The Islanders

by Christopher Priest

  Sentier City is a city only in name: the harbour is quiet and utilitarian, with a small area set aside as a marina for visitors. Fishing goes on, but in a desultory fashion. There is little trade with other islands, although because of its rich volcanic soil Sentier wines are popular and bring in much currency.

  Most conventional visitors and tourists head inland, to the small town of Cuvler. Here there are unusual ruins: Sentier was purged during the first Federation invasion, and all the then-inhabitants were either taken as hostages or liquidated. This was of course before the making of the Covenant. The troops were soon removed under treaty and the island was eventually repopulated, but much of the old flavour of the town has long gone. There was once a thriving artists’ colony in Cuvler, and the small area of the town, close to the desiccated banks of Sentier’s sole river, where the houses and studios were once occupied, is now a protected zone. It is open to visitors. There is an excellent museum and gallery which displays the best surviving examples of the work from the early days, as well as more recent work, including a large but mediocre Bathurst: The Coming of the Revenger. Some of the ruined buildings in the Old Town also contain fragments of artwork.

  Oddly, for such a remote and in many ways primitive island, Sentier has a worldwide reputation in the sciences and in medicine, and all this is to be found in Cuvler.

  It was in Cuvler that the astronomer PENDIK MUDURNU was born, and it was he who set in motion the thirty-year project to build the world’s largest optical telescope on the lip of the crater of the mountain. Mudurnu himself lived long enough to use the main Brother reflector, and subsequently the existence of the telescope has led to the building of many more observatories on the summit of the mountain, and the installation of instruments of every kind. The presence on this island of the Brother centre, and all the various comings and goings of scientists and visitors, has underwritten the prosperity of the region for many years.

  Illustrious sons of Sentier include the mime artiste Commis, murdered by unknown assailants during one of his performances, and the author and philosopher Visker Deloinne.

  The island flower is the quadrifoil, which manages to thrive in spite of the arid conditions on the island, and whose pretty yellow sepals have hallucinogenic attributes after drying and curing.

  Currency: Archipelagian simoleon, Aubracian talent.

  SIFF

  WHISTLING ONE

  Although its location is known and certain, and there are several tour operators who will transport you to the site, no living person has ever seen SIFF. It is an island unique in the Dream Archipelago, because it is the only one completely destroyed by its inhabitants. The last traces of Siff sank beneath the waves more than a hundred and twenty-five years ago. All that remains is a huge area of rocky waste and rubble on the sea bed, which although in relatively shallow and clear water, and which it is possible for divers to explore, can never be seen above the surface.

  Most visitors now view the remains of Siff through glass-bottomed boats. Single boats for up to six people may be individually hired on the neighbouring island of Gençek. Larger boats carrying up to fifty passengers set out daily from the same island.

  There had always been a tradition of freelance tunnelling on Siff, because of the suitable nature of the rock and a lenient approach by the Seigniory officials (many of whom were themselves enthusiastic amateur tunnellers). Major excavations did not start, though, until the arrival on Siff of the installation artist Jordenn Yo. Yo had already made her name with various works of earth-moving art in many other parts of the Archipelago. Although there was at first a surprising amount of resistance from some of the inhabitants of Siff, Yo brought in a team of geologists who declared that many valuable minerals almost certainly lay beneath the surface, and in commercial quantities. Yo was granted a limited licence to drill exploratory deep tunnels. It did not take her long to produce samples of gold, platinum, oil shale and copper. As the assayers in Siff Town hesitated, Yo soon produced some rare earth minerals, including apatite, yttrium and fluorite. Her licence was quickly amended to allow unrestricted drilling. Because Siffians were largely ignorant of such matters, no one thought to question either where she had found the samples, or why she never brought any more to light.

