Surface Detail

Thirteen

This deep in the ice you would need serious amounts of cooling. Otherwise you’d boil. At least you would if you were any normal sort of human, or indeed if you were any kind of conventional being with the sort of biochemistry that could not cope with temperatures much outside a narrow band between freezing and boiling. Keep cool inside the ice or you’d boil alive. The alternative would be to submit to the pressure, which would crush you to oblivion even quicker than the temperature would cook you to death.

It was all relative, of course. Below freezing or above boiling of what, and where? Water was the reference medium he was used to, as part of the pan-human meta-species, and liquid water at standard temperature and pressure, he supposed, but then: whose standard temperature and pressure?

Down here, inside a water planet, under a hundred kilometres of warm ocean, the sheer pressure of the water column above turned the water first to slush and then to ice. It was high-pressure ice, not low-temperature ice, but it was still ice, and the further down towards the planet’s centre you went the harder and hotter the ice got, heated by the same pressure that had forced the water from its liquid to its solid state.

Even so, there were imperfections and contaminants in the ice: flaws, boundaries — sometimes narrowing down to only a single molecule wide — between volumes of the solid where it was possible for other liquids to slip amidst the vast compressive masses of the surrounding ice.

And, if you had evolved here, or had been carefully designed to exist here, it was even possible for creatures to exist within the ice. Tendril-slim, transparently tenuous, more like highly spread-out membranes than anything resembling an animal, they were able to make their way up and down and along the flaws and seams and fissures in the ice, seeking food in the shape of those minerals and other contaminants the ice held, or, in the case of the predators of the deep ice, attacking those grazing creatures themselves.

He — what he now was — had not evolved here. What he was now was a simulation of a creature, an organism designed to be at home in the pressure ice of a water world. But only a simulation. He was not what he appeared to be.

He was beginning to wonder if he ever had been.

The ice inside the water planet did not really exist; neither did the water planet itself, nor the star it orbited nor the galaxy beyond nor anything of what appeared to be real no matter how far out you might think you were looking. Nor how far in you looked, either. Peer into anything closely enough and you would find only the same graininess that the Real exhibited; the smallest units of measurement were the same in both realms, whether it was of time or extent or mass.

For some people, of course, this meant the Real itself was not really real, not in the sense of being genuinely the last un-simulated bedrock of actuality. According to this view everybody was already in a pre-existing simulation but simply unaware of it, and the faithful, accurate virtual worlds they were so proud of creating were just simulations within a simulation.

That way though, arguably, madness lay. Or a kind of lassitude through acceptance that could be exploited. There were few better ways of knocking the fight out of people than by convincing them that life was a joke, a contrivance under somebody else’s ultimate control, and nothing of what they thought or did really mattered.

The trick, he supposed, was never to lose sight of the theoretical possibility while not for a moment taking the idea remotely seriously.

Musing upon such thoughts, he slipped with the others down a one-kilometre-high, many-kilometres-long flaw in the ice. In human terms it was probably like being a caver, a pot-holer, he imagined. Though that must do the experience little justice.

They were, he supposed, like separate strands of sluggish oil seeping between the ice sheets on what he still thought of as a conventional world, a rocky planet with ice at the poles and mountain peaks.

He commanded a small but potent force a crack team of thirty, all highly trained and armed with poisons, chemical micro-explosives and packages of solvent. Most — perhaps all — of the marines and machines whose representations he’d inhabited over the subjective-time decades the great war had lasted to date would have regarded this as laughably inadequate weaponry, but it would be perfectly deadly down here, where not one of those marines or war machines would last for more than a fraction of a second. They were over-officered — he was here as a major, though in any other theatre he’d be a general — but that just reflected the importance of the mission.

He could feel the presence of each of the others, chemical gradients and electrochemical signals passing within and between each of them keeping him in literal touch with every one of the thirty marines under his command. Here was Corporal Byozuel on the right, slipping and sliding down a particularly wide channel, briefly beating the rest of them for penetration; here was Captain Meavaje way out on the left and spin-forward, guiding his squad’s four solvent-carrying specialists through a tricky sequence of fissures like a three-dimensional maze. First Byozuel, then the marines between them in sequence, reported a strong quake. Vatueil felt it himself an instant later.

The ice seemed to creak and whine, the space which most of Vatueil himself was in tightened, shrinking by half a millimetre. Another part of him was in a cavity a little higher further up; this widened a fraction, trying to pull him upwards. He had to grip tighter, push harder, to continue his slow progress downwards, towards the core.

…All right, sir…? came the question from Lieutenant Lyske, who was next but one along the line.

…Fine, lieutenant… he sent back.

