Neverness

by David Zindell

  As the night wore on, we became tired and crabby, susceptible to wild ideas. I think we had lived too long in those snowy hills, had spent too many nights in the snow–hut listening to the wind blow and the wolves howl. For me, at least, all the familiar things of the City seemed far away. The City itself seemed somehow fantastic and unreal, a memory of an earlier Mallory, a buried dream. Looking around at the harpoons, the ripe furs, the oilstones flickering yellow and orange, it was hard to think that a larger world existed. Almost anything seemed possible: What if a new race of aliens had come to Neverness, killed all the humans and taken the City for their own? What if the Solid State Entity or some other god had changed the laws of spacetime so that radio and other eem waves were either slowed or could not locally exist? What if the City itself did not exist?

  All this talk had obviously made Bardo nervous. He twined and untwined his mustache between his fingers, and he massaged his belly. Silently—it was a custom of his when women were present to do so silently—he began breaking wind. The air of the hut began to stink. Justine coughed and waved her hand beneath her nose. Bardo puffed out his cheeks as he pointed to the tunnel–way where the dogs slept, and he cursed, “That damn Tusa! Feed him the decaying guts of a seal and he fans like a rocket. By God, it stinks in here!”

  So badly did it stink that everyone except Soli was breathing through his or her mouth. (He was intently picking at the radio’s casing, oblivious to Bardo’s little problem.) My mother wrinkled her nose and covered her face with the edge of her furs. She glared at Bardo. “Men are stinky beasts,” she said.

  Bardo’s face fell into an embarrassed frown while my mother cocked her chin, looking at him with contempt. After a moment the contempt intensified into hatred, both for Bardo and herself. My mother had a tongue as cruel as a double−edged knife, and it was a cruelty which cut two ways: If someone offended her, she would be cruel to him and hate herself for being cruel, and then she would hate him for instigating these twin cruelties.

  “Ah, I know what you’re thinking,” Bardo said to her. “But it was Tusa who farted, or Lola, not me.”

  In disgust, my mother began putting on her furs. She turned to Soli and said, “If the radio is dead, then it was killed. Tinker–made instruments don’t die a natural death.” Then she left the hut to take a breath of fresh air. (Or perhaps she went to Anala’s hut to drink tea and gossip, an activity she had grown quite fond of during our brief stay in the cave.)

  Soli was slicing at the radio’s casing with a flint blade, and he said, “There must be a way to open the radio, to find out why it’s dead.”

  “Open the radio, Lord Pilot?” Bardo asked, rubbing his red cheeks. “Surely you’re joking?” Soli might as well have suggested opening Bardo up to determine why his gut produced so much gas.

  But Soli was not joking. He was intent upon getting the radio open. Sometime around midnight, he discovered that heated flints applied to the thick, lacquer–like sealant caused the plastic to peel away in flaky layers as thin as a snow crystal. At last he laid the casing bare, but the radio would still not open. He stared at the back side of it for a long time before he noticed four small, round spots, black against darker black, one spot at each corner of the radio’s casing. He found that the round spots were in fact holes filled with sealant. He excavated these holes, slowly and painstakingly digging and reaming with hot needles of flint. When he had finished this excruciatingly boring work, he held the radio to the oilstones and announced that he could see bits of bifurcated metal set down into the holes.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “That’s hard to say.”

  “Tinker work,” I said. “Pilots shouldn’t meddle with tinker work.”

  On their snow beds, Justine and Katharine were trying to sleep; Bardo was flopped down like a dead bear, snoring loudly.

  “Yes, tinker work,” Soli said. “But where is the tinker to do the work?” His lips tightened as he inserted a flint needle into one of the holes. He twisted it and it broke. He inserted another needle and twisted the opposite way. It broke as well.

  “Damn the tinkers and their arcane arts,” I said, and he turned the radio over and shook the flint fragments from the hole.

