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David Hilbert, Machine Century Cantor, from On the Infinite
The days following the pilot’s race and Leopold Soli’s near-murder passed quickly. The clear, dry, sunny weather gave way to winter’s deep powder snows that continually fell on the glissades and kept the zambonies busy. Soli’s would-be assassins were never caught. Though he made full use of the Order’s resources, and the Timekeeper set his spies to listening at doorways and peeking in windows (or whatever it is that spies do), our Lord Pilot could do little more than rage and demand that my mother be brought before the akashics. ‘Lay her brain bare,’ he thundered at the pilot’s conclave, ‘expose her plots and lies!’ It was a measure of his vast reputation that the pilots, many of whom had grown to adulthood and had taken their vows during his long journey, voted to try my mother.
On fourthday she submitted to the review of Nikolos the Elder. With his computers he painted pictures of her brain as vivid as a Fravashi fresco. But the plump, little Lord Akashic pronounced that he could find no memory inside her of a plot to kill Soli.
That night, in her little brick house in the Pilot’s Quarter, she said to me, ‘Soli goes too far! Nikolos proclaims my innocence. What does Soli say? He says, “It’s well known that the matriarchs of Lechoix keep drugs that destroy specific memories.” Destroy! As if I’d destroy part of my brain!’
I knew how my mother treasured the hundred billion neurons that made up her brain. I did not believe that she, as those of the aphasic sect often did, had taken an aphagenic to destroy her memory; neither could I trust that she was innocent, not after what she had said to me the day of the race. (Even supposing she had used such a drug, I could not very well ask her if she had. Such is the nature of the induced micro-brain lesions that she would have no memory of her crime, nor of having dissolved the memory of her crime.) I was angry and my voice quavered as I asked, ‘How did you fool the Lord Akashic?’
‘My son doubts me?’ she said as she slumped against the bare brick wall of her sleeping room. ‘How I hate Soli! The Lord Pilot returns. To take away what I love most. And so I went to the Timekeeper. And lied, yes, I admit I lied. I begged him to ask Soli. To release you from your oath.’
‘And the Timekeeper listened to you?’
‘The Timekeeper thinks he’s cunning. But I told him we would go to Tria. To become merchant pilots, if he didn’t talk to Soli. The Timekeeper thinks he’s fearless, but he fears such a scandal.’
‘You told him that? He must think I’m the worst kind of coward.’
‘Who cares what he thinks? At least I’ve saved you. From a stupid death.’
‘You’ve saved me from nothing,’ I said as I walked towards the door. ‘Don’t ever lie on my behalf again, Mother.’
I told her I had resolved to keep my oath, and she began to cry. ‘How I hate Soli!’ she said as I opened the door to the street. ‘I’ll teach him about hate.’
I spent the next few days in final preparation for my journey. I consulted eschatologists and other professionals, hoping to glean some bit of information as to the nature and purpose of the impossible being known as the Solid State Entity. Burgos Harsha told me that Rollo Gallivare had discovered the first of the mainbrains, and that he believed them to be aliens from another galaxy. ‘It is recorded in the apocrypha of the first Timekeeper that the Silicon God appeared within the Eta Carina Nebula towards the end of the Swarming Centuries. And in the chronicles of Tisander the Wary, we find a similar assertation. But when have those sources ever been accurate, I ask you? In the history of the Tycho, Reina Ede holds that the brains evolved from the seed of the Ieldra, as did Homo Sapiens. What do I believe? I don’t know what I believe.’
Kolenya Mor thought that the Ieldra, before they melded their consciousness with the bizarrely tortured spacetime of the core singularity, must have closely resembled the Solid State Entity. ‘As to the Entity’s purpose, why, it’s the purpose of all life, to awaken to itself.’ We talked for a long time, and I told her that many of the younger pilots denied that life had a purpose. She looked at me with her horrified little eyes and exclaimed, ‘Heresy! That ancient heresy!’
