Of course, it was impossible for her to come with me. I told her it was impossible. I said, ‘The Alaloi leave their crippled and blind out on the ice when it blizzards. They kill them.’ I had no idea, really, if this were true.
She turned towards me and smiled. ‘You’re not a very good liar,’ she said.
‘No, I’m not, am I? But I don’t understand why you would want to come with me.’
‘It’s hard to explain.’
‘Tell me.’
‘I’m sorry, Mallory, but I can’t tell you.’
‘Because of your vows?’
‘Of course, but … but more because the words don’t exist to describe the future.’
‘I thought you scryers had invented a special vocabulary.’
‘I wish I could find the words to tell you what I’ve seen.’
‘Try,’ I said.
‘I want to grow eyes again so I can see the faces of your … it’s there, on the ice in deep winter you’ll find your … Oh, what should I call it, this thing I see, this image, the image of man? I’ll break my vows, and I’ll grow eyes to see it again for a while before I … before I see.’
Silently I rubbed the bridge of my nose while I sat sweating in front of the crackling fire. Grow eyes indeed! It was a shocking thing for a scryer to say.
‘There,’ she sighed. ‘You see, I’ve said it so badly.’
‘Why can’t you just say which events will occur and which will not?’
‘Sweet Mallory, suppose I had seen the only event which really matters. If I told you that you must die at a certain time, every moment of your life would be agony because … you see, you’d always dwell on the moment of … it would rob every other moment of your life of happiness. If you knew.’
I kissed her mouth and said, ‘There’s another possibility. If I knew I had a hundred years before I died, I’d never be afraid of anything my whole life. I could enjoy every instant of living.’
‘Of course, that’s true,’ she said.
‘But that’s a paradox.’
She laughed for a while before admitting, ‘We scryers are known for our paradoxes, aren’t we?’
‘Do you see the future? Or do you see possible futures? That’s something I’ve always wanted to know.’
Indeed, most pilots – and everyone else in our Order – were curious to know the secrets of the scryers.
‘And seeing the future,’ I said, ‘why not change it if you wish?’
She laughed again. At times, such as when she was relaxed in front of the fire, she had a beautiful laugh. ‘Oh, you’ve just stated the first paradox, did you know? Seeing the future of … if we then act to change it, and do change it … if it’s changeable, then we haven’t really seen the future, have we?’
‘And you would refuse to act, then, merely to preserve this vision of what you’d seen?’
She took my hand and stroked my palm. ‘You don’t understand.’
I said, ‘In some fundamental sense, I’ve never really believed you scryers could see anything but possibilities.’
She dragged her fingernail down my lifeline. ‘Of course … possibilities.’
Because I was frustrated, I laughed and said, ‘I think it’s easier to understand a mechanic than a scryer. At least their beliefs are quantifiable.’
‘Some mechanics,’ she said, ‘believe that each quantum event occurring in the universe changes the … They’ve quantified the possibilities. With each event, a different future. Spacetime divides and redivides, like the branches of one of your infinite trees. An infinity of futures, these parallel futures, they call them, all occurring simultaneously. And so, an infinity of parallel nows, don’t you see? But the mechanics are wrong. Nowness is … there is a unity of immanence … oh, Mallory, only one future can ever be.’
‘The future is unchangeable, then?’
‘We have a saying,’ she told me. ‘“We don’t change the future; we choose the future.”’
‘Scryer talk.’
She reached up to me. She ran her fingers through my chest hair and made a sudden, tight fist above my heart, pulled at me as she said, ‘I will have gone to a cutter named … He’ll grow me new eyes. I want to see your face when you … one time, just the one time, is that okay?’
‘Would you really do that?’ I wondered aloud. ‘Break your vows? Why?’
‘Because I love … ,’ she said, ‘I love you, do you see?’
During the next few days I could think of little else except this strange conversation. As a returning pilot I was required to teach, so I agreed to tutor two novices in the arts of hallning. I must admit I did not perform my teaching duties with as much attention as I should have. Early one morning in the classroom of my chalet, as I was supposedly demonstrating simple geometric transformations to little Rafi and Geord, I found myself thinking back to my journey to the Entity, remembering how the imago of Katharine had grown eyes and looked at me. I wondered: Had She known what Katharine would one day say to me? I was mulling over the implications of this while I showed the novices how it is impossible to rotate a paper, two-dimensional tracing of a right-handed glove to match and fit the tracing of a left-handed glove, if the motion was restricted to rotations within a plane. I failed to notice they were bored. I picked up one of the glove tracings from the wooden floor, flipped it over and placed it on top of the other tracing. I said, ‘But if we lift it off the plane like so and rotate it through space, it’s trivial to match the two tracings. Similarly –’
And here the gangly, impatient Rafi interrupted me, calling out, ‘Similarly, it’s impossible to rotate a three-dimensional left glove into a right-handed glove. But if we rotate the glove through four-space, it’s simple to superimpose the two gloves. We know that, Pilot. Are we done now? You promised to tell us about your journey to the Alaloi – remember? Are you really going to drive dogsleds across the ice and eat living meat?’
My distractions, I saw to my dismay, had apparently infected even the novices. I was a little annoyed at Rafi, who was too quick for his own good. I said, ‘True, the gloves can be superimposed, but can you visualize the rotation through four-space? No? I didn’t think so.’
Two days later I took them to a cutter who modified their lungs, and then down to the Rose Womb Cloisters. I put them into the hexagonal attitude chamber, which occupied most of the rose-tiled tank room. There they floated and breathed the super-oxygenated water while performing the day’s exercises. With their sense of right and left, and up and down, dissolved by the dark, warm, salty water, they visualized four-space; they rotated the image of their own bodies around the imaginary plane cutting through their noses, navels and spines. They were trying to rotate themselves into their own mirror images. Even though it is really a simple exercise, akin to reversing the line diagram of a cube by staring at it until it ‘pops,’ I should have paid them close attention. But again, I let my mind wander. I was wondering if Katharine would be able to find a cutter to make her new eyes when I happened to look through the wine dark water at the novices. Rafi, I noticed, had his arms wrapped around his knees, and his eyes were tightly closed as he breathed water. How long had I left him like this? If I left him too long in the foetal attitude, he would build a dependency on sightlessness and closure. I reminded myself that he was to be a pilot, not a scryer, so I removed him from the tank.
‘The exercise was … too easy,’ Rafi said. He stood there naked, beads of water dripping off