distortions are uniquely observable at sea level.
Aylett noticed something that generations of fishermen had taken for granted: that every time you circumnavigate the island, the appearance of the cliffs, the rocky foreshore, even the lie of the land, seems to change. The headland you were navigating towards is lower or longer than the last time you saw it; a certain group of rocks that are dangerous at high tide are no longer visible, even at low tide; a thicket of trees on the clifftop, which could be seen from the harbour now appear to be behind a hill you know would block the view from the quayside.
Without more than the crudest maps, sailors and fishermen could never be sure if what they were seeing was true, or if they were somehow misremembering from the previous sighting. People were always getting lost and there were many shipwrecks.
Aylett, though, took the phenomenon seriously and made repeated circuits of the island. He kept careful records of what he saw, and took hundreds of photographs. He then correlated these observations with date and time, position of the sun, tides, wind-strength, seeking a pattern.
Aviation was not then a widespread activity, because it was thought to be highly dangerous. The actual construction of aircraft was sound enough, but pilots were constantly getting lost and being forced to crash-land on other islands or ditch in the treacherous seas. Without knowing it they were early victims of the visual or temporal distortions. All aircraft at this time flew only at rooftop height, and as slowly as possible, enabling the pilot or navigator to maintain direction, but this was another factor which caused accidents.
Aylett was determined to test his theory and invested his entire savings with a pilot willing to take him on a series of flights across Reever Quadros, initially at low level, but at slowly increasing altitudes as their confidence grew.
Aylett discovered what is now commonplace. If you fly in one direction, looking down at the ground — say from north to south — a certain island will look a certain way: mountains here, a river there, a town, a bay, forest, and so on. However, if you fly over it a second time — east to west — the same island will look oddly different: the river doesn’t reach the sea in quite the same part of the coast, the forest looks darker or larger, the mountains now have fewer peaks, the coast seems less jagged, or more. Has it actually changed? Or was your observation inaccurate the first time? You go round for a third look — north to south again — and the island has seemed to change its layout yet again, and is different in a new way.
Worse, if you set off across the sea to an adjacent island, then try to return home, the island you left will now seem to be in another place or direction entirely. Sometimes it will have vanished altogether, or that is how it appears.
Aylett’s measurements and calculations began to make sense of this, calibrating the degree of distortion to longitude and latitude, and the position of the sun.
In the present day, modern aircraft make use of the vortical distortions. By flying high in the direction of the Equator, the craft pass through the distortion, greatly shortening the distance needed to be flown, even from one side of the world to the other. It makes all flights reasonably short in duration, with a great saving in fuel. Although aviation charts of the Archipelago airspace are as unreliable as every other kind of map, the air operators have worked out a complicated but effective system of physical markers, so that as the aircraft descend from the distorted zone the pilots are able to see these markers and navigate to their destination by dead reckoning.
Twice a day, as the two main vortices go around the world, people on the islands in the equatorial zone are rewarded by the sight of the stack of aircraft passing overhead, all of them pointing in different directions, the spiralling condensation trails spreading out across the blue sky.
The Aylett Observatory on Reever Quadros is one of the best places to see this phenomenon. There are daily tours and lectures, and a special section provides many projects for young people to set up their own observation stations at home or at school.
There is a small artists’ colony in Reever Town, no longer as influential as once before, but RASCAR ACIZZONE, founder of the Tactilist School, painted here before he was arrested. Although he was late to the technique of tactilism — ultrasound microcircuitry adapted to blend into and work with pigments — it was Acizzone who perfected the technique and gave it the name by which it is still known. After Acizzone was taken into custody and later exiled, the remaining artists in Reever Town referred to themselves as Pre-Tactilists, less as an identifier of their work so much as a way of avoiding some of the fallout from Acizzone’s disaster. The artists’ colony continues to exist in the present day and although most of the current work in Reever is conventional one or two of the younger artists are producing work that is challenging, experimental and of the highest quality. None of Acizzone’s work is on public view.
Tunnelling is prohibited, but deep natural caves may be explored on Reever Tros. There are strict shelterate laws and local taxes are high. The casino is a major attraction, and is a significant earner for the Reever Seigniory.
Currency: Archipelagian simoleon, Faiandland dollar, Federation credit. Local transactions (only) in Aubracian talent.
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.
