He promised me then that he would never leave the Order of his own choice, even if the sky filled with a thousand supernovas. “In my soul I love this City and my friends almost as much as I love Justine. I would save her if I could. Which is why I’ll tell you what I shall tell you. Hold your breath, Little Fellow, because I’ve some hard news for you.”
So I learned that in Neverness, the City of Light, the Last City, the City of a Thousand Plots, there was a plot to remake the Order. It was almost as if the City had been waiting for me to return from Agathange. Since then, a group of pilots and professionals had been plotting to change things according to their designs. And the architect of the plot, Bardo told me sadly, reluctantly—the leader of the conspirators who would unmake the Timekeeper and perhaps everything else was my mother, the master cantor, Dama Moira Ringess.
19
The Parable of the Mad King
What good is a warrior without a war, a poet without a poem?
saying of the warrior–poets
Later that day I tried to find my mother. But her little house in the Pilot’s Quarter was empty. I went to her friends, Helena Charbo and Kolenya Mor, among others, but no one seemed to know where she was. And no one seemed willing to admit that there was a plot to overthrow the Timekeeper, much less remake the Order. Bardo had obviously been listening too hard to the gossips, Kolenya told me. And according to Burgos Harsha, who nervously picked at his bushy eyebrows as I talked to him, there was no plot. “It’s true many of the pilots are unhappy,” he said. “But who would plot against the Timekeeper? Who—and I might add that there are pilots and professionals who might be willing to campaign for certain changes, but changes within the structure of the canons, of course, legally, legally—who would be so stupid?”
When a few days passed and still my mother did not return to her house, I began to worry. Li Tosh swore he had seen my mother in the company of a warrior–poet one night near the Merripen Green in the Farsider’s Quarter. This was proof that she was alive, he said, and I should not worry. Perhaps my mother had finally taken a lover. But I did worry; I was ill with worry. I did not believe she had taken a lover. Then why else would she seek out a warrior–poet? Why do otherwise reasonable people risk contact with warrior–poets, if not to have their enemies murdered? And who was her main enemy, if not Soli? She had slelled Soli’s DNA to make me, and this was a great crime. Soli could even demand that the Timekeeper have her beheaded, if Soli desired revenge, if he would acknowledge that I was his son. I knew Soli would never admit this to anybody, not even to himself. But could my mother be sure? No, she could not be sure, and so she plotted her plots and hid in the Farsider’s Quarter and consorted with murderers—all without bothering to confide in me. Obviously, she did not trust me.
If I have given the impression that the whole of our Order was busy with plots and politics, this was not so. There was always the quest. Great discoveries were still being made; for a few, it was still a time of inspiration and daring. Two years ago, while I hunted silk belly in Kweitkel’s forest, a team of five pilots had proposed to penetrate the Silicon God. Only one of them, Anastasia of The Nave, had returned to tell of wild spaces more impenetrable than those of the Entity. Another pilot, the fabulous Kiyoshi, had come across a planet believed to be the ancestral home of the Ieldra. Great deeds, great inspirations: A programmer working with a splicer and a historian (and what an unholy triad that must have been!) had retraced the evolutionary pathways and had made a model of early man’s DNA. Master splicers were at work decoding this modeled DNA, hoping to discover the secret of the ancient gods. And of course I must mention the fabulist who created a scenario in which Old Earth was not destroyed. This led Sensim Wen, the semanticist, to reinterpret the meaning of a Fravashi tone poem, which in turn inspired a holist to propose a different model for the progression of the Swarming. A phantast, who studied the new model, retired to his den and re–created a hologram of what he called “The Galaxy As It Might Have Been.” Finally a pilot studied this hologram and journeyed near the inner edge of the Orion Arm where he expected to find Old Earth. All to no avail, of course. But it was a gallant attempt, if somewhat ridiculous and bizarre.
Just as bizarre, in its own way, was the memory—the revelation—of Master Thomas Rane, the remembrancer. Because this revelation ignited a bitter argument among the eschatologists and was to prove important in the crisis which followed my return to the City, I record here his famous words as he remembered down the dark spiral of racial memory into his distant past.
