I think he wanted very badly to die. But life was too much of a habit, and he could not die so easily, not the Timekeeper, so he charged Soli and tried to put his knife into him. Soli threw his spear. With his spear he had once killed a great white bear, and now he would kill an old, old wolf of a man. Even though the Timekeeper tried to twist out of the way, Soli’s spear caught him in the chest.
“So!” the Timekeeper howled out in pain. He stumbled and fell into the snow, ten feet from the edge of the crevasse.
Then Soli was all over him, kicking him in the face and throat, grabbing the spear shaft and jerking it back and forth, the better to ruin as much flesh as possible and to work the tip deep into the Timekeeper’s heart.
When I began to move forward, Soli shouted, “Stay away!”
I took a step closer to them, the last step, the fateful step, the step I had seen myself take a thousand different times as I lay scrying in our silent snow–hut. I did not know why I took the step. I only knew that I must, that if I stepped closer to Soli, somehow the secret I had sought for so long would be revealed to me. My foot seemed to hang in the snow as it settled downward. My muscles were nearly frozen. The cold air hurt my eyes. My vision of the future—the future that was now, had always been and would always be—had taken me this far but no farther. Beyond this time, nothing. I was as blind to future moments as a child floating in his mother’s womb is to light.
“Bastard!” Soli shouted. “Stay away!”
He ripped his spear from the Timekeeper’s chest. There was a hole in the Timekeeper’s furs as big as my fist, an ocean of blood. With the strength of an Alaloi—or the frenzy of a madman—Soli bent low and lifted him straight up over his head. He staggered over to the edge of the crevasse.
“No, Soli!” I cried out. I moved across the snow as fast as I could, but I was remembering too much to fall into slowtime, and therefore I moved too slowly.
“Soli, no!”
I grabbed at Soli as he heaved and pitched the Timekeeper’s body into the crevasse. I fell against him; both of us nearly followed the Timekeeper over, too. There was a crack and a splash as the body broke through the thin, new sea ice twelve feet below us. The Timekeeper plunged into black water; he sank like a stone and disappeared. The secret of life.
“Damn you, Soli!”
The seals and fishes would scavenge the Timekeeper’s body, and the secret of life would pass into them and be lost forever somewhere in the icy deeps of the sea. I clung to Soli’s furs waiting for the Timekeeper’s body to rise, but it did not rise; it would never rise again.
“Bastard!” Soli shouted this ugliest of words as he caught his good hand up in my hair and tried to snap my head back.
Then I went mad, too. How thin the line between love and hate, reason and rage! Soli and I went down into the snow, tearing at each other as if we were mad dogs. I blindly grabbed for his throat. I punched his nose. With his two–fingered hand he must have found his spear because the bloody, frozen point dipped towards my face. I am sure he would have shoved it into my throat, but he did not have a very good grip on it. I dropped my chin to cover my throat and jerked suddenly. Somehow the flint tip glanced across my forehead over my eyes. There was a hot pressure and a ripping sound and blood. The flint was in my blood, and his blood, the Timekeeper’s blood frozen to the sharp spear point, melted into my blood as Soli sawed the spear across my skull. I had the eerie sensation that my blood recognized the kinship of the Timekeeper’s blood, that inside me his blood was whispering to me, calling forth my deepest memories. Or perhaps it was the shock of the spear or the brilliant glare of the sun off the eastern ice that set me to remembrancing—I do not know. I grappled with Soli hand to two−fingered hand, and the cold tide of memory (and rage) swept me under.
I remembered a simple fact of genetics; I remembered that all human beings shared a common ancestry. The kinship of blood: Soli rolled against me, and his chest came up against mine, pressing me down through the layers of snow. I opened my mouth to scream, but the blood dripping out of his nose got in and gagged me. I swallowed his blood, my blood, the blood of his father and grandfather, who was the Timekeeper, the grandfather of Bardo and Li Tosh, too, perhaps even Shanidar’s grandfather, the grandfather of the entire human race. For thirty thousand years the Timekeeper had wandered the continents of Old Earth, all the while filling the women he took with the flood of his loins. Filling them with godseed. How many children he had fathered across the centuries I could not guess. Perhaps tens of thousands of children. And in each one of them, girl and boy, the secret of the Ieldra coiled and was passed on to their children and their children’s children, and on and on, father to son, mother to daughter year after year so that on all the continents and oceans of all the planets of man (and on the made–worlds, too) no woman or man lived in whom the great secret did not live, lying dormant, waiting inside. Inside me.
