Neverness

by David Zindell

  “The Continuum Hypothesis,” Soli said to me as he spun his empty tumbler on top of the bar, “may very well be unprovable.”

  “I understand you are bitter.”

  “As you will be if you seek the unobtainable.”

  “Forgive me, Lord Pilot, but how are we to know what is obtainable and what is not?”

  “We grow wiser as we grow older,” he said.

  I kicked the toe of my boot against the brass railing at the foot of the bar. The metal rang dully. “I may be young, and I don’t want to sound like—”

  “You’re bragging,” Lionel said quickly.

  “—but I think the Hypothesis is provable, and I intend to prove it.”

  “For the sake of wisdom,” Soli asked me, “or for the glory? I’ve heard that you’d like to be Lord Pilot someday.”

  “Every journeyman dreams of being Lord Pilot.”

  “A boy’s dreams often become a man’s nightmares.”

  I kicked the railing, accidentally. “I’m not a boy, Lord Pilot. I take my vows tomorrow; one of my vows is to discover wisdom. Have you forgotten?”

  “Have I forgotten?” he said, breaking his taboo and flinching as he shouted out the forbidden pronoun. “Listen, Boy, I’ve forgotten nothing.”

  The word “nothing” seemed to hang in the air along with the hollow ringing of the railing as Soli stared at me and I at him. Then there came too–loud laughter from the street outside, and the door suddenly opened. Three tall, heavy men, each of them with pale yellow hair and drooping mustaches, each of them wearing light black furs dusted with snow, ejected their skate blades and stomped into the bar. They came up to Lionel and Soli and grasped each other’s hands. The largest of the three, a master pilot who had terrorized Bardo during our novice years at Borja, called for three mugs of kvass. “It’s spiky cold outside,” he said.

  Bardo leaned over to me and whispered, “Time to go, I think.”

  I shook my head.

  The master pilots—their names were Neith, Seth and Tomoth—were brothers. They had their backs to us, and they seemed not to have noticed us.

  “I’ll pay for six nights of master courtesans,” Bardo mumbled.

  The novice banged three mugs of steaming hot black beer down on the bar. Tomoth backed a few steps closer to the fire and shook the melting snow from his furs. Like some of the older pilots who had gone blind from old age, he wore jewelled, mechanical eyes. He had just returned from the edge of the Vild, and he said to Soli, “Your Ieldra were right, my friend. The Gallivare Binary and Cerise Luz have exploded. Nothing left but dirty hard dust and light.”

  “Dust and light,” his brother Neith said, and he burned his mouth with hot kvass and cursed.

  “Dust and light,” Seth repeated. “Sodervarld and her twenty millions caught in a storm of radioactive dust and light. We tried to get them off but we were too late.”

  Sodervarld orbits Enola Luz, which is—had been—the star nearest the Gallivare Binary. Seth told us that the supernova had baked the surface of Sodervarld, killing off every bit of life except the ground worms. The small master pilot’s bar suddenly seemed stultifyingly tiny. The three brothers, I recalled, had been born on Sodervarld.

  “To our mother,” Seth said as he clinked mugs with Soli, Lionel and his brothers.

  “To our father,” Tomoth said.

  “Freyd.” This came from Neith who inclined his head so slightly that I was not sure if he had actually nodded or if his image had wavered in the firelight. “To Yuleth and Elath.”

  “Time to go,” I said to Bardo.

  We made ready to leave, but Neith fell weeping against Tomoth, who turned our way as he caught his brother. His jewelled eyes gleamed in the half–light when he saw us. “What’s this?” he shouted.

  “Why are there journeymen in our bar?” Seth wanted to know.

  Neith brushed yellow hair from his wet eyes and said, “My God, it’s the Bastard and his fat friend—what’s his name?—Burpo? Lardo?”

  “Bardo,” Bardo said.

  “They were just about to leave,” Soli said.

  I suddenly did not feel like leaving. My mouth was dry, and there was a pressure behind my eyes.

