Canal Dreams

by Iain Banks

  'So it's today, Bleveans said, tapping the carpet with one finger. 'The plane's meant to fly over today. He looked at Philippe and Endo. 'What d'you think, guys; SAMs?

  'Pardon?

  'Wakarimasen.

  Hisako translated Surface to Air Missiles for Endo; Bleveans used the words rather than their acronym for Philippe. Both nodded and looked worried.

  'I no see any… samus, Endo told Bleveans.

  'No, Philippe agreed. 'Their weapons I see are… guns; grenades.

  'Same here, Bleveans said. He glanced at Hisako. 'Just a thought. But if that is what they're up to I guess they would keep the heavy weaponry away, out of our sight.

  'On the Nakodo? Hisako ventured.

  'Mm-hmm, Bleveans yawned, nodding. 'Yeah, the Nakodo rather than the Le Cercle. Safer loosing off rockets from that than a tanker full of fuel.

  'You think they shoot plane? Endo said quietly.

  'Maybe, Bleveans said.

  'Is very dangerous, I think, Philippe said, frowning.

  'Might just start World War Three, Mr Ligny, Bleveans said, nodding in agreement. 'Yeah, I'd call that dangerous. If that's what they intend doing. He rubbed his eyes, sniffed. 'Anybody thought of any escape plans yet?

  'No, Philippe said.

  'Hmm. I guess they got this bit thought out fairly well. He stretched again, looking back for a moment. 'Leaving us free is a kindness; gives us something to lose. Keeping those stools in front of the bar is gonna make rushing the guy next to impossible… unless we want to take serious casualties. We could try a diversion, but… I have a feeling that's always looked a lot more easy in the movies than it really is.

  'Doesn't everything? Hisako blurted, then put her hand to her mouth.

  'I guess so, ma'am. He started to get up. 'They letting us use the heads?

  'Yes, Hisako said, when the two men looked blank. Philippe understood. He shook his head. 'I check in there Captain; I do not think is way out there.

  Bleveans smiled as he got to his feet. 'I guessed that much, Philippe; I just want to take a leak before I crash, you know? Excuse me. He nodded to them and walked off, swinging his arms slowly, holding each shoulder alternately. He gave a sort of half-salute to the vencerista behind the bar, who waved the Coke bottle in return.

  Todai is not to be taken lightly; it is The Place, the Harvard, the Ox bridge of Japan; virtual guarantor of a job in the diplomatic service, the government or the fast track of a zaibatsu. In a country more obsessed with education than any other in history, Tokyo University is the very summit. Still, she sailed through it. She had grown; shot up in height at the last moment, becoming briefly gangly, her aboriginal, Ainu heritage catching up with her again. Still smaller than most gaijin, she became used to looking down on the average Japanese man. She swam, she hiked, she went gliding a few times and sailing occasionally. She kept up her Japanese sports too; the way of gentleness; the open hand; archery; kendo. These activities were financed with the money she got from the string quartet she helped form; they were popular, always raising their fees to keep demand down. She knew she didn't practise enough, and she scraped through numerous exams, because no matter how smart and how energetic you were there was still only so much time in each day. She still thought of it as sailing through, then and afterwards, and never lost a night's or even an hour's sleep over an exam, while her friends and the other people around her got far better grades and worried themselves sick.

  She knew she didn't have to worry; she would float through everything, she'd be found regardless, and at her finale mountains would tremble. So she thought of it sometimes, in her wildest moments, when she'd had too much beer with her friends. She would survive; she would always survive. She was smart and strong after all, and with gaijin words or a gaijin music box, she'd get by.

  For a while she had just three problems. Two were solved in one night. After a great deal of thought, having decided she didn't need love the way everybody else said they did, or thought they did, at least not the sort that you couldn't get from a mother or a few close friends, or feel towards a piece of music, or your homeland, she decided to be seduced, and to let a gaijin do the seducing.

