Neverness

by David Zindell

  I remembered that Liam’s sled had been close behind us along the trail. When I turned, he was running at me. His shape was dark and featureless against the bright circle of the cave’s mouth. He had his seal knife gripped low. He must have thought I was going to kill his mother—I realize that now. Obviously he had not seen me drop my knife. He shoved the knife towards my belly, and I caught his arm. We kicked at each other’s legs, and suddenly we were down, rolling in the snow. He stabbed for my throat but I got an arm up, taking the knife through my forearm. The pain enraged me. I was full of rage and pain, so I got my other arm up in a hold that the Timekeeper had taught me. I grabbed his windpipe. “Sister–swiver!” Liam shouted in my ear.

  There was a moment. His life pulsed against my fingertips. There was a moment of crushing strength, a moment of choice. Perhaps I could have let him go; perhaps we could have left the Devaki in peace. But I raged and I squeezed and I crushed his throat until his face grew red with blood and his eyes bulged from their sockets. I killed him. It was an easy thing to do, really, easier than killing a shagshay or a seal.

  “By God, he’s dead!” Bardo yelled as he helped me stand. “Hurry, we’ve got to leave before Yuri returns.”

  “No,” I mumbled, “there’s Katharine…her body. We’ve got to take her home.”

  “It’s too late, Little Fellow.”

  “No, never too late.”

  “No!” Anala screamed. She was kneeling over Liam, feeling his throat, sobbing.

  “Oh, too bad. By God, it’s too bad, but we’ve got to hurry!”

  We went to find Katharine’s body but it was gone. The women must have dragged it outside the cave. I would have searched for it; I would have grabbed Anala by the hair and made her tell me where she was, but my mother came up to me and said, “Bardo is right. We’ll leave now. Or we won’t leave at all.”

  I am not sure how we forced our way back to our ruined hut. I remember scrambling about on my knees and hands like a madman, scooping up unopened spheres of krydda while Justine and my mother packed our sleeping furs and other things. Somehow we threw everything onto our sleds. I think the Devaki women could have stopped us if they had wanted to. But they were stunned, and I think they did not want even to look at us. As we pointed our sleds downhill, there was wailing from the cave, the wailing of a mother praying for the ghost of a son who had gone over too soon. It was the most pitiful sound in the universe. So piercing was the sound, so insistent and catching that our dogs lifted their heads and howled and whined. We fled into the cold hills, and the dogs did not stop whining for many miles.

  16

  The Death of a Pilot

  If I am fond of the sea and of all that is of the sea’s kind, and fondest when it angrily contradicts me; if that delight in searching which drives the sails towards the undiscovered is in me; if a seafarer’s delight is in my delight; if ever my jubilation cried, “The coast has vanished, now the last chain has fallen from me; the boundless roars around me, far out glisten space and time; be of good cheer, old heart!” Oh, how should I not lust after eternity and after the nuptial ring of rings, the ring of recurrence?

  Never yet have I found the woman from whom I wanted children, unless it be this woman whom I love: for I love you, O eternity.

  For I love you, O eternity!

  fifth death meditation of the warrior–poets

  Somewhere along the stream below the cave, we stopped to heave shagshay meat off the sleds, to lighten our loads. I took my mother into the woods, through the yu trees sparkling with snow. I made her tell me everything. At first, she lied to me, saying that she had no idea why the Devaki had thought Katharine was a witch. But then she grew angry and said, “Wasn’t Katharine a witch? What is a scryer, if not a witch? Why else would my son lie with a scryer? Why would you be so careless? To rut like a beast and have your fun—how did it feel? You men! You have your fun, and then we must have the child. But Katharine wanted the child, didn’t she? Your child. Yes, I know, the child was yours. Your seed. I heard Katharine say so. Your cousin and...and Soli’s daughter, Katharine. She knew. She was a scryer and she saw the truth. Willingly, she took you willingly! That witch! And so I went to her and called her a witch. Can you blame me? She should have aborted the fetus. When she had the chance.”

  It was the second time in my life that I almost struck her. I was sweating and hot despite the bitter cold. I could hardly look at her. “You killed her, then,” I said.

