Whit

by Iain Banks

  'Wimps!'

  * * *

  The big, dark blue car swept into the drive of Clissold's Health Farm and Country Club. We had encountered a few police vehicles, and passed a lay-by where they were checking an old, decrepit-looking coach, but we hadn't been stopped.

  The Health Farm and Country Club proved to be a mansion with what looked like a giant conservatory tacked onto the back. I suppose I had been expecting something more farm-like. The mansion's grounds looked old, neat and manicured, just like the receptionist.

  'I'm afraid Miss Whit checked out this morning.'

  'Oh drat.'

  'Shit!'

  'Did she say where she was going?' I asked.

  'Well, I wouldn't be able to tell you if she had, but-'

  'Oh for God's sakes; this is her cousin; and she's my-' Yolanda broke off and looked at me, frowning. 'Hell, what is Morag to me?'

  I shrugged. 'Great-niece? Grand-niece?'

  Yolanda turned back to the receptionist. 'Yeah, whatever,' she said, with convincing decisiveness.

  'Well, she didn't, anyway. Sorry.' The receptionist smiled. She didn't look very sorry.

  'Was she due to check out today?' I asked, trying to look sweet and reasonable and in need of help.

  'Let me see,' the receptionist said, lifting a pair of glasses from round her neck and placing them on her nose. She keyed something into her computer, then consulted the screen. 'No; she was due to stay until the end of the week.'

  'Damn!'

  'Hmm,' I said.

  'Oh, I remember,' the lady said, replacing her glasses on her cardigan. 'I do believe she said she'd changed her plans because of something she'd seen on the local news last night.'

  Yolanda and I looked at each other.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  'I know you think I'm just a complaining old woman, Isis-'

  'Not at-'

  '-and I know you don't drive, but you must see what I mean.'

  'Well-'

  'I mean, it stands to reason; you go into a gas station and you get gas. You get served; somebody fills your tank, maybe gets their hands dirty, checks your oil, washes the bugs off your windshield, kicks the tyres, whatever; you pay the bill, and that's all very fine… but you pull into a gas station, you serve yourself, you get your own hands dirty, maybe break a nail, for God's sakes; no oil check, no windshield wash unless you do it yourself; and you pay the same amount of money! Now, really, I mean, come on; does that seem reasonable to you? Do you think that's right?'

  'Put like that-'

  'I'm only asking you because maybe you can be objective because you don't drive and maybe you haven't ever thought about all this, maybe you've never noticed all this. I mean, you've never bin to the States, have you?'

  'No.'

  'No; exactly. So you don't expect service pumps and self-serve pumps, and because you're a good little Orderite you've never even seen movies about the States either, right?'

  'Right.'

  'Right; unusual in this day and age, believe you me. So you-'

  'Grandma?'

  'What, honey?'

  I laughed. 'Is all this important? I mean to say, does it really matter?'

  'Well hell yes! Service matters. This country used to be cute and quaint and kinda socialist; it's got a bit better now since your Mrs Thatcher; people are more polite, they know their jobs are on the line and there are other people who'll do them, they know there are other corporations who'll do the same thing for less money or just plain better, so you're sort of on the way, you know? But you still got a long way to go. And you lost a lot of the cuteness along the way, believe me. You abandon cuteness, you better make damn sure you're pretty goddamn efficient or you're down the tubes, baby. And all this ye olde fuckin' heritage shit ain't gonna fool people forever.'

  '… Is that a blue flashing light behind us?'

  'Say what? Ah, shee-it…'

  * * *

  '… Now, you see? That was a case in point; if you had on-the-spot fines those traffic cops could have taken me for a couple of hundred bucks; help pay for that fancy bear-mobile there. Instead, what do I get? A ticking-off. I mean, that's sad.'

  'I think being American helped,' I said, watching the needle swing back up across the speedometer. 'Are American miles really shorter than British ones?'

  'I think so, aren't they? Same with gallons, I think…' Yolanda waved one hand dismissively. 'What the hell; it worked. They let us go; probably thought of all the paperwork involved.'

