Other books by Christopher Priest
NOVELS
The Separation
The Extremes
The Prestige
The Quiet Woman
The Glamour The Affirmation
A Dream of Wessex
The Space Machine
Inverted World
Fugue for a Darkening Island
Indoctrinaire
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS
Real-Time World
An Infinite Summer
The Dream Archipelago
Like all dreamers,
I mistook disillusionment for truth
Jean-Paul Sartre
CONTENTS
•
Other books by Christopher Priest
The Equatorial Moment
The Negation
Whores
The Trace of Him
The Miraculous Cairn
The Cremation
The Watched
The Discharge
Original Appearances
Copyright
The
Equatorial
Moment
•
Up there in the sky, high above the sea and the islands, while the aircraft cruised through air barely dense enough to support it and too thin for you to breathe unaided, you sometimes thought that you might at last understand how time worked.
You never could; it was an illusion. The sudden sense of intuition was familiar to many aircrew, a realization, as it seemed, that they alone had been granted a privileged insight into the nature of the vortex. The feeling was a false one. The vortex was beyond comprehension. All you could do was enter it, make use of it, leave it.
Sitting in the pressurized rear turret of the jet transport, supposedly on watch for incoming missiles or enemy fighters, with the length and weight of the aircraft unseen behind your back, and the thrust of the engines so steady that the plane seemed hardly to move, and the sound of the jet exhausts so swept away by the air-speed that they were almost inaudible, then you felt as if the world below you extended for ever, an unfolding panorama without limits. Land and coastline, seas and islands and clouds, picked out in brilliant contrasting colours by the noontime sun, sliding slowly by beneath. The height lent a sense of aloofness. You felt that you had become a part of the sky itself, not a temporary intruder into it. The world lay below you, and you sensed that anywhere on it could become part of your domain simply by choosing to set down upon it.
From this height, though, it was obvious there was not much land. Most of the world at the equator was the sea and the sky, with only intermittent darker patches where the equatorial islands lay, their brilliant white margins of sea meeting shore. You were supposed to be able to land on some of the larger ones if you needed to, but one of the properties of the vortex was that it seemed to protect you from emergencies. No one had ever heard any stories about planes that crashed out of time. Accidents happened elsewhere: on take-off or landing, or when an incoming missile found its target before or after you were inside the vortex. You were safe from attack when inside: missiles also flew through time, they too never went anywhere in real time.
The dots that were the islands had other temptations, though, principally the lure of neutrality. Most of the men actually involved in the fighting wanted to be out of it; war was ever thus. The knowledge that most of the surface area of the world constituted a neutral zone was endlessly confounding to the young and usually frightened men who fought the battles. While you flew above the islands you could look down at them and dream of war’s end, of not having an enemy, of wandering from one island to the next, of lying in the sun and trying exotic foods and making love with the sound of waves around you for the remainder of your life. But you also knew that in reality wherever you were flying to was not into neutrality. On the further side of the Midway Sea, when you reached the southern continental mass, you and your plane would become combatants again, because there all neutrality ended. Treaties and alliances began.
When you returned to your base you again crossed above the neutral islands, dreaming in the sun, and you landed in your own belligerent nation in the cooler north.
The plane swept you on, the pilot in the distant cockpit at the front imperceptibly correcting the drift, the momentary losses of altitude, the alignment of the flying surfaces. It was tempting to dream while you flew above the Archipelago, or while you were flown above it, while you were held in the thrall of the timeless noon.
Glancing above or below you would be able to see the other aircraft soaring with you in the vortex of time. Their condensation trails lay like chalked lines across the deep blue of the heavens, meeting at the centre, multi-layered. All time met at this vortical point, midday at the equator, or more rarely midnight, marked by the converging trails and the vertical stack of jet aircraft that produced them. If you were at the top of the stack you could sometimes glimpse the sheer scale of the vortex effect. Although the planes flew straight tracks, the twin actions of coriolis and the sweep of time made each white condensation trail curve to the golden mean. The lines across the sky spiralled into the central point, the eye of time, so that seen from above the vortex looked like a swirling of white ribbons, a spinning nebula, or the wispy outer clouds of a hurricane.
If you were in the stack itself, or close to the bottom of it, you could not enjoy the coriolis effect in full, but if you glanced up through your tinted, impact-proof canopy you would see the craft nearest to you, directly above, pointing at an angle away from your own flight path, churning through the sky, apparently motionless in the air, blocking the light of the zenithal sun. Above it would be another plane, heading in its own direction, flying along, going somewhere. Above that one several more, higher and higher, up through the stack to the altitude where the air was so rarefied that even a charging jet transport could not gain enough lift beneath its wings.
If you could look down you would see many more aircraft, some of them skimming along just above the sea.
And beneath them was the place on the earth’s surface – usually a point in the sea, but several islands also straddled the equator – which for an instant twice a day, solar noon and midnight, was the exact focus of the temporal vortex.
So here in the sky you believed that you had glimpsed the insight: the mystery of the vortex appeared to be laid bare before you. It made time cease, you reasoned. All flying aircraft that entered it were held by it so long as they maintained a steady course, only to be released when they made their crucial change of direction. So it seemed. In fact, all you had gained was a different view of the vortex. You could see up into its effects, or down upon them, but the mystery remained.
Because of the vortex every point on the surface of the earth existed in the same subjective moment of time, the same apparent day, the same season. The vortex spread with invisible gradients across the surface of the world to alter perception of time.
No matter where you stood to view the going down of the sun, the same sunset could be seen by anyone else in the world – north or south of your position, east or west of it – who cared to look. When it was mid-morning on one side of the world, it was perceived to be mid-morning on the other. There were no time zones, no date lines, no hours gained or lost by travelling to east or west, no interruption to diurnal rhythms should you travel by jet across the world. Seventeen minutes past the hour here, or anywhere, was perceived as seventeen minutes past the same hour everywhere else and anywhere else.
Night followed day, summer followed spring, no matter where you were. The fact that the same night, the same summer, was occurring everywhere else in the world, was not in itself interesting. Why should anyone know, who could not compare a clock on the other side of t
he world? Why should anyone care?
For centuries no one did. Then came the modern age and modern travel, and when man began to fly his fast jets at great heights his eager wings first grazed the edge of the vortex. Looking down he saw where he was but flew further before looking down again, only to find that he had not travelled as far as he had intended. Then, dipping down to the land, confused by this, frightened by the way his sense of time and space had been distorted, he found the time apparently sweeping past him, the ground racing by at a greater speed than anything his engines could produce. When he at last set down again upon the ground he was nowhere near where he thought he would be, and in the two or three subjective hours of travel he had traversed half the world.
Many men died and many aircraft were lost while the struggle to solve the puzzle went on. In the end, with the puzzle unsolved, it became possible to measure the vortex, work mathematically with it, plan routes from one part of the world to another with the use of it. You left your starting place, and climbed towards the equatorial noon. You joined the stack of other aircraft at the altitude you had calculated, you flew steadily on, trailing your thin white spoor of condensation behind you. You watched the ground, read your instruments, waited for the moment which you had computed was the one that would take you close to where you wanted to be, then you throttled back the engines, lowered the nose of the aircraft, and began your descent through the gradients of time.
If you had calculated correctly you arrived within a short flying distance of your destination, a twelve-hour flight accomplished in thirty minutes, a twenty-hour flight in two hours, a six-hour flight in twenty minutes. Flying became routine, a necessary ingredient of the world’s economy, but for it to continue uninterrupted it was essential that the equatorial zone remained neutral. That dark shape above you, with those swept-back wings, its long barrels of engines, the huge fuselage throwing down its shadow on you, was as likely to belong to the other side as it might be one of yours.
So you flew, undisturbed by others, with the only apparent movement being the keeping in step with the slow progress of the sun, at its daytime zenith, over the equator. You grew to recognize the shapes of the equatorial islands, the changing colours of the sea where the currents flowed more slowly or deeply, where the surface was broken by rocks. You grew to know the islands without ever visiting them. You yearned to travel among them, to discover what neutrality meant, where it would lead you.
One day the war would have to end. But for now it had not.
The
Negation
•
The sound of the trains was a melancholy reminder of home. Dik would listen for their arrival whenever he was not on patrol in the evenings. Sometimes, when the mountain winds had temporarily stilled, he could hear the rhythmic drumming of the wheels while the train was still a long way from the depot, but he always heard the blast of steam as it arrived, and the shriek of its whistle when it left. He invariably thought of his parents, the house in Jethra where he had grown up, his school, his friends, the ordinary accomplishments of childhood, less than a year in his past, but now unreachably remote from him. The railway line was the only contact with that vanished childhood. When his time was up, and he could leave this desolate, snow-bound frontier, it would be by the same means as he had arrived, on one of those nightly trains.
He had recently written a few lines of verse about the train, in the pretence that conscription and military training had not managed to change him at all, but the writing was unsatisfactory and he destroyed the poem soon afterwards. It was the only writing he had tried since being inducted into the Border Police. The failure of the verse made him feel it would be unlikely he would try any more, at least until he was moved to a less harsh posting.
For the last two weeks he had been listening for the train with extra attentiveness because he knew that Moylita Kaine, the novelist, should be arriving soon. He clung to the irrational notion that the train would sound different merely by having her aboard it, but he was not entirely sure what the difference would be. In the event her arrival in the isolated village was revealed in another way.