  “Flint’s too brittle,” he said. He picked up a long sliver of shatterwood shaved from his mammoth spear. “Shatterwood is not quite as hard as flint, but it’s not as brittle, is it?” So saying, with a flint carver, he whittled the end of the wood sliver to fit neatly into the bifurcations in the bits of metal set into the four holes.

  “Why are you doing this?” I asked. “If the tinkers made the radio to be opened by tinkers only, how do you expect to open it?”

  “Where is your famed initiative?” he asked. “It’s a mystery, isn’t it, how you were able to penetrate and return from the Entity.”

  “That was different.”

  “Yes, you were lucky then, but here luck is not a factor, is it?”

  He dropped the shaped end of the wood sliver down one of the holes and twisted it to the right without result. He twisted it to the left, but this too accomplished nothing. “Luck,” he said, and he twisted harder. “It gives!” he said. He twirled his fingers, and moments later he removed a peg of metal as long as my fingernail.

  “What is it?” I asked again.

  “That’s unknown.” He scrutinized the metal peg under the oilstones’ light. He handed it to me. There was a thin ridge of metal raised up from and wrapped in a continuous spiral around the length of the peg. “It’s obvious, though, that this ridge must work against a similar ridge set into the casing, else the peg would have just fallen out.” As the others slept, he removed the three other pegs, and the radio popped open.

  “Ha!” I whispered, “a tinker would go mad at the first glimpse of the manifold, but a pilot can unravel a tinker’s secrets as easily as—”

  “Be quiet! We’ve unravelled nothing.”

  I looked into the workings of the radio. There was a jumble of varicolored plastics, claries and metals twisting and joining together in strange and unfathomable ways. I saw immediately why the radio had not healed itself: For some reason, the tinkers had assembled the radio from unusual and archaic components rather than growing it whole as, for instance, they grew the circuitry and other parts of a lightship. The sight of these obviously simple components unnerved me. I made a guess as to how the radio worked, though I might as well have tried to glean esoteric knowledge from a writhing ball of spirali. I realized I no more understood the secrets of the tinkers’ radio than I did the Ieldra’s secret locked inside the Alaloi’s germ plasm.

  “It’s so barbaric,” I said. “Why would the tinkers make a radio from ancient components?”

  “Tinkers have their secrets as we have ours,” he said. “A device from the past for our journey to the past—that would be their kind of joke, wouldn’t it?”

  I glanced at him and said, “Shake it. Perhaps one of the components has come loose.”

  “That’s not probable,” he said, but he did as I suggested, to no avail. Tinker–made components, I realized, do not come loose.

  “Why do you think it’s dead?” I asked.

  “When this switch is thrown,” he said flipping a piece of black plastic on the front of the radio, “nothing happens. There is no flow of electrons. One or more of the components must be ill.”

  “Which one?”

  He poked various components with his index finger and said, “Who knows?”

  “Well, it’s dead, and there’s nothing we can do, then.”

  “Perhaps, perhaps not.”

  I looked into the guts of the radio again. Obviously, one or more of the components must have been responsible for receiving our voices, another to encode the information carried in the sound waves, others to modulate the information, and still others to generate and send the radio waves skyward to the satellites orbiting the planet. Which components did which I had no idea.

  “It’s hopeless,” I said.

>   “Perhaps.”

  With his long fingernail he scratched the surface of a white crystal. He said, “Perhaps this vibrates at the touch of our voices, vibrates and produces a corresponding vibration in an electric current. Yes, it could cause the electrical resistance to vary, to alter the current. If we could trace the current flow, we might be able to tell why the radio was dead.”

  I shook my head because there were a hundred components stuck to the inside of the radio. I did not think we could trace the current flow or deduce the purpose of the other components.

  “My father,” Soli said, “once taught me the theory of radios and other ancient things. He wanted me to know the history of our technology.”

  “I thought Alexandar was a cantor, not an historian.”

