Polystom (Gollancz Sf S.)

by Adam Roberts

  There is a silence.

  ‘A question,’ says Polystom. ‘When you were alive . . .’

  ‘When I was alive,’ repeats Beeswing. ‘When we were married, and you were alive, did you . . . love me?’

  ‘I did,’ says Beeswing, looking directly into his eyes. ‘I loved you. We were different, you and I, but ‘I loved you, for your poetic soul. Mind you,’ she adds, looking at him more strangely, ‘you’re not talking to the Beeswing you married, are you now. If you’re right, then you’re talking to a being that your uncle wrote, based on the dossier you assembled – for none of my own notes, assuming I made any (and I don’t even know that) were part of the dossier. And if that’s the case, then what else would you expect me to say? You wrote me, of course I love you. On the other hand,’ she said, leaning back, ‘if I’m right, then we are both written, written by some creature in the vacuum-surrounded world outside our world.’

  ‘And if that’s the case,’ says Polystom, seizing on the idea, ‘then this person, he or she, would surely write you – as ghost – as an extension of the person you had been when you were alive?’

  ‘Possibly,’ concedes Beeswing.

  It is another reason to believe in her version of reality rather than his. In his version, the Beeswing he married is fundamentally unknowable, locked away on the other side of death, and this Beeswing he is talking to is nothing but a self-serving fiction of his own concoction. But in her version, this Beeswing is the real one.

  In her version she loved him.

  She loves him.

  The weight is so strongly on that side of things that he can almost feel it. Like a physical pressure. Everyone, he realises as he stretches on the floor to sleep, is a ghost. I’m a ghost myself. All around us, all walking breathing ghosts. The spectres are truly everywhere yet invisible, like the air.

  The next day comes, and they give him a pistol, standing warily round him as if they expect him immediately to start shooting at them with it. That, he realises with a start, is what one of them would do if the positions were reversed. But he is enamoured of them all, of this crude vital life they lead, of the insubstantial figure of his wife. He loves all of them. He loves them so much that there are tears in his eyes. For their heroic struggle, the unstinting, unselfish perseverance of it, the reality of it. When he thinks what they have endured! – not merely them, but all servants, everybody – his wife, Beeswing, what she had to endure – when he thinks of it, he cannot hold back the tears. He is so profoundly grateful to them: that they are labouring at this work, this rebellion, that they have the strength for that. Grateful that they have accepted him, even in so small a capacity. Grateful that his wife has said the words she never said when she was alive.

  There are tears in his eyes as he leaves them, and strikes out alone at the foot of the mountain. There are tears in his eyes as he makes his way up the cloddy ridge, his pistol in a belt at his side, his hands up. The sentries are suspicious of him, but they yield to his automatic habit of command. ‘Captain Polystom,’ he tells them. And the rifles aimed at his gut; the pistol taken away from him; walked through to a mess-hall – properly built, with stone floor and plastered walls – where a colonel is having breakfast. He fetches another officer, somebody who recognises Polystom, and is, in fact, related to him distantly. There’s a deal of embracing and several slugs of cherry-wine. As the alcohol washes down his throat, and starts to blur his perceptions, he thinks to himself this isn’t real, is it – not real wine, not a real sensation. The colonel, indignant with the sentries, retrieves Polystom’s pistol, and Polystom smiles and smiles as he slips it into his belt again. Another colonel, and then a general – honoured to meet the nephew of the great inventor, is his own drawled testimony – come along to join the drinks, to debrief the newcomer. Hilarity. More wine. Toasts, to the Princeling. And, says the general, to the Steward of Enting. It takes Stom a moment to realise they are toasting him. Then the conversation wandering into more military matters. Tell us your story, my dear man. I got separated from my platoon, Polystom says, thinking but not adding, my various examples of Computational Programming that appeared to me as people. We retrieved them weeks ago, beams the General. Half a dozen men, and an officer too – Lieutenant Stetrus. Stet? Alive? A trifle drunk with written-not-real wine Polystom is suspiciously over-enthusiastic at the news. Eyes narrow, fractionally, around the table. But he carries it off, his relief seems so genuine. I thought he was dead. He was certainly injured, concedes the general, he was fairly shot up. Head wounds, they’re nasty. But he’s off the world now, being cared for in a top-rate Berthing military hospital. I thought he was dead, repeats Polystom, noticing albeit through a haze, the attitudes around him. Or I would have gone back for them. Ah, says the general. Ah, say the colonels. What would be marvellous, says Polystom, reaching for the bottle, would be a tour of this splendid facility. A tour around the marvellous corridors of the marvellous Computation Device. Now, says the general, freezing more than a little. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We do need, my dear fellow, to plot out where you’ve been for the last two weeks. More than two, in fact.

