Neverness (73 page)

   He stood next to one of his grandfather clocks as he alternately stared at Nikolos the Elder's jiggly belly and grimly smiled at Soli. The clock's brass pendulum swung back and forth, and I heard the ticking. The room, as always, was full of ticking clocks. I listened to the ticking of steel and wood, the pulsing, pings and beeping of the clocks around the room. My heart was beating like a drumclock as the Timekeeper's eyes fixed mine, and he asked, "Do you hear the ticking, Mallory, my brave, foolish
Lord
Pilot?"

   Without waiting for an answer, he stepped over to the Fravashi driftglass glowing in one of the clock cases. He abruptly turned to us, addressing us all at once: "_My_ Lords and Masters," he began. He emphasized the word "my" as if we must still submit to his will, as if he were still Lord of the Order. "So, it's time, is it? You are come to tell me my time has run out?"

   Nikolos screwed up his soft, intelligent face as if someone had just gouged his shin with a sharp skate. He looked at me, silently imploring me to say something. I stepped forward and took a breath. "It is the decision of the College of Lords," I said, "that you be forgiven your crimes. You will not be banished. Surrender the Seal of the Order, and you will be permitted to remain in your Tower."

   "You'd forgive
me
?"

   I wanted to tell him that I would forgive him anything because he had once saved my life and shaped my fate when he had given me the books of poems. A part of me - the boyish novice he had once taught the art of wrestling - was still somewhat in awe of him. "We'll forget that Bardo and eighty other pilots are dead because of you."

   "Pompous, young pilot! What do you know about my crimes? What do you
know
about anything?"

   "Surrender the Seal," I said. Behind me Burgos Harsha and Lord Parsons mumbled that the Timekeeper should hand us the Seal formally, without delay. I looked across the room at the Seal of the Order where it sat ticking atop its polished stand. Even thirty feet away, I could smell the wood's bitter, newly applied yu-oil polish.

   "The Ringess asks for the Seal of the Order," he said. "And if I gave it to him, what then? You lords think to change the Order! Ha, how will you do that?" His voice lowered to the timbre of a gong. "So, I've seen change in my time, but man always remains the same."

   I thought of the godseed alive inside my head, of the Great Theorem and other things, and I said, "No, not always the same."

   "A man and his crimes," he said.

   I let his words echo from ear to ear. The way he said "crimes" was a tell. A memory began to form up, and I had the nagging feeling I should know exactly what crimes he was referring to.

   The Timekeeper's eyes wandered over us, lingering a moment too long on Soli. "So, Mallory, if I'm to be Timekeeper no more, who'll do the hard things, eh?"

   "Who will murder, is that what you mean?"

   "Was it I," he asked, "who tried to assassinate Soli?"

   There were more tells in the sibilant sounds of "assassinate," and suddenly I knew. "Yes, I said, "the first time Soli was nearly murdered - that was your crime, I think." I turned to Soli, who was staring out the window at the City lights. I finally caught his eye, and I explained, "It was the Timekeeper who tried to assassinate you the day of the Pilot's Race."

   "Is that true?" Soli asked. He stood still as a hunter, and he looked down at the Timekeeper. Although he pretended to a cool detachment, a journeyman cetic could have seen he was furious. "Why did you do that?"

   My mother caught his elbow and said, "I've lived long enough. For you to know I'm innocent. Now it's too late."

   Soli wrenched his arm away and spat out, "Yes, you are innocent of
that
attempted murder."

   "So, it's true," the Timekeeper said. "It's too late."

   "Why would you want to have me assassinated?" Soli asked him.

   I rubbed the side of my nose and said, "Tell us about the Entity. Why would the gods warn man against Her?"

   "Is it true?" Soli asked him.

   The Timekeeper suddenly whirled, and his words lashed Soli like a whip. "Of course it's true! I'll say it now as I've said before: Piss on the Ieldra and their damn secrets! When you returned from the core, all your damn talk of the Elder Eddas - you forced me to call the Quest. There are some things we're not meant to know, but you wouldn't listen to me." He stepped close to Soli. He clenched his fists and asked, "Why wouldn't you listen to me, Leopold? So, it's your damn pride. How you talked of your damn discovery, talked and drank your filthy skotch in your damn bar! You had every novice in the City dreaming of your Ieldra and their Eddas. I asked you to keep your silence. I told you; I warned you, but you wouldn't listen. You had to argue with me. 'The truth is the truth,' you told me. So, damn your truth! Leopold, why wouldn't you listen?"

