The Dream Archipelago

by Christopher Priest

  He reared up like a non-swimmer who has fallen suddenly into shallow water, showering flowers around him in a pink and scarlet spray, trying to spit the petals from his mouth.

  He felt something gritty between his teeth. He reached in with a finger and wiped it around. When he brought it out several petals were clinging moistly to it. He raised it to look more closely at them and Ordier saw a sudden glint of reflected light.

  At first he thought it was a bit of his own spittle, but then he saw that all the petals had an identical high spot of reflected light embedded in their fragile material.

  He sank down again on his knees and picked up another of the petals at random. He held it before his eyes, squinting at it. He saw a tiny gleam of light, a glittering, shimmering fragment of metal and glass.

  Ordier picked up a handful of the petals, felt and saw the same microscopic glitter on every one. He threw them up and let them float away around him.

  As they flickered down the sun reflected minutely from the scintillas embedded in all the petals.

  Ordier closed his eyes. The scent of the petals was overpowering. He staggered forward on his knees, the petals rippling about his waist. Again he reached the depression in the ground beneath the petals and he fell forward into the lake of flowers, reaching out for the body of the woman. He was in an ecstasy of delirium, desire and tumescence.

  He floundered and beat his arms, thrashing the petals aside, sinking deeper into the morass of colour and scent, kicking and struggling against the increasing weight around him, seeking her, seeking her.

  But the four ropes met in the centre of the arena, and she was no longer there.

  Where she had been bound there was now a large and tightly drawn knot.

  Exhausted by the heat, by the tensions coursing through him, by the disappointment, Ordier rolled over on his back and sank into the petals, letting the sun beat down on him.

  It was directly overhead; it must be noon. He could feel the hard lump of the knotted ropes between his shoulder blades, supporting him so that he did not sink further into the lake. The metal heads of the encircling statues loomed over and around him. The sky was brilliant and blue. He reached behind himself to grasp the ropes above his head, and spread his legs along the others.

  The midday wind was rising and petals were blowing, drifting across him, covering his limbs, spinning above him in a sinuous red twister.

  Behind the statues, dominating the arena, was the bulk of the folly. The sun reflected from its many rough surfaces. In the centre of the wall, and about halfway up, was a narrow slit with a small overhang above it. Ordier stared up at the slash of darkness in the sunlit wall. Somewhere within there were two identical glimmers of reflected light. They were circular and cold, like the lenses of binoculars.

  The petals blew across him, covering him, and soon only his eyes were still exposed.

  He stared up at the sky. Aircraft were spiralling in from all directions, the highest ones trailing long white paths of condensation. The aircraft arrived simultaneously above him, appearing to halt. It was the equatorial vortex, the noonday stasis of time.

  Dozens of the flying machines were hovering there, seemingly stacked one above the other, pointing in every direction, flying fiercely through time, blocking the zenithal sun, never moving away from his line of sight. Each was flying at operating speed; each was suspended in the vortex; each appeared from the ground to be unmoving in the air.

  The closest plane, the lowest, was a single-engined propeller-powered monoplane. The noise of its engine drummed against him. It seemed to have become trapped in the pink tornado of whirling petals, as the coriolis slowly twisted it horizontally. Then, like an insect laying a clutch of airborne eggs, a dark cloud of tiny particles was ejected from the fuselage of the aircraft. The spinning vortex of petals took them and scattered them in all directions.

  The scintillas drummed down around Ordier, on to his face, into his eyes, into his mouth.

  The vortex passed, moving on with the noon moment, moving on along the equator. The aircraft, subjectively released from the stasis of the vortex, appeared to shoot away along their many different courses, continuing their spiralling trajectories above the equator, travelling on through their eternal noon, leaving their trails of condensation behind them. Slowly, the tiny particles of condensed moisture dispersed, and the hot sky reverted to its dome of unbroken blue.

  Around Ordier’s inert body, other tiny particles settled quietly on the ground.

  The

  Discharge

  •

  I emerge into my memories of life at the age of twenty. I was a soldier, recently released from boot camp, being marched by an escouade of black-cap military policemen to the naval compound in Jethra Harbour. The war was approaching the end of its three-thousandth year and I was serving in a conscript army.

  I marched mechanically, staring at the back of the man’s helmet in front of me. The sky was dark grey with cloud and a stiff cold wind streamed in from the sea. My awareness of life leapt into being around me. I knew my name, I knew where we had been ordered to march, I knew or could guess where we would be going after that. I could function as a soldier. This was my moment of birth into consciousness.

  Marching uses no mental energy – the mind is free to wander, if you have a mind. I record these words some years later, looking back, trying to make sense of what happened. At the time, the moment of awareness, I could only react, stay in step.

  Of my childhood, the years leading up to this moment of mental birth, little remains. I can piece together the fragments of a likely story. I was probably born in Jethra, university town and capital city on the southern coast of our country. Of my parents, brothers or sisters, my education, any history of childhood illnesses, friends, experiences, travels, I remember nothing. I grew to the age of twenty; only that is certain.

