The Pillars of Eternity

5

The descent had been hasty, the need to escape the enforcer cruiser’s ravening beams overriding any interest Boaz felt in the enlarging landscape. The cruiser, shooting ships out of the sky as it came back round the curve of the planet, The Sedulous Seeker fleeing before it, had followed the mob as far as the troposphere – before returning again to orbit. The Sedulous Seeker and its two sudden allies, the armed ships belonging to Larry and the Hat Brothers, had soon abandoned their abortive attempt to put the cruiser out of action and, outgunned, had also dived into the atmosphere.

Vast patches of gold and silver, interspersing a less brilliant background of lavender and violet, had slid below. The prospectors, including Boaz, had all made an instinctive dash for darkness, zipping in a drove over the terminator before scattering. In fact the cruiser would be able to scan the night as well as the day, and for that matter probably had orders not to fire on the surface of Meirjain. But people felt safer in the dark. Boaz, like the others, sought cover, landing in what looked like the leeward side of a cliff.

No one would move until daylight came. Boaz calculated that the hours of waiting would be useful, putting the commander of the government cruiser in a more passive mode. He would probably take no further action until the prospector tried to leave the planet – then their problems would begin in earnest.

Boaz reminisced, skulking within his ship.

‘What you plan is quite impossible. Nothing can ever be changed.’

These words of Madrigo, uttered at Boaz’s last meeting with him, were often replayed in the shipkeeper’s mind. They dropped into his consciousness now, provoking as usual a response that he knew was perverse. They should have affected him like drops of slow poison, steadily depressing him into senselessness. Instead, they infected him with a kind of manic exhilaration. Insane stubbornness, irrational determination, gave his will a hard edge. When last had man pitted himself against the gods?

Romrey sat watching Boaz curiously from the other side of the small cabin. The shipkeeper had rebuffed all his attempts to engage in conversation. He sat slouched over a table, moodily fondling his deck of colonnader cards while waiting for Meirjain’s new sun to come up. The totality of his self-absorption reminded Romrey of someone on a run-up to suicide—real suicide, not clone-backed self-immolation.

What was it, he wondered, that Boaz was after? He gestured to the cards. ‘You have a deck, too. Are they anything like mine?’

Boaz shook his head. ‘Nothing like,’ he muttered. Actually Romrey would have found little difference, but for Boaz there was no comparison. In his cards the symbolism was pure and elegant, with none of the carborundum deck’s florid arcanery. They were philosophical, not occult. Neither did he expect any mysterious help from them, as Romrey did from his.

He stopped at the card called the Universe. One way which the colonnader cards differed from the degraded decks was that however familiar the images became they seemed fresh and new each time one looked at them. Boaz could still intuit original nuances, even after years of study.

The Universe showed a city set on an island, amid a wavy blue-green sea. Gaily-garbed people thronged the balconies, traversed the walkways, ascended and descended the upthrusting towers, appeared briefly at countless windows. The meaning of the card was relatively simple (though a wealth of more technical ideas was encoded in the shapes and numbers of its towers and shafts). It expressed the basic colonnader idea that the universe was an organized whole, and that all sentient beings in it were, so to speak, citizens of a common polis.

Boaz thumbed out two more cards: the Priestess, which was the Universe’s complementary card at the other end of the twenty-one card sequence, and Strength, which as the middle pivotal card of the whole sequence linked them together. The three cards comprised a potent triad. The Priestess was a card of ceaseless allure and enchantment. She sat on a throne, smiling in benign, pleased fashion at the beholder. The pillars Joachim and Boaz flanked her rear, the space between them screened by a veil merging with the wimple she wore as a headdress. On her lap lay an open book, whose pages she turned one by one, unendingly. Each leaf of this book, the reverse of which was left blank, bore exactly the same image: a miniature of the card called the Universe. It was complete in every detail, every tower, every traverse, every citizen, every tiny motion. Again and again the city reappeared, absolutely unvarying from page to page, vanishing for the moment that the leaf was turned.

Thus was the doctrine of the world’s eternal recurrence explicated.

Strength, the card through which the other two interacted was also a female card. A willowy woman, wearing a flowing gown, stood on a bare landscape. Her face was serene and gentle. In her two hands she held the jaws of a lion, which somehow seemed to merge with or emerge from her pelvis.

Some called the card Nature, or the Strength of Nature. Others Force, or Conservation. Few without colonnader training knew what it really signified: the obdurate rock-steadiness of natural forces, which were absolutely self-regulating in the cosmic context, and which could not be made to swerve or alter by a single iota.

Madrigo had explained: ‘Imagine a force which whenever it acts calls into play a countervailing force which instantly dampens it down. Such a force would display no positive characteristic, and would be undetectable. It would be indistinguishable from empty void. And yet it might be nature’s ultimate force that maintains all others.

‘Such a force exists. It is indeed the ultimate conserving force, the absolute bedrock of nature. It cannot be detected. Neither can it be interfered with, even in the least degree…‘

Boaz laid out the three cards in a triangle. Here was the Priestess, the birth of the universe when the twin pillars of existence separated from one another and matter unfolded from potentiality, just like a book opening. Here was the Universe: the world-city itself, no more than a detail in the Priestess. And here, at the other corner of the triangle, was Strength, the linking card. This explained, to the superior understanding, why it was that the world could only exist in the mode of eternal repetition, for otherwise there would be no unity to nature, no strength….

The cards distressed him and he rose from the occasional table where he had been seated, to go pacing about the narrow space.

Eternal recurrence… it was his burden. Should it not be everyone’s? What was more depressing than that one’s life must be repeated endlessly, to the last unalterable syllable?… But to the common man this knowledge had no meaning, he realized. It was an equation in a book. Only to a philosopher, to Boaz who had had the sure proof of the equation shown to him, for whom it had become a part of everyday thought, was it as real as yesterday, tomorrow, or today.

His stricken look amazed Romrey. He stared up at the shipkeeper. ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked. ‘Did you see something in the cards?’

‘If you like,’ Boaz answered brusquely.

‘You know,’ Romrey said, after a thoughtful pause, ‘it’s probably not good manners after you saved my life, but I’m curious about you. You look like one lonely man to me.’

Words came from Boaz before he had to time to check them. ‘Loneliness: an abyss without a bottom, into which to fall, without limit. So it must be.’

The intensity of Boaz’s pronouncement took Romrey aback slightly. ‘Nobody need be that alone,’ he said. ‘I wonder if you’d mind telling me what you’re hoping to find here on the Wanderer. It’s probably not money, like the rest of us.’

When Boaz ignored him, he slipped his carborundum cards out of his pocket. ‘Well, maybe these can tell me,’ he said, and began to shuffle preparatory to dealing them out for a reading.

He had half feared that Boaz would react to his temerity by turning him out onto the surface to fend for himself, regardless of colonnader ethics. Boaz, indeed, seemed angry. He knocked the cards from Romrey’s hand.

