Neverness (17 page)

   "So, the poems. You learned them well?"

   "Yes, Timekeeper."

   "Ahhh." He smiled, resting his scarred hand on my shoulder. His face was fierce, hard to read. He seemed at once kindly and aggrieved, as if he could not decide whether giving me the book of poems had been the right thing to do.

   He stood above me and I looked at my reflection in his black eyes. I asked the question burning in my mind. "How could you know the Entity would ask me to recite the poems? And the poems She asked - two of them were poems you had recited to me!"

   He grimaced and said, "So, I couldn't know. I guessed,"

   "But you must have known the Entity plays riddle games with ancient poetry. How could you possibly know that?"

   He squeezed my shoulder hard; his fingers were like clutching, wooden roots. "Don't question me, damn you! Have you forgotten your manners?"

   "I'm not the only one who has questions. The akashics and others, everyone will wonder how you knew."

   "Let them wonder."

   Once, when I was twelve years old, the Timekeeper had taught me that secret knowledge is power. He was a man who kept secrets. During the hours of our talk, he secretively moved about the room giving me no opportunity to ask him questions about this past or anything else. He ordered coffee and drank it standing as he shifted from foot to foot. Frequently, he would pace to the window and stare out at the buildings of the Academy, all the while shaking his head and clenching his jaws. Perhaps he longed to confide his secrets with me (or with anybody) - I do not know. He looked like a strong, vital animal confined within a trap. Indeed, there were some who said that he never left his tower because he feared the world of rocketing sleds and fast ice and murderous men. But I did not believe this. I had heard other gossip: a drunken horologe who claimed the Timekeeper kept a double to attend to the affairs of the Order while he took to the streets at night, hunting like a lone wolf down the glissades for anyone so foolish as to plot against him. It was even rumored that he left the City for long periods of time; some said he kept his own lightship hidden within the Caverns. Had he duplicated my discoveries a lifetime ago and kept the secrets to himself? I thought it was possible. He was a fearless man too full of life not to have needed fresh wind against his face, the glittering crystals of the number storm, the cold, stark beauty of the stars at midnight. He, a lover of life, had once told me that the moments of a man's life were too precious to waste sleeping. Thus he practiced his discipline of sleeplessness, and he paced as his muscles knotted and relaxed, knotted and relaxed; he paced during the bright hours of the day, and he paced all the long night driven by adrenalin and caffeinated blood and by his need to see and hear and be.

   I felt a rare pang of pity for him (and for myself for having to endure his petty inquisitions), and I said, "You look worried."

   It was the wrong thing to say. The Timekeeper hated pity, and more, he despised pitiers, especially when they pitied themselves. "Worry! What do you know of worry! After you've listened to the mechanics petition me to send an expedition into the Entity's nebula, then you may speak to me of worry, damn you!"

   "What do you mean?"

   "So, I mean Marta Rutherford and her faction would have me mount a
major
expedition! She wants me to send a deepship into the Entity! As if I can afford to lose a deepship and a thousand professionals! They think that because you were lucky, they'll be, too. And already, the eschatologists are demanding that if there
is
an expedition,
they
should lead it."

   I squeezed the arms of the chair and said, "I'm sorry my discovery has caused so many problems." I was not sorry at all, really. I was delighted that my discovery - along with Soli's - had provoked the usually staid professionals of our Order into action.

   "Discovery?" he growled out. "What discovery?" He walked over to the window and silently shook his fist at the gray storm clouds drifting over the City from the south. He didn't like the cold, I remembered, and he hated snow.

   "The Entity ... She said the secret of life -"

   "The secret of life! You believe the lying words of that lying mainbrain? Gobbledygook! There's no secret to be found in 'man's oldest DNA,' whatever
that
might be. There's no secret, do you understand? The secret of life is life: It goes on and on, and that's all there is."

   As if to punctuate his pessimism, just then the low, hollow bell of one of his clocks chimed, and he said, "It's New Year on Urradeth. They'll be killing all the marrow-sick babies born this past year, and they'll drink and they'll couple all day and all night until the wombs of all the women are full again. On and on it goes, on and on."

   I told him I thought the Entity had spoken the truth.

   He laughed harshly, causing the weathered skin around his eyes to crack like sheets of broken ice. "Struth!" he said bitterly, a word I took to be one of his archaisms. "A god's truth, a god's lies - what's the difference?"

   I told him I had a plan to discover man's oldest DNA.

   He laughed again; he laughed so hard his lips pulled back over his long white teeth and tears flowed from his eyes. "So, a plan. Even as a boy, you always had plans. Do you remember when I taught you slowtime? When I said that one must be patient and
wait
for the first waves of adagio to overtake the mind, you told me there had to be a way to slow time by skipping the normal sequence of attitudes. You even had a plan to enter slowtime without the aid of your ship-computer! And why? You had a
problem
with patience. And you still do. Can't you wait to see if the splicers and imprimaturs - or the eschatologists, historians or cetics - can discover this oldest DNA? Isn't it enough you'll probably be made a master pilot?"

   I rubbed the side of my nose and said, "If I petition you to mount a small expedition of my own, would you approve it?"

   "Petition me?" he asked. "Why so formal? Why not just ask me?"

   "Because," I said slowly, "I'd have to break one of the covenants."

   "So."

   There was a long silence during which he stood as still as an ice sculpture.

   "Well, Timekeeper?"

   "Which covenant do you want to break?"

   "The eighth covenant," I said.

   "So," he said again, staring out the window to the west. The eighth covenant was the agreement made three thousand years ago between the founders of Neverness and the primitive Alaloi who lived in their caves six hundred miles to the west of the City.

   "They're neanderthals," I said. "Cavemen. Their culture, their bodies ... so old."

   "You'd petition me to journey to the Alaloi, to collect tissues from their living bodies?"

   "The oldest DNA of man," I said. "Isn't it ironic that I might find it so close to home?"

   When I told him the exact nature of my plan, he leaned over and gripped my wrists, resting his weight on the arms of the chair. His massive head was too close to mine; I smelled coffee and blood on his breath. He said, "It's a damn dangerous plan, for you and for the Alaloi, too."

   "Not so dangerous," I said too confidently. "I'll take precautions. I'll be careful."

   "_Dangerous_, I say! Damn dangerous."

   "Will you approve my petition?" I asked.

   He looked at me painfully, as if he were making the most difficult decision of his life. I did not like the look on his face.

   "Timekeeper?"

   "I'll consider your plan," he said coldly. "I'll inform you of my decision."

   I looked away from him and turned my head to the side. It was not like him to be so indecisive. I guessed that he agonized between breaking the covenant and fulfilling his own summons to quest; I guessed wrongly. It would be years, however, before I discovered the secret of his indecision.

   He dismissed me abruptly. When I stood up, I discovered the edge of the chair had cut off my circulation; my legs were tingly and numb. As I rubbed the life back into my muscles, he stood by the window talking to himself. He seemed not to notice I was still there. "On and on it goes," he said in a low voice. "On and on and on."

   I left his chamber feeling as I always did: exhausted, elated and confused.

The days (and nights) that followed were the happiest of my life. I spent my mornings out on the broad glissades watching farsiders fight the thick, midwinter snows. It was a pleasure to breathe fresh air again, to smell pine needles and baking bread and alien scents, to skate down the familiar streets of the City. There were long afternoons of coffee and conversation with my friends in the cafes lining the white ice of the Way. During the first of these afternoons, Bardo and I sat at a little table by the steamed-over window, watching the swarms of humanity pass while we traded stories of our journeys. I sipped my cinnamon coffee and asked for the news of Delora wi Towt and Quirin and Li Tosh and our other fellow pilots. Most of them, Bardo told me, were spread through the galaxy like a handful of diamonds cast into the nighttime sea. Only Li Tosh and the Sonderval and a few others had returned from their journeys.

   "Haven't you heard?" he asked, and he ordered a plate of cookies. "Li Tosh has discovered the homeworld of the Darghinni. In another age it would have been a notable discovery, a great discovery, even. Ah, but it was his bad luck to take his vows at the same time as Mallory Ringess." He dunked his cookie in his coffee. "And," Bardo said, "it was Bardo's bad luck to take them then, too."

   "What do you mean?"

