Canal Dreams

by Iain Banks

  'I just want know if anything… anything, umm happen out there. Umm; what gives? CNN say venceristas maybe to attack Panama city. This is true? You must to get out. Must to go away.

  The pressure on her ear had relaxed a little; she brought her head up, pushing against the gun, stealing one angry glance at Sucre, who was staring intently at her, unsmiling. She blinked and sniffed the tears away, ashamed at having cried. 'Well, no, she told Moriya. 'Not right now. Maybe later. Perhaps later. I can't get out now. Sorry.

  She had decided; she would say something. Not to warn, but to find out. She would say something about them waiting for the congressmen's plane to fly over. Her heart pounded in her chest, worse than when Sucre had had his gun at her throat. She started to phrase the sentence, to try to say something that would get Mr Moriya to respond and tell her if the plane was delayed or not. Something which would not get her brains blown out would be a good idea, too.

  'You look, Mr Moriya said, 'I call back when we talk together alone. Is too uneasy so, OK?

  'I… uh, yes, she said, suddenly shaking, unable to think straight. The hand round the handset was aching; she realised she was gripping the receiver as though she was hanging from it over a cliff.

  'Goodbye, Hisako, Mr Moriya said.

  'Ye — yes; goodbye… Sayonara… She could not control her trembling. Her eyes were closed. The line made clicking noises. Somebody took the handset from her, prising her fingers off; she loosened them as soon as she felt the other hand on hers. She opened her eyes as Sucre put the handset back on its hook.

  'You did all right, he told her. 'That was OK. Now we go back.

  Afterwards, her ears still ringing, she found it all a little difficult to piece together. It seemed as if things had happened in some strange, disordered, disjointed manner, as though such violent action happened in its own micro-climate of reality.

  She was walking down the corridor, still a little shaky, with Sucre behind her. There was a hint of movement at the far, aft end of the corridor, where it led out of the superstructure to an outside deck. She took no notice, still thinking about what she might have said to Moriya, and feeling guilty at her relief that she hadn't had the chance to say anything and so endanger herself.

  They were almost at the companionway leading back down to the lower decks. There was a muffled shout from that end of the corridor. She looked up. Then a shot; percussive and clanging. She froze. Sucre said something she didn't catch. Another shot. She was pushed from behind. The stairs were at her right.

  Steve Orrick appeared, dressed in swimming trunks, holding a hand gun and an Uzi, from a cabin doorway right in front of her. She felt her jaw drop. His eyes went wide. He brought the gun up, pointing it over her shoulder. She was struck from behind, pushed against the rail at the top of the companionway, almost sending her over into the stairwell. She swung round and caught a glimpse of Orrick grimacing, clicking the trigger of the boxy-looking Uzi futilely. Sucre raised his own gun.

  She kicked out with one foot, hitting Sucre's rifle. It blasted into the ceiling, filling the metal corridor with stunning noise. She had her balance back by then; she chopped Sucre across the neck, open handed, but he had started to move away. It was only the second time she'd ever hit somebody in anger. Sucre staggered, looking more surprised than anything else and stumbled against the far wall. Orrick was fiddling with the small gun. Then he ducked, and fired between her and Sucre, down towards the bridge. Her ears were ringing. The Uzi made a noise like heavy cloth ripping, magnified a hundred times. Fire sounded down the corridor; Orrick leapt back, into the doorway he'd appeared from. Something tugged suddenly at the hem of the yukata. She turned, glanced down into the stairwell, to see one of the venceristas pointing a gun at her. She dived across the corridor, into the cabin where Orrick was.

  It was dark, blinds closed. The acrid smell of powder smoke filled the place. There was a dead man in the bed. Firing sounded behind her, making her flinch; Orrick knelt at the door, peeping out and firing.

