Neverness

by David Zindell

  As if he could hear my thoughts, he turned his head in my direction and suddenly stopped smiling. “You know, even kind men such as you and I must grow old, hmmm? That is why we must go over at the right time. Otherwise there is no peace forever.”

  He talked about the peace and enlightenment awaiting on the other side of day, and he talked about his love for his people who had almost completely rejected him. I must admit I paid him little attention. I wanted to run back into the main cave, to find Soli and the others, to make them understand that our quest for the secret of life was stupid and meaningless. There was no secret; there was only the crushing bondage of being, and finally when it was time to be no more, nothingness.

  I stood up abruptly, nearly ignoring the Old Man of the Cave as he said, “There is one thing I should tell you before you leave, hmmm? I forgot to tell you this, but you should know. God’s wings touch at the far end of the universe—did I tell you this before?—His wings are silver and they touch, but His eyes are closed because He Himself is sleeping. Listen, one day God will wake up and be able to see himself as he really is. I can almost hear his scream, the beating of his wings. But until then, good and evil will not exist because only God can truly see what is good and what is not. And this is the thing that I wanted to tell you: Men such as you and I, kind men who kill their own doffels, we must do as we will because for us all things are permitted. But there is always a price, hmmm?” He ran his trembling finger along the gums inside his mouth and repeated, “The price must be paid.”

  I returned down the rock vent as fast as I could. I wanted to find Katharine, to stroke her hair, to ask her what she had seen; I wanted to make her tell me what I would be like when I had grown old. As I hurried through the dark passageway, the Old Man of the Cave began to sing a mournful song, and I tried not to listen.

  12

  The Little Death

  What an extraordinary thing, that the ripples in the spacetime continuum should ripple in such a way that the ripples could control their own rippling! That energy captured and bound should lead to greater concentrations of energy instead of gradually bleeding away into the heat death and universal calm! How mysterious that consciousness should lead to greater consciousness and life beget life greater and more complex!

  from A Requiem for Homo Sapiens by Horthy Hosthoh

  When I returned to the main cave, the Devaki and my “family” were feasting on seal meat. Obsessed as I was with thoughts of decay and death, I was unprepared for joy, the joy of a hundred and twenty happy people filling themselves with their beautiful meat. It was a feast of flesh, a celebration of love and life with little respite or pause. Everyone except the unweaned babies and children gorged on roasted seal steaks and blubber. (At first, of course many were so impatient and hungry they ate their meat raw.) The cave was alive with the smell of burning sweetbreads and the happy chatter of the children as they licked down fingers of grilled liver dipped in melted fat. Yuri and the rest of the Manwelina were glad to share the food with the Yelenalina and Reinalina families. Their hunters had returned earlier that day from their shagshay hunt with empty sleds, but Yuri announced they would fill their bellies anyway because he knew that in the next hunt the luck might go the other way. Even the Sharailina, who possessed the lowest status of all the families due to an unfortunate and unsavory acccident that happened years ago, even the lowly Sharailina partook of the rich meat. Around all the huts the cave floor was littered with cracked bones; the bloated, distended bodies of those who had eaten too much (nearly everyone) were sprawled in front of the fires. There were grunts and belches and moans. And to my surprise, many of the Devaki were telling lewd jokes and touching each other openly. I stalked through the cave, and I saw a nubile Yelenalina woman—I think her name was Pualani—giggling and whispering something in young Choclo’s ear. They fondled each other and disappeared into one of the Yelenalina’s huts. All around the oilstones in the soft, flickering light, it seemed the men and women were pairing and touching, quietly vanishing into the darker recesses of the cave. I found Bardo with his arms thrown across the backs of two pretty Senwelina girls as he sat between them singing. I walked closer to huts noisy with gasps of passion, and he winked at me and bellowed, “Two’s not too many for one, but it’s too few for two such men as we! But when Bardo is content, Bardo is willing to share.” And then, “Where have you been? You look white as bird puke.”

  “Where’s Katharine?” I asked him.

  “Forget about Katharine,” he said, pulling at his beard. “Why do you care where she is?”

  I did not think it was a good time to tell him that Katharine and I were lovers, though from the look in his crafty brown eyes, I think he must have guessed the truth well before we had left Neverness.

  “Have you seen her?” I asked.

  He licked his lips, ignoring my question. He nuzzled the neck of the youngest girl, the one with the small nose and beautiful high laugh. He said, “Her name is Nadia, daughter of Jense. She’s curious, she tells me, to see if the spear of Mallory Sealkiller is long and straight enough to pierce her aklia.”

  Nadia giggled again and seemed disappointed when I shook my head. “I have to find Katharine,” I said.

  “Ah, too bad.” He shook himself free of the girls, stood up, and took me aside. “What’s wrong with you?”

  I started to tell him about my visit with Shanidar, but I found myself biting my lip instead. All I could force out was: “This expedition, the quest...everything, it’s all meaningless.”

