Neverness

by David Zindell

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

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

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

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

  Others have not survived the Test of Realities.

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

  There will be one last test.

  —What test?

  Call it the Test of Fate.

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

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

  I love, pale one, your lifted eyebrows bridging

  Twin darknesses of flowing depth.

  But however deep they are, they carry me

  Another way than that of death.

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

  “What is the Test of Fate?” I asked aloud.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  The many men, so beautiful!

  And they all dead did lie:

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

  The many men, so beautiful!

  And they all dead did lie:

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

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

  The many men, so beautiful!

  And they all dead did lie:

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

  The many men, so beautiful!

  And they all dead did lie:

  And a thousand slimy things

  Lived on; and so did I.

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

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

  Katharine smiled again and said, “Oh, but there are two more poems.”

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

  “No,” she said, “I can’t see...I don’t know.”

  “You must know,” I repeated.

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

  “It’s foreordained, isn’t it?”

  “Everything is foreordained. What has been will be.”

  “Scryer talk.”

  “I’m a scryer, you know.”

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

  “Nothing is determined; in the end we choose our futures.”

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

  “Yet you revel in your mathematical paradoxes.”

  “That’s different.”

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

  Stars, I have seen them fall,

  But when they drop and die…

  And I replied:

  No star is lost at all,

  From all the star–sown sky.

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

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

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

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

  Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

  In the forests of the night,

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

  Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

  In the forests of the night,

  What immortal hand or eye

  Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

  In the forests of the night,

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

  Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

  In the forests of the night,

  What immortal hand or eye...

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

  In the forests of the night,

  What immortal hand or eye

  Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

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

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

  “Isn’t it?”

  And then she smiled and whispered:

  “Tis evening on the moorland free,

  The starlit wave is still:

  Home is the sailor from the sea,

  The hunter from the hill.

  “Goodbye, my Mallory. Who dares frame thy fearful symmetry? Not I.”

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

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

  —The poem...I remembered it correctly, then?

  You may ask me three questions.

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

  The light goes out.

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

  Ask your questions.

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

  That I would like to know, too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  You have asked your three questions.

  —But you’ve answered with riddles!

  Then you must solve your riddles.

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

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

  —Damn you and your games!

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

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

  Have you examined your proof?

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