18
The Tycho’s Conjecture
The brain is not a computer; the brain is the brain.
saying of the akashics
Some say Neverness is the true Eternal City, the city that will never die. For three thousand years she has stood as a testament to man’s ability to endure. In her granite spires and towers, in her gleaming domes, her streets of fire, in the eyes of her pilots and the farsiders burns the cold flame of our immortality, the soul of mankind. I do not know if she will last for thirty thousand more years, as the scryers prophesy, or for thirty million years. Will the planets last that long? Will the stars? As a child of the City, I have always believed her fate is intertwined with man’s fate. She is the topological nexus of this brilliant galaxy, and she is also the City of Light to which all seekers someday come. There are secrets buried here; there are wonders; there are glories. Neverness, I believe, is eternal in the way that our dreams are eternal; she will endure as long as the race who made her.
So, she is eternal, and she is beautiful, and she embodies man’s very essence. But I must not rhapsodize too strenuously or too long. Our human natures are many–layered. “Verily, a polluted stream is man,” as the Solid State Entity once quoted to me. And Neverness, that quintessential city of man, is a stratified city. She is layered with the finest of mathematicians and imprimaturs and phantasts, as well as the sludge of autists, exemplars, and Yarkona slel–neckers. Strange new sects continually change the composition of the City, clogging the glidderies with bewildered (and bewildering) people. She is a beautiful city—I cannot say this often enough—a city of truth. But she is also a city polluted with politics and intrigues and plots; often she is a quicksilver city of sudden change.
On the eighteenth day of false winter in the year 2933, I returned to the streets and spires of my childhood. The city seemed subtly changed. There were the new buildings, of course. In the Zoo, there was a huge balloonlike, purple aerodome which housed the embassy of the new, winged aliens called the Elidi. (I should mention that there was an ongoing, violent debate among the eschatologists and other professionals as to whether the diminutive Elidi were true aliens or were merely one of the many carked, lost races of man. It was a time of violent debates, as I soon discovered.) The College of Lords, those crusty old women and men who ruled our Order, had at last approved and erected the tower celebrating the founding of the profession of phantasts. The phantasts’ tower stood among the spires of the Old City; it was a strange building of sweeping curves and odd angles, a disturbing building. Its opalescent façade seemed to catch and hold, at different times, all the colors of the City. Like the compositions of the phantasts themselves, the longer one tried to engrave an image of the tower on the mind’s eye, the more it shifted and changed. There were new sects, too, skulking down the back glidderies. Near Rollo’s Ring in the Farsider’s Quarter, I saw a neurosinger, with his cortically implanted biochips, singing himself unending songs of electric bliss. He made me feel uneasy, probably because he seemed too happy. He accosted me, grabbing the sleeve of my kamelaika, and he claimed a spiritual kinship with me, as all neurosingers did with pilots. After I had explained that we pilots were forbidden to continually interface with our ship’s computer (or any other computer), I shunned him as a pilot should. And there were old sects too: Friends of God off Simoom, and ancient Maggids chanting their histories of what they called the first Diaspora, as well as the ever–present autists, harijan, hibakusha and refugees from the stars of the Vild. There were too many warrior–poets—I noticed this immediately. Of course, one warrior–poet is too many, but on the Street of the Ten Thousand Bars, and along the Way, and in the cafes, ice rings and squares, during one long afternoon, I counted ten of them. Why, I wondered, were there so many of the deadly warrior–poets in my city?