  'Hmm. Anyway…' (I'd been thinking.) '… is efficiency really the best way to measure this sort of thing?'

  'What?'

  'Well, if you can do a job more efficiently with fewer people, that's all very well for that one particular company, but if you all still have to live in the same society, does it matter? We could probably do a lot of things more efficiently with fewer people at the Community, but that would just leave the people put out of work hanging around feeling useless. What's the point in that? You can't throw people off the farm or lock them up or kill them, so why not let them all have a job, even if that's less efficient?'

  Yolanda was shaking her head. 'Honey, that's what the communists used to do, and look what happened to them.'

  'Well, perhaps that happened for other reasons. What I'm saying is that efficiency is a strange way to evaluate how a society is doing. After all, the most efficient thing to do might be to kill everybody as soon as they grow old, so they won't be a burden, but you can't do that either because-'

  'The Eskimos; the goddamn Inuit; they used to do exactly that,' Yolanda said. 'But it wasn't when you got to a certain numerical age, it was once you couldn't pull your weight. If you looked after yourself you could go on a long time.'

  'Maybe they had no choice. But my point is that morality outranks efficiency. And, anyway, extreme efficiency would dictate less choice in the end; the most efficient thing would be for everybody to drive the same sort of car due to the economies of scale. Or for there not to be any private cars at all. You wouldn't like that, would you?'

  Yolanda grinned and shook her head. 'You don't really understand Capitalism, do you, Isis?'

  'From what I've heard, the best economists in the world don't understand Capitalism either, or do they all agree nowadays, and there are no more booms and slumps, just a steadily rising growth rate?'

  'Child, no system is perfect, but this one's the best we got, that's the point.'

  'Well, I think our system works better,' I said, settling myself primly in my seat with my hands clasped in my lap. 'The High Easter Offerance estate is a model of archaic working practices, inefficiency, over-manning and job-duplication, and everybody is extremely happy.'

  Yolanda laughed. 'Well, good for you guys, Isis, but I don't know that would scale up too successfully.'

  'Perhaps not, but it is my belief that contentment speaks for itself and has no need to worship at the altar of monetary efficiency's false and brazen idol.'

  'Whoa,' Yolanda said, glancing over at me with narrowed eyes. 'You speaking ex-cathedra there, oh Elect one?'

  'Let's just say that when the Community passes into my charge, as it sadly must one day, there will be no change in the way the farm and the Order is run.'

  'Good for you, honey; you do it your way. Don't let me persuade you no different.'

  'Whatever you say,' I said.

  * * *

  We had returned to Bath from Dudgeon Magna to discuss what to do next. We had another margarita. We suspected that Morag might have returned to La Mancha, Mr Leopold's home in Essex; Yolanda attempted to call the house, but the number was ex-directory and I had not thought to look for the number when I'd had the chance, in the hallway by the phone when Tyson was distracting the young man.

  'How far's Essex?' Yolanda asked.

  'A hundred and… fifty miles?' I hazarded. 'Beyond London.'

  'Wanna go, or d'you want to head north now?'

  'I don't know,' I confessed, pacing up and down the sitt
ing room of Grandmother Yolanda's suite, my hands clasped behind my back. I was in a quandary. I really didn't like the sound of the way things were going back at High Easter Offerance, and my first instinct was to return there as quickly as possible to discover what was going on and do whatever sorting out might be required. Nevertheless, I was here on an important mission, and Morag/Fusillada's trail had not yet gone totally cold. My duty remained as it had been: to attempt to track and intercept my cousin and reason with her. I continued pacing. My new leather trousers creaked and squeaked, and I kept wanting to giggle at this. Which reminded me. I stopped and looked Yolanda in the eye. 'Are you fit to drive, Grandma?'

  Yolanda raised her glass. 'Almost up to operating level.'

  'Maybe we should get the train.'

  'Nonsense. But where are we going?'

  'Essex,' I decided. I stuck my hands in the pockets of my fancy trousers. 'Do you think my old clothes are ready yet?'

  * * *

  La Mancha was dark, silent and locked. It was evening by the time we got there and we'd have seen any lights on inside. There was no sign of Tyson or the young man or anybody else.

