Iain Banks - Canal Dreams

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Canal Dreams (v1.2)

Iain Banks, 1989

Hisako Onoda, world famous cellist, refuses to fly. And so she travels through the Panama

Canal as a passenger on a tanker bound for Europe. But Panama is a country whose politics

are as volatile as the local freedom fighters. When Hisako's ship is captured, it is not long

before the atmosphere is as flammable as an oxy-acetylene torch, and the tension as sharp

as the spike on her cello ...

Contents

Demurrage

1: Fantasia del Mer

2: Bridge of the World

3: The Universal Company

4: Water Business

Casus Belli

5: Concentration

6: Sal Si Puedes

7: Salvages

8: Conquistadores

Force Majeure

9: Aguaceros

10: Average Adjuster

11: Oneiric

12: The Heart of the Universe

DEMURRAGE

demurrage n. Rate or amount payable to shipowner by charterer for failure to load or

discharge ship within time allowed; similar charge on railway trucks or goods; such

detention, delay. [f. OF demo(u)rage (demorer, as DEMUR see -- AGE)]

1: Fantasia del Mer

tic tic tic tic ... Tiny noises of compression, sounding through her skull.

She'd been alarmed, the first time she'd heard them, over the noise of her breathing and

the tinny wheezes of the scuba gear which sat on her back, wrapping its plastic limbs round

her and jamming rubber and metal into her mouth. Now she just listened to the ticking

noises, imagining they were the signature of some erratic internal metronome; the unsteady

beats of a tiny, bony heart.

The noises were her skull's reaction to the increasing weight of water above her as she

dived, descending from the unsteady mirror of the surface, through the warm waters of the

lake, to the muddy floor and the stumps of the long-dead trees.

She had held a skull once, and seen the minute fissures marking its surface; tiny hairline

cracks stretching from side to side and end to end, jagged valleys on an ivory planet. They

were called sutures. Plates of bone grew and met while the baby was still in the womb. The

bones jammed together and locked, but left one area free so that the infant's head could

pass through its mother's pelvis, producing the spot on a baby's head which remained soft

and vulnerable until the bones had clasped there too, and the brain was safe, locked in

behind its wall.

When she'd first heard the noises in her head, she'd thought it was caused by those

bone-plates in her skull pressing harder in against each other, and the noise travelling

through those bones to her ears ... but then Philippe had disillusioned her; it was the sinuses

which produced the faint, irregular clicking sounds.

It came again, like some slow abacus. tic tic tic ...

She pinched her nose and blew, equalising the pressure on either side of her eardrums.

Deeper; she followed Philippe down, keeping his slowly stroking flippers a couple of

metres in front of her, conscious of her rhythm matching his, her legs moving through the

water in time to Philippe's. His white legs looked like stocky, strangely graceful worms; she

laughed into the mouthpiece. The mask pressed harder into her face as they continued

down. tic tic ...

Philippe began to level out. She could see the lake floor clearly now; a crumpled, grey

landscape fading slowly away into the gloom. The old tree stumps poked up through the

mud, flat eruptions of drowned life. Philippe looked round briefly at her, and she waved,

then levelled out too, to follow him along the water-buried surface of the land, over the

sliced trunks and the slow bursts of mud produced by his flippers. tic.

The pressures equalised, the column of water above her and the fluids and gases of her

body achieving a temporary equilibrium. The warm water moved against her skin in silky

folds, and her hair ruffled behind her in the slipstream of her body, stroking the nape of her

neck.

Settled into the pace of swimming, balanced and lulled, flying slowly over the slow

settlement of a near-century, following the just-tangible turbulence of the man's wake, she

let her mind wander.

She felt -- as she always did, down here -- untied from the commonality of breath that

was the air above. Here, however briefly, she was free. It was a freedom with its own many

and precise rules -- of times and depths, atmospheres and experience, maintained

equipment and weights of air and it was a freedom purchased through surrender to the

technology that was strapped to her back (clicking and hissing and burbling) but it was

freedom. The air in the mouthpiece tasted of it.

