Neverness

‘Discovery?’ he growled out. ‘What discovery?’ He walked over to the window and silently shook his fist at the grey storm clouds drifting over the City from the south. He didn’t like the cold, I remembered, and he hated snow.

‘The Entity … She said the secret of life –’

‘The secret of life! You believe the lying words of that lying mainbrain? Gobbledygook! There’s no secret to be found in “man’s oldest DNA,” whatever that might be. There’s no secret, do you understand? The secret of life is life: It goes on and on, and that’s all there is.’

As if to punctuate his pessimism, just then the low, hollow bell of one of his clocks chimed, and he said, ‘It’s New Year on Urradeth. They’ll be killing all the marrowsick babies born this past year, and they’ll drink, and they’ll couple all day and all night until the wombs of all the women are full again. On and on it goes, on and on.’

I told him I thought the Entity had spoken the truth.

He laughed harshly, causing the weathered skin around his eyes to crack like sheets of broken ice. ‘Struth!’ he said bitterly, a word I took to be one of his archaisms. ‘A god’s truth, a god’s lies – what’s the difference?’

I told him I had a plan to discover man’s oldest DNA.

He laughed again; he laughed so hard his lips pulled back over his long white teeth and tears flowed from his eyes. ‘So, a plan. Even as a boy, you always had plans. Do you remember when I taught you slowtime? When I said that one must be patient and wait for the first waves of adagio to overtake the mind, you told me there had to be a way to slow time by skipping the normal sequence of attitudes. You even had a plan to enter slowtime without the aid of your ship-computer! And why? You had a problem with patience. And you still do. Can’t you wait to see if the splicers and imprimaturs – or the eschatologists, historians or cetics – can discover this oldest DNA? Isn’t it enough you’ll probably be made a master pilot?’

I rubbed the side of my nose and said, ‘If I petition you to mount a small expedition of my own, would you approve it?’

‘Petition me?’ he asked. ‘Why so formal? Why not just ask me?’

‘Because,’ I said slowly, ‘I’d have to break one of the covenants.’

‘So.’

There was a long silence during which he stood as still as an ice sculpture.

‘Well, Timekeeper?’

‘Which covenant do you want to break?’

‘The eighth covenant,’ I said.

‘So,’ he said again, staring out the window to the west. The eighth covenant was the agreement made three thousand years ago between the founders of Neverness and the primitive Alaloi who lived in their caves six hundred miles to the west of the City.

‘They’re neanderthals,’ I said. ‘Cavemen. Their culture, their bodies … so old.’

‘You’d petition me to journey to the Alaloi, to collect tissues from their living bodies?’

‘The oldest DNA of man,’ I said. ‘Isn’t it ironic that I might find it so close to home?’

When I told him the exact nature of my plan, he leaned over and gripped my wrists, resting his weight on the arms of the chair. His massive head was too close to mine; I smelled coffee and blood on his breath. He said, ‘It’s a damn dangerous plan, for you and for the Alaloi, too.’

‘Not so dangerous,’ I said too confidently. ‘I’ll take precautions. I’ll be careful.’

‘Dangerous, I say! Damn dangerous.’

‘Will you approve my petition?’ I asked.

He looked at me painfully, as if he were making the most difficult decision of his life. I did not like the look on his face.

‘Timekeeper?’

‘I’ll consider your plan,’ he said coldly. ‘I’ll inform you of my decision.’

I looked away from him and turned my head to the side. It was not like him to be so indecisive. I guessed that he agonized between breaking the covenant and fulfilling his own summons to quest; I guessed wrongly. It would be years, however, before I discovered the secret of his indecision.

He dismissed me abruptly. When I stood up, I discovered the edge of the chair had cut off my circulation; my legs were tingly and numb. As I rubbed the life back into my muscles, he stood by the window talking to himself. He seemed not to notice I was still there. ‘On and on it goes,’ he said in a low voice. ‘On and on and on.’

I left his chamber feeling as I always did: exhausted, elated and confused.

The days (and nights) that followed were the happiest of my life. I spent my mornings out on the broad glissades watching the farsiders fight the thick, midwinter snows. It was a pleasure to breathe fresh air again, to smell pine needles and baking bread and alien scents, to skate down the familiar streets of the City. There were long afternoons of coffee and conversation with my friends in the cafes lining the white ice of the Way. During the first of these afternoons, Bardo and I sat at a little table by the steamed-over window, watching the swarms of humanity pass while we traded stories of our journeys. I sipped my cinnamon coffee and asked for the news of Delora wi Towt and Quirin and Li Tosh and our other fellow pilots. Most of them, Bardo told me, were spread through the galaxy like a handful of diamonds cast into the nighttime sea. Only Li Tosh and the Sonderval and a few others had returned from their journeys.

