Neverness (48 page)

   One final time they opened my brain, but they did not so physically. They opened me with their thoughts, and with their love. With their need.

   - You are restored, and it is time for you to leave.

   - There's something inside me, now. Something that I can't quite articulate, can't even think. The key - tell me about the orcas.

   - Feel the freedom of the waves inside you.

   - Why can't a god give a man a simple answer?

   - You're still a stupid man, ha, ha!

   - You haven't told me everything.

   - We've told you the secret of life.

   - No, there's no secret.

   - Stupid, stupid, oh, ho!

   - Why did you restore me?

   - Because it was fun.

   - Why?

   - Why? Why? Why? Because you are Mallory Ringess, the pilot who has been inside Kalinda, and because she has been inside you.

   - Kalinda?

   - You call her the Solid State Entity, but her name is Kalinda. And Kalinda knows the secret.

   - The secret of life?

   - She knows the secret of the Vild. You could say it's the secret to life in this galaxy.

   - I don't understand.

   - The hosts sing to the life of Agathange and to the ocean, and sometimes we even sing to the sun, but we cannot stop the stars of the Vild from exploding.

   - No one can.

   - You can, ha, ha!

   - No, I'm afraid not. I'm just a stupid man.

   - Oh, ho, you're something more!

   - What am I?

   - Someday you'll know.

   - What?

   - What? What? What? You're Mallory Ringess, the man whose brain has been made as vast as the sea of Agathange. Do you not feel
vaster
? As the sea swells to wind and rain, so will you rise to the storms of your life. There are
possibilities
, Pilot Man, and they will unfold, one by one. Someday, when you have been even further
vastened
, you will ask Kalinda why the Vild is growing. We would ask her ourself [sic; not "ourselves" - reb], but Kalinda hates us and there are hierarchies. The lesser gods must bow to the greater.

   - I'll never return to the Entity.

   - Someday you will return because it is your fate to return and because we ask you to return.

   - Why?

   - Because the stars are dying and we are afraid.

   I often think that fear is the worst thing there is. The Hosts of Agathange said goodbye to me, then. They swam out into the quickest part of the current. One by one the sperm whales took in great breaths of air and dived. The dolphins smiled and whistled goodbye and followed them. And then the gray whales and the sei whales, the bowheads and blues and others of the mysticeti disappeared beneath the sea. I saw no orcas that day, and I never learned their dark secrets. All around me, from horizon to horizon, the water was blue, empty and still. In the distance, the glistening sands of my little island beckoned. I treaded water and shook the long wet hair away from my eyes, and I looked closer. It wasn't the sand which glistened in the sun; it was the hull of my mother's shuttle. Somehow the Hosts had informed her of my restoration and sent a ship to fetch her. She was waiting to take me home. As I began the long swim back to shore, I heard the waves of consciousness swelling and roaring within me, and I never felt so afraid or so alone.

The brain is not a computer; the brain is the brain.

   saying of the akashics

Some say Neverness is the true Eternal City, the city that will never die. For three thousand years she has stood as a testament to man's ability to endure. In her granite spires and towers, in her gleaming domes, her streets of fire, in the eyes of her pilots and the farsiders burns the cold flame of our immortality, the soul of mankind. I do not know if she will last for thirty thousand more years, as the scryers prophesy, or for thirty million years. Will the planets last that long? Will the stars? As a child of the city, I have always believed her fate is intertwined with man's fate. She is the topological nexus of this brilliant galaxy, and she is also the City of Light to which all seekers someday come. There are secrets buried here; there are wonders; there are glories. Neverness, I believe, is eternal in the way that our dreams are eternal; she will endure as long as the race who made her.

   So, she is eternal, and she is beautiful, and she embodies man's very essence. But I must not rhapsodize too strenuously or too long. Our human natures are many-layered. "Verily, a polluted stream is man," as the Solid State Entity once quoted to me. And Neverness, that quintessential city of man, is a stratified city. She is layered with the finest of mathematicians and imprimaturs and phantasts, as well as the sludge of autists, exemplars, and Yarkona slel-neckers. Strange new sects continually change the composition of the City, clogging the glidderies with bewildered (and bewildering) people. She is a beautiful city - I cannot say this often enough - a city of truth. But she is also a city polluted with politics and intrigues and plots; often she is a quicksilver city of sudden change.

