Dawud’s response, when it came, was so faint I could barely hear it, muffled words lost down a black tunnel of stone: “You’re just afraid the gas will kill you, too.”
From Dawud I learned little pieces of news he had gleaned during his audience with the Timekeeper. The news was not good. Apparently, the Timekeeper had loosed his tutelary robots upon the City. Warrior–poets had been captured and banished. The robots had “accidentally” pinched the heads off of three pilots—Faxon Wu, Takenya the Fearless and Rosalinda li Howt—who were ready to desert the Order for Tria. (I later learned that hundreds of autists had mysteriously vanished from the Farsider’s Quarter at this time. The Timekeeper, I knew, had always hated autists.) When the pilots, high professionals and academicians had learned of the Timekeeper’s violation of canon law, there was talk of taking a deepship and leaving in swarm for some new planet on which to start an entirely new Academy. Somehow, the news of my imprisonment had spread, and Soli had called for my beheading, while Justine and the Sonderval had called for a convocation of the Pilot’s College. They would ask the other master pilots to remove Soli and elect a new Lord Pilot—so the rumor went. Nikolos the Elder, the Lord Akashic, had surprised everyone by asking for a convocation of the College of Lords. Would that plump, hitherto timid little man really call for a new Timekeeper, as Kolenya Mor warned he would? No one seemed to know. No one—especially not the Timekeeper—seemed to know where my mother was, or what she was doing. And all the while, Bardo was petitioning the Timekeeper for my release, petitioning, blustering, threatening, and bribing various masters and lords to add their names to the petition. He had called for me to be tried before the akashics. I was innocent, he argued, and I should be allowed to establish my innocence. But Soli, who hated Bardo for stealing away his wife, invented a counter–argument. I should not go before the akashics, he said, because their computers were made to model only human brains. Who could know whether or not my brain—my Agathanian–carked brain—could fool the akashic computers? (Who could have suspected that Soli was my father, that he feared the akashics would unfold this fact and make it known? Who knew what anyone’s motives were during that maddest of times in our city?)
Ironically, the Timekeeper’s judgement filled Dawud with joy. He was so excited that he could neither eat nor sleep. He would pace his cell for days at a time, composing poems and shouting the verses out until his voice grew hoarse. “Imminent death is the spice of life,” he quoted. “It is true, of course. Pilot? Are you listening? Tell me your thoughts—are you thinking about the possibilities?”
I am not by nature a meditative man. I dreaded being left alone in a moist, dark cell with nothing to hold my mind other than my own fearful thoughts, thoughts of painful possibilities. Most of the time, I slumped against the freezing walls; I stared at the blackness in front of my face, waiting. I listened to the warrior–poet as he paced and howled out his ecstatic verses, and when the pacing ceased and he was quiet, I listened to the pup–plop of the condensation droplets against the floor. I listened to my heart beat. Often, usually after I had just awakened from a fitful sleep against the hard, moist flagstones, I was stiff and cold. I ate the nuts and bread dropped at intervals through the slit at the base of the door, and I slurped down water from a large bowl. Into that same bowl I dropped my dung and piss, hoping that the robots had been programmed to clean it before refilling it. (I have always, incidentally, disregarded Turin’s Law, crudely put that any robot sufficiently intelligent to clean dishes is too intelligent to clean dishes. That may be true of human beings, but the cold, soulless tutelary robots guarding us possessed only those specific intelligence functions required of them. Such as killing the Timekeeper’s enemies should they try to escape. I cannot believe they were self–aware.) I am ashamed to admit that I fell into long spells of self–pity. I thought about myself too much. I tried to concentrate on externals, but sensa of any sort were weak and few. The clanging of the robots beyond the door, the muted words of Dawud’s poems—these sounds I listened to, but as I contemplated a robot’s self–awareness, or lack thereof, and judged the quality of the poet’s verses (they were not extraordinary), I was led ever inward to my deepest worries and fears.