I was not the only one, of course, called to quest. The whole of our Order seemed afire with the dream of finding Soli’s Elder Eddas. What indeed was the secret of man’s immortality? ‘Find out why the goddamned stars are exploding,’ Bardo said, ‘and you’ll find your secret.’ Of course, he was a pragmatist whose mind did not often turn towards esoteric problems. Others believed that the secret of the exploding Vild would be only the first part of the Elder Eddas. (Albeit a vital part.) Where should we look for this secret? Why hadn’t we discovered it long ago? Phantasts and tinkers and pilots – many of us felt that despite the three millennia which our Order had spent accumulating knowledge, we might have overlooked an important, perhaps vital thing. Historians begged the Timekeeper for permission to leave Neverness, to raid the library on Ksandaria for clues to the mystery. Neologicians and semanticists locked themselves in their cold towers as they set to creating and discovering new languages, lost in their certitude that the secret of the Elder Eddas – and every other kind of wisdom – was to be found in words. The fabulists spun their fictions, which they claimed were as real as any reality, and declared that the Elder Eddas is that which we create. And who was to say they were wrong? And the pilots! My brave, fellow pilots, Richardess and the Sonderval, went forth into the manifold, seeking lost planets and strange new alien races. Tomoth and a hundred other master pilots would try to map the Vild. Soli himself would attempt to penetrate the inner veil of the Vild, while Lionel devised yet another plan to find Old Earth. Even cowardly Bardo would make a journey, even if he proposed nothing more daring than his own, private expedition to Ksandaria. Although a few cynical professionals like my mother had no intention of chancing their lives on such a dream, it was an exciting time, and more, a glorious time we would never see again.
The day before my departure, a day of fierce, sudden gales and stinging ice-powder, the Timekeeper summoned me to his Tower. As I skated between the dark grey buildings separating Resa from the great Tower, I shivered beneath my too-thin kamelaika. I wished that I had either greased my face or worn a mask against the freezing wind. It would be an insult, I thought, to appear before the Timekeeper with patches of white, frostbitten skin blighting my face. It was good to enter the warm Tower, good, even, to stand impatiently in an anteroom below the top of the Tower as I stamped my boots on the red carpet and waited for the master horologe to announce my arrival.
‘He is waiting for you,’ the horologe said in a voice almost breathless from his climbing up and down the stairs into the Timekeeper’s chambers. ‘Be careful,’ he said, ‘he’s in an ugly mood today,’ and then he ushered me up the winding stairs into the circular sanctum of the tower where the Timekeeper stood waiting.
‘So, Mallory,’ he said, ‘the pilot’s ring looks good on your hand, eh?’
The Timekeeper was a grim-faced man with a mane of thick white hair erupting from his taut skin. Most of the time he seemed very old, though no one knew just how old he was. When he frowned, which he often did, the muscles of his jaws stood out like knots of wood. His neck was thick and popping with tendons, as was the rest of his tense, large-boned body. I stood in the spacious, well-lighted room, and he stared at me as he always did when I came to see him. His eyes were black and fathomless like chunks of barely cooled obsidian hammered into his skull; his eyes were hot, restless, angry and pained.
‘What would it take to kill you?’ he asked me.
The muscles of his bare forearms tensed and relaxed, tensed and relaxed. Once, when I was a novice, when he had taught me leverage grips and killing holds and other wrestling skills, I had had occasion to view the powerful body beneath the long red robe he always wore. His torso and legs were etched with scars; a fine network of hard, white cicatrices more intricate and convoluted than the glidderies of the Farsider’s Quarter began at his neck, twisted through his dense, white, body hair, and ran down his groin and muscular legs to his feet. When I had asked him about the scars, he had said, ‘It takes a lot to kill me, you see.’
He motioned for me to sit in an ornate, wooden chair facing the southern window. The Tower, a monolith of white marble imported from Urradeth at extraordinary cost, overlooked the whole of the Academy. To the west were the granite and basalt arches of the professionals’ colleges, Upplyssa and Lara Sig; to the north, the densely clumped spires of Borja, and looking south towards Urkel, I saw my beloved Resa. (I should mention that the tower windows are made of fused silica, and calcium and sodium oxides, a substance the Timekeeper calls glass. It is a brittle substance given to shattering when the gales of midwinter spring come roaring across the Starnbergersee. Nevertheless, the Timekeeper, who is fond of archaisms, claims that glass allows in a cleaner light than does the clary used in all the buildings of the Civilized Worlds.)
‘Do you hear the ticking, Mallory, my brave, foolish, young pilot? Time – it ticks, it runs, it twists, it dilates, shrinks, and kills, and one day for each of us, no matter what we do, it stops. Stops, do you hear me?’
