Neverness

I was wrong.

I was skating west on the Run, cleverly – or so I thought – doubling back along the northern edge of the Old City so that I could cut along a little gliddery I knew of that led straight to the Academy’s north gate. The blue ice was crowded with novices and others who had somehow guessed that a few of the racers might choose this unlikely route. As I was congratulating myself and envisioning Burgos pinning the diamond victory medal to my chest, I glimpsed a streak of black through the press of skaters in front of me. The crowd shifted, and there was Soli calmly stroking close to the red stripe separating the skating lane from the sled lane. I was considering shouting out a challenge when I heard raucous laughter behind my back. I turned my head midstroke and saw two black-bearded men – wormrunners I guessed from the flamboyant cut of their furs – elbowing each other, clasping hands, and alternately whipping each other ahead by snapping their arms. They were much too old, of course, and the street was much too crowded for a game of bump-and-stake. I should have perceived this immediately. Instead, I completed my stroke because I was determined to give Soli no warning as I passed him. All at once the larger wormrunner smacked into Soli’s back, propelling him across the warning stripe into the sled lane. There came the sudden thunder of a large red sled as he stutter-stepped on his skates with his arms outstretched. He performed a desperate dance to avoid the sled’s hard, pointed nose, and suddenly he was down. The sled rocketed over him in a tenth of a second. (Though it seemed like a year.) I crossed the warning stripe and pulled him to the skating lane. He pushed me away with an astonishing force for someone who so nearly had been impaled. ‘Assassin,’ he said to me. He grunted and tried to stand.

I told him that it was a wormrunner who had pushed him, but he said, ‘If not you, then your mother’s hirelings. She hates me because she thinks you’ll be held to your oath. And for other reasons.’

I looked at the circle of people standing over us. Nowhere could I see the two black-bearded wormrunners.

‘But she’s wrong, Moira is.’

He held his side and coughed. Blood trickled from his long nose and open mouth. He beckoned to a nearby novice who approached nervously. ‘Your name?’ he asked.

‘Sophie Dean, from The Nave, Lord Pilot,’ the pretty girl answered.

‘Then,’ he said, ‘your Lord Pilot in the presence of the witness Sophie Dean releases Mallory Ringess from his oath to penetrate the Solid State Entity.’

He coughed again, spraying tiny red droplets over Sophie’s white jacket.

‘I think your ribs must be broken,’ I said. ‘The race is over for you, Lord Pilot.’

He grabbed my arm and pulled me closer to him. ‘Is it?’ he asked. Then he coughed as he pushed me away and began skating towards the Academy.

I stood there for a moment staring at the drops of blood burning tiny holes into the blue ice. I did not want to believe that my mother had sent assassins to murder Soli. I could not understand why he had released me from my oath.

‘Are you all right, Pilot?’ Sophie asked.

I was not all right. Though my life was saved, I felt sick to my stomach, utterly wretched. I coughed suddenly and vomited up a chyme of black bread and black coffee and bile.

‘Pilot?’

Sophie blinked her clear blue eyes against the sudden wind cutting beneath my garments, and in my mind was a knowledge, a complete and utter certainty that I would keep my oath to Soli and my vows to the Order no matter the cost. Each of us, I realized, must ultimately face death and ruin. It was merely my fate to have to face them sooner than most.

‘Pilot, shall I call for a sled?’

‘No, I’ll finish the race,’ I said.

‘You’re letting him get a lead.’

It was true. I looked down the Run as Soli turned onto the yellow street leading to my secret shortcut to the west gate.

‘Don’t worry, child,’ I said as I pushed off. ‘He’s injured and full of pain, and he’s coughing blood. I’ll catch him before we get halfway to Borja.’

I was again wrong. Though I struck the ice with my skates as fast as I could, I did not catch him as we passed the spires of Borja, and I did not catch him as we circled the Timekeeper’s Tower; I did not catch him at all.

The wind against my ears was like a winter storm as we entered Resa Commons. The multitudes cheered, and Burgos Harsha waved the green victory flag, and Leopold Soli, barely conscious and leaking so much blood from his torn lungs that a cutter later had to pump plasma into his veins, beat me by ten feet.

It might as well have been ten light-years.

