The Watched Read online

  The Watched

  Christopher Priest

  The Watched

  Christopher Priest

  I

  Sometimes Jenessa was slow to leave in the mornings, reluctant to return to the frustrations of her job, and when she lingered in his house on these occasions Yvann Ordier had difficulty in concealing his impatience. This morning was one such, and he lurked outside the door of the shower cubicle while she bathed, fingering the smooth leather case of his binoculars. Ordier was alert to Jenessa’s every movement, each variation in sound giving him as clear a picture as there would be if the door were wide open and the plastic curtain held back: the spattering of droplets against the curtain as she raised an arm, the lowering in pitch of the hissing water as she bent to wash a leg, the fat drops plopping soapily on the tiled floor as she stood erect to shampoo her hair. He could visualize her glistening body in every detail, and thinking of their lovemaking during the night he felt a renewed lust for her. He knew he was standing too obviously by the door, too transparently waiting for her, so he put down the binoculars case and went into the kitchen and heated some coffee. He waited until it had percolated, then left it on the hot plate. Jenessa had still not finished her shower; Ordier paused by the door of the cubicle and knew by the sound of the water that she was rinsing her hair. He could imagine her with her face uptilted toward the spray, her long dark hair plastered flatly back above her ears. She often stood like this for several minutes, letting the water run into her open mouth before dribbling away, coursing down her body; twin streams of droplets would fall from her nipples, a tiny rivulet would snake through her pubic hair, a thin film would gloss her buttocks and thighs. Again torn between desire and impatience, Ordier went to his bureau, unlocked it, and took out his scintilla detector. He checked the batteries first; they were sound, but he knew they would have to be replaced soon. He made frequent use of the detector because he had discovered by chance a few weeks before that his house had become infested with several of the microscopic scintillas, and since then he had been searching for them every day. There was a signal the instant he turned on the detector, and he walked through the house listening for subtle changes in the pitch and volume of the electronic howl. He traced the scintilla to the bedroom, and by switching in the directional circuit and holding the instrument close to the floor, he found it a few moments later. It was in the carpet, near where Jenessa’s clothes were folded over a chair. Ordier parted the tufts of the carpet, and picked up the scintilla with a pair of tweezers. He took it through into his study. This was the third he had discovered this week, and although there was every chance it had been brought into the house on someone’s shoes, it was nevertheless unsettling to find one. He put it on a slide, then peered at it through his microscope. There was no serial number. Jenessa had left the shower, and was standing by the door of the study. “What are you doing?” she said.

  “Another scintilla,” Ordier said. “In the bedroom.” “You’re always finding them. I thought they were supposed to be undetectable.” “I’ve got a gadget that locates them.” “You never told me.” Ordier straightened, and turned to face her. She was naked, with a turban of golden toweling around her hair. “I’ve made some coffee,” he said. “Let’s have it on the patio.” Jenessa walked away, her legs and back still moist from the shower. Ordier watched her, thinking of another girl, the Qataari girl in the valley, and wishing that his response to Jenessa could be less complicated. In the last few weeks she had become at once more immediate and more distant, because she aroused in him desires that could not be fulfilled by the Qataari girl. He turned back to the microscope and pulled the slide gently away. He tipped the scintilla into a quiet-case—a soundproof, lightproof box where twenty or more of the tiny lenses were already kept—then went to the kitchen. He collected the percolator and cups, and went outside to the heat and the rasping of cicadas. Jenessa sat in the sunlight of the patio, combing the tangles from her long, fine hair. As the sun played on her, the water dried, and she talked of her plans for the day. “There’s someone I’d like you to meet,” she said. “He’s coming to dinner this evening.” “Who is he?” Ordier said, disliking any interruption of his routine. “A colleague. He’s just arrived from the north.” Jenessa was sitting with the sun bright behind her, outlining her bronzed body. She was at ease when naked; beautiful and sexual and aware of it.

