Neverness

‘I don’t understand,’ I said, ‘how a book of poems could save my life.’ I began to laugh.

He stopped by the window, smiling at me without humour. His large, veined hands were clasped behind his back. ‘I’ll tell you something about the Entity that no one else knows. She has a fondness for many things human, and of all these things, she likes ancient poetry the best.’

I sat quietly in my chair. I did not dare ask him why he thought the Solid State Entity liked human poetry.

‘If you learn these poems,’ he said, ‘perhaps the Entity will be less likely to kill you like a fly.’

I thanked him because I did not know what else to do. I would humour this somewhat deranged old man, I decided. I accepted the book. I even turned the pages, carefully, pretending to take an interest in the endless lines of black letters. Near the middle of the book, which contained thirteen hundred and forty-nine brittle pages, I saw a word that I recognized. The word reminded me that the Timekeeper was not a man to be laughed at or mocked. Once, when I was a young novice, the horologes had caught a democrat with a laser burning written words into the white marble of the Tower. The Timekeeper – I remember his neck muscles writhing like spirali beneath his tight skin – had ordered the poor man thrown from the top of the Tower in atonement for the dual crimes of destroying beauty and inflicting his ideas on others. Barbaric. According to the canons of our Order, of course, slelling is supposedly the only crime punishable by death. (When slel-neckers are caught stealing another’s DNA they are beheaded, one of the few ancient customs both efficient and merciful.) We hold that banishment from our beautiful city is punishment enough for all other crimes, but for some reason, when the Timekeeper had seen the graffito, FREEDOM, etched into the archway above the Tower’s entrance, he had raged and had discovered an exceptionary clause in the ninety-first canon permitting him, so he claimed, to order that: ‘The punishment will fit the crime.’ To this day, the graffito remains above the archway, a reminder not only that freedom is a dead concept, but that our lives are determined by sometimes capricious forces beyond our control.

We talked for a while about the forces that control the universe, and we talked about the quest. When I expressed my excitement over the possibility of discovering the Elder Eddas, the Timekeeper, ever a man of contradictions, ran his fingers through his snowy hair as he grimaced and said, ‘I’m not so sure I want man saved. So, I’ve had enough of men – maybe it’s time the ticking stopped and the clock ran down. Let the Vild explode, every damn star from Vesper to Nwarth. Saved! Life is hell, eh? And there’s no salvation except death, no matter what the Friends of Man say.’ I waited for his breath to run out as he ranted about the pervasive – and perverse – effect that the alien missionaries and alien religions had had upon the human race; I waited a long time.

The sky had long since grown dark and blackened when he hammered the edge of his fist against his thigh and growled out, ‘Piss on the Ieldra! So they made themselves into gods and carked themselves into the core? They should leave us alone, eh? Man’s man, and gods are gods, each to his own purpose. But you’ve sworn your silly oath, so you go find them or their Eddas or anything else you think you can find.’

Then he sighed and added, ‘But go carefully.’

It is strange how often the smallest of events, the most trivial of decisions, can utterly change our lives. Having said goodbye to the Timekeeper, I reached the ice beneath the tower, and I stole another look at the book he had given me. Poems! A simple book of clumsy, ancient poems! There on the gliddery, which was dark and bare, I stood for a long time wondering if I shouldn’t throw the book into our dormitory room’s fireplace; I stood there brooding over the meaning of chance and fate. Then the icy, damp wind off the Sound began to blow, carrying into my bones the chill of death – whose death I did not then know. The wind drove hard snowflakes across the ice, stinging my face and scouring the windows of the Tower. The soft sound of ice brushing against glass was almost lost to the tinkling of the wind chimes hanging from the Tower’s window ledges. Shrugging my shoulders, I pulled the hood of my kamelaika over my head. The Timekeeper wanted me to read the book. Very well, I would read the book.

My hands were numb as I slipped it into the pack I wore at the small of my back. I struck off down the gliddery in a hurry. Bardo and my other friends would be waiting dinner for me, and I was hungry and cold.

