The brain played tricks on itself to pretend that it saw as well away from the centre of its visual target as it did right at that bull’s-eye. Smart VR used that same deception; zoom in on a detail and it would be created for you in all its pinpoint exactitude, but everything else you weren’t attending to with such concentration could safely be ignored until your attention swung that way, keeping the amount of processing power within acceptable limits.
Fassin dragged his attention away from his blood-spattered leg. “Is this real?” he asked.
The little man sighed. “Mr Taak,” he said, glancing down at a screen, “your profile indicates that you are from a respectable family and may one day even become a useful member of society. You shouldn’t be mixing and living with the sort of people you have been mixing and living with. You’ve all been very foolish and people have suffered because of that stupidity. You’ve been living in a kind of dream, really, and that dream is now over. Officially. I think you ought to go back home. Don’t you?”
“Where are my friends?”
“Mr Iifilde, Mr Resiptiss, Ms Cargin and Ms Hohuel?”
Fassin just stared at him. Shit, in all the last few months he’d been staying here he’d only known them by their first names. He supposed those were Thay, Sonj and Mome’s last names, but really he’d no idea. And there had been four, hadn’t there? Did that mean they were counting K as well? But she hadn’t been to the protest.
“They’re being held elsewhere, or they’ve been processed and released, or we’re still looking for them.” The little man smiled.
Fassin looked down at his arms, held within metal hoops. He tried to move his legs, then leaned over and looked down. His legs were shackled too. Or manacled or whatever. His mouth felt very odd. He ran his tongue round where his teeth had been, checking again. He supposed he’d have to get false ones until the new ones grew back. Or sport a piratical grin. “Why am I being treated like this?” he asked.
The little man looked incredulous. He appeared to be about to hurt Fassin again, then shook his head in exasperation. “Because you took part in a violent demonstration against the Diegesian, that’s why!” he said.
“But I wasn’t violent,” Fassin said.
“You personally may not have been. The demonstration you took part in most certainly was.”
Fassin would have scratched his head. “Is that all it takes?”
“Of course!”
“Who started the violence?” he asked.
The little man jerked his arms out to each side. His voice went very high. “Does it matter?”
Fassin had meant which side, but he could tell the little man thought he’d meant which demonstrator. He sighed. “Look, I just want to get back to my friends, to my nest. Can I go? I didn’t do anything, I got my teeth knocked out, I can’t tell you anything, or… anything…’ he said. He sighed again.
“You can go when you sign this.” The little man swivelled the screen around so Fassin could see. He looked at what he was supposed to sign, and at the fingerprint pad and camera patches on the screen which would record that it had really been him signing (or, more to the point, make a fake document take up a fraction more storage space).
“I can’t sign this,” he said. “It basically says my friends are all Beyonder agents and deserve death.”
The little man rolled his eyes. “Read it carefully, will you? It just says you have suspicions in that regard. You don’t seriously think your word would be enough to convict anybody of anything, do you?”
“Well then, why get me to—?”
“We want you to betray them!” the little man shouted, as though it was the most obvious thing ever. “We want you to turn your back on them and become a productive member of society. That’s all.”
“But they’re my friends.” Fassin coughed, swallowed. “Look, could I get a drink of water?”
“No. You can’t. And they’re not your friends. They’re just people you know. They’re barely acquaintances. You got drunk with them, got stoned with them, talked a bit with them and slept with some of them. You’ll all go your separate ways soon enough anyway and probably never keep in touch. They are not your friends. Accept that.”
Fassin thought better of debating what being a friend meant, in the circumstances. “Well, I’m still not betraying them.”
“They’ve betrayed you!”
The little interrogator swung the screen round, clicked on a few patches and swung it back. Fassin watched Thay, Sonj and Mome — all stuck in seats like the one he was secured in, and Sonj looking pretty beaten-up — say they thought that Fassin held Beyonder sympathies and was a danger to society who needed watching. They each mumbled something to that effect, signed the screen and pressed a thumb against the print patch (Sonj’s left a smear of blood).
The screenage shook him. It had probably been faked, but all the same. He sat back. “You faked that,” he said, unsteadily. The little man laughed. “Are you mad? Why would we bother?”
“I don’t know,” Fass admitted. “But I know my friends. They wouldn’t—”
The little man sat forward. “So just sign this and in the highly unlikely event that it ever crops up, just say yours has been faked.”
“So why not fake it anyway?” Fassin shouted.
“Because then you won’t have betrayed them!” the little man yelled back. “Come on! Sign and you can go. I’ve got better things to do.”
“But why do any of this?” Fassin said, wanting to cry. “Why make anybody betray anybody?”
The little man looked at him for a moment. “Mr Taak,” he said, sitting back, sounding patient. “I’ve inspected your profile. You are not stupid. Misguided, idealistic, naive, certainly, but not stupid. You must know how societies work. You must at least have an inkling. They work on force, power and coercion. People don’t behave themselves because they’re nice. That’s the liberal fallacy. People behave themselves because if they don’t they’ll be punished. All this is known. It isn’t even debatable. Civilisation after civilisation, society after society, species after species, all show the same pattern. Society is control: control is reward and punishment. Reward is being allowed to partake of the fruits of that society and, as a general but not unbreakable rule, not being punished without cause.”
“But—”
“Be quiet. The idiotic issue you chose to complain about -ownership of a habitat — really has nothing to do with you. It’s a legal matter, an ownership thing. You weren’t even born here and you wouldn’t have stayed beyond a few more months anyway, admit it. You should have kept out of it. You chose not to, you put yourself in harm’s way and now you’re paying the price. Part of that price is letting us know that you have made an effort to dissociate yourself from the people you were complicit with. Once you do that, you can go. Home, I would suggest. I mean to ’glantine.”
“And if I say no?”
“You mean not sign?”
“Yes.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“Then it’s taken out of my hands. You’ll go to meet people who enjoy doing this sort of thing.”
This time, when the little man moved his hand over the desk, Fassin screamed with the pain. He must have bitten his tongue. There was a taste of iron and his mouth filled with fresh blood and hot saliva.
“Because I,” the little man said wearily, “don’t.”
In the end Fassin signed. He’d kind of known he would.
The little man looked happy, and a couple of big female guards came in and helped Fassin from the chair, his bonds unfastened.
“Thank you, Mr Taak,” the little man said, and grasped his hand and shook it before they took him out of the room. “I hate all that unpleasantness, and it is always so good to see somebody being sensible. Try not to think too badly of me. Good luck to you.”
They got him showered down and fixed up and he left after a medical and a cup of soup, dressed in paper-thin overalls. He looked around when they ushered him through the doorways into what passed for outside in a hab. He’d been somewhere inside the Diegesian’s palace.