Neverness (53 page)

   "Time is mutable," I said, mocking one of his famous sayings. But my smile faded as I accepted his point. If journeying through the manifold became easy, war would become easy, too? And who could journey as easily and elegantly as a pilot of our Order? What could be more disastrous than a war between our Order's different factions? "But even if war were easy," I objected, "it would be too terrible, and no one would go to war against any other, I think. Besides, skirmish or war, the people of the Greater Cihele and Mio Luz were insane. Most peoples and planets love peace."

   Unexpectedly, he walked over and stood above my chair. He scowled and said, "Mallory, Mallory, you've been bludgeoned, cut, swived, hated, loved and taught the truth but you're still naive." He brushed back the white hair from his forehead and sighed. "Naive, I say! What's the essence of history? The desire for peace? Ha! War's the price of our quest for power; war's been the curse of man for twenty thousand years. It's the nature of things that no one can choose peace, but anyone can make all others face war. Why do you think the Earth was destroyed? Shall I tell you a parable of Earth's history?"

   I shifted about in my chair, trying to get comfortable. Because I had no choice but to listen to his parable, I said, "Tell me."

   He smiled and cleared his throat. "Once a time," he began, "all men lived in tribes and the air was clean and there was food for all, and peace was the law of the Earth. But then one tribe, because they loved themselves more than their mother planet, grew deaf to this law. So they fell into insanity. They grew too large and too powerful. They found that it was easier to steal their bread from others than to bake it themselves. They coveted an empire, a life of ease. They sent their armies westward against the four nearest tribes, each of which had a great love of peace. But peace they could not have. The first tribe faced spear with spear, but they were too few, and the insane tribe slaughtered them down to the last man. The women, of course, were raped and given hoes to slave their lives away with their children in the wheatfields. The second tribe, seeing what had happened to the first tribe, flung down their spears, for the moment, and kissed the feet of the insane tribe's king. They pleaded for their lives. If only the king would allow them to keep their wives and children, they would be good warriors and do as the king commanded. Thus the second tribe was absorbed and the insane tribe grew larger still. The third tribe, who loved their freedom as they loved their lives, fled southward to the desert where the living was hard and there was barely food and water enough for all. The fourth tribe wanted neither to be exterminated, nor to be absorbed, nor to flee. They loved their land passionately. And so their king, who was a visionary man, ordered his warriors to make their spears longer than those of the insane tribe's warriors. When battle came the greater numbers of the insane tribe were checked by the longer spears of the fourth tribe. So neither tribe could prevail. Then the visionary king, who had come to relish the taste of war, realized that in the next battle, the insane tribe would return with yet longer spears. 'We must have more warriors" the visionary king exclaimed. And he turned his gaze further westward, and his armies enslaved the western tribes and made still longer spears. And so the fourth tribe became as insane as the insane tribe. In this manner, like a disease, the habit of war spread outward to the farthest tribes of the Earth. The tribes grew into empires which destroyed the nearer empires, and they lamented that they could not make war on the farthest empires because the distances were too great for their armies to cross. At last one king, the cleverest of all, attached rockets to the butt end of his men's spears and fusion bombs to their tips. When all the kings of all the empires of the Earth did likewise, the clever king observed that war was obsolete and impossible. If any empire cast its spears at another, he said, it would assure its own destruction, for against the rain of spears tipped with fusion bombs even the finest and most costly shields were useless. And so there was peace on Earth ... until the court fool of the clever king reminded him that he had forgotten one thing."

   He paused here in his fervid speech to wipe the sweat from his forehead. He looked at me expectantly to see if I would ask him what the clever king had forgotten. Although I did not want to hear the words of an allegorical fool, I asked, "And what had the clever king forgotten?"

   The Timekeeper grinned and replied, "He'd forgotten that he and all the people of his empire and all the empires of the world were insane."

   I held my breath and asked, "And then?"

   "You know the end of the parable," he said softly. "You know."

