by Iain Banks
• • •
As for the little animals, the gerbils, white mice and hamsters, they had to die their muddy little ploppy deaths so that I could get to the Skull of Old Saul. I catapulted the tiny beasts across the creek and into the mud on the far side so that I could have funerals. My father would never have let me start digging up our graveyard for family pets otherwise, so off they had to go, departing this life in the rather undignified garb of half a badminton shuttlecock. I used to buy the shuttlecocks in the town toy and sports shop and cut the rubber end off, then squeeze the protesting guinea-pig (I did use one once, just on principle, but as a rule they were too expensive and a little too big) up through the funnel of plastic until it sat round their waist like a little dress. Thus flighted, I sent them shooting out over the mud and the water towards their suffocating ends; then I buried them, using as coffins the big matchboxes we always kept by the stove, and which I had been saving for years and using as toy-soldier containers, model houses and so on.
I told my father I was trying to get them over to the far side, to the mainland, and that the ones I had to bury, the ones which fell short, were victims of scientific research, but I doubt I really needed this excuse; my father never seemed bothered about the suffering of lower forms of life, despite having been a hippy, and perhaps because of his medical training.
I kept a log, naturally, and therefore have it recorded that it took no less than thirty-seven of these supposed flight experiments before my trusty long-handled trowel, in biting the Skull Grounds’ earth skin, struck something harder than the sandy soil, and I finally knew where the dog’s bones were.
It would have been nice if it had been a decade to the day since the dog died that I exhumed its skull, but in fact I was a few months late. Nevertheless, the Year of the Skull ended with my old enemy in my power; the bone jug pulled from the ground like a very rotten tooth indeed one suitably dark and stormy night, by torchlight and Stoutstroke the trowel while my father was sleeping and I should have been, and the heavens shook with thunder, rain and gale.
I was shaking by the time I got the thing to the Bunker, nearly frightening myself to death with my paranoid imaginings, but I prevailed; I took the filthy skull there and I cleaned it and stuck a candle in it and I surrounded it with heavy magic, important things, and got back cold and wet to my warm little bed safely.
So, all things considered, I think I have done all right, handled my problem as well as it could have been handled. My enemy is twice dead, and I still have him. I am not a full man, and nothing can ever alter that; but I am me, and I regard that as compensation enough.
This burning dogs stuff is just nonsense.
7: Space Invaders
BEFORE I realised the birds were my occasional allies, I used to do unkind things to them: fish for them, shoot them, tie them to stakes at low tide, put electrically detonated bombs under their nests, and so on.
My favourite game was capturing two using bait and a net, then tying them together. Usually they were gulls and I tied thick orange nylon fishing-line to a leg each, then sat on a dune and watched. Sometimes I would have a gull and a crow but, whether they were the same species or not, they quickly found out they couldn’t fly properly – though the twine was long enough in theory – and ended up (after a few hilariously clumsy aerobatics) fighting.
With one dead, though, the survivor – usually injured – wasn’t really any better off, attached to a heavy corpse instead of a live opponent. I have seen a couple of determined ones peck the leg off their defeated adversary, but most were unable, or didn’t think of it, and got caught by the rats during the night.
I had other games, but that one always struck me as one of my more mature inventions; symbolic somehow, and with a nice blend of callousness and irony.
• • •
One of the birds shat on Gravel as I pedalled up the path to town on the Tuesday morning. I stopped, glared up at the wheeling gulls and a couple of thrushes, then got some grass and wiped the yellow-white mess off the front guard. It was a bright, sunny day and a light breeze blew. The forecast for the next few days was good, and I hoped the fine weather held for Eric’s arrival.
I met Jamie in the lounge bar of the Cauldhame Arms for lunch and we sat playing an electronic game over a TV table.
‘If he’s that crazy, I don’t know why they haven’t caught him yet,’ Jamie said.
‘I’ve told you; he’s crazy but he’s very cunning. He’s not stupid. He was always very bright, right from the start. He was reading early and getting all his relations and uncles and aunts to say “Och, they’re old so young these days” and things like that before I was even born.’
