There’s no secret, do you understand? The secret of life is life: It goes on and on, and that’s all there is.’
As if to punctuate his pessimism, just then the low, hollow bell of one of his clocks chimed, and he said, ‘It’s New Year on Urradeth. They’ll be killing all the marrowsick babies born this past year, and they’ll drink, and they’ll couple all day and all night until the wombs of all the women are full again. On and on it goes, on and on.’
I told him I thought the Entity had spoken the truth.
He laughed harshly, causing the weathered skin around his eyes to crack like sheets of broken ice. ‘Struth!’ he said bitterly, a word I took to be one of his archaisms. ‘A god’s truth, a god’s lies – what’s the difference?’
I told him I had a plan to discover man’s oldest DNA.
He laughed again; he laughed so hard his lips pulled back over his long white teeth and tears flowed from his eyes. ‘So, a plan. Even as a boy, you always had plans. Do you remember when I taught you slowtime? When I said that one must be patient and wait for the first waves of adagio to overtake the mind, you told me there had to be a way to slow time by skipping the normal sequence of attitudes. You even had a plan to enter slowtime without the aid of your ship-computer! And why? You had a problem with patience. And you still do. Can’t you wait to see if the splicers and imprimaturs – or the eschatologists, historians or cetics – can discover this oldest DNA? Isn’t it enough you’ll probably be made a master pilot?’
I rubbed the side of my nose and said, ‘If I petition you to mount a small expedition of my own, would you approve it?’
‘Petition me?’ he asked. ‘Why so formal? Why not just ask me?’
‘Because,’ I said slowly, ‘I’d have to break one of the covenants.’
‘So.’
There was a long silence during which he stood as still as an ice sculpture.
‘Well, Timekeeper?’
‘Which covenant do you want to break?’
‘The eighth covenant,’ I said.
‘So,’ he said again, staring out the window to the west. The eighth covenant was the agreement made three thousand years ago between the founders of Neverness and the primitive Alaloi who lived in their caves six hundred miles to the west of the City.
‘They’re neanderthals,’ I said. ‘Cavemen. Their culture, their bodies … so old.’
‘You’d petition me to journey to the Alaloi, to collect tissues from their living bodies?’
‘The oldest DNA of man,’ I said. ‘Isn’t it ironic that I might find it so close to home?’
When I told him the exact nature of my plan, he leaned over and gripped my wrists, resting his weight on the arms of the chair. His massive head was too close to mine; I smelled coffee and blood on his breath. He said, ‘It’s a damn dangerous plan, for you and for the Alaloi, too.’
‘Not so dangerous,’ I said too confidently. ‘I’ll take precautions. I’ll be careful.’
‘Dangerous, I say! Damn dangerous.’
‘Will you approve my petition?’ I asked.
He looked at me painfully, as if he were making the most difficult decision of his life. I did not like the look on his face.
‘Timekeeper?’
‘I’ll consider your plan,’ he said coldly. ‘I’ll inform you of my decision.’
I looked away from him and turned my head to the side. It was not like him to be so indecisive. I guessed that he agonized between breaking the covenant and fulfilling his own summons to quest; I guessed wrongly. It would be years, however, before I discovered the secret of his indecision.
He dismissed me abruptly. When I stood up, I discovered the edge of the chair had cut off my circulation; my legs were tingly and numb. As I rubbed the life back into my muscles, he stood by the window talking to himself. He seemed not to notice I was still there. ‘On and on it goes,’ he said in a low voice. ‘On and on and on.’
I left his chamber feeling as I always did: exhausted, elated and confused.
The days (and nights) that followed were the happiest of my life. I spent my mornings out on the broad glissades watching the farsiders fight the thick, midwinter snows. It was a pleasure to breathe fresh air again, to smell pine needles and baking bread and alien scents, to skate down the familiar streets of the City. There were long afternoons of coffee and conversation with my friends in the cafes lining the white ice of the Way. During the first of these afternoons, Bardo and I sat at a little table by the steamed-over window, watching the swarms of humanity pass while we traded stories of our journeys. I sipped my cinnamon coffee and asked for the news of Delora wi Towt and Quirin and Li Tosh and our other fellow pilots. Most of them, Bardo told me, were spread through the galaxy like a handful of diamonds cast into the nighttime sea. Only Li Tosh and the Sonderval and a few others had returned from their journeys.
‘Haven’t you heard?’ he asked, and he ordered a plate of cookies. ‘Li Tosh has discovered the homeworld of the Darghinni. In another age it would have been a notable discovery, a great discovery, even. Ah, but it was his bad luck to take his vows at the same time as Mallory Ringess.’ He dunked his cookie in his coffee. ‘And,’ Bardo said, ‘it was Bardo’s bad luck to take them then, too.’
‘What do you mean?’
As he munched his cookies, he told me the story of his journey: After fenestering to the edge of the Rosette Nebula, he had tried to bribe the encyclopaedists on Ksandaria to allow him into their holy sanctum. Because the secretive encyclopaedists were known to be jealous of their vast and precious pools of knowledge, and because they hated and feared the power of the Order, he had disguised himself as a prince of Summerworld, for him not a very difficult thing to do.
‘One hundred maunds of Yarkona bluestars I paid those filthy tubists to enter their sanctum,’ he said. ‘And even at that skin price – you’ll forgive me, my friend, if I admit that, despite our vow of poverty, I had hoarded a part, just a small part of my inheritance – ah, now where was I? Yes, the encyclopaedists. Even though they gouged a fortune from me, they kept me from their sanctum, thinking that an ignorant buffoon such as I would be content to fill my head from one of their lesser pools of esoterica. Well, it did take me a good twentyday before I realized the information I was swallowing was as shallow as a melt puddle, but I’m not stupid, am I? No, I’m not stupid, so I told the wily master encyclopaedist I’d hire a warrior-poet to poison him if he didn’t open the gates to the inner sanctum. He believed me, the fool, and so I dipped my brain into their forbidden pool where they keep the ancient histories and Old Earth’s oldest commentaries. And …’
Here he paused to sip his coffee and munch a few more cookies.
‘And I’m tired of telling this story because I’ve had my brains sucked dry by our akashics and librarians, but since you’re my best friend, well, you should know I found an arcanum in the forbidden pool that led right to the guts of the past, or so I thought. On Old Earth just before the Swarming, I think, there was a curious religious order called arkaeologists. They practised a bizarre ritual known as ‘The Diggings.’ Shall I
