II

"Are you going to feed me by hand--or unlock my wrists while I eat?"

Jason asked. Mikah stood over him with the tray, undecided. Jason gave

a light verbal prod, very gently, because whatever else he was, Mikah

was not stupid. "I would prefer you to feed me of course, you'd make

an excellent body servant."

"You are capable of eating by yourself," Mikah responded instantly,

sliding the tray into the slots of Jason's chair. "But you will have

to do it with only one hand. If you were freed you would only cause

trouble." He touched the control on the back of the chair and the

right wrist lock snapped open. Jason stretched his cramped fingers and

picked up the fork.

While he ate Jason's eyes were busy. Not obviously, since a gambler's

attention is never obvious, but many things can be seen if you keep

your eyes open and your attention apparently elsewhere. A sudden

glimpse of someone's cards, the slight change of expression that

reveals a player's strength. Item by item his seemingly random gaze

touched the items in the cabin: control console, screens, computer,

chart screen, jump control chart case, bookshelf. Everything was

observed, remembered and considered. Some combination of them would

fit into the plan.

So far all he had was the beginning and the end of an idea. Beginning:

He was a prisoner in this ship, on his way back to Cassylia. End: He

was not going to remain a prisoner--nor return to Cassylia. Now all

that was missing was the vital middle. It looked impossible at the

moment, but Jason never considered that it couldn't be done. He

operated on the principle that you made your own luck. You kept your

eyes open as things evolved and at the right moment you acted. If you

acted fast enough, that was good luck. If you worried over the

possibilities until the moment had passed, that was bad luck.

He pushed the empty plate away and stirred sugar into his cup. Mikah

had eaten sparingly and was now starting on his second cup of tea. His

eyes were fixed, unfocused in thought as he drank. He started slightly

when Jason called to him.

"Since you don't stock cigarettes on this ship--how about letting me

smoke my own? You'll have to dig them out for me since I can't reach

the pocket while I'm chained to this chair."

"I cannot help you," Mikah said, unmoving. "Tobacco is an irritant, a

drug and a carcinogen. If I gave you a cigarette, I would be giving

you cancer."

"Don't be a hypocrite!" Jason snapped, inwardly pleased at the

rewarding flush in the other's neck. "They've taken the

cancer-producing agents out of tobacco for centuries now. And even if

they hadn't--how does that affect this situation. You're taking me to

Cassylia to certain death. So why should you concern yourself with the

state of my lungs in the future?"

"I hadn't considered it that way. It is just that there are certain

rules of life...."

"Are there?" Jason broke in, keeping the initiative and the advantage.

"Not as many as you like to think. And you people who are always

dreaming up the rules never carry your thinking far enough. You are

against drugs. Which drugs? What about the tannic acid in that tea

you're drinking? Or the caffeine in it? It's loaded with caffeine--a

drug that is both a strong stimulant and a diuretic. That's why you

won't find tea in spacesuit canteens. That's a case of a drug

forbidden for a good reason. Can you justify your cigarette ban the

same way?"

Mikah started to talk, then thought for a moment. "Perhaps you are

right. I'm tired, and it is not important." He warily took the

cigarette case from Jason's pocket and dropped it onto the tray. Jason

didn't attempt to interfere. Mikah poured himself a third cup of tea

with a slightly apologetic air.

"You must excuse me, Jason, for attempting to make you conform to my

own standards. When you are in pursuit of the big Truths, you

sometimes let the little Truths slip. I'm not intolerant, but I do

tend to expect everyone else to live up to certain criteria I have set

for myself. Humility is something we should never forget and I thank

you for reminding me of it. The search for Truth is hard."

"There is no Truth," Jason told him, the anger and insult gone now

from his voice since he wanted to keep his captor involved in the

conversation. Involved enough to forget about the free wrist for a

while. He raised the cup to his lips and let the tea touch his lips

without drinking any. The half-full cup supplied an unconsidered

reason for his free hand.

"No Truth?" Mikah weighed the thought. "You can't possibly mean that.

The galaxy is filled with Truth, it's the touchstone of Life itself.

It's the thing that separates Mankind from the animals."

"There is no Truth, no Life, no Mankind. At least not the way you

spell them--with capital letters. They don't exist."

Mikah's taut skin contracted into a furrow of concentration. "You'll

have to explain yourself," he said. "You're not being clear."

