Neverness. David Zindell
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The correspondences are superluminal, then? The correspondence scheme collapses? I’ve tried to prove that a hundred times but –
Everything in the universe is woven of a single superluminal fabric. Tat tvam asi, that thou art.
– I don’t understand.
You are not here to understand.
– Why do you think I’ve crossed half the galaxy, then?
You are here to kneel.
– What?
You are here to kneel – these are words from an old poem. Do you know the poem?
– No, of course not.
Ahhh, that is a shame. Then perhaps you are here to die as well as kneel.
– I’ll die in the infinite tree; there’s no mapping out of an infinite tree.
Others have come before you; others are lost in the tree.
– Others?
Suddenly the voice of the goddess grew as high and sweet as a little girl’s. Like the piping of a flute, the following words spilled into my brain:
They are all gone into a world of light!
And I alone sit lingering here;
Their very memory is fair and bright,
And my sad thoughts doth clear.
You must die. Deep inside you know this. Don’t be afraid.
– Well, pilots die – or so they say. I’m not afraid.
I am sorry you are afraid. It was that way with the others.
– What others?
Eight pilots of your Order have tried to penetrate my brains: Wicent li Towt, Erendira Ede and Alexandravondila; Ishi Mokku, Ricardo Lavi, Jemmu Flowtow and Atara of Darkmoon. And John Penhallegon, the one you call the Tycho.
– Then you killed them?
What do you know about killing? As an oyster, to protect itself, encapsulates an irritant grain of sand with layer upon layer of pearl, so I have confined all but one of these pilots to the branchings of a decision tree.
– What’s an oyster?
The Entity reached into my computer’s thoughtspace and placed there an image etched in light and touch and smell. By means of this forbidden telepathy – forbidden to us pilots – I experienced Her conception of oyster. In my mind I saw a soft, squishy creature which protected itself with a hinged shell that it could open or close at will. My fingers closed almost against my will, and in my hand I felt gritty sand against a scoop-shaped, hard, wet shell. My jaws moved of their own, moved my teeth against a tender meat which suddenly ruptured, filling my mouth with living fluids and salt and the taste of the sea. I smelled the thick, cloying perfume of naked proteins and heard a sucking sound as I swallowed the gobbet of raw, living flesh.
That is oyster.
– It’s wrong to kill animals for their meat.
And you, my innocent man, are a pretty pearl in the necklace of time. Do you understand the time distortions? The other pilots are alive, as a pearl is alive with lustre and beauty, yet they do not live. They have died, yet they remain undead.
– Again, you speak in riddles.
The universe is a riddle.
– You’re playing with me.
I like to play.
Before my mind’s eye, a transparent, glowing cube appeared. The cube was segmented into eight other stacked cubes, each of which flickered with confusing images. I looked inward at the cubes, and the images began to coalesce and harden. In each cube, except the one on the lower right, a disembodied head floated within its prison, as a pilot floats within his ship’s pit. Each face was scarred with the rictus of terror and insanity. Each face stared open-mouthed at me – stared through me – as if I were air. I recognized the faces, then. The historians had taught me well. They were the faces of Wicent li Towt, Ishi Mokku and the others who had come before me.
What is death, Mallory? The pilots are each lost in a dividing branch of the decision tree. They are as lost and forgotten as poems of the Aeschylus. But someday, I will remember them.
I wondered how she had encapsulated the pilots (and myself) in the infinite tree. There are ways, of course, to open a window into the manifold at random, to send a pilot unmapped and unprepared into an infinite tree. But She had used none of these ways. She had done something else, something marvellous. How was it possible? I wanted to know. Had Her consciousness really moulded the shape of the manifold, twisted the very strands of deep reality, much as a child braids together ropes of clay?
I did not know. I could not know. I had seen less than a millionth part of her, and She had probably needed only the tiniest portion of that part to speak with me mind to mind. I was like a grain of sand trying to understand an ocean from a few eddies and currents sweeping it along; I was like a flower trying to deduce space travel from the faint tickle of starlight upon its delicate petals. To this day I search for words describing my impression of the Entity’s power, but there are no words. I learned – if that is the right word for knowledge which comes in a sudden flash of insight – I was given to understand that She manipulated whole sciences and thought systems as I might string words into a sentence. But Her ‘sentences’ were as huge and profound as the utterances of the universe itself. She had reached truths and ways of knowing far beyond even the metaphilosophies of the alien Fravashi. She, a goddess, played with concepts which could remake the universe, concepts unthinkable to the mind of Man. While most of my race lived out their days muddled and confused in darkness, She had solved problems and found new directions of thought which we had never dreamed of, and worse, She had done so as easily as I might multiply two times one.
The mechanics often bemoan their oldest paradox, which is this: The strings weaving the fabric of the universe are so infinitesimal that any attempt to study them will change their properties. The very act of observation perturbs that which is observed. On Old Earth, it is said, there was a king who carked the atoms of everything around him so that all he touched turned into gold. The fabled king could neither eat nor drink because his food and wine tasted of nothing but gold. The mechanics are like this king: Everything they ‘touch’ turns into ugly lumps of matter, into electrons, quarks, or zeta-neutrinos. There is no way for them to perceive deep reality except through the golden, distorting lenses of their instruments or through the touch of their golden equations. In some unfathomable way, the Entity had transcended this prison of matter. To see reality directly, as it really is – this, I thought, must be the privilege of a godly intellect.
Do you see the pilots, Mallory Ringess?
I saw insanity and chaos. I stared into the cube containing the undead pilots. The black, sharp face of Jemmu Flowtow was leaking drool from its narrow lips.
– You trapped the pilots; then you could free them. And me.
But they are free. Or will be free when the universe has remade itself. What has been will be.
– That’s scryer talk.
The time distortions: When the universe has expanded outward so that the closest two stars are as far apart as the Grus Cloud of galaxies is now from the Canes Venatici, after billions of your years, the pilots will be as you see them, frozen into forever nowness. It is easier to stop time, is it not, than to restart it? To kill than create? But creation is timeless; creation is everything.
– The pilots … in the tree where the infinities branch into insanity, have you seen their insane frozen faces, then?