The Pillars of Eternity

Surveying the town below, he recalled that other occasion when he had noted how the econosphere’s fading glory seemed, in the human imagination, to invest the universe itself with an aura of nostalgia – a subjective impression that could only be delusory, given the span of cosmic life. By the same token, was not the whole scope of human thought also inapplicable to the universal immensity? Against that immensity, was not any idea, however trivial and shallow, like the seedy charm of the town below? It was a novel thought, a shocking thought, but suddenly he could not understand why it had never occurred to him that behind all the teachings of Madrigo, so steeped in ataraxy, so rational, so wise – a rock of sanity, a paragon of the intellect – there might lurk a single ineradicable fact of human knowledge: that no one knew anything.

If the colonnaders were wrong, his burden was lifted. A surge of joy jolted through him at the prospect. Free of fear! Free of return to pain! Free to live, and then to live no more!

How was it that Mace’s harsh, uneducated words could, in the space of moments, rip open his garment of decades of stubborn brooding? No, it could not be … an ignorant, suicidal girl could not know better than Madrigo …

He became aware that, unknown to himself, he had taken his colonnader cards from his pocket and was sifting them idly through his hands. He glanced down, faced with the appalling new impression that these superb, numinous symbols were after all pure invention… Then Mace snatched them from him and flung them away. He saw them go fluttering over the cyan grass of the hilltop.

Next, she swiftly unfastened her shift and let it fall from her body, revealing her nakedness. He saw from the exalted, ecstatic look in her eye that she was switching on her bone functions one by one. She leaned close to him, her hands resting on his shoulders, the aroma of her rising from her body, her plump, firm breasts, nipples erect, filling his vision.

‘Forget it all, Joachim,’ she hissed. ‘Remember you are a boneman. Come on! Switch on your bones! Feel them glowing within you!’

He sat motionless, not responding. She placed her cheek against his. ‘Philosophy isn’t real. But what bones give you, that’s real. Ever since it happened, you haven’t allowed yourself anything good, Joachim. That’s the trouble. You must learn to enjoy. That’s the only way to wipe out the past.’

Boaz, his picture of himself and the world, were all adrift. At present he had no sexual feeling. But to Mace’s cajoling he answered at last by dredging from his memory the all-but-forgotten controlling syllables.

It was like remembering flavours lost in the past. Felicity came on: for the first time in many years he knew the joy of emotion and sensation linked together, of delight at the sight of his surroundings, at sounds and smells, at the sigh of air on his skin. Adjusted rheobase came on, and everything he perceived became sharper and more vivid than an unboned man would have thought possible. Adjusted chronaxy slowed his time sense. Mace, as she edged closer to him, was performing a vast balletic dance in which every slight movement, every pore of her skin, took part.

At her urging whisper, the sex function came on.

She was helping him out of the modsuit, out of the sheathlike undergarment. ‘Higher,’ she moaned. ‘Take it all the way. You can stand it.’

Her hands ran over his ravaged skin. He obeyed her, pushing all the settings higher and higher, to maximum, until his mind dizzied with the assault of impressions and sensations, and the aid of the ship was necessary to maintain his sanity.

Oh, it was madness! It was a seething cauldron of desire, a world of endless eroticism, a delirium of delight that snatched away his identity and put in place of it – pleasure! Infinite excitement! She grappled with him until they scarcely knew which was which, and in a dazzling flashing fog of arousal he felt his ship, visible on the level ground to one side of the town, gearing itself up, getting ready to raise his phallus – which he would not have been able to do without its help, although it had never been called upon to accomplish this for him before.

A hard, bulky object filled his being, a tower of strength. Then – penetration. Now it filled her being too, dominant, lunging.

Into fire. Into a burning, seething, hopeful world.

The light gravity of Chaunce made Cere Chai Hebron feel slightly unsteady. To increase his weight marginally he wore a slimmed modsuit, scarcely more bulky than a chemise and hose, but this too lacked comfort. He liked his raiment to be loose and flowing.

But for the news of Boaz’s arrival he would have returned to Kathundra by now. ‘That is his ship, you say?’ he said. He pointed through the recessed upper-story window, over the roofs of the town to the space vessel that distinguished itself by its tall, rounded form among the more ungainly shapes of the ship ground.