The Pillars of Eternity

1

He came slowly down the arcaded avenue that led from the landing ground. He was a blunt, stocky man encased in a modsuit, the ribbed, scruffy appearance of which might have caused some to think of him as an old trader who had grown careless about his equipment. They would have been wrong: though the modsuit was standard wear for shipkeepers, adaptable to a variety of gravities, he would have been happy to shuck it off like a torn jacket. His muscles were lithe and flexible, though now beginning to stiffen a little, for in his youth he had often scorned the use of a modsuit altogether, and he had trodden many worlds. His face was clearly unaccustomed to expressing emotion: impassive, square, pockmarked, jutting forward from the collar of the suit and surmounted by shorn grey hair. A perceptive person might have seen it as a face that masked suffering. This man, such a person might have said, has known pain, and has not overcome it. But there were unlikely to be such persons here in Hondora. A trader’s town, on a planet whose culture was all borrowed from other sources, had little room for sensitivity. Here people would notice only how much he could be induced to bend in price, would ask only where he had been, where he was able to go. They would take more interest in his ship than in himself.

His ship. They would do well, he might have said to himself, to look at his ship.

Joachim Boaz was how he named himself. Captain was how he styled himself, preferring the archaism over the more modern ‘shipkeeper’. There was a reason for this eccentricity. He did not see himself as his ship’s keeper. Quite the reverse.

The air had a balmy, lemony quality, like aerial sherbet. It was distinctive of class-C planets, and resulted from the overlarge yellow suns that abounded in the region, or more properly speaking from the mixture of secondary gases in the atmosphere, gases which such suns exuded when they expelled the material that was to form planetary systems. Captain Boaz drew the tangy breeze deep into his lungs. He cast a lingering glance at the luminous, sulphur-colored sky. He liked it here, to the extent he ever liked anything.

The arcade was fringed with fragrant tree blossoms. He pressed on, ignoring any who passed him on the avenue, and shortly came to the edge of the town. Youths and girls gazed languidly through the shaded entrances of service rooms. Stray wisps of conversation drifted to him, scarcely noticed by him but nevertheless recorded in his brain and simultaneously transmitted to his ship which stood parked a mile away. ‘Choc me one more style…’ ‘…wild one…’‘… the rod gap’s closed up in Ariadne now…can’t get through…’‘… have you ever killed a girl like me before?…’

In the meantime his ship was transmitting subliminal signals to him, guiding him with unheard suggestions. He was prompted to enter a drum-shaped room where men in dhotis and togas sat on benches against the walls. Some drank, some sniffed yellow powder, some talked to breastless girls draped in loose shifts. Walls and ceiling were bare of ornament. They were the colour of chalk, except at the rear where an ochrous red tunnel gaped, serving robots shifting from foot to foot in its mouth.

In the center of the room was a circular table occupied by five men, four of them shipkeepers, by the signs on their chests. The other was a merchant with cargoes to be moved.

Pausing, Captain Boaz waited to be noticed. Eyes swivelled, saw his modsuit, his cargo carrier’s sign.

‘Will you join us, shipkeeper?’ called the merchant jovially. ‘The game is better the more the players.’

Idly Boaz thought: for you it is. He took a vacant seat, and spoke in a dour tone. ‘I can take a load Harkio way. Nowhere else.’

‘Harkio?’ the merchant squeaked in surprise. Boaz was breaking an unspoken rule of contract bargaining by stating his intentions at the outset like this. The other players gave him glances of disapproval.

‘Yes, I might have something in that quarter,’ the merchant said smoothly. ‘Will you sit this round out, then? We’ll come to it.’

Boaz nodded. He took a small deck of picture cards from his pocket and began to shuffle them in a habitual, self-calming ritual. Those present would recognize the cards and know him for a colonnader.

He relaxed, inspecting a card occasionally. Games were played with such cards once. That was long ago, when a card deck could be depended on to stay inert and not play tricks at the behest of its owner.

A slot in the center of the table disgorged the card pack’s equivalent: shiny cubes an inch on a side, guaranteed fully randomized by the house. The merchant was banker. He took a cube; the others each took one. They all examined the facets for the symbols that in a few moments appeared there.

Boaz ignored the proceedings and concentrated on his cards. No one seemed to know how game bargaining had begun; but shipkeepers were generally born gamblers and, after all, it was only a logical extension of haggling. The shipkeepers made bids that represented what they would be prepared to carry a cargo for. The merchant tried to drive them down by calling their bluff. In the last resort it was the cards that decided.

It could mean that a shipkeeper would have to carry a cargo for below cost. Or he could collect an exorbitant fee. Usually, however, matters worked out reasonably enough.

The merchant gave a grunt of satisfaction as he held up his cube, the signs flashing from it in pastel colors. ‘Excellent, Rodrige. You will be able to afford a holiday after this trip! Now, then. The Ariadne gap is closed up, I hear. For the time being I shall hold my Ariadne-vectored goods in store; perhaps the gap will open up again. Now let us see… Harkio!’ He looked up at Boaz. ‘Your name, shipkeeper?’

‘I am Captain Joachim Boaz,’ Boaz said.

‘Ah! How quaint! What is the load capacity of your ship?’

‘Two and one-fifth milliards.’

‘That should suffice. Let us play.’

Rodrige, who in fact had achieved a worse deal than he had hoped for, left the table with a sour face. Captain Boaz spoke again.

‘I do not wish to play; I am not in the mood for it. I will take your cargo for the cost of the fuel plus a point eight per cent for depreciation.’

The merchant’s face showed pleasure when he received this offer. The shipkeepers gave Boaz looks of malice. He was joyriding, taking a cargo simply to finance himself as a passenger on his own ship. ‘That might be agreeable… any other offers, gentlemen?’

‘What could there be?’ muttered one bitterly. They left, allowing Boaz to feel their dislike.

When they had gone a look of anxiety crossed the merchant’s features. ‘Your ship… is it sound? I do not know you. Are you qualified?’

The barest hint of a smile almost came to Boaz. He pulled an identibloc from his pocket. The merchant’s face smoothed out and became bland as he read it. ‘Ah yes… that should do…’

‘My ship is open to your inspection.’

‘I will rely on your experience, good shipkeeper – or should I call you “Captain”, eh? Ha ha! Well, then, Harkio. I have a consignment of Boems for Schloss III.’

‘Boems?’ said Boaz.

‘Something wrong, Captain?’ the merchant enquired.

A moral struggle ensued within Captain Boaz. He had always refused to take Boems before. Some philosophers classed them as sentient beings. In which case to traffic in them would involve him in slavery.

‘I am not sure I can do it.’

‘What? Ah, I see your problem. You are a colonnader, are you not? You follow an ethical code. Luckily I am a sceptic in gnostical matters. Well, you need not worry. These Boems have no conscious process. It has been scrambled out of them, if any ever existed. They would classify as corpses.’

‘Then what use are they?’

‘Oh, they can perform many functions of the simpler sort,’ explained the merchant in good humour. ‘They are used mainly in children’s toys. Does that clear it up for you?’

Boaz decided. He was keen to get to Harkio.

‘It’s agreed.’

‘Good. Now let me see… hmm, hmm.’ The merchant was computing the figures with his adp implant. ‘The Boems amass one point seven eight milliards. What’s the mass of your ship?’

Boaz told him. The merchant worked out how many fuel sticks the trip would need, added a little leeway, reckoned the cost plus Boaz’s depreciation.

‘Two hundred and twenty-eight point one eight nine psalters,’ he mutterd. Captain Boaz nodded, having simultaneously done the same calculation on his own adplant. The merchant wrote out a contract on a vissheet, finishing with a flourish. Each touched it to his forehead, recording his body odour as a signature of compliance with the terms. The merchant counted out some domino-like coins from a bag on his lap, giving them to Boaz wrapped in a cloth.

‘Here you are, then. My goods will be delivered tomorrow morning.’

He left, looking satisfied. For a while Captain Boaz sat alone at the table, the folded cloth of money in his hand, watching the fizzy sunshine filter through the open doorway.

A nymphgirl who had been drinking on a side bench stood up suddenly, discarded her shift and began to dance naked. Her body was hairless, narrow-waisted and without breasts. She was just like a girl child enlarged to the size of a full-grown woman. It was the current fashion in Hondora, again a fashion imported from nearby worlds.

The girl stopped dancing when a robot stepped quietly from the red tunnel to place a hand on her shoulder. ‘You must not do that here, madam. This is a place of business. For that, you must go to other establishments.’

Wordlessly she picked up her shift. Glancing scornfully around her, she stalked out.

Captain Boaz rose to address the robot. ‘Where can I get ship fuel?’

‘The nearest stockist is close by, sir,’ the robot said, turning its smooth face toward him. ‘Proceed down the avenue and take the second turning on the right. Proceed further a hundred yards. The stockist’s name is Samsam.’

Boaz quit the room and again walked the arcade, going deeper into Hondora. Further down, the avenue became more lively, assailing him with motley smells and noises. Metal clashing, food frying, the aromas of a hundred mingled drugs and perfumes. He heard laughter, screams of mirth, the tinkling sounds of soft music. Men and nymphgirls spilled out of doorless openings and chased one another, kicking up the orange dust of the unpaved concourse.

Under shimmering awnings merchandise was displayed on glittering trays: foods, sweetmeats, drugs, trinkets, garments, a thousand intricate artifacts. Captain Boaz’s step faltered. He had come to a stall offering Boems for sale. The pale micelike slabs were piled carelessly in the trays, their crystalline ridges jammed into one another.

Were they decerebrated or not? Captain Boaz looked away and strode on.

The side street was quieter. Samsam’s was an unprepossessing shop without windows or display stall. Inside it was dim and cool.

The shopkeeper shuffled out from the back, blinking. ‘Yes?’

‘Good day.’ Captain Boaz presented his credentials and placed the money on the counter. ‘I need fuel sticks. I’m told you charge standard price, otherwise I’ll go elsewhere.’

‘Oh, yes indeed.’

The old man leaned across the counter, and his voice fell. ‘I can get you some for less, if you like.’

‘Thank you, no. I want no stolen merchandise, and no inferior fuel. Give me good rods.’

The shopkeeper turned to the shelves behind the counter that were stacked with sticks. ‘What size?’

‘X20. Give me five full-length, and one you’ll have to cut.’

‘What d’you want it cut to, then?’ The man selected sticks and laid them on the counter.

‘Give me thirty-seven over a hundred,’ Boaz said, stating a fraction.

‘Oh, I don’t cut to anything less than an inch,’ the shopkeeper grumbled. ‘I can’t get rid of scraps like that.’

‘Very well, give me four over ten,’ Boaz said impatiently. The man picked up a stick and took it to a cutting machine at the end of the counter. He put it in the grip, calibrated it, and set the blade to whining at high speed through the yellow rod.

While this happened Boaz picked up another of the rods and ran his eye along it as if testing the straightness of an arrow. It was about two feet long and two inches in diameter. It sparkled like sugar frosting and was rough to the touch.

The special kind of energy that resided in the rods was put there by a very expensive process. Each one would carry two milliards of shipweight a distance of ten light-years. Boaz unfolded the cloth that contained his money and counted out rectangular coins while the shopkeeper placed the sticks in a carrying bag. He received the change, thanked the vendor and stepped back out into the lemon sunshine.

Halfway down the side street, his ship told him he was being stalked. He tucked the fuel sticks under his arm. It was those they were after. About a minute later, his ship reported the attack was imminent.

Then a spring lasso snaked out from the nearby wall, jerking him off balance. Like a paper box, a section of wall folded in and revealed a narrow alley, and in it two men, one wielding the lasso and hauling Boaz inward, the other shifting from foot to foot with hands reaching out, like a wrestler looking for a hold.

For a moment Boaz could not deploy his strength. Still clutching the fuel sticks, he was dragged into the alley. Only then was he able to grab the lasso with his free hand, seizing it by the haft and pulling the man down on top of him.

For a stocky, modsuited man, his subsequent speed was a surprise to his attackers. He rolled, and was on his feet, in almost the same movement delivering a kick to the lasso man’s coccyx, snapping his spine.

The man gave a bubbling moan, face down and moving his arms like a crippled insect. He would not live long. Boaz turned to face the second robber over the semi-paralysed form of his comrade. The man had a gun. Boaz saw a snarl of fear, felt heat as the beam struck his chest.

But this sensation was measured in microseconds. Two miles away on the landing ground Boaz’s ship was responding to the events impinging on his body. Billions upon billions of digital pulses passed down the tight directional beam it maintained, and set about arranging his body’s defences. The lethal shot from the thief’s gun was diverted, dissipated in a thin blaze of light.

Taking one step forward with the fuel sticks still under his arm, Captain Boaz tore the gun from the mugger’s grasp, smashing its handle against the wall so that the charge pack broke open and tossing it aside. The thief backed away with a glance to his rear. The alley was a dead end, probably constructed specifically for the purpose of robbers.

‘We weren’t going to hurt you, shipkeeper,’ he pleaded quickly. ‘We only wanted your fuel sticks.’

‘Liar. That was a kill shot.’

‘Look what you did to my friend—’

He could not evade Boaz, who grabbed him by the front of his toga and forced him to his knees, still using only one hand. Then he took him by the throat.

Just as Boaz began to throttle him, a transformation came over the thief’s face. His terror dissolved into a dreamy leer, and he looked up at Boaz.

‘You goin’ to kill me?’ he asked breathlessly.

Boaz glanced at the still moaning form behind him. Abruptly he saw his posture in a new light, and he did not like it. He withdrew his hand. The robber sagged, looked relieved, disappointed, edgy.

No expression at all showed on Boaz’s face. He backed out of the alley, turned, and set off for the main avenue.

He came again to the ship ground. A few dozen ships dotted the flat, three-mile-square expanse. They loomed and seemed to drift on the hazy air. A few were half-heartedly streamlined for a swift getaway, but most ship designers did not consider the small saving in fuel worth the trouble and ungainly shapes abounded.

Evening was coming on. The sun was low and on the sky’s opposite horizon a few stars showed. Overhead was an unusual sight; this system was irregular in its planetary formation, and the planet was actually the binary satellite of a gas giant. It could be seen glowing palely in the effervescent sky, its rings clearly visible.

The ship ground was a raised plateau. From its vantage the landscape and the town were laid out like a map. Captain Boaz paused to look at it. Why was it, he wondered, that on nearly all man-inhabited worlds he had visited he received this same feeling of universe old and in decline? A universe experiencing a soft autumn, wearing out, losing vitality. Could the universe really be approaching its end, when it would dissolve in mind-fire? Or was it only human society that exuded such decay?

He reminded himself that the impression could not be other than subjective: it emanated from its own feelings. Such a belief had arisen before, when in fact mankind had been very young, as he knew from reading the works of philosophers and historians such as Plutarch, Lucretius and Marcus Aurelius, who had lived before there was even a machine civilization. They too had concluded, for reasons that seemed trivial now, that the world was in its dotage, and they, it was evident, had stood on some hill as Boaz did now, and saw the fey melancholy that seemed to invest everything and even to drift down from the stars.

It said something for Captain Boaz’s character that he could muse in so pensive a manner just after having killed one man, barely refraining from killing another. It was not that he was a cruel or heartless man; on the contrary his adherence to colonnade philosophy gave him a strictly ethical outlook. But, in comparison with what he had known, it simply did not seem important. They had come against him, and that was that.

A flowing tread-rail carried him up the ship’s side to the manport. Inside, he went to the engine cabin, where he busied himself with checking out the fuel sticks, measuring their straightness (vital for smooth performance) and sampling their peculiar energy, which alone could send a ship faster than light. Finally he slammed them into the empty induction tubes (on landing there had been less than an inch of stick left).

He went to the main cabin and prepared himself a simple meal of the special foods he ate. He felt at home. The metal, the processors, the adp, the transmitters, enwrapped him. He was inside his ship like a babe inside the womb. No longer did it need to protect him from afar; there was no fear of distance, no narrow control-beam. Its emanations regulated his nervous system, his perceptions, carefully preserved him from harm, and did it all by means of a suffused ambiance of constant signalling that filled the air around him.

His ship; it was his tragedy, and his salvation, and his hope. It reached out its gentle hands and maintained him for as long as he remained within range. It gave him abnormal strength and immunity from many weapons. At ten miles its efficacy began to fade and he would fall ill. At fifteen miles he would die, in a horrible agony that was a repetition of the agony he could remember.

And the ship, just as it could reach out to regulate his ravaged body, could also reach out with its subtle beams to tell him what was happening elsewhere. Boaz settled himself in a low armchair, and without really meaning to, found himself indulging in the random spying he would sometimes resort to as a means of diverting his mind from the broodings that threatened to overwhelm him. His mind seemed to drift, as if in a waking dream, through the streets and buildings of Hondora. The sun was down; the day’s business was over. The town was giving itself over to the pursuits that mainly interested its habitants: the pursuits of aimless pleasure.

The ship’s beams lunged softly, undetectable, through metal, through walls of lithoplaster, paint and HCferric. Boaz perceived the interior of a crowded bar. Nymphgirls danced in the centre of the room, rarely with men, who held back and drank solidly.

His perspective shifted, zoomed in on a booth at the far end. A tough-looking man sat at a narrow table, a tankard in front of him. His face was broad and flat, with a spade jaw, squashed nose and widely separated eyes, as if it had been hit with a mallet. Sharing the table with him was a girl with long red hair, red lips, long cheeks. Her movements were mobile; she gestured and shifted as she talked, quite unlike her stolid partner.

