Free Neverness by David Zindell

little more than rage and demand that my mother be brought before the akashics. "Lay her brain bare," he thundered at the pilot's conclave, "expose her plots and lies!" It was a measure of his vast reputation that the pilots, many of whom had grown to adulthood and had taken their vows during his long journey, voted to try my mother.
       On fourthday she submitted to the review of Nikolos the Elder. With his computers he painted pictures of her brain as vivid as a Fravashi fresco. But the plump, little Lord Akashic pronounced that he could find no memory inside her of a plot to kill Soli.
       That night, in her little brick house in the Pilots' Quarter, she said to me, "Soli goes too far! Nikolos proclaims my innocence. What does Soli say? He says, 'It's well known that the matriarchs of Lechoix keep drugs that destroy specific memories" Destroy! As if I'd destroy part of my
brain
!"
       I knew how my mother treasured the hundred billion neurons that made up her brain. I did not believe that she, as those of the aphasic sect often did, had taken an aphagenic to destroy her memory; neither could I trust that she was innocent, not after what she had said to me the day of the race. (Even supposing she
had
used such a drug, I could not very well ask her if she had. Such is the nature of the induced micro-brain lesions that she would have no memory of her crime, nor of having dissolved the memory of her crime.) I was angry and my voice quavered as I asked, "How did you fool the Lord Akashic?"
       "My son doubts me?" she said as she slumped against the bare brick wall of her sleeping room. "How I hate Soli! The Lord Pilot returns. To take away what I love most. And so I went to the Timekeeper. And lied, yes I admit I lied. I begged him to ask Soli. To release you from your oath."
       "And the Timekeeper listened to you?"
       "The Timekeeper thinks he's cunning. But I told him we would go to Tria. To become merchant pilots, if he didn't talk to Soli. The Timekeeper thinks he's fearless, but he fears such a scandal."
       "You told him
that
? He must think I'm the worst kind of coward."
       "Who cares what he thinks? At least I've saved you. From a stupid death."
       "You've saved me from nothing," I said as I walked toward the door. "Don't ever lie on my behalf again, Mother."
       I told her I had resolved to keep my oath, and she began to cry. "How I hate Soli!" she said as I opened to door to the street. "I'll teach him about hate."
       I spent the next few days in final preparation for my journey. I consulted eschatologists and other professionals, hoping to glean some bit of information as to the nature and purpose of the impossible being known as the Solid State Entity. Burgos Harsha told me that Rollo Gallivare had discovered the first of the mainbrains, and that he believed them to be aliens from another galaxy. "It is recorded in the apocrypha of the first Timekeeper that the Silicon God appeared within the Eta Carina nebula toward the end of the Swarming Centuries. And in the chronicles of Tisander the Wary, we find a similar assertation [sic; probably "assertion" - reb]. But when have those sources ever been accurate, I ask you? In the history of the Tycho, Reina Ede holds that the brains evolved from the seed of the Ieldra, as did Homo Sapiens. What do I believe? I don't know what I believe."
       Kolenya Mor thought that the Ieldra, before they melded their consciousnesses 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." We talked for a long time, and I told her that many of the younger pilots denied that life
had
a purpose. She looked at me with her horrified little eyes and exclaimed, "Heresy!
That
ancient heresy!"
       I was not the only one, of course, called to quest. The whole of our Order seemed afire with the dream of finding