The Islanders (41 page)

Then the day came when we too were to depart for Seevl. I was more nervous about the prospect of this than Alvasund. She said it was because she was involved in the work, had responsibilities and co-workers and a purpose. I supposed this meant that I had had time to think, and when I did I thought about where she was going and what she was likely to be doing. I was filled with a deep sense of dread for her. I could never forget that fugitive glimpse of Alvasund’s final moments of life, projected to me by the presumed living entity that now she was about to investigate – or to intercede with, in the jargon they used.

I needed something to involve me. I did not enjoy hanging around doing nothing while Alvasund was so active. In short, I wished I could find a job, but I was feeling indecisive about that. There were plenty of jobs available in Jethra, and with time I could probably find something that not only suited me but which I would do well. That, however, would place me permanently in Jethra, whereas I wanted to be with Alvasund on Seevl. Everyone I spoke to said jobs were scarce on the island, a place that had been depopulating for many years, and whose economy was mostly at subsistence level.

I wondered if I should make contact with the glass resources laboratory in Ia Town. They were still technically my employers but they now seemed half a world away. I was still trying to decide when Alvasund told me we would be sailing to Seevl the following day.

I had already met the other members of her team: six young people, four men and two women. They were all graduates. One had a master’s degree in psychology, another in geomorphology, another in biochemistry, and so on. The team leader, a woman called Ref, was a doctor of medicine, specializing in vascular anomaly. Alvasund was the only one of the team from an arts background, but her skills in imaging, perspective building and active viability put her second in the team, behind Ref.

Marse too was working in the Authority headquarters building – we were surprised to see him the day after our arrival. Both Alvasund and I were shocked by the change in his appearance. It was only a couple of weeks since that brief meeting on the street in Ørsknes, yet he looked haggard, neurotic, shrunken. He recognized neither of us, even though Alvasund made an effort to sit down with him and speak to him. He barely said a word, would not meet her gaze and answered her questions in subdued monosyllables.

Later Alvasund told me she asked Ref what had happened to him. Ref said that in the previous year Marse was on one of the teams who went to Seevl to carry out preliminary surveys of the towers. At that time, intercession workers were not provided with protective gear. He had been taken off the work when he showed the first signs of psychosis. The Authority staff found him alternative work to do while his condition was assessed – his posting to Ørsknes had been one of these jobs, but his health was now deteriorating rapidly. They were waiting for a place to come free for him at a neuropathology hospital.

‘Do they know what he’s suffering from?’ I asked Alvasund.

She simply stared straight at me, without saying anything. Then I held her to me.

‘It won’t happen again,’ she said. ‘Not now. We have protective gear, probably because of what happened to Marse.’

‘It’s dangerous,’ I said. ‘Must you go through with this?’

‘Yes,’ she said.

The next day, early morning, we were driven to the harbour passenger terminal in an Authority bus, all of us on edge, anticipating, excited, perhaps fearful. I was the only extra person on the team: everyone else had come without their partners.

We transferred to a launch for the trip across to Seevl, although first we had to go through exit formalities. Expecting this to be merely a technicality the group of us entered the border control building in lighthearted mood, but as we tried to pass through the exit channel we were delayed. The officials took a particular interest in Alvasund and myself because we were discovered to be Archipelagian nationals. The officials were suspicious of why we had visited the mainland for such a short time. How had we obtained permission to leave the Archipelago and why now were we departing, and did we intend to make more short trips to and fro across the international border?

They eventually accepted that Alvasund was a paid employee of the Authority, which they appeared never to have heard of, but which qualified her for an exit visa. They wondered aloud and lengthily about who I was, who was paying me, what my intentions were. My role was in their terms undefined. The interrogation, masked in a false bonhomie, seemed to go on for ever. Nothing I told them in answer to their questions seemed acceptable to them.

However, we were all in the end cleared for departure. We walked down through a maze of stairways and passages, finally emerging on the harbour apron. A steel-grey launch was tied up alongside, where our crates and cases were being loaded via a system of conveyor belts. There was a short delay while that was completed. When everything had been stowed below-decks the captain started the engines and the boat moved quickly away from the quay. I saw Ref leaving the wheelhouse. She went to the cabin below, where the others were.