  “What’s he here for?” “To try to observe the Qataari. He knows the difficulties, apparently, but he’s been given a research grant. I suppose he should be allowed to spend it.” “But why should I have to meet him?” Jenessa reached across, took his hand briefly. “You don’t have to… but I’d like him to meet you.” Ordier was stirring the sugar in the bowl, watching it heap and swirl like a viscid liquid. Each of the grains was larger than a scintilla, and a hundred of the tiny lenses scattered in the sugar would probably go unnoticed. How many scintillas were left in the dregs of coffee cups, how many were accidentally swallowed? Jenessa lay back across the lounger, and her breasts flattened across her chest. Her nipples were erect and she had raised a leg, knowing that he was admiring her. “You like to stare,” she said, giving him a shrewd look from her dark-set eyes, and she turned toward him on her side, so that her large breasts appeared to fill again. “But you don’t like being watched, do you?” “What do you mean?” “The scintillas. You’re very quiet whenever you find one.” “Am I?” Ordier said, not aware that Jenessa had been noticing. He always tried to make light of them. “There are so many around… all over the island. There’s no evidence anyone’s planting them.” “You don’t like finding them, though.” “Do you?” “I don’t look for them.” In common with most of the people who lived on the islands

  of the Dream Archipelago, Ordier and Jenessa did not speak very often of their past lives. In the islands, past and future were effectively suspended by the Covenant of Neutrality. The future was sealed, as were the islands themselves, for until the conclusion of the war on the southern continent no one was permitted to leave the Archipelago; no one, that is, except the crews of ships and the troops of both combatant sides who constantly passed through. The future of the islands would be determined by the war, and the war was indeterminate; it had continued, without a break, for more than two centuries, and was as entrenched now as it had been fifty years before. With a sense of future removed, the past became irrelevant, and those who came to the Archipelago, choosing the permanence of neutrality, made a conscious decision to abandon their former lives. Yvann Ordier was one amongst thousands of such émigrés; he had never told Jenessa how he had made his fortune, how he had paid for his passage to the Archipelago. All he had told her was that he had been prodigiously successful in business, enabling him to take an early retirement. She, for her part, spoke little of her background, although Ordier realized this was a characteristic of native islanders, rather than a desire to forget a doubtful past. He knew she had been born on the island of Lanna, and that she was an anthropologist attempting, unsuccessfully, to study the refugee Qataari. What Ordier did not want to reveal to Jenessa was how he came to possess a scintilla detector. He did not want to speak of past nefariousness, nor of his role in the planned proliferation of the scintilla surveillance lenses. A few years before, when he had been more opportunistic to a degree that now alienated him from the memory of his younger self, Ordier had seen the chance to make a great deal of money, and he had taken the chance unscrupulously. At that time, the war on the southern continent had settled into an expensive and attritional impasse, and the enterprises sections of the armed forces had been raising money by unconventional means. One of these was the selling of commercial franchises to some of their hitherto classified equipment; Ordier, with a ruthlessness that shocked him in retrospect, had
obtained exploitation rights to the scintillas. His formula for success was simple: he sold the scintillas to one side of the market, and the detectors to the other. Once the potential of the miniature transmitters had been recognized, his fortune had been assured. Soon Ordier was selling more scintillas than the army ordnance factories could produce, and demand continued to rise. Although Ordier’s organization remained the prime distributor of the scintillas and their computerized image-retrieval equipment, unauthorized copies were soon available on the underground market. Within a year of Ordier opening his agency, the saturation distribution of the scintillas meant that no room or building was closed to the eyes and ears of one’s rivals. No one ever found a way of jamming the tiny transmitters; no one ever knew for sure just who was watching and listening. For the next three and a half years, Ordier’s personal fortune had been amassed. During the same period, paralleling his rise in wealth, a deeper sense of moral responsibility grew in him. The way of life in the civilized northern continent had been permanently changed: scintillas were used in such profusion that nowhere was entirely free of them. They were in the streets, in the gardens, in the houses. Even in the erstwhile privacy of one’s bed one never knew for sure that a stranger was not listening, watching, recording. At last, with the guilt of his participation overwhelming any other motivation, Ordier took himself and his fortune to the permanent exile of the Dream Archipelago, knowing that his departure from the world of eavesdropping commerce would make not the slightest difference to its accelerating growth, but that he wanted no more part in it.

