The Pillars of Eternity

4

Madrigo, on Boaz’s last visit to Theta, had been pleased by the extent of his seeming recovery. It had almost been a trial to disabuse him.

In his memory, emblazoned there like poignant signs of an existence that might have been, Boaz saw the immense colonnades stretching to the horizon, the benign sherbet-like atmosphere fading into the crocus-coloured sky. He smelled the delightful yet calming fragrances of the place. By his side walked Madrigo, that rock of assurance.

‘I can see from your manner that you have proved the supremacy of mind, Boaz,’ he said. ‘You have conquered your ill fate.’

‘I have not conquered it,’ said Boaz.

And it was true. Boaz’s rock-steady personality, like the modsuit he now always wore – like, on the somatic level, his strong and craggy body – was armour. Character armour, permitting him to function in the real world, but protecting a core of absolute horror.

It was Madrigo himself who had helped create this armour. Without colonnader knowledge of the mind the task would have been impossible. By the same token, it was Madrigo who was now fooled by it.

‘I chose ill when I selected my names,’ Boaz said. ‘They augur a destiny I would avoid…’

He spoke on, outlining his great fear. Madrigo nodded, and looked serious.

And then Boaz put his question. It would, for a fact, have been hard to find a more audacious question. It was the first time he had ever seen his mentor appear startled.

He waited.

‘What you plan is quite impossible,’ said Madrigo when he was sure he had understood Boaz’s intention. ‘Nothing can ever be changed. If it were otherwise, your names would be lies.’

Then Boaz knew that no human being, not even his wise and kindly mentor, would or could help him, and the utter loneliness of his mission overwhelmed him.

Boaz pushed the memory away, inasmuch as it could be pushed, into the burning coffers of his mind. He had checked the fuel rods to see that they were delivering their energy evenly. Now he carried out a similar but less practical ritual – inspecting those parts of the ship with which he was in somatic integration.

Apart from the space taken up by the engines, the hold, living quarters and astrogation, there were four decks devoted to keeping Boaz alive. The ship was constructed on the principle of ‘holistic integration,’ which meant that no system in it was left entirely unaffected by what happened in any other system. Boaz, in other words, was entirely a part of the ship. When the engines exerted themselves, he could feel it in his guts. When the ship changed state or direction, he experienced a momentary feeling of vertigo.

The somatic system, as the bonemakers called it, was all-enveloping. It extended through the walls of his living quarters and into the working parts of the ship. Its main bulk, however, lay in the four decks crammed with dull-coloured casings. When he moved among them, Boaz had the feeling of moving within his own body – for this, in a sense more real than flesh and blood, was his body. Even his consciousness was maintained here.

Normal adp was silent; but this was not. Boaz did not fully comprehend the reason why, but it whirred and clicked in a constant mutter of mechanical conversation – although he knew it had no moving parts.

On each casing was a check screen. Moving from casing to casing, Boaz stared in fascination at the symbols that flickered ceaselessly on the glowing green plates. The bonemakers had taught him the meanings of some of those symbols, though in actuality there was no need for him to look at them at all. The somatic system was entirely self-supervising.

The reason for the existence of the screens, as for his daily inspection of them, was that they constituted a reminder of where his health lay. Otherwise there was a danger (the bonemakers believed) that he might forget, and wander out of the ship’s range despite the warning bleeps that would be transmitted to him were he to do so.

Last of all he went to the transmitters on the fourth level. It was an extraordinary sensation to stand there. The beams were at maximum penetration (though very nearly parallel and coherent, their strength weakened with distance due to loss of intelligibility on passing through a material medium. Each inch of emanating beam was like a computer system in its own right). Boaz had the feeling that a strong, invigorating light shone through his body, filling him with health and power.

The temptation was to spend long periods of time there, but it was a temptation he resisted every day. Quickly and efficiently he carried out his checks (to which there was a more practical point than with the processors, the transmitters being more liable to deterioration) and withdrew.

He went back to his cabin.

