Neverness (49 page)

   "But your fat friend will return," the Timekeeper said to me at the top of his tower one day. "Even as you've returned to me. Luck! It's my bad luck that Bardo is run by his lusts. But aren't we all, eh? Have you heard the talk? So, there have been changes in the City since your damn expedition. Some of my pilots - I won't mention their names - are talking of leaving the Order. Leaving, I said! But no, they won't leave." He walked over to the chair in front of the window and gripped the curved back rail as if he would never let go. "When Bardo returns, you'll talk to him. You'll explain that it's unseemly for one of my pilots to swive the Lord Pilot's wife. Now tell me about Agathange. Sit
down
! Tell me how my bravest pilot returns to me resurrected instead of lost down the black hole of death."

   When Bardo returned thirteen days later, I was faced with the most painful of changes: The changing of a man who, like myself, had returned from the black hole of death. I met him in the Hofgarten, and we drank skotch and beer as we had in the master pilot's bar four years ago. It was an unhappy, painful afternoon of angry words and misunderstood silences. Because that day marked the beginning of
my
great change, I must record its miraculous events in greater detail.

   It is curious that I have made so little mention of the Hofgarten, for in some ways it is the most important structure in the City. The Hofgarten, a huge, domed circle of cafes and bars, sits on the cliffs overlooking the sea. The cafes are built around the rim of a great ice ring, and they support a magnificent clary dome, the largest of its kind, or so it is said, on any of the Civilized Worlds. Each cafe - or bar - has two large windows: a convex window through which one can watch the skaters as they make circles around the ice ring, and a concave window allowing a view of the Old City or the Farsider's Quarter or - depending on which segment of the rim the cafe occupies - the icy waters of the Sound. The cafes are always full of farsiders and aliens who come to informally meet the men and women of our Order. (And, sometimes, to skate inelegantly around the ice ring.) It is a festive place where the haikuists and spelists delight with their quaint entertainments. But the cafes are also thick with exemplars trying to persuade eschatologists to the logic of their breeding strategies, and with warrior-poets and democrats and merchant-princes and many others who plot, conspire and scheme. In the cafe nearest the edge of the cliff, I found Bardo hunched over a foamy mug of beer. "Alark Mandara told me I would find you here," I said.

   "Mallory! I knew you couldn't stay killed!" He jumped up from the table, shoved a wormrunner out of his way, and he threw his arms around me. "Little Fellow, Little Fellow," he said as he thumped my back and tears filled his eyes. "We're alive! By God, we are!"

   He pulled the iron table closer to the outer window so that we might have a bit of privacy. We sat down on the hard iron chairs. I looked at him, all the while tapping the toe of my boot against the black and gold triangles of the parqueted floor.

   "By God, what are you staring at?"

   Bardo, my great, strong, mountain of a friend had changed. He no longer looked like an Alaloi. He had been to a cutter who had shaped him back to his old self - almost. Apparently, he had shaven the thick black beard, and loose folds of flesh hung from his cheekbones. Without his beard he looked younger; he also seemed angry, pale and thin, like a great white bear at the end of deep winter. Too, too thin.

   "Ah, you see, it's true what they say - Bardo is not well. Am I not? No, I'm not well. Well. I shall drink beer and fill my gut with newt steaks, and I shall be well." So saying, he drained his mug and called for a large plate of meats and kafir and buttered bread. As he stuffed his cheeks, he glanced at me nervously, as if keeping a secret from me.

   "I missed you," I said.

   The cafe was fetid with people; it was noisy, full of toalache and tobako smokes. The table top was littered with dirty plates and mugs encrusted with sour-smelling beer dregs. Obviously, Bardo had been here for a while, perhaps all day, eating and drinking.

   "Two years you've been gone," he said. "The hardest two years of my life. I thought you were dead. Oh, the things I've suffered because you and your damn quest!"

   The novice whose pleasure it was to serve us, a nervous boy with large, too-sensitive brown eyes, brought me a pot of coffee and poured the aromatic liquid into a large blue mug. I sipped the coffee - it was Summerworld coffee, thick, rich delicious coffee - and I asked Bardo to tell me what had happened. As he wiped crumbs from his carmine lips, he looked at me sadly and confided his greatest fear. He tapped his head with his fingers and said, "As a pilot I'm ruined. The finest fruit of this overripe brain - I've plucked it and eaten it and spat out the seeds. My discoveries, my inspirations, my moments of genius, never to come again. It's a terrible thing, my friend, to know that the best has been, and all the remaining days of our lives lead on to rot and decay."

