Polystom (Gollancz Sf S.)

by Adam Roberts

  ‘Try climbing over the wire,’ urged the ghost. ‘Use your jacket as a way of passage.’

  But Polystom didn’t like the look of that. The jacket stretched only halfway over the metal brambles, and an intimidating stretch of barbs glinted in the sunlight.

  ‘Can’t you move the wire out of the way for me?’ he asked his dead uncle. ‘You’re dead, after all. It can’t hurt you.’

  ‘I don’t really interact with this world in that way.’

  ‘You don’t? But you’re speaking to me. I saw the rain bounce off your shoulders.’

  ‘You didn’t, not really. You saw my programme, my writing-essence, adapt to the environment by adding rain. The rain in the air was real, but the rain bouncing off my shoulders was not. And yes I can talk to you; and I have been able, on occasion, to affect things more materially. But not very well, not without great effort. It’s a matter of the algorithm that describes me; it functions only on the boundary of materiality – you can see me and hear me, but I can’t move the wire for you.’

  ‘It’s hopeless,’ Stom said. ‘It’s hopeless. And even if I could go on, there would be more wire. Wire and mines.’

  ‘Now, now,’ said the ghost of his uncle. ‘That sounds like the counsel of despair.’

  ‘And if I did reach the mountain, how could I possibly persuade the authorities there to allow me to rewrite the patterns inside the Computational Device? It’s madness to think of it! What would I tell them? That the ghost of my dead uncle told me to do it?’

  The light thickened and greyed around him, as a new raft of clouds slid in front of the sun. These clouds were black as plums, threatening renewed downpour. The change in the quality of the light was extraordinarily pronounced: from bright sunshine to an almost submarine gloom. It took a second for Polystom’s eyes to adjust to the duskiness, and when he looked around for his uncle he found himself amongst a crowd of silent figures. They had appeared from nowhere, every one of them a foot or more taller than Polystom, all dressed in dark clothes, their skin looking grey in the dimness of the light. They stood all around him, distributed evenly amongst the wire, the craters, but every one of them was turned to face him, Polystom, faces like grey sunflowers aimed at the sun. Their silent attention was thrillingly upsetting.

  ‘Uncle?’ Stom said; but Cleonicles seemed even more startled by the arrival of the ghosts than he was.

  And then, from nowhere, the land to the west exploded, the air shattering with noise, a cliff-face of brown hurled up by the explosions and atomising into a locust-cloud of mud-clods, swarming brown through the air as Polystom, half knocked-over and half diving for cover, put his face into the mud.

  There were half a dozen more detonations, each one making the earth tremble beneath Polystom like palsy. He wrapped his arms about his head. A heavy rain of mud clattered against his back. More explosions. Something jagged into his arm, by his shoulder; a bullet? Shrapnel?

  Polystom waited minutes after the last of the explosions, the wound in his shoulder burning all the while, before he considered it safe enough to sit up. A shard of wire, with three barbs upon it, had stuck itself into his flesh. It had not gone deep, and the end that had inserted itself into his flesh was barb-free, so that Polystom was able to pull it clear. His shirt wore a rosette of blood on its arm, but the bleeding dried up quickly.

  Only after he had pulled the wire free did Polystom look around him. Cleonicles was gone. The eerie crowd of motionless, grey figures was no more. Away to the west, the ground was newly cratered, up and down like a monumental sculpture of an ocean stormscape. All around him were gathered mud-coloured men, all of them carrying weapons of one sort or another.

  Polystom had fallen into the hands of the enemy.

  His heart lurched and pounded. They were about to kill him. To kill him. One of them lifted a hand, closed it to a fist, holding it around the level of his shoulder. And then, with a ridiculous sense of relief, Stom saw the ghost of his dead wife making her way through the crowd.

  [seventh leaf]

  The insurrectionists tied his hands behind him, and marched him for several hours westwards, down the broken landscape of the west ridge and into the valley. ‘Beeswing?’ he called. ‘Beeswing?’

  ‘Hello again,’ she said, at his shoulder.