I am named Kelkemesh, and my arms are young and brown as coffee. I am wearing the skin of the wolf I killed when I first became a man. The skin is wet. I am standing on a ridge high on a mountainside. It has rained, and there are mists in the green valleys below, a rainbow above. The stillness is very real. And then in the sky, at the rainbow’s edge, there is a hole. There is a hole in the sky, and it is as black as my father’s eye. From the hole comes a silvery light, and then white light; soon the entire sky is a ball of light. The light falls on me like a rainshower. As I open my mouth to scream, the light runs down my throat. My spine tingles. The light runs down my spine into my loins. My loins burn; my loins are afire; my loins fill with burning raindrops of light. It is the god Shamesh inside me and he is burning his image into my flesh. Shamesh is the sun; Shamesh is the light of the world; Shamesh speaks and his voice is my own: “You are the memory of Man, and the secret of immortality is inside you. You will live until the stars fall from the sky and the last man dies. That is my blessing and my curse.” And then the light is gone. In the sky the rainbow is fading; the sky is a blue eggshell without holes.
I run down the mountainside to the huts of my father, Urmesh, the shaman. When I tell him I am filled with god–light, he tears his white hair and looks at me in anger and jealousy. He tells me I have been bitten by a demon; the gods do not touch men with their light. He prepares a burning spear–point to let the demons out of my loins. My brothers are called to hold me. But I am full of fire and light, and I rise up and kill my brothers and kill Urmesh, who is no longer my father. Shamesh the god is my father. I take my bloody knife and wrap myself in my wolfskin and go down into the valleys to live among the peoples of the world.
It was argued that the great remembrancer’s memory was a false memory. Perhaps. Or perhaps he really had relived the lives—and deaths—of his ancestors. I myself believed he had re–created the primal myth of the Ieldra and had encoded it as memory. But who could really know? During those chaotic, troubled days, who knew which of us were true seekers and which were merely fooling themselves?
Soon after this, on a day of mashy paste, the kind of snow that usually only falls in midwinter spring, the Timekeeper summoned me to his tower. Although the nature of life is change, there were a few things in my life which seemed to never change. That ageless, changeless man bade me sit on the familiar chair by the glass windows. The chair’s black and red inlaid squares of jewood and shatterwood were as hard as they had always been. The clocks were ticking; the room was full of the pulsing, hissing and rhythmic beating of clocks. One of them—it was a glass–encased clock whose visible workings were carved of jewood—chimed. The Timekeeper, who paced back and forth before the curved windows, shot me a grim look as if to say the clock chimed for me.
“So, Mallory, you’re looking exceptionally wary today.”
He circled my chair so that he stood staring down at my profile. I inhaled the aroma of coffee on his breath. When I lifted my head to examine the spiderweb of lines at the corners of his eyes, he said, “No, don’t turn your face to me. Resume the proper attitude—I’ve questions to ask you.”
“And I would question you,” I said. “Do I have anything to be wary about?”
“Ha, the young pilot would question me?”
“I’m not so young anymore, Timekeeper.”
“Just a little while ago, less than four years ago, you sat in that chair and bragged how you were going to penetrate the spaces of
the Entity. And now—”
“Four years...can be a long time.”
“Don’t interrupt me! And now you sit here almost as young and twice as foolish. Plots! I know certain pilots plot against me. Your mother—I’m told she’s been talking with warrior–poets. Don’t try to deny it. What I want to know, what I need to know is: Are you your mother’s son or your Timekeeper’s pilot?” He rapped his fingernails against the metal casing of one of the clocks. There was a “ping” of ringing chrome. “Tell me, Mallory, where’s your devious mother, your bloody, slel–necker of a mother?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “And don’t say that word, no matter what you think she’s done.”
“I know what your mother has done,” he growled. “And I know who your father is.”
“I don’t have a father.”
“Soli is your father.”
“No.”
“You’re Soli’s son—I should have seen it years ago, eh? Who would have thought your mother would be so bold as to slel his damn plasm? So, I know what your mother has done, and I’m reasonably sure she plans to murder Soli, possibly me as well—your goddamned mother!”
