Surface Detail(172)

So, he had not really woken up at all, was not really looking round. They had found a way into his dreams. They would tempt him here, then. He wondered how they’d accomplished this. May as well just ask. “How are you doing this?” he asked.

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 expression lessly 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.