  She recognised the dead man. It was one of the men who'd guarded them during the night. The one who'd waved the Coke bottle at Bleveans. He was missing most of the left side of his head, and there was a huge patch of glistening darkness staining the white sheets around his midriff. The noise of gunfire resounded through the cabin, filling her. She felt bad, and had to sit down on the floor between Orrick and the bed. Orrick's broad, water-spotted back filled most of the doorway. The trunks had a little belt on them; attached to it was a big sheathed knife. She recognised his trunks, remembered them from a day they'd all gone picnicking on -

  She shook her head. Orrick was firing with the pistol, the Uzi lying at his knee. She looked around the cabin. The Uzi magazines lay on the small table, in a pile beside an open copy of Hustler. She grabbed them, clattered them down on the floor beside Orrick and nudged him. She stood up. The Uzi's ripping noise started again.

  The side of the superstructure at this level was flush with the deck beneath, but she leant over the bed and opened the blinds and looked out of the porthole to make sure. She wondered if she might squeeze through, and started unscrewing the wing nut securing the glass.

  'Grenade! Orrick screamed, and fell back into the cabin. He tried to kick the door shut; half-succeeded. It burst open again in a cloud of smoke and a blast that seemed to reverberate through every atom of Hisako's body.

  She'd fallen; she was lying on the warm stickiness of the dead man, blood soaking into the yukata. She struggled away from him, the cabin ringing like a bell about her. More firing behind as Orrick squatted once again at the door. She looked around, wild-eyed, saw the dead man's combat jacket. She took it, felt its heaviness and turned it round, searching. The grenades were there. She tore them from their velcro fastenings. Orrick was back at the door, apparently unharmed. She collapsed to her knees beside him, nudging him again and offering the grenades. He saw them, grabbed one, dropped the other, still firing with his other hand. He shouted something at her.

  '- Out! — she heard. She felt as if she had road drills lodged in each ear. She shook her head. - go first! — Orrick screamed at her. He looked at the grenade he held, took the ring in his teeth and pulled; it worked. He threw it down the corridor towards the bridge, picked up the other grenade from the deck, and a magazine. He emptied the Uzi down the corridor after the first grenade, then leapt out, disappearing aft, astonishing her; a sudden increase in light from that direction, then dark again and a metal door slamming. Instantly the grenade detonated, a blast and clattering screech from forward.

  A noise like a waterfall filled her ears. She found herself sitting on the floor. Her head buzzed; everything was going grey and watery, reality dissolving in the reeking smoke and the obliterating noise.

  She felt herself start to tip back and to the side, but her arm moved in slow motion, as though it moved through treacle, while the rest of her body moved through air. She hit the floor.

  Blinked.

  She knew she was going to die. Perhaps they all were. At least Sucre had probably been the first. The others might not know she'd hit him.

  She could see Sucre's face; so smooth and shining; the neat black fatigues — not as though they'd been in the jungle (jungle?) for weeks at all — the pert little beret with its chic little red badge; those black curls… His face seemed to swim in and out of focus above her. No beret, this time. Curls in disarray. He was looking down at her, mouth twisted.

  He reached down, dragged her up. He was real, and alive.

  That's it. I'm dead.

  She was thrown out into the corridor, hit the far wall. Then she was pushed out into the sunlight. She stood blinking in the glare, blinded. The aft hatches of the Nadia lay below her; water sparkled beyond, holding the green shadow of an island. Sucre pushed her to the rail. Men were running along the aft deck, to the stern of the ship. They held guns.

  At the rail, she looked down along the hull of the ship. A couple of men were leaning over the decks below, flying dow
n into the water towards the stern. At the Nadia's landing stage, midships, a black Gemini looked limp and low and crumpled in the water, stern down. She remembered the hunting knife on Orrick's trunks.

  The men running to the stern stopped and looked over the rail every now and again, pointing their guns down, sometimes firing them.

  Sucre held her arm painfully far up her back, forcing her on tip-toes, grunting with the pain. He shouted to the men at the stern of the ship. They shouldered their guns and reached for their grenades.

  She bent over the rail, easing the pressure on her arm a little. Yes, she could still see the ripples. Orrick must have jumped. Swam — probably underwater as much as possible to the stern, where the overhang would protect him from the guns. But not from the grenades.

