by Iain Banks
They think there is a threat. I tell them there isn't. Some people have started to avoid me. I tell the people who will listen that they are in prison, but the prison is in their own heads.
I sat up drinking far too much spirit with my workmates last night. I told them all about the bridge and that I had seen nothing threatening to them on my long journey here. Most of them just said I was crazy and went to bed. I stayed up too late, drank too much.
I have a hangover now, at the start of the week. I pick up my brush from the depot and head into the chilly spaces of the park, where the leaves lie, damp or frozen on the ground according to where the sunlight falls. They are waiting for me in the park; four men and a big black car.
In the car two of them hit me while the other two talk about the women they screwed that weekend. The beating is painful but not enthusiastic; the two men administering it seem almost bored. One of them cuts a knuckle on my teeth and looks annoyed for a moment; he takes out a knuckleduster, but one of the other men says something to him; he puts it away again and sits sucking at his finger. The car screams through the wide streets.
The thin, grey-haired man behind the desk is apologetic; I wasn't supposed to be beaten up, but it's standard procedure. He tells me I am a very lucky man. I dab at my bloody nose and puffy eyes with my monogrammed hanky - still, miraculously, not stolen - and try to agree with him. If you were one of ours, he says, then shakes his head. He taps a key on the surface of his grey metal desk.
I am somewhere in a large underground building. They blindfolded me in the car, on the road between the town and whatever city this is. I know it is a city because I heard its noises, and we drove through it for an hour before the car dipped into some echoing underground space, spiralling down and down into the earth. When it stopped I was led out of the car and along innumerable curving corridors to this room, where the thin, grey-haired man was waiting, tapping his grey desk with a key and drinking tea.
I ask him what they are going to do with me. He tells me instead about the combined prison and police headquarters I am now in. It is mostly underground, as I had guessed. He explains, with genuine enthusiasm, the principles upon which it has been designed and built, warming to his subject as he goes on. The prison/HQ is in the form of several tall, buried cylinders; inverted circular skyscrapers interred together beneath the surface of the city. He is deliberately vague about the exact number, but I form the impression there are between three and six of these close-packed cylinders. Each of these huge sunken drums contains many hundreds of rooms: cells, offices, toilets, canteens, dormitories, and so on, and each cylinder can be individually rotated, like some immense battleship magazine, so that the orientation of the corridors and doors leading into and out of each drum can be changed almost continually. A door which one day leads to a lift or an underground car park or a railway station or a certain place in one of the other cylinders might on the following day lead to a completely different cylinder, or to solid rock. From day to day, even - in conditions of high security alert - from hour to hour, this massive gearbox of revolving drums can be moved either at random or according to a complex, coded pattern, thus totally confounding the planning and execution of any attempted escape. The information necessary to decode these erratic transformations is distributed to the police and staff strictly on a need-to-know basis, so that nobody ever knows in exactly what new configuration the composite subterranean complex has been arranged; only the very highest and most trusted officials have access to the machines which set up and oversee these rotations, and the machinery and electronics which are its muscles and nerves are so designed that no engineer or electrician working on any conceivable fault or failure could possibly gain a working overview of the whole system.
The fellow's eyes are bright and wide as he describes all this to me. My head hurts, my vision is blurred and I need to relieve myself, but I agree, quite honestly, that it is a considerable work of engineering. But don't you see? he says, don't you see what it is, what it is an image of? No, I don't, I confess, ears ringing.
A lock! he says triumphantly, eyes flashing. It is a poem; a song in metal and rock. A perfect, real image of its purpose; a lock, a safe, a set of tumblers; a safe place to store evil.
I see what the man means. My head throbs and I black out.
When I wake up it is on another train and I've peed my pants.
Miocene
'Versions of the truth disseminated, To the flock like plastic shrapnel, Getting under the skin of most, And on the nerves of some. - Another chip off the old blastema, Another symptom of the system; The bloom and sump of your diabetical materialism.
