Surface Detail

And the pro-Hell side – the Erruns of their world, the people who would keep Hell – had started trying to reach him through their public pronouncements, hinting at a deal that would let Chay go, if he would retract his earlier testimony and agree not to testify again. Prin had given Filhyn and Kemracht permission to try to shield him from this sort of temptation, but there was only so much he could do, especially when journalists – granted interviews and calling in remotely – asked him for his response to such vicariously delivered overtures.

And now, a week before he was due to testify before the Galactic Council, the pro-Hell people had tracked him down.

He knew something was wrong even before he fully woke up. The sensation was like knowing you had gone to sleep on a narrow ledge high on a cliff and woken in darkness to find there was the hint of an edge under your back and nothing there when you stretched out to one side.

His heart thumped, his mouth felt dry. He felt he was about to fall. He struggled to consciousness.

“Prin, son, are you all right?”

It was Representative Errun, the old pro-Hell campaigner who had tried to stop him giving any evidence at all in the parliament two long months earlier. Of course now it felt like he’d known from the start it would be Errun they’d send, but he told himself it was just a lucky guess, a coincidence.

Prin woke up, looked around. He was in a fairly grand, rather cluttered, comfortable-looking room that might have been modelled on Representative Errun’s own study for all he knew.

So, he had not really woken up at all, was not really looking round. They had found a way into his dreams. They would tempt him here, then. He wondered how they’d accomplished this. May as well just ask. “How are you doing this?” he asked.

Errun shook his head. “I don’t know the technical details, son.”

“Please do not call me ‘son’.”

Errun sighed, “Prin, I just need to talk to you.”

Prin got up, walked to the door of the room. The door was locked. Where windows might have been there were mirrors. Errun was watching him. Prin nodded at the desk. “I intend to pick up that antique lamp and attempt to strike you across the head with it, representative. What do you think will happen?”

“I think you should sit down and let us talk, Prin,” Errun said.

Prin said nothing. He went to the desk, picked up the heavy oil lamp, gripped it in both trunks so that its weighted base was upright and walked towards the older male, who was now looking alarmed.

He was back in the seat, sitting facing Errun again. He looked at the desk. The lamp was where it had been. The representative appeared unruffled.

“That is what will happen, Prin,” Errun told him.

“Say what you have to say,” Prin said.

The older male hesitated, wore an expression of concern. “Prin,” he said, “I can’t claim to know everything you’ve been through, but…”

Prin let the old one witter on. They could make him stay in here, stop him from leaving and stop him from offering any violence to this dream-image of the old representative, but they couldn’t stop his attention from wandering. The techniques learned in lecture theatres and later honed to perfection in faculty meetings were proving their real worth at last. He could vaguely follow what was being said without needing to bother with the detail.

When he’d been a student he had assumed he could do this because he was just so damn smart and basically already knew pretty much all they were trying to teach him. Later, during seemingly endless committee sessions, he’d accepted that a lot of what passed for useful information-sharing within an organisation was really just the bureaucratic phatic of people protecting their position, looking for praise, projecting criticism, setting up positions of non-responsibility for up-coming failures and calamities that were both entirely predictable but seemingly completely unavoidable, and telling each other what they all already knew anyway. The trick was to be able to re-engage quickly and seamlessly without allowing anyone to know you’d stopped listening properly shortly after the speaker had first opened their mouth.

So Representative Errun had been blathering on with some homely, folksy little speech about a childhood experience that had left him convinced of the need for useful lies, pretend worlds and keeping those that made up the lumpen herd in their place. He was coming to the end of his rather obvious and graceless summing-up now. Reviewing it with his academic hat on, Prin thought it had been a rather pedestrian presentation; capable but unimaginative. It might have merited a C. A C+ if one was being generous.