Neverness (44 page)

   "There's always hope."

   "No, not always," Soli said, and he covered his eyes with his hand. "We should let your son die peacefully. To drill holes in his head, that would be insane, wouldn't it?"

   "I won't let my son die."

   "You can't save him." And then, the mocking words: "It's his fate. Would you keep him from his fate?"

   "If he dies, I'll die."

   "Pilots die," he said. "Mallory was told about these things. Yes, he knew his luck wouldn't hold forever. Nobody's luck lasts that long."

   "The Lord Pilot is a scryer, then?"

   "Don't say that word to me."

   "My son is dying. And the Lord Pilot worries about the words I speak?"

   "Why speak to me at all? Yes, it would be better if you didn't speak another word ever again." He made a fist and pressed his nose so hard that it bled - so Justine told me years later.

   My mother went out to the sled and returned with a bag of flints. She spilled the stones onto her hand, sorting through them with her finger. The brown, fine-grained flints rattled against each other. "I've decided," she said. "We'll make a drill. We'll open a hole and let the blood run free. Will you help me, Justine?"

   Justine was beating the ice from our furs and working the inner skin with her teeth to keep it supple. She brushed back her hair, looked up an said, "Of course I'll help, if you think we really have to open Mallory's poor head, but it's such a dangerous thing to do, and I'm not sure it will help no matter what we do, but I'll do whatever I have to, even though I'm afraid for him, and what will we do to stop the pain when he feels the drill, and ... oh, Moira, do we really have to open his head?"

   "No," Soli said, and he gave Justine a sharp look, plainly disapproving of her support for her sister's plan. He was angry and his skin was pale; the blood was running away from his face. "The best thing to do would be to wait for him to die. Then we could open a hole in the ice, and there would be that much less weight for the dogs to pull. Yes, drop him down a hole and his fat friend, too."

   "Leopold, you don't know what you're saying!" Justine gasped.

   And my mother spat out, "The Lord Pilot
thinks
he knows. What he says with his cruel words. But he knows nothing."

   "Do not speak to me."

   "The Lord Pilot should be told that -"

   "Please do not speak."

   "My son is
dying
," my mother said, and her voice thickened into deep-throated rage.

   "Let him die."

   I heard these sounds bubbling above me: Justine's piping soprano as she took my mother's side against Soli, and the steel of Soli's deep voice, which rang like a bell about to crack. The argument continued for some time; I remember that there was something in the sound of Soli's words and in my mother's anguished plea that made me pay close attention. And then, after an instant of silence, my mother drew in a breath of air, and she spoke the worst words I had ever heard: "He's your son! Mallory is your son."

   "_My son!_"

   "He's our son."

   "_My son!_"

   "To let him die - it would be like killing a part of yourself"

   "I don't have a son!"

   "Yes, you have a son. Our son."

   And then she spoke more words that I did not want to hear, revealing heritage which I bitterly wanted to deny. Long ago, she told him - and I did not want to know this; I was nearly dead, but I knew I did not want to know this, even though a part of me had always known it, at least ever since I first saw Soli that night in the master pilot's bar - on the day before his journey to the core of the galaxy, my mother had decided that he would never return. All her life she had been jealous of Justine and envious of the things her beautiful sister possessed. Including Soli, especially Leopold Tisander Soli. She did not love him. I do not think my mother could have loved a man as a wife loves a husband. But she knew that he was the most brilliant pilot since the Tycho - even she always admitted this. She envied him his brilliance and coveted his chromosomes, which she believed to be the fount of his brilliance. Since she desired a child of her own, a brilliant child like Justine's little girl, why not pair Soli's fine chromosomes to her own? (Because it is a crime, Mother, I thought. Almost the worst crime imaginable.) The stealing of Soli's plasm had been an easy thing to do: a quick, seemingly accidental dragging of her sharp fingernails across the back of his ungloved hand one day in the Hofgarten - that was how it all began. She carefully scraped beneath her fingernails and took the few thousand epidermal cells to a renegade splicer, who split the DNA into haploid chromosomes and fashioned a set of gametes. When Soli did not return from his journey and it seemed he would never return, she used the gametes to fertilize one of her eggs and had the egg implanted in her womb. As a result of this despicable
slelling
I was conceived, and two hundred eighty days later I was born. So my mother told Soli as I worked my lips, listening to her story, struggling to deny what I dreaded was true.

