by Iain Banks
'You can swear in front of women if you want, nephew, but don't swear in front of women in front of me.'
'Yeah, right,' Dwight said, casting his gaze briefly towards the stars again. 'Anyway,' he said, and with gratuitous emphasis went on, 'the idea is that the rock inside the Kaaba isn't a rock: it's a lifeboat, it's an escape pod from an alien spacecraft that blew up above Earth fifteen hundred years ago. The lifeboat half burned up in the atmosphere so that's why it looks like a rock, or maybe it's designed to look like a rock, right, so nobody tries to look inside it — I mean, maybe all this happened in some sort of, like, war, okay? So it had to be disguised, right? Anyway, it crashed to the ground in Arabia and got taken for this incredibly holy, like, thing. And, like, maybe it did something, you know? Maybe that's why it was venerated and stuff, because it did something that rocks don't usually do, that even meteorites don't usually do, like float above the ground or dig itself out of the sand or something or zap somebody who was trying to cut into it. Whatever. But it gets taken to Mecca and everybody comes to worship it and stuff, but…' He chugged some more frothy beer. 'But, being a lifeboat, it's sent out a distress signal, right?' He laughed, obviously greatly taken with his own free-wheeling inventiveness. 'And it's, like, taken all this time until now for the distress signal to get back to aliens and them to get here. But as our story begins — I mean, we might have had some sort of pre-titles stuff featuring the firefight between the spaceships and the lifeboat streaking down through the atmosphere, watched by shepherds tending their flocks by night, or whatever — anyway, as our story begins properly, the mothership's, like, here. And there's these alien guys inside the escape pod and they're just starting to wake up.' He sat back, eyes wide with enthusiasm. He spread his arms. 'What do you think? I mean, like, that's just the start, but what do you think of it so far?'
I stared at Dwight. Jebbet E. Dessous seemed to be gauging the width of his forehead with his hand. Eastil was blowing across the neck of his beer bottle, producing a low, breathy note.
I cleared my throat. 'Do you have any more of the story?'
'Na.' Dwight waved one hand. 'They have scriptwriters for that sort of stuff. It's the concept that matters. What do you think? Huh? Be honest.'
I looked at his eager, smiling face for a few moments and then said, 'You want to make a movie in which the holiest shrine of what is arguably the world's most militant and fundamentalist religion turns out to be —'
'An alien artifact,' Dwight said, nodding. 'I mean, Uncle Jeb's concerned that people might be upset by it, but I'm telling you, Kate, this is a great idea. I know people in Hollywood who'd kill to produce this movie.'
I watched Dwight carefully at this point for any sign of irony, or even humour. Not a sausage. I looked at Mr Dessous, who was shaking his head.
'Dwight,' I said. 'Does the word "fatwa" mean anything to you?'
Dwight started to grin.
'Or the name Salman Rushdie?'
Dwight hooted with laughter. 'Aw , Kate, come on, he was an Islamic! I'm not!'
'Actually I think he was sort of lapsed at the time,' I said.
'Well, he came from an Islamic family or whatever! I mean, he was from India or something, wasn't he? The point is I've got nothing to do with their religion. Hell, I'm not sure what I am — lapsed Baptist or something. Yeah, Uncle Jeb?'
'Your mother was a Baptist, I think.' Dessous nodded. 'I have no idea what your father thought he was.'
'See?' Dwight said to me, as though this explained everything.
'Uh-huh,' I said. 'Dwight, I think the point is that you might be seen as dissing their faith. That might not go down too well, regardless of your own belief or lack of it.'
'Kate,' Dwight said, suddenly looking serious, 'I'm not saying this movie isn't going to be controversial and cutting edge. I want this movie to be impactful. I want people to on-board this bigtime, to sit up and think and overstand, you know? I want them to think, Hey, what if, like, our religions don't just come from above,' (at this point Dwight mugged staring nervously up at the near-black sky) 'what if they come from, like, the stars? You know?' He smiled widely and threw back the last of his beer.
I took a deep breath. 'Well, that's not exactly a new idea, Dwight. But if that's what you want to say, why not…well, do it through a different religion? Or even invent one?'
