Neverness

by David Zindell

  Cristobel the Bold nodded and said, “If there’s really to be a war, we should try to surprise Soli, take the war to him.”

  “War!” Bardo cried out. “Why do we have to have a goddamned war?”

  Richardess blinked his tired, red eyes (he was an albino, with white hair and dead, white skin devoid of any pigmentation, and he was very old, the oldest of us pilots), and he said, “The Bardo is right—why should we have a war? Have we forgotten our vows to quest? Why not scatter across the lens of the galaxy? Why should we wait for a war?”

  All this time Li Tosh hadn’t spoken. He looked from face to face as he smiled his bright, gentle smile. Finally, after Richardess had finished cataloguing the horrors of war, he found his moment and said, “Whatever we do, if we do it together as brother and sister pilots, we must have a single plan. The Sonderval is right.” He looked at me, and his almond eyes were smiling, always smiling. “A single plan—therefore we should elect one of us to be Lord Pilot, at least temporarily.”

  “A Lord Pilot,” the Sonderval agreed, “it’s necessary to elect one.”

  “Ah, but who will it be?” Bardo asked.

  “Who are the master pilots among us?” Justine replied. “Who may we choose from?”

  “Well, there’s yourself,” Bardo said. “And Li Tosh, of course, and Richardess, Cristobel, Veronika Menchik, Helena Charbo and Aja—master pilots all.”

  “And there is Thomas Sonderval,” the Sonderval said, most unhumbly, I thought. “Don’t forget—I was made a master pilot on ninetieth day last midwinter spring.”

  Li Tosh smiled at our old rival and said, “For myself, I would not want to be Lord Pilot.”

  “Nor I,” Bardo admitted.

  “Nor I,” Justine said.

  “And who else is a master pilot?” Li Tosh asked, almost innocently. “Tetsu? Matteth Jons? And, of course, I almost forgot...Mallory Ringess.”

  He looked at me, and all of a sudden, the head of every pilot and master pilot was turned my way. “The Ringess,” he said, “is perhaps the finest master pilot that’s ever been.”

  “He is the finest, by God!”

  “The Ringess found his way in—and out—of the Solid State Entity. The Ringess,” and here he recited a long list of my qualifications, among which were the rumors that I was a hidden cetic, a remembrancer, and maybe even a scryer. Above all, Li Tosh told them, I was a lucky man, lucky to be alive after dying such a seemingly final death. And who wouldn’t want to elect such a lucky Lord Pilot?

  I won’t record here everything that was said after that. I suspected that Bardo, Justine and Li Tosh together had orchestrated their dramatic little speeches. They must have planned from the first that I should be the Lord of the schismatic pilots. Had they, before they ever left the City, cajoled their friends and fellows into voting for me? I think they must have. Fifty–four of the ninety–seven pilots bowed their heads to indicate they favored my elevation. Twelve of them, for one reason or another, declined to vote. Thirty–one pilots—and I was sorry to see that Richardess was one of these—shook their heads vigorously. Each of them denied that I had any right to be Lord Pilot over anyone. I was tempestuous and too bold, they said. (Paradoxically, some people fear bold leaders while most others value the quality of boldness above all else.) To a pilot, they immediately deserted us. Some left for Tria; some of them returned to the City. A few decided to honor their vow to quest and followed Richardess, perhaps out into one of the arms of the galaxy.

  In this way, I became Lord Pilot of sixty–six rebellious pilots; if there was war, I would be a warlord responsible for sixty–six lives.

  “Congratulations, Little Fellow!” Bardo said to me in the privacy of my ship. He looked at me as he pulled at his mustache. He began naming names of pilots who had remained loyal to the Timekeeper, and to Soli. “What will you do now? If Soli moves against us, there will be at least two of Soli’s ships to our one.”

  “What a fine mathematician you are!” I said. “At least you can still count.”

  I assured him we would win against Soli despite our numbers. If he fell against us, we would maneuver and strike and fall away into the manifold; we would lay cunning traps and make double attacks; we would tempt the enemy into spreading his forces too thinly, and then we would turn and pin ship against ship and win all the pieces, and the game would be ours.

