Neverness (2 page)

   We turned onto the Way at an orange and white checkered intersection about a mile west of the Academy. The street was crowded with harijan and wormrunners and other farsiders. We passed and bowed to the eschatologists, cetics, akashics, horologes, the professionals and academicians of our Order. (We did not come across any other pilots. Although we pilots - some will deny this - are the very soul of our Order, we are outnumbered by the scryers, holists, historians, remembrancers and ecologists, by the programmers, neologicians and cantors. Our Order is divided into one hundred and eighteen disciplines; there are too many disciplines, more disciplines, it seems, every year.) There was excitement in the air, as well as the alien scent of a couple of Friends of Man, who had their trunks lifted as they talked to each other, spraying out their foul speech molecules. Next to us skated an expensively dressed Alaloi - or rather a man whose flesh had been sculpted into the thick, powerful, hairy body of an Alaloi. This kind of artificial return to the primitive form had been a fashion in the city for years, ever since the famous Goshevan of Summerworld had tired of his human flesh and had gone to live with the Alaloi in their caves on the islands to the west of Neverness. The false-Alaloi, who was wearing too much purple velvet and gold, pushed one of the slender, gentle harijan out of his way and shouted, "Watch out, stupid farsider!" The bewildered harijan stumbled, made a sign of peace across his shiny forehead, and slunk off into the crowd like a beaten dog.

   Bardo looked at me and shook his head sadly. He had always had a strange empathy for the harijan and other homeless pilgrims who come to our city seeking enlightenment. (And too often, they come seeking riches of a more mundane nature.) He smiled as he edged closer to the barbaric Alaloi. He insinuated his thick tree-trunk of a leg between the purple-covered legs of the unsuspecting man. There was a ringing of steel against steel, and steel grinding against ice, and suddenly the man pitched forward to the street with a slap and a crack. Bardo shouted, "Excuse me!" Then he laughed, reached back and grabbed my forearm, and pulled me through the crush of skaters who were jostling one another and vying for position in their hurry to reach their favorite cafes or kiosks for their evening meal. I looked back through the crowd, but I could not see the man whom Bardo had tripped.

   "On Summerworld," Bardo said to me between gasps of air, "we brand dung like him with red-hot steel."

   We crossed into the Farsider's Quarter and came to the Street of the Ten Thousand Bars. I have said that the streets of Neverness have no names, but that is not entirely true. They have no
official
names, no names that are marked on buildings or posted on street signs. Especially in the Farsider's Quarter, there are many nameless streets that are named according to the prevailing enterprise transpiring along its convolutions of colored ice. Thus there is a Street of Cutters and Splicers, and a Street of Common Whores, as well as a Street of Master Courtesans. The Street of the Ten Thousand Bars is actually more of a district than a street; it is a maze of red lesser glidderies encompassing tiny bars that cater to the unique tastes of their patrons. One bar will serve only toalache while another might specialize in cilka, the pineal gland of the thallow bird which induces visions in small quantities and is lethal in larger ones. There are bars frequented only by the alien Friends of Man, and there are bars open to anyone who writes haiku (but only Simoom haiku) or plays the shakuhachi. Near the edge of the district, there is a bar where the eschatologists argue as to how long it will be before the exploding Vild destroys the last of the Civilized Worlds, and next door, a bar for the tychists who believe that absolute chance is the fundament of the universe, and that most probably some worlds will survive. I do not know if there are as many as ten thousand bars or if there are many more. Bardo often joked that if one could imagine a bar existing, it must exist. Somewhere there is a bar, he claimed, where the Fravashi analyze the anguished poetry of the Swarming Centuries and another bar where their criticisms are criticized. Somewhere - and why not? - there is a bar for those wishing to talk about what is occurring in all the other bars.

   We stopped in front of the black, windowless master pilots' bar, or, I should say, the bar for master pilots
recently
returned from the manifold. The sun had set, and the wind moaned as it drove flowing, ghostlike wisps of snow down the darkened gliddery. In the dim light of the street globes - when for a moment the wind suddenly pulled away the ragged, drifting snow shroud - the ice of the street was blood red.

