Walking on Glass

by Iain Banks

  "All the same, though, like you say," Quiss said, "it's better than nothing."

  "To be a parasite? To end up with your head stuck inside some cheap biological time machine? I don't believe it. I thought more, even of you. I haven't lied to you, you know. The truth is quite awful enough. It's not as though these zombies really do influence the people whose brains they inhabit. The seneschal might like to pretend that they do, that free will increases with time and these people account for the sudden impulses in the primitives they haunt, but that's all nonsense. The creatures around the holes may make them think that, but experiments I have carried out myself indicate quite definitely that only the illusion of this effect exists and anyway, which is the more likely explanation?

  "I tell you: these people are as good as dead. Theirs is a dreaming death."

  "Still better than nothing," Quiss insisted. "Definitely."

  The red crow was silent for some time, flapping lazily in front of him, hovering there, black eyes staring, expressionless. Eventually it said, "Then, warrior, you have no soul."

  It flew in a semi-circle around him, heading back for the black wall which was the castle's base. 'We'd better get back," it said. "Ask the seneschal about this place, if you like. He will be angry, but he will not punish you and he cannot punish me. Ask him," the red crow said as it beat back to the curved wall of the roots of the Castle Doors, the Castle of Bequest, "anything at all. He will confirm that I almost none escape, that most end up here, or- the brave ones, the really civilised ones - kill themselves."

  They arrived back at the door; it was still ajar. The red crow flapped at its side as Quiss, following it back, walked past the pillars and columns and dreaming people. At the same man, in furs, on a stool, he had looked at earlier, he stopped and turned to the red crow saying, "Let me ask you something."

  "Yes, of course you can have a preview," the red crow said, and started to fly towards him. "There's an empty -"

  "Oh no," Quiss said, shaking his head, looking at the bird as it stopped near him. Quiss nodded at the skinny man in the furs with his head stuck in the glass ceiling. "I was just wondering if you knew anything about him, say. What's his name? How long's he been here?"

  "What?" the red crow said, sounding a little confused, even upset (Quiss concealed the thrill of triumph which shivered through him). "Him?" The red crow fluttered a little closer. "Oh, he's been here for ages," it said, its voice recovering its usual composure. "Name's... Godot? Goriot? Gerrut; something like that. The records aren't perfect, you know. An odd case... listen, are you sure you don't want to see what it's like? I can show you where -"

  "No," Quiss said firmly, and walked smartly to the door leading back to the castle. "I'm not interested. Let's go back now."

  And he had gone to the seneschal, who in the kitchens" clamour had confirmed most of what the red crow had said.

  "So?" the seneschal had said, obviously annoyed. "You have seen your most likely fate; what of it? What am I supposed to do about it? Just think yourself lucky you didn't take the red crow up on its offer; once you're in one of those things properly you don't come out of your own free will; too beguiling. If somebody doesn't come to get you out you stay there, tapping every form of human excitement. By the time your belly rumbles you're hooked. You come out for food and it's just a grey dream compared to what you have just left.

  "That's what the bird was up to. It would have shown you the free ceiling-port down there, then just have left you. And don't trust it on free will, either. The ceiling-ports allow full control of the primitives" minds. Everything can be altered. Every mind contains its own universe. We can be sure of nothing. That is all I have to say. If you want to enter officially that place which you have already seen informally, file a notice of surrender with me through the proper channels. Now go away, please." The seneschal had scowled, and gone back up the rickety wooden steps to his office, away from the continuing chaos of the kitchens.

  Quiss had gone back to the games room, his old legs quite exhausted by the time he got back.

  He said nothing to Ajayi.

  He stood on the parapet of the balcony.

  Yes, the red crow had been right. It did not know it, it could never have been sure, it had probably only dwelled on the awfulness of the dreamers" fate to bluff him into trying the experience out, so that it could leave him there, but it had been right, nevertheless, about the eventual effect of its revelation.

