The Islanders

by Christopher Priest

  The boat docked. Thankful to have something active to do, we busied ourselves with unloading our baggage and the equipment the team would be using. The modern dock facilities used in Jethra had no equivalent here, so everything had to be carried ashore by hand. No one said anything but there was a new quietness that had fallen on us as a group.

  The town was still, almost free of traffic. No one seemed curious about us as we clustered on the quay with our baggage. People walked by slowly, their faces averted, not acknowledging us. The stiff wind had become a light breeze now we were ashore. I was oppressed by the sense of gloom and fearfulness, I felt no interest in our surroundings, and above all I no longer wished to look any further or higher than the ground around me. I was in terror of what lay above, but I did not know what it was.

  Ref said that the cars that were planned to rendezvous with us at the dock had not for some reason been sent, and she went to the harbour office to find out what had happened. Eventually she returned, complaining that it was almost impossible to get a cellular signal on this island. We stood indecisively, but a few minutes later two large vehicles did arrive to collect us.

  It turned out that because Alvasund and I were travelling together we had been allocated to another Authority-owned property, a small apartment some distance from the central harbour but close to the water. This turned out to be to our advantage. After a long delay the others had to move temporarily into rooms over a bar in the centre of the town. There was supposed to be a larger building available, operated by the Authority, specially built and equipped for a long stay, but neither Ref nor anyone else knew how to find it. The representative from the Authority, supposedly at the dock to greet us, had not appeared. Seevl already seemed to us a place permanently in disarray, running on half power.

  The moment we entered our apartment and closed the door behind us, the sensation of dread abruptly lifted. It was so abrupt, so noticeable that we reacted simultaneously to it. It was like the sensation of air pressure being released as a plane descended: a relief, a clearing up, a removal of a background sensation.

  We quickly explored the apartment, exclaiming at the sense of new freedom.

  ‘The building must be shielded,’ Alvasund said, when we had looked into both main rooms and dumped our luggage in the bedroom. ‘After everything else, I wasn’t counting on it. But I was told Authority buildings here were supposed to have been screened. It seems they did it.’

  ‘What about the others?’

  ‘They’ll be all right for one night.’

  When we had unpacked some of our things we ate the food we had brought. We sat together at the cramped fold-out table in the kitchenette. The window there looked over the water, not far below us. Outside it had started to rain, a mist drifting up the inlet from the direction of the sea. We kept remarking on the feeling of relief inside the apartment, the welcome sense of normality.

  Alvasund showed me what she said was the material they were using as a shield against the psychic emissions from the towers. It had been placed hard against each of the windows, but it was also possible to see that it extended to each side, and above and below, an unseen layer concealed within the walls.

  Alvasund said the material was some kind of plastic, but the moment I looked at it closely I suddenly realized what it was. It was neither plastic nor conventional glass, but a sort of non-metallic alloy created by fusing a number of polymers with glass crystals. In other words it was BPSG, polymerized borophosphosilicate glass, closely similar to the material I had been working with on Ia. It was made so that it remained transparent, and could be used instead of conventional glass. It was also a powerful transducer of energy. When you touched it there was a feeling of tough resilience, like hard rubber, almost impossible to break or shatter, although it could be moulded.

  I looked more closely at the BPSG that had been used in the apartment. I touched it again and peered at it by leaning down so that the light from the sky was refracted through it. I saw a faint web of tell-tale halation, a misting of the transparency. This would be normally undetectable in use, caused by the many layers of molecular mini-circuitry within, and visible only at certain oblique angles. The variant we had been experimenting with on Ia was to enable high-energy waves to be collected, condensed, then amplified. Practical applications were yet to be designed, although we were funded by two major electronics companies. We had been experimenting with polarization of the glass at the time I left.

  Ever since the incident at the tower on Goorn the thought had been nagging at me that maybe that kind of glass, suitably polarized and strengthened, could be used to divert, transduce or even block whatever those terrifying emanations might be. Now I realized that someone else, working for the Intercession teams, must have had the same idea.

  After we had eaten, and because there was still time before we were supposed to meet up with the others, we lay down on the bed and rested. It was good to be there together, undisturbed, affectionate and relaxed.

  Neither of us wanted to leave the apartment, return to the unshielded streets outside, but finally we went in search of the rest of the team. We walked through the narrow streets and alleys of Seevl Town, already gripped by the horrible feeling of psychic dread, but because we knew there would be an escape from it when we returned to the flat we could put up with it.

  We saw how decrepit most of the town appeared – there was none of the sense of industry and purposeful activity that we had seen in Ørsknes, let alone the thriving metropolis of Jethra. Most of the buildings had been constructed from the dark grey local stone. They looked thick and solid, perhaps an attempt to shut out the pervading gloom. They were also shabby. The windows and doors were narrow, with makeshift shutters and blinds. Galvanized iron sheets were laid roughly against many of the entrances.

  There seemed to be no wildlife – we heard no birds, not even the gulls which were otherwise found in every port in the Archipelago. When we went down to the quay we saw that the water of the inlet had an oily, lifeless look to it, as if the fish too were repelled by the emanations from the towers.

  I began to think that I would find it difficult living in such a place for long, at least without the shielding, but I said nothing of this to Alvasund.

  We found the building where the rest of the team was staying overnight, and as I had suspected there was no shielding. The building was just a normal town bar, clearly on the point of going out of business. The team members were stoical about the arrangement, as they had made contact with the Authority and would be moving the next day.

  Gloomily we walked with the rest of the team through the town in search of somewhere we could find a meal; worriedly we ate it; and afterwards we dispersed with unenthusiastic farewells.

  Once Alvasund and I were in our apartment again, though, our spirits lifted with the closing of the door. It was like shaking off the memory of fog, or removing a bulky garment. In fact, we threw off all our clothes and went straight to bed.

  In the morning Alvasund dressed for work. She took out overalls and gauntlets, and so on, from one of the large cartons we had brought with us. The garments were made of heavy fabric, camo green. She put these on over her own clothes, becoming shapeless. Finally, she pulled on a large helmet, which I took at first glance to be made of metal. It covered her entire head as well as her throat and neck. It had a glass visor, which she snapped down over her face, then she tilted her head in a familiar gesture, suggesting she would like me to kiss her. I went across to her, smiling at what she was doing.

  She flipped open the visor, and tapped it.

  ‘I’m protected,’ she said.

  ‘You’re completely beyond reach!’ I said, groping unsuccessfully across her cumbersome garments, and trying to push my mouth through the narrow slot to kiss her.

  ‘You know what I mean,’ she said.

  I looked closely at the visor, and saw that it was made of the polymerized BPSG. I held her as affectionately as her thick clothing would allow.
/>   ‘Don’t take risks, Alvasund,’ I said.

  ‘I think I know what I’m doing. The others certainly do.’ She drew back from me. Then she added, ‘I want you to do something for me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘All my friends call me Alvie. From now, today, tonight, for ever, I want you to call me that too.’

  ‘You may call me Torm,’ I said.

  ‘I already do.’

  She snapped down the protective visor, smiled at me through the transductive glass, and walked with wide and awkward steps to the stairs that led down to the road.

  I gave her another clumsy hug, and then she was gone. When she was outside I watched her through the window of the apartment as she stood by the side of the street. Soon enough the Authority vehicle appeared with the others aboard, and they drove away towards the edge of town.

  * * *

  I began to feel trapped in that apartment in Seevl Town. Although Alvie returned every day, sometimes early, halfway through the afternoon, and she was as loving and physical with me as ever, inevitably our lives were drifting slowly away from each other. I was alone almost every day. Although there were, or I obtained, the usual distractions, like books, internet access, films, music, it was still a fact that I could only leave when I felt able to brave the psychic aura that drifted around the town. I had no other protection than the discreetly glazed walls of the building. There was no work I could do beyond maintaining distant electronic contact with my former colleagues on Ia.

  Alvie rarely talked about the work they were doing, but as they settled into what I assumed were routines she and the others always referred to it as ‘decommissioning’. One day a small freighter arrived in the harbour. A heavy tractor, the kind of thing used in demolition jobs, was unloaded. It bore Authority markings. The driver took it clattering and smoking through the narrow streets and up into the hills away from town.

  For me, the weird threat of the towers was gradually being replaced by a more comprehensible longing. In short I was missing the outdoor life I had enjoyed in the subtropical warmth of Ia. My early background on Goorn had created in me an inward habit, one of staying at home, keeping warm, spending time alone, but I had found, a few years earlier when I arrived on Ia, that I much preferred those benign sea winds, the open spaces and cooling heights, the tangled forests, the hotly glittering seas.

  Soon I took to walking every day on Seevl, at first simply for the needed change of environment, then later with increasing interest in the area around the town. Of course, unprotected, unshielded, I took the full force of the psychic emanations from the towers, but I discovered that it was possible to get used to them. I realized that they weren’t targeted exclusively on me and after that I could almost ignore them. I also carried the knowledge that at the end of my excursion there was a shielded home sanctuary in which normality would return, not to speak of a happy physical affair with an attractive young woman.

  I relished my daily walks, felt myself coming alive again, and a feeling of physical well-being was growing in me. My senses were developing – I felt as if I was seeing, hearing, tasting better than I had ever done before.

  * * *

  After two or three weeks of these long walks, I was hardly noticing the sense of dread. In fact, I so much enjoyed striding across the blustery high moors, with the racing skies, the blown coarse grasses, the stunted brambles and clammy mosses, that any mood induced by the dead towers was easily overlooked.

  One day, clambering through hills a fair distance inland of the town, I noticed deep and parallel clayey furrows left by caterpillar tracks, and I realized that I must be close to one of the places where Alvie and her decommissioning team had been working.

  I wandered up the slope, following the tracks, interested to see what might be there.

  I came eventually to a shallow declivity, a way down from the local summit of a rising moor, exactly the sort of site where the towers were usually placed. I could see no sign of any tower ahead of me as I walked, but this was soon explained. I came to an area where the ground was torn and furrowed by the repeated movements of the heavy machine.

