Читать книгу Neverness - David Zindell, David Zindell - Страница 8

Strange, though, alas! are the

Streets of the City of Pain …

Rainer Maria Rilke, Holocaust Century Scryer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘But you’d have me dishonour myself.’

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

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

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

‘What did you say?’ I asked.

‘I didn’t say anything.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I heard that you had returned, Father.’

‘Yes, that’s true.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Pride kills,’ Soli said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘No, Mother, never that.’

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

‘But no one has accepted, have they?’

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

‘I’d rather die than go to Tria.’

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

‘I don’t think she will.’

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

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

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

‘What do you mean?’

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

‘You’re not eating?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘She?’

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

‘Why do you call her “She”?’

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

‘What of the Silicon God, then?’

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

‘And what of men?’

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

‘And women without men?’

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

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

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

‘You’re a foolish boy.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was wrong.

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

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

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

‘But she’s wrong, Moira is.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Pilot?’

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

‘Pilot, shall I call for a sled?’

‘No, I’ll finish the race,’ I said.

‘You’re letting him get a lead.’

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

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

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

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

It might as well have been ten light-years.