Neverness

by David Zindell

  Soli said, “When I entered the cave and Anala showed me the boy, she said Haidar had gone with Wemilo and Choclo to hunt shagshay. That’s why it took me so long to come back, because Haidar had to be asked. When Haidar returned from his hunt, he said that I could carry the boy back on the sled. To say goodbye—that’s what Haidar said, do you understand? He said that the boy should see his blood–father once before saying goodbye forever.”

  I stared down at the snow, knowing what Soli would say, yet stunned when he said it. I walked over to the sled and picked the boy up. He was heavier than he looked.

  “Padda,” he said. A curious look crossed his forehead, and with his long fingers he picked through my beard, examining the red strands he found there. “Padda,” he said again. But there was no emotion in his voice. He said the Devaki word for father as if it were an abstraction, as if he had learned the name of a strange new animal.

  “Danlo,” I said, and I kissed him on the forehead that was shaped as mine used to be. “My son.”

  I set the boy down on the snow, and he ran over to the hut and crawled through the tunnel to see what he might discover there. I looked up into the sky, silent and blue above me. I swallowed hard, once or twice. My eyes were burning with pain; I was surprised that they were as dry as the frigid air swirling around me. Perhaps, I thought, my damned, carked soul was no longer capable of tears.

  “I can’t take him with me,” I told Soli.

  “No.”

  “My son—he’ll grow thinking he’s a misshapen AIaloi.”

  Soli rubbed the side of his nose, saying nothing.

  From inside the hut came a giggle of delight. I crawled through the tunnel and smiled at Danlo, who was sitting at the head of my bed. He had found the Timekeeper’s book. He was turning the pages one by one, picking at the black letters as if he thought they were worms.

  I looked through the hut’s shadowy, freezing air at infinite possibility, and I bit my lip. Gently, I pulled the book away from his lap. “Li los book,” I forced out.

  He was angry because I had taken his new toy from him. He glared at me for a long time. I was afraid of the rage I saw in his eyes, the rage that cut me like a spear. Then his curiosity returned and he smiled. “Ki los buka?” he asked me.

  “A book,” I explained, “is just a bundle of decorated leaves tied together. It is nothing important. Nothing at all.”

  Later, when I had packed the sled and Soli stood holding Danlo’s hand for the short trip back to the beach, I whispered in Soli’s ear, “Don’t let my son grow up in ignorance. Tell him that the lights in the sky are not just the eyes of the dead. Tell him about stars, will you?”

  I turned the sled in a circle eastward, and I gripped the hard, frozen rails.

  “Yes,” Soli said, “I’ll tell him.”

  “Goodbye, Danlo,” I said as I bent and lifted him into the air. Because his long hair smelled so good I kissed his head again. I grasped Soli’s naked hand and told him goodbye, too.

  “Yes, goodbye,” he said. Then he did an astonishing thing. He pulled hard on my arm and leaned over suddenly as I nearly stumbled. He kissed me once, fiercely, on the forehead. I felt his chapped lips burning my cold skin; to this day I can feel the burning still. “Fall far and fall well, Pilot,” he said.

  I called to the dogs and drove the sled downwind into the gleaming plain of snow which opened before me. I never looked back with my eyes, though in my thoughts and dreams I have often looked back. I did not think I would see either of them again. Never, came the whisper, never again. The air was so cold and bitter that my eyes were full of tears before I had covered half a mile of the distance towards Neverness.

  * * * * *

  I am coming to the end of my story. There is little to tell of my journey homeward. The dogs and I ate our baldo nuts and mammoth meat, and after that we were hungry. Although I opened many aklia to hunt seals, they no longer leapt to my spear. Most of the time it was very cold. Twice my toes froze; to this day my toes have trouble with the cold. When I was almost within sight of the City, a blizzard caught me unprepared. For fifteen days I lay huddled with my half–frozen dogs in a hastily made snow–hut, reading the Timekeeper’s book and listening to the storm. Arne and Bela died next to me, from frostbite and hunger. I left them buried in the snow.

