Neverness

by David Zindell

  Liam looked at me as he tore at his meat. Yuri, too, had his eye turned to me, obviously wondering why I did not accept the meat. “It is good, fat meat,” he said as he winked at me and licked his mustache. “I hate to kill Nunki, but I love the taste of his meat.”

  Soli was staring at me, and Wicent and his sons, Wemilo and Haidar, were staring too. My mother and Katharine and a hundred curious Devaki men and women—everyone was staring at me. Bardo, sitting cross–legged next to me, nudged me with his elbow. I reached out to take the meat. It was still warm from the fire, hard on the surface, hot and soft and yielding within. I held it lightly, as if afraid my nervous fingers would bruise the meat. Greasy juices oozed from the broken crust, running over my hands. I felt hot juices squirt inside my mouth, the sudden hot nausea deep in my throat. The smell of roasted meat made me want to retch. I turned my head, swallowing saliva, and I said, “I should give this meat to my cousin, Bardo. He is bigger than I and hungrier than a bear at the end of midwinter spring.”

  I glanced at Bardo, who was indeed eyeing the meat as he chewed his mustache. Bardo, I thought, despite his layers of acquired culture and taste, despite the deep repugnance of a civilized man for anything other than cultured meat, despite the sheer barbarity of eating living meat, Bardo if he were hungry enough would eat anything.

  But Yuri shook his head back and forth and said, “Does a son refuse the life his mother and father gave him? No, and so he may not refuse the meat his father offers him nor the drink his mother makes. Are you sick, Mallory? Sometimes the cold and wind make a man so sick with hunger he cannot eat. Then his hunger dies and his meat falls away from his bones, and his hungry ghost is too eager to see the other side of day. I think you are a hungry man who has denied his hunger too long: This a blind man could see. Shall I send Anala to make some blood tea? To awaken your hunger?”

  I held the rope of meat in my hands and I swallowed back my vomit and I said, “No, I will eat the meat.” From the lore of Rainer’s akashic records I suddenly remembered the recipe for blood tea. Great as my disgust was at the eating of meat, I had a greater horror of drinking the tea, an unbelievable mixture of seal’s blood, urine, and the bitter root of the shatterwood tree. I tilted my head back and dangled the meat above my mouth. I took a bite of meat.

  I will not pretend the meat tasted very different from the cultured meats my mother had made me eat as a child. It did not. True, the meat was fattier and rimed with char and much, much rarer than any meat should be. But it was still meat. “Meat’s meat,” Bardo said, stuffing himself with meat after I had eaten my share. No, it was not the taste of meat that bothered me; it was the idea of chewing flesh that had once jumped to the command of a living brain, flesh that had been alive. I chewed and swallowed slimy proteins little different from those cloned from de–brained muscle cells and cultured in vats. I ate my portion of meat horrified yet fascinated at this need of life to feed from other life. The tastes of iron and salt filled my mouth, and my cold, exhausted body awakened to its urge to life. I took another bite of meat and then another, and still another. It tasted good. I was so hungry I filled my mouth with bloody gobbets; I chewed so quickly I bit my cheeks. I swallowed my own blood along with that of the seal’s and ate until I felt the urge to vomit. When I could eat no more I handed the meat to Bardo.

  The rest of our meal was even more disgusting. And worse, the old, decayed foods Anala and the women brought forth did not even taste good. The Devaki men and women, their children too, cracked baldo nuts between their teeth. They ate the plump nut–meats, which were yellow and moldy, covered with a white fuzz. Wicent’s wife, Liluye, a skinny, nervous woman with stumpy yellow teeth, prepared us a soup of rotten thallow eggs. The big blue eggs had incubated too long, but the Devaki ate them anyway, straining out only the eyes of the embryos. (They did this because thallows are blind at birth, and they did not wish to acquire this blindness.) There were other foods as well, foods I could not believe a human could eat: raw chunks of seal fat swallowed as my mother would a ball of chocolate; the raw intestines of thallows and other birds; year–old mammoth bones which had been buried and allowed to soften and rot; and of course, the ever–present bowls of reeking blood tea. (I do not mean to imply that the Devaki took no care of the substances they swallowed. This was not so. Curiously, they would drink no water containing the tiniest particle of dirt. And as to the aforementioned foods, they ate them only because they were hungry. Hunger is the great spice of life. Later that winter, when we were nearly starving, worse horrors were to come.)