  And one other thing, useless to a soldier. I knew I was an artist.

  How could I be sure of that, trudging along with the other men, in a phalanx of dark uniforms, kitbags, clanking mess tins, steel helmets, boots, stamping down a puddled road with a chill wind in our faces?

  I knew that in the area of mental blankness behind me was a love of paintings, of beauty, of shape and form and colour. How had I gained this passion? What had I done with it? Aesthetics were my obsession and fervour. What was I doing in the army? Somehow this totally unsuitable candidate must have passed medical and psychological tests. I had been drafted, sent to boot camp; somehow a drill serjeant had trained me to become a soldier.

  Here I was, marching to war.

  We boarded a troopship for passage to the southern continent, the world’s largest unclaimed territory. It was there that the fighting was taking place. All battles had been fought in the south for nearly three thousand years. It was a vast, uncharted land of tundra and permafrost, buried in ice at the pole. Apart from a few outposts along the coast, it was uninhabited except by battalions.

  I was assigned to a mess deck below the waterline, already hot and stinking when we boarded, soon crowded and noisy as well.

  I withdrew into myself, while sensations of life coursed maddeningly through me. Who was I? How had I come to this place? Why could I not remember what I had been doing even the previous day?

  But I was able to function, equipped with knowledge of the world, with working ability to use my equipment, I knew the other men in my escadron and I understood some of the aims and history of the war. It was only myself I could not remember. For the first day, as we waited in our deck for other detachments to board the ship, I listened in to the talk of the other men, hoping mainly for insights about myself, but when none of those was revealed I settled instead for finding out what concerned them. Their concerns would be mine.

  Like all soldiers they were complaining, but in their case the complaints were tinged with real apprehension. It was the prospect of the three-thousandth anniversary of the outbreak of war that was the problem.

  They were a
ll convinced that they were going to be caught up in some major new offensive, an assault intended to resolve the dispute one way or another. Some of them thought that because there were still more than three years to go until the anniversary the war would end before then. Others pointed out cynically that our four-year term of conscription was due to end a few weeks after the millennium. If a big offensive was in progress we would never be allowed out until it was over.

  Like them, I was too young for fatalism. The seed of wanting to escape from the army, to find some way to discharge myself, had been sown.

  I barely slept that night, wondering about my past, worrying about my future.

  When the ship started its voyage it headed south, passing the islands closest to the mainland. Off the coast of Jethra itself was Seevl, a long grey island of steep cliffs and bare windswept hills that blocked the view of the sea from most parts of the city. Beyond Seevl a wide strait led to a group of islands known as the Serques – these were greener, lower, with many attractive small towns nestling in coves and bays around their coastlines.

  Our ship passed them all, weaving a way between the clustering islands. I watched from the rail, enchanted by the view.

  As the long shipboard days passed slowly I found myself drawn again and again to the upper deck, where I would find a place to stand and stare, usually alone. So close to home but beyond the blocking mass of Seevl, the islands slipped past, out of reach, this endless islandscape of vivid colours and glimpses of other places, distant and shrouded in marine haze. The ship ploughed on steadily through the calm water, the massed soldiery crammed noisily within, few of the men so much as even glancing away to see where we were.

  The days went by and the weather grew perceptibly warmer. The beaches I could see now were white and fringed with tall trees, with tiny houses visible in the shade beyond. The reefs that protected many of the islands were brilliantly multi-coloured, jagged and encrusted with shells, breaking the sea-swell into spumes of white spray. We passed ingenious harbours and large coastal towns clinging to spectacular hillsides, saw pluming volcanoes and rambling, rock-strewn mountain pastures, skirted islands large and small, lagoons and bays and river estuaries.

  It was common knowledge that it was the people of the Dream Archipelago who had caused the war, though as you passed through the Midway Sea the peaceful, even dreamy aspect of the islands undermined this certainty. The calm was only an impression, an illusion borne of the distance between ship and shore. To keep us alert on our long southerly voyage the army mounted many compulsory shipboard lectures. Some of these recounted the history of the struggle to achieve armed neutrality in which the islands had been engaged for most of the three millennia of the war.

  Now they were by consent of all parties neutral, but their geographical location – the Midway Sea girdled the world, separating the warring countries of the northern continent from their chosen battlefields in the uninhabited southern polar land – ensured that military presence in the islands was perpetual.

  I cared little for any of that. Whenever I was able to get away to the upper deck I would stare in rapt silence at the passing diorama of islands. I tracked the course of the ship with the help of a torn and probably outdated map I had found in a ship’s locker and the names of the islands chimed in my consciousness like a peal of bells: Paneron, Salay, Temmil, Mesterline, Prachous, Muriseay, Demmer, Piqay, the Aubracs, the Torquils, the Serques, the Reever Fast Shoals and the Coast of Helvard’s Passion.

  Each of these names was evocative to me. Reading the names off the map, identifying the exotic coastlines from fragments of clues – a sudden rise of sheer cliffs, a distinctive headland, a particular bay – made me think that everywhere in the Dream Archipelago was already embedded in my consciousness, that somehow the islands were where my roots were found, that I belonged in them, had dreamed of them all my life. In short, while I stared at the islands from the ship I felt my artistic sensibilities reviving.

