Neverness (77 page)

   I jumped out of the sled and looked down. Twelve feet below me, at the bottom of the crevasse, there was the black, churning sea. The heavy sled quickly sank, pulling the frantic dogs one by one down into the water. At first I thought Soli must have caught himself up in the sled. He was dead, I thought, the great pilot dead at last. I looked for his body in the floating mound of what had been the snowbridge, but I did not see him. Then I heard him shout, "Mallory, help me!"

   He was clinging to the jagged wall of the crevasse just beneath me. Somehow he must have freed his bear spear even as he went down into the crevasse. He must have jumped from his sled at the last instant and thrust his spear into the rotten, cracked, ice wall, levering himself out of the water.

   "My legs ... it's so cold."

   I threw a rope to him and heaved him up. It was harder than pulling a two-man seal from his hole. He had soaked his legs and half his torso in the killing water. His legs were so numb he couldn't use them to kick away from the wall, to help himself up and out of the crack. My shoulders were popping in their joints, but at last I got a hand on his collar and hauled him over the edge. He nearly fell on top of me. He lay there gasping as the snow fell in waves and I stripped his sodden furs away from his skin. "It's so cold, let me die." I unlashed my sled's binding straps, burying him in my unrolled sleeping furs. The snow was thick as the fur of a bear, and I turned the dogs and drove back toward our but. Like blind lice we felt our way through the snowstorm. We were very lucky to find our hut half-buried under a mound of snow. (We were lucky, too, that we never came across the unseen bear. Perhaps Totunye had fallen into the crevasse along with Soli's poor dogs.)

   How fragile is the life of a man! Let his core temperature drop a few degrees, and he will begin to shiver. Let it drop a little further, and he will begin to die. I dragged a dying Soli into the hut. I laid out his furs, lit the oilstones, and set the water to boil. If I could get a little hot coffee into him, I thought, I could warm him from core to skin. But I did not have time to make the coffee. His violent shivering stopped abruptly as he fell into unconsciousness, into the coma of hypothermia. His skin was blue; his breathing shallow and ragged. I touched his forehead. It was as cold as ice.

   Because he was dying, because he was, in truth, my father, I stripped to the skin and squeezed down into the sleeping furs with him. There was nothing else to do. Against my neck was the softness of shagshay fur; my naked chest pressed his hairy back. His cold, stiff legs were next to mine. I was so close to him that I did not dare open my mouth, else his long hair would have gotten in. I threw my arms around him. The Devaki, when they need to warm a frozen hunter, fall into just such a disgustingly intimate position. I could not bear to touch him, yet I found myself hugging him tightly, pressing him close, letting my body's heat flow into him. For a long time I held him that way. The furs trapped the heat, and he began to shiver. That was good because he had come alive enough to make his own heat. While half inside the furs, I prepared the coffee. I held his mug to his lips, encouraging him to drink. We lay there for most of a day, and at last, when he could finally eat, I cooked seal steaks, which we dipped in liquid seal blubber. The food revived him enough so that he looked at me and said, "It wasn't you who tried to assassinate me, was it?"

   "No, Soli."

   "Then Justine's death, my part in the Pilot's war - it was all madness, wasn't it? A stupid mistake?"

   "It was a tragedy," I said.

   "Yes, it's ironic." His fingers were working the heavy brows above his eyes. "After Justine was abandoned, after
I
hit her, there was no going back, not for us, not for me. That was the worst moment of my life. So, this Alaloi body of mine - it could have been resculpted but it was kept to remind me. As a penance, you see. And now, if not for this thick body and your help, well, the water would have killed me."

   Although each of us had slid towards the opposite edges of the furs, we were still very close. I smelled his breath, which was rank with coffee and ketones, the stinking result of our all-meat diet, of our bodies burning protein for glucose. I smelled other things about him, mainly anger, fear, and resentment. "You shouldn't have helped me," he said, "but you couldn't help helping me, could you? It's your revenge."

   "No," I said.

   "Yes, you love feeling holy about yourself, don't you?"

   "What do you mean?" I asked, though I knew exactly what he meant.

   "Even before you had the slightest reason ... Do you remember that night in the bar? When Tomoth called you a bastard? You couldn't help your temper, could you?"

