The Gradual
‘I suppose you could say I’m on vacation,’ I said.
The officer paused in what he was doing.
‘You suppose what?’ he said, looking me in the eye for the first time since I had walked in. ‘Are you or are you not on vacation? Are you intending to do any more of whatever this is?’ He pointed to my manuscript paper.
‘No,’ I said at once. ‘I’m touring the islands.’ I realized I was being taught a lesson. I had never before heard this warning about a work permit – was there the same rule throughout the Archipelago, or was it just on Quy?
He demanded to see the stave again, which I handed over. I watched as he scrutinized it closely. Then he asked me to open my violin case. Apparently never having seen an instrument at close quarters before he made me take it out, show him how I held it to play, then demanded to hear some notes. I told them I played it for my own pleasure, and gave him the first four bars of the allegro maestoso from my Violin Concerto in D major. The violin needed retuning, but I don’t think the man noticed.
After all this I went slowly across the harbour to the quay where the Serquian had berthed earlier, because when I and the woman at the tourist agency on Muriseay planned the long journey to Temmil we used the published schedule of shipping times as a way of deciding the route. She had said, casually, that the announcements of the ships’ arrival and departure times provided the best framework for planning. I had already noticed that the ferries rarely left or arrived late, and then not by much.
I was therefore disconcerted to discover that the Serquian was not at the berth where I had expected her to be. If she had already sailed then I wanted to know at what time. She was not my next ship for Tumo, but on an island where the sun rose in reverse sunset she was, to say the least, a symbol of the known. But Serquian was not there.
I went to the harbour office where there was a display board of arrivals and departures. The Serquian was shown prominently – in fact, her arrival appeared to be the most important of the day. She was known to be on time but was not expected to arrive until late afternoon. About an hour before sunset.
The date was unchanged.
I decided I should not be in the harbour area when the ship did dock – I did not want to see the passengers disembarking. Five and a half hours returned to me, Renettia had said. I looked at my wristwatch, which was showing the same time as the clock on the wall of the harbour office. Who would I see stepping down to the quayside from the Serquian?
I struggled one last time with my bulky luggage, then went slowly and painfully up to the centre of the town, looking for the hotel where I had reserved a room.
46
Shedding personal property has always been something I find difficult. My family owned so few material possessions in the years when I was growing up that in these financially easier times I was still careful with money, tried to keep and use possessions for as long as possible. But I knew now that most of what I was carrying around with me had become unwanted deadweight, an unavoidable penance. I was cursed with carrying my baggage through time.
Once I decided to rid myself of as much as I could it felt like a new start, a purging of the old me. It did not take long to choose what to keep: changes of underwear, my manuscript paper, my violin, the book I was currently reading, a few other things. They all fitted into the smaller of my two cases with room to spare.
The morning after I arrived on Quy I checked out of the hotel, first making use of the huge recycling centre at the back of the building staffed by a local charity – I realized it was probably likely that many of the hotel guests decided to get rid of things, and often for the same reason as I did.
Clad in one of my lightweight robes and my broad-brimmed hat I returned to the harbour.
During the night, cool and comfortable in the hotel room, I had found at last the mental space to think about what I wanted to do. Life on a ship had many constraints and distractions, and the mystical adepts, and to lesser extent the obtuse officials, maddened and annoyed me. In the calm of the night I had had a chance to reflect.
I realized that I was beginning to feel a slave to my travel schedule. When I left home I was full of fears. I had no real motive for this long journey, other than to make myself safe from the Generalissima. Solving the mystery of my brother, perhaps, and finding a new life on an island I had visited only once, and in doing so indulging in a final uncertainty: to try to meet the man who plagiarized me. A kind of desperation had gripped me.
I was used to a regulated life. Like it or not I had the Glaundian way of thinking, acting, preparing. Life in Glaund was controlled, contained, observed. There had to be a reason for everything we did and that reason had to be acceptable to the monitoring officials. My work as a musician was as close as possible to a free Glaund life, but even then I had been bound by the same restrictions as everyone else. I carried government stamped identification everywhere – the stamp was renewed every three months, causing a time-consuming visit to a government office. I always carried a minimum amount of cash, as I was required to, as everyone was required to. If I stayed away from home more than three nights at a time I had to register with the police. There were certain days of the year when the whole country was under curfew and I could not be outside my home after nightfall. I had to be assigned to a church, even though I was not religious. Like every man or woman under the age of fifty I was in theory capable of being drafted into the armed forces at any time, or into one of several mandatory occupations. I was a registered user of the internet, but access to it was strictly controlled and there were severe search limits. All emails were automatically copied to the government department responsible for overseeing communications. Social media, briefly introduced, had been comprehensively and effectively banned ever since. Freedom of expression was not permitted – members of the Glaundian public were not allowed to know what each other thought.
These were just some of the limitations on daily liberties; but there was a host of extra minor regulations applied to Glaundian life. I had grown up with them, I had forged my career within them, I had grown used to them. And, I was discovering, I had made a habit of them.
