Neverness (67 page)

   And yet it is true that murder is as natural to humans as making flint axes or suckling babies. And humans are noble, tragic, splendid beings around a core of barbarity. When I at last returned to the battle, I had a moment to observe the ripple and flux of the lightships as they murdered each other. Although the battle seemed utterly chaotic, as if a cloud of madness had overcome the pilots on both sides, it was not so. To murder may indeed be madness, but the pilots did not murder at random. No, my brother and sister pilots were men and women of passion, if not compassion. I watched as certain pilots seemed to seek each other out. Bardo and Justine in their fat, sleek,
Blessed Harlot
, pursued Lionel's needlelike
Infinite Sloop
into the manifold. In vengeance for Delora wi Towt's death, they murdered him. It was revenge that impelled Tomoth to fall against Li Tosh and sent them plunging through pathways I would have warned them against. All around me, beneath the cold yellow light of Perdido Luz, the battle degenerated into tens of vengeance combats. My pilots quickly abandoned my strategy and our prearranged mappings. Soli's pilots, as I later learned, were poisoned with old rivalries and hatreds. They ignored Soli's master plan. Salmalin, who had always been jealous of his most brilliant pupil, the Sonderval, fell against his
Cardinal Virtue
. Madness and murder; murder and madness. There was one awful moment when two of Soli's pilots went mad and turned against each other. And then an even more awful moment when Tomoth fell out into realspace, and by sheer bad chance, caught me unmapped. To this day I can still imagine how his ugly, red, jeweled eyes must have gleamed when he realized he could at last avenge my insulting him that night in the master pilot's bar, and moreover - a thousand times moreover - he could have his vengeance for my murdering his brother, Neith. But vengeance, like a Devaki spearpoint, cuts two ways. Li Tosh, and Bardo and Justine, fell on Tomoth in the instant before he murdered me. They murdered him; they opened a window into the manifold and sent him down a dark tunnel into the hell of a nearby star.

   I come now to perhaps the saddest part of my story. When Soli saw that Tomoth and Lionel were dead, he fell into a rage. I might have hoped that he had learned compassion, but no, he fell against Bardo and Justine without mercy or restraint. For a moment their ships floated like thallows beneath the fourth planet's icy rings. Soli's elegant, lithe
Vorpal Blade
glistening behind the
Blessed Harlot
- this image burned through my telescopes into the neurologics of my ship. I was close enough - a hundredth of a light-second - to meld my ship's neurologics with those of the
Blessed Harlot
. In a frantic effort to help Bardo and Justine find a mapping, I did so. But they ignored the mapping I showed them. Probably Justine did not believe Soli would really murder them.

   Certainly, as I realize now, they were intent on making a particular mapping of their own. Although I "listened" to their final interior dialogue, I listened only for a moment. I understood only a part of their private thoughts. Here, for the sake of history and the preserving art of the remembrancers, is what I heard:

   - There, see the curve of Soli's
Vorpal Blade
?

   - He always was a romantic man, really, and I-

   - Think now, beneath the ring's thickspace, the point-source where if alpha is a statement scheme then there exists a solution class such that-

   - A cantor once told me, he said he'll destroy you because-

   - Therefore the universal class and every other class is a subclass of-

   - Of course I'm ready to define the cardinal, but I can't stop thinking about Soli and the cantor. He said, Justine, your husband is a tychist in his heart who'd chance almost anything to prove his theorem, and he said between love and hate there's nothing and ...

   And they were gone. A window to the manifold opened, and they were gone.

   I have seen this moment before, I thought. In my time of scrying, in my stone cell, I had seen many futures. In one of them, just before Soli destroyed them, Bardo and Justine opened a window to the manifold and fled the battle. In another, Bardo and Justine held each other in each other's arms and in each other's thoughts as Soli himself opened the window and thus became a murderer. Which future had come to be? Which event was now already microseconds past?

   _In the end we choose our futures_, the scryers are fond of saying. I made my choice. I chose that Bardo and Justine should live. And so I waited. How long I waited for them to return to the battle! How long must a Lord Pilot wait before he must turn his attention elsewhere? I waited vast, endless, countable, whole seconds; I waited an eternity. But Bardo's ship did not return.