  He chose the island of Tumo more or less at random, and he built his house in the remote eastern part, well away from the populous mountainous region in the west… but even on Tumo there were scintillas. Some were from the armies, in breach of the Covenant; a few were from commercial companies; and some, most numerous, were uncoded and thus untraceable. Jenessa was right when she said that he did not like to find scintillas in his house, but those were an intrusion on his own privacy; he gave no thought to the ones scattered over the rest of the island. For the past two years he had tried, with a considerable measure of success, to put the scintillas from his mind. His life now was centered on Jenessa, on his house, on his growing collections of books and antiques. Until the beginning of this island summer he had felt reasonably happy, relaxed and coming to terms with his conscience. But at the end of the Tufoit spring, with the first spell of hot weather, he had made a certain discovery, and as a result an obsession had grown within him. It was focused on the bizarre, castellated folly that was built on the ridge on the eastern border of his grounds. There, in the sun-warmed granite walls, was his obsession. There was the Qataari girl, the Qataari ritual; there he listened and watched, as hidden from those he observed as the men who decoded the mosaic of images from the ubiquitous scintillas.

  II

  Jenessa lounged in the sun and drank her coffee, and then poured herself a second cup. She yawned and lay back in the sun, her hair dry now and shining in the light. Ordier wondered if she

  was intending to stay all day, as she sometimes did. He enjoyed their lazy days together, alternating between swimming in the pool, lovemaking, and sunbathing… but the previous evening she had been talking of spending the day in Tumo Town, and he was uncertain of her intentions. At last, though, she went into the bedroom to dress, and afterwards they walked together down to her car. There were last words and kisses, and then she drove away. Ordier stood idly by the grove of trees on the edge of his grounds, waiting to wave to her as she turned from the track to the main road leading toward Tumo Town. The brisk wind of the evening before had died, and the cloud of white dust thrown up by the wheels hovered behind the car… and long after Jenessa had passed from sight, Ordier stared after her. She sometimes returned unexpectedly. When the dust had settled, and his view across to the distant white buildings of the town was interrupted by nothing more than the shimmering of early heat, Ordier turned back to his house and walked up the slope to the main door. Once inside the house he made no attempt to conceal the impatience he had been suppressing while Jenessa was there. He hurried to his study and found his binoculars, then went through the house and left by the door which opened on the rough ground behind. A short walk took him to the high stone wall that ran laterally across the ridge, and he unlocked the padlock on the stout wooden gate and let himself through. Beyond was a sandy, sun-whitened courtyard, surrounded on all sides by walls, and already hot in the windless day. Ordier made sure that the gate was locked on the inside, then climbed steadily up the slope toward the angular height of the battlemented folly on the summit of the ridge. It was this folly and its walled courtyard that Ordier had first chanced upon, and with the same recklessness of spirit of the madman who had built it three centuries before, he bought it and

  the land around it after the most cursory of inspections. Only later, when the headiness of the purchase had faded, had he taken a second, calmer look at his new property and realized that the place was completely uninhabitable. So, not without regret, he had hired a local firm of builders, and his house had been put up a short distance away. The ridge that marked the eastern boundary of his property ran due north and south for several miles, and for most of its length it was unscalable, except by someone equipped with climbing boots and ropes. It was not so much that it was high—on the side facing Ordier’s house it rose on average about two hundred feet above the plain—but that it was broken and jagged, and the rocks were sharp and friable. In the geophysical past there must have been a tumultuous upheaval, compressing and raising the land along some deep-lying fault, the crust snagging upwards like two sheets of brittle steel rammed against each other’s edge. It was on the summit of this ridge that the folly had been built, although at what expense in human life and ingenuity Ordier could not imagine. It balanced on the broken rocks, a daring edifice, and a tribute to the singularity and eccentricity of its architect. When Ordier had seen and bought the folly, the valley that lay beyond it had been a wide tract of desert land, muddy and overgrown with rank vegetation, or cracked, barren, and dusty, according to the season. But that had been before the coming of the Qataari, and all that that had entailed. A flight of steps had been built across the inner wall of the folly, leading eventually to the battlements. Before Ordier had moved into his house, he paid the builders to reinforce most of the steps with steel and concrete, but the last few had been left unrepaired. The battlements could be reached, but only with great difficulty. About halfway up, well before the last of the reinforced steps, Ordier reached the fault that had been contrived carefully inside the main wall. He glanced back, staring down from his vertiginous perch across the land beneath. There was his house, its evenly tiled roofs glittering in the sunlight; beyond, the untamed stretch of scrubland, and beyond that the buildings of Tumo Town, a sprawling modern settlement built on the ruins of the seaport that had been sacked at the outbreak of the war. In the far distance were the brown and purple heights of the Tumoit Mountains, rich in the mythology of the Dream Archipelago. To north and south Ordier could see the splendent silver of the sea. Somewhere to the north, on the horizon, was the island of Muriseay, invisible today because of the haze. Ordier turned away from the view, and stepped through into the fault in the wall, squeezing between two overlapping slabs of masonry which, even on close inspection, seemed to be so solidly in place that nothing could lie behind them. But there was a warm, dark space beyond, high enough and wide enough for a man to stand. Ordier wriggled through the gap, and stood inside on the narrow ledge, breathing quickly after his climb. The brilliant sunshine outside had dulled his eyes, and the tiny space was a cell of blackness. The only light came from a horizontal crack in the outer wall, a slit of shining sky that seemed, in contrast with the rest, to darken, not lighten, the cell. When his breathing had steadied, Ordier stepped forward onto the ledge where he generally stood, feeling with his foot for the slab of rock. Beneath him was the inner cavity of the wall, falling irregularly to the fo
undations far below. He braced himself with his elbow against the wall as he transferred his weight, and at once a sweet fragrance reached his nostrils. As he brought his second foot onto the slab he glanced down, and saw in the dim light a pale, mottled coloring on the ledge.