‘Haven’t you heard?’ he asked, and he ordered a plate of cookies. ‘Li Tosh has discovered the homeworld of the Darghinni. In another age it would have been a notable discovery, a great discovery, even. Ah, but it was his bad luck to take his vows at the same time as Mallory Ringess.’ He dunked his cookie in his coffee. ‘And,’ Bardo said, ‘it was Bardo’s bad luck to take them then, too.’

‘What do you mean?’

As he munched his cookies, he told me the story of his journey: After fenestering to the edge of the Rosette Nebula, he had tried to bribe the encyclopaedists on Ksandaria to allow him into their holy sanctum. Because the secretive encyclopaedists were known to be jealous of their vast and precious pools of knowledge, and because they hated and feared the power of the Order, he had disguised himself as a prince of Summerworld, for him not a very difficult thing to do.

‘One hundred maunds of Yarkona bluestars I paid those filthy tubists to enter their sanctum,’ he said. ‘And even at that skin price – you’ll forgive me, my friend, if I admit that, despite our vow of poverty, I had hoarded a part, just a small part of my inheritance – ah, now where was I? Yes, the encyclopaedists. Even though they gouged a fortune from me, they kept me from their sanctum, thinking that an ignorant buffoon such as I would be content to fill my head from one of their lesser pools of esoterica. Well, it did take me a good twentyday before I realized the information I was swallowing was as shallow as a melt puddle, but I’m not stupid, am I? No, I’m not stupid, so I told the wily master encyclopaedist I’d hire a warrior-poet to poison him if he didn’t open the gates to the inner sanctum. He believed me, the fool, and so I dipped my brain into their forbidden pool where they keep the ancient histories and Old Earth’s oldest commentaries. And …’

Here he paused to sip his coffee and munch a few more cookies.

‘And I’m tired of telling this story because I’ve had my brains sucked dry by our akashics and librarians, but since you’re my best friend, well, you should know I found an arcanum in the forbidden pool that led right to the guts of the past, or so I thought. On Old Earth just before the Swarming, I think, there was a curious religious order called arkaeologists. They practised a bizarre ritual known as ‘The Diggings.’ Shall I tell you more? Well, the priests and priestesses of this order employed armies of slave-acolytes to painstakingly sift layers of dirt for buried fragments of clay and other relics of the past. Arkaeologists – and this was the prime datum from the forbidden pool – were, I quote: “Those followers of Henrilsheman believing in ancestor veneration. They believed that communion with the spirit world could be made by collecting objects which their ancestors had touched and in some cases, by collecting the corpses of the ancestors themselves.” Ah, would you like more coffee? No? Well, the arkaeologists, like all orders, I suppose, had been riven into many different factions and sects. One sect – I think they were called aigyptologists – followed the teachings of one Flinders Petr and the Champollion. Another sect dug up corpses preserved with bitumen. Then they pounded the corpses to a powder. This powder – would you believe it? – they consumed it as a sacrament, believing as they did that the life essence of their ancestors would strengthen their own. When generation had passed into generation, on and on, as the Timekeeper would say, well, they thought eventually man would be purified and they’d be immortal. Am I boring you? I hope not because I must tell you of this one sect whose high priests called themselves kurators. Just before the third exchange of the holocaust, the kurators, and their underlings, the daters, sorters and the lowly acolytes, they loaded a museum ship with old stones and bones and the preserved corpses of their ancestors that they called mumiyah. It was their ship – they named it the Vishnu – which landed on one of the Darghinni worlds. Of course, the kurators were too ignorant to recognize intelligent aliens when they saw them. Sad to say, they began delving into the dirt of that ancient civilization. They couldn’t have known the Darghinni have a horror of their own past – as well they should. And that, my friend, is how the first of the Man-Darghinni wars really began.’

