The Crow Road

by Iain M. Banks

  Fergus glittered; crystal buttons sparkled on his jacket; black pearls of obsidian decorated his sporran, and the skean dhu stuck into the top of his right sock - a rather more impressive and business-like example of the traditional Highland-dress knife than mine, which looked like a glorified letter opener - was crowned with a large ruby, glinting in the light against the hairs of his leg like some grotesquely faceted bulb of blood.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, getting my breath back.’

  Fergus looked into the marquee. ‘They’re a handsome couple, eh?’

  I glanced in, to see Lewis and Verity, hand in hand, talking to some of Verity’s relations. Lewis had changed into a dark suit and a bootlace tie; Verity wore a dark skirt and long, gold-coloured jacket.

  I nodded. ‘Yes,’ I said. I cleared my throat.

  ‘Cigar?’ Fergus said, digging an aluminium tube from one pocket of his jacket. I shook my head. ‘No,’ Fergus said, looking at me tolerantly. ‘Of course you don’t, do you.’

  ‘No,’ I said. I grinned inanely.

  I was surprised at just how uncomfortable I felt in his presence, and how hard it was both to work out precisely why I felt that way, and to disguise the fact. We talked for a little while. About my studies; going better now, thank you. And about flying. Fergus was learning to fly; up at Connel, the air field a few miles north of Oban. Oh, really? Yes. Hoped to be going solo by the end of the year, if all went according to plan. He asked me what I thought of the Gulf crisis and I, quailing, said it all kind of depended how you looked at it.

  I think I made him feel as awkward eventually as I had from the start of the conversation, and I took the opportunity of a new reel beginning to head back into the marquee, to join in another swirling, riotous dance.

  Ashley, Dean and I retired to my room in the house during the supper interval, while people got their breath back and the band - four oldish guys mysteriously called the Dougie McTee Trio - tried to get drunk.

  We snorted some coke, we had a couple of Js, and in response to a single question from Dean, I told them both all about the River Game; its history, every rule and feature, a thorough description of the board, an analysis of the differing playing styles of myself, Lewis, James, dad, mum and Helen Urvill, some handy tips and useful warnings, and a few interesting excerpts from certain classic games we’d played. It took about ten minutes. I don’t think I repeated myself once or left anything out, and I finished by saying that all of that, of course, wasn’t to mention the secret, banned version; the Black River Game.

  They both stared at me. Dean looked like he hadn’t believed a word I’d said. Ashley just seemed amused.

  ‘Aye. Good coke, isn’t it?’ she said.

  ‘Yep,’ Dean said, busy with mirror and blade again. He glanced at his sister and nodded at me. ‘For God’s sake, Ash, stick that number in his mouth and shut him up.’

  I accepted the J with a smile.

  The three of us kick-stepped down the stairs.

  ‘Hoy, all that stuff about that game,’ Dean shouted as we three swung into the marquee, where an Eightsome Reel of extravagant proportions and high decibel-count was in its Dervish phase. ‘That gospel, aye?’

  I frowned deeply as I looked at him. ‘Oh no.’ I shook my head earnestly. ‘It’s true.’

  Later, I sat alone at a table, quietly drinking whisky, watching them all. I’d lowered my head; one hand lay flat, palm-down, on the table. I felt very calm and deadly and in control; shit, I felt like I was Michael Corleone. The tunes and laughs and shouts washed through me, and the people, for that moment, seemed to be dancing about me, for me. I felt ... pivotal, and drank a silent toast to Grandma Margot. I drank to my late father. I thought of Uncle Rory, wherever he was, and drank to him. I even drank to James, also absent.

  James was coming down only slowly from his peak of anger. Even now, he was still so sullen and difficult to get on with that it had almost been a relief when he’d said he didn’t want to be involved in the wedding. He’d gone to stay with some school pals at Kilmartin, a little north of Gallanach, for the weekend. I think mum was unhappy he wasn’t here today, but Lewis and I weren’t.

  I drank some more whisky, thinking.

  A marriage.

  And a little information.

  Not to mention more than a little suspicion.

