Neverness (7 page)

   I shall mention only a few details of what happened on the streets of my City that day, because due to the peculiar nature and rules of the race, that is all a single pilot can do. The rules are simple: A pilot may choose any path through the four quarters of the city so long as she or he passes in sequence through one of the various checkpoints such as Rollo's Ring in the Farsider's Quarter, or the Hofgarten between the Zoo and the Pilot's Quarter. The theory is that the smartest and most cunning pilot will win, the pilot who had best memorized the streets and shortcuts of our city. In practice, though, speed is at least as important as brains.

   Bardo bellowed and stroked as he pushed between a cluster of master pilots who were blocking his way. (Such shoving, I should add, is permitted if the pilot first shouts out a warning.) Blond-haired Tomoth, who stroked furiously in a high tuck, almost fell as Bardo's elbow caught him on the shoulder. Then Bardo shouted out, "First among equals!" and he disappeared around the curve of the gliddery.

   We caught up to him at the Rose Womb Cloisters, that jumble of squat buildings at Resa's western edge housing the tanks in which we had floated for a considerable portion of our journeyman years. He was skating raggedly as we passed him. He had pulled the hood of his kamelaika away from his dripping head. "First among ... equals," he said wheezing and gasping for air. "At least ... for a ... quarter mile."

   At the west gate of the Academy we dispersed. Fifteen pilots turned onto the southernmost of the orange glidderies that lead to the Way while eight master pilots and six pilots - Soli and myself among them - chose a lesser gliddery through the gleaming Old City in order to avoid the arterial's heavier traffic. And so it went. The sky above us was deep blue, the air dense and cold. In front of me Soli's steel skates striking smoothly against the ice and the shouts and laughter of the onlookers lining the narrow street were like a racy music. I tucked low and turned as I cradled my right arm against the small of my back, and suddenly I was alone.

   I saw other pilots only a few times during the rest of the race. I did not want to make a false analogy between the streets of Neverness and the pathways through the manifold, yet I could not help thinking about the similarities: to suddenly pass from the cold, shadowed, red lesser glidderies onto a sliddery and then to the brilliantly illuminated Way was like fenestering, falling from the manifold into the bright light surrounding a star. As a pilot far from our city segues into a decision tree where he must choose the correct pathway or perish, so we racers had to match our memories of the branching streets against the reality of the tangled knots of glissades and glidderies, or lose. And if dreamtime can be said to be the most important and pleasurable of a pilot's mindsets, then the ecstasy of cool wind and intensely focused vision was what we felt, at least for the first five miles or so. Thus when I entered the checkpoint of the Winter Ring deep within the Farsider's Quarter, and I saw Soli and Lionel ten yards in front of me and other racers skating onto the opening of ice behind me, I had enough breath and enthusiasm to call out, "Five miles alone on the city streets, and here we gather, as if we were stived around the fixed-points of a star."

   As Soli turned to answer me, the features of his face narrowed into a mask of fierce concentration. He was breathing deeply, and he said, "Beware exploding stars!" And then he was gone, speeding down one of the lesser glidderies connecting to the dangerous Street of Smugglers.

   I did not catch up to him until near the end of the race. I circled the spouting Silver Spume in the Zoo, where Friends of Man and Fravashi and two races of aliens I had never seen before looked on at the curious spectacle that we provided them. At North Ring the race officer shouted, "Soli first followed by Killirand a hundred yards followed by Ringess one hundred fifty yards followed ..." and at the great circle outside the Hofgarten, where the Run intersects the Way, I heard, "Soli first followed by Ringess fifty yards followed by Killirand three hundred...," and so it went. At the last checkpoint, which was in the Pilot's Quarter, I saw my uncle a mere twenty yards ahead. I knew I would not see him again until I crossed first into the Commons and Burgos Harsha pronounced me the winner.

   I was wrong.

