Neverness

by David Zindell

  I did not sleep at all that night. For a long time my patterns of sleep had been changing as I changed. I lay listening to the muffled breathing of the dogs in the tunnel and to the wind working through the chinks between the snow blocks. The hut was aglow with the light of the oilstones, which I kept full and burning until the morning. On his snow bed next to me Soli stared up at the flickering flame shadows on the ceiling. He lay still and quiet; it seemed as if he were sleeping with his eyes open. But he was not sleeping. Without looking at me he began discussing the little problems of our day’s run. “That sledmaster knew nothing about dogs. Well, he was a Yarkonan, wasn’t he? Tomorrow you should leash Arne in Neva’s place. Put him between the bitches, that way he’ll leave Kuri alone and Hisu won’t snap at him.” He fell back into silence, then continued, “We’ll have to cut socks for Bela and Matsu, won’t we? Did you see their paws? Yes, we’ll have to cut socks for both teams before the Outer Islands. The wormrunners say the ice there is ragged as an autist’s robe.”

  It was sad that the only time Soli and I seemed to understand each other was when we struggled together to solve a problem, either a mathematical problem or the much more immediate problem of staying alive in temperatures cold enough to freeze the carbon dioxide in our breath. We talked of hunting seals when our food inevitably ran out; we talked of the fine quality of the saffel, the fast snow. Towards morning our talk began to turn to mathematics. He wanted to hear my proof of the Great Theorem, but he was too proud to ask. His bitterness hung between us like a frozen cloud.

  “My life has been given to mathematics, and what has it given me?” he muttered into the hut’s curving walls. I told him, then, the proof of the Continuum Hypothesis. Without the stimulation of my ship (and his Vorpal Blade), blinded of the visual spaces in which to conjure up the ideoplasts of the Hypothesis, it took a long time to make him see the proof. At last, when I had worked my way through the demonstration that the Justerini subspace is embedded in the simple Lavi space, he sat upright so quickly that he nearly smashed his head through the snowy ceiling. He explained, “Stop! I see it now! I should have seen it before, it’s such a sharp trick: The Lavi correspondence scheme collapses now, doesn’t it? It’s a beautiful proof, an elegant proof.” And then his voice died to a sigh, and I had to strain to hear him say, “Oh, I was so close.”

  I said, “It’s a constructive proof, you see.” I bent over and trimmed the oilstone’s wick with my knife. A constructive proof: Not only was it possible to fall from any star to any other with a single mapping, but there existed a way, inherent in my proof, to construct such a mapping.

  “A beautiful proof,” Soli repeated. “Yes, and now your dilemma. Anyone—even the merchant pilots and the like—will be able to fall where they will.”

  “Perhaps,” I said.

  “War, real war between planets will be possible.”

  “That was the Timekeeper’s theory.”

  “The Order will never be the same, will it? All the Civilized Worlds?”

  I drew the hood of my furs around my head. I said, “That was the Timekeeper’s fear. He tried to kill me—kill us both—because he was afraid.”

  “Yes,” Soli said. “We used to talk about such things all the time. He warned me against change, and punished me many times for not listening. Change—if it hadn’t been for your reckless first run to the Entity, we might have had change without...” And here his voice hardened and cracked, “...without disaster.”

  I knew he was thinking of Justine so I said, “I’m sorry.”

  “What will you decide?” he asked me. “About the Hypothesis? What will you do?”

  “I don’t know,” I told him.

