Their witness needed no real coaching, which was just as well as there had been little time to arrange any.
“Prin,” she’d told him, just before the session started, while they’d been waiting in the antechamber and Errun and his people had been trying to get the special session cancelled or postponed, “will you be able to do this?”
She knew how intimidating it could be to stand in the chamber, all eyes upon you, trying to make your point, knowing that hundreds were looking at you there and then, tens of millions were watching throughout the system in real time and possibly billions might hear your words and see your actions and expressions later — potentially tens, even hundreds of billions if what you said turned out to be of any great importance or at least of interest to the news channels.
“I can do it,” he’d told her. His eyes looked too old, she thought, though that might just be her fancy, given that she now knew a little of what he’d been through.
“Deep breaths,” she’d advised him. “Concentrate on one person when you speak. Ignore others and forget about the cameras.” He’d nodded.
She hoped he’d be able to keep himself together. The chamber had an odd buzz about it, with a few more straggler Reps suddenly present who hadn’t been able to drag themselves away from whatever City business had been detaining them in the morning. Some of the journalist seats and camera positions in the press galleries were occupied now that hadn’t been before. Usually the afternoon sessions were quieter than the morning ones. The rumour mills had obviously been working. Even less than a third full, the chamber could be an intimidating place.
Ultimately, they were herd animals, for all their civilising, and to be singled out in the herd had been almost inevitably lethal for most of the millions of years of their species’ existence. Other species, non-herd species, must have it easier, she supposed. Their own predator species would have found it easier, for sure, had they won the struggle to be the planet’s dominant species. But then they were not the ones present. For all their ferocity they had lost the struggle, been quietly out-bred, sidelined, driven to extinction or into the twilight existence of nature reserves and breeding zoos.
In the end she need not have worried.
She was able to sit back and listen — crying, quite a lot, quite openly and freely and without even trying to hide it — and watch the effect that Prin’s sober, unhurried testimony had on the others in the chamber. The bare details were unbearable enough — she discovered later that most of the networks censored some of the more sickening parts — but the truly crushing, the most undeniably effective moments came when Prin was subject to the most ferocious cross-examination by the Traditionalist party in general and by Representative Errun in particular.
Did he really expect to be taken seriously with this mass of lies?
They were not lies. He wished that they were. He did not necessarily expect to be taken seriously because he knew how monstrous and cruel it all sounded, and how much many different interests did not want the truth to be known. He knew that they would do all that they could to discredit both him personally and what he was telling people.
How could he even tell this was not some bizarre nightmare, some possibly drug-induced hallucination?
It was a matter of fact that he had been away for real-time weeks, his body held within a fully licensed medical facility, exactly like the kind that many Representatives had used for various treatments over the years. He had never heard of a nightmare that went on for so long. Had the Representative?
So, he did not deny it might have been drug-induced?
He did deny it. He did not take drugs. He never had, not even now, when his physician said he ought to, to try to stop the nightmares he had, reliving what he had been through. Would a blood test convince the Representative?
So now he suddenly admitted that he did have nightmares after all!
As he’d just said, only due to the Hell he had just lived through.
Representative Errun would not let go. He had been a trial lawyer, then a judge, and famous for his questioning, his brutal tenacity. She watched him become more and more determined to rattle Prin, to trip him up and bring him down, to reveal him as a liar or a fantasist or a fanatic, and she listened to him lose. With every extra detail Errun dragged out of Prin he made the totality of the revelations’ impact all the greater.
Yes, everybody was nude in Hell. Yes, people in Hell might try to have sex, but that was punishable. In Hell only rape was permitted. Just as in Hell only war formed the basis for any social structure. Yes, people died in Hell. You could die a million times, suffer its agonies on a million separate occasions, and every time you would be brought back for further punishment, more torture. The demons were people who had been sadists in the Real; to them, Hell was more like their own heaven.
No, there were not that many sadists in the Real, but there could be as many as the functioning of Hell required because this was all virtual, remember, and individuals could be copied. One sadist, one person who gloried in the pain of others, would be all you needed; you’d just create a million copies.
Yes, he was aware of the claims that the tours of Hell that people were forced to undergo, sometimes as part of a court’s judgement, were of a Hell that didn’t exist, or that only existed in a very limited sense while the miscreants were being shown round, and that anybody who failed to return from such grisly junkets had merely been put into limbo. But that was a lie.
Filhyn saw somebody hand Errun a note. A shiver of apprehension ran through her.
She thought she saw Errun’s eyes glint with something like exaltation, with cruelty, with victory anticipated. The old male’s tone and demeanour changed as he became more statesmanlike and solemn, like somebody delivering a final judgement, a coup-de-grâce, more in regret than anger.
Was it not true, he said, that he, Prin, had gone into this dream or nightmare, this supposed Hell, with his wife? So where was she? Why was she not at his side now to back up his wild claims?
Filhyn thought she might faint. Wife? He’d taken his wife with him? Had he been mad? Why hadn’t he said anything — even just to her? A despair settled over her.
Prin was answering.
First of all, the female concerned was his love and his mate, but not formally his wife. He had left her behind, right at the very end, when there had been a chance for only one of them to get out and he had had to do the hardest thing he had ever had to do in his life and leave her in there to suffer while he escaped to tell the truth of what was happening there, what was still happening there to—
And why had he left her out of this tale, this — it was now conclusively revealed — confection of lies, half-truths and outright fantasy?
Because he had been afraid to mention her participation in the mission into Hell.
Afraid? Him? A man who claimed to have been through Hell and come back? Afraid?
“Yes, afraid,” Prin said, his voice ringing out in the hushed chamber, “I am afraid that before I can take my testimony to where it really needs to be heard, before a Jury of the Galactic Council, somebody old and trustworthy and of impeccable, indisputable honour — somebody like yourself, sir — will come to me and quietly tell me that I can have my beloved back, out of Hell, if only I’ll say no more about what she and I experienced there, and indeed even retract what I’ve already said.” Prin looked, blinking, round the other members of the party opposite, then at the press and public galleries, as though suddenly seeing them for the first time. Then he looked back at Representative Errun. “Because I am afraid that I will accept that offer, sir, because I can’t bear the thought of her continuing to suffer in that place a moment longer, and I will abandon all the others there just to get my beloved back, and so will hate myself for ever for my weakness and selfishness.” He let out a deeply held breath. “That’s why I kept her—”