For me it was a time of many questions and few answers. On Agathange, my mother had recounted the disastrous end of our expedition. I remembered, on my own, that Soli was my father. And worse things. Of course, neither of us could know what had happened in Neverness during our two–year absence. Immediately upon returning. I asked the Lord Akashic for the news, and there was good news along with the tragic: Bardo was alive! The cryologists had thawed him, healed his ruined heart, and restored him to life. He was off somewhere in the manifold, piloting for the first time since the Timekeeper called his summons for the quest. But others were not alive. I skated down narrow glidderies during the deepest part of the night, and I saw Shanidar’s toothless face smiling at me from the shadows. Wherever I could, I avoided scryers. The flash of a white robe or white fur ahead of me on the street was enough to send me stumbling through the doorways of strange bars and phantast dens. Once I came upon the false–corpse of a moulting Scutari. Its red coils of muscle reminded me of too many things I had seen among the Devaki. Everything reminded me of the expedition. I could not stop thinking of Katharine. I was full of sad, wild ideas: I would return alone to the Devaki and recover Katharine’s body; I would take her to Agathange; and when she was healed, I would marry her, and we would leave the Order, find some beautiful, pristine planet and make a new race of our own. In my more sober moments, I admitted that Katharine’s body had probably long since decayed and been eaten by bears; it did not exist. She was far beyond the restoring arts of the Agathanians or any other gods.
Because the Agathanian godseed was burning inside me, because I was afire with fear, I went to the Lord Akashic and asked him to make a model of my brain. But he could not help me. (Neither did the cetics, holists, or imprimaturs help me when I went to them.) In his dark, wood–panelled chambers, Nikolos the Elder played with the folds of fat hanging from his little face as he lowered the heaume of the akashic computer over my head. He mapped the base structures of my brain, the amygdala and the cerebellum, the fear–producing limbic system and the folds of the parietal lobe. He mapped my brain from cortex to stem, and then he modelled the synapses of the temporal lobes.
“To begin with, as you must know, Mallory, the virus has replaced neurons all through the brain. It’s magic, of course, and I can’t explain it. For instance, in the cluster below the sylvan fissure—it’s all new. That’s where your time sense is—well, it’s really nowhere and everywhere, but it originates there, do you understand?”
“If I understood what the Agathanians had done to me, I would not have come to you, Lord Akashic. My brain, the hologram, myself—is it preserved or does it change? I need to know.”
“Such a miracle!” he said. He shrugged his shoulders and pulled at his pendulous ear lobe. “Well, the hologram is preserved, after all. I think. No, no, no—don’t worry and don’t bother me with any more questions. You’ll return here every tenday, and we’ll make a new mapping. No, make that every five days—this is a rare chance. The magic of gods! It’s too bad we can’t detach your head from your torso, arrange a nutrient bath, and model your brain moment by moment—No, no, I’m just joking, don’t look at me like that!”
Soon after my arrival, I tried to confront Soli. But he, the vainglorious Lord Pilot of our Order, my uncle, my father, would not see me. I wanted to seize his hand in mine, to study the shape and contours of his long fingers for an answer to the riddle of my own. I would make him go with me to the imprimatur for a genotyping. I told myself I wanted proof that he really was my father, but in truth, I was desperate for any evidence at all that I was not his son. For most of a morning I waited in an anteroom outside his chambers at the top of the Danladi Tower. At last a tall, pimply novice emerged from between the arched, obsidian doors, and he told me, “The Lord Pilot is working on a theorem. You may have heard of it—it’s called the Continuum Hypothesis. He’s sworn to remain sequestered until he proves it.”
I was amused at the novice’s rude, arrogant manner. Soli was known to choose arrogant novices to serve him. “How long has the Lord Pilot been at his work, then?”
“He’s been alone for most of two years.”
“Then the Lord Pilot won�
�t see me?”
“He won’t see anyone.”
“Not even me?”
“And who are you?” he asked. “Dozens of pilots, master pilots such as yourself, have tried to see him, even his friends, but he wants to be alone.”
I was glad that he did not seem to know I was Soli’s son. Soli would want to keep this a secret, no doubt. The novice was beginning to annoy me, so I stood up and looked down at him. He blushed, and his pimples became even redder. Perhaps he had heard that I had murdered a man; perhaps he was intimidated by the smile on my still–savage face or by the wildness in my eyes, because he suddenly remembered his manners.
“I’m sorry, Master Mallory,” he said. “But the Lord Pilot would not want to see you in any case. He hasn’t been the same since Justine left him, since your, uh expedition. And you are Bardo’s friend, and Bardo and Justine are, uh...friends, and everyone knows it, too, I think. You have heard the rumor, haven’t you, Master Pilot?”
