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Praise

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

For Melody

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

1 Journeymen Die

2 A Pilot’s Vows

3 The Timekeeper’s Tower

4 The Number Storm

5 The Solid State Entity

6 The Image of Man

7 Rainer’s Sculpture

8 Kweitkel

9 Yuri the Wise

10 The Aklia

11 The Old Man of the Cave

12 The Little Death

13 Hunger

14 The Radio

15 The Eyes of a Scryer

16 The Death of a Pilot

17 Agathange

18 The Tycho’s Conjecture

19 The Parable of the Mad King

20 The Rings of Qallar

21 The Eyes of a Child

22 The Hanuman-Ordando Paradox

23 Plutonium Spring

24 Deus ex Machina

25 The Great Ocean of Truth

26 Kalinda of the Flowers

27 Kelkemesh

28 Ananke

29 The Secret of Life

30 Neverness

Keep Reading

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

1
Journeymen Die

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.

‘Aren’t you curious?’ I asked. ‘The Lord Pilot returns from the longest journey in the three thousand years of our Order, and you aren’t even curious to know what he’s discovered?’

‘No, I’m not afflicted with curiosity, thank God.’

‘It’s said that the Timekeeper will call the quest at the convocation. Don’t you even want to know?’

‘If there’s a quest,’ he said, ‘we’ll probably all die.’

‘Journeymen die,’ I said.

Journeymen Die – it was a saying we had, a warning cut into the marble archway above the entrance to Resa that is meant to terrorize young journeymen into leaving the Order before the manifold claimed them; it is a saying that is true.

‘“To die among the stars,”’ I quoted the Tycho, ‘“is the most glorious death.”’

‘Nonsense!’ Bardo shouted as he slapped the arm of the chair. He belched and said, ‘Twelve years I’ve known you, and you’re still talking nonsense.’

‘You can’t live forever,’ I said.

‘I can damn try.’

‘It would be hell,’ I said. ‘Day after day, thinking the same thoughts, the same dull stars. The same faces of friends doing and talking about the same things, the relentless apathy, trapped within our same brains, this negative eternity of our confused and painful lives.’

He shook his head back and forth so violently that drops of sweat flew off his forehead. ‘A different woman each night,’ he countered. ‘Or three very different women each night. A boy or an alien courtesan if things got too boring. Thirty thousand planets of the Civilized Worlds, and I’ve seen only fifty of them. Ah, I’ve heard the talk of our Lord Pilot and his quest. For the secret of life! Do you want to know the secret of life? Bardo will tell you the secret of life: it’s not the amount of time we have, despite what I’ve just said. No, it’s not quantity and it’s not even quality. It’s variety.’

As I usually did, I had let him blather, and he had blathered his way into a trap.

‘The variety of the bars in the Farsider’s Quarter,’ I said, ‘is nearly infinite. Are you coming with me?’

‘Damn you, Mallory! Of course I am!’

I put on my racing gloves and clipped in the blades of my skates. I walked towards the heavy mahogany door of our room. The long racing blades left dents in the alien-woven Fravashi carpet. Bardo bellowed as he stood up and followed behind me, smoothing out the dents with the balls of his black-slippered feet. ‘You’ve no respect for art,’ he said as he put on his skates. He fastened his black shagshay fur cape around his neck with a gold chain and opened the door. ‘Barbarian!’ he said, and we skated out onto the street.

We sped between Resa’s Morning Towers tucked low and tight with our arms swinging and our skates clacking mechanically against the smooth red ice. The cold wind against my face felt good. In no time at all we shot past the granite and basalt towers of the high professionals’ college, Upplysa, and passed through the marble pillars of the west gate of the Academy, and there she was.

She shimmers, my city, she shimmers. She is said to be the most beautiful of all the cities of the Civilized Worlds, more beautiful even than Parpallaix or the cathedral cities of Vesper. To the west, pushing into the green sea like a huge, jewel-studded sleeve of city, the fragile obsidian cloisters and hospices of the Farsider’s Quarter gleamed like black glass mirrors. Straight ahead as we skated, I saw the frothy churn of the Sound and the whitecaps of breakers crashing against the cliffs of North Beach, and above the entire city, veined with purple and glazed with snow and ice, Waaskel and Attakel rose up like vast pyramids against the sky. Beneath the half-ring of extinct volcanoes (Urkel, I should mention, is the southernmost peak, and though less magnificent than the others, it has a conical symmetry that some find pleasing) the towers and spires of the Academy scattered the dazzling false winter light so that the whole of the Old City sparkled. The streets, as everyone knows, are coloured ice. Throughout the city, the white shimmer is broken by strands of orange and green and blue. ‘Strange are the streets of the City of Pain,’ the Timekeeper is fond of quoting, but though indeed colourful and strange, they are colourful and strange to a purpose. The streets – the glissades and slidderies – have no names. Thus it has been since our first Timekeeper announced that young novices could prepare their brains for the pathways of the manifold by memorizing the pathways of our city. Since he understood that our city would grow and change, he devised a plan whereby returning pilots who had been away too long might still be able to negotiate the ice and not lose their way. The plan is supposed to be simple. There are two main streets: the Run, coloured blue, which twists from West Beach across the long sleeve of the peninsula where it meets the foothills of Attakel and Urkel, and the Way, which is laid straight from the Hollow Fields to the Sound. Any orange sliddery intersects – eventually – the Way. Any green glissade intersects the Run. The glidderies, coloured purple, join with glissades, and the red lesser glidderies give out onto the slidderies. I should not confuse matters by mentioning that there are two yellow streets running through the Pilot’s Quarter, but there are. No one knows how they came to be there. A joke, no doubt, on our first Timekeeper.

We turned onto the Way at an orange and white chequered intersection about a mile west of the Academy. The street was crowded with harijan and wormrunners and other farsiders. We passed and bowed to the eschatologists, cetics, akashics, horologes, the professionals and academicians of our Order. (We did not come across any other pilots. Although we pilots – some will deny this – are the very soul of our Order, we are outnumbered by the scryers, holists, historians, remembrancers and ecologists, by the programmers, neologicians and cantors. Our Order is divided into one hundred and eighteen disciplines; there are too many disciplines, more disciplines, it seems, every year.) There was excitement in the air, as well as the alien scent of a couple of Friends of Man, who had their trunks lifted as they talked to each other, spraying out their foul speech molecules. Next to us skated an expensively dressed Alaloi – or rather a man whose flesh had been sculpted into the thick, powerful, hairy body of an Alaloi. This kind of artificial return to the primitive form had been a fashion in the city for years, ever since the famous Goshevan of Summerworld had tired of his human flesh and had gone to live with the Alaloi in their caves on the islands to the west of Neverness. The false-Alaloi, who was wearing too much purple velvet and gold, pushed one of the slender, gentle harijan out of his way and shouted, ‘Watch out, stupid farsider!’ The bewildered harijan stumbled, made a sign of peace across his shiny forehead, and slunk off into the crowd like a beaten dog.

Bardo looked at me and shook his head sadly. He had always had a strange empathy for the harijan and other homeless pilgrims who come to our city seeking enlightenment. (And too often, they come seeking riches of a more mundane nature.) He smiled as he edged closer to the barbaric Alaloi. He insinuated his thick tree trunk of a leg between the purple-covered legs of the unsuspecting man. There was a ringing of steel against steel, and steel grinding against ice, and suddenly the man pitched forward to the street with a slap and a crack. Bardo shouted, ‘Excuse me!’ Then he laughed, reached back and grabbed my forearm, and pulled me through the crush of skaters who were jostling one another and vying for position in their hurry to reach their favourite cafes or kiosks for their evening meal. I looked back through the crowd, but I could not see the man whom Bardo had tripped.