I gripped the chair’s curved arms, which were shiny and worn from the hands of a thousand sweating pilots before me. I struggled to say nothing, to keep my hands locked to the chair.
“So, she’s betrayed me, but you wouldn’t betray me, would you, Mallory?”
“You think I’m a traitor, then?”
“Did I say you were a traitor? No, you’re no traitor, I hope, but what about your friends?”
“Bardo has given me his word he won’t—”
“Bardo!” he roared. “That tube of blubber, that disobedient mule! Even if I ignored his adulterous ways, his cowardly talk has already infected your friends. It’s the younger pilots I’m thinking of: Jonathan Ede and Richardess and Debra wi Towt. And the older pilots, Neith and Nona, and Cristobel. And my professionals. And my academicians, such as Burgos Harsha, a hundred others. There’s talk of them leaving the City forever. Schism! They’re talking schism, the ruin of the Order!”
“There is talk of change,” I agreed.
“Too great a change is death.” He stepped over to the window. He pressed his forehead to the frosted glass, then sighed. “Do you think I’m deaf to what’s being said? So, the Order has stagnated for a thousand years; so, the professions and professionals have grown rigid in their thoughtways; so, we need new dreams, new problems, new ways. Do we? What do you think?”
I thought what many of my Order thought: that pilots too often fell out against their fellow pilots in jealousy or rivalry, that profession vied with profession, and within the individual professions, different schools fought among themselves to impose their interpretation of the Order’s purpose on all the others. The original, unifying vision of a spacefaring humanity discovering its place and purpose in the universe had dissolved into a hundred different philosophies, notions and conceits. “But isn’t that the fate of all religions and orders, then? In the end, divisiveness and death?”
“You mean divisiveness and war. If I let my pilots go their separate ways, in the end there would be war—a great, filthy, bloody war.”
I smiled because I thought the Timekeeper was being overly dramatic. I quoted the historians, saying, “War is a dead art, as dead as Old Earth. There are restraints, aren’t there? The lessons of history? I don’t think anyone in our Order would wish to reinvent war.”
“And what of the war between Greater Cihele and Mio Luz?”
“That was a skirmish,” I said. “Not a real war.”
“Not a real war! Ha, what do you know of war? The tychists dropped fusion bombs on the determinists. How many were killed? Thirty million?”
I shook my head, trying to remember my history lessons. “I don’t know,” I said. “Thirty something.” And then a few moments later, the memory came. “Thirty million four hundred and fifty–four thousand—approximately.”
“And you call that a ‘skirmish’? So, call it what you will, why do you think this skirmish didn’t spread into a ‘real war’? Restraint, hell! What do you think keeps the Civilized Worlds at peace? It’s because war is ruinously expensive to wage—that’s the most important reason. Even though the Greater Cihele and Mio Luz are connected by a single pathway, it took the incompetent tychist pilots with their filthy fusion bombs—those few who survived the manifold—it took them thirty years to reach Mio Luz. Our rawest journeyman could make the journey in thirty days.”
“Time is mutable,” I said, mocking one of his famous sayings. But my smile faded as I accepted his point. If journeying through the manifold became easy, war would become easy, too. And who could journey as easily and elegantly as a pilot of our Order? What could be more disastrous than a war between our Order’s different factions? “But even if war were easy,” I objected, “it would be too terrible, and no one would go to war against any other, I think. Besides, skirmish or war, the people of the Greater Cihele and Mio Luz were insane. Most peoples and planets love peace.”
Unexpectedly, he walked over and stood above my chair. He scowled and said, “Mallory, Mallory, you’ve been bludgeoned, cut, swived, hated, loved and taught the truth but you’re still naïve.” He brushed back the white hair from his forehead and sighed. “Naïve, I say! What’s the essence of history? The desire for peace? Ha! War’s the price of our quest for power; war’s been the curse of man for twenty thousand years. It’s the nature of things that no one can choose peace, but anyone can make all others face war. Why do you think the Earth was destroyed? Shall I tell you a parable of Earth’s history?”