Alvasund and I remained on the upper deck. We both anticipated the presence of islands. We sat together close to the prow, staring ahead at Seevl’s dark bulk.

From Jethra, even from the hotel situated in the centre of the business section of the city, well back from the coast, Seevl had seemed to be so close that it loomed against the city, but once we had eased out past the harbour wall into the choppier waters of the open sea, the island was no longer an oppressive sight. It now looked to be just another island, one of the hundreds Alvasund and I had each passed or sailed close to at different moments in our lives. It was true that the cliffs seemed greyer and steeper than those we normally saw, and that there was a fringe of white breakers around every part of the rocky shore, but to our eyes there was something familiar about it.

The only port on the island was Seevl Town, positioned at the head of a narrow inlet on the south-western corner. While we were staying in the hotel in Jethra I had examined a chart which was in a display panel in the reception area and I knew that to reach the port from Jethra entailed rounding a series of rocky cliffs and landslips called Stromb Head. Once we approached the cliffs in the launch it was apparent there had been many rockfalls over the years. The debris had created a series of shallow shoals stretching a long way out into the sea. A wide diversion was necessary. Also, I knew from the chart that the seas were often rough around Stromb because of a conflict of tides. The shape of the island caused a flow to north and south of it and the two tidal surges met up again near Stromb.

The launch we were in was a modern, stabilized boat, which moved smoothly and quickly through the waves. Standing next to Alvasund on the foredeck, I started to enjoy the voyage, with a pleasant sensation that I was regaining my sea legs after so long on solid ground. The high sides of the deck protected us from much of the headwind. As the boat finally turned past Stromb, it heeled over more sharply than we expected, the high superstructure catching the wind like a pair of sails. The skipper increased the engine revs and started to push at an angle into the waves, cutting directly through the swell.

The launch turned into the inlet almost before we realized we had reached it. The gap in the cliffs was unexpectedly narrow, although once we were through the sea-opening the waters widened and there was room to manoeuvre. The swell here was moderate – the skipper throttled back the engine. Seevl Town was in sight almost at once, a small township, ranked in terraces around the steep and hilly sides of the inlet, predominantly grey like the rocks on which it stood. We chugged smoothly towards it.

‘Torm!’ A sharp intake of breath. Alvasund gripped my upper arm.

She pointed across to the northern shore of the inlet. There stood one of the towers, dark and dilapidated, built on the steep slope of the cliff so that it commanded most of the waters. It did not break the skyline.

We looked around in all directions. I soon spotted another of the towers, this one on the southern shore, again overlooking the town but not high enough to stand out against the sky.

Behind us, Ref and the rest of the team were coming up to the deck from below. They too moved to the rail of the boat and gazed up at the surrounding steep walls of the inlet. Between us we had soon counted eight of the towers, looming over the little town like a series of radio masts. The fact that they appeared to have been built low, so they did not rise above the level of the cliffs, gave them a clustered, covert quality that added to the sense of menace.

Ref, through her binoculars, described each of the towers, distinguishing them expertly. She used an alphanumeric identifier, which one of the men noted carefully on his digital pad. He read back each code for confirmation. Some of the towers were cylindrical, tapering towards the top, while others, believed to be from an older period, were square in plan. There was one tower which looked at first sight to be another circular one, but Ref said it was one of the more unusual octagonal buildings. One of the men, standing beside me, said there were known to be only nine of the octagonal towers on Seevl, but all of them were better preserved than the others.

I said nothing about it to Alvasund at that moment, knowing we would have time alone later, but the closer the launch moved us towards the town, and the deeper we penetrated into the inlet, the more I felt the creeping sense of disquiet. The impression that the towers had been put up deliberately to surround or confine the town was one thing, but I was also suffering an all too familiar mental or psychic feeling, a reminder of our frightening experience in the mountains around Ørsknes. It was as if an odourless gas had been released into the narrow inlet around Seevl Town, one that numbed the mind and induced fear.

Alvasund’s hand tightened in mine. I glanced at her face – her jaw was set, the tendons in her neck stood out with strain.

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.