David Zindell - Neverness

She shimmers, my city, she shimmers. She is said to be the most beautiful of all the cities of the Civilized Worlds, more beautiful even than Parpallaix or the cathedral cities of Vesper. To the west, pushing into the green sea like a huge, jewel-studded sleeve of city, the fragile obsidian cloisters and hospices of the Farsider’s Quarter gleamed like black glass mirrors. Straight ahead as we skated, I saw the frothy churn of the Sound and the whitecaps of breakers crashing against the cliffs of North Beach, and above the entire city, veined with purple and glazed with snow and ice, Waaskel and Attakel rose up like vast pyramids against the sky. Beneath the half-ring of extinct volcanoes (Urkel, I should mention, is the southernmost peak, and though less magnificent than the others, it has a conical symmetry that some find pleasing) the towers and spires of the Academy scattered the dazzling false winter light so that the whole of the Old City sparkled. The streets, as everyone knows, are coloured ice. Throughout the city, the white shimmer is broken by strands of orange and green and blue. ‘Strange are the streets of the City of Pain,’ the Timekeeper is fond of quoting, but though indeed colourful and strange, they are colourful and strange to a purpose. The streets – the glissades and slidderies – have no names. Thus it has been since our first Timekeeper announced that young novices could prepare their brains for the pathways of the manifold by memorizing the pathways of our city. Since he understood that our city would grow and change, he devised a plan whereby returning pilots who had been away too long might still be able to negotiate the ice and not lose their way. The plan is supposed to be simple. There are two main streets: the Run, coloured blue, which twists from West Beach across the long sleeve of the peninsula where it meets the foothills of Attakel and Urkel, and the Way, which is laid straight from the Hollow Fields to the Sound. Any orange sliddery intersects – eventually – the Way. Any green glissade intersects the Run. The glidderies, coloured purple, join with glissades, and the red lesser glidderies give out onto the slidderies. I should not confuse matters by mentioning that there are two yellow streets running through the Pilot’s Quarter, but there are. No one knows how they came to be there. A joke, no doubt, on our first Timekeeper.

We turned onto the Way at an orange and white chequered intersection about a mile west of the Academy. The street was crowded with harijan and wormrunners and other farsiders. We passed and bowed to the eschatologists, cetics, akashics, horologes, the professionals and academicians of our Order. (We did not come across any other pilots. Although we pilots – some will deny this – are the very soul of our Order, we are outnumbered by the scryers, holists, historians, remembrancers and ecologists, by the programmers, neologicians and cantors. Our Order is divided into one hundred and eighteen disciplines; there are too many disciplines, more disciplines, it seems, every year.) There was excitement in the air, as well as the alien scent of a couple of Friends of Man, who had their trunks lifted as they talked to each other, spraying out their foul speech molecules. Next to us skated an expensively dressed Alaloi – or rather a man whose flesh had been sculpted into the thick, powerful, hairy body of an Alaloi. This kind of artificial return to the primitive form had been a fashion in the city for years, ever since the famous Goshevan of Summerworld had tired of his human flesh and had gone to live with the Alaloi in their caves on the islands to the west of Neverness. The false-Alaloi, who was wearing too much purple velvet and gold, pushed one of the slender, gentle harijan out of his way and shouted, ‘Watch out, stupid farsider!’ The bewildered harijan stumbled, made a sign of peace across his shiny forehead, and slunk off into the crowd like a beaten dog.

Bardo looked at me and shook his head sadly. He had always had a strange empathy for the harijan and other homeless pilgrims who come to our city seeking enlightenment. (And too often, they come seeking riches of a more mundane nature.) He smiled as he edged closer to the barbaric Alaloi. He insinuated his thick tree trunk of a leg between the purple-covered legs of the unsuspecting man. There was a ringing of steel against steel, and steel grinding against ice, and suddenly the man pitched forward to the street with a slap and a crack. Bardo shouted, ‘Excuse me!’ Then he laughed, reached back and grabbed my forearm, and pulled me through the crush of skaters who were jostling one another and vying for position in their hurry to reach their favourite cafes or kiosks for their evening meal. I looked back through the crowd, but I could not see the man whom Bardo had tripped.

‘On Summerworld,’ Bardo said to me between gasps of air, ‘we brand dung like him with red-hot steel.’

We crossed into the Farsider’s Quarter and came to the Street of the Ten Thousand Bars. I have said that the streets of Neverness have no names, but that is not entirely true. They have no official names, no names that are marked on buildings or posted on street signs. Especially in the Farsider’s Quarter, there are many nameless streets that are named according to the prevailing enterprise transpiring along its convolutions of coloured ice. Thus there is a Street of Cutters and Splicers, and a Street of Common Whores, as well as a Street of Master Courtesans. The Street of the Ten Thousand Bars is actually more of a district than a street; it is a maze of red lesser glidderies encompassing tiny bars that cater to the unique tastes of their patrons. One bar will serve only toalache while another might specialize in cilka, the pineal gland of the thallow bird which induces visions in small quantities and is lethal in larger ones. There are bars frequented only by the alien Friends of Man, and there are bars open to anyone who writes haiku (but only Simoom haiku) or plays the shakuhachi. Near the edge of the district, there is a bar where the eschatologists argue as to how long it will be before the exploding Vild destroys the last of the Civilized Worlds, and next door, a bar for the tychists who believe that absolute chance is the fundament of the universe, and that most probably some worlds will survive. I do not know if there are as many as ten thousand bars or if there are many more. Bardo often joked that if one could imagine a bar existing, it must exist. Somewhere there is a bar, he claimed, where the Fravashi analyse the anguished poetry of the Swarming Centuries and another bar where their criticisms are criticized. Somewhere – and why not? – there is a bar for those wishing to talk about what is occurring in all the other bars.

We stopped in front of the black, windowless master pilot’s bar, or, I should say, the bar for master pilots recently returned from the manifold. The sun had set, and the wind moaned as it drove flowing, ghostlike wisps of snow down the darkened gliddery. In the dim light of the street globes – when for a moment the wind suddenly pulled away the ragged, drifting snow shroud – the ice of the street was blood red.

‘This is an ugly place,’ Bardo said, his voice booming from the stone walls surrounding us. ‘I have a proposition. Since I’m in a generous mood, I’ll buy you a master courtesan for the night. You’ve never been able to afford one, have you? By God, it’s like nothing you’ve ever –’

‘No,’ I said as I shook my head.

I opened the heavy stone door, which was made of obsidian and so smooth that it felt almost greasy to the touch. For a moment, I thought the tiny room was empty. Then I saw two men standing at the dark end of the narrow bar, and I heard the shorter one say, ‘If you please, close the door, it’s cold.’