Neverness

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– Damn you and your games!

There is no escape from an infinite tree. But are you sure the tree is not finite?

Of course I was sure! Wasn’t a pilot weaned on the Gallivare mapping theorems? Hadn’t I proved that the Lavi set could not be embedded in an invariant space? Didn’t I know an infinite tree from a finite one?

Have you examined your proof?

I had not examined my proof. I did not like to think that there could be a flaw in my proof. But neither did I want to die, so I faced my ship-computer. I entered the thoughtspace of the manifold. Instantly there was a rush of crystal ideoplasts in my mind, and I began building the symbols into a proof array. While the number storm swirled, I made a mathematical model of the manifold. The manifold opened before me. Deep in dreamtime, I reconstructed my proof. It was true, the Lavi set could not be embedded in an invariant space. Then a thought occurred to me as if from nowhere: Was the Lavi set the correct set to model the branchings of the tree? What if the tree could be modelled by a simple Lavi set? Could the simple Lavi set be embedded in an invariant space?

I was trembling with anticipation as I built up a new proof array. Yes, the simple Lavi could be embedded! I proved it could be embedded. I wiped sweat from my forehead, and I made a probability mapping. Instantly the trillions of branches of the tree narrowed to one. So, it was a finite tree after all. I was saved! I made another mapping to the point-exit near a blue giant star. I fell out into realspace, into the swarm of the ten thousand moon-brains of the Solid State Entity.

You please me, my Mallory. But we will meet again when you please me more. Until then, fall far, Pilot, and farewell.

To this day I wonder at the nature of the original tree imprisoning me. Had it really been a finite tree? Or had the Entity somehow – impossibly – changed an infinite tree into a finite one? If so, I thought, then She truly was a goddess worthy of worship. Or at least She was worthy of dread and terror. After looking out on the warm blue light of the sun, I was so full of both these emotions that I made the first of many mappings back to Neverness. Though I burned with strange feelings and unanswered questions, I had no intention of ever meeting Her again. I never again wanted to be tested or have my life depend upon chance and the whimsy of a goddess. Never again did I want to hear the godvoice violating my mind. I wanted, simply, to return home, to drink skotch with Bardo in the bars of the Farsider’s Quarter, to tell the eschatologists and Leopold Soli, and the whole city, that the secret of life was written within the oldest DNA of man.

6 (#ulink_41ed74d4-4119-5072-bc33-ba1669c561f3)

The Image of Man (#ulink_41ed74d4-4119-5072-bc33-ba1669c561f3)

For us, humanity was a distant goal toward which all men were moving, whose image no one knew, whose laws were nowhere written down.

Emil Sinclair, Holocaust Century Eschatologist

My homecoming was as glorious as I hoped it would be, marred only by Leopold Soli’s absence from the City. He was off mapping the outer veil of the Vild, so he could not appreciate my triumph. He was not present in the Lightship Caverns with the other pilots, cetics, tinkers and horologes as I emerged from the pit of my ship. How I wish he had seen them lined up on the dark, steel walkway along the row of ships, to see their shocked faces and listen to their furious, excited whispers when I announced that I had spoken with a goddess! Would he have clapped his hands and bowed his head to me as even the most sceptical and jaded of the master pilots did? Would he have honoured me with a handshake, as did Stephen Caraghar and Tomoth and his other friends?

It was too bad he wasn’t there when Bardo broke from the line of pilots and stomped towards me with such reckless enthusiasm that the whole walkway shook and rang like a bell. It was quite a moment. Bardo threw out his huge arms and bellowed, ‘Mallory! By God, I knew you couldn’t be killed!’ His voice filled the Caverns like an exploding bomb, and he suddenly whirled to address the pilots. ‘How many times these past days have I said it? Mallory’s the greatest pilot since Rollo Gallivare! Greater than Rollo Gallivare, by God if he isn’t!’ He looked straight at Tomoth who was watching his antics with his hideous, mechanical eyes. ‘You say he’s lost in dreamtime? I say he’s schooning, scurfing the veils of the manifold, and he’ll return when he’s damn ready. You say he’s lost in an infinite loop, snared by that bitch of a goddess called the Solid State Entity? I say he’s kleining homeward, tunnelling with elegance and fortitude, returning to his friends with a discovery that will make him a master pilot. Tell me, was I right? Master Mallory – how I like the sound of it! By God, Little Fellow, by God!’

He came over to me and gave me a hug that nearly cracked my ribs, all the while thumping my back and repeating, ‘By God, Little Fellow, by God!’

The pilots and professionals swarmed around me, shaking hands and asking me questions. Justine, dressed sleekly in woollens and a new black fur, touched my forehead and bowed. ‘Look at him!’ she said to my mother, who was weeping unashamedly. (I felt like weeping myself.) ‘If only Soli could be here!’

