The airship was a giant dark blister riding the poisoned air above a still glowing battlefield. They had been brought here in Hyrlis’ own small, svelte air vehicle, which had lifted silently from the bottom of another giant crater and flown whispering through clouds and smoke then clearer weather, chasing a ruddy sunset into a night whose far horizon was edged with tiny sporadic flashes of yellow-white light. Below them, rings and circles of dull and fading red covered the dark, undulating land. The airship was bright, all strung with lights, lit from every side and covered in reflective markings. It hung above the livid-bruised land like an admonition.
The little aircraft docked in a broad deck slung underneath the giant ship’s main body. Various other craft were arriving and departing all the time, arriving full of injured soldiers accompanied by a few medical staff and departing empty save for returning medics. Quiet moans filled the warm, smoke-scented air. Hyrlis led them via some spiralled steps to a ward full of coffin-like beds each containing a pale, squat, unconscious figure. Holse looked at the lifeless-looking people and felt envious; at least they didn’t have to stand up, walk around and climb stairs in this awful gravity.
“You know there is a theory,” Hyrlis said quietly, walking amongst the gently glowing coffin-beds, Ferbin and Holse at his rear, the four dark-dressed guards somewhere nearby, unseen, “that all that we experience as reality is just a simulation, a kind of hallucination that has been imposed upon us.”
Ferbin said nothing.
Holse assumed that Hyrlis was addressing them rather than his demons or whatever they were, so said, “We have a sect back home with a roughly similar point of view, sir.”
“It’s a not uncommon position,” Hyrlis said. He nodded at the unconscious bodies all around them. “These sleep, and have dreams inflicted upon them, for various reasons. They will believe, while they dream, that the dream is reality. We know it is not, but how can we know that our own reality is the last, the final one? How do we know there is not a still greater reality external to our own into which we might awake?”
“Still,” Holse said. “What’s a chap to do, eh, sir? Life needs living, no matter what our station in it.”
“It does. But thinking of these things affects how we live that life. There are those who hold that, statistically, we
“There are always people who can convince themselves of near enough anything, seems to me, sir,” Holse said.
“I believe them to be wrong in any case,” Hyrlis said.
“You have been thinking on this, I take it then?” asked Ferbin. He meant to sound arch.
“I have, prince,” Hyrlis said, continuing to lead them through the host of sleeping injured. “And I base my argument on morality.”
“Do you now?” Ferbin said. He did not need to affect disdain.
Hyrlis nodded. “If we assume that all we have been told is as real as what we ourselves experience — in other words, that history, with all its torturings, massacres and genocides, is true — then, if it is all somehow under the control of somebody or some thing, must not those running that simulation be monsters? How utterly devoid of decency, pity and compassion would they have to be to allow this to happen, and keep on happening under their explicit control? Because so much of history is precisely this, gentlemen.”
They had approached the edge of the huge space, where slanted, down-looking windows allowed a view of the pocked landscape beneath. Hyrlis swept his arm to indicate both the bodies in their coffin-beds and the patchily glowing land below.
“War, famine, disease, genocide. Death, in a million different forms, often painful and protracted for the poor individual wretches involved. What god would so arrange the universe to predispose its creations to experience such suffering, or be the cause of it in others? What master of simulations or arbitrator of a game would set up the initial conditions to the same pitiless effect? God or programmer, the charge would be the same: that of near-infinitely sadistic cruelty; deliberate, premeditated barbarism on an unspeakably horrific scale.”
Hyrlis looked expectantly at them. “You see?” he said. “By this reasoning we must, after all, be at the most base level of reality — or at the most exalted, however one wishes to look at it. Just as reality can blithely exhibit the most absurd coincidences that no credible fiction could convince us of, so only reality — produced, ultimately, by matter in the raw — can be so unthinkingly cruel. Nothing able to think, nothing able to comprehend culpability, justice or morality could encompass such purposefully invoked savagery without representing the absolute definition of evil. It is that unthinkingness that saves us. And condemns us, too, of course; we are as a result our own moral agents, and there is no escape from that responsibility, no appeal to a higher power that might be said to have artificially constrained or directed us.”
Hyrlis rapped on the clear material separating them from the view of the dark battlefield. “We are information, gentlemen; all living things are. However,
Holse had been thinking about this. “Of course, sir, your god
“That is possible,” Hyrlis said, a smile fading. “Those above and beyond us might indeed be evil personified. But it is a standpoint of some despair.”
“And all this pertains how, exactly?” Ferbin asked. His feet were sore and he was growing tired of what seemed to him like pointless speculation, not to mention something dangerously close to philosophy, a field of human endeavour he had encountered but fleetingly through various exasperated tutors, though long enough to have formed the unshakeable impression that its principal purpose was to prove that one equalled zero, black was white and educated men could speak through their bottoms.
“I am watched,” Hyrlis said. “Perhaps your home is watched, prince. It is possible that tiny machines similar to those that observe me spy upon your people too. The death of your father might have been overseen by more eyes than you thought were present. And if it was watched once, it can be watched again, because only base reality cannot be fully replayed; anything transmitted can be recorded and usually is.”
Ferbin stared at him. “Recorded?” he said, horrified. “My father’s murder?”
“It is possible; no more,” Hyrlis told him.
“By whom?”
“The Oct, the Nariscene, the Morthanveld?” Hyrlis suggested. “Perhaps the Culture. Perhaps anybody else with the means, which would include some dozens of Involved civilisations at least.”
“And this would be done,” Holse suggested, “by the same unseen agents that you address from time to time, sir?”
“By things most similar,” Hyrlis agreed.
“Unseen,” Ferbin said contemptuously. “Unheard, untouched, unsmelled, untasted, undetected. In a word, figmented.”
“Oh, we are often profoundly affected by unseeably small things, prince.” Hyrlis smiled wistfully. “I have advised rulers for whom the greatest military service I could perform had nothing to do with strategy, tactics or weapons technology; it was simply to inform them of and persuade them to accept the germ theory of disease and infection. Believing that we are surrounded by microscopic entities that profoundly and directly affect the fates of individuals and through them nations has been the first step in the ascendancy of many a great ruler. I’ve lost count of the wars I’ve seen won more by medics and engineers than mere soldiery. Such infective beings, too small to see, assuredly exist, prince, and believe me so do those designed, made and controlled by powers beyond your grasping.” Ferbin opened his mouth to say something but Hyrlis went on, “Your own faith holds the same idea centrally, prince. Do you not believe that the WorldGod sees everything? How do you think it does that?”
Ferbin felt baulked, tripped up. “It is a god!” he said, blustering.
“If you treat it as such then such it is,” Hyrlis said reasonably. “However, it is unarguably a member of a long-declining species with a clearly traceable galactic lineage and evolutionary line. It is another corporeal being, prince, and the fact that your people have chosen to call it a god does not mean that it is particularly powerful, all- seeing even within the limitations of Sursamen, or indeed sane.” Ferbin wanted to speak but Hyrlis held up one hand. “No one knows why Xinthians inhabit Shellworld Cores, prince. Theories include them being sent there by their own kind as a punishment, or to isolate them because they have become infectiously diseased, or mad. Some