I spent most of my last night in the City making my various goodbyes. There was a dinner on my behalf in one of the smaller, more elegant restaurants of the Hofgarten. As was the custom of the scryers, Katharine refused to wish me well because, as she said, ‘my destiny was written in my history,’ whatever that meant. Bardo, of course, alternately wept and cursed and blustered. He had, perversely, taken a liking to heated beer, and he drank copious amounts of the foamy yellow liquid to ease his fear of the uncertain future. He made toasts and speeches to our friends, reciting sentimental verses he had composed. He lapsed into song, until Chantal Astoreth, that wry, dainty lover of music, pointed out that his voice was slurry with drink and not up to its usual fine quality. Finally, he fell stupefied into his chair, took my hand in his, and announced, ‘This is the saddest day of my damned life,’ And then he fell asleep.

My mother said a similar thing, and she barely kept herself from crying. (Though the corner of her mouth twitched uncontrollably as it did when she was full of strong emotion.) She looked at me, with her crooked, dark eyebrows and her nervous eyes, and she said, ‘Soli severs your oath because your mother went begging to the Timekeeper. And how do you repay me? You cut my heart.’

I did not tell her what the Timekeeper had said to me earlier that day in the Tower. She would not want to know how easily he had seen through her lies. She drew on her drab fur, which was shiny grey in patches where the fine shagshay hairs had worn off. She laughed in a low, disturbing manner as if she had a private joke with herself. I thought she would leave then without saying another word. But she turned to me, kissed my forehead, and whispered, ‘Come back. To your mother who bleeds for you, who loves you.’

I left the restaurant before dawn (I didn’t sleep that night), and I skated down the deserted Way to the Hollow Fields. There, at the foot of Urkel, even in the coldest part of morning, its acres of runs and pads were busy with sleds and windjammers and other craft. Thunder shook the ice of the slidderies, and the air was full of red rocket tailings and sonic booms. High above, the feathery lines of contrails glowed pink against the early blue sky. It was very beautiful. Although I had come here often on duties at this time of day, it occurred to me that I had always taken such beauty for granted.

Beneath the Fields, the Cavern of the Thousand Light Ships opened through a half-mile of melted rock. Although there were not nearly so many as a thousand ships – and have not been since the Tycho’s time – there were many more than the eye could take in at a glance. Near the middle of the eighth row of ships, I stood chatting with an olive-robed programmer beside my ship, the Immanent Carnation. While we debated a minor augmentation in the ship’s heuristics and paradox logics, someone called out my name. I looked down the walkway where the row of sleek, diamond hulls disappeared into the depths. I saw a long shape limned by the faint light of the luminescent lichen covering the Cavern’s walls. ‘Mallory,’ the voice rang out, echoing from the dark, curving ceiling above us. ‘It’s time to say goodbye, isn’t it?’ The walkway sang with the slap of heavy boots against reverberating steel, and then I saw him clearly, tall and severe in his black woollens. It was Soli.

The programmer, Master Rafael, who was a shy, quiet-loving man with skin as smooth and black as basalt, greeted him and hastily made an excuse for leaving us alone together.

‘She’s beautiful,’ Soli said, scrutinizing the lines of my ship, the narrow nose and the swept-forward wings. ‘That has to be admitted. Outside she’s lithe and balanced and beautiful. But it’s the inside that is the soul of a lightship, isn’t it? The Lord Programmer told me you’ve played with the Hilbert logics to an unusual degree. Why so, Pilot?’

For a while we talked about the things that pilots talk about. We debated the paradoxes and discussed my choosing of Master Jafar’s ideoplasts. ‘He was a great notationist,’ he said, ‘but his representation of Justerini’s omega function is redundant, isn’t it?’

He suggested certain substitutions of symbols that seemed to make great sense, and I could not keep the note of surprise from my voice as I asked, ‘Why are you helping me, Lord Pilot?’

‘It’s my duty to help new pilots.’

‘I thought you wanted me to fail.’

‘How could you know what was wanted?’ He rubbed his temples as he looked into the open pit of my ship. He seemed agitated and ill at ease.

‘But you tricked me into swearing the oath.’

‘Did I? Did I?’

‘And then you released me. Why?’

He reached out and touched the hull of my ship, almost as one would stroke a woman. He did not answer my question. Instead he pressed his lips together, and he asked me, ‘Then you really will journey into the Entity?’

‘Yes, Lord Pilot, I’ve said I would.’

