Neverness

‘No,’ I said as I shook my head.

I opened the heavy stone door, which was made of obsidian and so smooth that it felt almost greasy to the touch. For a moment, I thought the tiny room was empty. Then I saw two men standing at the dark end of the narrow bar, and I heard the shorter one say, ‘If you please, close the door, it’s cold.’

We stepped over to the bar, into the flickering light of the marble fireplace behind us. ‘Mallory,’ the man said, ‘and Bardo, what are you two doing here?’

My eyes adjusted to the dim orange light, and I saw the master pilot, Lionel Killirand. He shot me a swift look with his hard little eyes and contracted his blond eyebrows quizzically.

‘Soli,’ he said to the tall man next to him, ‘allow me to present your nephew.’

The tall man turned into the light, and I looked at my uncle, Leopold Soli, the Lord Pilot of our Order. It was like looking at myself.

He stared at me with troubled, deep-set, blue eyes. I did not like what I saw in his eyes; I remembered the stories my Aunt Justine had told me, that Soli was a man famous for his terrible, unpredictable rages. Like mine, his nose was long and broad, the mouth wide, firm. From his long neck to his skates, thick black woollens covered his lean body. He seemed intensely curious, scrutinizing me as carefully as I did him. I looked at his hair; he looked at mine. His hair was long and bound back with a silver chain, as was the custom of his birth planet, Simoom. He had unique hair, wavy black shot with red, a genetic marker of some Soli forebear who had tampered with the family chromosomes. My hair, thank God, was pure black. I looked at him; he looked at me. I wondered for the thousandth time about my chromosomes.

‘Moira’s son.’ He said my mother’s name as one says a curse word. ‘You shouldn’t be here, should you?’

‘I wanted to meet you,’ I said. ‘My mother has talked about you all my life.’

‘Your mother hates me.’

There was a long silence broken by Bardo, who said, ‘Where’s the bartender?’

The bartender, a tonsured novice who wore the white wool cap of Borja over his bald head, opened the storage room door behind the bar. He said, ‘This is the master pilot’s bar. Journeymen drink at the journeymen’s bar, which is five bars down the gliddery towards the Street of Musicians.’

‘Novices don’t tell journeymen what to do,’ Bardo said. ‘I’ll have a pipe of toalache and my friend drinks coffee – Summerworld coffee if you have it, Farfara if you don’t.’

The novice shrugged his skinny shoulders and said, ‘The master pilots don’t smoke toalache in this bar.’

‘I’ll have a tumbler of liquid toalache, then.’

‘We don’t serve toalache or coffee.’

‘Then we’ll have an amorgenic. Something strong to send the hormones gushing. We’ve a busy night ahead of us.’

Soli picked up a tumbler of a smoky coloured liquid and took a sip. Behind us a log in the fireplace popped and fell between two others, scattering glowing cinders and ashes over the tiled floor. ‘We drink liquor or beer,’ he said.

‘Barbaric.’ This came from Bardo who added, ‘I’ll have beer, then.’

I looked at my tall uncle and asked, ‘What liquor are you drinking?’

‘It’s called skotch.’

‘I’ll have skotch,’ I said to the novice, who filled two tumblers – a large one with foamy beer and a smaller one with amber skotch – and set them in front of us atop the rosewood bar.

Bardo gulped his beer, and after I had taken a sip of skotch and coughed, he asked, ‘What does it taste like?’ I handed him my tumbler, watching as he brought it up to his fat red lips. He, too, coughed at the fire of the burning liquid and announced, ‘It tastes like gull piss!’

Soli smiled at Lionel and asked me, ‘How old are you?’

‘Twenty-one, Lord Pilot. Tomorrow when we take our vows, I’ll be the youngest pilot our Order has ever had, if I may say that without sounding like I’m bragging.’

‘Well, you’re bragging,’ Lionel said.

We talked for a while about the origins of such immense and fathomless beings as the Silicon God and the Solid State Entity, and other things that pilots talk about. Soli told us of his journey to the core; he spoke of dense clusters of hot new stars and of a great ringworld that some god or other had assembled around Betti Luz. Lionel argued that the great and often insane mainbrains (he did not like to use the word ‘gods’) roaming the galaxy must be organized according to different principles than were our own minuscule minds, for how else could their brains’ separate lobes – some of which were the size of moons – intercommunicate with others across light-years of space? It was an old argument. It was one of the many bitter arguments dividing the pilots and professionals of our Order. Lionel, and many eschatologists, programmers, and mechanics as well, believed the mainbrains had mastered nearly instantaneous tachyonic information flow. He held that we should seek contact with these beings, even though such contact was very dangerous and might someday force the Order to change in ways repugnant to older and more old-fashioned pilots such as Soli.

