networks, not the psychic tendrils of ancient or supernatural evil.
We played music on the car radio, took a long lunch at an inn on a hill overlooking the sea, and carried on towards the port.
On arrival we discovered we had just missed a sailing to Jethra. The next ferry did not leave for two days. We stayed overnight in a small hotel, but then learnt that to travel to Jethra we needed exit and entry visas. Jethra is the capital of Faiand, one of the mainland combatant powers, officially and actually in a state of war. To travel from our neutral territory required permission from Goorn to leave the Archipelago, and permission from the Jethran administration to disembark.
Three days were lost while we trawled around between the Faiand High Commission and the Hettan Seigniory Office. I was the problem, the main cause of the official enquiries — Alvasund had a job to go to, I was merely her companion. She began to fret at the delay. Messages went to and fro between her and the Authority.
We took a ferry to Cheoner, having been told there was an airport, but when we were halfway there we learned there had been a marine collision between one of the ships and a dredger. Many lives had been lost. Ferry services in and out of Cheoner were suspended.
We disembarked at the small island of Cheoner Ante, waited and waited. Two days later, when I think Alvasund had almost given up hope, everything fell into place. The ferries were sailing again — exit visas were available at the Seigniory office on Cheoner. We should be able to get a flight from there the following day. Against all our despondent expectations, seats on the aircraft were available, it took off on time, did not crash, climbed surprisingly high above the islands to take advantage of the temporal distortions, and within an hour was landing in Jethra.
We walked out of the airport into a hilly, forested terrain bathed in sunshine, caught a modern streetcar to the city centre, and after a long journey through many of the residential suburbs and newly built business departments of Jethra, astonishing us both — neither of us had been in such a huge city before — we located the downtown building where the Intercession Authority was based, and went inside.
The island of Seevl dominated the view to the south of the city, its long grey-green bulk hogging the horizon and seeming to produce the effect of an inland sea. Its high range of undulating moorland created a feeling of enclosure across the wide bay. The city faced across to the north side of the island, which was permanently in shade.
Jethra itself was built on a river delta, with level ground in the immediate vicinity of the main channel of the river and its distributaries, but with gentle hill country further away at the edges of the former flood-plain. We found that the way most Jethra people spoke was urbane, sophisticated and full of allusions that we struggled to understand or respond to properly. From the occasional remark we heard or overheard I realized many of the Jethrans we met found our island way of speaking, or our island outlook, charming but quaint. All the preconceptions I had formed about Faiandland over the years were gently subverted away.
Much of our island outlook was created by the presence of wars, in fact by these Jethran people’s wars, as well as our islander habit of turning away from those who transited the Archipelago on the way to battle. I had formed a general impression that everyone in the north lived in countries ruled and dominated by military or extremist regimes, that their freedoms of movement or speech were curtailed, that armed troops daily marched through the streets, that they lived in joyless barrack cities or wasted away in camps in bleak or remote countryside.
While Alvasund was getting to know her co-workers, and training on the elaborate new equipment they would be using, I had plenty of time to wander alone through the streets of this war-mongering place. I found a busy, productive city, with wide streets and thousands of trees, a modern high-rise business section, a huge number of ancient buildings and palaces, but around the docks I saw areas that had been recently devastated, presumably by bombing. Other parts of Jethra appeared to have been untouched by the war. There was an artists’ quarter I returned to almost every day.
In Jethra I became conscious of a sense of unending terrain: island life imbues in you an awareness of the edge, the shore, the littoral, the adjacent lives on other islands, but in Jethra I felt instead the lure of distance, of places I could travel to and people I could meet without crossing a sea, and an endlessly unfolding world of certainty. Islands lacked that. Islands gave an underlying feeling of circularity, of coast, a limit to what you could achieve or where you might go. You knew where you were but there was invariably a sense that there were other islands, other places to be. I loved the Archipelago but living for a while on a continental mass, albeit the rim of a continent, gave me a new and enthralling feeling of possibility. However, there was little time to explore the sensation.
Alvasund’s induction was being fast-tracked. The team to which she had been assigned was the last to set out from Jethra — they had been waiting for her while we lost time on Goorn and Cheoner Ante, waiting for boats and visas. The other three teams had already transferred to their bases on Seevl, reporting back as they made preliminary surveys of some of the towers, and conducted tests on the equipment, all at safe distances.
Then the day came when we too were to depart for Seevl. I was more nervous about the prospect of this than Alvasund. She said it was because she was involved in the work, had responsibilities and co-workers and a purpose. I supposed this meant that I had had time to think, and when I did I thought about where she was going and what she was likely to be doing. I was filled with a deep sense of dread for her. I could never forget that fugitive glimpse of Alvasund’s final moments of life, projected to me by the presumed living entity that now she was about to investigate — or to intercede with, in the jargon they used.
I needed something to involve me. I did not enjoy hanging around doing nothing while Alvasund was so active. In short, I wished I could find a job, but I was feeling indecisive about that. There were plenty of jobs available in Jethra, and with time I could probably find something that not only suited me but which I would do well. That, however, would place me permanently in Jethra, whereas I wanted to be with Alvasund on Seevl. Everyone I spoke to said jobs were scarce on the island, a place that had been depopulating for many years, and whose economy was mostly at subsistence level.
I wondered if I should make contact with the glass resources laboratory in Ia Town. They were still technically my employers but they now seemed half a world away. I was still trying to decide when Alvasund told me we would be sailing to Seevl the following day.
I had already met the other members of her team: six young people, four men and two women. They were all graduates. One had a master’s degree in psychology, another in geomorphology, another in biochemistry, and so on. The team leader, a woman called Ref, was a doctor of medicine, specializing in vascular anomaly. Alvasund was the only one of the team from an arts background, but her skills in imaging, perspective building and active viability put her second in the team, behind Ref.
Marse too was working in the Authority headquarters building — we were surprised to see him the day after our arrival. Both Alvasund and I were shocked by the change in his appearance. It was only a couple of weeks since that brief meeting on the street in Orsknes, yet he looked haggard, neurotic, shrunken. He recognized neither of us, even though Alvasund made an effort to sit down with him and speak to him. He barely said a word, would not meet her gaze and answered her questions in subdued monosyllables.
Later Alvasund told me she asked Ref what had happened to him. Ref said that in the previous year Marse was on one of the teams who went to Seevl to carry out preliminary surveys of the towers. At that time, intercession workers were not provided with protective gear. He had been taken off the work when he showed the first signs of psychosis. The Authority staff found him alternative work to do while his condition was assessed — his posting to Orsknes had been one of these jobs, but his health was now deteriorating rapidly. They were waiting for a place to come free for him at a neuropathology hospital.
‘Do they know what he’s suffering from?’ I asked Alvasund.
She simply stared straight at me, without saying anything. Then I held her to me.
‘It won’t happen again,’ she said. ‘Not now. We have protective gear, probably because of what happened to Marse.’
‘It’s dangerous,’ I said. ‘Must you go through with this?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
The next day, early morning, we were driven to the harbour passenger terminal in an Authority bus, all of us on edge, anticipating, excited, perhaps fearful. I was the only extra person on the team: everyone else had come without their partners.
