Throne of Time - Chapter 74: Morality Within Time (Patreon)

For the first saintsday break, Maut-mai left campus to visit a friend in the region, which she had never done before. Suria almost felt insulted by it, despite or perhaps because she had become much closer with her roommate in this cycle. She tried not to let it get to her and just enjoyed the days with a half-empty campus.

At first she tried to find and talk to Rije, but he was only civil with her and seemed to be busy all the time. Most of the other loopers had gone on trips, if they hadn't abandoned the school altogether, so Suria instead sent an invitation to Xuhriha. They met in the Taedric cafeteria, which was almost empty other than one man eating his usual bowl of porridge... Suria would need to talk to him one day and find out why he liked porridge so much, but she was already dealing with too many things at once.

After collecting their food, Suria and Xuhriha retreated to a warded room for a safer conversation. Though they discussed the weevil infestation and other details, Suria was having trouble focusing and her friend clearly noticed.

"What's bothering you?" Xuhriha asked. "You're only half here."

"It's not any one thing in particular." Suria sighed and set down her piece of bread. "There's just so much happening every loop, and I can't engage with all of it. How many cycles have passed without anyone taking care of the weevils? I... I saw Bumbledun lose his eye to them. Even if it comes back, doesn't it feel wrong to let it happen?"

"Oh my. Light lunch conversation." Xuhriha chewed for a while, apparently unconcerned, but when she spoke again her voice had changed. "Do you feel obligated to help every single person in the world?"

"Well, that's a bit heavy. But if someone was injured in front of me, and I could heal them... then, yes, I think I'm obligated to help."

"And if there was someone in the other direction, not in front of you, who you didn't see..."

"I understand where you're going with this." Suria took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. "Yes, this is an unusual situation. I keep looking in different directions and finding more people I could help, until there are too many. But I could have helped Bumbledun and the other xenarths. I didn't... because the problem will just come back, and I'm tired of doing it over and over."

"Are healers not allowed to get tired?"

"There's actually something we call 'healer's guilt' because no matter how much you do, sometimes you lose patients. It can destroy people, if you're not careful."

"There's something similar called necromancer's guilt," Xuhriha said somberly. "It's when you feel bad about not being able to create a large enough pile of the skulls of your enemies."

Suria stared for a second, then snickered. "Okay, that did make me feel better, b-"

"Then it would have been morally wrong of me not to say something stupid!"

"But it doesn't solve the actual problem. How do I live like this?"

Xuhriha didn't answer right away, toying with the food on her plate for a while before she spoke in a softer voice. "I don't know much about being a healer, but it seems to me that you can't work literally all the time. You have to sleep and eat and care of yourself, or you won't be able to take care of anyone else."

"That's true," Suria admitted, "but it's so easy to justify anything that way. The worst person in the world can use the same excuse to-"

"No, let me finish. What I mean is that, even if you're the most selfless person in the world, sometimes you have to accept a smaller pain in order to heal a larger one. You aren't ignoring the weevils because you're cruel, but because you're spending that time studying."

"But Bumbledun still gets his eye clawed out. That pain is still real, even if it goes away. Or at least that's how I see it, or we could justify doing anything."

"Temporarily," Xuhriha pointed out, raising a finger. "What if you had a patient who was going to lose their sight, but only for a while? Would you let them suffer that if you could use that time to save someone's life?"

"Everything is temporary in this situation, though." Suria sat in silence for a time, cleaning dust from her glasses as she thought. "I suppose I've already accepted that trade-off. There are people suffering back in my home village while I go to Darkmoon, and they don't blame me for it. I've learned so much; I'll be able to help many more people... if we ever get out of this, anyway."

"Exactly! I think if you could ask Bumbledun, he'd be willing to give up his eye temporarily if it meant saving lives."

"Well, he probably would, but Bumbledun is too nice." Suria put her glasses back on. "So you're saying that the time loop doesn't actually change the moral question all that much. We still face the same problem everyone does, we just... see more of it."

"And that doesn't have to be all bad!" Xuhriha pointed out. "I'm sure healers make mistakes sometimes: not realizing a serious problem, or spending their time on a problem that turns out to be minor. This way, you see all the problems and you can choose which ones are most important. It hurts to know everything you aren't choosing, but would you make a different choice?"

"I suppose not. That's based on the assumption that we eventually get out of the loop, though."

They lapsed into silence because there was nothing that could be said about that. So many of them had been trapped in the time loop for most of a year and they still didn't know so many essential things about what would happen. Given how much trouble it was taking to enter the Sequential Library and try to solve that problem, Suria understood why it was so difficult.

"Okay," Suria said, more to herself than Xuhriha. "I can accept that. If we knew the loop was going to end, I'd give 100% of myself to do everything I could. Until then, I don't have to blame myself for taking time to prepare. But if we devalue loops until then, doesn't that lead us to some dark places?"

"It could," Xuhriha agreed. She picked up one of her vegetables and popped it into her mouth. "It seems to me like you're actually asking about something in particular."

"I suppose I am, it's just..." Suria realized that her mind kept circling around the Akrashic faction and their proposal to attack one of the Perception teachers. Saying it out loud like that sounded wrong, and she wasn't sure if that was moral good sense or a hang-up that she needed to work through.

"You think your moral quandaries are bad?" Xuhriha asked. "I can out-quander you by a landslide."

"What do you mean?"