‘Who can understand a brain encompassing a thousand cubic light-years of space?’ Soli asked. ‘And who knows about tachyons? Perhaps the mainbrains think slowly, very slowly.’

To him, the origin and technology of the gods were of little interest. In this he was as stodgy as the Timekeeper, and like the Timekeeper, he thought that there were certain things that man was not meant to know. He recited a long list of pilots, the Tycho among them, who had been lost trying to penetrate the mystery of the Solid State Entity. ‘They overreached themselves,’ he told us. ‘They should have been aware of their limits.’ I smiled because this came from the tight lips of a man who had reached farther than any other, a famous pilot whose discovery would provoke the great crisis of our Order.

It was a heady drug, to talk with master pilots as pilots, as if we had long ago taken our vows and proved our mastery of the manifold. I drank my skotch and gathered up my courage, and I said, ‘I’ve heard there will be a quest. Will there really be?’

Soli glared at me. He was a sullen man, I thought, with a sad, faraway look to his sea-blue eyes, a look that hinted of freezing mists and sleepless nights and fits of madness. Though his face was young and smooth, as young as mine, it had recently been as old and deeply seamed as a face could be. It is one of the peculiarities of the manifold that a pilot sometimes ages, intime, three years to every year on Neverness. I imagined, for a moment, that I had the powers of a cetic and that I could see the wrinkled, ancient Soli through the taut olive skin of his new body, in the same manner one envisions a fireflower drying to a brittle black, or the skull of death beneath the pink flesh of a newborn baby boy. A master horologe, whose duty it was to determine the intime of returning pilots according to complicated formulae weighting einsteinian time distortions against the unpredictable deformations of the manifold, had told me that Soli had aged one hundred and three years this last journey and would have died but for the skills of the Lord Cetic. This made my uncle, who had been brought back three times to his youth, the oldest pilot of our Order.

‘Tell us about your discovery,’ I said. I had heard a wild rumour that he had reached the galactic core, the only pilot to have done so since the Tycho, who had returned half-insane.

He took a long drink of skotch, all the while watching me through the clary bottom of the tumbler. The poorly dried firewood hissed and groaned, and from the street came the humming and steaming of a zamboni as it hovered over the gliddery, melting and smoothing the ice for the next day’s skaters.

‘Yes, the impatience of youth,’ he said. ‘You come here disrespecting the needs of a pilot for privacy and the company of his friends. In that, you’re much like your mother. Well, then, since you’ve gone to so much trouble and endured the vileness of skotch whisky, you’ll be told what happened to me, if you really want to know.’

I found it irritating that Soli could not simply say, ‘I’ll tell you what happened to me.’ Like most others from that too-mystical planet, Simoom, he usually observed their taboo against using the pronoun ‘I’.

‘Tell us,’ Bardo said.

‘Tell us,’ I said, and I listened with that strange mixture of worship and dread that journeymen feel towards old pilots.

‘It happened like this,’ Soli said. ‘A long time had passed since my leaving Neverness. We were deep in dreamtime and fenestering inwards towards the core. The stars were dense. They shined like the lights of the Farsider’s Quarter at night, yes, a great burning fan of stars disappearing into the blackness at the fan’s pivot point, at the singularity. There was the white light of dreamtime – you young pilots think instantaneity and stopping time are all there is to dreamtime, and you have much to learn – there was a sudden clarity, and voices. My ship told me it was receiving a signal, intercepting one of a billion or so laser beams streaming out of the singularity.’

He suddenly slammed his empty tumbler on the bar and his voice rose an octave. ‘Yes, that’s what was said! From the singularity! It’s impossible, but true. A billion lines of infrared light escaping the black maw of gravity.’ To the novice he said, ‘Pour some skotch in here, please.’

‘And then?’

‘The voices, the ship-computer receiving half a trillion bits per second and translating the information in the laser beams into voices. They, the voices, claimed to be – let’s call them the Ieldra. Are you familiar with that term?’

‘No, Lord Pilot.’

‘It’s what the eschatologists have named the aliens who seeded the galaxy with their DNA.’

‘The mythical race.’

