Polystom (41 page)

‘And this is why you want to blow the thing up?’

‘Yes.’ Her voice sounded very pure.

‘Did you tell all this to your insurrectionist friends?’

‘Goodness, no.’ There was the sound of laughter in the dark. Beeswing’s ghost seemed to be moving around the space. ‘That would not be appropriate at all. Tell them that none of them were real? They’d simply ignore me. No, they want the Computational Device destroyed because they believe that the Forces of Authority depend upon it.
They believe that with the Device gone, they’ll soon enough be able to win the war here on the Mudworld. But the
why
doesn’t matter so much. What matters is testing the theorem.’

‘You make it sound very abstract.’

‘Don’t you want to know? To know the truth?’

‘I don’t know anything at all,’ said Polystom. ‘I’m a little confused, I think. And tired. Very tired.’

‘Then sleep,’ said Beeswing. ‘And be grateful that your writers have written-in the release of sleep for you. Sleep is a particularly lovesome thing.’

‘Do you,’ said Polystom, rolling onto his side and slotting his elbow under his head as a pillow. ‘Do you sleep?’

‘I’m a ghost,’ came his dead wife’s voice in the dark. ‘Ghosts don’t sleep. Surely you know that?’

Over two weeks Polystom is brought round. He spends every day with the ghost of his wife; and, later on, he spends some time with the leaders of this particular insurrectionist troop. They are a taciturn group of men and women, the women almost indistinguishable from the men in mire. Although he only gleans fragmented aspects of their story, he has the sense that they have been fighting blood-and-bone, tooth-and-nail, for a very long time: fighting for very survival, fighting with the determined work-ethic that had once defined them as servants. They do not talk much. Some of them are old, in their forties, fifties, one old woman so crumpled with age-wrinkles that she might have been ninety except for her sprightly, murderous physical energy and agility. Others of them are young: twenty, fifteen, it’s hard to tell. They eat and sleep in common, and their command structure appears to shift in ways that Polystom finds hard to follow. On the third day they bring him out of the dugout, and allow him to eat with them. On the sixth day their position comes under attack from aerial bombardment, and they dig themselves deeper under the
earth. Later that same day there is a ground assault, which they repel with grim, silent, collective action. During this assault Polystom cowers at the base of the trench, every explosion and every gunshot like an electrical jolt to his nervous system. He has come to hate, very deeply, the unexpected violence of this Mudworld war.

Once the attack is repelled, the troop pulls back, up the flank of a hill and into a network of tiny tunnels. Polystom clambers through this claustrophobic network for hours, a soldier in front of him and one behind. He weeps as he crawls, with exhaustion and fear. Eventually they reach a groined-out chamber, fifteen yards high and twice as long. There are other enemy soldiers here, and the two groups spend two days in the darkness, lit with electric torches. From time to time the walls tremble and the earth around them rumbles, a dyspeptic sound on a huge scale. But no disaster befalls, and nothing else happens. On the third day they exit this room, and make their way along another tunnel, soon appearing in the open air. From here the troops split, one party heading south, and Polystom’s original captors moving north up the valley.

The troop of insurrectionists seem to regard Beeswing as a talismanic figure. They rarely speak to Polystom, and he comes to realise that, as a representative of the ruling class, they despise him on principle. But they chat with the ghost-woman all the time. Do they ponder how she came to be here? Do they have any comprehension of the situation, of the philosophical double-bind of the two Computational Devices? They give no indication, if so. Perhaps they don’t care.

‘I’ve told them that you’re prepared to work with them,’ Beeswing says to him. ‘To help them destroy the Computational Device. Please tell me that you are.’

‘I am.’

And he is: the longer he spends with these people, the more he admires them. Perhaps it has something to do with
the surly disregard they use on him. Subconsciously, perhaps, he wishes to ingratiate himself with them. Or perhaps he is seduced by the sheer uncomplaining effort that their lives are. Like the men on the skin-frame, back on the moon of Enting, a million years ago, it seems to him, there’s a ferocious authenticity about their mode of life. They labour and labour at the business of making war; they put all their strenuous efforts of work in that business. Beside them, Polystom feels himself to be insubstantial, to be as unreal as Beeswing would argue he is. He sees the life he used to live as frothy; wealth, poetry, nothingness. Here, in the soil, amongst death and pain, is real human will, real experience, real existence. And every tossed-aside remark in his direction makes him glow. When they share their food with him he feels like a patted dog. His inner being twists a little in self-disgust; but more and more he feels that these people, these authentic human beings, are his rightful superiors.

