“And people are going to die.”
“People? Very likely even ships!”
She just looked at him.
“Lededje,” the avatar said, taking one of her armour-fat hands in his own. “I am a warship. This is in my nature; this is what I’m designed and built for. My moment of glory approaches and you can’t expect me not to be excited at the prospect. I was fully expecting to spend my operational life just twiddling my metaphorical thumbs in the middle of empty nowhere, ensuring sensible behaviour amongst the rolling boil of fractious civs just by my presence and that of my peers, keeping the peace through the threat of the sheer pandemonium that would result if anybody resurrected the idea of war as a dispute-resolution procedure with the likes of me around. Now some sense-forsaken fuckwit with a death wish has done just that and I strongly suspect I shortly get a chance to shine, baby!”
On the word “shine”, Demeisen’s eyebrows shot up, his voice rose a tone or two and increased markedly in volume. Even through the armoured glove, she could feel the pressure of his hands squeezing hers.
Lededje had never seen anybody look so happy.
“And what happens to me?” she asked quietly.
“You should get back home,” the avatar told her. It glanced at the screen, where the black snowflake with too many limbs still filled the centre of the image. “I’d chuck you overboard in this shuttle right now and let you head for Sichult, but whatever the fuck that is might mistake you for a munition or just waste you for the target practice so I’d better deal with it first.” The avatar looked at her with a strange, intense expression. “Necessarily dangerous, I’m afraid. No getting away from it.” Demeisen took a deep breath. “You afraid to die, Lededje Y’breq?”
“I’ve already died,” she told him.
He spread his hands, looked genuinely interested. “And?”
“It’s shit.”
“Fair enough,” he said, turning to face the screen and sitting back properly in the shuttle command seat. “Let’s put that one down as a mistake and try to stop it turning into a habit.”
Lededje watched the seat contort itself around the avatar, securing his body in place with padded extensions of the chair’s own legs, arms, seat and back. She felt movement around and beneath her and realised her seat was doing the same thing, enclosing her one more time; another layer of confinement beyond the gel suit and the armoured outer suit. She was pressed and shuffled backwards until everything fitted snugly against the contours of the seat.
“Now we get foamed,” Demeisen told her.
“What?” she said, alarmed, as the suit’s visor swung smoothly down over her face. The shuttle’s interior went dark, but the visor showed some sort of compensated image that gave her a very clear view of what looked like red-glowing bubbling liquid filling up the space she’d been living in for the last twenty-plus days, rising quickly in a dark red tide around the base of the chair, flowing up and over her armoured body and then foaming all about her, rapidly covering the visor and leaving her briefly blind in the darkness before she heard the avatar speak again.
“Space view? Or some screen entertainment to while away the time?” Suddenly the visor was showing her the same view the screen had, but wrap-around. The wrong-looking, eight-limbed black snowflake was still centre-image.
“You might have done better to ask whether I was afraid of forced immobility and confined spaces,” Lededje told the avatar.
“I forgot. Of course, the suit can just put you under for the duration of … well, whatever.”
“No, thanks.”
“So, make you mind up. Real space view with potential scariness, or some screen; gentle feel-good, wistful comedy, razor-sharp witterage, outright slapstick hilarity, engrossing human drama, historical epic, educational documentary, ambient meanderance, pure art appreciation, porn, horror, sport or news?”
“Real space view, thanks.”
“I’ll do my best. Might all happen too quickly if anything happens at all. Though prepare for disappointment and anti-climax; chances are still that this particular encounter will be resolved peacefully. Bastarding things usually are.”
“You are astoundingly bad at hiding your feelings in such matters,” she told the ship. “I hope your space-battle tactics are more subtle.”
The avatar just laughed.
Then everything went quiet for a moment. She could hear her own heart beat distantly. There was a noise just like a single in drawn breath and then the avatar’s voice said quietly, “Okay …”
On the screen before her eyes, the black snowflake image flickered.
