Authors: Christopher Priest
It was a few days after the conversation with Ganner that I heard a second orchestral tour of the Archipelago was being planned. A new promoter was involved – there was no word of Msr Axxon, from before. As soon as I heard about the new tour I made it clear, presumptuously perhaps, that I did not wish to take part in any way. I certainly did not wish to be taken around the islands once more.
When I later discovered the planned route – it was to be a longer tour with more island visits, Temmil to be included again – I felt an unmistakable yearning to go back. I stayed on the sidelines, alert for news, but I felt then that there was nothing in reality that would draw me back. I later discovered that not a single person who had been on the first tour either agreed to go on the second tour, or volunteered for it.
A few weeks later the tour party set off to the Dream Archipelago: a major concert programme was planned for each of twelve islands, with a number of extra recitals and performances at smaller venues. There would be a stay of between seven and ten days in every place. The repertoire was more extensive than our earlier one and more varied, and I heard about complicated arrangements involving guest conductors and soloists who lived on islands in the Archipelago, not all of them on the itinerary islands. For part of the tour my friend Denn Mytrie would accompany the players, conduct workshops in partnership with them, introduce his own concert of island themes. Once again, briefly, I wished I could be a part of that. I had not seen Denn for a long time.
My only direct involvement with the tour was to deliver a celebratory farewell lecture to the tour party. In the days before I gave the lecture I wondered for a long time how much I should say about what they were likely to discover when they returned. I was still not sure what exactly had happened to me, and even if I found out I would have no idea how I could explain it.
On the night of the lecture I took what I saw as a safe approach and spoke to them about music only, told them anecdotes about the conductors they would be meeting and working with, mentioned technical or acoustic details about some of the concert halls they would be going to that I had already experienced, and so on.
At the conclusion of the speech, I suddenly felt compelled to allude at least to the time distortion effect. Departing from my prepared text I reached down to my side and produced my stave.
‘You have all been given one of these?’ I declared, brandishing it in the way I had once seen Msr Axxon brandishing his. I saw recognition in many of the faces close to the stage. ‘Be sure to use it in the way you have been instructed! Never forget this. It is most important. Good luck to you all!’
The response was an outburst of clapping, which became prolonged when they realized that it was also the conclusion of my speech. I stood beside the lectern, acknowledging the applause, smiling around, modestly accepting the compliments of the chairman of the event, but thinking to myself, What advice have I just given? On what experience of my own was it based? It was advice I had not followed myself because I did not know how. It was advice I knew nothing about because I had had no instruction.
While the applause continued I raised the stave so that the wooden rod rested lightly against the fingers of my other hand, and I felt again the sensation of contact being made, of an awareness that was beyond the moment.
The next morning I was on the quayside at Questiur to watch their ship depart, to wave them away, to wish them well. I stood there on the cold concrete wharf long after the ship had disengaged from the quay and headed out into the bay. I remained there long after most of the relatives and friends had dispersed. I watched the ship while it steamed across the bay until all sight of it had been consumed by the chill sea-mist that obscured the Glaundian coastline in the morning hours.
Most of my thoughts were guilty ones, wishing that I had had the strength to try to warn them while I had the chance the evening before, but there was still a part of me, a substantial part, that deeply envied them. I did want to be on the ship with them.
How profoundly I wished to return to the sea! To the islands, to the dreams they contained, perhaps to vanish forever into the vague tides of distorted time, days and weeks gained, or days and weeks forever lost.
The fourteen-week orchestral tour of the Dream Archipelago returned to Glaund City exactly fourteen weeks and one day later. I had not been expecting them. I was not there to greet them when their ship docked.
Five years passed – I had reached the age of, what? Did I count the two years I had lost? Were they to be added to or subtracted from my calendar? All that was certain was that I was somewhere around fifty.
I felt myself to be in my prime, if not physically then certainly creatively. After I discovered that the people who took part in the second Archipelagian concert tour had returned exactly when expected, with no apparent trauma of lost time, I was drained emotionally by the news.
I was confused: was their experience the same, subjectively, as mine had been, subjectively? Or had they somehow avoided the time paradox? Or, worst of all, had I imagined the whole thing? These thoughts confounded and scared me for a long time.
But the deep store of music I had imagined while I sailed between the islands became something I could explore at last.
I calmed myself, I turned my mind away from my troubles, I thought about my experiences in the islands. Memories poured in, vague and precise and allusive. Finally, I settled down to work. Those two years following the return of the second tour became one of my most fecund periods. I composed two short symphonies, a suite of piano sonatas, two dozen songs, five concerti, a volume of trio and chamber pieces – one followed the other.
The critical reception was positive but the popular audience left me with mixed feelings. I believed my work was under-appreciated by audiences. At worst I assumed I was misunderstood, or at best that my music was taken for granted.
How should one read the response of a live audience at the end of a concert? I sampled many such evening events, where my work was performed. Applause followed invariably, often there were cheers, sometimes flowers were thrown appreciatively on to the platform, but I always left the concert hall with an inexplicable feeling of anticlimax.
My record sales increased steadily, though. My new work received good reviews, it sold well in the shops and my back catalogue was often re-released. I found these apparent contradictions confusing.
And Ante returned unexpectedly into my life. One morning I received an email from a record dealer in Glaund City, saying he understood that in the past I had shown an interest in the work of the ‘progressive jazz/rock fusion musician And Ante’ – was I aware that Ante had recently released a new record? The dealer said he had imported a small stock, and would be pleased to receive an order from me.
