“Of course, man is already part god,” I said. “And we’re part insane, which is why we’re arrogant enough to tamper with the natural life cycle of the stars. And therefore: the Vild. Because we’re ignorant, Soli, because we don’t know. We don’t see. There are rules; the Eddas are rules, rules on becoming, of determining our place in the ecology.”
The deep structure of the universe is pure consciousness.
Soli nodded his head and sipped his coffee as he listened to me talk on through the day into the night. The beginning of everything, I said, is the reprogramming of our brains. Even our antiquated human brains can be reprogrammed. We can write our master programs; there are techniques for doing so; the Elder Eddas lays down the rules for these techniques. In the end, we can remake our brains, and if we aspire to greater consciousness, then we must,
for what is the brain but a small lump of matter
that concentrates consciousness? Matter/energy; space/time; information/consciousness—consciousness; there are fundamentals describable by the Ieldra’s beautiful, simple mathematics. In a way, matter is merely frozen energy floating in an icefield of space–time. And consciousness is matter’s way of organizing itself; consciousness is immanent in every snowflake, atom, blood drop, photon and grain of sand, every neighborhood of spacetime from the Virgo Cloud to Perdido Luz. Consciousness inheres, I whispered; consciousness orders everything. The mathematics of order: There are rules for quantifying the involvement/duty/identification among all the living organisms and inorganic matter in the universe. Tat Tvam Asi, That Thou Art, and what do I owe a stranger or an alien? My father? A bloodworm? A distant star? What is man’s place in the universal scheme? The great danger, I said, is in falsely perceiving the otherness of all things. Then we will pull the wings off flies, or murder seals, or other human beings; then we may destroy the stars.
“There’s help for the Vild, Soli. A solution, a way out. There’s a unity of...consciousness. In a way, matter is just a standing wavefront of consciousness, and energy, every bit of gamma radiating from the Vild stars, every photon, this moving wavefront—it was all created by human action, and therefore it can be uncreated. Or, I should say, re–created. Made over in a different form, do you see? It’s part of the ecology, now.”
“You keep saying the ecology,” he said, sipping more coffee. “What ecology?”
There is an ecology of information. Stars will die; people and gods will die, but information is conserved. Macroscopic information decays to microscopic information. But microscopic information is eventually concentrated. Nothing is lost. Gods exist to devour information. The lower intelligences sort, filter, concentrate and organize information. And the gods feed.
“Pilot?”
“I’m sorry, I was...remembering.” I licked coffee from my teeth and said, “There are natural rules for determining our place in the ecology. If we could decode the universal program, read the intention of the universe, then—”
“You’re not answering my question.”
“I’m trying. The Vild—it’s not the intention of the universe. What do human beings know of ananke? There are always imperfections and insanities. The orcas—”
“The what?”
“On Agathange, the orcas may or may not be insane, but they play a crucial role in that planet’s ecology. And so, consider the Vild: an ocean of energy to be used.”
As the Entity had made thousands of black bodies to store the energy of Gehenna Luz, so could we use the energy of the Vild. Information could be coded into signals and sent anywhere, given enough energy. Sent everywhere, this interfiow of information. We could speak with the nebular brains in our galaxy. We could extend our galaxy’s information ecology. We—every human being, Fravashi, oyster, sentient bacterium, virus, or seal—we could drive our collective consciousness across the two million light–years of the intergalactic void to the information ecologies of the nearer galaxies, Andromeda and Maffei and the First Leo—all the galaxies of the local group were alive with intelligence and vibrated with the thoughts of organisms such as ourselves. Someday the time would come to interface with the ecologies of other groups of galaxies. Within ten million light–years off the supergalactic plane of the local supercluster were many groups of galaxies. Canes Venatici, the Pavo–Indus and the Ursa galaxies—these burning, brilliant clouds of intelligence and others enveloped our own small galaxy in a sphere of light four hundred million light–years in diameter. To speak with such distant galaxies would require the energy of a supernova, perhaps many tens of thousands of supernovas.
