Walking on Glass

by Iain Banks

  Now she filled up her spare time with reading. She took books from the interior walls of the castle and read them. They were in many different languages, most of them tongues from the nameless planet which was the castle's Subject and from where all the books seemed to originate. These languages she could not understand.

  Some of the books, however, appeared to have been produced on this single globe as translations into other - alien - languages, some of which Ajayi could to varying degrees understand. She often wondered, as she read, if perhaps the name of the Subject world was some sort of clue; it had been carefully removed from any and every book in the castle which mentioned it, the word cut out from each page it had been written on.

  Ajayi read the books she could. She took them from the littered floor of the games room, or from deteriorating walls and columns, only glancing at most of them, dropping or replacing those whose languages she couldn't understand, scanning the remainder and keeping to read later those which sounded interesting. Only about one in twenty or thirty was both comprehensible and intriguing. Quiss wasn't happy with her new pastime, and accused her of wasting not only her own time, but his as well. Ajayi had told him she needed something to keep her sane. Quiss still grumbled, but he was hardly blameless himself. He still went for his long walks through the castle, and sometimes didn't come back for several days. She had tried asking him what he did, but the reaction was always either blank or hostile.

  So she was reading, and gradually, with the use of some picture books she had discovered in one not-too-distant gallery, she was trying to teach herself one of the languages she kept encountering in the books which appeared to be written in one of the Subject world's own tongues. It was difficult - almost as though by design - but she was persevering, and after all, she had plenty of time.

  THE CAT SAT ON THE MAT. Well, it was a start.

  Ajayi put her last domino down. Quiss hesitated before completing the pattern, suddenly unsure which end of the line of tiles to put his last one on.

  The woman was getting restless, and soon, he guessed, it would be time to eat. And this would be another wasted, stupid game, like all the others, no matter what way he put this piece down. They should have come up with a solution by now, a good pattern, a logical arrangement that would satisfy whatever subtle mechanism existed within the small table. But they hadn't. Were they doing something wrong? Had something escaped them in their attempt to escape? They had checked and re-checked and didn't think so.

  Perhaps they were just unlucky.

  Already they had gone through three sets of the pieces; three times he had become so frustrated with the whole idiotic exercise he had just thrown the dominoes away, out over the balcony; once while still in their ivory box, once lifting the table and shaking it over the edge of the balcony (Ajayi had almost died of fright, he remembered with a grim smile; she thought he was going to throw the table away too, and there was only one table; no replacements. If it was destroyed or badly damaged then they were not allowed to play any more games, and therefore could give no more answers), and once he had just cuffed the bone pieces off the table surface and sent them scattering through the pot-bellied slatework of the balcony's balustrade. (However, now the seneschal was saying he would have the table bolted to the floor.)

  Well, what did they expect? He was a man of action. This constipated, decaying puzzle-palace wasn't his sort of place at all. Ajayi seemed to enjoy it at times, and he would have to sit sometimes, fidgeting, while she expounded on some philosophical or mathematical idea she thought might get them out of their predicament. He wasn't going to challenge her on what was more or less her home ground, but from the little that even he knew of philosophy, he thought that her smug positivism sounded too soulless and logical to be much use in the real world. What the hell was the point of trying rationally to analyse what was fundamentally irrational (or a-rational as she, splitting hairs as usual, would sometimes admit)? It was a way to arrive at personal madness and despair, not some universal understanding. But he wasn't going to put this to Ajayi; she'd smile tolerantly and shoot him down in flames, without a doubt. Know your strengths; don't attack where you're weak. That was his sort of philosophy; military. That and an acceptance that life was basically absurd, unfair and - ultimately -pointless.

  The woman read a lot. She was going downhill, even trying to understand one of the common languages she had found in the books on the games room floor and in the walls. It was a bad sign, Quiss was sure. She was starting to give in, not taking the games they were playing seriously. Or taking them too seriously; the wrong way. The appearance was taking over the reality. She was getting caught up in the surface of the games, not their real meaning, so that instead of getting the games over with as quickly as possible and so getting to their real goal - another crack at the riddle - she was starting to behave as though the playing, the motions and apparent choices, mattered.

  He wasn't going to give up, but he did need to escape this dead, desperate feeling the games and the woman gave him. He had escorted her round the castle for a while, showing her the odd places he had discovered, the one or two odd characters who existed in the place (the neurotic barber was his personal favourite), but gradually she had gone off more and more by herself, then seemingly become bored with it (or frightened, somehow, he wasn't sure), and stopped.

  He still visited the castle's lower floors and storeys, journeying down to the kitchens and even beyond, so far below he guessed he was almost down to the level of the snowy plain itself, deep inside the rocky crag the castle proper stood upon. There were a few strange things down there, and, past a certain level, a suspicious number of locked, stout, metal-banded doors.

  He had a few attendants he had partly befriended and partly terrorised into acting as guides for him. He told them he would put in a good word for them with the seneschal if they did what he wanted, but that if they didn't he would have them transferred to the slate mines or the ice-gathering expeditions. Apart from these bribes and threats (none of which he could deliver on as he had no influence whatsoever with the seneschal in such matters) he relied entirely on personal charm.

