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Neverness
David Zindell
An epic masterwork of science fiction, Neverness is a stand-alone novel from one of the most important talents in the genre.
The universe of Neverness is intriguingly complex and filled with extraordinary beings. There are the Alaloi, whose genes have ‘backmutated’ so that they look like Neanderthals… the Order of Pilots, which reworks the laws of time and physics to slingshot its members through dense regions of ‘thickspace’… the Solid State Entity, a nebula-sized brain made up of moon-sized biocomputers…
Against this backdrop stands Mallory Ringer, the headstrong novitiate of the Order of Pilots, who, against all odds, navigates a maze of interspatial passageways to penetrate the Solid State Entity. There he makes a stunning discovery. A discovery that could unlock the secret of immortality hidden among the Alaloi.
DAVID ZINDELL
Neverness
Copyright (#ulink_9e5f25c1-efe2-54da-8acb-df275b261c72)
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events of localities is entirely coincidental.
HarperVoyager
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)
First published in Great Britain by Grafton 1988
Copyright © David Zindell 1988
David Zindell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library
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HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780007305179
Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2016 ISBN: 9780007397952
Version: 2016-09-01
Praise (#ulink_b3dec800-aedf-53a7-9437-5aa7ac2e783d)
Neverness is Zindell’s highly acclaimed first novel. A reviewer in the New Scientist wrote of it in 1992: ‘David Zindell writes of interstellar mathematics in poetic prose that is a joy to read’.
His second novel, The Broken God, Book One of A Requiem for Homo Sapiens, is a sequel to Neverness. It has been hailed as Dune for the 1990s and was equally well-received: ‘SF as it ought to be: challenging, imaginative, thought-provoking and well-written. Zindell has placed himself at the forefront of literary SF’.
Times Literary Supplement
The Wild, Book Two of A Requiem for Homo Sapiens was also published to great acclaim: ‘A disturbing vision of the impending collapse of a transgalactic society … the ideas are hard SF with philosophical undertones, and the story is compelling’.
New Scientist
Zindell has completed A Requiem for Homo Sapiens with War in Heaven, available now, in hardback. He lives in Boulder, Colorado.
Dedication (#ulink_b8624031-4466-5c2c-98fb-5c4610ddfe65)
For Melody
Contents
Cover (#u3ea30a08-e35a-529f-b522-89d3fe8732ee)
Title Page (#u370be4be-8d67-560d-a96a-b96be5aa0054)
Copyright (#ulink_91e1fcdf-14c2-506c-b266-cd1bbb79ad44)
Praise (#u2ab04f5f-aedd-597a-872b-58b2a25d3a64)
Dedication (#ulink_e949b1b1-d386-5bd8-8ac5-bd596234983f)
1 Journeymen Die (#ulink_2121ba3a-fd38-5cea-a12c-099294b2576c)
2 A Pilot’s Vows (#ulink_d1c6ce94-d10c-52f9-8863-e995581c0298)
3 The Timekeeper’s Tower (#ulink_080d0219-7122-5307-95e4-8991bc016618)
4 The Number Storm (#ulink_dc10b5b5-0000-5cb0-9158-c5ede1ec893c)
5 The Solid State Entity (#ulink_8b0c7a6e-4982-5d29-9910-da797054a870)
6 The Image of Man (#ulink_e795634a-85c3-59df-83c1-e29e6e7dec3d)
7 Rainer’s Sculpture (#ulink_ca68dac7-0574-5e47-9942-e46a385c6aa7)
8 Kweitkel (#litres_trial_promo)
9 Yuri the Wise (#litres_trial_promo)
10 The Aklia (#litres_trial_promo)
11 The Old Man of the Cave (#litres_trial_promo)
12 The Little Death (#litres_trial_promo)
13 Hunger (#litres_trial_promo)
14 The Radio (#litres_trial_promo)
15 The Eyes of a Scryer (#litres_trial_promo)
16 The Death of a Pilot (#litres_trial_promo)
17 Agathange (#litres_trial_promo)
18 The Tycho’s Conjecture (#litres_trial_promo)
19 The Parable of the Mad King (#litres_trial_promo)
20 The Rings of Qallar (#litres_trial_promo)
21 The Eyes of a Child (#litres_trial_promo)
22 The Hanuman-Ordando Paradox (#litres_trial_promo)
23 Plutonium Spring (#litres_trial_promo)
24 Deus ex Machina (#litres_trial_promo)
25 The Great Ocean of Truth (#litres_trial_promo)
26 Kalinda of the Flowers (#litres_trial_promo)
27 Kelkemesh (#litres_trial_promo)
28 Ananke (#litres_trial_promo)
29 The Secret of Life (#litres_trial_promo)