  I knew nothing of war. War, as I would soon discover, was not a game, though I could not help thinking of it as a game. Real war was really not much fun. I found that I had no liking or genius for war. In truth, I was surprised and somewhat ashamed to find myself leading pilots to war. I consulted the library of my ship–computer and discovered that my understanding of the elements of strategy was based solely upon games such as chess and ko that I had played as a child. Real war, it seemed, was much more chaotic than any game. Real war had no rules. I studied the annals of ancient warlords and strategists. Sun Tzu, Liddell Hart, The Tolstoi, Julius Caesar, Musashi the Sword–Saint, the First Richard Ede—all the great authors of war. I hurried my brain with slowtime, and their words were like photons illuminating a lightsail. I learned the axioms of war. Never divide your forces; choose your own space and time for battle; never be predictable—these fundamentals, so often ignored by princes and generals who had led millions to their deaths, I learned as quickly as I could. I studied the ancient campaigns of Aleksander, and classic battles, and the tragic Man–Darghinni Wars, which were not so ancient. I was like a slightly talented novice forced to learn the rules of chess and study the games of the grandmasters all in a single night. My computer made simulations of history. I relived Caesar’s genocide of the Tencredi and watched Hannibal Barka’s horse warriors roll up the Roman flanks at Kannae. And then there was slaughter; then the murderous Karthaginian infantry closed and killed sixty thousand legionnaires so crushed together they could not lift their swords nor cover themselves with their shields. Their shields failed. I followed this theme of failing shields ahead two thousand years. As if I were standing with a telescope on the cratered surface of Old Earth’s moon, I watched the brilliant, terribly beautiful First Exchange of the Holocaust. I marveled as the space shields were overwhelmed and the northern continents flared with ten thousand balls of expanding white light. From Taddeo Astoreth’s The Way of War, I learned that all battles, no matter how complex, are decided according to four simple elements: force, space, time, and intelligence. Although Soli might outnumber us two to one, Aleksander had overcome odds of five to one at Gaugamela. If I were to defeat Soli at real war, I would have to lead my pilots into familiar spaces of my choosing and fall against him when he was not ready. Most important, in this strange, unprecedentedly mathematical war we might wage, would be intelligence, for we would have to predict the mappings of Soli’s pilots almost as they made them.

  If Soli fell against us; if he could track us through the manifold.

  Every ship, of course, when it opens a window perturbs the manifold slightly. If two ships are far from each other, these perturbations are impossible to detect. But if the ships are close enough, if they are within a well–defined region, the radius of convergence narrows, and a probability mapping can be made. Any ship, with a degree of probability, can track—can “predict”—the mappings of any other. If we could flee far enough and fast enough, the probability of Soli finding us would approach zero.

  And so we fled along the fallaways towards Ninsun. Stars streamed past like snowflakes in a storm. We fled fast and far. Finally we fell out around Ninsun, which was a small white star orbited by a single planet. And Soli and his pilots were there, above the planet, waiting for us. I counted one hundred and twenty–nine lightships. The Vorpal Blade, Tomoth’s and his brothers’ Time Past, Time Present and Time Future—like diamond knives they hung poised above Ninsun, reflecting the light of that feeble star and the glowing, dusty lights of the Aud Cluster. Immediately I called out to my pilots. (How quickly I thought of them as “my” pilots! How quickly and finally
we fall to vanity!) I called out a ten–star sequence beginning with Shima Luz. We made our mappings and disappeared into the fallaways. And Soli and his pilots, I am sorry to say, because they were well within the region defined by the Aud Cluster’s gravity field, had no trouble tracking our perturbations of the manifold.

  “By God, we’ve been betrayed!” Bardo’s voice boomed. “Who could have told Soli we would choose Ninsun, of all the damn stars in the damn galaxy?”

  I, too, wanted to know this. I tried to contact Soli by light radio, and it surprised me that he agreed to talk to me.

  “How far do you fall, Pilot? Not far enough—no, never far enough, isn’t that true?”

  This was Soli’s voice, and it was speaking to me in the pit of my ship. We had fallen out above a star with a number but no name, one of the blue supergiants at the edge of the Cluster. It was the first time we had talked since the day I murdered Liam. His imago appeared before me. He was thinner than I had remembered, his cheeks gaunt, sunken. His hand covered his eyes as if he were agonizing over a deep loss and did not want to look at me. Everywhere else, on his face, and in the tremors of his starved body, I read the tells of anger and pain.

