Neverness

by David Zindell

  “Six thousand...one hundred?”

  He pointed to the pieces of the mug scattered across the table. “I must factor in my advertising costs. They blow these mugs on Fostora, and you must know, it was precious.”

  I pounded the table with the edge of my fist and felt porcelain crumbs grinding into the thin leather of my glove. “You’re a filthy, greedy tubist,” I said.

  He looked at me quickly as his nostrils opened and closed. “A tubist, you call me. Yes, it’s true, I serve myself, and why not? I used to serve my God, but He betrayed me.” He pointed to the tondo and at the case of priceless Darghinni jewellery standing next to it. “Now I collect things. Things do not betray.”

  “Too many things,” I said. “You’re a thingist and a tubist.”

  “And why not? Certain things possess a luster and beauty that do not fade with age. We arise in the morning to greet our things, a place for each finely made thing, and each thing in its special place. We buy things, perhaps a chair carved of fine–grained shatterwood or a beautiful Darghinni hangnest, and we can be certain that the having of it will increase our worth.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  He smiled and said, “Nevertheless, it’s true. When we own many things, we may trade them to acquire more things, each more beautiful, each more precious, each containing real value against the day of disaster when things will have to be traded to preserve that most precious thing of all: our precious lives.”

  “Nobody lives forever,” I said. I stared at the silvery strands of the hangnest glittering in its case. I thought of the thousands of Darghinni nymphs who must have died when their nest was stolen. “Maybe you value yourself too much.”

  “Well, Pilot, this flesh I wear, it’s all I am. What should I value more? Six thousand one hundred city disks—a heavy sum, but there’s never enough to ensure the sanctity of a man’s flesh. Never, never enough.”

  In the end I paid the amount he asked. It was bad enough having to deal in money; it was far worse to argue over it. The next day when I told Bardo the details of our arrangement he was aghast. “By God, you’ve been plundered! I really should have come with you. What did the Timekeeper say? He’s a miserly old wolf and...ahh, he doesn’t know, does he?”

  “He won’t know unless the master bursar tells him.”

  “Good, good.” And then, “Do you really trust this Mehtar Hajime to sculpt us?”

  Did I trust the cutter? How could one trust a man who wore smuggled shagshay furs stolen from the flayed body of a once–living animal? “I trust his greed,” I said. “He’ll do what we pay him to do in the hope that our friends will come to him for sculpting.”

  Four days later I was the first to lie beneath Mehtar’s lasers. I was surprised to learn that the difference between an Alaloi and a full human was really very little. Unfortunately, these little differences had to be added or deleted from every part of my body. He remade me from inside out, leaving no part of me untouched. He did the bone work first, thickening and strengthening one hundred and eighty of my body’s bones. It was during this period, which lasted a couple of tendays, that I felt the worst pain of the entire procedure. Whistling to himself and occasionally telling me bad jokes, Mehtar would lay open layers of skin and muscle and cut among the plates and spicules of a bone’s honeycombed interior as I clamped my jaws shut and sweated. He steened the walls with new bone and strengthened the shafts and tendon attachments. “Bone pain is deep,” he said, all the while opening and closing his nostrils as he drilled down the length of my thigh bone. “Deep and hot but it doesn’t last long.”

  There were a few times when my pain blocks failed and Mehtar had to render me unconscious. I suspected he used these times to introduce colonies of illegal, programmed bacteria into my body. The bacteria—I was never able to prove this—found their way into those parts of my bones Mehtar could not reach with his drills. There some of the bacteria disassembled and ingested my natural bone while others manufactured and spun out a webwork of collagens and mineral crystals, layer upon layer of new bone with a tensile strength greater than steel. Once, when I hinted how afraid I was of this technology, Mehtar laughed and said, “You should think of the bacteria as tools, tiny machines, infinitesimal robots programmed to do a certain biochemical task. Do machines rebel? Can a computer take charge of its own programming? No, no, no, Pilot, there’s no danger in these tools, but of course, all the same, I would never employ them because to do so would violate your city canons, archaic as those canons are.”

  I rubbed the glued skin of my arm—he had been working on the humerus that day—and I said, “No one likes to be colonized by bacteria, especially intelligent bacteria.”

