Neverness

by David Zindell

“Perhaps it was just a joke,” I said. “Perhaps there is no plutonium and no gas. Perhaps the Timekeeper is trying to destroy your sanity—what little a warrior–poet has.”

  There was a silence, and I had to let go of the duct. After a while Dawud gasped out, “Fate and chance, the same glad dance.”

  To a warrior–poet who believed in eternal recurrence, of course, that would be so.

  “Pilot, can you hear me?” After I had pulled myself up to the duct, I could hear him plainly. “These past days have been such an ecstasy,” he said. “I find I no longer want to die. I have made poetry, and I have thought such thoughts, and dreamed and...Can you hear me?”

  “Yes,” I said into the darkness.

  “The gas is coming soon. The plutonium is about to explode. There are hot gases, dying hydrogen—how delicate the falling violets are!”

  “Is this part of a poem?”

  “Life is a poem that we compose. This is the faith of the warrior–poets: that we can capture life’s essence, the moment of the possible, in words.”

  I said nothing because it is my faith that the essence of the universe lies far beyond the realm of human words.

  “I will die soon, of course. There are killing vapors in the granite darkness.”

  “Are you a scryer, then?”

  “No, a poet. And I have composed my death poem. Will you promise me something? When I am dead, my body must be brought back to Qallar in a black marble casket. If you live long enough, you must find a farsider who knows the art of writing. The words of my death poem must be chiselled onto the casket’s facing.”

  My fingers began to cramp, and my forearm muscles trembled. I made him a promise I had no intention to keep. For no good reason, I told him of my remembrancing. I tasted gummy old food and blood in my mouth as I said, “Nils Ordando was a son of the Ringess line.”

  “Yes, that is known,” he replied instantly. “The founders of both our Orders were hibakusha. They fled the Agni Nebula during the computer wars. When the hydrogen—”

  “We’re almost brothers,” I said.

  “All men are brothers,” he said. “And all men are hibakusha. And fratricide is the rule of the species.” And then, “Can you smell the gas, Pilot?”

  Here he recited his poem, the last stanza of which was:

  I am sodden beneath wrappings of flesh;

  I am golden beneath the morning sky;

  I am holy beneath my evaporating flesh;

  I am naked beneath the plutonium sky.

  I shouted to him but there was no answer. I listened for the sound of hissing gas. I pulled up and tried to get an elbow into the air duct as I wedged my head and shoulder into the stuffy, tight tunnel. Would I hear the whine of an airlock grinding shut? Would the poet scream and thrash as he gasped for clean air? With my head ridiculously squeezed into a dark hole in the wall, I listened for any sound at all, but in the poet’s cell there was silence.

  After a while, I pushed off the wall and began pacing my cell. A madman, a murderer, a lover of words, my near–brother—I called out to him, but he did not answer me then, nor during the days that followed. I repeated the words to his poem, “Plutonium Spring,” and I memorized them. It was an easy thing to do.

  Everything is recorded; nothing is forgotten.

  Again I fell into racial memory. I fell far back, seeing archetypal images, smelling primal smells, hearing the heartbeat of ancient poems. I remembranced Old Earth. There the sky was a lighter blue than that of Icefall, light blue like a thallow’s eggshell; there the land was warm and the valleys were green, and there were orchards of real apple trees, fields of golden wheat–grain. There my far–grandfather lived in a whitewashed cottage in a city by the sea. He was a pilot and a boatmaker. His hands—my hands—were yellow with callus, and wood splinters stung his fingers. He had a wife, and there was a coupling, thousands of joyous couplings, and there was a son, and they were happy. And then the robot armies came and burned his boats, burned his city with a hellish, glowing mineral that exploded and shattered his windows and fused the glass, fused and flared, and then there was light everywhere, the unbearable flash of memory.

  I heard the clanging of robots, steel denting steel, and a high–pitched whine of metal shearing sheet. The smell of burning steel. And more sounds: robots banging against stone walls, ringing steel, humming, shouting, cursing, and a curious “pinging” sound I could not quite identify. “Mallory!” a voice from the past called to me. “By God, let’s have this door open!” the voice boomed.

