by Iain Banks
We are rock, part of the machine (what machine? This machine; look, pick it up, shake it, see the pretty patterns form; watch it snow, or rain, or blow, or shine), and we live the life of rocks; first igneous as children, metamorphic in our prime, sedimentary in our sedentary dotage (back to the subduction zone?) In fact the literal truth is even more fantastic: that we are all stars; that we, all our systems and this single system, are the gathered silt of ancient explosions, dying stars from that first birth, detonating in the silence to send their shrapnel gases spinning, swarming, collecting, forming (beat that, mean 'magined monks).
So we are silt, we are precipitate, we are leavings (cream and scum); none the worse for that. You are what has gone before, just another collection, a point on a (stretched) line, just the wave-front.
Shake and jostle. A machine within a machine within a machine within a machine within a - you want me to stop here?
Jostle, shake. Dreams of something long ago, something lodged in the brain somewhere, finally coming to the surface (another shrapnel, more splinters).
Jostle shake jostle shake. Half awake half awake.
Cities and Kingdoms and Bridges and Towers; I'm sure I'm heading for them all. Can't go for long without getting somewhere, after all.
Where the hell was that dark bridge? Still looking.
In the silence of the speeding train, I see the bridge pass. At speed, the secondary architecture can almost disappear at times; all that is visible is the bridge itself, the original structure, flashing red criss-crossing, in its own lights or the sunlight. Beyond, the blue firth, shining under a new day.
The slanted girders pass like forever chopping blades, dimming the view, sectioning it, parcelling it. In the new light, and in the haze of the day, I seem to see another bridge, up river; a grey echo, a shadow-ghost of the one bridge, towering out of the mists above the river, at once more straight and less so. Ghost. Ghost bridge; a place I knew once but know no more. A place to -
On the other side, down-river, through the cutting dark lines of the structure, I can see the barrage balloons, hanging blackly in the sunlight like obese submarines, dead and bloated with some corrupting gas.
Then the planes come, level with me, flying alongside me; they are heading in the same direction as the train, overtaking it slowly. They are surrounded by black clouds; dark bursts of smoke detonate in the sky all around them. Their own pulsed signals mingle with the black smudges of the bridge's reactivated anti-aircraft defences, scrambling the already nonsensical message trailed behind the craft still further.
Invulnerable, uncaring, the silver planes fly on through the furious hail of exploding shells, their formation perfect, their sky writing as neat and precise as ever, sunlight glinting over their sleekly bulbous bodies. All three, from boss to skid, look quite undamaged; their flush-riveted lines are unmarred even by soot or oil stains.
Then, when they are almost too far away for me to see them clearly through the angle of increasing structure, when I have determined they must be really invulnerable, or at least that the bridge's guns are firing smoke charges, not shrapnel or even impact rounds, one of the aircraft is hit. Hit in the tail. It is the middle plane. Immediately it starts to slow down, dropping behind the other planes, grey smoke pouring from its tail, the black puffs of its message continuing for a while, then growing fainter as the plane drops further and further back until it is alongside the train. It does not peel away or take any other evasive action; it keeps the same steady course, but slower now.
Its tail disappears, consumed by the smoke. Still it flies, straight and level. Gradually the fuselage is eaten away. The plane keeps pace with the train and does not deviate from its course, though black anti-aircraft bursts still swarm around it, damage or no. Half the fuselage is gone; it has no tail. The grey smoke starts to eat into the trailing edge of the wing roots and the rear of the cockpit canopy. The plane cannot be flyable; it should have tumbled out of control the instant it lost its tail surfaces, but it flies on, still accurately level with the racing train, and matching its speed. The thick cloud of grey smoke eats fuselage, cockpit, wings, then thins out as they disappear; only the engine cowling and the near-invisible line of the propeller remain to be consumed.
A flying engine; no pilot, no fuel, no control surfaces, no means of lift. The cowling disappears, exhaust by exhaust. Only a few puffs of black smoke bother to follow it. The engine has vanished; the propeller disappears in a sudden thick pulse of grey, then only the boss is left, quickly shrivelling to leave a thin grey line; then it is gone. Just blue sky and balloons beyond the whirling verticals and slants of the speed-blurred bridge. The train jostles and shakes me. I am half awake. I go back to sleep.
On the journey I had strange recurring dreams of a life lived on land; I kept seeing one man, first as a small boy and then as a youth and finally as a young man, but I did not see him clearly at any stage. It was as though all of it was through some mist, and only in black and white and cluttered with things that were more than just visual images but less than real, as if I watched that life on a distorted screen but at the same time could see into that man's head, see the thoughts inside, the associations and connections, conjectures and imaginings all bursting from him and onto the screen I was watching. It all seemed grey and unreal, and I could sometimes spot similarities between what happened in this odd, recurring dream and what really did happen while I lived on the bridge.
Perhaps that was reality, my damaged memories just restored enough to put on some sort of disordered show and doing their best either to entertain or to inform me. I recall that I did see something that looked like the bridge at one point in my dream, but only from a distance, from a desert coast I think, and besides it was far too small. Later I thought I might have stood underneath it, but again it was too small, and too dark; a minor echo, no more.
