The Pillars of Eternity

10

Again, lemon-sherbet skies. Again, sitting on a hill to contemplate a fading universe.

Except that it was a different hill, and a different town sprawling below it. Except that this time Mace was beside him, and that his thoughts and feelings were, comparatively, confused.

‘You took a long time getting here,’ she said.

‘I made a mistake,’ he told her. ‘I stopped over at Al-Kadron to buy fuel rods. I was spotted by Rectification Branch agents. I had to kill three of them.’

It was soon after leaving Kathundra that he had parted company with Mace, feeling that the risk of capture was too great and should not involve her. But she had insisted on a rendezvous. When he arrived on Chaunce, the planet chosen by Hebron, it was to find her waiting.

His delayed, wandering course – he had taken eight standard months in getting here – was not entirely due to caution. In a deeper sense, Boaz had lost his way. Now, when he should at last have been feeling some hope of success in his mission, it was as if the quest itself had deserted him, and the iron-hard certainty in his soul seemed, despite himself, to waver, and all his efforts to seem trivial and useless.

‘I think Hebron is here,’ Mace told him.

He looked at her in surprise. ‘What makes you think that?’

‘Ebarak was acting shifty the last time I saw him, and there were some official people about. I got the idea Hebron had arrived to see how the research was going. Ebarak wouldn’t tell me that, of course.’

Boaz grunted. He had already seen Ebarak himself, and the scientist had said nothing of this.

Hebron was probably disappointed in Ebarak’s results so far. Scientifically, they were exciting – but they came nowhere near satisfying the exalted ambitions of the Director and his group.

‘They’ve created a new future-myth,’ Boaz murmured. ‘The myth of an operator-controlled universe, with man as the operator.’ He shook his head. ‘Men as the new gods of a new universe. What an absurd notion. Anthropomorphism carried to the ultimate degree. It’s the best piece of squirrelling I’ve heard.’

‘Squirrelling?’

‘Sorry.’ Mace would not know the word; it was a technical term of obscure derivation. ‘Losing sane perspective. Going nuts.’ His words sounded despairing. ‘What I mean is, in my view Hebron’s crew are barely sane, and probably actually deranged. It’s a ludicrous spectacle.’

Mace began to laugh, unpleasantly, mockingly. It startled him, and he turned to her, disconcerted.

‘You’re some alec, Joachim. You see derangement clearly in their case, but you’re incapable of seeing the same thing in yourself. It’s comic!’

‘What are you saying?’

‘Well, isn’t your objective the same as theirs, basically, and just as egocentric? I agree, they are mad. But by the same token so must you be.’

‘It was never conceivable that you could understand me,’ Boaz said, averting his face again, and feeling disappointed at her lack of sympathy.

‘Why not? Because I’m uneducated? Just the same, I’m a bonewoman, remember.’ She stood up and moved in front of him, brashly confronting him. Her big breasts fell bulkily in her shift as she leaned toward him. Her face was annoyed and admonishing. ‘Why don’t you just drop it? Why don’t you stop pitying yourself? There’s still time left to live!’

‘Live? It is living that’s the trouble.’ Boaz’s voice sounded burdened. He didn’t know why he was again taking the trouble to explain himself to her. It was the first time since his childhood that anyone’s derision had affected him. ‘As you said, you have no proper education in philosophy. For that reason you don’t quite comprehend that an unbearable past is to be feared – because it is also the future.’

‘Here we go again.’ Mace waved her hand. ‘Philosophy’s all junk, do you hear me? Junk. How do you know the past repeats itself? It’s only a theory. It’s only what people think. Perhaps the world doesn’t repeat itself the way you say it does. Perhaps it just goes on and on forever, changing all the time.’

‘It’s been scientifically proved.’

To Boaz’s vast surprise Mace uttered a sound of disgust and kicked him as hard as she could in the shin. ‘If you could list everything that’s been “scientifically proved” and still turned out wrong, it would make the world’s longest book. All the scientists do is play around with ideas they get from philosophers. Some deep-thinking alec says, “the world is made of lemons and bananas”. So the scientists get busy and start calculating, until they come up with some “equation” that tells you how many lemons and how many bananas there are. Fifteen million lemons and nineteen million bananas, or something. And there’s your proof. What fools you people are.’

Boaz did not look up. One part of him dismissed what Mace was saying as shallow ignorance. But another part of him, the part that had felt shaken and uneasy over recent months, saw in it an unfamiliar viewpoint that jolted his perception of things.

How did he know? How could he be certain that cosmic recurrence was true? How could anyone?

Could a bacterium, however hard it tried, ever chart the cycles of cosmic evolution?

Surveying the town below, he recalled that other occasion when he had noted how the econosphere’s fading glory seemed, in the human imagination, to invest the universe itself with an aura of nostalgia – a subjective impression that could only be delusory, given the span of cosmic life. By the same token, was not the whole scope of human thought also inapplicable to the universal immensity? Against that immensity, was not any idea, however trivial and shallow, like the seedy charm of the town below? It was a novel thought, a shocking thought, but suddenly he could not understand why it had never occurred to him that behind all the teachings of Madrigo, so steeped in ataraxy, so rational, so wise – a rock of sanity, a paragon of the intellect – there might lurk a single ineradicable fact of human knowledge: that no one knew anything.

If the colonnaders were wrong, his burden was lifted. A surge of joy jolted through him at the prospect. Free of fear! Free of return to pain! Free to live, and then to live no more!

How was it that Mace’s harsh, uneducated words could, in the space of moments, rip open his garment of decades of stubborn brooding? No, it could not be… an ignorant, suicidal girl could not know better than Madrigo…

He became aware that, unknown to himself, he had taken his colonnader cards from his pocket and was sifting them idly through his hands. He glanced down, faced with the appalling new impression that these superb, numinous symbols were after all pure invention… Then Mace snatched them from him and flung them away. He saw them go fluttering over the cyan grass of the hilltop.

Next, she swiftly unfastened her shift and let it fall from her body, revealing her nakedness. He saw from the exalted, ecstatic look in her eye that she was switching on her bone functions one by one. She leaned close to him, her hands resting on his shoulders, the aroma of her rising from her body, her plump, firm breasts, nipples erect, filling his vision.

‘Forget it all, Joachim,’ she hissed. ‘Remember you are a boneman. Come on! Switch on your bones! Feel them glowing within you!’

He sat motionless, not responding. She placed her cheek against his. ‘Philosophy isn’t real. But what bones give you, that’s real. Ever since it happened, you haven’t allowed yourself anything good, Joachim. That’s the trouble. You must learn to enjoy. That’s the only way to wipe out the past.’

Boaz, his picture of himself and the world, were all adrift. At present he had no sexual feeling. But to Mace’s cajoling he answered at last by dredging from his memory the all-but-forgotten controlling syllables.

It was like remembering flavours lost in the past. Felicity came on: for the first time in many years he knew the joy of emotion and sensation linked together, of delight at the sight of his surroundings, at sounds and smells, at the sigh of air on his skin. Adjusted rheobase came on, and everything he perceived became sharper and more vivid than an unboned man would have thought possible. Adjusted chronaxy slowed his time sense. Mace, as she edged closer to him, was performing a vast balletic dance in which every slight movement, every pore of her skin, took part.

At her urging whisper, the sex function came on.

She was helping him out of the modsuit, out of the sheathlike undergarment. ‘Higher,’ she moaned. ‘Take it all the way. You can stand it.’

Her hands ran over his ravaged skin. He obeyed her, pushing all the settings higher and higher, to maximum, until his mind dizzied with the assault of impressions and sensations, and the aid of the ship was necessary to maintain his sanity.

Oh, it was madness! It was a seething cauldron of desire, a world of endless eroticism, a delirium of delight that snatched away his identity and put in place of it – pleasure! Infinite excitement! She grappled with him until they scarcely knew which was which, and in a dazzling flashing fog of arousal he felt his ship, visible on the level ground to one side of the town, gearing itself up, getting ready to raise his phallus – which he would not have been able to do without its help, although it had never been called upon to accomplish this for him before.

A hard, bulky object filled his being, a tower of strength. Then – penetration. Now it filled her being too, dominant, lunging.

Into fire. Into a burning, seething, hopeful world.

The light gravity of Chaunce made Cere Chai Hebron feel slightly unsteady. To increase his weight marginally he wore a slimmed modsuit, scarcely more bulky than a chemise and hose, but this too lacked comfort. He liked his raiment to be loose and flowing.

But for the news of Boaz’s arrival he would have returned to Kathundra by now. ‘That is his ship, you say?’ he said. He pointed through the recessed upper-story window, over the roofs of the town to the space vessel that distinguished itself by its tall, rounded form among the more ungainly shapes of the ship ground.

‘Yes, Grand Master. That is his ship.’

A dozen members of Thelema, seated in formal convention, faced Grand Master Hebron. Nine of them had been hastily summoned from Kathundra and had arrived only that morning. Hebron turned from the window and resumed his seat, twirling the toga he wore over his modsuit around him.

‘Those of us who came earlier,’ he said, ‘have evaluated the work carried out by Citizen Ebarak and our own scientists on the time artifacts.’ He hesitated. ‘Our scientists have not been called to this meeting, for tactical reasons. It is best that what I have to tell you should not reach the ears of Ebarak.