"If I wanted to test out the darker side of necromancy, I could probably become more powerful by sacrificing people. Blood sacrifices are still one of the most potent rituals you can perform, despite all the advancements in magic. Is that one of those dark places you were talking about?"

For all that she joked about piles of skulls, Xuhriha didn't sound like she was joking now, so Suria tried to consider the issue seriously. She immediately realized that their previous analogy of someone suffering for a little while in order to prevent greater pain later had a much less wholesome corollary now.

"You could argue that you aren't really killing them," Suria said slowly, "just hurting them for a little while. I don't know... you could argue that someone who won't endure a little pain to save lives is ethically wrong, but that's different from inflicting that pain because you think it will save lives."

"Oh, it's worse than that," Xuhriha countered. "What if you could kill someone painlessly, without them knowing? In the loop, it would just be like putting them to sleep temporarily. I think if you accept that, it becomes hard to argue against a lot of things."

"Well, you could still argue based on the consequences. To you or other loopers, I mean. If we lived dozens of cycles so ruthlessly, what would that do to us? Would becoming the sort of person who can justify anything actually do more good in the end?"

"Would it? I'm not sure we have an answer to that question."

Once more the silence descended around them, filled with unanswerable questions. Suria had an unpleasant knot in her stomach and had basically forgotten about her food. She saw that Xuhriha was munching away, but that didn't mean that she wasn't taking the questions seriously.

Suria wanted to believe that, if given the opportunity, she would sacrifice even her own life if it was the right thing to do - though it was easy to think that when she hadn't been tested. In the same way, she wanted to believe that, if she could explain the stakes to others, they would agree with her. But shifting between those two and making someone else's sacrifice for them, even within the bounds of one loop, was taking a massive moral step.

"Of course," Suria eventually said, "these are hypotheticals. In real life you should try to avoid crises as much as possible."

"Sure, and you should heal everyone and end all wars," Xuhriha said with a chuckle.

"You know, you're just making things worse, because this is more than healing. Just helping the xenarths is insignificant compared to everything we could potentially do. If we could find a way to stop that accident that fills the Medical Ward early in the cycle, we could save far more lives than we could ever heal. And the consequences might be even bigger for getting involved with politics."

"Ugh, politics. But I guess you could be the first person who could actually see the results of their policies and figure out which ones are best."

"Hah, are we going to end up saying that Wynchard is right about everything?" Suria asked with a choked laugh. "Maybe we are in this time loop for a reason, even if it's one we have to find for ourselves."

"I know you're joking, but I actually don't agree." Xuhriha set down her food to stare at Suria. "If this is 'for a reason' that implies that there's a right answer. But there might not be. We might be in a situation with no real answers and no perfect solution."

"That's fair." Suria sat back to thought for a while. "Well, since I've already done the harm of completely ruining our lunch-"

"Not for me! This bread is great."

"I suppose we should keep going. Do you think it's fine to... manipulate people the way I have? I mean, when Maut-mai joined the Water Society she was so cruel, but do I have the right to treat her like an experiment?"

"I honestly don't understand you on this one," Xuhriha said. "Aren't you always trying to influence people around you? It's just that in normal life everyone is running a constant stream of uncontrolled experiments."

"But this isn't normal life," Suria protested. "We have a huge advantage over anyone who can't remember."

"Parents have a huge advantage over their children, but that doesn't mean they don't have a responsibility to use that advantage as wisely as they can. You're overthinking this one, Suria. Don't replace the nice Maut-mai with the nasty one just because of some moral qualm."

"I suppose..."

"Speaking of consequences, you've actually persuaded me to try my own experiments!" Xuhriha said brightly. "I've been checking in on Kiznua, keeping her from doing something really stupid. She's actually passing her healing classes and doing pretty well."

"She should be a strong mage," Suria said absently. "It's her confidence that stops her."

It was possible that Xuhriha had brought that up purely at random, and equally possible that it was another part of her argument. Suria found it effective either way: she wouldn't condemn anyone for trying to help Kiznua reach her potential, so there wasn't much difference in any of things she tried. Of course the ability to influence others could be used for ill, but that was always true.

"What about Rije?" Suria asked. "I feel like I lost him this cycle."

"He's still investigating the murder conspiracy," Xuhriha told her. "He's downright dogged about it. We don't really chat, but I'm hoping he'll discover something before the end."

"Have you learned anything more about the library?"

"Not really, and I'm afraid there's still not much chance I can help."

"That's fine. I don't know if I can manage to convince enough people anyway."

Suria sat in silence for a while, tried to eat her food, then set it aside. She wasn't hungry anymore, and when she was honest with herself she could admit that almost all of this was just trying to distract herself from the major problem she was still facing.

The Akrashic faction wanted to ambush a professor in order to get into the vault of the Perception department, and that might end up killing someone. Suria wasn't confident that she could justify participating in that when the goal was just power, but she had to admit that the vault could contain things that would be extremely useful to her - it could even contain hints that would help her unravel the whole conspiracy.

Did that justify her actions? Would it be easier for her if the target was an unfamiliar professor Suria had never seen before as opposed to someone she knew? She didn't want to believe that it would, but she suspected it would make all the difference.

At least she'd gained clarity about one thing: the time loop didn't make her a god; she was still just a mortal trying to make the best of a bad situation. A situation that, as Xuhriha had reminded her, might have no good solutions. But that didn't actually answer her question about what to do.

-

Can I get away with a chapter like this? I guess we'll find out.