David Zindell - Neverness

I found it irritating that Soli could not simply say, ‘ I’ll tell you what happened to me.’ Like most others from that too-mystical planet, Simoom, he usually observed their taboo against using the pronoun ‘I’.

‘Tell us,’ Bardo said.

‘Tell us,’ I said, and I listened with that strange mixture of worship and dread that journeymen feel towards old pilots.

‘It happened like this,’ Soli said. ‘A long time had passed since my leaving Neverness. We were deep in dreamtime and fenestering inwards towards the core. The stars were dense. They shined like the lights of the Farsider’s Quarter at night, yes, a great burning fan of stars disappearing into the blackness at the fan’s pivot point, at the singularity. There was the white light of dreamtime – you young pilots think instantaneity and stopping time are all there is to dreamtime, and you have much to learn – there was a sudden clarity, and voices. My ship told me it was receiving a signal, intercepting one of a billion or so laser beams streaming out of the singularity.’

He suddenly slammed his empty tumbler on the bar and his voice rose an octave. ‘Yes, that’s what was said! From the singularity! It’s impossible, but true. A billion lines of infrared light escaping the black maw of gravity.’ To the novice he said, ‘Pour some skotch in here, please.’

‘And then?’

‘The voices, the ship-computer receiving half a trillion bits per second and translating the information in the laser beams into voices. They, the voices, claimed to be – let’s call them the Ieldra. Are you familiar with that term?’

‘No, Lord Pilot.’

‘It’s what the eschatologists have named the aliens who seeded the galaxy with their DNA.’

‘The mythical race.’

‘The hitherto mythical race,’ he said. ‘They have – and many refuse to believe this – they’ve projected their collective selfness, their consciousnesses, into the singularity.’

‘Into the black hole?’ Bardo asked as he pulled at his moustache.

I looked at Soli carefully, to see if he was having a joke with us. I did not believe him. I looked down at his tense hands and saw that he was carelessly ungloved. Plainly, he was an arrogant man who had little fear of contagion or that his enemies might make use of his plasm. His knuckles were white around the curve of his refilled tumbler. The black diamond of his pilot’s ring cut into the skin of his little finger. He said, ‘The message. The white light of dreamtime hardened and crystallized. There was a stillness and a clarity, and then the message. “There is hope for Man,” they said. “Remember, the secret of Man’s immortality lies in your past and in your future” – that’s what they said. We must search for this mystery. If we search, we’ll discover the secret of life and save ourselves. So the Ieldra told me.’

I think he must have known we did not believe him. I nodded my head stupidly while Bardo stared at the bar as if the knots and whorls of the rosewood were of great interest to him. He dipped his finger into the foam of his beer, brought it to his lips, and made a rude sucking sound.

‘Young fools,’ Soli said. And then he told us of the prediction. The Ieldra, he said, understanding the cynicism and doubtfulness of human nature, had provided a surety that their communication would be well received, a prediction as to part of the sequence of supernovae in the Vild.

‘How can they possibly know what will occur according to chance?’ I asked.

‘ Do the Vild stars explode at random?’ Lionel broke in.

‘Ah, of course they do,’ Bardo said.

In truth, no one knew very much about the Vild. Was the Vild a discrete, continuous region of the galaxy expanding outwards spherically in all directions? Or was it a composite of many such regions, random pockets of hellfire burning and joining, connecting in ways our astronomers had not determined? No one knew. And no one knew how long it would be before Icefall’s little star exploded, along with all the others, putting an end to such eschatological speculations.

‘How do we know what we know?’ Soli asked, and he took a sip of skotch. ‘How is it known the memory in my brain is real, that there was no hallucination, as some fools have suggested? Yes, you doubt my story, and there’s nothing to prove to you, even if you are Justine’s nephew, but this is what the Lord Akashic told me: He said that the auditory record was clear. There was a direct downloading from the ship-computer to my auditory nerve. Perhaps you think my ship was hallucinating?’

‘No, Lord Pilot.’ I began to believe him. I knew well the power and skills of the akashics. A short half-year ago, on a bitterly cold day in deep winter, having completed my first journey alone into the manifold, I had gone before the akashics. I remembered sitting in the Lord Akashic’s darkened chamber as the heaume of the deprogramming computer descended over my head, sitting and sweating and waiting for my memories and mappings of the manifold to be proved true. Though there had been no cause for fear, I had been afraid. (Long ago, in the time of the Tycho, there had been reason to be afraid. The clumsy ancient heaumes, so I understand, extruded protein filaments through one’s scalp and skull into the brain. Barbaric. The modern heaume – this is what the akashics claim – models the interconnections of the neurons’ synapses holographically, thereby ‘reading’ the memory and identity functions of the brain. It is supposed to be quite safe.)

Bardo, as was his habit when he was nervous or afraid, farted loudly, and he asked, ‘Then you think there will be a quest for this … this, uh, secret of the Ieldra, Lord Pilot?’

‘The eschatologists have named the secret the “Elder Eddas,”’ Soli said as he backed away from him. ‘And yes, there will be a quest. Tomorrow, at your convocation, the Timekeeper will issue his summons and call the quest.’

I believed him. The Lord Pilot, my uncle, said there would be a quest, and I suddenly felt my heart beating up through my throat as if it were fate’s fist knocking at the doorway to my soul. Wild plans and dreams came half-formed into my mind. I said quickly, ‘If we could prove the Continuum Hypothesis, the quest would be full of glory, and we’d find your Elder Eddas.’

‘Don’t call them my Elder Eddas,’ he said.

I should admit that I did not understand the Lord Pilot. One moment he proclaimed that there were things man was not meant to know, and the next moment he seemed proud and eager to go off seeking the greatest of secrets. And yet a moment later, he was bitter and appeared resentful of his own discovery. In truth, he was a complicated man, the second most complicated man I have ever known.

‘What Mallory meant,’ Bardo said, ‘was that he admires – as we all do – the work you’ve done on the Great Theorem.’

That was not at all what I had meant.

Soli looked at me fiercely and said, ‘Yes, the dream of proving the Continuum Hypothesis.’

The Continuum Hypothesis (or, colloquially, the Great Theorem): an unproved result of Lavi’s Fixed-Point Theorem stating that between any pair of discrete Lavi sets of point-sources, there exists a one-to-one mapping. More simply, that it is possible to map from any star to any other in a single fall. It is the greatest problem of the manifold, of our Order. Long ago, when Soli had been a pilot not much older than I, he had nearly proved the Hypothesis. But he had become distracted by an argument with Justine and had forgotten (so he claimed) his elegant proof of the theorem. The memory of it haunted him. And so he drank his poisonous skotch whisky, to forget. (The powers of a pilot’s mind, Bardo reminds me, crescendo at an early age. It is a matter of dying brain cells, he says, and the rejuvenation we pilots undergo is imperfect in this respect. We grow slowly stupider as we age, and so why not drink skotch, or smoke toalache and lie with whores?)