There came a time when she found the shallow valley with the iron cages where the acid rain fell to torment the howling inmates, and each day the demons dragged them screaming to the canted slabs where their blood was spilled to form the gurgling stream at the valley’s foot which flowed glutinously into the header pond just upstream from the little mill.
She beat her great dark wings over the scene, watching as a giant flying beetle machine arrived to disgorge the latest batch of the badly behaved who’d been appropriately terrified by their tour round Hell. The beetle landed in a storm of dust, caking the mill and adding to the patina on the black-dark blood pond.
On the side of the mill, the wheel revolved ponderously, eliciting screams and groans from the still-living tissues, sinews and bones from which it was made.
Every beat of her wings caused her a tiny twinge of pain.
Chay had killed her thousand souls, enveloping them to release them into oblivion. This had happened some time ago. She still had no idea how quickly time moved within the virtual environment of the Hell. For her, it had been over thirteen hundred days; nearly three years in Pavulean terms, back in the Real.
With every death she took on a little more pain; the lantern-headed uber-demon had not lied. An aching tooth here, a stabbing feeling in her gut there, a persistent headache, what felt like a trapped nerve in one hip, a twinge every time she clenched her talons, a cramp when she flexed her wings in a certain way … a thousand almost infinitesimal little pangs and stings and sprains and strains and ulcers and chafings, either adding incrementally to some established hurt or starting a fresh site. She had long since stopped assuming that there were no bits of her great dark body left to experience pain; there always were. She remembered being the old Superior, near the end of her life in the Refuge; filled with aches and pains. At least there, death was always on its way, a release from suffering.
No single ache dominated, and even when taken together the sum of them was not utterly debilitating, but they all nagged, all had their effect, filling her days with the grumbling torment of continual, grinding misery; all the worse, on those days when she was feeling sorry for herself, for being self-inflicted.
Still she beat on though, still she flew across the calamitous geographies of Hell; watching, witnessing, and worshipped. She didn’t wonder that she had become part of this constructed world’s emergent mythology. Had she still been a lost soul wandering these reeking morasses, denuded, fire-blacked forests, crater-pitted concrete aprons and blasted, cinder-strewn hillsides, so traumatised she had started to believe there never had been a Real in which she’d lived … she too might have worshipped something like herself, praying to the half-fabled, occasionally glimpsed angel of death for a release from her torments.
She had toured the Hell to its limits, many tens of days flight away, and, beating upright by those iron walls, talons scrabbling at their vast, unyielding extent, accepted that this was indeed not an infinite space. It had its boundaries, distant though they may be.
She established a sort of mental map of the place. Here were the scorched plains, the poisoned marshes, the arid badlands, the steaming swamps, the bleached salt pans, the alkali lakes, acid ponds, bubbling mud craters and sintered lava flows amongst all the other bewilderingly varied wastelands of the place; here were the tremendous peaks of iron-frozen mountains, their glaciers red with blood, here t
he encircling sea of Hell, which lapped at the foot of the boundary wall and teemed with voracious monsters.
Here were the great valved doors that admitted the newly condemned; here were the roads the towering juggernauts of dead and dying trundled down, delivering their grisly cargoes to the vast prisons, camps, factories and barracks of the place; here the damned were set to their slave labour within the munitions factories or condemned to wander the ruins and the wilderness, or were chosen to fight in the everlasting war that consumed, recycled and re-consumed lives by the thousands and tens of thousands each and every day by, both sides.
Because there were two sides to Hell, though you’d have struggled to spot the slightest difference if you’d simply found yourself set down in the midst of either. The unfortunates delivered into Hell were allocated sides before they even entered the place, generally half going to one and half to the other.
There were two sets of the great valved doors – only admitting, impossible to exit through – two vast sets of boulevards paved with wracked backs and splintered bones, two whole sets and systems of prisons and factories and camps and barracks, two hier-archies of demons and – she’d been surprised to find – two of the colossal king-demons. They fought over the centre ground of Hell, throwing forces into the fray with a sort of manic relish, uncaring how many fell because they would always be resurrected again within days for fresh punishment.