  ‘Are you with these people?’

  ‘Indeed I am.’

  ‘Wife, please tell me that they’re not going to execute me. Please. I couldn’t bear that.’ Under the power of these servants, Polystom couldn’t help think of the flayed man, the ghastly individual who had haunted his dreams.

  ‘Couldn’t bear it,’ said Beeswing distantly. ‘Excuse me, I have to go.’ She tripped off, away, out of sight.

  They marched in silence along the valley, Polystom sobbing openly; footsore, hungry, thirsty, his shoulder throbbing with pain, and fear chewing at his insides like toothache. The strands of muscle bunched together like balls of red wool, just below the comforting cloth of the skin. The flayed man grasping at his ankles. The servant had caught him at last.

  They had come from the Mudworld, those two who had been executed. Perhaps they had been the colleagues of these dour, dirt-covered soldiers. Had they followed the news? Polystom tried, with an increasing sense of desperation, to remember the occasion. It had been widely reported; that had been half the point of it. Had reports showed him sitting on the pedestal, observing the execution? Had these reports reached the Mudworld? Of course they had, he told himself. Of course they had. How had he appeared, on those reports? He had – surely – worn a face of elegantly repressed distress. He had thought it a barbarous, unnecessary manner of death. He had only attended because the military insisted. But would these insurrectionists understand that? Could they be made to understand it?

  They stopped for ten minutes in a shell-crater as a heavy storm rolled through the sky. Thorns of water bristled in ever-changing patterns on the surface of the pond. Polystom watched the patterns in a sort of ecstasy of fear. Then the sky cleared, and they were off again.

  They pushed him, and he tumbled forward into a trench, landing awkwardly and winding himself. Gasping, tears in his eyes, they hauled him upright and threw him into a dark dugout. The door was shut behind him.

  He wriggled round, his arms still tied behind him, and managed to get himself sitting against the wall. Eventually the blackness resolved itself into a grainy greyness, the thread-thin Π of light from the edges of the shut door seeping illumination through. The walls and floor were mud. There was no furniture.

  ‘Hello again,’ said Beeswing. Of course she had appeared from nowhere, through the closed door. Polystom could just about make out the shape of her, uncertain in outline in the darkness. She moved, her shadowy silhouette passing in front of him. Then she was on the other side.

  ‘Beeswing,’ said Polystom. ‘You’ve got to help me.’

  ‘They took you,’ said Beeswing, in her singsong voice, ‘on my suggestion. They’re not much given to taking prisoners, you see. They tried it, as a tactic, decades ago, in the early years of the war – or so they told me, when I suggested taking you. Said it had never done them any good in the past.’

  ‘Beeswing . . .’

  ‘But I talked them round.’

  ‘They listen to you?’

  ‘It’s a funny thing,’ she said. ‘They do. They seem to regard the ghosts as a sort of supernatural talisman. Something like that. Some of us have convinced them that we’re on the same side. There’s little we can do, as ghosts, you know,’ she added with a bubbling chuckle, ‘except pop up out of strange places and frighten the soldiers. But we are privy, some of us, to important information. That counts for something.’

  ‘This is all madness,’ sobbed Polystom. ‘I shouldn’t be here. I’m a poet, not a soldier. I never intended those men to be executed, certainly not in the manner they were. Please tell them, Beeswing, please tell them. It wasn’t my choice.’

  ‘What on earth are you talking about?’


  ‘Please, wife, please,’ Polystom whined. ‘Please, please.’

  It took him several long moments to realise he was alone.

  Polystom was in the dugout for days, or weeks, or a day: it was impossible to gauge the passing of time. He was brought a hunk of bread and some water in a can. In the seconds that the door was open, and bright sunshine spilling in from outside, the bread looked blotchy with mould; but in the greyness that followed the door being shut he was able to tell himself that he had been dazzled, that the bread was fine, and he ate it all down and drank the warm water.

  ‘I never meant to be a soldier,’ he told the ghost of his wife. ‘Do you know why I think I volunteered?’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘It was because my uncle was killed, you know.’

