The Pillars of Eternity

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….