The empty train I had stowed away on moved for days over the bridge, sometimes slowing but never stopping. I could have jumped from it a couple of times, but I might have killed myself, and I was still determined to reach the end of the structure. I had the run of only three deserted carriages, two passenger cars - with seats and small tables and sleeping compartments - and one dining-car. But no kitchen-car, no galley, and locked doors at each end of those three carriages.
I hid most of the time, slouched down in one of the reclining seats so that I could not be seen from outside, or lying in a sleeping compartment top bunk and peeping out through half drawn curtains at the bridge outside. I drank water from the toilet washbasins, and day-dreamed or dreamt about food.
The carriages were unlit at night, haunted by the flickering beams of yellow-orange light from outside. It grew gradually warmer with each passing day, and the sunlight outside became brighter. The overall shape of the bridge outside the windows did not seem to change, but the people I glimpsed occasionally by the trackside did alter; their skins became different colours, darker as the sunlight increased.
After some days, though, everything seemed to get darker again, as I lay, faint with hunger, rattled like something loose in a long, reclined seat. I began to believe that the light had not changed at all, and that it was something inside my eyes that made the people look like shadows. Still, my eyes hurt.
Then one night I awoke, dreaming of the last meal I had had with Abberlaine Arrol, and saw that it was very dark, both inside the carriage and out.
No glow of light came from the bridge outside, no chrome edge of reflecting cabin fitments was visible; neither was my own hand when I held it in front of my face. I closed my eyes and pressed them, only then seeing the false nerve-light that is the eyes' reaction to pressure.
I felt my way to the nearest outside door, opened the window and stared out. A strange, thick, heavy smell came into the carriage on the warm air. It alarmed me at first; no smell of salt, of paint or oil or even smoke and fumes.
Then I saw a faint edge of light above me, moving very slowly. The train was still moving at close to full
speed - the slipstream poured roaring through the window to tug at my loose clothes - but whatever it was I could see, the light was moving very slowly over it; it must be very far away. A cloudbank, I thought, lit by starlight, then realised I could see that outline of light continuously, without any interrupting beams and girders chopping the sight into flickering fragments.
A part of the bridge where the load-bearing structure was beneath the level of the rails? I started to feel faint again.
Then the train slowed for some points, and before it speeded up again I could hear, through the lessened noise of its progress, the distant night noises of a dark, wild forest, and saw that the edging of the light I had mistaken for a cloudbank was a raggedly wooded ridge a couple of miles away. I laughed, delirious and delighted, and sat by the window until the dawn came up and made the green forest steam with fragment mists.
That day the train slowed, and entered the outskirts of a sprawling town. It wound sinuously, slowly, through a great marshalling yard towards a long, low station. I hid in a linen cupboard. The train stopped. I heard voices, the whirring noises of unidentifiable machines inside the carriages, then nothing. I tried to get out of the cupboard but it had been locked from the outside. While I was sitting wondering what to do next, more voices sounded through the cupboard's metal door, and I formed the impression that the train was filling up with people. After a few hours, the train moved again. I slept in the locked cupboard that night and was discovered by a steward the next morning.
The train was full of passengers; well-dressed ladies and gentlemen who looked as though they came from the bridge. They wore summer suits and dresses; they sipped cocktails chinking with ice at little tables in the observation cars. They looked vaguely disgusted when they saw me led through the train in my crumpled, stale clothes, a railway policeman's hand forcing one of my arms painfully high up my back. Outside, the countryside was mountainous, full of tunnels and tall viaducts spanning boulder-torn torrents.
I was interrogated by one of the train's deputy firemen, a young man in a sparkling white uniform which seemed rather inappropriately spotless given his rank. He asked me how I came to be on board; I told the truth. I was taken back through the train and locked in a bare, barred section of a baggage car. I was fed well, on galley leftovers. My clothes were taken from me, washed and returned. The handkerchief Abberlaine Arrol had monogrammed, and on which she had left a smudged red image of her lips, came back quite thoroughly clean.
The train moved for days through mountains, and then across a high, grass-covered plain where distant herds of animals scattered and fled on its approach and the wind blew continually. Beyond the plain it started to climb towards another range of mountains. It unwound its way through those, across more spindly viaducts and long tunnels, descending all the time and stopping at small, quiet towns along the way, amongst forests and green lakes and rock spires plinthed in scree. The barred and rattling little cell had only a single small window two feet long and six inches high, but I could observe the scenery well enough, and the fresh, rarefied smells of the mountains and the plateaux leaked through the large baggage door at one end of the car, wrapping me with the scents which I seemed, tantalisingly, to recall from long ago.
I had other dreams, besides the recurring one of the man in the severely beautiful city; I dreamt one night that I woke up and went to my small window and looked out over a boulder-strewn plain, and saw two sets of weak lights as they approached each other over the moonlit wasteland. Just as they stopped, facing each other, the train roared into a tunnel. On another occasion I thought I looked out during the day, while the train ran along the top of a great cliff facing a blue, glittering sea; the cliff-edge was strung about with puffy clouds which we continually plunged into and rushed out of, and a few times in the clear spaces, through a haze of heat, far below on the surface of the sun-burnished sea, I thought I saw two ships of the line sailing alongside one another, the space between them filled with puffs of grey smoke and darting flames. But that was a day-dream.