  All it had taken was one blurred face, glimpsed far away by somebody else, seen soundless for a second on a fuzzed TV in a noisy, crowded, smoky pub in Soho, one Friday evening - just one tiny example of all the inevitable, peripheral results of a confrontation in a distant desert - and suddenly, despite all our efforts, we were back amongst the bad stuff again; shrapnel from the coming war. Although, of course, I couldn’t be sure.

  Mum went past, dancing with Fergus Urvill, who was sweating. Mum looked small, next to him. Her expression was unreadable. Jlsy, I thought, and drank to Uncle Rory.

  Lewis and Verity left at midnight in a taxi. None of that let’s-make-a-mess-of-the-car nonsense for them. The taxi was supposedly heading for Gallanach; only mum and I knew they were actually booked into the Columba in Oban, and heading for Glasgow and the airport tomorrow.

  The four-man trio played; the dancing continued. Mum left with Hamish and Tone; she was staying with them tonight. I was in charge of the house. I danced until my legs ached. I talked until my throat hurt. The band, and the bagpipe players who’d joined in with them, stopped playing at about two. Dean and I fed some home-made compilation tapes through the PA, and the dancing went on.

  Later, after everybody had either left or crashed out in the house, Ash and I walked out along the shore, by the calmly lapping waters of Loch Fyne, in a clear, cool dawn.

  I remember babbling, high and spacey and danced-out all at once. We sat and stared out over the satin grey stretch of water, watching low-flying seagulls flapping lazily to and fro. I treated Ash to bits of Uncle Rory’s poetry; I knew some of it by heart, now.

  Ash suggested heading back and to the house, and either having some coffee or getting some sleep. Her wide eyes looked tired. I agreed coffee might be an idea. The last thing I remember is insisting I had whisky in my coffee, then falling asleep in the kitchen, my head on Ash’s shoulder, mumbling about how I’d loved dad, and how I’d loved Verity, too, and I’d never find another one like her, but she was a heartless bitch. No she wasn’t, yes she was, no she wasn’t, it was just she wasn’t for me, and if I had any sense I’d go for somebody who was a kind and gentle friend and who I got on well with; like Ash. I should take up with Ash; I should fall in love with her, that’s what I ought to do. Only if I did, I muttered into her shoulder, she’d be sure to fall for somebody else, or die, or get a job in New Zealand, but that’s what I ought to do, if only things worked that way ... Why do we always love the wrong people?

  Ash, silent beneath me, above me, just patted my shoulder and laid her head on mine.

  Mum woke me in the late afternoon. I moaned and she put a pint glass of water and two sachets of Resolve down on the table near my head. I tried to focus on the water. Mum sighed, tore the sachets open and tipped the powder fizzing into the glass.

  I checked things out with the one eye that would open. I was in my room at Lochgair, on my bed, still mostly clothed in shirt and kilt and socks. My head felt like it had been recently used for a very long and closely contested game of basketball. Somebody had stolen my real body and replaced it with a Prentice-shaped jelly mould packed full of enhanced-capacity pain receptors firing away like they were auditioning for a Duracell commercial. Mum was dressed in faded jeans and an old holed sweater. Her hair was tied back and she wore violently yellow rubber kitchen gloves which were doing horrible things to my visual cortex. A yellow duster dangled from her hip pocket. I couldn’t think what else to do, so I moaned again.

  Mum sat down on the bed, put a hand on my head and ran my curls through her rubber-clad fingers.

  ‘What’s that you’ve got in your hair?’ she said.

  My brain c
ells? I wondered. Certainly it felt like they’d been squeezed out of my ears. Damn rim-shots. Not that I could share this insight with my mother, for the simple reason that I couldn’t talk.

  ‘What is it?’ mum said. ‘This black stuff?’ She rubbed her fingers together in my hair, the rubber gloves squeaking horribly. ‘Oh, stop moaning, Prentice. Drink your water.’ She sniffed at her fingers. ‘Hmm,’ she said, rising and heading for the door. ‘Mascara, eh?’

  I looked up, monocular, at the closing door, grimacing.

  Massacre?

