Neverness

by David Zindell

  Near the Merripen Green, where the streets narrow and the many fine, three–story blackstones shelter the richer of the farsiders, I talked to a cetic fresh off Melthin. He had the harrowed, somewhat bitter look of an itinerant professional; my first thought was that he had traveled among planets such as Orji and Yasmeen teaching his art to the backward novices of the Order’s lesser schools. He stank of travel, and of fear. In front of his hotel I stopped him and quickly explained what I was seeking.

  “Yes, it’s true,” he said, wiping the sweat from his forehead with his orange sleeve. “A few minutes ago, the poet in the rainbow kamelaika—but how did you know?”

  Because I wanted to make certain that it was Dawud I pursued and not some other, I asked, “His warrior’s ring—was it red? Did he wear the poet’s green ring?”

  “His rings?”

  “Quickly, then, what color were his rings?”

  “I didn’t notice his rings; I was looking at his face.”

  “Damn!”

  I quickly, breathlessly explained that I was following the warrior–poet’s track of fear; being a cetic, I thought he would appreciate my little quest. But like many of the lesser professionals he was overly proud and chary of anyone—a pilot no less—who might challenge his meager authority. “One must be careful in reading the fear programs, very careful. How many types of fear do you think there are, Pilot?”

  How many types of programs animate the flesh and brain of a human being? I stroked up the street and turned onto a sliddery, wondering about this. The sliddery led past the Winter Ring. Here were obsidian blackstones eight stories high, curving walls of chipped glass inside which the apartments were tiny and stacked one atop the other like a child’s blocks. I had seldom been in this part of the City before, and I marvelled that so many strange people could live so closely with one another. I made my way towards the edge of the Ring. There were many skaters resting on the dilapidated, splintery benches set around the Ring. Between the benches and the orange band of the Street, which circled the Ring around its northern half, every hundred yards or so, stood the ice statues of our Order’s famous pilots. There were fifteen of these white monoliths. Wind and sun and freezing mists had worked at the statues’ features; it was nearly impossible to distinguish the pitted, imperious face of Tisander the Wary from the Tycho’s jowly frown. I skated backward into the ring, absorbed for a moment with the silly notion of reading the Tycho’s programs from his statue’s deformed features. But it was impossible to do so. Even if the sculptor had once captured the Tycho’s essence and chiselled it into ice, even though the faces were resculpted once every year or so, the slow melt of time had degraded any information bound into the ice crystals and had rendered the programs unreadable.

  Almost unreadable. For a moment, I struggled with my perceptions, without and within, and I was dizzy. I looked out and up, and there was the dizzying effect of concentric circles: the satiny, whitish circle of the Winter Ring where the farsiders laughed and spun and ground their toe picks into the ice, the circle of blue and red benches, and the ice statues surrounded by the curving orange street, and above the street, the tenements gleaming like mountains of glass, and far above, the marbled crown of the sky. I turned my head, looking for the warrior–poet, but he was nowhere in sight. Although I very badly wanted to find him, I felt that I must pay attention to this new perception of mine, this new way of seeing.

  Near me a harijan was flopping about on skates too big for him. He was a savage, jowly man dressed in a purple parka and yellow pants so tight that his membrum bulged beneath the dirty silk. Because his boots provided too little ankle support, he had no feel for the edges of his blades. He stumbled about grasping for the arms and the support of nearby farsiders. In a way, he reminded me of Bardo. I looked more closely and saw determination and the stamp of cruelty on his thin lips. In another way he reminded me of the Tycho, of the Tycho’s imago that I had encountered inside the Entity. I stared at the harijan, and it was like staring at Bardo and the Tycho. Each of them, I thought, bore a streak of cruelty, of self−love and brazen sexuality. I knew well how these traits—these programs—had been shaped in Bardo’s case. But what of the Tycho and the comically dressed harijan? I was dizzy as I turned and stared at the Tycho’s icy, half–melted face. Suddenly I knew a thing: The Tycho’s cruelty and the harijan’s (and Bardo’s, too) had been programmed by the cruelty of their fathers. I do not mean to imply that all men who are cruel have cruel fathers. The fount of cruelty is as deep and turbid as an ocean. But certainly it was so with the harijan; I could read his cruelty program as plainly as I could read his fear.