  He was called Bertil and he was from Malmo in Sweden; two years older than her, spending a year at a language college in Tokyo. He was blond which she loved and oddly funny, once you got past a layer of half-hearted Scandinavian gloom. She was still plucking her eyebrows and shaving her legs and arms, thinking them hairy and horrible, but when they got to the Love Hotel in Senzoku, and he undressed her — she'd told him she was a virgin, she hoped he wouldn't be put off by the way she trembled — he stroked her pubic hair (so that suddenly she thought, Oh no! The one place I didn't shave! — and it's a forest down there!) and said… well, she was too flustered to remember the exact words, but they were delighted, admiring words… and the one word she didn't forget, the one that a quarter of a century later she still could not hear without shivering; the word which had become almost synonymous with that feeling of a soft, sensual stroking, was the English word — how pleased he had sounded to think of it — luxuriant…

  Bertil had to go back to Sweden a week later; the parting was excitingly bitter-sweet. She threw her razor away.

  Which left just one problem; she hated the idea of flying. She traipsed out to Narita sometimes, to watch the jets take off and land. She enjoyed that, it was no ordeal. But the idea of actually getting on to a plane filled her with horror.

  She auditioned for the NHK, the same orchestra she'd heard in Sapporo when she'd been a little girl and decided she wanted a cello. That she was nervous about.

  But her fate was unstoppable now. She scraped through her last exams at Todai just as she'd scraped through the rest, but it was still a pass, and she'd hardly finished celebrating when the letter came from the NHK.

  The day before her mother was due to arrive from Sapporo, she went back to the bald summit of the hill north of the Fuji Five Lakes, and sat there cross-legged in her kagool, listening to the rain drip off the trees and spatter on her hood, and watched the clouds trail like skirts round the base of Fuji. She took the letter out a couple of times and reread it. It still said yes; she had the place; it was hers. She kept thinking something was going to go wrong, and prayed her mother didn't change her mind at the last moment and in a fit of extravagance fly down to Tokyo.

  'In the Caribbean, Mr Mandamus said in the midst of the storm, pronouncing the name of the sea in the British manner, with the emphasis on the third syllable, 'if you are on a low-lying island or part of the coast, you must beware of the slow-timed waves. The normal timing of waves hitting a shore is seven or eight per minute, but if the frequency becomes four or five beats a minute, you must flee, or be prepared to meet your maker. First of all, the sky will be cloudless and brassy, and the wind dies, leaving a leaden heat. The sea goes strangely greasy-looking, becoming uniform and undisturbed except for the long, ponderous waves; all lesser movements are smothered. The breakers hit the beach with a slow monotony, regular and machine-like and mindless.

  'Then, in the sky; streamers of high cloud like ragged rays of dark sunlight, seeming to imanate from one place over the horizon. They spread over the head, while in the distance, beneath them, clouds form, and the sun looks milky, and a halo the colour of ashes surrounds it, so that it begins to look like an eye.

  'In time, the sun is put out by the clouds, and it begins to go gloomy; quick dark clouds fill the middle air while on the horizon a wall of cloud starts to engulf the sky. It is the colour of copper at first. As it comes closer and grows higher, it darkens, through brown to black, and half the sky is covered by it. It is like an impossibly tall wave of darkness, tall like the night; the winds around you are still slight and uncertain, but the surf is hammering the beach like thunder, slow and heavy, like the beat of a cruel god's mighty heart.

  'The dark wave falls, the winds land like hammer blows; rain like an ocean falling from the sky; waves like walls.

  'When
you think — if you are still alive to think — it can grow no worse, the sea retreats, sucked back into the darkness, leaving the coast far below the lowest low tidemark draining away into a violent night. Then the ocean returns, in a wave that dwarfs all previous waves; a cliff; a black mountain spilling over the land like the end of the world.

  'Perhaps you have seen satellite photographs of a hurricane; from space, the eye looks tiny and black in the centre of the white featheriness of the storm. It looks too small and too perfectly round and black to be natural; you think it is something lying on the film. The hurricanes look very like galaxies, which I hear also have black holes in their centres. The eye is maybe thirty kilometres across. The air pressure can be so low sailors have said blood comes to the mouth and the eardrums ache. The water at the bottom of the eye is sucked up three metres above the rest of the ocean. Seen from a ship which has survived the winds, it is like being in a cauldron; the walls of blackness swirl round about, but in the eye the air is calm, humid, and appallingly hot. The circling storm moans from all around. The waves on the water froth and jostle and leap up, coming crashing in from every direction, colliding and bursting their spray into the boiling calm air. More often than not, raggedy, exhausted birds fly aimlessly inside the eye, those not killed by it; confused and beaten, they fill up the moaning air with their cries. A circle of clear sky overhead looks like Earth seen from space; blue and far away and unreal; sun and stars shine as though through gauze, removed and unreal. Then the screaming winds and the blackness and the drowning rain starts again.

