Iain Banks - Against a Dark Background

Finally the military traffic became too thick, and they left the metalled ways altogether. They took to tracks and forest fire-breaks, old drove-ways and canal tow-paths. They passed hill villages and dark-looking towns, old orchards and walled compounds; the monowheel rose and fell and banked and paced through the gloaming.

She thought she smelled something in the air as they rolled down the bed of a half-dried river, over water-meadows and sand banks and through clear shallows between hills bright and clear in the winter dusk. The river splayed out, deepening to become a tree-studded estuary; they took to the bank, then summited a sand dune.

They were facing the sea.

Feril drove through the depths of the night, once she had gone to sleep. They had made good time along the cold beaches of the coast and watched the skies to the south and east flicker and pulse with different-coloured lights. Feril picked up officially sanctioned broadcast reports of limited engagements taking place between Security Franchise units-backed by World Court licensed forces-and the armed services of Lantskaar, following acts of aggression and an invasion by the latter; the situation was being contained and there was no need to worry. The broadcast ended abruptly in another, strong, electromagnetic pulse.

Stretched forward over the cockpit, Feril only glanced at the monowheel’s nightsight display now and again to check on its sensitivity. Sea, surf, beach and dunes were bright in the moonlight. The strand was flat and smooth in places, strewn with braided streams and shallow pools in others; the monowheel thrummed across it all as though over glass.

She was on a station platform, in the middle of a snowy plain. An old steam train huffed behind the crowd of people. The Gun was there again, but it wasn’t saying anything this time; it stayed in the background while she said good-bye to Miz and Dloan and Zefla and Cenuij. They were whole and fit and well, as she’d have liked to remember them. She tried not to cry as she hugged them and said good-bye. She kept thinking there was somebody else there, too; somebody she could only see from the corner of her eye, a faceless figure in a wheelchair, but whenever she turned to look at the figure, she disappeared.

Then she saw Froterin and Cara and Vleit standing behind the others, and they looked great and hadn’t aged at all, and she laughed and cried and hugged them too, and they were all talking at once and everybody was hugging everybody else, all so glad to see one another after all this time, but soon it was time for them all to go, and her eyes filled with so many tears she couldn’t see properly as they all boarded the train, waving and smiling sadly as the old engine went huff, huff, and gradually pulled the dark carriages away from the little station in the snow.

She and the Gun watched the train disappear into the white distance. Then she looked at the Gun and It smiled.

The sleeping woman stirred beneath the android, sighing and turning over in her sleep. Feril pushed the speed up as they flashed past a town, burning in the darkness. More lights flared in the sky to the south, and the broad band of junklight sparkled intermittently.

The monowheel forded two rivers and swam three.

Lady Sharrow woke with the dawn.

The sky was a shroud of low cloud; light drizzle fell. They zipped along the tide-wet shore, leaving their single cryptic track behind on the winter beach. The sky ahead looked dark, solid and certain after the hollow blueness and the overcast’s grey indeterminacy.

The beach went on into the distance, and she let the speed climb until the monowheel would go no faster. The cockpit closed right over and the noise was still colossal. The streaked sand and water flashed at them and beneath them to be pressed and flung, arcing and falling into the whirling vortex the vehicle left behind as it screamed along the shore, its whole body humming, vibrating like a tensed, quivering animal, their speed so great that its suspension was finally registering bumps and small shocks. She smiled. The dunes to her right were a blur. The velocity read-out indicated that they were travelling at about seventy per cent of the speed of sound.

Feril was hunched over the rear of the liquid glass. She risked a glance. The android’s expressionless face gave no hint of its emotions.

The beach became uncomfortably bumpy and changed to a mixture of sand and gravel; drizzle sounded on the screen like blasted shot. She relaxed and slowed the car until the cockpit glass opened a hole above her head. The roaring noise was still terrific.

“You okay?” she shouted.

“Extremely!” Feril said loudly, and sounded as though it meant it. “What an exhilarating experience!”

She drove on; three hundred kilometres an hour suddenly seemed terribly slow. Surf boomed to their left as the drizzle became rain and the cloud overhead thickened. She took the monowheel into the dunes in the cloud-dark noon.

On the far side of a stinking marsh guarded by ancient, crumbling concrete monoliths and a series of weed-scummed lagoons, they came to the fence. It looked dilapidated but still strong. There was a guard tower nearby but it was unoccupied and strung with blow-weed.

The cold wind moaned through the hexagons in the fence and the metal support legs of the tower.

They got out of the vehicle. Feril could detect no surveillance devices. She considered using the cannon just for speed, but it would be noisy; she cut the fence’s steel mesh strand by strand with the laser instead. The monowheel curtsied through the hole and they rolled on through the chill levels of marshland beyond.

She brought the vehicle splashing out of a greasy, polluted stream and charged it up the wet-dark sand to the bottom of a dip between two tall dunes.

The Sea House lay in the rain-dulled distance, its dark bulk shrouded in squalls and cloud. Its top hundred metres were hidden, the spires and towers vanishing into the murk like the giant trunks of a petrified forest.

The cold wind gusted; a stench of rotting seaweed flowed around the stationary vehicle like a slimy, stroking hand.

“Ah-ha,” said Feril.

“Yes,” she said, tilting the wheel towards the slope of gravel beach beneath and squeezing the throttle. “Ah-fucking-ha.”

The monowheel skimmed easily across the weed and pools in the bay, climbed the greasy stones of the causeway’s steep sides without a pause and came to rest near the middle of the isthmus, facing the Sea House and standing absurdly on its single disc like a resting bird. She climbed out; Feril remained in the vehicle.

She walked, limping, to the great iron door overhanging the incline at the end of the causeway. Her hands were empty; they shook. Her belly grumbled and she felt faint. The blood pumped and coursed within her, and with each beat of her heart the whole vast edifice seemed to quake and pulse and shiver, as though for all its mountainous solidity the Sea House was merely a projection, something held in the power of her blood-quickened eyes.

There was no sign that anybody had noticed her approach. Clouds bundled round the House’s crenellated slopes, snagged there and were dragged away again. The rain was cold on her face. She reached the tilted gatehouse and found a heavy stone. She slammed the rock against the great iron door repeatedly. Chips of stone and rust fell together to the damp cobbles. Her muscles ached; the bones in her arms seemed to resonate with each quivering concussion.

“All right! All right!” a voice said. She dropped the rock and stooped to the opened grille.

“What do you want?” the voice said from the darkness.

“In,” she said.

“What?”

“Let me in,” she said.

“Who are you? What’s your name? Have you made an appointment?”