Vatueil had sensed them all stopping, freezing in position as the quake’s compression wave had passed around and through them. Freezing like that slowed them down a fraction and it did no real good unless you were in a wide fissure about to enter a narrower one, but it was just what happened, what you did; human nature, or animal nature, or sentient nature, however you wanted to characterise it; you stopped and waited, hoping and dreading, hoping not to be about to die and dreading the feel of the ice around you shifting, and dreading too the biochemical scream that might come pulsing through the single living net they had made of themselves as somebody else was so compressed by fissures closing around them that they were squeezed to single, separated molecules, crushed to mush, chemicalised out of existence.

However, the quake had gone, leaving them all intact and alive. They resumed their progress, insinuating themselves deeper and deeper into the water world’s ice. He sent electrochemical signals out to let everybody know that they were all okay. Still, they could not afford to relax just because that little instance of random danger had gone; they were approaching the level where they might expect to find defences and guards.

He wondered how you could characterise where they were now. It was not part of the main war sim. It was not another simulation running within that one either. It was something separate, something elsewhere; similar, but held apart from the other sims.

Byozuel’s sudden signal came flashing through the net of the unit, passing from marine to marine: …Something, sir…

Vatueil commanded a full stop; they all came to a halt as quickly as possible without causing any further disturbance.

He waited a moment then sent …What do we have, corporal?

…Movement ahead, sir…

Vatueil held, waited. They all did. Byozuel was no fool — none of them were, they’d all been carefully picked. He’d be in touch when there was something to report. In the meantime, best to let him listen, sniff ahead, watch for any scintillations in the glassy darkness of the ice all around them.

Not that they’d seen much since the submarine had offloaded them in the silt slush at the bottom of the ocean, hours earlier. There had been absolutely nothing to see there; no sunlight was visible below a quarter of a klick down from the ocean surface, never mind a hundred klicks.

Once they’d entered the ice, a few cosmic rays had produced distant flashes, and a shallow ice-quake when they’d been less than a kilometre into the hard ice had produced some piezoelectric activity including a few dim glimmers, but their eyes, such as they were, represented their least useful sense.

…Ha!… The exclamation came along with a chemically transmitted wave of elation and relief, pulsing through the company of marines as though through a single body. …Sorry, sir… Byozuel sent. …Didn’t want to risk communicating anything there. Enemy combatant engaged and neutralised, sir…

…Well done, Byozuel. Its identity?

…Here, sir… A complex set of chemical idents and gradients transmitted itself through the web of the unit to Vatueil. A guard. A single, highly aware but barely sentient unit secreted in a fissure within the ice ahead and sensed by Byozuel before it could sense him. So they had to hope, anyway. Studying the analysis of the paralysed, dying creature, Vatueil could see no sign that it had communicated anything before it had been speared by Byozuel and filled with poison.

Vatueil communicated the necessary details to the rest of the platoon. …Let’s assume there will be more ahead… he told them. …Byozuel… he sent. …how’s the way ahead look from where you are?

…Good, sir. Good as we’ve seen. Not getting anything un toward, listening or smelling.

…Okay, we’re going to shift formation… Vatueil sent. …Rest of squad one and squad two, follow behind Byozuel. Three and four, regroup with same internal spacing and keep probing as we descend. We’ve got one enemy profile so watch for that but be aware there will be other types. We’re tightening up here, concentrating. Stay as wary as you like.

He felt the formation change around him, the two squads slowly shifting to concentrate and gather above Byozuel, the other two pulling in from the other side.

The ice-quake came without warning. The screams came from both sides, seemingly at the same time as the tortured shriek of the shifting ice and the hazy scintillations produced by ice contaminants’ piezoelectricity. The ice closed around Vatueil, squeezing him, producing a feeling of utter helplessness and terror just for a moment. He ignored it, let it all pass through him, prepared to die if it came to it but not prepared to show his fear. He was squeezed out of where he was, forced downwards by the sheer closing force of the ice above into a broader fissure beneath. He felt others moving out of control as well, felt three lose contact, tendrils between them broken, snapped, teased apart.

They all stopped again, those that were not writhing. Moments later, even they ceased to move, either dead or after self-administering relaxants, or being darted with them by their comrades.

Could it have been an explosion, enemy action? Had they set something off when Byozuel had neutralised the guard? The after-shocks moaned and rattled through the vastness above and around them. The quake felt too big, too comprehensive, to have come from a single-point detonation.

…Report, Vatueil sent, a moment later.

They had lost five of their total including Captain Meavaje. Some injuries: loss of senses in two, partial loss of locomotion in another two.