‘Nearly there now,’ the ship whispered to him.

‘Show me.’

Boaz settled in his armchair. Dispensing with artificial displays, the ship fed his mind with an image of the Brilliancy Cluster through which he was now moving. A crimson circle pinpointed the star which it was expected would be host to the wandering planet.

Flecks of bright purple were a swarm of other ships migrating purposefully toward the same location. Some were far ahead of others – as soon as it was realized the broadcast from Brilliancy had to be genuine, they had started taking off from Sarsuce like fleas leaving a drowning dog. In the rush nobody had paused to dwell on who had sent the broadcast, or why.

‘After the gold,’ Boaz muttered to himself. ‘All after the gold.’ It was an old saying from a time when gold had been a valuable metal and men had stampeded for any chance of laying their hands on it.

He was going to be among the stragglers getting there. There were operators in the vicinity with very fast ships, and he had delayed some hours before taking off.

But Meirjain was a big planet, and he had the advantage that he did not want as much as they did. Boaz, in his gloomy way, was feeling fairly optimistic.

The ship woke him from his troubled sleep. A minor note of urgency pervaded the summons, and Boaz came instantly to a sitting position in the armchair that served him in place of a bed.

‘Look,’ said the ship.

Again a picture in his mind – or rather, a montage of pictures. A planet, its surface mottled purple, blue and mauve, fretted with a filigree of other colours – gold, silver, scarlet. It was warmed by a yellow sun with a hint of blue; a sun, he recognized, that offered the full spectrum of colors accessible to the human eye.

In diagrammatized form he saw what the naked eye would not see: scores of ships in orbit. Their outlines flickered in his vision. Many of them he could remember seeing on Wildhart ship ground.

‘Why haven’t they gone down?’ he asked.

‘They can’t,’ his ship told him.

‘Why not?’

‘I have called The Sedulous Seeker for you.’

The Sedulous Seeker, Radalce Obsoc’s yacht, was as fast as anything flying and would have been among the first vessels to arrive. Obsoc’s image rose before Boaz’s mind’s eye, a sumptuous lounge providing a background. Mace lolled on a couch, her eyes closed.

The collector’s bulging eyes glistened. ‘Good day, shipkeeper. You got here at last.’

‘What happened?’ Boaz asked. ‘Is no one down?’

‘No one has been able to get down.’ Obsoc’s mouth twitched. ‘Plenty have tried. The atmosphere is impossible to penetrate.’

Boaz was silent; he left it to his puzzled expression to ask the question.

‘My engineer tells me the planet is surrounded by a “reverse inertial field”,’ Obsoc supplied. ‘Though in my view he is simply covering up ignorance with clever words.’

‘It doesn’t make sense,’ Boaz said slowly.

‘For Meirjain to be inaccessible? Presumably it makes sense to whatever intelligence is manipulating us in this fashion. There is something down there, shipkeeper, and it is playing games with us.’

‘We can’t hang around here forever,’ Boaz said. ‘The cruiser will be on us in a few standard days.’

‘The cruiser may not necessarily have things all its own way. We have a regular orbital town here, Shipkeeper Boaz, and some firepower.’ Obsoc frowned. ‘The real problem is whether anything is going to come of this exercise. You may care to add your voice to an attempt to find a way out of the impasse. We are holding a meeting to see if there might be some way forward.’

‘Who will be at this meeting?’

‘Some of those who have tried to penetrate the barrier. Also some scientific minds who are among us.’ Obsoc paused. ‘Also it has not been possible to exclude some of the more forceful personalities present. I should warn you that they are people of the most dangerous sort. Tempers are frayed; there has already been fighting.’

‘And who is holding it?’

‘It will take place aboard my yacht. The quarters here are particularly commodious. Heave to in three standard hours if you are interested.’

‘All right,’ Boaz decided. ‘I’ll be there.’

The image disappeared from his projective imagination. ‘Instructions?’ the ship queried.

‘Continue orbit.’

