The Wild

by David Zindell

  CHAPTER THREE

  Ancestral Voices

  The ability to remember the past gives one the power to descry events that have yet to be. This is the great problem of consciousness, for man and god, this awareness in time: the more clearly we visualize the future, the more we live in dread that it will inevitably become the present.

  – from A Requiem For Homo Sapiens, by Horthy Hosthoh

  Danlo fell out near a small yellow star as beautiful as any star he had ever seen. The star was circled by nine fat round planets, one of which was very near to him indeed. Below his lightship – a bare ten thousand miles below the Snowy Owl – there spun a planet all green and blue and swaddled in layers of bright white clouds. He could scarcely believe his good fortune. It seemed too much of a miracle to have escaped an inescapable attractor, only to then fall out above such a lovely and earthlike planet. In the pit of his ship he lay shaking with triumph and joy, and he opened a window in the ship’s hull to look out over this unnamed planet. For a long time he looked down through space at mossy brown continents and sparkling blue oceans. With his scanning computers, he analysed the gases of the atmosphere, the oxygen and nitrogen and carbon dioxide involved in the interflow of organic life. He did this to reassure himself that he had really fallen out into realspace, and so he reached out with his telescopes and scanners and eyes to embrace it, to touch it, to see it as it truly was. In the sweep of the planet’s mountains, in the fractal curves of the continents’ coastlines and the shape of the vast oceans, he became aware of a pattern hauntingly familiar to him. At first he could not identify this pattern. But then he searched his memory, and there was a shock of recognition, like suddenly beholding the face of a friend who has returned from the wounds and scars of old age into an untouched and marvellous youth. It astonished him that the face of the planet below him matched his brilliant memory so exactly; it was an astonishing thing to discover here in the heart of the Solid State Entity a planet that must be, that could only be that great and glorious planet that men remembered as Old Earth.

  It cannot be, he thought. It is not possible.

  The planet was Earth; and yet it was not Earth. It was a pristine, primeval Earth untouched by war or the insanity of the Holocaust, an Earth somehow healed of its terrible wounds. Its atmosphere bore no trace of the fluorocarbons or chloride plastics or plutonium that he would have expected to find there. As he saw through his telescopes, the oceans teemed with life and were free of oil slicks or the taint of garbage. Far below him, on the grassy veldts of a continent that looked like Afarique, there were herds of antelope and prides of lions, and an animal that looked much like a horse but was covered from nose to tail with vivid white and black stripes. There were trees. There were trees! Parts of every continent, save the southernmost, were covered in unbroken swathes of brilliant green forests. Such an Earth might have existed fifty thousand years ago or fifty thousand years in the future, but it was hard to understand how this beautiful planet had come to be here now. As Danlo well knew, if Old Earth still existed it must lay some eight thousand light-years coreward along the Orion Arm, in the spaces near Sahasrara and Anona Luz. It was impossible, he thought, that even a goddess might have arms strong enough or long enough to move a whole planet fifty thousand trillion miles through a dangerous and star-crossed space. Still gazing through his telescopes, he wondered if he was really seeing anything through his telescopes. The Entity, it was said, could directly manipulate any type of matter through countless miles of realspace, through the force of Her will and Her thoughts alone. Perhaps the Entity, even at this moment, was manipulating the molecules of his mind, subtly pulling at his neurons, much as a musician might pluck the strings of a gosharp. What unearthly tunes, he wondered, might a vastly greater mind play upon his consciousness? What otherworldly visions might a true goddess cause a man to see?

  After a very long time of thinking such deep thoughts and brooding over the nature of reality, Danlo decided he must accept the sensation of his eyes as true vision and his computer’s analyses of the planet’s carbon cycles as true information, even though he feared that his sense of interfacing his ship computer (and everything else) might be an almost perfect simulation of reality that the Entity had somehow carked into his mind. He had no objective reason for making such an affirmation. It occurred to him that just as he had penetrated the spaces of the Entity to fall out inside Her very brain, in some way, as with an information virus or an ohrworm. She might be inside the onstreaming consciousness of his brain. And the image of himself as pilot who had penetrated the living substance of a goddess might be, at this moment, one of Her deepest thoughts, and suddenly this looking inside himself to apprehend the reality of who lay inside whom was like holding a mirror before a silver mirror and looking down into an infinite succession of smaller mirrors as they almost vanished into a dazzling, singular point.

