Neverness

by David Zindell

  —Where is Justine, then? Why can’t I hear her thoughts?

  —She’s here asleep, next to me. When she saw what happened to Debra...ah, well, she’s faced away, for a while.

  —I’ve blundered, Bardo. I should never have...tried to meet Soli that night in the bar. You remember. That’s where it all started, this sequence of bad chance.

  —You should think about the pilots we’ve lost instead of your life’s mistakes.

  —I can’t stop thinking about them. If we...why did Debra have to die, then? Why should anyone have to die?

  I thought about all of the billions of people who had died in wars, and I discovered one of war’s many perversities and ironies: The hell of war is not multiplicative. Or rather, it is inversely multiplicative. The pain of losing someone you know is a thousand times greater than the deaths of a thousand people unknown.

  —By God, I loved her once, did you know that, Little Fellow? Debra was my first lover, and she was patient with me. At Borja. I needed patience back then.

  —She was a brilliant pilot.

  —Ah, you don’t understand. She was a woman. And now she’s gone.

  —War is hell, the hibakusha say.

  —“War is hell!”—what a thing to think! “War is hell,” you say with ice in your damn cold breath, but I know you really feel, so don’t think you can hide it, because you can’t.

  It was true. I was trying to turn a diamond face to the deaths of Ali Alesar and Cristobel and Debra, but it was not working. Bardo, who was listening to my thoughts almost as they formed, reminded me that I should be full of hot rage; I should ball my fists and curse and swear vengeance against Lionel Killirand. Aloof compassion, he whispered in my mind, was the emotion of a saint. And bitter self–doubt was childish.

  —You’re not a child and you’re no saint.

  —What am I, then?

  —You’re a man, by God! I loved you better when you used to rage like a man. You almost snapped Kesse’s head off his goddamned neck, by God you did! I can’t forget that.

  —Neither can I, Bardo. I can’t forget anything.

  —Ah, too bad.

  —I’m changing, now...so fast.

  —I know, Little Fellow, I know. Sometimes I don’t understand you anymore.

  —If I could make you see the probabilities...the possibilities. Soon, there will be a battle, the beginning of the end. I can see it coming. I’m—

  —What’s wrong?

  —I’m afraid. I’m afraid of losing everything. Sometimes I’m even afraid of losing you.

  —But you can never lose your friends, Little Fellow. Haven’t I told you that before?

  —Will we still be friends, then, after it is finished?

  —By God, I swear we will!

  Bardo was still my friend, and as we entered the Orion Nebula, he began to examine the tactical implications of his infamous Boomerang Theorem. We fell among the stars of the Trapezium, which glowed with the lovely green of interstellar ionized oxygen. We fell among stars so young that they had been born when man was still half an ape roaming the grasslands of Old Earth’s mother continent. Near the Chu Binary we fought a skirmish with Soli’s main force. Bardo and Justine—and Charl Rappaporth and Li Tosh—discovered they could fall instantly back along their pathways to a window and thereby surprise any pilot who might have followed them. In this way they sent eight of Soli’s pilots into stars. It was a clever trick, but it could not be so easily duplicated. To defeat Soli, who copied and used our tactics against us as quickly as RNA copies and splits our proteins, we would need more than tricks.

  At last we made our way past the Tycho’s Thick into the Rosette. Surrounding us was that glorious star–making machine I had passed through on my journey into the Entity. Here were stars and mappings I knew well. We were close to the Vild—perilously close—and I could not help wondering what it would be like to fall out among the ashes and degraded light of that star–blown hell. As we passed through the spaces of Rollo’s Rock and Farfara and Nwarth, we lost Duncaness and his Riggersworm. To be sure, in revenge we destroyed Alhena Ede. (This huge, sardonic pilot was Jonathan Ede’s older sister. Of all the tragedies of our tragic war that might have occurred, I am at least glad that brother never killed sister. But both Edes died, and that is too bad. They were the last of their famous line, and their talents disappeared along with their bodies, chromosomes, and lightships.) For every pilot we lost we took one of Soli’s. But we could not keep on this way forever. Every pilot we lost increased the odds against us, and Soli had more pilots to lose than we did. When three of my pilots vanished into the Northwest Thick, I knew I had to close with Soli in one, final, decisive battle.

