Polystom (39 page)

‘It doesn’t matter. Beeswing, however,
could
appear to you fairly easily – again, perhaps because the logic of her algorithm was closely allied to you. She’s not really Beeswing at all, in fact. She’s your perspective of Beeswing. So I asked her to go fetch you – to persuade you to come close enough to the Computation core of the Device for me to be able to pop out and say hello.’

He smiled.

Polystom stopped. There was a stretch of barbed wire before him that ran right down both flanks of the ridge. ‘How do I go on from here?’ he asked.

Cleonicles, the ghost, frowned, lines puckering into his brow like tic-tac-toe. ‘Can you go down and round?’

‘The flanks are mined. I’d be blown to shreds.’

‘Perhaps you can go over? Or – or dig your way under?’

‘I’m hungry, tired,’ said Polystom, dropping to the ground with his legs before him. ‘This is too much.’

‘I don’t understand how things like poems,’ said Polystom, after ruminating for a while, ‘how things like poems can haunt the real world. If you’re written into the, what are they, the
pages
, so to speak, of this great Computational Machine, then how do you find yourself outside the machine with me?’

‘That’s the most interesting question of all,’ said Cleonicles. ‘I’ll not pretend I can answer it straight away. But, observe: this situation has only come to pass since the simulation has developed cognate or even superior computational abilities of its own. It has something to do with the interaction of these two systems – perhaps that interaction enhanced the respective ability to realise the agents many times over? Perhaps some complex of energy and ordering, of power and computational, bodies forth myself, Beeswing, all the rest. The Device, in the mountain, does use an enormous amount of power. It’s something along these lines, I’m certain. Or perhaps you’d prefer to think that we’re actually ghosts? Spirits from the dead?’

‘Poems walking around,’ Polystom repeated, with a degree of stubbornness. ‘In the world.’

‘The important thing is that we must rewrite the simulation.’

‘And this will help?’

‘I believe so. I believe it will liberate all of the ghosts.’

‘What will you do?’

‘The culture of the simulation has advanced too far. If, as I believe, it is their own computational power that has
brought this terrible situation into being, then we must rewrite the simulation to do away with that power.’

‘Simply write-out their simulated Computational Devices?’

‘Not
simply
write them out, no, no. I said that the simulation absorbs a surprising degree of self-contradiction, but there are limits. No, there are more elegant ways of solving the problem. These civilisations, inside the device, are enormously belligerent, as I said. They have invented some extremely powerful weapons of destruction. It would be an afternoon’s work for me, for you with me guiding you, to have some of these devices malfunction, attack an enemy, such that the enemy retaliates. In a day, one of our days, their culture would be smashed back into primitiveness.’

‘You’ll write-in a war?’

‘Yes. Write-in the collapse of their civilisation. I’m convinced that it will end the interference pattern, the destructive interference pattern of their own independent advances, their own computational skills.’

‘Won’t millions die?’

‘I daresay.’

‘Bad news for them,’ Polystom observed.

‘Well, quite,’ said Cleonicles. ‘But they’re not real, now, are they?’

‘As real as you,’ said Stom, with a spiteful emphasis. ‘I’m sure they feel real. I’m sure, from their point of view, they feel very real indeed.’

‘They
may
very well feel that,’ said Cleonicles, levelly. ‘But that doesn’t make it true, now, does it.’

After a pause, Stom asked: ‘What happens to
you
when you write-in this mass destruction for the simulation? I mean, what actually happens, for you and Beeswing and the others like you? You say this will liberate the ghosts – what does that mean? Will you cease to be?’

‘I hardly think,’ said Cleonicles, smiling, ‘that I’d be
planning such a course of action if
that
were to be the result. No, I assume what will happen is that our “agent” algorithms will be inserted into the simulation in the usual way. Which is to say, what used to be the usual way before the onset of the problem. I suppose I’ll be “born” somewhere, have to grow to adulthood inside the simulation, and so on. It’ll be preferable to wandering these wastelands for goodness knows how long,’ he added, with an unconvincing smile. ‘Believe you me.’