  Within Yo’s lifetime, Siff gained the patois name by which it was popularly known. Much of the island’s rock strata were tunnelled, with the passages contrived in such a way that a wind from any direction above a speed of about five knots would set up a harmonic note. In normal times the sound would be a pleasant background humming, like the drone from a reed pipe, but during the seasonal gales (Siff was in the temperate north Midway, where winter low-pressure areas were always on the move) the island gave off a high-pitched wailing sound that could be heard on many of the neighbouring islands.

  Yo called this the music of the sea and skies, and declared her ambition was to render every island in the Dream Archipelago into a gigantic wind-chime. Every day the tune would change, she said, but it would bring harmony to the entire world. She died not long after making the grandiose claim.

  It was during this period that Dryd Bathurst visited Siff. His apocalyptic masterpiece Night of Final Wrath was painted on Whistling One.

  It is often alleged that the gigantic painting was itself a form of cipher, the images of wrath being derived from a caricature of the important politician Bathurst had travelled to Siff to cuckold. The godly wrath, in this interpretation, was no more than the fury of a man betrayed by a wife many years younger than himself. This theory has latterly been borne out. Recent forensic analysis using X-rays and other exploratory techniques have shown that the cipher theory was not far-fetched. For instance, layer analysis of the oil painting has revealed that some of the more intimate curves of Dryd Bathurst’s pretty young mistress were contrived almost undetectably into the scenes of apocalyptic collapse and destruction. DNA profiling has also established that the actual hairs plastered finely into the painted image of the godly pate were human in origin, and traceable to his mistress.

  Naturally, this theory had not been formulated at the time. Dryd Bathurst left Siff in the way which was commonly associated with him: suddenly and in conditions of urgent secrecy. He was never to return. But the popular success of his enormous painting brought Siff to wider attention throughout the Archipelago. Then as now tunnelling was a popular pastime with many people, but there were critically few places where it was allowed to be carried out. Tunnellers descended eagerly on Siff from all over the Archipelago. Soon tunnels were being excavated in every part of the island.

  The first major collapse occurred about a century after Bathurst’s painting became known. Siff Town, by then thoroughly undermined, had to be evacuated and within another half-century the island was entirely abandoned to the teams of tunnellers.

  Although many tunnellers were to die in the years ahead, the honeycombing of the island continued to its tragic and inevitable conclusion. In its final years, Siff fell silent: even the gales and storms could no longer find a tune to strike from the broken, gaunt and crumbling crags that the little island had become.

  Siff’s final collapse was witnessed by only a few. There is a poor-quality video of the last few moments, and this can be viewed in the museum on neighbouring Gençek. It makes depressing viewing. More than five hundred tunnellers died in the flooded galleries and passages during that terrible day. Today, their only memorial is under the clear, shallow seas where Siff once rose above the unforgiving waves.

  SMUJ

  OLD RUIN / STICK FOR STIRRING / CAVE WITH ECHO

  By Dant Willer, IDT Political Editor, writing for Travel & Vacation Supplement, Islander Daily Times. Although never published in the newspaper, this short essay has been available online from the IDT website for several years.

  It began as a routine assignment for this newspaper, the sort of travel story I have been writing on and off for many years. As readers will know my by-line appears more often in the main part of the newspa
per reporting politics or the economy, but all the staff here at IDT are given occasional travel assignments. Someone, we console ourselves as we pack our sandals and sun block, has to do these things.

  The reader we have in mind is someone who might be thinking of taking a trip or a holiday. For those who are not we try to convey a reliable idea of what the destination is like. Travel journalism is not important in itself and only rarely has a wider relevance – for each reporter it can be a gentle reminder that there is more to life than trying to break a major news story.

  My assignment, only the third in as many years, was to visit SMUJ. Why Smuj? everyone asked, including myself before I set out. Joh, the chief editor of the T&V Supp, said, ‘Your question provides its own answer. It’s a place no one seems ever to have heard of. There is no better reason for going there.’

  So, in the spirit of seeking the hidden, the lost, the forgotten, the unknown, the undiscovered, I set out to explore Smuj. The first challenge was to find it.

