Neverness

by David Zindell

  “Don’t come any closer, please, Mallory.”

  This came from the warrior–poet, who was standing half behind the tree. The colors of his kamelaika were dirtied with blood; blood stained the tree where his clothes had touched the gray bark. He held the point of his thin killing knife pressed to the corner of Soli’s eye. He called out, “I was just about to run this up his optic nerve, but once again you’ve surprised me.”

  Soli’s drugged eyes were open wide and twitching. Almost every muscle in his face was locked, and sweat globules ran off his forehead. He stank of fear.

  “Let him go,” I said.

  I stepped closer and Dawud held out his hand. “Your mother was not supposed to have revealed our plans. How did you get her to speak?”

  I pointed at Soli and repeated, “Let him go.”

  “But we haven’t reached the moment,” Dawud said. “And in any case, my Order has been paid for his death.”

  “Yes, I know. Tell me what you’ve done to my mother.”

  He laid his hand gently on Soli’s head. He ignored my demand. “Your mother has paid well for this possibility.”

  “Possibility?” I did not know what he meant. Soli stared emptily as if he knew nothing at all. His face was blanker than an autist’s. There was nothing to read except pain and fear.

  “What type of poison is this, then?” I asked. “That can rob a man of his self–awareness and render the programs unreadable?” I was trembling to rush over to Soli, to slap the anger back into his face. I did not like to see him like this.

  “No, Pilot, don’t move! We’ve almost reached the moment of the possible.” He said this by way of explanation. (Perhaps he could read my curiosity program.) “Soli is almost alive; in moments he’ll be reborn.”

  Suddenly Soli screamed and bit through his lip. Blood ran down his chin and neck. The bloody flap of his lower lip stuck to his teeth; his incisors were visible through the ragged tear. All at once every muscle in his body seemed to fire and contract. His body was a knot of spasming muscles. I thought the spasms would break his bones and burst his tendons but Mehtar had sculpted him into an Alaloi, after all, and sculpted well.

  “He’s in agony!”

  Dawud smiled at me and said, “Please stay where you are, or the Lord Pilot will have to die before his moment.”

  “You’re torturing him!”

  “Yes, of course; how else to awaken him? Pain is the lightning that will illuminate his mind and wake him up.” He ran his thick fingers through Soli’s sweat–drenched hair. He made a fist, clamping the hair in his fingers, holding Soli’s head tight. His red ring gleamed through the black tangle like a burning pool of blood. “You see, Soli is living intensely now. I’ve given him the drug. As I speak, the sound waves are striking his skin like fists. Do you smell my perfume? The pungence of the kana oil? To Soli it is acid eating away his nose and lungs. You can’t imagine his pain: The light of the flame globes is like knives through his eyes. He wishes he could close them, he prays. And in a short while, I’ll run the tip of this knife into his eye, right up the optic nerve. And then there will truly be a frenzy, then the lightning will split his head. And then, the moment, Pilot. A single, clear moment, brighter than lightning, a moment without fear. I’ll take the lesser life of the robot, give him the greater. Soon—you see he’s almost ready.”

  “But he’ll be dead!”

  “No, he’ll have truly lived for a moment, and in the endless rings of eternity, his perfect moment will live again and again.”

  “That’s madness!”

  “He’s ready! Look, can you see the fear in his eyes, like an ocean! He hears my every word, though he understands nothing but fear. The fear; the ring of eternity; the pain.”

  “No!”

  I did not want to know any more about the warrior–poet’s bizarre religion; I did not care if Soli overcame his master fear program and lived his perfect moment. The poet’s need to carve his beliefs into Soli’s flesh sickened me. Why, I wondered, must fanatics always infect others with the virus of their beliefs? Why must beliefs always seek to invade their victims, to fill them with fever, and then to infect yet others like a plague? Why this madness? I wanted to know. I watched the knife dip towards Soli’s waiting eye, and I screamed, “No!”

  I moved across the room. I fell into slowtime, and I moved in a frenzy of speed. It was this rash, lightning movement, I think, which saved Soli’s life. (The lesser life, that is. The simple life of mathematics and westering that a pilot was born to live.) The poet had no more time for torture. He could have killed Soli immediately, but then there would have been no “moment of the possible.” To his skewed system of belief, the assassination would have been in vain. He watched me jump over an uprooted bush, and with his full, red lips he made a sour face. It was plain he did not want to kill me. But he shook his head and his voice poured forth like wine. “You almost could have been one of us,” he said. “A lover of eternity.”

  He accelerated into slowtime; he was all precision and exquisite motion, a blur of flashing red and green rings and swirling cape and flickering steel. I knew my only hope was to avoid the finger knives and poisons and needles secreted within his cape, to dodge or block the edge of his fist, and above all, to slip beneath the scythe of his killing knife. I had to close with him. Then I could grapple, hand to neck and arm to arm. I could apply the art the Timekeeper had taught me and bring the power of my Alaloi muscles and bones to bear.

