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Iain M. Banks

Against a Dark Background

© 1993

Prologue

She put her chin on the wood below the window. The wood was cold and shiny and smelled. She kneeled on the seat; it smelled too, but different. The seat was wide and red like the sunset and had little buttons that made deep lines in it and made it look like somebody’s tummy. It was dull outside and the lights were on in the cable car. There were people skiing on the steep slopes beneath. She could see her own face looking back at ‘her in the glass; she started to make faces at herself.

After a while the glass in front of her face went misty. She reached up and wiped it. Somebody in another car, going down the hill, waved at her. She ignored them. The hills and the white trees tipped slowly back and forward.

The cable car swung gently as it rose through the mountain air towards the cloudbase. The trees and runs on the slopes beneath were equally white; a fresh snowfall and freezing fog blowing up the valley overnight had coated the branches and needles of the trees with a crisp white wrap of crystals. Skiers cut and scythed through the new plumpness of the fall, engraving a carved text of blue-white lines onto the bulging fresh page of snow.

She watched the child for a moment. She was kneeling on the button-hide seat, looking out. Her ski-suit was garish pink, fur trimmed.

Her gloves, hanging from her sleeves on lengths of cord, were a clashing mauve. Her little boots were orange. It was a foul-looking combination (especially so here in Frelle, Northern Caltasp’s supposedly most exclusive and certainly its most snobbish resort), but-she suspected-probably less psyche-damaging than the tantrum and sulk which would inevitably have resulted had her daughter not been allowed to choose her own skiing outfit. The girl wiped at the window, frowning.

She wondered what the child was frowning at, and turned to see another cable car passing them on the way down, twenty metres or so away. She put her hand out and moved it through the girl’s black hair, pulling some of the curls away from her face. She didn’t seem to notice; she just kept gazing out of the window. Such a serious face for a little girl.

She smiled, remembering when she had been that age. She could recall being five; she had memories from about as far back as three, but they were vague and inchoate; flashes of memory illuminating a dark landscape of forgotten past.

But she could remember being conscious of being five; even remember her fifth birthday party and the fireworks over the lake.

How she had wanted to be older then; to be grown up and stay up late and go to dances. She had hated being young, hated always being told what to do, hated the way adults didn’t tell you everything. And hated, too, some of the stupid things they did tell you, like, ‘These are the best days of your life’. You could never believe at the time that adults had any idea-beyond mischief-what they were talking about. You had to be an adult, with all the cares and responsibilities it brought, before you could appreciate the struggling ignorance adults termed innocence, and-usually forgetting the way they too had felt at the time-call the captivity of childhood, however caring, freedom.