Neverness (27 page)

   The Devaki, I remembered, believe that every man's soul is mirrored in the soul of a particular animal, his doffel, his other-self whom he may not hunt.

   I looked around quickly, but no one was paying us any attention. Soli and Justine had returned to our hut. My mother and Katharine sat with Anala while Bardo entertained - if that is the right word - the others with a song he composed as he sang it.

   I turned to Yuri and said the first thing that came to mind, "No,
Ayeye
, the thallow is my doffel. My grandfather told me so when I became a man."

   He grabbed my arm suddenly, looking at me with his sad eye as he said, "Sometimes it is very hard to determine which animal holds our other-self. It is hard to see and mistakes are made."

   "My grandfather," I lied, for I had no grandfather whom I knew, "was a very wise man."

   Just then everyone started laughing because Bardo had mispronounced two words of his song, which had completely changed their meaning. He had meant to sing:

I am a lonely man from the southern ice

Searching for an elegant wife.

   But he had gotten the vowels all wrong, and the lines came out as:

I am a purple man from the southern ice

Searching for an elegant lice.

   He seemed not to notice his mistake, not even when Anala cackled like a snow loon, slapped her thighs and started searching through Liam's blonde hair to see if she could find Bardo any "elegant lice." Apparently, everyone thought his mistake was intentional, that he was a great wit, not just a silly buffoon.

   Yuri smiled and gripped my arm more tightly. His hands were as huge as Bardo's but harder, toughened by years of work and cold. "Sometimes," he said - and there was a peculiar urgency to his voice - "sometimes grandfathers, who are very near to their grandsons, cannot see the soul hiding behind the eyes. And you have difficult eyes, a blind man could see that. They are blue and fierce as an ice-mist, and they look far away. Can you blame your grandfather, Mauli, for mistaking your soul for the angry soul of the thallow? But Ayeye is not your doffel, I need only a single eye to see that. Nunki the seal, who loves the taste of sea-salt and the ocean's cold peace - he is your doffel."

   It is impossible to explain here the beliefs of the Alaloi. There is no space to record the rich mythologies, the totem system devised to commune with the spirits of animals and with what they call the World-soul. (In any case I am not sure I really understand the concept of telepathic communications with trees and thallows and seals, even rocks. I do not understand even now, after all that has happened - how the Alaloi creates the world moment by moment in the trance of the eternal Now-moment.) It is a complicated system and old, so old the historians have no record of its beginnings. Burgos Harsha believed the original Alaloi had borrowed piecemeal bits of Sufi mysticism and other ancient philosophies that would suit their new environment. They had also adopted, he thought, the totem system and dreamtime of Old Earth's ancient Strailia tribes. There, in the deserts of that isolated continent, man had had fifty thousand years of solitude to develop this system of symbol and thought. It was an elaborate system, logically consistent, dependent on strange hierarchies of thought and mind. There were rules by which men and women lived their lives. A man's method of building a fire, the direction in which he pisses (to the south, always to the south), the times he is permitted copulation with his wife - every aspect of life is determined by this refined system. No matter how primitive and naive it seemed to me, it represented the longest unbroken intellectual scheme in man's history. And since Yuri, as eldest of his tribe, was a master of this system, I should have accepted that he could determine the one animal I was not permitted to hunt. But I did not accept this and I said, "Tomorrow I shall hunt Nunki as I said I would."

   Yuri shook his head back and forth. He whistled the long, low note the Devaki whistle when they mourn for the dead. "It is sad," he said, "It is not well known that once in a great while a man is born who does not accept his other-self. And not accepting this he is vulnerable because the other-self will seek to destroy him rather than be left alone forever. For him there can be no joining, no unity. And so he must kill, he is doomed to kill this half of himself - do you understand? If he does not do this, the remaining half - the deathless-self - can never grow to fullness. It is very painful and hard, and I must ask you: Are you willing to be a murderer?"