My mother forced her way through the swarm, and we touched each other’s forehead. She surprised me, saying, ‘I’m so tired. Of these formal politenesses.’ Then she kissed me on the lips and hugged me. ‘You’re too thin,’ she said as she dried her eyes on the back of her gloves. She arched her bushy eyebrows and wrinkled her nose, sniffing. ‘As thin as a harijan. And you stink. Come see me. When you’ve shaved and bathed and the akashics are through with you. I’m so happy.’

‘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.

I felt a rare pang of pity for him (and for myself for having to endure his petty inquisitions), and I said, ‘You look worried.’

It was the wrong thing to say. The Timekeeper hated pity, and more, he despised pitiers, especially when they pitied themselves. ‘Worry! What do you know of worry! After you’ve listened to the mechanics petition me to send an expedition into the Entity’s nebula, then you may speak to me of worry, damn you!’

‘What do you mean?’

‘So, I mean Marta Rutherford and her faction would have me mount a major expedition! She wants me to send a deepship into the Entity! As if I can afford to lose a deepship and a thousand professionals! They think that because you were lucky, they’ll be, too. And already, the eschatologists are demanding that if there is an expedition, they should lead it.’

I squeezed the arms of the chair and said, ‘I’m sorry my discovery has caused so many problems.’ I was not sorry at all, really. I was delighted that my discovery – along with Soli’s – had provoked the usually staid professionals of our Order into action.

‘Discovery?’ he growled out. ‘What discovery?’ He walked over to the window and silently shook his fist at the grey storm clouds drifting over the City from the south. He didn’t like the cold, I remembered, and he hated snow.

‘The Entity … She said the secret of life –’

‘The secret of life! You believe the lying words of that lying mainbrain? Gobbledygook! There’s no secret to be found in “man’s oldest DNA,” whatever that might be. There’s no secret, do you understand? The secret of life is life: It goes on and on, and that’s all there is.’

As if to punctuate his pessimism, just then the low, hollow bell of one of his clocks chimed, and he said, ‘It’s New Year on Urradeth. They’ll be killing all the marrowsick babies born this past year, and they’ll drink, and they’ll couple all day and all night until the wombs of all the women are full again. On and on it goes, on and on.’

I told him I thought the Entity had spoken the truth.

He laughed harshly, causing the weathered skin around his eyes to crack like sheets of broken ice. ‘Struth!’ he said bitterly, a word I took to be one of his archaisms. ‘A god’s truth, a god’s lies – what’s the difference?’

I told him I had a plan to discover man’s oldest DNA.

He laughed again; he laughed so hard his lips pulled back over his long white teeth and tears flowed from his eyes. ‘So, a plan. Even as a boy, you always had plans. Do you remember when I taught you slowtime? When I said that one must be patient and wait for the first waves of adagio to overtake the mind, you told me there had to be a way to slow time by skipping the normal sequence of attitudes. You even had a plan to enter slowtime without the aid of your ship-computer! And why? You had a problem with patience. And you still do. Can’t you wait to see if the splicers and imprimaturs – or the eschatologists, historians or cetics – can discover this oldest DNA? Isn’t it enough you’ll probably be made a master pilot?’

I rubbed the side of my nose and said, ‘If I petition you to mount a small expedition of my own, would you approve it?’

‘Petition me?’ he asked. ‘Why so formal? Why not just ask me?’

‘Because,’ I said slowly, ‘I’d have to break one of the covenants.’

‘So.’

There was a long silence during which he stood as still as an ice sculpture.

‘Well, Timekeeper?’

‘Which covenant do you want to break?’

‘The eighth covenant,’ I said.

‘So,’ he said again, staring out the window to the west. The eighth covenant was the agreement made three thousand years ago between the founders of Neverness and the primitive Alaloi who lived in their caves six hundred miles to the west of the City.

‘They’re neanderthals,’ I said. ‘Cavemen. Their culture, their bodies … so old.’

‘You’d petition me to journey to the Alaloi, to collect tissues from their living bodies?’

‘The oldest DNA of man,’ I said. ‘Isn’t it ironic that I might find it so close to home?’

When I told him the exact nature of my plan, he leaned over and gripped my wrists, resting his weight on the arms of the chair. His massive head was too close to mine; I smelled coffee and blood on his breath. He said, ‘It’s a damn dangerous plan, for you and for the Alaloi, too.’

‘Not so dangerous,’ I said too confidently. ‘I’ll take precautions. I’ll be careful.’

‘Dangerous, I say! Damn dangerous.’

‘Will you approve my petition?’ I asked.

