The Ethical Engineer

II

“Are you going to feed me by hand — or unlock my wrists while I eat?” Jason asked. Mikah stood over him with the tray, undecided. Jason gave a light verbal prod, very gently, because whatever else he was, Mikah was not stupid. “I would prefer you to feed me of course, you’d make an excellent body servant.”

“You are capable of eating by yourself,” Mikah responded instantly, sliding the tray into the slots of Jason’s chair. “But you will have to do it with only one hand. If you were freed you would only cause trouble.” He touched the control on the back of the chair and the right wrist lock snapped open. Jason stretched his cramped fingers and picked up the fork.

While he ate Jason’s eyes were busy. Not obviously, since a gambler’s attention is never obvious, but many things can be seen if you keep your eyes open and your attention apparently elsewhere. A sudden glimpse of someone’s cards, the slight change of expression that reveals a player’s strength. Item by item his seemingly random gaze touched the items in the cabin: control console, screens, computer, chart screen, jump control chart case, bookshelf. Everything was observed, remembered and considered. Some combination of them would fit into the plan.

So far all he had was the beginning and the end of an idea. Beginning: He was a prisoner in this ship, on his way back to Cassylia. End: He was not going to remain a prisoner — nor return to Cassylia. Now all that was missing was the vital middle. It looked impossible at the moment, but Jason never considered that it couldn’t be done. He operated on the principle that you made your own luck. You kept your eyes open as things evolved and at the right moment you acted. If you acted fast enough, that was good luck. If you worried over the possibilities until the moment had passed, that was bad luck.

He pushed the empty plate away and stirred sugar into his cup. Mikah had eaten sparingly and was now starting on his second cup of tea. His eyes were fixed, unfocused in thought as he drank. He started slightly when Jason called to him.

“Since you don’t stock cigarettes on this ship — how about letting me smoke my own? You’ll have to dig them out for me since I can’t reach the pocket while I’m chained to this chair.”

“I cannot help you,” Mikah said, unmoving. “Tobacco is an irritant, a drug and a carcinogen. If I gave you a cigarette, I would be giving you cancer.”

“Don’t be a hypocrite!” Jason snapped, inwardly pleased at the rewarding flush in the other’s neck. “They’ve taken the cancer-producing agents out of tobacco for centuries now. And even if they hadn’t — how does that affect this situation. You’re taking me to Cassylia to certain death. So why should you concern yourself with the state of my lungs in the future?”

“I hadn’t considered it that way. It is just that there are certain rules of life….”

“Are there?” Jason broke in, keeping the initiative and the advantage. “Not as many as you like to think. And you people who are always dreaming up the rules never carry your thinking far enough. You are against drugs. Which drugs? What about the tannic acid in that tea you’re drinking? Or the caffeine in it? It’s loaded with caffeine — a drug that is both a strong stimulant and a diuretic. That’s why you won’t find tea in spacesuit canteens. That’s a case of a drug forbidden for a good reason. Can you justify your cigarette ban the same way?”

Mikah started to talk, then thought for a moment. “Perhaps you are right. I’m tired, and it is not important.” He warily took the cigarette case from Jason’s pocket and dropped it onto the tray. Jason didn’t attempt to interfere. Mikah poured himself a third cup of tea with a slightly apologetic air.

“You must excuse me, Jason, for attempting to make you conform to my own standards. When you are in pursuit of the big Truths, you sometimes let the little Truths slip. I’m not intolerant, but I do tend to expect everyone else to live up to certain criteria I have set for myself. Humility is something we should never forget and I thank you for reminding me of it. The search for Truth is hard.”

“There is no Truth,” Jason told him, the anger and insult gone now from his voice since he wanted to keep his captor involved in the conversation. Involved enough to forget about the free wrist for a while. He raised the cup to his lips and let the tea touch his lips without drinking any. The half-full cup supplied an unconsidered reason for his free hand.

“No Truth?” Mikah weighed the thought. “You can’t possibly mean that. The galaxy is filled with Truth, it’s the touchstone of Life itself. It’s the thing that separates Mankind from the animals.”

“There is no Truth, no Life, no Mankind. At least not the way you spell them — with capital letters. They don’t exist.”

Mikah’s taut skin contracted into a furrow of concentration. “You’ll have to explain yourself,” he said. “You’re not being clear.”

