Neverness (45 page)

   There must always come a time when our luck runs out, when the ticking of the clock must finally stop. Neither the cetics nor the cutters nor the imprimaturs could help me. To preserve a flawed, damaged brain would have been a crime, and for me it would have been hell, the everness of a life without sound or sight or love or hope. Far better to embrace fate at the right time, and it would be far easier, like falling down a black spiral stairway longer than the one in the Timekeeper's Tower, the stairway without light, without end. And so in a small, dark room almost within sight of Resa's Morning Towers, on a cold, snowless day in deep winter, I turned my gaze inward to the deeper darkness and fell. To this day I have not stopped falling.

   In Neverness I died my first death.

Much of death depends on state of mind.

   Maurice Gabriel-Thomas, Swarming Centuries Programmer

Who can know what it is to be a god? Who can say which of the carked races of man - the Elf-men of Anya and the Hoshi, the Newvanian Arhats and all the others - have attained to the godly, and which are extremely long-lived women and men wearing bizarre and sometimes beautiful bodies? How much wisdom must a race acquire before it is deemed worthy of the godhead? How much knowledge, how much power, how final an immortality? Are the god-kings of the Eriades cluster - they who build a ringworld around Primula Luz - are these human computers merely clever men or something more profound? I do not know. I know little of the art of eschatology, of its tidy classifications and endless debates. Kolenya Mor argues that what really matters is not the status of a race, but its direction. Are the Agathanians, for instance, moving godward or have they reached an evolutionary dead-end? To me, who came as a corpse to the mysterious planet called Agathange, there was only one criterion upon which to judge the question of Agathanian godhead, and it was this: How much of the great secret did they know? Did they, who swam through Agathange's warm, eternally blue waters, possess the secret of life and an answer to death?

   I have said before that Neverness is the most beautiful city on all the planets, but Icefall, while beautiful in its own frigid way, is not the most beautiful of the planets. Agathange is the most beautiful planet. As seen from deep space, she is a glittering blue and white jewel floating in a diamond-etched bowl of black amber. (I should mention that I had my first glimpse of the whole planet only after my resurrection and departure. Upon my arrival, of course, I saw nothing because I was dead.) The stars surrounding Agathange swim with light; looking upward from the luminous, lapping waves the sky is brilliant. Only on cloudy nights is the sea dark, and even then it is the darkness of quicksilver and cobalt rather than that of obsidian or black ink. The sea - the single ocean which covers all the planet except for a few small islands - is warm and peaceful. It teems with fish and other sea life. Schools of taofish and konani numbering in the tens of millions swim through the sparkling waters of the shoals and shallows, while in the deeps of the true ocean, the larger ranita hunt other fish which have no names. Flying fish, perhaps drunk with the sheer delight of racing through the tropical whorls and hollows, school in such profusion that the sea's surface for miles often seems aquiver with a carpet of arching silver. It was this overwhelming abundance of life, I think which led the first Agathanians to cark their human bodies into seal-like shapes, to escape into the whisperless depths and fill the ocean with their mutable, godling children.

   "Properly, the Agathanians are god-men, not gods," as Kolenya Mor later told me. "They do not seek personal immortality; they do not desire to escape the prison of matter, as the Ieldra did, nor do they attempt to remake the universe to their liking." They had come to Agathange, she said, on the first wave of the Swarming. The most common story of their origin - and the one that happens to be true - is this: Long ago, at the end of the Holocaust's third interlude, a group of ecologists fled Old Earth in one of the first deep ships. With them they carried the krydda-preserved zygotes of narwhals, dolphins, sperm whales and other extinct sea mammals. When they discovered a world of fecund oceans and sweet, untainted air, they quickened the zygotes and nursed the baby whales through their childhood terrors of sharks and other predators. When the whales had grown - and grown - and had absorbed the oceans of whalesong preserved within the ship's computer, the ecologists released them into the blue bed of the sea. They saw how happy the animals were, and they held a celebration, drinking casks of centuries-old wine and smoking a seaweed they discovered and named toalache. Days later they came to their right senses. They were envious and sad because they could never know the joy of the whales they saved. The master ecologist said that man, with his monkey hands and desire to own pieces of land and other things, had nearly ruined the Earth. Man was an unfortunate terrestrial species flawed by form and by nature. Ah, but what if that form and nature were changed? And so the ecologists smoked their toalache, and they saw visions of their life as it could be, and they bred their children to have pointed noses and flippers and fluked tails. They named their watery world Agathange, which means, "place where all things move toward the ultimate good." There, for thousands of years, the Agathanians carked and bred their children, whether to ultimate good or evolutionary abomination not even the eschatologists can say.

