“We do,” Ferbin said, glancing at Holse, “understand.”
“Good,” Hyrlis said casually. He leaned forward, putting his elbows on the table and clasping his hands under his chin. “Now, back to you. You have come a very long way, prince. I assume to see me?”
“Indeed, that I have.”
“And with more intended than simply bringing me the news that my old friend Nerieth has been murdered, honoured though I am to hear from a real person rather than a news service.”
“Indeed,” Ferbin said, and pulled himself up in his seat as best he could. “I seek your help, good Hyrlis.”
“I see.” Hyrlis nodded, looking thoughtful.
Ferbin said, “Can you, will you help?”
“In what way?”
“Will you return to the Eighth with me to help avenge my father’s murder?”
Hyrlis sat back. He shook his head. “I cannot, prince. I am needed here, committed here. I work for the Nariscene, and even if I wanted to I could not return to Sursamen in the near or medium future.”
“Are you saying you do not even want to?” Ferbin asked, not hiding his displeasure.
“Prince, I am sorry to hear your father is dead, sorrier still to hear of the manner of it.”
“You have said so, sir,” Ferbin told him.
“So I say it again. Your father was a friend of mine for a short while and I respected him greatly. However, it is not my business to right wrongs occurring deep inside a distant Shellworld.”
Ferbin stood up. “I see I misunderstood you, sir,” he said. “I was told you are a good and honourable man. I find I have been misinformed.”
Holse stood up too, though slowly, thinking that if Ferbin was to storm out – though God knew to where – he had best accompany him.
“Hear me out, prince,” Hyrlis said reasonably. “I wish you well and tyl Loesp and his co-conspirators an undignified end, but I am unable to help.”
“And unwilling,” Ferbin said, almost spitting.
“Yours is not my fight, prince.”
“It should be the fight of all who believe in justice!”
“Oh, really, prince,” Hyrlis said, amused. “Listen to yourself.”
“Better than listening to you and your insulting complacency!”
Hyrlis looked puzzled. “What exactly did you expect me to do?”
“Something! Anything! Not nothing; not just sit there and smirk!”
“And why aren’t you doing something, Ferbin?” Hyrlis asked, still reasonable. “Might you not have been more effective staying on the Eighth rather than coming all this way to see me?”
“I am no warrior, I know that,” Ferbin said bitterly. “I have not the skills or disposition. And I have not the guile to go back to the court and face tyl Loesp and pretend I did not see what I did, to plot and plan behind a smile. I’d have drawn my sword or put my hands on his throat the instant I saw him and I’d have come off the worse. I know that I need help and I came here to ask you for it. If you will not help me, kindly let us go from here and do whatever you might be able and willing to do to speed my journey to my sibling Djan Seriy. I can only pray that she has somehow escaped infection by this Cultural disease of uncaring.”
“Prince,” Hyrlis sighed, “will you please sit down? There is more to discuss; I might help you in other ways. Plus we should talk about your sister.” Hyrlis waved one hand at Ferbin’s seat. “Please.”
“I shall sit, sir,” Ferbin told him, doing so, “but I am grievously disappointed.”
Holse sat too. He was glad of this; the wine was very good and it would be a criminal shame to have to abandon it.
Hyrlis resumed his earlier pose, hands under chin. A small frown creased his brow. “Why would tyl Loesp do what he has done?”
“I care not!” Ferbin said angrily. “That he did it is all that matters!”
Hyrlis shook his head. “I must disagree, prince. If you are to have any chance of righting this wrong, you’d be well advised to know what motivates your enemy.”
“Power, of course!” Ferbin exclaimed. “He wanted the throne, and he’ll have it, the moment he’s had my young brother killed.”
“But why now?”
“Why not!” Ferbin said, clenched fists hammering at the unforgiving stone of the great table. “My father had done all the work, the battles were all won, or as good as. That’s when a coward strikes, when the glory might be stolen without the bravery that afforded it.”
