hefted
a granite boulder which he placed over Liko's body. I lifted a rock a
smaller rock, and did the same. In this manner, working like madmen, we
quickly built a cairn over the dog.

When we were finished, Katharine came over with handfuls of fireflowers
she had picked in the woods. She laid them atop Liko's grave. "I'm
sorry, Mallory," she said. "You saw the thallow, didn't you? In a
dream-you knew this would happen."

"I saw ... possibilities. I knew but I didn't ... There's no way I can
make you see it, is there?"

I watched the flowers shrivel and lose their red fire; it only took a
few moments for the light to die. "You should have warned me, what you
saw. I could have saved him."

"I'm sorry."

"I don't think you are."

"I'm sorry for you."

There is not much left to tell of our long day's journey to the Devaki's
cave. Our passage through the forest was as quick and easy as I had
hoped. I remember that the island was beautiful. The green trees against
the soft, white slopes, the white and green hills where they touched the
blue skycuriously this perfection of colors comes instantly to mind
whenever I recall the tragic events of our journey. (I do not mean the
death of Liko; I am referring to the tragedies which were soon to come.)
Our dogs pulled us gliding over the gentle, gradually rising upland. It
was not so cold as it had been out on the ice, but it was cold enough to
crack trees. A few times we passed the shredded, fallen corpses of the
shatterwood trees half-buried in the snow. Though we never saw one
explode, the thunder of dying trees reverberated from hill to hill.

There was wood-dust and long white splinters driven into the drifts; I
saw that Soli was right, that the forest was no place to be at night.

At last, as the light faded and our shadows grew almost as long as trees
we came around the curve of a small hill. Before us was a larger hill,
and set into its northeast face like a black mouth was the cave of the
Devaki. Above us, to the north above both hills, high above the lesser
undulations of the world stood Kweitkel, vast and white and holy-or so
the Devaki believe. But standing there in the half-light and stillness,
looking up into the depths of the cave I did not feel holy at all; I
felt tired, desecrated, and very, very profane.

Chapter 9 - Yuri the Wise

From Man and the Bomb were born the Hibakusha, the worlds of Gaiea,
Terror, Death, and the First Law of the Civilized Worlds, which was that
man was forbidden to explode hydrogen into light. And the Hibakusha fled
and took to bed Law, and so were born the Aphasics, the Friends of God,
the Astriers, Autists, Maggids and Arhats of Newvania. And Terror wed
Death, and so were born the Vild and the great Nothingness beyond. And
Terror wed Law as well and begat the Hive Peoples, who valued life less
than Order, and so they surrendered their Free Will to the lesser god of
Order. Of the Hive Peoples we know almost nothing.

-from A Requiem for Homo Sapiens, by Horthy Hosthoh

Our entrance to the cave was a confusion of barking dogs and shouts and
children running between our sleds. With their little hands they peeled
back the sled covers to see if we had brought with us mammoth tongues or
shagshay liver or any other of the Devaki's favored delicacies. They
rapped the leather barrels of baldo nuts and shook their heads,
disappointed that our only remaining food was so meager and poor. They
seemed not to suspect that we were not their distant cousins but
civilized people come to steal their plasm. We stood near our sleds
waiting as their parents emerged from the mouth of the cave. I turned my
face to the entrance fires and let the heat melt the ice from my beard.

There were babies crying, the smell of roasting meats as well as the
stench of wet fur and rotting blood. I was unready for this stench, and
it made me sick. The cloying thickness of old piss sprayed on rocks, the
woodsmoke and cut pine, the reek of skin oils and baby vomit wafting
from the furs of the curious Devaki women-though Rainer's memory had
proven accurate it seemed that it was also incomplete; I had no memory
in my mind of these terrible smells. (This, I believe, is a flaw in the
workings of the akashic computers. The memory of smells is captured deep
within the limbic brain, sometimes too deep for the akashics to reach.)
The area between the firepits was strewn with gnawed bones and pieces of
hide and flesh; I had to step carefully lest I squash one of the
numerous, halffrozen piles of dog dung atop the snow. The men of the
Devaki-thick, rude men dressed as we were in shagshay furs-surrounded
us, touching our furs, touching our sleds, touching each other as they
spoke their words of welcome, ni luria Ia Devaki, ni luria Ia. Then
Soli, who was patting the head of one of the children, said, "I am Soli,
son of Mauli who was the son of Wilanu, the Whalekiller, whose father
was Rudolf, son of Senwe who left the Devaki many years ago to seek the
Blessed Isles." He turned to me and put his arm around my shoulders.

"This is my son Mallory; we are the people of Senwe, who was the son of
Jamaliel the Fierce."

I hated the touch of Soli's hand on my shoulder; I hated having to pose
as his son. I hated the stench of the cave and the running wounds on the
blunt hands of the men, and I hated the crush of stinking bodies
pressing me, the odor and intimations of disease and death. I hated all
these things and more, but I had little time to savor my hatreds because
Soli's recitation of our fake lineage had aroused great excitement.

There were laughs and shouts and gasps of astonishment. A huge, one-eyed
man limped forward and cupped his hand around the back of Soli's neck.

He did the same to me and said, "I am Yuri son of Nuri who was the son
of Lokni the Unlucky." Yuri, with his bristly gray beard and weathered
skin, was past middling old and taller than any of the forty men of the
cave except Bardo. He had a huge, high nose cutting between his
prominent cheekbones. While he spoke to us, he turned his head back and
forth like a thallow, his single eye scrutinizing our sleds and our
gaunt, growling dogs. He seemed to be searching for something he could
not find. He continued, "Lokni's father was Jyasi, son of Omar son of
Payat, who was Senwe's older brother and Jamaliel's son." He threw his
arms around Soli, pummeling his back with his fists. "We are
near-brothers," he said, and his great brown eye glistened in the light
of the fires. "Ni luria, ni luria, Soli wi Senwelina."

He led us inside the entrance to the cave. Thirty feet from the fires
there were two snow-huts, small domes made of cut snow blocks carefully
trimmed and fit together. The small hut nearest the rear of the cave had
a hole in the wall big enough to stick a head through. The other hut,
which was pitted with the shallow pockmarks of dripping water, was even
smaller. After Soli introduced my mother and Bardo as his sister-by
-marriage and nephew (this, too was part of our deception), Yuri stared
at them with his eye and told them that they were welcome to share the
smaller hut. He came up to Bardo and he squeezed his upper arm and felt
the muscles of his chest. He said, "Bardo is a strange name, and you are
a strange man, I think, strange but very strong." He looked my mother up
and down as if doubting that she was Bardo's mother, and told her, "You
should have named him Tuwa, the mammoth." He indicated that Soli and I,
and Justine and Katharine, were to share the larger hut. I thought I had
misheard him. Surely he could not really expect all of us to cram into
such a tiny space? I looked through the hole in the wall but it was too
dark to see anything. The smells of rotting fish and piss made me want
to kick the hut in. "You may lay your sleeping furs and patch the hole,
and you will be warm," Yuri said. "Now, I will show you the cave of
Jamaliel son of Ian whose father was Malmo the Lucky, son of.. ." and as
we went deeper into the cave, he recited our line of ancestry halfway
back to the mythical Manwe, who was the son of Devaki, mother of the
people. (According to the myth, the god Kweitkel thrust the tip of his
cone inside Devaki where it erupted, thus filling her womb with Yelena
and Reina and Manwe, and the other sons and daughters of the world.)

The cave was a lava tube opening seventy yards into the depths of the
hill. It had been formed, no doubt, when some gigantic bubble of gas was
trapped within a pocket of molten lava flowing from one of Kweitkel's
erupting vents. (The real Kweitkel, I mean, not the god.) The lava had
cooled and the gases had bled away through cracks in the hardened rock.

At some time in the distant past, a quake had fractured the end of the
tube, opening the cave to wind and snow, and to the tiny band of Alaloi
who had made it their home. Opposite our two snow-huts, but deeper
inside the nearly cylindrical cave, were the huts of one of the smaller
families of the tribe, the Sharailina. Midway into the cave -it was
difficult to see very much-a pendant of cooled lava hung from the
ceiling to the cave floor. The lava, perhaps molded and shaped by the
pressures of the wild, primal gases, had cooled unevenly; if one looked
at the pendant from behind, facing the entrance fires, the bulges of
rock and shadowy indentations took on the profile of an old man smiling.

"He is the Old Man of the Cave," Yuri told us, "and he is smiling
because deep winter has come and all his children have returned to him."

We went deeper into the cave, past the huts of the Reinalina and
Yelenalina families, until we came to the Manwelina's six huts, as deep
as I thought we could go. Then I heard a baby squalling, and Yuri
pointed into the darkness. "Deeper still are the birthing huts; it is my
granddaughter you hear crying."

We sat on the dirty furs laid between the huts of the Manwelina family.

Strictly speaking we were not of the Manwelina because our pretend
ancestor, Senwe, had left the family to form one of his own.

Nevertheless, Yuri welcomed us as family. He motioned for Liam and Seif,
his two huge sons, to sit with us while his wife served us bowls of hot
soup. Her name was Anala, which means "lifefire," and she was a stout,
well-formed woman with gray hair hanging to her waist. She smiled too
readily and too much, and I did not like it when she immediately
befriended my mother. I was suspicious of the way they hugged each other
and alternately cupped their hands and whispered in each other's ear. My
mother, I thought, had become a Devaki woman a little too quickly.

Yuri said, "My wife is happy to meet her near-sister, and who can blame
her?" Then he looked into the sick yellow glow of the burning oilstones
as if he were not happy at all. Plainly, he did not like my mother. To
Soli he said, "Tell us of your journey, tell us of Pelasalia, the
Blessed Isles."

While Soli told the carefully forged lies, the fake story of our
"miraculous" journey, the people of the Devaki gathered around us. Where
they could not sit, they stood with necks stretched and ears turned
toward Soli, hoping to hear his memorable words. When he had finished,
there were surprised gasps and cries of woe. Wicent, who was Yuri's
younger, shaggy brother, said, "It was a great tell. A sad tell, but a
great tell. We will pray for the spirits of our near-mothers and fathers
and children who died on the frozen sea."

What Soli had told them was that Senwe had not found the Blessed Isles,
that he had found instead a frozen, barren waste where the living was
hard and grim. Soli's ancestors, he lied, had neither prospered nor
multiplied. When his father, Mauli, had died, Soli said he had
determined to return the survivors of the family to their ancestral
home. "But Mallory's wife, Helena, and my three grandchildren took a
fever and died on the journey. And Bardo's wife died in childbirth
before we ever set out."

I rubbed the side of my nose in embarrassment because it was hard to
listen to such a fraudulent story. To my surprise (and, I suppose,
satisfaction), the Devaki seemed to believe every word of it. "We will
pray for the children especially," Yuri said. "When you arrived without
your children I was afraid to ask you what had happened."

With feigned bitterness Soli rubbed his temples and said, "The Blessed
Isles are a dream. To the south there is nothing but bare rocks and ice;
the ice goes on forever." He told them this, as we had planned, so that
none of the Devaki would kill themselves journeying south, seeking a
dream.

But Liam, whose blue eyes were wild with bravery and dreams, said, "You
should have gone farther south instead of returning to Kweitkel. South,
where the ice is not endless but gives way to the Blessed Isles. The air
is so warm, snow falls as water from the sky."

"There is only ice and death to the south," Soli said.

Liam looked at Katharine as she threw back the hood of her furs, and he
mumbled, "Perhaps it is good that you came north."

I did not like the pugnacity of his strong face; I did not like the way
he looked at Katharine as she brought the bowl of soup to her lips and
blew on the steaming broth..Even by civilized standards of beauty he was
too handsome a man, with his straight nose and long, pretty eyelashes.

His hair and his luxurious beard were golden, a color I never liked to
see on a human being. I suppose he had a charming smile-everyone said he
did-but when he opened his mouth to smile at Katharine, all I could
think was that his teeth were too large and fine, his lips too red, too
full, too sensual. "To the south," I said, for once agreeing with Soli,
"There is only ice and death. Only a fool would seek death by ice."

"It is said, what is foolishness to a weak man, a strong man does
bravely."

"After you've crossed a thousand miles of ice," I said, "and had to kill
your lead dog, then you may speak of bravery."

Liam looked at me quickly, as if realizing he could achieve more with
flattery than insults. "Of course all the Senwelina were strong and
brave to cross the frozen sea. To survive the storms, the cold of the
Serpent's Breath. My near-brother, Mallory, is very brave, and my
near-sister is very brave and beautiful. It is good you have returned
home so that such a beautiful woman does not have to marry Bardo, her
brave cousin."

I hated the way Katharine smiled at him as he said this. It was a bold
smile, an intimate smile laden with curiosity. I hated having to pose as
her brother. I wanted to grab Liam by the collar, to shake him, to tell
him that I was Katharine's cousin, not Bardo. I wanted to tell him, to
tell everybody that as soon as we returned to the City, Katharine would
marry her cousin, her real cousin. Instead I clamped my jaws shut and
said nothing.

Yuri got up and walked to the front of the cave. He removed several
ropes of meat hanging from the spit above the fire. He carried these
back to us slung over his arm, careless of the juices leaking from the
cracks in the blackened flesh. One of these ropes he presented to Soli,
while he kept one and handed the remaining one to his brother. "We
watched you coming from the south," Yuri said. "It has been a poor year;
the shagshay and the silk belly have fled to the Outer Islands, and Tuwa
is so sick with mouthrot and his numbers so diminished that we may not
hunt him." He brought the charcoaled meat to his nose and sniffed.

"We've had to hunt Nunki, the seal. But his numbers too are diminished
because the fish do not swim as they used to. Nunki does not leap to our
spears. This seal meat is the last of our meat. Liam would have eaten it
for breakfast, and who could blame him? But we saw you coming from the
south; and we knew that if you were men, not spirits as Wicent said you
must be, you would have a hunger for meat."

So saying he threw back his head and opened his mouth. He dipped the
meat rope in and severed a section of it with his strong, white teeth.

The meat, I saw to my horror, was raw beneath the black crust, Yuri bit
and chewed quickly and swallowed and bit again; he swallowed and chewed
and blood from the near-living meat ran over his red lips. As he chewed
he made a sucking, slobbering sound as of wetness being slapped against
wetness. He chewed with his mouth open, gustily pulping the tough meat.

Soli watched him carefully and then did as the old man did, devouring
the meat like a beast. Yuri ate a few more mouthfuls of meat, and he
passed what was left to his oldest son, Liam. Soli, with his face held
rigidly impassive as his jaws worked, offered me the disgusting,
mutilated rope of meat. But I could not touch it. I, who had so eagerly
planned this romantic quest for the secret of life-I was sickened and
frozen by the piece of life dangling from Soli's greasy fingers.

Liam looked at me as he tore at his meat. Yuri, too, had his eye turned
to me, obviously wondering why I did not accept the meat. "It is good,
fat meat," he said as he winked at me and licked his mustache. "I hate
to kill Nunki, but I love the taste of his meat."

Soli was staring at me, and Wicent and his sons, Wemilo and Haidar, were
staring too. My mother and Katharine and a hundred curious Devaki men
and women-everyone was staring at me. Bardo, sitting cross-legged next
to me, nudged me with his elbow. I reached out to take the meat. It was
still warm from the fire, hard on the surface, hot and soft and yielding
within. I held it lightly, as if afraid my nervous fingers would bruise
the meat. Greasy juices oozed from the broken crust, running over my
hands. I felt hot juices squirt inside my mouth, the sudden hot nausea
deep in my throat. The smell of roasted meat made me want to retch. I
turned my head, swallowing saliva, and I said, "I should give this meat
to my cousin, Bardo. He is bigger than I and hungrier than a bear at the
end of midwinter spring."

I glanced at Bardo, who was indeed eyeing the meat as he chewed his
mustache. Bardo, I thought, despite his layers of acquired culture and
taste, despite the deep repugnance of a civilized man for anything other
than cultured meat, despite the sheer barbarity of eating living meat,
Bardo if he were hungry enough would eat anything.

But Yuri shook his head back and forth and said, "Does a son refuse the
life his mother and father gave him? No, and so he may not refuse the
meat his father offers him nor the drink his mother makes. Are you sick,
Mallory? Sometimes the cold and wind make a man so sick with hunger he
cannot eat. Then his hunger dies and his meat falls away from his bones,
and his hungry ghost is too eager to see the other side of day. I think
you are a hungry man who has denied his hunger too long: This a blind
man could see. Shall I send Anala to make some blood tea? To awaken your
hunger?"

I held the rope of meat in my hands and I swallowed back my vomit and I
said, "No, I will eat the meat." From the lore of Rainer's akashic
records I suddenly remembered the recipe for blood tea. Great as my
disgust was at the eating of meat, I had a greater horror of drinking
the tea, an unbelievable mixture of seal's blood, urine, and the bitter
root of the shatterwood tree. I tilted my head back and dangled the meat
above my mouth. I took a bite of meat.

I will not pretend the meat tasted very different from the cultured
meats my mother had made me eat as a child. It did not. True, the meat
was fattier and rimed with char and much, much rarer than any meat
should be. But it was still meat. "Meat's meat," Bardo said, stuffing
himself with meat after I had eaten my share, No, it was not the taste
of meat that bothered me; it was the idea of chewing flesh that had once
jumped to the command of a living brain, flesh that had been alive. I
chewed and swallowed slimy proteins little different from those cloned
from de-brained muscle cells and cultured in vats. I ate my portion of
meat horrified yet fascinated at this need of life to feed from other
life. The tastes of iron and salt filled my mouth, and my cold,
exhausted body awakened to its urge to life. I took another bite of meat
and then another, and still another. It tasted good. I was so hungry I
filled my mouth with bloody gobbets; I chewed so quickly I bit my
cheeks, I swallowed my own blood along with that of the seal's and ate
until I felt the urge to vomit. When I could eat no more I handed the
meat to Bardo.

The rest of our meal was even more disgusting. And worse, the old,
decayed foods Anala and the women brought forth did not even taste good.

The Devaki men and women, their children too, cracked baldo nuts between
their teeth. They ate the plump nut-meats, which were yellow and moldy,
covered with a white fuzz. Wicent's wife, Liluye, a skinny, nervous
woman with stumpy yellow teeth, prepared us a soup of rotten thallow
eggs. The big blue eggs had incubated too long, but the Devaki ate them
anyway, straining out only the eyes of the embryos. (They did this
because thallows are blind at birth, and they did not wish to acquire
this blindness.) There were other foods as well, foods I could not
believe a human could eat: raw chunks of seal fat swallowed as my mother
would a ball of chocolate; the raw intestines of thallows and other
birds; year-old mammoth bones which had been buried and allowed to
soften and rot; and of course, the ever-present bowls of reeking blood
tea. (I do not mean to imply that the Devaki took no care of the
substances they swallowed. This was not so. Curiously, they would drink
no water containing the tiniest particle of dirt. And as to the
aforementioned foods, they ate them only because they were hungry.

Hunger is the great spice of life. Later that winter, when we were
nearly starving, worse horrors were to come.)

After we finished our meal, Yuri massaged his belly and said a prayer
for the souls of the animals we had eaten. "The winter has been cold and
hard," he said. "And last winter was hard, and the one before that. And
the winter before, when Merilee died, that was a bad year.,But if you
had come five winters ago you would have feasted on mammoth steaks." He
yawned and squeezed Anala's thigh. She sat next to him searching through
his head hair with her fingers. "But tomorrow Tuwa is sick with the
mouthrot and the Devaki are hungry, and so we hunt the seal," Anala
removed an insect-I think it was a louse-from the gray hair above his
ear. She crushed it between her dirty fingernails and swallowed it. Yuri
motioned to Soli, Bardo and myself
"Are the men of the Senwelina, who
are Devaki as I am Devaki, are they too tired to hunt the fat, gray seal
with us tomorrow?"

I should have let Soli answer since he was the supposed head of our
family. But I was full of seal meat and horror, and I could not bear the
thought of murdering so intelligent an animal as a seal. "We are tired,"

I blurted out. "We are tired and our dogs need rest."

Soli flashed me a fierce look as Liam rubbed his greasy hands over the
face of his younger brother, Seif (Was this a protection against the
cold? A barbaric benediction? I searched my mind, but I had no memory of
such a custom.) With a broken fingernail Liam pried a strand of meat
from between his teeth. "You were not too tired to eat the seal," he
pointed out.

He bent over me suddenly, and I smelled his thick reek as he ran his
calloused hand under my furs and tested the muscles of my neck and back.

How I hated the Devaki customs! I hated this intimate touching; I hated
the cold, greasy touch of a strange man's hands, the horror of another's
skin touching mine. "Mallory is thin but still strong," he announced.

"Strong enough to hunt the seal, I think. But he is tired; perhaps he
should rest in his furs while his near-brothers bring him fat-rib and
tenderloin and other delicate pieces of meat."

I twisted away from him. How easy it would be, I thought, to grab his
windpipe and tear it from his throat. I twisted and I pulled my collar
tight around my neck, and then I said a thing that made Bardo and Soli,
and the others from the City, look at me strangely. "We are tired," I
said, "but not too tired to hunt. On the southern ice there are no
mammoth so we hunt the seal often. I have killed many seals; tomorrow I
shall kill a seal for Liam and give him the liver,"

As I said this I was reminded of my brag to penetrate the Entity. But
where that brag had been impulsive and had nearly cost me my life, to
Liam I had bragged to a purpose, I would kill a seal. Somehow I would
kill a noble animal. I would do this in order to shame Liam into silence
and to gain approval for my "family." Then, I thought, we might more
quickly find what we were looking for and leave this filthy, barbaric
place.

We sat there on the furs for a while telling stories-false stories-of
hunting seals on the southern seas, Anala's pretty daughter, Sanya,
served blood tea, which the Devaki slurped noisily, smacking their lips
and tongues. Later I was shocked to see Sanya's baby sucking milk from
her nude, blue veined breast. Everything seemed to shock me that night,
especially the uninhibited cries of delight coming from the nearby huts
of the Yelenalina. I overheard a woman gasping out intimate instructions
to her husband-I hoped it was her husband-and I listened to the ragged
breathing and rustling furs, the sounds of human- beasts rutting.

Immersed as I was in these new sensations, I hardly noticed Yuri moving
closer to me. I stared at the faint petals of fire fluttering above the
oilstone in front of me, and I was shocked when he softly said, "You
should not kill the seal. Nunki is your doffel. That is why you had
trouble eating seal meat-I should have seen this immediately."

The Devaki, I remembered, believe that every man's soul is mirrored in
the soul of a particular animal, his doffel, his other-self whom he may
not hunt.

I looked around quickly, but no one was paying us any attention. Soli
and Justine had returned to our hut. My mother and Katharine sat with
Anala while Bardo entertained-if that is the right word-the others with
a song he composed as he sang it.

I turned to Yuri and said the first thing that came to mind, "No, Ayeye,
the thallow is my doffel. My grandfather told me so when I became a
man."

He grabbed my arm suddenly, looking at me with his sad eye as he said,
"Sometimes it is very hard to determine which animal holds our
other-self It is hard to see and mistakes are made."

"My grandfather," I lied, for I had no grandfather whom I knew, "was a
very wise man."

just then everyone started laughing because Bardo had mispronounced two
words of his song, which had completely changed their meaning. He had
meant to sing:

I am a lonely man from the southern ice Searching for an elegant wife.

But he had gotten the vowels all wrong, and the lines came out as:

I am a purple man from the southern ice Searching for an elegant lice.

He seemed not to notice his mistake, not even when Anala cackled like a
snow loon, slapped her thighs and started searching through Liam's
blonde hair to see if she could find Bardo any "elegant lice."

Apparently, everyone thought his mistake was intentional, that he was a
great wit, not just a silly buffoon.

Yuri smiled and gripped my arm more tightly. His hands were as huge as
Bardo's but harder, toughened by years of work and cold. "Sometimes," he
said-and there was a peculiar urgency to his voice-"sometimes
grandfathers, who are very near to their grandsons, cannot see the soul
hiding behind the eyes. And you have difficult eyes, a blind man could
see that. They are blue and fierce as an ice-mist, and they look far
away. Can you blame your grandfather, Mauli, for mistaking your soul for
the angry soul of the thallow? But Ayeye is not your doffel, I need only
a single eye to see that. Nunki the seal, who loves the taste of
sea-salt and the ocean's cold peace-he is your doffel."

It is impossible to explain here the beliefs of the Alaloi. There is no
space to record the rich mythologies, the totem system devised to
commune with the spirits of animals and with what they call the
World-soul. (In any case I am not sure I really understand the concept
of telepathic communications with trees and thallows and seals, even
rocks. I do not understandeven now, after all that has happened-how the
Alaloi creates the world moment by moment in the trance of the eternal
Now-moment.) It is a complicated system and old, so old the historians
have no record of its beginnings. Burgos Harsha believed the original
Alaloi had borrowed piecemeal bits of Sufi mysticism and other ancient
philosophies that would suit their new environment. They had also
adopted, he thought, the totem system and dreamtime of Old Earth's
ancient Strailia tribes. There, in the deserts of that isolated
continent, man had had fifty thousand years of solitude to develop this
system of symbol and thought. It was an elaborate system, logically
consistent, dependent on strange hierarchies of thought and mind. There
were rules by which men and women lived their lives. A man's method of
building a fire, the direction in which he pisses (to the south, always
to the south), the times he is permitted copulation with his wife-every
aspect of life is determined by this refined system. No matter how
primitive and naive it seemed to me, it represented the longest unbroken
intellectual scheme in man's history. And since Yuri, as eldest of his
tribe, was a master of this system, I should have accepted that he could
determine the one animal I was not permitted to hunt. But I did not
accept this and I said, "Tomorrow I shall hunt Nunki as I said I would."

Yuri shook his head back and forth. He whistled the long, low note the
Devaki whistle when they mourn for the dead. "It is sad," he said, "It
is not well known that once in a great while a man is born who does not
accept his other-self. And not accepting this he is vulnerable because
the other-self will seek to destroy him rather than be left alone
forever. For him there can be no joining, no unity. And so he must kill,
he is doomed to kill this half of himself-do you understand? If he does
not do this, the remaining half-the deathless-self-can never grow to
fullness. It is very painful and hard, and I must ask you: Are you
willing to be a murderer?"

We sat there talking for a long time, gazing at the cave's walls. All
the others had long since gone to bed, and there I sat listening to the
words of a superstitious old man. Yuri had a richly resonant voice. With
the intonation of a master storyteller-or shaman-he held me with his
voice, speaking, on and on, far into the night. His words contained
echoes of arcane philosophies and mysteries. His words were too simple
to be taken seriously, yet they disturbed me even so. He told me that
the fear of this self-murder would make me sick; he prophesied that a
day would come, and soon, when my courage would flee like a snow hare
into the forest, a day when I would gnash my teeth and cry: All is
false! "For what is the great fear?" he asked me. "It is not the dread
of cold nor of the white bear's teeth. These are fears of flesh, fears
we forget sitting by the warm fire or playing with our wives. It is not
even the fear of death because we know that if the tribe prays for our
ghosts we will live forever on the other side of day. No, the great fear
is the fear of the self inside. We fear becoming this deathless-self. To
discover the unknown within is like jumping into the mouth of the
volcano. It burns the soul. If you kill your doffel, you will come to
know this fear. And you must understand, this is pain without measure or
end."

I finally limped back to our hut in a state of utter exhaustion. It had
been the longest day of my life. (Excluding, of course, those days in
the manifold-they were not really days-spent in slowtime.) I crawled
through the entrance tunnel into the hut's glowing interior and found
that someone had laid out my sleeping furs on a bed of snow. I climbed
into them. The pain of my knee and the other pain made me lie uneasily.

The oilstones were burning and they cast a warm yellow light over the
sleeping figures on their snow beds. Katharine lay next to me, her
breathing as even and gentle as the lapping waves of the sea. Soli, I
noticed to my astonishment, was holding Justine in his arms as he slept
fitfully. (I do not know which was the greater shock: this tenderness of
his or to see that he, the broody Soli, was actually capable of sleep.)
I was exhausted but I was also trapped in that overly stimulated state
of wakefulness beyond exhaustion. I thought about Yuri's words. I could
not sleep. Soli's grinding teeth, the plip-plop of water falling from
the roof in syncopation with the overly loud beats of my heart, the
hissing of the wind through the ice-patched hole in the wall-these
sounds kept me awake. The snow walls were too good of an insulation
against the cold. The hut was too warm and it stank. The heat of the
sleeping bodies brought out the reek of rotting piss and my own sour
sweat and other odors I could not identify. So awful was this reek that
I could hardly breathe. The air smothered me like an old fur soaked with
vomit. I felt a sickness and dread in the pit of my stomach. I flung off
the furs, dressed quickly and ran from the hut to the mouth of the cave
where I spewed my feast onto the snow. I thought of my promise to murder
a seal the next day, and I retched until my stomach was knotted and dry.

As I stumbled outside the cave a dog growled and snapped, and then
another and another. I turned in a half-crouch back toward the cave.

There, in the ragged, orange light, against the flickering tongues of
fire, the dogs were leaping at their leashes. Tusa, and Nura, Rufo and
Sanuye, my poor, starved sled dogs, fought among themselves, snapping up
half-digested pieces of seal meat from the pink slop steaming on the
snow. Tusa growled and slashed at gentle Rufo, who yelped and contented
himself with lapping up one of the smaller puddles of vomit. Then Tusa
ripped open Nura's ear, and Sanuye ate the slushy snow red with Nura's
blood.

I pulled the dogs apart. There was a jumble of snapping muzzles and
barks and surging fur. One of the dogs bit me. I tied them tighter to
their stakes, and I scooped mounds of snow over the mess I had made.

What a terrible thing true hunger was! How wrong I was to have starved
the dogs! My bleeding hand burned as I thought about this, and there was
a pain in my empty stomach. Was this life, then? Was this emptiness
inside and desire for food the price of living? No, I thought, it is too
terrible a price, and I wondered at the vanity which had brought me to
the Devaki seeking the meaning of life. The secret of life-could it
really be embroidered upon the chromosomes of these filthy,
blood-drinking people? Could their ancestors really have captured within
their DNA the mystery of the Ieldra?

I imagined I had the skills of a splicer and an imprimatur, that I could
unravel the strands of Yuri's DNA as an historian, in his search for
knowledge, might pull apart an ancient tapestry. Would I find coded
among the twisting sugars and bases information that the Ieldra had
woven long ago? Was there some message coiled within the testes of
Wicent or Liam, some secret of meaning, a right way of living for all
mankind? And if this message existed, why should it be shrouded in
mystery? If the Ieldra could tell us to look in our past and future for
the secret of life, why couldn't they tell us what this secret was?

Why couldn't the gods, if they were gods, simply talk to us? I looked up
at the stars, at the bright triangle of Wakanda, Eanna and Farfara
twinkling above the eastern horizon. Beyond them the core of the galaxy
was streaming with laser pulses in a way the mechanics could not
explain. If I opened my eyes as wide as I could, would they burn with
the light of the gods? If I turned my face to the distant solar wind of
the core stars, would I hear the gods whispering in my ears?

I listened but the only sound was the sigh of the wind sifting through
the forest below. From the western slope of Kweitkel came the howl of a
wolf calling out to the sky. I stood there for a while listening and
watching, watching and waiting. After a while I turned back to the cave.

Tomorrow I would kill a seal and perhaps understand, if not the secret
of life, the meaning of death.

Chapter 10 - The Aklia

Man cannot bear too little reality.
-Saying of the Cetics

Early the next morning I awoke to a chorus of coughing and spitting, the
sounds the women and men of the Reinalina family in the huts across the
cave made as they hawked up clots of phlegm and cleared their sore
throats. My throat, too, was raw from the intensely cold air of the
previous day's journey. (Was it only a day ago, I wondered, that the
thallow had killed Liko? It seemed like a year.) Dressing was painful.

My leg was so stiff I could hardly straighten it. Although I was very
hungry, I could not eat the nuts Justine offered me. "All our throats
are sore," she said while she roasted nuts over the fire at the center
of the hut. "It hurts to swallow them, I know, but they don't taste bad
if you chew them quickly, and you'll need your strength if you're really
going to hunt a seal. Are you?"

Katharine, who was on her knees dressing, looked at me as if she knew
exactly what I would do. She said nothing. Soli sat by the oilstones
scraping ice from his furs. I marveled at how erect and straight he
could hold himself even when sitting-and this despite the pain of his
newly sculpted spine. (For some reason, Soli had taken longer to heal
than the rest of us. Mehtar had hypothesized that there was a limit to
the resiliency of rejuvenated cells and that Soli, who had thrice been
brought back to youth, was close to that limit.) He looked up, and for a
moment his eyes moved over the objects and features of the hut: the
rectangular block of snow used to stop the tunnelway against the
drilling wind, the cracked, peeling drying rack above the oilstones, the
long, serrated snow-knife, the hide-scrapers, spears, bowls, drills and
other tools stacked against the curving walls, the soft, still-warm
sleeping furs atop the snow bed on which he and Justine had so recently
lain. He said, "Yes, Mallory will hunt the seal."

I looked at him and lowered my voice, "We spent half a year planning
this expedition but we forgot one thing."

He contracted his black eyebrows and stroked his beard. "What thing?"

"Coffee," I said, feeling the ache in my head. "I'm dying for the taste
of coffee."

"You're hungry," he said. "That's why your head aches."

"I didn't say my head aches."

"You didn't have to say anything." And then, "Do you think you're the
only one who craves coffee?"

I coughed and looked at Katharine combing her long, black hair. I said,
"Perhaps this journey was a stupid idea."

"Eat some nuts," Soli said.

"Eat; don't think about coffee or your stupidity. You'll have time
enough for both when we return to Neverness."

I picked up a handful of nuts and popped them in my mouth. They tasted
dry and bitter. "You have to chew them," Justine said. To Soli she held
out a bowl of roasted nuts, which he took in the following manner: He
placed his long hands over hers and watched her eyes as she slowly drew
her hands away, slowly allowing him to take the weight of the bowl. With
this intimate gesture they touched each other's skin and caressed with
their eyes. Obviously, despite their very different motivations and
dreams, despite years of mutual neglect and rancor, despite the
bitterness of crueltime, they loved each other deeply. It was a love, I
thought, renewed by their sense of isolation, by the clarity of frozen
ice and open sky. And how not to love the beautiful Justine with her
endless optimism, her zest and happiness at merely being alive? Yes, I
could see why Soli loved her, because we all loved her; what I could not
understand was why she loved him.

After we had munched down our breakfast, Bardo and my mother crowded
into our hut to drink a few bowls of herb tea. What a strange little
group we were, sitting elbow to elbow in a circle, hunched over, sipping
from our bone bowls, pretending to be Alaloi! What a miracle that we had
fooled the Devaki into believing we were their near-brothers! In a way,
I was glad enough to be posing as Soli's son. Everyone had accepted Soli
as my father, whereas Liam had made jokes about Bardo's conception. "I
don't like that man," Bardo said to me, all the while rubbing the sleep
from his large, brown eyes. (It was a pity, I thought, that Mehtar had
little altered the ugliness of his great bulging forehead or his bulbous
nose.) "Did you hear what Liam said? He said your mother shouldn't be
left alone when we go hunting, or else she might be raped again by a
bear and give birth to another Bardo. What a joke!"

I was glad none of the Devaki knew I was my mother's son, not Justine's.

If they had known, they probably would have joked that Soli had raped my
mother. "If they knew my mother," I whispered to Bardo, "they'd feel
sorry for any bear-or anyone else-who tried to rape her." As far as I
knew, my mother had lain with a man only once in her life, the night she
had conceived me.

Soli finished his tea and announced it was time to go. He reached for
his seal spears. "Yuri and his family will be waiting." He was frowning,
looking at Katharine when he said, "We'll leave you women to do your ...
women's work."

Somehow I did not think Soli was referring to the sewing of skins or the
suckling of babies, the everyday work of the Devaki women. Clearly, he
suspected that Katharine and I were lovers. Clearly, he wanted to
torment me with thoughts of her lying beneath the Devaki men. Either
that or he wanted to torment himself-I am not sure which, But I did not
think Katharine would have much of a chance to "do her work" that day,
Most of the men would be away hunting, and I did not think she would
have any luck collecting semen from young boys.

As we put on our furs, my mother was looking from me to Soli to
Katharine, and then back at me. I did not like the way she looked at
Katharine. It was a look, I thought, of envy, probably because Katharine
was capable of work that she was not. "Go hunt your seals," my mother
said. "And while you are gone we womenwill prepare your beds. To lie in
when you return."

We joined the other men and boys of the Manwelina family at the entrance
of the cave. The many teams of dogs gobbled their food as the men laid
out the harnesses and iced the runners of their sleds. The work was cold
and painful in the pink light of the dawn. Beneath ice-glazed boulders
and fir trees heavy with snow, Yuri and Wicent, and Liam, Seif, Haidal,
Jinje and the other men of the Manwelina, had their sleds belly-up
towards the still dark sky. Since ice would not adhere directly to bone,
they plastered a paste of vegetable muck and pulverized dirt mixed with
water and urine over the runners, repairing the nicks and divots with a
thick shoeing of frozen mud. The morning air was so cold that the paste
froze immediately upon contact, making it difficult to shape and
smoothe. It was frustrating work. I expected to hear grumbling and
curses, but the Devaki men joked and laughed, all the while dipping
their fingers into the bag of warm mud they wore inside their furs next
to their skins. Quickly, precisely and quickly, they daubed blobs of mud
over bone. Ten feet from me Liam artfully smoothed over a divot with his
fingers and then quickly stuck them in his mouth so they wouldn't
freeze. The air was thick with little shouts and puffs of steam and
muddy spittle as the men sucked their fingers and laughed and talked and
spat. Bardo was having a difficult time with his sled, and so was I. He
moved over next to me and muttered, "Isn't it romantic? The cold, clear
air, the lonesome cry of the wolf, peace, nature's sweet kiss,
serenity-and the taste of pissy muck, Thank you, Little Fellow, for
bringing me to this enlightened place."

I watched Liam spray lukewarm water from his mouth. He smeared the
quickly freezing liquid over the mud shoeing. In little time, the
runners of his sled glistened with layers of ice. I looked around the
clearing. Yuri's cousins, Arani and Bodhi, and their sons, Yukio, Jemmu
and Jinje were spraying their sleds, too.

Bardo shook his head at jaywe and Arwe, who were also Yuri's cousins,
and he said, "They've had a lifetime of this stinking work. How do they
stand it?" Then he bent and spat water along the runners of his sled,
doing as he saw the others do, binding ice to frozen mud. "This is what
I truly hate," he said as he hefted his waterskin. I loathe having to
carry this bag of water next to my belly. What is man-a heat machine to
keep water from freezing? The damn sloshing galls me, by God!"

Soli saw us whispering and strode over to us. "Quiet," he said. And
then, "Situ wanya, manse ri damya," which might be translated as:
Children complain; men restrain (themselves).

We loaded the sleds and harnessed the dogs, and Yuri gathered his family
around him. He said, "Mallory has promised to take a seal, and so
Mallory must tell us where Nunki is waiting."

The men looked at me, and I remembered that among the Alaloi promises to
take meat are not made lightly. A hunter may promise a kill only when he
perceives that his meat animal is ready to "leap to his spear." To do
this he must fall into the state of auvania, or open-waiting, a sort of
trance state in which he feels wild and fey and can see through the
black sea of death to the other side of day. Such visions he may not
seek-they are a gift of the to-be-slain animal's living spirit, his
anima. I faced Kweitkel's white cone and let my eyes focus on infinity.

I tried to practice this seeing, tried to askeer, as the Alaloi say; I
tried too hard. No vision came to me. But the men were waiting, so I
pretended the seal's anima had appeared before me. I said-I lied: "Lo
askaratha ni Nunki, mi anaslan, to moratha wi Nunkiyan ima. I sagely
pointed west because the western islands, Takel and Alisalia, seemed
like golden mountains of snow and I felt an urge to be closer to them.

Yuri nodded his head and turned his eyes east to greet dawn. "Eura
sawel, "he said, and we repeated after him, "Lura sawel, "all the time
standing in that curious position in which the Alaloi do reverence to
the sun: Like insects I had once seen in the zoo, we stood with our arms
together and raised to the sun, our fingers closed and pointed towards
the snowy ground. With our heads bowed, we stood on one leg, the other
leg bent up behind. We stood in this ridiculous position for a long time
because the great Manwe, on the tenth morning of the world, had so
honored his uncle, the sun. Then Yuri grasped the rails of his sled,
whistled to his dogs and we were off.

The day broke cold and calm with the hills smothered in near-silence.

The only sounds were the schussing of the sleds and the snow loons'
warbling as they glided and circled, circled and dived, looking for
their morning meals. On the far ridges the shagged limbs of the fir
trees stood out clearly, so clearly I could almost distinguish the
separate needles, We drove straight down the gently sloping forest to
the sea. The land was folded and in places cut with ravines and granite
cliffs. I was wary of those cliffs because thallows made their aeries
there, above the dark green trees. There were no thallows that day,
however, even though the snow hares and sleekits were busy digging for
berries. Once I saw an arctic fox, and more than once we came upon wolf
tracks frozen in the snow. But they were old tracks; most of the wolves,
Yuri said, had abandoned the island to follow the shagshay heards.

When we reached the sea there was some trouble crossing the frozen
breakers, though far less than we had encountered the previous day on
the ragged southern shore. By late morning we were free of the icy
jungle, running fast over the cotton cake snow of the Starnbergersee.

About five miles from land I nodded to Yuri and we scattered. I say
"about" because the air was heavy as liquid over the ice, a huge, blue
lens distorting distances, making far things seem near. Four sleds
glided northwest towards Alisalia, which wavered on the horizon across
miles of white ocean; nine sleds-Yuri's and Liam's among them-headed in
the direction of Jakel and Waasalia. We fanned out over a circle of ice
perhaps two miles in diameter. I halted my sled at a likely spot. I
presumed all the other hunters did the same. I unharnessed Nura, who had
been trained to sniff out seal holes. To the north, some fifty yards
away, Bardo had his seal dog leashed, though it was not clear who was
leading whom. The powerful Samsa pulled Bardo in jerks across the snow,
trotting this way and that, occasionally sticking his black nose in the
snow and blowing out a cloud of white powder. To the south was Soli, and
to the west, across the brilliant ice, Yuri and his sons had apparently
found their holes and were cutting snow blocks to build a wall against
the wind.

The Alaloi call the seal's hole the aklia. I held Nura on a leash of
braided leather as he pawed the snow and sniffed, searching for his
aklia. He seemed happy to be free from the sled; twice he lifted his leg
and yellowed the snow just for the fun of it, Then he caught a scent,
let out an excited bark, and lunged at the leash. He started digging at
the snow. After marking the spot with a stick, I dragged the
disappointed dog downwind and staked him to the ice. I did the same with
my other dogs, Rufo, Sanuye and Tusa. Seals are practically blind but
their sense of hearing is extraordinarily keen, and I did not want the
dogs' barks to alert my seal. I returned to the aklia carrying my
feeler-stick and ice-saw, and other more murderous gear.

Seals, being earth-type mammals, cannot breathe water, as can certain
peculiar orders of carked mammals bred to the seas of Agathange and
Balaniki and other watery worlds. They must have air, and so each seal
keeps many holes in the ice open throughout the winter. A bull seal-and
perhaps a cow-will bob up and down in the water as the ice crusts are
forming in early winter, breaking and rebreaking the thin, frozen sheets
as the ice builds and builds around the aklia. He visits his many holes,
bobbing up and plunging down, breaking through to the air, breathing and
swimming on to his next hole. When winter deepens to its longest,
coldest days, the walls of the hole are nearly ten feet thick. As the
snows fall and blow and freeze and melt and refreeze, a snowbridge forms
over the hole, obscuring it from the eyes of the hunter, but not from
the dogs' sensitive noses. Beneath the snowbridge, the seal comes up to
sit on the sloping ice ledges on either side of the hole. There, under
the arch of packed snow, in midwinter spring, the cows give birth to
their furry pups. There the seals huddle and play, safe from the wind
and drowning and the teeth of the killer whales-but not safe from men.

I took my curved feeler-stick and pushed it down through the snowbridge,
down into the hole I could not see. By rotating it around in a circle I
felt out the size of the hole and determined its center. Then I lifted
my face to the north wind, which stung me even through layers of grease.

It was cold, not so cold as deep cold, but colder than blue cold. My
eyes watered and my toes were a little numb. I thought it might be a
long wait for the seal, so I cut blocks of snow and built a wall around
the north rim of the aklia to shield against the killing wind. Next I
slid my wooden marker-bob down through the center of the hole until it
touched the water. As the seal came up to breath, he-I prayed it would
be a bull because I dreaded killing a pregnant female-he would displace
a large quantity of water, causing the marker to bob up. When it sank, I
would know the water had fallen back to the ocean's surface and the seal
had risen. "Lo luratha lani Nunki," I prayed, and I spread a square of
silk belly fur in front of the hole. I stood on it wiggling my stiff
toes, hoping its insulation would keep my feet from freezing like blocks
of ice. The last thing I did was to rest my harpoon across two forked
sticks that I shoved into the crusty snow. The detachable head of the
harpoon, the wickedly sharp, barbed, murderous head, was made of
whalebone and had a carved ring at its base. Knotted to this ring was a
long, braided leather cord. I wrapped the end of the cord around my hand
and watched the marker-bob. When it rose I would pick up my harpoon, and
when it fell-when the seal had risen and the marker fell-I would thrust
the harpoon into the center of the aklia. I would do this murderous
thing because in my jealousy and pride I had promised to do so. And so I
waited. Precisely how long I waited I do not know. What is time without
a clock with which to measure it? How long did I stand in that difficult
attitude of the hunter, feet together, buttocks high, looking down,
always down, watching the marker-bob in the seal's hole? How long, pela
Nunki? How long must a hungry man wait until his emptiness is filled?

"Three days," Yuri had told me the night before. "Three days is not too
long to wait because Nunki has many holes. At the last moment his anima
might be too frightened to make the great journey, and so he will make
the shorter journey to another hole."

I watched and I waited bent over like a crippled old man. I stood
absolutely still while the muscles along the back of my legs began to
knot and burn; I waited a long time.

It is said that patience is the supreme virtue of the hunter. Very well,
I told myself, I would be patient. I listened to the wind slash across
the ice; I listened to the individual whorls and eddies which flowed
together into gusts and then nearly died before building and surprising
me with stronger, colder blasts. Occasionally the wind would die
altogether, and there would be silence. These long spells filled me with
unease and restless anticipation. I did not want to hear the murmur of
my own heart, nor was I eager for the explosive rush of air when the
seal came up to breathe, when he came, if he came at all. There were
many things I did not want to hear. I knew that the great white bears
hunted seals and hunted humans, too. According to Yuri, Totunye liked to
sneak up close to an aklia, to lie in wait before pouncing and bashing
in the hunter's head with his murderous paw. When stalking across the
snowdrifts the bears are impossible to see, and they make almost no
noise. I listened for the swish of bear fur against ice, waiting. From
the north there came a distant moan. It was the wind again, and it
swelled into a low howl, whipped across the ice and began to roar. I
waited a long time and I was very cold. My bladder filled. Far above me
the yellowish glare off the icefields vibrated against the blueness of
the sky. The Devaki call this cold shimmer of yellow-chrome an iceblink
I suppose because the brightness makes them blink. I blinked my eyes,
all the while staring at the marker-bob set into the aklia. I thought of
the pain in my bladder and the pain of the bear's teeth, and other
pains. I tried to concentrate. I imagined the seal's anima was
whispering in my ears, calling out to me, but it was only the wind. The
wind cut my face, and I waited, and I blinked my eyes, and ... The
marker-bob rose. I picked up my harpoon, waiting for the marker-bob to
fall. As it disappeared into the aklia, with both hands I grasped the
long harpoon high above my head. I drove it down into the snow. It slid
easily through the crust, and then there was the sickening resistance of
the harpoon's barb piercing the seal. A deep, anguished bellow resounded
beneath the snow as the seal called to me. I shouted, "Lo moras li
Nunki!" and I gripped the leather cord attached to the harpoon's head.

There was a violent pull which nearly jerked me off my feet. I dug my
heels into the snow, leaning backward, straining against the cord while
I wrapped it around my back. "Mallory moras li Nunki!" I heard Bardo
call out. And then, echoing across the ice from aklia to aklia, growing
ever fainter, the cry: Mallory moras li Nunki!"

I heaved backward trying to pull the seal from his hole. There was a
stab of pain in my sore knee. I gained a few feet. And then, forward
again as the seal fought me and backward, and suddenly, beneath the
snowbridge, the seal surged with life and pulled me off my feet. I slid
toward the aklia with my face and chest scraping the snow. If I did not
let go, the seal would pull me down through the crumbling snowbridge,
down into the killing sea. I gripped the cord more tightly. I tried to
flip onto my back and rotate my heels forward, to dig them into the
snow. But I fouled my legs on the cord even as the snowbridge began to
buckle and collapse. I was helplessly ensnarled by the tightening cord.

"Let gol" a voice boomed out. But I could not let go. Then the cord
tightened behind me. I turned to see Bardo, with his eyes bulging and
his fat red cheeks puffed out, heaving against the cord. "Pull, damn
you!" he shouted.

I found my feet and pulled at the cord. I stared down into the open
aklia. From beneath the blocks of snow floating and bobbing atop the
churning sea there emerged a great, black seal. High on his side, above
the flipper, the base of the harpoon's head stuck out of a bloody hole
in his skin. I heaved so hard I thought the harpoon would pull free. But
it held, and foot by foot we hauled the seal out of the aklia onto the
snow. I was horrified because the old bull was still alive. He let loose
a cough that sounded like an exhausted sigh, and bright arterial blood
sprayed from his mouth onto the snow.

"Mori-sel" I said to Bardo, "kill him!"

But Bardo shook his head and pointed north at Yuri and Liam, who were
running to help us. It was my privilege and duty to kill the seal, as
cowardly Bardo reminded me. I had promised to do so, but I could not.

"Ti Mori-te," Bardo said, and he handed me a stone maul. "Quickly,
Little Fellow, before I start crying."

I swung the maul in an arc down against the seal's forehead. There was a
thwack of granite against flesh and a whoosh of air as if the seal were
expressing gratitude at being released from his agony. And then silence
and stillness. I looked into the seal's dark, liquid eyes but the life
was gone. Yuri and Liam stopped at the edge of the aklia. They were
puffing for air. Yuri examined the seal and immediately prayed for his
spirit. "Pela Nunkiyanima," he said, "mi alasharia la shantih Devaki."

He turned to me and said, "Look at him, Mallory! Never have I seen such
a seal! He is a grandfather of a seal, a great-grandfather of a seal! It
is a miracle that you and Bardo alone could pull him from his hole."

Soli came running to us, as did Wicent and the rest of the Manwelina
family. They surrounded the seal, nudging his blubber with the toes of
boots and touching his dark skin. Liam pulled at his thick lower lip and
said, "This is a four-man seal. Once, when I was a boy, my father and
Wicent and Jaywe pulled up a three-man seal, and that was the largest
seal I have ever seen." He looked at Bardo and me with a mixture of envy
and awe and asked, "How did two men pull up a four-man seal?"

Yuri turned his eye to his son and explained simply, "Bardo is as strong
as two men, I think and today Mallory killed his doffel, and so you must
not wonder how two men pulled a great-grandfather of a four-man seal
from the sea." But for a long time he looked at the huge carcass lying
on the snow as if he wondered how we had done such a thing.

I had killed a seal. I scooped a handful of snow into my mouth. I leaned
over and opened the seal's mouth. His smell was fermy and strong. From
my lips, I let a stream of cold water trickle into his mouth, giving him
a drink so he would not be thirsty on his journey to the other side.

Soli caught my attention and gave me a slight nod. Among the Alaloi it
is a given, the most basic thing, that hunters who have taken an animal
will immediately eat their fill. Since I had killed the seal, it was my
privilege to begin the butchering. But I hesitated so long I could
almost feel Soli's eyes drilling into me. Then I picked up my knife. I
split the seal's belly open, and I cut around the liver. It was bloody,
horrifying work. To Liam, as I had promised, I handed the purple,
steaming liver. He sullenly cut it into strips and distributed them
among the other hunters. "Mallory was lucky," he said.

I ate a piece of liver. The taste was rich and steely and good. I could
hardly believe I had killed a seal. "Mallory Sealkiller has brought us
luck," Yuri said. "Bardo the Strong and Mallory Sealkiller, they have
brought us luck. Tomorrow, I think, there will be many seals."

Almost everyone was smiling and seemed happy. There was one man,
however, Yuri's cousin's son, who was not so happy. His name was Jinje,
and he was a stocky, ugly man with a crooked leg. He had frozen his feet
waiting for his nonexistent seal. Yuri helped him get his boots off,
then held him while he stuck his ugly, hairy, white, frozen feet into
the seal's carcass to thaw them. Then Liam cut him a piece of liver
which he gulped as if he were a dog.

The men fell on the seal with their knives, hacking out choice organs
and cuts of meat. Wicent's youngest son, Choclio, opened the stomach and
found it full of notothins and ice perch and other fish. With his
impish, beardless face and his small hands, he was really more of a boy
than a man, but he was an expert with his fish knife. In no time at all
he scaled an ice perch, gutted it and found yet a smaller fish in its
stomach. After cutting off its head and scales he swallowed it whole.

All around me the other men were busy cutting and swallowing. The snow
near the seal was slippery with fat and spattered blood. It was a
terrible thing, this hunger of men. Their bellies groaned and rumbled
while their teeth tore at huge chunks of meat. It was astonishing how
much meat a single man could eat. I myself ate most of the heart because
that is where the Alaloi believe the soul dwells. We fifteen hunters,
our bellies bloated and our beards crusty with frozen blood, must have
eaten a hundred pounds of meat. It was a serious business, this
devouring of ready flesh, and we ate without pause or conversation. The
only sounds were the cracking of our jaws and smacking lips, and the
fatty belches of Bardo and Choclo competing to see who could let loose
the loudest. Like beasts we first ate the choicer cuts of meat and then
put our teeth to less desirable tidbits. Liam, perhaps impatient with
the pace of the feast, tore out a rib which he broke apart with his fine
teeth. He sucked down the marrow as a baby does milk. We ate for a long
time, stopping only because dusk was approaching and it would be deadly
to be caught in the open after dark.

The men of the Manwelina returned to their aklias to build snowhuts for
the night. After moving our sleds and dogs closer, we fed the whining
beasts a slop of intestines, blubber and lungs. Then Soli and I built
ourselves a hut near the aklia. I cut blocks of snow which Soli stacked
one atop the other, filling in the chinks with ice-powder. Bardo held
his belly and belched, watching us work. "Oh, my poor stomach," he
moaned, "what have I done to you!" To Soli he said, "It's selfish of me,
I know, to watch while you work, but you're doing so well without me."

Indeed, Soli was doing well, trimming out the hut and fitting the key
block as expertly as any Alaloi. Soon the hut was done and we flopped
out sleeping furs inside. The north wind blew a continuous sheet of
spindrift across the darkening sea. In silence we each turned to the
south and performed our "piss-before-sleeping." Bardo went to bed while
Soli and I staked Tusa near the tunnel of the hut. We hoped he would let
out a howl or bark in case a bear sniffed out the seal's carcass and
came to explore.

For a while we watched the stars wink into brightness in the sky. Soli
drew the hood of his parka tightly over his head. "You were lucky to
kill the seal-such extraordinary luck."

So, I was lucky to have killed a great, noble animal. "You can't always
count on luck," he said. "One day the weight of antichance will fall
against you. You'll be standing under a building at the wrong time or
perhaps one night on a back gliddery you'll cross paths with a poor
harijan only to find he's a slel necker come to steal your plasm. Or
perhaps you'll try to pierce the Vild's inner veil and lose yourself-"

"I don't believe in chance," I said. "Yes, how forgetful of me, Mallory
must pursue his fate."

"Don't you think it's strange beyond coincidence that the seal chose my
aklia?"

"Yes," he mocked, "the seal's anima sought your hole so you could grasp
your fate. Well, how does it feel to be a killer?"

I wiped the water from my nose and said, "It feels ... natural." In
truth, it did feel natural, although I did not tell him how I dreaded
taking my place in the natural order of things. "Is that true?" he asked
me.

I placed my mittens over my face to warm the muscles. Talking was
difficult and my words were coming out like slush. I did not want to
discuss my fears with him so I said, "You're a tychist, aren't you?"

"You think so?"

"It's the creed of older pilots, I've heard."

He rubbed his temples and said, "Yes. Those pilots who rely on
possessing a fate grow careless and do not grow old."

"But you've taken greater chances than I have. 'Soli the Lucky' the
journeymen used to call you when I was at Resa."

"Calculated chances, every one."

"But chances, nevertheless."

I think he smiled then, but it was already so dark I could not be sure.

He stomped his boots against the snow, trying to keep warm. "One day the
weight of antichance will fall against me, too." And again he mocked me,
saying, "It's my fate."

I worked my jaws silently before asking him, "You don't believe it could
be a man's fate to be lucky, then?"

"No," he said, "not forever."

Then he yawned, knocked the spindrift from his furs, and entered the hut
to sleep for the night. I stood looking at the purple-black mountains of
Alisalia outlined against the glowing horizon.

It was my fate to have killed a great, noble seal. At last the wind
found me beneath my furs, and I began to shiver. I crowded into the
small hut and collapsed next to Bardo, who was snoring loudly. I lay
stiffly awake for a long time before the warmth of my furs lulled me and
I slept. But I did not sleep soundly. It was a night of twisting and
sweating, a night of dreams. One of my dreams I remember well: I dreamed
I killed a great seal; I dreamed that the seal's sons and daughters, not
wanting to be alone, leapt to our spears so they could join their father
on the other side of day.

The next morning we killed nine seals, and Soli said that we were very
lucky.

Chapter 11 - The Old Man of the Cave

Live? Our servants can do that for us.
-from Axel, by Villiers de L'Isle Adam, Machine Century Fabulist

The Devaki say the firefalls is the most beautiful sight in the world.

It is a wall of light created by the excitation and discharge of oxygen
atoms high in the atmosphere. (The Devaki, of course, do not know this.
They believe the pale, ghostly fire is alive with the spirits of their
ancestors. Sometimes they whistle to the cold lights, hoping to draw
them nearer.) On certain nights in deep winter the firefalls hangs from
the northern sky like a luminous curtain of green and rose. It has a
delicate, almost other-worldly beauty, But there is beauty and there is
beauty. The Devaki have two words for beauty: shona, which they use to
describe sunsets and mountains and trees fresh with snow, and halla,
which has a different meaning altogether. In essence a thing-or event-is
halla if it is in harmony with nature, more precisely, if it "sees the
intention of the world-soul." Thus it is halla for the Devaki not to
slaughter sick mammoths, just as it is halla to die at the right time.

Almost anything can be halla. A spear, if properly balanced and
wellmade, is also halla. The Devaki have come to call halla many things
that would not at first thought seem to possess beauty of any kind.

Being human, they often confuse the world-soul's intention with their
most basic desires. Even though the scooped-out carcass of a seal is the
ugliest of sights, I have heard Yuri declare it halla. Does not a single
seal feed the entire Manwelina family for three days? And is it not the
world-soul's intention that the Devaki nourish themselves and thrive? So
a gutted seal is halla, and ten seals laid out on the sleds of returning
hunters are hallahalla because in reality nothing is more beautiful to
the Devaki than the sight of fresh meat. The night of our lucky hunt we
unloaded our sleds near the entrance fires, and the whole cave emptied
of women, men and children, each of them touching the seals and crying
out, "Losna halla! Li pela Nunki losna-nu hallahalla!" Only one of them,
an old woman named Lorelei, happened to notice the firefalls shimmering
in the north. "Loshisha shona," she said, looking at the lights, which
that evening were like an evanescent, scarlet robe. "Lo morisha wi shona
gelstei." While we were dividing up the beautiful seals, Yuri came up to
me and said, I must find someone to take a meat offering to the Old Man
of the Cave."

I looked deeply into the cave, at the lava pendant almost lost in the
shadows. I was confused because I thought the Devaki did not make
offerings to idols or to natural rock formations accidentally shaped in
the image of an old man. I do not understand," I said.

He rubbed his forehead with his bloody fingers. He said, "There is one
of the Devaki who lives alone in a chamber off the side of the cave. He
is your great near-uncle, and I must ask you, since you killed the first
seal and it is your privilege, will you do the honor?"

"Why does he live alone?"

"He lives alone," Yuri said, "because he committed a great crime long
ago, and no one wishes to live with him. He is the other 'Old Man of the
Cave.'"

"Did he murder someone?" I asked. "No, it is worse than that. He lived
when he should have died. When it was time for him to make the great
journey, his father became filled with the volcano spirit and saved him
from the death-by-ice. And is it not said that many try to die too late
but few too soon? We are obliged, are we not, to die at the right time?

Well, this man did not die at the right time. He was born a marasika
without legs, and when the midwife tried to smother him, his father beat
her and stole his son back to life."

Yuri's story seemed achingly familiar. I tried to ignore the shouts of
all the happy people kicking up the snow and swarming around the meat,
and I asked, "What is this man's name?"

And he covered his eyes with his scarred hand as he said, "His name is
Shanidar, son of Goshevan. Goshevan, who killed my grandfather, Lokni,
for trying to prevent this crime. Goshevan came to the Devaki to live,
but when his son was born without legs, he stole Shanidar away across
the eastern ice to the Unreal City where the shadow-men made him new
legs. And when Shanidar had grown to be a man, he returned and said, 'I
am Shanidar, and I have come to live with my people" But everyone knew
it was too late for him to live, and so my father, Nuri, told him he
could spend the rest of his days in the chamber off the side of the
cave."

We walked into the cave and he pointed at a long, dark gash in the
cave's wall behind the huts of the Sharailina family. I assumed it was a
side vent leading to Shanidar's chamber. He blinked his eye and said,
"Now he is an old man who cannot kill his own meat. And who can blame
him? He is a little crazy from the hell of the living-death, this poor,
lonely man named Shanidar."

I nodded my head as if it all made sense. "Meat must be taken to
Shanidar so that he does not make the double crime of dying too soon."

I nodded my head that this was so. "Shanidar would be eager to hear the
story of your journey across the southern ice because he himself has
made a long journey."

I nodded my head very slowly and asked, "There is no one else to fetch
his meat?" I did not want to see this old man who had once known the
cutting shops-and other sights-of the City.

Yuri sighed. "The honor usually falls to Choclo. But tonight, I must ask
you: Will you take Shanidar his portion of this beautiful meat?"

I tried looking through the side vent into Shanidar's chamber, but I saw
nothing except blackness. "Yes," I said, "I will take Shanidar his
meat."

I piled some hunks of meat together and wrapped them in a skin. Through
the side vent of the cave I climbed, stumbling against blocks of rock
projecting from the upward-sloping, black floor. The walls were cold and
close around me. I bumped my head on a blade of rock and cursed. Ahead
of me and above was a faint yellow glow, as of coldflame lighting a
distant window. Somewhere water was dripping; the plip-plop was too loud
and very near. I smelled wet rock and a sickly, sweet aroma that made my
throat gag and clutch. From the walls of rock surrounding me
reverberated a moaning that was at once full of irony and sorrow, pity
and pain. Occasionally the moaning would break into a high-pitched
ululation and then soften to a sing-song gurgle. I drove myself upward
towards this pitiful, demented wailing, dreading what I would find. I
wondered that the fabulous Shanidar should still be alive. He must be
very old, I thought, very old.

But what can a young man understand of old age? How to understand the
aches and fears, the nostalgic looking backward to the days of youth?

Although I had been among many old men-Soli and the timeless Timekeeper
came immediately to mind-their oldness had been transmuted by the arts
of civilization; they were old souls brought back to young, vital flesh,
men who had tasted little of decrepitude or helplessness. And I, too,
was a civilized man-of the slow death of shaking limbs and cankers and
sudden lapses of memory I had no wish to know.

I had never before seen a truly old man. He was sitting cross-legged in
the middle of a stone chamber so small that two men would have had
trouble lying lengthwise, toe to head. In front of him burned a small,
wood fire, which sent plumes of smoke curling up toward a crack in the
ceiling high above. I could see him plainly, holding his frail, bony
hands in front of the fire, watching me approach. "Mallory Sealkiller,"

he said. He smiled at me nicely, but he had no teeth. "Ni luria, ni
luria. I am Shanidar."

"Ni luria," I said, and I dumped the meat onto a slab of rock next to
the fire. "How did you know my name?"

"Choclo, my little near-grandson, visits me often, you know. Yesterday
morning, before the hunt, he told me that men had come across the ice.

Such a tale he told me. Of course, he himself likes to hear tales of the
Unreal City, even though he doesn't believe me when I say the shadow-men
build boats that sail among the stars. Who could believe such a thing,
hmmm?

Nevertheless, it's true. I have seen it with my eyes."

He carefully touched his temples and smiled again. The skin around his
eyes was inelastic and heavy, drooping so much that he seemed sleepy.

The eyes themselves were of some indeterminate bluish color and milky
with cataracts-I did not think he could have appreciated the silvery
lines of a lightship with those eyes, though perhaps they were still
sensitive to the rhythms of light and dark. He was an old, old man whose
wasted lower jaw met the upper without the interference of teeth. The
effect of this mutilation was to foreshorten his face so that his chin
nearly touched his nose. It was an ugly thing. His cheek skin, I
noticed, hung from his face bones in loose, white, wrinkled sheets; his
skin was thin and delicate and shot with a webwork of ruptured blood
vessels. I did not like to look at him, but the sheer grandeur of his
ugliness made me stare.

He saw at once-if "saw" is the right word-he detected my horror and
fascination, and he said, "The shadow-men of the Unreal City trap their
spirits inside young flesh, you know, you know, and so their animas are
very old when they make the journey to the other side of day. Did you
bring me meat? I'm sorry: too old, you know. It's said that there is a
barren island on the other side where these spirits howl with outrage
because they are so old-old, old, old, old-they have been cheated their
enlightenment. Seal meat isn't it? They won't be redeemed from time, of
course you know that listen I must interrupt myself often because I'm
afraid if I don't then I'll forget something important-they won't be
redeemed so they'll wander their lifeless island stuck in the eternal
Then-moment. The pity-that's the real hell. We must grow old, and we
must die at the right time. That's the key, did you know?" And then,
"Seal meat is full of life, hmmm? Will you be kind and cut me a small
piece of blubber?"

I did as he asked and he popped the cube of fat into his mouth. I did
not like it that he spoke so often of the Unreal City, and so I repeated
the skeptical (and wishful) saying of the Devaki: "I had a dream that
shadowmen live in a city under the silver fog of dawn, unreal, unreal. I
had a nightmare and when I awoke the city was gone, unreal, unreal."

He ate another piece of blubber while he stared in my direction with his
cloudy eyes. "That is good," he said. "Will you cut me some meat? Cut
the pieces small, you know, I have to swallow them whole. This is good
meat-did you know the meat in the Unreal City grows in ponds? I have
seen it with my eyes. But this meat tastes better-careful, you know, cut
the pieces smaller or I'll choke." He laughed and said, "And that would
be an undignified way to go over, you know, choking with a throat full
of seal meat. Of course, there are some who will tell you I should have
gone over long ago, when I was a baby born without legs. But my father
had a dream and brought me to the Unreal City which I have seen with my
own eyes. My father, whom I loved, had a dream."

As he rambled on about his father's dream of escaping the nightmare of
civilization, I cut tiny cubes of seal meat and glanced about the
chamber. I was surprised that the grooved and rippled walls were covered
with paintings. How he had acquired the magenta, pink and green pigments
to Color his paints I could not guess. Along one wall, the silvers and
reds and purples flowed together in a brilliant fusion of colors. I had
the impression he had tried to capture a vision of his Unreal City. It
was beautiful, if inelegant work The paintings on the other wall were
quite different; the other wall ran with ochers and dark greens and
puce. The light in the chamber was poor, but I saw that Shanidar had
daubed red splotches everywhere, seemingly at random. They could have
been anything: a predator's eyes peering from behind a mottled curtain
of vegatation or expanding red giant stars gone nova-or drops of blood.

The splotches-indeed, all the rest of the paintings-were very
disturbing. He must have known what I was looking at because he said,
"You see my glories? You see? You see?"

I saw that this old man was neither truly civilized nor savage. I
thought his paintings were mirrors for both the terrors of the primitive
world and the (to him) marvels of civilization. Here, in a dark crack in
the ground, he lived apart from other men, an outsider who had no home.

(I did not consider his stinking chamber, with its piss-soaked furs and
neat, conical piles of dung, to be a home.) I pitied him, but as we
talked it became clear that he had little pity for himself. "How I love
the taste of seal meat!" he exclaimed. "It was better, you know, when I
had teeth to release the juices, but it is still very good. Mallory
Sealkiller-it is said that Nunki is your doffel and you killed him, is
that true?"

"Yuri believes the seal is my doffel."

"He is a wise man, it is said."

"My grandfather told me Ayeye, the thallow, is my doffel."

"And who was your grandfather?"

I recited my fake lineage, and he confided, "When I was a boy I had no
grandfather to name my doffel. So I had to discover it for myself. Could
you cut me more meat, hmmm? Cut the pieces small, you know. That way you
release more juice. Ah, that's good! Such a taste-I love the taste of
Nunki, who doesn't?"

"Would you like some more blubber?"

"When I was a young man I crossed the eastern ice from the Unreal
City-yes, blubber tastes good, hmmm? I crossed the ice. Why do I
remember every crevasse and snowstorm of that journey when I cannot
remember young Choclo's birth, which happened only thirteen winters ago?

Or was it twelve? But I remember my doffel." He grinned and looked at me
expectantly. "And who is your doffel, then?"

I cut him a handful of diced meat and gave it to him. He rolled the meat
around in his mouth, swallowed, and said, "I've lived such a life. There
is nothing like the taste of seal meat, is there? I've lived alone and
apart but I've lived a rich life, no man richer. Sometimes a man must
live apart from his brothers, outside of his family's cave. It is a hard
life then, you know, but rich and beautiful because living apart is like
being a mountain above hills, like being a god among men The glories! On
the top of a mountain there is loneliness and terror, but there are
glories, too. The drop is terrible, but the view, oh, the glorious view!

And you know this, so why listen to an old man? Because you are
kind-Mallory the Kind I will call you. It will be our secret, you know.

Now will you cut me some of this delicious seal meat? It is delicious,
isn't it, this meat of Nunki's, who is my doffel, too. Did Yuri tell you
that? When I was younger, one time I killed a seal just to see if I
could. Yuri thought I would be too afraid, but I killed him just the
same."

I cut him slices of meat, all the while wondering how I could run from
his chamber without offending him. I did not want to agree that the seal
was my doffel. I hated that there should be a correspondence of any sort
between us. I did not want to share the infamy of having killed our
mutual doffel, nor did I desire the lonely kinship of men who must stand
apart from other men. What I wanted, simply, was to discover the secret
of life so I could live it more fully in the company of other women and
men.

The Old Man of the Cave ate as he waited for my reply. He slurped his
meat into his toothless mouth and swallowed it unchewed. He consumed so
much meat I thought his old, shrunken belly would burst. As I watched,
his skin took on ugly sallow tones as if his bile were poisoning him. He
began to cough. His stomach rumbled and he farted so loudly even Bardo
would have been impressed. "It is too much, you know. Oh, the pain, it
cuts like ice through my bowels." He hunched forward on his hands and
knees, gasping, trying to stand. "A man should not eat his meat like a
dog," he said. And then, "Help me."

I helped him to his feet. I hated touching him; I hated the frailness of
his thin, birdlike bones, the obscene feel of the hump between his
shoulders where the spine had cracked and bent with age. He opened his
lips to thank me, and I could not help looking into his mouth. His mouth
was a horror. The tongue was coated and thickened, and his gums were
bleeding, covered with sores. The odor was like nothing I had ever
smelled before. He hobbled to the end of the chamber where he carefully
vomited over one of the piles of excreta. When he returned to the fire,
his skin seemed white, almost translucent like glacier ice. He took my
arm in his cold, wilted hands. "Nunki's meat is good but it is tough,
you know? Oh, I think you are smiling because you still have all your
teeth. They are strong, aren't they, hmmm? Will you be kind enough to
chew my meat for me with your strong teeth?"

I did not want to chew his meat for him. I was full of meat; the thought
of chewing more meat made me sick. "Choclo sometimes chews my meat, you
know. Such a kind boy."

I could not bear to watch him place a meaty wad moist with my saliva
into his mouth. "I can't," I said. "Please, Mallory, I'm hungry."

I quietly cursed and bit off a chunck of meat. I chewed it thoroughly.

As I spat out the brownish-red mass into my hand, he said, "You know, I
used to chew my father's meat when he was old." He scooped up the
contents of my hand with his own and gobbled it down. "That's good, very
good. But you don't have to chew it so much. You'll chew out the juices
if you are not careful, and meat is best when it is juicy, hmmm?"

He reached out feeling the meat I had brought him, kneading his hands
through the seal blubber. With his greasy fingers he rubbed his face
thoughtfully and then returned to his explorations. "What's this?" he
cried out. "Under the ribs-if feels like liver!"

"Yes, I've brought you some liver," I said. "I thought you might like
it."

"But I may not eat liver, don't you know?"

"Is it too rich?"

"It is too rich and that is why I may not eat it. Yuri says liver must
be reserved for the hunters and pregnant women. And sometimes the
children. They need its richness more than I do, you know."

"It's just a little liver," I said. "Would Yuri deny you a taste of
liver?"

"Listen, he would deny me more than that, of course. Before you came I
had not eaten much for twelve days. When times are hard, you know ...
well, I am old and the children must eat, hmmm?"

I did know about this cruel custom of the Alaloi's, and thoughtlessly, I
said, "Children must eat, then, but it is evil for a man's family to
make him starve."

In truth, I did not really think it was evil that the old should die so
the young could live. But that the Alaloi should have to live so close
to life-and death-that, I thought, was somehow evil. "Evil, hmmm ...
would you cut me a piece of liver, please?" He stared at the fire for a
long time, pulling at the loose skin of his throat. Orange fingers of
light played across his greasy face. With his scrawny neck and
toothless, puckered mouth opening and closing in anticipation of his
dessert, he looked like a hellish, glowing bird. "What is evil, hmmm?

What is good? Do you know?"

He turned around and rummaged in a pile of decaying offal and old bones.

He grunted, turned back to me, and held up a piece of organ meat. "This
is the stomach of Ayeye, the thallow who flies above-did you know Yuri
hates me because I once freed a young thallow from one of his traps? the
thallow flies above mountains, and it is bad to eat Ayeye, but Yuri
wanted the thallow for Liam's initiation, not for eating. But I freed
the bird anyway because I pitied him, you know? Of course I would have
freed him even if Yuri had been hungry and wanted to eat him because it
is wrong to eat-do you see the stomach of this thallow that Choclo has
brought me, that my hungry people have eaten?"

"I see it," I said. "Put it away, it stinks."

He jabbed his pale, crooked finger through the lower opening of the
stomach. As one puts on a glove, he pulled the glistening muscle in
folds down around his hand until the finger emerged from the upper
opening. He wriggled his finger and said, "Death is evil, do you think?

You know, we are worms in the belly of God, and so we perceive only two
of God's attributes, hmmm? Like a worm," and here he again wriggled his
finger inside the bird's stomach, "one part of us looks up through the
throat and mouth of God into the light, and we call this good-did you
know that Yuri's doffel is the thallow?-we look into the light of life
and call it good while our other part crawls down into God's bowels,
down into blackness and dung and evil. You know, most people, caught in
the stomach of God as they are, tend to see these two attributes only,
but there are many more beyond our comprehension. Can you please slice
me another piece of liver?"

I cut him a piece of liver and said, "Try to eat it slowly. Else you'll
waste it, and that would be evil."

"Thank you. That was good, hmmm? Good for an old man to eat the tender
liver of the seal, but not so good for Nunki, hmmm? If Nunki could talk,
he might even say it was evil that he should go over to the other side
while still so young and full of life?

But what can an animal know? What does a man know? Listen, little Choclo
likes to talk to me-shall I sing the song I taught him?-he talks about
what he sees, you know, and he said that Mallory Sealkiller looks at his
sister, Katharine, the way Liam looks at Katharine. And that is wrong,
he says, that is evil, but what can he know of either? He thinks he
knows good and evil, of course, but I did not tell him that some men,
men who stand apart high on mountain tops, some men can imagine what it
is like to leave the belly and view the whole body of God. I myself have
almost seen it once or twice. It is a mighty thing, you know, with a
golden beak and silver wings stretching across all the universe until
the tips touch at the far side. I heard its cry once or twice as a child
so I can tell you the deepest thing I know: The nature of God is beyond
good or evil."

I smiled as I sliced soft, jellylike pieces of liver. I remembered that
the Alaloi believe God is a thallow so great it can devour the world as
easily as a loon swallows a berry; they believe that God and the
universe are one. I chewed quickly and spat a purple bolus of liver into
my hand. Because I doubted that any man could know the true nature of
God, be it a thallow or a ball of light or an ultimate system of
describing the infinite structures of the manifold (as certain pilots
believe), because I doubted many things, I said, "Perhaps your vision of
the thallow was only a dream. Dreams can sometimes seem real. But most
dreams are false, aren't they?"

He snapped the liver from my hand and ate it. "You men of the southern
ice have strange dreams, hmmm? False dreams, too, I see. You know, you
are a kind man but sometimes your words cut like the wind. I will tell
you the simplest thing I know, hmmm? A hungry man is not more certain of
the existence of hot meat than I am of God."

Thus I passed most of the evening, feeding him as a beast feeds its
young. We talked about many things, but most of all we-I should say
Shanidar-talked about good and evil. I was surprised that he talked so
freely with me, but then the Alaloi are natural philosophers and they
love to talk. Also, I think he was too aware of his own mortality; he
must have been desperate for companionship of any sort, even mine. It
puzzled me, though, that he seemed to like me, because I did not like
him. I pitied him, especially when he reached out to grasp my hand, and
he said, "Once at night, years ago, I dreamed of having a son but none
of the Devaki would marry a man who had not died at the right time, you
know, you know? I had a dream at night-Listen, the lights in the sky are
the eyes of God watching us. The lights in the midnight sky are stars,
and there real men live in the radiance of God's eyelight, though no one
believes me that this is so. If I had been blessed with a son I would
have taught him the truth-Listen, there is something I want to ask you,
hmmm? When it is time for me to go over-clearly it is not time yet
because this liver lies so cleanly in my belly-when it is time, just
before I-Listen, don't let Yuri know you brought me the seal liver
because he would think I am stealing it from-the mouths of the mothers,
and if it were true that would be evil, hmmm?-When it is time for God to
devour my meat, would you carry me out of the cave so I can sit beneath
the night? I want to feel the starlight once more before I make the
great journey."

I promised to do as he asked and he squeezed my hand. He thanked me for
bringing him enough meat so he could go to bed and not lay awake
thinking about his hunger. He patted his belly, smiling. I was glad to
be done with my loathsome task and I smiled too. We smiled together. It
should have been a good moment, with both of us smiling, but it was a
moment of horror. I was seized with a sudden, inexplicable panic. The
cave walls drowning in vivid colors, the fiery logs crackling and
spitting cinders, the putrid smells of blood and breath, Shanidar's
too-familiar smile-all these sensa filled me with a deep fear of my own
existence. The sheer hopelessness of life terrified me. Shanidar smiled
at me from across the fire, and it seemed as if his head were floating
above a sea of orange flames. I could see only his head, sunken in flesh
and the folds of time, smiling as I smiled. I stared at his eyes, at the
lenses frosted and white with the ice of cataracts. I stared through my
eyes at eyes similar to mine. All men, I realized, would come to have
such eyes if only they lived long enough. I was shaken with the fear,
the bone knowledge, the utter certainty that the shape of Shanidar's
smiling face was the shape of my own. No skill or force could keep me
from this fate should the ticking of my inner clock slow down as his had
slowed for him. I was young now, but soon, very soon according to the
measure of universal time, I would be old. My fear was so great that I
felt an overwhelming urge to scream for help. There was no escape, I
thought, and my stomach knotted and I began to sweat. No matter the arts
of the cutters and the cetics-they could fold flesh back to youth a few
times, perhaps even many times, but they could do nothing to prevent the
mutability of one's selfness and soul. There was no way I could keep
myself young, no way to stop myself from changing inside, where it
mattered. It was my fate to change, as it was everyone's fate. Shanidar
smiled, and he had no teeth, and I realized that the whole of my life
until this moment had been false. I looked at the solid walls of rock
running with paints, and I squeezed my aching knee, and everything at
once, the rocks and blood and bones seemed utterly unreal.

As if he could hear my thoughts, he turned his head in my direction and
suddenly stopped smiling. "You know, even kind men such as you and I
must grow old, hmmm? That is why we must go over at the right time.

Otherwise there is no peace forever."

He talked about the peace and enlightenment awaiting on the other side
of day, and he talked about his love for his people who had almost
completely rejected him. I must admit I paid him little attention. I
wanted to run back into the main cave, to find Soli and the others, to
make them understand that our quest for the secret of life was stupid
and meaningless. There was no secret; there was only the crushing
bondage of being, and finally when it was time to be no more,
nothingness.

I stood up abruptly, nearly ignoring the Old Man of the Cave as be said,
"There is one thing I should tell you before you leave, hmmm? I forgot
to tell you this, but you should know. God's wings touch at the far end
of the universe-did I tell you this before?-his wings are silver and
they touch, but his eyes are closed because he himself is sleeping.

Listen, one day God will wake up and be able to see himself as he really
is. I can almost hear his scream, the beating of his wings. But until
then, good and evil will not exist because only God can truly see what
is good and what is not. And this is the thing that I wanted to tell
you: Men such as you and I, kind men who kill their own doffels, we must
do as we will because for us all things are permitted. But there is
always a price, hmmm?" He ran his trembling finger along the gums inside
his mouth and repeated, "The price must be paid."

I returned down the rock vent as fast as I could. I wanted to find
Katharine, to stroke her hair, to ask her what she had seen; I wanted to
make her tell me what I would be like when I had grown old. As I hurried
through the dark passageway, the Old Man of the Cave began to sing a
mournful song, and I tried not to listen.

Chapter 12 - The Little Death

What an extraordinary thing, that the ripples in the spacetime continuum
should ripple in such a way that the ripples could control their own
rippling! That energy captured and bound should lead to greater
concentrations of energy instead of gradually bleeding away into the
heat death and universal calm! How mysterious that consciousness should
lead to greater consciousness and life beget life greater and more
complex!

-from A Requiem for Homo Sapiens, by Horthy Hosthoh

When I returned to the main cave, the Devaki and my "family" were
feasting on seal meat. Obsessed as I was with thoughts of decay and
death, I was unprepared for joy, the joy of a hundred and twenty happy
people filling themselves with their beautiful meat. It was a feast of
flesh, a celebration of love and life with little respite or pause.

Everyone except the unweaned babies and children gorged on roasted seal
steaks and blubber. (At first, of course, many were so impatient and
hungry they ate their meat raw.) The cave was alive with the smell of
burning sweetbreads and the happy chatter of the children as they licked
down fingers of grilled liver dipped in melted fat. Yuri and the rest of
the Manwelina were glad to share the food with the Yelenalina and
Reinalina families. Their hunters had returned earlier that day from
their shagshay hunt with empty sleds, but Yuri announced they would fill
their bellies anyway because he knew that in the next hunt the luck
might go the other way. Even the Sharailina, who possessed the lowest
status of all the families due to an unfortunate and unsavory accident
that happened years ago, even the lowly Sharailina partook of the rich
meat. Around all the huts the cave floor was littered with cracked
bones; the bloated, distended bodies of those who had eaten too much
(nearly everyone) were sprawled in front the fires. There were grunts
and belches and moans. And to my surprise, many of the Devaki were
telling lewd jokes and touching each other openly. I stalked through the
cave, and I saw a nubile Yelenalina woman-I think her name was
Pualani-giggling and whispering something in young Choclo's ear. They
fondled each other and disappeared into one of the Yelenalina's huts.

All around the oilstones, in the soft, flickering light, it seemed the
men and women were pairing and touching, quietly vanishing into the
darker recesses of the cave. I found Bardo with his arms thrown across
the backs of two pretty Senwelina girls as he sat between them singing.

I walked closer to huts noisy with gasps of passion, and he winked at me
and bellowed, "Two's not too many for one, but it's too few for two such
men as we! But when Bardo is content, Bardo is willing to share." And
then, "Where have you been? You look white as bird puke."

"Where's Katharine?" I asked him. "Forget about Katharine," he said,
pulling at his beard. "Why do you care where she is?"

I did not think it was a good time to tell him that Katharine and I were
lovers, though from the look in his crafty brown eyes, I think he must
have guessed the truth well before we had left Neverness. "Have you seen
her?" I asked.