Boaz looked again at the planet below. For some reason the events taking place did not arouse his curiosity. He merely found the mystery annoying.

With an aggrieved sigh, he went back to sleep.

The ships were beginning to gather when Boaz approached The Sedulous Seeker. A crowd of them, of all shapes and sizes, stretched about the sleek, elegant form of the yacht. He recognized Romrey’s natty Stardiver nestling close under the belly of the bigger spaceship, its access tube dangling. Romrey, it appeared, had already joined the party.

A voice sounded in his head, not Obsoc’s but a crewman’s or else a machine’s. ‘Citizen Obsoc welcomes you aboard, Shipkeeper Boaz.’

His ship conveyed his thanks for him. He clambered down to the port, from where an access tube was already reaching out to join up with a similar tube from the star yacht. As soon as they were sealed the lid flicked up to allow him to enter.

The distance to the yacht was about fifty yards. The inertial gravity field did not operate outside the skin of the ship and once in the tube he was in free fall, pulling himself along by means of handholds. Then, as he passed the midpoint, he came down to the floor with a bump. He might have guessed, he thought ruefully, that a man as wealthy as Obsoc would have gravity even in an access tube.

The farther lid flicked up as he reached it. A solicitous robot helped him through the port. ‘Citizen Obsoc is in the main lounge, sir,’ it said, in the same voice Boaz had heard earlier. ‘If you will follow me.’

The corridor was panelled with honeywood, an organic fibrous substance with an intriguing texture which had highlights of silver in it. A thick-piled carpet made walking a silent, mossy experience. It was quite unlike the hard though sometimes springy floors he was used to.

The robot ushered him into the lounge. Radalce Obsoc stepped politely forward to greet him.

Boaz gazed about him. Walls and ceiling were patterned in fretted gold. There was little furniture. He got the idea most of it had been removed, perhaps to make more room, perhaps to avoid risk of damage to Obsoc’s valuable antiques. There were about a dozen people present, including Romrey who sat talking with a young man while a fat, bland woman watched them both. He had been invited, presumably, on the strength of the partnership the three of them had recently enjoyed. Obsoc, perhaps uniquely among those who had flocked to Wildhart, had a sense of propriety.

‘You won’t accommodate everybody here,’ he remarked.

‘You refer to the ships outside? They gather like insects around honey. Word has gone around. But I have invited only twenty-six persons in all.’ He lowered his tone. ‘Over there is Larry with two of his girls. You must, of course, take care not to annoy them.’

Surreptitiously he gestured to a huge man, big-boned, with the hard, aggressive face of a mobster, who stood by a table. He was flanked by two junoesque women as large as himself, younger but with a striking family resemblance – the same large-boned jaw, the flashing, challenging eyes. They would be taken for Larry’s sisters or daughters. They were, Boaz knew, his clones, genetically male like himself but somatically female, having been given hormone treatment in the foetus stage. Larry’s entire gang consisted of such girls, of whom he had an unknown number. Now, like most of the other guests, he stood awkwardly, impatiently sipping from a glass.

Boaz’s attention was caught by the opening of another door farther along the lounge. This time it was the Hat Brothers who entered. Obsoc rushed immediately to receive them.

The Hat Brothers might also have been taken for clones, but were in fact naturally identical twins. Their appearance together was striking not so much for their lookalike features as for the black, wide-brimmed hats they both wore. The story of those metal hats was well known. Boaz was aware that the psychopathology of the professional criminal involved a passion for strong family relationships – as witness the Larry gang. The brothers’ hats were welded to their skulls. Bestowed on them by their father, they were transceivers for relaying mental activity, tuned and coded only to one another. Each brother experienced all the thoughts and feelings of the other, and this had been the case since their early years. They were, in effect, one mind with two bodies.

It was an unsettling sensation to be in the presence of the brothers. Boaz watched as, walking in step, they traversed the lounge to reach the drinks table. People moved furtively out of their path. As they passed near Larry and his girls, ignoring them, there was a definite air of tension.

Deftly, like two android robots operated by a single controller, they took a drink apiece from the table top and turned to face the room.

‘All right!’ barked one in an acid voice. ‘Let’s get started!’

‘We’re not all here yet,’ growled Larry, his voice testy.

‘It’s not our liking to be kept waiting,’ the Hat Brother said. Then his twin, as if continuing the same speech (which was likely pointed to the young man who had been talking with Romrey). ‘You tried to get down, and got farther than most. You’re an engineer too, we hear.’

‘And you,’ continued his brother, pointing to another man, bearded, in a crimson tunic, ‘you’re a physicist.’ The twins looked around the now silent gathering. ‘We’ve enough here to be starting with. If there are any ideas, let’s have them.’

One of Larry’s girls suddenly strode across the room. She raised her fist at the last brother to speak. ‘If you think you can push us around—’

‘Ladies! Gentlemen! Please!’ Obsoc pressed himself forward supplicatingly. ‘We must not quarrel. We are here to co-operate.’

There was a smile of amusement hovering around Larry’s thin, hard lips. He beckoned to his girl. She rejoined him.

At that moment the robot servant opened the door again. Several more people entered, including, Boaz noted to his faint surprise, a nymphgirl wearing a gauzy shift.

Obsoc turned, then reached out his arm to disengage her from the group. ‘May I introduce Neavy Hirester? Though you may not think it to look at her, she is an expert on inertial field.’

Looking at her, the Hat Brothers smiled ironically. ‘Really? Now that’s something we didn’t know. And where did you train, girl?’

‘I didn’t train,’ Neavy answered in a cool voice. ‘I had it adplanted.’

‘An adplant doesn’t make you an expert,’ the Hat Brother said. ‘An expert is somebody who understands what he’s talking about. Like my brother and I are experts at seeing to it that people do—’

‘Shut up, Hat,’ grated Larry. He turned to Neavy, ‘You’ve worked with fields?’

She nodded. ‘I was servicing generators before—’

‘—you started servicing people!’ another voice finished for her, and laughed.

Boaz wondered what urge it was that had brought the girl to Meirjain. That she was unusual among nymphgirls – who as a rule lived only for uncomplicated sensual pleasure – was attested by her having specialist technical knowledge, albeit adplanted.

What of the others, for that matter? For her it was probably a simple desire for quick wealth, as it was with Romrey. But for some of the others – like the Hat Brothers, and the Larry Family – there had to be more to it. They were already wealthy. What kind of greedy craving was it that made them want even more wealth, at whatever risk?

Neavy was speaking. ‘The Meirjain barrier is quite clearly an inertial field, like the artificial gravity in a spaceship except that it resists the approach of matter instead of attracting it. And except that it’s much more powerful, of course. Now it’s not commonly appreciated by laymen that artificial fields of this type have a breaking point. It will be pretty high in a planet-sized field this strong, but I think we might give it a try.’

‘How?’ Larry asked. Once she had started talking they all seemed intrigued by the idea of taking technical advice from her.

‘The field is designed to keep ships out. Ergo, it will be designed to withstand any normal ship propulsion unit. So we lash up a number of units on one ship and try to go through.’ She paused. ‘I calculate that where an inertial field is used as a repulsor instead of an attractor, puncturing it will have a bubble effect. It will disintegrate – until the generator can build it up again.’

‘That’s not an advantage,’ Obsoc pointed out. ‘It’s not in our interest to clear the way for all that mob out there.’ He waved his hand to take in the raggle-taggle fleet gathered around his yacht.

‘We won’t be able to do anything about it,’ the girl pointed out.

Boaz spoke up. ‘There’s another aspect to all this. The sequence of events puzzles me. A broadcast from the Wanderer practically invites us here, but then an inertial field stops us from getting down. Someone is playing games with us.’

Larry pulled a face. ‘Nobody is there. The first expeditions reported no intelligent life. Only dead civilization.’

His girls nodded approvingly, inadvertently advertising that he had already talked over this point with them.

‘Then to what do you attribute both the broadcast and the field?’ one of the Hat Brothers asked archly.

‘Some left-over machine is doing it. At random, for no reason.’

‘I’d say that’s a good explanation,’ the young man Romrey had been talking to offered anxiously. His face was serious. ‘There used to be a saying in the Academy – when events contradict one another, put it down to nature or machine, not consciousness.’

What academy he referred to wasn’t clear, but his contribution was ignored as though he had never spoken. Boaz sensed something happening between Larry and the Hat Brothers. He tensed, but the outcome, when it fell out, took him by surprise.

Larry looked straight at the nearest brother and raised his eyebrows. In return, both brothers nodded.

‘Things need simplifying,’ the brother farthest from him said, though he was looking the other way and couldn’t have seen Larry’s signal. For a moment the three men stood motionless, eyes glazed.

‘How do we do that?’ the nymphgirl asked. No one seemed to have noticed the exchange between the men. The Hat Brother’s remark was received, with only slight bewilderment, as continuing the previous conversation.

It was, Boaz supposed, to be expected – treachery, combinations between enemies, anything that could bestow an unfair advantage even though, on the face of it, probably no one would gain anything anyway. Was Obsoc party to this, or had he innocently invited a viper to his bosom?

But what was it Larry and the Hat Brothers planned? Simply to shoot down everyone present. Boaz reached out in his mind to draw extra defensive strength over the beam from his ship – but at that moment the ship itself spoke to him:

Extreme danger. Return immediately.

He was puzzled by the message. He could not imagine what threat to him there was here that the ship could not help him handle. Larry was doing nothing, merely smiling to himself, while the brothers gazed in bored fashion at the floor.

He was about to ask the ship for an explanation when a shout from the far end of the lounge directed him to the answer. A big wall screen had come on, probably activated by a robot on the yacht’s bridge.

The gathered swarm of small ships was on the screen. Moving through them, firing in all directions with what looked like proton broadbeams, came two slightly larger vessels, almost certainly those belonging to the Hat Brothers and to Larry and his girls.

It now became urgently clear to Boaz what the danger was. It was not directly to him. It was to his ship. His ship, without which he was dead. This had been prearranged; while seeming to do nothing, Larry and the Hat Brothers had been sending go signals to their vessels.

The scene was little short of carnage. Very few of the starcraft had weapons, and those that were manned got under way and fled in panic. Others – mostly those whose occupants were aboard The Sedulous Seeker – floated passively and were junked by the withering effect of high-velocity proton pulses.

While seeing this, Boaz was on his way to the exit. There the robot which had admitted him barred his path.

‘Sir, I strongly urge you not to leave the ship. It is not safe out there.’

‘Get out of my way!’ Boaz bawled.

‘Sir, for your own safety I cannot allow you to pass. Citizen Obsoc would be most distressed if you came to harm on his account.’

Boaz paused, turning to see what happened in the lounge behind him. Everyone now realized what was afoot. Some recognized the identity of the attacking ships. But just as they might have been thinking of doing something about it, they were pre-empted by Larry’s girls. Parawhips in hand, they stepped toward the gathering their motions animal and predatory, sending the thin whips singing out warningly over the heads of those present.

The Hat Brothers entered into the act, too. Producing numbnerve guns, they separated to dance down opposite sides of the lounge. Watching them move was fascinating. It was not a walk, not a lope, but more like a beautifully co-ordinated balletic performance. Boaz realized that they enjoyed moving together. Phut, phut went the hazy blue spheres of static they sent rebounding through the lounge from the muzzles of their guns, again taking care not to aim at anyone.

‘Don’t anybody move,’ said a brother in a confident, low-timbred voice. ‘When we’ve cleared the riffraff away we’ll carry out the nymphgirl’s plan.’

‘My ship!’ screamed someone. Boaz waited to see no more. He pushed aside the robot, who did not have the strength to restrain a human being anyway, and ran down the corridor.

Others had got the idea of trying to save their craft by the time he reached the skin of the ship, but he had no difficulty in sending the signal that automatically reconnected the access tubes. Wondering what he would do if a proton beam accidentally sliced through the tunnel, he hauled himself swiftly along it and in minutes had regained his own ship.

As with most vessels, there was no external armament and it was imperative to get out of danger as quickly as possible. Ordering the ship to bring him an image of surrounding space, he went to his cabin.

The long shaft of Obsoc’s yacht floated fifty yards away. In the other direction was a scene of chaos. With scarcely a thought from Boaz, the ship disconnected and was about to withdraw the access tube, when he noticed a figure floating near the dangling end of another access tube farther along The Sedulous Seeker.

The figure, wearing an emergency space cape and twisting slowly, looked familiar. ‘Give me a closer look at that,’ Boaz ordered.

The picture zoomed in his mind. As he had thought, it was Romrey. Panning the image, Boaz found the wreck of his Stardiver. Romrey must have been trying to reach it, and had somehow fallen out of the end of the tube. Very careless of him.

Boaz knew he should be steering his ship away from here without delay. But there was never a time when ethics could be entirely overridden. He nudged the ship closer and ordered the tube extended toward the stranded man.

Suddenly the ship spoke to him again, with a note of even greater urgency: Attention. A government cruiser approaches.

‘What?’ Boaz spoke out loud in his startlement. ‘But it isn’t due for another two standard days.’

Whoever made that assessment was mistaken, or mischievous. It is here.

‘Let me see.’

From a purely rational point of view the ensuing images were confusing, but Boaz was used to the semi-diagrammatic way of representation his ship sometimes adopted. He saw Romrey reaching for the access tube, ridiculously waving his arms and legs as though swimming toward it (like most people, he had practically no experience of free fall). He saw the scattering, damaged cloud of space craft, as though from a different viewpoint imposed on the first. And imposed on that, he saw the fully armed econosphere cruiser, more than twice as large as Obsoc’s yacht, its form functional and ungainly – ugly, in fact – swiftly moving in to enforce the government edict which everyone here had defied.

The montage fused into one coherent picture as the cruiser darted sharklike among the still-disorganized crowd of ships, the official blazon – a starburst with eight glowing rays – clearly visible on its flanks. The servants of the econosphere were notoriously unfastidious about how they achieved their aims. The cruiser opened fire from the start, ruthlessly selecting targets with a view to chasing away anyone trying to land on the planet that loomed to one side of the scene. Its heavy-duty beams immediately vaporized three ships. Its staff was probably surprised, however, to see the eerie blue glow of a magnetic defense screen abruptly surround The Sedulous Seeker. The yacht returned fire and began to accelerate, sliding around the gorgeous curve of Meirjain.

The two ships that earlier had been firing on the assembly followed suit – presumably because Larry and the Hat Brothers were still aboard Obsoc’s yacht. They, too, opened up on the now pursuing cruiser. In seconds all four vessels had disappeared over the horizon.

But they would soon be back. ‘Seal the tube and haul it in quickly,’ Boaz ordered. ‘This is all a dead loss. We shall have to withdraw.’

It is being done, the ship said. Then: A message is coming through. Listen.

Once again a set of interpreted images impinged on Boaz’s consciousness. When the crowd of ships scattered in panic, one of them had gone plunging down toward the planet. Now, from within the atmosphere, an excited voice was broadcasting from that ship:

‘The screen is down. I’m getting through! The screen’s vanished, everybody! I’m going right on down!’

Wryly Boaz reflected that the broadcaster was doing himself little good by making this announcement. Probably he had been betrayed by a sudden excess of enthusiasm and a misplaced sense of camaraderie with his fellow prospectors. But whoever he was, Boaz felt grateful for his mistake. A note of triumph entered his feelings.

Your guest is aboard, the ship informed him.

‘Take us down,’ Boaz said. ‘We’re landing on Meirjain.’