Errun shook his head. “I don’t know the technical details, son.”
“Please do not call me ‘son’.”
Errun sighed, “Prin, I just need to talk to you.”
Prin got up, walked to the door of the room. The door was locked. Where windows might have been there were mirrors. Errun was watching him. Prin nodded at the desk. “I intend to pick up that antique lamp and attempt to strike you across the head with it, representative. What do you think will happen?”
“I think you should sit down and let us talk, Prin,” Errun said.
Prin said nothing. He went to the desk, picked up the heavy oil lamp, gripped it in both trunks so that its weighted base was upright and walked towards the older male, who was now looking alarmed.
He was back in the seat, sitting facing Errun again. He looked at the desk. The lamp was where it had been. The representative appeared unruffled.
“That is what will happen, Prin,” Errun told him.
“Say what you have to say,” Prin said.
The older male hesitated, wore an expression of concern. “Prin,” he said, “I can’t claim to know everything you’ve been through, but…”
Prin let the old one witter on. They could make him stay in here, stop him from leaving and stop him from offering any violence to this dream-image of the old representative, but they couldn’t stop his attention from wandering. The techniques learned in lecture theatres and later honed to perfection in faculty meetings were proving their real worth at last. He could vaguely follow what was being said without needing to bother with the detail.
When he’d been a student he had assumed he could do this because he was just so damn smart and basically already knew pretty much all they were trying to teach him. Later, during seemingly endless committee sessions, he’d accepted that a lot of what passed for useful information-sharing within an organisation was really just the bureaucratic phatic of people protecting their position, looking for praise, projecting criticism, setting up positions of non-responsibility for up-coming failures and calamities that were both entirely predictable but seemingly completely unavoidable, and telling each other what they all already knew anyway. The trick was to be able to re-engage quickly and seamlessly without allowing anyone to know you’d stopped listening properly shortly after the speaker had first opened their mouth.
So Representative Errun had been blathering on with some homely, folksy little speech about a childhood experience that had left him convinced of the need for useful lies, pretend worlds and keeping those that made up the lumpen herd in their place. He was coming to the end of his rather obvious and graceless summing-up now. Reviewing it with his academic hat on, Prin thought it had been a rather pedestrian presentation; capable but unimaginative. It might have merited a C. A C+ if one was being generous.
Sometimes you didn’t want to re-engage quickly and seamlessly; sometimes you wanted the student, post- grad, colleague or official to know that they had been boring you. He gazed expressionlessly at Errun for a moment too long to be entirely polite before saying, “Hmm. I see. Anyway, representative; I assume you’re here to offer a deal. Why don’t you just make your offer?”
Errun looked annoyed, but — with an obvious effort — controlled himself. “She’s still alive in there, Prin. Chay; she’s still in there. She hasn’t suffered, and she’s proved stronger than people in there thought she was, so you can still save her. But their patience is running out, both with her and you.”
“I see,” Prin said, nodding. “Go on.”
“Do you want to see?”
“See what?”
“See what has happened to her since you left her there.”
Prin felt the words like a blow, but tried not to show it. “I’m not sure that I do.”
“It’s not… it’s not that unpleasant, Prin. The first, longest part isn’t even Hell at all.”
“No? Where, then?”
“In a place they sent her to recover,” Errun said.
“To recover?” Prin was not especially surprised. “Because she’d lost her mind, and the mad don’t suffer properly?”
“Something like that, I suppose. Though they didn’t punish her after she seemed to get it back, either. Let me show you.”
“I don’t—”
But they showed him anyway. It was like being strapped into a chair in front of a wrap-around screen, unable to move your eyes or even blink.
He watched her arrive at a place called the Refuge, in some medieval place and time, copying manuscripts in an era before moveable type and printing. He heard her voice, saw her threatened with punishment for voicing doubts about religion and faith, saw her acquiesce and conform, saw her work diligently through the following years and watched her work her way up the shallow, arthritic hierarchy of the place, always keeping a journal, until she became its chief. He saw her sing their chants and take comfort in the rituals of their faith, saw her admonish a noviciate for lack of faith, just as she had been admonished years earlier, and thought he could see where this was going.
But then on her death bed she revealed she had not changed, had not let the behaviour of piety become the reality of internalised faith. He wept a little, and was proud of her, even though he knew such vicarious pride was mere sentimentality, arguably just a typically male attempt to appropriate some of her achievement for himself. But still.
Then he watched her become an angel in Hell. One who delivered sufferers from their suffering, ending their torment — one per day, no more — and taking on a fraction of their pain with every merciful snuffing-out, so that to the extent that she suffered, she did so of her own volition, and meanwhile became an object of veneration, the centre of a death cult within Hell, the miracle-working messiah of a new faith. So she was being used to bring a little extra hope to Hell, removing one lucky winner per day as though in some fatal state lottery of release, to increase the suffering of the vast majority left behind.
Prin was moderately impressed. What an inspired, diabolical way to use one who had lost their mind, to stop others losing theirs, the better to torment them more efficiently.
A blink, and he was back in Errun’s study.
“Taking that all at face value,” Prin said, “it provides a fascinating insight into the thought processes of those concerned. And so; this deal?”
The old male stared at him for a moment, as though nonplussed, before he seemed to gather himself. “Don’t go humiliating your own society at that hearing, Prin,” he said. “Don’t presume to know better than so many generations of your ancestors; don’t give in to that desire to posture. Don’t testify, that’s all we ask… and she will be released.”
“Released? In what sense?”
“She can come back, Prin. Back to the Real.”
“There already is a Chayeleze Hifornsdaughter here in the Real, representative.”
“I know.” Errun nodded. “And I understand there is probably no way of re-integrating the two. However, there would be nothing to stop her from living on in an entirely pleasant Afterlife. I understand there are hundreds of different Heavens, enough to suit every taste. There is, however, another possibility. A new body could be found for her. Grown for her, indeed; created specially just for Chay.”
“I thought we had laws about that sort of thing.” Prin said, smiling.
“We do, Prin. But laws can be amended.” It was Errun’s turn to smile. “That’s what those of us lucky enough to serve as representatives do.” He looked serious again. “I can assure you there will be no obstacle to Chay being re-embodied. Absolutely none.”
Prin nodded, and hoped that he looked thoughtful. “And, either way,” he said, “whether she ends up in a Heaven or a new body, there will be no trace left of her being, her consciousness, left in Hell?” Prin asked. Immediately, he felt guilty. He, not the senator, already knew how this was going to play out, and giving the old male false hope was a little cruel. Only a little cruel, of course; within the context they were talking about, it was trivial to the point of irrelevance.
“Yes,” Errun agreed. “There will be no trace of her consciousness left in Hell whatsoever.”
“And all I have to do is not testify.”
