The Islanders (35 page)

The swirls took shape before me, creating a ghostly impression of his head and face. It was the face as I remembered it from two decades before, not the one the public knew or the grizzled countenance of the old man glimpsed on his identical brother. No time had passed for me, nor for the trace he left. The features were like a mask, but intimately detailed. Lips, hair, eyes, all had their shapes, contoured by the shifting wafts of smoke.

My breath stuttered, halted momentarily. Panic and adoration seized me.

His head was tilted slightly to one side, his eyes were half closed, his lips were apart. I leaned forward to take my kiss, felt the light pressure of the smoky lips, the brush of ghostly eyelashes. It lasted only an instant.

His face, his mask, contorted in the air, jolting back and away from me. The eye shapes clenched tightly. The mouth opened. The lines of smoke that formed his forehead became furrowed. He jerked his head back again, then lunged in a spasm of deep coughing, rocking backwards and forwards in agony, hacking for breath, painfully trying to clear whatever obstructed him below.

A spray of bright redness burst out from the shape that was his open mouth, droplets of scarlet smoke, a fine aerosol. I stepped back in horror, trying to avoid it, and the kiss was lost for ever.

The apparition was wheezing, making dry hacking coughs, small ones now, weak and unhoping, the end of the attack. He was staring straight at me, terrified, full of pain and unspeakable loss, but already the smoke was untangling, dispersing.

The red droplets had fallen to the floor and formed a pool on one of his discarded sheets of paper. I knelt down to look more closely and trailed my fingertips through the sticky mess. When I stood again, my fingers carried a smear of the blood, but the air in the study had cleared. The blue haze had gone at last. The final traces of him had vanished. The dust, the sunlight, the books, the dark corners remained.

I fled.

Downstairs I stood once again with the others, waiting in the great hall to be allocated to one of the cars. Until my name was spoken by one of the undertaker’s staff, no one acted as if they knew who I was or acknowledged my presence in any way. Even the man who had spoken to me, the brother, stood with his back against me. His hand was linked affectionately around the upper arm of a short, grey-haired woman, speaking quietly to people as they stepped outside to join the cortège. Everyone seemed daunted by the seriousness of the occasion, by the thought of the crowds waiting in the road at the end of the long drive, by the passing of this great man.

I was given a seat in the last of the cars, bringing up the rear of the cortège. I was pressed against the window by the large bodies of two serious and unspeaking adolescents.

In the crowded church I sat by myself to one side, forcing calmness by staring at the flagstone floor, the ancient wooden pews. I stood for the hymns and prayers but only mouthed the words silently, remembering what he had said were his feelings about church services. The tributes to him were formal, grand, spoken sincerely by illustrious men and women. I knew some of the speakers already, but not one of them acknowledged me. I listened closely, recognizing nothing of him in their words. He had not sought this renown, this greatness.

In the churchyard on a hill overlooking the sea, standing near the grave, back from the main group of mourners, hearing the words of committal distorted by the breeze, I was again alone. I remembered the first book of his I had ever read, while I was still at college. An inspiration for me, a constant guide through life. Everyone knew his work now, but at that time he was unknown and it had been my own deeply personal discovery.

The persistent wind from the islands buffeted against me, pressing my clothes against my body on one side, sending strands of hair across my eyes. I smelt the salt from the sea, and the fragrance of flowers, the promise of distance, departure, escape from this place.

Members of the public and the cameras of the media were only just visible, kept in the distance beyond a cordon of flowers and a patrol of policier officers. In a lull of the wind I heard the familiar words of the committal being uttered by the priest, and watched the coffin lowered into the ground. The sun continued to shine but I could not stop shivering. I could think only of him, the caress of his fingertips, the light pressure of his lips, his gentle words, his tears when I had had to leave him at the end. The long years without him, holding on to everything I knew of him. I barely dared to breathe for fear of expelling him from my thoughts.

I held my hand out of sight beneath the small bag I was carrying. The blood had congealed on my fingers, cold, an encrustation, eternal, the final trace of him.

Reever

HISSING WATERS

R
EEVER
is the largest island in a group known as the R
EEVER
F
AST
S
HOALS
. Close to the Equator, the Shoals consist of some fourteen hundred islands, most of them unnamed and unpopulated. If they could be seen from the air without visual distortion the Shoals would appear in the shape of a large sickle, curving out in a southwesterly direction across the Equator, before turning and stretching away towards the east. Reever and two of the other main islands in the group are in the northern hemisphere, but most of the lesser islands are south of the line. The sea throughout the formation is warm and shallow, serene and idyllic in appearance but made treacherous by rip-tides, guyots, whirlpools and reefs. There are only a few navigable passages. Some of the smallest islets are little more than protruding rocks which are covered at high tide.

The four main islands, Reever itself and Reever Dos, Tros and Quadros, are large enough to support populations, and away from the coastlines there are areas of forestry and a little farmland recovered from cleared rainforest.

On the northern side of Reever the sea is much deeper, and it is here that the North Faiand Drift passes during its brief transit close to the Equator. The combination of deep cool water and sun-warmed shallow feeding grounds means that the finest rod-fishing is possible. Reeverites claim their islands are the recreational fishing capital of the world, but in reality it is a sport only for the wealthier visitors: vacationing financiers, investment bankers, tax exiles, remittance men and others with less conventional sources of wealth are the main beneficiaries of this bounty.

The restaurants, clubs, bars and marina buildings along the seafront of Reever Town display many photographs of huge fish, some of them two or three times the size of the overweight men said to have landed them.

Because of its position close to the Equator, Reever affords one of the best places to observe the twice-daily vortices as they pass above.

This is a common but almost invariably misunderstood phenomenon. If you look up at the sky at the right time of day you will see apparently stationary jets and transports stacked overhead, pointing in every direction and drifting slowly together in a westerly direction. The stack can be seen in many parts of the world close to the tropics, but it occurs directly over the Equator. The aircraft fly at many altitudes, their contrails stretching out behind them across the blue sky, spiralling to the golden mean. This astonishing sight is the sole visible evidence of a passing vortex.

It was on Reever that the temporal vortex was first noticed, investigated, identified and measured, by a local man called D
EDELER
A
YLETT
. A small museum and observatory on Reever Quadros now commemorate Aylett’s work. There are several working models to illustrate how the vortices affect our perception of the physical world.

Aylett made his discovery while sailing around the coast of Reever Quadros. This is the smallest of the four main islands, and its rocky shore is popular with shallow-water fishermen. By chance, the island lies directly on the Equator and is bisected by the imaginary line into two areas of roughly equal size. For this reason, the visual distortions are uniquely observable at sea level.

Aylett noticed something that generations of fishermen had taken for granted: that every time you circumnavigate the island, the appearance of the cliffs, the rocky foreshore, even the lie of the land, seems to change. The headland you were navigating towards is lower or longer than the last time you saw it; a certain group of rocks that are dangerous at high tide are no longer visible, even at low tide; a thicket of trees on the clifftop, which could be seen from the harbour now appear to be behind a hill you know would block the view from the quayside.

Without more than the crudest maps, sailors and fishermen could never be sure if what they were seeing was true, or if they were somehow misremembering from the previous sighting. People were always getting lost and there were many shipwrecks.

Aylett, though, took the phenomenon seriously and made repeated circuits of the island. He kept careful records of what he saw, and took hundreds of photographs. He then correlated these observations with date and time, position of the sun, tides, wind-strength, seeking a pattern.

Aviation was not then a widespread activity, because it was thought to be highly dangerous. The actual construction of aircraft was sound enough, but pilots were constantly getting lost and being forced to crash-land on other islands or ditch in the treacherous seas. Without knowing it they were early victims of the visual or temporal distortions. All aircraft at this time flew only at rooftop height, and as slowly as possible, enabling the pilot or navigator to maintain direction, but this was another factor which caused accidents.

Aylett was determined to test his theory and invested his entire savings with a pilot willing to take him on a series of flights across Reever Quadros, initially at low level, but at slowly increasing altitudes as their confidence grew.

Aylett discovered what is now commonplace. If you fly in one direction, looking down at the ground – say from north to south – a certain island will look a certain way: mountains here, a river there, a town, a bay, forest, and so on. However, if you fly over it a second time – east to west – the same island will look oddly different: the river doesn’t reach the sea in quite the same part of the coast, the forest looks darker or larger, the mountains now have fewer peaks, the coast seems less jagged, or more. Has it actually changed? Or was your observation inaccurate the first time? You go round for a third look – north to south again – and the island has seemed to change its layout yet again, and is different in a new way.

Worse, if you set off across the sea to an adjacent island, then try to return home, the island you left will now seem to be in another place or direction entirely. Sometimes it will have vanished altogether, or that is how it appears.

Aylett’s measurements and calculations began to make sense of this, calibrating the degree of distortion to longitude and latitude, and the position of the sun.

In the present day, modern aircraft make use of the vortical distortions. By flying high in the direction of the Equator, the craft pass through the distortion, greatly shortening the distance needed to be flown, even from one side of the world to the other. It makes all flights reasonably short in duration, with a great saving in fuel. Although aviation charts of the Archipelago airspace are as unreliable as every other kind of map, the air operators have worked out a complicated but effective system of physical markers, so that as the aircraft descend from the distorted zone the pilots are able to see these markers and navigate to their destination by dead reckoning.

Twice a day, as the two main vortices go around the world, people on the islands in the equatorial zone are rewarded by the sight of the stack of aircraft passing overhead, all of them pointing in different directions, the spiralling condensation trails spreading out across the blue sky.

The Aylett Observatory on Reever Quadros is one of the best places to see this phenomenon. There are daily tours and lectures, and a special section provides many projects for young people to set up their own observation stations at home or at school.

There is a small artists’ colony in Reever Town, no longer as influential as once before, but R
ASCAR
A
CIZZONE
, founder of the Tactilist School, painted here before he was arrested. Although he was late to the technique of tactilism – ultrasound microcircuitry adapted to blend into and work with pigments – it was Acizzone who perfected the technique and gave it the name by which it is still known. After Acizzone was taken into custody and later exiled, the remaining artists in Reever Town referred to themselves as Pre-Tactilists, less as an identifier of their work so much as a way of avoiding some of the fallout from Acizzone’s disaster. The artists’ colony continues to exist in the present day and although most of the current work in Reever is conventional one or two of the younger artists are producing work that is challenging, experimental and of the highest quality. None of Acizzone’s work is on public view.

Tunnelling is prohibited, but deep natural caves may be explored on Reever Tros. There are strict shelterate laws and local taxes are high. The casino is a major attraction, and is a significant earner for the Reever Seigniory.

Currency: Archipelagian simoleon, Faiandland dollar, Federation credit. Local transactions (only) in Aubracian talent.

Seevl