I had heard the rumor. Everyone said that Justine had left Soli because he was a cruel, wild man. He had broken her jaw one day out on the ice when he had fallen into rage. In revenge, so the rumor went, she had befriended Bardo, and more, she had begun sharing his bed. Some even said they had shared the pit of Bardo’s lightship, laying bare their brains to each other, floating together in nude bliss. Could it be true? Had their separate selves joined with the neurologics of the Blessed Harlot? Had they shared the same extensional brain, solved the same theorems, viewed the manifold through the same inner eyes, thought the same thoughts? Although there was no proof of this forbidden telepathy, it was the scandal of the Order. Many of Justine’s former friends—fine master pilots such as Tomoth of Thorskalle, Lionel Killirand and Pilar Gaprindashavilli—had spoken against her, demanding that the Timekeeper punish her or even banish her from the City, and banish Bardo, too. Others had remained more faithful. Cristoble the Bold had announced that if Justine were banished, he and his friends would leave the Order with her. Perhaps, he said, they would flee to Tria and join the merchant pilots; perhaps they would find a new planet and found an order of their own.
Of course, this vicious rumor had quickly reached the ear of the Timekeeper. Immediately that grim, old man had reminded Bardo of his oath to quest for the Ieldra’s secret, and he had ordered him into the manifold.
“But your fat friend will return,” the Timekeeper said to me at the top of his tower one day. “Even as you’ve returned to me. Luck! It’s my bad luck that Bardo is run by his lusts. But aren’t we all, eh? Have you heard the talk? So, there have been changes in the City since your damn expedition. Some of my pilots—I won’t mention their names—are talking of leaving the Order. Leaving, I said! But no, they won’t leave.” He walked over to the chair in front of the window and gripped the curved back rail as if he would never let go. “When Bardo returns, you’ll talk to him. You’ll explain that it’s unseemly for one of my pilots to swive the Lord Pilot’s wife. Now tell me about Agathange. Sit down! Tell me how my bravest pilot returns to me resurrected instead of lost down the black hole of death.”
When Bardo returned thirteen days later, I was faced with the most painful of changes: The changing of a man who, like myself, had returned from the black hole of death. I met him in the Hofgarten, and we drank skotch and beer as we had in the master pilot’s bar four years ago. It was an unhappy, painful afternoon of angry words and misunderstood silences. Because that day marked the beginning of my great change, I must record its miraculous events in greater detail.
It is curious that I have made so little mention of the Hofgarten, for in some ways it is the most important structure in the City. The Hofgarten, a huge, domed circle of cafes and bars, sits on the cliffs overlooking the sea. The cafes are built around the rim of a great ice ring, and they support a magnificent clary dome, the largest of its kind, or so it is said, on any of the Civilized Worlds. Each cafe—or bar—has two large windows: a convex window through which one can watch the skaters as they make circles around the ice ring, and a concave window allowing a view of the Old City or the Farsider’s Quarter or—depending on which segment of the rim the cafe occupies—the icy waters of the Sound. The cafes are always full of farsiders and aliens who come to informally meet the men and women of our Order. (And, sometimes, to skate inelegantly around the ice ring.) It is a festive place where the haikuists and spelists delight with their quaint entertainments. But the cafes are also thick with exemplars trying to persuade eschatologists to the logic of their breeding strategies, and with warrior–poets and democrats and merchant princes and many others who plot, conspire and scheme. In the cafe nearest the edge of the cliffs I found Bardo hunched over a foamy mug of beer. “Alark Mandara told me I would find you here,” I said.
“Mallory! I knew you couldn’t stay killed!” He jumped up from the table, shoved a wormrunner out of his way, and threw his arms around me. “Little Fellow, Little Fellow,” he said as he thumped my back and tears filled his eyes. “We’re alive! By God, we are!”
He pulled the iron table closer to the outer window so that we might have a bit of privacy. We sat down on the hard iron chairs. I looked at him, all the while tapping the toe of my boot against the black and gold triangles of the parqueted floor.
“By God, what are you staring at?”
