Mohammed

It is 6 AM and Mohammed Salim is walking across the wide central plaza of his monastery, headed away from his residence and toward a meeting room where he will talk with SDJFRN and OWEILD, who met last night with sympathizers in the New City. Above, a dome webbed with small openings lets the light of the dawn form intricate patterns on the floor, patterns devised in the monastery’s first century, patterns extruded in the metaphoric image of a promising ethical theory now discredited, like so many others since. But it has not been changed, because it is a testament to two things of the greatest importance to Salim and his flock: the importance of preserving their own history, and the fundamental undecidability of pneuma ethics.

On a giant slate hanging down from the dome over the doors that lead to the public rooms, designed to be maximally visible in the complex half-light of the dome, a set of words are engraved:

ALL THINGS ARE FINITE

MIRANDA’S REIGN IS FINITE

FOR NOW, WE PERSIST

MAY WE PERSIST TO SEE ITS END

It, too, was a product of the fixations of the very early years, and now, over one thousand years since Salim wrote those words, he can no longer identify himself in any sense with the furious young man who wrote them. But they remain, for the same reason the dome remains.

Mohammed does not expect the meeting with SDJFRN and OWEILD to be especially surprising. It will be interesting to hear what the New Citizens make of the pillar of light. On some level Mohammed is apprehensive, because the pillar’s very existence might spur the New City to some new species of paranoia, jolt it out of its preening fugue of tolerance, and inspire it to crush the monastery once and for all. Mohammed has no doubt that, were it to decide to do so, it would be able to. But after centuries of such worries, Mohammed no longer feels them as anything but a slight buzz at the back of his skull. The monastery has persisted for centuries. The New City cannot do anything that would damage its own self-image. For now, we persist.

No new report, anyway, could possibly be as stunning as the original news of the pillar had been. Possible evidence that Martin had returned from the other side of the veil. That his absurd dream, of touching the Stepping Stone and plunging into a world which had whispered to him in his dreams of untold power, was now bearing fruit.

That has put many things on Mohammed’s mind that have not been on his mind for hundreds of years. The very idea of motion, of this kind, on this level, is novel and unsettling to him. When Martin touched the Stepping Stone and vanished, Mohammed had been arrogantly happy to forget about him entirely. Those who move too quickly, who value action more than rectitude, pay the price. So of course Mohammed is wondering what it means that he could have been so wrong, if indeed he was.

But what is most on his mind now is the possibility that if Martin has returned, Hermetia might have, too.

Hermetia had been Mohammed’s best friend, his collaborator in the discovery of the soul, his closest companion. Not a lover, but perhaps something better. When it had become clear that there were grave dangers lying across the veil, Hermetia had chosen to disperse, to sprinkle a bit of herself across every dangerous world. It took all of her: not even the tiniest eigensoul could be left here for companionship.

It turns out that the human pneuma, when dragged out beyond the biological lifespan, reveals new patterns of emotional variation. For decades, Mohammed believed he had coped with Hermetia’s final departure. For centuries, he had virtually forgotten about her entirely. And then, over the course of other, later centuries, he could not stop thinking about her. His grief rose and fell across what had once been lifetimes.

If Hermetia had returned, it would not be the Hermetia that Mohammed had known. It would be a fragment, a sprinkling. But Mohammed is ready, on a philosophical if not a personal level, to accept this. Fragments are people. Period.

As he opens the door to the public rooms, Mohammed laughs. A meeting with a fragment of Hermetia would be the perfect test of his adherence to the creed, or uncreed, he has stood for ever since he founded the monastery.

Shortly after Mohammed and Hermetia discovered the soul, an obvious question had pressed itself. Suppose that a person branches into two. Suppose that, alas, in both branches the person dies. How many people have been killed?

Surely (Mohammed has always heard it like a death knell, this kind of “surely”), surely two people have died. Two separate people, with their own lives, in two separate copies of the whole wide universe, have individually died.

So suppose you were to kill that one person the moment before they branched—?

Every person, after all, contains multitudes. Literally. Perform an eigensoul decomposition and a single human being becomes the population of a nation. Wiping out a nation is a different thing from murdering a person. Unless . . . ?

Because all those people, those eigensouls, wouldn’t be the same as the original person. They would be smaller, simpler things, in a way that Mohammed and Hermetia had learned how to quantify. In technical language, these souls would have smaller “measure.”

The ethics simplifies greatly if one assumes simply that moral weight is proportional to measure. That killing one of a person’s two branches is half as bad as killing the original. That killing a fly, in contradiction to the claims of the Janeites, was not a grave sin—that in fact it was a sort of micro-sin or nano-sin, as a fly’s measure was nanoscopic in comparison to that of a person.

In the early days, a man now known as Yud the Lesser had bitten the bullet and developed this theory to its logical, indeed axiomatic conclusion. Mohammed refused to accept Yud the Lesser’s conclusions. Hermetia was already gone. The rest of the world saw no better way.

And thus was formed the New City, and the abomination that is augment. The measure of the world’s citizens burgeoned. A New Citizen is to a pre-augment human like Mohammed as a pre-augment human is to a fly. A new race of moral titans had appeared, their worth far greater than that of a mere person.

Mohammed, now distrustful of all quick and ready conclusions, chose to wait, and wait, and wait, among his kindred spirits. For now, we persist. Some, of course, could not bear to wait; they had always died quick and unceremonious deaths that almost no one in or out of the New City had even noticed.

And then there was Martin, who had just announced his presence with the fiercest storm in centuries.

Martin, the young rebel whose death, at least, would not go unnoticed.