He pulled up a chair identical to mine and rested his red-slippered foot on the seat. The Timekeeper – afraid perhaps that if he ceased his restless motions, his internal clock might stop – did not like to sit. ‘You’re the youngest pilot in history. Twenty-one years old – a nano in the life of a star, but it’s all the time you’ve had. And the clock beats; the clock tolls; the clock ticks; do you hear it ticking?’
I heard it ticking. All around us, in the Timekeeper’s circular Tower, were clocks ticking. Interspersed with the curved panes of glass around the circumference of the room, from the fur-covered floor to the white plaster ceiling, were wooden shelves upon which sat the clocks. Clocks of every conceivable design. There were archaic weight-driven clocks and spring clocks encased in plastic; there were wood-covered pendulum clocks, electric clocks and quartz crystal clocks; there were bio-clocks powered by the disembodied heart muscles of various organisms; there were quantum clocks and hourglasses filled with cobalt and vermilion sands; I saw three water clocks and even a Fravashi driftglass, which measured the time since the drifting super-galactic clusters had erupted from the primeval singularity. As far as I could determine, no two of the clocks told the same time. On top of the highest shelf was the Seal of our Order. It was a small glass and steel atomic clock which had been set on Old Earth the day the Order was founded. (The largest clock, of course, was – is – the Tower itself. Far below, set into the circle of ice surrounding it, twenty rows of granite radiate outward and mark the passing of the sun’s shadow. This giant sundial, inaccurate though it may be, is theoretically the only clock in the city by which we citizens can direct our activities. The Timekeeper abhorred the tyranny of time, and so he long ago ordered all clocks banned. This prohibition has proved a boon to the wormrunners who make fortunes smuggling in Yarkona pocket watches and other contraband.)
A clock gonged, and he gripped his forearms, one in either hand. He said, ‘I’ve heard that Soli has dissolved your oath.’
‘That’s true, Timekeeper. And I wish to apologize for my mother. She had no right to come to you, asking you to talk to Soli on my behalf.’
With his foot he pushed back the chair as he kneaded the tight muscles of his forearms. ‘So, you think I ordered Soli to release you from your oath?’
‘Didn’t you?’
‘No.’
‘My mother seems to think –’
‘Your mother – forgive me, Pilot – your mother often thinks wrongly. I’ve known you all your life. Do you think I’m stupid enough to believe you’d desert the Order to become a merchant pilot? Ha!’
‘Then you didn’t speak to Soli?’
‘You question me?’
‘Excuse me, Timekeeper.’ I was confused. Why else would Soli have released me from my oath, unless it was to shame me before all my friends and masters of the Academy?
I confided my doubts to the Timekeeper who said, ‘Soli has lived three long lifetimes; don’t try to understand him.’
‘It seems there are many things I don’t understand.’
‘You’re modest today.’
‘Why did you send for me?’
‘Don’t question me, damn you! I’ve only so much patience, even for you.’
I sat mutely in the chair looking out the window at Borja’s beautiful main spire, the one the Tycho had built a thousand years ago. The Timekeeper circled around to my side so that he could look upon my face as I stared straight ahead. It was the traditional position of politeness between master and novice that I had been taught when I first entered the Academy. The Timekeeper could search my face for truth or lies (or any other emotion) while preserving the sanctity of his own thoughts and feelings.
‘Everyone knows you intend to keep your oath,’ he said.
‘Yes, Lord Horologe.’
‘It seems that Soli has tricked you.’
‘Yes, Lord Horologe.’
‘And your mother has failed you.’
‘Perhaps, Lord Horologe.’
‘Then you’ll still try to penetrate the Entity?’
‘I’ll leave tomorrow, Lord Horologe.’
‘Your ship is ready?’
‘Yes, Lord Horologe.’
‘“To die among the stars is the most glorious death,” is it not?’
‘Yes, Lord Horologe.’
There was a blur from my side and the Timekeeper slapped my face. ‘Nonsense!’ he roared. ‘I won’t listen to such nonsense from you!’
He walked over to the window and rapped the glass pane with his knuckles. ‘Cities such as Neverness are glorious,’ he said. ‘And the ocean at sunset, or deep winter’s firefalls – these things are glorious. Death is death; death is horror. There’s no glory when the time runs out and the ticking stops, do you hear me? There’s only blackness and the hell of everlasting nothingness. Don’t be too quick to die, do you hear me, Mallory?’