‘On Summerworld,’ Bardo said to me between gasps of air, ‘we brand dung like him with red-hot steel.’

We crossed into the Farsider’s Quarter and came to the Street of the Ten Thousand Bars. I have said that the streets of Neverness have no names, but that is not entirely true. They have no official names, no names that are marked on buildings or posted on street signs. Especially in the Farsider’s Quarter, there are many nameless streets that are named according to the prevailing enterprise transpiring along its convolutions of coloured ice. Thus there is a Street of Cutters and Splicers, and a Street of Common Whores, as well as a Street of Master Courtesans. The Street of the Ten Thousand Bars is actually more of a district than a street; it is a maze of red lesser glidderies encompassing tiny bars that cater to the unique tastes of their patrons. One bar will serve only toalache while another might specialize in cilka, the pineal gland of the thallow bird which induces visions in small quantities and is lethal in larger ones. There are bars frequented only by the alien Friends of Man, and there are bars open to anyone who writes haiku (but only Simoom haiku) or plays the shakuhachi. Near the edge of the district, there is a bar where the eschatologists argue as to how long it will be before the exploding Vild destroys the last of the Civilized Worlds, and next door, a bar for the tychists who believe that absolute chance is the fundament of the universe, and that most probably some worlds will survive. I do not know if there are as many as ten thousand bars or if there are many more. Bardo often joked that if one could imagine a bar existing, it must exist. Somewhere there is a bar, he claimed, where the Fravashi analyse the anguished poetry of the Swarming Centuries and another bar where their criticisms are criticized. Somewhere – and why not? – there is a bar for those wishing to talk about what is occurring in all the other bars.

We stopped in front of the black, windowless master pilot’s bar, or, I should say, the bar for master pilots recently returned from the manifold. The sun had set, and the wind moaned as it drove flowing, ghostlike wisps of snow down the darkened gliddery. In the dim light of the street globes – when for a moment the wind suddenly pulled away the ragged, drifting snow shroud – the ice of the street was blood red.

‘This is an ugly place,’ Bardo said, his voice booming from the stone walls surrounding us. ‘I have a proposition. Since I’m in a generous mood, I’ll buy you a master courtesan for the night. You’ve never been able to afford one, have you? By God, it’s like nothing you’ve ever –’

‘No,’ I said as I shook my head.

I opened the heavy stone door, which was made of obsidian and so smooth that it felt almost greasy to the touch. For a moment, I thought the tiny room was empty. Then I saw two men standing at the dark end of the narrow bar, and I heard the shorter one say, ‘If you please, close the door, it’s cold.’

We stepped over to the bar, into the flickering light of the marble fireplace behind us. ‘Mallory,’ the man said, ‘and Bardo, what are you two doing here?’

My eyes adjusted to the dim orange light, and I saw the master pilot, Lionel Killirand. He shot me a swift look with his hard little eyes and contracted his blond eyebrows quizzically.

‘Soli,’ he said to the tall man next to him, ‘allow me to present your nephew.’

The tall man turned into the light, and I looked at my uncle, Leopold Soli, the Lord Pilot of our Order. It was like looking at myself.

He stared at me with troubled, deep-set, blue eyes. I did not like what I saw in his eyes; I remembered the stories my Aunt Justine had told me, that Soli was a man famous for his terrible, unpredictable rages. Like mine, his nose was long and broad, the mouth wide, firm. From his long neck to his skates, thick black woollens covered his lean body. He seemed intensely curious, scrutinizing me as carefully as I did him. I looked at his hair; he looked at mine. His hair was long and bound back with a silver chain, as was the custom of his birth planet, Simoom. He had unique hair, wavy black shot with red, a genetic marker of some Soli forebear who had tampered with the family chromosomes. My hair, thank God, was pure black. I looked at him; he looked at me. I wondered for the thousandth time about my chromosomes.

‘Moira’s son.’ He said my mother’s name as one says a curse word. ‘You shouldn’t be here, should you?’

‘I wanted to meet you,’ I said. ‘My mother has talked about you all my life.’

‘Your mother hates me.’

There was a long silence broken by Bardo, who said, ‘Where’s the bartender?’

The bartender, a tonsured novice who wore the white wool cap of Borja over his bald head, opened the storage room door behind the bar. He said, ‘This is the master pilot’s bar. Journeymen drink at the journeymen’s bar, which is five bars down the gliddery towards the Street of Musicians.’

‘Novices don’t tell journeymen what to do,’ Bardo said. ‘I’ll have a pipe of toalache and my friend drinks coffee – Summerworld coffee if you have it, Farfara if you don’t.’

The novice shrugged his skinny shoulders and said, ‘The master pilots don’t smoke toalache in this bar.’

‘I’ll have a tumbler of liquid toalache, then.’

‘We don’t serve toalache or coffee.’

‘Then we’ll have an amorgenic. Something strong to send the hormones gushing. We’ve a busy night ahead of us.’

Soli picked up a tumbler of a smoky coloured liquid and took a sip. Behind us a log in the fireplace popped and fell between two others, scattering glowing cinders and ashes over the tiled floor. ‘We drink liquor or beer,’ he said.

‘Barbaric.’ This came from Bardo who added, ‘I’ll have beer, then.’

I looked at my tall uncle and asked, ‘What liquor are you drinking?’

‘It’s called skotch.’

‘I’ll have skotch,’ I said to the novice, who filled two tumblers – a large one with foamy beer and a smaller one with amber skotch – and set them in front of us atop the rosewood bar.

Bardo gulped his beer, and after I had taken a sip of skotch and coughed, he asked, ‘What does it taste like?’ I handed him my tumbler, watching as he brought it up to his fat red lips. He, too, coughed at the fire of the burning liquid and announced, ‘It tastes like gull piss!’

Soli smiled at Lionel and asked me, ‘How old are you?’

‘Twenty-one, Lord Pilot. Tomorrow when we take our vows, I’ll be the youngest pilot our Order has ever had, if I may say that without sounding like I’m bragging.’

‘Well, you’re bragging,’ Lionel said.

We talked for a while about the origins of such immense and fathomless beings as the Silicon God and the Solid State Entity, and other things that pilots talk about. Soli told us of his journey to the core; he spoke of dense clusters of hot new stars and of a great ringworld that some god or other had assembled around Betti Luz. Lionel argued that the great and often insane mainbrains (he did not like to use the word ‘gods’) roaming the galaxy must be organized according to different principles than were our own minuscule minds, for how else could their brains’ separate lobes – some of which were the size of moons – intercommunicate with others across light-years of space? It was an old argument. It was one of the many bitter arguments dividing the pilots and professionals of our Order. Lionel, and many eschatologists, programmers, and mechanics as well, believed the mainbrains had mastered nearly instantaneous tachyonic information flow. He held that we should seek contact with these beings, even though such contact was very dangerous and might someday force the Order to change in ways repugnant to older and more old-fashioned pilots such as Soli.

‘Who can understand a brain encompassing a thousand cubic light-years of space?’ Soli asked. ‘And who knows about tachyons? Perhaps the mainbrains think slowly, very slowly.’

