The Pillars of Eternity

His delayed, wandering course – he had taken eight standard months in getting here – was not entirely due to caution. In a deeper sense, Boaz had lost his way. Now, when he should at last have been feeling some hope of success in his mission, it was as if the quest itself had deserted him, and the iron-hard certainty in his soul seemed, despite himself, to waver, and all his efforts to seem trivial and useless.

‘I think Hebron is here,’ Mace told him.

He looked at her in surprise. ‘What makes you think that?’

‘Ebarak was acting shifty the last time I saw him, and there were some official people about. I got the idea Hebron had arrived to see how the research was going. Ebarak wouldn’t tell me that, of course.’

Boaz grunted. He had already seen Ebarak himself, and the scientist had said nothing of this.

Hebron was probably disappointed in Ebarak’s results so far. Scientifically, they were exciting – but they came nowhere near satisfying the exalted ambitions of the Director and his group.

‘They’ve created a new future-myth,’ Boaz murmured. ‘The myth of an operator-controlled universe, with man as the operator.’ He shook his head. ‘Men as the new gods of a new universe. What an absurd notion. Anthropomorphism carried to the ultimate degree. It’s the best piece of squirrelling I’ve heard.’

‘Squirrelling?’

‘Sorry.’ Mace would not know the word; it was a technical term of obscure derivation. ‘Losing sane perspective. Going nuts.’ His words sounded despairing. ‘What I mean is, in my view Hebron’s crew are barely sane, and probably actually deranged. It’s a ludicrous spectacle.’

Mace began to laugh, unpleasantly, mockingly. It startled him, and he turned to her, disconcerted.

‘You’re some alec, Joachim. You see derangement clearly in their case, but you’re incapable of seeing the same thing in yourself. It’s comic!’

‘What are you saying?’

‘Well, isn’t your objective the same as theirs, basically, and just as egocentric? I agree, they are mad. But by the same token so must you be.’

‘It was never conceivable that you could understand me,’ Boaz said, averting his face again, and feeling disappointed at her lack of sympathy.

‘Why not? Because I’m uneducated? Just the same, I’m a bonewoman, remember.’ She stood up and moved in front of him, brashly confronting him. Her big breasts fell bulkily in her shift as she leaned toward him. Her face was annoyed and admonishing. ‘Why don’t you just drop it? Why don’t you stop pitying yourself? There’s still time left to live!’

‘Live? It is living that’s the trouble.’ Boaz’s voice sounded burdened. He didn’t know why he was again taking the trouble to explain himself to her. It was the first time since his childhood that anyone’s derision had affected him. ‘As you said, you have no proper education in philosophy. For that reason you don’t quite comprehend that an unbearable past is to be feared – because it is also the future.’

‘Here we go again.’ Mace waved her hand. ‘Philosophy’s all junk, do you hear me? Junk. How do you know the past repeats itself? It’s only a theory. It’s only what people think. Perhaps the world doesn’t repeat itself the way you say it does. Perhaps it just goes on and on forever, changing all the time.’

‘It’s been scientifically proved.’

To Boaz’s vast surprise Mace uttered a sound of disgust and kicked him as hard as she could in the shin. ‘If you could list everything that’s been “scientifically proved” and still turned out wrong, it would make the world’s longest book. All the scientists do is play around with ideas they get from philosophers. Some deep-thinking alec says, “the world is made of lemons and bananas”. So the scientists get busy and start calculating, until they come up with some “equation” that tells you how many lemons and how many bananas there are. Fifteen million lemons and nineteen million bananas, or something. And there’s your proof. What fools you people are.’

Boaz did not look up. One part of him dismissed what Mace was saying as shallow ignorance. But another part of him, the part that had felt shaken and uneasy over recent months, saw in it an unfamiliar viewpoint that jolted his perception of things.

How did he know? How could he be certain that cosmic recurrence was true? How could anyone?

Could a bacterium, however hard it tried, ever chart the cycles of cosmic evolution?