The Pillars of Eternity

7

‘This is a nice one,’ said Mace.

Boaz had left his colonnader cards on the table. Mace had been sorting idly through them, and now was inspecting Major Arcanum number twenty. It was the card called Unveiling. Specifically, the veil that in the card called the Priestess had hung between the pillars Joachim and Boaz had now been drawn aside and was draped along one edge of the card. The scene it revealed was unworldly. A mythical semi-human figure, with richly pinioned wings half unfolded to extend rakishly along its back, hovered in a horizontal posture over an indistinct landscape. The ‘angel’, as the figure was called, held to its lips a long, slender trumpet that itself seemed to float endlessly over this same landscape, so elongated was it. The trumpet evidently gave voice to a powerful blast, of a force so great that the group of people who threw up their hands in its path was being dispersed.

Dissolution was the meaning of the card: it depicted, in parabolical language, the time when the universe would collapse into fire and come to an end. The pillars of existence would fall into one another, and the latent, unmanifest eons would begin.

The slight movement of the ship stopped. It had completed its short journey across the ship ground and had entered an underground parking shed. Boaz had taken this precaution to try to reduce the possibility of early discovery by the authorities.

From his armchair, he looked across the table at Mace. They had been together for nearly a year now, hiding in space or on fringe worlds to evade the police hunt which he was sure would be taking place. She had come out of time-stop when they were exactly ten light-hours from Meirjain, and she had told him, when she was able to speak, what it was like to be trapped in one moment in time: an experience which, perhaps, could only be comprehended, and that only partially, by a boneman or woman who had experienced the elongated time sense of altered chronaxy. It had clearly had an effect on her, giving her eyes a drugged, haunted look which faded only after some days.

He should have parted company with her, but he had not. He sensed that she had not yet shaken off the wish to commit suicide, and his colonnader obligations still told on him. He had embarked on a course of mental therapy, of the kind that had so deftly been practiced on him when he was a boy in Theta, and of whose methods his subsequent training had given him some knowledge.

It was odd, he admitted, that a man bent on total self-obliteration should, in passing, bother to mend the self-feeling of someone else. Mace, of course, had no idea that any form of process was being practiced on her. Colonnader techniques were not that formal. All she knew was that she had close discussions with Boaz, and that somehow her attitude toward herself gradually changed.

They had come to know one another well in the past year. Boaz, his tongue loosened perhaps by his earlier disclosure to Gare Romrey, as well as by the confidentiality of the therapist-patient relationship, had even confessed the nature of his mission to Mace.

She had listened with fascination, and none of the criticism or uncomprehending blame he could have expected from most. ‘But what does your mentor say to this?’ she asked eventually.

‘Madrigo?’ Boaz made a wry face. ‘He thinks I have fallen victim to cachexia. He does not admit the possibility of what I am trying to do.’

‘Cachexia?’

‘Mental disturbance. An ill-conditioned state of mind. When colonnaders use the term, it betokens a particularly serious kind of mental illness.’

‘Do you think you could have it?’

‘Of course I have it. The mistake is in thinking it is based on delusion. True, all other cases of cachexia are based on delusion. But in me it is based on reality. A reality deeper than any that underpins sanity. Not even Madrigo understands that.’

He sighed, the conversation coming briefly to his memory, and rose. ‘It is time for me to find my friends, Mace. You may go into the city if you wish. Or remain here. You have your own key.’

She nodded, and carried on sorting through the cards. Boaz hesitated; he would have liked to ask her for them, preferring to have them with him always, but decided it would be impolite. He left the ship, passed up the flow-elevator to the surface, and ventured cautiously onto the street.

He had wondered if he could have handled events better on Meirjain, but could see no ethical way in which he could have prevented his identity from becoming known to the authorities. Since then he was almost certainly a fugitive (although he had heard no official posting of his name) and the necessity of maintaining close proximity to his ship was proving a decided disadvantage. It was, in fact, the main reason why he had delayed events by nearly a year while he skulked on the edge of the econosphere, only now reckoning it relatively safe to come to Kathundra, a member of the Central Clique of worlds, a seat of government, though only one of several, a centre of science and learning, and home of vices more sophisticated and depraved than raw boundary planets had yet imagined.

Mace, he imagined, would have a good time here. At other ports of call he had sometimes had occasion in passing to glance at her erotic adventures during his voyeuristic surveys.

She had once, with some eagerness, offered herself to him, but he had been obliged to decline. When he shut down his bone functions long ago, he had relinquished all sexual feeling with them.

He took a deep breath. At last he was on the planet Kathundra, in the city of Kathundra (on all Clique worlds the capital bore the same name as the planet). Here, within the ten miles of freedom his ship allowed him, was the man who all these years had been waiting for him.

He strolled for a while through the glittering walkways, interrogating his ship with orders to ascertain whether he was under observation. Because his shabby modsuit identified him as an outworld visitor, he was constantly beset by commercial adflashes and come-ons, as well as accosted by various individuals offering services likely to be sought by the tourist, and all of which he rudely refused. Finally satisfied that he had done all he could, he entered a travel agency. Kathundra boasted a modern transport system working on the instantaneous acceleration principle – an adaptation of star drive – and all he had to do was wait his turn at a line of stage chambers, dial a number and step inside. The door slid shut behind him, sealing the ceramic-lined cubicle with a hiss. He was seized in a complex field of uni-directional electrostatic forces which separated ever so slightly the positive and negative charges of every atom in his body. Other, more powerful uni-directional fields were added, acting on those charges and accelerating Boaz down a ceramic-lined tunnel. He passed through perhaps thirty switching points in the process of being routed to his destination, his velocity retarded or accelerated in each case so as to slot him in with millions of others passing through those same points. Boaz was not aware of what was happening, of course. The entire process, involving a roundabout journey of perhaps ten miles, took place in the standard interval of one-twentieth of a second. All he was conscious of was that a light came on and the cubicle number on the wall suddenly changed. He stepped out into the house of Aban Ebarak.

