The Islanders

Seevl DEAD TOWER THE GLASS

I had known Alvasund Raudeberg all through our school days. She came back into my life at a time when I had all but forgotten her. Time seems to accelerate after you leave school, and I had gone away, an exhibitioner at Kellno University on the subtropical island of Ia. The sheer hard grind and intellectual stimulation of my course speeded up the change even more. I was glad to leave my home island behind, and move into what I considered to be the modern world. Alvasund, and everyone I had known as a child, drifted into my past.

Then my parents unexpectedly died and I had to return to Goorn, the Hettan island where I was born. I did so reluctantly. It was one of the years when the Goornak wind was gusting down, a time of omens for most of the people in the Hetta group. The icy wind brought a regression to many of the primitive fears and superstitions which lent our part of the Archipelago a reputation for backwardness. The Goornak is a freezing, blustering stream of air from the north-east, the vile breath of a witch, or so some of the Hetta people say. When the Goornak blows the curse wind is thought to have returned and many aspects of the modern world retreat from Hetta for the duration.

I had then been away for four years, absorbed in a course in glass sciences. Ia was a long way to the south of the Hetta Islands, covered in lush vegetation and bathed by warm seas, modern in all things, a place where young minds are trained, ideas are formed and technology is developed. At Kellno Uni I learned to respect science and engineering, to be sceptical of superstition, to reject the conventional but to value the past, to think for myself. I read widely and eagerly, met other people of my own age, fell in love, fell out of love, debated, questioned, argued, got drunk, sobered up, learned, lazed around. I was a student, not typical of everyone else but not so different from them either. I grew up while I was on Ia, leaving behind, or so I assumed, the unattractive mental and psychological baggage I had carried with me when I first left Goorn. I had been born on Goorn, so what could I know of the rest of the world?

I made the best use of my time at the university, where I became involved in an outreach placement. It was a commercial laboratory, working on a research project into a new form of BPSG, borophosphosilicate glass, developed for use in superconductors. After I graduated, the time I had spent gaining experience in the lab in Ia Town benefited me in two ways. It meant I received a First with Honours, and following from that I was offered a full-time job at the same laboratory.

I barely thought of home, communications across certain sections of the Archipelago being slow, unreliable and expensive. Hetta is one such area. It’s a wild and ruggedly attractive place, thirteen medium-sized islands in a large bight, tucked up against the coastal range along the southern shore of Faiandland. In winter three or four of the smaller islands are temporarily joined to the mainland when the sea freezes, but unreliably: the ice is too thick for small boats to break through, and too unreliable for traffic to cross over it. There are traditional trading contacts across the straits, but since the war began most dealings with the Faiand mainland have had to be undercover. Strict border controls exist.

On Goorn itself, the second largest of the Hetta group but not one of those close to the mainland, the northern coastline is mountainous, broken by deep fjords. This is the region of Goorn called the Tallek. Among the Tallek’s headlands, steep cliffs and long bays of freezing cold water there are several small ports tucked away, sheltered from the prevailing winds. The mountains that loom over the sea are bare in summer, iced-over in winter. Deep-sea fishing is the main industry in the Tallek. I went to the Tallek only once, when I was still a child — my father had a business meeting there and he took the rest of the family along. Afterwards, ever afterwards, my memories of that high, chilly landscape informed my feelings about my home island, even those of the dull plains of grazing animals around Goorn Town, where I lived.

I had been working at the lab on Ia for less than three months when I learned that my mother had died. I had known she was ill, but had not been told how serious it was. Then soon afterwards my father suffered a fatal heart attack. Numbed by this double tragedy I made contact with my elder brother Brion, who now lived on the mainland, but he was unable to obtain an exit visa. Therefore, alone, I took the slow sequence of ferries north, one island to the next, frequently delayed, arriving in Goorn Town eight days later.

Once I was home I had much to do, sorting out my parents’ financial affairs, clearing the house, and so on. While I was away from Ia my job was still in theory safe, but one day my boss made contact — a sponsorship deal had fallen throufgh, and all the people in my team had been placed on half-salary. There was no pressure on me to return.

The atmosphere of Goorn was all too chillingly familiar. The days were short, the skies permanently fuliginous, the temperature icy. Sooty clouds scudded across from the north-east. I had already lived in the subtropics long enough to wish I could be there all the time. Goorn and its constant wind depressed me. I glimpsed other people about the streets, not many, but the few who ventured out huddled against the wind, huddled against their own thoughts and, I supposed, their pagan fears. Cars went by slowly, the sombre light reflecting ominously from their windows. I felt crowded in by the ignorant beliefs I discerned, but also lonely because of them.

In this state of suspense, trying to complete my parents’ affairs was all but impossible. The bank staff, the lawyers, the Seigniory Estates Commission either did not respond to my enquiries or they made excuses or they sent the wrong paperwork. Almost nothing was being done.

After a few more days I realized I was wasting my time until the Goornak ceased. I decided to travel back to Ia, where at least I could see my friends and find out the facts about my job. I would have to make the long return journey to Goorn when summer came. I began packing.

Seeing Alvasund Raudeberg again changed everything. She came to the house on the morning of the day before I was due to catch the ferry. I was not only surprised to see her, I was pleased and intrigued that she had sought me out. I had always rather fancied her when we were at school together. She entered the house in a flurry of fine blown snow.

‘I realized you must be back, Torm,’ she said. ‘I was sorry to hear the news about your parents.’

In the house I made her a hot chocolate and we sat side by side at the scrubbed-deal table in the kitchen, sipping at our drinks, our shoulders touching companionably for warmth. The eaves of the house groaned and sometimes shrieked as the hostile wind blustered through the town. The outer door was creaking and the house felt cold.