   "I had no self-restraint, then."

   "'Heredity is destiny,'" he quoted.

   "I don't believe that," I said as I held a spitted sweetbread over the fire.

   "What do you believe?"

   "I think we can change ourselves, rewrite our programs. Ultimately, we're free."

   "No," he said. "You're wrong, Life is a trap. There's no way out."

   He was quiet while he sat up munching the crusted organ meat. He was deep in thought. His lean, hairy stomach rose and fell, rose and fell, as he sucked in the relatively warm air of the hut. He swallowed and said, "Let's talk about the Fravashi, this favored alien race of yours. The Timekeeper would have banished all of them from the City, if he could. Their alien teachings, this notion of ultimate fate, of - what do you call it? - of ananke. You've listened to them more than a man should, haven't you?"

   I had never heard Soli wax so philosophical before, so I let him continue: "_Free will_? Have you thought about that term, the way the Fravashi use it? It's an oxymoron, as self-contradictory as a 'cheerful pessimist' or a 'happy fate" If the universe is alive and conscious, as you believe, if it moves itself toward ... if it has a purpose, then we're all slaves because it moves
us
towards that purpose as if we were pieces on a chessboard. And we don't know anything of the higher game, do we? Yes, and so where is the freedom? It's fine to talk of ananke, of this merging of our individual wills with the higher - is that what you believe? - but for human beings, ananke means hate, desperate love, despair, death."

   "No," I said, "you don't understand."

   He spat a piece of gristle against the packed-snow floor and said, "Enlighten me."

   "We're ultimately free, not totally free. We're free within certain bounds. In the end, our individual wills are a part of the will of the universe."

   "And you believe that?"

   "It's what the Fravashi teach."

   "And what is the will of the universe?" he asked as he dumped a handful of snow into the coffee pot.

   Outside, the storm was drowning the hut in snow. The north wall, the only uncovered wall, glowed grayly with the light sifting through the snow blocks. "I don't know," I said.

   "But you think you can discover what it is?"

   "I don't know."

   "That's an arrogant thought, isn't it?" he said.

   "Why else are we here? Discovery or creation - in the end it's the same thing."

   "Yes, why are we here? - the cardinal trivial question. We're here to suffer and die. We're here because we're here."

   "That's pure nihilism."

   "You're so arrogant," he said, and he shut his eyes and ground his teeth together, almost as it he were asleep. "You think there is a way out for yourself, don't you?"

   "I don't know."

   "Well, there is no way out. Life is a trap, no matter at what level you live it. There is always a crescendoing series of traps. The Timekeeper was right: Life is hell."

   "We're creators of our hells."

   He jumped up off the snowbed and stood naked on the floor. Beneath his skin his muscles were long and flat, like leather straps wrapped around wood. His lean shadow cut the curving, white walls. "Yes," he said slowly. "Half my hell was created by me, and the other half you created for me."

   My lips and cheeks were burning in the warm air, and I mocked him, saying, "Heredity is destiny."

   "Damn you!"

   "We're creators of our heavens," I said softly. "We can create ourselves."

   "No, it's too late."

   "Never too late," I said.

   "For me it's too late." He rubbed some seal fat on the red scar tissue of his finger stumps. He said, "Arrogance, everywhere such arrogance - it makes me ill. But soon there will be no more of this arrogance." Here he shot me a look of resentment, of awe, of hate. "In the whole Devaki tribe, there's not one man who is tired or ashamed of being a man, who wants to be more than he is. And that's why I'll never go back to the City."

   That night I had dreams of the future, of Soli's future and my own. I scryed until dawn, and I drank some coffee and scryed halfway through the snowy day. I wanted to show him what I had seen, to tell him that life is not a trap, at least no more of a trap than we make from the sharpened ends of our cold bones and the sinews of our twisted hearts. I wanted to tell him the simplest of things. Instead I stood up and began pulling on my furs. "It will stop snowing soon," I said. "Before nightfall."

   Soli sat inside his furs as he fitted his spear with a new blade of flint. (The old point had snapped in the wall of the crevasse.) He looked at me with the loathing he held for scryers and said nothing.