  Polystom, frozen in the act of reaching for the bottle, looks around him. There are smiles on the faces, but that fact doesn’t conceal the suspicion. He senses the good humour of the moment slipping away. Have you seen any ghosts? he asks. The dead? They’re all around us, you know. I’ve had several fascinating conversations with them.

  He can see from their expressions that he’s gone too far. Well, says the general, opening his mouth only a little and drawing the syllable out. But Polystom never finds out what he was about to say, because he pulls his pistol out of his belt and fires a bullet into the man’s forehead. No, he reminds himself as his heart hammers and the general topples backward on his chair, not a man, a piece of writing in the shape of a man. Only writing in the shape of a man.

  The colonels are all on their feet: all three of them. But only one has the presence of mind to be reaching for his own pistol. Polystom’s mind is suddenly sharp, the alcohol distilled away by the adrenalin, and he takes a moment to aim his pistol properly and shoots that one in the chest. The colonel sprawls back dramatically, but the blood that showers out with surprising force is not real blood. It feels real, feels warm as pee on the face, but it’s not. One of the other two colonels is scrabbling with the button-down-flap on his holster. The other is dashing towards the door. Polystom, not thinking consciously, shoots the second first, knocking a red dent out of his back so that he tumbles straight down. Then his eyes meet those of the one remaining colonel. The pistol is not in the other man’s hands. He lurches to the left, ducking down, trying to get under the table for cover, but Polystom is too fast for him. Too fast for him. A properly-written person, a person with agency, facing an unreal, a mere shadow, it is no contest.

  There are shouts in the corridor, footsteps, so Polystom steps through the back into the little kitchen. A servant is standing there, upright, frozen, and Polystom ignores him, stepping through into the storeroom, and out of that into a service corridor. This leads down to the sunlight, and Stom steps into the imitation sunlight and breathes in a lungful of imitation air. He can see for many miles from this vantage point.

  He can see the cannon away to the left; its barrel enormous like a roll of carpet. It is hedged about with slabs of metal, but a little path runs along the slope, with lengths of wood embedded into the mud to ease passage. Polystom trots along this, greets the sentry at the doorway to the gun emplacement cheerily. Sir, you alright? says the sentry, nervous. The general sent me along, says Polystom, trying to remember the name of the general he had just killed. Sent me along. There’s blood on your face, sir, says the sentry. Polystom lurches forward, as if drunk, as if tripped or slipped in the mud, and pushes himself up against the young fellow. He can see his face enlarged by proximity, confused and terrified. But it’s an easy thing, from this position, to hold the barrel of his rifle with his left hand, to prevent the sentry fr
om lowering it or aiming it, whilst bringing out his pistol with his right. He feels the heat of the discharge as he shoots it point-blank into the sentry’s stomach: a sudden spurt of heat, not unpleasant. Then a spreading sense of wetness, warm again. Polystom steps back, lifts the gun and fires again. Through the door without looking back, swept along on the on-rolling motion of events now. The space inside, cluttered with metal shapes and stacked shells, contains only two people. They are sitting on boxes, using another box as a table, cards fanned out before them, more in their hands. They are both staring, wide-eyed, at the doorway, one half-turned at the waist. Polystom thinks of the insurrectionist commander. Shoot the gun crew she had said. Shoot the gun crew. The pistol is hot in his hand now, toasty with use. He shoots, misses, shoots again as they simply sit there, stupid and wooden men. Shoots again, shoots again, until their blood is dashed over the wall behind. Then he is fishing the grenade from his underpants, where it has nestled all this time like a third weighty bollock. It takes him a moment to determine how to swing the heavy doorway of the cannon’s breach open, to pull the fuse cable of the grenade, to place it carefully inside the cavity, and to push the circular doorway closed – not all the way shut (he had been told), leave a sliver. Then it’s away, away, mustn’t hang around, stepping briskly back through the doorway (ducking so as not to crack his head), past the body of the sentry, none of them real, none of them real in the slightest. He’s twenty yards up the path, and almost back inside the service tunnel, when he hears the explosion behind him. Turning he sees a banner of smoke curling out of the sighting windows, and a second thread coming out of the barrel. And, moments after that, in the valley at the foot of the mountain he hears the appallingly realistic-sounding crashes of shellfire, the shouts of men. He can even see, distantly, the swarming soldiers drawing closer. But he mustn’t loiter here. It’s almost time. Soon enough the insurrectionists would overrun the Computational Device and destroy it. That would be the moment of truth. That would resolve the difficult philosophical problem.

