The Pillars of Eternity

‘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….