‘You’ll do it freely, of your own will?’

‘Yes, Lord Pilot.’

‘Is that possible? You think you can bend yourself to your own will, that you’re free? Such arrogance!’

I had no idea of what he was leading up to, so I recited the usual evasion, ‘The holists teach that the apparent dichotomy between free will and forced action is a false dichotomy.’

He pulled at his chin and said, ‘Holists and their useless teachings! Who listens to holists? The question is this: Does your will impel you to your death, or will it be blamed on your Lord Pilot?’

Of course I blamed him; I blamed him so fiercely I felt the bile souring my stomach and spreading hotly through my veins. I wanted badly to tell him how much I blamed him, but instead I stared at his dull reflection in the hull of my ship. I looked at his black-gloved hand resting against my ship. I said nothing.

He removed his hand, rubbed his nose, and said, ‘When your time comes, when you’re close to it and have the choice between blaming me or not, please remember you tricked yourself into failure.’

My muscles were hot and tight, and without really thinking about it, I punched the hull of my ship where his face wavered in the gleaming blackness. I nearly broke my knuckles. ‘I … won’t … fail.’ I let the words out slowly, to keep from screaming in pain. I could hardly bear to look at him, with his long nose and his shiny black hair shot full of red.

He bowed his head quickly and said, ‘All men fail in the end, don’t they? Well, then. Goodbye, Pilot, we wish you well.’ He turned his back abruptly and walked away, into the depths of the Cavern.

There is not much more I wish to tell of that unhappy morning. Master Rafael returned accompanied by the usual cadre of professionals, journeymen and novices that attend a pilot’s departure. There was an orange-robed cetic who pressed his thumbs against my temples and examined my face for illness. There were journeymen tinkers who lifted me into the darkened pit of my ship, and a horologe to seal the ship’s clock. And others. After what seemed like days (already the distortions were working on my time sense), I ‘faced my ship,’ as the master pilots say; I interfaced with the deep, profound neurologics that are the soul of a lightship. My brain was now two brains, or rather, a single brain of blood and neurons which had been extended and melded into the brain of my ship. Reality, the lesser reality of sights and sounds and other sensual impressions, gave way to the vastly greater reality of the manifold. I plunged into the cold ocean of pure mathematics, into the realm of order and meaning underlying the chaos of everyday space, and the Cavern of the Thousand Light Ships was no more.

There was, of course, a brief moment of impatience as my ship was lifted to a surface run, the boredom of rocketing through the atmosphere and falling into the thickspace above our icy planet. I made a mapping, and a window into the manifold opened to me. Then our star, the little yellow sun, was gone, and there were an infinite number of lights and beauty and terror, and I left Neverness and my youth far behind me.

4

The Number Storm

In the beginning, of course, there was God. And from God arose the Elder Ieldra, beings of pure light who were like God except that there was a time before their existence, and a time would come when they would exist no more. And from the Elder Ieldra arose the Ieldra, who were like the elder race except they had substance and flesh. The Ieldra seeded the galaxy, and perhaps many galaxies, with their DNA. On Old Earth, from this godseed evolved the primitive algae and bacteria, the plankton, slime moulds, worms, fishes, and so on until ape-Man stood away from the trees of the mother continent. And ape-Man gave birth to cave-Men, who were like Men except that they did not have the power to end their own existence.

And from cave-Men at last arose Man, and Man, who was at once clever and stupid took to bed four wives: The Bomb; The Computer; The Test Tube; and Woman.

from A Requiem for Homo Sapiens, by Horthy Hosthoh

It is impossible to describe the indescribable. Words, being words, are inadequate to represent that for which there are no words. Having said this, I shall attempt an explanation of what occurred next, of my journey into the nameless pathways of the manifold.

I made my way along the glittering, spiral Sagittarius arm of the galaxy. I progressed outward in good style across the lens of the Milky Way, though there were of course times when I was forced to loop back across my pathways, kleining coreward towards the hellishly bright and dense stars of the central bulge. This part of my journey, I knew, would be easy. I followed pathways that the Tycho and Jemmu Flowtow had long ago discovered. To fall from a red giant such as Gloriana Luz to one of the hot blue stars of the Lesser Morbio is easy when the mapping of the respective point-sources in the neighbourhood of the two stars has long ago been made (and proved to be simply connected). So easy is it that the cantors have given these known pathways a special name: They call them the stellar fallaways to distinguish them from that part of the manifold that is unmapped, and quite often, unmappable. Thus, to be precise I should say I began my journey through the fallaways, fenestering at speed from window to window, from star to star in my hurry to reach the Solid State Entity.