  “Don’t call him ‘Bardo,’” Neith said. “When we tutored him at Borja, everyone called him Piss–All Lal because he used to piss in his bed every night.”

  It was true, Bardo’s birth name was Pesheval Lal. When he first came to Neverness, he had been a skinny, terrified, homesick boy who had loved to recite romantic poetry and who had pissed in his bed every night. Half of the novices and masters had called him “Bardo,” and the other half, “Piss–All.” But after he had begun lifting heavy weights above his head and had taken to spending the nights with bought women so that he wet his bed with the liquids of lust instead of piss, few had dared to call him anything but “Bardo.”

  “Well,” Tomoth said as he clapped his hands at the novice behind the bar. “Piss–All and the Bastard will toast with us before they leave.”

  The novice filled our mugs and tumblers. Bardo looked at me; I wondered if he could hear the blood pounding in my throat or see the tears burning in my eyes.

  “Freyd,” Tomoth said. “To the dead of Sodervarld.”

  I was afraid I was about to cry from rage and shame, and so, looking straight into Tomoth’s ugly metal eyes, I picked up my tumbler and tried to swallow the fiery skotch in a single gulp. It was the wrong thing to do. I gagged and coughed and spat all at once, spraying Tomoth’s face and yellow mustache with tiny globules of amber spit. He must have thought that I was mocking him and defiling the memory of his family because he came at me without thought or hesitation, came straight for my eyes with one hand and for my throat with the other. There was a ragged burning beneath my eyebrow. Suddenly there were fists and blood and elbows as Tomoth and his brothers swept me under like an avalanche. Everything was cold and hard: cold tile ground against my spine, and hard bone broke against my teeth; someone’s hard nails were gouging into my eyelid. Blindly, I pushed against Tomoth’s face. For a moment, I thought that cowardly Bardo must have slipped out the door. Then he bellowed as if he had suddenly remembered he was Bardo, not Piss–All, and there was the meaty slap of flesh on flesh, and I was free. I found my feet and punched at Tomoth’s head, a quick, vicious, hooking punch that the Timekeeper had taught me. My knuckles broke and pain burned up my arm into my shoulder joint. Tomoth grabbed his head, dropping to one knee.

  Soli was behind him. “Moira’s son,” he said as he bent over and reached for the collar of Tomoth’s fur to keep him from falling. Then I made a mistake, the second worst mistake, I think, of my life. I swung again at Tomoth, but I hit Soli instead, smashing his proud, long nose as if it were a ripe bloodfruit. To this day, I can see the look of astonishment and betrayal (and pain) on his face. He went mad, then. He ground his teeth and snorted blood out of his nose. He attacked me with such a fury that he got me from behind in a head hold and tried to snap my neck. If Bardo had not come between us, peeling Soli’s steely hands away from the base of my skull, he would have killed me.

  “Easy there, Lord Pilot,” Bardo said. He massaged the back of my neck with his great, blunt hand and eased me towards the door. Everyone stood panting, looking at each other, not quite knowing what to do next.

  There were apologies and explanations, then. Lionel, who had held himself away from the melee, told Tomoth and his brothers that I had never drunk skotch before and that I had certainly meant them no insult. After the novice refilled the mugs and tumblers, I said a requiem for the Sodervarld dead. Bardo toasted Tomoth, and Tomoth toasted Soli’s discovery. And all the while, our Lord Pilot stared at me as blood trickled from his broken nose down his hard lips and chin.

  “Your mother hates me, so there should be no surprise that you do too.”

  “I’m sorry, Lord Pilot. I swear it was an accident. Here, use this to wipe your nose.”

  I offered him my handkerchief, but he pretended not to
see my outstretched hand. I shrugged my shoulders, and I crumpled the linen to sponge the blood out of my eye. “To the quest for the Elder Eddas,” I said as I raised my tumbler. “You’ll drink to that, won’t you, Lord Pilot?”

  “What hope does a journeyman have of finding the Eddas?”

  “Tomorrow I’ll be a pilot,” I said. “I’ve as much a chance as any pilot.”