He licked his lips, ignoring my question. He nuzzled the neck of the
youngest girl, the one with the small nose and beautiful high laugh. He
said, "Her name is Nadia, daughter of Jense. She's curious, she tells
me, to see if the spear of Mallory Sealkiller is long and straight
enough to pierce her aklia."

Nadia giggled again and seemed disappointed when I shook my head. "I
have to find Katharine," I said. "Ah, too bad." He shook himself free of
the girls, stood up, and took me aside. "What's wrong with you?"

I started to tell him about my visit with Shanidar, but I found myself
biting my lip instead. All I could force out was: "This expedition, the
quest ... everything, it's all meaningless."

"Of course it is. And that's why you should live while you can. Life is
boring and meaningless, but when you explode inside a woman, for a
moment your boredom dies and-am I boring you?-and you feel like you
could die from the pleasure, or from anything else, and not care a damn.

When you die the little death and she screams and claws your back
because ,she's dying, too-well, is there anything better than that?"

I tried to tell him that the problem was much more complicated than he
thought. But he just stood there, squeezing my shoulder and shaking his
head. "How hard I've tried to educate you!" he said. "All in vain, all
in vain!" In a low voice he said, "But thank you, Little Fellow, for
bringing me to this enlightened place."

When I warned him of the dangers of swiving ripe, young women, he pulled
his beard thoughtfully. He had always feared fathering children. It was
a bizarre, irrational fear: He had half-convinced himself that if his
seed ever sprouted inside a woman, then somehow he would have fulfilled
his purpose in life and would therefore be obsolete and liable to death.

"It's too bad," he said, "that I can't train my sperm to die the instant
they leave my body. But if I ... ah, that is to say, if one of these
hairy women did become pregnant, who could ever know who the father
was?"

He sighed, then licked his mustache as he turned back to the girls. For
men such as Bardo, I am afraid, lust will always conquer fear.

I stalked through the cave looking for Katharine but I did not find her.

No one could tell me where she was. I returned to our hut and almost
embarrassed Soli and Justine in the middle of their loveplay. Quietly, I
limped away toward the huts of the Manwelina. I saw my mother and Anala
sitting together. They were scraping seal skins, talking and laughing. I
overheard Anala bragging about her son Liam's virility. He would make
any young woman a good husband, she said. I remembered that in my
wanderings in the dark I had not seen Liam either. From the soft, round,
glowing hut behind them came a rhythmic gasping and sudden, private
cries. I ground my teeth and leaned against the cold cave wall,
wondering why this contagious communal passion had been no part of
Rainer's memory.

What occurred that night and for the next two days was not precisely an
orgy. As far as I could tell, the Devaki did their sex in couples and as
privately as possible. With one exception (I shall discuss Bardo's
peccadillos and exploits presently), there were no groupings of three or
more, no voyeurism or drunken perversions. The Devaki, it seemed, knew
little of the failed arts of civilization. But they were very familiar
with promiscuity, or I should say, they practiced a zestful coupling
that was free and wild within a rigid system of rules and taboos. (No
man or woman, for instance, could lie with another's mate, and sex among
family members was an abomination.) The young and unmarried "shared the
volcano's explosion" often and with many different partners. Especially
when they had eaten great heaps of meat and the blood grew hot and full,
they sought each other in the darkness of the cave and furiously coupled
and feasted and found another with whom to share their fire. They did
this, Yuri told me, because eros was the gift of Devaki to the god
Kweitkel and should be practiced with energy and passion until the wombs
of the women (or the girls who had thus become women) were full of new
life. "Do not wait too long for your spear to rise," he warned me around
midnight, when he found me sitting with the dogs by the entrance fires.

"Soon the young women's aklias will be exhausted and you will have
missed your fun." He threw some wood on the fire and sighed as it began
to crackle and roar. "Perhaps you are thinking how hard it was to kill
your doffel, and who could blame you? But it is not good for a man to
think too much." With his huge finger, he tapped his forehead above his
eye socket and admonished, "In you I think there is too much
distraction, too many voices inside. You must quiet the word storm in
your head, and what better way than to lose yourself in a woman? Haven't
you seen how the Sharailina girls, Mentina and Lilith, look at you?"

What better way indeed! How I envied Yuri his purity and innocence! He
knew nothing of contagion or the diseases that had ruined many of the
Civilized Worlds. He was ignorant of the touch of slel neckers who
tailor genotoxins to rob a man of his selfness and soul. I desperately
wanted to lose myself in a woman, to lose myself in something, anything
to drown out Shanidar's quavering old voice, to extinguish his image
burning within me. But I was a civilized man, despite my primitive body.

I dreaded intimately touching these unwashed, lice-ridden women. How
could I explain this to Yuri? How to explain that I, who sought the
secret of life, was afraid of life?

There was one Yelenalina woman, however, who seemed different than the
others. Her name was Kamalia, and she was beautiful. Her hair seemed
less full of grease than that of her cousins and near-sisters; her teeth
were white and not so worn. After Yuri had gone off to bed with Anala,
she sat with me by the fire. She smiled at me coyly, covering her pink
lips with her hand. She began pulling at my furs, and I found her thick
odor somehow pleasant, intoxicating even. The fire was hot on my face,
the air full of sweet smoke and Ka'malia's laughter. Suddenly I was
tired of searching, tired of thinking, tired of everything but the touch
of Kamalia's clever little hands. I nuzzled her neck (the Devaki do not
practice the barbaric art of kissing, thank God!), and we found an empty
hut in which to do our sex. We swived each other to exhaustion and slept
and awoke and swived some more. I died the little death. I felt wild and
pure and invulnerable. I swived her four times during the day that
followed, trying to escape boredom and fear of living. I swived her, and
it was good. But it was not enough, and I sought out her younger sister,
Pilaria, and I swived her as well, and she screamed and clawed my back,
and it was very good, but it was not enough to soothe me. I was hungry
so I ate some meat and found myself in Arwe's hut where I coaxed shy
Tasarla into sex play. Later that day-I did not care what day it was-I
swived Mentina, who hummed a little melody as she massaged my chest and
rocked back and forth astride me, back and forth, rubbing and humming.

When Bardo learned of my private quest to find oblivion, he spread the
rumor that I, too, was a great hunter of women and very skilled with my
spear, which was long and thick if not quite so long and thick as his.

(But then, whose was?) I swived women whose names I have forgotten or
never learned. They were each beautiful in their own way, even
cross-eyed Mentina and Lilith, with her fishy smell and crooked teeth. I
took great pleasure with them, but it was not enough, never enough to
silence the noise inside my head. Early in the third night of this
revelry, during a rare moment of sleep, Kamalia and I were awakened by
the cries and bellows echoing from the hut next to us. I listened to a
long, barbaric rondo of moans and giggles and belches, an obscene
symphony of unrestrained squeals of delight. "Ten!" a voice called out,
and I recognized Bardo's basso profundo booming beneath a waterfall of
high-pitched, girlish laughter. And later, "Eleven!" and later still,
"Twelve and thirteen!" I heard low sighs, the voices of different women.

"Fourteen!" Bardo cried, and I realized he was-stupidly-keeping a count
of his copulations. When he reached the number "nineteen," towards dawn,
I was afraid he would have to lapse into civilized language because, as
I have said, the Alaloi have no numbers for quantities greater than
twenty. (it would be ridiculous, I thought, for him to call out hela, or
"many," after each woman he swived.) Kamalia and I shared a piece of
seal meat as we waited for him to breach his twentieth woman. But he
never called out number twenty. Instead there was a long silence, broken
when he shouted, "By God, what trick is this? What poison?" And then,
"It won't go down!" He called out my name, and there was panic and
desperation in his voice. I smiled at Kamalia, quickly dressed and went
into Bardo's hut. "Mallory," he gasped, "look at it, it won't go down!"

He paced helplessly at the center of the hut, entirely naked. On one of
the snow beds two women half-covered with furs sat watching him. They
held hands, giggling and pointing at his enormous, rigid membrurn, which
stood out beneath his round belly like the spout of a teapot. "Bardo wos
Tuwalankal" one of the women said as she held her hands spread in front
of her, "Fuwalankal" (It was true, Bardo did have the "spear" of a
mammoth. So large was his membrum, in fact, that when he was younger, he
used to fear that the blood needed to engorge it would be diverted from
his brain, robbing it of oxygen and thus damaging that most precious of
organs.)

I told the women to dress, and I shooed them from the hut. "What's
wrong?" I asked. "I don't know," he said. He grasped the shaft of his
membrum, pulling it horizontal. "I won't get soft. Ah, I don't know-it
must be poison, this has never happened before."

"You've merely overstimulated yourself."

"No, no, Little Fellow."

"Six or seven women in three days has drugged your body with adrenalin
and sex." In truth, I, too, felt insatiable and prepotent-who would not
with a succession of young women eager to rouse one's spear? "Eleven
women and I don't think that's it at all. I feel the hormones gushing
inside. It's poison, by God!"

From a distance I examined his membrum. I noticed a curious thing. On
the underside of the shaft, the small, round multicolored keloids
scarring his "mammoth spear" did not seem to be arranged at random. The
red dots twisted among the green and blue, forming a familiar pattern. I
moved closer and half-squatted, peering at the ugly patch of skin just
beneath the bulb. I remembered the verses and the dead languages of the
Timekeeper's book of poems, and the pattern became clear: The red dots
formed the ancient Japanese pictogram for the word "revenge." Mehtar,
that cunning pointillist, had tattooed Bardo's membrum with what he had
obviously believed to be an undecipherable message. So, Mehtar had
remembered Bardo, after all. The wily cutter had revenged himself for
Bardo's pushing him to the ice the day we had met Soli in the master
pilot's bar. Most likely he had implanted timed hormones in Bardo's
flesh, afflicting him with unending tumescence. It'was a cruel thing he
had done, a nasty joke. It was cruel and treacherous and distressing,
but it was also, for some reason I could not quite understand,
hilariously funny, "What do you see?" he asked me. "I don't know."

"Don't lie to me, Little Fellow."

"You'll be fine," I said. "Mallory!"

"It's nothing, really," I reassured him, and I began to laugh. "Tell me,
by God!"

I laughed for a while as his face reddened and his membrum grew even
stiffer. I laughed until the tears ran from my eye; I laughed so hard I
began to hiccup and cough. "Oh, you're cruel," he said. "You're a hard
man."

I calmed myself and explained what I thought Mehtar had done. He said,
"I've heard of such things. He's altered my chemistry, by God! I'm being
killed by poisons from the gonads! Revenge is it? When we return to the
City I'll show him revenge! I'll cut off his pissroot and nail it to the
sign above his shop, by God I will!"

"Shhh, keep your voice low!" I said. "No one can hear me!"

But obviously someone had heard him. Either that or the two women had
spread the news of his turgid condition throughout the cave. Yuri and
his brother Wicent entered the hut and looked at Bardo in astonishment.

"We heard your shouts," Yuri said. I will never forget the helpless
expression on Bardo's face as Yuri examined his membrum, freely feeling
the shaft with his greasy fingers. "Whoever initiated you was very
careful," Yuri said. "A great shaman made these scars, but then he had a
great spear to carve on. Truly, Bardo has a mammoth spear, Seratha and
Oma did not exaggerate."

Bardo pulled away from him and began putting on his furs. His face was
as red as a bloodfruit. "The women are curious to view such a spear,"

Yuri said. "And who could blame them?" He leaned closer to Bardo,
speaking in a low, confidential voice. "They are too curious, I think.

We would not want the married women sneaking into your hut to verify the
greatness of your spear, would we? That would cause disharmony. You must
satisfy their curiosity now while they are sick of sex and men's spears.

What is seen and known often creates less desire than the hidden. Come
outside the hut; Anala and Liluye are waiting."

Bardo stared at him and did not move. "Quickly now, before it softens
like a worm." Bardo looked at me as an array of emotions crossed his
face. One who did not know him would have thought he was too modest to
expose himself to the women's stares. But he was not a modest man. He
was afraid, I thought, that Soli and the others would view his engorged
membrum and thus witness Mehtar's humiliating revenge. It seemed
unlikely, though, that anyone except me, and possibly my mother, had
studied ancient Japanese. I nodded to him reassuringly. He must have
somehow understood because he shrugged and said, "I hope they don't
faint at the sight of this," and he backed out of the hut. With a
shagshay fur thrown like a cape across his massive shoulders, he strode
nearly naked among the glowing huts, stopping to pose and preen in front
of the Old Man of the Cave. The Devaki women-there must have been fifty
of them-surrounded him. (I should add that the men were also very
curious. They stood peering from behind the women's shoulders, plainly
envious.) A few of the more fascinated women, Anala and nervous Liluye
among them, pointed and gasped and vied with one another to grasp his
membrum, as if to palpably verify its size. A sea of snakelike arms
reached out for him, touching, fondling. Most of the women, however,
groaned and sadly shook their heads and looked away. Bardo ignored them.

He paraded around making obscene thrusting motions with his hips as he
announced, "Tuwa the mammoth does not have a bigger spear. Behold!" And
then he recited a little poem that was a favorite of his:

short and thin

Has little in; it's long and thick

That does the trick

Muliya, who was Mentina's fat, cross-eyed mother, laughed and asked,
"Does a woman lie down with a beast?" Anala stroked her gray hair and
said, "You are supposed to make fire inside a woman, not kill her with
your spear." And everyone, including Bardo, laughed. "Ah, but it's
cold," he said, all the while strutting with his hands on his hips. "So
cold," someone called out, "that your spear is frozen."

This seemed to remind him of the seriousness of his condition. "Ah, yes
... frozen. Too bad." He winked at me, shivered, and returned to the hut
to fetch his clothes.

The men and women joked for a while and went back to their feasting and
sleeping. Yuri caught me by the arm and said, "Bardo is a strange man.

All the men of the southern ice-you sons of Senwe are strange. Brave and
strong, but strange."

I didn't say anything because I was worried Bardo's obscene antics, and
perhaps my own foolish inhibitions, had caused him to suspect our
civilized origins. But he continued and it was clear that Bardo and I
weren't the only ones he considered strange: "Soli, too, is a strange
man. Never have I seen anyone take so little joy from living. He loves
Justine like the sun loves the world, but when he discovers she cannot
reflect the wholeness of his radiance, he grows as cold as a star. He
forgets that such love is the soul's hopeless attempt to escape its own
loneliness. Strange. And you, Mallory, the strangest of all-you have
murdered your own doffel. What strangenesses will come of all this?" He
looked at me with his deep, single eye, plainly worried. I do not know,"

he said, I do not know."

I stared over his shoulder at the huts of the Manwelina. As he spoke,
Liam emerged from the nearest hut. He combed back his long, blond hair
and went over to the meat pit where he picked up an axe and hacked at a
piece of seal meat. Moments later Katharine backed out of the hut's
tunnelway. She stood up and smiled at him in a way that made me want to
grind rock between my teeth. She began walking toward the entrance
fires. I stepped into the shadow of the Old Man of the Cave so she
wouldn't see me. I quickly looked back at Yuri. I don't know either," I
said. I don't know."

I followed Katharine back to our hut. I didn't want her to think that I
was a spy, so I waited a while before joining her inside. As silently as
I could, I crept through the dark, icy tunnelway. When I reached the
main chamber, all the oilstones were lit and the interior was awash in a
sea of golden light. Soli was gone, probably out feeding the dogs or
skiing through the forest, which he liked to do at daybreak. I did not
know where Justine could have been. I pushed my belly close to the snow,
watching. Katharine was kneeling above her snowbed, looking around at
the white, curving walls as if to examine them for flaws. She lifted
back the fur draped over the edge of the bed, exposing the bare, packed
snow. She began to dig. It was so quiet I could hear her deep breathing
above the sounds that her fingers made scooping out clumps of snow. In
little time she had excavated a hollow perhaps two feet deep. She pulled
her head back-despite my jealousy I could not help thinking how
beautiful she was-she looked around the hut once more before reaching
into her secret crypt. One by one she removed five krydda spheres, which
were each a translucent green and slightly smaller than a snow loon's
egg. She opened the first sphere carefully. Very carefully, from the
inner pocket of her fur, she removed a snipping of blond hair. She
twisted it into a golden ball and pushed it into the sphere. She
performed a similar procedure with the other spheres in turn, storing in
them nail parings, a child's tooth, and, amazingly, the blackened,
amputated little toe of Jinje, whose flesh had run to gangrene after his
feet had thawed. The last thing she did I could not see clearly because
she was squatting with her back to me. She reached down into her furs
below her stomach and removed something. I guessed it was a pessary, no
doubt full of Liam's seed. I think she emptied it into the last sphere.

When she finished this private work she replaced the spheres and closed
the hole beneath her bed.

I was so angry I forgot that I was not supposed to be spying on her. I
stood up and said, "I hope you have enough samples."

She jumped suddenly; her whole body contracted at once as it sometimes
did at night when she lay near me in that floating state of
consciousness just before sleep. "Oh," she said, "I didn't know you were
.. ." She pulled the fur over her handiwork and sat on the bed. She
thrust her hands beneath her crossed arms to warm them.

I wanted to take her cold hands in mine, to let the flush and heat flow
into them. But I was very angry so I asked, "How many samples do you
have?"

"I'm not sure I know."

"You've had three days to skulk about the cave," I said. "How much
longer do you think you'll need?" Originally, we had planned to take at
least twenty samples of the Devaki's plasm and tissues, five from each
of the four families. According to the master imprimatur, that should
have contained a sufficient expression of the tribe's chromosomes. "I'm
not sure," she repeated. "Why don't we count the samples, then?"

"Why are you always so obsessed with numbers?"

"I'm a mathematical man."

She rubbed her naked hands together and blew on them. The air was steamy
with her breath. "You mean to ask how many men I've been withnot enough,
do you see?" And then, that infuriating saying of the scryers: "What
will happen has happened; what has been will be." She flexed her
intertwined fingers and said, "I'm not Bardo; I haven't counted my-"

"How many?" I asked.

She looked straight at me. "It would be cruel of me to tell you," she
said. "How many men?" I asked. "Seven? Eight? The barbaric orgy lasted
three days."

"Fewer than you might think. I don't like men as well as you or Bardo
like women."

I crossed the space between us and grasped her hands. "Two? Three? I
couldn't find you for days," I said. "How many?"

She smiled sadly as I held her hands. "There was only one man, don't you
see?"

I did see. All at once the hateful images of her and Liam naked together
came unbidden into my mind. I tried to think of other things, but I
could not. My beautiful Katharine lying beneath him, pulling at his
buttocks with her hands-this image burned inside me. It was an obscene
image, like the lewd and colorful flesh frescoes which writhe beneath
the pale skins of farsider whores. I clenched my teeth and asked, "You
spent all your time with Liam? Why?"

"It's best I don't tell you," she said. "It would be cruel of me to tell
.."

It was stupid of me to insist that she tell me, but I was stupid that
day, so I repeated, "Why?"

She twisted her hands away and said, "Liam .. . he's different than
other men, different than civilized men."

"Men are men," I said, rubbing my nose. I was thinking furiously. I
asked, "Different how?"

"When I'm .

.. when he's ... when we're together, he isn't thinking of diseases or
of other men I've been with or the consequences of ... he isn't always
thinking don't you see? Do you know what it's like to be with someone
who exists in the moment solely with you? Solely for you?"

"No," I said truthfully. "What is it like?"

"Ecstasy," she said.

I was silent and I stared into her eyes. "Ecstasy," I repeated. I was so
sick with jealousy the veins in my neck ached. "With Liam, it's as
natural as breathing ... he's patient, do you see?"

Ecstasy. I closed my eyes, and I could see it all too easily, this
ecstasy of Katharine's. I saw her with her eyes tightly closed, with her
head thrown back, lost in pleasure. Perversely, my jealousy began to
change into desire even as my anger gave way to the quick swelling of
lust. There was a pressure all through my body, the heaviness of
pounding blood. Despite the excitement of the past three days, perhaps
because of it, I was eager to swive her; I was dying to swive her. I
found myself whispering apologies in her ear while I lost my hand in the
raw silk of her hair. Barbarically, I kissed her neck. And all the
while-even as I pulled the furs from her-she stared at me with eyes both
open and blind. She nodded suddenly as if she had seen a clear and vivid
image of her own. She pressed her palms against my cheeks and slowly
said, "It's ... so ... dangerous!" But I didn't care about danger just
then; I trembled with a need to act and do, so I threw off my furs and
began caressing her. "You don't see," she murmured, "you don't.. ." She
lay back against the bed, and like a farsider whore, she threw her arms
up above her head and bent her knees to reveal the dark wedge of hair
between her legs. The tendons strained beneath her skin, and she smelled
of sex. "Mallory," she said, and I rested my knees between hers, and I
did not care that I heard scraping sounds outside the hut; I did not
care at all.

How can I explain this mysterious impulse that overcame us every time we
were alone? We used to joke that although we often didn't like each
other, the cells of her body loved the cells of mine. It was love, I
like to think that drove us together that day in the hut. We rutted
quickly like beasts, and it was an artless but ecstatic copulation.

Unlike most women, Katharine was quick and easy to arouse. However, once
her blood was hot she liked to spread her pleasure out for hours,
savoring each moment one by one. This had often annoyed me because I was
always eager for the finish, for that blinding moment when our ecstasy
crescendoed and we died the little death together. I was eager for
ecstasy, and we had only a few moments, so we thrust furiously, in
rhythm, pushing and panting and sweating. Her heels were hard against
the backs of my legs as she urged on and on. I must have kicked aside
the old furs covering the floor because I felt my naked toes gripping
and digging into the snow. I was dying to be done, and I moved faster,
moaning like a beast. "No, wait," she said, and I opened my eyes, and
she opened hers, staring through me into herself, into her luminous,
crystalline interior where she could view her own pleasure as a voyeur
peers at a rutting couple through a crack in an icy wall. But I was
dying and I couldn't think of waiting; I couldn't think of anything at
all. I gasped to feel myself hot and alive inside her, burning drops of
life leaving me in spasms. We gasped together too loud and too long, but
I did not care.

Afterwards she lay still for a long time, clutching the back of my neck,
opening and closing her fingers. She seemed both sad and amused; her
face was open with resignation and anxiety, but with, happiness, too.

"Oh, Mallory," she said, "poor Mallory." I wondered if what we had done
had happened against her will, but then I remembered she was a scryer
who denied her individual will. "It's all so intense for you, isn't it?"

she said. When she held her hands over her eyes and shook with both
laughter and tears, I realized that I would never understand her.

She separated from me and stood up to dress. She turned to me,
whispering her scryer's whisper: "How I loved the memory of the last
you; how I always shall." Then she fled from the hut, leaving me to
renew the oilstones' flames, which had burned too brightly and were pale
yellow and dim. 

Chapter 13 - Hunger

If we become too many, we will kill all the mammoth and have to hunt
silk belly and shagshay for food. And when they are gone, we will have
to cut holes in the ice of the sea so to spear the seals when they come
up to breathe. When the seals are gone, we will be forced to murder
Kikilia, the whale, who is wiser than we and as strong as God. When all
the animals are gone, we will dig tangleroot and eat the larvae of
furflies and break our teeth gnawing the lichen from the rocks. At last
we will be so many, we will murder the forests to plant snow apple so
that men will come to lust for land, and some men will come to have more
land than others. And when there is no land left, the stronger men will
get their sustenance from the labor of weaker men, who will have to sell
their women and children so that they might have mash to eat. The
strongest men will make war on each other so that they might have still
more land. Thus we will become hunters of men and be doomed to hell in
living and hell on the other side. And then, as it did on Earth before
the time of the Swarming, fire will rain from the sky and the Devaki
will be no more.
-from the Life of Lokni the Unlucky, as told by Yuri the Wise

A few days later I confessed everything to Bardo. Because he was as
terrified of his own mortality as anyone I have ever known, he pretended
to boredom and a false calm when I told him of my experience in
Shanidar's chamber, my great "vastation," as he called it. But he was
more than curious to hear the details of my tryst with Katharine. Upon
learning that we had been lovers since the night we received our pilot's
rings, he was full of advice. "Your jealousy unmans you, Little Fellow.

Let her swive as many men as she needs to-why else did we come here? A
man should love women, of course, but he should not love a woman too
well. It poisons him to do so." We were standing in the woods outside
the cave, drilling yellow holes in the snow as we performed our
"piss-after-drinking-the-morning-tea." The wind was up, blowing in gusts
from the south. This made our urination awkward and perilous, because as
I have said, the Devaki must always face south when they relieve
themselves. Bardo shook himself dry and said, "By God, it's cruel the
way this wind blows down the trousers." And then, "Poisons! I should
tell you this poison of Mehtar's is peculiar, indeed. Here, look at
this," he said showing me his membrum, which was limp and wrinkled,
though still very large. "Who ever heard of such a poison? During the
day it hangs like the hammer of a bell, and there is nothing I or these
hairy women can do to make it rise. But at night-ah, at night it splits
the air, so what else is there to do but find a woman to drain it dry?

You should be glad the Devaki share their sex so freely, my friend. Do
you want some advice? I will give you some advice: Let Katharine collect
her samples, and then we'll go home."

Katharine, I should mention, was not the only one who managed to collect
bits and pieces of Devaki flesh. As head of our family, Soli was called
to help hold Jinje when Yuri decided that his frozen, rotten toes must
come off. I was not present at the amputation so I never learned how
Soli pocketed one of the toes and smuggled it to Katharine for storage
in her krydda sphere. And of course I was not allowed near Marya at the
rear of the cave when she gave birth to her baby boy. The men, being
men, were forbidden to witness this deepest of feminine mysteries. But
my mother was there helping (I would not doubt that she took charge of
the entire labor), and she returned to our hut with a small section of
Marya's afterbirth. Even though I had instigated, had once believed in
this expedition, I found it difficult to think there could be any great
secret hidden in the slelled tissues of an afterbirth. Surely, I
thought, the Entity had deceived me. Surely it was all a joke, or
perhaps a game in which we were pieces to be moved, frozen, starved or
sliced into parts at the caprice of the goddess or according to the
whimsy of the greater gods. Surely there was no secret at all.

Our life among the Devaki soon settled into a routine. After we had
finished the last of the seal meat, every morning the men would arise,
ice the sleds, and go off hunting on the ice or skiing through the dark
forest. Although we had bad luck with the animals, I came to cherish
these moments of clean air and exhilaration away from the smoky cave,
away from Katharine's nightly forays into the huts of different Devaki
men. Out on the ice there was peace and privacy, even in waiting for the
seals that never came. And in the forests where the shagshay used to
herd, I came to love the hunters' keen whistles ringing across the
ridges; I loved the feel of the silky snow beneath my skis; I loved the
silence of the morning trees, the greenness against the quiet white, and
above the trees and the snow and the silence, the blue window of the
winter sky. I often think of those Tugged hills beneath Kweitkel, for it
was there that I first began to see the Devaki for what they were. To
watch Yuri stalking an arctic fox or setting his snares for the eiders
and other birds was to appreciate the care which attended every aspect
and moment of the hunt. The Devaki were neither wanton murderers nor
butchers, nor did they do their killing without thought. When a seal was
taken, water had to be passed from the hunter's lips into the seal's
mouth, or else his anima would have to go over to the other side
thirsty. A kittiwake's eyes had to be rubbed with ice, and so on. There
were a hundred rituals to be performed, one for each of the different
animals. The Devaki, I realized, did not really see the animals as meat
at all, at least not as long as their spirits remained to be honored.

They loved the animals; they could not conceive of life or the world
without animals; they even thought of themselves as animals, or rather,
as spirits who had duties and responsibilities to the spirits of each of
the animals they hunted. They were intimately connected to the world of
animals, and to the world itself, in countless different ways.

Once, on a cold day near the end of deep winter when we were all a
little hungry, I watched Yuri let a white bear escape from the ring of
spears pointed at her chest. Why did he do this? Because, as he
observed, the bear's third claw on the right paw was broken, and
everyone knew (or should have known) that such bears were imakla, magic
animals who may not be killed. Killing, I discovered, was not the real
purpose or end of the hunt. This was a hard lesson for me to learn. I
spent many bad moments hating that I must kill to live. Most of all I
hated the rush of intense aliveness which pumped through me like a drug
whenever I speared an innocent animal and I saw the spurting of his
blood as drink that would soon quicken my own. The Devaki did not share
my hatred, although I believe they never felt so alive as when they were
close to killing their prey. I do not claim I was ever able to enter
into the hunter's mindset, but I think I glimpsed at least a portion of
their worldview: To hunt was to absorb the wind's myriad sounds or the
distant smell of the mammoths, to see the patterns in the ermine's
droppings and scratchings in the snow, to see patterns in the folds of
ice and in the undulations of the land and sky and world; to hunt was to
be a part of this pattern, just as the rocks and trees and birds were
parts, too. Nothing was so important as the perception of this pattern,
of the beauty that is the intention of the World-soul. And nothing the
hunter said or thought or did should disturb this beauty, this halla.

"It is better to go over to the other side hungry," Yuri said as he
watched the bear disappear into her snowcave, "than to go over deranged
and drunk with the blood of an imakla blinding our souls."

This attention to the interconnectedness of all the animals, events and
things of their world was not a question of morality, but of survival.

The Devaki believe they can only survive moment by moment, generation by
generation, if they pay attention to what the world requires of them.

And by behaving, by learning to perceive what is halla and what is not.

I do not mean that any of the Devaki learned this art perfectly. There
were always imperfections, uncertainties and little evils in their
everyday life. Someone, I remembered, had killed Shanidar's thallow for
food even though all thallows were imakla. Certain of the Devaki,
although they knew the rules of impeccable behavior, could not conceive
of a world in which they had to starve while the thallows soared free.

How could such a world be halla? And so they killed the sacred birds, or
killed imakla bears, or, rarely, they killed seals or other animals
which happened to be their doffels.

In truth, the Devaki never really starved. The forest was not really
empty, but rather like a cafe which had run out of the choicer foods.

When we were hungry we began eating those disgusting things we had so
far disdained. We ate-I should say the Manwelina and the other families
bolted down this slime, for we of the City held back as long as we
could-we ate unbelievable things. Wicent and his son Wemilo uncovered a
cache of fish heads they had buried during the previous false winter.

The sharp bones had decayed to a dead grayish-white and were as soft as
flesh. Liluye collected the rotton bones in a bowl and kneaded the
reeking mass into a paste from which she made small round cakes,
flipping them back and forth between her nervous little hands. She baked
them in the glowing coals of the fire, and the men ate them slowly as if
they were being forced to eat dirt. Other foods were worse. The dogs
were fed slime scraped from old hides stinking of the putrefied brains
used in the tanning process. Yuri killed a silk belly, and with his
single eye half shut and twitching, he gobbled down the contents of the
stomach, all the while smacking his lips and insisting, for the benefit
of the children, that the goo tasted sweet as roasted nuts. The children
often foraged through the snow for whatever they could find. Often they
ate sleekit droppings, which they munched like berries. Yuri's cousin,
Jaywe, split apart years-old mammoth bones swarming with maggots. Jaywe,
a short, funny man whose peculiar palate had led him to savor the slip
of birds' eggs, licked his lips and sucked down handfuls of squirming
white maggots and said that they were more delicate than year-old snow
loon embryos. I did not doubt him. Thereafter the rest of his family
jokingly referred to him as Jaywe Maggoteater. I myself ventured to eat
thawed oysters. The squishy blobs of meat ruptured inside my mouth; the
squirt of juices and salt instantly reminded me of my experiences inside
the Entity. I marveled that the taste of real oysters was exactly the
same as the taste the Entity had placed inside my mind-just as real and
just as bad.

In truth, the Devaki were-and are-a smart, resourceful people. They are
tough and hard to kill. During our brief stay in the cave, I heard tens
of stories of resourcefulness and survival. Yuri once told me that when
he was a boy, his immediate family had almost been exterminated while
crossing the ice in early false winter.

"When I was five years old," Yuri told me, "my father and my mother
decided to make the pilgrimage to Imakel, where my mother's ancestors
are buried. But one night the ice opened unexpectedly, as it sometimes
does. We lost one of our sleds, and all of our harpoons, furs,
oilstones, spears-everything. And we lost most of our dogs, too. My
father had only his snowknife, and my mother-her name was Eliora-had
nothing but her teeth and a few old sealskins. We had no way to spear
seals, to hunt, or even to make a fire. I was afraid, and who could
blame me? But my mother and father never lost their courage."

I will not relate the whole story here because it is too long. But
briefly, Nuri, who was Yuri's father, fished his dead dogs out of the
sea (his heavy sled had sunk like rock), and he and his family and the
remaining dogs ate them. Somehow they managed to reach the nearest
island, which was so small and barren that it had no name. With his
snow-knife Nuri cut blocks of snow and built a hut. Somehow, Nuri and
Eliora made new weapons and tools from the poor materials they found on
the island. Nuri hunted and Eliora skinned the animals he killed, and
she made their clothing. They ate snow hare and sleekits, and
kittiwakes, gulls and chinocha-anything they could find. They fed
themselves, and they fed their dogs; Yuri grew quickly and one of the
dogs bore a litter the following false winter. The two of them, husband
and wife, over the course of that winter and the winters that followed,
re-created from almost nothing most of the tools and artifacts of their
culture. It took them three years of collecting pieces of driftwood and
saving bones to gather together the materials to build a new sled. They
improvised and invented new ways of putting together hides and bones,
and when they were done, they did not return to Kweitkel. They continued
on to Imakel, completing their pilgrimage. They placed fireflowers on
the grave of Eliora's grandfather and grandmother. They visited with
Eliora's family. And when Ellora's father, Narain, offered to give them
a sled for their journey home, Nuri pointed at his patchwork creation
and told him, "Thank you, but you see, the Manwelina know how to build
sleds." And everyone laughed because his sled could not have carried
them another mile, let alone the two hundred miles back to Kweitkel.

I often thought that this ability to shape random materials into useful
things lay at the heart of the Alaloi's culture. Given the requirements
of their world, there was nothing they could not make. If a tool or item
of clothing required a particular combination of flexibility, strength,
texture or insulative properties, they would experiment until they
discovered the right combination. Their knowledge of the things of the
world was detailed and precise: Lubricants were extracted from the
shagshay hoof because they had discovered the fats in the joints
furthest from the body froze at lower temperatures; they made the
windows of their huts (when they desired windows) from the tough,
translucent intestines of the bearded seal; shagshay horns were flexible
and so were bent into the side prongs of fish spears; and so on.

They were geniuses at making things, the women as much so as the men.

Among other things, the women were responsible for making and caring for
that most vital of all survival tools: the marvelous Alaloi clothing.

At night after hunting-and this, too, was part of our daily routine-we
would sit around the oilstones, eating what food we had, talking,
watching the women making our clothes. The women's mouths were always
busy because they were either chatting about the events of the day or
chewing skins with their stubby, worn teeth. Their teeth were tools, and
they used them effectively, to soften the frozen parkas of their
husbands and to work new skins into leather. By early midwinter spring,
with the first storms of the new year blowing outside the cave, my
mother and Justine, Katharine too, had become used to this grueling
work. They had also become experts at sewing waterproof sealskins into
boots, or making waterproof kamelaikas, or tailoring the ruffs of the
shagshay parkas with wolf fur, a fur which would shed the ice crystals
condensed from one's breath. With their bone needles and sinews they
made their precise stitches, stitches which would swell when wet,
keeping cold and moisture from entering the clothing. I was glad they
had imprinted these skills because an Alaloi hunter is utterly dependent
upon the women in his family. As my mother put it one night, holding a
half-made kamelaika up to my shoulders, "Where would Yuri be today? If
not for the skills of his mother? If not for the clothes she made, the
fish spears, the oilstones, if not for her milk, the very flesh of his
flesh? Is there anything a woman cannot make?"

There was one part of our daily routine I wish I could forget. During
this cold, hard time of hungers and chilblain and petty miseries, I
began suffering another misery, in some ways the most miserable misery
of all. I discovered I had lice. The hair of my body and head and pubes
was crawling with these tiny, flat insects. It was the price of swiving
dirty, savage women, I thought, and I twitched and scratched until I
bled, and I rubbed ash mud over my body from ankle to neck but nothing
helped until I submitted to my mother for what would come to be the
nightly delousing. Every night, I would rest my head on my mother's lap
while she danced her fingers through my hair, searching for lice. She
had sharp eyes, my mother did, to pick them out with only the oilstones'
dim light illuminating my black hair. I felt her sharp fingernails like
a tweezers crushing the lice and, occasionally, plucking from my itchy
scalp a few hairs which she said were as gray as Yuri's.

Her grooming did little good, however, because the cave and all the furs
were full of nits waiting to hatch. The other members of my family
became infested as well, although they seemed to have fewer lice and a
greater tolerance for this petty torture than I did. (Bardo, for some
inexplicable, unjust reason-he ridiculously claimed that the poisons
from his gonads had soured his skin, rendering him unappealing to
crawling insects-remained free of lice.) It was not the prickling pain
or itch that bothered me; it was the idea of the lice thrusting their
tiny mouthparts into my skin that sent me shuddering and twitching. I
loathed the idea of insects drinking my blood, of life living off other
life. I considered shaving my body with sharp blades of flint. But I did
not do so. I recalled that there were whole segments of humanity out
towards Gamina Luz who had purged their systems of bacteria and other
parasites only to discover they had to enclose themselves in made-worlds
lest they contaminate their sterile bodies with the dirt of
civilization. This isolation, however, had weakened their immune
systems, leaving them vulnerable to bizarre diseases. Who knew what
natual balances i might disturb if I did not live as the Alaloi lived?

There was another reason, too, why I did not shave myself: The flint
flakes we made were so sharp I might easily cut my skin, opening it to
infection. And infection among the Alaloi, as Jinje had proven with his
rotting toes, could be very bad.

Of all the triumphs of civilization I sometimes think the greatest and
most sublime was the invention of the hot bath. How I longed for soap
and hot water! How I missed the joy of soaking my cold limbs, of letting
the wet heat lull me and warm me from skin to bone! How badly I wanted
to be clean! I missed the sounds and smells and comforts of the City and
found myself thinking about her all the time. Why had I left her? Why
had I come here seeking nonexistent secrets, killing seals, feeding
toothless old men, disturbing the harmony of the Devaki families? How
could I have believed a civilized man could live as a savage? From where
had I acquired such arrogance?

One night over a mug of tea, Bardo confessed that he, too, missed the
comforts of our city. "I would advise that we leave here as soon as
Katharine has collected her samples," he said to me. "We don't want to
starve, do we? How long can it take her to swive a few men? Excuse my
candor, Little Fellow, but I don't understand why she has ignored so
many, ah ... possibilities?

Of course, he hadn't had the slightest thought of leaving so long as he
could fill his belly with meat every night, and every night fill one or
more women with his seed. The others, though, were not so eager to leave
as I would have hoped. Soli welcomed the hardships of our primitive life
and seemed to be enjoying himself, if that dour man was capable of joy.

Justine found everything about her new existence "fascinating," as she
put it, while my mother reveled in her power to make her living directly
from the things of life. And as for Katharine, she seemed to be biding
her time, to be waiting for some important event that she would not
reveal. As the storms of the new year grew more frequent, I gradually
became aware that the Devaki had not completely accepted us. I do not
mean that they necessarily suspected our civilized origins. But many of
them, not just Yuri, thought that we were strange, and worse than
strange. Because of the storms, the hunting became more difficult and
dangerous. Our hunger deepened. Sometimes there were grumblings and
complaints and petty arguments over the division of the meat. More than
once I heard the men grumble that my killing my doffel had brought them
bad luck not good. There was a rumor going about the cave that I had fed
Shanidar half of the beautiful liver of a snow loon. (In truth, ever
since my encounter with the Old Man of the Cave, I had been smuggling
him choice cuts of meat, to keep him alive. It was wrong of me, I know,
but what else could I do?) And there was other gossip, vicious talk the
women spread among themselves that gradually reached the ears of their
husbands. I should have been warned something was wrong when Piero of
the Yelenalina family and Olin of the Sharailina began threatening to
leave Kweitkel for the islands of the west. I thought they were just
crabby with hunger, but I soon discovered they had other complaints.

One late afternoon after a long, fruitless day of hunting, Yuri caught
me aside in the forest outside the cave and said, "Piero is wrong to
blame you for our hunger. Iftuwa was not sick with mouthrot, we would
have plenty to eat."

I agreed that it was so.

"Still, it is strange that the animals no longer leap to our spears, is
it not?"

I agreed with him that it was strange.

"Although Piero is wrong to blame you, I cannot blame him for blaming
you Can you? And there are others who might observe your strange
behavior and come to blame you for their own misfortunes. I myself have
no respect for these people, but how can I blame them?"

"How is my behavior strange?" I asked. "Do they blame me for killing the
seal, then?"

He held up his scarred hand and shook his head. "It is not that, even
though there are few men who kill their doffels. It is this: A wise man
takes care not to be left alone in his hut with his sister, especially
one so beautiful as Katharine. Then no one can blame him for
abominations which bring his people bad luck."

As he said this there was a sudden sharp pain in my stomach. I felt sick

I felt the burn of guilt coloring my cheeks, and I was grateful that the
wind through the trees was so icy and bitter that my face must have
already been crimson with cold. I turned to Yuri, who was leaning
against a boulder and puffing steam as he looked out across the broad,
white valley below. I wanted to tell him that whoever had accused
Katharine and me of abomination was guilty of slander. And more, I
wanted to shout out, to scream into the valley that Katharine was not my
sister. I wanted to reveal the ugly tapestry of lies and fakery that had
led us to pose as Alaloi. I wanted to do this for two reasons: to bring
this foolish journey to an end, and so Yuri would know I was a man of
honor. But I said nothing, did nothing. How could I make this savage,
one-eyed man understand the complexity of civilized ways or the esoteric
nature of the quest? I said nothing, and Yuri shrugged his shoulders.

"Katharine, too, she is a strange woman," he said.

On the tenth day of midwinter spring, I discovered just how serious the
slander against me was. It was a day of ice flurries and moist, heavy
air. The snow was gray and leaden, and the trees were grayish green
beneath the dark gray sky. The wind, blowing in fits and stops, smelled
like wet slate. The few men who had gone hunting the day before-they
were all Sharailina-returned to the cave in the closing grayness of
twilight when the snow and the shadowed slopes and the low, dark sky
seemed to merge into an impenetrable sea of gray. They had found meat,
they said. Ouray and his son, Vishne, beat the snow from their gray furs
as they stomped into the cave. They were followed by Olin the Ugly, a
surly man with a great swatch of scar running down his forehead to his
jaw. Olin was grasping the tail of a half-eaten animal, dragging the
carcass towards the Sharailina's huts. "Sabra meat!" he announced, and
his ugly wife, elina, and the rest of his family came out of the huts
smiling" and eagerly sniffing the air.

I looked up from the shaft of a new spear I was carving-I was standing
on the snow-packed cave floor outside our hut-and I saw at once that
Olin had little meat to share. I was wondering how Olin had found the
wolf carrion when he began telling the story of their hunt.

The day before, it seemed, the Sharailina men had tracked Totunye, the
bear, through the southern forests down to the sea. When the snow began
to fall, young Vishne wanted to return to the cave, but Olin led them
down to the beach where, he said, he had heard rocks cracking and a
distant roar. Ouray, though, thought the cracking was the sound of the
heavy limbs snapping off the trees and the roar was only the roar of the
wind. When they emerged from the forest they saw a white bear clawing a
wolf apart against a mound of rocks. They rushed the bear, but Totunye,
with his long, black claws and cowardly eyes, saw the scars on Olin's
face (this is the story as Olin told it), and he fled into the storm
because he could see that Olin had long ago been scarred by another bear
and was therefore invulnerable. And so they had returned with the meat
of the wolf which, as Ouray put it while staring at the face of his
brother, "is leaner and tougher than bear meat but not as costly to
take."

Several of the Manwelina had gathered around to listen to this story.

Wicent's son, Wemilo, and the ever-mischievous Chocio began making
jokes. Seif, who looked much like his brother, Liam, except that he was
not quite so handsome or large, covered his eyes and laughed at Olin.

Then Liam came out of his hut and joined in the fun. "Are you certain
that it is Sabra, the wolf?" Liam taunted Olin. He licked his red lips
and flung back his long, blond hair. "I would want to be certain before
I ate him, wouldn't you?"

Olin cursed and he ripped the tail from the base of the wolfs carcass.

He threw it at Liam, who was laughing and rubbing tears from his eyes.

"Do I not know Sabra when I see Sabra?" Olin shouted.

Liam licked his lips again and cruelly joked, "Do I not know Devaki when
I see Devaki? And then he laughed harder.

He was referring to the unfortunate abomination which had fractured the
honor of the Sharailina family. Once, years ago in false winter, Olin's
great grandfather had cached some shagshay meat for eating the following
midwinter spring. When the time came, he and his family had dug up what
they thought was shagshay thigh and they had eaten it. The next day
Lokni, who was Liam's great-grandfather, had discovered the meat was in
reality part of a human corpse that a bear had uncovered from the
graveyard above the cave. Apparently, the bear had dragged the human
remains down to the snowfield below the cave where the Devaki sometimes
store their meat. It was an understandable mistake, but ever after, for
three generations the sons of Lokni had made a tradition of ridiculing
the eating habits of the Sharailina family.

Liam laughed and licked his lips and rubbed his belly, and he picked up
the tail Olin had flung at him. He held it to his open mouth as if he
intended to eat it. He made a gagging sound and said, "How I love
Sabra's furry tail, there is so much meat!" And then, "It makes me happy
that you are certain this is wolf meat. But I must ask you one thing."

And here he turned to Seif and shook his head with fake sadness. He
looked back at Olin all the while running his finger through the
shredded gray fur. "Does a wolf have gray fur?" he asked. "I myself have
only seen white wolves; perhaps the Sharailina know a different kind?"

Olin bent to the carcass and kicked it with his foot. "The fur is
white," he said. "It is only the lack of light that makes it seem gray."

"It is as gray as the fur of a dog," Liam taunted.

"No," Ouray said, defending his brother, "it is white. It has been
stained gray by dirt and sea salt."

Liam, who thought he was a funny man, suddenly dropped down on his hands
and knees, and he pulled his golden head back and let loose a series of
barks. "It is a dog," he said as he flopped over and rolled about in his
mocking imitation of a dog scratching his back
"You eat the meat of a
dog."

I watched this ridiculous scene as I twirled my spear beneath my carving
flints. I realized what should have been obvious all along: Olin and his
brother had found the cairn of stones that Bardo and I had built over
the body of my lead sled dog. The torn carcass lying by Olin's hut was
what remained of Liko.

"Dog meat!" Liam said. "The Sharailina hunt dogs!"

Olin protested again that it was indeed a wolf. He moved to flay it with
his knife, and I crossed the cave as quickly as I could. "It is a dog,"

I said. I explained how the thallow had killed Liko, how Bardo and I had
buried him. "Don't cut him-he was brave and loyal, and it is not right
to eat him."

By this time the whole Devaki tribe had emerged from their huts. They
encircled us. The voluptuous Sanya, who was suckling her newborn girl,
said, "It is not right for the mothers to grow so hungry their milk
dries like puddle-melt in the sun. Mallory forgets that meat is meat;
meat is neither brave nor loyal."

All this time Liam was rolling on his back laughing in between his
derisive dog sounds. "Rart, rart, rart," he barked. "Rart, rart, rart,
rart." And then he looked up at Olin and said, "I hope the shagshay leap
to our spears soon. Or else we will be meat for the hungry Sharailina."

This proved too much for Olin. He shook his long, flint knife in the
air, cursed and fell upon Liam. Olin's knees crushed the wind from
Liam's chest-I heard the whumph of air escape from Liam's lips. Someone
called out, "Watch the knife!" and for some reason which made no sense
to me at the time, Olin dropped the knife. They wrestled, then. On the
hard snow, they grappled and heaved and rolled. Liam managed to trap one
of Olin's arms between their bodies. He used this momentary advantage to
jab at Olin's eyes with his long fingernails. I was sure that he
intended to gouge his fingers into the sockets, to feel for the
eyestrings, to blind him. Olin had been mauled by a bear once; it made
me sick to see the bearlike Liam mauling him again. "Not his eyes!" I
yelled, and I stepped forward, planted my foot, and whacked Liam's
temple with the butt end of my spear. He tumbled away from Olin,
stunned, holding the side of his head. The blow had cut him; blood
flowed from between his splayed fingers, trickling down his thick golden
beard.

He cursed me and spat at my legs. He shouted, "What is wrong with you
that you cannot tell sport from killing? Your brains have softened like
seal fat-but that is the way with sister-seducers. Did Katharine suck
out your brains along with your seed?"

I think I tried to kill him, then. As Olin and Yuri and all the people
of the families looked on, I raised my spear back behind my head. I
clutched the shaft's leather grip, dimly aware that Bardo and Justine
and my trembling mother were watching me from behind a wall of
astonished Devaki. "No!" I cried, and straight ahead of me as I sighted
on Liam's throat, there was Katharine standing between two Manwelina
women. She was staring at me unashamedly as if she knew I would not kill
him. "No!" I cried again, and I began to whip my arm forward. But there
was a sudden resistance; I could no more cast the spear than I could
uproot a shatterwood tree. All at once I felt other hands on the shaft,
and someone ripped the spear from my grip. I turned and there was Soli
holding the spear as he would a dead fish. His lips were hard against
each other, as white as ice. He was holding his breath; beneath his
forehead's white skin pulsed a thick vein.

Yuri came forward and grabbed the spear from Soli. He broke it across
his knee. His eye flashed on me like a rocket beacon, and he said
simply, "Strange you forget we are not hunters of men." Then he turned
away from me, leading the rest of his family back to their huts.

Olin came over to me and scratched his scarred face. "It was only a
game," he said. "Why do you think I dropped my knife? Do you think Liam
would have blinded me, his near-brother?"

He looked at the halves of the spear lying crooked on the snow, laughed
nervously and walked away, repeating, "It was only a game."

Soli stood there glaring at me, stiff and cold as a tree. Katharine
bowed her head to us and went into our hut. After a few moments Bardo,
Justine and my mother went inside, too. Soli and I were alone in the
middle of the darkening cave. I thought he might never move or speak
again. Then he whispered, "Why, Pilot? Why are you so reckless? Tell me,
please." With his heel he ground the spear into the snow. "Why do you do
what you do?"

I stared down at the spear, biting my lip.

"Why?"

"I don't know," I said truthfully.

"You're dangerous Pilot. It's been said before. And now, this .. . this
situation the expedition, everything we do here-it's all become too
dangerous, hasn't it?"

"Perhaps."

"Yes, too dangerous to stay here any longer. Let's hope Katharine has
most of her samples because it's too dangerous for her to collect any
more. Tomorrow we'll radio the City for a jammer. We'll say our goodbyes
and that will be the end."

"Do you think that's necessary?" I asked. "To slink back to the city
like whipped dogs, then?" I do not know why I said this-probably just to
be contrary. In truth, I was dying to return to the City, to immerse
myself in the beautiful but meaningless study of mathematics. He grew
very angry after I said this. I thought the blood vessels in his eye
might rupture, leaving him blind. "Yes, it's necessary," he whispered.

And then he said the forbidden word, "I've decided. We'll leave
tomorrow."

He rubbed his eyes, whirled and left me. I stood alone wondering why I
was so reckless, wondering why I did the things that I did.

Chapter 14 - The Radio

Preserve art above artifact; preserve memory above all.
-Saying of the Remembrancers

At dawn the next day the Reinalina, Yelenalina and Sharailina families
packed their long traveling sleds. Ouray and Julitha of the Sharailina,
and their children, Vishne, Namiley and Emily the Younger, tied the
binding lashes and harnessed the dogs reluctantly, as if they were
uncertain that driving into the storms of midwinter spring would be a
wise thing to do. But Olin and the heads of the other families were
adamant in their decision to leave. They cited hunger and the scarcity
of the animals as their reason for seeking the islands of the west. They
cited other reasons, too. "We will journey to Sawelsalia," Olin
announced. "There the Patwin will share mammoth steaks dripping with
fat. There the men do not raise their spears to one another."

Yuri, who stood there in his worn underfurs shaking his head sadly,
said, "This is a bad day for the Devaki. Why do you think our
far-cousins on Sawelsalia will have meat to share? Perhaps they will not
welcome you with mammoth steaks; perhaps they will not welcome Devaki
with the same love Devaki welcome Devaki."

But Olin replied, "Perhaps the Devaki have grown too many to live in
this small cave. And if the mammoth herds of our far-cousins are sick
and there is not enough meat, we will eat tripe until the sea thaws.

Then we will build boats and hunt Kikilia when he comes up to breathe."

He turned to me and said, "Goodbye Man of the Southern Ice. Perhaps you,
too, should return to your home." So saying he slapped his son, Yasha,
on the back of his neck whistled to his dogs, and then he and his family
disappeared into the forest. A little while later, the other families
were gone, too.

Yuri scolded his little grandson, Jonath, away from the crackling fire
at the mouth of the cave. He said, "It is sad to speak of killing
whales. Better to sacrifice the mammoth herds than to hunt Kikilia, who
is wiser than we and strong as God. But Olin's family is hungry so who
can blame him?"

"It is wrong to kill whales," I agreed. I turned to the east where the
distant snowfields were flowing with the blood of the rising sun, and I
was full of blame and other emotions.

Yuri squinted his eye and mumbled, "Red sky at morning, travelers are
mourning-it is a bad day for travel, I think." And then, "I must tell
you that there are those among my family-Liluye, Seif, Jaywe, and of
course Liam-who say that you and your family should leave, too. I,
myself, and Wicent and Old Ilona, believe you should stay, but the
others ... after you raised your spear to Liam, well, who can blame
them?"

I looked at Yuri, with the rancid grease shiny on his face, and I was
suddenly sick of him and his little saying: "Who can blame them?" I felt
an urge to stumble against him, to "accidentally" push him down into one
of the puddles that the fire had melted from the snow, to watch as he
splashed in icy water and say, "Who could blame me?" I did not want to
hear any more words of wisdom from his thick chapped, greasy lips.

"Soli has decided we will leave," I said. "So we will leave, tomorrow or
the day after."

"Well, Soli is a willful man, and Soli has decided you will leave, and
who can blame him?"

But our departure from the Devaki tribe was not to be so simple. Early
that morning Soli freed the radio from its hiding place in his sled, and
he went out into the woods to find a space of privacy. He tried to radio
the City. He failed. He tried all morning and half the afternoon until a
fierce storm began covering the trees in sheet ice, forcing him inside
the cave. When evening came, we all crowded inside our hut around the
oilstones. On the white furs at the center of the hut Soli placed a
glossy black box the size of a large man's forearm. He pointed at it and
told us, "The radio is dead."

"Thats impossible," Bardo said as he toyed with the hairs of his beard.

He was half-lying on my bed, eating some nuts he had found. "The radio
is dead? No, no, that can't be."

My mother and Justine were busy on the far side of the hut adjusting the
furs atop the drying rack. The hut was warm, so warm that the curved
walls were gleaming with a glaze of water and ice. My mother brushed
drops of water from the silky shagshay fur. Her strong face was yellow
in the yellow light, and she tilted her head to the side and asked, "How
do you know the radio is dead?"

"If it were dead, that would be too bad," Bardo added, as he watched
Justine shake out a fur. Much to Soli's annoyance, he liked to watch her
whenever he had the chance, and worse, he liked to talk to her, as one
friend talks to another. "But whoever heard of a dead radio?" He
nonchalantly popped a nut into his mouth, but I could tell he was
nervous and worried.

"Of course the radio can't be dead," Justine said. She looked at Bardo
and smiled her beautiful smile. "That's quite a thought, isn't it? You
might just as well imagine that the sun won't rise tomorrow! It's
impossible for these things to die, it really is. The Lord Tinker made
the radio himself. How could the radio be dead?"

Bardo grabbed his stomach and let out a long groan, which was answered
by a whining from the tunnelway. Because two of our dogs were sick, we
had brought them inside the hut, sheltering them from the storm. "Tusa,"

Bardo called out, "Lola ... do you think the radio is dead? Bark three
times if you think it is dead." He waited for a moment, but the dogs
were silent in their snow holes, so he said, "You see, everyone agrees,
the radio can't be dead."

"Quiet!" Soli hissed, kneeling over the radio. "Restrain yourself, if
you can."

"Have you wondered if the radio is only ill?" Katharine asked. She had
the crypt beneath her bed open; I could barely watch her sorting her
samples. Bent over as she was, her body seemed fuller than usual, and
her hair fell in a lustrous black curtain down her shoulders and breasts
to the floor. She held up one of the spheres and emptied it. Frothing
blue krydda the color of her eyes spilled out over the snow, melting it
into indigo slush. I smelled the preservative's pungent, peppermintlike
aroma, and she covered the slush with handfuls of fresh snow. "Now that
the families are gone, these samples are all .. ." As she counted her
samples one by one, she showed Justine the most precious of them.

Justine said, "If these samples are all we have, well, I'm sure they'll
be enough; they'll have to be enough because they must have been
difficult to collect, and there are no men left to collect samples from,
except the Manwelina men, of course, and you've ... and you've been with
most of them, haven't you, Katharine?"

I did not want to look at the spheres, at the thick, white glue of the
Devaki then. I went to the center of the hut and picked up the radio, To
Soli I said, "Perhaps Katharine is right. Perhaps the radio is only
ill."

Soli watch me turn the radio over and over in my hands.

"Ah, but if the radio were only ill," Bardo pointed out, "why doesn't it
heal itself Lord Pilot? Have you asked the radio if it is ill, Lord
Pilot?"

"Yes, that was the first question asked," Soli said, "But the radio is
silent; therefore the radio is dead."

"It's this damn cold," Bardo said, playing with his mustache. "It could
freeze the bowels of anything."

"Have we considered everything?" my mother asked. "All the
possibilities?"

"What possibilities?" Soli asked.

For a while, we debated possibilities: Perhaps the Lord Tinker had
forgotten to monitor his radio for our signal; perhaps a sunspot or
pulse of radiation from the Vild had at last reached Neverness,
distorting the propagation of radio waves through the atmosphere;
perhaps the Order had at last fallen into schism and civil war-what if
the Tinker's Tower had been thrown down and all the wonderful devices of
the tinkers had been destroyed?

As the night wore on, we became tired and crabby, susceptible to wild
ideas. I think we had lived too long in those snowy hills, had spent too
many nights in the snow hut listening to the wind blow and the wolves
howl. For me, at least, all the familiar things of the City seemed far
away. The City itself seemed somehow fantastic and unreal, a memory of
an earlier Mallory, a buried dream. Looking around at the harpoons, the
ripe furs, the oilstones flickering yellow and orange, it was hard to
think that a larger world existed. Almost anything seemed possible: What
if a new race of aliens had come to Neverness, killed all the humans and
taken the City for their own? What if the Solid State Entity or some
other god had changed the laws of spacetime so that radio and other eem
waves were either slowed or could not locally exist? What if the City
itself did not exist?

All this talk had obviously made Bardo nervous. He twined and untwined
his mustache between his fingers, and he massaged his belly. Silently-it
was a custom of his when women were present to do so silently-he began
breaking wind. The air of the hut began to stink. Justine coughed and
waved her hand beneath her nose, Bardo puffed out his cheeks as he
pointed at the tunnelway where the dogs slept, and he cursed, "That damn
Tusal Feed him the decaying guts of a seal and he farts like a rocket.

By God, it stinks in here!"

So badly did it stink that everyone except Soli was breathing through
his or her mouth. (He was intently picking at the radio's casing,
oblivious to Bardo's little problem.) My mother wrinkled her nose and
covered her face with the edge of her furs. She glared at Bardo. "Men
are stinky beasts," she said.

Bardo's face fell into an embarrassed frown while my mother cocked her
chin, looking at him with contempt. After a moment the contempt
intensified into hatred, both for Bardo and herself. My mother had a
tongue as cruet as a double-edged knife, and it was a cruelty which cut
two ways: If someone offended her, she would be cruel to him and hate
herself for being cruel, and then she would hate him for instigating
these twin cruelties.

"Ah, I know what you're thinking," Bardo said to her. "But it was Tusa
who farted, or Lola, not me."

In disgust, my mother began putting on her furs. She turned to Soli and
said, "If the radio is dead, then it was killed. Tinker-made instruments
don't die a natural death." Then she left the hut to take a breath of
fresh air. (Or perhaps she went to Anala's hut to drink tea and gossip,
an activity she had grown quite fond of during our brief stay in the
cave.)

Soli was slicing at the radio's casing with a flint blade, and he said,
"There must be a way to open the radio, to find out why it's dead."

"Open the radio, Lord Pilot?" Bardo asked, rubbing his red cheeks.

"Surely you're joking?" Soli might as well have suggested opening Bardo
up to determine why his gut produced so much gas.

But Soli was not joking. He was intent upon getting the radio open.

Sometime around midnight, he discovered that heated flints applied to
the thick, lacquer-like sealant caused the plastic to peel away in flaky
layers as thin as a snow crystal. At last he laid the casing bare, but
the radio would still not open, He stared at the back side of it for a
long time before he noticed four small, round spots, black against
darker black, one spot at each corner of the radio's casing. He found
that the round spots were in fact holes filled with sealant. He
excavated these holes, slowly and painstakingly digging and reaming with
hot needles of flint. When he had finished this excruciatingly boring
work, he held the radio to the oilstones and announced that he could see
bits of bifurcated metal set down into the holes.

"What is it?" I asked. "That's hard to say."

"Tinker work," I said. "Pilots shouldn't meddle with tinker work."

On their snowbeds, Justine and Katharine were trying to sleep; Bardo was
flopped down like a dead bear, snoring loudly.

"Yes, tinker work," Soli said. "But where is the tinker to do the work?"

His lips tightened as he inserted a flint needle into one of the holes.

He twisted it and it broke. He inserted another needle and twisted the
opposite way. It broke as well.

"Damn the tinkers and their arcane arts," I said, and he turned the
radio over and shook the flint fragments from the hole.

"Flint's too brittle," he said, He picked up a long sliver of
shatterwood shaved from his mammoth spear. "Shatterwood is not quite as
hard as flint but it's not as brittle, is it?" So saying, with a flint
carver, he whittled the end of the wood sliver to fit neatly into the
bifurcations in the bits of metal set into the four holes.

"Why are you doing this?" I asked. "If the tinkers made the radio to be
opened by tinkers only, how do you expect to open it?"

"Where is your famed initiative?" he asked. "It's a mystery, isn't it,
how you were able to penetrate and return from the Entity."

"That was different."

"Yes, you were lucky then, but here luck is not a factor, is it?"

He dropped the shaped end of the wood sliver down one of the holes and
twisted it to the right without result. He twisted it to the left, but
this too accomplished nothing. "Luck," he said, and he twisted harder.

"it gives!" he said. He twirled his fingers, and moments later he
removed a peg of metal as long as my fingernail.

"What is it?" I asked again. "That's unknown." He scrutinized the metal
peg under the oilstones' light. He handed it to me. There was a thin
ridge of metal raised up from and wrapped in a continuous spiral around
the length of the peg. "It's obvious, though, that this ridge must work
against a similar ridge set into the casing, else the peg would have
just fallen out." As the others slept, he removed the three other pegs,
and the radio popped open.

"Ha!" I whispered, "a tinker would go mad at the first glimpse of the
manifold, but a pilot can unravel a tinker's secrets as easily as-"

"Be quiet! We've unraveled nothing."

I looked into the workings of the radio. There was a jumble of
varicolored plastics, claries and metals twisting and joining together
in strange and unfathomable ways. I saw immediately why the radio had
not healed itself. For some reason, the tinkers had assembled the radio
from unusual and archaic components rather than growing it whole as, for
instance, they grew the circuitry and other parts of a light ship. The
sight of these obviously simple components unnerved me. I made guesses
as to how the radio worked, though I might as well have tried to glean
esoteric knowledge from a writhing ball of spirali. I realized I no more
understood the secrets of the tinkers' radio than I did the Ieldra's
secret locked inside the Alaloi's germ plasm.

"It's so barbaric," I said. "Why would the tinkers make a radio from
ancient components?"

"Tinkers have their secrets as we have ours," he said. "A device from
the past for our journey to the past-that would be their kind of joke
wouldn't it?"

I glanced at him and said, "Shake it. Perhaps one of the components has
come loose."

"That's not probable," he said, but he did as I suggested, to no avail,
Tinker-made components, I realized, do not come loose.

"Why do you think it's dead?" I asked.

"When this switch is thrown," he said flipping a piece of black plastic
on the front of the radio, "nothing happens. There is no flow of
electrons. One or more of the components must be ill."

"Which one?"

He poked various components with his index finger and said, "Who knows?"

"Well, it's dead, and there's nothing we can do, then."

"Perhaps, perhaps not."

I looked into the guts of the radio again. Obviously, one or more of the
components must have been responsible for receiving our voices, another
to encode the information carried in the sound waves, others to modulate
the information, and still others to generate and send the radio waves
skyward to the satellites orbiting the planet, Which components did
which I had no idea.

"It's hopeless," I said. "Perhaps."

With his long fingernail he scratched the surface of a white crystal. He
said, "Perhaps this vibrates at the touch of our voices, vibrates and
produces a corresponding vibration in an electric current. Yes, it could
cause the electrical resistance to vary, to alter the current. If we
could trace the current flow, we might be able to tell why the radio was
dead."

I shook my head because there were a hundred components stuck to the
inside of the radio. I did not think we could trace the current flow or
deduce the purpose of the other components.

"My father," Soli said, "once taught me the theory of radios and other
ancient things. He wanted me to know the history of our technology."

"I thought Alexandar was a cantor, not an historian."

"Yes, he was a cantor. And therefore he wanted me to appreciate the
limits of technology, or rather, the ugliness of practical theories. He
himself hated technology, old or new. The best mathematics, he used to
say, is pure mathematics, mathematics that can't be put to use by the
mechanics or tinkers. He taught me thermodynamics and hydraulics, the
theory of making fusion bombs. Particle theory and hologram theory, and
map theory, and information theory, a hundred theories of manipulating
things, a thousand. He was a cold, hard, mercilessly precise man, my
father. And he wanted me to share his aesthetics, to be just like him."

He closed his eyes, rubbed his temples, and turned his head away from
me. I heard him whisper, "But I am not; I am not."

I waited a while before saying, "You know about radios, then."

He shook his head. "Once the theory of radios was known. But it's all
forgotten."

Of course, Soli had not quite forgotten everything. Bits and pieces of
his father's teachings came back to him: Eem waves were made up of
magnetic and electric fields vibrating at right angles to each other;
information could be enfolded into the eem wave in different ways, for
instance, by modulating the wave's amplitude or frequency; once the
signal had left the radio, it was vulnerable to distortion from sunspots
and atmospheric ionization and interference from other electrical
sources; and so on. There were a hundred ways to introduce noise into
the radio's signal. The elimination of noise, Soli said, was the real
problem in transmitting information.

"But if it's coded properly, the signal can be as free from error as we
choose to make it. There are ways of adding redundancy to the signal,
theorems proving a nearly perfect code exists, if we have the cleverness
to devise it. Yes, that must be the trick, encoding the signal and
filtering out the noise. Discovering the code." He stared at the radio
and pressed his lips together.

"And if it's not coded properly, the information is destroyed?" I asked.

"No, information can be created but never destroyed-if you believe the
holists. At some level, the information always exists. The trick is
keeping it together coherently, and transmitting it without noise."

I rubbed my nose, then touched a translucent, blue component. It was as
hard and smooth as glass. "But which components encode the information
and which filter out the noise? Do you remember?"

He made a fist and ground it against his temple. "Unfortunately, no," he
said.

"Too bad I replied.

"Yes, too bad, but there's always a chance the memories can be
recovered."

"A chance?"

We awoke the others, then, and Bardo went to fetch my mother from
Anala's hut. My mother ducked into the hut followed by Bardo, who was
cursing because he had crawled into a pile of dog dung. Soli motioned
for everyone to gather around him. He laid the radio on his lap and
said, "Your help is needed."

Bardo shifted his bulk back and forth, in obvious misery. He was still
bothered by the nightly risings of his membrum; the furs stretched over
his belly almost like fabric over a tent pole. He eyed the radio
suspiciously and said, "Too bad, Lord Pilot, too bad." And then he began
scraping dung from the knee of his trousers.

"Is that all you have to say?"

"Ah ... no. What I meant to say was, with the radio dead, we can't leave
here until deep winter, can we? And that's too bad because-"

"No, we'll heal the radio," Soli said. "Search your memory. Perhaps you
once watched a tinker heal a robot; perhaps there is some bit of
childhood tore you might recall."

"Not I, Lord Pilot," Bardo said. "Not I." Then he laughed, and I did
too, because on Summerworld where he had spent his childhood, there are
neither tinkers nor robots. On Summerworld the lords and nobles despise
complicated mechanisms of any sort because they rightly fear the power
of tinkers and programmers and others who understand what they do not.

And so on Summerworld, men are made to do the work of machines. "I
recall," Bardo said, "that when slaves were broken in my family's
mines-don't look at me like that Mallory, there was nothing I could
do-we used to sell them to the damned cutters. The cutters would
scavenge their organs. I never saw the workings of a machine until I
came to Neverness."

My mother made a sour face at Bardo and began nodding her head. To Soli
she said, "Do you really expect to heal the radio? Even if we remember?

The functions of every part? How could we heal even a single part? Where
are the tools? Where is the knowledge? Before we had imprinted the art
of flaking flint, could we have straightened a chipped spear point?"

"Possibly," Soli said.

And my mother cocked her head, squinted and said, "The Lord Pilot has
always been critical. Of certain people who attempt the impossible."

Soli's eyes narrowed to blue slits but he said nothing.

All this time Justine had been staring at the innards of the radio.

Suddenly her smooth, tan cheeks broke into a smile. "I can't be sure,"

she said, "how can one ever be sure of childhood memories? Especially
memories which seem to be memories of memories, or even memories of what
somebody once told us long ago, so I'm not sure I remember correctly,
but when I was a little girl-you remember this, Moira, don't you?" she
asked my mother. "When we were little girls, don't you remember how
Mother used to take us to the museum on the Ruede? You don't remember?

Well, I remember, and I once saw a display of ancient electronics." She
carefully touched her long finger to a tiny circle of metal inside the
radio. "I may be wrong, but I think this was called a diode or triode,
I'm not sure which, but I remember there was something called rectifier
diodes which shaped the waveform of the radio signal. Or were they
called pin diodes? I'm really not sure."

As she spoke, Soli watched her intently, as a thallow watches a snow
hare. "Try to remember," he said.

Justine smiled at him, touching the fine hair on the back of his wrist.

"But why should I try to remember, Leopold, when you've seen similar
exhibits in the museums of the City? You used to be interested, in such
things when we were first married. Don't you remember?"

Soli's face suddenly drained of color. He rubbed his eyes, coughed and
sighed. "Yes, there is a vague memory," he admitted. "But it was so long
ago."

He closed his eyes, wincing as if he had a headache. He held his breath
before opening them.

"It's true," he said at last. "Near the Hyacinth Gardens, there is a
room full of components like these." He ran his fingers over his narrow
lips. It was the first time I had ever seen him embarrassed. "But the
names and functions of the components-well, the memory is gone."

"The remembrancers," I reminded him, "say that memory can be hidden but
never destroyed."

"Yes," he said, "the remembrancers say that, the remembrancers."

"Their training is not so different from ours," Justine said. "Some of
the attitudes are the same, that's what Thomas Rane told me one day at
the North Ring, he said, 'Justine" .. . well, I won't tell you
everything he said, but I remember him saying that all we've ever seen,
heard, felt or thought is recorded somewhere in memory, and anyone can
unfold her memory if she tries, if she knows sequencing-I think that's
what Thomas called it-and imaging, those are two of their attitudes
similar to ours."

Soli looked at the radio for a while, staring into the past. "Can a
pilot think like a remembrancer?" he asked. "Is it possible? Yes,
perhaps it's possible."

His eyes closed as he fell into the twentieth of the sixty-four
attitudes of hallning, the attitude the pilots call association-memory.

From this attitude he passed into imaging, where he remained for a good
part of the night. (It was only years later, on the ice of the sea, that
he gave me a full account of this grueling labor. At the time, I
wondered if he was only sleeping, or perhaps resting in the attitude of
open-waiting.) He tried to call up images seen a hundred years ago, but
he did not have a remembrancer's skill in decoding the images from
chemical memory into eidetic memory. Since the remembrancers teach that
the memory of smells is often the key to greater memory sequences, he
tried to key off the memories by scratching and smelling the gallium
arsenides and germanium of the radio's components; he tried forcing by
means of logic-memory; he tried very hard to accomplish a thing he had
not been trained to do; he tried all that night, tried everything he
could think of to unfold his memory, tried until he was so weary he
could hardly hold his head up, but in the end he sat squeezing the radio
so tightly that the edge cut his fingers and blood leaked across his
knuckles. He did this, Justine whispered to me, because he was furious
with himself for failing.

At last he opened his eyes. I did not like the look in his eyes,
especially when he began staring from me to my mother. "The radio is
dead," he announced. "There will be no healing it."

"Too bad," Bardo said.

"When we return to the City," Soli said, "everyone who's ever touched
the radio will go before the akashics. Moira is right, someone killed
the radio, probably to ruin this expedition by stranding us here. And
whoever killed the radio will be banished from the City-I swear it."

I exchanged glances with my mother. Surely not even Soli could suspect
either of us of risking our lives by sabotaging our own expedition?

In the darkness before dawn we debated who might have killed the radio.

Bardo pointed out that there were many-the merchant pilots of Tria, for
instance-who would not want our Order to possess the secrets of the
Ieldra, whatever those secrets might be. "And there are aliens such as
the Darghinni who'd be jealous if human beings proclaimed that the
Ieldra favored our race. Also the Scutari, and for the same reason. And
on the planets-how many of the religious orders would murder to ensure
their mysteries and secrets were not replaced by a greater secret, a
higher mystery? What of Heaven's Gate, Vesper, even Larrondissement? And
the madeworlds of the Aud Binary, by God? What of-"

"Yes, we have enemies," Soli said. "But we don't let them handle our
private things, do we?"

"Ah ... of course not, Lord Pilot." Bardo chewed his mustache
thoughtfully, and he asked the question on everyone's mind, "What will
we do now, Lord Pilot?"

We all looked at Soli, waiting.

"Yes, that's the problem," he said, "what to do now, since Mallory has
failed to restrain himself Should we wait for the jammer, or shouldn't
we?" I should mention here that Soli had foreseen the possibility of
losing one or more of the sleds (and thus the losing of the radio)
through different sorts of disasters. So he had arranged for a jammer to
rendezvous with us at our drop-off point south of the island if we were
unable to radio the City. The date for the rendezvous was the first of
deep winter, some two hundred days away.

"No, we shouldn't wait so long," Soli said. "We're no longer welcome
here, are we? Perhaps we should leave today. We could drive our sleds
east to the Outer Islands and wait there during break-up. Then next
winter, when the sea freezes, we can make the rest of the way back to
the City."

But Bardo did not like this plan, and he said, "What if we don't find
anything to eat in the Outer Islands? What if the sea breaks up early,
before false winter? What if-"

"We're Alaloi now, aren't we?" Soli mocked. "We're supposed to be able
to do what Alaloi do best-survive. Yes, that's a fine plan, isn't it?

We'll leave as soon as the sleds are packed."

"But what if a storm comes up," Bardo protested, "what if we lose our
way?"

"We're pilots, too," Soli said. "We'll steer by the stars. We won't lose
our way.

All this time Katharine had remained silent. She sat on her bed combing
her hair with her fingers, gazing into the flames of the fire, taking
little interest in our arguments. But when Soli started gathering his
furs together, she went over to him and covered his fingers with her
hand. It was the first time I had seen her touch him.

"That wouldn't be wise, Father," she said. "To journey east when ..

"When what?"

"I mean to say, it might be all right for you and everyone else to
journey east and go hungry, but it would be wrong for me and-"

"Wrong? Wrong why?"

She dug her toes into the snow and said, "Because I'm pregnant, Father."

The silence in the hut was nearly absolute, like the silence of deep
space. Soli stared at Katharine while Justine propped her head up on the
bed and opened her eyes wide. I stared at Katharine, too.

"Whose child is it?" Soli asked at last.

I, too, was eager to know who the father was. "Is it Liam's?" Soli
asked.

"Who knows?"

"What did you say?"

"How should you expect me to know whose child ... I've been with so many
men, do you see?"

Soli squeezed his bleeding fingers with his other hand and said, "But
there were precautions you were supposed to take, weren't there? Methods
of ... these things that women do when-"

"I didn't want to become pregnant, Father."

"How careless of you!" Soli whispered.

She smiled and said, "What has happened will happen; what will be had
been."

"Scryer talk," Soli muttered, "always this scryer talk."

"I'm sorry, Father."

Again she covered his hand with her own. After a while he turned his
head away and spoke into the roof of the hut, "Well, what does it matter
who the father is? What matters is that we return to the City so you can
bear the child properly. When will the child be born?"

"If one were to pick the most probable day, he would be born on the
seventeenth of deep winter."

"Then we'll stay here until ninety-third day in winter. We'll meet the
jammer on the first of deep winter. Mallory will apologize for his
little crimes. We'll make our peace and live here as peacefully as we
can." He turned back to the radio, dripping blood over the components as
he touched them. "Yes, Mallory will apologize and restrain himself so we
can live here in peace."

Later that day I went to Liam and apologized for raising my spear to
him. It was a hard thing to do because he would not look at me eye to
eye. I apologized to Yuri; I apologized to Anala, Wicent, Seif and
Liluye, all the women and men of the Manwelina. Lastly, I apologized to
Soli but I don't think he listened to what I said. He sat in the hut
with the radio in his lap, and he whispered, "When we return to the City
we'll do a genotyping. We'll find out who the father of the child is."

I tried to sleep after that but I couldn't; I lay awake all that day
listening to the storm howl outside, wondering if the child growing in
Katharine's belly was my child, too.

Chapter 15 - The Eyes of a Scryer

If you can look into the seeds of time, And say which grain will grow
and which will not, Speak then to me, who neither beg nor fear Your
favors nor your hate.
-from Macbeth, by the Shakespeare, Century of Exploration Fabulist

And so we lived peacefully among the Devaki, even though it was often an
uneasy peace. Time passed quickly. The storms of midwinter spring ended,
and the clear, dry days of false winter began. When the ice of the sea
broke up and melted, we hunted migrating cod and coho in the waters by
the beach. We hunted shagshay across the land. We drove a small herd of
them off a cliff, and after that there was no more hunger. Our life
became settled, our days so filled with food and sunshine and warmth
that I paid little attention to the sullen stares Liam shot me every
time our paths crossed, in the cave or forest. I tried not to worry; I
tried to ignore the feeling of impending doom that gripped me whenever I
looked at Katharine. Each day I watched her belly swell, and I thought
about the seed growing within. A thousand times I wondered whose child
she carried. A thousand times I looked forward to the day when I could
return to the City, deliver the child to the master splicer and say,
"Tell me if I am a father."

I was not the only one concerned with fatherhood. Liam, and not a few of
the Devaki men, must have wondered who the child's father would be. But
their wonder was different than mine. They had little, knowledge of
genetics, and they did not very much care who the genetic parents of
their children were. The Devaki shared so many of their chromosomes that
they rightly regarded all the children of the tribe as their near-sons
and daughters. To be sure, they acknowledged that only one man could be
a child's bloodfather, but what really mattered to them was marriage.

What everyone wanted to know was: when Katharine's time came, who would
marry her and thus become the father of the newborn child? Everyone
thought it would be Liam. Many times during those long days, Yuri came
to Soli to arrange a marriage between our two families.

"It is not good for a child to have no father," he said one day after a
successful hunt. "Have you seen how Katharine and Liam laugh together?

And who can blame them? Katharine is a beautiful woman, and my son is a
beautiful man, and they will have many beautiful children, if they are
married."

And Soli said, as he said every other time, "Yes, marriage. Well,
perhaps; we'll wait and see."

This talk worried Soli so much that he avoided Yuri's shambling approach
whenever he could. He spent many nights with the radio, trying to
remember how it worked. Often, he would watch Katharine sleeping; he
would brood and think his solemn thoughts. One night my mother caught
him staring, and she completely misread his look. I was sitting by the
oilstones when she came up to Soli and said, "Katharine should abort the
fetus. That's what you were thinking. That's what all of us think. Who
knows who the father is? She should cleanse herself There are ways,
Alaloi ways. The root of wolf bush-it's a natural abortifacient."

Soli was very quiet then and he did not move. He did not look at my
mother. "Go away," he whispered. "Go away."

I think it would have been better for my mother if he had spit on her.

Above all things she hated to be scorned. (In this respect, she was
exactly like Soli.) I cannot describe how her face contorted when he
said this. Usually she made a religion of self-control, but that night
her face betrayed shame, rage, fear and other dark emotions that I could
not quite name. Her eyes began twitching, and to Soli she mysteriously
said, "The Lord Pilot thinks he's holy. But you can't know. You've never
known."

To this day I believe we might have avoided disaster, if we had had the
foresight to leave as soon as we discovered the radio was dead, or if
certain of us had practiced restraint. (Though Katharine would certainly
disagree with me: What happened had always happened; as she might say,
the seeds of disaster had been planted before either of us was born,
perhaps before the stars were born.) How is it that we have an almost
infinite ability to delude ourselves, to see truth before our eyes and
proclaim it untrue? Why did I fool myself that the Devaki were a kind,
forgiving people, a people who loved peace and harmony above all else?

Or rather, why did I think they were only that (for they truly were
kind, and their forgiveness would one day surprise me to tears)? Why did
I conceive of them so simply? Why didn't I see them as they really were?

To believe our own feelings and thoughtways must be universally shared
by others is the commonest of mistakes, made by aliens and human beings
alike. Despite my experiences inside the Entity-perhaps because of
them-I made this mistake. Once, I had entered the reality and smellspace
of the alien, jasmine Orange. How much simpler it should have been to
understand a primitive people I had lived close to for half a year. I
thought I did understand them. I lived as an Alaloi, and I thought my
appreciation of the Alaloi life must be close to theirs. Did they
perceive beauty as I did? Surely when hunting through the forest they
loved, as I loved, the crunch of cotton cake beneath their skis, the
cool air, the barking of the dogs, and everywhere, the spruce trees
frozen with white and green, singing with snow loons, swaying in the
wind. Certainly they lived closer to life than civilized people; in many
ways they were happier, more alive, somehow more fully human. (I, too,
found a kind of happiness in the mountains, despite the little evils of
lice and dirt and blood tea. It still puzzles me how I became used to
these things.) There were moments in the forest, or on the beach by the
cold ocean, when I felt alive for the first time in my life. How ironic,
I thought, that I had come to the island seeking the secret of life in
the tissues of women and men only to find it in the rushing waves, in
the cries of the eider and snow geese, in all the wild things of the
world. How remote, how meaningless the quest seemed then! What was a
god's knowledge embroidered into a man's chromosomes next to the
infinitely greater wisdom of the world? I discovered within myself a
profound will to live life as completely as I could. I took joy in most
of the things I did, in building a fire and watching the snowflakes
melt, joy in eating and coupling, joy even in hunting the animals. I
came to believe the Devaki shared this joy; sheer joy, I thought, was
what they lived for. Harmony, peace, joy-these were the elements of life
lived naturally in a natural world.

But there is more to life than joy. The Devaki knew this. In my bones
and in my heart, I knew it too, though knowledge and acceptance are
different things. This was the essence of my arrogance, my
shortsightedness, my mistake: I had forgotten that nature was not only
full of joy, but was tragic and violent, too. I did not understand how
the Devaki could accept-could even love and embrace-life's violence and
tragedies. I underestimated their love of harmony, the true
understanding of the World-soul's intention that they call halla. I
thought that in the forests of the Thousand islands, peace and
forgiveness were the essence of a people's relations with others. In
truth, I knew nothing of the sometimes terrible nature of halla.

The supreme tragedy of life, I have always thought, is that it must end
in death. Even for those who die too late, death must one day come.

Although it is unpleasant to do so, I must here tell of Shanidar's death
because it was this event, and the events that followed, which led to my
discovery of what the Devaki would do to preserve their halla relation
with the world.

The beginning of winter is usually a time of cool, bright days and spiky
cold nights. There is snow perhaps every third day; the light powder
falls softly and builds into sparkling, fluffy drifts. But sometimes,
once every ten years, winter arrives suddenly, with teeth. The mornings
dawn blue cold, with the air so harsh and dry that it does not snow.

When we had lived among the Devaki for some two hundred days, the
weather turned very cold, and everyone said it would be a long, ten year
winter. The Devaki were happy because there was a great harvest of baldo
nuts, which they stored in leather barrels. There was frozen coho and
sheefish; there was smoked shagshay and eider eggs and roasted silk
belly, an abundance of food. The old people who had gone hungry the
winter before were very happy, all except Shanidar whose tired body
could not hold any more food. On fifty-third day, he began complaining
of a hot pain in his belly. During the days that followed, I visited his
chamber and tried to feed him soft-cooked eggs, but it did no good. His
flesh fell inward; his old yellow skin tightened around his bones. Days
passed and I marveled that he remained alive. Often he joked that some
men could suck their nourishment from the very air. At other times he
coughed for air and could not speak. I wondered what sustained him, what
inner fire kept him living long past his time.

