Neverness (The Neverness Cycle Book 1)

by David Zindell

the Order of Mystic Mathematicians and Other Seekers of the Ineffable Flame

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.”

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.

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.”

“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?”

And the clock beats; the clock tolls; the clock ticks;

“To die among the stars is the most glorious death, is it not?” “Yes, Lord Horologe.” There was a blur from my side and the Timekeeper slapped my face. “Nonsense!” he roared. “I won’t listen to such nonsense from you!” He walked over to the window and rapped the glass pane with his knuckles. “Cities such as Neverness are glorious,” he said. “And the ocean at sunset, or deep winter’s firefalls—these things are glorious. Death is death; death is horror. There’s no glory when the time runs out and the ticking stops, do you hear me? There’s only blackness and the hell of everlasting nothingness. Don’t be too quick to die, do you hear me, Mallory?”

“my destiny was written in my history,”

“The holists teach that the apparent dichotomy between free will and forced action is a false dichotomy.”

is impossible to describe the indescribable. Words, being words, are inadequate to represent that for which there are no words.

In the manifold there is no space, and therefore there is no time. That is to say there is no outtime. For me, inside my lightship, there was only shiptime or slowtime, or dreamtime, or sometimes quicktime—but never the realtime of the outer universe. Because my passage to the Rosette would probably be long and uneventful, I often quieted my brain with quicktime. I did this to ward off boredom. My mentations slowed to a glacial pace, and time passed more quickly. Years became hours while long segments of tedious nothingness were shrunken into the moment it took my heart to beat a single time.

But it was the poems themselves that gave me the greatest pleasure. It was wonderful to discover that the ancients, in all their stupendous ignorance of the immensity of spacetime and the endless profusion of life that fills our universe, knew as much of the great secret of life—or as little—as we know now. Though their perceptions were simple and bold, it seemed to me they often perceived more deeply that part of reality directly apprehensible to a mere man. Their poems were like hard diamonds crudely cut from some primal stone; their poems were full of a pounding, sensual, barbaric music; their poems sent the blood rushing and made the eyes focus on vistas of untouchable stars and cold, distant, northern seas. There were short, clever poems designed to capture one of life’s brief and sad (but beautiful) moments as one might capture and preserve a butterfly in glacier ice. There were poems that ran on for pages, recounting man’s lust for killing and blood and those pure and timeless moments of heroism when one feels that the life inside must be rejoined with the greater life without.

I was curious and as convinced of my own immortality as all young men are,

a red star named Kamilusa,

But the people had no lord—nor masters, sensei, matriarchs, kings, protectors or anyone else to direct their day–to–day activities. They were anarchists. As I learned, they were probably the descendants of hibakusha who centuries ago had fled the oppressive hierarchies of the Japanese Worlds. However, they seemed to have only the sketchiest memories of their passage through the Entity. No one could tell me how they had once piloted their deep ships and scurfed the windows of the manifold because no one remembered. And no one cared. They had lost the noblest of arts, and most other arts as well. The planet’s few hundred thousand people were barbarians who spent their long days eating, swimming, copulating and roasting their bodies brown in the sun’s red oven. The society of Kamilusa was one of those stale utopias where robots did the work of man’s hands and made more robots to do ever more work. And worse, they had programmed their computers to direct their robots, and worse still, they had let their computers do all their thinking for them. I spent five hundred–hour days there, and not once did I find a woman or man who cared where life had come from or where it was going to. (Though many of the children possessed a natural, soon–to–be–crushed curiosity.) Remarkably, no one—except perhaps the computers—seemed to realize that Kamilusa lay within the brain of a goddess.

I knew then that I had lied to myself utterly. I was not ready to chance everything to experience a goddess; I was not ready to face death at all. I remembered I had chosen my fate freely. I could only blame myself and my foolish pride. My last thought, as a scream formed upon my lips and I began hearing voices inside me, was: Why is man born to self–deception and lies?

If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn’t.

Do not flatter yourself that what occurs in your mind is true thought.

I did not want anything alien to “jiggle” the electrons in my brain, to fill me with its images and sounds, to make me see and hear and touch and smell things which did not exist, to change my very perception of reality. With this thought came a much more disturbing thought: What if the Entity already were jiggling my brain’s electrons? Perhaps She only wanted me to think that the voice I heard came from the computer. I did not know what to think. Was I really thinking my own thoughts? Or was the Entity playing with me, making me doubt that I was thinking my own thoughts?

I thought that the universe was a terribly uncertain place where I could be certain of only a single thing: that in the realm of my mind, I wanted no thoughts other than my own to alter my thinking.

At the beginning of time all the particles of the universe were crushed together into a single point; all the particles were as one, in the singularity.

Memory is everything. All particles remember the instant the singularity exploded and the universe was born. In a way, the universe is nothing but memory.

Everything in the universe is woven of a single superluminal fabric. Tat tvam asi, that thou art.

And you, my innocent man, are a pretty pearl in the necklace of time.

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.

Oh, where does the light go when the light goes out?