3

The Timekeeper’s Tower

The goal of my theory is to establish once and for all the certitude of mathematical methods … The present state of affairs where we run up against the paradoxes is intolerable. Just think, the definitions and deductive methods which everyone learns, teaches and uses in mathematics, lead to absurdities! If mathematical thinking is defective, where are we to find truth and certitude?

David Hilbert, Machine Century Cantor, from On the Infinite

The days following the pilot’s race and Leopold Soli’s near-murder passed quickly. The clear, dry, sunny weather gave way to winter’s deep powder snows that continually fell on the glissades and kept the zambonies busy. Soli’s would-be assassins were never caught. Though he made full use of the Order’s resources, and the Timekeeper set his spies to listening at doorways and peeking in windows (or whatever it is that spies do), our Lord Pilot could do little more than rage and demand that my mother be brought before the akashics. ‘Lay her brain bare,’ he thundered at the pilot’s conclave, ‘expose her plots and lies!’ It was a measure of his vast reputation that the pilots, many of whom had grown to adulthood and had taken their vows during his long journey, voted to try my mother.

On fourthday she submitted to the review of Nikolos the Elder. With his computers he painted pictures of her brain as vivid as a Fravashi fresco. But the plump, little Lord Akashic pronounced that he could find no memory inside her of a plot to kill Soli.

That night, in her little brick house in the Pilot’s Quarter, she said to me, ‘Soli goes too far! Nikolos proclaims my innocence. What does Soli say? He says, “It’s well known that the matriarchs of Lechoix keep drugs that destroy specific memories.” Destroy! As if I’d destroy part of my brain!’

I knew how my mother treasured the hundred billion neurons that made up her brain. I did not believe that she, as those of the aphasic sect often did, had taken an aphagenic to destroy her memory; neither could I trust that she was innocent, not after what she had said to me the day of the race. (Even supposing she had used such a drug, I could not very well ask her if she had. Such is the nature of the induced micro-brain lesions that she would have no memory of her crime, nor of having dissolved the memory of her crime.) I was angry and my voice quavered as I asked, ‘How did you fool the Lord Akashic?’

‘My son doubts me?’ she said as she slumped against the bare brick wall of her sleeping room. ‘How I hate Soli! The Lord Pilot returns. To take away what I love most. And so I went to the Timekeeper. And lied, yes, I admit I lied. I begged him to ask Soli. To release you from your oath.’

‘And the Timekeeper listened to you?’

‘The Timekeeper thinks he’s cunning. But I told him we would go to Tria. To become merchant pilots, if he didn’t talk to Soli. The Timekeeper thinks he’s fearless, but he fears such a scandal.’

‘You told him that? He must think I’m the worst kind of coward.’

‘Who cares what he thinks? At least I’ve saved you. From a stupid death.’

‘You’ve saved me from nothing,’ I said as I walked towards the door. ‘Don’t ever lie on my behalf again, Mother.’

I told her I had resolved to keep my oath, and she began to cry. ‘How I hate Soli!’ she said as I opened the door to the street. ‘I’ll teach him about hate.’

I spent the next few days in final preparation for my journey. I consulted eschatologists and other professionals, hoping to glean some bit of information as to the nature and purpose of the impossible being known as the Solid State Entity. Burgos Harsha told me that Rollo Gallivare had discovered the first of the mainbrains, and that he believed them to be aliens from another galaxy. ‘It is recorded in the apocrypha of the first Timekeeper that the Silicon God appeared within the Eta Carina Nebula towards the end of the Swarming Centuries. And in the chronicles of Tisander the Wary, we find a similar assertation. But when have those sources ever been accurate, I ask you? In the history of the Tycho, Reina Ede holds that the brains evolved from the seed of the Ieldra, as did Homo Sapiens. What do I believe? I don’t know what I believe.’

Kolenya Mor thought that the Ieldra, before they melded their consciousness with the bizarrely tortured spacetime of the core singularity, must have closely resembled the Solid State Entity. ‘As to the Entity’s purpose, why, it’s the purpose of all life, to awaken to itself.’ We talked for a long time, and I told her that many of the younger pilots denied that life had a purpose. She looked at me with her horrified little eyes and exclaimed, ‘Heresy! That ancient heresy!’

