Neverness (25 page)

   I stood over Liko, opening and closing my hands, helpless.

   Soli came over to me, and Bardo, and the others came too. Soli looked at Liko, who was whimpering, and he said, "Can't you see he's dying?"

   I was silent, staring at the red stains on the snow.

   "Your dog, Pilot, he's your dog."

   The bloody slush froze while I watched, and Soli said, "You'll have to kill him."

   No, I thought, I can't kill Liko, my lead dog, my friend.

   "Do it now, Pilot. Quickly."

   "No," I said. "I can't."

   Soli, who rarely cursed, shouted, "Damn you!" and he bent quickly as he whipped his balled fist with a terrible force against Liko's head. I heard the skull crack, and Liko was still, a piece of fur and meat lying dead against the snow. Soli cursed again, and he bowed his head and pressed the flat of his hand against his temple as he walked away.

   Bardo came over to me, and I said, "Liko's dead."

   He draped his heavy arm around my shoulders and squeezed. "Little Fellow," he said.

   I tried to look at Liko but I could not. "He was alive," I whispered, "and now he's dead."

   Bardo dropped to his knees. He removed his mitten and felt beneath Liko's fur for a heartbeat. "Too bad," he muttered as he shook his head. "Too bad."

   I wanted to throw my arms around Liko to touch his fur, to hold my hand against his freezing nose. But I could not touch him. He was not an alive being to be touched; he was a thing of fur and hardening blood and bone, and soon, when the thallow returned or the wolves worked at his meat, he would be nothing more than a stain on the snow.

   "He was so pretty," Justine said. And then, so softly her words were nearly lost to the wind, she said, "Liko,
mi alasharia la shantih
," which is the Devaki prayer for the dead.

   I tried to repeat the prayer, but, I could not make my lips form the words. I had never before seen an animal die. I did not believe that Liko's spirit would rest in peace on the other side of day. "There's no glory when the ticking stops," the Timekeeper had told me. "There's only blackness and the hell of everlasting nothingness." I looked at the dog's body, and I saw nothingness. The wind roared in my ear and rippled through his fur like waves upon false winter's sea, and I remembered I had seen death before. Once, when I was a boy on the beach outside the Hofgarten, I had seen a seagull pecking the corpse of one of his brothers. I remembered this first vision of death very well: the torn, oily feathers dirty with seafoam and sand, the bright red jewels of meat holding my fascinated stare. And later that same day, the day I had ended my solitary walks on the beach, I had seen the skeleton of a beached whale revealed by the ebb-tide as it withdrew into the sea. I remembered the great fingers of white bone curving upward from the wet sand as if to grasp the wind's breath from the sky. Yes, I had seen death before, but never the dying, never. The broken, seagull's wings, the whale's naked ribs - these were
things
capriciously cast upon the beach, bone reminders that there was a horror and final mystery to be avoided at any cost. I looked at Liko's fine body, the thick neck, the deep chest, and I saw that he was at once a thing and something more; he was a unique being I had watched pass from life into death. It was this passage that terrified me. It was the dying that made my teeth ache and robbed my muscles of will. I looked at Liko and felt tears freezing in my eyes; I looked at Liko and I despised myself because I realized he was far beyond my pity or pain.

   I would have buried him but the snow was too hard for digging. Down the beach, Soli whistled to his dogs, a reminder that soon the forest would be dark, that we had no time for burials. Justine, that innocent, beautiful woman who thought she could never die, said a few foolish words of consolation to me and went to join him. My mother stood over Liko, rubbed her heavy eyebrows and cocked her head. "He was only a dog," she said. "What is left to bury? We should go back to the sleds. Before it's too dark." She left me there, too. I watched her unharness Tusa and put him at the lead of the sled in Liko's place.

   "Barbarians!" Bardo shouted at them. "By God, look at this poor dog!" He lifted his head to the sky and let loose a thunderous curse. He cursed the thallow for killing Liko, and he cursed the gods for letting him die; he cursed Liko's sire and dame for whelping him; he cursed Soli and last of all he cursed me. He bent low to the beach, cursing, and in his arms he hefted a granite boulder which he placed over Liko's body. I lifted a rock a smaller rock, and did the same. In this manner, working like madmen, we quickly built a cairn over the dog.

   When we were finished, Katharine came over with handfuls of fireflowers she had picked in the woods. She laid them atop Liko's grave. "I'm sorry, Mallory," she said.

   "You saw the thallow, didn't you? In a dream - you knew this would happen."

