Neverness (57 page)

   After I had broken free into the cooler air at the western edge of the Gardens, I began seeing on the faces of the thinned-out crowd that particular kind of fear indicating a near encounter with a warrior-poet. I will call it fear of madmen, most people regard the warrior-poets as being truly mad. When I was a young child I had often noticed that adults were inexplicably afraid of the many babbling madmen who roam the City streets. Most of the madmen, of course, were - and are - quite harmless. How then to explain how
master pilots
, for instance, could be so afraid of them, they who had mastered their fear of the manifold? I had never understood this phenomenon, but all at once the answer seemed obvious: A madman's jerky motions, his aimless words, the wild glint in his eyes - everything he does seems to bubble up from some private well deep within his being. It is a well which spouts actions seemingly beyond his control. And why does a madman appear to have no control? It is because he appears to have no fear; that is, he lacks a certain kind of fear. He is unafraid of embarrassing himself or others with his animal screams and mumbled prophecies. This fearlessness is very threatening to the typical civilized person because he understands, in some portion of his self, that it is only the fear of what others think that keeps
him
from skating naked down the street and howling at the moon when the miseries of life are more than he can bear. (If indeed he lives on one of the eighty-six civilized planets which have moons.) Fear is the glue that keeps civilization together. Without the fear of consequence, men would take forcefully the women of their choice, Elidi children would pull the wings off their younger siblings and women would tell their husbands their innermost thoughts. And that would be the end of the world, the end of all the worlds on which human beings live. Without fear we would fly about at random like billions of unpredictable atoms. I must repeat that one does not fear a madman because he is dangerous; a madman is feared because he appears to have no fear, and therefore he is unpredictable and might do anything. And it is the same with warrior-poets. One does not fear them because they are dangerous; the sun, after all, is dangerous. But the sun is predictable (or it used to be before the Vild began to explode), and the warrior-poets, those fearless fanatics of Qallar, are not. Often they act at random. Their passage through a crowd leaves a trail of fear, the fear of fearlessness, which is really a fear of randomness. To live in a universe which does not listen to our plea for order and meaning is our most basic fear, and we fear it more than death. It was this trail of chaotic fear left by the warrior-poet Dawud that I followed across the Great Circle outside the Hofgarten and down an orange sliddery deep into the Farsider's Quarter.

   Near the Merripen Green, where the streets narrow and the many fine, three-story blackstones shelter the richer of the farsiders, I talked to a cetic fresh off Melthin. He had the harrowed, somewhat bitter look of an itinerant professional; my first thought was that he had traveled among planets such as Orji and Yasmeen teaching his art to the backward novices of the Order's lesser schools. He stank of travel, and of fear. In front of his hotel I stopped him and quickly explained what I was seeking.

   "Yes, it's true," he said, wiping the sweat from his forehead with his orange sleeve. "A few minutes ago, the poet in the rainbow kamelaika - but how did you know?"

   Because I wanted to make certain that it was Dawud I pursued and not some other, I asked, "His warrior's ring - was it red? Did he wear the poet's green ring?"

   "His rings?"

   "Quickly, then, what color were his rings?"

   "I didn't notice his rings; I was looking at his face."

   "Damn!"

   I quickly, breathlessly explained that I was following the warrior-poet's track of fear; being a cetic, I thought he would appreciate my little quest. But like many of the lesser professionals he was overly proud and chary of anyone - a pilot no less - who might challenge his meager authority. "One must be careful in reading the fear programs, very careful. How many types of fear do you think there are, Pilot?"

