Neverness (36 page)

   I stared down at the spear, biting my lip.

   "Why?"

   "I don't know," I said truthfully.

   "You're dangerous Pilot. It's been said before. And now, this ... this
situation
the expedition, everything we do here - it's all become too dangerous, hasn't it?"

   "Perhaps."

   "Yes, too dangerous to stay here any longer. Let's hope Katharine has most of her samples because it's too dangerous for her to collect any more. Tomorrow we'll radio the City for a jammer. We'll say our goodbyes and that will be the end."

   "Do you think that's necessary?" I asked. "To slink back to the city like whipped dogs, then?" I do not know why I said this - probably just to be contrary. In truth, I was dying to return to the City, to immerse myself in the beautiful but meaningless study of mathematics.

   He grew very angry after I said this. I thought the blood vessels in his eye might rupture, leaving him blind. "Yes, it's necessary," he whispered. And then he said the forbidden word, "_I_'ve decided. We'll leave tomorrow."

   He rubbed his eyes, whirled and left me. I stood alone wondering why I was so reckless, wondering why I did the things that I did.

Preserve art above artifact; preserve memory above all.

   saying of the remembrancers

At dawn the next day the Reinalina, Yelenalina and Sharailina families packed their long traveling sleds. Ouray and Julitha of the Sharailina, and their children, Vishne, Namiley and Emily the Younger, tied the binding lashes and harnessed the dogs reluctantly, as if they were uncertain that driving into the storms of midwinter spring would be a wise thing to do. But Olin and the heads of the other families were adamant in their decision to leave. They cited hunger and the scarcity of the animals as their reason for seeking the islands of the west. They cited other reasons, too. "We will journey to Sawelsalia," Olin announced. "There the Patwin will share mammoth steaks dripping with fat. There the men do not raise their spears to one another."

   Yuri, who stood there in his worn underfurs shaking his head sadly, said, "This is a bad day for the Devaki. Why do you think our far-cousins on Sawelsalia will have meat to share? Perhaps they will not welcome you with mammoth steaks; perhaps they will not welcome Devaki with the same love Devaki welcome Devaki."

   But Olin replied, "Perhaps the Devaki have grown too many to live in this small cave. And if the mammoth herds of our far-cousins are sick and there is not enough meat, we will eat tripe until the sea thaws. Then we will build boats and hunt Kikilia when he comes up to breathe." He turned to me and said, "Goodbye Man of the Southern Ice. Perhaps you, too, should return to your home." So saying he slapped his son, Yasha, on the back of his neck whistled to his dogs, and then he and his family disappeared into the forest. A little while later, the other families were gone, too.

   Yuri scolded his little grandson, Jonath, away from the crackling fire at the mouth of the cave. He said, "It is sad to speak of killing whales. Better to sacrifice the mammoth herds than to hunt Kikilia, who is wiser than we and strong as God. But Olin's family is hungry so who can blame him?"

   "It is wrong to kill whales," I agreed. I turned to the east where the distant snowfields were flowing with the blood of the rising sun, and I was full of blame and other emotions.

   Yuri squinted his eye and mumbled, "Red sky at morning, travelers are mourning - it is a bad day for travel, I think." And then, "I must tell you that there are those among my family - Liluye, Seif, Jaywe, and of course Liam - who say that you and your family should leave, too. I, myself, and Wicent and Old Ilona, believe you should stay, but the others ... after you raised your spear to Liam, well, who can blame them?"

   I looked at Yuri, with the rancid grease shiny on his face, and I was suddenly sick of him and his little saying: "Who can blame them?" I felt an urge to stumble against him, to "accidentally" push him down into one of the puddles that the fire had melted from the snow, to watch as he splashed in icy water and say, "Who could blame me?" I did not want to hear any more words of wisdom from his thick chapped, greasy lips.

   "Soli has decided we will leave," I said. "So we will leave, tomorrow or the day after."

   "Well, Soli is a willful man, and Soli has decided you will leave, and who can blame him?"