  “Oh, noble Pilot, even if I was one of those cutters who ignore your foolish laws, I would program the bacteria to die after they had completed their task, of course I would! You have my promise!”

  Somehow his promises did not reassure me. I said, “And what of Chimene and the April cluster, then?”

  “Those names mean nothing to me.”

  I told him that Chimene was one of those planets where a colony of bacteria had mutated and escaped, consuming all life in the biosphere, disassembling and totally remaking the planet’s surface into a mat of purplish–brown, hugely intelligent bacteria—all in a matter of days.

  “And the eschatologists think it only took a few years for them to infect the whole April cluster,” I said. “Ten thousand stars swarming with your harmless bacteria.” Of all the gods in the galaxy, the eschatologists feared the April colonial intelligence the most.

  “Ancient history!” Mehiar scoffed. “Such carelessness could never happen today. Who would permit it? Again, I assure you, you have nothing to fear.”

  While I was healing, he worked on the others in succession. Soli was the second to feel the marrow–pain, followed by Justine, Katharine and my mother. Bardo, wanting to see the results of as many sculptings as he could, went last.

  “I’ve heard terrible things about these cutters,” he confided to me one day in the changing room. “Aren’t I thick enough that he could leave my bones alone? No? By God, I wish he’d avoid the spine—so many delicate nerves there. What if he sneezes at the wrong moment? One little slip of the laser and Bardo would never mount another woman. I’ve heard of it happening. Can’t you imagine: Bardo’s mighty pole rendered as limp as a soba noodle because of a sneeze?”

  To help him relax and block his nerves, I massaged the heavy, fanlike muscles at the top of his spine. I tried to reassure him, pointing out that many people underwent cuttings much more extensive solely for the sake of fad or fashion. I did not tell him my suspicions about Mehtar’s bacteria.

  “Well, this may be a minor alteration,” he admitted after we had talked about certain pilots who had found it useful to pose as one or another species of alien. “But there’s another thing. Doesn’t this cutter look like that rude Alaloi I tripped the day you broke Soli’s nose? Do you remember?”

  Suddenly, I did remember. Suddenly, I knew where I had seen Mehtar before. To reassure Bardo, I said, “I’m sure this isn’t the same man.” It was a lie, but what could I do?

  “Ah, but what if you’re wrong? Suppose he remembers me? Suppose he dismembers me, forgive the pun, out of vengeance, do you know what I mean?”

  It seemed, though, that Mehtar did not remember him. Either that, or he did not hold a grudge. If anything, Mehtar did his smoothest work on him, probably because he had had all the rest of us to practice on. Bardo, of course, was not satisfied until he had tested his virility on his whores. Everything must have functioned properly because he claimed he had swived twelve whores in a single evening, which was a record, even for him.

  The work on my face began soon after this, in late false winter. Mehtar built me a new jaw filled with larger teeth. The enamel of the molars was thick and layered; the jaw itself was massive and jutting in order to provide greater leverage for the toughened jaw muscles. I would be able to crack baldo n
uts or gnaw bones without trouble or pain. The work was delicate, especially around the eyes. Because my entire face, as seen from profile, projected at a greater angle from my skull, Mehtar needed to sculpt great browridges to protect the vulnerable eyes. This he did slowly, taking great care with the optic nerves. I was blind for the better part of two days. I was afraid I would never see again, and I wondered how Katharine made her way through the black prison surrounding her head.

  When the cutter finished this painstaking procedure and I could see again, he held a silver mirror in front of me. “Behold,” he said. “You are magnificent, yes? Note the nose, which I broadened while you were pain–blocked and blind. Note the flaring nostrils. Wiggle them for me, please. Very good, open, now close, and open again. A protection against the cold,” he said proudly, all the while opening and closing his own nostrils. “This planet is so cold.”

