Neverness

by David Zindell

  Leopold Soli, however, was not pleased with this fakery. In his own way he was a careful, meticulous man, despite the fantastic chances he had taken on his journeys into the manifold. As the time of our departure drew nearer, he became increasingly critical of my planning and preparations. We argued over a hundred little things, from the number of dogsleds we should take to my insistence that one radio would be enough to summon help from the City if we found ourselves stranded or otherwise needed rescue. We argued important questions, too. It was our argument over one vital, blindingly important question that nearly wrecked the expedition before it began.

  At the very edge of the high professionals’ college, Upplyssa, is a row of buildings known as the Brain Boxes. The pink granite buildings—there are seven of them—are squat and low, roofed with triangular panes of glass. On snowfree days, the interiors of the buildings are bright with a clean, natural light. Before all such enterprise had been moved to the factories south of Urkel, in the time of Ricardo Lavi, the tinkers and programmers had grown the neurologics for their computers in these seven buildings. During the winter before our expedition, the huge, enclosed spaces were given over to journeymen who sculpted great blocks of ice and others needing (or wanting) to manipulate material things. In the fourth and third buildings the fabulists created their three–dimensional tone poems while in the second building certain historians were reconstructing in miniature the underground cities of Old Earth. Soli had chosen the empty seventh building to store the equipment for our expedition. Along the bare wall nearest the Academy’s west gate were stacked long, heavy mammoth spears, bales of silky white shagshay furs, leather straps and slats of supple wood which could be bent into long skis or fashioned into the chassis of our sleds. There were strips of raw, frozen meat wrapped in oilskins, and snow goggles, oilstones, heaps of flint, and a hundred other things.

  On sixtieth day, early in the morning, I was alone in the cold building making harnesses for the dog teams. Because Soli did not trust our hasty imprinting, he had suggested that we practice working leather or flaking flint and other Devaki skills. I sat punching holes in a stiff piece of leather with a bone awl. Next to me crouched a sleek, beautiful sled dog named Liko. I had made friends with this intelligent beast, and he liked to watch me work, even as he licked and worked at the clean marrow–bone I had given him. I was talking to Liko—and occasionally running my fingers through the gray fur covering his broad head—when he cocked his ears and let out a whine. There came the grinding speed–stop of a skater from the gliddery outside. The doors opened with much creaking and scraping against frozen snow, and the dark figure of Soli stood limned in the soft light streaming in from the street. Despite the bitter cold, he wore only a kamelaika and a thin wool jacket. His sculpted head was bare. For all the weight of the new bone grafted onto his face, he held himself rigidly erect. As he crossed the building his steps were measured, full of grace—I will admit that—but full of a dangerous new power as well.

  “It’s early,” he said, picking up a chisel and laying out a mammoth tusk. He stroked his beard, which was black and thick and shot with stiff red hairs. His eyes were deeply pouched as if he had not slept well; he looked worn and middling old. He was too thin from having eaten too little. He whistled at Liko and watched me as I punched a hole, and he said, “That’s no way to hold an awl. Careful you don’t punch a hole in your leg.”

  We worked for a while in silence. The only sounds were the scraping of flint against wood, and the soft popping of the awl punching through leather. (And the clack of Liko’s teeth as he munched his bone.) Occasionally Soli would shrink his neck down into his wool collar and let out a huff of steamy air. When I told him he was foolish for exposing his naked head to the wind, he asked, “Is it stupid to prepare for the deep cold of the Ten Thousand Islands? To toughen ourselves, to plan for the worst? You seem to be afraid of planning.”

  “What do you mean?” I ground my teeth and punched a hole in the cold leather.

  He examined my handiwork and said, “Careful you space your holes evenly. We don’t want the Devaki to think we do careless work.” He shook his head at me, then said, “Your plan to collect tissue samples—it’s really no plan at all, is it?”

  Again I asked, “What do you mean?”

  I had planned to collect Devaki nail clippings and strands of hair and other bits of cast–off tissue in the hope of deciphering the Elder Eddas from their plasm—as circumspectly as possible. This was the Timekeeper’s ruling: The Devaki must never know we were breaking the covenant between the founders of Neverness and the tribes of the Alaloi; they must never know who we really were.

