The Crow Road by Iain Banks

had been making these tenth-scale wood and plastic models of sculptures he wanted to build full size in concrete and steel one day. The idea was to construct these things on a beach; he’d need planning permission, lots of money, and waves. The sculptures were wave-powered mobiles and fountains. When a wave struck them a giant wheel would revolve, or air would be forced through pipes, producing weird, chest-shaking, cathedral-demolishing bass notes and uncanny howls and moans, or the water in the waves themselves would be channelled, funnelled, and emerge in a whale-like spout of spray, bursting from the top or sides of the sculpture. They sounded great, perfectly feasible, and I wanted to see one work, so this was good news.
    I went downstairs for a pee, and came back to a good-natured but confused argument. ‘What do you mean, no it doesn’t?’ Verity said from her sleeping-bagged cubby-hole.
    ‘I mean, what is sound?’ Lewis said. ‘The definition is; what we hear. So if there’s nobody there to hear it ...’
    ‘Sounds a bit anthro-thingy to me,’ Helen Urvill said, from the card table.
    ‘But how can it fall without making a sound?’ Verity protested. ‘That’s crazy.’
    I leaned over to Darren, who was sitting looking amused. ‘We talking trees falling in forests?’ I asked. He nodded.
    ‘You’re not listening -’ Lewis told Verity.
    ‘Maybe you’re not making a sound.’
    ‘Shut up, Prentice,’ Lewis said, without bothering to look at me. ‘What I’m saying is, What is a sound? If you define it as -’
    ‘Yeah,’ interrupted Verity. ‘But if the tree hits the ground that must make the air move. I’ve stood near a tree when it’s felled; you feel the ground shake. Doesn’t the ground shake either, when there’s nobody there? The air has to move; there must be ... movement, in the air; its molecules, I mean ...’
    ‘Compression waves,’ I provided, nodding to Verity, and thinking about Darren’s wave-powered organ-pipe coast sculptures.
    ‘Yeah; producing compression waves,’ Verity said, with an acknowledging wave at me (oh, my heart leapt!). ‘Which birds and animals and insects can hear -’
    ‘Ah!’ Lewis said. ‘Supposing there aren’t -’
    Well, it got silly after that, dissolving into the polemical equivalent of white noise, but I liked the robustly common-sensical line Verity was taking. And when she was talking, of course, I got to stare at her without anybody thinking it odd. It was wonderful. I was falling in love with her. Beauty and brains. Wow!
    More sounds, more spliffs, more star-gazing. Lewis did his impression of a radio being tuned through various wavelengths; fingers at his lips to produce the impressively authentic between-stations noises, then suddenly putting on silly voices to impersonate a news reader, compere, quiz contestant, singer ... ‘ttttrrrrsssshhhh ... reports that the London chapter of the Zoroastrians have fire-bombed the offices of the Sun newspaper for blasphemy ... zzzoooowwwaaanngggg ... athangyou, athangyou, laze an ge’men, andenow, please put your hands together for the Siamese Twins ... kkkkrrrraaasshhhwwwaaaassshhhaaa ... uh, can you eat it, Bob? Ah, no, you can’t. I’m afraid the answer is; a Pot Nooddle ... bllbllbllbl ... Hey hey, we’re the junkies! ... zpt!’
    And so on. We laughed, we drank more coffee, and we smoked.
    The gear was black and powerful like the night; the hollow aluminium skull of the observatory tracked the ‘scope’s single eye slowly over the rolling web of stars, or - hand-cranked - swivelled the universe about our one fixed point. Soon my head was spinning, too. The music machine played away - far away - and when I started to understand the lyrics of a Cocteau Twins song, I knew I was wrecked. The stars shone on in mysterious galactic harmonies, constellations like symphonies of ancient, trembling light; Lewis told weird and creepy stories and bizarrely apposite jokes, and the twins - hunkered over