30 Neverness (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
1 (#ulink_90356429-853d-5ffa-b266-0958fb2505ef)
Journeymen Die (#ulink_90356429-853d-5ffa-b266-0958fb2505ef)
On Old Earth the ancients often wondered at the origin of life, and they created many myths to explain the mystery of mysteries. There was Mumu the mother goddess who swallowed a great snake which multiplied inside of her and whose nine billion children ate their way through her belly into the light of day and so became the animals of the land and the fishes of the sea. There was a father god, Yahweh, who created Earth and the heavens in six days and who called forth the birds and the beasts on days five and six. There was a fertility goddess and a goddess of chance named Random Mutation. And so on. And so on. The truth is, life throughout the galaxy was everywhere seeded by a race known as the Ieldra. Of course the origin of the Ieldra is unknown and perhaps unknowable; the ultimate mystery remains.
from A Requiem for Homo Sapiens by Horthy Hosthoh, Timekeeper and Lord Horologe of the Order of Mystic Mathematicians and Other Seekers of the Ineffable Flame
There is infinite hope, but not for Man.
Franz Kafka, Holocaust Century Fabulist
Long before we knew that the price of the wisdom and immortality we sought would be almost beyond our means to pay, when man – what was left of man – was still like a child playing with pebbles and shells by the seashore, in the time of the quest for the mystery known as the Elder Eddas, I heard the call of the stars and prepared to leave the city of my birth and death.
I call her Neverness. The founders of our Order, so the Timekeeper once told me, having discovered a neighbourhood of space where the pathways through the manifold twist and loop together like a hard knot of string, decided to build our city on a nearby planet named Icefall. Because such knots of space were once thought to be rare or nonexistent – the cantors now call them thickspace – our first Timekeeper declared that we could fall through the galaxy until the universe collapsed inward upon itself and never find a denser thickspace. How many billions of pathways converge around our cool yellow star no one knows. There are probably an infinite number of them. The ancient cantors, believing that their theorems proved the impossibility of an infinite thickspace, had predicted that our pilots would never find the topological nexus that they sought. So when our first Lord Pilot had fallen out of the manifold above the small, cold, mountainous island that was to shelter our beloved and doomed city, he named her Neverness, in mockery of the nay-saying academicians. Of course to this day the cantors call her the Unreal City, but few pay them much attention. I, Mallory Ringess, whose duty it is to set forth here the history of the golden age and great crisis of our Order, shall follow the tradition of the pilots who came before me. Neverness – so I knew her as a child when I entered the novitiate such a short time ago; Neverness I call her now; Neverness she will always remain.
On the fourteenth day of false winter in the year 2929 since the founding of Neverness, Leopold Soli, my uncle and Lord Pilot of our Order, returned to our city after a journey lasting twenty-five years – four years longer than I had been alive. Many pilots, my mother and Aunt Justine among them, had thought him dead, lost in the inky veils of the manifold or perhaps incinerated by the exploding stars of the Vild. But he, the famous Lord Pilot, had fooled everyone. It was the talk of the City for eighty days. As false winter hardened and the light snows deepened, I heard it everywhere whispered, in the cafes and bars of the Farsider’s Quarter as well as the towers of the Academy, that there would be a quest. A quest! For journeymen pilots such as we were then – in a few more days we would take our pilot’s vows – it was an exciting time, and more, a time of restlessness and excruciating anticipation. Within each of us stirred a dreamlike but deeply felt intimation and fear that we would be called to do impossible things, and soon. What follows, then, is a chronicle of the impossible, a story of dreams and fears and pain.