‘This trash will tell you nothing.’ He spoke thickly. ‘Your pack has not the depth. Very well, you importuning thief, I will tell you. Who knows, perhaps you have the intelligence to understand it. But first you must be able to understand that there could be a man who has suffered in a way unknown by any other being in the history of creation. Could you believe in inconceivable suffering? Does it sound like a melodramatic exaggeration? No, it is literally true, and I am that man. I will not explain how, except to say that science, in seeking greater good, has wrought the greatest ever evil, and that the school of mental calm is responsible for such agony as to make calm impossible. All my actions are directed toward escaping from this agony. And that is why I am on Meirjain.’

‘You suffer it now?’ Romrey inquired.

‘It is in the past.’ Boaz turned away to hide his haunted eyes.

‘Then you already have escaped it,’ Romrey said, puzzled. He shrugged. ‘If the memory is unbearable, you could always have it erased.’

‘No!’ Boaz turned to Romrey again. His expression was savage. ‘Don’t you see? The universe repeats. Everything that has gone before must come again, and again, forever and ever. It lies before me.’

‘Yes, of course,’ muttered Romrey, though he showed by his quizzical expression that the idea was barely comprehensible to him.

Suddenly he laughed softly. ‘It is time-gems you’re after, then! You want time travel, right? To travel back and change what happened… whatever it was….’

‘The past? Why change the past?’ Boaz shook his head. ‘You disappoint me, Gare. Do you know nothing of cosmology? The future is the past. Because the future has already occurred, countless times in the past. What has been must be, again and again. Do you see, Gare? What has been must be, again and again. I must change the future, abolish predestination, put time on a new track.’

‘Past, present or future, everybody knows time is immutable – predestined, as you put it. The world goes from phase to phase of the same eternal cycle. It’s a law.’

‘Time has been immutable till now.’ Boaz slammed his fist on the table, causing the cards he had laid there to jump. ‘You are wrong. It is not a law. It is a circumstance. Nature is strong, but not omnipotent. Indeed, her strength can be used against her.’

It was on this point that all his hopes were pinned. He had studied all the data obtained by scientists, and all the arguments of the philosophers, and he had concluded that nothing made predestination an absolute law. It was a consequence of the strength of nature, that was all. The sheer weight of the universe, so to speak, caused events to run an identical course with each manifestation. If someone could be strong enough, or clever enough….

‘If one small detail in present time can be altered,’ he went on, ‘then eventually all will be altered. The tiniest deviation can only accumulate, until there are untold results.’ His voice shook. ‘If only somewhere in the whole vast universe, some little flower can be caused to have seven petals instead of eight! If one lone electron orbit acquires one quantum of energy more or less! Then the next manifestation of the world will not be identical to this one, and the next one will be different again. The nature of cause and effect must make it so. Then,’ he added dreamily, ‘my prison will be shattered. I shall have a chance to be spared that torment.’

‘It might mean you don’t exist at all, next time,’ Romrey ruminated.

‘Gladly, gladly!’

‘Mankind might not exist either.’

‘What does it matter? Conceivably the whole universe will never exist again. There might be just nothing, for ever and ever. Or it might take a wholly new form, in which matter itself will be different. I do not care one jot about it. All I care is that—’

Boaz halted, his fist clenched. A knowing look had come over Romrey’s face. He spread his legs so that the colonnader cards that Boaz had knocked on the floor became visible.

The cards had fallen in a mass, faces down. Only one card had separated and lay face up. Romrey bent and retrieved it. It pictured a stone tower in the instant of being shattered by a massive lightning bolt or gush of energy. From its buckling height a lone figure tumbled head first.

Romrey said sourly, ‘So we have a reading after all. This card is something of a mystery. There’s no general agreement on its meaning. Some people call it “the Universe Buster”. If that’s right, you’ve interpreted it nicely.’

Staring at the card, Boaz said, ‘It symbolizes simultaneous creation and destruction, in the colonnader deck.’

They fell silent. How Sisyphean, Boaz wondered for the thousandth time, was his task? The time-gems gave some prospect of hope – yet how often had he spent his life in this quest, only for the rock of his labours to roll back down to its resting place at his death?

In a sense, he was forced to admit that the hopelessness of his quest was the very essence of it. Its audacity, its irrational grandiosity, gave point to his existence. He pursued only because life offered no other possibility….

Romrey, meanwhile, was having thoughts of his own. He knew now, after what he had just heard, that Joachim Boaz was quite insane.

Together, without speaking, they waited for the dawn.

It came first as a glow that suffused the darkness, then as a sudden blaze. Surveying the scene through the ship’s sensors, Boaz saw at once that he had misjudged his surroundings when landing in the darkness, but he decided that the ship might as well stay put for the present. The atmosphere checked as breathable, just as previous explorers had reported – though as a different sun had then warmed the planet, the datum was not necessarily reliable.

Boaz got busy, getting together a tool kit and float sledge. ‘If you like, we’ll go together.’

Romrey nodded.

‘We’ll make a short reconnoitre to start with,’ Boaz continued. ‘As you may have guessed, there is a limit to how far I can wander from my ship. You may be useful to me in that regard.’

No mist rose from the ground to greet the burgeoning yellow sun as they descended the tread-rail. The air was perfectly clear, the landscape shining. The sky was like none either man had ever seen: it seemed to be of no single colour, but glimmered patchily, mauve, blue, pink, shot through with channels and outlines of brighter colours, like a reflection of the planet’s surface as it had appeared from space—which it probably was, thought Boaz, wondering what combination of upper atmosphere gases might bring about such a refractive trick.

But it was the ground below that held the greatest surprise. It was not ground but a floor, stretching indistinctly toward the horizon. It shone, it gleamed, it was brilliant but with a soft brilliance. It was pure yellow. As soon as they set foot on it Boaz took a cutting tool from his kit. In moments he had cut out a cavity in which yellow shadows gleamed. Wonderingly he massaged in his hands the lump he had cut. It was so malleable he could bend it where it was not too thick, needing to summon only a little strength over his integration beam.

He tested the metal with a chemical assay. Gold. Purest gold. The plain was made of it. Now that he looked close he could see that it was marked with a checkerboard of fine, barely visible etched lines.

Romrey eyed the sample without interest. Though neither of them had ever seen gold used so lavishly, it was, like every other natural element except radium and technetium, too low in value to be worth taking. What everyone now scattered around Meirjain was after was the incredibly rare, the new, the unexpected, small in bulk and huge in desirability – like time-gems….

Boaz threw aside the lump and directed Romrey’s attention to what, on landing, he had taken to be an uneven cliff wall behind them.

It was not a cliff wall. It was definitely artificial. It was a bulging, rounded hull, reddish gold in hue but studded and decorated with baroque traceries the colour of ruby, cobalt, copper and amber. The two men were too close to the gigantic structure to gain any clear idea of its nature, and Boaz gestured to Romrey to mount the float sled. Together they glided over the gold floor for a distance of about a mile.

