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‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘Oh, too bad for Bardo, and too bad for you if you insist on this mad plan. And how do you think we could disguise ourselves? Oh no, please don’t tell me, I’ve had enough of your plans.’
I said, ‘There’s a way. Do you remember the story of Goshevan? We’ll do as he did. We’ll go to a cutter and have our bodies sculpted. The Alaloi will think we are their cousins.’
He farted again and belched. ‘That’s insane! Please, Mallory, look at me and admit you know it’s insane. By God, we can’t become Alaloi, can we? And why should you think the Alaloi’s DNA is older than any other? Shouldn’t we concentrate our efforts on the main chance? Since I’ve discovered mumiyah from three thousand years before the Swarming, why don’t we – you, I and Li Tosh, mount an expedition back to the Darghinni? After all, we know there are the remains of a museum ship on one of their worlds.’
I coughed and I rubbed the side of my nose. I did not want to point out that as of yet, we had no idea where to look for the wreckage of the museum ship. I said, ‘The Alaloi DNA is probably fifty thousand years old.’
‘Is that true? We don’t know anything about the Alaloi except that they’re so stupid they don’t even have a language!’
I smiled because he was being deliberately fatuous. I told him everything known about the Alaloi, those dreamers who had carked their humanness into neanderthal flesh. According to the historians, the Alaloi’s ancestors had hated the rot and vice of civilization, any civilization. Therefore, they had fled Old Earth in long ships. Because they wanted to live what they thought of as a natural life, they back-mutated some of their chromosomes, the better to grow strong, primitive children to live on the pristine worlds they hoped to discover. In one of their long ships, they carried the frozen body of a neanderthal boy recovered from the ice of Tsibera, which was the northernmost continent of Old Earth. They had spliced strands of frozen DNA; with the boy’s replicated DNA they performed their rituals and carked their germ cells with ancient chromosomes. Generations later, generations of experiment and breeding, the cavemen – to use the ancient, vulgar term – landed on Icefall. They destroyed their ships, fastened their hooded furs, and they went to live in the frozen forests of the Ten Thousand Islands.
‘That’s interesting,’ Bardo said. ‘But I’m bothered by one thing. Well, I’m bothered by everything you’ve said, of course, but there is one thing that bothers me stupendously about this whole scheme of searching for man’s oldest DNA.’
He ordered some coffee and drank it. He looked across the cafe at a pretty journeyman historian, and he began flirting with his eyes.
‘Tell me, then,’ I said.
He reluctantly looked away, looked at me, and said, ‘What did the goddess mean that the secret of life is written in the oldest DNA of the human species? We must think very carefully about this. What did She mean by “old”?’
‘What do you mean, “what did She mean by old?”’
He puffed his cheeks out and swore, ‘Damn you, why do you still answer my questions with questions? Old – what’s old? Does one race of man have older DNA than another? How can one living human have older DNA than another?’
‘You’re splitting words like a semanticist,’ I said.
‘No, I don’t think I am.’ He removed his glove, fingered his greasy nose and said, ‘The DNA in my skin is very old stuff, by God! Parts of the genome have been evolving for four billion years. Now that’s old, I think, and if you want me to split words, I shall. What of the atoms that make up my DNA? Older still, I think, because they were made in the heart of stars ten billion years ago.’
He scraped along the side of his nose and held out his finger. Beneath the long nail was a smear of grease and dead, yellow skin cells. ‘Here’s your secret of life,’ he said. He seemed very pleased with himself, and he went back to flirting with the historian.
I knocked his hand aside and said, ‘I admit the Entity’s words are something of a riddle. We’ll have to solve the riddle, then.’
‘Ah, but I was never fond of riddles.’
I caught his eyes and told him, ‘As you say, the genome has been evolving for billions of years. And therefore any of our ancestors’ DNA is older than ours. This is how I’ll define old, then. We’ll have to start somewhere. The Alaloi have spliced DNA from a body fifty thousand years old into their own bodies. We can hope this DNA – and the message in the DNA – hasn’t mutated or degraded.’
‘But the Alaloi are not our ancestors,’ he said.
‘Yes, but the neanderthals of Old Earth were.’
‘No, by God, they weren’t even members of the human species! They were slack-jawed, stoop-shouldered brutes as dumb as dodos.’
‘You’re wrong,’ I said. ‘Their brains were larger than those of modern man.’