“I’m afraid it’s you who aren’t being clear. You’re making a reality where none exists. Truth — with a small T is a description, a relationship. A way to describe a statement. A semantic tool. But capital T Truth is an imaginary word, a noise with no meaning. It pretends to be a noun but it has no referent. It stands for nothing. It means nothing. When you say ‘I believe in Truth’ you are really saying ‘I believe in nothing’.”

“You’re wrong, you’re wrong,” Mikah said, leaning forward, stabbing with his finger. “Truth is a philosophical abstraction, one of the tools that mankind’s mind has used to raise it above the beasts — the proof that we are not beasts ourselves, but a higher order of creation. Beasts can be true — but they cannot know Truth. Beasts can see, but they cannot see Beauty.”

“Arrgh!” Jason growled. “It’s impossible to talk to you, much less enjoy any comprehensible exchange of ideas. We aren’t even speaking the same language. Aside from who is right and who is wrong, for the moment, we should go back to basics and at least agree on the meaning of the terms that we are using. To begin with — can you define the difference between ethics and ethos?”

“Of course,” Mikah snapped, a glint of pleasure in his eyes at the thought of a good rousing round of hair-splitting. “Ethics is the discipline dealing with what it good or bad, or right or wrong — or with moral duty and obligation. Ethos means the guiding beliefs, standards or ideals that characterize a group or community.”

“Very good, I can see that you have been spending the long spaceship-nights with your nose buried in the books. Now make sure the difference between those two terms is very clear, because it is the heart of the little communications problem we have here. Ethos is inextricably linked with a single society and cannot be separated from it, or it loses all meaning. Do you agree?”

“Well….”

“Come, come — you have to agree on the terms of your own definition. The ethos of a group is just a catch-all term for the ways in which the members of a group rub against each other. Right?”

Mikah reluctantly produced a nod of acquiescence.

“Now that we agree about that we can push on one step further. Ethics, again by your definition, must deal with any number of societies or groups. If there are any absolute laws of ethics, they must be so inclusive that they can be applied to any society. A law of ethics must be as universal of application as is the law of gravity.”

“I don’t follow you…?”

“I didn’t think you would when I got to this point. You people who prattle about your Universal Laws never really consider the exact meaning of the term. My knowledge of the history of science is very vague, but I’m willing to bet that the first Law of Gravity ever dreamed up stated that things fell at such and such a speed, and accelerated at such and such a rate. That’s not a law, but an observation that isn’t even complete until you add ‘on this planet.’ On a planet with a different mass there will be a different observation. The law of gravity is the formula

and this can be used to compute the force of gravity between any two bodies anywhere. This is a way of expressing fundamental and unalterable principles that apply in all circumstances. If you are going to have any real ethical laws they will have to have this same universality. They will have to work on Cassylia or Pyrrus, or on any planet or in any society you can find. Which brings us back to you. What you so grandly call — with capital letters and a flourish of trumpets — ’Laws of Ethics’ aren’t laws at all, but are simple little chunks of tribal ethos, aboriginal observations made by a gang of desert sheepherders to keep order in the house — or tent. These rules aren’t capable of any universal application, even you must see that. Just think of the different planets that you have been on and the number of weird and wonderful ways people have of reacting to each other — then try and visualize ten rules of conduct that would be applicable in all these societies. An impossible task. Yet I’ll bet that you have ten rules you want me to obey, and if one of them is wasted on an injunction against saying prayers to carved idols I can imagine just how universal the other nine are. You aren’t being ethical if you try to apply them wherever you go — you’re just finding a particularly fancy way to commit suicide!”

“You are being insulting!”

“I hope so. If I can’t reach you in any other way, perhaps insult will jar you out of your state of moral smugness. How dare you even consider having me tried for stealing money from the Cassylia casino when all I was doing was conforming to their own code of ethics! They run crooked gambling games, so the law under their local ethos must be that crooked gambling is the norm. So I cheated them, conforming to their norm. If they have also passed a law that says cheating at gambling is illegal, the law is unethical, not the cheating. If you are bringing me back to be tried by that law you are unethical, and I am the helpless victim of an evil man.”

