The State of the Art Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Road of Skulls

  A Gift from the Culture

  Odd Attachment

  Descendant

  Cleaning Up

  Piece

  The State of the Art - CONTENTS

  The State of the Art

  Scratch

  THE STATE OF THE ART

  PRAISE FOR IAIN M. BANKS

  ‘The standard by which the rest of SF is judged’ Guardian

  ‘A mordant wit, a certain savagery and a wild imagination’ Mail on Sunday

  ‘Spectacular . . . the field needs his energy, skill and invention’ The Scotsman

  ‘Gripping, touching and funny’ TLS

  ‘Dazzlingly original’ Daily Mail

  ‘Sharp, witty, comprehensively terrifying’ Observer

  ‘Banks is a phenomenon . . . writing pure science fiction of a peculiarly gnarly energy and elegance’ William Gibson

  ‘There is now no British SF writer to whose work I look forward with greater keenness’ The Times

  ‘Banks has rewritten the libretto for the whole space-opera genre’ The Times

  ‘Poetic, humorous, baffling, terrifying, sexy - the books of Iain M. Banks are all these things and more’ NME

  ‘Staggering imaginative energy’ Independent

  BY IAIN M. BANKS

  Consider Phlebas

  The Player of Games

  Use of Weapons

  The State of The Art

  Against a Dark Background

  Feersum Endjinn

  Excession

  Inversions

  Look to Windward

  The Algebraist

  Matter

  BY IAIN BANKS

  The Wasp Factory

  Walking On Glass

  The Bridge

  Espedair Street

  Canal Dreams

  The Crow Road

  Complicity

  Whit

  A Song of Stone

  The Business

  Dead Air

  The Steep Approach to Garbadale

  The State of the Art

  IAIN M. BANKS

  Hachette Digital

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  Published by Hachette Digital 2009

  ORBIT

  First published in Great Britain by Orbit in 1991

  This paperback edition published by Orbit in 1993

  Reprinted 1994, 1995, 1996 (twice), 1997, 1998, 1999,

  2001, 2002, 2005 (twice), 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 (twice)

  Copyright © Iain M. Banks 1991

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Illustrations © Nick Day 1991

  Acknowledgements: ROAD OF SKULLS first published in ‘20 under 35’, Sceptre 1988, A GIFT FROM THE CULTURE first published in ‘Interzone’, No. 20, 1987, ODD ATTACHMENT first published in ‘Tales from the Forbidden Planet’, Titan Books 1987, CLEANING UP first published by the Birmingham Science Fiction Group on the occasion of NOVACON 17, October 1987, PIECE first published by the ‘Observer’ magazine in 1989, THE STATE OF THE ART first published in the United States in 1989 by Mark V. Zeising, SCRATCH first published by ‘Fiction’ magazine, volume 6 No. 6, in August 1987.

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  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  eISBN : 978 0 7481 1007 0

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  For John Jarrold

  Road of Skulls

  The ride’s a little bumpy on the famous Road of Skulls . . .

  ‘My God, what’s happening!’ Sammil Mc9 cried, waking up.

  The cart he and his companion had hitched a ride on was shaking violently.

  Mc9 put his grubby hands on the plank of rotten wood which formed one of the cart’s sides and looked down at the legendary Road, wondering what had caused the cart’s previously merely uncomfortable rattling to become a series of bone-jarring crashes. He expected to discover that they had lost a wheel, or that the snooze-prone carter had let the vehicle wander right off the Road into a boulderfield, but he saw neither of these things. He stared, goggle-eyed, at the Road surface for a moment, then collapsed back inside the cart.

  ‘Golly,’ he said to himself, ‘I didn’t know the Empire ever had enemies with heads that big. Retribution from beyond the grave, that’s what this is.’ He looked forward; the cart’s senile driver was still asleep, despite the vehicle’s frenzied bouncing. Beyond him, the lop-eared old quadruped between the shafts was having some difficulty finding its footing on the oversized skulls forming that part of the Road, which led . . . Mc9 let his eyes follow the thin white line into the distance . . . to the City.

  It lay on the horizon of the moor, a shimmering blur. Most of the fabled megalopolis was still below the horizon, but its sharp, glittering towers were unmistakable, even through the blue and shifting haze. Mc9 grinned as he saw it, then watched the silent, struggling horse-thing as it clopped and skidded its way along the Road; it was sweating heavily, and beset by a small cloud of flies buzzing around its ear-flapping head like bothersome electrons around some reluctant nucleus.

