Neverness

‘To be tested … how?’

‘To be tested for possibilities.’

As I was soon to learn, the Entity had been testing me since I first crossed the threshold of her immense brain. The torison spaces and the ugly segmented spaces that had almost defeated me – they were her handiwork, as was the infinite tree imprisoning me. She had tested my mathematical prowess, and – this is what the Tycho told me – She had tested my courage. Not the least of my tests had been my ability to listen to Her godvoice and not lose myself in terror. I had no idea why She would want to test me at all, unless it was just another of Her games. And why should She use the Tycho to test me when She could look into my brain to see all of me there was to see? No sooner had I thought this when the godvoice rolled through my head like thunder:

Thousands of years ago your eschatologists mapped the DNA molecule down to the last carbon atom. But they still search for the rules by which DNA unfolds life and codes for new forms of life. They are still learning DNA’s grammar. As with DNA, so it is with the unfolded brain. Imagine a baby who has learned the alphabet but who has no idea what words mean or the rules for putting them together. To understand the brain from its trillions of synapses would be like trying to appreciate a poem from the arbitrary twistings of individual letters. You are that poem. There are infinite possibilities. You, my Mallory, will always be a mystery to me.

– I don’t want to be tested.

Life is a test.

– If I succeed, will you free me from the tree?

Like an ape, you are free at this moment to escape your tree.

– Free? I don’t know how.

That is too bad. If you succeed, you are free to ask me three questions, any questions. It is an old, old game.

– And if I fail?

Then the light goes out. Oh, where does the light go when the light goes out?

I tightened my fists until my fingernails cut my palms. I did not want to be tested.

‘Well, my Pilot, shall we begin?’ It was the Tycho speaking as he scratched his jowls.

‘I don’t know.’

I will not record here in detail the many tests that the Tycho – the Entity – put to me. Some of the tests, such as the Test of Knowledge, as he called it, were long, meticulous and boring. The nature of other tests, such as the Test of Chaos, I hardly understood at all. There was a Test of Reason and a Test of Paradox, followed, I think, by the Test of Reality in which I was made to question my every assumption, habit and belief while the Tycho bombarded me with alien ideas that I had never thought before. This test nearly drove me mad. I never understood the need to be tested at all, not even when the Tycho explained: ‘Someday, my angry Pilot, you may have great power, perhaps as Lord Pilot, and you’ll need to see things through multiplex eyes.’

‘I’m rather fond of my own eyes.’

‘Nevertheless,’ he said, ‘nevertheless …’

Suddenly, within my head, echoed the teachings of the famous cantor, Alexandar of Simoom, Alexandar Diego Soli, who was Leopold Soli’s long-dead father. I was immersed body, mind and soul in the belief system of the strange Friends of God. I saw the universe through Alexandar’s dark, grey eyes. It was a cold universe in which nothing was certain except the creation of mathematics. Other forms of creation did not really exist. Yes, there was man, but what was man, after all? Was man the creation of the Ieldra, who had in turn been created by the Elder Ieldra? And if so, who had created them? The Very Elder Ieldra?

And so I learned this strange theology of Alexandar Diego Soli: It was known that the first Lord Cantor, the great Georg Cantor, with an ingenious proof array had demonstrated that the infinity of integers – what he called aleph null – is embedded within the higher infinity of real numbers. And he had proved that that infinity is embedded within the greater infinity of aleph two, and so on, a whole hierarchy of infinities, an infinity of infinities. The Simoom cantors believe that as it is with numbers, so it is with the hierarchies of the gods. Truly, as Alexandar had taught his son, Leopold, if a god existed, who or what had created him (or her)? If there is a higher god, call him god2, there must be a god3 and a god4, and so on. There is an aleph million and an aleph centillion, but there is no final, no highest infinity, and therefore there is no God. No, there could be no true God, and so there could be no true creation. The logic was as harsh and merciless as Alexandar of Simoom himself: If there is no true creation then there is no true reality. If nothing is real, then man is not real; man in some fundamental sense does not exist. Reality is all a dream, and worse, it is less than a dream because even a dream must have a dreamer to dream it. To assert otherwise is nonsense. And to assert the existence of the self is therefore a sin, the worst of sins; therefore it is better to cut out one’s tongue than to speak the word ‘I.’