   Perhaps seeking her own ultimate good (or perhaps simply because she had given me life and she loved me), my mother determined to bear my ruined, krydda-preserved body to Agathange. She knew in detail the story of Shanidar. Once, the god-men had restored him to life - could they do less for a
pilot
of our famous Order? She found passage on a deepship traveling out beyond the Purple Cluster. She surrendered my corpse to a group of Agathanians (actually, they were more of a family) who called themselves the Host of Restorers. She was then invited to leave Agathange, to wait in one of the tiny hotels which orbit the planet, while the Restorers worked - or failed to work - their miracles.

   She waited a long time. The painstaking repair of my brain lasted the greater part of two years. (I am speaking of Neverness years, of course. On Agathange there is only one season - forever spring - and the many hosts measure time in terms of their degree of advancement toward ultimate planetary consciousness. But I am getting ahead of my story.) For most of the first year I lay suspended beneath the buoyant sea while Balusilustalu and others restored parts of my brain with temporary prosthetics. These clumsy, cortically implanted biochips were only meant to get my heart and limbs and lungs moving again; the tiny computers were too crude to help me regain much of my speech function, nor was I able to remember large portions of my life. My first thought after awakening among a host of a thousand, black, gliding, slippery bodies was that I had gone over to the other side of day, and the doffels of all the seals I had killed had come to ask me why I was insane.

   It is a truism, a discovery of the ancient scryers, that any civilization made by gods will appear to humans as incomprehensible and miraculous. How, then, can I describe the Agathanian miracle when I still do not comprehend all the details, the complexities of their fabulous technology? I will tell of what I know: The ocean was full of created organisms, many of which were one third computer, one third robot, one third living thing. Most of these tiny tools were microscopic in size. There were programmed bacteria of every size and shape, eubacteria, spherical cocci, and spirochetes with their whiplike tails. They floated among the engineered phytoplankton; the water was rich with flagellates, single-celled and colonial algae, diatoms with their beautiful symmetry, the little jewels of the sea spinning out silicates or carbon fibers or whatever else they had been designed to manufacture. Mostly though, the Agathanians were concerned with the manipulation of proteins. The entire ocean was a stew pot for making, dissolving, and reassembling proteins. It was an ancient technology: Restriction enzymes, which were nothing more than protein machines, were used to cut, rearrange and splice bits of a bacterium's DNA. But the Agathanians, being gods, had unraveled more of the mysteries of DNA than our City's splicers ever would. They had created wholly new forms of DNA. And in the trillions of cells of the created organisms all through the waters of Agathange, the DNA was transcribed, its information read and copied into RNA. And the RNA instructed the cells' natural molecular machines, the ribosomes, to build proteins: new enzymes, hormones, muscle protein, hemoglobin, neurologic circuitry to weave into the miniscule computer-brains of new bacteria, protein of every conceivable shape and function, a potentially infinite variety of protein.

   "The variety of life is endless," Balusilustalu would say to me one day. "What do human beings know of life? So little, so little, ha, ha! On Agathange even some of the bacteria - ah, but are they bacteria or are they computers, do you know? - even the pyramid bacteria are intelligent. There are infinite possibilities."