  “Who killed her? Was it I who wanted this expedition? Was it I who went to her bed? My seed? The things you say—my son can be cruel when he forgets to think before speaking.”

  In silence we walked through the deep snow back to the sleds. The fingers of my wounded arm were numb as I gripped the rails. We followed the stream down through the hills below the cave. We wound our way east away from Kweitkel, where the mountain’s many frozen rills and brooks flowed into the stream, swelling it into a small river. Rising up above a bend in the river was a barren hill the Devaki call Winterpock. (The hill is visible from the cave but because of its peculiar barrenness, when the light is poor or diffuse, the hill appears as a depression rather than as a prominence. Hence its ugly name.) The river cut through the woods below Winterpock, a gleaming, white iceway twisting through the trees. Close to the river’s south bank we found Soli spearing fatfish through a hole in the ice. He was out on the river, gazing into the water below him, standing over a pile of fish. As we rounded the bend, his dogs started barking at us. He straightened suddenly, looking at us. He had keen eyes, and he dropped his fish spear, grabbed his shagshay spear from his sled and ran to meet us. “Where’s Katharine?” he called out. He ran along the river bank from sled to sled. He rammed the end of his spear against the bank. “What happened? Where’s Katharine?”

  Justine went up to him and began whispering furiously in his ear. His face hardened and he did not breathe. Then Justine sobbed out the whole story of Katharine’s death. She did not tell him the complete truth. She did not want him to know that my mother had called Katharine a witch, so she told him that Anala had spied on Katharine, had caught her sorting her samples. “Our girl is dead,” she whimpered. “Oh, Leopold, she’s dead!”

  “Why would Anala spy on Katharine?” he asked.

  My mother embroidered the lie, saying, “Anala never liked Katharine. We were friendly, and I know. She didn’t like Yuri talking. Talking and saying Liam should marry Katharine. A few days ago I heard her mention that maybe Katharine had bewitched Liam. I told her this was nonsense. I thought she believed it was nonsense.”

  I sat on the bed of my sled listening to this lie. I had my furs off so Bardo could dress my wounds, which were bleeding, painful and deep. How I hated lying and liars! Is there anything more infectious and ruinous than disinformation, the twisted words of untruth? I looked at Bardo, but he seemed more worried about my wounds than the deepness and poison of my mother’s lies. He wrapped newl skins around the gashes in my arm. He made a knot and tightened the skins. I was cold and numb, shivering like a naked puppy. I wanted to expose this lie of my mother’s, but I was afraid that if I did, Soli might kill her.

  “Nonsense!” Soli said. He stood over my mother looking down at her. “Wasn’t Katharine a scryer? Wouldn’t she have seen it if Anala was spying on her? Why would she be so stupid?”

  “Who knows a scryer’s ways?” my mother said as she twisted her hands together.

  “Why? Why?”

  “Maybe she wanted to die. She seemed to know. All about her death.”

  Soli dropped his head, exhaling a cloud of steam. “Why did she become a scryer?” he said, talking to the rocks of the river bank. “And if she saw her death, why not prevent it? Why? No, no, I should never have let her become a scryer.” He said the word as if it were the filthiest word he knew. He stared at the river while he clenched the shaft of his spear. Then he asked us why we had not rescued Katharine’s body. “That was careless. Yes, so careless, wasn’t it, Pilot?”

>   I was gasping from the pain of my bandage. “There...was...no time,” I blurted out.

  “You might have saved her,” Soli accused.

  “Saved her? She was dead.”

  “If,” Soli whispered to me, “if you had rescued the body, we might have frozen her in the river and taken her to the cryologists. They might have healed her. But you say there was no time. Wasn’t there? Yes, there was time. There was a chance—she might have been saved. But you were not thinking of Katharine, you had to have your little rage, your revenge, your stupid murder, and you say there was no time.”

  In truth, it had never occurred to me to save her this way. Why hadn’t it occurred to me? What was wrong with my thinking? Why was Soli quicker to see the possibilities than I, quicker to grasp the main chance? Could I have saved Katharine? To this day, I do not know.

  “It was too late,” I said. “It was warm in the rear of the cave; her brain would have been dead too long. Would you want the cryologists to restore a drooling child to you?”