I was not the only one, of course, called to quest. The whole of our Order seemed afire with the dream of finding Soli’s Elder Eddas. What indeed was the secret of man’s immortality? ‘Find out why the goddamned stars are exploding,’ Bardo said, ‘and you’ll find your secret.’ Of course, he was a pragmatist whose mind did not often turn towards esoteric problems. Others believed that the secret of the exploding Vild would be only the first part of the Elder Eddas. (Albeit a vital part.) Where should we look for this secret? Why hadn’t we discovered it long ago? Phantasts and tinkers and pilots – many of us felt that despite the three millennia which our Order had spent accumulating knowledge, we might have overlooked an important, perhaps vital thing. Historians begged the Timekeeper for permission to leave Neverness, to raid the library on Ksandaria for clues to the mystery. Neologicians and semanticists locked themselves in their cold towers as they set to creating and discovering new languages, lost in their certitude that the secret of the Elder Eddas – and every other kind of wisdom – was to be found in words. The fabulists spun their fictions, which they claimed were as real as any reality, and declared that the Elder Eddas is that which we create. And who was to say they were wrong? And the pilots! My brave, fellow pilots, Richardess and the Sonderval, went forth into the manifold, seeking lost planets and strange new alien races. Tomoth and a hundred other master pilots would try to map the Vild. Soli himself would attempt to penetrate the inner veil of the Vild, while Lionel devised yet another plan to find Old Earth. Even cowardly Bardo would make a journey, even if he proposed nothing more daring than his own, private expedition to Ksandaria. Although a few cynical professionals like my mother had no intention of chancing their lives on such a dream, it was an exciting time, and more, a glorious time we would never see again.

The day before my departure, a day of fierce, sudden gales and stinging ice-powder, the Timekeeper summoned me to his Tower. As I skated between the dark grey buildings separating Resa from the great Tower, I shivered beneath my too-thin kamelaika. I wished that I had either greased my face or worn a mask against the freezing wind. It would be an insult, I thought, to appear before the Timekeeper with patches of white, frostbitten skin blighting my face. It was good to enter the warm Tower, good, even, to stand impatiently in an anteroom below the top of the Tower as I stamped my boots on the red carpet and waited for the master horologe to announce my arrival.

‘He is waiting for you,’ the horologe said in a voice almost breathless from his climbing up and down the stairs into the Timekeeper’s chambers. ‘Be careful,’ he said, ‘he’s in an ugly mood today,’ and then he ushered me up the winding stairs into the circular sanctum of the tower where the Timekeeper stood waiting.

‘So, Mallory,’ he said, ‘the pilot’s ring looks good on your hand, eh?’

The Timekeeper was a grim-faced man with a mane of thick white hair erupting from his taut skin. Most of the time he seemed very old, though no one knew just how old he was. When he frowned, which he often did, the muscles of his jaws stood out like knots of wood. His neck was thick and popping with tendons, as was the rest of his tense, large-boned body. I stood in the spacious, well-lighted room, and he stared at me as he always did when I came to see him. His eyes were black and fathomless like chunks of barely cooled obsidian hammered into his skull; his eyes were hot, restless, angry and pained.

‘What would it take to kill you?’ he asked me.

The muscles of his bare forearms tensed and relaxed, tensed and relaxed. Once, when I was a novice, when he had taught me leverage grips and killing holds and other wrestling skills, I had had occasion to view the powerful body beneath the long red robe he always wore. His torso and legs were etched with scars; a fine network of hard, white cicatrices more intricate and convoluted than the glidderies of the Farsider’s Quarter began at his neck, twisted through his dense, white, body hair, and ran down his groin and muscular legs to his feet. When I had asked him about the scars, he had said, ‘It takes a lot to kill me, you see.’

He motioned for me to sit in an ornate, wooden chair facing the southern window. The Tower, a monolith of white marble imported from Urradeth at extraordinary cost, overlooked the whole of the Academy. To the west were the granite and basalt arches of the professionals’ colleges, Upplyssa and Lara Sig; to the north, the densely clumped spires of Borja, and looking south towards Urkel, I saw my beloved Resa. (I should mention that the tower windows are made of fused silica, and calcium and sodium oxides, a substance the Timekeeper calls glass. It is a brittle substance given to shattering when the gales of midwinter spring come roaring across the Starnbergersee. Nevertheless, the Timekeeper, who is fond of archaisms, claims that glass allows in a cleaner light than does the clary used in all the buildings of the Civilized Worlds.)

‘Do you hear the ticking, Mallory, my brave, foolish, young pilot? Time – it ticks, it runs, it twists, it dilates, shrinks, and kills, and one day for each of us, no matter what we do, it stops. Stops, do you hear me?’