   I fell against Soli, then. Or he fell against me. In truth, we fell against each other. Our two lightships so different in design, my
Immanent Carnation
with her swept-forward wings and Soli's
Vorpal Blade
- we were like streaks of lightning splitting the night. We maneuvered for advantage in and out of the windows we opened. At last, I thought, at last. I made a simple mapping. I fell into an open loop which was partially bounded by a Danladi sequence. As the manifold opened before me, I was sure I would fall out into the thickspace and ambush Soli. But he had guessed my strategy and was waiting for me. I was helplessly unmapped with none of my fellow pilots near enough to save me. I am sure he would have murdered me. My Lord Pilot, my uncle, my executioner, my father.

   I believe the pilots of both sides would have fought and murdered down to the last ship if the voices had not begun. Everyone, even Soli - especially Soli - heard the voices, although they were not really voices at all, but word plasts that we interpreted as voices. Each pilot's ship-computer began to manufacture the ideoplasts for words and idea structures. In the pit of my ship, the neurologics enveloping me began to quiver with subtle rhythms not entirely their own. Immediately I sensed the handiwork of the Entity. I was trying to escape Soli (or was I really trying to murder him?) when the bright, snowflake ideoplast representing the Axiom of Plexity shattered into fragments. My mathematical thought array was completely ruined. Then the ship-computer produced the orange, multipronged ideoplast for "the categorical imperative to prove." This plast connected to a red cylinder representing the specific solution set. The red cylinder joined with a black torus, the ideoplast of universal negation. Together these plasts formed a word plast which I understood to mean:
You must discover the answer to death
. In a like manner, other word plasts formed and joined to the central word plast. A black torus appeared again and merged with the first plast of universal negation. There was a spearlike green plast representing a specific type of mapping, and automorphism, and the thought:
Death lies within me grew
from the central concept. In a few moments other ideoplasts formed and swirled about each other and fell into place as the little word-storm quieted and cleared. I wondered why She did not appear to us as an imago of the Tycho as She had when I first penetrated Her. Perhaps She wanted to stop the battle by interrupting the number-storm within each ship. If that was Her intention, She succeeded. One hundred and twelve lightships hung motionless in realspace, and these words played through each of us:

   _How far do you fall, Pilots? How do you like war? Do you still seek the secret of life? Then you must discover an answer to death. Death lies within me. Death is a star I will call Gehenna Luz. If you seek an answer to the dying stars of the Vild, you must quit your war and journey to Gehenna Luz. I will help you. But you must hurry because Gehenna Luz will die very soon. The way is far but not too far; the secret of life is near. The first pilot to reach Gehenna Luz will be told the secret._

   I cannot wholly explain why this simple message destroyed our will to war. I cannot - and could not - look inside the minds of Li Tosh and Carman of Simoom and Leopold Soli and proclaim: "See, this is where the cool stream of devotion extinguished the flames of madness." Why should we have even believed Her, that inhuman, capricious goddess? Perhaps our warring inside Her and our rape of the manifold had outraged Her; perhaps She wanted only to lure us on to our doom. I can only say that we did believe her. We needed to believe Her. One hundred and twelve ships floated above the rings of the fourth planet, and we believed that the secret of the dying Vild (and perhaps the other secret) was close at hand. There came a moment, I think, when we looked out over the array of ships, and at the coffee-black spaces where the
Infinite Sloop
and the
Blessed Harlot
had recently been, and we were ashamed. We were not warriors; we were Pilots of the Order of Mystic Mathematicians and Other Seekers of the Ineffable Flame - I cannot explain why we each should suddenly remember this.

   We held a conclave, there near the thickspace. We sent our imagos ship to ship, listening to the voices of our "enemy" pilots, watching the lips of pilots we had known all our lives. It was as if we had awakened from a terrible dream. The sad Li Tosh, the anguished Sonderval grieving for Delora wi Towt, Soli with his death-ruined eyes and silent face - almost all the pilots agreed we must call a truce.

   "This has been a waste," Soli's imago spoke to me later in the privacy of my ship. "What fools we've been."

   "Bardo is dead," I told him.

   "So many dead."

   "And Justine. How could you have killed them?"