Looking back, it was just possible to see what the ‘cliff’ was. It was, Boaz was sure, a ship, though conceivably it might have been a fixed building of fantastic shape. But what a ship! No econosphere spacedock, nor the yards of any past or present civilization in Boaz’s ken had ever constructed or planned a vessel remotely like it in size and magnificence. Its height was about a mile, but it rested lengthways on immense ornate runners, and its length was about three miles. Its form was everywhere gently rounded, though its sides, as near as Boaz could judge, were nearly parallel near the center. As the sun rose, at an angle to the horizon, the light slid along the shining bulk disclosing a richness of age, and of sheer wealth.

And that was not all. On either side of it were similar ships, forming a rank from horizon to horizon. This was a parking ground.

‘By the gods,’ Romrey muttered. ‘Just look at that. I wonder if the other people who came to the Wanderer found anything like this?’

‘There’s no saying. Most information about what was found here was suppressed. Not that there seems to have been all that much of it in the first place. They only stayed a few hours.’

‘Yeah, I know. A slingshot orbit. When they came back, Meirjain was gone and they never tracked it again – until now. Phew.’ A greedy look came over Romrey’s face. ‘We’ve got to get inside one of those things.’

‘Later, perhaps,’ frowned Boaz. He was looking in the opposite direction. Near the horizon, which was about three miles away, was a different type of structure. It looked rather like a miniature city built of purple blocks, towers and various other shapes that were indistinct at this distance. Although it could have been an industrial plant or some such artifact, it did have more of the appearance of a permanent dwelling than the monstrous vessel – although, paradoxically, it also seemed smaller.

‘That might be a better place to look, at first,’ he observed.

He was about to put the sledge in motion again when Romrey gave an alarmed grunt and pointed to the sky. Limned against the confusing multicoloured backdrop was a slender shape, which as they watched enlarged itself into the elegant outline of Radalce Obsoc’s yacht. Boaz stayed his hand on the controls of the float sledge. The Sedulous Seeker hovered, moved to and fro slightly, then put down not half a mile away.

‘What do you think?’ Romrey asked. ‘This isn’t coincidence.’

‘Not with a whole planet to fly to.’

‘I’m not going to like it if all those people are aboard. Especially you-know-who.’

Boaz was prepared to deal mortally with the persons Romrey referred to, if he had to. He decided it was an issue best faced up to now rather than left until later. He put the sledge on a steady glide and swept toward the portal of the yacht. It opened even before they reached it.

Obsoc appeared in the entrance as they stepped off the sledge. He was blinking rapidly and his face showed obvious strain. ‘Oh, come in, come in, both of you,’ he entreated in a high-pitched voice. ‘You don’t know how glad I am to see you. It’s been simply dreadful.’

‘Are the others with you?’ Boaz asked him.

‘Ach!’ Obsoc put his hand to his forehead. ‘Only Neavy. And I think she’s dying.’

He led them into the main lounge. Neavy Hirester lay on a couch, attended by one of the yacht robots which had been given a medical programme. Mace was kneeling beside her, a hand on her brow.

No one else was present in the lounge. Boaz noticed, however, the dark bloodstains on the carpet.

He and Romrey stepped near the couch. Neavy’s eyes were closed, and she appeared unconscious. She was very pale. Her clothing was open and the robot was binding an ugly cut with a surgical instrument.

‘It isn’t really any use,’ Mace said, glancing up. ‘She’s lost too much blood, and we haven’t got any.’

‘What did it?’

‘Parawhips. Those damned girls. She’s got some really deep lacerations. Haemorrhaged like mad.’

Boaz turned to Obsoc. ‘How did you find us?’

‘My robots tracked you down. I hope you don’t mind our turning up like this. I feel shaken, citizens, I don’t mind telling you – what a business!’

‘What happened?’ asked Romrey.

‘As soon as they realized the barrier was down Larry and the Hat Brothers started fighting. They just didn’t care – they were killing anyone. They would have killed us too, if our robots hadn’t helped us to hide. One of Larry’s girls was killed, too. Luckily their own ships came down for them, and they left.’

‘You mean everyone else is dead, except Neavy?’

Obsoc nodded. ‘Everyone. Oh, what a business! The carnage!’

‘Where are the bodies?’

‘I got the robots to throw them out.’ Obsoc rubbed his eyes, as if very tired, then leaned against a table. ‘This is dreadful. What am I doing here? I have risked my life – for what? For the satisfaction of ownership! And yet I would do it again. My friends, you probably do not understand these things. You cannot comprehend the compulsion that comes over the impassioned collector.’

‘It is the same as any other vice,’ Boaz said absently. ‘The object of it is largely irrelevant.’ He reflected. ‘You haven’t seen anything more of the econosphere ship?’

‘No. It won’t bother us while we’re down here.’

‘I think she’s going,’ Mace said sadly.

The robot paused, then felt a pulse, probed for a heartbeat, and finally applied a little flat meter box to the girl’s temple. It straightened.

‘She has died, sir,’ it said to Obsoc.

Obsoc sighed, a trifle ostentatiously. ‘All right, put her outside.’

Romrey stirred. ‘I don’t think I like the idea of a corpse lying around the place.’

‘Oh, all right.’ Obsoc gestured to the robot. ‘Put her in the freezer. You can dispose of her later.’ The robot bent and, with obvious difficulty (robots generally were quite frail), lifted the dead girl in its arms and carried her out.

‘I wonder if she has a clone,’ Mace said dreamily. ‘The trouble is, it’s probably light-years away. It won’t receive her death signal.’

The men ignored her. Obsoc’s manner suddenly changed and became brisk as he spoke to the other two. ‘Well, gentlemen, from the look of it you were about to do some exploring. You’ve noticed those gigantic ships, I suppose? From the air you can see hundreds of them! And that’s not all. This planet is a fairyland. It’s quite unbelievable. How the race that did all this could have died out I just don’t know.’

‘We were heading for the citylike structure,’ Boaz said. ‘I suppose you have a suggestion to make?’

Obsoc shrugged. He looked uncertain, and Boaz realized that he was frightened. He wanted the other two to find the goods for him.

‘Perhaps we can be most useful to one another when it comes to leaving,’ Boaz offered. ‘There is still the cruiser to be got past.’

‘And the time-gems?’ Obsoc queried anxiously.

‘If we find any, we’ll share them.’

‘Good! And if there should be other finds, other jewels, hitherto unknown, perhaps—’

‘We’ll have to talk about it,’ Romrey said sourly. ‘Maybe you’ll have to do some exploring yourself.’ He turned to the exit. ‘Well, how about it, shipkeeper? We’re wasting time.’

