Neverness

by David Zindell

  In a moment, I had my spear in hand, and Soli, even my mother and Justine—we all whipped our spears from their holders. There was no room to easily turn the sleds around and no time, so we kneeled behind the bed of my sled, kneeled over Bardo, watching as Yuri slid up to Seif and put his hand on his son’s spear. “Ti Mallory!” Yuri called me. “This is a bad night, and why did you let Bardo catch your spear for you?”

  Seif ripped his spear away from his father’s hand. He shouted, “Welcome, Mallory! You have killed my brother, and I have killed your cousin even though I meant to kill you! Welcome, welcome!” He raised his spear and said, “And now I will kill you!”

  “No,” Yuri said. “Bardo has gone over, and now Liam will have a friend to hunt with on the other side.” Some of the Devaki men, Haidar and Wemilo, were weeping; they had always liked Bardo, and he had liked them.

  “I will kill him now,” Seif said. His face pulled back in a grimace while his arm trembled.

  “No,” Yuri said, “I am tired of killing.”

  “He killed my brother.”

  “And you have killed his cousin.”

  “My brother!”

  “Even so, you must not kill him.”

  “I have to kill him now.”

  “No.”

  “Please.”

  “No, we would all be to blame if you killed him.”

  I bent down over Bardo, listening to the men who had killed my pretend–cousin, my brother in spirit, my friend. I tried to beat his chest back to thumping, tried to breathe life into his lips. But my frantic efforts were in vain because his heart had no blood left to pump. “Mallory!” Seif shouted at me, and Bardo’s lips were cold, and because I was dying inside and still knew nothing of compassion or restraint, I ripped the spear from Bardo’s chest, stood and threw it at Seif. But it was a poor, blind cast and he dodged it easily. “Bardo was a warm man, and I am sorry I killed your cousin,” he cried out. “But your soul is hard like ice, and who will be sorry when I kill you?”

  As he said this, I had a sudden idea. I dropped down and grabbed Bardo by the collar. “Mother, help me!” I said. “Down to the river, quickly, before his brain...” I started dragging him through the snow. “Justine...Soli, we’ll freeze him and take him back with us. The cryologists will save him, the cryologists. Help me, he’s so damn heavy!”

  “Let him go!” my mother hissed. She was always the strategist, always thinking, always planning. “Keep low! If we expose ourselves, we’ll be too easy to hit.”

  But I wasn’t thinking of the Devaki’s spears just then. In truth, they had us trapped and could have killed us whenever they wanted. I pulled at Bardo; Justine and Soli must have reached a similar conclusion because they each grabbed an arm and helped me. Then my mother threw her spear down in the powdery snow, cocked her head, and asked, “Why is my son so foolish?”

  We dragged him down through the thicket and then across the ice crusts to the edge of the river, which roared like black blood through a tube of ice. We eased him out towards the center of the river where the ice was the thinnest. The air was full of our quick, steamy breaths; Justine and my mother were huffing and panting, hopping about like birds. Soli whispered to himself—it was kind of an apology, I thought—that he was stupid for not having foreseen the Devaki would come for us on skis. He ran back to the sled and returned with the ice axes, and we fell at the ice, chopping and hacking so fast and furiously that glistening chips flew up in showers around us. There was crunching and cracking, and then running water as we broke through ice. We opened a hole almost as large as a seal’s aklia. With each of us grabbing a part of his body, an arm or a leg or whatever else came to hand, we lowered him into the hole, submerging him in the freezing water. The water—it was much colder than freezing, really—hurt my hands. The cold was sharp and intense, numbing my fingers to the bone. I could hardly feel to grip his curly hair. “Hold on!” I said, “hold on!” We held him as long as we could, and then we heaved and dragged him up onto the ice. There was a slapping and squishing as the weight of his body squeezed the water from his furs. I hurried to dry my hands and put my mittens back on; if I hadn’t my fingers would have instantly frozen, even as Bardo’s body was now freezing. In moments his furs stiffened, encasing him in a glossy sheath of ice. He lay on his back with his eyes open. I tried to close them but they were as hard as marble. One of his arms, I saw, had solidified in a crooked position; his fingers were clenched as if he were shaking his fist at the stars. I noticed that his furs bulged from his belly as if a piece of driftwood had washed down his trousers and lodged there. I remembered that he still suffered his nightly priapism, and I laughed. It was a harsh sound, which caused the others to look at me. They must have thought I was insane. But it was better to laugh than to cry, and wasn’t it ironic that Bardo had died as he had lived, wasn’t it funny? I did not know if the city cryologists could restore him to life, but if they couldn’t, at least he would go to his grave in a fitting manner.