Under the waves, with the skull adjusted. Headlong through the warm waters, like an

easy and continual birth. Swimming like flying; the one buoyant image of her fear she could

accept.

This had been rainforest; the trees had grown in the wind and the sunlight, and trawled

the air for clouds and mist. Now they were gone, long turned to planks and rafters and ribs

and seats. Perhaps some of the great trees were pulped, and became paper; perhaps some

were turned into sleepers for the railways that helped the canal be built; perhaps some

formed the buildings in the Zone, and perhaps some became small ships; boats that had

plied the lakes. Sunk, their waterlogged timbers would nestle in these shaded depths,

rejoined. Maybe some became musical instruments; a cello, even! She laughed to herself

again.

She listened for more tics, but heard none.

She followed the man. In a few strokes and kicks, she knew, she could pass and out-

distance him. She was stronger than he knew, perhaps she was even stronger than he was

... but he was younger; he was a man, and proud. So she let him lead.

In a few minutes, hypnotically over the drowned forest, they came to what had once been

a road. Philippe stopped briefly, treading water over the muddied track, raising clouds of soft

grime beneath him while he studied the plastic-wrapped map. She drifted nearby, watching

his bubbles wobble their way to the surface. His breath.

He put the map back under his T-shirt, nodded down the road and set off. She kept pace.

She knew the gesture he'd just made, and knew the sort of grunt that accompanied it; she

imagined she'd heard it translated through the water. She followed him, thinking dreamily of

whale songs.

Before they found the village, they heard the noise of an engine. She heard it first, and

hardly thought about it, though some part of her was trying to analyse the noise, put a

name and a key to it. She realised it was engine noise just as Philippe stopped in front of

her, looking around and up, and holding his breath. He gestured to his ears, looking at her;

she nodded. They stared up.

The shadow of the boat's hull went past, not overhead but a few tens of metres to their

right; a long dark shape dragging a twisted thread of bubbles after it. The noise of its

passing grew, peaked, then fell away. She looked at Philippe once the boat had passed, and

he shrugged; he pointed down the road again. She hesitated, then nodded.

She followed Philippe, but the mood was different now. Something in her wanted to go

back to the Gemini. The inflatable they'd set out from was moored a hundred metres away,

in roughly the direction the boat had been heading. She had wondered if the noise of the

boat would alter after they'd passed, telling her it had slowed and stopped at the Gemini

after all, it might look as though it had been abandoned -- but the boat seemed to have

continued on beyond that, heading for the middle of the lake and the ships anchored there.

She wanted to go back, to return to the Gemini and then to the ships; to find out what

that boat was doing, and who was on it.

She didn't know why she felt so nervous, so suddenly full of a low, nagging dread. But

the feeling was there. The war might be coming to touch them at last.

The drowned road dipped, and they followed it. tic tic she heard, diving deeper. tic tic, as

they swam towards the ruins.

When Hisako Onoda was six her mother took her to a concert in Sapporo; the NHK

Orchestra playing works by Haydn and Handel. Hisako Onoda was a restless, occasionally

recalcitrant child and her weary mother suspected she'd have to remove the squirming,

wriggling, and quietly but insistently complaining child before the end of the first piece, but

she didn't. Hisako Onoda sat still, looked straight ahead at the stage, didn't rustle her bag of

taka rabukoro, and -- instead, incredibly -- listened.

When the concert was over she didn't clap with everybody else, but started eating the

deep-fried tofu in the bag instead. Meanwhile her mother stood up with everybody else,

clapping brightly and happily with small, fast movements of her hands, blinking furiously and

gesturing to Hisako to stand and applaud too. The child did not stand, but sat looking

around at the politely enthusiastic adults towering everywhere about her with an expression

somewhere between mystification and annoyance. When the applause faded at last, Hisako

Onoda pointed to the stage and told her mother, 'I would like one, please.'

Her mother thought -- for one confused moment -- that her seemingly gifted but

undeniably troublesome and disobedient daughter wanted a Western symphony orchestra of

her own. It was some time before she was able, through patient questioning, to discover

that what the child wanted was a cello.