‘Tell me what you’ve been doing since school,’ I said to her. ‘Did you go away to college?’

The morning passed. We each had our stories to tell, catching up, but in a sense they were similar. Like so many others we had left Goorn to escape — we had both been forced to return. Neither of us had clear ideas about what we should do next.

Alvasund told me she had been living on Muriseay until recently, but she had lost her job and could not find another. She had returned to Goorn because her sister had just given birth to twins, and most of the family were there to celebrate. She seemed restless and anxious to leave. I mentioned I was about to head back to Ia, suddenly realizing how much I would like Alvasund to travel with me. I could not stop thinking about her, how much we had both grown up, that I had always liked her, the possibilities that were gathering. But after I had mentioned Ia a few more times, trying to make it sound interesting and attractive, I realized that it was not an option for her.

‘I’m heading up to the Tallek region in a day or two,’ she said. ‘Do you know it?’

‘I was there with my parents, when I was a kid. Just a couple of days.’

‘Do you remember much about it?’

‘A lot of mountains,’ I said, wishing I could elaborate more. ‘A constant smell of fish and smoke. I was cold all the time. Just like this, but I was there in the summer so I guess the Tallek is cold all year. Why do you want to go there?’

‘Various reasons.’

‘Such as?’

‘I’ve never seen the fjords.’

‘It must be more than that. It’s so hard to get there.’

‘It’s all a bit vague. There’s the possibility of a job, but I need to know more about it. And the other day I found out there’s a Yo tunnel in the Tallek somewhere.’

‘I didn’t know she came to Goorn,’ I said.

‘She wasn’t here long. They threw her off the island when they caught up with her, but apparently she was in the Tallek long enough to drill most of the way through one of the slopes. She never finished, which is why it’s interesting. Anyone can go in and explore.’

Alvasund suddenly changed the subject and talked about her course. She had studied stagecraft, gaining skills in computer-generated three dimensional sets, perspective building and subjective animatronic modelling. She said it was called active intelligence, because stages dressed in this way were capable of responding, not just to the actors’ lines but to the reactions of the audience. It was still a new technology, and many theatre managers were conservative about stage techniques.

Once she had gained her degree she discovered jobs were hard to find. She worked for a while for a TV company. They had sent her to a regional studio on Muriseay, but that job expired when the studio closed. She was unable to find work in any of the theatres on Muriseay.

Now she was planning to visit the north, before she went back to Muriseay.

‘Would you like company on the trip?’ I said suddenly, trying to make it sound spontaneous.

‘I thought you were returning to Ia.’

‘No urgency. I just don’t want to be in this house any longer.’

‘Can you drive a car?’ Alvasund said.

‘Yes.’

‘That would solve a problem for me. If we rented a car together, would you be willing to drive?’

‘Where would we stay, what would we do?’

She looked gravely at me — a sudden reminder of her intriguing seriousness in class at school. ‘We’ll work something out, Torm.’

Then she laughed, so I did too. There was now a prospect of intimacy, alone with her for some days. She told me there was a house she could stay in, something to do with the job offer. She wasn’t clear about that. ‘No one else there now,’ she added, and laughed again.

She left soon after that, but she came back the next day and we discussed practicalities. I cancelled my ferry ticket, obtained a refund. She had located a car rental firm that was not expensive. We looked at maps of the fjords, picked out the places we might pass through.

The town we were going to was called Ørsknes, close to where Yo had been drilling. The absence of markings on the map of the surrounding terrain gave a chill impression of bleakness, windswept peaks. We packed warm clothes, bought food and drinks, and agreed to set out the following morning. I offered to walk with her back to her sister’s house, but she said no.

North of Goorn Town there is almost nothing of scenic interest, and the road is straight. The car was buffeted by gusts of wind. We drove all day, stopping for a rest and a brief lunch, neither of us sure how long the whole journey might take. We did not want to be driving through the mountains after dark. We could see them ahead of us, a dark range capped by many snowy peaks. Although the car was a recent model the heater did not work well and the further north we drove the colder we felt. Alvasund wrapped her legs under a travel blanket, and I halted the car long enough to pull on my wind-cheater.

It was late afternoon when we climbed towards the first pass, finding the road ice-covered and treacherous in places. A heavy snowstorm started, whiting out visibility. It did not last long, but it was concerning. Old snow was already piled on both sides, and the fresh fall was settling on the paved surface. When about half an hour later we saw a small hotel set back from the road, we immediately turned in to stay the night.

We drove down from the high pass into Ørsknes. It was close to midday. The sun was low in the sky but brilliant, the sea was deep blue but troubled with many flecks of white, the mountains hung above us, snow-covered, perilously steep, rocky. There were signs of rockfall near the bases of some of the mountains, close to where the road ran alongside the fjord. Using a small, hand-drawn map, Alvasund directed me to the house we would be staying in. We climbed out of the car, assailed by the freezing wind. Small white clouds raced overhead. The streets looked deserted. The curse wind was felt here too.

The house was built so that it backed on to the first elevation of a slope, which rose steeply from a tiny yard at the rear. Alvasund walked quickly to the main door of the house, produced a key and we were in. We carted our bags into the house, our breath blowing white around us, even in the interior.

It was an A-frame building, furnished minimally. The large street-level floor was dominated by a wood-burning stove, with neat stacks of logs placed alongside the stone wall. A long couch and a hide rug were in front of the stove. There was a kitchen and bathroom. Everything was clean, tidy, functional.

The upper floor was a mezzanine, attained by narrow wooden steps. Beneath the sharply-angled roof a large, thick mattress lay on the floor, with quilts and bolsters folded neatly on the top.

