by Iain Banks
I'm not mollified but I make a half-smile and give a grudgingly confirmatory grunt.
"Agreed?" Eddie asks.
"Okay," I say, nodding. "Agreed."
"Good," Eddie says, sitting back. "Anyway. How's everything else going? Liked that piece on the submarine, incidentally; nicely balanced; just hovering on the brink of editorialising, but never quite going over. Good stuff, good stuff… By the by, I hear rumours you might have something interesting coming up involving a government mole, that true?"
I fix Eddie with my best steely look. It seems to bounce off. "What's Frank been saying?" I ask.
"I didn't say I heard it through Frank," Eddie says, looking all innocent and open. Too innocent and open. "A few people have mentioned you seem to have something on the go, something you're not telling anybody about. I'm not prying; I don't want to know anything about it yet. I just wondered if these rumours are true."
"Well, they are," I say, hating having to admit it.
"I — " Eddie begins, then his phone rings. He looks annoyed as he answers it.
"Morag, I thought — " he says, then his expression changes to one of sour resignation. "Yes, all right. Just a second."
He presses the mute button and looks apologetically at me. "Cameron, sorry; this bloody Fettesgate thing. High-altitude leaning going on. Got to field all this stuff. Nice talking to you. See you later."
I leave the office feeling like I've just been to see the headmaster. Retreat to toilets for nose-to-nose with Auntie Crystal. Thank fuck for drugs.
Andy and Clare and I walked through the Strathspeld estate, from the house across the lawn and the terrace and through the shrub garden and the forest, down into the glen and out again, up to the wooded hill beyond and the densely overgrown dip where the old air-shaft chimney was.
The chimney was one of two on the hill; the old railway line ran directly underneath. The line had been closed for thirty years and the tunnel entrances had been first boarded up and then filled in with rubble. The viaduct over the Speld a half-mile away had been demolished, so that only the piers were still visible in the rushing waters. The tracks themselves had been torn up, leaving a long, flat-floored canyon curving under the trees of the estate.
The two air-shaft chimneys — squat dark cylinders of undressed stone a couple of metres across and a little over half that high, each capped with an iron grating — had vented the steam and smoke from the trains in the tunnel. You could climb up onto them and sit on the rusting iron grid — afraid it would give way but afraid to admit you were afraid — and look down into that utter blackness, and sometimes catch the cold, dead scent of the abandoned tunnel, rising up around you like some remorseless chilly breath. From there, too, you could let stones fall into the darkness, to land with a distant, hardly heard thud on the floor of the tunnel thirty or forty metres below. Once Andy and I had come here with old newspapers and a box of matches and dropped the lit, twisted papers into the hole and watched them slowly fall flaming, spiralling silently downwards into the blackness until they hit the tunnel floor.
Andy was eleven, Clare ten, and I was nine. We were there for a ceremony. Andy was slightly plump at the time, Clare agreeably normal. I was — everybody agreed — wiry, but I'd probably fill out, like my dad had.
"Blimey!" Clare said. "Dark in here, isn't it?"
It was dark. In high summer the outrageously tangled bushes around the chimney grew fast and green and blocking, starving the hollow of light. We'd had to fight our way in here to the little oasis of calm clarity around the forgotten chimney itself. Now that we were here, in its little green cave, the light seemed dim and clotted.
Clare shivered and clung to Andy, face puckering in pretended terror. "Argh, help!"
Andy grinned, putting an arm round her. "Never fear, sis."
"Do the dreadful deed!" she cried, making a face at me.
"You first," Andy said, handing the packet to me.
I took the box, extracted a cigarette from it and put it in my mouth. Andy fumbled with the match, lit it, then quickly put it to the cigarette. I sucked hard, eyes narrowed.
I inhaled a smell of sulphur, coughed immediately, turned appropriately green and nearly threw up.
Andy and his sister laughed themselves hoarse while I kept on coughing.
They each tried smoking, too, and pronounced it utterly foul, quite disgusting, what did people see in it? Adults were mad.