As this reality gripped me, I was transported in space and time. I shivered and opened my eyes to the mountain mists settling over Alexandar’s stone house on Simoom. I was in a tiny, bare, immaculate room with grey slate walls, and I looked at a young boy kneeling in front of me. I was Alexandar of Simoom, and the boy was Soli.

‘Do you see?’ the Tycho asked me. And he placed in my mind Alexandar’s memory of his son’s austere, bitter education:

‘Do you understand, Leopold? You must never say that word again.’

‘What word, Father?’

‘Don’t play games, do you understand?’

‘Yes, Father, but please don’t slap me again.’

‘And who do you think you are to be worthy of punishment?’

‘Nobody, Father … nothing.’

‘That is true, and since it is true, there is no reason for you to be spoken to, is there?’

‘The silence is terrible, Father, worse than being punished. Please, how can you teach me in silence?’

‘And why should you be taught anything at all?’

‘Because mathematics is the only true reality, but … but how can that be? If we are really nothing, we cannot create mathematics, can we?’

‘You have been told, haven’t you? Mathematics is not created; it is not a thing like a tree or a ray of light; nor is it a creation of mind. Mathematics is. It is all that is. You may think of God as the timeless, eternal universe of mathematics.’

‘But how can it … if it is … I just don’t under –’

‘What did you say?’

‘I don’t understand!’

‘And still you profane. You won’t be spoken to again.’

‘I, I, I, I, I … Father? Please.’

I did not understand how the Entity had acquired the memories of Alexandar of Simoom. (Or perhaps they were Soli’s memories?) Nor did I learn how She knew so much of the even stranger realities of the autists and the brain-maiming aphasics. Strange as these realities were, however – and it was very strange to enter the internal, self-painted thoughtscapes of an autist – they were human realities. Human thought is really all the same. Thoughts may differ from person to person and from group to group, but the way we think is limited by the deep structures of our all too human brains. This is both a curse and a blessing. We are all trapped within the bone coffins of our same brains, imprisoned in thoughtways evolved over a million years. But it is a comfortable prison of familiar white walls, whose air, however stale, we can breathe. If we would escape our prison only for an instant, our new way of seeing, of knowing, would leave us gasping. There would be glories and excruciating beauty and – as I was soon to learn – madness.

‘Okay,’ the Tycho said to me, ‘you grasp Alexandar of Simoom and Iamme, the solipsist. And now, the alien realities.’

The Tycho – or rather the phased light waves that were the Tycho – began to blur. The redness of his round nose deepened into violet as the nose itself broadened into a bristly snout. Like a piece of pulled clay, the snout stretched out into a long, supple trunk. His forehead bulged like a bloodfruit swollen with rotten gases, and his chin and jowls hardened into a boxlike organ lined with dozens of narrow, pinkish slits. Suddenly, his robe vanished like smoke. His naked body began to change. Balls of round muscle and brown and scarlet fur replaced the Tycho’s grey, sagging flesh. His ponderous testes and membrum withered like seaweed and shrunk, vanishing within the red fold of skin between the thick legs. I waited and stared at the alien thing being born within the pit of my ship. Soon I recognized her for what she was: an imago of one of that gentle (if cunning) race known as the Friends of Man.

The alien raised her trunk, and the pink slits of her speech organ vibrated and quivered, released a rank spray of molecules. I smelled esthers and ketones and flowers, the stench of rotting meat mingled with the sweetness of snow dahlia. In a way, with her trunk entwined with the blue helix of a master courtesan, she reminded me of Soli’s friend (and, some said, mistress) Jasmine Orange.

Behold Jasmine Orange.