  “Of course it is. And that’s why you should live while you can. Life is boring and meaningless, but when you explode inside a woman, for a moment your boredom dies and—am I boring you?—and you feel like you could die from the pleasure, or from anything else, and not care a damn. When you die the little death and she screams and claws your back because she’s dying, too—well, is there anything better than that?”

  I tried to tell him that the problem was much more complicated than he thought. But he just stood there, squeezing my shoulder and shaking his head. “How hard I’ve tried to educate you!” he said. “All in vain, all in vain!” In a low voice he said, “But thank you, Little Fellow, for bringing me to this enlightened place.”

  When I warned him of the dangers of swiving ripe, young women, he pulled his beard thoughtfully. He had always feared fathering children. It was a bizarre, irrational fear: He had half–convinced himself that if his seed ever sprouted inside a woman, then somehow he would have fulfilled his purpose in life and would therefore be obsolete and liable to death. “It’s too bad,” he said, “that I can’t train my sperm to die the instant they leave my body. But if I...ah, that is to say, if one of these hairy women did become pregnant, who could ever know who the father was?”

  He sighed, then licked his mustache as he turned back to the girls. For men such as Bardo, I am afraid, lust will always conquer fear.

  I stalked through the cave looking for Katharine but I did not find her. No one could tell me where she was. I returned to our hut and almost embarrassed Soli and Justine in the middle of their loveplay. Quietly, I limped away towards the huts of the Manwelina. I saw my mother and Anala sitting together. They were scraping seal skins, talking and laughing. I overheard Anala bragging about her son Liam’s virility. He would make any young woman a good husband, she said. I remembered that in my wanderings in the dark I had not seen Liam either. From the soft, round, glowing hut behind them came a rhythmic gasping and sudden, private cries. I ground my teeth and leaned against the cold cave wall, wondering why this contagious communal passion had been no part of Rainer’s memory.

  What occurred that night and for the next two days was not precisely an orgy. As far as I could tell, the Devaki did their sex in couples and as privately as possible. With one exception (I shall discuss Bardo’s peccadillos and exploits presently), there were no groupings of three or more, no voyeurism or drunken perversions. The Devaki, it seemed, knew little of the failed arts of civiliz
ation. But they were very familiar with promiscuity, or I should say, they practiced a zestful coupling that was free and wild within a rigid system of rules and taboos. (No man or woman, for instance, could lie with another’s mate, and sex among family members was an abomination.) The young and unmarried “shared the volcano’s explosion” often and with many different partners. Especially when they had eaten great heaps of meat and the blood grew hot and full, they sought each other in the darkness of the cave and furiously coupled and feasted and found another with whom to share their fire. They did this, Yuri told me, because eros was the gift of Devaki to the god Kweitkel and should be practiced with energy and passion until the wombs of the women (or the girls who had thus become women) were full of new life.

  “Do not wait too long for your spear to rise,” he warned me around midnight, when he found me sitting with the dogs by the entrance fires. “Soon the young women’s aklias will be exhausted and you will have missed your fun.” He threw some wood on the fire and sighed as it began to crackle and roar. “Perhaps you are thinking how hard it was to kill your doffel, and who could blame you? But it is not good for a man to think too much.” With his huge finger, he tapped his forehead above his eye socket and admonished, “In you I think there is too much distraction, too many voices inside. You must quiet the word storm in your head, and what better way than to lose yourself in a woman? Haven’t you seen how the Sharailina girls, Mentina and Lilith, look at you?”

  What better way indeed! How I envied Yuri his purity and innocence! He knew nothing of contagion or the diseases that had ruined many of the Civilized Worlds. He was ignorant of the touch of slel neckers who tailor genotoxins to rob a man of his selfness and soul. I desperately wanted to lose myself in a woman, to lose myself in something, anything to drown out Shanidar’s quavering old voice, to extinguish his image burning within me. But I was a civilized man, despite my primitive body. I dreaded intimately touching these unwashed, lice–ridden women. How could I explain this to Yuri? How to explain that I, who sought the secret of life, was afraid of life?

  There was one Yelenalina woman, however, who seemed different than the others. Her name was Kamalia, and she was beautiful. Her hair seemed less full of grease than that of her cousins and near–sisters; her teeth were white and not so worn. After Yuri had gone off to bed with Anala, she sat with me by the fire. She smiled at me coyly, covering her pink lips with her hand. She began pulling at my furs, and I found her thick odor somehow pleasant, intoxicating even. The fire was hot on my face, the air full of sweet smoke and Kamalia’s laughter. Suddenly I was tired of searching, tired of thinking, tired of everything but the touch of Kamalia’s clever little hands. I nuzzled her neck (the Devaki do not practice the barbaric art of kissing, thank God!), and we found an empty hut in which to do our sex. We swived each other to exhaustion and slept and awoke and swived some more. I died the little death. I felt wild and pure and invulnerable. I swived her four times during the day that followed, trying to escape boredom and fear of living. I swived her, and it was good. But it was not enough, and I sought out her younger sister, Pilaria, and I swived her as well, and she screamed and clawed my back, and it was very good, but it was not enough to soothe me. I was hungry so I ate some meat and found myself in Arwe’s hut where I coaxed shy Tasarla into sex play. Later that day—I did not care what day it was—I swived Mentina, who hummed a little melody as she massaged my chest and rocked back and forth astride me, back and forth, rubbing and humming. When Bardo learned of my private quest to find oblivion, he spread the rumor that I, too, was a great hunter of women and very skilled with my spear, which was long and thick, if not quite so long and thick as his. (But then, whose was?) I swived women whose names I have forgotten or never learned. They were each beautiful in their own way, even cross–eyed Mentina and Lilith, with her fishy smell and crooked teeth. I took great pleasure with them, but it was not enough, never enough to silence the noise inside my head.

