The Dream Archipelago

by Christopher Priest

  At last, with guilt overwhelming every other feeling, Ordier sold the business to one of the major electronics corporations and took himself and his fortune to exile in the Dream Archipelago. He knew that his departure from the world of eavesdropping commerce would make not a jot of difference to its booming growth, but he himself wanted no more part in it.

  He chose the equatorial island of Tumo from one of many that the island property brokers offered to him, and purchased a large tract of land in the remote eastern part, well away from the populous mountain region in the centre of the island. Many years before, the land had belonged to a noble Tumoit family, but the last of them had died decades earlier and the property was mostly derelict. Ordier had paid for the old ruins to be razed and removed, and the land made suitable for building. With this done he had commissioned the erection of a large, modern, barricaded house beside the edge of a long valley, while he lived in suspension of activity in a secure hotel in Tumo Town. When the house had been completed and furnished, the services connected, the security systems tested and certified, and when all the grounds and buildings had been repeatedly swept and cleared of stray scintillas, Ordier moved in.

  He lived for some time in what he believed was a scintilla-free environment but he was finally forced to face up to the fact that nowhere was truly safe from them. His first use of the detector had turned up a scintilla infestation on what the trade would call a randomized cover basis. In other words, his house and grounds were only lightly covered and therefore did not appear to have been targeted. After he had located and removed all those scintillas – a task which took him several weeks – Ordier regularly checked his property. Until recently, the spread of scintillas had continued to be sporadic and accidental.

  A few weeks ago, though, Ordier had discovered that scintillas now appeared to be infesting his house and grounds on an organized basis. The possibility of random cover remained, but not only did the number of scintillas increase, they were turning up where most people would seek privacy: the bedroom where he and Jenessa usually made love, the rooms where they played or relaxed, the shower cubicles, the toilets, the walled garden, this patio where Jenessa customarily sat around naked after her morning showers.

  There were other features of the infestation that were just as alarming.

  In the first place Ordier had no idea how the scintillas were actually being placed around his property. No one could enter or leave except by the main gates, which could only be opened by direct control from within the house, or by using a portable radar key; he and Jenessa were the only two who had such keys. All other access to the house was closed, so the scintillas were either being sown from the air, or intruders were finding a way into the grounds when the house was unattended.

  Squinting up at the sky, against the bright sunshine, Ordier could see the familiar swirls of aircraft condensation trails, spiralling in towards the overhead position. Scintillas were often distributed from the air, but only in saturation quantities. How could a single one, placed by air, be hidden in the tufts of a carpet beside his bed? Somehow, intruders must be gaining access.

  The other feature of the scintillas that concerned Ordier was the matter of their source. There seemed no discernible pattern: some were coded to sections of the belligerent forces in the south, which meant that their presence on any of the islands was a breach of the Covenant. Both sides, of course, were using them. Most of them, though, were from commercial marketing or lobbying companies, and many of these were licensed to organizations Ordier could identify. In an irony not lost on him, the scintillas were most likely to be part of consignments he himself had once sold. But there was a third group, and these scintillas were uncoded and thus untraceable. It was a new and worrying development for Ordier. In his day scintillas had invariably carried internal markings.

  Ordier’s life now was ostensibly centred on his casual but well-established relationship with Jenessa, on his house and garden, on his growing collections of books and antiques. He often made journeys to other parts of Tumo, an island rich in archaeological treasures, and during Jenessa’s long vacations they sometimes travelled together to other islands in this part of the Dream Archipelago. Until the beginning of the summer he had felt reasonably happy, secure and relaxed, and coming to terms at last with his conscience. But at the end of the short Tumoit rainy season, with the first spell of really hot dry weather, the apparently planned placing of scintillas in his house had begun. At the same time, by chance, he had made a certain discovery about the Qataari refugees and it had created an obsession which had grown ever since.

  It was focused on the ancient, castellated folly that had been built centuries before on the ridge of the eastern border of his grounds. On taking over the property the folly had struck him as so odd and beautiful that he had not had it demolished with the other buildings. Exploring the folly one day, clambering around in the sun-warmed granite walls, he had come across the discovery that quickly became his obsession.

  There in the folly he had gained his first sight of the young Qataari woman, had uniquely witnessed the Qataari rituals. There he had listened and watched, as hidden from those he watched as the men who decoded the mosaic of digital images broadcast by the ubiquitous scintillas.

  Jenessa lounged in the sun. She drank her coffee, then when Ordier made a fresh pot she poured herself another. She asked him to collect her bottle of sun blocker from the bathroom and spread it slowly across her body like a cat grooming itself. She asked Ordier to rub it on her back. This sometimes turned out to be a preliminary to sex but today she didn’t seem interested in that. She lay back in the hot sunshine, glistening with the cream, the dazzling sunlight making irregular streaks of brilliance on the curves of her naked body.