  Because he could not tell inside from out, for an endless moment, he was nauseous and dizzy. It occurred to him that perhaps he had not escaped the attractor after all. Perhaps he was still falling through the black ink of the manifold, falling and falling through the endless nightmares and hallucinations of a pilot who has gone mad. Or perhaps he was still on the planet of his birth; perhaps he was still thirteen years old, still lost in the wind and ice of the sarsara, the great mother storm that had nearly killed him out on the frozen sea before he had come to Neverness. It was possible, he thought, that he had never really reached Neverness or become a pilot. Perhaps he had only dreamed the last nine years of his life. He might be dreaming still. As bubbles rise through dark churning waters, his mind might only be creating dream images of his deepest friend, Hanuman li Tosh, he of the hellish blue eyes and broken soul who had once betrayed him. Who would betray him, who was always staring at Danlo with his death-haunted eyes even as he seared open in Danlo a wound of lightning and blood and memory, the deep and primeval wound that would not be healed. Perhaps the wind had driven Danlo to the ice at last, and at this moment he lay down against terrible cold, frozen and lost in dreams of the future, dreaming his life, dreaming his death. He would never really know. He could never know, and that was the terrifying and paradoxical nature of reality, that if he thought about it too much or looked at it too deeply, it all began to seem somehow unreal.

  But I do know, Danlo thought. I know that I know.

  Somewhere inside him, beyond his mentations or the impulses of his brain, there was a deeper knowledge. Somehow, without the mediation of his mind, all the cells of his body were gravid with a vast and ancient intelligence, and each individual cell felt the pull of the planet beneath him. Every atom of his body, it seemed, recognized this planet and remembered it. At last he decided that he would no longer doubt this deep sense of reality. He knew that this wandering Earth was real, that he was truly seeing the polar icecaps and the grey-green northern rainforests for what they were. At all costs, he would will himself to affirm what he knew as true and this affirmation of his vision and the whisper of his cells was the full flowering of his truth sense, that mysterious and marvellous consciousness that all people and all things possess.

  If this Earth is real, then it has a real origin in spacetime. It is possible that this Earth has not been brought here across space – it is possible that She has created it.

  With this thought, a beam of laser light flashed up from the planet’s surface through the atmosphere out into space. His telescopes intercepted this intense, coherent light. There was no information bound within this signal that his computers could decode. But the very phenomenon of laser light streaming up from a densely-forested coastline was itself a kind of signal and a kind of information. For the first time, he wondered if human beings might live on this Earth. It seemed only natural that they would. He remembered that his father, on his first journey into the Entity, had discovered a world full of men and women who could not believe that they lived their entire lives inside a stellar nebula rippling with a godly intelligence. Of course, Danlo ha
d seen no cities below him, no mud huts nor pyramids nor domes nor other signs of human life. It was possible that the men of this Earth might live as hunters beneath the canopies of the vast emerald forests. If this was so, then he would never see them from a lightship floating in the near space above their world. Because he was lonely and eager for the sound of human voices – and because he was unbearably curious – he decided to take his ship down through the atmosphere to discover the source of this mysterious laser light.

  He fell to Earth down through the exosphere and stratosphere, and then he guided his ship through the billowing (and blinding) layers of clouds of the troposphere. The Snowy Owl fell down into the gravity well of the planet, and Danlo was very glad that he had become the pilot of a lightship, those great, gleaming, winged ships that can fall not only between the stars, but also rocket up and down through the thickest atmospheres. Lightships can fall almost anywhere in the universe, and that was the glory of piloting such a ship, to be as fast and free as a ray of light. And so he fell down and down through dense grey clouds, homing on the place where the laser beam had originated. On a broad sandy beach at the edge of one of the continents he made planetfall. He wasted no time analysing the viruses and bacteria which everywhere swam through this planet’s moist winds and oceans. He had not come this far to be killed by a virus. In truth, it is hideously difficult to predict the effects of alien viruses on the human body, and many pilots disdain the dubious results of animal tests or computer simulations or other means of determining what is safe and what is not. For many pilots, the true test of an alien biosphere’s lethality is in walking along alien soil and breathing alien air. And this was no alien planet, as Danlo reminded himself. It was Earth. Or rather, it was an Earth, a world of ancient trees and sea otters and snails – and all the other kinds of life that would be as familiar and friendly to him as the bacteria that lived inside his belly.