   I was skating west on the Run, cleverly - or so I thought - doubling back along the northern edge of the Old City so that I could cut along a little gliddery I knew of that led straight to the Academy's north gate. The blue ice was crowded with novices and others who had somehow guessed that a few of the racers might choose this unlikely route. As I was congratulating myself and envisioning Burgos pinning the diamond victory medal to my chest, I glimpsed a streak of black through the press of skaters in front of me. The crowd shifted, and there was Soli calmly stroking close to the red stripe separating the skating lane from the sled lane. I was considering shouting out a challenge when I heard raucous laughter behind my back. I turned my head midstroke and saw two black-bearded men - wormrunners I guessed from the flamboyant cut of their furs - elbowing each other, clasping hands, and alternately whipping each other ahead by snapping their arms. They were much too old, of course, and the street was much too crowded for a game of bump-and-skate. I should have perceived this immediately. Instead, I completed my stroke because I was determined to give Soli no warning as I passed him. All at once the larger wormrunner smacked into Soli's back, propelling him across the warning stripe into the sled lane. There came the sudden thunder of a large red sled as he stutter-stepped on his skates with his arms outstretched. He performed a desperate dance to avoid the sled's hard, pointed nose, and suddenly he was down. The sled rocketed over him in a tenth of a second. (Though it seemed like a year.) I crossed the warning stripe and pulled him to the skating lane. He pushed me away with an astonishing force for someone who so nearly had been impaled. "Assassin," he said to me. He grunted and tried to stand.

   I told him that it was a wormrunner who had pushed him, but he said, "If not you, then your mother's hirelings. She hates me because she thinks you'll be held to your oath. And for other reasons."

   I looked at the circle of people standing over us. Nowhere could I see the two black-bearded wormrunners.

   "But she's wrong, Moira is."

   He held his side and coughed. Blood trickled from his long nose and open mouth. He beckoned to a nearby novice who approached nervously. "Your name?" he asked.

   "Sophie Dean, from The Nave, Lord Pilot," the pretty girl answered.

   "Then," he said, "your Lord Pilot in the presence of the witness Sophie Dean releases Mallory Ringess from his oath to penetrate the Solid State Entity."

   He coughed again, spraying tiny red droplets over Sophie's white jacket.

   "I think your ribs must be broken," I said. "The race is over for you, Lord Pilot."

   He grabbed my arm and pulled me closer to him. "Is it?" he asked. Then he coughed as he pushed me away and began skating towards the Academy.

   I stood there for a moment staring at the drops of blood burning tiny holes into the blue ice. I did not want to believe that my mother had sent assassins to murder Soli. I could not understand why he had released me from my oath.

   "Are you all right, Pilot?" Sophie asked.

   I was not all right. Though my life was saved, I felt sick to my stomach, utterly wretched. I coughed suddenly and vomited up a chyme of black bread and black coffee and bile.

   "Pilot?"

   Sophie blinked her clear blue eyes against the sudden wind cutting beneath my garments, and in my mind was a knowledge, a complete and utter certainty that I would keep my oath to Soli and my vows to the Order no matter the cost. Each of us, I realized, must ultimately face death and ruin. It was merely my fate to have to face them sooner than most.

   "Pilot, shall I call for a sled?"

   "No, I'll finish the race," I said.

   "You're letting him get a lead."

   It was true. I looked down the Run as Soli turned onto the yellow street leading to my secret shortcut to the west gate.

   "Don't worry, child," I said as I pushed off. "He's injured and full of pain, and he's coughing blood. I'll catch him before we get halfway to Borja."

   I was again wrong. Though I struck the ice with my skates as fast as I could, I did not catch him as we passed the spires of Borja, and I did not catch him as we circled the Timekeeper's Tower; I did not catch him at all.

   The wind against my ears was like a winter storm as we entered Resa Commons. The multitudes cheered, and Burgos Harsha waved the green victory flag, and Leopold Soli, barely conscious and leaking so much blood from his torn lungs that a cutter later had to pump plasma into his veins, beat me by ten feet.

   It might as well have been ten light-years.

The goal of my theory is to establish once and for all the certitude of mathematical methods ... The present state of affairs where we run up against the paradoxes is intolerable. Just think, the definitions and deductive methods which everyone learns, teaches and uses in mathematics lead to absurdities! If mathematical thinking is defective, where are we to find truth and certitude?

   David Hilbert, Machine Century Cantor, from
On the Infinite

The days following the pilot's race and Leopold Soli's near-murder passed quickly. The clear, dry, sunny weather gave way to winter's deep powder snows that continually fell on the glissades and kept the zambonies busy. Soli's would-be assassins were never caught. Though he made full use of the Order's resources, and the Timekeeper set his spies to listening at doorways and peeking in windows (or whatever it is that spies do), our Lord Pilot could do little more than rage and demand that my mother be brought before the akashics. "Lay her brain bare," he thundered at the pilot's conclave, "expose her plots and lies!" It was a measure of his vast reputation that the pilots, many of whom had grown to adulthood and had taken their vows during his long journey, voted to try my mother.

   On fourthday she submitted to the review of Nikolos the Elder. With his computers he painted pictures of her brain as vivid as a Fravashi fresco. But the plump, little Lord Akashic pronounced that he could find no memory inside her of a plot to kill Soli.