Two hours later we had the place habitable. The stove was alight, filling the house with the sweet scent of burning birch, and the water jacket around the firebox was piping heat around the house. Alvasund warmed up some canned soup and we drank it sitting together on the couch, staring into the glowing fire.

We had found some maps of the fjord which showed that Ørsknes was a distance inland from the sea, with another fishing settlement called Omhuuv lying further along the same shore, closer to the mouth of the fjord. A larger-scale street map revealed that it was probably not going to take long to explore the town. There were just the two main streets, with a compact maze of side streets like the one where the house was situated. The harbour and wharf buildings ran for most of the length of the waterfront. We could hear the winches and cranes, even through the stone and doubly insulated wooden walls of the house.

We walked around the town before sunset, wrapped up against the icy north-east wind. It seemed to gain strength as it passed along the narrowing fjord. Alvasund showed me the building where she believed Yo had kept her studio — it was now a net store — but many decades had passed since the artist had been there. Her studio could have been in any one.

As we walked back towards the house we spotted a restaurant close to the wharves. The place was open, so we ate dinner there. Some of the other customers looked at us curiously a few times, but there was no hostility in their interest. Alvasund and I were learning to relax with each other, and several times we stopped talking and sat and ate in silence, glancing warmly at each other across the table.

Afterwards, we returned through the now dark streets, looking for the house, hearing our own footsteps echoing in the deserted streets. We glimpsed dim lights behind the curtained or shuttered windows of many of the houses, but there was little other outward sign of occupation. It was starting to snow, a thin, cold downfall, blown along on the turbulent Goornak. We leaned against each other, holding on as we slithered along the increasingly slippery paths.

I was assuming nothing about what might happen when we went to bed, but the knowledge that there was only one bed in the house had quietly illuminated the evening for me. I could not forget Alvasund’s unexpected laughter when we first discussed this trip, the smiling implication of us travelling together, and the easy affection we had shared in the restaurant.

But the night before, when we stopped at the hotel in the mountains, had been a surprise if not a disappointment. The moment I switched off the car’s ignition Alvasund had leapt out and run through the swirling snowstorm into the building. She returned with the news that we could stay, and started pulling her bags out of the car. Once inside the building I discovered we were to be in separate rooms, but I did not ask, and Alvasund did not tell me, if this was at her own request or if those were the only ones available. That is how I had spent the previous night, comfortably enough, warmly enough, but alone in a single narrow bed.

Now we were in Ørsknes, in a house where it was plain we would be sharing a bed. Once inside the house, with our warm outer clothes removed and the fire stirred up into a burst of new radiance, we made some tea. We sat together, as before, staring at the fireglow. Alvasund had picked up a tourist guide in the restaurant so we now knew where the Yo tunnel was located and how we could find it. We made plans to visit it the next day.

With the tea finished Alvasund stood up quickly, said she would like a shower and asked me if I wanted to take mine first or after her. I opted to go first.

Afterwards, I went up the narrow steps, crawled on to the mattress, and pulled the quilt around me. I was full of anticipation, my senses tingling, my appetite and readiness for her growing. As soon as I was in the bed she came up the steps to join me. She was still in her clothes and stood where I could see her. She undressed with her back towards me, stripping unsensationally to her underwear, then pulled on a wrap and went downstairs to the cubicle. I could hear the water flowing through the pipes, the shower running below, the sound of the splashing changing as she moved around. I stared at the small pile of clothes she had left on the floor beside our bed.

After a silence I heard her do something to the wood-burning stove, then she turned out the lights on the ground floor and came back up to the bed. She was wearing the wrap, with her hair hanging damply about her shoulders.

She kneeled forward on the edge of the mattress, pulled out the bolster from where it had been laid, and placed it along the bed, down the middle, dividing it in two.

‘You understand, Torm, don’t you?’ She was patting down the long, heavy pillow, making sure it extended the full length of the bed.

‘I think so,’ I said, kicking the thing where it had rolled against me. ‘I can see what you are doing. Is that what I have to understand?’

‘Yes. Don’t touch me. Imagine there is a sheet of glass between us.’

She towelled her hair briefly, then slipped off the wrap. For a moment she was naked, standing there, within my reach, but she was already crawling forward, sliding under the quilt beside me. The bolster lay between us.

She turned out the light, pulling on the cord that dangled from the rafter above.

I turned it on again and sat up. I leaned over towards her. She was already lying with the quilt pulled tight up to her face. Her eyes were open.

‘Torm —’

I said, ‘I wasn’t assuming anything, but you’re acting as if you think I was.’

‘It’s obvious. What you’re expecting.’

‘Everything we did today — was I wrong?’

‘We’re just friends, Torm. That’s how I want it to be. If you assume that, that’s OK.’

‘What if I want that to change? Or you do?’

‘Then we’ll both know. Please, for now just treat me as if we have glass between us. Everything is visible, but nothing can be reached. This was something I learned at college, about an audience and a stage. There’s an invisible wall between the actors and the audience. You look and you see, but there’s no real interaction.’

I said, protesting, ‘A stage effect isn’t the same thing at all!’

‘I know. But for now, just for now, for tonight.’

‘You want me to be your audience.’

‘I suppose so, yes.’

I thought about that. She suddenly seemed to me rather naïve, adapting a concept some drama teacher had explained, but applying it inappropriately. I reached up and turned off the light, aroused and annoyed. Moments later I switched it on again. She had not moved and her eyes were still open. She blinked.

‘You say I can look at you.’

‘Yes.’

‘Let me look now.’

