David Zindell - Neverness

At twilight of the evening before our convocation, my fat, lazy friend Bardo and I devised a plan whereby we – I – could confront the Lord Pilot before the next day’s long, boring ceremony. It was the ninety-fourth of false winter. Outside our dormitory rooms, a soft snow had recently fallen, dusting the commons of the pilot’s college with a veil of cold white powder. Through our frosted windows, I saw the towers of Resa and the other colleges gleaming in the light of the setting sun.

‘Why do you always do what you’re not supposed to do?’ Bardo asked me as he stared mournfully at me with his large brown eyes. I had often thought that the whole of his complicated character and cunning intelligence was concentrated in his great, bulging forehead and in his deep-set, beautiful eyes. Apart from his eyes, though, he was an ugly man. He had a coarse black beard and bulbous red nose. His gaudy silk robe spilled over his mountainous chest, belly and legs, onto the seat of the immense, padded chair on which he sat, next to the window. On each of his ten fat fingers he sported a differently coloured jewelled ring. He had been born a prince on Summerworld; the rings and the chair were articles of great value he had imported from his family’s estate, reminders of the riches and glory that could have been his had he not renounced (or tried to renounce) worldly pleasures for the beauty and terror of the manifold. As he twined his long moustache between his thumb and forefinger, his rings clicked together. ‘Why do you want what you can’t have?’ he asked me. ‘By God, where’s your sense?’

‘I want to meet my uncle, what’s wrong with that?’ I said as I pulled on my black racing kamelaika.

‘Why must you answer a question with a question?’

‘And why shouldn’t I answer a question with a question?’

He sighed and rolled his eyes. He said, ‘You’ll meet him tomorrow. Isn’t that soon enough? We’ll take our vows, and then the Lord Pilot will present us our rings – I hope. We’ll be pilots , Mallory, and then we can do as we damn please. Tonight we should smoke toalache or find a couple of beautiful whores – a couple apiece, I mean – and spend the night swiving them until our blood’s dry.’

Bardo, in his own way, was wilder and more disobedient than I. What we should have been doing the night before taking our vows was to be practising zazen, hallning and fugue, some of the mental disciplines needed to enter – and survive – the manifold.

‘Last seventyday,’ I said, ‘my mother invited Soli and Justine to dinner. He didn’t have the decency to answer the invitation. I don’t think he wants to meet me.’

‘And you think to repay his rudeness with greater rudeness? If he wants to waste away drinking with his friends, well, everyone knows how Lord Soli likes to drink, and why. Leave him alone, Little Fellow.’

I reached for my skates and pushed my feet into them. They were cold and stiff from lying beneath the draughty window too long. ‘Are you coming with me?’ I said.

‘Am I coming with you? Am I coming with you? What a question!’

He belched and patted his rumbling belly as he looked out the window. I thought I saw confusion and indecision rippling in his dark, liquid eyes.

‘If Bardo doesn’t come with you, you’ll go alone, don’t tell me you won’t, goddammit!’ Like many of the princely caste on Summerworld, he had the pretentious habit of occasionally speaking of himself by his own name. ‘And what then? Bardo will be to blame if anything happens to you.’

I tightened the laces of my skates. I said, ‘I want to make friends with my uncle, if I can, and I want to see what he looks like.’

‘Who cares what he looks like?’

‘I do. You know I do.’

‘You can’t be his son, I’ve told you that a hundred times. You were born four years after he left Neverness.’

It was said that I looked enough like the Lord Pilot to be mistaken for his brother – or son. All my life I had endured the slander. My mother, so the gossips prattled, had long ago fallen in love with the great Soli. When he had spurned her in favour of my Aunt Justine – this is the lie they tell – she had searched the back streets of the Farsider’s Quarter for a man, any man, who looked enough like him to father her son. To father me. Mallory the Bastard – so the novices at Borja had whispered behind my back, and some of them, the bolder few, to my face. At least they had until the Timekeeper taught me the ancient arts of wrestling and boxing.

‘So what if you do look like him? You’re his nephew.’

‘His nephew by marriage.’

I did not want to look like the famous, arrogant Lord Pilot. I hated that the signature of his chromosomes was seemingly written upon my own. Bad enough to be his nephew. My great fear, as Bardo knew, was that Soli had returned in secret to Neverness and had used my mother for his own selfish purposes or … I did not like to think of other possibilities.

‘Aren’t you curious?’ I asked. ‘The Lord Pilot returns from the longest journey in the three thousand years of our Order, and you aren’t even curious to know what he’s discovered?’

‘No, I’m not afflicted with curiosity, thank God.’

‘It’s said that the Timekeeper will call the quest at the convocation. Don’t you even want to know?’

‘ If there’s a quest,’ he said, ‘we’ll probably all die.’

‘Journeymen die,’ I said.

Journeymen Die – it was a saying we had, a warning cut into the marble archway above the entrance to Resa that is meant to terrorize young journeymen into leaving the Order before the manifold claimed them; it is a saying that is true.

‘“To die among the stars,”’ I quoted the Tycho, ‘“is the most glorious death.”’

‘Nonsense!’ Bardo shouted as he slapped the arm of the chair. He belched and said, ‘Twelve years I’ve known you, and you’re still talking nonsense.’

‘You can’t live forever,’ I said.

‘I can damn try.’

‘It would be hell,’ I said. ‘Day after day, thinking the same thoughts, the same dull stars. The same faces of friends doing and talking about the same things, the relentless apathy, trapped within our same brains, this negative eternity of our confused and painful lives.’

He shook his head back and forth so violently that drops of sweat flew off his forehead. ‘A different woman each night,’ he countered. ‘Or three very different women each night. A boy or an alien courtesan if things got too boring. Thirty thousand planets of the Civilized Worlds, and I’ve seen only fifty of them. Ah, I’ve heard the talk of our Lord Pilot and his quest. For the secret of life! Do you want to know the secret of life? Bardo will tell you the secret of life: it’s not the amount of time we have, despite what I’ve just said. No, it’s not quantity and it’s not even quality. It’s variety.’

As I usually did, I had let him blather, and he had blathered his way into a trap.

‘The variety of the bars in the Farsider’s Quarter,’ I said, ‘is nearly infinite. Are you coming with me?’

‘Damn you, Mallory! Of course I am!’

I put on my racing gloves and clipped in the blades of my skates. I walked towards the heavy mahogany door of our room. The long racing blades left dents in the alien-woven Fravashi carpet. Bardo bellowed as he stood up and followed behind me, smoothing out the dents with the balls of his black-slippered feet. ‘You’ve no respect for art,’ he said as he put on his skates. He fastened his black shagshay fur cape around his neck with a gold chain and opened the door. ‘Barbarian!’ he said, and we skated out onto the street.

We sped between Resa’s Morning Towers tucked low and tight with our arms swinging and our skates clacking mechanically against the smooth red ice. The cold wind against my face felt good. In no time at all we shot past the granite and basalt towers of the high professionals’ college, Upplysa, and passed through the marble pillars of the west gate of the Academy, and there she was.