Neverness (62 page)

   "Perhaps because the Entity is perceived to be female, and the association with flowers has always been perceived to be a feminine thing. Who knows the origin of names?"

   "But you say she knows about you poets?"

   "Of course," he said. "Once, long ago, my order tried to breed female warrior-poets but ... it was a disaster. Kalinda - the Entity - made us stop."

   "I hadn't thought the gods take an interest in the affairs of man."

   "What do you know of gods, Pilot?"

   "'As flies are to little boys, so are we to the gods,'" I quoted. "'They kill us for their sport.'"

   "Of course, The Shakespeare. Very good."

   "Gods are gods. They do as they please."

   "You think so?"

   I thought of my journey to Agathange. I clung to the lip of stone and gasped out, "The gods make us in their image. Or remake us."

   "No," he said, and his voice came roaring through the air duct. "That is exactly wrong."

   "I didn't know you poets were masters of eschatology, then."

   "Why are you always so sarcastic, Pilot?"

   "Why must you poets answer a question with a question?"

   "Did you
ask
me a question?"

   After perhaps a few days of this arguing - in our dark, featureless cells time was hard to measure - the poet grew silent and would not answer when I called out to him, which I did at intervals for hours. I was sure that he had been executed, beheaded at the Timekeeper's command. Then, finally, he answered back. My relief that he was still alive surprised me.

   "I've been before your Timekeeper," he said. "He's clever, isn't he? Should I tell you my sentence? He contrives my death in a way which won't offend my order. He is a just man."

   "No," I huffed out as I strained to keep myself from falling back to the floor. I kicked out to obtain leverage, but my boots skidded against the smooth walls. "He's just a man."

   "He is merciful; his punishment is sublime."

   "It's barbaric."

   "I can't expect a pilot to understand."

   "You warrior-poets are mad."

   "What
is
madness?"

   "Only a madman would know."

   "Only a stubborn pilot would refuse to appreciate the genius of his Timekeeper's sentence."

   In a way, the Timekeeper's punishment
was
clever and perhaps even sublime, though I hardly thought it admitted of genius, Quite simply, he had contrived an ancient and barbaric means of execution: In the empty cell adjoining the warrior-poet's (we were the only prisoners in the Tower, the only prisoners for many, many years), the tinkers had placed a mechanism which, upon the reception of a certain signal, would release a cloud of poison gas. Inside the mechanism they had placed a minute quantity of plutonium. The signal for the release of the gas would be the random decay of any of the plutonium's individual atoms. Dawud might live for years or, more probably, he might die the next instant - he wouldn't know until he heard the hissing of the gas and smelled its vinegary acridness. It is bizarre, but true, that his order could blame only a random, quantum event for his death, which for the warrior-poets was no blame at all.

   "Certainly," I said, "the Timekeeper will have placed a large enough piece of plutonium in his damn machine so that the probability of your living more than a few days approaches zero."

   I did not tell him how shocked I was that the Timekeeper possessed stores of plutonium. It was the most barbarous of barbarities.

   "Of course," Dawud agreed. "There will be a sufficient quantity of plutonium. But you miss the point."

   "Which is?"

   "Imagine for a moment, Pilot, that you were my lord - his name is Dario Redring. When Dario comes to your city and asks for me, asks, 'Is he alive?" your Timekeeper can respond truthfully that he doesn't know.
Am
I alive? No one can know. From the point of view of others, I am inside a sealed cell. I am in limbo. Has the plutonium decayed? There is a probability. The degree of my aliveness is represented by a wave function which contains probabilities of life and death. Only when my cell is opened and Dario and your Timekeeper look inside will one of the probabilities actualize, while the other vanishes and the wave function will collapse. Only their act of observing my state of being will cause my aliveness or deadness to become manifest. Until then, as far as everyone outside my cell is concerned, I am neither alive nor dead. Or rather, I am both dead and alive. And that is why I don't think your Timekeeper will ever permit my cell to be opened. Until then, your Order will remain blameless for my fate."

   "But that's absurd!"

   "My order relishes absurdity and paradox, Pilot."

   "You gave me the impression that you were ignorant of mathematics."

   "I speak of philosophy, not mathematics."