At twilight of the evening before our convocation, my fat, lazy friend Bardo and I devised a plan whereby we – I – could confront the Lord Pilot before the next day’s long, boring ceremony. It was the ninety-fourth of false winter. Outside our dormitory rooms, a soft snow had recently fallen, dusting the commons of the pilot’s college with a veil of cold white powder. Through our frosted windows, I saw the towers of Resa and the other colleges gleaming in the light of the setting sun.
‘Why do you always do what you’re not supposed to do?’ Bardo asked me as he stared mournfully at me with his large brown eyes. I had often thought that the whole of his complicated character and cunning intelligence was concentrated in his great, bulging forehead and in his deep-set, beautiful eyes. Apart from his eyes, though, he was an ugly man. He had a coarse black beard and bulbous red nose. His gaudy silk robe spilled over his mountainous chest, belly and legs, onto the seat of the immense, padded chair on which he sat, next to the window. On each of his ten fat fingers he sported a differently coloured jewelled ring. He had been born a prince on Summerworld; the rings and the chair were articles of great value he had imported from his family’s estate, reminders of the riches and glory that could have been his had he not renounced (or tried to renounce) worldly pleasures for the beauty and terror of the manifold. As he twined his long moustache between his thumb and forefinger, his rings clicked together. ‘Why do you want what you can’t have?’ he asked me. ‘By God, where’s your sense?’
‘I want to meet my uncle, what’s wrong with that?’ I said as I pulled on my black racing kamelaika.
‘Why must you answer a question with a question?’
‘And why shouldn’t I answer a question with a question?’
He sighed and rolled his eyes. He said, ‘You’ll meet him tomorrow. Isn’t that soon enough? We’ll take our vows, and then the Lord Pilot will present us our rings – I hope. We’ll be pilots, Mallory, and then we can do as we damn please. Tonight we should smoke toalache or find a couple of beautiful whores – a couple apiece, I mean – and spend the night swiving them until our blood’s dry.’
Bardo, in his own way, was wilder and more disobedient than I. What we should have been doing the night before taking our vows was to be practising zazen, hallning and fugue, some of the mental disciplines needed to enter – and survive – the manifold.
‘Last seventyday,’ I said, ‘my mother invited Soli and Justine to dinner. He didn’t have the decency to answer the invitation. I don’t think he wants to meet me.’
‘And you think to repay his rudeness with greater rudeness? If he wants to waste away drinking with his friends, well, everyone knows how Lord Soli likes to drink, and why. Leave him alone, Little Fellow.’
I reached for my skates and pushed my feet into them. They were cold and stiff from lying beneath the draughty window too long. ‘Are you coming with me?’ I said.
‘Am I coming with you? Am I coming with you? What a question!’
He belched and patted his rumbling belly as he looked out the window. I thought I saw confusion and indecision rippling in his dark, liquid eyes.
‘If Bardo doesn’t come with you, you’ll go alone, don’t tell me you won’t, goddammit!’ Like many of the princely caste on Summerworld, he had the pretentious habit of occasionally speaking of himself by his own name. ‘And what then? Bardo will be to blame if anything happens to you.’
I tightened the laces of my skates. I said, ‘I want to make friends with my uncle, if I can, and I want to see what he looks like.’
‘Who cares what he looks like?’
‘I do. You know I do.’
‘You can’t be his son, I’ve told you that a hundred times. You were born four years after he left Neverness.’
It was said that I looked enough like the Lord Pilot to be mistaken for his brother – or son. All my life I had endured the slander. My mother, so the gossips prattled, had long ago fallen in love with the great Soli. When he had spurned her in favour of my Aunt Justine – this is the lie they tell – she had searched the back streets of the Farsider’s Quarter for a man, any man, who looked enough like him to father her son. To father me. Mallory the Bastard – so the novices at Borja had whispered behind my back, and some of them, the bolder few, to my face. At least they had until the Timekeeper taught me the ancient arts of wrestling and boxing.
‘So what if you do look like him? You’re his nephew.’
‘His nephew by marriage.’
I did not want to look like the famous, arrogant Lord Pilot. I hated that the signature of his chromosomes was seemingly written upon my own. Bad enough to be his nephew. My great fear, as Bardo knew, was that Soli had returned in secret to Neverness and had used my mother for his own selfish purposes or … I did not like to think of other possibilities.