  I bent over, resting my arms on my knees. I gasped for air. All around were children, men and women, and the statues of my father pilots, and I saw in each the set of muscles and nerves which betrayed their programs. A woman with a slender chest and great, streamlined thighs clumsily landed a waltz jump, and I understood—I “saw at a glance,” as the cetics say—the many years of practice and the slightly mistaken programming causing her to catch the outside edge of her skate and nearly stumble. Here a pretty boy cried in frustration because he couldn’t cut a decent eight, and there another laughed to hide the very same emotion, a program he had probably learned from his stoical father. How many programs command the muscles and thoughts of a human being? There are one million, twenty–seven hundred and six such programs. (I am joking, of course. I record this only because an infamous cetic once set himself the task of counting and classifying all possible programs, and he gave up after reaching this number. The number and variety of programs is potentially infinite, as is man.) There are programs determining the fluidity of our speed strokes, and there are programs which lead us to lather our bodies in precisely the same manner every time we bathe. We are programmed to fear darkness and loud noises, and we program ourselves to fear a thousand things, failure and poverty, for instance. I saw these programs on the farsiders’ faces: the sex programs, the men lusting for women, the dark women and the plump, the skinny or the tall; the women with their subtle body language, initiating and often running the men’s sex programs, the different shades and manifestations of lust; and more sex programs, the children programmed with dormant, powerful urges, completely unaware of their own programs; the love, dread, pride, shame, sympathy, grief, melancholy and joy programs, the programs of hate and rage; there were beliefs and belief programs in the eyes of a Summerworld Buddhist, a belief in cyclic universes and rebirth of the soul and many, many stranger beliefs; there were programs to control beliefs, and occasionally, on certain naked faces, the imprimatur of beliefs which controlled programs. I saw one woman, a wise, strikingly beautiful woman wearing the embroidered gown of a Urradeth neurologician, who bore the burn of self–mastery in her brilliant eyes. A few, rare people, it seemed, were sometimes able to master their beliefs and run their own programs. How this fascinated me! These belief programs which can write, edit and command other programs are called master or metaprograms. I wondered at the origin of the programs which run our lives. Why is one man quick and another slow? Why will one woman smile knowingly as she speaks of ananke and ultimate fate while her sister denies meaning, and drugs herself with toalache and sex? Could it be, as the splicers claim, that our initial set of programs is wholly written by our chromosomes?

  I do not believe so. Ah, but from where does this disbelief, this program of skepticism arise—from my chromosomes as well? And how were my chromosomes programmed? By chance evolution? By God? And who, then, wrote the deity program, or the programs of the natural universe? Who programs the programmer? One could go mad pondering such infinite regresses of cause and effect. I do not believe there can be a simple explanation. Some programs—an infant’s crying, defecating, sucking and sleeping modes, for example—are certainly written in our chromosomes. Other programs are copies of our parents’ programs; sometimes the world we live in writes programs into our nerves with pleasure and, too often, with fire and pain. The origin of certain progr
ams is a secret which will perhaps always remain unknown. Does the brain hold the secret in the way it molds itself to fit its tiny corner of the universe, the billions of neurons weaving together, forming trillions of interconnections? The akashics believe so, yet they have never realized their dream of mapping and understanding man’s soul. It is a commonplace that each human being possesses a unique set of programs. Each of us takes great pride in his uniqueness; we often justify our existence by looking up at the stars and observing that in all the universe, there is no other being quite like ourself. We are special, we believe, and therefore uniquely valuable. In a way, we are our own unique universe, as worthy of existence as the greater universe surrounding us. I, too, had always believed this; I had always regarded my arrogance, vanity and rage programs as endearing faults without which the bright jewel I knew as Mallory Ringess would somehow shatter inward and cease to shine, like a diamond with only a single, cracked face. Now I looked around the ice ring at the faces of my fellow human beings, and I was no longer so sure. I saw arrogance as an exemplar completed a difficult axel, and vanity in the carriage of a pretty, black–skinned matron off Summerworld. All the programs which drove me to change my flesh, to love, to joke, to murder, to seek the secret of life—each particle of myself was somewhere duplicated within the selfness of another man, woman or child. My programs were not unique; only their seemingly random arrangement within me was. Why should I take pride in programs which sprang from the coil of inherited chromosomes or from my mother’s painful pinches as she programmed me not to lie? Why should I be aware of myself as a separate being at all?