  “Your plan is careless,” Soli said. “It may not be as easy as you think to gather up skin scrapings and the like.”

  “And you have a better plan, then?”

  “There is a better plan. It’s the women’s plan; it’s not my plan.” He shivered violently and rubbed his hands together. His teeth chattered as he fitted the long bone runner to the wood chassis he held clamped in his white hand.

  “Tell me about this plan,” I said.

  He rubbed the side of his nose and told me, “It’s simple: The Devaki are known to be promiscuous in their sex. As Justine has pointed out, it would be a simple thing for our women to collect samples of the Devaki’s semen.”

  “But that would be adultery!” I shouted. “Justine and you—and if you think my mother will swive—”

  “Neither your mother nor Justine will collect the semen. No one could ask your mother to do the impossible, and Justine, well it would be unseemly for a married woman to do that, wouldn’t it? No, as Justine reminds me, the semen must be collected by an unmarried woman. And that’s why Katharine will collect the semen.”

  “Katharine!”

  “Yes.”

  “Your daughter? You’d make your daughter into a whore?”

  “It was Katharine who suggested the plan.”

  “I don’t believe you!”

  He shot me a swift look, and I realized I had protested too strenuously. Until that moment, he probably had not suspected I had a passion for Katharine. I clamped my jaws shut and gripped the awl tightly. The hardness of it hurt my fingers.

  “My daughter?” He smiled and I wanted to push the sharp tip of the awl into the black spot at the center of his eye. Never had I struggled so hard to swallow my rage and restrain myself. “Yes, she was my daughter, wasn’t she?”

  “I don’t understand you.”

  He felt the sled’s runner with his thumb tip; he stared at it with unfocused eyes as if he were examining a castoff piece of his life rather than a material thing made of wood and bone. How I hated this inwardness of his! I hated that he found in every person or problem or thing an excuse to guiltily examine the scars and contours of his soul.

  “It used to be,” he said slowly, “when Katharine was a little girl, we could understand each other just by looking at each other. She was wise beyond her years, a beautiful, beautiful girl. But when she became a scryer, not a pilot according to my will, but a damned scryer—when she took her scryer’s vows it was impossible to look at her eyes because she had plucked them out. No, Katharine left me long ago.”

  I told him I could not believe that a woman of the City—my cousin, especially—would willingly lie with the Devaki men, though in truth it was all too easy for me to imagine her coaxing the liquids of life from the membrums of brutal, rutting cavemen.

  “Perhaps she’s tired of the arms of civilized men,” he said. I thought he was looking at my knotted hands, at my trembling arms. “Or perhaps she’s just curious—she was always a curious girl.”

  I pushed hard with the awl, careless of what I was doing. There was a sharp, hot pain in my thigh; I yelled and looked down to see the bone point puncturing my woollens. A dark, widening circle of blood spread out from the hole. Liko, who had been anxiously worrying his bone, was up on his legs whining, sniffing, and looking back and forth between Soli and me.

&nb
sp; Soli shook his head, all the while watching me peel back the fabric from the edge of my wound. “Do you need help, Pilot?” he asked. “So careless,” and he came over to me and reached for my leg.

  “Damn you!” I shouted. I stood up and grabbed his forearms as he grabbed me. Hot trickles of blood ran down my leg, and Liko was barking because he didn’t know what to do. “Damn you!”

  We stood there for a moment, grappling. I felt the power of his new body running along the muscles of his forearms. I fought to get a hand free so I could dig my fingers into the soft area beneath his ear, to rip his jaw away from his face. But he held me as tightly as I held him. I could see in his frosty eyes a knowledge, an utter certainty, that with our toughened ligaments and new, popping tendons, we could destroy each other. We could pull each other apart, snap each other’s bones, pulp each other’s precious brains. Strong men can quickly kill strong men—I knew this suddenly; suddenly I was certain that he could see the knowledge in my eyes. We let go of each other at the same moment. Never again, I knew, could I touch him in anger unless I was prepared to kill him.

