Neverness (81 page)

A day, whether six or seven ago, or more than six thousand years ago, is just as near to the present as yesterday. Why? Because all time is contained in the present Now-moment.

To talk about the world being made by God tomorrow, or yesterday, would be talking nonsense. God makes the world and all things in this present Now. Time gone a thousand years ago is now as present and near to God as this very instant.

   Johannes Eckehart, Mongol Century Horologe

The next day Soli rubbed his red-rimmed eyes and announced that he would take the Timekeeper's sled and dogs and go on to Kweitkel. I could turn around immediately, he said, and hunt seals all the way back to Neverness. However, the Timekeeper's poor dogs were in no condition to pull a sled. Three of them were sick with frostbite, and all of them were starving.

   "I'll come with you as far as Kweitkel," I said. I adjusted my snow goggles and looked out at the mountain. In the pristine air, its gleaming cone seemed much closer than it really was. "It would be best to leave the Timekeeper's sled here. The sick dogs can ride in our sled; the others can follow after us."

   In truth, neither of us felt very sure that the Devaki would welcome Soli, and I did not want to leave him stranded with a team of sick dogs. So I accompanied him for this last part of his journey. It took us two days to reach the island. We built a hut thirty yards from the rugged shoreline. Yuri had told me three years ago - it seemed like three lifetimes - that I would never be welcome on Kweitkel. Very well, I would not touch foot to land. (Unless, of course, a bear clawed open my hut and chased me into the pretty yu trees above the beach.) Soli set out into the forest on skis. He would tell the Devaki some made-up story of tragedy and woe, of how Justine and Bardo, and my mother, had each gone over to the other side. He would return the next day, he said, with skinfuls of baldo nuts for my return home, and with meat for the dogs, if it had been a good year for the Devaki and they were feeling gracious.

   I waited three days and three nights while the wind blew and nearly buried my hut. I was worrying fiercely when, on the afternoon of the fourth day, several sleds appeared at the edge of the forest. One of them slipped down the beach to the sea. I stood with my hand shielding my eyes against the noonday sun. I looked closely at the sled. Soli was driving it, and he was not alone.

   "_Ni luria la!_" I called out. I did not know what else to say. I squinted and stared at the sled. At first I thought that Soli had a little bear cub riding atop the stacked skinfuls of baldo nuts. Then I looked more closely. It was not a bear cub; it was a Devaki child bundled in shagshay furs. I could not guess why Soli had a child with him.

   The men at the edge of the forest did not greet me. They stood by their sleds, half behind the yu trees, looking out to sea. Because of the glare, I could not make out their faces.

   "_Ni luria la_," Soli answered, and he drew closer. I squinted and saw that the child was a boy, perhaps three years old. In his lap he held a stick doll. As the sled scraped to a stop, he looked down, studying the doll with a shy intensity.

   Soli left the boy on the sled. He walked over to me, and in the language of the Devaki, he said, "It's too bad you had to wait."

   "Who is the boy?" As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I knew who the boy was.

   "He is the found-son of Haidar and Chandra," he said.

   At the mention of his found-parents' names, the boy looked up and smiled. "_Haidar mi padda moru ril Tuwa_," he suddenly said without any prompting, and he told me the story of how his found-father had killed a mammoth the preceding winter. "_Los pela manse, mi Haidar, mi Haidar lo li wos._"

   He was a handsome, strong-looking boy with an easy smile and quick, blue-black eyes the color of the twilight sky. He did not really look much like other Alaloi children I had seen. When I smiled at him his shyness melted instantly. He boldly stared at me as if he had known me all his life.

   _The color of Katharine's eyes_, I whispered to myself. "What is his name?" I asked in a raw, uneven voice.

   The boy smiled, showing me his straight, white teeth. "_Padda_," he said, "_ni luria la; ti los mi lot-Padda?_" - "Welcome, Father; are you really my blood-father?"

   "It's impossible," I said, although I knew that in this strange universe we inhabit, there is very little that is impossible.

   Soli crunched through the snow closer to me and grabbed my arm. I whispered in his ear, "He can't be my son. Anala cut the fetus from Katharine a good forty-days before her time. Do you remember? He couldn't have lived."

   "Couldn't he?" he murmured as he turned to look at the boy. "He's tough as a diamond. He's my grandson. All the Soli line - we're hard to kill, aren't we?" And then, "Look at him! The cutter sculpted your face but he left your chromosomes alone. How can you doubt it?"

