Neverness

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 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 Kafka, 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 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, hallning 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 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," 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 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.