The Islanders (40 page)

It was tempting to return home, but Alvasund said that if she was appointed she wanted to take up the job straight away. Goorn Town was at the wrong end of the island for ferries to Jethra.

Outside, the spring thaw commenced, the little town sprucing itself up for the summer. We saw more people walking through the streets, and winter shutters and shelters were put away. Alvasund and I concentrated on each other, saying nothing but doing what we could.

Then came news of Alvasund’s appointment.

It was six days after our experience at the tower, in mid-evening. We were both sleepy and we were planning to go to bed early. When I had taken my shower and I climbed up to the sleeping loft, Alvasund was sitting on the mattress before her laptop, her legs crossed, apparently reading something online. She said nothing, so I lay on the bed beside her.

‘I’ve been offered the job,’ she said at last, and turned the screen around so that I could see it.

She scrolled the display. It was a formal letter from the Intercession Authority, based in the city of Jethra on the Faiand mainland. The writer said they had examined carefully all current applications for the vacant position of perspective viability modeller. Alvasund’s qualifications closely matched their requirements. As they urgently needed to fill the vacancy, they were prepared to offer her a probationary appointment at fifty per cent of the advertised salary, provided she accepted immediately. If her work was satisfactory, the position would be made permanent and her salary would be topped up and backdated to the full amount.

‘Congratulations!’ I said. ‘I assume you still want the job?’

‘Oh yes. But read the rest and tell me what you think.’

The writer insisted that she must read again the original prospectus, and also read the conditions of employment below. There was a reminder that the work could be hazardous, that they would provide all statutory liability insurance, accident and interment insurance, and a guarantee. All these details required her assent.

‘You’re going to go through with this?’ I said.

‘I need the money, and the work is what I’m good at.’

‘But after what happened?’

‘Have you any idea what that was?’

‘No.’

‘The whole rationale of this job is that it’s the first properly funded scientific investigation into what’s inside those towers.’

‘Are you sure you want to know?’

She stared at me for a moment, with a familiar forthrightness.

‘I’ll never get another chance like this again.’

‘Doesn’t it worry you, what happened when we went to the tower?’

‘Yes.’ She looked disturbed by my questions, or irritated, and for a moment she shrugged her shoulder up and against me, half turning away. ‘Maybe it’s different on Seevl,’ she said, but unconvincingly. She scrolled the image on the screen again. ‘I had only read the first two pages before you came upstairs.’

I moved so that I squatted beside her. Together we read through all the material the Authority had sent.

Alvasund indicated a paragraph at the end. Here was a claim about recent developments. It said that it had become possible for researchers to approach the towers in much greater safety than before, enabling them to be protected from the psychic activity that appeared to emanate from within the tower. There was also an effective physical defence.

‘If it’s as safe as all that,’ I said, ‘why do they make all the other warnings about hazard?’

‘They’re just trying to cover themselves. They must know what the risks are, and they have come up with a way of protecting against them.’

‘Yes, but they don’t say how.’

I was thinking about the ‘psychic activity’, in the words of the document, that had ‘appeared to emanate’ from within the tower we had been to. Like a remembered feeling of pain, it was hard to imagine later how bad it had been, but the relief that I was away from it was like a gift of freedom. I could not imagine ever willingly surrendering to it again.

We read on.

The final document was an illustrated history of the towers on Seevl, and what investigations of them had been made in the past. According to what we read, there were more than two hundred towers still standing. All were approximately the same age and all had been damaged in the past, presumably by islanders trying to demolish them. None of the towers was undamaged, and there had never been any attempt to restore them. There were a few sites where a tower had once stood, but had been successfully brought down.

All the remaining towers were dangerous to approach and the ordinary people of Seevl never went near them. Many myths and superstitions had grown up, the towers widely regarded as supernatural in origin. They were often used as symbols of dread or repression in Seevl literature and art. There were countless folkloric accounts of giants, mysterious paw-prints, nighttime visitations, loud screams, lights in the sky and alleged sightings of large or slithering beasts.

Past scientific investigations had invariably failed to produce reliable information, but out of the almost invariably hectic accounts that followed contact a consensus had emerged. Each tower appeared to be occupied by, or at least was a habitat of, some kind of living being or intelligence. No one had ever seen what it was. No one had any idea how such a being might survive, feed or reproduce. The sense of morbid fear, endured by all researchers, suggested a form of defensive or even entrapping psychic emanation, emitted by whatever was inside.

‘Are you certain you want this job?’ I said.

‘Yes. It terrifies me, but – why does it worry you?’

‘I’ll be there with you.’

She was in my arms, suddenly. I had sensed that the appointment, if she accepted it, would cause us to split up. They wanted an instant decision, which meant by tomorrow morning at the latest. If I did not commit to her, she would travel to Seevl, I would return to Goorn Town, and from there, eventually, to Ia. We should probably not see each other again. This felt like a parting forced on us by circumstance, not choice. We were still too new to each other to feel a sense of emotional momentum that would carry us through a separation. I did not want to lose her.

So we made love. The screen of the laptop glowed on the floor beside the bed, the words of the job offer radiated unregarded into the night. Afterwards, we sat up again, feeling tired but now wakeful. Alvasund typed at the keyboard for a while, then showed me the message she was about to send.

It was an acceptance of the job on the terms being offered. She added in her message that she would depart from Ørsknes the following day, and would arrive in Jethra as soon as possible. She informed them that I would be travelling and staying with her, and that we would require accommodation for us both.

‘May I send it?’ she said.