  “Who betrayed us?” I asked. “How did you know we’d journey to Ninsun?”

  “The Timekeeper knew Bardo’s plan all along. He’s always been good at spying.”

  “And so he sent you to murder us, then?”

  “Essentially,” he said, “that’s true. But is there need for more murders? No, there’s no need, not if you surrender and return to the City.”

  I think he must have known I would not surrender because he was not at all surprised when I said, “No, Leopold, I won’t go back.”

  “You call me by my given name?”

  “Should I call you ‘Father,’ then?”

  When I said this he grabbed his belly and dug his fist in. He winced as if his stomach acid were eating up through his throat. “No,” he told me, “you should say instead: ‘Yes, Lord Pilot, I will return to face my punishment.’”

  “You’re not my Lord Pilot anymore.”

  “Yes, you’ve been elected Lord Ringess—isn’t that what your pilots are calling you? Let us hope none of them lose faith in your leadership and try to assassinate you.”

  I pressed my knuckles up to my lip, then said, “I didn’t try to kill you; I tried to save you. The warrior–poet—”

  “Who are you to save anyone?” he asked. He clearly didn’t believe that I had saved his life.

  “Don’t you remember anything?” I asked.

  He took his hand away from his eyes. The whites were shot with ruptured, red capillaries. He looked as if he hadn’t slept for a long time. His hand was shaking like that of a palsied, old man. “The Timekeeper said his robots captured you and the poet as you were about to murder me. What else should I remember? What was seen...was seen.”

  “No, that’s not true! I’d tracked the poet through the City. And I—”

  “Yes, you’re a liar, aren’t you? But even if you were telling the truth...it’s too late, isn’t it? There are all your other crimes to pay for.”

  In a way, he was right; it was too late. Our private enmity had festered and infected the Order, and now many would have to pay. Neither of us, however, was eager to see pilot murder pilot. (At least, I think we both wanted to keep our murders in the family, so to speak. Once, when I informed him—and this was sheer cruelty on my part—that Bardo and Justine would never return to Neverness unless the Timekeeper forgave them and permitted them to marry, he whispered, “Justine, how was I so stupid...Justine?” and there was murder on his lips.) And so, by unspoken consensus, we began a war of maneuver. At first it was more of a game than a real war. Like any good general or warlord, Soli hoped to win as much as possible with as little loss as possible. He sought to demonstrate by manuver that our position was hopeless, that we should surrender without battle. Following his lead, pilots such as Stephen Caraghar and Salmalin would cut across our pathways, fall out, and harry the fat, whalelike deepship. They would then demonstrate the finesse of their predictive mappings, a warning meant to say, “You see, we pilots of the Order can find you wherever you are and destroy you.”

  Soon our tactics became more provocative. When one of Soli’s pilots fell out above the deepship, Debra wi Towt, for instance, might fall out of the manifold near both ships. The two lightships would dance in and out of the manifold, two lightning slivers of silver seeking an advantageous probability mapping. The “victorious” pilot would be the one who best predicted the mappings of her “enemy.” She—or he—would fall out into realspace, into inky blackness and prepare the ship’s spacetime engines while she lay in wait. If her enemy fell out at the predicted point–exit, the soon–to–be victorious pilot would demonstrate that she could have destroyed the other. As the victorious pilot’s spacetime engines fixed on a point–source near her enemy, the realspace near the enemy ship would begin to buckle and distort, to bubble like a sheet of hot clary. And when the bubble burst and the window to the manifold was open for an instant, the victorious pilot would spin her lightship along its axis in a gesture of triumph as if to say, “Therefore I could have made a mapping into the core of a nearby star, and hurled your ship into hellfire. If this were a real war, you’d be annihilated.”