  'You ever been in a hurricane, Mandamus? Broekman asked.

  'Merciful heavens, no, Mandamus shook his big head heavily. 'But I have read about it.

  Hisako listened to the sound of the aguacero howling outside, and thought Mr Mandamus was very likely the sort of person who talked about air crashes during a bumpy flight, attempting to reassure nervous passengers with the thought that they wouldn't feel a thing, possibly. She decided not to correct him on 'imanate'.

  The storm passed quickly, as aguaceros always did. Behind the drawn curtains of the stuffy lounge, it looked like a pleasant day.

  Gordon Janney had slept badly, and his speech was slurred. Mrs Bleveans was changing the dressing on his head. Her husband was still sound asleep on the floor. There were two and sometimes three venceristas behind the bar at any particular moment. One was reading a Spanish-language Superman comic.

  Then the venceristas took one of the cooks away; some time later he returned with a trolley of burgers, potatoes and salad. The gunmen watched them eat and passed out bottles of water and Coke.

  Mrs Bleveans persuaded Sucre she should be allowed to collect some toothpaste, a few toothbrushes and a bottle of antiseptic. Before she went she checked with Marie and Hisako, to find out if either of them needed any sanitary protection; neither did.

  'Christ, I suppose that could be it, Broekman said, rubbing his lips with one hand. Philippe, Endo and Hisako had told him of the theory that the venceristas had come to shoot down the plane. The noise of Mr Mandamus snoring as he slept off his meal covered any sounds short of a shout they were likely to make.

  'Is just a thought, Philippe said.

  'Flight today, Endo confirmed.

  'Crazy bastards; what're they trying to do?

  'Maybe we're being paranoid, Hisako said. 'We'll know soon anyway.

  'If the flight is today, Broekman said. 'On the news yesterday there was talk of some last-minute hitch; might be a delay.

  'There was? Hisako looked at Philippe and Endo. Nobody else had heard this.

  'On the World Service, just before our friends arrived.

  Philippe looked worried. 'Captain Bleveans; he said the venceristas became… upset? Upset, when they hear something on the radio. Last evening.

  'Shit, Broekman said. 'Sounds uncomfortably neat, doesn't it? He rubbed one bristly cheek. 'I didn't think the venceristas were that crazy.

  'I think we must get to the radio, Philippe said.

  'How do we do that? Broekman said, patting his overalls pockets for cigars that weren't there. 'Rushing the guy at the bar would be suicide, and all we get's a gun or two and a couple of grenades, plus we alert the others. If we had the time and a screwdriver maybe we could unscrew the windows, he nodded slightly towards the curtains, 'if they aren't rusted up. But we'd have to distract them for ten minutes or more. There's no outside access from the toilets; no access anywhere. The alternative is, one of us can try to get out on some sort of excuse and aim to overpower whoever they send with us. That's probably our best bet. And they probably know that.

  Philippe shrugged. 'What excuse, you think?

  'Try pretending we have to do something to one of the ships; tell them we have to turn on the bilge pumps or we'll sink, or transfer fuel to the generator or we'll lose power; something like that.

  'You think they believe us?

  'No. Broekman shook his head.

  'So is not much hope?

  Broekman shook his head. 'Doesn't mean it isn't worth a try. Perhaps we'll be lucky. They've been very casual so far; maybe they're not as confident and professional as they look; maybe they're just sloppy. Broekman ran one hand through his hair, looked round at where the Nadia's captain lay, one arm raised over his head to keep the light out of his eyes. 'We'd better get Bleveans in on this; it's his ship we might break if it goes wrong. Do we wake him now or leave him to get up in his own time?

  Hisako confirmed Endo had understood. 'Leave him, Endo said.

