The Pillars of Eternity

‘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?