  It was wholly my decision to lead my pilots into the spaces surrounding Perdido Luz. I cannot apologize for that. Having failed to use time and intelligence successfully, I had only the element of space left to offset Soli’s greater force. We fenestered past Kaarta and New Earth on to the stars of the Fayoli because I was familiar with those mappings and those spaces. Because I was seeking a particular thickspace in which to trap Soli, we segued into the manifold near Darrein Luz. There the stars are small and burn with yellow and orange lights; there time is a little strange; there the Entity has distorted the manifold beyond probability. According to our star maps, Perdido Luz was not a part of the Entity. Had it been, no pilot (except perhaps Bardo and Justine, and Li Tosh) would have followed me there. But star maps are sometimes out of date and just plain wrong. Star maps take little account of a nebular brain’s rapid growth. I guided my pilots through the thickspace I had mastered years ago, and we fell out near Perdido Luz. None of us—not even I—guessed we were perturbing the space, the very essence of the Solid State Entity.

  Of course I knew it was a wild risk to seek battle within that thickspace. But what choice did I have? Ages ago Hannibal Barka had shocked a nation called Rome by driving his army of men and hairless mammoths across a range of mountains. All the mammoths and many of his men had frozen to death in the snow–drenched passes, but his army had survived to destroy the Romans at Lake Trasimene. I was no Hannibal, but I could still choose my space for battle. Soli would know nothing of the Perdido Thickspace, and if he followed us there, I would surprise him as Hannibal had the Romans.

  In Neverness, journeymen and novices were trudging through slushy streets on their way to dinner; and in the heart of the Entity, She was thinking Her great thoughts; and the killing radiations of Merripen’s Star and other Vild stars were rushing towards Neverness, always rushing; and Leopold Soli and a hundred lightships fell out of the manifold. They hovered above Perdido Luz’s fourth planet, a gas giant encircled by ghostly rings of ice. We caught them at a point–exit near the silvery center ring. My pilots used the prepared mappings I had shown them, and we fell upon Soli through the thickspace as if we were a pack of hungry wolves.

  I now understand what the ancient warlords meant by “the fog of war.” Although I could not place each of my pilots as I would stones upon the interstices of a ko board, I had hoped at least to observe and control the tide of the battle. I found I could control nothing, not even my sweating palms nor the throbbing of my heart. I fell out into realspace for less than an instant, and the sparkling center ring of the fourth planet hung like a glacier above me. I made an instant mapping. My ship–engines opened the manifold near Gregorik Smith’s Rose of Earth. I made another mapping and again my ship–engines opened the manifold. Blackness split, like a rent in a pilot’s kamelaika. And then were were both gone, he into the heart of Perdido Luz, and I into the point–rich pathways of the thickspace. There was a rush of theorems, the sparkling ideoplasts of the number–storm. I flowed through the dense mesh of the thickspace as if my lightship were an information virus finding its way through the dark red veins of a man’s brain. There was a branching and then a joining of tunnels. The manifold opened again. There was light, the weak yellow light of Perdido Luz. One of Soli’s pilots—it was Neith of Thorskalle in his disti
nctive, wingless ship—was waiting for me. But I had fixed a sequence of mappings. Before he could drive me into the star, I escaped, back into the throbbing arteries of the manifold. In and out of the manifold we danced until Neith made a mistake. He entered a pathway which, in its looping through the manifold, intersected with only one other. For him and his Time Future, there could be only two possible point–exits into the realspace near Perdido Luz. I calculated the probabilities, and I was waiting for him when his ship silvered the blackness. Waiting to murder him. He never had a chance.

  Be compassionate, Katharine had said to me.