  Ordier, while pretending to sit contentedly with her, wondered if she was intending to stay with him all day, as sometimes she did. He enjoyed their lazy days together, alternating between swimming in the pool, making love and sunbathing. The previous evening she had been talking about some assignments she had to collect from her office at the university, and the presence of her new colleague. Now, though, because she seemed to be settling in for a day of sunbathing he wasn’t sure what she was really planning.

  At last though she collected up her things and walked through to the nearest bathroom. She showered again, this time wearing a shower cap for her hair and staying in only long enough to rinse off the sun blocker. A few minutes later she appeared on the patio fully dressed and they walked together down to where she had left her car. There were last words and perfunctory kisses before she drove away.

  Ordier stood under the shady edge of the grove of trees that grew beside the main drive and watched the gates open and close for her as she drove through. The car turned on to the track that led down to the main road crossing the island. The white cloud of dust thrown up by her tyres hovered long after the car had driven away.

  Ordier waited, knowing that sometimes she returned to pick up something she had forgotten.

  When the dust had settled and his view across to the mountains was interrupted by nothing more than the shimmering of the heat haze, Ordier turned back to his house and walked up the sloping drive to the main door.

  Once inside he made no further attempt to conceal the impatience he had been suppressing while Jenessa was there. He hurried to his study and found his binoculars, then went through the house and left by the side door. A short walk took him across to the high stone wall that ran laterally along the base of the ridge. He unlocked the padlock on the stout wooden gate and let himself through. Beyond was a sandy, sun-whitened courtyard, surrounded on all sides by walls and already breathlessly hot in the windless day. Ordier made sure the gate was locked on the inside then climbed steadily up the slope towards the angular height of the castellated folly on the summit of the ridge.

  It was the presence of the folly that had made Ordier want to buy this piece of land in this part of the island, an area that was inconveniently remote from most
of the other people who lived on Tumo. He had intended to find somewhere outlying to live, but perhaps not to this degree. Whatever, the presence of the folly, an act of inspired foolishness by whoever had built it three centuries before, had decided him to make the purchase.

  The ridge that marked the eastern boundary of his property ran more or less due north and south. For most of its length it was unscalable, except by someone properly equipped with climbing boots and ropes. It was not so much that it was high – on the side facing Ordier’s house it was never more than a couple of hundred feet above the plain – but that it was broken and jagged with many small, sharp and friable rocks loose underfoot. In the geophysical past there must have been a tumultuous seismic upheaval, compressing and raising the land along some deep-lying fault, the crust snagging upwards like two sheets of brittle steel rammed with overwhelming force against each other’s edges.

  It was on the summit of the ridge that the folly had been precariously built, although at what risk to the lives of the builders Ordier could not imagine. It balanced on the broken rocks, seemingly in permanent danger of collapse.

  When Ordier had first been shown the folly the valley which lay beyond the ridge had been a wide tract of semi-desert, alternately muddy and dusty depending on the time of year, studded with rank vegetation. But that had been before the arrival of the refugees and the changes that followed.

  A flight of stone steps had been built across the inner wall of the folly, leading to the battlements. Before Ordier had moved into the house he had paid his own builders to strengthen many of the lower steps with steel rods and concrete stanchions, but the upper ones had been left in their original state. It was still possible to reach the narrow battlements but only with difficulty and at some peril.

  About halfway up, before the last of the reinforced steps, Ordier reached the tiny hidden cell that had been contrived inside the main wall.

  He glanced back, staring down from his vertiginous position across the land beneath. There was his house, its evenly tiled roofs glittering in the sunlight. The constantly watered gardens that surrounded it were a verdant green, almost uniquely so in the whole visible landscape. Beyond the house lay the huge untamed stretch of scrubland, reaching as far as the brown and purple heights of the distant Tumoit Range, with their evidence of human habitation. Behind the first range of peaks, invisible to Ordier from here, was Tumo Town, nestling in its blue bay, a sprawling modern settlement built on the ruins of the seaport that had been sacked in the early days of the war.

  To north and south Ordier could see the splendent silver of the sea. Somewhere to the north, a strip on the horizon, with most of it below the curvature, was the island of Muriseay. It was not in sight today because of the haze.

  Ordier turned away from the view and stepped through into the cell, squeezing between two overlapping slabs of masonry which had clearly been positioned to conceal the presence of the cavity behind. Even from just outside, standing on the perilous steps, it was not immediately obvious that there was a way in. However, as Ordier had discovered by chance the first time he had explored up here, there was a warm, dark space within, high enough and wide enough for a man to stand. Ordier wriggled through the gap and stood inside on the narrow ledge, still out of breath after his brisk climb.