He looked at me painfully, as if he were making the most difficult decision of his life. I did not like the look on his face.

‘Timekeeper?’

‘I’ll consider your plan,’ he said coldly. ‘I’ll inform you of my decision.’

I looked away from him and turned my head to the side. It was not like him to be so indecisive. I guessed that he agonized between breaking the covenant and fulfilling his own summons to quest; I guessed wrongly. It would be years, however, before I discovered the secret of his indecision.

He dismissed me abruptly. When I stood up, I discovered the edge of the chair had cut off my circulation; my legs were tingly and numb. As I rubbed the life back into my muscles, he stood by the window talking to himself. He seemed not to notice I was still there. ‘On and on it goes,’ he said in a low voice. ‘On and on and on.’

I left his chamber feeling as I always did: exhausted, elated and confused.

The days (and nights) that followed were the happiest of my life. I spent my mornings out on the broad glissades watching the farsiders fight the thick, midwinter snows. It was a pleasure to breathe fresh air again, to smell pine needles and baking bread and alien scents, to skate down the familiar streets of the City. There were long afternoons of coffee and conversation with my friends in the cafes lining the white ice of the Way. During the first of these afternoons, Bardo and I sat at a little table by the steamed-over window, watching the swarms of humanity pass while we traded stories of our journeys. I sipped my cinnamon coffee and asked for the news of Delora wi Towt and Quirin and Li Tosh and our other fellow pilots. Most of them, Bardo told me, were spread through the galaxy like a handful of diamonds cast into the nighttime sea. Only Li Tosh and the Sonderval and a few others had returned from their journeys.

‘Haven’t you heard?’ he asked, and he ordered a plate of cookies. ‘Li Tosh has discovered the homeworld of the Darghinni. In another age it would have been a notable discovery, a great discovery, even. Ah, but it was his bad luck to take his vows at the same time as Mallory Ringess.’ He dunked his cookie in his coffee. ‘And,’ Bardo said, ‘it was Bardo’s bad luck to take them then, too.’

‘What do you mean?’

As he munched his cookies, he told me the story of his journey: After fenestering to the edge of the Rosette Nebula, he had tried to bribe the encyclopaedists on Ksandaria to allow him into their holy sanctum. Because the secretive encyclopaedists were known to be jealous of their vast and precious pools of knowledge, and because they hated and feared the power of the Order, he had disguised himself as a prince of Summerworld, for him not a very difficult thing to do.

‘One hundred maunds of Yarkona bluestars I paid those filthy tubists to enter their sanctum,’ he said. ‘And even at that skin price – you’ll forgive me, my friend, if I admit that, despite our vow of poverty, I had hoarded a part, just a small part of my inheritance – ah, now where was I? Yes, the encyclopaedists. Even though they gouged a fortune from me, they kept me from their sanctum, thinking that an ignorant buffoon such as I would be content to fill my head from one of their lesser pools of esoterica. Well, it did take me a good twentyday before I realized the information I was swallowing was as shallow as a melt puddle, but I’m not stupid, am I? No, I’m not stupid, so I told the wily master encyclopaedist I’d hire a warrior-poet to poison him if he didn’t open the gates to the inner sanctum. He believed me, the fool, and so I dipped my brain into their forbidden pool where they keep the ancient histories and Old Earth’s oldest commentaries. And …’

Here he paused to sip his coffee and munch a few more cookies.

‘And I’m tired of telling this story because I’ve had my brains sucked dry by our akashics and librarians, but since you’re my best friend, well, you should know I found an arcanum in the forbidden pool that led right to the guts of the past, or so I thought. On Old Earth just before the Swarming, I think, there was a curious religious order called arkaeologists. They practised a bizarre ritual known as ‘The Diggings.’ Shall I tell you more? Well, the priests and priestesses of this order employed armies of slave-acolytes to painstakingly sift layers of dirt for buried fragments of clay and other relics of the past. Arkaeologists – and this was the prime datum from the forbidden pool – were, I quote: “Those followers of Henrilsheman believing in ancestor veneration. They believed that communion with the spirit world could be made by collecting objects which their ancestors had touched and in some cases, by collecting the corpses of the ancestors themselves.” Ah, would you like more coffee? No? Well, the arkaeologists, like all orders, I suppose, had been riven into many different factions and sects. One sect – I think they were called aigyptologists – followed the teachings of one Flinders Petr and the Champollion. Another sect dug up corpses preserved with bitumen. Then they pounded the corpses to a powder. This powder – would you believe it? – they consumed it as a sacrament, believing as they did that the life essence of their ancestors would strengthen their own. When generation had passed into generation, on and on, as the Timekeeper would say, well, they thought eventually man would be purified and they’d be immortal. Am I boring you? I hope not because I must tell you of this one sect whose high priests called themselves kurators. Just before the third exchange of the holocaust, the kurators, and their underlings, the daters, sorters and the lowly acolytes, they loaded a museum ship with old stones and bones and the preserved corpses of their ancestors that they called mumiyah. It was their ship – they named it the Vishnu – which landed on one of the Darghinni worlds. Of course, the kurators were too ignorant to recognize intelligent aliens when they saw them. Sad to say, they began delving into the dirt of that ancient civilization. They couldn’t have known the Darghinni have a horror of their own past – as well they should. And that, my friend, is how the first of the Man-Darghinni wars really began.’