  The old carter woke up and lashed inaccurately at the nag between the shafts, then nodded back into his slumber. Mc9 looked away and gazed out over the moor.

  Usually the moor was a cold and desolate place, wrapped in wind and rain, but today it was blisteringly hot; the air reeked of marsh gases and the heath was sprinkled with tiny bright flowers. Mc9 sank back into the straw again, scratching and squirming as the cart bucked and heaved about him. He tried shifting the bundles of straw and the heaps of dried dung into more comfortable configurations, but failed. He was just thinking that the journey would seem very long, and be uncomfortable indeed if this outrageous juddering went on, when the crashes died away and the cart went back to its more normal rattling and squeaking. ‘Thank goodness they didn’t hold out too long,’ Mc9 muttered to himself, and lay down again, closing his eyes.

  ... he was driving a haycart down a leafy lane. Birds were chirping, the wine was cool, money weighed in his pocket . . .

  He wasn’t quite asleep when his companion - whose name, despite their long association, Mc9 had never bothered to find out - surfaced from beneath the straw and dung beside him and said, ‘Retribution?’

  ‘Eh
? What?’ Mc9 said, startled.

  ‘What retribution?’

  ‘Oh,’ Mc9 said, rubbing his face and grimacing as he squinted at the sun, high in the blue-green sky. ‘The retribution inflicted upon us as Subjects of the Reign, by the deceased Enemies of the Beloved Empire.’

  The small companion, whose spectacular grubbiness was only partially obscured by a covering of debatably less filthy straw, blinked furiously and shook his head. ‘No . . . me mean, what “retribution” mean?’

  ‘I just told you,’ Mc9 complained. ‘Getting back at somebody.’

  ‘Oh,’ said the companion, and sat mulling this over while Mc9 drifted off to sleep again.

  . . . there were three young milkmaids walking ahead of his haycart; he drew level and they accepted a ride. He reached down to . . .

  His companion dug him in the ribs. ‘Like when me take too many bedclothes and you kick I out of bed, or me drink your wine and you make I drink three guts of laxative beer, or when you pregnanted that governor’s daughter and him set the Strategic Debt Collectors on you, or someplace doesn’t pay all its taxes and Its Majesty orders the first born of every family have their Birth Certificates endorsed, or . . . ?’

  Mc9, who was well used to his companion employing the verbal equivalent of a Reconnaissance By Fire, held up one hand to stem this flood of examples. His companion continued mumbling away despite the hand over his mouth. Finally the mumbling stopped.

  ‘Yes,’ Mc9 told him. ‘That’s right.’ He took his hand away.

  ‘Or is it like when -?’

  ‘Hey,’ Mc9 said brightly. ‘How about I tell you a story?’

  ‘Oh, a story,’ beamed his companion, clutching at Mc9’s sleeve in anticipation. ‘A story would be . . .’ his grimy features contorted like a drying mudflat as he struggled to find a suitable adjective. ‘. . . Nice.’

  ‘OK. Let go my sleeve and pass me the wine to wet my throat.’

  ‘Oh,’ Mc9’s companion said, and looked suddenly wary and doubtful. He glanced over the front of the cart, past the snoring driver and the toiling beast pulling them, and saw the City, still just a distant shimmer at the end of the Road’s bleached ribbon of bone. ‘OK,’ he sighed.

  He handed the wineskin to Mc9, who guzzled about half of what was left before the squealing, protesting companion succeeded in tearing it from his grasp, spilling most of the remainder over the two of them and squirting a jet of the liquid spattering over the neck of the snoring driver, and on out as far as the head of the horse-like animal (which lapped appreciatively at the drops spilling down its sweat-matted face).

  The decrepit driver woke with a start and looked around wildly, rubbing his damp neck, waving his frayed whip and apparently fully expecting to have to repel robbers, cut-throats and villains.

  Mc9 and his companion grinned sheepishly at him when he turned to look down at them. He scowled, dried his neck with a rag, then turned round and relapsed into his slumber.

  ‘Thanks,’ Mc9 told his companion. He wiped his face and sucked at one of the fresh wine stains on his shirt.

  The companion took a careful, dainty sip of wine, then twisted the stopper firmly back into the gut and placed it behind his neck as he lay back. Mc9 belched, yawned.

  ‘Yes,’ his companion said earnestly. ‘Tell I a story. Me would love to hear a story. Tell I a story of love and hate and death and tragedy and comedy and horror and joy and sarcasm, tell I about great deeds and tiny deeds and valiant people and hill people and huge giants and dwarfs, tell I about brave women and beautiful men and great sorcerorcerors . . . and about unenchanted swords and strange, archaic powers and horrible, sort of ghastly . . . things that, uhm . . . shouldn’t be living, and . . . ahm, funny diseases and general mishaps. Yeah, me like. Tell I. Me want.’

