Читать книгу Neverness - David Zindell, David Zindell - Страница 10

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

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

from A Requiem for Homo Sapiens, by Horthy Hosthoh

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

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

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

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

Stars, I have seen them fall

But when they drop and die

No star is lost at all

From all the star-sown sky.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘But could they train pilots?’

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

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

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

‘You can’t live forever.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I said, ‘I wouldn’t lie to you.’

‘And what do you mean by goddess?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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