David Zindell - Neverness

After greeting the people by radio, I made planetfall on one of the broad, western beaches of the island continent called Sendai. It was very warm so I opened the pit of my ship. The sun was a hot, red plate above me, and birds resembling snowgulls swooped and sloshed along the currents of the moist wind, which stank of seaweed and other vegetation. Everything, even the air itself, was too green.

To the naked people lining the dunes of the beach, I must have looked very alien as I stood on the packed, wet sand, sweating in my black boots and kamelaika. My beard had grown out during the long days of my journey, and my body was slightly wasted from too little exercise. When I bowed to the people, my back muscles quivered with the strain. Naturally I had asked to speak to the lord of the planet. But the people had no lord – nor masters, sensei, matriarchs, kings, protectors or anyone else to direct their day-to-day activities. They were anarchists. As I learned, they were probably the descendants of hibakusha who centuries ago had fled the oppressive hierarchies of the Japanese Worlds. However, they seemed to have only the sketchiest memories of their passage through the Entity. No one could tell me how they had once piloted their deep ships and scurfed the windows of the manifold because no one remembered. And no one cared. They had lost the noblest of arts, and most other arts as well. The planet’s few hundred thousand people were barbarians who spent their long days eating, swimming, copulating and roasting their bodies brown in the sun’s red oven. The society of Kamilusa was one of those stale utopias where robots did the work of man’s hands and made more robots to do ever more work. And worse, they had programmed their computers to direct their robots, and worse still, they had let their computers do all their thinking for them. I spent five hundred-hour days there, and not once did I find a woman or man who cared where life had come from or where it was going to. (Though many of the children possessed a natural, soon-to-be-crushed curiosity.) Remarkably, no one – except perhaps the computers – seemed to realize that Kamilusa lay within the brain of a goddess. I record the following conversation because it is representative of others that I had during those stifling, hot nights and days.

One evening, on the veranda of one of the villas built on the beach dunes, I sat in a plush chair across from an old woman named Takara. I had learned a dialect of New West Japanese just to talk to her. She was a tiny, shrivelled woman with wispy strands of hair growing in patches from her round head. Like everyone else, she was as naked as an animal. When I asked her why no one wanted to know about such wonders as the construction of my ship, she said, ‘Our computers could design a lightship, if that was our desire.’

‘But could they train pilots?’

‘Hai, I suppose.’ She took a drink of a clear blue liquid one of her domestic robots had brought her. ‘But why should we want to train pilots?’

‘To fall among the stars. There are glories that only pilots –’

‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ she interrupted. ‘One star is much like any other, isn’t it? Stars give us their warmth, isn’t that enough? And also, as you admit, your travel from star to star is too dangerous.’

‘You can’t live forever.’

‘Hai, but you can live a long time,’ she said. ‘I, myself, have lived …’ and here she spoke at one of the computers built into the sandstone veranda. It spoke back, and she said, ‘I’ve lived five hundred of your Neverness years. I’ve been a young woman, oh, perhaps …’ and she spoke to the computer again. ‘I’ve been young ten times; it’s wonderful to be young. Maybe I’ll be young ten more times. But not if I do dangerous things. Swimming is dangerous enough, and I don’t do that anymore even though the robots keep the sharks away. Hai, I could always take a cramp, you know. It’s well known how the dangers build over the years. There is a word for it, oh … what is it?’ When her computer had supplied her with the word, she said, ‘If there is a certain probability that I will die in any year, then the probability grows greater every year. It multiplies , I think. The tiniest risk becomes riskier as time goes on. In time, if there is the slightest risk of death, then death will occur. And that is why I do not leave my villa. Oh, I used to love to swim, but my fourteenth husband died when a bird dropped a conch shell on his head. Ashira – he was a beautiful man – he used to shave his head. He was bald as a rock. The bird must have thought his head was a rock. The conch shell broke his skull, and he died.’

As if she were ever wary of bizarre accidents, she looked up into the starry sky to look for birds. She pointed to the robot lasers lining the veranda’s high walls, aimed at the dark sky, and she said, ‘But I’m not afraid of birds any longer.’

What she had said was of course true. Life is dangerous. Because of the laws of antichance, pilots – and everyone else in our Order – almost never lived as long as Soli had. Which explains why the younger pilots called him ‘Soli The Lucky.’

‘It’s a dangerous universe,’ I said. ‘And mysterious, but there are beauties – you admit you’re a student of beauty.’

‘What do you mean by beauty ?’ she wanted to know as she placed her hand between her breasts, which were brown and withered as old leather bags. She sniffed the air in my direction and wrinkled her tiny nose. Plainly, she did not like the woolly smell of my sweat-stained kamelaika. It was annoying that she looked at me as if I were the barbarian, not she.

I pointed to the moon shining above us. I told her that the moon was really a huge bio-computer, the brain and substance of a goddess. ‘It shines like silver, and that’s beautiful,’ I said. ‘But it shares its shining intelligence with a million other moons, and just to imagine the possibilities … that’s a different, higher kind of beauty.’

She looked at me as a logician looks at a babbling autist and said, ‘I don’t think the moon is a computer. Why should you lie to me? Computers aren’t beautiful, I don’t think.’

I said, ‘I wouldn’t lie to you.’

‘And what do you mean by goddess ?’

When I had explained to her about higher intelligences and the classifications of the eschatologists, she laughed at me and said, ‘Oh, there’s God , I suppose. Or there used to be – I can’t remember anymore. But to think the moon thinks , well, that is insane!’

Suddenly she glared at me with her old, old eyes and shook like a tent in the wind. It must have occurred to her that if I were insane, I might do something risky and was therefore a threat to her longevity. When she looked at me again, I noticed that the robots were pointing their lasers at me. She spoke to her computer and said, ‘The moon is made of … of elements : carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen.’

‘The elements of protein,’ I said. ‘The neurologics of computers are often made of protein.’

‘Oh, who cares what things are made of? What matters is peace and harmony. And you are dangerous to our harmony, I think.’

‘I’ll leave, if that’s what you want.’

In truth, I couldn’t wait to leave that hot, stifling planet.

‘Hai, you must leave. The longer you stay, the more dangerous you become. Please, tomorrow will you leave? And please, do not talk to the children anymore. They would be frightened if they thought the moon was alive.’

I abandoned the people to their pleasures and their decadent harmonies. In the middle of the long night, I rocketed away and fell again into the manifold. Again I fenestered inward towards the centre of the Entity’s brain. I was more determined than ever to seek the nexus of her intelligence, if indeed such a nexus existed. The further I fell, the more moon-brains I discovered. Near one hot, blue giant star, there must have been ten thousand moons clumped together like the cells of an embryo. I had an intense feeling that I was witnessing something I was not meant to see, as if I had caught my mother naked in her morning bath. Were the moons somehow reproducing themselves, I wondered? I could not tell. I could not see into the centre of the clump because the space there was as black as a black hole. Even though I knew it would be chancy to fall any further, I was afire with the possibilities of new, godly life, so I made a point-to-point mapping into the centre of the gathered moons.