  He fell into silence, and much later, passed into a fitful sleep. I lay awake watching him shift about and twist inside his furs. I wondered if I should and would show the proof of the Hypothesis to the other pilots. I began to play the proof over again in my mind. When I reached the complex exposition of the first Danladi Lemma, I mourned the loss of my ship. Reflexively—almost instinctively—I found myself mentally reaching out as I would towards my ship’s neurologics. I faced myself. My eyes were tightly closed; I seemed to float within the dark covering of my furs. Outside the hut was blackness and cold, but inside, inside my head, there was fire and light. For a moment the diamond ideoplasts of the Lemma stood out as clearly as anything I had ever seen. Then there was a blizzard of ideoplasts as the proof took shape. I did not know exactly how these ideoplasts infused my visual cortex. There was no ship–computer, no neurologics to create the visual spaces of dreamtime and the other spaces of a pilot deep within the manifold. There was only my brain and my changing self, whatever that self and brain really were. And there were mappings, a whole sequence of mappings. The thickspace above Neverness appeared, dense, twisted and impenetrable. Suddenly it unravelled like a ball of silk, and I saw thousands of new mappings, new pathways to the stars. To Vesper and Darghin, and on, to the Takeko Double and to Abrath Luz where she burned hot and blue and bright, and further on to the stars which have no names, the doomed and lost stars of the Vild. There were an infinity of interconnections between the stars of the universe; every star was connected to every other. I saw this in a moment, and I was more deeply aware of the manifold than ever before. When I thought of the source of this vision I fell into fear. Then, as suddenly as it had come, it was gone. The manifold closed in like a winter sea. There was darkness. I opened my eyes to the shadows of the hut. Soli was snoring in ragged spurts as he ground his teeth. Even though I was close enough that the icy dew of his breath beaded up on my furs, I felt very alone.

  The fear stayed with me through the night, more intense than it had been since I had returned from Agathange. I wondered again at the evolution of the Agathanian’s godseed. Had it completed its work? Was my brain dying, replaced bit by bit with preprogrammed neurologics? I did not know, but I felt something terrible and wonderful was happening to me. I conjured up this image: I saw millions of neurons, with their fat, irregularly shaped cell bodies, swelling and bursting, the myelin sheaths coating the long axons dissolving, being absorbed. Throughout the hideously complex weave and mesh of the millions and millions of threadlike dendrites, the neurologics were replicating and growing. There would be new connections, crystal sheets of protein computers linking up. And all this occurring, or so I imagined, inside my cortex, in that wondrous red jelly above my eyes. And here was my fear. The frontal lobes would be disconnecting with my limbic brain, or perhaps connecting in strange new ways. My control of myself would be changing. There would be new programs, perhaps profound, new, hidden programs. And now it was done, or almost done. How I knew this I could not say. I knew only that when I closed my eyes and mastered my fear program, the manifold opened to me, as splendent and deep as ever the manifold from within my lightship had been. And here was my wonder. Within me was a fathomless, shining, crystal sea flowing outward in every direction. I felt intimations of infinity, that all things were possible. I lay awake watching the light of dawn come streaming through the cracks between the snow blocks. Then the dogs began to whine and bark as Soli stirred and knocked the ice–powder from his furs. I rubbed my eyes and blinked, and I heaped a few handfuls of snow into the pot above the oilstones so we would have some coffee to face the new day.

  * * * * *

  For ten days we followed the Timekeeper’s tracks due west. Twice we lost them where the spindrift was thick and heaped up into gleaming white dunes half a mile long. But we easily found them again by driving our sleds in a sinusoidal wave pattern along the western axis of our run: First we would curve out to the north and then bend back south, cutting across what would have been our straight line westward. And then south, curving back north, and so on, wriggling across the snow like a sleekit until we found his tracks. As long as the Timekeeper ran westward—and what other way could he run?—this little technique would be infallible. Unless it snowed. If it snowed mile after mile of ice would be furred with unmarked w
hiteness, and we would waste too much time moving in undulating waves. But it was much too cold to snow. We depended on the cold, even though the cold knifed through our furs and chilled us to the core. In truth, the cold nearly killed us. It was so cold that the snow was dry and gritty like sand. The air held no moisture, and the sky was deep blue, almost blue–black like an eschatologist’s folded robes. The dry chill air worked at our noses until they began to bleed. We sucked in air hard as icicles, and we felt ice points crystallizing in our nostrils, freezing and cutting our warm, tunnelled flesh. Soli suffered more than I. Frozen blood encrusted his mustache and beard, and the collar and chest of his white furs. He looked like a great white bear who had thrust his muzzle into the bloody carcass of a seal. But the blood was all his own; he was weak from cold and the steady loss of blood. Once, during a windstorm as he stumbled behind the snow wall we had hastily flung up, he stupidly removed a mitten to warm his nose with his hand. The tips of three of his fingers—and they were the same fingers which had been cut by glass in the Timekeeper’s Tower—quickly froze. Because he was cold and shivering I loosened my own furs in the Devaki fashion, and I warmed his iced fingers against my stomach. It was strange to feel his hard fingernails and skin against my own, strange and disturbing. As soon as his fingers thawed, I thrust his hand away from me and covered it. “Make a fist inside your mitten,” I told him. “And try to keep your hand out of the wind.”