  After we finished our meal, Yuri massaged his belly and said a prayer for the souls of the animals we had eaten. “The winter has been cold and hard,” he said. “And last winter was hard, and the one before that. And the winter before, when Merilee died, that was a bad year. But if you had come five winters ago you would have feasted on mammoth steaks.” He yawned and squeezed Anala’s thigh. She sat next to him searching through his head hair with her fingers. “But tomorrow Tuwa is sick with the mouthrot and the Devaki are hungry, and so we hunt the seal.” Anala removed an insect—I think it was a louse—from the gray hair above his ear. She crushed it between her dirty fingernails and swallowed it. Yuri motioned to Soli, Bardo and myself. “Are the men of the Senwelina, who are Devaki as I am Devaki, are they too tired to hunt the fat, gray seal with us tomorrow?”

  I should have let Soli answer since he was the supposed head of our family. But I was full of seal meat and horror, and I could not bear the thought of murdering so intelligent an animal as a seal. “We are tired,” I blurted out. “We are tired and our dogs need rest.”

  Soli flashed me a fierce look as Liam rubbed his greasy hands over the face of his younger brother, Seif. (Was this a protection against the cold? A barbaric benediction? I searched my mind, but I had no memory of such a custom.) With a broken fingernail Liam prised a strand of meat from between his teeth. “You were not too tired to eat the seal,” he pointed out.

  He bent over me suddenly, and I smelled his thick reek as he ran his calloused hand under my furs and tested the muscles of my neck and back. How I hated the Devaki customs! I hated this intimate touching; I hated the cold, greasy touch of a strange man’s hands, the horror of another’s skin touching mine. “Mallory is thin, but still strong,” he announced. “Strong enough to hunt the seal, I think. But he is tired; perhaps he should rest in his furs while his near–brothers bring him fat–rib and tenderloin and other delicate pieces of meat.”

  I twisted away from him. How easy it would be, I thought, to grab his windpipe and tear it from his throat. I twisted and I pulled my collar tight around my neck, and then I said a thing that made Bardo and Soli, and the others from the City, look at me strangely.

  “We are tired,” I said, “but not too tired to hunt. On the southern ice there are no mammoth so we hunt the seal often. I have killed many seals; tomorrow I shall kill a seal for Liam and give him the liver.”

  As I said this I was reminded of my brag to penetrate the Entity. But where that brag had been impulsive and had nearly cost me my life, to Liam I had bragged to a purpose. I would kill a seal. Somehow I would kill a noble animal. I would do this in order to shame Liam into silence and to gain approval for my “family.” Then, I thought, we might more quickly find what we were looking for and leave this filthy, barbaric place.

  We sat there on the furs for a while telling stories—false stories—of hunting seals on the southern seas. Anala’s pretty daughter, Sanya, served blood tea, which the Devaki slurped noisily, smacking their lips and tongues. Later I was shocked to see Sanya’s baby sucking milk from her nude, blue–veined breast. Everything seemed to shock me that night, especially the uninhibited cries of delight coming from the nearby huts of the Yelenalina. I overheard a woman gasping out intimate instructions to her husband—I hoped it was her husband—and I listened to the ragged breathing and rustling furs, the sounds of human beasts rutting. Immersed as I was in these new sensations, I hardly noticed
Yuri moving closer to me. I stared at the faint petals of fire fluttering above the oilstone in front of me, and I was shocked when he softly said, “You should not kill the seal. Nunki is your doffel. That is why you had trouble eating seal meat—I should have seen this immediately.”

  The Devaki, I remembered, believe that every man’s soul is mirrored in the soul of a particular animal, his doffel, his other–self whom he may not hunt.

  I looked around quickly, but no one was paying us any attention. Soli and Justine had returned to our hut. My mother and Katharine sat with Anala while Bardo entertained—if that is the right word—the others with a song he composed as he sang it.

  I turned to Yuri and said the first thing that came to mind, “No, Ayeye, the thallow is my doffel. My grandfather told me so when I became a man.”

