Neverness (76 page)

   He hated himself. All women and men, of course, being human beings find some part of their all-too-human selves to hate. But he took this hatred further; he made an art of hating himself His pride, his anger, his aloofness from the sufferings of his fellow man - he hated these weaknesses just as he hated his lack of imagination and failure to prove the Hypothesis. And more, he hated himself merely for having weaknesses of any sort. I watched him place his white, blistered lips above the rim of his mug and blow on his coffee, and it occurred to me that he hated being human. He, that broody, inward-looking man who had so often ventured down the dark icy glidderies of his soul, had discovered that we define our humanity - our very selves - more by our weaknesses than by our strengths. And there was the trap which held him like the enclosing freeze of the winter sea: He loved being human as much as he hated it because it was the only thing he knew how to be. The greater Soli, the Soli who might someday emerge from the flawed, bitter, old Soli if only he would relinquish his icy grip upon himself, this Soli he feared (and therefore hated) above all things. And he knew all this. He saw himself more clearly than I ever could through my naive cetic's eyes. It was this self-knowledge and self-vision which sealed the tomb of his self-hatred. If he could really see the spiral of hate and fear binding him, shouldn't he be able to break free? No, he could not. He was only human, after all, wonderfully, tragically human. Human beings, he had tried to tell himself for three lifetimes, must accept their own humanity.

   By the time we reached the first of the Outer Islands, he had to accept the weakness of his human flesh, too. Thirtyday dawned even colder than it had been. Ten miles to the south of our hut - and it seemed even closer in the clear morning air - the ancestral home of the Yelenalina family was a green and white hump above the sea. Soli was coughing at the harsh air (so was I), all the while stealing quick looks southward as he fumbled with the dogs' harnesses. At first I thought his clumsiness was due to his distracted thoughts; perhaps he was wondering what had happened to the Yelenalina family these past few years. When Leilani unexpectedly dug his claws into the snow and began barking at a horde of snow loon making their way toward the island, the leather straps came up tight around Soli's fingers. He winced and bit his lip.

   "Are they frozen again?" I asked as I stepped through the crunching, squeaking snow. I helped him untangle Leilani and his second dog, Gita, who had leaped into the air in her futile effort to get at the birds. "Let me see your fingers."

   "No, they're fine," he said with steam puffing out of his bloody nose. "Yes, cold but fine."

   "Let's get them warm," I said. "It will be hard going from here to Kweitkel. We're about forty miles from the Fairleigh ice-shelf, I think." I reached for his hand. "Here, I'll warm them for you."

   "No."

   "Your damn fingers are frozen, aren't they? You should have kept them warm, as I said."

   "No, they're not frozen."

   "Let me see."

   "Go away, Pilot."

   I was shivering in the morning half-light while the wind drove snow down my neck. I wanted to be off on our day's run, to let the rising sun and my exertions warm me. I turned west, looking into the hazy whiteness for the folds and crevasses of the ice-shelf. I said, "Let's go into the hut. I'll heat some water and we'll thaw your fingers that way."

   Despite the cold, Soli's forehead was covered with sweat. "We don't have the time, do we?"

   I thumped Arne's side, and I tied a leather sock over his sore paw. "If you lose control of your sled and drive it into a crevasse, we'll lose more than time."

   Then he shook his head and kicked the snow and said, "Yes, time." And, unexpectedly, he went into the hut.

   I followed him through the tunnel. When we had gotten his mittens off, I saw that he had not lied. His fingers were not frozen. They were worse than frozen. His flesh had died and run to rot. His fingertips were black with bacteria, stinking with gangrene. They smelled worse than year-old, decayed fish heads. I could barely stand the stench so I backed up until my head bumped the wall of the hut.

   He held his fingers away from him as he would a dead sleekit and said, "The healing primaries haven't helped, have they?"

   "We could return to the City," I said. "Even if the gangrene got your whole hand, the splicers could grow you a new one in half a hundred-day." In truth, I did not really want to return to the City.

   "No, there's no time, is there? We'd lose the Timekeeper."

   "Would you rather lose your fingers?"

   "Better that than my returning to the City like a beaten dog."

   I looked at his ruined, swollen fingers, which were puffy with diseased gases, and I told him, "I'm no cutter."