To him, the origin and technology of the gods were of little interest. In this he was as stodgy as the Timekeeper, and like the Timekeeper, he thought that there were certain things that man was not meant to know. He recited a long list of pilots, the Tycho among them, who had been lost trying to penetrate the mystery of the Solid State Entity. ‘They overreached themselves,’ he told us. ‘They should have been aware of their limits.’ I smiled because this came from the tight lips of a man who had reached farther than any other, a famous pilot whose discovery would provoke the great crisis of our Order.

It was a heady drug, to talk with master pilots as pilots, as if we had long ago taken our vows and proved our mastery of the manifold. I drank my skotch and gathered up my courage, and I said, ‘I’ve heard there will be a quest. Will there really be?’

2
A Pilot’s Vows

Strange, though, alas! are the

Streets of the City of Pain …

Rainer Maria Rilke, Holocaust Century Scryer

We received our pilot’s rings late in the afternoon of the next day. At the centre of Resa, surrounded by the stone dormitories, apartments and other buildings of the college, the immense Hall of the Ancient Pilots overflowed with the men and women of our Order. From the great arched doorway to the dais where we journeymen knelt, the brightly coloured robes of the academicians and high professionals rippled like a sea of rainbow silk. Because the masters of the various professions tended to cleave to their peers, the rainbow sea was patchy: near the far pillars at the north end of the Hall stood orange-robed cetics, and next to them, a group of akashics covered from neck to ankle in yellow silk. There were cliques of scryers berobed in dazzling white, and green-robed mechanics standing close to each other, no doubt arguing as to the ultimate (and paradoxical) composition and nature of the spacetime continuum, or some other arcanum. Just below the dais was the black wavefront of the pilots and master pilots. I saw Lionel, Tomoth and his brothers, Stephen Caraghar and others that I knew. At the very front stood my mother and Justine, looking at us – I thought – proudly.

The Timekeeper, resplendent and stern in his flowing red robe, bade the thirty of us to repeat after him the vows of a pilot. It was good that we knelt close together. The warm, reassuring bulk of Bardo pressing me from the right, and my friend Quirin on my left, kept me from pitching forward to the polished marble surface of the dais. Although that morning I had been to a cutter who had melded the ragged tear of my eyelid and had taken a purgative to cleanse my body of poisonous skotch, I was ill. My head felt hot and heavy; it seemed that my brain was swollen with blood and would burst my skull from inside. My spirit, too, was burning. My life was ruined. I was sick with fear and dread. I thought of the Tycho and Erendira Ede and Ricardo Lavi, and other famous pilots who had died trying to pierce the mystery of the Solid State Entity.

Immersed as I was in my misery, I missed most of the Timekeeper’s warnings as to the deadliness of the manifold. One thing he said I remember clearly: that of the two hundred and eleven journeymen who had entered Resa with us, only we thirty remained. Journeymen Die, I said to myself, and suddenly the Timekeeper’s deep, rough voice vibrated through the haze of my wandering thoughts. ‘Pilots die too,’ he said, ‘but not as often or as easily, and they die to a greater purpose. It is to this purpose that we are gathered here today, to consecrate …’ He went on in a like manner for several minutes. Then he enjoined us to celibacy and poverty, the least in importance of our vows. (I should mention that the meaning of celibacy is taken in its narrowest sense. If it were not, Bardo could never have been a pilot. Although physical passion between man and woman is exalted, it is the rule of our Order that pilots not marry. It is a good rule, I think, a rule not without reason. When a pilot returns from the manifold years older or younger than his lover, as Soli recently had, the differential ageing – we call it crueltime – can destroy them.) ‘As you have learned and will learn, so must you teach,’ the Timekeeper said, and we took our third vow. Bardo must have heard my voice wavering because he reached over and squeezed my knee, as if to impart to me some of his great strength. The fourth vow, I thought, was the most important of all. ‘You must restrain yourselves,’ the Timekeeper told us. I knew it was true. The symbiosis between a pilot and his ship is as profound and powerful as it is deadly addictive. How many pilots, I wondered, had been lost to the manifold because they too often indulged in the power and joy of their extensional brains? Too many. I repeated the vow of obedience mechanically, with little spirit or enthusiasm. The Timekeeper paused, and I thought for a moment he was going to look at me, to chasten me or to make me repeat the fifth vow again. Then, with a voice pregnant with drama, in a ponderous cadence, he said, ‘The last vow is the holiest vow, the vow without which all your other vows would be as empty as a cup full of air.’ So it was that on the ninety-fifth day of false winter in the year 2929 since the founding of Neverness, we vowed above all else to seek wisdom and truth, even though our seeking should lead to our death and to the ruin of all that we loved and held dear.

The Timekeeper called for the rings. Leopold Soli emerged from an anteroom adjacent to the dais. A frightened-looking novice followed him carrying a velvet wand around which our thirty rings were stacked, one atop the other. We bowed our heads and extended our right hands. Soli proceeded down the line of journeymen, slipping the spun-diamond rings off the wand and sliding them onto each of our little fingers. ‘With this ring, you are a Pilot,’ he said to Alark Mandara and Chantal Astoreth. And to the brilliant Jonathan Ede and the Sonderval, ‘With this ring you are a pilot,’ on and on down the line of kneeling journeymen. His nose was so swollen that his words sounded nasal, as if he had a cold. He came to Bardo, whose fingers were bare of the jewellery he usually wore and instead encircled with rings of dead white flesh. He removed the largest ring from the wand. (Though my head was supposed to be bowed, I could not resist peeking as Soli pushed the gleaming black ring around Bardo’s mammoth finger.) Then it was my turn. Soli bent over to me, and he said, ‘With this ring you are a … pilot.’ He said the word ‘pilot’ as if it had been forced out of him, as if the word were acid to his tongue. He jammed the ring on my finger with such force that the diamond shaved a layer from my skin and bruised my knuckle tendon. Eight more times I heard ‘With this ring you are a pilot,’ and then the Timekeeper intoned the litany for the Lord Pilot, and said a requiem, and we were done.

We thirty pilots left the dais to show our new rings to our friends and masters. A few of the wealthier new pilots had family members who had paid the expensive passage to Neverness aboard a commercial deep ship, but Bardo was not one of these. (His father thought him a traitor for abandoning the family estates for the poverty of our Order.) We mingled with our fellows, and the sea of coloured silk engulfed us. There were shouts of happiness and laughter and boots stamping on the tiled floor. My mother’s friend, the eschatologist Kolenya Mor, indecently pressed her plump, wet cheek next to mine. She hugged me as she bawled, ‘Look at him, Moira.’

‘I’m looking at him,’ my mother said. She was a tall woman and strong (and beautiful), though I must admit she was slightly fat due to her love of chocolate candies. She wore the plain grey robe of a master cantor, those purest of pure mathematicians. Her quick grey eyes seemed to look everywhere at once as she tilted her head quizzically and asked me, ‘Your eyelid has been melded. Recently, hasn’t it?’ Ignoring my ring, she continued, ‘It’s well known what you said, the oath you swore. To Soli. It’s the talk of the city. “Moira’s son has sworn to penetrate the Solid State Entity,” that’s all I’ve heard today. My handsome, brilliant, reckless son.’ She began to cry. I was shocked, and I could not look at her. It was the first time I had ever seen her cry.

