Neverness

by David Zindell

  As if the fresco had been listening to his words (or perhaps Dawud had timed his words with exquisite precision), just then, at the center of the painting a star cluster flared into prominence. The most brilliant of the stars was the Poet’s Glory; orbiting that hellish, blue binary was a small, ochre speck representing the planet Qallar. As the perspective shifted and magnified, the planet grew to the size of a snow apple. Dawud looked at me, smiled, then plunged his hand into the folds of his cloak. He removed a knife; it was a double–edged murderous, shining thing. He held it in front of me. “Is my will free?” he asked me. “Can I let go of this knife or not, as I will?”

  I was suddenly aware of the pungent pepperiness of kana oil, the dreadfully slow inrushing of my breath. He closed his fingers around the knife. He moved very fast. He was balanced and fluid as he entered into the slow–time state of the warrior–poet. My own time sense began to dilate and slow, otherwise I could never have tracked his motions. Between his thumb and forefinger he held the knife. He whipped his arm forward. The knife tore through the painting’s clear outer membrane into the heart of the red sphere that was Qallar. There it quivered. A thick soup of red and orange paints bubbled from the wound, coloring the knife with liquid rust. The bubbling subsided and slowed to a pulsing ooze and then stopped altogether. Like a quickly hardening lava, the paint had completely covered the haft of the knife. It looked like a volcano uplifted from the painting’s surface.

  “Look at the painting, Pilot.”

  I stared at the desecration, horrified. As I stared, I noticed a peculiar thing: The painting was healing itself. Dawud, whatever his intentions had been, had failed to destroy it. There was a violent surge of scarlets and bursting orange as the colors reorganized themselves, revealing the most startling pattern of design. I had seen the fresco many times before, but never had I watched the drama which played itself out in front of us. From Qallar’s running surface a red blob of paint broke loose and began migrating across the length of the painting. As it drifted, it glowed and divided and grew. The blob—it began to look more and more like a twenty–day fetus—fell through a black pool of living paint until it reached a small yellow star that I recognized as Darrein Luz. Then there were many stars, and for a moment the red blob disappeared into a shower of light. Suddenly, in the spaces beyond Darrein Luz, between the white stars, round, red moons began to coalesce. There were many of them. The moons had embedded themselves in a nebula I knew well. They had chosen the stars of the Solid State Entity. The moons began to pulsate, and red streamers of light projected out from their surfaces, touching each other, joining moon to moon in a web of red filaments. I realized, of course, that the moons were meant to represent the brains—the brain—of the Entity. But I could not understand why and how the Fravashi fresco could hint (if a painting could indeed hint) that there was some connection between the planet of the warrior–poets and the Entity’s mysterious origins. Perhaps Dawud’s knife had permanently warped the painting’s patterns; perhaps there was no connection.

  “The programs, Pilot, what controls the programs?”

  I rushed him, then, hoping to catch him in my arms, to hold him until the robots came to take him away. But while I had been watching the painting, he had removed a needle–dart from his cloak. I grabbed him and tried to wrench him down to the carpet, but he stuck the dart in the side of my neck. The dart must have been tipped with a drug because almost instantly my muscles began seizing up and I could not move. He unlocked my hands from around him and pushed away. I stood there paralyzed, frozen. I could not even blink my eyes.

  He smiled, reached out and touched my eyelid, pressing on my eye, testing. His fingers were hard, skilled and gentle. He said, “This is an elegant drug. It will edit your bio–programs—for a time. Your muscles will still listen to your brain, but you will not control the brain’s signals. Can you control the beating of your heart? No, and for a few hours, you will have no control over yourself. Where is free will now, Pilot? Who programs the programmer? Can you tell me? No, you can’t move your tongue, even though you can feel it pressed into the cracks between your teeth. Now, Pilot, I must go to your mother. Goodbye.”

  He left me standing there, silently and freely cursing my lack of freedom. I could not help watching the painting. The colors were beautiful and they did not stop moving.

  21

  The Eyes of a Child

  The first and hardest teaching of our profession always must be to view the world as through the eyes of a child.

