Lanark_ a life in 4 books - Alasdair Gray [237]
A small voice near his toes was saying “… identify self. This is Provan Air Authority addressing the U-1 flight from Unthank. Repeat: will passenger please identify self. Over.” “I am the Lord Provost of the Greater Unthank region,” said Lanark firmly, yet with elation, “and delegate to the general assembly of council states.”
“Please rep—please rep—please repeat. Over.”
Lanark said it again.
“The U-1 flight from Unthank may proceed to Hampden as planned on beam co—beam co—beam coordinate zero flux zero parahelion 43 minutes 19 point nought 7 seconds epihelion ditto neg—ditto neg—ditto negating impetus reversal flow 22 point nought 2—nought 2—nought 2—nought 2—nought 2 beyond the equinoctial of Quebus on the international nerve—national nerve—national nerve-circuit-decimal-calendar-cortexin-quantum-clock. Message understood? Over.”
“It sounds like gibberish to me,” said Lanark.
“Proceed as planned. Repeat: as planned. Repeat: as planned. Out.”
There was a click and silence. He lay thinking of how he kept being pushed into certain actions, and how people kept talking to him as though he had planned them. But perhaps the message had not been for him but for his aircraft. It had sounded very like a machine talking to a machine. He pushed his head out into sunlight again.
He was flying up a wide and winding firth with very different coasts. To the right lay green farmland with clumps of trees and reservoirs in hollows linked by quick streams. On the left were mountain ridges and high bens silvered with snow, the sun striking gold sparkles off bits of sea loch between them. On both shores he saw summer resorts with shops, church spires and crowded esplanades, and clanging ports with harbours full of shipping. Tankers moved on the water, and freighters and white-sailed yachts. A long curving feather of smoke pointed up at him from a paddle steamer churning with audible chunking sounds toward an island big enough to hold a grouse moor, two woods, three farms, a golf course and a town fringing a bay. This island looked like a bright toy he could lift up off the smoothly ribbed, rippling sea, and he seemed to recognize it. He thought, ‘Did I have a sister once? And did we play together on the grassy top of that cliff among the yellow gorse-bushes? Yes, on that cliff behind the marine observatory, on a day like this in the summer holidays. Did we bury a tin box under a gorse root in a rabbit hole? There was a half-crown piece in it and a silver sixpence dated from that year, and a piece of our mothers jewellery, and a cheap little notebook with a message to ourselves when we grew up. Did we promise to dig it up in twenty-five years? And dug it up two days later to make sure it hadn’t been stolen? And were we not children then? And was I not happy?’
The shores grew steeper, more wooded and close together; the firth was pinched between them to a water-lane marked by buoys and light-towers. In places docks embanked it and vessels were being built or unloaded beneath the arms of cranes. Then the high land sloped away left and right and he came to a valley, a broad basin of land filled by a city with the river gleaming toward a centre of spires, towers and high white blocks. The eagle-machine left the river and soared in a long curve over sloping hills to the south, then to the east, then to the north. It crossed tenements of clean stone enclosing gardens where children played and lines of washing flapped in a slow breeze. There was a holiday in this city for the air was transparent and the bowling greens and tennis courts busy with players. The width and beauty of the view, its clearness under the sun seemed not only splendid but familiar. He thought, ‘All my life, yes, all my life I’ve wanted this, yet I seem to know it well. Not the names, no, the names have gone, but I recognize the places. And if I really lived here once, and was happy, how