It had taken a while for him to register where he was, who this person looking over at him was, even who he himself was. At first all he knew was that he was somewhere vaguely medical, that he felt something very sweet and special for the female lying opposite, and that he had done something important and terrifying.
Hell. He had been in Hell. They had been in Hell; he and Chay. They had gone in there to prove that it was real, not a myth, and that it was a vile, perverted version of an afterlife, a place of unredeemed cruelty, impossible to defend in any civilised society.
They had sought to witness this and then to bring the evidence back and do what they could to make it public; get it disseminated as widely as possible, defying the state, the government, the political-commercial establishment and all the various vested interests which wanted their Hell — all the hells — to continue.
Now, here they were, back in the Real, the two of them.
He couldn’t quite speak yet. He was lying on this bed, in what certainly looked like the clinic they had left from, with Chay on the bed opposite his. They had transferred their personalities into electronic or photonic form or whatever it was — he had never been interested in the technical details — and they had set out together for Hell.
He could hear faint beeping noises, and see various pieces of medical equipment and communications gear stationed around their two beds.
“Prin! You’re back!” a voice said. He recognised the voice, or at least knew that he ought to know who the speaker was. A male came into view.
He did recognise him. Irkun. He was called Irkun and he was the medic-cum-comms-wizard who had been overseeing the transfer of their personalities, their beings, from their own bodies, through the communications network to wherever the state-run link to Hell was, and then on to the Hell itself. And back, of course. That was the point; they had to come back, and so they’d been sent with lengths of code attached that would let them come back. In the Hell these had been disguised as necklaces of barbed wire. They gave the wearer one brief spell to impersonate one of the more powerful and privileged demons within the Hell, and one chance to get back out of the virtual world back to the Real.
He remembered the blue glowing gate and the mill and the valley side with the X-shaped devices bearing the rotting corpses.
Blue glowing gate, and his desperate leap, holding her…
Tumbling in the air, somersaulting so that he went through first, her in his limbs immediately afterwards, if possible.
“You made it!” Irkun said, clapping both trunks together. He was dressed like a medic; white waistcoat, tail bunned and pinned, hooves in little white bootees. “You’re back! You made it! And Chay, is she…?”
Irkun turned to look at Chay. She was still staring straight ahead. Prin had thought she was gazing at him, but of course, she wasn’t. She blinked slowly, again, exactly as she had a little earlier.
“… right behind you?” Irkun asked, voice trailing away a little as he looked at the medical units and comms gear gathered around her bed. He pulled out a tablet remote and started tapping at it, trunk-fingers dancing over the icons, letters and numbers. “Is she…?” he said, falling silent. He stopped tapping at the remote and looked, stricken, at Prin.
Irkun, Chay, the bed she was lying on and the whole small clinic room — on a houseboat in a lagoon off a shallow sea — all started to waver and dissolve as tears began to fill Prin’s eyes.
There were three others besides Prin and Irkun. They had kept the core team as small as they possibly could to avoid the pro-Hell people finding out.
They lay on couches on a deck looking out over the lagoon towards the distant dunes and the sea. Birds flew across the reflection of a livid sunset, dark shapes against the long rips and tearings of the cloud-streaked sky. There were no other boats or houseboats visible. The one they were on looked innocent enough, though it concealed some very hi-tech gear and a buried optic cable linking them to a satellite array in the nearest small town, kilometres distant. Prin had been awake for about half a day now. They needed to decide what to do next, especially about Chay.
“If we leave her under we can re-integrate her fine, whenever she comes back,” Biath said. He was their mind-state expert.
“Even with a broken mind?” Prin asked.
“Certainly,” Biath said, as though this was some sort of accomplishment.
“So we take a perfectly healthy sleeping mind and plonk a broken one into it and it’s the broken one that wins, that emerges?” Yolerre said. She was their main programmer, the whiz that had come up with the barbed-wire code to let them escape from the Hell.
Biath shrugged. “The newer writes over the older,” he told her. “That’s just normal.”
“But if we wake her—?” Prin began.
“If we wake her she’ll be just as she was before the two of you went under,” Sulte said. He was their mission controller, their main ex-government source and another comms expert. “But the longer she’s awake and living any sort of normal life, the harder it gets to re-integrate her two personalities: the unconscious one here that doesn’t include her experiences in the Hell and the virtually conscious one — wherever it is — that does.” He looked at Biath, who nodded to this.
“Which, given that the latter will probably leave her out of her mind,” Irkun said, “may be for the best.”
“She could be treated,” Irkun said. “There are techniques.”
“These techniques ever been tried on somebody carrying all the nightmares of Hell in their head?” Yolerre asked.
Irkun just shook his head and made a sucking noise.
“How long before any re-integration becomes impossible?” Prin asked.
“At worst, problematic within hours,” Biath said. “Few days probably. Week at the most. Over-write would be brutal, could leave her… catatonic at best. Only humane course would be trying to prise the Hell memories in piecemeal.” He shook his head. “Very likely her continuance personality would just reject the memories completely. Nightmares would need watching.”
“You really don’t think she’s likely to pop out soon?” Irkun asked Prin. Irkun had his tablet remote propped up in front of him, monitoring Chay’s condition in the clinic room just a few metres away.
Prin shook his head. “I don’t think there’s any chance,” he said. “She’d forgotten what the emergency code was, what it was for, how you operated it; like I keep saying, she even denied that there was any Real. And those bastard demons would have been on her in seconds after I barged through. If she didn’t follow me in a few heartbeats, she isn’t following me for… months.” He started crying again. The others saw, huddled closer, made soothing noises, and those closest reached out to touch him with their trunks.
He looked round them all. “I think we have to wake her,” he told them.
“What happens if we do get her back?” Yolerre asked.
“She can be given some sort of existence in a virtual world,” Sulte said. “Fact is it’ll be easier to treat her there, yes?” he said glancing at Biath, who nodded.
“Do we need to take a vote?” Irkun asked.
“I think it’s Prin’s call,” Sulte said. The others nodded, made noises of assent.
“You’ll have her back, Prin,” Yolerre said, reaching out to stroke him gently with one trunk.
Prin looked away. “No, I won’t,” he said.
When they did wake her, the following morning, he had already left.
He didn’t want to see her. He didn’t want to abandon the one he loved and who was still in Hell by accepting the love of the one who had never been there, no matter how whole, perfect and un-traumatised she might be.
No doubt this Chay, this one who had never seen Hell, would feel injured by his actions, and not understand how he could be so cruel to her, but then he had seen what real hurt and real cruelty was, and the person that he was now could never pretend that what had happened to the two of them in Hell had somehow not taken place, and changed who he was for ever.