   For a while there was silence in the hut. Perhaps I sank down into coma; perhaps the listening centers of my brain were growing deaf. I missed much of what Soli said to her, but I remember his shouting out, "... not my son! And when he's buried at Resa, he won't be buried as my son!"

   "He is," my mother said. "Your son."

   "You're lying."

   "Your
son
. Our son."

   "No."

   "I wanted to have your son - was this so wrong?"

   "He's a bastard. He's not my son."

   "I'll show you, then."

   "No, do not."

   "Your son," she said, and while Justine held Soli's elbow and looked on with amazement, my mother drew the wolf fur away from my head. "Come closer and look. He has the Lord Pilot's hair." Gently, she parted the hair on the side of my head opposite my wound. "Such thick black hair. But sprinkled with strands of red. Like the Lord Pilot's own. Like the hair of every Soli male, father and son. I've been plucking the red from the black. Because I didn't want you to know. But now you
must
know. Come here, then, look at your son's hair!"

   I remembered my mother plucking the supposedly "gray" hairs from my head in the Devaki's cave when she groomed me for lice, and the riddle of my heritage was no longer a riddle. She had plucked red hairs from my head, not gray. Red hairs, the hairs of the Soli lineage that sometimes do not appear until early manhood. During our expedition, perhaps due to the shocks of hunger and cold, I must have begun sprouting red hairs. I was not a bastard, then. I was something much worse. I was - and to this day I have difficulty forming this word even within the most private recesses of my mind - I was a slel-son. I had been called forth to life from Soli's DNA, from his precious chromosomes, from the very stuff of his selfhood. But it had been my mother who had called me, not he. She had used the information bound inside of him to make me, and she was therefore a slel-necker, and who could blame Soli for hating me?

   "Look at these red hairs!" my mother said as she ran her fingers through my hair. "Who else but your son? Who would have such hair, black and red?"

   "It's only blood," Soli said. "His hair is stained with blood, isn't it?"

   "Look closer, then. See? This isn't blood. You can see, can't you? You're his father."

   "No," he whispered.

   "You must help him."

   "No."

   "He'll die if you -"

   "No!" he shouted, and he jerked his arm away from Justine. It must have been clear to him that if I was really his son, then Katharine was my sister. "You knew," he said to my mother. "All this time, since the City, Katharine and Mallory ...
together
! And you
knew
?"

   "Oh, no!" Justine said.

   "Don't blame my son," my mother said. Blame Katharine. She was a scryer. She knew Mallory was her brother. And she bore his son anyway."

   "What!" Soli yelled.

   "The child. It was Mallory's son, not Liam's."

   "No!"

   Yes, Soli, I wanted to say. I am your son, and Katharine was my sister, and her son was my son, your grandson, and the chain of crime and horror goes on and on. But I could not speak; I could not move. I could only listen.

   "Katharine bewitched him," my mother said. She was very angry, and the words spilled out like poison. "She knew Mallory was her brother. Who but that witch of a scryer would mate with her own brother?"

   "Why?" Soli asked.

   "I asked Katharine why, but she wouldn't tell me."

   "You asked her?"

   "She was a witch, your daughter. A damn witch."

   "You accused her of being a witch? Then you killed her, didn't you? Yes, you killed her."

   "She deserved to die."

   Soli stood motionless for a moment, and there was madness in his eyes. And then he fell into one of his rare, terrible rages, and he slapped my mother away from me. He tried to kill her. (Or rather, to
execute
her, as he would later claim.) He tried to choke her to death even as she tore his face to meat with her fingernails and nearly crushed his stones with her knee. "Filthy slel-necker!" Soli cried out, "you
knew
!"

   I tried to rise, but as in a nightmare, I could not move.

   There was horror then, crime heaped upon crime. Justine came to her sister's rescue. She peeled Soli's fingers from my mother's throat. Soli struck out in rage. I do not believe he knew what he was doing. Once, twice, thrice, he struck, smashing my mother's chest bones, breaking Justine's teeth and jaw. My mother collapsed to the packed snow floor, writhing. Justine moaned and gagged and spat out bloody tooth fragments. "Oh, Soli!" she wept, and blood flowed from her lips, but Soli was mad, and he tried to kill his beautiful wife. He broke her arm, broke her nose, and worst of all, he broke the hard, pure love she had always had for him. The mad Lord Pilot, whose face resembled a shagshay carcass after a feast, stared down at Justine as his rage slowly drained away. He pointed at my mother. "You should have let me kill her!" he roared. "This filthy slel-necker!" He came over to my bed and pulled the furs over my head, hiding my hair and most of my face. "He's not my son," he said.