  She watched them splash into the waves around the rear of the ship. She looked up into the blue, lightly clouded sky. No sign of any plane. What a nice day to die on, she thought. Sucre was still shouting behind her. Men and their noise. Suddenly, in a dozen places around the stern of the ship, the water bulged and went white, like a series of giant watery bruises. The bruises burst; fluting and climbing, white stems exploding in the sunlight and falling back. There was hardly any noise. The ship rail under Hisako's sternum vibrated with each shock.

  Sucre shouted again. Then there was silence. She felt the sunlight on her neck and forearms, could smell the distant land. An insect buzzed distantly, through the continual ringing in her ears.

  Orrick's body floated out after a minute; pale and face down, spread like a parachutist in free fall. The venceristas cheered, and emptied their guns into the man's body, making it disappear in a tiny forest of white and red splashes, until Sucre's shouting made them stop.

  He twisted her back round to face him. He looked uninjured, but shaken and dishevelled. He took the pistol out of its holster.

  She ought to do something, but she couldn't. There was no fight left. I won't close my eyes. I won't close my eyes.

  Sucre brought the pistol up to her face, up to her eye, pressed it forward. She closed her eyes. The gun's muzzle pressed on to her eyelid, forcing her head back. She could see a halo of light against the brown-black, like an image of the gun barrel and the twisted hole the bullet would travel.

  The gun was taken away. A slap jerked her head one way, then another. Her head sang; another instrument in the orchestra of internal noise that was crowding into her skull.

  She opened her eyes. Sucre was standing grinning in front of her.

  'Yeah, you're pretty cool, Señorita, he told her. He flourished the pistol; it glinted in the sunlight. 'You a man, I'd kill you. He re-holstered the gun, glanced to the stern of the ship, took a deep breath and whistled. 'Woo; that was something, huh?

  She swallowed a little blood, and nodded.

  Then the sound of rapid, automatic gunfire came through the open door behind them, from down inside the ship.

  7: Salvages

  She stood, confronting her fear at last. Everything had led up to this. It had been forever coming closer, like a distant storm, and now it had arrived and she was powerless and weak, wallowing without way in the face of the dread she'd tried and tried to confront but with which she had never been able to connect.

  In school once, in a physics class, she'd tried to push two very strong magnets together, north against north and south against south, and sweated and gritted her teeth and braced her arms against the bench and watched her straining, quivering hands push the big U-shaped lumps of metal together, constantly trying to stop them glancing away, sliding to one side, struggling to twist out of her grasp, and felt her strength going and so finally putting everything into one last explosive burst of effort, and shouted out as she did so as if screaming the targeted part of the body in a kendo thrust. The magnets slid across each other, writhing in her hands like something alive, clunking one south pole against one north, the other ends of each U sticking out, so that she was left holding a solid, S-shaped piece of metal. It took an even greater effort than that she'd just made to stop herself throwing the magnet down to the floor, or just slamming it into the wooden bench top. But she put the gunmetal lump down quietly, and dropped her head a little, as though saluting a victorious opponent.

  It had been the same with her fear. She had tried to force it to a confrontation, to pin it down, to wrestle with it… but it had always twisted away, wriggled mightily even as she tried to grapple with it, and sunk back into the usual shape of her life.

  So now she stood in Narita airport, waiting with the rest of the NHK orchestra to board the JAL 747 bound for Los Angeles. She'd sat in the departure lounge with some of the others, chatting nervously and drinking tea and watching the clock on the wall and glancing all the time at her wristwatch, stroking the new leather bag she'd bought for the trip, trying to make the cold tangle of cramp in her belly go away.

  The others knew she hadn't flown before, and that she was afraid. They joked with her, tried to take her mind off it, but she could not stop thinking about the plane; the fragile aluminium tube of its body; the screaming engines, encasing fire; the wings that flexed, heavy with fuel; the wheels that… it was that moment, the visual instant when the spinning wheels left the ground and the aircraft tilted its nose to the sky and rose, that sank her. She could think no further. She had watched that moment on television and in movies many times, and could see that there was indeed a slow-motion grace about it, and could quite happily admire the plane maker's and the pilot's skill, and know that the same manoeuvre was completed thousands of times each hour throughout the world… but the thought of being on one of those delicately huge contraptions as it lifted itself into the air still saturated her with terror. It made her bones ache.

