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“You all die in the end, don’t you?” I said miserably. “No matter what I do. It’s just one increasingly bad dilemma after another until everyone’s dead, right?”
“Four minutes, Captain.”
“Am I right?”
Fitzwilliam looked away.
“I asked you a question, Number One.”
He looked up at me, and he seemed to have tears in his eyes. “We have all been drowned,” he said in a quiet voice, “over a thousand times each. We have been eaten, blown up and suffered fatal illnesses. The drownings are the worst. Each time I can feel the smothering effect of water, the blind panic as I suffocate—”
“Fitzwilliam,” I demanded, “where is this damnable place?”
He took a deep breath and lowered his voice. “We’re oral tradition, but we’re not in a story—we’re an ethics seminar.”
“You mean you’re all hypothetical characters during a lecture?”
Fitzwilliam nodded miserably. The steward somewhat chillingly handed me a pair of pliers, while reminding me in an urgent whisper that there were only three minutes left.
I looked down at the pliers in an absent sort of way, at Jebediah, then back to Fitzwilliam, who was staring at the floor. So much suffering on board this ship, and for so long. Perhaps there was another way out. The thing was, to take such radical action in the oral tradition risked the life of the lecturer giving the talk. But what was more important? The well-being of one real-life ethics professor or the relentless torture of his subjects, who had to undergo his sadistic and relentless hypothetical dilemmas for two-hour sessions three times a week? When you tell a tragic story, someone dies for real in the BookWorld. I was in the oral tradition. Potentially the best storytelling there was—and the most destructive.
“McTavish, prepare the lifeboat for launching. I’m leaving.”
McTavish looked at Fitzwilliam, who shrugged, and the large Scotsman and his tattoos departed.
“That isn’t one of the options,” said Fitzwilliam. “You can’t do it.”
“I have experience of the oral tradition,” I told him. “All these scenarios are taking place only because I am here to preside in judgment upon them. This whole thing goes just one way: in a downward spiral of increasingly impossible moral dilemmas that will leave everyone dead except myself and one other, whom I will be forced to kill and eat or something. If I take myself out of the equation, you are free to sail across the sea unhampered, unimpeded—and safe.”
“But that might…that might—”
“Harm the lecturer, even kill him? Possibly. If the bomb goes off, you’ll know I’ve failed and he’s okay. If it doesn’t, you’ll all be safe.”
“And you?” he asked. “What about you?”
I patted him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry about me. I think you’ve all suffered enough on account of the Outland.”
“But surely…we can pick you up again if all goes well?”
“No,” I said, “that’s not how it works. It can’t be a trick. I have to cast myself adrift.”
I trotted out of the wardroom and to the side of the ship, where McTavish had already lowered the lifeboat. It was being held against the scramble net by lines fore and aft clutched by deck-hands, and it thumped against the hull as the waves caught it. As I put my leg over the rail to climb down, Fitzwilliam grasped my arm. He wasn’t trying to stop me—he wanted to shake me by the hand.
“Good-bye, Captain—and thank you.”
I smiled. “Think you’ll make Port Conjecture?”
He smiled back. “We’ll give it our best shot.”
I climbed down the scramble net and into the lifeboat. They let go fore and aft, and the boat rocked violently as the bow wave caught it. For a moment I thought it would go over, but it stayed upright, and I rapidly fell behind as the ship steamed on.
I counted off the seconds until the bomb was meant to explode, but, thankfully, it didn’t, and across the sea I heard the cheer of forty people celebrating their release. I couldn’t share in their elation, because in a university somewhere back home the ethics lecturer had suddenly keeled over with an aneurysm. They’d call a doctor, and with a bit of luck he’d pull through. He might even lecture again, but not with this crew.
The Moral Dilemma was at least a quarter mile away by now, and within ten minutes the steamer was just a smudge of smoke on the horizon. In another half hour, it had vanished completely, and I was on my own in a gray sea that lasted forever in all directions. I looked through my shoulder bag and found a bar of chocolate, which I ate in a despondent manner and then just sat in the bow of the lifeboat and stared up at the gray sky, feeling hopelessly lost. I leaned back and closed my eyes.
Had I done the right thing? I had no idea. The lecturer couldn’t have known the suffering he was putting his hypothetical characters through, but even if he had, perhaps he’d justify it by reasoning that the suffering was worth the benefits to his students. If he survived, I’d be able to ask him his opinion. But that wasn’t likely. Rescue seemed a very remote possibility, and that was at the nub of the whole ethical-dilemma argument. You never come out on top, no matter what. The only way to win the game is not to play.
34.