After a while, I found that my sleeping habits were being destroyed. I would sleep for long periods of time, perhaps as long as a day, escaping myself. Then would come fits of anxiety, surges of mania. I paced my cell and my muscles knotted and relaxed, over and over, rhythmically rippling like the waves of the sea. I had thoughts. I tried not to think about the origin of my thoughts. I tried not to think at all. I scratched my dirty beard and felt along the slick wall for cracks or weaknesses, but I could not stop thinking. I brooded, wondering what I was becoming. How I dreaded this becoming! There was something new inside me—when I thought about it and tried to conceive its shape and direction, I was as excited as I was terrified. I tried to sleep, and sleep would not come. Whole days must have passed in which I did not sleep. The spells of sleeplessness were punctuated by instances of micro–sleep when my brain would deaden for a moment or two. And I would awaken to cold, rank air, the sound of dripping water and the smell of my fear. Sometimes I would test myself to see if I was going mad. Could I still do the calculus of free sets? Did it feel just the same as always to scratch my itchy, greasy scalp? Could I open and close my fingers at will? In this way, and in a thousand other ways, I tested the cavern of my mind for hidden fissures and flaws, and for new, crystalline formations of ability and thought. What thoughts, what actions, what dreams could I will, if my will were truly free? Could I will my brain to change as I wished, or were there restraints, natural rules of development which could not be violated? In the deepest part of my mind, where the universe runs like a cold, black stream, I searched for the fount of free will. There was a moment when I could almost see the ultimate impulse guiding my actions, could almost taste the cool deliciousness of pure freedom. The moment lingered like a water droplet flung into the air. And then it was gone, sucked down the whirlpool of my thoughts. There was a black hole at the whirlpool’s center, and within that hole, another, blacker still. There was an infinity of holes within holes waiting to swallow the sanity of anyone who contemplated himself for too long.
For me, my prison became a hell. I have always feared darkness; when I was a novice, I had irritated Bardo by keeping my light burning all night. And silence is the darkness of sound, the death of the everyday vibrations, rhythms and tones that give song to the soul. We are creators of our heavens, the poet had said, but lately he had grown ominously quiet. Perhaps the plutonium had decayed; perhaps the poison gas had seared his lungs and liquefied his brain. Or perhaps he had tired of ecstasy, tired of balancing on the knifeblade edge between life and death. Had he flopped to the floor of his cell in an exhausted stupor? I did not know. There was silence inside his cell, silence in the still air currents, the silence of stone. Even the water on the ceiling had stopped dripping. My body no longer seemed to stink. In front of my eyes the blackness was fuzzy like wool, and my fingers were so numb that the texture of the walls felt waxen, and there was no smell or taste, no sound at all. I hallucinated. For a moment I imagined I was floating in the pit of my lightship. I dreamed there were stars. But then, when I reached out with my mind to face the ship’s computer—nothing. There was neither the torrential rush of the number storm, nor the white light of dreamtimc, nor any hint of the manifold’s splendid music. I realized I was alone within a real stone cell as black and empty as deadspace. I was alone inside my mind, and I was in hell.
As the days passed the hallucinations grew stronger, more total. Since my sensory nerves were quiescent, my brain supplied its own stimulation. My visual cortex began firing of its own accord. There were colors. Showers of purple sparks cascaded through the air. The air itself sparkled like a flowing robe of green and blue silk. I saw pulsating, concentric circles of red light turning inside each other, and yellow and orange wavy lines flashing and quivering. There were a hundred
different smells: spices and perfume, incense and feverbalm and musk. I heard bells ringing and crunching ice, the sound of a howling wolf. Such hallucinations, of course, are common among those who are robbed of contact with the external world. Journeymen often see visions the first time they float within the Rose Wombs. And the Alaloi, too, tell of hunters trapped out on the icepack in endless snowstorms who lose their sense of up and down, right and left, and begin to see bright bands and streamers of light splitting the swirling clouds of snow. I knew the colors and sounds I sensed were not real, but I also knew that if the hallucinations continued for too long, I might end up more brain–damaged than a pathetic aphasic.
