Neverness (63 page)

   For a long while I distracted myself with pure mathematics. I conjured up the bright, violet ideoplasts for the Axiom of Choice, and I lost myself in the beautiful Theory of Sets. I invented (or perhaps discovered) theorems :that might someday be useful in proving the Continuum Hypothesis. There was a moment when the luminescent, many-shaped ideoplasts appeared so rapidly and vividly that I thought the number-storm might begin of its own, without the aid of my ship-computer. And what a wonder that would have been! To enter into the manifold at will, to face the universe with nothing more than mathematics and will and naked brain - how often during those hellish days I prayed for this ability! But prayer is the signpost of helplessness and failure. The freedom of the manifold was denied me, and I soon found that in my prison of darkness, mathematics seemed all too arbitrary and unreal.

   I might have emulated the autists and created fantasies and thoughtscapes in which I could dwell for as long as I lived. To dream lucid dreams, and all the while, to be aware of the dreams, and more, to change their shape and texture at will - this was a possibility. I might have experienced clear, rippling, aquamarine water, the warm, rushing waves of an otherworldly beach, the sticky clutch of a woman lying beneath me on the hot sand. But - despite what the autists say - it would not have been real. I would be lost in the unreal, devoured by images and events which could never and had never really occurred. If at last the Timekeeper gave me my freedom, I would be as mad as any autist.

   I do not know how long I could have stood the silence had I not chanced to recall a rather pretentious saying of the remembrancers. One day as I was dragging my long, curling fingernails across the slatelike flagstones, I was thinking of the master remembrancer, Thomas Rane, turning over in my mind the implications of his memory of the god-man, Kelkemesh, and the primal myth. These words came of their own to my inner ear:
Memory is the soul of reality
. Within me were years of memories, a whole lifetime of memories. Memory, then, would be my salvation. I would dwell in the past. I would take refuge in my memories like a wounded seal seeking safety in his aklia. I would live again the crucial moments of my life, and if I lived them too passionately - well, at least I would remain within a reality which had actually existed.

   At first all went well. As time dripped on, I found I had less and less need of physical distractions. I stopped singing to myself, which was a great relief because I have never been able to keep a tune. I had little need to lick my kamelaika's scratchy wool, or to taste the salty blood of my gnawed lip, or to press my eyes with my thumbs in order to induce phosphenes, those bright pinpoints of light we sometimes see when our eyes are closed. My memories were more stimulating than mere sensation; my memories were gleaming jewels suspended in ice water; my memories were the soul of my distant and recent past. I remembered learning to tie the laces of my skates. How frustrated I had been when the looping of the knot had eluded my childish fingers! How I had raged when my mother tried to help me! I remembered other happier events, such as the first time Bardo and I had taken a yellow-sailed ice schooner out onto the frozen Sound. Bardo had been reluctant to borrow the schooner and had pointed out that we knew nothing about sailing. But I had ridiculed him into recklessness. (Journeymen often think that because they have survived the manifold, they can master any form of transportation.) A fierce wind had come up unexpectedly, nearly smashing us against the rocks of Waaskel, Still, our rush across the Sound had been exhilarating, a few moments of pure fun. In the darkness of my cell, there were other memories, each more vivid than the last. Like an old man, I remembered, and I wondered what different memories I might have had if only I had made different choices when I was younger. Why had I decided to become a pilot instead of a cantor? Why did I love Katharine? Why did I murder Liam?
Why were my memories growing ever more burningly real?