   "The probabilities -"

   "Of course," he interrupted, "the
possibility
exists that the plutonium will never decay and I will never die."

   "But you
will
die. The Timekeeper has seen to that."

   "Of course! And it will be a sublime death. I must compose a poem to celebrate it."

   "To never know one moment if it will be the last - that's hell!"

   "No, Pilot, there is no hell. We are creators of our heavens."

   "Madman!" I said. I pushed off the air duct, and landed on the floor with a slap.

   Dawud's response, when it came, was so faint I could barely hear it, muffled words lost down a black tunnel of stone: "You're just afraid the gas will kill you, too."

   From Dawud I learned little pieces of news he had gleaned during his audience with the Timekeeper. The news was not good. Apparently, the Timekeeper had loosed his tutelary robots upon the City. Warrior-poets had been captured and banished, The robots had "accidentally" pinched the heads off of three pilots - Faxon Wu, Takenya the Fearless and Rosalinda li Howt - who were ready to desert the Order for Tria. (I later learned that hundreds of autists had mysteriously vanished from the Farsider's Quarter at this time. The Timekeeper, I knew, had always hated autists.) When the pilots, high professionals and academicians had learned of the Timekeeper's violation of canon law, there was talk of taking a deepship and leaving in swarm for some new planet on which to start an entirely new Academy. Somehow, the news of my imprisonment had spread, and Soli had called for my beheading, while Justine and the Sonderval had called for a convocation of the Pilot's College. They would ask the other master pilots to remove Soli and elect a new Lord Pilot - so the rumor went. Nikolos the Elder, the Lord Akashic, had surprised everyone by asking for a convocation of the College of Lords. Would that plump, hitherto timid little man really call for a new Timekeeper, as Kolenya Mor warned he would? No one seemed to know. No one - especially not the Timekeeper - seemed to know where my mother was, or what she was doing. And all the while, Bardo was petitioning the Timekeeper for my release, petitioning, blustering, threatening, and bribing various masters and lords to add their names to the petition. He had called for me to be tried before the akashics. I was innocent, he argued, and I should be allowed to establish my innocence. But Soli, who hated Bardo for stealing away his wife, invented a counter-argument. I should not go before the akashics, he said, because their computers were made to model only
human
brains. Who could know whether or not my brain - my Agathanian-carked brain - could fool the akashic computers? (Who could have suspected that Soli was my father, that he feared the akashics would unfold this fact and make it known? Who knew what anyone's motives were during that maddest of times in our City?)

   Ironically, the Timekeeper's judgment filled Dawud with joy. He was so excited that he could neither eat nor sleep. He would pace his cell for days at a time, composing poems and shouting the verses out until his voice grew hoarse. "Imminent death is the spice of life," he quoted. "It is true, of course. Pilot? Are you listening? Tell me your thoughts - are you thinking about the possibilities?"

   I am not by nature a meditative man. I dreaded being left alone in a moist, dark cell with nothing to hold my mind other than my own fearful thoughts, thoughts of painful possibilities. Most of the time, I slumped against the freezing walls; I stared at the blackness in front of my face, waiting. I listened to the warrior-poet as he paced and howled out his ecstatic verses, and when the pacing ceased and he was quiet, I listened to the plip-plop of the condensation droplets spattering against the floor. I listened to my heart beat. Often, usually after I had just awakened from a fitful sleep against the hard, moist flagstones, I was stiff and cold. I ate the nuts and bread dropped at intervals through the slit at the base of the door, and I slurped down water from a large bowl. Into that same bowl I dropped my dung and piss, hoping that the robots had been programmed to clean it before refilling it. (I have always, incidentally, disregarded Turin's Law, crudely put that any robot sufficiently intelligent to clean dishes is too intelligent to clean dishes. That may be true of human beings, but the cold, soulless tutelary robots guarding us possessed only those specific intelligence functions required of them. Such as killing the Timekeeper's enemies should they try to escape. I cannot believe they were self-aware.) I am ashamed to admit that I fell into long spells of self-pity. I thought about myself too much. I tried to concentrate on externals, but sensa of any sort were weak and few. The clanging of the robots beyond the door, the muted words of Dawud's poems - these sounds I listened to, but as I contemplated a robot's self-awareness, or lack thereof, and judged the quality of the poet's verses (they were not extraordinary), I was led ever inward to my deepest worries and fears.