‘But he is insane, all the same.’
‘That’s what they say, but I don’t know.’
‘What about the dogs? And the maggots?’
‘OK, that looks pretty crazy, I’ll admit, but sometimes I think maybe he’s up to something, maybe he’s not really crazy after all. Perhaps he just got fed up acting normal and decided to act crazy instead, and they locked him up because he went too far.’
‘And he’s mad at them,’ Jamie grinned, drinking his pint as I annihilated various dodging, multi-coloured spacecraft on the screen. I laughed. ‘Yeah, if you like. Oh, I don’t know. Maybe he really is crazy. Maybe I am. Maybe everybody is. Or at least all of my family.’
’Now you’re talking.’
I looked up at him for a second, then smiled. ‘It does occur to me sometimes. My dad’s an eccentric . . . I suppose I am, too.’ I shrugged, concentrated on the space battle again. ‘But it doesn’t bother me. There are a lot madder people about the place.’
Jamie sat in silence for a while as I went from screenful to screenful of wheeling, whining craft. Finally my luck ran out and they caught me. I took up my pint as Jamie settled in to blast a few of the gaudy formations. I looked at the top of his head as he bent to the task. He was starting to go bald, though I knew he was only twenty-three. He reminded me again of a puppet, with his out-of-proportion head and stubby little arms and legs waggling with the exertion of punching the ‘fire’ button and jiggling the positioning joystick.
‘Yeah,’ he said after a while, still attacking the oncoming craft, ‘and a lot of them seem to be politicians and presidents and things.’
‘What?’ I said, wondering what he was talking about.
‘The madder people. A lot of them seem to be leaders of countries or religions or armies. The real loonies.’
‘Aye, I suppose.’ I said thoughtfully, watching the battle on the screen upside down. ‘Or maybe they’re the only sane ones. After all, they’re the ones with all the power and riches. They’re the ones who get everybody else to do what they want them to do, like die for them and work for them and get them into power and protect them and pay taxes and buy them toys, and they’re the ones who’ll survive another big war, in their bunkers and tunnels. So, given things being the way they are, who’s to say they’re the loonies because they don’t do things the way Joe Punter thinks they ought to be done? If they thought the same way as Joe Punter, they’d be Joe Punter, and somebody else would be having all the fun.’
‘Survival of the fittest.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Survival of the –’ Jamie drew his breath in sharply and pulled the stick so hard he almost fell off his stool, but he managed to dodge the darting yellow bolts that had driven him into the corner of the screen ‘ – nastiest.’ He looked up at me and grinned quickly before hunching over the controls again. I drank, nodded.
‘If you like. If the nastiest survive, then that’s our tough shit.’
‘ “Us” being all us Joe Punters,’ Jamie said.
‘Aye, or everybody. The whole species. If we’re really so bad and so thick that we’d actually use all those wonderful H-bombs and Neutron bombs on each other, then maybe it’s just as well we do wipe ourselves out before we can get into space and start doing horrible things to other races.’
‘You mean we’ll be the Space Invaders?’
‘Yeah!’ I laughed, and rocked back on my stool. ‘That’s it! That’s really us!’ I laughed again and tapped the screen above a formation of red and green flapping things, just as one of them, peeling off to the side of the main pack, dived down firing at Jamie’s craft, missing it with its shots but clipping him with one green wing as it disappeared off the bottom of the screen, so that Jamie’s craft detonated in a blaze of flashing red and yellow.
‘Shit,’ he said, sitting back. He shook his head.
I sat forward and waited for my craft to appear.
• • •
Just a little drunk on my three pints, I cycled back to the island whistling. I always enjoyed my lunch-time chats with Jamie. We sometimes talk when we meet on Saturday nights, but we can’t hear when the bands are on, and afterwards I’m either too drunk to talk or, if I can speak, I’m too drunk to recall much of what I’ve said. Which, come to think of it, is probably just as well, judging by the way people who are normally quite sensible dissolve into gibbering, rude, opinionated and bombastic idiots once the alcohol molecules in their bloodstream outnumber their neurons, or whatever. Luckily, one only notices this if one stays sober oneself, so the solution is as pleasant (at the time, at least) as it is obvious.