   But our departure from the Devaki tribe was not to be so simple. Early that morning Soli freed the radio from its hiding place in his sled, and he went out into the woods to find a space of privacy. He tried to radio the City. He failed. He tried all morning and half the afternoon until a fierce storm began covering the trees in sheet ice, forcing him inside the cave. When evening came, we all crowded inside our hut around the oilstones. On the white furs at the center of the hut Soli placed a glossy black box the size of a large man's forearm. He pointed at it and told us, "The radio is dead."

   "That's impossible," Bardo said as he toyed with the hairs of his beard. He was half-lying on my bed, eating some nuts he had found. "The radio is dead? No, no, that can't be."

   My mother and Justine were busy on the far side of the hut adjusting the furs atop the drying rack. The hut was warm, so warm that the curved walls were gleaming with a glaze of water and ice. My mother brushed drops of water from the silky shagshay fur. Her strong face was yellow in the yellow light, and she tilted her head to the side and asked, "How do you know the radio is dead?"

   "If it
were
dead, that would be too bad," Bardo added, as he watched Justine shake out a fur. Much to Soli's annoyance, he liked to watch her whenever he had the chance, and worse, he liked to talk to her, as one friend talks to another. "But whoever heard of a dead radio?" He nonchalantly popped a nut into his mouth, but I could tell he was nervous and worried.

   "Of course the radio can't be dead," Justine said. She looked at Bardo and smiled her beautiful smile. "That's quite a thought, isn't it? You might just as well imagine that the sun won't rise tomorrow! It's impossible for these things to die, it really is. The Lord Tinker made the radio
himself
. How could the radio be dead?"

   Bardo grabbed his stomach and let out a long groan, which was answered by a whining from the tunnelway. Because two of our dogs were sick, we had brought them inside the hut, sheltering them from the storm. "Tusa," Bardo called out, "Lola ... do you think the radio is dead? Bark three times if you think it is dead." He waited for a moment, but the dogs were silent in their snow holes, so he said, "You see, everyone agrees, the radio can't be dead."

   "Quiet!" Soli hissed, kneeling over the radio. "Restrain yourself, if you can."

   "Have you wondered if the radio is only ill?" Katharine asked. She had the crypt beneath her bed open; I could barely watch her sorting her samples. Bent over as she was, her body seemed fuller than usual, and her hair fell in a lustrous black curtain down her shoulders and breasts to the floor. She held up one of the spheres and emptied it. Frothing blue krydda the color of her eyes spilled out over the snow, melting it into indigo slush. I smelled the preservative's pungent, peppermintlike aroma, and she covered the slush with handfuls of fresh snow. "Now that the families are gone, these samples are all ..." As she counted her samples one by one, she showed Justine the most precious of them.

   Justine said, "If these samples are all we have, well, I'm sure they'll be enough; they'll
have
to be enough because they must have been difficult to collect, and there are no men left to collect samples
from
, except the Manwelina men, of course, and you've ... and you've
been
with most of them, haven't you, Katharine?"

   I did not want to look at the spheres, at the thick, white glue of the Devaki then. I went to the center of the hut and picked up the radio, To Soli I said, "Perhaps Katharine is right. Perhaps the radio is only ill."

   Soli watch me turn the radio over and over in my hands.

   "Ah, but if the radio were only ill," Bardo pointed out, "why doesn't it heal itself Lord Pilot? Have you
asked
the radio if it is ill, Lord Pilot?"

   "Yes, that was the first question asked," Soli said, "But the radio is silent; therefore the radio is dead."

   "It's this damn cold," Bardo said, playing with his mustache. "It could freeze the bowels of anything."

   "Have we considered everything?" my mother asked. "All the possibilities?"

   "What possibilities?" Soli asked.

   For a while, we debated possibilities: Perhaps the Lord Tinker had forgotten to monitor his radio for our signal; perhaps a sunspot or pulse of radiation from the Vild had at last reached Neverness, distorting the propagation of radio waves through the atmosphere; perhaps the Order had at last fallen into schism and civil war - what if the Tinker's Tower had been thrown down and all the wonderful devices of the tinkers had been destroyed?