“Limb of Satan!” Mikah shouted, leaping to his feet and pacing back and forth before Jason, clasping and unclasping his hands with agitation. “You seek to confuse me with your semantics and so-called ethics that are simply opportunism and greed. There is a Higher Law that cannot be argued — ”

“That is an impossible statement — and I can prove it.” Jason pointed at the books on the wall. “I can prove it with your own books, some of that light reading on the shelf there. Not the Aquinas — too thick. But the little volume with Lull on the spine. Is that Ramon Lull’s ‘The Booke of the Ordre of Chyualry’?”

Mikah’s eyes widened. “You know the book? You’re acquainted with Lull’s writing?”

“Of course,” Jason said, with an offhandedness he did not feel, since this was the only book in the collection he could remember reading, the odd title had stuck in his head. “Now let me see it and I shall prove to you what I mean.” There was no way to tell from the unchanged naturalness of his words that this was the moment he had been working carefully towards. He sipped the tea. None of his tenseness showing.

Mikah Samon got the book and handed it to him.

Jason flipped through the pages while he talked. “Yes… yes, this is perfect. An almost ideal example of your kind of thinking. Do you like to read Lull?”

“Inspirational!” Mikah answered, his eyes shining. “There is beauty in every line and Truths that we have forgotten in the rush of modern life. A reconciliation and proof of the interrelationship between the Mystical and the Concrete. By manipulation of symbols he explains everything by absolute logic.”

“He proves nothing about nothing,” Jason said emphatically. “He plays word games. He takes a word, gives it an abstract and unreal value, then proves this value by relating it to other words with the same sort of nebulous antecedents. His facts aren’t facts — just meaningless sounds. This is the key point, where your universe and mine differ. You live in this world of meaningless facts that have no existence. My world contains facts that can be weighed, tested, proven related to other facts in a logical manner. My facts are unshakeable and unarguable. They exist.”

“Show me one of your unshakeable facts,” Mikah said, his voice calmer now than Jason’s.

“Over there,” Jason said. “The large green book over the console. It contains facts that even you will agree are true — I’ll eat every page if you don’t. Hand it to me.” He sounded angry, making overly bold statements and Mikah fell right into the trap. He handed the volume to Jason, using both hands since it was very thick, metal bound and heavy.

“Now listen closely and try and understand, even if it is difficult for you,” Jason said, opening the book. Mikah smiled wryly at this assumption of his ignorance. “This is a stellar ephemeris, just as packed with facts as an egg is with meat. In some ways it is a history of mankind. Now look at the jump screen there on the control console and you will see what I mean. Do you see the horizontal green line? Well, that’s our course.”

“Since this is my ship and I’m flying it I’m aware of that,” Mikah said. “Get on with your proof.”

“Bear with me,” Jason told him. “I’ll try and keep it simple. Now the red dot on the green line is our ship’s position. The number above the screen our next navigational point, the spot where a star’s gravitational field it strong enough to be detected in jump space. The number is the star’s code listing. DB89-046-229. I’ll look it up in the book” — he quickly flipped the pages — ”and find its listing. No name. A row of code symbols though that tell a lot about it. This little symbol means that there is a planet or planets suitable for man to live on. Doesn’t say if any people are there though.”

“Where does this all lead to?” Mikah interrupted.

“Patience — you’ll see in a moment. Now look, at the screen. The green dot approaching on the course line is the PMP. Point of Maximum Proximity. When the red dot and green dot coincide….”

“Give me that book,” Mikah ordered, stepping forward. Aware suddenly that something was wrong. He was just an instant too late.

“Here’s your proof,” Jason said, and hurled the heavy book through the jump screen into the delicate circuits behind. Before it hit he had thrown the second book. There was a tinkling crash, a flare of light and the crackle of shorted circuits.

The floor gave a tremendous heave as the relays snapped open, dropping the ship through into normal space.

Mikah grunted in pain, clubbed to the floor by the suddenness of the transition. Locked into the chair, Jason fought the heaving of his stomach and the blackness before his eyes. As Mikah dragged himself to his feet, Jason took careful aim and sent the tray and dishes hurtling into the smoking ruin of the jump computer.

“There’s your fact,” he said in cheerful triumph. “Your incontrovertible, gold-plated, uranium-cored fact.

“We’re not going to Cassylia any more!”