“It’s a nice ethical problem,” I mused after the Bagpipes had left.
“I can see a number of them,” snapped Rebona tartly. “Which particular one are you talking about?”
“My personal one. If I return the crystals I’ll be left with an empty ship, no prospects, just enough emergency money to fuel up one more time and get off-planet, and absolutely nowhere to go.”
“If you don’t give them up the Bagpipes will chase you down and take them. What’s the ethical problem?”
“Now we know what my crystals can be used for. It’s obvious that I am sitting on Xavier Xerxes’s fortune.”
“So?”
“The Bagpipes need these nullspace creatures alive for their ships to work. But we don’t. Tall And Thin’s modifications to the Venture will let me see the currents in nullspace. It might take ten or twenty years and a few hundred million credits, but one way or another we’ll figure out how to tie pieces of these crystals into our VR/navigation nets. The crystals’ value is almost unimaginable. Every ship in HOS will need a chunk of the stuff. I can think of five corporations that would pay me millions in cash for what’s in my cargo hold.”
“OK, I can see how that would upset the Bagpipes, but why do you think it’s an ethical dilemma?”
“Because as soon as the crystal’s value is discovered they’ll all be mined out and chopped up into little instrument panel-sized pieces. It will be like gold fever was centuries ago. In a generation or two humans will destroy the crystals and the Bagpipes’ civilization with them.”
“Then don’t let anyone know about them.”
“If I can’t earn enough money in the very near future to keep up the payments on this ship, my artificial pancreas will shut down and I won’t be alive to worry about anything. Being an ethicist doesn’t mean I have to commit suicide.”
“Can’t you sell this one load but make sure that everyone knows that the crystals are part of a living creature? The New Sonorans aren’t ethical morons. In fact, they’re actually very dedicated environmentalists. They’d make the crystals a protected life form.”
I heaved a deep sigh. “That’s where the ethical nicety arises. In order to prove what we’re saying, we’d have to show how the crystals can be used for nullspace navigation. Then, instead of just Xerxes and a few hundred thousand New Sonorans, we’d have 20 trillion other people all over Human Occupied Space trying to dig up Carson’s crystals and install them in their ships. It would make things infinitely worse. It would certainly lead to war between humans and Bagpipes.”
“War?” Rebona looked horrified. “You can’t mean that!”
“I’m still a facilitator. Whether I’m licensed or not I can’t escape seeing the consequences of a course of action. Everything I’ve ever learned tells me that war would be inevitable. If human use of the crystals became sufficiently widespread, it would not only doom the crystal creatures, it would eventually relegate the Bagpipes to a single planet. They’re not stupid. Long before they let it come to that, they’d go to war to stop us.”
“Isn’t this the sort of problem facilitators are trained to solve? Can’t you figure out a solution?”
“If there’s a way out of this, I don’t know what it is.”
“What do you mean, if?”
“I mean that one of the first things a facilitator learns is that not all problems have a solution acceptable to all parties. It’s entirely possible that this is one of them.”
“I see.” Rebona considered me for a long moment, then turned towards the hatch. “You’ll probably get more accomplished without me around—I’ll leave you to your facilitator-type thoughts.” With what might have been a wistful glance over her shoulder, she made her way out of the ship.
The first of my facilitator-type thoughts was no more profound than: So now what?
No matter how I looked at it, Xavier Xerxes was obviously the key to the puzzle. One more attempt to reason with him could hardly make things worse.
Or so I thought.
An hour after Rebona left, the aircar the Venture ordered for me—through the local net settled next to the main ramp—and I climbed aboard. It was mid-afternoon when I reached the entrance to Xerxes’s mine in the Hormagaunt Hills. His battered blue aircar had been joined on the rocky soil by an even more decrepit flyer that might once have been red. I strode through the adit to the shambles of the miner’s living quarters. They were lighted but empty.
Sighing, I moved deeper into the labyrinth of dimly lighted tunnels that Xerxes had gouged out of the mountain. As I neared the rock face where his excavations had exposed the crystal lattice, I heard whoops and yells of drunken excitement. Had Xerxes brought in a gaggle of party girls, along with a basket or two of cactus petals, and gotten himself thoroughly bent?
Rounding the final bend, I saw a bright actinic light flickering against the wall in front of me. I turned the corner to the hemispherical chamber and was treated to a macabre display. The darkness was almost total, illuminated only by a single glow wand lying on the floor. It was enough, however, to reveal Xerxes and another man capering in front of the fifteen-foot-high wall of exposed crystal.
Xerxes’s companion, well over six feet tall, with a beefy flushed face, an orange ruff of bristly hair, and the bloated body of a weightlifter gone to seed, was laughing maniacally as he twirled an eighty-pound beam welder around his head like a toy. Xavier Xerxes, giggling like a wirehead, was staggering back and forth as he tried ineffectually to wrest the welder from the other’s grasp.
“My turn, MacKay,” Xerxes whined, making yet another grab for the welder, “my turn!”
“Not yet!” MacKay howled gleefully. “Once more! I get to do it once more!” He lurched to his left, raised the welder, and pointed it at the center of the crystal face. I managed to shut my eyes an instant before he loosed a ten-foot beam of high-voltage electrons at the wall.
Built to draw huge currents from planetary mains, beam welders excite electrons to an extremely high voltage, then force them through a series of tightly focused magnetic fields to project a beam no more than three inches in diameter as much as fifteen feet from its muzzle.
When MacKay bombarded the crystal wall with high-voltage electrons the current had to find its way to ground. In doing so, it excited various portions of the lattice depending upon the electrical properties of the crystalline structure. MacKay was giving the crystal the equivalent of electric shock therapy.
Why he was doing it became immediately apparent. The moment the beam impacted the lattice, my mind was overwhelmed with fantastic images, colors, tastes, smells, and every other conceivable kind of perceptual sensation. It was as if someone had short-circuited every sensory nerve in my body, had fed me the electronic equivalent of a high-voltage psychotropic drug. These two lunatics were obviously enraptured by the experience, but even in the grip of sensory overload I knew that what they found so pleasurable was, in fact, the screams of terror and pain emanating from the crystal entity.
“Stop that!” I somehow managed to shout. “You’re killing it!”
Stumbling forward, I attempted to wrestle the beam welder from MacKay’s meaty grasp but I might as well have been trying to pull a musket from the hands of a bronze statue. At least now, though, the welder was shut off. As my mind gradually cleared, I continued to grapple ineffectually with Xerxes’s enormous friend until he tired of the unequal contest and ponderously removed one massive hand from the welder.