Christopher Priest - The Islanders

In the apartment, which was stickily hot after the long day, she went around and opened all the windows wide, bending her head beside each one, listening outside. Finally, she threw off all her clothes.

‘Come to bed!’ she said.

‘What were you listening for?’ said Oy.

‘Keep quiet!’ She crossed to him, sank to her knees and quickly undid his pants.

An hour later, lying naked side by side on the bed, listening to the peaceful sounds of the night-time town through the open windows, they became aware of a deep vibration, transmitted through the building.

‘That’s it at last!’ Yo said, sitting up and moving quickly to the window. ‘Listen!’

He went to stand beside her. The Nariva wind was blowing more strongly now, gusting across the town and along the streets, skidding litter around, but the vibration was rising through the ground. At first he could not discern any sound that was part of it, but soon he heard a deep, low rumbling, a constant note, a distant siren. The town remained dark and shuttered against the windy night. The droning note wavered with the gusting of the wind as it came down from the direction of the mountain, sometimes fading away but mostly gaining in strength.

After a few minutes of gradual crescendo, the note held at a steady volume, a loud, deep booming, basso profundo.

‘Ah,’ said Yo.

‘Congratulations,’ said Oy. ‘I’m impressed.’

‘Now that’s why you are here,’ she said, holding herself against his arm.

‘Just so you could show off to me?’

‘Who better to show off to than you? Could you have done this?’

‘I might have done it more quickly. But I fill things in. I would never have even started.’

He had rarely seen her smile before.

The immense bass note throbbed unendingly across the town. Somewhere in a street adjacent to theirs a car alarm, nudged into life by the vibration, began to screech. Another followed soon after. A policier car, or some other kind of emergency vehicle, rushed unseen by them through the town with its own siren suppressed but with its warning lights blazing and flashing. They saw the radiance reflecting quickly off the tops of walls and roofs, before the vehicle sped off in the direction of the port. After a few more minutes of electronic screeching the car alarms switched themselves off. Mt Voulden continued to moan its single, dark note.

The mountain fell silent an hour after sunrise, when the wind at last slackened. Yo had been euphoric throughout the hours of darkness, alternating between manic proclamations of her own genius, and bitter, lacerating attacks on Oy’s own perceived failings as an artist. He no longer minded her abuse, because he knew by now it was her way of working herself up into a sexual frenzy.

If he learned anything from that long sleepless night of the mountain’s deep roaring it was that the time had indeed come for him to move on. In some way he barely understood he knew he must have been useful to her, perhaps as a foil. Whatever it was, it seemed to be over.

Yo fell asleep soon after the mountain went quiet. Oy left her in the bed, showered and dressed and packed his few belongings. Yo woke up again before he could leave. She sat up, yawning and stretching, her face drawn with fatigue after the mostly sleepless night.

‘Don’t go yet,’ she said. ‘I still need you here.’

‘We agreed you were showing off. That’s what you wanted from me. What you’ve done with the mountain is good, it’s brilliant, it’s incredible, it’s unique. I’m impressed. There’s never been anything like it before. I couldn’t have built it myself. Is that what you want me to say?’

‘No.’

‘I really mean it.’

‘But it’s incomplete. I’ve hardly started. What happened last night — it was like someone picking up a musical instrument for the first time. Have you ever tried to get a note out of a trumpet? That’s all I achieved last night. I simply made my instrument sound a note. Now I have to learn how to play it properly.’

‘You’re going to teach the mountain to play tunes?’

‘Not straight away. But I can program a tonic sol-fa, at least. There are vents up there in the tunnel that will create vortices when I open them. One will release a torus of air. I’ve no idea yet what they will sound like.’

‘All right, but I’ve stuff of my own to do. Maybe I’ll come back and see you later, when you’ve taught it to play the national anthem. How long is that likely to be? See you in another five years?’

‘Don’t be a bastard now, Oy. I need your help. I really do.’

‘Anti-help, anti-art?’

‘Come to bed and put me back to sleep.’

In the end Oy agreed to stay on with her. Yo remained as she was, difficult and perverse, often yelling at him for doing something wrong, sometimes abandoning him so she could work on her own, but her reliance on him did appear to be genuine. Every day they worked together on the tuning vents inside the tunnel. Oy found this interesting, the endless range of settings and combinations, harmonizing as the wind shifted direction and pressure.

Soon the mountain was responding to the opening of the extra vents. A strong wind was no longer necessary to produce a note — Yo had installed a series of Venturi tubes that increased the local speed at which the wind stream passed through the tuners. One night they lay awake as the mountain groaned and curled its tremendous rumbling notes, fading away and recovering as the erratic Nariva swept across the face of the mountain. It was gaining a sort of ponderous, elephantine beauty.

But much as Oy admired her ingenuity he found the endless deep droning of the bass notes uninspiring. People in the town had started complaining too, but so far no one appeared to have worked out who was behind the all-pervading sound.

If Mt Voulden had been one of his own pieces, Oy would already have left the island. He disliked hearing comment on his work.

One morning at dawn, after another wakeful night, he said to Yo, ‘It needs a descant.’

‘A what?’

‘Another tunnel, shorter, narrower, at a different angle to the wind, playing a higher harmony.’

Yo said nothing but stared at him in silence, before she shut her eyes. Several minutes passed. He could see her eyes moving rapidly behind the closed lids. Her jaw was clamped tight and Oy could see veins in her neck, pulsing with pressure. He braced himself.

Finally, she said, ‘Fuck you, you bastard. Fuck you, fuck you !’

But this time her abuse did not lead to sex. She dressed in a hurry, went to the mountain alone and Oy did not see her again until the following day.

When she was ready she took him up the mountain, much higher than the main tunnel, to a place where she had found a long ridge on the southern face. The wind was keener and colder there and made its own harsh whistling as it scoured across the bare rocks and deep crevasses.

‘If I could somehow drill a new tunnel through this ridge, would you stay around and help?’

Oy was balancing on an exposed boulder, buffeted by the freezing wind. Far below them the first tunnel was moaning, but they could barely hear it up here.

‘If you could somehow drill it, I would somehow fill it in.’

‘Then what’s the point?’

‘Ah — that old argument about point,’ Oy said. ‘Art has no point. It only is. We could do both. You drill a tunnel and I’ll fill it in.’

‘I thought I was the mad one.’

‘Yes and no. That’s the other old argument.’

Yo gestured impatiently. ‘Then what the hell?’

‘What the hell what?’ Oy stared down at the astounding elevated view, the hommke islands, the seething sea, the white clouds and the shafts of brilliant sunlight. A squall of rain was distantly moving across from the south. Two white-painted ferries were passing in the narrow strait between two islands. ‘Some places don’t need art,’ he said. ‘Look at what’s here! How could you or I improve on that?’