   "This is an ugly place," Bardo said, his voice booming from the stone walls surrounding us. "I have a proposition. Since I'm in a generous mood, I'll buy you a master courtesan for the night. You've never been able to afford one, have you? By God, it's like nothing you've ever -"

   "No," I said as I shook my head.

   I opened the heavy stone door, which was made of obsidian and so smooth that it felt almost greasy to the touch. For a moment, I thought the tiny room was empty. Then I saw two men standing at the dark end of the narrow bar, and I heard the shorter one say, "If you please, close the door, it's cold."

   We stepped over to the bar, into the flickering light of the marble fireplace behind us. "Mallory," the man said, "and Bardo, what are you two doing here?"

   My eyes adjusted to the dim orange light, and I saw the master pilot, Lionel Killirand. He shot me a swift look with his hard little eyes and contracted his blonde eyebrows quizzically.

   "Soli," he said to the tall man next to him, "allow me to present your nephew."

   The tall man turned into the light, and I looked at my uncle, Leopold Soli, the Lord Pilot of our Order. It was like looking at myself.

   He stared at me with troubled, deep-set, blue eyes. I did not like what I saw in his eyes; I remembered the stories my Aunt Justine had told me, that Soli was a man famous for his terrible, unpredictable rages. Like mine, his nose was long and broad, the mouth wide, firm. From his long neck to his skates, thick black woolens covered his lean body. He seemed intensely curious, scrutinizing me as carefully as I did him. I looked at his hair; he looked at mine. His hair was long and bound back with a silver chain, as was the custom of his birth planet, Simoom. He had unique hair, wavy black shot with red, a genetic marker of some Soli forebear who had tampered with the family chromosomes. My hair, thank God, was pure black. I looked at him; he looked at me. I wondered for the thousandth time about my chromosomes.

   "Moira's son." He said my mother's name as one says a curse word. "You shouldn't be here, should you?"

   "I wanted to meet you," I said. "My mother has talked about you all my life."

   "Your mother hates me."

   There was a long silence broken by Bardo who said, "Where's the bartender?"

   The bartender, a tonsured novice who wore the white wool cap of Borja over his bald head, opened the storage room door behind the bar. He said, "This is the master pilot's bar. Journeymen drink at the journeymen's bar, which is five bars down the gliddery towards the Street of Musicians."

   "Novices don't tell journeymen what to do," Bardo said. "I'll have a pipe of toalache and my friend drinks coffee - Summerworld coffee if you have it, Farfara if you don't."

   The novice shrugged his skinny shoulders and said, "The
master pilots
don't smoke toalache in this bar."

   "I'll have a tumbler of liquid toalache, then."

   "We don't serve toalache or coffee."

   "Then we'll have an amorgenic. Something strong to send the hormones gushing. We've a busy night ahead of us."

   Soli picked up a tumbler of a smoky colored liquid and took a sip. Behind us a log in the fireplace popped and fell between two others, scattering glowing cinders and ashes over the tiled floor. "We drink liquor or beer," he said.

   "Barbaric." This came from Bardo who added, "I'll have beer, then."

   I looked at my tall uncle and asked, "What liquor are you drinking?"

   "It's called skotch."

   "I'll have skotch," I said to the novice, who filled two tumblers - a large one with foamy beer and a smaller one with amber skotch - and set them in front of us atop the rosewood bar.

   Bardo gulped his beer, and after I had taken a sip of skotch and coughed, he asked, "What does it taste like?" I handed him my tumbler, watching as he brought it up to his fat red lips. He, too, coughed at the fire of the burning liquid and announced, "It tastes like gull piss!"

   Soli smiled at Lionel and asked me, "How old are you?"

   "Twenty-one, Lord Pilot. Tomorrow when we take our vows, I'll be the youngest pilot our Order has ever had, if I may say that without sounding like I'm bragging."

   "Well, you're bragging," Lionel said.