  The others talked to her. One of the younger men in the orchestra told her he'd been scared of flying at first, but then had looked into the statistics. Did she know, he said, that you were far more likely to die in a car crash than in a plane?

  But not when you're in a plane! She wanted to scream at him.

  Chizu and Yayoi, her flatmates, who were also in the orchestra string section, talked of a previous trip to the States, when they'd been students. How vast it was, and how beautiful; Yosemite, the Mohave, the Redwoods… a single state like a whole country, sprawling and empty and unmissable, even before the Rockies and the Grand Canyon, the fertile wasteland of the wheatfields from flat horizon to flat horizon, like an ocean of grain; the colours of a New England fall, and the dizzy verticals of Manhattan. Unmissable. Not to be missed. She must not miss it.

  The hands of the clock swept on, impossibly thin wings.

  The time came. She stood with the rest, clutching her new leather bag. They went to the tunnel. She lifted the bag up, cradling it tightly in her arms. It smelled luxurious and sweet and comforting. She saw the plane outside in the sunlight; massive, secure, anchored-looking. It was linked to the terminal at nose and tail by the fitted collars of the access jetties, and fuel hoses looped under its wings from tanker trucks. At one side, a catering vehicle's raised body stood perched on an X of struts over the braced chassis, its platform extended to an open door in the aircraft's side; tall thin trolleys were being wheeled from truck to plane by two men in bright red overalls. A squat, flat truck sat under the 747's bulbous nose, fixed there with a thick yellow towbar. Various other vehicles scurried like toys about the poised bulk of the big plane, squires and armourers to the impassive warrior-king above them being readied to join battle with the oceanic air.

  She moved towards the tunnel. Her legs felt as if somebody else was operating them. The leather bag smelled of animal death. She wished she'd taken the pills the doctor had prescribed. She wished she'd got drunk. She wished she'd told them at the start she wouldn't be able to go abroad with the orchestra. She wished she'd turned down the job. She wished she was somebody else, or somewhere else. She wished for a broken leg or a ruptured appendix; anything to stop her having to board the plane.

  The tunnel finished her.
The smell of fuel, the sound of an engine, the quiet flow of people in the windowless corridor, tipping towards the corner that led to the plane itself. She stopped, letting people go past her, staring ahead; Chizu and Yayoi stopped too, in front of her, talking to her (but she couldn't hear what they were saying). They touched her, guided her to the side of the corridor, where she stood shivering in a cold sweat, smelling that fuel smell and hearing the increasing whine of the engines and feeling the list in the floor tipping her towards the craft the people were filing into, and she could not think and could not believe this was happening to her.

  So well. It had all gone so well. She'd fitted in, she'd made friends, she'd enjoyed the concerts and hadn't been very nervous apart from the very first one, and recording could be boring but you could switch off to some extent; nobody expected to do their most inspired work after thirty takes… She had money, and a new cello, and her mother was proud of her; her life looked set and certain, and her future bright and exciting, and she'd wondered what could go wrong, because she was used to things balancing out, and this was it.

  What was ironic was that the balancing disaster came from inside, where she was most vulnerable. She'd never needed to develop the spurious justifications and excuses, or the fragile ego-props and unlikely hopes so many other people had to construct to cope with their lives.

  She'd lived with some inner certainty that they hadn't had; safe inside, defences turned outwards, weapons trained beyond her immediate space… and now she was suffering for her hubris.

  They did get her on to the plane eventually; Mr Yano, the orchestra's tour manager, and Mr Okamoto, the leader of the orchestra, came to talk to her, and gently guided her down the rubber slope, between the metal corrugations of the white walls, to the open door of the plane, where stewardesses waited and the plane was big and full of bright seats inside, and the thick door sat, a curved slab, against the bulge of the plane's skin. She was shaking. They took her inside.