As he left the canteen one evening, half an hour before the train was due, he noticed that several of the burghers’ limousines were parked in the centre of the village. They were lined up outside the Civic Hall, their engines idling and the drivers sitting inside. Dik walked by slowly on the other side of the street, smelling the gasoline fumes and listening to the soft rhythmic concussions of the muffled exhausts. Clouds of white condensation rose around the cars, infused with colour by the ornamental lights nailed to the eaves of the hall.
The large double doors of the hall opened and a broad beam of orange light fell across the polished cars and the trodden snow. Dik hunched his shoulders and trudged on towards the constabulary barracks. He heard the burghers leaving the Civic Hall, the car doors slamming. After a few moments the vehicles passed him in a slow convoy, turning from the village street into the narrow track that led to the station further down the steep valley. It was only then that Dik guessed at the reason for the burghers’ expedition. When he reached the entrance to the barracks he paused to listen for the train. It was still too early for its scheduled arrival and with the wind in this particular quarter it would be impossible to hear the wheels in the distance.
Inside the overheated building he walked down the corridor past his room and went out on the outside balcony. No fresh snow had fallen that day. His frozen footprints from the night before led to the corner of the balcony and lost themselves in a confusion of stamping and shuffling. He went to the same corner, thrusting his hands deep into the pockets of his greatcoat. Soon he was stamping to keep his feet warm.
From this position he could see up the narrow street that led back to the centre, but apart from the coloured lights festooning the exteriors of the larger buildings most of the windows seemed dark and the village had the appearance of emptiness. From the bar in the barracks cellar there came the sound of an accordion and men were talking and laughing drunkenly.
When he looked in the other direction, across the sharply angled roofs of the houses on the edge of the village, he could glimpse against the starlit sky the dark outline of the mountains that loomed above the village from the other side of the broad glacial valley. There was a thin moon and Dik could discern the dark smudge of the pine forest clinging to the frozen scarps. On the northern ridge, several thousand feet higher than the village, was the frontier wall that protected the valley and the routes to the sea. It was impossible to see anything of the wall from here, particularly at night, but when patrolling it you were afforded magnificent vistas of the valley and the surrounding mountains.
Dik waited, stamping his feet and shivering, until at last he heard a jetting of released steam, echoing up through the chill, blustery air of the valley and he felt again the now familiar pang of homesickness.
He went back into the building at once and found some of the squad in one of the common rooms next to the bar. Most of the young men, like Dik, were too hard up to be able to buy drinks. They usually spent the evenings joshing each other and bragging, adding to the noise from the bar, distracting themselves from thinking about what they had to do up there on the border. Tonight, one of the lads had brought out a bottle of home-distilled schnapps, and this was being passed around, eked out in a succession of small sips and extravagant backhand wipes of the mouth. Dik was soon shouting and laughing with the rest of them.
Some time later one of the lads by the window let out a yell and beckoned to the others. They moved over to cluster around him. Peering with them through the hand-wiped gap in the heavy film of condensation, Dik saw the convoy of burghers’ cars returning from the depot, the powerful engines making hardly any noise at all, and the fat tyres crunching softly across the compacted snow.
*
Dik had been about to enter college when his draft notice arrived. Because of this his conscription was a marginal case, and after a few anxious
days he had been relieved to learn that his course qualified him for three years’ deferment of service. Like all youths in his position, he felt that the delay had to be good enough for the time being and that by the end of his course the political situation might have improved. It was unlucky for Dik that the draft papers arrived more or less coincidentally with the first of a series of air and missile attacks on the industrial sections of the capital, Jethra, and a few weeks after that there was an unsuccessful invasion in the east of the country. All around him, lads of his age were joining up, even many of those who had also been given deferment. Dik held out as long as his conscience would allow him to but then at last signed on as a volunteer.
Before all this he had been intending to read modern literature at Jethra University, and it was the writing of Moylita Kaine that had directly prompted the decision. Although he had been reading fiction and poetry for as long as he could remember, and had written many poems of his own, one book – a long novel entitled The Affirmation, more than a thousand pages in extent – had so impressed him that he counted the reading of it as the single most important and influential experience of his life. In many ways a deep and difficult work, the book was little known or discussed. During his one interview for the course at the university he had expressed his interest in the book, but none of the academics on the panel appeared even to have heard of it. For Dik, the book’s apparent obscurities were among its greatest pleasures. The novel spoke to him in an intensely clear, wise and passionate voice, its story an elemental conflict between deceit and romantic truth, its resolution profoundly emotional and its understanding of human nature so perceptive that he could still recall, three years later, the shock of recognition when he read the book for the first time. In the months since he had re-read the book more times than he could remember, he had urged it on his few close friends (though had never once allowed his precious copy out of his possession) and tried, as far as was humanly possible, to live his own life within the philosophy and moral precepts of Orfé, the novel’s protagonist.