“Still, it is often easier to be the second in command, prince,” Hyrlis said. “The throne is a lonely place, and the nearer you are to it the clearer you see that. There are advantages to having great power without ultimate responsibility. Especially when you know that even the king does not have ultimate power, that there are always powers above. You say tyl Loesp was trusted, rewarded, valued, respected . . . Why would he risk that for the last notch of a power he knows is still enchained with limitations?”
Ferbin sat boiling with frustration but had resolved not to say anything this time. This only gave occasion for Hyrlis to look to the side and say quietly, “Do you know? Do you look there? Are you allow—?”
Ferbin could stand it no longer. “Will you stop talking to these phantoms!” he shouted, springing up again, this time so quickly his chair toppled over. Holse, having taken the opportunity to sip from his glass at what had seemed a handily quiet moment, had to gulp and stand quickly too, wiping his mouth with his sleeve. “These imagined demons have stolen what wits you ever had, sir!”
Hyrlis shook his head. “Would that they were imaginary, prince. And if there are similar systems of observation within Sursamen, they might hold one key to your difficulty.”
“What in the world are you talking about?” Ferbin hissed through clenched teeth.
Hyrlis sighed again. “Please, prince, do sit down again . . . No, no, I’ll stand,” he said, changing his mind. “Let’s all stand. And let me show you something. Please come with me. There is more to explain.”
The airship was a giant dark blister riding the poisoned air above a still glowing battlefield. They had been brought here in Hyrlis’ own small, svelte air vehicle, which had lifted silently from the bottom of another giant crater and flown whispering through clouds and smoke then clearer weather, chasing a ruddy sunset into a night whose far horizon was edged with tiny sporadic flashes of yellow-white light. Below them, rings and circles of dull and fading red covered the dark, undulating land. The airship was bright, all strung with lights, lit from every side and covered in reflective markings. It hung above the livid-bruised land like an admonition.
The little aircraft docked in a broad deck slung underneath the giant ship’s main body. Various other craft were arriving and departing all the time, arriving full of injured soldiers accompanied by a few medical staff and departing empty save for returning medics. Quiet moans filled the warm, smoke-scented air. Hyrlis led them via some spiralled steps to a ward full of coffin-like beds each containing a pale, squat, unconscious figure. Holse looked at the lifeless-looking people and felt envious; at least they didn’t have to stand up, walk around and climb stairs in this awful gravity.
“You know there is a theory,” Hyrlis said quietly, walking amongst the gently glowing coffin-beds, Ferbin and Holse at his rear, the four dark-dressed guards somewhere nearby, unseen, “that all that we experience as reality is just a simulation, a kind of hallucination that has been imposed upon us.”
Ferbin said nothing.
Holse assumed that Hyrlis was addressing them rather than his demons or whatever they were, so said, “We have a sect back home with a roughly similar point of view, sir.”
“It’s a not uncommon position,” Hyrlis said. He nodded at the unconscious bodies all around them. “These sleep, and have dreams inflicted upon them, for various reasons. They will believe, while they dream, that the dream is reality. We know it is not, but how can we know that our own reality is the last, the final one? How do we know there is n
ot a still greater reality external to our own into which we might awake?”
“Still,” Holse said. “What’s a chap to do, eh, sir? Life needs living, no matter what our station in it.”
“It does. But thinking of these things affects how we live that life. There are those who hold that, statistically, we must live in a simulation; the chances are too extreme for this not to be true.”
“There are always people who can convince themselves of near enough anything, seems to me, sir,” Holse said.
“I believe them to be wrong in any case,” Hyrlis said.
“You have been thinking on this, I take it then?” asked Ferbin. He meant to sound arch.
“I have, prince,” Hyrlis said, continuing to lead them through the host of sleeping injured. “And I base my argument on morality.”
“Do you now?” Ferbin said. He did not need to affect disdain.