   I was dutifully thoughtful for a while. Except for the ticking and clicking of the clocks and our syncopated breathing, the room was silent. Outside the window the snow fell in sheets. I was cold, but he was sweating. Beads of sweat rolled down his flat cheeks, down the hard line of his chin. I could not help smiling and saying, "Timekeeper, it seems that
you've
forgotten one thing."

   "Eh?"

   "The third tribe, the one that fled to the desert where the living was hard - what ever became of that tribe?"

   He laughed then, a deep, rich laugh full of irony and sadness. I sat in my chair squeezing my forearms. It was one of the few times I had heard him laugh.

   "We're the third tribe," he said. "And deepspace is the desert. All the peoples of the Civilized Worlds have fled from war; we're all hibakusha. And there's peace in the galaxy, a fragile, relative peace, but there are always new tribes waiting to fall into insanity. Why do you think we must tyrannize the fallaways? It's because we can't allow these tribes to grow. Our Order and the Order of the Warrior-Poets - for three thousand years we've kept the peace."

   "The warrior-poets!" I exclaimed. "They're murderers."

   "Precisely. Few know this, but the warrior-poets were founded precisely to exterminate insane tribes and insane kings. Terror was their tool, and they used it well. No king could think of warring against his neighbor without fearing that a warrior-poet would assassinate him."

   "You speak in the past tense, Timekeeper."

   "So I do. That's because the warrior-poets have been in decline for a thousand years. Now they're not so concerned with preserving the peace. In the process of breeding their assassins - and it took them centuries - they developed a religion to help them face their inevitable deaths. And often, these were suicidal deaths, because kings, mad or not, are hard to kill, eh? This religion has become their reason for existing. Now they seek disciples, not peace."

   Again, like a shark, he circled around my chair. He began to rant. Only our Order, he said, could preserve the peace. But if our Order divided in two, there would be no
order
. (This is my word, not the Timekeeper's. He despised puns almost as much as punsters.) Eventually our most precious knowledge would be scattered like pearls beneath the feet of a harijan.

   I thought about his words for a long time. Because I disagreed with his fundamental elitism, and because I sensed a contradiction in his beliefs, I said, "But we can't keep our secrets forever. Information is like a virus. It spreads."

   "Viruses can be quarantined," he snapped. And then, more ominously, "Viruses can be exterminated, too."

   "But it's the Order's purpose to discover knowledge," I said.

   His voice grew low and ugly like a wolfs growl. He said, "Knowledge must be cherished and used wisely, eh? Not squandered like a foolish pilot dropping City disks into the palm of a whore."

   Because my back was aching and I was tired, I began to reposition myself in the chair. He caught me turning toward him, and barked out, "Don't move, now! Remain in the proper attitude."

   I suddenly did not want to remain in the proper attitude. I was tired of him staring at me while I could not look at him. I stood up, turned my head, and caught him unguarded. The look on his face surprised me. His eyes were wide open and his lips set into a shy smile as if he were a boy looking at the firefalls for the first time. He was looking inside himself, remembering, perhaps even remembrancing. At first, I did not know how I knew this. His eyes were black pools as blind as any scryer's. He was looking many places at once, examining future possibilities and dreaming private dreams. Only for a moment did it last, this look of acceptance, of sad innocence and wonder. Then, like a steamy breath on a winter day, it was gone, replaced by harsh vertical lines of defiance and ancient grief. His eyes glowed with dark lights and his lips turned down as he thundered, "Sit down! Restrain yourself and sit down, damn you!"

   I did not sit down. I nudged the chair with my foot and said, "I'm tired of sitting."