   "Yes, it's true," Soli said sarcastically. "You tried to assassinate me because I wouldn't listen."

   "What is there that man shouldn't know, then?" I asked the Timekeeper. "Tell me, I need to know."

   Soli smacked a black-gloved fist into his open hand. He bowed to the Timekeeper and said, "Who should judge you? Yes, who judges the judge? You and I, we've had a long run, haven't we? But it's over. It's time you surrendered the Seal, isn't it?"

   The Timekeeper glanced at one of his clocks and smiled grimly. "So, it's time," he said. He circled the room and stood before the Seal of the Order. He placed his hands on the clock's steel casing.

   Behind me Nikolos muttered, "Carefully!" as Burgos Harsha drew in a quick breath of air. Many of the lords were whispering to each other; the room was hissing with their whispers.

   The Timekeeper approached us holding the Seal close to his body. I heard its rhythmic ticking. Inside the Seal's glass window, I watched the blue and white imago of Old Earth orbiting the Sun. The Timekeeper stopped in front of me, and the ticking grew louder. I half-suspected that the Seal was a fake, a replica clock made into a weapon of some sort. I was afraid it might explode.

   "Who shall I surrender it to?" he asked. "So, will the Lord Pilot accept this?"

   I had to remind myself that I was now the Lord Pilot. I opened and spread my hands. As he held out the Seal to me the ticking grew even louder. I was very aware of the ticking of every clock in the Tower.

   "The Seal of the Order," the Timekeeper said. He paused a moment, and then held the clock tightly to his chest, as a Devaki mother suckles her baby. He seemed to be waiting for something. I could almost hear him counting to himself.

   "My Lords!" he said. "You say I must surrender the Seal of the Order. So. Here it is."

   "Mallory!" my mother shrieked.

   My eyes were frozen on the Timekeeper's as he dropped the Seal into my hands. It was heavier than I had thought it would be; I nearly dropped it.

   "'Send not to ask for whom the bell tolls,'" the Timekeeper said, quoting one of his infamous poems, "'it tolls for thee.'"

   The Seal chimed one single time, and then it grew silent. I had one of those foolish, irrational fears that I had done something wrong, perhaps grasping it too hard and somehow damaging the interior mechanism. I shook the Seal beside my ear. Nothing. Suddenly I noticed that the Tower had grown disturbingly quiet. I heard my heart thumping; other than the breathing of the other lords and masters, it was the only sound I heard. All of the clocks in the room had grown silent at the same moment. The ticking had stopped. The pendulum clocks were still, and the bio-clocks were dead, and the cobalt sands of the hourglasses had run out.

   "It's time," the Timekeeper said. He aimed a gnarled finger at the southern window behind us and growled, "Look!"

   I did not look. This, among other things, saved me. But Jonath Parsons and Nikolos the Elder and Burgos Harsha - they and many of the others looked out the window. Burgos later said that he saw a dazzling flash and a glowing gout of clouds billowing outward above the Hollow Fields, but that would have been impossible. We all felt the Tower shake, however. Up through the foundations came a rumble which felt like an icequake. All at once the brittle Tower windows shattered inward. There was a cracking and a roar, a rainshower of glass. Flying shards were everywhere. Tiny glass spears stung the back of my neck and head. Burgos and a few others screamed out, "My eyes!" while the Timekeeper covered his own eyes with his forearm. There was a hot wind while the glass storm blew through the room. When the shockwave had passed, the Timekeeper threw his arm away from his eyes, and there was a knife in his hand. It was as long and silvery as a blade of glass. At first I thought it
was
glass, so quickly did its gleaming edge whirl towards my face.

   "So, it was too old," the Timekeeper said cryptically. Then he moved toward me, and he was as fast as any warrior-poet. I dropped the Seal of the Order. I accelerated, too. As my inner clock began ticking furiously and time slowed, I began to scry.

   "Mallory!" my mother cried out.

