Surface Detail

She stood by the walls over the cliff sometimes, staring down at the land beneath, marvelling at her lack of fear. She knew that she ought to feel threatened by the precipitous drop, but she didn’t. The others thought she was mad. They stayed away from the edges, avoided being too near windows over sheer drops.

She had no idea how long she would be allowed to stay in the Refuge. Presumably until she got so used to life here it had come to seem normal. Then, when all that had gone before had started to seem like a terrible dream, just a nightmare, and she had convinced herself that this limited but safe and frugally rewarding life was going to continue; then, when she had learned to hope, she would be taken back to the Hell.

They had done what they could with her memories to make them less raw and livid than they would have been, and, when she slept, the nightmares, though still terrible, were somehow more vague than she might have expected.

After a year there, she began to sleep quite well. But the memories were still there in some form, she knew. She supposed they had to be. Your memories made you.

She could remember more of her life in the Real, now. Before, during roughly the latter half of the time she had spent in the Hell with Prin, she had come to think that that earlier life – her real life, she supposed – had itself been a dream, or something that had been part of the torture: concocted, imposed to make the suffering worse. Now she accepted that it probably had been real, and she had simply been driven out of her mind by her experiences in Hell.

She had been a real person, a Pavulean academic involved with the good cause of bringing an end to the Hells. She had met Prin at the university and between them they’d had the connections and the bravery to get themselves sent into the Hell, to record what they experienced there and bring back the truth of it to the world. The Hell had been virtual, but the experiences and the suffering had felt entirely real. She had lost her mind and retreated to a belief that her earlier, Real life had been a dream, or some thing invented within the Hell to make the contrast between the two all the more painful.

Prin had been stronger than her. He had stayed sane and tried to save her along with himself when the time came for them to attempt their escape, but only he had got through and returned to the Real. At the time she’d convinced herself he’d only gone from one bit of the Hell to another, but he must have got out entirely. If he hadn’t she was sure she’d have been presented with the proof of it by now.

She had been taken before the king of Hell, some ultimate demon who had been frustrated that she had no hope and so was resigned to the Hell, and he had killed her. Then she had woken here, in this hale and healthy Pavulean body, on this strange tall stick of rock poised between the plateau and the desert.

A sun, yellow-white, rose and fell, arcing high over the desert. Out in the desert, lines of tiny dots that might be animals or people moved sometimes. Birds flew in the sky, singly or in small flocks, occasionally landing and calling raucously from the highest roofs of the Refuge buildings.

Rains came rarely, sweeping in from the plateau in giant dark veils like the trailing bristles of a vast broom. The Refuge smelled strange, pleasantly different for a half-day afterwards, and the open rooms and quiet courtyards were full of the sound of dripping. Once she stood and listened to the steady drip-drip-drip of an overflowing gutter as its rhythm exactly matched that of a chant being sung in the chapel, and marvelled at the simple beauty of both.

There was a track that led away over the plateau towards the flat horizon, and from the track’s end a steep path zigzagged down flaws and ravines cut into the plateau edge until it met the slope of rubble at the foot of the cliff. Far away across the plateau, at the far end of the track, there was a road, apparently, and the road led to a city; to many cities, eventually, but even the closest was many tens of days away and none of them were good places; they were dangerous and unhealthy, the sort of places that you needed a refuge to get away from. She had never felt any desire to go to any of them, never felt any desire to leave the Refuge at all.

They would leave her until this all became normal, until it had become all that she really remembered, then she would be dragged back to the Hell again. She never lost sight of this, accepting each day without pain as a blessing but never taking the next day for granted.