'Come give us your excuses, Explain why you did what you had to do; Tell us of your hurting to be kind. You talk of: Bloody Sundays. Black Septembers, And all the time you're wasting.
'We'll smile, dissemble, Case the joint for barricades, Count the weapons, Cost the operation, And mutter back meantime "I believe that's just the way it happened. I'm sure it's exactly as you say."'
'... Oh well, very radical. Lot of street cred there.' Stewart nodded. 'I've always said a good poem's worth a dozen Kalash-nikovs.' He nodded again and drank from his glass.
'Look, asshole, just tell me if you mind the bit about "Diabetical Materialism".'
Stewart shrugged, reached for another bottle of Pils. 'Doesnae bother me, pal. You just go ahead. That a new poem?'
'No, ancient. But I'm thinking I might try to get some printed. Just thought you might be offended.'
Stewart laughed. 'God, you're a daft bugger sometimes, you know that?'
'I know that.'
They were in Stewart and Shona's house in Dunfermline. Shona had taken the kids to Inverness for the weekend; he'd come over to leave their Christmas presents and talk to Stewart. He needed somebody to talk to. He opened another can of export and added the ring-pull to the growing pile in the ashtray.
Stewart poured the Pils into his glass and took the drink over to the hi-fi. The last record had ended a few minutes earlier. 'How about a blast from the past?'
'Yeah, let's wallow in nostalgia. Why not.' He settled back in the seat, watching Stewart thumb through the collection of records and wishing he'd been able to think of something more imaginative than record tokens to give the kids. Well, it was what they'd both asked for. Ten and twelve; he remembered he'd bought his first single on his sixteenth birthday. These youngsters already had their own album collections. Oh well.
'Good heavens,' Stewart said, taking out a blue and grey cover and looking slightly shocked. 'Did I really buy Deep Purple In Rock?'
'You must have been stoned,' he told him. Stewart turned round and winked at him as he took the record out. 'Oh, eh? Was that a little flash of wit there?'
'Merely a scintilla; put the goddamn record on.'
'Well it hasn't been played for a while, just let me clean it here ...' Stewart cleaned the record, put it on: Can't Stand The Rezillos. My God, he thought, that was from 1978; a blast from the past already, indeed. Stewart nodded in time to the music, then sat down in his armchair. 'I like these gentle melodic songs,' he shouted. The track he'd put the stylus down on was Somebody's Gonna Get Their Head Kicked In Tonight.
He raised his can to Stewart. 'God almighty, seven years!' Stewart leaned forward, a hand cupped at one ear. He pointed at the turntable, shouted, 'I said seven years ...' He nodded towards the hi-fi. 'That: seventy-eight.' Stewart sat back, shaking his head emphatically.
'Aw naw; thirty-three and a third,' he shouted.
I am reduced to telling stories for my living. I raid my dreams for tasty morsels to feed my jealous Field Marshal and his motley band of vapidly murderous ancillaries. We hunker down round a fire of fallen flags and precious books, flames glinting on their bandoliers and bayonets; we eat long pig and drink rough whisky; the Field Marshal boasts of famous battles he has won, all the women he has fucked, and then, when he can think of no more lies, he demands a story from me. I tell him the one about the small
boy whose dad had a pigeon loft and who later as a man never felt happier than when his proposal of marriage was turned down, at the top of a pigeon-loft folly of monumental proportions.
The Field Marshal looks unimpressed, so I go back to the beginning.
By the time I recovered from my melodramatic swoon in the office of the grey-haired man with the tapping key and the grey desk, the train I'd been put on had crossed the rest of the Republic, steamed across the causeway to the far shore of the nearly circular sea, and travelled some way across a cold waste of tundra.
I had another new set of clothes; a uniform for the train. I was in a small bunk and I'd wet my pants. I felt terrible; my head was pounding, I ached in various places, and the old circular pain in my chest had returned. The train rattled around me.
