Surface Detail

Eighteen

There was nothing worse, Veppers thought, than a loser who’d made it. It was just part of the way things worked — part of the complexity of life, he supposed — that sometimes somebody who absolutely deserved nothing more than to be one of the down-trodden, the oppressed, the dregs of society, lucked out into a position of wealth, power and admiration.

At least people who were natural winners knew how to carry themselves in their pomp, whether their ascendancy had come through the luck of being born rich and powerful or the luck of being born ambitious and capable. Losers who’d made it always let the side down. Veppers was all for arrogance — he possessed the quality in full measure himself, as he’d often been informed — but it had to be deserved, you had to have worked for it. Or at the very least, an ancestor had to have worked for it.

Arrogance without cause, arrogance without achievement — or that mistook sheer luck for true achievement — was an abomination. Losers made everybody look bad. Worse, they made the whole thing — the great game that was life — appear arbitrary, almost meaningless. Their only use, Veppers had long since decided, was as examples to be held up to those who complained about their lack of status or money or control over their lives: look, if this idiot can achieve something, so can anybody, so can you. So stop whining about being exploited and work harder.

Still, at least individual losers were quite obviously statistical freaks. You could allow for that, you could tolerate that, albeit with gritted teeth. What he would not have believed was that you could find an entire society — an entire civilisation — of losers who’d made it. And the Culture was exactly that.

Veppers hated the Culture. He hated it for existing and he hated it for — for far too damned many credulous idiots — setting the standard for what a decent society ought to look like and so what other peoples ought to aspire to. It wasn’t what other peoples ought to aspire to; it was what machines had aspired to, and created, for their own inhuman purposes.

It was another of Veppers’ deeply held personal beliefs that when you were besieged or felt cornered, you should attack.

He marched into the Culture ambassador’s office in Ubruater and threw the remains of the neural lace down on her desk.

“What the fuck is this?” he demanded.

The Culture ambassador was called Kreit Huen. She was a tall, statuesque woman, slightly oddly proportioned for a Sichultian but still attractive in a haughty, formidable sort of way. It had crossed Veppers’ mind on more than one occasion to have one of his impersonator girls change to look just like the Culture woman, so he could fuck her conceited brains out, but in the end he couldn’t bring himself to; he had his pride.

When Veppers burst in she was standing at a window of her generously proportioned penthouse office looking out over the city to where, in the hazy sunlight of early afternoon, a large, dark, sleek ship was hovering over the massive Veprine Corporation tower, at the heart of Ubruater’s central business district. She was drinking something steaming from a cup and was dressed like an office cleaner; a barefoot office cleaner. She turned and looked, blinking, at the tangle of silvery-blue wires lying on her desk.

“Afternoon to you too,” she said quietly. She walked over, peered more closely at the thing. “It’s a neural lace,” she told him. “How bad are your techs getting?” She looked at the other man just entering the room. “Good afternoon, Jasken.”

Jasken nodded. Behind him, floating in the doorway, was the drone which had chosen not to get in Veppers’ way when he’d come storming through. They’d known Veppers was heading in their direction for about three minutes, as soon as his flier had left the Justice Ministry and set course for their building, so she had had plenty of time to decide exactly how to appear when he arrived.

“Ki-chaow! Ki-chaow!” a reedy voice sang out from behind one of the room’s larger couches. Veppers looked and saw a small blond head duck back down.

“And what is that?” he asked.

“That is a child, Veppers,” Huen said, pulling her chair out from the desk. “Really, what next?” She pointed at the window. “Sky. Clouds. Oh look; a birdy.” She sat down, picked up the lace. The drone — a briefcase-sized lozenge — floated nearby. Huen frowned. “How did you come by this?”

“It’s been in a fire,” the drone muttered. The machine had been Huen’s servant (or master — who knew!) for the three years she had been there. It was supposed to have a name or a title or some thing and Veppers had been “introduced” to it but he refused to remember whatever it was supposed to be called.

“Ki-chaow!”

The blond child was standing behind the couch, only its head and one hand — formed into a pretend gun — showing. The gun was pointing at Jasken, who had brought his Oculenses down from over his head and was frowning like a stage villain and pointing his own finger at the child, sighting carefully down it. He jerked his hand back suddenly, as though in recoil. “Urk!” the child said, and disappeared, flopping onto the couch with a small thud. Veppers knew Huen had a child; he hadn’t expected to find the brat in her office.