  “Yes, he was a cantor. And therefore he wanted me to appreciate the limits of technology, or rather, the ugliness of practical theories. He himself hated technology, old or new. The best mathematics, he used to say, is pure mathematics, mathematics that can’t be put to use by the mechanics or tinkers. He taught me thermodynamics and hydraulics, the theory of making fusion bombs. Particle theory and hologram theory, and map theory, and information theory, a hundred theories of manipulating things, a thousand. He was a cold, hard, mercilessly precise man, my father. And he wanted me to share his aesthetics, to be just like him.” He closed his eyes, rubbed his temples, and turned his head away from me. I heard him whisper, “But I am not; I am not.”

  I waited a while before saying, “You know about radios, then.”

  He shook his head. “Once the theory of radios was known. But it’s all forgotten.”

  Of course, Soli had not quite forgotten everything. Bits and pieces of his father’s teachings came back to him: Eem waves were made up of magnetic and electric fields vibrating at right angles to each other; information could be enfolded into the eem wave in different ways, for instance, by modulating the wave’s amplitude or frequency; once the signal had left the radio, it was vulnerable to distortion from sunspots and atmospheric ionization and interference from other electrical sources; and so on. There were a hundred ways to introduce noise into the radio’s signal. The elimination of noise, Soli said, was the real problem in transmitting information.

  “But if it’s coded properly, the signal can be as free from error as we choose to make it. There are ways of adding redundancy to the signal, theorems proving a nearly perfect code exists, if we have the cleverness to devise it. Yes, that must be the trick, encoding the signal and filtering out the noise. Discovering the code.”

  He stared at the radio and pressed his lips together.

  “And if it’s not coded properly, the information is destroyed?” I asked.

  “No, information can be created but never destroyed—if you believe the holists. At some level, the information always exists. The trick is keeping it together coherently, and transmitting it without noise.”

  I rubbed my nose, then touched a translucent, blue component. It was as hard and smooth as glass. “But which components encode the information and which filter out the noise? Do you remember?”

  He made a fist and ground it against his temple. “Unfortunately, no,” he said.

  “Too bad,” I replied.

  “Yes, too bad, but there’s always a chance the memories can be recovered.”

  “A chance?”

  We awoke the others, then, and Bardo went to fetch my mother from Anala’s hut. My mother ducked into the hut followed by Bardo, who was cursing because he had crawled into a pile of dog dung. Soli motioned for everyone to gather around him. He laid the radio on his lap and said, “Your help is needed.”

  Bardo shifted his bulk back and forth, in obvious misery. He was still bothered by the nightly risings of his membrum; the furs stretched over his belly almost like fabric over a tent pole. He eyed the radio suspiciously and said, “Too bad, Lord Pilot, too bad.” And then he began scraping dung from the knee of his trousers.

  “Is that all you have to say?”

  “Ah...no. What I meant to say was, with the radio dead, we can’t leave here until deep winter, can we? And that’s too bad because—”

  “No, we’ll heal the radio,” Soli said. “Search your memory. Perhaps you once watched a tinker heal a robot; perhaps there is some bit of childhood lore you might recall.”

  “Not I, Lord Pilot,” Bardo said. “Not I.” Then he laughed, and I did too, because on Summerworld where he had spent his childhood, there are neither tinkers nor robots. On Summerworid the lords and nobles despise complicated mechanisms of any sort because they rightly fear the power of tinkers and programmers and others who understand what they do not. And so on Summerworid, men are made to do the work of machines. “I recall,” Bardo said, “that when slaves were broken in my family’s mines—don’t look at me like that, Mallory, there was nothing I could do—we used to sell them to the damned cutters. The cutters would scavenge their organs. I never saw the workings of a machine until I came to Neverness.”

  My mother made a sour face at Bardo and began nodding her head. To Soli she said, “Do you really expect to heal the radio? Even if we remember? The functions of every part? How could we heal even a single part? Where are the tools? Where is the knowledge? Before we had imprinted the art of flaking flint, could we have straightened a chipped spear point?”

  “Possibly,” Soli said.