I beheld Jasmine Orange through her own eyes: I became Jasmine Orange. I was at once Jasmine Orange and Mallory Ringess, looking at an alien through human eyes and, through my trunk, smelling the essence of a human being. Suddenly, my consciousness left my human body altogether, and there were no colours. I watched the scarlets and browns of my fur fade to light and dark grey. I looked across the pit of my ship and saw a bearded, young, human pilot staring at me; I saw myself. I listened for the sound of the Entity’s voice, but there was no sound inside or out because I was as deaf as ice. I did not really know what sound was. I knew only smell, the wonderful, mutable world of free-floating scent molecules. There was jasmine and the tang of crushed oranges as I spoke my lovely name. I curled my trunk, sucking in the fragrance of garlic and ice-wine as I greeted the human, Mallory Ringess, and he greeted me. How alien, how bizarre, how hopelessly stupid seemed his way of representing single units of meaning by a discrete progression of linear sounds, whatever sounds really were! How limited to put sounds together, like beads on a string! How could human beings think at all when they had to progress from sound to sound and thought to thought one word at a time like a bug crawling along the beads of a necklace? How very slow!

Because I wanted to speak with the pilot Ringess, I raised my trunk and released a cloud of pungent odours that was to a human sentence what I supposed a symphony must be to a child’s jingle. But he had no nose and he understood so little. Yes, Ringess, I told him, the scent-symbols are not fixed as, for example, the sounds in the word ‘purple’ are fixed; they do not always mean the same thing. Isn’t meaning as mutable as the smells of the sea? Can you sense the configuration of the minute pyramids of mint and vanilla bean and musk in this cloud of odours? And the meanings – do you know that the smells of jasmine and olathe and orange might mean, ‘I am Jasmine Orange, the lover of Man,’ or, ‘The sea is calm tonight,’ depending on the arrangement and the proximity of the unit pyramids to the other molecules of scent? Can you grasp meaning as a whole? And the logic of structure? Do you understand the complexities of language, my Ringess?

Ideas blossom outward like arctic poppies in the sun growing into other ideas crosslinked and connected by pungent association links, and link to link the smells of roasting meat and wet fur flow outward and sideways and down, and blend into fields redolent with the sweet perfume of strange new logic structures and new truths that you must inhale like cool mint to overwhelm and obliterate your bitter, straightforward ideas of logic and causality and time. Time is not a line; the events of your life are rather like a jungle of smells forever preserved in a bottle. One sniff and you’ll sense instantly the entire jungle rather than the fragrances of individual flowers. Do you understand the subtleties? Do you dare open the bottle? No, you have no nose, and you don’t understand.

He understands all that the structure of his brain will let him understand.

I understood that a man who dwelt too long inside an alien brain would go mad. I closed my eyes and shook my head as I pinched my nostrils shut against the mind-twisting smells flooding the pit of my ship. My eyes, my nostrils! – when I opened them, I was human again. The alien imago was gone, though the aftersmells of vanilla bean and wormwood remained. I was alone inside my sweaty, hairy, human body, inside my old brain which I thought I knew so well.

– Their logic, the truth structures … it’s so different; I never knew.

The deep structure of their brain is different. But at a deeper level still, the logic is the same.

– I can’t understand this logic.

Few of your Order have understood the Friends of Man.

Like everyone else, I had always been suspicious of these exotic, alien whores. I had supposed they seduced men with their powerful, aphrodisiacal scents in order to proselytize them when they were drugged with sex, to slyly persuade them to the truth of their mysterious alien religion. Now I saw – ‘saw’ is not the right word – I perceived that their purpose was much deeper than merely changing mankind’s beliefs; they desired to change mankind itself.

But it is the hardest thing to change the mind of a man. You have such a small sense of yourselves.

– A man must know who he is, as Bardo says.

And what is a Bardo?

While I snorted and tried to rid my nose and mind of disturbing smells, I thought about Bardo and how he had always had a clear, if flamboyant, sense of who he was: a man determined to experience pleasure as no other man ever had or ever would.

Your Bardo defines himself too narrowly. Even he may have possibilities.

During the tests which followed, by implication and deduction, I learned much about the Entity’s sense of Herself. Each moon-brain, it seemed, was at once an island of consciousness and part of the greater whole. And each moon could subdivide and compartmentalize at need into smaller and smaller units, trillions of units of intelligence gathering and shifting like clouds of sand. I supposed only the tiniest part of one of her lesser moons was occupied with testing me. And yet I was given to understand that, paradoxically, all of Her was in some small way inside my brain, as I was inside hers. When I joked about the strange topologies involved in this paradox, Her thoughts drowned out my own:

You are like the Tycho, but you are playful where he is savage.