They regrouped again. He confirmed Lyske as his new second-in-command. They left the injured and one able-bodied marine to guard their retreat.

…Bastard blow, sir… Byozuel sent from his down-forward position, fifteen metres further down. …But it’s opened a fine-looking cleft down here. A positive highway it is, sir.

…Treat it as suspicious, Byozuel… he told the marine. …Anything obvious might be mined or sucker-trapped.

…Yes, sir. But this only just opened, to the side of the one where our friend was. Looks pristine. And deep.

…Feel confident to explore, Byozuel?

…Feel confident, sir.

…Okay, I think we’re all where we should be again. Go ahead, Byozuel, but still; take it easy.

The new fracture led almost straight down. Byozuel dropped hesitantly at first, then more quickly, with greater confidence. The rest formed up behind Byozuel, following him downwards.

The other two squads were making little progress. Vatueil decided to make the most of the advantage. He ordered them into the new fissure too.

The next guard came stumbling out of a side-crevice, a breach from the earlier fissure they’d been taking before. The guard lanced into Byozuel, instantly disabling him, but was in turn pierced by a pump-dart from one of the weapon-support specialists immediately behind Byozuel; the enemy struggled, died, started to dissolve. Byozuel adhered to one wall of the crevasse, sticking there, immobile, poisons spreading through his extended body. Another specialist flowed over him; investigating, diagnosing, trying to see where he might be cauterised, what parts might be amputated to save him. The specialist pulled away, cutting connections with Byozuel before communicating with Vatueil.

…Looks like I’ll be covering retreat too, sir… Byozuel sent.

…Looks like it, Byozuel…

…That one might have got a warning off… one of the specialists sent.

…I can see something down here, sir… sent the one who’d continued past where Byozuel had been hit. …Deep down. Looks… looks like a comprehensive light source, sir.

Establishing a better link through two more descending marines, Vatueil could more or less see what the deepest marine was seeing.

Caution to the wind time, he thought to himself.

…Stay here, Byozuel.

…Not much choice, sir.

…We’ll be back for you, Byozuel. Everybody else: we’re here. This is it. Form up for maximum attack by squad.

They gathered, shifted, configured. He felt the familiar pride, close to love, for those to whom he’d become close as they calmly and efficiently prepared to put themselves at great risk for a cause they believed in and for the collective good of their comrades. Almost sooner than he’d have liked, they were ready.

They floated, four small squads of marines, ready to receive one last electrochemical command before they split into their separate squads and could communicate only by vibration or light.

…On my command… he told them. …Go go go…

They powered down the fissure towards the unreal light of the core.

“Of course these things do not exist as you describe them. Not in the sense that they are suffered by these so-called virtual people in these alleged virtual realities. They exist only in the sense that they are imagined, talked about, warned of. Ultimately we believe that these things do exist, but we believe that they exist in the greater reality — beyond our limited understanding, and yours — that is the true Afterlife, the one that awaits all who faithfully believe, regardless of whether they have these ‘soulkeeper’ devices or not. We are content to leave such reward and punishment to God. We would not presume to take on the work of God. That is for God alone. It would be blasphemy so to presume. Frankly, you insult us by making the claims about us that you do.”

This had been a remarkably short speech by Representative Errun’s standards. As he finished, sweeping his senatorial robes about him and sitting down, Representative Filhyn had to scramble to her feet again.

“Well,” she said, “I’m sure we didn’t mean to insult you, honourable colleague.”

Errun only half-rose from his seat to say, “Insult, like many such feelings, is experienced in the soul of the person addressed; it is not something that can be granted or withheld by the person doing the addressing.”

There was murmured assent to this expression, as there had been to the one before. Representative Errun resumed his seat, accepting shoulder-pats, nods and muttered well-dones from his retinue of advisors and aides.

“As I say,” the young Representative from the Outlying Habitats said, “we did not mean to take offence.” Filhyn realised what she had said and blurted, “I mean give offence.” She stared at the Senate Speaker at the raised end of the debating chamber. “Ah, apologies,” she said to the ancient and worthy senator sitting there, surrounded by his scribbling, keyboard-tapping staff. She felt herself flush, saw the amused expression on the face of Representative Errun, and with a gesture indicating to the Speaker that she was giving way, sat down. She could hear a leaves-in-the-wind noise spreading through the public and press galleries.

Representative Filhyn went to put her trunks over her face, then remembered that the cameras would probably still be on her and so didn’t. Instead, as the Speaker brought up some doubtless lengthy and utterly irrelevant point of order, she made sure her mike was off, dipped her head to Kemracht, her aide, and said, “I might as well be wearing a necklace saying Bite Here. Put me out of my misery, Kemracht.”