  Marinar Adam, Twelfth Lord Cetic

  We do not see things as they are; we see them as we are.

  saying of the cetics

  The effects of Dawud’s drug lasted not a few hours but a few minutes. Soon, I could move again of my own free will, and I was immediately afraid of the implications of this freedom. Did the godseed in my head seek out and neutralize—devour—invasive drugs, much as it sought out and replaced dead brain cells? Or had it altered certain of the neurotransmitters, leaving me immune to the actions of drugs? I had no time to wonder at the drug’s ineffectualness, not if I was to follow the warrior–poet to my mother. I staggered out of the room and ran down the empty hallway adjacent to the Gallery of the Thousand Ice Glyphs; by means of this shortcut I hoped to reach the street in time to catch sight of him. When I passed between the gleaming entrance pillars, I found that he had already descended the fifty–four steps and disappeared into the crowds skating along the glissade below. A horologe that I stopped told me this. When I began sprinting down the steps, he waggled his long finger at the glissade to the west and called out, “You’ll never catch a warrior–poet—are you mad?”

  I was very mad, or at least very angry, so I pushed through a group of fabulists. One of them, a skinny, delicate woman with pale, blue–veined skin and fearful eyes, told me that the warrior–poet had recently passed the Darghinni Rotunda. And as I rounded that huge, cylindrical building, a wormrunner muttered a few sullen words. The warrior–poet, he said, had entered the Hyacinth Gardens. I sensed a note of fear in his voice as he rubbed his beard and asked, “But why would you want to find a warrior–poet? Where’s the profit in dealing with those madmen?” In this way, by stopping and questioning people seemingly at random, I made my way down the long band of ice into the Hyacinth Gardens.

  It was a tortuously inefficient manner in which to proceed—I realized this almost at once. The glissade was crowded with exemplars and harijan come to view the blue snow dahlia and other flora of the Gardens. In the patchy, uneven light of late afternoon, the crowds seemed hungry, whether for the flaming red beauty of the alpine fireweed or for their evening meals it was difficult to tell. The wind came in spurts and gusts, and the sky was full of dense clouds which intermittently blocked the sun; snow flurries blew with a chill intensity and then, a few moments later, would cease, and there would be a moment of calm and sudden sunshine. As a result of this fickle weather, without warning people would come to an abrupt, grinding stop in order to open or readjust the folds of their robes. (Or to zip or unzip their kamelaikas.) Here a Friend of God would pause to wipe the rancid, garlicky sweat from his forehead and there, a quarter–mile later, he would shiver, whisper a silent supplication, and hunch down in his robes as he tried to appreciate a grove of yu trees. Many were skating in and out of the warming pavilions; the normal flow of traffic had degenerated into hundreds of turbulent pockets of men and women in search of thermal comfort. I had to push and dart to make any progress at all. To my right were fields of yellow litlits and alien trees, and beyond them, the broad, blue glimmer of the Run where it curved along the edge of the Pilot’s Quarter; to my left, the twisted, beautiful shapes of the winter bonsai grew according to the whims of the splicers who had designed them; straight ahead as I skated were people, a surging river of people, too damn many people.

  Near the middle of the Gardens, where the ice sculptures glittered and the air smelled of snow dahlia and a sweet, minty alien scent, I noticed the imprint of fe
ar stamped on the face of an astrier. I paused to ask her if she had seen the warrior–poet pass. I had this notion that a warrior–poet sailing quickly by might leave a track of fear in his wake. She was a stout, pretty woman, and she stood like a rock between me and her fourteen children, half–defiantly, half in fear. She denied that she had seen the warrior–poet. At first I did not believe her. I wasted precious moments while she stood with her hands on her hips and shrilly informed me that the strictly celibate, death–seeking warrior–poets were as different from astriers as night from day; if she had seen the warrior– poet, she said, she would have pulled the hoods over her children’s eyes, to shield them from evil. I moved closer to her, the better to read her face, and she stuck her chin out, as if to warn me away. I drank in the thick, womanly musk emanating from her woollens; I listened to the subtle tremolo of her voice. I heard fear in the tenseness of her vowels, the quick, stuttering sounds of nervousness and doubt. Faintly I smelled her fear. All at once—and I did not know how I had come to this skill—I realized it was not a fear of the warrior–poet, or at least, it was not a fear of warrior–poets in particular. It was a more general fear that I detected, in a way, a fear of all things or anything that might harm her children. She, who had no doubt left the hundreds of her youngest children safely in the care of her husbands on Goodrest, was quietly, if subliminally, afraid of every person on the glissade. If she had seen a warrior–poet, her fear would have built to a roar and screamed from her eyes. Perhaps she would have clenched her hands and sweated a profuse, acrid sweat as her bio–programs prepared her to flee or fight. With excitement I realized that fear has many colors, shades and tones. I would have to be careful to distinguish the cool blue of wariness from blind, crimson, panic, if I hoped to find the warrior–poet.

