Free Neverness by David Zindell Page A

Soli's Elder Eddas. What indeed
was
the secret of man's immortality? "Find out why the goddamned stars are exploding," Bardo said, "and you'll find your secret." Of course, he was a pragmatist whose mind did not often turn towards esoteric problems. Others believed that the secret of the exploding Vild would be only the first part of the Elder Eddas. (Albeit a vital part.) Where should we look for this secret? Why hadn't we discovered it long ago? Phantasts and tinkers and pilots - many of us felt that despite the three millennia in which our Order had spent accumulating knowledge, we might have overlooked an important, perhaps vital thing. Historians begged the Timekeeper for permission to leave Neverness, to raid the library on Ksandaria for clues to the mystery. Neologicians and semanticists locked themselves in their cold towers as they set to creating and discovering new languages, lost in their certitude that the secret of the Elder Eddas - and every other kind of wisdom - was to be found in words. The fabulists spun their fictions, which they claimed were as real as any reality, and declared that the Elder Eddas is that which we create. And who was to say they were wrong? And the pilots! My brave, fellow pilots: Richardess and the Sonderval, went forth into the manifold, seeking lost planets and strange new alien races. Tomoth and a hundred other master pilots would try to map the Vild. Soli himself would attempt to penetrate the inner veil of the Vild, while Lionel devised yet another plan to find Old Earth. Even cowardly Bardo would make a journey, even if he proposed nothing more daring than his own, private expedition to Ksandaria. Although a few cynical professionals like my mother had no intention of chancing their lives on such a dream, it was an exciting time, and more, a glorious time we would never see again.
       The day before my departure, a day of fierce, sudden gales and stinging ice-powder, the Timekeeper summoned me to his tower. As I skated between the dark gray buildings separating Resa from the great tower, I shivered beneath my too-thin kamelaika. I wished that I had either greased my face or worn a mask against the freezing wind. It would be an insult, I thought, to appear before the Timekeeper with patches of white, frostbitten skin blighting my face. It was good to enter the warm tower, good, even, to stand impatiently in an anteroom below the top of the tower as I stamped my boots on the red carpet and waited for the master horologe to announce my arrival.
       "He is waiting for you," the horologe said in a voice almost breathless from his climbing up and down the stairs into the Timekeeper's chambers. "Be careful," he said, "he's in an ugly mood today," and then he ushered me up the winding stairs into the circular sanctum of the tower where the Timekeeper stood waiting.
       "So, Mallory," he said, "the pilot's ring looks good on your hand, eh?"
       The Timekeeper was a grim-faced man with a mane of thick white hair erupting from his taut skin. Most of the time he seemed very old, though no one knew just how old he was. When he frowned, which he often did, the muscles of his jaws stood out like knots of wood. His neck was thick and popping with tendons, as was the rest of his tense, large-boned body. I stood in the spacious, well-lighted room, and he stared at me as he always did when I came to see him. His eyes were black and fathomless like chunks of barely cooled obsidian hammered into his skull; his eyes were hot, restless, angry and pained.
       "What would it take to kill you?" he asked me.
       The muscles of his bare forearms tensed and relaxed, tensed and relaxed. Once, when I was a novice, when he had taught me leverage grips and killing holds and other wrestling skills, I had had occasion to view the powerful body beneath the long red robe he always wore. His torso and legs were etched with scars; a fine network of hard, white cicatrices more intricate and convoluted