  But what place could compassion have when it came time to make war? No, sometimes there could be only cold, murderous passions, and so all around me like a winter storm at night the battle raged. The lightships were glittering ice slivers, and they tore through the dark of realspace and disappeared into the manifold. The complexities of the battle overwhelmed me. There was slowtime, rushing time, theorems to prove, mappings of point to point, and the ever–present acid of pure terror. At first the burning yellow point of Perdido Luz was below me, and then it was above. (And by above, I mean that it was between me and the Canes Venatici cloud of galaxies. The stars of the Canes Venatici, by ancient convention, are said to be above all the stars of our galaxy.) As I made a mapping and eluded Lionel’s Infinite Sloop, I realized I had fallen out on the far side of Perdido Luz opposite the fourth planet. I was a mere billion miles from the battle. And then the manifold engulfed me, and I mapped through to the thickspace beneath the planet’s rings, and there was a haze of light, as of the sun through a dense ice–fog in Neverness. There were a hundred dancing lightships. I had no idea who was winning the battle. I tried to talk ship to ship with my pilots but there was no time. I escaped one of Soli’s pilots only by making a desperate mapping through a finite tree. I escaped into the manifold, but I could not immediately return because the tree’s branchings were numerous and complex. I seemed to fall forever. Time flowed as slowly as glacier ice. For a while I was sick with battle lust; I was sick with myself. How easily I had again become a murderer! How easily the virus of war had infected us all! Even as I proved a minor result of the Inclusion Theorem, pilots were murdering pilots. It was unbelievable, really. This is what battle is, I thought. Battle is not merely a word; it is organized murder. I balled my fists then in the darkness of my ship, and I cursed. I remembered a thing which should have been on all our minds before we ever decided to schism and fall against our fellow pilots: War is the worst thing that human beings do. To think of it abstractly or treat it as a game is worse than barbaric.

  And yet it is true that murder is as natural to humans as making flint axes or suckling babies. And humans are noble, tragic, splendid beings around a core of barbarity. When I at last returned to the battle, I had a moment to observe the ripple and flux of the lightships as they murdered each other. Although the battle seemed utterly chaotic, as if a cloud of madness had overcome the pilots on both sides, it was not so. To murder may indeed be madness, but the pilots did not murder at random. No, my brother and sister pilots were men and women of passion, if not compassion. I watched as certain pilots seemed to seek each other out. Bardo and Justine in their fat, sleek Blessed Harlot, pursued Lionel’s needlelike Infinite Sloop into the manifold. In vengeance for Debra wi Towt’s death, they murdered him. It was revenge that impelled Tomoth to fall against Li Tosh and sent them plunging through pathways I would have warned them against. All around me, beneath the cold yellow light of Perdido Luz, the battle degenerated into tens of vengeance combats. My pilots quickly abandoned my strategy and our prearranged mappings. Soli’s pilots, as I later learned, were poisoned with old rivalries and hatreds. They ignored Soli’s master plan. Salmalin, who had always been jealous of his most brilliant pupil, the Sonderval, fell against his Cardinal Virtue. Madness and murder; murder and madness. There was one awful moment when two of Soli’s pilots went mad and turned against each other. And then an even more awful moment when Tomoth fell out into realspace, and by sheer bad chance, caught me unmapped. To this day I can still imagine how his ugly, red, jewelled eyes must have gleamed when he realized he could at last avenge my insulting him that night in the master pilot’s bar, and moreover—a thousand times moreover—he could have his vengeance for my murdering his brother, Neith. But vengeance, like a Devaki spearpoint, cuts two ways. Li Tosh, and Bardo and Justine, fell on Tomoth in the instant before he murdered me. They murdered him; they opened a window into the manifold and sent him down a dark tunnel into the hell of a nearby star.

  I come now to perhaps the saddest part of my story. When Soli saw that Tomoth and Lionel were dead, he fell into a rage. I might have hoped that he had learned compassion, but no, he fell against Bardo and Justine without mercy or restraint. For a moment their ships floated like thallows beneath the fourth planet’s icy rings. Soli’s elegant, lithe Vorpal Blade glistening behind the Blessed Harlot—this image burned through my telescopes into the neurologics of my ship. I was close enough—a hundredth of a light–second—to meld my ship’s neurologics with those of the Blessed Harlot. In a frantic effort to help Bardo and Justine find a mapping, I did so. But they ignored the mapping I showed them. Probably Justine did not believe Soli would really murder them. Certainly, as I realize now, they were intent on making a particular mapping of their own. Although I “listened” to their final interior dialogue, I listened only for a moment. I understood only a part of their private thoughts. Here, for the sake of history and the preserving art of the remembrancers, is what I heard:

  —There, see the curve of Soli’s Vorpal Blade?