The end did not come quickly. On eighty-second day he began vomiting
blood. For two days he drank no water, and when the third day dawned it
was clear it would be his last. He called for me to carry him from his
chamber to the front of the cave. I did as he asked; even swaddled in
thick furs he was as light as a child, so light that I thought a good
part of him had already gone over to the other side. As I set him down
in front of the fires, only his eyes moved, perhaps trying to take in
the wisps of clouds high in the sky.

"Mallory Sealkiller is kind," he said, and he coughed.

I threw a few sticks on the fire and asked, "Are you warm enough?"

"You know, I cannot feel my body, so how can I know if I am cold, hmmm?"

And then, "Listen, yes, I am cold-so cold. I feel like I've fallen
through a hole into the sea."

I built the fire up until it roared. Orange tongues of fire flickered
outward, licking the rocky cavefront and melting a circle of snow four
feet wide around the firepit. The heat burned my face. With our backs to
the warm rock, we sat looking out over the long, snowy slope leading to
the forest below.

"That is better, it is good to be warm-Listen, how long will it be
before the stars light the sky?"

"Not long," I lied.

We sat there throughout the agonizingly long afternoon, talking of
Katharine's pregnancy and other concerns of the tribe. Shanidar loved to
talk, even when he was so weak and ill that his breath rattled. He had
to pause for long periods in between his words. The Devaki came and
went. When they passed, they gave us a wide berth. The women especially,
bent low beneath huge blocks of drinking snow, looked at us
suspiciously, as if we were wolves intent upon stealing their children.

Often during the past days, they had whispered and shaken their heads at
my visits to Shanidar, perhaps wondering why I would choose to be with a
man who had not died at the right time. As I fed the fire and watched
Shanidar's shrunken lips struggle to shape his words, I wondered the
same thing.

Darkness fell at last and the stars came out, ten thousand glittering
particles of ice against the black fur of night. "Losas shona," he said,
struggling to look at them with his half-blind eyes. He coughed for a
while before gasping, "How I love these lights!-Could you throw some
more wood on the fire, it is cold, hmmm? Listen, I think this deep
winter will be dead cold early. It is still winter, isn't it?-and
already it is so cold. Listen, Mallory, my eyelashes are freezing from
my breath. Could you wipe the ice from my eyes?"

I wiped his eyes, and a fit of coughing wracked his entire body. When it
was over, he was silent and still. I thought he had died, but no, he
gripped my hand suddenly, keeping me there while he grasped at life as a
falling climber grasps at the rocks of a mountain. "It hurts," he said.

And then, The lights in the sky are stars, you know. Burning hydrogen
fuses into ; light-my father taught me that when I was a boy."

For a moment I was shocked at his use of the word "hydrogen." I was not,
of course, shocked because he knew the word-I remembered that he had
journeyed to the stars in his youth-but because he had spoken the word
to me as if I would know it, too. "Ydroogene?" I said, feigning
puzzlement. "You use strange words, Old Man."

He clutched the edge of my fur, and he said, "You have fooled the
others, but you have not fooled me, Man of the City. When I was
younger-" And here he coughed for a while. "You know ... I remember what
it was like to have strong muscles as you have-when I was a young man
who had no legs, I went to the cutter named Rainer, and he grew me new
legs, there in his cutting shop in the Farsider's Quarter of the Unreal
City. You see, I know a man of the City when I see one."

After much evasiveness and outright lying on my part, after I had looked
around to make sure no one was near, I finally admitted that I was
indeed a man of the City. "But how did you know?"

"You can wear real shagshay furs and you can learn The Language and you
can change your body-You know, I used to have a fine strong body, even
though I had no legs-Listen, you can change everything but the way you
think, hmmm? You cannot change your thoughtways-otherwise I would not be
an outcast among my own people." He asked me why we had come to the
Devaki, and I told him. I do not know why I trusted him. The night was
deepening around us, cold and bottomless as space, and I repeated the
message of the Ieldra: "The secret of man's immortality lies in our past
and in our future. If we search, we will discover the secret of life and
save ourselves." I told him of my journey into the Entity. Even though I
no longer believed it, I said that the secret of secrets might be found
in the oldest DNA of human beings. I told him all these things as the
fire burned low and the stars showered streamers of faint light into our
eyes.

"You are a pilot, then? Listen, I am an ignorant man-you know, my father
taught me as best he could-you are a pilot, and you might think all the
things I have said to you this past year are nonsense, hmmm? But no, you
know, it is not nonsense."

His coughing had stopped only to be replaced by a liquid wheezing. Every
word forced from his throat was gasped out in between clutching breaths.

"Listen, the Devaki have their own knowledge so you must understand that
everything I said to you about killing your doffel and standing apart
from other men-and do you remember what I said about evil and good,
hmmm?-all that I've told you is true."

"I've listened to everything you've said," I told him truthfully.

"Then listen to the plea of an old man. Do not trust the message of the
gods. When I was born without legs here in this cave-Listen, this is the
saddest story I know-because I was born a marasika without legs, in deep
winter they dumped me into the snow where I froze to death. My father
brought me frozen to the cutters of the City, but they could do nothing
to help me. So my father, my poor father who was Goshevan, son of
Jaharawal whose father was Pesheval Kulpak of Summerworld, my father
brought me to Agathange. There the men-do you know this, Pilot?-the men
are like gods. They brought me back to life so that I could return to
the cave of my birth-how kind of them, hmmm? You know, they made me
alive again, and they could easily have grown me new legs, but they did
not. Why? Listen, this is the truth: The gods are tricksters, and when
they remake a man, they always leave something undone. To humble him. So
do not believe this message of your Ieldra about the secret of life
because those gods have obviously left unsaid the simplest thing, which
is this: The secret of life is more life." And here he tried to lift his
body towards the opening of the cave. I turned my head and listened to
high-pitched barking and squeals of childish laughter. "Listen, do you
hear the sounds of Jonath and Aida playing with the puppies? The secret
of life is making children-my father told me this when I was a boy, but
I did not believe him."

I thought about fathers and sons, and I listened to him choke for words.

"If you ever have a son, you must be kind to him, Mallory." I rubbed my
nose and said, "You don't know the rule of our Order, but I should tell
you: pilots may not marry." I thought of Katharine growing bigger day by
day with someone's child. "I'll never have a son," I said.

"Oh, it is very bad to go over to the other side without sons and
daughters, I should have believed my father." He coughed and he moaned;
he tried to say something that I could not understand.

"Does it hurt?" I asked.

He rubbed his arm weakly and said, "You know, when the Devaki go over
they are never afraid because they have sons and daughters to pray for
their ghosts." He raised his eyes to the sky and spoke so softly I had
to strain to hear him, "But I'm afraid, Pilot." And then, "Oh, it hurts,
here in my arm and in my throat-" He coughed hard once and grabbed his
chest. "Like ice, oh, listen .. ." and here he began to mumble and
groan. I think he said something like, "Shona los halla; halla los
shona," and then he closed his eyes and gasped for air. After a while-it
was a long time, really-his breathing seemed to stop. I held the corner
of his robe under his nose to see if his exhalation would move the silky
white hairs. But the fur remained unruffled because he had no breath. I
would have felt for the pulse in his throat, but I did not want to touch
him. I was afraid he was dead.

I stood up and drew my furs tightly around me. The air was so cold I
thought my eyes would freeze. I watched him for a long time, until the
skin of his old, shriveled face began hardening like marble. And then
for no good reason-for whatever he had been was gone, swallowed like a
ray of light down a black hole-I raised my head to the night and prayed
for his ghost: "Shanidar, mi alasharia la shantih Devaki." His mouth and
lips were frozen into a slack mask;- his face seemed both too familiar
and utterly alien. I could not look at him so I covered him with his
fur. I turned my back to his body and went to find Yuri.

I had never before seen a dead human being.

I hurried through the cave, stumbling across the pitted, uneven floor.

The oilstones had burned low, and the huts were dim globes lost in
darkness. I came to the lava pendant in the middle of the cave. It was
the Old Man of the Cave, smiling his dark smile into the cave's black
depths. For no reason, I slapped the rock sculpture on its face. The
slap cracked through the air. I struck the Old Man of the Cave again,
all the while thinking about Shanidar. I wondered if everyone felt as I
did upon seeing a dead human being for the first time: I was terrified
of dying myself and ecstatic because I was still alive. Later would come
mourning and melancholy, but at the moment, I was glad that it was he
who was dead, and not I. I felt intensely alive; possibly at no moment
in my life had I ever tasted life so poignantly. I slapped the
sculpture, and my hand stung. I thought the secret of life must be
feeling intensely alive.

I woke Yuri in his hut and told him that his near-cousin had died. While
he roused the rest of his family-for no event among the Devaki is as
important as a death-I went to get Soli and the others. We gathered in
the open area behind the Manwelina huts. Wicent and Yuri laid Shanidar's
body on a newl skin, and Liam and Seif built six small stacks of
aromatic pela wood around him and lit the mourning fires. The warm light
bathed Shanidar's naked skin, which Anala and Liluye rubbed from heel to
brow with hot seal oil. (The Devaki believe that a man-or a woman-must
make the journey to the other side naked, as when he first comes into
the world. But since he must journey past the frozen sea, his body must
be properly greased against the cold.) The red streaks of light
reflected off Shanidar's white body were both ghastly and beautiful. As
the women covered him with blue snow dahlia and arctic poppies, I
covered my eyes with my hand. The sweet smell of broken flowers stung my
nose. Then Yuri, who was Shanidar's nearest near-cousin, picked up a
flint knife and sliced the right ear from the corpse's head. Someone
wrapped it in feather moss, and Yuri said, "We preserve the ear of
Shanidar, and he will always hear the prayers of our tribe. I, Yuri, son
of Nuri, will pray for Shanidar's ghost because he had no sons or
daughters to pray for him. And my son Liam and his sons, we will all
pray for Shanidar, mi alasharia la shantih Devaki. Even though it is
easy to blame him for waiting so long to go over, we must not blame him
because a man must go over free from blame."

When the mourning fires had burnt low and most of our throats were sore
from praying and weeping-most of the men were able to Weep on command
while the women remained dry-eyed and somber-we wrapped Shanidar in the
newl skin and carried him outside to the graveyard above the cave. The
ground was frozen hard as stone and buried in snow, so we built a
pyramid of granite boulders over his body. The boulders were heavy; our
stomach muscles strained and our biceps popped, but soon, under the
watchful eyes of the stars, we finished our work. Yuri said another
requiem and the Devaki yawned and returned to their beds. My mother and
the rest of my family, even Bardo, left me there, too.

I stood alone above the grave. The wind spilled down between the black
tree trunks, drowning me in cold, muddled thoughts. I stood there all
night until the blackness began to soften. How tragic, I thought, that
Shanidar had died leaving no particle of himself to grow and taste the
bittersweet liquor of life! How I pitied him, pitied myself, pitied
anyone who had to die childless and alone! Shanidar was right: To be a
link in the eternal, unbroken chain of life-this was the secret of life.

There was nothing else, no other immortality, no deeper meaning. I
turned away from the wind and slapped some life back into my freezing
face. Suddenly, the begetting of children seemed the most important
thing in the universe. A son, I thought, could there be anything better
than having a son?

I ran back to the cave to find Katharine. I crept through the tunnel of
our hut, went to her bed, and I covered her mouth with my hand. I woke
her. I whispered in her ear; I told her that I had to talk to her. In
silence she dressed, and in silence we sneaked out into the open air.

Down into the forest I led her, down to the stream cutting through the
hills below the cave. During the night some clouds had come up; it was
warmer but the moisture made everything feel cold as slush. The woods
were submerged in the rolling gray of twilight, and snow was falling.

The air was marbled with patterns of light and dark. I could barely see
my boots slipping against the rounded rocks of the stream bank. At last
I stopped and began to talk to her. My words were nearly lost to the
gurgling of the stream beneath the ice, but at least no one would be
able to overhear what we said.

I took her arm and looked at her. "You told Soli that you didn't know
who the father of the child would be. Is that true?"

"Did I say that? I don't think I said ... you should search your memory,
Mallory, what were my exact words?"

I did not remember her exact words, though I remembered that one must
listen with exactitude to everything a scryer said. I tried to read the
truth from her face, but I could not see the shape of her mouth. It was
dark and her lips were hidden beneath the ruff of her hood. She stood
with her hands over her belly. She could not hide the shape of her
belly. Unlike some women who carried their babies low, as if they had a
ball tucked beneath their furs, Katharine's belly was long and ovoid
like a bloodfruit.

"Who is the father, then?" I asked. "Do you know?"

"The father is ... who he is; he is who he will be. The mother ... the
father."

I was desperate to know if I would be a father. I could not bear the
thought that Liam might be the father. What would the child look like?

Would he have blond hair and thick brow ridges? Would he be half-Alatoi
and half-human? Or-since Mehtar had sculpted our flesh but not our germ
cells-would he be wholly human, wholly the fusion of Katharine's and my
seed, wholly mine to call "son?" I took her mittened hand in mine and
asked her, "Is it our child, Katharine?"

"Is it possible I don't know?"

"But you're a scryer; scryers know these things, don't they? What is the
first training of a scryer?-to 'think like DNA" isn't that it?"

"You're a pilot, you should know," she mocked. Her laughter bubbled out
of her in a clear stream. "Mallory, Mallory, sweet Mallory."

"Listen to me," I said. "It's a humiliating thing for a child to be
called a bastard." (I should mention that although on many planets the
word "bastard" simply means one who is born out of wedlock, I use the
word in its broader sense to identify those unfortunates who do not know
who their parents or grandparents are. What does it matter if the mother
and father are married or not? What matters is knowing one's genetic
endowment, the heritage of fine chromosomes, the tracing of one's
abilities-and liabilitiesback through the generations.)

I think she smiled at me, then. "The child won't be a bastard. I promise
YOU."

Because I thought of myself as a bastard, I took this to mean that I was
not the child's father. I was disappointed and my head suddenly seemed
as heavy as stone. Next to me the stream ran darkly through a white pipe
of ice. In places the pipe had cracked and fallen inward. I stared down
through feathery layers of ice to the rushing black water below. "If I'm
not the father, then who is?"

"Did I say you weren't the father of the ... ?PP "Don't play games with
me, Katharine."

"I'm not playing; it's just that if I told you, oh, the possibilities,
the ... the pain, .. . do you see?"

The wind rose and she drew her hood tightly around her face and crossed
her arms over her chest. She began to shudder so I put my arms around
her and touched my head to hers. I realized a thing about the scryers
then: They do not play games for the love of play; they play to distract
themselves and others from the terrible truths they have seen.

"Who is the father?" I whispered in her ear. "Tell me."

"If I told you, it would kill you, don't you see?"

"He's Liam's son, then?"

She began to speak but her voice cracked, revealing an inner core of
fear. Her blue eyes were cold with terror. I was aware of this core only
for an instant. Then her scryer training took hold and her eyes closed,
and her face was as smooth and white as a scryer's robes. She laughed
for a little while as she touched her belly. "He's your son, Mallory.

Our son. He'll be a beautiful boy; he is a beautiful, compassionate ...
a dreamer like his father."

A son! Katharine had told me we would have a son, and true to her words,
the news had killed me; I was dying with pride and happiness. I was so
happy that I threw my head back and shouted out: "My son! A goddamned
son!"

Katharine was dead quiet, staring into the gray, morning woods. I paid
her little attention. I listened to the wind sighing through the trees,
carrying in from the hills the howl of a wolf It was a long, low sound
full of loneliness and yearning. The wind blew across the snowy white
ridges and valleys, and an absurb notion came to me: The wolfs howl was
Shanidar's other-soul calling to me, whispering that I should be kind to
my son. The wolf howled for a long time. Then Katharine began to cry,
and I remembered that Shanidar's doffel had been the seal, not the wolf
I listened to the howling, and I knew the sound for what it really was:
just a rush of breath through the throat of a cold, lonely beast. I held
Katharine and she sobbed in my arms. With my fingers I touched her wet
cheeks. I kissed her eyelids. I asked her why she was so sad, but she
could not tell me what was wrong. "A son," she said, and her voice was
raw and burning. That was all she could say. "A son, a beautiful boy, do
you see?"

To tell of the ruin of our expedition, to give a proper account of the
plots and murders leading to the great crisis of our Order and the war
that followed, I must here relate events which I did not directly
witness. There are those who would doubt such a second-tongue
knowledge-I am thinking of the epistemologists-but I myself am sure that
Justine's testimony of that day is a close approximation of the truth.

After all, what is truth? I can, of course, offer no episteme, for in
the affairs of our race, no intellectually certain knowledge can exist.

If what I say here sometimes seems illogical, sometimes tainted with
chaos and a touch of madness, that is because human life is so tainted
and touched.

Two days after Shanidar's burial, on eighty-fifth day in winter, all of
the men and most of the boys left the cave early in the morning to hunt
shagshay in one of Kweitkel's western valleys. It was a cold day; it
dawned blue cold and became colder throughout the day. The air was like
a steel mask covering the island. It was so cold that the trees cracked
and thundered, spraying splinters into the blue air. Because of the
cold, the women and children kept to the cave, gathering around the
fires and oilstones wherever they could. Everyone was cold, shivering
cold, miserably cold, everyone except my mother. My mother was burning
with a fever. But she was not sick. Or rather, she was not sick with
disease; she was sick with jealousy and hatred because two days before
she had followed Katharine and me down to the stream. She was a good
spy, my mother was. She had hidden behind a yu tree and heard me shout
with joy. The knowledge of my fatherhood had wounded her, and for two
days she kept to herself, and her hatred rankled and festered.

When she could stand the burning no longer, on the afternoon of the
hunt, she found Katharine alone in our hut. There was a fight, spitting
words of poison from my mother and Katharine's infuriating (to my
mother) nearsilence. I will never know everything that was said, but
Justine and the other women overheard bad things, terrible things, My
mother called Katharine a witch. "What have you done?" my mother
accused. "You've bewitched my son. With your secret ways. Trapped him
with sympathy and sex."

These were serious words, so Anala, Sanya and Muliya forced their way
into the hut. Justine was out helping one of the dogs deliver her
puppies, and when she heard the commotion she ran to join the others
inside. In the tight, round space, the four women crowded around my
mother and Katharine, keeping them apart.

"Why did you call Katharine a witch?" Anala asked my mother.

At the sound of the word "witch," cross-eyed Muliya mumbled a hasty
prayer. Her fat arms jiggled as she rubbed ashes over her eyelids so
that the other-soul of the witch would have difficulty seeing her. (I
have forgotten to mention that Muliya was an extremely ugly woman. As
Justine reminded me, she had a broken nose, and she looked something
like a muskox. It is curious that women are often more sensitive to a
woman's beauty-or lack of beauty- than are men.)

Sanya nervously rubbed her skinny hands together while she looked from
Anala to Muliya. She was a small, intelligent woman with a narrow face
like a fox. She licked her stumpy, yellow teeth and said, "We have all
wondered why Mallory acts so strange. But witchcraft? Why would
Katharine bewitch him?" She smiled at Katharine because she liked her.

She clearly did not believe Katharine could be a witch.

"Some women like the shape of their brother's arms," Muliya said. "And
they like the touch of their spears even more. Everyone knows Katharine
and Mallory were alone together grinding snow."

My mother was aghast at what had happened. She said, "I spoke hastily.

Because I was angry. Of course Katharine is not a witch."

All this time, Justine stood between Muliya and the calm, silent
Katharine.

To my mother, Muliya said, "I've made blood-tea with you for almost a
year. When have you ever spoken hastily? You called Katharine a witch, I
heard you."

Anala stood in the center of the hut, looking at the other women. She
pulled back her hair, which was as gray as steel. She was the tallest of
the women, the strongest, and possibly the most clear-headed. She looked
at my mother. "You call her a witch, and those are the worst words a
woman can fling at another. If she is a witch, where is the craft of her
witchery?"

An argument erupted, then, about the many ways a woman might bewitch a
man. (Or, more, rarely, another woman.) Muliya's eyes crossed as she
said, "It is well known that the Patwin tribe went hungry because a
woman bewitched her near-brother and sucked out his seed. It is a bad
thing to bewitch a man."

"But who hasn't thought of doing it?" Sanya pointed out, and she laughed
nervously again.

Muliya told of an Oluran woman cursed with a brutal husband who beat her
whenever he returned home from the hunt with no meat. One day in late
midwinter spring, the woman-her name was Calya-had made a doll of sticks
and fur, and had cast it into a pool of snowmelt. The following day her
doomed husband stepped on a thin crust of ice and broke through to the
sea where he drowned. "And what of Takeko of the Nodin tribe? Everyone
knows she fed her lover seeds purple with the araglo mold, and everyone
knows how she aroused her lover's rage with her cunning, witch's words.

And didn't her lover then kill her husband?"

Anala seemed to grow angry when she heard this. With her hidescraper she
shaved a layer of callous from the palm of her hand. She held the
yellowed, half-moon wafer of skin between her fingers and said, "How
does a woman capture the soul of a man? She must have a part of him so
her other-soul can see the other-soul of the man through this part-is
this not well known? If Katharine were a witch, she would have gathered
tufts of hair or nail parings and the like to work her craft. Where is
this craftwork? Who has seen it?"

And Muliya slyly said, "A witch would hide such things, wouldn't she?"

She appeared to be staring through Katharine's legs at the bed behind
her. Even though her eyes were crossed and weak, they were Alaloi eyes,
and they did not miss very much, especially concerning the shape and
texture of snow, for which the Alaloi have a hundred words. "Why is
there soreesh, fresh powder, packed beneath Katharine's bed?"

Sanya shrugged her shoulders and shook her head. "Perhaps one of the
dogs yellowed the hardpack and burned a hole with his piss?"

"Who would let a dog piss on her bed?" Muliya asked. "No, I think we
should see what is buried beneath the bed."

Neither my mother nor Justine wanted Muliya digging beneath the bed, so
they tried to distract her with arguments and denials, and when that
didn't work they asked her to leave the hut. "If Katharine is a witch,"

Justine said, "of course, I'm sure she's not, but if she is, we can
discover the witchcraft for ourselves, and since she's my daughter,
shouldn't I be the one to punish her?"

And Anala shook her handsome head and told her, "That would be too much
to ask of any mother."

Muliya approached the bed, and my mother stopped her. There was another
fight. While Katharine sat on the bed watching, my mother and Justine
tried to force the Devaki women from the hut. Justine pushed Muliya, and
she tripped and fell through the wall of the hut. There was a crunching
and a cloud of snow. Other Devaki women were waiting outside. They
picked Muliya up. They kicked in the rest of the hut. They demolished
it, crushed the snow blocks beneath their feet, and they swarmed around
Katharine's bed. Irisha and Liluye and six others held my mother and
Justine from behind.

Anala said, "You see, the mother of the witch always protects the
daughter. This is a sad day, but Muliya is right. We must see what is
beneath the bed." She squatted, and like a dog digging for a bone, she
began hacking at the snow with her hide-scraper. Showers of chiseled
snow flew out behind her, covering the furred boots of the other women
who were craning their necks, anxious to see what she might find. There
was a dull "chink" as of stone against obsidian. "Here it is," Anala
said, and she held up a snowencrusted sphere of krydda.

"What is it?" Sanya asked. "It is so beautiful!"

After Anala had picked off the clinging granules of wet snow, Muliya
said, "It looks like a shell, but I've never seen a shell so beautiful
or so round." She turned to my mother and asked, "Are there many shells
like these on the beaches of the Southern Islands?"

My mother struggled to break away from Marya, Lusa and Liluye. "There
are many such shells," she lied.

Anala managed to open one of the spheres. She turned it upside down,
letting its bluish-white contents dribble into her open hand. She held
the sticky puddle to her nose and sniffed. "Manseed," she announced, and
all the women made a sour face.

Muliya dipped her fingers into Anala's outstretched hand. She licked her
fingers and gagged and said, "Manseed-but it is sweetened with a juice I
have never tasted before. Witchcraft, and here it is: Katharine mixes
Mallory's seed with the juice of strange plants to bewitch him."

It was a serious thing they had discovered. Sanya approached Muliya and
said, "I have always liked Katharine. She always smiles, even when
things are bad. Is it such a terrible thing to have bewitched Mallory?

What a wild man he is! If ever a man needed taming, surely he does?" And
then she asked the question on all the women's tongues: "Must we send
her out onto the ice of the sea?"

"We should smash her fingers off," Muliya said. "Then she could work no
more witchcraft."

Justine stood very still, wondering how she could break away from Liluye
and the others. She was afraid for Katharine, but she had the coolness
of mind to realize that it would be better for her daughter to lose her
fingers than her life. Fingers, as she told me later, can always be
regrown.

While the women argued over Katharine's fate, Muliya began digging
beneath the bed. "Look at this!" she cried as she uncovered two more
krydda spheres. "And this! And look, four more, and here, so many of
these shells!"

All at once the women fell into silence. One by one, they opened the
krydda spheres, sampling what was inside them. "Look, a lock of hair,"

Irisha said. "Who has hair so yellow? Liam? Seif?"

Muliya emptied sphere after sphere and called out, "More manseed! And in
this one, manseed that smells like tangleroot! Whosever seed this is
must have eaten a great mess of tangleroot." A few of the women laughed
because it was well known that the bitter tangleroot makes a man's seed
stink. "And in this shell, the seed is thin and watery like a boy's. So
many, I did not think she had swived so many!"

At last she emptied the spheres containing the nail parings and Jinje's
amputated toe. The woman moaned and looked at each other; they touched
each other's faces to reassure themselves, and Anala stood up straight
and pointed at Jinje's rotten toe lying on the crushed snow. "This is
very bad, very, very bad. I have never known of anything so bad."

They talked for a while and agreed that Jinje's foot had rotted because
of Katharine's witchcraft. "But why would Katharine curse Jinje?" Sanya
wanted to know. "To bewitch Mallory is understandable, but to maim
Jinje, that is evil."

The women agreed that Katharine was indeed a witch of the worst sort, an
evil satinka who wreaked harm on innocents solely for sport and
pleasure. And when Sanya wondered how a satinka could appear so gentle
and kind, Anala said, "That is their art." Then she turned to Muliya and
said, "Katharine is a satinka, and that is why this year has been so
hard and hungry. We must all blame her for being a satinka, otherwise
the Devaki will have no more halla. And that is why we must prepare the
satinka's bed."

For a moment Justine was confused. She could not guess why Anala would
want to prepare Katharine's bed. Then she looked at my mother, who was
almost crying because she knew too much about the Devaki ways. Suddenly,
Justine was very afraid. In fact, she was terrified. She began screaming
at Anala. She told her everything, told her that we had come from the
City to find the secret of life. But no one believed her. To many of the
Devaki, the City was only a myth. And even for those few who might have
been willing to admit that strange, weak-faced people lived in the
Unreal City, Mehtar's sculpture had fooled them too well. As Muliya put
it, "Look at Katharine and Justine, are they not Devaki as we are
Devaki?"

And Anala. said to Justine, "You must not invent tales to save your
daughter. No one can blame a mother for loving her child, but not even a
mother can suffer a satinka to live."

So saying, she and the others grabbed Justine, my mother and Katharine,
and they began dragging them toward the back of the cave. There, where
the floor rose to meet the cave's dark roof, the air stank of oil and
smoke and was too warm. The oilstones-there must have been twenty or
more-were full of seal fat and brightly aglow. The walls writhed with
shadows, and yellow fingers of light wrapped around the black
stalactites hanging from ceiling to floor. At the very rear of the cave,
the women had made a bed of packed snow. They staked Katharine to this
cold bed as if she were a dog. Her arms and legs were splayed, tied to
four stakes with leather thongs.

Anala turned to Justine and said, "The mother of the satinka must
witness the ceremony."

"No!" Justine shouted. She wrenched an arm free and struck Liluye in the
face. "Moira!" she called to my mother. "Moira!" But Marya and two
others had their hands clamped around my mother, holding her like an
animal in a trap.

"A witch," Anala said, "cannot do her work without fingers." She bent
low and grasped Katharine's wrist. "We'll sacrifice the fingers first."

All this time Katharine had remained preternaturally calm. Her eyes were
wide open; it seemed she was staring at the whorls and swirling rock
patterns of the ceiling. But Justine did not think she was looking at
rock. She was looking at her life, reviewing these last moments which
she had perhaps seen many times before. How is it possible that she
could have accepted her fate so willingly? Had she truly seen her own
death? Or had she merely seen possibilities, variations on the fatal
theme in which Anala decided to spare her, or where she was saved by
design or chance? What a hell it must be to foresee the manner and
moment of one's death! Others can fool themselves that they are
immortal. Or, at least, during every instant of their lives, they can
look forward to the sweetness of instants still to come. They never
know; they never see. But a scryer, she knows and sees too much. All she
has in the face of infinity is her training and her courage. Katharine
had courage, great courage, but at the end her courage failed her. (Or
was it her vision that failed her?) She looked at Anala as if seeing her
for the first time. She struggled against the binding thongs. She began
to scream: "No, no, I can't see ... please!"

Anala began hacking at Katharine's fingers with her hide-scraper.

Katharine thrashed and screamed and balled her fist tightly, and Anala
said to Muliya, "This flint is too dull. Bring me my seal knife,
please." When Muliya returned with the sharp knife, Anala thanked her
politely and began sawing at Katharine's fingers. In a surprisingly
short time-for the Devaki are quick and precise at the cutting of
meat-she struck off the fingers of one hand and went to work on the
other.

When she was done, she stood back and looked at Katharine's still body.

"She has fainted from the pain," she said. "Who can blame her?" She
looked at Justine and told her, "It is known that a satinka cannot go
over to the other side of day, carrying a child. Else she would be born
a satinka, too." She motioned to Sanya and Muliya and said, "We will
take the child while she sleeps." So saying, they cut away Katharine's
furs and laid open her belly. As the fetus was torn away from the water
sack and its cord was cut, Katharine opened her eyes suddenly. Anala
handed the bloody fetus to Sanya and said, "Take care of this," and the
younger woman did as she was told.

"No!" Katharine screamed, and she began calling for her mother. She
lapsed into the language of the City, calling to Justine to save her
baby. "You see," Anala said to Justine, who had dislocated a shoulder in
her struggle with the other women. "She speaks in the satinka's
tongue-her witchery is proven."

"She's not a witch!" Justine screamed. "She's a scryer!"

"Strange words," Anala said. "The mother of the satinka has been touched
with strange words, too. And that is why we must take out the satinka's
tongue." She picked up her knife and continued, "But first we must take
the eyes so the satinka cannot watch us from the other side and work her
curses."

As quickly as she would shell a nutmeat, she put the tip of the knife in
Katharine's eye and twisted her hand with a scooping motion. The eyeball
came out neatly, and she gave it into Muliya's care, Somehow, Katharine
kept her silence, even when Anala took out her other eye as well. It was
only when Anala called for Muliya and Liluye to hold open her jaws that
she came alive and screamed, inexplicably, "Mallory, do not kill him!"

All this Justine told me later, after the deed was done. But I was able
to verify a part of her story with my own eyes. It was my luck-and
Bardo's-to have killed the first of the shagshay earlier that day. It
was my fate to be the first to return to the cave. I do not think that
anyone except Katharine expected us to return so early. But our sleds
were heaped with butchered meat, so we drove the dogs toward the cave
even as Anala worked her butcheries within. I remember this clearly: It
was so cold that the mass of steaming red shagshay meat had frozen hard
along the trail. It was deep cold; the sky itself seemed frozen like a
deep, blue ocean. And like water, the air carried sounds, building and
amplifying the wind's whisper into a shriek. I heard sounds from the
cave. From the distance I thought it was merely the screaming of puppies
calling to their mothers. We drew closer, and I realized that the
screams were the screams of a human being. Panic seized me. There was a
sudden, dreadful knowledge. I grabbed my bloody shagshay spear and ran
for the cave.

Several women-I do not remember their faces-tried to stop me from going
to the rear of the cave. I knocked them out of the way. (One of them,
perhaps the gentle Mentina, gouged my cheek with her hide-scraper. The
scar is still there.) Bardo puffed and panted close behind me. Together
we fought our way through the women to find Anala trying to pry open
Katharine's teeth. There was blood on her lips. There was blood
everywhere, blood streaming from Katharine's open belly and from her
knuckle stumps, blood burning holes in the snow bed surrounding her;
there were pools of blood filling the holes where her eyes had been. My
mother started to gasp out the whole incredible story. I knocked Anala
away from Katharine, and Muliya and Liluye as well. Bardo freed Justine,
clubbing at the women with his spear. He grunted and bellowed and
shoved; he stood with his spear pointing at the women. Most of them had
grabbed up knives or scrapers or other tools, and were glaring at us. No
one seemed to know what to do.

I dropped down to listen to the words Katharine was struggling to speak
But I couldn't hear anything because Bardo's voice was booming. "I hope
they don't rush us," he said, "because I don't think I could kill them."

"Be quiet!" I said. And then so softly only Katharine could hear me, I
whispered, "Neither could I. I could hardly kill a damn seal."

Katharine's lips were moving. "Oh, but you could," she murmured. "It's
so easy to ... but you mustn't kill him, do you see?"

"What did you say?" Her face was anguished; I tried not to look intc the
pools in her eyepits.

"You choose," she whispered. "The choice is always .. ." She was deef in
her scryer's universe, freed from time by Anala's blinding knife.

Perhaps she was seeing things in the clear light for the first time.

"I don't understand you."

"You've killed him, but you mustn't kill him, because he's your ... oh
Mallory, stop being such a fool!"

"Katharine, I can't-"

"In the end we choose our futures, don't you see?"

"No, I don't-"

"Yes," she said. And then there was no time, and she was a young woman
again repeating her final scryer's vows: "Give; be compassionate;
restrain yourself because-" and here the words rushed out as if someone
had dropped a stone on her belly, "-because you will never die." She
panted for a while, then her lips stopped moving, and her chest and her
legs and thi pulses of blood-everything about her was silent and still.

She lay staring through the black stone ceiling into the sky, eyeless in
eternity as all scryer hope to be.

That was the beginning of the nightmare. I stood up, and there was blood
on my lips and in my eyes. I grabbed Anala's seal knife from the bloody
snow. I should have directed my thoughts to Katharine's body-had done so
my life, and hers, might have been very different. But I did not think
of her; I did not think at all because I was as full of rage as any
beast. I ran towards the Manwelina huts, looking for Anala. A crazy idea
had come to me: If I grabbed her by the back of the neck and shook her
as a dog would a sleekit, I could make her put the pieces of Katharine's
body back together again. I found her coming out of Yuri's hut. She was
holding his mammoth spear, and I decided it would do no good to shake
her. After all, she was not a cutter; nothing, I thought, could restore
Katharine to me or redeem her from death. No, I would not shake Anala; I
would cut out her eyes so she could see the evil of what she had done.

Confusing things happened. Someone sliced my ear with her knife. Anala
threw her husband's spear, which I knocked away with my forearm. Someone
drove her knife into the back of my arm. Justine rammed her elbow into
Muliya's face while Bardo groaned like a bear. A woman tripped and fell
into Anala's hut. Snow crunched. In the light of the sputtering
oilstones, particles of snow clogged the air. Anala was terrified-I
could see the fear on her broad, yellow face. And then I let my arm fall
to the side, and I quietly dropped the knife into the snow. I could no
more put it into Anala's eye than I could carve out a seal's eye. I was
about to turn back to Katharine when Bardo shouted, "Watch out for
Liam!"

I remembered that Liam's sled had been close behind us along the trail.

When I turned, he was running at me. His shape was dark and featureless
against the bright circle of the eave's mouth. He had his seal knife
gripped low. He must have thought I was going to kill his mother-I
realize that now. Obviously he had not seen me drop my knife. He shoved
the knife toward my belly, and I caught his arm. We kicked at each
other's legs, and suddenly we were down, rolling in the snow. He stabbed
for my throat but I got an arm up, taking the knife through my forearm.

The pain enraged me. I was full of rage and pain, so I got my other arm
up in a hold that the Timekeeper had taught me. I grabbed his windpipe.

"Sister swiver!" Liam shouted in my ear.

There was a moment. His life pulsed against my fingertips. There was a
moment of crushing strength, a moment of choice. Perhaps I could have
let him go; perhaps we could have left the Devaki in peace. But I raged
and I squeezed and I crushed his throat until his face grew red with
blood and his eyes bulged from their sockets. I killed him. It was an
easy thing to do, really, easier than killing a shagshay or a seal.

"By God, he's dead!" Bardo yelled as he helped me stand. "Hurry, we've
got to leave before Yuri returns."

"No," I mumbled, "there's Katharine ... her body. We've got to take her
home."

"It's too late, Little Fellow."

"No, never too late."

"No!" Anala screamed. She was kneeling over Liam, feeling his throat,
sobbing.

"Oh, too bad. By God, it's too bad, but we've got to hurry!"

We went to find Katharine's body but it was gone. The women must have
dragged it outside the cave. I would have searched for it; I would have
grabbed Anala by the hair and made her tell me where she was, but my
mother came up to me and said, "Bardo is right. We'll leave now. Or we
won't leave at all."

I am not sure how we forced our way back to our ruined hut. I remember
scrambling about on my knees and hands like a madman, scooping up
unopened spheres of krydda while Justine and my mother packed our
sleeping furs and other things. Somehow we threw everything onto our
sleds. I think the Devaki women could have stopped us if they had wanted
to. But they were stunned, and I think they did not want to even look at
us. As we pointed our sleds downhill, there was wailing from the cave,
the wailing of a mother praying for the ghost of a son who had gone over
too soon. It was the most pitiful sound in the universe. So piercing was
the sound, so insistent and catching that our dogs lifted their heads
and howled and whined. We fled into the cold hills, and the dogs did not
stop whining for many miles.

Chapter 16 - The Death of a Pilot

I am fond of the sea and of all that is of the sea's kind, and fondest
when it angrily contradicts me; if that delight in searching which
drives the sails toward the undiscovered is in me; if a seafarer's
delight is in my delight; if ever my jubilation cried, "The coast has
vanished, now the last chain has fallen from me; the boundless roars
around me, far out glisten space and time; be of good cheer, old heart!"

Oh, how should I not lust after eternity and after the nuptial ring of
rings, the ring of recurrence? Never yet have I found the woman from
whom I wanted children, unless it be this woman whom I love: for I love
you O eternity. For I love you O eternity!

-Fifth Death Meditation of the Warrior-poets

Somewhere along the stream below the cave, we stopped to heave shagshay
meat off the sleds, to lighten our loads. I took my mother into the
woods, through the yu trees sparkling with snow. I made her tell me
everything. At first, she lied to me, saying that she had no idea why
the Devaki had thought Katharine was a witch. But then she grew angry
and said, "Wasn't Katharine a witch? What is a scryer, if not a witch?

Why else would my son lie with a scryer? Why would you be so careless?

To rut like a beast and have your fun-how did it feel? You men! You have
your fun, and then we must have the child. But Katharine wanted the
child, didn't she? Your child. Yes, I know, the child was yours. Your
seed. I heard Katharine say so.. Your cousin and ... and Soli's
daughter, Katharine. She knew. She was a scryer and she saw the truth.

Willingly, she took you willingly! That witch! And so I went to her and
called her a witch. Can you blame me? She should have aborted the fetus.

When she had the chance."

It was the second time in my life when I almost struck her. I was
sweating and hot despite the bitter cold. I could hardly look at her.

"You killed her, then," I said.

"Who killed her? Was it I who wanted this expedition? Was it I who went
to her bed? My seed? The things you say-my son can be cruel when he
forgets to think before speaking,"

In silence we walked through the deep snow back to the sleds. The
fingers of my wounded arm were numb as I gripped the rails. We followed
the stream down through the hills below the cave. We wound our way east
away from Kweitkel, where the mountain's many frozen rills and brooks
flowed into the stream, swelling it into a small river. Rising up above
a bend in the river was a barren hill the Devaki call Winterpock. (The
hill is visible from the cave but because of its peculiar barrenness,
when the light is poor or diffuse, the hill appears as a depression
rather than as a prominence. Hence its ugly name.) The river cut through
the woods below Winterpock, a gleaming, white iceway twisting through
the trees. Close to the river's south bank we found Soli spearing
fatfish through a hole in the ice. He was out on the river, gazing into
the water below him, standing over a pile of fish. As we rounded the
bend, his dogs started barking at us. He straightened suddenly, looking
at us. He had keen eyes, and he dropped his fish spear, grabbed his
shagshay spear from his sled and ran to meet us. "Where's Katharine?" he
called out. He ran along the river bank from sled to sled. He rammed the
end of his spear against the bank. "What happened? Where's Katharine?"

Justine went up to him and began whispering furiously in his ear. His
face hardened and he did not breathe. Then Justine sobbed out the whole
story of Katharine's death. She did not tell him the complete truth. She
did not want him to know that my mother had called Katharine a witch, so
she told him that Anala had spied on Katharine, had caught her sorting
her sample. "Our girl is dead," she whimpered. "Oh, Leopold she's dead!"

"Why would Anala spy on Katharine?" he asked.

My mother embroidered the lie, saying, "Anala never liked Katharine. We
were friendly, and I know. She didn't like Yuri talking. Talking and
saying Liam should marry Katharine. A few days ago I heard her mention
that maybe Katharine had bewitched Liam. I told her this was nonsense. I
thought she believed it was nonsense."

I sat on the bed of my sled listening to this lie. I had my furs off so
Bardo could dress my wounds, which were bleeding, painful and deep. How
I hated lying and liars! Is there anything more infectious and ruinous
than disinformation, the twisted words of untruth? I looked at Bardo,
but he seemed more worried about my wounds than the deepness and poison
of my mother's lies. He wrapped newl skins around the gashes in my arm.

He made a knot and tightened the skins. I was cold and numb, shivering
like a naked puppy. I wanted to expose this lie of my mother's, but I
was afraid that if I did, Soli might kill her.

"Nonsense!" Soli said. He stood over my mother looking down at her.

"Wasn't Katharine a scryer? Wouldn't she have seen it if Anala was
spying on her? Why would she be so stupid?"

"Who knows a scryer's ways?" my mother said as she twisted her hands
together.

"Why? Why?"

"Maybe she wanted to die. She seemed to know. All about her death." Soli
dropped his head, exhaling a cloud of steam. "Why did she become a
scryer?" he said, talking to the rocks of the river bank. "And if she
saw her death, why not prevent it? Why? No, no, I should never have let
her become a scryer." He said the word as if it were the filthiest word
he knew. He stared at the river while he clenched the shaft of his
spear. Then he asked us why we had not rescued Katharine's body. "That
was careless. Yes, so careless, wasn't it, Pilot?"

I was gasping from the pain of my bandage. "There ... was ... no time,"

I blurted out.

"You might have saved her," Soli accused. "Saved her? She was dead."

"If," Soli whispered to me, "if you had rescued the body, we might have
frozen her in the river and taken her to the cryologists. They might
have healed her. But you say there was no time. Wasn't there? Yes, there
was time. There was a chance-she might have been saved. But you were not
thinking of Katharine, you had to have your little rage, your revenge,
your stupid murder, and you say there was no time."

In truth, it had never occurred to me to save her this way. Why hadn't
it occurred to me? What was wrong with my thinking? Why was Soli quicker
to see the possibilities than I, quicker to grasp the main chance? Could
I have saved Katharine? To this day, I do not know.

"It was too late," I said. "It was warm in the rear of the cave; her
brain would have been dead too long. Would you want the cryologists to
restore a drooling child to you?"

"She was such a pretty girl," he said as he paced the river bank. "Even
when she drooled on me when she was a baby, even when she spat rice
cakes in my face. Oh, so long ago, too long-she was so pretty and
innocent." (I must admit that he said this word as if it were the most
beautiful word in the universe.) "So innocent before she became a
scryer."

Justine began to cry, and then, unbelievably, he walked over to her and
put his arms around her, and he dropped his head down against her black
hair and wept like a boy. I watched this unbelievable scene in silence.

The great Lord Pilot stood weeping like a novice, and I turned away, put
on my furs, and walked out on the river where the ice was clear and
blue. The wind cut me to the skin. I was numb with cold, but the image
of Katharine alive and whole was more chilling than the wind. I wondered
if Katharine could have been saved and resurrected even as Shanidar had
once been saved. But saved for what? No cryologist in the City, I
thought-or in the universes had the skill to resurrect dead,
disassociated brain cells. It was an impossible thing. Clearly,
Katharine had known this. Somehow she had believed in the rightness of
her death. Unlike Shanidar-and how I wanted to believe this!-she had
died at the right time.

When I returned to the sleds, Soli and Justine were leaning against the
gray trunk of a yu tree, holding each other. Their grief had infected
Bardo, and he was weeping, too. Huge tears rolled down his cheeks into
his beard, which was frozen with ice drops. He looked at me through wet,
red eyes; I could tell he was angry at me.

"Katharine's dead!" he shouted. "And look at you! Dry-eyed as a dead
bird! What's wrong with you? What kind of man are you? She's dead, and
you can't even cry like a man!"

How could I tell him the truth? I loved Katharine, and now part of me
was dead; to weep for her would be to weep for myself, which would have
been a cowardly, shameful thing to do.

Soli and Justine broke apart, and he walked toward me. The skin of his
cheeks was glazed but his eyes were as clear and dry and sober as the
eyes of a pilot should be. He asked me, "And what of the child? What
happened to my grandson?"

I was so cold that I didn't immediately understand his question. "Did he
die when they took him away from Katharine? Did they smother him?"

"Of course he's dead," I said. "No, it's more that that-he never really
lived. How could he have lived, born thirty-some days too soon? And not
born. They gutted her like a seal, Soli, like a damned seal!"

"You're sure?"

I was sure of nothing except my need to build a fire and stare at the
flames, to escape the cold ice of Soli's eyes. "He's dead," I repeated.

"He must be dead."

We talked for a while; everyone except Soli agreed that the child could
not have lived. Bardo kept looking off into the woods, obviously afraid
that the Devaki men would follow us once they discovered Liam's body. We
were all afraid of this. "We've got to hurry," Bardo said. "Ah, there's
so little time and so far to go."

The light was quickly fading from the hills; the shadows drew out long
and gray and thin across the chalky snow. Like the sea before a false
winter storm, the trees were dark green and rippling in the wind.

Already the sky was darkening, bruised with purples and dark blues. We
hoped the Devaki would not pursue us through the forest at night.

Perhaps they would not pursue us at all. We decided to follow the river
down to the sea. There, off the eastern shore of the island, we would
turn southward, circling until we came to our rendezvous point. Then we
would wait the five days until the jammer fetched us back to the City.

So began our retreat through the woods homeward to the City. Bardo and I
had the lead sled, followed by my mother. Soli and Justine, who seemed
to need their privacy, took turns driving the rear sled. Night fell, and
it grew very cold. The dogs flung themselves at their harnesses, pulling
and panting in the hard air, and we shot along the starlit trail by the
river. It was an eerie journey, this nighttime sledding through the
nightmare forest. Except for the cracking whips and the dogs' whines and
the occasional shriek of a snow loon (and the river's eternal roar), the
hills were quiet and deserted. The air flowing down the valley carried
the essence of wood dust and pine and other scents I could not quite
recognize. For half the night, the starlight was so feeble that it
illuminated only the white snowpack and the icicles hanging from the
trees; the trees themselves were sunken in darkness and nearly
invisible. Behind us and ahead, the dogs and sleds were strung out along
the trail like gray pearls on a silver strand. Through the forest the
strand twisted and wound and seemed to quiver, and we floated above the
silken snow buoyed by the frictionless glide of the runners and by our
private feelings of fate and fear. The forest turned beneath the starry
sky, and the landscape began to brighten. On the eastern horizon
Pelablinka rose, a great white blister of light bursting above the
conical yu trees. Although it had been a while since the supernova had
exploded, its radiance was still intense. I could almost make out the
reds of the yu fruit and the blue-green needles. I stared up at
Pelablinka, stared at this most recent of the Vild's exploding stars and
wondered how long it would be before the sky was so full of Pelablinka's
that there would never be night again? How long before the light, the
gamma and the alpha of the supernovas bathed the Civilized Worlds in a
radiance of death? How long before human beings had to abandon their
planets and flee from the light, flee across the black dreams of space
to the farthest arms of the galaxy? How long before the stars and the
dreams of human beings and a billion billion other living things all
died? How long before I died? Never, Katharine had said to me, you will
never die. But Katharine was dead, and I was dying inside, slowly dying
as I fled through the shimmering trees of the forest. In the bed of my
sled, tucked safely beneath the furs, were the krydda spheres full of
life, possibly full of life's secrets. But Katharine was dead, and
Pelablinka's light hurt my eyes, and the krydda spheres meant nothing to
me, nothing at all.

In this manner, each of us silent and alone with our separate thoughts,
we followed the river down to where it broadened and straightened a few
miles from the sea. We entered a thicket of yarkona fir. I remember this
well. On either side of the trail, the trees were dense and close, two
walls of gray needles almost prickling our furs as we guided the sleds
between. The wind, what little wind there was, blew at our backs, urging
us forward. The bright nimbus of Pelablinka was high in the sky; the
whole of the forest seemed made of silver-steel. As we neared the
thicket's edge, the wind died altogether, and it was so quiet I could
distinguish the individual pants of the dogs. Tusa was sniffing the air,
lifting his paws high, slogging through the powder. Suddenly the wind
shifted; it blew at our faces from the east, from the edge of the
thicket where the shatterwood trees loomed like straight, black, silent
gods. Tusa whipped his head up and barked. All at once Rufo and the rest
of the dogs let loose a chorus of howls and barks. There was a blur of
black against gray. A spear-it was thick enough to be a mammoth
spear-flew out of the woods and struck Sanuye in the side. So powerful
was the cast that it pinned the dog to the snow. Instantly there was a
tangle of snarled harnesses and yelping, furious dogs. More spears flew
from the thicket. One of my mother's dogs was hit and shrieked like an
old woman.

"Ni luria-mul" came a shout from the woods ahead, and there, stealing
from tree to tree like wolves, were men on skis sliding onto the trail,
blocking our way. Their furs rippled in the starlight, and they each
carried spears in either hand. The Devaki men, Yuri, Wicent, Haidar and
Wemilo, and their near-brothers, Arani, Jaywe, Yukio and Santayana,
stood shoulder to shoulder and spear to spear. Seif, who was shaking
mad, stepped forward and said, "Li luria, Mallory-mi, you have killed my
brother, and I have come to kill you, welcome!" Some of them threw their
spears. Bardo, who was moving next to me, let out a curse. He pirouetted
like an ice dancer avoiding an unexpected pothole. "Watch your side,
Little Fellow!" he cried out, and he tried to knock a spear from the
air. He stepped in front of me. I will never know whether he did this by
accident or design. He swatted at the air like a bear swatting at a
stream for a darting flatfish, but it was dark and he had never been
good at catching moving things with his hands, not even as a boy, and he
missed the spear. The spear went into him. All at once he knocked into
me and cried out, "By ... God!" The force of his blow propelled me from
the back of the sled down into the snow. Bardo stood facing the Devaki
with a red, yu spear sticking out of his chest. I coughed and wiped snow
from my eyes, and there was the spear's point splitting his furs exactly
at the center of his back. The spear had gone clean through him, but he
was not dead, he was far from being dead. He was coughing and cursing,
shaking his fist at Seif, staggering, stomping the snow like a wounded
shagshay bull. And then the blood came, and the pain, and he bellowed
and twisted in agony, and he dropped next to me in the snow. "Little
Fellow," he gasped, "don't let me die."

In a moment, I had my spear in hand, and Soli, even my mother and
Justine-we all whipped our spears from their holders. There was no room
to easily turn the sleds around and no time, so we kneeled behind the
bed of my sled, kneeled over Bardo, watching as Yuri slid up to Seif and
put his hand on his son's spear. "Ti Mallory!" Yuri called me. "This is
a bad night, and why did you let Bardo catch your spear for you?"

Seif ripped his spear away from his father's hand. He shouted, "Welcome,
Mallory! You have killed my brother, and I have killed your cousin even
though I meant to kill you! Welcome, welcome!" He raised his spear and
said, "And now I will kill you!"

"No," Yuri said, "Bardo has gone over, and now Liam will have a friend
to hunt with on the other side." Some of the Devaki men, Haidar and
Wemilo, were weeping; they had always liked Bardo, and he had liked
them.

"I will kill him now," Seif said. His face pulled back in a grimace
while his arm trembled.

"No," Yuri said, "I am tired of killing."

"He killed my brother."

"And you have killed his cousin."

"My brother!"

"Even so, you must not kill him."

"I have to kill him now."

"No."

"Please."

"No, we would all be to blame if you killed him."

I bent down over Bardo listening to the men who had killed my
pretend-cousin, my brother in spirit, my friend. I tried to beat his
chest back to thumping, tried to breathe life into his lips. But my
frantic efforts were in vain because his heart had no blood left to
pump. "Mallory!" Scif shouted at me, and Bardo's lips were cold, and
because I was dying inside and still knew nothing of compassion or
restraint, I ripped the spear from Bardo's chest, stood and threw it at
Seif. But it was a poor, blind cast and he dodged it easily. "Bardo was
a warm man, and I am sorry I killed your cousin," he cried out. "But
your soul is hard like ice, and who will be sorry when I kill you?"

As he said this, I had a sudden idea. I dropped down and grabbed Bardo
by the collar. "Mother, help me!" I said. "Down to the river, quickly,
before his brain .. ." I started dragging him through the snow.

"Justine ... Soli, we'll freeze him and take him back with us. The
cryologists will save him, the cryologists. Help, me, he's so damn
heavy!"

"Let him go!" my mother hissed. She was always the strategist, always
thinking, always planning. "Keep low! If we expose ourselves, we'll be
too easy to hit."

But I wasn't thinking of the Devaki's spears just then. In truth, they
had us trapped and could have killed us whenever they wanted. I pulled
at Bardo; Justine and Soli must have reached a similar conclusion
because they each grabbed an arm and helped me. Then my mother threw her
spear down in the powdery snow, cocked her head, and asked, "Why is my
son so foolish?"

We dragged him down through the thicket and then across the ice crusts
to the edge of the river, which roared like black blood through a tube
of ice. We eased him out toward the center of the river where the ice
was the thinnest. The air was full of our quick, steamy breaths; Justine
and my mother were huffing and panting, hopping about like birds. Soli
whispered to himself-it was kind of an apology, I thought-that he was
stupid for not having foreseen the Devaki would come for us on skis. He
ran back to the sled and returned with the ice axes, and we fell at the
ice, chopping and hacking so fast and furiously that glistening chips
flew up in showers around us. There was crunching and cracking, and then
running water as we broke through ice. We opened a hole almost as large
as a seal's aklia. With each of us grabbing a part of his body, an arm
or a leg or whatever else came to hand, we lowered him into the hole,
submerging him in the freezing water. The water-it was much colder than
freezing, really-hurt my hands. The cold was sharp and intense, numbing
my fingers to the bone. I could hardly feel to grip his curly hair.

"Hold on!" I said, "hold on!" We held him as long as we could, and then
we heaved and dragged him up onto the ice. There was a slapping and
squishing as the weight of his body squeezed the water from his furs. I
hurried to dry my hands and put my mittens back on; if I hadn't my
fingers would have instantly frozen, even as Bardo's body was now
freezing. In moments his furs stiffened, encasing him in a glossy sheath
of ice. He lay on his back with his eyes open. I tried to close them but
they were as hard as marble. One of his arms, I saw, had solidified in a
crooked position; his fingers were clenched as if he were shaking his
fist at the stars. I noticed that his furs bulged from his belly as if a
piece of driftwood had washed down his trousers and lodged there. I
remembered that he still suffered his nightly priapism, and I laughed.

It was a harsh sound, which caused the others to look at me. They must
have thought I was insane. But it was better to laugh than to cry, and
wasn't it ironic that Bardo had died as he had lived, wasn't it funny? I
did not know if the City cryologists could restore him to life, but if
they couldn't, at least he would go to his grave in a fitting manner.

All this time the Devaki had been watching us from the river bank. Our
"funeral rites" must have appeared incomprehensible to them. After we
had chiseled Bardo free from the ice (his furs had frozen fast to the
cold, slick surface), we carried him back to the sleds. Seif knocked his
spear against a tree and called out, "You see, it is as I have said: The
satinka's witchcraft has touched everything they do. We should kill them
all." Under the Devaki's pointed spears, we placed Bardo on the bed of
the lead sled. I covered him, then turned to cut Sanuye away from his
harness. It was a bad moment, a whole series of bad, uncertain moments.

Yuri stroked the shaft of his spear. His eye fixed on Bardo's body. "We
will spear no one," he said. He looked at Seif and shaggy Wicent who
stood next to him. "No man of the Manwelina will spear any man or woman
of the Senwelina. Liam rests in peace, and there is no need to spear
Mallory even though he has killed his own doffel and has given tender
livers to an old man who lived long past his time. You will not raise
your spears to him even though he raised his spear to Liam and has
caused the animals to stay away, and has swived his own sister, who was
a satinka and therefore needed to die. You will not spear Mallory even
though he has killed your brother. We are not hunters of men; it is bad
to be hunters of men."

We whistled to the dogs, and the sleds inched forward as the Devaki
parted to allow us passage. We moved very slowly. The trail led across a
gully full of smooth stones and flaky ice crystals as large as knives.

We had to partially lift the sleds and carry them across the gully. As
we did so, we stepped on the flakes, which snapped and crunched and
filled the air with hard, breaking sounds. The Devaki followed us,
whispering among themselves; their strident words rushed through the
forest along with the rustling of the pine needles and other sounds. I
was so full of grief that I stumbled over ice-slicked stones, little
aware of where I was going. Because I was sorry for all that had
happened, because my throat and eyes and soul were freezing with cold,
because I was dying, I had a sudden urge to explain myself, to
apologize, to atone for my crimes. I would tell them the truth about
myself, the truth about all women and men: that within each of us lives
a murderous beast beyond control. It was this desire to make things
right that ruined me. I emerged from the gully and turned to face Yuri
and Seif
"Liam was a murderer .. ." I began, but that was as far as I
got. I wanted to tell them that Liam was a murderer, as I was a murderer
and all men are murderers because life lives off life, and he would have
killed me so that he himself might live. We are all murderers because
that is the way the world is made. But we are all brothers, too, and
sisters and fathers and mothers and sons, and I would have told them
this and a few other simple things. "Liam was a murderer," I said, and
Seif must have been waiting for just such a slur because he reached back
far behind his head and then whipped his hand forward. A black rock shot
toward me. Had it been a spear, I might have knocked it away. Unlike
Bardo, my hands had always been quick to follow the movements of my
eyes. But it was not a spear because Seif was obeying the letter of his
father's command not to spear me. It was a heavy black rock, nearly
invisible against the black veil of the forest, even if my mind had been
alert and clear of other dark images, which it was not. I did not see
the rock. It struck the side of my head-I have reconstructed this event
from the story Soli later told me. All is recorded; all has been and
will always be recorded, so the scryers say. There was a blur in front
of my eyes like a black cloud descending, and the rock struck my head
and pushed part of my skull against my brain. There was an intense
light, a universe of exploding stars. And then I dropped like a beast to
the snow, and all was silent and dark and cold.

What follows is an account of our retreat across the sea to our
rendezvous point and our return to the City. During much of this time I
was dimly aware of the voices and actions of Soli and the others around
me; just as often, though, I was comatose or rising or falling through
that hellish state of consciousness in which all the sounds of the world
seem at once overloud, monotonous and confused. Much of what I shall
relate I pieced together long afterward. But I was aware of the crucial
event-revelation, really-and it burns in my memory still.

When Yuri saw what his son had done, he was aghast and ashamed. He
crossed the gully and placed his hand on my mother's shoulder as she
tried to revive me. He took a single look at my head and announced,
"Mallory will go over now, and I can do nothing since it is his time to
die." He nodded at Soli and asked, "Do you want us to bury your son by
Katharine's grave? It is unlucky what has happened between us, and I
want no more bad luck."

"No, he's not dead yet," Soli said. "We'll bury him ourselves when he
goes over."

My mother and Justine lifted me onto the second sled and swaddled me in
furs.

"It is a terrible thing to lose a son," Yuri said.

"Yes, it would be terrible to lose a son," Soli said, speaking
precisely. "We're sorry for Liam."

"And to lose a daughter, too, even a satinka-that is terrible. I bleed
for you." So saying, Yuri took his knife and gashed his cheek down to
his jaw. And then because he was at heart a kind man who could really
bear no permanent blame for anybody, he said, "You will go now, perhaps
to Urasalia or Kelkel, and it is good you should go. But if you need to
visit your daughter's grave someday, you will be welcome."

"And my grandson?" Soli asked. "Did my grandson live? What about the
child?"

Yuri pressed his hand to his slashed face to stop the bleeding. "And who
is the father of the child if not Liam or one of Liam's near-brothers?

Isn't the child a son of Manwe's sons?" And here he held his bloody hand
up for Soli to see, and his voice wavered in a strange way. I do not
think he ever suspected that the child was mine. "Isn't the child my
grandson, too? His blood is my blood, and he will be buried near the
cave of his grandfathers."

After that we went down to the sea. A hut was built from sawed snow
blocks. For the rest of the night and part of the next morning, I lay in
delirium while my mother fussed Over me as she had when I was a child
sick with fever. She was frantic over my wound. More than once she asked
Justine, "What good are the cutters? If not to take the pressure of
blood off the brain?"

As the day passed and I grew no better, she almost despaired. "What
should we do? The skull is broken. I'm sure of it. Oh, Justine I think
he's dying! But what can I do? To take the pressure off the brain? I
could drill holes. In his head through the skull, holes. Or I could
wait. But it's so hard to wait."

Soli listened to this while he grilled fish over the oilstones. He stood
up and crouched over me, watching my mother gently wrap my head with
wolf fur. I did not see the look on his face-he must have been mad over
Katharine's loss-but I remember the sizzling of fat, the greasy fish
smell, the suffering in his voice when he said, "Yes, Katharine is gone,
and soon, Mallory, too. There's nothing we can do; he probably won't
live through the night."

"The Lord Pilot gives up hope too easily," my mother said as she
dribbled water from a skin into my mouth.

"But there's no hope, is there?"

"There's always hope."

"No, not always," Soli said, and he covered his eyes with his hand. "We
should let your son die peacefully. To drill holes in his head, that
would be insane, wouldn't it?"

"I won't let my son die."

"You can't save him." And then, the mocking words: "It's his fate. Would
you keep him from his fate?"

"If he dies, I'll die."

"Pilots die," he said. "Mallory was told about these things. Yes, he
knew his luck wouldn't hold forever. Nobody's luck lasts that long."

"The Lord Pilot is a scryer, then?"

"Don't say that word to me."

"My son is dying. And the Lord Pilot worries about the words I speak?"

"Why speak to me at all? Yes, it would be better if you didn't speak
another word ever again." He made a fist and pressed his nose so hard
that it bled-so Justine told me years later.

My mother went out to the sled and returned with a bag of flints. She
spilled the stones onto her hand, sorting through them with her finger.

The brown, fine-grained flints rattled against each other. "I've
decided," she said. "We'll make a drill. We'll open a hole and let the
blood run free. Will you help me, Justine?"

Justine was beating the ice from our furs and working the inner skin
with her teeth to keep it supple. She brushed back her hair, looked up
an said, "Of course I'll help, if you think we really have to open
Mallory's poor head, but it's such a dangerous thing to do, and I'm not
sure it will help no matter what we do, but I'll do whatever I have to,
even though I'm afraid for him, and what will we do to stop the pain
when he feels the drill, and ... oh, Moira, do we really have to open
his head?"

"No," Soli said, and he gave Justine a sharp look, plainly disapproving
of her support for her sister's plan. He was angry and his skin was
pale; the blood was running away from his face. "The best thing to do
would be to wait for him to die. Then we could open a hole in the ice,
and there would be that much less weight for the dogs to pull. Yes, drop
him down a hole and his fat friend, too."

"Leopold, you don't know what you're saying!" Justine gasped.

And my mother spat out, "The Lord Pilot thinks he knows. What he says
with his cruel words. But he knows nothing."

"Do not speak to me."

"The Lord Pilot should be told that-"

"Please do not speak."

"My son is dying" my mother said, and her voice thickened into
deep-throated rage.

"Let him die."

I heard these sounds bubbling above me: Justine's piping soprano as she
took my mother's side against Soli, and the steel of Soli's deep voice,
which rang like a bell about to crack. The argument continued for some
time; I remember that there was something in the sound of Soli's words
and in my mother's anguished plea that made me pay close attention. And
then, after an instant of silence, my mother drew in a breath of air,
and she spoke the worst words I had ever heard: "He's your son! Mallory
is your son."

"My son!"

"He's our son."

"My son!"

"To let him die-it would be like killing a part of yourself"

"I don't have a son!"

"Yes, you have a son. Our son."

And then she spoke more words that I did not want to hear, revealing
heritage which I bitterly wanted to deny. Long ago, she told him-and I
did not want to know this; I was nearly dead, but I knew I did not want
to know this, even though a part of me had always known it, at least
ever since I first saw Soli that night in the master pilot's bar-on the
day before his journey to the core of the galaxy, my mother had decided
that he would never return. All her life she had been jealous of Justine
and envious of the things her beautiful sister possessed. Including
Soli, especially Leopold Tisander Soli. She did not love him. I do not
think my mother could have loved a man as a wife loves a husband. But
she knew that he was the most brilliant pilot since the Tycho-even she
always admitted this. She envied him his brilliance and coveted his
chromosomes, which she believed to be the fount of his brilliance. Since
she desired a child of her own, a brilliant child like Justine's little
girl, why not pair Soli's fine chromosomes to her own? (Because it is a
crime, Mother, I thought. Almost the worst crime imaginable.) The
stealing of Soli's plasm had been an easy thing to do: a quick,
seemingly accidental dragging of her sharp fingernails across the back
of his ungloved hand one day in the Hofgarten-that was how it all began.

She carefully scraped beneath her fingernails and took the few thousand
epidermal cells to a renegade splicer, who split the DNA into haploid
chromosomes and fashioned a set of gametes. When Soli did not return
from his journey and it seemed he would never return, she used the
gametes to fertilize one of her eggs and had the egg implanted in her
womb. As a result of this despicable slelling I was conceived, and two
hundred eighty days later I was born. So my mother told Soli as I worked
my lips, listening to her story, struggling to deny what I dreaded was
true.

For a while there was silence in the hut. Perhaps I sank down into coma;
perhaps the listening centers of my brain were growing deaf. I missed
much of what Soli said to her, but I remember his shouting out, ".. .

not my son! And when he's buried at Resa, he won't be buried as my son!"

"He is," my mother said. "Your son."

"You're lying."

"Your son. Our son."

"No."

"I wanted to have your son-was this so wrong?"

"He's a bastard. He's not my son."

"I'll show you, then."

"No, do not."

"Your son," she said, and while Justine held Soli's elbow and looked on
with amazement, my mother drew the wolf fur away from my head. "Come
closer and look. He has the Lord Pilot's hair." Gently, she parted the
hair on the side of my head opposite my wound. "Such thick black hair.

But sprinkled with strands of red. Like the Lord Pilot's own. Like the
hair of every Soli male, father and son. I've been plucking the red from
the black. Because I didn't want you to know. But now you must know.

Come here, then, look at your son's hair!"

I remembered my mother plucking the supposedly "gray" hairs from my head
in the Devaki's cave when she groomed me for lice, and the riddle of my
heritage was no longer a riddle. She had plucked red hairs from my head,
not gray. Red hairs, the hairs of the Soli lineage that sometimes do not
appear until early manhood. During our expedition, perhaps due to the
shocks of hunger and cold, I must have begun sprouting red hairs. I was
not a bastard, then. I was something much worse. I was-and to this day I
have difficulty forming this word even within the most private recesses
of my mind-I was a slel-son. I had been called forth to life from Soli's
DNA, from his precious chromosomes, from the very stuff of his selfhood.

But it had been my mother who had called me, not he. She had used the
information bound inside of him to make me, and she was therefore a
slel-necker, and who could blame Soli for hating me?

"Look at these red hairs!" my mother said as she ran her fingers through
my hair. "Who else but your son? Who would have such hair, black and
red?"

"It's only blood," Soli said. "His hair is stained with blood, isn't
it?"

"Look closer, then. See? This isn't blood. You can see, can't you?

You're his father."

"No," he whispered. "You must help him."

"No."

"He'll die if you-"

"No!" he shouted, and he jerked his arm away from Justine. It must have
been clear to him that if I was really his son, then Katharine was my
sister. "You knew," he said to my mother. "All this time, since the
City, Katharine and Mallory ... together! And you knew?"

"Oh, no!" Justine said.

"Don't blame my son," my mother said. Blame Katharine. She was a scryer.

She knew Mallory was her brother. And she bore his son anyway."

"What!"

Soli yelled.

"The child. It was Mallory's son, not Liam's."

"No!"

Yes, Soli, I wanted to say. I am your son, and Katharine was my sister,
and her son was my son, your grandson, and the chain of crime and horror
goes on and on. But I could not speak; I could not move. I could only
listen.

"Katharine bewitched him," my mother said. She was very angry, and the
words spilled out like poison. "She knew Mallory was her brother. Who
but that witch of a scryer would mate with her own brother?"

"Why?" Soli asked.

"I asked Katharine why, but she wouldn't tell me."

"You asked her?"

"She was a witch, your daughter. A damn witch."

"You accused her of being a witch? Then you killed her, didn't you? Yes,
you killed her."

"She deserved to die."

Soli stood motionless for a moment, and there was madness in his eyes.

And then he fell into one of his rare, terrible rages, and he slapped my
mother away from me. He tried to kill her. (Or rather, to execute her,
as he would later claim.) He tried to choke her to death even as she
tore his face to meat with her fingernails and nearly crushed his stones
with her knee. "Filthy slel-necker!" Soli cried out, "you knew!"

I tried to rise, but as in a nightmare, I could not move.

There was horror then, crime heaped upon crime. Justine came to her
sister's rescue. She peeled Soli's fingers from my mother's throat. Soli
struck out in rage. I do not believe he knew what he was doing. Once,
twice, thrice, he struck, smashing my mother's chest bones, breaking
Justine's teeth and jaw. My mother collapsed to the packed snow floor,
writhing. Justine moaned and gagged and spat out bloody tooth fragments.

"Oh, Soli!" she wept, and blood flowed from her lips, but Soli was mad,
and he tried to kill his beautiful wife. He broke her arm, broke her
nose, and worst of all, he broke the hard, pure love she had always had
for him. The mad Lord Pilot, whose face resembled a shagshay carcass
after a feast, stared down at Justine as his rage slowly drained away.

He pointed at my mother. "You should have let me kill her!" he roared.

"This filthy slel-necker!" He came over to my bed and pulled the furs
over my head, hiding my hair and most of my face. "He's not my son," he
said.

When Soli came to his right mind, he was ashamed of what he had done. He
tried to apologize to Justine, tried to help her. But she would not be
helped.

"No, no," she said, "leave me alone." Blood bubbled from her nose, and
it was very hard for her to speak. However, she managed to force out, I
told you thirty years ago, never again, and I'm sorry, for you, sorry
for us, I truly am, but how can I trust you now, because if you can do
this, you can do anything, and what will I do now?" She covered her face
with her hands and cried out, "Oh, Leopold, it hurts, it hurts, it
hurts, it hurts!"

"You're still my wife," he said. "No, no!"

"We've been friends for more than a hundred years."

The presumptuous tone of his voice made Justine angry (and my aunt
rarely suffered from that ugly emotion), and she said, "I thought we
were friends, but I was wrong."

Soli stared at the wall of the hut. Then he made a fist and punched out
one of the snow blocks, and the wind spilled in. He looked out of this
makeshift window, pointing at Bardo's sled where his huge body lay
strapped beneath the furs. For a long time he had kept his silence
concerning Justine's and Bardo's blossoming friendship, but now he was
sick with jealousy, so he said, "Yes, now you have new friends. Dead
friends."

What happened next is sad to tell. Soli's rage had left him, but the
madness had grown worse. He did not realize how badly Justine and my
mother were injured. He accused his wife-wrongly-of contemplating
adultery. Justine was weeping into her hands, and he took this as an
admission of guilt. He told her that he could never forgive her. Since
the jammer would be arriving in four more days, he said, it was time to
drive the sleds south to our rendezvous, or else a storm might make us
miss our ship. When my mother started talking again about drilling holes
in my head and Justine would not look at him, he threw his furs onto a
sled, harnessed the dogs, and whispered, "Yes, drill if you want to
drill, do whatever you want and meet the jammer at the rendezvous if you
want to return to the City. What does it matter?"

After he was gone, my mother wrapped Justine's face in newl skins. She
set her arm and splinted it. She did this, and all the while her broken
ribs rubbed and clicked and scratched at her lungs, causing her great
pain. That night she made a flint drill and opened my head to let the
blood out, Probably because of her drilling I did not die out on the
ice. Somehow-to this day it seems miraculous that my mother and Justine
were able to do so-somehow the next morning they lifted me onto one of
the sleds. Somehow, they managed to lash Bardo's sled and mine in tandem
and drive them across miles of sheet snow. It was a tortuous journey, a
killing journey. I remember my mother screaming at every bump or divot
in the snow; I remember wind and cold and pain; I remember screaming
myself that my head hurt and that Soli was not my father, and many, many
other incomprehensible things.

Later the next evening, under Pelablinka's bubbling white glister, we
reached the rendezvous point. There was a single snow dome sitting alone
on the immense white bowl of the sea. Soli was there waiting, but he
would not come out of his small hut, nor would he speak to anyone. My
mother and Justine built another hut for themselves and for me. Even
though I fell into a deep coma, my mother continued opening my head.

"He'll live," she kept telling Justine, "if only we can get him home in
time."

We waited three days for the windjammer, three days and nights of wind
and pain. Finally it came. The journey back to the City was quick- our
return to the glittering spires and the crowds of professionals lining
the Hollow Fields was glorious. (At least it was glorious until my
mother and Justine stepped off the windjammer and our tragedy became
well known.) But I was blind to glory and almost beyond pain. They took
me to a dark room beneath the Fields where pilots are brought back to
their youth. There the cutters went into my skull. Someone announced
that despite my mother's truly delicate and remarkable efforts to save
me, Seifs rock had crushed and ruined parts of my brain. After a time,
someone else announced that all our sufferings had been pointless
because the rescued Devaki plasm had proved to be little different than
that of modern human beings. The master splicers had not found the
Ieldra's message inscribed within their DNA. The secret of life remained
undiscovered, perhaps undiscoverable, veiled and hidden, eternally
mysterious. The Lord Cetic proclaimed that it was a pity our search had
been in vain. "It's a pity too much of Mallory's brain is gone for us to
bring him back. A pity he must pay the final price for nothing."

There must always come a time when our luck runs out, when the ticking
of the clock must finally stop. Neither the cetics nor the cutters nor
the imprimaturs could help me. To preserve a flawed, damaged brain would
have been a crime, and for me it would have been hell, the everness of a
life without sound or sight or love or hope. Far better to embrace fate
at the right time, and it would be far easier, like falling down a black
spiral stairway longer than the one in the Timekeeper's Tower, the
stairway without light, without end. And so in a small, dark room almost
within sight of Resa's Morning Towers, on a cold, snowless day in deep
winter, I turned my gaze inward to the deeper darkness and fell. To this
day I have not stopped falling.

In Neverness I died my first death.

Chapter 17 - Agathange

Much of death depends on state of mind.
-Maurice Gabriel-Thomas, Swarming Centuries Programmer

Who can know what it is to be a god? Who can say which of the carked
races of man-the Elf-men of Anya and the Hoshi, the Newvanian Arhats and
all the others-have attained to the godly, and which are extremely
long-lived women and men wearing bizarre and sometimes beautiful bodies?

How much wisdom must a race acquire before it is deemed worthy of the
godhead? How much knowledge, how much power, how final an immortality?

Are the god-kings of the Eriades cluster-they who build a ringworld
around Primula Luz-are these human computers merely clever men or
something more profound? I do not know. I know little of the art of
eschatology, of its tidy classifications and endless debates. Kolenya
Mor argues that what really matters is not the status of a race, but its
direction. Are the Agathanians, for instance, moving godward or have
they reached an evolutionary dead-end? To me, who came as a corpse to
the mysterious planet called Agathange, there was only one criterion
upon which to judge the question of Agathanian godhead, and it was this:
How much of the great secret did they know? Did they, who swam through
Agathange's warm, eternally blue waters, possess the secret of life and
an answer to death?

I have said before that Neverness is the most beautiful city on all the
planets, but Icefall, while beautiful in its own frigid way, is not the
most beautiful of the planets. Agathange is the most beautiful planet.

As seen from deep space, she is a glittering blue and white jewel
floating in a diamond-etched bowl of black amber. (I should mention that
I had my first glimpse of the whole planet only after my resurrection
and departure. Upon my arrival, of course, I saw nothing because I was
dead.) The stars surrounding Agathange swim with light; looking upward
from the luminous, lapping waves the sky is brilliant. Only on cloudy
nights is the sea dark, and even then it is the darkness of quicksilver
and cobalt rather than that of obsidian or black ink. The sea-the single
ocean which covers all the planet except for a few small islands-is warm
and peaceful. It teems with fish and other sea life. Schools of taofish
and konani numbering in the tens of millions swim through the sparkling
waters of the shoals and shallows, while in the deeps of the true ocean,
the larger ranita hunt other fish which have no names. Flying fish,
perhaps drunk with the sheer delight of racing through the tropical
whorls and hollows, school in such profusion that the sea's surface for
miles often seems aquiver with a carpet of arching silver. It was this
overwhelming abundance of life, I think which led the first Agathanians
to cark their human bodies into seal-like shapes, to escape into the
whisperless depths and fill the ocean with their mutable, godling
children.

"Properly, the Agathanians are god-men, not gods," as Kolenya Mor later
told me. "They do not seek personal immortality; they do not desire to
escape the prison of matter, as the Ieldra did, nor do they attempt to
remake the universe to their liking." They had come to Agathange, she
said, on the first wave of the Swarming. The most common story of their
origin-and the one that happens to be true-is this: Long ago, at the end
of the Holocaust's third interlude, a group of ecologists fled Old Earth
in one of the first deep ships. With them they carried the
krydda-preserved zygotes of narwhals, dolphins, sperm whales and other
extinct sea mammals. When they discovered a world of fecund oceans and
sweet, untainted air, they quickened the zygotes and nursed the baby
whales through their childhood terrors of sharks and other predators.

When the whales had grown-and grown-and had absorbed the oceans of
whalesong preserved within the ship's computer, the ecologists released
them into the blue bed of the sea. They saw how happy the animals were,
and they held a celebration, drinking casks of centuries-old wine and
smoking a seaweed they discovered and named toalache. Days later they
came to their right senses. They were envious and sad because they could
never know the joy of the whales they saved. The master ecologist said
that man, with his monkey hands and desire to own pieces of land and
other things, had nearly ruined the Earth. Man was an unfortunate
terrestrial species flawed by form and by nature. Ah, but what if that
form and nature were changed? And so the ecologists smoked their
toalache, and they saw visions of their life as it could be, and they
bred their children to have pointed noses and flippers and fluked tails.

They named their watery world Agathange, which means, "place where all
things move toward the ultimate good." There, for thousands of years,
the Agathanians carked and bred their children, whether to ultimate good
or evolutionary abomination not even the eschatologists can say.

Perhaps seeking her own ultimategood (or perhaps simply because she had
given me life and she loved me), my mother determined to bear my ruined,
krydda-preserved body to Agathange. She knew in detail the story of
Shanidar. Once, the god-men had restored him to life-could they do less
for a pilot of our famous Order? She found passage on a deepship
traveling out beyond the Purple Cluster. She surrendered my corpse to a
group of Agathanians (actually, they were more of a family) who called
themselves the Host of Restorers. She was then invited to leave
Agathange, to wait in one of the tiny hotels which orbit the planet,
while the Restorers worked-or failed to work-their miracles.

She waited a long time. The painstaking repair of my brain lasted the
greater part of two years. (I am speaking of Neverness years, of course.

On Agathange there is only one season-forever spring-and the many hosts
measure time in terms of their degree of advancement toward ultimate
planetary consciousness. But I am getting ahead of my story.) For most
of the first year I lay suspended beneath the buoyant sea while
Balusilustalu and others restored parts of my brain with temporary
prosthetics. These clumsy, cortically implanted biochips were only meant
to get my heart and limbs and lungs moving again; the tiny computers
were too crude to help me regain much of my speech function, nor was I
able to remember large portions of my life. My first thought after
awakening among a host of a thousand, black, gliding, slippery bodies
was that I had gone over to the other side of day, and the doffels of
all the seals I had killed had come to ask me why I was insane.

It is a truism, a discovery of the ancient scryers, that any
civilization made by gods will appear to humans as incomprehensible and
miraculous. How, then, can I describe the Agathanian miracle when I
still do not comprehend all the details, the complexities of their
fabulous technology? I will tell of what I know: The ocean was full of
created organisms, many of which were one third computer, one third
robot, one third living thing. Most of these tiny tools were microscopic
in size. There were programmed bacteria of every size and shape,
eubacteria, spherical cocci, and spirochetes with their whiplike tails.

They floated among the engineered phytoplankton; the water was rich with
flagellates, single-celled and colonial algae, diatoms with their
beautiful symmetry, the little jewels of the sea spinning out silicates
or carbon fibers or whatever else they had been designed to manufacture.

Mostly though, the Agathanians were concerned with the manipulation of
proteins. The entire ocean was a stew pot for making, dissolving, and
reassembling proteins. It was an ancient technology: Restriction
enzymes, which were nothing more than protein machines, were used to
cut, rearrange and splice bits of a bacterium's DNA. But the
Agathanians, being gods, had unraveled more of the mysteries of DNA than
our City's splicers ever would. They had created wholly new forms of
DNA. And in the trillions of cells of the created organisms all through
the waters of Agathange, the DNA was transcribed, its information read
and copied into RNA. And the RNA instructed the cells' natural molecular
machines, the ribosomes, to build proteins: new enzymes, hormones,
muscle protein, hemoglobin, neurologic circuitry to weave into the
miniscule computer-brains of new bacteria, protein of every conceivable
shape and function, a potentially infinite variety of protein.

"The variety of life is endless," Balusilustalu would say to me one day.

"What do human beings know of life? So little, so little, ha, ha! On
Agathange even some of the bacteria-ah, but are they bacteria or are
they computers, do you know?-even the pyramid bacteria are intelligent.

There are infinite possibilities."

As on other worlds, the ocean swarmed with copepods, salps, annelid
worms, sponges, and jellyfish, and with squid, swallowers, sharks and
other fishes higher on the food chain. But in the water there were other
things as well, bizarrely shaped animals which looked like crushing or
cutting machines, and there were machines which looked like animals. The
Agathanians made these things, or I should say, they designed assembler
enzymes to make them. (I will call them assemblers because they were
really enzymelike machines.) The ribosomes of programmed bacteria pumped
out assemblers designed for specific tasks. Assemblers sifted through
the water, constructing large molecules by seizing and bonding bits of
carbon or silicon, atoms of gold, copper, sodium, any and every element
dissolved into the warm, salty stew of the ocean. Lipid molecules,
hormones, chlorophyll, and new twists of DNA-the assemblers welded them
into organisms which were half plant, half animal. Assemblers bonded
carbon atoms layer upon layer, and so the sea-nymphs spun their networks
of diamond fibers, building their beautiful, glittering nests.

Assemblers bonded atom to atom, sticking them together like marbles with
glue. The Agathanians could-and didassemble atoms into any arrangement
permitted by natural law. They linked molecular conductors to voltage
sources within'living tissues and shaped electric fields directly and in
new ways. If they had wanted to, they could have built a city beneath
the waters; I believe they could have made a whale as big as a deepship;
perhaps they could have woven circuitry into a whale's nerves and
diuscles and created a living lightship to sail the cold currents of
space. There was nothing they could not fabricate, disassemble and
re-create molecule by molecule, neuron by neuron, including a man.

And so Balusilustalu and my host of Agathanians altered my body to
breathe both air and water. Somehow they sliced through my brain and
managed to keep my cortex free of phytoplankton and seaworms and other
muck. For my comfort, they raised up an island, from the sea bed. They
made the trees to grow and blossom and bear fruit, all within a few
days. Other things did not happen so quickly. Inside I was changing
slowly, day by day, one cell at a time. By the end of my first year on
Agathange, I was spending half my time in the water, half on land. I
wandered my little island, wondering who I was and why I was alone. I
picked tart fruits from the trees; they tasted like snow apples. But
they were more sustaining than snow apples. Indeed, the Host of
Restorers had designed a single food which nourished me better than the
fish swimming through the island's lagoon would have done. Soon,
however, I tired of eating fruit. I began to crave silvery fish, to
crave meat, anything that twitched or swam or moved. I longed to shape a
tree branch into a pronged trident, to spear a fat wingfish, to fillet
it with my overgrown fingernails and suck down the salty meat. But I was
forbidden to do so. Balusilustalu had pronounced that I was to enter the
water only during those semiconscious moments when my brain was opened.

