Iain Banks - Walking on Glass

The door nearest Quiss clicked. He heard a tapping noise, and went forward. There was a metal-lined slit in the door which he took to be a handle. He pulled on it; the door opened slowly, smoothly, and revealed the red crow hovering in a long corridor lit by small glowing globes fixed to the wall.

"Welcome," the crow said. It turned, flew slowly down the long corridor. "Close the door; follow me," it said. Quiss did as he was told.

The bird flew, and he walked, for about ten minutes. The tunnel led down and to the left, curving gradually. It was quite warm. The red crow flew, silently, about five metres in front of him. Finally they came to another door, similar to the one through which they had entered the tunnel. The red crow stopped at it.

"Excuse me," it said, and disappeared through the door. Quiss was startled. He touched the door, to make sure it was not a projection; it was solid, warm. It clicked. The red crow reappeared over Quiss's head. "Well, open it," it said. Quiss pulled the door towards him.

He walked, with the red crow behind him and over him, into a strange place.

His head swam; he felt himself stagger momentarily. He blinked his eyes and shook his head. He felt at once that he had walked into a place, but also out into the open air.

It was as though he stood on a flat desert floor, or the dulled bed of a salt lake. But the sky was within touching distance, as if some flat layer of clouds had lowered to within a couple of metres of that salt or sandy surface.

Behind him (as he turned, dizzy, looking for a point of reference in the confusing, pillared infinity before him) was the door they had just come through. It was set in a black wall which at first sight seemed straight, but which he soon realised was curved; pan of a gigantic circle. The red crow flapped lazily just overhead, watching with amused malevolence as Quiss turned again to the space in front of them.

The floor was smooth slate, the ceiling composed of the glass and ironwork and water common to the castle's upper storeys. Slate and iron columns supported the roof, which was at the same height it had been in the room Quiss had found his way into such a long time ago, when he discovered the hole in the glass with the creature over and around it. All that was missing, in three out of the four directions, was a wall.

It was not bright, with only a few of the luminous fish waving lazily over his head and nearby, but it was light enough to see that the space he was now in seemed endless. Quiss peered into the distance, but all he could see were pillars and columns, growing smaller and smaller in the squeezed, twisted depths before him. Pillars and columns and... people. Human figures stood on small stools, or sat in high chairs, arms in iron hoops, shoulders hard up against the undersurface of the endless glass ceiling. Some of the things he had thought were pillars or columns at first, stunned sight were not; they were people with their heads stuck in the ceiling, dark shadowy forms above them in the glass, surrounding holes in the ceiling like the one he had stuck his own head into, briefly, in that small room long ago.

He shook his head again, peered again into the distance. The narrow space between floor and ceiling vanished, all around, into a thin line, hazed by distance. The line looked very slightly curved, like a horizon of empty water seen from a ship on a planetary ocean. He felt dizzy again. His eyes could not accept it; his brain took in the short space between floor and ceiling and so expected walls, expected a room-space. But if he was in a room (and if this was not some sort of projection, or even some unsubtle trick with mirrors) then its walls appeared to be somewhere over the horizon. He turned again, carefully, trying to recall his early training for the Wars, which had included balance and disorientation exercises that had left him feeling a bit like he did now, and looked again at the black wall just behind him, with the metal-strapped door in it. He looked along the very slightly curved wall, trying to estimate the diameter of the circle it implied. It must be several kilometres; sufficient to encompass the castle, mines and quarries. This wall was the castle's root, its foundation. This endless space some sort of vast basement.

"What is this place?" he said, and felt as though he was whispering; his brain expected echoes, but none came. It was like speaking in the open air. He looked round at the people stood on stools and slumped in tall chairs as the red crow said, "Let's take a walk. Follow me and I'll tell you." It flapped slowly past him, and he walked slowly after it. He passed near one of the standing figures: a man, dressed in furs similar to his own, but older-looking. The man looked skinny. A pipe led from the furs round the man's crotch to a stone jug on the floor. They passed him by. Some movement, far in the hazy distance, attracted Quiss's eyes. It looked like a small train; a narrow-gauge railway with a small locomotive on it, hauling hopper-like carriages. It was difficult to estimate the distance, but he guessed it was at least four hundred metres away, moving out from the castle, away into the thin space of standing people and supporting columns. He remembered the train he had seen, long ago, in the kitchens.

He looked round, trying to estimate the density of people in the place. There seemed to be about one person per ten metres square. Fascinated, he stared at them, seeing hundreds, thousands of them. If the density was the same throughout the space he could make out in the dim haze of distance before floor and ceiling seemed to meet, then there must be ...

"It has no name," the red crow said, flapping in front of him, facing away from him, its voice far away. Technically I believe this is part of the castle. It may even be thought of as the basement." Its voice became a chuckle for a moment. "I have no idea how large this place is. I have flown for ten thousand wingbeats in many directions and not even seen a wall. It is all very, very uniform. Apart from a greater concentration of railway lines in the floor, what you see here is what you would see anywhere, in any part of it. There must be many tens of millions of people here, with their heads stuck inside the ceiling, in these reverse goldfish-bowls."

Quiss didn't know what a goldfish-bowl was, but he thought it best to feign ignorance of what these people were doing with their heads stuck in the ceiling. He asked the crow about this.

"There is a type of animal which sits over the hollow glass semi-sphere the people have their heads inside," the red crow said. "The animal translates thoughts through time. Each of these people is inside the head of a human being from the past."

"I see," Quiss said, hoping he sounded more blase than the red crow expected. "The past, you say?" He scratched his chin. He still could not believe what his eyes told him; he was walking forward, not bumping into anything, but some part of him still expected to hit a projection screen or wall.

The red crow turned easily in the air in front of him, so that it was now flying backwards, something it appeared to do with the same facility with which it flew forwards, or smoked a cigar. "You haven't guessed, have you?" it said to him. There was a smirk in its voice, if not on its expressionless face. Iron reinforcing bands in the ceiling cast bands of shadow over the slowly flapping red wings.

"Guessed what?"

"Where this is. Where you are. The name of this place."

"Where? Tell me, then," Quiss said, and stopped walking. The small train had disappeared in the distance. He thought he could just hear it, though; rails singing. A whisper of that noise seemed to fill this place, like low voices.

"Hmm," the crow said, "well, you may not have heard of it; even at the times of the Therapeutic Wars the memory was being lost well, anyway. This is, as you might have guessed, a planet. Its name is Earth ."