For a moment Boaz felt slightly dizzy, a consequence of the generally excellent transport system unique to him. While he was in the acceleration fields his ship’s beams, though they were able to track him, were vitiated in their integrative functions. If he were trapped in the system for, say, a matter of minutes, he would probably die.

He stood in a small vestibule. To one side a broad window (which Boaz knew to be genuine, not a display) revealed that the scientist Ebarak’s house was half a mile up a tower block and gave a breathtaking view of the jungle of shafts which was Kathundra. Ebarak himself was not in evidence, though Boaz had received the acceptance signal before stepping into the stage chamber. The scientist had in fact, been expecting him for days.

Pausing to recover from the journey, he moved to a door and opened it, disclosing a neat study. Ebarak was within, poring over a reading screen. He looked up at the intrusion, a smallish, tidy man, with a pale face, chiselled nose, and mild blue eyes, which, when they were directed at anything or anyone, seemed to turn flint-hard.

‘Ah, hello, Joachim. Sorry I wasn’t on hand to greet you. I was just reading up on some material here. The memory gets a bit rusty, you know.’ Ebarak was one of many scientists who did not trust adplants too far, believing them to make the intellect lazy. He did not have a single memory adplant and only a standard type of adplanted calculator. The book he was reading on the screen, Boaz saw, was one on the econosphere’s index of prohibited texts: Whitlaw’s Cases of Relativistic Event Reversal. It dealt with the way in which time order could seemingly be reversed in small, insignificant ways as a result of the relativity laws.

The scientist killed the screen as he stood up. His mouth firmed. ‘Have you got them with you?’

‘I have.’ Boaz took a pouch from a pocket of his modsuit. He handed it to Ebarak, who loosened the cord at the neck and poured out a number of gems onto the palm of his hand.

‘They look so ordinary, don’t they?’ he murmured.

Laying the pouch on his desk, he picked up a gem between thumb and finger and brought it close to his eye, peering intently. After a moment in which he rolled the gem to tilt facet after facet, Ebarak saw a tiny scene. He saw himself, in his laboratory, fitting something gem-sized into an instrument with a long, shiny barrel.

He smiled. He was, he realized, looking a few minutes into his own future.

It was not the first time he had seen such gems. Briefly he had begun to investigate two specimens brought back from the first landings on Meirjain, before the Scientific Ministry for which he then worked had closed down all such work in panic and impounded the jewels. He believed they had been destroyed.

‘Thank you,’ he said with feeling. ‘Thank you.’

‘When shall I see you again?’

‘Call me in a few days. Better leave now. I want to get down to work.’

‘Yes, of course.’ Shyly, hesitantly, Boaz turned to go. He would have liked to stay, to watch or assist his co-conspirator, but he knew that Ebarak did not want him there, and besides, the longer he stayed the more he increased the danger to the scientist.

He dialled the same travel agency he had come by and emerged, only slightly unsteady, back onto the walkway. For some time he drifted with the throng as before. Then he entered an eating house, sat and watched the passersby through the transparent frontage. As he knew from his previous visit, when he had sought and eventually made the acquaintance of Aban Ebarak, Kathundra was a place of affected mannerisms. People who met on the street greeted one another with exaggerated gestures and flourishes. Which, he supposed, made the offhanded casualness of Ebarak a distinctive mark of individuality.

After a while he returned to his ship. Mace was not there. He sat in his armchair, relaxed, and fell into a semi-doze. Without any prompting on his part, the ship began to send out its spy-beams, bringing him the habitual montage of scenes from the surrounding city.

He paid them only a fraction of his attention; he was like a man who kept the video switched on all the time. He showed a little more interest when the beam brought him a picture of Mace. It was hardly a coincidence, especially in a city of such size. Boaz had realized that the ship showed him Mace much more often than chance would account for. It was, he reasoned, obeying his subconscious wish to keep watch over her.

Usually he did not linger over her escapades, but this time some unformed impulse made him hold the image steady. Mace was in a private room with two others, a man and a woman. The woman was voluptuous like Mace, with heavy breasts and hips: the nymphgirl fashion was long out of date here on Kathundra. All three were naked, except that the man and woman wore gas masks. And they were spraying some kind of pearly mist over Mace from nozzles they held in their hands. The mist billowed over her skin and seemed to be absorbed by it. It drifted in her mouth and nostrils. As all this happened, her face took on a look of extraordinary, ever-increasing ecstasy.

Boaz knew that the mist was a sex-enhancing drug. He knew, too, from the look on Mace’s face, that she had switched on several of her bone functions.

The man and woman put aside the nozzles, ripped off their gas masks, and fell together on Mace. In moments all three were squirming and rocking together. Boaz, seeing the incredible intensity of the pleasure Mace was experiencing, was struck by a totally new thought which brought him instantly to wakefulness.

Could there be, to the horrendous negative experience that had ruined his life, a positive one of equal intensity? Was it possible to know pleasure, or happiness, in the same degree in which he had known pain and misery?

Could that be his salvation? Could there be a cancelling of effects?

Gradually he faded out Mace’s continuing transports of delight. He ordered the spy-beam withdrawn from the city and then sat alone in the darkness. It seemed a wonder to him that he had never considered this before. After all, equilibrium was one of the basic principles of the colonnader card pack….

But no. The idea was fanciful, absurd. It seemed that his long cohabitation with the girl was causing his mind to wander.

He began thinking about the time-gems, and to wonder instead if Aban Ebarak would make any progress.