Hyrlis nodded. “If we assume that all we have been told is as real as what we ourselves experience – in other words, that history, with all its torturings, massacres and genocides, is true – then, if it is all somehow under the control of somebody or some thing, must not those running that simulation be monsters? How utterly devoid of decency, pity and compassion would they have to be to allow this to happen, and keep on happening under their explicit control? Because so much of history is precisely this, gentlemen.”
They had approached the edge of the huge space, where slanted, down-looking windows allowed a view of the pocked landscape beneath. Hyrlis swept his arm to indicate both the bodies in their coffin-beds and the patchily glowing land below.
“War, famine, disease, genocide. Death, in a million different forms, often painful and protracted for the poor individual wretches involved. What god would so arrange the universe to predispose its creations to experience such suffering, or be the cause of it in others? What master of simulations or arbitrator of a game would set up the initial conditions to the same pitiless effect? God or programmer, the charge would be the same: that of near-infinitely sadistic cruelty; deliberate, premeditated barbarism on an unspeakably horrific scale.”
Hyrlis looked expectantly at them. “You see?” he said. “By this reasoning we must, after all, be at the most base level of reality – or at the most exalted, however one wishes to look at it. Just as reality can blithely exhibit the most absurd coincidences that no credible fiction could convince us of, so only reality – produced, ultimately, by matter in the raw – can be so unthinkingly cruel. Nothing able to think, nothing able to comprehend culpability, justice or morality could encompass such purposefully invoked savagery without representing the absolute definition of evil. It is that unthinkingness that saves us. And condemns us, too, of course; we are as a result our own moral agents, and there is no escape from that responsibility, no appeal to a higher power that might be said to have artificially constrained or directed us.”
Hyrlis rapped on the clear material separating them from the view of the dark battlefield. “We are information, gentlemen; all living things are. However, we are lucky enough to be encoded in matter itself, not running in some abstracted system as patterns of particles or standing waves of probability.”
Holse had been thinking about this. “Of course, sir, your god could just be a bastard,” he suggested. “Or these simulationeers, if it’s them responsible.”
“That is possible,” Hyrlis said, a smile fading. “Those above and beyond us might indeed be evil personified. But it is a standpoint of some despair.”
“And all this pertains how, exactly?” Ferbin asked. His feet were sore and he was growing tired of what seemed to him like pointless speculation, not to mention something dangerously close to philosophy, a field of human endeavour he had encountered but fleetingly through various exasperated tutors, though long enough to have formed the unshakeable impression that its principal purpose was to prove that one equalled zero, black was white and educated men could speak through their bottoms.
“I am watched,” Hyrlis said. “Perhaps your home is watched, prince. It is possible that tiny machines similar to those that observe me spy upon your people too. The death of your father might have been overseen by more eyes than you thought were present. And if it was watched once, it can be watched again, because only base reality cannot be fully replayed; anything transmitted can be recorded and usually is.”
Ferbin stared at him. “Recorded?” he said, horrified. “My father’s murder?”
“It is possible; no more,” Hyrlis told him.
“By whom?”
“The Oct, the Nariscene, the Morthanveld?” Hyrlis suggested. “Perhaps the Culture. Perhaps anybody else with the means, which would include some dozens of Involved civilisations at least.”
“And this would be done,” Holse suggested, “by the same unseen agents that you address from time to time, sir?”
“By things most similar,” Hyrlis agreed.
“Unseen,” Ferbin said contemptuously. “Unheard, untouched, unsmelled, untasted, undetected. In a word, figmented.”
“Oh, we are often profoundly affected by unseeably small things, prince.” Hyrlis smiled wistfully. “I have advised rulers for whom the greatest military service I could perform had nothing to do with strategy, tactics or weapons technology; it was simply to inform them of and persuade them to accept the germ theory of disease and infection. Believing that we are surrounded by microscopic entities that profoundly and directly affect the fates of individuals and through them nations has been the first step in the ascendancy of many a great ruler. I’ve lost count of the wars I’ve seen won more by medics and engineers than mere soldiery. Such infective beings, too small to see, assuredly exist, prince, and believe me so do those designed, made and controlled by powers beyond your grasping.” Ferbin opened his mouth to say something but Hyrlis went on, “Your own faith holds the same idea centrally, prince. Do you not believe that the WorldGod sees everything? How do you think it does that?”