   As on other worlds, the ocean swarmed with copepods, salps, annelid worms, sponges, and jellyfish, and with squid, swallowers, sharks and other fishes higher on the food chain. But in the water there were other things as well, bizarrely shaped animals which looked like crushing or cutting machines, and there were machines which looked like animals. The Agathanians made these things, or I should say, they designed assembler enzymes to make them. (I will call them assemblers because they were really enzymelike machines.) The ribosomes of programmed bacteria pumped out assemblers designed for specific tasks. Assemblers sifted through the water, constructing large molecules by seizing and bonding bits of carbon or silicon, atoms of gold, copper, sodium, any and every element dissolved into the warm, salty stew of the ocean. Lipid molecules, hormones, chlorophyll, and new twists of DNA - the assemblers welded them into organisms which were half plant, half animal. Assemblers bonded carbon atoms layer upon layer, and so the sea-nymphs spun their networks of diamond fibers, building their beautiful, glittering nests. Assemblers bonded atom to atom, sticking them together like marbles with glue. The Agathanians could - and did - assemble atoms into any arrangement permitted by natural law. They linked molecular conductors to voltage sources within living tissues and shaped electric fields directly and in new ways. If they had wanted to, they could have built a city beneath the waters; I believe they could have made a whale as big as a deepship; perhaps they could have woven circuitry into a whale's nerves and muscles and created a living lightship to sail the cold currents of space. There was nothing they could not fabricate, disassemble and re-create molecule by molecule, neuron by neuron, including a man.

   And so Balusilustalu and my host of Agathanians altered my body to breathe both air and water. Somehow they sliced through my brain and managed to keep my cortex free of phytoplankton and seaworms and other muck. For my comfort, they raised up an island, from the sea bed. They made the trees to grow and blossom and bear fruit, all within a few days. Other things did not happen so quickly. Inside I was changing slowly, day by day, one cell at a time. By the end of my first year on Agathange, I was spending half my time in the water, half on land. I wandered my little island, wondering who I was and why I was alone. I picked tart fruits from the trees; they tasted like snow apples. But they were more sustaining than snow apples. Indeed, the Host of Restorers had designed a single food which nourished me better than the fish swimming through the island's lagoon would have done. Soon, however, I tired of eating fruit. I began to crave silvery fish, to crave meat, anything that twitched or swam or moved. I longed to shape a tree branch into a pronged trident, to spear a fat wingfish, to fillet it with my overgrown fingernails and suck down the salty meat. But I was forbidden to do so. Balusilustalu had pronounced that I was to enter the water only during those semiconscious moments when my brain was opened.

   "You do not understand the sea, and you do not know what you are permitted to eat, and you do not know what is permitted to eat you," she said to me one day after she had restored the perception of the color azure to my visual cortex. (I call Balusilustalu "she" even though she was not entirely female. But she, like almost every Agathanian, was much more female than male.) She was flopped up on the beach of my island, laughing at me so hard that her long torso jiggled, rings of beautiful fat rippling beneath her glistening skin. On her flippers she had claws; she used these claws to draw figures of animals on the wet beach sand. For an Agathanian, her neck was very long and sinuous, as graceful as a swaying seasnake. I should mention that the god-men - the god-_women_ - did not all look alike. Some took on the appearance of sea-cows while others were like dolphins, otters or even whales. They bred their children to a thousand different shapes; a City ecologist would swear they were not of a single species. But for all their differences, they shared a common feature: Their eyes were human. Balusilustalu had large brown eyes, intelligent eyes, eyes full of irony and humor. She looked at me with those eyes, all the while speaking to me in her sophisticated language of barks and grunts and clicks. I understood this language clearly. Later, after the translating biochips had been removed from my brain, it would all sound like gobbledygook.

   But she knew everything about my human speech. "Meat's meat," I said, not remembering then that I was a man of the City. "A man must hunt meat to live."

   "You are a stupid man, ha, ha, not a shark - eat the fruit of the trees; the trees are for you."

   She seemed contemptuous of me in the same way a new journeyman feels superior to a novice. Did she expect me to spend my days climbing trees as if I were a monkey? In no matter was her contempt more obvious than at my attempt to understand Agathanian society. "Even if your brain were whole," she said, "you could not hear the sea talking to you. "You are a
mathematical
man seeking immortality for yourself, ha, ha! What can you know of the World-soul?" But then, "Wait, wait, we must wait until you remember yourself, and then wait some more to see if you understand the simple things."