David Zindell - Neverness

‘We’re all happy,’ Lionel said as he bowed, slightly. Then he snapped his head suddenly, flinging his blond hair from his eyes. ‘And I suppose we’re fascinated with these words of your goddess. The secret of life written in the oldest DNA of man – what do you suppose She meant by that? What, after all, is the oldest DNA?’

Even as the akashics dragged my grimy, bearded, emaciated body off to their chamber to de-program me, I had a sudden notion of what this oldest DNA might be. Like a seed it germinated inside me; the notion quickly sprouted into an idea, and the idea began growing into the wildest of plans. Had Soli been there I might have blurted out my wild plan just to see the frown on his cold face. But he was off trying to penetrate the warped, star-blown spaces of the Vild, and he probably thought I was long dead, if he thought about me at all.

I was not dead, though, I was far from dead. I was wonderfully, joyfully alive. Despite the manifold’s ravaging my poor body, despite the separation from my ship and the return to downtime, I was full of confidence and success, as cocky as a man can be. I felt invincible, as if I were floating on a cool wind. The cetics call this feeling the testosterone high, because when a man is successful in his endeavours, his body floods with this potent hormone. They warn against the effects of testosterone. Testosterone makes men too aggressive, they say, and aggressive men grasp for success and generate ever more testosterone the more successful they become. It is a nasty cycle. They say testosterone can poison a man’s brain and colour his judgements. I believe this is true. I should have paid more attention to the cetics and their teachings. If I hadn’t been so full of myself, if I hadn’t been so swollen with tight veins and racing blood and hubris, I probably would have immediately dismissed my wild plan to discover the oldest DNA of the human race. As it was, I could hardly wait to win Bardo and the rest of the Order over to my plan, to bathe myself in ever more and greater glory.

During the next few days I had little time to think about my plan because the akashics and other professionals kept me busy. Nikolos the Elder, the Lord Akashic, examined in detail my every memory from the moment I had left Neverness. He copied the results in his computers. There were mechanics who questioned me about the black bodies and other phenomena I had encountered within the Entity. They were properly impressed – astounded is a more accurate word – when they learned that She had the power to change the shape of the manifold as She pleased. A few of the older mechanics did not believe my story, not even when the cetics and akashics agreed that my memories were not illusory but the result of events that really happened. The mechanics, of course, had known for ages that any model of reality must include consciousness as a fundamental waveform. But Marta Rutherford and Minima Jons, among others, refused to believe the Entity could create and uncreate an infinite tree at will. They fell into a vicious argument with Kolenya Mor and a couple of other eschatologists who seemed more interested that people lived within the Entity than they were in the esoterics of physics. The furore and petty antagonisms that my discoveries provoked among the professionals amused me. I was pleased that the programmers, neologicians, historians, even the holists, would have much to talk about for a long time to come.

I was curious when the master horologe, with the aid of a furtive-looking young programmer, read the memory of the ship-computer and opened the sealed ship’s clock. Although there is a prohibition against immediately telling a returning pilot how much inner time has elapsed, it is almost always ignored. I learned that I had aged, intime, five years and forty-three days. (And eight hours, ten minutes, thirty-two seconds.) ‘What day is it?’ I asked. And the horologe told me that it was the twenty-eighth day of midwinter spring in the year of 2930. On Neverness, little more than half a year had passed. I was five years older, then, while Katharine had only aged a tenth as much. Crueltime, I thought, you can’t conquer crueltime. I hoped the differential ticking of Katharine’s and my internal clocks would not be as cruel to us as it had been to Justine and Soli.

Later that day – it was the day after my return – I was summoned to the Timekeeper’s Tower. The Timekeeper, who seemed not to have aged at all, bade me sit in the ornate chair near the glass windows. He paced about the bright room, digging his red slippers into the white fur of his rugs, all the while looking me over as I listened to the ticking of his clocks. ‘You’re so thin,’ he said. ‘My horologes tell me there was much slowtime, too damn much slowtime. How many times have I warned you against the slowtime?’