‘It’s a beautiful ring,’ my Aunt Justine said as she came up to me and bowed her head. She held up her own pilot’s ring for me to look at. ‘And well deserved, no matter what Soli says.’ Like my mother, Justine was tall with slightly greyed black hair pulled back in a chignon; like my mother she loved chocolates. But where my mother most often spent her days thinking and exploring the possibilities of her too-ambitious daydreams, Justine liked to socialize and skate figures and perform difficult jumps at the Ring of Fire, or the North Ring, or one of the city’s other crowded ice rings. Thus she had retained the streamlined suppleness of her first youth at the expense, I thought, of her naturally quick mind. I often wondered why she had wanted Soli for a husband, and more, why the Timekeeper had allowed these two famous pilots a special dispensation to marry.

Burgos Harsha, with his bushy eyebrows, jowls and long black hairs pushing out of his piglike nostrils, approached us and said, ‘Congratulations, Mallory. I always expected you to do something extraordinary – we all did, you know – but I never dreamed you’d break our Lord Pilot’s nose the first time you met him and swear to kill yourself in that nebula known colloquially – and, I might add, quite vulgarly – as the Solid State Entity.’ The master historian rubbed his hands together vigorously and turned to my mother. ‘Now, Moira, I’ve examined the canons and the oral history of the Tycho as well as the customaries, and it’s clear – I may be wrong, of course, but when have you known me to be wrong? – it’s clear that Mallory’s oath was a simple troth to the Lord Pilot, not a promissory oath to the Order. And certainly not a solemn oath. At the time he swore to kill himself – and this is a subtle point, but it’s clear – he hadn’t taken his vows, so he wasn’t legally a pilot, so he was not permitted to swear a promissory oath.’

‘I don’t understand,’ I said. From behind me came singing, the swish of silk against silk, and the chaotic hum of a thousand voices. ‘I swore what I swore. What difference does it make who I swore it to?’

‘The difference, Mallory, is that Soli can release you from your oath, if he wants to.’

I felt a squirt of adrenalin in my throat, and my heart fluttered in my chest like a nervous bird. I thought of all the ways pilots died: They died fenestering, their brains ruined by too-constant symbiosis with their ship, and they died of old age lost in decision trees; supernovae reduced their flesh to plasma, and dreamtime, too much dreamtime, left them forever staring vacantly at the burning stars; they were killed by aliens, and murdered by human beings, and minced by meteor swarms, and charred by the penumbras of blue giant stars, and frozen by the nothingness of deep space. I knew then that despite my foolish words about death among the stars being glorious, I did not want glory, and I desperately did not want to die.

Burgos left us, and my mother said to Justine, ‘You’ll talk to Soli, won’t you? I know he hates me. But why should he hate Mallory?’

I kicked the heel of my boot against the floor. Justine traced her index finger along her eyebrow and said, ‘Soli’s so difficult now. This last journey nearly killed him, inside, as well as out. Oh, I’ll talk to him, of course, I’ll talk on until my lips fall off as I always do, but I’m afraid he’ll just stare at me with his broody eyes and say things like “If life has meaning, how can we know if we’re meant to find it?” or, “A pilot dies best who dies young, before crueltime kills what he loves.” I can’t really talk to him when he’s like that, of course, and I think it’s possible that he thinks he’s being noble, letting Mallory swear to die heroically, or perhaps he really believes Mallory will succeed and just wants to be proud of him – I can’t tell what he thinks when he’s all full of himself, but I’ll talk to him, Moira, of course I will.’

I had little hope that Justine would be able to talk to him. Long ago, when the Timekeeper had let them marry, he had warned them, ‘Crueltime, you can’t conquer crueltime,’ and he had been right. It is commonly believed that it is differential ageing, the alder, that kills love, but I do not think this is entirely true. It is age and selfness that kill love. We grow more and more into our true selves every second that we are alive. If there is such a thing as fate it is this: the outer self seeking and awakening to the true self no matter the pain and terror – and there is always pain and terror – no matter how great the cost may be. Soli, true to his innermost desire, had returned from the core enthralled by his need to comprehend the meaning of death and the secret of life, while Justine had spent those same long years on Neverness living life and enjoying the things of life: fine foods and the smell of the sea at dusk (and, some said, her lovers’ caresses), as well as her endless quest to master her waltz jumps and perfect her figure eights.

‘I don’t want Justine to talk to him,’ I lied.

My mother tilted her head and touched my cheek with her hand as she had done when I was a boy sick with fever. ‘Don’t be foolish,’ she said.

A group of my fellow pilots, led by the immensely tall and thin Sonderval, diffused like a black cloud through the professionals around us and surrounded me. Li Tosh, Helena Charbo, and Richardess – I thought they were the finest pilots ever to come out of Resa. My old friend, Delora wi Towt, was pulling at her blonde braids as she greeted my mother. The Sonderval, who came from an exemplar family off Solsken, stretched himself straight to his eight feet of height, and said, ‘I wanted to tell you, Mallory. The whole college is proud of you. For facing the Lord Pilot – excuse me, Justine, I didn’t mean to insult – and we’re proud of what you swore to do. That took courage, we all know that. We wish you well on your journey.’

I smiled because the Sonderval and I had always been the fiercest of rivals at Resa. Along with Delora and Li Tosh (and Bardo when he wanted to be), he was the smartest of my fellow pilots. The Sonderval was a sly man, and I sensed more than a bit of reproach in his compliment. I did not think he believed I was courageous for swearing to do the impossible; more likely he knew that my anger had finally undone me. He seemed very pleased with himself, probably because he thought I would never return. But then, the exemplars of Solsken always need to be pleased with themselves, which is why they have bred themselves to such ridiculous heights.

The Sonderval and the others excused themselves and drifted off into the crowd. My mother said, ‘Mallory was always popular. With the other journeymen, if not his masters.’

I coughed as I stared at the white triangles of the floor. The singing seemed to grow louder. I recognized the melody of one of Takeko’s heroic (and romantic) madrigals. I was filled instantly with despair and false courage. Confused as I was, vacillating between bravado and a cowardly hope that Soli would dissolve my oath, I raised my voice and said, ‘Mother, I swore what I swore; it doesn’t matter what Justine says to Soli.’

‘Don’t be a fool,’ she said. ‘I won’t have you killing yourself.’

‘But you’d have me dishonour myself.’

‘Better dishonour – whatever that is – than death.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘better death than dishonour.’ But I did not believe my own words. In my heart, I was all too ready to accept dishonour rather than death.

My mother muttered something to herself – it was a habit of hers – something that sounded like, ‘Better that Soli should die. Then you’d suffer neither. Death nor dishonour.’

‘What did you say?’ I asked.

‘I didn’t say anything.’

She looked over my shoulder and frowned. I turned to see Soli, tall and sombre in his tight black robe, pushing his way through the sea of people. He was leading a beautiful, eyeless scryer by the arm. I was struck immediately by the contrast of white and black: The scryer’s black hair hung like a satin curtain over the back of her white robes, and her eyebrows were bushy and black against her white forehead. She moved slowly and too carefully, like a cold, marble statue brought to sudden – and unwelcome – life. I took little notice of her heavy breasts and dark, large nipples so obvious beneath the thin silk; it was her face that fixed my stare, the long aquiline nose and full red lips, and most of all, the dark, smoothly scarred hollows where her eyes used to be.