  All this time the Devaki had been watching us from the river bank. Our “funeral rites” must have seemed incomprehensible to them. After we had chiselled Bardo free from the ice (his furs had frozen fast to the cold, slick surface), we carried him back to the sleds. Seif knocked his spear against a tree and called out, “You see, it is as I have said: The satinka’s witchcraft has touched everything they do. We should kill them all.”

  Under the Devaki’s pointed spears, we placed Bardo on the bed of the lead sled. I covered him, then turned to cut Sanuye away from his harness. It was a bad moment, a whole series of bad, uncertain moments.

  Yuri stroked the shaft of his spear. His eye fixed on Bardo’s body. “We will spear no one,” he said. He looked at Self and shaggy Wicent who stood next to him. “No man of the Manwelina will spear any man or woman of the Senwelina. Liam rests in peace, and there is no need to spear Mallory even though he has killed his own doffel and has given tender livers to an old man who lived long past his time. You will not raise your spears to him even though he raised his spear to Liam and caused the animals to stay away, and has swived his own sister, who was a satinka and therefore needed to die. You will not spear Mallory even though he has killed your brother. We are not hunters of men; it is bad to be hunters of men.”

  We whistled to the dogs, and the sleds inched forward as the Devaki parted to allow us passage. We moved very slowly. The trail led across a gully full of smooth stones and flaky ice crystals as large as knives. We had to partially lift the sleds and carry them across the gully. As we did so, we stepped on the flakes, which snapped and crunched and filled the air with hard, breaking sounds. The Devaki followed us, whispering among themselves; their strident words rushed through the forest along with the rustling of the pine needles and other sounds. I was so full of grief that I stumbled over ice–slicked stones, little aware of where I was going. Because I was sorry for all that had happened, because my throat and eyes and soul were freezing with cold, because I was dying, I had a sudden urge to explain myself, to apologize, to atone for my crimes. I would tell them the truth about myself, the truth about all women and men: that within each of us lives a murderous beast beyond control. It was this desire to make things right that ruined me. I emerged from the gully and turned to face Yuri and Seif. “Liam was a murderer...” I began, but that was as far as I got. I wanted to tell them that Liam was a murderer, as I was a murderer and all men are murderers because life lives off life, and he would have killed me so that he himself might live. We are all murderers because that is the way the world is made. But we are all brothers, too, and sisters and fathers and mothers and sons, and I would have told them this and a few other simple things. “Liam was a murderer,” I said, and Seif must have been waiting for just such a slur because he reached back far behind his head and then whipped his hand forward. A black rock shot towards me. Had it been a spear, I might have knocked it away. Unlike Bardo, my hands had always been quick to follow the movements of my eyes. But it was not a spear because
Seif was obeying the letter of his father’s command not to spear me. It was a heavy black rock, nearly invisible against the black veil of the forest, even if my mind had been alert and clear of other dark images, which it was not. I did not see the rock. It struck the side of my head—I have reconstructed this event from the story Soli later told me. All is recorded; all has been and will always be recorded, so the scryers say. There was a blur in front of my eyes like a black cloud descending, and the rock struck my head and pushed part of my skull against my brain. There was an intense light, a universe of exploding stars. And then I dropped like a beast to the snow, and all was silent and dark and cold.

