‘On Summerworld,’ Bardo said to me between gasps of air, ‘we brand dung like him with red-hot steel.’
We crossed into the Farsider’s Quarter and came to the Street of the Ten Thousand Bars. I have said that the streets of Neverness have no names, but that is not entirely true. They have no official names, no names that are marked on buildings or posted on street signs. Especially in the Farsider’s Quarter, there are many nameless streets that are named according to the prevailing enterprise transpiring along its convolutions of coloured ice. Thus there is a Street of Cutters and Splicers, and a Street of Common Whores, as well as a Street of Master Courtesans. The Street of the Ten Thousand Bars is actually more of a district than a street; it is a maze of red lesser glidderies encompassing tiny bars that cater to the unique tastes of their patrons. One bar will serve only toalache while another might specialize in cilka, the pineal gland of the thallow bird which induces visions in small quantities and is lethal in larger ones. There are bars frequented only by the alien Friends of Man, and there are bars open to anyone who writes haiku (but only Simoom haiku) or plays the shakuhachi. Near the edge of the district, there is a bar where the eschatologists argue as to how long it will be before the exploding Vild destroys the last of the Civilized Worlds, and next door, a bar for the tychists who believe that absolute chance is the fundament of the universe, and that most probably some worlds will survive. I do not know if there are as many as ten thousand bars or if there are many more. Bardo often joked that if one could imagine a bar existing, it must exist. Somewhere there is a bar, he claimed, where the Fravashi analyse the anguished poetry of the Swarming Centuries and another bar where their criticisms are criticized. Somewhere – and why not? – there is a bar for those wishing to talk about what is occurring in all the other bars.
We stopped in front of the black, windowless master pilot’s bar, or, I should say, the bar for master pilots recently returned from the manifold. The sun had set, and the wind moaned as it drove flowing, ghostlike wisps of snow down the darkened gliddery. In the dim light of the street globes – when for a moment the wind suddenly pulled away the ragged, drifting snow shroud – the ice of the street was blood red.
‘This is an ugly place,’ Bardo said, his voice booming from the stone walls surrounding us. ‘I have a proposition. Since I’m in a generous mood, I’ll buy you a master courtesan for the night. You’ve never been able to afford one, have you? By God, it’s like nothing you’ve ever –’
‘No,’ I said as I shook my head.
I opened the heavy stone door, which was made of obsidian and so smooth that it felt almost greasy to the touch. For a moment, I thought the tiny room was empty. Then I saw two men standing at the dark end of the narrow bar, and I heard the shorter one say, ‘If you please, close the door, it’s cold.’
We stepped over to the bar, into the flickering light of the marble fireplace behind us. ‘Mallory,’ the man said, ‘and Bardo, what are you two doing here?’
My eyes adjusted to the dim orange light, and I saw the master pilot, Lionel Killirand. He shot me a swift look with his hard little eyes and contracted his blond eyebrows quizzically.
‘Soli,’ he said to the tall man next to him, ‘allow me to present your nephew.’
The tall man turned into the light, and I looked at my uncle, Leopold Soli, the Lord Pilot of our Order. It was like looking at myself.
He stared at me with troubled, deep-set, blue eyes. I did not like what I saw in his eyes; I remembered the stories my Aunt Justine had told me, that Soli was a man famous for his terrible, unpredictable rages. Like mine, his nose was long and broad, the mouth wide, firm. From his long neck to his skates, thick black woollens covered his lean body. He seemed intensely curious, scrutinizing me as carefully as I did him. I looked at his hair; he looked at mine. His hair was long and bound back with a silver chain, as was the custom of his birth planet, Simoom. He had unique hair, wavy black shot with red, a genetic marker of some Soli forebear who had tampered with the family chromosomes. My hair, thank God, was pure black. I looked at him; he looked at me. I wondered for the thousandth time about my chromosomes.
‘Moira’s son.’ He said my mother’s name as one says a curse word. ‘You shouldn’t be here, should you?’
‘I wanted to meet you,’ I said. ‘My mother has talked about you all my life.’
‘Your mother hates me.’
There was a long silence broken by Bardo, who said, ‘Where’s the bartender?’
The bartender, a tonsured novice who wore the white wool cap of Borja over his bald head, opened the storage room door behind the bar. He said, ‘This is the master pilot’s bar. Journeymen drink at the journeymen’s bar, which is five bars down the gliddery towards the Street of Musicians.’
‘Novices don’t tell journeymen what to do,’ Bardo said. ‘I’ll have a pipe of toalache and my friend drinks coffee – Summerworld coffee if you have it, Farfara if you don’t.’
The novice shrugged his skinny shoulders and said, ‘The master pilots don’t smoke toalache in this bar.’
‘I’ll have a tumbler of liquid toalache, then.’
‘We don’t serve toalache or coffee.’
‘Then we’ll have an amorgenic. Something strong to send the hormones gushing. We’ve a busy night ahead of us.’
Soli picked up a tumbler of a smoky coloured liquid and took a sip. Behind us a log in the fireplace popped and fell between two others, scattering glowing cinders and ashes over the tiled floor. ‘We drink liquor or beer,’ he said.
‘Barbaric.’ This came from Bardo who added, ‘I’ll have beer, then.’
I looked at my tall uncle and asked, ‘What liquor are you drinking?’
‘It’s called skotch.’
‘I’ll have skotch,’ I said to the novice, who filled two tumblers – a large one with foamy beer and a smaller one with amber skotch – and set them in front of us atop the rosewood bar.
Bardo gulped his beer, and after I had taken a sip of skotch and coughed, he asked, ‘What does it taste like?’ I handed him my tumbler, watching as he brought it up to his fat red lips. He, too, coughed at the fire of the burning liquid and announced, ‘It tastes like gull piss!’
Soli smiled at Lionel and asked me, ‘How old are you?’
‘Twenty-one, Lord Pilot. Tomorrow when we take our vows, I’ll be the youngest pilot our Order has ever had, if I may say that without sounding like I’m bragging.’
‘Well, you’re bragging,’ Lionel said.
We talked for a while about the origins of such immense and fathomless beings as the Silicon God and the Solid State Entity, and other things that pilots talk about. Soli told us of his journey to the core; he spoke of dense clusters of hot new stars and of a great ringworld that some god or other had assembled around Betti Luz. Lionel argued that the great and often insane mainbrains (he did not like to use the word ‘gods’) roaming the galaxy must be organized according to different principles than were our own minuscule minds, for how else could their brains’ separate lobes – some of which were the size of moons – intercommunicate with others across light-years of space? It was an old argument. It was one of the many bitter arguments dividing the pilots and professionals of our Order. Lionel, and many eschatologists, programmers, and mechanics as well, believed the mainbrains had mastered nearly instantaneous tachyonic information flow. He held that we should seek contact with these beings, even though