‘Katharine!’ Justine suddenly exclaimed as they came closer. ‘My darling daughter!’ She threw her arms around the scryer and said, ‘It’s been so long!’ They embraced for a while; then Justine wiped her moist eyes on the back of her gloves and said, ‘Mallory, may I present your cousin, Dama Katharine Ringess Soli.’

I greeted her and she turned her head in my direction. ‘Mallory,’ she said, ‘at last. It’s been so long.’

There have been moments in my life when time came to a stop, when I felt as if I were living some dimly remembered (though vital) event over again. Sometimes the sound of thallows screeching in winter or the smell of wet seaweed will take me instantly back to that clear night long ago when I stood alone on the desolate and windy beach of the Starnbergersee and gave myself over to the dream of mastering the stars; sometimes it is a colour, perhaps the sudden orange of a sliddery or a glissade’s vivid greenness, that transports me to another place and time; sometimes it is nothing at all, at least nothing more particular than a certain low slant of the sun’s rays in deep winter and the rushing of the icy sea wind. These moments are mysterious and wonderful, but they are also full of strange meaning and dread. The scryers, of course, teach the unity of nowness and thenness and times yet to be. For them, I think, future dreams and self-remembrance are two parts of a single mystery. They, those strange, holy, and self-blinded women and men of our Order, believe that if we are to have visions of our future, we must look into our past. So when Katharine smiled at me, and the calm, dulcet tones of her voice vibrated within me, I knew that I had come upon such a moment, when my past and future were as one.

Although I knew I had never seen her before, I felt as if I had known her all my life. I was instantly in love with her, not, of course, as one loves another human being, but as a wanderer might love a new ocean or a gorgeous snowy peak he has glimpsed for the first time. I was practically struck dumb by her calmness and her beauty, so I said the first stupid thing which came to mind. ‘Welcome to Neverness,’ I told her.

‘Yes, welcome,’ Soli said to his daughter. ‘Welcome to the City of Light.’ There was more than a little sarcasm and bitterness in his voice.

‘I remember the city very well, Father.’ And so she should have remembered since, like me, she was a child of the city. But when she was a girl, when Soli had gone off on his journey to the core, Justine had taken her to be raised by her grandmother on Lechoix. She had not seen her father (and I thought she would never see him again) for twenty-five years. All that time she had remained on Lechoix in the company of man-despising women. Although she had reason to be bitter, she was not. It was Soli who was bitter. He was angry at himself for having deserted his wife and daughter, and he was bitter that Justine had allowed and even encouraged Katharine to become a scryer. He hated scryers.

‘Thank you for making the journey,’ Soli said to her.

‘I heard that you had returned, Father.’

‘Yes, that’s true.’

There was an awkward silence as my strange family stood mute in the middle of a thousand babbling people. Soli was glowering at Justine, and she at him, while my mother stole furtive, ugly glances at Katharine. I could tell that she did not like her, probably because it was obvious that I did. Katharine smiled at me again, and said, ‘Congratulations, Mallory, on your … To go off exploring the Entity, that was a brave … we’re all very proud.’ I was a little irritated at her scryer’s habit of not completing her sentences, as if the person she was talking to could ‘see’ what was left unsaid and skip ahead to the crest of her rushing thoughts.

‘Yes, congratulations,’ Soli said. ‘But the pilot’s ring seems a little small for your finger. Let’s hope your pilot’s vows aren’t too great for your spirit.’

My mother cocked her head as she pointed at Soli’s chest and said, ‘What spirit remains? Within the Lord Pilot? A tired, bitter spirit. Don’t speak to my son of spirit.’

‘Shall we speak of life, then? Yes, we shall speak of life: Let’s hope Mallory lives long enough to enjoy the life of a new pilot. If there was a tumbler of skotch at hand we’d toast to the glorious but too short lives of foolish young pilots.’

‘The Lord Pilot,’ my mother said quickly, ‘is too proud of his own long life.’

Justine grasped Soli’s arm while she brought her full, pouting lips to his ear and began whispering. He broke away and said to me, ‘You were probably drunk when you swore your oath. And your Lord Pilot was certainly drunk. Therefore, my lovely wife informs me, we’ve only to announce that the whole thing was a joke, and we are both finished with this foolishness.’

Beneath the silk of my robe, I felt hot sweat running down my sides in rivulets as I asked, ‘You would do that, Lord Pilot?’

‘Who knows? Who knows his fate?’ He turned to Katharine and asked, ‘Have you seen his future? What will be done with Mallory? Should he be kept from his fate? “To die among the stars is the most glorious death” – that’s what the Tycho said before he disappeared into the Solid State Entity. Maybe Mallory will succeed where our greatest pilot failed. Should he be kept from fate and glory? Tell me, my lovely scryer.’

Everyone looked at Katharine as she stood there calmly listening to Soli. She must have sensed their stares because she put her hand into the side pocket of her robe, ‘the pocket of concealment,’ where the scryers keep their tub of blacking oil. When she removed her hand, her forefinger was covered with a cream so black that it shed no light; it was as if she had no finger, as if a miniature black hole existed in the space that her finger occupied. According to the custom of the scryers she daubed the oil into the hollows of her eyepits, coating the scars with concealing blackness. I looked at the hollows above her high cheekbones; it was like looking down two dark, mysterious tunnels into her soul where windows should have been. I looked at her for only a moment before I had to look away.

I was about to tell my sarcastic, arrogant uncle that I would do as I had sworn no matter what he decided when Katharine let out a clear, girlish laugh and said, ‘Mallory’s fate is his fate, and nothing can change … Except, Father, that you have changed it and always will have …’ And here she laughed again, and continued, ‘But in the end we choose our futures, do you see?’

Soli did not see, and neither did I nor anyone else. Who could understand the paradoxical, irritating sayings of the scryers?

Just then Bardo ambled over and thumped me on the back. He bowed to Justine and smiled before quickly looking away. Bardo – he had always tried to keep it a secret, but he could not – lusted for my aunt. I did not think that she lusted for him, nor did she quite approve of his brazen sexuality, though in truth, they were alike in one certain way: They both loved physical pleasure, and cared little for the past, nothing at all for the future. After being introduced to Katharine, he bowed to Soli and said, ‘Lord Pilot, has Mallory apologized for his barbaric behaviour last night? No? Well, I’ll apologize for him because he’s much too proud to apologize, and only I know how sorry he really is.’

‘Pride kills,’ Soli said.

‘“Pride kills,”’ Bardo repeated as he smoothed his black moustache with the side of his thumb. ‘Of course it does! But where does Mallory get his pride from? I’ve been his roommate for twelve years, and I know. “Soli is mapping the core stars,” he used to say. “Soli almost proved the Great Theorem.” Soli this, and Soli that – do you know what he says when I tell him he’s insane for wasting time practising his speed strokes? He says, “When Soli became a pilot, he won the pilot’s race, and so shall I.”’

He was referring, of course, to the race between the new pilots and the older ones held every year just after the convocation. For many, it is the high point of the Tycho’s Festival.

I was sure that my face was red. I could hardly bear to look at my uncle as he said, ‘Then tomorrow’s race should be challenging. No one has beaten me for …’ His eyes suddenly clouded, and his voice trembled, slightly, and he continued, ‘for a long time.’

We spent a short while debating the aerodynamics of racing. I held that a low tuck was more efficient, but Soli pointed out that in a long race – as tomorrow’s race would be – a low tuck quickly burned out the muscles of the thigh, and that one must practise restraint.