   How many types of programs animate the flesh and brain of a human being? I stroked up the street and turned onto a sliddery, wondering about this. The sliddery led past the Winter Ring. Here were obsidian blackstones eight stories high, curving walls of chipped glass inside which the apartments were tiny and stacked one atop the other like a child's blocks. I had seldom been in this part of the City before, and I marveled that so many strange people could live so closely with one another. I made my way toward the edge of the Ring. There were many skaters resting on the dilapidated, splintery benches set around the Ring. Between the benches and the orange band of the street, which circled the Ring around its northern half, every hundred yards or so, stood the ice statues of our Order's famous pilots. There were fifteen of these white monoliths. Wind and sun and freezing mists had worked at the statues' features; it was nearly impossible to distinguish the pitted, imperious face of Tisander the Wary from the Tycho's jowly frown. I skated backward into the Ring, absorbed for a moment with the silly notion of reading the Tycho's programs from his statue's deformed features. But it was impossible to do so. Even if the sculptor had once captured the Tycho's essence and chiseled it into ice, even though the faces were resculpted once every year or so, the slow melt of time had degraded any information bound into the ice crystals and had rendered the programs unreadable.

   Almost unreadable. For a moment, I struggled with my perceptions, without and within, and I was dizzy. I looked out and up, and there was the dizzying effect of concentric circles: the satiny, whitish circle of the Winter Ring where the farsiders laughed and spun and ground their toepicks into the ice, the circle of blue and red benches, and the ice statues surrounded by the curving orange street, and above the street, the tenements gleaming like mountains of glass, and far above, the marbled crown of the sky. I turned my head, looking for the warrior-poet, but he was nowhere in sight. Although I very badly wanted to find him, I felt that I must pay attention to this new perception of mine, this new way of seeing.

   Near me a harijan was flopping about on skates too big for him. He was a savage, jowly man dressed in a purple parka and yellow pants so tight that his membrum bulged beneath the dirty silk. Because his boots provided too little ankle support; he had no feel for the edges of his blades. He stumbled about grasping for the arms and the support of nearby farsiders. In a way, he reminded me of Bardo. I looked more closely and saw determination and the stamp of cruelty on his thin lips. In another way he reminded me of the Tycho, of the Tycho's imago that I had encountered inside the Entity. I stared at the harijan, and it was like staring at Bardo and the Tycho. Each of them, I thought, bore a streak of cruelty, of self-love and brazen sexuality. I knew well how these traits - these programs - had been shaped in Bardo's case. But what of the Tycho and the comically dressed harijan? I was dizzy as I turned and stared at the Tycho's icy, half-melted face. Suddenly I knew a thing: The Tycho's cruelty and the harijan's (and Bardo's, too), had been programmed by the cruelty of their fathers. I do not mean to imply that all men who are cruel have cruel fathers. The fount of cruelty is as deep and turbid as an ocean. But certainly it was so with the harijan; I could read his cruelty program as plainly as I could read his fear.

   I bent over, resting my arms on my knees. I gasped for air. All around were children, men and women, and the statues of my father pilots, and I saw in each the set of muscles and nerves which betrayed their programs. A woman with a slender chest and great, streamlined thighs clumsily landed a waltz jump, and I understood - I "saw at a glance," as the cetics say - the many years of practice and the slightly mistaken programming causing her to catch the outside edge of her skate and nearly stumble. Here a pretty boy cried in frustration because he couldn't cut a decent eight, and there another laughed to hide the very same emotion, a program he had probably learned from his stoical father. How many programs command the muscles and thoughts of a human being? There are one million, twenty-seven hundred and six such programs. (I am joking, of course. I record this only because an infamous cetic once set himself the task of counting and classifying all possible programs, and he gave up after reaching this number. The number and variety of programs is potentially infinite, as is man.) There are programs determining the fluidity of our speed strokes, and there are programs which lead us to lather our bodies in precisely the same manner every time we bathe. We are programmed to fear darkness and loud noises, and we program ourselves to fear a thousand things, failure and poverty, for instance. I saw these programs on the farsiders' faces: the sex programs, the men lusting for women, the dark women and the plump, the skinny or the tall; the women with their subtle body language, initiating and often running the men's sex programs, the different shades and manifestations of lust; and more sex programs, the children programmed with dormant, powerful urges, completely unaware of their own programs; the love, dread, pride, shame, sympathy, grief, melancholy and joy programs, the programs of hate and rage; there were beliefs and belief programs in the eyes of a Summerworld Buddhist, a belief in cyclic universes and rebirth of the soul and many, many stranger beliefs; there were programs to control beliefs, and occasionally, on certain naked faces, the imprimatur of beliefs which controlled programs. I saw one woman, a wise, strikingly beautiful woman wearing the embroidered gown of a Urradeth neurologician, who bore the burn of self-mastery in her brilliant eyes. A few, rare people, it seemed, were sometimes able to master their beliefs and run their own programs. How this fascinated me! These belief programs which can write, edit and command other programs are called master or metaprograms. I wondered at the origin of the programs which run our lives. Why is one man quick and another slow? Why will one woman smile knowingly as she speaks of ananke and ultimate fate while her sister denies meaning, and drugs herself with toalache and sex? Could it be, as the splicers claim, that our initial set of programs is wholly written by our chromosomes?