  But it was not so easy to close with him. He must have immediately guessed my strategy. He lunged at my belly in diversion and then slashed at my fingers. There was a heat in my fingertips as if the displaced air of the lightning knife had burned me. I looked down. He had cut through two of my fingernails into the soft tissue beneath. The blood was welling up—slowly, slowly, everything appeared to move so slowly in slowtime—beneath the nail. We whirled and thrashed about, crashing through the plants. I knocked my head into the pot of a hanging fern. I made a fist and squeezed; blood drops rained onto the leaves of a fairy moss, slow red splashing against veinous, green lace. I punched at his throat. He easily blocked my arm, stepping aside as gracefully as a ballerina. Although we were both deep in the amber of slowtime, it seemed that he was moving more quickly than I. Either that or he was reading my programs and anticipating my moves. The arts of a warrior–poet, I thought, are devious and deadly.

  There is one art, however, which the warrior–poets have never mastered. They, who live every moment so intensely on the brink of death, can never know the passive, melancholic, secretly fearful mindsets of the scryers. And who, after all, can truly comprehend the mysterious dance of future dreams which plays before the inner eye of a scryer? From where do these images come? In what manner are they made manifest within the mind? Some say scrying and remembrancing are parts of a single phenomenon. If it is true that the universe eternally recurs, like a poet’s drama playing over and over again with the same actors acting precisely the same way during each performance, then isn’t an ancient memory also a vision of the far future? It may be so. As Dawud aimed a thrust at my eyes—a thrust I barely avoided—I smelled the thickness of kana oil, and I began to remember. Or so I thought. At first the images that came to me seemed like recent memories. There Dawud lunged and cut my hand; there he stabbed at my temple; there he reached inside his cape and removed a dart enamelled with purple bo poison. But they were not memories, I realized, but something new. For a moment I thought I was not seeing these images at all; in one instantaneous particle of time, I concluded that I was reading the subtle shifts of weight and muscle that betrayed Dawud’s fighting programs. From these tells I was reconstructing in my mind the sequence of killing moves he would choose to make—so I thought. He lunged and he stabbed and he plucked a purple dart from his cape; I watched the skin on the palm of my hand opening like a fireflower. The sequence of moves was exactly as I had envisioned. I suddenly knew I was not reading his programs, or rather, I was not just reading his program
s. There were images, precise colors and motions, a new mode of vision. Dawud lunged and feinted and flicked the dart at my neck. Something new: I had time to block and counterfeint and pull my neck out of the way. Was I reading his programs? I did not think so. I knew that a warrior–poet is trained from childhood to mask his programs. For a warrior to telegraph his moves is a sin. And there is more to it than that. It is a basic result of the theory of games that a warrior must introduce a number of random elements into his moves, else his enemy might figure out his strategy. Thus some of the slashes and feints that Dawud aimed at me were made at random. His muscle and nerves had been trained—programmed—to fire of their own will at certain instances. He might plan a lunge and a groin kick only to find his arm pulling up short and the kick delivered to the throat instead. I could not be reading these random programs because they originated so quickly, so impulsively; I could not read his other programs because they were masked. But if I could not, how did these vivid images come to me? How did I avoid his killing knife?

  I was scrying—I knew it immediately although I tried to deny it. I entered into that peculiar, melancholic mindset where one’s life (and death) is seen as a slow, almost abstract picture about to be made real. There was a moment of instantaneity, and then, a brilliant flash as if the interior of a vast, darkened chamber had suddenly been illuminated. My eyes were open yet I was momentarily blind to the colors and textures of the chamber. There were images, a bright mosaic of pattern and possibility. The various objects of the room, the dividing branches of the spinnaker tree to my side, the red– streaked rug, the green and yellow and red plants, the rainbow colors of Dawud’s kamelaika, his cruel, killing, knifeblade of a nose, and his intense eyes so calm and so aware—all these things seemed to shimmer, to dissolve into a sea of color, to shimmer again as they flowed and formed and rearranged, and reformed into the angles and shadows and curves of a warrior–poet in motion. I “saw” his arms and legs and cape coalesce into a blur of light. There were images and futures to choose from: He slashed at my eyes; he slashed at my throat; he planted his foot and slashed my hands. The possibilities stunned me. I was blind because he had slid his steel across the blueness of my irises; I was struck dumb because my throat was in pieces; I could not feel to grip his neck because he had hacked the fingers from my knuckles. But only one future would come to pass; his knife could not be in a thousand places at once. He moved, had moved, will always have moved. The tapestry of events that would in moments come into existence twisted together. The silver thread of his thrusting knife, the bright, decorative green and red bands of his rings, the black, curling threads of his hair, and the red and black threads of my own, his kamelaika’s gold and purple and orange threads, all the threads of my life were tightening, weaving. But in the end we choose our futures, as Katharine would have said. As she did say, as she always will say. The futures formed within me, and without, and Dawud was about to move. I was scrying—it was a wonderful and terrible thing. I looked into Dawud’s eyes, and the purple fibers and flecks of blue within his irises shimmered. His pupils dilated. There was vision. With a scryer’s sight, I saw the muscles of the iris diaphragm uncoil, the long, purplish protein fibers untwisting, and deeper, the vibrating carbon atoms, the hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen of protein. Dawud’s eyes and the fabrics of the wall tapestries, the blood drops on his knife, were alive with proteins. And the atoms of the proteins were composed of yet tinier particles which possessed charge and mass, color and spin and charm, and all was movement, oscillation and energy. And deeper still: The chamber melted into a brilliance of light, and the tiniest of particles unravelled like balls of gaudy silk. There was an infinity of meshing, polychromatic, silken threads made of...but it is impossible to singularly describe the deepest structure of reality. The threads were flaming crimson; the threads were molten gold; the threads were the standing wavefronts of the mechanics and the theorems of the cantors and the conscious choices of a pilot in slowtime. I followed this thread of consciousness, staring blindly at the patterns all around me, and I suddenly knew, as all scryers know, that I was looking at the very tapestry of the universe as it formed. I watched the threads of the universal hologram unfold. In a way, I was uncoding the hologram, looking ahead to read the code, for what is scrying if not the reading of the master program of the universe? But in the end we choose our futures. One forming pattern seemed brighter than the others. It was embroidered with beautiful (and terrible) iridescent threads. The threads wove, and the greens were glowing emerald, and the purples brightened to burning indigo. There was a rainbow–colored kamelaika, a warrior’s crimson ring, and a killing knife made of steel. And choice, there was always choice. Dawud chose to plunge the knife into my unguarded belly. He came for me. But I saw the motion before he moved, and when he lunged, I twisted out of the way. He slashed at my throat. I blocked his arm and locked it, and it snapped. And when he shifted the knife to his other hand, I jumped away from him and rather clumsily kicked his groin.

