Then a second message arrived from Yo, a few days after the first:
You are anathema to me. I loathe and despise what you do. You are a NON ARTIST. I hate everything you conceive or draw or build or fill in or cover up or make smooth or correct or stand near or pass by or breathe in the locality of or EVEN FOR A MOMENT THINK ABOUT. What you do is anti-art, anti-beauty, anti-life, anti-anti. Your so-called work is an abomination to every artist who has ever lived, or whoever will live. I have nothing to ‘try’ with you, except I would like to spit on you repeatedly. Yo.
But an hour later the same day her third message arrived:
Pls send two photos of you, one of them naked and from the front and close up, but not your face. Yo.
Moments later came the fourth and last message from her:
Come and see what I am doing, Oy. I am not mad. I am on Yannet. Yo.
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.
She calculated the likely size of spoil heaps, chose places where they might be positioned and soon the tailings began to pile up in the foothills around Mt Voulden. Yo decided against trying to landscape them. She thought that slag was something Oy might deal with for her, should he ever turn up.
The work went on slowly, with more than three years of drilling necessary.
While Yo tunnelled, Oy was moving almost as slowly through other parts of the Archipelago. He went to several islands, but either could not find a subject that engaged his interest or stimulated his imagination, or he had to move on when local people recognized him.
He managed to complete some pieces successfully. He went to the island of Foort, a dry, rocky island, which initially he thought uninspiring, but he was able to go ashore, find somewhere to stay and then to move around freely. Either they did not recognize his face or name or reputation on Foort, or they did not care.
On one of his travels around Foort he went to the low eastern end of the island, where the coastline was defended by ranges of huge sand dunes. The sharp contrast between the deep blue sky, the ultramarine of the sea and the dark dampness of the creeping sands at low tide captivated him immediately. For a week he returned daily to the dunes and sweltered under the relentless sun, clambering across their shifting heights, blinded by the dazzle of the sun, scorched by the dry exposed sand and its coarse grasses.
He went to work. He had never liked a hot climate so he planned to work swiftly, make a minor installation that would require only a few assistants.
The first stage was to excavate and remove one of the existing dunes to make room for one of his own. The vast amount of sand and gravel that had to be shifted was distributed as unobtrusively as possible amongst other dunes. With a patch of rocky base finally exposed, Oy’s artisans drilled solid foundations, then built and raised the wooden framework of the new dune. The timber Oy was using had to be specially imported from another island, and every exposed part of the wood was treated with fungicide and several coats of insecticide.
The outer integument was moulded from the toughest kind of plasticized sheeting, guaranteed by its manufacturer to be almost indestructible. Oy tested it with fire, rifle bullets and diamond-bit scalpels, and only the last managed to break through the tough fabric.
The false dune was then coated with sandlike carbonized fragments, pigmented to appear identical to the real dunes all around.
When the artisans had been paid off, Oy settled down alone to the intricate work of setting and adjusting the electronics. Firstly, the dune had to be sand repellent. The wind always blew, and the sand around the installation was constantly drifting. He did not want real sand on his dune, so he devised a mineral loose-body repellent which temporarily polarized and repelled any grains that came close to the integument.
On the windier days his dune was surrounded by a whirling cloud of polarized quartz crystals, shot up into a funnel of stinging sand.