   "The Timekeeper is close," I said. "He's fifteen miles northwest; three of his dogs are sick inside his hut, and the aklia he opens today will be empty."

   "Scryer talk."

   "If we sled all night, we'll surprise him in the morning."

   "If we sled all night," he said, "we'll drop down the first crevasse, won't we?"

   From a piece of newl skin I began cutting socks for the dogs. "No," I told him, "I know where the crevasses are."

   "We'll sled circles in the blackness."

   "No," I said. "The stars will be out. We'll steer by the stars."

   He smiled at this old saying and bowed his head. "All right, Pilot, we'll steer by the stars, if they come out."

   When night fell the wind was blowing from the north, blowing the last of the warm air and snow clouds away. It was very cold. The sky was as black as a rippling pilot's robe, and it was full of stars. In the north Shonablinka lit the rim of blackness; westward the hexagonal array of the Fravashi Ring twinkled high above the horizon. We drove the sled northwest through the silky, new snow. The dogs must have thought we were crazy, sledding through chest-high powder at night (chest-high to them, that is), skirting the crevasses that they must have feared lay beneath their covered paws. Far into the night it turned deep cold. The air was like frozen oxygen; my lips were so numb that I could not whistle, nor could I speak. We sledded silently across the seascape that I had seen in my scryer's vision, every gleaming fold and drift. We did not stumble across any crevasses. We stopped only once, to boil water for coffee. I kept my eyes fixed on the stars and on the horizon beneath the stars. In the twilight, just before morning, I saw a tiny hump of snow raised up from the immense white hump of the world. "There it is," I huffed out and pointed, "The Timekeeper's hut. Do you see it?"

   "Yes, there it is. You were right."

   He whistled to Kuri - and how I marveled at his beautiful whistle, his way with dogs - and with the wind lashing our faces, we slid over the snow-drowned sea.

When the Fravashi first became a people, the Dark God came down from the stars and spoke to the First Least Father of the Adamant Mindsinger Clan. "First Least Father," he said, "if I promise to tell you the secret of the universe at the end of ten million years, will you agree to listen to my song?"

The First Least Father was thirsty for new music, so he told him, "Fill my windpipes; sing me your song."

So the Dark God sang his song, and ten million years passed while the Adamant Mindsinger Clan warred against the Faithful Thoughtplayer Clan and the other Clans, and in all this time on all of Fravashing there was only this single, dreadful song.

When the Dark God returned, he told the First Least Father the secret of the universe. "I don't understand," the First Least Father said at last.

Whereupon the Dark God laughed at him and said, "How did you expect to understand? Your brain hasn't changed at all in ten million years."

The First Least Father contemplated these words and sang out, "My God! I didn't think about that when we made the bargain!"

   Fravashi parable

We came at the Timekeeper from the south in the very first part of the morning. He had built his hut fifty feet away from a newly opened crevasse. Fifty miles away, Kweitkel stood revealed by the dawn; the holy mountain was like a great blue and white pillar holding up the western edge of the sky. When the Timekeeper saw us sledding toward his hut from the south, he must have thought we were Devaki hunters returning home. We wanted him to think this. We had circled south just so he would think this. In truth, even if he had guessed who we were, we gave him no time to ice his sled, to load his furs and food (what little food remained), to harness his dogs and flee. We slid into his camp just after first light, and he was outside his hut politely waiting for us in Devaki fashion with steaming mugs of blood tea.

   "_Ni luria la!_" he called out, "_Ni luria la!_" In his white furs, which covered almost all of his face except his black eyes, he seemed as watchful as a wolf.

   "_Ni luria la!_" I answered.

   All at once three starved dogs bounded from the tunnel of his hut and ran among our dogs, barking, sniffing and licking each other's black noses. The Timekeeper must have recognized my voice immediately; he must have seen that our sled was a city sled, that our dogs were city dogs who greeted his dogs with wagging tails and red tongues lolling. He set the mugs of blood tea down into the fluffy snow, ignoring the largest of his dogs when he began lapping down our welcoming drink. He threw back the hood of his furs. His smooth brown face was shiny with grease, set with the stamp of grim humor and fate.