The disc arrived in the mail a week later. I did not open it straight away, feeling unexpectedly fearful of it. What had Ante done with my music this time? How would I react? From the size and shape of the outer packaging I could tell that what was inside was a digital record – at this time digital records were still something of a novelty and I had not expected the technology to be available in a remote place like Temmil. However, I had already bought a player for myself, so I had no excuse not to play it.
I was astonished by what I heard. Ante had taken nothing away from me: none of my melodies or themes, none of my harmonic progressions, no signature tempo changes, nothing. I would never like the kind of vaguely jazzy music Ante was writing and playing now, but at least he appeared to be working with original ideas. I played his record three times, listening closely to each track, but finally I was satisfied, pleased even, that I had nothing to worry about.
Only the following day did I think to look more closely at the printed sleeve notes. The plastic case included the usual inlay card, but I had skipped it at first because of the small print. I put on my recently acquired reading glasses and read what was there. Although the notes were written by someone who was an admirer of Ante’s work, and therefore totally uncritical, it was possible to see beyond the praise to understand some of the traditions Ante was drawing on, who his influences were, what he aspired to. He was quoted directly a few times. Answering a question he listed the musicians and composers who had most influenced his work, singling out two or three of them for special praise. I knew all the composers he mentioned, of course, but also could not help noticing that my own name was not among them.
Not long after this, And Ante released two more records in short order. Astonished that he was so prolific, I ordered copies from the same dealer. Once again I was pleased to discover that Ante’s career as a plagiarist had apparently come to an end, perhaps for good. He had moved on in another way – his interest in jazz/rock fusion had evidently soon passed and he was now experimenting with more ambitious music. One album was a film soundtrack, with a full orchestra, Ante conducting. The other was a suite of jazz-influenced tracks, with a five-piece band. I noted with surprise that my friend, Denn Mytrie, was listed as playing the piano on every track.
One day while I was listening to the news on the radio I heard a short item that electrified me. The Ministry of National Defence – a government department which served as a source of instructions, warnings and propaganda on behalf of the ruling military junta – announced that the 286th Battalion had completed its war duties and that the troops would be returning to a heroes’ welcome in Glaund City. They were already aboard their troop carrier and heading for home. The item was over within seconds and spoken by the presenter in a monotone, immediately followed by a story about a dispute between two business corporations which would be going to court for an adjudicated hearing.
But I had caught what was said. I noted down the day that had been announced when the troops were expected to arrive home, and as soon as I could afterwards I made enquiries about them.
Throughout my life, as the years passed, the unexplained absence of my brother Jacj had been like a background droning sound of depression, worry and sadness. I had never given up hope about him but it had become more an act of faith than a genuine expectation. It was decades since I had seen him. Jacj’s battalion was the 289th – three away in the numbered sequence. Two or three battalions were recruited and sent south to the ice-bound battlefields every year. The numbering sequence was closely followed – the troops were demobilized in the same order as the one in which they had been drafted.
A nation at war is a secretive place. The war that was being fought against our enemy, the Faiandland Alliance, was managed and contained within a structure of secrecy. Once the fighting was moved to Sudmaieure, the unpopulated southern continent, the deception that normal life could continue was enabled. That was what they intended and after a few months that was how we learned to act.
It was sometimes easy to overlook the fact that we were at war. So much was held back from the ordinary people – national security was invoked in many different guises. All my adult life I had been encouraged to believe, along with everybody else, that the war did not endanger me, nor even inconvenience me.
Of course there was a price for this and I discovered it as soon as I began to enquire about the return of the battalions, and in particular when I tried to find out about the 289th.
Letters, emails and personal approaches to the Ministry, to my elected parliamentary deputy, and to various other authorities, were all nullified either by a lack of response, or by bland stonewalling. The fact that I had become by default Jacj’s only living relative made no difference at all.
Meanwhile, the day of the arrival of the 286th Battalion came closer.
I reasoned that if the return of one of the battalions could be reported on the radio, then similar information must be discoverable in newspaper archives. One day I went to the Central Library, asked to see the archive of the
Glaundian Times
, and was taken to a computer terminal by a helpful librarian. She showed me how to access the software and how to search the archive, and also how to narrow my search to find and focus on the material I wanted to read.
If these notices had been published in the newspaper on the days I was reading it, I would have missed them. They were certainly there, made publicly available, but the release was a technical one. They were not printed or displayed prominently. Whenever the software located one of the announcements by a data search it was invariably written in a short paragraph, usually without a headline, and almost always placed on a page of classified advertisements and government directives, buried among planning applications, declarations of bankruptcy, statutory information, and so on.
However, I had soon identified and downloaded all the announcements of battalion returns from the last two or three years.
The information was not clear and it was often ambiguous. It appeared true that a battalion arrived back in Glaund City, or more accurately in the Questiur docks, about once every three or four months. The troops arrived in roughly the same order as the numbering sequence of the battalions themselves. Much else was left unsaid.
In the period I was searching, the 276th, 280th, 279th, 282nd and even the 288th had all reached home, but they had arrived in that order, not according to the battalion numbers. Two of them had docked more or less simultaneously. One, the 277th, appeared to be entirely missing – I found a vague note about ‘redeployment’, which revealed nothing. As I already knew, the 286th Battalion was expected next, but I could find no information about any of the others. My brother Jacj’s battalion, the 289th, was mentioned nowhere.
A second visit to the library, using slightly different search terms, established that battalions were occasionally merged on the battlefield into fighting divisions under a different numbering sequence, and in other cases were broken up and divided into smaller operating companies, again with another numbering sequence.