LITMIR.BIZ

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for this … this, uh, secret of the Ieldra, Lord Pilot?’

      ‘The eschatologists have named the secret the “Elder Eddas,”’ Soli said as he backed away from him. ‘And yes, there will be a quest. Tomorrow, at your convocation, the Timekeeper will issue his summons and call the quest.’

      I believed him. The Lord Pilot, my uncle, said there would be a quest, and I suddenly felt my heart beating up through my throat as if it were fate’s fist knocking at the doorway to my soul. Wild plans and dreams came half-formed into my mind. I said quickly, ‘If we could prove the Continuum Hypothesis, the quest would be full of glory, and we’d find your Elder Eddas.’

      ‘Don’t call them my Elder Eddas,’ he said.

      I should admit that I did not understand the Lord Pilot. One moment he proclaimed that there were things man was not meant to know, and the next moment he seemed proud and eager to go off seeking the greatest of secrets. And yet a moment later, he was bitter and appeared resentful of his own discovery. In truth, he was a complicated man, the second most complicated man I have ever known.

      ‘What Mallory meant,’ Bardo said, ‘was that he admires – as we all do – the work you’ve done on the Great Theorem.’

      That was not at all what I had meant.

      Soli looked at me fiercely and said, ‘Yes, the dream of proving the Continuum Hypothesis.’

      The Continuum Hypothesis (or, colloquially, the Great Theorem): an unproved result of Lavi’s Fixed-Point Theorem stating that between any pair of discrete Lavi sets of point-sources, there exists a one-to-one mapping. More simply, that it is possible to map from any star to any other in a single fall. It is the greatest problem of the manifold, of our Order. Long ago, when Soli had been a pilot not much older than I, he had nearly proved the Hypothesis. But he had become distracted by an argument with Justine and had forgotten (so he claimed) his elegant proof of the theorem. The memory of it haunted him. And so he drank his poisonous skotch whisky, to forget. (The powers of a pilot’s mind, Bardo reminds me, crescendo at an early age. It is a matter of dying brain cells, he says, and the rejuvenation we pilots undergo is imperfect in this respect. We grow slowly stupider as we age, and so why not drink skotch, or smoke toalache and lie with whores?)

      ‘The Continuum Hypothesis,’ Soli said to me as he spun his empty tumbler on top of the bar, ‘may very well be unprovable.’

      ‘I understand you are bitter.’

      ‘As you will be if you seek the unobtainable.’

      ‘Forgive me, Lord Pilot, but how are we to know what is obtainable and what is not?’

      ‘We grow wiser as we grow older,’ he said.

      I kicked the toe of my boot against the brass railing at the foot of the bar. The metal rang dully. ‘I may be young, and I don’t want to sound like –’

      ‘You’re bragging,’ Lionel said quickly.

      ‘ – but I think the Hypothesis is provable, and I intend to prove it.’

      ‘For the sake of wisdom,’ Soli asked me, ‘or for the glory? I’ve heard that you’d like to be Lord Pilot someday.’

      ‘Every journeyman dreams of being Lord Pilot.’

      ‘A boy’s dreams often become a man’s nightmares.’

      I kicked the railing, accidentally. ‘I’m not a boy, Lord Pilot. I take my vows tomorrow; one of my vows is to discover wisdom. Have you forgotten?’

      ‘Have I forgotten?’ he said, breaking his taboo and flinching as he shouted out the forbidden pronoun. ‘Listen, Boy, I’ve forgotten nothing.’

      The word ‘nothing’ seemed to hang in the air along with the hollow ringing of the railing as Soli stared at me and I at him. Then there came too-loud laughter from the street outside, and the door suddenly opened. Three tall, heavy men, each of them with pale yellow hair and drooping moustaches, each of them wearing light black furs dusted with snow, ejected their skate blades and stomped into the bar. They came up to Lionel and Soli and grasped each other’s hands. The largest of the three, a master pilot who had terrorized Bardo during our novice years at Borja, called for three mugs of kvass. ‘It’s spiky cold outside,’ he said.

      Bardo leaned over to me and whispered, ‘Time to go, I think.’

      I shook my head.

      The master pilots – their names were Neith, Seth and Tomoth – were brothers. They had their backs to us, and they seemed not to have noticed us.

      ‘I’ll pay for six nights of master courtesans,’ Bardo mumbled.

      The novice banged three mugs of steaming hot black beer down on the bar. Tomoth backed a few steps closer to the fire and shook the melting snow from his furs. Like some of the older pilots who had gone blind from old age, he wore jewelled, mechanical eyes. He had just returned from the edge of the Vild, and he said to Soli, ‘Your Ieldra were right, my friend. The Gallivare Binary and Cerise Luz have exploded. Nothing left but dirty hard dust and light.’

      ‘Dust and light,’ his brother Neith said, and he burned his mouth with hot kvass and cursed.

      ‘Dust and light,’ Seth repeated. ‘Sodervarld and her twenty millions caught in a storm of radioactive dust and light. We tried to get them off but we were too late.’

      Sodervarld orbits Enola Luz, which is – had been – the star nearest the Gallivare Binary. Seth told us that the supernova had baked the surface of Sodervarld, killing off every bit of life except the ground worms. The small master pilot’s bar suddenly seemed stultifyingly tiny. The three brothers, I recalled, had been born on Sodervarld.

      ‘To our mother,’ Seth said as he clinked mugs with Soli, Lionel and his brothers.

      ‘To our father,’ Tomoth said.

      ‘Freyd.’ This came from Neith who inclined his head so slightly that I was not sure if he had actually nodded or if his image had wavered in the firelight. ‘To Yuleth and Elath.’

      ‘Time to go,’ I said to Bardo.

      We made ready to leave, but Neith fell weeping against Tomoth, who turned our way as he caught his brother. His jewelled eyes gleamed in the half-light when he saw us. ‘What’s this?’ he shouted.

      ‘Why are there journeymen in our bar?’ Seth wanted to know.

      Neith brushed yellow hair from his wet eyes and said, ‘My God, it’s the Bastard and his fat friend – what’s his name? – Burpo? Lardo?’

      ‘Bardo,’ Bardo said.

      ‘They were just about to leave,’ Soli said.

      I suddenly did not feel like leaving. My mouth was dry, and there was a pressure behind my eyes.

      ‘Don’t call him “Bardo”,’ Neith said. ‘When we tutored him at Borja, everyone called him Piss-All Lal because he used to piss in his bed every night.’

      It was true, Bardo’s birth name was Pesheval Lal. When he first came to Neverness, he had been a skinny, terrified, homesick boy who had loved to recite romantic poetry and who had pissed in his bed every night. Half of the novices and masters had called him ‘Bardo,’ and the other half, ‘Piss-All.’ But after he had begun lifting heavy weights above his head and had taken to spending the nights with bought women so that he wet his bed with the liquids of lust instead of piss, few had dared to call him anything but ‘Bardo.’

      ‘Well,’ Tomoth said as he clapped his hands at the novice behind the bar. ‘Piss-All and the Bastard will toast with us before they leave.’

      The novice filled our mugs and tumblers. Bardo looked at me; I wondered if he could hear the blood pounding in my throat or see the tears burning in my eyes.

      ‘Freyd,’ Tomoth said. ‘To the dead of Sodervarld.’

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