  —He always was a romantic man, really, and I—

  —Think now, beneath the ring’s thickspace, the point–source where if alpha is a statement scheme then there exists a solution class such that—

  —A cantor once told me, he said he’ll destroy you because—

  —Therefore the universal class and every other class is a subclass of—

  —Of course I’m ready to define the cardinal, but I can’t stop thinking about Soli and the cantor. He said, Justine, your husband is a tychist in his heart who’d chance almost anything to prove his theorem, and he said between love and hate there’s nothing and…

  And they were gone. A window to the manifold opened, and they were gone.

  I have seen this moment before, I thought. In my time of scrying, in my stone cell, I had seen many futures. In one of them, just before Soli destroyed them, Bardo and Justine opened a window to the manifold and fled the battle. In another, Bardo and Justine held each other in each other’s arms and in each other’s thoughts as Soli himself opened the window and thus became a murderer. Which future had come to be? Which event was now already microseconds past?

  In the end we choose our futures, the scryers are fond of saying. I made my choice. I chose that Bardo and Justine should live. And so I waited. How long I waited for them to return to the battle! How long must a Lord Pilot wait before he must turn his attention elsewhere? I waited vast, endless, countable, whole seconds; I waited an eternity. But Bardo’s ship did not return.

  I fell against Soli, then. Or he fell against me. In truth, we fell against each other. Our two lightships so different in design, my Immanent Carnation with her swept−forward wings and Soli’s Vorpal Blade—we were like streaks of lightning splitting the night. We manuvered for advantage in and out of the windows we opened. At last, I thought, at last. I made a simple mapping. I fell into an open loop which was partially bounded by a Danladi sequence. As the manifold opened before me, I was sure I would fall out into the thickspace and ambush Soli. But he had guessed my strategy and was waiting for me. I was helplessly unmapped with none of my fellow pilots near enough to save me. I am sure he would have murdered me. My Lord Pilot, my uncle, my executioner, my father.

  I believe the pilots of both sides would have fought and murdered down to the last ship if the voices had not begun. Everyone, even Soli—especially Soli—heard the
voices, although they were not really voices at all, but word plasts that we interpreted as voices. Each pilot’s ship–computer began to manufacture the ideoplasts for words and idea structures. In the pit of my ship, the neurologics enveloping me began to quiver with subtle rhythms not entirely their own. Immediately I sensed the handiwork of the Entity. I was trying to escape Soli (or was I really trying to murder him?) when the bright, snowflake ideoplast representing the Axiom of Plexity shattered into fragments. My mathematical thought array was completely ruined. Then the ship–computer produced the orange, multipronged ideoplast for “the categorical imperative to prove.” This plast connected to a red cylinder representing the specific solution set. The red cylinder joined with a black torus, the ideoplast of universal negation. Together these plasts formed a word plast which I understood to mean: You must discover the answer to death. In a like manner, other word plasts formed and joined to the central word plast. A black torus appeared again and merged with the first plast of universal negation. There was a spearlike green plast representing a specific type of mapping and automorphism, and the thought: Death lies within me grew from the central concept. In a few moments other ideoplasts formed and swirled about each other and fell into place as the little word storm quieted and cleared. I wondered why She did not appear to us as an imago of the Tycho as She had when I first penetrated Her. Perhaps She wanted to stop the battle by interrupting the number–storm within each ship. If that was Her intention, She succeeded. One hundred and twelve lightships hung motionless in realspace, and these words played through each of us:

  How far do you fall, Pilots? How do you like war? Do you still seek the secret of life? Then you must discover an answer to death. Death lies within me. Death is a star I will call Gehenna Luz. If you seek an answer to the dying stars of the Vild, you must quit your war and journey to Gehenna Luz. I will help you. But you must hurry because Gehenna Luz will die very soon. The way is far but not too far; the secret of life is near. The first pilot to reach Gehenna Luz will be told the secret.