  The kick would have maimed a civilized man. But, as I later learned, when the warrior–poets pass into puberty they undergo a cutting which enables them to retract their testes into their abdomens at will. (The slander that the warrior–poets are smooth between the legs is untrue. Nor is it true that they do not feel the urge to couple with human females. The poets, of course, worship passion even though they do not allow its physical expression. Chastity begets intensity, they say.) Dawud staggered for a moment, then flicked an orange–tipped dart at me. It missed my head by an inch. I heard it scrape along the individual follicles as it passed through the long hair hanging over my ear.

  “Very good!” he gasped out. “So good, now.”

  “Damn you!”

  “Help me, Pilot.”

  “Put your knife away, then.”

  “Help me with Soli.”

  “No, no, you’re mad.”

  As we continued our deadly game, it must have become clear to him that something was wrong. In truth, he should have killed me at the first pass of the knife. Something was very wrong—he must have known this because he began to talk to me, to try to distract me. And then I caught his other arm in my hands and broke it, too. The knife went spinning out of his hand into a clot of roots and dirt. I grabbed his biceps and drew him closer. Although I expected him to cry out, or to look down in horror at the sharp prongs of bone ripping through his kamelaika, of course he did not. He smiled. With his tongue he fumbled about in his mouth as if he were trying to pry loose a sliver of a baldo nut from his teeth. But it was not a nut; it was a tiny dart, and he spat it at me even as I jerked his arm up in front of my face. The dart went into his own hand. In the moment before the poison paralyzed him, he gasped. “Scryer–pilot, warrior–pilot—I should have known.”

  His entire body spasmed and went rigid, like Soli’s. I reached inside the compartments of his robe until I found the golden, tubular spinneret all warrior–poets carry. I shook it against my ear listening to the liquid proteins slosh inside the tube. It was nearly full. I held the tube over the poet’s chest, and as I squeezed the pressure–sensitive end, an exceedingly fine jet of proteins squirted from the tip and hardened into a steely strand. It took me a few moments to circle and recircle his body—I had to half–lift him off the floor—and I bound him in a sticky cocoon.

  I had defeated a warrior–poet!

  My moments of scrying passed, and I returned to realtime. I sat back against the bole of a rubber tree. I was exhausted, elated and afraid. Dawud slowly regained the use of his muscles as I watched. He must have absorbed much less of the poison than Soli had, either that or his accelerated metabolism had burned it out of his body. Soli, I saw, remained as stiff and unmoving as a robot.

  “How do I go about cutting him free?” I asked Dawud.

  “You must cut me free first,” he said as he worked his jaws. “Please.”

  I looked at him to see if he was joking. I could not think of a single reason why I should cut him loose.
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br />   “Warrior–pilot, scryer–pilot—are you listening? On Qallar there is a code of honor. Cut me loose and give me back my knife. Or kill me yourself. I need to die.”

  There was not the slightest hint of deception in his voice. A warrior–poet cannot live with the shame of defeat and capture. I am sure that if I had immediately freed him, he would have plunged the knife through his eye and into his brain, which is how a warrior–poet must kill himself when it is time. There was an excitement about his whole being. If he had been Devaki, he might have employed the uswa tense of “exalted impatience” to indicate his eagerness for the coming moment.