‘The hitherto mythical race,’ he said. ‘They have – and many refuse to believe this – they’ve projected their collective selfness, their consciousnesses, into the singularity.’

‘Into the black hole?’ Bardo asked as he pulled at his moustache.

I looked at Soli carefully, to see if he was having a joke with us. I did not believe him. I looked down at his tense hands and saw that he was carelessly ungloved. Plainly, he was an arrogant man who had little fear of contagion or that his enemies might make use of his plasm. His knuckles were white around the curve of his refilled tumbler. The black diamond of his pilot’s ring cut into the skin of his little finger. He said, ‘The message. The white light of dreamtime hardened and crystallized. There was a stillness and a clarity, and then the message. “There is hope for Man,” they said. “Remember, the secret of Man’s immortality lies in your past and in your future” – that’s what they said. We must search for this mystery. If we search, we’ll discover the secret of life and save ourselves. So the Ieldra told me.’

I think he must have known we did not believe him. I nodded my head stupidly while Bardo stared at the bar as if the knots and whorls of the rosewood were of great interest to him. He dipped his finger into the foam of his beer, brought it to his lips, and made a rude sucking sound.

‘Young fools,’ Soli said. And then he told us of the prediction. The Ieldra, he said, understanding the cynicism and doubtfulness of human nature, had provided a surety that their communication would be well received, a prediction as to part of the sequence of supernovae in the Vild.

‘How can they possibly know what will occur according to chance?’ I asked.

‘Do the Vild stars explode at random?’ Lionel broke in.

‘Ah, of course they do,’ Bardo said.

In truth, no one knew very much about the Vild. Was the Vild a discrete, continuous region of the galaxy expanding outwards spherically in all directions? Or was it a composite of many such regions, random pockets of hellfire burning and joining, connecting in ways our astronomers had not determined? No one knew. And no one knew how long it would be before Icefall’s little star exploded, along with all the others, putting an end to such eschatological speculations.

‘How do we know what we know?’ Soli asked, and he took a sip of skotch. ‘How is it known the memory in my brain is real, that there was no hallucination, as some fools have suggested? Yes, you doubt my story, and there’s nothing to prove to you, even if you are Justine’s nephew, but this is what the Lord Akashic told me: He said that the auditory record was clear. There was a direct downloading from the ship-computer to my auditory nerve. Perhaps you think my ship was hallucinating?’

‘No, Lord Pilot.’ I began to believe him. I knew well the power and skills of the akashics. A short half-year ago, on a bitterly cold day in deep winter, having completed my first journey alone into the manifold, I had gone before the akashics. I remembered sitting in the Lord Akashic’s darkened chamber as the heaume of the deprogramming computer descended over my head, sitting and sweating and waiting for my memories and mappings of the manifold to be proved true. Though there had been no cause for fear, I had been afraid. (Long ago, in the time of the Tycho, there had been reason to be afraid. The clumsy ancient heaumes, so I understand, extruded protein filaments through one’s scalp and skull into the brain. Barbaric. The modern heaume – this is what the akashics claim – models the interconnections of the neurons’ synapses holographically, thereby ‘reading’ the memory and identity functions of the brain. It is supposed to be quite safe.)

Bardo, as was his habit when he was nervous or afraid, farted loudly, and he asked, ‘Then you think there will be a quest for this … this, uh, secret of the Ieldra, Lord Pilot?’

‘The eschatologists have named the secret the “Elder Eddas,”’ Soli said as he backed away from him. ‘And yes, there will be a quest. Tomorrow, at your convocation, the Timekeeper will issue his summons and call the quest.’

I believed him. The Lord Pilot, my uncle, said there would be a quest, and I suddenly felt my heart beating up through my throat as if it were fate’s fist knocking at the doorway to my soul. Wild plans and dreams came half-formed into my mind. I said quickly, ‘If we could prove the Continuum Hypothesis, the quest would be full of glory, and we’d find your Elder Eddas.’

‘Don’t call them my Elder Eddas,’ he said.

I should admit that I did not understand the Lord Pilot. One moment he proclaimed that there were things man was not meant to know, and the next moment he seemed proud and eager to go off seeking the greatest of secrets. And yet a moment later, he was bitter and appeared resentful of his own discovery. In truth, he was a complicated man, the second most complicated man I have ever known.

‘What Mallory meant,’ Bardo said, ‘was that he admires – as we all do – the work you’ve done on the Great Theorem.’

That was not at all what I had meant.