   The remembrancers, it is said, must overcome a difficult problem when they are younger. To remember too well is to forget only with great difficulty. As my memories grew more and more vivid, they seemed to linger, burning themselves into my inner eye. I might conjure up the first time I had seen a Friend of Man, and the blue trunk of the alien would wriggle like a sleekit and obscure more important memories. I began to have trouble forgetting. I recalled reading the poems of the Timekeeper, and whole pages of print were indelibly stamped onto the white tissue of my mind. I could see every bend and twist of each black letter as if I were reading an open page of the book. This was the memory of pictures I had heard so much about from childhood friends who had gone on to become scryers or remembrancers. I remembered that there were tricks for forgetting. In my mind, I built a long black wall and superimposed lines and words, whole stanzas and pages of poetry onto the wall. The squiggly black letters disappeared, black into blackness - for a time. Other memories, such as Katharine's smile, were harder to banish. I had to resolve the pale tones of her skin into a million dots of primary colors. Each red and green and blue dot I then intensified until it flared and swelled and exploded like a tiny star. A million points of light burst inside me and then coalesced into a blinding haze, like that Of an icefield on a false winter day. Most difficult to forget were sounds. The memory of music persisted despite my efforts to drown it out with the boom of rockets or with other noise. I was surprised to hear entire symphonies with a clarity almost hyperreal. Again and again the melody of the Takeko's Madrigal of Sorrow played inside the round tones of the adagio forming up like beads of gold. I heard and reheard Bardo singing love songs to Justine, and I listened to the keening of the shakuhachis and the gosharps that my mother used to play. I do not mean to say that I heard each of these things simultaneously, for I did not. One sound gave way to another only with difficulty. For instance, the music of seagulls and the 'drumbeat of the sea I could not forget until I had taken the component sine waves of the sounds through a Fourier transform, enfolding them into a hologram. I could then "drop" this hologram into a black, soundproofed box where it would remain until I wished to remove it and
unfold
the sounds of memory. Thus I created millions of mental boxes for the memories that haunted me. In this way I made room for other deeper memories, memories I did not know I possessed.

   _Everything is recorded; nothing is forgotten._

   I do not know exactly when I became aware that I was remembrancing. Many people, of course, are cursed and blessed with nearly perfect memory, but they are not remembrancers. They can see only the faintest spark of racial memory. To remember the lives of our fathers and of our mothers' grandfathers and their great-grandfathers and so on down the branching tree of our descent, to unlock the memories of our race's distant past encoded within our chromosomes, to "think like DNA," as Lord Galina would say - this is the higher art of remembrancing. It is an art which consumed me.

   With a dizzying speed, images of my ancestors' lives flickered before me. I saw slick blood and an uncoiled umbilical cord as my grandmother, Dama Oriana Ringess, screamed and pushed my mother from within her into the light of day. How my mother cried in her pain! I saw Soli. He was, in truth, my father. There were memories from Soli's childhood; I understood, finally, what I had remembered inside the Entity, the memory of Alexander Diego Soli teaching his son mathematics. And deeper and back generation fell from generation; faces formed and changed, as mutable as clay. There was the long, broad Soli nose and the ice-blue eyes; there the full lips of a Ringess pressed together and then parted to reveal the twenty-eight thick Ringess teeth. Further back a Soli tampered with his chromosomes to strengthen his mathematical abilities. (It was from this Soli, Mahavira Andreivi Soli, that I inherited my strands of red hair.) And deeper down the roots of time: There were poets, scryers, whores, pilots, katholiks, shepherds (of sheep), slaves, kings, warriors, and even an astrier named Cleo Ringess, half of whose five hundred children went on to populate the moons of Durrikene, half of whom carked their DNA and eventually came to be known as the alien Fayoli.

   One day when I was remembrancing, I heard Dawud stir within his cell. It seemed he was still very much alive, if exhausted from his long wait for the plutonium to decay. He recited a short poem to me - the first in a long while - and one couplet rang in my ears and pulled at the cords of my memory:

Only bone remembers pain;

Only pain and bone remain.

   Then there was a long silence followed by a long, convoluted poem he had entitled "Plutonium Spring." I stood to chin myself up to the air duct, the better to listen to his strident words. I heard him intone:

The rhythm in my blood is the dancing of blinded locusts

   And then, "Pilot, are you still alive? Can you hear me?"

   "Yes, I was ... remembering."

   I wanted to tell him a thing that I had seen, that Eva Reiness was the great-grandmother of Nils Ordando. The warrior-poets shared a portion of my chromosomes. We were near-brothers, I wanted to tell him. All men are brothers.

   "Do you believe in chance?" came his measured words through the black duct.

   "I ... sometimes I believe in chance, sometimes in fate. I don't know what I believe."