  ‘That happened after my death,’ ‘Beeswing reminded him. That wasn’t in my dossier. I’ve heard something about it subsequently – and of course, spoken to your uncle personally. But, you know, he doesn’t remember his own death except in a secondhand manner, because that wasn’t in his dossier. Anyway, go on: you were saying?’

  ‘I think I volunteered out of guilt.’

  ‘Guilt?’

  ‘My uncle was assassinated, and I didn’t feel anything. Can you believe that? I was numb to it. I knew, in my brain, that it was a terrible thing that had happened, but I didn’t feel it, in my heart. Do you know what I mean?’

  ‘Having neither heart nor brain,’ said Beeswing, ‘it’d take me an effort of imagination.’

  ‘It was all blank,’ said Polystom. He was lying on his back, his captors having removed his bindings. ‘I felt nothing. Eventually I felt guilty that I felt nothing. And because I felt guilty, empty, nothing; and because I was surrounded by all these military men who seemed so purposeful and assured; and because my uncle had been involved, in some mysterious way that I didn’t understand, in the war on the Mudworld. Because of all this I thought to myself that a glorious military commission would make things better, somehow.’ He coughed. ‘So I volunteered. What a fool I have been. I don’t belong here.’

  ‘I certainly don’t belong here,’ said Beeswing.

  ‘Cleonicles, his ghost, said that if the Computational Device could be rewritten . . .’

  ‘I know all about that,’ said Beeswing, cutting him off. ‘That’s a bit misguided.’

  ‘Misguided?’

  ‘Oh yes. Doesn’t go nearly far enough. The people here, well now. They’re keen to see the whole machine destroyed.’

  ‘Destroyed?’

  ‘I told them you could help. That’s why you’re still alive.’

  ‘Destroyed?’ said Polystom again. ‘But that’s insanity. What about the simulated world in there? Whole civilizations! You, yourself – and all the other ghosts like you. You only exist because you were written-in to that imaginary cosmos. How could you destroy it? You’d be destroying yourself!’

  ‘Well,’ said Beeswing, her voice very close. ‘Let me tell you about that.’

  ‘Cleonicles told you,’ came the ghost’s voice in the darkness, ‘that he personally wrote-in an entire world, into the switches, crystals and valves of the Computational Device. He did that?’

  ‘He did.’

  ‘He explained it to me in similar terms,’ said Beeswing.

  There was a silence. Polystom was acutely aware of the grey shape, to his left, of his wife. It was hard to believe she wasn’t real, a material presence. If he reached out, would he touch her skin? Could he slip the shift from her shoulders? Or would his hand go through her body like slipping through cold water?

  ‘He told you,’ she went on, her voice as light as it had ever been in life. ‘He told you that some years ago, their years, the simulations inside the Computational Device invented Computational Devices of their own?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That these Devices are more powerful, faster, more capable, than our own Devices?’

  ‘I told him,’ said Polystom, ‘that it seemed, what would you say, counter-intuitive to me. But he said it was a question of efficiency rather than actual capacity. Or something like that.’

  ‘It’s not like that at all,’ said Beeswing. She moved her head. The darker shadow that was her hair moved a fraction later. ‘It’s not like that at all.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well I’ll tell you. How can I put it? This way: which would you say is more likely? That our Computational Device, here in the mountain, has invented the whole cosmos of which we’ve been talking? Or that their Computational Device, invented this cosmos?’

  ‘Well that’s just ridiculous,’ said Stom, immediately.

  ‘Why ridiculous?’

  ‘Obviously, it is. I know I’m real.’

  ‘So do I. Yet you’d describe me as a piece of writing, rather than anything else. But if I feel real, under those circumstances, why might you not feel yourself to be real too?’

  Polystom thought about it. ‘Our cosmos predates theirs,’ he pointed out. ‘My uncle invented it, for one thing.’

  ‘Their cosmos,’ said Beeswing, ‘predates either of us. It’s been around longer than we’ve been alive. That’s all we know. Assume your uncle is a programme: may be he’s been programmed to tell you that he invented the other cosmos. Perhaps everything around us was invented, say, thirty years ago.’