   I stared at him. I could not imagine what had occasioned his lapse into the contemplative. Then I realized - and it was one of the more wrenching realizations of my life - I saw at a flash that this was no mere lapse. He was a man divided, a seeker - tortured by an eternal inner war between his dreams and his bitter experience - this I had always known. But suddenly I knew more. I was sensing the minutia about him: the tension of the little muscles above the eyes; his archaic speech habits; his harsh philosophies; his sour smell; and thousands of other things. Somehow, I was processing this rich current of information. I was sure I was reading him. Whereas most such men (and Soli, my moody father is one such) spend their moments vacillating between light and dark like a terrified child being whipped back and forth across an ice ring by two of his schoolmates, the Timekeeper lived within conflicting realities simultaneously. He was truly a man who lived at the top of a frozen, inner mountain above other men. For him evil and good did not exist. Or rather, they existed not as opposites but as different flavors of reality, like honey and black acid coffee, both of which at any moment must be tasted, swallowed, and if possible, savored. In the terminology of the Entity, he was a multiplex man, part hero, part rogue, heretic, tychist, determinist atheist and god-worshipper - all of these and a myriad of others at once. if the face he showed to the Order and the ambassadors of the Civilized Worlds was the singular, stern face of a just tyrant, it was the face he chose to wear. And more, it was the persona he chose to
be
. It was wrenching to realize that he had this power of choice. I had always thought of him as a man utterly divided by the reality of dying and death. Now I saw that this was not so. Like all great men, he had a vision. It was what he lived for. It was this vision, the tiny part of which I glimpsed, that terrified me.

   "So, young Mallory, what are you looking at; what do you see?"

   "What should I see? Am I a cetic, then, to read your programs as I would the poems in your book?"

   "I, myself, have often wondered what you are, what you might become."

   I rubbed the side of my nose, then said, "I see a man seemingly torn apart by contradictions. But there is a fundamental unity, isn't there? You won't allow farsiders the simplest of our secrets, and you were and are suspicious of the secrets of the Ieldra. I see -"

   "No man has ever talked to me like this before! No man!"

   "I see this passion of yours to protect, at the same time you -"

   "Quiet now! I can't have my pilots - or anyone else - reading me, can I? You see too damn much."

   "I see what I see."

   "It's dangerous to see too much," he said. "The scryers know this. What's their little saying? - 'Eyes once blinded by the light are now truly blind?'"

   _His_ eyes were burning stones as he said this, and then he bowed his head and rubbed his snowy temples. I had always supposed that he had a sort of grandfatherly affection for me, but now I saw that the requirements of his private vision would always submerge and drown his kindness. When it had suited his purpose to rescue me from my own impetuousness, he had given me a book of poems and saved my life. If my death would serve his dreams or plans - well, as he had said, viruses can be exterminated.

   "Why did you summon me?" I asked him.

   "Why must you question me, damn you!" He clenched his fists and the muscles along his neck tensed. It was as if he were hardening himself to make an agonizing decision he did not want to make. I thought that since he had little compassion for himself, he would finally make the harshest of choices. He must have feared that compassion toward another might weaken him and eat away at the steely coil of his being as rust slowly devours the interior mechanism of a clock.

   "Why am I here?" I repeated.

   He paced to the window and swiped at the glass with his fingernails as if he were a bear digging at a sheet of ice. The nails dragged and scraped, leaving sharp, clear streaks cutting the white frost. He was quiet for a moment, and then the breath rushed out of him all at once.

   "It would be the greatest of catastrophes," he said, "if one of my pilots were to solve the Continuum Hypothesis only to have the secret spread like a virus. To fall from any star instantly to any other - so, you understand, only
my
pilots must have that knowledge."

   "The Hypothesis may be unprovable," I said.

   "It would be better if that were so."

   "In any case, I haven't proven it. The Tycho and Dov Danladi, Soli too - they struggled all their lives to prove the Great Theorem. Who am I to prove it, then?"

   "Ha, you've changed!" he mocked. "Who
are
you? - this I would like to know. What have the damn gods done to you? We'd all like to know this, eh? You return like a ghost from Agathange, and, suddenly, seemingly, you've gained modesty ... and other things."

   "What do you mean?"

   "You know, Mallory, you know. Ten days ago your Bardo ruined part of the Tycho's Monument, didn't he? Tell me, what happened that day?"

   "Bardo drank himself into a stupor and broke one of the crystals."

   "My novices tell me that you fell into slowtime - is this true?"