by Iain Banks
Better to keep your eyes open; better to trust your instincts and take deep breaths between the parked cars. You couldn't be too careful.
He got to the car and stopped opposite it, breathing deeply. He took off his hard hat and wiped his brow, after checking for scaffolding. The safety helmet was another of his discoveries, his good ideas. He knew how vulnerable people's heads were, and how important his own was. He knew they would just love to arrange a little "accident" with some spanner or brick falling from a building, or, more plausibly still, from some scaffolding. So he had worn that hard hat, since even before he left the home. No matter what the job was, or what else he might be doing, he wore the hat when he was outside. They had laughed at him in the road gang; who did he think he was? they said. Poncy engineers wore hard hats everywhere, not your labourers. Or was he frightened of pigeons then? Going a bit thin on top as well as inside, eh? Ha ha. Let them laugh. They wouldn't get the hat off him. He had two spare hats in his room just in case he ever lost his usual one, or somebody stole it. People had done that before now, too.
He started walking again, treading carefully on the cracks between the paving stones. A careful, steady stride was very important, anyway. Good for the breathing and the heart rate.
People stared at him sometimes, jumping from one paving stone border to another, then taking some mincing little half-steps over others, his face going strange colours as he ran out of stored air in his lungs, sweating under a hard hat with no construction sites anywhere in evidence, but he didn't care. They'd be sorry, one day.
As he walked, he wondered what he would do today with his new-found freedom. He had lots of money; perhaps he would get drunk... the pubs would be open soon. He supposed he ought to go and sign on; let the unemployment people know he was out of a job again. He wished he could remember what you were supposed to do when you wanted to register as unemployed, but he always forgot. Obviously the whole unemployment, Social Security system had been set up to confuse, anger and demoralise him. He kept meaning to take notes, write down all the separate moves you were meant to make, forms fill out, offices visit, people see, but he always forgot. Anyway, he always told himself that this would be the last time; this time he would find some really good job in which he would get on really well and his talents would be appreciated and people would like him and he would surprise all his Tormentors, so there would be no reason to go through the whole fraught and sapping business of signing on again. He wondered vaguely about going back to Mrs Short's boarding house and getting a pen and paper.
He would go back to his room. He always felt better there, and he still felt like a good wash; he needed to get rid of all this sweat and clamminess, wash all the dust and the lead off his face and hands. He could do that back at Mrs Short's. He would gain strength from being back with his books, his bed and his little bits and pieces. He could have a look at the Evidence, again; that would be good. He could start re-reading a book.
He had a lot of books. Most of them were Science Fiction or Fantasy. He had long ago realised that if he was going to find any clues to the whereabouts of the Way Out, the location or identity of the Key, there was a good chance he might get some ideas from that type of writing. He knew this from the way he felt attracted to it.
It was a contemptuous sop of a clue, something they thought they could afford, but it might be useful. Obviously they thought that by letting this sort of thing out they would have an excuse for putting him away if he ever attempted to call their bluff. "Ha!" they would be able to say, "Crazy; read too much SF. Bonkers; let us put him away and keep him under sedation and have done with him." That was the way their minds worked.
That realisation was supposed to put him off, but he was too clever for them. He bought all the most fantastic "unrealistic" fiction he could find and afford; by the rules they must have hidden a clue away in it somewhere. One day he would open up a book - some new sword-and-sorcery trilogy, probably - and something he would read there would trigger what he knew was locked away in his own brain somewhere. It might be the name of a character (there was one already he was sure sounded familiar; it was one of his bits of Evidence), it might be the description of a place or a sequence of events... all he needed was that Key.
Escapism, they called it. Oh, they were clever all right!