‘Larger than your brain, perhaps,’ he said. He tapped his bulging forehead. ‘Not larger than Bardo’s, no, I can’t believe that.’
‘We evolved from them.’
‘Now there’s a revolting thought. But I don’t believe you. Does Bardo know his history? Yes, I think I do. But why should pilots argue history?’ He held his head up, stroked his beard and looked at the historian. ‘Why not let an historian settle an historical argument?’
So saying, he excused himself, belched, stood up, brushed cookie crumbs from his beard and squeezed by the crowded tables. He approached the historian and said something to her. She laughed; she took his hand as he guided her back towards our table.
‘May I present Estrella Domingo of Darkmoon.’ Estrella was a bright-looking journeyman and nicely fat, the way Bardo liked his women to be. He introduced me, then said, ‘Estrella has consented to resolve our argument.’ He pulled up a chair so she could sit down. He poured her a cup of coffee. ‘Now tell us, my young Estrella,’ he said. ‘Were neanderthals really our ancestors?’
In truth, I do not think Bardo had any hope of winning his argument. After a while, it became obvious that he had invited this pretty, impressionable girl from Darkmoon to our table not to listen to a history lesson, but to seduce her. After she had patiently explained that there were different theories as to man’s recent evolution and told him, yes, it was most likely that the neanderthals were our direct ancestors, he exclaimed, ‘Ah, so my friend is right once again! But you must admit, it’s too bad that man once looked like cavemen. They’re so ugly, don’t you agree?’
Estrella did not agree. She coyly observed that many women liked thick, muscular, hairy men. Which was one of the reasons it had become fashionable years ago for certain professionals to sculpt their bodies into the shape of Alaloi.
‘Hmmm,’ Bardo said as he twisted his moustache, ‘that is interesting.’
Estrella further observed that the difference between neanderthals and modern man was not so great as most people thought. ‘If you look carefully,’ she said, ‘you can see neanderthal genes in the faces of certain people on any street in any city on any planet of the Civilized Worlds.’ (As I have said, she was a nice, intelligent young woman, even if she had the irritating habit of stringing together too many prepositional phrases when she spoke.) ‘Even you, Master Bardo, with your thick browridges above your deepset eyes surrounded by such a fine beard – have you ever thought about this?’
‘Ah, no, actually I never have. But it would be interesting to discuss the matter in greater detail, wouldn’t it? We could scrutinize various parts of my anatomy and determine those parts which are the most primitive.’
After Bardo and she had made plans ‘to discuss the matter in greater detail,’ she returned to her table and whispered something in her friend’s ear.
‘What a lovely girl!’ he said. ‘Isn’t it wonderful how these journeymen acquiesce to established pilots?’ And then, ‘Ah, perhaps the neanderthals were our ancestors … or perhaps not. That’s still no reason to sculpt our bodies and live among cavemen. I have a better plan. We could bribe a wormrunner to capture an Alaloi. They poach shagshay, don’t they? Well, let them poach a caveman and bring him back to the City.’
I took a sip of coffee and tapped the bridge of my nose. ‘You know we can’t do that,’ I said.
‘Of course, all the wormrunner would really need is a little blood. He could render a caveman unconscious, bleed him a little, and return with a sample of his blood.’
I sloshed the coffee around in my mouth. It had grown cold and acidy. I said, ‘You’ve always accused me of being too innocent, but I’ll admit that I’ve thought about doing what you suggest.’
‘Well?’
I ordered a fresh pot of coffee and said, ‘One man’s blood would not be enough. The neanderthal genes are spread among the Alaloi families. We have to be sure of getting a large enough statistical sample.’
He belched and rolled his eyes. ‘Ah, you always have these reasons, Little Fellow. But I think the real reason you want to make this mad expedition is that you like the idea of sculpting your body and living among savages. Such a romantic notion. But then, you always were a romantic man.’
I said, ‘If the Timekeeper grants my petition, I’ll go to the Alaloi. Will you come with me?’
‘Will I come with you? Will I come with you? What a question!’ He took a bite of bread and belched. ‘If I don’t come with you, they’ll say Bardo is afraid, by God! Well, too bad. I don’t care. My friend, I’d follow you across the galaxy, but this, to go among savages and slel their plasm, well … it’s insane!’
