Читать книгу Neverness - David Zindell, David Zindell - Страница 12

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

Emil Sinclair, Holocaust Century Eschatologist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘The accelerations have wasted your body.’

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

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

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

‘You think so?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Yes, Timekeeper.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Let them wonder.’

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

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

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

‘What do you mean?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘So.’

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

‘Well, Timekeeper?’

‘Which covenant do you want to break?’

‘The eighth covenant,’ I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Dangerous, I say! Damn dangerous.’

‘Will you approve my petition?’ I asked.

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

‘Timekeeper?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What do you mean?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘He might.’

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

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

‘I have a different plan,’ I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Tell me, then,’ I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘We evolved from them.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Well?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘It’s hard to explain.’

‘Tell me.’

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

‘Because of your vows?’

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

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

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

‘Try,’ I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Of course, that’s true,’ she said.

‘But that’s a paradox.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘The future is unchangeable, then?’

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

‘Scryer talk.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Well, you can’t come.’

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

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

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

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

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