Surface Detail

After a few years she took on some extra responsibilities in the script room, overseeing and checking the work of others. In the chapel, she led the singing, often as not. By now the Refuge Superior was a wizened old thing with poor back legs; in time she needed a trolley for her hind quarters, and help to ascend the spiral ramp that led to the higher floors of the Refuge. She started instructing Chay in the running of the Refuge, bringing her into its administration. Chay was given her own small room, though usually she still preferred to bed down with the others when night fell. She still had nightmares of suffering and torment, but they were duller and even more vague now.

One evening, seven years after she’d arrived, a fire broke out when the hot desert wind was blowing. They all fought it desperately, quickly using up the little water they had. Ten of them perished in smoke-filled rooms trying to save the manuscripts, finally throwing the precious originals from high windows into the central courtyard and saving all but two before being choked by the smoke or caught by the flames. Six of them died when a whole wing of the Refuge, supports weakened by the fire, fell to the desert in a great boiling burst of flame and smoke. Even over the terrible roaring noise produced by the disintegrating brick work, splintering wood and careening flame, you could hear the screams as they fell.

Night had fallen by then and the wind had gone. She watched the rolling rush of sparks produced by the collapse sweeping upwards, outshining and outnumbering the stars in the clear black gulf of sky.

They buried the remains in the small graveyard at the foot of the mesa. It was the first time she had descended from the Refuge in all those years. The ceremony was brief, the most meaningful words said impromptu. The chants sung over the graves sounded flat, unechoing. She could find nothing to say, but stood looking at the little piles of sandy earth with their wooden grave markers and thought of the suffering the dead had endured just before they died. At least it had been brief, she told herself, and when it was over it was over.

Maybe, she reminded herself bleakly. They were still within the virtual; this had all taken place inside a simulation, no matter that there was no proof of this. Who within it knew what had really happened to whatever consciousness those dead individuals had possessed?

She stood in one of the burned-out script halls that night. She was one of those on fire-watch in case it all started up again, surrounded by the smell of burned wood and re-baked brick. Wisps of smoke or steam leaked into the cool, still night air from a few places. She checked each one, lantern in one trunk, bucket of water at the ready in the other.

Under an overturned, burned-black table she found one charred blank manuscript – it was a small one, for the tiniest of the manuscripts they ever copied. She brushed the brown, crisped edges of the pages clear. It would never do to be copied onto now. She couldn’t bear to put it back where she’d found it, so she stuffed it into a pocket.

She thought back to this later, and knew that she had had no idea at the time what she was going to do with the blank book. Maybe just keep it in her copying cell, or on the shelves of her room. A grim and grisly souvenir, a memento mori.

Instead she started writing in it. She would set down the story of her life as she remembered it, just a dozen or so lines each day. It was not something that was forbidden – as far as she could gather, there were no rules covering such a thing at all – but she kept it secret nevertheless.

She used worn-out pens which had become too scratchy to be risked on the manuscript copies. The ink was made from the charred timbers from the fire.

Life went on, they rebuilt much of the Refuge, took in fresh noviciates. The Superior died and a new one was appointed – Chay even had a vote – and she found herself a little further up the hierarchy. The old Superior had wanted to be disposed of the old way, left to the elements and the scavenger birds on the Refuge’s highest tower. Chay was one of those accorded the dubious privilege of cleaning up the bits of bone after the birds had picked them clean and the sun had bleached them white.

It was nearly a year after the old Superior’s death, while she was singing one of the most beautiful chants, that she broke down and wept for the old female. Gradually, the chants had brought a sort of beauty and even a meaning into her life, she realised.