David Zindell - Shanidar

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Shanidar

a novelette

by David Zindell

I have heard the eschatologists deny the future of our kind. Man, they say, is a bridge between

ape and superman, a rusty old bridge that we can neither preserve nor restore, any more than we

can stop the stars beyond the Vild from exploding or turn the snows of deep winter into rain. For

man, or for a man, there can be no new beginnings. The story I tell here is a story of restoration

and resurrection, of how the philosophers of this doomed city were both right and wrong, a story,

if you will, of endings and beginnings which sometimes are, as old men such as I well know, one

and the same thing.

For me, the end of civilization came on the seventieth night of my fiftieth--or was it fifty-

first?--deep winter in this City of Pain. Icefall, some called it, or Unreal City, city of lights

and mists, the topological and, some say, spiritual center of a thousand decaying worlds. The

eschatologists called it Neverness, which means, I think, "Last City" or "Lost City." I prefer the

latter name, though it isn't names that matter. What matters is ice and snow and cold so deep that

your breath shatters into ice crystals on the hard air, and flesh -- should any man be foolish

enough to let the air of this forsaken city touch his naked flesh -- flesh turns to stone as you

watch. What matters is men who deny the importance of flesh, men who seek new beginnings.

He came into my cutting shop on a quiet night when the air was black and still, the only sound the

far-off hissing and humming of the machines as they hovered over the city streets, melting and

smoothing the ice for the following day. He was a pale young man with brown, lively eyes beneath

the white hood of his parka, and he wore a beard so dense and black that you would have thought

him born on Gehenna or Sheydveg and not, as he claimed, on Summerworld where the men are nearly

hairless and their skin is as dark as coffee. With his heavy brows and large, muscular face he

nearly had the look of the Alaloi which had been the fashion -- you will presently understand why -

- some twenty years ago. As he stood there in the stone hallway knocking the slush from his

skates, he explained that he had need of my services. "You are Rainer, the cutter?" he asked me in

a low, conspiratorial voice. I told him that was what the people of the city called me. "I want

you to use all your skills," he said. "I want to become an Alaloi."

I led him into my tearoom where he ejected the blades from his skates and flopped his dripping

mittens on top of the marble table which I had imported from Urradeth at great cost. And though I

didn't feel much like playing the host -- my white tunic was spattered with blood and brains and I

had matters to attend to -- I offered him kvass or coffee and was surprised that he chose coffee.

"Kvass fogs the brain," he said, ignoring the frescoes on the stone walls around him and staring

me in the eyes. "Drink makes men forget their purpose."

I sent for the domestic and I asked the young man, "And your purpose is to look like an Alaloi?"

He shook his head. "My purpose is to become an Alaloi. Completely."

I laughed and I said, "You know I can't do that; you know the law. I can change your flesh as you

please but -- "

"What about Goshevan?"

"Goshevan!" I shouted. "Why do the young men always come asking about Goshevan?" The domestic came

and I embarrassed myself by shouting out an order for coffee and kvass. As it rolled away, I said,

"There are more stories told about Goshevan than dead stars in the Vild. What do you know about

Goshevan?"

"I know that he wanted what I want. He was a man with a dream who -- "

"He was a dreamer! Do you want to know about Goshevan? I'll tell you the story that I tell all the

young men who come to me seeking nightmares. Are you sitting comfortably? Then listen well..."

The domestic brought our drink bubbling in two of those huge, insulated pots that they blow on

Fostora. It clumsily poured the dark liquids into our delicate marble cups as I told the young man

the story of Goshevan:

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"There lived on Summerworld a young noble who took a greater interest in antiques and old books --

some say he had been to Ksandaria and bribed the librarians into selling him part of the Kyoto

collection of Old Earth -- than he did in managing his estates. He was an erudite man who claimed

that the proper study of man was man -- not how to produce five tons more coffee per cubage. One

day he tired of his life and said, 'My s-sons are weak-faced maggots who exist on the diseased

flesh of this rotten civilization. They p-plot with my wives against me and laugh as my wives

sleep with other men.' And so Goshevan sold his estates, freed his slaves, and told his family

they would have to make their living by the sweat of their hands and the inspiration of their

brains. He paid for a passage on a Darghinni long ship and made his way toward the Vild.

