Iain Banks - The Crow Road

And now the field had burned. Recently, too, because there was no new growth on the brown-black earth. And yet the field was not fully dark. All the grass had been consumed save for a giant green X that lay printed, vivid and alive, on the black flag of the scorched ground. It was the two criss-crossing paths through the wedged-in scrap of field that still shone emerald in the sunlight. The flames had passed over those foot-flattened blades and consumed their healthier neighbours on either side while they themselves had were back amongst the bad stuff again; shrapnel from the coming war. Although, of course, I couldn't be sure.

Mum went past, dancing with Fergus Urvill, who was sweating. Mum looked small, next to him. Her expression was unreadable. Jlsy, I thought, and drank to Uncle Rory.

Lewis and Verity left at midnight in a taxi. None of that let's-make-a-mess-of-the-car nonsense for them. The taxi was supposedly heading for Gallanach; only mum and I knew they were actually booked into the Columba in Oban, and heading for Glasgow and the airport tomorrow.

The four-man trio played; the dancing continued. Mum left with Hamish and Tone; she was staying with them tonight. I was in charge of the house. I danced until my legs ached. I talked until my throat hurt. The band, and the bagpipe players who'd joined in with them, stopped playing at about two. Dean and I fed some home-made compilation tapes through the PA, and the dancing went on.

Later, after everybody had either left or crashed out in the house, Ash and I walked out along the shore, by the calmly lapping waters of Loch Fyne, in a clear, cool dawn.

I remember babbling, high and spacey and danced-out all at once. We sat and stared out over the satin grey stretch of water, watching low-flying seagulls flapping lazily to and fro. I treated Ash to bits of Uncle Rory's poetry; I knew some of it by heart, now.

Ash suggested heading back and to the house, and either having some coffee or getting some sleep. Her wide eyes looked tired. I agreed coffee might be an idea. The last thing I remember is insisting I had whisky in my coffee, then falling asleep in the kitchen, my head on Ash's shoulder, mumbling about how I'd loved dad, and how I'd loved Verity, too, and I'd never find another one like her, but she was a heartless bitch. No she wasn't, yes she was, no she wasn't, it was just she wasn't for me, and if I had any sense I'd go for somebody who was a kind and gentle friend and who I got on well with; like Ash. I should take up with Ash; I should fall in love with her, that's what I ought to do. Only if I did, I muttered into her shoulder, she'd be sure to fall for somebody else, or die, or get a job in New Zealand, but that's what I ought to do, if only things worked that way… Why do we always love the wrong people?

Ash, silent beneath me, above me, just patted my shoulder and laid her head on mine.

Mum woke me in the late afternoon. I moaned and she put a pint glass of water and two sachets of Resolve down on the table near my head. I tried to focus on the water. Mum sighed, tore the sachets open and tipped the powder fizzing into the glass.

I checked things out with the one eye that would open. I was in my room at Lochgair, on my bed, still mostly clothed in shirt and kilt and socks. My head felt like it had been recently used for a very long and closely contested game of basketball. Somebody had stolen my real body and replaced it with a Prentice-shaped jelly mould packed full of enhanced-capacity pain receptors firing away like they were auditioning for a Duracell commercial. Mum was pressed in faded jeans and an old holed sweater. Her hair was tied up and she wore violently yellow rubber kitchen gloves which started doing horrible things to my visual cortex. A yellow duster hung from her hip pocket. I couldn't think what else to do, so I moaned again.

Mum sat down on the bed, put a hand on my head and ran my curls through her rubber-clad fingers.

"What's that you've got in your hair?" she said.

My brain cells? I wondered. Certainly it felt like they'd been squeezed out of my ears. Damn rim-shots. Not that I could share this insight with my mother, for the simple reason that I couldn't talk.

"What is it?" mum said. "This black stuff?" She rubbed her fingers together in my hair, the rubber gloves squeaking horribly. "Oh, stop moaning, Prentice. Drink your water." She sniffed at her fingers. "Hmm," she said, rising and heading for the door. "Mascara, eh?"

I looked up, monocular, at the closing door, grimacing.

Massacre?

I sipped my Bloody Mary, looking down at huge, white, piled-up clouds so bright in the mid-day sunshine they looked yellow. The plane had just levelled out and there was a smell of food; they were serving lunch further forward in the cabin. I watched the clouds for a moment, then looked at my magazine. I was on my way to London, a couple of torn-off match-book covers m my pocket, hoping to confront Mr Rupert Paxton-Marr.

"Thanks mum… Ash?"

"Yo, Prentice. How's it hanging?"

"Oh, plum."

"Still wearing the kilt, eh? Look, I've had some word from —»

"How about you?"

"Eh?"

"How are you?"

"Oh, rude health. Verging on the obscene. Listen; my computer wizard's been in touch."

"What? About the disks?"

"Cor-rect."

"What's on them? What do they day? Is there anyth —»

"Hey… hold your horses. Had to get the stuff to him first."

"Oh. Where is he?"

"Denver."

"Denver?"

"Yup."

"Denver Colorado?"

"… Yes."

"What, in America?"

"Yeah, Northern Hemisphere, The World, The Solar System…»

"Okay, okay, so he's… hey, is this your Texan programmer? Has he moved states?"

"Systems Analyst, for the last fucking time, Prentice, and no, it isn't him; just a guy I exchange E-mail with sometimes."

"Right. And he's got the disks?"

"No, of course he hasn't got the disks."

"What? Then —»

"He has the information that was held on them. Well, on the one that held anything. Seven were blank; not even formatted."

"Ah, right. I see… so what does it say? What is on it? Was it all Rory's —»

"It's a little more complicated than that, Prentice."

"Oh."

"I've got a message on my screen here from him. Thought you might be interested in it."

"Oh; you're at work. Hey, have you seen the time? You're working late, aren't you?"

"Yes…, Prentice. Do you want to hear the message?"

"Will I understand it?"

"You'll get the gist of it."

"Okay."

"Right. I quote: 'I thought your man up there in the misty glens might like to know —»

"'Misty glens'? That's sounds a bit patronising."

"Prentice; shut up."

"Sorry."

"… might like to know what our game plan is with respect to your word-processed file(s). As we don't yet know what geek program this mutant No-namo-brand clone was running, we have had to resort to extreme measures to access the data. Dr Claire Simmons of London University, who picked up the disks, will use a vintage Hewlett Packard TouchScreen (which has compatible eight-inch drives) in the establishment's Museum of Computing to extract the raw binaries, sector by sector, praying all the while that somebody has posted an ediger to Usenet that she can use to strip off the physical addressing; she will then attack the content one word at a time, swapping bytes as needed and inverting bits if none of it looks like ASCII, stripping the eighth bits if they're in the way or un-encoding the lot if we can't do without them, and unload the result to a Prime mini-computer (another indestructible antique) somewhere on the campus network. She moves all this to her Iris, double-encrypts it and E-mails it via Internet (off JANUS or BITNET to nsfnet-relay.ac.uk, probably) via Cornell to an account I'm not supposed to have on the Minnesota Supercomputer Center's Cray-2 (currently the biggest and quickest compute-server short of a Connection Machine at the high end, so I might as well use it to do the decryptions and perhaps take my own first whack at demangling before moving the data along). From there I download via a dedicated T3 line to an SGI 380SX–VGX at one of AT&T's Bell Labs (the one in Boulder, I think — another unofficial account) from where I can further download — and filter out certain offending control characters — to a Mac II at my office. Then I dump the results onto a floppy and bike them home to tinker with in my basement, which is where the hard work starts… Get all that, Prentice?"