The Pillars of Eternity

2

Once Boaz was among the blazing lights that were stars and the curtains of splendour that were stretches of dust and gas, there was nothing to distract him. As his ship sped through the galactic realm he had little to do but sit, and as he sat he brooded, and when he brooded the past could not help but well up. Onplanet he could always direct his attention elsewhere. But here there was only the ship and the void.

The faint drone of the ship engine was a constant background. His attention, even when resisting at first, found itself flicking from one to another of the images that bubbled up to claim it.

Memory took over.

Captain Joachim Boaz had not always borne that name. His original name had been a single word, a curse, a nickname, a word he would not bother to articulate now; it did not seem like him any more. Born in the warrens of Corsair, he had never known a father and saw little of his mother. From the age of ten he had been alone, trying to join one of the conduit gangs, as the packs of juveniles who terrorized the warrens were called.

But Boaz was ill-fated from birth. He was born deformed, his spine twisted, his limbs warped, unable to walk but only to hump himself along with a stout stick he held in both hands, and which was also his defence against the kicks and blows he received from young and old alike. He never was accepted by any gang, though he ran with any that would tolerate him, able to get up a fair speed as he lolloped along with his stick.

Unable to share in the thievery and robbery by which the conduit gangs survived, he spent much of his time begging at the spaceport. By the time he was fifteen he had conceived an ambition: he wanted to be a shipkeeper. Those straight-backed, steady-eyed men, owners of their own ships, able to go anywhere, were heroes to him as they strode about the spaceground. They were less liable to kick him aside with a well-shod boot than were space passengers, mechanics or even company crewmen; more inclined to give him a coin instead. Dimly Boaz guessed that there was more to the universe than Corsair’s brutish, pitiless society. When he saw a ship soar up into the blue (Corsair had a blue sky) he thought of escape.

When he was sixteen, it happened. Boaz came humping out of the conduit onto a shadowed corner of the spaceground. Half a dozen Slashers, the conduit gang he avoided most, were chasing him, shouting his name at him, the name he hated, the name that described what he was.

He might even have got away from them had not a pylon been in his way. With his mode of locomotion he could not change direction easily at speed. It gave one of them a chance to head him off. His stick was kicked from under him and went skittering away. He scrabbled after it, but they had him now. They put a prong on him to hear him scream.

He only felt one jolt. Then a change came over the scene. The Slashers paused, their yells cut short. The prong was suspended in midair. Boaz raised his eyes as he lay on the floor of the spaceground. He saw a pair of bare feet, above them bare ankles and legs bare up to the mid-thigh. Then the hem of a chiton, a toga-like garment that draped loosely from the shoulders.

It was a garment worn by professional people who did not have to work much. The young Boaz peered up over his humped, twisted shoulder. Above the white fabric of the chiton he saw blue eyes gazing from a clean-shaven face with hair cut neatly across the forehead.

The stranger must have stepped from behind the pylon. The Slashers could have dealt with him easily, but they seemed too surprised to act for the moment. The conduit gangs had a tacit agreement with the port managers: they did not molest off-world visitors on the spaceground itself. Yet that did not seem to be all that was restraining them. There was something in the unflinching look of the newcomer that was overpowering.

He made a sweeping gesture with his arm. ‘Be off with you.’

They did not move at once but after a few moments, with surly glances, they made their way back to the conduit. The stranger retrieved Boaz’s stick and handed it to him. Boaz planted its end on the floor and hauled himself up it until he was as nearly upright as he could be. He came not far above the stranger’s waist.

‘Thank you, sir. If you could spare a small coin, sir…’

The man in the chiton ignored his automatically replayed spiel. He was looking Boaz over with a professional eye.

‘Were you born in that condition, young man?’

Nervously Boaz took one hand off his stick to clutch his ragged tunic protectively to him, bunching it up at his throat. ‘Yes, sir,’ he whispered.

‘Have you ever seen a doctor?’

‘A doctor, sir?’

Boaz scarcely knew what a doctor was. Sickness on Corsair was as rare as congenital disorder; natural selection had bred it out.

‘A doctor is someone who mends a body that has gone wrong.’ The man spoke patiently, at once understanding the extent of Boaz’s ignorance.

‘No, sir.’ Boaz held out his hand but then, perceiving that he was to be given nothing, made as if to shuffle off.

‘Wait,’ the man said. ‘I wish to talk to you. Follow me.’

Wonderingly Boaz obeyed. He felt peculiar and out of place as the man escorted him into one of the hotels lining the spaceground. Soon he found himself in a well-lit, well-furnished room. It was all strange to him; he was not used to furnished interiors.

The man spoke, but not to Boaz. A minute later a servitor appeared and delivered a covered tray. Inside it was an oval plate of spiced food. The man invited Boaz to eat.