Amazingly she smiled at that and without another word pushed down the quilt to expose herself. I raised myself on my elbow again, stared at her lying there so close to me, her neat, compact body, quite bare, frankly naked to me. She kicked the quilt completely away with one of her feet, then moved slightly, revealing everything of herself.

Almost at once it felt intrusive and somehow pointless to be looking at her like that, so I turned away. Still she did not pull up the quilt to cover herself but I turned off the light. Moments later I felt her move under the quilt again. She fidgeted a few times and finally lay still. I tried to relax too, lying back with my head on the large soft pillow. I was breathing hard but I tried to still myself, to be calm. The bolster lay between us.

It was almost impossible for me to sleep but I think Alvasund did fall asleep more or less straight away. Her breathing was steady, almost inaudible. She barely moved.

Of course what she had done had thrown me into a whirl of thoughts, desires, inhibitions, frustration. What was she up to? She appeared to like me, but somehow not enough. She let me look at her, seemed to invite it and even enjoy it, but I was not allowed near her, kept back in a kind of imaginary auditorium. I was dazzled and aroused by the brief glimpse I had had of her, the way she lay there close to me, relaxing her arms so her breasts were revealed, and parting her legs a little. She wanted me to see her, or at least would allow it.

She was not the first naked woman I had seen, nor was she the first I had been in bed with. I assumed she must know that, or could guess it. During my four years away from home, growing up rapidly, enjoying new freedoms, I had had girlfriends and lovers, and there was Enjie, one of the students, a young woman reading Economics in another department of the college. Enjie and I had shared an enthusiastic physical relationship for several months. Nor was Alvasund an object of long-held desire, because she had barely been in my thoughts since I left Goorn. Her return to my life had been completely unexpected. However, she was attractive to me, becoming more so, I was enjoying being with her, and —

There was a sheet of glass between us.

I knew about glass, but the glass I knew about was not for looking through, nor was it a barrier. On the contrary it was a medium of transient, non-fixed effect, used to control or enhance an electronic flow at some frequencies, while at others it functioned as an insulator or compressor. Her metaphor did not work for me.

I was awake for much of the night, sensing her physical closeness, knowing that were I to move just a short distance, or to throw an arm towards her across the bolster, or to allow one of my hands to slip beneath the damned thing, she would be there, close beside me, reachable, touchable.

But I did not. I listened to the constant wind, scouring across the roof just a short distance above me. I must eventually have slept because when I was next fully awake it was daylight. Alvasund was not in the bed beside me. She had already dressed and was downstairs doing something in the kitchen. I dressed quickly and went to join her. Neither of us said anything about what had happened, or not happened. I touched her hand to say hello, and she put an arm around my shoulder in a brief but affectionate hug.

I supposed that now, for the time being at least, it was my sort of glass between us, not just hers.

The wind was less bitter that morning, so we decided to walk up to the site of Yo’s tunnel. According to the leaflet Alvasund had found it was only a short distance from the town centre. It involved a steep climb along a fairly wide track with a frozen, crumbly surface, iced up in several places, loose with stones in others. A layer of snow covered much of the way.

We soon found the site of the tunnel, which had been created so that the opening could not be seen from below. As we climbed we suddenly came upon it, a short section of tunnel leading back from the rocky wall and then falling sharply downwards, curling away from the light. The tunnel was huge. A truck or other vehicle could have passed through it. Guard rails had been erected at knee and thigh height.

We stood and stared down into it. Alvasund seemed moved by the sight of it, but to be candid it left me unimpressed. It was a large hole in a mountainside.

‘You don’t get it, do you?’ Alvasund said eventually.

‘Yes, I do, I think.’

‘Jordenn Yo is really important to me,’ Alvasund said. ‘As an artist, as a kind of ideal, a personal role model. She stood for everything I want to be. She lived for her work, and in the end died for it. Almost every installation she completed was managed in the face of objections, bans, threats. She was thrown into prison several times. Of course, everyone prizes her work now, as if none of that happened. Any island where she worked shows it off as if it was their idea. But in reality she was always being harassed by the same sort of people then, the ones who run islands now. This is one of the tunnels she wasn’t able to finish. She later disowned it, said it had been ruined by the Hetta authorities. Can’t you see what she meant?’

‘What would it have been if she had finished it?’

‘Longer and deeper . . . it was supposed to reach the far side of the hill. What’s unique about this one is there’s a vertical spiral down there somewhere.’

We stared at the entrance for a while longer, then turned and skittered carefully down the slippery track, returning towards the town.

‘Is that it?’ I said. ‘Have we done what you came here to do?’

‘I don’t know. I’m waiting to hear about the job offer, if it still exists.’

‘Are they here in town, or do you have to make contact with them somehow?’

‘I said I don’t know.’

‘We could always come back and look at the hole again,’ I said. ‘Nothing else to do.’

The way back took us straight from the mountain track to a steep flight of stone steps, thence down to one of the town streets. We passed through the central area. I was hoping we might see a shop open or perhaps a café, somewhere we could buy a newspaper then sit and warm up for a while. As we approached the house a young man appeared. He was about to pass by without noticing us, but Alvasund reacted to him at once.

‘Marse!’ She let go my hand, raising her arm in a warm greeting. She walked quickly towards him.

He responded to the sound of his name, looking at her with a startled expression. He quickly averted his eyes and looked as if he were about to stride on past us, but when Alvasund said his name again he acted as if he had recognized her all along. He lifted a gloved hand in welcome. It was a brief gesture, almost a warding off.

He said, his voice muffled by a thick scarf he wore across his mouth, ‘Alvie . . . is that you?’

‘Of course it’s me, Marse. Why do you say that?’ She was still smiling with recognition, disregarding his scowling manner.