'Invent one?' Dwight said, frowning.
I shrugged. 'It doesn't appear to be that difficult.'
'But this idea needs the Kaaba thing, Kate, it needs this escape pod.'
'Dwight, if by some miracle you get to make this movie, you'll be the one who needs an escape pod.'
'Bullshit, Kate!'
'Dwight,' Dessous said tiredly.
Dwight looked genuinely sad. 'I thought you at least would understand! I'm an artist; artists have to take risks. It's my job, it's my calling. I have to be true to myself and my gift, true to my ideas, or what am I bothering for? I mean, why are any of us bothering? I have a responsibility here, Kate. I must be true to my Muse.'
'Your Muse?' Dessous said, almost choking.
'Yeah,' Dwight said, glancing from his uncle to me. 'Otherwise I'm just, like, a fake, and I won't be a fake, Kate.'
'Dwight, ah, there's a movie out at the moment called The Siege —'
'Yeah yeah yeah,' Dwight said, smiling tolerantly and patting the air as though pacifying an invisible dog. 'I know. Completely different sort of movie altogether. This movie's going to be big budget and ultra-spectacular, but it's going to be, like, thoughtful?'
'The people who made The Siege probably thought it was thoughtful, too. They probably didn't mean to upset the entire Arab-American community and have movie theatres picketed across America.'
'Well, across New York City, anyway,' Dwight said, shaking his head at my lack of understanding. 'You really on Uncle Jeb's side?' he asked me, disappointed. 'Frankly I was hoping you might help me talk him into putting some money into this project.
This time Dessous did choke on his beer.
'I think you'd be mad to go ahead with this, Dwight,' I told him.
Dwight stared at me, aghast. Then he leant towards me, eyes narrowed. 'But you do think it's a great idea?'
'Brilliant. It's a breathtakingly good idea. But if you really want to put it to good use, find somebody in the movie industry you hate and would like to see ruined or dead and suggest the idea to them in a way that would let them claim it as their own.'
'And watch them pick up the Academy Award?' Dwight laughed at my naïveté. 'I think not!'
Dessous and I exchanged looks.
Dinner, an hour later, was in Jebbet E. Dessous' own home, an Italianate villa overlooking a broad lake on the outskirts of the deserted town, which was just what it appeared to be. Premier, Nebraska, had been a declining township on the fringe of Dessous' ranch for years before he'd taken over the spread on its other side; he'd bought the place up lot by lot and gradually moved people out until he'd created his own ghost town. The main reason he'd done this, he explained, while showing me round the villa before dinner, was so that he had the sort of room a man needs when he's using heavy ordnance.
Jebbet E. Dessous was into weaponry the way Uncle Freddy was into cars. Hand guns, rifles, automatics, mortars, heavy machine-guns, tanks, rocket-launchers, he had everything, including a helicopter gunship stored out at the airfield where I'd landed and a motor torpedo boat which he kept in a large boathouse on the lakeside. Most of the heavier stuff — like the tanks, housed in a warehouse in the town — was old; Second World War vintage or not much later. He grumbled about the government's reluctance to sell tax-paying citizens main battle tanks and anti-aircraft missiles.
Dwight and I followed him round the stables attached to the main villa; this was where Dessous kept his collection of howitzers and field pieces, some dating back to the Civil War.
'See this?' He patted what looked like a load of long, open pipes mounted on a trailer. 'Stalin's organ pipes, they used to call these
. The Wehrmacht were terrified of them. So were the Red Army; used to fall short too often. You can't get the rockets any more but I'm having a bunch of them made.' He slapped one of the dark green metal tubes with his giant hand again. 'Make a hell of a noise, apparently. Looking forward to letting these suckers off, let me tell you.'
'What's the biggest missile you've got, Jeb?' I asked, as innocently as I could, thinking of the Scuds he was supposed to have bought.
He grinned. He was dressed in a white tuxedo now — Dwight had thrown on a jacket, too — but Dessous still looked like a bucolic farmer dressed up and in town for a dance. 'Ah-hah,' was all he would say. He winked.
