The Pillars of Eternity

‘No!’ Boaz shouted. He knew in his heart that it would be the end of him if he surrendered to the assault. He felt the ship rally and try again. He staggered once more, forgot where he was for an instant, and then was suddenly still.

It was over, except for a feeling of inner pressure which betokened an extra vigilance from the ship.

Apart from that, what had changed?

Romrey had changed. The prospector stood stock-still, like a statue. His eyes stared. Boaz passed a hand before them. Nothing.

He touched Romrey’s cheek. The flesh was hard and smooth, like stone.

Experimentally he nudged the rocklike body, then pushed it gently. Romrey toppled over, clanked dully to the floor of gold. Not a finger had shifted position.

Whatever had attacked Boaz, and been fought off by his ship, had attacked Romrey too. Boaz allowed his gaze to wander to three newly landed ships parked on the golden, shining landscape. The Hat Brothers stood staring at one another, or seeming to. They were utterly motionless.

He framed a question, staring at The Sedulous Seeker. ‘The same,’ his ship answered, with an alacrity that showed it had already checked the yacht on its own initiative. Briefly it brought Boaz a cameo of Obsoc and Mace sitting together, also motionless.

Boaz came to a quick decision. He would take the stiffened bodies of Romrey, Obsoc and Mace aboard his ship and take off immediately, taking his chance on getting past the econosphere cruiser. In his haste he forgot, for the moment, his advance knowledge of his future words to the yacht robot. When he remembered them it was already too late to do anything, for the chess game began again. Once more Boaz was a manipulated piece. Once more he went through a dizzying sequence of impressions, too fast for him to be able to take in, in which colours, images and sounds flashed past.

But in what sense was he now being moved? He sensed that it was not just in time – perhaps not in time at all. After scant seconds all went black. He seemed to be hurtling down a dark tunnel. Then he was still, but in darkness, into which a yellow glow spread slowly.

The darkness fled, revealing that he stood in a dome-shaped chamber. Around him stood five or six of the ibis-headed creatures he had seen in the time-gem. They regarded him calmly, with beady eyes, their beaklike faces gleaming. They were, on average, a little shorter than a man, and their thin, smoothly muscled, olive-colored bodies appeared youthful, like the bodies of young girls – for, he noticed, they all lacked anything resembling male sex organs. The silver circlets around their waists, which comprised their only adornment, seemed, now that Boaz saw them more closely, to be in ceaseless motion, as if made of flowing quicksilver.

Despite the ordeal he had just been through, he did not feel particularly afraid of them. It was, however, a habituated response. He had encountered intelligent aliens several times before, and had come to learn that in general they were apt to offer him less threat than were strangers of his own species.

He did, on the other hand, feel awe. These were the beings who could manipulate time, to whom time was no more than an additional spatial dimension. They were, in other words, four-dimensional beings.

In comparison with ordinary creatures like Boaz, who crawled like worms from one moment to the next, that made them like gods. Were they, in fact, gods? And was not the ibis head, he recalled with an inward shudder, a symbol of the ancient god Thoth, said to have shown and explained the colonnader card pack to mankind long ago, before the technical age?

Once Boaz had asked Madrigo if there were gods. Madrigo had answered: ‘There may be; it has not been settled. But if there are then they are transient and limited beings, as we are. More intelligent, more potent, with a consciousness whose relation to matter is perhaps somewhat different from ours, but that is all. One should not,’ he had added, ‘be afraid of any entity.’

‘They will not be immortal?’ Boaz had asked.

‘All beings are immortal,’ Madrigo had reminded him. ‘But like us, the gods must live and die.’

The creature facing Boaz made a cryptic gesture, touching a finger to its flattened forehead. With the same flowing motion it turned, with an open hand indicating the curved wall behind it. Then the entire group turned, and filed out of the chamber to Boaz’s left.

Boaz could not see the door they exited by. But in front of him, where there had been only blank wall a moment before, there was now an arched opening. A purple cloth screened the opening, waving slightly as if in a breeze. He stepped forward, touched the cloth – which wasn’t there. There was just the feeling of something silky, like warm oil, touching his skin, and his hand went right through.