‘No one was supposed to be here until next week. Have you been to the house?’

‘You sent me the key. Or someone from the Authority did.’ She was not smiling now. ‘I arrived yesterday, a few days earlier than I expected. I managed to get someone to give me a lift.’

‘All right.’ He was backing away from us, seemingly anxious to leave. He had an evasive look — what we could see of his face was raw from the wind, and his hair straggled out from beneath his hood.

‘But what about the job?’ Alvasund said. ‘That’s what I came here for.’

‘I don’t know anything about that. I’ve quit the operational side. I just check the office here, part-time.’

‘So what do I do about the job?’

‘There’s an appointment form. Was it in the house?’

Alvasund glanced at me, querying. I shook my head.

‘No.’

‘Then someone will send it.’

‘I need to know if I can still get the job,’ Alvasund said.

‘I’ll hurry them along a bit, the people in Jethra. But — don’t get involved.’

‘Marse, it’s what we were trained to do. You know that. You kept urging me to apply. We were going to do it together.’

‘That was before.’

‘Before what?’

He took another step back. He was looking at neither of us. ‘I’ll contact the Authority,’ he said. He flashed a furtive look at me. ‘Have you applied too?’

‘No.’

The young man turned and walked quickly away, his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his padded cagoule, his shoulders hunched, his chin buried in his scarf.

His last words were more or less the first acknowledgement by him that I was there. I was at Alvasund’s side, shivering in the bitter wind, a bystander, excluded. It made me realize how little I knew of Alvasund, or what her life had been like before we met again.

‘Shall we go to the house?’ she said.

‘I’ll collect my stuff,’ I said. ‘I think I’ll drive back to Goorn Town straight away.’

As soon as we were inside the house I moved quickly, finding my clothes and the other things I had brought, stuffing them into my holdall. I was angry with myself, but also furious with Alvasund. She went to the kitchen, made some tea. She sat at the table, staring down, holding the cup in both hands.

‘What’s the problem, Torm?’ she said, when I went into the kitchen to pick up the coffee I had brought with me.

‘You don’t need me here. I drove you, but you can find your own way back.’

‘What’s brought this on?’

‘Who the hell was that? What was his name — Marse?’

‘Just someone I used to know at university.’

‘A boyfriend?’

‘Just an old friend.’

‘And who the hell am I?’

‘An old friend.’

‘No difference between us then. Except I was the someone you found to drive you here.’

Alvasund blinked and turned away. ‘I’m sorry I said it like that. I knew straight away it was insensitive.’

‘Too bad. Too late.’

‘Torm, you’re jealous!’

I stopped pacing around then and turned back to her. ‘What do I have to be jealous about? What do I lose by you meeting up with an old boyfriend? Not a damned thing. You’ve given me nothing—’

‘I thought we were only just at the beginning.’

She rose from the table and pushed past me, through to the main part of the house. I followed. The stove was still alight, a deep-red glow behind the fireproof glass. The house was warm, rich with the smell of woodsmoke. The windows were translucent with condensation. She sat down on the thick rug in front of the fire doors, leaning towards the heat. I sat in one of the cushioned chairs, half turned away from her.

Alvasund immediately rose to her knees, leaned towards me and kissed me full on the lips. Her hand rested affectionately on my chest. I was too angry for that, and pulled away from her. She persisted.

Finally she said, ‘Torm, I’m sorry. Really sorry! Please . . . let’s forget everything that just happened. Marse is an old friend from college — I hadn’t seen him for over a year. But he was acting weird, and I forgot what I was doing.’

In a cupboard she found an unopened bottle of apple brandy, distilled and bottled locally. She broke the seal and poured two glasses.

‘I think you should explain what’s going on,’ I said. I was still residually angry with her, thinking of what had happened in the night. Nothing had happened in the night. The sheet of virtual glass she put up as a barrier remained a barrier. ‘You didn’t bring me here to look at a hole in the ground. What’s the truth about this job?’

‘I’ve never been sure the job is real,’ she said. ‘If it is, it would be ideal for me. The money’s terrific and I’m qualified for it. But I’ve been getting so many mixed messages from Marse — he took a similar job last year. First he’d tell me the job was open, and urge me to apply — then I wouldn’t hear from him for weeks. For a while he was pretending he didn’t know me. Then he changed again. Finally he told me to come here. But you saw what happened, in the street.’

‘What was he when you were at college? A boyfriend?’

‘Ages ago. It’s been over for more than a year.’

‘A one-night stand?’

‘No — more than that.’

‘A long affair, then?’

‘It’s in the past, Torm. It’s not important . . . but no, it wasn’t a long affair.’ She sat up, moved back from me. ‘We were together for about a month. Then he dropped out of the course after only a year and a half. He had been offered this tremendous job in Jethra. He told me about it, then left. I didn’t think I’d see him again because it was on the mainland. That’s when he started sending emails — he wanted me to join him. But Marse is a difficult kind of guy, so I kept saying I wanted to complete my course first. Then the messages became mixed. He seemed to be discouraging me, ignoring me. He had moved to work on an island called Seevl. I discovered that the people who had employed him, an agency called the Intercession Authority, were still hiring. They couldn’t find the right people, but my qualification made me ideal for it. Marse changed again, urging me to apply. For a time it was irrelevant — I hadn’t finished at college. Then I went to work on Muriseay, but after that went wrong I began wondering if I should try it. Anyway, in the end I did apply. I have to run a preliminary test, and then I’ll be told if I’ve got the job.’

‘Which island did you say it was?’

‘Seevl.’

‘I don’t know it. There are so many islands to remember.’