   As the night wore on, we became tired and crabby, susceptible to wild ideas. I think we had lived too long in those snowy hills, had spent too many nights in the snow hut listening to the wind blow and the wolves howl. For me, at least, all the familiar things of the City seemed far away. The City itself seemed somehow fantastic and unreal, a memory of an earlier Mallory, a buried dream. Looking around at the harpoons, the ripe furs, the oilstones flickering yellow and orange, it was hard to think that a larger world existed. Almost anything seemed possible: What if a new race of aliens had come to Neverness, killed all the humans and taken the City for their own? What if the Solid State Entity or some other god had changed the laws of spacetime so that radio and other eem waves were either slowed or could not locally exist? What if the City itself did not exist?

   All this talk had obviously made Bardo nervous. He twined and untwined his mustache between his fingers, and he massaged his belly. Silently - it was a custom of his when women were present to do so silently - he began breaking wind. The air of the hut began to stink. Justine coughed and waved her hand beneath her nose, Bardo puffed out his cheeks as he pointed at the tunnelway where the dogs slept, and he cursed, "That damn Tusa! Feed him the decaying guts of a seal and he farts like a rocket. By God, it stinks in here!"

   So badly did it stink that everyone except Soli was breathing through his or her mouth. (He was intently picking at the radio's casing, oblivious to Bardo's little problem.) My mother wrinkled her nose and covered her face with the edge of her furs. She glared at Bardo. "Men are stinky beasts," she said.

   Bardo's face fell into an embarrassed frown while my mother cocked her chin, looking at him with contempt. After a moment the contempt intensified into hatred, both for Bardo and herself. My mother had a tongue as cruet as a double-edged knife, and it was a cruelty which cut two ways: If someone offended her, she would be cruel to him and hate herself for being cruel, and then she would hate him for instigating these twin cruelties.

   "Ah, I know what you're thinking," Bardo said to her. "But it was Tusa who farted, or Lola, not me."

   In disgust, my mother began putting on her furs. She turned to Soli and said, "If the radio is dead, then it was killed. Tinker-made instruments don't die a natural death." Then she left the hut to take a breath of fresh air. (Or perhaps she went to Anala's hut to drink tea and gossip, an activity she had grown quite fond of during our brief stay in the cave.)

   Soli was slicing at the radio's casing with a flint blade, and he said, "There must be a way to open the radio, to find out why it's dead."

   "_Open_ the radio, Lord Pilot?" Bardo asked, rubbing his red cheeks. "Surely you're joking?" Soli might as well have suggested opening Bardo up to determine why his gut produced so much gas.

   But Soli was not joking. He was intent upon getting the radio open. Sometime around midnight, he discovered that heated flints applied to the thick, lacquerlike sealant caused the plastic to peel away in flaky layers as thin as a snow crystal. At last he laid the casing bare, but the radio would still not open, He stared at the back side of it for a long time before he noticed four small, round spots, black against darker black, one spot at each corner of the radio's casing. He found that the round spots were in fact holes filled with sealant. He excavated these holes, slowly and painstakingly digging and reaming with hot needles of flint. When he had finished this excruciatingly boring work, he held the radio to the oilstones and announced that he could see bits of bifurcated metal set down into the holes.

   "What is it?" I asked.

   "That's hard to say."

   "Tinker work," I said. "Pilots shouldn't meddle with tinker work."

   On their snow beds, Justine and Katharine were trying to sleep; Bardo was flopped down like a dead bear, snoring loudly.

   "Yes, tinker work," Soli said. "But where is the tinker to do the work?" His lips tightened as he inserted a flint needle into one of the holes. He twisted it and it broke. He inserted another needle and twisted the opposite way. It broke as well.

   "Damn the tinkers and their arcane arts," I said, and he turned the radio over and shook the flint fragments from the hole.

   "Flint's too brittle," he said, He picked up a long sliver of shatterwood shaved from his mammoth spear. "Shatterwood is not quite as hard as flint but it's not as brittle, is it?" So saying, with a flint carver, he whittled the end of the wood sliver to fit neatly into the bifurcations in the bits of metal set into the four holes.

   "Why are you doing this?" I asked. "If the tinkers made the radio to be opened by tinkers only, how do you expect to open it?"

   "Where is your famed initiative?" he asked. "It's a mystery, isn't it, how you were able to penetrate and return from the Entity."

   "That was different."

   "Yes, you were lucky then, but here luck is not a factor, is it?"