   "I saw ... possibilities. I knew but I didn't ... There's no way I can make you see it, is there?"

   I watched the flowers shrivel and lose their red fire; it only took a few moments for the light to die.

   "You should have warned me, what you saw. I could have saved him."

   "I'm sorry."

   "I don't think you are."

   "I'm sorry for you."

   There is not much left to tell of our long day's journey to the Devaki's cave. Our passage through the forest was as quick and easy as I had hoped. I remember that the island was beautiful. The green trees against the soft, white slopes, the white and green hills where they touched the blue sky - curiously this perfection of colors comes instantly to mind whenever I recall the tragic events of our journey. (I do not mean the death of Liko; I am referring to the tragedies which were soon to come.) Our dogs pulled us gliding over the gentle, gradually rising upland. It was not so cold as it had been out on the ice, but it was cold enough to crack trees. A few times we passed the shredded, fallen corpses of the shatterwood trees half-buried in the snow. Though we never saw one explode, the thunder of dying trees reverberated from hill to hill. There was wood-dust and long white splinters driven into the drifts; I saw that Soli was right, that the forest was no place to be at night.

   At last, as the light faded and our shadows grew almost as long as trees we came around the curve of a small hill. Before us was a larger hill, and set into its northeast face like a black mouth was the cave of the Devaki. Above us, to the north above both hills, high above the lesser undulations of the world stood Kweitkel, vast and white and holy - or so the Devaki believe. But standing there in the half-light and stillness, looking up into the depths of the cave I did not feel holy at all; I felt tired, desecrated, and very, very profane.

From Man and the Bomb were born the Hibakusha, the worlds of Gaiea, Terror, Death, and the First Law of the Civilized Worlds, which was that Man was forbidden to explode hydrogen into light. And the Hibakusha fled and took to bed Law, and so were born the Aphasics, the Friends of God, the Astriers, Autists, Maggids and Arhats of Newvania [sic; probably "Newvannia" - reb]. And Terror wed Death, and so were born the Vild and the great Nothingness beyond. And Terror wed Law as well and begat the Hive Peoples, who valued life less than Order, and so they surrendered their Free Will to the lesser god of Order. Of the Hive Peoples we know almost nothing.

   from
A Requiem for Homo Sapiens
, by Horthy Hosthoh

Our entrance to the cave was a confusion of barking dogs and shouts and children running between our sleds. With their little hands they peeled back the sled covers to see if we had brought with us mammoth tongues or shagshay liver or any other of the Devaki's favored delicacies. They rapped the leather barrels of baldo nuts and shook their heads, disappointed that our only remaining food was so meager and poor. They seemed not to suspect that we were not their distant cousins but civilized people come to steal their plasm. We stood near our sleds waiting as their parents emerged from the mouth of the cave. I turned my face to the entrance fires and let the heat melt the ice from my beard. There were babies crying, the smell of roasting meats as well as the stench of wet fur and rotting blood. I was unready for this stench, and it made me sick. The cloying thickness of old piss sprayed on rocks, the woodsmoke and cut pine, the reek of skin oils and baby vomit wafting from the furs of the curious Devaki women - though Rainer's memory had proven accurate it seemed that it was also incomplete; I had no memory in my mind of these terrible smells. (This, I believe, is a flaw in the workings of the akashic computers. The memory of smells is captured deep within the limbic brain, sometimes too deep for the akashics to reach.) The area between the firepits was strewn with gnawed bones and pieces of hide and flesh; I had to step carefully lest I squash one of the numerous, half-frozen piles of dog dung atop the snow. The men of the Devaki - thick, rude men dressed as we were in shagshay furs - surrounded us, touching our furs, touching our sleds, touching each other as they spoke their words of welcome,
ni luria la Devaki, ni luria la
. Then Soli, who was patting the head of one of the children, said, "I am Soli, son of Mauli who was the son of Wilanu, the Whalekiller, whose father was Rudolf, son of Senwe who left the Devaki many years ago to seek the Blessed Isles." He turned to me and put his arm around my shoulders. "This is my son Mallory; we are the people of Senwe, who was the son of Jamaliel the Fierce."