We drank our coffee and talked about this shameful, unique war – the only war there had ever been between mankind and an alien race. When I congratulated him on making a fine discovery, he banged the table with his fat hand and said, ‘I haven’t finished my story! I hope you’re not bored because I was just about to tell you the climax of my little adventure. Well, after my success with the encyclopaedists – yes, yes, I admit I was successful – I was filled with joy. “The secret of man’s immortality lies in our past and in our future” – that was the Ieldra’s message, wasn’t it? Well, I’m not a scryer, so what can I say about the future? But the past, ah, well, I thought I’d discovered a vital link with the past. And as it happens, I have. My mumiyah may prove to contain some very old DNA, what do you think? Anyway, the climax: I was so full of joy, I rushed home to Neverness. I wanted to be the first to return with a significant discovery, you see. You must visualize it: I would have been famous. The novices would have stumbled over each other for the privilege of touching my robes. Master courtesans would have paid me for the pleasure of discovering what kind of man lives beneath these robes. How pungent my life would have been! But Bardo grew careless! In my hurry through the windows, I grew careless.’

I will not record all of my friend’s words here. In short, while fenestering through the dangerous Danladi thinspace he made a mistake that would have made the youngest of journeymen blush. In his mapping of the decision-group onto itself, he neglected to show the function was one-to-one, so he fell into a loop. Now any other pilot would have laboriously searched for a sequence of mappings to extricate himself from the loop. But Bardo was lazy and did not want to spend a hundred or more days of intime searching for such a mapping. He had an idea as to how he might instantly escape the loop, this lazy but brilliant man, and he played with his idea. After a mere seven hours of intime, he tasted the pungent fruit of genius. He proved that a mapping of points present to points past always exists, that a pilot could always return to any point along his immediate path. Moreover, it was a constructive proof; that is to say, not only did he prove such a mapping existed, he showed how such a mapping could be constructed. Thus he made a mapping with the star just beyond Ksandaria’s. He fell out into the fallaways, into the familiar spaces he had recently passed through. And then he journeyed homeward to Neverness.

‘I’m sought after, now,’ he laughed out. ‘It’s ironic: I, in my stupidity, I stumbled into a loop but I’ve proved the greatest of the lesser unproved theorems. Bardo’s Boomerang Theorem – that’s what the journeymen have named my little mapping theorem. There’s even talk of elevating me to a mastership, did you know that? I, Bardo, master pilot! Yes, I’m sought after now, by Kolenya and others with their luscious lips and beautiful, fat thighs. My seed flows like magma, my friend. I’m famous! Ah, but not as famous as you, eh?’

We talked all afternoon until the light died from the grey sky and the cafe filled with hungry people. We ordered a huge meal of cultured meats and the various exotic dishes favoured by Bardo. He poked his finger into my ribs and said, ‘You’ve no meat on your skinny bones!’ He praised me again for my discovery, and then I told him about my new plan.

‘You want to do what?’ he said, wiping meat jelly from his lips with a cloth. ‘To journey to the Alaloi and steal their DNA? That’s slelling, isn’t it?’ Realizing he had spoken that awful word too loudly, he looked around at the other diners and lowered his voice conspiratorially. He leaned across the table, ‘We can’t go slelling the Alaloi’s DNA, can we?’

‘It’s not really slelling,’ I said. ‘It’s not as if we’d use their DNA to tailor poisons or clone them or –’

‘Slelling is slelling,’ he interrupted. ‘And what about the covenants? The Timekeeper would never allow it, thank God!’

‘He might.’

I told him about my petition, and he grew sullen and argumentative.

‘By God, we can’t just take a windjammer and land on one of their islands and ask them to drop their seed in a test tube, can we?’

‘I have a different plan,’ I said.

‘Oh, no, I don’t think I want to hear this.’ He ate a few more cookies, wiped his lips and farted.

‘We’ll go to the Alaloi in disguise. It shouldn’t be too hard to learn their customs and to scrape a few skin cells from the palms of their hands.’

‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘Oh, too bad for Bardo, and too bad for you if you insist on this mad plan. And how do you think we could disguise ourselves? Oh no, please don’t tell me, I’ve had enough of your plans.’

I said, ‘There’s a way. Do you remember the story of Goshevan? We’ll do as he did. We’ll go to a cutter and have our bodies sculpted. The Alaloi will think we are their cousins.’

He farted again and belched. ‘That’s insane! Please, Mallory, look at me and admit you know it’s insane. By God, we can’t become Alaloi, can we? And why should you think the Alaloi’s DNA is older than any other? Shouldn’t we concentrate our efforts on the main chance? Since I’ve discovered mumiyah from three thousand years before the Swarming, why don’t we – you, I and Li Tosh, mount an expedition back to the Darghinni? After all, we know there are the remains of a museum ship on one of their worlds.’

