Iain Banks - The Bridge

'Oh,' he said, nodding, 'pretty damn certain.'

She kissed him, lightly at first. He leant back against one of the grey square posts of the tower's superstructure, clutching her buttocks and rolling his tongue round inside her mouth, thinking, Well if the damn post gives way, what the hell; I may never be this happy again. There are worse ways to go.

She pulled away from him, a familiar, ironic smirk on her face. 'Yi talked me inta it, yi sweet-talkin bestid.' He laughed and pulled her back.

'You insatiable hussy.'

'You bring out the best in me.' She fondled his balls through his jeans, stroked his erection.

'Anyway, I thought your period had started.'

'Good God man, not afraid of a little bit of blood are you?'

'No of course not, but I haven't brought any tissues or -'

'Oh why are men so fucking fastidious ?' she growled, biting his chest through his shirt and pulling a thin white scarf from a pocket in her jacket like a magician producing a rabbit. 'Use this, if you must mop up.' She covered his mouth with hers. He pulled her shirt out of her trousers, looked at the scarf held in his other hand.

'This is silk ,' he told her.

She pulled his zip down. 'You better believe it kid; I deserve the best.'

Afterwards they lay still, shivering a little in the breeze of a cool July day as it moved through the painted wooden structure. He told her her aureoles were like pink washers, her nipples like little marshmallow bolts, and the tiny puckered slits at their tips like slots for a screwdriver. She laughed quietly, dozily, amused at such comparisons. She looked up at him, a sort of ironical, roguish expression on her face. 'Do you really love me?' she said, apparently unbelieving. He shrugged.

''Fraid so.'

'You're a fool,' she chided gently, lifting one hand to play with a lock of his hair, smiling at it.

'You think so,' he said, lowering himself for a moment, kissing the tip of her nose.

'Yes,' she said. 'I am fickle and selfish.'

'You are generous and independent.' He brushed some windblown hair away from near her eyes. She laughed, shook her head.

'Well, love is blind,' she said.

'So they tell us.' He sighed. 'Can't see it myself.'

When I was young I used to see these things float down in front of my eyes, but I knew they were inside my eyes and that they moved the same way that pretend snowflakes move in one of those little snow scene ornaments. Never could work out what the hell they were (I described them to the doctor once as looking like roads on a map - I still know what I meant - but they'd be better described as looking like tiny twisted glass pipes with bits of dark matter stuck in the tubes), but they never seemed to cause any real problems so I paid them no attention. Only years later did I find out they were quite normal; just dead cells from the top of the eye floating down through the fluid. I believe I did once worry about them silting up, but I guessed there was some bodily process that went on inside my eyes which would make sure it didn't happen. Shame, really; with an imagination like mine I think I'd have made a great hypochondriac.

Somebody told me something about silt; that little dark fellow with the stick. Said the whole thing was sinking; they'd taken so much water from artesian wells, and so much oil and gas too, that whole bits of the thing were just sinking into the water. Quite upset about it, he was. Of course there's a fix; you pump in sea water. More expensive than just sucking out what you want, but you don't get anything for nothing (although, of course, there are margins , which come pretty damn close).

We are rock, part of the machine (what machine? This machine; look, pick it up, shake it, see the pretty patterns form; watch it snow, or rain, or blow, or shine), and we live the life of rocks; first igneous as children, metamorphic in our prime, sedimentary in our sedentary dotage (back to the subduction zone?) In fact the literal truth is even more fantastic: that we are all stars; that we, all our systems and this single system, are the gathered silt of ancient explosions, dying stars from that first birth, detonating in the silence to send their shrapnel gases spinning, swarming, collecting, forming (beat that, mean 'magined monks).

So we are silt, we are precipitate, we are leavings (cream and scum); none the worse for that. You are what has gone before, just another collection, a point on a (stretched) line, just the wave-front.

Shake and jostle. A machine within a machine within a machine within a machine within a - you want me to stop here?

Jostle, shake. Dreams of something long ago, something lodged in the brain somewhere, finally coming to the surface (another shrapnel, more splinters).

Jostle shake jostle shake. Half awake half awake.

Cities and Kingdoms and Bridges and Towers; I'm sure I'm heading for them all. Can't go for long without getting some where, after all.

Where the hell was that dark bridge? Still looking.

In the silence of the speeding train, I see the bridge pass. At speed, the secondary architecture can almost disappear at times; all that is visible is the bridge itself, the original structure, flashing red criss-crossing, in its own lights or the sunlight. Beyond, the blue firth, shining under a new day.

The slanted girders pass like forever chopping blades, dimming the view, sectioning it, parcelling it. In the new light, and in the haze of the day, I seem to see another bridge, up river; a grey echo, a shadow-ghost of the one bridge, towering out of the mists above the river, at once more straight and less so. Ghost. Ghost bridge; a place I knew once but know no more. A place to -

On the other side, down-river, through the cutting dark lines of the structure, I can see the barrage balloons, hanging blackly in the sunlight like obese submarines, dead and bloated with some corrupting gas.

Then the planes come, level with me, flying alongside me; they are heading in the same direction as the train, overtaking it slowly. They are surrounded by black clouds; dark bursts of smoke detonate in the sky all around them. Their own pulsed signals mingle with the black smudges of the bridge's reactivated anti-aircraft defences, scrambling the already nonsensical message trailed behind the craft still further.

Invulnerable, uncaring, the silver planes fly on through the furious hail of exploding shells, their formation perfect, their sky writing as neat and precise as ever, sunlight glinting over their sleekly bulbous bodies. All three, from boss to skid, look quite undamaged; their flush-riveted lines are unmarred even by soot or oil stains.

Then, when they are almost too far away for me to see them clearly through the angle of increasing structure, when I have determined they must be really invulnerable, or at least that the bridge's guns are firing smoke charges, not shrapnel or even impact rounds, one of the aircraft is hit. Hit in the tail. It is the middle plane. Immediately it starts to slow down, dropping behind the other planes, grey smoke pouring from its tail, the black puffs of its message continuing for a while, then growing fainter as the plane drops further and further back until it is alongside the train. It does not peel away or take any other evasive action; it keeps the same steady course, but slower now.

Its tail disappears, consumed by the smoke. Still it flies, straight and level. Gradually the fuselage is eaten away. The plane keeps pace with the train and does not deviate from its course, though black anti-aircraft bursts still swarm around it, damage or no. Half the fuselage is gone; it has no tail. The grey smoke starts to eat into the trailing edge of the wing roots and the rear of the cockpit canopy. The plane cannot be flyable; it should have tumbled out of control the instant it lost its tail surfaces, but it flies on, still accurately level with the racing train, and matching its speed. The thick cloud of grey smoke eats fuselage, cockpit, wings, then thins out as they disappear; only the engine cowling and the near-invisible line of the propeller remain to be consumed.