Surface Detail(171)

She had denied the Real while she’d been in Hell, to preserve what was left of her disintegrating sanity; how could he be sure she wouldn’t have denied the reality of Hell once she was back in the Real? Even that presupposed that she’d have made a considerable recovery from the pathetic state she’d been in towards the end.

Well, the end for him, because he got out. Probably just the start of fresh torment and horror for her.

Of course he had nightmares and of course he tried not to think of what might be happening to her back in the Hell. The pro-Hell parts of Pavulean society, headed by people like Representative Errun, had been doing everything they could to destroy his reputation and make his testimony look like a lie, or grossly exaggerated. Everything from a schooldays girlfriend who felt she’d been dumped too harshly to a fine for being disruptive in a university bar when he was a first-year student had been dragged out to make him look unreliable. That such trivial misdemeanours were the best the other side could do had been treated as a great and unexpected victory by Rep. Filhyn, who had become a trusted friend over the months since he’d first testified at her side.

They saw each other only rarely now; it would have made him too easy to trace. Instead they talked on the phone, left messages. He could watch her on the screen most evenings too, on news coverage, magazine programmes, documentaries or specialist feeds; denouncing the Hells and defending him, mostly. He liked her and could even imagine something happening between them – if that idea wasn’t in itself a wild fantasy – if things had been different, if he wasn’t for ever thinking of Chay.

It was assumed that the Pavulean Hell was running on a substrate far away from Pavul itself; for decades people had been searching for any sign of it being in any sense physically on the planet itself, or even anywhere near – the relatively anarchic habitats of the planet’s inner system were particularly favoured as locations – but without having found any evidence at all. Most likely, Chay’s being resided tens, hundreds, maybe thousands of light years away, deep-buried inside the substrate of some unknowably alien society.

He looked up at the stars some nights, wondering where she was.

Don’t you feel guilty about leaving her? Do you feel guilty that you left her? How guilty do you feel, abandoning her there? Do you sleep well, with all that guilt? Do you dream about her? You must feel so guilty – would you do the same thing again? Would she have abandoned you there? He had been asked the same question in many slightly different guises many times and answered it as honestly as he could, each time.

They had tried to get at him through her, tried to get her – the Chay who had been woken up on the houseboat, the Chay who would never have the memories of their time together in Hell – to denounce him for abandoning her. But she hadn’t let them use her. She said she’d felt hurt initially but thought he’d done the right thing. She still completely believed in what they’d done. She supported him fully.

She wasn’t saying the things the media – especially the hostile, pro-Hell media – wanted her to say so they quickly stopped asking her how she felt.

And the pro-Hell side – the Erruns of their world, the people who would keep Hell – had started trying to reach him through their public pronouncements, hinting at a deal that would let Chay go, if he would retract his earlier testimony and agree not to testify again. Prin had given Filhyn and Kemracht permission to try to shield him from this sort of temptation, but there was only so much he could do, especially when journalists – granted interviews and calling in remotely – asked him for his response to such vicariously delivered overtures.

And now, a week before he was due to testify before the Galactic Council, the pro-Hell people had tracked him down.

He knew something was wrong even before he fully woke up. The sensation was like knowing you had gone to sleep on a narrow ledge high on a cliff and woken in darkness to find there was the hint of an edge under your back and nothing there when you stretched out to one side.

His heart thumped, his mouth felt dry. He felt he was about to fall. He struggled to consciousness.

“Prin, son, are you all right?”

It was Representative Errun, the old pro-Hell campaigner who had tried to stop him giving any evidence at all in the parliament two long months earlier. Of course now it felt like he’d known from the start it would be Errun they’d send, but he told himself it was just a lucky guess, a coincidence.

Prin woke up, looked around. He was in a fairly grand, rather cluttered, comfortable-looking room that might have been modelled on Representative Errun’s own study for all he knew.