Neverness (22 page)

   I must admit that no one else suffered this same sense of loss of identity as I did. My mother and Justine, and of course, Soli, had more than once experienced the shock of having their old bodies made new. This is not to say they each were wholly pleased with Mehtar's sculpting. In particular, Soli hated it that after so many drastic alterations, we still nearly resembled each other. (Though as usual, he kept his silence.) Justine hated everything about her new self. When she saw what Mehtar had done to her, she said, "Oh, no, look at me! They'll laugh at me when I skate at the Hofgarten, and as for
that
, look how my weight has been redistributed, I've lost my center and I'm so
ungainly
!" and she sulked for three days. When Soli told her that the Alaloi would consider her beautiful, she asked him, "And do
you
think I'm beautiful?" And Soli, who liked to pretend he was a truthful man, said nothing.

   Just before the first storm of midwinter spring, we underwent changes not quite so severe. Mehtar stippled our skin, cutting away many of our sweat glands so we would not soak our furs and freeze to death encased in a sheath of lice. He also stimulated the individual hair follicles, and we each of us, the women as well as the men, sprouted a forest of hair from neck to ankle. (For some reason Mehtar could not explain, thick sprigs of black hair erupted from between Bardo's toes and along the tops of his feet. As Mehtar said, there are some genetic quirks beyond the control of the finest cutters.) During this time we lifted stones and performed vigorous exercises to stimulate muscular growth. Mehtar took us into his weight chamber and rubbed our limbs as he subjected us to the Fravashi deep-space method of locally inducing supergravities along the muscles of our arms and legs. Soli hated this as much as he hated it whenever Mehtar touched him. "If this continues," he said, flexing the great ball of muscle of his upper arm, "I'll be as bulky as Bardo."

   There were thought exercises as well. One by one, we visited an imprimatur who made us visualize the coordinated firing of individual muscle fibers. She imprinted our neural pathways with certain skills we would need to pose as Alaloi. Thus, for instance, we learned how to flake a blade of flint without ever touching hand to stone. And where the Alaloi men practice for a decade before they can hit their marks with their spears, we learned this art in a single day.

   There was one minor surgery I have neglected to mention. The Alaloi, it seems, with their sharp flakes of flint mutilate the membrums of their male children at the onset of manhood. The tribal elder slices off the foreskin covering the bulb of the membrum, and he makes tiny cuts in the delicate skin along the shaft. Into these cuts he rubs ashes and salt and colored powders. The wounds fester and sear, and the man - the boy who has become a man - is left with rows of minute, multicolored keloids decorating his membrum from base to bulb. Naturally, Bardo was terrified when he learned Mehtar would have to duplicate the effects of this barbaric ritual. (I had withheld the foreknowledge of it until the last possible moment.) I, myself, was a little apprehensive, especially when Mehtar grasped my membrum and joked that if he ruined it beyond repair, he could easily transform me into a woman, and no one I met would be the wiser. Again, everything went smoothly, though for days afterward I could not bear to look down when I stood up to piss.

   The last thing Mehtar did, or so I thought at the time, was to make Katharine new eyes. He implanted them in the vacant hollows beneath her dark, enlarged brows. They were beautiful eyes, eyes that I had seen before in dreams; they were the eyes of the Entity's Katharine imago, deep and lovely like blue-black, liquefied jewels. I held a mirror to her so she could see her eyes, but she pushed my hand away, saying, "I've looked inside for so long; now I want to look at
things
."

   Like a child gazing through a telescope for the first time, she took joy in examining the things of Mehtar's changing room: the hard white tile, the intricate tubular microscopes, the lasers, pessaries, and other gleaming instruments. When I took her to the Hofgarten to watch the skaters, she sighed and said, "Oh, it's good to see again! I'd forgotten how deeply colored the ice is, the blueness."

   The next day, in the privacy of my house, she probed my body with her hands as well as her eyes. With her hot, dry hands, she grasped my membrum, running her fingers over the colored bumps along the shaft. It excited her, I think, and I wondered if the Alaloi decorate their membrums in order to please their women. (Though my studies of their culture indicated that little the Alaloi men did was solely for the pleasure of their women.) Later as we panted and pushed our thickened loins against each other with zest and abandon, at our moment of ecstasy, she opened her eyes and looked at me as if she were seeing me for the first time.