  * * * * *

  What follows is an account of our retreat across the sea to our rendezvous and our return to the City. During much of this time I was dimly aware of the voices and actions of Soli and the others around me; just as often, though, I was comatose or rising or falling through that hellish state of consciousness in which all the sounds of the world seem at once overloud, monotonous and confused. Much of what I shall relate I pieced together long afterwards. But I was aware of the crucial event—revelation, really—and it burns in my memory still.

  When Yuri saw what his son had done, he was aghast and ashamed. He crossed the gully and placed his hand on my mother’s shoulder as she tried to revive me. He took a single look at my head and announced, “Mallory will go over now, and I can do nothing since it is his time to die.” He nodded at Soli and asked, “Do you want us to bury your son by Katharine’s grave? It is unlucky what has happened between us, and I want no more bad luck.”

  “No, he’s not dead yet,” Soli said. “We’ll bury him ourselves when he goes over.”

  My mother and Justine lifted me onto the second sled and swaddled me in furs.

  “It is a terrible thing to lose a son,” Yuri said.

  “Yes, it would be terrible to lose a son,” Soli said, speaking precisely. “We’re sorry for Liam.”

  “And to lose a daughter, too, even a satinka—that is terrible. I bleed for you.” So saying, Yuri took his knife and gashed his cheek down to his jaw. And then because he was at heart a kind man who could really bear no permanent blame for anybody, he said, “You will go now, perhaps to Urasalia or Kelkel, and it is good you should go. But if you need to visit your daughter’s grave someday, you will be welcome.”

  “And my grandson?” Soli asked. “Did my grandson live? What about the child?”

  Yuri pressed his hand to his slashed face to stop the bleeding. “And who is the father of the child if not Liam or one of Liam’s near–brothers? Isn’t the child a son of Manwe’s sons?” And here he held his bloody hand up for Soli to see, and his voice wavered in a strange way. I do not think he ever suspected that the child was mine. “Isn’t the child my grandson, too? His blood is my blood, and he will be buried near the cave of his grandfathers.”

  After that we went down to the sea. A hut was built from sawed snow blocks. For the rest of the night and part of the next morning, I lay in delirium while my mother fussed over me as she had when I was a child sick with fever. She was frantic over my wound. More than once she asked Justine, “What good are the cutters? If not to take the pressure of blood off the brain?”

  As the day passed and I grew no better, she almost despaired. “What should we do? The skull is broken. I’m sure of it. Oh, Justine, I think he’s dying! But what can I do? To take the pressure off the brain? I could drill holes. In his head through the skull, holes. Or I could wait. But it’s so hard to wait.”

  Soli listened to this while he grilled fish over the oilstones. He stood up and crouched over me, watching my mother gently wrap my head with wolf fur. I did not see the look on his face—he must have been mad over Katharine’s loss—but I remember the sizzling fat, the greasy fish smell, the suffering in his voice when he said, “Yes, Katharine is gone, and soon, Mallory, too. There’s nothing we can do; he probably won’t live through the night.”

  “The Lord Pilot gives up hope too easily,” my mother said as she dribbled water from a skin into my mouth. “But there’s no hope, is there?”

  “There’s always hope.”

  “No, not always,” Soli said, and he covered his eyes with his hand. “We should let your son die peacefully. To drill holes in his head, that would be insane, wouldn’t it?”

  “I won’t let my son die.”

  “You can’t save him.” And then, the mocking words: “It’s his fate. Would you keep him from his fate?”

  “If he dies, I’ll die.”

  “Pilots die,” he said. “Mallory was told about these things. Yes, he knew his luck wouldn’t hold forever. Nobody’s luck lasts that long.”

  “The Lord Pilot is a scryer, then?”

  “Don’t say that word to me.”

  “My son is dying. And the Lord Pilot worries about the words I speak?”

  “Why speak to me at all? Yes, it would better if you didn’t speak another word ever again.” He made a fist and pressed his nose so hard that it bled—so Justine told me years later.