  I apologized for disturbing her, and I pushed off down the glissade. I saw an autist who was clearly afraid of something. I began to ask the ragged, filthy, barefooted man if he had seen “Death sailing by on silver skates.” (One had to translate words into the autists’ peculiar idiom or they would pretend not to understand the simplest things.) Then, once again, I found myself spontaneously practising the skills of a cetic. I found I could read the autist’s fear program. I saw that his was not a fear of pain or death at the hands of a warrior–poet. Indeed, he did not fear his suffering, and he scarcely feared death. As all of us do, he feared losing what was dearest to him. I was surprised to see that autists—if this rotting, miserable, stinking wretch of a human being was a typical specimen—live solely for pleasure. I could see this in his smiling, constantly moving lips as plainly as I could see the vacant smiles of the ice sculptures lining the street. But the pleasure he sought was not the fullness of gut after a fine meal or of sexual ecstasy; it was not even the toalache aficionado’s euphoria or the number storm of those many pilots who love their mathematics too well. What pleased the autist was to exist wholly within a world of his own creation. His was the pleasure of fantasy and delusion; to him his thoughtscapes were as beautiful and as real as the ice castles of Urradeth appear to a child. And the thing he feared above all else was the intrusion of external reality—what the autists would call the lesser–real—and the ruin of that perfect thoughtscape he sought, the realreal. (It is an irritating fact that the autists claim spiritual kinship with pilots. What is the manifold, they will ask, if not a creation of the ship’s computer and the mind of a pilot in fugue? It does no good, of course, to explain that a pilot’s mathematics is a vision of the deepest structures of the universe. They will just stare into your eyes and babble, “Brother Pilot, the realreal is one of the manifold beauties inside the godhead when the good god is inside the real head.”) An autist will suffer every sort of bodily degradation rather than lose sight of his precious realreal.

  I examined the autist’s slack facial lines, and I saw that for him death was merely an abstract thought to be filed at some arbitrary address of his awareness; death was the never–real. Since he did not believe that he really existed, he could not fear losing himself to death. There was no fear of death in his milky, diseased eyes. There was only a hint of quiet regret and sadness that the beauty of his thoughtscapes would dissolve into nothingness when his mind ceased to be. And of that final tragedy he had little fear because he would not be in−the–real to witness it. Then, too, it is the faith of autists everywhere that: “In the realm of the real, the almost–real becomes sometimes–real according to the realness of the real head. The sometimes–real is a realness to be reborn into the realreal. In the realm of the realreal, there are many layers of reals; the realreal can be created but not destroyed.”