   "Your face," she said after we had separated. "It was like the face of a rutting ... It was so
bestial
."

   I rubbed my beard and felt my huge jaw, and I told her that indeed I now possessed the face of a beast.

   But she said, "No, you don't understand. I've seen something I haven't realized since I was a little girl. All men are beasts if you look at them just right."

   During the days that followed we were very busy. It was not enough, of course, that we merely sculpt our bodies to look like Alaloi. We had to
become
Alaloi, which meant learning their language and imprinting millions of bits of specialized knowledge. The correct method of slitting a snow hare's belly, the aligning of one's head towards north during sleep, the words and intonations for the burial of the dead - all must be learned before we could pose as cavemen. The language of the Devaki, the tribe of Alaloi we planned to join, proved more difficult than I had imagined. I do not mean that it was difficult to learn or articulate. It was not. My mother discovered that the akashic's computers had once laid bare the mind of the Alaloi named Rainer and had recorded his thought, deeds and memories. It was a simple thing to infuse our memories with his, with the words and grammatical rules of the Devaki language. It was a simple thing to find our lips smoothly articulating the soft, round vowels, to listen to the liquid consonants rolling easily off our skilled tongues. To be sure, the mastering of the tones took a little time. A few of the Devaki words were distinguishable from each other solely by the tones of their vowels. For instance,
sura
might mean either "purple" or "lonely," depending on whether the first vowel was pronounced in a sing-songy, rising tone, or in a low, falling tone. But in the end, everyone except Bardo found these few words simple to memorize. What was not simple was the understanding. The morphology, particularly of the Devaki verbs, proved to be subtle and complex. The verbs were not inflected according to our basic notions of past, present and future tense, because the Devaki do not understand time as we do. (As I was to learn later, the Devaki deny the existence of past and future.) How do the Devaki inflect their verbs? They inflect them according to the state of consciousness of the speaker. Thus a man full of fear might scream,
Lo mora Li Tuwa
, I killed the mammoth!, while a man deep in dreamtime - what the Devaki call dreamtime - will say,
Lo morisha Li Tuwa
, which means something like: I, in the ecstasy of the eternal Now-moment, am joined by the spirit of the mammoth who opened his heart to my spear. There are one hundred and eight verb inflections, each corresponding to a different emotion or state of mind. What worried me was that at least seven of these states were alien to me and would be incomprehensible to any woman or man of our Order. How could we choose the correct word forms, how could we understand primitives who sliced up and understood reality in ways very different from ours?

   My mother and I, Justine too, spent much time discussing the problem with the semanticists, Yannis the Elder, who was taller than any man I have ever known, as thin and fragile-looking as an icicle, suggested that the Friends of Man might help us to duplicate these incomprehensible states of mind. "I understand you have achieved a partial understanding of the aliens' scent language," he said to me, referring to my experiences within the Entity. "Now to understand alien thinking, which I
think
we understand the Devaki mindsets to be, why not approach
true
aliens as to their understanding of thoughtways which may, or may not, be considered by them to be understandable to anyone who understands that that which
cannot
be understood, cannot be understood solely on account of the context of the misunderstanding." (That is how the master semanticists, those miserable, pedantic seekers of word-meaning often talk. I am not joking.) In the end, his suggestions were of little help. When deep winter came and hardened, smothering the City in a sea of almost liquid air, we were forced to break off our research into these esoteric matters. There was only so much we could learn of the Devaki language and customs. Some things, it seemed, would have to be faked.

   Leopold Soli, however, was not pleased with this fakery. In his own way he was a careful, meticulous man, despite the fantastic chances he had taken on his journeys into the manifold. As the time of our departure drew nearer, he became increasingly critical of my planning and preparations. We argued over a hundred little things, from the number of dogsleds we should take to my insistence that one radio would be enough to summon help from the City if we found ourselves stranded or otherwise needed rescue. We argued important questions, too. It was our argument over one vital, blindingly important question that nearly wrecked the expedition before it began.

