Authors: Christopher Priest
The stillness of her standing there, the manner of her waiting, the hidden cameras, the implied threat.
‘You said I might leave, madam,’ I said. ‘May I do so now?’
‘Are you still intending to visit the harbour?’
The actual answer was that I wanted to be anywhere that was not in this bare and terrifying room with its neutral, monochrome appearance, the cameras, the single red light, unblinking. The longer I was there the more the danger to me increased, even if it was only the psychic damage of realizing the depths of my hatred. She was not alone – she could not be alone. Aides and associates and armed guards would be poised invisibly around her, behind doors, a few paces away from where we stood.
‘I don’t know about the harbour,’ I said, making an ineffectual effort to sound as if I had changed my mind. ‘That is why I came to Glaund City today, but if you are saying I am forbidden to go there, then I will not.’
‘You are free to leave, Msr Sussken. Remember you are a contract artist.’
She turned away from me, stepped back to the desk. She touched something beneath the rim of the desk top, and instantly the red light went out and three doors opened. Two were behind her, the other was the one by which I had been brought in. Four armed soldiers walked quickly in and stood in a rank behind her.
I turned. The senior officer who had escorted me had already entered behind me. He was standing to attention, saluting the Generalissima.
It was loathsome, alien, horrifying. I wanted to be out of there. I backed away from the woman, turning and heading for the door as quickly as I could, but I could feel my knees shaking. The knees would betray me – I did not want the weakness in me to be noticed. The lust to kill had still not entirely fled: even as I made my ignominious exit, it was in fact a retreat, a part of me was thinking that in spite of the numbers against me, in spite of their weapons, if only …
I reached the door feeling ashamed and frightened and relieved. The officer ushered me swiftly through and closed the door behind us both. He said nothing. My music case was still on the shelf where it had been placed. The officer passed it to me. The doors to the elevator were wide apart in the short corridor beyond. I went in by myself. Even as I took my two steps across the threshold of the compartment, the officer reached brusquely past me and jabbed the button. The doors closed swiftly as he jerked back his arm.
I was alone under an amber glow coming from a light dome in the ceiling of the compartment. As the elevator bore me downwards I turned to look at myself in one of the mirrors – I hardly recognized the person I saw. I looked shrunken, defeated, crushed down. I grimaced at myself, as we do when we are alone with a mirror, and the face that looked back at me seemed alien, older, pathetic.
The elevator stopped automatically and the doors opened to the wide hall I had been taken through before. The workmen were still on their stepladders, the busy movements continued of people crossing to and fro, a group of tourists was standing close to two large paintings of military personnel, a guide of some kind was pointing up at one of the figures, proudly describing insignia.
I hastened to the street, desperate to be out of there. Moments later I was back in the narrow lane where the official car had deposited me. The sleet, stinging as it fell against my head, leaching an acidic taste into my mouth, hammered unrelentingly down.
For about a minute I felt I had lost my bearings. I could not concentrate. I remembered the car crossing Republic Plaza, but where was that from where I was standing? I walked back down the way I thought the car had brought me, but the road that the lane opened into was a narrow service road. I headed back, the sharp wind blowing the rain directly against me. I felt it on my face, my eyes, my throat. My ears were unprotected and stinging. It was freezing cold, depressing and discouraging. I always hated this kind of weather – you never grew used to it, even in Glaund.
I found the boulevard. It was largely free of traffic, vaingloriously wide, with huge institutional buildings on each side, many soldiers standing guard by entrances and access points. I turned to the left, walked along as quickly as I could and the wind seemed perversely to re-angle itself against me. It made furrowed, spreading patterns on the inundated road surface. I kept my head down, hoisted up my jacket as far as I could to protect my neck and ears from the stabbing pellets of frozen rain.
