The Pillars of Eternity

An initial silence followed Madrigo’s words. Then a babble of argument began. One of the econospheric ministers raised his hand, at which the noise stopped.

He conferred briefly with his two colleagues, in tones which the others could not decipher. Then he turned back to face the gathering.

‘The sense of the meeting is that a situation exists where a derangement of the structure of time could be possible,’ he said coldly, ‘and that this constitutes a threat to the econosphere. We order that the individual Joachim Boaz be found and destroyed. The colonnader’ – he cast an unfriendly glance at Madrigo – ‘is to be held until that is done, for any further assistance he can render.’

Hearing of his pending detention, Madrigo understood that its main purpose was to prevent him from getting a warning to Boaz – even though, on the face of it, memory elision would render it unnecessary. Econosphere officials had a sometimes exaggerated respect for the mental abilities of colonnaders.

He noted, as the meeting broke up, that the police chief’s eyes gleamed with the prospect of the hunt. Even though he, too, after the next few minutes, would not know why the man he hunted was a danger to society.

7

‘This is a nice one,’ said Mace.

Boaz had left his colonnader cards on the table. Mace had been sorting idly through them, and now was inspecting Major Arcanum number twenty. It was the card called Unveiling. Specifically, the veil that in the card called the Priestess had hung between the pillars Joachim and Boaz had now been drawn aside and was draped along one edge of the card. The scene it revealed was unworldly. A mythical semi-human figure, with richly pinioned wings half unfolded to extend rakishly along its back, hovered in a horizontal posture over an indistinct landscape. The ‘angel’, as the figure was called, held to its lips a long, slender trumpet that itself seemed to float endlessly over this same landscape, so elongated was it. The trumpet evidently gave voice to a powerful blast, of a force so great that the group of people who threw up their hands in its path was being dispersed.

Dissolution was the meaning of the card: it depicted, in parabolical language, the time when the universe would collapse into fire and come to an end. The pillars of existence would fall into one another, and the latent, unmanifest eons would begin.

The slight movement of the ship stopped. It had completed its short journey across the ship ground and had entered an underground parking shed. Boaz had taken this precaution to try to reduce the possibility of early discovery by the authorities.

From his armchair, he looked across the table at Mace. They had been together for nearly a year now, hiding in space or on fringe worlds to evade the police hunt which he was sure would be taking place. She had come out of time-stop when they were exactly ten light-hours from Meirjain, and she had told him, when she was able to speak, what it was like to be trapped in one moment in time: an experience which, perhaps, could only be comprehended, and that only partially, by a boneman or woman who had experienced the elongated time sense of altered chronaxy. It had clearly had an effect on her, giving her eyes a drugged, haunted look which faded only after some days.

He should have parted company with her, but he had not. He sensed that she had not yet shaken off the wish to commit suicide, and his colonnader obligations still told on him. He had embarked on a course of mental therapy, of the kind that had so deftly been practiced on him when he was a boy in Theta, and of whose methods his subsequent training had given him some knowledge.

It was odd, he admitted, that a man bent on total self-obliteration should, in passing, bother to mend the self-feeling of someone else. Mace, of course, had no idea that any form of process was being practiced on her. Colonnader techniques were not that formal. All she knew was that she had close discussions with Boaz, and that somehow her attitude toward herself gradually changed.

They had come to know one another well in the past year. Boaz, his tongue loosened perhaps by his earlier disclosure to Gare Romrey, as well as by the confidentiality of the therapist-patient relationship, had even confessed the nature of his mission to Mace.

She had listened with fascination, and none of the criticism or uncomprehending blame he could have expected from most. ‘But what does your mentor say to this?’ she asked eventually.

‘Madrigo?’ Boaz made a wry face. ‘He thinks I have fallen victim to cachexia. He does not admit the possibility of what I am trying to do.’

‘Cachexia?’

‘Mental disturbance. An ill-conditioned state of mind. When colonnaders use the term, it betokens a particularly serious kind of mental illness.’

‘Do you think you could have it?’