  He grabbed my arm suddenly, looking at me with his sad eye as he said, “Sometimes it is very hard to determine which animal holds our other–self. It is hard to see and mistakes are made.”

  “My grandfather,” I lied, for I had no grandfather whom I knew, “was a very wise man.”

  Just then everyone started laughing because Bardo had mispronounced two words of his song, which had completely changed their meaning. He had meant to sing:

  I am a lonely man from the southern ice

  Searching for an elegant wife.

  But he had got the vowels all wrong, and the lines came out as:

  I am a purple man from the southern ice

  Searching for an elegant lice.

  He seemed not to notice his mistake, not even when Anala cackled like a snow loon, slapped her thighs and started searching through Liam’s blond hair to see if she could find Bardo any “elegant lice.” Apparently, everyone thought his mistake was intentional, that he was a great wit, not just a silly buffoon.

  Yuri smiled and gripped my arm more tightly. His hands were as huge as Bardo’s but harder, toughened by years of work and cold. “Sometimes,” he said—and there was a peculiar urgency to his voice—“sometimes grandfathers, who are very near to their grandsons, cannot see the soul hiding behind the eyes. And you have difficult eyes, a blind man could see that. They are blue and fierce as an ice–mist, and they look far away. Can you blame your grandfather, Mauli, for mistaking your soul for the angry soul of the thallow? But Ayeye is not your doffel, I need only a single eye to see that. Nunki the seal, who loves the taste of sea–salt and the ocean’s cold peace—he is your doffel.”

  It is impossible to explain here the beliefs of the Alaloi. There is no space to record the rich mythologies, the totem system devised to commune with the spirits of animals and with what they call the World–soul. (In any case I am not sure I really understand the concept of telepathic communications with trees and thallows and seals, even rocks. I do not understand even now, after all that has happened—how the Alaloi creates the world moment by moment in the trance of the eternal Now–moment.) It is a complicated system and old, so old the historians have no record of its beginnings. Burgos Harsha believed the original Alaloi had borrowed piecemeal bits of Sufi mysticism and other ancient philosophies that would suit their new environment. They had also adopted, he thought, the totem system and dream–time of Old Earth’s ancient Strailia tribes. There, in the deserts of that isolated continent, man had had fifty thousand years of solitude to develop this system of symbol and thought. It was an elaborate system, logically consistent, dependent on strange hierarchies of thought and mind. There were rules by which men and women lived their lives. A man’s method of building a fire, the direction in which he pisses (to the south, always to the south), the times he is permitted copulation with his wife—every aspect of life is determined by this refined system. No matter how primitive and naïve it seemed to me, it represented the longest unbroken intellectual scheme in man’s history. And since Yuri, as eldest of his tribe, was a master of this system, I should have accepted that he could determine the one animal I was not permitted to hunt. But I did not accept this and I said, “Tomorrow I shall hunt Nunki as I said I would.”

  Yuri shook his head back and forth. He whistled the long, low note the Devaki whistle when they mourn for the dead. “It is sad,” he said. “It is not well known that once in a great while a man is born who does not accept his other–self. And not accepting this he is vulnerable because the other–self will seek to destroy him rather than be left alone forever. For him there can be no joining, no unity. And so he must kill, he is doomed to kill this half of himself—do you understand? If he does not do this, the remaining half—the deathless–self—can never grow to fullness. It is very painful and hard, and I must ask you: Are you willing to be a murderer?”

  We sat there talking for a long time, gazing at the cave’s walls. All the others had long since gone to bed, and there I sat listening to the words of a superstitious old man. Yuri had a richly resonant voice. With the intonation of a master storyteller—or shaman—he held me with his voice, speaking on and on, far into the night. His words contained echoes of arcane philosophies and mysteries. His words were too simple to be taken seriously, yet they disturbed me even so. He told me that the fear of this self–murder would make me sick; he prophesied that a day would come, and soon, when my courage would flee like a snow hare into the forest, a day when I would gnash my teeth and cry: All is false! “For what is the great fear?” he asked me. “It is not the dread of cold nor of the white bear’s teeth. These are fears of flesh, fears we forget sitting by the warm fire or playing with our wives. It is not even the fear of death because we know that if the tribe prays for our ghosts we will live forever on the other side of day. No, the great fear is the fear of the self–inside. We fear becoming this deathless–self. To discover the unknown within is like jumping into the mouth of the volcano. It burns the soul. If you kill your doffel, you will come to know this fear. And you must understand, this is pain without measure or end.”