  Somewhere it is recorded that on the ninety–first day of deep winter in the year 2934, Mallory wi Soli Ringess, having failed in his quest to find the Elder Eddas, returned to the city of his birth. (I am told this is how the Sarojin’s famous fantasy, The Neurosingers, ends.) I returned to one of the most bitter ironies of my life: The lords and masters, and most others, did not want to believe I had “remembered” the Elder Eddas. A few of them, the Lord Imprimatur in particular, ridiculed me. At least they did until, on the last day of the year, the greatest of our remembrancers, Thomas Rane, stripped off his robes, closed his eyes and floated in one of the tanks of the Rose Womb Cloisters. He remembered far into the murky past. He called up the memories that are within each of us, and he listened, as I had listened, to the whisper of the Elder Eddas. With joy (and too much pride) he taught many others of his profession to remember them, too. The word of this great remembrance quickly spread through the Academy. For days, I could not skate down the most out–of–the–way gliddery without some novice tugging on the sleeve of a schoolmate and pointing at me in awe. Even certain of the exemplars, who stand in awe of no man, could scarcely meet my eyes when they talked to me. It was very embarrassing. In truth, I much preferred ridicule to awe.

  Soon after this the College of Lords made me Lord of the Order. I immediately took charge of the rebuilding of the Lightship Caverns and the surrounding, bomb–ruined City. I sent robots into the mountains beyond Urkel to cut great quantities of stone. By twentieth day in midwinter spring, the foundations of a grand spire (some said grandiose) had been laid. As the gray, snowy days passed, a needle of pink granite rose above the newly built Hollow Fields, above the halls and towers of what came to be called the New City. In a year, when the spire was completed, it would be the tallest in the entire City. I named it Soli’s Spire, to the surprise and consternation of everyone who thought they knew how much I hated my father.

  During this time I led a miniature expedition into the sealed–off Timekeeper’s Tower. I trudged up the stairs to the Timekeeper’s sanctum. Snow had blown through the ruined windows and accumulated, covering hundreds of the Timekeeper’s clocks. I rescued the clocks. I ordered the snow removed and the windows rebuilt, of glass. The entire Tower, I decided, would be a museum.

  In the basement of the Tower, I discovered many, many ancient books, a whole library of musty, leather–bound books. I read the books; to this day I continue reading them. I walked through the long, stone corridors winding down into the deepest levels of the Tower. I came to my old cell and looked within, remembering. I opened the heavy door of the adjacent cell, the cell in which the warrior–poet had composed his death poem. There was a smell of dust and animal droppings and death. I found his white bones picked glisteningly clean by the sleekits whose burrows tunnelled deep beneath the ground. His red warrior’s ring and his poet’s ring gleamed against the long, curled finger bones. So, I thought, the warrior–poet had really died. Then I remembered that he had made me promise to send his body back to his planet of birth. In all the confusion of the War, I had forgotten him. I ordered his bones removed and wrapped in his warrior’s cloak. Robots cut a black marble casket and polished it until it shone like a mirror. I, myself, chiselled the words of his death poem into the facing. The novices who watched me working in the dark basement—and perhaps everyone else as well—must have thought that I was two–thirds insane. When they supposed I wasn’t listening, they laughed at me. But they did not yet understand how vital it was that the dead, any dead, must be honored and, more, remembered.

  I must now tell of the promise that I made to the goddess, Kalinda, and of the miracle which caused me to keep that promise. The miracle
: On the fifty–sixth day of false winter, Bardo’s Blessed Harlot fell out of the manifold and was brought down to the newly built Lightship Caverns. For many days the Hollow Fields had been reopened to the stream of shuttles from the deepships and longships which are the lifeblood of the City. And one by one, the lightships of pilots who had journeyed far across the galaxy during the quest began to return. (Many pilots, of course, had remained true to the quest and had not seen Neverness since the day the Timekeeper issued his summons. Their names are honored above all others.) At first it was thought that the Blessed Harlot was one of these ships. But then a journeyman tinker recognized her great, drooping wings and blunt nose and sent a novice to inform me. I met Bardo at the Caverns, but he refused to immediately explain the miracle of his existence.