   He called for another beer. As the room grew ever fuller, he rubbed his forehead and glared at me. "I am not myself, you see. After your damn expedition - did you know everyone is calling it Mallory's Folly? - after we returned to the City, when the cryologists thawed me, when the cutters heated my heart ... well, by God, they waited too long! It's my brain that's rotted. Too many brain cells dead and decayed, too bad. I'm not the pilot I once was. It's gone, Little Fellow. The theorems, the associations, the beauty - all gone. I've tried to face the manifold, but I can't. I'm too stupid."

   I ordered a tumbler of skotch - Bardo had chosen one of the few cafes in the Hofgarten that served skotch - and I drank it quickly. And then another and yet another. I suddenly did not want to hear his story, his moans of self-pity. I drank quickly to drug my brain cells into stupidity, but the skotch seemed to have little effect. Perhaps, I thought, I had drunk too much coffee.

   "There's nothing wrong with your mind," I said. "In time, it will all come back. The mathematics - you're a born pilot."

   "I am?"

   "Soli once said you could be the finest of pilots."

   "He did? He said that? Well, he's wrong. My brilliance is dead along with the brain cells, and ... and other things, too."

   "What other things?" I asked him.

   "Other things." He stared at the tabletop's etched flower patterns and would not look at me.

   "Tell me," I said.

   "No, I can't."

   "Tell me."

   "You'll laugh at me."

   "I promise I won't."

   "No, I can't tell you."

   "Tell me."

   "It's too embarrassing, Little Fellow, too, too, embarrassing."

   "You've never kept secrets from me before," I said.

   "I don't know how to tell you."

   "Well, just tell me."

   "I can't."

   "With your lips, just speak the words, then."

   "No, no."

   I looked through the spaces between the table's delicate, wrought flowers down at his lap. His wool pants were loose over his belly. "Have you been cured of Mehtar's poison? Tell me."

   "Ah, you've guessed it haven't you? But what is there to tell? When the cryologists thawed me, I went to a new cutter who changed my body back to the magnificence of my old self. And he cured me of Mehtar's poison, cured me too well, by God! You should know, I no longer suffer from the nightly risings of my spear; I no longer suffer its rising at night or during the day or ... or ever. It's gone: Bardo's mighty spear softened like a rotting log. Oh, too bad, too bad!"

   Although I wanted to laugh at him, I did not laugh. I did not even smile. "Sometimes," I said, "the cure is worse than the curse."

   "Don't repeat banalities."

   "I'm sorry."

   "Ah, of course you are. Well, I've searched for Mehtar, but it seems he's closed his cutting shop and fled the City." He took a long pull at his beer and continued: "I was so distraught over the loss of my ... of my
powers
, that I let the new cutter stipple the root cells of my face. "No one wears beards anymore" that's what he said, so I let him denude my face. So here I sit, beardless like a boy. I look ridiculous, I know. This is a face to be ashamed of, which is why you see me as I am, sitting here all day swigging beer."

   As if to emphasize the poignancy of his story, he gulped his beer and sat stroking his bare upper lip. With his cheeks and lips uncovered for the first time since his novice years, I was forced to consider that most unpleasant aspect of his face: Bardo, my charismatic, ugly friend, had no chin. Worse, his tendencies toward sloth and cowardice had shaped his naked face as time sculpts a mountain. Without a beard, he seemed at once boyish and cruel, saintly and damaged. And unhappy as well, too unhappy for his - or the Order's - own good.

   I stroked the beard over my thick jaw, and I decided to wait a while before sculpting my body back to its old self. In truth, I did not really mind looking like an Alaloi.

   We drank our beverages and talked about our glorious journeyman years at Resa and other things not so glorious. I listened to his deep bass vibrating above the chaotic rattle of knives and plates, the low boil of voices all around us. I turned to look through the inner window into the ice ring. There were journeymen in their kamelaikas, master pilots, academicians and high professionals - all of them skating and talking. Bardo pointed at Kolenya Mor as she attempted a waltz double and fell on her plump buttocks.

