Neverness

by David Zindell

  Once, on a cold day near the end of deep winter when we were all a little hungry, I watched Yuri let a white bear escape from the ring of spears pointed at her chest. Why did he do this? Because, as he observed, the bear’s third claw on the right paw was broken, and everyone knew (or should have known) that such bears were imakla, magic animals who may not be killed. Killing, I discovered, was not the real purpose or end of the hunt. This was a hard lesson for me to learn. I spent many bad moments hating that I must kill to live. Most of all I hated the rush of intense aliveness which pumped through me like a drug whenever I speared an innocent animal and I saw the spurting of his blood as drink that would soon quicken my own. The Devaki did not share my hatred, although I believe they never felt so alive as when they were close to killing their prey. I do not claim I was ever able to enter into the hunter’s mindset, but I think I glimpsed at least a portion of their worldview: To hunt was to absorb the wind’s myriad sounds or the distant smell of the mammoths, to see the patterns in the ermine’s droppings and scratchings in the snow, to see patterns in the folds of ice and in the undulations of the land and sky and world; to hunt was to be a part of this pattern, just as the rocks and trees and birds were parts, too. Nothing was so important as the perception of this pattern, of the beauty that is the intention of the World–soul. And nothing the hunter said or thought or did should disturb this beauty, this halla.

  “It is better to go over to the other side hungry,” Yuri said as he watched the bear disappear into her snowcave, “than to go over deranged and drunk with the blood of an imakla blinding our souls.”

  This attention to the interconnectedness of all the animals, events and things of their world was not a question of morality, but of survival. The Devaki believe they can only survive moment by moment, generation by generation, if they pay attention to what the world requires of them. And by behaving, by learning to perceive what is halla and what is not. I do not mean that any of the Devaki learned this art perfectly. There were always imperfections, uncertainties and little evils in their everyday life. Someone, I remembered, had killed Shanidar’s thallow for food even though all thallows were imakla. Certain of the Devaki, although they knew the rules of impeccable behavior, could not conceive of a world in which they had to starve while the thallows soared free. How could such a world be halla? And so they killed the sacred birds, or killed imakla bears, or, rarely, they killed seals or other animals which happened to be their doffels.

  In truth, the Devaki never really starved. The forest was not really empty, but rather like a cafe which had run out of the choicer foods. When we were hungry we began eating those disgusting things we had so far disdained. We ate—I should say the Manwelina and the other families bolted down this slime, for we of the City held back as long as we could—we ate unbelievable things. Wicent and his son Wemilo uncovered a cache of fish heads they had buried during the previous false winter. The sharp bones had decayed to a dead, grayish–white and were as soft as flesh. Liluye collected the rotten bones in a bowl and kneaded the reeking mass into a paste from which she made small round cakes, flipping them back and forth between her nervous little hands. She baked them in the glowing coals of the fire, and the men ate them slowly as if they were being forced to eat dirt. Other foods were worse. The dogs were fed slime scraped from old hides stinking of the putrefied brains used in the tanning process. Yuri killed a silk belly, and with his single eye half–shut and twitching, he gobbled down the contents of the stomach, all the while smacking his lips and insisting, for the benefit of the children, that the goo tasted sweet as roasted nuts. The children often foraged through the snow for whatever they could find. Often they ate sleekit droppings, which they munched like berries. Yuri’s cousin, Jaywe, split apart years–old mammoth bones swarming with maggots. Jaywe, a short, funny man whose peculiar palate had led him to savor the slip of birds’ eggs, licked his lips and sucked down handfuls of squirming white maggots and said that they were more delicate than year–old snow loon embryos. I did not doubt him. Thereafter the rest of his family jokingly referred to him as Jaywe Maggoteater. I myself ventured to eat thawed oysters. The squishy blobs of meat ruptured inside my mouth; the squirt of juices and salt instantly reminded me of my experiences inside the Entity. I marvelled that the taste of real oysters was exactly the same as the taste the Entity had placed inside my mind—just as real and just as bad.

  In truth, the Devaki were—and are—a smart, resourceful people. They are tough and hard to kill. During our brief stay in the cave, I heard tens of stories of resourcefulness and survival. Yuri once told me that when he was a boy, his immediate family had almost been exterminated while crossing the ice in early false winter.

  “When I was five years old,” Yuri told me, “my father and my mother decided to make the pilgrimage to Imakel, where my mother’s ancestors are buried. But one night the ice opened unexpectedly, as it sometimes does. We lost one of our sleds, and all of our harpoons, furs, oilstones, spears—everything. And we lost most of our dogs, too. My father had only his snow–knife, and my mother—her name was Fliora—had nothing but her teeth and a few old sealskins. We had no way to spear seals, to hunt, or even to make a fire. I was afraid, and who could blame me? But my mother and father never lost their courage.”

