Surface Detail

She had been there over two years before she was asked to help with the copying of the manuscripts. This was what the females of the Refuge did to pay for the food they received via the road and the track and the path and the buildings at the foot of the mesa and the rope-hauled cane baskets: they made perfect copies of ancient, illuminated manuscripts in a language that none of them understood. The blank books, pens, inks and gold leaf arrived by basket and, a year or two later, the completed books were sent back down by basket to start their journey back to the distant cities.

You were only alone when you worked on the manuscripts. You were allocated a bare copying cell which had a desk, a manuscript to be copied, a blank book which would become the copy and a supply of pens and inks. Each cell had a single window which was too high up in the wall to present a distracting view but which provided plenty of light. Her eyes would start to hurt after a few hours. It was a relief to herd down to the chapel with the others and sing, eyes closed or raised to the resplendent light of the chapel’s translucently glowing plaster windows. She had become a good singer, and knew many of the chants by heart.

She worked hard at copying the manuscripts, marvelling at their indecipherable beauty. The illuminations were of stars and planets and fabulous animals and ancient buildings and plants; lots of trees and flowers and verdant landscapes. Even so, she thought, as she carefully traced and then coloured in the illuminations and subsequently copied the mysterious letters, for all she knew these were instruction manuals for torturing people and the pretty illustrations were just to fool you.

She worked away, filling her days with the silent copying of the words onto the blank pages and the echoed singing of the chants into the embracing space of the chapel.

The books that she was able to read – which came from a separate library, and were much plainer and cruder-looking than the ones she and the others copied – all talked only of a time long before she had been born, and the other females of the Refuge also talked solely of a much more simple time: cities with no public transport, ships with sails and no engines, medicine that was little better than crossing your trunks and hoping, and no real industry at all, just the workshops of individuals.

Still, they found things to talk about: the general idiocy of males, the boringness of their diet, the rumours of bandits in the desert or on the plateau, the frailties, jealousies, friendships, enmities and crushes of their fellows and all the general gossip of a couple of hundred people of the same sex all cooped up together with a rigid if generally non-punitive hierarchy.

The other females looked at her uncomprehendingly when she tried to tell them what had happened to her. She guessed they thought she was mad. They seemed to have had no life beyond this one, with all the limitations of technology and mores that implied; they had been raised in the distant cities or in rural communities, they had experienced some misfortune and been thrown out of whatever herd community they had been part of, been rescued and brought here. As far as she could tell they really did believe in this God that they all had to worship. Still, at least this God promised only one afterlife, for those worthy. Heaven awaited the pious while those found wanting faced oblivion rather than perpetual torture.

She wondered sometimes how long this was all taking, back in the Real. She knew something of the technology and the ratios involved; a year of time in the Real could be compressed into a minute in a virtual environment. It was the opposite of a nearlightspeed experience; spend what felt to you like half a lifetime away but come back – a changed, completely different person – and find that only an hour had passed and nobody had even missed you. Was this quiet, pain-free life running at that speed? Or at a gentler rate, perhaps even in real-time?

For all she knew, she realised eventually, she was living ultra slowly in this virtual existence, and what felt like a few years here was a millennium back in the Real, so that if she ever did get back she would find everything altered totally and all the people she had known long dead; so long dead that even in the average and perfectly pleasant Afterlife there would be no trace of them left.

Very occasionally, as she stood by one of the cliff-edge walls, she wondered what would happen to her if she climbed over and jumped. Straight back here? Back to the Hell? Or nothing, just oblivion. “You are so fearless!” the others told her when they saw her standing there, looking down.

But not so fearless she would take the leap and find out.