I spent most of this time floating freely within the darkened pit of my ship. For some fearful pilots – such as the failed ones who guide the deep ships and long ships that ply the trade routes of the fallaways – the ship’s pit can be more of a trap than a sanctuary in which to experience the profounder states of mind; for them the pit is a black metallic coffin. For me, the pit of the Immanent Carnation was like a gentle, comfortable heaume surrounding my whole body rather than just my head. (Indeed, in the Tycho’s time the ship’s computer fitted tightly over the pilot’s head and extruded protein filaments into the brain, in the manner of the ancient heaumes.) As I journeyed through the near stars, the neurologics woven into the black shell of the pit holographically modelled my brain and body functions. And more, the information-rich logics infused images, impulses and symbols directly into my brain. Thus I passed the stars of the Nashira Triple, and I faced my ship’s computer and ‘talked’ to it. And it talked to me. I listened to the soundless roar of the ship’s spacetime devouring engines opening windows to the manifold, and I watched the fire of the more distant nebulae as I proved my theorems – all through the filter of the computer and its neurologics. This melding of my brain with my ship was powerful but not perfect. At times the information flooding within the various centres of my brain became mixed up and confused: I smelled the stars of the Sarolta being born and listened to the purple sound of equations being solved and other like absurdities. It is to integrate this crosstalk of the mind’s senses that the holists evolved the discipline of hallning; of a pilot’s mental disciplines I shall later have much to say.

I entered the Trifid Nebula, where the young, hot stars pulsed with wavelengths of blue light. At those times when my ship fell out into realspace around a star, it seemed that the whole of the nebula’s interior was aglow with red clouds of hydrogen gas. Because I needed to pass to the nearby Lagoon Nebula, I crossed the Trifid at speed, fenestering from window to window so quickly that I had to hurry my brain with many moments of slowtime. For me, with my metabolism and my mind speeding from the electric touch of the computer, since I could think much faster, time paradoxically seemed to slow down. In my mind, time dilated and stretched out like a sheet of rubber, seconds becoming hours, and hours like years. This slowing of time was necessary, for otherwise the flickering rush of stars would have left me too little time to establish my isomorphisms and mappings, to prove my theorems. Or I would have dropped into the photosphere of a blue giant, or fallen into an infinite tree, or died some other way.

At last I passed into the Lagoon. I was dazzled by the intense lights, some of which are among the brightest objects in the galaxy. Around a cluster of stars called the Blastula Luz, I prepared my long passage to the Rosette Nebula in the Orion Arm. I penetrated the Blastula and segued to the thickspace at its nearly hollow centre. This thickspace is called the Tycho’s Thick, and though it is not nearly so dense as the one that lies in the neighbourhood of Neverness, there are many point-sources connecting to point-exits within the Rosette Nebula.

I found one such point-source, and the theorems of probabilistic topology built before my inner eyes, and I made a mapping. The manifold opened. The star I orbited, an ugly red giant I named Bloody Bal, disappeared. I floated in the pit of my ship, wondering how long I would fall along the way from the Lagoon to the Rosette; I wondered – and not for the last time – at the very peculiar nature of this thing we call time.

In the manifold there is no space, and therefore there is no time. That is to say there is no outtime. For me, inside my lightship, there was only shiptime or slowtime, or dreamtime, or sometimes quicktime – but never the realtime of the outer universe. Because my passage to the Rosette would probably be long and uneventful, I often quieted my brain with quicktime. I did this to ward off boredom. My mentations slowed to a glacial pace, and time passed more quickly. Years became hours while long segments of tedious nothingness were shrunken into the moment it took my heart to beat a single time.