  As regular readers know, the IDT no longer publishes maps. The official reason for this is because most maps of the Archipelago are notoriously inaccurate, but our former policy was that an approximate map was better than no map at all. However, the newspaper had to revise this policy when a few years ago the T&V Supp inadvertently sent a group of retired church workers to a Glaund Army rest and recreation base on the island of Temmil. Perhaps that is largely anecdotal, but the lesson was learned. Instead of printing an unreliable map now we give details instead of how we travelled to the destination, and leave it to our readers to follow in our steps. This is always the hardest part of the assignment, as here in the IDT office we are not even allowed to use the unreliable maps printed by our rivals.

  So my search for Smuj began. All I knew at the outset was that it is somewhere in the seas between Paneron and Winho, and is often said to be obscured behind the magnificent Coast of Helvard’s Passion. As I began my search on the internet – a first resort for everyone – a website assured me that Smuj was so well hidden within its own mysteries that even today the people who come from there, should they leave their enigmatic homeland to venture into the wider, mapless reaches of the Archipelago, will maintain the fiction of its inaccessibility and lament the impossibility of their ever being able to return.

  It is all, I am a little sad to report, a romantic fiction. Smuj can be found. Neither immediately, quickly nor easily, but it is there to be found. All that is necessary is to forage through the small print of the ferry services in the approximate area and you will find that regular services are there. Not advertised, I should add, but certainly there.

  Because I wish to encourage you to follow in my footsteps, I can save you the task of foraging. I chose to travel to Smuj on the scheduled services run by the Skerries Line, one of the smaller ferry operators in that part of the Archipelago.

  The ship picked me up as the brochure said it would, and it departed and arrived on time at every port of call. There are many of these stopovers but they are greatly varied. The comfort on board for passengers was plain but of a completely acceptable standard, and the ship neither sank, went aground nor played loud music on its public address system. The cabins were air conditioned. While on board there was full, if occasionally intermittent, internet access. The shaded decks were adequate protection from the sun, and the steward service was good.

  At one point in the voyage I was so lulled into a sense of contentment that I even thought, given the time and the funds, that I should like to spend the rest of my life cruising slowly through the Dream Archipelago. I loved the endless cerulean seas, the beneficent breezes, the tropical warmth, the attendant seabirds and surfacing dolphins, and of course the passing show of islands and rocky passages and glasslike calms. At night too the spectacle continued: we frequently saw the diamanté glitter of the lights in houses and towns, sometimes burning a path of bright colours across the dark sea towards our ship. I was therefore not all that pleased to disembark on Smuj, but because in reality I have neither the time nor the money to spend the rest of my life on boats, I was not sorry either.

  On arrival I found, as half-expected, a small island, charming and unspoilt, with many of the conventional, expectable attractions for visitors. The swimming is safe and there are several uncrowded beaches and coves to choose from. The scenery is modest but appealing. There are quiet mooring places for private yachts all around the coast. Scuba diving on the reefs is recommended. There is no casino, but once a year there is a horse-racing event. As for eating, the standard of cuisine in the restaurants I went to was normally better than adequate and at best of world-class excellence. Private or rental cars are not allowed on Smuj, but two-stroke mopeds may be rented on a daily or weekly basis. The proprietors of several of the hotels I went to in Smuj Port claimed to have recently installed internet access, but I was unable to confirm this.

  Smuj is one of the few islands I have visited where there is inter-ethnic tension. For some reason Smuj has inherited three different vernacular patois systems, but none of them is dominant over the other two. It seems apparent to me that should the tourist trade increase then the influx of visitors will have the same unifying effect on the locals it has everywhere else, but that has not yet happened. One of the curious sights and sounds at the end of the long hot days on Smuj is the evening promenadá, where parading individuals and families exchange remarks, clearly mildly offensive, in street language the recipient probably does not understand, while the meaning is not in doubt. The mood is aggressive, but also somehow good-natured, almost a ritual. Rude hand signals do not a civil war make! Balancing this is the obviously high level of interested interaction between opposite members of sex in the young people. Perhaps within the next generation this conflict will die out, if only for this reason.

