The Walking Shadow. Brian Stableford
Much confusion has arisen in the past by virtue of the fact that we have habitually construed the word “believe” as “believe to be true”. This has led us to assume that, in order to believe in a metascientific statement, we need to assert that it is true, which, by definition, we cannot justifiably do. It is time now to recognize that this is a mistaken notion of what belief involves and of what beliefs consist, and for what purpose they are useful.
If we know something to be true, because it has been established by the methods of science, we do not need to add something extra which converts that knowledge into a belief. If we do “believe” it, we do so in the special sense that the knowledge must always remain provisional, dependent upon further data. Scientific knowledge is always subject to revision or rejection in the light of further discoveries, and any commitment of faith to the current body of knowledge is both superfluous and dangerous.
By contrast, commitment is exactly what is involved—and exactly what is needed—in holding to a metascientific statement. Belief in a statement involves shielding and protecting it, holding it invulnerable against criticism. There can never be any logical warrant for such a strategy, which is, of course, completely out of place in science, but in metascience we need only seek a warrant on pragmatic grounds.
If, because of an excessive admiration of science, or because we have excessive expectancies of its rewards, we find ourselves unable to make a commitment to metascientific speculations of one kind or another, then we are the poorer for our failure. Indeed, it might be that such a psychological stance is literally impossible to maintain, for what is actually involved in the rigorously skeptical world-view of the determined empiricist is not an absence of metascientific commitment but a metascientific commitment to the present state of scientific knowledge, which reads into that state an authority and invulnerability to falsification which science simply cannot possess. People who can do that are doubly unfortunate, firstly because they delude themselves as to the extent of their own metascientific commitment, and secondly because their commitment is tied to a speculation which is likely to be psychologically unsatisfactory. Nevertheless, such people are certainly better off than they would be if they genuinely had no commitments of the kind we call belief.
To sum up, therefore, the situation is this. We need metascientific beliefs. We cannot get by in life without them. We cannot select these beliefs on the grounds of their truthfulness or their likelihood, because there is no way that we can establish the truth or likelihood of metascientific statements. That such statements do sometimes seem likely or unlikely is a function of their aesthetic appeal, not of their logical appeal. It follows, therefore, that the most reasonable strategy is to select beliefs for commitment on the grounds of their psychological utility, in purely pragmatic terms. If asked what our warrant is for the commitments which we make, we need only answer: I believe it not because it is true, but because it is necessary.
It is the only answer we can give, but it is the only answer we need.
PART TWO
THE WRECKAGE OF THE WORLD
CHAPTER THREE
He was crawling, dragging himself over jagged rocks and sills while a terrible wind lashed sand into his face and about his body, stinging and scourging. He had been crawling for a long, long time, and exhaustion made every movement difficult.
In and behind the wind there was another force: a sluggish but relentless current, which tugged at something inside him.
He hooked his bleeding fingers over sharp spurs of rock and hauled himself forward, his legs dragging and barely able to push at all. The hot sand swirled over his bare forearms, stirring the fine blond hair.
He felt as if he was aging, the years coursing through his body as he headed for the night of time. He knew that he had a destination but he did not know what or where it was, or even that he was going in the right direction, although he had to believe that he was, for without that belief he would simply have stopped and died. He felt that the current plucking at his soul was carrying his goal away from him, bearing it into the mists of eternity, which were forever inaccessible, but still he kept himself moving, still he would not yield.
He had seen glimmering lights above the horizon from time to time, but they were gone now, faded into a draining twilight that cast wan shadows beneath the serrated ridges of bone-white rock. Perhaps they had never been anything more than mirages, shimmering in layers of air undisturbed by the fierce wind that attacked him down here in the valley.
Night came, but still he struggled. The wind of time would bring day again, and then the night, but there was no relief from the heat and the sand and the sharp stone spurs which had already begun to lacerate his fingers. His fingers, though, did not pause in their grappling, and he was almost grateful for the ridges which allowed him purchase to drag himself along.
Beneath his body something was slithering: something massive, conjoined with the substance of the desert itself, an essence or a spirit within the rock. Because it slithered he named it a snake, but it had no form as yet.
The snake cradled him in its shapeless coil, ready to engulf him when the desert gave it birth.
His movements grew fevered and desperate as the need to rest grew within him. He knew that he must not stop, that sleep would be fatal, but even the fear of sleep spread a numb drowsiness through his lean frame. His arms jerked spasmodically as the muscles corded and cramped momentarily.
After one last agonized heave, he was still, face down against the slithering scaliness of the desert’s skin.
The current ceased to grip him. The slithering ceased. A brief, fugitive instant of panic was lost in a swirl of time and space.
With the most delicate of emetic shudders, the other world spat him out.
CHAPTER FOUR
Sheehan attempted to pull the collar of his greatcoat a little tighter as he stood back in the shadow of the tunnel mouth and listened to the ring of Boulton’s approaching footfalls on the frosted concrete.
Boulton walked with the precisely measured stride of an old army man. He should have retired when the last state of emergency passed peacefully away, but instead he had come to the capital and joined the police force. He was twenty years older than Sheehan, but he hardly seemed to feel the cold.
Sheehan came forward out of the tunnel to meet Boulton, and the other paused. For a moment they didn’t speak, but glanced instead at the concrete pedestal supporting the cage that enclosed the glittering statue.
The pedestal had been built so that Paul’s feet were resting on its surface, but it would not have mattered had it been an inch or two shorter; he would simply have remained suspended there, locked into Earth’s gravitational field: immutable, immovable, unreachable.
Boulton inclined his head slightly toward the gleaming statue. “Be a fool to come back tonight,” he observed. “Freeze to death inside the cage.”
Sheehan laughed, dutifully but uneasily.
“They should put some clothes on him,” he said.
“They used to. Made him look like a scarecrow. Can’t keep them all clothed, anyhow. A third of all the jumpers in the country are in this city. More jumpers here than living people, I reckon. Anyhow, clothes’d spoil that pretty glow.”
There were no electric lights out in the open expanse of the stadium, but there were dozens of wax candles that people had brought and lit early the previous evening. There were no people about now, but well over half the candles burned on, and some were long enough to last until the dawn. The perfectly reflective surface of Paul Heisenberg’s body reflected the candlelight as if it were itself a faintly glowing object: a human body, limned in fire. The effect was rather eerie.
Paul was not alone—there were more than a hundred similar static figures scattered over the flat surface of the arena, and a couple of hundred more in the derelict stands—but it was to see him that the crowds came, and they stationed their candles to illuminate him, not his companions.
“Hope there’s no