   He picked some ice from his furs and told me what had happened: "When they saw me approaching the cave, the Devaki were surprised to see me. And they surprised me by holding a feast in my honor. They roasted mammoth - they've been having luck with the mammoth herds these past years, even though a big bull trampled Yuri two years ago and crushed his skull. But everyone remembered what Yuri had said that day, so they welcomed me. They forgave me, can you believe that, Pilot?"

   "_Tuwa wi lalunye_," the boy said as he licked his lips, watching us. Obviously he thought that Soli was telling me about the mammoth feast.

   Soli rubbed the back of his head and continued. "It was Anala who told me. About the boy. None of the Devaki women expected him to live, even Chandra, who nursed him after Katharine ... after we returned to the City. But he did live. It's a miracle, isn't it?"

   I watched the boy as he fidgeted and slipped a tiny bone spear into the doll's curved fist. His long chin, I saw, could have been my own chin before I had been made into an Alaloi; his wavy hair was black and shot with red.

   "But they murdered Katharine!" I said. "They called her a satinka. Why didn't they smother the baby and bury it in the snow?"

   "That's not their way, is it?"

   "I never thought he could have lived. I never saw it. I never guessed."

   Soli scratched at the blood beneath his nose and coughed. "He was a tough little baby, they say. Chandra told me he rarely cried, not even when he burned his hand in the oilstones."

   I blinked my eyes and said, "Katharine, before she died, she would have seen it if he were to have lived. Why didn't she tell me?"

   "A scryer's ways."

   "What's his name?" I asked, forgetting for a moment that the Devaki do not name their children until they are at least four years old.

   "They haven't named him yet," he said. "But Haidar talks of naming him Danlo the Younger, after his grandfather. After Haidar's grandfather, that is."

   I closed my eyes and shook my head. "No," I said, "he'll be a pilot, and people will call him Danlo Peacewise because he'll lead a mission to the Vild. He'll learn numbers and geometry, and he doesn't know the names of the stars yet, but he'll -"

   "No," Soli said softly. He turned to the boy, who dug into one of the skins and popped a baldo nut into his mouth. He cracked it between his hard little teeth and smiled at me.

   "He's my son!" I shouted.

   "No, he's Haidar's son, now. His found-son, yes, but he loves him as much as his other sons. Haidar is the only father he knows. He'll be a good -"

   "No!" I took a step toward the sled. "He's my son, and when he sees the City for the first time, he'll cry out, 'Father, I'm home!'"

   Soli shook his head and pointed toward the line of thick-ribbed ice above the beach. Haidar, Wemilo, Seif, Jonath and Choclo stood on the blue whorls and crusts, watching us. They were dressed in their hunting furs, and each of them held a shagshay spear. I raised my open hand to them, but only little Choclo - he was no longer very little - smiled back. I had always liked Choclo.

   Soli said, "When I entered the cave and Anala showed me the boy, she said Haidar had gone with Wemilo and Choclo to hunt shagshay. That's why it took me so long to come back, because Haidar had to be asked. When Haidar returned from his hunt, he said that
I
could carry the boy back on the sled. To say goodbye - that's what Haidar said, do you understand? He said that the boy should see his blood-father once before saying goodbye forever."

   I stared down at the snow, knowing what Soli would say, yet stunned when he said it. I walked over to the sled and picked the boy up. He was heavier than he looked.

   "_Padda_," he said. A curious look crossed his forehead, and with his long fingers he picked through my beard, examining the red strands he found there. "_Padda_," he said again. But there was no emotion in his voice. He said the Devaki word for father as if it were an abstraction, as if he had learned the name of a strange new animal.

   "Danlo," I said, and I kissed him on the forehead that was shaped as mine used to be. "My son."

   I set the boy down on the snow, and he ran over to the hut and crawled through the tunnel to see what he might discover there. I looked up into the sky, silent and blue above me. I swallowed hard, once or twice. My eyes were burning with pain; I was surprised that they were as dry as the frigid air swirling around me. Perhaps, I thought, my damned, carked soul was no longer capable of tears.

   "I can't take him with me," I told Soli.

   "No."

   "My son - he'll grow thinking he's a misshapen Alaloi."

   Soli rubbed the side of his nose, saying nothing.