“I’m hoping to, ma’am,” the young male said, nodding to a departing messenger. He put his mouth near her ear. “We have a guest for the afternoon session.”

Something about the way he said it made her rock back in her seat. She stared at him. He smiled back, using both his trunks to half-hide the expression, modestly.

“Do you mean…?” she said.

“A visitor come back from the other side.”

She smiled at him. He looked down. She gazed away to see Representative Errun looking suspiciously at her from the other side of the debating chamber. She wanted to smile broadly at him, but thought the better of it. Best to give no hint. She made her smile look like a brave but hopeless one, then quickly looked away again, as though covering her inability to keep up the pretence of good humour any longer. She put both her trunks up to her eyes, as though wiping away tears.

My, I’ll make a politician of myself yet, she thought.

They lost a whole squad to a sudden electric jolt that ran through the ice like a depth charge, leaving the marines who’d borne the brunt of it dissolving in their wakes as those unaffected continued to power their way downwards.

Another attack came from the side where the original fissure had been. Two guards, and coordinated, but this time they were ready, darting them both and leaving them jerking and dying in their slipstream as the light from below took on a greenish tinge.

The light brightened smoothly as they got closer, then it changed, became slightly duller, speckled, and with something about it that implied movement. A whole force of guards was moving up towards them, their shadows flickering against the green light from below. Vatueil tried to count, then to roughly estimate. A dozen? Twenty? More? It was too difficult and it made no difference. They were not going to pull out now.

He wished that his real self — the self that would continue back in the main war sim, the self that still held all his memories of the decades of war — would be able to remember all this. But that self would never know.

In the war sim you learned from all your mistakes, including the ones that killed you. Death itself was part of the learning process. Everything, including dying, happened within a meticulously overseen simulation where the backed-up self was allowed to know everything that had happened to each of its earlier iterations. So you learned, became continually more experienced — even wise.

This was a simulation, a virtual world, but it was not part of the war sim and there would be no going back for him or any of the other marines. They might succeed or fail, but both results would lead to their deaths. His real, continuing self, back in the war sim, would learn nothing from this mission.

If he was lucky, that self might hear that this self had succeeded on this mission — if he and the others succeeded.

They closed quickly with the core’s guards. The guards were wriggling up to meet them almost as fast as they were plunging downwards. Some darts from their opponents whizzed up past them, one deflecting off the shield of the marine next to Vatueil. His squad was in the lead; they were the vanguard, the very tip of the spear. He watched the dark shapes of the guards flit quickly closer. Very quickly; faster now than his force was falling and powering down towards them.

They would have time for one barrage, Vatueil realised, then this was rapidly going to turn into what in the old days they’d have called hand-to-hand. …Steady… he sent. Then: …Open fire!

Impact lances, poison darts, dissolver rods and tasing bolts rained down onto their opponents.

Representative Filhyn had taken her lunch on one of the broad grassy terraces on the wide roof of the main senate building. The terrace looked out over the rolling grasslands that wound around the Central Leadership Complex like a mother’s trunk round a new-born. Beyond the green river of the grasslands, the great shallow-sided ziggurats rose, vast outcrops of administration, commerce and habitation, their sides festooned with vegetation, their terraces and levels dotted with trees. The great plains beyond the city were lost in the bulking presences of the pyramids and the haze of the warm day.

Errun came alone, as his obviously hastily scribbled message had said he would. She wondered how much he had found out, and through whom. She met him at a deserted wallow near the transparent wall which ran round the terrace. She had left her robes and other personal effects with her aides, so sat, modestly attired, in the cool mud, nodding to the old male when he arrived, grunted a greeting and lowered his old, rotund body into the mud alongside.

“I am trying to imagine to what I owe this unexpected honour, senator,” she told him.

“Perhaps you are,” the portly old male said, relaxing luxuriantly in the mud. He kept his back to the view from the wallow. There was a three-metre safety gap between the transparent wall round the whole terrace and the edge — that was pretty much the minimum that a Pavulean could cope with once they were higher than one storey up — but the old senator was known to be particularly prone to vertigo. She was surprised he’d agreed to meet on such a high level in the first place. He turned in the mud to look at her. “On the other trunk, perhaps you’re not.”

He left a space she was seemingly meant to fill, but she didn’t. Half a year ago, she would have, and might have given away more than she’d have wanted to. She declined to congratulate herself just yet. Representative Errun had many more tricks than just leaving people the space to talk themselves into trouble.

“Either way,” he said, slapping some mud over his back with one trunk, “I think we should clear some things up.”