The food was delicious, but scant in quantity. Boaz did not guess that this was because his host, seeing his half-starved features, did not wish to overburden his stomach. With it was a fizzy drink, the sort Boaz liked and bought often. He gulped it greedily.

The man in the chiton let him finish before beginning to talk to him again. ‘Your body can be mended,’ he told him. ‘Your bones can be remade and straightened. Your tissues can be stimulated and adjusted, so that you will attain your proper growth. Did you not know this?’

Boaz shook his head. He had never even thought about it.

‘The process is, of course, very costly.’

The stranger was making some sort of pitch, that much Boaz knew very well. But what it was he could want from him was a total mystery. He listened while the man continued in his mild, factual voice. He could see to it that Boaz got the required treatment, he said. He was prepared to take Boaz off Corsair and to a planet where friends of his, skilled doctors, would straighten out his body. But he was not making this offer only to help Boaz. There was something he wanted out of it, too – something that could be greatly to Boaz’s advantage if all went well. If not – well, the risk was a small one, it was unlikely that anything would go wrong that could not be put right. At the worst the experiment would fail, but they would still ensure that Boaz ended up with good bones. He promised Boaz that.

The price Boaz had to pay for these benefits was that he was to be used as an experimental subject. In fact, the orthopedic surgeons – bonemakers, the man called them – would replace Boaz’s entire skeleton. In place of his poor twisted bones, they would insert bones they had made themselves. These would be as good as natural bones in strength and durability, and they would contain marrow for making blood. But they would have a lot of silicon in them. Every gram of this silicon would comprise adp.

‘Do you know what adp is?’ the man asked him.

Boaz shook his head. The man shrugged. ‘Automatic data processing. It is what all machines work by. The servitor that brought you your meal. Every type of control system.’ He tapped his brow. ‘The implant in my skull that allows me to calculate beyond limit. In effect, your whole skeleton will consist of microprocessing. It will be like a second person within you, with new perceptions, new feelings, new abilities. Except that there will be no second person there. These benefits will be all yours, whenever you wish to make use of them.

‘This is the natural direction for human evolution to take. The brain is not large enough, even with adplants added. Silicon bones provide the room for extra processes, while still doubling as a skeleton. So far the technique has been developed using animals… the vital stage of adaptation to human beings has been delayed while we waited for one of us to volunteer as a subject… You, however, could solve our little problem. You are unusual; there are not many congenitally deformed people in the galaxy.’

‘Why’d you come to Corsair looking for someone like me? ’Cause there are no doctors here?’

‘I did not come to Corsair looking for anything. This spaceport is a stop-over point; I shall be here for a few hours waiting for my connection to Aurelius. It is by simple good fortune that I found you – good fortune for us both, I hope.’

Later, Boaz was to compare these silicon bones with the Boems, the crystalline adp that grew naturally. It had made him think that perhaps Boems weren’t sentient after all, any more than the bones were.

The sixteen-year-old beggar boy had not understood everything the bonemaker said to him. Later he was to find that fullness of explanation was an ethical consideration on the other’s part. To estimate another’s level of comprehension was arrogance, since it was nearly always to underestimate his mental capacity. Civilized standards required that all the facts be made available for the listener to understand or not, as the case may be.

In fact, the bonemaker’s talk of new perceptions went right over Boaz’s head. But he understood clearly that the stranger was offering to take him off Corsair, and besides that was offering him hope of a kind he had never dared to contemplate.

But why should he trust this chiton-wearing offworlder, a man whose class was despised in the warrens because of the ease and comfort of its life-style? Boaz had a reason, which he could not articulate but which told on him as he sat across from his host. All the man’s words and actions were careful and deliberate, yet they displayed no desire to impress. He had not once smiled at Boaz. He had not tried to apply persuasion. He had put facts, and had left it to Boaz to decide. It was the first time in his life that Boaz had been treated as an equal.

He decided.

‘I’ll come with you,’ he said.

The bonemaker’s name was Hyton. When asked his, the boy simply went even paler than usual and looked away. Hyton did not inquire again; and Boaz found that he could manage without a name. In a week they were on Aurelius, and here his horizons expanded swiftly.

His first change of perspective came almost immediately. He was confused by the unfailing courtesy shown him by the men into whose charge he had delivered himself. When the time came for physical examination, he flinched as they approached him, and could barely refrain from cowering.

The specialist (it was another, not Hyton) team leader smiled. ‘There was once a civilization, you know,’ he said to Boaz, ‘in which a malformed person was not at all an object of contempt. Rather, he was pitied, and given special deference.’

Boaz gaped.

‘Matters are different now, of course. I have no doubt you have been abused a great deal.’

He nodded, as though the silent youth had given him some answer. ‘Nature has taken over. Compassion is to some extent artificial, a product of urban life. It is more normal for a malformed specimen to be attacked and driven out by the community. That is how it is with animals, and so it is with the village mentality into which most of civilization has declined.’