   I hated the touch of Soli's hand on my shoulder; I hated having to pose as his son. I hated the stench of the cave and the running wounds on the blunt hands of the men, and I hated the crush of stinking bodies pressing me, the odor and intimations of disease and death. I hated all these things and more, but I had little time to savor my hatreds because Soli's recitation of our fake lineage had aroused great excitement. There were laughs and shouts and gasps of astonishment. A huge, one-eyed man limped forward and cupped his hand around the back of Soli's neck. He did the same to me and said, "I am Yuri son of Nuri who was the son of Lokni the Unlucky." Yuri, with his bristly gray beard and weathered skin, was past middling old and taller than any of the forty men of the cave except Bardo. He had a huge, high nose cutting between his prominent cheekbones. While he spoke to us, he turned his head back and forth like a thallow, his single eye scrutinizing our sleds and our gaunt, growling dogs. He seemed to be searching for something he could not find. He continued, "Lokni's father was Jyasi, son of Omar son of Payat, who was Senwe's older brother and Jamaliel's son." He threw his arms around Soli, pummeling his back with his fists. "We are near-brothers," he said, and his great brown eye glistened in the light of the fires. "_Ni luria, ni luria, Soli wi Senwelina._"

   He led us inside the entrance to the cave. Thirty feet from the fires there were two snow-huts, small domes made of cut snow blocks carefully trimmed and fit together. The small hut nearest the rear of the cave had a hole in the wall big enough to stick a head through. The other hut, which was pitted with the shallow pockmarks of dripping water, was even smaller. After Soli introduced my mother and Bardo as his sister-by-marriage and nephew (this, too was part of our deception), Yuri stared at them with his eye and told them that they were welcome to share the smaller hut. He came up to Bardo and he squeezed his upper arm and felt the muscles of his chest. He said, "Bardo is a strange name, and you are a strange man, I think, strange but very strong." He looked my mother up and down as if doubting that she was Bardo's mother, and told her, "You should have named him
Tuwa
, the mammoth." He indicated that Soli and I, and Justine and Katharine, were to share the larger hut. I thought I had misheard him. Surely he could not really expect all of us to cram into such a tiny space? I looked through the hole in the wall but it was too dark to see anything. The smells of rotting fish and piss made me want to kick the hut in. "You may lay your sleeping furs and patch the hole, and you will be warm," Yuri said. "Now, I will show you the cave of Jamaliel son of Ian whose father was Malmo the Lucky, son of..." and as we went deeper into the cave, he recited our line of ancestry halfway back to the mythical Manwe, who was the son of Devaki, mother of the people. (According to the myth, the god Kweitkel thrust the tip of his cone inside Devaki where it erupted, thus filling her womb with Yelena and Reina and Manwe, and the other sons and daughters of the world.)

   The cave was a lava tube opening seventy yards into the depths of the hill. It had been formed, no doubt, when some gigantic bubble of gas was trapped within a pocket of molten lava flowing from one of Kweitkel's erupting vents. (The real Kweitkel, I mean, not the god.) The lava had cooled and the gases had bled away through cracks in the hardened rock. At some time in the distant past, a quake had fractured the end of the tube, opening the cave to wind and snow, and to the tiny band of Alaloi who had made it their home. Opposite our two snow-huts, but deeper inside the nearly cylindrical cave, were the huts of one of the smaller families of the tribe, the Sharailina. Midway into the cave - it was difficult to see very much - a pendant of cooled lava hung from the ceiling to the cave floor. The lava, perhaps molded and shaped by the pressures of the wild, primal gases, had cooled unevenly; if one looked at the pendant from behind, facing the entrance fires, the bulges of rock and shadowy indentations took on the profile of an old man smiling.

   "He is the Old Man of the Cave," Yuri told us, "and he is smiling because deep winter has come and all his children have returned to him." We went deeper into the cave, past the huts of the Reinalina and Yelenalina families, until we came to the Manwelina's six huts, as deep as I thought we could go. Then I heard a baby squalling, and Yuri pointed into the darkness. "Deeper still are the birthing huts; it is my granddaughter you hear crying."

   We sat on the dirty furs laid between the huts of the Manwelina family. Strictly speaking we were not of the Manwelina because our pretend ancestor, Senwe, had left the family to form one of his own. Nevertheless, Yuri welcomed us as family. He motioned for Liam and Seif, his two huge sons, to sit with us while his wife served us bowls of hot soup. Her name was Anala, which means "lifefire," and she was a stout, well-formed woman with gray hair hanging to her waist. She smiled too readily and too much, and I did not like it when she immediately befriended my mother. I was suspicious of the way they hugged each other and alternately cupped their hands and whispered in each other's ear. My mother, I thought, had become a Devaki woman a little too quickly.