I was to be a waiter; one who waited. The train contained various elderly officials from the Republic who were on a peace mission - I never did discover exactly who they were or what sort of peace they envisaged - and I, along with an experienced chief steward, was supposed to wait on them in the dining-car, serving them drinks, taking their orders, bringing their food. Luckily they were drunk for most of the time, these ageing bureaucrats, and my initial gaffes went mostly unnoticed as the steward trained me. Sometimes I had to make beds too, or sweep and dust and polish in the sleeping compartments and public carriages.
If this was a punishment, I thought, then it is very mild. I found out later all that had saved me from a much worse fate was the fact that I was - to these people - illiterate, dumb and deaf. Because I could not understand any conversations I heard, or read any papers left lying about in the cars, I could be trusted and used. Of course I did learn something of the language, but my vocabulary was mostly limited to table matters and the decoding of signs saying Do Not Disturb and the like. I did my job. The train rolled through the windswept tundra, passing flat towns and camps and army posts.
The composition of the train gradually changed. As we went further from the Republic the attitude of the officials on the train gradually moved from drunken relaxation to drunken tension; slow columns of smoke climbed blackly on the horizon and occasionally a flight of war planes would swoop, sudden and screaming, across the train. The officials at their tables ducked instinctively when the planes flashed over us, then laughed, loosened collars and nodded appreciatively at the fast-receding dots of the flight. They caught my eye and snapped their fingers commandingly for more drinks.
First we had a couple of flat cars with two four-barrel antiaircraft guns on them, one just ahead of the engine, one at the back of the guard's van, then later a carriage to accommodate the gun crews and an armoured wagon full of extra ammunition. The military tended to keep to their own carriages, and I was not called on to serve them.
Later, a couple of the public cars were taken off at a small town where sirens and klaxons blared in the distance and a large fire burned near the station. The cars were replaced with armoured carriages containing troops. Their officers took over some of the sleeping cars. Still the people on the train were mostly bureaucrats. The officers were polite.
The air changed; snow fell. We passed by the side of gravel roads where burned-out trucks lay at angles in ditches, and the trackside and road were pitted with craters. Lines of troops and poor-looking civilians pushing prams loaded with household goods started to appear; the soldiers going in either direction, the civilians only in one; the opposite to ours. Several times the train stopped for no apparent reason, and often, in a siding, I would see a train pass us, carrying sections of track, and cranes, and wagons full of small stones. Often the bridges over the snow-covered tundra were built on the ruins of older bridges, and manned by sappers. The train crossed these bridges at a crawl; I got down and walked alongside to stretch my legs, shivering in my thin waiter's jacket.
Almost before I realised what was happening there were no more civilians on the train; only officers and men and the train crew. All the carriages were armoured; we had three armour-plated diesel locomotives in front and another two behind, there were anti-aircraft flat cars every three or four carriages, covered wagons holding field guns and howitzers, a radio car with its own generator, several flat cars with tanks and staff cars and artillery tractors, many conscript-crammed barrack cars, and a dozen or so wagons full of oil drums.
I now served only officers. They drank more and tended to damage things, but were less likely to throw cutlery if one dropped dirty plates.
The sunlight grew less, the winds colder, the clouds darker and thicker. We passed no more refugees, only the ruins of towns and villages; they looked like charcoal sketches: the black of soot-covered stones and the empty white of clinging snow. There were army camps, sidings full of trains like ours, or trains with hundreds of tanks on flat cars, or gigantic guns on articulated many-axled cars the length of half a dozen ordinary wagons.
We were attacked by planes; the anti-aircraft platforms crackled with noise and sent clouds of acrid smoke drifting down the side of the train; the planes attacked with cannon shell, smashing windows. Bombs missed us by a hundred yards. I lay on the floor of the galley with the chief steward, hugging a box of finest crystal glasses while the windows splintered around us. We both stared in horror as a wave of red liquid spilled from round the galley door, thinking one of the chefs had been hit. It was only wine.