The drowned village was wrapped in weeds and mud, like tendrils of some solid, cloying

mist. The roofs had all collapsed, caved in on their timbers, tiles lying scattered and ruffled-

looking under the wrapping of grey mud. She thought the houses looked small and pathetic.

Floating over a broken street, she was reminded of a row of rotten teeth.

The church was the largest building. Its roof seemed to have been removed; there was no

wreckage inside the shell. Philippe swam down into it, and trod water above the flat stone

table that had been the altar, raising lazy clouds of dust about him like slow smoke. She

swam through a narrow window and rubbed one of the walls, wondering if there were any

paintings under the film of mud. The wall was dull white, though, unmarked.

She watched Philippe investigate the niches in the wall behind the altar, and tried to

imagine the church full of people. The sunlight must have shone on its roof and through the

windows, and the people in their Sunday best must have trooped in here, and sung, and

listened to the priest, and filed out again, and the place must have been cool in the summer

heat, and white and clean. But it was difficult to imagine. The thickness of the underwater

light, the monotonous ubiquity of the grey mud, the enfolding quietness of the place,

somehow denied the past that had brought the village and the church into existence; it was

as though it had always been like this, was always meant to be like this, and the chatter and

light of the village -- when only the wind had flowed down these streets and around these

walls -- had been a dream; a brief, breezy, immature little life, before the burying

permanence of the water extinguished it.

The noise of an engine drilled through her thoughts. The sound was far away, just

audible, and soon faded. She imagined the faint grumble echoing off the muddy walls of the

drowned church's shell, the only vestige of music left to the place.

Philippe swam over to her and gestured at his watch; they both struck up for the surface,

flippers waving down at the wrecked church beneath them, as though saying goodbye.

The Gemini bounced across Gatún Lake beneath a bright overcast sky, heading for the

moored ships. She sat in the bows, slowly drying her hair, watching the three vessels

coming closer.

'Perhaps it was the National Guard.' She turned round to look at Philippe. 'But it sounded

bigger than a Gemini.'

'Perhaps.' Philippe nodded slowly. 'But it did not come from the direction of Gatún.

Frijoles, perhaps.'

'The Fantasia?' She smiled back at him, watching his brown tanned face, looking at the

small lines around his eyes which made him look older than he was.

A frown crossed the man's face. 'I think it is not to come until tomorrow.' He shrugged.

She smiled again. 'We'll know soon, when we get to the ships.'

He nodded, but the frown resurfaced briefly. He was gazing past her, watching their

course. There were old logs floating in the lake, almost waterlogged, that could turn a

Gemini over or break its outboard prop. Hisako Onoda studied the man's face for a while,

and found herself thinking she ought to write again to her mother; perhaps that evening.

Maybe she would mention Philippe this time, but maybe not. She felt a little warmth rise to

her face, and then felt foolish.

I am forty-four years old, she told herself, and still feel embarrassed to tell my mother I

have a lover.

Dear Mother,

Here I am in Panama in the middle of the war. I dive, we have parties, we see artillery

battles and missile streaks, and planes scream over us sometimes. Food good, weather

warm mostly.

Love, Hisako.

P.S. I have a boyfriend.

A French boyfriend. A married French boyfriend who was younger than she was. Ah well.

She looked at her fingertips, crinkled from the water as though after a long bath. Maybe I

should have flown, she thought, rubbing at the corrugated flesh.

'Hisako, Hisako, it's only a few hours!'

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摘要：

CanalDreams(v1.2)IainBanks,1989HisakoOnoda,worldfamouscellist,refusestofly.AndsoshetravelsthroughthePanamaCanalasapassengeronatankerboundforEurope.ButPanamaisacountrywhosepoliticsareasvolatileasthelocalfreedomfighters.WhenHisako'sshipiscaptured,itisnotlongbeforetheatmosphereisasflammableasanoxy-acet...

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Iain Banks - Canal Dreams

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