We drank our coffee and talked about this shameful, unique war – the only war there had ever been between mankind and an alien race. When I congratulated him on making a fine discovery, he banged the table with his fat hand and said, ‘I haven’t finished my story! I hope you’re not bored because I was just about to tell you the climax of my little adventure. Well, after my success with the encyclopaedists – yes, yes, I admit I was successful – I was filled with joy. “The secret of man’s immortality lies in our past and in our future” – that was the Ieldra’s message, wasn’t it? Well, I’m not a scryer, so what can I say about the future? But the past, ah, well, I thought I’d discovered a vital link with the past. And as it happens, I have. My mumiyah may prove to contain some very old DNA, what do you think? Anyway, the climax: I was so full of joy, I rushed home to Neverness. I wanted to be the first to return with a significant discovery, you see. You must visualize it: I would have been famous. The novices would have stumbled over each other for the privilege of touching my robes. Master courtesans would have paid me for the pleasure of discovering what kind of man lives beneath these robes. How pungent my life would have been! But Bardo grew careless! In my hurry through the windows, I grew careless.’

I will not record all of my friend’s words here. In short, while fenestering through the dangerous Danladi thinspace he made a mistake that would have made the youngest of journeymen blush. In his mapping of the decision-group onto itself, he neglected to show the function was one-to-one, so he fell into a loop. Now any other pilot would have laboriously searched for a sequence of mappings to extricate himself from the loop. But Bardo was lazy and did not want to spend a hundred or more days of intime searching for such a mapping. He had an idea as to how he might instantly escape the loop, this lazy but brilliant man, and he played with his idea. After a mere seven hours of intime, he tasted the pungent fruit of genius. He proved that a mapping of points present to points past always exists, that a pilot could always return to any point along his immediate path. Moreover, it was a constructive proof; that is to say, not only did he prove such a mapping existed, he showed how such a mapping could be constructed. Thus he made a mapping with the star just beyond Ksandaria’s. He fell out into the fallaways, into the familiar spaces he had recently passed through. And then he journeyed homeward to Neverness.

‘I’m sought after, now,’ he laughed out. ‘It’s ironic: I, in my stupidity, I stumbled into a loop but I’ve proved the greatest of the lesser unproved theorems. Bardo’s Boomerang Theorem – that’s what the journeymen have named my little mapping theorem. There’s even talk of elevating me to a mastership, did you know that? I, Bardo, master pilot! Yes, I’m sought after now, by Kolenya and others with their luscious lips and beautiful, fat thighs. My seed flows like magma, my friend. I’m famous! Ah, but not as famous as you, eh?’

We talked all afternoon until the light died from the grey sky and the cafe filled with hungry people. We ordered a huge meal of cultured meats and the various exotic dishes favoured by Bardo. He poked his finger into my ribs and said, ‘You’ve no meat on your skinny bones!’ He praised me again for my discovery, and then I told him about my new plan.

‘You want to do what?’ he said, wiping meat jelly from his lips with a cloth. ‘To journey to the Alaloi and steal their DNA? That’s slelling, isn’t it?’ Realizing he had spoken that awful word too loudly, he looked around at the other diners and lowered his voice conspiratorially. He leaned across the table, ‘We can’t go slelling the Alaloi’s DNA, can we?’

‘It’s not really slelling,’ I said. ‘It’s not as if we’d use their DNA to tailor poisons or clone them or –’

‘Slelling is slelling,’ he interrupted. ‘And what about the covenants? The Timekeeper would never allow it, thank God!’

‘He might.’

I told him about my petition, and he grew sullen and argumentative.

‘By God, we can’t just take a windjammer and land on one of their islands and ask them to drop their seed in a test tube, can we?’

‘I have a different plan,’ I said.

‘Oh, no, I don’t think I want to hear this.’ He ate a few more cookies, wiped his lips and farted.

‘We’ll go to the Alaloi in disguise. It shouldn’t be too hard to learn their customs and to scrape a few skin cells from the palms of their hands.’