But Bardo grew careless! In my hurry through the windows, I grew careless.’
I will not record all of my friend’s words here. In short, while fenestering through the dangerous Danladi thinspace he made a mistake that would have made the youngest of journeymen blush. In his mapping of the decision-group onto itself, he neglected to show the function was one-to-one, so he fell into a loop. Now any other pilot would have laboriously searched for a sequence of mappings to extricate himself from the loop. But Bardo was lazy and did not want to spend a hundred or more days of intime searching for such a mapping. He had an idea as to how he might instantly escape the loop, this lazy but brilliant man, and he played with his idea. After a mere seven hours of intime, he tasted the pungent fruit of genius. He proved that a mapping of points present to points past always exists, that a pilot could always return to any point along his immediate path. Moreover, it was a constructive proof; that is to say, not only did he prove such a mapping existed, he showed how such a mapping could be constructed. Thus he made a mapping with the star just beyond Ksandaria’s. He fell out into the fallaways, into the familiar spaces he had recently passed through. And then he journeyed homeward to Neverness.
‘I’m sought after, now,’ he laughed out. ‘It’s ironic: I, in my stupidity, I stumbled into a loop but I’ve proved the greatest of the lesser unproved theorems. Bardo’s Boomerang Theorem – that’s what the journeymen have named my little mapping theorem. There’s even talk of elevating me to a mastership, did you know that? I, Bardo, master pilot! Yes, I’m sought after now, by Kolenya and others with their luscious lips and beautiful, fat thighs. My seed flows like magma, my friend. I’m famous! Ah, but not as famous as you, eh?’
We talked all afternoon until the light died from the grey sky and the cafe filled with hungry people. We ordered a huge meal of cultured meats and the various exotic dishes favoured by Bardo. He poked his finger into my ribs and said, ‘You’ve no meat on your skinny bones!’ He praised me again for my discovery, and then I told him about my new plan.
‘You want to do what?’ he said, wiping meat jelly from his lips with a cloth. ‘To journey to the Alaloi and steal their DNA? That’s slelling, isn’t it?’ Realizing he had spoken that awful word too loudly, he looked around at the other diners and lowered his voice conspiratorially. He leaned across the table, ‘We can’t go slelling the Alaloi’s DNA, can we?’
‘It’s not really slelling,’ I said. ‘It’s not as if we’d use their DNA to tailor poisons or clone them or –’
‘Slelling is slelling,’ he interrupted. ‘And what about the covenants? The Timekeeper would never allow it, thank God!’
‘He might.’
I told him about my petition, and he grew sullen and argumentative.
‘By God, we can’t just take a windjammer and land on one of their islands and ask them to drop their seed in a test tube, can we?’
‘I have a different plan,’ I said.
‘Oh, no, I don’t think I want to hear this.’ He ate a few more cookies, wiped his lips and farted.
‘We’ll go to the Alaloi in disguise. It shouldn’t be too hard to learn their customs and to scrape a few skin cells from the palms of their hands.’
‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘Oh, too bad for Bardo, and too bad for you if you insist on this mad plan. And how do you think we could disguise ourselves? Oh no, please don’t tell me, I’ve had enough of your plans.’
I said, ‘There’s a way. Do you remember the story of Goshevan? We’ll do as he did. We’ll go to a cutter and have our bodies sculpted. The Alaloi will think we are their cousins.’
He farted again and belched. ‘That’s insane! Please, Mallory, look at me and admit you know it’s insane. By God, we can’t become Alaloi, can we? And why should you think the Alaloi’s DNA is older than any other? Shouldn’t we concentrate our efforts on the main chance? Since I’ve discovered mumiyah from three thousand years before the Swarming, why don’t we – you, I and Li Tosh, mount an expedition back to the Darghinni? After all, we know there are the remains of a museum ship on one of their worlds.’
I coughed and I rubbed the side of my nose. I did not want to point out that as of yet, we had no idea where to look for the wreckage of the museum ship. I said, ‘The Alaloi DNA is probably fifty thousand years old.’
‘Is that true? We don’t know anything about the Alaloi except that they’re so stupid they don’t even have a language!’
I smiled because he was being deliberately fatuous. I told him everything known about the Alaloi, those dreamers who had carked their humanness into neanderthal flesh. According to the historians, the Alaloi’s ancestors had hated the rot and vice of civilization, any civilization. Therefore, they had fled Old Earth in long ships. Because they wanted to live what they thought of as a natural life, they back-mutated some of their chromosomes, the better to grow strong, primitive children to live on the pristine worlds they hoped to discover. In one of their long ships, they carried the frozen body of a neanderthal boy recovered from the ice of Tsibera, which was the northernmost continent of Old Earth. They had spliced strands of frozen DNA; with the boy’s replicated DNA they performed their rituals and carked their germ cells with ancient chromosomes. Generations later, generations of experiment and breeding, the cavemen – to use the ancient, vulgar term – landed on Icefall. They destroyed their ships, fastened their hooded furs, and they went to live in the frozen forests of the Ten Thousand Islands.
‘That’s interesting,’ Bardo said. ‘But I’m bothered by one thing. Well, I’m bothered by everything you’ve said, of course, but there is one thing that bothers me stupendously about this whole scheme of searching for man’s oldest DNA.’
He ordered some coffee and drank it. He looked across the cafe at a pretty journeyman historian, and he began flirting with his eyes.
‘Tell me, then,’ I said.
He reluctantly looked away, looked at me, and said, ‘What did the goddess mean that the secret of life is written in the oldest DNA of the human species? We must think very carefully about this. What did She mean by “old”?’
‘What do you mean, “what did She mean by old?”’
He puffed his cheeks out and swore, ‘Damn you, why do you still answer my questions with questions? Old – what’s old? Does one race of man have older DNA than another? How can one living human have older DNA than another?’
‘You’re splitting words like a semanticist,’ I said.
‘No, I don’t think I am.’ He removed his glove, fingered his greasy nose and said, ‘The DNA in my skin is very old stuff, by God! Parts of the genome have been evolving for four billion years. Now that’s old, I think, and if you want me to split words, I shall. What of the atoms that make up my DNA? Older still, I think, because they were made in the heart of stars ten billion years ago.’
He scraped along the side of his nose and held out his finger. Beneath the long nail was a smear of grease and dead, yellow skin cells. ‘Here’s your secret of life,’ he said. He seemed very pleased with himself, and he went back to flirting with the historian.
I knocked his hand aside and said, ‘I admit the Entity’s words are something of a riddle. We’ll have to solve the riddle, then.’
‘Ah, but I was never fond of riddles.’
I caught his eyes and told him, ‘As you say, the genome has been evolving for billions of years. And therefore any of our ancestors’ DNA is older than ours. This is how I’ll define old, then. We’ll have to start somewhere. The Alaloi have spliced DNA from a body fifty thousand years old into their own bodies. We can hope this DNA – and the message in the DNA – hasn’t mutated or degraded.’
‘But the Alaloi are not our ancestors,’ he said.
‘Yes, but the neanderthals of Old Earth were.’
‘No,