In the rare event that one side established military superiority over the other, through simple luck or an accident of good leadership – threatening the balance of territory and forces and so the continuance of the war – extra recruits would be funnelled to the temporarily losing side by the simple expedient of shutting down one of the sets of gates, channelling all the new arrivals to the disadvantaged side, gradually restoring balance through sheer weight of numbers.
She thought of the gates she and Prin had entered through as the Eastern gate, for no particularly good reason. So they had been on the East side, but basically every aspect of the East side in this vast dispute was replicated in the West as well, and the two appeared identical in their gruesomeness. From a distance, anyway. She was not welcome in the West; smaller winged demons came up to mob her when she overflew too far beyond the front of the everlasting war, so she had to keep away entirely, or fly so high that the detail of what went on was denied her.
Still, she had flown to see the opposing Western gates, soared above the scattered dark clouds of the Western hinterland and even landed on occasion – usually only for a few minutes at a time – on certain jagged, frozen peaks, well away from the most intense fighting and the greatest numbers of enemy demons.
Whether in the West or the East, she looked down from such high crags, wrapped from the cold in her own gale-fluttering wings, and watched the scudding shreds of bruise-coloured clouds move over the distant landscapes of terror and pain with a sort of horrified amusement.
When she had killed the thousandth soul, she had taken the half-eaten body and dropped it at the feet of the great lantern-headed demon sitting in his red-glowing iron throne looking out over the vast reeking valley of smokes and fumes and screams.
“What?” the colossal creature boomed. With one enormous foot it kicked aside the husk of body she’d deposited in front of it.
“A thousand souls,” she told it, treading the air with deep, easy sweeps of air, keeping herself level with its face but too far away for it to swipe at her easily. “A thousand days since you told me that once I’d released ten times one hundred souls you’d tell me what happened to my love, the male I first came here with: Prin.”
“I said I’d think about it,” the great voice thundered.
She stayed where she was, the black, leathery wings fanning some of the valley’s noxious fumes towards the uber-demon’s face. She gazed into the gaseous impression of a face writhing and billowing behind the house-sized pane of glass, trying to ignore the four fat, dripping candles at each of the lantern’s four corners, their carbuncled surfaces veined with a hundred screaming nerve clusters. The creature stared back at her. She kept station, refused to move.
“Please,” she said, at last.
“Long dead,” the vast voice burst out across her. She heard the words with her wings. “Time moves more slowly in here, not faster. He is barely a memory. He died by his own hand, ashamed, penurious, disgraced and alone. There is no record of whether he remembered you at the end. He escaped being sent here, more’s the pity. Satisfied?”
She stayed where she was a while longer, upright in the air before it, beating her cloak wings like slow, mocking applause.
“Huh,” she said at last, and turned, dropping, swooping only to zoom again, beating away up and across the valley’s slope to its furthest ridge.
“How are the pains, bitchlet?” she heard the demon shout after her. “Do they grow?” She ignored it.
She waited until they came back out of the mill: the three demons and the one sad, screaming soul who had not been released after his tour of Hell. The demons held the howling, frantically struggling male between them; one holding both front feet, one each at the rear legs. They laughed and talked, taunting the screeching male as they carried him back to the beetle-shaped flier.
She stooped upon them, slaughtering the three demons easily; the two at the rear with a single pinch of one of her great talons. The unfortunate male lay quivering on the scaly ground, watching the demons’ blood pool dustily in towards him from three different directions. The beetle tried to take off; she screamed at it and with a two-legged blow ripped one of its wings right off and then tipped it over onto its back. It lay making clicking, chirring noises. When the pilot crawled out she wanted to rip him apart too, but instead she let him go.
She picked the trembling male up with one talon and stared into his petrified face while he voided his bowels noisily on the ground beneath.
“When you left the Real,” she said to him, “what date was it?”