My father was asleep in a deckchair in the front garden when I got back. I left the bike in the shed and watched him from the shed door for a while, poised so that if he happened to wake up it would look as though I was just in the act of shutting the door. His head was tilted a little to me and his mouth was slightly open. He had dark glasses on, but I could just see through them to his closed eyes.
I had to go for a piss, so I didn’t watch him for very long. Not that I had any particular reason for watching him; I just liked doing it. It made me feel good to know that I could see him and he couldn’t see me, and that I was aware and fully conscious and he wasn’t.
I went into the house.
• • •
I had spent Monday, after a cursory check of the Poles, making one or two repairs and improvements to the Factory, working through the afternoon until my eyes got sore and my father had to call up to me to come down for my dinner.
In the evening it rained, so I had stayed in and watched television. I went to bed early. Eric didn’t call.
• • •
After I’d got rid of about half the beer I’d drunk in the Arms, I went to have another look at the Factory. I clambered up into the loft, all sunlight and warmth and smelling of old and interesting books, and I decided to clear the place up a bit.
I sorted out old toys into boxes, got a few rolls of carpet and wallpaper back into their places from where they’d fallen, pinned a couple of maps back on to the sloping wooden under-roof, cleared away some of the tools and bits and pieces that I’d used to repair the Factory, and loaded the various sections of the Factory that needed to be loaded.
I found some interesting things while I was doing all this: a home-made astrolabe I’d carved, a box containing the folded-flat parts for a scale model of the defences around Byzantium, the remains of my collection of telegraph-pole insulators, and some old jotters from when my father was teaching me French. Leafing through them, I couldn’t see any obvious lies; he hadn’t taught me to say anything obscene instead of ‘Excuse me’ or ‘Can you direct me to the railway station, please?’, though I’d have thought the temptation would have been all but irresistible.
I completed tidying the loft, sneezing a few times as the golden space filled with motes of shining dust. I looked over the refurbished Factory again, just because I love looking at it and tinkering with it and touching it and tipping some of its little levers and doors and devices. Finally I dragged myself away, telling myself that I’d get a chance to use it properly soon enough. I would capture a fresh wasp that afternoon to use the following morning. I wanted another interrogation of the Factory before Eric arrived; I wanted more of an idea what was going to happen.
It was a little risky, of course, asking it the same question twice, but I thought the exceptional circumstances demanded it, and it was my Factory, after all.
• • •
I got the wasp without any difficulty. It more or less walked into the ceremonial jam-jar which I have always used to hold subjects for the Factory. I kept the jar, sealed with the lid with the holes in it and stocked with a few leaves and a morsel of orange peel, standing in the shade of the river bank while I made a dam there that afternoon.
I worked and sweated in the sunlight of late afternoon and early evening while my father did a bit of painting at the back of the house and the wasp felt its way around the inside of the jar, antennae waving.
Halfway through building the dam – not the best time – I thought it might be amusing to make it an Exploder, so I set the overflow going and trotted up the path to the shed for the War Bag. I brought it back and sorted out the smallest bomb I could find wired for electrical detonation. I attached it to the wires from the torch-firer by the bared ends poking out of the drilled hole in the black metal casing and wrapped the bomb in a couple of plastic bags. I shoved the bomb backwards into the base of the main dam, leading the wires away and back behind the dam, past the static waters backed up behind it to near where the wasp crawled in its jar. I covered the wires over so that it looked more natural, then went on building the dam.
The dam system ended up very big and complicated and included not one but two little villages, one between two of the dams and one downstream from the last one. I had bridges with little roads, a small castle with four towers, and two road tunnels. Just before tea-time I played out the last of the wire from the torch body and took the wasp jar up on to the top of the nearby dune.
