The Islanders (24 page)

She allowed him to lead her to the door of her apartment, but then she went past him, pushed the key into the lock and turned to face him.

‘I don’t want you to come in, Bradd,’ she said. ‘I don’t think that would be right any more.’

‘So you think we should talk about a visit to Tremm out here in the passage?’

His voice was loud, unguarded. He intended that. They both looked from side to side along the corridor. It could hardly be more open to the risk of being overheard.

‘If you come in, tell me what you know, then please leave.’

He nodded, but it could have meant anything.

Lorna opened the door and they both went inside. She left the light off in the passage, and instead led him straight to her own room. Once they were inside she realized with a second inner thrill of guilt how normal it felt for him to be there with her. At the time of their affair, he had been a regular visitor to this room. Patta, for instance, clearly became used to him turning up at the apartment. Lorna did not want all that to start up again. She was certain about that. But even so Bradd had been much more than a one-night stand, and for a while at least, in that dark time when she realized Tomak was completely out of contact with her, she had believed she might even grow to love him. All that came back as an unwelcome reminder, just from him standing there, being in the room again. But it was over now, had been over for months. It was Tomak she still wanted, only Tomak.

‘You need to get across to Tremm,’ Bradd said. He had kicked the door closed behind him. ‘I know what’s on your mind and I don’t really care any more. You made all that clear last year.’

‘I’m sorry, Bradd. I never meant to hurt your feelings. We said everything then. It was just a mistake – ’

‘Well, it’s in the past, and I’ve moved on,’ he said. ‘I’m all for making a fresh start. I believe I can help you now. I’ve recently gained the use of a friend’s boat, a yacht. I’ve been learning how to sail it and I’ve already made several long trips along the coast here. I think, I
know
, that I could navigate across the strait to Tremm without any risk.’

‘You mean, without risk of a boating accident?’ Bradd nodded to confirm this. ‘But what about the security?’

‘Where I found the map I sent you – that file also has a lot of information about the way the island is patrolled. In theory it’s as tightly protected as the Seigniory Palace, but in reality security along the coast is lax. If we make the crossing at night, we wouldn’t run into anything.’

‘It’s far too dangerous!’

‘I don’t think so. How closely did you look at the chart of the coastal waters?’

‘Hardly at all. I only had the graphic on the screen for a few seconds. I couldn’t leave it there.’

‘The water is shallow, usually calm. The tidal surge is moderate. There are some rocks, but they’re all at the western end of the bay. The bay itself has a wide beach where I could simply run the boat ashore. The only danger would be if the weather was bad, but we wouldn’t even set out if that was the case.’

‘Why are you doing this, Bradd?’

‘All sorts of reasons.’

‘Go on.’

‘Well, for one thing, I feel guilty about what happened last year. We both feel bad about it, but you were on the rebound. I took advantage of you. I want to make amends. I hated what you said at the time but I realize now what Tomak means to you. In some ways I regret nothing because I was genuinely attracted to you. What happened shouldn’t have happened.’

‘Bradd, I told you I was sorry.’

A shadow of a memory was passing overhead, though, breathing a quiet menace. She had heard this from him once before, a different context, not in this room, another. Then it had come with unstated threats – his obsession that she could not cope without him, his repeated claims that she needed him. He built her up and knocked her down, undermining her confidence in herself, in her job, in her belief in Tomak, sometimes even in her own sanity. It had terrified her then, helped make up her mind about him. She had refused to go near him for several weeks. But that was then. A safer distance had grown in the months that passed since.

She said quietly, ‘You said there were several reasons.’

‘There was all that. What happened between us, and trying to make amends. That’s the main reason. The only other one is more complex. It’s because we’re told we shouldn’t go to Tremm, that no one is allowed there. That feels like a challenge to me. We’re both cartographers, Lorna, we’ve been trained to believe that a map should be something of objective fact. If a place is there, if an island exists, then we should be free to chart it. The only reason Tremm is not on our maps is political. Some government somewhere has decided its national interest lies in putting Tremm under its domain, and suddenly the island ceases to exist. But it’s not our government and it’s not our war. It’s one of the countries in the north that must have made some kind of deal with the Seigniory. These things go on. Anyway, the result is ludicrous. We can see the island with our own eyes, every day, every night. Everyone who lives on Meequa knows Tremm is there, so do thousands of other people. So why can’t we put it on a map? To me that’s the challenge. I just want to go there, walk around on it for a while.’

‘And then you would come back here?’ Lorna said. He shrugged his shoulders. ‘What about me, if I went with you? Are you planning to leave me there?’

‘What do you want to do if I can get you across?’

‘I need to find out what’s happened to Tomak. I know that sounds desperate, but I haven’t heard from him since he left. Anything could have happened to him: illness, accident. Or maybe he was the victim of some kind of crime. I don’t even know if he’s still alive. I assume he is, but all I can do is assume that. I’ve no other way of knowing. But until you sent me the map a few minutes ago it never occurred to me I could go to the island. I haven’t already worked out a plan, a list of things I must complete.’

‘Then why don’t we sail across one night, when the tide is right? We’ll land there, walk around for a bit. That’ll satisfy me, and it’ll give you a feel for the place. We needn’t stay long and if it’s as easy as I think we can return some other time.’

‘I don’t know,’ Lorna said. ‘I need time to think about it.’

She was standing with the tabulator and her binoculars still slung over her shoulder. She wanted to put them down, but an instinct warned her that Bradd would see that as some kind of relaxation of her guard. He was rushing her, seeming to want a decision immediately. What would be the point of sailing across to Tremm? How would that help her find Tomak?