He pulled up a chair identical to mine and rested his red-slippered foot on the seat. The Timekeeper – afraid perhaps that if he ceased his restless motions, his internal clock might stop – did not like to sit. ‘You’re the youngest pilot in history. Twenty-one years old – a nano in the life of a star, but it’s all the time you’ve had. And the clock beats; the clock tolls; the clock ticks; do you hear it ticking?’

I heard it ticking. All around us, in the Timekeeper’s circular Tower, were clocks ticking. Interspersed with the curved panes of glass around the circumference of the room, from the fur-covered floor to the white plaster ceiling, were wooden shelves upon which sat the clocks. Clocks of every conceivable design. There were archaic weight-driven clocks and spring clocks encased in plastic; there were wood-covered pendulum clocks, electric clocks and quartz crystal clocks; there were bio-clocks powered by the disembodied heart muscles of various organisms; there were quantum clocks and hourglasses filled with cobalt and vermilion sands; I saw three water clocks and even a Fravashi driftglass, which measured the time since the drifting super-galactic clusters had erupted from the primeval singularity. As far as I could determine, no two of the clocks told the same time. On top of the highest shelf was the Seal of our Order. It was a small glass and steel atomic clock which had been set on Old Earth the day the Order was founded. (The largest clock, of course, was – is – the Tower itself. Far below, set into the circle of ice surrounding it, twenty rows of granite radiate outward and mark the passing of the sun’s shadow. This giant sundial, inaccurate though it may be, is theoretically the only clock in the city by which we citizens can direct our activities. The Timekeeper abhorred the tyranny of time, and so he long ago ordered all clocks banned. This prohibition has proved a boon to the wormrunners who make fortunes smuggling in Yarkona pocket watches and other contraband.)

A clock gonged, and he gripped his forearms, one in either hand. He said, ‘I’ve heard that Soli has dissolved your oath.’

‘That’s true, Timekeeper. And I wish to apologize for my mother. She had no right to come to you, asking you to talk to Soli on my behalf.’

With his foot he pushed back the chair as he kneaded the tight muscles of his forearms. ‘So, you think I ordered Soli to release you from your oath?’

‘Didn’t you?’

‘No.’

‘My mother seems to think –’

‘Your mother – forgive me, Pilot – your mother often thinks wrongly. I’ve known you all your life. Do you think I’m stupid enough to believe you’d desert the Order to become a merchant pilot? Ha!’

‘Then you didn’t speak to Soli?’

‘You question me?’

‘Excuse me, Timekeeper.’ I was confused. Why else would Soli have released me from my oath, unless it was to shame me before all my friends and masters of the Academy?

I confided my doubts to the Timekeeper who said, ‘Soli has lived three long lifetimes; don’t try to understand him.’

‘It seems there are many things I don’t understand.’

‘You’re modest today.’

‘Why did you send for me?’

‘Don’t question me, damn you! I’ve only so much patience, even for you.’

I sat mutely in the chair looking out the window at Borja’s beautiful main spire, the one the Tycho had built a thousand years ago. The Timekeeper circled around to my side so that he could look upon my face as I stared straight ahead. It was the traditional position of politeness between master and novice that I had been taught when I first entered the Academy. The Timekeeper could search my face for truth or lies (or any other emotion) while preserving the sanctity of his own thoughts and feelings.

‘Everyone knows you intend to keep your oath,’ he said.

‘Yes, Lord Horologe.’

‘It seems that Soli has tricked you.’

‘Yes, Lord Horologe.’

‘And your mother has failed you.’

‘Perhaps, Lord Horologe.’

‘Then you’ll still try to penetrate the Entity?’

‘I’ll leave tomorrow, Lord Horologe.’

‘Your ship is ready?’

‘Yes, Lord Horologe.’

‘“To die among the stars is the most glorious death,” is it not?’

‘Yes, Lord Horologe.’

There was a blur from my side and the Timekeeper slapped my face. ‘Nonsense!’ he roared. ‘I won’t listen to such nonsense from you!’

He walked over to the window and rapped the glass pane with his knuckles. ‘Cities such as Neverness are glorious,’ he said. ‘And the ocean at sunset, or deep winter’s firefalls – these things are glorious. Death is death; death is horror. There’s no glory when the time runs out and the ticking stops, do you hear me? There’s only blackness and the hell of everlasting nothingness. Don’t be too quick to die, do you hear me, Mallory?’