  The thought of that low, limitless space beneath the castle had filled Quiss's thoughts - and, more importantly, his dreams - for almost a hundred days and nights since. A deep, dark depression had settled on him, weighing him down like some heavy suit of armour. He felt like some warrior, chain-mailed, stumbling into quicksand...

  He could not keep his mind from dwelling on what he had seen, on the sheer extent of the place beneath them, that impression of claustrophobic infinity. So many people, so many failed hopes, lost games, surrendered dreams; and the castle, a single island of warped chance in a frozen ocean of missed opportunities.

  That bright, beguiling image he had held on to all these days, of those brown arms, that blue sky, the single shining line of contrail; it returned only to hurt him now, taunt him in his dreams. In that deep, dark, echoless and echo-filled space far beneath him, his mind was already lost; sideless, wall-less the place, bottomless his despair.

  His hope, his determination - once so fierce, so furious and powerful and energetic - had ground to a halt, rusted up; seized.

  The castle's doing. That was its effect, on those within it as well as on itself. To grind down, to slowly, slowly abrade and at the same time fuse, wearing away and seizing up at once, like sand-laden water in some huge engine. He felt like that now. He felt like some grain of sand inside the place, no more important.

  He stared down at the crags and snow far below him, rocked once back and forward on his feet, felt himself tremble. His jaw wanted to shake, but he clenched his teeth. The wind gusted, swaying him. Cold as a glacier, he thought, smiling grimly. A slow-flowing glacier. A fit image to take to his death, he thought, and remembered the room of flowed glass, the final straw which had eventually followed the red crow's revelation. That had been the real trigger, that was why he really stood here.

  It was a room he had discovered, just that day, on one of his now infrequent walks. He had wandered, lost as usual, then he had come to a room inside the thick walls where the wind blew in and snow heaped on the glass floor under the windows.

  In the window spaces there were the remains of metal frames; he noticed this as he went to the aperture to look out and so get his bearings from the landscape beyond (he should see the slate mines if his sense of direction was right, but it had been failing him with increasing frequency lately).

  Something like clear tar had flowed from the almost empty frames, where only a thin edge of glass lay in the bottom of each hexagon of the metal frames. The glass under his feet was dark. He looked out of the windows, eyes narrowed against the cold, funnelled wind moaning quietly through the deep slit. The floor sloped slightly, up to the windows. Clear stuff, like ice, stuck to the walls under the windows. He stooped, grunting with effort, to examine it, finally got down stiffly to his knees, scraping at the floor (there was a slate floor just underneath the thin covering of glass). He tapped at the clear stuff still in the window frames above, then ran one finger down from the glass still in the frames, over the sill, down over the clear flow on the walls until finally his finger slid all the way down without a flaw, crack or join registering under his fingertip, to the floor.

  The glass in the bottom of the frames, on the narrow sill, on the walls under the windows and on the floor of the room was joined. It was all one. He stayed kneeling and let his hands rest in his sloped lap. He stared ahead.

  He recalled, from when he could not remember, that glass - ordinary glass, made from sand - was theoretically a liquid, that in old buildings" very sensitive measuring equipment could detect a significan
t thinning at the top of the pane, and a corresponding thickening at the bottom of the sheet as the glass gradually gave in to the incessant pull of gravity. In the Castle of Bequest, in places at least, the process had simply had time to go further. The glass had flowed - was still flowing - from the frame, over the sill, down the wall, to the floor.

  He knelt, realised this, and after a little while, to his own astonishment, he started to cry.

  The mines, anyway, had not been visible from the windows; he had wandered again, mind blank, until he found himself back where he had started, in the empty games room.

  He had made for the balcony almost automatically, then stopped to think; vaguely, almost innocently surprised at the ease with which he was suddenly able to accept his own death, even desire it.

  And, thinking, there was nothing.

  So he had climbed up onto the cold stone parapet.

  Now he knew what the red crow had meant by soul, and that a-religious quality of irreducible character, that selfness, would now articulate its most profound self-statement, in its own destruction.