  I looked at the reflection in the mirror; it was not really like looking at myself. Or rather, it was like looking at some mutation of myself composed of two–thirds Mallory Ringess and one–third beast. My face was strong and well proportioned, at once primitive and as expressive as any human face. My ancestors on Earth, I thought, must have looked as I did. I could not decide if I was handsome or ugly (or neither). I placed my fingertips on my forehead feeling the browridge; it was like the overhang of a cliff. I was not used to seeing myself in a thick beard, nor could I keep my tongue from probing the slippery contours of my huge, new teeth. For a moment I was disoriented and despondent. I had a feeling of intense depersonalization, as if I didn’t know who I was, and worse, as if I didn’t really exist. Then I looked at my eyes, and though they were set deeply into my skull, I saw that they were my same blue eyes, the eyes I knew so well.

  I must admit that no one else suffered this same sense of loss of identity as I did. My mother and Justine, and of course, Soli, had more than once experienced the shock of having their old bodies made new. This is not to say they each were wholly pleased with Mehtar’s sculpting. In particular Soli hated it that after so many drastic alterations, we still nearly resembled each other. (Though as usual, he kept his silence.) Justine hated everything about her new self. When she saw what Mehtar had done to her, she said, “Oh, no, look at me! They’ll laugh at me when I skate at the Hofgarten, and as for that, look how my weight has been redistributed, I’ve lost my center and I’m so ungainly!” and she sulked for three days. When Soli told her that the Alaloi would consider her beautiful, she asked him, “And do you think I’m beautiful?” And Soli, who liked to pretend he was a truthful man, said nothing.

  Just before the first storm of midwinter spring, we underwent changes not quite so severe. Mehtar stippled our skin, cutting away many of our sweat glands so we would not soak our furs and freeze to death encased in a sheath of ice. He also stimulated the individual hair follicles, and we each of us, the women as well as the men, sprouted a forest of hair from neck to ankle. (For some reason Mehtar could not explain, thick sprigs of black hair erupted from between Bardo’s toes and along the tops of his feet. As Mehtar said, there are some genetic quirks beyond the control of the finest cutters.) During this time we lifted stones and performed vigorous exercises to stimulate muscular growth. Mehtar took us into his weight chamber and rubbed our limbs as he subjected us to the Fravashi deepspace method of locally inducing supergravities along the muscles of our arms and legs. Soli hated this as much as he hated it whenever Mehtar touched him. “If this continues,” he said, flexing the great ball of muscle of his upper arm, “I’ll be as bulky as Bardo.”

  There were thought exercises as well. One by one, we visited an imprimatur who made us visualize the coordinated firing of individual muscle fibers. She imprinted our neural pathways with certain skills we would need to pose as Alaloi. Thus, for instance, we learned how to flake a blade of flint without ever touching hand to stone. And where the Alaloi men practice for a decade before they can hit their marks with their spears, we learned this art in a single day.

  There was one minor surgery I have neglected to mention. The Alaloi, it seems, with their sharp flakes of flint mutilate the membrums of their male children at the onset of manhood. The tribal elder slices off the foreskin covering the bulb of the membrum, and he makes tiny cuts in the delicate skin along the shaft. Into these cuts he rubs ashes and salt and colored powders. The wounds fester and scar, and the man—the boy who has become a man—is left with rows of minute, multicolored keloids decorating his membrum from base to bulb. Naturally, Bardo was terrified when he learned Mehtar would have to duplicate the effects of this barbaric ritual. (I had withheld the foreknowledge of it until the last possible moment.) I, myself, was a little apprehensive, especially when Mehtar grasped my membrum and joked that if he ruined it beyond repair, he could easily transform me into a woman, and no one I met would be the wiser. Again, everything went smoothly, though for days afterwards I could not bear to look down when I stood up to piss.

  The last thing Mehtar did, or so I thought at the time, was to make Katharine new eyes. He implanted them in the vacant hollows beneath her dark, enlarged brows. They were beautiful eyes, eyes that I had seen before in dreams; they were the eyes of the Entity’s Katharine imago, deep and lovely like blue–black, liquefied jewels. I held a mirror to her so she could see her eyes, but she pushed my hand away, saying, “I’ve looked inside for so long; now I want to look at things.”

  Like a child gazing through a telescope for the first time, she took joy in examining the things of Mehtar’s changing room: the hard white tile, the intricate tubular microscopes, the lasers, pessaries, and other gleaming instruments. When I took her to the Hofgarten to watch the skaters, she sighed and said, “Oh, it’s good to see again! I’d forgotten how deeply colored the ice is, the blueness.”

