Inversions

Iain M. Banks: Inversions

For Michelle

PROLOGUE

The only sin is selfishness. So said the good Doctor. When she first expressed this opinion I was young enough initially to be puzzled and then to be impressed at what I took to be her profundity.

It was only later, in my middle-age, when she was long gone from us, that I began to suspect that the opposite is just as true. Arguably there is a sense in which selfishness is the only true virtue, and therefore that — as opposites are given to cancelling each other out — selfishness is finally neutral, indeed valueless, outside a supporting moral context. In later years still — my maturity, if you will, or my old age, if you wish — I have with some reluctance again come to respect the Doctor’s point of view, and to agree with her, tentatively at least, that selfishness is the root of most evil, if not all.

Of course I always knew what she meant. That it is when we put our own interests before those of others that we are most likely to do wrong, and that there is a commonality of guilt whether the crime is that of a child stealing coins from his mother’s purse or an Emperor ordering genocide. With either act, and all those in between, we say: Our gratification matters more to us than whatever distress or anguish may be caused to you and yours by our actions. In other words, that our desire outranks your suffering.

My middle-years objection was that only by acting on our desires, by attempting to bring about what pleases us because it feels agreeable, are we able to create wealth, comfort, happiness and what the good Doctor would have termed in that vague, generalising way of hers “progress”.

Eventually, though, I came to admit to myself that, while my objection might be true, it is insufficiently all-embracing to cancel out the Doctor’s assertion entirely, and that while it may sometimes be a virtue, selfishness by its nature is more often a sin, or a direct cause of sin.

We never like to think of ourselves as being wrong, just misunderstood. We never like to think that we are sinning, merely that we are making hard decisions, and acting upon them. Providence is the name of the mystical, divinely inhuman Court before which we wish our actions to be judged, and which we hope will agree with us in our estimation both of our own worth and the culpability or otherwise of our behaviour.

I suspect the good Doctor (you see, I judge her too in naming her so) did not believe in Providence. I was never entirely sure what she did believe in, though I was always quite convinced that she believed in something. Perhaps, despite all she said about selfishness, she believed in herself and nothing else. Perhaps she believed in this Progress that she talked about, or perhaps in some strange way, as a foreigner, she believed in us, in the people she lived with and cared for, in a way that we did not believe in ourselves.

Did she leave us better off or not? I think, undeniably, better. Did she do this through selfishness or selflessness? I believe that in the end it does not matter in the least, except as it might have affected her own peace of mind. That was another thing she taught me. That you are what you do. To Providence — or Progress or the Future or before any other sort of judgment apart from our own conscience — what we have done, not what we have thought, is the result we are judged by.

So, the following is the collected chronicle of our deeds. One part of my tale is presented as something I can vouch for, for I was there. As to the other part, I cannot confirm its veracity. I stumbled across its original version by sheer chance, long after the events described in it had taken place, and while I believe it forms an interesting counterpoint to the story in which I was involved, I present it more as an artistic flourish than as a judgment born of intense study and reflection. Nevertheless, I believe the two tales belong together, and carry more weight united than they could separately. It was, I think there is no doubt, a crucial time. Geographically the crux was divided, but — after all — much was, then. Division was the only order.

I have tried in what I have written here not to judge, yet I confess that I hope the Reader — a sort of partial Providence, perhaps — will do just that, and not think badly of us. I freely admit that a specific of my motive (especially in amending and adding to my earlier self’s chronicle, as well as in refining the language and grammar of my co-teller) is to try to make sure that the Reader will not think ill of me, and of course that is a selfish desire. Yet still I would hope that such selfishness might lead to good, for the simple reason that otherwise this chronicle might not exist.

Again, the Reader must decide whether that would have been the more fortunate outcome, or not.

Enough. A young and rather earnest man wishes to address us:

1. THE DOCTOR

Master, it was in the evening of the third day of the southern planting season that the questioner’s assistant came for the Doctor to take her to the hidden chamber, where the chief torturer awaited.

I was sitting in the living room of the Doctor’s apartments using a pestle and mortar to grind some ingredients for one of the Doctor’s potions. Concentrating on this, it took me a moment or two fully to collect my wits when I heard the loud and aggressive knocking at the door, and I upset a small censer on my way to the door. This was the cause both of the delay in opening the door and any curses which Unoure, the questioner’s assistant, may have heard. These swear-words were not directed at him, neither was I asleep or even remotely groggy, as I trust my good Master will believe, no matter what the fellow Unoure — a shifty and unreliable person, by all accounts — may say.

The Doctor was in her study, as was usual at that time in the evening. I entered the Doctor’s workshop, where she keeps the two great cabinets containing the powders, creams, ointments, draughts and various instruments that are the stock of her trade as well as the pair of tables which support a variety of burners, stoves, retorts and flasks. Occasionally she treats patients in here too, when it becomes her surgery. While the unpleasant-smelling Unoure waited in the living room, wiping his nose on his already filthy sleeve and peering round with the look of one choosing what to steal, I went through the workshop and tapped at the door to the study which also serves as her bedroom.

“Oelph?” the Doctor asked.

“Yes, mistress.”

“Come in.”

I heard the quiet thud of a heavy book being closed, and smiled to myself.

The Doctor’s study was dark and smelled of the sweet istra flower whose leaves she habitually burned in roof-hung censers. I felt my way through the gloom. Of course I know the arrangement of the Doctor’s study intimately — better than she might imagine, thanks to the inspired foresight and judicious cunning of my Master — but the Doctor is prone to leaving chairs, stools and shelf-steps lying where one might walk, and accordingly I had to feel my way across the room to where a small candle flame indicated her presence, sitting at her desk in front of a heavily curtained window. She sat upright in her chair, stretching her back and rubbing her eyes. The hand-thick, fore-arm-square bulk of her journal lay on the desk in front of her. The great book was closed and locked, but even in that cave-darkness I noticed that the little chain on the hasp was swinging to and fro. A pen stood in the ink well, whose cap was open. The Doctor yawned and adjusted the fine chain round her neck which holds the key for the journal.

My Master knows from my many previous reports that I believe the Doctor may be writing an account of her experiences here in Haspide to the people of her homeland in Drezen.

The Doctor obviously wishes to keep her writings secret. However, sometimes she forgets that I am in the room, usually when she has set me the task of tracking down some reference in one of the books in her extravagantly endowed library and I have been silently doing so for some time. From the little that I have been able to glimpse of her writings on such occasions I have determined that when she writes in her journal she does not always use Haspidian or Imperial — though there are passages in both — but sometimes uses an alphabet I have never seen before.