We saw how decrepit most of the town appeared — there was none of the sense of industry and purposeful activity that we had seen in Ørsknes, let alone the thriving metropolis of Jethra. Most of the buildings had been constructed from the dark grey local stone. They looked thick and solid, perhaps an attempt to shut out the pervading gloom. They were also shabby. The windows and doors were narrow, with makeshift shutters and blinds. Galvanized iron sheets were laid roughly against many of the entrances.
There seemed to be no wildlife — we heard no birds, not even the gulls which were otherwise found in every port in the Archipelago. When we went down to the quay we saw that the water of the inlet had an oily, lifeless look to it, as if the fish too were repelled by the emanations from the towers.
I began to think that I would find it difficult living in such a place for long, at least without the shielding, but I said nothing of this to Alvasund.
We found the building where the rest of the team was staying overnight, and as I had suspected there was no shielding. The building was just a normal town bar, clearly on the point of going out of business. The team members were stoical about the arrangement, as they had made contact with the Authority and would be moving the next day.
Gloomily we walked with the rest of the team through the town in search of somewhere we could find a meal; worriedly we ate it; and afterwards we dispersed with unenthusiastic farewells.
Once Alvasund and I were in our apartment again, though, our spirits lifted with the closing of the door. It was like shaking off the memory of fog, or removing a bulky garment. In fact, we threw off all our clothes and went straight to bed.
In the morning Alvasund dressed for work. She took out overalls and gauntlets, and so on, from one of the large cartons we had brought with us. The garments were made of heavy fabric, camo green. She put these on over her own clothes, becoming shapeless. Finally, she pulled on a large helmet, which I took at first glance to be made of metal. It covered her entire head as well as her throat and neck. It had a glass visor, which she snapped down over her face, then she tilted her head in a familiar gesture, suggesting she would like me to kiss her. I went across to her, smiling at what she was doing.
She flipped open the visor, and tapped it.
‘I’m protected,’ she said.
‘You’re completely beyond reach!’ I said, groping unsuccessfully across her cumbersome garments, and trying to push my mouth through the narrow slot to kiss her.
‘You know what I mean,’ she said.
I looked closely at the visor, and saw that it was made of the polymerized BPSG. I held her as affectionately as her thick clothing would allow.
‘Don’t take risks, Alvasund,’ I said.
‘I think I know what I’m doing. The others certainly do.’ She drew back from me. Then she added, ‘I want you to do something for me.’
‘What?’
‘All my friends call me Alvie. From now, today, tonight, for ever, I want you to call me that too.’
‘You may call me Torm,’ I said.
‘I already do.’
She snapped down the protective visor, smiled at me through the transductive glass, and walked with wide and awkward steps to the stairs that led down to the road.
I gave her another clumsy hug, and then she was gone. When she was outside I watched her through the window of the apartment as she stood by the side of the street. Soon enough the Authority vehicle appeared with the others aboard, and they drove away towards the edge of town.
I began to feel trapped in that apartment in Seevl Town. Although Alvie returned every day, sometimes early, halfway through the afternoon, and she was as loving and physical with me as ever, inevitably our lives were drifting slowly away from each other. I was alone almost every day. Although there were, or I obtained, the usual distractions, like books, internet access, films, music, it was still a fact that I could only leave when I felt able to brave the psychic aura that drifted around the town. I had no other protection than the discreetly glazed walls of the building. There was no work I could do beyond maintaining distant electronic contact with my former colleagues on Ia.
Alvie rarely talked about the work they were doing, but as they settled into what I assumed were routines she and the others always referred to it as ‘decommissioning’. One day a small freighter arrived in the harbour. A heavy tractor, the kind of thing used in demolition jobs, was unloaded. It bore Authority markings. The driver took it clattering and smoking through the narrow streets and up into the hills away from town.
For me, the weird threat of the towers was gradually being replaced by a more comprehensible longing. In short I was missing the outdoor life I had enjoyed in the subtropical warmth of Ia. My early background on Goorn had created in me an inward habit, one of staying at home, keeping warm, spending time alone, but I had found, a few years earlier when I arrived on Ia, that I much preferred those benign sea winds, the open spaces and cooling heights, the tangled forests, the hotly glittering seas.
Soon I took to walking every day on Seevl, at first simply for the needed change of environment, then later with increasing interest in the area around the town. Of course, unprotected, unshielded, I took the full force of the psychic emanations from the towers, but I discovered that it was possible to get used to them. I realized that they weren’t targeted exclusively on me and after that I could almost ignore them. I also carried the knowledge that at the end of my excursion there was a shielded home sanctuary in which normality would return, not to speak of a happy physical affair with an attractive young woman.
I relished my daily walks, felt myself coming alive again, and a feeling of physical well-being was growing in me. My senses were developing — I felt as if I was seeing, hearing, tasting better than I had ever done before.
After two or three weeks of these long walks, I was hardly noticing the sense of dread. In fact, I so much enjoyed striding across the blustery high moors, with the racing skies, the blown coarse grasses, the stunted brambles and clammy mosses, that any mood induced by the dead towers was easily overlooked.
One day, clambering through hills a fair distance inland of the town, I noticed deep and parallel clayey furrows left by caterpillar tracks, and I realized that I must be close to one of the places where Alvie and her decommissioning team had been working.
I wandered up the slope, following the tracks, interested to see what might be there.
I came eventually to a shallow declivity, a way down from the local summit of a rising moor, exactly the sort of site where the towers were usually placed. I could see no sign of any tower ahead of me as I walked, but this was soon explained. I came to an area where the ground was torn and furrowed by the repeated movements of the heavy machine.
Dark bricks lay all around, some of them broken by the violent act of demolition, but many more of them intact. I walked around the site, looking at the ground, the view, the glimpse of the sea that could be distantly made out. I sensed no concentration or intensity of the psychic emanation. I assumed that Alvie and Ref and the others must have succeeded in removing whatever entity or force there might have been. It just looked and felt like a place where an old building once existed.
In the centre of the rubble I saw a series of deep channels, trenches, arranged in an octagonal shape.
When I was back in the peace of the apartment that night I said nothing to Alvie about this. She was in a quiet mood, and later, when Ref came to visit, I overheard the two women talking quietly about the need to take a short break from the work.
Alvie said at one point, in a hushed voice, ‘I think it’s getting to me at last.’ Ref replied softly, obviously not realizing that even in the next room I could hear her whispered words, ‘Two of the guys have requested a trip to the mainland.’ And Alvie said, ‘Then I would come too.’ Ref: ‘What about Torm?’ Alvie said, ‘I think he likes it here.’