Neverness (14 page)

   - Free? I don't know how.

   _That is too bad. If you succeed, you are free to ask me three questions, any questions. It is an old, old game._

   - And if I fail?

   _Then the light goes out. Oh, where does the light go when the light goes out?_

   I tightened my fists until my fingernails cut my palms. I did not want to be tested. "Well, my Pilot, shall we begin?" It was the Tycho speaking as he scratched his jowls. "I don't know."

   I will not record here in detail the many tests that the Tycho - the Entity - put to me. Some of the tests, such as the Test of Knowledge, as he called it, were long, meticulous and boring. The nature of other tests, such as the Test of Chaos, I hardly understood at all. There was a Test of Reason and a Test of Paradox, followed, I think, by the Test of Reality in which I was made to question my every assumption, habit and belief while the Tycho bombarded me with alien ideas that I had never thought before. This test nearly drove me mad. I never understood the need to be tested at all, not even when the Tycho explained: "Someday, my angry Pilot, you may have great power, perhaps as Lord Pilot, and you'll need to see things through multiplex eyes."

   "I'm rather fond of my own eyes."

   "Nevertheless," he said, "nevertheless ..

   Suddenly, within my head, echoed the teachings of the famous cantor, Alexandar of Simoom, Alexandar Diego Soli, who was Leopold Soli's long-dead father. I was immersed body, mind and soul in the belief system of the strange Friends of God. I saw the universe through Alexandar's dark gray eyes. It was a cold universe in which nothing was certain except the creation of mathematics. Other forms of creation did not really exist. Yes, there was man, but what was man, after all? Was man the creation of the Ieldra, who had in turn been created by the Elder Ieldra? And if so, who had created
them
? The Very Elder Ieldra?

   And so I learned this strange theology of Alexandar Diego Soli: It was known that the first Lord Cantor, the great Georg Cantor, with an ingenious proof array had demonstrated that the infinity of integers - what he called aleph null - is embedded within the higher infinity of real numbers. And he had proved that
that
infinity is embedded within the greater infinity of aleph two, and so on, a whole hierarchy of infinities, an infinity of infinities. The Simoom cantors believed that as it is with numbers, so it is with the hierarchies of the gods. Truly, as Alexandar had taught his son, Leopold, if a god existed, who or what had created him (or her)? If there is a higher god, call him god^2, there must be a god^3 and a god^4, and so on. There is an aleph million and an aleph centillion, but there is no final, no highest infinity, and therefore there is no God. No, there could be no true God, and so there could be no true creation. The logic was as harsh and merciless as Alexandar of Simoom himself: If there is no true creation then there is no true reality. If nothing is real, then man is not real; man in some fundamental sense does not exist. Reality is all a dream, and worse, it less than a dream because even a dream must have a dreamer to dream it. To assert otherwise is nonsense. And to assert the existence of the self is therefore a sin, the worst of sins; therefore it is better to cut out one's tongue than to speak the word "I."

   As this reality gripped me, I was transported in space and time. I shivered and opened my eyes to the mountain mists settling over Alexandar's stone house on Simoom. I was in a tiny, bare, immaculate room with gray slate walls, and I looked at a young boy kneeling in front of me. I was Alexandar of Simoom, and the boy was Soli. "Do you see?" the Tycho asked me. And he placed in my mind Alexandar's memory of his son's austere, bitter education: "Do you understand, Leopold? You must never say that word again."

   "What word, Father?"

   "Don't play games, do you understand?"

   "Yes, Father, but please don't slap me again."

   "And who do you think you are to be worthy of punishment?"

   "Nobody, Father ... nothing."

   "That is true, and since it is true, there is no reason for you to be spoken to, is there?"

   "The silence is terrible, Father, worse than being punished. Please, how can you teach me in silence?"

   "And why should you be taught anything at all?"

   "Because mathematics is the only true reality, but ... but how can that be? If we are really nothing, we cannot create mathematics, can we?"

   "You have been told, haven't you? Mathematics is not created; it is not a thing like a tree or a ray of light; nor is it a creation of mind.

