Neverness (52 page)

   "Of course I'm a coward," Bardo said. "But when we were younger, you had the grace never to call me a coward. Even when I
was
a coward."

   "I'm sorry."

   He kicked the broken jewel again and then looked at my drooping shoulder. He said, "You fell into slowtime, didn't you?"

   "It's worse than that."

   "Without facing your goddamned ship - you slowed time?"

   "I stopped time."

   "That's impossible," he said. "No one can stop time."

   "I can."

   "By God, it's a miracle!"

   "Inside, what the Agathanians call their godseed - it's remaking my neurons, and maybe my nerves. Even now, as I speak the changes ... how can I know what the changes will be? I seem to still be myself, I believe I am, but -"

   "You
are
yourself. Wouldn't
I
know if Mallory was no longer Mallory?"

   "I'm sorry for what I said, Bardo. I'm wild and impulsive, and I have no self-restraint."

   "By God, that's the Mallory that I know!"

   I clasped my hand to my injured shoulder and said, "And I'm afraid."

   "Ah, there's nothing worse than fear, is there?"

   "I'm afraid of losing myself."

   He put his arm around my back and half-lifted, half-carried me to the sliddery. "Little Fellow," he said, "you can never lose yourself. And you can never lose your friends, at least not such a friend as I."

   He promised me then that he would never leave the Order of his own choice, even if the sky filled with a thousand supernovas. "In my soul I love this City and my friends almost as much as I love Justine. I would save her if I could. Which is why I'll tell you what I shall tell you. Hold your breath, Little Fellow, because I've some hard news for you."

   So I learned that in Neverness, the City of Light, the Last City, the City of a Thousand Plots, there was a plot to remake the Order. It was almost as if the City had been waiting for me to return from Agathange. Since then, a group of pilots and professionals had been plotting to change things according to their designs. And architect of the plot, Bardo told me sadly, reluctantly - the leader of the conspirators who would unmake the Timekeeper and perhaps everything else was my mother, the master cantor, Dama Moira Ringess.

What good is a warrior without a war, a poet without a poem?

   saying of the warrior-poets

Later that day I tried to find my mother. But her little house in the Pilot's Quarter was empty. I went to her friends, Helena Charbo and Kolenya Mor, among others, but no one seemed to know where she was. And no one seemed willing to admit that there was a plot to overthrow the Timekeeper, much less remake the Order. Bardo had obviously been listening too hard to the gossips, Kolenya told me. And according to Burgos Harsha, who nervously picked at his bushy eyebrows as I talked to him, there was no plot. "It's true many of the pilots are unhappy," he said. "But who would
plot
against the Timekeeper? Who - and I might add that there
are
pilots and professionals who might be willing to campaign for certain changes, but changes
within
the structure of the canons, of course, legally, legally - who would be so stupid?"

   When a few days passed and still my mother did not return to her house, I began to worry. Li Tosh swore he had seen my mother in the company of a warrior-poet one night near the Merripen Green in the Farsider's Quarter. This was proof that she was alive, he said, and I should not worry. Perhaps my mother had finally taken a lover. But I did worry; I was ill with worry. I did not believe she had taken a lover. Then why else would she seek out a warrior-poet? Why do otherwise reasonable people risk contact with warrior-poets, if not to have their enemies murdered? And who was her main enemy, if not Soli? She had slelled Soli's DNA to make me, and this was a great crime. Soli could even demand that the Timekeeper have her beheaded, if Soli desired revenge, if he would acknowledge that I was his son. I
knew
Soli would never admit this to anybody, not even to himself. But could my mother be sure? No, she could not be sure, and so she plotted her plots and hid in the Farsider's Quarter and consorted with murderers - all without bothering to confide in me. Obviously, she did not trust me.