His room was full of books; thick, dog-eared, broken-spined gaudy-covered paperbacks. They lay on the floor, stacked on their sides because he didn't have any proper shelves. The floor of his room was like a maze, with tower-blocks of books, whole walls of them set out on the thin carpet and holed linoleum so that only small corridors for him to walk in remained between them. He could go from bed to window and table, to cupboard and door and fire and wash-handbasin, but only by certain routes. Making the bed was difficult. Pulling the drawers in the cupboard out properly needed great care. Coming back to the place drunk, especially when he couldn't find the light switch, was horrendous; he would wake to a sight like Manhattan after a severe earthquake. In paperback.
But it was worth it. He needed both those avenues of escape; drink because it felt like escape, a way out of their fetid reality for a while... and the books because they soothed, they offered hope. He might lose himself in the books sometimes, but he might find the Key there, too.
A car he was heading for to draw his next breath suddenly drove off. Steven cursed inwardly and had to step up on to a low wall above the height of the laser-axles to empty and fill his lungs again. He got down from the wall and walked on.
He'd show them all, one day. All the people who had taunted him and hurt him and confused him and denied him. Even the ones whose names he had forgotten. When he found the Key he'd get them. People like Mr Smith, Dan Ashton and Partridge. He'd find that Way Out, but he wouldn't leave until he'd found them again and sorted them out. They'd pay all right.
Couldn't even take a joke. Throw a shovelful of tarmac into the canal and they went to pieces. It hadn't been his fault he'd tripped over the cat. He knew he shouldn't have hit the animal, but he'd been angry. Then Partridge had tried to wrestle with him, claiming later that he was only trying to "restrain" him. Partridge had got all angry and upset soon too, because as he was struggling with Steven a magazine fell out of his trousers on to the towpath of the canal and the other men had picked it up and it had been a spanking magazine so all the other men who weren't laughing and shouting already started teasing Partridge; Partridge started trying to wrestle Steven to the ground but Steven had got free and clouted the other man with the shovel, which was still bloody from hacking the cat to bits, and after that, with the magazine coming apart as the other men grabbed at it and Partridge rolling about dazed on the towpath in the cat's blood and almost falling into the canal, Dan Ashton had said soberly that enough was enough and they'd better go and see Mr Smith the supervisor because they just couldn't go on like this. They weren't getting the work done.
It was all horribly sordid, but the more he thought about it, the more he became certain that, far from being a disaster, leaving the Highways Department was in fact a real step forward. It hadn't been much of a job after all; he had thought at first from the sound of it that it might mean travel, but it didn't.
He would definitely go to the pub later, he decided. It was a day to celebrate. For two reasons, he reminded himself. Not that it meant very much, because when you thought about it it wasn't something really to celebrate, but today, June 28th, was his birthday.
He stopped, opposite a car, of course, and looked at his reflection in a shop window. He was tall and thin. He had longish, lank dark hair he didn't wash often enough. It stuck out from under his red hard hat in scrappy curls. His trousers were slightly too short, and showed off his purple nylon socks and his tar-stained desert boots. His Paisley pattern shirt didn't go too well with the greying Marks & Spencer pullover he wore instead of a jacket, and he knew his fingernails were dirty. But it was a good disguise, he told himself. Great Warriors didn't want to attract too much attention to
themselves when they were trying to think their way out of their penalty period in the ultimate war.
A young woman who was dressing the female dummies in the lingerie department window Steven was looking at frowned at him and gave him a suspicious, disapproving look which he noticed her just in time to see. He saw the half-dressed models then, and quickly walked away, only just taking a deep breath in time as he walked out from the cover of the parked car.
"Many happy returns," he said to himself, then suddenly gulped as he put his hand to his mouth and looked around. What was he saying!
ONE-DIMENSIONAL CHESS
Quiss paused near the topmost window in the winding-stair. His old body, for all its girth, thick size and seeming weight of muscle, was less than fit, and not so warm either. The cold air of the castle fumed from his mouth as he rested, gathering breath. It was dark in the turret stair, the only light coming from a small open window just round the twist in the rising steps. The steamy clouds of his breath were first caught in the light from above, then pulled slowly away in a draught from the same source. He wondered if Ajayi had finished the game yet.