I coughed and I rubbed the side of my nose. I did not want to point out that as of yet, we had no idea where to look for the wreckage of the museum ship. I said, ‘The Alaloi DNA is probably fifty thousand years old.’

‘Is that true? We don’t know anything about the Alaloi except that they’re so stupid they don’t even have a language!’

I smiled because he was being deliberately fatuous. I told him everything known about the Alaloi, those dreamers who had carked their humanness into neanderthal flesh. According to the historians, the Alaloi’s ancestors had hated the rot and vice of civilization, any civilization. Therefore, they had fled Old Earth in long ships. Because they wanted to live what they thought of as a natural life, they back-mutated some of their chromosomes, the better to grow strong, primitive children to live on the pristine worlds they hoped to discover. In one of their long ships, they carried the frozen body of a neanderthal boy recovered from the ice of Tsibera, which was the northernmost continent of Old Earth. They had spliced strands of frozen DNA; with the boy’s replicated DNA they performed their rituals and carked their germ cells with ancient chromosomes. Generations later, generations of experiment and breeding, the cavemen – to use the ancient, vulgar term – landed on Icefall. They destroyed their ships, fastened their hooded furs, and they went to live in the frozen forests of the Ten Thousand Islands.

‘That’s interesting,’ Bardo said. ‘But I’m bothered by one thing. Well, I’m bothered by everything you’ve said, of course, but there is one thing that bothers me stupendously about this whole scheme of searching for man’s oldest DNA.’

He ordered some coffee and drank it. He looked across the cafe at a pretty journeyman historian, and he began flirting with his eyes.

‘Tell me, then,’ I said.

He reluctantly looked away, looked at me, and said, ‘What did the goddess mean that the secret of life is written in the oldest DNA of the human species? We must think very carefully about this. What did She mean by “old”?’

‘What do you mean, “what did She mean by old?”’

He puffed his cheeks out and swore, ‘Damn you, why do you still answer my questions with questions? Old – what’s old? Does one race of man have older DNA than another? How can one living human have older DNA than another?’

‘You’re splitting words like a semanticist,’ I said.

‘No, I don’t think I am.’ He removed his glove, fingered his greasy nose and said, ‘The DNA in my skin is very old stuff, by God! Parts of the genome have been evolving for four billion years. Now that’s old, I think, and if you want me to split words, I shall. What of the atoms that make up my DNA? Older still, I think, because they were made in the heart of stars ten billion years ago.’

He scraped along the side of his nose and held out his finger. Beneath the long nail was a smear of grease and dead, yellow skin cells. ‘Here’s your secret of life,’ he said. He seemed very pleased with himself, and he went back to flirting with the historian.

I knocked his hand aside and said, ‘I admit the Entity’s words are something of a riddle. We’ll have to solve the riddle, then.’

‘Ah, but I was never fond of riddles.’

I caught his eyes and told him, ‘As you say, the genome has been evolving for billions of years. And therefore any of our ancestors’ DNA is older than ours. This is how I’ll define old, then. We’ll have to start somewhere. The Alaloi have spliced DNA from a body fifty thousand years old into their own bodies. We can hope this DNA – and the message in the DNA – hasn’t mutated or degraded.’

‘But the Alaloi are not our ancestors,’ he said.

‘Yes, but the neanderthals of Old Earth were.’

‘No, by God, they weren’t even members of the human species! They were slack-jawed, stoop-shouldered brutes as dumb as dodos.’

‘You’re wrong,’ I said. ‘Their brains were larger than those of modern man.’

‘Larger than your brain, perhaps,’ he said. He tapped his bulging forehead. ‘Not larger than Bardo’s, no, I can’t believe that.’

‘We evolved from them.’

‘Now there’s a revolting thought. But I don’t believe you. Does Bardo know his history? Yes, I think I do. But why should pilots argue history?’ He held his head up, stroked his beard and looked at the historian. ‘Why not let an historian settle an historical argument?’

So saying, he excused himself, belched, stood up, brushed cookie crumbs from his beard and squeezed by the crowded tables. He approached the historian and said something to her. She laughed; she took his hand as he guided her back towards our table.

‘May I present Estrella Domingo of Darkmoon.’ Estrella was a bright-looking journeyman and nicely fat, the way Bardo liked his women to be. He introduced me, then said, ‘Estrella has consented to resolve our argument.’ He pulled up a chair so she could sit down. He poured her a cup of coffee. ‘Now tell us, my young Estrella,’ he said. ‘Were neanderthals really our ancestors?’

