Neverness (10 page)

   I entered the Trifid Nebula, where the young, hot stars pulsed with wavelengths of blue light. At those times when my ship fell out into realspace around a star, it seemed that the whole of the nebula's interior was aglow with red clouds of hydrogen gas. Because I needed to pass to the nearby Lagoon Nebula, I crossed the Trifid at speed, fenestering from window to window so quickly that I had to hurry my brain with many moments of slowtime. For me, with my metabolism and my mind speeding from the electric touch of the computer, since I could think much faster, time paradoxically seemed to slow down. In my mind, time dilated and stretched out like a sheet of rubber, seconds becoming hours, and hours like years. This slowing of time was necessary, for otherwise the flickering rush of stars would have left me too little time to establish my isomorphisms and mappings, to prove my theorems. Or I would have dropped into the photosphere of a blue giant, or fallen into an infinite tree, or died some other way.

   At last I passed into the Lagoon. I was dazzled by the intense lights, some of which are among the brightest objects in the galaxy. Around a cluster of stars called the Blastula Luz, I prepared my long passage to the Rosette Nebula in the Orion Arm. I penetrated the Blastula and segued to the thickspace at its nearly hollow center. This thickspace is called the Tycho's Thick and though it is not nearly so dense as the one that lies in the neighborhood of Neverness, there are many point-sources connecting to point-exits within the Rosette Nebula.

   I found one such point-source, and the theorems of probabilistic topology built before my inner eye, and I made a mapping. The manifold opened. The star I orbited, an ugly red giant I named Bloody Bal, disappeared. I floated in the pit of my ship, wondering how long I would fall along the way from the Lagoon to the Rosette; I wondered - and not for the last time - at the very peculiar nature of this thing we call time.

   In the manifold there is no space, and therefore there is no time. That is to say there is no
outtime
. For me, inside my lightship, there was only shiptime or slowtime, or dreamtime, or sometimes quicktime - but never the realtime of the outer universe. Because my passage to the Rosette would probably be long and uneventful, I often quieted my brain with quicktime. I did this to ward off boredom. My mentations slowed to a glacial pace, and time passed more quickly. Years became hours while long segments of tedious nothingness were shrunken into the moment it took my heart to beat a single time.

   After a while I tired of quicktime. I thought I might as well drug my mind with sleep, or drug it with drugs. I spent most of my passage in the more or less normally alert state of shiptime examining the book that the Timekeeper had given me. I learned to read. It was a painful thing to do. The ancient way of representing the sounds of speech by individual letters was an inefficient means of encoding information. Barbaric. I learned the cursive glyphs of that array known as the alphabet, and I learned how to string them together linearly - linearly! - to form words. Since the book contained poems written in several of the ancient Old Earth languages, I had to learn these, languages as well. This, of course, was the easier of my tasks since I could infuse and superscribe the language and memory centers of my brain directly from the computer's store of arcana. (Though few of these poems were composed in ancient Anglish, I learned that oldest of tongues because my mother had long nagged me to do so.)

   When I had learned to scan the lines of letters printed across - and, sometimes, down - the old, fibrous pages of yellowed paper, learned so well that I had no need to sound out the individual letters in the inner ear of my brain but could perceive the units of meaning word by word, I found to my astonishment that this thing called reading was pleasurable. There was pleasure in handling the cracked leather of the cover, pleasure too in the quiet stimulation of my eyes with black symbols representing words as they had once been spoken. How simple a thing reading really was. How strange I would have appeared to another pilot, had she been able to watch me reading. There, in the illuminated pit of my ship, I floated and held the Timekeeper's book in front of me as I did nothing more than move my eyes from left to right, left to right, down the time-stiffened pages of the book.