“I am all for clearing things up,” she told him.

“Um-hum,” he said, throwing more mud over himself. There was a surprising neatness, almost a delicacy to how he did this that Filhyn found quite endearing. “We are,” the old male began, then paused. “We are a fallen species, Representative.” He stopped, looked her in the eye. “May I call you Filhyn?” He raised one muddied trunk, let it fall with a small muddy splash. “As we are in such informal circumstances?”

“I suppose so,” she said. “Why not?”

“Well then. We are a fallen species, Filhyn. We have never been entirely sure what really came before us, but we have always imagined something more heroic, more bold, more like a predator. We are told this is the price of having become civilised.” Errun snorted at this. “Anyway, we are who we are, and although we are not perfect, we have done the best we could, and done quite well. And we can be proud that we have not yet surrendered to the AIs we have brought into being, or abandoned all the attributes and mechanisms that made us great, and civilised, in the first place.”

By this, Errun probably meant the primacy of natural Pavulean decision-making rather than letting their AIs have anything other than an advisory role, and commerce: money, the accumulation of capital. And — of course — Collective Wisdom, the Pavulean philosophy/religion/way of life which still bore within it traces of male supremacism and Haremism. These were exactly the things which Filhyn personally thought were now holding their whole civilisation back, but she wasn’t about to start arguing with an ancient and revered conservative like Errun. Some problems were generational; you just had to wait for the relevant elders to die off and be replaced with more progressive types. With luck.

“You people from the Outlyings see matters differently, we realise,” Errun told her. “But still, the soul of our people — our species, our civilisation — lies here, on these plains, this planet, on the terraformed New Homes and the habitats that spin around our home star.” Errun raised his gaze to the sun, currently lighting up some layers of creamy cloud to the south.

“Under this sun,” Filhyn said. She was also not going to bring up the absurdity of her being the only Representative for the whole diasporic mass of the Greater Pavulean Herd. In theory they were all part of the Fifteen Herds and there was no need for all the tens of billions of Pavuleans who now lived around other stars to have extra representation, but this was of course complete nonsense, just a way for the centre here on Pavul to keep control of its distributed empire.

“Under this sun,” the old male agreed. “Do you possess a soul-keeper device?” he asked her suddenly.

“Yes,” she told him.

“For an Outlying religion, I dare say.”

She wasn’t sure she would even call it a religion. “I’ll stay amongst my far-flung friends when I die,” she said. “My soul-keeper is keyed to our local Afterlife.”

The old male sighed, shook his head. He seemed to be about to say something — perhaps he was going to chastise her, she thought — but then he didn’t. He slapped some more mud about himself.

“We need threat to keep us honest, Filhyn,” he told her. He sounded regretful, but intent. “I wouldn’t go as far as those who wish we hadn’t rid ourselves of predators, but we need something to keep us on our toes, to bring us up to the moral mark, don’t you see?”

“I see that you believe that deeply, Representative,” she said diplomatically.

“Um-hum. You will see the track I am heading along here. I won’t dissemble. We need the threat of punishment in the after-life to keep us from behaving like mere beasts in this existence.” He waved one trunk. “I have no idea if there really is a God, Filhyn, any more than you do, any more than the Grand High Priest does.” He snorted. Filhyn was genuinely shocked to hear him say this, even if she’d long assumed just that. “Perhaps God resides in the places where the Sublimed live, in these hidden dimensions, so conveniently folded up and hard to get at,” the old male said. “I suppose it is almost the last place He might. As I say, I don’t know. But I know most certainly that there is evil in us, and I know and accept that the technologies that have given us the means to express that evil — allowing us to exterminate our natural predators — have led in turn to the technologies that now let us save our souls, that let us save ourselves and that let us continue to administer rewards and punishments beyond the grave. Or at least… the threat of punishment.” He looked at her.

She slowly smeared her own back with mud. “Are you going to tell me that it is only the threat?”

He rolled a little closer to her, rotating in the grey-brown mud. “Of course it is just the threat,” he told her quietly, conspiratorially, with a hint of humour. He rolled back again. “All that matters is that people are frightened into behaving properly while they are alive. What happens after they are dead is really no concern of the living. Nor should it ever be.” He chuckled. “That last bit’s just my personal belief, but it’s also the truth of the matter as it stands. We scare them with these threats of correction and unpleasantness but once they’re scared there’s no need actually to impose the punishments. There are entire teams of creatives: artists, scenarioists, writers, explicators, designers, psychologists, sound sculptors and… well, God knows who and what else… Anyway, their entire working lives are spent creating a completely unrealistic environment and a completely false expectation for completely good and moral reasons.”

