Neverness (78 page)

   "So, the bastard Ringess has tracked me. Or should I call you, 'Lord Ringess?" Ha!"

   Before we had come to a stop, Soli was off the sled with his spear cocked behind his ear, aiming the point at the Timekeeper's belly.

   "Leopold," the Timekeeper said. "Have you made your peace with your son? Tell me, does the City still stand? How did you escape my old bomb?"

   Soli ground his teeth so hard that blood ran from his nose. I could see that he trembled to spear the Timekeeper, so I said, "Wait!"

   "Yes, wait," the Timekeeper repeated.

   Quickly I told him that part of the City had been destroyed, that my mother and six thousand others lay frozen in a mass grave. I told him how my mother had died trying to save me from his slel-clone's killing knife.

   "I knew the bomb was old," he said. "So old."

   "You're a murderer," Soli said. He kicked up a shower of snow as he planted his rear foot.

   "So, here I stand, a murderer tracked and trapped by murderers."

   Soli's fist tightened around the spear. I felt certain he was about to kill the Timekeeper. I watched the murder programs begin to run. But he surprised me. He stared the Timekeeper up and down and asked simply, "Why the City? The City you founded three thousand years ago? Is that true?"

   The Timekeeper let out a puff of steam and turned to me. He said, "So, you've been inside the goddess, and she's talked to you. What did she tell you about me, eh, Mallory?"

   "She said you were the oldest human being, that you've been alive for thousands of years."

   "How old am I? What did she say?"

   "She said you've been alive at least since the Holocaust Century."

   "I'm old, it's true."

   I climbed out of the sled and stood by Soli. He stepped closer to the Timekeeper; the Timekeeper stepped backward in the direction of the crevasse. "How old?" I asked.

   "So old," he said. "Very old. Older than the snow. Older than the ice of the sea."

   "You'll have to pay for your murders," Soli said.

   For no good reason, the Timekeeper quickly looked up into the sky. I saw the old hell bubbling in his black eyes, and I knew that he had already paid for the murders with pieces of his soul. He was paying still; he would never stop paying.

   "It's so quick," the Timekeeper said. "All human lives happen so quickly, a few hard seconds, no more. Is it murder to mercifully end their lives a few moments before the ticking stops of its own and they die a natural death? Tell me!"

   But neither Soli nor I had anything to add about the nature of murder so we said nothing.

   "The City's had its time," the Timekeeper said. "The Order, too. You know why I did what I did."

   "Did you have to kill my mother, then?"

   "It was my double that killed her, not I."

   "No, you killed her."

   He made a fist and growled out, "Your mother and you, the bastard Ringess with your carked brains, your wild new ideas, all of you, the doom of the human race."

   I wiped ice from my eyelashes and said, "You would have killed me."

   "Once I tried to save you - do you remember? - saved you because I loved you like a son." He glanced at Soli then quickly turned back to me. "Do you still have the book of poems? I wanted to save you from the goddess. I saved you too well, goddamn me for trying!"

   I stepped closer to him. He was scratching Tusa's ear, pointedly not looking at Soli's raised spear. jets of steam billowed from his nostrils in slow, even spurts. In the morning air I smelled his sour skin, his sweat, his carnivorous breath. He was afraid of something. His face was as hard as any human face I had ever seen, but there was fear cut into it. I moved closer, stepping between him and Soli. Soli cursed and began circling in order to have a clear line of sight should he decide to spear him after all.

   I rubbed my cheeks, trying to warm them so my words wouldn't be slurry. I said, "When the Lord Imprimatur unraveled your slel-clone's DNA, he found nothing."

   "So? There's nothing to find."

   "The Elder Eddas," I said. "The secret of the Ieldra."

   "Gobbledygook!"

   "The Entity told me their secret was embroidered in your chromosomes."

   "Gobbledygook!"

   "What do you know about the Ieldra?"

   "Piss on the Ieldra!"

   "Why would the Ieldra warn me - warn all of us - of the goddess?"

   He smacked his fist into his mitten and yelled out, "Why this? Why that? Why, why, why?"

   "How old are you?" I asked.

   "Old as stone."

   "What did the Ieldra do to you? I need to know."

   "Piss on you!"

