Surface Detail (34 page)

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.