“La ilaha il Allah,” I said, “and we’re all a part.”
“Listen, Pilot, I don’t understand you.”
I listened to the night wind whispering outside the hut, and to the quieter whispering inside. In truth, most of the Eddas I did not understand, either. Most of it was—there is no other word—gobbledygook. I did not yet have the brain to understand it. For a moment, the whole, vast architecture of the coming information ecology unfolded before me, layer upon layer of ideas, biological systems and information structures spreading out, opening like the pages of a book. It was overwhelming and wonderful, but I was like a worm crawling across the first page of the book, trying to read it letter by letter by the feel of the ink across my belly. I understood perhaps a single page in all the millions of pages of the Eddas. And the Eddas themselves, the collected wisdom of the gods, were only a tiny part of the secrets that the universe held, as insignificant as a single snowflake in a blizzard.
I tried to tell Soli all this, but I do not think he really wanted to understand. “You say that these memories are in each of us? The whole of the Eddas?” He was staring straight ahead as he knelt on the floor, roasting a baldo nut over the oilstone.
“Yes,” I said, “passed down from father to son. That’s why the Timekeeper killed the other immortals. He didn’t want anyone telling people what was inside them. Because he knew.”
“Knew what?”
“That the bridge can only be crossed one way. And he knew that if we listened to the memories, we’d want to make the crossing.”
“It’s not so easy to remember,” he said.
“You could remember the Eddas, if you wanted to.”
“Is that true?”
I watched the flame’s reflection in his eyes. It must hurt him, I thought, to stare so long without blinking. “I could show you how to remember,” I said.
He chewed his baldo nut a long time before he swallowed. “No,” he said, “there are enough memories already. It’s too late, isn’t it?”
“Never too late,” I said.
“Yes, too late.”
I drank the last of my coffee and wiped my lips. “What will you do now, then?”
He sucked on his fingers a moment to warm them. He said. “All my life—and it’s been a long life, hasn’t it?—I’ve spent every moment trying to figure out why I was alive. My own private quest, Pilot. Now you say the Eddas are inside me; you tell me I have only to remember and...and what? You say I’ll learn the secret of life on a higher level of existence. But life’s life, isn’t it? There’s always misery, yes; and the higher the level of existence, the greater the misery. I’ve had enough—do you understand? I, Leopold Soli...I. I, like the Timekeeper—enough. How can there ever be an answer?” He rubbed his nose and looked at me. “All my life I thought I was learning how to live. But I knew nothing, did I? Justine knew everything. Yes, I’ll sled on to Kweitkel and live with the Devaki, if they’ll let me. We were happy there once, Justine and I. Do you remember?”
Later we heard the bawl of a bear far out on the ice. Soli thought it might be the same one who had led his dogs to their deaths in the crevasse. He went out to look for the pieces of his bear spear that he had cast into the snow. When he returned, he held the broken end of the spear by its point. “It was reckless of me to break the spear,” he said. “But at least the flint can be saved. It’s a good piece of flint.”
I ran my fi
nger lightly along the cut on my forehead. “A good piece of flint,” I agreed. “It nearly killed me.”
“Yes,” he said, and he punched out and knocked away part of a snow block from the roof. For a while he watched the spindrift curling through the opening before he began to shiver. He stood up to patch the hole and said, “Ever since we first met, I’ve wondered: Why?”
He cut a new block of snow, trimmed it and tapped it into place. He sat across from me on the Timekeeper’s bed. He tried to meet my eyes, but he could not. His face was hard with emotion, the muscles locking as two contradictory programs began to run. He wanted to tell me how much he hated me, how he resented my very existence. The words were almost on his lips. His eyes were bright blue, as shiny as the sea. He opened his mouth. He wanted to say, “Yes, I wanted to kill you; I was ready to kill you; I would love to have killed you.” And then a long moment slowly passed as his face softened, and he rubbed his eyes, and he said the other thing, the thing that he thought he did not want to say: “No, I couldn’t kill you. How can a man kill his own son?”
