Iain Banks - Against a Dark Background

Sharrow swallowed. “Onward,” she said.

Her hand hurt. She felt hungry and nauseous at the same time. She recalled Miz talking about eating fish and suddenly her mouth filled with saliva as she remembered the taste of spiced, blackened fish. That had been in Shouxame, in Tile, many years ago. She had sat at the rough wooden tables with the others, beneath the lanterns and the firecracker strings and the glow-ropes. They had eaten fish caught in the lake that afternoon and drunk a lot of wine; then she and Miz had gone to bed, and then while they were making love the firecrackers had gone off, and she was there again, in the hotel in Malishu, on the bed under the membrane roof in front of the tall mirrors, but even as she thought about that something dragged her further onwards, transported her forward and back at the same time, to that quiet hotel in the mountains, with the view over the hills and the windows opened to the cool breeze which blew the gauzy white curtains softly in and made her skin tingle and dried her sweat and gave Miz cold bumps, and her hands stroked him, fingers stroked him, smoothing the skin on his back and his flanks and shoulders and behind and chest, urging him, controlling him, moving him, and he was a beautiful grey shape above her in the first hint of dawn, and a slowly pulsing presence inside her, a soft-hard rocking nudging her closer and closer to an edge like the edge of the balcony, grey-pink stone through the haze of curtains, shoving and nuzzling and pressing her closer and closer, his breath and her breath like the noise of surf, so that she remembered building sand-castles on the shore once when she was young.

Breyguhn and she; they had each built a castle and made it as high and as strong as they could, right alongside each other; they had each put a paper flag on top of the tallest tower of their castles, and waited to see whose castle would collapse first; the two-moon tide had come in strong and fast and the waves beat at the walls they had each built, and she had seen her own castle start to crumble at the edges, but knew she had built better and had really been watching Breyguhn’s, willing the waves to hit the base of that sea-facing wall, and watched wave after wave after wave hit the sand, bringing the wall to the point of crumbling but not quite undermining it sufficiently, and slowly an incredible sensation of expectation and frustration had built up in her chest and belly, along with a fury that the sea could so nearly hand her victory but then hold back-as the power and strength of the waves seemed to ebb briefly, and no more damage was done-and started to believe that it was never going to happen, that neither castle was ever going to fall, but then seen the waves come strongly in again, breaking and surging and sucking at the castles’ walls, and then finally, finally, finally, with a sudden last pulsed rush of waves-waves that went on and on, piling into the sand when the thing was done and the contest decided-the whole wall of Breyguhn’s castle collapsed and fell, tipping out and breaking in the air and disintegrating into the waves, turning them golden brown as the surf fell tumbling over the wreckage and burst against the rough vulnerability of the sand revealed inside, and smoothed that and slipped back and surged forward again and smoothed and slipped and smoothed and slipped and smoothed, tumbling Breyguhn’s tower and flag into the water.

But then the light had flared, beautiful and terrifying, sublime and sickening, erupting over the beach and the mountains as the burst, glittering ship spun end over end towards the cold planet where she fell forever to the snow; a snow-flake amidst the fall.

There had been another night when she slept badly, trying to curl up round her injured hand, holding the thing to her like a treasure and trying to will the pain to stop and let her sleep until eventually she fell into a kind of coma from sheer exhaustion, a semi-sleep in which she dreamt of the distant sparks of the two fires on the other side of the fjord, so far in front of them now that they could only just be glimpsed with the naked eye, flickering through the trees. She had thought she’d heard Cenuij calling to them from the trees ahead, but at least he hadn’t actually appeared in her dream.

Then she was woken with the others to the freezing cold of another day when the floor of grey flat water and the ceiling of grey flat clouds were shackled together by chains of sleet, and in the clear spells between the hail and the sleet showers they could see that the mountain tops were covered in white.

She marched on, talking with the others and to herself and getting hungrier and thinking about food and wishing her hand would stop hurting, and telling the others she was fine even though she wasn’t. They took the detour the android had suggested, around the beach in front of the cliff, near the point on the other side of the fjord, then crossed the first of the two large streams the android had warned them about by going across a fallen tree. Miz cut some branches off it with a laser to make the traverse easier but still she almost fell.

The forest was a cold, dark, damp place and she hated it. She hated her hand for hurting and her belly for being empty and her head for being dizzy and sore and her anus and vagina for itching and her eyes for not focusing and her brain for not working properly.

The android carried her across the second stream, the cold water washing round its chest.

They walked on as the weather cleared a little then got even colder while dark, tall clouds built up to windward and started towards them. Sometime about then she began to forget which day this was and where exactly they were and what they were looking for and why they were looking for it.

Plodding on became everything; her being became centred on the in-out ebb and flow of breath, the thud-thudding of her feet hitting the ground one after another and the lifting, dropping, lifting, dropping motion of her legs, sending vibrations up through her that she received as though from far away and in slow motion. Even her voice sounded distant and not really hers. She listened to herself answer the things the others asked her, but she didn’t know what it was she was saying and she didn’t really care; only the onwardness of walking mattered, only that slow thud-thudding that was her feet and her heart and the wounding pulse of her poisoning pain.

She was alone. She was quite alone. She walked a frozen shore in the middle of nothing, with only the solitude to stalk her either side, and she began to wonder whether she really was a Solipsist, the traitor amongst them.

A brain in a body; a collection of cells in a collection of cells, making its way in a menagerie of other cell-collections, animal and vegetable, wandering the same rough globe with their own share of its dumb cargo of minerals and chemicals and fluids carried strapped and trapped in and by that cage of cells-temporarily-always part of it but always utterly alone.

Like Golter; like poor, poor Golter.

It had found itself alone and it had spread itself as far as it could and produced so much, but it was still next to nothing.

They had grown up-had they only known it-in one room of an empty house. When they began to understand it was a house, they had thought there must be others nearby; they had thought perhaps they were in the suburbs, or even a well-hidden part of the city, but though they had colonised those other rooms, they had looked out from their furthest windows and tallest skylights and found-to their horror, and a horror only their own increased understanding made them fully able to appreciate-that they were truly alone.

They could see the nebulae, beautiful and distant and beckon-ing, and could tell that those faraway galaxies were composed of suns, other stars like Thrial, and even guess that some of those suns too might have planets round them… but they looked in vain for stars anywhere near their own.