Andy said, But it looked good; had we ever seen Casablanca with Humphrey Bogart? There was a film. And who could imagine Rick without a cigarette in his hand if not hanging from his mouth? (Clare and I could, as we mugged to each other. Hell, I'd seen that film a couple of Christmases ago, hadn't I? It was a Marx Brothers movie and there was nobody called Humphrey Bogart in it I could remember.)
We tried another cigarette, and by then I'd — maybe instinctively — sussed how to handle it.
I was getting a hit from the stuff! I really toked on that second fag. Andy and Clare just sipped at it, took it into their mouths but not their lungs, not their beings, didn't accept it into their own personal ecospheres; just giggled childishly, peripheral.
Not me. I sucked that smoke in and made it part of me, joined mystically with the universe right at that point, said Yes to drugs forever just by the unique hit I got from that one packet of fags Andy liberated from his dad. It was a revelation, an epiphany; a sudden realisation that it was possible for matter — something there in front of you, in your hand, in your lungs, in your pocket — to take your brain apart and reassemble it in ways you hadn't thought of previously.
This was better than religion, or this was what people always meant by religion! The whole point was that this worked! People said Believe In God or Be Good or Do Well At School or Buy This or Vote For Me or whatever, but nothing actually worked the way substances worked, nothing fucking well delivered like they did. They were truth. Everything else was falsehood.
I became a semi-junkie that day, that afternoon, that hour, that second-fag-length moment. In that first virginal rush of toxins to the brain I believe I started to become my later self; I finally had my internal eyes opened to my true being. Truth and revelation. What is actually going on? What is literally the case? What really works?
There you are, the Journo Catechism, the truth-teller's tale, written in any damn scrip or script you care to choose to denominate, elect to go for or designate. WHAT FUCKING WORKS?
I rest my case.
We threw the burned-out fag-butts down the chimney into the darkness without further ceremony. We walked back towards the house and while Andy was ahead of us he suddenly announced a race, so we yelled, protesting, and darted off after him over the last hundred metres, sprinting across the lawn and the gravel to the porch.
Breathless in the main hall, all pronounced the experiment at the old chimney a failure… but in my heart I knew different.
CHAPTER 3: DESPOT
Despot is a world-builder game from the HeadCrash Brothers, the same team that brought us Brits, Raj and Reich. It's their latest, biggest and best, it's Byzantinely complicated, baroquely beautiful, spectacularly immoral and utterly, utterly addictive. It's only been out for two months and I've played it practically every day since the muggy Monday morning in late August when I first stepped out of the Virgin games shop on Castle Street clutching my shrink-wrapped copy and scuttled back to the office reading the outside of the pack like some "sixties ten-year-old with the latest Airfix model.
I'm sat in the flat in Cheyne Street, playing the game when I should be working on a story. The trouble is that the game and the machine go together so well; the HeadCrash team designed Despot so that it takes advantage of whatever configuration of system it's being played on, with the maximum on a PC being a 386SX running at 25Mhz with at least 2Mb of RAM and 8Mb of hard-disk space free plus an S3-based graphics card fitted. The game will run on anything down to an Atari 520ST and still work (but it won't look remotely as good, run so fast or have all the int
eractive features) and obviously it'll look just as good and do everything on a better-than-maximum machine, but it just so happens that the above spec is exactly what I've got on my machine.
This is purely a coincidence, of course; it's not fate, not karma, not anything except a fortuitous accident, but dammit, it's just so neat! No waste! No fat! Just exactly the right, most elegantly eco-optimum system — as near to state-of-the-art as I could afford at the time, barely a year ago and I'm still paying the now quite superseded bastard off — to run this stunningly Machiavellian turbo-screamer of a game; an instant classic, easily a year ahead of its time and just possibly better than sex.