  He looked at me through eyelashes frozen with tears (the cold made our eyes run with tears), and he said, “You’re not the only one who remembers how to heal frozen fingers, are you?” And then he made a fist and tucked it beneath his armpit. “Thank you,” he said.

  During the whole time of our run we rarely spoke to each other unless it was to convey some vital bit of information. Even then we would often communicate by shaking our heads at a quick, grunted–out question, or by pointing at the Timekeeper’s tracks where they veered slightly northwest, or by smiling our thanks as one or the other brewed the morning coffee. Our cold, painful lives soon settled into a rhythm. At the end of the day’s run, we would build the snow–hut and shovel over and patch the chinks from outside. After this we would bring in our cooking pots and food, our stiff sleeping furs which we rolled out across the snow beds we built, everything we would need for the night. While Soli tended the oilstones and the hut filled with light, I would bring in blocks of snow to be melted for coffee and a single block to stop the tunnel against the wind. When the dogs had been fed and we went through our furs with the snow–beater, it was time to drink our Summerworld coffee, to eat our stewed baldo nuts and boiled meat. Time to warm ourselves and think. Later, with our furs hanging from the drying racks, as we lay abed sipping our last mugs of coffee, Soli would read to me from the Book of Silence.

  Most people think of silence in the negative, as the mere absence of sound. But this is not true. Silence is a real thing, almost as palpable and hard as stone. Those nights inside the hut when the wind had died and the dogs were asleep, Soli would sit propped up in his furs silently staring into his blue coffee mug. Once, when the air warmed slightly and ice crystals hung in the sky like a yellow veil over the sun, we argued about what we would do if a front passed through and it snowed. After we were comfortable (and I use this word in a very relative sense) inside the hut, I insisted that the Timekeeper would run for Kweitkel. I was very sure of myself. Soli pressed his fingers tightly against his coffee mug and shot me a look which might have meant: “You’re just like me, too damn stubborn and arrogant!” Then he was still and silent as stone, and the Book of Silence opened. His cold eyes and face were the key; upon his face was written the first page of the Book, and what was written there was hatred.

  He hated himself. All women and men, of course, being human beings find some part of their all–too−human selves to hate. But he took this hatred further; he made an art of hating himself. His pride, his anger, his aloofness from the sufferings of his fellow man—he hated these weaknesses just as he hated his lack of imagination and failure to prove the Hypothesis. And more, he hated himself merely for having weaknesses of any sort. I watched him place his white, blistered lips above the rim of his mug and blow on his coffee, and it occurred to me that he hated being human. He, that broody, inward–looking man who had so often ventured down the dark, icy glidderies of his soul, had discovered that we define our humanity—our very selves—more by our weaknesses than by our strengths. And there was the trap which held him like the enclosing freeze of the winter sea: He loved being human as much as he hated it because it was the only thing he knew how to be. The greater Soli, the Soli who might someday emerge from the flawed, bitter, old Soli, if only he would relinquish his icy grip upon himself, this Soli he feared (and therefore hated) above all things. And he knew all this. He saw himself more clearly than I ever could through my naïve cetic’s eyes. It was this self–knowledge and self–vision which sealed the tomb of his self–hatred. If he could really see the spiral of hate and fear binding him, shouldn’t he be able to break free? No, he could not. He was only human, after all, wonderfully, tragically human. Human beings, he had tried to tell himself for three lifetimes, must accept their own humanity.