Our conversation was cut short when ten red-robed horologes marched out on to the dais and took their places by the Timekeeper, five to either side. In unison they sang out, ‘Silence, it is time! Silence, it is time!’ and there was a sudden silence in the Hall. Then the Timekeeper stepped forward, and he announced his summons and called the quest for the Elder Eddas. ‘The secret of Man’s immortality,’ he told us, ‘lies in our past and in our future.’ I felt Katharine’s shoulder brush my own, and I was shocked (and excited) to feel her long fingers quickly and secretly squeeze my hand. I listened to the Timekeeper repeat the message that Soli had brought back from the core; I listened and for a moment I was enraptured with dreams of discovering great things. Then I happened to look at Soli’s brooding eyes, and I did not care if I did great things. In my single-minded way I cared about only a single thing: that I should beat Soli in the pilot’s race. ‘We must search for the mystery,’ the Timekeeper continued. ‘If we search, we will discover the secret of life and save ourselves.’ At that moment I did not care about secrets or salvation. What I wanted, simply, was to defeat a proud, arrogant man.

I had resolved to return to my room and to sleep until the sun was high above the slopes of Urkel, but I had not counted on the excitement that the Timekeeper’s summons would arouse. The halls of our dormitory – and indeed, all of Resa – rang from the happy cries and shouts of pilots and journeymen and masters. Against my wishes, our rooms became a nexus for the night’s celebrations. Chantal Astoreth and Delora wi Towt arrived with three of their neologician friends from Lara Sig. Bardo distributed pipefuls of toalache, and the revelry began. It was a wild, magic night; it was a night of tremulously announced plans to reach Old Earth or to map the Tycho’s nebula, to fulfil our vow to seek wisdom as befitted our individual talents and dreams. Soon our two adjoining rooms were thick with blue smoke and carpeted from wall to wall with excited pilots and various other professionals who had heard about the party. Li Tosh, who was a gentle man with bright, quick almond eyes, announced his plan to reach the homeworld of the trickster aliens, the Darghinni. ‘It’s said that they’ve studied the history of the nebular brains,’ he told us. ‘Perhaps when I return, I’ll have enough courage to penetrate the Entity, too.’ Hideki Smith would sculpt his body into the weird, cruel shape of the Fayoli; he would journey to one of their planets and try to pose as one of them in hope of learning their secrets. Not to be outdone, red-haired Quirin proposed to journey to Agathange, where he would ask the porpoise-like men – who had long ago broken the law of the Civilized Worlds and had carked their DNA so that they were now more than men – he would ask the wise Agathanians about the secret of human life. I must admit that there were many sceptics such as Bardo who did not believe that the Ieldra possessed any great secret. But even the most sceptical of these pilots – Richardess and the Sonderval came immediately to mind – were eager to be off into the manifold. To them the quest was a wonderful excuse to seek fame and glory.

Around midnight my cousin Katharine appeared in our outer room’s open doorway. How she had found her way blind and alone across the confusing streets of the Academy she would not say. She sat next to me cross-legged on the floor. She flirted with me in her secretive, scryer’s way. I was intrigued that an older, wiser woman paid me such attention, and I think she must have realized that I found her tantalizing. I told myself that she, too, was a little in love with me, although I knew that scryers often act not to satisfy their passions but to fulfil some tenuous and private vision. In many barbaric places, of course, where the art of genotyping is primitive, cousin marriage (and mating) is forbidden. One never knows what sort of monsters the mingling of the germ plasm will produce. But Neverness was not one of those places. That we were so closely related seemed only slightly incestuous and very exciting.

We talked about what she had said earlier to Soli about fate, in particular about my fate. She laughed at me as she stripped the black leather glove from my right hand. She slowly stroked the lines of my naked palm and foresaw that the span of my years would be ‘measureless to man.’ I thought that she had a keen sense of humour. When I asked if her words meant that my life would be very long or absurdly short, she turned to me with that beautiful, mysterious smile the scryers affect, and she said, ‘A moment to a photino is infinite, and to a god, our universe has lived but a moment. You must learn to love the moments you have, Mallory.’ (Towards the early part of morning, she taught me that moments of sexual ecstasy and love can indeed be made to last nearly forever. At the time I did not know whether to ascribe this miracle to the time-annihilating training of the scryers, or if all women had such power.)

It was a night of sorrowful goodbyes, as well. At one point Bardo, his weepy eyes electric with toalache, pulled me away from Katharine and said, ‘You’re the finest friend I’ve ever had. The finest friend anyone has ever had. And now Bardo must lose you because of a stupid oath. It’s not fair! Why is this cold, empty universe, which has bestowed upon us what we so laughingly call life, why is it so barbarically unfair? I, Bardo, will shout it across the room, shout it to the Rosette Nebula and to Eta Carina and to Regal Luz: It’s unfair! Unfair it is, and that’s why we were given brains, to cozen and plan, to circumvent and cheat. It’s to cheat death that I’m going to tell you what I’ll tell you. You won’t like this, my brave, noble friend, but here it is: You’ve got to let Soli win the race tomorrow. He’s like my father, he’s proud and vain, and he hates for anyone to beat him. I’m a keen judge of character, and I know. Let him win the race and he’ll let you take back your oath. Please, Mallory, as you love me, let him win the stupid race!’

Late the next morning, I pulled on my racing kamelaika and met my mother for breakfast at one of the cafes that line the Run opposite the flowing Hyacinth Gardens. ‘You’re racing Soli today, and you didn’t sleep last night, did you? Here, drink this coffee. It’s Farfara prime. I’ve taught you strategy since you were four years old, and you didn’t sleep last night?’

‘Bardo thinks I should let Soli win the race.’

‘He’s a fat fool. Haven’t I told you that for twelve years? He thinks he’s clever. Clever he’s not. I could have taught him cleverness. When I was four years old.’

From a delicate blue pot, she poured coffee into a marble cup and slid it across the table. I sipped the hot, black coffee, totally unprepared for what she said next. ‘We can leave the Order,’ she whispered, tilting her head as she quickly glanced at the two master mechanics sitting at the table next to us. ‘The new academy, the one on Tria, you know what I’m saying, don’t you? They need pilots, good ones like you. Why should our Order tyrannize the fallaways?’

I was so shocked that I spilled coffee on my lap, burning my leg. The Merchant Pilots of Tria – those wily, unethical thingists and tubists – for a long time had tried to break the power of our Order. ‘What are you saying, Mother? That we should be traitors?’

‘Traitors to the Order, yes. Better for you to betray a few hastily given vows, than to betray the life I gave you.’

‘You always hoped I’d be Lord Pilot someday.’

‘You could be a merchant prince. Of Tria.’

‘No, Mother, never that.’

‘It would surprise you. That certain pilots have been offered middle estates on Tria. Certain programmers and cantors, too.’

‘But no one has accepted, have they?’

‘Not yet,’ she said, and she began drumming her fingers against the table top. ‘But there is more dissension among the professionals than you know. Some of the historians like Burgos Harsha think the Order is stagnating. And the pilots. The rule against marriage is almost as hated as marriage is hateful.’ Here she paused to laugh at her little joke, then continued, ‘There is more disorder in the Order than you’d dream.’ She laughed again as if she knew something I didn’t, and she sat back in her chair, waiting.

‘I’d rather die than go to Tria.’

‘Then we’ll flee to Lechoix. Your grandmother will welcome us, even if you are a bull.’

‘I don’t think she will.’