"Now everyone knows the Darghinni are tricksters and so is it any wonder they didn't warn him of

the laughing pools on Darkmoon? Well, warn him they didn't, and Goshevan spent two seasons on that

dim, lukewarm planet coughing at the lungmelt in his chest while the surgeons painstakingly cut

the spirulli from his muscles and waited and watched and cut some more.

"When he was well, he found a Fravashi trader who was willing to take him to Yarkona; on Yarkona

he shaved his head and wrapped his body in rags so that the harijan pilgrims he befriended there

would allow him a corner on one of their sluggish prayer ships in which to float. And so, gray of

hair and stinking of years of his own sweat and filth, he came to Neverness like any other seeker.

"Though it was late midwinter spring, and warm for that season, he was stunned by the cold and

dazzled by the brightness of our city. And so he paid too much money for snow goggles and the

finest of shagshay furs lined with silk belly. 'The streets are colored ice,' he said

disbelievingly, for the only ice he had ever seen had been brought to him in exotic drinks by his

slaves. And he marvelled at the purples and greens of the glissades and the laughing children who

chased each other up and down the orange and yellow glidderies on ice skates. The silvery spires

and towers were frozen with the ever present verglas of that season, scattering the white spring

light so that the whole city gleamed and sparkled in a most disconcerting manner. 'There is beauty

here,' he said. 'The false beauty of artifice and a civilization gone to rot.' And so, dressed in

deep winter furs and wobbling on his newly bought skates, he struck out into the streets to preach

to the people.

In the great square outside the Hofgarten where the people of the Unreal City, high and low, meet

and take their refreshment, the scryers, eschatologists, and cantors as well as the harijan,

splicers and whores, he said, 'I s-speak to that inside you which is less than m-man but also m-

more.' And he raged because no one would listen to a short, overdressed farsider who stuttered and

could barely stand on his skates. 'You p-pilots,' he said, 'you are the p-pride of the galaxy! You

travel from Simoom to Urradeth and on to Jacaranda in less time than the Darghinni need to prepare

the first of eighteen Jumps from Summerworld to Darkmoon. You penetrate the Vild, lost in your

mathematics and dreamtime and tell yourself you have seen something of the ineffable and eternal.

But you have forgotten how to take pleasure in a simple flower! You foreswear marriage and

children and thus you are more and less than men!'

"When the pilots turned away from him to drink their kvass and eiswein, he told the historians and

fabulists that they knew nothing of the true nature of man. And they, those haughty professionals

of our city, snubbed him and went on talking about Gaiea and Old Earth as if he were invisible. So

Goshevan spoke to the programmers and holists, the Fravashi aliens and Friends of God, the

harijan, the wormrunners, the splicers, and at last, because he was filled with a great sadness

and longing, he zipped up his furs and went deep into the Farsiders' Quarter where he might pay

for the company of a friendly ear.

"Because he was lonely and had been without a woman for many years, he took his pleasure among the

whores of the lesser glidderies, which at that time were stained crimson and were narrow and

twisted like snakes. Because his soul was empty he smoked toalache and awoke one fine morning to

find himself in bed with four courtesans from Jacaranda. They asked him if all dark little men

were as potent as he and advised him that the joys of conjoining with the alien Friends of Man

were such that no man who had known only women could comprehend them. Goshevan, horrified at what

he had done and forgetting where he was, began swearing and shouting and ordered that the

courtesans be sold as field slaves. He threw a bag of diamonds at them, clipped in the blades to

his skates, and raced up and down the back glissades for two days before he came to his right

mind."

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I paused here in my story to refill our cups. The young man was staring at me intently, watching

my every move with those piercing brown eyes and, I felt, stripping my words bare for lies. The

room was very quiet and cold; I could hear his slow, even breathing as he nodded his head and

asked, "And then?"