  I will not relate the whole story here because it is too long. But briefly, Nun, who was Yuri’s father, fished his dead dogs out of the sea (his heavy sled had sunk like rock), and he and his family and the remaining dogs ate them. Somehow they managed to reach the nearest island, which was so small and barren that it had no name. With his snow–knife Nuri cut blocks of snow and built a hut. Somehow, Nuri and Eliora made new weapons and tools from the poor materials they found on the island. Nuri hunted and Eliora skinned the animals he killed, and she made their clothing. They ate snow hare and sleekits, and kittiwakes, gulls and chinocha—anything they could find. They fed themselves, and they fed their dogs; Yuri grew quickly and one of the dogs bore a litter the following false winter. The two of them, husband and wife, over the course of that winter and the winters that followed, re–created from almost nothing most of the tools and artifacts of their culture. It took them three years of collecting pieces of driftwood and saving bones to gather together the materials to build a new sled. They improvised and invented new ways of putting together hides and bones, and when they were done, they did not return to Kweitkel. They continued on to Imakel, completing their pilgrimage. They placed fireflowers on the grave of Eliora’s grandfather and grandmother. They visited with Eliora’s family. And when Eliora’s father, Narain, offered to give them a sled for their journey home, Nuri pointed at his patchwork creation and told him, “Thank you, but you see, the Manwelina know how to build sleds.” And everyone laughed because his sled could not have carried them another mile, let alone the two hundred miles back to Kweitkel.

  I often thought that this ability to shape random materials into useful things lay at the heart of the Alaloi’s culture. Given the requirements of their world, there was nothing they could not make. If a tool or item of clothing required a particular combination of flexibility, strength, texture or insulative properties, they would experiment until they discovered the right combination. Their knowledge of the things of the world was detailed and precise: Lubricants were extracted from the shagshay hoof because they had discovered the fats in the joints furthest from the body froze at lower temperatures; they made the windows of their huts (when they desired windows) from the tough, translucent intestines of the bearded seal; shagshay horns were flexible and so were bent into the side prongs of fish spears; and so on. They were geniuses at making things, the women as much so as the men. Among other things, the women were responsible for making and caring for that most vital of all survival tools: the marvellous Alaloi clothing.

  At night after hunting—and this, too, was part of our daily routine—we would sit around the oilstones, eating what food we had, talking, watching the women making our clothes. The women’s
mouths were always busy because they were either chatting about the events of the day or chewing skins with their stubby, worn teeth. Their teeth were tools, and they used them effectively, to soften the frozen parkas of their husbands and to work new skins into leather. By early midwinter spring, with the first storms of the new year blowing outside the cave, my mother and Justine, Katharine too, had become used to this gruelling work. They had also become experts at sewing waterproof sealskins into boots, or making waterproof kamelaikas, or tailoring the ruffs of the shagshay parkas with wolf fur, a fur which would shed the ice crystals condensed from one’s breath. With their bone needles and sinews they made their precise stitches, stitches which would swell when wet, keeping cold and moisture from entering the clothing. I was glad they had imprinted these skills because an Alaloi hunter is utterly dependent upon the women in his family. As my mother put it one night, holding a half–made kamelaika up to my shoulders, “Where would Yuri be today? If not for the skills of his mother? If not for the clothes she made, the fish spears, the oilstones, if not for her milk, the very flesh of his flesh? Is there anything a woman cannot make?”

  There was one part of our daily routine I wish I could forget. During this cold, hard time of hungers and chilblain and petty miseries, I began suffering another misery, in some ways the most miserable misery of all. I discovered I had lice. The hair of my body and head and pubes was crawling with these tiny, flat insects. It was the price of swiving dirty, savage women, I thought, and I twitched and scratched until I bled, and I rubbed ash mud over my body from ankle to neck, but nothing helped until I submitted to my mother for what would come to be the nightly delousing. Every night, I would rest my head on my mother’s lap while she danced her fingers through my hair, searching for lice. She had sharp eyes, my mother did, to pick them out with only the oilstones’ dim light illuminating my black hair. I felt her sharp fingernails like tweezers crushing the lice and, occasionally, plucking from my itchy scalp a few hairs which she said were as gray as Yuri’s.

  Her grooming did little good, however, because the cave and all the furs were full of nits waiting to hatch. The other members of my family became infested as well, although they seemed to have fewer lice and a greater tolerance for this petty torture than I did. (Bardo, for some inexplicable, unjust reason—he ridiculously claimed that the poisons from his gonads had soured his skin, rendering him unappealing to crawling insects—remained free of lice.) It was not the prickling pain or itch that bothered me; it was the idea of the lice thrusting their tiny mouthparts into my skin that sent me shuddering and twitching. I loathed the idea of insects drinking my blood, of life living off other life. I considered shaving my body with sharp blades of flint. But I did not do so. I recalled that there were whole segments of humanity out towards Gamma Luz who had purged their systems of bacteria and other parasites only to discover they had to enclose themselves in made–worlds lest they contaminate their sterile bodies with the dirt of civilization. This isolation, however, had weakened their immune systems, leaving them vulnerable to bizarre diseases. Who knew what natural balances I might disturb if I did not live as the Alaloi lived? There was another reason, too, why I did not shave myself: The flint flakes we made were so sharp I might easily cut my skin, opening it to infection. And infection among the Alaloi, as Jinje had proven with his rotting toes, could be very bad.

