Neverness (13 page)

   _Everything in the universe is woven of a single superluminal fabric. Tat tvam asi, that thou art._

   - I don't understand.

   _You are not here to understand._

   - Why do you think I've crossed half the galaxy, then?

   _You are here to kneel._

   - What?

   _You are here to kneel - these are words from an old poem. Do you know the poem?_

   - No, of course not.

   _Ahhh, that is a shame. Then perhaps you are here to die as well as kneel._

   - I'll die in the infinite tree; there's no mapping out of an infinite tree.

   _Others have come before you; others are lost in the tree._

   - Others?

   Suddenly, the voice of the goddess grew as high and sweet as a little girl's. Like the piping of a flute, the following words spilled into my brain:

They are all gone into a world of light

   And I alone sit lingering here;

Their very memory is fair and bright,

   And my sad thoughts doth clear.

   _You must die. Deep inside you know this. Don't be afraid._

   - Well, pilots die - or so they say. I'm not afraid.

   _I am sorry you are afraid. It was that way with the others._

   - What others?

   _Eight pilots of your Order have tried to penetrate my brains. Wicent li Towt, Erendira Ede and Alexandravondila; Ishi Mokku, Ricardo Lavi, Jemmu Flowtow and Atara of Darkmoon. And John Penhallegon, the one you call the Tycho._

   - Then you killed them?

   _What do you know about killing? As an oyster, to protect itself, encapsulates an irritant grain of sand with layer upon layer of pearl, so I have confined all but one of these pilots to the branchings of a decision tree._

   - What's an oyster?

   The Entity reached into my computer's thoughtspace and placed there an image etched in light and touch and smell. By means of this forbidden telepathy - forbidden to us pilots - I experienced Her conception of oyster. In my mind I saw a soft, squishy creature which protected itself with a hinged shell that it could open or close at will. My fingers closed almost against
my
will, and in my hand I felt gritty sand against a scoop-shaped, hard, wet shell. My jaws moved of their own, moved my teeth against a tender meat which suddenly ruptured, filling my mouth with living fluids and salt and the taste of the sea. I smelled the thick, cloying perfume of naked proteins and heard a sucking sound as I swallowed the gobbet of raw, living flesh.

   _That is oyster._

   - It's wrong to kill animals for their meat.

   _And you, my innocent man, are a pretty pearl in the necklace of time. Do you understand the time distortions? The other pilots are alive, as a pearl is alive with luster and beauty, yet they do not live. They have died, yet they remain undead._

   - Again, you speak in riddles.

   _The universe is a riddle._

   - You're playing with me.

   _I like to play._

   Before my mind's eye, a transparent, glowing cube appeared. The cube was segmented into eight other stacked cubes, each of which flickered with confusing images. I looked inward at the cubes, and the images began to coalesce and harden. In each cube, except the one on the lower right, a disembodied head floated within its prison, as a pilot floats within his ship's pit. Each face was scarred with the rictus of terror and insanity. Each face stared open-mouthed at me - stared through me - as if I were air. I recognized the faces, then. The historians had taught me well. They were the faces of Wicent li Towt, Ishi Mokku and the others who had come before me.

   _What is death, Mallory? The pilots are each lost in a dividing branch of the decision tree. They are as lost and forgotten as poems of the Aeschylus. But someday, I will remember them._

   I wondered how she had encapsulated the pilots (and myself) in the infinite tree. There are ways, of course, to open a window into the manifold at random, to send a pilot unmapped and unprepared into an infinite tree. But She had used none of these ways. She had done something else, something marvelous. How was it possible, I wanted to know? Had Her consciousness really molded the shape of the manifold, twisted the very strands of deep reality, much as a child braids together ropes of clay?