  My mother went out to the sled and returned with a bag of flints. She spilled the stones onto her hand, sorting through them with her finger. The brown, fine–grained flints rattled against each other. “I’ve decided,” she said. “We’ll make a drill. We’ll open a hole and let the blood run free. Will you help me, Justine?”

  Justine was beating ice from our furs and working the inner skin with her teeth to keep it supple. She brushed back her hair, looked up and said, “Of course I’ll help, if you think we really have to open Mallory’s poor head, but it’s such a dangerous thing to do, and I’m not sure it will help no matter what we do, but I’ll do whatever I have to, even though I’m afraid for him, and what will we do to stop the pain when he feels the drill, and…oh, Moira, do we really have to open his head?”

  “No,” Soli said, and he gave Justine a sharp look, plainly disapproving of her support for her sister’s plan. He was angry and his skin was pale; the blood was running away from his face. “The best thing to do would be to wait for him to die. Then we could open a hole in the ice, and there would be that much less weight for the dogs to pull. Yes, drop him down a hole, and his fat friend, too.”

  “Leopold, you don’t know what you’re saying!” Justine gasped.

  And my mother spat out, “The Lord Pilot thinks he knows. What he says with his cruel words. But he knows nothing.”

  “Do not speak to me.”

  “The Lord Pilot should be told that—”

  “Please do not speak.”

  “My son is dying,” my mother said, and her voice thickened into a deep–throated rage.

  “Let him die.”

  I heard these sounds bubbling above me: Justine’s piping soprano as she took my mother’s side against Soli, and the steel of Soli’s deep voice, which rang like a bell about to crack. The argument continued for some time; I remember that there was something in the sound of Soli’s words and in my mother’s anguished plea that made me pay close attention. And then, after an instant of silence, my mother drew in a breath of air, and she spoke the worst words I had ever heard: “He’s your son! Mallory is your son.”

  “My son!”

  “He’s our son.”

  “My son!”

  “To let him die—it would be like killing a part of yourself.”

  “I don’t have a son!”

  “Yes, you have a son. Our son.”

  And then she spoke more words that I did not want to hear, revealing a heritage which I bitterly wanted to deny. Long ago, she told him—and I did not want to know this; I was nearly dead, but I knew I did not want to know this, even though a part of me had always known it, at least ever since I first saw Soli that night in the master pilot’s bar—on the day before his journey to the core of the galaxy, my mother had decided that he would never return. All her life she had been jealous of Justine and envious of the things her beautiful sister possessed. Including Soli, especially Leopold Tisa
nder Soli. She did not love him. I do not think my mother could have loved a man as a wife loves a husband. But she knew that he was the most brilliant pilot since the Tycho—even she always admitted this. She envied him his brilliance and coveted his chromosomes, which she believed to be the fount of his brilliance. Since she desired a child of her own, a brilliant child like Justine’s little girl, why not pair Soli’s fine chromosomes to her own? (Because it is a crime, Mother, I thought. Almost the worst crime imaginable.) The stealing of Soli’s plasm had been an easy thing to do: a quick, seemingly accidental dragging of her sharp fingernails across the back of his ungloved hand one day in the Hofgarten—that was how it all began. She carefully scraped beneath her fingernails and took the few thousand epidermal cells to a renegade splicer, who split the DNA into haploid chromosomes and fashioned a set of gametes. When Soli did not return from his journey and it seemed he would never return, she used the gametes to fertilize one of her eggs and had the egg implanted in her womb. As a result of this despicable slelling I was conceived, and two hundred and eighty days later I was born. So my mother told Soli as I worked my lips, listening to her story, struggling to deny what I dreaded was true.

  For a while there was silence in the hut. Perhaps I sank down into coma; perhaps the listening centers of my brain were growing deaf. I missed much of what Soli said to her, but I remember his shouting out, “...not my son! And when he’s buried at Resa, he won’t be buried as my son!”

  “He is,” my mother said. “Your son.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “Your son. Our son.”

  “No.”

  “I wanted to have your son—was this so wrong?”

  “He’s a bastard. He’s not my son.”

  “I’ll show you, then.”

  “No, do not.”