  And then he would know whether his wife truly loved him or not.

  [A note on the leaves]

  The text of Polystom is preserved upon thirty numbered leaves, most of which survive in a reasonable state of repair. Each leaf is a narrow strip of pseudo-paper, no more than twenty-six characters to a line, although some leaves are as many as forty or fifty feet long. They were stored rolled tightly and tied about. Some decay is evident at the outer range of some of these leaves, whilst others are pristine. The numbering does not seem entirely logical or consistent, but has been largely followed in this edition except in such cases where confusion might result from the numbered order, and small corrections have been introduced.

  Editorial interventions have been made on the principle of non-intrusiveness, although occasional headnotes have proved unavoidable. The current edition draws heavily, of course, on the work of Professor the Lord Barnaby, to whom all Polystom scholars owe an incalculable debt, both for his Polystom: a Variorum Edition (University of London Press, 2019) and his monograph Entropy and the Polystomic Manuscripts (Everyman, 2017). The following quotation from the latter work is quoted by gracious permission of the author, and remains copyright to Earl Barnaby and his electronic estate:

  Given two universe, one ‘real’ and one ‘programmed’ from within the logic of physics of the other, it can be very difficult to determine grounds upon which one is to be preferred to the other. As Polystom and his dead wife discuss in leaf 28c [this ed. Book 3, leaf 7], evidence for the ‘reality’ of each in turn can be presented with equal apparent validity. The two key pieces of evidence, it seems to many experts, are, on the one hand, the appearance of the software ‘ghost’ programmes of specific individuals in the Polystomic world rather than the other – and, on the other hand, the implausibility of ‘vacuum’ in any naturally occurring cosmos. On this latter point, my own experiences are perhaps relevant. I have been in a high-flying airliner, in which the compartment is pressurised to two thirds of an atmosphere and the air outside at considerably lower pressure. On this particular occasion a rear porthole shattered, and the explosive decompression that followed – even though the air outside was not vacuum, but merely ‘low pressure’ – was terrifying to behold. The pressure gradient between sea level and vacuum is much more pronounced than this, and on a cosmic scale these two pressure differentials are essentially next to one another.

  On the other hand, as is argued in leaf 28c, there are inconsistencies in the internal coherence of the Polystomic world: it is hard to see, for instance, how programmes written into the mainframe of a computer could manifest themselves outside that computer. The debate is moot.

  But there is one benchmark, one absolute, that will help us gauge relative merits, something more universal, even, than gravity (for there are places in the universe called black holes inside which even gravity ceases to become constant): and that absolute is entropy. Let us thumbnail our definition of entropy as ‘the tendency of pattern and order to degrade over time’. Then we may examine the extent to which the transmission of text from one cosmos to the other can be thought of as entropic. Because in the subordinate cosmos, a limited system controlled by the superordinate cosmos, entropy will be a minor consideration; whereas in the superordinate cosmos it is a major. Hence a text passed from up, as it were, from the model to the reality will be intact; whereas data passed from the reality to the model will tend to degrade. Think of it this way: if you enter data into your computer there is a high chance of error, whereas if you download data from your computer you expect it to emerge from the databanks exactly as recorded there. If text passes from the subordinate to the superordinate world (from model to reality) we would not expect there to be any degradation to the data of that text; but if the passage is the other way – from reality to model – then there is a chance that a degree of degradation will occur.