  The brilliant sunshine had dulled his eyes and the tiny space was at first a cell of blackness. The only light came from a horizontal crack in the outer wall, a slit of shining sky.

  When his breathing had steadied and his eyes had adjusted, Ordier stepped up to the ledge where he generally stood, feeling with his foot for the slab of smooth rock. Beneath him was the whole of the inner cavity, plunging between the jagged rocky walls to the foundations far below: Ordier had shone a bright torch down there on one of his first visits and realized that if he slipped and fell there would be little hope of escape.

  He braced himself with his elbow as he transferred his weight and at once a sweet fragrance reached his nostrils. As he brought his second foot up to the slab he glanced down and saw in the dim light a pale, mottled colouring on the ledge where he was standing.

  The smell was distinctively that of Qataari roses. Ordier remembered the hot southerly wind that had been blowing all day yesterday – the Naalattan as it was called on Tumo – and the whirling vortex of light and colour that had risen from the valley floor as the fragrant petals of the Qataari roses scattered and circled. Many of the petals had been lifted by the wind as high as his vantage point here in the cell. Some had seemed to hover almost within reach of his fingers, were he to stretch through the slit and try to grab them. He had had to quit his hidden cell to meet Jenessa when she was due to arrive at the house and before he left he had not seen the end of the warm blizzard of petals.

  The fragrance of the Qataari rose was known to be narcotic. The cloying smell released as his feet crushed the petals was sweet in his nose and mouth. Ordier kicked and scuffed at the petals that had landed on the shelf, sweeping them down into the wall cavity.

  At last he leaned across to the slit that looked outwards into the valley. Here too the wind had deposited a few petals. Ordier brushed them away with his fingers, careful that they fell into the cavity beneath him and not out into the open air.

  He raised his binoculars and leaned forward until the metal hoods over the object lenses rested on the stone edge of the horizontal slit. With rising excitement, he focused the glasses and began scanning the Qataari in the valley below.

  In the evening Ordier drove to Jenessa’s apartment in Tumo Town. He went reluctantly, out of a sense of loyalty to her. He usually disliked having to make conversation with strangers, but in addition he knew that the talk on this evening was unavoidably going to centre around the Qataari refugees.

  Since his discovery in the folly Ordier found all discussion of the Qataari difficult and unpleasant, as if some private part of himself was being invaded. For this and other reasons Ordier had never told Jenessa what he knew. Like her main dinner guest that evening she was a cultural anthropologist. She too had spent most of her working life trying to solve the enigma represented by the Qataari. He did not know how to tell her that he thought he was in the process of solving the mystery, partly because he did not want to reveal how he was doing it but also because to tell her would mean he would have to reveal the guilty and illicit pleasures he was experiencing.

  The other dinner guests had already arrived when Ordier walked in.

  Jenessa introduced them as Professor Jacj Parren and his wife Luovi. Ordier’s first impression of Parren was unfavourable: he was a short, overweight and intense man who shook Ordier’s hand with nervous, jerky movements, then turned away at once to resume the conversation with Jenessa that Ordier’s arrival had interrupted. Normally, Ordier would have bridled at such graceless behaviour but Jenessa flashed him a soothing look.

  He poured himself a drink and went to sit beside Luovi.

  During the apéritifs and main course the conversation stayed on general subjects, with the islands of the Archipelago the main topic. Parren and Luovi had only recently arrived from the north and were anxious to learn what they could about some of the islands where they might make their home. The only places they had so far been to were Muriseay – which was the island where many immigrants disembarked when heading for this part of the Archipelago – and Tumo itself.

  Ordier noticed that when he and Jenessa described any of the other islands with which they were familiar it was Luovi who showed the most interest. She always asked how far such-and-such an island would be from Tumo, how long it might take to commute from there.

  ‘Jacj must be close to his work,’ she said to Ordier.

  ‘I think I told you, Yvann,’ Jenessa said conventionally. ‘Professor Parren is here to study the Qataari.’

  ‘Yes, of course. Then why don’t you simply move here to Tumo?’

  ‘Naturally, we’ve thought of that,’ said Parren quickly. ‘But among the theories I’ve been developing abou
t the Qataari, and it will come as no surprise to Jenessa, is the proposition that they are acutely sensitive to smell. There are of course essential background odours associated with every location, the product of soil, vegetation, agriculture, industry, all that sort of thing, and it occurs to me that part of the sensory warning apparatus used by the Qataari might be olfactory recognition of place. If we were to make our home here, we would become identifiable in the same way as everyone else who approaches them with the dust of Tumo, so to speak, on them. Our ideal location would therefore be one that is within reasonable commuting distance of Tumo, yet which has a completely different olfactory signature.’

  ‘I think you might have something there,’ said Ordier, sipping his drink, and sensing an inconsistency in the argument.