  Quiss closed his eyes, leaned forward into space.

  Arms closed around his waist; he was pulled back. He opened his eyes to see the sky tipping, the wall of the castle above the balcony slanting over him as he fell. Ajayi gasped as they thumped together onto the slate of the balcony floor. Quiss rolled over, into the warmth of the games room, banging his head on the glass floor.

  He looked up, dazed, to see Ajayi lying on the floor of the balcony itself, her chest heaving, her eyes wide and staring at him. She was picking herself up. "Quiss -"

  He scrambled to his feet, drew back his hand and hit her hard across the face, knocking her to the ground again. "Leave me alone!" he shouted. "Why can't you leave me alone?" he screamed. He bent down and picked her up. Her mouth was bleeding, her face was white. She cried out, and put her hands up in front of her face to protect herself; he threw her into the games room and she staggered across the floor, tripped on some fallen books and went sprawling. He went after her. "You just can't leave me alone, can you?" he sobbed. His eyes were filling with tears, his hands and arms shook. He bent and picked the woman off the floor again; she brought her hands up, her eyes tightly screwed up, face grimacing; he slapped her and she cried out again, falling to the floor as he let her go. He drew back his foot to kick her, as she lay, curled up on :he glass floor, hands over her head, crying.

  He saw the games table, not far away, with the pack of cards lying on it. He didn't kick the woman, but stamped over to the small table, got hold of it by two of its legs, took it over to the woman, then as she looked up, eyes wide with fear, he raised the table over his head (she cringed, cowered, hands over her head again; the cards fluttered down), he swung the table down, into the glass floor near her head, shattering the table and smashing a network of cracks a jagged metre in diameter on the floor's transparent surface.

  The table disintegrated; the small red jewel at its centre broke into a thousand pieces, a tracery of shining filaments burst from the table's intricate surface, sparking and spitting for a second, then smoking and going dull, and the solid legs of the table sprang open, cracking and revealing tightly compressed pages with print on them. Quiss kicked the debris, then turned away, covering his eyes with his hands and sobbing.

  He stumbled off, into the back of the room, away from the balcony.

  Ajayi looked up, over the remains of the shattered table, and saw Quiss bump into the wall by the winding-stair. He staggered down the first few steps and disappeared. She breathed again, dabbed at her split lip with the hem of her furs.

  She sat up properly on the glass surface, moving away from where a thin pool of warm salty water was spreading from the cracks where the table had hit. She was trembling.

  She looked at what was left of the table.

  Well, they had played their last game; they had been left in no doubt about that. No table, no valid games. So they had just their one, unused answer left.

  She tried to think calmly, wondering what had made Quiss want to kill himself. She didn't know. He had been increasingly morose recently, but would not talk about the reasons, if there were any. She had hoped he would come out of it; he had been depressed before, as had she, but for the last hundred days there had been a special sort of despair about him, and he had just kept on going downhill, unwilling to talk about it or be cheered up. Perhaps she shouldn't have left him alone just now, but what could she do? If he was determined to kill himself there was nothing she could really do about it. It was his life, it was his right. Maybe she was just being selfish.

  She stood up shakily. She was a little dazed, and she hurt in a variety of places. Well, nothing was broken; that was something to be thankful for.

  She noticed that the legs of the small table had been made out of books. A couple of them had torn covers and pages; bits of them were still stuck to the veneer of wood which had covered them when they were still part of the table. There had been one or two books making up each of the three legs. The books were written in English.

  "Titus Groan," she read, talking softly to herself. "The Castle, Labyrinths, The Trial..." And another book, which had the title page missing. She glanced over the torn remains of the first page instead, and frowned.

  She looked at the other books she held. This was interesting. She had been looking for a couple of them, having read about them in some of the literary guides and commentaries which she was using to select which books she ought to read. They hadn't been in the places in the castle where she had expected to find them. Perhaps it was significant that they had turned up instead inside the games table. She looked again at the book with no title page.