Probably not. Prevaricating woman. He sighed and set off up the stairs again, pulling himself up by his hands on the thick, frozen rope fixed to the outside of the staircase, the castle's concession to their earlier request for a handhold on the often ice-slicked steps.
Ajayi was in the games room still, hunkered over the small table in her furs, huge as a bear, perched on a small stool all but hidden beneath the furs and cloths which smothered her old frame. She didn't look up as Quiss - panting heavily - appeared at the top of the stairs and made his way down the length of the dimly lit room. She seemed to notice him only as he came closer, up to his chair, facing her across the small, four-legged table with the dully glowing red jewel in its centre. Ajayi smiled and nodded, perhaps at the man, perhaps at the thin, wavering line of squares which seemed to hang in the air over the small circular table.
The thin line of squares - alternately black and white, like tiny isolated tiles of shadow and mist - stretched over the table, through the air on either side of it, and disappeared into the distant side walls of the broad games room, over fallen slates and past rusting columns of wrought iron. The flat string of squares flickered slightly, just sufficiently to show it was a projection, nothing real; but although it was apparent the line of squares itself was merely an image, on its surface sat seemingly real and solid wooden chess pieces made from black and white wood, and set on that strange line like tiny isolated guard towers on a chequered frontier wall.
Ajayi looked slowly up at her companion, her old lined face gradually contorting into a smile. Quiss looked down at her. Maybe there's something of the reptile in her, he thought. Maybe she slows down in the cold. As though I didn't have enough problems.
"Well?" the old woman said.
"Well what?" Quiss said, still breathing hard from his walk up the stairs from the castle's lower levels. What was she asking him questions for? He was the one who should be doing the asking. Why hadn't she finished the game yet? Why was she still just sitting looking at it?
"What did they say?" Ajayi asked patiently, smiling a little.
"Oh," Quiss said, shaking his great bearded head quickly as though the whole subject was of too little consequence to be worth discussing, "they said they'd see what they could do. I told them if we didn't get more light and heat up here soon I'd tear a few more of them apart, but after that they only started acting all stupid, and anyway they'll soon forget; they always do."
"You didn't see the seneschal himself then?" Ajayi said. She sounded disappointed, and a small frown creased her forehead.
"No. He was busy, they said. Just saw the little bastards." Quiss sat down heavily on his small chair, wrapping some more furs around himself to keep warm. He stared mournfully at the bright strip which appeared to float in the cold air over the small table. In the centre of the table's delicately carved surface the jewel, which was the colour of blood, shone like something warm.
Ajayi pointed at one of the wooden chess pieces - a black queen - and said, "Well, I think you're too hard on them. That's not the way to get results. By the way, I think that's checkmate."
"You don't know -" Quiss began, then gave a start as the last part of what his adversary had said sank in. He frowned deeply and peered at the narrow line of black and white spaces hanging in the air in front of him. "What?" he said.
"Checkmate," Ajayi said, her old voice slightly cracked and uneven. "I think."
"Where?" Quiss said indignantly, sitting back with a smile somewhere between annoyance and relief. "That's only check; I can get out of it. There." He leaned forward quickly and took hold of a white bishop, placing it one black square further forward, in front of his king. Ajayi smiled and shook her head; she put her hand just to one side of the glittering, projected line of squares and seemed to fumble with something invisible in the air. A black knight appeared, as though out of profound shadow, on the surface of the ultimately narrow board. Quiss took in his breath to say something, then held it.
"Sorry," Ajayi said, "that's mate." She said it quietly, but then wished she hadn't spoken at all. She frowned to herself, but Quiss was too absorbed glaring at the board - looking desperately up and down its length for useful pieces that were not there - to notice what she'd said.