Human thought is really all the same. Thoughts may differ from person to person and from group to group, but the way we think is limited by the deep structures of our all too human brains. This is both a curse and a blessing. We are all trapped within the bone coffins of our same brains, imprisoned in thought–ways evolved over a million years. But it is a comfortable prison of familiar white walls, whose air, however stale, we can breathe. If we would escape our prison only for an instant, our new way of seeing, of knowing, would leave us gasping. There would be glories and excruciating beauty and—as I was soon to learn—madness.

Ideas blossom outward like arctic poppies in the sun growing into other ideas crosslinked and connected by pungent association links, and link to link the smells of roasting meat and wet fur flow outward and sideways and down, and blend into fields redolent with the sweet perfume of strange new logic structures and new truths that you must inhale like cool mint to overwhelm and obliterate your bitter, straightforward ideas of logic and causality and time. Time is not a line; the events of your life are rather like a jungle of smells forever preserved in a bottle. One sniff and you’ll sense instantly the entire jungle rather than the fragrances of individual flowers. Do you understand the subtleties? Do you dare open the bottle? No, you have no nose, and you don’t understand.

she was my imperfect memory sucked from my mind. I realized that I knew only a hundredth part of the real Katharine. I knew her long, hard hands and the depths between her legs, and that she had a submerged, burning need for beauty and pleasure (to her, I think, they were the same thing); I knew the sound of her dulcet voice as she sang her sad, fey songs, but I could not look into her soul. Like all scryers she had been taught to smother her passions and fears within a wet blanket of outer calm. I did not know what lay beneath, and even if I had known, who was I to think I could hold the soul of a woman within me? I could not, and because I could not, the imago of Katharine created from my memory was subtly wrong.

“Everything is foreordained. What has been will be.”

“Nothing is determined; in the end we choose our futures.”

The mechanics, of course, had known for ages that any model of reality must include consciousness as a fundamental waveform.

“On and on it goes,” he said in a low voice. “On and on and on.”

“The DNA in my skin is very old stuff, by God! Parts of the genome have been evolving for four billion years. Now that’s old, I think, and if you want me to split words, I shall. What of the atoms that make up my DNA? Older still, I think, because they were made in the heart of stars ten billion years ago.”

Man is man, and even civilized man—especially civilized women and men—will sometimes long for simplicity. In each of us, there is the lure of the primitive, an atavistic desire to experience life in its rawest form; there is a need to be tested, to prove our worth as natural (and ferocious) animals in a natural world.

I was an experiment on the part of Nature, a gamble within the unknown, perhaps for a new purpose, perhaps for nothing, and my only task was to allow this game on the part of primeval depths to take its course, to feel its will within me and make it wholly mine. That or nothing! Emil Sinclair, Holocaust Century Eschatologist

“And why not? Certain things possess a luster and beauty that do not fade with age. We arise in the morning to greet our things, a place for each finely made thing, and each thing in its special place. We buy things, perhaps a chair carved of fine–grained shatterwood or a beautiful Darghinni hangnest, and we can be certain that the having of it will increase our worth.”

I told him that Chimene was one of those planets where a colony of bacteria had mutated and escaped, consuming all life in the biosphere, disassembling and totally remaking the planet’s surface into a mat of purplish–brown, hugely intelligent bacteria—all in a matter of days. “And the eschatologists think it only took a few years for them to infect the whole April cluster,” I said. “Ten thousand stars swarming with your harmless bacteria.” Of all the gods in the galaxy, the eschatologists feared the April colonial intelligence the most.

For a moment I was disoriented and despondent. I had a feeling of intense depersonalization, as if I didn’t know who I was, and worse, as if I didn’t really exist.

the Devaki deny the existence of past and future.) How do the Devaki inflect their verbs? They inflect them according to the state of consciousness of the speaker. Thus a man full of fear might scream, La mora li Tuwa, I killed the mammoth!, while a man deep in dreamtime—what the Devaki call dreamtime—will say, La morisha li Tuwa, which means something like: I, in the ecstasy of the eternal Now–moment, am joined by the spirit of the mammoth who opened his heart to my spear.

And so Man dropped his seed into the Test Tube, and from the artificial wombs came many races of men, and races that were men no longer. The Elidi grew wings and the Agathanians carked their bodies into the shape of seals and dove beneath the waters of their planet; the Hoshi learned the difficult art of breathing methane while the Alaloi rediscovered arts ancient and ageless. On the Civilized Worlds there were many who sought to improve their racial inheritance in some small way. The exemplars of Bodhi Luz, for example, desired children of greater stature and so, inch by inch, generation by generation, they bred human beings ten feet tall. Chaos reigned as human beings from different planets found that they were unable to mate and bear children in the natural manner. Thus Man formulated the third and greatest of his laws, which came to be called The Law of the Civilized Worlds: A man may do with his flesh as he pleases but his DNA belongs to his species.

From Man and the Bomb were born the Hibakusha, the worlds of Gaiea, Terror, Death, and the First Law of the Civilized Worlds, which was that Man was forbidden to explode hydrogen into light. And the Hibakusha fled and took to bed Law, and so were born the Aphasics, the Friends of God, the Astriers, Autists, Maggids and Arhats of Newvania. And Terror wed Death, and so were born the Vild and the great Nothingness beyond. And Terror wed Law as well and begat the Hive Peoples, who valued life less than Order, and so they surrendered their Free Will to the lesser god of Order. Of the Hive Peoples we know almost nothing.