  “Bardo!” I cried out when he stepped from his ship’s pit. “How is it possible?”

  “Little Fellow!” We embraced and he thumped my back, as usual. He felt as massively solid—as real—as he always had. He was weeping freely. Fat teardrops ran down his cheeks. “Little Fellow!” he said. “Little Fellow. By God, it’s good to be home!”

  “Tell me what happened to you. Are you alone? Where’s Justine, then—may I ask?”

  He smiled sadly as he grabbed his belly and shook his head. Except for a slight graying of his temples and beard, he looked much the same as I remembered. “Oh, you may certainly ask,” he said. “But not here. I’m so thirsty—I haven’t tasted beer for a long time. I’m dying for the taste of it. Will you come to the Hofgarten with me so I can drink some beer?”

  On a day of brilliant sunshine and warm mountain breezes we went to the Hofgarten to drink beer and skotch. We sat at a polished wooden table in our favorite room overlooking the sea cliffs. The outer windows were open to let in the air and the hot rays of the sun. We sat by the window, drinking our drinks, and talking.

  “Ah, this is good,” he said as he held the mug of beer to his lips. He licked foam from his mustache and then took a few more gulps. “So good. I should tell you about Justine. She is well. She has gone to Lechoix, to visit her mother and to teach at the elite school. She won’t be coming back to Neverness, too bad.”

  I sipped my skotch, but there was little pleasure there. The taste of it distracted me from the important thing I had to ask Bardo. “Begin at the beginning,” I said. “How did you survive the battle? The star?”

  “Shall I tell you of the battle? How am I still alive? There is a simple explanation, my friend. We were rescued. The Entity saved us, somehow—I don’t know how. One moment we had fallen out in the heart of the star and we were being fried like meatworms in a fire. We were dying, you see. The next moment—well, we were free.”

  He finished his beer and called for another. His fat cheeks were very red, whether from the beer or from embarrassment, it was hard to tell.

  “And then?” I asked.

  “And then we fled, by God! There, now I’ve told you. ‘Bardo the Coward’—that’s what you’re thinking, I know. We found a mapping back to the fallaways, and then on to Lechoix. We couldn’t stay together that way, Justine and I. Sometime I’ll have to describe it, the hell of losing yourself in someone else. Sometime. The Timekeeper was right. It’s not good for pilots to share the same ship. Oh, you must hate me, Little Fellow, for being the coward that I am!”

  In truth, I did not hate him; I loved him for being a coward. “I’m glad you’re alive,” I said.

  He would not say anything more about Justine, so I told him everything that had happened since the battle. He was glad that the Timekeeper was dead, and gladder still that I was Lord of the Order. Of my discovering the Elder Eddas he was not so glad. Bardo, my irreverent, profane friend, had come to mistrust the gods.

  “Why aren’t you drinking your skotch?” he asked as he slapped the table. “Drink, Little Fellow, and I shall tell you about the Entity and what she’s done to me. She’s talked to me! I, Bardo, a prince of Summerworld and soon–to–be master pilot, that is, if the Lord Pilot finds me worthy—I’ve talked to the goddess and returned to tell you!”

  I picked up my tumbler of skotch. I put it to my lips and sniffed, but I did not drink it, because of the memories. “What do you want to tell me, Bardo?”

  He belched, and a sour, sick look came over his face. He was already a little drunk. “Ah,” he said, “I haven’t been entirely truthful to you. Forgive me. The goddess didn’t tell me that she had rescued me from the star. She said that she had created me. Remembered me, by God! Justine and I—we were dead, she said. Our beautiful ship destroyed. Oh, too bad! This is what she told me, Little Fellow. She said that she remembered the configuration of every atom, every synapse of our goddamned bodies and brains. She re–created me, she said, from hydrogen gas, from carbon molecules and stardust. She saved me from death. A resurrection, she said, a second chance. Is it possible?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is it possible? By God, tell me, Little Fellow!”

