Surface Detail

Nevertheless, despite being caught up in the horrifying vortex of violence and sheer hatred that had enveloped them instantly on their arrival, they had stayed together and they had, in some sense, accomplished their mission. He had got out, even if Chay had lost her mind. He had been able to be the sober, sensible, unrufflable witness that he had meant to be right from the start, when they had first started talking about the mission with the relevant programmers, hackers and ex-government agency whistle-blowers who’d originally been put in touch with their little underground organisation.

But he had had to leave Chay behind. He’d done what he could to get her through as well, but he hadn’t made her his first priority. At the last moment, as they’d hurtled through the air towards the glowing gate that led back to reality and a relief from pain, he had twisted, led with his own back rather than with her, held in his limbs, literally putting himself first.

He had hoped they would both make it through, but he had known that it was unlikely.

And what he had to ask himself – what he had been asking himself, ever since – was this: if Chay had been of sound mind at the time, would he have acted any differently?

He thought – he hoped – he would have.

That being the case, he was sure she would have made just as good a witness as he had. Then he could have done the decent, chivalrous, masculine thing and saved the girl, got her to safety and taken whatever extra punishment the mephitic bureaucracy of Hell decreed. But he could only have done that if he’d thought that she would get back to the Real as anything other than a broken, weeping wreck.

She had denied the Real while she’d been in Hell, to preserve what was left of her disintegrating sanity; how could he be sure she wouldn’t have denied the reality of Hell once she was back in the Real? Even that presupposed that she’d have made a considerable recovery from the pathetic state she’d been in towards the end.

Well, the end for him, because he got out. Probably just the start of fresh torment and horror for her.

Of course he had nightmares and of course he tried not to think of what might be happening to her back in the Hell. The pro-Hell parts of Pavulean society, headed by people like Representative Errun, had been doing everything they could to destroy his reputation and make his testimony look like a lie, or grossly exaggerated. Everything from a schooldays girlfriend who felt she’d been dumped too harshly to a fine for being disruptive in a university bar when he was a first-year student had been dragged out to make him look unreliable. That such trivial misdemeanours were the best the other side could do had been treated as a great and unexpected victory by Rep. Filhyn, who had become a trusted friend over the months since he’d first testified at her side.

They saw each other only rarely now; it would have made him too easy to trace. Instead they talked on the phone, left messages. He could watch her on the screen most evenings too, on news coverage, magazine programmes, documentaries or specialist feeds; denouncing the Hells and defending him, mostly. He liked her and could even imagine something happening between them – if that idea wasn’t in itself a wild fantasy – if things had been different, if he wasn’t for ever thinking of Chay.

It was assumed that the Pavulean Hell was running on a substrate far away from Pavul itself; for decades people had been searching for any sign of it being in any sense physically on the planet itself, or even anywhere near – the relatively anarchic habitats of the planet’s inner system were particularly favoured as locations – but without having found any evidence at all. Most likely, Chay’s being resided tens, hundreds, maybe thousands of light years away, deep-buried inside the substrate of some unknowably alien society.

He looked up at the stars some nights, wondering where she was.

Don’t you feel guilty about leaving her? Do you feel guilty that you left her? How guilty do you feel, abandoning her there? Do you sleep well, with all that guilt? Do you dream about her? You must feel so guilty – would you do the same thing again? Would she have abandoned you there? He had been asked the same question in many slightly different guises many times and answered it as honestly as he could, each time.

They had tried to get at him through her, tried to get her – the Chay who had been woken up on the houseboat, the Chay who would never have the memories of their time together in Hell – to denounce him for abandoning her. But she hadn’t let them use her. She said she’d felt hurt initially but thought he’d done the right thing. She still completely believed in what they’d done. She supported him fully.

She wasn’t saying the things the media – especially the hostile, pro-Hell media – wanted her to say so they quickly stopped asking her how she felt.