  Meanwhile, it means that Smuj offers the sympathetic visitor an unusual social experience.

  The patois divide also means that the name Smuj has three patois interpretations: ‘old ruin’, ‘stick for stirring’ and ‘cave with echo’. These are by consent more or less interchangeable.

  I was due to stay on Smuj for a whole week, but by the third day time was hanging heavy on me. There is little culture on the island. In Smuj Town there is a small lending library, containing popular novels and copies of recent newspapers. There is a theatre, but locals told me it had been closed for several years. Touring companies rarely visited Smuj, they said, and in any event the theatre building needed to be renovated. I went to the museum, but had exhausted my interest in its few exhibits in under half an hour. I found a cinema, but it was closed. The only art gallery was exhibiting colourful paintings of the town. Swimming beaches and coves speak for themselves, and photographs are enough.

  Then, one day at noon, while I was in a bar cooling off from the blistering sunlight, someone asked me if I had yet visited the ruined city in the hills. I had not. That evening I found out what I could – it was thought to be more than a thousand years old, destroyed in an ancient war, abandoned by what inhabitants had survived, and thereafter the little that remained had been sacked and looted.

  The next morning I set off on a rented moped and headed for the range of inland hills. There were no indicating signs, but the man at the rental office told me that once I was through the pass I would see a large wooded basin surrounded by the hills, and the ruins were probably somewhere there. No one apart from me seemed at all interested.

  I was soon to discover why. There had certainly once been some kind of settlement in the valley, but the traces that remained, all wildly overgrown with creeper, moss, intrusive shrubbery, were not much more than patches of broken rubble. I walked around for more than an hour, hoping to find something that might once have been a recognizable building or open space, but the clustering broadleaf trees had taken over. It was clearly a site that would reward scientific exploration, but I am not an archaeologist so would not know where to begin. I still do not know for sure which era it represents, who built it, who lived
there.

  I retraced my steps to where I had left my moped, wondering what else there could possibly be about Smuj that would be worth writing about. And at the exact instant, I found it.

  When I dismounted I had hardly noticed the building next to where I had parked the moped. Now, walking back to it, I looked at the house for the first time. It was more than just a dwelling: a mansion of some extent, surrounded by mature trees, almost shielded from the road by the thicket. Beyond the widened patch of the road where I had left the two-stroke was a tall, metal gate, clearly locked and intended to be secure: it was not instantly obvious from the road because it was set in the drive itself, which curved away. I walked over and read the sign with great interest:

  SCHOOL OF CAURER INSTRUCTION

  AGES 6–18

  UNDER PERSONAL SUPERVISION

  AND PARTICIPATION OF E. W. C.

  It took a few moments for the meaning of this to sink in.

  Of anything that I had expected to find on Smuj, a Caurer Special School was not it. My state when I arrived to confront that gate was that I was hot, thirsty, sweaty, bitten by numerous insects and in general frustrated by my visit to this small and obscure island. All these were uppermost in my mind as I stared in surprise at the sign on the gate. It was not an old sign – it looked recently made.

  Did the phrase under personal supervision… of E. W. C. mean what I had assumed in the first instant? That Caurer herself was here, working in the school, on Smuj? Supervising and participating in person?

  It seemed unlikely. Caurer had died several years before, which would seem to eliminate her from everything. But the circumstances of her death were attended by a certain mystery that I well remembered. The death certificate revealed that she had died of ‘infection / infestation’. In the shorthand understood throughout the Archipelago, this strongly suggested she had suffered a fatal insect bite, probably that of a thryme. The consequences of such an attack were so appalling that even though several hundred people a year were killed by the insects, there was still a stigma attached. Death after a thryme bite usually led to a hastily arranged cremation, often within twenty-four hours, and was always the target of speculation and comment.