‘And what of you?’ Boaz challenged.

Again the bonemaker smiled. ‘We are what are known as “colonnaders”,’ he replied.

Boaz had never heard of colonnade philosophy, and this news meant nothing to him. But it was important, he was told, that he should be instructed in it. Silicon bones were intended for people of philosophic attainment, and it was necessary to test out their effects as completely as possible.

Aurelius was in fact the planet from which colonnade philosophy had emanated. After examining him, the bonemakers proclaimed that lengthy preparation would be needed before the final operation. Suitable bones would have to be manufactured to his dimensions, and besides there was much in his musculature to be rectified. Meantime they carried out some temporary corrective work. Boaz could now walk with a limp, again with the help of a stick, though his leg muscles were assisted by calipers and fired by adplants.

Hyton took him to Theta, the city in the equatorial sunbelt which was the home of colonnade thought. Colonnaders did not, in fact, call themselves colonnaders at all. The word was a popularism, coined from Theta’s distinctive architectural feature – its immensely long and spacious colonnades and peristyles which made the flower-decked city so delightful. To themselves, the colonnaders were merely philosophers – ‘lovers of wisdom’.

Along these airy pathways Boaz learned the refined pleasure of cool discourse. Aurelius was yet another class-C planet: another with a lemon sherbet sky, investing the colonnades with a crocus-colored radiance, as though the stone itself were soaked in saffron. Gazing down the endless perspectives was like staring into a benign infinity, while unfamiliar and marvellous ideas suffused Boaz’s brain.

Hyton introduced him to a man called Madrigo, whom he was eventually to look upon as his mentor. Madrigo paid no attention to his lack of experience in the world; he informed him from the start that this was of no moment. At first Boaz was inclined, more or less by a reflex learned on Corsair, to seek small advantages for himself, even to try to manipulate those around him. But this quickly faded when it met with no response.

Instead he began to emulate the behaviour of the people around him: the dispassionate considerateness, the assumption of good will on the part of others – for all conscious beings, Madrigo assured him, were in reality common citizens of a single city, the city of the universe.

But most important of all was the attitude Madrigo taught him to adopt toward himself. The mental condition striven for by colonnader training was known as ataraxy; undisturbed consciousness, or stoical indifference to events.

‘Everything is transitory, everything is arbitrary, yet at the same time everything is inevitable,’ Madrigo told him. ‘Whatever happens to you must be borne, without resentment if bad, without glee if good. Your own unconditioned consciousness is the secret of life.’

‘You can’t help your feelings,’ Boaz mumbled.

‘That is why you are here. You will learn to recognize your feelings, and not to be ruled by them. It will come.’

And he did learn. Guided by Madrigo, he made what was to him an amazing discovery: that his own feelings were not the most important things in the world, not even to himself. He learned to detach himself from troublesome emotions, to treat them as objects external to himself. When he did this, he found that his senses grew a little sharper, his attention span a little longer. Gradually, too, he found that behind the cruder kind of emotions, based on desire or the thwarting of it, were feelings of a broader sort – warmth toward others, pleasure that was softer, more voluptuous. These, too, Madrigo warned him, he must not become attached to. He must always remember that the world was, in a sense, illusory.

Boaz balked at this. ‘It seems pretty real to me,’ he sniffed.

‘So it is; it is real, but it is not self-sustaining. Everything that happens passes, and fades, and so it is as if it had never been – until it happens again.’

Boaz did not understand what Madrigo meant by these last words until, some time later, he came to know something of colonnader cosmology. The world consisted in reality of mind-fire, their term for a kind of undifferentiated consciousness. Something happened in this mind-fire; it began to attenuate here and thicken there, becoming uneven. From this movement there began to differentiate out the physical elements. The sidereal universe evolved, and the elements combined in countless ways. Yet mind-fire was always there, even if reduced in quantity and quality, and it coarsened itself sufficiently to become individual consciousness, manifest in organic creatures.

This was how the universe came into being, congealed, as it were, out of mind-fire. But only for a period. After an unknown number of billions of years it entered a phase of collapse until eventually it was consumed by fire – mind-fire, the purest form of fire imaginable. The elements dissolved into it, sinking back to the latent state. Thus the world came to an end. But not forever. After a similarly protracted period of time the process began again, exactly as before. The manifest universe re-emerged just as it had already been. Every atom, every individual, every event recurred, identical in every detail. Nothing ever changed, from eternity to eternity.

The cosmic oscillation was fundamental: two pillars of universal stability. Indeed they were but the first instance of the basic law of polarity on which all manifest existence depended.

Fond of symbolism, the colonnaders represented this law in terms of two upright pillars, one positive, one negative. And there were names for them dating back to ancient lore: Joachim and Boaz.