"You do not understand the sea, and you do not know what you are
permitted to eat, and you do not know what is permitted to eat you," she
said to me one day after she had restored the perception of the color
azure to my visual cortex. (I call Balusilustalu "she" even though she
was not entirely female. But she, like almost every Agathanian, was much
more female than male.) She was flopped up on the beach of my island,
laughing at me so hard that her long torso jiggled, rings of beautiful
fat rippling beneath her glistening skin. On her flippers she had claws;
she used these claws to draw figures of animals on the wet beach sand.

For an Agathanian, her neck was very long and sinuous, as graceful as a
swaying seasnake. I should mention that the god-men-the god-women-did
not all look alike. Some took on the appearance of sea-cows while others
were like dolphins, otters or even whales. They bred their children to a
thousand different shapes; a City ecologist would swear they were not of
a single species. But for all their differences, they shared a common
feature: Their eyes were human. Balusilustalu had large brown eyes,
intelligent eyes, eyes full of irony and humor. She looked at me with
those eyes, all the while speaking to me in her sophisticated language
of barks and grunts and clicks. I understood this language clearly.

Later, after the translating biochips had been removed from my brain, it
would all sound like gobbledygook.

But she knew everything about my human speech. "Meat's meat," I said,
not remembering then that I was a man of the City. "A man must hunt meat
to live."

"You are a stupid man, ha, ha, not a shark-eat the fruit of the trees;
the trees are for you."

She seemed contemptuous of me in the same way a new journeyman feels
superior to a novice. Did she expect me to spend my days climbing trees
as if I were a monkey? In no matter was her contempt more obvious than
at my attempt to understand Agathanian society. "Even if your brain were
whole," she said, "you could not hear the sea talking to you. "You are a
mathematical man seeking immortality for yourself, ha, ha! What can you
know of the World-soul?" But then, "Wait, wait, we must wait until you
remember yourself, and then wait some more to see if you understand the
simple things."

After a while, after I had regained the full use of my muscles, I began
to remember. Whole pieces of my personal history would come to me,
appearing for an instant tenuous and insubstantial, like sea foam, and
then churning, vanishing into the breaking crests of memory. It was an
unsettling, eerie feeling. Like a child at night, sometimes I would
awaken from the sea not quite knowing who I was or how I had come to be
there. I would float up and over the dark waves, rising and falling,
looking up at the stars. I had dreams. Sometimes I thought I was Mallory
Ringess, an innocent novice learning the Boolean algebras; I was
teacher, hunter, journeyman, "Little Fellow," father and son, and
sometimes, during those lucid moments when I opened my eyes to the dark
ecstasies beneath the slipping waves, I was a pilot and I was a fish-I
was a pilot-fish-come to learn the secrets of the ageless sea.

One day, when I thought I had remembered all the events of my life
excepting the times when I first had murdered and had come to be
murdered, and all those moments in between, one day when the sky was
full of puffy, white clouds and the sea was quiet and still,
Balusilustalu nudged my floating body with her nose and said, "Now we
will remake your brain properly; when we are done, you will know you
have a brain."

She led me out to the deeper waters where the others of the Host were
waiting. The Agathanians enveloped me. A hundred cold noses poked every
part of my naked body. Tongues licked my skin. There was a flurry of
flippers beneath me and by my sides. Salty foam washed into my mouth.

For a moment, Pakupakupaku and Tsatsalutsa and many others lifted me out
of the water on their backs. My tiny island wavered in the distance, a
speck of gold and green against the sparkling blue sea. There were
whistles and barks and puckering sounds. From all around us came
answering barks and yodels; the sea was suddenly alive with smooth,
black gliding shapes. I counted six hundred and thirty of the Host
before I was dunked beneath the water and I had to stop counting. (I
later learned that there are about a thousand Agathanians to a host and
some ten thousand hosts scattered across the ocean.) Balusilustalu-or
perhaps it was Mumu or Siseleka-let loose a series of high-pitched
squeaks and clicks. She was talking to the dolphins and whales, I
thought, and soon the water rippled with massive shapes. "We are calling
the deep gods to witness your rebirth," Balusilustalu said. I marveled
that the clever Agathanians had formed their tongues and speech organs
so they could articulate not only their own languages, but also
whalespeak and whalesong.

All this time they were touching each other and barking; information was
passing from nose to nose and from throat to ear. The touching suddenly
became friskier, more intimate, more urgent. There in the swirling water
some of the host lay up against others, and they opened their slits to
deep caresses, and the coupling began. Above me, beneath me and on all
sides, many were coupling with gusto and abandon, and then more than
many-I watched and listened in fascination while the water filled with
their barks and groans. At first I did not understand what was
happening. I thought the gods had gone crazy with their sex. But soon I
became aware of a knowledge within me. A part of the miracle was
revealed to me, whether by telepathy or information stored in my brain's
biochips I did not know. The godvoice whispered to me while I floated
beneath the water, listening, and this is what I knew: that when an
adult of a host is ready to mate, she, the First Mother, creates an egg
in one of her ovaries. She finds a partner and a coupling then occurs.

(All Agathanians possess membrums, huge ones with triangular red tips
bigger than Bardo's, but they do not have testes because they do not
need them.) The First Mother thrusts her membrum into the slit of the
Second Mother. The egg is squirted into a peculiarly crafted organ
called the bakula. In the bakula the egg is partially fertilized. The
Second Mother injects the egg with carefully designed strands of germ
plasm in much the same manner that a virus infects a host cell with its
DNA. Then she passes the egg out her membrum to a third partner where
the same process occurs again, and so on many, many times. Finally, when
the egg has been passed from bakula to bakula-the Agathanians sometimes
refer to this doughnut-shaped protein factory as the "organ of
change"when all the mothers have contributed to the egg's heritage and
the fertilization is complete, the Last Mother accepts the zygote into
her womb where the fetus grows. Thus each Agathanian is the daughter of
the entire host.

"But today we are not making daughters," Balusilustalu said to me as I
watched the Host passing their plasm back and forth beneath the sea. "We
are making something else, oh, ho!"

What they were making is difficult to describe. In some ways the seed
inside the Agathanian's bakulas was like a bacterium, like a
"neurophage," since it was designed to consume and replace dead,
disassociated neurons. In other ways, it was much more like an
information virus. Each mother of the Host wove chains of carked DNA,
tiny association strings, into the information virus. The mothers moved
through the water, touching each other inside, reeling in ecstasy, and
they passed the virus from bakula to bakula. And so the impulsive Tenth
Mother added association strings according to her inspiration while the
wiser Five Hundredth Mother deleted strings and added still others. When
the virus was almost finished, Balusilustalu took it into her bakula
where she made the final changes.

"We will put it into your brain now," she said. "I invite you to accept
the gift of my sisters."

I must admit that I did not want to accept any gift. Even though I was
not completely myself, I was aware enough to be very afraid. I am not
sure how they opened my brain. I think they used disassemblers to gently
split the collagens of my scalp, to dissolve the bone of my skull. I
felt as if my whole body were being laid open and spread out tissue by
tissue, layer by layer, cell by cell. The water was red and ropy with
strands of blood. Parts of me floated in the warm salty sea, unfolding,
unraveling slowly. They removed some of the biochips from my brain. When
they put the virus inside me, I screamed. There was no pain, but I
screamed because I was afraid the virus would destroy rather than heal
me. The scream must have carried through the dense, rippling water out
to where the circle of bluntheaded sperm whales waited. I heard a series
of bubbling groans, which I interpreted as laughter. And then
Balusilustalu spoke, without moving her mouth, and I heard her voice
inside me.

-The deep gods are wondering why apes always scream when they are born?

Ha, ha-because they are stupid, I told them.

-No, I'm dying, you're killing me.

-We are restoring you to what you could be. -To live, I die. The virus
will kill me, I know.

-You are so simple, oh, ho! What we have made for you is not really a
virus.

-What is it?

-We are gods, are we not, ha, ha! We have made this seed in our bodies
to restore you. You may call it godseed.

-Viruses infect, this hierarchy of DNA, the more primitive programming,
killing the higher cells-the ecologists taught me this when I was a
novice.

-So stupid! The godseed will seek dead brain cells; so many parts of
your brain have died.

-Too bad, too bad, as Bardo would say.

-The godseed is intelligent, in a way. It introduces association strings
into dead neurons, revitalizing them for a short time. The godseed will
take over the programming of the DNA.

-I'm being taken over, too bad.

-Listen, Man, this is the art ofagathange: The association strings
reproduce themselves a thousand times over. Replication and life, stupid
Man. The new strings organize themselves, clumping together like sea
worms, forming thousands of interconnections. And when they grow, the
neuron bursts and dies. And the new godseed is born, thousands of
godseeds.

-journeymen die; why don't you leave me alone?

-When the millions of godseeds have migrated across your brain, we will
remove the rest of the biochips. The biochips are impossibly clumsy.

They are good for moving your legs or so you can wag your stupid tongue
but useless for remembering mathematics and other memories that have
been enfolded.

-Enfolded? -The brain is like a hologram; the whole is enfolded within
the part. -No.

-Let me explain.

-No, no, I'm dying and I'm afraid.

For a long time I floated in the water, bobbing up and down in the
undulations of the gentle current. Somehow I was fed. In my mouth were
the tastes of salt and blood, the rank flavor of seal-skin and piss.

(The Agathanians gave as little thought to their excretions as does a
baby in a tub of warm water. But the ocean was very large so the clouds
of dark, orange piss dissipated quickly.) Long days gradually faded into
long nights, and night became day, and the rhythms of the light and dark
were lost into the deeper rhythms of the sea. And always, the sound of
the Host barking and moaning and talking, and the piping of the dolphins
as they chattered among themselves, and the huge sound of the sperm
whales merging with the long, black roar of the sea-all these sounds
surrounded me, beating at my skin in endless waves of sound. I felt the
sound in my bones. I felt as if I were swallowing sound, as if the sound
of the sea nourished and sustained me. Dark rhythms raced along my
blood, and again there was sound in my brain. The Host glided through
the water, passing the song and substance of created life back and
forth, back and forth as they touched and sang and emptied themselves
into one another. Again they opened my brain, and again they touched the
deep parts of me with their virus, with their godseed. And again, many
times. The Agathanians sang of the stupidity of human beings, and they
sang of humans' cleverness, too. They sang of the World-soul and of
darkness and light. As the virus did its work I floated in an expanding
ocean of sound. The song of the Host gradually grew clearer. I began to
understand things. Sad, mournful notes sounded inside, and I remembered
that I had once murdered a seal. Then there was a single high-pitched
tone, like the anguished shriek of a shakuhachi. I remembered murdering
a man called Liam, and I lived again the moment of my death. The sound
of death, the sounds of life: Waves broke over my head, and a seagull
beat the air with his wings and cried out above the distant beach, and I
remembered things which should have remained obliterated; I remembered
learning to count as a child; I remembered elegant theorems and how to
knap a blade of flint; I remembered that Leopold Soli was my father;
perhaps for an instant I remembered all the events of my life. I
remembered things I had never known. Strange, new memories came to me. I
knew these memories were the work of the virus inside me. I listened to
the song of the sea, the song of the Host of Restorers and all the other
hosts. The song of life.

-Because it is fun! And too, we restore you because of who you are,
Mallory Ringess, the pilot who will never die, ha, ha! We give you our
memories because you must know.

-I don't want to know anything.

-Oh, ho, listen, Man, and we'll tell you everything! Do you hear the
waves whispering the secret? We know you know, Man. The secret of life
is just sheer joy, and joy is everywhere. joy is what we were made for.

It is in the rush of the nighttime surf and in the beach rocks and in
the salt and the air and in the water we breathe and deep, deep within
the blood. And the sifting ocean sands and the wriggling silverfish and
the hooded greens of the shallows and the purple deeps and in the
oyster's crusty shell and the pink reefs and even in the muck of the
ocean's floor, joy, joy, joy!

-No, life is pain, I know. There's a poem; I remember some of it: "We're
born in our mother's pain and perish in our own."

-Life will not perish. We give you these memories so life will not
perish.

-I remember the song of the Host of Restorers.

-All of the hosts are restorers. That is what we are; that is what we
do. -I don't want to be restored like this.

-It is a great song, isn't it? Do you hear the song? -I'm afraid.

-Ha, ha!

The song of Agathange is a great song, but it is not a song most human
beings would care to hear. Some parts, of course, given the wholly human
heritage of that mysterious race, are understandable. Humans and god-men
(or even most gods, I think) share the knowledge that matter and
consciousness are inseparable. The knowledge is old; ages ago the
mechanics found that it was impossible to describe the behavior of
subatomic particles without considering the effects of consciousness on
the objects they were studying, just as it was impossible to explain the
disasterous thermodynamics and poisoning of the Earth, all the while
ignoring the conscious and criminal actions of billions of human beings.

(This was, of course, before most mechanics gave up their silly notion
of searching for an ultimate particle. It is an unbelievable fact that
the ancients had "discovered," described and catalogued thirty thousand
three hundred and eight discrete particles-leptons, gluons, photinos,
charms, gravitons, quons, quarks, upside-down quiffs and other figments
of their equations-before they abandoned their hopeless quest.) So, the
Agathanians revere the unity of consciousness and matter, and they have
pushed their belief to the logical end. The ten thousand hosts of
restorers were trying to awaken the whole of their planet to greater
consciousness. The song tells of the great restoration: The first
ecologists had not trusted their miniscule consciousnesses. Had man's
consciousness saved Old Earth? No, and neither would Agathange be saved,
because man was man, and someday-even though they made themselves like
seals and took to the sea-the natural harmonies would be broken. Only by
creating a consciousness far beyond their own, a World-soul, could they
sing a song of total joy, which, after all, is what they sought to do.

When my brain had healed sufficiently for me to understand the most
ancient harmonies of the sea, Balusilustalu permitted me to hunt the
fish of my island's lagoon. I spent long afternoons remembering, and
spearing sandfish and shohi and silvertail. I slept on the beach and
burnt my fair, Alaloi skin under the bright, pink sun's glare. Often I
would swim out away from the lagoon into the offshore current where the
migrating whales frolicked and scooped up great mouthfuls of krill. The
water churning red with tiny crustaceans, the spouts of the humpbacks
and the sei and bluefins, the tang of sea-salt and foam-I remembered the
sea as if I had lived in the water for a million years. But I was still
afraid of the sharks and predators swimming beneath the waves, afraid,
too, of less tangible things. Often I would swim like a pup surrounded
by the safety of the Host. And when they opened my brain, the soothing
thoughts of Balusilustalu and the others washed through me:

-Do not be afraid of losing yourself. There is the part and there is the
whole, and both exist at once.

-I am a man! I could never be one of the Host.

-And the women of Old Earth nearly succeeded in creating a planetary
consciousness. Ten billion women and children-each one like a neuron in
a brain. And all their touching and talking and copulating and writing
and fighting and singing-all the instances of intercommunication, just
like the interconnecting synapses of a neuron. Ha!

-Why did we fail?

-Why does a manchild pull the wings off flies? -I don't want to be part
of a planetary brain.

-Ha, ha, but it wants you to be a part of.. . the whole. At least for a
time.

-No, no.

-And that is why our ancestors failed. The nascent consciousness of
Mother Earth was damaged by its youthful carelessness. In a way, it was
never born. The parts were never truly aware of the whole.

-They were afraid, I think.

-Ha, ha, they were stupid! Is a fish aware of the sea, or only the
immediate water in which she swims? What does a single neuron in your
brain know of mathematics or music or love? We can never be completely
aware of the entire dimensionality of the whole, but we can know some of
the things it does.

-And the ten thousand hosts-what do you do, then?

-Miraculous things! We're gods, aren't we, oh, ho? We are the brain of
Agathange, and when we weep there is rain, and when we sigh the wind
blows. When the coral die at the right place, their skeletons form the
reefs of the sea. We create new species when there is need, sometimes
just because it is fun. And the other things, the higher things, the
ecologies and harmonies-we tremble to tell you about these things, we
are on the verge of telling you, we want to tell you, we must but ...
-But? -But you are too stupid, ha, ha! As even the individual
Agathanians, Balusilustalu, Mumu and Pakupakupaku are too stupid. But we
at least are aware of the whole; the whole is us, and it is aware of us.

-And the whales?

-As your cortex is to the more primitive parts of your brain, so are the
whales to the hosts. You might say the whales are the soul of Agathange.

But that would be a simplification, ha, ha!

-So many hierarchies and layers of intelligence; I'd be afraid of losing
myself.

-Stupid, stupid man! The hologram is preserved; all is preserved. -I am
afraid.

My great fear was not that the planetary consciousness would absorb me.

Could a man with hair and fingers and a mathematical brain be absorbed
by a host of seal-men? And even if they could change my flesh and cark
my brain to their whims-and I had to admit they could-why would they
want to? What value did Mallory Ringess, a simple pilot of an archaic
Order, possess to a race of gods? No, my great fear, what I dreaded
above all was losing my selfness to the virus that they had put inside
me. The longer I swam among the Host and the more my brain "healed," the
more fearful I became.

As the days passed, I gradually realized that the Agathanians had great
power over matter and consciousness. (And to complete the semimystical
quincunx of the mechanics, over energy, spacetime and information as
well. Especially over information.) I noticed that wherever the Host
swam, it never rained, nor did the wind blow too hard or the waves grow
too steep. Even the sharks were somehow kept at bay. These great, sleek
beautiful murderers ate only a few of the oldest Agathanians, those who
were ready to "go on," as they put it. The sharks left the pups-the
children-alone. I never understood how Mumu and Siseleka were able to
swim right up to a great white shark and impudently touch flipper to
fin. It was a mystery why they would wish to do so, unless it was to
impress me with their love of nature, and more importantly, of nature's
love for them. Only once did I doubt their power. Only once did nature
seem as far beyond their control as the sun is to a sunfish.

One day a pod of orcas, with their even-spaced, conical teeth and grim
smiles, appeared as if from nowhere. In no time, Siseleka and seven
others were torn apart and swallowed piecemeal. The blood was so thick
in the water that even the sharks became crazed. There was a slaughter,
then. Somehow the sharks died even as they bit at mouthfuls of water.

During this confusion one of the orcas forced his way into the center of
the Host. He gobbled down eight screaming children as if they were
oysters. When he was full-he must have been full, I thought-he
whacked-his great tail up under a baby, propelling her up out of the
water over the backs of her mothers and into the waiting jaws of another
orca. Three times this trick was repeated, and each time a hapless child
disappeared into the belly of a smiling black and white beast. Then, as
quickly as they had come, the orcas were gone, and the red waters grew
still.

The Host's sobs, shrieks, cries, whistles and moans continued for a long
time. A few of the mothers took me under the water and engulfed me with
layers of seal bodies which writhed and quivered around me. When it
seemed the orcas had eaten their fill, the song of the Hosts returned to
the sea. Perhaps the Agathanians were taking inventory of their losses
or were merely soothing each other. Perhaps they were busy with their
"higher things." I was terrified. by the dangers, without and within. I
wanted only to be back on my island, to pull myself to safety up the
branches of a tree. But after a while the many singing voices calmed and
reached a harmony; the shrieks and barks flowed into words, the words
into thoughts.

-The price, the price, there is always a price, ha, ha! -But you're
gods! When you weep there is rain, you said.

-We're still human, deep inside, and when there is blood we weep. -You
said the whales are the higher gods. I don't understand-are they insane?

-Oh, the debts, the sins of our fathers. The consciousness of Agathange
is not quite achieved, not quite perfect. The price.

-Tell me about the orcas.

-Listen to the music of the rising waves. -Is part of your planetary
brain insane? -Listen to the rush of the drifting clouds. -Tell me.

-Listen to the sound of your own beating heart. -No!

-The price, the flaws. The universe is flawed.

-Is my brain flawed? Tell me about the virus-what will it do? -The
universe is perfect, too, and your brain is perfect or will be soon, oh,
ho! And you must not call it a virus. The godseed is perfect. The
godseed is only for you. The mind of the hosts has surrounded you and
modeled your brain. Our mind is a computer, like your Order's akashic
computers or the neurologics of your ship. Only much more powerful and
profound, oh, ho! We're gods, are we not? Your brain is like a perfect
hologram. And in a hologram, isn't information about the whole preserved
in every part? And in our bakulas, which listen to our mind's computer,
we make the godseed. The godseed "reads" the hologram of your brain. It
unfolds it, you are being unfolded now, ha, ha! The godseed knows the
exact order in which your neurons must be replaced. The godseed "sees"

the connections which must be made to the living neurons.

-And my memories?

-Memory is a nonlocal phenomenon. Memory can be created but not
destroyed. Every part of your brain contains all of your memories. The
godseed preserves memory.

-And myself?

-Ha, ha, you are Mallory Ringess, aren't you?

-Is my sense of selfness preserved? Will I still be myself? How will I
know?

-What is the sound of the rising sun? -I feel like I'm drowning.

-Drowning in a sea of information, oh, ho! Information, information
everywhere! Information in the conch's spiral shell, and in the song of
the hosts: information; information passing beneath the sea, passing
from the true information viruses to the mothers, and from mother to
virus; and the viruses infect the otters and the octopuses, the sunfish
and diatoms. This is what a true information virus is: It keeps our DNA
informed of the changes of the other species. As it informs us, we
inform the life of the sea, passing the information, always passing,
back and forth from creature to creature and from plant to plant, under
the sea across all the waters of Agathange. Let us open you to the sea
of information.

-No! -Don't be afraid. All will be restored. -I'm afraid of dying.

-Information is like water, and you are dying of thirst.

There was a moment of stillness, then, hard to remember, impossible to
fully forget. They opened me, and the tides of consciousness rushed in.

I think I became a part of Agathange, a part of the living mind of the
planet. I heard things; I felt the planet moving beneath me. Information
passed from me into the sea, while each living creature and plant
informed me of its existence. My consciousness was embodied in every
clam, whale or starfishi am sure of it. I was a lobster feeling with my
claws through the bottom sand for decaying tidbits; I was the blue-green
algae floating on the currents, soaking up sunlight, and I was a diatom
and an arrowworm and a kerfer slicing open the soft tissues of a
jellyfish. I was a great sperm whale who sang the ecstasy of his mating
and moaned the joy of her giving birth. I was many things and one thing,
enfolding the world in my tentacles, in my flippers, in my arms. And
always information was passing, from plant to animal, from eaten to
eater, from virus to bacteria, from mother to daughter. There was a
brilliant pattern to this information, a vision as clear as diamond, but
now there are only memories of vision; like starlight diffusing through
deep blue waters, the memories are tenuous and dim. I was at once
myself, a tiny cell with tiny human consciousness, and I was a vast
being aware of the information flooding through the universe. I knew
things. To me as a man, the knowledge was impossibly complex. But as
Agathange the planet, when I looked out at the stars, I was aware of the
beauty and simplicity. In ways I still do not understand, this awareness
changed me and has never stopped changing me, and I am afraid it never
will.

When I awoke I was lying on the beach with the heels of my feet stuck
down into the wet sand near the water's edge. There was sand in my
mouth, sand in my hair, ears and eyes. I moved my parched, gummy lips to
speak and my teeth ground against particles of grit. A seagull cried
out. All along the line of crashing surf, the waves were white and
foamy. The pink sun was sliding down the western sky, and I wondered how
long I had been lying there. My skin was hot, burnt red as a bloodfruit.

I clasped my hands to my head and ran my fingers across my scalp,
searching for some fissure, scab or scar to prove my brain had been
opened. But I found only a few pieces of crackling, black seaweed
clinging to the hair. (To the black and red hairs.) I closed my eyes,
then. I looked inward to the interior of my brain; I looked for memories
which might seem unreal. I tested my mathematical powers. I proposed
arbitrary axioms and created a logic, and I invented some pretty
theorems. I did other things. For a long time I thought deeply, brooding
about the problem of identity I had first faced within the Entity. How
would I know if my true self had changed? And if it had changed, subtly
changed so I never knew, if I were somehow different or diminished,
would it matter?

Yes, it would matter. My eyes moved beneath shut lids, and I thought of
Katharine's last words to me, and it suddenly mattered more than
anything in the universe. My great fear was that the Agathanian virus
would rob me of free will. It had happened before, to other men. In a
way, the fundamental technology was old. The warrior-poets of Qallar and
the despicable alien Scutari were known to practice this barbaric art of
brain replacement. They call their art "slel-mime," and it is a horrible
thing. Tiny slel-viruses- they are computers, really-invade their
victim's brain. The viruses first establish colonies at critical
locations throughout the cortex. One by one they take over the victim's
programs, all of the human habits, beliefs, emotions, thoughts, and
mental functions. The victim's brain then runs the programs of his new
master. In the end, when the virus has done its work and all the brain
has been remade, the man is no more than a machine.

What is inside of you is neither a true information virus nor a
slelvirus. We have told you, it is godseed. The hologram is preserved.

I lay there on the beach, listening to the internal rhythms. In truth, I
felt as I had always felt-perhaps a little more complex, angrier,
grimmer, and too full of the world, but ... myself I stood up and looked
out across the breakers where the ocean swelled and the Host of
Restorers gathered. I heard the Song of Agathange in my blood. Although
I remained the proud, vain, murderous man I had always been, I knew I
was something more. There was a new truth, a new passion inside me-I
could feel it burning somewhere behind my eyes. I almost knew what it
was. Something-and not just the Song of the Hosts-had been added to me.

I looked out to sea, and I listened to the ebb-sob of the waves, and I
knew that the Agathanians had left something unsaid, something
unexplained.

I swam out past the lagoon, past the white and pink coral reefs into the
deeper waters. Whistling dolphins raced ahead of me, and a humpback
breached the surface and landed on his back with a gigantic splash. I
found Balusilustalu swimming with the Host. She nudged my stomach as I
talked to her in the language of the Civilized Worlds. Once again I
asked her about the orcas, and again she answered me in riddles. I was
given to understand that the subject was taboo, a thing she could not or
would not talk about. (It is curious that for all people-even
god-men-there are things which cannot be discussed. The Devaki, for
instance, almost never reveal their nighttime dreams, while many of the
exemplars disdain any mention of sex or sexuality. And even we pilots
may not talk about those things that we may not talk about.)

One final time they opened my brain, but they did not so physically,
They opened me with their thoughts, and with their love. With their
need. -You are restored, and it is time for you to leave.

-There's something inside me, now. Something that I can't quite
articulate, can't even think. The key-tell me about the orcas.

-Feel the freedom of the waves inside you. -Why can't a god give a man a
simple answer? -You're still a stupid man, ha, ha!

-You haven't told me everything. -We've told you the secret of life.

-No, there's no secret.

-Stupid, stupid, oh, ho!

-Why did you restore me? -Because it was fun.

-Why?

-Why? Why? Why? Because you are Mallory Ringess, the pilot who has been
inside Kalinda, and because she has been inside you.

-Kalinda? -You call her the Solid State Entity, but her name is Kalinda.

And Kalinda knows the secret.

-The secret of life?

-She knows the secret of the Vild. You could say it's the secret to life
in this galaxy.

-I don't understand.

-The hosts sing to the life of Agathange and to the ocean, and sometimes
we even sing to the sun, but we cannot stop the stars of the Vild from
exploding.

-No one can. -You can, ha, ha!

-No, I'm afraid not. I'm just a stupid man. -Oh, ho, you're something
more!

-What am I? -Someday you'll know. -What?

-What? What? What? You're Mallory Ringess, the man whose brain has been
made as vast as the sea of Agathange. Do you not feel vaster? As the sea
swells to wind and rain, so will you rise to the storms of your life.

There are possibilities, Pilot Man, and they will unfold, one by one.

Someday, when you have been even further vastened, you will ask Kalinda
why the Vild is growing. We would ask her ourself, but Kalinda hates us
and there are hierarchies. The lesser gods must bow to the greater.

-I'll never return to the Entity.

-Someday you will return because it is your fate to return and because
we ask you to return.

-Why? -Because the stars are dying and we are afraid.

I often think that fear is the worst thing there is. The Hosts of
Agathange said goodbye to me, then. They swam out into the quickest part
of the current. One by one the sperm whales took in great breaths of air
and dived. The dolphins smiled and whistled goodbye and followed them.

And then the gray whales and the sei whales, the bowheads and blues and
others of the mysticeti disappeared beneath the sea. I saw no orcas that
day, and I never learned their dark secrets. All around me, from horizon
to horizon, the water was blue, empty and still. In the distance, the
glistening sands of my little island beckoned. I treaded water and shook
the long wet hair away from my eyes, and I looked closer. It wasn't the
sand which glistened in the sun; it was the hull of my mother's shuttle.

Somehow the Hosts had informed her of my restoration and sent a ship to
fetch her. She was waiting to take me home. As I began the long swim
back to shore, I heard the waves of consciousness swelling and roaring
within me, and I never felt so afraid or so alone.

Chapter 18 - The Tycho's Conjecture

The brain is not a computer; the brain is the brain.
-Saying of the Akashics

Some say Neverness is the true Eternal City, the city that will never
die. For three thousand years she has stood as a testament to man's
ability to endure. In her granite spires and towers, in her gleaming
domes, her streets of fire, in the eyes of her pilots and the farsiders
burns the cold flame of our immortality, the soul of mankind. I do not
know if she will last for thirty thousand more years, as the scryers
prophesy, or for thirty million years. Will the planets last that long?

Will the stars? As a child of the city, I have always believed her fate
is intertwined with man's fate. She is the topological nexus of this
brilliant galaxy, and she is also the City of Light to which all seekers
someday come. There are secrets buried here; there are wonders; there
are glories. Neverness, I believe, is eternal in the way that our dreams
are eternal; she will endure as long as the race who made her.

So, she is eternal, and she is beautiful, and she embodies man's very
essence. But I must not rhapsodize too strenuously or too long. Our
human natures are many-layered. "Verily, a polluted stream is man," as
the Solid State Entity once quoted to me. And Neverness, that
quintessential city of man, is a stratified city. She is layered with
the finest of mathematicians and imprimaturs and phantasts, as well as
the sludge of autists, exemplars, and Yarkona slel-neckers. Strange new
sects continually change the composition of the City, clogging the
glidderies with bewildered (and bewildering) people. She is a beautiful
city-I cannot say this often enough-a city of truth. But she is also a
city polluted with politics and intrigues and plots; often she is a
quicksilver city of sudden change.

On the eighteenth day of false winter in the year 2933, I returned to
the streets and spires of my childhood. The city seemed subtly changed.

There were the new buildings, of course. In the Zoo, there was a huge
balloonlike, purple aerodome which housed the embassy of the new, winged
aliens called the Elidi. (I should mention that there was an ongoing,
violent debate among the eschatologists and other professionals as to
whether the diminuitive Elidi were true aliens or were merely one of the
many carked, lost races of man. It was a time of violent debates, as I
soon discovered.) The College of Lords, those crusty old women and men
who ruled our Order, had at last approved and erected the tower
celebrating the founding of the profession of phantasts. The phantasts'
tower stood among the spires of the Old City; it was a strange building
of sweeping curves and odd angles, a disturbing building. Its opalescent
facade seemed to catch and hold, at different times, all the colors of
the City. Like the compositions of the phantasts themselves, the longer
one tried to engrave an image of the tower on the mind's eye, the more
it shifted and changed. There were new sects, too, skulking down the
back glidderies. Near Rollo's Ring in the Farsider's Quarter, I saw a
neurosinger, with his cortically implanted biochips, singing himself
unending songs of electric bliss. He made me feel uneasy, probably
because he seemed too happy. He accosted me, grabbing the sleeve of my
kamelaika, and he claimed a spiritual kinship with me, as all
neurosingers did with pilots. After I had explained that we pilots were
forbidden to continually interface with our ship's computer (or any
other computer), I shunned him as a pilot should. And there were old
sects, too: Friends of God off Simoom, and ancient Maggids chanting
their histories of what they called the first Diaspora, as well as the
ever-present autists, harijan, hibakusha and refugees from the stars of
the Vild. There were too many warrior-poets-I noticed this immediately.

Of course, one warrior-poet is too many, but on the Street of the Ten
Thousand Bars, and along the Way, and in the cafes, ice rings and
squares, during one long afternoon, I counted ten of them. Why, I
wondered, were there so many of the deadly warrior-poets in my city?

For me it was a time of many questions and few answers. On Agathange, my
mother had recounted the disastrous end of our expedition. I remembered,
on my own, that Soli was my father. And worse things. Of course, neither
of us could know what had happened in Neverness during our two year
absence. Immediately upon returning, I asked the Lord Akashic for the
news, and there was good news along with the tragic: Bardo was alive!

The cryologists had thawed him, healed his ruined heart, and restored
him to life. He was off somewhere in the manifold, piloting for the
first time since the Timekeeper called his summons for the quest. But
others were not alive. I skated down narrow glidderies during the
deepest part of night, and I saw Shanidar's toothless face smiling at me
from the shadows. Wherever I could, I avoided scryers. The flash of a
white robe or white fur ahead of me on the street was enough to send me
stumbling through the doorways of strange bars and phantast dens. Once I
came upon the false-corpse of a molting Scutari. Its red coils of muscle
reminded me of too many things I had seen among the Devaki. Everything
reminded me of the expedition. I could not stop thinking of Katharine. I
was full of sad, wild ideas: I would return alone to the Devaki and
recover Katharine's body; I would take her to Agathange; and when she
was healed, I would marry her, and we would leave the Order, find some
beautiful, pristine planet and make a new race of our own. In my more
sober moments, I admitted that Katharine's body had probably long since
decayed and been eaten by bears; it did not exist. She was far beyond
the restoring arts of the Agathanians or any other gods.

Because the Agathanian godseed was burning inside me, because I was
afire with fear, I went to the Lord Akashic and asked him to make a
model of my brain. But he could not help me. (Neither did the cetics,
holists, or imprimaturs help me when I went to them.) In his dark
wood-paneled chambers, Nikolos the Elder played with the folds of fat
hanging from his little face as he lowered the heaume of the akashic
computer over my head. He mapped the base structures of my brain, the
amygdala and the cerebellum, the fear-producing limbic system and the
folds of the parietal lobe. He mapped my brain from cortex to stem, and
then he modeled the synapses of the temporal lobes.

"To begin with, as you must know, Mallory, the virus has replaced
neurons all through the brain. It's magic, of course, and I can't
explain it. For instance, in the cluster below the sylvan fissure-it's
all new. That's where your time sense is-well, it's really nowhere and
everywhere, but it originates there do you understand?"

"If I understood what the Agathanians had done to me, I would not have
come to you, Lord Akashic. My brain, the hologram, myself-is it
preserved or does it change? I need to know."

"Such a miracle!" he said. He shrugged his shoulders and pulled at his
pendulous ear lobe. "Well, the hologram is preserved, after all. I
think. No, no, no-don't worry and don't bother me with any more
questions. You'll return here every tenday, and we'll make a new
mapping. No, make that every five days-this is a rare chance. The magic
of gods! It's too bad we can't detach your head from your torso, arrange
a nutrient bath, and model your brain moment by moment-No, no, I'm just
joking, don't look at me like that!"

Soon after my arrival, I tried to confront Soli. But he, the vain
glorious Lord Pilot of our Order, my uncle, my father, would not see me.

I wanted to seize his hand in mine, to study the shape and contours of
his long fingers for an answer to the riddle of my own. I would make him
go with me to the imprimatur for a genotyping. I told myself I wanted
proof that he really was my father, but in truth, I was desperate for
any evidence at all that I was not his son. For most of a morning I
waited in an anteroom outside his chambers at the top of the Danladi
Tower. At last a tall, pimply novice emerged from between the arched,
obsidian doors, and he told me, "The Lord Pilot is working on a theorem.

You may have heard of it-it's called the Continuum Hypothesis. He's
sworn to remain sequestered until he proves it."

I was amused at the novice's rude, arrogant manner. Soli was known to
choose arrogant novices to serve him. "How long has the Lord Pilot been
at his work, then?"

"He's been alone for most of two years."

"Then the Lord Pilot won't see me?"

"He won't see anyone."

"Not even me?"

"And who are you?" he asked. "Dozens of pilots, master pilots such as
yourself, have tried to see him, even his friends, but he wants to be
alone." I was glad that he did not seem to know I was Soli's son. Soli
would want to keep this a secret, no doubt. The novice was beginning to
annoy me, so I stood up and looked down at him. He blushed, and his
pimples became even redder. Perhaps he had heard that I had murdered a
man; perhaps he was intimidated by the smile on my still-savage face or
by the wildness in my eyes, because he suddenly remembered his manners.

"I'm sorry, Master Mallory," he said. "But the Lord Pilot would not want
to see you in any case. He hasn't been the same since Justine left him,
since your, uh ... expedition. And you are Bardo's friend, and Bardo and
Justine are, uh ... friends, and everyone knows it, too, I think. You
have heard the rumor, haven't you, Master Pilot?"

I had heard the rumor. Everyone said that Justine had left Soli because
he was a cruel, wild man. He had broken her jaw one day out on the ice
when he had fallen into rage. In revenge, so the rumor went, she had
befriended Bardo, and more, she had begun sharing his bed. Some even
said they had shared the pit of Bardo's lightship, laying bare their
brains to each other, floating together in nude bliss. Could it be true?

Had their separate selves joined within the neurologics of the Blessed
Harlot! Had they shared the same extensional brain, solved the same
theorems, viewed the manifold through the same inner eyes, thought the
same thoughts? Although there was no proof of this forbidden telepathy,
it was the scandal of the Order. Many of Justine's former friends-fine
master pilots such as Tomoth of Thorskalle, Lionel Killirand and
Pilatgaprindashavilli-had spoken against her, demanding that the
Timekeeper punish her or even banish her from the City, and banish
Bardo, too. Others had remained more faithful. Cristoble the Bold had
announced that if Justine were banished, he and his friends would leave
the Order with her. Perhaps, he said, they would flee to Tria and join
the merchant pilots; perhaps they would find a new planet and found an
order of their own.

Of course, this vicious rumor had quickly reached the ear of the
Timekeeper. Immediately that grim, old man had reminded Bardo of his
oath to quest for the Ieldra's secret, and he had ordered him into the
manifold.

"But your fat friend will return," the Timekeeper said to me at the top
of his tower one day. "Even as you've returned to me. Luck! It's my bad
luck that Bardo is run by his lusts. But aren't we all, eh? Have you
heard the talk? So, there have been changes in the City since your damn
expedition. Some of my pilots-I won't mention their names-are talking of
leaving the Order. Leaving, I said! But no, they won't leave." He walked
over to the chair in front of the window and gripped the curved back
rail as if he would never let go. "When Bardo returns, you'll talk to
him. You'll explain that it's unseemly for one of my pilots to swive the
Lord Pilot's wife. Now tell me about Agathange. Sit down! Tell me how my
bravest pilot returns to me resurrected instead of lost down the black
hole of death."

When Bardo returned thirteen days later, I was faced with the most
painful of changes: The changing of a man who, like myself, had returned
from the black hole of death. I met him in the Hofgarten, and we drank
skotch and beer as we had in the master pilot's bar four years ago. It
was an unhappy, painful afternoon of angry words and misunderstood
silences. Because that day marked the beginning of my great change, I
must record its miraculous events in greater detail.

It is curious that I have made so little mention of the Hofgarten, for
in some ways it is the most important structure in the City. The
Hofgarten, a huge, domed circle of cafes and bars, sits on the cliffs
overlooking the sea. The cafes are built around the rim of a great ice
ring, and they support a magnificent clary dome, the largest of its
kind, or so it is said, on any of the Civilized Worlds. Each cafe-or
bar-has two large windows: a convex window through which one can watch
the skaters as they make circles around the ice ring, and a concave
window allowing a view of the Old City or the Farsider's Quarter
or-depending on which segment of the rim the cafe occupies-the icy
waters of the Sound. The cafes are always full of farsiders and aliens
who come to informally meet the men and women of our Order. (And,
sometimes, to skate inelegantly around the ice ring.) It is a festive
place where the haikuists and spelists delight with their quaint
entertainments. But the cafes are also thick with exemplars trying to
persuade eschatologists to the logic of their breeding strategies, and
with warrior-poets and democrats and merchant-princes and many others
who plot, conspire and scheme. In the cafe nearest the edge of the
cliff, I found Bardo hunched over a foamy mug of beer. "Alark Mandara
told me I would find you here," I said.

"Mallory! I knew you couldn't stay killed!" He jumped up from the table,
shoved a wormrunner out of his way, and he threw his arms around me.

"Little Fellow, Little Fellow," he said as he thumped my back and tears
filled his eyes. "We're alive! By God, we are!"

He pulled the iron table closer to the outer window so that we might
have a bit of privacy. We sat down on the hard iron chairs. I looked at
him, all the while tapping the toe of my boot against the black and gold
triangles of the parqueted floor.

"By God, what are you staring at?"

Bardo, my great, strong, mountain of a friend had changed. He no longer
looked like an Alaloi. He had been to a cutter who had shaped him back
to his old self-almost. Apparently, he had shaven the thick black beard,
and loose folds of flesh hung from his cheekbones. Without his beard he
looked younger; he also seemed angry, pale and thin, like a great white
bear at the end of deep winter. Too, too thin.

"Ah, you see, it's true what they say-Bardo is not well. Am I not? No,
I'm not well. Well. I shall drink beer and fill my gut with newt steaks,
and I shall be well." So saying, he drained his mug and called for a
large plate of meats and kafir and buttered bread. As he stuffed his
cheeks, he glanced at me nervously, as if keeping a secret from me.

"I missed you," I said.

The cafe was fetid with people; it was noisy, full of toalache and
tobako smokes. The table top was littered with dirty plates and mugs
encrusted with sour-smelling beer dregs. Obviously, Bardo had been here
for a while, perhaps all day, eating and drinking.

"Two years you've been gone," he said. "The hardest two years of my
life. I thought you were dead. Oh, the things I've suffered because you
and your damn quest!"

The novice whose pleasure it was to serve us, a nervous boy with large,
too-sensitive brown eyes, brought me a pot of coffee and poured the
aromatic liquid into a large blue mug. I sipped the coffee-it was
Summerworld coffee, thick, rich delicious coffee-and I asked Bardo to
tell me what had happened. As he wiped crumbs from his carmine lips, he
looked at me sadly and confided his greatest fear. He tapped his head
with his fingers and said, "As a pilot I'm ruined. The finest fruit of
this overripe brain-I've plucked it and eaten it and spat out the seeds.

My discoveries, my inspirations, my moments of genius, never to come
again. It's a terrible thing, my friend, to know that the best has been,
and all the remaining days of our lives lead on to rot and decay."

He called for another beer. As the room grew ever fuller, he rubbed his
forehead and glared at me. "I am not myself, you see. After your damn
expedition-did you know everyone is calling it Mallory's Folly?-after we
returned to the City, when the cryologists thawed me, when the cutters
heated my heart ... well, by God, they waited too long! It's my brain
that's rotted. Too many brain cells dead and decayed, too bad. I'm not
the pilot I once was. It's gone, Little Fellow. The theorems, the
associations, the beauty-all gone. I've tried to face the manifold, but
I can't.. I'm too stupid."

I ordered a tumbler of skotch-Bardo had chosen one of the few cafes in
the Hofgarten that served skotch-and I drank it quickly. And then
another and yet another. I suddenly did not want to hear his story, his
moans of self-pity. I drank quickly to drug my brain cells into
stupidity, but the skotch seemed to have little effect. Perhaps, I
thought, I had drunk too much coffee.

"There's nothing wrong with your mind," I said. "In time, it will all
come back. The mathematics-you're a born pilot."

"I am?"

"Soli once said you could be the finest of pilots."

"He did? He said that? Well, he's wrong. My brilliance is dead along
with the brain cells, and ... and other things, too."

"What other things?" I asked him.

"Other things." He stared at the tabletop's etched flower patterns and
would not look at me.

"Tell me," I said. "No, I can't."

"Tell me."

"You'll laugh at me."

"I promise I won't."

"No, I can't tell you."

"Tell me."

"It's too embarrassing, Little Fellow, too, too, embarrassing."

"You've never kept secrets from me before," I said.

"I don't know how to tell you."

"Well, just tell me."

"I can't."

"With your lips, just speak the words, then."

"No, no."

I looked through the spaces between the table's delicate, wrought
flowers down at his lap. His wool pants were loose over his belly. "Have
you been cured of Mehtar's poison? Tell me."

"Ah, you've guessed it haven't you? But what is there to tell? When the
cryologists thawed me, I went to a new cutter who changed my body back
to the magnificence of my old self And he cured me of Mehtar's poison,
cured me too well, by God! You should know, I no longer suffer from the
nightly risings of my spear; I no longer suffer its rising at night or
during the day or ... or ever. It's gone: Bardo's mighty spear softened
like a rotting log. Oh, too bad, too bad!"

Although I wanted to laugh at him, I did not laugh. I did not even
smile. "Sometimes," I said, "the cure is worse than the curse."

"Don't repeat banalities."

"I'm sorry."

"Ah, of course you are. Well, I've searched for Mehtar, but it seems
he's closed his cutting shop and fled the City." He took a long pull at
his beer and continued: "I was so distraught over the loss of my ... of
my powers, that I let the new cutter stipple the root cells of my face.

"No one wears beards anymore" that's what he said, so I let him denude
my face. So here I sit, beardless like a boy. I look ridiculous, I know.

This is a face to be ashamed of, which is why you see me as I am,
sitting here all day swigging beer."

As if to emphasize the poignancy of his story, he gulped his beer and
sat stroking his bare upper lip. With his cheeks and lips uncovered for
the first time since his novice years, I was forced to consider that
most unpleasant aspect of his face: Bardo, my charismatic, ugly friend,
had no chin. Worse, his tendencies toward sloth and cowardice had shaped
his naked face as time sculpts a mountain. Without a beard, he seemed at
once boyish and cruel, saintly and damaged. And unhappy as well, too
unhappy for his-or the Order's-own good.

I stroked the beard over my thick jaw, and I decided to wait a while
before sculpting my body back to its old self. In truth, I did not
really mind looking like an Alaloi.

We drank our beverages and talked about our glorious journeyman years at
Resa and other things not so glorious. I listened to his deep bass
vibrating above the choatic rattle of knives and plates, the low boil of
voices all around us. I turned to look through the inner window into the
ice ring. There were journeymen in their kamelaikas, master pilots,
academicians and high professionals-all of them skating and talking.

Bardo pointed at Kolenya Mor as she attempted a waltz double and fell on
her plump buttocks.

"Have you heard the gossip?" he asked. "Ah, I'm sure you've heard the
gossip. Justine made the mistake of confiding in Kolenya, and now the
whole Order knows about us." He drank some more beer and muttered, "They
think they know."

"Is it true, then? You and Justine? My Aunt Justine? How can that be?

Intime, she's a hundred years older than you."

"Time, what's time?" he asked. "Forgive me if I speak poetically, but
after a time, ah, after a woman has reached a sort of final maturity,
her soul has unfolded like a fireflower and no amount of time can
extinguish the flame or attenuate the colors. And Justine's soul is a
perfect flower, as beautiful as a violet sunset, as timeless as the sun.

It's her soul that I love, Little Fellow. Her soul."

"You love her? I remember you once told me it was wrong for a man to
love a woman too fully."

"Did I? Well I was stupid, wasn't I? Yes, it's true, I love her. Bardo
has fallen-oh, how I've fallen! I love her deeply; I love her
continuously; I love her absolutely; I love her passionately, and I
would love her wantonly, if I could."

"But she is Soli's wife."

"No, no, not any longer. When Soli abandoned her, he divorced her in
spirit, if not by law."

The smoke in the cafe was dense and irritating; my eyes were stinging,
so I rubbed them slowly. "But we live in a city of law, don't we?" I
said. "The laws of the Order.

He licked his nude upper lip and said, "Do I hear the Timekeeper's voice
speaking through yours? Or is this the voice, of my friend lecturing me
on law?"

"My voice is my own," I said. "I speak for myself, as a friend to a
friend: Listen to me, Bardo, we're pilots, aren't we? We've taken vows."

"Ah, you are lecturing me on law, by God! I would think that you, of all
men, would appreciate the need to go beyond law."

"Why? Aren't I a man like anyone else?"

"Well, you've always been different, even from your ungodly
conception-you were born out of law, weren't you? When your mother
slelled Soli's-"

"It doesn't matter how I was born; I don't want to speak about this
again."

"I'm sorry, Little Fellow. But I was merely remarking on the relativity
of law. Wasn't it you who petitioned the Timekeeper to slel plasm from
the poor Devaki?"

I gulped my skotch and quickly downed two more tumblers. But I was so
drunk with anger that the alcohol had no effect. "There is the law of
the City, and of course there is a higher law. I wish I knew what that
higher law was."

"And yet you raped the Devaki for their tissues, by God, you did!"

I let go of my tumbler and turned my palms to my eyes. My voice was
hoarse as I said, "Once, I thought I could see the higher things so
clearly, but I was only seeing my wants, my vanity, my passion for what
I supposed was truth. I was always fooling myself that I was an organ,
even a part of a higher law, a higher order of things. I could feel it,
Bardo; at times I could almost see it. But there are false feelings and
false vision, aren't there? What am I, then? I'm a man like you, like
anyone else. Once, I placed myself above the law of men, and now
Katharine is dead. And Liam. I murdered him with these hands."

"Well, there is the Law of Survival," he said. "That's the highest law
of all."

I thought of Agathange, and other things, and I said, "No, that is not
the highest law."

"What could be higher than that?"

"I don't know."

Later, after our evening meal, Justine entered the cafe and came
straight over to our table. Bardo stood up quickly and took her hand. He
seemed at once annoyed yet pleased to touch her. "I thought we had
agreed not to be seen together," he said.

She shot him a look which he must have immediately understood, because
he nodded his head, then asked, "Ah, what's wrong? What's happened?"

"Haven't you heard the news?" Her voice was raw and breathy, as if she
had been skating fast for a long way. And then, "Mallory, I'm so happy
to see you!"

We embraced and I bowed my head to her. She had changed since our return
from our expedition two years ago. Gone was her Alaloi body, her Alaloi
nose, her Alaloi brow, teeth and chin. She had been resculpted. With her
pouting, full lips and long black hair, she was the same tall, beautiful
Aunt Justine I had always known. If she was not quite so lithe as she
had been, if her breasts were a little fuller, her hips broader, her
thighs a little too thick with voluptuous fat-well, I thought, that
would please Bardo endlessly.

"It's been so long!" she said. She touched the side of my head lightly
as if she could not quite believe I had been healed. She took me aside,
and in a low, dulcet voice, said, "It's a miracle, you know. Poor
Katharine! If only we'd thought to ... oh, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have
said anything, I know it's painful to remember, and I try not to, but I
can't help remembering especially at times like these, these public
places where Soli's friends-all of my friends, too, as I remind
myself-everyone looks at me and Bardo as if we're, well, slel-neckers,
excuse me for saying that, but the truth is, and I want you to know the
truth, Mallory, whatever anyone says to you, you should know that Bardo
and I are just friends, good friends, maybe even best friends as I
always wanted me and Soli to be, but never could be because, oh, you
know what Soli is like, don't you? Of course you know, especially now
that ... well, we won't talk about that, but Soli, oh, he's so damn
cold, too damn cold, and that's too bad."

I must admit, it bothered me to hear Justine curse because she almost
never cursed. It bothered me even more that she had copied some of
Bardo's speech mannerisms. "Tell me your news," I said to her.

She sat in a chair next to Bardo's and, without invitation, took a sip
of his beer. "You haven't heard, have you? Merripen's Star has exploded;
it's a second class supernova, that's true, at least according to your
friend Li Tosh who was on his way home when he discovered it, but of
course at this distance even a second class supernova is-"

She stopped in midsentence to look at Bardo. Bardo's eyebrows were
pulled in tight; it was obvious he had never heard of Merripen's Star.

I, too, was unfamiliar with the name.

"How far?" Bardo asked.

"Merripen's star is ... oh, I should say it was, well, it's one of the
stars of the Abelian Group."

Bardo and I looked at each other, and I shook my head. The Abelian Star
Group was close to Neverness; the mean distance of its hundred stars
from Icefall was about thirty light-years.

"How long ago did it explode?" Bardo asked. "How far away is the
wavefront?"

"Li Tosh estimates twenty-five light-years."

Even as we spoke, photons and gamma from the dead star were streaming
outward through space in an expanding sphere. In six seconds, light
would travel more than a million miles; in some eight hundred million
seconds, the sphere's wavefront would begin to bathe Icefall-and the
city in a lightshower of hard radiation.

"Ah," Bardo said, "there it is, then, the end of everything. Too bad."

He nonchalantly sipped his beer. However, I could see that he was
stunned by the news, as I was stunned. Although we had been waiting for
this news all our lives, we were unready when it finally came.

"What's the intensity?" I asked. "How bad will it be?"

Bardo glanced at Justine and answered for her. "Oh, it will be bad
enough; it will be very bad, sadly bad, probably even finally bad."

The supernova would melt the ice from the seas; the light would roast
the green plants and dazzle the birds and animals into blindness.

Possibly, it might sterilize Icefall's surface.

Justine took another sip of his beer. She nodded in agreement. "There is
already talk of abandoning the planet," she said.

For quite a while we discussed the fate of our city, of our star, and of
our galaxy. At last, Bardo (and Justine) became bored with this
discussion. Most human beings find it possible to concentrate only on
those events which will occur in the near future, and Bardo was
preeminently human. Given his innate pessimism, he was usually content
merely to be assured of his next meal.

"Ahhh," Bardo said slowly, and in that time, the star's killing light
streaked another half-million miles closer. "Why should we worry about
this supernova when anything might happen, perhaps another, nearer
supernova, or an earthquake, or a stroke, or ... oh, anything could
happen in twenty-five years, I think, so why should we spend every
second talking about something we probably won't be here to witness?" He
wiped sweat from his forehead. "Now where's that damn novice-I'd very
much like some more beer." It worried me that certain of Bardo's
phrasings sounded suspiciously like Justine's. In truth, it was a much
more immediate worry than my worry of the supernova. I thought they were
aware of my worry and did not care, and that was very worrisome indeed.

Although I was no cetic, it seemed they were in danger of copying, and
perhaps running, each other's programs. Such was the danger of sharing
the pit of a lightship-if one could believe the warnings of the cetics
and the programmers. So far as I knew, no two pilots had ever faced the
same thoughtspace at the same time. When I hinted of this danger, and
hinted of my worry, Justine smoothed the folds of her robe, straightened
her back stiffly, and told me, "You don't understand."

"Ah, you can't understand," Bardo agreed.

"You're not a cetic."

"Of course he's not a cetic."

"He's a pilot."

"Maybe the best pilot that's ever been."

"Well, certainly he's the luckiest."

"Ah, but he's a pilot who's never known what it's like to pilot a ship
together with, ah ... a friend."

"Too bad."

"Oh, too bad, this rule against pilots journeying together."

"It's a foolish rule, really, an archaic rule."

"Rules should be changed to suit the times."

"People shouldn't have to change to suit the rules."

"I'd tell the Timekeeper that, too, if he'd agree to see me."

"But he wouldn't understand, either."

"No, he wouldn't understand."

"And what's worse, he wouldn't want to understand."

They went on in a like manner for quite some time. Though their faces
and bodies were very different, Bardo and Justine seemed too much alike.

If I hadn't known differently, I might have guessed they were brother
and sister, cut from the same chromosomes. When he smiled, she smiled,
and their smiles were the same. They laughed at the same little jokes in
the same way; they seemed to anticipate and even to prompt these jokes
by some little mannerism or body motion I could not quite detect. Word
by word, thought by thought, smile by smile, one of them would originate
an idea or a program only to have the other complete it. Or if the
program were interrupted midrun, it might play back and forth between
them so that it was impossible to tell who was thinking what. They
sounded like two brightly plumed Trian parrots squawking empty words
back and forth. And when they grew tired of talking and stood looking
into each other's eyes, they even breathed together, inhaling and
letting out their air in silent syncopation.

"How can we tell Mallory what it's like, this sharing of the same
extensional brains?"

"When we're together there is, A ... an augmentation."

"Of our selves."

"When we're together outside our ship."

"But when we're together inside, well, that's different, there is, ah-"

"There's an augmentation of more than ourselves."

"There's the creation of our self"

"One plus one equals-"

"Infinity."

"Aleph two, at the very least."

"By God, there's a mathematics the Timekeeper would appreciate!"

"Our separate selves are infinite, too, so the cetics say, but when
we're alone, oh, you could say that we're prisoners of a lesser
infinity."

"To enter a lightship together, ah, tell Mallory what it's like."

"It's wonderful."

"But frightening, oh, so frightening!"

"It's like falling through a tapestry woven of ten billion threads, and
the touch of each single thread is ... ecstasy."

"It's indescribable."

"It's terrifying, really."

"I can't tell him what it's like, not really."

"Neither can I."

"It's the best thing there is. There's nothing better."

"But there's a price."

"Of course, there has to be."

"The price."

"There's always a price."

The price, I thought, would be the death of the Bardo and Justine I
cherished, and soon, if they continued to journey together. I did not
like this created Bardo/Justine entity. Their deep, private programs
still ran, but new programs superceded them, layered over their old
selves like the gold plate of a Trian's goblet. It was their tragedy-and
I hoped it would not actually come to be a tragedy-that they loved the
created luster of their shared-self more than the steel of their truer
selves within. They were not really in love with each other; they were
in love with the idea of being in love with each other. And soon, I was
afraid, too soon their deep programs would die altogether and there
would be nothing left to love. Should they have a right to kill
themselves? Should they have the right, despite their vows and the rules
of the Order, to create something new outside themselves?

For reasons of my own, I wanted to talk to them about this, but before I
could say anything, Justine excused herself and went off to tell Kolenya
Mor her news. After she had gone, I leaned across the table and asked,
"What's wrong with you?"

Bardo wiped the sweat from his forehead where it bulged. "What do you
mean?"

"When Justine told us about the supernova, you seemed relieved."

"Relieved? No, I'm scared enough to puke my beer."

"In truth?"

He looked over his shoulder at three mechanics sitting at the table next
to ours, but no one was paying us any attention. "Ahhh ... well, in
truth, I am scared, but in one way, this supernova is a timely
happenstance, don't you agree? It will give us an excuse to flee, if we
must."

"You'd leave the Order?"

"I wouldn't be the only one. I can't tell you how many pilots are tired
of the Timekeeper and the other old bones who rule the Order." He waved
to the novice and pointed to his empty beer mug. "And we're tired of not
having our freedom, too."

I drank some skotch and asked, "The freedom to share your ship with
Soli's wife?"

"Don't speak about things you know nothing about. I love her, Little
Fellow, by God I do!"

"Then she should petition Soli for a divorce. And-"

"He won't divorce her; he's too damn proud. just like his son."

"Don't call me his son; never say it again. Never, Bardo, never."

I rested my elbow on the cool sill of the window overlooking the sea. I
could not look at him, so I watched the screaming seagulls swoop down to
devour the shellfish that washed onto the beach below the cliffs. Across
the Sound, the glacier cutting between Waaskel and Attakel was breaking
up under false winter's warm sun. Like a great, blunt knife, the glacier
splintered, sending a mountain of ice plunging into the sea. The crack
and oom of the nascent icebergs reverberated from Waaskel's southern
wall so strongly that I felt the window vibrating through the wool
covering my forearm.

Bardo's voice boomed and he said, "You've changed, my friend. As have I,
as have I."

"Long ago," I said, "when we were journeymen, the horologes and cetics
warned us that friendship between pilots would be nearly as difficult as
marriage. Because of crueltime, they said, the long absences, the
changes."

"Ah, that's true," he said. "But you weren't going to let crueltime-or
anything else-come between us. That's what you told me. You gave me your
promise, Little Fellow."

"I know."

I was silent, thinking about the inherent fragility of friendship. What
is friendship, I wondered, if not a double-faced mirror we hold up
between ourselves reflecting those images most pleasing to behold? And
when we see images diminished and hardened with the frost of time, and
the mirror begins to crack where is friendship then? There I sat like a
hard, cold mirror in front of my agonizing friend, and he must have seen
himself as sulky, faithless and confused. And I, through the reflecting
pools of his deep-set eyes-I saw a savage man I did not like.

I will not tell here everything we talked about that night. Although the
sun did not set until midnight and rose again a few hours after that, it
was a long night. We sat at our little table drinking steadily until the
cafe emptied of people. We made half-hearted, obligatory attempts to
joke with one another, to recall and laugh at past anecdotes; we talked
about every possible thing that two friends could talk about. And all
the while, Bardo seemed surly, as if he were blaming me for some
unstated thing. At last when morning was almost upon us, after we could
drink no more, he stood up from the table and blamed me for killing his
faith in his mission as a pilot.

"It's your fault," he said. He banged his fist down on the table so hard
that the iron top rattled and bent like the skin covering of a drum.

"I'm a defeated man because of you."

"My fault?"

"You and your damn quest! You wanted to know about life, and that's what
was too bad. So did I. Your dream, my dream-you'd infected me with your
damned enthusiasm. Ahhh ... We were the breath and soul of the quest, by
God! But we killed it, didn't we? It's all gone now. You killed it; you
killed me. Bardo is not the man he was, no, no, no, too bad."

He was very drunk but I was as sober as a cetic. Perhaps the godseed in
my head made me immune to drunkenness. I turned to leave but he grabbed
my arm and said, "Let's take a circle around the ring."

"You're too drunk."

"I'm not drunk enough."

We left the cafe, clipped in our blades, and skated to the center of the
great ring of the Hofgarten. A few yards away, a group of journeymen
fresh from their beds were practicing their morning figure eights. I
reached out to steady Bardo, who was wobbling on his skates, grasping
his beer-bloated belly. "Let go of me!" he said.

"Listen, Bardo, you're still a pilot, still my friend, and-"

"Am I your friend?"

"Listen to me! The quest isn't over, not as long as we're still alive,
it goes on and-"

"By God, you are a dreamer-too damn bad!"

"And you're afraid of-"

"I'm afraid?" he bellowed. "I haven't seen you in two years, I thought
you were dead, and all night long you sit talking about everything but
the important thing. Oh, I know you, Little Fellow, too damn well. You
like to pretend you're hard as a diamond, but inside you're pissing
afraid. Tell me you're not! Pointedly, pointedly, you refrain from
discussing Agathange. Do you think I don't know what they did to you?

Well, I know. I've seen how you brood, always looking inward, all night,
inward through the blue diamonds, through your damn blue eyes like your
damned father. Look at me! What are you afraid of? I'll tell you: you're
afraid of losing yourself, am I right? Oh, I know you better than you'd
guess. You're afraid of losing your humanity. Well, who isn't, tell me,
who? For everyone, it all slips away, doesn't it? It rots, cell by cell,
bit by bit until it's all gone. So they added parts to your brain, so
what? I wish the goddamned gods had made me a new brain. Your brain is
your brain! What does it matter if it's made of silicon or bloody
neurons or shagshay cheese? It's your brain, by God! When we grow old
and our eyes cloud up, what's it matter if the cutter grows us new ones,
or builds us jeweled eyes to see up into the ultra-violet, to see the
new colors? We're still seeing, aren't we? We see what we want to
see-and you with your brain, ah, you'll think what you want to think.

You'll think your goddamned wild thoughts because you always have. That
won't change. Do you want to know what I'm really afraid of? I'm afraid
of you because you're wild as a madman!"

I was furious with him, and I let go of his shoulder. I kicked the ice
with my toe pick;- there was a shower of snow on ice. "No, you're afraid
of yourself," I said. Then I clamped my jaws tight because I knew I was
accusing myself, not him.

"What kind of a man are you? I took a spear through my heart for you, by
God! Because I knew your secret, because I knew you were afraid of
dying, pissing afraid!" His voice dropped and he blinked his eyes,
staring at me. "And because I-"

"No," I said, "I don't believe you. You stepped in front of the spear by
accident. You're just a limp, drunken coward."

I regretted the words the moment they sprang from my lips. They were
terrible words, words that a friend should never speak to another, no
matter if they were true. Especially since they were true. I moved my
lips silently, seeking words to negate the words I had so cruelly
spoken. But the words were too slow in coming, and as Bardo's face
filled with blood, he spoke words that were crueler still: "Well, you're
a bastard," he said. "And your mother is a filthy slel-necker. You're a
wild, dangerous, slelled bastard."

I felt as if he had pounded my face with a block of ice. My muscles
trembled, yet I could not move. Bardo disappeared from my sight, as did
the other skaters in their colorful kamelaikas. There was only the
steely glare of the ice puncturing my eyes with hard, white stabs of
light. An ocean of far-off voices engulfed me; I heard skates clacking
against ice; there was a dull wind and the hundred other sounds of the
ice ring, yet I could not see. How long I passed in my blind rage I did
not know. When the reds, blues and greens returned to my eyes suddenly
as flowers come to a snowfield in false winter, I was standing alone in
the middle of the noisy ice ring. Bardo, my cowardly friend, my oldest
friend, was gone.

I left the Hofgarten determined to stop Bardo before he found another
bar, before he drank himself into a stupor and collapsed in some dark
alley deep in the Farsider's Quarter. I skated towards the Street of the
Ten Thousand Bars. The early light was streaming through the fragile
obsidian hospices and other buildings. The cross streets were deserted,
and to the east, the lesser glidderies were pools of fire. From the
hatch of a hospice, a few Fravashi emerged looking tired and hungry.

They rubbed the nictating membranes from their eyes and whistled to each
other with such a high pitch that I could only make out a tenth of their
words. When they passed a group of sleepy novices, they pitched their
whistles lower so their fluting, piping prayers might be felt and
understood. The novices whistled back with clumsy, inexpert notes,
thanking the aliens. They clapped their hands and laughed as they
hurried off to practice their thought primaries. In their clean white
robes, with their white-gloved hands shielding their eyes against the
glare, they looked like immaculate toy dolls saluting the rising sun.

Down the middle of the street, bright yellow sleds filled to the rails
with foodstuffs, woolens and other goods rocketed continually past. The
sleds, burning hydrogen and oxygen in well-spaced, measured blasts
spewed out an exhaust of water vapor. It was this fine spray from sleds
across the City that everywhere settled on cold stone, freezing and
silvering the buildings with verglas. I remembered Master Jonath-the
historian who had tutored Bardo and me in our second year at
Borja-saying that on Old Earth during the holocaust century, the sleds
in many cities had been mounted on greased wheels and had burned
hydrocarbons inside a steel engine. The resultant fumes, he claimed, had
been invisible to the eye and not at all harmful. He, a hater of the
cold mists that so often steal over our City, held that we should tear
up our beautiful streets and copy the example of the ancients. I
remembered him saying this, remembered as clearly as I remembered my
multiplication tables. Kindly Master Jonath with his warts and his long,
stringy black hair lecturing patiently as Bardo and I traded punches on
the ugly gray rug of his apartment-what trick of memory is it that
permits us to see our younger selves so clearly? Why are events that
happened later in time-important events such as the time Bardo claims I
lost my temper and nearly murdered Marek Kesse-why are these memories so
often muddy and dim?

Whatever the flaws in my memory, I shall always remember the miracle
that happened that morning. I was skating down the Promenade of the
Thousand Monuments when my time sense began to dilate. The sliddery
divided into two broad bands of orange even as my mind began dividing
segments of time into endlessly long infinitesimals. Separating the
north and south lanes of the street was a mile-long Promenade of
statues, obelisks and other testaments to glories past and glories yet
to be. As I passed the immense, mushroom-shaped hibakusha memorial, the
nearby novices seemed to be moving with exquisite precision, slowly,
slowly, so slowly, as if their limbs were immersed in the slushy,
freezing waters of the Starnbergersee. Suddenly, there was a dazzling
array of colors. Ahead of me The Tycho's Vanity cut the air with knives
of amethyst and diamond and ruby. The monstrous gemstones-some were as
tall as a spruce tree-grew out of the Promenade's ice. They joined with
one another, red to blue, gold fusing with purple, at strange, twisting
angles. To many of our City's pilgrims, the long display must have
seemed a bewildering jumble of carelessly assembled jewels, a
fantastically expensive jungle of colors thrown together at random. To a
pilot, the monument had a different meaning. The thick emerald blocks
and graceful sapphire strands were a physical representation of the
ideoplasts the Tycho had used in the formulation of his famous
conjecture. He had commanded that the finest inspiration of his Mind
should be made manifest, and so for seventy yards up and down the
Promenade, the first of the twenty-three lemmas needed to prove the
conjecture was captured in hard, flowing columns of diamond meant to
last forever. (The Tycho had originally called for all twenty-three
lemmas to be so arrayed, one after the other for a mile and a half down
the Promenade. Such a plan, however, had proven too grandiose. The cost
of importing the jewels had nearly ruined the Order, then much wealthier
and more powerful than now.) I was skating next to the ruby coiled
glyphs representing the proof of the fixed-point theorem, when the
moment of slowtime hardened and time came almost to a standstill. Never
before had I experienced such a profound instantaneity away from the
time-warping neurologics of my light-ship; I did not believe that it was
possible for the unaided brain to stop time. Engraved on my retina were
images of open-mouthed novices frozen midstroke like white statues. The
thunder of the sleds and the click-clack of steel skates broadened, drew
out long and slow and deep, solidified into a single sound. With my one
arm thrown straight backward and the other forward, the toe of my skate
motionless and pointed, I must have born a curious resemblance to the
Tycho's frozen glyphs. It was in that moment, with the snow loons
suspended low and gracefully in midflight, with my City stopped all
around me, that I found Bardo.

He was hanging from one of the glyphs. His great hands were wrapped
around a connecting ruby crystal; the bulk of his body was pitched
forward, stretching his long arms, pulling at his gripped hands. His
face was frozen into a mask. He seemed at once terrified and excited,
ashamed and mischievous like a disobedient boy.

How can mind exist outside of time? How can thoughts be completed and
strategems devised when the brain's neurotransmitters are quiet and
still as blue ice in deep winter? Is it possible to completely stop
time? (Katharine believed that mind creates time. She believed that
lovers, in their moment of joy, exist together in a timeless realm of
mind. Once, she taught me a kind of pure instantaneity, but in one way
or another, I have been trapped in time for most of my life.) Does time
stop-or does it merely dilate so that it seems to stop, a nanosecond
into a year, an infinitesimal into an eternity? Most of my brain was
still human, I thought, blood and neurons, but parts of me were phased
into computer time; the godseed within was ,electric, processing
information in ways I did not understand. The ridiculous image of Bardo
swinging like an ape from the ruby spear was fixed in my mind, and I
wondered how I could rescue him-and our friendship-from the black amber
of time. It came to me, then, all at once what he was trying to do.

There, on the ice, as the moment of instantaneity failed and the world
came alive around me and rushed in, I knew that Bardo had come here to
kill himself.

To my dilated time sense what happened next proceeded as slowly as a
seaworm building its shell: Bardo swung back and forth, snapping the
crystal with his pendulous weight. The crack of the splintering crystal
for a long time hung in the cold morning air. As if he were a slowly
deflating balloon, he fell to the ice. In his bleeding hands he clasped
the sharp ruby spear. He planted the spear into a mound of frozen slush.

The sharp, ragged tip projected upward toward his chest. He looked at
me. Slowly, sadly, slowly-and a sad comprehension slowly stole over the
tortured features of his face. His eyes moved. He clenched his teeth. A
silver drop of water floated from his cheek. He dragged his bloody hands
across his black robes. Slowly he smiled. A thin film of beery saliva
stretched between his upper and lower teeth. The film bubbled and
expanded. It filled with air. At last, as I watched, it popped. He
placed his reddened hands on the folds of his robes where they gathered
at the neck. He pulled open the layered folds. Red soaked into black. He
bared his chest. I saw olive skin covered with thousands of curled,
black hairs. He laughed. The low boom took hours to reach my straining
ears. Like a mountain of ice slowly breaking away from a glacier, he
began to topple toward the jagged ruby spear. Clearly, if he completed
his trajectory, the spear would enter the skin of his chest. The spear
would slowly make its waythrough the tightening muscles. Perhaps the
spear would push apart the ribs. There would be a moment of eternal
pain. It would be cruel. The spear would touch the great heart as it
paused between beats. It would go in. And Bardo would cry out, and there
would be a sea of blood, and Bardo would be endlessly afraid.

Suddenly, I moved. Around me the world moved with exquisite slowness
even as I must have moved with the speed and frenzy of a diving thallow.

I am the frenzy, I am the lightning, I thought, all the while repeating
mentally the saying of the warrior-poets. And instantly I knew the fiery
ecstasy of electric neurons and fast-burning muscles and accelerated
motion. Like a warrior-poet in his rush toward his victim's death, I
rushed at Bardo, crossing the long stretch of ice between us in a
shriveled second, a frozen nothing of realtime. I caught his armpit with
my shoulder, throwing him, and myself, to the ice. The red spear missed
his chest by an inch.

We lay there stunned, disoriented, gasping for air. I returned to
realtime with a wrenching mental snap, and Bardo said, "By God, it's
impossible to move so fast!"

I tried to sit up, but the tissues of my body burned and would not move
me. "If I hadn't, you'd have killed yourself."

He stood in a half-crouch, leaning with his forearms against his thighs.

He looked at me coyly and said, "Well, I wouldn't have, not really.

Bardo is too much of a coward to kill Bardo. I saw you skating down the
sliddery. I thought you might, ah ... well, I hoped you'd call out for
me to stop."

"It would have been simpler, that's true."

"Well, once again, you've saved me," he said. "Like the time you kicked
Marek Kesse in the head when he was choking me, do you remember?" With
his help, I stood up but my shoulder would not work right. There was a
fire in the joint as if the bones had pulled apart. "I have ... a memory
of a memory."

He rubbed his bloody hands together and coughed. "There is no way I can
unsay what I said, is there, Little Fellow?"

"No." From behind us came the voices of the novices and the Fravashi.

They crowded around us, plainly appalled at Bardo's desecration of the
great, monument. (And no less appalled, I thought, that I had moved as
fast as a warrior-poet.)

"What are you staring at?" Bardo shouted at them.

I tried to raise my arm to steady myself against him, but I could barely
move it. "There is no way I can unsay my words either," I told him. "But
I'll say it anyway: You're not a coward."

He looked at the ruby spear which had so nearly impaled him. He gave it
such a hard kick that it fell over and clattered to the ice. A thin,
freckled novice gasped. Apparently he did not know that, although the
huge crystals of the Tycho's Vanity had been ruinously expensive to
fabricate, as jewels that might be cut and sold they were worthless. The
Tycho, that vain and cunning man, had thought to prevent just such a
desecration and theft by ordering that the jewels be impregnated with
various impurities and stived with flaws.

"Of course I'm a coward," Bardo said. "But when we were younger, you had
the grace never to call me a coward. Even when I was a coward."

"I'm sorry."

He kicked the broken jewel again and then looked at my drooping
shoulder. He said, "You fell into slowtime, didn't you?"

"It's worse than that."

"Without facing your goddamned ship-you slowed time?"

"I stopped time."

"That's impossible," he said. "No one can stop time."

"I can."

"By God, it's a miracle!"

"Inside, what the Agathanians call their godseed-it's remaking my
neurons, and maybe my nerves. Even now, as I speak the changes ... how
can I know what the changes will be? I seem to still be myself, I
believe I am, but-"

"You are yourself. Wouldn't I know if Mallory was no longer Mallory?"

"I'm sorry for what I said, Bardo. I'm wild and impulsive, and I have no
self-restraint."

"By God, that's the Mallory that I know!"

I clasped my hand to my injured shoulder and said, "And I'm afraid."

"Ah, there's nothing worse than fear, is there?"

"I'm afraid of losing myself"

He put his arm around my back and half-lifted, half-carried me to the
sliddery. "Little Fellow," he said, "you can never lose yourself. And
you can never lose your friends, at least not such a friend as I."

He promised me then that he would never leave the Order of his own
choice, even if the sky filled with a thousand supernovas. "In my soul I
love this City and my friends almost as much as I love Justine. I would
save her if I could. Which is why I'll tell you what I shall tell you.

Hold your breath, Little Fellow, because I've some hard news for you."

So I learned that in Neverness, the City of Light, the Last City, the
City of a Thousand Plots, there was a plot to remake the Order. It was
almost as if the City had been waiting for me to return from Agathange.

Since then, a group of pilots and professionals had been plotting to
change things according to their designs. And architect of the plot,
Bardo told me sadly, reluctantly-the leader of the conspirators who
would unmake the Timekeeper and perhaps everything else was my mother,
the master cantor,- Dama Moira Ringess.

Chapter 19 - The Parable of the Mad King

What good is a warrior without a war, a poet without a poem?
-Saying of the Warrior-poets

Later that day I tried to find my mother. But her little house in the
Pilot's Quarter was empty. I went to her friends, Helena Charbo and
Kolenya Mor, among others, but no one seemed to know where she was. And
no one seemed willing to admit that there was a plot to overthrow the
Timekeeper, much less remake the Order. Bardo had obviously been
listening too hard to the gossips, Kolenya told me. And according to
Burgos Harsha, who nervously picked at his bushy eyebrows as I talked to
him, there was no plot. "It's true many of the pilots are unhappy," he
said. "But who would plot against the Timekeeper? Who-and I might add
that there are pilots and professionals who might be willing to campaign
for certain changes, but changes within the structure of the canons, of
course, legally, legally-who would be so stupid?"

When a few days passed and still my mother did not return to her house,
I began to worry. Li Tosh swore he had seen my mother in the company of
a warrior-poet one night near the Merripen Green in the Farsider's
Quarter. This was proof that she was alive, he said, and I should not
worry. Perhaps my mother had finally taken a lover. But I did worry; I
was ill with worry. I did not believe she had taken a lover. Then why
else would she seek out a warrior-poet? Why do otherwise reasonable
people risk contact with warrior-poets, if not to have their enemies
murdered? And who was her main enemy, if not Soli? She had slelled
Soli's DNA to make me, and this was a great crime. Soli could even
demand that the Timekeeper have her beheaded, if Soli desired revenge,
if he would acknowledge that I was his son. I knew Soli would never
admit this to anybody, not even to himself. But could my mother be sure?

No, she could not be sure, and so she plotted her plots and hid in the
Farsider's Quarter and consorted with murderers-all without bothering to
confide in me. Obviously, she did not trust me.

If I have given the impression that the whole of our Order was busy with
plots and politics, this was not so. There was always the quest. Great
discoveries were still being made; for a few, it was still a time of
inspiration and daring. Two years ago, while I hunted silk belly in
Kweitkel's forest, a team of five pilots had proposed to penetrate the
Silicon God. Only one of them, Anastasia of The Nave, had returned to
tell of wild spaces more impenetrable than those of the Entity. Another
pilot, the fabulous Kiyoshi, had come across a planet believed to be the
ancestral home of the Ieldra. Great deeds, great inspirations: A
programmer working with a splicer and a historian (and what an unholy
triad that must have been!) had retraced the evolutionary pathways and
had made a model of early man's DNA. Master splicers were at work
decoding this modeled DNA, hoping to discover the secret of the ancient
gods. And of course I must mention the fabulist who created a scenario
in which Old Earth was not destroyed. This led Sensim Wen, the
semanticist, to reinterpret the meaning of a Fravshi tone-poem, which in
turn inspired a holist to propose a different model for the progression
of the Swarming. A phantast, who studied the new model, retired to his
den and recreated a hologram of what he called
"The Galaxy As It Might
Have Been." Finally a pilot studied this hologram and journeyed near the
inner edge of the Orion Arm where he expected to find Old Earth. All to
no avail, of course. But it was a gallant attempt, if somewhat
ridiculous and bizarre.

just as bizarre, in its own way, was the memory-the revelation-of Master
Thomas Rane, the remembrancer. Because this revelation ignited a bitter
argument among the eschatologists and was to prove important in the
crisis which followed my return to the city, I record here his famous
words as he remembered down the dark spiral of racial memory into his
distant past.

I am named Kelkemesh, and my arms are young and brown as coffee. I am
wearing the skin of the wolf I killed when I first became a man. The
skin is wet. I am standing on a ridge high on a mountainside. It has
rained, and there are mists in the green valleys below, a rainbow above.

The stillness is very real. And then in the sky, at the rainbow's edge,
there is a hole. There is a hole in the sky, and it is as black as my
father's eye. From the hole comes a silvery light, and then white light;
soon the entire sky is a ball of light. The light falls on me like a
rainshower. As I open my mouth to scream, the light runs down my throat.

My spine tingles. The light runs down my spine into my loins. My loins
burn; my loins are afire; my loins fill with burning raindrops of light.

It is the god Shamesh inside me and he is burning his image into my
flesh. Shamesh is the sun; Shamesh is the light of the world; Shamesh
speaks and his voice is my own: "You are the memory of Man, and the
secret of immortality is inside you. You will live until the stars fall
from the sky and the last man dies. That is my blessing and my curse."

And then the light is gone. In the sky the rainbow is fading the sky is
a blue eggshell without holes.

I run down the mountainside to the huts of my father, Urmesh, the
shaman. When I tell him I am filled with god-light, he tears his white
hair and looks at me in anger and jealousy. He tells me I have been
bitten by a demon; the gods do not touch men with their light. He
prepares a burning spearpoint to let the demons out of my loins. My
brothers are called to hold me. But I am full of fire and light, and I
rise up and kill my brothers and kill Urmesh, who is no longer my
father. Shamesh the god is my father. I take my bloody knife and wrap
myself in my wolfskin and go down into the valleys to live among the
peoples of the world

It was argued that the great remembrancer's memory was a false memory.

Perhaps. Or perhaps he really had relived the lives-and deaths-of his
ancestors. I myself believed he had re-created the primal myth of the
Ieldra and had encoded it as memory. But who could really know? During
those chaotic, troubled days, who knew which of us were true seekers and
which were merely fooling themselves?

Soon after this, on a day of mashy paste, the kind of snow that usually
only falls in midwinter spring, the Timekeeper summoned me to his tower.

Although the nature of life is change, there were a few things in my
life which seemed to never change. That ageless, changeless man bade me
sit on the familiar chair by the glass windows. The chair's black and
red inlaid squares of jewood and shatterwood were as hard as they had
always been. The clocks were ticking; the room was full of the pulsing,
hissing and rhythmic beating of clocks. One of them-it was a
glass-encased clock whose visible workings were carved of jewood-chimed.

The Timekeeper, who paced back and forth before the curved windows, shot
me a grim look as if to say the clock chimed for me.

"So, Mallory, you're looking exceptionally wary today."

He circled my chair so that he stood staring down at my profile. I
inhaled the aroma of coffee on his breath. When I lifted my head to
examine the spiderweb of lines at the corners of his eyes, he said, "No,
don't turn your face to me. Resume the proper attitude-I've questions to
ask you."

"And I would question you," I said. "Do I have anything to be wary
about?"

"Ha, the young pilot would question me?"

"I'm not so young anymore, Timekeeper."

"Just a little while ago, less than four years ago, you sat in that
chair and bragged how you were going to penetrate the spaces of the
Entity. And now-"

"Four years ... can be a long time."

"Don't interrupt me! And now you sit here almost as young and twice as
foolish. Plots! I know certain pilots plot against me. Your mother-I'm
told she's been talking with warrior-poets. Don't try to deny it. What I
want to know, what I need to know is: Are you your mother's son or your
Timekeeper's pilot?" He rapped his fingernails against the metal casing
of one of the clocks. There was aping" of ringing chrome. "Tell me,
Mallory, where's your devious mother, your bloody, slel-necker of a
mother?"

"I don't know," I said. "And don't say that word, no matter what you
think she's done."

"I know what your mother has done," he growled. "And I know who your
father is."

"I don't have a father,"

"Soli is your father."

"No."

"You're Soli's son-I should have seen it years ago, eh? Who would have
thought your mother would be so bold as to slel his damn plasm? So, I
know what your mother has done, and I'm reasonably sure she plans to
murder Soli, possibly me as well-your goddamned mother!"

I gripped the chair's curved arms, which were shiny and worn from the
hands of a thousand sweating pilots before me. I struggled to say
nothing, to keep my hands locked to the chair.

"So, she's betrayed me, but you wouldn't betray me, would you, Mallory?"

"You think I'm a traitor, then?"

"Did I say you were a traitor? No, you're no traitor, I hope, but what
about your friends?"

"Bardo has given me his word he won't-"

"Bardo!" he roared. "That tube of blubber, that disobedient mule! Even
if I ignored his adulterous ways, his cowardly talk has already infected
your friends. It's the younger pilots I'm thinking of Jonathan Ede and
Richardess and Delora wi Towt. And the older pilots, Neith and Nona, and
Cristoble. And my professionals. And my academicians, such as Burgos
Harsha, a hundred others. There's talk of them leaving the city forever.

Schism! They're talking schism, the ruin of the Order!"

"There is talk of change," I agreed.