Bardo, my great, strong, mountain of a friend, had changed. He no longer looked like an Alaloi. He had been to a cutter who had shaped him back to his old self—almost. Apparently, he had shaven the thick black beard, and loose folds of flesh hung from his cheekbones. Without his beard he looked younger; he also seemed angry, pale and thin, like a great white bear at the end of deep winter. Too, too thin.
“Ah, you see, it’s true what they say—Bardo is not well. Am I not? No, I’m not well. Well. I shall drink beer and fill my gut with newl steaks, and I shall be well.” So saying, he drained his mug and called for a large plate of meats and kafir and buttered bread. As he stuffed his cheeks, he glanced at me nervously, as if keeping a secret from me.
“I missed you,” I said.
The cafe was fetid with people; it was noisy, full of toalache and tobako smokes. The table top was littered with dirty plates and mugs encrusted with sour–smelling beer dregs. Obviously, Bardo had been here for a while, perhaps all day, eating and drinking.
“Two years you’ve been gone,” he said. “The hardest two years of my life. I thought you were dead. Oh, the things I’ve suffered because of you and your damn quest!”
The novice whose pleasure it was to serve us, a nervous boy with large, too–sensitive brown eyes, brought me a pot of coffee and poured the aromatic liquid into a large blue mug. I sipped the coffee—it was Summerworld coffee, thick, rich, delicious coffee—and I asked Bardo to tell me what had happened. As he wiped crumbs from his carmine lips, he looked at me sadly and confided his greatest fear. He tapped his head with his fingers and said, “As a pilot I’m ruined. The finest fruit of this overripe brain—I’ve plucked it and eaten it and spat out the seeds. My discoveries, my inspirations, my moments of genius, never to come again. It’s a terrible thing, my friend, to know that the best has been, and all the remaining days of our lives lead on to rot and decay.”
He called for another beer. As the room grew ever fuller, he rubbed his forehead and glared at me. “I am not myself, you see. After your damn expedition—did you know everyone is calling it Mallory’s Folly?—after we returned to the City, when the cryologists thawed me, when the cutters healed my heart...well, by God, they waited too long! It’s my brain that’s rotted. Too many brain cells dead and decayed, too bad. I’m not the pilot I once was. It’s gone, Little Fellow. The theorems, the associations, the beauty—all gone. I’ve tried to face the manifold, but I can’t. I’m too stupid.”
I ordered a tumbler of skotch—Bardo had chosen one of the few cafes in the Hofgarten that served skotch—and I drank it quickly. And then another and yet another. I suddenly did not want to hear his story, his moans of self–pity. I
drank quickly to drug my brain cells into stupidity, but the skotch seemed to have little effect. Perhaps, I thought, I had drunk too much coffee.
“There’s nothing wrong with your mind,” I said. “In time, it will all come back. The mathematics—you’re a born pilot.”
“I am?”
“Soli once said you could be the finest of pilots.”
“He did? He said that? Well, he’s wrong. My brilliance is dead along with the brain cells, and...and other things, too.”
“What other things?” I asked him.
“Other things.” He stared at the table top’s etched flower patterns and would not look at me.
“Tell me,” I said.
“No, I can’t.”
“Tell me.”
“You’ll laugh at me.”
“I promise I won’t.”
“No, I can’t tell you.”
“Tell me.”
“It’s too embarrassing, Little Fellow, too, too embarrassing.”
“You’ve never kept secrets from me before,” I said.
“I don’t know how to tell you.”
“Well, just tell me.”
“I can’t.”
“With your lips, just speak the words, then.”
“No, no.”
I looked through the spaces between the table’s delicate, wrought flowers down at his lap. His wool pants were loose over his belly. “Have you been cured of Mehtar’s poison? Tell me.”
“Ah, you’ve guessed it, haven’t you? But what is there to tell? When the cryologists thawed me, I went to a new cutter who changed my body back to the magnificence of my old self. And he cured me of Mehtar’s poison, cured me too well, by God! You should know, I no longer suffer from the nightly risings of my spear; I no longer suffer its rising at night or during the day or…or ever. It’s gone: Bardo’s mighty spear softened like a rotting log. Oh, too bad, too bad!”
Neverness Page 38