  Of all the triumphs of civilization I sometimes think the greatest and most sublime was the invention of the hot bath. How I longed for soap and hot water! How I missed the joy of soaking my cold limbs, of letting the wet heat lull me and warm me from skin to bone! How badly I wanted to be clean! I missed the sounds and smells and comforts of the City and found myself thinking about her all the time. Why had I left her? Why had I come here seeking nonexistent secrets, killing seals, feeding toothless old men, disturbing the harmony of the Devaki families? How could I have believed a civilized man could live as a savage? From where had I acquired such arrogance?

  One night over a mug of tea, Bardo confessed that he, too, missed the comforts of our city. “I would advise that we leave here as soon as Katharine has collected her samples,” he said to me. “We don’t want to starve, do we? How long can it take her to swive a few men? Excuse my candor, Little Fellow, but I don’t understand why she has ignored so many, ah...possibilities?”

  Of course, he hadn’t had the slightest thought of leaving so long as he could fill his belly with meat every night, and every night fill one or more women with his seed. The others, though, were not so eager to leave as I would have hoped. Soli welcomed the hardships of our primitive life and seemed to be enjoying himself, if that dour man was capable of joy. Justine found everything about her new existence “fascinating,” as she put it, while my mother revelled in her power to make her living directly from the things of life. And as for Katharine, she seemed to be biding her time, to be waiting for some important event that she would not reveal.

  As the storms of the new year grew more frequent, I gradually became aware that the Devaki had not completely accepted us. I do not mean that they necessarily suspected our civilized origins. But many of them, not just Yuri, thought that we were strange, and worse than strange. Because of the storms, the hunting became more difficult and dangerous. Our hunger deepened. Sometimes there were grumblings and complaints and petty arguments over the division of the meat. More than once I heard the men grumble that my killing my doffel had brought them bad luck, not good. There was a rumor going about the cave that I had fed Shanidar half of the beautiful liver of a snow loon. (In truth, ever since my encounter with the Old Man of the Cave, I had been smuggling him choice cuts of meat, to keep him alive. It was wrong of me, I know, but what else could I do?) And there was other gossip, vicious talk the women spread among themselves that gradually reached the ears of their husbands. I should have been warned something was wrong when Piero of the Yelenalina family and Olin of the Sharailina began threatening to leave Kweitkel for the islands of the west. I thought they were just crabby with hunger, but I soon discovered they had other complaints.

  One late afternoon after a long, fruitless day of hunting, Yuri caught me aside in the forest outside the cave and said, “Piero is wrong to blame you for our hunger. If Tuwa was not sick with mouthrot, we would have plenty to eat.”

  I agreed that it was so.

  “Still, it is strange that the animals no longer leap to our spears, is it not?”

  I agreed with him that it was strange.

  “Although Piero is wrong to blame you, I cannot blame him for blaming you. Can you? And there are others who might observe your strange behavior and come to blame you for their own misfortunes. I myself have no respect for these people, but how can I blame them?”

  “How is my behavior strange?” I asked. “Do they blame me for killing the seal, then?”

  He held up his scarred hand and shook his head. “It is not that, even though there are few men who kill their doffels. It is this: A wise man takes care not to be left alone in his hut with his sister, especially one so beautiful as Katharine. Then no one can blame him for abominations which bring his people bad luck.”

  As he said this there was a sudden sharp pain in my stomach. I felt sick; I felt the burn of guilt coloring my cheeks, and I was grateful that the wind through the trees was so icy and bitter that my face must have already been crimson with cold. I turned to Yuri, who was leaning against a boulder and puffing steam as he looked out across the broad, white valley below. I wanted to tell him that whoever had accused Katharine and me of abomination was guilty of slander. And more, I wanted to shout out, to scream into the valley that Katharine was not my sister. I wanted to reveal the ugly tapestry of lies and fakery that had led us to pose as Alaloi. I wanted to do this for two reasons: to bring this foolish journey to an end, and so Yuri would know I was a man of honor. But I said nothing, did nothing. How could I make this savage, one–eyed man understand the complexity of civilized ways or the esoteric nature of the quest? I sa
id nothing, and Yuri shrugged his shoulders. “Katharine, too, she is a strange woman,” he said.