  By the time we reached the first of the Outer Islands, he had to accept the weakness of his human flesh, too. Thirtyday dawned even colder than it had been. Ten miles to the south of our hut—and it seemed even closer in the clear morning air—the ancestral home of the Yelenalina family was a green and white hump above the sea. Soli was coughing at the harsh air (so was I), all the while stealing quick looks southward as he fumbled with the dogs’ harnesses. At first I thought his clumsiness was due to his distracted thoughts; perhaps he was wondering what had happened to the Yelenalina family these past few years. When Leilani unexpectedly dug his claws into the snow and began barking at a horde of snow loon making their way towards the island, the leather straps came up tight around Soli’s fingers. He winced and bit his lip.

  “Are they frozen again?” I asked as I stepped through the crunching, squeaking snow. I helped him untangle Leilani and his second dog, Gita, who had leaped into the air in her futile effort to get at the birds. “Let me see your fingers.”

  “No, they’re fine,” he said with steam puffing out of his bloody nose. “Yes, cold but fine.”

  “Let’s get them warm,” I said. “It will be hard going from here to Kweitkel. We’re about forty miles from the Fairleigh ice–shelf, I think.” I reached for his hand. “Here, I’ll warm them for you.”

  “No.”

  “Your damn fingers are frozen, aren’t they? You should have kept them warm, as I said.”

  “No, they’re not frozen.”

  “Let me see.”

  “Go away, Pilot.”

  I was shivering in the morning half–light while the wind drove snow down my neck. I wanted to be off on our day’s run, to let the rising sun and my exertions warm me. I turned west, looking into the hazy whiteness for the folds and crevasses of the ice–shelf. I said, “Let’s go into the hut. I’ll heat some water and we’ll thaw your fingers that way.”

  Despite the cold, Soli’s forehead was covered with sweat. “We don’t have the time, do we?”

  I thumped Arne’s side, and I tied a leather sock over his sore paw. “If you lose control of your sled and drive it into a crevasse, we’ll lose more than time.”

  Then he shook his head and kicked the snow and said, “Yes, time.” And unexpectedly, he went into the hut.

  I followed him through the tunnel. When we had got his mittens off, I saw that he had not lied. His fingers were not frozen. They were worse than frozen. His flesh had died and run to rot. His fingertips were black with bacteria, stinking with gangrene. They smelled worse than year–old, decayed fish heads. I could barely stand the stench so I backed up until my head bumped the wall of the hut.

  He held his fingers away from him as he would a dead sleekit and said, “The healing primaries haven’t helped, have they?”

/>   “We could return to the City,” I said. “Even if the gangrene got your whole hand, the splicers could grow you a new one in half a hundredday.” In truth, I did not really want to return to the City.

  “No, there’s no time, is there? We’d lose the Timekeeper.”

  “Would you rather lose your fingers?”

  “Better that than my returning to the City like a beaten dog.”

  I looked at his ruined, swollen fingers, which were puffy with diseased gases, and I told him, “I’m no cutter.”

  “You have a knife, don’t you? Therefore you may cut.”

  I rubbed my nose and said, “It won’t be easy.”

  “Are you afraid?” he asked me.

  “It won’t be easy to live among the Devaki without fingers.”

  “No, it won’t be, will it?” he said.

  His face was somber as I took his hand in mine and turned to examine his fingers. I did not really want to touch him, much less cut his fingers off, but there was nothing else to do. Onto a newl skin I set out a needle and thread from my sewing bag. I unsheathed my seal knife. I held it over the oilstone until it was hot and black with carbon. Then I cut off his fingers. As he ground his teeth and groaned and attempted his pain primaries, I took his middle and forefingers off at the second knuckle, and I cut the finger next to them all the way down to the palm. Quickly I staunched the bleeding with the hot knife and sewed the stumps closed. All the time that I held his hand, I could not help noticing how closely its shape matched my own. (For all his professed bitterness with the Order, he still wore his pilot’s ring around his little finger. I did not think he would ever take it off, unless I had to amputate that finger, too, and the ring fell off on its own.)