Soli looked at me fiercely and said, ‘Yes, the dream of proving the Continuum Hypothesis.’

The Continuum Hypothesis (or, colloquially, the Great Theorem): an unproved result of Lavi’s Fixed-Point Theorem stating that between any pair of discrete Lavi sets of point-sources, there exists a one-to-one mapping. More simply, that it is possible to map from any star to any other in a single fall. It is the greatest problem of the manifold, of our Order. Long ago, when Soli had been a pilot not much older than I, he had nearly proved the Hypothesis. But he had become distracted by an argument with Justine and had forgotten (so he claimed) his elegant proof of the theorem. The memory of it haunted him. And so he drank his poisonous skotch whisky, to forget. (The powers of a pilot’s mind, Bardo reminds me, crescendo at an early age. It is a matter of dying brain cells, he says, and the rejuvenation we pilots undergo is imperfect in this respect. We grow slowly stupider as we age, and so why not drink skotch, or smoke toalache and lie with whores?)

‘The Continuum Hypothesis,’ Soli said to me as he spun his empty tumbler on top of the bar, ‘may very well be unprovable.’

‘I understand you are bitter.’

‘As you will be if you seek the unobtainable.’

‘Forgive me, Lord Pilot, but how are we to know what is obtainable and what is not?’

‘We grow wiser as we grow older,’ he said.

I kicked the toe of my boot against the brass railing at the foot of the bar. The metal rang dully. ‘I may be young, and I don’t want to sound like –’

‘You’re bragging,’ Lionel said quickly.

‘ – but I think the Hypothesis is provable, and I intend to prove it.’

‘For the sake of wisdom,’ Soli asked me, ‘or for the glory? I’ve heard that you’d like to be Lord Pilot someday.’

‘Every journeyman dreams of being Lord Pilot.’

‘A boy’s dreams often become a man’s nightmares.’

I kicked the railing, accidentally. ‘I’m not a boy, Lord Pilot. I take my vows tomorrow; one of my vows is to discover wisdom. Have you forgotten?’

‘Have I forgotten?’ he said, breaking his taboo and flinching as he shouted out the forbidden pronoun. ‘Listen, Boy, I’ve forgotten nothing.’

The word ‘nothing’ seemed to hang in the air along with the hollow ringing of the railing as Soli stared at me and I at him. Then there came too-loud laughter from the street outside, and the door suddenly opened. Three tall, heavy men, each of them with pale yellow hair and drooping moustaches, each of them wearing light black furs dusted with snow, ejected their skate blades and stomped into the bar. They came up to Lionel and Soli and grasped each other’s hands. The largest of the three, a master pilot who had terrorized Bardo during our novice years at Borja, called for three mugs of kvass. ‘It’s spiky cold outside,’ he said.

Bardo leaned over to me and whispered, ‘Time to go, I think.’

I shook my head.

The master pilots – their names were Neith, Seth and Tomoth – were brothers. They had their backs to us, and they seemed not to have noticed us.

‘I’ll pay for six nights of master courtesans,’ Bardo mumbled.

The novice banged three mugs of steaming hot black beer down on the bar. Tomoth backed a few steps closer to the fire and shook the melting snow from his furs. Like some of the older pilots who had gone blind from old age, he wore jewelled, mechanical eyes. He had just returned from the edge of the Vild, and he said to Soli, ‘Your Ieldra were right, my friend. The Gallivare Binary and Cerise Luz have exploded. Nothing left but dirty hard dust and light.’

‘Dust and light,’ his brother Neith said, and he burned his mouth with hot kvass and cursed.

‘Dust and light,’ Seth repeated. ‘Sodervarld and her twenty millions caught in a storm of radioactive dust and light. We tried to get them off but we were too late.’

Sodervarld orbits Enola Luz, which is – had been – the star nearest the Gallivare Binary. Seth told us that the supernova had baked the surface of Sodervarld, killing off every bit of life except the ground worms. The small master pilot’s bar suddenly seemed stultifyingly tiny. The three brothers, I recalled, had been born on Sodervarld.

‘To our mother,’ Seth said as he clinked mugs with Soli, Lionel and his brothers.

‘To our father,’ Tomoth said.

‘Freyd.’ This came from Neith who inclined his head so slightly that I was not sure if he had actually nodded or if his image had wavered in the firelight. ‘To Yuleth and Elath.’

‘Time to go,’ I said to Bardo.