‘Yes, Lord Horologe.’
‘Good!’ He crossed the room and opened a cabinet supporting a jar of pulsing, glowing red fluid. (I had always presumed that this evil-looking display was a clock of some sort, but I had never had the courage to ask him exactly what sort.) From the cabinet’s dark interior – the wood was a rare ebony and so dully black that it shed little light – he removed an object that appeared to be an old, leather-covered box. I soon saw that it was not; when he opened the ‘box,’ that is to say, when he turned back one section of the stiffened pieces of the brown, cracked leather, there were many, many sheets of what seemed to be paper cleverly fastened to the middle section. He came closer to me; I smelled mildew and dust and centuries-old paper. As his fingers turned the yellow sheets he would occasionally let out a sigh or exclaim, ‘Here it is, in ancient Anglish, no less!’ Or, ‘Ah, such music, no one does this now, it’s a dead art. Look at this, Mallory!’ I looked at the sheets of paper covered line after line with squiggly black characters, all of which were alien to me. I knew that I was looking at one of those archaic artifacts in which words are represented symbolically (and redundantly) by physical ideoplasts. The ancients had called the ideoplasts ‘letters,’ but I could not remember what the letter-covered artifact itself was called.
‘It’s a book!’ the Timekeeper said. ‘A treasure – these are the greatest poems ever dreamed by the minds of human beings. Listen to this … ,’ and he translated from the dead language he called Franche as he recited a poem entitled ‘The Clock.’ I did not like it very much; it was a poem full of dark, shuddering images and hopelessness and dread.
‘How is it that you can interpret these symbols into words?’ I asked.
‘The art is called “reading,”’ he said, ‘It’s an art I learned long ago.’
I was confused for a moment because I had always used the word ‘read’ in a different, broader context. One ‘reads’ the weather patterns from the drifting clouds or ‘reads’ a person’s habits and programs according to the mannerisms of his face. Then I remembered certain professionals practised the art of reading, as did the citizens of many of the more backward worlds. I had even once seen books in a museum on Solsken. I supposed that one could read words as well as say them. But how inefficient it all seemed! I pitied the ancients who did not know how to encode information into ideoplasts and directly superscribe the various sense and cognitive centres of the brain. As Bardo would say, how barbaric!
The Timekeeper made a fist and said, ‘I want you to learn the art of reading so you can read this book.’
‘Read the book?’
‘Yes,’ he said as he snapped the cover shut and handed it to me. ‘You heard what I said.’
‘But why, Timekeeper, I don’t understand. To read with the eyes; it’s so … clumsy.’
‘You’ll learn to read, and you’ll learn the dead languages in this book.’
‘Why?’
‘So that you’ll hear these poems in your heart.’
‘Why?’
‘Question me again, damn you, and I’ll forbid you to journey for seven years! Then you’ll learn patience!’
‘Forgive me, Timekeeper.’
‘Read the book, and you may live,’ he said. He reached out and patted the back of my neck. ‘Your life is all you have; guard it like a treasure.’
The Timekeeper was the most complicated man I have ever known. He was a man whose selfness comprised a thousand jagged pieces of love and hate, whimsy and will; he was a man who battled himself. I stood there dumbly holding the dusty old book he had placed in my hands, and I looked into the black pools of his unfathomable eyes, and I saw hell. He paced the room like an old, white wolf who had once been caught in a wormrunner’s steel trap. He was wary of something, perhaps of giving me the book. As he paced, he rubbed the muscles of his right leg and limped, slightly. He seemed at once vicious and kind, lonely, and bitter at his loneliness. Here was a man, I thought, who had never known a single day’s (or night’s) peace, an old, old man who had been wounded in love and cut in wars and burnt by dreams turned to ashes in his hands. He possessed a tremendous vitality, and his zest and love of life had finally led him to that essential paradox of human existence. He loved the air he breathed and the beating of his heart so fully and well that he had let his natural hatred of death ruin his living of life. He brooded too much about death. It was said that he had once killed another human being with his own hands to save his own life. There were rumours that he used a nepenthe to ease the panic of lapsing time and to forget, for a little while, the pains of his past and the angry roar of pure existence. I looked at the lines of his scowling face, and I thought the rumours might be true.
