He pushed the empty plate away and stirred sugar into his cup. Mikah had eaten sparingly and was now starting on his second cup of tea. His eyes were fixed, unfocused in thought as he drank. He started slightly when Jason called to him.
“Since you don’t stock cigarettes on this ship — how about letting me smoke my own? You’ll have to dig them out for me since I can’t reach the pocket while I’m chained to this chair.”
“I cannot help you,” Mikah said, unmoving. “Tobacco is an irritant, a drug and a carcinogen. If I gave you a cigarette, I would be giving you cancer.”
“Don’t be a hypocrite!” Jason snapped, inwardly pleased at the rewarding flush in the other’s neck. “They’ve taken the cancer-producing agents out of tobacco for centuries now. And even if they hadn’t — how does that affect this situation. You’re taking me to Cassylia to certain death. So why should you concern yourself with the state of my lungs in the future?”
“I hadn’t considered it that way. It is just that there are certain rules of life….”
“Are there?” Jason broke in, keeping the initiative and the advantage. “Not as many as you like to think. And you people who are always dreaming up the rules never carry your thinking far enough. You are against drugs. Which drugs? What about the tannic acid in that tea you’re drinking? Or the caffeine in it? It’s loaded with caffeine — a drug that is both a strong stimulant and a diuretic. That’s why you won’t find tea in spacesuit canteens. That’s a case of a drug forbidden for a good reason. Can you justify your cigarette ban the same way?”
Mikah started to talk, then thought for a moment. “Perhaps you are right. I’m tired, and it is not important.” He warily took the cigarette case from Jason’s pocket and dropped it onto the tray. Jason didn’t attempt to interfere. Mikah poured himself a third cup of tea with a slightly apologetic air.
“You must excuse me, Jason, for attempting to make you conform to my own standards. When you are in pursuit of the big Truths, you sometimes let the little Truths slip. I’m not intolerant, but I do tend to expect everyone else to live up to certain criteria I have set for myself. Humility is something we should never forget and I thank you for reminding me of it. The search for Truth is hard.”
“There is no Truth,” Jason told him, the anger and insult gone now from his voice since he wanted to keep his captor involved in the conversation. Involved enough to forget about the free wrist for a while. He raised the cup to his lips and let the tea touch his lips without drinking any. The half-full cup supplied an unconsidered reason for his free hand.
“No Truth?” Mikah weighed the thought. “You can’t possibly mean that. The galaxy is filled with Truth, it’s the touchstone of Life itself. It’s the thing that separates Mankind from the animals.”
“There is no Truth, no Life, no Mankind. At least not the way you spell them — with capital letters. They don’t exist.”
Mikah’s taut skin contracted into a furrow of concentration. “You’ll have to explain yourself,” he said. “You’re not being clear.”
“I’m afraid it’s you who aren’t being clear. You’re making a reality where none exists. Truth — with a small
“You’re wrong, you’re wrong,” Mikah said, leaning forward, stabbing with his finger. “Truth is a philosophical abstraction, one of the tools that mankind’s mind has used to raise it above the beasts — the proof that we are not beasts ourselves, but a higher order of creation. Beasts can be true — but they cannot know Truth. Beasts can see, but they cannot see Beauty.”
“Arrgh!” Jason growled. “It’s impossible to talk to you, much less enjoy any comprehensible exchange of ideas. We aren’t even speaking the same language. Aside from who is right and who is wrong, for the moment, we should go back to basics and at least agree on the meaning of the terms that we are using. To begin with — can you define the difference between
“Of course,” Mikah snapped, a glint of pleasure in his eyes at the thought of a good rousing round of hair- splitting. “Ethics is the discipline dealing with what it good or bad, or right or wrong — or with moral duty and obligation. Ethos means the guiding beliefs, standards or ideals that characterize a group or community.”
“Very good, I can see that you have been spending the long spaceship-nights with your nose buried in the books. Now make sure the difference between those two terms is very clear, because it is the heart of the little communications problem we have here. Ethos is inextricably linked with a single society and cannot be separated from it, or it loses all meaning. Do you agree?”
“Well….”
“Come, come — you
Mikah reluctantly produced a nod of acquiescence.
“Now that we agree about that we can push on one step further. Ethics, again by your definition, must deal with any number of societies or groups. If there are any absolute laws of ethics, they must be so inclusive that they can be applied to
“I don’t follow you…?”
“I didn’t think you would when I got to this point. You people who prattle about your Universal Laws never really consider the exact meaning of the term. My knowledge of the history of science is very vague, but I’m willing to bet that the first Law of Gravity ever dreamed up stated that things fell at such and such a speed, and accelerated at such and such a rate. That’s not a law, but an observation that isn’t even complete until you add ‘on this planet.’ On a planet with a different mass there will be a different observation. The law of gravity is the formula
and this can be used to compute the force of gravity between any two bodies anywhere. This is a way of expressing fundamental and unalterable principles that apply in all circumstances. If you are going to have any real ethical laws they will have to have this same universality. They will have to work on Cassylia or Pyrrus, or on any planet or in any society you can find. Which brings us back to you. What you so grandly call — with capital letters and a flourish of trumpets — ’Laws of Ethics’ aren’t laws at all, but are simple little chunks of tribal ethos, aboriginal observations made by a gang of desert sheepherders to keep order in the house — or tent. These rules aren’t capable of any universal application, even you must see that. Just think of the different planets that you have been on and the number of weird and wonderful ways people have of reacting to each other — then try and visualize ten rules of conduct that would be applicable in all these societies. An impossible task. Yet I’ll bet that you have ten rules you want me to obey, and if one of them is wasted on an injunction against saying prayers to carved idols I can imagine just how universal the other nine are. You aren’t being ethical if you try to apply them wherever you go — you’re just finding a particularly fancy way to commit suicide!”
“You are being insulting!”
“I hope so. If I can’t reach you in any other way, perhaps insult will jar you out of your state of moral smugness. How dare you even consider having me tried for stealing money from the Cassylia casino when all I was doing was conforming to their own code of ethics! They run crooked gambling games, so the law under their local ethos must be that crooked gambling is the norm. So I cheated them, conforming to their norm. If they have also passed a law that says cheating at gambling is illegal, the
“Limb of Satan!” Mikah shouted, leaping to his feet and pacing back and forth before Jason, clasping and unclasping his hands with agitation. “You seek to confuse me with your semantics and so-called ethics that are simply opportunism and greed. There is a Higher Law that cannot be argued — ”