I was not able to persuade Bardo to my plan. I was so full of optimism, however, so happy to be home that it didn’t matter. As a returning pilot, I was entitled to take a house in the Pilot’s Quarter. I chose a small, steeply roofed chalet heated by piped-in water from the geyser at the foot of Attakel. Into the chalet I moved my leather-bound book of poems, my furs and kamelaikas and my three pairs of skates, my chessboard and pieces, the mandolin I had never learned to play, and the few other possessions I had accumulated during my years at Resa. (As novices at Borja, of course, we were allowed no possessions other than our clothes.) I considered ordering a bed and perhaps a few wooden tables and chairs, such minor tubist indulgences being at that time quite popular. But I disliked sleeping in beds, and it seemed to me that chairs and tables were only appropriate in bars or cafes, where many could make use of their convenience. Too, I had another reason for not wanting my house cluttered with things: Katharine had begun spending her nights with me. I did not want her, in her world of eternal night, tripping over a misplaced chair and perhaps fracturing her beautiful face.
We kept our nightly trysts a secret from my mother and my aunt, and from everyone else, even Bardo. Of course I longed to confide in him; I wanted to tell him how happy Katharine made me with her hands and tongue and rolling hips, with her passionate (if anticipated) whispered words and moans. But Bardo could no more keep a secret than he could hold his farts after consuming too much bread and beer. Soon after our conversation in the cafe, half the Order, it seemed – everyone except my cowardly friend – wanted to accompany me on what would come to be called the great journey.
Even Katharine, who had seen enough of the future not to be excited, was excited. Long after midnight on fiftieth night, after a night of slow, intense coupling (she seemed always to want to devour time slowly, sensuously, as a snake swallows its prey), she surprised me with her excitement. She lay naked in front of the stone fireplace, flickers of orange and red playing across her sweating, white skin. She smelled of perfume and woodsmoke and sex. With her arms stretched back behind her head, her heavy breasts were spread like perfect disks against her chest. Eyeless as she was, she had no body shame, nor any appreciation of her beauty. At my leisure I stared at the dark, thick triangle of hair below her rounded belly, the long, crossed legs and deeply arched feet. She stared upward at the stars, scrying. That is, she would have stared at the stars if she had had eyes, and if the skylight between the ceiling beams hadn’t been covered with snow. Who knows what she saw gazing down the dark tunnels to the future? And if she had suddenly been able to see again, I wondered, could the sparkle of the milky, midwinter stars ever have pleased her as much as her own interior visions?
‘Oh, Mallory!’ she said. ‘What a thing I’ve … I must come with you to your Alaloi, do you see?’
I smiled but she could not see my smile. I sat cross-legged by her side, a fur thrown over my shoulders. With my fingers, I combed her long, black hair away from her eyepits and said, ‘If only Bardo had your enthusiasm.’
‘Don’t be too hard on Bardo. In the end, he’ll come, too.’
‘Come too? Come where?’ I wasn’t sure which disturbed me more: her descrying the future or her insistence I take her with me to the Alaloi. ‘What have you seen?’
‘Bardo, in the cave with his big … he’s so very funny!’
‘You can’t come with me,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘But I must come with you! I will come because I have … Oh, Mallory?’
Of course, it was impossible for her to come with me. I told her it was impossible. I said, ‘The Alaloi leave their crippled and blind out on the ice when it blizzards. They kill them.’ I had no idea, really, if this were true.
She turned towards me and smiled. ‘You’re not a very good liar,’ she said.
‘No, I’m not, am I? But I don’t understand why you would want to come with me.’
‘It’s hard to explain.’
‘Tell me.’
‘I’m sorry, Mallory, but I can’t tell you.’
‘Because of your vows?’
‘Of course, but … but more because the words don’t exist to describe the future.’
‘I thought you scryers had invented a special vocabulary.’
‘I wish I could find the words to tell you what I’ve seen.’
‘Try,’ I said.
‘I want to grow eyes again so I can see the faces of your … it’s there, on the ice in deep winter you’ll find your … Oh, what should I call it, this thing I see, this image, the image of man? I’ll break my vows, and I’ll grow eyes to see it again for a while before I … before I see.’
Silently I rubbed the bridge of my nose while I sat sweating in front of the crackling fire. Grow eyes indeed! It was a shocking thing for a scryer to say.
‘There,’ she sighed. ‘You see, I’ve said it so badly.’
‘Why can’t you just say which events will occur and which will not?’
‘Sweet Mallory, suppose I had seen the only event which really matters. If I told you that you must die at a certain time, every moment of your life would be agony because … you see, you’d always dwell on the moment of … it would rob every other moment of your life of happiness. If you knew.’