‘It’s one of the Torquis. Like Hetta, it’s close to the Faiand coast, but it’s at the other end of the country. Offshore from Jethra. It’s only a small island. Marse told me once it’s similar to the Tallek: cold climate, short summer, subsistence farming and fishing. Well, the story is that there are some old constructions on Seevl, built hundreds of years ago. No one knows who built them, or what they were for. Most of them are still there but they’re falling into ruin. They want to make them safe.’

‘I don’t see the connection with you.’

‘I’ve been trained in perspective imaging. 3-D visualization. But I couldn’t get much sense out of Marse.’

‘What does 3-D imaging have to do with making a ruin safe?’

‘That’s what the test is for. The reason I’m in Ørsknes is because there’s a similar ruin in the mountains here. What I have to do is go there as a sort of trial run, use my imaging equipment, write some notes and then they’ll have something of mine they can look at. The point is that most of the ruins are only on Seevl, but there’s one other that’s the same. It’s here in the Tallek. It was built at the same time and in the same way. People who apply to work for the Authority usually have to go there first.’

‘Where is it?’

‘I’ve been given directions. On my laptop.’

‘So why didn’t you tell me this before?’

‘It didn’t seem important until just now.’

We sipped more of the brandy, stopped arguing and enquiring. Alvasund went to the kitchen, made some food for us and we ate it while we sprawled in front of the stove. It was one of those days shaped by the chilly weather, the memory of having been cold while we were outside. Gradually, I began to relax with her again — maybe the brandy helped with that.

Outside it had started to rain, a heavy, steady downpour. I went to one of the windows, wiped a hole in the condensation with my hand and looked out at the dismal view of the street. We could hear the rain in every part of the house, the drumming on the wooden roof, the sheeting noise on the concrete path, the swirling sound as the water coursed away. A sudden onset of rain was supposed to augur the coming end of the Goornak, said to be the spittle of the curse-witch. At least the wind had died.

After we had eaten we sat together on the rug, my arm loosely around Alvasund, resting on the lower part of her back. When the logs settled suddenly, with a bright uprush of sparks, she snuggled affectionately against me.

But in spite of all that, when it came to bedtime Alvasund again acted as if a sheet of glass stood between us.

This time I let her take the first shower, so she was lying in the bed by the time I clambered up to join her. I stood naked before her, but she was lying so that she faced away and her eyes were already closed. I slipped into the bed and felt the bolster lying alongside. I left the light on, listening to the rain, to the quiet sound of her breathing. Finally, I turned out the light.

Alvasund said in the dark, ‘Would you hold me, Torm?’

‘Is that what you’d like?’

‘Please.’

She turned over suddenly, sat up, pulled on the bolster and tossed it to the side. Then she lay down again and moved so that she was pressing her naked back against me. I tucked my legs against hers, pressed my face into her hair. I reached over, laid my hand on her stomach. She felt warm, relaxed. After a few moments she took my hand and guided it to her breast.

The rain poured down endlessly on the roof just above us, but in the warmth and security of the house it was almost a reassuring sound. Although I was excited and aroused by holding her like that, I soon drifted off to sleep. Her nipple was a stiff little bud tucked into the space between two of my fingers.

In the night, in the dark, she woke me up, kissing me and caressing me. At last we made love, and I happily imagined invisible shards of glass flying away harmlessly in all directions.

Three days later we drove out of Ørsknes, heading northwards through the mountains on the eastern side of the fjord. The rain had ceased before dawn and the streets of the town were for the first time clear of any snow or ice. The sun was shining in the cold air. The wind had died. Leaving Ørsknes and climbing up to the mountainous hinterland meant we soon crossed the snowline. The higher peaks of the Tallek region often stayed snow-covered long into summer. However, the roads had been cleared of all ice and we were rewarded by one vista after another of the great Tallek skyline, the vast range of peaks under an azure sky. Attendant white clouds clung like ethereal banners to the leeward sides.

Alvasund glanced at the view from time to time, but much of her attention was on her laptop. She was running through the program that built 3-D visualizations, then extrapolated and modelled from a library of artefacts. She had already shown me some of the demo routines: for instance, one in which a single fossil bone could be extrapolated into a complete skeleton of some extinct reptile, and another in which pieces of timber, joined using certain vernacular building techniques, could suggest the outlines of long-vanished buildings. Working with a real artefact was something she had not yet had to do, so as we drove through the mountains she was studying the online manuals and further demos.

We were approaching the northern coast of Goorn and already I had several times glimpsed the calm cold blue of the distant sea. The mountains were less rugged here. We soon crossed down through the snowline into a high area of barren rock and clumps of coarse grasses. We stopped to consult the map that had been sent to Alvasund by the Authority: they had finally authorized her to go ahead and complete the test assignment.

In the event the site was not hard to find. The ruined tower stood on a smooth bluff of land, facing towards the sea above a steep decline. We could see it long before we reached it: a tall, narrow construction of dark stone, all alone, no sign of any other buildings or activity around it.

I parked within walking distance of it. Alvasund gathered her laptop and digitizing equipment from the rear seat and then we sat for a few moments in the car, staring across the moor at the old building. There was something about the tower that gave me a feeling of dread — it was imprecise and irrational, so I said nothing to Alvasund about it.

Wearing our thick coats we strode across the uneven ground, beset by a strong breeze from the sea. I felt the sense of inner unease gradually intensify, but again I said nothing to Alvasund. As we drew closer to the ruin we could see how jagged and cracked were the stone walls, with a large gap near the top on one side — there was a glimpse of some kind of wooden floor or joists within, broken and hanging at an angle. Orange lichen spread across much of the south-facing surface. The tower looked solid but decrepit, the stones dark in the bright sunlight.