   On the eighteenth day of false winter in the year 2933, I returned to the streets and spires of my childhood. The city seemed subtly changed. There were the new buildings, of course. In the Zoo, there was a huge balloonlike, purple aerodome which housed the embassy of the new, winged aliens called the Elidi. (I should mention that there was an ongoing, violent debate among the eschatologists and other professionals as to whether the diminutive Elidi were true aliens or were merely one of the many carked, lost races of man. It was a time of violent debates, as I soon discovered.) The College of Lords, those crusty old women and men who ruled our Order, had at last approved and erected the tower celebrating the founding of the profession of phantasts. The phantasts' tower stood among the spires of the Old City; it was a strange building of sweeping curves and odd angles, a disturbing building. Its opalescent facade seemed to catch and hold, at different times, all the colors of the City. Like the compositions of the phantasts themselves, the longer one tried to engrave an image of the tower on the mind's eye, the more it shifted and changed. There were new sects, too, skulking down the back glidderies. Near Rollo's Ring in the Farsider's Quarter, I saw a neurosinger, with his cortically implanted biochips, singing himself unending songs of electric bliss. He made me feel uneasy, probably because he seemed too happy. He accosted me, grabbing the sleeve of my kamelaika, and he claimed a spiritual kinship with me, as all neurosingers did with pilots. After I had explained that we pilots were forbidden to continually interface with our ship's computer (or any other computer), I shunned him as a pilot should. And there were old sects, too: Friends of God off Simoom, and ancient Maggids chanting their histories of what they called the first Diaspora, as well as the ever-present autists, harijan, hibakusha and refugees from the stars of the Vild. There were too many warrior-poets - I noticed this immediately. Of course, one warrior-poet is too many, but on the Street of the Ten Thousand Bars, and along the Way, and in the cafes, ice rings and squares, during one long afternoon, I counted ten of them. Why, I wondered, were there so many of the deadly warrior-poets in my city?

   For me it was a time of many questions and few answers. On Agathange, my mother had recounted the disastrous end of our expedition. I remembered, on my own, that Soli was my father. And worse things. Of course, neither of us could know what had happened in Neverness during our two year absence. Immediately upon returning, I asked the Lord Akashic for the news, and there was good news along with the tragic: Bardo was alive! The cryologists had thawed him, healed his ruined heart, and restored him to life. He was off somewhere in the manifold, piloting for the first time since the Timekeeper called his summons for the quest. But others were not alive. I skated down narrow glidderies during the deepest part of night, and I saw Shanidar's toothless face smiling at me from the shadows. Wherever I could, I avoided scryers. The flash of a white robe or white fur ahead of me on the street was enough to send me stumbling through the doorways of strange bars and phantast dens. Once I came upon the false-corpse of a molting Scutari. Its red coils of muscle reminded me of too many things I had seen among the Devaki. Everything reminded me of the expedition. I could not stop thinking of Katharine. I was full of sad, wild ideas: I would return alone to the Devaki and recover Katharine's body; I would take her to Agathange; and when she was healed, I would marry her, and we would leave the Order, find some beautiful, pristine planet and make a new race of our own. In my more sober moments, I admitted that Katharine's body had probably long since decayed and been eaten by bears; it did not exist. She was far beyond the restoring arts of the Agathanians or any other gods.

   Because the Agathanian godseed was burning inside me, because I was afire with fear, I went to the Lord Akashic and asked him to make a model of my brain. But he could not help me. (Neither did the cetics, holists, or imprimaturs help me when I went to them.) In his dark wood-paneled chambers, Nikolos the Elder played with the folds of fat hanging from his little face as he lowered the heaume of the akashic computer over my head. He mapped the base structures of my brain, the amygdala and the cerebellum, the fear-producing limbic system and the folds of the parietal lobe. He mapped my brain from cortex to stem, and then he modeled the synapses of the temporal lobes.