In truth, I do not think Bardo had any hope of winning his argument. After a while, it became obvious that he had invited this pretty, impressionable girl from Darkmoon to our table not to listen to a history lesson, but to seduce her. After she had patiently explained that there were different theories as to man’s recent evolution and told him, yes, it was most likely that the neanderthals were our direct ancestors, he exclaimed, ‘Ah, so my friend is right once again! But you must admit, it’s too bad that man once looked like cavemen. They’re so ugly, don’t you agree?’

Estrella did not agree. She coyly observed that many women liked thick, muscular, hairy men. Which was one of the reasons it had become fashionable years ago for certain professionals to sculpt their bodies into the shape of Alaloi.

‘Hmmm,’ Bardo said as he twisted his moustache, ‘that is interesting.’

Estrella further observed that the difference between neanderthals and modern man was not so great as most people thought. ‘If you look carefully,’ she said, ‘you can see neanderthal genes in the faces of certain people on any street in any city on any planet of the Civilized Worlds.’ (As I have said, she was a nice, intelligent young woman, even if she had the irritating habit of stringing together too many prepositional phrases when she spoke.) ‘Even you, Master Bardo, with your thick browridges above your deepset eyes surrounded by such a fine beard – have you ever thought about this?’

‘Ah, no, actually I never have. But it would be interesting to discuss the matter in greater detail, wouldn’t it? We could scrutinize various parts of my anatomy and determine those parts which are the most primitive.’

After Bardo and she had made plans ‘to discuss the matter in greater detail,’ she returned to her table and whispered something in her friend’s ear.

‘What a lovely girl!’ he said. ‘Isn’t it wonderful how these journeymen acquiesce to established pilots?’ And then, ‘Ah, perhaps the neanderthals were our ancestors … or perhaps not. That’s still no reason to sculpt our bodies and live among cavemen. I have a better plan. We could bribe a wormrunner to capture an Alaloi. They poach shagshay, don’t they? Well, let them poach a caveman and bring him back to the City.’

I took a sip of coffee and tapped the bridge of my nose. ‘You know we can’t do that,’ I said.

‘Of course, all the wormrunner would really need is a little blood. He could render a caveman unconscious, bleed him a little, and return with a sample of his blood.’

I sloshed the coffee around in my mouth. It had grown cold and acidy. I said, ‘You’ve always accused me of being too innocent, but I’ll admit that I’ve thought about doing what you suggest.’

‘Well?’

I ordered a fresh pot of coffee and said, ‘One man’s blood would not be enough. The neanderthal genes are spread among the Alaloi families. We have to be sure of getting a large enough statistical sample.’

He belched and rolled his eyes. ‘Ah, you always have these reasons, Little Fellow. But I think the real reason you want to make this mad expedition is that you like the idea of sculpting your body and living among savages. Such a romantic notion. But then, you always were a romantic man.’

I said, ‘If the Timekeeper grants my petition, I’ll go to the Alaloi. Will you come with me?’

‘Will I come with you? Will I come with you? What a question!’ He took a bite of bread and belched. ‘If I don’t come with you, they’ll say Bardo is afraid, by God! Well, too bad. I don’t care. My friend, I’d follow you across the galaxy, but this, to go among savages and slel their plasm, well … it’s insane!’

I was not able to persuade Bardo to my plan. I was so full of optimism, however, so happy to be home that it didn’t matter. As a returning pilot, I was entitled to take a house in the Pilot’s Quarter. I chose a small, steeply roofed chalet heated by piped-in water from the geyser at the foot of Attakel. Into the chalet I moved my leather-bound book of poems, my furs and kamelaikas and my three pairs of skates, my chessboard and pieces, the mandolin I had never learned to play, and the few other possessions I had accumulated during my years at Resa. (As novices at Borja, of course, we were allowed no possessions other than our clothes.) I considered ordering a bed and perhaps a few wooden tables and chairs, such minor tubist indulgences being at that time quite popular. But I disliked sleeping in beds, and it seemed to me that chairs and tables were only appropriate in bars or cafes, where many could make use of their convenience. Too, I had another reason for not wanting my house cluttered with things: Katharine had begun spending her nights with me. I did not want her, in her world of eternal night, tripping over a misplaced chair and perhaps fracturing her beautiful face.