  The stunted minions led him to new places in and under the Castle of Bequest, and even told him things about themselves; that of course they too were exiles from the Wars, but from a somewhat lower scale than he and Ajayi. They even coyly revealed the secret of their physiology; Quiss listened patiently though in fact he knew all about their physical make-up, having taken one of them apart not long after he first arrived in the castle, trying to torture the truth out of it. So he knew that these failed soldiers had no solid bodies at all; he had peeled layer after layer off the one he was interrogating, robe after robe after vest after vest after tunic after tunic, taking off finer and finer layers of gloves and little socks and clothing, taking off mask after mask only to find smaller and smaller masks inside, and a sort of ubiquitous gooey stuff which permeated all the fabrics and in places acted like some silicone mixture, flowing easily but cracking when hit sharply. This whole, weird stripping process was accompanied by the gradually diminishing screams of the wretch he had tried his experiment on. The bits of it he tore off and threw to the ground moved weakly of their own accord, as though trying to reassemble themselves, while the bit he still held, slowly getting smaller and weaker and thinner as he went on, struggled hopelessly.

  Eventually he was holding nothing more than a sort of squidgy sack, like a sort of sticky fabric balloon from which a clear, odourless fluid wept, while all the rest of the layers and pieces of clothing trembled and spasmed on the glassy floor around him, their movements attracting the slowly writhing shapes of the luminescent fish in the waters below. He hung the whole scrappy assemblage out to dry, eventually, on a makeshift washing line. The wind moved the pieces so that he could not tell whether the thing was still in some dismembered way alive, or not. A few crows had pecked at the remains, but not for long. When he brought the bits back in to try and reassemble them, they had started
to smell, so he just threw it all away.

  He had asked the minions if they knew of anything the castle kitchens produced - or any other part of the castle produced, for that matter - which could get a chap merry? You know; drunk, happy, smashed, out of one's box? Did they?

  They looked at him, mystified.

  Drink? Fermented something-or-other. Brewed or distilled; boiling off vapours to leave alcohol behind, or even freezing water off...fruit, vegetables, grains... no? Any plants they knew of which, when you dried the leaves...?

  The minions had never heard of such things. He suggested they investigate, see if they could set something up. He met a few of them every now and again, and was even fairly confident that he could have picked them out in a crowd of the things. They weren't all identical, after all; they had slightly different patterns of stains and scorch-marks on their little robes which helped one to identify them, and of course their boots seemed to be colour-coded to their precise duty in the castle's service structure. The ones he had made contact with, this gullible gang, tried to do what he asked them. They stole food from the kitchens and hid bits and pieces of kitchenware under their cloaks. They tried to set up a still and a fermentation vat, but it didn't work. They produced a liquid at one rendezvous which made Quiss throw up just from the smell, and when he ordered them to take him to their equipment so that he could look it over and set it up properly, they explained that they had set it up in the only place they thought was safe from the prying eyes of the seneschal; their own quarters, where the cramped scale of their tiny cells and corridors made it impossible for the seneschal - and, alas, Quiss - to enter. They refused to set it up anywhere else. The seneschal would do much worse things to them than what Quiss was threatening. This was all strictly illegal and against the rules, didn't he know?

  Quiss was depressed by this. He had thought it would be possible to find some way of getting out of one's skull in this place. Perhaps it was thought that here in Castle Doors reality itself was so strange that there was no need for any substance to make it more so. That was Ajayi's sort of thinking; logical but out of touch, even naive.

  Then, by chance, he found something which really did do just that; alter reality. But not in the way he had expected.

  He had been exploring alone, deep down, well underneath the level of the kitchens and the great central clock mechanism. The walls were of naked slate, blasted and scraped out of the rock on which the castle stood. Light came from transparent pipes set in the ceiling, but it was cold and still quite dark. He came to one of the heavy, metal-strapped doors he had seen time and time again on his travels in the lower levels, but unlike all the rest, this one was open very slightly. He could see a glint of light as he passed; he stopped, looked around, then pulled the door towards him.

  It was a small, low-ceilinged room. The ceiling was like that of the upper reaches of the castle, made of glass, with a few dim specimens of the light-fish swimming slowly to and fro. The floor was rock. The room had one other door, on the far wall, also constructed of wood and metal strapping. In the centre of the room, alone in the place, stood a small stool. Above it was what looked like a hole in the glass ceiling.

  Quiss looked up and down the dark corridor. There was nobody about. He slipped into the room, observing as he did so that the door had in fact been locked, but somehow the bolt had missed the hole it ought to have slipped into. He let the door swing to behind him, so that it caught on the extruded bolt, but was as closed and as unobstrusive from the outside as possible. He explored the small room.

  The far door was locked securely. There was nothing in the place except for the small stool under the hole in the ceiling glass. It looked like the stools the scullions employed to bring themselves up to the right level to attend to their duties in the kitchens. The hole above the stool was dark; something seemed to be shielding the inside of the hole from the glow of the light-fish. A large, shadowy shape filled a circle nearly a metre in diameter around the hole, which was ringed with what looked like some sort of fur, like a collar, and which was just about big enough for a human head to go through. Warily, Quiss went up to it. He stood on the stool.