“It was found in the ashes of one of my staff,” Veppers told Huen, knuckles on her desk, arms spread, leaning over her. “And my extremely able techs reckon it’s one of yours, so my next question is, what the fuck is the Culture doing putting illegal espionage equipment into the heads of my people? You are not supposed to spy on us, remember?”

“Haven’t the foggiest idea what it was doing there,” Huen said, handing the lace to the outstretched maniple field of the drone, which teased it out to its maximum extent. The remains of the lace took on the rough shape of a brain. Veppers caught a glimpse and found the sight oddly unsettling. He slammed one palm on Huen’s desk.

“What the hell do you think gives you the right to do something like this?” He waved one hand at the lace as it glowed in the drone’s immaterial grasp. “I have every right to take this to court. This is a violation of our rights and the Mutual Contact Agreement we signed in good faith when you communist bastards first arrived.”

“Who had it in their head anyway?” Huen asked, sitting back in her seat and putting her hands behind her head, one shoeless foot over her other knee. “What happened to them?”

“Don’t evade the question!” Veppers slammed the desk again.

Huen shrugged. “All right. Nothing in particular gives us — whoever ‘us’ might be here — the right to do something like this.” She frowned. “Whose head was it in?”

The drone made a throat-clearing noise. “Whoever they were they either died in a fire or were cremated,” it said. “Probably the latter; high-temperature combustion, probably few impurities. Hard to tell — this has been cleaned and analysed. At first quite crudely and then only a little clumsily.” The machine swivelled in the air as though looking at Veppers. “By Mr. Veppers’ techs and then by our Jhlupian friends, I’d guess.” The barely visible haze around the machine had turned vaguely pink. Veppers ignored it.

“Don’t try to wriggle out of it,” he said, pointing one finger at Huen. (“Ki-chaow!” said a small voice from the other side of the room.) “Who cares who ‘us’ is? ‘Us’ is you; ‘us’ is the Culture. This thing is yours so you’re responsible. Don’t try to deny it.”

“Mr. Veppers has a point,” the drone said reasonably. “This is our tech — quite, ah, high tech — if you know what I mean, and I imagine it — or the seed that became it, as it were — was emplaced by somebody or something who might reasonably be described as belonging to the Culture.”

Veppers glared at the machine. “Fuck off,” he told it.

The drone seemed unruffled. “I was agreeing with you, Mr. Veppers.”

“I don’t need this thing’s agreement,” Veppers told Huen. “I need to know what you intend to do about this violation of the terms of the agreement that lets you stay here.”

Huen smiled. “Leave it with me. I’ll see what I can do.”

“That’s not good enough. And that thing leaves with me,” he said, pointing at the lace. “I don’t want it conveniently disappearing.” He hesitated, then snatched it from the drone’s grasp. The sensation was unsettling, like plunging one’s hand into a warm, cloying foam.

“Seriously,” Huen said. “Whose head was it in? It’ll help with our investigations if we know.”

Veppers pushed himself upright with one fist, folded his arms. “Her name was L. Y’breq,” he told the Culture woman. “A court authorised ward of mine and the subject of a commercial Generational Reparation Order under the Indented Intagliate Act.”

Huen frowned, then sat forward, looked away for a moment. “Ah, the Marked woman?… Lededje? I remember her. Talked to her, a few times.”

“I’m sure you did,” Veppers said.

“She was… okay. Troubled, but all right. I liked her.” She looked at Veppers with what he felt sure was meant to be profound sincerity. “She’s dead?”

“Extremely.”

“I’m very sorry to hear that. Please pass on my condolences to her family and loved ones.”

Veppers smiled thinly. “Myself, in other words.”

“I’m so sorry. How did she die?”

“She took her own life.”

“Oh…” Huen said, her expression pained. She looked down. Veppers wanted to smack her in the teeth with something heavy. She took a deep breath, stared at the surface of the desk. “That is… ”

Veppers took over before it got too sentimental. “I expect some sort of report, an accounting for this. I’m going to be away for the next few days—”

“Yes,” the drone said, pivoting to point towards the view, specifically at where the sleek shape of the ship stationed over the Veprine Corporation tower threw a slanted grey shadow over part of the city, “we saw your ride arrive.”