Once beside the tower we could see the huge, amazing view of the sea and the rocky coast. Far away on the coastal plain there was a modern road, bearing fast-moving traffic.

‘It must have been built as a watch-tower,’ I said, looking towards the sea.

‘I’ve been reading about the towers on Seevl,’ Alvasund said. ‘None of those was built with windows. Just the outer wall and a roof. This is the same design. Whatever they did here, it wasn’t to stare at the view.’

‘It’s giving me the creeps,’ I said.

In response Alvasund came towards me and hugged me, her cases and holdalls banging against my arms. ‘I feel it too,’ she said. ‘Let’s get on with it.’

She started setting up her equipment. This consisted of a digitizing panoramic viewer on a steadihold bracket, a compiler with an aural sensor on a short mast, and her laptop computer. I helped her into the web of counterbalanced steadihold straps, with the battery pack and the harness for the digitizer. I watched as she booted up the equipment, running the self-test, satisfying herself that she was ready to go.

‘I want to try to finish everything in one circuit,’ she said. ‘Unless you intend to be analysed with everything else you should stay out of range behind me.’

She took a few experimental lines with the digitizer, but the battery pack was in the way of her arm. She took this off and handed it to me.

She began a first circuit of the base of the tower, sidestepping around at an even distance from the masonry of the wall. I stayed with her, carrying the batteries. The ground was broken, with many stone pieces half buried, and in front of the tower there was a steep downward gradient. After she had stumbled a couple of times I held on to the harness at the back, guiding her.

Finally, she said she was ready. I stood close behind her, grasping the battery pack. We were close against the base of the tower and the feeling of unexplained terror was sharper in me than ever before. Alvasund looked pale, her hair blowing around her face.

She started recording, then moved around with a steady sideways step, holding the digitizer trained on the main wall. I shadowed her, warning her whenever a stone or some other obstruction was underfoot.

We completed the take at the first attempt. As she closed the activator a powerful feeling of relief swept over me, that we could soon leave this place.

I walked to the rest of the equipment to collect it up.

Alvasund said, ‘We can’t go until I’ve interpreted the image.’

‘How long will that take?’

‘Not long.’

She downloaded the material from the digitizer to the equalizer, then to the laptop. Nothing seemed to happen for a long time. She and I were standing beside the equipment, face to face, staring at each other. I could see the stress on her face, the anxiety to leave. I had never known anything like this before, a dread without any kind of focus or reason, a blank fright, an unknown terror.

‘Torm, there is something inside that place. I could detect it through the viewfinder.’ There was a kind of nervy tightness in her voice, newly there, that suddenly scared me.

‘What do you mean, something in there?’

‘Something alive. Inside the tower. It’s huge!’ She closed her eyes, shaking her head. ‘I want to get away from here. I’m terrified!’

She signalled helplessly towards the electronic equipment, where the online lights were still glittering faintly under the unremitting sunlight.

‘What is it? An animal?’

‘I can’t tell. It’s moving about all the time.’ Her voice was shrill. ‘But it can’t be an animal. It’s much too big for that.’

‘Too big? How big?’

‘It fills the whole place.’ She reached out a hand towards me, but for some reason I couldn’t identify I pulled back from her, not wanting her to touch me. She must have felt something of the same, because in the same instant she snatched her hand back. ‘It’s like an immense coil. Round and round. Against the walls, or inside them somehow.’

Not far from where we were standing was one of the gaps in the masonry at ground level. Through this it was possible to see some of the way inside. I could see a mass of broken stone, brickwork and rotting pieces of timber. Nothing alive was in there, or nothing visibly alive. No coil of anything.

Just then the interpreter completed its run, emitting a brief musical note, and we both turned with a feeling of relief. Alvasund grabbed the laptop.

‘Torm, look at this.’ She turned the screen around for me to see. ‘You can see it now. It’s there!’

The sunlight was too bright and I could see hardly anything at all on the monitor. Alvasund kept moving it around, first to put the thing where I could see it, then to move it back so she could. I stood beside her and raised part of my coat to throw a shadow on the display.

What was on the screen looked to me like an ultrasound scan: a monochrome image, slightly blurred, with no guide as to left or right, up or down.

‘That’s a trace of the wall,’ Alvasund said, indicating a large grey patch. ‘That jagged line is the broken bit there.’ I glanced up and could see how the display matched it. It was a kind of three dimensional X-ray of the interior of the tower ruin.

I looked more closely. There was a ghostly image behind the wall, grey and indistinct, but it was clearly moving. It rippled, a peristaltic thrusting from one side to another, a sort of immense pliable tube, compressing and expanding. There were several such movements, some higher up and only just visible at the top of the screen. The largest area of this horrific movement was close to the ground.

‘It’s a snake, a serpent!’ Alvasund cried. ‘Coiled around. In there!’

‘But there’s nothing. We can see that. It’s full of old rubble.’

‘No . . . it’s definitely in there! An immense snake!’

‘Something wrong with the software, then?’

‘This is what the program does — it picks up traces of viability. It’s detecting something viable in there. Look — the thing’s moving!’

She took a step back, suddenly, knocking the laptop against me. The trace had moved, upwards and across. I imagined a vast reptilian head, eyes and tongue and long fangs, rearing up to strike. I stepped back too, but there was still nothing visible through the small gap in the wall. Nothing there we could confirm with our eyes. Nothing visible, nothing real. My terror of it remained.

I was trying to think of an explanation: perhaps there was a cavity wall with something trapped inside. I was scared that if there was something in there that it would break out and come at us.