   I did not know. I could not know, I had seen less than a millionth part of her, and She had probably needed only the tiniest portion of that part to speak with me mind to mind. I was like a grain of sand trying to understand an ocean from a few eddies and currents sweeping it along; I was like a flower trying to deduce space travel from the faint tickle of starlight upon its delicate petals. To this day I search for words describing my impression of the Entity's
power
, but there are no words. I learned - if that is the right word for knowledge which comes in a sudden flash of insight - I was given to understand that She manipulated whole sciences and thought systems as I might string words into a sentence. But her "sentences" were as huge and profound as the utterances of the universe itself She had reached truths and ways of knowing far beyond even the meta-philosophies of the alien Fravashi. She, a goddess, played with concepts which could remake the universe, concepts unthinkable to the mind of Man. While most of my race lived out their days muddled and confused in darkness, She had solved problems and found new directions of thought which we had never dreamed of, and worse, She had done so as easily as I might multiply two times one.

   The mechanics often bemoan their oldest paradox, which is this: The strings weaving the fabric of the universe are so infinitesimal that any attempt to study them will change their properties. The very act of observation perturbs that which is observed. On Old Earth, it is said, there was a king who carked the atoms of everything around him so that all he touched turned into gold. The fabled king could neither eat nor drink because his food and wine tasted of nothing but gold. The mechanics are like this king: Everything they "touch" turns into ugly lumps of matter, into electrons, quarks, or zeta-neutrinos. There is no way for them to perceive deep reality except through the golden, distorting lenses of their instruments or through the touch of their golden equations. In some unfathomable way, the Entity had transcended this prison of matter. To see reality directly, as it really is - this, I thought must be the privilege of a godly intellect.

   _Do you see the pilots, Mallory Ringess?_

   I saw insanity and chaos. I stared into the cube containing the undead pilots. The black sharp face of Jemmu Flowtow was leaking drool from its narrow lips.

   - You trapped the pilots; then you could free them. And me.

   _But they are free. Or will be free when the universe has remade itself. What has been will be._

   - That's scryer talk.

   _The time distortions: When the universe has expanded outward so that the closest two stars are as far apart as the Grus Cloud of galaxies is now from the Canes Venatici, after billions of your years, the pilots will be as you see them frozen into forever nowness. It is easier to stop time, is it not, than to restart it? To kill than create? But creation is timeless; creation is everything._

   - The pilots ... in the tree where the infinities branch into insanity, have you seen their insane frozen faces, then?

   _There is no help for insanity. It is the price that some must pay._

   - I feel like I'm going insane now down the branching of this tree where it splits into two and two into for insanity you say there's no helping me escape from infinity and stop playing games with my mind!

   _You, Mallory, my wild man, we will play together, and I will teach you all there is to know of instantaneity, and perhaps insanity, too. Will you join the other pilots? Watch carefully, the empty cube is for you._

   I noticed then what I should have seen immediately: that eight pilots had been lost within the Entity, but only seven of the ghastly death's-heads floated within the cubes. In none of them did I see the huge, walruslike head of the Tycho.

   - What happened to the Tycho?

   _I am the Tycho; the Tycho is me, part of me._

   - I don't understand.

   _The Tycho exists in a memory space._

   Inside my mind the little girl's voice returned, only it was no longer quite so sweet, no longer quite the voice of a little girl. There were sultry, dark notes coloring the innocent fluting and I heard:

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted

Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!

A savage place! as holy and enchanted

As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted

By woman wailing for her demon lover!

   _He was a savage man beneath his silken robes, a lovely man, a demon lover of a man. When I saw what a wild intelligence he had, I severed his brain from his body, and I copied it synapse by synapse into a tiny pocket of one of my lesser brains. Behold John Penhallegon._

   Suddenly, within the pit of my ship, an image of the Tycho appeared. He was so close to me that I could have touched his swollen red nose as one reaches for a snow apple. He was - had been - a thick-faced man with yellowish incisors too long for his blubbery lips. He had a mass of shiny black hair hanging in clumps halfway down his back - his jowls hung from his bristly chin halfway to his chest. "How far do you fall, Pilot?" he asked in a voice thick with age, repeating the traditional greeting of pilots who meet in faraway places. His voice rang like a bell through the pit of my ship. Apparently the Entity could generate holograms and sound waves as easily as She could jiggle electrons.