Ferbin felt baulked, tripped up. “It is a god!” he said, blustering.
“If you treat it as such then such it is,” Hyrlis said reasonably. “However, it is unarguably a member of a long-declining species with a clearly traceable galactic lineage and evolutionary line. It is another corporeal being, prince, and the fact that your people have chosen to call it a god does not mean that it is particularly powerful, all-seeing even within the limitations of Sursamen, or indeed sane.” Ferbin wanted to speak but Hyrlis held up one hand. “No one knows why Xinthians inhabit Shellworld Cores, prince. Theories include them being sent there by their own kind as a punishment, or to isolate them because they have become infectiously diseased, or mad. Some speculate they’re there because the individual Xinthians concerned are simply fascinated by Shellworlds. Another guess has it that each seeks somehow to defend its chosen Shellworld, though against what nobody knows, and the truth is that Tensile Aeronathaurs are not in themselves especially powerful creatures, and seem to scorn the kind of high-level weaponry that might compensate for that lack. All in all, not much of a God, prince.”
“We claim it as our God, sir,” Ferbin said frostily. “Not as some mythical Universal Creator.” He glanced at Holse, looking for support, or at least acknowledgement.
Holse wasn’t about to get involved in any theological arguments. He looked serious and nodded, hoping this would do.
Hyrlis just smiled.
“So you are saying we have no privacy?” Ferbin said, feeling angry and dismayed.
“Oh, you may have.” Hyrlis shrugged. “Perhaps nobody watches you, including your god. But if others do, and you can persuade them to share that recording, then you will have a weapon to use against tyl Loesp.”
“But sir,” Holse said, “given such fantastical apparatus, might not anything and everything be faked?”
“It might, but people can be quite good at spotting what has been faked. And the effect on people who do not know that anything can be faked is usually profound. Revealed at the right mo
ment, such a recording, if it exists, may so visibly shake tyl Loesp or his co-conspirators that their immediate reaction leaves no doubt in the unprejudiced mind that they are guilty.”
“And how might we discover whether such a recording exists?” Ferbin asked. It still all sounded absurdly far-fetched to him, even in this entire hierarchical realm of far-fetched world beyond far-fetched world.
“It may be as simple as just asking the right people,” Hyrlis said. He was still standing beside the down-sloped windows. Something flashed white far away on the dark plain below, briefly illuminating one side of his face. Some part of the initial illumination remained, fading slowly to yellow. “Find someone sympathetic in the Culture and ask them. Your sister, prince, would seem an obvious choice, and, being in Special Circumstances, she would stand a good chance of being able to find out the truth, even if it is hidden, and even if it is not the Culture itself that is doing the observing. Look to your sister, prince. She may hold your answer.”
“Given your own refusal to help, I have little choice, sir.”
Hyrlis shrugged. “Well, family should stick together,” he said casually. Another flash lit up his face, and – away in the distance – a great rolling, rising glowing cloud of yellow surged with an unstoppable slowness into the night air. The orange-ruddy light from the huge climbing cloud lit up distant hills and mountains, rubbing them blood-coloured.
“You might have imparted this information in your own quarters,” Ferbin told the man. “Why bring us here, amongst these wretches and above this savagery, to tell us something you might have told over dinner?”
“So that we might, appropriately, observe, prince,” Hyrlis said. He nodded at the landscape below. “We look down upon all this, and perhaps are looked down on in turn. It is entirely possible that everything we see here is only taking place at all so that it may be observed.”
“Meaning what, sir?” Holse asked, when Ferbin didn’t. Also, their host looked as though he had no mind to add any more; he just gazed languidly out through the slanted windows over the red, under-lit clouds and the spark-infested darkness of the cratered landscape beneath.