  CHAPTER 15

  I sipped my Bloody Mary, looking down at huge, white, piled-up clouds so bright in the mid-day sunshine they looked yellow. The plane had just levelled out and there was a smell of food; they were serving lunch further forward in the cabin. I watched the clouds for a moment, then looked at my magazine. I was on my way to London, a couple of torn-off match-book covers in my pocket, hoping to confront Mr Rupert Paxton-Marr.

  ‘Thanks mum ... Ash?’

  ‘Yo, Prentice. How’s it hanging?’

  ‘Oh, plum.’

  ‘Still wearing the kilt, eh? Look, I’ve had some word from -’

  ‘How about you?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘Oh, rude health. Verging on the obscene. Listen; my computer wizard’s been in touch.’

  ‘What? About the disks?’

  ‘Cor-rect.’

  ‘What’s on them? What do they say? Is there anyth -’

  ‘Hey ... hold your horses. Had to get the stuff to him first.’

  ‘Oh. Where is he?’

  ‘Denver.’

  ‘Denver?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Denver Colorado?’

  ‘... Yes.’

  ‘What, in America?’

  ‘Yeah, Northern Hemisphere, The World, The Solar System ...’

  ‘Okay, okay, so he’s ... hey, is this your Texan programmer? Has he moved states?’

  ‘Systems Analyst, for the last fucking time, Prentice, and no, it isn’t him; just a guy I exchange E-mail with sometimes.’

  ‘Right. And he’s got the disks?’

  ‘No, of course he hasn’t got the disks.’

  ‘What? Then -’

  ‘He has the information that was held on them. Well, on the one that held anything. Seven were blank; not even formatted.’

  ‘Ah, right. I see ... so what does it say? What is on it? Was it all Rory’s -’

  ‘It’s a little more complicated than that, Prentice.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I’ve got a message on my screen here from him. Thought you might be interested in it.’

  ‘Oh; you’re at work. Hey, have you seen the time? You’re working late, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes ..., Prentice. Do you want to hear the message?’

  ‘Will I understand it?’

  ‘You’ll get the gist of it.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Right. I quote: “I thought your man up there in the misty glens might like to know -”’

  ‘ “Misty glens”? That’s sounds a bit patronising.’

  ‘Prentice; shut up.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘ “... might like to know what our game plan is with respect to your word-processed file(s). As we don’t yet know what geek program this mutant No-namo-brand clone was running, we have had to resort to extreme measures to access the data. Dr Claire Simmons of London University, who picked up the disks, will use a vintage Hewlett Packard TouchScreen (which has compatible eight-inch drives) in the establishment’s Museum of Computing to extract the raw binaries, sector by sector, praying all the while that somebody has posted an ediger to Usenet that she can use to strip off the physical addressing; she will then attack the content one word at a time, swapping bytes as needed and inverting bits if none of it looks like ASCII, stripping the eighth bits if they’re in the way or un-encoding the lot if we can’t do without them, and unload the result to a Prime mini-computer (another indestructible antique) somewhere on the campus network. She moves all this to her Iris, double-encrypts it and E-mails it via Internet (off JANUS or BITNET to nsfnet-relay.ac.uk, probably) via Cornell to an account I’m not supposed to have on the Minnesota Supercomputer Center’s Cray-2 (currently the biggest and quickest compute-server short of a Connection Machine at the high end, so I might as well use it to do the decryptions and perhaps take my own first whack at demangling before moving the data along). From there I download via a dedicated T3 line to an SGI 380SX-VGX at one of AT&T’s Bell Labs (the one in Boulder, I think - another unofficial account) from where I can further download - and filter out certain offending control characters - to a Mac II at my office. Then I dump the results onto a floppy and bike them home to tinker with in my basement, which is where the hard work starts.” ... Get all that, Prentice?’

  ‘Yeah. Basically what he’s saying is, it’s a piece of piss.’

  ‘Absolutely. A doddle.’

  ‘Great. So when can we expect to see some results?’

  ‘No idea. Don’t forget the guy’s doing it for fun, and he’s a busy man. No promises, but he sounds confident. I’ll call him in a week if he doesn’t get in touch first.’

  ‘Tell him I’ll fax him a crate of champagne or something.’

  ‘Certainly. So, when ...? Ah shit. Fucking decollator’s jammed again. Gotta go attend the print, Prent.’