“So the Hells only exist as a threat, to keep people in line while they’re still alive.”

“Well, ours certainly does. And that’s all it does. Can’t speak for the Afterlives of aliens. But I’ll tell you this: a lot of the current fuss about them is founded on a basic misunderstanding. What’s annoying is that people who don’t want them to exist can’t accept that they actually don’t exist. Meanwhile they’re wrecking the whole point of pretending that they do. If people just shut up and stopped complaining about things that don’t happen in the first place then there wouldn’t be any problem. Life would go on, people would behave themselves and nobody would really get hurt.” The old male shook himself, seemingly disgusted. “I mean, what do they want? To make the Hells real so that people can be suitably frightened of them?”

“So where are all the people who ought to be in other Afterlives, in Heavens? Because they are not there.”

Errun snorted. “In limbo.” He slapped at something on his flank, inspected what he found there. An imaginary insect, Filhyn suspected. “Stored, but not functioning, not in any sense living.” He seemed to hesitate, then rolled closer to her again. “May I speak in confidence, Filhyn?”

“I assumed all that’s being said here is in confidence, Representative.”

“Of course, of course, but I mean in particular confidence; something that you would not even share with your closest aides or a partner. Something strictly between you and me.”

“Yes,” she said. “Very well. Go ahead,”

He rolled closer still. “Some of those who disappear, who it might appear go into this so-called Hell,” he said quietly, “are simply deleted.” He looked at her, quite serious. She looked back. “They are not even held in limbo,” he told her. “They simply cease to be; their soulkeeper thing is wiped clean and the information, their soul, is not transferred anywhere. That’s the truth, Filhyn. It’s not something that’s supposed to happen, but it does. Now,” he said, tapping her on one front knee, “you most emphatically did not hear that from me, do you understand?”

“Of course,” she said.

“Good. That really is something we don’t want people knowing. Don’t you see?” he asked her. “All that matters is that people believe they are still living in some sense, and suffering. But, frankly, why waste the computer space on the bastards? Excuse my language.”

Filhyn smiled. “Is it not always better to tell the truth though, Representative?”

Errun looked at her, shook his head. “The truth? No matter what? For good or ill? Are you mad? I do hope you’re having a joke with me here, young lady.” He held his nostrils with the finger stubs of one trunk and submerged himself completely in the mud, resurfacing moments later and snorting powerfully before wiping the mud from his eyes. “Don’t pretend you are so naive, Filhyn. The truth is not always useful, not always good. It’s like putting your faith in water. Yes, we need the rain, but too much can sweep you away in a flood and drown you. Like all great natural, elemental forces, the truth needs to be channelled, managed, controlled and intelligently, morally allocated.” He glared at her. “You are having a joke with me, aren’t you?”

I might as well be, she thought. She wondered if she would finally be a real politician when she agreed with what Errun was saying.

“Otherwise we are both wasting our time here, Representative.”

One of us certainly is, she thought. She looked up, saw Kemracht signalling her from some distance away. “Not at all, Representative,” she told the old male as she rose on all fours. “This has been most instructive. However, if you’ll excuse me, I must go. Will you shower with me?”

The old male looked at her for some moments. “Thank you, no. I’ll stay here a little longer.” He kept looking at her. “Don’t rock the barge, Filhyn,” he told her. “And don’t believe everything that everybody tells you. That’s no way to the truth; just confusion and muddle.”

“I assure you I don’t,” she told him. She performed a modestly shallow curtsy with her front legs. “I’ll see you for the afternoon session, Representative.”

He was one of the only two survivors of his squad, and their total force now numbered six. The rest had fallen to the up-swarming mass of guards. His marines had the better weaponry and were easily a match for the opposition, one against one, but there had been many more of the guards than there had seemed at first, and even when he and his men had poured through their entangling mass of bodies and weaponry they had encountered nets of barbs, nets of poisons and nets of convulsing electricity. Piercing, cutting those took more time, and, held up there, enfolded in the sickly green light flooding up from below, they’d been attacked from above by the remnants of the guards they had forced their way through. More marines had fallen, or dissolved, or jerked and spasmed, spiralling upwards.

But then they were through, just six of them. They fell against the green glowing surface, expanded, released their packaged solvents and seemed to become part of the transparent wall itself.

Then they were through, and falling. The conceit of the ice above was gone. Now they were in some vast spherical space, like the inside of a multi-layered moon. Above were quickly closing holes like bruises in a layer of dark cloud. The conceit of their own forms had changed too. No longer tissue-thin membranes, they were dark, solid shapes; serrated spearheads plunging down, accelerating hard. They fell through vacuum towards a landscape of something between a single surface-covering city and a gigantic industrial plant, all lights and grids and swirling patterns of luminescence, flares, drifting smokes and steams, rivers and fountains and whirlpools of light.