I took the laptop from Alvasund, turned away to get the best look I could get. I glanced back at her, but discovered that she was no longer standing beside me. Somehow she had moved away. I looked around, but I was alone.

‘Alvasund?’

‘Torm!’

Her voice sounded faint, all but carried away on the wind. Then I saw her. She was inside the tower!

I could see her dimly through the gap at ground level. She was facing me, calling my name. But no time had passed. Had I blacked out for a few seconds?

I put the laptop roughly on the ground and scrambled across towards her, fighting back the intense feeling of fear. In a few seconds I was there by the gap. I went down on my haunches to squeeze through so I could reach the interior.

The way was blocked. Something hard, transparent, cold, like a pane of thick glass, had been placed over the aperture. Alvasund was there, an arm’s length away from me, but she was trapped behind this invisible barrier, inside the tower. She kept shouting my name. I pushed and banged against the glass, uselessly.

She kept on shouting. She had raised her arms, was shaking her head from side to side, and her mouth was turned down in a horrid inverse rictus of fear and pain.

As I watched helplessly, a swift and horrible transformation came over her.

She grew old. She aged before my eyes.

She lost height, gained weight. Instead of her lithe figure contained in bulky winter clothes I saw Alvasund overweight, sagging, unhealthy, thinly clad in some kind of shapeless nightgown. Her hair became grey, lank, greasy, pulled into an untidy plait that rested over one shoulder. Her face became pallid and swollen, with a rash across one cheek. Her eyes were sunk into their sockets, dark-surrounded. Her lips were blue with cyanosis. Saliva smeared her chin, blood ran unabated from a nostril.

She was being held aloft by unseen hands. Her legs were dangling beneath her. She wore black stockings. They had slipped down to reveal blue bulging tangles of varicose veins on her scrawny, pallid calves.

Not understanding, I stumbled back from the gap in the stonework, tripped over one of the half-buried rocks, rolled to recover, then dived across to where the laptop lay on the ground. Almost not caring what happened, what the consequences might be, I pulled every cable out of it, then fumbled underneath, found the battery, snatched it out of its housing. The instrument died. No image remained on its screen.

I turned to disconnect the interpreter, but as I moved towards it Alvasund was already there! She was outside the tower again, frantically disconnecting cables from the device. I saw her familiar face, the thick windcheater, her warm trousers.

She turned and she saw me.

It was impossible to think of driving but we reached the car somehow, hauling the equipment any way we could. We threw the stuff carelessly on the rear seat, then scrambled in at the front, slamming and locking the doors. We held each other, shaking and trembling. Alvasund’s hair fell about her face, hiding her. I could still feel, almost taste, the terrible menace of whatever there was in that ruin.

Alvasund was crying, or so I thought, but when I looked closely at her I realized she was still shaking with fear, her breath coming in shallow gasps, her hands and arms and head trembling constantly. I put my arms around her, pulled her close to me and for a long time we were just there together, bulky and awkward in our outdoor clothes, trying to recover from whatever it was that had happened to us.

Through it all the constancy of the dark tower, the dead tower, looming over us.

At last I felt able to start the car’s engine, backed away slowly down the track until we were at a safe distance. The tower was out of sight beyond a spur of land.

‘What happened to you?’ Alvasund said. ‘You just vanished suddenly!’ Her voice still had the shrill edge I had heard earlier. ‘We were there together, and the next thing I knew was that you had somehow moved into the tower itself. I was left outside! I couldn’t reach you, or make you hear me!’

‘But it was you inside the tower,’ I said.

‘Don’t say that! You were in there. I thought you had died.’

The mountain wind was blustering against the side of the car.

Eventually I was able to tell her what I had seen. Eventually she told me what she had seen.

We had had identical but opposite experiences. Each of us had seemed to appear before the other, transported somehow into the broken tower interior.

Alvasund said, ‘You suddenly looked old and ill, and — I couldn’t get to you.’

‘How old, how ill?’

‘I saw — I can’t say!’

Remembering her, remembering the image of her inside the tower, I said, ‘You thought I was about to die.’

‘You were already dead. It looked like, I don’t know, some horrible accident. I could see blood all over your head — I was trying to get in to help you, but there was a sheet of something in the way, a piece of thick glass or plastic blocking the gap. I couldn’t get past it. I turned around to get a stone or something. I was going to try to bash my way through. Then suddenly you were outside again.’

‘And suddenly you were outside.’

‘What the hell happened, Torm?’

I could not answer that and neither could she. The one certainty was that that psychic image of Alvasund in the final moments of her life would haunt me for ever.

We returned to Ørsknes.

Everything about us had changed because of what happened at the tower, although we did not admit it to each other. Suddenly it felt as if we had known each other for years. The urgency of learning about and of trying to attract each other had receded. We were still in the first days of our relationship together, a time when new lovers feel endlessly curious about each other, but our curiosity had died. We knew more than we should. The knowledge was awful. It was a subject which remained unspoken, unexamined. We simply understood it, and always found it too awful to put into words.

So the words were never said and the knowledge we had of each other was never admitted, but it did make us closer, it bound us with its terrible secret. The fearful memory of the tower loomed over us both.

A short period of inertia followed. We were uncertain whether we should return to Goorn Town, or stay on in Ørsknes until Alvasund received a response of some kind. She had gone ahead and sent in her notes with the recorded results of the test, but there was no reply from either the Authority or Marse. Marse himself appeared not to be in Ørsknes any more. When he made no contact after Alvasund emailed him, we tried to find him in the town. He had said he worked in the Authority office, but we had never seen such a place. We traced it to one of the buildings near the wharves. There were no lights on and the door was closed and locked.

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.

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.

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 the 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.