Iain Banks - Surface Detail

This was what people were generally told, anyway. Some were told the mill did power something. They were told it held great stone wheels which ground the bodies and bones of those guilty of crimes committed within hell. Those so punished suffered even greater agonies than those whose bodies still in some sense resembled those they had inhabited before death; for those who had sinned even within Hell, the rules — always entirely flexible — were changed so that they could suffer with every sinew, cell and structure of their body, no matter how atomised it might have become and how impossible such suffering would have been with an utterly shredded nervous central system in the Real.

The truth was different, however. The truth was that the mill had a quite specific purpose and the energy it produced did not go to waste; it operated one of the small number of gates that led out of Hell, and that was why the two small Pavuleans sheltering on the far side of the valley were there.

No, we are lost, entirely lost, Prin.

We are where we are, my love. Look. The way out is right there, in front of us. We are not lost, and we shall shortly escape. Soon, we’ll be home.

You know that is not true. That is a dream, just a dream. A treacherous dream. This is what is real, not anything we might think we remember from before. That memory is itself part of the torment, something to increase our pain. We should forget what we think we remember of a life before this. There was no life before this. This is all there is, all there ever was, all there ever will be. Eternity, this is eternity. Only this is eternity. Surrender to that thought and at least the agony of hope that can never be fulfilled will disappear.

They were crouching together, hidden within the lower part of a cheval de frise , its giant X of crossed spikes laden with impaled, half-decayed bodies. Those bodies and the bodies all around them littering this section of hillside — indeed the seemingly living or apparently dead bodies of everybody within the Hell, including their own — were Pavulean in form: metre-and-half-long quadrupeds with large, round heads from which issued small twin trunks, highly prehensile probosces with little lobes at the tip resembling stubby fingers.

Agony of hope? Listen to yourself, Chay. Hope is all we have, my love. Hope drives us on. Hope is not treachery! Hope is not cruel and insane, like this perversion of existence; it is reasonable, right, only what we might expect, what we have every right to expect. We must escape. We must! Not just for selfish reasons, to escape the torments we’ve been subject to here, but to take the news, the truth of what we’ve experienced here back to the Real, back to where, somehow, some day, something might be done about it.

The two Pavuleans presently hiding under the covering of rotting corpses were called — in the familiar form they used with each other — Prin and Chay, and they had journeyed together across several regions of this Hell over a subjective period of several months, always heading for this place. Now, finally, they were within sight of it.

Neither resembled Pavuleans in the peak of health. Only Prin’s left trunk was intact; the other was just a still-ragged stump after a casual swipe from the sword of a passing demon some weeks ago. The poisoned sword had left a wound that would not heal or stop hurting. His intact left trunk had been nicked in the same strike and made him wince with every movement. Around both their necks was a twist of tightened barbed wire like a depraved version of a necklace, the barbs biting through their skin, raising welts that seeped blood and left itching, flaking scabs.

Chay limped because both her hind legs had been broken just days after they’d entered the Hell; she had been run over by one of an endless line of bone-and-iron juggernauts transporting mangled bodies from one part of the Hell to another. The juggernauts moved along a road whose every cobble was the warted, calloused back of screaming unfortunates buried beneath.

Prin had carried her on his back for weeks afterwards while she healed, though the bones in her legs had never set properly; in Hell bones never did.

You are wrong, Prin. There is no Real. There is no outside reality. There is only this. You may need this delusion to make the pain of being here less for you, but in the end you will be better off accepting the true reality, that this all there is, all there ever has been and all there ever will be.

No, Chay , he told her. At this moment we are code, we are ghosts in the substrate, we are both real and unreal. Never forget that. We exist here for now but we had and have another life, other bodies to return to, back in the Real.

Real, Prin? We are real fools, fools to have come, if what you say is true and we came from somewhere else; fools to think we could do anything of use here, and most certainly fools to think we can ever leave this ghastly, filthy, sickening place. This is our life now, even if there was another one before it. Accept it, and it may not be so terrible. This is the Real; this that you see and feel and smell around you. Chay reached out with her right trunk and its tip almost touched the partially rotted face of a young female impaled face down on the spikes above, her emptied eye sockets staring blankly in at the two people cowering beneath. Though terrible it is. So, so terrible. Such a terrible place. She looked at her mate. Why make it worse with the lie of hope?

Prin reached out with his surviving trunk and wrapped it around both of hers as best he could. Chayeleze Hifornsdaughter, it is your despair that is the lie. The blood-gate across this valley opens within the hour to let out those who’ve been allowed a half-day glimpse of Hell in the hope of making them behave better back in the Real, and we have the means to leave with them. We shall, we will go back! We will leave this place, we will return to our home and we will tell of what we’ve seen here; we’ll let the truth of it out for ever, free into the Real, to do whatever damage to this outrage upon kindness and sentience it is possible to do. This vast obscenity around us was made, my love: it can be unmade. We can help, we can begin that unmaking. We can, we will do this. But I will not do it alone. I can’t and won’t leave without you. We go together or not at all. Just one last effort, please, my love. Stay at my side, come with me, escape with me, help me save you and help me save myself! He hugged her to his chest as hard as he was able.

Here come osteophagers , she said, looking out over his shoulder.

He let her go and looked round, peeking under hanging, rotting limbs to the uphill entrance to their impromptu shelter. She was right. A detail of half a dozen osteophagers were moving down and across the barren hillside, dragging bodies off the chevaux de frise and the other spiked and barbed barriers that littered the slope. The osteophagers were specialist demons, flesh- and bone-eating scavengers who lived off the carcasses of those re-killed either in Hell’s never-ending war or just in the normal course of its perpetual round of mutilation and pain. The souls of those they ate would already have been recycled into fresh, mostly whole if never entirely healthy bodies better able to appreciate the torments in store for them.

Like almost all the demons in the Pavulean Hell, the osteophagers resembled predator beasts from the Pavulean evolutionary past. The osteophagers moving down the hillside towards where the two small Pavuleans were hiding looked like glossily powerful versions of animals that had once preyed upon Chay and Prin’s ancestors, millions of years earlier: four-legged, twice the size of a Pavulean, with big, forward-facing eyes and — again like most demons — perversely sporting two, more muscular versions of Pavulean trunks from the sides of their massive, crushing jaws.