– Am I? Sometimes I don’t know who I am.

You are that you are. You are a man open to possibilities.

– Others used to say I thought too many things were possible. A wise man knows his limits, they said.

Others have not survived the Test of Realities.

I was delighted that I would have to suffer no more alien realities and more than a little pleased with myself, a pleasure lasting no longer than it took for me to draw in a breath of air.

There will be one last test.

– What test?

Call it the Test of Fate.

The air in front of me flickered, and there appeared an imago of a tall woman wearing a white robe. Her straight black hair shined and smelled of snow dahlia. When she turned to me, I could not take my eyes off her face. It was a face I knew well, the aquiline nose and high cheeks and most of all, the dark, smoothly scarred hollows where the eyes should have been; it was the face of my beautiful Katharine.

I was angry that the Entity would pull this most private memory from my mind. When Katharine smiled at me and bowed her head slightly, I hoped that the Entity would not overhear the words to an ancient poem which formed unspoken on my lips:

I love, pale one, your lifted eyebrows bridging

Twin darknesses of flowing depth.

But however deep they are, they carry me

Another way than that of death.

In a voice mysterious and deep, a voice which was a weird blend of Katharine’s compassionate forebodings and the calculated words of the Entity, the imago tensed her lips and said, ‘There is another way, my Mallory, than that of death. I’m glad you like poetry.’

‘What is the Test of Fate?’ I asked aloud.

As I stared into the caverns beneath her black eyebrows, flickers of colour brightened the twin darknesses. At first I thought it was merely an aberration of the imago’s phased light waves. Then the wavering blueness coalesced and stilled, filling her vacant eyepits as water fills a cup. She blinked her newly grown eyes, which were large and deep and shone like liquefied jewels. She looked at me with those lovely, blue-black eyes and said, ‘Because of you, I renounce the greater vision for … Do you see your fate? Now I have eyes again I’m blind, and I truly can’t see what will … Your face, you’re splendid! I’d preserve you if I could! If only … the Test of Fate; the Test of Whimsy or Caprice. I will recite words from three ancient poems. If you can complete the unfinished stanzas, then the light burns on.’

‘But that’s absurd! Should my life depend on my knowing a stupid poem, then?’

I chewed the edges of the moustache that had grown over my lip during my long journey. I was furious that my fate – my life, my death – should be decided by so arbitrary a test. It made no sense. Then I remembered that the warrior-poets, that sect of assassins which infect certain of the Civilized Worlds, were rumoured to ask their victims the lines of a poem before they murdered them. I wondered why the goddess would practise the custom of the warrior-poets? Or perhaps She had originated the custom aeons ago, and the warrior-poets worshipped Her and all Her practices? How could I know?

‘And the Tycho,’ I said. I ground my teeth. ‘He didn’t know any of your poems, did he?’

Katharine smiled the mysterious smile of the scryers as she shook her head. ‘Oh, no, he knew each poem but the last, of course. He chose his fate, do you see?’

I did not see. I was rubbing my dry, hot eyes, trying to understand when she sighed and said in a sad voice:

The many men, so beautiful!

And they all dead did lie:

She looked at me as if she expected me to immediately complete the stanza. I could not. My chest was suddenly tight, my breathing ragged and uneven. Like a snowfield, my mind was barren.

The many men, so beautiful!

And they all dead did lie:

I was empty and sick because I knew I had ‘read’ those words before. They were from a long poem three-quarters of the way through the Timekeeper’s book. I closed my eyes, and I saw on page nine hundred and ten the title of the poem. It was called, ‘The Rhyme of the Ancient Pilot.’ It was a poem of life and death and redemption. I tried to summon from my memory the long sequences of black letters, to superimpose them against the white snowfield of my mind, even as the poet had once written them across white sheets of paper. I failed. Although at Borja, along with the other novices, I had cross-trained in the remembrancers’ art (and various others), I was no remembrancer. I lamented, and not for the first time, that I did not possess that perfect ‘memory of pictures’ in which any image beheld by the living eye can be summoned at will and displayed before the mind’s eye, there to be viewed and studied in vivid and varicoloured detail.