She sent it, and afterwards we were charged up and feeling loving and lazy and aroused, so we made love again. We slept. In the morning we carried our property to the car, cleaned and locked up the house, dropped the key off at the Authority office (still closed), then we drove away towards the coast.

We followed the road that ran alongside the fjord, the mountains meeting the calm waters of the deep inlet at an almost vertical angle – the road was carved out of the side of the mountains, with sections of it on piles built out from the rock or standing in the sea. In other places there were short tunnels drilled through spurs and promontories. Alvasund loved tunnels and talked again about Jordenn Yo.

We passed through Omhuuv, finally reaching the coast at the islet-strewn mouth of the fjord. We drove east along the coast road, heading for the ferry port we knew was somewhere on the north-eastern corner of the island. Soon we glimpsed the dead tower we had visited, standing back from the sea on its rise of high ground, black stone, a fractured outline, bare, blighted earth around it in every direction. It was too far away from the road to exert its influence, or so we believed, but even so the mere sight of the gaunt edifice gave us a thrill of familiar dread.

We were soon past it, out of sight of it, on a main highway with traffic flowing swiftly in both directions. This was the modern world, a place of industry and clerks and bankers and scientists, of trucks and policier patrol vehicles and motorcycles, a world where the ether was busy with radio exchanges, wireless communications, digital networks, not the psychic tendrils of ancient or supernatural evil.

We played music on the car radio, took a long lunch at an inn on a hill overlooking the sea, and carried on towards the port.

On arrival we discovered we had just missed a sailing to Jethra. The next ferry did not leave for two days. We stayed overnight in a small hotel, but then learnt that to travel to Jethra we needed exit and entry visas. Jethra is the capital of Faiand, one of the mainland combatant powers, officially and actually in a state of war. To travel from our neutral territory required permission from Goorn to leave the Archipelago, and permission from the Jethran administration to disembark.

Three days were lost while we trawled around between the Faiand High Commission and the Hettan Seigniory Office. I was the problem, the main cause of the official enquiries – Alvasund had a job to go to, I was merely her companion. She began to fret at the delay. Messages went to and fro between her and the Authority.

We took a ferry to Cheoner, having been told there was an airport, but when we were halfway there we learned there had been a marine collision between one of the ships and a dredger. Many lives had been lost. Ferry services in and out of Cheoner were suspended.

We disembarked at the small island of Cheoner Ante, waited and waited. Two days later, when I think Alvasund had almost given up hope, everything fell into place. The ferries were sailing again – exit visas were available at the Seigniory office on Cheoner. We should be able to get a flight from there the following day. Against all our despondent expectations, seats on the aircraft were available, it took off on time, did not crash, climbed surprisingly high above the islands to take advantage of the temporal distortions, and within an hour was landing in Jethra.

We walked out of the airport into a hilly, forested terrain bathed in sunshine, caught a modern streetcar to the city centre, and after a long journey through many of the residential suburbs and newly built business departments of Jethra, astonishing us both – neither of us had been in such a huge city before – we located the downtown building where the Intercession Authority was based, and went inside.

The island of Seevl dominated the view to the south of the city, its long grey-green bulk hogging the horizon and seeming to produce the effect of an inland sea. Its high range of undulating moorland created a feeling of enclosure across the wide bay. The city faced across to the north side of the island, which was permanently in shade.

Jethra itself was built on a river delta, with level ground in the immediate vicinity of the main channel of the river and its distributaries, but with gentle hill country further away at the edges of the former flood-plain. We found that the way most Jethra people spoke was urbane, sophisticated and full of allusions that we struggled to understand or respond to properly. From the occasional remark we heard or overheard I realized many of the Jethrans we met found our island way of speaking, or our island outlook, charming but quaint. All the preconceptions I had formed about Faiandland over the years were gently subverted away.

Much of our island outlook was created by the presence of wars, in fact by these Jethran people’s wars, as well as our islander habit of turning away from those who transited the Archipelago on the way to battle. I had formed a general impression that everyone in the north lived in countries ruled and dominated by military or extremist régimes, that their freedoms of movement or speech were curtailed, that armed troops daily marched through the streets, that they lived in joyless barrack cities or wasted away in camps in bleak or remote countryside.

While Alvasund was getting to know her co-workers, and training on the elaborate new equipment they would be using, I had plenty of time to wander alone through the streets of this war-mongering place. I found a busy, productive city, with wide streets and thousands of trees, a modern high-rise business section, a huge number of ancient buildings and palaces, but around the docks I saw areas that had been recently devastated, presumably by bombing. Other parts of Jethra appeared to have been untouched by the war. There was an artists’ quarter I returned to almost every day.

In Jethra I became conscious of a sense of unending terrain: island life imbues in you an awareness of the edge, the shore, the littoral, the adjacent lives on other islands, but in Jethra I felt instead the lure of distance, of places I could travel to and people I could meet without crossing a sea, and an endlessly unfolding world of certainty. Islands lacked that. Islands gave an underlying feeling of circularity, of coast, a limit to what you could achieve or where you might go. You knew where you were but there was invariably a sense that there were other islands, other places to be. I loved the Archipelago but living for a while on a continental mass, albeit the rim of a continent, gave me a new and enthralling feeling of possibility. However, there was little time to explore the sensation.

Alvasund’s induction was being fast-tracked. The team to which she had been assigned was the last to set out from Jethra – they had been waiting for her while we lost time on Goorn and Cheoner Ante, waiting for boats and visas. The other three teams had already transferred to their bases on Seevl, reporting back as they made preliminary surveys of some of the towers, and conducted tests on the equipment, all at safe distances.