They left me here eventually, after the mountains and the hills and tundra and another, lower, colder plain. Here is the Republic, a cold, concentric place once known, they say, as The Eye of God. It is reached, from the barren plain, by a long causeway which divides the waters of a huge grey inland sea. The sea is almost perfectly circular, and the large island at its centre is also very close to that same geometric shape. The first I saw of it was the wall; the grey sea wall skirted by low surf and topped by low towers. It seemed to stretch curving away for ever, vanishing in a haze of distant rain squalls. The train clattered through a long tunnel, over a deep moat of water and then another wall. Beyond lay the island and the Republic, a place of wheatfields and wind, low hills and grey buildings; it seemed at once rundown and full of energy, and those grey buildings gave way, every now and again, to immaculate palaces and temples of an obviously earlier age, perfectly restored but seemingly unused. And there was a graveyard, a cemetery miles to each side, packed with millions of identical white pillars spread geometrically across a green sea of grass.
I live in a dormitory with a hundred other men. I sweep leaves from the broad paths of a park. Tall grey buildings rise on all sides, bulking square shapes against the grainy, dusty-blue sky. There are spires and thin towers on top of the buildings; banners I cannot read fly from them.
I sweep the leaves even when there are no leaves to sweep; it is the law. I formed the impression when I first came here that this was a prison, but this is not the case, at least not in the obvious sense. It seemed then that everybody I met was either a prisoner or a guard, and even when I was weighed and measured and inspected and given my uniform and taken by bus to this large, anonymous town that nothing had really changed. I could talk to relatively few people - this came as no surprise, of course - but the ones I did talk to seemed delighted that I could speak to them in my strange, alien tongue, but also rather guarded when talking about their own circumstances. I asked them if they had heard about the bridge; some had, but when I said I came from there they seemed to think I was joking, or even that I was mad.
Then my dreams changed, were taken over, invaded.
I woke up one night in the dormitory; the air was sick with the smell of death, and choked with the sounds of people moaning and crying out. I looked through a broken window and saw the flashes of distant explosions, the steady glow of large fires, and could hear the crump of falling shells and bombs. I was alone in the dormitory, the sounds and smells came from outside.
I felt weak and desperately hungry, more hungry than I had felt on the train which had taken me away from the bridge. I discovered I had lost almost half my weight during the night. I pinched myself and bit the inside of my cheek, but I did not wake up. I looked round the deserted dormitory; the windows had been covered in tape; black and white tape made X's all over the rectangular panes. Outside, the town was burning.
I found some ill-fitting shoes and an old suit where my standard-issue uniform should have been. I went out into the town. The park which I was supposed to sweep was there, but covered in tents and surrounded by ruined buildings.
Planes droned overhead, or came hurtling down out of the cloudy night sky, screaming. Explosions shook the ground and air; flames leapt into the sky. Everywhere was rubble and the smell of death. I saw a dead, skinny horse, fallen in its traces, the cart behind it half-covered by the ruins of a fallen building. The horse was being carefully butchered by a group of thin, wide-eyed men and women.
The clouds were orange islands against the ink-black sky; fires reflected there on the hung vapour, and sent huge columns of their own darkness into the air to meet them. The planes wheeled, like birds of carrion over the burning town. Sometimes a searchlight would pick one out, and a few black puffs of smoke would darken the sky around the plane still further, but it seemed that otherwise the town was defenceless. Occasionally shells shrieked overhead; twice explosions nearby made me duck for cover as debris - dusty bri
cks, shards of stone - fell pattering and thumping around me.
I wandered for hours. Towards dawn, as I was returning to the dormitory through this unending nightmare, I found myself behind two old people, a man and a woman. They were walking along the street, each supporting the other, when the man suddenly crumpled and fell, taking the old lady down with him. I tried to help them up, but the man was already dead. There had been no bombs or shells for several minutes, and though I thought I could hear distant crackling small-arms fire, none of it was near us. The woman, almost as thin and grey looking as the old dead man, cried hopelessly, sobbing and moaning into the worn collar of the old man's coat, slowly shaking her head and repeating over and over some words I could not understand.
I did not think the shrivelled old could contain so many tears.
The dormitory was full of dead soldiers in grey uniforms when I returned. One bed was unoccupied. I lay down on it and woke up.
It was the same peaceful, intact town, with the same trees and paths and tall grey buildings. I was still here. The buildings I had seen in flames or in ruins were those that overlooked the park where I worked. When I looked carefully though, in some places I found stones which had not been restored, and which were part of the original buildings. Some of those blocks were chipped and scarred with the distinctive, but weathered, marks of bullets and shrapnel.
I had similar dreams for weeks; always much the same, never exactly similar. Somehow I was not surprised when I discovered that everybody had these dreams. They were surprised; surprised that I had never had such dreams before. I cannot understand, I tell them, why they seem frightened of their dreams. That was the past, I say, this is the present; the future will be better, it won't be the past.
