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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 jewelry 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 Lost 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 colored 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 gray robe of a master cantor, those purest of pure mathematicians. Her quick gray 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