Neverness (11 page)

   I had no time to explore this fascinating discovery because the intense magnetic field of the star - it was a thousand billion times stronger than that of Icefall's - was ruining my ship. The star's densely packed neutrons, probably the core remnants of an ancient supernova, were spinning rapidly, and they had conserved the magnetic field of the original star. I had to make an instant mapping, but at least I escaped being crushed and pulled apart like a seashell. I fell at random into the manifold, and I was lucky I did not fall into an infinite decision tree.

   There were other dangers and escapes I will not mention. And wonders, too. I discovered the first of the Entity's brain lobes in a region of the nebula where the underlying manifold was rich with tunnels and point-sources winding through and connecting with every other part. There was a star pumping out light in measured, intense bursts every nine-tenths of a second. It was a little pulsar which reminded me of the beacon atop Mount Attakel warning the windjammers away from its dark, frozen rocks. But it was much, much brighter. In time with the beating of my heart, it pulsed with the energy of a thousand suns. With every pulse, it illuminated the silver moon orbiting it half a billion miles away. I saw this through my ship's telescopes, which were my ears and eyes. I watched the fabled moon-brain of the Solid State Entity as it absorbed energy and spun on its axis and thought its unfathomable, infinite thoughts, or whatever it was that a goddess did to fulfill her existence.

   Of course, it was a mystery what the Entity did with all this energy. I saw that She used energy faster than a starving hibakusha could swallow a bowl of milk. And, as long as I am speaking of my ignorance, I should mention that I did not really know if the Entity's brain was solid state or if it was put together of some bizarre type of manufactured matter. (I thought of the black bodies I had seen near the neutron star, and I wondered.) Certainly Her brain was not solid state in the sense that it was composed of silicon crystals or germanium or other such semiconductors. Long ago, during the lordship of Tisander the Wary, the eschatologists had found a single, dead mainbrain out near the stars of the Aud Binary. When they dissected the moon-brain - it was really only the size of a large asteroid - they discovered billions of layers of ultra-thin organic crystals, a vast latticework of interconnecting proteins which jumped to the touch of an electric current. The latticework was much like the neurologics that the tinkers grow inside the lightships - but infinitely more complex. It was so complex that the programmers had never decoded a single one of the mainbrain's programs, not even the simple survival programs which must have been hard-wired into the protein circuits. They had remained as ignorant of the mainbrain's purpose (and cause of death) as I was of the living brain orbiting the pulsar.

   I found a point-to-point mapping and fell to within half a million miles of the moon. Though I made such analyses and tests as I could, I discovered little about its composition. That it really was a brain and not a natural moon I did not doubt. I had never seen a natural moon so featureless and uncratered. Its surface was as smooth and satiny as the skin of a Jacarandan whore. And as I have said, the manifold nearby was distorted in ways explicable only by the presence of a huge intelligence. But what was the
nature
of this intelligence? However desperately I wanted to know, I could not seriously consider landing on the moon's surface to drill a core sample for analysis. It would have been a crude, barbaric thing to do, and futile, like drilling into the pink brain of an autist in an attempt to map his inner world of fantasy. And it would have been dangerous beyond thinking. Already, I knew, I had been lucky to survive the dangers of the manifold. If I were stupid enough to perturb the Entity, as She perturbed the manifold by Her mere presence, I did not think I would be lucky much longer.

   I should have fled homeward immediately. I had fulfilled my vow to penetrate the Entity, and I had mapped at least a part of Her. I probably should not have tried to communicate with Her. Who is man to talk with a goddess? It was foolish - so I thought - to bombard the moon with information written into laser beams, to bathe her silvery surface with radio waves carrying my inquisitive voice and the coded greeting of the ship-computer. But I did it anyway. Once in a lifetime a man must chance everything to experience something greater than himself.

