Neverness (80 page)

   One of the Timekeeper's skinny dogs trotted over to me and I patted his side. He sniffed the air in the direction of the crevasse and began to whine. "What could be simpler, Soli? The Ieldra shared their wisdom with everyone. In truth, it's ironic: They relied on our intelligence to remember their intelligence. They must have thought it would be the simplest thing for man to learn the true art of remembrancing. And we should have, thousands of years ago. They never dreamed we'd be so stupid."

   _Infinite dangers_. I glanced north at the blue-black curtain of the sky hanging over the frozen icebergs. I listened to the Eddas whisper.

   Soli stood up and whistled to the rest of the Timekeeper's dogs. When he was done going over them with his hands and eyes, he asked, "is this how it ends? The quest?" Then he, too, was staring off, blinking against the fresh wind.

   I turned my head. To the south, the ice was as smooth and white as an Alaloi baby's skin. There was no end to the southern ice of the Starnbergersee. "It goes on and on," I said.

   We went into the Timekeeper's hut, and Soli boiled water for coffee. He bathed the wound on my forehead with hot, soaking cottons; he thawed it, cleaned it, and, with a strand of seal sinew, sewed it closed. After we had drunk our coffee, he fed and tended the sick dogs while I explored the inside of the hut. I searched through the Timekeeper's things until I found the book. Along with a few steel pens and a glass sphere full of ink, it was wrapped in an oilskin, shoved between the pillowed furs at the head of his bed. It was a fat, leather-bound book which closely resembled the book of poems he had once given me. I opened it and smelled the thickness of old leather. An icy gust blew through the chinks in the wall, rattling its white pages. It was not a book of poems. The Timekeeper had painstakingly - agonizingly - covered the pages of the book line after line, with letters he had inked and drawn (and composed) himself. It was an exquisite work of calligraphy, the work of a man who cared not at all if he spent an hour penning a single word. The work of a lifetime. I turned to the title page of the book. There, in black letters as thick as a dog's claws, I read:

A REQUIEM FOR HOMO SAPIENS

BY

HORTHY HOSTHOH

TIMEKEEPER AND LORD HOROLOGE

OF THE ORDER OF MYSTIC MATHEMATICIANS

AND OTHER SEEKERS OF THE INEFFABLE FLAME

   I turned the page and found that the book began with the following words: "These are
my
Eddas." I ran my eyes over the other pages of the book, reading continuously. The last page, I saw, was unfinished. The Timekeeper's sequence of words ended midsentence, and at least one hundred of the book's pages after that were blank.

   Soli, who had never learned the art of reading, came over to me and asked, "Why would the Timekeeper want you to have this book?"

   I closed the book and rapped the cover with my pilot's ring. I said, "This book, these words - it's his Eddas."

   "Tell me about the Eddas," Soli said. "Not the Timekeeper's Eddas. That would make me too sad. Tell me about
your
Elder Eddas, the message of the gods."

   I told him all that I knew. This is what I said: The Eddas were the Ieldra's instructions to human beings on how to become gods. Man is a bridge between ape and god, and the Eddas were a design for a bridge which would not crumble into snow dust. Men must be gods because that was how we were built. The god program runs deep in our race, as deep as the primitive DNA from which we sprang billions of years ago. We must learn how this program runs because that is our fate. I told him this simple thing as he pressed a mug of hot coffee into my hands. But there are infinite dangers, I said. When man looked godward with insane eyes, the very stars would explode and drop from the sky. Insane god-men, insane gods - the universe is full of insanity; insanity lurks everywhere, like a mad, cannibalistic thallow waiting to gobble up any godling who attains great intelligence and power. The more complex the programs of an organism, the greater is the danger of insanity. It is very, very hard to be a god. I breathed in the rich fumes of the coffee, and I said that it was the gift of the Ieldra to help man cross the bridge. Because they were compassionate beings, yes, but also because it was part of their purpose to save the universe from insanity.

   "Of course, man is already part god," I said. "And we're part insane, which is why we're arrogant enough to tamper with the natural life-cycle of the stars. And therefore: the Vild. Because we're ignorant, Soli, because we don't know. We don't see. There are rules; the Eddas are rules, rules on becoming, of determining our place in the ecology."

