The Timekeeper, resplendent and stern in his flowing red robe, bade the thirty of us to repeat after him the vows of a pilot. It was good that we knelt close together. The warm, reassuring bulk of Bardo pressing me from the right, and my friend Quirin on my left, kept me from pitching forward to the polished marble surface of the dais. Although that morning I had been to a cutter who had melded the ragged tear of my eyelid and had taken a purgative to cleanse my body of poisonous skotch, I was ill. My head felt hot and heavy; it seemed that my brain was swollen with blood and would burst my skull from inside. My spirit, too, was burning. My life was ruined. I was sick with fear and dread. I thought of the Tycho and Erendira Ede and Ricardo Lavi, and other famous pilots who had died trying to pierce the mystery of the Solid State Entity.
Immersed as I was in my misery, I missed most of the Timekeeper’s warnings as to the deadliness of the manifold. One thing he said I remember clearly: that of the two hundred and eleven journeymen who had entered Resa with us, only we thirty remained. Journeymen Die, I said to myself, and suddenly the Timekeeper’s deep, rough voice vibrated through the haze of my wandering thoughts. ‘Pilots die too,’ he said, ‘but not as often or as easily, and they die to a greater purpose. It is to this purpose that we are gathered here today, to consecrate …’ He went on in a like manner for several minutes. Then he enjoined us to celibacy and poverty, the least in importance of our vows. (I should mention that the meaning of celibacy is taken in its narrowest sense. If it were not, Bardo could never have been a pilot. Although physical passion between man and woman is exalted, it is the rule of our Order that pilots not marry. It is a good rule, I think, a rule not without reason. When a pilot returns from the manifold years older or younger than his lover, as Soli recently had, the differential ageing – we call it crueltime – can destroy them.) ‘As you have learned and will learn, so must you teach,’ the Timekeeper said, and we took our third vow. Bardo must have heard my voice wavering because he reached over and squeezed my knee, as if to impart to me some of his great strength. The fourth vow, I thought, was the most important of all. ‘You must restrain yourselves,’ the Timekeeper told us. I knew it was true. The symbiosis between a pilot and his ship is as profound and powerful as it is deadly addictive. How many pilots, I wondered, had been lost to the manifold because they too often indulged in the power and joy of their extensional brains? Too many. I repeated the vow of obedience mechanically, with little spirit or enthusiasm. The Timekeeper paused, and I thought for a moment he was going to look at me, to chasten me or to make me repeat the fifth vow again. Then, with a voice pregnant with drama, in a ponderous cadence, he said, ‘The last vow is the holiest vow, the vow without which all your other vows would be as empty as a cup full of air.’ So it was that on the ninety-fifth day of false winter in the year 2929 since the founding of Neverness, we vowed above all else to seek wisdom and truth, even though our seeking should lead to our death and to the ruin of all that we loved and held dear.
The Timekeeper called for the rings. Leopold Soli emerged from an anteroom adjacent to the dais. A frightened-looking novice followed him carrying a velvet wand around which our thirty rings were stacked, one atop the other. We bowed our heads and extended our right hands. Soli proceeded down the line of journeymen, slipping the spun-diamond rings off the wand and sliding them onto each of our little fingers. ‘With this ring, you are a Pilot,’ he said to Alark Mandara and Chantal Astoreth. And to the brilliant Jonathan Ede and the Sonderval, ‘With this ring you are a pilot,’ on and on down the line of kneeling journeymen. His nose was so swollen that his words sounded nasal, as if he had a cold. He came to Bardo, whose fingers were bare of the jewellery he usually wore and instead encircled with rings of dead white flesh. He removed the largest ring from the wand. (Though my head was supposed to be bowed, I could not resist peeking as Soli pushed the gleaming black ring around Bardo’s mammoth finger.) Then it was my turn. Soli bent over to me, and he said, ‘With this ring you are a … pilot.’ He said the word ‘pilot’ as if it had been forced out of him, as if the word were acid to his tongue. He jammed the ring on my finger with such force that the diamond shaved a layer from my skin and bruised my knuckle tendon. Eight more times I heard ‘With this ring you are a pilot,’ and then the Timekeeper intoned the litany for the Lord Pilot, and said a requiem, and we were done.