The crippled lad found these conceptions awesome. On a more personal level they solved a problem for him. Since coming to Theta he had given thought to the choosing of a new name for himself. The trouble was that all names he heard sounded like someone else, not himself. But now, ignoring any possible accusation of false grandeur, he decided to give himself names representative of his rebirth as a person, and besides that indicative of the new mental horizons opening before him.

He named himself Joachim Boaz.

His old life was finished, and he put all thought of Corsair behind. Three months later, the bonemakers announced that they were ready to perform the operation.

His heart beating (he was not yet so trained in ataraxy that he did not feel prey to fear), he submitted himself to pre-med. His body was purged of poisons and waste matter. He was meticulously cleaned and shaved. It was explained to him that he would be unconscious for ten weeks. After the skeleton replacement, he would lie in a tank where his muscles would be coaxed into adjusting themselves to his new, straightened frame. There would be a subsequent operation in which the new bones would be connected up to his nervous system. Finally, completely healed, he would be taken from the tank and allowed a further short term of recuperation. Only then would his higher brain functions be switched back on. He would awaken between crisp sheets in a fresh room with the scent of flowers wafting through an open window, and he would be new.

And so it was.

Boaz stirred in his chair. He thought he had fallen asleep and had been dreaming, but no, he was only remembering. There was a remedy for memory. It could be selectively excised by surgery or by electrical manipulation of the brain’s storage areas. New memories could be introduced, even. One could have a new past, become a new, different person with different experiences. There were cults that practiced this rewriting of past life. But Boaz, a man of rigid personal integrity, had never even considered it. Life was real, and only memories that were based on real episodes counted. To accept other memories was to live in a dream, and from a dream, even if it took half of eternity, one must eventually awaken…

The thought evoked a painful emotion in him, and in response the ship stirred. It was always busy, always worrying both over itself and over Boaz – they both were its province. He heard a faint hum, a click, the quietest whisper of some change of state taking place in the ever-watchful mechanisms. Then he sank into the vivid hallucinatory quality of his memories again….

There was no mirror in the recuperation center. He asked for one, but they told him to be patient. First he had to learn to balance, to walk, to get used to himself. What of the bone functions? he asked. They were not switched on. He would be shown how later.

Just by looking down at himself he could see he was differently shaped. Looking around him, he could see he stood in a different relationship to his environment. No longer was his form a cowering one. He was tall: nearly as tall as most people. His spine was erect. His limbs moved freely.

His musculature was marvellously flexible and strong. It was a new, delightful experience to be able to poise his body on one foot, to stride across a room, to bend and reach out without danger of falling over. But it was remarkable how quickly he adjusted to his new condition. To his surprise, it was no longer new after a day or two; it was normal.

Only then did they bring in mirrors.

After a week they took him back to the operating theatre and put him to sleep to check out his bones on the mass of testing equipment they had there. It was like switching on a new kind of engine; if it didn’t run right, there could be damage.

He woke up back in the recuperation center. Hyton was there to greet him. Everything was in order. The switching on could begin.

It was something he had to do himself, but he had to be shown how, and it was necessary to be cautious. In all, the bones had eight functions; but for the present he was to be shown only the preservation function and the felicity function, and the latter he would only be shown how to raise to Grade Three on a scale of ten.

The preservation function was simple off/on. It was, however, the only function intended to be left permanently on, and it was, moreover, the greatest triumph of the bonemaker’s art so far. By supplementing the natural repair systems, it endowed the physical organism with an unprecedented ability to withstand shock and injury, even rendering organs capable of regenerating themselves to some extent, after the manner of the liver (previously the only organ able to do so). It prolonged life, slowing the biological clock.

The felicity function was of a psychological type. It engendered a state that would also be obtained – but temporarily – through the use of drugs, and which was faintly foreshadowed in the side effects of the mental exercises Boaz had received from Madrigo. Like them, the function worked on the feelings. Hyton also referred to it as ‘the joy function.’

Its action was to open a direct conduit between sensory perception and emotional life. The sight of any scene or object, the hearing of any sound, was greeted with feelings of joy, wonderment, pleasure, happiness. Nothing was bland or mundane. The universe came to life: it glowed with radiance and meaning, from every drop of water to every spacious landscape.

The felicity function was, as Hyton had promised, like possessing another mode of perception. Boaz chuckled with delight as he gazed around him at setting two. The even, light tangerine color of the wall – how hopeful, how genial it was! The flashing mirror, with its surround of sheened bluemetal – why, it struck him at once with its sense of self-confidence, its ability to return and project images of any hue! It warmed his heart to see it!

And when he looked out of the window at the garden beyond and at the daffodil sun low in the sky – the ravishing scene made his heart burst with happiness. Just to know that all this existed!

‘May I raise to setting three?’ he asked.

‘Very well, but be careful.’