   "Have you heard the gossip?" he asked. "Ah, I'm sure you've heard the gossip. Justine made the mistake of confiding in Kolenya, and now the whole Order knows about us." He drank some more beer and muttered, "They
think
they know."

   "Is it true, then? You and Justine? My Aunt Justine? How can that be? Intime, she's a hundred years older than you."

   "Time, what's time?" he asked. "Forgive me if I speak poetically, but after a time, ah, after a woman has reached a sort of final maturity, her soul has unfolded like a fireflower and no amount of time can extinguish the flame or attenuate the colors. And Justine's soul is a perfect flower, as beautiful as a violet sunset, as timeless as the sun. It's her soul that I love, Little Fellow. Her soul."

   "You love her? I remember you once told me it was wrong for a man to love a woman too fully."

   "Did I? Well I was stupid, wasn't I? Yes, it's true, I love her. Bardo has fallen - oh, how I've fallen! I love her deeply; I love her continuously; I love her absolutely; I love her passionately, and I would love her wantonly, if I could."

   "But she is Soli's wife."

   "No, no, not any longer. When Soli abandoned her, he divorced her in spirit, if not by law."

   The smoke in the cafe was dense and irritating; my eyes were stinging, so I rubbed them slowly. "But we live in a city of law, don't we?" I said. "The laws of the Order.

   He licked his nude upper lip and said, "Do I hear the Timekeeper's voice speaking through yours? Or is this the voice, of my friend lecturing
me
on law?"

   "My voice is my own," I said. "I speak for myself, as a friend to a friend: Listen to me, Bardo, we're
pilots
, aren't we? We've taken vows."

   "Ah, you
are
lecturing me on law, by God! I would think that you, of all men, would appreciate the need to go beyond law."

   "Why? Aren't I a man like anyone else?"

   "Well, you've always been different, even from your ungodly conception-you were born out of law, weren't you? When your mother slelled Soli's -"

   "It doesn't matter how I was born; I don't want to speak about this again."

   "I'm sorry, Little Fellow. But I was merely remarking on the relativity of law. Wasn't it you who petitioned the Timekeeper to slel plasm from the poor Devaki?"

   I gulped my skotch and quickly downed two more tumblers. But I was so drunk with anger that the alcohol had no effect. "There is the law of the City, and of course there is a higher law. I wish I knew what that higher law was."

   "And yet you raped the Devaki for their tissues, by God, you did!"

   I let go of my tumbler and turned my palms to my eyes. My voice was hoarse as I said, "Once, I thought I could see the higher things so clearly, but I was only seeing my wants, my vanity, my passion for what I supposed was truth. I was always fooling myself that I was an organ, even a part of a higher law, a higher order of things. I could feel it, Bardo; at times I could almost see it. But there are false feelings and false vision, aren't there? What am I, then? I'm a man like you, like anyone else. Once, I placed myself above the law of men, and now Katharine is dead. And Liam. I murdered him with these hands."

   "Well, there is the Law of Survival," he said. "That's the highest law of all."

   I thought of Agathange, and other things, and I said, "No, that is not the highest law."

   "What could be higher than that?"

   "I don't know."

   Later, after our evening meal, Justine entered the cafe and came straight over to our table. Bardo stood up quickly and took her hand. He seemed at once annoyed yet pleased to touch her. "I thought we had agreed not to be seen together," he said.

   She shot him a look which he must have immediately understood, because he nodded his head, then asked, "Ah, what's wrong? What's happened?"

   "Haven't you heard the news?" Her voice was raw and breathy, as if she had been skating fast for a long way. And then, "Mallory, I'm so happy to see you!"

   We embraced and I bowed my head to her. She had changed since our return from our expedition two years ago. Gone was her Alaloi body, her Alaloi nose, her Alaloi brow, teeth and chin. She had been resculpted. With her pouting, full lips and long black hair, she was the same tall, beautiful Aunt Justine I had always known. If she was not quite so lithe as she had been, if her breasts were a little fuller, her hips broader, her thighs a little too thick with voluptuous fat - well, I thought, that would please Bardo endlessly.