We thirty pilots left the dais to show our new rings to our friends and masters. A few of the wealthier new pilots had family members who had paid the expensive passage to Neverness aboard a commercial deep ship, but Bardo was not one of these. (His father thought him a traitor for abandoning the family estates for the poverty of our Order.) We mingled with our fellows, and the sea of coloured silk engulfed us. There were shouts of happiness and laughter and boots stamping on the tiled floor. My mother’s friend, the eschatologist Kolenya Mor, indecently pressed her plump, wet cheek next to mine. She hugged me as she bawled, ‘Look at him, Moira.’
‘I’m looking at him,’ my mother said. She was a tall woman and strong (and beautiful), though I must admit she was slightly fat due to her love of chocolate candies. She wore the plain grey robe of a master cantor, those purest of pure mathematicians. Her quick grey eyes seemed to look everywhere at once as she tilted her head quizzically and asked me, ‘Your eyelid has been melded. Recently, hasn’t it?’ Ignoring my ring, she continued, ‘It’s well known what you said, the oath you swore. To Soli. It’s the talk of the city. “Moira’s son has sworn to penetrate the Solid State Entity,” that’s all I’ve heard today. My handsome, brilliant, reckless son.’ She began to cry. I was shocked, and I could not look at her. It was the first time I had ever seen her cry.
‘It’s a beautiful ring,’ my Aunt Justine said as she came up to me and bowed her head. She held up her own pilot’s ring for me to look at. ‘And well deserved, no matter what Soli says.’ Like my mother, Justine was tall with slightly greyed black hair pulled back in a chignon; like my mother she loved chocolates. But where my mother most often spent her days thinking and exploring the possibilities of her too-ambitious daydreams, Justine liked to socialize and skate figures and perform difficult jumps at the Ring of Fire, or the North Ring, or one of the city’s other crowded ice rings. Thus she had retained the streamlined suppleness of her first youth at the expense, I thought, of her naturally quick mind. I often wondered why she had wanted Soli for a husband, and more, why the Timekeeper had allowed these two famous pilots a special dispensation to marry.
Burgos Harsha, with his bushy eyebrows, jowls and long black hairs pushing out of his piglike nostrils, approached us and said, ‘Congratulations, Mallory. I always expected you to do something extraordinary – we all did, you know – but I never dreamed you’d break our Lord Pilot’s nose the first time you met him and swear to kill yourself in that nebula known colloquially – and, I might add, quite vulgarly – as the Solid State Entity.’ The master historian rubbed his hands together vigorously and turned to my mother. ‘Now, Moira, I’ve examined the canons and the oral history of the Tycho as well as the customaries, and it’s clear – I may be wrong, of course, but when have you known me to be wrong? – it’s clear that Mallory’s oath was a simple troth to the Lord Pilot, not a promissory oath to the Order. And certainly not a solemn oath. At the time he swore to kill himself – and this is a subtle point, but it’s clear – he hadn’t taken his vows, so he wasn’t legally a pilot, so he was not permitted to swear a promissory oath.’
‘I don’t understand,’ I said. From behind me came singing, the swish of silk against silk, and the chaotic hum of a thousand voices. ‘I swore what I swore. What difference does it make who I swore it to?’
‘The difference, Mallory, is that Soli can release you from your oath, if he wants to.’
I felt a squirt of adrenalin in my throat, and my heart fluttered in my chest like a nervous bird. I thought of all the ways pilots died: They died fenestering, their brains ruined by too-constant symbiosis with their ship, and they died of old age lost in decision trees; supernovae reduced their flesh to plasma, and dreamtime, too much dreamtime, left them forever staring vacantly at the burning stars; they were killed by aliens, and murdered by human beings, and minced by meteor swarms, and charred by the penumbras of blue giant stars, and frozen by the nothingness of deep space. I knew then that despite my foolish words about death among