For a long while I distracted myself with pure mathematics. I conjured up the bright, violet ideoplasts for the Axiom of Choice, and I lost myself in the beautiful Theory of Sets. I invented (or perhaps discovered) theorems that might someday be useful in proving the Continuum Hypothesis. There was a moment when the luminescent, many–shaped ideoplasts appeared so rapidly and vividly that I thought the number storm might begin of its own, without the aid of my ship–computer. And what a wonder that would have been! To enter into the manifold at will, to face the universe with nothing more than mathematics and will and naked brain—how often during those hellish days I prayed for this ability! But prayer is the signpost of helplessness and failure. The freedom of the manifold was denied me, and I soon found that in my prison of darkness, mathematics seemed all too arbitrary and unreal.
I might have emulated the autists and created fantasies and thoughtscapes in which I could dwell for as long as I lived. To dream lucid dreams, and all the while, to be aware of the dreams, and more, to change their shape and texture at will—this was a possibility. I might have experienced clear, rippling, aquamarine water, the warm, rushing waves of an other–worldly beach, the sticky clutch of a woman lying beneath me on the hot sand. But—despite what the autists say—it would not have been real. I would be lost in the unreal, devoured by images and events which could never and had never really occurred. If at last the Timekeeper gave me my freedom, I would be as mad as any autist.
I do not know how long I could have stood the silence had I not chanced to recall a rather pretentious saying of the remembrancers. One day as I was dragging my long, curling fingernails across the slatelike flagstones, I was thinking of the master remembrancer, Thomas Rane, turning over in my mind the implications of his memory of the god–man, Kelkemesh, and the primal myth. These words came of their own to my inner ear: Memory is the soul of reality. Within me were years of memories, a whole lifetime of memories. Memory, then, would be my salvation. I would dwell in the past. I would take refuge in my memories like a wounded seal seeking safety in his aklia. I would live again the crucial moments of my life, and if I lived them too passionately—well, at least I would remain within a reality which had actually existed.
At first all went well. As time dripped on, I found I had less and less need of physical distractions. I stopped singing to myself, which was a great relief because I have never been able to keep a tune. I had little need to lick my kamelaika’s scratchy wool, or to taste the salty blood of my gnawed lip, or to press my eyes with my thumbs in order to induce phosphenes, those bright pinpoints of light we sometimes see when our eyes are closed. My memories were more stimulating than mere sensation; my memories were gleaming jewels suspended in ice water; my memories were the soul of my distant and recent past. I remembered learning to tie the laces of my skates. How frustrated I had been when the looping of the knot had eluded my childish fingers! How I had raged when my mother tried to help me! I remembered other happier events, such as the first time Bardo and I had taken a yellow–sailed ice schooner out onto the frozen Sound. Bardo had been reluctant to borrow the schooner and had pointed out that we knew nothing about sailing. But I had ridiculed him into recklessness. (Journeymen often think that because they have survived the manifold, they can master any form of transportation.) A fierce wind had come up unexpectedly, nearly smashing us against the rocks of Waaskel. Still, our rush across the Sound had been exhilarating, a few moments of pure fun. In the darkness of my cell, there were other memories, each more vivid than the last. Like an old man, I remembered, and I wondered what different memories I might have had if only I had made different choices when I was younger. Why had I decided to become a pilot instead of a cantor? Why did I love Katharine? Why did I murder Liam? Why were my memories growing ever more burningly real?