   After a while, I found that my sleeping habits were being destroyed. I would sleep for long periods of time, perhaps as long as a day, escaping myself. Then would come fits of anxiety, surges of mania. I paced my cell and my muscles knotted and relaxed, over and over, rhythmically rippling like the waves of the sea. I had thoughts. I tried not to think about the origin of my thoughts. I tried not to think at all. I scratched my dirty beard and felt along the slick wall for cracks or weaknesses, but I could not stop thinking, I brooded, wondering what I was becoming. How I dreaded this
becoming
! There was something new inside me - when I thought about it and tried to conceive its shape and direction, I was as excited as I was terrified. I tried to sleep, and sleep would not come. Whole days must have passed in which I did not sleep. These spells of sleeplessness were punctuated by instances of micro-sleep when my brain would deaden for a moment or two. And I would awaken to cold, rank air, the sound of dripping water and the smell of my fear. Sometimes I would test myself to see if I was going mad. Could I still do the calculus of free sets? Did it feel just the same as always to scratch my itchy, greasy scalp? Could I open and close my fingers at will? In this way, and in a thousand other ways, I tested the cavern of my mind for hidden fissures and flaws, and for new, crystalline formations of ability and thought. What thoughts, what actions, what dreams could I
will
, if my will were truly free? Could I will my brain to change as I wished, or were there restraints, natural rules of development which could not be violated? In the deepest part of my mind, where the universe runs like a cold, black stream, I searched for the fount of free will. There was a moment when I could almost see the ultimate impulse guiding my actions, could almost taste the cool deliciousness of pure freedom. The moment lingered like a water droplet flung into the air. And then it was gone, sucked down the whirlpool of my thoughts. There was a black hole at the whirlpool's center, and within that hole, another, blacker still. There was an infinity of holes within holes waiting to swallow the sanity of anyone who contemplated himself for too long.

   For me, my prison became a hell. I have always feared darkness; when I was a novice, I had irritated Bardo by keeping my light burning all night. And silence is the darkness of sound, the death of the everyday vibrations, rhythms and tones that give song to the soul. We are creators of our heavens, the poet had said, but lately he had grown ominously quiet. Perhaps the plutonium had decayed; perhaps the poison gas had seared his lungs and liquefied his brain. Or perhaps he had tired of ecstasy, tired of balancing on the knifeblade edge between life and death. Had he flopped to the floor of his cell in an exhausted stupor? I did not know. There was silence inside his cell, silence in the still air currents, the silence of stone. Even the water on the ceiling had stopped dripping. My body no longer seemed to stink. In front of my eyes the blackness was fuzzy like wool, and my fingers were so numb that the texture of the walls felt waxen, and there was no smell or taste, no sound at all. I hallucinated. For a moment I imagined I was floating in the pit of my lightship. I dreamed there were stars. But then, when I reached out with my mind to face the ship's computer - nothing. There was neither the torrential rush of the number-storm, nor the white light of dreamtime, nor any hint of the manifold's splendid music. I realized I was alone within a real stone cell as black and empty as deadspace. I was alone inside my mind, and I was in hell.

   As the days passed the hallucinations grew stronger, more total. Since my sensory nerves were quiescent, my brain supplied its own stimulation. My visual cortex began firing of its own accord. There were colors. Showers of purple sparks cascaded through the air. The air itself sparkled like a flowing robe of green and blue silk. I saw pulsating, concentric circles of red light turning inside each other, and yellow and orange wavy lines flashing and quivering. There were a hundred different smells: spices and perfume, incense and feverbalm and musk. I heard bells ringing and crunching ice, the sound of a howling wolf. Such hallucinations, of course, are common among those who are robbed of contact with the external world. journeymen often see visions the first time they float within the Rose Wombs. And the Alaloi, too, tell of hunters trapped out on the icepack in endless snowstorms who lose their sense of up and down, right and left, and begin to see bright bands and streamers of light splitting the swirling clouds of snow. I
knew
the colors and sounds I sensed were not real, but I also knew that if the hallucinations continued for too long, I might end up more brain-damaged than a pathetic aphasic.