Veppers ignored it. He pointed at Huen again. (“Ki-chaow!” said the voice from the couch.) “And by the time I get back I expect to hear some sort of explanation. If not, there will be consequences. Legal and diplomatic consequences.”

“Did she leave a note?” Huen asked.

“What?” Veppers said.

“Did she leave a note?” Huen repeated. “Often when people kill themselves, they leave a note. Something to explain why they did it. Did Lededje?”

Veppers allowed his mouth to hang open a little, to attempt to express just how grotesquely insulting and irrelevant this piece of meddling effrontery was. He shook his head.

“You have six days,” he told the woman. He turned and walked to the door. “Answer any further questions she has,” he told Jasken as he passed him. “I’ll be in the flier. Don’t take too long.” He left.

“That man had a funny nose,” said the little voice from behind the couch.

“So, Jasken,” Huen said, smiling a little for a moment. “Did she leave a note?”

Jasken cradled his good hand in the sling. “No note was left, ma’am,” he told her.

She looked at him for a moment. “And was it suicide?”

Jasken’s expression remained just as it had been. “Of course, ma’am.”

“And you have no idea how the lace came to be in her head?”

“None, ma’am.”

She nodded slowly, took a breath, sat forward. “How’s the arm?”

“This?” he moved the arm in the cast out from his body a little. “Fine. Healing. Feels good as new.”

“I’m glad.” Huen smiled. She got up from the chair behind the desk and nodded. “Thank you, Jasken.”

“Ma’am,” he said, with a short bow.

Huen held her child in her arms as she and the drone watched Veppers’ wide-bodied flier depart from overhead, its rotund mirrored rear glinting in the golden sunshine as it banked. The craft straightened and headed directly towards the Veprine Corporation tower and the ship — barely smaller than the tower itself — poised immediately above it.

The drone’s name was Olfes-Hresh. “Well,” it said, “the nose injury’s real enough, but it was never done with a blade, and not a bone in Jasken’s arm has ever been broken. His arm is perfectly healthy save for about twenty days’ worth of minor atrophy due to partial immobility. Also? That cast has concealed hinges to let it come off easily.”

“Did you get a full reading on the lace?”

“As good as though he’d left it.”

She glanced at the machine. “And?”

The drone wobbled, its equivalent of a shrug. “SC tech, or good as.”

Huen nodded, staring at the Jhlupian ship as Veppers’ aircraft flew towards it. She patted her child’s back softly. “That’s interesting.”

Chay found herself in the Refuge. The Refuge took up the entire summit of a finger of rock which thrust up from the scrubby desert. The remains of a natural arch lay in great piles of sand blown stone between the Refuge mesa and the nearby plateau. The only access to the Refuge was by a rope and cane basket, lowered the thirty metres from the Refuge to the desert floor by pulleys worked by muscle power. The Refuge had expanded over the years to rise to six or seven storeys of cluttered wood and adobe buildings, and spilled over the side of the mesa itself via tree-trunk-propped platforms supporting further precariously poised architecture.

Only females were allowed in the Refuge. The more senior females copied things called manuscripts. She was treated, if not exactly as a servant, then certainly as somebody who was junior, whose opinions did not really matter, whose importance came solely from the menial tasks that she performed.

When not sleeping, eating or working she was at worship, joining everybody else in the Refuge praising God in the chapel. God here was a female deity, worshipped for Her fecundity by these celibates in long services full of chanting.

She tried to explain that she didn’t believe in God but this was at first dismissed as impossible nonsense — as absurd as denying the existence of the sun or gravity — then, when the others saw she was serious, she was hauled up before the fearsome Superior of the Refuge, who explained that belief in God was not a choice. She was newly arrived and would be indulged this time, but she must submit to the will of God and obey her betters. In the villages and cities they burned people alive for proclaiming that God did not exist. Here, if she persisted, she would be starved and beaten until she saw sense.

