Iain Banks - Whit

I went back over to the mansion house. I told Sister Erin I would be in the library, and sat in there trying to read passages from the previous edition of the Orthography in a restless, unsettled manner until I gave up and just sat, looking round those thousands of books and wondering how many I had read and how many more I still had to read.

I picked up The Prince and read a few of my favourite passages, then I returned to Erin and said I'd be in the meeting room - the mansion house's old ballroom, where the organ was.

I sat there at the old organ, playing it silently save for the click and clack of my fingers on the keys and my feet on the pedals, pulling out stops and sweeping my hands over the keyboard, caressing it and pummelling it, humming and hissing to myself on occasion, but mostly just hearing the music in my head, its flowing, pulsing power and body-shaking reverberations existing only between my ears. I played until my fingers hurt, and then Sister Jess came to fetch me.

Jess left me in the sitting room of Grandfather's quarters while she checked he was quite ready to see me. She reappeared from the bedroom, closing the door on the dark space behind. 'He's having another bath,' she said, sounding exasperated. 'He's in a funny mood today. Do you mind waiting?'

'No,' I said.

Jess smiled. 'He said to break out the drinks; shall we?'

'Why not?' I said, smiling.

Sister Jess opened the drinks cabinet; I declined a whisky, having not long since got rid of my hang-over from the previous night, and settled for a glass of wine. Sister Jess chose the whisky, well watered.

We settled down on a couple of seat-boarded but otherwise quite plumply luxurious couches and talked for a while. Sister Jess is a doctor; she is slim and has long black hair she wears in a single long plait. She is about forty and has been with us for nearly fourteen years. Her daughter Helen is thirteen and Salvador may or may not be the child's father.

I have always got on fairly well with Jess, though I sometimes wonder to what extent she feels that I usurp some of her powers with my ability to Heal.

I told her of my trip down south; she said that at the time she'd thought I was mad to travel to Edinburgh by inner-tube, but congratulated me on getting there. She took a dimmer view of interfering with train signalling systems, but let it pass. There was no embargo I had been told of regarding the things I had found out in England, so, while I did swear her to secrecy until we both knew how widely Salvador wanted such facts to be disseminated, I felt free to tell her about Morag's alter ego, Fusillada. She blinked rapidly at that point, and almost choked on her whisky.

'You saw one of these videos?' she asked.

'By sheer luck, yes.'

She glanced at the closed door to Salvador's bedroom. 'Hmm; I wonder what he feels about that ?'

'I take it Allan's told him all this?'

She leaned over towards me, with another glance at the door. 'I think he overheard quite a bit from outside the office door,' she said quietly.

'Oh,' I said.

'Let's have another drink,' she said. 'About time the lamps were lit, too.'

We lit the lamps and recharged our glasses.

'How is Salvador?' I asked her. 'Has he been keeping all right?'

She laughed quietly. 'Strong as an ox,' she said. 'He's fine. Been tiring himself out a bit recently and drinking too much whisky, but I think that's just all this revising he's doing.'

'Oh,' I said. 'He's managing all right with that himself?'

'Allan's been helping him; him and Erin, sometimes.'

'Oh. Well, that's good.'

'It's keeping him busy,' she said, glancing at the door again. 'I think he's getting impatient for the Festival.'

'I suppose everybody is, a bit.'

'Some with better reason than him,' she said quietly, leaning forward and with a conspiratorial grin. I did my best to reciprocate the expression. 'But, anyway,' she said, sitting back, 'what happened after you were arrested?' She held her hand up over her mouth, giggling.

I regaled her with the rest of my story, settling into the swing of its telling with, by now, practised ease. Grandma Yolanda was about to make her appearance - and Jess was still laughing at the thought of me being arrested and being televised in the process - when we realised our glasses were empty again. Jess listened quietly at the bedroom door, then tiptoed away with her finger to her lips and whispered, 'Singing. Still in the bath,' as she made her way to the drinks cabinet.

'Thanks,' I said, accepting my refilled glass.

'Cheers.'

'Mud in your eye.'

'You have been with Yolanda, haven't you?'

'She does rather rub off on you,' I admitted as we resumed our seats. I took up the threads of my story. I had almost finished when there was a ringing sound; the spring-hung bell up in one corniced corner of the room went on jangling as Jess straightened her plain grey shift and went to the bedroom door. I undid the laces on my boots.

She stuck her head round, I heard Grandfather's voice, then Jess turned and nodded to me. I drained my glass and ascended into the bedroom.

The door closed behind me.

Grandfather sat at one end of the room, against a huge pile of cushions. Candles burned on the shelf that ran all around the dark space, filling it with their soft yellow light and the heady fumes of their scent. Joss-sticks were fanned out in a small brass holder on the shelf near Salvador. My Grandfather was plump, pale, voluminously robed and his face was surrounded with fluffily dry white curly hair. He looked like a cross between Buddha and Santa Claus. He sat looking at me.

I made the Sign and bowed slowly to him; the bed moved gently underneath my sock-clad feet, like a gentle oceanic swell. Salvador nodded briefly when I straightened. He pointed to a place close in front of him to his left.

By his right hand would have been better, but probably too much to hope for. I sat where he had indicated, cross-legged. Grandfather's room-size bed was the one place one was allowed to sit without a Sitting Board; the softness was oddly unsettling when one's buttocks were habituated to the hardness of wood.

He reached under one of the giant cushions at his back and produced a bottle and two chunky cut glasses. He handed one glass to me, set the other on the shelf near him and poured us both some whisky. More drink, I thought. Ah well.

He raised his glass to me, though his expression remained serious. We drank. The whisky was smooth and I didn't cough.

He gave a great long sigh and sat back amongst the pillows. He looked at his glass and then, slowly, to me.

'So, Isis: do you want to tell me why?' he asked; his deep, luxuriant voice sounded thick, half choked.

'Grandfather,' I said, 'I did not take the vial. It was in my kit-bag. I didn't know it was there until I found it when I was at Gertie Fossil's.'

He looked into my eyes for a long time. I returned his gaze. He shook his head and looked across the room.

'So you had no hand in this at all; no idea it had been put there?'

'None.'

'Well then, who do you want to accuse, Isis?

'I don't want to accuse anybody. I've thought about who could have done this, and it could have been anybody. I have no idea who.'

'I've been told that you claim there was a… note,' he said, pronouncing the last word with the effect of somebody picking something distasteful up by the corner between thumb and forefinger.

'It said, "In case you need it", or something similar; I can't remember the exact words. It was signed with an "S".'

'But this has disappeared, of course.'

'Yes.'

'Weren't you even slightly suspicious?' he asked, a sour look on his face. 'Didn't it seem odd to you that I might have given you our most precious substance, our last link with Luskentyre, to take into the midst of the Unsaved?'