Neverness (54 page)

   "How could it be true? How is it possible to enter slowtime without the aid of a computer?"

   He pounded his fist against the window sill and snarled out, "Why must you answer a question with a question, damn you! Tell me,
did
you enter into slowtime?"

   "Some say I did," I admitted. "But the truth is, I stopped time."

   "_Stopped_ time? Ha, I hadn't thought it possible! But you are a truthful man, aren't you? You wouldn't lie to your Lord Horologe. Why, Mallory, why are you so taken with this holy notion of truth?"

   "I don't know."

   "_Struth_! There's truth and there's truth. Truth's as mutable as time."

   "I don't believe that."

   He rubbed his eyes and looked at me. "You must promise me a thing, young Mallory. If you should ever discover the proof of the Great Theorem, you must not inform the cetics nor akashics nor the cantors nor your fellow pilots. You must tell no one except me."

   I stood motionless while I thought at great speed. If I ever solved the Hypothesis and confided in the Timekeeper, the knowledge would disappear like light down a black hole.

   "I've vowed to seek truth," I said.

   "You've vowed to seek truth, not to disseminate it and spray it all about like an old man's piss."

   "In front of you in the Pilot's Hall, four years ago, I took this vow, to seek wisdom. and truth even though the seeking might lead to ruin and death."

   "Ruin and death! Whose death, damn you! Is it wisdom to let truth ruin the Order?"

   "All my life, I've dreamed of proving the Great Theorem."

   "Dreams, what are dreams? Why are you so damn stubborn? Why? Why are you?" And then he groaned out, "Whose death? Whose death will it be?"

   "All my life, and to, this day, I've dreamed of an Order, a whole universe, where wisdom and truth are one."

   "Noble words; naive words - how weary I am of words!" There was an almost unbearable tension in his voice, in each of his steely words. "Either give me your promise or do not."

   "I can't give you my promise."

   "So."

   He spoke this final word mournfully, regretfully, as if he could not bear to shape his lips around the simple consonant and vowel. The sound hung in the air like the low ringing of a bell. For a while he looked at me. And in his eyes, love and hate and another passion I thought of as will, or will toward fate, his fate and perhaps a universal fate, which he must have known was the most terrible and lonely fate of all. Then he scowled and pushed his palms at me and turned away, looking out the window. He dismissed me. Before leaving his tower for what I thought would be the last time, I looked out, too, down at the novices who skated by, oblivious of the judgment that had just occurred high above their snow-speckled heads.

If ever I spread tranquil skies over myself and soared on my own wings into my own skies; if I swam playfully in the deep light-distances and the bird-wisdom of my freedom came - but bird-wisdom speaks thus: "Behold, there is no above, no below! Throw yourself around, out, back, you who are light! Sing! Speak no more! Are not all words heavy and made to die? Are not all words lies to those who are light? Sing! Speak no more!" Oh, how should I not lust after eternity and after the nuptial ring of rings, the ring of recurrence?

Never yet have I found the woman from whom I wanted children, unless it be this woman whom I love: for I love you, O eternity.

For I love you, O eternity!

   seventh death meditation of the warrior-poets

The historians believe that near the end of the second Swarming Century, the warrior-poets perfected the art of using bio-computer bits to replace parts of the brain. Unlike the Agathanians, however, the warrior-poets applied their art to different ends. Slel-mime, that unspeakable crime in which a poet's cunningly crafted programs run the brain of his victim, is only one application. The poets are also known to cark parts of their own brains. They do this to give themselves power over their time-sense, so that they can slow time without the aid of an exterior computer. And for other reasons. It is said that they alter their own brains' profoundest programs in order to erase their fear of death. Indeed, the cetics believe they are utterly devoid of fear. In this respect, the poets are unnatural beings, for fear is as natural to humans as breathing air. To live, to feel the starlight in our eyes and the joy of the deep light-distances, to
be
- this is all we know. To be
not
is unimaginable and therefore terrifying. The birds who spread their wings to the sun, the silvery bottom fish gliding through their world of dark, silent joys, and even the sentient computers, in their ecstatic inward crackling of electricity and lightning information flows - all living things, in some tiniest particle of their beings, must fear the final mystery.

