David Zindell - Neverness

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 and 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-stake. 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 Pilot’s 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?’