  For me the problem of uniqueness was really worse than I have stated. I was full of my new power of reading people’s programs; when I looked inside myself I could almost read my own. And I saw a horrible thing: Not only were my programs not unique, but in many ways, I was no more in control of my programs than a dog was of its own wagging tail. Even the best of human beings—such as the Urradeth neurologician—could control only some of their programs. And as for the others, the harijan, whores and wormrunners that I saw, well, the warrior–poet had been right, after all. We are sheep awaiting the butcheries of time; we are clots of brain tissue and bundles of muscle, meat–machines that jump to the touch of our most immediate passions; we—I have said this before—we react rather than act; we have thoughts in place of thinking. We are, simply, robots; robots aware that we are robots, but robots nonetheless.

  And yet. And yet we are something more. I have seen a dog, Yuri’s beloved Kyoko, a lowly beast whose programs were mostly muzzle and hunger, growls and smell, overcome her fear and flight programs to hurl herself at a great white bear, purely out of love for her master. Even dogs possess a spark of free will. And as for humans, within each of us, I believe, burns a flame of free will. In some it is tenuous and dim as an oilstone’s flame; in others it burns hot and bright. But if our will is truly free, why do our robot programs run our bodies and minds? Why do we not run our programs? Why do we not write our own programs? Was it possible that all women and men could free ourselves and thus become their own masters?

  No, it was not possible. I looked at the faces of a tychist and a Jacarandan whore, and their ugliness overwhelmed me. How ugly the set of bitter experience, the lines and etchings of time! In their terminal adulthood, how ugly and tragi–comic adult human beings really were! With eyes for a moment freed of the distorting lense of my own programs—with the eyes of a child—I saw a tragic thing: We are prisoners of our natural brains. As children we grow, and new programs are layered down, set into the jelly of our brains. When we are young we write many of these programs in order to adapt to a bizarre and dangerous environment. And then we grow some more. We mature. We find our places in our cities, in our societies, in ourselves. We form hypotheses as to the nature of things. These hypotheses shape us in turn, and yet more programs are written until we attain a certain level of competence and mastery, even of comfort, with our universe. Because our programs have allowed us this mastery, however limited, we become comfortable in ourselves, as well. And then there is no need for new programs, no need to erase or edit the old. We even forget that we were once able to program ourselves. Our brains grow opaque to new thoughts, as rigid as glass, and our programs are frozen for life, hardwired, so to speak, within our hardened brains. And this is how we were designed to be. Evolution has made us to grow, to grow up, to have our children, to pass on our programs, and then to die. Life goes on this way. And so the flame burns weakly but freely, trapped inside a sphere of glass. We burn with sufficient light to illuminate the code of our programs, but we lack the means. We don’t know how, and we are afraid, utterly terrified to break the glass. And even if we could master our fear, what then?

  If I could find courage, I wondered, what would I see? Would I be ashamed of the arrangement of programs—of my very self—beyond my control? Ah, but what if I could write new metaprograms controlling this arrangement of programs? Then I might one day attain the uniqueness and value that I found so lacking in myself and the rest of my race; as an artist composes a tone poem, I could create myself and call into being wonderful new programs which had never existed within the rippling tides of the universe. Then I would be free at last, and the flame would burn like star fire; then I would be something new, as new to myself as the morning sun is to a newborn child.

  Where does the flame go when the flame explodes?

  On the ice of the Winter Ring, surrounded by people skating, laughing, jumping, grimacing and shouting, as I stared at the frozen, mutilated Tycho’s face and at the face of the harijan in the yellow pants and at the faces of all the people on the ice and on the worlds of man, as I stared at my own face, in an instant, I had this dream of being something new. But it was only a dream. When I looked up and out across the Ring, I saw Dawud skating towards a woman who looked like my mother, and my dizziness gave way to anger, and I became a robot once again.

