First Among Sequels

He glared at me menacingly, then leaned over the rail and repeated my order, making sure the men knew who had made it. After that, he went into the wheel house, rang up “full ahead,” and the vessel shuddered as we made extra speed and steamed on.

  “Come inside,” said Dr. Glister.

  “No,” I said. “I’m staying here. I won’t hide from the men I’ve condemned to death.”

  And I stood there and watched as the lifeboat and the men drifted astern of the ship and were soon lost to view in the seas.

  It was with a heavy heart that I walked back into the wheel-house and sat in the captain’s chair. Baldwin was silent, gazing straight ahead.

  “It was the right thing to do,” I muttered, to no one in particular. “And what’s more, I could have used the WordStorm to escape after all.”

  “Things happen here,” muttered Baldwin. “Difficult things.”

  I suddenly had a thought, but hoped upon hope I was wrong. “What’s the name of this ship?”

  “The ship?” replied Baldwin cheerily. “It’s the steamship Moral Dilemma, Cap’n.”

  I covered my face with my hands and groaned. Anne Wirthlass-Schitt and her obnoxious husband had not been kidding when they said they’d chosen this place especially for me. My nerves were already badly frayed, and I felt the heavy hand of guilt pressing upon me. I’d only been here an hour—what would I be like in a week, or a month? Truly, I was trapped in an unenviable place: adrift on the Hypothetical Ocean, in command of the Moral Dilemma.

  “Captain?”

  It was the cook this time. He was unshaven and wearing a white uniform that had so many food stains on it that it was hard to say where stain ended and uniform began.

  “Yes?” I said, somewhat wearily.

  “Begging your pardon, but there’s been a gross underestimation on the provisions.”

  “And?”

  “We don’t get into port for another six months,” the cook continued, referring to a grubby sheet of calculations he had on him, “and we only have enough to feed the crew and passengers on strict rations for two-thirds of that time.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “That all forty of us will starve long before we reach port.”

  I beckoned Fitzwilliam over. “There wouldn’t be another port closer than that, would there?”

  “No, Captain,” he answered. “Port Conjecture is the only port there is.”

  “I thought so. And no fish either?”

  “Not in these waters.”

  “Other ships?”

  “None.”

  I got it now. These were the “difficult things” Baldwin had spoken of, and they were mine and mine alone to deal with. The ship, the sea and the people on it might be hypothetical—but they could suffer and die the same as anyone.

  “Thank you, Cook,” I said. “I’ll let you know of my decision.”

  He gave a lazy salute and was gone.

  “Well, Fitzwilliam,” I said, doing some simple math on a piece of paper, “there’s enough food for twenty-six people to survive until we reach port. Do you think we could find fourteen volunteers to throw themselves over the side to ensure the survival of the rest?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Then I have something of a problem. Is my primary sense of duty as captain to see to it that as many people as possible survive on my ship, or is it my moral obligation not to conduct or condone murder?”

  “The men in the lifeboat just now wouldn’t see you as anything but a murderer.”

  “Perhaps so, but this one’s harder; it’s not a case of inaction to bring about a circumstance, but action. This is what I’m going to do. Anyone under eighteen is excluded, as are six essential crew to keep the ship going. All the rest will choose straws—thirteen will go over the side.”

  “If they don’t want to go?”

  “Then I will throw them over.”

  “You’ll hang for it.”

  “I won’t. I’ll be the fourteenth.”

  “Very…selfless,” murmured Fitzwilliam, “but even after your crew and age exclusions, thirty-one passengers are still under eighteen. You will still have to select seven of them. Will you be able to throw them overboard, the children, the innocents?”

  “But I save the rest, right?”

  “It’s not for me to say,” said Fitzwilliam quietly. “I am not the captain.”

  I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, my heart thumping and a cold panic roiling inside me. I had to do terrible things in order to save others, and I’m not sure I could even do it—and thus imperil everyone’s life. I stopped for a moment and thought. The dilemmas had been getting progressively worse since I arrived. Perhaps this place—wherever it was—was quirkily responsive to my decisions. I decided to try something.

  “No,” I said. “I’m not going to kill anyone simply because an abstract ethical situation demands it. We’re going to sail on as we are and trust to providence that we meet another ship. If we don’t, then we may die, but we will have at least done the right thing by one another.”

  There was a distant rumble of thunder in the distance, and the boat heeled over. I wondered what would be next.

  “Begging your pardon, Captain, but I bring bad news.” It was a steward whom I hadn’t seen before.

  “And…?”

  “We have a gentleman in the wardroom who claims there is a bomb on board the ship—and it’s set to go off in ten minutes.”

  I allowed myself a wry smile. The rapidly changing scenarios seemed to have a clumsy intelligence to them. It was possible this was something in the oral tradition, but I couldn’t be sure. If this small world were somehow sentient, though, it could be beaten. To vanquish it, I needed to find its weakness, and it had just supplied one: impatience. It didn’t want a long, drawn-out starvation for the passengers; it wanted me to commit a hands-on murder for the greater good—and soon.

  “Show me.”

  I followed the steward down into the wardroom, where a man was sitting in a chair in the middle of the room. He looked sallow and had fine, wispy blond hair and small eyes that stared intently at me as I walked in. A burly sailor named McTavish, who was tattoo and Scotsman in a three-to-four ratio, was standing guard over him. There was no one else in the room—there didn’t need to be. It was a hypothetical situation.

  “Your name, sir?”

  “Jebediah Salford. And I have hidden a bomb—”

  “I heard. And naturally you won’t tell me where it is?”

  “Naturally.”