   "To begin with, as you must know, Mallory, the virus has replaced neurons all through the brain. It's magic, of course, and I can't explain it. For instance, in the cluster below the sylvan fissure - it's all new. That's where your time sense is - well, it's really nowhere and everywhere, but it
originates
there, do you understand?"

   "If I understood what the Agathanians had done to me, I would not have come to you, Lord Akashic. My brain, the hologram, myself - is it preserved or does it change? I need to know."

   "Such a miracle!" he said. He shrugged his shoulders and pulled at his pendulous ear lobe. "Well, the hologram
is
preserved, after all. I think. No, no, no - don't worry and don't bother me with any more questions. You'll return here every tenday, and we'll make a new mapping. No, make that every five days - this is a rare chance. The magic of gods! It's too bad we can't detach your head from your torso, arrange a nutrient bath, and model your brain moment by moment - No, no, I'm just joking, don't look at me like that!"

   Soon after my arrival, I tried to confront Soli. But he, the vain glorious Lord Pilot of our Order, my uncle, my
father
, would not see me. I wanted to seize his hand in mine, to study the shape and contours of his long fingers for an answer to the riddle of my own. I would make him go with me to the imprimatur for a genotyping. I told myself I wanted proof that he really was my father, but in truth, I was desperate for any evidence at all that I was not his son. For most of a morning I waited in an anteroom outside his chambers at the top of the Danladi Tower. At last a tall, pimply novice emerged from between the arched, obsidian doors, and he told me, "The Lord Pilot is working on a theorem. You may have heard of it - it's called the Continuum Hypothesis. He's sworn to remain sequestered until he proves it."

   I was amused at the novice's rude, arrogant manner. Soli was known to choose arrogant novices to serve him. "How long has the Lord Pilot been at his work, then?"

   "He's been alone for most of two years."

   "Then the Lord Pilot won't see me?"

   "He won't see anyone."

   "Not even me?"

   "And who are you?" he asked. "Dozens of pilots, master pilots such as yourself, have tried to see him, even his friends, but he wants to be alone."

   I was glad that he did not seem to know I was Soli's son. Soli would want to keep this a secret, no doubt. The novice was beginning to annoy me, so I stood up and looked down at him. He blushed, and his pimples became even redder. Perhaps he had heard that I had murdered a man; perhaps he was intimidated by the smile on my still-savage face or by the wildness in my eyes, because he suddenly remembered his manners.

   "I'm sorry, Master Mallory," he said. "But the Lord Pilot would not want to see you in any case. He hasn't been the same since Justine left him, since your, uh ... expedition. And you are Bardo's friend, and Bardo and Justine are, uh ...
friends
, and everyone knows it, too, I think. You
have
heard the rumor, haven't you, Master Pilot?"

   I had heard the rumor. Everyone said that Justine had left Soli because he was a cruel, wild man. He had broken her jaw one day out on the ice when he had fallen into rage. In revenge, so the rumor went, she had befriended Bardo, and more, she had begun sharing his bed. Some even said they had shared the pit of Bardo's lightship, laying bare their brains to each other, floating together in nude bliss. Could it be true? Had their separate selves joined within the neurologics of the
Blessed Harlot
? Had they shared the same extensional brain, solved the same theorems, viewed the manifold through the same inner eyes, thought the same thoughts? Although there was no proof of this forbidden telepathy, it was the scandal of the Order. Many of Justine's former friends - fine master pilots such as Tomoth of Thorskalle, Lionel Killirand and Pilar Gaprindashavilli - had spoken against her, demanding that the Timekeeper punish her or even banish her from the City, and banish Bardo, too. Others had remained more faithful. Cristoble [sic; probably "Cristobel" - reb] the Bold had announced that if Justine were banished, he and
his
friends would leave the Order with her. Perhaps, he said, they would flee to Tria and join the merchant pilots; perhaps they would find a new planet and found an order of their own.

   Of course, this vicious rumor had quickly reached the ear of the Timekeeper. Immediately that grim, old man had reminded Bardo of his oath to quest for the Ieldra's secret, and he had ordered him into the manifold.