   "You have a knife, don't you? Therefore you may cut."

   I rubbed my nose and said, "It won't be easy."

   "Are you afraid?" he asked me.

   "It won't be easy to live among the Devaki without fingers."

   "No, it won't be, will it?" he said.

   His face was somber as I took his hand in mine and turned to examine his fingers. I did not really want to touch him, much less cut his fingers off, but there was nothing else to do. Onto a newl skin I set out a needle and thread from my sewing bag. I unsheathed my seal knife. I held it over the oilstone until it was hot and black with carbon. Then I cut off his fingers. As he ground his teeth and groaned and attempted his pain primaries, I took his middle and forefingers off at the second knuckle, and I cut the finger next to them all the way down to the palm. Quickly I stanched the bleeding with the hot knife and sewed the stumps closed. All the time that I held his hand, I could not help noticing how closely its shape matched my own. (For all his professed bitterness with the Order, he still wore his pilot's ring around his little finger. I did not think he would ever take it off, unless I had to amputate that finger, too, and the ring fell off on its own.)

   When I finished binding his fingers, I brewed him a mug of cha tea to quicken his body against infection. He looked at his hand with disgust written across his lips. He was giddy with pain and curiously talkative. "A piece of glass lacerates my fingers, wrecking the circulation, and this is the result, isn't it? One happening begets another, on and on, as the Timekeeper used to say. This chain of logic, as inexorable as a proof. If Justine hadn't made me ... if
I
hadn't hit her, what would our lives have been? It's hard to stop thinking about that, Pilot; there's no help for the thoughts. She's dead, because of me. And now, almost home, but ... but, no, the Alaloi do not die from lost fingers, do they?"

   During the next few days we made slow progress while he learned to manage his sled with one hand. His fingers healed quickly, and by fortyday he could manipulate the traces between his thumb and stumps with a fair skill and without real pain. One night as I was rationing out the last of our baldo nuts, he admitted that sometimes he felt a ghost pain where his finger tips used to be. He hated these pains. "It's too bad we didn't bring any skotch," he said. "Don't look at me like that, Pilot! It's not that the ghost pain is so hard to bear; it's that it reminds me of the tricks our nerves and brain play on us. It's all so
uncertain
, isn't it?"

   I knew about these tricks of the brain, I, myself, as we threaded across the ice-shelf's crevasses, was tormented by such tricks. Why do we see what we see, hear what we hear? How is it that nerves can drink in information from the outer world? How do our brains make sense of this information? Is it true, as the ancient akashic Huxley once claimed, that our brains are no more than reducing valves which limit our reality, reducing our perception of the universe so that we are not driven mad by an endless wash of sensa, data, sights, colors, smells, sounds, thoughts, feelings, heat, cold, bits and bytes, a swirling, soul-swallowing ocean of information?

   One afternoon - it was on forty-second day, I think - as I stood with my yu rod probing the snowcrust over what I believed to be a crevasse, the changes in my senses overwhelmed me. I realized that the godseed must have worked on parts of me other than my brain. Like a drillworm it had chewed its way up my optic nerve into my eye, redesigning and replacing the nerve ganglia with neurologics. My vision was different, subtly different at first, and then very different. I blinked my eyes against the metallic glare of the iceblooms. I saw new colors and strange new hues and shades embedded within the old colors of green and red and blue. I looked up the spectrum into the ultraviolet where the colors - I named them brillig and mimsy and high purp - were seething with an indescribable fire. That night, when the sun had fallen out of her golden robes, and the scarlets and pinks bled from the sky, I beheld the colors of heat, the gloze and flush of infrared. The jagged peaks of Urasalia to the south were stony crimson, much cooler than the glowing flush of the surrounding sea ice. The air was marbled with different colors: with glore and high gloze and the lava of ruby running off the warm bodies of the dogs as Soli unharnessed them. My eyes (and ears) had newly come alive to radiations of many sorts. I was afraid to look skyward, afraid I might drink in the gamma murmur and radio whisper of the distant galaxies. With difficulty I made sense of all this information. The normal eye - the human eye - reacts to a single photon, a single "ping" of radiation striking the retina, the tiniest of quantum events. But the brain ignores these reactions, reducing the noise of its own nerve cells so that it takes at least seven photons to make the brain see light. My new brain was sensitive to single photons. It was sensitive to much else, too. When the wind died and all was quiet, I heard the background hiss and rustle of individual molecules colliding, rebounding, rushing past, and colliding yet again. All about me, in my eyes, nose, and ears, was noise. It took me many days to integrate this noise; it was many days before the damping gates of my new brain cutoff the noise and allowed me to lay back in my furs and think in peace. Despite these distractions, with each mile we sledded, we drew closer to the Timekeeper. Every day we came across one of his abandoned nightly camps, and we searched the gnawed thallow bones (evidently he had killed one of these great, elusive birds), the dog dung, and knocked-in snow blocks of his huts for signs of age. The Timekeeper's lead - four days when we had set out - had dwindled to no more than a day. Given our average sledding speed, he was probably twenty-two miles ahead of us, out where the world curved into the sky.