Ajayi sat back in her little stool and stretched. She put her arms out from her sides and back, arching her spine and wondering vaguely as she did so why it had been thought necessary or relevant to give them such old bodies. Perhaps to keep the idea of the passing of time, simple mortality, to the forefront of their minds. If so, it was a redundant measure, even in this strange and singular place, even given their odd, frozen state (as the castle was frozen, so were they; as the castle was slowly crumbling but they stayed in their stasis, so their hopes, their chances decayed). She got up stiffly from the table, with one last look at the scowling form of the man trying to work a way out of his hopeless situation, then walked slowly, limping a little, over the scratched glass floor of the room to the bright chill of the balcony.
She leaned slackly against the square pillar in the middle of the row of columns which divided room from terrace, and looked into the snowy distance.
An unbroken plain of white stretched to the far horizon, only the faintest shadings of light indicating any variation in the almost dead flat land. To the right, Ajayi knew, if she leaned out from the balcony (which she did not like to do as she was a little afraid of heights), she would be able to see the quarries, and the start of the thin, also snow-covered and treeless line of stunted hills. She didn't bother to lean out. She had no particular desire to see either the hills or the quarries.
"Aaah!" Quiss roared behind her, and she turned in time to see him sweep his arm over the surface of the thin, artificial board in a gesture of fury and frustration. Chess pieces scattered from the board, but blinked out the instant they dropped below the level it was on, as though falling beneath some invisible beam. All except a couple of knights, which vanished as soon as they left the board itself. The board flickered for a second or two, then slowly faded until it was gone, and Quiss was left sitting looking angrily at the small wooden table. The faint glow from the jewel in the middle of its filigreed surface dimmed, went out.
Ajayi raised her eyebrows, waiting for the man to look at her, but he did not; he simply sat, torso perched forward, one elbow on his knee, hairy chin in one hand. "Fucking stupid knights," he said at last. He scowled at the table.
"Well," Ajayi said, leaving the open entrance to the balcony as a light wind picked up and blew a small flurry of snow around her booted feet, "at least the game's over."
"I thought we had a stalemate." Quiss seemed to be addressing the table, not his opponent. "We had an agreement."
"It was quicker this way." Ajayi sat down on the small stool on the other side of the table. Light from the ceiling moved uncertainly over the carved wood Quiss was still stari
ng at. Ajayi looked at her companion's face in the dimness. Quiss had a broad, dark grey face, covered with mottled black and white hair. His eyes looked small and yellow, set in a tracery of deepening lines which seemed to radiate from his eyes like waves in a small still pool. He still did not look at her, so she shook her head slowly, resignedly, and looked about the room.
It was long and wide and very dark, with many pillars. Most of the light came from the openings onto the balcony. There should have been light from above and below, but in fact there was almost none, and it was partly because of that, and because it was also rather colder than it had to be, that Quiss had set off something like an hour before to find some of the castle's attendants. He was supposed to have asked politely for more heat up on their level, but from what he'd said Ajayi suspected he had been his usual brusque and threatening self. She would have gone herself, but her leg was stiff and sore again and she wasn't sure she would have been able to manage the stairs.
She looked up at the ceiling, where one of the room's many odd columns flared into the flat, thick, pale green glass. A single sinuous shape, shedding milky light, moved in the cold, murky water overhead.
It was one of the castle's many peculiarities that the interior lighting was produced by several species of luminescent fish.
"Where's the bell?" Quiss said suddenly, sitting upright and looking about the room. He got up from his seat as quickly as his thick furs and old muscles would allow, kicked some slates and books out of his way across the glass floor and started inspecting a pillar a few metres away. They've moved it again," he muttered. He started looking at some of the nearby pillars and columns, his boots scraping on the glass slabs of the floor as he moved. "Ah," he said, when almost out of sight, back in the depths of the room, not far from the small winding-stair he had entered the room by a few minutes earlier. Ajayi heard a distant scraping noise as Quiss pulled on the bell-chain.