Neverness (58 page)

   No, it was not possible. I looked at the faces of a tychist and a Jacarandan whore, and their ugliness overwhelmed me. How ugly the set of bitter experience, the lines and etchings of time! In their terminal adulthood, how ugly and tragi-comic adult human beings really were! With eyes for a moment freed of the distorting lense [sic; a synonym for "lens" - reb] of my own programs - with the eyes of a child - I saw a tragic thing: We are prisoners of our natural brains. As children we grow, and new programs are layered down, set into the jelly of our brains. When we are young we write many of these programs in order to adapt to a bizarre and dangerous environment. And then we grow some more. We mature. We find our places in our cities, in our societies, in ourselves. We form hypotheses as to the nature of things. These hypotheses shape us in turn, and yet more programs are written until we attain a certain level of competence and mastery, even of comfort, with our universe. Because our programs have allowed us this mastery, however limited, we become comfortable in ourselves, as well. And then there is no need for new programs, no need to erase or edit the old. We even forget that we were once able to program ourselves. Our brains grow opaque to new thoughts, as rigid as glass, and our programs are frozen for life, hardwired, so to speak within our hardened brains.
And this is how we were designed to be.
Evolution has made us to grow, to grow up, to have our children, to pass on our programs, and then to die. Life goes on this way. And so the flame burns weakly but freely, trapped inside a sphere of glass. We burn with sufficient light to illuminate the code of our programs, but we lack the means. We don't know how, and we are afraid, utterly terrified to break the glass. And even if we could master our fear, what then?

   If
I
could find courage, I wondered, what would I see? Would I be ashamed of the arrangement of programs - of my very self - beyond my control? Ah, but what if I could write new metaprograms controlling this arrangement of programs? Then I might one day attain the uniqueness and value that I found so lacking in myself and the rest of my race; as an artist composes a tone poem, I could create myself and call into being wonderful new programs which had never existed within the rippling tides of the universe. Then I would be free at last, and the flame would burn like star fire; then I would be something new, as new to myself as the morning sun is to a newborn child.

   _Where does the flame go when the flame explodes?_

   On the ice of the Winter Ring, surrounded by people skating, laughing, jumping, grimacing and shouting, as I stared at the frozen, mutilated Tycho's face and at the face of the harijan in the yellow pants and at the faces of all the people on the ice and on the worlds of man, as I stared at my own face, in an instant, I had this dream of being something new. But it was only a dream. When I looked up and out across the Ring, I saw Dawud skating toward a woman who looked like my mother, and my dizziness gave way to anger, and I became a robot once again.

I accelerated across the ice, dodging the people as best I could. The wind whistled in my ears and stung my face. I dropped my shoulder to pass a half-naked courtesan. When the shivering, blue-skinned woman saw me approaching madly at speed, and saw that I was skating straight toward a warrior-poet, she made an "O" of fear with her tattooed lips. She jumped out of my way. Dawud saw me, too. I was perhaps thirty yards from him, but I could see him smile. It was a smile of admiration, and faintly, of surprise. He bowed his head to me. The muscles jumped in his throat, and his curly black hair rippled in the wind. My mother opened her fur collar, and he immediately struck one of his needles in her neck. Then he sped away toward the eastern half of the Ring. My mother, probably following his smile, turned, saw me, tilted her head, and pushed off in the opposite direction.

   I could follow only one of them, so I sprinted after my mother. I caught her at the edge of the Ring as she passed beneath the milky, gleaming statue of Tisander the Wary. I grabbed the hood of her furs and yanked her to a stop. She didn't struggle. I pivoted just in time to see Dawud, in his rainbow kamelaika, disappear down one of the eight streets giving out onto the sliddery circling the Ring.

   "Mother," I gasped, "why did you run away from me?"

   A few fearful arhats near us snapped their tangerine robes and kept their distance, although they looked at us with the awe which farsiders so often have of pilots. (And what is awe, I suddenly realized, if not a blend of love and fear?)

   "Where is the poet skating? What did he do to you?"

   "Mallory," she said, and she shut her eyes. Her eyelids fluttered as if she were passing through dream-sleep. She was breathing heavily, and her eye was twitching, slightly. It was an old program. I had thought Mehtar had cut it from her muscles when he had sculpted her face, but apparently the program ran deep. She opened her eyes and squinted as she cocked her head and asked, "Why were you tracking me?"

   "Where have you been?"

   "And why must you answer a question with a question? Haven't I taught you? That it's disrespectful?"

   I told her of my meeting Dawud in the Hibakusha Gallery and of what had followed. I propped my boot up on a nearby bench, digging at the old wood with my blade. "Why were you meeting a warrior-poet, Mother?"

   "It was a chance meeting."

   "You don't believe in chance," I said.

   "You think I'm lying? I'm not lying; my mother taught me. Not to lie."

   She laughed then, a disturbed laugh as if she had a private joke with herself. There was a deep tension in her laughter. I detected the subtle strains of untruth, and I found - amazingly - that I could read this particular program of my mother's. She was, quite simply, lying.

   "What did the poet put in your neck then?"

   "Nothing," she said. She reached up and touched the ugly wood collar pin fastening her furs. "He was returning the pin. It had come off. He found it lying on the ice."

   I looked behind me at the streets which radiated away from the Ring, cutting between the circle of glass tenements. I considered pursuing Dawud, but I was afraid I would lose my mother. And clearly she knew what I was thinking. Clearly she planned to lure me away from him.

   "The warrior-poet could have killed you," I said.

   "The warrior-beasts can kill anyone they choose."

   "And who does Dawud choose to kill?" I asked. "Soli?"

   "How would I know?"

   Lies, lies, lies.

   Her eye twitched then, and I saw what I should have seen long ago: My mother was addicted to toalache - the facial tics were the result of her hiding this shame from her friends, and from herself. I saw other things, too, other programs: The layers of fat girdling her hips, which betrayed her compulsive eating programs and love of chocolate drinks and candies; her arrogant speech patterns, the clipped sentence fragments hinting at her belief that others were too stupid to understand any but the briefest bursts of information (and hinting, too, at her basic shyness); the way she had programmed herself to squint in place of smiling. The cetics call these program revealing body signs "tells." I searched her face for the frowns, eye-rolls and blinks that would tell the tale of herself. I saw ... shocking things. I had always known - even if I had not been aware of the knowledge - that she possessed a sort of slovenly voluptuousness. Now I saw something else; now her omnifarious sexuality was revealed. To my vast embarrassment, I saw that she was capable of coupling with an exemplar, boy, woman, alien or beast - or even with a beam of pure radiant energy, if that kind of union between flesh and light were possible. (The arhats, of course, believe it is.) If she was chaste in everyday practice, it was not because she didn't have her desires. It is from my mother, I believe, that I have inherited my wildness.

   My hands were numb from squeezing the wood slats of the bench, so I rubbed them together. Around the Ring, the flame globes began to flare. The ice was shiny with hundreds of lights. The skaters were deserting in mass for the nearby cafes. Only a few groups of harijan were left near the edge of the Ring. In the dropping darkness, their shouts seemed harsh and too near.

   "I think there's a plot to kill Soli," I half-whispered. "What do you know of it, Mother?"

   "Nothing."

   From the tightness of her lips I saw that she knew everything.

   "If Soli is assassinated you'll be the first person the Timekeeper will suspect. He'll drag you before the akashics, lay your brain bare."

   She squinted and said, "There are ways. Of fooling the akashics and their primitive computers."

   For reasons of my own I was very concerned with any limitations of the akashic computers, and I asked, "What ways?"

   "Ways, Haven't I taught you that there are always ways of outwitting your competitors?"

   "You also taught me that it's wrong to murder."

   She tilted her head and nodded. "A child must be taught certain ... certainties. Otherwise the universe will engulf her. But when she is a
woman
, she learns what is permitted."

   "You'd murder Soli? How blithely we speak of murder, then."

   "_You_ speak. I've never killed a living thing."

   "But you'd send the poet to do your killing. Is that
permitted
?"