  “Yes, chance. What chance does a young fool of a pilot have of discovering the secret of life? Where will you look? In some safe place, no doubt, where you’ve no chance of finding anything at all.”

  “Perhaps I’ll search where bitter and jaded master pilots are afraid to.”

  The room grew so quiet that I heard the spatter of my uncle’s blood–drops against the floor.

  “And where would that be?” he asked. “Beneath the folds of your mother’s robes?”

  I wanted to hit him again. Tomoth and his brother laughed as they slapped each other on the back, and I wanted to break my uncle’s bleeding, arrogant face. I have always felt the hot pus of anger too keenly and quickly. I wondered if it had been an accident that I had hit him; perhaps it was my fate (or secret desire) to have hit him. I stood there on trembling legs staring at him as I wondered about chance and fate. The heat of the glowing fire was suddenly oppressive. My head was pounding with blood and skotch, and my eye felt like molten lava, and my tongue was like syrup as I made the worst mistake of my life. “No, Lord Pilot,” I blurted out. “I’ll journey beyond the Eta Carina nebula. I intend to penetrate and map the Solid State Entity.”

  “Don’t joke with me.”

  “I’m not joking. I don’t like your kind of jokes; I’m not joking.”

  “You are joking,” he said as he stepped closer to me. “It’s just the silly brag of a foolish journeyman pilot, isn’t it?”

  Through the haze of my good eye, I saw that everyone, even the young bartender, was staring at me.

  “Of course it was a joke.” Bardo’s voice boomed as he farted. “Tell him it was a joke, Little Fellow, and let’s leave.”

  I looked into Soli’s intense, fierce eyes and said, “I swear to you I’m not joking.”

  He grabbed my forearm with his long fingers. “You swear it?”

  “Yes, Lord Pilot.”

  “You’ll swear it, formally?”

  I pulled away from him and said, “Yes, Lord Pilot.”

  “Swear it, then. Say, ‘I, Mallory Ringess, by the canons and vows of our Order, in fulfilment of the Timekeeper’s summons to quest, swear to my Lord Pilot I will map the pathways of the Solid State Entity.’ Swear it to me!”

  I swore the formal oath in a trembling voice as Bardo looked at me, plainly horrified. Soli called for our tumblers to be filled and announced, “To the quest for the Elder Eddas. Yes, my young fool of a pilot, we’ll all drink to that!”

  I do not remember clearly what happened next. I think that there was much laughter and drinking of skotch and beer, as well as talk about the mystery, the joy and agony of life. I remember, dimly, Tomoth and Bardo weeping, locking wrists and trying to push each other’s arm to the gleaming surface of the bar. It is true, I now know, that liquor obliterates and devours the memory. Bardo and I found other bars that night serving skotch and beer (and powerful amorgenics); we also found the Street of the Master Courtesans and beautiful Jacarandans who served our lust and pleasure. At least I think they did. Because it was my first time with a skilled woman—women—I knew very little of lust and pleasure, and I was to remember even less. I was so drunk that I even allowed a whore named Aida to touch my naked flesh. My memories are of heavy perfume and dark, burning skin, the blindly urgent pressing of body against body; my memories are murky and vague, spoiled by the guilt and fear that I had made enemies with the Lord Pilot of our Order and had sworn an oath that would surely lead to my death. “Journeymen die,” Soli said as we left the master pilot’s bar. As I stumbled out onto the gliddery I remember praying that he would be wrong.

  2

  A Pilot’s Vows

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

  The Timekeeper, resplendent and stern in his flowing red robe, bade the thirty of us to repeat after him the vows of a pilot. It was good that we knelt close together. The warm, reassuring bulk of Bardo pressing me from the right, and my friend Quinn 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.” S
o 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 colored silk engulfed us. There were shouts of happiness and laughter and boots stamping on the tiled floor. My mother’s friend, the eschatologist Kolenya Mor, indecently pressed her plump, wet cheek next to mine. She hugged me as she bawled, “Look at him, Moira.”