We rolled over and over in the snow as Soli tried to stab his spear into my neck. But I locked his arm—it was a lock the Timekeeper had taught me as a child—and I felt the joint stiffen up as he grunted in anger and pain. Soli, too, had once taken wrestling lessons, and he broke my hold. He got a knee up and spun about. There was snow in my mouth and down the collar of my furs. I was swimming in snow. The ice points stung my naked shoulders and froze my neck. Rivulets of snowmelt and sodden clumps of icepaste chilled my chest. We punched and gouged and wrestled through the clean snow, trying to kill each other.
“Should I kill him?” Soli suddenly screamed. But, no, the scream was inside of him, not in his mouth. I was reading his face; perhaps I was reading his mind. The scream was inside me.
The brain is only a tool...
Something else called to me, and I shut my eyes to Soli’s clawing fingers, turned my head and listened to the voice of memory. In a way, it was like a song. There were harmonies, microscopic motions, and rhythms. I looked into my blood, looked down the dark squiggle of my chromosomes where the Elder Eddas was hidden. I looked into a place where the imprimaturs had often looked, into that useless collection of “junk–genes” making up much of every cell’s genetic material. I listened to my blood telling me that the junk–genes did have a purpose. They coded for and produced the proteins of chemical memory. They were nothing but memory. The Ieldra had not meant for their message to be decoded into something so crude as human language. Their secret, the secret of life, was to be remembered.
The brain is that instrument for running and reading the programs of the universe.
Each of us carries inside the key to memory. I felt a rhythm in my blood, and it was the precise dance of adenine and guanine, thymine and cytosine, and the threads of memory encoded within my chromosomes began to unravel. Somewhere deep inside me, strands of DNA were coding for alanine and tryptophan and other amino acids, building up the proteins of chemical memory for my brain to read. Or perhaps the memory of my DNA had already been encoded within the neurologics of my new brain; perhaps I was remembrancing to the fervid touch of electrons instead of forming images called up by protein sequences. Protein/electrons—in the end, did it matter how information was stored? No, what mattered was the voice of the Ieldra whispering those few parts of the Elder Eddas that I could understand. The memories of the gods. The secret of life, they said, is simple; the secret of life is…
“Should I kill him? Decide, then!”
Man is a bridge, they said.
The simplest things are the most difficult to understand. I grabbed Soli’s beard and jerked his head back and forth. I felt my awareness spreading outward from our thrashing bodies, outward in circles through the cold powder, spreading outward like a blanket of snow over the frozen seascape of the world. I was aware of many things at once: of the morning wind as it hissed and hugged the ice; of Kweitkel’s white summit poking into the blue belly of the sky; of Soli’s hot breath exploding in my ear. I remembered many, many things. I remembered myself as I really was. Usually our awareness flickers from the inner to the
outer and back again like a thallow cocking its head from side to side. We spend our lives being aware of objects and events, and occasionally we are even aware of ourselves, but to hold both points of view at the same time is a very rare thing. I remembered that I was a man who hated Soli; I remembered this hatred as if I were watching myself hate him. It was stupid of me to hate. My rage and hate programs were ruining me, imprisoning me, robbing me of my freedom to think and feel and be. I hated that my hatred was ruining me, and yet I could not stop hating.
Human beings must free themselves, whispered the Eddas in my inner ear, they must be free.
“Decide, then!”
Soli gouged my cheek with his fingernail; it parted the layers of my skin one by one. I gasped in pain, and I remembered there was a way out, the way I had once seen on the ice of the Winter Ring, the way of creation. Many had crossed the bridge of creation before me. I remembered the first female warrior–poet, Kalinda, she who had loved flowers and life so greatly that she had fled the death–worshippers for the healing oceans of Agathange. There the god–men had remade her brain as they had mine. She had fled the worlds of man, fled far into the manifold. She had laid her brain naked from its surrounding coffin of skin and bone. With the elements of asteroids and planets that she consumed, she had added to the neurologics of her brain. She had created her brain and watched herself grow, century after century, growing and creating until her brain had become as large as a moon, and then many, many moons. The misnamed Solid State Entity, I remembered as I heaved against the churning snow, had once been as human as I; she had been a little girl who liked to put flowers in her hair.
The voice of memory, of an old, dying man: The gods are tricksters, and when they remake a man, they always leave something undone.
Soli began to reach back to grab his spear lying half–buried in the snow. It was the wrong thing for him to do. I felt his body’s programs pulsing beneath his powdered furs, running along the length of his hard muscles into his arm. I coughed at the bitter air as I whirled and wove my arm beneath his arm up over the back of his neck. The half–nelson is the first hold I’ll teach you, the Timekeeper whispered in my ear, and I was a novice once again grunting on the white furs of the Timekeeper’s Tower. And younger: I was the boy Kelkemesh wrestling with his father, Shamesh, on a mountain glade on Old Earth. It’s a good hold, but the full–nelson is a deadly hold. I forced my other arm up into Soli’s armpit halfway to his neck. “Bastard!” he screamed, and I remembered then the thing that the Agathanians had left undone: the determination of my fate. I could choose. I could edit and rewrite my programs; I could create myself, here, in this very moment of rage and cold, rolling over and over in the snow.
But the price of birth is death, the Ieldra whispered.
Yes, I could create myself, but to create, I must uncreate first. To die is to live; to live, I die. Could I be a murderer? My life, myself—and there could be no returning that way ever again; there could only be the great journey, on and on towards the infinite things, the quest without boundary or end. I remembered my promise to the Entity. How, I wondered, would I find the strength to sacrifice my fear?
There are infinite possibilities. And infinite dangers, too.
“Should I kill him? Decide now!”
I joined both my hands in the dense, wet hair at the back of Soli’s neck. His sweat was freezing as I locked my fingers and began to pull downward, forcing his head towards his chest. And in my fingers, a great strength, the strength that Soli and my mother, and even Mehtar the Cutter, had put there. I must break his neck, I whispered to myself, I must snap it as I would a piece of shatterwood because he had murdered Bardo and was murdering me, because the universe was cold and unfair, because, after all, more than anything else I loved being human. I must choose a death. Never mind that a few wild chances had led me to this moment wrestling in the snow. In the end, weren’t chance and fate two sides of a single face? I stared into the face of fate and found that it was my own. Does a man have free will? Can you read the programs of the universe, the infinite possibilities? There, on a cold, windy morning in deep winter, I remembered myself and saw a sad, windburnt, finally compassionate face smiling back. Yes, I can, I whispered. I will—a choice freely made beneath the freedom of the deep sky.
And so, a moment of letting go, of disengagement and freedom. I heard the snap I had been waiting for all my life. Soli crouched a few feet away from me holding the pieces of his spear on either side of his bent knee. He threw them spinning far out into the snow. He rubbed the back of his neck and said, “We could have killed each other, couldn’t we? What’s wrong with us, Pilot?”
I pressed my hand to the cut on my forehead to stop the bleeding. I was panting and I said, “Listen, Soli, this…trite tautology, not so trite: The secret of life...is life.”
Soli got up and went over to the crevasse. He looked down. “The Timekeeper is dead,” he mumbled half to himself. He seemed not to have heard what I told him. “Your secret, dead too. Why couldn’t you have stayed away from me? Yes, why this cycle of...why does it go on? But no, it won’t go on, I swear it, never, never again.”
I stared west at Kweitkel as the memories thundered within me. I listened and I watched the light refract in colors off the sparkling snow. Everything—the pink granite of the mountain’s northern pinnacle, the fresh white powder, the blue air itself—seemed newly created. I stood like a man stupefied with skotch, drunk with the beauty of the world. There was no more rage or fear. I turned east where the endless sheet of ice was burning with the light of the morning sun. Somewhere out there, beneath the red ball of fire boiling low on the horizon, was Neverness. Infinite possibilities, she whispered to me.
Soli knelt suddenly, going down on his hands and knees, systematically beating the snow near him. I remembered that the Timekeeper had hurled his finger into the snow.
“No, Soli, don’t bother trying to find it. There’s no point, now.”