‘The results are disappointing. It is unlikely that the time-gems will be of any help in achieving our aims. But then, I had reached this conclusion even before the work was moved to Chaunce. As you know, we have gained new information. Through suffering, the mind of man may become the mind of a god.’

Not a hint of reaction came from his followers (all men – women were not permitted into the higher ranks of Thelema) as he reminded them of the nature of their quest. Their discipline, which included restraint in the expression of feeling, was good. ‘The secret lies, then, not in some technical resource, but in the strength of our own will. But can suffering of the requisite intensity be mastered? It must of necessity be transcendent and therefore unendurable. One individual has known this degree of suffering, but failed to be transformed: the shipkeeper Joachim Boaz, a strange man who was marked ineradicably by his experience.’

He paused for almost ten seconds, then in the growing silence said: ‘It is true to say that Boaz is not really a man at all. His body is incapable of sustaining its own life. It is dependent on adp machinery within his ship, which integrates his every somatic function over a communication beam. The ship, rather than the walking man, is the bodily Boaz.’

He again indicated the window, in which Boaz’s ship, not far away on the ship ground, was neatly framed. Hebron did not know that at that moment it was assisting Boaz in an ecstasy of a wholly positive nature. ‘We have a unique opportunity for researching the true means to attaining transcendental consciousness. Control that ship, and we control Boaz. That gives us the means to use him as an experimental subject. It is said that the alien being on Meirjain offered to reintroduce Boaz to his agony, so he could attempt to overcome it. Though he did not have the courage to accept, we can force the issue on him, again and again if need be. Since he failed the test once he will do so again; but in so doing he will provide us with valuable data. This is indispensable if we are to prepare ourselves for the same trial.’

Hebron stopped, looking the meeting over in the manner that tacitly allowed questions. ‘Why should this particular individual be valuable to us?’ someone asked.

‘For two reasons: he is uniquely controllable, and he has already been close to the transcendental state. He is a natural subject for research into it.’

‘And what if our manipulations should, after all, cause him to cross the barrier?’ someone else asked. ‘Our position might be unenviable.’

Hebron smiled. ‘We are playing with fire,’ he agreed. ‘Mind-fire, to be exact. Anyone who is afraid has no place in Thelema.’

He nodded to the one nearest him, who then read out a list of names from among those newly arrived from Kathundra: the attack team.

‘Our task is simple,’ Hebron told them. ‘You will break into the Boaz ship and gain control over the equipment there, using the apparatus you brought with you. You must analyse it before he can return to confront you – he is a fierce adversary if opposed. Once you succeed, he can do nothing by himself.’

The small man who had helped Hebron with the interrogation of Mace spoke. ‘Is there not a moral issue here?’

‘Why should there be?’ Hebron said, his tone supercilious. ‘Who will judge a god?’

In another part of the town (which was much like Hondora, the town Boaz had been thinking of a few minutes earlier) a smaller meeting took place. The Rectification Branch colonel had not arrived on Chaunce in uniform but he donned it now, feeling more secure, stronger, in the shiny black and green, in the broad utensil belt and slant hat.

The room was small and low-ceilinged, shielded against every known spy-ray. Every police station in the econosphere had such a room. ‘It is confirmed, then,’ he said to the three non-uniformed agents with him. ‘The quarry is here.’

‘He is here, sir.’ The agents, though large of build, had an anonymous blankness about them. They were selected for it: it was supposed to make their activities more invisible. The colonel wasn’t sure if the ploy wasn’t sometimes counterproductive: put several of them together, and their ordinariness became almost glaring.

‘This is a matter of importance,’ he said. ‘I can tell you that I have come straight from the Chief. Orm’s orders are that Boaz is to be liquidated outright. No attempt at arrest.’

‘There are problems in either case, sir.’

‘Yes… he is a difficult man to stop. If we were in Kathundra, now, it would be different.’ He chuckled. The police in Kathundra had a secret right of control over the force-transport network. Any citizen under observation could, at any time he entered a travel booth, be switched straight to a police cell or killing chamber, or even circulated endlessly through the system for as long as need be… ‘But there is an easier way,’ he went on. ‘This creature Boaz has a grave deficiency. He is a man on remote: his ship keeps him alive. To destroy him, one should destroy his ship, preferably choosing a time when the two are separated…’

They spoke further, laying plans and appointing a time. In actual fact the plotting of Boaz’s course had been firming up for more than a standard month: that Chaunce would be his final destination had been extrapolated in advance. Police Chief Orm had gleefully told the colonel an even more interesting fact: Chaunce had a secret visitor, a government minister no less, though Orm was not at liberty to name him. Nevertheless when he made his report it would be to the full Cabal, and someone very important had better have a damned good explanation… Treason in high places was a crime for which Police Chief Orm had particular relish.