"And then Goshevan made a decision. You see, he had hoped to win people over to his dream, which

was to go out into the wasteland and live as what he called 'natural man.' The Alaloi, of course,

had been his model. When he found he could not emulate them, he decided to join them."

"A noble vision," the young man said.

"It was insane!" I half-shouted "Who were these Alaloi he so admired? Dreamers and madmen they

were -- and still are. They came to this world on the first wave of the swarming, when Old Earth

was young and, some say, as radioactive as plutonium. Cavemen! They wanted to be cavemen! So they

back-mutated their chromosomes, destroyed their ship, and went to live in the frozen forests. And

now their great-grandchildren's great-great-grandchildren hunt mammoths for meat and die long

before they've seen their hundredth winter."

"But they die happy," the young man said.

"Who knows how they die?" I said to him. "Goshevan wanted to know. He sought me out because it was

said that once as a journeyman I had pioneered the operation he wanted, cutting on my very own

self to prove my worth as a flesh changer. 'Make me into an Alaloi,' he begged me, in this very

room where we presently drink our coffee and kvass. And I told him, 'Go to any of the cetics in

this quarter and they will cure you of your delusions.' And he said, 'I will p-pay you ten million

talanns!' But his farsider money was worthless in the Unreal City and I told him so. 'Diamonds,'

he said. 'I've two thousand carats of Yarkona bluestars.' 'For that price,' I said, 'I can add

eight inches to your spine or make you into a beautiful woman. I can lighten your skin and make

your hair as white as a Jacaranda courtesan's.' Then he looked at me cunningly and said, 'I'll

trade information for your services: I know the fixed-points of Agathange.' I laughed at him and

asked, 'How is it you know what the pilots of our city have been seeking for three thousand

years?'

"Well, it happened that he did know. With the riches from the sale of his estates, he had bought

the secret of the location of that fabled world from a renegade pilot he had met on Darkmoon. I

consulted our city archives: the librarians were very excited. They sent a young pilot to verify

my information, and I told Goshevan we might have to wait two or three hundred days before we

would know.

"Ten thousand city disks his information was worth! The pilot who rediscovered Agathange was very

good. Phased into his light ship, the Infinite Sloop, proving the theorems of probabilistic

topology -- or whatever it is that our famous pilots do when they wish to fall through the space

that isn't space -- he rushed through the fallaways, fenestering from window to window with such

precision and elegance that he returned from Agathange in forty days.

"'You can be a rich man,' Goshevan said to me on a clear, sparkling day of false winter. 'Do as I

ask and all the disks are yours.'

"I hesitated not for a moment. I took him into the changing room and I began to cut. It was a

challenge, I lied to myself, a test of knowledge and skill -- to a dedicated cutter, it wasn't

disks that mattered. I enlarged the basal bone of his jaw and stimulated the alveolar bone to

maximal growth so that his face could support the larger teeth I implanted. The angle of the face

itself I broadened so that there would be more room for a chewing apparatus strong enough to crack

marrowbones. And of course, since the face jutted out farther from the skull, I had to build up

the brow ridge with synthetic bone to protect the eyes. And though this shaping took the better

part of winter, it was only the beginning.

"As he writhed beneath my lasers and scalpels, all the while keeping his face as quiet and blank

as a snowfield, I went to work on his body. To support his huge new muscles -- which were grown by

the Fravashi deep-space method -- I built him new bones. I expanded the plates and spicules of the

honeycombed interior and strengthened the shafts and tendon attachments, adding as much as three

millimeters to the cortices of the longer bones such as his femur. I stippled his skin. I went

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beneath the dermis, excising most of his sweat glands to keep him from soaking his furs and

freezing to death at the first hint of false winter. Because his dark skin would synthesize too

little vitamin D to keep his bones calcified during the long twilight of deep winter, I inhibited

his melanocytes -- it is little known that all men, light or dark, have nearly the same number of

melanocytes -- I lightened his skin until he was as fair as a man from Thorskalle. The last thing

I did for him, or so I thought at the time, was to grow out his fine, almost invisible body hair

so that it covered him like brown fur from toe to eyebrow.