  I was startled by the emotional impact on me of the names, so delicate and suggestive of unspecified sensual pleasures, out of key with the rest of the coarse and manly existence on the ship. As I stared out across the narrow stretches of water that lay between our passing ship and the beaches and reefs I would quietly recite the names to myself, as if trying to summon a spirit that would lift me up, raise me above the sea and carry me to those tide-swept strands.

  Some of the islands were so large that the ship sailed along parallel with their coastlines for most of the day, while others were so small they were barely more than half-submerged reefs which threatened to rip at the hull of our elderly ship.

  Small or large, all the islands had names. As we passed one I could identify on my map I circled the name, then later added it to an ever-growing list in my notebook. I wanted to record them, count them, note them down as an itinerary so that one day I might go back and explore them all. The view from the sea tempted me.

  There was only one island stop for our ship during that long southward voyage.

  My first awareness of the break in our journey was when I noticed that the ship was heading towards a large industrialized port, the installations closest to the sea seemingly bleached white by the cement dust spilling from an immense smoking factory that overlooked the bay. Beyond this industrial area was a long tract of undeveloped shoreline, the tangle of rainforest briefly blocking any further sight of civilization. Then, after rounding a hilly promontory and passing a high jetty wall, a large town built on a range of low hills came suddenly into sight, stretching away in all directions, my view of it distorted by the shimmering heat that spread out from the land across the busy waters of the harbour. We were of course forbidden from knowing the identity of our stop, but I had my map and I already knew the name.

  The island was Muriseay, the largest of the islands in the Archipelago and one of the most important.

  It would be hard to underestimate the impact this discovery had on me. Muriseay’s name came swimming up out of the blank pool that was my memory.

  At first it was just an identifying word on the map: a name printed in letters larger than the ones used for other islands. It puzzled me. Why should this word, this foreign name, mean something to me? I had been stirred by the sight of the other islands, but although the resonances were subtle I had felt no close identification with any of them.

  Then we approached the island and the ship started to follow the long coastline. I had watched the distant land slip by, affected more and more, wondering why.

  When we came to the bay, to the entrance to the harbour, and I felt the heat from the town drifting across the quiet water towards us, something at last became clear to me.

  I knew about Muriseay. The knowledge came to me as a memory from the place where I had no memory.

  Muriseay was something or somewhere I had known, or it represented something I had done, or experienced, as a child. It was a whole memory, discrete, telling me nothing about the rest. It involved a painter who had lived on Muriseay and his name was Rascar Acizzone.

  Rascar Acizzone? Who was that? Why did I suddenly remember the name of a Muriseayan painter when otherwise I was a hollow shell of amnesia?

  I was able to explore this memory no further: without warning all troops were mustered to billets and with the other men who had drifted to the upper decks I was forced to return to the mess decks. I descended to the bowels of the ship resentfully. We were kept below for the rest of the day and night, as well as for much of the day that followed.

  Although I suffered in the airless, sweltering hold with all the others, it gave me time to think. I closed myself off, ignored the noise of the other men and silently explored this one memory that had returned.

  When the larger memory is blank, anything that suddenly seems clear becomes sharp, evocative, heavy with meaning. I gradually was able to remember my interest in Muriseay, although without learning much else about myself.

  I was a boy, a teenager, so it was not so long ago, in my s
hort life. I learned somehow of a colony of artists who had gathered in Muriseay Town the previous century. I saw reproductions of their work somewhere, perhaps in books. I investigated further and found that several of the originals were kept in the city’s art gallery. I went there to see them for myself. The leading painter, the eminence within the group, was the artist called Rascar Acizzone.

  It was Acizzone’s work which inspired me.

  Details continued to clarify themselves. A coherent exactness emerged from the gloom of my forgotten past.

  Rascar Acizzone developed a painting technique he called tactilism. A tactilist work used a kind of pigment that had been developed some years before, not by artists but by researchers into ultrasound microcircuitry. A range of dazzling colours produced by these pigments became available to artists when certain patents expired and for a brief period there had been a vogue for paintings that used the garish but exciting ultrasound primaries.

  Most of these early works were little more than pure sensationalism: colours were blended synaesthetically with ultrasonics to shock, alarm or provoke the viewer. Acizzone came late to the techniques, his work beginning as the others lost interest, consigning themselves to the minor artistic school that soon became known as the Pre-Tactilists.

  Acizzone used the pigments to more disturbing effect than anyone before him. His glowing abstracts – large canvases or boards painted in one or two primary colours, with few shapes or images to be seen – appeared at a casual first look, or from a distance, or when seen as reproductions in books, to be little more than arrangements of colours. Closer up or, better still, if you made physical contact with the ultrasonic pigments used in the originals, it became apparent that the concealed images were of a most profoundly and shockingly erotic nature. Detailed and astonishingly explicit scenes were mysteriously evoked in the mind of the viewer, inducing an intense charge of sexual excitement.