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 Orsknes, 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 Orsknes 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.