My grandmother whom I had never met, Dama Oriana Ringess, had brought up Justine and my mother – and Katharine – properly. ‘Properly’ in the Lechoix Matriarchy meant an early introduction into the feminine mysteries and severe language rules. Thus men are despised and are referred to as ‘bulls,’ or ‘gamecocks,’ or sometimes ‘mules.’ Desire between man and woman is called ‘the sick heat,’ and marriage, heterosexual marriage, that is, is ‘the living hell.’ The High Damen, of which my grandmother is one of the highest, abhorring the belief that men make better pilots than women, support the largest and best of the Order’s elite schools. So it was that when my mother and Justine arrived at Borja long ago having never seen a man, they were shocked – and in my mother’s case, hateful – that such young beasts as Lionel and Soli could be better mathematicians than they were.

‘Dama Oriana,’ I said, ‘would do nothing that would shame the Matriarchy, would she?’

‘Listen to me. Listen! I won’t let Soli kill my son!’ She said the word ‘son’ with such a wrenching desperation that I felt compelled to look at her, even as she burst into tears and sobbed. She nervously pulled her hair from the chignon’s binding leather and used the shiny strands to dry her face. ‘Listen, listen,’ she said. ‘Brilliant Soli returns from the manifold. Brilliant as always, but not so brilliant. I used to beat him. At chess. Three games out of four before he quit playing me.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’ve ordered you bread,’ she said as she held up her hand and motioned to the domestic. It rolled to the table where it placed before me a basket of hot, crusty black bread. ‘Eat your bread and drink your coffee.’

‘You’re not eating?’

Usually she had bread at breakfast; like her sisters on Lechoix she would eat no foods of animal origin, not even the cultured meats favoured by almost everyone in our city.

I reached for one of the small, oblong loaves. I bit into it; it was delicious. As I chewed the hard bread, she removed a ball of chocolate from the blue bowl in front of her and popped it into her mouth.

‘What if I succeed, Mother?’ I asked. She stuffed three more balls of chocolate into her mouth, staring at me.

Her reply was barely comprehensible, a burble of words forced through a mouthful of sticky, melting chocolate: ‘Sometimes I think Soli’s right. My son is a fool.’

‘You’ve always said you have faith in me.’

‘Faith I have; blind faith I have not.’

‘Why should it be impossible? The Entity is a nebula much like any other: hot gases, interstellar dust, a few million stars. Perhaps it’s mere chance that the Tycho and the others were lost.’

‘Heresy!’ she said as she picked apart a chocolate ball with her long fingernails. ‘Haven’t I taught you better? I won’t have you saying that word. It’s not chance. That killed the Tycho. It’s She.’

‘She?’

‘The Entity. She’s a web of a million meshing biocomputers the size of moons. She manipulates matter. And She plies energy. And She twists space to Her liking. The manifold inside Her is known to be strange, hideously complex.’

‘Why do you call her “She”?’

My mother smiled and said, ‘Should I call the greatest intelligence, the holiest life in our universe, “he”?’

‘What of the Silicon God, then?’

‘Misnamed. By certain of the older eschatologists who divide essences into male and female. She should be called the “Silicon Goddess.” The universe gives birth to life; the essence of the universe is female.’

‘And what of men?’

‘They are repositories for sperm. Have you studied the dead languages of Old Earth as I’ve asked you to do? No? Well, there was a Romance expression: instrumenta vocalia. Men are tools with voices. Magnificent tools they are. And sometimes their voices are sublime. But without women, they’re nothing.’

‘And women without men?’

‘The Lechoix Matriarchy was founded five thousand years ago. There are no patriarchies.’

I sometimes think my mother should have been an historian or a remembrancer. She always seemed to know too much of ancient peoples, languages and customs, or at least enough to turn arguments her way.

‘I’m a man, Mother. Why did you choose to have a son?’

‘You’re a foolish boy.’

I took a long sip of coffee, and I wondered aloud, ‘What would it be like for a man to talk with a goddess?’

‘More foolishness,’ she said. And then, ‘I’ve made our decision. We’ll go to Lechoix.’

‘No, Mother. I won’t be the only man among eight million women who prize cunning above faith.’

She banged her coffee cup down on the table. ‘Then go to your race. With Soli. And be thankful your mother’s mother taught me cunning.’

I stared as she stared at me. We stared at each other for a long time. As a master cetic might, I tried to read the truth from the flickers of light reflecting from her bright irises and from the set of her wide mouth. But the only truth that came to me was an old truth: I could no more read her face than I could descry the future.

I sucked the last drops of coffee from my cup and touched my mother’s forehead. And then I went out to race Soli.

The race of the Thousand Pilots is not supposed to be a serious affair. (Neither do as many as a thousand pilots ever take part in the festivities.) It is, essentially, a somewhat farcical pitting of old pilots against the new, a symbolic rite of passage. The master pilots – usually there are about a hundred or so – gather in front of the Hall of the Ancient Pilots, and, as is their wont, they drink mugs of steaming kvass or other such beverages, all the while slapping shoulders and hands to give each other encouragement while they shout and jeer at the smaller group of new pilots. That afternoon there were mobs of brightly furred academicians, high professionals and novices crowding the ice of Resa Commons. There were wind chimes tinkling and journeymen whistling to the wormrunners as they held up their gloved hands to place their illegal bets. From the steps of the Hall came the piping of the clarinas and shakuhachis. The high, keening notes seemed to me like an anguished plea full of desperation and foreboding, at odds with the gaiety all around us. Bardo, too, must have felt the music inappropriate because he came up to me as I tested the edges of my skates with my thumbnail, and he said, ‘I detest mystical music. It makes me feel pity for the universe and arouses certain other feelings I’d rather not have aroused. Give me horns and drums, and by the way, Little Fellow, could I offer you a pinch of fireweed to get the blood singing?’

I refused his red crystals, as he must have known I would. The race master – I saw to my surprise that it was Burgos Harsha, wobbling on his skates because he had no doubt been drinking kvass since the morning’s preparations – called the two groups to our starting places. We crowded along the red chequered line where the lesser glidderies gave out onto the white ice at the edge of the Commons. ‘I had something important to tell you, but I’ve forgotten what it was,’ he cried out. ‘And when have you ever known me to forget anything? Now what was I saying? Does it matter? Well, then, may you pilots not lose your way and may you return soon.’ He reached for the white starting flag that a novice held out to him and managed to entangle his forearm in the cotton fabric. The novice pressed the short, wooden staff into his grasping fingers, and he waved the flag back and forth in front of his face, and the race began.

I shall mention only a few details of what happened on the streets of my city that day, because due to the peculiar nature and rules of the race, that is all a single pilot can do. The rules are simple: A pilot may choose any path through the four quarters of the city so long as she or he passes in sequence through one of the various checkpoints such as Rollo’s Ring in the Farsider’s Quarter, or the Hofgarten between the Zoo and the Pilot’s Quarter. The theory is that the smartest and most cunning pilot will win, the pilot who has best memorized the streets and shortcuts of our city. In practice, though, speed is at least as important as brains.

Bardo bellowed and stroked as he pushed between a cluster of master pilots who were blocking his way. (Such shoving, I should add, is permitted if the pilot first shouts out a warning.) Blond-haired Tomoth, who stroked furiously in a high tuck, almost fell as Bardo’s elbow caught him on the shoulder. Then Bardo shouted out, ‘First among equals!’ and he disappeared around the curve of the gliddery.