   When Soli came to his right mind, he was ashamed of what he had done. He tried to apologize to Justine, tried to help her. But she would not be helped.

   "No, no," she said, "leave me alone." Blood bubbled from her nose, and it was very hard for her to speak. However, she managed to force out, I told you thirty years ago, never again, and I'm sorry, for you, sorry for us, I truly am, but how can I trust you now, because if you can do this, you can do anything, and what will I do now?" She covered her face with her hands and cried out, "Oh, Leopold, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts!"

   "You're still my wife," he said.

   "No, no!"

   "We've been friends for more than a hundred years."

   The presumptuous tone of his voice made Justine angry (and my aunt rarely suffered from that ugly emotion), and she said, "I thought we were friends, but I was wrong."

   Soli stared at the wall of the hut. Then he made a fist and punched out one of the snow blocks, and the wind spilled in. He looked out of this makeshift window, pointing at Bardo's sled where his huge body lay strapped beneath the furs. For a long time he had kept his silence concerning Justine's and Bardo's blossoming friendship, but now he was sick with jealousy, so he said, "Yes, now you have new friends. Dead friends."

   What happened next is sad to tell. Soli's rage had left him, but the madness had grown worse. He did not realize how badly Justine and my mother were injured. He accused his wife - wrongly - of contemplating adultery. Justine was weeping into her hands, and he took this as an admission of guilt. He told her that he could never forgive her. Since the jammer would be arriving in four more days, he said, it was time to drive the sleds south to our rendezvous, or else a storm might make us miss our ship. When my mother started talking again about drilling holes in my head and Justine would not look at him, he threw his furs onto a sled, harnessed the dogs, and whispered, "Yes, drill if you want to drill, do whatever you want and meet the jammer at the rendezvous if you want to return to the City. What does it matter?"

   After he was gone, my mother wrapped Justine's face in newl skins. She set her arm and splinted it. She did this, and all the while her broken ribs rubbed and clicked and scratched at her lungs, causing her great pain. That night she made a flint drill and opened my head to let the blood out. Probably because of her drilling I did not die out on the ice. Somehow - to this day it seems miraculous that my mother and Justine were able to do so - somehow the next morning they lifted me onto one of the sleds. Somehow, they managed to lash Bardo's sled and mine in tandem and drive them across miles of sheet snow. It was a tortuous journey, a killing journey. I remember my mother screaming at every bump or divot in the snow; I remember wind and cold and pain; I remember screaming myself that my head hurt and that Soli was not my father, and many, many other incomprehensible things.

   Later the next evening, under Pelablinka's bubbling white glister, we reached the rendezvous point. There was a single snow dome sitting alone on the immense white bowl of the sea. Soli was there waiting, but he would not come out of his small hut, nor would he speak to anyone. My mother and Justine built another hut for themselves and for me. Even though I fell into a deep coma, my mother continued opening my head. "He'll live," she kept telling Justine, "if only we can get him home in time."

   We waited three days for the windjammer, three days and nights of wind and pain. Finally it came. The journey back to the City was quick; our return to the glittering spires and the crowds of professionals lining the Hollow Fields was glorious. (At least it was glorious until my mother and Justine stepped off the windjammer and our tragedy became well known.) But I was blind to glory and almost beyond pain. They took me to a dark room beneath the Fields where pilots are brought back to their youth. There the cutters went into my skull. Someone announced that despite my mother's truly delicate and remarkable efforts to save me, Seif's rock had crushed and ruined parts of my brain. After a time, someone else announced that all our sufferings had been pointless because the rescued Devaki plasm had proved to be little different than that of modern human beings. The master splicers had not found the Ieldra's message inscribed within their DNA. The secret of life remained undiscovered, perhaps undiscoverable, veiled and hidden, eternally mysterious. The Lord Cetic proclaimed that it was a pity our search had been in vain. "It's a pity too much of Mallory's brain is gone for us to bring him back. A pity he must pay the final price for nothing."