  I withdrew the awl from my thigh and threw it at the bale of shagshay furs. It bounced twice across the topmost fur, leaving red skidmarks on the stretched, white leather. I tried to stop the flow of blood much as Mehtar had staunched his bleeding hand. The mind can control the body, I thought; how wonderful that brain is the master of muscle. I was trying to remember this, trying hard to quiet my raging muscles when Soli patted Liko on his head, nodded at me and said, “It must hurt you bad.”

  I did not know if he was referring to my wounded leg or to my outrage at Katharine’s planned infidelities. He never said another word about either. (Nor would Katharine answer me when I demanded to know if she had really volunteered to collect the semen samples.) Ten days later, before dawn on the first of deep winter’s dead days, Bardo and the members of my unhappy family drove our three loaded sleds out of the building. We paraded through the streets of the Academy down to the Hollow Fields where a windjammer was waiting to carry us six hundred miles over the western ice.

  8

  Kweitkel

  And so Man dropped his seed into the Test Tube, and from the artificial wombs came many races of men, and races that were men no longer. The Elidi grew wings and the Agathanians carked their bodies into the shape of seals and dove beneath the waters of their planet; the Hoshi learned the difficult art of breathing methane while the Alaloi rediscovered arts ancient and ageless. On the Civilized Worlds there were many who sought to improve their racial inheritance in some small way. The exemplars of Bodhi Luz, for example, desired children of greater stature and so, inch by inch, generation by generation, they bred human beings ten feet tall. Chaos reigned as human beings from different planets found that they were unable to mate and bear children in the natural manner. Thus Man formulated the third and greatest of his laws, which came to be called The Law of the Civilized Worlds: A man may do with his flesh as he pleases but his DNA belongs to his species.

  from A Requiem for Homo Sapiens, by Horthy Hosthoh

  The Thousand Islands is a vast archipelago scattered across four thousand miles of ocean. In a broad crescent the islands reach from Landasalia in the uttermost west, to Neverness in the southeast. Although there are many more than a thousand islands, many, many more, most of them are small, volcanic upspillings worn almost flat by wind and ice and the pull of gravity; they are barren wastes of tundra and sedge and wind–packed snow. (In fact, the name “The Thousand Islands” is a mistranslation of the Devaki, helahelasalia, which means “The Many, Many Islands.” The Devaki, indeed all the tribes of the Alaloi, have no expression other than hela for quantities greater than twenty.) It is on the larger islands that the thirty–three tribes of the Alaloi make their homes. The islands of the southern group, which are called the Aligelstei (or “God’s Glittering Jewels”), teem with life. They are very beautiful. There the Alaloi hunt shagshay and trumpeting mammoths through the evergreen forests; there they shield their eyes from the colors and brightness of the snowfields, and at night, they huddle in their snow–huts and caves drinking their blood tea and wondering at the light of the stars.

  The sixteenth island is called Kweitkel, named for its great white peak rising fifteen thousand feet above the sea. According to my mother, who had imprinted the more relevant of the Alaloi Rainer’s memories, we would find the Devaki gathered in a cave below the southern foothills of Kweitkel. Every winter, when the sea freezes fast, the scattered families of the tribe drive their dog teams across the open ice. They come from nearby islands such as Waasalia and Jalkel and Alisalia, and other islands, Sawelsalia and Aurunia, which are not so near. They come together to find wives for their sons and to perform their ceremonies of initiation into manhood; they come to tell stories and give gifts to each other, and they come because the dark of deep winter, when the air is so cold it sucks the soul from your breath, is a terrible time to be alone.

  Our plan was to approach Kweitkel from the south, a single family group seeking our ancestral home. Here was the ruse towards which all our fakery had been aimed: We would pretend to be the descendants of Senwe, a brave man who had left the Devaki four generations ago to found a tribe of his own. (I hoped that the memory of Rainer was clean and true, that there had actually been a man named Senwe. Had he really ventured across the southern ice seeking Pelasalia, the fabled Blessed Islands? There are, of course, no islands to the south of Kweitkel, blessed or otherwise. Senwe, if he had really set out to the south, had no doubt died long ago when the pack ice broke up under false winter’s harsh sun; he and his doomed family had most likely been sucked down into the cold, fathomless sea.) Under the shroud of darkness we would set down ten miles from the southern shore of Kweitkel. There, where the wind roars unceasingly and unhindered over thousands of miles of ice, we would harness our dogs and fasten our furs and make the short journey to our new home.