When we travel we take our expectations with us, our prejudices, our sense of normality. We see what we see through eyes trained by home.
Now, though, I was regulating myself and it was because of conditions I had never really known before. I felt constrained by time – the self-determined need to catch certain boats, confirm pre-booked hotels. But I was in the Archipelago – nothing was urgent, there were no pressures of time. No authorities knew where I was or where I was going. Even the Shelterate officials, with their banal enquiries, always seemed surprised to see me.
I knew I could follow my existing schedule across the Archipelago to the end of my planned voyage, taking the ships and staying at the hotels booked in advance. But I had also learned that the calm and shallow seas of the Archipelago were criss-crossed by hundreds of different ferries, and that there was no reason why I should not strike out on my own, make spontaneous decisions about whether to travel or not travel, stay longer on some islands, skip others. Finding places to stay whenever I landed was even less of a problem: there were dozens of inns, guest houses and hotels in every port I had visited. I was beginning to feel like an experienced Archipelagian traveller.
It had taken until now for me to realize this, to gain some idea of the freedoms I was enjoying, or at least was potentially able to enjoy.
Even so, a realization that change is possible does not lead to immediate change. In Quy’s harbour I cautiously established that the next ship where I had a cabin reserved was expected to arrive within the next two hours, and that she would be reprovisioned and refuelled, ready to sail late that evening. She was the Scintilla Queen, destined for the university island of Tumo, with eight ports of call en route. I confirmed my booking, telling myself that I would decide later if I would stay with the ship all the way to Tumo. I felt in conflict with myself, that I was denying a
genuine change in me, but I had a luxury cabin reserved for me, and the old habit-follower in me did not want to lose it.
Then I changed my mind. When I boarded the Scintilla Queen it turned out to be the last time I followed my original itinerary. I never went as far as Tumo. I changed ships and my plans at a small island called Sanater. For two days I explored the Sanaterian hills, villages and cliffs, striding around unencumbered by everything except overnight essentials. I had left what remained of my luggage in storage in Sanater Base. When I decided to continue my voyage I abandoned my eastward quest and impulsively headed north, seeking cooler weather. That was hopeless because I was in the equatorial zone, but I did find an island that briefly felt a little fresher. This was on Ilkla, a place of high, windswept moors, but Ilkla turned out to be a bleak place of subsistence farming where almost the entire population seemed to speak a heavily glottal patois. It was picturesque in a bare sort of way but it was also unwelcoming. Nothing about it inspired me. If music there was somewhere beneath that scrawny grass and those rocky escarpments, it was a dull, distant beat of a drum. I moved from Ilkla to a larger island called Meequa, further south, still subject to the same winds but because of a warm ocean current it was as hot as the islands in the zone I was briefly trying to leave.
I had cancelled my planned itinerary by this time, sometimes having to pay penalties for changing my mind. I did not care: I wanted at last to be free, at least in the sense I understood it then. After the next fifty-six days and more than twenty ships later, all of which I boarded on impulse, I was feeling completely at home in my new mode of casual and unhurried travel from one island to the next. I changed ships and destinations at will. I chose short crossings and long voyages, but primarily the shorter ones – I was still attracted by the novelty of a succession of small places. Some of the places I visited did not even appear on the shipping schedules of the main ferry companies, and could be reached only by small boat. One ferry was pulled by underwater chains, across a fierce tidal channel.
All these sea journeys ravished my eyes, and once again I started responding to the rhythm of a seaboard life, to the stimulus of discovering one new place after another. Each island called to me – my mind was overflowing with music. I found the discomforts of an onboard life only relative, even on the smaller boats and the ones with few facilities. When I sailed overnight I made sure I would have a cabin to myself, and then slept soundly and ate well, and during the long hours of the afternoons, when the ships’ engines settled into a routine throbbing from deep below, and most of the other passengers went below-decks to avoid the glaring sunshine, I would find a shaded place and work happily in my notebook. Ideas for new music were coming constantly to me, sometimes in such profusion that I worried that I could not get them down quickly enough before they were lost or supplanted by others.
But the mystery of the adepts remained. I never understood why or how, but they appeared to be following me.
So long as I was aboard a ship and travelling between islands I rarely saw any of them. I knew or suspected, though, that they must be with me, also sailing on the same ships I was aboard but concealed somewhere. There was no other explanation for the fact that whenever I arrived at a port of call they were already there, able to get ashore before me, waiting for me, lined up or in a group by the entrance to the Shelterate halls. I never understood how they did that.
I usually saw the same faces: Pheelp and Renettia were invariably there at the Shelterate entrance but so too were many others. Most of them I came to know, by sight if not by name, because at every island disembarkation one or another of them would step forward and present me with a solution to my endless problem with the gradual tides of time. Money was invariably involved. There was some kind of hierarchy among them, about which of them would take the job. I never worked out how these choices were made, and anyway it seemed to make no difference.