Switching was accomplished by means of mentally intoned syllables. So far, Boaz had been told six – two on/off pairs and the two additional settings for felicity. In his mind he spoke the syllable for the third setting – and immediately gasped at the shock-flood of emotion that the glowing, blazing scene before his eyes evoked in him. Hastily he reverted to setting two.

‘You must raise any function only to the level that your consciousness is able to handle,’ Hyton warned him. ‘The danger with silicon bones is of being swamped, even eradicated, by the strength of some of the functions. Generally speaking we shall install bones only in people who have had philosophical training.’

Boaz switched off felicity and came down to ground level. ‘What are the other functions?’

Hyton smiled. ‘There is adjusted chronaxy, which alters the minimum duration of nervous excitability and therefore controls the time sense by lengthening or shortening the specious present. There is also adjusted rheobase, which alters the galvanic threshold of nervous excitability; this heightens or lowers the intensity of sensory impressions. By the same token adjusted rheobase should affect the range of mental associations, provoking new chains of thought – as to that, we shall see.’ He paused before continuing. ‘There is also a sexually oriented function which I will not go into now. Then there is the kinesthetic function which makes one more alert to movement and the shapes of edges much as certain predatory animals are; dances should prove particularly entertaining when viewed with this function….’

Hyton chattered on, but Boaz understood scarcely a word of what he was saying. ‘Why isn’t there an ataraxy function?’ he asked.

‘Ataraxy is not a function,’ Hyton told him. ‘It is a primary condition. You have eight-function bones; they are experimental to a degree. Later models may have more functions, but ataraxy will not be one of them. Nor can it be.’

Hyton paused again. ‘That is why you must be introduced gradually to the effects of these functions. They are designed to be used in a condition of high ataraxy, or your mind could be blown. For that reason fail-safe fuses are installed, but just the same… we estimate that your functions should be switched on gradually over a period of years.’

‘Years?’ the young Boaz said. He sounded alarmed. ‘How many years am I supposed to stay here?’

There was nothing they could do to hold him, short of unethical imprisonment. All his early years his true character, cowed and beaten, had been given no chance to express itself. Now he was freed of the harshness of Corsair; his true nature was beginning to show, and it turned out that his character was an impetuous one. He yearned to roam, and his restlessness became a knot of frustration that could not tolerate any restraint.

He stuck it out for two months, during which time he learned to handle the felicity function up to setting four. Then he announced that he was going.

Hyton tried to persuade him against it; Madrigo made no attempt to do so. Boaz was adamant. He was eager to experience life; the remaining control syllables could wait until he was ready. He promised only that while he was away he would strive at all times for ataraxy, and that he would return so that the experiment could continue.

He went. And he did the bonemakers a great service.

He found out their basic mistake.

To own his own ship was still his goal, but for that he would need extensive financial credit. Meantime he entered the cargo trade as a hired hand, serving first on a cheap tatty scow with her tubes half rotted, then working his way up to the larger lines. He did gain experience of life, on a score of worlds, and the galaxy was as colorful as anything he could have imagined…. Sometimes he would feel sorry for his tormentors back on Corsair. They, like him, would be grown men and women now, but it was unlikely that many of them would have got offplanet. To imagine their no doubt dreary lives gave him a feeling of vengeful satisfaction that only his philosophical training prevented him from revelling in….

He kept his promise. As the years passed, he did go back to Aurelius, several times, and spent months at a time there. Mostly, though, it was Madrigo who gave him his attention. The bonemakers, disappointed at not finding him permanently at their disposal, had located new, more co-operative subjects. Hyton himself, in fact, had been installed with silicon bones, and the number of bonemen and bonewomen was increasing. Still, Boaz could boast of being the first. They checked him out, debriefed him, gave him a few more syllables, the first settings of other functions. Meantime, Boaz saved as hard as he could….

No longer so young, he grew mature….

…day 29, month 3, year 716 standard time….

H819 was an anomalous planet. It was lifeless, but it had a breathable atmosphere, if you didn’t mind breathing in sulphides along with it or else wore an air filter. The oxygen was belched out by numerous volcanoes whose intense heat apparently split some underground oxide such as water. Boaz arrived there as a crewman on a ship bringing equipment to an alchemical research station. The company he worked for had decided to switch him to another ship, so he was left onplanet to wait for his new berth to pick him up.

He remembered craggy cliffs and burning cones, nothing moving except the constant movement of rocks dislodged by frequent ground tremors….

Alchemy was not a popular sect. Colonnader cosmology was the one most universally respected in man-inhabited space; the most scientific, the most proven. And while it had its variants and deviations, alchemy was not one of them. Alchemists were famous for spreading noxious and dangerous gases, dusts and radiations through their ill-considered experiments, and were forbidden to practice their art on more worlds than not; hence this station on a dead world where they could harm no one but themselves. In place of the stoical calm of the colonnaders, they had a reputation for mental aberration and reckless improvisation, for being unable to restrain their burning zeal for chemical discovery.