  Polystom shook his head, a meaningless gesture in the dark. He saw what Beeswing was trying to say, he could see the slippery-smooth logic of the statement, but nonetheless his soul rejected it as nonsensical. As sophistry. He couldn’t refute it rationally, he saw: any statement he brought up to counter it could be explained away. Nonetheless he felt its wrongness. He felt, in his gut, the real-ness of his own existence. This other realm, which he knew only through descriptions from his dead uncle, sounded far too outlandish – vacuum throughout the System? A constant state of war? Worldwide revolutions? It did not have the smack of reality.

  ‘If I kick a stone, on this world,’ said Polystom, ‘I feel it as a stone. It’s not a piece of writing, it’s actually, really, a stone.’

  ‘Of course you’d say that,’ said Beeswing. ‘It feels that way to you because that’s how it’s been written.’

  ‘This is nonsense.’

  ‘It isn’t.’

  ‘By your own logic,’ said Polystom, ‘it could be either way. Any argument you make about the unreality of our world, could be made with equal relevance about the unreality of this other place, this vacuum-cosmos. And vice versa: any argument you make about the reality of that world, you can make with equal validity about this world, our world.’

  ‘Well that’s a very interesting point,’ agreed Beeswing. ‘I can see the force of that argument. What can we do, then, except set the two cosmoses side by side and see which is the more likely? The more plausible? Can we agree, you and I, in this dark hole, that we should believe in the more plausible of the two?’

  ‘Well,’ said Polystom, uncertainly. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I can’t see any other path.’

  ‘If you like,’ said Stom. ‘But our world is much, much more “plausible” than that other, the cosmos Cleonicles described to me.’

  ‘Why so?’

  ‘Of course it is! A massive swollen sun? Millions of miles of emptiness and vacuum between the worlds? It beggars belief.’

  ‘I think,’ said Beeswing with an infuriating catch of smugness in her voice, ‘that actually what you are saying is that you, personally, are more familiar with this world than the other. That’s all. If you’d grown up in the other cosmos, you’d consider the things you mentioned normal, and would consider our System outlandish.’

  ‘Don’t be absurd.’

  ‘Let us,’ said Beeswing, her shadowy presence moving in front of Stom to take up a position on his right side. ‘Let us be rational about it. In what respects is this other world less plausible than ours?’

  ‘It has no stability, according to Cleonicles. Thousands of years of constant fight
ing and war? Such a civilisation would have destroyed itself. And yet, on the contrary, rather than smashing itself to atoms this civilisation is supposed to have developed with staggering rapidity to staggering levels of technical sophistication? How can this have happened? It’s nonsense.’

  ‘Agreed,’ said Beeswing. ‘That’s hard to understand.’

  ‘And it’s a vacuum cosmos,’ said Polystom with heat. ‘Because my uncle had a strange obsession with the idea! So he invented this System with emptiness between its worlds. Scientific opinion in our System is adamant that such a world is an impossibility, but my uncle made it anyway, for his own reasons. He told me he had to fiddle the physics, to make it happen. It could never occur naturally! The vacuum would suck away all the atmosphere from any world – it would be barren.’

  ‘Agreed, again,’ said Beeswing. ‘That’s two good points.’

  ‘There’s a hundred points,’ insisted Polystom, although he couldn’t think of any more at that moment. ‘It’s absurd. And there’s nothing illogical about our System, the real System. It’s entirely self-consistent – which, Cleonicles told me, wasn’t the case with the simulated System either.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Beeswing. ‘But I’m not sure I share your belief in the inherent stability of our model of reality. If we grew up in a System with vacuum between the worlds, bizarre as that sounds to us – but perhaps if we grew up in such a world, then we would regard our System, with its interplanetary atmosphere, as outlandish and strange. The friction of worlds circulating through the air would slow everything down, and the worlds would all spiral in towards the centre.’

  ‘Nonsense. The air is orbiting, just as the worlds are.’