  Bardo, I remembered, had such a booming voice. But this was no memory! “Open, now!” Then the heartstone door rolled open, and there was a brilliant flash, and I covered my eyes. “What’s wrong, Little Fellow, are you blind?”

  I moved towards the sound of his voice. “Not blind,” I said. My eyes burned and hurt. It felt as if someone had stuck the tip of a heated knife through my pupils and wiggled it back and forth. Then I realized the brilliance was only the dim flicker of the flame globes. My eyes were adjusting to the feeble light, slowly. “How did you get in, then? What day is it?”

  Bardo’s arm went around my back, and I smelled his flowery, sweet scent, and the smell of his fear. “We’ve got to hurry,” he said. “Can you walk? By God, you stink! Didn’t they let you have a bath? Look at your goddamned filthy beard! Hurry, now. We’ve got to hurry. Justine and the others are waiting. Ah, I shouldn’t have done this—what have I done?”

  “It was necessary,” someone said. “We should never have allowed the Timekeeper robots.”

  I covered my brows with my hands, squinting. Bardo’s face, inches from my own, was dripping blood. There was a cut on his nose, a gash near his ear lobe. Nikolos the Elder, the Lord Akashic, stood close by. A master akashic and a couple of journeymen carrying a computer accompanied him. Then I saw the robots. Up and down the long, stone corridor were robots of two different kinds: the large, red, Timekeeper’s robots, with their pincers and clamps, and black robots of a type I had never seen before. All of the tutelary robots—there were four of them—lay inert against the gray floor, a twisted, burnt, metal wreckage. The black robots were smaller, but obviously deadlier. Like an ant, each had six legs; each had metal drills and plasma torches and guns and killing lasers mounted on black steel. Four of these robots lined the corridor. At the far door, where the row of cells ended, were four more.

  As we made for the door Bardo huffed out, “Look at my face! Stone chips—I think a bullet hit the wall. Oh, what have I done? This is madness!”

  “Not madness,” Lord Nikolos said. He screwed up his round, little face. “It’s a well–organized plan—try to remember that.”

  Lord Nikolos hastily informed me of recent events. The College of Lords, he said, had threatened to censure the Timekeeper for keeping me a prisoner in his Tower. (And for his misuse of his tutelary robots. And for other reasons.) They had forced the Timekeeper to allow Lord Nikolos and his subordinate akashics to examine me, to establish my guilt or innocence. And so the plan: When the Tower doors were thrown open to Lord Nikolos and his akashic computer, Bardo’s robots had rushed in to rescue me.

  “Goddamned robots!” Bardo cursed. “My entire fortune, five hundred and thirty thousand city disks—I had to bribe the tinkers to make the robots. It cost me everything. But I had to—”

  “How many disks? No one has that much money.”

  “What else could I do? The Timekeeper would have executed you, by God!”

  “What about the warrior–poet?”

  “Dead, maybe still alive—why do I care?” He grabbed my arm and pulled me up the stairs. “Come on, Little Fellow, we’ve got to leave now! Escape—that’s the only way.”

  We went through the doorway and up the stairs to the Street. It was cold and blustery with a wet wind off the Sound. It was dark; no one was in sight.

  “This way!” Bardo said. He urged me towards a sled waiting by the curb. “To the Fields—we’ve got to hurry!”

  “What a
bout Lord Nikolos, then?”

  “I’ll remain in the City,” Nikolos said. “I think the College of Lords will have to censure or even remove the Timekeeper, in the end. Either that, or there will be full schism.”

  “What do you mean, full schism?”

  “Ah, I should have told you immediately,” Bardo said. “Li Tosh, the Sonderval, all our fellow pilots—we’re leaving the City tonight. Because of you, my friend, in protest, and because we’re sick of the Timekeeper and the other old bones who rule the Order.”

  We rocketed through the streets, and at various places along the sliddery, all the way to the Hollow Fields, the windows of the surrounding buildings were lit, hundreds of bright, yellow squares against black granite. It seemed that the eyes of the City itself were watching us. It was an eerie feeling. I knew that I had seen this moment before. In my prison, then, I had been scrying, as well as remembrancing.

  “What’s wrong, Little Fellow?” Bardo shouted above the roar of the jets and the wind. “Doesn’t it feel good to be free?”