"Too great a change is death." He stepped over to the window, He pressed
his forehead to the frosted glass, then sighed. "Do you think I'm deaf
to what's being said? So, the Order has stagnated for a thousand years;
so, the professions and professionals have grown rigid in their
thoughtways; so, we need new dreams, new problems, new ways. Do we? What
do you think?"

I thought what many of my Order thought: that pilots too often fell out
against their fellow pilots in jealousy or rivalry, that profession vied
with profession, and within the individual professions, different
schools fought among themselves to impose their interpretation of the
Order's purpose on all the others. The original, unifying vision of a
spacefaring humanity discovering its place and purpose in the universe
had dissolved into a hundred different philosophies, notions and
conceits. "But isn't that the fate of all religions and orders, then? In
the end, divisiveness and death?"

"You mean divisiveness and war. If I let my pilots go their separate
ways, in the end there would be war-a great, filthy, bloody war."

I smiled because I thought the Timekeeper was being overly dramatic. I
quoted the historians, saying, "War is a dead art, as dead as Old Earth.

There are restraints, aren't there? The lessons of history? I don't
think anyone in Our order would wish to reinvent war."

"And what of the war between Greater Cihele and Mio Luz?"

"That was a skirmish," I said. "Not a real war."

"Not a real war! Ha, what do you know of war? The tychists dropped
fusion bombs on the determinists. How many were killed? Thirty million?"

I shook my head, trying to remember my history lessons. "I don't know,"

I said. "Thirty something." And then a few moments later, the memory
came. "Thirty million four hundred and fifty four thousand
approximately."

"And you call that a skirmish? So, call it what you will, why do you
think this skirmish didn't spread into a 'real war?" Restraint, hellf
What do you think keeps the Civilized Worlds at peace? It's because war
is ruinously expensive to wage-that's the most important reason. Even
though the Greater Cihele and Mio Luz are connected by a single pathway,
it took the incompetent tychist pilots with their filthy fusion
bombs-those few who survived the manifold-it took them thirty years to
reach Mio Luz. Our rawest journeyman could make the journey in thirty
days."

"Time is mutable," I said, mocking one of his famous sayings. But my
smile faded as I accepted his point. If journeying through the manifold
became easy, war would become easy, too? And who could journey as easily
and elegantly as a pilot of our Order? What could be more disastrous
than a war between our Order's different factions? "But even if war were
easy," I objected, "it would be too terrible, and no one would go to war
against any other, I think. Besides, skirmish or war, the people of the
Greater Cihele and Mio Luz were insane. Most peoples and planets love
peace."

Unexpectedly, he walked over and stood above my chair. He scowled and
said, "Mallory, Mallory, you've been bludgeoned, cut, swived, hated,
loved and taught the truth but you're still naive." He brushed back the
white hair from his forehead and sighed. "Naive, I say! What's the
essence of history? The desire for peace? Ha! War's the price of our
quest for power; war's been the curse of man for twenty thousand years.

It's the nature of things that no one can choose peace, but anyone can
make all others face war. Why do you think the Earth was destroyed?

Shall I tell you a parable of Earth's history?"

I shifted about in my chair, trying to get comfortable. Because I had no
choice but to listen to his parable, I said, "Tell me."

He smiled and cleared his throat. "Once a time," he began, "all men
lived in tribes and the air was clean and there was food for all, and
peace was the law of the Earth. But then one tribe, because they loved
themselves more than their mother planet, grew deaf to this law. So they
fell into insanity. They grew too large and too powerful. They found
that it was easier to steal their bread from others than to bake it
themselves. They coveted an empire, a life of ease. They sent their
armies westward against the four nearest tribes, each of which had a
great love of peace. But peace they could not have. The first tribe
faced spear with spear, but they were too few, and the insane tribe
slaughtered them down to the last man. The women, of course, were raped
and given hoes to slave their lives away with their children in the
wheatfields. The second tribe, seeing what had happened to the first
tribe, flung down their spears, for the moment, and kissed the feet of
the insane tribe's king. They pleaded for their lives. If only the king
would allow them to keep their wives and children, they would be good
warriors and do as the king commanded. Thus the second tribe was
absorbed and the insane tribe grew larger still. The third tribe, who
loved their freedom as they loved their lives, fled southward to the
desert where the living was hard and there was barely food and water
enough for all. The fourth tribe wanted neither to be exterminated, nor
to be absorbed, nor to flee. They loved their land passionately. And so
their king, who was a visionary man, ordered his warriors to make their
spears longer than those of the insane tribe's warriors. When battle
came the greater numbers of the insane tribe were checked by the longer
spears of the fourth tribe. So neither tribe could prevail. Then the
visionary king, who had come to relish the taste of war, realized that
in the next battle, the insane tribe would return with yet longer
spears. 'We must have more warriors" the visionary king exclaimed. And
he turned his gaze further westward, and his armies enslaved the western
tribes and made still longer spears. And so the fourth tribe became as
insane as the insane tribe. In this manner, like a disease, the habit of
war spread outward to the farthest tribes of the Earth. The tribes grew
into empires which destroyed the nearer empires, and they lamented that
they could not make war on the farthest empires because the distances
were too great for their armies to cross. At last one king, the
cleverest of all, attached rockets to the butt end of his men's spears
and fusion bombs to their tips. When all the kings of all the empires of
the Earth did likewise, the clever king observed that war was obsolete
and impossible. If any empire cast its spears at another, he said, it
would assure its own destruction, for against the rain of spears tipped
with fusion bombs even the finest and most costly shields were useless.

And so there was peace on Earth .. . until the court fool of the clever
king reminded him that he had forgotten one thing."

He paused here in his fervid speech to wipe the sweat from his forehead.

He looked at me expectantly to see if I would ask him what the clever
king had forgotten. Although I did not want to hear the words of an
allegorical fool, I asked, "And what had the clever king forgotten?"

The Timekeeper grinned and replied, "He'd forgotten that he and all the
people of his empire and all the empires of the world were insane."

I held my breath and asked, "And then?"

"You know the end of the parable," he said softly. "You know."

I was dutifully thoughtful for a while. Except for the ticking and
clicking of the clocks and our syncopated breathing, the room was
silent. Outside the window the snow fell in sheets. I was cold, but he
was sweating. Beads of sweat rolled down his flat cheeks, down the hard
line of his chin. I could not help smiling and saying, "Timekeeper, it
seems that you've forgotten one thing."

"Eh?"

"The third tribe, the one that fled to the desert where the living was
hard-what ever became of that tribe?"

He laughed then, a deep, rich laugh full of irony and sadness. I sat in
my chair squeezing my forearms. It was one of the few times I had heard
him laugh.

"We're the third tribe," he said. "And deepspace is the desert. All the
peoples of the Civilized Worlds have fled from war; we're all hibakusha.

And there's peace in the galaxy, a fragile, relative peace, but there
are always new tribes waiting to fall into insanity. Why do you think we
must tyrannize the fallaways? It's because we can't allow these tribes
to grow. Our Order and the Order of the Warrior-Poets-for three thousand
years we've kept the peace."

"The warrior-poets!" I exclaimed. "They're murderers."

"Precisely. Few know this, but the warrior-poets were founded precisely
to exterminate insane tribes and insane kings. Terror was their tool,
and they used it well. No king could think of warring against his
neighbor without fearing that a warrior-poet would assassinate him."

"You speak in the past tense, Timekeeper."

"So I do. That's because the warrior-poets have been in decline for a
thousand years. Now they're not so concerned with preserving the peace.

In the process of breeding their assassins-and it took them
centuries-they developed a religion to help them face their inevitable
deaths. And often, these were suicidal deaths, because kings, mad or
not, are hard to kill, eh? This religion has become their reason for
existing. Now they seek disciples, not peace."

Again, like a shark, he circled around my chair. He began to rant. Only
our Order, he said, could preserve the peace. But if our Order divided
in two, there would be no order. (This is my word, not the Timekeeper's.

He despised puns almost as much as punsters.) Eventually our most
precious knowledge would be scattered like pearls beneath the feet of a
harijan.

I thought about his words for a long time. Because I disagreed with his
fundamental elitism, and because I sensed a contradiction in his
beliefs, I said, "But we can't keep our secrets forever. Information is
like a virus. It spreads."

"Viruses can be quarantined," he snapped. And then, more ominously,
"Viruses can be exterminated, too."

"But it's the Order's purpose to discover knowledge," I said.

His voice grew low and ugly like a wolfs growl. He said, "Knowledge must
be cherished and used wisely, eh? Not squandered like a foolish pilot
dropping City disks into the palm of a whore."

Because my back was aching and I was tired, I began to reposition myself
in the chair. He caught me turning toward him, and barked out, "Don't
move, now! Remain in the proper attitude."

I suddenly did not want to remain in the proper attitude. I was tired of
him staring at me while I could not look at him. I stood up, turned my
head, and caught him unguarded. The look on his face surprised me. His
eyes were wide open and his lips set into a shy smile as if he were a
boy looking at the firefalls for the first time. He was looking inside
himself, remembering, perhaps even remembrancing. At first, I did not
know how I knew this. His eyes were black pools as blind as any
scryer's. He was looking many places at once, examining future
possibilities and dreaming private dreams. Only for a moment did it
last, this look of acceptance, of sad innocence and wonder. Then, like a
steamy breath on a winter day, it was gone, replaced by harsh vertical
lines of defiance and ancient grief. His eyes glowed with dark lights
and his lips turned down as he thundered, "Sit down! Restrain yourself
and sit down, damn you!"

I did not sit down. I nudged the chair with my foot and said, "I'm tired
of sitting."

I stared at him. I could not imagine what had occasioned his lapse into
the contemplative. Then I realized-and it was one of the more wrenching
realizations of my life-I saw at a flash that this was no mere lapse. He
was a man divided, a seeker-tortured by an eternal inner war between his
dreams and his bitter experience-this I had always known. But suddenly I
knew more. I was sensing the minutia about him: the tension of the
little muscles above the eyes; his archaic speech habits; his harsh
philosophies; his sour smell; and thousands of other things. Somehow, I
was processing this rich current of information. I was sure I was
reading him. Whereas most such men (and Soli, my moody father is one
such) spend their moments vacillating between light and dark like a
terrified child being whipped back and forth across an ice ring by two
of his schoolmates, the Timekeeper lived within conflicting realities
simultaneously. He was truly a man who lived at the top of a frozen,
inner mountain above other men. For him evil and good did not exist. Or
rather, they existed not as opposites but as different flavors of
reality, like honey and black acid coffee, both of which at any moment
must be tasted, swallowed, and if possible, savored. In the terminology
of the Entity, he was a multiplex man, part hero, part rogue, heretic,
tychist, determinist atheist and god-worshipper-all of these and a
myriad of others at once. if the face he showed to the Order and the
ambassadors of the Civilized Worlds was the singular, stern face of a
just tyrant, it was the face he chose to wear. And more, it was the
persona he chose to be. It was wrenching to realize that he had this
power of choice. I had always thought of him as a man utterly divided by
the reality of dying and death. Now I saw that this was not so. Like all
great men, he had a vision. It was what he lived for. It was this
vision, the tiny part of which I glimpsed, that terrified me.

"So, young Mallory, what are you looking at; what do you see?"

"What should I see? Am I a cetic, then, to read your programs as I would
the poems in your book?"

I, myself, have often wondered what you are, what you might become." I
rubbed the side of my nose, then said, "I see a man seemingly torn apart
by contradictions. But there is a fundamental unity, isn't there? You
won't allow farsiders the simplest of our secrets, and you were and are
suspicious of the secrets of the Ieldra. I see-"

"No man has ever talked to me like this before! No man!"

"I see this passion of yours to protect, at the same time you-"

"Quiet nowl I can't have my pilots-or anyone else-reading me, can I? You
see too damn much."

"I see what I see."

"It's dangerous to see too much," he said. "The scryers know this.

What's their little saying?-'Eyes once blinded by the light are now
truly blind?'"

His eyes were burning stones as he said this, and then he bowed his head
and rubbed his snowy temples. I had always supposed that he had a sort
of grandfatherly affection for me, but now I saw that the requirements
of his private vision would always submerge and drown his kindness. When
it had suited his purpose to rescue me from my own impetuousness, he had
given me a book of poems and saved my life. If my death would serve his
dreams or plans-well, as he had said, viruses can be exterminated.

"Why did you summon me?" I asked him.

"Why must you question me, damn you!" He clenched his fists and the
muscles along his neck tensed. It was as if he were hardening himself to
make an agonizing decision he did not want to make. I thought that since
he had little compassion for himself, he would finally make the harshest
of choices. He must have feared that compassion toward another might
weaken him and eat away at the steely coil of his being as rust slowly
devours the interior mechanism of a clock.

"Why am I here?" I repeated.

He paced to the window and swiped at the glass with his fingernails as
if he were a bear digging at a sheet of ice. The nails dragged and
scraped, leaving sharp, clear streaks cutting the white frost. He was
quiet for a moment, and then the breath rushed out of him all at once.

"It would be the greatest of catastrophes," he said, "if one of my
pilots were to solve the Continuum Hypothesis only to have the secret
spread like a virus. To fall from any star instantly to any other-so,
you understand, only my pilots must have that knowledge."

"The Hypothesis may be unprovable," I said. "It would be better if that
were so."

"In any case, I haven't proven it. The Tycho and Dov Danladi, Soli
too-they struggled all their lives to prove the Great Theorem. Who am I
to prove it, then?"

"Ha, you've changed!" he mocked. "Who are you?-this I would like to
know. What have the damn gods done to you? We'd all like to know this,
eh? You return like a ghost from Agathange, and, suddenly, seemingly,
you've gained modesty ... and other things."

"What do you mean?"

"You know, Mallory, you know. Ten days ago your Bardo ruined part of the
Tycho's Monument, didn't he? Tell me, what happened that day?"

"Bardo drank himself into a stupor and broke one of the crystals."

"My novices tell me that you fell into slowtime-is this true?"

"How could it be true? How is it possible to enter slowtime without the
aid of a computer?"

He pounded his fist against the window sill and snarled out, "Why must
you answer a question with a question, damn you! Tell me, did you enter
into slowtime?"

"Some say I did," I admitted. "But the truth is, I stopped time."

"Stopped time? Ha, I hadn't thought it possible! But you are a truthful
man, aren't you? You wouldn't lie to your Lord Horologe. Why, Mallory,
why are you so taken with this holy notion of truth?"

"I don't know."

"Struth! There's truth and there's truth. Truth's as mutable as time."

"I don't believe that."

He rubbed his eyes and looked at me. "You must promise me a thing, young
Mallory. If you should ever discover the proof of the Great Theorem, you
must not inform the cetics nor akashics nor the cantors nor your fellow
pilots. You must tell no one except me."

I stood motionless while I thought at great speed. If I ever solved the
Hypothesis and confided in the Timekeeper, the knowledge would disappear
like light down a black hole.

"I've vowed to seek truth," I said.

"You've vowed to seek truth, not to disseminate it and spray it all
about like an old man's piss."

"In front of you in the Pilot's Hall, four years ago, I took this vow,
to seek wisdom. and truth even though the seeking might lead to ruin and
death."

"Ruin and death! Whose death, damn you! Is it wisdom to let truth ruin
the Order?"

"All my life, I've dreamed of proving the Great Theorem."

"Dreams, what are dreams? Why are you so damn stubborn? Why? Why are
you?" And then he groaned out, "Whose death? Whose death will it be?"

"All my life, and to, this day, I've dreamed of an Order, a whole
universe, where wisdom and truth are one."

"Noble words; naive words-how weary I am of words!" There was an almost
unbearable tension in his voice, in each of his steely words. "Either
give me your promise or do not."

"I can't give you my promise."

"SO."

He spoke this final word mournfully, regretfully, as if he could not
bear to shape his lips around the simple consonant and vowel. The sound
hung in the air like the low ringing of a bell. For a while he looked at
me. And in his eyes, love and hate and another passion I thought of as
will, or will toward fate, his fate and perhaps a universal fate, which
he must have known was the most terrible and lonely fate of all. Then he
scowled and pushed his palms at me and turned away, looking out the
window. He dismissed me. Before leaving his tower for what I thought
would be the last time, I looked out, too, down at the novices who
skated by, oblivious of the judgment that had just occurred high above
their snow-speckled heads.

Chapter 20 - The Rings of Qallar

If ever I spread tranquil skies over myself and soared on my own wings
into my own skies; if I swam playfully in the deep light-distances and
the bird-wisdom of my freedom came - but bird-wisdom speaks thus:
"Behold, there is no above, no below! Throw yourself around, out, back,
you who are light! Sing! Speak no more! Are not all words heavy and made
to die? Are not all words lies to those who are light? Sing! Speak no
more!" Oh, how should I not lust after eternity and after the nuptial
ring of rings, the ring of recurrence? Never yet have I found the woman
from whom I wanted children, unless it be this woman whom I love: for I
love you O eternity. For I love you O eternity!
-Seventh Death Meditation of the Warrior-poets

The historians believe that near the end of the second Swarming Century,
the warrior-poets perfected the art of using bio-computer bits to
replace parts of the brain. Unlike the Agathanians, however, the
warrior-poets applied their art to different ends. Slel-mime, that
unspeakable crime in which a poet's cunningly crafted programs run the
brain of his victim, is only one application. The poets are also known
to cark parts of their own brains. They do this to give themselves power
over their time-sense, so that they can slow time without -the aid of an
exterior computer. And for other reasons. It is said that they alter
their own brains' profoundest programs in order to erase their fear of
death. Indeed, the cetics believe they are utterly devoid of fear. In
this respect, the poets are unnatural beings, for fear is as natural to
humans as breathing air. To live, to feel the starlight in our eyes and
the joy of the deep light-distances, to be-this is all we know. To be
not is unimaginable and therefore terrifying. The birds who spread their
wings to the sun, the silvery bottom fish gliding through their world of
dark, silent joys, and even the sentient computers, in their ecstatic
inward crackling of electricity and lightning information flows-all
living things, in some tiniest particle of their beings, must fear the
final mystery.

When I began seeking out various of the City's warrior-poets, seeking in
the bars, hospices, ice rings and cafes that they frequented, Bardo
alternately accused me of being fearless and of having a will to suffer
this mystery. "Are you mad?" he said to me a few days after my meeting
with the Timekeeper.

"Oh, you are mad-I've always known you are. These poets kill because
they like death, don't you know?"

"That's true," I said. "They worship death. But I'd like to find my
mother-it's worrisome the way she's disappeared."

I was very worried about her plotting with warrior-poets. I planned to
find the warrior-poet with whom she had been keeping company these past
days. But because I was a novice in the seeking of human beings, he
found me instead.

Adjacent to the Hyacinth Gardens, along the Run where it dips south
toward the Old City, is a collection of twelve buildings made entirely
of exotic woods. Some of the buildings are cavernous structures housing
the historians' artifacts and relics; a few are somewhat smaller. Their
elegant, polished rosewood rooms are given over solely to the display of
art, alien and human, ancient and modern. Although all twelve buildings
are called the Art Museum, it is the smaller buildings that hold the
Fravashi frescoes and tone poems, the Urradeth ice sculptures and other
treasures. The smallest building, a classic rectangular hall faced with
shatterwood pillars, is the House of Remembrance. Its four sections are
filled with many rooms, but the most famous of them is the Hibakusha
Gallery. There reside some of the oldest frescoes depicting unbelievable
scenes of chaos and war. There the tone poems build and swirl and fuse,
unfolding the epic battles of the Holocaust Century. I had come to view
the famous frescoe, "Humanity Rising," which ran along the north wall
for a hundred feet. When I was worried, or when I was tired and cold
from skating the streets of the City, I liked to sit on one of the
Gallery's benches, to breath in the smells of warm wood and flowers; I
liked to watch the fresco move, the pretty colors. It was one of my
favorite things to do.

It was late afternoon, and I was not alone. Next to me, near the center
of the long room, there were a couple of fabulists, no doubt seeking
inspirations for work of their own. And at the edge of the carpet behind
my bench, near the bubbling fountain, were a group of Friends of God off
Simoom. They were each very tall and very thin, and they stank of garlic
and goatroot and other exotic spices. They had a habit of twisting the
silver chains binding their long, black hair. The habit annoyed me, as
did their hissing. As they whispered, they hissed, the sibilant sounds
rushing out of their mouths in quick choked-off breezes. One of them
said, "See? Here is evidence the Swarming began during the Holocaust
Century, not after. It is as was thought." I looked at the painting's
bubbling blues and greens and whites. I watched silvery rockets rising
from Old Earth's oceans, but whether or not the rockets were ships
launched toward the stars or missiles carrying fusion weapons was
difficult to tell. Then one of the rockets divided into two, the two
into four and so on, and suddenly there were the bright stars of the Eta
Carina nebula, and the four ships had become four thousand streamers of
light. The light spread outward in great, glowing balls. In a flash it
filled the nebula with a luminous white. For a moment the entire center
section of the painting was brilliantly white, and then splotches of
gray appeared at random to mar the brilliance. The white darkened to
sky-blue as the blotches began to take shape, and a thousand black
mushroom clouds began rising up from Old Earth's atmosphere. I was not
at all certain that the painting was the "evidence" that the Friends of
God sought. It seemed more likely that for the Fravashi who had made the
fresco, the Swarming was the Holocaust.

After a while I became vaguely aware of subtle changes in the muffled
sounds and odors of the room. The stink of goatroot and garlic had
subsided; disturbed voices and the quick rustle of fabric had replaced
the whispering. Then there was silence, and I smelled the sudden aroma
of kana oil. Warrior-poets, I knew, were famous for wearing effervescent
kana oil perfumes. I turned my head, and there stood a deep-chested man
of medium height who was plainly not interested in watching the
painting. He was watching me. He studied my face as a master player
might a chessboard, with an intense, almost fanatic concentration.

Immediately I knew that he was a warrior-poet; all warrior-poets are cut
from the same cells. He had the curly black hair, the coppery skin and
sinuous neck of his kind. He was beautiful, as the highly bred races
often are. How well-proportioned his fine nose and broad cheek planes
seemed, how balanced his sculpted jaw, what a beautiful, fearful
symmetry! But it was his unique poet's eyes that possessed the most
compelling beauty: His eyes were deep indigo, almost purple; his eyes
were vivid, clear, soulful, utterly aware-and utterly without fear.

Although he looked young, I thought he must be very old, for only a man
who had been brought back to youth many times could have such eyes. But
no, I remembered, warrior-poets do not restore themselves to youth.

Worshipping death as they do, they believe it is the greatest sin-indeed
the only sin-to prolong one's life past "the moment of the possible."

The warrior-poet, then, was as young as I. He walked down the edge of
the carpet until he stood almost on top of me. His movements were
graceful, quick exquisite. "My name is Dawud," he said, and his voice
flowed like molten silver. "And you are Mallory Ringess, aren't you?

I've heard the strangest things about you."

Except for the shifting, throbbing painting and the other frescoes on
the far walls, the room was empty. No one trusts a warrior-poet, I
thought. I examined the black sable cloak he wore and the eye-catching,
rainbow kamelaika beneath. His clothes were richly made and beautiful,
though the poets were known to care nothing of riches and but little for
beauty. I turned my eyes to his hands, looking for the rings. All
warrior-poets wear two rings, one each on the little finger of either
hand. The rings are made of various metals and can be of different
colors, green or yellow, indigo or blue. There are seven colors, and in
the manner of the spectrum's progression, each marks the level of the
warrior-poet's attainments. A violet ring means he is of the seventh and
lowest circle; a red ring is given to those rare individuals who attain
the first circle. The left-hand ring is the ring of the poet, while the
one on the right hand is the warrior's ring. It is said that no one has
ever been at once a great enough poet and warrior to wear two red rings.

On the little finger of his left hand was a green ring. He was of the
poets' fourth circle, then; his poetic prowess was not extraordinary.

But around his other finger, cut from one of Qallar's artificial metals,
he wore a red ring. The ring seemed to glow to match the fiery reds of
the painting, and he said, "You have been looking for me, I have been
told."

"Do you know my mother? Are you the poet who ... do you know my mother?"

"I know your mother well."

"Where is she?"

He ignored my question, and he bowed his head politely. "I would have
wanted to meet you in any case, to see the son of the mother. I've
collected the stories about you. One day, if I live, I'll write a poem.

I've heard you stopped time fifteen days ago, saved your friend from
dying."

"You shouldn't listen to gossip."

"You shouldn't have saved your friend from his moment. And it isn't
gossip, as I know. I know, too, about Agathange. We poets are familiar
with-"

"Yes," I interrupted, "you're masters of slel-mime."

"You use that slandered term."

"You create human beings robbed of free will."

He smiled and said, "Do you think you know about free will?"

"You're assassins who kill for pleasure."

"You think so?"

I was confused, distracted by his teeth and nice smile, lulled by his
warm, reassuring manner. I said, "You do kill, then?"

"Often."

"And your victims are sometimes innocent?"

He smiled and his eyes sparkled. "I have never seen an innocent woman or
man, never even an innocent child-have you, Mallory Ringess? You know
there is no true innocence. No, don't protest because I can see the
knowledge in the furrows of your forehead."

I rubbed back and forth above my eyes and accused, "You poets-you're
death worshippers, I think."

"Certainly. But if you please-tell me about worship? Or shall I tell
you? Dario Redring once composed a poem about worship. Shall I recite
it?"

"No," I said, "I hate poetry."

"If that is true, then you are crippled in your soul. But I don't think
you hate poetry."

"Where's my mother?"

"She is waiting for me."

"Waiting where?"

He again ignored my question and pointed toward the corner of the
painting; the interior of the Orion Nebula was lit with stars where some
of the first swarms of human beings had made their new homes. "Pretty,"

he said. And then, "How, would you suppose, the prettiness of this
painting is protected?"

"I don't know what you mean."

"If someone were to ruin or steal this painting, what would happen?"

"Why would anyone ruin the painting?" I asked. "And if anyone stole it,
the robots would stop him from leaving the museum, I think."

"And if by chance the robots were ruined too, of what crime would our
hypothetical thief be guilty? Theft? Desecration? Murder?"

"You can't murder a robot," I said. I shrugged my shoulders because I
didn't know where his sequence of thought would converge.

"I am pleased you understand, Mallory-you can't really murder a robot,
can you?"

I made a fist and said, "People aren't robots." He was silent and he
smiled at me.

"You carve words to fit your purposes," I said.

"True, I am a poet after all. And you are beginning to see with a
warrior's eyes: You can't murder a robot because they are not really
alive. They can't program themselves, and they have no true awareness."

I stood up and zipped my kamelaika, "I shouldn't be talking to you. I
don't understand why the Timekeeper allows you out on the streets."

"Because Neverness is a free city, and a warrior-poet must have his
freedom."

"Freedom," I said, and I shook my head.

"There is another reason, too. Your Timekeeper has his robot-fears just
as everyone does. Almost everyone."

"You threaten the Timekeeper, then?"

"I didn't say that, exactly."

"You implied it."

"You must listen to a poet very carefully," he said, and he touched his
lips with his green ring. "We speak with silver tongues, and sometimes
our words have multiple meanings."

"I'm here to watch the painting, not to listen."

He smiled, bowed to the painting and then said, "If it pleases you, I
will listen to you. Tell me about Soli's chambers, and I will listen. Is
there an outer chamber adjoining the inner-is that true? How large are
the chambers? How many flights of stairs leading to them?"

We talked for a while, or rather, he asked me questions to which I did
not respond. He wanted to know the foods Soli preferred, what position
he slept in and other personal things. I listened to his words
carefully. I immediately understood that he intended to assassinate
Soli.

I stood very still before saying, "Go away. I won't help you murder Soli
or anyone else."

He touched his red warrior's ring to his red lips. "There are stories
told about your journey to the Alaloi-it is said you know about murder."

"What has my mother told you?"

"That Soli is your father; that you hate him; that he hates you."

I stared at him as my muscles tightened; I wondered if my time-sense
dilated, if I would be quick enough to kill him before he killed me. I
stared at his ring. I did not think I would be quick enough.

He read my face and said, "Don't be afraid to get too close to death.

Don't be afraid to die."

"All living things are afraid to die."

"No, you're exactly wrong," he said, and he smiled. "The only truly
alive beings are those unafraid to die."

I made fists with my hands and told him, "You imply that human beings
aren't truly alive, then. That's absurd."

"Human beings are sheep," he said. "And what are sheep?"

"Sheep are like shagshay only stupider. On Old Earth, and still on many
planets, they are kept in flocks for their wool and meat."

"Human beings are not sheep."

"You think not? Have you heard the parable of the cetic and his sheep?"

I looked at the painting, at the progression of exploding stars that was
the beginning of the Vild's brilliant chaos. I heard people walking by
outside the Gallery, but none of them decided to come in. "The
Timekeeper is fond of parables," I said.

He must have taken this as a sign of encouragement for he continued,
"Once a time on Urradeth there was a cetic who had a great flock of
sheep. But the cetic was very busy fashioning metaprograms which he
hoped would control his own baser, more mundane programs. Consequently,
he had little time to tend his flock. Often they wandered off into the
forest or stumbled into snowdrifts, and worse, they ran away because
they knew that the cetic wanted their wool and their meat."

I glanced at the doorway, measuring distances with my eyes as Dawud went
on with his parable: "One day the cetic found an answer to his problem.

He programmed his sheep to believe that they were immortal. He convinced
them that no harm would be done to them when they were skinned; the
sheep believed it would be very good for them, even pleasurable; Then he
wrote a program to make his sheep believe he was a good master who loved
his flock so much that he would do anything for them. Thirdly, through
the sheep's dull brains he ran a program which reassured them that if
anything bad were going to happen to them, it was not going to happen
right away, certainly not that day. Therefore they could get on with
their mechanical thoughts of eating grass and mating and lying about in
the sun. Last of all-and this was the cetic's most cunning program-he
convinced the sheep that they were not sheep at all; to some of them he
suggested that they were wolves, to some that they were thallows, to
others that they were men, and to a few that they were really cunning
cetics.

"After this all his worries about his sheep ended. He devoted all his
cunning towards redesigning his deepest programs. The sheep never ran
away again. They quietly awaited the day when the cetic would come for
their wool and meat. And the cetic-"

"And the cetic," I interrupted, "lived happily ever after. I don't think
I like your parable-men are not sheep."

It occurred to me that I was protesting too strenuously, too loudly. The
rosewood panels above the painting echoed my words of denial. I tried to
understand the warrior-poet's dictum that to really live, one must "live
as one already dead." It is a strange, merciless philosophy, but then,
the warrior-poets are as strange as the system which breeds them, and
they know nothing of mercy. They breed for perfection; it is said that
their splicers have tampered with the male and female genomes,
completely editing out the extraneous and redundant DNA. On Qallar, each
year a million identical zygotes are quickened and a million identical,
perfect babies are brought into the light of day. But they are not
really so perfect. Some are killed at random immediately after they have
drawn their first breaths. This is supposed to be a demonstration that
we live in a random, merciless universe. Many are killed because they
cannot learn the deadly skills of a warrior or the delicate words of a
poet. When they are twelve years old, the warriors-tobe are given knives
and grouped together in pairs. Only one of each pair survives this cruel
combat, and then pairs are made again and again until perhaps only a
tenth of the original million are left. A similar procedure of poetry
competitions culls the most poetic of the children. The losers, the
stammering children who cannot craft beautiful, clever words in the face
of death, are invited to kill themselves. Those who are too cowardly to
perform this "noblest" of actions are tortured to death by the others.

The torture, Kolenya Mor once told me, is not meant as a punishment. It
is supposed to induce the unfortunate child to reprogram his death fear
at the last moment, to enable him to ultimately savor his ephemeral life
even as it slips away. There are other, worse trials that the
warrior-poets must endure as they grow older. There are alterations of
body and brain, the subtle molding of a man's soul. No one, not even the
eschatologists, knows very much of these trials. Two things, though,
seem certain: that every moment of a warrior-poet's life is meant to
smoothly lead him to his death, and that of the original million, only a
hundred or so survive to wear the rings of Qallar.

Dawud smiled and he looked at me intensely, as if he could read my
deepest programs. He was a man who smiled too often, but I must admit he
had a beautiful, intense smile. In a way, he was the most intense person
I have ever known. "The cetic who founded the Order of Warrior-poets,"

he said, "did not live happily ever after. What is happiness, after all?

The cetic, after much hard work finally decoded his death program, or, I
should say, his fear-of-death program. He purged it from his brain, from
his very neurons. And there are many poems written of this-the cetic
discovered that it is the fear of death which enslaves us. You might say
the dread of the dying self sends us stumbling blindly about our daily
tasks as if we are nothing but sleepwalking robots programmed to feed
and drink and copulate. Fear is the drug which makes us sleep. But when
the fear is gone-no, Pilot, please don't leave quite yet-when fear is
extinguished it is like plunging into a pool of cold water. To awaken is
wonderful. To see clearly, to taste the intensity of each instant of
life-this is what the warrior-poets teach; this is why we live; this is
why we die."

I made a move to leave, then. I did not want to listen to a murderer
tell me how life should be lived. But Dawud held up his large, square
hand and said, "Please don't go. There is much of the poet inside me
that speaks to the warrior in you. And inside of you-such secrets! Tell
me, Pilot, because I have come so far to know: What is it like to die?"

"What can I tell you that you don't already know?" I asked him. "Have I
died? Some say I have, but what is death, then? Now, I live, and that's
what matters-I'm tired of thinking about life and death, ill with
worrying about meaning or the lack of meaning. You, with your need to
embrace your own death, to live intensely-or die-no matter the pain
you'd bring to yourself or others-you think pain can wake a man up to
intensity, but there's a hell of being too awake, too aware, isn't
there?"

And he said simply, quoting his masters, "He who would hold light must
endure burning."

I rubbed my temples, looking down at the edge of the carpet against the
glossy floor. "Give me darkness, then," I said.

"What is it like to live again?"

Because his questions irked me, because I was suddenly feeling contrary
and as mischievous as a young journeyman, I said, "To live, I die."

"You like to mock people, don't you? Please don't mock me; it would be
senseless to mock me. I would like to know about the Agathanians, about
their designs, about their programs, about you."

"Isn't the art of Agathange similar to the art of the warrior-poets?"

"It is similar but not the same."

"You poets-when you reprogram your victims-"

"They are not 'victims" Pilot. They are converts to the Way of the
Warrior."

"But you rob them of their free will, it's said."

He flipped back the edge of his cloak, exposing his muscular arm. "This
question of free will is subtle and treacherous, and we won't solve it
here. Better men than we have enslaved their minds wondering about free
will. Let us say that a living thing is free, relatively free, the
greater its independence from its environment. The more it depends on
other living systems, the more its activities are necessarily shaped by
its environment. Independence increases with complexity; the greater the
complexity, the greater the amount of free will. A virus, for instance,
must largely do what it is programmed to do. A man is more complex."

"Then you imply that men have free will," I said. "Men are robots and
sheep."

"I can't believe that."

"Some men have free will some of the time," he said as he smiled.

I reached into the leg sheath of my kamelaika and removed one of my
skate blades. I held it flat in my hand. "I believe I have the freedom
to drop this or not, as I wish."

"Free will is illusory."

"I will not drop it," I said, sliding it back in the sheath. "A free
choice, freely made."

"But not so free, after all, Pilot. Why did you choose not to drop it?

Because this fine, wood floor is polished so nicely? You wouldn't want
to scar the fine floor, would you? You have a respect for finely made
things-I can tell. But from where did this respect come? Who programmed
it into you? You can't tell me, but I can tell you: It was your mother,
years ago when you were a boy. She taught you about beauty in the
unspoken ways she appreciated beauty, with the silent language of her
eyes and hands. Your mother loves beautiful things, even though she
doesn't know of her love, even if she would deny it if you asked her."

I pulled the skate blade back out and pointed it at him. "I'm afraid to
ask how you know so much about my mother."

"Your mother is a complex woman, confused sometimes, but I have helped
her see things more simply."

"Tell me."

"Your mother came to me freely. Of her own free will she asked for my
help. It is this way with everyone we help."

"You've helped her lose herself, then. You poets-"

"We poets replace useless programs with new ones. To help them run
their-"

"My mother is not a robot, damn you!"

He took a step back and smiled at me. Although he must have known I was
trembling to kill him, he seemed quite relaxed. "Your mother's
metaprogram has been rewritten," he said almost casually. "Her master
program, her defining program-it is the same way with all converts,
religious or otherwise."

"Tell me what this new program is, then."

"Will you tell me the code of your new program, Mallory Ringess? The
program that the Agathanians wrote into their virus?"

"Is that why you've come here?"

"The program, Mallory, the metaprogram-you tell me. What makes you run?

What runs you?"

I squeezed the skate blade and the edges cut into the callouses on my
palm. "If I knew, if I knew-how can I tell you what I don't know, damn
you!"

"We should all know the code of our programs," he said. "Otherwise we
can never be free."

So saying, he turned to face the painting and let out a sigh. "The
Fravashi are very clear with their living paintings. This is a pretty
picture-I always enjoy watching the bacteria colonies move across the
painting. The programs are so elegant, controlled, and yet
unpredictable."

As if the frescoe had been listening to his words (or perhaps Dawud had
timed his words with exquisite precision), just then, at the center of
the painting a star cluster flared into prominence. The most brilliant
of the stars was the Poet's Glory; orbiting that hellish, blue binary
was a small, ocher speck representing the planet Qallar. As the
perspective shifted and magnified, the planet grew to the size of a snow
apple. Dawud looked at me, smiled, then plunged his hand into the folds
of his cloak. He removed a knife; it was a double-edged murderous,
shining thing. He held it in front of me. "Is my will free?" he asked
me. "Can I let go of this knife or not, as I will?"

I was suddenly aware of the pungent pepperiness of kana oil, the
dreadfully slow inrushing of my breath. He closed his fingers around the
knife. He moved very fast. He was balanced and fluid as he entered into
the slowtime state of the warrior-poet. My own time sense began to
dilate and slow, otherwise I could never have tracked his motions.

Between his thumb and forefinger he held the knife. He whipped his arm
forward. The knife tore through the painting's clear outer membrane into
the heart of the red sphere that was Qallar. There it quivered. A thick
soup of red and orange paints bubbled from the wound, coloring the knife
with liquid rust. The bubbling subsided and slowed to a pulsing ooze and
then stopped altogether. Like a quickly hardening lava, the paint had
completely covered the haft of the knife. It looked like a volcano
uplifted from the painting's surface.

"Look at the painting, Pilot."

I stared at the desecration, horrified. As I stared, I noticed a
peculiar thing: The painting was healing itself Dawud, whatever his
intentions had been, had failed to destroy it. There was a violent surge
of scarlets and bursting orange as the colors reorganized themselves,
revealing the most startling pattern of design. I had seen the fresco
many times before, but never had I watched the drama which played itself
out in front of us. From Qallar's running surface a red blob of paint
broke loose and began migrating across the length of the painting. As it
drifted, it glowed and divided and grew. The blob-it began to look more
and more like a twentyday fetus-fell through a black pool of living
paint until it reached a small yellow star that I recognized as Darrein
Luz. Then there were many stars, and for a moment the red blob
disappeared into a shower of light. Suddenly, in the spaces beyond
Darrein Luz, between the white stars, round, red moons began to
coalesce. There were many of them. The moons had embedded themselves in
a nebula I knew well. They had chosen the stars of the Solid State
Entity. The moons began to pulsate, and red streamers of light projected
out from their surfaces, touching each other, joining moon to moon in a
web of red filaments. I realized, of course, that the moons were meant
to represent the brains-the brain-of the Entity. But I could not
understand why and how the Fravashi fresco could hint (if a painting
could indeed hint) that there was some connection between the planet of
the warrior-poets and the Entity's mysterious origins. Perhaps Dawud's
knife had permanently warped the painting's patterns; perhaps there was
no connection.

"The programs, Pilot, what controls the programs?"

I rushed him, then, hoping to catch him in my arms, to hold him until
the robots came to take him away. But while I had been watching the
painting, he had removed a needle-dart from his cloak. I grabbed him and
tried to wrench him down to the carpet, but he stuck the dart in the
side of my neck. The dart must have been tipped with a drug because
almost instantly my muscles began seizing up and I could not move. He
unlocked my hands from around him and pushed away. I stood there
paralyzed, frozen. I could not even blink my eyes.

He smiled, reached out and touched my eyelid, pressing on my eye,
testing. His fingers were hard, skilled and gentle. He said, "This is an
elegant drug. It will edit your bio-programs-for a time. Your muscles
will still listen to your brain, but you will not control the brain's
signals. Can you control the beating of your heart? No, and for a few
hours, you will have no control over yourself Where is free will now,
Pilot? Who programs the programmer? Can you tell me? No, you can't move
your tongue, even though you can feel it pressed into the cracks between
your teeth. Now, Pilot, I must go to your mother. Goodbye."

He left me standing there, silently and freely cursing my lack of
freedom. I could not help watching the painting. The colors were
beautiful and they did not stop moving.

Chapter 21 - The Eyes of a Child

The first and hardest teaching of our profession always must be to view
the world as through the eyes of a child.
-Marinar Adam, Twelfth Lord Cetic

We do not see things as they are; we see them as we are.
-Saying of the Cetics

The effects of Dawud's drug lasted not a few hours but a few minutes.

Soon, I could move again of my own free will, and I was immediately
afraid of the implications of this freedom. Did the godseed in my head
seek out and neutralize-devour-invasive drugs, much as it sought out and
replaced dead brain cells? Or had it altered certain of the
neurotransmitters, leaving me immune to the actions of drugs? I had no
time to wonder at the drug's ineffectualness, not if I was to follow the
warrior-poet to my mother. I staggered out of the room and ran down the
empty hallway adjacent to the Gallery of the Thousand Ice Glyphs; by
means of this shortcut I hoped to reach the street in time to catch
sight of him. When I passed between the gleaming entrance pillars, I
found that he had already descended the fifty-four steps and disappeared
into the crowds skating along the glissade below. A horologe that I
stopped told me this. When I began sprinting down the steps, he waggled
his long finger at the glissade to the west and called out, "You'll
never catch a warrior-poet-are you mad?"

I was very mad, or at least very angry, so I pushed through a group of
fabulists. One of them, a skinny, delicate woman with pale, blue-veined
skin and fearful eyes, told me that the warrior-poet had recently passed
the Darghinni Rotunda. And as I rounded that huge, cylindrical building,
a wormrunner muttered a few sullen words. The warrior-poet, he said, had
entered the Hyacinth Gardens. I sensed a note of fear in his voice as he
rubbed his beard and asked, "But why would you want to find a
warrior-poet? Where's the profit in dealing with those madmen?" In this
way, by stopping and questioning people seemingly at random, I made my
way down the long band of ice into the Hyacinth Gardens.

It was a tortuously inefficient manner in which to proceed-I realized
this almost at once. The glissade was crowded with exemplars and harijan
come to view the blue snow dahlia and other flora of the Gardens. In the
patchy, uneven light of late afternoon, the crowds seemed hungry,
whether for the flaming red beauty of the alpine fireweed or for their
evening meals it was difficult to tell. The wind came in spurts and
gusts, and the sky was full of dense clouds which intermittently blocked
the sun; snow flurries blew with a chill intensity and then, a few
moments later, would cease, and there would be a moment of calm and
sudden sunshine. As a result of this fickle weather, without warning
people would come to an abrupt, grinding stop in order to open or
readjust the folds of their robes. (Or to zip or unzip their
kamelaikas.) Here a Friend of God would pause to wipe the rancid,
garlicky sweat from his forehead and there, a quarter-mile later, he
would shiver, whisper a silent supplication, and hunch down in his robes
as he tried to appreciate a grove of yu trees. Many were skating in and
out of the warming pavilions; the normal flow of traffic had degenerated
into hundreds of turbulent pockets of men and women in search of thermal
comfort. I had to push and dart to make any progress at all. To my right
were fields of yellow litlits and alien trees, and beyond them, the
broad, blue glimmer of the Run where it curved along the edge of the
Pilot's Quarter; to my left, the twisted, beautiful shapes of the winter
bonsai grew according to the whims of the splicers who had designed
them; straight ahead as I skated were people, a surging river of people,
too damn many people.

Near the middle of the Gardens, where the ice sculptures glittered and
the air smelled of snow dahlia and a sweet, minty alien scent, I noticed
the imprint of fear stamped on the face of an astrier. I paused to ask
her if she had seen the warrior-poet pass. I had this notion that a
warrior-poet sailing quickly by might leave a track of fear in his wake.

She was a stout, pretty woman, and she stood like a rock between me and
her fourteen children, half defiantly, half in fear. She denied that she
had seen the warrior-poet. At first I did not believe her. I wasted
precious moments while she stood with her hands on her hips and shrilly
informed me that the strictly celibate, death-seeking warrior-poets were
as different from astriers as night from day; if she had seen the
warrior-poet, she said, she would have pulled the hoods over her
children's eyes, to shield them from evil. I moved closer to her, the
better to read her face, and she stuck her chin out, as if to warn me
away. I drank in the thick, womanly musk emanating from her woolens; I
listened to the subtle tremulo of her voice. I heard fear in the
tenseness of her vowels, the quick, stuttering sounds of nervousness and
doubt. Faintly I smelled her fear. All at once-and I did not know how I
had come by this skill-I realized it was not a fear of the warrior-poet,
or at least, it was not a fear of warrior-poets in particular. It was a
more general fear that I detected, in a way, a fear of all things or
anything that might harm her children. She, who had no doubt left the
hundreds of her youngest children safely in the care of her husbands on
Goodrest, was quietly, if subliminally, afraid of every person on the
glissade. If she had seen a warrior-poet, her fear would have built to a
roar and screamed from her eyes. Perhaps she would have clenched her
hands and sweated a profuse, acrid sweat as her bio-programs prepared
her to flee or fight. With excitement I realized that fear has many
colors, shades and tones. I would have to be careful to distinguish the
cool blue of wariness from blind, crimson panic, if I hoped to find the
warrior-poet.

I apologized for disturbing her, and I pushed off down the glissade. I
saw an autist who was clearly afraid of something. I began to ask the
ragged, filthy, barefooted man if he had seen
"Death sailing by on
silver skates." (One had to translate words into the autists' peculiar
idiom or they would pretend not to understand the simplest things.)
Then, once again, I found myself spontaneously practicing the skills of
a cetic. I found I could read the autist's fear program. I saw that his
was not a fear of pain or death at the hands of a warrior-poet. Indeed,
he did not fear his suffering, and he scarcely feared death. As all of
us do, he feared losing what was dearest to him. I was surprised to see
that autists-if this rotting, miserable, stinking wretch of a human
being was a typical speciman-live solely for pleasure. I could see this
in his smiling, constantly moving lips as plainly as I could see the
vacant smiles of the ice sculptures lining the street. But the pleasure
he sought was not the fullness of gut after a fine meal or of sexual
ecstasy; it was not even the toalache afficionada's euphoria or the
number-storm of those many pilots who love their mathematics too well.

What pleased the autist was to exist wholly within a world of his own
creation. His was the pleasure of fantasy and delusion; to him his
thoughtscapes were as beautiful and as real as the ice castles of
Urradeth appear to a child. And the thing he feared above all else was
the intrusion of external reality-what the autists would call the
lesser-real-and the ruin of that perfect thoughtscape he sought, the
realreal. (It is an irritating fact that the autists claim spiritual
kinship with pilots. What is the manifold, they will ask, if not a
creation of the ship's computer and the mind of a pilot in fugue? It
does no good, of course, to explain that a pilot's mathematics is a
vision of the deepest structures of the universe. They will just stare
into your eyes and babble, "Brother Pilot, the realreal is one of the
manifold beauties inside the godhead when the good god is inside the
real head.") An autist will suffer every sort of bodily degradation
rather than lose sight of his precious realreal.

I examined the autist's slack facial, and I saw that for him death was
merely an abstract thought to be filed at some arbitrary address of his
awareness; death-was the never-real. Since he did not believe that he
really existed, he could not fear losing himself to death. There was no
fear of death in his milky, diseased eyes. There was only a hint of
quiet regret and sadness that the beauty of his thoughtscapes would
dissolve into nothingness when his mind ceased to be. And of that final
tragedy he had little fear because he would not be in-the-real to
witness it. Then, too, it is the faith of autists everywhere that: "In
the realm of the real, the almost-real becomes sometimes-real according
to the realness of the real head. The sometimes-real is a realness to be
reborn into the realreal. In the realm of the realreal, there are many
layers of reals; the realreal can be created but not destroyed."

All of this, I should emphasize, I saw in an instant. I think I was
reading most of his programs; possibly I was reading his mind. I never
talked to him (if one can really talk to an autist), nor did I dally to
appreciate the subtleties of my new powers. I skated down the glissade
trying to distinguish the different tones of fear on the hundreds of
faces. Warrior-poets notwithstanding, we all fear something, and in some
part of our being, we fear it every moment of our lives. I quickly
became adept at reading people's fear programs. I passed a
merchant-prince afraid of losing his jewels and silks. A hibakusha, a
wizened, little brown-skinned woman dressed in patched woolens,
approached him begging for the means to pay for the expensive procedure
which might restore her to health. But the merchant could not see the
desperation (and fear) in the beggar's eyes because he would not look in
her eyes. He would not look at her pained face, at the bald head where
only a few wispy filaments of hair hung above her high collar. He
coughed loudly and hurried by, careful not to let any portion of his
robes touch the poor woman. I saw an aphasic who feared that the mental
use of words or any sort of symbol would bind her thoughts and therefore
ruin her freedom of mind; an eschatologist lost in fear of his fear; a
dozen men off Lone Jack fearfully avoiding all aliens, even the gentle
Friends of Man; a cowardly pilot by the name of Dixon Dar; a seemingly
blissful arhat covered with soft snowflakes and stinking of sihu
perfume. (I did not need a cetic's powers to perceive that the arhat was
afraid of being thought a fake-as in fact she was. It is an ill-kept
secret- that sihu oil is absorbed through the skin and induces the
artificial nirvanas of which the arhats are so falsely proud); a
frightened, lonely novice who had just entered Borja; hundreds of men,
women and children all betraying their fear. I stroked by fearful,
heaving bodies, and I passed into a bubble of warm, almost tropical air.

The crowds grew so thick that I had to walk my skates across the ice.

There were maggids and nimspinners and exemplars bunched together,
gawking at the fields of hyacinths on either side of the glissade. The
air was sick with flowery fragrance. It was suddenly warm and humid so I
unzipped my kamelaika down to my belly. One of the maggids. exclaimed
that it was a miracle that tropical flowers could grow on an ice planet.

I looked through the shifting throng at the ten thousand delicate,
hanging curlicues of pink and white and blue. They were beautiful. I
caught the eye of a fat historian and shook my head silently, sharing
our mutual fear: that the expense of maintaining an exterior
microclimate and other like extravagances would one day break the
Order-if indeed the imminent schism did not do so first.

After I had broken free into the cooler air at the western edge of the
Gardens, I began seeing on the faces of the thinned-out crowd that
particular kind of fear indicating a near encounter with a warrior-poet.

I will call it fear of madmen, most people regard the warrior-poets as
being truly mad. When I was a young child I had often noticed that
adults were inexplicably afraid of the many babbling madmen who roam the
City streets. Most of the madmen, of course, were-and are-quite
harmless. How then to explain how master pilots, for instance, could be
so afraid of them, they who had mastered their fear of the manifold? I
had never understood this phenomenon, but all at once the answer seemed
obvious: A madman's jerky motions, his aimless words, the wild glint in
his eyes-everything he does seems to bubble up from some private well
deep within his being. It is a well which spouts actions seemingly
beyond his control. And why does a madman appear to have no control? It
is because he appears to have no fear; that is, he lacks a certain kind
of fear. He is unafraid of embarrassing himself or others with his
animal screams and mumbled prophecies. This fearlessness is very
threatening to the typical civilized person because he understands, in
some portion of his self, that it is only the fear of what others think
that keeps him from skating naked down the street and howling at the
moon when the miseries of life are more than he can bear. (If indeed he
lives on one of the eighty-six civilized planets which have moons.) Fear
is the glue that keeps civilization together. Without the fear of
consequence, men would take forcefully the women of their choice, Elidi
children would pull the wings off their younger siblings and women would
tell their husbands their innermost thoughts. And that would be the end
of the world, the end of all the worlds on which human beings live.

Without fear we would fly about at random like billions of unpredictable
atoms. I must repeat that one does not fear a madman because he is
dangerous; a madman is feared because he appears to have no fear, and
therefore he is unpredictable and might do anything, And it is the same
with warrior-poets. One does not fear them because they are dangerous;
the sun, after all, is dangerous. But the sun is predictable (or it used
to be before the Vild began to explode), and the warrior-poets, those
fearless fanatics of Qallar, are not. Often they act at random. Their
passage through a crowd leaves a trail of fear, the fear of
fearlessness, which is really a fear of randomness. To live in a
universe which does not listen to our plea for order and meaning is our
most basic fear, and we fear it more than death. It was this trail of
chaotic fear left by the warrior-poet Dawud that I followed across the
Great Circle outside the Hofgarten and down an orange sliddery deep into
the Farsider's Quarter.

Near the Merripen Green, where the streets narrow and the many fine,
three-story blackstones shelter the richer of the farsiders, I talked to
a cetic fresh off Melthin. He had the harrowed, somewhat bitter look of
an itinerant professional; my first thought was that he had traveled
among planets such as Orji and Yasmeen teaching his art to the backward
novices of the Order's lesser schools. He stank of travel, and of fear.

In front of his hotel I stopped him and quickly explained what I was
seeking.

"Yes, it's true," he said, wiping the sweat from his forehead with his
orange sleeve. "A few minutes ago, the poet in the rainbow kamelaika-but
how did you know?"

Because I wanted to make certain that it was Dawud I pursued and not
some other, I asked, "His warrior's ring-was it red? Did he wear the
poet's green ring?"

"His rings?"

"Quickly, then, what color were his rings?"

"I didn't notice his rings; I was looking at his face."

"Damn!"

I quickly, breathlessly explained that I was following the
warrior-poet's track of fear; being a cetic, I thought he would
appreciate my little quest. But like many of the lesser professionals he
was overly proud and chary of anyone-a pilot no less-who might challenge
his meager authority. "One must be careful in reading the fear programs,
very careful. How many types of fear do you think there are, Pilot?"

How many types of programs animate the flesh and brain of a human being?

I stroked up the street and turned onto a sliddery, wondering about
this. The sliddery led past the Winter Ring. Here were obsidian
blackstones eight stories high, curving walls of chipped glass inside
which the apartments were tiny and stacked one atop the other like a
child's blocks. I had seldom been in this part of the City before, and I
marveled that so many strange people could live so closely with one
another. I made my way toward the edge of the Ring. There were many
skaters resting on the dilapidated, splintery benches set around the
Ring. Between the benches and the orange band of the street, which
circled the Ring around its northern half, every hundred yards or so,
stood the ice statues of our Order's famous pilots. There were fifteen
of these white monoliths. Wind and sun and freezing mists had worked at
the statues' features; it was nearly impossible to distinguish the
pitted, imperious face of Tisander the Wary from the Tycho's jowly
frown. I skated backward into the Ring, absorbed for a moment with the
silly notion of reading the Tycho's programs from his statue's deformed
features. But it was impossible to do so. Even if the sculptor had once
captured the Tycho's essence and chiseled it into ice, even though the
faces were resculpted once every year or so, the slow melt of time had
degraded any information bound into the ice crystals and had rendered
the programs unreadable.

Almost unreadable. For a moment, I struggled with my perceptions,
without and within, and I was dizzy. I looked out and up, and there was
the dizzying effect of concentric circles: the satiny, whitish circle of
the Winter Ring where the farsiders laughed and spun and ground their
toepicks into the ice, the circle of blue and red benches, and the ice
statues surrounded by the curving orange street, and above the street,
the tenements gleaming like mountains of glass, and far above, the
marbled crown of the sky. I turned my head, looking for the
warrior-poet, but he was nowhere in sight. Although I very badly wanted
to find him, I felt that I must pay attention to this new perception of
mine, this new way of seeing.

Near me a harijan was flopping about on skates too big for him. He was a
savage, jowly man dressed in a purple parka and yellow pants so tight
that his membrum bulged beneath the dirty silk. Because his boots
provided too little ankle support; he had no feel for the edges of his
blades. He stumbled about grasping for the arms and the support of
nearby farsiders. In a way, he reminded me of Bardo. I looked more
closely and saw determination and the stamp of cruelty on his thin lips.

In another way he reminded me of the Tycho, of the Tycho's imago that I
had encountered inside the Entity. I stared at the harijan, and it was
like staring at Bardo and the Tycho. Each of them, I thought, bore a
streak of cruelty, of self-love and brazen sexuality. I knew well how
these traits-these programs-had been shaped in Bardo's case. But what of
the Tycho and the comicly dressed harijan? I was dizzy as I turned and
stared at the Tycho's icy, half-melted face. Suddenly I knew a thing:
The Tycho's cruelty and the harijan's (and Bardo's, too), had been
programmed by the cruelty of their fathers. I do not mean to imply that
all men who are cruel have cruel fathers. The fount of cruelty is as
deep and turbid as an ocean. But certainly it was so with the harijan; I
could read his cruelty program as plainly as I could read his fear.

I bent over, resting my arms on my knees. I gasped for air. All around
were children, men and women, and the statues of my father pilots, and I
saw in each the set of muscles and nerves which betrayed their programs.

A woman with a slender chest and great, streamlined thighs clumsily
landed a waltz jump, and I understood-I "saw at a glance," as the cetics
say-the many years of practice and the slightly mistaken programming
causing her to catch the outside edge of her skate and nearly stumble.

Here a pretty boy cried in frustration because he couldn't cut a decent
eight, and there another laughed to hide the very same emotion, a
program he had probably learned from his stoical father. How many
programs command the muscles and thoughts of a human being? There are
one million, twenty-seven hundred and six such programs. (I am joking,
of course. I record this only because an infamous cetic once set himself
the task of counting and classifying all possible programs, and he gave
up after reaching this number. The number and variety of programs is
potentially infinite, as is man.) There are programs determining the
fluidity of our speed strokes, and there are programs which lead us to
lather our bodies in precisely the same manner every time we bathe. We
are programmed to fear darkness and loud noises, and we program
ourselves to fear a thousand things, failure and poverty, for instance.

I saw these programs on the farsiders' faces: the sex programs, the men
lusting for women, the dark women and the plump, the skinny or the tall;
the women with their subtle body language, initiating and often running
the men's sex programs, the different shades and manifestations of lust;
and more sex programs, the children programmed with dormant, powerful
urges, completely unaware of their own programs; the love, dread, pride,
shame, sympathy, grief, melancholy and joy programs, the programs of
hate and rage; there were beliefs and belief programs in the eyes of a
Summerworld Buddhist, a belief in cyclic universes and rebirth of the
soul and many, many stranger beliefs; there were programs to control
beliefs, and occasionally, on certain naked faces, the imprimatur of
beliefs which controlled programs. I saw one woman, a wise, strikingly
beautiful woman wearing the embroidered gown of a Urradeth
neurologician, who bore the burn of self-mastery in her brilliant eyes.

A few, rare people, it seemed, were sometimes able to master their
beliefs and run their own programs. How this fascinated me! These belief
programs which can write, edit and command other programs are called
master or metaprograms. I wondered at the origin of the programs which
run our lives. Why is one man quick and another slow? Why will one woman
smile knowingly as she speaks of ananke and ultimate fate while her
sister denies meaning, and drugs herself with toalache and sex? Could it
be, as the splicers claim, that our initial set of programs is wholly
written by our chromosomes?

I do not believe so. Ah, but from where does this disbelief, this
program of skepticism arise-from my chromosomes as well? And how were my
chromosomes programmed? By chance evolution? By God? And who, then,
wrote the deity program, or the programs of the natural universe? Who
programs the programmer? One could go mad pondering such infinite
regresses of cause and effect. I do not believe there can be a simple
explanation. Some programs-an infant's crying, defecating, sucking and
sleeping modes, for example-are certainly written in our chromosomes.

Other programs are copies of our parents' programs; sometimes the world
we live in writes programs into our nerves with pleasure and, too often,
with fire and pain. The origin of certain programs is a secret which
will perhaps always remain unknown. Does the brain hold the secret in
the way it molds itself to fit its tiny corner of the universe, the
billions of neurons weaving together, forming trillions of
interconnections? The akashics believe so, yet they have never realized
their dream of mapping and understanding man's soul. It is a commonplace
that each human being possesses a unique set of programs. Each of us
takes great pride in this uniqueness; we often justify our existence by
looking up at the stars and observing that in all the universe, there is
no other being quite like ourself. We are special, we believe, and
therefore uniquely valuable. In a way, we are our own unique universe,
as worthy of existence as the greater universe surrounding us. I, too,
had always believed this; I had always regarded my arrogance, vanity and
rage programs as endearing faults without which the bright jewel I knew
as Mallory Ringess would somehow shatter inward and cease to shine, like
a diamond with only a single, cracked face. Now I looked around the ice
ring at the faces of my fellow human beings, and I was no longer so
sure. I saw arrogance as an exemplar completed a difficult axel, and
vanity in the carriage of a pretty, black-skinned matron off
Summerworld. All the programs which drove me to change my flesh, to
love, to joke, to murder, to seek the secret of life-each particle of
myself was somewhere duplicated within the selfness of another man,
woman or child. My programs were not unique; only their seemingly random
arrangement within me was. Why should I take pride in programs which
sprang from the coil of inherited chromosomes or from my mother's
painful pinches as she programmed me not to lie? Why should I be aware
of myself as a separate being at all?

For me the problem of uniqueness was really worse than I have stated. I
was full of my new power of reading people's programs; when I looked
inside myself I could almost read my own. And I saw a horrible thing:
Not only were my programs not unique, but in many ways, I was no more in
control of my programs than a dog was of its own wagging tail. Even the
best of human beings-such as the Urradeth neurologician-could control
only some of their programs. And as for the others, the harijan, whores
and wormrunners that I saw, well, the warrior-poet had been right, after
all. We are sheep awaiting the butcheries of time; we are clots of brain
tissue and bundles of muscle, meat-machines that jump to the touch of
our most immediate passions; we-I have said this before-we react rather
than act; we have thoughts in place of thinking. We are, simply, robots;
robots aware that we are robots, but robots nonetheless.

And yet. And yet we are something more. I have seen a dog, Yuri's
beloved Kyoko, a lowly beast whose programs were mostly muzzle and
hunger, growls and smell, overcome her fear and flight programs to hurl
herself at a great white bear, purely out of love for her master. Even
dogs possess a spark of free will. And as for humans, within each of us,
I believe, burns a flame of free will. In some it is tenuous and dim as
an oilstone's flame; in others it burns hot and bright. But if our will
is truly free, why do our robot programs run our bodies and minds? Why
do we not run our programs? Why do we not write our own programs? Was it
possible that all women and men could free themselves and thus become
their own masters?

No, it was not possible. I looked at the faces of a tychist and a
Jacarandan whore, and their ugliness overwhelmed me. How ugly the set of
bitter experience, the lines and etchings of time! In their terminal
adulthood, how ugly and tragi-comic adult human beings really were! With
eyes for a moment freed of the distorting lense of my own programs-with
the eyes of a child-I saw a tragic thing: We are prisoners of our
natural brains. As children we grow, and new programs are layered down,
set into the jelly of our brains. When we are young we write many of
these programs in order to adapt to a bizarre and dangerous environment.

And then we grow some more. We mature. We find our places in our cities,
in our societies, in ourselves. We form hypotheses as to the nature of
things. These hypotheses shape us in turn, and yet more programs are
written until we attain a certain level of competence and mastery, even
of comfort, with our universe. Because our programs have allowed us this
mastery, however limited, we become comfortable in ourselves, as well.

And then there is no need for new programs, no need to erase or edit the
old. We even forget that we were once able to program ourselves. Our
brains grow opaque to new thoughts, as rigid as glass, and our programs
are frozen for life, hardwired, so to speak within our hardened brains.

And this is how we were designed to be. Evolution has made us to grow,
to grow up, to have our children, to pass on our programs, and then to
die. Life goes on this way. And so the flame burns weakly but freely,
trapped inside a sphere of glass. We burn with sufficient light to
illuminate the code of our programs, but we lack the means. We don't
know how, and we are afraid, utterly terrified to break the glass. And
even if we could master our fear, what then?

If I could find courage, I wondered, what would I see? Would I be
ashamed of the arrangement of programs-of my very self-beyond my
control? Ah, but what if I could write new metaprograms controlling this
arrangement of programs? Then I might one day attain the uniqueness and
value that I found so lacking in myself and the rest of my race; as an
artist composes a tone poem, I could create myself and call into being
wonderful new programs which had never existed within the rippling tides
of the universe. Then I would be free at last, and the flame would burn
like star fire; then I would be something new, as new to myself as the
morning sun is to a newborn child.

Where does the flame go when the flame explodes?

On the ice of the Winter Ring, surrounded by people skating, laughing,
jumping, grimacing and shouting, as I stared at the frozen, mutilated
Tycho's face and at the face of the harijan in the yellow pants and at
the faces of all the people on the ice and on the worlds of man, as I
stared at my own face, in an instant, I had this dream of being
something new. But it was only a dream. When I looked up and out across
the Ring, I saw Dawud skating toward a woman who looked like my mother,
and my dizziness gave way to anger, and I became a robot once again.

I accelerated across the ice, dodging the people as best I could. The
wind whistled in my ears and stung my face. I dropped my shoulder to
pass a half-naked courtesan. When the shivering, blue-skinned woman saw
me approaching madly at speed, and saw that I was skating straight
toward a warrior-poet, she made an
"O" of fear with her tattooed lips.

She jumped out of my way. Dawud saw me, too. I was perhaps thirty yards
from him, but I could see him smile. It was a smile of admiration, and
faintly, of surprise. He bowed his head to me. The muscles jumped in his
throat, and his curly black hair rippled in the wind. My mother opened
her fur collar, and he immediately struck one of his needles in her
neck. Then he sped away toward the eastern half of the Ring. My mother,
probably following his smile, turned, saw me, tilted her head, and
pushed off in the opposite direction.

I could follow only one of them, so I sprinted after my mother. I caught
her at the edge of the Ring as she passed beneath the milky, gleaming
statue of Tisander the Wary. I grabbed the hood of her furs and yanked
her to a stop. She didn't struggle. I pivoted just in time to see Dawud,
in his rainbow kamelaika, disappear down one of the eight streets giving
out onto the sliddery circling the Ring.

"Mother," I gasped, "why did you run away from me?"

A few fearful arhats near us snapped their tangerine robes and kept
their distance, although they looked at us with the awe which farsiders
so often have of pilots. (And what is awe, I suddenly realized, if not a
blend of love and fear?)

"Where is the poet skating? What did he do to you?"

"Mallory," she said, and she shut her eyes. Her eyelids fluttered as if
she were passing through dream-sleep. She was breathing heavily, and her
eye was twitching, slightly. It was an old program. I had thought Mehtar
had cut it from her muscles when he had sculpted her face, but
apparently the program ran deep. She opened her eyes and squinted as she
cocked her head and asked, "Why were you tracking me?"

"Where have you been?"

"And why must you answer a question with a question? Haven't I taught
you? That it's disrespectful?"

I told her of my meeting Dawud in the Hibakusha Gallery and of what had
followed. I propped my boot up on a nearby bench, digging at the old
wood with my blade. "Why were you meeting a warrior-poet, Mother?"

"It was a chance meeting."

"You don't believe in chance," I said.

"You think I'm lying? I'm not lying; my mother taught me. Not to lie."

She laughed then, a disturbed laugh as if she had a private joke with
herself. There was a deep tension in her laughter. I detected the subtle
strains of untruth, and I found-amazingly-that I could read this
particular program of my mother's. She was, quite simply, lying.

"What did the poet put in your neck then?"

"Nothing," she said. She reached up and touched the ugly wood collar pin
fastening her furs. "He was returning the pin. It had come off. He found
it lying on the ice."

I looked behind me at the streets which radiated away from the Ring,
cutting between the circle of glass tenements. I considered pursuing
Dawud, but I was afraid I would lose my mother. And clearly she knew
what I was thinking. Clearly she planned to lure me away from him.

"The warrior-poet could have killed you," I said. "The warrior-beasts
can kill anyone they choose."

"And who does Dawud choose to kill?" I asked. "Soli?"

"How would I know?" Lies, lies, lies.

Her eye twitched then, and I saw what I should have seen long ago: My
mother was addicted to toalache-the facial tics were the result of her
hiding this shame from her friends, and from herself. I saw other
things, too, other programs: The layers of fat girdling her hips, which
betrayed her compulsive eating programs and love of chocolate drinks and
candies; her arrogant speech patterns, the clipped sentence fragments
hinting at her belief that others were too stupid to understand any but
the briefest bursts of information (and hinting, too, at her basic
shyness); the way she had programmed herself to squint in place of
smiling. The cetics call these program revealing body signs "tells." I
searched her face for the frowns, eye-rolls and blinks that would tell
the tale of herself. I saw ... shocking things. I had always known-even
if I had not been aware of the knowledge-that she possessed a sort of
slovenly voluptuousness. Now I saw something else; now her omnifarious
sexuality was revealed. To my vast embarrassment, I saw that she was
capable of coupling with an examplar, boy, woman, alien or beast-or even
with a beam of pure radiant energy, if that kind of union between flesh
and light were possible. (The arhats, of course, believe it is.) If she
was chaste in everyday practice, it was not because she didn't have her
desires. It is from my mother, I believe, that I have inherited my
wildness.

My hands were numb from squeezing the wood slats of the bench, so I
rubbed them together. Around the Ring, the flame globes began to flare.

The ice was shiny with hundreds of lights. The skaters were deserting in
mass for the nearby cafes. Only a few groups of harijan were left near
the edge of the Ring. In the dropping darkness, their shouts seemed
harsh and too near.

"I think there's a plot to kill Soli," I half-whispered. "What do you
know of it, Mother?"

"Nothing," From the tightness of her lips I saw that she knew
everything.

"If Soli is assassinated you'll be the first person the Timekeeper will
suspect. He'll drag you before the akashics, lay your brain bare."

She squinted and said, "There are ways. Of fooling the akashics and
their primitive computers."

For reasons of my own I was very concerned with -any limitations of the
akashic computers, and I asked, "What ways?"

"Ways, Haven't I taught you that there are always ways of outwitting
your competitors?"

"You also taught me that it's wrong to murder."

She tilted her head and nodded. "A child must be taught certain ...
certainties. Otherwise the universe will engulf her. But when she is a
woman, she learns what is permitted."

"You'd murder Soli? How blithely we speak of murder, then."

"You speak.

I've never killed a living thing."

"But you'd send the poet to do your killing. Is that permitted?"

"Everything is permitted. To those who see the need. Certain few people
are chosen. For these few, the laws of the many don't apply."

"And who choses them, Mother?"

"They're chosen by fate. Fate marks them, and they must leave their
mark."

"Murder Soli and you'll leave a bloody mark."

"The great acts of history," she said, "are written in blood."

"You see Soli's murder as an act of greatness?"

"Without Soli, there would be no more talk of Schism. The Order would be
preserved."

"You think that?"

She smiled her disturbed, conceited smile, and the wind began to blow.

It was a bitter wind carrying in the first cold of night. My mother
pulled her collar tightly around her throat. Her robe was drab and
ill-fitting; I realized that she habitually wore these plain garments as
a kind of camouflage. People would look at the lumpy folds and conclude
that here was a selfless woman caring little for style or ostentation.

But appearances, I thought, lie. In truth, my mother gloried in herself
as if she were still a little girl. "How I hate Soli!" she said.

I kicked my blade into the ice and said, "And yet you chose him to be my
father."

"I chose his chromosomes to make yours," she corrected.

I took off my glove and ran my fingers through my hair feeling for the
strands of red, which were coarser and stiffer than the black hairs. But
my fingers were too cold and numb to feel much of anything. "Why,
Mother?" I asked suddenly.

"Don't ask me these questions."

"Tell me-I have to know."

She sighed and sucked her tongue as if it were a ball of chocolate. "Men
are tools," she said. "And their chromosomes are tools. I slelled Soli's
chromosomes to make you. Lord Pilot of our Order."

I rubbed the side of my nose and looked at her. She was squinting at me,
biting her lip and pulling at the fat skin beneath her chin. I thought I
saw the skeleton of her plan. She would connive to make me Lord Pilot,
and then she would manipulate me from behind as if I were a phantast's
puppet. When I accused her of this, she asked me, "How could I
manipulate my own son? You manipulate yourself. I have no desire to
manipulate. The future Lord Pilot."

As she laughed to herself, I thought that I had been blind to the
essential conceit of her plan. I looked at her eyes, which were dark
blue pools against the deeper darkness of her hood, and I saw
overweening pride and ambition. I said, "But it's the Timekeeper who
rules the Order, not the Lord Pilot."

"The Timekeeper," she agreed.

And then I knew; then I could perceive the full flesh of her grand
strategy. She said the word
"Timekeeper," and there was an unbearable
stress in the syllables of that word. My mother was an ambitious woman.

She would have the Timekeeper killed, too. And more-she would plot to
make herself the Lord of the Order.

Vanity, vanity, vanity.

"No, mother," I said, reading the tells on her face, "you'll never rule
the Order."

The air escaped her lips in a quick "whoosh." She clasped her hands to
her belly as if I'd punched her beneath her heart. "My son has powers,"

she said. "You can read me, I think. Your own mother."

"I can read some of your programs."

"What have they done to you?" She looked at me as if she were seeing me
for the first time, with horror tightening her anxious squint. (And what
is horror if not a blending of hate and fear?)

"What has the poet done to you, Mother?"

"Don't answer a question with a question! Why were you always so
disobedient? I thought I'd taught you. Obedience long ago."

I did not like the turn of our conversation. I hated the way she
pronounced the word "obedience." It was an ugly word; the way she said
it, it was a word rife with strange connotations and terrible meaning. I
remembered that the warrior-poets were infamous for instilling in their
victims an irreversible and total obedience. What poisons had Dawud
planted in her brain? Genotoxins to combine with her chromosomes and to
subtly alter her deepest programs? Had he introduced into her blood a
slel-virus that would devour her brain and replace it, bit by bit, with
preprogrammed neurologics? With obedient neurologics? Had he slel-mimed
her brain? My mother stared at the dark circle of the Ring, and I
wondered what portion of her free will had already been dissolved and
replaced by the will of the warrior-poet.

"This poet is very dangerous," I said. He'd kill you like a flea, if he
wanted."

"Everyone dies."

"He'd kill your soul."

"I'm not afraid of dying."

"I always thought you were afraid, Mother."

"No, I'm not afraid. Doesn't the acceptance of death free us from fear?

And if we're free, isn't everything possible? No, I'm not afraid."

I rubbed the ice from my mustache and said, "Those are the poet's words,
I think, not yours."

She pulled her hood more tightly around her head. She began speaking in
a slow, even voice, as if she were explaining ring theory to a novice.

Even though she kept her voice calm, I could hear the rhythms of new
programs in her voice. Her words, the ways she emphasized and
articulated certain sounds (she overaspirated the consonants made by
stopping the flow of air with the tongue), the choppy phrasing of her
sentences and thoughts-everything about her was the same yet slightly
different. I could read her, but I could not tell if the new programs
originated merely from Dawud's ideas and beliefs, or if he had in fact
mimed her brain. I trembled when she said, "You think Dawud manipulates
me? No, it is I. Who manipulates him. He thinks he has found a way. To
eventually control my programs. Call it slel-mime or call it what you
will. He thinks this. But from where did this thought come? I gave him
these thoughts. It's the most subtle kind of manipulation; my mother
taught me about manipulation."

Had Dawud rewritten her software or carked the hardware? I trembled to
know this.

"Perhaps the akashics could help you," I said. "I think not."

"I could take you to them. But you must tell me how I can find you."

"Haven't your friends told you? That I've become a student of the
warrior-poet's?"

"Where can I find the poet?"

"And why would my son want to find a warrior-poet?"

"Perhaps I want to warn him that he's being manipulated." In truth, I
wanted to trap him before he had a chance to mime my mother's brain, if
he already hadn't. I wanted to kill him.

"It's the nature of my manipulation," she said, "that to inform him he's
being manipulated will only work to manipulate him into believing he can
manipulate the manipulation by manipulating me into believing I'm
manipulating him. It's a complicated thing. Do as you will." She smiled
and nodded her head, turning into the light, Her shadow lengthened into
a black spear, then shortened, back and forth across the glossy ice.

"After all, no one is manipulating you."

"Oh, God!"

"Haven't I taught you not to blaspheme?"

"Where is the poet, Mother?"

"Am I my master's keeper?"

"Where, Mother?"

"If you can read me, then you tell me."

"You've sent him to murder Soli," I said.

"Soli," she repeated. She closed her eyes because it must have been
finally clear to her that I could read her.

"Why would the poet murder for you, then?"

"It's an exchange, of course. Of devotion. The warrior-poets seek
converts, don't they? Therefore, I devote myself to becoming. Like a
warrior-poet. And in exchange, Dawud will-"

"When, Mother? Oh, God, it's too late isn't it?"

"How I hate Soli!"

"Mother!"

"Don't look for a warrior-poet," she said, "you might find him."

"I'll kill him."

"No, Mallory, don't leave me. Let him do his work. Why would you want to
save Soli? As we speak the poet is most likely climbing Soli's tower. Or
sending Soli's guards over. Or asking Soli the poem."

I kicked my skate against the ice in an attempt to knock some blood back
into my numb feet. I was cold and confused, and I asked, "What poem?"

"It's a tradition of the warrior-poets," she said. "They trap and
immobilize their victims. And then they recite part of an ancient poem.

If the victim can complete it, he's spared. Of course, no one ever knows
the poem."

I pushed away from her and began stroking across the Ring. I could not
believe her. She was mocking me. Surely a warrior-poet would not risk
failure by taking the time to ask his victim a poem.

"Where are you going?" she called out before I had skated a dozen yards.

"To warn Soli of a madman!" I shouted. "Don't leave me! Please!"

"Goodbye, Mother."

She tilted her head from side to side and shouted back:

Because I could not stop for Death He kindly stopped for me.

The tower held but just Ourselves And Immortality

"That's the poem," she said. "If the warrior-poet traps you, too."

I bent low and drew in deep breaths of air as I waved goodbye and pushed
against the ice. I did not intend to let a murderer-a master of
slel-mime, a madman-trap me. It was my intention to trap him.

Chapter 22 - The Hanuman-Ordando Paradox

To be fully alive is to be fully aware. To be fully aware is to be full
of fear. To fear is to die.
-Saying of the Warrior poets

I raced eastward through the nighttime city streets. I took a shortcut
through the heart of the Farsider's Quarter. The poet had a lead on me,
but he could not know the City as I did. Neither, I hoped, could he
skate as fast or as far without rest. The dimmed colors of the glissades
and lesser glidderies seemed to flow and blend, red into orange, purple
into green. The pretty buildings lining the extremely narrow Street of
the Neurosingers, with their balconies and lacy stone grillwork, were
hung with dripping icicles. Directly below, the drips had frozen into a
jungle of icy bumps, tubercles and miniature volcanoes. The skating was
treacherous so I turned down the Street of Fumes. There the ice was not
quite so irregular, but there were dangers of a different kind. A myriad
of odors wafted out of the half-open doorways of the remembrancer dens.

The air was redolent with the bubble of hot tar, with the fragrance of
hair oils and new woolens and a thousand other smells and smell-drugs.

Instantly I recalled sprinting down the street the day of the pilot's
race. (It did not seem possible that three years had passed since that
day.) Memories consumed me. I could almost see Soli smoothly stroking
fifty yards ahead; I could almost hear the click-clack of his long,
shiny racing blades. I was passing one of the larger dens when a couple
of common whores opened the door. Their lips were stained red and their
breath stank of alcohol. They stood holding hands beneath the cold flame
globe, which was one of the clear types, with the plasma crackling along
its colors within. They blocked my way and immediately sidled up next to
me. The taller of the two-her hair was like dark, red wine-flung open
her furs. She wasn't wearing any under-robes; her skin was naked and
white. She offered to take me down one of the alleys off the street, to
spread her furs and lie back in the snow, to perform an immediate
coupling without charge. She was very drunk. No doubt she was
remembering previous, impulsive pleasures she had experienced while
under the hot wash of alcohol. That is the limitation of that particular
drug: It brings clear memories of other times passed while drunk, but
little else. I smelled the heady esters of skotch and remembered the
night in the master pilot's bar when I had first met Soli. I hated Soli,
I remembered, so why should I hurry to push the two whores aside, to
rush halfway across the City to warn him? Why not stay to take my
pleasure with the whore? (She was quite beautiful-one of those rare
whores who loved whoring because she loved men.) Why not let Soli die?

Although I made fast progress, crossing the broad, milky ice of the Way
before the nightly swarms rushed into the Quarter, I worried that Dawud
would reach Soli's tower ahead of me. In truth, I did not want Soli to
die. He was my Lord Pilot, my uncle, my father; it would have been wrong
to let a warrior-poet kill him. Also-and this was wholly selfish of me-I
thought I might earn his gratitude. If I could soften his heart, he
might forgive Bardo and Justine (and me), and I might stop the schism
before it really began. I considered calling for a sled. However, on the
narrow, twisting streets of the Old City through which I had to pass, a
sled would only have been a hindrance. It was one of the few times in my
life when I wished for the convenience of a fone. Then I could simply,
and instantly, warn him that Death was on his way. But, as the
Timekeeper would say, if we permitted fones people would forever be
foning each other with their most immediate and frivolous thoughts. They
would make appointments to meet each other at a certain place and time,
and they would demand the use of timepieces, and of private sleds to
carry them at whim about the City. The streets would fill with
explosive, noisy machines and other noisome things, because once the
technology beast was uncaged, people would want squawking private radios
and private sense boxes and a host of other things. When I was a novice,
I had often sniggered at this domino theory of technology, but later,
when I had seen Tria and Gehanna and other hellish planets which chose
not to limit their technology, I decided that in this one matter the
Timekeeper's edicts were justified.

And yet when I reached the entrance of the Danladi Tower, I cursed the
Timekeeper and his edicts. The wind spilled down from Urkel's ghostly
foothills, down over the deserted Hall of the Ancient Pilots and the
Chess Pavilion, whistling through the dormitories and lesser buildings
at the edge of Resa. It whipped clouds of ice-powder into the Tower's
open doorway. There was a dreadful sucking sound as of air being forced
through a tube. The rectangular wooden door, which was as plain and
severe as the illustrious Lord Danladi had been, creaked as it swung
back and forth, and it was smeared with blood. There was blood
everywhere. Inside the doorway, corpses littered the hallway. There were
six of them. A journeyman lay crumpled with her throat cut open like a
second red mouth; next to her-half on top of her-slumped the corpse of
Tymon the Equivocator, a pilot who had graduated the year before Bardo
and I. The line of corpses progressed down the cold, quiet hallway to
the stairwell. Clearly, the pilots and journeymen had tried to stop the
warrior-poet, and he must have fallen on them with his quick, killing
knife like a madman among children. The freshscrubbed body of a novice
blocked the stairwell, hugging the first few steps; his pink lips pushed
against the stone lip of the fourth step. I had to jump over him. His
once-immaculate woolens were stained. There was a red circle above his
heart. It looked like a sign above a cutting shop. There was a fresh,
soapy smell in the air, as well as the smells of blood and fear.

I climbed the winding stairs as silently as I could. And then through
the short hallway to Soli's chambers, and all the while my boots slapped
against the stone and my breath exploded from my lungs like rocket
gases. I was afraid my noise would have warned the warrior-poet, if
indeed it wasn't already too late for warnings. The white furs of the
inner chamber were drenched with the blood of Soli's journeyman,
Markoman li Towt, who was kneeling backwards on dead legs with his arms
splayed out and his head thrown back like a doll's. The neck was cut and
broken, and his thin lips were pulled back against his fine, white
teeth. The rest of the room-the tapestries on the wall, the low couches
and tables, the prayer books, chess set and the coffee service-was
undisturbed. The door to Soli's inner chamber was ajar so I pushed it
and stepped inside. Into chaos. I had never been inside his sanctum
before, and I was surprised to see that Soli kept plants. Green plants
and flowers were everywhere; there were potted plants, plants on
shelves, plants hanging from the slanting, black slab of the obsidian
ceiling. (The Danladi Tower, I think is the only building in the City
made entirely of that glassy substance.) Everywhere there was wreckage.

Plants and pots had been smashed into the fireplace; a stringy mass of
charred vegetable matter was roasting, entangled between the andirons
and the crackling logs. Loose black dirt and shards of clay ground
beneath my boots. I smelled the perfume of crushed shira flowers. And
then, through the foliage of a half-overturned bush I saw them. Near the
window the poet had bound Soli to the bole of a spinnaker tree. A cocoon
of sticky, steely protein filaments, the kind they grow on Qallar, was
wrapped around Soli's chest, biting into the bark of the tree behind
him. He was struggling as furiously as a netted fish, pulling at the
cocoon, lumping from side to side, trying to overturn the tree. But the
tree was huge. It grew from a huge pot set into a recess in the floor.