   As he munched his cookies, he told me the story of his journey: After fenestering to the edge of the Rosette Nebula, he had tried to bribe the encyclopaedists on Ksandaria to allow him into their holy sanctum. Because the secretive encyclopaedists were known to be jealous of their vast and precious pools of knowledge, and because they hated and feared the power of the Order, he had disguised himself as a prince of Summerworld, for him not a very difficult thing to do.

   "One hundred maunds of Yarkona bluestars I paid those filthy tubists to enter their sanctum," he said. "And even at that skin price - you'll forgive me, my friend, if I admit that, despite our vow of poverty, I had hoarded a part, just a small part of my inheritance - ah, now where was I? Yes, the encyclopaedists. Even though they gouged a fortune from me, they kept me from their sanctum, thinking that an ignorant buffoon such as I would be content to fill my head from one of their lesser pools of esoterica. Well, it did take me a good twentyday before I realized the information I was swallowing was as shallow as a melt puddle, but I'm not stupid, am I? No, I'm not stupid, so I told the wily master encyclopaedist I'd hire a warrior-poet to poison him if he didn't open the gates to the inner sanctum. He believed me, the fool, and so I dipped my brain into their forbidden pool where they keep the ancient histories and Old Earth's oldest commentaries. And ..."

   Here he paused to sip his coffee and munch a few more cookies.

   "And I'm tired of telling this story because I've had my brains sucked dry by our akashics and librarians, but since you're my best friend, well, you should know I found an arcanum in the forbidden pool that led right to the guts of the past, or so I thought. On Old Earth just before the Swarming, I think, there was a curious religious order called arkaeologists. They practiced a bizarre ritual known as 'The Diggings.' Shall I tell you more? Well, the priests and priestesses of this order employed armies of slave-acolytes to painstakingly sift layers of dirt for buried fragments of clay and other relics of the past. Arkaeologists - and this was the prime datum from the forbidden pool - were, and I quote: 'Those followers of Henrilsheman believing in ancestor veneration. They believed that communion with the spirit world could be made by collecting objects which their ancestors had touched and in some cases, by collecting the corpses of the ancestors themselves.' Ah, would you like more coffee? No? Well, the arkaeologists, like all orders, I suppose, had been riven into many different factions and sects. One sect - I think they were called aigyptologists - followed the teachings of one Flinders Petr and the Champollion. Another sect dug up corpses preserved with bitumen. Then they pounded the corpses to a powder. This powder - would you believe it? - they consumed it as a sacrament, believing as they did that the life essence of their ancestors would strengthen their own. When generation had passed into generation, on and on, as the Timekeeper would say, well, they thought eventually man would be purified and they'd be immortal. Am I boring you? I hope not because I must tell you of this one sect whose high priests called themselves kurators. Just before the third exchange of the holocaust, the kurators, and their underlings, the daters, sorters and the lowly acolytes, they loaded a museum ship with old stones and bones and the preserved corpses of their ancestors that they called mumiyah. It was their ship - they named it the
Vishnu
- which landed on one of the Darghinni worlds. Of course, the kurators were too ignorant to recognize intelligent aliens when they saw them. Sad to say, they began delving into the dirt of that ancient civilization. They couldn't have known the Darghinni have a horror of their own past - as well they should. And
that
, my friend, is how the first of the Man-Darghinni wars really began."

   We drank our coffee and talked about this shameful, unique war - the only war there had ever been between mankind and an alien race. When I congratulated him on making a fine discovery, he banged the table with his fat hand and said, "I haven't finished my story! I hope you're not bored because I was just about to tell you the climax of my little adventure. Well, after my success with the encyclopaedists - yes, yes, I admit I was successful - I was filled with joy. 'The secret of man's immortality lies in our past and in our future' - that was the Ieldra's message, wasn't it? Well, I'm not a scryer, so what can I say about the future? But the past, ah, well, I thought I'd discovered a vital link with the past. And as it happens, I have. My mumiyah may prove to contain some very old DNA, what do you think? Anyway, the climax: I was so full of joy, I rushed home to Neverness. I wanted to be the first to return with a significant discovery, you see. You must visualize it: I would have been famous. The novices would have stumbled over each other for the privilege of touching my robes. Master courtesans would have paid
me
for the pleasure of discovering what kind of man lives beneath these robes. How pungent my life would have been! But Bardo grew careless! In my hurry through the windows, I grew careless."