   But it was the poems themselves that gave me the greatest pleasure. It was wonderful to discover that the ancients, in all their stupendous ignorance of the immensity of spacetime and the endless profusion of life that fills our universe, knew as much of the great secret of life - or as little - as we know now. Though their perceptions were simple and bold, it seemed to me they often perceived more deeply that part of reality directly apprehensible to a mere man. Their poems were like hard diamonds crudely cut from some primal stone; their poems were full of a pounding, sensual, barbaric music; their poems sent the blood rushing and made the eyes focus on vistas of untouchable stars and cold, distant, northern seas. There were short, clever poems designed to capture one of life's brief and sad (but beautiful) moments as one might capture and preserve a butterfly in glacier ice. There were poems that ran on for pages, recounting man's lust for killing and blood and those pure and timeless moments of heroism when one feels that the life inside must be rejoined with the greater life without.

   My favorite poem was one that the Timekeeper had read to me the day before my departure. I remembered him pacing through the Tower as he clenched his fists and recited:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

   "It is important," he had told me, "to rhyme 'symmetry' with 'eye'."

   I read the poems over and over; after a time, I could repeat some of them without looking at the book. I said the poems out loud until they echoed inside, and I could hear them in my heart.

   And so I fell out in the Rosette Nebula, which lies at the edge of the expanding star-blown region known as the Vild. I looked out into the glowing hell of hard light and ruined stars and dust, and I heard myself say:

Stars, I have seen them fall

   But when they drop and die

No star is lost at all

   From all the star-sown sky.

   (When I say I "looked out" at the Vild, I mean, of course, that my ship illuminated my brain with models of the Vild that it had made. So far away was the Rosette from the Vild in realspace - in light-years - that the light from most of the exploding stars had not yet reached the Rosette.)

   In contrast to the ugliness of the dying Vild, the Rosette, was beautiful. It was a giant star-making womb whose newborn suns flashed and pulsed with such violent energies that the shock waves and pressures of light had swept away the whole of its interior, leaving the nebula hollow like a ruby and diamond-studded eggshell. It was around the famous Siva Luz, brightest of that splendid, rosy sphere of lights, that I began the first of the mappings that would lead me to the doorway of Eta Carina and the Solid State Entity.

   I continued my journey along the most ancient route of the manswarm. I fell out around stars whose planets were thick with human beings (and beings who were less and more than human.) Rollo's Rock, Wakanda and Vesper - these old planets I passed by as quickly as I could. And Nwarth and Ocher, Farfara and Fostora, where, it was said, the men had long ago learned the art of carking their selfnesses into their computers, (it was also said that the Fostora women, disdaining the transfer of human mind into "machine," had ventured forth in long ships until they came to the planet they called Lechoix. Whereupon they founded the oldest of the matriarchies. The historian Burgos Harsha, however, gives a different explanation of their origin. He holds that Lechoix was colonized by a renegade deep ship full of nubile girls bound for the sun domes on Heaven's Gate. Who really knows?)

   After a long time, I passed into that portion of the fallaways little touched by either the second or third waves of the Swarming. Here were planets so old - Freeport and New Earth and Kaarta among others - that they had been peopled long before man had come to formulate the laws of civilization. Here were woman and men who had carked their DNA, tampered with their chromosomes and changed their flesh in many horrible ways to fit their new habitats as a drillworm fits the hole it chews into a living skull.

   Darrein Luz was a yellow star, beyond which lay others for which there existed no known mappings. It was my task, as a pilot, to discover new mappings, to set up the isomorphisms and prove my theorems, that or die. And though as a journeyman I had made such mappings of the manifold near our city's little sun, I had never made so many nor journeyed so far.

   At first it was easy. With zazen I emptied my mind of everything except mathematical thoughts. I was alert and open to the manifold's undulations and sudden deformations. Various spaces folded and re-folded around me. I was afraid as I entered a torison space, but I found a little theorem that let me make sense of the writhing tunnels threatening to devour me. "The faithful mathematician must use his will to achieve insight from pattern" - so the cantors say. My will was strong at first, and with each successful mapping I made, it grew stronger still. Sixty-eight stars beyond Darrein Luz, I was so puffed-up with pride I plunged into what I thought would be a rather simple thickspace.