I kissed her mouth and said, ‘There’s another possibility. If I knew I had a hundred years before I died, I’d never be afraid of anything my whole life. I could enjoy every instant of living.’
‘Of course, that’s true,’ she said.
‘But that’s a paradox.’
She laughed for a while before admitting, ‘We scryers are known for our paradoxes, aren’t we?’
‘Do you see the future? Or do you see possible futures? That’s something I’ve always wanted to know.’
Indeed, most pilots – and everyone else in our Order – were curious to know the secrets of the scryers.
‘And seeing the future,’ I said, ‘why not change it if you wish?’
She laughed again. At times, such as when she was relaxed in front of the fire, she had a beautiful laugh. ‘Oh, you’ve just stated the first paradox, did you know? Seeing the future of … if we then act to change it, and do change it … if it’s changeable, then we haven’t really seen the future, have we?’
‘And you would refuse to act, then, merely to preserve this vision of what you’d seen?’
She took my hand and stroked my palm. ‘You don’t understand.’
I said, ‘In some fundamental sense, I’ve never really believed you scryers could see anything but possibilities.’
She dragged her fingernail down my lifeline. ‘Of course … possibilities.’
Because I was frustrated, I laughed and said, ‘I think it’s easier to understand a mechanic than a scryer. At least their beliefs are quantifiable.’
‘Some mechanics,’ she said, ‘believe that each quantum event occurring in the universe changes the … They’ve quantified the possibilities. With each event, a different future. Spacetime divides and redivides, like the branches of one of your infinite trees. An infinity of futures, these parallel futures, they call them, all occurring simultaneously. And so, an infinity of parallel nows, don’t you see? But the mechanics are wrong. Nowness is … there is a unity of immanence … oh, Mallory, only one future can ever be.’
‘The future is unchangeable, then?’
‘We have a saying,’ she told me. ‘“We don’t change the future; we choose the future.”’
‘Scryer talk.’
She reached up to me. She ran her fingers through my chest hair and made a sudden, tight fist above my heart, pulled at me as she said, ‘I will have gone to a cutter named … He’ll grow me new eyes. I want to see your face when you … one time, just the one time, is that okay?’
‘Would you really do that?’ I wondered aloud. ‘Break your vows? Why?’
‘Because I love … ,’ she said, ‘I love you, do you see?’
During the next few days I could think of little else except this strange conversation. As a returning pilot I was required to teach, so I agreed to tutor two novices in the arts of hallning. I must admit I did not perform my teaching duties with as much attention as I should have. Early one morning in the classroom of my chalet, as I was supposedly demonstrating simple geometric transformations to little Rafi and Geord, I found myself thinking back to my journey to the Entity, remembering how the imago of Katharine had grown eyes and looked at me. I wondered: Had She known what Katharine would one day say to me? I was mulling over the implications of this while I showed the novices how it is impossible to rotate a paper, two-dimensional tracing of a right-handed glove to match and fit the tracing of a left-handed glove, if the motion was restricted to rotations within a plane. I failed to notice they were bored. I picked up one of the glove tracings from the wooden floor, flipped it over and placed it on top of the other tracing. I said, ‘But if we lift it off the plane like so and rotate it through space, it’s trivial to match the two tracings. Similarly –’
And here the gangly, impatient Rafi interrupted me, calling out, ‘Similarly, it’s impossible to rotate a three-dimensional left glove into a right-handed glove. But if we rotate the glove through four-space, it’s simple to superimpose the two gloves. We know that, Pilot. Are we done now? You promised to tell us about your journey to the Alaloi – remember? Are you really going to drive dogsleds across the ice and eat living meat?’
My distractions, I saw to my dismay, had apparently infected even the novices. I was a little annoyed at Rafi, who was too quick for his own good. I said, ‘True, the gloves can be superimposed, but can you visualize the rotation through four-space? No? I didn’t think so.’