   On forty-seventh day we paused to hunt seals. As once before, I was lucky. We killed three small seals. We quickly butchered them and stowed the meat in my sled.

   "The Timekeeper hasn't been so lucky," Soli said. "Why are you so lucky every time you hunt your doffel? How many times has the Timekeeper opened an aklia - six times? And not one seal. He's losing time. He's probably hungry and weak. We'll trap him soon, won't we?"

   But we did not trap him as soon as I would have liked. The next day it was much warmer than it had been, too damn warm. A mass of warm air had moved in from the south. The low sky was a solid, seamless expanse of white clouds hanging over the grayish-white sea ice; the hut and the dog's gray coats and Soli's frosted furs as he bent over to ice his sled's runners, were lost into the enclosing whiteness. Even though I was close to his sled - perhaps ten feet away - it seemed like half a mile. In the whiteness, distances were strangely expanded or shrunken. The ice around us was dented with fissures and folds, almost like a Fravashi carpet after a journeyman pilot has walked across it wearing steel skate blades. But it was difficult to make out its individual features because there were no shadows to highlight the icescape's undulations and sudden cleavages. I smelled tingling needles of moisture in addition to the normal morning odors of seal blood, dung and coffee. After Soli tightened the traces of his rear dog, Zorro, he came over to me and pointed at the sky. "Snow," he said. "Before morning is over."

   "We can go five miles before it snows."

   "It's too dangerous. What's five miles?"

   "Five miles is five miles," I said.

   "It's impossible to see five miles ahead. The damn clouds."

   "We'll take the run mile by mile."

   "It will snow before we've gone a mile."

   "We'll take it foot by foot until it snows, then."

   "You're a tenacious bastard, aren't you?"

   "You should know," I said.

   We had gone about one mile when large flakes of cotton cake began fluttering down from the sky. Soli was just ahead of me, and his playful dogs jerked this way and that, sneezing and snapping snowflakes from the air. I should have paid more attention to the dogs and called an immediate halt, but I was taken with the colors of the six-sided crystals as they tickled my nose and stung my eyes. Through the snowstorm came a bellow, as of a great white bear who had cut his paw on an ice splinter. All at once Leilani and Soli's other dogs began a tremendous chorus of barking. And then they were off into the swirling storm, pulling their sled and a cursing Soli over the ice. I could not help thinking that these soft, city dogs had never seen a bear before, or else they would have tucked their tails between their legs, turned and fled instead of running blindly into the wind.

   My dogs needed no encouragement to follow Soli's. Wind and ice pelted my face as Kuri and Neva and the others lunged against their harnesses. In no time at all we were whipping across the snow almost as fast as an ice schooner. I gripped the sled rails and dug my boots into the snow. This slowed us a little. In vain I whistled to the dogs. We probably would have run on top of Soli's sled if Leilani hadn't let loose a high, pitiful yelp. Soli's other dogs cried out in panic as the snowbridge over a crevasse crumbled. Leilani and Zorro - and Finnegan, Huchu, Samsa and Pakko along with Soli and his sled - plunged over the rim downward, one after another, pulling each other like connected stones, disappearing into a crack in the ice of the sea. My lead dog, Kuri, saw this happening, and he pulled up short before he too went over. He crouched belly low to the snow, barking as he sniffed the open air of the crevasse.