  “She was such a pretty girl,” he said as he paced the river bank. “Even when she drooled on me when she was a baby, even when she spat rice cakes in my face. Oh, so long ago, too long—she was so pretty and innocent.” (I must admit that he said this word as if it were the most beautiful word in the universe.) “So innocent before she became a scryer.”

  Justine began to cry, and then, unbelievably, he walked over to her and put his arms around her, and he dropped his head down against her black hair and wept like a boy. I watched this unbelievable scene in silence. The great Lord Pilot stood weeping like a novice, and I turned away, put on my furs, and walked out on the river where the ice was clear and blue. The wind cut me to the skin. I was numb with cold, but the image of Katharine alive and whole was more chilling than the wind. I wondered if Katharine could have been saved and resurrected even as Shanidar had once been saved. But saved for what? No cryologist in the City, I thought—or in the universe—had the skill to resurrect dead, disassociated brain cells. It was an impossible thing. Clearly, Katharine had known this. Somehow she had believed in the rightness of her death. Unlike Shanidar—and how I wanted to believe this!—she had died at the right time.

  When I returned to the sleds, Soli and Justine were leaning against the gray trunk of a yu tree, holding each other. Their grief had infected Bardo, and he was weeping, too. Huge tears rolled down his cheeks into his beard, which was frozen with ice drops. He looked at me through wet, red eyes; I could tell he was angry at me.

  “Katharine’s dead!” he shouted. “And look at you! Dry–eyed as a dead bird! What’s wrong with you? What kind of man are you? She’s dead, and you can’t even cry like a man!”

  How could I tell him the truth? I loved Katharine, and now part of me was dead; to weep for her would be to weep for myself, which would have been a cowardly, shameful thing to do.

  Soli and Justine broke apart, and he walked towards me. The skin of his cheeks was glazed but his eyes were as clear and dry and sober as the eyes of a pilot should he. He asked me, “And what of the child? What happened to my grandson?”

  I was so cold that I didn’t immediately understand his question.

  “Did he die when they took him away from Katharine? Did they smother him?”

  “Of course he’s dead,” I said. “No, it’s more than that—he never really lived. How could he have lived, born thirty–some days too soon? And not born. They gutted her like a seal, Soli, like a damned seal!”

  “You’re sure?”

  I was sure of nothing except my need to build a fire and stare at the flames, to escape the cold ice of Soli’s eyes. “He’s dead,” I repeated. “He must be dead.”

  We talked for a while; everyone except Soli agreed that the child could not have lived. Bardo kept looking off into the woods, obviously afraid that the Devaki men would follow us once they discovered Liam’s body. We were all afraid of this. “We’ve got to hurry,” Bardo said. “Ah, there’s so little time and so far to go.”

  The light was quickly fading from the hills; the shadows drew out long and gray and thin across the chalky snow. Like the sea before a false winter storm, the trees were dark green and rippling in the wind. Already the sky was darkening, bruised with purples and dark blues. We hoped the Devaki would not pursue us through the forest at night. Perhaps they would not pursue us at all. We decided to follow the river down to the sea. There, off the eastern shore of the island, we would turn southward, circling until we came to our rendezvous point. Then we would wait the five days until the jammer fetched us back to the City.