We caught up to him at the Rose Womb Cloisters, that jumble of squat buildings at Resa’s western edge housing the tanks in which we had floated for a considerable portion of our journeyman years. He was skating raggedly as we passed him. He had pulled the hood of his kamelaika away from his dripping head. ‘First among … equals,’ he said, wheezing and gasping for air. ‘At least … for a … quarter mile.’

At the west gate of the Academy we dispersed. Fifteen pilots turned onto the southernmost of the orange glidderies that lead to the Way while eight master pilots and six pilots – Soli and myself among them – chose a lesser gliddery through the gleaming Old City in order to avoid the arterial’s heavier traffic. And so it went. The sky above us was deep blue, the air dense and cold. In front of me Soli’s steel skates striking smoothly against the ice and the shouts and laughter of the onlookers lining the narrow street were like a racy music. I tucked low and turned as I cradled my right arm against the small of my back, and suddenly I was alone.

I saw other pilots only a few times during the rest of the race. I did not want to make a false analogy between the streets of Neverness and the pathways through the manifold, yet I could not help thinking about the similarities: to suddenly pass from the cold, shadowed, red lesser glidderies onto a sliddery and then to the brilliantly illuminated Way was like fenestering, falling from the manifold into the bright light surrounding a star. As a pilot far from our city segues into a decision tree where he must choose the correct pathway or perish, so we racers had to match our memories of the branching streets against the reality of the tangled knots of glissades and glidderies, or lose. And if dreamtime can be said to be the most important and pleasurable of a pilot’s mindsets, then the ecstasy of cool wind and intensely focused vision was what we felt, at least for the first five miles or so. Thus when I entered the checkpoint of the Winter Ring deep within the Farsider’s Quarter, and I saw Soli and Lionel ten yards in front of me and other racers skating onto the opening of ice behind me, I had enough breath and enthusiasm to call out, ‘Five miles alone on the city streets, and here we gather, as if we were stived around the fixed-points of a star!’

As Soli turned to answer me, the features of his face narrowed into a mask of fierce concentration. He was breathing deeply, and he said, ‘Beware exploding stars!’ And then he was gone, speeding down one of the lesser glidderies connecting to the dangerous Street of Smugglers.

I did not catch up to him until near the end of the race. I circled the spouting Silver Spume in the Zoo, where Friends of Man and Fravashi and two races of aliens I had never seen before looked on at the curious spectacle that we provided them. At North Ring the race officer shouted, ‘Soli first followed by Killirand a hundred yards followed by Ringess one hundred and fifty yards followed … ,’ and at the great circle outside the Hofgarten, where the Run intersects the Way, I heard, ‘Soli first followed by Ringess fifty yards followed by Killirand three hundred … ,’ and so it went. At the last checkpoint, which was in the Pilot’s Quarter, I saw my uncle a mere twenty yards ahead. I knew I would not see him again until I crossed first into the Commons and Burgos Harsha pronounced me the winner.

I was wrong.

I was skating west on the Run, cleverly – or so I thought – doubling back along the northern edge of the Old City so that I could cut along a little gliddery I knew of that led straight to the Academy’s north gate. The blue ice was crowded with novices and others who had somehow guessed that a few of the racers might choose this unlikely route. As I was congratulating myself and envisioning Burgos pinning the diamond victory medal to my chest, I glimpsed a streak of black through the press of skaters in front of me. The crowd shifted, and there was Soli calmly stroking close to the red stripe separating the skating lane from the sled lane. I was considering shouting out a challenge when I heard raucous laughter behind my back. I turned my head midstroke and saw two black-bearded men – wormrunners I guessed from the flamboyant cut of their furs – elbowing each other, clasping hands, and alternately whipping each other ahead by snapping their arms. They were much too old, of course, and the street was much too crowded for a game of bump-and-stake. I should have perceived this immediately. Instead, I completed my stroke because I was determined to give Soli no warning as I passed him. All at once the larger wormrunner smacked into Soli’s back, propelling him across the warning stripe into the sled lane. There came the sudden thunder of a large red sled as he stutter-stepped on his skates with his arms outstretched. He performed a desperate dance to avoid the sled’s hard, pointed nose, and suddenly he was down. The sled rocketed over him in a tenth of a second. (Though it seemed like a year.) I crossed the warning stripe and pulled him to the skating lane. He pushed me away with an astonishing force for someone who so nearly had been impaled. ‘Assassin,’ he said to me. He grunted and tried to stand.

I told him that it was a wormrunner who had pushed him, but he said, ‘If not you, then your mother’s hirelings. She hates me because she thinks you’ll be held to your oath. And for other reasons.’

I looked at the circle of people standing over us. Nowhere could I see the two black-bearded wormrunners.

‘But she’s wrong, Moira is.’

He held his side and coughed. Blood trickled from his long nose and open mouth. He beckoned to a nearby novice who approached nervously. ‘Your name?’ he asked.

‘Sophie Dean, from The Nave, Lord Pilot,’ the pretty girl answered.

‘Then,’ he said, ‘your Lord Pilot in the presence of the witness Sophie Dean releases Mallory Ringess from his oath to penetrate the Solid State Entity.’

He coughed again, spraying tiny red droplets over Sophie’s white jacket.

‘I think your ribs must be broken,’ I said. ‘The race is over for you, Lord Pilot.’

He grabbed my arm and pulled me closer to him. ‘Is it?’ he asked. Then he coughed as he pushed me away and began skating towards the Academy.

I stood there for a moment staring at the drops of blood burning tiny holes into the blue ice. I did not want to believe that my mother had sent assassins to murder Soli. I could not understand why he had released me from my oath.

‘Are you all right, Pilot?’ Sophie asked.

I was not all right. Though my life was saved, I felt sick to my stomach, utterly wretched. I coughed suddenly and vomited up a chyme of black bread and black coffee and bile.

‘Pilot?’

Sophie blinked her clear blue eyes against the sudden wind cutting beneath my garments, and in my mind was a knowledge, a complete and utter certainty that I would keep my oath to Soli and my vows to the Order no matter the cost. Each of us, I realized, must ultimately face death and ruin. It was merely my fate to have to face them sooner than most.

‘Pilot, shall I call for a sled?’

‘No, I’ll finish the race,’ I said.

‘You’re letting him get a lead.’

It was true. I looked down the Run as Soli turned onto the yellow street leading to my secret shortcut to the west gate.

‘Don’t worry, child,’ I said as I pushed off. ‘He’s injured and full of pain, and he’s coughing blood. I’ll catch him before we get halfway to Borja.’

I was again wrong. Though I struck the ice with my skates as fast as I could, I did not catch him as we passed the spires of Borja, and I did not catch him as we circled the Timekeeper’s Tower; I did not catch him at all.

The wind against my ears was like a winter storm as we entered Resa Commons. The multitudes cheered, and Burgos Harsha waved the green victory flag, and Leopold Soli, barely conscious and leaking so much blood from his torn lungs that a cutter later had to pump plasma into his veins, beat me by ten feet.

It might as well have been ten light-years.

3
The Timekeeper’s Tower

The goal of my theory is to establish once and for all the certitude of mathematical methods … The present state of affairs where we run up against the paradoxes is intolerable. Just think, the definitions and deductive methods which everyone learns, teaches and uses in mathematics, lead to absurdities! If mathematical thinking is defective, where are we to find truth and certitude?

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.)