Surface Detail

by Iain M. Banks

  When not sleeping, eating or working she was at worship, joining everybody else in the Refuge praising God in the chapel. God here was a female deity, worshipped for Her fecundity by these celibates in long services full of chanting.

  She tried to explain that she didn’t believe in God but this was at first dismissed as impossible nonsense – as absurd as denying the existence of the sun or gravity – then, when the others saw she was serious, she was hauled up before the fearsome Superior of the Refuge, who explained that belief in God was not a choice. She was newly arrived and would be indulged this time, but she must submit to the will of God and obey her betters. In the villages and cities they burned people alive for proclaiming that God did not exist. Here, if she persisted, she would be starved and beaten until she saw sense.

  Not everybody, the Superior explained – and at this point the formidable female in her dark robes of office appeared suddenly old, Chay thought – was able to accept God into their hearts as easily or as fully as did the most pious and enlightened. Even if she had not yet opened herself completely to God’s love, she must realise that it was something that would come with time, and the very rituals and services, devotions and chants that she found so meaningless might themselves lead to the belief she lacked, even if at first she did not feel that she partook of them with any faith at all.

  Just as one might do useful work without fully understanding the job one was engaged in, or even what the point of it was, so the behaviour of devotion still mattered to the all-forgiving God, and just as the habitual performance of a task gradually raised one’s skills to something close to perfection, bringing a deeper understanding of the work, so the actions of faith would lead to the state of faith.

  Finally, she was shown the filthy, stinking, windowless cell carved into the rock beneath the Refuge where she would be chained, starved and beaten if she did not at least try to accept God’s love. She trembled as she looked at the shackles and the flails, and agreed she would do her best.

  She shared a dorm with half a dozen others on the floor beneath the top, looking out in the other direction from the nearby plateau, towards the open desert. These were open rooms; one wall missing with only a heavy tarpaulin to lower if the dusty wind was blowing in, with stepped floors leading down to a wall that was hidden from the topmost tier. Open rooms, with a view over the plain, desert or grassland, were comforting places. Closed rooms felt wrong, imprisoning, especially for going to sleep in or waking up in. Similarly, being alone was a punishment to an individual from a herd species, so like most normal people she liked to bed down in a group with at least half a dozen others.

  She woke the others up with her nightmares too often to be a popular sleep-companion, but then she was not alone in having tormenting dreams.

  She had books to read and other people to talk to, and all she had to do for her keep was help with the general work required to keep the place in good repair and add her strength to help pull on the ropes which brought the baskets of water and food – and the very occasional visitor or noviciate – up from the cluster of small buildings at the base of the mesa. The services and chants became just part of the routine. She still resented them and still thought they were without meaning, but she added her voice to all the others.

  The weather was warm without being uncomfortable except when the wind blew out of the desert and brought dust with it. The water came from a deep well near the base of the mesa and was still deliciously cold when it arrived in the big cane-wrapped pottery jars.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  Twenty years later she was the Superior, and had it not been for the book of her life, written in the manuscript blank with the charred page, she might not still have believed that she had had any sort of existence before that: no life as a gifted academic in a free, liberated society with superconductors, space elevators, AIs and life-extension treatments, and no few months spent in the utter ghastliness of the virtual Hell, accumulating the evidence to present to an unbelieving world – an unbelieving galaxy, for that matter – that might help bring about the destruction of the Hells for ever.

  She had kept writing her book, continuing on beyond all that she could recall of her life in the Real and her time with Prin in the virtual Hell, writing down everything that happened to her since, here in this quiet, untroubled existence which she had come to love and believe in and still expected to be dragged away from, back to Hell, every single night …

  She had become wizened. Her face was lined, her pelt was grey and her gait had stiffened and become awkward with age. She oversaw the workings of the Refuge to the best of her ability and did all that she could for the noviciates and other occupants. At least once per season, now that she was Superior, she had to clamber into a basket and be lowered to the austere cluster of small buildings at the foot of the mesa to deal and negotiate with the representative of the charity which distributed their manuscripts in the cities. The representatives were always male, so she had no choice but to descend to them; they could not be winched up to come and see her, because it was forbidden.