  There were two metal bands, hoops of iron which extended from the lower surface of the glass ceiling's iron reinforcing bands, with leather pads on them. The U-shaped pieces of metal were on either side of the hole, a little over half a metre apart, and hanging about a quarter of a metre down from the ceiling. Looking at them more closely, Quiss saw they were adjustable; they could be lowered or raised slightly, and set further apart or closer together. He didn't like the look of them. He had seen pieces of torturing apparatus which looked vaguely similar.

  He peered up into the dark hole in the glass ceiling. He carefully touched the fur surround. It seemed ordinary enough. He took the end of his loose-fitting fur sleeve and poked the pinched cuff up into the hole. It came back down unscathed, and he inspected it carefully. He grimaced, stuck a small finger into the gap. Nothing. He put his whole hand in. There was the faintest of tingling feelings, like blood going back into a cold limb after a winter's walk.

  He looked at his hand. It too seemed undamaged and the tingling had disappeared. He put his head tentatively up towards the hole, the fur tickling his grey-haired head. The hole smelled of... fur, if anything. He stuck his head up inside, not the full way, and only briefly. He had a very vague sensation of tingling on his skin, and an even more vague impression of scattered lights.

  He put his hand in one more time, felt the tickling, tingling on it, then checked the door again. He stood on the stool and put his head fully up into the hole.

  The tingling disappeared quickly. The impression of tiny scattered lights, like a rather too consistent starfield, stayed, and it made no difference whether his eyes were open or not. He thought for a moment he could hear voices, but wasn't sure. The lights were unsettling. He felt he could make them out individually, but at the same time felt there were too many - far too many - to count, or even for him to be able to see separately. Also, he had the disturbing impression that he was looking at the surface of a globe; all of it, all of it at once, in some way spread out in front of him so that no part of it hid another pan. His mind swam. The lights seemed to beckon him, and he could feel himself starting to slide down towards them, then pull back as he fought the impulse. He arrived back at some still point.

  He got down out of the hole again. He rubbed his chin. Very odd. He put his head back in. Temporarily ignoring the lights, he snapped his fingers, outside, in the room. He could just hear the small sound. He felt for the iron loops and put his arms through them, supporting himself there as one was obviously meant to.

  He felt the pull of those lights again, and let himself go towards them, sliding down towards one area. He found that just by thinking about them he could head for other areas. It was as though he was parachuting, able to steer however he wanted as he fell.

  As he approached the area of lights he was sliding towards, he got the impression of them also being strangely globe-like yet spread out. He still had the impression that he could see too many, that they should not look so individual for their apparent size, but he ignored this as he approached the surface of whatever the lights were placed upon. He tried to convince himself that he was floating towards the outside of the sphere, that he had started at the centre and worked his way out, but for some reason he felt he was falling down the way, onto a convex surface.

  A single light approached; an orb of shifting, multi-coloured hues, like something cellular, dividing and re-dividing within a single membrane, yet with the patterns in the sphere somehow like distorted pictures, images thrown haphazardly on an unfixed screen. He felt himself float round this odd, scaleless thing, the other lights still apparently as far away as they had always been, and he felt oddly attracted to this globe of light, and that he could somehow, without damage to it or himself, enter inside it.

  He was still, when he thought about it, aware he was standing in the room. He sn
apped his fingers, felt the edge of his tunic sleeve where it still hung at his side, then willed himself to enter the glowing, slowly pulsing sphere.

  It was like walking into a room filled with babbling voices and lit with chaotic, ever-changing images. His head was full of confusion for a moment, then he thought he started to glimpse patterns and real shapes within the inchoate mix.

  He let himself relax slightly, ready to watch, and just then all the images and noises seemed to coalesce, become part of some single feeling, which included the impression of touch and taste and smell as well. Quiss reacted against this, and was back in the noisy, gaudily chaotic room-feeling. He relaxed again, just a little more warily and slowly. The strange crystallisation of sensation occurred again, and slowly Quiss became aware of some sort of other thought-process, a set of feelings which was at once intimately close but still utterly cut off from him.

  The truth of what was going on suddenly hit him, stunning him. He was inside somebody else's head.

  He was so amazed he didn't have time to be revolted or really shocked before the novelty, the sheer interest of it all, took him, excited him. He shifted his body slightly, feeling in a very distant sort of way, like something in a dream, his feet move on the small stool he stood on, his armpits settling a little more comfortably into the leather-softened hoops.

  He felt a moment of dizziness as the light and sound swelled around him, then a sudden, sharp feeling of anxiety; fear and distress. He smelled burning, heard loud, crude engine noises, saw metal wheeled vehicles frighteningly close (the fear increased, he felt dizzy again, sensed he was somehow losing contact), then he looked up, or the person whose head he was in did, and saw a blue, blue sky, like some polished, blue, shining sphere, some immense, smooth and flawless jewel.