David Zindell - Neverness

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/David%20Zindell%20-%20Neverness.TXT

Neverness

by

David Zindell

"Neverness is an exceptional feat of both world-creation and

storytelling: grand in scope, vivid in evocation, inventive in its

sure-handed marshalling of far-future detail, and genuinely moving as a

human document. This book suggests that Zindell has just embarked on a

major career in science fiction. I applaud his accomplishment and look

forward to following his growth."

-Michael Bishop,

author of No Enemy But Time, Ancient of Days and Blood on Arachne

"David Zindell's first novel has the big screen splash and color of Jack

Vance, but with an epic complexity. His feat of universe crafting

propels him instantly into the big leagues with the likes of Frank

Herbert and Ursula K. LeGuin"

-Edward Bryant

author of Cinnabar and Particle Theory

NEVERNESS

A novel by David Zindell

Donald I. Fine, Inc. New York

of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

Published in the United States of America by Donald I. Fine, Inc., and in

Canada by General Publishing Company Limited.

Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: 87-45104

ISBN: 0-917657-97-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Zindell, David

Neverness.

1. Title. PS3576.15183N4 1988 813.54 87-45104

ISBN 0-917657-97-7

(all paper)

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is printed on acid-free paper. The paper in this book meets

the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on

Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library

Resources.

This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents

are either the product of the author's imagination or are used

fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations

or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the

intent of either the author or publisher.

Journeymen die

On Old Earth, the ancients often wondered at the origin of life, and

they created many myths to explain the mystery of mysteries. There was

Mumu the mother goddess who swallowed a great snake which multiplied

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/David%20Zindell%20-%20Neverness.TXT (1 of 369) [12/30/2004 2:15:45 PM]

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/David%20Zindell%20-%20Neverness.TXT

inside of her and whose nine billion children ate their way through her

belly into the light of day and so became the animals of the land and

the fishes of the sea. There was a father god, Yahweh, who created Earth

and the heavens In six days and who called forth the birds and the

beasts on days five and six. There was a fertility goddess and a goddess

of chance named Random Mutation. And so on. And so on. The truth is,

life throughout the galaxy was everywhere seeded by a race known as the

Ieldra. Of course the origin of the Ieldra is unknown and perhaps

unknowable: the ultimate mystery remains.

from A Requiem for Homo Sapiens by Horthy Hosthoh, Timekeeper and Lord

Horologe of the Order of Mystic Mathematicians and Other Seekers of the

Ineffable Flame

There Is infinite hope, but not for Man. -Franz Kalka, Holocaust Century

Fabulist

Long before we knew that the price of the wisdom and immortality we

sought would be almost beyond our means to pay, when man-what was left

of man-was still like a child playing with pebbles and shells by the

seashore, in the time of the quest for the mystery known as the Elder

Eddas, I heard the call of the stars and prepared to leave the city of

my birth and death.

I call her Neverness. The founders of our Order, so the Timekeeper once

told me, having discovered a neighborhood of space where the pathways

through the manifold twist and loop together like a hard knot of string,

decided to build our city on a nearby planet named Icefall. Because such

knots of space were once thought to be rare or nonexistent-the cantors

now call them thickspace-our first Timekeeper declared that we could

fall through the galaxy until the universe collapsed inward upon itself

and never find a denser thickspace.

How many billions of pathways converge around our cool yellow star no

one knows. There are probably an infinite number of them. The ancient

cantors, believing that their theorems proved the impossibility of an

infinite thickspace, had predicted that our pilots would never find the

topological nexus that they sought. So when our first Lord Pilot had

fallen out of the manifold above the small, cold, mountainous island

that was to shelter our beloved and doomed city, he named her Neverness,

in mockery of the nay-saying academicians. Of course to this day the

cantors call her the Unreal City, but few pay them much attention. I,

Mallory Ringess, whose duty it is to set forth here the history of the

golden age and great crisis of our Order, shall follow the tradition of

the pilots who came before me. Neverness-so I knew her as a child when I

entered the novitiate such a short time ago; Neverness I call her now;

Neverness she will always remain.