We made ready to leave, but Neith fell weeping against Tomoth, who turned our way as he caught his brother. His jewelled eyes gleamed in the half-light when he saw us. ‘What’s this?’ he shouted.

‘Why are there journeymen in our bar?’ Seth wanted to know.

Neith brushed yellow hair from his wet eyes and said, ‘My God, it’s the Bastard and his fat friend – what’s his name? – Burpo? Lardo?’

‘Bardo,’ Bardo said.

‘They were just about to leave,’ Soli said.

I suddenly did not feel like leaving. My mouth was dry, and there was a pressure behind my eyes.

‘Don’t call him “Bardo”,’ Neith said. ‘When we tutored him at Borja, everyone called him Piss-All Lal because he used to piss in his bed every night.’

It was true, Bardo’s birth name was Pesheval Lal. When he first came to Neverness, he had been a skinny, terrified, homesick boy who had loved to recite romantic poetry and who had pissed in his bed every night. Half of the novices and masters had called him ‘Bardo,’ and the other half, ‘Piss-All.’ But after he had begun lifting heavy weights above his head and had taken to spending the nights with bought women so that he wet his bed with the liquids of lust instead of piss, few had dared to call him anything but ‘Bardo.’

‘Well,’ Tomoth said as he clapped his hands at the novice behind the bar. ‘Piss-All and the Bastard will toast with us before they leave.’

The novice filled our mugs and tumblers. Bardo looked at me; I wondered if he could hear the blood pounding in my throat or see the tears burning in my eyes.

‘Freyd,’ Tomoth said. ‘To the dead of Sodervarld.’

I was afraid I was about to cry from rage and shame, and so, looking straight into Tomoth’s ugly metal eyes, I picked up my tumbler and tried to swallow the fiery skotch in a single gulp. It was the wrong thing to do. I gagged and coughed and spat all at once, spraying Tomoth’s face and yellow moustache with tiny globules of amber spit. He must have thought that I was mocking him and defiling the memory of his family because he came at me without thought or hesitation, came straight for my eyes with one hand and for my throat with the other. There was a ragged burning beneath my eyebrow. Suddenly there were fists and blood and elbows as Tomoth and his brothers swept me under like an avalanche. Everything was cold and hard: cold tile ground against my spine, and hard bone broke against my teeth; someone’s hard nails were gouging into my eyelid. Blindly, I pushed against Tomoth’s face. For a moment, I thought that cowardly Bardo must have slipped out the door. Then he bellowed as if he had suddenly remembered he was Bardo, not Piss-All, and there was the meaty slap of flesh on flesh, and I was free. I found my feet and punched at Tomoth’s head, a quick, vicious, hooking punch that the Timekeeper had taught me. My knuckles broke and pain burned up my arm into my shoulder joint. Tomoth grabbed his head, dropping to one knee.

Soli was behind him. ‘Moira’s son,’ he said as he bent over and reached for the collar of Tomoth’s fur to keep him from falling. Then I made a mistake, the second worst mistake, I think, of my life. I swung again at Tomoth, but I hit Soli instead, smashing his proud, long nose as if it were a ripe bloodfruit. To this day, I can see the look of astonishment and betrayal (and pain) on his face. He went mad, then. He ground his teeth and snorted blood out of his nose. He attacked me with such a fury that he got me from behind in a head hold and tried to snap my neck. If Bardo had not come between us, peeling Soli’s steely hands away from the base of my skull, he would have killed me.

‘Easy there, Lord Pilot,’ Bardo said. He massaged the back of my neck with his great, blunt hand and eased me towards the door. Everyone stood panting, looking at each other, not quite knowing what to do next.

There were apologies and explanations, then. Lionel, who had held himself away from the melee, told Tomoth and his brothers that I had never drunk skotch before and that I had certainly meant them no insult. After the novice refilled the mugs and tumblers, I said a requiem for the Sodervarld dead. Bardo toasted Tomoth, and Tomoth toasted Soli’s discovery. And all the while, our Lord Pilot stared at me as blood trickled from his broken nose down his hard lips and chin.

‘Your mother hates me, so there should be no surprise that you do too.’

‘I’m sorry, Lord Pilot. I swear it was an accident. Here, use this to wipe your nose.’

I offered him my handkerchief, but he pretended not to see my outstretched hand. I shrugged my shoulders, and I crumpled the linen to sponge the blood out of my eye. ‘To the quest for the Elder Eddas,’ I said as I raised my tumbler. ‘You’ll drink to that, won’t you, Lord Pilot?’