They left. Outside, Boaz put the sledge in motion again, and they set off for their goal. As they came closer, some first impressions of the ‘city’ were dispelled. On the one hand it began to seem more machine-like, the blocks and pipes taking on the appearance of components of a mechanism. On the other, the purple colour resolved itself into a pointillism of colours which glittered like tinsel, all merging at a distance into the one luminous purple. There was an eerie beauty to it that threatened to befuddle the senses – or at least Boaz thought so. From the restlessness of his companion he guessed that Romrey was simply filling himself with excited thoughts of riches.

A low wall, about three feet in height, surrounded the city. He floated the sledge over it, then set down and stepped out, looking around him. He touched the wall; it had a roughened surface, every wrinkle of which was a different colour. He was not surprised at the apparently perfect state of preservation of what they had seen so far. Only primitive civilizations built with materials that decayed. It was another question whether the long-dead inhabitants had left behind them any energy sources that were also non-degradable. If so, it was remotely possible that even the ships looming behind them were still workable.

Neither was it the first time that Boaz had stood amid the works of an alien culture. His search for a means to change time had led him to many strange places. He lifted his gaze and surveyed what turned out to be a tangle of pylons, snaking pipelike shapes, oddly formed blocks, figures from some twisted geometry.

‘There’s something queer about this place,’ Romrey said.

‘I know what you mean.’ Boaz picked on a spot and tried to follow a pipe, oval in cross-section, as it veered among the towers of the ‘city’. He soon lost it.

There was a topological oddness to it all. While it obviously existed in the normal three dimensions of space, it reminded him more than anything of sketches and models that were meant to represent forms in four-dimensional space. The thought gave him a feeling of excitement that subjectively, he guessed, was much like Romrey’s delirium of greed for wealth.

He looked back. His ship was a small grey shape against the golden balloon of the Meirjain giant. It was already some miles away, and there was no saying whether there might not be materials in the ‘city’ that would prove impervious to its beams, or at least that might attenuate them. He issued a silent command: Follow. Obediently the ship lifted itself, soared past The Sedulous Seeker (which unlike Boaz’s ship had a horizontal landing attitude) and put down half a mile away.

Romrey observed the move in silence. ‘Let’s move,’ Boaz said. ‘If we find any doors, we might be able to tell what kind of place this is.’

Romrey stepped down from the sledge, which dutifully trailed after them as they moved deeper into the ‘city’. Soon it engulfed them. The sky seemed to disappear, its colours merging with those of the structures that rose and danced all around them. His surroundings began to seem forbidding to Boaz. He was telling himself that they were wasting their time here, and that they would do better to search elsewhere, when a cry of ‘Hey!’ came from Romrey.

He had found an entrance to one of the blocklike buildings, shaped like a man-sized door. The aperture was too small to admit the sledge. Leaving it parked outside, Boaz followed his companion through.

Inside, the darkness was almost complete. Boaz switched on a torch and held it aloft. By its fierce radiance he saw that they were in an empty chamber, cube-shape but with rounded corners. In the opposite wall was another entrance, this time oval but also of a size to admit a man.

Romrey peered through it. ‘It’s a tunnel.’

Boaz joined him, twisting the ring on the torch to produce a beam. There was nothing to be seen in the tunnel, which after a few yards curved out of sight.

Pausing, Boaz told himself that poking into any chance corner was perhaps not the best way of persuading this fabled world to reveal its treasures. A more reliable method might be to trust his ship’s spy beams. While Romrey urged him to go down the tunnel, he summoned up the ship, asking which way he should go.

The ship spoke, but mingled with the message was a note that was unfamiliar: Go forward.

He stepped through the opening, beckoning Romrey to follow.

They moved cautiously, for what seemed a long time. There was no apparent sense to the oval corridor’s convolutions: it turned this way and that, it dipped, it rose, it slanted at random oblique angles, it turned – so Boaz suspected – back on itself. Then, as he was about to suggest they retrace their steps, it delivered them to a low-ceilinged, boat-shaped chamber, about the size of the lounge in Radalce Obsoc’s yacht.

Returning the torch to an all-round lamp, he took quick stock of the room. The walls were of a matt lavender louvred with close-set ribs which followed the curve of the chamber like the ribs of a sail-driven water boat. Placed along the center of the chamber were about half a dozen closed chests, or coffers. A storage place, perhaps?

Romrey dashed to the chests and threw open the unresisting lid of the first one he came to. He drew his breath in sharply, dipped in a hand and pulled out something that glittered.

It looked at first like a silver spider’s web. But its threads seemed to flow and reorganize themselves constantly as Romrey held it up to the light, turned it over and examined it through an eyeglass.

‘I don’t know what this stuff is. Never seen anything like it before.’

Boaz was not listening to him. He was receiving a message, which at first he thought came from his ship – but no, it was that other, unfamiliar note which minutes before had mingled with the ship’s voice.

Here, little Mudworm, is the treasure you seek.

Mudworm! That hated name – the name he had not heard all these years, the original name he had been given by his enemies – where had it come from now? What was speaking to him?

With the words, there was an instruction. He was directed to the third chest in the row. Moving to it, he saw that it had a transparent lid. Not only that, but a square in the ceiling over it was also transparent, and light – daylight, as far as he could tell – shone down onto the cask below.

Through the crystalline lid, he saw a layer of what appeared to be large diamonds.

The use of his earlier name had provoked turbulent and unpleasant feelings in Boaz. Nevertheless he forced himself to be calm, and lifted the lid.

The gems, about a hundred of them, were laid on something resembling velvet. Each was faceted, and about an inch and a half in diameter. Boaz picked one up, turned it over, let it catch the light.

Romrey was suddenly at his elbow, the silver spider web dangling from his hand. ‘What’s that? Is it…?’

For answer, Boaz brought the gem close to his face to peer into it. One could see reflections in the facets, tiny little pictures. He brought it closer to his eye, looking as though through a lens.

And he saw himself and Romrey, coasting over the yellow plain on the float sledge, reaching the ‘city’, dismounting…

A scene from the recent past.

Now he understood why this chest had a transparent lid, why the light shone on it from outside. Time-gems refracted light through time. From the past, from the future. The overhead panel brought it light from the city’s environs.

But a scene from the past could be explained by other means than time transference. He turned to another facet. And saw himself again.

He saw Romrey, too, but something was wrong. Romrey was standing like a statue, staring ahead of him as if frozen. In the scene Boaz himself seemed disturbed. He staggered, peered close at Romrey, reached out his arm to touch him…

The picture faded.

A warning?

‘What did you see?’ asked Romrey. He reached past Boaz and picked up another gem, focusing his gaze into it as Boaz had done. For a while both men were absorbed in the tiny picture shows.

It was strange that images so minuscule, and presumably bounced around the interiors of the gems at random, should be so clear. The gems themselves were as limpid as water, except where glints and sparkles flashed through them – and as these glints enlarged themselves, as the facets were turned, the scenes came suddenly into focus, never lasting more than a few seconds before vanishing.

If the glimpses were all from past and future time, then the range was immense; somehow Boaz had expected it to encompass a few hours or minutes only – perhaps no more than seconds or a part of a second. Briefly he saw a perfect little landscape with a yellow sun and wavy, frondlike trees swishing over dusty ground. Flowerlike creatures walked in groups beneath those trees…. Now he saw one of the golden ships flying. It swept over Meirjain’s fantastic landscape, then soared upward, disappearing in a sky that was blue rather than mottled.

Boaz snatched up another gem and examined it for scenes also. He was greedy for evidence of time transference. But fascinating though the little cameos were, nothing seemed to distinguish one jewel from another.

‘Let’s get ’em,’ Romrey exclaimed feverishly. They scooped the gems up, pouring them into their belt pouches. Then Romrey turned his attention to the other chests.

Boaz stood where he was. He had retained the last gem in his hand and was staring into it. He turned the stone ever so slightly, until a tiny scene came into focus.

For the first time the scene was within the chamber itself. The six chests were being carried into it and laid down in a row, just as he and Romrey had found them. The work was being done by humanoid, olive-skinned creatures who were completely naked except for silver circlets around their waists. The humanish impression was completely destroyed, however, by their faces, which more than anything resembled the head of an Egyptian ibis…

It was wholly coincidence, a startled Boaz decided, that the ibis also figured in a colonnader card entitled the Stellar Realm…

He tried to hold the scene, but his fingers trembled and he lost it.

He dropped the gem in his pouch.

He felt frightened. He did not know who or what had spoken to him a short while ago. He presumed it was a thought from his own mind (perhaps even some sinister stray datum from his ship?); he wanted to stay and explore further, at the same time fighting an urge to leave, now, with what he had found.

What happened next was terrifying, yet so unexpected and bewildering that, paradoxically, it was robbed of its terror. He was seized. He felt something pick him up and move him, like a chess piece. He hurtled up the winding tunnel, which was still lit by the beam of his torch. An astonishing flurry of sights, thoughts, words and sensations dizzied past him.

He stood in the lounge of Obsoc’s yacht. ‘Perhaps we can be most useful to one another when it comes to leaving,’ he said to the anxious collector. ‘There is still the cruiser to be got past.’

‘And the time-gems?’

‘If we find any, we’ll share them round.’

‘Good!’ Obsoc’s eyes gleamed. ‘And if there should be other finds—’

Once again the chess piece was moved from square to square. Boaz was picked up, whisked across the board. Flashing squares of yellow gold. A kaleidoscope of impressions, like a vid recording played a hundred times too fast. The jewel chamber. Purple blocks. Words, feelings. Flashing squares of yellow gold.

He stood in the lounge of Obsoc’s yacht. He spoke to one of the yacht robots. ‘Take off and enter circumpolar orbit, achieving stable velocity over the magnetic north pole. Meanwhile broadcast a surrender message to the government cruiser. With luck they will intercept you rather than shoot you down, and you can gain medical assistance for your master and his friends.’

The robot inclined its head in understanding. Boaz turned to go, and in turning was moved off again, even faster than before. He was in the storage chamber. Romrey had stuffed his pouches full and shook loose a carry-bag, which he also proceeded to fill.

‘This is where they kept their valuables, all right. I don’t recognize a single gem-stone, not a single metal – if they are metals. Come on, get your share.’

‘Let’s go.’

‘Go?’

Boaz was mad with elation. ‘I knew it was true,’ he murmured. Already he understood that he had travelled through time, to the past, then to the future, and now back to the present. ‘The answer is here.’

But he felt a terrible fear that whatever power it was that had seized him would carry him out of the range of his ship’s healing beams. That would be the end of him – in the agony he was doing all this to avoid.

‘I’m going back to the ship,’ he said. ‘Do what you like.’

‘Well, all right. But let’s get a couple of these chests to the sledge.’

‘I’m going straight back.’ Boaz turned and started back up the tunnel. Twisting and turning, he eventually gained the outside, to find that Romrey was not far behind him.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ Romrey said. ‘We were doing fine.’

Boaz ignored him and made his way through the complex’s eye-straining shapes, signing the sledge to follow. There was a fact that up to now he had been too numbed to admit, but that now was bursting upon him.

It was as if the unreality of a dream had imposed itself on real experience, and as in a dream logic had been short-circuited. But now logic was back, bringing with it a single, luminous inference. Meirjain was not uninhabited. He had been projected into his past, then into his future, he presumed (in the hastiness of his thought he found no time to wonder what was implied by his future instructions to the yacht robot). Ergo, beings existed here who had mastered time travel, probably the same ibis-headed beings he had seen in the time-gem.

Unless a machine had accomplished it, acting at random? Possible, he thought, but unlikely.

Romrey joined him as he stepped over the wall and turned his back on the complex. They saw that a third prospector ship had landed on the plain, a little way in front of his own. Like The Sedulous Seeker it was horizontal in line, but much smaller and sleeker.

‘I don’t like this,’ Romrey breathed. ‘That’s the Hat Brothers’ ship.’

And even as he spoke the figures of the two brothers were already emerging, distinctive in their dark garments and wide-brimmed hats. Romrey came abreast of Boaz, who stood still. ‘They must have followed Obsoc here,’ he said. ‘They probably imagine he knows something they don’t about time-gems.’

‘Fools,’ Boaz muttered. ‘The time-gems are all over the planet. How else could we have found them so easily?’

Giving a nervous smile, Romrey took his deck of cards out of a pocket. ‘You are too sceptical, shipkeeper. It was these cards that led us to the gems. They create events, remember? I told you they were effective.’

‘Don’t you know the econosphere regulates against magic charms?’ Boaz replied acidly. ‘Never mind. I will deal with the Hat Brothers. Come along.’

He had meant to move off toward The Sedulous Seeker. But before he could take the first step a sensation like a sudden and crushing blow made him gasp and stagger. It was as if a huge shadow stood over him, as if a great weight, a gigantic foot, were stamping down to crush him like an insect. And yet the blow was not physical at all. It was mental, a blow at his consciousness.

He gave a choking cry. Instantly the ship was coming to his aid. He felt the integrative machinery gearing up, reaching out, casting about for the source of the attack. Briefly he had the peculiar sensation of being frozen in a block of ice. Then a titanic struggle, an unbearable tension, permeated his body. It was total war, interspersed, to his amazement, with fragmentary, whispered comments:

‘Special measures necessary…. Total opposition…. The impact has radius vectors in the negative dimension….’

He was hearing the ship talking to itself as it sought to save him! Never before had he experienced that! On and on the voices went, debating, conferring, deciding – and all, he realized later, in a split second of time. Then a moment of horror as the ship, as if demoralized, consulted him:

‘You may submit, if you wish.’

‘No!’ Boaz shouted. He knew in his heart that it would be the end of him if he surrendered to the assault. He felt the ship rally and try again. He staggered once more, forgot where he was for an instant, and then was suddenly still.

It was over, except for a feeling of inner pressure which betokened an extra vigilance from the ship.

Apart from that, what had changed?