   When I began seeking out various of the City's warrior-poets, seeking in the bars, hospices, ice rings and cafes that they frequented, Bardo alternately accused me of being fearless and of having a will to suffer this mystery. "Are you mad?" he said to me a few days after my meeting with the Timekeeper. "Oh, you are mad - I've always known you are. These poets kill because they like death, don't you know?"

   "That's true," I said. "They worship death. But I'd like to find my mother - it's worrisome the way she's disappeared."

   I was very worried about her plotting with warrior-poets. I planned to find the warrior-poet with whom she had been keeping company these past days. But because I was a novice in the seeking of human beings, he found me instead.

   Adjacent to the Hyacinth Gardens, along the Run where it dips south toward the Old City, is a collection of twelve buildings made entirely of exotic woods. Some of the buildings are cavernous structures housing the historians' artifacts and relics; a few are somewhat smaller. Their elegant, polished rosewood rooms are given over solely to the display of art, alien and human, ancient and modern. Although all twelve buildings are called the Art Museum, it is the smaller buildings that hold the Fravashi frescoes and tone poems, the Urradeth ice sculptures and other treasures. The smallest building, a classic rectangular hall faced with shatterwood pillars, is the House of Remembrance. Its four sections are filled with many rooms, but the most famous of them is the Hibakusha Gallery. There reside some of the oldest frescoes depicting unbelievable scenes of chaos and war. There the tone poems build and swirl and fuse, unfolding the epic battles of the Holocaust Century. I had come to view the famous fresco, "Humanity Rising," which ran along the north wall for a hundred feet. When I was worried, or when I was tired and cold from skating the streets of the City, I liked to sit on one of the Gallery's benches, to breath in the smells of warm wood and flowers; I liked to watch the fresco move, the pretty colors. It was one of my favorite things to do.

   It was late afternoon, and I was not alone. Next to me, near the center of the long room, there were a couple of fabulists, no doubt seeking inspirations for work of their own. And at the edge of the carpet behind my bench, near the bubbling fountain, were a group of Friends of God off Simoom. They were each very tall and very thin, and they stank of garlic and goatroot and other exotic spices. They had a habit of twisting the silver chains binding their long, black hair. The habit annoyed me, as did their hissing. As they whispered, they hissed, the sibilant sounds rushing out of their mouths in quick choked-off breezes. One of them said, "See? Here is evidence the Swarming began during the Holocaust Century, not after. It is as was thought." I looked at the painting's bubbling blues and greens and whites. I watched silvery rockets rising from Old Earth's oceans, but whether or not the rockets were ships launched toward the stars or missiles carrying fusion weapons was difficult to tell. Then one of the rockets divided into two, the two into four and so on, and suddenly there were the bright stars of the Eta Carina nebula, and the four ships had become four thousand streamers of light. The light spread outward in great, glowing balls. In a flash it filled the nebula with a luminous white. For a moment the entire center section of the painting was brilliantly white, and then splotches of gray appeared at random to mar the brilliance. The white darkened to sky-blue as the blotches began to take shape, and a thousand black mushroom clouds began rising up from Old Earth's atmosphere. I was not at all certain that the painting was the "evidence" that the Friends of God sought. It seemed more likely that for the Fravashi who had made the fresco, the Swarming
was
the Holocaust.