   I stepped closer; he stepped back. "Tell me, Kelkemesh," I said. "I've come so far to know."

   He closed his eyes and grimaced. With his mouth open he threw his head back as if he were about to scream. It was the first time I had ever seen his eyes closed. "So, you know my name; then you know everything. What's left to tell you, eh?"

   "The secret."

   "How old?" Soli asked.

   He pointed his chin at me and opened his eyes. He held his palm pushing out toward Soli. "I was born thirty thousand years ago," he said. "Old Earth years. Do you need to know exactly how many years? One hundred forty-two years more than thirty thousand years ago. One hundred forty-two years, eighteen days and five hours more." As he said this he pulled a flat, gold clock from his furs, opened it, and said, "And fifteen minutes more, twelve seconds, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen seconds ... how many more seconds do I have? If the Ieldra would have had their way, I'd live forever. They
made
me to live forever, damn them! It's my purpose, they would say.
Their
purpose."

   "That's impossible," Soli said. He circled back the other way so the Timekeeper stood between him and the crevasse. "No one could live that long."

   "Ha, Leopold, you're wrong! Shall I tell you? One day, long ago, when the forests of Old Earth were green and seamless as a mechanic's robe, they came down from the sky and told me they had chosen me to carry their message. The damn gods! I never saw their bodies; I don't think they had bodies, maybe they had never had bloody bodies. Do gods have bodies like men? They appeared as balls of light, bright blue balls like the hottest flames of a wood fire. They told me this: They said that the Earth - even my Earth of thirty thousand years ago - they said it was too full of men. The lights in the sky were stars, they said. Soon men would leave Earth and wander among the stars. I thought I was going mad. No, they said, I was not going mad; I was one of one hundred and twenty-five immortals chosen to carry the Ieldra's message through time. To carry their damn message so human beings, when we learned to burn the fuel of the stars, would listen to the voice of wisdom and not go mad, and we would not burn ourselves with starlight or other heavenly fires. The Ieldra - damn their faceless faces! - they said their spirits were ready to live within a sky so black and vast that not even the starlight could escape the blackness. A black hole, they said. I didn't understand a word of their gobbledygook, of course. They told me they were sad to leave the human race alone, naked in our ignorance. 'Naked" I said to them. 'Ignorant" Why, I wore the skin of the wolf that I killed with my own hands, and I knew the name of every plant and animal in the forest! The Ieldra didn't laugh at me because they had no mouths, but I heard them whispering and laughing inside me, all the same. Then they opened me, the bloody gods. They filled me with their crewelwork every bit of me, embroidering every cell of my body, down to the last strand of DNA. They carked my seed, my goddamned soul! I didn't understand what they were doing. I was so pissing afraid that I knocked my own teeth out with my fist. I was burning from inside out. It felt like I'd swallowed hot tallow, like I'd eaten the magic mushroom and lay dying of fever, all at the same time. After that they left me to my fate. They carked their consciousness into the core singularity and left me to wander Old Earth for most of thirty-thousand years. My teeth soon grew back, of course, once, twice, many times, my damn teeth, every time I wore them out. They left me with these fine white teeth, to chew the bitter root of immortality, to taste the fruit of the world over and over until I was so sick of the world I could have died. But I couldn't die, and that's the hell of it. So now you know."

   I looked down for a moment, thinking about gods and immortality. The snow was up to my knees; it was so powdery and dry I could see each ice crystal tumbling down the holes I made as I stepped closer to the Timekeeper, closer to Soli.

   To the Timekeeper I said, "The message inside you - don't you want to know?"

   "No."

   "Embroidered in your DNA."

   He grimaced again, revealing his long, white teeth. "No, there's nothing there but disinformation and noise."

   "They're gods! Why would you doubt the message of the gods?"

   "Because they lie," he said. "The gods, they lie."

   Soli pushed through the snow, circling right, then left. His hand was hard over the leather grip of the spear while he wiped his bleeding nose with the other. He was backing the Timekeeper toward the crevasse.

   I held a naked hand to my chapped lips, then asked, "The other immortals, what happened to them? Where are they?"

   "They're dead," the Timekeeper told me. "The Ieldra made us immortal, but we could be killed. A stone through the forehead, a knife ..." and here he looked straight at Soli, "a spear through the heart - there are ways."