   "Everything is permitted. To those who see the need. Certain few people are chosen. For these few, the laws of the many don't apply."

   "And who chooses them, Mother?"

   "They're chosen by fate. Fate marks them, and they must leave their mark."

   "Murder Soli and you'll leave a bloody mark."

   "The great acts of history," she said, "are written in blood."

   "You see Soli's murder as an act of greatness?"

   "Without Soli, there would be no more talk of Schism. The Order would be preserved."

   "You think that?"

   She smiled her disturbed, conceited smile, and the wind began to blow. It was a bitter wind carrying in the first cold of night. My mother pulled her collar tightly around her throat. Her robe was drab and ill-fitting; I realized that she habitually wore these plain garments as a kind of camouflage. People would look at the lumpy folds and conclude that here was a selfless woman caring little for style or ostentation. But appearances, I thought, lie. In truth, my mother gloried in herself as if she were still a little girl.

   "How I hate Soli!" she said.

   I kicked my blade into the ice and said, "And yet you chose him to be my father."

   "I chose his chromosomes to make yours," she corrected.

   I took off my glove and ran my fingers through my hair feeling for the strands of red, which were coarser and stiffer than the black hairs. But my fingers were too cold and numb to feel much of anything. "Why, Mother?" I asked suddenly.

   "Don't ask me these questions."

   "Tell me - I have to know."

   She sighed and sucked her tongue as if it were a ball of chocolate. "Men are tools," she said. "And their chromosomes are tools. I slelled Soli's chromosomes to make you. Lord Pilot of our Order." I rubbed the side of my nose and looked at her. She was squinting at me, biting her lip and pulling at the fat skin beneath her chin. I thought I saw the skeleton of her plan. She would connive to make me Lord Pilot, and then she would manipulate me from behind as if I were a phantast's puppet. When I accused her of this, she asked me, "How could I manipulate my own son? You manipulate yourself. I have no desire to
manipulate
. The future Lord Pilot."

   As she laughed to herself, I thought that I had been blind to the essential conceit of her plan. I looked at her eyes, which were dark blue pools against the deeper darkness of her hood, and I saw overweening pride and ambition. I said, "But it's the Timekeeper who rules the Order, not the Lord Pilot."

   "The
Timekeeper
," she agreed.

   And then I knew; then I could perceive the full flesh of her grand strategy. She said the word "Timekeeper," and there was an unbearable stress in the syllables of that word. My mother was an ambitious woman. She would have the Timekeeper killed, too. And more - she would plot to make herself the Lord of the Order.

   Vanity, vanity, vanity.

   "No, mother," I said, reading the tells on her face, "you'll never rule the Order."

   The air escaped her lips in a quick "whoosh." She clasped her hands to her belly as if I'd punched her beneath her heart. "My son has
powers
," she said. "You can read me, I think. Your own mother."

   "I can read some of your programs."

   "What have they
done
to you?" She looked at me as if she were seeing me for the first time, with horror tightening her anxious squint. (And what is horror if not a blending of hate and fear?)

   "What has the poet done to
you
, Mother?"

   "Don't answer a question with a question! Why were you always so disobedient? I thought I'd taught you. Obedience long ago."

   I did not like the turn of our conversation. I hated the way she pronounced the word "obedience." It was an ugly word; the way she said it, it was a word rife with strange connotations and terrible meaning. I remembered that the warrior-poets were infamous for instilling in their victims an irreversible and total obedience. What poisons had Dawud planted in her brain? Genotoxins to combine with her chromosomes and to subtly alter her deepest programs? Had he introduced into her blood a slel-virus that would devour her brain and replace it, bit by bit, with preprogrammed neurologics? With
obedient
neurologics? Had he slel-mimed her brain? My mother stared at the dark circle of the Ring, and I wondered what portion of her free will had already been dissolved and replaced by the will of the warrior-poet.

   "This poet is very dangerous," I said. He'd kill you like a flea, if he wanted."

   "Everyone dies."

   "He'd kill your soul."

   "I'm not afraid of dying."