  And my mother cocked her head, squinted and said, “The Lord Pilot has always been critical. Of certain people who attempt the impossible.”

  Soli’s eyes narrowed to blue slits but he said nothing.

  All this time Justine had been staring at the innards of the radio. Suddenly her smooth, tanned cheeks broke into a smile. “I can’t be sure,” she said, “how can one ever be sure of childhood memories? Especially memories which seem to be memories of memories, or even memories of what somebody once told us long ago, so I’m not sure I remember correctly, but when I was a little girl—you remember this, Moira, don’t you?” she asked my mother. “When we were little girls, don’t you remember how Mother used to take us to the museum on the Ruede? You don’t remember? Well, I remember, and I once saw a display of ancient electronics.” She carefully touched her long finger to a tiny circle of metal inside the radio. “I may be wrong, but I think this was called a diode or triode, I’m not sure which, but I remember there was something called rectifier diodes which shaped the waveform of the radio signal. Or were they called pin diodes? I’m really not sure.”

  As she spoke, Soli watched her intently, as a thallow watches a snow hare. “Try to remember,” he said.

  Justine smiled at him, touching the fine hair on the back of his wrist. “But why should I try to remember, Leopold, when you’ve seen similar exhibits in the museums of the City? You used to be interested in such things when we were first married. Don’t you remember?”

  Soli’s face suddenly drained of color. He rubbed his eyes, coughed and sighed. “Yes, there is a vague memory,” he admitted. “But it was so long ago.”

  He closed his eyes, wincing as if he had a headache. He held his breath before opening them.

  “It’s true,” he said at last. “Near the Hyacinth Gardens, there is a room full of components like these.” He ran his fingers over his narrow lips. It was the first time I had ever seen him embarrassed. “But the names and functions of the components—well, the memory is gone.”

  “The remembrancers,” I reminded him, “say that memory can be hidden but never destroyed.”

  “Yes,” he said, “the remembrancers say that, the remembrancers.”

  “Their training is not so different from ours,” Justine said. “Some of the attitudes are the same, that’s what Thomas Rane told me one day at the North Ring, he said, “Justine,”…well, I won’t tell you everything he said, but I remember him saying that all we’ve ever seen, heard, felt or thought is recorded somewhere in memory, and anyone can unfold her memory if she tries, if she knows sequencing—I think that’s what Thom
as called it—and imaging, those are two of their attitudes similar to ours.”

  Soli looked at the radio for a while, staring into the past. “Can a pilot think like a remembrancer?” he asked. “Is it possible? Yes, perhaps it’s possible.”

  His eyes closed as he fell into the twentieth of the sixty–four attitudes of hallning, the attitude the pilots call association–memory. From this attitude he passed into imaging, where he remained for a good part of the night. (It was only years later, on the ice of the sea, that he gave me a full account of this grueling labor. At the time, I wondered if he was only sleeping, or perhaps resting in the attitude of open–waiting.) He tried to call up images seen a hundred years ago, but he did not have a remembrancer’s skill in decoding the images from chemical memory of smells into eidetic memory. Since the remembrancers teach that the memory of smells is often the key to greater memory sequences, he tried to key off the memories by scratching and smelling the gallium arsenides and germanium of the radio’s components; he tried forcing by means of logic–memory; he tried very hard to accomplish a thing he had not been trained to do; he tried all that night, tried everything he could think of to unfold his memory, tried until he was so weary he could hardly hold his head up, but in the end he sat squeezing the radio so tightly that the edge cut his fingers and blood leaked across his knuckles. He did this, Justine whispered to me, because he was furious with himself for failing.

  At last he opened his eyes. I did not like the look in his eyes, especially when he began staring from me to my mother. “The radio is dead,” he announced. “There will be no healing it.”

  “Too bad,” Bardo said.

  “When we return to the City,” Soli said, “everyone who’s ever touched the radio will go before the akashics. Moira is right, someone killed the radio, probably to ruin this expedition by stranding us here. And whoever killed the radio will be banished from the City—I swear it.”