Meanwhile, there was Oy.
At this time Oy was engaged in a small but exacting installation on the tumultuous shores of the island of Semell. Yo and Oy were still more than four years away from meeting on Yannet. Semell was in a distant part of the Archipelago called the Swirl, a system of more than seven hundred small islands and atolls in the southern hemisphere.
Oy’s full name was Tamarra Deer Oy, but he had become known by his surname only. A conceptual and installation artist, he had spent the years since leaving college touring the Swirl, searching for suitable islands. He experimented with his techniques and materials on every island he visited, using local aggregates to mix with resinous cements, seeking the hardest and smoothest compounds, ones that would withstand not just time and the elements but the inevitable attempts by others to destroy or damage his works.
Like his near-namesake Yo, Oy was often unwelcome in the places he visited. He had been forcibly expelled from half a dozen islands, although so far he had managed to avoid prison. Also like Yo, as his reputation spread he too was often obliged to enter islands incognito and work fast, completing as much as possible before being discovered or exposed, having to leave his work unfinished.
His first complete work, uninterrupted, was on the island of Selli, a fiercely hot tourist island with immense bays and beaches, and a legendarily exuberant nightlife. Oy arrived out of season on Selli, and soon discovered two holiday-let cottages built close together on a shallow pine-cooled slope overlooking one of the beaches. The trees helped screen him as he worked. He began on both cottages, first sealing them up with thick layers of cement on the inside, leaving the exteriors unchanged but the interiors no longer accessible. He and his artisans then set about erecting a conjoining piece, simulated walls and a roof, making the two small houses into three, or one, or none. Using carefully matched washes he painted the exterior of his installation in several coats of island whiteness.
He paid off his artisans and departed Selli before the artwork was discovered. Before he left he gave the installation a good and approving kick with the flat of his foot.
Other forays into the inhabited Swirl islands were to prove more difficult, but he managed to seal the main street of a village on the island of Thet, and converted a small church on Lertode into an aesthetically satisfying, impermeable egg-shaped dome, painted matt black.
His first shoreline piece was a stretch of rockfall at the foot of chalk cliffs on the island of Tranne. Working in the ebb tide, Oy smoothed and levelled the rocks and their pools by infilling with cement. It was an isolated, unvisited expanse of coastline. Few people ever wandered by or saw what he was doing. At first he worked alone, but the sheer size of the installation made it necessary to hire artisans from the local villages.
Within three months most of the installation was complete. The area of broken rocks had been converted to a white plain, so smooth a ball could be rolled across it, and so uniformly flat that not even the most sensitively calibrated spirit level could detect a slope.
Satisfied, Oy discharged the workers and spent a few days working alone on the final details. Two days later, as he was preparing to leave Tranne for another island, a large fall of rock from the overhanging cliff covered or destroyed everything he had done. He went to see the damage for himself, but left Tranne immediately after.
It was Oy who made the first personal contact. He had long known of Yo’s reputation, of course, but they had never met. Then one of the trustees at the Muriseay Covenant Foundation mentioned her and gave him a contact address. A few days later he messaged her:
Yo did not reply at once. About six weeks later she messaged him:
At this time Oy was working on a large, curving staircase he had chanced to find in an apparently disused part of the back of the Metropolitan Hall, in Canner Town. He was converting it to a flight of irregular steps that could only be mounted from below, using ropes, and in a horizontal attitude. He filled in the former stairs above to make a smooth descent. It was a challenge of great intricacy, and every day he worked there he expected to be discovered by the Metro officials.
Then a second message arrived from Yo, a few days after the first:
But an hour later the same day her third message arrived:
Moments later came the fourth and last message from her:
He sent some photographs, more than two, later that day. Yo never acknowledged them.
It took Oy the rest of the year to complete the horizontal staircase, and he left at once before he might be discovered. He travelled across the Swirl to the island of Tumo, where after a boisterous holiday he began to contemplate his next work.
The horizontal staircase was opened up by Metro officials. It became apparent they had known all along what Oy was doing. Inferring who he was they had made an unannounced and enlightened decision to allow him to finish. They mounted the staircase as a permanent installation in an exhibition of modern art that was created to occupy the rear area of the Metropolitan Hall. Although it was excoriated by the first critics who reviewed it, the staircase quickly became popular with the public and within a year people were travelling from all parts of the Archipelago to see it and to try climbing it. Oy’s financial support from the Muriseay Covenant Foundation was substantially increased.
Yo was being delayed by Seigniory officials who objected to the two huge pieces of tunnelling equipment, currently in the hold of a freighter impounded in the port. Her open manifest had no apparent influence on their objections.
While trying to resolve this she managed to get several of her smaller earth-movers and bulldozers secretly ashore on a remote part of the Hommke peninsula, by using beach-assault landing craft she hired from the Faiand base on Luice. This operation used up most of her remaining money, so there was a further delay while she applied to the Foundation on Muriseay. By the time the new grant came through, which was much less than she had hoped for, she had solved the problem of the tunnelling equipment.
To the Seigniory assay consultant, a retired gentleman who held the post as an honorary appointment, she produced several examples of valuable mineral ores, explained that Mt Voulden contained so much wealth that life on Yannet would be transformed for ever, and pointed out that for obvious reasons her work must remain secret. She contrived to leave a small nugget behind on his desk, when she left his office.
The tunnelling equipment came ashore shortly afterwards. Soon she was training two teams of artisans for the work that lay ahead. Her location for the installation had been identified for months, so the teams moved to opposite sides of the mountain without delay. Working under Yo’s detailed and strenuous instructions they prepared to chew their way mechanically through the rock towards each other.
This was for Yo the most stressful and exacting period. Every day she had to make repeated visits to each side of the mountain, measuring the orientation of each machine, checking and confirming the quality, accuracy and angle of the workings. Numerous test and access shafts had to be drilled. At first progress was infinitesimally slow — three months after she had employed the teams they were still mostly idle. They crept forward with immense caution, each making preparatory drillings, but both machines remained visible outside the mountain.
However, she was eventually able to give her orders to start drilling in earnest. Both sides moved forward into the mountain itself, the great circular drill faces grinding slowly through the rock.
It was not long before a familiar but major problem emerged, which was how to dispose of the broken rock that was removed as the tunnel progressed. Yo’s first remedy was a method she had used on other projects in the past: she paid an off-island contractor to take away the tailings. Several large loads were disposed of in that way. She discovered, though, that the movement of the heavily laden trucks through the town, and the effect they had on the loading of the ships, was attracting unwanted interest in what she was doing. She soon cancelled the deal and paid off the contractor.