  The next day, in the privacy of my house, she probed my body with her hands as well as her eyes. With her hot, dry hands, she grasped my membrum, running her fingers over the colored bumps along the shaft. It excited her, I think, and I wondered if the Alaloi decorate their membrums in order to please their women. (Though my studies of their culture indicated that little the Alaloi men did was solely for the pleasure of their women.) Later as we panted and pushed our thickened loins against each other with zest and abandon, at our moment of ecstasy, she opened her eyes and looked at me as if she were seeing me for the first time.

  “Your face,” she said after we had separated. “It was like the face of a rutting...It was so bestial.”

  I rubbed my beard and felt my huge jaw, and I told her that indeed I now possessed the face of a beast.

  But she said, “No, you don’t understand. I’ve seen something I haven’t realized since I was a little girl. All men are beasts if you look at them just right.”

  During the days that followed we were very busy. It was not enough, of course, that we merely sculpt our bodies to look like Alaloi. We had to become Alaloi, which meant learning their language and imprinting millions of bits of specialized knowledge. The correct method of slitting a snow hare’s belly, the aligning of one’s head towards north during sleep, the words and intonations for the burial of the dead—all must be learned before we could pose as cavemen. The language of the Devaki, the tribe of Alaloi we planned to join, proved more difficult than I had imagined. I do not mean that it was difficult to learn or articulate. It was not. My mother discovered that the akashic’s computers had once laid bare the mind of the Alaloi named Rainer and had recorded his thought, deeds and memories. It was a simple thing to infuse our memories with his, with the words and grammatical rules of the Devaki language. It was a simple thing to find our lips smoothly articulating the soft, round vowels, to listen to the liquid consonants rolling easily off our skilled tongues. To be sure, the mastering of the tones took a little time. A few of the Devaki words were distinguishable from each other solely by the tones of their vowels. For instance, sura might mean either “purple” or “lonely,” depending on whether the first vowel was pronounced in a sing–s
ongy, rising tone, or in a low, falling tone. But in the end, everyone except Bardo found these few words simple to memorize. What was not simple was the understanding. The morphology, particularly of the Devaki verbs, proved to be subtle and complex. The verbs were not inflected according to our basic notions of past, present and future tense, because the Devaki do not understand time as we do. (As I was to learn later, the Devaki deny the existence of past and future.) How do the Devaki inflect their verbs? They inflect them according to the state of consciousness of the speaker. Thus a man full of fear might scream, La mora li Tuwa, I killed the mammoth!, while a man deep in dreamtime—what the Devaki call dreamtime—will say, La morisha li Tuwa, which means something like: I, in the ecstasy of the eternal Now–moment, am joined by the spirit of the mammoth who opened his heart to my spear. There are one hundred and eight verb inflections, each corresponding to a different emotion or state of mind. What worried me was that at least seven of these states were alien to me and would be incomprehensible to any woman or man of our Order. How could we choose the correct word forms, how could we understand primitives who sliced up and understood reality in ways very different from ours?

  My mother and I, Justine too, spent much time discussing the problem with the semanticists. Yannis the Elder, who was taller than any man I have ever known, as thin and fragile–looking as an icicle, suggested that the Friends of Man might help us to duplicate these incomprehensible states of mind. “I understand you have achieved a partial understanding of the aliens’ scent language,” he said to me, referring to my experiences within the Entity. “Now to understand alien thinking, which I think we understand the Devaki mindsets to be, why not approach true aliens as to their understanding of thoughtways which may, or may not, be considered by them to be understandable to anyone who understands that that which cannot be understood, cannot be understood solely on account of the context of the misunderstanding.” (That is how the master semanticists, those miserable, pedantic seekers of word–meaning often talk. I am not joking.) In the end, his suggestions were of little help. When deep winter came and hardened, smothering the City in a sea of almost liquid air, we were forced to break off our research into these esoteric matters. There was only so much we could learn of the Devaki language and customs. Some things, it seemed, would have to be faked.