   After a while I became vaguely aware of subtle changes in the muffled sounds and odors of the room. The stink of goatroot and garlic had subsided; disturbed voices and the quick rustle of fabric had replaced the whispering. Then there was silence, and I smelled the sudden aroma of kana oil. Warrior-poets, I knew, were famous for wearing effervescent kana oil perfumes. I turned my head, and there stood a deep-chested man of medium height who was plainly not interested in watching the painting. He was watching me. He studied my face as a master player might a chessboard, with an intense, almost fanatic concentration. Immediately I knew that he was a warrior-poet; all warrior-poets are cut from the same cells. He had the curly black hair, the coppery skin and sinuous neck of his kind. He was beautiful, as the highly bred races often are. How well-proportioned his fine nose and broad cheek planes seemed, how balanced his sculpted jaw, what a beautiful, fearful symmetry! But it was his unique poet's eyes that possessed the most compelling beauty: His eyes were deep indigo, almost purple; his eyes were vivid, clear, soulful, utterly aware - and utterly without fear. Although he looked young, I thought he must be very old, for only a man who had been brought back to youth many times could have such eyes. But no, I remembered, warrior-poets do not restore themselves to youth. Worshipping death as they do, they believe it is the greatest sin - indeed the only sin - to prolong one's life past "the moment of the possible." The warrior-poet, then, was as young as I.

   He walked down the edge of the carpet until he stood almost on top of me. His movements were graceful, quick exquisite. "My name is Dawud," he said, and his voice flowed like molten silver. "And you are Mallory Ringess, aren't you? I've heard the strangest things about you."

   Except for the shifting, throbbing painting and the other frescoes on the far walls, the room was empty. No one trusts a warrior-poet, I thought. I examined the black sable cloak he wore and the eye-catching, rainbow kamelaika beneath. His clothes were richly made and beautiful, though the poets were known to care nothing of riches and but little for beauty. I turned my eyes to his hands, looking for the rings. All warrior-poets wear two rings, one each on the little finger of either hand. The rings are made of various metals and can be of different colors, green or yellow, indigo or blue. There are seven colors, and in the manner of the spectrum's progression, each marks the level of the warrior-poet's attainments. A violet ring means he is of the seventh and lowest circle; a red ring is given to those rare individuals who attain the first circle. The left-hand ring is the ring of the poet, while the one on the right hand is the warrior's ring. It is said that no one has ever been at once a great enough poet and warrior to wear two red rings. On the little finger of his left hand was a green ring. He was of the poets' fourth circle, then; his poetic prowess was not extraordinary. But around his other finger, cut from one of Qallar's artificial metals, he wore a red ring. The ring seemed to glow to match the fiery reds of the painting, and he said, "You have been looking for me, I have been told."

   "Do you know my mother? Are you the poet who ... do you know my mother?"

   "I know your mother well."

   "Where is she?"

   He ignored my question, and he bowed his head politely. "I would have wanted to meet you in any case, to see the son of the mother. I've collected the stories about you. One day, if I live, I'll write a poem. I've heard you stopped time fifteen days ago, saved your friend from dying."

   "You shouldn't listen to gossip."

   "You shouldn't have saved your friend from his moment. And it isn't gossip, as I know. I know, too, about Agathange. We poets are familiar with -"

   "Yes," I interrupted, "you're masters of slel-mime."

   "You use that slandered term."

   "You create human beings robbed of free will."

   He smiled and said, "Do you think you know about free will?"

   "You're assassins who kill for pleasure."

   "You think so?"

   I was confused, distracted by his teeth and nice smile, lulled by his warm, reassuring manner. I said, "You
do
kill, then?"

   "Often."

   "And your victims are sometimes innocent?"

   He smiled and his eyes sparkled. "I have never seen an innocent woman or man, never even an innocent child - have you, Mallory Ringess?
You
know there is no true innocence. No, don't protest because I can see the knowledge in the furrows of your forehead."

   I rubbed back and forth above my eyes and accused, "You poets - you're death worshippers, I think."

   "Certainly. But if you please - tell me about worship? Or shall I tell you? Dario Redring once composed a poem about worship. Shall I recite it?"

   "No," I said, "I hate poetry."

   "If that is true, then you are crippled in your soul. But I don't think you hate poetry."

   "Where's my mother?"

   "She is waiting for me."

   "Waiting where?"

   He again ignored my question and pointed toward the corner of the painting; the interior of the Orion Nebula was lit with stars where some of the first swarms of human beings had made their new homes. "Pretty," he said. And then, "How, would you suppose, the prettiness of this painting is protected?"