Because my voyages and crossings were mostly short the adjustments of the detriments were often minor, although not much less expensive. Many of the detriments that emerged during this part of my journey were a matter of seconds, cancelled by a short walk along a quayside, or a drive in a car, or a climbing of steps into the main town. Once, after the chain ferry, the adjustment was achieved by a shaking of hands. It cost me ten thalers, even so.
Some of the adepts worked with me more than once: for instance, I had a second short encounter with Pheelp, who took me for a brief walk around a couple of large buildings on the island of Sentier, then brusquely abandoned me in the middle of a street. Afterwards my wristwatch was again showing the right time and I was forty thalers poorer.
Renettia also worked with me again – she took me on a longer detour, a dull car ride in residential streets at the back of a port, a long walk by the sea, time regained, wristwatch inexplicably corrected, money spent.
The wooden shaft of my stave was looking well used. Every adept made new marks. Most of these lines were short, or ran alongside existing scores. Many of them crossed and re-crossed earlier ones – in places there were so many lines they created a hachure effect. One part of the stave, close to the handle, was deeply marked to the point that the wood was scored almost halfway through. I still believed there must be something buried inside the visible wood, something metallic or perhaps silicon, with the capability of recording or noting whatever it was that happened when the Shelterate officials scanned it, or downloaded some sort of information about me into their device. But even in this relatively exposed part of the blade there was no hint that the stave was made of anything other than the wood I could see.
As well as the adepts known to me there were of course more I often saw but never worked with, and so had no knowledge of them at all, certainly not their names. There were others I saw only once – these I assumed must live on whichever island I happened to be passing through at that time, but there were more of them who followed me, or seemed to, wherever I went.
They were always there, hanging around with the others by the Shelterate office of the island where I had just landed, sometimes regarding me furtively from behind a hand, or a skein of long hair which had fallen across their eyes, or, more often, staring away from me as if I did not matter. They all carried knives.
Gradually, the number of adepts around me was increasing. At first there had only ever been half a dozen of them, then the number swelled to about ten, but after my fifth day of spontaneously chosen voyages there were at least twenty of these people waiting for me every time I disembarked. The number went on increasing the further I travelled.
And the central mystery about them remained unsolved. I never saw how they moved from one island to the next.
They did not appear to board with me. Although in some cases I was able to watch the boarding ramps after I was aboard the ships, I did not see them following me up the gangplank. They were invisible to me while the ship was under way except on rare occasions, when for some reason the adept needed to speak to me before we berthed. Then he or she would materialize quietly beside me for as long as it took, before retreating quickly to the decks below. Then when I arrived at the port, there they would be: the waiting group outside the Shelterate building, lurking in the canopy’s shade or standing in the bright sunshine. Sometimes, if it was a night arrival, they would be clustered in the glow of the harbour’s floodlamps, letting their knives dangle suggestively on chains.
It was obvious to me that there was no way they could reach the islands at the same time as me unless they were on the same boat, but I never knew where they were. Did they hide somewhere deep in the bowels of each ship? In a separate section of the vessel, reserved for them? It would have to be away from the passenger cabins, or the open decks. But if such a hiding place existed I never found it.
On the larger steamers there were multiple decks and cargo areas, and I could not search them all. Anyway, I had other things I wished to do with my time.
Some of the boats I sailed on were so small, so simple in design, tha
t it seemed impossible that anyone could be on board without being immediately noticed. This profoundly puzzled me.
Less mysterious, but in its own way intriguing, was the fact that the adepts rarely worked alike. I recalled Renettia’s remark that what they did was an art, not a technique. Each had developed his or her own ways and the practical imperfections always interested me. There was clearly some kind of calculation involved in what they did: they balanced what they knew or felt about the gradual against what they perceived from me. The stave was crucial somehow: was it a record of what they had done, or some means of holding true whatever they had determined was the detriment? And how was that discerned, as a matter of interest?
Some of the adepts did their work by mental exercise: they stared into space, or looked down at the ground or the deck or wherever we were standing. Most of them looked out to sea but a few did so only quickly, while others deliberately scanned the islands that could be seen, or gazed towards the horizon for several minutes. One young woman took me to a beach, then stood immobile on the sloping sand – she warned me to stay well back from her and for about an hour she waited while the rising tide lapped around her legs. From time to time she turned a full circle where she stood. The waves were about to reach her waist when she appeared to break out of her trance, waded back to dry land, then told me to follow her along the beach. Throughout all this I stood in the unshaded glare of the sun.
One of the male adepts used a battery-powered electronic calculator. Another carried a little pad of paper on which he scribbled inscrutable sums. One counted on his fingers. Most of them had a pen and paper in addition to the etching knife, and they would take notes as we walked or drove along. Some of adepts ignored me as they led me through the areas of time’s tidal gradients – others were talkative, almost informative.
The first contact with them was always the same. One adept would detach from the group, approach me and request a sum of money. Mostly this happened outside the Shelterate building, but occasionally it was while I was still on the ship – once I was approached in mid-voyage, a few other times just as the ship was about to dock. The matter of the detriment was never in doubt, because it was a given problem in every encounter. Sometimes it represented time gained, but in most cases it was a true detriment, time that had been lost.