By now sufficiently schooled in philosophy to be able to call himself a colonnader, Boaz felt curious about doctrines that were rivals of his own. Alchemical work was exotic enough for him to feel attracted to the alchemists despite their dour and over-intense manner. He became friendly with Dorsuse, the chief artifex at the station, and this individual indulged him to the extent of using him as an untrained assistant in the main laboratory.

The alchemists were indeed contemptuous of danger. Their skin was discoloured and bore the marks and scars of many strange burns and lacerations. Boaz alone took the precaution of wearing a face mask in the mercury-laden, vapour-drenched air of the laboratory, and many were those present whose breath came in gasps or whose limbs shook from the intake of similar unholy mixtures over the years.

Boaz counted himself lucky. Since coming to the planet the team of adepts had been preparing a singularly arcane experiment, and it was about to come to culmination. Dorsuse had promised to take him to the firepit to witness the climax.

The object of the operation was to isolate a particularly potent and rarefied form of fire as the alchemists understood the element. They called it ethereal fire. According to them, its existence was so far hypothetical only. The firepit, dug by the alchemists themselves, was lined with mica and diamond laminate. For nearly a standard year they had been slowly dripping into it a mixture made up of more than forty substances, including plutonium, electronium (a form of matter whose nuclear protons had been replaced by positrons; the substance was electrically neutral but incredibly light, and capable of numerous fanciful molecular configurations impossible for normal matter), mercury which had been treated by a secret process known only to alchemists, and other substances which they also claimed were not known by orthodox science.

The real secret, Dorsuse assured him, lay in the measured proportions by which the ingredients were slowly introduced to one another. A century of experimentation, he told Boaz, had gone into the formula that was now being tried. It was calculated that on the 29th of month three, the meld would be complete, all the ingredients being exactly tempered and suffused. The result should be ethereal fire.

Boaz was excited. With Dorsuse and two other alchemists, he stood on the overhanging observation platform on the lip of the pit. Down below was a faint orange-green radiance from a cloudlike mass.

He was wearing dark goggles Dorsuse had given him. The alchemists had goggles, too, but careless as ever, they left them dangling around their necks. On an impulse Boaz tore off his goggles too, and gloried in the stinging sensation in his eyes as the glow fell on them.

He wanted to make the most of this. He switched on rheobase setting three, felicity setting two (he didn’t want to lose control by setting too high). Preservation, of course, was already on. He never switched it off.

Glow, glow, orange and green. The now-familiar intensification of vision due to lowered rheobase hit him (lowering the rheobase threshold intensified sensation; raising rheobase dimmed it). The depth of the pit, with its dark, round, brooding walls, the nascent life of the cloudy mass, made him heady with anticipation.

‘I think the light is increasing,’ Dorsuse said.

Another of the alchemists nodded. ‘Do you think we shall be on schedule this time?’

‘Schedule’ was an obsessive word with Boaz’s hosts. Their theory of chemical operations contained a time factor. Ordinary chemical reactions, which took place immediately or in seconds or minutes, were in their parlance ‘vulgar’ or ‘common.’ The arcane chemical processes took place over time spans of days, months, years, even decades (there was a legend of an alchemical reaction that took more than six hundred standard years to take place). The sought-for transformation of substance, however, usually happened suddenly at the end of this time, and was supposed to be predictable to within seconds. This was what was implied by ‘schedule.’ In fact, an alchemical operation was likely to involve a whole sequence of colour changes, transitions between solid, liquid, gas and plasma, or other signs Boaz was not familiar with, all consequent on the continued application of the enlivening energy source, and if any single one of them failed to occur on time the whole procedure was deemed abortive.

For all that, there was a great deal of self-glorification in the alchemists’ own descriptions of their art. Though they would speak airily of predicting the outcome of years-long operations to ‘within seconds,’ in practice they could rarely calibrate their schedules to less than a calendar day.

‘Yes, it is increasing,’ Dorsuse said. He leaned out over the parapet, craning his neck to get a better view.

‘Is there any danger?’ Boaz asked tentatively. ‘How will the ether-fire manifest itself?’

‘Well, we can always get out of the way if anything alarming looks about to happen….’

As he spoke the incandescent mass exploded. It reared up the well of the pit in a gaseous flash. The platform supports were burned through in an instant. Down fell the platform and its occupants. The ethereal fire (for that was what it truly was) boiled over the rim in a foaming, expanding mushroom head of light.

Paradoxically, it was indescribably beautiful: a golden, radiant, softly roaring incandescence. Boaz knew this because he did not disappear into the depths of the pit as did the others. They must have been killed in a split second. He, by contrast, grabbed the lip of the pit as he fell, and with a strength he should not have possessed he hung on.