I could see my father, still painting the window surrounds of the lounge. I can just remember the designs he used to have on the front of the house, the face turned towards the sea; they were fading even then, but they were minor classics of tripped-out art, as I recall; great sweeping sworls and mandalas that leaped about the house front like Technicolor tattoos, curving round windows and arching over the door. A relic from the days when my father was a hippy, they are worn and gone now, erased by wind and sea and rain and sunlight. Only the vaguest outlines are still discernible now, along with a few freak patches of real colour, like peeling skin.
I opened the torch-firer up, shoved the cylindrical batteries inside, secured them, then clicked the flasher button on top of the torch body. The current flowed in series with the nine-volt pack-battery taped to the outside, down the wires leading from the hole where the bulb used to go, and into the casing of the bomb. Somewhere near its centre, steel wool glowed dully, then brightly and started to melt, and the white crystal mixture exploded, tearing the metal – which it took me and a heavy-duty vice a lot of sweat, time and leverage to bend at all – as though it was paper.
Wham! The front of the main dam crashed up and out; a messy mix of steam and gas, water and sand leaped into the air and fell back spattering. The noise was good and dull, and the tremor I felt through the seat of my pants just before I heard the whump, single and strong.
The sand in the air slipped, fell back, splashed in the waters and thudded in little heaps on to roads and houses. The unleashed waters flooded out of the gap smashed in the sand wall and rolled down, sucking sand from the edges of the breach and spilling in a sloped brown tide down upon the first village, cutting through it, piling up behind the next dam, backing up, collapsing sand houses, tipping the castle to one side as a unit and undermining its already cracked towers. The bridge supports gave way, the wood slipped, fell in at one side, then the dam started to spill over and soon its whole top was awash and being eaten away by the flood still piling out of the first dam as the head of water pushed forward from fifty metres or more back up the stream. The castle disintegrated, falling over.
I left the jar and ran down the dune, exulting in the wave of water as it sped over the braided surface of the str
eam bed, hit houses, followed roads, ran through tunnels, then hit the last dam, quickly overwhelmed it and went on to smash into the rest of the houses, grouped into the second village. Dams were disintegrating, houses slipping into the water, bridges and tunnels falling and banks collapsing all over the place; a gorgeous feeling of excitement rose in my stomach like a wave and settled in my throat as I thrilled to the watery havoc about me.
I watched the wires wash and roll themselves to one side of the flood’s course, then looked at the front of the racing water as it headed quickly for the sea over the long-dried sand. I sat down opposite where the first village had been, where long brown humps of water surged, slowly advancing, and waited for the storm of water to subside, my legs crossed, my elbows on my knees and my face in my hands. I felt warm and happy and slightly hungry.
Eventually, when the stream was almost back to normal and there was virtually nothing left of my hours of work, I spotted what I was looking for: the black and silver wreck of the bomb, sticking ripped and gnarled in the sand just downstream from the site of the dam it had destroyed. I didn’t take my boots off but, with the tips of my toes still on the dry bank, walked with my hands until I was almost at full stretch out in the middle of the stream. I picked the remains of the bomb out of the stream bed, put its jagged body carefully into my mouth, then walked my hands back until I was able to throw myself back and stand up.
I wiped the almost flat piece of metal with a rag from the War Bag, put the bomb inside the bag, then collected the wasp jar and went back to the house for tea, leaping the stream just up from the highest point the waters had been backed up to.
• • •
All our lives are symbols. Everything we do is part of a pattern we have at least some say in. The strong make their own patterns and influence other people’s, the weak have their courses mapped out for them. The weak and the unlucky, and the stupid. The Wasp Factory is part of the pattern because it is part of life and – even more so – part of death. Like life it is complicated, so all the components are there. The reason it can answer questions is because every question is a start looking for an end, and the Factory is about the End – death, no less. Keep your entrails and sticks and dice and books and birds and voices and pendants and all the rest of that crap; I have the Factory, and it’s about now and the future; not the past.