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The Pillars of Eternity

And in that pain, as hellish super-fire whirled for the second time through his being, Boaz remembered. He remembered. With a depth of recall impossible to mistake he remembered this scene. He had lived it before. A thousand, a million times before. He remembered how he died, minutes from now, thrashing about the room and killing Mace in his uncontrolled spasms.

With that, he stopped screaming, though he felt system after system collapse within him as the somatic disaster deepened. He tried to speak, and words came out, the voice roaring, distorted, from a furnace of suffering.

‘The – colonnaders – are – right … The – world – repeats …’

Hand to mouth, eyes wide, she stared at him in horror.

‘But – death – is – not – an – end – to – be – sought, Mace … Go – escape – live!’

He turned from her. ‘It need not be!’

He went crashing through the flimsy wall of the fun room. He staggered into the dusty arcade. It was deserted, fading into a dusk relieved only by a white glare beyond the low buildings.

This prospect was new. Never in all the infinity of ages had his eyes, at this instant, beheld it.

The ship, even while dying, still fought to preserve him. He knew the Rectification agents would not be content with killing him. They would search the town, find and kill Mace too, unless he gave her a breathing space. He moved down the arcade. He staggered up an alley, smashed through a wall, and was on the ship ground.

His ship was a streaming tree of withering white fire. The first flash he had felt, from bottom to top, had been the thermal grenades exploding and taking hold even on metal. A knot of men, three with guns covering two others, stood nearer to him, using their arms to shield their faces from the heat.

There was still strength in him. He leaped to them. His eerie, screeching voice seemed to fall from the sky.

‘I – Joachim Boaz – have – altered – the – world … Never – again – will – you – destroy – me—’

His sense of liberty was absolute. He was transgressing physical law. He had stepped out from under Nature. Their terror did not register with him as he fell on them. Three he certainly killed, two more perhaps, but then his consciousness was cut off from the outside world. A series of images passed through his mind: Priestess, Vehicle, Justice, Strength, all the colonnader cards flashing by in sequence. Then he heard an immense trumpet blast that wiped out everything. Then nothing.

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Also by Barrington J. Bayley

Age of Adventure

Annihilation Factor

Collision with Chronos

Empire of Two Worlds

Sinners of Erspia

Star Winds

The Fall of Chronopolis

The Forest of Peldain

The Garments of Caean

The Grand Wheel

The Great Hydration

The Pillars of Eternity

The Rod of Light

The Soul of the Robot

The Star Virus

The Zen Gun

The Knights of the Limits

The Seed of Evil

Barrington J. Bayley (1937–2008)

Barrington John Bayley was born in Birmingham and began writing science fiction in his early teens. After serving in the RAF, he took up freelance writing on features, serials and picture strips, mostly in the juvenile field, before returning to straight SF. He was a regular contributor to the influential New Worlds magazine and an early voice in the New Wave movement.

A Gollancz eBook

The right of Barrington J. Bayley to be identified as the author

of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the

This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2011 by

Gollancz

The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

Orion House

5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane

London, WC2H 9EA

An Hachette UK Company

A CIP catalogue record for this book

is available from the British Library.