The Pillars of Eternity

‘Ah, hello, Joachim. Sorry I wasn’t on hand to greet you. I was just reading up on some material here. The memory gets a bit rusty, you know.’ Ebarak was one of many scientists who did not trust adplants too far, believing them to make the intellect lazy. He did not have a single memory adplant and only a standard type of adplanted calculator. The book he was reading on the screen, Boaz saw, was one on the econosphere’s index of prohibited texts: Whitlaw’s Cases of Relativistic Event Reversal. It dealt with the way in which time order could seemingly be reversed in small, insignificant ways as a result of the relativity laws.

The scientist killed the screen as he stood up. His mouth firmed. ‘Have you got them with you?’

‘I have.’ Boaz took a pouch from a pocket of his modsuit. He handed it to Ebarak, who loosened the cord at the neck and poured out a number of gems onto the palm of his hand.

‘They look so ordinary, don’t they?’ he murmured.

Laying the pouch on his desk, he picked up a gem between thumb and finger and brought it close to his eye, peering intently. After a moment in which he rolled the gem to tilt facet after facet, Ebarak saw a tiny scene. He saw himself, in his laboratory, fitting something gem-sized into an instrument with a long, shiny barrel.

He smiled. He was, he realized, looking a few minutes into his own future.

It was not the first time he had seen such gems. Briefly he had begun to investigate two specimens brought back from the first landings on Meirjain, before the Scientific Ministry for which he then worked had closed down all such work in panic and impounded the jewels. He believed they had been destroyed.

‘Thank you,’ he said with feeling. ‘Thank you.’

‘When shall I see you again?’

‘Call me in a few days. Better leave now. I want to get down to work.’

‘Yes, of course.’ Shyly, hesitantly, Boaz turned to go. He would have liked to stay, to watch or assist his co-conspirator, but he knew that Ebarak did not want him there, and besides, the longer he stayed the more he increased the danger to the scientist.

He dialled the same travel agency he had come by and emerged, only slightly unsteady, back onto the walkway. For some time he drifted with the throng as before. Then he entered an eating house, sat and watched the passersby through the transparent frontage. As he knew from his previous visit, when he had sought and eventually made the acquaintance of Aban Ebarak, Kathundra was a place of affected mannerisms. People who met on the street greeted one another with exaggerated gestures and flourishes. Which, he supposed, made the offhanded casualness of Ebarak a distinctive mark of individuality.

After a while he returned to his ship. Mace was not there. He sat in his armchair, relaxed, and fell into a semi-doze. Without any prompting on his part, the ship began to send out its spy-beams, bringing him the habitual montage of scenes from the surrounding city.

He paid them only a fraction of his attention; he was like a man who kept the video switched on all the time. He showed a little more interest when the beam brought him a picture of Mace. It was hardly a coincidence, especially in a city of such size. Boaz had realized that the ship showed him Mace much more often than chance would account for. It was, he reasoned, obeying his subconscious wish to keep watch over her.

Usually he did not linger over her escapades, but this time some unformed impulse made him hold the image steady. Mace was in a private room with two others, a man and a woman. The woman was voluptuous like Mace, with heavy breasts and hips: the nymphgirl fashion was long out of date here on Kathundra. All three were naked, except that the man and woman wore gas masks. And they were spraying some kind of pearly mist over Mace from nozzles they held in their hands. The mist billowed over her skin and seemed to be absorbed by it. It drifted in her mouth and nostrils. As all this happened, her face took on a look of extraordinary, ever-increasing ecstasy.

Boaz knew that the mist was a sex-enhancing drug. He knew, too, from the look on Mace’s face, that she had switched on several of her bone functions.

The man and woman put aside the nozzles, ripped off their gas masks, and fell together on Mace. In moments all three were squirming and rocking together. Boaz, seeing the incredible intensity of the pleasure Mace was experiencing, was struck by a totally new thought which brought him instantly to wakefulness.

Could there be, to the horrendous negative experience that had ruined his life, a positive one of equal intensity? Was it possible to know pleasure, or happiness, in the same degree in which he had known pain and misery?

Could that be his salvation? Could there be a cancelling of effects?