Polystom (40 page)

‘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 fighting 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.’

‘Possibly. And maybe that explains why our worlds are so close together,’ Beeswing mused. ‘But we have other considerations. If
ours
is the real world, then we could write-in characters in the other realm. But if that’s the case, then what am I doing here? I’m dead, I died.’

‘You were written into the Computational Device,’ said Polystom. ‘Using your dossier.’

‘Let’s say I accept that; that I’m constructed, not real. What we two are trying to determine is – who wrote me in? Was it somebody in
this
system? Or somebody in the other?’

‘Obviously, somebody in this System.’

‘Then what am I doing
here
?’

Polystom was silent. He saw what she meant.

‘If I’m
here
,’ she went on, ‘I must have been written from the other place. If I were written from
this
place, I wouldn’t be here, I’d be there.’

‘I asked Cleonicles about that,’ said Stom.

‘And?’

‘I can’t remember exactly how he explained it. He said that the Computational Device in the simulation set up – something – I can’t remember the phrase he used. But he had an explanation for it.’

‘It seems to me,’ said Beeswing, in the darkness, ‘that the fact there are ghosts on the Mudworld implies that the Mudworld isn’t real. That’s one point.’

‘Well,’ said Polystom uncertainly. ‘Well, I’m not sure.’

‘The other point,’ said Beeswing, ‘the other point is the fact, which your uncle concedes, as quickly as anybody, the fact that this other System is more advanced than we are. How can that be? The Computational Device supposedly inside our own Computational Device – how can that be better than its parent machine? How can this invented society be more advanced than the society that invented it? To me, the gradient should run the other way. Don’t you think?’

Polystom was silent for a while. ‘That’s two points on both sides.’

‘To me,’ came Beeswing’s voice, ‘the arguments are stronger on my side than yours.’

‘Well,’ said Polystom, his aching body and weary head flaring up in a display of petty irritation, ‘well, to me it seems exactly the other way about.’

‘Well,’ said Beeswing.

‘Well,’ said Polystom.

They sat in silence, in the darkness, for a while.

‘Suppose you tell me,’ said Polystom. ‘Tell me the way
you
think it is. Suppose you give me your version of events.’

‘I think,’ said Beeswing, her voice steady and mellow, ‘that there is a civilisation out there, outside us. I think that civilisation developed Computational Devices, and that one of these Devices has been given over to an elaborate simulation. I think somebody in that other world wrote our System into being; he, or she, wrote a complex set of Computational algorithms that modelled our cosmos, our worlds, our population. I can believe, as Cleonicles said, only he meant it the other way around, that most of the people in this world are varieties of computational automata, that they follow their preprogrammed pattern and that is all. And I can believe that a small proportion of the population is written differently, with algorithms that mimic consciousness, so that those individuals feel themselves to be real, they operate in a problem-solving, free-will manner. Who knows why they would construct such a thing? For study, or pleasure, I don’t know. I think that it’s probably based on aspects of the root-culture, that various aspects of the written-world are copied from paradigms in the real world, out there. I think that when we were written, we were given the illusion of a lengthy and detailed historical past. But I’m not sure I believe that we actually
have
a past. For all I know, the entire simulation was constructed, past and all, thirty of our years ago. Maybe less. I also think that from time to time they change things. I think that they’ve written this war, on the Mudworld, into being: for whatever reason. Education or entertainment, I don’t know.’

‘But who could find entertainment in any of this?’ Polystom said bitterly.

‘I agree, it’s hard to understand the attraction of it, it’s all pain and death here. But I think that the “ghosts”, of whom I am one, have been written-in to leaven this aspect of the simulation. That’s why I’m here. The back-story, all the stuff told to you by Cleonicles, has only been introduced to help iron out the inconsistencies in the programme that
would otherwise bewilder the free agents within it. But, actually,
you
, Polystom, are precisely as unreal as I. We both come from the same source: from the Computational writers in this other place.’

There was a lengthy silence, after Beeswing had completed this speech. Eventually Polystom stirred.

‘I think we haven’t moved on,’ he said. ‘We’re in the same position we were before. Either of these versions of reality could be correct. They are each equally plausible.’

‘There’s a test we can make.’

‘Which is?’

Beeswing’s voice sounded very close, in Polystom’s ear. ‘We can destroy the Computational Device.’

‘Back to that?’

‘If we destroy the Device, then – assuming your uncle is correct – the whole of this
other
cosmos disappears with it. Yes? And all the ghosts on the Mudworld disappear too. Do you agree?’

‘Yes,’ said Polystom.

‘If I – and your dead uncle – if
we
only exist because we were written into the Computational Device inside the mountain, then when that machine is destroyed we will disappear. But if the Device is destroyed
and we are still here
– then there will be only one explanation. It could only mean that our existence does not depend upon the Device in the mountain, but on something else. Something outside our world.’