   "I don't know," he said.

   Inside my pit I floated and rubbed my nose, which was so congested from filtering dry, recycled air that I breathed with difficulty. "You would have killed me too, wouldn't you?"

   "I don't know," he said. And then, after a moment's reflection: "Yes."

   "But the war is over," I said. "These murders diminish us. They're barbaric. They make little men of all of us. I can't kill anymore; I will not."

   "Yes," he said, "it's over. The war." He pressed his eyes, then said, "But between you and me, the race goes on, doesn't it, Pilot?"

   "How could it not, then?" I agreed. "It goes on."

   Because we were both Lord Pilots, Soli and I said a requiem for all the pilots that had died that day. Then each of us faced our ships and made our mappings. The stars vanished and the lightships fell through their windows into the manifold. So began our race to find the star Gehenna Luz before it exploded, into the lonely, deceptive heart of the Solid State Entity.

God created the integers, and all the rest is the work of man.

   Leopold Kronecker, Machine Century Constructivist

The knowledge at which geometry aims is the knowledge of the eternal.

   The Plato

Mathematics is a game. Its pieces are the axioms we create, and its rules are logic. That mathematics is occasionally useful to mechanics and pilots is accidental.

   Mahavira Lal, third Lord Cantor

I do not know what I appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

   Isaac Newton, first Lord Mechanic

It is the strangest of phenomena that intelligence can shape the deep structures of the universe. How often I have had to admit this; how often I have had to contemplate this mystery. As I fenestered into the heart of the Entity, as I again penetrated that fathomless brain, I wondered again and again how her great, rippling waves of intelligence created the wild, segmented spaces, the infinite loops (not to mention the omnipresent infinite trees) and the other dangers of Her interior manifold. She, Herself, strange to say, could not tell me. She did not know. She was not aware of every bubble and topological transformation which occurred within Her. When I learned this, I was surprised, though I should not have been. Is a pilot in dreamtime aware of the firing of each individual neuron within his brain? Can he ever fully understand the flow of blood through arteries, diffusing cell by cell through millions of capillaries, the hot rush of electrochemical impulses which is the fount of his pleasure? What is this thing we call intelligence? If electrical events within the brain, how can intelligence turn itself outside-in to understand itself? It is an old problem with a simple solution: For any brain to be entirely aware of itself, it would have to be vastly larger than itself. Within the bounds of simple matter and energy, this is impossible. (Though our eschatologists have theorized that the Ieldra, and the mythical Elder Ieldra, have an infinite intelligence. And since infinite sets may contain subsets of themselves which are themselves infinite, they say it is possible that such godly intelligences can fully understand themselves. I do not know. Intelligence is not a set, and it is wrong to analogously apply the theory of sets in this manner. One would think the eschatologists would appreciate this simple fact.) And if we truly possess a free will, the problem grows worse, much worse. If I freely concentrated on a particular question - for instance, why would the Entity encourage one hundred and twelve pilots to enter
Her
brain? - if I thought this thought freely, I would be the
cause
of the fear and doubt which crackled through me. I would cause particular neurons within my limbic brain to fire. If I should somehow attempt to understand these impulses, the very act of my understanding would interfere with them. And then, at the very moment I thought I knew the shape of my fear, it would be gone, evaporated like snow crystals in the noonday sun.

   The Entity, of course, understood this as clearly as a pilot understands that two times two is four. Although She apparently wanted us to find the star Gehenna Luz, She did not really care about discovering the shape of the manifold within Her. We pilots could do that. She wanted only - at least this is my understanding - to think and be. If this tremendously concentrated thinking caused the manifold to distort into a series of infinite trees or to warp into a Danladi bubble - well, that was interesting, but not nearly so interesting as the openness or closure of realspace, and the other problems of the universe. To be sure, much as a man is aware that his visual cortex lies beneath the bone at the back of his head, She knew that certain pockets of the manifold were distorted in certain ways. This knowledge saved some of us pilots from stumbling into infinite trees, as I once had. She warned us away from the worst dangers. She provided us mappings, when She could, and She provided us with the fixed-points of Gehenna Luz. Had She not helped us this way, I believe few pilots would have dared to go on.