   _The deep structure of the universe is pure consciousness._

   Soli nodded his head and sipped his coffee as he listened to me talk on through the day into the night. The beginning of everything, I said, is the reprogramming of our brains. Even our antiquated human brains can be reprogrammed. We
can
write our master programs; there are techniques for doing so; the Elder Eddas lays down the rules for these techniques. In the end, we can remake our brains, and if we aspire to greater consciousness, then we must, for what is the brain but a small lump of matter that concentrates consciousness? Matter/energy; space/time; information/consciousness - consciousness; there are fundamentals describable by the Ieldra's beautiful, simple mathematics. In a way, matter is merely frozen energy floating in an icefield of spacetime. And consciousness is matter's way of organizing itself; consciousness is immanent in every snowflake, atom, blood drop, photon and grain of sand, every neighborhood of spacetime from the Virgo Cloud to Perdido Luz.
Consciousness inheres
, I whispered; consciousness orders everything. The mathematics of order: There are rules for quantifying the involvement/duty/identification among all the living organisms and inorganic matter in the universe.
Tat Tvam Asi
, That Thou Art, and what do I owe a stranger or an alien? My father? A bloodworm? A distant star? What is man's place in the universal scheme? The great danger, I said, is in falsely perceiving the otherness of all things. Then we will pull the wings off flies, or murder seals, or other human beings; then we may destroy the stars.

   "There's help for the Vild, Soli. A solution, a way out. There's a unity of ... consciousness. In a way, matter is just a standing wavefront of consciousness, and energy, every bit of gamma radiating from the Vild stars, every photon, this moving wavefront - it was all created by human action, and therefore it can be uncreated. Or, I should say,
re
-created. Made over in a different form, do you see? It's part of the ecology, now."

   "You keep saying
the
ecology," he said, sipping more coffee. "What ecology?"

   _There is an ecology of information. Stars will die; people and gods will die, but information is conserved. Macroscopic information decays to microscopic information. But microscopic information is eventually concentrated. Nothing is lost. Gods exist to devour information. The lower intelligences sort, filter, concentrate and organize information. And the gods feed._

   "Pilot?"

   "I'm sorry, I was ... remembering." I licked coffee from my teeth and said, "There are natural rules for determining our place in the ecology. If we could decode the universal program, read the intention of the universe, then -"

   "You're not answering my question."

   "I'm trying. The Vild - it's not the intention of the universe. What do human beings know of ananke? There are always imperfections and insanities. The orcas -"

   "The
what
?"

   "On Agathange, the orcas may or may not be insane, but they play a crucial role in
that
planet's ecology. And so, consider the Vild: an ocean of energy to he used."

   As the Entity had made thousands of black bodies to store the energy of Gehenna Luz, so could we use the energy of the Vild. Information could be coded into signals and sent anywhere, given enough energy. Sent
everywhere
, this interflow of information. We could speak with the nebular brains in our galaxy. We could extend our galaxy's information ecology. We - every human being, Fravashi, oyster, sentient bacterium, virus, or seal - we could drive our collective consciousness across the two million light-years of the intergalactic void to the information ecologies of the nearer galaxies, Andromeda and Maffei and the First Leo - all the galaxies of the local group were alive with intelligence and vibrated with the thoughts of organisms such as ourselves. Someday the time would come to interface with the ecologies of other groups of galaxies. Within ten million light-years off the supergalactic plane of the local supercluster were many groups of galaxies. Canes Venatici, the Pavo-Indus and the Ursa galaxies - these burning, brilliant clouds of intelligence and others enveloped our own small galaxy in a sphere of light four hundred million light-years in diameter. To speak with such distant galaxies would require the energy of a supernova, perhaps many tens of thousands of supernovas.

   "_La ilaha il Allah_," I said, "and we're all a part."

   "Listen, Pilot, I don't understand you."

