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
