alike, with no riches or poverty to put one person above or beneath another.”
“But now you’re here?” Sensia offered, sounding sad.
“But now I’m here I find Joiler Veppers is still deferred to because he is a rich and powerful man.” She took a deep, shuddering breath. “And I find I need to return because that is my home, like it or not, and I must make my peace with it somehow.” She looked sharply at Sensia. “Then I might come back. Would I be allowed to come back?”
“You’d be allowed.”
Lededje nodded once and looked away.
They were both silent for a few moments. Then Sensia said, “Slap-drones can be quite useful companions, anyway; willing and obedient servants — bodyguards, too — so long as you don’t try to kill or injure somebody. I’ll choose you a good one.”
“I’m sure we’ll get on just fine,” Lededje said.
She wondered how easy it would be to lose a slap-drone. Or to kill it, too.
Yime Nsokyi stood in the main room of her apartment, her stance upright, her booted feet together, her head slightly back, her hands clasped behind her back. She was dressed formally in long dark grey boots, grey trousers, a light blouse and a plain grey jacket with a stiff, high collar. She had a pen terminal in the breast pocket of the jacket and a back-up terminal in the shape of an earbud attached to the lobe of her left ear. Her hair was very neatly combed.
“Ms. Nsokyi, hello.”
“Good day.”
“You look very… poised. Wouldn’t you rather sit?”
“I prefer to stand.”
“Okay.” The avatar of the GCU
“That would be my choice,” Yime agreed.
“I see. In that case, are you ready to…?”
Yime flexed her knees, picked up a small soft bag at her feet and stood again. “Fully,” she said.
“Okay then.”
The avatar and the human female disappeared inside two silver ellipsoids which had hardly appeared before they shrank to two points and vanished, not quite fast enough to create two tiny claps of thunder, but sufficiently quickly to cause a draught that ruffled the leaves of nearby plants.
Prin awoke from the long and terrible real nightmare of his time in Hell and found Chay, his true love, gazing over at him as he lay, blinking, on the clinic bed. He was on his side, looking at her; she was on her other side on a bed a metre away, facing him. Her eyes blinked slowly.
It had taken a while for him to register where he was, who this person looking over at him was, even who he himself was. At first all he knew was that he was somewhere vaguely medical, that he felt something very sweet and special for the female lying opposite, and that he had done something important and terrifying.
Hell. He had been in Hell. They had been in Hell; he and Chay. They had gone in there to prove that it was real, not a myth, and that it was a vile, perverted version of an afterlife, a place of unredeemed cruelty, impossible to defend in any civilised society.
They had sought to witness this and then to bring the evidence back and do what they could to make it public; get it disseminated as widely as possible, defying the state, the government, the political-commercial establishment and all the various vested interests which wanted their Hell — all the hells — to continue.
Now, here they were, back in the Real, the two of them.
He couldn’t quite speak yet. He was lying on this bed, in what certainly looked like the clinic they had left from, with Chay on the bed opposite his. They had transferred their personalities into electronic or photonic form or whatever it was — he had never been interested in the technical details — and they had set out together for Hell.
He could hear faint beeping noises, and see various pieces of medical equipment and communications gear stationed around their two beds.
“Prin! You’re back!” a voice said. He recognised the voice, or at least knew that he ought to know who the speaker was. A male came into view.
He did recognise him. Irkun. He was called Irkun and he was the medic-cum-comms-wizard who had been overseeing the transfer of their personalities, their beings, from their own bodies, through the communications network to wherever the state-run link to Hell was, and then on to the Hell itself. And back, of course. That was the point; they had to come back, and so they’d been sent with lengths of code attached that would let them come back. In the Hell these had been disguised as necklaces of barbed wire. They gave the wearer one brief spell to impersonate one of the more powerful and privileged demons within the Hell, and one chance to get back out of the virtual world back to the Real.
He remembered the blue glowing gate and the mill and the valley side with the X-shaped devices bearing the rotting corpses.
Blue glowing gate, and his desperate leap, holding her…
Tumbling in the air, somersaulting so that he went through first, her in his limbs immediately afterwards, if possible.
“You made it!” Irkun said, clapping both trunks together. He was dressed like a medic; white waistcoat, tail bunned and pinned, hooves in little white bootees. “You’re back! You made it! And Chay, is she…?”
Irkun turned to look at Chay. She was still staring straight ahead. Prin had thought she was gazing at him, but of course, she wasn’t. She blinked slowly, again, exactly as she had a little earlier.
“… right behind you?” Irkun asked, voice trailing away a little as he looked at the medical units and comms gear gathered around her bed. He pulled out a tablet remote and started tapping at it, trunk-fingers dancing over the icons, letters and numbers. “Is she…?” he said, falling silent. He stopped tapping at the remote and looked, stricken, at Prin.
Irkun, Chay, the bed she was lying on and the whole small clinic room — on a houseboat in a lagoon off a shallow sea — all started to waver and dissolve as tears began to fill Prin’s eyes.
There were three others besides Prin and Irkun. They had kept the core team as small as they possibly could to avoid the pro-Hell people finding out.
They lay on couches on a deck looking out over the lagoon towards the distant dunes and the sea. Birds flew across the reflection of a livid sunset, dark shapes against the long rips and tearings of the cloud-streaked sky. There were no other boats or houseboats visible. The one they were on looked innocent enough, though it concealed some very hi-tech gear and a buried optic cable linking them to a satellite array in the nearest small town, kilometres distant. Prin had been awake for about half a day now. They needed to decide what to do next, especially about Chay.
“If we leave her under we can re-integrate her fine, whenever she comes back,” Biath said. He was their mind-state expert.
“Even with a broken mind?” Prin asked.
“Certainly,” Biath said, as though this was some sort of accomplishment.
“So we take a perfectly healthy sleeping mind and plonk a broken one into it and it’s the broken one that wins, that emerges?” Yolerre said. She was their main programmer, the whiz that had come up with the barbed- wire code to let them escape from the Hell.
Biath shrugged. “The newer writes over the older,” he told her. “That’s just normal.”
“But if we wake her—?” Prin began.
“If we wake her she’ll be just as she was before the two of you went under,” Sulte said. He was their mission controller, their main ex-government source and another comms expert. “But the longer she’s awake and living any sort of normal life, the harder it gets to re-integrate her two personalities: the unconscious one here that