  So began our retreat through the woods homeward to the City. Bardo and I had the lead sled, followed by my mother. Soli and Justine, who seemed to need their privacy, took turns driving the rear sled. Night fell, and it grew very cold. The dogs flung themselves at their harnesses, pulling and panting in the hard air, and we shot along the starlit trail by the river. It was an eerie journey, this nighttime sledding through the nightmare forest. Except for the cracking whips and the dogs’ whines and the occasional shriek of a snow loon (and the river’s eternal roar), the hills were quiet and deserted. The air flowing down the valley carried the essence of wood dust and pine and other scents I could not quite recognize. For half the night, the starlight was so feeble that it illuminated only the white snowpack and the icicles hanging from the trees; the trees themselves were sunken in darkness and nearly invisible. Behind us and ahead, the dogs and sleds were strung out along the trail like gray pearls on a silver strand. Through the forest the strand twisted and wound and seemed to quiver, and we floated above the silken snow buoyed by the frictionless glide of the runners and by our private feelings of fate and fear. The forest turned beneath the starry sky, and the landscape began to brighten. On the eastern horizon Pelablinka rose, a great white blister of light bursting above the conical yu trees. Although it had been a while since the supernova had exploded, its radiance was still intense. I could almost make out the reds of the yu fruit and the blue–green needles. I stared up at Pelablinka, stared at this most recent of the Vild’s exploding stars and wondered how long it would be before the sky was so full of Pelablinkas that there would never be night again? How long before the light, the gamma and the alpha of the supernovas bathed the Civilized Worlds in a radiance of death? How long before human beings had to abandon their planets and flee from the light, flee across the black drears of space to the farthest arms of the galaxy? How long before the stars and the dreams of human beings and a billion billion other living things all died? How long before I died? Never, Katharine had said to me, you will never die. But Katharine was dead, and I was dying inside, slowly dying as I fled through the shimmering trees of the forest. In the bed of my sled, tucked safely beneath the furs, were the krydda spheres full of life, possibly full of life’s secrets. But Katharine was dead, and Pelablinka’s light hurt my eyes, and the krydda spheres meant nothing to me, nothing at all.

  In this manner, each of us silent and alone with our separate thoughts, we followed the river down to where it broadened and straightened a few miles from the sea. We entered a thicket of Yarkona fir. I remember this well. On either side of the trail, the trees were dense and close, two walls of gray needles almost prickling our furs as we guided the sleds between. The wind, what little wind there was, blew at our backs, urging us forward. The bright nimbus of Pelablinka was high in the sky; the whole of the forest seemed made of silver–steel. As we neared the thicket’s edge, the wind died altogether, and it was so quiet I could distinguish the individual pants of the dogs. Tusa was sniffing the air, lifting his paws high, slogging through the powder. Suddenly the wind shifted; it blew at our faces from the east, from the edge of the thicket where the shatterwood trees loomed like straight, black, silent gods. Tusa whipped his head up and barked. All at once Rufo and the rest of the dogs let loose a chorus of howls and barks. There was a blur of black against gray. A spear—it was thick enough to be a mammoth spear—flew out of the woods and stru
ck Sanuye in the side. So powerful was the cast that it pinned the dog to the snow. Instantly there was a tangle of snarled harnesses and yelping, furious dogs. More spears flew from the thicket. One of my mother’s dogs was hit and shrieked like an old woman.

  “Ni luria–mu!” came a shout from the woods ahead, and there, stealing from tree to tree like wolves, were men on skis sliding onto the trail, blocking our way. Their furs rippled in the starlight, and they each carried spears in either hand. The Devaki men, Yuri, Wicent, Haidar and Wemilo, and their near–brothers, Arani, Jaywe, Yukio and Santayana, stood shoulder to shoulder and spear to spear. Seif, who was shaking mad, stepped forward and said, “Li luria, Mallory–mi, you have killed my brother, and I have come to kill you, welcome!”

  Some of them threw their spears. Bardo, who was moving next to me, let out a curse. He pirouetted like an ice dancer avoiding an unexpected pothole. “Watch your side, Little Fellow!” he cried out, and he tried to knock a spear from the air. He stepped in front of me. I will never know whether he did this by accident or design. He swatted at the air like a bear swatting at a stream for a darting flatfish, but it was dark and he had never been good at catching moving things with his hands, not even as a boy, and he missed the spear. The spear went into him. All at once he knocked into me and cried out, “By…God!” The force of his blow propelled me from the back of the sled down into the snow. Bardo stood facing the Devaki with a red yu spear sticking out of his chest. I coughed and wiped snow from my eyes, and there was the spear’s point splitting his furs exactly at the center of his back. The spear had gone clean through him, but he was not dead, he was far from being dead. He was coughing and cursing, shaking his fist at Seif, staggering, stomping the snow like a wounded shagshay bull. And then the blood came, and the pain, and he bellowed and twisted in agony, and he dropped next to me in the snow. “Little Fellow,” he gasped, “don’t let me die.”