‘There were many bad moments,’ I said. ‘I had to think like light, as you say. If I hadn’t used slowtime, I’d be dead.’

‘The accelerations have wasted your body.’

‘I’ll spend the rest of the season skating, then. And eating. My body will recover.’

‘I’m thinking of your mind, not your body,’ he said. He made a fist and massaged the knuckles. ‘So, your mind, your brain, is five years older.’

‘Cells can always be made young again,’ I said.

‘You think so?’

I did not want to argue the effects of the manifold’s time distortions with him so I fidgeted in my hard chair and said, ‘Well, it’s good to be home.’

He rubbed his wrinkled neck and said, ‘I’m proud of you, Mallory. You’re famous now, eh? Your career is made. There’s talk of making you a master pilot, did you know that?’

In truth, my fellow pilots such as Bardo and the Sonderval had talked of little else since my return. Even Lionel, who had once despised my impulsive bragging, confided to me that my elevation to the College of Masters was almost certain.

‘A great discovery,’ the Timekeeper said. He ran his fingers back through his thick white hair. ‘I’m very pleased.’

In truth, I did not think he was pleased at all. Oh, perhaps he was pleased to see me again, to rumple my hair as he had when I was a boy, but I did not think he was at all pleased with my sudden fame and popularity. He was a jealous man, a man who would suffer no challenge to his preeminence among the women and men of our Order.

‘Without your book of poems,’ I said, ‘I would be worse than dead.’ I told him, then, everything that had happened to me on my journey. He did not seem at all impressed with the powers of the Entity.

‘So, the poems. You learned them well?’

‘Yes, Timekeeper.’

‘Ahhh.’ He smiled, resting his scarred hand on my shoulder. His face was fierce, hard to read. He seemed at once kindly and aggrieved, as if he could not decide whether giving me the book of poems had been the right thing to do.

He stood above me and I looked at my reflection in his black eyes. I asked the question burning in my mind. ‘How could you know the Entity would ask me to recite the poems? And the poems She asked – two of them were poems you had recited to me!’

He grimaced and said, ‘So, I couldn’t know. I guessed.’

‘But you must have known the Entity plays riddle games with ancient poetry. How could you possibly know that?’

He squeezed my shoulder hard; his fingers were like clutching, wooden roots. ‘Don’t question me, damn you! Have you forgotten your manners?’

‘I’m not the only one who has questions. The akashics and others, everyone will wonder how you knew.’

‘Let them wonder.’

Once, when I was twelve years old, the Timekeeper had taught me that secret knowledge is power. He was a man who kept secrets. During the hours of our talk, he secretively moved about the room giving me no opportunity to ask him questions about his past or anything else. He ordered coffee and drank it standing as he shifted from foot to foot. Frequently, he would pace to the window and stare out at the buildings of the Academy, all the while shaking his head and clenching his jaws. Perhaps he longed to confide his secrets with me (or with anybody) – I do not know. He looked like a strong, vital animal confined within a trap. Indeed, there were some who said that he never left his Tower because he feared the world of rocketing sleds and fast ice and murderous men. But I did not believe this. I had heard other gossip: a drunken horologe who claimed the Timekeeper kept a double to attend to the affairs of the Order while he took to the streets at night, hunting like a lone wolf down the glissades for anyone so foolish as to plot against him. It was even rumoured that he left the City for long periods of time; some said he kept his own lightship hidden within the Caverns. Had he duplicated my discoveries a lifetime ago and kept the secrets to himself? I thought it was possible. He was a fearless man too full of life not to have needed fresh wind against his face, the glittering crystals of the number storm, the cold, stark beauty of the stars at midnight. He, a lover of life, had once told me that the moments of a man’s life were too precious to waste sleeping. Thus he practised his discipline of sleeplessness, and he paced as his muscles knotted and relaxed, knotted and relaxed; he paced during the bright hours of the day, and he paced all the long night driven by adrenalin and caffeinated blood and by his need to see and hear and be.