  We left the City in the hold of a silvery windjammer, and we rocketed across the six thousand miles separating Neverness from the first of the Outer Islands. Two generations ago Goshevan had come this way, alone on the ice miles below us. Our journey was far easier and much quicker than his had been. In little time we passed over the fifteen Outer Islands, a famous poaching ground for wormrunners who risk death by laserfire in their lust to smuggle priceless, real furs to the tubists of the City. Below us, covered by the ink of night, were forested mountains and herds of white shagshay. Below us—again I had to rely on Rainer’s memory—was the ancestral home of the Yelenalina and Reinalina, two of the largest families of the Devaki tribe.

  We landed to the south of Kweitkel, according to our plan. At least, I believed we landed there. We had to rely on the navigation skills of a Markov Ling, a journeyman pilot fresh out of Borja. (It is ironic that we pilots, who easily journey from Urradeth to the Gelid Luz, are notoriously inept at the much simpler task of flying a windjammer.) In near silence we unloaded our three sleds and our fifteen whining dogs. We worked quickly so Markov could be off before the sun rose to expose our fakery to anyone who might be watching from the distant shore.

  It was cold and black as I fumbled with the harness traces; the starlight was too faint to fully illumine my snarling dogs. But I could hear them growling and snapping at each other, biting at the freezing leather straps binding them. The wind blew dark, flowing sheets of spindrift over them, and they began to snort and sneeze and shiver. Next to me Bardo cuffed his lead dog, Alisha, with his open hand. With the hood of his shagshay fur pulled tightly around his head, he looked like a great white bear. He cursed and spoke to Justine; I could not make out what he said because the wind rose like a howl and blew his words out across the ice. Soli, who seemed immune from the wind, harnessed his dogs and bent low to check his load. The women, according to the Alaloi custom, helped where they could. But Justine grew careless. She pulled the harness too tightly around my third dog, Tusa’s, chest. He slashed at her, nearly tearing her mitten from her hand
. Instantly my mother fell upon the vicious dog with a leather whip. She lashed his hindquarters until he yelped and pushed his belly down against the snow. “That Tusa is a beast,” she said into the whistling wind. She turned to me. “Didn’t I tell you? That we should have used bitches instead of males?”

  All this time Soli was staring at her, although it was too dark to see the expression on his face. He said simply, “Males are stronger,” and he signalled to Markov that we were ready to be off. Markov, who never left the warmth of the ship, made a sign to Soli and fired the rockets. With a roar, the windjammer shot forward and angled upward into the dark eastern sky. The thunder echoed across the ice, then died.

  I did not remember ever having felt so alone as I did that morning upon the sea. I, who had journeyed far into the manifold, billions of miles from another human being, stood to the east watching the red rocket tailings of the windjammer. To be alone inside a lightship—or any ship—was to be not really alone. There was the security of the womblike pit, the reassuring and familiar touch of the neurologics, the safety of human design. On the ice there was only bitter wind and cold so thick it was like liquid in my eyes and nose; on the ice there were things that kill, no matter the help of family or friends. For the first time in my life I would be intimately close with the things of life. I would kill animals for food and make my clothes from their bloody skins; I would fashion blocks of hard–packed snow into a house to keep from freezing to death. The wind cut beneath my parka, and I suddenly knew, in a tangible, immediate way, just how delicate my skin really was, despite its coverings of black hair and white fur. Ice–powder stung my greased face, and I listened to the moaning wind; I listened to the wind moaning from my chilled lungs and felt tiny needles of ice fracturing and reforming inside my nose with every breath taken and released. I wondered, neither for the first nor last time, if what I would find on the island of Kweitkel would be worth the price of aching teeth and frozen flesh.