Iain Banks - Whit

By working two small wheels, one could manipulate the glass bed the fiches rested upon and so rove at will across the hundreds of pages recorded on each plastic sheet. When one had found a sheet one wanted to record, all that had to be done was to press a button, and the contents of the screen would be transferred by a photocopying process to a sheet of ordinary paper.

I suspect it was something about the mechanical nature of the whole business - despite the machine's obvious reliance on electrical power - that attracted me. If you held the riches up to the light you could just make out the tiny shapes of the newspapers, easily identifying large headlines and photographs by the black and grey blocks they made on the white surface. It was obvious, in other words, that the information was physically there, albeit in microscopically reduced form, not macerated into digits or stripes of magnetism plastered on a bit of tape or a little brown disk and intrinsically unreadable without the intervention of a machine.

The fiches could probably be used without the machine, if one had a bright light and a very strong magnifying glass, and that seemed to me to define the limit of acceptable technology; Luskentyrians have traditionally had an almost instinctive suspicion of things which boast of having few or no moving parts. It makes us incompatible, as a rule, with electronics, but this device seemed just about tolerable. I was sure Brother Indra would like this machine. I thought again of Allan, using the portable phone in the office storeroom, and felt my teeth grind as I read the ancient headlines I had come here to inspect.

I was looking at old copies of Scottish and British newspapers from 1948. I glanced at one or two from the early months of the year, but was concentrating on the second half of the year. I was not entirely sure what it was I might find; I was just looking for something that caught my eye.

I sat alone at the machine, having given Brother Topee the task of finding out how one might investigate an individual who had been in the British Army; he had pointed me towards the Mitchell Library from an army recruitment centre in Sauchiehall Street. I had left him standing in a queue there; I was hoping he wouldn't join up by mistake, though with those earrings he was probably safe.

I had plenty of newspapers to choose from: The Herald , Scotsman , Courier , Dispatch , Mirror , Evening Times , Times , Sketch … I started with the Scotsman , for no better reason than that was the paper Mr Warriston took, and I had once picked it up and surreptitiously read a few pages on the first occasion I'd visited his house in Dunblane.

I read of the assassination of Gandhi, the formation of Israel, the Berlin airlift, Harry S. Truman elected President in the United States, the founding of the two Korean republics, the austerity Olympics in London, continuing rationing in Britain and the abdication of Queen Wilhelmina in Holland.

What I was looking for were shipwrecks, bank robberies, mysterious disappearances, people being washed overboard from troopships or going missing from army bases. After a quick look through a selection of months, I decided to restrict my search to that of September 1948 initially, reckoning that the chances were that whatever I was looking for had taken place then. I had got to the last September issue of the Scotsman without success when Topee appeared in the little alcove off the upper gallery where the fiche reading machine was situated.

'Any luck?' I asked.

He sat down on another chair, breathing hard as though he'd been running. 'No; it's been fucking privatised, man.'

'What? The army?'

'No; the records. All the armed forces' records. Used to be some civil service department, but now it's something called "Force Facts plc" and you have to pay for each inquiry and they're not open over the weekend anyway. Hilarious, eh? Total.' He shook his head. 'How about you?'

'Nothing yet. Done the Scotsman ; about to start on the Glasgow Herald . If you could take the right-hand side of the screen while I read the left, we'll get through this a lot quicker,' I told him, making room for his seat.

He scraped in beside me, glancing soulfully at his watch. 'The guys will be watching the jazz by now,' he said in a small voice.

'Topee,' I said. 'This is important. If you don't feel you can devote your full concentration to the task, just say so and run off to play with your pals.'

'No, no,' he said, pushing back his hair and sitting forward in his chair to peer intently at the screen.

I took the last Scotsman fiche off the glass plate and put the first Glasgow Herald fiche on. Topee continued to stare at the screen. 'Is?'

'What?'

'What am I looking for, anyway?'

'Shipwrecks.'

'Shipwrecks.'

'Well, maybe not actual shipwrecks,' I said, recalling that Zhobelia had said there hadn't been any shipwrecks at the time. 'But something like shipwrecks.'

Topee grimaced, looking up at the ceiling. 'Right. Cool. Anything else?'

'Yes. Anything that rings a bell.'

'Eh?'

'Anything that sounds familiar. Anything that sounds like it might be linked to the Order.'

He looked at me. 'You mean you don't know what we're looking for.'

'Not exactly,' I admitted, scanning my half of the display. 'If I knew exactly what it was there wouldn't be any need to look.'

'Right,' he said.'… So I've got to look for something, like, really carefully, but I don't know what it is I'm looking for except it might be something like a shipwreck, that isn't?'

'That's right.'

From the corner of my eye, I could see that Topee continued to study me. I half expected him to rise from his chair and walk out, but instead he just turned back to the screen and pulled his seat closer. 'Wow,' he chuckled. 'Like, Zen!'

An hour went by. Topee swore he was paying attention but he always claimed to be finished at the same time as me, and I know I read very quickly indeed. Still, I had calculated that we would be lucky to finish all the records of all the papers for September 1948 by the time the library closed, so I had no choice for now but to trust his word. After that first hour, Topee started humming and whistling and making little sibilant noises with his tongue, lips and teeth.

I suspected it was jazz.

The next hour grew to middle age.

I tried with all my might to concentrate, but occasionally I would drift away from my task and start reliving the previous night, hearing Zhobelia tell me in her matter-of-fact way that what I had thought a personal miracle - a blessed affliction, one wise wound upon another - was something I shared through time with generations of my female ancestors, including her. Did that make any more sense of what I felt when I envisioned something? I had no idea. It put my visions in a sort of context but it made the experience no less mysterious. Did it mean anything that God chose to order Their miracles in this manner? I could not shake off the feeling that if there was one thing Salvador had got right it was that we are not even capable yet of understanding the purpose God has in mind for us. We can only struggle through, doing the best we can and trying neither to hide behind ignorance nor over-estimate the reach of our knowledge. I kept having to drag myself back to the task in hand, trawling the past for the key to the present.

And found it.

It was in the Glasgow Courier , dated Thursday, 30th September, 1948. It was as well I was sitting down; the experience of dizziness induced by a familial revelation did not seem to be a condition I was becoming inured to, despite the frequency with which it had swept through me in the past few days. My sight seemed to go a bit swimmy for a while, but I just sat and waited for it to clear.