After a while I tired of quicktime. I thought I might as well drug my mind with sleep, or drug it with drugs. I spent most of my passage in the more or less normally alert state of shiptime examining the book that the Timekeeper had given me. I learned to read. It was a painful thing to do. The ancient way of representing the sounds of speech by individual letters was an inefficient means of encoding information. Barbaric. I learned the cursive glyphs of that array known as the alphabet, and I learned how to string them together linearly – linearly! – to form words. Since the book contained poems written in several of the ancient Old Earth languages, I had to learn these languages as well. This, of course, was the easier of my tasks since I could infuse and superscribe the language and memory centres of my brain directly from the computer’s store of arcana. (Though few of these poems were composed in ancient Anglish, I learned that oldest of tongues because my mother had long nagged me to do so.)

When I had learned to scan the lines of letters printed across – and, sometimes, down – the old, fibrous pages of yellowed paper, learned so well that I had no need to sound out the individual letters in the inner ear of my brain but could perceive the units of meaning word by word, I found to my astonishment that this thing called reading was pleasurable. There was pleasure in handling the cracked leather of the cover, pleasure too in the quiet stimulation of my eyes with black symbols representing words as they had once been spoken. How simple a thing reading really was! How strange I would have appeared to another pilot, had she been able to watch me reading! There, in the illuminated pit of my ship, I floated and held the Timekeeper’s book in front of me as I did nothing more than move my eyes from left to right, left to right, down the time-stiffened pages of the book.

But it was the poems themselves that gave me the greatest pleasure. It was wonderful to discover that the ancients, in all their stupendous ignorance of the immensity of spacetime and the endless profusion of life that fills our universe, knew as much of the great secret of life – or as little – as we know now. Though their perceptions were simple and bold, it seemed to me they often perceived more deeply that part of reality directly apprehensible to a mere man. Their poems were like hard diamonds crudely cut from some primal stone; their poems were full of a pounding, sensual, barbaric music; their poems sent the blood rushing and made the eyes focus on vistas of untouchable stars and cold, distant, northern seas. There were short, clever poems designed to capture one of life’s brief and sad (but beautiful) moments as one might capture and preserve a butterfly in glacier ice. There were poems that ran on for pages, recounting man’s lust for killing and blood and those pure and timeless moments of heroism when one feels that the life inside must be rejoined with the greater life without.

My favourite poem was one that the Timekeeper had read to me the day before my departure. I remembered him pacing through the Tower as he clenched his fists and recited:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

‘It is important,’ he had told me, ‘to rhyme “symmetry” with “eye.”’

I read the poems over and over; after a time, I could repeat some of them without looking at the book. I said the poems out loud until they echoed inside, and I could hear them in my heart.

And so I fell out in the Rosette Nebula, which lies at the edge of the expanding star-blown region known as the Vild. I looked out into the glowing hell of hard light and ruined stars and dust, and I heard myself say:

Stars, I have seen them fall

But when they drop and die

No star is lost at all

From all the star-sown sky.

(When I say I ‘looked out’ at the Vild, I mean, of course, that my ship illuminated my brain with models of the Vild that it had made. So far away was the Rosette from the Vild in realspace – in light-years – that the light from most of the exploding stars had not yet reached the Rosette.)

In contrast to the ugliness of the dying Vild, the Rosette was beautiful. It was a giant star-making womb whose newborn suns flashed and pulsed with such violent energies that the shock waves and pressures of light had swept away the whole of its interior, leaving the nebula hollow like a ruby- and diamond-studded eggshell. It was around the famous Siva Luz, brightest of that splendid, rosy sphere of lights, that I began the first of the mappings that would lead me to the doorway of Eta Carina and the Solid State Entity.

I continued my journey along the most ancient route of the manswarm. I fell out around stars whose planets were thick with human beings (and beings who were less and more than human). Rollo’s Rock, Wakanda and Vesper – these old planets I passed by as quickly as I could. And Nwarth and Ocher, Farfara and Fostora, where, it was said, the men had long ago learned the art of carking their selfnesses into their computers. (It was also said that the Fostora women, disdaining the transfer of human mind into ‘machine,’ had ventured forth in long ships until they came to the planet they called Lechoix. Whereupon they founded the oldest of the matriarchies. The historian Burgos Harsha, however, gives a different explanation of their origin. He holds that Lechoix was colonized by a renegade deepship full of nubile girls bound for the sun domes on Heaven’s Gate. Who really knows?)