Neverness. David Zindell
I told him, the scent-symbols are not fixed as, for example, the sounds in the word ‘purple’ are fixed; they do not always mean the same thing. Isn’t meaning as mutable as the smells of the sea? Can you sense the configuration of the minute pyramids of mint and vanilla bean and musk in this cloud of odours? And the meanings – do you know that the smells of jasmine and olathe and orange might mean, ‘I am Jasmine Orange, the lover of Man,’ or, ‘The sea is calm tonight,’ depending on the arrangement and the proximity of the unit pyramids to the other molecules of scent? Can you grasp meaning as a whole? And the logic of structure? Do you understand the complexities of language, my Ringess?
Ideas blossom outward like arctic poppies in the sun growing into other ideas crosslinked and connected by pungent association links, and link to link the smells of roasting meat and wet fur flow outward and sideways and down, and blend into fields redolent with the sweet perfume of strange new logic structures and new truths that you must inhale like cool mint to overwhelm and obliterate your bitter, straightforward ideas of logic and causality and time. Time is not a line; the events of your life are rather like a jungle of smells forever preserved in a bottle. One sniff and you’ll sense instantly the entire jungle rather than the fragrances of individual flowers. Do you understand the subtleties? Do you dare open the bottle? No, you have no nose, and you don’t understand.
He understands all that the structure of his brain will let him understand.
I understood that a man who dwelt too long inside an alien brain would go mad. I closed my eyes and shook my head as I pinched my nostrils shut against the mind-twisting smells flooding the pit of my ship. My eyes, my nostrils! – when I opened them, I was human again. The alien imago was gone, though the aftersmells of vanilla bean and wormwood remained. I was alone inside my sweaty, hairy, human body, inside my old brain which I thought I knew so well.
– Their logic, the truth structures … it’s so different; I never knew.
The deep structure of their brain is different. But at a deeper level still, the logic is the same.
– I can’t understand this logic.
Few of your Order have understood the Friends of Man.
Like everyone else, I had always been suspicious of these exotic, alien whores. I had supposed they seduced men with their powerful, aphrodisiacal scents in order to proselytize them when they were drugged with sex, to slyly persuade them to the truth of their mysterious alien religion. Now I saw – ‘saw’ is not the right word – I perceived that their purpose was much deeper than merely changing mankind’s beliefs; they desired to change mankind itself.
But it is the hardest thing to change the mind of a man. You have such a small sense of yourselves.
– A man must know who he is, as Bardo says.
And what is a Bardo?
While I snorted and tried to rid my nose and mind of disturbing smells, I thought about Bardo and how he had always had a clear, if flamboyant, sense of who he was: a man determined to experience pleasure as no other man ever had or ever would.
Your Bardo defines himself too narrowly. Even he may have possibilities.
During the tests which followed, by implication and deduction, I learned much about the Entity’s sense of Herself. Each moon-brain, it seemed, was at once an island of consciousness and part of the greater whole. And each moon could subdivide and compartmentalize at need into smaller and smaller units, trillions of units of intelligence gathering and shifting like clouds of sand. I supposed only the tiniest part of one of her lesser moons was occupied with testing me. And yet I was given to understand that, paradoxically, all of Her was in some small way inside my brain, as I was inside hers. When I joked about the strange topologies involved in this paradox, Her thoughts drowned out my own:
You are like the Tycho, but you are playful where he is savage.
– Am I? Sometimes I don’t know who I am.
You are that you are. You are a man open to possibilities.
– Others used to say I thought too many things were possible. A wise man knows his limits, they said.
Others have not survived the Test of Realities.
I was delighted that I would have to suffer no more alien realities and more than a little pleased with myself, a pleasure lasting no longer than it took for me to draw in a breath of air.
There will be one last test.
– What test?
Call it the Test of Fate.
The air in front of me flickered, and there appeared an imago of a tall woman wearing a white robe. Her straight black hair shined and smelled of snow dahlia. When she turned to me, I could not take my eyes off her face. It was a face I knew well, the aquiline nose and high cheeks and most of all, the dark, smoothly scarred hollows where the eyes should have been; it was the face of my beautiful Katharine.
I was angry that the Entity would pull this most private memory from my mind. When Katharine smiled at me and bowed her head slightly, I hoped that the Entity would not overhear the words to an ancient poem which formed unspoken on my lips:
I love, pale one, your lifted eyebrows bridging
Twin darknesses of flowing depth.
But however deep they are, they carry me
Another way than that of death.
In a voice mysterious and deep, a voice which was a weird blend of Katharine’s compassionate forebodings and the calculated words of the Entity, the imago tensed her lips and said, ‘There is another way, my Mallory, than that of death. I’m glad you like poetry.’
‘What is the Test of Fate?’ I asked aloud.
As I stared into the caverns beneath her black eyebrows, flickers of colour brightened the twin darknesses. At first I thought it was merely an aberration of the imago’s phased light waves. Then the wavering blueness coalesced and stilled, filling her vacant eyepits as water fills a cup. She blinked her newly grown eyes, which were large and deep and shone like liquefied jewels. She looked at me with those lovely, blue-black eyes and said, ‘Because of you, I renounce the greater vision for … Do you see your fate? Now I have eyes again I’m blind, and I truly can’t see what will … Your face, you’re splendid! I’d preserve you if I could! If only … the Test of Fate; the Test of Whimsy or Caprice. I will recite words from three ancient poems. If you can complete the unfinished stanzas, then the light burns on.’
‘But that’s absurd! Should my life depend on my knowing a stupid poem, then?’
I chewed the edges of the moustache that had grown over my lip during my long journey. I was furious that my fate – my life, my death – should be decided by so arbitrary a test. It made no sense. Then I remembered that the warrior-poets, that sect of assassins which infect certain of the Civilized Worlds, were rumoured to ask their victims the lines of a poem before they murdered them. I wondered why the goddess would practise the custom of the warrior-poets? Or perhaps She had originated the custom aeons ago, and the warrior-poets worshipped Her and all Her practices? How could I know?
‘And the Tycho,’ I said. I ground my teeth. ‘He didn’t know any of your poems, did he?’
Katharine smiled the mysterious smile of the scryers as she shook her head. ‘Oh, no, he knew each poem but the last, of course. He chose his fate, do you see?’
I did not see. I was rubbing my dry, hot eyes, trying to understand when she sighed and said in a sad voice:
The many men, so beautiful!
And they all dead did lie:
She looked at me as if she expected me to immediately complete the stanza. I could not. My chest was suddenly tight, my breathing ragged and uneven. Like a snowfield,