  Early in the third night of this revelry, during a rare moment of sleep, Kamalia and I were awakened by the cries and bellows echoing from the hut next to us. I listened to a long, barbaric rondo of moans and giggles and belches, an obscene symphony of unrestrained squeals of delight. “Ten!” a voice called out, and I recognized Bardo’s basso profundo booming beneath a waterfall of high–pitched, girlish laughter. And later, “Eleven!” and later still, “Twelve and thirteen!” I heard low sighs, the voices of different women. “Fourteen!” Bardo cried, and I realized he was—stupidly—keeping a count of his copulations. When he reached the number “nineteen,” towards dawn, I was afraid he would have to lapse into civilized language because, as I have said, the Alaloi have no numbers for quantities greater than twenty. (It would be ridiculous, I thought, for him to call out hela, or “many” after each woman he swived.) Kamalia and I shared a piece of seal meat as we waited for him to breach his twentieth woman. But he never called out number twenty. Instead there was a long silence, broken when he shouted, “By God, what trick is this? What poison?” And then, “It won’t go down!” He called out my name, and there was panic and desperation in his voice. I smiled at Kamalia, quickly dressed and went into Bardo’s hut.

  “Mallory,” he gasped, “look at it, it won’t go down!”

  He paced helplessly at the center of the hut, entirely naked. On one of the snow beds two women half–covered with furs sat watching him. They held hands, giggling and pointing at his enormous, rigid membrum, which stood out beneath his round belly like the spout of a teapot. “Bardo wos Tuwalanka!” one of the women said as she held her hands spread in front of her, “Tuwalanka!” (It was true, Bardo did have the “spear” of a mammoth. So large was his membrum, in fact, that when he was younger, he used to fear that the blood needed to engorge it would be diverted from his brain, robbing it of oxygen and thus damaging that most precious of organs.)

  I told the women to dress, and I shooed them from the hut. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. He grasped the shaft of his membrum, pulling it horizontal. “It won’t get soft. Ah, I don’t know—it must be poison, this has never happened before.”

  “You’ve merely overstimulated yourself.”

  “No, no, Little Fellow.”

  “Six or seven women in three days has drugged your body with adrenalin and sex.” In truth, I, too, felt insatiable and prepotent—who would not with a succession of young women eager to rouse one’s spear?

  “Eleven women and I don’t think that’s it at all. I feel the hormones gushing inside. It’s poison, by God!”

  From a distance I examined his membrum. I noticed a curious thing. On the underside of the shaft, the small, round multicolored keloids scarring his “mammoth spear” did not seem to be arranged at random. The red dots twisted among the green and blue, forming a familiar pattern. I moved closer and half–squatted, peering at the ugly patch of skin just beneath the bulb. I remembered the verses and the dead languages of the Timekeeper’s book of poems, and the pattern became clear: The red dots formed the ancient Japanese pictogram for the word “revenge.” Mehtar, that cunning pointillist, had tattooed Bardo’s membrum with what he had obviously believed to be an indecipherable message. So, Mehtar had remembered Bardo, after all. The wily cutter had revenged himself for Bardo’s pushing him to the ice the day we had met Soli in the master pilot’s bar. Most likely he had implanted timed hormones in Bardo’s flesh, afflicting him with unending tumescence. It was a cruel thing he had done, a nasty joke. It was cruel and treacherous and distressing, but it was also, for some reason I could not quite understand, hilariously funny. “What do you see?” he asked me.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t lie to me, Little Fellow.”

  “You’ll be fine,” I said.

  “Mallory!”

  “It’s nothing, really,” I reassured him, and I began to laugh.

  “Tell me, by God!”

  I laughed for a while as his face reddened and his me
mbrum grew even stiffer. I laughed until the tears ran from my eyes; I laughed so hard I began to hiccup and cough.

  “Oh, you’re cruel,” he said. “You’re a hard man.”

  I calmed myself and explained what I thought Mehtar had done. He said, “I’ve heard of such things. He’s altered my chemistry, by God! I’m being killed by poisons from the gonads! Revenge, is it? When we return to the City I’ll show him revenge! I’ll cut off his pissroot and nail it to the sign above his shop, by God I will.”