  “This bomb,” I went on, “will sink the ship, potentially leading to many deaths?”

  “Indeed, I hope so,” replied Jebediah cheerily.

  “Your own included?”

  “I fear no death.”

  I paused for thought. It was a classic and overused ethical dilemma. Would I, as an essentially good person, reduce myself to torturing someone for the greater good? It was a puzzle that had been discussed for many years, generally by those to whom it has no chance of becoming real. But the way in which the scenarios came on thick and fast suggested that whoever was running this show had a prurient interest in seeing just how far a decent person could be pushed before doing bad things. I could almost feel the architect of the dilemma gloating over me from afar. I would have to stall him if I could.

  “Fitzwilliam? Have all passengers go on deck, close all watertight doors, and have every crew member and able-bodied passenger look for the bomb.”

  “Captain,” he said, “that’s a waste of time. There is a bomb, but you can’t find it. The decision has to be made here and now, in this wardroom.”

  Damn. Outmaneuvered.

  “How many lifeboats do we have?” I asked, getting increasingly desperate.

  “Only one left, ma’am—with room for ten.”

  “Shit. How long do we have left before this bomb goes off?”

  “Seven minutes.”

  If this were the real world and in a situation as black and white as th
is, there wasn’t a decision to make. I would use all force necessary to get the information. But, most important, submit myself to scrutiny afterward. If you permit or conduct torture, you must be personally responsible for your actions—it’s the kind of decision where it’s best to have the threat of prison looming behind you. But the thing was, on board this ship here and now, it didn’t look as though torturing him would actually achieve anything at all. He would eventually tell me, the bomb would be found—and the next dilemma would begin. And they would carry on, again and again, worse and worse, until I had done everything I would never have done and the passengers of this vessel were drowned, eaten or murdered. It was hell for me, but it would be hell for them, too. I sat down heavily on a nearby chair, put my head in hands and stared at the floor.

  “Captain,” said Fitzwilliam, “we only have five minutes. You must torture this person.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I mumbled incoherently, “I know.”

  “We will all die,” he continued. “Again.”

  I looked up into his eyes. I’d never noticed how incredibly blue they were.

  “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.

  Rescue/Capture

  There was only one Jurisfiction agent who worked exclusively in the oral tradition. He was named Ski, rarely spoke and wore a tall hat in the manner of Lincoln—but that was the sum total of his recognizable features. When appearing at the Jurisfiction offices, he was always insubstantial, flickering in and out like a badly tuned TV. Despite this he did some of the best work in the OralTrad I’d seen. Rumor had it that he was a discarded Childhood Imaginary Friend, which accounted for his inconsolable melancholy.

  W hen I awoke, nothing had changed. The sea was still gray, the sky a dull overcast. The water was choppy but not dangerously so and had a sort of twenty-second pattern of movement to it. With nothing better to do, I sat up and watched the waves as they rose and fell. By fixing my eyes on a random part of the ocean, I could see that the same wave would come around again like a loop in a film. Most of the BookWorld was like that. Fictional forests had only eight different trees, a beach five different pebbles, a sky twelve different clouds. It was what made the real world so rich by comparison. I looked at my watch. The reality book show of The Bennets would be replacing Pride and Prejudice in three hours, and the first task of the household would be unveiled in two. Equally bad, that worthless shit Wirthlass-Schitt might well have the recipe by now and would be hoofing it back to Goliath. But then again, she might not. I’d visited enough Poetry to know that it’s an emotionally draining place and on a completely different level. Whereas story is processed in the mind in a straightforward manner, poetry bypasses rational thought and goes straight to the limbic system and lights it up like a brushfire. It’s the crack cocaine of the literary world.

  My mind, I knew,
was wandering. It was intentional. If I didn’t let it, it returned like an annoying default setting to Landen and the kids. Whenever I thought of them, my eyes welled up, and that was no good for anything. Perhaps, I mused, instead of lying to Landen after the Minotaur had shot me in 1988, I should have just stayed at home and led a blameless life of unabashed domestication. Washing, cleaning and making meals. Okay, with some part-time work down at Acme in case I went nuts. But no SpecOps stuff. None. Except maybe dispatching a teensy-weensy chimera. Or two. And if Spike needed a hand? Well, I couldn’t say no, now could— 1

  My thoughts were interrupted by my mobilefootnoterphone. Until now it had been resolutely silent. I dug it out of my bag and stared at it hopefully. There was still no signal, which meant that someone else was within a radius of about 10 million words. Not far in a shelf of Russian novels, perhaps, but out here in the oral tradition it could mean over a thousand stories or more. It was entirely possible that whoever it was wasn’t a friend at all, but anything was better than slow starvation, so I keyed the mike and pretended I was a communications expert from OFF-FNOP, the watchdog responsible for overseeing the network.

  “OFF-FNOP tech number…um, 76542: Request user ident.”

  I looked carefully all around me, but the horizon was clear. There was nothing at all, just endless gray. It was like— 2

  I paused. Footnoterphones weren’t like normal phones—they were textual. It was impossible to tell who was talking. It was a bit like text messages back home, but without the dopey CUL8R shorthand nonsense.

  “I say again: Request user ident.”

  I looked around desperately, but still nothing. I hoped it wasn’t another poor twit like me, compelled to take over the reins as ethical arbiter. 3

  My heart suddenly leaped. Whoever it was, was somewhere close—and didn’t read like anyone who would do me harm. I needed to tell the person how to find me, but the only directions I could think of were “I’m near a wave,” which was marginally less useful than “I’m in a boat.” Then I had an idea.

  “If you can hear me,” I said into my phone, “head for the rainstorm of text.”