‘I’m going to be in the bar for a while,’ Bradd said. ‘If you want to think things over, or know anything more, that’s where you’ll find me.’

He left then, and she followed him out. She waited until he had walked down the corridor and she could hear the swing doors close behind him, before she returned to her room. She closed the door firmly behind her, kicking it, just as Bradd had done. Only then did she ease the heavy tabulator and the binoculars from her shoulder.

She made herself a light meal in the kitchen, drank some tea. Patta would be home soon, so when she returned to her room Lorna made sure the door was closed and locked. Only then did she switch on her computer and put up the graphic map of Tremm. She regarded it at first with professional interest, noting the scale, the density of the contours, the level of mapping detail. But her eye kept being drawn by the undescribed installations. She knew that if Tomak was somewhere on the island, that must be where he was.

Poring over the details she noticed again the dots marked with a ‘Y’. There seemed to be no logical pattern to them: just a cluster of them here, more elsewhere, several more scattered across the face of one of the central mountains. There were dozens of them in all, perhaps as many as a hundred.

When she heard Patta opening and closing the outer door, Lorna quietly shut down the computer, made sure the encrypted data stick was safely concealed in the computer case, then went to find her roommate. She discovered Patta had been involved in an argument with her boyfriend and was crying quietly in her room. Lorna stayed to talk to her for a while.

Afterwards she went to the bar in search of Bradd. It was late, and she was expecting him to have left, but to her surprise he was still there. He was sitting by himself at a corner table, working on his laptop. As she went across to him he swung the screen to shut down the computer and waved to her to sit with him. The bar was about to close – only a handful of people remained, and they were in a group on the far side of the room. The shutter had already been lowered over the counter by the bar staff.

‘Have you decided?’ Bradd said.

‘Decided what?’

‘Do you want to sail across to Tremm one night? I thought you realized what I was suggesting.’

There was a clatter of glasses from the bar area, and one of the staff started music through the speaker system. After a few moments it was switched off again, and someone behind the bar laughed loudly. No one was interested in what Bradd and Lorna were doing.

‘I still don’t see what would be gained by just visiting the island,’ Lorna said. ‘If it’s night-time we wouldn’t see anything, we wouldn’t be able to travel inland and the chances are we’d be spotted and arrested.’

‘So that’s a no.’

‘It’s a maybe. But for now I’d like to find out if you know anything more than you’ve already told me. You said there were some files with the graphics.’

‘I’ll forward them to you.’

‘Is there anything in them that will help me locate Tomak?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘There are those unmarked installations on the map. What do you know about them?’

‘The same as you. You must have come to the same conclusion. They are the buildings used by the military. I ran a comparative scan. There’s an old map in the archives, more than a hundred years old, and at that time there was just the port and a few houses along the coast. Those huts are more or less the only new development since. I don’t see that they have any special interest, as buildings. People have to live and sleep somewhere. But living quarters aside, what the other buildings are being used for is a different matter. There’s something on the island they want to keep secret, so I imagine what goes on in those buildings is part of it.’

Lights in the room suddenly dimmed – the familiar signal from the bar staff that they wanted to close for the night.

Lorna said, ‘There’s something else about the map I don’t understand. Those dots marked with a “Y”.’

‘Well, I can tell you what they are because I looked them up. But I don’t think they’re going to help you find Tomak.’

‘Go on.’

‘Did you ever hear of the artist called Yo? The installation artist, who built underground cavities?’

‘Jordenn Yo. Of course! We studied her work at school. And there was a module on her work at university.’

‘She came from your part of the world, the area you’re trying to map. An island called Annadac, in the Swirl. You probably knew that? All right. She had to leave Annadac under something of a cloud. I’m not sure what happened there, but it was not before she had obtained a massive Lotterie-Collago grant. She used the money to take out a long lease on Tremm. She was working on the island for about five years. She later called it her apprenticeship period. She used the island’s mountains to practise tunnelling and caving techniques. She drilled many tunnels – different diameters, different shapes and depths. Some were simply drilled into the rock, but others penetrated the mountain from one side to the other. It was a huge operation. For a while she had more than a hundred people assisting her. Many of them went across to work for her from here, from Meequa.’

Lorna was feeling a sudden excitement. Art history had been a secondary or optional course for her, but she always considered Yo to be an inspirational figure as a woman who had built and continued her career in spite of endless antagonism and philistinism. There were many islands in different parts of the Archipelago where the intricate and sometimes terrifying tunnels drilled by Yo and her artisans were now recognized as major pieces of modern installation art.

She had achieved her work under a lifelong barrage of criticism and prejudice, sometimes also physical attack, with many of the more conservative islands passing laws that banned her from landing there. She had spent at least two years of her life in one prison or another. But anyone who saw her work today could not fail to be moved by the grandeur of her vision, the sheer scale of her achievement. Her memory was cherished for the great drilled mountains, the artificial valleys and passes, where tides and winds played the harmonics of the sea, the sky and the earth.

‘I had no idea,’ Lorna said. ‘Jordenn Yo, working on Tremm! That’s simply astonishing.’

‘Yo said that she did not want anything she left behind on Tremm to be considered as an example of her real work. She described Tremm as her schoolroom, a test laboratory. She was experimenting with techniques, discovering how rock strata had to be worked with, learning how to turn or reverse tunnels deep inside the mountains, or to tune the passages so that they reacted to the wind. She left Tremm while the lease was still in her name. As far as I know the tunnels are still more or less as she left them.’

Lorna said, ‘Where did you find this information? Have you known it all along?’