   At the very edge of the high professionals' college, Upplyssa, is a row of buildings known as the Brain Boxes. The pink granite buildings - there are seven of them - are squat and low, roofed with triangular panes of glass. On snowfree days, the interiors of the buildings are bright with a clean, natural light. Before all such enterprise had been moved to the factories south of Urkel, in the time of Ricardo Lavi, the tinkers and programmers had grown the neurologics for their computers in these seven buildings. During the winter before our expedition, the huge, enclosed spaces were given over to journeymen who sculpted great blocks of ice and others needing (or wanting) to manipulate material things. In the fourth and third buildings the fabulists created their three-dimensional tone poems while in the second building, certain historians were reconstructing in miniature the underground cities of Old Earth. Soli had chosen the empty seventh building to store the equipment for our expedition. Along the bare wall nearest the Academy's west gate were stacked long, heavy mammoth spears, bales of silky white shagshay furs, leather straps and slats of supple wood which could be bent into long skis or fashioned into the chassis of our sleds. There were strips of raw, frozen meat wrapped in oilskins, and snow goggles, oilstones, heaps of flint, and a hundred other things.

   On sixtieth day, early in the morning, I was alone in the cold building making harnesses for the dog teams. Because Soli did not trust our hasty imprinting, he had suggested that we practice working leather or flaking flint and other Devaki skills. I sat punching holes in a stiff piece of leather with a bone awl. Next to me crouched a sleek beautiful sled dog named Liko. I had made friends with this intelligent beast, and he liked to watch me work, even as he licked and worked at the clean marrow-bone I had given him. I was talking to Liko - and occasionally running my fingers through the gray fur covering his broad head - when he cocked his ears and let out a whine. There came the grinding speed-stop of a skater from the gliddery outside. The doors opened with much creaking and scraping against frozen snow, and the dark figure of Soli stood limned in the soft light streaming in from the street. Despite the bitter cold, he wore only a kamelaika and a thin wool jacket. His sculpted head was bare. For all the weight of the new bone grafted onto his face, he held himself rigidly erect. As he crossed the building his steps were measured, full of grace - I will admit that - but full of a dangerous new power as well.

   "It's early," he said, picking up a chisel and laying out a mammoth tusk. He stroked his beard, which was black and thick and shot with stiff red hairs. His eyes were deeply pouched as if he had not slept well; he looked worn and middling old. He was too thin from having eaten too little. He whistled at Liko and watched me as I punched a hole, and he said, "That's no way to hold an awl. Careful you don't punch a hole in your leg."

   We worked for a while in silence. The only sounds were the scraping of flint against wood, and the soft popping of the awl punching through leather. (And the clack of Liko's teeth as he munched his bone.) Occasionally Soli would shrink his neck down into his wool collar and let out a huff of steamy air. When I told him he was foolish for exposing his naked head to the wind, he asked, "Is it stupid to prepare for the deep cold of the Ten Thousand Islands? To toughen ourselves, to plan for the worst? You seem to be afraid of planning."

   "What do you mean?" I ground my teeth and punched a hole in the cold leather.

   He examined my handiwork and said, "Careful you space your holes evenly. We don't want the Devaki to think we do careless work." He shook his head at me, then said, "Your plan to collect tissue samples - it's really no plan at all, is it?"

   Again I asked, "What do you mean?"

   I had planned to collect Devaki nail clippings and strands of hair and other bits of cast off tissue in the hope of deciphering the Elder Eddas from their plasm - as circumspectly as possible. This was the Timekeeper's ruling: The Devaki must never know we were breaking the covenant between the founders of Neverness and the tribes of the Alaloi; they must never know who we really were.

   "Your plan is careless," Soli said. "It may not be as easy as you think to gather up skin scrapings and the like."

   "And you have a better plan, then?"

   "There is a better plan. It's the women's plan; it's not my plan." He shivered violently and rubbed his hands together. His teeth chattered as he fitted the long bone runner to the wood chassis he held clamped in his white hand.