  I finally limped back to our hut in a state of utter exhaustion. It had been the longest day of my life. (Excluding, of course, those days in the manifold—they were not really days—spent in slowtime.) I crawled through the entrance tunnel into the hut’s glowing interior and found that someone had laid out my sleeping furs on a bed of snow. I climbed into them. The pain of my knee and the other pain made me lie uneasily. The oilstones were burning and they cast a warm yellow light over the sleeping figures on their snow beds. Katharine lay next to me, her breathing as even and gentle as the lapping waves of the sea. Soli, I noticed to my astonishment, was holding Justine in his arms as he slept fitfully. (I do not know which was the greater shock: this tenderness of his or to see that he, the broody Soli, was actually capable of sleep.) I was exhausted but I was also trapped in that overly stimulated state of wakefulness beyond exhaustion. I thought about Yuri’s words. I could not sleep. Soli’s grinding teeth, the pup–plop of water falling from the roof in syncopation with the overly loud beats of my heart, the hissing of the wind through the ice–patched hole in the wall—these sounds kept me awake. The snow walls were too good an insulation against the cold. The hut was too warm and it stank. The heat of the sleeping bodies brought out the reek of rotting piss and my own sour sweat and other odors I could not identify. So awful was this reek that I could hardly breathe. The air smothered me like an old fur soaked with vomit. I felt a sickness and dread in the pit of my stomach. I flung off the furs, dressed quickly and ran from the hut to the mouth of the cave where I spewed my feast onto the snow. I thought of my promise to murder a seal the next day, and I retched until my stomach was knotted and dry. As I stumbled outside the cave a dog growled and snapped, and then another and another. I turned in a half–crouch back towards the cave. There, in the ragged, orange light, against the flickering tongues of fire, the dogs were leaping at their leashes. Tusa, and Nura, Rufo and Sanuye, my poor, starved sled dogs, fought among themselves, snapping up half–digested pieces of seal meat from the pink slop steaming on the snow. Tusa growled and slashed at gentle Rufo, who yelped and con
tented himself with lapping up one of the smaller puddles of vomit. Then Tusa ripped open Nura’s ear, and Sanuye ate the slushy snow, red with Nura’s blood.

  I pulled the dogs apart. There was a jumble of snapping muzzles and barks and surging fur. One of the dogs bit me. I tied them tighter to their stakes, and I scooped mounds of snow over the mess I had made.

  What a terrible thing true hunger was! How wrong I was to have starved the dogs! My bleeding hand burned as I thought about this, and there was a pain in my empty stomach. Was this life, then? Was this emptiness inside and desire for food the price of living? No, I thought, it is too terrible a price, and I wondered at the vanity which had brought me to the Devaki seeking the meaning of life. The secret of life—could it really be embroidered upon the chromosomes of these filthy, blood–drinking people? Could their ancestors really have captured within their DNA the mystery of the Ieldra?

  I imagined I had the skills of a splicer and an imprimatur, that I could unravel the strands of Yuri’s DNA as an historian, in his search for knowledge, might pull apart an ancient tapestry. Would I find coded among the twisting sugars and bases information that the Ieldra had woven long ago? Was there some message coiled within the testes of Wicent or Liam, some secret of meaning, a right way of living for all mankind? And if this message existed, why should it be shrouded in mystery? If the Ieldra could tell us to look in our past and future for the secret of life, why couldn’t they tell us what this secret was?

  Why couldn’t the gods, if they were gods, simply talk to us?

  I looked up at the stars, at the bright triangle of Wakanda, Eanna and Farfara twinkling above the eastern horizon. Beyond them the core of the galaxy was streaming with laser pulses in a way the mechanics could not explain. If I opened my eyes as wide as I could, would they burn with the light of the gods? If I turned my face to the distant solar wind of the core stars, would I hear the gods whispering in my ears?