   I do not believe so. Ah, but from where does this disbelief, this program of skepticism arise - from my chromosomes as well? And how were my chromosomes programmed? By chance evolution? By God? And who, then, wrote the deity program, or the programs of the natural universe? Who programs the programmer? One could go mad pondering such infinite regresses of cause and effect. I do not believe there can be a simple explanation. Some programs - an infant's crying, defecating, sucking and sleeping modes, for example - are certainly written in our chromosomes. Other programs are copies of our parents' programs; sometimes the world we live in writes programs into our nerves with pleasure and, too often, with fire and pain. The origin of certain programs is a secret which will perhaps always remain unknown. Does the brain hold the secret in the way it molds itself to fit its tiny corner of the universe, the billions of neurons weaving together, forming trillions of interconnections? The akashics believe so, yet they have never realized their dream of mapping and understanding man's soul. It is a commonplace that each human being possesses a unique set of programs. Each of us takes great pride in this uniqueness; we often justify our existence by looking up at the stars and observing that in all the universe, there is no other being quite like ourself. We are special, we believe, and therefore uniquely valuable. In a way, we are our own unique universe, as worthy of existence as the greater universe surrounding us. I, too, had always believed this; I had always regarded my arrogance, vanity and rage programs as endearing faults without which the bright jewel I knew as Mallory Ringess would somehow shatter inward and cease to shine, like a diamond with only a single, cracked face. Now I looked around the ice ring at the faces of my fellow human beings, and I was no longer so sure. I saw arrogance as an exemplar completed a difficult axel, and vanity in the carriage of a pretty, black-skinned matron off Summerworld. All the programs which drove me to change my flesh, to love, to joke, to murder, to seek the secret of life - each particle of myself was somewhere duplicated within the selfness of another man, woman or child. My programs were not unique; only their seemingly random arrangement within me was. Why should I take pride in programs which sprang from the coil of inherited chromosomes or from my mother's painful pinches as she programmed me not to lie? Why should I be aware of myself as a separate being at all?

   For me the problem of uniqueness was really worse than I have stated. I was full of my new power of reading people's programs; when I looked inside myself I could almost read my own. And I saw a horrible thing: Not only were my programs not unique, but in many ways, I was no more in control of my programs than a dog was of its own wagging tail. Even the best of human beings - such as the Urradeth neurologician - could control only some of their programs. And as for the others, the harijan, whores and wormrunners that I saw, well, the warrior-poet had been right, after all. We are sheep awaiting the butcheries of time; we are clots of brain tissue and bundles of muscle, meat-machines that jump to the touch of our most immediate passions; we - I have said this before - we react rather than act; we have thoughts in place of thinking. We are, simply, robots; robots aware that we are robots, but robots nonetheless.

   And yet. And yet we are something more. I have seen a dog, Yuri's beloved Kyoko, a lowly beast whose programs were mostly muzzle and hunger, growls and smell, overcome her fear and flight programs to hurl herself at a great white bear, purely out of love for her master. Even dogs possess a spark of free will. And as for humans, within each of us, I believe, burns a flame of free will. In some it is tenuous and dim as an oilstone's flame; in others it burns hot and bright. But if our will is truly free, why do our robot programs run our bodies and minds? Why do we not run our programs? Why do we not write our own programs? Was it possible that all women and men could free themselves and thus become their own masters?