“Thanks,” she said. She glanced around; seeing the room was empty, she gave him a peck on the cheek. “You’re a good man, Squadron Leader.”
She hurried out. Pirius stared after her, bemused.
Pirius Red decided to hotfoot it to the refectory while he had a chance, but Nilis waylaid him.
Even here on 492, while the squadron got itself together, Nilis was continuing his multifaceted studies of Chandra’s mysteries, but he was still encountering baffling obstructions. “It’s immensely frustrating,” he would say. “After all, the clock is counting down for me too. At this rate we will have destroyed Chandra before we know what it is!”
To Pirius’s relief, though, he didn’t want to talk about the black hole today.
“I watched the transcript of your meeting,” the Commissary said. “Abbreviated, of course.”
Pirius frowned. “Do you think I’m wrong to allow the Ghost to lead us?”
“I don’t know if you’re right or wrong — and nor do you, until you try it. But it’s certainly a good idea.” Nilis smiled. “You’ve come a long way since Pluto, Pirius. I’m proud of you. You are becoming able to rise above your first reactions, your conditioning. I think it’s called maturity.”
Well, perhaps. Pirius had thought this over before the meeting, knowing he had to float the possibility. He told himself he had no qualms about using the Ghost: whatever it took to get the job done. Pluto was far away, weeks ago. But even so, it had been odd seeing Burden and Hope trailing a Silver Ghost as it headed out of the room; Blue’s face, a cold mirror of his own, had been like his own conscience. Had he really matured since Pluto? Or was he compromised by contacts with earthworms, as Blue kept telling him?
Nilis said, “If I may, I’ll ride along with you tomorrow, on this remarkable flight. As a Virtual passenger, I mean,” he added hastily.
“Why? Because it’s historic?” Pirius, overstressed, overworked, felt irritated. “To be frank, Commissary, I don’t think many of us are thinking about history right now.”
Nilis winked. “Ah, but history never stops thinking about you, pilot.”
For some reason that chilled Pirius. “We might not end up with any crew capable of flying anyhow,” he said bleakly. “We lost another one today.”
“Tili Three? I know. But you did the right thing, Pirius. You showed compassion.” Nilis smiled, his face crumpling slightly. “I’m no military man, but I believe this is called leadership. I have the feeling that if you keep this up, you’re going to become the kind of stubborn, loyal, dependable, inspirational fool who soldiers have always followed, to glory or their deaths.”
Hotly embarrassed, Pirius looked away. “I wouldn’t know, sir.”
“Of course not, of course not.” Nilis stared at Pirius with his big, moist eyes, and his expressive face was creased with concern. “And how are you in yourself?”
“I’m fine,” Pirius snapped. He gazed back defiantly for a moment, but when Nilis waited for more, he weakened. “I’m doing my best,” he said. “It’s just there is so much to do.”
Nilis laid his warm, heavy hand on Pirius’s shoulder. “Listen to me. You’re doing all that could be asked of you. If you manage to get your hastily assembled crews of veterans and misfits through such a challenging training program, and all in a few weeks — that in itself will be a massive achievement, regardless of how the mission turns out.” Nilis straightened up. “Remember this, though: you are your own most important resource. Make time for yourself. Lean on Pila more. Make sure you rest properly, eat, all the rest of it. Don’t neglect the biology. I’m relieved you decided to fly yourself tomorrow. Remember, I pushed for you to be squadron leader in the first place because you’re the best pilot I’ve ever encountered. So keep up your own training. And another thing…”
Pirius, his stomach rumbling, resumed his walk to the refectory. Nilis trailed him, advising, hectoring, arguing, his eyes bright and earnest.
So the next day Pirius Red found himself free of his desk, at the controls of a greenship, and “flying down the tunnel,” as the crews were starting to call it. Ahead of him was the oscillating, turbulent, eye-watering disc of a grav shield, and around him were walls of distorted spacetime.
The little constellation of greenship lights was steady. The flight, under Burden’s command — Pirius had been careful to relegate himself to a mere pilot’s role — was going well.
Right at its heart was the shield-master ship, piloted by Jees. The best pilot in the squadron, in this most difficult of environments, was once again flying steady and true. Pirius had assigned Torec to serve as Jees’s navigator today — but in her engineer’s pod was the massive form of the Silver Ghost, working the grav shield generators.
Unconventional it was, but it seemed to be working. Even Pirius’s own flight had been smooth, though he had deliberately taken on board two comparative rookies for his own navigator and engineer. Up to now, the flight couldn’t have conformed more to plan if this had been a sim, even though no flight that was a surf along the stitched-up interface between one universe and another, with a Silver Ghost as guest engineer, was ever going to be routine.
As the record time of two hours flying behind a shield approached, Pirius felt some of the tension seep out of his body.
Nilis, a Virtual uncomfortably lodged in the cockpit with Pirius, was, after the first hour or so, relaxed enough to dip into the comm loops between the ships. He was particularly intrigued by the conversation between This Burden Must Pass, the notorious Friend of Wigner, and the Silver Ghost in the lead ship. Burden was taking the chance of talking to the Ghost away from its Guardians.
“And so you believe,” came the Ghost’s simulated voice, “that this universe is essentially transient — all you sense, all you achieve, even your experiences of your inner self will pass away.”
“Not transient, exactly,” Burden called back. “Just one of an uncountably infinite number of possibilities which will, cumulatively, be resolved at timelike infinity, after the manner of a collapse of quantum functions.”
“But in that case, what basis for morality can there be?”
“There is a moral basis for every decision,” said Burden. “To show loyalty to one’s fellows — to put oneself in harm’s way for the sake of one’s species. And while this is only one out of a myriad timelines, we believe that the, umm, the goodness in each timeline will sum at the decision point at timelike infinity to gather into Optimality…”
“Fascinating,” Nilis said to Pirius. The Commissary whispered, as if he might be overheard. “They are fencing, in a way. Each knows far more about the other’s beliefs than either is prepared to reveal. Fencing, and yet looking for common ground.”
Pirius Red was light on moral philosophy. “That stuff about putting one’s self in the way of harm for others — that sounded like Doctrine to me.”
“So it is,” Nilis said. “Much of the Friends’ ’philosophy’ is actually recycled Druzism — as you’d expect, given the environment it sprang from. Hama Druz seems to have believed that self-interest is the primary driver of any unthinking human action. He said that soldiers are therefore the only moral citizens of any society because only they have demonstrated their selfless morality by putting themselves in harm’s way.” He sniffed. “Of course Druz ignored the plentiful evidence of kinship bonds among the animals and insects — an ant isn’t driven by simple selfishness — and he certainly ignored Coalescences, human hive societies, which were plentiful even in his day. Druz was a good sloganeer, and he obviously was a key figure in human history. But he really wasn’t a very sophisticated thinker — I’ve always found his arguments terribly one-dimensional — haven’t you?”