Its branches spread out beneath the skylight twenty feet above us.

Leaves shook and rattled, and a few of the tree's triangular, yellow
flowers spiraled lazily to the floor.

"Don't come any closer, please, Mallory."

This came from the warrior-poet, who was standing half behind the tree.

The colors of his kamelaika were dirtied with blood; blood stained the
tree where his clothes had touched the gray bark. He held the point of
his thin killing knife pressed to the corner of Soli's eye. He called
out, "I was just about to run this up his optic nerve, but once again
you've surprised me."

Soli's drugged eyes were open wide and twitching. Almost every muscle in
his face was locked, and sweat globules ran off his forehead. He stank
of fear.

"Let him go," I said.

I stepped closer and Dawud held out his hand. "Your mother was not
supposed to have revealed our plans. How did you get her to speak?"

I pointed at Soli and repeated, "Let him go."

"But we haven't reached the moment," Dawud said. "And in any case, my
order has been paid for his death."

"Yes, I know. Tell me what you've done to my mother."

He laid his hand gently on Soli's head. He ignored my demand. "Your
mother has paid well for this possibility."

"Possibility?" I did not know what he meant. Soli stared emptily as if
he knew nothing at all. His face was blanker than an autist's. There was
nothing to read except pain and fear.

"What type of poison is this, then?" I asked. "That can rob a man of his
self-awareness and render the programs unreadable?" I was trembling to
rush over to Soli, to slap the anger back into his face. I did not like
to see him like this.

"No, Pilot, don't move! We've almost reached the moment of the
possible." He said this by way of explanation. (Perhaps he could read my
curiosity program.) "Soli is almost alive; in moments he'll be reborn."

Suddenly Soli screamed and bit through his lip. Blood ran down his chin
and neck. The bloody flap of his lower lip stuck to his teeth; his
incisors were visible through the ragged tear. All at once every muscle
in his body seemed to fire and contract. His body was a knot of spasming
muscles. I thought the spasms would break his bones and burst his
tendons but Mehtar had sculpted him into an Alaloi, after all, and
sculpted well.

"He's in agony!"

Dawud smiled at me and said, "Please stay where you are, or the Lord
Pilot will have to die before his moment."

"You're torturing him!"

"Yes, of course; how else to awaken him? Pain is the lightning that will
illuminate his mind and wake him up." He ran his thick fingers through
Soli's sweat-drenched hair. He made a fist, clamping the hair in his
fingers, holding Soli's head tight. His red ring gleamed through the
black tangle like a burning pool of blood. "You see, Soli is living
intensely now. I've given him the drug. As I speak, the sound waves are
striking his skin like fists. Do you smell my perfume? The pungence of
the kana oil? To Soli it is acid eating away his nose and lungs. You
can't imagine his pain: The light of the flame globes is like knives
through his eyes. He wishes he could close them, he prays. And in a
short while, I'll run the tip of this knife into his eye, right up the
optic nerve. And then there will truly be a frenzy, then the lightning
will split his head. And then, the moment, Pilot. A single, clear
moment, brighter than lightning, and a moment without fear. I'll take
the lesser life of the robot and give him the greater. Soon-you see he's
almost ready."

"But he'll be dead!"

"No, he'll have truly lived for a moment, and in the endless rings of
eternity, his perfect moment will live again and again."

"That's madness!"

"He's ready! Look can you see the fear in his eyes, like an ocean! He
hears my every word, though he understands nothing but fear. The fear;
the ring of eternity; the pain."

I did not want to know any more about the warrior-poet's bizarre
religion; I did not care if Soli overcame his master fear program and
lived his perfect moment. The poet's need to carve his beliefs into
Soli's flesh sickened me. Why, I wondered, must fanatics always infect
others with the virus of their beliefs? Why must beliefs always seek to
invade its victims, to fill them with fever, and then to infect yet
others like a plague? Why this madness, I wanted to know? I watched the
knife dip towards Soli's waiting eye, and I screamed, "No!"

I moved across the room. I fell into slowtime, and I moved in a frenzy
of speed. It was this rash, lightning movement, I think which saved
Soli's life. (The lesser life, that is. The simple life of mathematics
and westering that a pilot was born to live.) The poet had no more time
for torture. He could have killed Soli immediately, but then there would
have been no "moment of the possible." To his skewed system of belief,
the assassination would have been in vain. He watched me jump over an
uprooted bush, and with his full, red lips he made a sour face. It was
plain he did not want to kill me. But he shook his head and his voice
poured forth like wine. "You almost could have been one of us," he said.

"A lover of eternity."

He accelerated into slowtime; he was all precision and exquisite motion,
a blur of flashing red and green rings and swirling cape and flickering
steel. I knew my only hope was to avoid the finger knives, and poisons
and needles secreted within his cape, to dodge or block the edge of his
fist, and above all, to slip beneath the scythe of his killing knife. I
had to close with him. Then I could grapple, hand to neck and arm to
arm. I could apply the art the Timekeeper had taught me and bring the
power of my Alaloi muscles and bones to bear.

But it was not so easy to close with him. He must have immediately
guessed my strategy. He lunged at my belly in diversion and then slashed
at my fingers. There was a heat in my fingertips as if the displaced air
of the lightning knife had burned me. I looked down. He had cut through
two of my fingernails into the soft tissue beneath. The blood was
welling upslowly, slowly, everything appeared to move so slowly in
slowtime-beneath the nail. We whirled and thrashed about, crashing
through the plants. I knocked my head into the pot of a hanging fern. I
made a fist and squeezed; blooddrops rained onto the leaves of a fairy
moss, slow red splashing against veinous, green lace. I punched at his
throat. He easily blocked my arm, stepping aside as gracefully as a
ballerina. Although we were both deep in the amber of slowtime, it
seemed that he was moving more quickly than I. Either that or he was
reading my programs and anticipating my moves. The arts of a
warrior-poet, I thought, are devious and deadly.

There is one art, however, which the warrior-poets have never mastered.

They, who live every moment so intensely on the brink of death, can
never know the passive, melancholic, secretly fearful mindsets of the
scryers. And who, after all, can truly comprehend the mysterious dance
of future dreams which plays before the inner eye of a scryer? From
where do these images come? In what manner are they made manifest within
the mind? Some say scrying and remembrancing are parts of a single
phenomenon. If it is true that the universe eternally recurs, like a
poet's drama playing over and over again with the same actors acting
precisely the same way during each performance, then isn't an ancient
memory also a vision of the far future? It may be so. As Dawud aimed a
thrust at my eyes-a thrust I barely avoided-I smelled the thickness of
kana oil, and I began to remember. Or so I thought. At first the images
that came to me seemed like recent memories. There Dawud lunged and cut
my hand; there he stabbed at my temple; there he reached inside his cape
and removed a dart enamelled with purple bo poison. But they were not
memories, I realized, but something new. For a moment I thought I was
not seeing these images at all; in one instantaneous particle of time, I
concluded that I was reading the subtle shifts of weight and muscle that
betrayed Dawud's fighting programs. From these tells I was
reconstructing in my mind the sequence of killing moves he would choose
to make-so I thought. He lunged and he stabbed and he plucked a purple
dart from his cape; I watched the skin on the palm of my hand opening
like a fireflower. The sequence of moves was exactly as I had
envisioned. I suddenly knew I was not reading his programs, or rather, I
was not just reading his programs, There were images, precise colors and
motions, a new mode of vision. Dawud lunged and feinted and flicked the
dart at my neck. Something new: I had time to block and counterfeint and
pull my neck out of the way. Was I reading his programs? I did not think
so. I knew that a warrior-Poet is trained from childhood to mask his
programs. For a warrior to telegraph his moves is a sin. And there is
more to it than that. It is a basic result of the theory of games that a
warrior must introduce a number of random elements into his moves, else
his enemy might figure out his strategy. Thus some of the slashes and
feints that Dawud aimed at me were made at random. His muscles and
nerves had been trained-programmed-to fire of their own will at certain
instances. He might plan a lunge and a groin kick only to find his arm
pulling up short and the kick delivered to the throat instead. I could
not be reading these random programs because they originated so quickly,
so impulsively; I could not read his other programs because they were
masked. But if I could not, how did these vivid images come to me? How
did I avoid his killing knife?

I was scrying-I knew it immediately although I tried to deny it. I
entered into that peculiar, melancholic mindset where one's life (and
death) is seen as a slow, almost abstract picture about to be made real.

There was a moment of instantaneity, and then, a brilliant flash as if
the interior of a vast, darkened chamber had suddenly been illuminated.

My eyes were open yet I was momentarily blind to the colors and textures
of the chamber. There were images, a bright mosaic of pattern and
possibility. The various objects of the room, the dividing branches of
the spinnaker tree to my side, the red-streaked rug, the green and
yellow and red plants, the rainbow colors of Dawud's kamelaika, his
cruel, killing, knifeblade of a nose, and his intense eyes so calm and
so aware-all these things seemed to shimmer, to dissolve into a sea of
color, to shimmer again as they flowed and formed and rearranged, and
reformed into the angles and shadows and curves of a warrior-poet in
motion. I "saw" his arms and legs and cape coalesce into a blur of
light. There were images and futures to choose from: He slashed at my
eyes; he slashed at my throat; he planted his foot and slashed my hands.

The possibilities stunned me. I was blind because he had slid his steel
across the blueness of my irises; I was struck dumb because my throat
was in pieces; I could not feel to grip his neck because he had hacked
the fingers from my knuckles. But only one future would come to pass;
his knife could not be in a thousand places at once. He moved, had
moved, will always have moved. The tapestry of events that would in
moments come into existence twisted together. The silver thread of his
thrusting knife, the bright, decorative green and red bands of his
rings, the black, curling threads of his hair, and the red and black
threads of my own, his kamelaika's gold and purple and orange threads,
all the threads of my life were tightening, weaving. But in the end we
choose our futures, as Katharine would have said. As she did say, as she
always will say. The futures formed within me, and without, and Dawud
was about to move. I was scrying-it was a wonderful and terrible thing.

I looked into Dawud's eyes, and the purple fibers and flecks of blue
within his irises shimmered. His pupils dilated. There was vision. With
a scryer's sight, I saw the muscles of the iris diaphragm uncoil, the
long, purplish protein fibers untwisting, and deeper, the vibrating
carbon atoms, the hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen of protein. Dawud's eyes
and the fabrics of the wall tapestries, the blooddrops on his knife,
were alive with proteins. And the atoms of the proteins were composed of
yet tinier particles which possessed charge and mass, color and spin and
charm, and all was movement, oscillation and energy. And deeper still:
The chamber melted into a brilliance of light, and the tiniest of
particles unraveled like balls of gaudy silk. There was an infinity of
meshing, polychromatic, silken threads made of ... but it is impossible
to singularly describe the deepest structure of reality. The threads
were flaming crimson; the threads were molten gold; the threads were the
standing wavefronts of the mechanics and the theorems of the cantors and
the conscious choices of a pilot in slowtime. I followed this thread of
consciousness, staring blindly at the patterns all around me, and I
suddenly knew, as all scryers know, that I was looking at the very
tapestry of the universe as it formed. I watched the threads of the
universal hologram unfold. In a way, I was uncoding the hologram,
looking ahead to read the code, for what is scrying if not the reading
of the master program of the universe? But in the end we choose our
futures. One forming pattern seemed brighter than the others. It was
embroidered with beautiful (and terrible), irridescent threads. The
threads wove, and the greens were glowing emerald, and the purples
brightened to burning indigo. There was a rainbow-colored kamelaika, a
warrior's crimson ring, and a killing knife made of steel. And choice,
there was always choice. Dawud chose to plunge the knife into my
unguarded belly. He came for me. But I saw the motion before he moved,
and when he lunged, I twisted out of the way. He slashed at my throat. I
blocked his arm and locked it, and it snapped. And when he shifted the
knife to his other hand, I jumped away from him and rather clumsily
kicked his groin.

The kick would have maimed a civilized man. But, as I later learned,
when the warrior-poets pass into puberty they undergo a cutting which
enables them to retract their testes into their abdomens at will. (The
slander that the warrior-poets are smooth between the legs is untrue.

Nor is it true that they do not feel the urge to couple with human
females. The poets, of course, worship passion even though they do not
allow its physical expression. Chastity begets intensity, they say.)
Dawud staggered for a moment, then flicked an orange-tipped dart at me.

It missed my head by an inch. I heard it scrape along the individual
follicles as it passed through the long hair hanging over my ear.

"Very good!" he gasped out. "So good, now."

"Damn you!"

"Help me, Pilot."

"Put your knife away, then."

"Help me with Soli."

"No, no, you're mad."

As we continued our deadly game, it must have become clear to him that
something was wrong. In truth, he should have killed me at the first
pass of the knife. Something was very wrong-he must have known this
because he began to talk to me, to try to distract me. And then I caught
his other arm in my hands and broke it, too. The knife went spinning out
of his hand into a clot of roots and dirt. I grabbed his biceps and drew
him closer. Although I expected him to cry out, or to look down in
horror at the sharp prongs of bone ripping through his kamelaika, of
course he did not. He smiled. With his tongue he fumbled about in his
mouth as if he were trying to pry loose a sliver of a baldo nut from his
teeth. But it was not a nut; it was a tiny dart, and he spat it at me
even as I jerked his arm up in front of my face. The dart went into his
own hand. In the moment before the poison paralyzed him, he gasped,
"Scryer-pilot, warrior-pilot-I should have known."

His entire body spasmed and went rigid, like Soli's. I searched inside
the compartments of his robe until I found the golden, tubular spinneret
all warrior-poets carry. I shook it against my ear listening to the
liquid proteins slosh inside the tube. It was nearly full. I held the
tube over the poet's chest, and as I squeezed the pressure-sensitive
end, an exceedingly fine jet of proteins squirted from the tip and
hardened into a steely strand. It took me a few moments to circle and
recircle his body-I had to half-lift him off the floor-and I bound him
in a sticky cocoon.

I had defeated a warrior-poet!

My moments of scrying passed, and I returned to realtime. I sat back
against the bole of a rubber tree. I was exhausted, elated and afraid.

Dawud slowly regained the use of his muscles as I watched. He must have
absorbed much less of the poison than Soli had, either that or his
accelerated metabolism had burned it out of his body. Soli, I saw,
remained as stiff and unmoving as a robot.

"How do I go about cutting him free?" I asked Dawud.

"You must cut me free first," he said as he worked his jaws. "Please." I
looked at him to see if he was joking. I could not think of a single
reason why I should cut him loose.

"Warrior-pilot, scryer-pilot-are you listening? On Qallar there is a
code of honor. Cut me loose and give me back my knife. Or kill me
yourself. I need to die."

There was not the slightest hint of deception in his voice. A
warrior-poet cannot live with the shame of defeat and capture. I am sure
that if I had immediately freed him, he would have plunged the knife
through his eye and into his brain, which is how a warrior-poet must
kill himself when it is time. There was an excitement about his whole
being. If he had been Devaki, he might have employed the uswa tense of
"exalted impatience" to indicate his eagerness for the coming moment.

I bent over and picked up the knife. The steel was sticky with black
dirt. There was a spot beneath the olive skin of his neck where the
great artery pulsed. I could kill him easily, as a Devaki kills a
wounded shagshay bull. Why should I deny him his supreme moment?

"I could kill you," I told him. "Please, Pilot."

"I should kill you."

"You know about killing, it is said."

I hesitated, prying dirt-chips from the knife with my fingernail. There
was fear in the warrior-poet's eyes.

"Kill me quickly," he said. "Is it that easy to kill, then?"

"It is easy, Pilot. You should know. The knife, now, quickly before the
moment passes."

I was afraid to kill him, and he was afraid of my fear. He feared that I
would not kill him. Thus he would lose his perfect moment. He would be
doomed to the crushing mundaneness of quotidian life, and this, I saw,
was the single thing that all warrior-poets feared. And if I helped him
over to the other side, as he wanted, what then? He would be as dead as
dirt, and there would be no more possibilities, then or forever.

"I can't kill you," I said.

"To live, I die-you've heard our saying before, haven't you, Pilot? And
when I die, I'll live again and forever."

"Damn you and your paradoxes!"

"Yes, the Hanuman-Ordando Paradox."

I let the knife dangle carelessly and asked, "You have a name for it?"

He nodded his head. "The warrior, Ivar Hanuman and Nils Ordando, the
great poet, when they founded my order, they were aware of the essential
paradox of existence. And they found a way out."

There came a groan from the spinnaker tree. Soli's voicebox was bobbing
up and down but he could not speak. I turned back to the poet. "What is
the way out?" I asked.

"If the universe eternally recurs," he said, "then there is no true
death. There is nothing to fear. The moment of the possible lives again
and again, forever. Give me the knife, and I'll show yu. We'll relive
this moment a billion times."

"I do not believe in eternal recurrence," I said. "Few do."

I did not want to tell him that a whole school of scryers and
remembrancers believed that eternal recurrence is the rhythm of the
universe. "It's an absurd philosophy," I said.

"Yes," he agreed, "but it is the only way to resolve the paradox, which
is why we choose to believe in it."

My eyes itched so I rubbed them and managed to irritate them further
with dirt. I blinked rapidly as the tears ran down my cheeks. "You
choose to believe in a philosophy which you admit is absurd? That's even
more absurd."

Soli moaned and worked his lips. He was struggling to say something. I
did not think he could see either of us because he could not move his
head. "Yes," Dawud said, "when fear is gone, we can choose our beliefs."

"But an absurd belief? Can you really do that? In truth? Why?"

"Because it is the only way out of the paradox. Because it enables us to
live and die. Because it is comforting."

I felt the knife's edge with my thumb. It was very sharp. I said, "I
don't understand how you can choose to believe the unbelievable, all the
while knowing that it's unbelievable."

"But I do believe-as all warrior-poets believe-that this moment, as we
remain here arguing, will recur an infinite number of times. When you
kill me, or allow me the honor, my same death will occur again and
again. As it has already happened a billion billion times."

"That isn't even close to infinity," I said.

"It isn't? Well, I'm a poet, not a mathematician."

I swung the knife against one of the rubber tree's branches. With a dull
"thwack" the entire limb came off. I felt instantly guilty and pressed
my thumb against the wound where the sap oozed out.

"I can't share your belief," I said. "If I let you die, I let die what
you say is the most wonderful thing-this intensity of yours."

"No, the moment will live forever."

"No," I said. "When the light goes out, it's dark."

"Don't be afraid, Pilot."

"We're circling each other's words like double-stars," I said. "Kill
me," he said.

"And if I did, what would happen to my mother, then? If she's been
mimed? No, you'll have to live so you can tell me how to heal my
mother." I rubbed the bridge of my nose. There was another reason I did
not want to kill him: I wanted to know what happened when one's brain
had been infected with a virus, to ask him about the knifeblade edge
between life and death.

"There's an old haiku written by Lao Tzu," I told him. "'A man with
outward courage dares to die; a man with inward courage dares to live.'"

When I said this, the smile on his face told of humor and irony. "You
are clever, Pilot."

I pointed at Soli, who was struggling against the tight jacket of his
cocoon, and I said, "When a warrior-poet traps his victim, doesn't he
recite a poem before killing him? And if the victim can complete the
poem or stanza, he must be spared-isn't that right?"

"That is so."

I bent over him as he lay with his mouth half-open, smiling. I smelled
oranges on his breath, and I said, "Listen. Do you know this poem?"

Because I could not stop for Death-

He kindly stopped for me.

"What is the rest of it," I asked. "The poem, Poet?"

"You mock our tradition," he said. And then, reluctantly, he recited:

Because I would not stop for Death-

He kindly stopped for me.

The tower held butjust ourselves And Immortality.

At last Soli found his tongue and began shouting, "It hurts! It hurts!

Kill me-I can't stand the pain!" His face was shiny with grease and
sweat, and he was working at his lip. There was madness in his eyes.

"How long will it be before the drug metabolizes?" I asked Dawud. "You
don't understand, Pilot. The drug is not like the drug that immobilized
me, or you. The drug will never completely metabolize. Most of its
effects will attenuate after an hour, if he lives, but he will always
bear a special sensitivity to his ... moment of the possible."

I went over to Soli and tried to stop him from chewing at his lip. I
tried to cut the fibers binding him, but they were tougher than steel.

"Lord Pilot," I said
"My ... Lord Pilot." But he did not seem to
understand me.

"He hears your every word," Dawud said. "But he cannot comprehend the
meaning. The pain, that's all he knows."

From the stairwell across the outer chamber came a faint clanging, as of
metal against stone. The Timekeeper, then, must have sent robots into
the tower.

"Soli, it will be all right ... the robots will cut you free."

"Yes, it hurts," he said. "It hurts."

The clanging grew louder. There was the ringing of many tactors against
obsidian steps. It sounded as if an army of robots were banging up the
stairwell. And on the poet's face, a look of resignation tempered with
irony.

"Soli will be all right, then," I said

just then two immense, red, tutelary robots crossed the outer chamber.

They did not pause at the doors to the inner chamber. Two other tutelary
robots followed them closely, and behind them were two more. Stamped
into the metal of their base clusters was the outline of a standing
hourglass. They were the Timekeeper's robots, "the long hand of the Lord
Horologe," called forth on those rare occasions when order must be
restored to the City.

"I've captured a warrior-poet," I said. "He tried to kill the Lord
Pilot." I stood there waiting for the robots to say something, perhaps
waiting absurdly-for them to congratulate me or to inform me that the
Timekeeper was grateful I had arrived in so timely a manner. But they
said nothing. Then all was motion and hard metal, the lightning sweep of
metal appendages, grinding, clamping metal. The first robot swept me up
and caught me in its cold, metal clamps. The second robot hoisted up the
warrior-poet and ropped him into the open clamps of the third robot. It
clicked its pincers, waiting. The other robots scanned the wrecked
chamber. I struggled, but it was useless. I quickly told the robots what
had happened, but it was like explaining the opening theory of chess to
a radio. They did not listen.

"Can't you tell a pilot from a murdering poet?" I shouted.

Dawud laughed and the smile never left his face. "They're robots," he
said. "You must forgive them their actions."

As the robots dragged us away, I raged because the Timekeeper was not
here in his person. I could not wait to inform him of his robots' error,
to tell him that I had saved Soli from torture and death. I banged my
fist against the robot; I bruised my knuckles and twisted and cursed,
and all the while, Soli stood staring, shouting, "Yes, it hurts; it
hurts; it hurts; it hurts!"

Chapter 23 - Plutonium Spring

The good Kristian should be aware of mathematicians and all those who
make empty prophecies. The dangers already exist that the mathematicians
have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and to confine
man in the bounds of hell.
-Saint Augustine of Hippo

Why should man seek justice in a universe which is manifestly unjust?

Are we so insignificant and vain that we cannot look upon the raw, naked
face of randomness without praying it will smile upon us merely because
we have been righteous and good? If indeed vanity begets the desire for
justice, then I believe the Timekeeper is the vainest of men. As I have
said before, he is famous for his punishments. Someday, no doubt, the
sculptors will engrave his commemorative busts with glyphs meaning
"Horthy the just." It is a sobriquet he has earned. When that grim old
man learned of Soli's near assassination, he ordered the cleverest of
justices. His robots dragged Dawud and me to the basement of his tower
where we were locked into identical, adjoining cells. Our cells were
stone cubes one hundred and one inches on each side. (The end joint of
my little finger is exactly one inch long. For no good reason, it amused
me to measure the dimensions of my cell.) The walls were stone and the
floors were set with cold flagstones; the ceiling, as far as I could
determine, was a seamless square of black stone. The robots pushed us
through the doorways of our cells, and the doors rolled shut. Darkness
swallowed me. The blackness was total. With my fingers I pried at the
crack between the door and the jamb but it was useless. The door was a
single slab of heartstone, impossible to move.

I had defied the Timekeeper, and therefore he would falsely blame me for
Soli's near assassination-this was the conclusion logic forced on me.

Surely his robots would have informed him I had captured the
warrior-poet. Surely he knew I was innocent. Would he ever call me
before the akashics so I could explain my innocence? I did not think so.

In the cell's darkness, a hundred questions plagued me: Where was my
mother? Where was Soli? Did he believe I had been part of a plot to
assassinate him? Had the poet's drug destroyed his mind, then? Had the
Timekeeper told everyone I had tried to murder Soli? Had he told anyone?

Were Bardo and my friends at this very moment pleading for my release?

How could they if they did not know where I was? If the Timekeeper
wanted me dead, why was I still alive?

While we awaited the Timekeeper's judgment, we passed the time by
talking to each other. Near the ceiling there was a narrow tunnel of an
air duct connecting our two cells. By jumping up and clutching the
smooth lip of the duct, I found I could chin myself and converse through
the thick walls without shouting. Our conversations, however, were
always interrupted because I could only hold myself up for a few minutes
before my arm muscles cramped. We recited short poems to each other; we
made puns and played with words; we argued over those few beliefs that
our two orders held in common. I lost most of the arguments. The
warrior-poets, I am sorry to say, are sly with their words, even more so
than the neologicians or the wily semanticists.

Although Dawud seemed to speak precisely, one had to listen carefully to
what he said, or the meaning would slip away like a wriggling, wet fish
from greased fingers. One time, when I observed that it was strange
,beyond probability that the warrior-poets and the Solid State Entity
would practice the identical custom of asking their victims poems, he
remarked, "Oh, yes, Kalinda of the Flowers. She has always ... taken an
interest in warrior-poets."

"Kalinda?"

"That is what we call the goddess."

That was what the Agathanians called Her, too. "But why Kalinda of the
Flowers, then?"

"Perhaps because the Entity is perceived to be female, and the
association with flowers has always been perceived to be a feminine
thing. Who knows the origin of names?"

"But you say she knows about you poets?"

"Of course," he said. "Once, long ago, my order tried to breed female
warrior-poets but ... it was a disaster. Kalinda-the Entity-made us
stop." I hadn't thought the gods take an interest in the affairs of
man."

"What do you know of gods, Pilot?"

"'As flies are to little boys, so are we to the gods,'" I quoted. "'They
kill us for their sport.'"

"Of course, The Shakespeare. Very good."

"Gods are gods. They do as they please."

"You think so?"

I thought of my journey to Agathange. I clung to the lip of stone and
gasped out, "The gods make us in their image. Or remake us."

"No," he said, and his voice came roaring through the air duct. "That is
exactly wrong."

"I didn't know you poets were masters of eschatology, then."

"Why are you always so sarcastic, Pilot?"

"Why must you poets answer a question with a question?"

"Did you ask me a question?"

After perhaps a few days of this arguing-in our dark, featureless cells
time was hard to measure-the poet grew silent and would not answer when
I called out to him, which I did at intervals for hours. I was sure that
he had been executed, beheaded at the Timekeeper's command. Then,
finally, he answered back. My relief that he was still alive surprised
me.

"I've been before your Timekeeper," he said. "He's clever, isn't he?

Should I tell you my sentence? He contrives my death in a way which
won't offend my order. He is a just man."

"No," I huffed out as I strained to keep myself from falling back to the
floor. I kicked out to obtain leverage, but my boots skidded against the
smooth walls. "He's just a man."

"He is merciful; his punishment is sublime."

"It's barbaric."

"I can't expect a pilot to understand."

"You warrior-poets are mad."

"What is madness?"

"Only a madman would know."

"Only a stubborn pilot would refuse to appreciate the genius of his
Timekeeper's sentence."

In a way, the Timekeeper's punishment was clever and perhaps even
sublime, though I hardly thought it admitted of genius, Quite simply, he
had contrived an ancient and barbaric means of execution- In the empty
cell adjoining the warrior-poet's (we were the only prisoners in the
Tower, the only prisoners for many, many years), the tinkers had placed
a mechanism which, upon the reception of a certain signal, would release
a cloud of poison gas. Inside the mechanism they had placed a minute
quantity of plutonium. The signal for the release of the gas would be
the random decay of any of the plutonium's individual atoms. Dawud might
live for years or, more probably, he might die the next instant-he
wouldn't know until he heard the hissing of the gas and smelled its
vinegary acridness. It is bizarre, but true, that his order could blame
only a random, quantum event for his death, which for the warrior-poets
was no blame at all.

"Certainly," I said, "the Timekeeper will have placed a large enough
piece of plutonium in his damn machine so that the probability of your
living more than a few days approaches zero."

I did not tell him how shocked I was that the Timekeeper possessed
stores of plutonium. It was the most barbarous of barbarities.

"Of course Dawud agreed. "There will be a sufficient quantity of
plutonium. But you miss the point."

"Which is?"

"Imagine for a moment, Pilot, that you were my lord-his name is Dario
Redring. When Dario comes to your city and asks for me, asks, 'Is he
alive?" your Timekeeper can respond truthfully that he doesn't know. Am
I alive? No one can know. From the point of view of others, I am inside
a sealed cell. I am in limbo. Has the plutonium decayed? There is a
probability. The degree of my aliveness is represented by a wave
function which contains probabilities of life and death. Only when my
cell is opened and Dario and your Timekeeper look inside will one of the
probabilities actualize, while the other vanishes and the wave function
will collapse. Only their act of observing my state of being will cause
my aliveness or deadness to become manifest. Until then, as far as
everyone outside my cell is concerned, I am neither alive nor dead. Or
rather, I am both dead and alive. And that is why I don't think your
Timekeeper will ever permit my cell to be opened. Until then, your Order
will remain blameless for my fate."

"But that's absurd!"

"My order relishes absurdity and paradox, Pilot."

"You gave me the impression that you were ignorant of mathematics."

"I speak of philosophy, not mathematics,"

"The probabilities-"

"Of course," he interrupted, "the possibility exists that the plutonium
will never decay and I will never die."

"But you will die. The Timekeeper has seen to that."

"Of course! And it will be a sublime death. I must compose a poem to
celebrate it."

"To never know one moment if it will be the last-that's hell!"

"No, Pilot, there is no hell. We are creators of our heavens."

"Madman!" I said. I pushed off the air duct, and landed on the floor
with a slap.

Dawud's response, when it came, was so faint I could barely hear it,
muffled words lost down a black tunnel of stone: "You're just afraid the
gas will kill you, too."

From Dawud I learned little pieces of news he had gleaned during his
audience with the Timekeeper. The news was not good. Apparently, the
Timekeeper had loosed his tutelary robots upon the City. Warrior-poets
had been captured and banished, The robots had "accidentally" pinched
the heads off of three pilots-Faxon Wu, Takenya the Fearless and
Rosalinda Ii Howt-who were ready to desert the Order for Tria. (I later
learned that hundreds of autists had mysteriously vanished from the
Farsider's Quarter at this time. The Timekeeper, I knew, had always
hated autists.) When the pilots, high professionals and academicians had
learned of the Timekeeper's violation of canon law, there was talk of
taking a deepship and leaving in swarm for some new planet on which to
start an entirely new Academy. Somehow, the news of my imprisonment had
spread, and Soli had called for my beheading, while Justine and the
Sonderval had called for a convocation of the Pilot's College. They
would ask the other master pilots to remove Soli and elect a new Lord
Pilot-so the rumor went. Nikolos the Elder, the Lord Akashic, had
surprised everyone by asking for a convocation of the College of Lords.

Would that plump, hitherto timid little man really call for a new
Timekeeper, as Kolenya Mor warned he would? No one seemed to know. No
one-especially not the Timekeeper-seemed to know where my mother was, or
what she was doing. And all the while, Bardo was petitioning the
Timekeeper for my release, petitioning, blustering, threatening, and
bribing various masters and lords to add their names to the petition. He
had called for me to be tried before the akashics. I was innocent, he
argued, and I should be allowed to establish my innocence. But Soli, who
hated Bardo for stealing away his wife, invented a counter-argument. I
should not go before the akashics, he said, because their computers were
made to model only human brains. Who could know whether or not my
brain-my Agathanian-carked brain-could fool the akashic computers? (Who
could have suspected that Soli was my father, that he feared the
akashics would unfold this fact and make it known? Who knew what
anyone's motives were during that maddest of times in our City?)

Ironically, the Timekeeper's judgment filled Dawud with joy. He was so
excited that he could neither eat nor sleep. He would pace his cell for
days at a time, composing poems and shouting the verses out until his
voice grew hoarse. "Imminent death is the spice of life," he quoted. "It
is true, of course. Pilot? Are you listening? Tell me your thoughts-are
you thinking about the possibilities?"

I am not by nature a meditative man. I dreaded being left alone in a
moist, dark cell with nothing to hold my mind other than my own fearful
thoughts, thoughts of painful possibilities. Most of the time, I slumped
against the freezing walls; I stared at the blackness in front of my
face, waiting. I listened to the warrior-poet as he paced and howled out
his ecstatic verses, and when the pacing ceased and he was quiet, I
listened to the plipplop of the condensation droplets spattering against
the floor. I listened to my heart beat. Often, usually after I had just
awakened from a fitful sleep against the hard, moist flagstones, I was
stiff and cold. I ate the nuts and bread dropped at intervals through
the slit at the base of the door, and I slurped down water from a large
bowl. Into that same bowl I dropped my dung and piss, hoping that the
robots had been programmed to clean it before refilling it. (I have
always, incidentally, disregarded Turin's Law, crudely put that any
robot sufficiently intelligent to clean dishes is too intelligent to
clean dishes. That may be true of human beings, but the cold, soulless
tutelary robots guarding us possessed only those specific intelligence
functions required of them. Such as killing the Timekeeper's enemies
should they try to escape. I cannot believe they were self-aware.) I am
ashamed to admit that I fell into long spells of self-pity. I thought
about myself too much. I tried to concentrate on externals, but sensa of
any sort were weak and few. The clanging of the robots beyond the door,
the muted words of Dawud's poems-these sounds I listened to, but as I
contemplated a robot's self-awareness, or lack thereof, and judged the
quality of the poet's verses (they were not extraordinary), I was led
ever inward to my deepest worries and fears.

After a while, I found that my sleeping habits were being destroyed. I
would sleep for long periods of time, perhaps as long as a day, escaping
myself Then would come fits of anxiety, surges of mania. I paced my cell
and my muscles knotted and relaxed, over and over, rhythmically rippling
like the waves of the sea. I had thoughts. I tried not to think about
the origin of my thoughts. I tried not to think at all. I scratched my
dirty beard and felt along the slick wall for cracks or weaknesses, but
I could not stop thinking, I brooded, wondering what I was becoming. How
I dreaded this becoming! There was something new inside me-when I
thought about it and tried to conceive its shape and direction, I was as
excited as I was terrified. I tried to sleep, and sleep would not come.

Whole days must have passed in which I did not sleep. These spells of
sleeplessness were punctuated by instances of micro-sleep when my brain
would deaden for a moment or two. And I would awaken to cold, rank air,
the sound of dripping water and the smell of my fear. Sometimes I would
test myself to see if I was going mad. Could I still do the calculus of
free sets? Did it feel just the same as always to scratch my itchy,
greasy scalp? Could I open and close my fingers at will? In this way,
and in a thousand other ways, I tested the cavern of my mind for hidden
fissures and flaws, and for new, crystalline formations of ability and
thought. What thoughts, what actions, what dreams could I will, if my
will were truly free? Could I will my brain to change as I wished, or
were there restraints, natural rules of development which could not be
violated? In the deepest part of my mind, where the universe runs like a
cold, black stream, I searched for the fount of free will. There was a
moment when I could almost see the ultimate impulse guiding my actions,
could almost taste the cool deliciousness of pure freedom. The moment
lingered like a water droplet flung into the air. And then it was gone,
sucked down the whirlpool of my thoughts. There was a black hole at the
whirlpool's center, and within that hole, another, blacker still. There
was an infinity of holes within holes waiting to swallow the sanity of
anyone who contemplated himself for too long.

For me, my prison became a hell. I have always feared darkness; when I
was a novice, I had irritated Bardo by keeping my light burning all
night. And silence is the darkness of sound, the death of the everyday
vibrations, rhythms and tones that give song to the soul. We are
creators of our heavens, the poet had said, but lately he had grown
ominously quiet. Perhaps the plutonium had decayed; perhaps the poison
gas had seared his lungs and liquefied his brain. Or perhaps he had
tired of ecstasy, tired of balancing on the knifeblade edge between life
and death. Had he flopped to the floor of his cell in an exhausted
stupor? I did not know. There was silence inside his cell, silence in
the still air currents, the silence of stone. Even the water on the
ceiling had stopped dripping. My body no longer seemed to stink. In
front of my eyes the blackness was fuzzy like wool, and my fingers were
so numb that the texture of the walls felt waxen, and there was no smell
or taste, no sound at all. I hallucinated. For a moment I imagined I was
floating in the pit of my lightship. I dreamed there were stars. But
then, when I reached out with my mind to face the ship's
computer-nothing. There was neither the torrential rush of the
number-storm, nor the white light of dreamtime, nor any hint of the
manifold's splendid music. I realized I was alone within a real stone
cell as black and empty as deadspace. I was alone inside my mind, and I
was in hell.

As the days passed the hallucinations grew stronger, more total. Since
my sensory nerves were quiescent, my brain supplied its own stimulation.

My visual cortex began firing of its own accord. There were colors.

Showers of purple sparks cascaded through the air. The air itself
sparkled like a flowing robe of green and blue silk. I saw pulsating,
concentric circles of red light turning inside each other, and yellow
and orange wavy lines flashing and quivering. There were a hundred
different smells: spices and perfume, incense and feverbalm and musk. I
heard bells ringing and crunching ice, the sound of a howling wolf. Such
hallucinations, of course, are common among those who are robbed of
contact with the external world. journeymen often see visions the first
time they float within the Rose Wombs. And the Alaloi, too, tell of
hunters trapped out on the icepack in endless snowstorms who lose their
sense of up and down, right and left, and begin to see bright bands and
streamers of light splitting the swirling clouds of snow. I knew the
colors and sounds I sensed were not real, but I also knew that if the
hallucinations continued for too long, I might end up more brain-damaged
than a pathetic aphasic.

For a long while I distracted myself with pure mathematics. I conjured
up the bright, violet ideoplasts for the Axiom of Choice, and I lost
myself in the beautiful Theory of Sets. I invented (or perhaps
discovered) theorems :that might someday be useful in proving the
Continuum Hypothesis. There was a moment when the luminescent,
many-shaped ideoplasts appeared so rapidly and vividly that I thought
the number-storm might begin of its own, without the aid of my
ship-computer. And what a wonder that would have been! To enter into the
manifold at will, to face the universe with nothing more than
mathematics and will and naked brain-how often during those hellish days
I prayed for this ability! But prayer is the signpost of helplessness
and failure. The freedom of the manifold was denied me, and I soon found
that in my prison of darkness, mathematics seemed all too arbitrary and
unreal.

I might have emulated the autists and created fantasies and
thoughtscapes in which I could dwell for as long as I lived. To dream
lucid dreams, and all the while, to be aware of the dreams, and more, to
change their shape and texture at will-this was a possibility. I might
have experienced clear, rippling, aquamarine water, the warm, rushing
waves of an otherworldly beach, the sticky clutch of a woman lying
beneath me on the hot sand. But-despite what the autists say-it would
not have been real. I would be lost in the unreal, devoured by images
and events which could never and had never really occurred. If at last
the Timekeeper gave me my freedom, I would be as mad as any autist.

I do not know how long I could have stood the silence had I not chanced
to recall a rather pretentious saying of the remembrancers. One day as I
was dragging my long, curling fingernails across the slatelike
flagstones, I was thinking of the master remembrancer, Thomas Rane,
turning over in my mind the implications of his memory of the god-man,
Kelkemesh, and the primal myth. These words came of their own to my
inner ear: Memory is the soul of reality. Within me were years of
memories, a whole lifetime of memories. Memory, then, would be my
salvation. I would dwell in the past. I would take refuge in my memories
like a wounded seal seeking safety in his aklia. I would live again the
crucial moments of my life, and if I lived them too passionately-well,
at least I would remain within a reality which had actually existed.

At first all went well. As time dripped on, I found I had less and less
need of physical distractions. I stopped singing to myself, which was a
great relief because I have never been able to keep a tune. I had little
need to lick my kamelaika's scratchy wool, or to taste the salty blood
of my gnawed lip, or to press my eyes with my thumbs in order to induce
phosphenes, those bright pinpoints of light we sometimes see when our
eyes are closed. My memories were more stimulating than mere sensation;
my memories were gleaming jewels suspended in ice water; my memories
were the soul of my distant and recent past. I remembered learning to
tie the laces of my skates.

How frustrated I had been when the looping of the knot had eluded my
childish fingers! How I had raged when my mother tried to help me! I
remembered other happier events, such as the first time Bardo and I had
taken a yellow-sailed ice schooner out onto the frozen Sound. Bardo had
been reluctant to borrow the schooner and had pointed out that we knew
nothing about sailing. But I had ridiculed him into recklessness.

(journeymen often think that because they have survived the manifold,
they can master any form of transportation.) A fierce wind had come up
unexpectedly, nearly smashing us against the rocks of Waaskel, Still,
our rush across the Sound had been exhilarating, a few moments of pure
fun. In the darkness of my cell, there were other memories, each more
vivid than the last. Like an old man, I remembered, and I wondered what
different memories I might have had if only I had made different choices
when I was younger. Why had I decided to become a pilot instead of a
cantor? Why did I love Katharine? Why did I murder Liam? Why were my
memories growing ever more burningly real?

The remembrancers, it is said, must overcome a difficult problem when
they are younger. To remember too well is to forget only with great
difficulty. As my memories grew more and more vivid, they seemed to
linger, burning themselves into my inner eye. I might conjure up the
first time I had seen a Friend of Man, and the blue trunk of the alien
would wriggle like a sleekit and obscure more important memories. I
began to have trouble forgetting. I recalled reading the poems of the
Timekeeper, and whole pages of print were indelibly stamped onto the
white tissue of my mind. I could see every bend and twist of each black
letter as if I were reading an open page of the book. This was the
memory of pictures I had heard so much about from childhood friends who
had gone on to become scryers or remembrancers. I remembered that there
were tricks for forgetting. In my mind, I built a long black wall and
superimposed lines and words, whole stanzas and pages of poetry onto the
wall. The squiggly black letters disappeared, black into blackness-for a
time. Other memories, such as Katharine's smile, were harder to banish.

I had to resolve the pale tones of her skin into a million dots of
primary colors. Each red and green and blue dot I then intensified until
it flared and swelled and exploded like a tiny star. A million points of
light burst inside me and then coalesced into a blinding haze, like that
Of an icefield on a false winter day. Most difficult to forget were
sounds. The memory of music persisted despite my efforts to drown it out
with the boom of rockets or with other noise. I was surprised to hear
entire symphonies with a clarity almost hyperreal. Again and again the
melody of the Takeko's Madrigal of Sorrow played inside the round tones
of the adagio forming up like beads of gold. I heard and reheard Bardo
singing love songs to Justine, and I listened to the keening of the
shakuhachis and the gosharps that my mother used to play. I do not mean
to say that I heard each of these things simultaneously, for I did not.

One sound gave way to another only with difficulty. For instance, the
music of seagulls and the 'drumbeat of the sea I could not forget until
I had taken the component sine waves of the sounds through a Fourier
transform, enfolding them into a hologram. I could then "drop" this
hologram into a black, soundproofed box where it would remain until I
wished to remove it and unfold the sounds of memory. Thus I created
millions of mental boxes for the memories that haunted me. In this way I
made room for other deeper memories, memories (I did not know I
possessed.

Everything is recorded; nothing is forgotten.

I do not know exactly when I became aware that I was remembrancing. Many
people, of course, are cursed and blessed with nearly perfect memory,
but they are not remembrancers. They can see only the faintest spark of
racial memory. To remember the lives of our fathers and of our mothers'
grandfathers and their great-grandfathers and so on down the branching
tree of our descent, to unlock the memories of our race's distant past
encoded within our chromosomes, to "think like DNA," as Lord Galina
would say-this is the higher art of remembrancing. It is an art which
consumed me.

With a dizzying speed, images of my ancestors' lives flickered before
me. I saw slick blood and an uncoiled umbilical cord as my grandmother,
Dama Orian'a Ringess, screamed and pushed my mother from within her into
the light of day. How my mother cried in her pain! I saw Soli. He was,
in truth, my father. There were memories from Soli's childhood; I
understood, finally, what I had remembered inside the Entity, the memory
of Alexander Diego Soli teaching his son mathematics. And deeper and
back generation fell from generation; faces formed and changed, as
mutable as clay. There was the long, broad Soli nose and the ice-blue
eyes; there the full lips of a Ringess pressed together and then parted
to reveal the twenty-eight thick Ringess teeth. Further back a Soli
tampered with his chromosomes to strengthen his mathematical abilities.

(It was from this Soli, Mahavira Andreivi Soli, that I inherited my
strands of red hair.) And deeper down the roots of time: There were
poets, scryers, whores, pilots, katholiks, shepherds (of sheep), slaves,
kings, warriors, and even an astrier named Cleo Ringess, half of whose
five hundred children went on to populate the moons of Durrikene, half
of whom carked their DNA and eventually came to be known as the alien
Fayoli.

One day when I was remembrancing, I heard Dawud stir within his cell. It
seemed he was still very much alive, if exhausted from his long wait for
the plutonium to decay. He recited a short poem to me-the first in a
long while-and one couplet rang in my ears and pulled at the cords of my
memory:

Only bone remembers pain; Only pain and bone remain.

Then there was a long silence followed by a long, convoluted poem he had
entitled
"Plutonium Spring." I stood to chin myself up to the air duct,
the better to listen to his strident words. I heard him intone:

The rhythm in my blood is the dancing of blinded locusts

And then, "Pilot, are you still alive? Can you hear me?"

"Yes, I was ... remembering."

I wanted to tell him a thing that I had seen, that Eva Reiness was the
great-grandmother of Nils Ordando. The warrior-poets shared a portion of
my chromosomes. We were near-brothers, I wanted to tell him. All men are
brothers.

"Do you believe in chance?" came his measured words through the black
duct.

"I ... sometimes I believe in chance, sometimes in fate. I don't know
what I believe."

"How long do you think it has been? What are the chances that the
plutonium would not have decayed?"

"Perhaps it was just a joke," I said. "Perhaps there is no plutonium and
no gas. Perhaps the Timekeeper is trying to destroy your sanity-what
little a warrior-poet has."

There was a silence, and I had to let go of the duct. After a while
Dawud gasped out, "Fate and chance, the same glad dance."

To a warrior-poet who believed in eternal recurrence, of course, that
would be so.

"Pilot, can you hear me?" After I had pulled myself up to the duct, I
could hear him plainly. "These past days have been such an ecstasy," he
said. "I find I no longer want to die. I have made poetry, and I have
thought ... such thoughts, and dreamed and ... Can you hear me?"

"Yes," I said into the darkness.

"The gas is coming soon. The plutonium is about to explode. There are
hot gases, dying hydrogen-how delicate the falling violets are!"

"Is this part of a poem?"

"Life is a poem that we compose. This is the faith of the warrior-poets:
that we can capture life's essence, the moment of the possible, in
words." I said nothing because it is my faith that the essence of the
universe lies far beyond the realm of human words.

"I will die soon, of course. There are killing vapors in the granite
darkness."

"Are you a scryer, then?"

"No, a poet. And I have composed my death poem. Will you promise me
something? When I am dead, my body must be brought back to Qallar in a
black marble casket. If you live long enough, you must find a farsider
who knows the art of writing. The words of my death poem must be
chiseled onto the casket's facing."

My fingers began to cramp, and my forearm muscles trembled. I made him a
promise I had no intention to keep. For no good reason, I told him of my
remembrancing. I tasted gummy old food and blood in my mouth as I said,
"Nils OTdando was a son of the Ringess line."

"Yes, that is known," he replied instantly. "The founders of both our
Orders were hibakusha. They fled the Agni nebula during the computer
wars. When the hydrogen-"

"We're almost brothers," I said.

"All men are brothers," he said. "And all men are hibakusha. And
fratricide is the rule of the species." And then, "Can you smell the
gas, Pilot?" Here he recited his poem, the last stanza of which was:

I am sodden beneath wrappings of flesh, I am golden beneath the morning
sky, I am holy beneath my evaporating flesh, I am naked beneath the
plutonium sky.

I shouted to him but there was no answer. I listened for the sound of
hissing gas. I pulled up and tried to get an elbow into the air duct as
I wedged my head and shoulder into the stuffy, tight tunnel. Would I
hear the whine of an airlock grinding shut? Would the poet scream and
thrash as he gasped for clean air? With my head ridiculously squeezed
into a dark hole in the wall, I listened for any sound at all, but in
the poet's cell there was silence.

After a while, I pushed off the wall and began pacing my cell. A madman,
a murderer, a lover of words, my near-brother-I called out to him, but
he did not answer me then, nor during the days that followed. I repeated
the words to his poem, "Plutonium Spring," and I memorized them. It was
an easy thing to do.

Everything is recorded; nothing is forgotten.

Again I fell into racial memory. I fell far back, seeing archetypal
images, smelling primal smells, hearing the heartbeat of ancient poems.

I remembranced Old Earth. There the sky was a lighter blue than that of
Icefall, light blue like a thallow's eggshell; there the land was warm
and the valleys were green, and there were orchards of real apple trees,
fields of golden wheatgrain. There my far-grandfather lived in a
whitewashed cottage in a city by the sea. He was a pilot and a
boatmaker. His hands-my hands-were yellow with callous, and wood
splinters stung his fingers. He had a wife, and there was a coupling,
thousands of joyous couplings, and there was a son, and they were happy.

And then the robot armies came and burned his boats, burned his city
with a hellish, glowing mineral that exploded and shattered his windows
and fused the glass, fused and flared, and then there was light
everywhere, the unbearable flash of memory.

I heard the clanging of robots, steel denting steel, and a high-pitched
whine of metal shearing apart. The smell of burning steel. And more
sounds: robots banging against stone walls, ringing steel, humming,
shouting, cursing, and a curious "pinging" sound I could not quite
identify. "Mallory!" a voice from the past called to me. "By God, let's
have this door open!" the voice boomed.

Bardo, I remembered, had such a booming voice. But this was no memory!

"Open, now!" Then the heartstone door rolled open, and there was a
brilliant flash, and I Covered my eyes. "What's wrong, Little Fellow,
are you blind?"

I moved toward the sound of his voice. "Not ... blind," I said. My eyes
burned and hurt. It felt as if someone had stuck the tip of a heated
knife through my pupils and wiggled it back and forth, Then I realized
the brilliance was only the dim flicker of the flame globes. My eyes
were adjusting to the feeble light, slowly. "How did you get in, then?

What day is it?"

Bardo's arm went around my back, and I smelled his flowery, sweet scent,
and the smell of his feat. "We've got to hurry," he said. "Can you walk?

By God, you stink! Didn't they let you have a bath? Look at your
goddamned filthy beard! Hurry, now. We've got to hurry. Justine and the
others are waiting. Ah, I shouldn't have done this-what have I done?"

"It was necessary," someone said. "We should never have allowed the
Timekeeper robots."

I covered my brows with my hands, squinting. Bardo's face, inches from
my own, was dripping blood. There was a cut on his nose, a gash near his
earlobe. Nikolos the Elder, the Lord Akashic, stood close by. A master
akashic and a couple of journeymen carrying a computer accompanied him.

Then I saw the robots. Up and down the long, stone corridor were robots
of two different kinds: the large, red, Timekeeper's robots, with their
pincers and clamps, and black robots of a type I had never seen before.

All of the tutelary robots-there were four of them-lay inert against the
gray floor, a twisted, burnt, metal wreckage, The black robots were
smaller, but obviously deadlier. Like an ant, each had six legs; each
had metal drills and plasma torches and guns and killing lasers mounted
on black steel, Four of these robots lined the corridor. At the far
door, where the row of cells ended, were chips-I think a bullet hit the
wall. Oh, what have I done? This is madness!"

"Not madness," Lord Nikolos said. He screwed up his round, little face.

"It's a well-organized plan-try to remember that."

Lord Nikolos hastily informed me of recent events, The College of Lords,
he said, had threatened to censure the Timekeeper for keeping me a
prisoner in his Tower. (And for his misuse of his tutelary robots. And
for other reasons.) They had forced the Timekeeper to allow Lord Nikolos
and his subordinate akashics to examine me, to establish my guilt or
innocence. And so the plan: When the Tower doors were thrown open to
Lord Nikolos and his akashic computer, Bardo's robots had rushed in to
rescue me.

"Goddamned robots!" Bardo cursed. "My entire fortune, five hundred
thirty thousand City disks-I had to bribe the tinkers to make the
robots. It cost me everything. But I had to-"

"How many disks? No one has that much money."

"What else could I do? The Timekeeper would have executed you, by God!"

"What about the warrior-poet?"

"Dead, maybe still alive-why do I care?" He grabbed my arm and pulled me
up the stairs. "Come on, Little Fellow, we've got to leave now!

Escape-that's the only way."

We went through the doorway and up the stairs to the street. It was cold
and blustery with a wet wind off the Sound. It was dark- no one was in
sight.

"This way!" Bardo said. He urged me toward a sled waiting by the curb.

"To the Fields-we've got to hurry!"

"What about Lord Nikolos, then?"

"I'll remain in the city," Nikolos said. "I think the College of Lords
will have to censure or even remove the Timekeeper, in the end. Either
that, or there will be full schism."

"What do you mean, full schism?"

"Ah, I should have told you immediately," Bardo said. "Li Tosh, the
Sonderaval, all OUT fellow pilots-we're leaving the city tonight.

Because of you, my friend, in protest, and because we're sick of the
Timekeeper and the other old bones who rule the Order."

We rocketed through the streets, and at various places along the
sliddery, all the way to the Hollow Fields, the windows of the
surrounding buildings were lit, hundreds of bright, yellow squares
against black granite. It seemed that the eyes of the City itself were
watching us. It was an eerie feeling. I knew that I had seen this moment
before. In my prison, then, I had been scrying, as well as
remembrancing.

"What's wrong, Little Fellow?" Bardo shouted above the roar of the jets
and the wind. "Doesn't it feel good to be free?"

I looked up at the glowing sky above the runs and pads of the Fields, up
at the rocket tailings of the ships escaping the City. I had seen that
sky before, too, and other even brighter skys soon to come. I said
nothing, and we went down to the Caverns where we found a hundred other
pilots waiting their turns by their ships, and one by one we fled into
the plutonium sky.

Chapter 24 - Deus Ex Machina

Through wood and dale the sacred river ran, Then reached the caverns
measureless to man, And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean: And 'mid
this tumult heard from far Ancestral voices prophecying war!
-from "Kubla Khan" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Century of Revolution
Scryer

The hibakusha say that war is hell, and they should know. The Pilot's
War, as it came to be called, at its beginning was mostly fun. Of
course, there need not have been war at all, but when the Timekeeper
discovered our escape from the City-as I later learned-he was wroth. His
pilots, he declared, could not leave the Order without his first
dissolving their vows. Bardo and I, he proclaimed, must be returned to
the city to face our punishments. Failing that, we should be executed in
space at the soonest possible moment. He sent Leopold Soli to carry out
this sentence. And Soli was glad to obey him because he was even more
wrathful than the Timekeeper. He was mad with pain (the after-effects of
the warrior-poet's drug continually tortured his nerves), and mad with
jealousy, too. He vowed to capture Justine and Bardo-either that or kill
them. And I am sure that he wanted to kill me. He left the City in his
lightship, the Vorpal Blade. The lightships of his friends, Tomoth,
Seth, and Neith of Thorskalle, and the lightships of one hundred and
twenty-five pilots loyal to him and to the Timekeeper rocketed after
him. And so it began.

We really had no plan for war. Our plan-Lord Nikolos' and Bardo's
plan-was simple, and it did not include violence. We ninety-eight
schismatic pilots would escort a deepship full of men and women
representing our Order's every profession. Pilots, eschatologists,
mechanics, and tinkers would journey to Ninsun, which was a star near
the Aud Binary. We would found a new academy. And the Timekeeper would
be forced to either accept us as rivals, or to accept the changes that
the College of Lords was demanding and call us back to Neverness in
forgiveness and peace.

But peace we could not have. As the Timekeeper had once observed, it is
the nature of things that no one can choose peace if his enemy chooses
war. Soon after our escape, we rendezvoused around the fixed points of a
star near Icefall's, a white dwarf ridiculously named Milky Minikin. By
light radio we talked ship to ship. We held a conclave, of sorts, to
discuss what we should do. (At the time, of course, we did not know that
Soli intended to pursue and execute us.)

I remember seeing the imago of Bardo's bearded face come into my ship's
pit. And hearing his voice: "We're free, by God! Can Bardo outwit an old
tyrant who never leaves his Tower?" he asked rhetorically. "By God, does
tangleroot make your seed stink?"

"Was it necessary?" I said this into the black air of the pit. It was
hard to imagine Bardo hearing my words, seeing my face in the pit of his
ship-and at the same time, floating naked with Justine while she
listened to my words, too. "Wasn't there any other way, then?"

"No, there was no other way. The Timekeeper would have had you
beheaded."

"Bardo, has it occurred to you that our escape was too easy?"

"Easy!" he exclaimed. "Easy for you, because you didn't have to spend a
fortune to get robots made. You didn't have to coordinate-"

"I didn't mean that the planning was easy," I interrupted. "I meant our
actual escape. Why did the Timekeeper permit the akashics into his
Tower, if he knew they would find me innocent? Why didn't he try to stop
the pilots from leaving the Caverns? Why didn't-"

"You are beginning to worry me, Little Fellow. Well, in truth, I've
worried about these things all along. I can only guess that the
Timekeeper was pissing afraid that the College of Lords would censure
him."

"I have another hypothesis," I said.

"And what is that?" He-his imago-wiped sweat from his eyes. "What if the
Timekeeper let us, all of us, pilots and professionals, escape?"

"And why would he do that?" he asked. "No, no, don't tell me-I don't
like bad news. I think I see where your sequence of thoughts is
converging." Because I was crabby from my long imprisonment, I voiced
the obvious anyway. "I think the Timekeeper let us escape so he could
murder us, everyone who has openly gone against him. Here, in space, far
from the city, so he could hide his crime."

"Murder us, ah ... how?"

"Perhaps he'll send Soli to do his work."

"And how would Soli track us?" he asked. "He can't know our destination,
nor any of the fixed-points of our mapping sequences. And no, I don't
think Soli would work the Timekeeper's murders; no, no, that's not
possible, is it?"

I did not answer him. After a while, I asked, "Is Justine really there
with you, in your pit? Why can't I see her, then? Can I talk to her?"

Bardo's face reddened, then disappeared. His imago did not return. There
was a spell of silence. And then his voice-only his voice-filled the pit
of my ship: "Justine will talk to you but she's, ah ... unclothed, so
she doesn't want you to see her; she's your goddamned aunt, after all,
isn't she?"

I did not tell him that when I was a boy I used to peek between the
crack in the door while Justine took her morning bath. At least I had
until my mother caught me and pinched my nose until it bled. Justine had
a beautiful body, long and voluptuous like Katharine's. I could not
really blame Soli for being jealous of Bardo.

"I'm so glad you're alive," Justine finally said. "Where's my mother-do
you know?"

"We tried to find her, of course, but we couldn't. After you were
imprisoned .."

"Ah," Bardo's voice broke in, "did you know that another warrior-poet
tried to assassinate the Timekeeper?"

"Of course, the tutelary robots killed that poet before he ever reached
the Timekeeper's chambers."

"Your mother is in hiding, Little Fellow. Probably somewhere in the
Farsider's Quarter. We couldn't find her."

And Justine continued, "After the Timekeeper saw how close he'd come to
dying-well, Moira couldn't very well come out of hiding, could she?"

"She's still in the City."

"Of course she is."

"I'm sure she's still alive."

"There's always hope."

Once again, I noticed how alike they sounded. Except for their
intonations and the timbre of their voices, they spoke their words in
the same manner. Their programs were similar, much too similar. When I
told them how this worried me, their response was immediate: "Ah, of
course, Mallory is a cetic."

"Cetics are known to worry."

"But you shouldn't worry about us."

"No."

"We'll be all right if-"

"If only Soli would leave us alone!"

"If only Soli weren't so damn mad!"

"Ah, Soli's the real worry."

"Soli."

"If he comes after us-"

"Well, of course he will and-"

"That's too bad."

"Too damn bad."

Bardo and Justine, of course, weren't the only ones worried about Soli.

Other pilots voiced similar fears. Li Tosh, the Sonderval, Jonathan
Ede-I talked to each of my old friends separately, in private. But we
could reach no consensus, so we sent our imagos ship to ship, and the
other pilots did the same. In each pit floated the glowing, shrunken
heads of ninety-seven pilots. It was a strange, crowded, confusing way
to hold a conclave. I talked to these pilots simultaneously. They talked
to me. The finest young pilots of our Order: Delora wi Towt, Richardess,
Paloma, Zapata Karek, Matteth Jons, and Alark of Urradeth. And others
who were not so young, Justine's friends: Veronika Menchik, Helena
Charbo, Aja, Ona Tetsu, and Cristobel the Bold in his famous ship, The
Silver Thallow. And others, eighty-five other talking, jabbering,
arguing pilots.

"This discussion is useless," the Sonderval said. His head was the
longest and narrowest in the circle of heads. He had a long upper lip
and a dimpled chin. "We must have a strategy."

"By God, there can be only one strategy," Bardo said. I was pleased to
see that Justine had agreed to let the imago of her head appear next to
his. I smiled at her, and she smiled back. "We'll go on to Ninsun, as
planned."

"And what if there is war?" Zapata Karek said in his high, squeaky
voice. "Should we leave the deepship to be captured? Would you abandon
the professionals?"

"And what of the professionals?" Delora wi Towt asked. "Shouldn't they
have a vote in what we decide?"

Each of the heads turned toward hers, staring at her round, pink face,
as she twirled her braids. Obviously no one wanted to let the
professionals have a vote. "If Soli comes after us," the Sonderval said,
"it will be a war between pilots. We pilots should decide what to do."

Cristobel the Bold nodded and said, "If there's really to be a war, we
should try to surprise Soli, take the war to him."

"War!" Bardo cried out. "Why do we have to have a goddamned war?"

Richardess blinked his tired, red eyes (he was an albino, with white
hair and dead, white skin devoid of any pigmentation, and he was very
old, the oldest of us pilots), and he said, "The Bardo is right-why
should we have a war? Have we forgotten our vows to quest? Why not
scatter across the lens of the galaxy? Why should we wait for a war?"

All this time Li Tosh hadn't spoken. He looked from face to face as he
smiled his bright, gentle smile. Finally, after Richardess had finished
cataloging the horrors of war, he found his moment and said, "Whatever
we do, if we do it together as brother and sister pilots, we must have a
single plan. The Sonderval is right." He looked at me, and his almond
eyes were smiling, always smiling. "A single plan-therefore we should
elect one of us to be Lord Pilot, at least temporarily."

"A Lord Pilot," the Sonderval agreed, "it's necessary to elect one."

"Ah, but who will it be?" Bardo asked.

"Who are the master pilots among us?" Justine replied. "Who may we
choose from?"

"Well, there's yourself," Bardo said. "And Li Tosh, of course, and
Richardess, Cristobel, Veronika Menchik, Helena Charbo and Aja-master
pilots all."

"And there is Thomas Sonderval," the Sonderval said, most unhumbly, I
thought. "Don't forget-I was made a master pilot on ninetieth day last
midwinter spring."

Li Tosh smiled at our old rival and said, "For myself, I would not want
to be Lord Pilot."

"Nor I," Bardo admitted. "Nor I," Justine said.

"And who else is a master pilot?" Li Tosh asked, almost innocently.

"Tetsu? Matteth Jons? And, of course, I almost forgot ... Mallory
Ringess." He looked at me, and all of the sudden, the head of every
pilot and master pilot was turned my way. "The Ringess," he said, "is
perhaps the finest master pilot that's ever been."

"He is the finest, by God!"

"The Ringess found his way in-and out-of the Solid State Entity. The
Ringess," and here he recited a long list of my qualifications, among
which were the rumors that I was a hidden cetic, a remembrancer, and
maybe even a scryer. Above all, Li Tosh told them, I was a lucky man,
lucky to be alive after dying such a seemingly final death. And who
wouldn't want to elect such a lucky Lord Pilot?

I won't record here everything that was said after that. I suspected
that Bardo, Justine and Li Tosh together had orchestrated their dramatic
little speeches. They must have planned from the first that I should be
the Lord of the schismatic pilots. Had they, before they ever left the
City, cajoled their friends and fellows into voting for me? I think they
must have. Fifty-four of the ninety-seven pilots bowed their heads to
indicate they favored my elevation. Twelve of them, for one reason or
another, declined to vote. Thirty-one pilots-and I was sorry to see that
Richardess was one of these-shook their heads vigorously. Each of them
denied that I had any right to be Lord Pilot over anyone. I was
tempestuous and too bold, they said. (Paradoxically, some people fear
bold leaders while most others value the quality of boldness above all
else.) To a pilot, they immediately deserted us. Some left for Tria;
some of them returned to the City. A few decided to honor their vow to
quest and followed Richardess, perhaps out into one of the arms of the
galaxy.

In this way, I became Lord Pilot of sixty-six rebellious pilots; if
there was war, I would be a warlord responsible for sixty-six lives.

"Congratulations, Little Fellow!" Bardo said to me in the privacy of my
ship. He looked at me as he pulled at his mustache. He began naming
names of pilots who had remained loyal to the Timekeeper, and to Soli.

"What will you do now? If Soli moves against us, there will be at least
two of Soli's ships to our one."

"What a fine mathematician you are!" I said. "At least you can still
count."

I assured him we would win against Soli despite our numbers. If he fell
against us, we would maneuver and strike and fall away into the
manifold; we would lay cunning traps and make double attacks; we would
tempt the enemy into spreading his forces too thinly, and then we would
turn and pin ship against ship and win all the pieces, and the game
would be ours.

I knew nothing of war. War, as I would soon discover was not a game,
though I could not help thinking of it as a game. Real war was really
not much fun. I found that I had no liking or genius for war. In truth,
I was surprised and somewhat ashamed to find myself leading pilots to
war. I consulted the library of my ship-computer and discovered that my
understanding of the elements of strategy was based solely upon games
such as chess and ko that I had played as a child. Real war, it seemed,
was much more chaotic than any game. Real war had no rules. I studied
the annals of ancient warlords and strategists. Sun Tzu, Liddell Hart,
The Tolstoi, Julius Caesar, Musashi the Sword-Saint, the First Richard
Ede-all the great authors of war. I hurried my brain with slowtime, and
their words were like photons illuminating a lightsail. I learned the
axioms of war. Never divide your forces; choose your own space and time
for battle; never be predictable-these fundamentals, so often ignored by
princes and generals who had led millions to their deaths, I learned as
quickly as I could. I studied the ancient campaigns of Aleksander, and
classic battles, and the tragic Man-Darghinni wars, which were not so
ancient. I was like a slightly talented novice forced to learn the rules
of chess and study the games of the grandmasters all in a single night.

My computer made simulations of history. I relived Caesar's genocide of
the Tencredi and watched Hannibal Barka's horse warriors roll up the
Roman flanks at Kannae. And then there was slaughter; then the murderous
Karthaginian infantry closed and killed sixty thousand legionnaires so
crushed together they could not lift their swords nor cover themselves
with their shields. Their shields failed. I followed this theme of
failing shields ahead two thousand years. As if I were standing with a
telescope on the cratered surface of Old Earth's moon, I watched the
brilliant, terribly beautiful First Exchange of the Holocaust. I
marveled as the space shields were overwhelmed and the northern
continents flared with ten thousand balls of expanding white light. From
Taddeo Astoreth's The Way of War, I learned that all battles, no matter
how complex, are decided according to four simple elements: force,
space, time, and intelligence. Although Soli might outnumber us two to
one, Aleksandar had overcome odds of five to one at Gaugamela. If I were
to defeat Soli at real war, I would have to lead my pilots into familiar
spaces of my choosing and fall against him when he was not ready. Most
important, in this strange, unprecedentedly mathematical war we might
wage, would be intelligence, for we would have to predict the mappings
of Soli's pilots almost as they made them.

If Soli fell against us; if he could track us through the manifold.

Every ship, of course, when it opens a window perturbs the manifold
slightly. If two ships are far from each other, these pertubations are
impossible to detect. But if the ships are close enough, if they are
within a welldefined region, the radius of convergence narrows, and a
probability mapping can be made. Any ship, with a degree of probability,
can track-can "predict"-the mappings of any other. If we could flee far
enough and fast enough, the probability of Soli finding us would
approach zero.

And so we fled along the fallaways toward Ninsun. Stars streamed past
like snowflakes in a storm. We fled fast and far. Finally we fell out
around Ninsun, which was a small white star orbited by a single planet.

And Soli and his pilots were there, above the planet, waiting for us. I
counted one hundred and twenty-nine lightships. The Vorpal Blade,
Tomoth's and his brothers' Time Past, Time Present and Time Future-like
diamond knives they hung poised above Ninsun, reflecting the light of
that feeble star and the glowing, dusty lights of the Aud Cluster.

Immediately I called out to my pilots. (How quickly I thought of them as
"my" pilots! How quickly and finally we fall to vanity!) I called out a
ten-star sequence beginning with Shima Luz. We made our mappings and
disappeared into the fallaways. And Soli and his pilots, I am sorry to
say, because they were well within the region defined by the Aud
Cluster's gravity field, had no trouble tracking our perturbations of
the manifold.

"By God, we've been betrayed!" Bardo's voice boomed. "Who could have
told Soli we would choose Ninsun, of all the damn stars in the damn
galaxy?"

I, too, wanted to know this. I tried to contact Soli by light radio, and
it surprised me that he agreed to talk to me.

"How far do you fall, Pilot? Not far enough-no, never far enough, isn't
that true?"

This was Soli's voice, and it was speaking to me in the pit of my ship.

We had fallen out above a star with a number but no name, one of the
blue, supergiants at the edge of the Cluster. It was the first time we
had talked since the day I murdered Liam. His imago appeared before me.

He was thinner than I had remembered, his cheeks gaunt, sunken. His hand
covered his eyes as if he were agonizing over a deep loss and did not
want to look at me. Everywhere else, on his face, and in the tremors of
his starved body, I read the tells of anger and pain.

"Who betrayed us?" I asked. "How did you know we'd journey to Ninsun?"

"The Timekeeper knew Bardo's plan all along. He's always been good at
spying."

"And so he sent you to murder us, then?"

"Essentially," he said, "that's true. But is there need for more
murders? No, there's no need, not if you surrender and return to the
City."

I think he must have known I would not surrender because he was not at
all surprised when I said, "No, Leopold, I won't go back."

"You call me by my given name?"

"Should I call you 'Father" then?"

When I said this he grabbed his belly and dug his fist in. He winced as
if his stomach acid were eating up through his throat. "No," he told me,
"you should say instead: 'Yes, Lord Pilot, I will return to face my
punishment.'"

"You're not my Lord Pilot anymore."

"Yes, you've been elected Lord Ringess-isn't that what your pilots are
calling you? Let us hope none of them lose faith in your leadership and
try to assassinate you."

I pressed my knuckles up to my lip, then said, "I didn't try to kill
you; I tried to save you. The warrior-poet-"

"Who are you to save anyone?" he asked. He clearly didn't believe that I
had saved his life.

"Don't you remember anything?" I asked.

He took his hand away from his eyes. The whites were shot with ruptured,
red capillaries. He looked as if he hadn't slept for a long time. His
hand was shaking like that of a palsied, old man. "The Timekeeper said
his robots captured you and the poet as you were about to murder me.

What else should I remember? What was seen ... was seen."

"No, that's not true! I'd tracked the poet through the City. And I-"

"Yes, you're a liar, aren't you? But even if you were telling the truth
... it's too late, isn't it? There are all your other crimes to pay
for."

In a way, he was right; it was too late. Our private enmity had festered
and infected the Order, and now many would have to pay. Neither of us,
however, was eager to see pilot murder pilot. (At least, I think we both
wanted to keep our murders in the family, so to speak. Once, when I
informed him-and this was sheer cruelty on my part-that Bardo and
Justine would never return to Neverness unless the Timekeeper forgave
them and permitted them to marry, he whispered, "Justine, how was I so
stupid ... Justine?" and there was murder on his lips.) And so, by
unspoken consensus, we began a war of maneuver. At first it was more of
a game than a real war. Like any good general or warlord, Soli hoped to
win as much as possible with as little loss as possible. He sought to
demonstrate by maneuver that our position was hopeless, that we should
surrender without battle. Following his lead, pilots such as Stephen
Caraghar and Salmalin would cut across our pathways, fall out, and harry
the fat, whalelike deepship. They would then demonstrate the finesse of
their predictive mappings, a warning meant to say, "You see, we pilots
of the Order can find you wherever you are and destroy you."

Soon our tactics became more provocative. When one of Soli's pilots fell
out above the deepship, Delora wi Towt, for instance, might fall out of
the manifold near both ships. The two lightships would dance in and out
of the manifold, two lightning slivers of silver seeking an advantageous
probability mapping. The "victorious" pilot would be the one who best
predicted the mappings of her "enemy." She-or he-would fall out into
realspace, into inky blackness and prepare the ship's spacetime engines
while she lay in wait. If her enemy fell out at the predicted
point-exit, the soon-to-be victorious pilot would demonstrate that she
could have destroyed the other. As the victorious pilot's spacetime
engines fixed on a point-source near her enemy, the realspace near the
enemy ship would begin to buckle and distort, to bubble like a sheet of
hot clary. And when the bubble burst and the window to the manifold was
open for an instant, the victorious pilot would spin her lightship along
its axis in a gesture of triumph as if to say, "Therefore I could have
made a mapping into the core of a nearby star, and hurled your ship into
hellfire. If this were real war, you'd be annihilated."

Given our red, dripping, human natures, as Bardo reminded me,
inevitably, this war of maneuver could not last. One day, as we segued
into the August Cluster, Tomoth of Thorskalle murdered Jonathan Ede. Of
course, Jonathan's death may have been an accident. Perhaps Tomoth-that
murderous blond giant with his murderous mechanical eyes-"accidentally"

opened a window to the manifold too near the Ship of All Ships, and sent
Jonathan into the core of a star. But what exactly is an accident? Was
it an accident that the brilliant, and usually calm Li Tosh sought
vengeance for his best friend's murder? Was it an accident that he
sought out and outmaneuvered Tomoth's brother, Seth? That he destroyed
him as Jonathan had been destroyed? I do not believe so. And when pilot
began falling against pilot with frenzy and abandon, that was no
accident either.

(Was it an accident that I had punched out and broken Soli's nose? Was
the composition of my chromosomes an accident, too?)

I remember Soli's final words to me before we ceased our communications
for good and fell into real battle. "Why, Pilot?" he asked me. "Why did
you make it come to this?"

And just after Jonathan had fallen into his death, Bardo's imago
appeared before me. "It's unbelievable!" he roared. "What a crime!

Perfidy! Abomination! Sacrilege! By God, I'm running out of
words!-Barbarity! Catastrophe! Oh, what a tragedy this is! Oh, too bad!"

Because I was grieving over Jonathan's death, because I could not bear
the thought of causing anyone else to die, because I was grieving, I was
too cautious. Let me repeat that: I, Mallory Ringess, was too cautious.

I led my sixty-four lightships across the stars of the Triffid nebula
with the fearfulness of an old chessplayer moving his pieces across his
sixty-four squares. I sought to maneuver my force from Veda Luz to
Karanatha and on to the Danladi Thinspace at the edge of the Triffid.

There, where the pathways were few, we might trap Soli's ships. As they
fell out of the manifold and desperately sought to map one of the few
point-sources, we would surround them (in a topological sense, we had to
find a set of point-sources both closed and bounded, that is to say,
compact) and destroy them one by one.

But we never reached the Danladi Thin. Soli must have guessed my
strategy because he surprised me. I remember well the instant I came to
question caution. I-and my other pilots-had just fallen out, and the
light of Veda Luz dazzled me. The interior of the nebula glowed a soft,
ice-blue from the reflected light off the particles of interstellar
dust. Veda Luz itself was a burning blue, a hot blue supergiant as
bright as Alnilan or the First Spica. It was a huge star. So massive was
Veda Luz that the manifold in its neighborhood was vulgarly distorted. I
had difficulty leading my pilots through its windows in an orderly
manner. There came an instant when six of my pilots had to wait while
the others found their windows and fell through to Favasham, which was
the next star in our sequence towards the Danladi Thin. In that instant,
Soli's old friend Lionel Killirand in his Infinite Sloop fell out, fell
upon Cristobel the Bold and destroyed him. And in that instant,
thirty-two master pilots fell upon Olafson Jons and Nashira and Ali
Alesar of Urradeth and Nikolos Korso and the inimitable Delora wi Towt.

Probably it was Lionel who actually killed her. There was a snarling
confusion as lightships slipped in and out of realspace, thirty-seven
diamond needles darting at each other through blackness into starlight
as if they were a pack of Alaloi dogs fighting for position close to the
fire. I was aware of this battle as hundreds of quick vanishing-point
deformations of the manifold, hundreds of glinting ripples on a
shimmering, nighttime sea. I tried to turn our main body of lightships
back kleining along our pathways, but by the time we returned to Veda
Luz, the battle was over. Lionel and the others had fled. And six of our
pilots were lost.

Like a team of beaten sled dogs with their tails between their legs, we
retreated across Jonah's Star Far Group almost to the edge of the Orion
Nebula. I floated in the pit of my ship as I briefly talked with my
pilots. Bardo especially was wounded by the battle's outcome. We touched
the hulls of our ships, and his voice and thoughts propagated through my
shipcomputer and formed in my mind. For a moment, the neurologics of his
ship were faced with my own. We shared the same thoughtspace. Because we
were stunned and whipped with defeat, because we were grieving, we
allowed ourselves a few moments of this forbidden electronic telepathy.

-Little Fellow, can you hear/feel/see me?

I could see his intelligent, brown eyes, hear his voice, smell his fear
and farts as he floated within the pit of the Blessed Harlot. It was
something of a mystery how Justine could stand to be near him inside
such a tiny enclosed space.

-Where is Justine, then? Why can't I hear her thoughts?

-She's here asleep, next to me. When she saw what happened to Delora ...
ah, well, she's faced away, for a while.

-I've blundered, Bardo. I should never have ... tried to meet Soli that
night in the bar. You remember. That's where it all started, this
sequence of bad chance.

-You should think about the pilots we've lost instead of your life's
mistakes.

-I can't stop thinking about them. If we ... why did Delora have to die,
then? Why should anyone have to die?

I thought about all of the billions of people who had died in wars, and
I discovered one of war's many perversities and ironies: The hell of war
is not multiplicative. Or rather, it is inversely multiplicative. The
pain of losing someone you know is a thousand times greater than the
deaths of a thousand people unknown.

-By God, I loved her once, did you know that, Little Fellow? Delora was
my first lover, and she was patient with me. At Borja. I needed patience
back then.

-She was a brilliant pilot.

-Ah, you don't understand. She was a woman. And now she's gone. -War is
hell, the hibakusha say.

-"War is hell!"-what a thing to think! "War is hell," you say with ice
in your damn cold breath, but I know how you really feel, so don't think
you can hide it, because you can't.

It was true. I was trying to turn a diamond face to the deaths of Ali
Alesar and Cristobel and Delora, but it was not working. Bardo, who was
listening to my thoughts almost as they formed, reminded me that I
should be full of hot rage; I should ball my fists and curse and swear
vengeance against Lionel Killirand. Aloof compassion, he whispered in my
mind, was the emotion of a saint. And bitter self-doubt was childish.

-You're not a child and you're no saint. -What am I, then?

-You're a man, by God! I loved you better when you used to rage like a
man. You almost snapped Kesse's head off his goddamned neck, by God you
did! I can't forget that.

-Neither can I, Bardo. I can't forget anything. -Ah, too bad.

-I'm changing, now ... so fast.

-I know, Little Fellow, I know. Sometimes I don't understand you
anymore.

-If I could make you see the probabilities ... the possibilities. Soon,
there will be a battle, the beginning of the end. I can see it coming.

I'm-What's wrong?

-I'm afraid. I'm afraid of losing everything. Sometimes I'm even afraid
of losing you.

-But you can never lose your friends, Little Fellow. Haven't I told you
that before?

-Will we still be friends, then, after it is finished? -By God, I swear
we will!

Bardo was still my friend, and as we entered the Orion Nebula, he began
to examine the tactical implications of his infamous Boomerang Theorem.

We fell among the stars of the Trapezium, which glowed with the lovely
green of interstellar ionized oxygen. We fell among stars so young that
they had been born when man was still half an ape roaming the grasslands
of Old Earth's mother continent. Near the Chu Binary we fought a
skirmish with Soli's main force. Bardo and Justine-and Charl Rappaporth
and Li Tosh-discovered they could fall instantly back along their
pathways to a window and thereby surprise any pilot who might have
followed them. In this way they sent eight of Soli's pilots into stars.

It was a clever trick, but it could not be so easily duplicated. To
defeat Soli, who copied and used our tactics against us as quickly as
RNA copies and spits our protein, we would need more than tricks.

At last we made our way past the Tycho's Thick into the Rosette.

Surrounding us was that glorious star-making machine I had passed
through on my journey into the Entity. Here were stars and mappings I
knew well. We were close to the Vild-perilously close-and I could not
help wondering what it would be like to fall out among the ashes and
degraded light of that star-blown hell. As we passed through the spaces
of Rollo's Rock and Farfara and Nwarth, we lost Duncaness and his
Riggersworm. To be sure, in revenge we destroyed Alhena Ede. (This huge,
sardonic pilot was Jonathan Ede's older sister. Of all the tragedies of
our tragic war that might have occurred, I am at least glad that brother
never killed sister. But both Edes died, and that is too bad. They were
the last of their famous line, and their talents disappeared along with
their bodies, chromosomes, and lightships.) For every pilot we lost we
took one of Soli's. But we could not keep on this way forever. Every
pilot we lost increased the odds against us, and Soli had more pilots to
lose than we did. When three of my pilots vanished into the Northwest
Thick, I knew I had to close with Soli in one, final, decisive battle.

It was wholly my decision to lead my pilots into the spaces surrounding
Perdido Luz. I cannot apologize for that. Having failed to use time and
intelligence successfully, I had only the element of space left to
offset Soli's greater force. We fenestered past Kaarta and New Earth on
to the stars of the Fayoli because I was familiar with those mappings
and those spaces. Because I was seeking a particular thickspace in which
to trap Soli, we segued into the manifold near Darrein Luz. There the
stars are small and burn with yellow and orange lights; there time is a
little strange; there the Entity has distorted the manifold beyond
probability. According to our star maps, Perdido Luz was not a part of
the Entity. Had it been, no pilot (except perhaps Bardo and Justine, and
Li Tosh) would have followed me there. But star maps are sometimes out
of date and just plain wrong. Star maps take little account of a nebular
brain's rapid growth. I guided my pilots through the thickspace I had
mastered years ago, and we fell out near Perdido Luz. None Of us-not
even I-guessed we were perturbing the space, the very essence of the
Solid State Entity.

Of course I knew it was a wild risk to seek battle within that
thickspace. But what choice did I have? Ages ago Hannibal Barka had
shocked a nation called Rome by driving his army of men and hairless
mammoths across a range of mountains. All the mammoths and many of his
men had frozen to death in the snow-drenched passes, but his army had
survived to destroy the Romans at Lake Trasimene. I was no Hannibal, but
I could still choose my space for battle. Soli would know nothing of the
Perdido Thickspace, and if he followed us there, I would surprise him as
Hannibal had the Romans.

In Neverness, journeymen, and novices were trudging through slushy
streets on their way to dinner; and in the heart of the Entity, She was
thinking Her great thoughts; and the killing radiations of Merripen's
Star and other Vild stars were rushing towards Neverness, always
rushing; and Leopold Soli and a hundred lightships fell out of the
manifold. They hovered above Perdido Luz's fourth planet, a gas giant
encircled by ghostly rings of ice. We caught them at a point-exit near
the silvery center ring. My pilots used the prepared mappings I had
shown them, and we fell upon Soli through the thickspace as if we were a
pack of hungry wolves.

I now understand what the ancient warlords meant by "the fog of war."

Although I could not place each of my pilots as I would stones upon the
interstices of a ko board, I had hoped at least to observe and control
the tide of the battle. I found I could control nothing, not even my
sweating palms nor the throbbing of my heart. I fell out into realspace
for less than an instant, and the sparkling center ring of the fourth
planet hung like a glacier above me. I made an instant mapping. My
ship-engines opened the manifold near Gregorik Smith's Rose of Earth. I
made another mapping and again my ship-engines opened the manifold.