I'm playing Despot but I'm thinking about sex. I'm definitely seeing Y tomorrow and I can't stop thinking about sex. I've got an erection and I'm sitting here in front of the machine in the darkness, crouched here in the box room of the flat with the light off and the radio on and the computer screen awash with the seductive, gently scrolling graphics of Despot and the light from the screen — blue, ochre, red, green — throws the shadow of my cock onto my belly and the damn thing's getting in the way all the time so that I keep putting it under the desk where it rubs hard up against the metal strut at the front of the desk until that gets cold and uncomfortable and I have to push back in the chair and let the thick, bobbing weight of it rest against the edge of the chipboard, its big purple head and one little slit-mouth-eye staring dumbly, questioningly up at me like some mute, warm little puppy, distracting me, and I keep thinking I ought to have a wank but I don't want to because I want to save it all for Y, not because Y particularly desires that or it affects my performance but because it just seems important, part of the correct pre-coital ritual.
Maybe I should just put some pants on and control the thing but I kind of like sitting here in the nude and feeling the gentle breeze of warm air from the fan heater in the corner blowing over my skin. So, the big wee man is throbbing, looking forward to a welcome in the hillsides, a homecoming in the glen (even if it's prepared to be palmed off with less), but meanwhile the game is there to be played, and threatens to play with itself if I do the same. Because Despot is interactive, Despot will go on building your world for you even if you leave it alone because it actually watches you; it learns your playing style, it knows you, it will actually try its little damnedest to become you. All world-builder games — emulating life or at least some aspect of it — develop and change according to their programmed rules if you leave them running alone, but Despot is the only one that with a bit of coaching will actually attempt to emulate you.
I light another Silk Cut and sip a little whisky. I'm staying off the speed for now but when I get to the next era-level in the game — and I'm hovering within a few GNP points of it at the moment — I'm going to roll a number. I draw hard on the Silk Cut, filling my lungs with the fumes. I've smoked a packet since six this evening when I started working and then turned to the game. Half a bottle of whisky's gone too, and the inside of my mouth's got that rough, granular feel it gets when I've been drinking the stuff.
I gag on the smoke.
This happens sometimes when I've been smoking too much. I grind the fag out in the ashtray and cough a bit and then look at the cigarette packet. I've been meaning to give up for a while. I keep thinking, What is the point of using this drug? The only cigarettes I ever get any actual hit from are the ones I have first thing in the morning (when I'm barely half-awake anyway and in no state to enjoy it and my chest's usually hurting from the morning cough), and sometimes the first one after I've had a few drinks. Oh, and the one I have after I've given up for a few days. Or hours.
I take the packet up in my hand. My fist almost closes. In fact it seems to me that I do actually see my hand close, see the packet crumple and contract, almost as though I've actually done it. But then I think, Shit, there's only five fags out of the box. I ought to smoke those first; it would be a waste not to.
I take out another cigarette, light it and draw deeply. I gag again, coughing and hacking and feeling the whisky and the can of Export I had earlier slosh around inside me, almost coming up. My eyes are watering. What a stupid drug, what a completely useless fucking drug; no real hit after the first drag, highly addictive and lethal in all sorts of ways, and even if the lung cancer or the heart disease doesn't get you you can look forward to gangrenous legs in your old age, bits of your body just rotting away still attached and dying in instalments for you, rotting and stinking while you're still alive and then they have to cut them off and you wake up after the operation wheezing and burning with pain and gasping for a fag. Meanwhile the tobacco companies sponsor sport and fight off advertising bans and look forward to all the new markets in the East and the Far East and more women taking up the weed to show that they can be brainless fucks too, and suits with worm-shit in their brains go on television and say, "Well, nobody's actually proved how tobacco causes cancer you know," and you sit there seething and then you find Thatcher is taking half a million from Philip Morris for a three-year consultancy and you swear never to buy any of their products ever again but at the end of the day you still light another cigarette and suck in the smoke like you enjoyed it and make more profits for those evil fucks.