   Mathematics is. It is all that is. You may think of God as the timeless, eternal universe of mathematics."

   "But how can it ... if it is ... I just don't under -"

   "_What_ did you say?"

   "I don't understand!"

   "And still you profane. You won't be spoken to again."

   "I, I, I, I, I ... Father? Please."

   I did not understand how the Entity had acquired the memories of Alexandar of Simoom. (Or perhaps they were Soli's memories?) Nor did I learn how She knew so much of the even stranger realities of the autists and the brain-maiming aphasics. Strange as these realities were, however - and it was very strange to enter the internal, self-painted thoughtscapes of an autist - they were human realities. Human thought is really all the same. Thoughts may differ from person to person and from group to group, but the
way
we think is limited by the deep structures of our all too human brains. This is both a curse and a blessing. We are all trapped within the bone coffins of our same brains, imprisoned in thoughtways evolved over a million years. But it is a comfortable prison of familiar white walls, whose air, however stale, we can breathe. If we would escape our prison only for an instant, our new way of seeing, of
knowing
would leave us gasping. There would be glories and excruciating beauty and - as I was soon to learn - madness.

   "Okay," the Tycho said to me, "you grasp Alexandar of Simoom and Iamme, the solipsist. And now, the alien realities."

   The Tycho - or rather the phased light waves that were the Tycho - began to blur. The redness of his round nose deepened into violet as the nose itself broadened into a bristly snout. Like a piece of pulled clay, the snout stretched out into a long, supple trunk. His forehead bulged like a bloodfruit swollen with rotten gases, and his chin and jowls hardened into a boxlike organ lined with dozens of narrow, pinkish slits. Suddenly, his robe vanished like smoke. His naked body began to change. Balls of round muscle and brown and scarlet fur replaced the Tycho's gray, sagging flesh. His ponderous testes and membrum withered like seaweed and shrunk, vanishing within the red fold of skin between the thick legs. I waited and stared at the alien thing being born within the pit of my ship. Soon I recognized her for what she was: an imago of one of that gentle (if cunning) race known as the Friends of Man.

   The alien raised her trunk, and the pink slits of her speech organ vibrated and quivered, releasing a rank spray of molecules. I smelled esthers [sic; should be "esters" - reb] and ketones and flowers, the stench of rotting meat mingled with the sweetness of snow dahlia. In a way, with her trunk entwined with the blue helix of a master courtesan, she reminded me of Soli's friend (and, some said, mistress) Jasmine Orange.

   _Behold Jasmine Orange._

   I beheld Jasmine Orange through her own eyes: I became Jasmine Orange. I was at once Jasmine Orange and Mallory Ringess, looking at an alien through human eyes and, through my trunk, smelling the essence of a human being. Suddenly, my consciousness left my human body altogether, and there were no colors. I watched the scarlets and browns of my fur fade to light and dark gray. I looked across the pit of my ship and saw a bearded, young, human pilot staring at me; I saw myself I listened for the sound of the Entity's voice, but there was no sound inside or out because I was as deaf as ice. I did not really know what sound was. I knew only smell, the wonderful, mutable world of free-floating scent molecules. There was jasmine and the tang of crushed oranges as I spoke my lovely name. I curled my trunk, sucking in the fragrance of garlic and ice-wine as I greeted the human, Mallory Ringess, and he greeted me. How alien, how bizarre, how hopelessly stupid seemed his way of representing single units of meaning by a discrete progression of linear
sounds
, whatever sounds really were! How limited to put
sounds
together, like beads on a string! How could human beings think at all when they had to progress from sound to sound and thought to thought one word at a time like a bug crawling along the beads of a necklace? How very slow!

   Because I wanted to speak with the pilot Ringess, I raised my trunk and released a cloud of pungent odors that was to a human sentence what I supposed a symphony must be to a child's jingle. But he had no nose and he understood so little. Yes, Ringess, I told him, the scent-symbols are not fixed as, for example, the sounds in the word "purple" are fixed; they do not always mean the same thing. Isn't meaning as mutable as the smells of the sea? Can you sense the configuration of the minute pyramids of mint and vanilla bean and musk in this cloud of odors? And the meanings - do you know that the smells of jasmine and olathe and orange might mean, "I am Jasmine Orange, the lover of Man," or, "The sea is calm tonight," depending on the arrangement and the proximity of the unit pyramids to the other molecules of scent? Can you grasp meaning as a whole? And the logic of structure? Do you understand the complexities of language, my Ringess?