I stared at the fire as the hut filled with silence. He threw his hand over his eyes, rubbing his temples.
“Why you, Pilot?” he asked at last. “What will happen to you?”
I sat there with him eating baldo nuts, and I told him one last secret. Then everything seemed to be beating: my heart, his heart, the air molecules outside beating against the frozen snow. I listened to the beating of the Vild stars calling me, then I told him, as compassionately as I could, that it was his son’s fate to be a god.
30
Neverness
A day, whether six or seven years ago, or more than six thousand years ago, is just as near to the present as yesterday. Why? Because all time is contained in the present Now–moment.
To talk about the world as being made by God tomorrow, or yesterday, would be talking nonsense. God makes the world and all things in this present Now. Time gone a thousand years ago is now as present and as near to God as this very instant.
Johannes Eckehart, Mongol Century Horologe
The next day Soli rubbed his red–rimmed eyes and announced that he would take the Timekeeper’s sled and dogs and go on to Kweitkel. I could turn around immediately, he said, and hunt seals all the way back to Neverness. However, the Timekeeper’s poor dogs were in no condition to pull a sled. Three of them were sick with frostbite, and all of them were starving.
“I’ll come with you as far as Kweitkel,” I said. I adjusted my snow goggles and looked out at the mountain. In the pristine air, its gleaming cone seemed much closer than it really was. “It would be best to leave the Timekeeper’s sled here. The sick dogs can ride in our sled; the others can follow after us.”
In truth, neither of us felt very sure that the Devaki would welcome Soli, and I did not want to leave him stranded with a team of sick dogs. So I accompanied him for this last part of his journey. It took us two days to reach the island. We built a hut thirty yards from the rugged shoreline. Yuri had told me three years ago—it seemed like three lifetimes—that I would never be welcome on Kweitkel. Very well, I would not touch foot to land. (Unless, of course, a bear clawed open my hut and chased me into the pretty yu trees above the beach.) Soli set out into the forest on skis. He would tell the Devaki some made–up story of tragedy and woe, of how Justine and Bardo, and my mother, had each gone over to the other side. He would return the next day, he said, with skinfuls of baldo nuts for my return home, and with meat for the dogs, if it had been a good year for the Devaki and they were feeling gracious.
I waited three days and three nights while the wind blew and nearly buried my hut. I was worrying fiercely when, on the afternoon of the fourth day, several sleds appeared at the edge of the forest. One of them slipped down the beach to the sea. I stood with my hand shielding my eyes against the noonday sun. I looked closely at the sled. Soli was driving it, and he was not alone.
“Ni luria la!” I called out. I did not know what else to say. I squinted and stared at the sled. At first I thought that Soli had a little bear cub riding atop the stacked skinfuls of baldo nuts. Then I looked more closely. It was not a bear cub; it was a Devaki child bundled in shagshay furs. I could not guess why Soli had a child with him.
The men at the edge of the forest did not greet me. They stood by their sleds, half behind the yu trees, looking out to sea. Because of the glare, I could not make out their faces.
“Ni luria la,” Soli answered, and he drew closer. I squinted and saw that the child was a boy, perhaps three years old. In his lap he held a stick doll. As the sled scraped to a stop, he looked down, studying the doll with a shy intensity.
Soli left the boy on the sled. He walked over to me, and in the language of the Devaki, he said, “It’s too bad you had to wait.”
“Who is the boy?” As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I knew who the boy was.
“He is the found–son of Haidar and Chandra,” he said.
At the mention of his found–parents’ names, the boy looked up and smiled. “Haidar mi padda moru ril Tuwa,” he suddenly said without any prompting and he told me the story of how his found–father had killed a mammoth the preceding winter. “Los pela manse, mi Haidar, mi Haidar lo li wos.”
He was a handsome, strong–looking boy with an easy smile and quick, blue–black eyes the color of the twilight sky. He did not really look much like other Alaloi children I had seen. When I smiled at him his shyness melted instantly. He boldly stared at me as if he had known me all his life.
The color of Katharine’s eyes, I whispered to myself. “What is his name?” I asked in a raw, uneven voice.
The boy smiled, showing me his straight, white teeth. “Padda,” he said, “ni luria la; ti los mi lot–Padda?”—“Welcome, Father; are you really my blood–father?”
“It’s impossible,” I said, although I knew that in this strange universe we inhabit, there is very little that is impossible.
Soli crunched through the snow closer to me and grabbed my arm. I whispered in his ear, “He can’t be my son. Anala cut the fetus from Katharine a good forty–days before her time. Do you remember? He couldn’t have lived.”
“Couldn’t he?” he murmured as he turned to look at the boy. “He’s tough as a diamond. He’s my grandson. All the Soli line—we’re hard to kill, aren’t we?” And then, “Look at him! The cutter sculpted your face but he left your chromosomes alone. How can you doubt it?”
He picked some ice from his furs and told me what had happened: “When they saw me approaching the cave, the Devaki were surprised to see me. And they surprised me by holding a feast in my honor. They roasted mammoth—they’ve been having luck with the mammoth herds these past years, even though a big bull trampled Yuri two years ago and crushed his skull. But everyone remembered what Yuri had said that day, so they welcomed me. They forgave me, can you believe that, Pilot?”
“Tuwa wi lalunye,” the boy said as he licked his lips, watching us. Obviously he thought that Soli was telling me about the mammoth feast.
Soli rubbed the back of his head and continued. “It was Anala who told me. About the boy. None of the Devaki women expected him to live, even Chandra, who nursed him after Katharine...after we returned to the City. But he did live. It’s a miracle, isn’t it?”
I watched the boy as he fidgeted and slipped a tiny bone spear into the doll’s curved fist. His long chin, I saw, could have been my own chin before I had been made into an Alaloi; his wavy hair was black and shot with red.
“But they murdered Katharine!” I said. “They called her a satinka. Why didn’t they smother the baby and bury it in the snow?”
“That’s not their way, is it?”
“I never thought he could have lived. I never saw it. I never guessed.”
Soli scratched at the blood beneath his nose and coughed. “He was a tough little baby, they say. Chandra told me he rarely cried, not even when he burned his hand in the oilstones.”
I blinked
my eyes and said, “Katharine, before she died, she would have seen it if he were to have lived. Why didn’t she tell me?”
“A scryer’s ways.”
“What’s his name?” I asked, forgetting for a moment that the Devaki do not name their children until they are at least four years old.
“They haven’t named him yet,” he said. “But Haidar talks of naming him Danlo the Younger, after his grandfather. After Haidar’s grandfather, that is.”
I closed my eyes and shook my head. “No,” I said, “he’ll be a pilot, and people will call him Danlo Peacewise because he’ll lead a mission to the Vild. He’ll learn numbers and geometry, and he doesn’t know the names of the stars yet, but he’ll—”
“No,” Soli said softly. He turned to the boy, who dug into one of the skins and popped a baldo nut into his mouth. He cracked it between his hard little teeth and smiled at me.
“He’s my son!” I shouted.
“No, he’s Haidar’s son, now. His found–son, yes, but he loves him as much as his other sons. Haidar is the only father he knows. He’ll be a good—”
“No!” I took a step towards the sled. “He’s my son, and when he sees the City for the first time, he’ll cry out, “Father, I’m home!’”
Soli shook his head and pointed towards the line of thick–ribbed ice above the beach. Haidar, Wemilo, Seif, Jonath and Choclo stood on the blue whorls and crusts, watching us. They were dressed in their hunting furs, and each of them held a shagshay spear. I raised my open hand to them, but only little Choclo—he was no longer very little—smiled back. I had always liked Choclo.
Neverness Page 63