The damage was repaired; the train rolled on, into low hills under dark clouds. The hills were blown clear of snow in places, and though the sun now never rose very far in the sky, the air became warmer. I thought I could catch the breath of the ocean; sometimes there was a smell of sulphur. The army camps grew larger. The hills gradually became mountains, and I saw the first volcano one night while serving dinner; I mistook it for some terrible night attack in the distance. The soldiers gave it only the most cursory glance and told me not to spill the soup.
There were distant explosions all the time now; sometimes volcanic, sometimes man-made. The train rolled and whined over newly repaired track, crawling past long lines of grey-faced men with sledgehammers and long shovels.
We ran from attacking planes; dashing along straights, hurtling round bends - carriages tipping sickeningly - then plunging into tunnels, braking furiously, everything clattering and crashing^ the tunnel walls flashing with the light from our howling brakes.
We off-loaded tanks and staff cars, we took on wounded; the debris of war was scattered over these hills and valleys like rotting fruit in an abandoned orchard. Once, at night, I saw the glowing remains of tanks caught in a ruby-red flow. The lava rolled down the valley below us like burning mud, and the wrecked tanks - tracks undone, gun barrels tilted crazily into the air - were borne down on that incandescent tide like strange products of the earth itself; infernal antibodies in that red stream.
I still served the officers their meals, though we had no wine left and our supplies of food were reduced both in quantity and quality. Many of the officers who had joined the train after we entered the battle zone would stare at their plates for minutes at a time, gazing incredulously at what we'd put before them, as confused and disturbed as if we'd just ladled a bowlful of nuts and bolts onto their plates.
Our lights blazed all day; the dark clouds, the vast rolling billows of volcanic smoke, the low sun which we could go days at a time without seeing; all consipired to turn the wreckage-strewn mountains and valleys into a land of night. All was uncertainty. A horizon of deeper darkness might be raincloud or smoke; a layer of white on a hillside or plain might be snow, or ash; fires above us might be burning hill forts or the side vents of great volcanoes. We travelled through darkness, dust and death. After a while it began to seem quite natural.
I believe that if we had gone on, the train - lava-spattered, dust-caked, dented and patched - would have accumulated so much cooled lava on its carriage roofs that from above at least it would have had a form of natural camouflage of rock; an evolved skin, a protective layer grown in this harsh place, as though the metals of the tra
in's own articulated body were spontaneously returning to their original forms.
The attack came in the midst of fire and steam.
The train was descending from a mountain pass. In a shallow valley to one side a loose lava flow ran rapidly, almost keeping pace with the train. As we approached a tunnel through a spur of rock, a vast rising veil of steam reared in front of us, and a sound like a gigantic waterfall slowly drowned out the noise of the train. On the far side of the mist-filled tunnel, we saw that a glacier was blocking the lava flow's way: the ice sheet extended from a side valley, its soiled meltwaters feeding a broad lake. The lava had spilled into the lake, forcing a huge steaming wave of water-cooled debris in front of it.
The train rolled hesitantly forward towards another bank of thick mist. I was making beds in one of the sleeping cars. When the first small rocks started to roll down the mountainside I left that side of the carriage and watched through an open door as larger and larger boulders came crashing down the mist-shrouded slope into the train, bouncing up to break through windows or battering against the carriage sides. One vast boulder headed straight towards me; I ran down the corridor. The air was full of crashes and thuds and the sound of distant, confused, undirected gunfire. I felt the train shake, then a tremendous bang obliterated every other noise; the lava vaporising the lake, the gunfire, the small rocks whacking onto the sides and roof. The entire carriage flicked to one side, dashing me against the window and then over on my back as the car lights flickered and went out, a breaking, smashing sound seemed to come from all directions at once, and the buckling carriage roof and walls batted me between them like a ball.
Later, I discovered that the carriage had broken free from the rest of the stricken train and rolled down the slope of scree towards the boiling waters of the lake. The Field Marshal's men, looting and murdering their way through the cars, came upon me, mumbling to myself in the wreckage and - so they tell me, though they'd say anything-attempting to put the chief steward's head back onto what was left of his shoulders. I had stuck an apple in his mouth.
