David Zindell by Neverness

Author:Neverness
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

I left the Hofgarten determined to stop Bardo before he found another bar, before he drank himself into a stupor and collapsed in some dark alley deep in the Farsider’s Quarter. I skated towards the Street of the Ten Thousand Bars. The early light was streaming through the fragile obsidian hospices and other buildings. The cross streets were deserted, and to the east, the lesser glidderies were pools of fire. From the hatch of a hospice, a few Fravashi emerged looking tired and hungry. They rubbed the nictating membranes from their eyes and whistled to each other with such a high pitch that I could only make out a tenth of their words. When they passed a group of sleepy novices, they pitched their whistles lower so their fluting, piping prayers might be felt and understood. The novices whistled back with clumsy, inexpert notes, thanking the aliens. They clapped their hands and laughed as they hurried off to practice their thought primaries. In their clean white robes, with their white-gloved hands shielding their eyes against the glare, they looked like immaculate toy dolls saluting the rising sun.

Down the middle of the street, bright yellow sleds filled to the rails with foodstuffs, woolens and other goods rocketed continually past. The sleds, burning hydrogen and oxygen in well-spaced, measured blasts spewed out an exhaust of water vapor. It was this fine spray from sleds across the City that everywhere settled on cold stone, freezing and silvering the buildings with verglas. I remembered Master Jonath - the historian who had tutored Bardo and me in our second year at Borja - saying that on Old Earth during the holocaust century, the sleds in many cities had been mounted on greased wheels and had burned hydrocarbons inside a steel engine. The resultant fumes, he claimed, had been invisible to the eye and not at all harmful. He, a hater of the cold mists that so often steal over our City, held that we should tear up our beautiful streets and copy the example of the ancients. I remembered him saying this, remembered as clearly as I remembered my multiplication tables. Kindly Master Jonath with his warts and his long, stringy black hair lecturing patiently as Bardo and I traded punches on the ugly gray rug of his apartment - what trick of memory is it that permits us to see our younger selves so clearly? Why are events that happened later in time-important events such as the time Bardo claims I lost my temper and nearly murdered Marek Kesse - why are these memories so often muddy and dim?

Whatever the flaws in my memory, I shall always remember the miracle that happened that morning. I was skating down the Promenade of the Thousand Monuments when my time sense began to dilate. The sliddery divided into two broad bands of orange even as my mind began dividing segments of time into endlessly long infinitesimals. Separating the north and south lanes of the street was a mile-long Promenade of statues, obelisks and other testaments to glories past and glories yet to be.

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