Romrey had changed. The prospector stood stock-still, like a statue. His eyes stared. Boaz passed a hand before them. Nothing.

He touched Romrey’s cheek. The flesh was hard and smooth, like stone.

Experimentally he nudged the rocklike body, then pushed it gently. Romrey toppled over, clanked dully to the floor of gold. Not a finger had shifted position.

Whatever had attacked Boaz, and been fought off by his ship, had attacked Romrey too. Boaz allowed his gaze to wander to three newly landed ships parked on the golden, shining landscape. The Hat Brothers stood staring at one another, or seeming to. They were utterly motionless.

He framed a question, staring at The Sedulous Seeker. ‘The same,’ his ship answered, with an alacrity that showed it had already checked the yacht on its own initiative. Briefly it brought Boaz a cameo of Obsoc and Mace sitting together, also motionless.

Boaz came to a quick decision. He would take the stiffened bodies of Romrey, Obsoc and Mace aboard his ship and take off immediately, taking his chance on getting past the econosphere cruiser. In his haste he forgot, for the moment, his advance knowledge of his future words to the yacht robot. When he remembered them it was already too late to do anything, for the chess game began again. Once more Boaz was a manipulated piece. Once more he went through a dizzying sequence of impressions, too fast for him to be able to take in, in which colours, images and sounds flashed past.

But in what sense was he now being moved? He sensed that it was not just in time – perhaps not in time at all. After scant seconds all went black. He seemed to be hurtling down a dark tunnel. Then he was still, but in darkness, into which a yellow glow spread slowly.

The darkness fled, revealing that he stood in a dome-shaped chamber. Around him stood five or six of the ibis-headed creatures he had seen in the time-gem. They regarded him calmly, with beady eyes, their beaklike faces gleaming. They were, on average, a little shorter than a man, and their thin, smoothly muscled, olive-colored bodies appeared youthful, like the bodies of young girls – for, he noticed, they all lacked anything resembling male sex organs. The silver circlets around their waists, which comprised their only adornment, seemed, now that Boaz saw them more closely, to be in ceaseless motion, as if made of flowing quicksilver.

Despite the ordeal he had just been through, he did not feel particularly afraid of them. It was, however, a habituated response. He had encountered intelligent aliens several times before, and had come to learn that in general they were apt to offer him less threat than were strangers of his own species.

He did, on the other hand, feel awe. These were the beings who could manipulate time, to whom time was no more than an additional spatial dimension. They were, in other words, four-dimensional beings.

In comparison with ordinary creatures like Boaz, who crawled like worms from one moment to the next, that made them like gods. Were they, in fact, gods? And was not the ibis head, he recalled with an inward shudder, a symbol of the ancient god Thoth, said to have shown and explained the colonnader card pack to mankind long ago, before the technical age?

Once Boaz had asked Madrigo if there were gods. Madrigo had answered: ‘There may be; it has not been settled. But if there are then they are transient and limited beings, as we are. More intelligent, more potent, with a consciousness whose relation to matter is perhaps somewhat different from ours, but that is all. One should not,’ he had added, ‘be afraid of any entity.’

‘They will not be immortal?’ Boaz had asked.

‘All beings are immortal,’ Madrigo had reminded him. ‘But like us, the gods must live and die.’

The creature facing Boaz made a cryptic gesture, touching a finger to its flattened forehead. With the same flowing motion it turned, with an open hand indicating the curved wall behind it. Then the entire group turned, and filed out of the chamber to Boaz’s left.

Boaz could not see the door they exited by. But in front of him, where there had been only blank wall a moment before, there was now an arched opening. A purple cloth screened the opening, waving slightly as if in a breeze. He stepped forward, touched the cloth – which wasn’t there. There was just the feeling of something silky, like warm oil, touching his skin, and his hand went right through.

Boldly he walked through the screen, and stopped. He had entered a circular chamber like the first, but smaller. The walls and curved roof were of the same texture he had seen in the ‘city’ – indeed, Boaz guessed that he was in fact back in the mysterious complex. This chamber, however, contained more by way of furniture, though he could only guess at the functions of the three or four cabinet-like objects standing on the floor.

On a raised, cushioned dais in the center of the room there sat, cross-legged, another of the ibis-headed aliens. At first sight it seemed indistinguishable from the others. But for some reason, as he looked at it, Boaz gained an impression of immense age and experience. Furthermore, as the beady, expressionless eyes stared back, he felt like a puddle into which some lofty entity was poking a finger, so that the ripples radiated out into every crevice of his being and were reflected back. There was absolutely no doubt of it: the creature was inspecting his mind.

‘Come in, little Mudworm.’

Again the hated nickname which, among so many other factors, had helped make his life a misery in the Corsair warrens.

The voice was mature, full, human, – and male. Hearing it was a trifle odd. One imagined it was spoken by the creature facing him, but the curved, tubelike beak was clearly unsuited to human speech, and the creature’s head had not moved. The voice had emanated from empty air.

In spite of the irrational displeasure he felt at the reference to his early years, excitement mounted in Boaz. He had been given an interview with the inhabitants of Meirjain – with the time-gods, as he already thought of them! He could ask questions! He was close to learning what he needed to know!

‘So you know our language,’ he began.

‘Or you have been made to understand ours. What difference does it make? Come closer, Mudworm. Do not hover by the door.’

‘My name is Joachim Boaz,’ Boaz said sternly. But he obeyed, moving closer. The voice chuckled.

‘Aggressive self-assertiveness, as ever with your species. Very well, Joachim Boaz, as you will.’

‘What shall I call you?’ Boaz asked.

‘I am myself. I need no name. Does that answer sound familiar to you?’

‘No.’

‘It should. It is similar to an answer you once gave when asked the name of your ship.’

‘But we are not ships.’

‘Are you not? What are you without one?’

The creature clearly knew all about him. It was disconcerting to be so mentally naked. ‘I have questions,’ Boaz said. ‘But you already know what they are.’

‘You have questions. But discourse cannot be tacit. The mind must express itself.’

Boaz almost smiled. It was a remark Madrigo himself might have made. The thought provoked Boaz into dipping his hand in a pocket and coming out with the colonnader pack. Expertly he flipped through the cards until coming to the Stellar Realm, which showed a naked woman pouring out water onto a landscape from two jugs. Behind her, an ibis was taking flight from an evergreen tree.

He held out the card before the Meirjain creature, pointing to the ibis. ‘First,’ he said excitedly, ‘did your species have contact with mine long ago? This picture is centuries old. Note the head of the bird. It symbolizes the god of all the sciences. Perhaps you taught us the beginnings….’

His voice trailed off. The ibis-headed man leaned forward and inspected the card. ‘Yes, there is certainly a resemblance,’ the voice said. ‘But it means nothing. It is simply a matter of convergent evolution, arising from the manner of feeding. The general shape of my head is a commonly occurring one, as is the shape of yours. As for whether any of my colleagues visited your planets long ago, I have no idea. You have seen the big ships outside? They were mainly used for visiting foreign galaxies. But they have been laid up for a long time now.’

Slowly Boaz put away the cards. He had forgotten all about Romrey and the others. The big, big question hung in his mind, and he was afraid to speak it.

He stood silent, dumb. The ibis-headed man’s artificial voice spoke again, softly.

‘Yes, I can help you, Joachim Boaz. But I wonder if you really want it, little Mudworm.’

‘You know I want it!’ Boaz burst out. ‘It is all I want. You have conquered time! You can tell me how—’

He stopped, realizing the ridiculousness of his position, seeing how he had been reduced to helplessness. Why should these creatures help him? What interest had they in his mad scheme? And yet there was no way he could disguise his intention.

‘Yes?’ the voice said. ‘I can tell you how to alter time, you were about to say? There I can only disappoint you, Joachim Boaz. We cannot alter time, whether past, present or future. Time is inexorable.’

‘But I have experienced it!’

‘Have you? Think. All I did was move your consciousness along your time-line. I can take you into your past, and a little way – only a little way – into your future. In the same way we can refract light through time, by means of the time-gems. Yes, the past and the future can be known. But as for altering anything – no. Does this sound like a paradox? It isn’t really. I shall explain. As you have guessed, we are four-dimensional beings. But only in a sense. We have learned to do what I did for you – to move back and forth over our time-lines, though only to a limited degree into the future. No time transfer was involved in bringing you into this dwelling, incidentally. We merely put you through a displacement vortex, which is our normal way of travelling about the planet.

‘You might think that the foreknowledge this gives us, by governing our actions, enables us to control and alter future time – but no. Everything that happens in my future is already a result of this foreknowledge. It cannot be changed. Our time-travelling ability is, itself, part of the predestined cosmic pattern.’

Boaz stared at the ibis-headed man, a familiar burdensome feeling coming over him. ‘What is the good of such a faculty?’ he asked.

‘It adds an extra dimension to life, as you can appreciate. To return to the past is more efficient than memory, which is apt to be unreliable. Experience of the future is also more useful than mere prediction.’

‘You have some machinery for accomplishing this mental projection through time?’

‘It is a mental discipline. There is no machinery for it.’

‘Would you teach it to me?’

‘You could never learn it. Your brain is too different.’

The right adplants, or else the right silicon bones, might rectify that, Boaz thought. But if what he had just been told was true, there would probably be little point in it. The time-gems in his pocket still seemed to offer him most hope. Whatever the ibis-headed man said, they were proof that there was a physical means of manipulating time.

‘Then I thank you for your information. I would like to leave now.’

‘No, you cannot leave yet, Joachim Boaz. I have something more to tell you.’

The ibis-headed man shifted slightly. His head turned, as if to glance at something on the wall, and for a moment Boaz saw the strange face in profile, looking exactly like the Egyptian bird in the colonnader card.

‘Let me tell you what brought you here, what brought all the others here who landed in the last few hours. You see, I am very old. My species conquered the aging process long ago. My body will die only when accidental and unrepairable damage on the cellular level reaches a lethal accumulation – which will happen eventually, of course. Now, beings that live a long time are liable to develop special hobbies, so as to while away the period of their existence. My hobby is alien psychology. As our steerable planet wanders through the galaxy I made it my business to study the mental features of the various species we come across from time to time. This, let me add, is my own hobby. My friends and colleagues, some of whom you have just met, follow other interests…

‘But to come back to the point, Joachim Boaz. We have been in this star cluster for a while now, long enough for me to notice that your species possesses a certain psychological peculiarity. This quirk could be summed up as obsessiveness. Never have I met a race with such a capacity for letting the mind become possessed with a desire or idea. It intrigues me considerably.

‘So I decided to collect a few suitable specimens for study. Ordinary specimens were no good, I wanted those in whom this obsessive quirk is developed to a high degree. So I set up a fly trap. You know what a fly trap is? On your worlds you have troublesome insects, so you set a trap for them with something sweet and sticky. The sweetness attracts them, and the stickiness stops them from getting away. The flies cannot resist the sweetness, so they are bound to get caught. Do you see how I caught you all, little fly? You are all obsessed in one way or another – with greed, with desire for possession, with other, more interesting needs…. and Meirjain the Wanderer became the irresistible lure for you all! The ploy might be a convenient way of ridding your society of its undesirable elements – criminality, you see, is unusual among intelligent species. My own motive is not altruistic, however. I now have an adequate number of suitable specimens for future study.’

‘Then those people – are still alive?’

‘Alive and fully conscious. But conscious in an unaccustomed way. What else do you do with flies? You swat them. That is what I have done with the people who came here seeking their own ends. I stopped their consciousness at one moment of time. They live timelessly now, experiencing only that one moment, thinking their last thought, feeling their last feeling, seeing whatever happened in that instant. This mode of consciousness will be most strange for one of your kind. For me, of course, it is only a matter of convenience, a means of storage.’

‘Why are their bodies so stiff?’

‘Their bodies persist, even though consciousness is locked in the past. They are rigid because the electrical forces between molecules have been rendered incapable of change.’

‘But it didn’t work with me, did it?’

‘No. Your ship saved you. It is a remarkable phenomenon. And you yourself are by far the most interesting of the specimens, Joachim Boaz. That is why I have brought you here. The others all have minds that, when we come down to it, are petty in their concerns. But you! You have set yourself to change time itself, to negate the whole universe if need be. Could any obsession be so grandiose? You have set yourself to fight Hercules, to pull the legs from under Atlas, to wrestle with Mother Kali, to joust with Jesus, to battle with Ialdabaoth….’

Though he vaguely recognized the other names, only Atlas and Hercules were familiar to Boaz. They were ancient, cruder versions of the colonnader image of strength, or nature. ‘And you, I suppose, will tell me it is impossible,’ he said in a surly tone.

‘Could it be possible? After all, a bacterium can slay a man. But to do that it must multiply itself indefinitely, and there is only one Joachim Boaz. Besides, a bacterium and a man are of almost the same size, when compared with the ratio between you and nature. And there is something else you must understand, Joachim Boaz. Even those gods I mentioned are powerless to change anything. They are powerless because they do not exist. All that exists is natural force, and in the last resort, the unconditioned consciousness that comes into its own between successive world manifestations. But even this super-personal consciousness can neither change anything nor even decide to change anything. It is only the real world made latent, and the real world is changeless. So you see, in your madness you are striving for the absolutely impossible.

‘And yet I tell you, Joachim Boaz, that there is a way you can do it.’

The narrow curved beak, so nearly motionless while they had been talking, dipped as if in thought. Boaz found that he could not speak, so great was the tension within him, and after a while the ibis-headed man continued: ‘Let me paint you a picture. You are walking down a street in one of your towns. The street forks both left and right. Both routes bring you to the ship ground where your ship is parked. Both routes take about the same time. Always at this moment, throughout all eternity, you have taken the left turn. Can you now take the right turn instead?’

‘It is all that is needed,’ Boaz admitted. ‘I know this.’

‘But have you never tried to force yourself, in some such small action, to do something new?’

‘Of course!’ Boaz was familiar with this frustrating and futile exercise. A distressed frown crossed his face. ‘It is impossible to know! One can never remember what one’s future action is supposed to be!’

‘That is right. You cannot remember that you have lived before. You do not know what is supposed to happen. What you cannot remember, you cannot alter. Perhaps it would be easy to act differently if you could remember – who knows? But you cannot, so instead you look to science, to a mechanical device that can alter time for you. But you can never succeed that way, Joachim Boaz. No inanimate device can do it for you. You must do it yourself. You as you are cannot do it. The super-personal consciousness that keeps guard in the night of the world cannot do it. If it can be done at all, it can be done only by a new kind of consciousness – one that is personal, residing in a living creature, and yet remembers. Such a consciousness would be more intense than the abstract consciousness from which the world was originally made. It could act differently.’

‘This is all very well,’ Boaz rumbled, pondering as he listened, ‘but I don’t have this new consciousness. And although I have received mental training, I have never heard of it before.’

‘Of course not. If it existed, the world would not repeat from phase to phase with such absolute precision. But you can have it, Joachim Boaz – if you are brave enough.’

‘I am brave enough,’ Boaz said immediately. ‘Tell me how.’

‘Are you? We shall see. Only a god could change the course of the universe, and in effect you are asking how to become a god, the first ever to exist, since there have been no gods up to now. Very well, I will tell you. To become a god you must bear the unbearable. What brought you to this extraordinary idea, in the first place? Transcendental pain! It opened the door to a new idea, a new vision. For a fact, it was an event never intended by nature. All these ages it has lain as a minute but imperceptible chink in nature’s armour, a tiny flaw that conceivably could lead to her being overthrown. But the experience broke you, Joachim Boaz. You were unable to bear it; human consciousness is not strong enough.

‘Nevertheless you must bear it. Only if an experience of that order can be faced, contained, endured without losing control, can the human mind transcend itself. And if it transcends itself, it transcends nature. I tell you, Joachim Boaz, this event would be unique, unprecedented in the history of the cosmos. You could be catapulted into a new order of being. You would remember, Joachim Boaz. You would remember, and remembering, you could alter what you remember. The world around you would become a machine under your control.’

Boaz nodded, wondering what Madrigo would make of this.

But the news was not good enough for him. ‘You are telling me to wait, to be patient until the next manifestation of the world – and then to meet my misfortune in a different frame of mind. Your proposal is ludicrous.’

‘That is not what I propose, Joachim Boaz. There is no need to wait. With my help, you can do it now. I can return you to that horrendous event. I can backtrack your consciousness through time, so that you live through it again. But this time you must be prepared to conquer it.

‘Well?’ the ibis beak lifted challengingly. The small black eyes glittered.

When the shocking meaning of what the alien was offering came home to him, Boaz felt as though someone had punched him unexpectedly in the stomach. He flinched, he trembled, he was aghast.

‘No. You can’t expect – you couldn’t expect me to agree to that—’

‘You are afraid. It is natural. And yet you know that eventually it must come again, an unknown number of times, as the wheel turns. This is your chance to face it knowingly. Success is only a conceivable possibility, of course, not a guarantee. Perhaps you will triumph, perhaps you will sink into the final insanity. But to become a god, you must have the daring of a god.’

An irrational hatred of the ibis-headed man arose in Boaz, and with it an ungovernable panic. He was terrified that the alien might carry out the plan without permission. When he spoke, it was in a choking voice.

‘Plainly there is a limit to your knowledge. You imagine that I – or anyone – could face that. It is not the way. There must be another way.’

‘There is no other way. You will accomplish nothing unless you conquer your fear. Fear rules you, little Mudworm. Fear drives you to everything. But it does not matter what I say to you. You will continue to convince yourself that a miracle can be worked by purely material means. I knew already that this would be the outcome. Think how often you have been given this one opportunity which you lack the courage to seize.’

‘How dare you say that to me.’ Boaz was sobbing. ‘You have not suffered as I have.’

‘The worm would become a god. But the worm had not the heart of a god. Go then, little Mudworm, and live out your useless life. I have finished studying you.’

Boaz was enraged. He did not know, in that moment, whether he would attack the ibis-headed man or flee through the screen at his back. In any event, a black funnel formed suddenly in the air before him. He felt himself moving, traversing countless dizzying scenes as before.

Stillness again. He was standing on the plain of gold, which shone in the light of the yellow sun. The Hat Brothers stood near their ship, which was made tiny by the huge and gorgeous alien ships far off. A little farther away was Boaz’s alien ship, with The Sedulous Seeker behind it.

How much freedom would the ibis-headed man permit him? He shook off rage, shook off the sick feeling of having failed a crucial test. He shook off the resentment and contempt he felt for anyone, man or alien, who told him to endure what he was certain no being could endure.

He had the time-gems. He had an assurance, from his conversation with the ibis-headed man, that his quest was not totally hopeless, however qualified that statement might be. He could go forward.

He had to think how to leave Meirjain unmolested by the government cruiser. After only a moment’s deliberation he lifted Romrey’s statuelike body onto the sledge and set off for The Sedulous Seeker.

He could not resist slowing down as he passed the Hat Brothers. They were staring sightlessly at one another. As the time-swat jointly hit them, it must have been the last thing they did. That mutual look was now made timeless.

At the yacht Obsoc’s robots greeted him worriedly with concerned news of Obsoc and Mace, neither of whom, it seemed, could be roused. Boaz directed the sledge into the lounge, where he briefly inspected the two.

He spoke to one of the yacht robots. ‘Take off and enter circumpolar orbit, achieving stable velocity over the magnetic north pole. Meanwhile broadcast a surrender message to the government cruiser. With luck they will intercept you rather than shoot you down, and you can gain medical assistance for your master and his friends.’

The robot inclined its head in understanding. Boaz turned to go, then paused. Already he had saved Mace from self-destruction. By his ethic, he had an obligation to her.

He did not think the time-stop would prove permanent or incurable once they were away from Meirjain. But her future with Obsoc would probably land her in the same psychological state as before.

‘Move the girl onto my sledge,’ he ordered the robots. He left the yacht with her, and minutes later was aboard his own ship. He watched The Sedulous Seeker lift off. When he gauged that the econosphere cruiser would be moving to intercept it, he ordered his own ship up.

In the opposite direction, he hurtled in a low, flat trajectory. Over the south magnetic pole he piled on power and shot away from the planet, using it to screen his ship. Soon he was through the c barrier and safe.

Only then did he realize he had forgotten something. He should have taken Romrey’s time-gems from his belt pouch. Romrey, if he did come out of time-stop, was going to be in deep trouble over those gems.