  Therefore Danlo broke open the pit of his ship and fairly fell down to the soft beach sands. It dismayed him to discover that after many days of weightlessness inside his ship, his body was a little weak. Although the pits of all lightships are designed to induce micro-gravities along a pilot’s torso and limbs, these intense fields do not quite keep the muscles from shrinking or the bones from demineralizing. As Danlo took his first tentative steps, he found that his slightly wasted leg muscles at first would support him only with difficulty and considerable pain. But then he stood away from his ship, and his bare feet seemed to draw strength from the soft, cold touch of the sand. He stood straight and still, looking down the broad sweep of the beach. To his left, the great grey ocean roared and surged and broke upon the hardpack at the water’s edge. To his right, a dark green forest of fir trees flowed like an ocean of a different kind, toward the east and south, and northwards where it swelled up into a headland of rocks and steeply rising hills. There was also something else. Just above the foredunes and beach grasses, where the sand gave way to the towering trees, there was a house. It was a small chalet of shatterwood beams and granite stone, and Danlo suddenly remembered that he knew this house quite well.

  No, no, it is not possible.

  He stood staring up at this lovely house for a while, and then the cold wind blew in from the ocean and drowned him in memories. Soon he began shaking and shivering. The wind found his belly, and he was suddenly cold as if he had drunk an ocean of ice water. He looked down at his lean, ivory legs quivering in the cold. He was still as naked as a pilot in the pit of his ship, but now that he stood on soft shifting sands, he realized that he was naked to the world. Because he needed to protect himself from the bitter wind and cover his nakedness, he returned to his ship to fetch his boots, his heavy wool cloak, and the racing kamelaika he had once worn while skating the streets of Neverness.

  My mind is naked to Her. My memories, my mind.

  The Entity, he thought, could read his memories exactly enough to incarnate them as wood and stone – either that or She could make him see this unforgettable house out of his memory where no house really existed. But because he thought that the little white house beneath the forest must be real, he quickly left his ship and returned to the beach. He began trudging up the dunes, the fine sands slipping beneath his boots and his weakened muscles. He worked his way forward and up against the pull of the Earth as if he were drunk on strong alcoholic spirits. Soon, however, with every step taken as he drew nearer the house, he began to acclimatize to the planet’s gravity. He remembered how to walk on treacherous sands. He remembered other things as well. Once, in this simple house of white granite that he could now see too well, there had been long nights of passion and love and happiness. Once, a woman had lived here, Tamara Ten Ashtoreth, she of the great heart and broken life whom he had loved and lost. But she had fled this house. In truth, she had fled Danlo and his burning memories. It was said that she had even fled Neverness for the stars. Although Danlo did not think it was possible that she could have found her way to this mysterious planet deep within the Solid State Entity, he hurried up the beach straight towards this house to discover what (or who) lay inside.

  Tamara, Tamara – in this house you promised to marry me.

  At last, on top of a small, grass-covered hill, at the end of a path laid with flat sandstones, he came up to the house’s door. It was thick and arched and sculpted out of shatterwood, a dense black wood native only to islands on the planet Icefall. Shatterwood trees had never grown on Old Earth, and so it was a mystery how the Entity had found shatterwood with which to build this house. He reached out to touch the door. The wood was cold and hard and polished to an impossible smoothness in the way that only shatterwood can be polished. He traced his finger across the lovely grain of the door, remembering. Somehow the Entity had exactly duplicated the door of Tamara’s house. In Danlo’s mind, just behind his eyes, there were many doors, but this particular one stood out before all others. He remembered exactly how the door planks had joined together in an almost seamless merging of the grain; he could see every knot and ring and dark whorl as if he were standing on the steps of this house on Neverness about to knock on the door. But he was not on Neverness. He stood before the door of an impossible house above a desolate and windswept beach, and the pattern of the whorls twisting through the shatterwood exactly matched the bright black whorls that burned through his memory.

  How is it possible? he wondered. How is it possible that all things remember?

  For a long time he stood there staring at the door and listening to the cries of the seagulls and other shore birds on the beach below. Then he made a fist and rapped his knuckles against the door. The sound of resonating wood was hollow and ancient. He knocked again, and the sound of bone striking against wood was lost to the greater sounds of the sweeping wind and the ocean that rang like a great deep bell far below him. A third time he knocked, loudly with much force, and he waited. When there was no answer, he tried the clear quartz doorknob, which turned easily in his hand. Then he opened the door and stepped across the threshold into the cold hallway inside.

  ‘Tamara, Tamara!’ he called out. But immediately, upon listening to the echoes that his voice made against the hall stones, he knew the house was empty. ‘Tamara, Tamara – why aren’t you home?’