It does not happen instantly, but as day follows day his sense of his own worth crumbles; he is a miserable creature, sickly, cowardly, pathetic. The only thing to which he can cling is the worth of his captors. Their strength. Their courage; unshowy, genuine. Their superiority to him.

One evening he is waiting impatiently, hungry, for the group holding him to give him some food. A youngster brings in a satchel in which are several round loaves, going blue in patches but still plump and appetising. Stom fidgets in his corner as the soldiers tear gobbets of bread from the loaves and eat them, laughing occasionally and slapping one another’s shoulders. Finally he steps towards them, reaches out to help himself to some bread, as they are doing. Hardly looking at him, one of the group pushes a fist at him, catches him hard on the side of the head. As Stom rolls on the floor whimpering and crawls back to his corner the group’s laughter increases in intensity. Polystom slumps himself in a coign of the dugout, rubbing the side of his
head and staring at them. They make a perfect circle, of which he is not part. He resents them, hates the hurt they have so casually caused him; and at the same time, he admires them. They are so much more stronger and perfect than he. It is clear – he understands this now, realises that he has understood it for a while – it is clear that he deserved to be cuffed around the head. It was impertinent of him to approach them. Later that evening somebody brings him two raw potatoes, and even though he has to scrape away portions of slimy blackness from both before eating them, he is extraordinarily grateful. He gabbles his gratitude, between gobfuls of food, thank you, thank you. And he means it. He feels, in a small way, that he has been accepted into the group. He feels he belongs, even as a minion. He cannot remember when he last had the sense of belonging.

‘We’ll assemble a force,’ says the old woman, who adopts the position of leader more often than anybody else. Her face is like a relief map of the terrain, her wrinkles cut deeply into her skin, yet her eyes seem to Polystom more alive than anybody he knew in his former life. ‘Close to the southern entrance to the Machine. You know it?’

‘No,’ he confesses.

‘Don’t matter. We’ll turn you loose there, and you go inside. You’re a captain, aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘They’ll let you inside, won’t they?’

‘I think they will.’ He is eager as a puppy that she is talking to him. Talking directly to him!

‘Two things,’ says the old woman, gruffly. ‘Go up to the big gun, dug in over the entrance. You need to disable it.’

‘How?’ Polystom’s voice is nervous; he is unwilling to admit his ignorance of military matters. He doesn’t want the old woman to think less of him. But there’s no getting around it. He just doesn’t know.

‘Shoot the gun crew. Put a grenade in the chamber and get out of there.’ The old woman is utterly matter-of-fact.
‘Then you need to raise hell inside the Machine itself. Run about, shooting, making noise. When we see the cannon go up, we’ll launch an assault.’

‘I understand.’

And he does; or he thinks he does. He’s in a kind of dream. Every evening he talks with Beeswing. She is a different Beeswing from the live one he married. She is eloquent, filled with knowledge, and even with moments of poetry. Of the water, beading on the tight stretch of taurpaulin pulled to make an awning and shelter from the rain: ‘like seeds, don’t you think?’ Something promises spectacular growth on this world, if only the growing season could blossom uninterrupted. Something between Polystom and his dead wife, if not physical then perhaps spiritual. ‘Have you noticed?’ she asks him, one red-purple sunset. ‘There’s a kind of grain to the mud, like wood. Maybe it’s the way it slides.’

And as the weeks pass, he comes to see that her version of reality has its own beauty. The logic of it, taut and perfectly proportioned as an acorn in its cap. Everything around him, he tells himself one midday, imaginary. Everything here, the
beingness
of everything, is actually a sort of writing, conjured into being by one of the people from the other world, the world outside the world. The sluggish pliability of the clay; the weave of fabric in his shirt; the exact pattern of red jags and splotches of his dried blood on his sleeve. None of it real. He feels a light-headedness. It may be merely the diet of mouldy bread and occasional broths of impossible-to-determine meats, together with brackish water – but it feels like philosophy. It washes through him, just the idea of it. And although he can’t quite surrender his own sense of reality, his visceral belief in the mud and the cloth and his own blood, nonetheless there’s a part of him that joys in pretending that he does. What if Beeswing is right? The prison of reality is loosened, and that’s somehow a glorious prospect. The people he sees
around him, the misery and the suffering, it all vanishes as the reality vanishes. Those weren’t real people he saw flayed alive on the skin-frame: they were just algorithms. Their pain was just the addition of a few lines of writing, not real pain. All his men, the men he had seen killed, shot and blown apart – none of them were real. Their deaths weren’t real. He is liberated from the sense of guilt and despair, because none of it
actually
happened. The boots he found when he was going up the ridge – for a time those boots, each carrying their passenger severed feet, those boots had preyed on his mind. It was so grotesque. But now it was alright. They weren’t real feet: no
real
people had to suffer that violent amputation. Almost all the people he sees are not real. Perhaps only a few dozen out of the whole population of the system. Maybe once or twice some of those people, those ‘agents’ get caught up in the teeth and cogs of the system, and maybe they suffer. But the
weight
of suffering is lifted. It is epitomised for Polystom by the flayed man. For months that figure had haunted his dreams. But Beeswing’s version of events frees him from the nightmare. The skinless figure no longer drifted through his dreams; because he had never been real. Lines of code, not flesh and blood – the fact that the flesh and blood, so prominently displayed, had appeared real was simply a function of the expertise of the code-writer.

The world around him acquires a mystic transparency to Polystom’s eyes.

They move up the valley until the mountain looms over them, and then they dig into well-concealed hide-holes. Polystom, hunched against the wall, leans toward the figure of his wife at his side.

‘What’s her name? The old woman?’ he asks, sotto voce. She is the leader, it is clear; but more. She is a hero, a great person, a sort of queen. It is important to him that he know her name.

The space is busy with insurrectionist soldiers: some
eating, some cleaning their weapons. No matter how dirty their written-not-real bodies and clothing get, these soldiers are scrupulous about keeping their written-not-real rifles clean.

Polystom could almost will himself into the belief: Beeswing’s world was like religion, an act of faith.

‘She’s called Alea.’

‘She’s the leader?’ he murmurs, almost awestruck.

‘They try not to orchestrate it in quite that manner,’ said Beeswing. ‘But yes.’

‘She told me what to do.’

‘And?’

‘Go up there. Get into the gun emplacement and kill all the people there. That’s what she said, “shoot the gun crew”. Isn’t that cold-blooded?’

‘War,’ says Beeswing.

There is a silence.

‘A question,’ says Polystom. ‘When you were alive . . .’

‘When I was alive,’ repeats Beeswing. ‘When we were married, and you were alive, did you . . . love me?’

‘I did,’ says Beeswing, looking directly into his eyes. ‘I loved you. We were different, you and I, but ‘I loved you, for your poetic soul. Mind you,’ she adds, looking at him more strangely, ‘you’re not talking to the Beeswing you married, are you now. If
you’re
right, then you’re talking to a being that your uncle wrote, based on the dossier you assembled – for none of my own notes, assuming I made any (and I don’t even know that) were part of the dossier. And if that’s the case, then what else would you expect me to say? You wrote me, of course I love you. On the other hand,’ she said, leaning back, ‘if
I’m
right, then we are both written, written by some creature in the vacuum-surrounded world outside our world.’

‘And if that’s the case,’ says Polystom, seizing on the idea, ‘then this person, he or she, would surely write you – as
ghost – as an extension of the person you had been when you were alive?’

‘Possibly,’ concedes Beeswing.

It is another reason to believe in her version of reality rather than his. In his version, the Beeswing he married is fundamentally unknowable, locked away on the other side of death, and this Beeswing he is talking to is nothing but a self-serving fiction of his own concoction. But in
her
version, this Beeswing is the real one.

In
her
version she loved him.