Iain Banks - Whit

'Old bastard,' Morag said. Ricky looked up again.

'Please, Morag,' I said. 'He is still the Founder, still my Grandfather. It's just the man… and the drink, maybe, got the better of the prophet in him.'

'That's crap, cuz,' Morag said.

'He gave us everything, Morag,' I told her. 'Our whole way of life. I'll not deny the treasure he found just because the hand that opened the chest was human and soiled.'

'Very poetic,' Morag told me, 'but you're too bleedin' generous, that's your problem.' It was probably the least perspicacious statement she had made that afternoon.

'Well,' I said, 'I don't intend to be very generous with Allan, once I have my case ready to present before the Order.'

'Good,' she said, with relish.

'Will you help me?' I asked her.

'How?' She looked neutral, Ricky looked suspicious.

'Come to the Community? Back up my story? I mean; simply tell the truth about these letters and Allan's phone calls and what he's told you; how he's lied. Will you?'

'Think they'll listen to me?' She sounded doubtful.

'I think so. We mustn't let Allan suspect anything or he'll attempt to discredit you with everybody else beforehand, as he has me, but if we say nothing about us having met, we should be able to surprise him. If we had it all out in front of a meeting everyone attends, a full Service, there should be no opportunity for him to poison people's minds with rumours and lies. We ought to be able to denounce him without retort.'

'But what about the porn?' Morag asked warily.

'Well, it is hardly the most blessed of professions, certainly, but it was your apparent apostasy that alarmed us most, and I think there would be more rejoicing over your return to the fold than resentment due to the fact that your fame derives from an artistic area other than music, were you to return,' I said, with only a little more conviction than I felt. 'Salvador is upset apparently - at the deception more than the true nature of your… career, I suspect - but I think he'll come round.' I smiled. 'You'll charm him.'

'I can try,' Morag said, with a smile that would have charmed blood from a stone.

'It might be best,' I said, thinking it through as I sat there, 'if you and I didn't turn up together. At around the same time, certainly, but not obviously together. Well, maybe.'

'All right. Whatever. It's a deal. But when?' she asked.

I nodded, still thinking. The next big Service would be on Sunday evening, for the Full Moon. That was only two days away and so probably too soon, but you never knew. 'Let's keep in touch, but it might be as early as… day after tomorrow?'

Morag sat back, looking thoughtful. 'We're here tonight,' she said, glancing at Ricky, who had finished his cheeseburger and was now picking little bits of melted cheese and blobs of pickle off the surface of the tray. He looked up guiltily. 'Leven and Dundee tomorrow,' Morag continued. 'We were going to go to Aberdeen next, but we could make it Perth instead, and do Stirling as well, now. I'll give you the hotel numbers where we'll be staying. How'd that be?'

I thought. 'Fine. It might take a few more days, though.'

'Whatever,' Morag said, nodding and looking determined. 'What have you got to do next?'

It crossed my mind to lie, shame upon me, but it also occurred to me that there comes a point in such a campaign when you just have to trust, and let it be known that you trust. 'I'm going to visit Great-aunt Zhobelia,' I said.

Morag's eyes widened. 'You are? I thought she'd disappeared.'

'Me too. Uncle Mo held the key.'

'Did he now? And how's he?'

I looked at the wall clock. 'Hung-over, probably.'

If you travel the same route as everybody else, all you will see is what they have already seen. This has expressed our Faith's attitude to travel and Interstitiality for many years, and so it was with some regret that I reviewed the course of my recent journeys as I sat on the train from Edinburgh to Glasgow the evening after I had met Morag and Ricky.

It had long seemed to me that the best way one of our Faith might travel from Edinburgh to Glasgow, or vice versa, would be to walk the route of the old Forth and Clyde canal, and I had travelled that route a few times in my mind and on maps while I sat in the Community library. Yet here I was, taking a train from east to west, just like any normal Bland. My only -and rather pitiable - concession to the Principle of Indirectness had been to take the slow rather than the express line from one city to another; the fast route takes a trajectory via Falkirk, the stopping service bellies south through Shotts. I would change at Bellshill for the Hamilton loop, so in a way this route was frustratingly more, not less, direct. However, it was slower than heading straight for Glasgow and changing there, which alleviated the mundanity somewhat.

Morag and Ricky had invited me to stay for dinner with them; they would be eating at an Indian restaurant that evening. I'd been sorely tempted, but I'd thought it best to head straight for Mauchtie in the hope of obtaining an audience with Great-aunt Zhobelia that evening. Morag and I had parted with a hug at Waverley station; Ricky had shaken my hand grudgingly but gently. Morag had asked me if I needed any money; I'd thought about it.

I had determined early on - in the Community office, that Monday almost a fortnight ago, in fact - that twenty-nine pounds was a blessed and significant amount to carry, but that had been before I'd realised I was up against a brother prepared to use something as underhand and outrageous to our principles as a portable telephone in the heart of the Community, and I had certainly never been under any illusions about the importance of adequate finance in this cruelly acquisitive society. I said I'd be grateful for a loan of twenty-nine pounds. Morag laughed, but coughed up.

The train ride through the sun-rubbed landscape of assorted fields, small towns, industrial ruins, faraway woods and still more distant hills was the first chance I'd had to concentrate on all that had happened over the last couple of days. Before, I had still felt shocked, or I had been with people, or - on the train journey back from Newcastle - I had been rehearsing what I would say to Morag, trying to plan out the conversation we might have, especially if she had returned to her former scepticism and distrust. I still had a similar interview with my great-aunt ahead, but its parameters were so vague that there was little to hang a serious obsessive fugue on, so I could stop and think at last.

I reviewed my actions so far. To date, I had stolen, lied, deceived, dissembled and burgled, I had used the weakness of a relative to winkle information out of him, I had scarcely talked to my God for two weeks and I had used the works of the Unsaved almost as they did themselves, telephoning, travelling by car and bus and train and plane, entering retail premises and spending an entire evening enjoying a large proportion of all the exorbitantly hedonistic delights one of the world's largest cities could provide, though admittedly this last sin had been while in the company of a forceful and determinedly sensualistic relative from an alien culture where the pursuit of fun, profit and self-fulfilment was regarded practically as a commandment. Beyond all that, I had made an adamantinely pitiless commitment to myself - again, standing in that office in the mansion house - that I would use whatever truth I could discover like a hammer, to lay waste all those about me who were vulnerable to its momentous weight, without knowing what fragility might exist even in those I loved.

What a pretty alteration had taken place in me, I thought. I shook my head as I looked out across that motley landscape. I wondered - for the first time, oddly enough - whether I really could go back to my old life. I had stood in my little room in the farmhouse just two days ago, thinking that my life was represented not by my possessions but rather entirely defined by my relationship with the people of the Community and the Order, and with the farm and the lands around us… but now I had been exiled from all that - not as successfully in terms of distance as my brother had intended, but determinedly, and with a continuance of ill-wished intent that I did not doubt - and I wondered that I did not feel more abandoned and ostracised, even excommunicated, than I did.