  We stood on the back lawn, looking into a smoked-glass conservatory which held a huge round bath. The light faded slowly from the skies above.

  'They're outa town, we're outa luck,' Yolanda growled.

  'Oh dear.'

  We stepped back and walked round the side of the house. A small bright light came on under the eaves. 'Ah-ha!' I said.

  'Ah-ha nuthin',' Yolanda said, shaking her head. 'Those are security lights, child; automatic. Must of just got dark enough.'

  'Oh.'

  We returned to the car, past the painted plough, cartwheel and buggy, which I realised now were just ornamental. The gate had been padlocked so we had to get back over as we'd got in, over the top.

  'Well, hell,' Grandma Yolanda said, settling into the driver's seat of the hired car, 'we'll just be forced to go into London, stay at the Dorchester, eat at Le Gavroche, catch a show and party the night away in some grotesquely expensive club drinking vintage champagne.' She made a clicking noise with her mouth and fired up the car. 'I hate it when that happens.'

  * * *

  'How's your head?'

  'It feels like the china shop just after the bull's paid a visit.'

  'What, full of bull shit? Haw haw haw.'

  I opened my eyes and gave my grandmother what was supposed to be a withering look. She glanced at me over the top of her Wall Street Journal and winked. The grey-suited chauffeur slid the car -a 'Jag-waar' according to Yolanda - into a gap in the mid-morning traffic near Harrods. We were heading for Heathrow Airport. I shifted on my Sitting Board, making the leather trousers squeak. I'd had little choice over what to put on that morning; the hotel in Bath had not been able to extricate my old clothes from the laundry in time for us leaving for London. We had left the Order's address and been assured they would be forwarded, but it meant I had to wear the gear my grandmother had bought for me, which didn't seem altogether suitable for a return to the Community. However, I was in no state to try to find different clothes. Yolanda wore boots, dark blue culottes and a short matching jacket.

  '… Oh dear,' I said. 'I think I'm going to-'

  'You know how to open the window?' Yolanda said urgently. 'It's this button here-'

  'Oh,' I said, farting audibly inside my leather trousers. 'Sorry,' I said sheepishly.

  Grandma Yolanda sniffed the air. She shook her head, then buried it in the newspaper.

  'Hell, child; smells like a skunk crawled up your ass an' died.'

  * * *

  As I've indicated, our Faith is happy with tipsiness but frowns upon drunkenness taken to the point of incapacity, inarticulacy and insensibility. Nevertheless, it is recognised that people who normally only ever get slightly intoxicated may occasionally become utterly inebriate, and that one state can lead to the other. Unless this starts to happen rather too frequently, the hang-over will itself be seen as quite sufficient punishment for the transgression, and nothing will be said.

  Occasionally, when a Luskentyrian has a bad hang-over, they are inclined to wish that Salvador had been instructed to ban the use of alcohol entirely when he was being given the rules which would govern our Faith. In fact, right at the start, that is exactly what did happen; for a whole week, as my Grandfather scribbled down the results of his having tuned in to God's frequency, there was a commandment - there is no other word for it - written on page two of Salvador's original notes which stated that strong liquor had to be avoided, strenuously. It was crossed out during week two of our Founder's revelations, around the time when Mr McIlone started giving my Grandfather medicinal measures of whisky, reminding Salvador that there was a place for such things and causing him to realise that what he'd heard when he thought he was being told to prohibit drink was in fact a false signal.

  Before I'd left High Easter Offerance I'd been helping my Grandfather with his latest revisions to the Orthography, our holy book and repository of all Salvador's wisdom and insights. Part of this process had comprised weeding out false signals, the results of Dispatches our Founder had been the medium for which had turned out not fully to represent God's message. I regard it as a sign of strength and the influence of a higher Truth that our OverSeer is happy to look back and admit that some of his pronouncements were flawed, or at least capable of improvement. Of course, this wasn't really his fault; he has consistently tried to report the Voice which he hears as accurately and faithfully as possible, but he is only human, and to be human is to err. But to be human is also to be flexible and adaptable, and - if the individual does not succumb to the terrible influence of Pride - it is also to be capable of admitting one has been wrong, and to try to make corrections.