Katharine’s skin took on the texture of Urradeth marble as she said, ‘I shall repeat the line one more time. You must answer or …’ She put her hand to her throat, and in a voice as clear as Resa’s evening bell, she recited:

The many men, so beautiful!

And they all dead did lie:

I remembered then that the Timekeeper had told me I should read his book until I could hear the poems in my heart. I closed my mind’s eye to the confusion of twisting black letters I was struggling to see. The remembrancers teach that there are many ways to memory. All is recorded, they say; nothing is forgotten. I listened to the music and rhyme of Katharine’s poem fragment. Immediately distinct words sounded within, and I repeated what my heart had heard:

The many men, so beautiful!

And they all dead did lie:

And a thousand slimy things

Lived on; and so did I.

The Katharine imago smiled as if she were pleased. I had to remind myself that she wasn’t really Katharine at all, but only the Entity’s re-creation of Katharine. Or rather, she was my imperfect memory sucked from my mind. I realized that I knew only a hundredth part of the real Katharine. I knew her long, hard hands and the depths between her legs, and that she had a submerged, burning need for beauty and pleasure (to her, I think, they were the same thing); I knew the sound of her dulcet voice as she sang her sad, fey songs, but I could not look into her soul. Like all scryers she had been taught to smother her passions and fears within a wet blanket of outer calm. I did not know what lay beneath, and even if I had known, who was I to think I could hold the soul of a woman within me? I could not, and because I could not, the imago of Katharine created from my memory was subtly wrong. Where the real Katharine was provocative, her imago was playful; where Katharine loved poems and visions of the future for their own sake, her imago used them for other purposes. At the core of the imago was a vast but not quite omniscient entity playing with the flesh and personality of a human being: at the core of Katharine was … well, Katharine.

I was still angry, so I angrily said, ‘I don’t want to play this riddle game.’

Katharine smiled again and said, ‘Oh, but there are two more poems.’

‘You must know which poems I’ll know and which I won’t.’

‘No,’ she said, ‘I can’t see … I don’t know.’

‘You must know,’ I repeated.

‘Can’t I choose to know what I want to know and what I don’t? I love suspense, my Mallory.’

‘It’s foreordained, isn’t it?’

‘Everything is foreordained. What has been will be.’

‘Scryer talk.’

‘I’m a scryer, you know.’

‘You’re a goddess, and you’ve already determined the outcome of this game.’

‘Nothing is determined; in the end we choose our futures.’

I made a fist and said, ‘How I hate scryer talk and your seemingly profound paradoxes!’

‘Yet you revel in your mathematical paradoxes.’

‘That’s different.’

She held her flattened hand over her luminous eyes for a long moment as if their own interior light burned her. Then she said, ‘We continue. This simple poem was written by an ancient scryer who could not have known the Vild would explode.’

Stars, I have seen them fall,

But when they drop and die …

And I replied:

No star is lost at all,

From all the star-sown sky.

‘But the stars are lost, aren’t they?’ I said. ‘The Vild grows, and no one knows why.’

‘Something,’ she said, ‘must be done to stop the Vild from exploding. How unpoetic it would be if all the stars died!’

I brushed my hair out of my eyes and asked the question occupying some of the finest minds of our Order, ‘Why is the Vild exploding?’

Katharine’s imago smiled and said, ‘If you know the lines to this next poem, you may ask me why, or ask me anything you’d like … Oh, the poem! It’s so pretty!’ She clapped her hands together like a little girl delighted to give her friend a birthday gift. And words I knew well filled the air:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,

I was free! The Solid State Entity, through the lips of a simple hologram, had spoken the first two lines of my favourite poem, and I was free. I had only to repeat the next line, and I would be free to ask Her how a pilot could escape from an infinite tree. (I never doubted She would keep Her promise to answer my questions; why this is so I cannot say.) I laughed as beads of sweat formed up on my forehead. I recited: