The Pillars of Eternity

Halfway down the side street, his ship told him he was being stalked. He tucked the fuel sticks under his arm. It was those they were after. About a minute later, his ship reported the attack was imminent.

Then a spring lasso snaked out from the nearby wall, jerking him off balance. Like a paper box, a section of wall folded in and revealed a narrow alley, and in it two men, one wielding the lasso and hauling Boaz inward, the other shifting from foot to foot with hands reaching out, like a wrestler looking for a hold.

For a moment Boaz could not deploy his strength. Still clutching the fuel sticks, he was dragged into the alley. Only then was he able to grab the lasso with his free hand, seizing it by the haft and pulling the man down on top of him.

For a stocky, modsuited man, his subsequent speed was a surprise to his attackers. He rolled, and was on his feet, in almost the same movement delivering a kick to the lasso man’s coccyx, snapping his spine.

The man gave a bubbling moan, face down and moving his arms like a crippled insect. He would not live long. Boaz turned to face the second robber over the semi-paralysed form of his comrade. The man had a gun. Boaz saw a snarl of fear, felt heat as the beam struck his chest.

But this sensation was measured in microseconds. Two miles away on the landing ground Boaz’s ship was responding to the events impinging on his body. Billions upon billions of digital pulses passed down the tight directional beam it maintained, and set about arranging his body’s defences. The lethal shot from the thief’s gun was diverted, dissipated in a thin blaze of light.

Taking one step forward with the fuel sticks still under his arm, Captain Boaz tore the gun from the mugger’s grasp, smashing its handle against the wall so that the charge pack broke open and tossing it aside. The thief backed away with a glance to his rear. The alley was a dead end, probably constructed specifically for the purpose of robbers.

‘We weren’t going to hurt you, shipkeeper,’ he pleaded quickly. ‘We only wanted your fuel sticks.’

‘Liar. That was a kill shot.’

‘Look what you did to my friend –’

He could not evade Boaz, who grabbed him by the front of his toga and forced him to his knees, still using only one hand. Then he took him by the throat.

Just as Boaz began to throttle him, a transformation came over the thief’s face. His terror dissolved into a dreamy leer, and he looked up at Boaz.

‘You goin’ to kill me?’ he asked breathlessly.

Boaz glanced at the still moaning form behind him. Abruptly he saw his posture in a new light, and he did not like it. He withdrew his hand. The robber sagged, looked relieved, disappointed, edgy.

No expression at all showed on Boaz’s face. He backed out of the alley, turned, and set off for the main avenue.

He came again to the ship ground. A few dozen ships dotted the flat, three-mile-square expanse. They loomed and seemed to drift on the hazy air. A few were half-heartedly streamlined for a swift getaway, but most ship designers did not consider the small saving in fuel worth the trouble and ungainly shapes abounded.

Evening was coming on. The sun was low and on the sky’s opposite horizon a few stars showed. Overhead was an unusual sight; this system was irregular in its planetary formation, and the planet was actually the binary satellite of a gas giant. It could be seen glowing palely in the effervescent sky, its rings clearly visible.

The ship ground was a raised plateau. From its vantage the landscape and the town were laid out like a map. Captain Boaz paused to look at it. Why was it, he wondered, that on nearly all man-inhabited worlds he had visited he received this same feeling of universe old and in decline? A universe experiencing a soft autumn, wearing out, losing vitality. Could the universe really be approaching its end, when it would dissolve in mind-fire? Or was it only human society that exuded such decay?

He reminded himself that the impression could not be other than subjective: it emanated from its own feelings. Such a belief had arisen before, when in fact mankind had been very young, as he knew from reading the works of philosophers and historians such as Plutarch, Lucretius and Marcus Aurelius, who had lived before there was even a machine civilization. They too had concluded, for reasons that seemed trivial now, that the world was in its dotage, and they, it was evident, had stood on some hill as Boaz did now, and saw the fey melancholy that seemed to invest everything and even to drift down from the stars.

It said something for Captain Boaz’s character that he could muse in so pensive a manner just after having killed one man, barely refraining from killing another. It was not that he was a cruel or heartless man; on the contrary his adherence to colonnade philosophy gave him a strictly ethical outlook. But, in comparison with what he had known, it simply did not seem important. They had come against him, and that was that.