   The Entity, however, did not seem to be aware of my existence. To Her my laser beams must have been as unfelt and unheeded as is the "ping" of a single photon striking a man's calloused palm. My radio waves were like drops of water in the ocean of radio waves emitted by the pulsar. I was nothing to Her, I thought, and why should I despair that I was nothing? Was
I
aware of a single virus tumbling through the capillaries of my brain? Ah, I told myself, but a virus has almost no consciousness, whereas I was a
man
aware of my own awareness. Shouldn't a goddess, in some small way, take notice of that awareness? Shouldn't she be aware of
me
?

   Of course it was vain of me to think this way, but I have never been a humble man. It is one of my worst flaws. Vain as I was, though, I knew there was nothing I could do to apprehend this fantastic, glistening, alien intelligence. I was in
awe
of Her - there is no other word. With lasers I measured the diameter of her moon-brain and found that it was a thousand and forty miles from pole to pole. If I could reproduce my brain a trillion times over, I thought, and a billion times again, and glue the sticky, pink mass all together, it would still not be as great as hers. I realized that any bit of her neurologics was a million times faster than my own sluggishly firing neurons, and that within the nebula, around bright stars tens of light-years distant, there floated probably millions of moon-sized brain lobes, each pulsing with intense intelligence, each interconnected in unknown ways with every other across and through the rippling tides of space.

   Because I was curious and as convinced of my own immortality as all young men are, I set off to map the Entity more completely. I fell out around hot red giant stars and discovered many more moon-brains. As many as a hundred moons orbited some of the stars. There the manifold was warped and hideously complex. There I segued into dangerous decision trees and segmented spaces even wilder than the one I had first encountered. It was during this long journey inward through the Entity's brain that I first felt confident of my pilot's skills, that I really
became
a pilot. Sometimes I was overly confident, even cocky. Where was another pilot, I wondered, who had had to learn so much so quickly? Could Tomoth or Lionel - or any other master pilot - have threaded the torison spaces as elegantly as I did?

   I wish I had room here to catalog all the wonders of that unique nebula, for they would fascinate many, not just our Order's astronomers. Most wondrous of my discoveries, other than the wonder of the nebula Herself, was the planet I found orbiting a red star named Kamilusa, named not by me but by the people living on the planet. People! How had they come to be there, I wondered? Had they fallen through the manifold as I had? Were they perhaps the descendents of the Tycho and Erendira Ede or other pilots lost in the Entity? I was astonished that
people
could live inside the brain of a goddess. Somehow it did not seem right. I thought of them as parasites living off the light of their bloody sun, or as drillworms who had somehow chewed their way into the brain of an incomprehensibly greater being.

   After greeting the people by radio, I made planetfall on one of the broad, western beaches of the island continent called Sendai. It was very warm so I opened the pit of my ship. The sun was a hot, red plate above me, and birds resembling snow gulls swooped and sloshed along the currents of the moist wind, which stank of seaweed and other vegetation. Everything, even the air itself, was too green.

   To the naked people lining the dunes of the beach, I must have looked very alien as I stood on the packed, wet sand, sweating in my black boots and kamelaika. My beard had grown out during the long days of my journey, and my body was slightly wasted from too little exercise. When I bowed to the people, my back muscles quivered with the strain. Naturally I had asked to speak to the lord of the planet. But the people had no lord - nor masters, sensei, matriarchs, kings, protectors or anyone else to direct their day-to-day activities. They were anarchists. As I learned, they were probably the descendents of hibakusha who centuries ago had fled the oppressive hierarchies of the Japanese Worlds. However, they seemed to have only the sketchiest memories of their passage through the Entity. No one could tell me how they had once piloted their deep ships and scurfed the windows of the manifold because no one remembered. And no one cared. They had lost the noblest of arts, and most other arts as well. The planet's few hundred thousand people were barbarians who spent their long days eating, swimming, copulating and roasting their bodies brown in the sun's red oven. The society of Kamilusa was one of those stale utopias where robots did the work of man's hands and made more robots to do ever more work. And worse, they had programmed their computers to direct their robots, and worse still, they had let their computers do all their thinking for them. I spent five hundred-hour days there, and not once did I find a woman or man who cared where life had come from or where it was going to. (Though many of the children possessed a natural, soon-to-be-crushed curiosity.) Remarkably, no one - except perhaps the computers - seemed to realize that Kamilusa lay within the brain of a goddess. I record the following conversation because it is representative of others that I had during those stifling, hot, nights and days.

