Barrington Bayley - The Pillars of Eternity

‘But I have experienced it!’

‘Have you? Think. All I did was move your consciousness along your time-line. I can take you into your past, and a little way – only a little way – into your future. In the same way we can refract light through time, by means of the time-gems. Yes, the past and the future can be known. But as for altering anything – no. Does this sound like a paradox? It isn’t really. I shall explain. As you have guessed, we are four-dimensional beings. But only in a sense. We have learned to do what I did for you – to move back and forth over our time-lines, though only to a limited degree into the future. No time transfer was involved in bringing you into this dwelling, incidentally. We merely put you through a displacement vortex, which is our normal way of travelling about the planet.

‘You might think that the foreknowledge this gives us, by governing our actions, enables us to control and alter future time – but no. Everything that happens in my future is already a result of this foreknowledge. It cannot be changed. Our time-travelling ability is, itself, part of the predestined cosmic pattern.’

Boaz stared at the ibis-headed man, a familiar burdensome feeling coming over him. ‘What is the good of such a faculty?’ he asked.

‘It adds an extra dimension to life, as you can appreciate. To return to the past is more efficient than memory, which is apt to be unreliable. Experience of the future is also more useful than mere prediction.’

‘You have some machinery for accomplishing this mental projection through time?’

‘It is a mental discipline. There is no machinery for it.’

‘Would you teach it to me?’

‘You could never learn it. Your brain is too different.’

The right adplants, or else the right silicon bones, might rectify that, Boaz thought. But if what he had just been told was true, there would probably be little point in it. The time-gems in his pocket still seemed to offer him most hope. Whatever the ibis-headed man said, they were proof that there was a physical means of manipulating time.

‘Then I thank you for your information. I would like to leave now.’

‘No, you cannot leave yet, Joachim Boaz. I have something more to tell you.’

The ibis-headed man shifted slightly. His head turned, as if to glance at something on the wall, and for a moment Boaz saw the strange face in profile, looking exactly like the Egyptian bird in the colonnader card.

‘Let me tell you what brought you here, what brought all the others here who landed in the last few hours. You see, I am very old. My species conquered the aging process long ago. My body will die only when accidental and unrepairable damage on the cellular level reaches a lethal accumulation – which will happen eventually, of course. Now, beings that live a long time are liable to develop special hobbies, so as to while away the period of their existence. My hobby is alien psychology. As our steerable planet wanders through the galaxy I made it my business to study the mental features of the various species we come across from time to time. This, let me add, is my own hobby. My friends and colleagues, some of whom you have just met, follow other interests…

‘But to come back to the point, Joachim Boaz. We have been in this star cluster for a while now, long enough for me to notice that your species possesses a certain psychological peculiarity. This quirk could be summed up as obsessiveness . Never have I met a race with such a capacity for letting the mind become possessed with a desire or idea. It intrigues me considerably.

‘So I decided to collect a few suitable specimens for study. Ordinary specimens were no good, I wanted those in whom this obsessive quirk is developed to a high degree. So I set up a fly trap . You know what a fly trap is? On your worlds you have troublesome insects, so you set a trap for them with something sweet and sticky. The sweetness attracts them, and the stickiness stops them from getting away. The flies cannot resist the sweetness, so they are bound to get caught. Do you see how I caught you all, little fly? You are all obsessed in one way or another – with greed, with desire for possession, with other, more interesting needs…. and Meirjain the Wanderer became the irresistible lure for you all! The ploy might be a convenient way of ridding your society of its undesirable elements – criminality, you see, is unusual among intelligent species. My own motive is not altruistic, however. I now have an adequate number of suitable specimens for future study.’

‘Then those people – are still alive?’

‘Alive and fully conscious. But conscious in an unaccustomed way. What else do you do with flies? You swat them. That is what I have done with the people who came here seeking their own ends. I stopped their consciousness at one moment of time. They live timelessly now, experiencing only that one moment, thinking their last thought, feeling their last feeling, seeing whatever happened in that instant. This mode of consciousness will be most strange for one of your kind. For me, of course, it is only a matter of convenience, a means of storage.’

‘Why are their bodies so stiff?’

‘Their bodies persist, even though consciousness is locked in the past. They are rigid because the electrical forces between molecules have been rendered incapable of change.’

‘But it didn’t work with me, did it?’

‘No. Your ship saved you. It is a remarkable phenomenon. And you yourself are by far the most interesting of the specimens, Joachim Boaz. That is why I have brought you here. The others all have minds that, when we come down to it, are petty in their concerns. But you! You have set yourself to change time itself, to negate the whole universe if need be. Could any obsession be so grandiose? You have set yourself to fight Hercules, to pull the legs from under Atlas, to wrestle with Mother Kali, to joust with Jesus, to battle with Ialdabaoth….’

Though he vaguely recognized the other names, only Atlas and Hercules were familiar to Boaz. They were ancient, cruder versions of the colonnader image of strength, or nature. ‘And you, I suppose, will tell me it is impossible,’ he said in a surly tone.

‘Could it be possible? After all, a bacterium can slay a man. But to do that it must multiply itself indefinitely, and there is only one Joachim Boaz. Besides, a bacterium and a man are of almost the same size, when compared with the ratio between you and nature. And there is something else you must understand, Joachim Boaz. Even those gods I mentioned are powerless to change anything. They are powerless because they do not exist. All that exists is natural force, and in the last resort, the unconditioned consciousness that comes into its own between successive world manifestations. But even this super-personal consciousness can neither change anything nor even decide to change anything. It is only the real world made latent, and the real world is changeless. So you see, in your madness you are striving for the absolutely impossible.

‘And yet I tell you, Joachim Boaz, that there is a way you can do it.’

The narrow curved beak, so nearly motionless while they had been talking, dipped as if in thought. Boaz found that he could not speak, so great was the tension within him, and after a while the ibis-headed man continued: ‘Let me paint you a picture. You are walking down a street in one of your towns. The street forks both left and right. Both routes bring you to the ship ground where your ship is parked. Both routes take about the same time. Always at this moment, throughout all eternity, you have taken the left turn. Can you now take the right turn instead ?’

‘It is all that is needed,’ Boaz admitted. ‘I know this.’