"I was very pleased with my handiwork and a little frightened because Goshevan had grown so strong

-- stronger, I think, than any Alaloi -- that he could have torn my clavicle from my chest, had he

so desired. But he was not pleased and he said, 'The most important thing there is, this thing you

didn't do.' And I told him, 'I've made you so that no one among the Alaloi could tell you from his

brother.' But he looked at me with his dark fanatic's eyes and asked me, 'And my s-sons, should my

s-seed by some chance be compatible with the Alaloi women, who will there be to call my weak-jawed

half-breed sons brother?' I had no answer for him other than a dispirited repeating of the law: 'A

man may do with his flesh as he pleases,' I said, 'but his DNA belongs to his species.' And then

he grabbed my forearm so tightly that I thought my muscles would split away from the bone and

said, 'Strong men make their own laws.'

"Then, because I felt a moment of pity for this strange man who only wanted what all men want --

which is a son after his own image and a few moments of peace -- I broke the law of the civilized

worlds. It was a challenge, do you understand? I irradiated his testes and bathed them with

sonics, killing off the sperm. I couldn't, of course, engage the services of a master splicer

because all my colleagues shunned such criminal activity. But I was a master cutter -- some will

tell you the best in the city -- and what is gene-splicing but surgery on a molecular scale? So I

went into his tubules and painstakingly sectioned out and mutated segments of his stem cells' DNA

so that the newly produced germ cells would make for him sons after his new image.

"When I finished this most delicate of delicate surgeries, which took the better part of two

years, Goshevan regarded himself in the mirror of my changing room and announced, 'Behold Homo

neandertalis. Now I am less than a man but also more.'

"'You look as savage as any savage,' I said. And then, thinking to scare him, I told him what was

commonly believed about the Alaloi. 'They live in caves and have no language,' I said. 'They are

bestially cruel to their children; they eat strangers, and perhaps each other.'

"Goshevan laughed as I said this and then he told me, 'On Old Earth during the holocaust century,

a neandertal burial site was discovered in a place called Shanidar near the Zagros mountains of

Irak. The archeologists found the skeleton of a forty-year-old m-man who was missing his lower

right arm. Shanidar I, they named him, and they determined he had lost his arm long before he

died. In the burial site of another neandertal, Shanidar IV, was the pollen of several kinds of

flowers, mixed in with all the bone fragments, pebbles and dust. The question I have for you,

Cutter, is: how savage could these people have been if they supported a cripple and honored their

dead with bright colored wildflowers?' So I answered, 'The Alaloi are not the same.' And he said,

'We will see, we will see.'

"Here I freely admit I had underestimated him. I had supposed him to be a lunatic or at best, a

self-deluder who hadn't a chance of getting ten miles away from our city. The covenant between the

founder of Neverness and the Alaloi allows us this single island -- large though it might be --

and to our city fathers, this covenant is holy. Boats are useless because of the icebergs of the

Sound, and the windjammers of would-be poachers and smugglers are shot from the air. Because I

couldn't picture Goshevan walking out onto the Starnbergersee when it freezes over in deep winter,

I asked him somewhat smugly how he intended to find his Alaloi.

"'Dogs,' he said. 'I will attach dogs to a sled and let them pull me across the frozen sea.' And I

asked, 'What are dogs?' 'Dogs are carnivorous mammals from Old Earth,' he said. 'They are like

human slaves, only friendly and eager to please.' And I said, 'Oh, you mean huzgies,' which is

what the Alaloi call their sled dogs. I laughed at him then and watched the white skin beneath his

hairy face turn red as if slapped by a sudden cold wind. 'And how will you smuggle such beasts

into our city?' I asked him.

"So Goshevan parted the hair of his abdomen to show me a thin band of hard white skin I had taken

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