  Mc9 was falling asleep again, having had not the slightest intention of telling his companion a story in the first place. The companion prodded him in the back.

  ‘Hey!’ He prodded harder. ‘Hey! The story! No go to sleep! What about the story?’

  ‘Fornicate the story,’ Mc9 said sleepily, not opening his eyes.

  ‘WAA!’ the companion said. The carter woke up, turned round and clipped him across the ear. The companion went quiet and sat there, rubbing the side of his head. He prodded Mc9 again and whispered, ‘You said you’d tell me a story!’

  ‘Oh, read a book,’ mumbled Mc9, snuggling into the straw.

  The small companion made a hissing noise and sat back, his lips tight and his little hands clenched under his armpits. He glared at the Road stretching back to the wavering horizon.

  After a while, the companion shrugged, reached under the wineskin for his satchel and took out a small, fat black book. He prodded Mc9 once more. ‘All we’ve got is this Bible,’ he told him. ‘What bit should me read?’

  ‘Just open it at random,’ Mc9 mumbled from his sleep.

  The companion opened the Bible at Random, Chapter Six, and read:‘Yeah yeah yeah, verily I say unto you: Forget not that there are two sides to every story: a right side and a wrong side.’

  The companion shook his head and threw the book over the side of the cart.

  The road went ever on. The carter snuffled and snored, the sweating nag panted and struggled, while Mc9 smiled in his sleep and moaned a little. His companion passed the time by squeezing blackheads from his nose, and then replacing them.

  ... they had stopped at the ford through the shady brook, where the milkmaids were eventually persuaded to come for a swim, dressed only in their thin, clinging . . .

  Actually, the horse-like beast pulling the cart was the famous poet-scribe Abrusci from the planet Wellitisn’tmarkedonmychartlieutenant, and she could have told the bored companion any number of fascinating stories from the times before the Empire’s Pacification and Liberation of her homeworld.

  She could also have told them that the City was moving away from them across the moor as fast as they moved towards it, trundling across the endless heath on its millions of giant wheels as the continuous supply of vanquished Enemies of the Empire provided more trophies to be cemented into place on the famous Road of Skulls . . .

  But that, like they say, is another story.

  A Gift from the Culture

  Money is a sign of poverty. This is an old Culture saying I remember every now and again, especially when I’m being tempted to do something I know I shouldn’t, and there’s money involved (when is there not?).

  I looked at the gun, lying small and precise in Cruizell’s broad, scarred hand, and the first thing I thought - after: Where the hell did they get one of those? - was: Money is a sign of poverty. However appropriate the thought might have been, it wasn’t much help.

  I was standing outside a no-credit gambling club in Vreccis Low City in the small hours of a wet weeknight, looking at a pretty, toy-like handgun while two large people I owed a lot of money to asked me to do something extremely dangerous and worse than illegal. I was weighing up the relative attractions of trying to run away (they’d shoot me), refusing (they’d beat me up; probably I’d spend the next few weeks developing a serious medical bill), and doing what Kaddus and Cruizell asked me to do, knowing that while there was a chance I’d get away with it - uninjured, and solvent again - the most likely outcome was a messy and probably slow death while assisting the security services with their enquiries.

  Kaddus and Cruizell were offering me all my markers back, plus - once the thing was done - a tidy sum on top, just to show there were no hard feelings.

  I suspected they didn’t anticipate having to pay the final instalment of the deal.

  So, I knew that logically what I ought to do was tell them where to shove their fancy designer pistol, and accept a theoretically painful but probably not terminal beating. Hell, I could switch the pain off (having a Culture background does have some advantages), but what about that hospital bill?

  I was up to my scalp in debt already.

  ‘What’s the matter, Wrobik?’ Cruizell draw
led, taking a step nearer, under the shelter of the club’s dripping eaves. Me with my back against the warm wall, the smell of wet pavements in my nose and a taste like metal in my mouth. Kaddus and Cruizell’s limousine idled at the kerb; I could see the driver inside, watching us through an open window. Nobody passed on the street outside the narrow alley. A police cruiser flew over, high up, lights flashing through the rain and illuminating the underside of the rain clouds over the city. Kaddus looked up briefly, then ignored the passing craft. Cruizell shoved the gun towards me. I tried to shrink back.