The gentle, beautiful light was not all he knew as he hung there. Ethereal fire only looked beautiful, with a beauty that masked its inner horror, its antipathy to all organic life. It was fire upon fire, fire within fire, fire impounded, compounded, almost playful in its ability to torture without limit, penetrating his body to the core, to the bones in fact, infusing every cell to some degree.

Boaz should have died within two or three seconds. So would he have, had he been engulfed in ordinary fire, for the heat was intense. His flesh would have turned to shreds of carbon and even his bones, those shining silicon bones, would have melted.

But ethereal fire was subtle, rarefied, as tenuous as perfume. It burned in a way that ordinary heat did not. The chemical changes attendant upon combustion took place but leisurely in its presence (the observation platform had been charred to disintegration; it should have been vaporized). Boaz, likewise, burned slowly with a burning that soaked deep into his body, into his mind, into his feelings.

Yet if that were all he had to suffer, he might have died in not too large a fraction of a minute. But it was not all. He also had silicon bones.

Nature bestows one merciful beneficence on the living creatures she generates and touches with waking consciousness. She so arranges their nervous systems that there is a limit to the degree of suffering they can endure. When agony or terror reach a certain traumatic point, the organism immunizes itself against further horror by means of daze, unconsciousness or death. Shock is the ultimate guarantee. The heart stops, blood leaves the brain, catatonia develops.

That was the mistake of the bonemakers, who proved themselves less wise than nature.

For the whole ten minutes that Boaz was engulfed in ethereal fire, his preservation function kept his ravaged body working after a fashion. It kept the blood pumping, the nerve cells firing. It insisted, with an implacable preprogrammed will, that the ascending reticular system which brings alertness to the brain should not close down.

Boaz was conscious the whole time.

Not only that, he was on rheobase setting three. Put simply, lowered rheobase meant hyperaesthesia. Every sensation was felt with an unnatural keenness – every datum of pain had that extra edge. Not only that, he was on felicity setting two. Everything he received with his senses was being shunted to his emotions.

Boaz grabbled in his mind. Instant insanity might have been a refuge of sorts, but the preservation function was charged with maintaining not only his physical but also his psychological health. Mental coherence was another matter, however. He called on his bones to help him, trying to mouth trigger syllables as though screaming prayers to the gods.

He was too overwhelmed with pain to have any real control over what his mind pronounced. The heat had probably affected the bone functions, too. Because he did not even have the syllable for what followed.

Felicity retuned itself to setting eight – three settings higher than the bonemakers had allowed him to experience.

His burden of physical agony, already inconceivable in terms of what human awareness can be expected to survive, crashed through the remaining gates of his mind to take possession of the entire gamut of his emotions. Pain that had already stripped his consciousness bare, that burned and whipped him, that transcended all thought or explanation, that became a living entity, a personality that spoke to him, played with him, raped him, punished him with its enfolding caresses, now had access to the ‘joy function’ – a reservoir of positive emotional energy. It instantly turned that energy negative.

Misery would have been too bland a word to describe the rivers of ultimate horror that flooded and ran through Boaz. It is not often that emotional pain can equal physical pain of even a normal kind. Yet he knew grief that arose from and was the equal of his physical torment. There were no hidden parts to Joachim now. Not a thought, not a feeling, not a memory was not dredged up and drenched permanently in that grief. He howled his suffering until that howl echoed in an emptiness which was his own self, and that self contracted around and became only one thing. PAIN, AGONY, SUFFERING, GRIEF, repeated and repeated and repeated, forever and ever. Amen.

The alchemists in the distance heard his screams. They listened to them with curiosity and fascination. How could screams be so seemingly endless in content? How could they seem so much like a new language, for a new world? When the ethereal fire at length dissipated (rising through the atmosphere and into space, they said, seeking its proper abode among the stars) they ventured cautiously closer. They found the blackened form of Boaz still clinging as if in rigor mortis to the laminated diamond-and-mica lip of the pit. He wasn’t screaming now; the preservation function had robbed him of the physical strength to do so as it commandeered every erg of energy in its desperate fight to keep him alive. They presumed he was dead, of course. They scooped up his charred body and placed it on a wooden board. Then, amazed to find he was still breathing, they carried him into their small surgery, but appeared to think the case hopeless and did nothing for him.

As chance would have it the company ship put down to pick him up only an hour later. The ship’s robot doctor, observing that he did not immediately die, consulted Boaz’s medical record. Then it did its duty and informed the captain of his duty. Boaz was delivered, still suffering, to the bonemakers twenty light-years away.

The bonemakers, in turn, did their duty as they saw it. They set about to repair Boaz. The task was more massive than any they had yet envisioned; it made the mere making of silicon bones seem easy.