'Goddammit, Telman, I thought you of all people would agree with that!'
So I was Telman, now. I had kind of thought that when Mr Dessous had said he'd call me Miss Telman until he knew me better he meant that in the fullness of time he might get round to calling me Kathryn, or Kate. Apparently not. Or maybe that would come later. The point at issue was how easy it was to bootstrap yourself out of poverty.
'Why, Jeb?'
'Because you came up out the slums, didn't you?'
'Well, if not slums, certainly a degree of deprivation.'
'But you did it! That's my point; you're here!'
Here was the dining room of the villa, which was fairly big and untidily sumptuous. As well as myself, Dwight, Eastil and Dessous, there was Mrs Dessous, who was a stunning Los Angelino redhead about Dwight's age sheathed in silver and called Marriette. There were a dozen other people on Dessous' immediate staff, and a similar number of technicians and engineers, to whom I'd been introduced en masse.
The long table was stratified, with Dessous at the head dispensing Pétrus and the junior technicians somewhere at the far end swigging beer. The food had been Mexican, served by small and wondrously deft and inconspicuous Mexican men. I wondered if Dessous themed all his meals, so that if we'd eaten Chinese we'd have been surrounded by pigtailed Chinamen, while an Italian dinner would have been served by dark, slim-hipped young men called Luigi. The main course had been some very fine lean flag steak from one of Dessous' own herds, though I'd had to leave most of mine because there was just too much of it.
'I was extraordinarily lucky, Jeb,' I said. 'Mrs Telman's car blew a tyre near where I was playing with my pals. If it hadn't been for that piece of luck I'd probably still be in the west of Scotland. I'm thirty-eight. By now I'd have had three or four kids knocked out of me, I'd weigh another twenty or thirty pounds, I'd look ten years older, I'd smoke forty a day and eat too much chocolate and deep-fried food. If I was lucky I'd have a man who didn't hit me and kids who weren't doing drugs. Maybe I'd have a few high-school qualifications, maybe not. There's an outside chance I'd have gone to university, in which case it might all have been different. I might be a teacher or a social worker or a civil servant, all of which would be socially useful but wouldn't let me live the sort of life I've come to appreciate. But it's all based on luck.'
'No. You don't know. You're just making assumptions,' Dessous insisted. 'That's the Brit in you coming out there, this self-deprecating stuff. I knew Liz Telman; she told me when she found you, you were selling candy at fifty per cent mark-up. You trying to tell me you wouldn't have learned something from that?'
'Perhaps I'd have learned how easy it was to rip people off, and decided never to do it again. Maybe I'd have ended up working in a Citizens' Advice Bureau or —'
'This is perversity, Telman. The obvious lesson to draw is how easy it is to make money, how easy it is to use initiative and enterprise to pull yourself out of the environment you find yourself in. You'd have done it anyway, with or without Liz Telman. And that's precisely my point, dammit. The people who deserve to will get out of their deprivation, they'll rise above any goddamn social disadvantagement, whether it's in Scotland, Honduras, Los Angeles or anywhere else.'
'But it's not the people who deserve to,' I said. 'How can you condemn the vast majority who don't get out of the slums or the schemes or the barrios or the projects? Aren't they going to be the ones who put family, friends and neighbours first, the ones who support each other? The ones who rise are more likely to be the ones who are the most selfish, the most ruthless. The ones who exploit those around them.'
'Exactly!' Dessous said. 'Entrepreneurs!'
'Or drug-dealers, as we call them these days.'
'That's evolution, too! The smart ones sell, the dumb ones use. It's vicious, but that's the state and its dumb laws.'
'What are we really saying here, Jeb? Societies are made up of a mix of people, obviously. There will always be people who basically accept their lot and those who'll do anything to improve it, so you've got a spectrum of behaviour, with total compliance at one end — people who just want a quiet life, who really only want to be left alone to raise their families, talk about the ball game, think about their next holiday and maybe dream about winning the lottery — and dissidence at the other. Within the dissidents, some people will still identify strongly with their friends and family, and struggle to improve the lives of all of them. Some will only be out for themselves and they'll do anything to achieve material success, including lying, stealing and killing. What I'm questioning is who amongst this lot could be termed "better" than the others.'