‘I don’t understand,’ I said, ‘how a book of poems could save my life.’ I began to laugh.
He stopped by the window, smiling at me without humour. His large, veined hands were clasped behind his back. ‘I’ll tell you something about the Entity that no one else knows. She has a fondness for many things human, and of all these things, she likes ancient poetry the best.’
I sat quietly in my chair. I did not dare ask him why he thought the Solid State Entity liked human poetry.
‘If you learn these poems,’ he said, ‘perhaps the Entity will be less likely to kill you like a fly.’
I thanked him because I did not know what else to do. I would humour this somewhat deranged old man, I decided. I accepted the book. I even turned the pages, carefully, pretending to take an interest in the endless lines of black letters. Near the middle of the book, which contained thirteen hundred and forty-nine brittle pages, I saw a word that I recognized. The word reminded me that the Timekeeper was not a man to be laughed at or mocked. Once, when I was a young novice, the horologes had caught a democrat with a laser burning written words into the white marble of the Tower. The Timekeeper – I remember his neck muscles writhing like spirali beneath his tight skin – had ordered the poor man thrown from the top of the Tower in atonement for the dual crimes of destroying beauty and inflicting his ideas on others. Barbaric. According to the canons of our Order, of course, slelling is supposedly the only crime punishable by death. (When slel-neckers are caught stealing another’s DNA they are beheaded, one of the few ancient customs both efficient and merciful.) We hold that banishment from our beautiful city is punishment enough for all other crimes, but for some reason, when the Timekeeper had seen the graffito, FREEDOM, etched into the archway above the Tower’s entrance, he had raged and had discovered an exceptionary clause in the ninety-first canon permitting him, so he claimed, to order that: ‘The punishment will fit the crime.’ To this day, the graffito remains above the archway, a reminder not only that freedom is a dead concept, but that our lives are determined by sometimes capricious forces beyond our control.
We talked for a while about the forces that control the universe, and we talked about the quest. When I expressed my excitement over the possibility of discovering the Elder Eddas, the Timekeeper, ever a man of contradictions, ran his fingers through his snowy hair as he grimaced and said, ‘I’m not so sure I want man saved. So, I’ve had enough of men – maybe it’s time the ticking stopped and the clock ran down. Let the Vild explode, every damn star from Vesper to Nwarth. Saved! Life is hell, eh? And there’s no salvation except death, no matter what the Friends of Man say.’ I waited for his breath to run out as he ranted about the pervasive – and perverse – effect that the alien missionaries and alien religions had had upon the human race; I waited a long time.
The sky had long since grown dark and blackened when he hammered the edge of his fist against his thigh and growled out, ‘Piss on the Ieldra! So they made themselves into gods and carked themselves into the core? They should leave us alone, eh? Man’s man, and gods are gods, each to his own purpose. But you’ve sworn your silly oath, so you go find them or their Eddas or anything else you think you can find.’
Then he sighed and added, ‘But go carefully.’
It is strange how often the smallest of events, the most trivial of decisions, can utterly change our lives. Having said goodbye to the Timekeeper, I reached the ice beneath the tower, and I stole another look at the book he had given me. Poems! A simple book of clumsy, ancient poems! There on the gliddery, which was dark and bare, I stood for a long time wondering if I shouldn’t throw the book into our dormitory room’s fireplace; I stood there brooding over the meaning of chance and fate. Then the icy, damp wind off the Sound began to blow, carrying into my bones the chill of death – whose death I did not then know. The wind drove hard snowflakes across the ice, stinging my face and scouring the windows of the Tower. The soft sound of ice brushing against glass was almost lost to the tinkling of the wind chimes hanging from the Tower’s window ledges. Shrugging my shoulders, I pulled the hood of my kamelaika over my head. The Timekeeper wanted me to read the book. Very well, I would read the book.
My hands were numb as I slipped it into the pack I wore at the small of my back. I struck off down the gliddery in a hurry. Bardo and my other friends would be waiting dinner for me, and I was hungry and cold.