"I'm afraid it's you who aren't being clear. You're making a reality

where none exists. Truth--with a small _T_ is a description, a

relationship. A way to describe a statement. A semantic tool. But

capital _T_ Truth is an imaginary word, a noise with no meaning. It

pretends to be a noun but it has no referent. It stands for nothing.

It means nothing. When you say 'I believe in Truth' you are really

saying 'I believe in nothing'."

"You're wrong, you're wrong," Mikah said, leaning forward, stabbing

with his finger. "Truth is a philosophical abstraction, one of the

tools that mankind's mind has used to raise it above the beasts--the

proof that we are not beasts ourselves, but a higher order of

creation. Beasts can be true--but they cannot know Truth. Beasts can

see, but they cannot see Beauty."

* * * * *

"Arrgh!" Jason growled. "It's impossible to talk to you, much less

enjoy any comprehensible exchange of ideas. We aren't even speaking

the same language. Aside from who is right and who is wrong, for the

moment, we should go back to basics and at least agree on the meaning

of the terms that we are using. To begin with--can you define the

difference between _ethics_ and _ethos_?"

"Of course," Mikah snapped, a glint of pleasure in his eyes at the

thought of a good rousing round of hair-splitting. "Ethics is the

discipline dealing with what it good or bad, or right or wrong--or

with moral duty and obligation. Ethos means the guiding beliefs,

standards or ideals that characterize a group or community."

"Very good, I can see that you have been spending the long

spaceship-nights with your nose buried in the books. Now make sure the

difference between those two terms is very clear, because it is the

heart of the little communications problem we have here. Ethos is

inextricably linked with a single society and cannot be separated

from it, or it loses all meaning. Do you agree?"

"Well...."

"Come, come--you _have_ to agree on the terms of your own definition.

The ethos of a group is just a catch-all term for the ways in which

the members of a group rub against each other. Right?"

Mikah reluctantly produced a nod of acquiescence.

"Now that we agree about that we can push on one step further. Ethics,

again by your definition, must deal with any number of societies or

groups. If there are any absolute laws of ethics, they must be so

inclusive that they can be applied to _any_ society. A law of ethics

must be as universal of application as is the law of gravity."

"I don't follow you...?"

"I didn't think you would when I got to this point. You people who

prattle about your Universal Laws never really consider the exact

meaning of the term. My knowledge of the history of science is very

vague, but I'm willing to bet that the first Law of Gravity ever

dreamed up stated that things fell at such and such a speed, and

accelerated at such and such a rate. That's not a law, but an

observation that isn't even complete until you add 'on this planet.'

On a planet with a different mass there will be a different

observation. The law of gravity is the formula

mM

F = ----

d squared

and this can be used to compute the force of gravity between any two

bodies anywhere. This is a way of expressing fundamental and

unalterable principles that apply in all circumstances. If you are

going to have any real ethical laws they will have to have this same

universality. They will have to work on Cassylia or Pyrrus, or on any

planet or in any society you can find. Which brings us back to you.

What you so grandly call--with capital letters and a flourish of

trumpets--'Laws of Ethics' aren't laws at all, but are simple little

chunks of tribal ethos, aboriginal observations made by a gang of

desert sheepherders to keep order in the house--or tent. These rules

aren't capable of any universal application, even you must see that.

Just think of the different planets that you have been on and the

number of weird and wonderful ways people have of reacting to each

other--then try and visualize ten rules of conduct that would be

applicable in all these societies. An impossible task. Yet I'll bet

that you have ten rules you want me to obey, and if one of them is

wasted on an injunction against saying prayers to carved idols I can

imagine just how universal the other nine are. You aren't being

ethical if you try to apply them wherever you go--you're just finding

a particularly fancy way to commit suicide!"

"You are being insulting!"

"I hope so. If I can't reach you in any other way, perhaps insult will

jar you out of your state of moral smugness. How dare you even

consider having me tried for stealing money from the Cassylia casino

when all I was doing was conforming to their own code of ethics! They

run crooked gambling games, so the law under their local ethos must be

that crooked gambling is the norm. So I cheated them, conforming to

their norm. If they have also passed a law that says cheating at

gambling is illegal, the _law_ is unethical, not the cheating. If you

are bringing me back to be tried by that law you are unethical, and I

am the helpless victim of an evil man."