I shifted about in my chair, trying to get comfortable. Because I had no choice but to listen to his parable, I said, “Tell me.”
He smiled and cleared his throat. “Once a time,” he began, “all men lived in tribes and the air was clean and there was food for all, and peace was the law of the Earth. But then one tribe, because they loved themselves more than their mother planet, grew deaf to this law. So they fell into insanity. They grew too large and too powerful. They found that it was easier to steal their bread from others than to bake it themselves. They coveted an empire, a life of ease. They sent their armies westward against the four nearest tribes, each of which had a great love of peace. But peace they could not have. The first tribe faced spear with spear, but they were too few, and the insane tribe slaughtered them down to the last man. The women, of course, were raped and given hoes to slave their lives away with their children in the wheatfields. The second tribe, seeing what had happened to the first tribe, flung down their spears, for the moment, and kissed the feet of the insane tribe’s king. They pleaded for their lives. If only the king would allow them to keep their wives and children, they would be good warriors and do as the king commanded. Thus the second tribe was absorbed and the insane tribe grew larger still. The third tribe, who loved their freedom as they loved their lives, fled southward to the desert where the living was hard and there was barely food and water enough for all. The fourth tribe wanted neither to be exterminated, nor to be absorbed, nor to flee. They loved their land passionately. And so their king, who was a visionary man, ordered his warriors to make their spears longer than those of the insane tribe’s warriors. When battle came the greater numbers of the insane tribe were checked by the longer spears of the fourth tribe. So neither tribe could prevail. Then the visionary king, who had come to relish the taste of war, realized that in the next battle, the insane would return with yet longer spears. “We must have more warriors!” the visionary king exclaimed. And he turned his gaze further westward, and his armies enslaved the western tribes and made still longer spears. And so the fourth tribe became as insane as the insane tribe. In this manner, like a disease, the habit of war spread outward to the farthest tribes of the Earth. The tribes grew into empires which destroyed the nearer empires, and they lamented that they could not make war on the farthest empires because the distances were too great for their ar
mies to cross. At last one king, the cleverest of all, attached rockets to the butt end of his men’s spears and fusion bombs to their tips. When all the kings of all the empires of the Earth did likewise, the clever king observed that war was obsolete and impossible. If any empire cast its spears at another, he said, it would assure its own destruction, for against the rain of spears tipped with fusion bombs even the finest and most costly shields were useless. And so there was peace on Earth...until the court fool of the clever king reminded him that he had forgotten one thing.”
He paused here in his fervid speech to wipe the sweat from his forehead. He looked at me expectantly to see if I would ask him what the clever king had forgotten. Although I did not want to hear the words of an allegorical fool, I asked, “And what had the clever king forgotten?”
The Timekeeper grinned and replied, “He’d forgotten that he and all the people of his empire and all the empires of the world were insane.”
I held my breath and asked, “And then?”
“You know the end of the parable,” he said softly. “You know.”
I was dutifully thoughtful for a while. Except for the ticking and clicking of the clocks and our syncopated breathing, the room was silent. Outside the window the snow fell in sheets. I was cold, but he was sweating. Beads of sweat rolled down his flat cheeks, down the hard line of his chin. I could not help smiling and saying, “Timekeeper, it seems that you’ve forgotten one thing.”
“Eh?”
“The third tribe, the one that fled to the desert where the living was hard—what ever became of that tribe?”
He laughed then, a deep, rich laugh full of irony and sadness. I sat in my chair squeezing my forearms. It was one of the few times I had heard him laugh.
“We’re the third tribe,” he said. “And deepspace is the desert. All the peoples of the Civilized Worlds have fled from war; we’re all hibakusha. And there’s peace in the galaxy, a fragile, relative peace, but there are always new tribes waiting to fall into insanity. Why do you think we must tyrannize the fallaways? It’s because we can’t allow these tribes to grow. Our Order and the Order of the Warrior–Poets—for three thousand years we’ve kept the peace.”
Neverness Page 41