  I looked up at the glowing sky above the runs and pads of the Fields, up at the rocket tailings of the ships escaping the City. I had seen that sky before, too, and other even brighter skys soon to come. I said nothing, and we went down to the Caverns where we found a hundred other pilots waiting their turns by their ships, and one by one we fled into the plutonium sky.

  24

  Deus ex Machina

  Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,

  Then reached the caverns measureless to man,

  And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:

  And ’mid this tumult heard from far

  Ancestral voices prophesying war!

  from “Kubla Khan” by Samuel Taylor Koleridge,

  Century of Revolution Scryer

  The hibakusha say that war is hell, and they should know. The Pilot’s War, as it came to be called, at its beginning was mostly fun. Of course, there need not have been war at all, but when the Timekeeper discovered our escape from the City—as I later learned—he was wroth. His pilots, he declared, could not leave the Order without his first dissolving their vows. Bardo and I, he proclaimed, must be returned to the City to face our punishments. Failing that, we should be executed in space at the soonest possible moment. He sent Leopold Soli to carry out this sentence. And Soli was glad to obey him because he was even more wrathful than the Timekeeper. He was mad with pain (the after–effects of the warrior–poet’s drug continually tortured his nerves), and mad with jealousy, too. He vowed to capture Justine and Bardo—either that or kill them. And I am sure that he wanted to kill me. He left the City in his lightship, the Vorpal Blade. The lightships of his friends, Tomoth, Seth, and Neith of Thorskalle, and the lightships of one hundred and twenty–five pilots loyal to him and to the Timekeeper rocketed after him. And so it began.

  We really had no plan for war. Our plan—Lord Nikolos’s and Bardo’s plan—was simple, and it did not include violence. We ninety–eight schismatic pilots would escort a deepship full of men and women representing our Order’s every profession. Pilots, eschatologists, mechanics, and tinkers—we would journey to Ninsun, which was a star near the Aud Binary. We would found a new academy. And the Timekeeper would be forced to either accept us as rivals, or to accept the changes that the College of Lords was demanding and call us back to Neverness in forgiveness and peace.

  But peace we could not have. As the Timekeeper had once observed, it is the nature of things that no one can choose peace if his enemy chooses war. Soon after our escape, we rendezvoused around the fixed–points of a star near Icefall’s, a white dwarf ridiculously named Milky Minikin. By light radio we talked ship to ship. We held a conclave, of sorts, to discuss what we should do. (At the time, of course, we did not know that Soli intended to pursue and execute us.)

  I remember seeing the imago of Bardo’s bearded face come into my ship’s pit. And hearing his voice: “We’re free, by God! Can Bardo outwit an old tyrant who never leaves his Tower?” he asked rhetorically. “By God, does tangleroot make your seed stink?”

  “Was it necessary?” I said this into the black air of the pit. It was hard to imagine Bardo hearing my words, seeing my face in the pit of his ship—and at the same time, floating naked with Justine while she listened to my words, too. “Wasn’t there any other way, then?”

  “No, there was no other way. The Timekeeper would have had you beheaded.”

  “Bardo, has it occurred to you that our escape was too easy?”

  “Easy!” he exclaimed. “Easy for you, because you didn’t have to spend a fortune to get robots made. You didn’t have to coordinate—”

  “I didn’t mean that the planning was easy,” I interrupted. “I meant our actual escape. Why did the Timekeeper permit the akashics into his Tower, if he knew they would find me innocent? Why didn’t he try to stop the pilots from leaving the Caverns? Why didn’t—”

  “You are beginning to worry me, Little Fellow. Well, in truth, I’ve worried about these things all along. I can only guess that the Timekeeper was pissing afraid that the College of Lords would censure him.”

  “I have another hypothesis,” I said.

  “And what is that?” He—his imago—wiped sweat from his eyes.

  “What if the Timekeeper let us, all of us, pilots and professionals, escape?”

  “And why would he do that?” he asked. “No, no, don’t tell me—I don’t like bad news. I think I see where your sequence of thoughts is converging.”

  Because I was crabby from my long imprisonment, I voiced the obvious anyway. “I think the Timekeeper let us escape so he could murder us, everyone who has openly gone against him. Here, in space, far from the City, so he could hide his crime.”

