What he’s got here is a radical, left-field idea. The central concept is almost too original for its own good. That’s why it needs a generous helping of conventionality slathered over it. He’ll rework it, again. It’s not a prospect that fills him with joy, frankly, but he guesses it has to be done and he has to struggle on. It’s worth it. He still believes in it. It’s just a dream, but it’s a dream that could be made real and this is the place where that happens. Your dreams, of your idea and your future self, your fortunes, get turned into reality here. He still loves this place, still believes in it, too.
A woman comes in and sits two seats away. She’s rangy and dark, dressed in jeans and shirt. She sees him looking and he says Hi, asks if he can buy her a drink. She thinks about it, looks at him in a frankly evaluatory way and says okay. A beer. He asks to join her and she says yes to that as well. She’s cute and friendly and smart, nice laugh. Just his type. A lawyer, on a day off, just relaxing. Connie. They get to talking, have another beer each then decide they’re wasting the sunny day and go for a walk along the boardwalk beneath the tall palms, watching the rollers rolling in, the skaters skating, the bladers blading, the cyclists cycling, the walkers walking and the surfers, way in the distance, surfing. They sit in a little café still within sight of the beach, then go for dinner in a little Vietnamese place a short walk away. He gives her the pitch because she’s genuinely interested. She thinks it’s a great idea. It actually seems to make her thoughtful.
Later they walk on the beach in the light of a half-moon, then sit, and there’s some kissing and a modest amount of fooling around, though she’s already told him she doesn’t go any further on a first date. Him too, he tells her, though strictly speaking that’s nonsense of course and he guesses that she guesses this but doesn’t seem to care.
She takes his hands in hers and says, “Michael, what if I said I had access to a lot of money. Money that I think you could use. Money I’d like you to use.”
He laughs. “I’d… think this was too good to be true. You come into a bar, we leave it together, then here we are kissing in the moonlight and now you’re telling me you’re rich?” He shakes his head. “I wouldn’t write this. I wouldn’t dare. You serious?”
“The money would not be for making your script into a film, however.”
“Oh? Well, I’m crushed. What, then?”
“It would be so that you could become a shadow chaser. It would be so that you can travel the world going to particular places on the tracks of eclipses and looking for people who seem a little overdressed, for RVs with dark windows, for rented villas where the locals haven’t seen the residents, for yachts where nobody appears on deck.”
He stares at her for a while. “Hell, girl. You serious about that?”
“Also, you will need a new identity. There are people who would like to make you disappear. One of them was going to try to do this today. We passed her on the boardwalk earlier.”
He looks around. “Is this a joke? Where’s the camera?”
“No joke, Michael.” She puts her hands round his wrists, encircling them as near as she can. “Now, I am going to bring you back, but let me show how they would make you disappear.”
… “Holy shit.”
Adrian is left disoriented and slightly paranoid by it all. He gets back to dear old Blighty and, thoroughly rattled, begins to sell everything up. Handily, he manages to offload almost all he owns just days before Lehman Brothers collapses and the entirety of international finance falls flailing off the first of several cliffs. He immediately decides this is a sign of his invincible superiority and flawless luck. He also decides to live where his money is – with the Forth International Bank – so buys a villa on Grand Cayman in the Cayman Islands, south of Cuba.
The Cayman Islands are a proper tropical paradise with aquamarine crystal waters and palm trees and golden beaches and everything, but they are very prone to hurricanes. In the summer of 2009 Adrian hears there’s a big one on the way. Most of the rich just jet off to somewhere more congenial for a few days but he decides he’d like to experience a proper hurricane, because he is invincible, after all.
Just as well; he discovers that the villa was flooded in the last Category 5 and so, after some problems finding anybody still around and doing the jobs they’re fucking being paid to do, he hires an ancient walk-through delivery van from a friend and loads all the stuff he can carry from the villa into it: televisions, computers, hi-fis, scuba gear, rugs, pieces of designer furniture, some Benin bronzes, a couple of full-size replica terracotta warriors, various paintings and so on. It’s exhausting, but he’s sure it’ll be worth it. He parks up on higher ground, behind a sturdy-looking water tower just outside George Town, and sits there through the night, the winds shrieking around him and the truck, laden though it is, shaking and bouncing on its shot, overloaded springs.
The face of one of the terracotta warriors, standing right behind his seat, looks inscrutably over his shoulder throughout the night, either angel of death or guardian angel – Adrian can’t decide which. The disturbing thing is that the company making the replicas let you specify what you wanted their faces to look like, and Adrian chose his own face for both, so there’s basically a stony-faced version of himself standing right behind his seat the whole time.
The water tower makes some terrible groaning noises during the night and scares him half to death, but it doesn’t fall down and survives intact.
In the afternoon of the next day, when the hurricane has passed, he drives the beaten-up van back along the leaf- and wreckage-strewn road to discover the villa is intact and unflooded; almost undamaged. His luck has held yet again and he is still invincible. He grins, reaches behind him and pats the cheek of the terracotta warrior: guardian angel, then. But on the way down to the villa, whooping and hollering, he loses control of the truck and it slams into a ditch.
All his possessions in the back come sliding forward and crush him to death.
Bisquitine remains Empress of all she surveys, just as she always has been.
All right, I lied about the quiet and normal life bit. So I’m unreliable. And there was no deer, or fox, or any other form of wildlife involved. What there was, was me; briefly inside his head as he drove away. Long enough to unfasten the bastard’s seat belt and tug hard on the steering wheel before dancing back out of his head again an instant before the crash.
It was as long as I could have stayed in there anyway, and it hurt, plus it wore me out for days.
But it’s a start.
Iain M. Banks
Iain Banks came to widespread and controversial acclaim with the publication of his first novel, THE WASP FACTORY, in 1984. However, it was his 1987 novel CONSIDER PHLEBAS which introduced his remarkable talent to the SF community, and also saw the addition of the 'M' to his name – an addition which remains a distinguishing feature of his SF work. He has since written a further 5 SF novels, and a collection of SF short stories, THE STATE OF THE ART, all published by Orbit. Described by William Gibson as 'a phenomenon… wildly successful, fearlessly creative', he was acknowledged as one of the Best of Young British Writers in 1993, and lives in Fife, Scotland.