I spent most of my last night in the City making my various goodbyes. There was a dinner on my behalf in one of the smaller, more elegant restaurants of the Hofgarten. As was the custom of the scryers, Katharine refused to wish me well because, as she said, ‘my destiny was written in my history,’ whatever that meant. Bardo, of course, alternately wept and cursed and blustered. He had, perversely, taken a liking to heated beer, and he drank copious amounts of the foamy yellow liquid to ease his fear of the uncertain future. He made toasts and speeches to our friends, reciting sentimental verses he had composed. He lapsed into song, until Chantal Astoreth, that wry, dainty lover of music, pointed out that his voice was slurry with drink and not up to its usual fine quality. Finally, he fell stupefied into his chair, took my hand in his, and announced, ‘This is the saddest day of my damned life,’ And then he fell asleep.
My mother said a similar thing, and she barely kept herself from crying. (Though the corner of her mouth twitched uncontrollably as it did when she was full of strong emotion.) She looked at me, with her crooked, dark eyebrows and her nervous eyes, and she said, ‘Soli severs your oath because your mother went begging to the Timekeeper. And how do you repay me? You cut my heart.’
I did not tell her what the Timekeeper had said to me earlier that day in the Tower. She would not want to know how easily he had seen through her lies. She drew on her drab fur, which was shiny grey in patches where the fine shagshay hairs had worn off. She laughed in a low, disturbing manner as if she had a private joke with herself. I thought she would leave then without saying another word. But she turned to me, kissed my forehead, and whispered, ‘Come back. To your mother who bleeds for you, who loves you.’
I left the restaurant before dawn (I didn’t sleep that night), and I skated down the deserted Way to the Hollow Fields. There, at the foot of Urkel, even in the coldest part of morning, its acres of runs and pads were busy with sleds and windjammers and other craft. Thunder shook the ice of the slidderies, and the air was full of red rocket tailings and sonic booms. High above, the feathery lines of contrails glowed pink against the early blue sky. It was very beautiful. Although I had come here often on duties at this time of day, it occurred to me that I had always taken such beauty for granted.
Beneath the Fields, the Cavern of the Thousand Light Ships opened through a half-mile of melted rock. Although there were not nearly so many as a thousand ships – and have not been since the Tycho’s time – there were many more than the eye could take in at a glance. Near the middle of the eighth row of ships, I stood chatting with an olive-robed programmer beside my ship, the Immanent Carnation. While we debated a minor augmentation in the ship’s heuristics and paradox logics, someone called out my name. I looked down the walkway where the row of sleek, diamond hulls disappeared into the depths. I saw a long shape limned by the faint light of the luminescent lichen covering the Cavern’s walls. ‘Mallory,’ the voice rang out, echoing from the dark, curving ceiling above us. ‘It’s time to say goodbye, isn’t it?’ The walkway sang with the slap of heavy boots against reverberating steel, and then I saw him clearly, tall and severe in his black woollens. It was Soli.
The programmer, Master Rafael, who was a shy, quiet-loving man with skin as smooth and black as basalt, greeted him and hastily made an excuse for leaving us alone together.
‘She’s beautiful,’ Soli said, scrutinizing the lines of my ship, the narrow nose and the swept-forward wings. ‘That has to be admitted. Outside she’s lithe and balanced and beautiful. But it’s the inside that is the soul of a lightship, isn’t it? The Lord Programmer told me you’ve played with the Hilbert logics to an unusual degree. Why so, Pilot?’
For a while we talked about the things that pilots talk about. We debated the paradoxes and discussed my choosing of Master Jafar’s ideoplasts. ‘He was a great notationist,’ he said, ‘but his representation of Justerini’s omega function is redundant, isn’t it?’
He suggested certain substitutions of symbols that seemed to make great sense, and I could not keep the note of surprise from my voice as I asked, ‘Why are you helping me, Lord Pilot?’
‘It’s my duty to help new pilots.’
‘I thought you wanted me to fail.’
‘How could you know what was wanted?’ He rubbed his temples as he looked into the open pit of my ship. He seemed agitated and ill at ease.
‘But you tricked me into swearing the oath.’
‘Did I? Did I?’
‘And then you released me. Why?’
He reached out and touched the hull of my ship, almost as one would stroke a woman. He did not answer my question. Instead he pressed his lips together, and he asked me, ‘Then you really will journey into the Entity?’
‘Yes, Lord Pilot, I’ve said I would.’