   Ideas blossom outward like arctic poppies in the sun growing into other ideas crosslinked and connected by pungent association links, and link to link the smells of roasting meat and wet fur flow outward and sideways and down, and blend into fields redolent with the sweet perfume of strange new logic structures and new truths that you must inhale like cool mint to overwhelm and obliterate your bitter, straightforward ideas of logic and causality and time. Time is not a line; the events of your life are rather like a jungle of smells forever preserved in a bottle. One sniff and you'll sense instantly the entire jungle rather than the fragrances of individual flowers. Do you understand the subtleties? Do you dare open the bottle? No, you have no nose, and you don't understand.

   _He understands all that the structure of his brain will let him understand._

   I understood that a man who dwelt too long inside an alien brain would go mad, I closed my eyes and shook my head as I pinched my nostrils shut against the mind-twisting smells flooding the pit of my ship. My eyes, my nostrils! - when I opened them, I was human again. The alien imago was gone, though the aftersmells of vanilla bean and wormwood remained. I was alone inside my sweaty, hairy, human body, inside my old brain which I thought I knew so well.

   - Their logic, the truth structures ... it's so different; I never knew.

   _The deep structure of their brain is different. But at a deeper level still, the logic is the same._

   - I can't understand this logic.

   _Few of your Order have understood the Friends of Man._

   Like everyone else, I had always been suspicious of these exotic, alien whores. I had supposed they seduced men with their powerful, aphrodisiacal scents in order to proselytize them when they were drugged with sex, to slyly persuade them to the truth of their mysterious alien religion. Now I saw - "saw" is not the right word - I
perceived
that their purpose was much deeper than merely changing mankind's beliefs; they desired to change mankind itself

   _But it is the hardest thing to change the mind of a man. You have such a small sense of yourselves._

   - A man must know who he is, as Bardo says.

   _And what is a Bardo?_

   While I snorted and tried to rid my nose and mind of disturbing smells, I thought about Bardo and how he had always had a clear, if flamboyant, sense of who he was: a man determined to experience pleasure as no other man ever had or ever would.

   _Your Bardo defines himself too narrowly. Even he may have possibilities._

   During the tests which followed, by implication and deduction, I learned much about the Entity's sense of Herself Each moon-brain, it seemed, was at once an island of consciousness and part of the greater whole. And each moon could subdivide and compartmentalize at need into smaller and smaller units, trillions of units of intelligence gathering and shifting like clouds of sand. I supposed only the tiniest part of one of her lesser moons was occupied with testing me. And yet I was given to understand that, paradoxically, all of Her was in some small way inside my brain, as I was inside hers. When I joked about the strange topologies involved in this paradox, Her thoughts drowned out my own:

   _You are like the Tycho, but you are playful where he is savage._

   - Am I? Sometimes I don't know who I am.

   _You are that you are. You are a man open to possibilities._

   - Others used to say I thought too many things were possible. A wise man knows his limits, they said.

   _Others have not survived the Test of Realities._

   I was delighted that I would have to suffer no more alien realities and more than a little pleased with myself, a pleasure lasting no longer than it took for me to draw in a breath of air.

   _There will be one last test._

   - What test?

   _Call it the Test of Fate._

   The air in front of me flickered, and there appeared an imago of a tall woman wearing a white robe. Her straight black hair shined and smelled of snow dahlia. When she turned to me, I could not take my eyes off her face. It was a face I knew well, the aquiline nose and high cheeks and most of all, the dark smoothly scarred hollows where the eyes should have been; it was the face of my beautiful Katharine.

   I was angry that the Entity would pull this most private memory from my mind, When Katharine smiled at me and bowed her head slightly, I hoped that the Entity would not overhear the words to an ancient poem which formed unspoken on my lips: