The Pillars of Eternity

11

No longer was Boaz fighting a figment. For the first time, perhaps, since he had wakened in the city of Theta with a new, straight skeleton, with silicon bones that promised a new future, he knew a measure of happiness.

He was in a fun room with Mace, just off the main arcade of the sprawling, blossom-smelling town. The room itself was a work of art: walls a delicate shade of yellow, embossed with a frieze which could give the occupants enough suggestions to last a week; carpeted and furnished with a softness that made it seem a playland. An everchanging spectrum of perfumes made the air continually fresh and pleasant. Subliminal sounds – inaudible to those whose senses were not heightened by silicon bones – fed one’s sense of well being with constant, encouraging music.

They had rested, and now were ready to begin again. Mace smiled, and touched his naked shoulder. ‘Your body has qualities,’ she said, ‘that are yours alone.’

He looked down at his craggy self. She did not mention that perpetual virility was one of them: that was not unique – it was available by a simple piece of surgery. More important to him, in any case, was the new virility that had come to his mind.

That dreadful past, of course, was still there. But he could now bring himself to have the memory erased if he wished, flushed from his psyche. In fact, he had decided not to. Mace had shown him another way, another goal.

He would seek pleasure the equal of that pain! Even now he could not help but put it in philosophical terms. In the colonnader cards the principle of justice, or equilibrium, was all important. If such a principle truly existed in the universe, then his agony must be balanced by an equal positive experience able to cancel its evil effects!

He had not mentioned this piece of reasoning to Mace. She would only have laughed. It was a wonder to him, a marvel, that all she had done was to open his eyes to what any untutored workman, nymphgirl or shopkeeper could have told him – that because a body of ideas was impressive, and had the backing of civilization and classical discourse, did not make it true.

She opened her palm. In it rested four little filter plugs, two pink, two pale blue. ‘The blue ones are for men,’ she said. ‘Put them in.’

He took them and, following her example, inserted them in his nostrils. ‘Now we spray each other,’ she said. ‘Remember to breathe through your nose.’

She handed him a blue spray-gun that she took from a cushion, taking a pink one herself. Her selective nose filters protected her from the highly charged male-directed pheromonic molecules she puffed at him; his kept out the female-directed chemicals he puffed at her.

Standing only a couple of feet apart, they drenched each other. She threw back her head as she silently set her bone functions. She tossed aside the spray-gun, discarded the nose filters. She threw open her arms.

‘Bones!’ she screeched quietly. ‘Your bones, Boaz!’

Excitedly, he began to rise, and rise yet higher.

The low, single sun was casting long probing fingers across the ship ground when three large men, wearing the garb of technicians, approached an unusually upright cargo ship. They paused at the bottom of the tread-rail. Then one stepped on, his hand inside his tunic, holding the stock of the heat-and-shock pistol with which to force the hatch. As the rail started to flow the others stepped on after him, ready with hand weapons to deal with any defensive robots, the last man carrying the case of thermal grenades.

At the top, he received a surprise.

The hatch lock was already blown.

He signed the others to be cautious, then eased the hatch open and stepped through, placing his feet with cat-like quietness. He was on a between-decks gallery. A ship robot lay on the floor, limbs awry. It had a blast hole through its chest.

The others followed him in. ‘Someone’s been here before us,’ he murmured. ‘They could still be on board.’

‘Probably common robbers.’

‘Then they can go with the rest of it. Come on.’

Their main job was to make sure they blew both the transmitter and the processors. But this was a custom-built ship; it had not been possible to obtain a design print. He went through a door at the end of the gallery and found himself on a deck that was, he guessed, over the hold.

His eyes quickly adjusted to the dim light. The deck had a crammed appearance. It seemed to be made up of corridors whose walls were dull-coloured casings that whirred and clicked. On each casing was a dully glowing green check screen, so that the whole deck was filled with the eerie luminescence – the only light there was, apparently.

At the end of the first corridor two men, clad in black cat-suits, knelt by a flat box shape. Part of a casing had been cut away, and the innards connected to the box by adp-fibres. The nearby green screen was oscillating wildly.

‘Police,’ the Rectification Branch man announced in a cold voice. ‘On your feet, keep your hands in sight.’

The two jumped up, eyes flicking from the pale, indistinguishable faces of the Branch men to the guns they held. ‘We are on official business,’ said one.

‘Whose?’

There was no answer. Though incurious as to the truth of the claim, the Branch man was slightly mollified. ‘Get out fast,’ he said. ‘This ship is to be destroyed.’

