Neverness (16 page)

   _The light goes out._

   - That was not my question. I was just thinking ... wondering how -

   _Ask your questions._

   It seemed I had to be very careful in asking my questions, else the Entity might play games with me. I thought for a long time before asking a question whose answer might hint at many other mysteries. I licked my dry teeth and asked aloud a question which had bothered me since I was a boy: "Why is there a universe at all; why is there
something
rather than nothing?"

   _That I would like to know, too._

   I was angry that She hadn't answered my question, so without thinking very carefully I blurted out, "Why is the Vild exploding?"

   _Are you certain this is what you really want to know? What would it Profit you to discover the "why," if you do not know how to stop the Vild from exploding? Perhaps you should recast your question._

   - All right, how can I - can anyone - stop the Vild from exploding?

   Presently, you cannot. The secret of heating the Vild is part of the higher secret. You must discover this higher secret by yourself.

   More riddles! More games! Would She answer any of my questions simply, without posing riddles? I did not think so. Like a Trian merchant-queen guarding her jewels, She seemed determined to guard Her precious wisdom. Half in humor, half in despair, I said, "The message of the Ieldra - they spoke in riddles, too. They said the secret of man's immortality lay in the past and in the future. What did they mean? Exactly where can this secret be found?"

   I did not really expect an answer, at least not an intelligible answer, so I was shaken to my bones when the godvoice sounded within me:

   _The secret is written within the oldest DNA of the human species._

   - The oldest DNA of ... what is that, then? And how can the secret be decoded? And why should it be -

   _You have asked your three questions._

   - But you've answered with riddles!

   _Then you must solve your riddles._

   - Solve them? To what end? I'll die with my solutions. There's no escaping an infinite tree, is there? How can I escape?

   _You should have thought to ask me that as your last question._

   - Damn you and your games!

   _There is no escape from an infinite tree. But are you sure the tree is not finite?_

   Of course I was sure! Wasn't a pilot weaned on the Gallivare mapping theorems? Hadn't I proved that the Lavi set could not be embedded in an invariant space? Didn't I know an infinite tree from a finite one?

   _Have you examined your proof?_

   I had not examined my proof. I did not like to think that there could be a flaw in my proof. But neither did I want to die, so I faced my ship-computer. I entered the thoughtspace of the manifold. Instantly there was a rush of crystal ideoplasts in my mind, and I began building the symbols into a proof array. While the number storm swirled, I made a mathematical model of the manifold. The manifold opened before me. Deep in dreamtime, I reconstructed my proof. It was true, the Lavi set could not be embedded in an invariant space. Then a thought occurred to me as if from nowhere: Was the Lavi set the correct set to model the branchings of the tree? What if the tree could be modeled by a
simple
Lavi set? Could the simple Lavi set be embedded in an invariant space?

   I was trembling with anticipation as I built up a new proof array. Yes, the simple Lavi could be embedded! I proved it could be embedded. I wiped sweat from my forehead, and I made a probability mapping. Instantly the trillions of branches of the tree narrowed to one. So, it was a finite tree after all. I was saved! I made another mapping to the point-exit near a blue giant star. I fell out into realspace, into the swarm of the ten thousand moon-brains of the Solid State Entity.

   _You please me, my Mallory. But we will meet again when you please me more. Until then, fall far, Pilot, and farewell._

   To this day I wonder at the nature of the original tree imprisoning me. Had it
really
been a finite tree? Or had the Entity somehow - impossibly - changed an infinite tree into a finite one? If so, I thought, then She truly was a goddess worthy of worship. Or at least She was worthy of dread and terror. After looking out on the warm blue light of the sun, I was so full of both these emotions that I made the first of the many mappings back to Neverness. Though I burned with strange feelings and unanswered questions, I had no intention of ever meeting Her again. I never again wanted to be tested or have my life depend upon chance and the whimsy of a goddess. Never again did I want to hear the godvoice violating my mind. I wanted, simply, to return home, to drink skotch with Bardo in the bars of the Farsider's Quarter, to tell the eschatologists and Leopold Soli, and the whole city, that the secret of life was written within the oldest DNA of man.

For us, humanity was a distant goal toward which all men were moving, whose image no one knew, whose laws were nowhere written down.

   Emil Sinclair, Holocaust Century Eschatologist

My homecoming was as glorious as I hoped it would be, marred only by Leopold Soli's absence from the City. He was off mapping the outer veil of the Vild, so he could not appreciate my triumph. He was not present in the Lightship Caverns with the other pilots, cetics, tinkers and horologes as I emerged from the pit of my ship. How I wish he had seen them lined up on the dark steel walkway along the row of ships, to see their shocked faces and listen to their furious, excited whispers when I announced that I had spoken with a goddess! Would he have clapped his hands and bowed his head to me as even the most skeptical and jaded of the master pilots did? Would he have honored me with a handshake, as did Stephen Caraghar and Tomoth and his other friends?

   It was too bad he wasn't there when Bardo broke from the line of pilots and stomped towards me with such reckless enthusiasm that the whole walkway shook and rang like a bell. It was quite a moment. Bardo threw out his huge arms and bellowed, "Mallory! By God, I knew you couldn't be killed!" His voice filled the Caverns like an exploding bomb, and he suddenly whirled to address the pilots. "How many times these past days have I said it? Mallory's the greatest pilot since Rollo Gallivare! Greater than Rollo Gallivare, by God if he isn't!" He looked straight at Tomoth who was watching his antics with his hideous, mechanical eyes. "_You_ say he's lost in dreamtime?
I
say he's schooning, scurfing the veils of the manifold, and he'll return when he's damn ready.
You
say he's lost in an infinite loop, snared by that bitch of a goddess called the Solid State Entity?
I
say he's kleining homeward, tunneling with elegance and fortitude, returning to his friends with a discovery that will make him a master pilot. Tell me, was I right? Master Mallory - how I like the sound of it! By God, Little Fellow, by God!"

   He came over to me and gave me a hug that nearly cracked my ribs, all the while thumping my back and repeating, "By God, Little Fellow, by God!"

   The pilots and professionals swarmed around me, shaking hands and asking me questions. Justine, dressed sleekly in woolens and a new black fur, touched my forehead and bowed. "Look at him!" she said to my mother, who was weeping unashamedly. (I felt like weeping myself) "If only Soli could be here!"

   My mother forced her way through the swarm, and we touched each other's forehead. She surprised me, saying, "I'm so tired. Of these formal politenesses." Then she kissed me on the lips and hugged me. "You're too thin," she said as she dried her eyes on the back of her gloves. She arched her bushy eyebrows and wrinkled her nose, sniffing. "As thin as a harijan. And you stink. Come see me. When you've shaved and bathed and the akashics are through with you. I'm so happy."

   "We're all happy," Lionel said as he bowed, slightly. Then he snapped his head suddenly, flinging his blonde hair from his eyes. "And I suppose we're fascinated with these words of your goddess. The secret of life written in the oldest DNA of man - what do you suppose She meant by that? What, after all, is the oldest DNA?"

   Even as the akashics dragged my grimy, bearded, emaciated body off to their chamber to de-program me, I had a sudden notion of what this oldest DNA might be. Like a seed it germinated inside me; the notion quickly sprouted into an idea, and the idea began growing into the wildest of plans. Had Soli been there I might have blurted out my wild plan just to see the frown on his cold face. But he was off trying to penetrate the warped, star-blown spaces of the Vild, and he probably thought I was long dead, if he thought about me at all.

   I was not dead, though, I was far from dead. I was wonderfully, joyfully alive. Despite the manifold's ravaging my poor body, despite the separation from my ship and the return to downtime, I was full of confidence and success, as cocky as a man can be. I felt invincible, as if I were floating on a cool wind. The cetics call this feeling the testosterone high, because when a man is successful in his endeavors, his body floods with this potent hormone. They warn against the effects of testosterone. Testosterone makes men too aggressive, they say, and aggressive men grasp for success and generate ever more testosterone the more successful they become. It is a nasty cycle. They say testosterone can poison a man's brain and color his judgments. I believe this is true. I should have paid more attention to the cetics and their teachings. If I hadn't been so full of myself, if I hadn't been so swollen with tight veins and racing blood and hubris, I probably would have immediately dismissed my wild plan to discover the oldest DNA of the human race. As it was, I could hardly wait to win Bardo and the rest of the Order over to my plan, to bathe myself in ever more and greater glory.