  I took a sip of skotch and let the liquid amber roll across my tongue. I listened to the crosstalk between sense and memory, the memory contained in each molecule of skotch. The alcohols and ethers burned their way through the pink papillae into my blood. The taste of esters and the pungent, fufural aldehydes recalled the planet Urradeth where the skotch had been made forty years ago. I smelled the crisp grains of barley roasting over a peat fire, and barley mash fermenting, its essence being distilled into the golden liquor of memory. I swallowed and saw the man who had cut the barley, his steel scythe reflecting the harsh, blue light of Urradeth’s sun. In the body and germ of the barley were atoms of carbon, bits of countless exhalations of the people who had colonized Urradeth. Bits of Old Earth and her yellow sun, the hydrogen of the stars, and the oxygen made in a distant stellar fire which had no name that I knew—the tree of memory and being was infinite, and the contemplation of its interconnecting branches made me dizzy. The memory of all things is in all things. I coughed and spat a mouthful of fiery skotch over the table. The droplets beaded up on the oiled wood, the shatterwood which had been poached from Alisalia’s forest by a wormrunner long–since dead. Yes, I thought, She, a goddess, had made a man as easily as a man might carve a favorite stick doll he has remembered from his boyhood.

  Through consciousness, gods create; creation is everything.

  “It’s possible,” I said at last.

  “Oh, that’s too bad,” he said. “That’s the very worst thing. So bad, too damn bad. Perfect information is impossible, I think, and therefore Bardo is not the man he once was. What am I, then? How will I ever know?”

  It was the old problem, the old fear. But finally, here in the body and soul of my old friend, the possibility of a new solution.

  “You are who you are,” I said. “You’re Bardo, my best friend. That’s enough, then.”

  Beads of sweat shone on his bulging forehead. “And who is Mallory Ringess?”

  “I am that I am.”

  He licked his red lips and banged his mug on the table. He shook his head, rapped the window with his pilot’s ring, and he said, “The Entity told me that I was to bring a message to you, that I would be both the messenger and the goddamned message. To remind you of your promise. What did she mean?”

  “I’ve promised to return to Her, Bardo.”

  “Why?”

  I pushed the tumbler of skotch away from me. It slid almost frictionlessly across the wet table. “This will be hard to explain but I must try. Kalinda was a warrior–poet before she was ever a goddess. The poets, in their quest for the perfect human, they long ago embroidered their chromosomes. And worse, they edited what they thought was useless information, up and down the genome. In their ignorance, they edited out a vital thing. And that’s the tragedy. Each warrior–poet, even Kalinda—especially Kalinda—they can’t remember the Eddas. Because, inside them, where it whispers in us, there’s nothing.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “Kalinda—the Entity—she’s what
the Ieldra didn’t want: a goddess who grew into herself without the benefit of their wisdom.”

  He leaned over the window sill to take a breath of fresh air. He belched and said, “But the Entity must have known how to decode the Eddas. Think of the pilots who have been lost inside her. Ah, think of me. If she could...well, if she could really create me, then she must have been able to read every bit of my DNA.”

  “In truth, I believe She knows everything about the Eddas...now. But it’s too late, do you see? For all Her power, for all Her glory, She’s a little insane.”

  He belched again and said, “Well, I still don’t understand.”

  I stood up and pushed my chair away from the table. “It’s a beautiful day,” I said. “Let’s take a walk on the beach.”

  Because he was drunk, he threw his arm around my shoulder and half–stumbled, half–dragged me outside. We walked down the icy path cutting through the cliffs to the beach. I told him of my plans to send a mission to the Vild. Our Order’s finest pilots, I said, would lead the mission. There would be many lightships, and a seedship carrying historians, programmers, mechanics, eschatologists and remembrancers, above all, remembrancers—a full complement of masters representing our Order’s every profession. We would civilize the Vild. Or rather, we would civilize and teach the wild peoples of the Vild not to destroy the stars. I would show the pilots the proof of the Hypothesis, and they would teach the barbarians the art of mathematics. And somewhere in the ruins of the Vild, the masters of the seedship would establish a new Academy, perhaps many Academies to teach new pilots. To learn, to journey, to illuminate, to begin—that is the motto of our Order, and it would remain the motto no matter how far our pilots fell.