   I saw the future pattern of the Timekeeper's knifework even as he dropped the knife toward my stomach. I saw another thing. I saw my mother jump between us. I watched the Timekeeper's knife split the wool beneath her breast and bury itself up to its hilt. When I saw this future, I moved quickly to make sure it would never be. But although I scryed, I was not quite a scryer. I saw the future imperfectly. To this day, I
see
it imperfectly. I tried to knock my mother aside, but I had not foreseen everything. The Seal struck the fur carpet and rebounded at an odd angle. I barely avoided tripping over it. This caused me to knock her forward, slightly, rather than to the side. I drove her into the Timekeeper's knife. As the blade dipped into her chest she smiled - perhaps - it was really a grimace of agony - and she plunged a shining, warrior-poet's needle into the Timekeeper's neck. There were cries and shouts behind us. Dead cold waves of air slashed through the blown-out window jambs into the room. Soli, with puffs of steam escaping his cut, bleeding lips, rushed the Timekeeper. My mother fell back against me, and I eased her down to the soft furs. The Timekeeper almost fell on top of us. The needle's poison froze his nerves, and he toppled like an ice sculpture; he lay dead against the glass fragments on the floor.

   "Look!" someone cried out. But I did not have time to look because my mother was bleeding to death as she lay across my lap. Her hot blood soaked the wool on the top of my thighs. She did not speak. Her eyes were open, watching me. I saw she had no fear of death. Perhaps she was so driven by the warrior-poet's programs that she even welcomed death. I thought she had saved me not out of love but because she was programmed to seek her moment of the possible. I should be no more grateful to her than I would be to an obedient robot. And yet I was grateful; as the life flowed out of her, her racking coughs tore me apart. Perhaps all sons are programmed this way. Bright arterial blood burst from her lips, and I wanted to believe she was dying as my mother rather than a warrior-poet. I looked for the spark of humanity which I believed must burn within each of us, the eternal flame, the shining point of clear light.

   "The Timekeeper is dead," Soli said. He was standing above us holding his own hand, which was bleeding. A piece of glass had cut his fingers. He glanced at the Timekeeper's body. "A warrior-poet's nerve poison wasn't it? Your mother knew about these things." And then, looking down at her, he said quickly, urgently, "If we hurry, maybe we can carry her to a cryologist before her brain dies."

   I was shocked that he said this. I hadn't thought he was capable of forgiveness or compassion. I realized that I did not know him at all. I felt for a heartbeat in my mother's chest, and then I closed her eyes. "No," I said, "there will be no cryologist. She's dead, you see; she died at the right time."

   I stood up and turned toward the window. I saw a terrible sight. Most of the lords were kneeling or hunched up on the floor, bleeding from wounds. Nikolos the Elder was rubbing at his eyes, irrationally rubbing the glass into his eyes. Flying glass had shredded Burgos Harsha's face. He screamed and writhed on the floor while Mahavira Netis, whose firm brown face was gouged and bleeding, bent over him and picked out the longest of the glass splinters. And this was horrible but not terrible. "Look!" someone cried, and pointed out the window. "Look!" I looked and saw the terrible thing. Above the Hollow Fields rose a mushroom-shaped cloud. I had never, seen a mushroom before, but I knew very well what a mushroom was; all human beings had learned that sometimes clouds will rise in the shape of mushrooms. The cloud boiled up almost black against the blue twilight sky. It rose and billowed outward, a dark mushroom mountain joining the circle of real mountains around the City.

   "It's an atomic bomb, isn't it?" Soli asked as he joined me by the window. He saw what I saw: All the towers of the Fields and many of the buildings in the most southern part of the City had been ruined, blown down to their foundation stones. "Why are we alive? Why wasn't the whole City destroyed? It couldn't be - who could believe it's an atomic bomb?"

   But it was an atomic bomb. I somehow knew this, as indeed, Soli must have known, too. There was a roaring and thunder, and the mushroom cloud seemed to glow. More, specifically, it was a hydrogen bomb, as I later learned from the tinkers and mechanics who explored the fused crater where the Lightship Caverns had been. It was a small, laser-ignited hydrogen bomb, an old, old bomb which had leaked away much of its deuterium in the thousands of years before it exploded. The fireball had been hardly hot enough to destroy the Caverns. That was why we were alive. That was why the whole City was alive, because it was a weak old bomb, and it had exploded underground in the heart of the Caverns. But I did not know this as we watched the mushroom cloud growing over the southern part of the City. I thought of the Timekeeper's words: "So, it was too old," and I knew only that he had tried to destroy everything with an atomic bomb.