   If I have given the impression that the whole of our Order was busy with plots and politics, this was not so. There was always the quest. Great discoveries were still being made; for a few, it was still a time of inspiration and daring. Two years ago, while I hunted silk belly in Kweitkel's forest, a team of five pilots had proposed to penetrate the Silicon God. Only one of them, Anastasia of The Nave, had returned to tell of wild spaces more impenetrable than those of the Entity. Another pilot, the fabulous Kiyoshi, had come across a planet believed to be the ancestral home of the Ieldra. Great deeds, great inspirations: A programmer working with a splicer and a historian (and what an unholy triad that must have been!) had retraced the evolutionary pathways and had made a model of early man's DNA. Master splicers were at work decoding this modeled DNA, hoping to discover the secret of the ancient gods. And of course I must mention the fabulist who created a scenario in which Old Earth was
not
destroyed. This led Sensim Wen, the semanticist, to reinterpret the meaning of a Fravashi tone-poem, which in turn inspired a holist to propose a different model for the progression of the Swarming. A phantast, who studied the new model, retired to his den and recreated a hologram of what he called "The Galaxy As It Might Have Been." Finally a pilot studied this hologram and journeyed near the inner edge of the Orion Arm where he expected to find Old Earth. All to no avail, of course. But it was a gallant attempt, if somewhat ridiculous and bizarre.

   Just as bizarre, in its own way, was the memory - the revelation - of Master Thomas Rane, the remembrancer. Because this revelation ignited a bitter argument among the eschatologists and was to prove important in the crisis which followed my return to the city, I record here his famous words as he remembered down the dark spiral of racial memory into his distant past.

   _I am named Kelkemesh, and my arms are young and brown as coffee. I am wearing the skin of the wolf I killed when I first became a man. The skin is wet. I am standing on a ridge high on a mountainside. It has rained, and there are mists in the green valleys below, a rainbow above. The stillness is very real. And then in the sky, at the rainbow's edge, there is a hole. There is a hole in the sky, and it is as black as my father's eye. From the hole comes a silvery light, and then white light; soon the entire sky is a ball of light. The light falls on me like a rainshower. As I open my mouth to scream, the light runs down my throat. My spine tingles. The light runs down my spine into my loins. My loins burn; my loins are afire; my loins fill with burning raindrops of light. It is the god Shamesh inside me and he is burning his image into my flesh. Shamesh is the sun; Shamesh is the light of the world; Shamesh speaks and his voice is my own: "You are the memory of Man, and the secret of immortality is inside you. You will live until the stars fall from the sky and the last man dies. That is my blessing and my curse." And then the light is gone. In the sky the rainbow is fading the sky is a blue eggshell without holes._

   _I run down the mountainside to the huts of my father, Urmesh, the shaman. When I tell him I am filled with god-light, he tears his white hair and looks at me in anger and jealousy. He tells me I have been bitten by a demon; the gods do not touch men with their light. He prepares a burning spearpoint to let the demons out of my loins. My brothers are called to hold me. But I am full of fire and light, and I rise up and kill my brothers and kill Urmesh, who is no longer my father. Shamesh the god is my father. I take my bloody knife and wrap myself in my wolfskin and go down into the valleys to live among the peoples of the world._

   It was argued that the great remembrancer's memory was a false memory. Perhaps. Or perhaps he really had relived the lives - and deaths - of his ancestors. I myself believed he had re-created the primal myth of the Ieldra and had encoded it as memory. But who could really know? During those chaotic, troubled days, who knew which of us were true seekers and which were merely fooling themselves?

   Soon after this, on a day of mashy paste, the kind of snow that usually only falls in midwinter spring, the Timekeeper summoned me to his tower. Although the nature of life is change, there were a few things in my life which seemed to never change. That ageless, changeless man bade me sit on the familiar chair by the glass windows. The chair's black and red inlaid squares of jewood and shatterwood were as hard as they had always been. The clocks were ticking; the room was full of the pulsing, hissing and rhythmic beating of clocks. One of them - it was a glass-encased clock whose visible workings were carved of jewood - chimed. The Timekeeper, who paced back and forth before the curved windows, shot me a grim look as if to say the clock chimed for me.

   "So, Mallory, you're looking exceptionally wary today."

   He circled my chair so that he stood staring down at my profile. I inhaled the aroma of coffee on his breath. When I lifted my head to examine the spiderweb of lines at the corners of his eyes, he said, "No, don't turn your face to me. Resume the proper attitude - I've questions to ask you."

   "And I would question you," I said. "Do I have anything to be wary about?"