The other’s eyes widened in alarm. ‘No! It’s ours! It has to be preserved—’

There came a noise from behind the casing. Another cat-suited figure came around the bend of the corridor. This one was armed with a force gun.

The Branch men did not wait. Two of them opened fire. The unarmed victims before them cried out in panic and cringed, flinging out their arms in a useless, self-defensive reflex. WHO DARES WINS glared briefly on the palms of their hands, before they fell.

The third Branch man did not see the stigmata. He was crouched down between two casings and was opening his box of thermal grenades.

Mace was anointing his body with oil when Boaz first began to feel prodromic flashes of discomfort.

His bone settings were high, so high it was as if he were transported to another world. Yet it was a world in which Mace was present with him, into which they had entered together. In that world she had said to him: this is the future for mankind. We are like a new species, we bone people. Others cannot understand it. Hebron, Ebarak, they do not have bones. You can tell it. Everything about them is dull.

And, yes, it was true. It was true that new powers glowed within one, that the world was transfigured. That those without bones were to be pitied.

He moved a foot or two away from her, trying to identify the new source of physical unease.

Then unseen fire suddenly enveloped him, moving in a flash from the soles of his feet to the crown of this head. His ship screamed to him, one last cataclysmic message.

COLLAPSE

He knew in an instant that nothing could save him. He had failed to evade the Rectification Branch. His ship was being destroyed. All the work of the bonemakers, whose skill and resource had made of him again a functioning human entity, was being undone piece by piece as the regulating departments of the ship went out one by one. He took a step forward, and seemed, howling, to move as through a crystal lattice of pain. Too late, he realized he had unthinkingly keyed in all his bone functions, including – just as on that far-off day on the edge of the alchemists’ firepit – the preservation function. Too late, he realized he no longer had the power to switch any of them off.

The difference was that this time all the functions were on setting eight. The agony mounted and mounted, and mounted and mounted, fed by the super-senses silicon bones insisted, still, on giving him. He was back there. He was back with what he feared most, back in the pit, and Boaz howled his rage, howled his fear, screamed and screeched with his efforts to escape, to evade, to over-come, in any way at all to come to terms with torment as his bleak, twisted soul knew again its aloneness and its damnation. For the bones took the pain, took it, delighted in it, presented it to him enhanced to the ultimate. He journeyed a million years through winding labyrinths of exquisite, ecstatic agony. He dwelt in palaces of pain, he inhabited cities and civilizations based on the technology of torture.

And in that pain, as hellish super-fire whirled for the second time through his being, Boaz remembered. He remembered. With a depth of recall impossible to mistake he remembered this scene. He had lived it before. A thousand, a million times before. He remembered how he died, minutes from now, thrashing about the room and killing Mace in his uncontrolled spasms.

With that, he stopped screaming, though he felt system after system collapse within him as the somatic disaster deepened. He tried to speak, and words came out, the voice roaring, distorted, from a furnace of suffering.

‘The – colonnaders – are – right… The – world – repeats…’

Hand to mouth, eyes wide, she stared at him in horror.

‘But – death – is – not – an – end – to – be – sought, Mace… Go – escape – live!’

He turned from her. ‘It need not be!’

He went crashing through the flimsy wall of the fun room. He staggered into the dusty arcade. It was deserted, fading into a dusk relieved only by a white glare beyond the low buildings.

This prospect was new. Never in all the infinity of ages had his eyes, at this instant, beheld it.

The ship, even while dying, still fought to preserve him. He knew the Rectification agents would not be content with killing him. They would search the town, find and kill Mace too, unless he gave her a breathing space. He moved down the arcade. He staggered up an alley, smashed through a wall, and was on the ship ground.

His ship was a streaming tree of withering white fire. The first flash he had felt, from bottom to top, had been the thermal grenades exploding and taking hold even on metal. A knot of men, three with guns covering two others, stood nearer to him, using their arms to shield their faces from the heat.

There was still strength in him. He leaped to them. His eerie, screeching voice seemed to fall from the sky.

‘I – Joachim Boaz – have – altered – the – world… Never – again – will – you – destroy – me—’

His sense of liberty was absolute. He was transgressing physical law. He had stepped out from under Nature. Their terror did not register with him as he fell on them. Three he certainly killed, two more perhaps, but then his consciousness was cut off from the outside world. A series of images passed through his mind: Priestess, Vehicle, Justice, Strength, all the colonnader cards flashing by in sequence. Then he heard an immense trumpet blast that wiped out everything. Then nothing.