   One evening, on the veranda of one of the villas built on the beach dunes, I sat in a plush chair across from an old woman named Takara. I had learned a dialect of New West Japanese just to talk to her. She was a tiny, shriveled woman with wispy strands of hair growing in patches from her round head. Like everyone else, she was as naked as an animal. When I asked her why no one wanted to know about such wonders as the construction of my ship, she said, "Our computers could design a lightship, if that was our desire."

   "But could they train pilots?"

   "Hai, I suppose." She took a drink of a clear blue liquid one her domestic robots had brought her. "But why should we want to train pilots?"

   "To fall among the stars. There are glories that only pilots -"

   "I don't think so," she interrupted. "One star is much like any other, isn't it? Stars give us their warmth, isn't that enough? And also, as you admit, your travel from star to star is too dangerous."

   "You can't live forever."

   "Hai, but you can live a long time," she said. I, myself have lived ...' and here she spoke at one of the computers built into the sandstone veranda. It spoke back, and she said, "I've lived five hundred of your Neverness years. I've been a young woman, oh, perhaps ..." and she spoke to the computer again. "I've been young ten times; it's wonderful to be young. Maybe I'll be young ten more times. But not if I do dangerous things. Swimming is dangerous enough, and I don't do that anymore even though the robots keep the sharks away. Hai, I could always take a cramp, you know. It's well known how the dangers build over the years. There is a word for it, oh ... what is it?" When her computer had supplied her with the word, she said, "If there is a certain
probability
that I will die in any year, then the
probability
grows greater every year. It
multiplies
, I think. The tiniest risk becomes riskier as time goes on. In time, if there is the slightest risk of death, then death will occur. And that is why I do not leave my villa. Oh, I used to love to swim, but my fourteenth husband died when a bird dropped a conch shell on his head. Ashira - he was a beautiful man - he used to shave his head. He was bald as a rock. The bird must have thought his head
was
a rock. The conch shell broke his skull, and he died."

   As if she were ever wary of bizarre accidents, she looked up into the starry sky to look for birds. She pointed to the robot lasers lining the veranda's high walls, aimed at the dark sky, and she said, "But I'm not afraid of birds any longer."

   What she had said was of course true. Life is dangerous. Because of the laws of antichance, pilots - and everyone else in our Order - almost never lived as long as Soli had. Which explains why the younger pilots called him "Soli The Lucky."

   "It's a dangerous universe," I said. "And mysterious, but there are beauties - you admit you're a student of beauty."

   "What do you mean by
beauty
?" she wanted to know as she placed her hand between her breasts, which were brown and withered as old leather bags. She sniffed the air in my direction and wrinkled her tiny nose. Plainly, she did not like the wooly smell of my sweat-stained kamelaika. It was annoying that she looked at me as if I were the barbarian, not she.

   I pointed to the moon shining above us. I told her that the moon was really a huge bio-computer, the brain and substance of a goddess. "It shines like silver, and that's beautiful," I said. "But it shares its shining intelligence with a million other moons, and just to imagine the possibilities ... that's a different, higher kind of beauty."

   She looked at me as a logician looks at a babbling autist and said, "I don't think the moon is a computer. Why should you lie to me? Computers aren't beautiful, I don't think."

   I said, "I wouldn't lie to you."

   "And what do you mean by
goddess
?"

   When I had explained to her about higher intelligences and the classifications of the eschatologists, she laughed at me and said, "Oh, there's
God
, I suppose. Or there used to be - I can't remember any more. But to think the moon
thinks
, well that is insane!"

   Suddenly she glared at me with her old, old eyes and shook like a tent in the wind. It must have occurred to her that if I were insane, I might do something risky and was therefore a threat to her longevity. When she looked at me again, I noticed that the robots were pointing their lasers at me. She spoke to her computer and said, "The moon is made of ... of
elements
: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen."