Neverness (59 page)

   "I always thought you were afraid, Mother."

   "No, I'm not afraid. Doesn't the acceptance of death free us from fear? And if we're free, isn't everything possible? No, I'm not afraid."

   I rubbed the ice from my mustache and said, "Those are the poet's words, I think, not yours."

   She pulled her hood more tightly around her head. She began speaking in a slow, even voice, as if she were explaining ring theory to a novice. Even though she kept her voice calm, I could hear the rhythms of new programs in her voice. Her words, the ways she emphasized and articulated certain sounds (she overaspirated the consonants made by stopping the flow of air with the tongue), the choppy phrasing of her sentences and thoughts - everything about her was the same yet slightly different. I could read her, but I could not tell if the new programs originated merely from Dawud's ideas and beliefs, or if he had in fact mimed her brain. I trembled when she said, "You think Dawud manipulates me? No, it is I. Who manipulates him. He thinks he has found a way. To eventually control my programs. Call it slel-mime or call it what you will. He
thinks
this. But from where did this thought come?
I
gave him these thoughts. It's the most subtle kind of manipulation; my mother taught me about manipulation."

   Had Dawud rewritten her software or carked the hardware? - I trembled to know this.

   "Perhaps the akashics could help you," I said.

   "I think not."

   "I could take you to them. But you must tell me how I can find you."

   "Haven't your friends told you? That I've become a student of the warrior-poets?"

   "Where can I find the poet?"

   "And why would my son want to find a warrior-poet?"

   "Perhaps I want to warn him that he's being manipulated." In truth, I wanted to trap him before he had a chance to mime my mother's brain, if he already hadn't. I wanted to kill him.

   "It's the nature of my manipulation," she said, "that to inform him he's being manipulated will only work to manipulate him into believing he can manipulate the manipulation by manipulating me into believing
I'm
manipulating him. It's a complicated thing. Do as you will." She smiled and nodded her head, turning into the light, Her shadow lengthened into a black spear, then shortened, back and forth across the glossy ice. "After all, no one is manipulating
you
."

   "Oh, God!"

   "Haven't I taught you not to blaspheme?"

   "Where is the poet, Mother?"

   "Am I my master's keeper?"

   "Where, Mother?"

   "If you can read me, then you tell me."

   "You've sent him to murder Soli," I said.

   "Soli," she repeated. She closed her eyes because it must have been finally clear to her that I could read her.

   "Why would the poet murder for you, then?"

   "It's an exchange, of course. Of devotion. The warrior-poets seek converts, don't they? Therefore, I devote myself to becoming. Like a warrior-poet. And in exchange, Dawud will -"

   "When, Mother? Oh, God, it's too late isn't it?"

   "How I hate Soli!"

   "Mother!"

   "Don't look for a warrior-poet," she said, "you might find him."

   "I'll kill him."

   "No, Mallory, don't leave me. Let him do his work. Why would you want to save Soli? As we speak the poet is most likely climbing Soli's tower. Or sending Soli's guards over. Or asking Soli the poem."

   I kicked my skate against the ice in an attempt to knock some blood back into my numb feet. I was cold and confused, and I asked, "What poem?"

   "It's a tradition of the warrior-poets," she said. "They trap and immobilize their victims. And then they recite part of an ancient poem. If the victim can complete it, he's spared. Of course, no one ever knows the poem."

   I pushed away from her and began stroking across the Ring. I could not believe her. She was mocking me. Surely a warrior-poet would not risk failure by taking the time to ask his victim a poem.

   "Where are you going?" she called out before I had skated a dozen yards.

   "To warn Soli of a madman!" I shouted.

   "Don't leave me! Please!"

   "Goodbye, Mother."

   She tilted her head from side to side and shouted back:

Because I could not stop for Death -

He kindly stopped for me.

The tower held but just Ourselves

And Immortality.

   "That's the poem," she said. "If the warrior-poet traps you, too."

   I bent low and drew in deep breaths of air as I waved goodbye and pushed against the ice. I did not intend to let a murderer - a master of slel-mime, a madman - trap me. It was my intention to trap him.

To be fully alive is to be fully aware.

To be fully aware is to be full of fear.

To fear is to die.

   saying of the warrior poets

I raced eastward through the nighttime city streets. I took a shortcut through the heart of the Farsider's Quarter. The poet had a lead on me, but he could not know the City as I did. Neither, I hoped, could he skate as fast or as far without rest. The dimmed colors of the glissades and lesser glidderies seemed to flow and blend, red into orange, purple into green. The pretty buildings lining the extremely narrow Street of the Neurosingers, with their balconies and lacy stone grillwork, were hung with dripping icicles. Directly below, the drips had frozen into a jungle of icy bumps, tubercles and miniature volcanoes. The skating was treacherous so I turned down the Street of Fumes. There the ice was not quite so irregular, but there were dangers of a different kind. A myriad of odors wafted out of the half-open doorways of the remembrancer dens. The air was redolent with the bubble of hot tar, with the fragrance of hair oils and new woolens and a thousand other smells and smell-drugs. Instantly I recalled sprinting down the street the day of the pilot's race. (It did not seem possible that three years had passed since that day.) Memories consumed me. I could almost see Soli smoothly stroking fifty yards ahead; I could almost hear the click-clack of his long, shiny racing blades. I was passing one of the larger dens when a couple of common whores opened the door. Their lips were stained red and their breath stank of alcohol. They stood holding hands beneath the cold flame globe, which was one of the clear types, with the plasma crackling along its colors within. They blocked my way and immediately sidled up next to me. The taller of the two - her hair was like dark, red wine - flung open her furs. She wasn't wearing any under-robes; her skin was naked and white. She offered to take me down one of the alleys off the street, to spread her furs and lie back in the snow, to perform an immediate coupling without charge. She was very drunk. No doubt she was remembering previous, impulsive pleasures she had experienced while under the hot wash of alcohol. That is the limitation of that particular drug: It brings clear memories of other times passed while drunk, but little else. I smelled the heady esters of skotch and remembered the night in the master pilot's bar when I had first met Soli. I hated Soli, I remembered, so why should I hurry to push the two whores aside, to rush halfway across the City to warn him? Why not stay to take my pleasure with the whore? (She was quite beautiful - one of those rare whores who loved whoring because she loved men.) Why not let Soli die?

   Although I made fast progress, crossing the broad, milky ice of the Way before the nightly swarms rushed into the Quarter, I worried that Dawud would reach Soli's tower ahead of me. In truth, I did not want Soli to die. He was my Lord Pilot, my uncle, my father; it would have been wrong to let a warrior-poet kill him. Also - and this was wholly selfish of me - I thought I might earn his gratitude. If I could soften his heart, he might forgive Bardo and Justine (and me), and I might stop the schism before it really began. I considered calling for a sled. However, on the narrow, twisting streets of the Old City through which I had to pass, a sled would only have been a hindrance. It was one of the few times in my life when I wished for the convenience of a fone. Then I could simply, and instantly, warn him that Death was on his way. But, as the Timekeeper would say, if we permitted fones people would forever be foning each other with their most immediate and frivolous thoughts. They would make appointments to meet each other at a certain place and time, and they would demand the use of timepieces, and of private sleds to carry them at whim about the City. The streets would fill with explosive, noisy machines and other noisome things, because once the technology beast was uncaged, people would want squawking private radios and private sense boxes and a host of other things. When I was a novice, I had often sniggered at this domino theory of technology, but later, when I had seen Tria and Gehenna and other hellish planets which chose not to limit their technology, I decided that in this one matter the Timekeeper's edicts were justified.

   And yet when I reached the entrance of the Danladi Tower, I cursed the Timekeeper and his edicts. The wind spilled down from Urkel's ghostly foothills, down over the deserted Hall of the Ancient Pilots and the Chess Pavilion, whistling through the dormitories and lesser buildings at the edge of Resa. It whipped clouds of ice-powder into the Tower's open doorway. There was a dreadful sucking sound as of air being forced through a tube. The rectangular wooden door, which was as plain and severe as the illustrious Lord Danladi had been, creaked as it swung back and forth, and it was smeared with blood. There was blood everywhere. Inside the doorway, corpses littered the hallway. There were six of them. A journeyman lay crumpled with her throat cut open like a second red mouth; next to her - half on top of her - slumped the corpse of Tymon the Equivocator, a pilot who had graduated the year before Bardo and I. The line of corpses progressed down the cold, quiet hallway to the stairwell. Clearly, the pilots and journeymen had tried to stop the warrior-poet, and he must have fallen on them with his quick, killing knife like a madman among children. The fresh-scrubbed body of a novice blocked the stairwell, hugging the first few steps; his pink lips pushed against the stone lip of the fourth step. I had to jump over him. His once-immaculate woolens were stained. There was a red circle above his heart. It looked like a sign above a cutting shop. There was a fresh, soapy smell in the air, as well as the smells of blood and fear.

   I climbed the winding stairs as silently as I could. And then through the short hallway to Soli's chambers, and all the while my boots slapped against the stone and my breath exploded from my lungs like rocket gases. I was afraid my noise would have warned the warrior-poet, if indeed it wasn't already too late for warnings. The white furs of the inner chamber were drenched with the blood of Soli's journeyman, Markoman li Towt, who was kneeling backwards on dead legs with his arms splayed out and his head thrown back like a doll's. The neck was cut and broken, and his thin lips were pulled back against his fine, white teeth. The rest of the room - the tapestries on the wall, the low couches and tables, the prayer books, chess set and the coffee service - was undisturbed. The door to Soli's inner chamber was ajar so I pushed it and stepped inside. Into chaos. I had never been inside his sanctum before, and I was surprised to see that Soli kept plants. Green plants and flowers were everywhere; there were potted plants, plants on shelves, plants hanging from the slanting, black slab of the obsidian ceiling. (The Danladi Tower, I think is the only building in the City made entirely of that glassy substance.) Everywhere there was wreckage. Plants and pots had been smashed into the fireplace; a stringy mass of charred vegetable matter was roasting, entangled between the andirons and the crackling logs. Loose black dirt and shards of clay ground beneath my boots. I smelled the perfume of crushed shira flowers. And then, through the foliage of a half-overturned bush I saw them. Near the window the poet had bound Soli to the bole of a spinnaker tree. A cocoon of sticky, steely protein filaments, the kind they grow on Qallar, was wrapped around Soli's chest, biting into the bark of the tree behind him. He was struggling as furiously as a netted fish, pulling at the cocoon, lumping from side to side, trying to overturn the tree. But the tree was huge. It grew from a huge pot set into a recess in the floor. Its branches spread out beneath the skylight twenty feet above us. Leaves shook and rattled, and a few of the tree's triangular, yellow flowers spiraled lazily to the floor.

   "Don't come any closer, please, Mallory."

   This came from the warrior-poet, who was standing half behind the tree. The colors of his kamelaika were dirtied with blood; blood stained the tree where his clothes had touched the gray bark. He held the point of his thin killing knife pressed to the corner of Soli's eye. He called out, "I was just about to run this up his optic nerve, but once again you've surprised me."

   Soli's drugged eyes were open wide and twitching. Almost every muscle in his face was locked, and sweat globules ran off his forehead. He stank of fear.

   "Let him go," I said.

   I stepped closer and Dawud held out his hand. "Your mother was not supposed to have revealed our plans. How did you get her to speak?"

   I pointed at Soli and repeated, "Let him go."

   "But we haven't reached the moment," Dawud said. "And in any case, my order has been paid for his death."

   "Yes, I know. Tell me what you've done to my mother."

   He laid his hand gently on Soli's head. He ignored my demand. "Your mother has paid well for this
possibility
."

   "Possibility?" I did not know what he meant. Soli stared emptily as if he knew nothing at all. His face was blanker than an autist's. There was nothing to read except pain and fear.

   "What type of poison is this, then?" I asked. "That can rob a man of his self-awareness and render the programs unreadable?" I was trembling to rush over to Soli, to slap the anger back into his face. I did not like to see him like this.