  The smell was distinctive: Qataari roses. Ordier remembered the hot southerly wind of the day before—the Naalattan, as it was called on Tumo—and the whirling vortex of light and color that had risen above the valley floor, as the fragrant petals of the Qataari roses had scattered and circled. Many of the petals had been lifted by the wind as high as his vantage point here in the cell, and some had seemed to hover within grasping distance of his fingers. He had had to leave his hidden cell to meet Jenessa, and he had not seen the end of the warm blizzard of petals before he left. The fragrance of the Qataari rose was known to be narcotic, and the cloying smell released as his feet crushed the petals was sweet in his nose and mouth. Ordier kicked and scuffed at the petals that had been blown onto the shelf, and swept them down into the cavity of the wall. At last he leaned forward to the slit that looked outward into the valley; here too the wind had deposited a few petals, and Ordier brushed them away with his fingers, careful that they fell into the cavity beneath him, and not out into the open air. He raised his binoculars to his eyes, and leaned forward until the metal hoods over the object-lenses rested on the stone edge of the horizontal slit. With rising excitement, he stared down at the Qataari in the valley below.

  III

  In the evening, Ordier drove over to Jenessa’s apartment in Tumo Town. He went reluctantly, partly because of the necessity of making civil conversation with strangers—something he was habitually unwilling to do—and partly because he had more than a suspicion that the talk would center around the Qataari refugees. Jenessa had said that her visitor was a colleague, which meant that he was an anthropologist, and anthropologists only came to Tumo to study the Qataari. Since his discovery in the folly, Ordier found all discussion of the Qataari unbearably unpleasant, as if some private domain was being invaded. For this and other reasons, Ordier had never told Jenessa what he knew. The other guests had already arrived when Ordier walked in, and Jenessa introduced them as Jacj and Luovi Parren. His first impression of Parren was unfavorable: he was a short, overweight, and intense man who shook Ordier’s hand with nervous, jerky movements, then turned away at once to continue the conversation with Jenessa that Ordier’s arrival had interrupted. Normally, Ordier would have bridled at the snub, but Jenessa flashed him a soothing look, and anyway he was in no mood to try to like the man. He poured himself a drink and went to sit beside Luovi, Parren’s wife. During the aperitifs and meal, the conversation stayed on general subjects, with the islands of the Archipelago the main topic. Parren and his wife had only just arrived from the north, and were anxious to hear what they could about various islands where they might make a home. The only islands they had so far seen were Muriseay—which was where most immigrants arrived—and Tumo. Ordier noticed that when he and Jenessa were talking about the other islands they knew, it was Luovi who showed the most interest, and she kept asking how far they were from Tumo. “Jacj must be near his work,” she said to Ordier. “I think I told you, Yvann,” Jenessa said. “Jacj is here to study the Qataari.” “Yes, of course.”