have an amorgenic. Something strong to send the hormones gushing. We’ve a busy night ahead of us.’
Soli picked up a tumbler of a smoky coloured liquid and took a sip. Behind us a log in the fireplace popped and fell between two others, scattering glowing cinders and ashes over the tiled floor. ‘We drink liquor or beer,’ he said.
‘Barbaric.’ This came from Bardo who added, ‘I’ll have beer, then.’
I looked at my tall uncle and asked, ‘What liquor are you drinking?’
‘It’s called skotch.’
‘I’ll have skotch,’ I said to the novice, who filled two tumblers – a large one with foamy beer and a smaller one with amber skotch – and set them in front of us atop the rosewood bar.
Bardo gulped his beer, and after I had taken a sip of skotch and coughed, he asked, ‘What does it taste like?’ I handed him my tumbler, watching as he brought it up to his fat red lips. He, too, coughed at the fire of the burning liquid and announced, ‘It tastes like gull piss!’
Soli smiled at Lionel and asked me, ‘How old are you?’
‘Twenty-one, Lord Pilot. Tomorrow when we take our vows, I’ll be the youngest pilot our Order has ever had, if I may say that without sounding like I’m bragging.’
‘Well, you’re bragging,’ Lionel said.
We talked for a while about the origins of such immense and fathomless beings as the Silicon God and the Solid State Entity, and other things that pilots talk about. Soli told us of his journey to the core; he spoke of dense clusters of hot new stars and of a great ringworld that some god or other had assembled around Betti Luz. Lionel argued that the great and often insane mainbrains (he did not like to use the word ‘gods’) roaming the galaxy must be organized according to different principles than were our own minuscule minds, for how else could their brains’ separate lobes – some of which were the size of moons – intercommunicate with others across light-years of space? It was an old argument. It was one of the many bitter arguments dividing the pilots and professionals of our Order. Lionel, and many eschatologists, programmers, and mechanics as well, believed the mainbrains had mastered nearly instantaneous tachyonic information flow. He held that we should seek contact with these beings, even though such contact was very dangerous and might someday force the Order to change in ways repugnant to older and more old-fashioned pilots such as Soli.
‘Who can understand a brain encompassing a thousand cubic light-years of space?’ Soli asked. ‘And who knows about tachyons? Perhaps the mainbrains think slowly, very slowly.’
To him, the origin and technology of the gods were of little interest. In this he was as stodgy as the Timekeeper, and like the Timekeeper, he thought that there were certain things that man was not meant to know. He recited a long list of pilots, the Tycho among them, who had been lost trying to penetrate the mystery of the Solid State Entity. ‘They overreached themselves,’ he told us. ‘They should have been aware of their limits.’ I smiled because this came from the tight lips of a man who had reached farther than any other, a famous pilot whose discovery would provoke the great crisis of our Order.
It was a heady drug, to talk with master pilots as pilots, as if we had long ago taken our vows and proved our mastery of the manifold. I drank my skotch and gathered up my courage, and I said, ‘I’ve heard there will be a quest. Will there really be?’
Soli glared at me. He was a sullen man, I thought, with a sad, faraway look to his sea-blue eyes, a look that hinted of freezing mists and sleepless nights and fits of madness. Though his face was young and smooth, as young as mine, it had recently been as old and deeply seamed as a face could be. It is one of the peculiarities of the manifold that a pilot sometimes ages, intime, three years to every year on Neverness. I imagined, for a moment, that I had the powers of a cetic and that I could see the wrinkled, ancient Soli through the taut olive skin of his new body, in the same manner one envisions a fireflower drying to a brittle black, or the skull of death beneath the pink flesh of a newborn baby boy. A master horologe, whose duty it was to determine the intime of returning pilots according to complicated formulae weighting einsteinian time distortions against the unpredictable deformations of the manifold, had told me that Soli had aged one hundred and three years this last journey and would have died but for the skills of the Lord Cetic. This made my uncle, who had been brought back three times to his youth, the oldest pilot of our Order.
‘Tell us about your discovery,’ I said. I had heard a wild rumour that he had reached the galactic core, the only pilot to have done so since the Tycho, who had returned half-insane.
He took a long drink of skotch, all the while watching me through the clary bottom of the tumbler. The poorly dried firewood hissed and groaned, and from the street came the humming and steaming of a zamboni as it hovered over the gliddery, melting and smoothing the ice for the next day’s skaters.
‘Yes, the impatience of youth,’ he said. ‘You come here disrespecting the needs of a pilot for privacy and the company of his friends. In that, you’re much like your mother. Well, then, since you’ve gone to so much trouble and endured the vileness of skotch whisky, you’ll be told what happened to me, if you really want to know.’
I found it irritating that Soli could not simply say, ‘I’ll tell you what happened to me.’ Like most others from that too-mystical planet, Simoom, he usually observed their taboo against using the pronoun ‘I’.
‘Tell us,’ Bardo said.
‘Tell us,’ I said, and I listened with that strange mixture of worship and dread that journeymen feel towards old pilots.
‘It happened like this,’ Soli said. ‘A long time had passed since my leaving Neverness. We were deep in dreamtime and fenestering inwards towards the core. The stars were dense. They shined like the lights of the Farsider’s Quarter at night, yes, a great burning fan of stars disappearing into the blackness at the fan’s pivot point, at the singularity. There was the white light of dreamtime – you young pilots think instantaneity and stopping time are all there is to dreamtime, and you have much to learn – there was a sudden clarity, and voices. My ship told me it was receiving a signal, intercepting one of a billion or so laser beams streaming out of the singularity.’
He suddenly slammed his empty tumbler on the bar and his voice rose an octave. ‘Yes, that’s what was said! From the singularity! It’s impossible, but true. A billion lines of infrared light escaping the black maw of gravity.’ To the novice he said, ‘Pour some skotch in here, please.’
‘And then?’
‘The voices, the ship-computer receiving half a trillion bits per second and translating the information in the laser beams into voices. They, the voices, claimed to be – let’s call them the Ieldra. Are you familiar with that term?’
‘No, Lord Pilot.’
‘It’s what the eschatologists have named the aliens who seeded the galaxy with their DNA.’
‘The mythical race.’
‘The hitherto mythical race,’ he said. ‘They have – and many refuse to believe this – they’ve projected their collective selfness, their consciousnesses, into the singularity.’
‘Into the black hole?’ Bardo asked as he pulled at his moustache.
I looked at Soli carefully, to see if he was having a joke with us. I did not believe him. I
