“And so you believe,” came the Ghost’s simulated voice, “that this universe is essentially transient—all you sense, all you achieve, even your experiences of your inner self will pass away.”

“Not transient, exactly,” Burden called back. “Just one of an uncountably infinite number of possibilities which will, cumulatively, be resolved at timelike infinity, after the manner of a collapse of quantum functions.”

“But in that case, what basis for morality can there be?”

“There is a moral basis for every decision,” said Burden. “To show loyalty to one’s fellows—to put oneself in harm’s way for the sake of one’s species. And while this is only one out of a myriad timelines, we believe that the, umm, the goodness in each timeline will sum at the decision point at timelike infinity to gather into Optimality . . .”

“Fascinating,” Nilis said to Pirius. The Commissary whispered, as if he might be overheard. “They are fencing, in a way. Each knows far more about the other’s beliefs than either is prepared to reveal. Fencing, and yet looking for common ground.”

Pirius Red was light on moral philosophy. “That stuff about putting one’s self in the way of harm for others—that sounded like Doctrine to me.”

“So it is,” Nilis said. “Much of the Friends’ ‘philosophy’ is actually recycled Druzism—as you’d expect, given the environment it sprang from. Hama Druz seems to have believed that self-interest is the primary driver of any unthinking human action. He said that soldiers are therefore the only moral citizens of any society because only they have demonstrated their selfless morality by putting themselves in harm’s way.” He sniffed. “Of course Druz ignored the plentiful evidence of kinship bonds among the animals and insects—an ant isn’t driven by simple selfishness—and he certainly ignored Coalescences, human hive societies, which were plentiful even in his day. Druz was a good sloganeer, and he obviously was a key figure in human history. But he really wasn’t a very sophisticated thinker—I’ve always found his arguments terribly one-dimensional—haven’t you?”

Even now Pirius was horrified by such blasphemy, and he deflected the remark. “There’s more than just Druzism in Burden’s beliefs.”

“Oh, of course. The other element is this basic notion that this universe is an imperfect place that can somehow be fixed. It’s an expression of a feeling of betrayal, you see, a sense that one’s life is irredeemably imperfect and can never be made good. I can quite understand such a creed arising in a society of child soldiers—deliberately kept in miserable conditions as a motivator to fight—whose only escape is either to die young fighting, or grow old in shame. No wonder they want to believe things can be made better. They are quite right!

“But what’s interesting is that the Silver Ghosts came up with a similar belief. They too were betrayed by the universe, when their sun failed and their world froze over. They elaborated such traumas into a belief that the universe is a hostile place that must be tamed. But they sublimated their feelings of anger, not into the passive acceptance of the Friends, but into programs of exotic physics. They sought ways to change the universe—they tried to make it better!”