   "Ha, the young pilot would question
me
?"

   "I'm not so young anymore, Timekeeper."

   "Just a little while ago, less than four years ago, you sat in that chair and bragged how you were going to penetrate the spaces of the Entity. And now -"

   "Four years ... can be a long time."

   "Don't interrupt me! And now you sit here almost as young and twice as foolish. Plots! I know certain pilots plot against me. Your mother - I'm told she's been talking with warrior-poets. Don't try to deny it. What I want to know, what I need to know is: Are you your mother's son or your Timekeeper's pilot?" He rapped his fingernails against the metal casing of one of the clocks. There was aping" of ringing chrome. "Tell me, Mallory, where's your devious mother, your bloody, slel-necker of a mother?"

   "I don't know," I said. "And don't say that word, no matter what you think she's done."

   "I
know
what your mother has done," he growled. "And I know who your father is."

   "I don't have a father."

   "Soli is your father."

   "No."

   "You're Soli's son - I should have seen it years ago, eh? Who would have thought your mother would be so bold as to slel his damn plasm? So, I know what your mother has done, and I'm reasonably sure she plans to murder Soli, possibly me as well - your goddamned mother!"

   I gripped the chair's curved arms, which were shiny and worn from the hands of a thousand sweating pilots before me. I struggled to say nothing, to keep my hands locked to the chair.

   "So, she's betrayed me, but you wouldn't betray me, would you, Mallory?"

   "You think I'm a traitor, then?"

   "Did I say you were a traitor? No, you're no traitor, I hope, but what about your friends?"

   "Bardo has given me his word he won't -"

   "Bardo!" he roared. "That tube of blubber, that disobedient mule! Even if I ignored his adulterous ways, his cowardly talk has already infected your friends. It's the younger pilots I'm thinking of Jonathan Ede and Richardess and Delora wi Towt. And the older pilots, Neith and Nona, and Cristoble [sic; probably "Cristobel" - reb]. And my professionals. And my academicians, such as Burgos Harsha, a hundred others. There's talk of them leaving the city forever. Schism! They're talking schism, the ruin of the Order!"

   "There is talk of change," I agreed.

   "Too great a change is death." He stepped over to the window, He pressed his forehead to the frosted glass, then sighed. "Do you think I'm deaf to what's being said? So, the Order has stagnated for a thousand years; so, the professions and professionals have grown rigid in their thoughtways; so, we need new dreams, new problems, new ways. Do we? What do you think?"

   I thought what many of my Order thought: that pilots too often fell out against their fellow pilots in jealousy or rivalry, that profession vied with profession, and within the individual professions, different schools fought among themselves to impose their interpretation of the Order's purpose on all the others. The original, unifying vision of a spacefaring humanity discovering its place and purpose in the universe had dissolved into a hundred different philosophies, notions and conceits. "But isn't that the fate of all religions and orders, then? In the end, divisiveness and death?"

   "You mean divisiveness and war. If I let my pilots go their separate ways, in the end there would be war - a great, filthy, bloody war."

   I smiled because I thought the Timekeeper was being overly dramatic. I quoted the historians, saying, "War is a dead art, as dead as Old Earth. There are restraints, aren't there? The lessons of history? I don't think anyone in our Order would wish to reinvent war."

   "And what of the war between Greater Cihele and Mio Luz?"

   "That was a skirmish," I said. "Not a real war."

   "Not a real war! Ha, what do you know of war? The tychists dropped
fusion
bombs on the determinists. How many were killed? Thirty million?"

   I shook my head, trying to remember my history lessons. "I don't know," I said. "Thirty something." And then a few moments later, the memory came. "Thirty million four hundred and fifty four thousand approximately."

   "And you call that a skirmish? So, call it what you will, why do you think this skirmish didn't spread into a 'real war?' Restraint, hell! What do you think keeps the Civilized Worlds at peace? It's because war is ruinously expensive to wage - that's the most important reason. Even though the Greater Cihele and Mio Luz are connected by a single pathway, it took the incompetent tychist pilots with their filthy fusion bombs - those few who survived the manifold - it took them thirty years to reach Mio Luz. Our rawest journeyman could make the journey in thirty days."