Not everybody, the Superior explained — and at this point the formidable female in her dark robes of office appeared suddenly old, Chay thought — was able to accept God into their hearts as easily or as fully as did the most pious and enlightened. Even if she had not yet opened herself completely to God’s love, she must realise that it was something that would come with time, and the very rituals and services, devotions and chants that she found so meaningless might themselves lead to the belief she lacked, even if at first she did not feel that she partook of them with any faith at all.

Just as one might do useful work without fully understanding the job one was engaged in, or even what the point of it was, so the behaviour of devotion still mattered to the all-forgiving God, and just as the habitual performance of a task gradually raised one’s skills to something close to perfection, bringing a deeper understanding of the work, so the actions of faith would lead to the state of faith.

Finally, she was shown the filthy, stinking, windowless cell carved into the rock beneath the Refuge where she would be chained, starved and beaten if she did not at least try to accept God’s love. She trembled as she looked at the shackles and the flails, and agreed she would do her best.

She shared a dorm with half a dozen others on the floor beneath the top, looking out in the other direction from the nearby plateau, towards the open desert. These were open rooms; one wall missing with only a heavy tarpaulin to lower if the dusty wind was blowing in, with stepped floors leading down to a wall that was hidden from the topmost tier. Open rooms, with a view over the plain, desert or grassland, were comforting places. Closed rooms felt wrong, imprisoning, especially for going to sleep in or waking up in. Similarly, being alone was a punishment to an individual from a herd species, so like most normal people she liked to bed down in a group with at least half a dozen others.

She woke the others up with her nightmares too often to be a popular sleep-companion, but then she was not alone in having tormenting dreams.

She had books to read and other people to talk to, and all she had to do for her keep was help with the general work required to keep the place in good repair and add her strength to help pull on the ropes which brought the baskets of water and food — and the very occasional visitor or noviciate — up from the cluster of small buildings at the base of the mesa. The services and chants became just part of the routine. She still resented them and still thought they were without meaning, but she added her voice to all the others.

The weather was warm without being uncomfortable except when the wind blew out of the desert and brought dust with it. The water came from a deep well near the base of the mesa and was still deliciously cold when it arrived in the big cane-wrapped pottery jars.

She stood by the walls over the cliff sometimes, staring down at the land beneath, marvelling at her lack of fear. She knew that she ought to feel threatened by the precipitous drop, but she didn’t. The others thought she was mad. They stayed away from the edges, avoided being too near windows over sheer drops.

She had no idea how long she would be allowed to stay in the Refuge. Presumably until she got so used to life here it had come to seem normal. Then, when all that had gone before had started to seem like a terrible dream, just a nightmare, and she had convinced herself that this limited but safe and frugally rewarding life was going to continue; then, when she had learned to hope, she would be taken back to the Hell.

They had done what they could with her memories to make them less raw and livid than they would have been, and, when she slept, the nightmares, though still terrible, were somehow more vague than she might have expected.

After a year there, she began to sleep quite well. But the memories were still there in some form, she knew. She supposed they had to be. Your memories made you.

She could remember more of her life in the Real, now. Before, during roughly the latter half of the time she had spent in the Hell with Prin, she had come to think that that earlier life — her real life, she supposed — had itself been a dream, or something that had been part of the torture: concocted, imposed to make the suffering worse. Now she accepted that it probably had been real, and she had simply been driven out of her mind by her experiences in Hell.

She had been a real person, a Pavulean academic involved with the good cause of bringing an end to the Hells. She had met Prin at the university and between them they’d had the connections and the bravery to get themselves sent into the Hell, to record what they experienced there and bring back the truth of it to the world. The Hell had been virtual, but the experiences and the suffering had felt entirely real. She had lost her mind and retreated to a belief that her earlier, Real life had been a dream, or some thing invented within the Hell to make the contrast between the two all the more painful.

Prin had been stronger than her. He had stayed sane and tried to save her along with himself when the time came for them to attempt their escape, but only he had got through and returned to the Real. At the time she’d convinced herself he’d only gone from one bit of the Hell to another, but he must have got out entirely. If he hadn’t she was sure she’d have been presented with the proof of it by now.

She had been taken before the king of Hell, some ultimate demon who had been frustrated that she had no hope and so was resigned to the Hell, and he had killed her. Then she had woken here, in this hale and healthy Pavulean body, on this strange tall stick of rock poised between the plateau and the desert.

