Iain Banks: Canal Dreams

She hung there for a moment, gazing down at the flat shadow surface of the oil-carpeted lake. She put the mask over her eyes and nose, and held it there.

Ah, what the hell, she thought, and let go.

She dropped, crouched, foetal. She heard the wind whistle, increasing. The impact slammed her, made her think she'd somehow dropped off the wrong side and hit something solid; the pontoon; a boat; rock. The mouthpiece burst from her as her breath flew out. She was suddenly nowhere, struggling and bereft and windless, flailing for the metal and the rubber, surrounded by coolness and pressure going tic tic tic.

She righted, flapped round, found the mouthpiece and rammed it in, sucked and spat, sucked again and found air; opened her eyes. The mask was still there, but the view was black.

Well, what else?

Tic tic tic. She sank, gathering herself

Light from one side, slowly spreading. She drew on the air in the mouthpiece, then realised this was not her first breath. She calmed, swallowed a little water, tasting oil but finding clean sweet air after it. She was still sinking, so swam up a little, found a level, and stroked out, wishing for flippers.

The light spread over her. She kept her level by the clicking noises in her skull, unable to see the surface apart from the dimly burning orange light above, and without a torch to inspect the depth gauge. The current of air from the cylinders on her back was strong and sure, and the water coursed past, slower than with flippers but there… and the fire above covered the surface of the lake.

She waited for whatever had been wrong with the gear when Philippe had last used it to reassert itself, to stop and choke her — ha ha; not just a faulty needle after all; take that — but it didn't happen. The fire glowed overhead and she swam beneath it. She even rolled over at one point, and saw the burning oil above, and could have laughed.

Near to the edge where the ordinary light of day filtered down like a great gauzy curved curtain sheltering some vast and unseen stage Hisako Onoda looked back, and saw the blind spot, the black hole; the eye of the storm at the heart of the universe.

The fire was complete; it had covered all there was within its scope to cover (the water pulsed around her, and she guessed a tank on Le Cercle had blown, or some of the armaments still left on the husk of the soldiers' Gemini had exploded), and when the encircling arms of the blaze had joined, and the whole brown coin of oil was alight, there was no airspace left in or near its centre to feed any fire there, and all there was was the oxygen at the limit of the slick, round the circumference… so of course only the fringes burned; only the edge of the great circle could combust into the clear, isthmian air of Panama; a kilometre-wide ring of fire, enfolding and enclosing a dark and lifeless heart.

Hisako Onoda watched for a moment, then turned away, and swam on towards the distant falls of light, beneath a burning sky.

END