“Why not, Pilot?”
Quickly, as my body heat melted the snow that had got down my furs, I told him about my memories.
“But it makes no sense, does it?” Soli said. “Why were the Eddas encoded as memory? If the Ieldra wanted to tell us their message, why didn’t they choose a simpler means?”
One of the Timekeeper’s skinny dogs trotted over to me and I patted his side. He sniffed the air in the direction of the crevasse and began to whine. “What could be simpler, Soli? The Ieldra shared their wisdom with everyone. In truth, it’s ironic: They relied on our intelligence to remember their intelligence. They must have thought it would be the simplest thing for a man to learn the true art of remembrancing. And we should have, thousands of years ago. They never dreamed we’d be so stupid.”
Infinite dangers. I glanced north at the blue–black curtain of the sky hanging over the frozen icebergs. I listened to the Eddas whisper.
Soli stood up and whistled to the rest of the Timekeeper’s dogs. When he was done going over them with his hands and eyes, he asked, “Is this how it ends? The quest?” Then he, too, was staring off, blinking against the fresh wind.
I turned my head. To the south, the ice was as smooth and white as an Alaloi baby’s skin. There was no end to the southern ice of the Starnbergersee. “It goes on and on,” I said.
We went into the Timekeeper’s hut, and Soli boiled water for coffee. He bathed the wound on my forehead with hot, soaking cottons; he thawed it, cleaned it, and, with a strand of seal sinew, sewed it closed. After we had drunk our coffee, he fed and tended the sick dogs while I explored the inside of the hut. I searched through the Timekeeper’s things until I found the book. Along with a few steel pens and a glass sphere full of ink, it was wrapped in an oilskin, shoved between the pillowed furs at the head of his bed. It was a fat, leather–bound book which closely resembled the book of poems he had once given me. I opened it and smelled the thickness of old leather. An icy gust blew through the chinks in the wall, rattling its white pages. It was not a book
of poems. The Timekeeper had painstakingly—agonizingly—covered the pages of the book, line after line, with letters he had inked and drawn (and composed) himself. It was an exquisite work of calligraphy, the work of a man who cared not at all if he spent an hour penning a single word. The work of a lifetime. I turned to the title page of the book. There, in black letters as thick as a dog’s claws, I read:
A REQUIEM FOR HOMO SAPIENS
BY
HORTHY HOSTHOH
TIMEKEEPER AND LORD HOROLOGE
OF THE ORDER OF MYSTIC MATHEMATICIANS
AND OTHER SEEKERS OF THE INEFFABLE FLAME
I turned the page and found that the book began with the following words: “These are my Eddas.” I ran my eyes over the other pages of the book, reading continuously. The last page, I saw, was unfinished. The Timekeeper’s sequence of words ended midsentence, and at least one hundred of the book’s pages after that were blank.
Soli, who had never learned the art of reading, came over to me and asked, “Why would the Timekeeper want you to have this book?”
I closed the book and rapped the cover with my pilot’s ring. I said, “This book, these words—it’s his Eddas.”
“Tell me about the Eddas,” Soli said. “Not the Timekeeper’s Eddas. That would make me too sad. Tell me about your Elder Eddas, the message of the gods.”
I told him all that I knew. This is what I said: The Eddas were the Ieldra’s instructions to human beings on how to become gods. Man is a bridge between ape and god, and the Eddas were a design for a bridge which would not crumble into snow dust. Men must be gods because that was how we were built. The god program runs deep in our race, as deep as the primitive DNA from which we sprang billions of years ago. We must learn how this program runs because that is our fate. I told him this simple thing as he pressed a mug of hot coffee into my hands. But there are infinite dangers, I said. When man looked godward with insane eyes, the very stars would explode and drop from the sky. Insane god–men, insane gods—the universe is full of insanity; insanity lurks everywhere, like a mad, cannibalistic thallow waiting to gobble up any godling who attains great intelligence and power. The more complex the programs of an organism, the greater is the danger of insanity. It is very, very hard to be a god. I breathed in the rich fumes of the coffee, and I said that it was the gift of the Ieldra to help man cross the bridge. Because they were compassionate beings, yes, but also because it was part of their purpose to save the universe from insanity.
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