Iain Banks - Dead Air

She looked almost sleepy as she said, ‘You think I’m irrational, don’t you?’

‘I think you behave like the most rational person I’ve ever met, but you claim to have this completely crackpot belief in your own half life/half death and a spookily entangled twin in another universe. Maybe that is profoundly rational in some deep sense that has eluded me until now, but I don’t feel any nearer seeing it than I was when you sprang this frankly wacko ideology on me in the first place.’

She was silent for a moment. Those almond amber eyes gazed up at me, steady flames in a deep well. ‘You are a globalist, aren’t you?’

‘Hey, you were listening.’

She smoothed her fingers through my chest hair, then gently took a fist of it and let her hand hang there, caught up. ‘You make such a big thing,’ she said, ‘of developed countries, rich countries, not being allowed to impose their ways of life and their way of thinking and of doing business on smaller or poorer countries, and that extending to religions and customs and the like, and yet you want to make everybody think the same way. You’re like most people who have to… fulminate about things; you want everybody to think the same way you do.’

‘Doesn’t everybody?’

‘But it is true, isn’t it? You want the one way of thinking spread everywhere, throughout the world, replacing all the different ways of thinking that have grown up in all the different places and peoples and cultures. You are a colonialist of the mind. You believe in the justified imperialism of Western thought. Pax logica; that is what you believe in. You wish to see the flag of your rationalism planted firmly in every brain on the planet. You say you don’t care what people believe in, that you respect their right to worship as they wish, but you don’t really respect the people or their beliefs at all. You think that they are fools and what they believe in is worse than useless.’

I flopped onto my back. I let out a deep breath. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Do I want people to think the way I do? I suppose I do. But I know it’s never going to happen. Do I respect other people’s beliefs? Shit, Ceel, I don’t know. There’s this saying about how you should respect a man’s religious beliefs the same way you respect his belief that his wife is the most beautiful woman in the world. Casual – and hopefully non-malicious – sexism aside, I can see that. I do accept I could be wrong. Maybe the… the Abrahamists are right. Maybe their cruel, woman-hating, woman-fearing unholy trinity of mega-cultism is spot-on after all.

‘Maybe, even, some tiny, tiny little strand of it, like, for example, the Wee Frees, who are part of the Presbyterian movement in Scotland, which is itself part of the Protestant franchise, which is part of the Christian faith, which is part of the Abrahamic belief-set, which is one of the monotheistic religions… maybe they and only they – all few thousand of them – are absolutely bang on the money in what they believe and how they worship, and everybody else has been wrong-diddly-wrong-wrong all these centuries. Or maybe the One True Way has only ever been revealed to a one-man cult within the outer fringes of Guatemalan Highland Sufism, reformed. All I can say is, I’ve tried to prepare myself for being wrong, for waking up after I’ve died and finding that – uh-oh – my atheism was actually, like, a Really Big Mistake.’

I got up on one elbow again. ‘And do I think reason should replace irrationality? Well, yes. Yes, I do. Guilty as charged. And, bless it, society really is to blame. Society and education and enquiry and doubt and argument and disputation and progress; all the schools and libraries and universities, all the scholars and monks and alchemists and teachers and scientists. Faith is fine for poetry, for images and metaphors and art and for telling us who we are, who we’ve been. But when faith tries to describe the world, describe the universe, it just plain gets it wrong. Which wouldn’t matter if it admitted it was wrong, but it can’t, because all it’s got is its unwavering certainty in its own infallibility; the rest is smoke and mirrors, and admitting imperfection brings the whole lot tumbling down. There are no crystal spheres, and the planets are not the result of some sky god’s wet-dream. If that is supposed to be taken literally, then it’s a lie, plain and simple. If it’s a metaphor, then it has bugger all to do with the way things really work. Reason works, the scientific method works. Technology works.

‘If people want to respect their environment by believing that the fish they eat might have been an ancestor, or learn to lower toilet seats because their chi is leaking out, I’m happy to accept and even honour the results even if I think the root of their behaviour is basically barmy. I can live with that, and with them. I hope they can live with me.’

She spread her hand flat against my chest. I could feel my heart beating hard. I shouldn’t let this sort of thing get to me like this, but I had no choice. This stuff was important to me; I couldn’t help it.

‘Sometimes,’ she said quietly, looking at her own hand, or perhaps at my skin. ‘Sometimes I think we are like different coloured bishops on a chess board, you and I.’

‘Bishops? After all I’ve just said?’

She smiled, still spreading her hand on my chest, as though trying to span the distance between my nipples. ‘Better to be a queen,’ she agreed.

‘You’ll just have to take my word for it that I’d rather be a pawn than a bishop. At least they can transcend their origins.’

‘I believe you.’

‘Or a knight. I’ve always liked the fact a knight has what is basically a three-dimensional move on a two-dimensional surface. And the castle; there’s something about the bluff, blunt power of the rook that attracts me as well. And it does do a potentially three-dimensional thing, too, just once, come to think of it, castling. Bishops are more devious, somehow, sliding in between pieces like a knife through ribs. The king, of course, is simply a liability.’

‘I was thinking,’ she said, ‘of bishops on opposing sides, and of different colours as well. Just the two of them there on the chess board, with no other pieces present.’

I nodded. I saw, now, what she meant.

‘They could never connect,’ I said. ‘They could slide past each other for ever, but never affect. They appear to inhabit the same board, but really they don’t. Not at all.’

She looked up at me with heavy-lidded eyes, her head tipped fractionally to one side. ‘Don’t you think?’

‘Perhaps. And is that us?’

‘Maybe. Maybe all men and women. Maybe all people.’

‘For ever? Without exception? Without hope?’ I tried to say it lightly.

She took my cock in her hand, then brought her other hand out from underneath her head and cupped her sex. ‘We connect here…’ She smiled. (A smile, it seemed to me just then, fit to light up the universe inside the skull; a smile, indeed, to light up two. A smile to illuminate infinities.) ‘… That will have to do for now.’

‘ ‘Nikki! Oh my God! What have you done?’

‘Verhoeven? Underrated?’ I thought about this. ‘How?’

‘Hendrie. Aston Villa. Separated at birth.’

‘Wanking; why the bad press?’

‘Knock-knock.’

‘You know; all mouth and no trousers.’

‘The hell with you, grounded on Mount Arafat.’

Craig was having a Hogmanay party at his place in Highgate.

‘Ken, hi! What? Oh, I cut my hair. Like it?’

‘No! It’s-’