  All of this, I should emphasize, I saw in an instant. I think I was reading most of his programs; possibly I was reading his mind. I never talked to him (if one can really talk to an autist), nor did I dally to appreciate the subtleties of my new powers. I skated down the glissade trying to distinguish the different tones of fear on the hundreds of faces. Warrior–poets notwithstanding, we all fear something, and in some part of our being, we fear it every moment of our lives. I quickly became adept at reading people’s fear programs. I passed a merchant prince afraid of losing his jewels and silks. A hibakusha, a wizened, little brown–skinned woman dressed in patched woollens, approached him begging for the means to pay for the expensive procedure which might restore her to health. But the merchant could not see the desperation (and fear) in the beggar’s eyes because he would not look in her eyes. He would not look at her pained face, at the bald head where only a few wispy filaments of hair hung above her high collar. He coughed loudly and hurried by, careful not to let any portion of his robes touch the poor woman. I saw an aphasic who feared that the mental use of words or any sort of symbol would bind her thoughts and therefore ruin her freedom of mind; an eschatologist lost in fear of his fear; a dozen men off Lone Jack fearfully avoiding all aliens, even the gentle Friends of Man; a cowardly pilot by the name of Dixon Dar; a seemingly blissful arhat covered with soft snowflakes and stinking of sihu perfume (I did not need a cetic’s powers to perceive that the arhat was afraid of being thought a fake—as in fact she was. It is an ill–kept secret that sihu oil is absorbed through the skin and induces the artificial nirvanas of which the arhats are so falsely proud); a frightened, lonely novice who had just entered Borja; hundreds of men, women and children all betraying their fear. I stroked by fearful, heaving bodies, and I passed into a bubble of warm, almost tropical air. The crowds grew so thick that I had to walk my skates across the ice. There were maggids and nimspinners and exemplars bunched together, gawking at the fields of hyacinths on either side of the glissade. The air was sick with flowery fragrance. It was suddenly warm and humid so I unzipped my kamelaika down to my belly. One of the maggids exclaimed that it was a miracle that tropical flowers could grow on an ice planet. I looked through the shifting throng at the ten thousand delicate, hanging curlicues of pink and white and blue. They were beautiful. I caught the eye of a fat historian and shook my head silently, sharing our mutual fear: that the expense of maintaining an exterior microclimate and other like extravagances would one day break the Order—if indeed the imminent schism did not do so first.

  After I had broken free into the cooler air at the western edge of the Gardens, I began seeing on the faces of the thinned–out crowd that particular kind of fear indicating a near encounter with a warrior–poet. I will call it fear of madmen, for most people regard the warrior–poets as being truly mad. When I was a young child I had often noticed that adults were inexplicably afraid of the many babbling madmen who roam the city streets. Most of the madmen, of course, were—and are—quite harmless. How then to explain how master pilots, for instance, could be so afraid of them, they who had mastered their fear of the manifold? I had never understood this phenomenon, but all at once the answer seemed obvious: A madman’s jerky motions, his aimless words, the wild glint in his eyes—everything he does seems to bubble up from some private well deep within his being. It is a well which spouts act
ions seemingly beyond his control. And why does a madman appear to have no control? It is because he appears to have no fear; that is, he lacks a certain kind of fear. He is unafraid of embarrassing himself or others with his animal screams and mumbled prophecies. This fearlessness is very threatening to the typical civilized person because he understands, in some portion of his self, that it is only the fear of what others think that keeps him from skating naked down the street and howling at the moon when the miseries of life are more than he can bear. (If indeed he lives on one of the eighty–six civilized planets which have moons.) Fear is the glue that keeps civilization together. Without the fear of consequence, men would take forcefully the women of their choice, elidi children would pull the wings off their younger siblings and women would tell their husbands their innermost thoughts. And that would be the end of the world, the end of all the worlds on which human beings live. Without fear we would fly about at random like billions of unpredictable atoms. I must repeat that one does not fear a madman because he is dangerous; a madman is feared because he appears to have no fear, and therefore he is unpredictable and might do anything. And it is the same with warrior–poets. One does not fear them because they are dangerous; the sun, after all, is dangerous. But the sun is predictable (or it used to be before the Vild began to explode), and the warrior–poets, those fearless fanatics of Qallar, are not. Often they act at random. Their passage through a crowd leaves a trail of fear, the fear of fearlessness, which is really a fear of randomness. To live in a universe which does not listen to our plea for order and meaning is our most basic fear, and we fear it more than death. It was this trail of chaotic fear left by the warrior–poet Dawud that I followed across the Great Circle outside the Hofgarten and down an orange sliddery deep into the Farsider’s Quarter.