  Few scholars have been so even-handed. On one side there is the case made, polemically, by Gampson in his Presentation, representation and power: a Foucauldian reading of the Polystom manuscripts (University of Woking Press, 1999) which has attracted many followers. ‘Most people take the presence of interplanetary vacuum for granted, just as they assume that “gravity” is somehow “enough” to keep the violent Brownian bubblings of our atmosphere in place on our world. Even when physicists talk of the upper level of the atmosphere – where gases “boil into space” – they do so without noting how enormous the spherical area is over which this loss continually takes place, and without explaining what mechanism replaces the leaking atmosphere. Such people – not to mince words – are cretins.’ Professor Gampson’s implication is clear: for him the Polystom universe is the real one, and ‘our’ universe a poorly constructed computer model.

  Other scholars have been equally intemperate on the other side. Gampson’s great rival, Hibson, insists that ‘any assertion of the ultimate “realty” of the Polystom universe represents a sort of intellectual imbecility, ignoring as it does the manifold impossibilities of that universe: most notably the absurdly reduced size of the solar system, the consequent proximity of large gravitational bodies, the friction of large bodies orbiting a sun through a medium howsoever rarified etc.’ Gampson’s only reply to Hibson on this point is to assert that ‘just as the larger spheres orbit the sun, so do the smaller spheres of atmospheric molecules; everything is in orbital motion at once, and friction, accordingly, is minimal.’ Hibson’s second major objection to the cosmos (that the air pressure at ground level on any world in a solar system of interplanetary gravity would crush living things with its weight) is dismissed by Gampson with particular contempt:

  Take a point x, at a geostationary orbital position above the Earth. Imagine a column of air reaching from ground level to x; such a quantity of air would indeed be very much heavier than that found in our world, and would weigh horribly upon the person standing underneath it. But imagine the same column extended, as it would be in the Polystom cosmos, as
far out again, to 2x (and, indeed, further still, but let us simplify the model). As with the hypothesised Clarke space-elevator cable, the weight of the quantity of air from x to 2x, moving away from the world under centrifugal orbital effects, would in practice counteract the weight of the quantity of air from ground to x, and the net air pressure at sea level would in fact be less than is the case on Earth. In fact, and because we are not dealing with a rigid structure like a space-elevator cable, we cannot think of a vertical column of air over every person. Instead we must imagine very long, spiral trailing areas of air, in which the cumulative weight of all the individual molecules of air does not press directly downwards, but instead acts via a complex pattern of shearing forces and diagonal partial-pressures. Calculations suggest that air pressure under these circumstances, at sea level on any rotating body with gravity g, would be slightly less than one bar. To suggest otherwise, as some slapdash scholars have done – scholars of whom one must say, in certain cases, that they really ought to have known better – is to be guilty of solecisms that would embarrass a schoolchild.

  Interested readers may consult the extensive bibliography on the subject to be found at www.polystom.com.

  [Acknowledgments]

  I’d like to thank the following people for help and support during the writing of this novel: Simon Spanton for the economical excellence of his editorial work, as well as for his friendship; Malcolm Edwards; Malcolm Dixon, who read the manuscript; Steve Calcutt; Roger Levy; James Lovegrove; Bob Eaglestone, who disagreed with the physics of the Polystom world. Most of all, I would like to thank my wife Rachel, who read the manuscript and made many helpful suggestions.

  I would also like to acknowledge one very particular debt. Gillian Allnutt’s exquisite collection of poetry Lintel (Blood-axe, 2001) provided me with general inspiration for this novel, as well as specific quotation. Polystom’s own readings of Phanicles’ poetry are taken from three of Allnut’s poems: ‘turf’, the opening of ‘Tabitha and Lintel’ and ‘Annunciation’. These lines are quoted by kind permission of the author, and remain copyright to her.