Blackness split, like a rent in a pilot's kamelaika. And then we were
both gone, he into the heart of Perdido Luz, and I into the point-rich
pathways of the thickspace. There was a rush of theorems, the sparkling
ideoplasts of the number-storm. I flowed through the dense mesh of the
thickspace as if my lightship were an information virus finding its way
through the dark red veins of a man's brain. There was a branching and
then a joining of tunnels. The manifold opened again. There was light,
the weak yellow light of Perdido Luz. One of Soli's pilots-it was Neith
of Thorskalle in his distinctive, wingless ship-was waiting for me. But
I had fixed a sequence of mappings. Before he could drive me into the
star, I escaped, back into the throbbing arteries of the manifold. In
and out of the manifold we danced until Neith made a mistake. He entered
a pathway which, in its looping through the manifold, intersected with
only one other. For him and his Time Future, there could be only two
possible point-exits into the realspace near Perdido Luz. I calculated
the probabilities, and I was waiting for him when his ship silvered the
blackness. Waiting to murder him. He never had a chance.

Be compassionate, Katharine had said to me.

But what place could compassion have when it came time to make war? No,
sometimes there could be only cold, murderous passions, and so all
around me like a winter storm at night the battle raged. The lightships
were glittering ice slivers, and they tore through the dark of realspace
and disappeared into the manifold. The complexities of the battle
overwhelmed me. There was slowtime, rushing time, theorems to prove,
mappings of point to point, and the ever-present acid of pure terror. At
first the burning yellow point of Perdido Luz was below me, and then it
was above. (And by above, I mean that it was between me and the Canes
Venatici cloud of galaxies. The stars of the Canes Venatici, by ancient
convention, are said to be above all the stars of our galaxy.) As I made
a mapping and eluded Lionel's Infinite Sloop, I realized I had fallen
out on the far side of Perdido Luz opposite the fourth planet. I was a
mere billion miles from the battle. And then the manifold engulfed me,
and I mapped through to the thickspace beneath the planet's rings, and
there was a haze of light, as of the sun through a dense ice-fog in
Neverness. There were a hundred dancing lightships. I had no idea who
was winning the battle. I tried to talk ship to ship with my pilots but
there was no time. I escaped one of Soli's pilots only by making a
desperate mapping through a finite tree. I escaped into the manifold,
but I could not immediately return because the tree's branchings were
numerous and complex. I seemed to fall forever. Time flowed as slowly as
glacier ice. For a while I was sick with battle lust; I was sick with
myself How easily I had again become a murderer! How easily the virus of
war had infected us all! Even as I proved a minor result of the
Inclusion Theorem, pilots were murdering pilots. It was unbelievable,
really. This is what battle is, I thought. Battle is not merely a word;
it is organized murder. I balled my fists then in the darkness of my
ship, and I cursed. I remembered a thing which should have been on all
our minds before we ever decided to schism and fall against our fellow
pilots: War is the worst thing that human beings do. To think of it
abstractly or treat it as a game is worse than barbaric.

And yet it is true that murder is as natural to humans as making flint
axes or suckling babies. And humans are noble, tragic, splendid beings
around a core of barbarity, When I at last returned to the battle, I had
a moment to observe the ripple and flux of the lightships as they
murdered each other. Although the battle seemed utterly chaotic, as if a
cloud of madness had overcome the pilots on both sides, it was not so.

To murder may indeed be madness, but the pilots did not murder at
random. No, my brother and sister pilots were men and women of passion,
if not compassion. I watched as certain pilots seemed to seek each other
out. Bardo and Justine in their fat, sleek, Blessed Harlot, pursued
Lionel's needlelike Infinite Sloop into the manifold. In vengeance for
Delora wi Towt's death, they murdered him. It was revenge that impelled
Tomoth to fall against Li Tosh and sent them plunging through pathways I
would have warned them against. All around me, beneath the cold yellow
light of Perdido Luz, the battle degenerated into tens of vengeance
combats. My pilots quickly abandoned my strategy and our prearranged
mappings. Soli's pilots, as I later learned, were poisoned with old
rivalries and hatreds. They ignored Soli's master plan. Salmalin, who
had always been jealous of his most brilliant pupil, the Sonderval, fell
against his Cardinal Virtue. Madness and murder; murder and madness.

There was one awful moment when two of Soli's pilots went mad and turned
against each other. And then an even more awful moment when Tomoth fell
out into realspace, and by sheer bad chance, caught me unmapped. To this
day I can still imagine how his ugly, red, jeweled eyes must have
gleamed when he realized he could at last avenge my insulting him that
night in the master pilot's bar, and moreover-a thousand times
moreover-he could have his vengeance for my murdering his brother,
Neith. But vengeance, like a Devaki spearpoint, cuts two ways. Li Tosh,
and Bardo and Justine, fell on Tomoth in the instant before he murdered
me. They murdered him; they opened a window into the manifold and sent
him down a dark tunnel into the hell of a nearby star.

I come now to perhaps the saddest part of my story. When Soli saw that
Tomoth and Lionel were dead, he fell into a rage. I might have hoped
that he had learned compassion, but no, he fell against Bardo and
Justine without mercy or restraint. For a moment their ships floated
like thallows beneath the fourth planet's icy rings. Soli's elegant,
lithe Vorpal Blade glistening behind the Blessed Harlot-this image
burned through my telescopes into the neurologics of my ship. I was
close enough-a hundredth of a lightsecond-to meld my ship's neurologics
with those of the Blessed Harlot. In a frantic effort to help Bardo and
Justine find a mapping, I did so. But they ignored the mapping I showed
them. Probably Justine did not believe Soli would really murder them.

Certainly, as I realize now, they were intent on making a particular
mapping of their own. Although I "listened" to their final interior
dialogue, I listened only for a moment. I understood only a part of
their private thoughts. Here, for the sake of history and the preserving
art of the remembrancers, is what I heard:

-There, see the curve of Soli's Vorpal Blade? -He always was a romantic
man, really, and I-

-Think now, beneath the ring's thickspace, the point-source where if
alpha is a statement scheme then there exists a solution class such
that-A cantor once told me, he said he'll destroy you because-Therefore
the universal class and every other class is a subclass of-Of course I'm
ready to define the cardinal, but I can't stop thinking about Soli and
the cantor. He said, Justine, your husband is a tychist in his heart
who'd chance almost anything to prove his theorem, and he said between
love and hate there's nothing and ... And they were gone. A window to
the manifold opened, and they were gone.

I have seen this moment before, I thought. In my time of scrying, in my
stone cell, I had seen many futures. In one of them, just before Soli
destroyed them, Bardo and Justine opened a window to the manifold and
fled the battle. In another, Bardo and Justine held each other in each
other's arms and in each other's thoughts as Soli himself opened the
window and thus became a murderer. Which future had come to be? Which
event was now already microseconds past?

in the end we choose our futures, the scryers are fond of saying. I made
my choice. I chose that Bardo and Justine should live. And so I waited.

How long I waited for them to return to the battle! How long must a Lord
Pilot wait before he must turn his attention elsewhere? I waited vast,
endless, countable, whole seconds; I waited an eternity. But Bardo's
ship did not return.

I fell against Soli, then. Or he fell against me. In truth, we fell
against each other. Our two lightships so different in design, my
Immanent Carnation with her swept-forward wings and Soli's Vorpal
Blade-we were like streaks of lightning splitting the night. We
maneuvered for advantage in and out of the windows we opened. At last, I
thought, at last. I made a simple mapping. I fell into an open loop
which was partially bounded by a Danladi sequence. As the manifold
opened before me, I was sure I would fall out into the thickspace and
ambush Soli. But he had guessed my strategy and was waiting for me. I
was helplessly unmapped with none of my fellow pilots near enough to
save me. I am sure he would have murdered me. My Lord Pilot, my uncle,
my executioner, my father.

I believe the pilots of both sides would have fought and murdered down
to the last ship if the voices had not begun. Everyone, even
Soli-especially Soli-heard the voices, although they were not really
voices at all, but word plasts that we interpreted as voices. Each
pilot's ship-computer began to manufacture the ideoplasts for words and
idea structures. In the pit of my ship, the neurologics enveloping me
began to quiver with subtle rhythms not entirely their own. Immediately
I sensed the handiwork of the Entity. I was trying to escape Soli (or
was I really trying to murder him?) when the bright, snowflake ideoplast
representing the Axiom of Plexity shattered into fragments. My
mathematical thought array was completely ruined. Then the ship-computer
produced the orange, multipronged ideoplast for "the categorical
imperative to prove." This plast connected to a red cylinder
representing the specific solution set. The red cylinder joined with a
black torus, the ideoplast of universal negation. Together these plasts
formed a word plast which I understood to mean: You must discover the
answer to death. In a like manner, other word plasts formed and joined
to the central word plast. A black torus appeared again and merged with
the first plast of universal negation. There was a spearlike green plast
representing a specific type of mapping, and automorphism, and the
thought: Death lies within me grew from the central concept. In a few
moments other ideoplasts formed and swirled about each other and fell
into place as the little word-storm quieted and cleared. I wondered why
She did not appear to us as an imago of the Tycho as She had when I
first penetrated Her. Perhaps She wanted to stop the battle by
interrupting the number-storm within each ship. If that was Her
intention, She succeeded. One hundred and twelve lightships hung
motionless in realspace, and these words played through each of us:

How far do you fall, Pilots? How do you like war? Do you still seek the
secret of life? Then you must discover an answer to death. Death lies
within me. Death is a star I will call Gehenna Luz. If you seek an
answer to the dying stars of the Vild, you must quit your war and
journey to Gehenna Luz. I will help you. But you must hurry because
Gehenna Luz will die very soon. The way is far but not too far; the
secret of life is near. The first pilot to reach Gehenna Luz will be
told the secret.

I cannot wholly explain why this simple message destroyed our will to
war. I cannot-and could not-look inside the minds of Li Tosh and Carman
of Simoom and Leopold Soli and proclaim: "See, this is where the cool
stream of devotion extinguished the flames of madness." Why should we
have even believed Her, that inhuman, capricious goddess? Perhaps our
warring inside Her and our rape of the manifold had outraged Her;
perhaps She wanted only to lure us on to our doom. I can only say that
we did believe her. We needed to believe Her. One hundred and twelve
ships floated above the rings of the fourth planet, and we believed that
the secret of the dying Vild (and perhaps the other secret) was close at
hand. There came a moment, I think, when we looked out over the array of
ships, and at the coffee-black spaces where the Infinite Sloop and the
Blessed Harlot had recently been, and we were ashamed. We were not
warriors; we were Pilots of the Order of Mystic Mathematicians and Other
Seekers of the Ineffable Flame-I cannot explain why we each should
suddenly remember this.

We held a conclave, there near the thickspace. We sent our imagos ship
to ship, listening to the voices of our "enemy" pilots, watching the
lips of pilots we had known all our lives. It was as if we had awakened
from a terrible dream. The sad Li Tosh, the anguished Sonderval grieving
for Delora wi Towt, Soli with his death-ruined eyes and silent
face-almost all the pilots agreed we must call a truce.

"This has been a waste," Soli's imago spoke to me later in the privacy
of my ship. "What fools we've been."

"Bardo is dead," I told him. "So many dead."

"And Justine. How could you have killed them?"

"I don't know," he said.

Inside my pit I floated and rubbed my nose, which was so congested from
filtering dry, recycled air that I breathed with difficulty. "You would
have killed me too, wouldn't you?"

"I don't know," he said. And then, after a moment's reflection: "Yes."

"But the war is over," I said. "These murders diminish us. They're
barbaric. They make little men of all of us. I can't kill anymore; I
will not."

"Yes," he said, "it's over. The war." He pressed his eyes, then said,
"But between you and me, the race goes on, doesn't it, Pilot?"

"How could it not, then?" I agreed. "It goes on."

Because we were both Lord Pilots, Soli and I said a requiem for all the
pilots that had died that day. Then each of us faced our ships and made
our mappings. The stars vanished and the lightships fell through their
windows into the manifold. So began our race to find the star Gehenna
Luz before it exploded, into the lonely, deceptive heart of the Solid
State Entity.

Chapter 25 - The Great Ocean of Truth

God created the integers, and all the rest is the work of man.
-Leopold Kronecker, Machine Century Constructivist

The knowledge at which geometry aims is the knowledge of the eternal.
-The Plato

Mathematics is a game. Its pieces are the axioms we create, and its
rules are logic. That mathematics is occasionally useful to mechanics
and pilots is accidental.
-Mahavira Lal, third Lord Cantor

I do not know what I appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have
been only like a boy on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and
then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell, while the great
ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
-Isaac Newton, first Lord Mechanic

It is the strangest of phenomena that intelligence can shape the deep
structures of the universe. How often I have had to admit this; how
often I have had to contemplate this mystery. As I fenestered into the
heart of the Entity, as I again penetrated that fathomless brain, I
wondered again and again how her great, rippling waves of intelligence
created the wild, segmented spaces, the infinite loops (not to mention
the omnipresent infinite trees) and the other dangers of Her interior
manifold. She, Herself, strange to say, could not tell me. She did not
know. She was not aware of every bubble and topological transformation
which occurred within Her. When I learned this, I was surprised, though
I should not have been. Is a pilot in dreamtime aware of the firing of
each individual neuron within his brain? Can he ever fully understand
the flow of blood through arteries, diffusing cell by cell through
millions of capillaries, the hot rush of electrochemical impulses which
is the fount of his pleasure? What is this thing we call intelligence?

If electrical events within the brain, how can intelligence turn itself
outside-in to understand itself? It is an old problem with a simple
solution: For any brain to be entirely aware of itself, it would have to
be vastly larger than itself Within the bounds of simple matter and
energy, this is impossible. (Though our eschatologists have theorized
that the Ieldra, and the mythical Elder Ieldra, have an infinite
intelligence. And since infinite sets may contain subsets of themselves
which are themselves infinite, they say it is possible that such godly
intelligences can fully understand themselves. I do not know.

Intelligence is not a set, and it is wrong to analagously apply the
theory of sets in this manner. One would think the eschatologists would
appreciate this simple fact.) And if we truly possess a free will, the
problem grows worse, much worse. If I freely concentrated on a
particular question-for instance, why would the Entity encourage one
hundred and twelve pilots to enter Her brain?-if I thought this thought
freely, I would be the cause of the fear and doubt which crackled
through me. I would cause particular neurons within my limbic brain to
fire. If I should somehow attempt to understand these impulses, the very
act of my understanding would interfere with them. And then, at the very
moment I thought I knew the shape of my fear, it would be gone,
evaporated like snow crystals in the noonday sun.

The Entity, of course, understood this as clearly as a pilot understands
that two times two is four. Although She apparently wanted us to find
the star Gehenna Luz, She did not really care about discovering the
shape of the manifold within Her. We pilots could do that. She wanted
only-at least this is my understanding-to think and be. If this
tremendously concentrated thinking caused the manifold to distort into a
series of infinite trees or to warp into a Danladi bubble-well, that was
interesting, but not nearly so interesting as the openness or closure of
realspace, and the other problems of the universe. To be sure, much as a
man is aware that his visual cortex lies beneath the bone at the back of
his head, She knew that certain pockets of the manifold were distorted
in certain ways. This knowledge saved some of us pilots from stumbling
into infinite trees, as I once had. She warned us away from the worst
dangers. She provided us mappings, when She could, and She provided us
with the fixed-points of Gehenna Luz. Had She not helped us this way, I
believe few pilots would have dared to go on.

For me it was terrifying to find myself once again journeying through
that dark nebula that was the Entity. The dense, interstellar dust, the
glowing hydrogen clouds, the cancerous black bodies, and always those
goddamned mysterious moon-brains, as Bardo would say-whenever I fell out
into realspace, I had difficulty imagining why I had once again, despite
myself, returned to this strange hell. I was still full of the horror of
war, and the afterimage of Bardo's Blessed Harlot as it disappeared
haunted me- I would face his death? I wondered where my fellow pilots
were. I could not track their lightships across the Entity because the
manifold was like bubbling, black mud. Too bad. Often, I wondered at the
Entity's purpose. Did She really want us to witness the death of a star?

Or was it all just a cruel trick, Her way of exterminating the soul of
an Order which had grown stale, obnoxious and bellicose?

If She-this goddess whom the warrior-poet had once called Kalinda of the
Flowers-if it was important to Her that we quickly reach Gehenna Luz,
why didn't She give us more help? Specifically, I wondered why She
didn't show us the solution to the Continuum Hypothesis. If we could
prove the Hypothesis, we could have mapped from Perdido Luz to Gehenna
Luz in a single fall, in almost no time. Why had She provided us
laborious mappings through Her twisted interior if a much simpler
solution existed? Ah, but what if there was no solution? Or what if a
solution existed, and She did not know-or care-what it was? (As a
historical note, I should mention that there is an ancient, unrelated
theorem of the same name. The Old Continuum Hypothesis states that there
is no infinite set with a cardinality between that of the set of natural
numbers and the set of points in space. For a century, this remained
impossible to prove or disprove, until one of the first-and
last-self-programming computers discovered the axioms of Generalized Set
Theory and decided the question once and for all.)

Of course it was arrogant and foolish of me to suppose that I might
prove what the Entity perhaps could not. But for all my pains and
adventures, I was still an arrogant man. I wanted badly to prove the
Hypothesis, I needed to prove it, and to prove it before another pilot
such as Soli proved it. All my life I had dreamed of proving it, and now
great secrets lay before me if only the pure light of inspiration would
illumine this most famous of theorems. I floated naked within my ship's
pit, all the while wondering where this inspiration might come from.

From slowtime I passed into the white light of dreamtime, and the
manifold opened to my mind. Strange are the pathways of a goddess's
brain: I entered a rare Lavi torison space and began in-folding through
what I prayed would be a finite set of folds. Time slowed. I seemed to
have forever to think my thoughts. My thoughts were like the dull glow
of an oilstone; my thoughts were as weak as the light of a coldflame
globe through a drifting cloud of snow on a winter night. I did not know
where to seek inspiration. The great brain of my ship lay before me; its
neurologics surrounded me in a web of electric intelligence, but it had
been designed to compute, to reason by symmetry and heuristics, to
manipulate logic structures, to store information, to do a million
things which complemented and added to the mental powers of a human
brain without replacing it, I could face my ship, forever and be forever
lost to the ecstasy of the size of a brain, I thought, did not
necessarily determine its talent for creating athematics. Perhaps even,
the Entity-and here I was being utterly foolish-had little real interest
or talent for pure mathematics. And then I had another thought as clear
as the Timekeeper's glass: If I were to prove the Great Theorem, the
inspiration would have to come from somewhere within myself

I am a mathematical man. I am a curious man. I have always wondered at
the nature of mathematics, and at my own nature as well. What is
mathematics? Why should mathematics describe the laws of the universe so
exactly? Why should our minds' seemingly arbitrary creations and
discoveries fit so well this mad, swirling blizzard we call reality? For
example, why should gravity (to use the model of newtonian mechanics)
act between two objects according to the inverse of the square of the
distance separating them? Why doesn't it act according to the second and
a half power, or the point zero one five and so on power? Why is
everything so tidy and neat? It may be, of course, that the human brain
is so puny that it can discover only the simplest, the most obvious of
universal laws. Perhaps there remains an infinity of laws so hopelessly
complicated that they would be impossible to state. Had gravity acted
more complexly, The Newton probably never would have found an equation
to describe it, Who knows what wonders will forever remain hidden from
the mathematical sight of man?

This explanation, however, favored by the eschatologists, still does not
explain why mathematics works as it does, or why it even works at all.

What is mathematics? I have turned this question in my mind, turned and
returned to this mystery all my life. We create mathematics as surely as
we create a symphony. We manipulate our'axioms with logic as a composer
'arranges musical notes, and so the holy music of our theorems is born.

And n a different sense we also discover mathematics: The ratio of a
circle's circumference to the diameter remains the same for human minds
and for ,aliens of the Cetus cloud of galaxies. All minds discover the
same mathematics for that is the way the universe is. Creation and
discovery; discovery and Creation-in the end I believe they are the
same. We create (or discover) undefined concepts such as point, line,
set and betweenness. We do not seek to define these things because they
are as basic as concepts can be. (And if we did try to define them, we
would make the mistake of The Euclid and say something like: A line is
breadthless length. And then, using other words we would have to define
the concept "breadthless" and "length." And so on, and so on, until all
the words in our finite language were eventually used up, and we
returned to the simple concept: A line is a line. Even a child, after
all, knows what a line is.) From our basic concepts we make simple
definitions of mathematical objects we believe to be interesting, We
define "circle"; we create "circle"; we do this because circles are
beautiful and interesting. But still we know nothing about circles. Ah,
but some things are obviously true (or it is fun to treat them as if
they were true), and so we create the axioms of mathematics. All right
angles are congruent, parallel lines never intersect parallel lines
always intersect, there exists at least one infinite set-these are all
axioms. And so we have lines and circles and axioms, and we must have
rules to manipulate them. These rules are logic. By logic we prove our
theorems. We may choose the natural logic where a statement is either
true or not, or one of the quantum logics where a statement has a degree
or probability of trueness. With logic we transmute our simple, obvious
axioms into golden theorems of stunning power and beauty. With a few
steps of logic we may prove that in hyperbolic geometry rectangles do
not exist, or that the number of primes is infinite, or that aleph null
is the smallest infinity that exists, or that ... we may prove many
wonderful things which are not obvious at all; we may do this if we are
very clever and if we love the splendor of the number-storm as it rages
and consumes us, and if we are filled with the holy fire of inspiration.

What is inspiration? From where does it come? As I fenestered through
the torison space, the Lavi Curve Theorem and the Second Transformation
Theorem were as beautiful as diamonds, and I was full of wonder. Where
does mathematics come from? How is it born? Yes, we have axioms and
logic and concepts such as "line," but where do these abstractions come
from? How is it that even a child knows what a line is? Why do the
Darghinni, who are as alien as aliens can be, think according to the
same logic as human beings? Why should this be so?

I segued through the last fold in the torison space; my ship dropped
into realspace, like a flea popping out of the shaken robes of a
harijan. I looked at the veiled stars of the Entity, and I thought of
the age-old answer of the cantors. Mathematics is a special language,
and language is born within the brain. Our brains have evolved for
fifteen billion years from the brains of man-apes and back, from the
simpler mammalian brains, from the ganglia and nerve clusters of
creatures slithering or swimming through the warm salt water of our
distant past. And back still further to the bacterial spores which
carried life to Old Earth. But from where did these spores come? Did the
Ieldra create them? Who created the Ieldra? What is life? Life is the
information and intelligence bound within DNA, and life is the explosive
replication of protein molecules, and life is the carbon, hydrogen,
oxygen, and nitrogen which exist or are born with the cores of the
stars. And the universe gives birth to stars; the universe is a vast,
star-making engine; the universe brought forth Bellatrix and Sirius and
the blue giant stars of the greater Ede Cluster; from stars such as
Antares and the First Canopus the stuff of life is made. Every atom of
ourselves was assembled in some faraway, heavenly fire. We are the
children of the stars, the universe's creation. If our star-born brains
conceive "line" and the other elements of language, should we be
surprised that "line" is a natural and meaningful concept within that
universe? Is it a wonder that the logic of the universe is our logic,
too? The cantors are fond of saying that God is a mathematician. They
believe that when we create the special language of mathematics we are
learning to speak the language of the universe. We have all of us, we
pilots and mathematicians, uttered the sounds of this language, in
however an infantile and primitive form. Once or twice, while
contemplating the wonderful fit of mathematics to the contours of
spacetime and to the undulations of the manifold, I have felt that the
universe was talking to me in its special vocabulary, if only I could
listen. How could I learn to listen? How could I learn to speak more
elegantly the pure tones of mathematics? What is inspiration?

I journeyed on, and my ship seemed like a dark, stale tomb imprisoning
me darker by far than the Timekeeper's stone cell. As a germinated seed
seeks its way out of the ground into the light of day, I longed to break
free of the old thoughtways that stifled me and restrained my
inspiration. How I longed to prove the Great Theorem! But at the same
time that I had longings, I had a certain dread, too. I wondered, again
and again, at the nature of my own intelligence. From where did my
powers of scrying and remembrancing spring? What other powers might I
someday gain? If I did somehow prove my theorem, would the proof really
be my own? Or would it be merely the creation of the Agathanian's
information virus? Could I dare to call forth the seed of inspiration
within me, to try to shape that seed as it grew, to taste the
bittersweet fruit it might bear?

I followed the Entity's mappings across a series of thickspaces. Once, I
fell out into realspace as dark and empty as the intergalactic void. I
nearly panicked, then. But I found that I was actually in the middle of
a thickspace! The point-sources were stived as closely as the black eggs
in the belly of a jewfish. How this could be so I did not know. Only
stars or other matter (or intelligence) can deform space to create a
thickspace. I quickly opened a window, and I segued into the manifold. I
fell into dreamtime as I thought about this odd thickspace. If the brain
of the Entity could contain such wonders as a starless thickspace, what
wonders might lie within my brain? Suppose I really tried, tried so hard
my eyes burned like coals and my brain's blood surged like an
ocean-suppose I tried for the thousandth time to prove the Continuum
Hypothesis?

As soon as this thought hardened, the number-storm intensified. A tide
of ideoplasts began to build and flow and rage before my inner sight. I
was excited almost beyond control. For the thousandth time I
contemplated the deceptively simple statement of the Hypothesis: that
between any pair of discrete Lavi sets of point-sources there exists a
one-to-one mapping. I broke the statement apart and examined the pieces.

What, exactly was a Lavi set? What was a point-source? Was I sure I
understood the difference between a Lavi set and a discrete Lavi set?

How could I show the mapping was one-to-one, and more importantly, how
might I construct the mapping to begin with? At first I fell into old
thoughtways and rediscovered my old attempts to find a solution. Often I
found myself reasoning in circles. I grew discouraged at the shallowness
of my thinking. How could I prove this? How could I prove that? How
could I break the rusted chain of my habitual, uninspired thoughts?

I tried to restate the problem in a different form, hoping that a new
way of looking at it might enable me to see the obvious. And though I
did find an equivalent statement, it proved even more opaque than the
original. I decomposed the Hypothesis, recombined it into a slightly
different statement-all to no avail. In my mind, I represented the
pieces of the Hypothesis with pictures in order to "see" relations that
I might have overlooked. I generalized the Hypothesis to include all
Lavi sets, and I played with mappings of specific Lavi sets which were
quite well known; I tried proof by contradiction; I dissected related
theorems (Bardo's Boomerang theorem, incidentally, is closely related,
though simpler to prove); I followed long, dark corridors of reasoning
down thousands of steps; I cursed and I rubbed my eyes and temples, and
finally, when my beard and hair were rimed with crusts of dried sweat
and I had nearly abandoned hope, I began to make wild guesses.

I do not know how long I tried to prove the Hypothesis. Days, seconds,
years-what did time matter? And yet it did matter. At any given time,
Soli might be close to his moment of inspiration. The race went on, and
measureless moments passed into endless days, and I began to think the
Hypothesis was unprovable. For a long while I tried to show that it was
unprovable, even though I did not really believe it could be so. My
intuition-and a mathematical man should never ignore his
intuition-something within me whispered that the Hypothesis was indeed
provable, and more, that the proof would seem embarrassingly obvious
once I had found it. If it could be found. If I could find it. If .. .

If one mapping between a pair of discrete Lavi sets of point-sources
exists, then there are an infinite number of mappings; if one covers an
n-dimensional cube with finitely many sufficiently small closed sets,
then there are necessarily points which belong to at least n + 1 of
these sets; if one stirs a bowl of blood tea for a thousand years, there
will exist at least one point-one corpuscle of blood-which will remain
fixed in its original position, undisturbed by the stirring; if then; if
I examined the ideoplasts of the Tycho's Conjecture and the Tiling
Theorem and the Fixed-Point Theorem, if I broke down the brilliant
crystalline arrays into the simple shards of proof steps instead of
clumping the arrays together, then I might better understand the
inspirations leading to the proofs of these famous theorems. If I
understood the proofs better, then I might better use the theorems to
prove the Great Theorem.

If ... If a pilot dwelt too long in dreamtime, then he must withdraw
from the thoughtspace and sleep. I was suddenly tired of the interplay
of ideoplasts flooding my mind; I dreaded thinking ever again a single
mathematical thought. I bit my lip and cursed and despaired. Finally, I
slept. I closed my eyes and mind to the number-storm, and I floated like
a corpse in a deathship. I slept a long time. When I at last awoke my
eyelids were stuck together; my mouth tasted of blood. Probably I had
ground my teeth while I dreamed. My mind was dark and cold, like black
ice. I was as empty as an abandoned snow hut on the shelf of the deep
winter sea. And yet the cold was not total. There was a flush of warmth
inside me as if I had been rescued from a capsized sled and fed a bowl
of hot tea. The faint flame of an idea burned in my mind. Where it had
come from I did not know. For no particular reason I thought of an
obscure theorem, the justerini mapping theorem. The flame grew brighter,
as if I had breathed on the glowing embers of a woodfire. I was very
excited. How elegant, I thought, was the collapse of the omega function
by which Olaf Justerini had proved his neglected theorem! How beautiful!

I began thinking in a general manner of the whole structure of the
Continuum Hypothesis. I saw, in a general, hazy way, how the same idea
leading to the collapse of justerini's omega function might be applied
to collapse the Lavi correspondence scheme. I trembled with excitement
and with fear, too, because I had had a thousand such hazy ideas to
collapse the correspondence scheme. But this idea was different-I could
almost see the difference. Somehow my idea felt right; somehow it fit
and completed the holes in my pattern of thinking. I reached out to my
ship's neurologics, and there was light. Ideoplasts swirled around the
still point of my mind, and the manifold opened. I entered again into
dreamtime. I had an anticipation of rightness as I translated my idea
into the diamond crystal of a new ideoplast. The flames of my thoughts
grew hotter. I built up the array of my proof. The Lavi correspondence
scheme could be made to collapse if and only if the justerini subspace
was embedded within the simple Lavi space. Could I show it was embedded?

It must be embedded; there must be a simple series of steps to show it
was embedded; even a novice could show it was embedded. My thoughts
burned like lava in my brain. My brain itself felt electric and
different, vastly more capacious, as if it could hold an ocean of molten
thoughts. I felt that I was thinking in a way I never had before, not
even when I faced my computer and hurried my thoughts with slowtime. Now
my thoughts came much faster. Whole new concepts came to me and fell
into place, all in a flash. I understood things. How can I describe the
exquisite pain and pleasure of this understanding, this wonderful vision
of orderedness? My thoughts seared me; my thoughts were flaming crimson;
my thoughts were burning raindrops of light. The subspace was embedded
within the simple Lavi space! And then the correspondence scheme
collapsed, almost as the layers of a star collapse around the core when
it becomes a supernova, and there was a choosable mapping. There was a
choosable mapping! There was elegance, beauty and starlight. I made a
mapping. The white light of dreamtime swept by in brilliant streamers,
then collapsed into a single point of starlight which burned and
expanded and brightened until it filled all of my mind.

Oh, Soli, I thought, the race goes on, but this race is over.

I fell out into realspace above the hot white star that the Entity had
named Gehenna Luz. I had proved the Great Theorem; I had journeyed far
at a single fall, and now all the stars in the sky were finally mine.

Chapter 26 - Kalinda of the Flowers

When Man took to his bed the Computer, there was great rejoicing, and
great fear, too, for their children were almost like gods. The
mainbrains bestrode the galaxy at will, and changed its very face. The
Silicon God, the Solid State Entity, Al Squared, Enth Generation - their
names are many. And there were the Carked and the Symbionts, whose
daughters were the Neurosingers, Warrior-Poets, the Neurologicians and
the Pilots of the Order of Mystic Mathematicians. So beautiful were
these daughters that man longed to touch them, but touch them he could
not. And so was born the Second Law of the Civilized Worlds, which was
that Man could not stare too long at the faces of the Computer or her
children, and still remain as Man.

-from A Requiem for Homo Sapiens, by Horthy Hosthoh

Gehenna Luz was a beautiful star. It was a massive star, white and
scintillant and hot. I was ravished by its beauty. Why stars, I
wondered? Why was there anything at all? Why do we breathe, suck in
sorrow, joy, pity and pain? Why is

-You have proved your theorem, my Pilot, and still you ask these
questions.

It was the godvoice of the Entity inside my mind, a voice which I had
hoped I would never have to hear again. But She had prophesied that I
would return to Her, and return I had.

The stars are that we might glory in their beauty. And we exist to
worship light.

I remembered how the Entity loved her riddles and her games, and I
thought:

-Do you have such a simple answer for every question, then? I am here to
answer your questions.

-Well, I have a thousand questions. Where's Bardo? Why, if you could
have stopped the battle whenever you wished, why did you let him die? Is
he dead? Do you know? No! Do not speak to me ... like this. I don't want
to listen to your voice, here, inside. How can I guard the privacy of my
mind, then?

Human beings do not really want privacy.

There was silence for a while, and then inside the pit of my ship,
appeared the imago of the Tycho, with his walrus jowls and savage grin.

He was so close I could have reached out and plunged my hand into the
phased light waves that were his bristly face. When he spoke, real sound
waves washed my ears: "Would you rather speak as a human being? Then we
will speak thus."

"Where is Soti? The other pilots? What was the result of the battle?"

The Tycho licked spit from his yellow teeth and said, "You have fallen
far, no pilot further. The others are worming their way through the
manifold. Only you have proven your theorem; only you will be told the
secret. Fix your telescopes on the asteroid cluster twelve degrees above
the solar plane."

I oriented my ship's telescopes according to his/Her directions. I
looked out into the space a billion miles from Gehenna Luz, at a great
cloud of asteroids, rocks, dust and other debris. Some of these
fragments were huge, cratered and pocked, red with silicates and iron;
some were a darker dun color, probably rich with carbon and water
compounds. At first I had no idea why the Entity had bade me look at
such a bone-heap Of pulverized matter. Then, as the ship-computer
analyzed the carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen proportions of one of
the smaller asteroids my stomach tightened. I felt an overwhelming
apprehension-no, that is not the right word-I immediately knew that
something, in a cosmological sense, was very wrong.

"This used to be Gehenna's single planet," the Tycho said. "It was twice
as massive as Icefall. Now it orbits Gehenna in pieces. Human beings did
this. The manswarm tore the planet apart."

I could hardly believe that She would permit human beings to enter Her
brain, to tear planets apart. Then I thought of the decadent human
beings I had encountered on my first journey inside the Entity, and I
was not so sure.

"How many human beings?" I asked. "Where are these human beings?"

"Fix your telescopes on the long, crescent-shaped asteroid. There, do
you see? Look how they shimmer-their hulls are spun diamond, the same as
your lightships."

I looked through my telescope and saw the terrible image of many
man-made worlds. Each world was a spinning cylinder about thirty miles
long and ten miles wide. I wondered how many people lived inside each
world. I counted the worlds. There were ten thousand four hundred and
eight of them. They were like a colony of rod-shaped bacteria spread out
against the black blood of space. My first thought was that human beings
must have colonized Gehenna Luz before the Entity had grown into this
part of the nebula. Perhaps they had even come from Old Earth. A
deepship had fallen out, I thought, and the human beings had made a
world into which they could increase their numbers. They had mined and
smelted and metabolized the elements of the planet to grow habitats and
food, to reproduce themselves ten thousand times over. If that was true,
they would be among the oldest peoples of the galaxy. (I mean the oldest
human peoples.) They must have been here for thousands of years.

When I told this to the Tycho, he pulled his jowls and laughed until the
spit ran down his chin. He said, "You know your first thought is wrong.

Why don't you examine your second thought? You must know where these
human beings come from."

"Tell me."

"Think Mallory."

I rubbed my knuckles across my chin and asked, "How long did it take for
them to dismantle the planet?"

The Tycho smiled his humorous (or humoring) smile. "Okay, you can
calculate how long they've been here from the doubling time one of their
worlds needs to reproduce itself It's an exponential growth. A
mathematical man should be able to calculate such things."

My head hurt, and I pressed my eye and the side of my nose with my fist.

I did not know why the Tycho would want to tease me. "What is the
doubling time, then? How many years?"

The Tycho's smile was savage as he said, "Do you mean, how many days?"

"Days( "The manswarm breeds quickly, doesn't it, Pilot? Ten Neverness
years ago the first world fell out from the Vild."

"Ten years ago!"

"They were lost, you see, and they had hungers."

"Ten years!"

Shall I show you what human beings can do when they hunger for growth?

Are you ready to watch a star explode?"

Why," I whispered, "why would they explode their sun? Is it possible?" I
closed my eyes for a moment to watch the telescopic images my ship
infused into my visual cortex. I stared at the sifting dust and rocks
and ten-thousand made-worlds. I wondered again how many people lived in
each world. "Mallory," a voice called out to me. "Mallory, listen."

I threw my hands over my ears. "No," I shouted. "The dead don't have
tongues, so they shouldn't speak."

I did not want to listen. I did not want to open my eyes. I did not want
to hear the dulcet voice or look at the lovely, eyeless face that the
Entity was pulling from my memory.

"Oh, Mallory, Mallory!"

At last I could stand it no longer. I opened my eyes and looked at
Katharine. She floated before me wearing her white scryer's robe. Her
skin was white as marble, and her eye hollows were deepest black. She
smiled at me. "It was foreseen long ago," she said. "What is has been."

I wanted to reach out to her, to grab her up in my arms and kiss her
full red lips. But I told myself that she was nothing more than light
and memory, and dispassionate words hanging in the air. I would not try
to touch her, I promised myself. No matter what happened, I would keep
my fist pressed against my cheek.

"Why do you torture me, then? Are my crimes so great?" And I cursed and
shouted to the Entity, "Bring back the Tycho, damn you! I can talk to
him."

But the Tycho, it seemed, was gone. Katharine's imago-it was only
Katharine's imago, I reminded myself-answered me: "Long ago the first
scryers saw the painful future of ... Do you understand the pain of this
vision, now? Oh, sweet Mallory, with your sweet brain and your sweet
life, it hurts more than a man can bear, and so I'll show what man and
woman can ... Do you see what I've seen? Will you see it if I show you?

Look! What has been will be, again and again until all the stars ... Do
you see?"

In my mind a picture formed. There was a hot white star orbited by a
lifeless, frozen planet. Suddenly, from the thickspace close in towards
the sun where the photons and radiation spilled out into space like a
waterfall of white light, there came the hazy foreimage of an object
falling out of the manifold. The image hardened. A clear, diamond
cylinder thirty miles long spread its lightsails in a thousand-mile-wide
umbrella to capture Gehenna's profuse radiations. Slowly the
light-pressure of trillions of particles against the gossamer, silvery
lightsails imparted momentum to the cylinder. It accelerated. In a short
time-perhaps only as long as a long deep winter on Neverness-it reached
the planet. The cylinder opened. Clouds of tiny disassemblers (or
perhaps I should call them programmed bacteria) fell down like a meteor
shower through the airless vacuum and gathered over parts of the planet
in great patches of shiny dust. Then the disassemblers did their work.

They tore loose oxygen atoms from water molecules; they concentrated
masses of carbon and other elements. They ate away the very ground. They
concentrated hydrogen. In vast reservoirs carved out of the planet's
crust, clouds of hydrogen were stored. Again the cylinder opened, and an
army of robot-lasers fell to the planet. They found the hydrogen
reservoirs. Optical crystals in the hearts of the lasers converted
infrared light into short wave beams aimed at the hydrogen pockets. The
hydrogen grew hot and glowed; it heated to a hundred million degrees and
fusioned and exploded. In seconds, great balls of fire and light erupted
from the surface. The crust of the planet was vaporized, pulverized,
blown into hot dust. Rocks and fused sand fragments were flung out into
space. Ice became steam and boiled away. Later, when the dust had
settled, the cylinder opened and released still more disassemblers over
the chewed-up surface of the planet. In this way, layer by layer, the
planet was stripped crust, mantle and core, torn apart like a dirty
snowball and scattered into space.

More pictures formed inside me. I was fascinated with this vision of
assembler technology gone wild, so I closed my eyes and watched the
disassemblers mine the floating planetary fragments for silicon, mercury
and helium, and every other natural element. I watched a cloud of
assemblers escape from the cylinder into the newly created asteroids,
watched as they bonded carbon atom to atom until they had assembled the
gleaming, diamond hulls of many more cylinders. The assemblers built
other things. Telescopes, sulki grids, neurologics, flame globes,
shakuhachis, flying wings, chopsticks, gossilk, trees, houses, glucose
pellets, fields of grass-there was no end to the things that the
assemblers made. Assemblers made more assemblers, and so the process of
converting a planet into ten thousand cylinders did not take very long.

Assemblers bonded carbon to hydrogen and oxygen; assemblers had been
programmed to fix nitrogen, to build up amino acids and string together
proteins. Assemblers could even make human beings. A manswarm of human
beings, billions and billions of human beings. How many human beings?

"Do you see, sweet Mallory?" the Katharine imago asked me. "So many, who
could have foreseen that life would have made so many?"

"Are the images you showed me-this history-is it real?"

"Reach out with your telescopes. Are the ten thousand made-worlds real?"

I rubbed the side of my nose and said, "Can I know what's real when I'm
inside your brain and you're inside mine? You can make me see anything
you want me to, I think."

She smiled as she dipped her hand into her robe's pocket of concealment.

When she removed it, her finger was smeared with blacking oil, which she
daubed into her eyepits. She said, "You see well enough these pretty.

You must know they are real."

I pulled at my beard and asked, "How many people live in each cylinder?"

"It's not the same number for each ... It will take me a segment of time
to recite the exact numbers. And the numbers change as we speak. It's so
funny, the way you can't help counting all the time, this fetish for
exact numbers."

"Approximately how many people, then?"

She nodded her head as she spoke. "Ten million human beings live inside
each world."

"Human beings-" I began, "Human beings," she said, "are so wonderful!

Half animal, half .. .

I pressed my lips together (I couldn't help thinking that my face must
have looked as tight-lipped as Soli's), and I said, "It's impossible for
ten million people to reproduce like that in ten years."

But even as I spoke, I knew very well that it was not impossible.

Assemblers could be used to ripen infants into adults in a few years.

But what kind of humans would these be? It was impossible for a human
mind to bear its full fruit in the span of a couple of years. I did a
swift calculation. If the number of worlds doubled every three-fourths
of a year, most of the worlds and the people living inside had not
existed three years ago. (Assemblers could even build a fully grown
human being in a few days. During the second dark age, the imprimaturs
had performed many such forbidden experiments. It was true, a woman or
man could be grown like a joint of cultured meat. She would have working
arms and hair and hot red blood pumping through her arteries. She would
even have a brain. But the brain would be as barren as the upper slopes
of Mount Attake. Assemblers could make a woman or man, but they could
not make a mind. They could not make a human mind)

"You still don't see," Katharine said, and she brushed her hair away
from her forehead. She turned towards me. If she had had eyes, I would
have guessed she was reading my face for tells. "How can I make you
see?"

And then there were sights and smells and sounds. As if I were a thallow
soaring on a mountain thermal, my mind's eye-my ear and my nosefloated
across space and pierced the hull of one of the cylinders. There was
warm, moist air, the rich smells of life. Below me and above, curving
out and around and down on all sides for miles was a jungle of
encompassing green. There were trees and chess-board lawns and ponds and
apple orchards hung with sweet-smelling red fruits. And everywhere I
looked, circling forward and aft, left and right, there were babies.

Babies were everywhere. Naked babies, their bodies as wrinkled and soft
as spirali, crawled and squirmed through the long green grasses of the
lawns. A small army of domestic robots watched over them. Some of the
robots nursed newborn babies from plastic teats which they stuffed in
their moist, toothless mouths. Everywhere babies were crying, sucking,
sleeping anddefecating in the grass. The air was rank with the smells of
spit-up milk and mustardy baby dung and fresh, new baby skin. A few of
the older babies-tbey were children, really-climbed like hairless
monkeys through the spreading branches of an apple tree. They plucked
ripe, red apples and bit off chunks with a crunch, and flung the fruit
to the grass below. The lawns were littered with half-eaten apples. I
was appalled at the waste. It almost reminded me of a Devaki meat-orgy.

I wondered if the apples were riddled with worms. Why else would the
babies throw away so much fruit? One of the babies lay cradled in the
crotch of a tree while he picked over an apple as carefully as a novice
would study a hologram of the galaxy. He smiled, then sank his little
white teeth into the apple. The apple was full of worms. Worms swarmed
through the meat of the apple. With another smile, the boy-baby held the
apple to his lips and sucked out a couple of worms, which he gulped down
like milk. I was puzzled why he did this. I wondered why all the other
babies carefully sought out apples full of worms. Then I heard Katharine
whispering in my ear, and I knew the answer: Baby children-and all human
beings-need protein to grow, and worms are nothing but water, fat and
protein.

I closed my eyes, and when I opened them, I was back in the pit of my
ship looking at Katharine. "So many," she said, "the worlds are full of
new ... Oh, yes, there are adult humans, too, a thousand for every
world. The ultimate astriers, do you see? But the babies know the real
... They're so sweet and eager to live-and they're so hungry!"

"Worm eaters," I said, thinking of Shanidar's ghastly smile and the many
horrible things he had eaten. "It reminds me of certain things I'd
rather not be reminded of."

"Don't be afraid of your memories. Memory is everything."

"This careless fecundity. It's so damn barbaric!"

"Be compassionate, Mallory."

"They're barbarians."

"And that is the problem with human beings, do you see? Oh, these poor
people are uncivilized! They're so .. . Their hunger is so limitless.

They've consumed the elements of the planet, but they've run out of one
crucial ... The planet was nitrogen-poor-did you know that? This limits
their growth. How can they make protein without nitrogen? So now they
must look for more food. Other planets around other stars: food for
human babies, do you see?"

"No, I'd rather I was blind."

Katharine pointed her finger at me. The oil-smeared tip was invisible.

She spoke, and her words were slow and grave. "The ten thousand worlds
are like enormous deepships-only not so like. How is it possible, you
wonder, to open a window for such a massive object as a made-world? The
deformations would have to be so ... enormous. When Gehenna has fallen
into supernova, the deformed spacetime in the star's neighborhood will
suddenly unbend, like a sheet of rubber-isn't that the analogy pilots
always use? And like our pilots, the pilots of the made-worlds will make
their mappings. just before the light incinerates them, the worlds will
be flung into the manifold like ... like stones through an open window.

It's the only way."

"They're barbarians!"

She shook her head hard enough to whip her long, black hair from ear to
ear. "No, they are women and men, like us. Like, but not the same
because they lack our pilots' artistry. Their mapping theorems are so
crude. Rarely do they find a one-to-one mapping. Most of the time, they
must map from a point-source to an open set of ... You see, most of the
worlds will fall through a window and scatter at random throughout the
galaxy. Eventually they will fall out around other stars. Which stars
these will be, none of the lords of the manswarm can know."

"Barbarians!" The Vild was nothing but dead stars murdered by human
beings.

I understood, then. I thought I understood everything of human beings
and their terrible fate within the limiting lens of the Milky Way
galaxy. The blood was hot in my face because I was terribly embarrassed.

What have we done, I wondered? Why human beings at all? Human beings had
at last abandoned all restraint. Human beings would destroy a star
because the urge to new life and new niches for life was greater then
reverence for the life of any star; in a way, paradoxically, it was
greater than existing life itself. Ten thousand worlds full of human
beings would fall through the windows of the manifold to the galaxy's
distant stars. Some worlds might fall into stars; some would dwell too
long in the manifold and run out of food; a few worlds would be lost in
infinite trees or other topological traps. Perhaps only a half or a
third of the worlds would survive-who could calculate the probabilities?

But that would be enough. The seed worlds would reach bright new stars,
and they would make billions of new human beings. Nothing would stop the
wreckage of whole planets and the transmutation of simple elements into
human beings. Human beings in their billions would become trillions of
trillions, and the stars would die one by one, and thousand by thousand,
and the Vild would grow until all the stars and planets and interstellar
dust were used up, and the galaxy, from the dead Alpha Crux to the
burned-out Antares, was nothing but a swirling spiral of diamond-hulled
worlds full of hungry human beings.

To the glowing imago of Katharine, I said, "You must hate us."

"Sweet Mallory, no, I don't hate you."

"How can they reproduce and journey thus, knowing they'll destroy
everything?"

"But they don't know anything, don't you see? These ten thousand
worlds-the human beings inside believe they sacrifice a few stars so
their children can bloom and prosper. Because starlight ... because they
cannot journey as our pilots do, they lack perspective. Because the
light from most of the supernovas hasn't had time to reach much of the
galaxy, they can't see it. In truth, even though they are its creators,
they don't know the Vild exists."

"But they must know that sooner or later all the stars will be dead!"

She smiled and said, "They hope that event will occur later, not
sooner." And then she added, "If all the stars fell into supernovas, the
galaxy will flare with wild ... The star fire will create an abundance
of new elements, and so their childrens' children will find new, if
dangerous, possibilities for life."

Despite myself, I could not help smiling, too. I was dreadfully ashamed
that my fellow human beings were destroying the stars, yet perversely
proud that we were clever enough and powerful enough to do so. Even a
goddess, I thought, must be helpless before a galaxy-wrecking swarm of
human beings.

And then pride gave way to guilt, and I repeated, "You must hate us."

"Sweet Mallory, I don't hate you, I ... Oh, don't you see? We scryers,
all who learn the art ... this new ecology, it was foreseen so long ago.

Even the Agathanians, they saw this moment in its becoming."

"Why wasn't I told, then? If I knew-"

"Don't you see? If you had known, you would have despaired, because it
is one thing to know, another to ... What could you or anyone of our
Order have done to stop the Vild's growth?"

"Am I so different than I was? What can I do ... now?"

"You will stop the pain because that is your fate. The Vild is torturing
the galaxy. My sweet Mallory, you brought yourself here to cure the pain
... and for other reasons."

Although I dreaded hearing these "other reasons," I said, "Tell me,
then."

Katharine smoothed the flowing folds of her robe and said, "I can't tell
you. It's not for me to ... No, I must leave you now, Mallory. For the
time, for an eon of time, until I am remembered. Kalinda will tell you
what you need to know. Kalinda of the Flowers."

"Katharine, I never told you the most basic thing which is-"

"Goodbye, sweet Mallory, goodbye."

"No." Katharine shimmered as she disappeared. I knew it was a ridiculous
thing to do, but I reached out to touch her. I touched air. I floated
with my arm outthrust and my fist clenched, and I stared into the sudden
blackness.

"I remember you too well," I said aloud. "Goddamn my memory!"

A moment later, a new imago I had never seen before came alive and
floated above my head. I looked up. She was a beautiful girl. Her skin
was as brown as a baldo nut, and she wore a red robe from neck to knee.

Her eyes -were almost as black as the Timekeeper's; they were shaped
like almonds and seemed too large for her head. It occurred to me that I
had never seen eyes so wise and intelligent in a human face. Around the
little finger of each of her quick little hands she wore a red ring, and
her dark hair was decorated with tens of little white flowers. Her name
was Kalinda of the Flowers.

I would bless your memory and help you remember, if I could.

It is impossible to describe her voice. Certainly it was high and sweet
like the piping of a snow loon. At the same time, it was rich, measured,
and calm. When she spoke, she ennunciated each of her words clearly in a
very unchildlike manner. In a godly manner. Her voice was the godvoice,
and it sounded inside me in deeper tones that perfectly harmonized with
the music pouring out of her girlish throat. There was whimsy in her
voice, and there was poetry. She gave me a knowing look as she recited:

Dear, beauteous death the jewel of the just, Shining nowhere but in the
dark, What mysteries do lie beyond thy dust, Could man outlook that
mark!

There were more poems after this, ancient poems and modern, poems of
Fravashi origin and poems that I thought she must have composed
herself-I was given to understand that this too-wise little girl was a
part of the Entity in a way that the Tycho, and certainly Katharine,
were not. Had she lived on one of the worlds which fell out into the
Entity's dark interior long ago? Had she been killed, encapsulated and
absorbed into one of the Entity's old and deepest memory spaces? Why did
the warrior-poets and the Agathanians refer to the Entity as Kalinda? I
looked at her fingers, at the rings, the rings of a warrior-poet. Was it
possible? Was this the girl that Dawud had spoken of? Had she been the
result of an experiment in breeding female warrior-poets? And she wore
two red rings! I had a terrible suspicion. I felt-and probably the
goddess was quite pleased that I felt this way-I somehow guessed that
this poetry-loving child was alive within the very core of the Entity.

Perhaps the Entity had taken pity on the young warrior-poet; perhaps she
had honored the only human being ever to have worn the poet's an the
warrior's red rings. I thought of the image of an onion, and my eyes
burned with tears. The Entity must be very like an onion, layer upon
layer, whole moons of her brain built up over an inner self who loved
flowers and poetry. Don't be afraid of the death, my Pilot.

Aloud I said, "But every star in the galaxy, every poem that's ever been
written, everything-it will all be lost."

Kalinda plucked a flower from her hair. She placed it in the palm of her
hand, pursed her lips, and blew it at me. The flower floated in the air
a drifted toward me.

You still don't understand. Nothing is lost. I picked this hyacinth
thousands of years ago, but smell it-isn't it still fresh?

"I've tried to understand, thought about this all my life. The decay,
the entropy-"

Entropy is missing information; entropy is a measure of uncertainty.

When entropy is maximum, then all messages are equally probable. The
greater the uncertainty, the greater amount of information conveyed in
the message.

"The message of the Ieldra, it's-"

From the moment the universe was created it moved away from the disorder
of the primal explosion. Macroscopic information is continually created.

"But I-"

Gods seek perfect information about the universe. But information can
never be perfect. Consider one of your exhalations, your carelessly
bitter words of warm air. If a single gram of matter as far away as
Shiva Luz were to be moved a single centimeter, it would change the
microscopic state of your breath. Even the universe itself can never
create enough information to know its own future.

"'What has been will be" Katharine used to say."

You cannot even dream what the future of this galaxy will be. "We're all
doomed and damned, aren't we?"

No, it is just the opposite, my Pilot. There are infinite possibilities.

She plucked another hyacinth from the garland around her forehead and
placed this little flower of light in my hair. She told me many things,
then, wonderful things. Much of what she said I did not understand, or
understood only poorly, as a novice who has been given numbers to play
with has only the vaguest notion of transfinite arithmetic. When I asked
her why she would allow the ten thousand worlds to murder Gehenna
Luz-for clearly the goddess had the power to destroy every world inside
Her, if She so desired-she hinted at the existence of certain
unalterable ecological "laws." (If I confuse the pronouns referring to
Kalinda with those of the goddess, it is because I was confused. In some
sense, I am still confused.) Her words were almost gobbledygook: There
was something about the decisions of every entity in the universe
determining what she called the "ecology of choices." It would be a
great crime, she said, to needlessly interrupt the natural flow of
choices. And it was an even greater crime not to restore the flow if it
had been interrupted. It seemed that there were other ecologies, too.

There was an ecology of ideas and an ecology of prophesies, and an
ecology of information. She told me about the ecology of determined
actions and the ecology of fundamental paradoxes. There were many, many
of these ecologies; there was a hierarchy of ecologies. The study of the
interplay between ecologies, she said, was her art. When I admitted that
her art was as apprehensible to me as probabilistic topology was to a
worm, she said, "Worms know enough about transformations to become
butterflies."

She told me something else. All of our communications, all of her
manipulations of the manifold that I had found so disturbing, the
inexplicable phenomena inside of the Entity-everything that I had so far
witnessed, she had accomplished on an unconscious level. No being, she
said, could afford to be aware of life processes which she could make
automatic. Could a man take the time to consciously adjust his heartrate
to the many and varying needs of his environment? To speed up his
metabolism and bodily temperature in order to fight a bacterial
invasion? To be aware of each individual bacteria? No, and neither could
a goddess afford to be aware of a mere man, nor even ten thousand worlds
full of women and men. The true concerns of the goddess, it seemed, were
far beyond my concerns as to man's fate within the galaxy.

As we had talked, millions of black bodies had fallen out around the
star. She told me that they were a form of manufactured matter as dense
as black holes, but not nearly so massive. The black bodies-I might as
well call them gamma-phages-stored energy; she had made the gamma-phage
to absorb and hold the light of the supernova. Why she should need such
enormous quantities of energy she kept a mystery. She hinted that I
must, trust her, that there was a vital reason why stars must die. But
how could I trust this godchild with her goddamned, godwise eyes?

Kalinda smiled so sweetly, but she had devoured the brain and mind of
the Tycho, and the minds of Ricardo Lavi and other pilots, and who could
know what other feasts she might someday require?

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

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

And now it begins.

If I had possessed a millionth of the Entity's powers, I think I would
have stopped the murder of Gehenna Luz. But I was just a man, and there
was little I could do. Kalinda twisted the ring around one of her
fingers and told me to watch the swarm of worlds through my telescope. I
did as she commanded. I watched one of the worlds nearest the sun open.

It looked like two halves of a gigantic oyster opening to an ocean of
sunlight. And inside was a pearl of a machine, a great jewel of a
spacetime engine.

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

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

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

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

Because iron will not fuse spontaneously into heavier elements, soon the
entire core had burned itself out. The core grew too massive, too dense.

Without the electron pressure of gushing energy to oppose the gravity of
the star's interior-at the Chandrasekhar limit-the core collapsed at a
quarter of lightspeed. In less than a second, it fell inward like a
crushed thallow's egg. It grew hellishly hot, eight billion degrees hot.

The core matter broke down into protons and neutrons and was compressed
to such densities that it rebounded with a snap. An enormous shock wave
ripped through the onion skins to the surface, blowing off the star's
outer layers. Gehenna Luz exploded in a fire of hydrogen plasma and
gamma rays and bright, hot light. The secret of life.

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

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

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

Stars, I have seen them fall But when they drop and die, No star is lost
at all From all the star-sown sky.

Chapter 27 - Kelkemesh

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

-from A Requiem for Homo Sapiens, by Horthy Hosthoh

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

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

"Only mappings homeward."

"Yes, the race-"

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

There was sweat on his forehead, sweat in his beard. He didn't want to
believe I had reached Gehenna Luz before him. "No, that's impossible,"

he said. "My mappings were tight and elegant. Yours couldn't have been
tighter."

"Perhaps I didn't need to make as many mappings," I said. "Why not,
Pilot?"

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

"How should I tell you, then? It's the simplest reason: that between any
pair of discrete Lavi sets of point-sources there exists a-"

"It's proven!"

"-one-to-one-"

"You've proved it, haven't you?"

"-mapping."

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

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

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

"It's not your pity I want."

He said, surprisingly, "Pity these lost peoples of the Vild. You say
they've lost their sense of wrong and right. Isn't that the worst fate?

To lose that which is necessary to live happily within ... within the
bounds of ..."

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

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

"The Timekeeper," I said, "will call no more quests."

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

"Soli, I have to tel'i you about the Timekeeper."

"Yes, you'll tell me the words of your goddess."

"Words of truth. In truth-"

"Tell me the truth, not lies," he said.

"I'll tell you what I know, what I've deduced. And what I've seen. I'll
tell you everything."

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

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

We held another conclave. Soli surprised me by quickly spreading the
news that the Great Theorem had been solved. I think this must have
excited my fellow pilots more than the discovery about the Vild. "This
will change everything," Li Tosh said to the imagos of the other pilots.

He brushed his lank brown hair out of his eyes, and I read the
beginnings of awe there. "We should honor the Ringess for his brilliant
discoveries."

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

"You may call the Ringess, 'Lord Pilot" if that is what you decide,"

Soli said.

Salmalin puffed out his old, withered cheeks in surprise, in awe that
Soli would abandon his lordship to me. And then, like a wave, the awe
washed the faces of the other pilots. It swept the reason from them. I
have never understood this virus of servitude that infects human beings.

Most of them idolized me a little and I hated that. They projected their
own dreams and desires onto me. Somehow I was to be a vehicle for their
collective wills. I saw-and this realization sickened me-I suddenly knew
that to them I was no longer just a man. I was something else, or
rather, many things at once: dreammaker, pathfinder, a leader of men.

They bowed their heads to me, and thirty-five of them, even Soli, voted
that I should be Lord Pilot. I looked at their awe-stamped faces with
that uneasy mixture of emotions all leaders must feel towards those they
lead: love, contempt, irony and pride.

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

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

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

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

One thing in the City had changed. The Timekeeper was no longer
preeminent. Even as we pilots had fought our battle around Perdido Luz,
the lords of the Order had waged a battle of a different sort within the
Academy's cold towers and halls. Nikolos the Elder had finally persuaded
the College of Lords to place restrictions on the Timekeeper's powers.

As the days passed, the lords had changed certain of our Order's oldest
canons. With the replacement of the seventh canon some thirty days
before my return, the Timekeeper must have guessed that he might himself
soon be replaced. The lords had broken with a millennia-old tradition.

They had decided that the Lord of the Order could be retired while still
alive, and more, that any lord, even one such as the lowly Lord
Phantast, could be Lord of the Order. There were other changes, too. For
instance: The Timekeeper would not be allowed to ground a pilot, nor to
strip any master of his or her rank, never again would the Timekeeper-or
any Lord of the Order be allowed to keep a private army of tutelary
robots.

When we surviving pilots dropped our ships down into the Lightship
Caverns, the whole Academy (and many farsiders and aliens) turned out to
welcome us. There was a parade as if it were a festival day; there were
horns blaring away, and eiswein and kvass, and gossilk streamers blowing
in the wind. The schismatic professionals in the deepship returned with
us, and they immediately skated forth to heal the wounds of our Order.

We endured a few wild, anxious days as the various colleges held their
conclaves. Old rivalries and disputes still rumbled within the bowels of
a few of the professions, particularly those of the eschatologists and
mechanics. But when the professionals and academicians learned the
outcome of Perdido Luz, they were horrified. And when the news of the
Vild's origin spread, they were fitted with raw terror. They made their
peace. They agreed to let the College of Lords convene, to decide a new
"order for the Order," as the historian Burgos Harsha joked. In truth,
the Timekeeper had gambled sending Soli to capture or kill the
schismatic pilots, and he had lost his gamble. Instead of gaining time
in which to win over the lords, he had alienated them. Nikolos the Elder
called for an inquest into Soli's near assassination, and into the
causes of the Pilot's War, and then he called for the Timekeepers
abasement.

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

Lord Harsha met me on the slick steps outside the College. Looking to
the right and left at the other lords and professionals, he bowed his
head politely and said, "Congratulations, Mallory, I always expected you
to do great things." And then he asked me the question everyone must
have been wondering. "Who will tell the Timekeeper? I would not want to
be there when he is told."

"I'll tell him," I said. "And it would be better if the lords were
present when I tell him."

"Now, Mallory," Lord Harsha said as he pulled the ice from his nose
hairs. (He was the same Burgos Harsha who had directed the infamous
Pilot's Race five years ago, my mother's friend. He had been elevated to
Lord Historian when old Tutu Lee, who had always been one of the
Timekeeper's most faithful admirers, had slipped on the ice, cracked her
head open and died.) "Now, Mallory, just because it was an irksome thing
for the Timekeeper to imprison you-yes, yes, an irksome thing, but that
was a bad time, do you remember? What choice did he-"

"The Timekeeper must be told," I said.

The next day some of the lords gathered at the top of the Timekeeper's
Tower. Other prominent pilots and professionals had been invited to
witness the formal ceremony by which we would "honor" the Timekeeper's
many years of service. The Sonderval and Li Tosh came at my request. I
did not expect Soli to suffer this final humiliation, but he surprised
me and announced that he would attend. There was another surprise
waiting for me when I arrived by sled outside the arched doors. My
mother skated out of the crowd of curious professionals circling the
Tower, and she came right up to me.

"Lord Pilot," she said, and she touched my hair where Seifs stone had
crushed my head. "My son, we've made you. The Lord Pilot."

"Mother, you're still alive!"

The Tower doors were open. Li Tosh and Rodrigo Diaz, the Lord Mechanic,
stood inside the doorway, watching. It was dusk, and the hundreds of
brothers and sisters of our Order lined up beneath the gliddery's
numerous coldflame globes. Their furs-it was almost too dark to make out
their colors-were flapping in the wind. Everyone, it seemed, was
watching me.

"I was worried you'd been killed," I said.

"Haven't I taught you? To worry about worrisome problems? There's no
need for worry."

But I was very worried; I was horribly worried. I read my mother's face,
looking for the tells of fear, of worry. But there was no fear there. In
a way, the woman who held my shoulder for support as she ejected her
skate blade was not my mother; in a way, my mother had been killed the
day she first met the warrior-poet.

"Will you come up the Tower with me?" I asked.

"Of course I will," she said. She smiled a calm smile. Gone from her
face were the nervous tics that had always afflicted her. And in their
place, nothing. "Haven't I prepared for this moment all my life?"

Indeed, she had prepared too well. Later that day, I heard a rumor that
my mother had spent the last year trying to persuade certain of the
lords that the Timekeeper must be deposed. She had persuaded them by
threat of assassination. Many believed that old Tutu Lee's slip on the
ice had not really been a slip after all. Burgos Harsha, after all, was
my mother's friend, and now he was Lord Historian. But how could I blame
my mother for being a murderer? Parts of her brain-perhaps her whole
brain from amygdala to cortex-had been mimed. I was sure of it. And
therefore she was not my mother. I told myself this over and over: She
is not my mother.

Soli arrived, then, wearing nothing more than his formal black robes.

When Salmalin asked if he had forgotten his furs, Soli knocked the ice
from is skates and said, "My body must get used to the cold." He took
pains not to look at either my mother or myself. He turned to greet the
Lord Mechanic and other old friends.

It was blue cold, shivering cold, too cold to stand there talking, so we
went up to the top of the Tower. The Timekeeper received us with a
gracious head bow and invited us to stand next to the curving glass
panes of the southern windows, I squeezed between my mother and Knut
Osen the Emancipated, the Lord Ecologist. There were twelve of us lords
and masters, and we looked at the Timekeeper, who paced the white furs
at the center of the room as he looked at us.

"So." The Timekeeper, in his loose, red robes, seemed as gaunt and
restless as a starved wolf. His white hair was not so thick as I had
remembered. Beneath the skin of his neck, his muscles vibrated like the
strings of a gosharp. His face, with its sharp angles and scowl, had
subtly changed. Perhaps it was his eyes, those shiny black marbles
rolling right and left as he defiantly stared at us. His eyes were cool,
soulless and peaceful. I should have been immediately suspicious of
this. I could not read his eyes, nor could I read any feature of his
face. To be sure, there were tells in the measured way he growled out
his greeting, and tells, too, in his quick glances through the glass
towards the plain of the Hollow Fields gleaming in the distance. But I
could not interpret these tells. He was a ruined man, I reminded myself,
and ruined men will run new, desperate programs. Probably his blood was
singing with a nepenthe or some other euphoric. I watched him as
carefully as a Devaki watches a seal's aklia. I silently vowed that as
long as I remained in his Tower, I would not turn my eyes away from him.

He stood next to one of his grandfather clocks as he alternately stared
at Nikolos the Elder's jiggly belly and grimly smiled at Soli. The
clock's brass pendulum swung back and forth, and I heard the ticking.

The room, as always, was full of ticking clocks. I listened to the
ticking of steel and wood, the pulsing, pings and beeping of the clocks
around the room. My heart was beating like a drumclock as the
Timekeeper's eyes fixed mine, and he asked, "Do you hear the ticking,
Mallory, my brave, foolish Lord Pilot?"

Without waiting for an answer, he stepped over to the Fravashi
driftglass glowing in one of the clock cases. He abruptly turned to us,
addressing us all at once: "My Lords and Masters," he began. He
emphasized the word "my" as if we must still submit to his will, as if
he were still Lord of the Order. "So, it's time, is it? You are come to
tell me my time has run out?"

Nikolos screwed up his soft, intelligent face as if someone had just
gouged his shin with a sharp skate. He looked at me, silently imploring
me to say something. I stepped forward and took a breath. "It is the
decision of the College of Lords," I said, "that you be forgiven your
crimes. You will not be banished. Surrender the Seal of the Order, and
you will be permitted to remain in your Tower."

"You'd forgive me?"

I wanted to tell him that I would forgive him anything because he had
once saved my life and shaped my fate when he had given me the books of
poems. A part of me-the boyish novice he had once taught the art of
wrestling-was still somewhat in awe of him. "We'll forget that Bardo and
eighty other pilots are dead because of you."

"Pompous, young pilot! What do you know about my crimes? What do you
know about anything?"

"Surrender the Seal," I said. Behind me Burgos Harsha and Lord Parsons
mumbled that the Timekeeper should hand us the Seal formally, without
delay. I looked across the room at the Seal of the Order where it sat
ticking atop its polished stand. Even thirty feet away, I could smell
the wood's bitter, newly applied yu-oil polish.

"The Ringess asks for the Seal of the Order," he said. "And if I gave it
to him, what then? You lords think to change the Order! Ha, how will you
do that?" His voice lowered to the timbre of a gong. "So, I've seen
change in my time, but man always remains the same."

I thought of the godseed alive inside my head, of the Great Theorem and
other things, and I said, "No, not always the same."

"A man and his crimes," he said.

I let his words echo from ear to ear. The way he said "crimes" was a
tell. A memory began to form up, and I had the nagging feeling I should
know exactly what crimes he was referring to.

The Timekeeper's eyes wandered over us, lingering a moment too long on
Soli. "So, Mallory, if I'm to be Timekeeper no more, who'll do the hard
things, eh?"

"Who will murder, is that what you mean?"

"Was it I," he asked, "who tried to assassinate Soli?"

There were more tells in the sibilant sounds of "assassinate," and
suddenly I knew. "Yes, I said, "the first time Soli was nearly
murdered-that was your crime, I think." I turned to Soli, who was
staring out the window at the City lights. I finally caught his eye, and
I explained, "It was the Timekeeper who tried to assassinate you the day
of the Pilot's Race."

"Is that true?" Soli asked. He stood still as a hunter, and he looked
down at the Timekeeper. Although he pretended to a cool detachment, a
journeyman cetic could have seen he was furious. "Why did you do that?"

My mother caught his elbow and said, "I've lived long enough. For you to
know I'm innocent. Now it's too late."

Soli wrenched his arm away and spat out, "Yes, you are innocent of that
attempted murder."

"So, it's true," the Timekeeper said. "It's too late."

"Why would you want to have me assassinated?" Soli asked him.

I rubbed the side of my nose and said, "Tell us about the Entity. Why
would the gods warn man against Her?"

"Is it true?" Soli asked him.

The Timekeeper suddenly whirled, and his words lashed Soli like a whip.

"Of course it's true! I'll say it now as I've said before: Piss on the
Ieldra and their damn secrets! When you returned from the core, all your
damn talk of the Elder Eddas-you forced me to call the Quest. There are
some things we're not meant to know, but you wouldn't listen to me." He
stepped close to Soli. He clenched his fists and asked, "Why wouldn't
you listen to me, Leopold? So, it's your damn pride. How you talked of
your damn discovery, talked and drank your filthy skotch in your damn
bar! You had every novice in the City dreaming of your Ieldra and their
Eddas. I asked you to keep your silence. I told you; I warned you, but
you wouldn't listen. You had to argue with me. 'The truth is the truth,'
you told me. So, damn your truthl Leopold, why wouldn't you listen?"

"Yes, it's true," Soli said sarcastically. "You tried to assassinate me
because I wouldn't listen."

"What is there that man shouldn't know, then?" I asked the Timekeeper.

"Tell me, I need to know."

Soli smacked a black-gloved fist into his open hand. He bowed to the
Timekeeper and said, "Who should judge you? Yes, who judges the judge?

You and I, we've had a long run, haven't we? But it's over. It's time
you surrendered the Seal, isn't it?"

The Timekeeper glanced at one of his clocks and smiled grimly. "So, it's
time," he said. He circled the room and stood before the Seal of the
Order. He placed his hands on the clock's steel casing.

Behind me Nikolos muttered, "Carefully!" as Burgos Harsha drew in a
quick breath of air. Many of the lords were whispering to each other;
the room was hissing with their whispers.

The Timekeeper approached us holding the Seal close to his body. I heard
its rhythmic ticking. Inside the Seal's glass window, I watched the blue
and white imago of Old Earth orbiting the Sun. The Timekeeper stopped in
front of me, and the ticking grew louder. I half-suspected that the Seal
was a fake, a replica clock made into a weapon of some sort. I was
afraid it might explode.

"Who shall I surrender it to?" he asked. "So, will the Lord Pilot accept
this?"

I had to remind myself that I was now the Lord Pilot. I opened and
spread my hands. As he held out the Seal to me the ticking grew even
louder. I was very aware of the ticking of every clock in the Tower.

"The Seal of the Order," the Timekeeper said. He paused a moment, and
then held the clock tightly to his chest, as a Devaki mother suckles her
baby. He seemed to be waiting for something. I could almost hear him
counting to himself.

"My Lords!" he said. "You say I must surrender the Seal of the Order.

So. Here it is."

"Mallory!" my mother shrieked.

My eyes were frozen on the Timekeeper's as he dropped the Seal into my
hands. It was heavier than I had thought it would be; I nearly dropped
it.

"'Send not to ask for whom the bell tolls,'" the Timekeeper said,
quoting one of his infamous poems, "'it tolls for thee.'"

The Seal chimed one single time, and then it grew silent. I had one of
those foolish, irrational fears that I had done something wrong, perhaps
grasping it too hard and somehow damaging the interior mechanism. I
shook the Seal beside my ear. Nothing. Suddenly I noticed that the Tower
had grown disturbingly quiet. I heard my heart thumping; other than the
breathing of the other lords and masters, it was the only sound I heard.

All of the clocks in the room had grown silent at the same moment. The
ticking had stopped. The pendulum clocks were still, and the bio-clocks
were dead, and the cobalt sands of the hourglasses had run out.

"It's time," the Timekeeper said. He aimed a gnarled finger at the
southern window behind us and growled, "Look!"

I did not look. This, among other things, saved me. But Jonath Parsons
and Nikolos the Elder and Burgos Harsha-they and many of the others
looked out the window. Burgos later said that he saw a dazzling flash
and a glowing gout of clouds billowing outward above the Hollow Fields,
but that would have been impossible. We all felt the Tower shake,
however. Up through the foundations came a rumble which felt like an
icequake. All at once the brittle Tower windows shattered inward. There
was a cracking and a roar, a rainshower of glass. Flying shards were
everywhere. Tiny glass spears stung the back of my neck and head. Burgos
and a few others screamed out, "My eyes!" while the Timekeeper covered
his own eyes with his forearm. There was a hot wind while the glass
storm blew through the room. When the shockwave had passed, the
Timekeeper threw his arm away from his eyes, and there was a knife in
his hand. It was as long and silvery as a blade of glass. At first I
thought it was glass, so quickly did its gleaming edge whirl towards my
face.

"So, it was too old," the Timekeeper said cryptically. Then he moved
toward me, and he was as fast as any warrior-poet. I dropped the Seal of
the Order. I accelerated, too. As my inner clock began ticking furiously
and time slowed, I began to scry.

"Mallory!" my mother cried out.

I saw the future pattern of the Timekeeper's knifework even as he
dropped the knife toward my stomach. I saw another thing. I saw my
mother jump between us. I watched the Timekeeper's knife split the wool
beneath her breast and bury itself up to its hilt. When I saw this
future, I moved quickly to make sure it would never be. But although I
scryed, I was not quite a scryer. I saw the future imperfectly. To this
day, I see it imperfectly. I tried to knock my mother aside, but I had
not foreseen everything. The Seal struck the fur carpet and rebounded at
an odd angle. I barely avoided tripping over it. This caused me to knock
her forward, slightly, rather than to the side. I drove her into the
Timekeeper's knife. As the blade dipped into her chest she
smiled-perhaps- it was really a grimace of agony-and she plunged a
shining, warrior-poet's needle into the Timekeeper's neck. There were
cries and shouts behind us. Dead cold waves of air slashed through the
blown-out window jambs into the room. Soli, with puffs of steam escaping
his cut, bleeding lips, rushed the Timekeeper. My mother fell back
against me, and I eased her down to the soft furs. The Timekeeper almost
fell on top of us. The needle's poison froze his nerves, and he toppled
like an ice sculpture; he lay dead against the glass fragments on the
floor.

"Look!" someone cried out. But I did not have time to look because my
mother was bleeding to death as she lay across my lap. Her hot blood
soaked the wool on the top of my thighs. She did not speak. Her eyes
were open, watching me. I saw she had no fear of death. Perhaps she was
so driven by the warrior-poet's programs that she even welcomed death. I
thought she had saved me not out of love but because she was programmed
to seek her moment of the possible. I should be no more grateful to her
than I would be to an obedient robot. And yet I was grateful; as the
life flowed out of her, her racking coughs tore me apart. Perhaps all
sons are programmed this way. Bright arterial blood burst from her lips,
and I wanted to believe she was dying as my mother rather than a
warrior-poet. I looked for the spark of humanity which I believed must
burn within each of us, the eternal flame, the shining point of clear
light.

"The Timekeeper is dead," Soli said. He was standing above us holding
his own hand, which was bleeding. A piece of glass had cut his fingers.

He glanced at the Timekeeper's body. "A warrior-poet's nerve poison
wasn't it? Your mother knew about these things." And then, looking down
at her, he said quickly, urgently, "If we hurry, maybe we can carry her
to a cryologist before her brain dies."

I was shocked that he said this. I hadn't thought he was capable of
forgiveness or compassion. I realized that I did not know him at all. I
felt for a heartbeat in my mother's chest, and then I closed her eyes.

"No," I said, "there will be no cryologist. She's dead, you see; she
died at the right time."

I stood up and turned toward the window. I saw a terrible sight. Most of
the lords were kneeling or hunched up on the floor, bleeding from
wounds. Nikolos the Elder was rubbing at his eyes, irrationally rubbing
the glass into his eyes. Flying glass had shredded Burgos Harsha's face.

He screamed and writhed on the floor while Mahavira Netis, whose firm
brown face was gouged and bleeding, bent over him and picked out the
longest of the glass splinters. And this was horrible but not terrible.

"Look!" someone cried, and pointed out the window. "Look!" I looked and
saw the terrible thing. Above the Hollow Fields rose a mushroom-shaped
cloud. I had never, seen a mushroom before, but I knew very well what a
mushroom was; all human beings had learned that sometimes clouds will
rise in the shape of mushrooms. The cloud boiled up almost black against
the blue twilight sky. It rose and billowed outward, a dark mushroom
mountain joining the circle of real mountains around the City.

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

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

"Why?" Soll asked. "Was he so bitter?"

I bent to help Mahavira pick the glass out of Burgos' face, but there
was little I could do. I went over to the Timekeeper. Many of the
lords-fortunately, few of them were badly injured-gathered around me. I
touched the Timekeeper's face, which was locked and hard from the nerve
poison. I told them what Kalinda of the Flowers had told me: "He's old,"

I said, "and Horthy Hosthoh was not his birthname. He's been Timekeeper
for a long, long time."

"For hundreds of years," Soli said quickly.

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

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

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

"It's impossible," Soli said.

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

But the answer-the secret of life I had sought for so long-proved not to
be so close at hand. During the nightmare days which followed, days of
digging through the rubble of collapsed buildings for the thousands of
buried corpses and sorting out the bodies for burial, the Lord
Imprimatur, Nassar wi Jons, worked over the body of the Timekeeper.

Nassar was a gnarled, lump of a man, a man who had been born marrow-sick
with so many diseased bones and deformations of flesh that the cutters
and splicers had needed all their ingenuity merely to sculpt him into
the bent-but brilliant-little gargoyle who attempted to uncode the
Timekeeper's secrets. I had told him: "As you did with the Alaloi plasm,
as you tried to do, search along his DNA for the Ieldra's imprimatur."

On eleventh day he made his disappointing and shocking pronouncement:
The Timekeeper's DNA was no different than my own, or any other man's.

(Any other man, that is, who had not been born marrow-sick.) And this
Timekeeper was not really the Timekeeper.

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

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

"Where is the Timekeeper, then?"

"Who can know?"

I made a fist and rapped my knuckles against the table. "If it was a
slel-clone," I said, "its DNA should be identical to the Timekeeper's."

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

"Goddamn him!"

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

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

Later that day we buried six thousand two hundred and six people on the
Hill of Sorrows beneath Urkel. It seemed that most of the City had
endured the cold to attend the funeral. On the broad, snowy south side
of the gravepit huddled a mass of harijan, aliens and farsiders come to
honor their dead. (Most of the victims, of course, were horologes,
cetics, tinkers, and the various journeymen who attended the lightships.

A few were pilots.) Across from them, where the robots had excavated a
narrow plain abutting the Hill's vertical, scooped-out walls, were the
men and women of the Order. We stood in our professions, row after row,
lined up on the black, frozen earth. We pilots stood nearest the grave.

There were too few pilots. We-the Sonderval, Salmalin, Li Tosh and the
other survivors of Perdido Luz-we were a thin, black line pressed from
behind by the eschatologists in their blue furs, and from behind them,
by the rows of the mechanics. Because I was Lord Pilot and Soli was Past
Lord, we stood together at the very lip of the grave. It was there, even
as the pit was flooded and the icy waters began to rise over the stacked
bodies, that I learned of the Timekeeper's fate.

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

I dropped my head and looked down into the cubical pit. I looked for my
mother-I had been told she was somewhere among the top layer of bodies.

But the water froze quickly, and I could not find her.

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

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

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

"The Timekeeper killed her, didn't he? His clone? You should want the
Timekeeper dead."

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

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

"I loved her, Soli. Oh, God, I loved her!"

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

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

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

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

"I'm weary of the stars," he said. "And I hate this city. There is a
sled and dogs waiting for me at the Quay. I'm going out on the ice,
possibly past Kweitkel. I'll track the Timekeeper-it shouldn't be hard.

When I find him, I'll spear him like a fish. For what he's done to the
Order." A little clod of dirt, disturbed by his boot, plummeted outward
and down, into the grave. When it struck the ice, it broke into pieces.

"I'll never come back," he said. "The Timekeeper's body must be
returned, then."

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

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

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

I caught him staring beyond the City to the west. His face was long and
dark in the shadow of the Hill of Sorrows, but I saw there an
unmistakable glimmer of reverence. He did not hate Neverness; he loved
her. He felt driven by bad chance from the Order and from his city. If
he had to leave-I read this in his eyes, and he later told me so-he
wanted to send back what be thought of as a gift. Perhaps the Lord
Imprimatur would decode the secret from the Timekeeper's frozen body.

Perhaps the secret would save man from the Vild and from other dangers.

Because he loved the Order, and in the end because he loved life more
than he hated me, he restrained his anger and his spite, and he told me,
"The Timekeeper has a lead, but we both still wear our Alaloi bodies.

And two can travel faster than one, the Devaki say. We'll catch him,
won't we? Out there .. ." He pointed west where the edge of the sea
sparkled beneath Attakel's glaciers.

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

"I'll come with you," I said into the wind that cut between us. "To find
the Timekeeper."

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

Chapter 28 - Ananke

It lies not in our power to love or hate, For will in us is over-ruled by fate.
-Christopher Marlowe, Sailing Century Poet

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

He spoke the names of the other dog team to Soli, who was bent over
stroking the snout of his lead dog, Leilani. "You'd better be gentle
with them. They're not used to long runs. And watch out for the ice
schooners, please, because they like to chase them."

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

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

We traveled fast the whole day. By late afternoon the mountains of
Neverness were a blue and white haze behind us. They wavered in the air,
seeming more insubstantial than the air itself With every mile we
crossed, as I breathed through my frozen mustache and listened to the
scrape and glide of the sled runners and the dogs' panting, my memories
of the City became more insubstantial, too. I was taken with the world
and the sensations of the world. How I loved the silky, musty smell of
my shagshay furs, the stinging salt air against my greased face, even
the ache of cold fingertips inside cold mittens! The slow, steady west
wind murmured its music in my ear, and I was once again full of fear and
fate. In truth, I was a driven man, as driven as the poor dogs yelping
at the crack of my whip. But I was also being pulled by something,
something that was as outside myself and separate as the light of the
stars. This something I thought of as fate, not my own fate in
particular, but a higher fate, the fate to which all things in the
universe must submit. I felt -this fate-and it was the fate of Soli and
the Timekeeper and my City, the fate, too, of the flint tip of Soli's
bear spear-I felt the long, urgent sound of ananke roaring in my blood.

I kept my eyes fixed on the vibrating circle of the western horizon.

Even as darkness fell over us, I wanted to go on.

I was exhilarated, breathless with the thrill of our first day's run. I
felt I could go on into the night, on and on westward following the
Timekeeper's tracks by starlight. But the dogs were tired and hungry;
their paws were chafed and crusted with ice. We could not go on. Far
from the City, and still too far from our fate, we stopped to build a
snow-hut on the sea. In the dark we cut blocks of snow with our saws and
shaped them into a hut. Into the hut went our oilstones, food and
sleeping gear. We fed the dogs chunks of cultured fat steak; we fed
ourselves and sipped our coffee and slipped down into our furs to think
our private thoughts and dream our dreams.