Okay. I've worked myself up enough; I crush the packet. It doesn't crumple very satisfactorily because there are so many fags still inside it, but I persevere and use two hands and get it down to about half its earlier volume and then take it to the toilet and tear it open and empty the broken, folded cigarettes into the pan and pull the handle and watch most of them just float and swirl in the churning water and get so annoyed at them for not all just flushing away out of my life like I want them to that I get down on my knees and put my hands into the water and one by one push their broken bodies and the rest of the paper and tobacco debris down into the water and back round the U-bend so that they float up on the other side and I can't see them, then I wash my hands and dry them and by that time the cistern's full again and I flush it and this time the water's clear at the end and I can breathe at last.
I open the skylight in the toilet and the one in the box room to get a through draught and stand there shivering until I pull on my dressing-gown, feeling mightily pleased with myself. I sit down at the computer to find that my era-rating in Despot has slipped back a bit while all this has been going on, but I don't care; I feel righteous.
I suck the cold night air in and laugh, snapping the mouse around the desk surface like a wild thing while the little hand sprite on the screen flashes from control surface to display, grabbing icons and throwing them about my empire like thunderbolts, building roads, dredging ports, burning forests, digging mines and — using the very ironic Icon icon — opening more temples to myself.
A horde of barbarians from the unexplored steppes to the south tries to invade and I lose an hour fighting the bastards off and have to rebuild the Great Wall before I can get back to the Court display and continue my long-term strategy of weakening the power of the regional lords and the Church by making the palace so luxuriantly, sumptuously steeped in the ways of the flesh that the barons and the bishops become hopelessly decadent voluptuaries and hence ripe for the picking while my merchant classes prosper and I encourage cautious technological development.
I have another whisky and a bowl of Coco Pops with lots of milk. My hand keeps reaching for the place where the cigarette packet would normally be, but I'm coping with the cravings and surviving so far. I really want some speed but I know if I have any I'll want a cigarette afterwards, so I leave it alone.
I have a brainwave and get my secret police to go down to the bazaar and find some drug dealers; bingo! The dealers are introduced to the Court and soon most of the people I've been working on are thoroughly hooked. It occurs to me this might actually be a better way of controlling things than just bumping people off, which is what the secret police are usually best at. I call it a day at 4 a.m. and only feel slightly jittery as I head for bed. I can't get to sleep and I keep thinking about
Y; after half an hour I give in and have a wank and fall gratefully asleep afterwards.
The building is warm and smells of dog. You pull him through the door and lock it. The hounds are already yelping and barking. You turn on the light.
The kennels block is about the size of a double garage; its breeze-block walls are bare. Strip-lights hang from the ceiling. There is a broad central corridor between two rows of pens, also made from breeze blocks. The internal walls extend to just over head height and are open at the top; the pens are floored with straw over concrete and the front of each pen is formed by a gate made from light angle-iron and chicken wire.
So far everything has gone well. You came across the fields and through the wood just after sunset, checking the place out with the night sight and finding the big house dark and empty. The alarm box high up on one gable wall glowed soft red; you had already decided not to attempt breaking in. You went down the drive. The gatehouse was dark, too; the gamekeeper would be back after the pub in the village closed. Far enough up the drive so that it wouldn't be seen from the main road, you felled a small tree with the handsaw, then sat down to wait. The Range Rover came growling up the drive two hours later. He was alone, still wearing his city suit; you coshed him while he was standing looking down at the tree; the car's idling motor covered any noise you made and he didn't even turn round. You just drove the Range Rover right over the tree.
His arms move weakly as you haul him across the concrete and prop him against the gate of one of two unoccupied pens. The dogs" barks change as they see their master. You put your day-pack down on the concrete, take out some plastic ties and hold them in your mouth as you try to haul him to his feet, but he's too heavy. His eyelids are flickering. You let him slump back again so that he's sitting against the chicken-wire gate and when his eyes start to open you pull his head forward by the hair and cosh him again. He falls to the side. You put the plastic ties back in your pocket. You're thinking. The foxhounds continue barking and yelping.