‘Yes, Lord Horologe.’

‘Good!’ He crossed the room and opened a cabinet supporting a jar of pulsing, glowing red fluid. (I had always presumed that this evil-looking display was a clock of some sort, but I had never had the courage to ask him exactly what sort.) From the cabinet’s dark interior – the wood was a rare ebony and so dully black that it shed little light – he removed an object that appeared to be an old, leather-covered box. I soon saw that it was not; when he opened the ‘box,’ that is to say, when he turned back one section of the stiffened pieces of the brown, cracked leather, there were many, many sheets of what seemed to be paper cleverly fastened to the middle section. He came closer to me; I smelled mildew and dust and centuries-old paper. As his fingers turned the yellow sheets he would occasionally let out a sigh or exclaim, ‘Here it is, in ancient Anglish, no less!’ Or, ‘Ah, such music, no one does this now, it’s a dead art. Look at this, Mallory!’ I looked at the sheets of paper covered line after line with squiggly black characters, all of which were alien to me. I knew that I was looking at one of those archaic artifacts in which words are represented symbolically (and redundantly) by physical ideoplasts. The ancients had called the ideoplasts ‘letters,’ but I could not remember what the letter-covered artifact itself was called.

‘It’s a book!’ the Timekeeper said. ‘A treasure – these are the greatest poems ever dreamed by the minds of human beings. Listen to this … ,’ and he translated from the dead language he called Franche as he recited a poem entitled ‘The Clock.’ I did not like it very much; it was a poem full of dark, shuddering images and hopelessness and dread.

‘How is it that you can interpret these symbols into words?’ I asked.

‘The art is called “reading,”’ he said, ‘It’s an art I learned long ago.’

I was confused for a moment because I had always used the word ‘read’ in a different, broader context. One ‘reads’ the weather patterns from the drifting clouds or ‘reads’ a person’s habits and programs according to the mannerisms of his face. Then I remembered certain professionals practised the art of reading, as did the citizens of many of the more backward worlds. I had even once seen books in a museum on Solsken. I supposed that one could read words as well as say them. But how inefficient it all seemed! I pitied the ancients who did not know how to encode information into ideoplasts and directly superscribe the various sense and cognitive centres of the brain. As Bardo would say, how barbaric!

The Timekeeper made a fist and said, ‘I want you to learn the art of reading so you can read this book.’

‘Read the book?’

‘Yes,’ he said as he snapped the cover shut and handed it to me. ‘You heard what I said.’

‘But why, Timekeeper, I don’t understand. To read with the eyes; it’s so … clumsy.’

‘You’ll learn to read, and you’ll learn the dead languages in this book.’

‘Why?’

‘So that you’ll hear these poems in your heart.’

‘Why?’

‘Question me again, damn you, and I’ll forbid you to journey for seven years! Then you’ll learn patience!’

‘Forgive me, Timekeeper.’

‘Read the book, and you may live,’ he said. He reached out and patted the back of my neck. ‘Your life is all you have; guard it like a treasure.’

The Timekeeper was the most complicated man I have ever known. He was a man whose selfness comprised a thousand jagged pieces of love and hate, whimsy and will; he was a man who battled himself. I stood there dumbly holding the dusty old book he had placed in my hands, and I looked into the black pools of his unfathomable eyes, and I saw hell. He paced the room like an old, white wolf who had once been caught in a wormrunner’s steel trap. He was wary of something, perhaps of giving me the book. As he paced, he rubbed the muscles of his right leg and limped, slightly. He seemed at once vicious and kind, lonely, and bitter at his loneliness. Here was a man, I thought, who had never known a single day’s (or night’s) peace, an old, old man who had been wounded in love and cut in wars and burnt by dreams turned to ashes in his hands. He possessed a tremendous vitality, and his zest and love of life had finally led him to that essential paradox of human existence. He loved the air he breathed and the beating of his heart so fully and well that he had let his natural hatred of death ruin his living of life. He brooded too much about death. It was said that he had once killed another human being with his own hands to save his own life. There were rumours that he used a nepenthe to ease the panic of lapsing time and to forget, for a little while, the pains of his past and the angry roar of pure existence. I looked at the lines of his scowling face, and I thought the rumours might be true.