   During the next few days I had little time to think about my plan because the akashics and other professionals kept me busy. Nikolos the Elder, the Lord Akashic, examined in detail my every memory from the moment I had left Neverness. He copied the results in his computers. There were mechanics who questioned me about the black bodies and other phenomena I had encountered within the Entity. They were properly impressed - astounded is a more accurate word - when they learned that She had the power to change the shape of the manifold as She pleased. A few of the older mechanics did not believe my story, not even when the cetics and akashics agreed that my memories were not illusory but the result of events that really happened. The mechanics, of course, had known for ages that any model of reality must include consciousness as a fundamental waveform. But Marta Rutherford and Minima Jons, among others, refused to believe the Entity could create and uncreate an infinite tree at will. They fell into a vicious argument with Kolenya Mor and a couple of other eschatologists who seemed more interested that people lived within the Entity than they were in the esoterics of physics. The furor and petty antagonisms that my discoveries provoked among the professionals amused me. I was pleased that the programmers, neologicians, historians, even the holists, would have much to talk about for a long time to come.

   I was curious when the master horologe, with the aid of a furtive-looking young programmer, read the memory of the ship-computer and opened the seated ship's clock. Although there is a prohibition against immediately telling a returning pilot how much inner time has elapsed, it is almost always ignored. I learned that I had aged, intime, five years and forty-three days. (And eight hours, ten minutes, thirty-two seconds.) "What day is it?" I asked. And the horologe told me that it was the twenty-eighth day of midwinter spring in the year 2930. On Neverness, little more than half a year had passed. I was five years older, then, while Katharine had only aged a tenth as much. Crueltime, I thought, you can't conquer crueltime. I hoped the differential ticking of Katharine's and my internal clocks would not be as cruel to us as it had been to Justine and Soli.

   Later that day - it was the day after my return - I was summoned to the Timekeeper's Tower. The Timekeeper, who seemed not to have aged at all, bade me sit in the ornate chair near the glass windows. He paced about the bright room, digging his red slippers into the white fur of his rugs, all the while looking me over as I listened to the ticking of his clocks. "You're so thin," he said. "My horologes tell me there was much slowtime, too damn much slowtime. How many times have I warned you against the slowtime?"

   "There were many bad moments," I said. "I had to think like light, as you say. If I hadn't used slowtime, I'd be dead."

   "The accelerations have wasted your body."

   "I'll spend the rest of the season skating, then. And eating. My body will recover."

   "I'm thinking of your mind, not your body," he said. He made a fist and massaged the knuckles. "So, your mind, your brain, is five years older."

   "Cells can always be made young again," I said.

   "You think so?"

   I did not want to argue the effects of the manifold's time distortions with him so I fidgeted in my hard chair and said, "Well, it's good to be home."

   He rubbed his wrinkled neck and said, "I'm proud of you, Mallory. You're famous now, eh? You're career is made. There's talk of making you a master pilot, did you know that?"

   In truth, my fellow pilots such as Bardo and the Sonderval had talked of little else since my return. Even Lionel, who had once despised my impulsive bragging, confided to me that my elevation to the College of Masters was almost certain.

   "A great discovery," the Timekeeper said. He ran his fingers back through his thick white hair. "I'm very pleased."

   In truth, I did not think he was pleased at all. Oh, perhaps he was pleased to see me again, to rumple my hair as he had when I was a boy, but I did not think he was at all pleased with my sudden fame and popularity. He was a jealous man, a man who would suffer no challenge to his preeminence among the women and men of our Order.

   "Without your book of poems," I said, "I would be worse than dead." I told him, then, everything that had happened to me on my journey. He did not seem at all impressed with the powers of the Entity.