   We sat there talking for a long time, gazing at the cave's walls. All the others had long since gone to bed, and there I sat listening to the words of a superstitious old man. Yuri had a richly resonant voice. With the intonation of a master storyteller - or shaman - he held me with his voice, speaking, on and on, far into the night. His words contained echoes of arcane philosophies and mysteries. His words were too simple to be taken seriously, yet they disturbed me even so. He told me that the fear of this self-murder would make me sick; he prophesied that a day would come, and soon, when my courage would flee like a snow hare into the forest, a day when I would gnash my teeth and cry: All is false! "For what is the
great
fear?" he asked me. "It is not the dread of cold nor of the white bear's teeth. These are fears of flesh, fears we forget sitting by the warm fire or playing with our wives. It is not even the fear of death because we know that if the tribe prays for our ghosts we will live forever on the other side of day. No, the great fear is the fear of the self inside. We fear becoming this deathless-self. To discover the unknown within is like jumping into the mouth of the volcano. It burns the soul. If you kill your doffel, you will come to know this fear. And you must understand, this is pain without measure or end."

   I finally limped back to our hut in a state of utter exhaustion. It had been the longest day of my life. (Excluding, of course, those days in the manifold - they were not really
days
- spent in slowtime.) I crawled through the entrance tunnel into the hut's glowing interior and found that someone had laid out my sleeping furs on a bed of snow. I climbed into them. The pain of my knee and the other pain made me lie uneasily. The oilstones were burning and they cast a warm yellow light over the sleeping figures on their snow beds. Katharine lay next to me, her breathing as even and gentle as the lapping waves of the sea. Soli, I noticed to my astonishment, was holding Justine in his arms as he slept fitfully. (I do not know which was the greater shock: this tenderness of his or to see that he, the broody Soli, was actually capable of sleep.) I was exhausted but I was also trapped in that overly stimulated state of wakefulness beyond exhaustion. I thought about Yuri's words. I could not sleep. Soli's grinding teeth, the plip-plop of water falling from the roof in syncopation with the overly loud beats of my heart, the hissing of the wind through the ice-patched hole in the wall - these sounds kept me awake. The snow walls were too good of an insulation against the cold. The hut was too warm and it stank. The heat of the sleeping bodies brought out the reek of rotting piss and my own sour sweat and other odors I could not identify. So awful was this reek that I could hardly breathe. The air smothered me like an old fur soaked with vomit. I felt a sickness and dread in the pit of my stomach. I flung off the furs, dressed quickly and ran from the hut to the mouth of the cave where I spewed my feast onto the snow. I thought of my promise to murder a seal the next day, and I retched until my stomach was knotted and dry. As I stumbled outside the cave a dog growled and snapped, and then another and another. I turned in a half-crouch back toward the cave. There, in the ragged, orange light, against the flickering tongues of fire, the dogs were leaping at their leashes. Tusa, and Nura, Rufo and Sanuye, my poor, starved sled dogs, fought among themselves, snapping up half-digested pieces of seal meat from the pink slop steaming on the snow. Tusa growled and slashed at gentle Rufo, who yelped and contented himself with lapping up one of the smaller puddles of vomit. Then Tusa ripped open Nura's ear, and Sanuye ate the slushy snow red with Nura's blood.

   I pulled the dogs apart. There was a jumble of snapping muzzles and barks and surging fur. One of the dogs bit me. I tied them tighter to their stakes, and I scooped mounds of snow over the mess I had made.

   What a terrible thing true hunger was! How wrong I was to have starved the dogs! My bleeding hand burned as I thought about this, and there was a pain in my empty stomach. Was this life, then? Was this emptiness inside and desire for food the price of living? No, I thought, it is too terrible a price, and I wondered at the vanity which had brought me to the Devaki seeking the meaning of life. The secret of life - could it really be embroidered upon the chromosomes of these filthy, blood-drinking people? Could their ancestors really have captured within their DNA the mystery of the Ieldra?

   I imagined I had the skills of a splicer and an imprimatur, that I could unravel the strands of Yuri's DNA as an historian, in his search for knowledge, might pull apart an ancient tapestry. Would I find coded among the twisting sugars and bases information that the Ieldra had woven long ago? Was there some message coiled within the testes of Wicent or Liam, some secret of meaning, a right way of living for all mankind? And if this message existed, why should it be shrouded in mystery? If the Ieldra could tell us to look in our past and future for the secret of life, why couldn't they tell us what this secret was?

