the prime datum from the forbidden pool – were, I quote: “Those followers of Henrilsheman believing in ancestor veneration. They believed that communion with the spirit world could be made by collecting objects which their ancestors had touched and in some cases, by collecting the corpses of the ancestors themselves.” Ah, would you like more coffee? No? Well, the arkaeologists, like all orders, I suppose, had been riven into many different factions and sects. One sect – I think they were called aigyptologists – followed the teachings of one Flinders Petr and the Champollion. Another sect dug up corpses preserved with bitumen. Then they pounded the corpses to a powder. This powder – would you believe it? – they consumed it as a sacrament, believing as they did that the life essence of their ancestors would strengthen their own. When generation had passed into generation, on and on, as the Timekeeper would say, well, they thought eventually man would be purified and they’d be immortal. Am I boring you? I hope not because I must tell you of this one sect whose high priests called themselves kurators. Just before the third exchange of the holocaust, the kurators, and their underlings, the daters, sorters and the lowly acolytes, they loaded a museum ship with old stones and bones and the preserved corpses of their ancestors that they called mumiyah. It was their ship – they named it the Vishnu – which landed on one of the Darghinni worlds. Of course, the kurators were too ignorant to recognize intelligent aliens when they saw them. Sad to say, they began delving into the dirt of that ancient civilization. They couldn’t have known the Darghinni have a horror of their own past – as well they should. And that, my friend, is how the first of the Man-Darghinni wars really began.’
We drank our coffee and talked about this shameful, unique war – the only war there had ever been between mankind and an alien race. When I congratulated him on making a fine discovery, he banged the table with his fat hand and said, ‘I haven’t finished my story! I hope you’re not bored because I was just about to tell you the climax of my little adventure. Well, after my success with the encyclopaedists – yes, yes, I admit I was successful – I was filled with joy. “The secret of man’s immortality lies in our past and in our future” – that was the Ieldra’s message, wasn’t it? Well, I’m not a scryer, so what can I say about the future? But the past, ah, well, I thought I’d discovered a vital link with the past. And as it happens, I have. My mumiyah may prove to contain some very old DNA, what do you think? Anyway, the climax: I was so full of joy, I rushed home to Neverness. I wanted to be the first to return with a significant discovery, you see. You must visualize it: I would have been famous. The novices would have stumbled over each other for the privilege of touching my robes. Master courtesans would have paid me for the pleasure of discovering what kind of man lives beneath these robes. How pungent my life would have been! But Bardo grew careless! In my hurry through the windows, I grew careless.’
I will not record all of my friend’s words here. In short, while fenestering through the dangerous Danladi thinspace he made a mistake that would have made the youngest of journeymen blush. In his mapping of the decision-group onto itself, he neglected to show the function was one-to-one, so he fell into a loop. Now any other pilot would have laboriously searched for a sequence of mappings to extricate himself from the loop. But Bardo was lazy and did not want to spend a hundred or more days of intime searching for such a mapping. He had an idea as to how he might instantly escape the loop, this lazy but brilliant man, and he played with his idea. After a mere seven hours of intime, he tasted the pungent fruit of genius. He proved that a mapping of points present to points past always exists, that a pilot could always return to any point along his immediate path. Moreover, it was a constructive proof; that is to say, not only did he prove such a mapping existed, he showed how such a mapping could be constructed. Thus he made a mapping with the star just beyond Ksandaria’s. He fell out into the fallaways, into the familiar spaces he had recently passed through. And then he journeyed homeward to Neverness.
‘I’m sought after, now,’ he laughed out. ‘It’s ironic: I, in my stupidity, I stumbled into a loop but I’ve proved the greatest of the lesser unproved theorems. Bardo’s Boomerang Theorem – that’s what the journeymen have named my little mapping theorem. There’s even talk of elevating me to a mastership, did you know that? I, Bardo, master pilot! Yes, I’m sought after now, by Kolenya and others with their luscious lips and beautiful, fat thighs. My seed flows like magma, my friend. I’m famous! Ah, but not as famous as you, eh?’
We talked all afternoon until the light died from the grey sky and the cafe filled with hungry people. We ordered a huge meal of cultured meats and the various exotic dishes favoured by Bardo. He poked his finger into my ribs and said, ‘You’ve no meat on your skinny bones!’ He praised me again for my discovery, and then I told him about my new plan.
‘You want to do what?’ he said, wiping meat jelly from his lips with a cloth. ‘To journey to the Alaloi and steal their DNA? That’s slelling, isn’t it?’ Realizing he had spoken that awful word too loudly, he looked around at the other diners and lowered his voice conspiratorially. He leaned across the table, ‘We can’t go slelling the Alaloi’s DNA, can we?’
‘It’s not really slelling,’ I said. ‘It’s not as if we’d use their DNA to tailor poisons or clone them or –’
‘Slelling is slelling,’ he interrupted. ‘And what about the covenants? The Timekeeper would never allow it, thank God!’
‘He might.’
I told him about my petition, and he grew sullen and argumentative.
‘By God, we can’t just take a windjammer and land on one of their islands and ask them to drop their seed in a test tube, can we?’
‘I have a different plan,’ I said.
‘Oh, no, I don’t think I want to hear this.’ He ate a few more cookies, wiped his lips and farted.
‘We’ll go to the Alaloi in disguise. It shouldn’t be too hard to learn their customs and to scrape a few skin cells from the palms of their hands.’
‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘Oh, too bad for Bardo, and too bad for you if you insist on this mad plan. And how do you think we could disguise ourselves? Oh no, please don’t tell me, I’ve had enough of your plans.’
I said, ‘There’s a way. Do you remember the story of Goshevan? We’ll do as he did. We’ll go to a cutter and have our bodies sculpted. The Alaloi will think we are their cousins.’
He farted again and belched. ‘That’s insane! Please, Mallory, look at me and admit you know it’s insane. By God, we can’t become Alaloi, can we? And why should you think the Alaloi’s DNA is older than any other? Shouldn’t we concentrate our efforts on the main chance? Since I’ve discovered mumiyah from three thousand years before the Swarming, why don’t we – you, I and Li Tosh, mount an expedition back to the Darghinni? After all, we know there are the remains of a museum ship on one of their worlds.’
I coughed and I rubbed the side of my nose. I did not want to point out that as of yet, we had no idea where to look for the wreckage of the museum ship. I said, ‘The Alaloi DNA is probably fifty thousand years old.’
‘Is that true? We don’t know anything about the Alaloi except that they’re so stupid they don’t even have a language!’
I smiled because he was being deliberately fatuous. I told him everything known about the Alaloi, those dreamers who had carked their humanness into neanderthal flesh. According to the historians, the Alaloi’s ancestors had hated the rot and vice of civilization, any civilization. Therefore, they had fled Old Earth in long ships. Because they wanted to live what they thought of as a natural life, they back-mutated some of their chromosomes, the better to grow strong, primitive children to live on the pristine worlds they hoped to discover. In one of their long ships, they carried the frozen body of a neanderthal boy recovered
