Читать книгу Neverness - David Zindell, David Zindell - Страница 11

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

Lyall Watson, Holocaust Century Eschatologist

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

Why?

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

Why is man?

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

Why is man born?

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

Why is man born to self-deception and lies?

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

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

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

If thou beest born to strange sights,

Things invisible to see,

Ride ten thousand days and nights,

Till age snow white hairs on thee.

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

No, Mallory, you are speaking with me.

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

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

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

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

– What are you?

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

– I don’t understand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– I don’t understand.

You are not here to understand.

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

You are here to kneel.

– What?

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

– No, of course not.

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

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

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

– Others?

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

They are all gone into a world of light!

And I alone sit lingering here;

Their very memory is fair and bright,

And my sad thoughts doth clear.

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

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

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

– What others?

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

– Then you killed them?

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

– What’s an oyster?

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

That is oyster.

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

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

– Again, you speak in riddles.

The universe is a riddle.

– You’re playing with me.

I like to play.

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

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

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

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

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

Do you see the pilots, Mallory Ringess?

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

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

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

– That’s scryer talk.

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

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

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

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

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

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

– What happened to the Tycho?

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

– I don’t understand.

The Tycho exists in a memory space.

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

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted

Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!

A savage place! as holy and enchanted

As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted

By woman wailing for her demon lover!

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

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

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

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

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

‘I’m both.’

‘That’s impossible.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Okay. He made you.’

‘I could have controlled myself.’

‘Is that so?’ he asked.

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

‘You must like being mad.’

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

‘You must like the way you are.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘To be tested … how?’

‘To be tested for possibilities.’

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

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

– I don’t want to be tested.

Life is a test.

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

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

– Free? I don’t know how.

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

– And if I fail?

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

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

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

‘I don’t know.’

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

‘I’m rather fond of my own eyes.’

‘Nevertheless,’ he said, ‘nevertheless …’

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

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

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

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

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

‘What word, Father?’

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

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

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

‘Nobody, Father … nothing.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What did you say?’

‘I don’t understand!’

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

‘I, I, I, I, I … Father? Please.’

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

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

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

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

Behold Jasmine Orange.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– I can’t understand this logic.

Few of your Order have understood the Friends of Man.

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

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

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

And what is a Bardo?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Others have not survived the Test of Realities.

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

There will be one last test.

– What test?

Call it the Test of Fate.

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

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

I love, pale one, your lifted eyebrows bridging

Twin darknesses of flowing depth.

But however deep they are, they carry me

Another way than that of death.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The many men, so beautiful!

And they all dead did lie:

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

The many men, so beautiful!

And they all dead did lie:

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

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

The many men, so beautiful!

And they all dead did lie:

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

The many men, so beautiful!

And they all dead did lie:

And a thousand slimy things

Lived on; and so did I.

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

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

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

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

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

‘You must know,’ I repeated.

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

‘It’s foreordained, isn’t it?’

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

‘Scryer talk.’

‘I’m a scryer, you know.’

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

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

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

‘Yet you revel in your mathematical paradoxes.’

‘That’s different.’

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

Stars, I have seen them fall,

But when they drop and die …

And I replied:

No star is lost at all,

From all the star-sown sky.

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

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

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

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

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,

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

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,

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

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye …

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

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

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

‘Isn’t it?’

And then she smiled and whispered:

’Tis evening on the moorland free,

The starlit wave is still:

Home is the sailor from the sea,

The hunter from the hill.

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

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

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

– The poem … I remembered it correctly, then?

You may ask me three questions.

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

The light goes out.

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

Ask your questions.

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

That I would like to know, too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You have asked your three questions.

– But you’ve answered with riddles!

Then you must solve your riddles.

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

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

– Damn you and your games!

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

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

Have you examined your proof?

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

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

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

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