  ‘Okay. Bye. Oh, and thanks.’

  I now had a better idea of what Rory had been doing in the days before his disappearance. It looked like he had been working on Crow Road between the time he’d come back from London after seeing his friends and the evening he disappeared, on the motor bike he’d borrowed from his flat-mate. That was what he’d been doing, stuck in his room in the flat in Glasgow; finally actually writing something on his bizarre contraption of a computer.

  He’d done it, he’d stopped writing notes and started on the work itself.

  I’d talked to a retired policeman who at the time had looked - briefly - into what had happened to Rory. The police hadn’t come up with anything; they’d interviewed Janice Rae, and Rory’s flat-mate Andy Nichol, and looked at the papers Rory had left with Janice. There was no suicide note, so they’d decided the papers weren’t relevant. Apart from checking the hospitals and eventually listing Rory as a Missing Person, that had been that.

  The only useful information I’d got from the police was that Rory’s flat-mate had left local government and joined the civil service a few months after Rory had disappeared. I’d tracked Andy Nichol down at a tax office in Plymouth and called him there, but apart from saying he’d heard a lot of keyboard-clattering noises coming from Rory’s room during the days before Rory had borrowed his bike and disappeared, he’d only been able to confirm what I already knew. He did say he’d tried working Rory’s Neanderthal computer after dad had said he could have it, but he couldn’t make the beast work; he’d sold the machine and the two blank disks that had come with it to a friend in Strathclyde University. It had been chucked out years ago.

  ... Whatever; after those few days work, Rory had suddenly upped and offed, and never came back. Maybe the stuff on the disks would give me a clue why he’d suddenly done that. If there was anything useful there; that clattering noise didn’t prove anything ... I’d seen The Shining.

  The cloud cover started to break up over the midlands; I chomped through my lunch. The starter was smoked salmon. I thought of Verity and Lewis, on honeymoon in the Bahamas, and - with just a tinge of sadness - silently wished them well.

  I saw Ashley come into the pub. She stood near the door, looking round, that strong-boned head swivelling, those grey eyes scanning. She didn’t see me on the first sweep; I was mostly hidden by other people. I watched her take a couple of steps forward, look round again. She was dressed in a dark, skirted suit, under the old but still good-looking jacket I remembered her wearing at Grandma Margot’s funeral. Her hair was gathered up and tied; she wasn’t wea
ring her glasses. Her face looked tense and forbidding. She seemed harder, more capable and more self-contained than I recalled her being in Scotland.

  In those few moments, in the noise and smoke of a pub by the river, a quarter mile from the Tower, in the great, cruel, headless monster that was London after a decade of Hyaena rule, I wondered again at my own feelings for Ashley Watt. I knew I didn’t love her; she didn’t make me feel anything like the way I had about Verity, and yet I’d been - I realised - looking forward to seeing her, and now that I had seen her, just felt, well ... happier, I guess. It was all puzzlingly simple. Maybe - to lapse into the humdrum continuum for a moment - she was the sister I’d never had. I remembered the mascara mum had discovered in my hair after the wedding, and wondered if the position of honorary sibling was one Ashley would entirely welcome.

  I tried to remember Ashley’s tone when I’d rung her, a couple of days ago, to say that I was coming down (this about a week after I’d had my own personal info-dump on the workings of the world computer network). I had already called Aunt Ilsa and arranged to stay with her and Kentledge Man, and I’d wondered at the time if I’d detected the merest hint of reproach in Ashley’s voice when I’d told her I would be staying in deepest Kensington. At any rate, she’d told me there was a sofa-bed and a spare duvet of indeterminate tog value at the flat she shared in Clapham, in case Aunt Ilsa went on some sudden expedition to Antarctica and forgot to tell her Filipino maid, or whatever. She’d added that the two girls she shared with really wanted to meet me (I felt pretty sure the person they really wanted to meet was Lewis).

  I raised my hand as Ashley’s gaze passed again over where I stood; she caught the movement, and that city-hard expression changed instantly, relaxing and softening as she smiled broadly and walked over.

  ‘Hiya, babe.’ She punched my shoulder, then gave me a big hug. I hugged right back. She smelled of Poison.