I did not sleep at all that night. For a long time my patterns of sleep
had been changing as I changed. I lay listening to the muffled breathing
of the dogs in the tunnel and to the wind working through the chinks
between the snow blocks. The hut was aglow with the light of the
oilstones, which I kept full and burning until the morning. On his snow
bed next to me Soli stared up at the flickering flame shadows on the
ceiling. He lay still and quiet; it seemed as if he were sleeping with
his eyes open. But he was not sleeping. Without looking at me he began
discussing the little problems of our day's run. "That sledmaster knew
nothing about dogs. Well, he was a Yarkonan, wasn't he? Tomorrow you
should leash Arne in Neva's place. Put him between the bitches, that way
he'll leave Kuri alone and Hisu won't snap at him." He fell back into
silence, then continued, "We'll have to cut socks for Bela and Matsu,
won't we? Did you see their paws? Yes, we'll have to cut socks for both
teams before the Outer Islands. The wormrunners say the ice there is
ragged as an autist's robe."

It was sad that the only time Soli and I seemed to understand each other
was when we struggled together to solve a problem, either a mathematical
problem or the much more immediate problem of staying alive in
temperatures cold enough to freeze the carbon dioxide in our breath. We
talked of hunting seals when our food inevitably ran out; we talked of
the fine quality of the saffel, the fast snow. Toward morning our talk
began to turn to mathematics. He wanted to hear my proof of the Great
Theorem, but he was too proud to ask. His bitterness hung between us
like a frozen cloud.

"My life has been given to mathematics, and what has it given me?" he
muttered into the hut's curving walls. I told him, then, the proof of
the Continuum Hypothesis. Without the stimulation of my ship (and his
Vorpal Blade), blinded of the visual spaces in which to conjure up the
ideoplasts of the Hypothesis, it took a long time to make him see the
proof. At last, when I had worked my way through the demonstration that
the Justerini subspace is embedded in the simple Lavi space, he sat
upright so quickly that he nearly smashed his head through the snowy
ceiling. He exclaimed, "Stop! I see it now! I should have seen it
before, it's such a sharp trick: The Lavi correspondence scheme
collapses now, doesn't it? It's a beautiful proof, an elegant proof "

And then his voice died to a sigh, and I had to strain to hear him say,
"Oh, I was so close."

I said, "It's a constructive proof, you see." I bent over and trimmed
the oilstone's wick with my knife. A constructive proof Not only was it
possible to fall from any star to any other with a single mapping, but
there existed a way, inherent in my proof, to construct such a mapping.

"A beautiful proof," Soli repeated. "Yes, and now your dilemma.

Anyone-even the merchant pilots and the like-will be able to fall where
they will."

"Perhaps," I said.

"War, real war between planets will be possible."

"That was the Timekeeper's theory."

"The Order will never be the same, will it? All the Civilized Worlds?" I
drew the hood of my furs around my head. I said, "That was the
Timekeeper's fear. He tried to kill me-kill us both-because he was
afraid."

"Yes," Soli said. "We used to talk about such things all the time. He
warned me against change, and punished me many times for not listening.

Change-if it hadn't been for your reckless first run to the Entity, we
might have had change without-" And here his voice hardened and cracked,
"without disaster."

I knew he was thinking of Justine so I said, "I'm sorry."

"What will you decide?" he asked me. "About the Hypothesis? What will
you do?"

"I don't know," I told him.

He fell into silence, and much later, passed into a fitful sleep. I lay
awake watching him shift about and twist inside his furs. I wondered if
I should and would show the proof of the Hypothesis to the other pilots.

I began to play the proof over again in my mind. When I reached the
complex exposition of the first Danladi Lemma, I mourned the loss of my
ship. Reflexively-almost instinctively-I found myself mentally reaching
out as I would toward my ship's neurologics. I faced myself. My eyes
were tightly closed; I seemed to float within the dark covering of my
furs. Outside the hut was blackness and cold, but inside, inside my
head, there was fire and light. For a moment the diamond ideoplasts of
the Lemma stood out as clearly as anything I had ever seen. Then there
was a blizzard of ideoplasts as the proof took shape. I did not know
exactly how these ideoplasts infused my visual cortex. There was no
ship-computer, no neurologics to create the visual spaces of dreamtime
and the other spaces of a pilot deep within the manifold. There was only
my brain and my changing self, whatever that self and brain really were.

And there were mappings, a whole sequence of mappings. The thickspace
above Neverness appeared, dense, twisted and impenetrable. Suddenly it
unraveled like a ball of silk, and I saw thousands of new mappings, new
pathways to the stars. To Vesper and Darghin, and on, to the Takeko
Double and to Abrath Luz where she burned hot and blue and bright, and
further on to the stars which have no names, the doomed and lost stars
of the Vild. There were an infinity of interconnections between the
stars of the universe; every star was connected to every other. I saw
this in a moment, and I was more deeply aware of the manifold than ever
before. When I thought of the source of thisvision I fell into fear.

Then, as suddenly as it had come, it was gone. The manifold closed in
like a winter sea. There was darkness. I opened my eyes to the shadows
of the hut. Soli was snoring in ragged spurts as he ground his teeth.

Even though I was close enough that the icy dew of his breath beaded up
on my furs, I felt very alone.

The fear stayed with me through the night, more intense than it had been
since I had returned from Agathange. I wondered again at the evolution
of the Agathanian's godseed. Had it completed its work? Was my brain
dying, replaced bit by bit with preprogrammed neurologics? I did not
know, but I felt something terrible and wonderful was happening to me. I
conjured up this image: I saw millions of neurons, with their fat,
irregularly shaped cell bodies, swelling and bursting, the myelin
sheaths coating the long axons dissolving, being absorbed. Throughout
the hideously complex weave and mesh of the millions of millions of
threadlike dendrites, the neurologics were replicating and growing.

There would be new connections, crystal sheets of protein computers
linking up. And all this occurring, or so I imagined, inside my cortex,
in that wondrous red jelly above my eyes. And here was my fear. The
frontal lobes would be disconnecting with my limbic brain, or perhaps
connecting in strange new ways. My control of myself would be changing.

There would be new programs, perhaps profound, new, hidden programs. And
now it was done, or almost done. How I knew this I could not say. I knew
only that when I closed my eyes and mastered my fear program, the
manifold opened to me, as splendent and deep as ever the manifold from
within my lightship had been. And here was my wonder. Within me was a
fathomless, shining, crystal sea flowing outward in every direction. I
felt intimations of infinity, that all things were possible. I lay awake
watching the light of dawn come streaming through the cracks between the
snow blocks. Then the dogs began to whine and bark as Soli stirred and
knocked the ice-powder from his furs. I rubbed my eyes and blinked, and
I heaped a few handfuls of snow into the pot above the oilstones so we
would have some coffee to face the new day.

For ten days we followed the Timekeeper's tracks due west. Twice we lost
them where the spindrift was thick and heaped up into gleaming white
dunes half a mile long. But we easily found them again by driving our
sleds in a sinusoidal wave pattern along the western axis of our run:
First we would curve out to the north and then bend back south, cutting
across what would have been our straight line westward. And then south,
curving back north, and so on, wriggling across the snow like a sleekit
until we found his tracks. As long as the Timekeeper ran westward-and
what other way could he run?-this little technique would be infallible.

Unless it snowed. If it snowed mile after mile of ice would be furred
with unmarked whiteness, and we would waste too much time moving in
undulating waves. But it was much too cold to snow. We depended on the
cold, even though the cold knifed through our furs and chilled us to the
core. In truth, the cold nearly killed us. It was so cold that the snow
was dry and gritty like sand. The air held no moisture, and the sky was
deep blue, almost blue-black like an eschatologist's folded robes. The
dry, chill air worked at our noses until they began to bleed. We sucked
in air hard as icicles, and we felt ice points crystallizing in our
nostrils, freezing and cutting our warm, tunneled flesh. Soli suffered
more than I. Frozen blood encrusted his mustache and beard, and the
collar and chest of his white furs. He looked like a great white bear
who had thrust his muzzle into the bloody carcass of a seal. But the
blood was all his own; he was weak from cold and the steady loss of
blood. Once, during a windstorm as he stumbled behind the snow wall we
had hastily flung up, he stupidly removed a mitten to warm his nose with
his hand. The tips of three of his fingers-and they were the same
fingers which had been cut by glass in the Timekeeper's Tower-quickly
froze. Because he was cold and shivering I loosened my own furs in the
Devaki fashion, and I warmed his iced fingers against my stomach. It was
strange to feel his hard fingernails and skin against my own, strange
and disturbing. As soon as his fingers thawed, I thrust his hand away
from me and covered it. "Make a fist inside your mitten," I told him.

"And try to keep your hand out of the wind."

He looked at me through eyelashes frozen with tears (the cold made our
eyes run with tears), and he said, "You're not the only one who
remembers how to heal frozen fingers, are you?" And then he made a fist
and tucked it beneath his armpit. "Thank you," he said.

During the whole time of our run we rarely spoke to each other unless it
was to convey some vital bit of information. Even then we would often
communicate by shaking our heads at a quick, grunted-out question, or by
pointing at the Timekeeper's tracks where they veered slightly
northwest, or by smiling our thanks as one or the other brewed the
morning coffee. Our cold, painful lives soon settled into a rhythm. At
the end of the day's run, we would build the snowhut and shovel over and
patch the chinks from outside. After this we would bring in our cooking
pots and food, our stiff sleeping furs which we rolled out across the
snowbeds we built, everything we would need for the night. While Soli
tended the oilstones and the hut filled with light, I would bring in
blocks of snow to be melted for coffee and a single block to stop the
tunnel against the wind. When the dogs had been fed and we went through
our furs with the snow-beater, it was time to drink our Summerworld
coffee, to eat our stewed baldo nuts and boiled meat. Time to warm
ourselves and think. Later, with our furs hanging from the drying racks,
as we lay abed sipping our last mugs of coffee, Soli would read to me
from the Book of Silence.

Most people think of silence in the negative, as the mere absence of
sound. But this is not true. Silence is a real thing, almost as palpable
and hard as stone. Those nights inside the hut when the wind had died
and the dogs were asleep, Soli would sit propped up in his furs silently
staring into his blue coffee mug. Once, when the air warmed slightly and
ice crystals hung in the sky like a yellow veil over the sun, we argued
about what we would do if a front passed through and it snowed. After we
were comfortable (and I use this word in a very relative sense) inside
the hut, I insisted that the Timekeeper would run for Kweitkel. I was
very sure of myself. Soli pressed his fingers tightly against his coffee
mug and shot me a look which might have meant: "You're just like me, too
damn stubborn and arrogant!" Then he was still and silent as stone, and
the Book of Silence opened. His cold eyes and face were the key; upon
his face was written the first page of the Book and what was written
there was hatred.

He hated himself. All women and men, of course, being human beings find
some part of their all-too-human selves to hate. But he took this hatred
further; he made an art of hating himself His pride, his anger, his
aloofness from the sufferings of his fellow man-he hated these
weaknesses just as he hated his lack of imagination and failure to prove
the Hypothesis. And more, he hated himself merely for having weaknesses
of any sort. I watched him place his white, blistered lips above the rim
of his mug and blow on his coffee, and it occurred to me that he hated
being human. He, that broody, inward-looking man who had so often
ventured down the dark icy glidderies of his soul, had discovered that
we define our humanity-our very selvesmore by our weaknesses than by our
strengths. And there was the trap which held him like the enclosing
freeze of the winter sea: He loved being human as much as he hated it
because it was the only thing he knew how to be. The greater Soli, the
Soli who might someday emerge from the flawed, bitter, old Soli if only
he would relinquish his icy grip upon himself, this Soli he feared (and
therefore hated) above all things. And he knew all this. He saw himself
more clearly than I ever could through my naive cetic's eyes. It was
this self-knowledge and self-vision which sealed the tomb of his
self-hatred. If he could really see the spiral of hate and fear binding
him, shouldn't he be able to break free? No, he could not. He was only
human, after all, wonderfully, tragically human. Human beings, he had
tried to tell himself for three lifetimes, must accept their own
humanity.

By the time we reached the first of the Outer Islands, he had to accept
the weakness of his human flesh, too. Thirtyday dawned even colder than
it had been. Ten miles to the south of our hut-and it seemed even closer
in the clear morning air-the ancestral home of the Yelenalina family was
a green and white hump above the sea. Soli was coughing at the harsh air
(so was I), all the while stealing quick looks southward as he fumbled
with the dogs' harnesses. At first I thought his clumsiness was due to
his distracted thoughts; perhaps he was wondering what had happened to
the Yelenalina family these past few years. When Leilani unexpectedly
dug his claws into the snow and began barking at a horde of snow loon
making their way toward the island, the leather straps came up tight
around Soli's fingers. He winced and bit his lip.

"Are they frozen again?" I asked as I stepped through the crunching,
squeaking snow. I helped him untangle Leilani and his second dog, Gita,
who had leaped into the air in her futile effort to get at the birds.

"Let me see your fingers."

"NO, they're fine," he said with steam puffing out of his bloody nose.

"Yes, cold but fine."

"Let's get them warm," I said. "It will be hard going from here to
Kweitkel. We're about forty miles from the Fairleigh ice-shelf, I
think." I reached for his hand. "Here, I'll warm them for you."

"NO!, "Your damn fingers are frozen, aren't they? You should have kept
them warm, as I said."

"No, they're not frozen."

"Let me see."

"Go away, Pilot."

I was shivering in the morning half-light while the wind drove snow down
my neck. I wanted to be off on our day's run, to let the rising sun and
my exertions warm me. I turned west, looking into the hazy whiteness for
the folds and crevasses of the ice-shelf. I said, "Let's go into the
hut. I'll heat some water and we'll thaw your fingers that way."

Despite the cold, Soli's forehead was covered with sweat. "We don't have
the time, do we?"

I thumped Arne's side, and I tied a leather sock over his sore paw. "If
you lose control of your sled and drive it into a crevasse, we'll lose
more than time."

Then he shook his head and kicked the snow and said, "Yes, time." And,
unexpectedly, he went into the hut.

I followed him through the tunnel. When we had gotten his mittens off, I
saw that he had not lied. His fingers were not frozen. They were worse
than frozen. His flesh had died and run to rot. His fingertips were
black with bacteria, stinking with gangrene. They smelled worse than
year-old, decayed fish heads. I could barely stand the stench so I
backed up until my head bumped the wall of the hut.

He held his fingers away from him as he would a dead sleekit and said,
"The healing primaries haven't helped, have they?"

"We could return to the City," I said. "Even if the gangrene got your
whole hand, the splicers could grow you a new one in half a
hundred-day." In truth, I did not really want to return to the City.

"No, there's no time, is there? We'd lose the Timekeeper."

"Would you rather lose your fingers?"

"Better that than my returning to the City like a beaten dog."

I looked at his ruined, swollen fingers, which were puffy with diseased
gases, and I told him, "I'm no cutter."

"You have a knife, don't you? Therefore you may cut." I rubbed my nose
and said, "It won't be easy."

"Are you afraid?" he asked me.

"it won't be easy to live among the Devaki without fingers."

"No, it won't be, will it?" he said.

His face was somber as I took his hand in mine and turned to examine his
fingers. I did not really want to touch him, much less cut his fingers
off, but there was nothing else to do. Onto a newl skin I set out a
needle and thread from my sewing bag. I unsheathed my seal knife. I held
it over the oilstone until it was hot and black with carbon. Then I cut
off his fingers. As he ground his teeth and groaned and attempted his
pain primaries, I took his middle and forefingers off at the second
knuckle, and I cut the finger next to them all the way down to the palm.

Quickly I stanched the bleeding with the hot knife and sewed the stumps
closed. All the time that I held his hand, I could not help noticing how
closely its shape matched my own. (For all his professed bitterness with
the Order, he still wore his pilot's ring around his little finger. I
did not think he would ever take it off, unless I had to amputate that
finger, too, and the ring fell off on its own.)

When I finished binding his fingers, I brewed him a mug of cha tea to
quicken his body against infection. He looked at his hand with disgust
written across his lips. He was giddy with pain and curiously talkative.

"A piece of glass lacerates my fingers, wrecking the circulation, and
this is the result, isn't it? One happening begets another, on and on,
as the Timekeeper used to say. This chain of logic, as inexorable as a
proof. If Justine hadn't made me ... if I hadn't hit her, what would our
lives have been? It's hard to stop thinking about that, Pilot; there's
no help for the thoughts. She's dead, because of me. And now, almost
home, but ... but, no, the Alaloi do not die from lost fingers, do
they?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

But we did not trap him as soon as I would have liked. The next day it
was much warmer than it had been, too damn warm. A mass of warm air had
moved in from the south. The low sky was a solid, seamless expanse of
white clouds hanging over the grayish-white sea ice; the hut and the
dog's gray coats and Soli's frosted furs as he bent over to ice his
sled's runners, were lost into the enclosing whiteness. Even though I
was close to his sled-perhaps ten feet away-it seemed like half a mile.

In the whiteness, distances were strangely expanded or shrunken. The ice
around us was dented with fissures and folds, almost like a Fravashi
carpet after a journeyman pilot has walked across it wearing steel skate
blades. But it was difficult to make out its individual features because
there were no shadows to highlight the icescape's undulations and sudden
cleavages. I smelled tingling needles of moisture in addition to the
normal morning odors of seal blood, dung and coffee. After Soli
tightened the traces of his rear dog, Zorro, he came over to me and
pointed at the sky. "Snow," he said. "Before morning is over."

"We can go five miles before it snows."

"It's too dangerous. What's five miles?"

"Five miles is five miles," I said.

"It's impossible to see five miles ahead. The damn clouds."

"We'll take the run mile by mile."

"It will snow before we've gone a mile."

"We'll take it foot by foot until it snows, then."

"You're a tenacious bastard, aren't you?"

"You should know," I said.

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

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

I jumped out of the sled and looked down. Twelve feet below me, at the
bottom of the crevasse, there was the black, churning sea. The heavy
sled quickly sank, pulling the frantic dogs one by one down into the
water. At first I thought Soli must have caught himself up in the sled.

He was dead, I thought, the great pilot dead at last. I looked for his
body in the floating mound of what had been the snowbridge, but I did
not see him. Then I heard him shout, "Mallory, help me!"

He was clinging to the jagged wall of the crevasse just beneath me.

Somehow he must have freed his bear spear even as he went down into the
crevasse. He must have jumped from his sled at the last instant and
thrust his spear into the rotten, cracked, ice wall, levering himself
out of the water. "My legs ... it's so cold."

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

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

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

"No, Soli."

"Then Justine's death, my part in the Pilot's war-it was all madness,
wasn't it? A stupid mistake?"

"It was a tragedy," I said.

"Yes, it's ironic." His fingers were working the heavy brows above his
eyes. "After Justine was abandoned, after I hit her, there was no going
back, not for us, not for me. That was the worst moment of my life. So,
this Alaloi body of mine-it could have been resculpted but it was kept
to remind me.

As a penance, you see. And now, if not for this thick body and your
help, well, the water would have killed me."

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

"No," I said.

"Yes, you love feeling holy about yourself, don't you?"

"What do you mean?" I asked, though I knew exactly what he meant. "Even
before you had the slightest reason ... Do you remember that night in
the bar? When Tomoth called you a bastard? You couldn't help your
temper, could you?"

"I had no self-restraint, then."

"'Heredity is destiny,'" he quoted.

"I don't believe that," I said as I held a spitted sweetbread over the
fire. "What do you believe?"

"I think we can change ourselves, rewrite our programs. Ultimately,
we're free."

"No," he said. "You're wrong, Life is a trap. There's no way out."

He was quiet while he sat up munching the crusted organ meat. He was
deep in thought. His lean, hairy stomach rose and fell, rose and fell,
as he sucked in the relatively warm air of the hut. He swallowed and
said, "Let's talk about the Fravashi, this favored alien race of yours.

The Timekeeper would have banished all of them from the City, if he
could. Their alien teachings, this notion of ultimate fate, of-what do
you call it?-of ananke. You've listened to them more than a man should,
haven't you?"

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

"No," I said, "you don't understand."

He spat a piece of gristle against the packed-snow floor and said,
"Enlighten me."

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

"And you believe that?"

"It's what the Fravashi teach."

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

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

"But you think you can discover what it is?"

"I don't know."

"That's an arrogant thought, isn't it?" he said.

"Why else are we here? Discovery or creation-in the end it's the same
thing."

"Yes, why are we here?-the cardinal trivial question. We're here to
suffer and die. We're here because we're here."

"That's pure nihilism."

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

"I don't know."

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

"We're creators of our hells."

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

My lips and cheeks were burning in the warm air, and I mocked him,
saying, "Heredity is desfiny."

"Damn you!"

"We're creators of our heavens," I said softly. "We can create
ourselves."

"No, it's too late."

"Never too late," I said.

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

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

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

"The Timekeeper is close," I said. "He's fifteen miles northwest; three
of his dogs are sick inside his hut, and the aklia he opens today will
be empty."

"Scryer talk."

"If we sled all night, we'll surprise him in the morning."

"If we sled all night," he said, "we'll drop down the first crevasse,
won't we?"

From a piece of newl skin I began cutting socks for the dogs. "No," I
told him, "I know where the crevasses are."

"We'll sled circles in the blackness."

"No," I said. "The stars will be out. We'll steer by the stars."

He smiled at this old saying and bowed his head. "All right, Pilot,
we'll steer by the stars, if they come out."

When night fell the wind was blowing from the north, blowing the last of
the warm air and snow clouds away. It was very cold. The sky was as
black as a rippling pilot's robe, and it was full of stars. In the north
Shonablinka lit the rim of blackness; westward the hexagonal array of
the Fravashi Ring twinkled high above the horizon. We drove the sled
northwest through the silky, new snow. The dogs must have thought we
were crazy, sledding through chest-high powder at night (chest-high to
them, that is), skirting the crevasses that they must have feared lay
beneath their covered paws. Far into the night it turned deep cold. The
air was like frozen oxygen; my lips were so numb that I could not
whistle, nor could I speak. We sledded silently across the seascape that
I had seen in my scryer's vision, every gleaming fold and drift. We did
not stumble across any crevasses. We stopped only once, to boil water
for coffee. I kept my eyes fixed on the stars and on the horizon beneath
the stars. In the twilight, just before morning, I saw a tiny hump of
snow raised up from the immense white hump of the world. "There it is,"

I huffed out and pointed, "The Timekeeper's hut. Do you see it?"

"Yes, there it is. You were right."

He whistled to Kuri-and how I marveled at his beautiful whistle, his way
with dogs-and with the wind lashing our faces, we slid over the
snowdrowned sea.

Chapter 29 - The Secret of Life

When the Fravashi first became a people, the Dark God came down from the
stars and spoke to the First Least Father of the Adamant Mindsinger
Clan. "First Least Father," he said, "if I promise to tell you the
secret of the universe at the end of ten million years, will you agree
to listen to my song?" The First Least Father was thirsty for new music,
so he told him, "Fill my windpipes; sing me your song." So the Dark God
sang his song, and ten million years passed while the Adamant Mindsinger
Clan warred against the Faithful Thoughtplayer Clan and the other Clans,
and in all this time on all of Fravashing there was only this single,
dreadful song. When the Dark God returned, he told the First Least
Father the secret of the universe. "I don't understand," the First Least
Father said at last. Whereupon the Dark God laughed at him and said,
"How did you expect to understand? Your brain hasn't changed at all in
ten million years." The First Least Father contemplated these words and
sang out, "My God! I didn't think about that when we made the bargain!"
-Fravashi parable

We came at the Timekeeper from the south in the very first part of the
morning. He had built his hut fifty feet away from a newly opened
crevasse. Fifty miles away, Kweitkel stood revealed by the dawn; the
holy mountain was like a great blue and white pillar holding up the
western edge of the sky. When the Timekeeper saw us sledding toward his
hut from the south, he must have thought we were Devaki hunters
returning home. We wanted him to think this. We had circled south just
so he would think this. In truth, even if he had guessed who we were, we
gave him no time to ice his sled, to load his furs and food (what little
food remained), to harness his dogs and flee. We slid into his camp just
after first light, and he was outside his hut politely waiting for us in
Devaki fashion with steaming mugs of blood tea, Ni luria la!" he called
out, "Ni luria la!" In his white furs, which covered almost all of his
face except his black eyes, he seemed as watchful as a wolf

"Ni luria la!" I answered.

All at once three starved dogs bounded from the tunnel of his hut and
ran among our dogs, barking, sniffing and licking each other's black
noses. The Timekeeper must have recognized my voice immediately; he must
have seen that our sled was a city sled, that our dogs were city dogs
who greeted his dogs with wagging tails and red tongues lolling. He set
the mugs of blood tea down into the fluffy snow, ignoring the largest of
his dogs when he began lapping down our welcoming drink. He threw back
the hood of his furs. His smooth brown face was shiny with grease, set
with the stamp of grim humor and fate.

"So, the bastard Ringess has tracked me. Or should I call you, 'Lord
Ringess?" Ha!"

Before we had come to a stop, Soli was off the sled with his spear
cocked behind his ear, aiming the point at the Timekeeper's belly.

"Leopold," the Timekeeper said. "Have you made your peace with your son?

Tell me, does the City still stand? How did you escape my old bomb?"

Soli ground his teeth so hard that blood ran from his nose. I could see
that he trembled to spear the Timekeeper, so I said, "Wait!"

"Yes, wait," the Timekeeper repeated.

Quickly I told him that part of the City had been destroyed, that my
mother and six thousand others lay frozen in a mass grave. I told him
how my mother had died trying to save me from his slel-clone's killing
knife.

"I knew the bomb was old," he said. "So old."

"You're a murderer," Soli said. He kicked up a shower of snow as he
planted his rear foot.

"So, here I stand, a murderer tracked and trapped by murderers." Soli's
fist tightened around the spear. I felt certain he was about to kill the
Timekeeper. I watched the murder programs begin to run. But he surprised
me. He stared the Timekeeper up and down and asked simply, "Why the
City? The City you founded three thousand years ago? Is that true?"

The Timekeeper let out a puff of steam and turned to me. He said, "So,
you've been inside the goddess, and she's talked to you. What did she
tell you about me, eh, Mallory?"

"She said you were the oldest human being, that you've been alive for
thousands of years."

"How old am I? What did she say?"

"She said you've been alive at least since the Holocaust Century."

"I'm old, it's true."

I climbed out of the sled and stood by Soli. He stepped closer to the
Timekeeper; the Timekeeper stepped backward in the direction of the
crevasse. "How old?" I asked.

"So old," he said. "Very old. Older than the snow. Older than the ice of
the sea."

"You'll have to pay for your murders," Soli said.

For no good reason, the Timekeeper quickly looked up into the sky. I saw
the old hell bubbling in his black eyes, and I knew that he had already
paid for the murders with pieces of his soul. He was paying still; he
would never stop paying.

"It's so quick," the Timekeeper said. "All human lives happen so
quickly, a few hard seconds, no more. Is it murder to mercifully end
their lives a few moments before the ticking stops of its own and they
die a natural death? Tell me!"

But neither Soli nor I had anything to add about the nature of murder so
we said nothing.

"The City's had its time," the Timekeeper said. "The Order, too. You
know why I did what I did."

"Did you have to kill my mother, then?"

"It was my double that killed her, not I."

"No, you killed her."

He made a fist and growled out, "Your mother and you, the bastard
Ringess with your carked brains, your wild new ideas, all of you, the
doom of the human race."

I wiped ice from my eyelashes and said, "You would have killed me."

"Once I tried to save you-do you remember?-saved you because I loved you
like a son." He glanced at Soli then quickly turned back to me. "Do you
still have the book of poems? I wanted to save you from the goddess. I
saved you too well, goddamn me for trying!"

I stepped closer to him. He was scratching Tusa's ear, pointedly not
looking at Soli's raised spear. jets of steam billowed from his nostrils
in slow, even spurts. In the morning air I smelled his sour skin, his
sweat, his carnivorous breath. He was afraid of something. His face was
as hard as any human face I had ever seen, but there was fear cut Into
it. I moved closer, stepping between him and Soli. Soli cursed and began
circling in order to have a clear line of sight should he decide to
spear him after all.

I rubbed my cheeks, trying to warm them so my words wouldn't be slurry.

I said, "When the Lord Imprimatur unraveled your slel-clone's DNA, he
found nothing."

"So? There's nothing to find."

"The Elder Eddas," I said. "The secret of the Ieldra."

"Gobbledygook!"

"The Entity told me their secret was embroidered in your chromosomes."

"Gobbledygook!"

"What do you know about the Ieldra?"

"Piss on the Ieldra!"

"Why would the Ieldra warn me-warn all of us-of the goddess?" He smacked
his fist into his mitten and yelled out, "Why this? Why that? Why, why,
why?"

"How old are you?" I asked. "Old as stone."

"What did the Ieldra do to you? I need to know."

"Piss on you!"

I stepped closer; he stepped back. "Tell me, Kelkemesh," I said. "I've
come so far to know."

He closed his eyes and grimaced. With his mouth open he threw his head
back as if he were about to scream. It was the first time I had ever
seen his eyes closed. "So, you know my name; then you know everything.

What's left to tell you, eh?"

"The secret."

"How old?" Soli asked.

He pointed his chin at me and opened his eyes. He held his palm pushing
out toward Soli. "I was born thirty thousand years ago," he said. "Old
Earth years. Do you need to know exactly how many years? One hundred
forty-two years more than thirty thousand years ago. One hundred
forty-two years, eighteen days and five hours more." As he said this he
pulled a flat, gold clock from his furs, opened it, and said, "And
fifteen minutes more, twelve seconds, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen
seconds ... how many more seconds do I have? If the Ieldra would have
had their way, I'd live forever. They made me to live forever, damn
them! It's my purpose, they would say. Their purpose."

"That's impossible," Soli said. He circled back the other way so the
Timekeeper stood between him and the crevasse. "No one could live that
long."

"Ha, Leopold, you're wrong! Shall I tell you? One day, long ago, when
the forests of Old Earth were green and seamless as a mechanic's robe,
they came down from the sky and told me they had chosen me to carry
their message. The damn gods! I never saw their bodies; I don't think
they had bodies, maybe they had never had bloody bodies. Do gods have
bodies like men? They appeared as balls of light, bright blue balls like
the hottest flames of a wood fire. They told me this: They said that the
Earth-even my Earth of thirty thousand years ago-they said it was too
full of men. The lights in the sky were stars, they said. Soon men would
leave Earth and wander among the stars. I thought I was going mad. No,
they said, I was not going mad; I was one of one hundred and twenty-five
immortals chosen to carry the Ieldra's message through time. To carry
their damn message so human beings, when we learned to burn the fuel of
the stars, would listen to the voice of wisdom and not go mad, and we
would not burn ourselves with starlight or other heavenly fires. The
Ieldra-damn their faceless faces!- they said their spirits were ready to
live within a sky so black and vast that not even the starlight could
escape the blackness. A black hole, they said. I didn't understand a
word of their gobbledygook, of course. They told me they were sad to
leave the human race alone, naked in our ignorance. 'Naked" I said to
them. 'Ignorant" Why, I wore the skin of the wolf that I killed with my
own hands, and I knew the name of every plant and animal in the forest!

The Ieldra didn't laugh at me because they had no mouths, but I heard
them whispering and laughing inside me, all the same. Then they opened
me, the bloody gods. They filled me with their crewelwork every bit of
me, embroidering every cell of my body, down to the last strand of DNA.

They carked my seed, my goddamned soul! I didn't understand what they
were doing. I was so pissing afraid that I knocked my own teeth out with
my fist. I was burning from inside out. It felt like I'd swallowed hot
tallow, like I'd eaten the magic mushroom and lay dying of fever, all at
the same time. After that they left me to my fate. They carked their
consciousness into the core singularity and left me to wander Old Earth
for most of thirty-thousand years. My teeth soon grew back, of course,
once, twice, many times, my damn teeth, every time I wore them out. They
left me with these fine white teeth, to chew the bitter root of
immortality, to taste the fruit of the world over and over until I was
so sick of the world I could have died. But I couldn't die, and that's
the hell of it. So now you know."

I looked down for a moment, thinking about gods and immortality. The
snow was up to my knees; it was so powdery and dry I could see each ice
crystal tumbling down the holes I made as I stepped closer to the
Timekeeper, closer to Soli.

To the Timekeeper I said, "The message inside you-don't you want to
know?"

"No."

"Embroidered in your DNA."

He grimaced again, revealing his long, white teeth. "No, there's nothing
there but disinformation and noise."

"They're gods! Why would you doubt the message of the gods?"

"Because they lie," he said. "The gods, they lie."

Soli pushed through the snow, circling right, then left. His hand was
hard over the leather grip of the spear while he wiped his bleeding nose
with the other. He was backing the Timekeeper toward the crevasse.

I held a naked hand to my chapped lips, then asked, "The other
immortals, what happened to them? Where are they?"

"They're dead," the Timekeeper told me. "The Ieldra made us immortal,
but we could be killed. A stone through the forehead, a knife .. ." and
here he looked straight at Soli, "a spear through the heart-there are
ways."

"All of them? Dead by accident?"

"Old Earth was a very violent place."

I saw that he was lying, or at least, he was keeping part of the truth
from me. He watched Soli circle, watched the tip of his spear glowing
golden as it caught the light of the rising sun. "You killed them,
didn't you?" I asked suddenly.

He jerked his chin up and caught me with his eyes. "So quick, Mallory.

Always too damn quick. So, I hunted them down like sheep, now you know,
all of them, one by one, even the five of them-shall I tell you their
names?-even the five immortals who escaped the Holocaust and fled into
the manifold."

"Too bad," I said.

"They'd lived too long and the secret had to be kept, eh?"

"And you're the keeper of the secret?"

"So, I'm the Timekeeper and I've kept it all this time."

"You've decoded the Eddas-am I right? Tell me what they say."

"Tell yourself."

"You've no right to keep this secret," I said.

His eyes grew hot as coals and he shouted, "Rights? You talk of rights?

The damn Ieldra took apart my soul! Not even gods have such a right."

I held up my fist to show him my pilot's ring. I said, "The day I
received this, you called the quest for the Elder Eddas. The quest is
over, then."

"No, Mallory, it's not over."

"The imprimaturs could decode the Eddas from your insides if-"

"There's nothing to decode."

"-if we brought you back to the City."

"So, you'll bring me back dead. Can the noble Ringess and his nobler
father slaughter me like a sheep? Ha!"

Soli could kill him, I thought; he and I had raced across the sea just
to kill him. I knew he blamed the Timekeeper for Katharine's death, so
when he moved his spear, I thought he was about to kill him. He was
aching to kill him, but struggling to restrain himself. He licked blood
from his mustache and said to me, "if you want this old killer to live,
we don't need his whole body. Yes, cut a few fingers off and freeze
them. The imprimaturs can decode the Eddas from the DNA of his fingers."

He stared at the Timekeeper, and the Book of Silence opened. I read a
whole chapter of the Book. He, the proud Soli, was well pleased with
himself for rising to his humanity and not spearing the Timekeeper. He
loved the idea of being merciful and gracious at the last instant.

The Timekeeper's lips pulled back in what could have been either a snarl
or a smile. "Ha, is this all you want?" So saying he snapped his arm
like a whip, and a long steel knife fell from his sleeve into his hand.

He shook off the mitten from his other hand. As easily as I might trim
the wick of an oilstone, he stretched out his little finger and lopped
it off. The finger dropped into the fluffy snow and disappeared down a
hole rimmed with blood, which quickly froze into little ruby crystals.

He held his splayed, fourfingered hand in front of Soli's face. White
bone gleamed in the dark, red suck of the wound, but strangely there was
little blood.

"Take my finger," he said. And then he bent down, retrieved the finger
from the punched-in hole. He flung it at Soli's face. Soli moved his
head aside, and it went sailing past him, sailing past me, and it fell
again into the snow.

Such a little gesture of scorn, but the Timekeeper had read the Book of
Silence, too. He must have known about Soli and scorn. Soli went mad,
then. He fell into rage; every bit of humanity and graciousness fell
away from his mad eyes. He ground his teeth and snorted, and blood
sprayed out of his nose. His spear arm drew back behind his ear, far
back with his forefinger straight along the spear shaft, pointing behind
him at me.

"Read the book Mallory," the Timekeeper suddenly called out. I had no
idea which book he was referring to. I tried to step closer, to stop the
tide of violence beginning its surge, but I was already beginning to
remember, and I could hardly move. "The book is for you."

I think he wanted very badly to die. But life was too much of a habit,
and he could not die so easily, not the Timekeeper, so he charged Soli
and tried to put his knife into him. Soli threw his spear. With his
spear he had once killed a great white bear, and now he would kill an
old, old wolf of a man. Even though the Timekeeper tried to twist out of
the way, Soli's spear caught him in the chest.

"So!" the Timekeeper howled out in pain. He stumbled and fell into the
snow, ten feet from the edge of the crevasse.

Then Soli was all over him, kicking him in the face and throat, grabbing
the spear shaft and jerking it back and forth, the better to ruin as
much flesh as possible and to work the tip deep into the Timekeeper's
heart.

When I began to move forward, Soli shouted, "Stay away!"

I took a step closer to them, the last step, the fateful step, the step
I had seen myself take a thousand different times as I lay scrying in
our silent snow-hut. I did not know why I took the step. I only knew
that I must, that if I stepped closer to Soli, somehow the secret I had
sought for so long would be revealed to me. My foot seemed to hang in
the snow as it settled downward. My muscles were nearly frozen. The cold
air hurt my eyes. My vision of the future-the future that was now, had
always been and would always be-had taken me this far but no farther.

Beyond this time, nothing. I was as blind to future moments as a child
floating in his mother's womb is to light. "Bastard!" Soli shouted.

"Stay away!"

He ripped his spear from the Timekeeper's chest. There was a hole in the
Timekeeper's furs as big as my fist, an ocean of blood. With the
strength of an Alaloi-or the frenzy of a madman-Soli bent low and lifted
him straight-up over his head. He staggered over to the edge of the
crevasse.

"No, Soli!" I cried out. I moved across the snow as fast as I could, but
I was remembering too much to fall into slowtime, and therefore I moved
too slowly.

"Soli, no!"

I grabbed at Soli as he heaved and pitched the Timekeeper's body into
the crevasse. I fell against him; both of us nearly followed the
Timekeeper over, too. There was a crack and a splash as the body broke
through the thin, new sea ice twelve feet below us. The Timekeeper
plunged into black water; he sank like a stone and disappeared, The
secret of life.

"Damn you, Soli!"

The seals and fishes would scavenge the Timekeeper's body, and the
secret of life would pass into them and be lost forever somewhere in the
icy deeps of the sea. I clung to Soli's furs waiting for the
Timekeeper's body to rise, but it did not rise; it would never rise
again.

"Bastard!" Soli shouted this ugliest of words as he caught his good hand
up in my hair and tried to snap my head back.

Then I went mad, too. How thin the line between love and hate, reason
and rage! Soli and I went down into the snow, tearing at each other as
if we were mad dogs. I blindly grabbed for his throat. I punched his
nose. With his two-fingered hand he must have found his spear because
the bloody, frozen point dipped toward my face. I am sure he would have
shoved it into my throat, but he did not have a very good grip on it. I
dropped my chin to cover my throat and jerked suddenly. Somehow the
flint tip glanced across my forehead over my eyes. There was a hot
pressure and a ripping sound and blood. The flint was in my blood, and
his blood, the Timekeeper's blood frozen to the sharp spear point,
melted into my blood as Soli sawed the spear across my skull. I had the
eerie sensation that my blood recognized the kinship of the Timekeeper's
blood, that inside me his blood was whispering to me, calling forth my
deepest memories. Or perhaps it was the shock of the spear or the
brilliant glare of the sun off the eastern ice that set me to
remembrancing-I do not know. I grappled with Soli hand to two-fingered
hand, and the cold tide of memory (and rage) swept me under.

I remembered a simple fact of genetics; I remembered that all human
beings shared a common ancestry. The kinship of blood: Soli rolled
against me, and his chest came up against mine, pressing me down through
the layers of snow. I opened my mouth to scream, but the blood dripping
out of his nose got in and gagged me. I swallowed his blood, my blood,
the blood of his father and grandfather, who was the Timekeeper, the
grandfather of Bardo and Li Tosh, too, Perhaps even Shanidat'S
grandfather, the grandfather of the entire human race. For thirty
thousand years the Timekeeper had wandered the continents of Old Earth,
all the while filling the women he took with the flood of his loins.

Filling them with godseed. How many children he had fathered across the
centuries I could not guess. Perhaps tens of thousands of children. And
in each one of them girl and boy, the secret of the Ieldra coiled and
was passed on to their children and their children's children, on and
on, father to son, mother to daughter year after year so that on all the
continents and oceans of all the planets of man (and on the made-worlds,
too) no woman or man lived in whom the great secret did not live, lying
dormant, waiting inside. Inside me.

We roled over and over in the snow as Soli tried to stab his spear into
my neck. But I locked his arm-it was a lock the Timekeeper had taught me
as a child-and I felt the joint stiffen up as he grunted in anger and
pain. Soli, too, had once taken wrestling lessons, and he broke my hold.

He got a knee up and spun about. There was snow in my mouth and down the
collar of my furs I was swimming in snow. The ice points stung my naked
shoulders and froze my neck. Rivulets of snowmelt and sodden clumps of
icepaste chilled my chest, We punched and gouged and wrestled through
the clean snow, trying to kill each other.

"Should I kill him?" Soli suddenly screamed. But, no, the scream was
inside of him, not in his mouth. I was reading his face; perhaps I was
reading his mind. The scream was inside me.

The brain is only a tool ... Something else called to me, and I shut my
eyes to Soli's clawing fingers, turned my head and listened to the voice
of memory. In a way, it was like a song, There were harmonies,
microscopic motions, and rhythms. I looked into my blood, looked down
the dark squiggle of my chromosomes where the Elder Eddas was hidden. I
looked into a place where the imprimaturs had often looked, into that
useless collection of "junk genes" making up much of every cell's
genetic material, I listened to my blood telling me that the junk genes
did have a purpose. They coded for and produced the proteins of chemical
memory. They were nothing but memory. The Ieldra had not meant for their
message to be decoded into something so crude as human language. Their
secret, the secret of life, was to be remembered.

The brain is that instrument for running and reading the programs of the
universe.

Each of us carries inside the key to memory. I felt a rhythm in my
blood, and it was the precise dance of adenine and guanine, thymine and
cytosine, and the threads of memory encoded within my chromosomes began
to unravel. Somewhere deep inside me, strands of DNA were coding for
alanine and tryptophan and other amino acids, building up the proteins
of chemical memory for my brain to read. Or perhaps the memory of my DNA
had already been encoded within the neurologics of my new brain; perhaps
I was remembrancing to the fervid touch of electrons instead of forming
images called up by protein sequences. Protein/electrons-in the end, did
it matter how information was stored? No, what mattered was the voice of
the Ieldra whispering those few parts of the Elder Eddas that I could
understand. The memories of the gods. The secret of life, they said, is
simple; the secret of life is ... "Should I kill him? Decide, then!" Man
is a bridge, they said.

The simplest things are the most difficult to understand. I grabbed
Soli's beard and jerked his head back and forth. I felt my awareness
spreading outward from our thrashing bodies, outward in circles through
the cold powder, spreading outward like a blanket of snow over the
frozen seascape of the world. I was aware of many things at once: of the
morning wind as it hissed and hugged the ice; of Kweitkel's white summit
poking into the blue belly of the sky; of Soli's hot breath exploding in
my ear. I remembered many, many things. I remembered myself as I really
was, Usually our awareness flickers from the inner to the outer and back
again like a thallow cocking its head from side to side. We spend our
lives being aware of objects and events, and occasionally we are even
aware of ourselves, but to hold both points of view at the same time is
a very rare thing. I remembered that I was a man who hated Soli; I
remembered this hatred as if I were watching myself hate him. It was
stupid of me to hate. My rage and hate programs were ruining me,
imprisoning me, robbing me of my freedom to think and feel and be. I
hated that my hatred was ruining me, and yet I could not stop hating.

Human beings must free themselves, whispered the Eddas in my inner ear,
they must be free.

"Decide, then!"

Soli gouged my cheek with his fingernail; it parted the layers of my
skin one by one. I gasped in pain, and I remembered there was a way out,
the way I had once seen on the ice of the Winter Ring, the way of
creation. Many had crossed the bridge of creation before me. I
remembered the first female warrior-poet, Kalinda, she who had loved
flowers and life so greatly that she had fled the death-worshippers for
the healing oceans of Agathange. There the god-men had remade her brain
as they had mine. She had fled the worlds of man, fled far into the
manifold. She had laid her brain naked from its surrounding coffin of
skin and bone. With the elements of asteroids and planets that she
consumed, she had added to the neurologics of her brain. She had created
her brain and watched herself grow, century after century, growing and
creating until her brain had become as large as a moon, and then many,
many moons. The misnamed Solid State Entity, I remembered as I heaved
against the churning snow, had once been as human as I; she had been a
little girl who liked to put flowers in her hair.

The voice of memory, of an old, dying man: The gods are tricksters, and
when they remake a man, they always leave something undone.

Soli began to reach back to grab his spear lying half-buried in the
snow. It was the wrong thing for him to do. I felt his body's programs
pulsing beneath his powdered furs, running along the length of his hard
muscles into his arm. I coughed at the bitter air as I whirled and wove
my arm beneath his arm up over the back of his neck. The half-nelson is
the first hold I'll teach you, the Timekeeper whispered in my ear, and I
was a novice once again grunting on the white furs of the Timekeeper's
Tower. And younger: I was the boy Kelkemesh wrestling with his father,
Shamesh, on a mountain glade on Old Earth. It's a good hold, but the
full-nelson is a deadly hold. I forced my other arm up into Soli's
armpit halfway to his neck. "Bastard!" he screamed, and I remembered
then the thing that the Agathanians had left undone: the determination
of my fate. I could choose. I could edit and rewrite my programs; I
could create myself, here, in this very moment of rage and cold, rolling
over and over in the snow.

But the Price of birth is death, the Ieldra whispered.

Yes, I could create myself, but to create, I must un-create first. To
die is to live; to live, I die. Could I be a murderer? My life,
myself-and there could be no returning that way ever again; there could
only be the great journey, on and on toward the infinite things, the
quest without boundary or end. I remembered my promise to the Entity.

How, I wondered, would I find the strength to sacrifice my fear?

There are infinite possibilities. And infinite dangers, too. "Should I
kill him? Decide now!"

I joined both my hands in the dense, wet hair at the back of Soli's
neck. His sweat was freezing as I locked my fingers and began to pull
downward, forcing his head toward his chest. And in my fingers, a great
strength, the strength that Soli and my mother, and even Mehtar the
Cutter, had put there. I must break his neck, I whispered to myself, I
must snap it as I would a piece of shatterwood because he had murdered
Bardo and was murdering me, because the universe was cold and unfair,
because, after all, more than anything else I loved being human. I must
choose a death. Never mind that a few wild chances had led me to this
moment wrestling in the snow. In the end, weren't chance and fate two
sides of a single face? I stared into the face of fate and found that it
was my own. Does a man have free will? Can you read the programs of the
universe, the infinite possibilities? There, on a cold, windy morning in
deep winter, I remembered myself and saw a sad, windburnt, finally
compassionate face smiling back. Yes, I can, I whispered. I will-a
choice freely made beneath the freedom of the deep sky.

And so, a moment of letting go, of disengagement and freedom. I heard
the snap I had been waiting for all my life. Soli crouched a few feet
away from me holding the pieces of his spear on either side of his bent
knee. He threw them spinning far out into the snow. He rubbed the back
of his neck and said, "We could have killed each other, couldn't we?

What's wrong with us, Pilot?"

I pressed my hand to the cut on my forehead to stop the bleeding. I was
panting and I said, "Listen, Soli, this ... trite tautology, not so
trite: The secret of life .. . is life."

Soli got up and went over to the crevasse. He looked down. "The
Timekeeper is dead," he mumbled half to himself. He seemed not to have
heard what I told him. "Your secret, dead too. Why couldn't you have
stayed away from me? Yes, why this cycle of ... why does it go on? But
no, it won't go on, I swear it, never, never again."

I stared west at Kweitkel as the memories thundered within me. I
listened and I watched the light refract in colors off the sparkling
snow. Everything-the pink granite of the mountain's northern pinnacle,
the fresh white powder, the blue air itself-seemed newly created. I
stood like a man stupefied with skotch, drunk with the beauty of the
world. There was no more rage or fear. I turned east where the endless
sheet of ice was burning with the light of the morning sun. Somewhere
out there, beneath the red ball of fire boiling low on the horizon, was
Neverness. Infinite possibilities she whispered to me.

Soli knelt suddenly, going down on his hands and knees, systematically
beating the snow near him. I remembered that the Timekeeper had hurled
his finger into the snow.

"No, Soli, don't bother trying to find it. There's no point, now."

"Why not, Pilot?"

Quickly, as my body heat melted the snow that had gotten down my furs, I
told him about my memories.

"But it makes no sense, does it?" Soli said. "Why were the Eddas encoded
as memory? If the Ieldra wanted to tell us their message, why didn't
they choose a simpler means?"

One of the Timekeeper's skinny dogs trotted over to me and I patted his
side. He sniffed the air in the direction of the crevasse and began to
whine. "What could be simpler, Soli? The Ieldra shared their wisdom with
everyone. In truth, it's ironic: They relied on our intelligence to
remember their intelligence. They must have thought it would be the
simplest thing for man to learn the true art of remembrancing. And we
should have, thousands of years ago. They never dreamed we'd be so
stupid."

Infinite dangers. I glanced north at the blue-black curtain of the sky
hanging over the frozen icebergs. I listened to the Eddas whisper.

Soli stood up and whistled to the rest of the Timekeeper's dogs. When he
was done going over them with his hands and eyes, he asked, "is this how
it ends? The quest?" Then he, too, was staring off, blinking against the
fresh wind.

I turned my head. To the south, the ice was as smooth and white as an
Alaloi baby's skin. There was no end to the southern ice of the
Starnbergersee. "It goes on and on," I said.

We went into the Timekeeper's hut, and Soli boiled water for coffee. He
bathed the wound on my forehead with hot, soaking cottons; he thawed it,
cleaned it, and, with a strand of seal sinew, sewed it closed. After we
had drunk our coffee, he fed and tended the sick dogs while I explored
the inside of the hut. I searched through the Timekeeper's things until
I found the book. Along with a few steel pens and a glass sphere full of
ink, it was wrapped in an oilskin, shoved between the pillowed furs at
the head of his bed. It was a fat, leather-bound book which closely
resembled the book of poems he had once given me. I opened it and
smelled the thickness of old leather. An icy gust blew through the
chinks in the wall, rattling its white pages. It was not a book of
poems. The Timekeeper had painstakingly-agonizingly-covered the pages of
the book line after line, with letters he had inked and drawn (and
composed) himself. It was an exquisite work of calligraphy, the work of
a man who cared not at all if he spent an hour penning a single word.

The work of a lifetime. I turned to the title page of the book. There,
in black letters as thick as a dog's claws, I read:

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

I turned the page and found that the book began with the following
words: "These are my Eddas." I ran my eyes over the other pages of the
book, reading continuously. The last page, I saw, was unfinished. The
Timekeeper's sequence of words ended midsentence, and at least one
hundred of the book's pages after that were blank.

Soli, who had never learned the art of reading, came over to me and
asked, "Why would the Timekeeper want you to have this book?"

I closed the book and rapped the cover with my pilot's ring. I said,
"This book, these words-it's his Eddas."

"Tell me about the Eddas," Soli said. "Not the Timekeeper's Eddas. That
would make me too sad. Tell me about your Elder Eddas, the message of
the gods."

I told him all that I knew. This is what I said: The Eddas were the
Ieldra's instructions to human beings on how to become gods. Man is a
bridge between ape and god, and the Eddas were a design for a bridge
which would not crumble into snow dust. Men must be gods because that
was how we were built. The god program runs deep in our race, as deep as
the primitive DNA from which we sprang billions of years ago. We must
learn how this program runs because that is our fate. I told him this
simple thing as he pressed a mug of hot coffee into my hands. But there
are infinite dangers, I said. When man looked godward with insane eyes,
the very stars would explode and drop from the sky. Insane god-men,
insane gods-the universe is full of insanity; insanity lurks everywhere,
like a mad, cannibalistic thallow waiting to gobble up any godling who
attains great intelligence and power. The more complex the programs of
an organism, the greater is the danger of insanity. It is very, very
hard to be a god. I breathed in the rich fumes of the coffee, and I said
that it was the gift of the Ieldra to help man cross the bridge. Because
they were compassionate beings, yes, but also because it was part of
their purpose to save the universe from insanity.

"Of course, man is already part god," I said. "And we're part insane,
which is why we're arrogant enough to tamper with the natural life-cycle
of the stars. And therefore: the Vild. Because we're ignorant, Soli,
because we don't know. We don't see. There are rules; the Eddas are
rules, rules on becoming, of determining our place in the ecology."

The deep structure of the universe is pure consciousness.

Soli nodded his head and sipped his coffee as he listened to me talk on
through the day into the night. The beginning of everything, I said, is
the reprogramming of our brains. Even our antiquated human brains can be
reprogrammed. We can write our master programs; there are techniques for
doing so; the Elder Eddas lays down the rules for these techniques. In
the end, we can remake our brains, and if we aspire to greater
consciousness, then we must, for what is the brain but a small lump of
matter that concentrates consciousness? Matter/energy; space/time;
information/consciousness -consciousness; there are fundamentals
describable by the Ieldra's beautiful, simple mathematics. In a way,
matter is merely frozen energy floating in an icefield of spacetime. And
consciousness is matter's way of organizing itself; consciousness is
immanent in every snowflake, atom, blooddrop, photon and grain of sand,
every neighborhood of spacetime from the Virgo Cloud to Perdido Luz.

Consciousness inheres, I whispered; consciousness orders everything. The
mathematics of order: There are rules for quantifying the
involvement/duty/identification among all the living organisms and
inorganic matter in the universe. Tat Tvam Asi, That Thou Art, and what
do I owe a stranger or an alien? My father? A bloodworm? A distant star?

What is man's place in the universal scheme? The great danger, I said,
is in falsely perceiving the otherness of all things. Then we will pull
the wings off flies, or murder seals, or other human beings; then we may
destroy the stars.

"There's help for the Vild, Soli. A solution, a way out. There's a unity
of ... consciousness. In a way, matter is just a standing wavefront of
consciousness, and energy, every bit of gamma radiating from the Vild
stars, every photon, this moving wavefront-it was all created by human
action, and therefore it can be uncreated. Or, I should say, re-created.

Made over in a different form, do you see? It's part of the ecology,
now."

"You keep saying the ecology," he said, sipping more coffee. "What
ecology?"

There is an ecology of information. Stars will die; people and gods will
die, but information is conserved. Macroscopic information decays to
microscopic information. But microscopic information is eventually
concentrated. Nothing is lost. Gods exist to devour information. The
lower intelligences sort, filter, concentrate and organize information.

And the gods feed.

"Pilot?"

"I'm sorry,-I was ... remembering." I licked coffee from my teeth and
said, "There are natural rules for determining our place in the ecology.

If we could decode the universal program, read the intention of the
universe, then-"

"You're not answering my question."

"I'm trying. The Vild-it's not the intention of the universe. What do
human beings know of ananke? There are always imperfections and
insanities. The orcas-"

"The what?"

"On Agathange, the orcas may or may not be insane, but they play a
crucial role in that planet's ecology. And so, consider the Vild: an
ocean of energy to he used."

As the Entity had made thousands of black bodies to store the energy of
Gehenna Luz, so could we use the energy of the Vild. Information could
be coded into signals and sent anywhere, given enough energy. Sent
everywhere, this interflow of information. We could speak with the
nebular brains in our galaxy. We could extend our galaxy's information
ecology. We-every human being, Fravashi, oyster, sentient bacterium,
virus, or seal-we could drive our collective consciousness across the
two million light-years of the intergalactic void to the information
ecologies of the nearer galaxies, Andromeda and Maffei and the First
Leo-all the galaxies of the local group were alive with intelligence and
vibrated with the thoughts of organisms such as ourselves. Someday the
time would come to interface with the ecologies of other groups of
galaxies. Within ten million light-years off the supergalactic plane of
the local supercluster were many groups of galaxies. Canes Venatici, the
Pavo-Indus and the Ursa galaxies-these burning, brilliant clouds of
intelligence and others enveloped our own small galaxy in a sphere of
light four hundred million light-years in diameter. To speak with such
distant galaxies would require the energy of a supernova, perhaps many
tens of thousands of supernovas.

"La ilaha il Allah," I said, "and we're all a part."

"Listen, Pilot, I don't understand you."

I listened to the night wind whispering outside the hut, and to the
quieter whispering inside. In truth, most of the Eddas I did not
understand, either. Most of it was-there is no other word-gobbledygook.

I did not yet have the brain to understand it. For a moment, the whole,
vast architecture of the coming information ecology unfolded before me,
layer upon layer of ideas, biological systems and information structures
spreading out, opening like the pages of a book. It was overwhelming and
wonderful, but I was like a worm crawling across the first page of the
book, trying to read it letter by letter by the feel of the ink across
my belly. I understood perhaps a single page in all the millions of
pages of the Eddas. And the Eddas themselves, the collected wisdom of
the gods, were only a tiny part of the secrets that the universe held,
as insignificant as a single snowflake in a blizzard.

I tried to tell Soli all this, but I do not think he really wanted to
understand. "You say that these memories are in each of us? The whole of
the Eddas?" He was staring straight ahead as he knelt on the floor,
roasting a baldo nut over the oilstone.

"Yes," I said, "passed down from father to son. That's why the
Timekeeper killed the other immortals. He didn't want anyone telling
people what was inside them. Because he knew."

"Knew what?"

"That the bridge can only be crossed one way. And he knew that if we
listened to the memories, we'd want to make the crossing."

"It's not so easy to remember," he said.

"You could remember the Eddas, if you wanted to."

"Is that true?"

I watched the flame's reflection in his eyes. It must hurt him, I
thought, to stare so long without blinking. "I could show you how to
remember," I said.

He chewed his baldo nut a long time before he swallowed. "No," he said,
"there are enough memories already. It's too late, isn't it?"

"Never too late," I said.

"Yes, too late."

I drank the last of my coffee and wiped my lips. "What will you do now,
then?"

He sucked on his fingers a moment to warm them. He said, "All my
life-and it's been a long life, hasn't it?-I've spent every moment
trying to figure out why I was alive. My own private quest, Pilot. Now
you say the Eddas are inside me; you tell me I have only to remember and
... and what? You say I'll learn the secret of life on a higher level of
existence. But life's life, isn't it? There's always misery, yes; and
the higher the level of existence, the greater the misery. I've had
enough-do you understand? I, Leopold Soli ... I, like the
Timekeeper-enough. How can there ever be an answer?" He rubbed his nose
and looked at me. "All my life I thought I was learning how to live. But
I knew nothing, did I? Justine knew everything. Yes, I'll sled on to
Kweitkel and live with the Devaki, if they'll let me. We were happy
there once, Justine and I. Do you remember?"

Later we heard the bawl of a bear far out on the ice. Soli thought it
might be the same one who had led his dogs to their deaths in the
crevasse. He went out to look for the pieces of his bear spear that he
had cast into the snow. When he returned, he held the broken end of the
spear by its point. "It was reckless of me to break the spear," he said.

"But at least the flint can be saved. It's a good piece of flint."

I ran my finger lightly along the cut on my forehead. "A good piece of
flint," I agreed. "It nearly killed me."

"Yes," he said, and he punched out and knocked away part of a snow block
from the roof. For a while he watched the spindrift curling through the
opening before he began to shiver. He stood up to patch the hole and
said, "Ever since we first met, I've wondered: Why?"

He cut a new block of snow, trimmed it and tapped it into place. He sat
across from me on the Timekeeper's bed. He tried to meet my eyes, but he
could not. His face was hard with emotion, the muscles locking as two
contradictory programs began to run. He wanted to tell me how much he
hated me, how he resented my very existence. The words were almost on
his lips. His eyes were bright blue, as shiny as the sea. He opened his
mouth. He wanted to say, "Yes, I wanted to kill you; I was ready to kill
you; I would loved to have killed you." And then a long moment slowly
passed as his face softened, and he rubbed his eyes, and he said the
other thing, the thing that he thought he did not want to say: "No, I
couldn't kill you. How can a man kill his own son?"

I stared at the fire as the hut filled with silence. He threw his hand
over his eyes, rubbing his temples.

"Why you, Pilot?" he asked at last. "What will happen to you?"

I sat there with him eating baldo nuts, and I told him one last secret.

Then everything seemed to be beating: my heart, his heart, the air
molecules outside beating against the frozen snow. I listened to the
beating of the Vild stars calling me, then I told him, as
compassionately as I could, that it was his son's fate to be a god.

Chapter 30 - Neverness

A day, whether six or seven ago, or more than six thousand years ago, is
just as near to the present as yesterday. Why? Because all time is
contained in the present Now-moment. To talk about the world being made
by God tomorrow, or yesterday, would be talking nonsense. God makes the
world and all things in this present Now. Time gone a thousand years ago
is now as present and near to God as this very instant.
-Johannes Eckehart, Mongol Century Horologe

The next day Soli rubbed his red-rimmed eyes and announced that he would
take the Timekeeper's sled and dogs and go on to Kweitkel. I could turn
around immediately, he said, and hunt seals all the way back to
Neverness. However, the Timekeeper's poor dogs were in no condition to
pull a sled. Three of them were sick with frostbite, and all of them
were starving.

"I'll come with you as far as Kweitkel," I said. I adjusted my snow
goggles and looked out at the mountain. In the pristine air, its
gleaming cone seemed much closer than it really was. "It would be best
to leave the Timekeeper's sled here. The sick dogs can ride in our sled;
the others can follow after us."

In truth, neither of us felt very sure that the Devaki would welcome
Soli, and I did not want to leave him stranded with a team of sick dogs.

So I accompanied him for this last part of his journey. It took us two
days to reach the island. We built a hut thirty yards from the rugged
shoreline. Yuri had told me three years ago-it seemed like three
lifetimes-that I would never be welcome on Kweitkel. Very well, I would
not touch foot to land. (Unless, of course, a bear clawed open my hut
and chased me into the pretty yu trees above the beach.) Soli set out
into the forest on skis. He would tell the Devaki some made-up story of
tragedy and woe, of how Justine and Bardo, and my mother, had each gone
over to the other side. He would return the next day, he said, with
skinfuls of baldo nuts for my return home, and with meat for the dogs,
if it had been a good year for the Devaki and they were feeling
gracious.

I waited three days and three nights while the wind blew and nearly
buried my hut. I was worrying fiercely when, on the afternoon of the
fourth day, several sleds appeared at the edge of the forest. One of
them slipped down the beach to the sea. I stood with my hand shielding
my eyes against the noonday sun. I looked closely at the sled. Soli was
driving it, and he was not alone.

"Ni luria la!" I called out. I did not know what else to say. I squinted
and stared at the sled. At first I thought that Soli had a little bear
cub riding atop the stacked skinfuls of baldo nuts. Then I looked more
closely. It was not a bear cub; it was a Devaki child bundled in
shagshay furs. I could not guess why Soli had a child with him.

The men at the edge of the forest did not greet me. They stood by their
sleds, half behind the yu trees, looking out to sea. Because of the
glare, I could not make out their faces.

"Ni luria la," Soli answered, and he drew closer. I squinted and saw
that the child was a boy, perhaps three years old. In his lap he held a
stick doll. As the sled scraped to a stop, he looked down, studying the
doll with a shy intensity.

Soli left the boy on the sled. He walked over to me, and in the language
of the Devaki, he said, "It's too bad you had to wait."

"Who is the boy?" As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I knew who
the boy was, "He is the found-son of Haidar and Chandra," he said.

At the mention of his found-parents' names, the boy looked up and
smiled. "Haidar mi padda moru ril Tuwa," he suddenly said without any
prompting, and he told me the story of how his found-father had killed a
mammoth the preceding winter. "Los pela manse, mi Haidar, mi Haidar lo
li Wos"

He was a handsome, strong-looking boy with an easy smile and quick,
blue-black eyes the color of the twilight sky. He did not really look
much like other Alaloi children I had seen. When I smiled at him his
shyness melted instantly. He boldly stared at me as if he had known me
all his life.

The color of Katharine's eyes, I whispered to myself. "What is his
name?" I asked in a raw, uneven voice.

The boy smiled, showing me his straight, white teeth. "Padda," he said,
"ni luria la; ti los mi lot-Padda?"

"Welcome, Father; are you really my blood-father?"

"It's impossible," I said, although I knew that in this strange universe
we inhabit, there is very little that is impossible.

Soli crunched through the snow closer to me and grabbed my arm. I
whispered in his ear, "He can't be my son. Anala cut the fetus from
Katharine a good forty-days before her time. Do you remember? He
couldn't have lived."

"Couldn't he?" he murmured as he turned to look at the boy. "He's tough
as a diamond. He's my grandson. All the Soli line-we're hard to kill,
aren't we?" And then, "Look at him! The cutter sculpted your face but he
left your chromosomes alone. How can you doubt it?"

He picked some ice from his furs and told me what had happened: "When
they saw me approaching the cave, the Devaki were surprised to see me.

And they surprised me by holding a feast in my honor. They roasted
mammoth-they've been having luck with the mammoth herds these past
years, even though a big bull trampled Yuri two years ago and crushed
his skull. But everyone remembered what Yuri had said that day, so they
welcomed me. They forgave me, can you believe that, Pilot?"

"Fuwa wi lalunye," the boy said as he licked his lips, watching us.

Obviously he thought that Soli was telling me about the mammoth feast.

Soli rubbed the back of his head and continued. "It was Anala who told
me. About the boy. None of the Devaki women expected him to live, even
Chandra, who nursed him after Katharine ... after we returned to the
City. But he did live. It's a miracle, isn't it?"

I watched the boy as he fidgeted and slipped a tiny bone spear into the
doll's curved fist. His long chin, I saw, could have been my own chin
before I had been made into an Alaloi; his wavy hair was black and shot
with red.

"But they murdered Katharine!" I said. "They called her a satinka. Why
didn't they smother the baby and bury it in the snow?"

"That's not their way, is it?"

"I never thought he could have lived. I never saw it. I never guessed."

Soli scratched at the blood beneath his nose and coughed. "He was a
tough little baby, they say. Chandra told me he rarely cried, not even
when he burned his hand in the oilstones."

I blinked my eyes and said, "Katharine, before she died, she would have
seen it if he were to have lived. Why didn't she tell me?"

"A scryer's ways."

"What's his name?" I asked, forgetting for a moment that the Devaki do
not name their children until they are at least four years old.

"They haven't named him yet," he said. "But Haidar talks of naming him
Danlo the Younger, after his grandfather. After Haidar's grandfather,
that is."

I closed my eyes and shook my head. "No," I said, "he'll be a pilot, and
people will call him Danlo Peacewise because he'll lead a mission to the
Vild. He'll learn numbers and geometry, and he doesn't know the names of
the stars yet, but he'll-"

"No," Soli said softly. He turned to the boy, who dug into one of the
skins and popped a baldo nut into his mouth. He cracked it between his
hard little teeth and smiled at me.

"He's my son!" I shouted.

"No, he's Haidar's son, now. His found-son, yes, but he loves him as
much as his other sons. Haidar is the only father he knows. He'll be a
good-"

"No!" I took a step toward the sled. "He's my son, and when he sees the
City for the first time, he'll cry out, 'Father, I'm home!'"

Soli shook his head and pointed toward the line of thick-ribbed ice
above the beach. Haidar, Wemilo, Seif, Jonath and Choclo stood on the
blue whorls and crusts, watching us. They were dressed in their hunting
furs, and each of them held a shagshay spear. I raised my open hand to
them, but only little Choclo-he was no longer very little-smiled back. I
had always liked Choclo.

Soli said, "When I entered the cave and Anala showed me the boy, she
said Haidar had gone with Wemilo and Choclo to hunt shagshay. That's why
it took me so long to come back, because Haidar had to be asked. When
Haidar returned from his hunt, he said that I could carry the boy back
on the sled. To say goodbye-that's what Haidar said, do you understand?

He said that the boy should see his blood-father once before saying
goodbye forever."

I stared down at the snow, knowing what Soli would say, yet stunned when
he said it. I walked over to the sled and picked the boy up. He was
heavier than he looked.

"Padda," he said. A curious look crossed his forehead, and with his long
fingers he picked through my beard, examining the red strands he found
there. "Padda," he said again. But there was no emotion in his voice. He
said the Devaki word for father as if it were an abstraction, as if he
had learned the name of a strange new animal.

"Danlo," I said, and I kissed him on the forehead that was shaped as
mine used to be. "My son."

I set the boy down on the snow, and he ran over to the hut and crawled
through the tunnel to see what he might discover there. I looked up into
the sky, silent and blue above me. I swallowed hard, once or twice. My
eyes were burning with pain; I was surprised that they were as dry as
the frigid air swirling around me. Perhaps, I thought, my damned, carked
soul was no longer capable of tears.

"I can't take him with me," I told Soli. "No."

"My son-he'll grow thinking he's a misshapen Alaloi." Soli rubbed the
side of his nose, saying nothing.

From inside the hut came a giggle of delight. I crawled through the
tunnel and smiled at Danlo, who was sitting at the head of my bed. He
had found the Timekeeper's book. He was turning the pages one by one,
picking at the black letters as if he thought they were worms.

I looked through the hut's shadowy, freezing air at infinite
possibility, and I bit my lip. Gently, I pulled the book away from his
lap. "Li los book," I forced out.

He was angry because I had taken his new toy from him. He glared at me
for a long time. I was afraid of the rage I saw in his eyes, the rage
that cut me like a spear. Then his curiosity returned and he smiled. "Li
los buka?" he asked me.

"A book," I explained, "is just a bundle of decorated leaves tied
together. It is nothing important. Nothing at all."

Later, when I had packed the sled and Soli stood holding Danlo's hand
for the short trip back to the beach, I whispered in Soli's ear, "Don't
let my son grow up in ignorance. Tell him that the lights in the sky are
not just the eyes of the dead. Tell him about stars, will you?"

I turned the sled in a circle eastward, and I gripped the hard, frozen
rails.

"Yes," Soli said, "I'll tell him."

"Goodbye, Danlo," I said as I bent and lifted him into the air. Because
his long hair smelled so good I kissed his head again. I grasped Soli's
naked hand and told him goodbye, too.

"Yes, goodbye," he said. Then he did an astonishing thing. He pulled
hard on my arm and leaned over suddenly as I nearly stumbled. He kissed
me once, fiercely, on the forehead. I felt his chapped lips burning my
cold skin; to this day I can feel the burning still. "Fall far and fall
well, Pilot," he said.

I called to the dogs and drove the sled downwind into the gleaming plain
of snow which opened before me. I never looked back with my eyes, though
in my thoughts and dreams I have often looked back. I did not think I
would see either of them again. Never, came the whisper, never again.

The air was so cold and bitter that my eyes were full of tears before I
had covered half a mile of the distance towards Neverness.

I am coming to the end of my story. There is little to tell of my
journey homeward. The dogs and I ate our baldo nuts and mammoth meat,
and after that we were hungry. Although I opened many aklia to hunt
seals, they no longer leapt to my spear. Most of the time it was very
cold. Twice my toes froze; to this day my toes have trouble with the
cold. When I was almost within sight of the City, a blizzard caught me
unprepared. For fifteen days I lay huddled with my half-frozen dogs in a
hastily made snowhut, reading the Timekeeper's book and listening to the
storm. Arne and Bela died next to me, from frostbite and hunger. I left
them buried in the snow.

Somewhere it is recorded that on the ninety-first day of deep winter in
the year 2934, Mallory wi Soli Ringess, having failed in his quest to
find the Elder Eddas, returned to the city of his birth. (I am told this
is how the Sarojin's famous fantasy, The Neurosingets, ends.) I returned
to one of the most bitter ironies of my life: The lords and masters, and
most others, did not want to believe I had "remembered" the Elder Eddas.

A few of them, the Lord Imprimatur in particular, ridiculed me. At least
they did until, on the last day of the year, the greatest of our
remembrancers, Thomas Rane, stripped off his robes, closed his eyes and
floated in one of the tanks of the Rose Womb Cloisters. He remembered
far into the murky past. He called up the memories that are within each
of us, and he listened, as I had listened, to the whisper of the Elder
Eddas. With joy (and too much pride) he taught many others of his
profession to remember them, too. The word of this great remembrance
quickly spread through the Academy. For days, I could not skate down the
most out-of-the-way gliddery without some novice tugging on the sleeve
of a schoolmate and pointing at me in awe. Even certain of the
exemplars, who stand in awe of no man, could scarcely meet my eyes when
they talked to me. It was very embarrassing. In truth, I much preferred
ridicule to awe.

Soon after this the College of Lords made me Lord of the Order. I
immediately took charge of the rebuilding of the Lightship Caverns and
the surrounding, bomb-ruined City. I sent robots into the mountains
beyond Urkel to cut great quantities of stone. By twentieth day in
midwinter spring, the foundations of a grand spire (some said grandiose)
had been laid. As the gray, snowy days passed, a needle of pink granite
rose above the newly built Hollow Fields, above the halls and towers of
what came to be called the New City. In a year, when the spire was
completed, it would be the tallest in the entire City. I named it Soli's
Spire, to the surprise and consternation of everyone who thought they
knew how much I hated my father.

During this time I led a miniature expedition into the sealed-off
Timekeeper's Tower. I trudged up the stairs to the Timekeeper's sanctum.

Snow had blown through the ruined windows and accumulated, covering
hundreds of the Timekeeper's clocks. I rescued the clocks. I ordered the
snow removed and the windows rebuilt, of glass. The entire Tower, I
decided, would be a museum.

In the basement of the Tower, I discovered many, many ancient books, a
whole library of musty, leather-bound books. I read the books; to this
day I continue reading them. I walked through the long, stone corridors
winding down into the deepest levels of the Tower. I came to my old cell
and looked within, remembering. I opened the heavy door of the adjacent
cell, the cell in which the warrior-poet had composed his death poem.

There was a smell of dust and animal droppings and death. I found his
white bones picked glisteningly clean by the sleekits whose burrows
tunneled deep beneath the ground. His red warrior's ring and his poet's
ring gleamed against the long, curled finger bones. So, I thought, the
warrior-poet had really died. Then I remembered that he had made me
promise to send his body back to his planet of birth. In all the
confusion of the War, I had forgotten him. I ordered his bones removed
and wrapped in his warrior's cloak. Robots cut a black marble casket and
polished it until it shined like a mirror. I, myself, chiseled the words
of his death poem into the facing. The novices who watched me working in
the dark basement-and perhaps everyone else as well-must have thought
that I was two-thirds insane. When they supposed I wasn't listening,
they laughed at me. But they did not yet understand how vital it was
that the dead, any dead, must be honored and, more, remembered.

I must now tell of the promise that I made to the goddess, Kalinda, and
of the miracle which caused me to keep that promise. The miracle: On the
fifty-sixth day of false winter, Bardo's Blessed Harlot fell out of the
manifold and was brought down to the newly built Lightship Caverns. For
many days the Hollow Fields had been reopened to the stream of shuttles
from the deepships and longships which are the lifeblood of the City.

And one by one, the lightships of pilots who had journeyed far across
the galaxy during the quest began to return. (Many pilots, of course,
had remained true to the quest and had not seen Neverness since the day
the Timekeeper issued his summons. Their names are honored above all
others.) At first it was thought that the Blessed Harlot was one of
these ships. But then a journeyman tinker recognized her great, drooping
wings and blunt nose and sent a novice to inform me. I met Bardo at the
Caverns, but he refused to immediately explain the miracle of his
existence.

"Bardol" I cried out when he stepped from his ship's pit. "How is it
possible?"

"Little Fellow!" We embraced and he thumped my back, as usual. He felt
as massively solid-as real-as he always had. He was weeping freely. Fat
teardrops ran down his cheeks. "Little Fellow!" he said. "Little Fellow.

By God, it's good to be home!"

"Tell me what happened to you. Are you alone? Where's Justine, then-may
I ask?"

He smiled sadly as he grabbed his belly and shook his head. Except for a
slight graying of his temples and beard, he looked much the same as I
remembered. "Oh, you may certainly ask" he said. "But not here. I'm so
thirsty! I haven't tasted beer for a long time. I'm dying for the taste
of it. Will you come to the Hofgarten with me so I can drink some beer?"

On a day of brilliant sunshine and warm mountain breezes we went to the
Hofgarten to drink beer and skotch. We sat at a polished wooden table in
our favorite room overlooking the sea cliffs. The outer windows were
open to let in the air and the hot rays of the sun. We sat by the
window, drinking our drinks, and talking.

"Ah, this is good," he said as he held the mug of beer to his lips. He
licked foam from his mustache and then took a few more gulps. "So good.

I should tell you about Justine. She is well. She has gone to Lechoix,
to visit her mother and to teach at the elite school. She won't be
coming back to Neverness, too bad."

I sipped my skotch, but there was little pleasure there. The taste of it
distracted me from the important thing I had to ask Bardo. "Begin at the
beginning," I said. "How did you survive the battle? The star?"

"Shall I tell you of the battle? How am I still alive? There is a simple
explanation, my friend. We were rescued. The Entity saved us, somehow-I
don't know how. One moment we had fallen out in the heart of the star
and we were being fried like meatworms in a fire. We were dying, you
see. The next moment-well, we were free."

He finished his beer and called for another. His fat cheeks were very
red, whether from the beer or from embarrassment, it was hard to tell.

"And then?" I asked.

"And then we fled, by God! There, now I've told you. 'Bardo the
Coward'-that's what you're thinking, I know. We found a mapping back to
the fallaways, and then on to Lechoix. We couldn't stay together that
way, Justine and I. Sometime I'll have to describe it, the hell of
losing yourself in someone else. Sometime. The Timekeeper was right.

It's not good for pilots to share the same ship. Oh, you must hate me,
Little Fellow, for being the coward that I am!"

In truth, I did not hate him; I loved him for being a coward. "I'm glad
you're alive," I said.

He would not say anything more about Justine, so I told him everything
that had happened since the battle. He was glad that the Timekeeper was
dead, and gladder still that I was Lord of the Order. Of my discovering
the Elder Eddas he was not so glad. Bardo, my irreverent, profane
friend, had come to mistrust the gods.

"Why aren't you drinking your skotch?" he asked as he slapped the table.

"Drink, Little Fellow, and I shall tell you about the Entity and what
she's done to me. She's talked to me! I, Bardo, a prince of Summerworld
and soon-to-be master pilot, that is, if the Lord Pilot finds me
worthy-I've talked to the goddess and returned to tell you!"

I picked up my tumbler of skotch. I put it to my lips and sniffed, but I
did not drink it, because of the memories. "What do you want to tell me,
Bardo?"

He belched, and a sour, sick look came over his face. He was already a
little drunk. "Ah," he said, "I haven't been entirely truthful to you.

Forgive me. The goddess didn't tell me that she had rescued me from the
star. She said that she had created me. Remembered me, by God! Justine
and I-we were dead, she said. Our beautiful ship destroyed. Oh, too bad!

This is what she told me, Little Fellow. She said that she remembered
the configuration of every atom, every synapse of our goddamned bodies
and brains. She recreated me, she said, from hydrogen gas, from carbon
molecules and stardust. She saved me from death. A resurrection, she
said, a second chance. Is it possible?"

"I don't know."

"Is it possible? By God, tell me, Little Fellow!"

I took a sip of skotch and let the liquid amber roll across my tongue. I
listened to the crosstalk between sense and memory, the memory contained
in each molecule of skotch. The alcohols and ethers burned their way
through the pink papillae into my blood. The taste of esters and the
pungent, fufural aldehydes recalled the planet Urradeth where the skotch
had been made forty years ago. I smelled the crisp grains of barley
roasting over a peat fire, and barley mash fermenting, its essence being
distilled into the golden liquor of memory. I swallowed and saw the man
who had cut the barley, his steel scythe reflecting the harsh, blue
light of Urradeth's sun. In the body and germ of the barley were atoms
of carbon, bits of countless exhalations of the people who had colonized
Urradeth. Bits of Old Earth and her yellow sun, the hydrogen of the
stars, and the oxygen made in a distant stellar fire which had no name
that I knew-the tree of memory and being was infinite, and the
contemplation of its interconnecting branches made me dizzy. The memory
of all things is in all things. I coughed and spat a mouthful of firy
skotch over the table. The droplets beaded up on the oiled wood, the
shatterwood which had been poached from Alisalia's forest by a
wormrunner long-since dead. Yes, I thought, She, a goddess had made a
man as easily as a man might carve a favorite stick doll he has
remembered from his boyhood.

Through consciousness, gods create; creation is everything. "It's
possible," I said at last.

"Oh, that's too bad," he said. "That's the very worst thing. So bad, too
damn bad. Perfect information is impossible, I think, and therefore
Bardo is not the man he once was. What am I, then? How will I ever
know?"

It was the old problem, the old fear. But finally, here in the body and
soul of my old friend, the possibility of a new solution.

"You are who you are," I said. "You're Bardo, my best friend. That's
enough, then."

Beads of sweat shined on his bulging forehead. "And who is Mallory
Ringess?"

"I am that I am."

He licked his red lips and banged his mug on the table, He shook his
head, rapped the window with his pilot's ring, and he said, "The Entity
told me that I was to bring a message to you, that I would be both the
messenger and the goddamned message. To remind you of your promise. What
did she mean?"

"I've promised to return to Her, Bardo."

"Why?"

I pushed the tumbler of skotch away from me. It slid almost
frictionlessly across the wet table. "This will be hard to explain but I
must try. Kalinda was a warrior-poet before she was ever a goddess. The
poets, in their quest for the perfect human, they long ago embroidered
their chromosomes. And worse, they edited what they thought was useless
information, up and down the genome. In their ignorance, they edited out
a vital thing. And that's the tragedy. Each warrior-poet, even
Kalinda-especially Kalinda-they can't remember the Eddas. Because,
inside them, where it whispers in us, there's nothing."

"That's too bad."

"Kalinda-the Entity-she's what the Ieldra didn't want: a goddess who
grew into herself without the benefit of their wisdom."

He leaned over the window sill to take a breath of fresh air. He belched
and said, "But the Entity must have known how to decode the Eddas. Think
of the pilots who have been lost inside her. Ah, think of me. If she
could ... well, if she could really create me, then she must have been
able to read every bit of my DNA."

"In truth, I believe She knows everything about the Eddas .. . now. But
it's too late, do you see? For all Her power, for all Her glory, She's a
little insane."

He belched again and said, "Well, I still don't understand."

I stood up and pushed my chair away from the table. "It's a beautiful
day," I said. "Let's take a walk on the beach."

Because he was drunk, he threw his arm around my shoulder and
halfstumbled, half-dragged me outside. We walked down the icy path
cutting through the cliffs to the beach. I told him of my plans to send
a mission to the Vild. Our Order's finest pilots, I said, would lead the
mission. There would be many lightships, and a seedship carrying
historians, programmers, mechanics, eschatologists and remembrancers,
above all, remembrancers-a full complement of masters representing our
Order's every profession. We would civilize the Vild. Or rather, we
would civilize and teach the wild peoples of the Vild not to destroy the
stars. I would show the pilots the proof of the Hypothesis, and they
would teach the barbarians the art of mathematics. And somewhere in the
ruins of the Vild, the masters of the seedship would establish a new
Academy, perhaps many Academies to teach new pilots. To learn, to
journey, to illuminate, to begin-that is the motto of our Order, and it
would remain the motto no matter how far our pilots fell.

"But the Vild's radiation-it propagates, does it not? And what about
Merripen's Star? And all the others? Eventually, the light will sear the
entire galaxy."

"No, we won't allow that future to be." I closed my eyes and said,
"We'll make new life forms that live on light. Half-bacterium,
halfcomputer, half-photoelectric cell-a swarm of new life throughout the
galaxy, feeding on photons, shielding, becoming a part of the ecology.

Such an intelligence-you can't imagine."

"And then?" Bardo asked.

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

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

We picked our way across the rocks and sand, trying not to step on the
pretty pebbles and smooth shells washed up along the high tide line.

Bardo was puffing and panting; he leaned over with his hands on his
knees. His face had gone as pale as an autist's. I thought that he was
about to be sick. "Oh, my poor belly," he groaned. "I've drunk too much
beer." Then he remembered his dignity, straightened up and leaned on my
shoulder. His weight was very great, very comforting, very familiar.

He stared out at the water mournfully, then turned and examined my face.

"Look at you! A man wearing a caveman's body, and two-thirds a god
inside your head!"

Give, be compassionate, Katharine had told me.

"No god is there but God, and we're all a part," I said.

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

"No, Bardo, I didn't come here to skip stones."

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

"I'm sorry."

"No, you're a god, and gods aren't sorry, I don't think."

"I'm your friend."

He glanced up and down the beach, first at a couple of novices holding
hands by the water's edge, and then out at the seals on their rock.

There were nine gray seals, and they were basking in the sun with their
black noses pointed straight up towards the sky. He dropped his voice
low, as if he were telling me a secret. There were vapors on his breath,
the sour-sweet smell of beer. "No, Little Fellow," he said. "Can a man
be friends with a goddamned god?"

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

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

I told him. "I'm not hungry right now."

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

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

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

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