On Cleonicles’ instruction, Polystom took off his jacket and spread it over the nearest wire. Then he tried gripping the strands of biting steel, his hands cushioned by the fabric. It took several goes before he got purchase. He tried pulling the wire, shaking it (with the vague idea that he might set off mines further along its length and blow holes in it), but the thing was simply too heavy and massive. He couldn’t move it. Then he tried to recover his jacket, to find that it was gripped ferociously by the barbs. It didn’t matter. The afternoon was very hot. He was better off without the damn thing.

‘Try climbing over the wire,’ urged the ghost. ‘Use your jacket as a way of passage.’

But Polystom didn’t like the look of that. The jacket stretched only halfway over the metal brambles, and an intimidating stretch of barbs glinted in the sunlight.

‘Can’t you move the wire out of the way for me?’ he asked his dead uncle. ‘You’re dead, after all. It can’t hurt you.’

‘I don’t really interact with this world in that way.’

‘You don’t? But you’re speaking to me. I saw the rain bounce off your shoulders.’

‘You didn’t, not really. You saw my programme, my writing-essence, adapt to the environment by adding rain. The rain in the air was real, but the rain bouncing off my shoulders was not. And yes I can talk to you; and I have
been able, on occasion, to affect things more materially. But not very well, not without great effort. It’s a matter of the algorithm that describes me; it functions only on the boundary of materiality – you can see me and hear me, but I can’t move the wire for you.’

‘It’s hopeless,’ Stom said. ‘It’s hopeless. And even if I could go on, there would be more wire. Wire and mines.’

‘Now, now,’ said the ghost of his uncle. ‘That sounds like the counsel of despair.’

‘And if I did reach the mountain, how could I possibly persuade the authorities there to allow me to rewrite the patterns inside the Computational Device? It’s madness to think of it! What would I tell them? That the ghost of my dead uncle told me to do it?’

The light thickened and greyed around him, as a new raft of clouds slid in front of the sun. These clouds were black as plums, threatening renewed downpour. The change in the quality of the light was extraordinarily pronounced: from bright sunshine to an almost submarine gloom. It took a second for Polystom’s eyes to adjust to the duskiness, and when he looked around for his uncle he found himself amongst a crowd of silent figures. They had appeared from nowhere, every one of them a foot or more taller than Polystom, all dressed in dark clothes, their skin looking grey in the dimness of the light. They stood all around him, distributed evenly amongst the wire, the craters, but every one of them was turned to face him, Polystom, faces like grey sunflowers aimed at the sun. Their silent attention was thrillingly upsetting.

‘Uncle?’ Stom said; but Cleonicles seemed even more startled by the arrival of the ghosts than he was.

And then, from nowhere, the land to the west exploded, the air shattering with noise, a cliff-face of brown hurled up by the explosions and atomising into a locust-cloud of mud-clods, swarming brown through the air as Polystom,
half knocked-over and half diving for cover, put his face into the mud.

There were half a dozen more detonations, each one making the earth tremble beneath Polystom like palsy. He wrapped his arms about his head. A heavy rain of mud clattered against his back. More explosions. Something jagged into his arm, by his shoulder; a bullet? Shrapnel?

Polystom waited minutes after the last of the explosions, the wound in his shoulder burning all the while, before he considered it safe enough to sit up. A shard of wire, with three barbs upon it, had stuck itself into his flesh. It had not gone deep, and the end that had inserted itself into his flesh was barb-free, so that Polystom was able to pull it clear. His shirt wore a rosette of blood on its arm, but the bleeding dried up quickly.

Only after he had pulled the wire free did Polystom look around him. Cleonicles was gone. The eerie crowd of motionless, grey figures was no more. Away to the west, the ground was newly cratered, up and down like a monumental sculpture of an ocean stormscape. All around him were gathered mud-coloured men, all of them carrying weapons of one sort or another.

Polystom had fallen into the hands of the enemy.

His heart lurched and pounded. They were about to kill him. To kill him. One of them lifted a hand, closed it to a fist, holding it around the level of his shoulder. And then, with a ridiculous sense of relief, Stom saw the ghost of his dead wife making her way through the crowd.

The insurrectionists tied his hands behind him, and marched him for several hours westwards, down the broken landscape of the west ridge and into the valley. ‘Beeswing?’ he called. ‘Beeswing?’

‘Hello again,’ she said, at his shoulder.

‘Are you with these people?’

‘Indeed I am.’

‘Wife, please tell me that they’re not going to execute me. Please. I couldn’t bear that.’ Under the power of these servants, Polystom couldn’t help think of the flayed man, the ghastly individual who had haunted his dreams.

‘Couldn’t bear it,’ said Beeswing distantly. ‘Excuse me, I have to go.’ She tripped off, away, out of sight.

They marched in silence along the valley, Polystom sobbing openly; footsore, hungry, thirsty, his shoulder throbbing with pain, and fear chewing at his insides like toothache. The strands of muscle bunched together like balls of red wool, just below the comforting cloth of the skin. The flayed man grasping at his ankles. The servant had caught him at last.

They had come from the Mudworld, those two who had been executed. Perhaps they had been the colleagues of these dour, dirt-covered soldiers. Had they followed the news? Polystom tried, with an increasing sense of desperation, to remember the occasion. It had been widely reported; that had been half the point of it. Had reports showed him sitting on the pedestal, observing the execution? Had these reports reached the Mudworld? Of course they had, he told himself. Of course they had. How had he appeared, on those reports? He had – surely – worn a face of elegantly repressed distress. He had thought it a barbarous,
unnecessary manner of death. He had only attended because the military insisted. But would these insurrectionists understand that? Could they be made to understand it?

They stopped for ten minutes in a shell-crater as a heavy storm rolled through the sky. Thorns of water bristled in ever-changing patterns on the surface of the pond. Polystom watched the patterns in a sort of ecstasy of fear. Then the sky cleared, and they were off again.

They pushed him, and he tumbled forward into a trench, landing awkwardly and winding himself. Gasping, tears in his eyes, they hauled him upright and threw him into a dark dugout. The door was shut behind him.

He wriggled round, his arms still tied behind him, and managed to get himself sitting against the wall. Eventually the blackness resolved itself into a grainy greyness, the thread-thin Π of light from the edges of the shut door seeping illumination through. The walls and floor were mud. There was no furniture.

‘Hello again,’ said Beeswing. Of course she had appeared from nowhere, through the closed door. Polystom could just about make out the shape of her, uncertain in outline in the darkness. She moved, her shadowy silhouette passing in front of him. Then she was on the other side.

‘Beeswing,’ said Polystom. ‘You’ve got to help me.’

‘They took you,’ said Beeswing, in her singsong voice, ‘on my suggestion. They’re not much given to taking prisoners, you see. They tried it, as a tactic, decades ago, in the early years of the war – or so they told me, when I suggested taking you. Said it had never done them any good in the past.’

‘Beeswing . . .’

‘But I talked them round.’

‘They listen to you?’

‘It’s a funny thing,’ she said. ‘They do. They seem to regard the ghosts as a sort of supernatural talisman. Something like that. Some of us have convinced them that we’re
on the same side. There’s little we can do, as ghosts, you know,’ she added with a bubbling chuckle, ‘except pop up out of strange places and frighten the soldiers. But we are privy, some of us, to important information. That counts for something.’

‘This is all madness,’ sobbed Polystom. ‘I shouldn’t be here. I’m a poet, not a soldier. I never intended those men to be executed, certainly not in the manner they were. Please tell them, Beeswing, please tell them. It wasn’t my choice.’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’

‘Please, wife, please,’ Polystom whined. ‘Please, please.’

It took him several long moments to realise he was alone.

Polystom was in the dugout for days, or weeks, or a day: it was impossible to gauge the passing of time. He was brought a hunk of bread and some water in a can. In the seconds that the door was open, and bright sunshine spilling in from outside, the bread looked blotchy with mould; but in the greyness that followed the door being shut he was able to tell himself that he had been dazzled, that the bread was fine, and he ate it all down and drank the warm water.

‘I never meant to be a soldier,’ he told the ghost of his wife. ‘Do you know why I think I volunteered?’

‘Tell me.’

‘It was because my uncle was killed, you know.’

‘That happened after my death,’ ‘Beeswing reminded him. That wasn’t in my dossier. I’ve heard something about it subsequently – and of course, spoken to your uncle personally. But, you know,
he
doesn’t remember his own death except in a secondhand manner, because that wasn’t in
his
dossier. Anyway, go on: you were saying?’