He shrugged. ‘Whatever.’
‘Aw, Darac, come on; argue, dammit.’
‘I don’t believe in argument,’ he said, looking out into the darkness (and saw a towering ship, a capital ship, ringed with its layers and levels of armament and armour, dark against the dusk light, but not dead).
‘You don’t?’ Erens said, genuinely surprised. ‘Shit, and I thought I was the cynical one.’
‘It’s not cynicism,’ he said flatly. ‘I just think people overvalue argument because they like to hear themselves talk.’
‘Oh well, thank you.’
‘It’s comforting, I suppose.’ He watched the stars wheel, like absurdly slow shells seen at night; rising, peaking, falling… (And reminded himself that the stars too would explode, perhaps, one day.) ‘Most people are not prepared to have their minds changed,’ he said. ‘And I think they know in their hearts that other people are just the same, and one of the reasons people become angry when they argue is that they realise just that, as they trot out their excuses.’
‘Excuses, eh? Well, if this ain’t cynicism, what is?’ Erens snorted.
‘Yes, excuses,’ he said, with what Erens thought might just have been a trace of bitterness. ‘I strongly suspect the things people believe in are usually just what they instinctively feel is right; the excuses, the justifications, the things you’re supposed to argue about, come later. They’re the least important part of the belief. That’s why you can destroy them, win an argument, prove the other person wrong, and still they believe what they did in the first place.’ He looked at Erens. ‘You’ve attacked the wrong thing.’
‘So what do you suggest one does, Professor, if one is not to indulge in this futile… arguing stuff?’
‘Agree to disagree,’ he said. ‘Or fight.’
‘Fight?’
He shrugged. ‘What else is left?’
‘Negotiate?’
‘Negotiation is a way to come to a conclusion; it’s the type of conclusion that I’m talking about.’
‘Which basically is disagree or fight?’
‘If it comes to it.’
Erens was silent for a while, drawing on the pipe until its red glow faded, then saying, ‘You have a military background, at all, yeah?’
He sat and watched the stars. Eventually he turned his head and looked at Erens. ‘I think the war gave us all a military background, don’t you?’
‘Hmm,’ Erens said. They both studied the slowly moving star-field.
Twice, in the depths of the sleeping ship, he almost killed somebody. One of those times, it was somebody else.
He stopped on the long, spiralling outer corridor, about halfway to the waist of the ship, where he felt very light on his feet, and his face was a little flushed with effects of normal blood pressure working against the reduced pull. He hadn’t intended to look at any of the stored people – the truth was, he never really thought about them in any but the most abstract way – but suddenly he wanted to see something more of a sleeper than just a little red light. He stopped at one of the coffin-drawers.
He had been shown how to work them after he’d volunteered to act as crew, and had another, rather perfunctory, run through the procedures shortly after being revived. He turned the suit lights on, flipped out the drawer’s control pad, and carefully – using one bulky, gloved finger – keyed in the code that Erens said turned off the ship’s monitoring system. A little blue light came on. The red light stayed steady; if it flashed the ship knew there was something wrong.
He unlocked the cabinet, drew the whole device sliding out.
He looked at the woman’s name, printed on a plastic strip stuck to the head-unit. No-one he knew, anyway, he thought. He opened the inner cover.
He looked in at the woman’s calm, deathly pale face. His lights reflected on the crinkled transparent plastic wrapping covering her like something you’d buy in a shop. Tubes in her nose and mouth, leading away beneath her. A small screen flashed on above her tied-up hair, on the head-unit. He looked; she seemed in good shape, for somebody so nearly completely dead. Her hands were crossed across the chest of the paper tunic she wore. He looked at her finger-nails, like Erens had said. Quite long, but he’d seen people grow them longer.
He looked at the control pad again, entered another code. Lights flashed all over the control surface; the red light did not start flashing, but almost everything else did. He opened a little red and green door set in the top of the head-unit. Out of it he took a small sphere of what looked like fine green wires, containing an ice blue cube. A compartment alongside gave access to a covered switch. He pushed the cover back, put his finger down to the switch.
He held the woman’s recorded brain patterns, backed-up onto the little blue cube. Easily crushable. His other hand, finger resting on the small switch, could turn off her life.
He wondered if he would do it, and seemed to wait for a while, as if expecting some part of his own mind to assume control from him. A couple of times it seemed to him that he felt the start of the impulse to throw the switch, and could have started to do so just an instant later, but each time suppressed the urge. He left his finger there, looked at the small cube inside its protective cage. He thought how remarkable and at the same time how oddly sad it was that all of a human mind could be contained in something so small. Then he reflected that a human brain was not so very much bigger than the little blue cube, and used resources and techniques far more ancient, and so was no less impressive (and still as sad).
He closed the woman up again in her chill sleep, and continued on his slow-motion walk to the centre of the ship.
‘I don’t know any stories.’
‘Everybody knows stories,’ Ky told him.
‘I don’t. Not proper stories.’
‘What’s a “proper” story?’ Ky sneered. They sat in the Crew Lounge, surrounded by their debris.
He shrugged. ‘An interesting one. One people want to listen to.’
‘People want to listen to different things. What one person would call a proper story might not please somebody else.’
‘Well, I can only go by what I think would be a proper story, and I don’t have any. Not stories that I want to tell, anyway.’ He grinned coldly at Ky.
‘Ah; that’s different,’ Ky nodded.
‘Indeed it is.’
‘Well, tell me what you believe in, then,’ Ky said, leaning towards him.
‘Why should I?’
‘Why shouldn’t you? Tell me because I asked.’
‘No.’
‘Don’t be so stand-offish. We’re the only three people for billions of kilometres and the ship’s a bore; who else is there to talk to?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Exactly. Nothing and nobody.’ Ky looked pleased.
‘No; I meant that’s what I believe in; nothing.’
‘At all?’
He nodded. Ky sat back, thoughtful, nodding. ‘They must have hurt you bad.’
‘Who?’
‘Whoever robbed you of whatever it was you used to believe in.’
He shook his head slowly. ‘Nobody ever robbed me of anything,’ he said. Ky was silent for a while, so he sighed and said, ‘So, Ky, what do you believe in?’
Ky looked at the blank screen that covered most of one wall of the lounge. ‘Something other than nothing.’
‘Anything with a name is other than nothing,’ he said.
‘I believe in what’s around us,’ Ky said, arms crossed, sitting back in the seat. ‘I believe in what you can see from the carousel, what we’d see if that screen was on, although what you’d see wouldn’t be the only sort of what I believe in that I believe in.’
‘In a word, Ky,’ he said.
‘Emptiness,’ Ky said with a flickering, jittery smile. ‘I believe in emptiness.’
He laughed. ‘That’s pretty close to nothing.’
‘Not really,’ Ky said.
‘Looks it to most of us.’
‘Let me tell you a sort of story.’
‘Must you?’
‘No more than you must listen.’
‘Yeah… okay, then. Anything to pass the time.’
‘The story is this. It’s a true story, by the way, not that that matters. There is a place where the existence or non-existence of souls is taken very seriously indeed. Many people, whole seminaries, colleges, universities, cities and even states devote almost all their time to the contemplation and disputation of this matter and related topics.
‘About a thousand years ago, a wise philosopher-king who was considered the wisest man in the world announced that people spent too much time discussing these things, and could, if the matter was settled, apply their energies to more practical pursuits which would benefit everybody. So he would end the argument once and for all.
‘He summoned the wisest men and women from every part of the world, and of every known persuasion, to discuss the matter.
‘It took many years to assemble every single person who wished to take part, and the resulting debates, papers, tracts, books, intrigues and even fights and murders took even longer.