   "All of them? Dead by accident?"

   "Old Earth was a very violent place."

   I saw that he was lying, or at least, he was keeping part of the truth from me. He watched Soli circle, watched the tip of his spear glowing golden as it caught the light of the rising sun. "You killed them, didn't you?" I asked suddenly.

   He jerked his chin up and caught me with his eyes. "So quick, Mallory. Always too damn quick. So, I hunted them down like sheep, now you know, all of them, one by one, even the five of them - shall I tell you their names? - even the five immortals who escaped the Holocaust and fled into the manifold."

   "Too bad," I said.

   "They'd lived too long and the secret had to be kept, eh?"

   "And you're the keeper of the secret?"

   "So, I'm the Timekeeper and I've kept it all this time."

   "You've decoded the Eddas - am I right? Tell me what they say."

   "Tell yourself."

   "You've no right to keep this secret," I said.

   His eyes grew hot as coals and he shouted, "Rights? You talk of rights? The damn Ieldra took apart my
soul
! Not even gods have such a right."

   I held up my fist to show him my pilot's ring. I said, "The day I received this, you called the quest for the Elder Eddas. The quest is over, then."

   "No, Mallory, it's not over."

   "The imprimaturs could decode the Eddas from your insides if -"

   "There's nothing to decode."

   " - if we brought you back to the City."

   "So, you'll bring me back dead. Can the noble Ringess and his nobler father slaughter me like a sheep? Ha!"

   Soli
could
kill him, I thought; he and I had raced across the sea just to kill him. I knew he blamed the Timekeeper for Katharine's death, so when he moved his spear, I thought he was about to kill him. He was aching to kill him, but struggling to restrain himself. He licked blood from his mustache and said to me, "if you want this old killer to live, we don't need his whole body. Yes, cut a few fingers off and freeze them. The imprimaturs can decode the Eddas from the DNA of his fingers."

   He stared at the Timekeeper, and the Book of Silence opened. I read a whole chapter of the Book. He, the proud Soli, was well pleased with himself for rising to his humanity and not spearing the Timekeeper. He
loved
the idea of being merciful and gracious at the last instant.

   The Timekeeper's lips pulled back in what could have been either a snarl or a smile. "Ha, is this all you want?" So saying he snapped his arm like a whip, and a long steel knife fell from his sleeve into his hand. He shook off the mitten from his other hand. As easily as I might trim the wick of an oilstone, he stretched out his little finger and lopped it off. The finger dropped into the fluffy snow and disappeared down a hole rimmed with blood, which quickly froze into little ruby crystals. He held his splayed, four-fingered hand in front of Soli's face. White bone gleamed in the dark, red suck of the wound, but strangely there was little blood.

   "Take my finger," he said. And then he bent down, retrieved the finger from the punched-in hole. He flung it at Soli's face. Soli moved his head aside, and it went sailing past him, sailing past me, and it fell again into the snow.

   Such a little gesture of scorn, but the Timekeeper had read the Book of Silence, too. He must have known about Soli and scorn. Soli went mad, then. He fell into rage; every bit of humanity and graciousness fell away from his mad eyes. He ground his teeth and snorted, and blood sprayed out of his nose. His spear arm drew back behind his ear, far back with his forefinger straight along the spear shaft, pointing behind him at me.

   "Read the book, Mallory," the Timekeeper suddenly called out. I had no idea which book he was referring to. I tried to step closer, to stop the tide of violence beginning its surge, but I was already beginning to remember, and I could hardly move. "The book is for you."

   I think he wanted very badly to die. But life was too much of a habit, and he could not die so easily, not the Timekeeper, so he charged Soli and tried to put his knife into him. Soli threw his spear. With his spear he had once killed a great white bear, and now he would kill an old, old wolf of a man. Even though the Timekeeper tried to twist out of the way, Soli's spear caught him in the chest.

   "So!" the Timekeeper howled out in pain. He stumbled and fell into the snow, ten feet from the edge of the crevasse.

   Then Soli was all over him, kicking him in the face and throat, grabbing the spear shaft and jerking it back and forth, the better to ruin as much flesh as possible and to work the tip deep into the Timekeeper's heart.