The Pillars of Eternity

As a thief, Hansard was stupid. He piled cons on top of one another, multiplying the risk to himself.

‘You’re overdoing it,’ Boaz said aloud. ‘A good swindle doesn’t need redundancy.’

He rose and strode away. Back in the avenue the public announcement was beginning. CITIZENS ARE ADVISED AND WARNED…. Passersby paused, glanced up to let the flashing letters strike their eyes the better, then walked on unconcerned.

Boaz had the picture now. Wildhart would be crawling with dealers offering fake coordinates. And the real coordinates? How many people had those? Half a dozen? Two or three? Or only one?

He felt little doubt that the story of the race with the government cruiser was true. Otherwise there would be little demand for co-ordinates at all.

It was beginning to look like a problem.

Romrey had forgotten how kinky the fringe planets were. In former empires depravity had festered first in the central urban areas. In the econosphere, it seemed instead to arise in the nearly lawless peripheral provinces, working its way inward to eat steadily away at the fabric of morality.

The girl had picked him up at an eatery on the night of his arrival. The eatery served spicecrab, a dish banned on many conservative worlds whose flesh contained compounds related to L-dopamine and alpha androstinol. Romrey had damned the expense. In his euphoria at arriving on Sarsuce he had wanted to try something new.

But what the girl, whose name was Mace, hungered for was too new as far as he was concerned. The alpha androstinol had done its stuff (that was why she had gone there: to find a man whose pheromones excited her). But later, when they rented a play room not even the L-dopa could carry him through the scene she wanted. She wanted him to kill her.

Romrey had never done that before. The idea repelled him. And he told her so. Perversely (maybe it was the spicecrab again) his refusal excited her even more.

Since then, she had been pursuing him. In eateries, in drinking houses, in the street, hanging around outside the door of his lodging, she would sidle up to him. ‘Kill me,’ she would whisper in his ear. It was a determined kind of seduction he found horrifying. As if he were the one who was to be defiled.

In one way, he supposed, he could see some sense in it. On the night of their first meeting Mace had told him she was a bonewoman. Bone people were usually colonnaders, and colonnaders believed that consciousness – mind-fire, as they called it – was not limited by space or time. She probably had no real conception of personal extinction; she thought her same consciousness would awaken in the clone body she had somewhere.

A colonnader had once explained it to him in terms of the death and rebirth of the universe, ‘We never die, really,’ he had said. ‘When we are resurrected in the next turn of the wheel, it’s our own same consciousness that lives again.’

Romrey was sceptical. He wondered, though, whether Mace’s clone also had silicon bones. That would mean she had a lot of money….

He had resolved to ignore her until she eventually wearied of the game, but he had not reckoned on a deadly trick she had up her sleeve. He awoke one night and became aware that someone was in his room, moving clumsily.

He waved his hand at the service panel, flooding the room with light. Mace was there, naked, her voluptuous breasts flopping (she did not follow the breastless nymphgirl fashion). As the light came on, her hand went to her hair and pulled out what appeared to be a strand. The strand stiffened and went silvery. It was a paraknife.

In almost the same instant she flung herself toward the bed. Romrey rolled aside. The knife stabbed down where he had been and sliced his shoulder. He hardly felt it at first. Then the stinging pain and the sight of his dripping blood brought his senses to a furious awakening.

‘You bitch!’

They stood facing one another over the bed. She still pointed the paraknife at him, her shoulders hunched. Her face was slack. Her lips drooped, in a way that made him imagine something lascivious was dripping from them.

Then she began to giggle. ‘I’m going to have you,’ she told him. ‘You’ll have to kill me, because if you don’t I’m going to kill you! It’s you or me – get it?’

Gasping with passion and fright, she lunged at him again. He retreated, but she clambered over the bed to get at him. ‘You’d better do it,’ she breathed. ‘You’d better do it now. Or I’ll get you sooner or later. Creep up on you – stick it in – bet you got no other body to wake up in. Right?’

‘Right,’ he said harshly. He caught her wrists in his hand, holding the knife away from him, while she kicked desperately at his crotch with vermilion-painted toes. A rage was boiling up in him to think how close to death he might have been, accompanied by a feeling of heat and a pounding in his ears – an unfamiliar reaction he would not have guessed he could make.

‘All right.’ His words came thickly. ‘If that’s how you want it—’