   "How long do you think it has been? What are the chances that the plutonium would not have decayed?"

   "Perhaps it was just a joke," I said. "Perhaps there is no plutonium and no gas. Perhaps the Timekeeper is trying to destroy your sanity - what little a warrior-poet has."

   There was a silence, and I had to let go of the duct. After a while Dawud gasped out, "Fate and chance, the same glad dance."

   To a warrior-poet who believed in eternal recurrence, of course, that would be so.

   "Pilot, can you hear me?" After I had pulled myself up to the duct, I could hear him plainly. "These past days have been such an ecstasy," he said. "I find I no longer want to die. I have made poetry, and I have thought ... such thoughts, and dreamed and ... Can you hear me?"

   "Yes," I said into the darkness.

   "The gas is coming soon. The plutonium is about to explode. There are hot gases, dying hydrogen - how delicate the falling violets are!"

   "Is this part of a poem?"

   "Life is a poem that we compose. This is the faith of the warrior-poets: that we can capture life's essence, the moment of the possible, in words."

   I said nothing because it is my faith that the essence of the universe lies far beyond the realm of human words.

   "I will die soon, of course. There are killing vapors in the granite darkness."

   "Are you a scryer, then?"

   "No, a poet. And I have composed my death poem. Will you promise me something? When I am dead, my body must be brought back to Qallar in a black marble casket. If you live long enough, you must find a farsider who knows the art of writing. The words of my death poem must be chiseled onto the casket's facing."

   My fingers began to cramp, and my forearm muscles trembled. I made him a promise I had no intention to keep. For no good reason, I told him of my remembrancing. I tasted gummy old food and blood in my mouth as I said, "Nils Ordando was a son of the Ringess line."

   "Yes, that is known," he replied instantly. "The founders of both our Orders were hibakusha. They fled the Agni nebula during the computer wars. When the hydrogen -"

   "We're almost brothers," I said.

   "All men are brothers," he said. "And all men are hibakusha. And fratricide is the rule of the species." And then, "Can you smell the gas, Pilot?"

   Here he recited his poem, the last stanza of which was:

I am sodden beneath wrappings of flesh;

I am golden beneath the morning sky;

I am holy beneath my evaporating flesh;

I am naked beneath the plutonium sky.

   I shouted to him but there was no answer. I listened for the sound of hissing gas. I pulled up and tried to get an elbow into the air duct as I wedged my head and shoulder into the stuffy, tight tunnel. Would I hear the whine of an airlock grinding shut? Would the poet scream and thrash as he gasped for clean air? With my head ridiculously squeezed into a dark hole in the wall, I listened for any sound at all, but in the poet's cell there was silence.

   After a while, I pushed off the wall and began pacing my cell. A madman, a murderer, a lover of words, my near-brother - I called out to him, but he did not answer me then, nor during the days that followed. I repeated the words to his poem, "Plutonium Spring," and I memorized them. It was an easy thing to do.

   _Everything is recorded; nothing is forgotten._

   Again I fell into racial memory. I fell far back, seeing archetypal images, smelling primal smells, hearing the heartbeat of ancient poems. I remembranced Old Earth. There the sky was a lighter blue than that of Icefall, light blue like a thallow's eggshell; there the land was warm and the valleys were green, and there were orchards of real apple trees, fields of golden wheat-grain. There my far-grandfather lived in a whitewashed cottage in a city by the sea. He was a pilot and a boatmaker. His hands - my hands - were yellow with callous, and wood splinters stung his fingers. He had a wife, and there was a coupling, thousands of joyous couplings, and there was a son, and they were happy. And then the robot armies came and burned his boats, burned his city with a hellish, glowing mineral that exploded and shattered his windows and fused the glass, fused and flared, and then there was light everywhere, the unbearable flash of memory.

   I heard the clanging of robots, steel denting steel, and a high-pitched whine of metal shearing apart. The smell of burning steel. And more sounds: robots banging against stone walls, ringing steel, humming, shouting, cursing, and a curious "pinging" sound I could not quite identify. "Mallory!" a voice from the past called to me. "By God, let's have this door open!" the voice boomed.