'Basically what you're saying is the scum rises and I'm saying the cream rises. Now, you tell me who's got the more optimistic vision here, and who's being defeatist.'
'Me, and you, Mr Dessous, in that order.'
Dessous sat back. 'You're going to have to explain that to me, Telman.'
'Well, scum and cream both rise, I guess, depending on the context. Actually I don't think either analogy is particularly helpful. The comparison you choose to make shows which way you've already decided. However, what I'm saying is more optimistic because it supposes a way forward for everybody in a society, not just its most viciously competitive percentile. You're being defeatist because you're just giving up on nine people out of ten in a poor society and saying there's no helping them, and that the only way they can help themselves is individually, by climbing out on top of those around them.'
'That's evolution, Telman. People get hurt. People strive, people succeed. Some strive and don't make it, and some succeed without striving, but they're the exceptions, and if you don't at least make the attempt then you don't deserve to succeed. You've got to have struggle. You've got to have competition. You've got to have winners and losers. You can't just even everybody out; that's what the Communists thought you could do, and look what happened to them.'
'You can have fairness.'
Dessous roared with laughter. 'Telman! I can't believe I'm having to tell you this, but life isn't fair!'
'No, the world isn't fair, the universe isn't fair. Physics, chemistry and mathematics, they aren't fair. Or unfair, for that matter. Fairness is an idea, and only conscious creatures have ideas. That's us. We have ideas about right and wrong. We invent the idea of justice so that we can judge whether something is good or bad. We develop morality. We create rules to live by and call them laws, all to make life more fair. Of course, it depends exactly who draws up the laws who those laws are most fair to, but —'
'Selfishness is what drives people on, Telman. Not fairness.'
'And you accuse me of being pessimistic, Jeb?' I said it with a smile.
'I'm being realistic.'
'I think,' I said, 'that a lot of successful people are actually less hard-hearted than they like to think. They know in their hearts that people suffer terribly in poor societies through no fault of their own. The successful people don't want to admit that to themselves, they don't want to accept that really they're just the same as those poor people and they certainly don't want to face the horror of even suspecting that if they had been born into those societies they might have been stuck there and suffered and died, young and unknown after a miserable life, any more than they want to face the alternative of knowing that they could only have got out by being more
competitively brutal than everybody else around them. So, to save their consciences, they decide that the people in the slums are there because they somehow deserve to be, and if they just tried hard enough they could get out. It's nonsense, but it makes psychological sense and it makes them feel better.'
'You accusing me of self-deception, Telman?' Dessous said, looking surprised but not angry. I hoped I was getting the correct impression here, that he was enjoying all this.
'I don't know, Jeb. I'm still not sure what you really think. Maybe you secretly agree with me but you just like an argument.'
Dessous laughed. He slapped the table and looked round the others. A few of the people nearest us had been following the argument. Down in their own relatively impoverished area, at the end of the table where the beer was, nobody was taking a blind bit of notice: too busy having a good time.
In the lounge after dinner, fuelled by fine wine and brandy, Dessous talked with some of the technicians who'd been at the other end of the table. He came back to where I was sitting with Dwight and Eastil, rubbing his hands and positively glowing.
'Mechanism's ready!' he announced. 'Screen's up. Ready for some target practice?'
'Betcha,' Eastil said, and knocked back his drink.
'I've got to see this,' Dwight agreed. 'Kate…you ought to come.'
'Ought I?'
'Yee-ha!' said Dessous, turning and marching off.
'Yee-ha?' I said to Dwight, who just shrugged.
About a dozen of us drove to the drive-in movie theatre in three sport utes. The sky was clear, and Dessous, shucking off his DJ and pulling on a quilted jacket, ordered the other two drivers to leave their lights off. He drove in front, tearing along the road to town using only the moonlight and starlight, startling jack rabbits and discussing over the radio which way the wind was blowing.
We pulled up by the dark bulk of the projection building. While Dessous was cursing everybody for forgetting to bring a flashlight I pulled one from my pocket and clicked it on.