"Limb of Satan!" Mikah shouted, leaping to his feet and pacing back

and forth before Jason, clasping and unclasping his hands with

agitation. "You seek to confuse me with your semantics and so-called

ethics that are simply opportunism and greed. There is a Higher Law

that cannot be argued--"

"That is an impossible statement--and I can prove it." Jason pointed

at the books on the wall. "I can prove it with your own books, some of

that light reading on the shelf there. Not the Aquinas--too thick. But

the little volume with _Lull_ on the spine. Is that Ramon Lull's 'The

Booke of the Ordre of Chyualry'?"

Mikah's eyes widened. "You know the book? You're acquainted with

Lull's writing?"

"Of course," Jason said, with an offhandedness he did not feel, since

this was the only book in the collection he could remember reading,

the odd title had stuck in his head. "Now let me see it and I shall

prove to you what I mean." There was no way to tell from the unchanged

naturalness of his words that this was the moment he had been working

carefully towards. He sipped the tea. None of his tenseness showing.

* * * * *

Mikah Samon got the book and handed it to him.

Jason flipped through the pages while he talked. "Yes ... yes, this is

perfect. An almost ideal example of your kind of thinking. Do you like

to read Lull?"

"Inspirational!" Mikah answered, his eyes shining. "There is beauty in

every line and Truths that we have forgotten in the rush of modern

life. A reconciliation and proof of the interrelationship between the

Mystical and the Concrete. By manipulation of symbols he explains

everything by absolute logic."

"He proves nothing about nothing," Jason said emphatically. "He plays

word games. He takes a word, gives it an abstract and unreal value,

then proves this value by relating it to other words with the same

sort of nebulous antecedents. His facts aren't facts--just meaningless

sounds. This is the key point, where your universe and mine differ.

You live in this world of meaningless facts that have no existence. My

world contains facts that can be weighed, tested, proven related to

other facts in a logical manner. My facts are unshakeable and

unarguable. They exist."

"Show me one of your unshakeable facts," Mikah said, his voice calmer

now than Jason's.

"Over there," Jason said. "The large green book over the console. It

contains facts that even you will agree are true--I'll eat every page

if you don't. Hand it to me." He sounded angry, making overly bold

statements and Mikah fell right into the trap. He handed the volume to

Jason, using both hands since it was very thick, metal bound and

heavy.

[Illustration]

"Now listen closely and try and understand, even if it is difficult

for you," Jason said, opening the book. Mikah smiled wryly at this

assumption of his ignorance. "This is a stellar ephemeris, just as

packed with facts as an egg is with meat. In some ways it is a history

of mankind. Now look at the jump screen there on the control console

and you will see what I mean. Do you see the horizontal green line?

Well, that's our course."

"Since this is my ship and I'm flying it I'm aware of that," Mikah

said. "Get on with your proof."

"Bear with me," Jason told him. "I'll try and keep it simple. Now the

red dot on the green line is our ship's position. The number above the

screen our next navigational point, the spot where a star's

gravitational field it strong enough to be detected in jump space. The

number is the star's code listing. DB89-046-229. I'll look it up in

the book"--he quickly flipped the pages--"and find its listing. No

name. A row of code symbols though that tell a lot about it. This

little symbol means that there is a planet or planets suitable for man

to live on. Doesn't say if any people are there though."

"Where does this all lead to?" Mikah interrupted.

"Patience--you'll see in a moment. Now look, at the screen. The green

dot approaching on the course line is the PMP. Point of Maximum

Proximity. When the red dot and green dot coincide...."

"Give me that book," Mikah ordered, stepping forward. Aware suddenly

that something was wrong. He was just an instant too late.

"Here's your proof," Jason said, and hurled the heavy book through the

jump screen into the delicate circuits behind. Before it hit he had

thrown the second book. There was a tinkling crash, a flare of light

and the crackle of shorted circuits.

The floor gave a tremendous heave as the relays snapped open, dropping

the ship through into normal space.

Mikah grunted in pain, clubbed to the floor by the suddenness of the

transition. Locked into the chair, Jason fought the heaving of his

stomach and the blackness before his eyes. As Mikah dragged himself to

his feet, Jason took careful aim and sent the tray and dishes hurtling

into the smoking ruin of the jump computer.

"There's your fact," he said in cheerful triumph. "Your

incontrovertible, gold-plated, uranium-cored fact.

"We're not going to Cassylia any more!"