   _Why couldn't the gods, if they were gods, simply talk to us?_

   I looked up at the stars, at the bright triangle of Wakanda, Eanna and Farfara twinkling above the eastern horizon. Beyond them the core of the galaxy was streaming with laser pulses in a way the mechanics could not explain. If I opened my eyes as wide as I could, would they burn with the light of the gods? If I turned my face to the distant solar wind of the core stars, would I hear the gods whispering in my ears?

   I listened but the only sound was the sigh of the wind sifting through the forest below. From the western slope of Kweitkel came the howl of a wolf calling out to the sky. I stood there for a while listening and watching, watching and waiting. After a while I turned back to the cave. Tomorrow I would kill a seal and perhaps understand, if not the secret of life, the meaning of death.

Man cannot bear too little reality.

   saying of the cetics

Early the next morning I awoke to a chorus of coughing and spitting, the sounds the women and men of the Reinalina family in the huts across the cave made as they hawked up clots of phlegm and cleared their sore throats. My throat, too, was raw from the intensely cold air of the previous day's journey. (Was it only a day ago, I wondered, that the thallow had killed Liko? It seemed like a year.) Dressing was painful. My leg was so stiff I could hardly straighten it. Although I was very hungry, I could not eat the nuts Justine offered me. "_All_ our throats are sore," she said while she roasted nuts over the fire at the center of the hut. "It hurts to swallow them, I know, but they don't taste bad if you chew them quickly, and you'll need your strength if you're really going to hunt a seal. Are you?"

   Katharine, who was on her knees dressing, looked at me as if she knew exactly what I would do. She said nothing. Soli sat by the oilstones scraping ice from his furs. I marveled at how erect and straight he could hold himself even when sitting - and this despite the pain of his newly sculpted spine. (For some reason, Soli had taken longer to heal than the rest of us. Mehtar had hypothesized that there was a limit to the resiliency of rejuvenated cells and that Soli, who had thrice been brought back to youth, was close to that limit.) He looked up, and for a moment his eyes moved over the objects and features of the hut: the rectangular block of snow used to stop the tunnelway against the drilling wind, the cracked, peeling drying rack above the oilstones, the long, serrated snow-knife, the hide-scrapers, spears, bowls, drills and other tools stacked against the curving walls, the soft, still-warm sleeping furs atop the snow bed on which he and Justine had so recently lain. He said, "Yes, Mallory will hunt the seal."

   I looked at him and lowered my voice, "We spent half a year planning this expedition but we forgot one thing."

   He contracted his black eyebrows and stroked his beard. "What thing?"

   "Coffee," I said, feeling the ache in my head. "I'm dying for the taste of coffee."

   "You're hungry," he said. "That's why your head aches."

   "I didn't say my head aches."

   "You didn't have to say anything." And then, "Do you think you're the only one who craves coffee?"

   I coughed and looked at Katharine combing her long, black hair. I said, "Perhaps this journey was a stupid idea."

   "Eat some nuts," Soli said. "Eat; don't think about coffee or your stupidity. You'll have time enough for both when we return to Neverness."

   I picked up a handful of nuts and popped them in my mouth. They tasted dry and bitter.

   "You have to chew them," Justine said. To Soli she held out a bowl of roasted nuts, which he took in the following manner: He placed his long hands over hers and watched her eyes as she slowly drew her hands away, slowly allowing him to take the weight of the bowl. With this intimate gesture they touched each other's skin and caressed with their eyes. Obviously, despite their very different motivations and dreams, despite years of mutual neglect and rancor, despite the bitterness of crueltime, they loved each other deeply. It was a love, I thought, renewed by their sense of isolation, by the clarity of frozen ice and open sky. And how not to love the beautiful Justine with her endless optimism, her zest and happiness at merely being alive? Yes, I could see why Soli loved her, because we all loved her; what I could not understand was why she loved him.

   After we had munched down our breakfast, Bardo and my mother crowded into our hut to drink a few bowls of herb tea. What a strange little group we were, sitting elbow to elbow in a circle, hunched over, sipping from our bone bowls, pretending to be Alaloi! What a miracle that we had fooled the Devaki into believing we were their near-brothers! In a way, I was glad enough to be posing as Soli's son. Everyone had accepted Soli as my father, whereas Liam had made jokes about Bardo's conception.