Two days later I took them to a cutter who modified their lungs, and then down to the Rose Womb Cloisters. I put them into the hexagonal attitude chamber, which occupied most of the rose-tiled tank room. There they floated and breathed the super-oxygenated water while performing the day’s exercises. With their sense of right and left, and up and down, dissolved by the dark, warm, salty water, they visualized four-space; they rotated the image of their own bodies around the imaginary plane cutting through their noses, navels and spines. They were trying to rotate themselves into their own mirror images. Even though it is really a simple exercise, akin to reversing the line diagram of a cube by staring at it until it ‘pops,’ I should have paid them close attention. But again, I let my mind wander. I was wondering if Katharine would be able to find a cutter to make her new eyes when I happened to look through the wine dark water at the novices. Rafi, I noticed, had his arms wrapped around his knees, and his eyes were tightly closed as he breathed water. How long had I left him like this? If I left him too long in the foetal attitude, he would build a dependency on sightlessness and closure. I reminded myself that he was to be a pilot, not a scryer, so I removed him from the tank.
‘The exercise was … too easy,’ Rafi said. He stood there naked, beads of water dripping off him. Due to his altered lungs, he was having trouble breathing. ‘Once one sees one transformation, the others are easy.’
‘That’s true with geometric transformations,’ I said. ‘But the topological transformations are harder. I remember when Lionel Killirand made me reverse the tube of my body, inside out. Now that was a horrible exercise. Since you’ve found today’s exercise so easy, perhaps you’d like to play with the topological transformations, then?’
He smiled a haughty smile and said, ‘I’d rather play at a real transformation, like you, Pilot. Are you really going to sculpt yourself? Is that as severe a transformation as altering one’s lungs? Would you take a novice with you, to the Alaloi? Could I come?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘you’re just a boy. Now, shall we practise motions through five-space? I don’t think you’ll be able to visualize five-space so easily.’
The excitement that my proposed journey provoked throughout the Order was not wholly surprising. Man is man, and even civilized man – especially civilized women and men – will sometimes long for simplicity. In each of us, there is the lure of the primitive, an atavistic desire to experience life in its rawest form; there is a need to be tested, to prove our worth as natural (and ferocious) animals in a natural world. Some said the Alaloi led a truer, more purely human life than could any modern man. Too, the story of Goshevan and his marrow-sick son, Shanidar, had fired the imagination of an entire generation. To return to nature as strong, powerful, natural men – what could be more romantic than that? No day passed that some semanticist didn’t offer advice as to the complexities of the Alaloi language or a fabulist recite the epic of Goshevan’s doomed journey to live among the cavemen; no night ended without one pilot or another drugging himself with toalache and begging to accompany me to the Alaloi.
Towards the end of that brilliant, happy season of romance and deep snows and plans, I was elevated to my mastership. Strangely enough, although I was by far the youngest pilot ever to become a master, I no longer took pride in my relative youth. Having aged five years intime on my journey, I suddenly felt ageless, or rather, old – as old as the glazed ledges of the Hall of Ancient Pilots where the master pilots welcomed me to their college. I remember waiting for their decision at the far side of the Hall, near the dais where Bardo and I had received our rings. I tapped my boot against the cold floor, listening to the sound vanish into the arched vault above me. I examined the conclave room’s long, black doors, which were made of shatterwood and carved in bas-relief with the faces of Rollo Gallivare and Tisander the Wary, the Tycho and Yoshi, all three hundred and eighty-five of our Lord Pilots since the founding of our Order. Near the centre of the left door, I found Soli’s hard profile, with the long, broad nose, the hard chin and the combed hair bound in its silver chain. I wondered if my own profile would ever be carved in the old, brittle wood, and if it were, I wondered if anyone would be able to distinguish it from Soli’s. Then the doors opened, and the ancient Salmalin, who was the oldest pilot next to Soli, pulled his white beard and invited me into the circular conclave room, and I no longer felt very old. I sat on a stool at the centre of a huge, ringlike table. Around the table sat Tomoth, Pilar Gaprindashavilli, the dour Stephen Caraghar, as well as Lionel and Justine and the other master pilots. When Salmalin stood up to welcome me to the master’s college, all the pilots stood and removed the gloves from their right hands. In that simplest and most touching of all our Order’s ceremonies, I went around the table shaking hands. When I took Justine’s long, elegant hand in my own, she said, ‘If only Soli had been here to see this, I’m sure he would have been as proud as I am.’
I did not remind her that if Soli had been present, he would probably have vetoed my elevation.
After she and Lionel (and others) congratulated me, my mother met me outside the conclave room. We walked through the almost deserted Hall together. ‘You’re a master now,’ she said. ‘The Timekeeper will have to pay more attention to your petition. And if he approves it, we’ll sculpt our bodies. And go to the Alaloi where there will be fame and glory. No matter what we find or don’t.’