  “Murder us, ah...how?”

  “Perhaps he’ll send Soli to do his work.”

  “And how would Soli track us?” he asked. “He can’t know our destination, nor any of the fixed–points of our mapping sequences. And no, I don’t think Soli would work the Timekeeper’s murders; no, no, that’s not possible, is it?”

  I did not answer him. After a while, I asked, “Is Justine really there with you, in your pit? Why can’t I see her, then? Can I talk to her?”

  Bardo’s face reddened, then disappeared. His imago did not return. There was a spell of silence. And then his voice—only his voice—filled the pit of my ship: “Justine will talk to you but she’s, ah...unclothed, so she doesn’t want you to see her; she’s your goddamned aunt, after all, isn’t she?”

  I did not tell him that when I was a boy I used to peek through the crack in the door while Justine took her morning bath. At least I had until my mother caught me and pinched my nose until it bled. Justine had a beautiful body, long and voluptuous like Katharine’s. I could not really blame Soli for being jealous of Bardo.

  “I’m so glad you’re alive,” Justine finally said.

  “Where’s my mother—do you know?”

  “We tried to find her, of course, but we couldn’t. After you were imprisoned...”

  “Ah,” Bardo’s voice broke in, “did you know that another warrior–poet tried to assassinate the Timekeeper?”

  “Of course, the tutelary robots killed that poet before he ever reached the Timekeeper’s chambers.”

  “Your mother is in hiding, Little Fellow. Probably somewhere in the Farsider’s Quarter. We couldn’t find her.”

  And Justine continued, “After the Timekeeper saw how close he’d come to dying—well, Moira couldn’t very well come out of hiding, could she?”

  “She’s still in the City.”

  “Of course she is.”

  “I’m sure she’s still alive.”

  “There’s always hope.”

  Once again, I noticed how alike they sounded. Except for their intonations and the timbre of their voices, they spoke their words in the same manner. Their programs were similar, much too similar. When I told them how this worried me, their response was immediate: “Ah, of cou
rse, Mallory is a cetic.”

  “Cetics are known to worry.”

  “But you shouldn’t worry about us.”

  “No.”

  “We’ll be all right if—”

  “If only Soli would leave us alone!”

  “If only Soli weren’t so damn mad!”

  “Ah, Soli’s the real worry.”

  “Soli.”

  “If he comes after us—”

  “Well, of course, he will and—”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “Too damn bad.”

  Bardo and Justine, of course, weren’t the only ones worried about Soli. Other pilots voiced similar fears. Li Tosh, the Sonderval, Jonathan Ede—I talked to each of my old friends separately, in private. But we could reach no consensus, so we sent our imagos ship to ship, and the other pilots did the same. In each pit floated the glowing, shrunken heads of ninety–seven pilots. It was a strange, crowded, confusing way to hold a conclave. I talked to these pilots simultaneously. They talked to me. The finest young pilots of our Order: Debra wi Towt, Richardess, Paloma, Zapata Karek, Matteth ions, and Alark of Urradeth. And others who were not so young, Justine’s friends: Veronika Menchik, Helena Charbo, Aja, Ona Tetsu, and Cristobel the Bold in his famous ship, The Silver Thallow. And others, eighty–five other talking, jabbering, arguing pilots.

  “This discussion is useless,” the Sonderval said. His head was the longest and narrowest in the circle of heads. He had a long upper lip and a dimpled chin. “We must have a strategy.”

  “By God, there can be only one strategy,” Bardo said. I was pleased to see that Justine had agreed to let the imago of her head appear next to his. I smiled at her, and she smiled back. “We’ll go on to Ninsun, as planned.”

  “And what if there is war?” Zapata Karek said in his high, squeaky voice. “Should we leave the deepship to be captured? Would you abandon the professionals?”

  “And what of the professionals?” Debra wi Towt asked. “Shouldn’t they have a vote in what we decide?”

  Each of the heads turned towards hers, staring at her round, pink face, as she twirled her braids. Obviously no one wanted to let the professionals have a vote. “If Soli comes after us,” the Sonderval said, “it will be a war between pilots. We pilots should decide what to do.”