It is like a dream, Vatueil thought. A dream of flying, falling…

He snapped himself out of it, looked about, taking stock, evaluating. Five more besides himself. In theory only one was needed. In practice, or at least in the best sims they’d been able to run for this, a force of twelve gave an eighty per cent chance of success. Fifty-fifty came with a force of nine. With six of them to make the final assault, the odds were slim. The simulations experts hadn’t even wanted to talk about a force of less than eight making the last push.

Still, not impossible. And what was glory but something that reduced the more there were of you to share it?

The vast, coruscating landscape below was probably the most beautiful thing he had ever seen in his long and varied existence. It was heartbreaking that they had come here to destroy it utterly.

Special Witness Sessions were rare events in the chamber, even if this was the low season when most of the Representatives were on holiday or just on other business. Filhyn had had to pull pretty much all the strings she could, call in all the favours she thought she might be owed, to arrange the session, not just at such short notice, but at all.

Their witness needed no real coaching, which was just as well as there had been little time to arrange any.

“Prin,” she’d told him, just before the session started, while they’d been waiting in the antechamber and Errun and his people had been trying to get the special session cancelled or postponed, “will you be able to do this?”

She knew how intimidating it could be to stand in the chamber, all eyes upon you, trying to make your point, knowing that hundreds were looking at you there and then, tens of millions were watching throughout the system in real time and possibly billions might hear your words and see your actions and expressions later — potentially tens, even hundreds of billions if what you said turned out to be of any great importance or at least of interest to the news channels.

“I can do it,” he’d told her. His eyes looked too old, she thought, though that might just be her fancy, given that she now knew a little of what he’d been through.

“Deep breaths,” she’d advised him. “Concentrate on one person when you speak. Ignore others and forget about the cameras.” He’d nodded.

She hoped he’d be able to keep himself together. The chamber had an odd buzz about it, with a few more straggler Reps suddenly present who hadn’t been able to drag themselves away from whatever City business had been detaining them in the morning. Some of the journalist seats and camera positions in the press galleries were occupied now that hadn’t been before. Usually the afternoon sessions were quieter than the morning ones. The rumour mills had obviously been working. Even less than a third full, the chamber could be an intimidating place.

Ultimately, they were herd animals, for all their civilising, and to be singled out in the herd had been almost inevitably lethal for most of the millions of years of their species’ existence. Other species, non-herd species, must have it easier, she supposed. Their own predator species would have found it easier, for sure, had they won the struggle to be the planet’s dominant species. But then they were not the ones present. For all their ferocity they had lost the struggle, been quietly out-bred, sidelined, driven to extinction or into the twilight existence of nature reserves and breeding zoos.

In the end she need not have worried.

She was able to sit back and listen — crying, quite a lot, quite openly and freely and without even trying to hide it — and watch the effect that Prin’s sober, unhurried testimony had on the others in the chamber. The bare details were unbearable enough — she discovered later that most of the networks censored some of the more sickening parts — but the truly crushing, the most undeniably effective moments came when Prin was subject to the most ferocious cross-examination by the Traditionalist party in general and by Representative Errun in particular.

Did he really expect to be taken seriously with this mass of lies?

They were not lies. He wished that they were. He did not necessarily expect to be taken seriously because he knew how monstrous and cruel it all sounded, and how much many different interests did not want the truth to be known. He knew that they would do all that they could to discredit both him personally and what he was telling people.

How could he even tell this was not some bizarre nightmare, some possibly drug-induced hallucination?

It was a matter of fact that he had been away for real-time weeks, his body held within a fully licensed medical facility, exactly like the kind that many Representatives had used for various treatments over the years. He had never heard of a nightmare that went on for so long. Had the Representative?

So, he did not deny it might have been drug-induced?

He did deny it. He did not take drugs. He never had, not even now, when his physician said he ought to, to try to stop the nightmares he had, reliving what he had been through. Would a blood test convince the Representative?

So now he suddenly admitted that he did have nightmares after all!

As he’d just said, only due to the Hell he had just lived through.

Representative Errun would not let go. He had been a trial lawyer, then a judge, and famous for his questioning, his brutal tenacity. She watched him become more and more determined to rattle Prin, to trip him up and bring him down, to reveal him as a liar or a fantasist or a fanatic, and she listened to him lose. With every extra detail Errun dragged out of Prin he made the totality of the revelations’ impact all the greater.