   From inside the hut came a giggle of delight. I crawled through the tunnel and smiled at Danlo, who was sitting at the head of my bed. He had found the Timekeeper's book. He was turning the pages one by one, picking at the black letters as if he thought they were worms.

   I looked through the hut's shadowy, freezing air at
infinite possibility
, and I bit my lip. Gently, I pulled the book away from his lap. "Li los book," I forced out.

   He was angry because I had taken his new toy from him. He glared at me for a long time. I was afraid of the rage I saw in his eyes, the rage that cut me like a spear. Then his curiosity returned and he smiled. "_Ki los buka?_" he asked me.

   "A book," I explained, "is just a bundle of decorated leaves tied together. It is nothing important. Nothing at all."

   Later, when I had packed the sled and Soli stood holding Danlo's hand for the short trip back to the beach, I whispered in Soli's ear, "Don't let my son grow up in ignorance. Tell him that the lights in the sky are not just the eyes of the dead. Tell him about stars, will you?"

   I turned the sled in a circle eastward, and I gripped the hard, frozen rails.

   "Yes," Soli said, "I'll tell him."

   "Goodbye, Danlo," I said as I bent and lifted him into the air. Because his long hair smelled so good I kissed his head again. I grasped Soli's naked hand and told him goodbye, too.

   "Yes, goodbye," he said. Then he did an astonishing thing. He pulled hard on my arm and leaned over suddenly as I nearly stumbled. He kissed me once, fiercely, on the forehead. I felt his chapped lips burning my cold skin; to this day I can feel the burning still. "Fall far and fall well, Pilot," he said.

   I called to the dogs and drove the sled downwind into the gleaming plain of snow which opened before me. I never looked back with my eyes, though in my thoughts and dreams I have often looked back. I did not think I would see either of them again.
Never
, came the whisper,
never again
.

   The air was so cold and bitter that my eyes were full of tears before I had covered half a mile of the distance towards Neverness.

I am coming to the end of my story. There is little to tell of my journey homeward. The dogs and I ate our baldo nuts and mammoth meat, and after that we were hungry. Although I opened many aklia to hunt seals, they no longer leapt to my spear. Most of the time it was very cold. Twice my toes froze; to this day my toes have trouble with the cold. When I was almost within sight of the City, a blizzard caught me unprepared. For fifteen days I lay huddled with my half-frozen dogs in a hastily made snowhut, reading the Timekeeper's book and listening to the storm. Arne and Bela died next to me, from frostbite and hunger. I left them buried in the snow.

   Somewhere it is recorded that on the ninety-first day of deep winter in the year 2934, Mallory wi Soli Ringess, having failed in his quest to find the Elder Eddas, returned to the city of his birth. (I am told this is how the Sarojin's famous fantasy,
The Neurosingers
, ends.) I returned to one of the most bitter ironies of my life: The lords and masters, and most others, did not want to believe I had "remembered" the Elder Eddas. A few of them, the Lord Imprimatur in particular, ridiculed me. At least they did until, on the last day of the year, the greatest of our remembrancers, Thomas Rane, stripped off his robes, closed his eyes and floated in one of the tanks of the Rose Womb Cloisters. He remembered far into the murky past. He called up the memories that are within each of us, and he listened, as I had listened, to the whisper of the Elder Eddas. With joy (and too much pride) he taught many others of his profession to remember them, too. The word of this great remembrance quickly spread through the Academy. For days, I could not skate down the most out-of-the-way gliddery without some novice tugging on the sleeve of a schoolmate and pointing at me in awe. Even certain of the exemplars, who stand in awe of no man, could scarcely meet my eyes when they talked to me. It was very embarrassing. In truth, I much preferred ridicule to awe.

   Soon after this the College of Lords made me Lord of the Order. I immediately took charge of the rebuilding of the Lightship Caverns and the surrounding, bomb-ruined City. I sent robots into the mountains beyond Urkel to cut great quantities of stone. By twentieth day in midwinter spring, the foundations of a grand spire (some said grandiose) had been laid. As the gray, snowy days passed, a needle of pink granite rose above the newly built Hollow Fields, above the halls and towers of what came to be called the New City. In a year, when the spire was completed, it would be the tallest in the entire City. I named it Soli's Spire, to the surprise and consternation of everyone who thought they knew how much I hated my father.