The remembrancers, it is said, must overcome a difficult problem when they are younger. To remember too well is to forget only with great difficulty. As my memories grew more and more vivid, they seemed to linger, burning themselves into my inner eye. I might conjure up the first time I had seen a Friend of Man, and the blue trunk of the alien would wriggle like a sleekit and obscure more important memories. I began to have trouble forgetting. I recalled reading the poems of the Timekeeper, and whole pages of print were indelibly stamped onto the white tissue of my mind. I could “see” every bend and twist of each black letter as if I were reading an open page of the book. This was the memory of pictures I had heard so much about from childhood friends who had gone on to become scryers or remembrancers. I remembered that there were tricks for forgetting. In my mind, I built a long wall and superimposed lines and words, whole stanzas and pages of poetry onto the wall. The squiggly black letters disappeared, black into blackness—for a time. Other memories, such as Katharine’s smile, were harder to banish. I had to resolve the pale tones of her skin into a million dots of primary colors. Each red and green and blue dot I then intensified until it flared and swelled and exploded like a tiny star. A million points of light burst inside me and then coalesced into blinding haze, like that of an icefield on a false winter day. Most difficult to forget were sounds. The memory of music persisted despite my efforts to drown it out with the boom of rockets or with other noise. I was surprised to hear entire symphonies with a clarity almost hyperreal. Again and again the melody of the Takeko’s Madrigal of Sorrow played inside, the round tones of the adagio forming up like beads of gold. I heard and reheard Bardo singing love songs to Justine, and I listened to the keening of the shakuhachis and the gosharps that my mother used to play. I do not mean to say that I heard each of these things simultaneously, for I did not. One sound gave way to another only with difficulty. For instance, the music of seagulls and the drumbeat of the sea I could not forget until I had taken the component sine waves of the sounds through a Fourier transform, enfolding them into a hologram: I could then “drop” this hologram into a black, soundproofed box where it would remain until I wished to remove it and unfold the sounds of memory. Thus I created millions of mental boxes for the memories that haunted me. In this way I made room for other deeper memories, memories I did not know I possessed.
Everything is recorded; nothing is forgotten.
I do not know exactly when I became aware that I was remembrancing. Many people, of course, are cursed and blessed with nearly perfect memory, but they are not remembrancers. They can see only the faintest spark of racial memory. To remember the lives of our fathers and of our mothers’ grandfathers and their great–grandfathers and so on down the branching tree of our descent, to unlock the memories of our race’s distant past encoded within our chromosomes, to “think like DNA,” as Lord Galina would say—this is the higher art of remembrancing. It is an art which consumed me.
With a dizzying speed, images of my ancestors’ lives flickered before me. I saw slick blood and an uncoiled umbilical cord as my grandmother, Dama Oriana Ringess, screamed and pushed my mother from within her into the light of day. How my mother cried in her pain! I saw Soli. He was, in truth, my father. There were memories from Soli’s childhood; I understood, finally, what I had remembered inside the Entity, the memory of Alexandar Diego Soli teaching his son mathematics. And deeper and back, generation fell from generation; faces formed and changed, as mutable as clay. There was the long, broad Soli nose and the ice–blue eyes; there
the full lips of a Ringess pressed together and then parted to reveal the twenty–eight thick Ringess teeth. Further back, a Soli tampered with his chromosomes to strengthen his mathematical abilities. (It was from this Soli, Mahavira Andreivi Soli, that I inherited my strands of red hair.) And deeper down the roots of time: There were poets, scryers, whores, pilots, katholiks, shepherds (of sheep), slaves, kings, warriors, and even an astrier named Cleo Reiness, half of whose five hundred children went on to populate the moons of Durrikene, half of whom carked their DNA and eventually came to be known as the alien Fayoli.
One day when I was remembrancing, I heard Dawud stir within his cell. It seemed he was still very much alive, if exhausted from his long wait for the plutonium to decay. He recited a short poem to me—the first in a long while—and one couplet rang in my ears and pulled at the cords of my memory:
Only bone remembers pain;
Only pain and bone remain.
Then there was a long silence followed by a long, convoluted poem he had entitled “Plutonium Spring.” I stood to chin myself up to the air duct, the better to listen to his strident words. I heard him intone:
The rhythm in my blood is the dancing of blinded locusts
And then, “Pilot, are you still alive? Can you hear me?”
“Yes, I was...remembering.”
I wanted to tell him a thing that I had seen, that Eva Reiness was the great–grandmother of Nils Ordando. The warrior–poets shared a portion of my chromosomes. We were near–brothers, I wanted to tell him. All men are brothers.
“Do you believe in chance?” came his measured words through the black duct.
“I...sometimes I believe in chance, sometimes in fate. I don’t know what I believe.”
“How long do you think it has been? What are the chances that the plutonium would not have decayed?”
Neverness Page 49
