David Zindell - Neverness

I was still angry, so I angrily said, ‘I don’t want to play this riddle game.’

Katharine smiled again and said, ‘Oh, but there are two more poems.’

‘You must know which poems I’ll know and which I won’t.’

‘No,’ she said, ‘I can’t see … I don’t know.’

‘You must know,’ I repeated.

‘Can’t I choose to know what I want to know and what I don’t? I love suspense, my Mallory.’

‘It’s foreordained, isn’t it?’

‘Everything is foreordained. What has been will be.’

‘Scryer talk.’

‘I’m a scryer, you know.’

‘You’re a goddess, and you’ve already determined the outcome of this game.’

‘Nothing is determined; in the end we choose our futures.’

I made a fist and said, ‘How I hate scryer talk and your seemingly profound paradoxes!’

‘Yet you revel in your mathematical paradoxes.’

‘That’s different.’

She held her flattened hand over her luminous eyes for a long moment as if their own interior light burned her. Then she said, ‘We continue. This simple poem was written by an ancient scryer who could not have known the Vild would explode.’

Stars, I have seen them fall,

But when they drop and die …

And I replied:

No star is lost at all,

From all the star-sown sky.

‘But the stars are lost, aren’t they?’ I said. ‘The Vild grows, and no one knows why.’

‘Something,’ she said, ‘must be done to stop the Vild from exploding. How unpoetic it would be if all the stars died!’

I brushed my hair out of my eyes and asked the question occupying some of the finest minds of our Order, ‘Why is the Vild exploding?’

Katharine’s imago smiled and said, ‘If you know the lines to this next poem, you may ask me why, or ask me anything you’d like … Oh, the poem! It’s so pretty!’ She clapped her hands together like a little girl delighted to give her friend a birthday gift. And words I knew well filled the air:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,

I was free! The Solid State Entity, through the lips of a simple hologram, had spoken the first two lines of my favourite poem, and I was free. I had only to repeat the next line, and I would be free to ask Her how a pilot could escape from an infinite tree. (I never doubted She would keep Her promise to answer my questions; why this is so I cannot say.) I laughed as beads of sweat formed up on my forehead. I recited:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

‘It is important,’ I said, ‘to rhyme “symmetry” with “eye.”’ I laughed because I was as happy as I had ever been before. (It is strange how release from the immediate threat of death can produce such euphoria. I have this advice to offer our Order’s old, jaded academicians so bored with their daily routines: Place your lives at risk for a single night, and every moment of the next day will vibrate with the sweet music of life.)

Katharine’s imago was watching me. There was something infinitely appealing about her, something almost impossible to describe. I thought that this Katharine was at peace with herself and her universe in a way that the real Katharine could never be.

And then she closed her eyes and said, ‘No, that is wrong. I gave you the lines to the poem’s last stanza, not the first.’

It is possible that my heart stopped beating for a few moments. In a panic, I said, ‘But the first stanza is identical to the last.’

‘No, it is not. The first three lines of either stanza are identical. The fourth lines differ by a single word.’

‘In that case, then,’ I asked, ‘how was I to know which stanza you were reciting? Since, if the first three lines are identical, so are the first two?’

‘This is not the Test of Knowledge,’ she said. ‘It is the Test of Caprice, as I have said. However, it is my caprice,’ and here she smiled, ‘that you be given another chance.’ And, as her eyes radiated from burning cobalt to bright indigo, she repeated:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,

I was lost. I clearly – very clearly, as clearly as if I did possess the memory of pictures – I remembered every letter and word of this strange poem. I had recited correctly; the first and last stanza were identical. And I heard again:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye …

‘What is the last line, Mallory? The one the poet wrote, not the one printed in your book.’

I wondered if the ancient academicians, in their transcribing the poem from book to book (or from book to computer), had made a mistake? Perhaps the mistake had occurred during the last days of the holocaust century. It seemed likely that some ancient historian, in her hurry to preserve such a treasure before the marrowdeath rotted her bones, had carelessly altered a single (though vital) word. Or perhaps the mistake had been made during the confusion of the swarming centuries; perhaps some revisionist, for whatever reason, had objected to the single word and had changed it.

However the mistake had been made, I needed desperately to discover – or remember – what the original word had been. I tried my little trick of listening for the words in my heart, but there was nothing. I applied other remembrancing techniques – all in vain. Far better that I should guess which word had been changed and pick at random a word – any word – to replace it. At least there would be a probability, a tiny probability, that I might pick the right word.

Katharine, with her eyes tightly closed, licked her lips then asked, ‘What is the last line, Mallory? Tell me now, or must I prepare a pocket of my brain in which to copy yours?’

It was the Timekeeper who saved me from the Entity’s caprice. In my frustration and despair, as I ground my teeth, I happened to think of him, perhaps to revile him for giving me a book full of mistakes. I remembered him reciting the poem. At last, I heard the words in my heart. Had the Timekeeper spoken the true poem? And if he had, how had he known the more ancient version? There was something very suspicious, even mysterious, about the Timekeeper. How had he even chanced to speak the same poem as the goddess? Had he, as a young man, journeyed into the heart of the Entity and been asked the very same poem? The poem, which had passed from his mouth like a growl, was indeed different from the poem in the book, and it differed by a single word.

I clasped my hands together, took a deep breath, and said:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

‘ Dare frame,’ I repeated. ‘That’s the altered word, isn’t it? Dare frame.’

The imago of Katharine remained silent as she opened her eyes.

‘Isn’t it?’

And then she smiled and whispered:

’Tis evening on the moorland free,

The starlit wave is still:

Home is the sailor from the sea,

The hunter from the hill.

‘Goodbye, my Mallory. Who dares frame thy fearful symmetry? Not I.’

As soon as she said this her hologram vanished from the pit of my ship, and I was alone. Oh, where, oh, where, I wondered, does the light go when the light goes out?

You are almost home, my sailor, my hunter of knowledge.

– The poem … I remembered it correctly, then?

You may ask me three questions.

I had passed Her tests and I was free. Free! – this time I was certain I was free! In my mind, one hundred questions danced, like the tease of a troupe of scantily dressed Jacarandan courtesans: Is the universe open or closed? What was the origin of the primeval singularity? Can any natural number be expressed as the sum of two prime numbers? Had my mother really tried to kill Soli? How old was the Timekeeper, really? Why was the Vild exploding? Where does the light go when … ?