   It was nothing of the sort. The point-sources were indeed stived as densely as lice on the head of a harijan, but I could find no mappings to the point-exits in the nebula which lay before me, the nebula called the Solid State Entity. I wondered why. It seemed beyond all chance that there should be no mappings. Because I could go no further, I fell out into realspace above a ringed planet. I felt alone and lost, and so I named the faint, yellow star nearest the thickspace "Perdido Luz." I vowed I would master the thickspace even if it took me forty days of realtime.

   I do not know how long I spent, intime, scurfing the windows of the thickspace. Certainly it was much longer than forty days. It was truly a bizarre thickspace, riddled with too many zero-points and embedded spaces. Often I had trouble fixing points; often I tunneled from one dark window to another only to find the windows fixed in a closed ring. The usual rules of interfenestration seemed not to hold. I must have mapped sixty-four thousand point-sources, and not one of them could I prove to be simply connected with any other among the stars of the Entity. Once, I laughed so hard my jaws almost popped out of joint; then in despair I bit my lip until I tasted the hot salt of blood. The very existence of this impossible thickspace mocked my faith in the trueness of the Great Theorem. I was almost certain that
no
mapping from Perdido Luz to the Entity could be found. I was ready to give up when I stumbled upon a beautiful, discrete set of point-sources, all of which connected to a single white star in the outer envelope of the Entity. I had only to make the mapping, open a window, and I would be the first pilot in five hundred years to dare the fickle, whirlpool spaces of a living nebula.

   I made the mapping and fell out around the star. So, I thought,
this
is the group of stars that has terrorized the pilots of my Order; well, it is not so terrible after all. I told myself there was no reason for fear. Then I looked out on the glowing hydrogen clouds, and I was not so sure. The whole nebula seemed dark and strange. There were fewer stars than I had thought there would be, perhaps as few as a hundred thousand. The interstellar dust was too dense, scattering and obscuring the light of even the nearer stars. Grains of graphite and silicates and ices, and iron particles, too, reddened and polarized the dim starlight. Some of the individual dust particles were so gigantic that they seemed not to be dust at all but rather the fragments of planets which had been pulverized and torn apart. Why, I wondered, would the Entity need to tear planets apart? To gather the mass - the food - for Her fabled moon-sized brains? Or perhaps it wasn't She who had stripped of planets almost every star I came across; perhaps it was some other natural, if deadly, phenomenon?

   The mechanics say that intelligence can warp and shape the fabric of spacetime. I now know this is true. As I set out and fenestered inward toward the heart of the Entity, the manifold within the nebula changed in subtle ways. I found myself too often kleining back upon my pathways. Once, like a worm swallowing its tail, I thought I was caught in an infinite loop; I worried that I would die of old age or lose my mind among the incomprehensible pathways that bunched and writhed and led onwards and back, and through and in, into the twisting of this unknown portion of the manifold. Another time I lost the theme of a theorem I was proving. Usually such a trifling, momentary distraction would not have mattered, but I was in the middle of a wildly segmented space the like of which I had never seen before. I began slipsliding off my normal fenestering sequence. I had the strangest feeling that the Entity Herself was perturbing the spaces before me, measuring my mathematical abilities, testing me as pilot and man.

   Suddenly the segmented space snapped like a twig, and I fell out into realspace. I nearly scudded into the gravity well of a neutron star. There was blackness all around me. There were unusual black globules of matter half a mile in diameter floating in the blackness of space. These black bodies - there were millions of them - must have been the handiwork of the Entity. I could only guess what they were. Because they were so black that they did not reflect any of the milky starlight or any other radiation, I had to deduce their presence from their gravity fields. They had crushingly powerful gravity fields, though not so powerful as the neutron star they orbited. Why they were not sucked down the star's gravity well I could not say.

   Were these black bodies pieces of manufactured matter which somehow regulated the flow of information within the Entity? Were they tachyon machines or some other unnatural engine for producing particles traveling faster than light? Or were they perhaps cancerous growths, some type of wild, unstable matter left over from the Entity's experiments in shaping the universe to Her whims? I did not know. I wondered if the eschatologists were wrong after all; perhaps the Entity's brain was composed of black bodies much smaller than moons. Could it be that I was looking at the fount of intelligence of a goddess?