  She decided she would read this nameless book first. Anyway, it might help calm her down, take her mind off things...

  Yes, she thought, as she walked over to her stool, she would read this one first, then the others. She would just have to hope Quiss would be all right. They still had that last answer to come up with.

  She sat down.

  She started reading.

  After all, what else was there to do?

  The story began:

  He walked through the white corridors.

  PART SIX

  TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES

  The trees stood around the canal where it appeared out of the tunnel under the hill he had just walked over. Graham went through a small gate and down a path to the old towpath, through grass and flowers. Some distant part of his mind seemed to whisper to him that he had followed the line of the tunnel over the hill that he had walked from the house in Half Moon Crescent, which was over the tunnel, to here, its mouth.

  A sudden, quite physical pain made his guts constrict as he remembered the day he had stood in the street, talking up to her about secret passages down to the tunnel... he shook his head to dislodge the thought.

  He found that he had to breathe deeply, more deeply than he had been, to clear his head and quell his stomach. He stood on one bank of the canal, looking over to the far side and the bank of grass there, over the calm, still water. He listened to the distant noises of the traffic; another wailing siren, perhaps the ambulance he had seen. He looked around for a place to sit, and walked along the path a little way, until he came to a place where some tarmac had been scattered and there were black drops of what looked like dried blood lying on the dusty surface of the towpath; flies buzzed.

  In the grass he saw a magazine lying, torn. He looked more closely at it, saw a woman's buttocks, over a pair of hairy knees. The woman's bottom was reddened slightly; there was a hand poised, too obviously posed, not in motion, over her. A small breeze ruffled the pages of the magazine for him as he looked, as obligingly as any Hollywood wind-machine stripping a calendar between scenes. The pictures in the rest of the magazine were almost all identical.

  He turned away, disgusted with something other than the pathetic but relatively harmless fetish of the magazine, and saw a flurry of flies swirl into the
air from something dark in the grass; it looked like an animal's leg.

  He closed his eyes, willing tears to come, some final part of him giving in only now, wanting the surrender to animal emotion which until now he had fought against, but as he stood there he could feel no tears coming, only a son of resigned, ugly bitterness, a comprehensive revulsion for everything around him, for all the people and their artefacts and thoughts, all their stupid ways and pointless aims. He opened his smarting eyes, blinking angrily.

  Here it was; this was what it all really meant; here was your civilisation, your billion years of evolution, right here; a soiled and tattered wanking-mag and chopped domestic animal. Sex and violence, writ small like all our standard fantasies.

  The pain in his belly which had afflicted him earlier returned, sharp and fierce as a rusty blade.

  It swelled in him then, like some wildfire cancer; a rapid disgust, a total allergy syndrome directed at everything around him; at the filthy, eviscerated mundanity of it all, the sheer crawling awful-ness of existence; all the lies and the pain, the legalized murder, the privileged theft, the genocides and the hatreds and the stupefying human cruelties, all the starveling beauty of the burgeoning poor and the crippled in body and brain, all the life-defying squalor of the cities and the camps, all the sweltering frenetics of the creeds and the faiths, all the torturingly ingenious, carefully civilised savagery of the technology of pain and the economies of greed; all the hollow, ringing, bullshitting words used to justify and explain the utter howling grief of our own cruelty and stupidity; it piled on him, in him, like a weight of atmosphere, that awful mass of air above for those moments no longer balanced by a pressure within, so that he felt at once crushed, smashed inside, but swollen too; bursting with the sickening burden of a cheap and tumid revelation.

  He turned towards the canal, his belly like a lump of lead inside him. His tongue felt swollen; there was a thickness in his throat, and his tongue, that instrument of articulation, felt like a great poisoned sac, some gland caught full of all the body's wastes and debris, tight with putrid volume, ripe as any bloated carcase. He fought the urge to heave, tried to ignore his trembling guts. He took his portfolio, and by the side of the canal he opened it and drew out the large sheets of paper inside.