  Philippe pursed his lips. 'I don't know… if this plane-

  The lounge door opened. Sucre stood there, pointing the gun at Hisako with one hand. Señora Onoda, he called. Bleveans stirred a little at the noise. Mandamus snored loudly and muttered something under his breath in Arabic. Hisako stood up into a layer of smoke, smelling Gitanes.

  'Yes? She was aware that everybody was looking at her.

  Sucre waved the gun. 'You come with me. He stood away from the door. There was another armed man in the corridor behind him.

  Philippe started to get up too; she put a hand on his shoulder. 'Philippe-chan; it's all right.

  He squeezed her hand. 'Hisako, don't- he began, but she was moving quickly away.

  'Is just a phone call, Señora Onoda, Sucre told her on the way up to the radio room. He was about the same height as she, though much more muscled. His skin was coppery-olive and his face held no trace of the blacking; it looked freshly shaved. He smelled of cologne. She suspected his black curly hair was trimmed and perhaps even curled to make him look Guevara-ish.

  'Mr Moriya?

  'Sounds like, Sucre agreed, shepherding her up a companionway.

  She wondered if she could escape; perhaps kick down, disabling Sucre, taking his gun. But it was better to wait until she was in the radio room. Her mouth was dry again, but at the same time it was as though there was some strange electric charge running through her teeth and gums, leaving a sharp, metallic taste. Her legs wobbled a little as they walked along the central corridor that led to the ship's bridge, senior officers' quarters, and radio room. A vencerista rested against the wall outside, between her and the bridge. She smelled more tobacco smoke; cigars or cigarillos.

  Sucre took her elbow and stopped her, swung her round so that she bumped into the metal corridor wall. He pressed against her, the automatic pistol he'd pointed at her the evening before in his hand again. He put the gun up under her chin. She tipped her head back, looked into his dark eyes.

  'Señora — he began.

  'Señorita, she told him, then wished she hadn't.

  'Hey, you're cool, Sucre grinned. He moved his thumb. There was a click which she both heard and felt through her neck and jaw. 'Hear that, Señorita?

  She nodded slowly.

  'Now no safety catch. Safety catch off. You say anything on the radio, I blow your brains out. Then I give the other two women to my men; we been in the jungles long time, yeah? And then after that I take the cojones off you
r francés-man. He put his free hand between her legs, patting her through the light material of the yukata. He smiled broadly. Her heart thudded. She felt as if she might lose control of her bowels. The gun was hard under her chin, half-choking her, making her want to gag. 'Understand? Sucre said.

  'Yes.

  'Yes; good. And you make it short.

  'He will want to speak Japanese, she told him. Moriya would have used English to ask for her, but of course would expect to talk to her in Japanese.

  Sucre looked surprised, then briefly angry. Finally he grinned. 'Tell him your francés-man want to listen too.

  She nodded carefully. 'All right.

  He took his hand away, backed off, waved her to the radio room.

  The Nadia's radio operator let her into the seat. Sucre sat to her right, facing her, the automatic against her right ear. 'OK, he said quietly, not taking his eyes off her.

  She picked up the handset, put it to her left ear. It was the wrong side; it felt strange. 'Hello, she said, swallowing.

  'Hisako, what takes these people so long? And where did you get to anyway? Never mind. Look, it's getting ridiculous —

  'Mr Moriya; Mr Moriya…

  'Yes?

  'Talk in English, please. I have a friend here who does not understand Japanese.

  'What…? Moriya said in Japanese, then switched to English. 'Oh… Hisako… have I to?

  'Please. For me.

  'Very well. Very well. Let me see… Perhaps we have cancellings altogether. They still… they still… ah, want you appear some time, but — oh, I am sorry. I am impolite. How are you?

  'Fine. You?

  'Oh dear; you are being short with me. Always I know I say wrong thing when you are short with me. I am sorry.

  'I'm all right, Moriya-san, she told him. 'I am well. How are you?

  'Are you well really? You sound different.

  Sucre rammed the gun into her ear, forcing her head over to the left. She closed her eyes. 'Mr Moriya, she said, trying to sound calm. 'Please believe me; I'm all right. What did you call for? Please; I have to get back… Hot tears came to her eyes.