There had been tease-play between them. Boaz saw that they had only met that night, but she was seeking a relationship. He was less enthusiastic, offhanded but not dismissive. Consequently they needled one another.

He looked at her in annoyance. ‘I keep thinking I’ve met you before. I have, haven’t I?’

‘Have you?’

‘Ah, I don’t know.’ He drawled his words, scarcely moved his jaw when he spoke. ‘Maybe it was your sister. You got a sister?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Yah – I guess it was somebody else. There are a million girls like you. I’ve had a hundred, at least.’

She leaned close, looked up at him from under long lashes. Her mouth hung open lasciviously. ‘You ever kill a girl like me?’

‘I’ve killed lots of girls.’

Boaz became sleepy. He dozed. The man and the girl danced, drank, drifted in and out of his awareness. There was a certain savage intensity developing between them. When he came fully awake again they were in a private room, facing one another across the mattressed floor like animals ready to pounce on one another. Both were naked.

Suddenly her eyes hardened. ‘You have killed somebody like me before. I’m Jodie. Remember?’

He looked uncertain, flexing his muscled body in impatience. ‘Jodie? But your face. It’s not the same. Not quite, anyway.’

She looked triumphant. ‘I’m altered. A hormonal imbalance in the tank. Too much thyroid. But I’m Jodie all right – and I remember.’ Her voice became fervid. ‘God, how I remember!’

With a darting movement she bent to her discarded clothing and came up with a coiled tendril of an object. It was a parawhip. Her hair swung about her shoulders as she straightened. Her words came in gasps. ‘I’ve got kinky thinking about it. But this time it’s going to be different. This time, I’m going to kill you!’

The whip sang out to reach for the man’s nerves and incapacitate him for her pleasure. But he was too quick for her. He sidestepped. Then he sprang, caught her wrist and twisted her arm, catching the handle of the whip with his other hand as it fell from her grasp.

‘Sorry, honey, I don’t go for that clone stuff.’ His voice was gruff and hot. ‘There’s only one way I want to stay alive. For you, though—’

His big hand around her throat, he forced her to the floor. Boaz signalled the ship to withdraw from the scene. His voyeurism drew the line at sex murder; he found it distasteful.

The girl had a clone body stashed away somewhere. A transmitter was in her brain, something like the one in Boaz’s ship, but much, much simpler. Moment by moment it fed her experiences into the sleeping clone. When she died the clone would wake up. It would have all her memories, including the memory of dying. Jodie resurrected.

Sex killing had become a fashionable cult among the sated pleasure-seekers of this region, who found through it the acme of a connection long known to psychologists: the connection between sex and death. They said there was no ecstasy to match it, because there was nothing fake about it. The original did die, genuinely, forever. The sense of continuity belonged only to the new, awakened clone.

At least that was most people thought. Boaz wasn’t so sure. He believed that there was such a thing as the soul, and that it was not spatially limited. Perhaps it followed along with the identical memory. Just the same, he did not like the death cult. The clone’s memory of sex death caused it to seek the same experience over again. It was a vicious circle of perversion.

Boaz himself had no clone body. He would have welcomed death if it could have helped him. But it could not help him. It would still leave the past, where his agony lay.

He slept, still slumped in the armchair. After ten hours he awoke to find the merchant’s trucks arriving. Even before he roused himself his ship robots had put out a derrick and were clambering down the side of the hull. He followed, and watched them hoist the crates into the hold.

He opened the last crate. Inside were Boems, from a unique planet where crystalline growths proliferated to a fantastic degree. Boems were simply the most advanced form of this growth. Whether they were simply natural crystals with a better than adp complexity or evolved living forms, sentient but non-motile, had never been established. One could converse with them, using the right kind of modem, but the responses could equally be a processing of the inquirer’s own information as genuine.

Whatever the truth, they made useful control systems. Put a Boem in a cybernetic device and it became almost a person – hence the attraction for the toy industry, even for those cerebrally scrambled. Manufactured adp, on the other hand, lacked spontaneity.

Boaz had no way of knowing whether those were in fact scrambled, as the merchant had promised, but it was far too late for him to be able to reconsider the contract. He would have to deliver the cargo before attending to any quest of his own. Such was the law.

He put his odour to the delivery note. The trucks rolled away, the robots climbed back inside, the derrick withdrew. Captain Boaz mounted the tread-rail and took himself to the flight cabin. The first of the fuel sticks was sparked and began to deliver its energy. Slowly, the cargo carrier rose through the lemon-colored sky.