A sun, yellow-white, rose and fell, arcing high over the desert. Out in the desert, lines of tiny dots that might be animals or people moved sometimes. Birds flew in the sky, singly or in small flocks, occasionally landing and calling raucously from the highest roofs of the Refuge buildings.

Rains came rarely, sweeping in from the plateau in giant dark veils like the trailing bristles of a vast broom. The Refuge smelled strange, pleasantly different for a half-day afterwards, and the open rooms and quiet courtyards were full of the sound of dripping. Once she stood and listened to the steady drip-drip-drip of an overflowing gutter as its rhythm exactly matched that of a chant being sung in the chapel, and marvelled at the simple beauty of both.

There was a track that led away over the plateau towards the flat horizon, and from the track’s end a steep path zigzagged down flaws and ravines cut into the plateau edge until it met the slope of rubble at the foot of the cliff. Far away across the plateau, at the far end of the track, there was a road, apparently, and the road led to a city; to many cities, eventually, but even the closest was many tens of days away and none of them were good places; they were dangerous and unhealthy, the sort of places that you needed a refuge to get away from. She had never felt any desire to go to any of them, never felt any desire to leave the Refuge at all.

They would leave her until this all became normal, until it had become all that she really remembered, then she would be dragged back to the Hell again. She never lost sight of this, accepting each day without pain as a blessing but never taking the next day for granted.

She had been there over two years before she was asked to help with the copying of the manuscripts. This was what the females of the Refuge did to pay for the food they received via the road and the track and the path and the buildings at the foot of the mesa and the rope-hauled cane baskets: they made perfect copies of ancient, illuminated manuscripts in a language that none of them understood. The blank books, pens, inks and gold leaf arrived by basket and, a year or two later, the completed books were sent back down by basket to start their journey back to the distant cities.

You were only alone when you worked on the manuscripts. You were allocated a bare copying cell which had a desk, a manuscript to be copied, a blank book which would become the copy and a supply of pens and inks. Each cell had a single window which was too high up in the wall to present a distracting view but which provided plenty of light. Her eyes would start to hurt after a few hours. It was a relief to herd down to the chapel with the others and sing, eyes closed or raised to the resplendent light of the chapel’s translucently glowing plaster windows. She had become a good singer, and knew many of the chants by heart.

She worked hard at copying the manuscripts, marvelling at their indecipherable beauty. The illuminations were of stars and planets and fabulous animals and ancient buildings and plants; lots of trees and flowers and verdant landscapes. Even so, she thought, as she carefully traced and then coloured in the illuminations and subsequently copied the mysterious letters, for all she knew these were instruction manuals for torturing people and the pretty illustrations were just to fool you.

She worked away, filling her days with the silent copying of the words onto the blank pages and the echoed singing of the chants into the embracing space of the chapel.

The books that she was able to read — which came from a separate library, and were much plainer and cruder-looking than the ones she and the others copied — all talked only of a time long before she had been born, and the other females of the Refuge also talked solely of a much more simple time: cities with no public transport, ships with sails and no engines, medicine that was little better than crossing your trunks and hoping, and no real industry at all, just the workshops of individuals.

Still, they found things to talk about: the general idiocy of males, the boringness of their diet, the rumours of bandits in the desert or on the plateau, the frailties, jealousies, friendships, enmities and crushes of their fellows and all the general gossip of a couple of hundred people of the same sex all cooped up together with a rigid if generally non-punitive hierarchy.

The other females looked at her uncomprehendingly when she tried to tell them what had happened to her. She guessed they thought she was mad. They seemed to have had no life beyond this one, with all the limitations of technology and mores that implied; they had been raised in the distant cities or in rural communities, they had experienced some misfortune and been thrown out of whatever herd community they had been part of, been rescued and brought here. As far as she could tell they really did believe in this God that they all had to worship. Still, at least this God promised only one afterlife, for those worthy. Heaven awaited the pious while those found wanting faced oblivion rather than perpetual torture.

She wondered sometimes how long this was all taking, back in the Real. She knew something of the technology and the ratios involved; a year of time in the Real could be compressed into a minute in a virtual environment. It was the opposite of a nearlightspeed experience; spend what felt to you like half a lifetime away but come back — a changed, completely different person — and find that only an hour had passed and nobody had even missed you. Was this quiet, pain-free life running at that speed? Or at a gentler rate, perhaps even in real-time?

For all she knew, she realised eventually, she was living ultra slowly in this virtual existence, and what felt like a few years here was a millennium back in the Real, so that if she ever did get back she would find everything altered totally and all the people she had known long dead; so long dead that even in the average and perfectly pleasant Afterlife there would be no trace of them left.

Very occasionally, as she stood by one of the cliff-edge walls, she wondered what would happen to her if she climbed over and jumped. Straight back here? Back to the Hell? Or nothing, just oblivion. “You are so fearless!” the others told her when they saw her standing there, looking down.

But not so fearless she would take the leap and find out.

After a few years she took on some extra responsibilities in the script room, overseeing and checking the work of others. In the chapel, she led the singing, often as not. By now the Refuge Superior was a wizened old thing with poor back legs; in time she needed a trolley for her hind quarters, and help to ascend the spiral ramp that led to the higher floors of the Refuge. She started instructing Chay in the running of the Refuge, bringing her into its administration. Chay was given her own small room, though usually she still preferred to bed down with the others when night fell. She still had nightmares of suffering and torment, but they were duller and even more vague now.

One evening, seven years after she’d arrived, a fire broke out when the hot desert wind was blowing. They all fought it desperately, quickly using up the little water they had. Ten of them perished in smoke-filled rooms trying to save the manuscripts, finally throwing the precious originals from high windows into the central courtyard and saving all but two before being choked by the smoke or caught by the flames. Six of them died when a whole wing of the Refuge, supports weakened by the fire, fell to the desert in a great boiling burst of flame and smoke. Even over the terrible roaring noise produced by the disintegrating brick work, splintering wood and careening flame, you could hear the screams as they fell.

Night had fallen by then and the wind had gone. She watched the rolling rush of sparks produced by the collapse sweeping upwards, outshining and outnumbering the stars in the clear black gulf of sky.

They buried the remains in the small graveyard at the foot of the mesa. It was the first time she had descended from the Refuge in all those years. The ceremony was brief, the most meaningful words said impromptu. The chants sung over the graves sounded flat, unechoing. She could find nothing to say, but stood looking at the little piles of sandy earth with their wooden grave markers and thought of the suffering the dead had endured just before they died. At least it had been brief, she told herself, and when it was over it was over.

Maybe, she reminded herself bleakly. They were still within the virtual; this had all taken place inside a simulation, no matter that there was no proof of this. Who within it knew what had really happened to whatever consciousness those dead individuals had possessed?

She stood in one of the burned-out script halls that night. She was one of those on fire-watch in case it all started up again, surrounded by the smell of burned wood and re-baked brick. Wisps of smoke or steam leaked into the cool, still night air from a few places. She checked each one, lantern in one trunk, bucket of water at the ready in the other.

Under an overturned, burned-black table she found one charred blank manuscript — it was a small one, for the tiniest of the manuscripts they ever copied. She brushed the brown, crisped edges of the pages clear. It would never do to be copied onto now. She couldn’t bear to put it back where she’d found it, so she stuffed it into a pocket.

She thought back to this later, and knew that she had had no idea at the time what she was going to do with the blank book. Maybe just keep it in her copying cell, or on the shelves of her room. A grim and grisly souvenir, a memento mori.

Instead she started writing in it. She would set down the story of her life as she remembered it, just a dozen or so lines each day. It was not something that was forbidden — as far as she could gather, there were no rules covering such a thing at all — but she kept it secret nevertheless.

She used worn-out pens which had become too scratchy to be risked on the manuscript copies. The ink was made from the charred timbers from the fire.

Life went on, they rebuilt much of the Refuge, took in fresh noviciates. The Superior died and a new one was appointed — Chay even had a vote — and she found herself a little further up the hierarchy. The old Superior had wanted to be disposed of the old way, left to the elements and the scavenger birds on the Refuge’s highest tower. Chay was one of those accorded the dubious privilege of cleaning up the bits of bone after the birds had picked them clean and the sun had bleached them white.

It was nearly a year after the old Superior’s death, while she was singing one of the most beautiful chants, that she broke down and wept for the old female. Gradually, the chants had brought a sort of beauty and even a meaning into her life, she realised.

Twenty years later she was the Superior, and had it not been for the book of her life, written in the manuscript blank with the charred page, she might not still have believed that she had had any sort of existence before that: no life as a gifted academic in a free, liberated society with superconductors, space elevators, AIs and life-extension treatments, and no few months spent in the utter ghastliness of the virtual Hell, accumulating the evidence to present to an unbelieving world — an unbelieving galaxy, for that matter — that might help bring about the destruction of the Hells for ever.

She had kept writing her book, continuing on beyond all that she could recall of her life in the Real and her time with Prin in the virtual Hell, writing down everything that happened to her since, here in this quiet, untroubled existence which she had come to love and believe in and still expected to be dragged away from, back to Hell, every single night…

She had become wizened. Her face was lined, her pelt was grey and her gait had stiffened and become awkward with age. She oversaw the workings of the Refuge to the best of her ability and did all that she could for the noviciates and other occupants. At least once per season, now that she was Superior, she had to clamber into a basket and be lowered to the austere cluster of small buildings at the foot of the mesa to deal and negotiate with the representative of the charity which distributed their manuscripts in the cities. The representatives were always male, so she had no choice but to descend to them; they could not be winched up to come and see her, because it was forbidden.

Usually, as she was lowered carefully towards the desert floor, she reflected on how much she had changed. Her old self — the person she had been back in the Real, before the brief but traumatising excursion in the Hell — would have wanted to break with that tradition, would have wanted to change things, would have wanted to insist that there was nothing beyond idiotic, absurdly unquestioned tradition stopping males from being brought up into the Refuge itself.

The person she had become, the person she was now, could see the force in all such arguments and yet still thought it was right to continue with the tradition. Perhaps it was wrong in some theoretical way, but perhaps not, and if it was, well, it did no great harm. Maybe it was even charming, just eccentric. Anyway, she would not like to have to be the Superior on whose shift the tradition was changed.

She had always wondered how faithful to a real, changing society and world this simulation was. Did the cities that the noviciates, travellers and charity representatives spoke of and claimed to have come from really exist? Did people within those cities work and struggle and study and improvise as they would in the Real? If you left this sim running, would somebody somewhere invent moveable type and printing, and so make what they did here in the Refuge irrelevant and all its occupants redundant?

She kept waiting for one of the charity representatives to turn up for their latest meeting with a regretful look and a copy of something hot off this brand new thing called a press.

However, as she approached what must be the end of her life in this virtuality, the freshly illuminated manuscripts kept on being taken away and the supplies of writing materials and of food and other necessities kept on being delivered. She realised that she would die — as far as that idea had any meaning here — in the same society she had been born into. Then she would have to remind herself that she had not been born here, she had simply woken up, already an adult.

One year, a noviciate was brought before her for denying the existence of God. She found herself saying pretty much what had been said to her by the old Superior. Showing the girl the deep buried cell and the whips and flails gave Chay no pleasure, though the dank, lamp-lit dungeon didn’t smell as bad as it had when she’d been shown it, she thought. She’d never had cause to use it; that was probably why. Or maybe her sense of smell was going with everything else. Thankfully, the noviciate relented — albeit with ill-disguised contempt — and no further action needed to be taken. She wondered if she could have ordered the punishment carried out if things hadn’t gone so agreeably.

Her eyesight gradually grew too poor for her to continue to write her life story in her part-charred book. The letters had become larger and larger as her sight had failed. One day, she thought, she would be writing only a single letter per page. Just as well in way, as she had only filled two-thirds of the blank and would die soon with lots of pages unfilled. But writing the bigger and bigger letters made the whole undertaking start to appear ridiculous and self-important, and eventually she gave in and stopped writing altogether. She had long since caught up with herself anyway and was effectively just keeping a rather boring diary.

So she bored the noviciates with her stories instead. She was the Superior, so they had to listen. Or maybe young people these days were just very polite. Her voice had almost gone but still she would be carried to the chapel each day to listen, enraptured, eyes closed, to the beautiful, transcendent singing.

Eventually she lay on her death bed and an angel came for her.