Somehow I had walked in the wrong direction because I never found Republic Plaza, but I was relieved when I came into a familiar part of the city without really knowing how I had got there. I knew of a small café in a side street so I went straight to it and dived inside, shivering. My clothes were soaked. There were a few other customers already in the comfortingly stuffy and overheated room. I took a large cup of tea to the window where there was an electric heater. The glass was thickly covered in condensation. I found a seat and slowly recovered.
I was trying not to think about the Generalissima, but she was haunting my thoughts. Now I was away from the building I realized my obsession with a violent attack on her was inappropriate, to say the least. I was physically inept, out of condition, congenitally non-violent in every way. I hadn’t the faintest idea even of how to thump someone’s arm. An assault on her would have been a disaster for every reason.
Perhaps she would never know how the fear of her protected her. Then again, she probably did know, and that was how she operated, how she manipulated those around her.
I opened the envelope, which had become dampened by the weather. I took out the card binder. This contained, as the Generalissima had said, a contract of employment – one printed page after another of conditions, warranties, reprisals for breach, remedies of recovery.
Beneath it, something that was for me even worse: a prospectus for the sort of music they were trying to commission from me. I glanced at some of it, mentally shrinking away. It could only have been put together by a committee, and a committee of non-musicians at that. It was a kind of fantasy wish-list of every known musical trope, good or bad, fashionable or otherwise, serious or frivolous. If it wasn’t so manifestly purposeful, so intentionally pompous, and so backed up by implicit threat, it would have been ridiculous.
Any attempt to fulfil even a part of this commission would destroy my reputation as a musician for good.
Also in the envelope there was an old photograph of myself, standing next to Alynna. We were holding hands, smiling at the camera. I well remembered the occasion, a friend’s wedding, a happy day, innocent then of the future. How had these people found the photo?
Beneath it, a copy of the list which the Generalissima had read to me, her moral guidance, the avoidance of irony, crypticism, subtlety, and so on.
And the banker’s draft.
I took it out, quickly confirmed that it said what I thought it had said, then slipped it back into the concealment of the envelope. It was not the sort of thing I wanted seen by anyone else in this humble café. Thirty thousand gulden was a veritable fortune, enough money, in all probability, to see me through the rest of my life. It was not something I could ignore. Equally, I could not accept it, because of the conditions surrounding it. It was a sickening amount, for the temptations it offered, for the implications.
It all amounted to the same thing: if I remained in Errest, in Glaund, I was finished. I would be a chattel of the state, I would have lost all integrity as an artist and as a human being. I was marked. Everything about me was known. They even had suspicions about Dianme! I was in the grip of the people I loathed and feared more than anyone else in this world.
Sitting there, clothes slowly drying, my cup of tea gone cold, I knew that only one freedom was left to me. I had to run. I had to hide. I must find somewhere safe.
When I had finished my tea I wrapped myself up in my outer clothes as well as I could and went outside. The rain and sleet had been replaced by falling snow. Although it was colder, at least the snow did not soak me.
I went to a bank, presented the draft, and it was accepted without comment. I asked for the money to be paid into my existing account. It was a routine transaction – even the amount seemed not to impress the clerk who dealt with it. He told me that I could access the money within two working days. I went back outside, into the vile weather.
There was a metro station two hundred metres away and I hurried towards it. Inside the booking hall I stamped my feet and shook my arms, dislodging the flakes that had landed on me. A current of warmed air rose reassuringly from the platforms below, with the unmistakable smell of electric trains.
It was familiar and for me it was real. Had I imagined that interview with the woman who ran this country? It had all happened less than an hour before and already it felt like a horrible imagining. The terminal hall where I was standing was filling with people. Some like me were sheltering from the weather but others were passing through on their way to the train platforms below. After every flow of warming air from the tunnels, people ascended on the escalator from the trains and were forced to push their way through the crowd in the ticket hall.
From where I was standing I could still see over the heads of others out into the street – the wintry storm had intensified to fine, fast-blown blizzard. It was weather I well understood, as most likely did everyone else who was crammed into the booking hall with me: this kind of snowfall, dry and powdery and borne by air too cold to allow any thaw, could continue for days.