   "Shalom," he said. With his red, sweaty fingers he made the secret sign that only a pilot of our Order would know. "You can't be the Tycho," I said aloud. The sound of my own voice startled me. "The Tycho is dead."

   "I'm John Penhallegon," the imago said. "I'm as alive as you are. More alive, really, because I can't be killed so easily."

   "You're the voice of the Entity," I said as I wiped the sweat from my forehead. "I'm both."

   "That's impossible."

   "Don't be so certain of what's possible and what's not. Certainty can kill, as I know."

   I rubbed the side of my nose and said, "Then the Entity has absorbed the Tycho's memories and thoughtways - I can believe that. But the Tycho can't be
alive
, he can't have free will, can he? ... can
you
? If you're part of the whole ... Entity?"

   The Tycho - or the imago of the Tycho, as I reminded myself - laughed so hard that spit bubbled from his lips. "Nay, my Pilot, I'm like you, like all men, Sometimes I have free will, and sometimes I don't."

   "Then you're
not
like me," I said too quickly. "I've freedom of choice, everyone does."

   "Nay, was it freedom of choice made you break your Lord Pilot's nose?"

   It scared and angered me that the Entity could pull this memory from my mind, so I angrily said, "Soli goaded me. I lost my temper."

   The Tycho wiped the spit from his lips and rubbed his hands together. I heard the swish of skin against skin. "Okay.
Soli
goaded you. Then
Soli
was in control, not you."

   "You're twisting my words. He made me so mad I wanted to hit him."

   "Okay.
He
made you."

   "I could have controlled myself."

   "Is that so?" he asked.

   I was angry, and I huffed out, "Of course it is. I was just so mad I didn't care if I hit him."

   "You must like being mad."

   "No, I hate it. I always have. But then that's the way I am."

   "You must like the way you are."

   I closed my eyes and shook my head. "No, you don't understand. I've tried ... I
try
, but when I get mad, it's ... well, it's
part
of me, do you see? People aren't perfect."

   "And people don't have free will, either," he said. My cheeks were hot and my tongue was dry. It seemed that the Tycho, too, was trying to goad me into losing my temper. As I breathed rhythmically, struggling for control, I looked at the phased light waves composing the imago of the Tycho. His robe was like glowing smoke in the black air.

   I asked, "Does a goddess, then? Have free will?" Again the Tycho laughed, and he said, "Does a dog have Buddha nature? You're quick my Pilot, but you're not here to test the goddess. You're here to be tested."

   "To be tested ...
how
?"

   "To be tested for possibilities."

   As I was soon to learn, the Entity had been testing me since I first crossed the threshold of her immense brain. The torison spaces and the ugly segmented spaces that had almost defeated me - they were her handiwork, as was the infinite tree imprisoning me. She had tested my mathematical prowess, and - this is what the Tycho told me - She had tested my courage. Not the least of my tests had been my ability to listen to Her godvoice and not lose myself in terror. I had no idea why She would want to test me at all, unless it was just another of Her games. And why should She use the Tycho to test me when She could look into my brain to see all of me there was to see? No sooner had I thought this when the godvoice rolled through my head like thunder:

   _Thousands of years ago your eschatologists mapped the DNA molecule down to the last carbon atom. But they still search for the rules by which DNA unfolds life and codes for new forms of life. They are still learning DNA's grammar. As with DNA, so it is with the unfolded brain. Imagine a baby who has learned the alphabet but who has no idea what words mean or the rules for putting them together. To understand the brain from its trillions of synapses would be like trying to appreciate a poem from the arbitrary twistings of individual letters. You are that poem. There are infinite possibilities. You, my Mallory, will always be a mystery to me._

   - I don't want to be tested.

   _Life is a test._

   - If I succeed, will you free me from the tree?

   _Like an ape, you are free at this moment to escape your tree._