On the fourteenth day of false winter in the year 2929 since the

founding of Neverness, Leopold Soli, my uncle and Lord Pilot of our

Order, returned to our city after a journey lasting twenty-five

years-four years longer than I had been alive. Many pilots, my mother

and Aunt Justine among them, had thought him dead, lost in the inky

veils of the manifold or perhaps incinerated by the exploding stars of

the Vild. But he, the famous Lord Pilot, had fooled everyone. It was the

talk of the city for eighty days. As false winter hardened and the light

snows deepened, I heard it everywhere whispered, in the cafes and bars

of the Farsider's Quarter as well as the towers of the Academy, that

there would be a quest. A quest For journeymen pilots such as we were

then-in a few more days we would take our pilot's vows-it was an

exciting time, and more a time of restlessness and excruciating

anticipation, Within each of us stirred a dreamlike but deeply felt

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/David%20Zindell%20-%20Neverness.TXT (2 of 369) [12/30/2004 2:15:45 PM]

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/David%20Zindell%20-%20Neverness.TXT

intimation and fear that we would be called to do impossible things, and

soon. What follows, then, is a chronicle of the impossible, a story of

dreams and fears and pain.

At twilight of the evening before our convocation, my fat, lazy friend

Bardo and I devised a plan whereby we-I-could confront the Lord Pilot

before the next day's long, boring ceremony. It was the ninety-fourth of

false winter. Outside our dormitory rooms, a soft snow had recently

fallen, dusting the commons of the pilot's college with a veil of cold

white powder. Through our frosted windows, I saw the towers of Resa and

the other colleges gleaming in the light of the setting sun. "Why do you

always do what you're not supposed to do?" Bardo asked me as he stared

mournfully at me with his large brown eyes. I had often thought that the

whole of his complicated character and cunning intelligence was

concentrated in his great, bulging forehead and in his deep-set

beautiful eyes. Apart from his eyes, though, he was an ugly man. He had

a coarse black beard and bulbous red nose. His gaudy silk robe spilled

over his mountainous chest, belly and legs, onto the seat of the

immense, padded chair on which he sat, next to the window. On each of

his ten fat fingers he sported a differently colored jeweled ring. He

had been born prince on Summerworld; the rings and the chair were

articles of great value he had imported from his family's estate,

reminders of the riches and glory that could have been his had he not

renounced (or tried to renounce) worldly pleasures for the beauty and

terror of the manifold. As he twined his long mustache between his thumb

and forefinger, his rings clicked together. "Why do you want what you

can't have?" he asked me. "By God, where's your sense?"

"I want to meet my uncle, what's wrong with that?" I said as I pulled on

my black racing kamelaika. "Why must you answer a question with a

question?"

"And why shouldn't I answer a question with a question?"

He sighed and rolled his eyes. He said, "You'd meet him tomorrow. Isn't

that soon enough? We'll take our vows, and then the Lord Pilot will

present us our rings-I hope. We'll be pilots, Mallory, and then we can

do as we damn please. Tonight we should smoke toalache or find a couple

of beautiful whores-a couple apiece, I mean-and spend the night swiving

them until our blood's dry."

Bardo, in his own way, was wilder and more disobedient than I. What we

should have been doing the night before taking our vows was to be

practicing zazen, ballning and fugue, some of the mental disciplines

needed to enter-and survive-the manifold. "Last seventyday," I said, "my

mother invited Soli and Justine to dinner. He didn't have the decency to

answer the invitation. I don't think he wants to meet me."

"And you think to repay his rudeness with greater rudeness? If he wants

to waste away drinking with his friends, well, everyone knows how Lord

Soli likes to drink, and why. Leave him alone, Little Fellow."

I reached for my skates and pushed my feet into them. They were cold and

stiff from lying beneath the drafty window too long. "Are you coming

with me?" I asked. "Am I coming with you? Am I coming with you? What a

question!"

He belched and patted his rumbling belly as he looked out the window. I

thought I saw confusion and indecision rippling in his dark, liquid

eyes. "If Bardo doesn't come with you, you'll go alone, don't tell me

you won't, goddammit!" Like many of the princely caste on Summerworld,

he had the pretentious habit of occasionally speaking of himself by his

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/David%20Zindell%20-%20Neverness.TXT (3 of 369) [12/30/2004 2:15:45 PM]

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/David%20Zindell%20-%20Neverness.TXT

own name. "And what then? Bardo will be to blame if anything happens to

you."

I tightened the laces of my skates. I said, "I want to make friends with

my uncle, if I can, and I want to see what he looks like."

"Who cares what he looks like?"

"I do. You know I do."

"You can't be his son, I've told you that a hundred times. You were born

four years after he left Neverness."

It was said that I looked enough like the Lord Pilot to be mistaken for

his brother-or son.

All my life I had endured the slander. My mother, so the gossips

prattled, had long ago fallen in love with the great Soli. When he had

spurned her in favor of my Aunt Justine-this is the lie they tell-she

had searched the back streets of the Farsider's Quarter for a man, any

man, who looked enough like him to father her son. To father me. Mallory

the Bastard-so the novices at Borja had whispered behind my back, and

some of them, the bolder few, to my face. At least they had until the

Timekeeper taught me the ancient arts of wrestling and boxing. "So what

if you do look like him? You're his nephew."

"His nephew by marriage."

I did not want to look like the famous, arrogant Lord Pilot. I hated

that the signature of his chromosomes was seemingly written upon my own.

Bad enough to be his nephew. My great fear, as Bardo knew, was that Soli

had returned in secret to Neverness and had used my mother for his own

selfish purposes or ... I did not like to think of other possibilities.

"Aren't you curious?" I asked. "The Lord Pilot returns from the longest

journey in the three thousand years of our Order, and you aren't even

curious to know what he's discovered?"

"No, I'm not afflicted with curiosity, thank God."

"It's said that the Timekeeper will call the quest at the convocation.

Don't you even want to know?"

"If there's a quest," he said, "we'll probably all die."

"Journeymen die," I said.

Journeymen Die-it was a saying we had, a warning cut into the marble

archway above the entrance to Resa that is meant to terrorize young

journeymen into leaving the Order before the manifold claimed them; it

is a saying that is true.

To die among the stars," I quoted the Tycho, "'is the most glorious

death."

"Nonsense!" Bardo shouted as he slapped the arm of the chair. He belched

and said, "Twelve years I've known you, and you're still talking

nonsense."

"You can't live forever," I said. "I can damn try."

"It would be hell,"

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/David%20Zindell%20-%20Neverness.TXT (4 of 369) [12/30/2004 2:15:45 PM]

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/David%20Zindell%20-%20Neverness.TXT

I said. "Day after day, thinking the same thoughts, the same dull stars.

The same faces of friends doing and talking about the same things, the

relentless apathy, trapped within our same brains, this negative

eternity of our confused and painful lives."

He shook his head back and forth so violently that drops of sweat flew

off his forehead. "A different woman each night," he countered. "Or

three very different women each night. A boy or an alien courtesan if

things got too boring. Thirty thousand planets of the Civilized Worlds,

and I've seen only fifty of them. Ah, I've heard the talk of our Lord

Pilot and his quest. For the secret of life! Do you want to know the

secret of life? Bardo will tell you the secret of life: it's not the

amount of time we have, despite what I've just said. No, it's not

quantity and it's not even quality. It's variety."

As I usually did, I had let him blather, and he had blathered his way

into a trap. "The variety of the bars in the Farsider's Quarter," I

said, "is nearly infinite. Are you coming with me?"

"Damn you, Mallory!

Of course I am!"

I put on my racing gloves and clipped in the blades of my skates. I

walked towards the heavy mahogany door of our room. The long racing

blades left dents in the alien-woven Fravashi carpet. Bardo bellowed as

he stood up and followed behind me, smoothing out the dents with the

balls of his black-slippered feet. "You've no respect for art," he said

as he put on his skates. He fastened his black shagshay fur cape around

his neck with a gold chain and opened the door. "Barbarian!" he said,

and we skated out onto the street.

We sped between Resa's Morning Towers tucked low and tight with our arms

swinging and our skates clacking mechanically against the smooth red

ice. The cold wind against my face felt good. In no time at all we shot

past the granite and basalt towers of the high professionals' college,

Upplysa, and passed through the marble pillars of the west gate of the

Academy, and there she was.

She shimmers, my city, she shimmers. She is said to be the most

beautiful of all the cities of the Civilized Worlds, more beautiful even

than Parpallaix or the cathedral cities of Vesper. To the west, pushing

into the green sea like a huge, jewel-studded sleeve of city, the

fragile obsidian cloisters and hospices of the Farsider's Quarter

gleamed like black glass mirrors. Straight ahead as we skated, I saw the

frothy churn of the Sound and the whitecaps of breakers crashing against

the cliffs of North Beach. and above the entire city, veined with purple

and glazed with snow and ice, Urkel and Attakel rose up like vast

pyramids against the sky. Beneath the half-ring of extinct volcanoes

(Urkel, I should mention, is the southernmost peak and though less

magnificent than the others, it has a conical symmetry that some find

pleasing) the towers and spires of the Academy scattered the dazzling

false winter light so that the whole of the Old City sparkled. The

streets, as everyone knows, are colored ice. Throughout the city, the

white shimmer is broken by strands of orange and green and blue.

"Strange are the streets of the City of Pain," the Timekeeper is fond of

quoting, but though indeed colorful and strange, they are colorful and

strange to a purpose. The streets-the glissades and slidderies-have no

names. Thus it has been since our first Timekeeper announced that young

novices could prepare their brains for the pathways of the manifold by

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/David%20Zindell%20-%20Neverness.TXT (5 of 369) [12/30/2004 2:15:45 PM]

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/David%20Zindell%20-%20Neverness.TXT

memorizing the pathways of our city. Since he understood that our city

would grow and change, he devised a plan whereby returning pilots who

had been away too long might still be able to negotiate the ice and not

lose their way. The plan is supposed to be simple. There are two main

streets: the Run, colored blue, which twists from West Beach across the

long sleeve of the peninsula where it meets the foothills of Attakel and

Urkel, and the Way, which is laid straight from the Hollow Fields to the

Sound. Any orange sliddery intersects-eventually-the Way. Any green

glissade intersects the Run. The glidderies, colored purple, join with

glissades, and the red lesser glidderies give out onto the slidderies. I

should not confuse matters by mentioning that there are two yellow

streets running through the Pilot's Quarter, but there are. No one knows

how they came to be there. A joke, no doubt, on our first Timekeeper.

We turned onto the Way at an orange and white checkered intersection

about a mile west of the Academy. The street was crowded with harijan

and wormrunners and other farsiders. We passed and bowed to the

eschatologists, cetics, akashics, horologes, the professionals and

academicians of our Order. (We did not come across any other pilots.

Although we pilots-some will deny this-are the very soul of our Order,

we are outnumbered by the scryers, holists, historians, remembrancers

and ecologists, by the programmers, neologicians and cantors. Our Order

is divided into one hundred and eighteen disciplines; there are too many

disciplines, more disciplines, it seems, every year.) There was

excitement in the air, as well as the alien scent of a couple of Friends

of Man, who had their trunks lifted as they talked to each other,

spraying out their foul speech molecules. Next to us skated an

expensively dressed Alaloi-or rather a man whose flesh had been sculpted

into the thick, powerful, hairy body of an Alaloi. This kind of

artificial return to the primitive form had been a fashion in the city

for years, ever since the famous Goshevan of Summerworld had tired of

his human flesh and had gone to live with the Alaloi in their caves on

the islands to the west of Neverness. The false-Alaloi, who was wearing

too much purple velvet and gold, pushed one of the slender, gentle

harijan out of his way and shouted, "Watch out, stupid farsider!" The

bewildered harijan stumbled, made a sign of peace across his shiny

forehead, and slunk off into the crowd like a beaten dog.

Bardo looked at me and shook his head sadly. He had always had a strange

empathy for the harijan and other homeless pilgrims who come to our city

seeking enlightenment. (And too often, they come seeking riches of a

more mundane nature.) He smiled as he edged closer to the barbaric

Alaloi. He insinuated his thick tree-trunk of a leg between the

purple-covered legs of the unsuspecting man. There was a ringing of

steel against steel, and steel grinding against ice, and suddenly the

man pitched forward to the street with a slap and a crack. Bardo

shouted, "Excuse me!" Then he laughed, reached back and grabbed my

forearm, and pulled me through the crush of skaters who were jostling

one another and vying for position in their hurry to reach their

favorite cafes or kiosks for their evening meal. I looked back through

the crowd, but I could not see the man whom Bardo had tripped. "On

Summerworld," Bardo said to me between gasps of air, "we brand dung like

him with red-hot steel."

We crossed into the Farsider's Quarter and came to the Street of the Ten

Thousand Bars. I have said that the streets of Neverness have no names,

but that is not entirely true. They have no official names, no names

that are marked on buildings or posted on street signs. Especially in

the Farsider's Quarter, there are many nameless streets that are named

according to the prevailing enterprise transpiring along its

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/David%20Zindell%20-%20Neverness.TXT (6 of 369) [12/30/2004 2:15:45 PM]

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/David%20Zindell%20-%20Neverness.TXT

convolutions of colored ice. Thus there is a Street of Cutters and

Splicers, and a Street of Common Whores, as well as a Street of Master

Courtesans. The Street of the Ten Thousand Bars is actually more of a

district than a street; it is a maze of red lesser glidderies

encompassing tiny bars that cater to the unique tastes of their patrons.

One bar will serve only toalache while another might specialize in

cilka, the pineal gland of the thallow bird which induces visions in

small quantities and is lethal in larger ones. There are bars frequented

only by the alien Friends of Man, and there are bars open to anyone who

writes haiku (but only Simoom haiku) or plays the shakuhachi. Near the

edge of the district, there is a bar where the eschatologists argue as

to how long it will be before the exploding Vild destroys the last of

the Civilized Worlds, and next door, a bar for the tychists who believe

that absolute chance is the fundament of the universe, and that most

probably some worlds will survive. I do not know if there are as many as

ten thousand bars or if there are many more. Bardo often joked that if

one could imagine a bar existing, it must exist. Somewhere there is a

bar, he claimed, where the Fravashi analyze the anguished poetry of the

Swarming Centuries and another bar where their criticisms are

criticized. Somewhere-and why not?-there is a bar for those wishing to

talk about what is occurring in all the other bars.

We stopped in front of the black, windowless master pilots' bar, or, I

should say, the bar for master pilots recently returned from the

manifold. The sun had set, and the wind moaned as it drove flowing,

ghostlike wisps of snow down the darkened gliddery. In the dim light of

the street globes when for a moment the wind suddenly pulled away the

ragged, drifting snow shroud-the ice of the street was blood red.

“This is an ugly place," Bardo said, his voice booming from the stone

walls surrounding us. “I have a proposition. Since I'm in a generous

mood, I'll buy you a master courtesan for the night. You've never been

able to afford one, have you? By God, it's like nothing you've ever-"

“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 blonde 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 woolens 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

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/David%20Zindell%20-%20Neverness.TXT (7 of 369) [12/30/2004 2:15:45 PM]

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/David%20Zindell%20-%20Neverness.TXT

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 colored 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 miniscule minds, for how else could their

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/David%20Zindell%20-%20Neverness.TXT (8 of 369) [12/30/2004 2:15:45 PM]

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/David%20Zindell%20-%20Neverness.TXT

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 esc'hatologists,

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 lightyears 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 rumor 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

whiskey, you'll be told what happened to me, if you really want to

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/David%20Zindell%20-%20Neverness.TXT (9 of 369) [12/30/2004 2:15:45 PM]

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/David%20Zindell%20-%20Neverness.TXT

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 toward old

pilots. "It happened like this," Soli said. "A long time had passed

since my leaving Neverness. We were deep in dreamtime and fenestering

inward toward 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 mustache.

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

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/David%20Zindell%20-%20Neverness.TXT (10 of 369) [12/30/2004 2:15:45 PM]

David Zindell - Neverness

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: