Surface Detail

They were not lies. He wished that they were. He did not necessarily expect to be taken seriously because he knew how monstrous and cruel it all sounded, and how much many different interests did not want the truth to be known. He knew that they would do all that they could to discredit both him personally and what he was telling people.

How could he even tell this was not some bizarre nightmare, some possibly drug-induced hallucination?

It was a matter of fact that he had been away for real-time weeks, his body held within a fully licensed medical facility, exactly like the kind that many Representatives had used for various treatments over the years. He had never heard of a nightmare that went on for so long. Had the Representative?

So, he did not deny it might have been drug-induced?

He did deny it. He did not take drugs. He never had, not even now, when his physician said he ought to, to try to stop the nightmares he had, reliving what he had been through. Would a blood test convince the Representative?

So now he suddenly admitted that he did have nightmares after all!

As he’d just said, only due to the Hell he had just lived through.

Representative Errun would not let go. He had been a trial lawyer, then a judge, and famous for his questioning, his brutal tenacity. She watched him become more and more determined to rattle Prin, to trip him up and bring him down, to reveal him as a liar or a fantasist or a fanatic, and she listened to him lose. With every extra detail Errun dragged out of Prin he made the totality of the revelations’ impact all the greater.

Yes, everybody was nude in Hell. Yes, people in Hell might try to have sex, but that was punishable. In Hell only rape was permitted. Just as in Hell only war formed the basis for any social structure. Yes, people died in Hell. You could die a million times, suffer its agonies on a million separate occasions, and every time you would be brought back for further punishment, more torture. The demons were people who had been sadists in the Real; to them, Hell was more like their own heaven.

No, there were not that many sadists in the Real, but there could be as many as the functioning of Hell required because this was all virtual, remember, and individuals could be copied. One sadist, one person who gloried in the pain of others, would be all you needed; you’d just create a million copies.

Yes, he was aware of the claims that the tours of Hell that people were forced to undergo, sometimes as part of a court’s judgement, were of a Hell that didn’t exist, or that only existed in a very limited sense while the miscreants were being shown round, and that anybody who failed to return from such grisly junkets had merely been put into limbo. But that was a lie.

Filhyn saw somebody hand Errun a note. A shiver of apprehension ran through her.

She thought she saw Errun’s eyes glint with something like exaltation, with cruelty, with victory anticipated. The old male’s tone and demeanour changed as he became more statesmanlike and solemn, like somebody delivering a final judgement, a coup-de-grâce, more in regret than anger.

Was it not true, he said, that he, Prin, had gone into this dream or nightmare, this supposed Hell, with his wife? So where was she? Why was she not at his side now to back up his wild claims?

Filhyn thought she might faint. Wife? He’d taken his wife with him? Had he been mad? Why hadn’t he said anything – even just to her? A despair settled over her.

Prin was answering.

First of all, the female concerned was his love and his mate, but not formally his wife. He had left her behind, right at the very end, when there had been a chance for only one of them to get out and he had had to do the hardest thing he had ever had to do in his life and leave her in there to suffer while he escaped to tell the truth of what was happening there, what was still happening there to-

And why had he left her out of this tale, this – it was now conclusively revealed – confection of lies, half-truths and outright fantasy?

Because he had been afraid to mention her participation in the mission into Hell.

Afraid? Him? A man who claimed to have been through Hell and come back? Afraid?