   That night, in her little brick house in the Pilots' Quarter, she said to me, "Soli goes too far! Nikolos proclaims my innocence. What does Soli say? He says, 'It's well known that the matriarchs of Lechoix keep drugs that destroy specific memories" Destroy! As if I'd destroy part of my
brain
!"

   I knew how my mother treasured the hundred billion neurons that made up her brain. I did not believe that she, as those of the aphasic sect often did, had taken an aphagenic to destroy her memory; neither could I trust that she was innocent, not after what she had said to me the day of the race. (Even supposing she
had
used such a drug, I could not very well ask her if she had. Such is the nature of the induced micro-brain lesions that she would have no memory of her crime, nor of having dissolved the memory of her crime.) I was angry and my voice quavered as I asked, "How did you fool the Lord Akashic?"

   "My son doubts me?" she said as she slumped against the bare brick wall of her sleeping room. "How I hate Soli! The Lord Pilot returns. To take away what I love most. And so I went to the Timekeeper. And lied, yes I admit I lied. I begged him to ask Soli. To release you from your oath."

   "And the Timekeeper listened to you?"

   "The Timekeeper thinks he's cunning. But I told him we would go to Tria. To become merchant pilots, if he didn't talk to Soli. The Timekeeper thinks he's fearless, but he fears such a scandal."

   "You told him
that
? He must think I'm the worst kind of coward."

   "Who cares what he thinks? At least I've saved you. From a stupid death."

   "You've saved me from nothing," I said as I walked toward the door. "Don't ever lie on my behalf again, Mother."

   I told her I had resolved to keep my oath, and she began to cry. "How I hate Soli!" she said as I opened to door to the street. "I'll teach him about hate."

   I spent the next few days in final preparation for my journey. I consulted eschatologists and other professionals, hoping to glean some bit of information as to the nature and purpose of the impossible being known as the Solid State Entity. Burgos Harsha told me that Rollo Gallivare had discovered the first of the mainbrains, and that he believed them to be aliens from another galaxy. "It is recorded in the apocrypha of the first Timekeeper that the Silicon God appeared within the Eta Carina nebula toward the end of the Swarming Centuries. And in the chronicles of Tisander the Wary, we find a similar assertation [sic; probably "assertion" - reb]. But when have those sources ever been accurate, I ask you? In the history of the Tycho, Reina Ede holds that the brains evolved from the seed of the Ieldra, as did Homo Sapiens. What do I believe? I don't know what I believe."

   Kolenya Mor thought that the Ieldra, before they melded their consciousnesses with the bizarrely tortured spacetime of the core singularity, must have closely resembled the Solid State Entity. "As to the Entity's purpose, why, it's the purpose of all life, to awaken to itself." We talked for a long time, and I told her that many of the younger pilots denied that life
had
a purpose. She looked at me with her horrified little eyes and exclaimed, "Heresy!
That
ancient heresy!"

   I was not the only one, of course, called to quest. The whole of our Order seemed afire with the dream of finding Soli's Elder Eddas. What indeed
was
the secret of man's immortality? "Find out why the goddamned stars are exploding," Bardo said, "and you'll find your secret." Of course, he was a pragmatist whose mind did not often turn towards esoteric problems. Others believed that the secret of the exploding Vild would be only the first part of the Elder Eddas. (Albeit a vital part.) Where should we look for this secret? Why hadn't we discovered it long ago? Phantasts and tinkers and pilots - many of us felt that despite the three millennia in which our Order had spent accumulating knowledge, we might have overlooked an important, perhaps vital thing. Historians begged the Timekeeper for permission to leave Neverness, to raid the library on Ksandaria for clues to the mystery. Neologicians and semanticists locked themselves in their cold towers as they set to creating and discovering new languages, lost in their certitude that the secret of the Elder Eddas - and every other kind of wisdom - was to be found in words. The fabulists spun their fictions, which they claimed were as real as any reality, and declared that the Elder Eddas is that which we create. And who was to say they were wrong? And the pilots! My brave, fellow pilots: Richardess and the Sonderval, went forth into the manifold, seeking lost planets and strange new alien races. Tomoth and a hundred other master pilots would try to map the Vild. Soli himself would attempt to penetrate the inner veil of the Vild, while Lionel devised yet another plan to find Old Earth. Even cowardly Bardo would make a journey, even if he proposed nothing more daring than his own, private expedition to Ksandaria. Although a few cynical professionals like my mother had no intention of chancing their lives on such a dream, it was an exciting time, and more, a glorious time we would never see again.