   I listened to the night wind whispering outside the hut, and to the quieter whispering inside. In truth, most of the Eddas I did not understand, either. Most of it was - there is no other word - gobbledygook. I did not yet have the brain to understand it. For a moment, the whole, vast architecture of the coming information ecology unfolded before me, layer upon layer of ideas, biological systems and information structures spreading out, opening like the pages of a book. It was overwhelming and wonderful, but I was like a worm crawling across the first page of the book, trying to read it letter by letter by the feel of the ink across my belly. I understood perhaps a single page in all the millions of pages of the Eddas. And the Eddas themselves, the collected wisdom of the gods, were only a tiny part of the secrets that the universe held, as insignificant as a single snowflake in a blizzard.

   I tried to tell Soli all this, but I do not think he really wanted to understand. "You say that these memories are in each of us? The whole of the Eddas?" He was staring straight ahead as he knelt on the floor, roasting a baldo nut over the oilstone.

   "Yes," I said, "passed down from father to son. That's why the Timekeeper killed the other immortals. He didn't want anyone telling people what was inside them. Because he knew."

   "Knew what?"

   "That the bridge can only be crossed one way. And he knew that if we listened to the memories, we'd want to make the crossing."

   "It's not so easy to remember," he said.

   "You could remember the Eddas, if you wanted to."

   "Is that true?"

   I watched the flame's reflection in his eyes. It must hurt him, I thought, to stare so long without blinking. "I could show you how to remember," I said.

   He chewed his baldo nut a long time before he swallowed. "No," he said, "there are enough memories already. It's too late, isn't it?"

   "Never too late," I said.

   "Yes, too late."

   I drank the last of my coffee and wiped my lips. "What will you do now, then?"

   He sucked on his fingers a moment to warm them. He said, "All my life - and it's been a long life, hasn't it? - I've spent every moment trying to figure out why I was alive. My own private quest, Pilot. Now you say the Eddas are inside me; you tell me I have only to remember and ... and what? You say I'll learn the secret of life on a higher level of existence. But life's life, isn't it? There's always misery, yes; and the higher the level of existence, the greater the misery. I've had enough - do you understand? I, Leopold Soli ...
I
. I, like the Timekeeper - enough. How can there ever be an answer?" He rubbed his nose and looked at me. "All my life I thought I was learning how to live. But I knew nothing, did I? Justine knew everything. Yes, I'll sled on to Kweitkel and live with the Devaki, if they'll let me. We were happy there once, Justine and I. Do you remember?"

   Later we heard the bawl of a bear far out on the ice. Soli thought it might be the same one who had led his dogs to their deaths in the crevasse. He went out to look for the pieces of his bear spear that he had cast into the snow. When he returned, he held the broken end of the spear by its point. "It was reckless of me to break the spear," he said. "But at least the flint can be saved. It's a good piece of flint."

   I ran my finger lightly along the cut on my forehead. "A good piece of flint," I agreed. "It nearly killed me."

   "Yes," he said, and he punched out and knocked away part of a snow block from the roof. For a while he watched the spindrift curling through the opening before he began to shiver. He stood up to patch the hole and said, "Ever since we first met, I've wondered: Why?"

   He cut a new block of snow, trimmed it and tapped it into place. He sat across from me on the Timekeeper's bed. He tried to meet my eyes, but he could not. His face was hard with emotion, the muscles locking as two contradictory programs began to run. He wanted to tell me how much he hated me, how he resented my very existence. The words were almost on his lips. His eyes were bright blue, as shiny as the sea. He opened his mouth. He wanted to say, "Yes, I wanted to kill you; I was ready to kill you; I would loved to have killed you." And then a long moment slowly passed as his face softened, and he rubbed his eyes, and he said the other thing, the thing that he thought he did not want to say: "No, I couldn't kill you. How can a man kill his own son?"

   I stared at the fire as the hut filled with silence. He threw his hand over his eyes, rubbing his temples.

   "Why
you
, Pilot?" he asked at last. "What will happen to you?"

   I sat there with him eating baldo nuts, and I told him one last secret. Then everything seemed to be beating: my heart, his heart, the air molecules outside beating against the frozen snow. I listened to the beating of the Vild stars calling me, then I told him, as compassionately as I could, that it was his son's fate to be a god.