Yes, everybody was nude in Hell. Yes, people in Hell might try to have sex, but that was punishable. In Hell only rape was permitted. Just as in Hell only war formed the basis for any social structure. Yes, people died in Hell. You could die a million times, suffer its agonies on a million separate occasions, and every time you would be brought back for further punishment, more torture. The demons were people who had been sadists in the Real; to them, Hell was more like their own heaven.

No, there were not that many sadists in the Real, but there could be as many as the functioning of Hell required because this was all virtual, remember, and individuals could be copied. One sadist, one person who gloried in the pain of others, would be all you needed; you’d just create a million copies.

Yes, he was aware of the claims that the tours of Hell that people were forced to undergo, sometimes as part of a court’s judgement, were of a Hell that didn’t exist, or that only existed in a very limited sense while the miscreants were being shown round, and that anybody who failed to return from such grisly junkets had merely been put into limbo. But that was a lie.

Filhyn saw somebody hand Errun a note. A shiver of apprehension ran through her.

She thought she saw Errun’s eyes glint with something like exaltation, with cruelty, with victory anticipated. The old male’s tone and demeanour changed as he became more statesmanlike and solemn, like somebody delivering a final judgement, a coup-de-grâce, more in regret than anger.

Was it not true, he said, that he, Prin, had gone into this dream or nightmare, this supposed Hell, with his wife? So where was she? Why was she not at his side now to back up his wild claims?

Filhyn thought she might faint. Wife? He’d taken his wife with him? Had he been mad? Why hadn’t he said anything — even just to her? A despair settled over her.

Prin was answering.

First of all, the female concerned was his love and his mate, but not formally his wife. He had left her behind, right at the very end, when there had been a chance for only one of them to get out and he had had to do the hardest thing he had ever had to do in his life and leave her in there to suffer while he escaped to tell the truth of what was happening there, what was still happening there to—

And why had he left her out of this tale, this — it was now conclusively revealed — confection of lies, half-truths and outright fantasy?

Because he had been afraid to mention her participation in the mission into Hell.

Afraid? Him? A man who claimed to have been through Hell and come back? Afraid?

“Yes, afraid,” Prin said, his voice ringing out in the hushed chamber, “I am afraid that before I can take my testimony to where it really needs to be heard, before a Jury of the Galactic Council, somebody old and trustworthy and of impeccable, indisputable honour — somebody like yourself, sir — will come to me and quietly tell me that I can have my beloved back, out of Hell, if only I’ll say no more about what she and I experienced there, and indeed even retract what I’ve already said.” Prin looked, blinking, round the other members of the party opposite, then at the press and public galleries, as though suddenly seeing them for the first time. Then he looked back at Representative Errun. “Because I am afraid that I will accept that offer, sir, because I can’t bear the thought of her continuing to suffer in that place a moment longer, and I will abandon all the others there just to get my beloved back, and so will hate myself for ever for my weakness and selfishness.” He let out a deeply held breath. “That’s why I kept her—”

Errun seemed finally to wake up to the veiled accusation Prin had just levelled at him. He erupted with indignation, swiftly followed by his followers and shortly by the rest of the Traditionalist party. In moments, the chamber was as noisy as Filhyn had ever heard it, even when it was packed.

Prin might have permitted himself a smile then, Filhyn thought, if this had been no more than a debate in a debating chamber. He did not, could not, she realised, because he was perfectly serious and completely terrified of exactly what he had just revealed.

He turned to look at her. She smiled as best she could through her tears, mouthed “Well done,” at him and nodded for him to sit down.

He nodded to the Speaker, then sat.

Not that the worthy senator in the Speaker’s chair was actually in it, or taking any notice; he was on his feet roaring and waving both trunks, trying to restore order. Filhyn recognised the chamber letting off steam after having been forced to listen to something they hadn’t wanted to hear coming from somebody who was not one of their own. Not to mention somebody who had just reminded them that there were higher and greater talking shops than this one.

“That’s put the pride amidst the herd,” Kemracht muttered from behind her. Meanwhile the Speaker was rising furiously on his hind legs and clapping his front feet together. That wild breach of protocol hadn’t happened for years.

The news services carried everything — ah, the joys of a slow news day during the slack season. They showed the Speaker trampling etiquette and rearing to his feet like a disputing skivvy, they showed Errun turning shades of rage that Filhyn had not thought him capable of; and most of all they showed Prin: calm, flawless but sincere. And his words, those ghastly, searing, near-unimaginable details!

And herself. With her, mostly the news teams focused on her crying.

Her tears — not her oratory, sincerity, political skill or her principles — had made her properly famous.