“Eh?”
She repeated the question. He told her.
She asked him a couple of other questions about banal things like current affairs and civilisational status, then she let him go; he scurried away along the road leading from the mill. She might have killed him, she supposed, but she had already released one soul from its torments that day; all this had been a sudden inspiration, brought on for some reason when she’d come upon the mill.
She trashed the building too, scattering its screaming, protesting components across the valley’s slope, throwing wreckage splashing into the mill race and the header pond, displacing sloshing tons of blood while the building’s operators ran scampering for their lives. The blue-glowing door was not glowing at all, of course. It was just a plain, rough wooden door, now hanging off its hinges; a doorway to nowhere.
Oddly satisfied, she swept back into the grim skies with a single great clap of her wings, then beat off across the valley. She dropped the massive lump of wood that had been the door’s lintel towards the fleeing figures of the mill operators as they ran away, missing them by less than a metre.
She wheeled once above the valley, just a collection of pains and sundered lives, then struck out, cloudward, rising all the time, heading for her roost.
Always assuming the hapless male had been telling the truth, the uber-demon had lied.
Barely a quarter of a year had passed in the Real.
Vatueil was hanging upside down. He wondered absently if there were any circumstances when this could be a good sign.
He appeared to be inhabiting a physical body. Hard to tell whether he’d actually been embodied in a real one or this was just a full-sensory-spectrum virtuality. He was in no pain, but the blood roared in his ears due to the gravitational inversion and he felt distinctly disoriented, beyond the obvious fact that he was the wrong way up.
He opened his eyes to see a creature like a giant flying something-or-other staring straight back at him. It was also hanging upside down, though unlike him it appea
red to be entirely happy with the situation. It was human-size, had a long, intelligent-looking face with large bright yellow eyes. Its body was covered in soft folds of golden-grey fur. It had four long limbs with what looked like thick membranes of the same soft fur linking the limbs on each side of its body to each other.
It opened its mouth. It had a lot of very small very sharp teeth.
“You are … Vatch-oy?” it said in a thick accent.
“Vatueil,” he corrected it. Looking away from the creature, he seemed to be hanging in the blue-green foliage of a great, tall tree. Further away, he could glimpse the trunks of other tall trees. The tree he was in was nothing like the size of the impossible tree, where he had spent many a happy holiday, winged and flying, but it was still too big for him to be able to see the ground. The branches and trunks he could see looked substantial. His feet, he noticed, were tied together with what looked like rope, while another length of rope ran through the noose his feet were in and then right round the metre-broad branch he was hanging from.
“Vatoy,” the creature said.
“Close enough,” he conceded. He felt he ought to know what this creature was, what species it was part of, but he had no internal access to any remote networks here; he was effectively just human, just meat, hanging here. All he had to rely on was his own all-too-fallible memories, such as they’d survived all the transcriptions they’d had to undergo over the years and regenerations, plus whatever unexpected intervention had led to him being here. His memories were anyway suspect, jumbled by a hundred different reincarnations in as many different environments, the vast majority virtual, unreal, militarily metaphorical.
“Lagoarn-na,” the creature beside him said, thumping itself on the chest.
“Yeah, hello,” Vatueil said cautiously. “Pleased to meet you.”
“Pleased meet you too,” Lagoarn-na said, nodding, its big yellow eyes staring at him, unblinking.
Vatueil felt a little groggy. He tried to remember where he’d been last. Where this version of himself had been last, anyway. A fellow could lose track when he was copied and re-copied so often. He started to recall sitting round a table with a bunch of aliens, in … had it been a ship? A meeting. In a ship. Not fighting a war then, trapped in tunnels or trenches or the guts of a land ship or a sea ship or a gas-giant dirigible the shape of a gigantic bomb, or finding himself downloaded into a smart battle tank or some sort of cross between a microship and a missile, or … his memories flickered past him, detailing what certainly felt like every single time he’d played a part in the vast war he’d been a part of, the war over the Hells.