  * * * * *

  I accelerated across the ice, dodging the people as best I could. The wind whistled in my ears and stung my face. I dropped my shoulder to pass a half–naked courtesan. When the shivering, blue–skinned woman saw me approaching madly at speed, and saw that I was skating straight towards a warrior–poet, she made an “O” of fear with her tattooed lips. She jumped out of my way. Dawud saw me, too. I was perhaps thirty yards from him, but I could see him smile. It was a smile of admiration, and faintly, of surprise. He bowed his head to me. The muscles jumped in his throat, and his curly black hair rippled in the wind. My mother opened her fur collar, and he immediately stuck one of his needles in her neck. Then he sped away towards the eastern half of the Ring. My mother, probably following his smile, turned, saw me, tilted her head, and pushed off in the opposite direction.

  I could follow only one of them, so I sprinted after my mother. I caught her at the edge of the Ring as she passed beneath the milky, gleaming statue of Tisander the Wary. I grabbed the hood of her furs and yanked her to a stop. She didn’t struggle. I pivoted just in time to see Dawud, in his rainbow kamelaika, disappear down one of the eight streets giving out onto the sliddery circling the Ring.

  “Mother,” I gasped, “why did you run away from me?”

  A few fearful arhats near us snapped their tangerine robes and kept their distance, although they looked at us with the awe which farsiders so often have of pilots. (And what is awe, I suddenly realized, if not a blend of love and fear?)

  “Where is the poet skating? What did he do to you?”

  “Mallory,” she said, and she shut her eyes. Her eyelids fluttered as if she were passing through dream–sleep. She was breathing heavily, and her eye was twitching, slightly. It was an old program. I had thought Mehtar had cut it from her muscles when he had sculpted her face, but apparently the program ran deep. She opened her eyes and squinted as she cocked her head and asked, “Why were you tracking me?”

  “Where have you been?”

  “And why must you answer a question wit
h a question? Haven’t I taught you? That it’s disrespectful?”

  I told her of my meeting Dawud in the Hibakusha Gallery and of what had followed. I propped my boot up on a nearby bench, digging at the old wood with my blade. “Why were you meeting a warrior–poet, Mother?”

  “It was a chance meeting.”

  “You don’t believe in chance,” I said.

  “You think I’m lying? I’m not lying; my mother taught me. Not to lie.”

  She laughed then, a disturbed laugh as if she had a private joke with herself. There was a deep tension in her laughter. I detected the subtle strains of untruth, and I found—amazingly—that I could read this particular program of my mother’s. She was, quite simply, lying.

  “What did the poet put in your neck, then?”

  “Nothing,” she said. She reached up and touched the ugly wood collar pin fastening her furs. “He was returning the pin. It had come off. He found it lying on the ice.”

  I looked behind me at the street which radiated away from the Ring, cutting between the circle of glass tenements. I considered pursuing Dawud, but I was afraid I would lose my mother. And clearly she knew what I was thinking. Clearly she planned to lure me away from him.

  “The warrior–poet could have killed you,” I said.

  “The warrior–beasts can kill anyone they choose.”

  “And who does Dawud choose to kill?” I asked. “Soli?”

  “How would I know?”

  Lies, lies, lies.

  Her eye twitched then, and I saw what I should have seen long ago: My mother was addicted to toalache—the facial tics were the result of her hiding this shame from her friends, and from herself. I saw other things, too, other programs: The layers of fat girdling her hips, which betrayed her compulsive eating programs and love of chocolate drinks and candies; her arrogant speech patterns, the clipped sentence fragments hinting at her belief that others were too stupid to understand any but the briefest bursts of information (and hinting, too, at her basic shyness); the way she had programmed herself to squint in place of smiling. The cetics call these program– revealing body signs “tells.” I searched her face for the frowns, eye–rolls and blinks that would tell the tale of herself. I saw...shocking things. I had always known—even if I had not been aware of the knowledge—that she possessed a sort of slovenly voluptuousness. Now I saw something else; now her omnifarious sexuality was revealed. To my vast embarrassment, I saw that she was capable of coupling with an exemplar, boy, woman, alien or beast—or even with a beam of pure radiant energy, if that kind of union between flesh and light were possible. (The arhats, of course, believe it is.) If she was chaste in everyday practice, it was not because she didn’t have her desires. It is from my mother, I believe, that I have inherited my wildness.