  Given our red, dripping, human natures, as Bardo reminded me, inevitably, this war of maneuver could not last. One day, as we segued into the August Cluster, Tomoth of Thorskalle murdered Jonathan Ede. Of course, Jonathan’s death may have been an accident. Perhaps Tomoth—that murderous blond giant with his murderous mechanical eyes—“accidentally” opened a window to the manifold too near the Ship of All Ships, and sent Jonathan into the core of a star. But what exactly is an accident? Was it an accident that the brilliant, and usually calm Li Tosh sought vengeance for his best friend’s murder? Was it an accident that he sought out and outmaneuvered Tomoth’s brother, Seth? That he destroyed him as Jonathan had been destroyed? I do not believe so. And when pilot began falling against pilot with frenzy and abandon, that was no accident either.

  (Was it an accident that I had punched out and broken Soli’s nose? Was the composition of my chromosomes an accident, too?)

  I remember Soli’s final words to me before we ceased our communications for good and fell into real battle. “Why, Pilot?” he asked. “Why did you make it come to this?”

  And just after Jonathan had fallen into his death, Bardo’s imago appeared before me. “It’s unbelievable!” he roared. “What a crime! Perfidy! Abomination! Sacrilege! By God, I’m running out of words!—Barbarity! Catastrophe! Oh, what a tragedy this is! Oh, too bad!”

  Because I was grieving over Jonathan’s death, because I could not bear the thought of causing anyone else to die, because I was grieving, I was too cautious. Let me repeat that: I, Mallory Ringess, was too cautious. I led my sixty–four lightships across the stars of the Triffid nebula with the fearfulness of an old chessplayer moving his pieces across his sixty–four squares. I sought to maneuver my force from Veda Luz to Karanatha and on to the Danladi Thinspace at the edge of the Triffid. There, where the pathways were few, we might trap Soli’s ships. As they fell out of the manifold and desperately sought to map one of the few point–sources, we would surround them (in a topological sense, we had to find a set of point–sources both closed and bounded, that is to say, compact) and destroy them one by one.

  But we never reached the Danladi Thin. Soli must have guessed my strategy because he surprised me. I remember well the instant I came to question caution. I—and my other pilots—had just fallen out, and the light of Veda Luz dazzled me. The interior of the nebula glowed a soft ice–blue from the reflected light off the particles of interstellar dust. Veda Luz itself was a burning blue, a hot blue supergiant as bright as Alnilan or the First Spica. It was a huge star. So massive was Veda Luz that the manifold in its neighborhood was vulgarly distorted. I had difficulty leading my pilots through its windows in an or
derly manner. There came an instant when six of my pilots had to wait while the others found their windows and fell through to Favasham, which was the next star in our sequence towards the Danladi Thin. In that instant, Soli’s old friend Lionel Killirand in his Infinite Sloop fell out, fell upon Cristobel the Bold and destroyed him. And in that instant, thirty–two master pilots fell upon Olafson Jons and Nashira and Ali Alesar of Urradeth and Nikolos Korso and the inimitable Debra wi Towt. Probably it was Lionel who actually killed her. There was a snarling confusion as lightships slipped in and out of realspace, thirty–seven diamond needles darting at each other through blackness into starlight as if they were a pack of Alaloi dogs fighting for position close to the fire. I was aware of this battle as hundreds of quick, vanishing–point deformations of the manifold, hundreds of glinting ripples on a shimmering, nighttime sea. I tried to turn our main body of lightships back, kleining along our pathways, but by the time we returned to Veda Luz, the battle was over. Lionel and the others had fled. And six of our pilots were lost.

  Like a team of beaten sled dogs with their tails between their legs, we retreated across Jonah’s Star Far Group almost to the edge of the Orion Nebula. I floated in the pit of my ship as I briefly talked with my pilots. Bardo especially was wounded by the battle’s outcome. We touched the hulls of our ships, and his voice and thoughts propagated through my ship–computer and formed in my mind. For a moment, the neurologics of his ship were faced with my own. We shared the same thoughtspace. Because we were stunned and whipped with defeat, because we were grieving, we allowed ourselves a few moments of this forbidden electronic telepathy.

  —Little Fellow, can you hear/feel/see me?

  I could see his intelligent, brown eyes, hear his voice, smell his fear and farts as he floated within the pit of the Blessed Harlot. It was something of a mystery how Justine could stand to be near him inside such a tiny enclosed space.