  So, having originally held that God was male, our Founder later realised that the Voice he had heard had only sounded male because he himself was male; he had been expecting a male voice, he had grown up in a Christian society which took it as read that God was male and always depicted God as a man, and so it was understandable that while undergoing the revelatory whirlwind which had swept through him, my Grandfather had missed the fact that God was not as he'd been brought up to believe.

  It is true that we can only take so much revelation at one time, only bring on board a certain amount of change; otherwise we simply become confused and start to lose context. We must have some sort of framework to understand ideas within, and when the ideas you are using are so powerful and so important that they threaten to change the nature of that framework itself, you have to be careful to change only a little at a time, or you risk losing the pattern for the whole fragile artifice that is human understanding. So it might even be, Grandfather has hinted, that God deliberately misled him, or at least made no attempt to correct him when it became clear that he was making such mistakes, because to have done so would effectively have been saying, Everything you have believed until now has been false, which, if it had not caused my Grandfather to doubt his very sanity, might well have caused him to take the easier course of ignoring what God was telling him, dismissing the Voice as some aberration, just some banal medical condition, not a profound paradigm-shift in the spiritual history of the world and the birth of a fresh and vital new religion.

  However it may have been, it is the case that having put in place the skeleton of Salvador's faith, God later fleshed out this new creation, and gradually revealed to our Founder the tripartite nature of Their being: both male and female and sexless (this was what God had been saying to Christians, but they had misinterpreted it as Father, Son and Holy Ghost because of the nature of society of the time, which was profoundly patriarchal).

  Similarly, Salvador originally thought that there was a Devil - old Redtop as he sometimes referred to him - and that there was a Hell, too, a place submerged in eternal darkness whose walls were made of glass, where tormented souls burned like a billion scattered embers on a million blackly towering levels, forever sliced an
d cut by the razor-sharp edges of their frozen prison.

  Later, he was able to separate this fevered, fearful vision from the quiet, calm articulation of perfection that is the true Voice of God, and realise that - again - what he had been experiencing was something from inside himself. These were his visions, not God's; they were the result of the fear and terror and guilty dread that exist in everyone and which certain faiths, especially Christianity, prey upon and exaggerate the better to control their flocks. My Grandfather was a new voice bringing glad tidings of joyful, ultimate hope and a whole new way of looking at both the world and God, but he still had to speak in the tongue he'd been taught as a child and which other people understood, and that language itself carried with it a host of assumptions and prejudices, telling its own old stories even as Salvador was using it to reveal his brand-new one.

  The idea that there is a Devil is obviously a powerful one, and common to many different cultures, but I think our Founder is right in emphasising the Satan-free nature of our Faith. We have no need of bogeymen to frighten our children with, and do not believe in giving adults any excuse for their own faults; ours is a modern faith, born after the War's great blood-letting in the midst of our century of pain, when humanity finally revealed itself as the ultimate devil. Just as there is both fear and comfort to be drawn from devils - the fear speaks for itself, the comfort comes from being able to absolve oneself of responsibility for one's actions - so there is, inversely, both comfort and fear to. be drawn from the realisation that there are no such things after all.

  Of course, this means that we must shoulder more responsibility for our lives than other religions would allow, and one of the other errors in this area my Grandfather has cleared up over the years includes the Heresy of Prudishness.

  The Heresy of Prudishness was a result of Grandfather originally teaching that while it was wrong to restrict sexual relations between people of the same generation, it was right to do so between generations. He later amended this to specify that only if one full generation lay between the two people concerned should their love be forbidden. Again, I think one can see the divinely inspired but still humanly limited prophet struggling to hear the Creator's voice above the clutter of a hypocritical and morally constipated society whose restrictive teachings still echoed in his ears. Let cynics find their own shortcomings and denied desires in what they blame our Founder for; I believe he has only ever tried to tell the truth as best he can, and if the truth leads him - as our leader - to a better, fuller personal life then we ought all to be grateful, both for him and for ourselves.