The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [732]
“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 this, 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,