And indeed, bones were of no use in a case like this. Every cell, every nerve, every gland, every single metabolic process would have to be closely and permanently regulated by artificial means; truly speaking, Boaz’s entire somatic integrity was gone, and would never in future be able to stave off total collapse. On the other hand, all the adp that would be needed could never be packed inside Boaz’s frame, not even using bones – and even if some means of incorporating could be found, the bonemakers would have decided firmly against it. So fine were the attunements that were required that bringing the processors into physical contiguity with the ruined soma would in short order have led to functional coalescence. Boaz would no longer have been human.

So regulators and soma had to be separate, and to house everything necessary to keep his destroyed body miraculously walking, digesting, feeling and thinking would take a building the size of a small dwelling.

But that would effectively have imprisoned him within a radius of a few miles. The bonemakers chose another course. They felt they owed it to Boaz to do more than merely heal him. They owed him something in recompense.

Knowing of his ambitions, they bought him a ship. A newly built cargo ship, crew-robotized (independent shipkeepers disliked hiring employees), with range enough to allow him to roam almost anywhere, provided he could find cargoes to pay his way. And into that ship they put all the processing. Into it they put the transceivers that linked him to this secret brain, larger than any natural brain since it undertook to keep biological functions running that should have been able to run themselves. The ship was, in fact, a preservation function, but one far more capacious and more penetrating than that put earlier into his silicon bones. Correspondingly, it gave him a survivability that was unparalleled.

The bonemakers’ unheated apologies still rang in Boaz’s ears. They admitted to having made a serious mistake. It might comfort him to know that other bonemen would benefit from his experience. Future models would have an automatic cutoff on the preservation function to render the owner unconscious beyond a set level of pain, or even to permit him to die. And they were calling in all bones installed so far for modification.

While Boaz and the bonemakers could never be quits, they had done all they could for him. In their opinion he was still far better off than when they had first picked him up off that Corsair spaceground.

His bones, they informed him, were still operable. It made no difference to Boaz. He had never used them since.

Captain Boaz groaned out loud.

AGONY – AGONY – AGONY –

Normal physical pain, however bad, is mentally unrecoverable once it is over. That it happened can be recollected, the nervous system can be permanently depressed by it, but the memory carries no storage facility whereby the experience of it can be relived.

Emotional pain, however, the mind can remember, and relive. Boaz’s pain had not been normal. It had been physical and emotional all at once, supernal physical pain married to emotional pain of like intensity. And the memory of it bubbled up unbidden, again and again.

And yet such memory was not the worst of it; burdensome though it was, it was but a pale copy of the original. Worse was knowledge. The knowledge that it had happened.

In the doctrine of an extinct religion the wicked were consigned after death to a lake of supernatural fire. This fire burned a thousand times more intensely than ordinary fire, and was a thousand times more agonizing. Yet it burned without consuming, and those cast into it burned forever.

Boaz understood the description. He had been dipped into the lake of hellfire.

As if in dim after-image to the brilliant pain-flash, he remembered when, after a long time spent in the medibath, his tissues were mended and he emerged as a lumpy, scarred version of his former self – but only physically. Psychologically he was broken.

Then began the visits of Madrigo, his mentor. Methodically, with sure touches, he began the job of reconstituting Boaz’s shattered mentality. Boaz could hear now the mentor’s quiet, sympathetic voice. Ataraxy was all. A contented life was impossible without it. Everything that happened, no matter how good or how bad, must simply be accepted, with equanimity.

Madrigo agreed that some experiences were dread enough to overcome even the most highly controlled human consciousness, and Boaz had been through something that could destroy any normal psyche utterly. Without philosophy there would be no hope for him. But there was philosophy, and the mind, in the last analysis, was stronger than all, simply because it was eternal while experiences were only temporary.

Ataraxy must be striven for. Pleasure and pain, however intense the degree, must never be acknowledged as a master.

‘After all, are not your chosen names Joachim and Boaz, the two pillars of universal stability?’

‘Yes,’ said Boaz, ‘but I am beginning to curse those names….’

‘Take the large view,’ the mentor told him. ‘When the world ends, when all is absorbed in mind-fire, your accident will take on a different aspect. It will not seem fearsome, then.’

‘No!’ Boaz protested with a passion that broke through the resolve that Madrigo had patiently been building in him. ‘I do not believe mind-fire sees experience as illusory or unreal – that would be to render the creation meaningless! The world is real, mentor, you have taught me that. My sufferings were real! They cannot be mitigated by a change of view!’

To that, Madrigo remained silent.

Boaz slumped in his chair, head and shoulders slouched forward as though he were about to fall out of it. The memories faded, then disintegrated and flew apart like a flock of birds startled by a gunshot.

A set of luminous dials on the wall of the cabin quivered. From the drive down below a fuzzy whine, his constant companion, permeated the cabin.

A chime gonged. It was time to change the fuel rods.

With an effort he lurched reluctantly up from his chair. He flexed his stiffened limbs, and turned up the cabin’s dim lighting.

He scanned the dials. He would soon be in Harkio.

Then he would know whether the lead he had was worth anything or not.