Christopher Priest: The Watched

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.

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 foundations 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.

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