   We talked for a while about the origins of such immense and fathomless beings as the Silicon God and the Solid State Entity, and other things that pilots talk about. Soli told us of his journey to the core; he spoke of dense clusters of hot new stars and of a great ringworld that some god or other had assembled around Betti Luz. Lionel argued that the great and often insane mainbrains (he did not like to use the word "gods") roaming the galaxy must be organized according to different principles than were our own miniscule minds, for how else could their brains separate lobes - some of which were the size of moons - intercommunicate with others across light-years of space? It was an old argument. It was one of the many bitter arguments dividing the pilots and professionals of our Order. Lionel, and many eschatologists, programmers, and mechanics as well, believed the mainbrains had mastered nearly instantaneous tachyonic information flow. He held that we should seek contact with these beings, even though such contact was very dangerous and might someday force the Order to change in ways repugnant to older and more old-fashioned pilots such as Soli.

   "Who can understand a brain encompassing a thousand cubic light-years of space?" Soli asked. "And who knows about tachyons? Perhaps the mainbrains think slowly, very slowly."

   To him, the origin and technology of the gods were of little interest. In this he was as stodgy as the Timekeeper, and like the Timekeeper, he thought that there were certain things that man was not meant to know. He recited a long list of pilots, the Tycho among them, who had been lost trying to penetrate the mystery of the Solid State Entity. "They overreached themselves," he told us. "They should have been aware of their limits." I smiled because this came from the tight lips of a man who had reached farther than any other, a famous pilot whose discovery would provoke the great crisis of our Order.

   It was a heady drug, to talk with master pilots as pilots, as if we had long ago taken our vows and proved our mastery of the manifold. I drank my skotch and gathered up my courage, and I said, "I've heard there will be a quest? Will there really be?"

   Soli glared at me. He was a sullen man, I thought, with a sad, faraway look to his sea-blue eyes, a look that hinted of freezing mists and sleepless nights and fits of madness. Though his face was young and smooth, as young as mine, it had recently been as old and deeply seamed as a face could be. It is one of the peculiarities of the manifold that a pilot sometimes ages, intime, three years to every year on Neverness. I imagined, for a moment, that I had the powers of a cetic and that I could see the wrinkled, ancient Soli through the taut olive skin of his new body, in the same manner one envisions a fireflower drying to a brittle black, or the skull of death beneath the pink flesh of a newborn baby boy. A master horologe, whose duty it was to determine the intime of returning pilots according to complicated formulae weighting Einsteinian time distortions against the unpredictable deformations of the manifold, had told me that Soli had aged one hundred and three years this last journey and would have died but for the skills of the Lord Cetic. This made my uncle, who had been brought back three times to his youth, the oldest pilot of our Order.

   "Tell us about your discovery," I said. I had heard a wild rumor that he had reached the galactic core, the only pilot to have done so since the Tycho, who had returned half-insane.

   He took a long drink of skotch, all the while watching me through the clary bottom of the tumbler. The poorly dried firewood hissed and groaned, and from the street came the humming and steaming of a zamboni as it hovered over the gliddery, melting and smoothing the ice for the next day's skaters.

   "Yes, the impatience of youth," he said. "You come here disrespecting the needs of a pilot for privacy and the company of his friends. In that, you're much like your mother. Well, then, since you've gone to so much trouble and endured the vileness of skotch whiskey, you'll be told what happened to me, if you really want to know."

   I found it irritating that Soli could not simply say, "_I'll_ tell you what happened to me." Like most others from that too-mystical planet, Simoom, he usually observed their taboo against using the pronoun 'I'"

   "Tell us," Bardo said.

   "Tell us," I said, and I listened with that strange mixture of worship and dread that journeymen feel toward old pilots.

   "It happened like this," Soli said. "A long time had passed since my leaving Neverness. We were deep in dreamtime and fenestering inward toward the core. The stars were dense. They shined like the lights of the Farsider's Quarter at night, yes, a great burning fan of stars disappearing into the blackness at the fan's pivot point, at the singularity. There was the white light of dreamtime - you young pilots think instantaneity and stopping time are all there is to dreamtime, and you have much to learn - there was a sudden clarity, and voices. My ship told me it was receiving a signal, intercepting one of a billion or so laser beams streaming
out
of the singularity."

   He suddenly slammed his empty tumbler on the bar and his voice rose an octave. "Yes, that's what was said!
From
the singularity! It's impossible, but true. A billion lines of infrared light escaping the black maw of gravity." To the novice he said, "Pour some skotch in here, please."