‘The philosopher-king took himself off to the mountains to spend these years alone, emptying his mind of everything so that he would be able, he hoped, to come back once the process of argument was ended and pronounce the final decision.
‘After many years they sent for the king, and when he felt ready he listened to everyone who thought they had something to say on the existence of souls. When they had all said their piece, the king went away to think.
‘After a year, the king announced he had come to his decision. He said that the answer was not quite so simple as everybody had thought, and he would publish a book, in several volumes, to explain the answer. The king set up two publishing houses, and each published a great and mighty volume. One repeated the sentences, “Souls do exist. Souls do not exist,” time after time, part after part, page after page, section after section, chapter after chapter, book after book. The other repeated the words, “Souls do not exist. Souls do exist,” in the same fashion. In the language of the kingdom, I might add, each sentence had the same number of words, even the same number of letters. These were the only words to be found beyond the title page in all the thousands of pages in each volume. The king had made sure that the books began and finished printing at the same time, and were published at the same time, and that exactly the same number were published. Neither of the publishing houses had any perceivable superiority or seniority over the other.
‘People searched the volumes for clues; they looked for a single repetition, buried deep in the volumes, where a sentence or even a letter had been missed out or altered, but they found none. They turned to the king himself, but he had taken a vow of silence, and bound up his writing hand. He would still nod or shake his head in reply to questions concerning the governing of his kingdom, but on the subject of the two volumes, and the existence or otherwise of souls, the king would give no sign.
‘Furious disputes arose, many books were written; new cults began. Then a half-year after the two volumes had been published, two more appeared, and this time the house that had published the volume beginning, “Souls do not exist,” published the volume which began, “Souls do exist.” The other publisher followed suit, so that theirs now began, “Souls do not exist.” This became the pattern.
‘The king lived to be very old, and saw several dozen volumes published. When he was on his death bed, the court philosopher placed copies of the book on either side of him, hoping the king’s head would fall to one side or the other at the moment of death, so indicating by the first sentence of the appropriate volume which conclusion he had really come to… but he died with his head straight on the pillow and with his eyes, under the eyelids, looking straight ahead.
‘That was a thousand years ago,’ Ky said. ‘The books are published still; they have become an entire industry, an entire philosophy, a source of un-ending argument and -‘
‘Is there an ending to this story?’ he asked, holding up one hand.
‘No,’ Ky smiled smugly. ‘There is not. But that is just the point.’
He shook his head, got up and left the Crew Lounge.
‘But just because something does not have an ending,’ Ky shouted, ‘doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a…’
The man closed the elevator door, outside in the corridor; Ky rocked forward in the seat and watched the lift-level indicator ascend to the middle of the ship. ‘… conclusion,’ Ky said, quietly.
He’d been revived nearly half a year when he almost killed himself.
He was in the elevator car, watching a torch he had left in the centre of the car as it slowly spun. He had left the torch switched on, and put out all the other lights. He watched the tiny spot of light move slowly around the circular wall of the car, slow as any clock hand.
He remembered the search lights of the Staberinde, and wondered how far they were away from it now. So far that even the sun itself must be weaker than a searchlight seen from space.
He did not know why that made him think of just taking off the helmet, but found himself starting to do it, nevertheless.
He stopped. It was quite a complicated procedure to open the suit while in vacuum. He knew each of the steps, but it would take some time. He looked at the white spot of light which the torch was shining on the wall of the lift, not far from his head. The white spot was gradually coming closer as the torch spun. He would start to ready the suit to take the helmet off; if the torch beam hit his eye – no, his face, any part of his head – before that, then he would stop, and go back as though nothing had happened. Otherwise, if the spot of light did not strike his face in time, he would take the helmet off and die.
He allowed himself the luxury of letting the memories wash over him, while his hands slowly began the sequence that would end, unless interrupted, with the helmet being blasted off his shoulders by the air pressure.
Staberinde, the great metal ship stuck in stone (and a stone ship, a building stuck in water), and the two sisters. Darckense; Livueta (and of course he’d realised at the time that he was taking their names, or something like their names, in making the one he masqueraded under now). And Zakalwe, and Elethiomel. Elethiomel the terrible, Elethiomel the Chairmaker…
The suit beeped at him, trying to warn him he was doing something very dangerous. The spot of light was a few centimetres from his head.
Zakalwe; he tried to ask himself what the name meant to him. What did it mean to anybody? Ask them all back home; what does this name mean to you? War, perhaps, in the immediate aftermath; a great family, if your memory was long enough; a kind of tragedy. If you knew the story.
He saw the chair again. Small and white. He closed his eyes, tasting bitterness in this throat.
He opened his eyes. Three final clips to go, then one quick twist… he looked at the spot of light. It was invisible, so close to the helmet, so close to his head. The torch in the centre of the elevator car was facing almost straight at him, its lens bright. He undid one of the three final helmet clips. There was a tiny hiss, barely noticeable.
Dead, he thought, seeing the girl’s pale face. He undid another clip. The hiss grew no louder.
There was a sense of brightness at the side of the helmet, where the light would be shining.
Metal ship, stone ship, and the unconventional chair. He felt tears come to his eyes, and one hand – the one not undoing the third helmet clip – went to his chest, where, under the many synthetic layers of the suit, beneath the fabric of the under-suit, there was a small puckered mark on the skin just over his heart; a scar that was two decades old, or seven decades old, depending how you measured time.
The torch swung, and just as the final clip came undone, and the spot of light started to leave the inside edge of the suit, to shine on his face, the torch flickered and went out.
He stared. It was almost totally dark. There was the hint of light from outside the car; the faintest of red glows, produced by all the near-dead people and the quietly watching equipment.
Out. The torch had gone out; charge exhausted or just a fault, it didn’t matter. It had gone out. It hadn’t shone on his face. The suit beeped again, plaintive above the quiet hiss of escaping air.
He looked down, at the hand that lay over his chest.
He looked back up at where the torch must be, unseen in the centre of the car in the centre of the ship, in the middle of its journey.
How do I die now? he thought.
He did go back to his chill sleep, after a year. Erens and Ky, their sexual predilections forever estranging them despite the fact they seemed like a well-matched couple otherwise, were still arguing when he left.
He ended up in another lo-tech war, learning to fly (because he knew now that aircraft would always win against a battleship), and flying the frosty vortices of air above the vast white islands that were the colliding tabular icebergs.
* * *
Thirteen
Where they lay, the discarded robes looked like the just-shed skin of some exotic reptile. He had been going to wear those, but then changed his mind. He would wear the clothes he had come here in.