I wondered again if I should abandon my planned trip to the harbour – maybe by now the troopship would already have docked? I knew that waiting around on the bleakly unprotected quayside in this weather would be unpleasant. I also knew that winter storms like this one often disrupted the train service in my overground route home. I began thinking I should leave, try to get home before the weather closed in completely.
I rode down to platform level. If I turned to the right when I reached the landing at the bottom of the escalator any train from that platform would take me via two intermediate stations to the overground terminus. If I went the other way I could catch a train to the dockside metro station in Questiur, which was only a short distance from where the troopship was likely to dock.
I hesitated a little longer, then a train happened to come in on the left, so I walked through on impulse and boarded it.
Ten minutes later I was on the windswept wharf, the snow blustering insistently around me and starting to form drifts wherever something protruded above ground level. I knew that in under an hour the snow would be too deep for safe walking, and not long after that the overground trains would be subject to delays and cancellation.
With no sign of any ship, either tied up alongside or heading in from the bay, I walked as quickly as I could around to the next quay, keeping my face down to avoid the snow. As soon as I emerged from behind the stand of immense mobile cranes I saw a darkly painted vessel already tied up. No identifying name or mark was visible. Two covered companionways led down from the ship’s side to the dock.
Dozens of young men were pouring off the ship, their boots making a clumping noise inside the hollow passage. They emerged in a single file into the whirling snow. A group of soldiers in full uniform were at the base of both of the companionways, quickly patting down the men as they stepped down on to the wharf. Each one had to raise his arms then turn a full circle. After that he was made to pass through a tall metal detector gate. Once free of this the men lowered their heads and ran slithering across the slippery dock towards a windowless dockside building. None of them was wearing army uniforms or fatigues. Most of them were clad only in jackets or woollen sweaters, with ordinary civilian trousers or slacks, and none wore hats.
No one challenged me as I walked along the quay. I headed for the nearer of the two companionways, watching as the men continued to thud down the passage from within the ship.
When I was closer to them I could see that they were all much younger than I had thought at first – they were youths, teenagers, young men. If they had clearly not been part of the armed services on active service, or returning from it, I would describe most of them as boys.
Bowing my head against the wind I went to the group of soldiers waiting at the base of the companionway.
‘Is this the 286th Battalion?’ I shouted, over the noises of the ship, the docks, the wind, the tramping passage of young soldiers. Snowflakes flew into my mouth, and I spat them out and shook my head.
One of the soldiers heard me and half turned. His upper lip and eyebrows were crusted with blown snow. His face was grizzled, impassive against the cold and the job he was doing. He indicated the military flagpole propped up beside him: a colour drooped at the top, partly obscured by old grime and recent snow. On a yellow background, formerly bright, I could see the numbers ‘286’ picked out in white stitching.
‘Are these the troops?’ I said, feeling stupid for having to ask the question. The young men were pushing past me, not looking up, trying to protect their eyes and heads from the swirling flurries of snow.
‘You can’t speak to them down here,’ the soldier said. ‘If you’re a parent there are facilities for meeting your son in the reception hall. Discharged women from the 286th will arrive tomorrow.’
He indicated the grey concrete building at the rear of the quay. He turned away from me impatiently, barked an order at the next young man waiting in line, then roughly searched him.
I had to leave Glaund as soon as possible. The only place open to me, and indeed the only place I wanted to go to, perhaps forever, was the Dream Archipelago.
Although that night I returned home with relatively few travel problems, because of the snow it was impossible to leave my apartment for more than a week. I was still feeling paranoid after the meeting with the Generalissima, but I soothed my worried mind with music: I loved my piano, my violin felt like an extension of my soul, and for many years I had spent winter periods of isolation practising, learning new pieces, and, as often as I could, composing. Like most Glaundians I kept reserves of food in the flat during the winter months, and the place was always well heated.