  Dark bricks lay all around, some of them broken by the violent act of demolition, but many more of them intact. I walked around the site, looking at the ground, the view, the glimpse of the sea that could be distantly made out. I sensed no concentration or intensity of the psychic emanation. I assumed that Alvie and Ref and the others must have succeeded in removing whatever entity or force there might have been. It just looked and felt like a place where an old building once existed.

  In the centre of the rubble I saw a series of deep channels, trenches, arranged in an octagonal shape.

  When I was back in the peace of the apartment that night I said nothing to Alvie about this. She was in a quiet mood, and later, when Ref came to visit, I overheard the two women talking quietly about the need to take a short break from the work.

  Alvie said at one point, in a hushed voice, ‘I think it’s getting to me at last.’ Ref replied softly, obviously not realizing that even in the next room I could hear her whispered words, ‘Two of the guys have requested a trip to the mainland.’ And Alvie said, ‘Then I would come too.’ Ref: ‘What about Torm?’ Alvie said, ‘I think he likes it here.’

  That night she and I made exuberant love.

  But the next day, as soon as Alvie had been picked up by the team transporter, I put on my walking clothes and set out for the site of the demolished tower.

  The fallen bricks had not been on the ground long enough for them to become embedded in the thin soil and therefore difficult to move. They were heavy, of course, and hard on my hands, but if I moved one brick at a time and rested for a few moments afterwards, it was a practicable task.

  When I took a break in the middle of the day I had succeeded in returning many of the bricks to the octagonal trench, the original base of the wall. As I had hefted each one in, it felt so right and natural that every brick seemed to slip willingly into its place. By the end of that day, one row of bricks, neatly octagonal, was just visible above the surface of the ground, giving the semblance of a deliberate construction.

  I returned to the tower day after day, intent only on working with the bricks that were mostly undamaged. I had no means of mortaring them, so I had to find a way of resting each new brick so securely that it would hold firm – in practice, the bricks seemed eager to nestle once more with the others.

  Soon the octagonal tower stood slightly higher than myself, and I had used nearly all the intact bricks I had found lying on the ground.

  I stood back from the new building, looked at it critically, walked around it, admired the view of the valley and the distant sea it commanded.

  Then I clambered over the wall, and for the first time I stood within.

  I was surrounded by the tower’s walls. I could see nothing outside. There was only the endless wind, the rushing sound of blown grasses. I sat down, stood up again, stretched out my arms to see if I could straddle the interior with both my hands.

  Then I sat down again, until it began to be dark.

  Of course I returned the next day, and every day after, climbing over the wall, taking up my position inside the octagonal compartment, listening to the unceasing moorland winds. I liked to sit, but I also liked to raise myself up to see over the wall, to regard the area of the island my tower was covering. It frustrated me that I could not both sit down and see outside, but after a while a solution became obvious to me.

  Amongst the rubble of bricks left behind by the tractor were several heavy wooden beams, clearly once used as joists or supports. If I were to make an aperture in one of the walls, used a beam to support the bricks above, then a crude window would be possible. I could afterwards crouch silently within, looking out at the view.

  For that I would require glass, not only to shield myself from the constant winds, but to give me a way of concentrating the sensations that poured through me whenever I went inside. I was thrilled by th
e idea, and also by the other thoughts I was having. My sensations were constantly expanding. Whenever I was inside the tower I felt I could see everything, hear everything, within me and without, past, present and future.

  That night I went to the Authority’s works depot in the town, and there I found several sheets of the special shielding glass. I chose a piece of suitable size, concealed it overnight close to our apartment.

  It had been many days since Alvie had left for Jethra with Ref and the others. It would be many more days before she came back. Now I barely thought of her.

  The next day I carried the glass up to the moors, dreaming about how I might fix it in place, planning how to use it, imagining the concentration of my thoughts and senses emanating from the tower, intensified, condensed, enhanced, transduced and transformed by the polymerized material, a psychic triumph, a focus of all fears and hopes.

  There in my tower behind the glass I would wait patiently for Alvie’s return. I had much to tell her about, much to show her, from the past, in the present and into the future.

  SENTIER

  HIGH / BROTHER

  SENTIER is a semi-arid island in the sub-tropical region of the southern Midway Sea. It is dominated by the cone of an immense extinct volcano, whose name in island patois renders not only as HIGH (the island’s local name), but also as BROTHER. The island is short of natural resources, and there is a constant scarcity of drinking water. Large storage cisterns can be seen all over the landscape, especially in the drier uplands. In summer the island is beset by a hot wind from the equatorial north, the ROSOLINO. This was once the strumpet wind of the south-eastern spice trade, ruthlessly used by mariners but never trusted, but in the age of modern shipping the Rosolino brings aridity and dust to the islands it sweeps disdainfully across.

  Because of its remoteness and the liberal attitudes of the inhabitants, Sentier is favoured by the backpack generation. There are many cheap hotels and food places along the strip and around the port in Sentier City. In this transient population, the young men and women who are deserters from the war find a congenial and safe environment. Sentier has permissive attitudes towards the use of alcohol and recreational drugs, and has allowed all havenic laws to fall into disuse.