The Watched

III

In the evening, Ordier drove over to Jenessa’s apartment in Tumo Town. He went reluctantly, partly because of the necessity of making civil conversation with strangers—something he was habitually unwilling to do—and partly because he had more than a suspicion that the talk would center around the Qataari refugees. Jenessa had said that her visitor was a colleague, which meant that he was an anthropologist, and anthropologists only came to Tumo to study the Qataari. Since his discovery in the folly, Ordier found all discussion of the Qataari unbearably unpleasant, as if some private domain was being invaded. For this and other reasons, Ordier had never told Jenessa what he knew. The other guests had already arrived when Ordier walked in, and Jenessa introduced them as Jacj and Luovi Parren. His first impression of Parren was unfavorable: he was a short, overweight, and intense man who shook Ordier’s hand with nervous, jerky movements, then turned away at once to continue the conversation with Jenessa that Ordier’s arrival had interrupted. Normally, Ordier would have bridled at the snub, but Jenessa flashed him a soothing look, and anyway he was in no mood to try to like the man. He poured himself a drink and went to sit beside Luovi, Parren’s wife. During the aperitifs and meal, the conversation stayed on general subjects, with the islands of the Archipelago the main topic. Parren and his wife had only just arrived from the north, and were anxious to hear what they could about various islands where they might make a home. The only islands they had so far seen were Muriseay—which was where most immigrants arrived—and Tumo. Ordier noticed that when he and Jenessa were talking about the other islands they knew, it was Luovi who showed the most interest, and she kept asking how far they were from Tumo. “Jacj must be near his work,” she said to Ordier. “I think I told you, Yvann,” Jenessa said. “Jacj is here to study the Qataari.” “Yes, of course.”

“I know what you’re thinking, Ordier,” Parren said. “Why should I succeed where others have failed? Let me just say this, that I wouldn’t have left the mainland to pursue something I thought was an insurmountable problem. There are ways that haven’t been tried yet.” “We were talking about this before you arrived,” Jenessa said to Ordier. “Jacj believes he can do better than us.” “How do you feel about that?” Ordier said. Jenessa shrugged, and looked at Jacj and his wife. “I don’t have any personal ambition.” “Ambition, Jenessa dear, is the foundation of achievement.” Luovi’s smile across the table, first at Jenessa, then at Ordier, was brittle. “For a social anthropologist?” Ordier said. “For all scientists. Jacj has taken leave from a brilliant career to study the Qataari. But of course you would know his work already.” “Naturally.” Ordier was wondering how long it would be before Parren, or his wife, discovered that one never took “leave” to visit the Archipelago. Spitefully, it amused Ordier to think that Luovi probably imagined, in anticipation of her husband’s success, that completed research into the Qataari society would buy them a ticket back to the north, where the brilliant career would be resumed. The islands were full of exiles who had once nurtured similar illusions. Ordier was looking covertly at Jenessa, trying to divine how she was taking all this. She had spoken truly when she denied personal ambition, but that was not the whole story. Because Jenessa was Archipelago-born she had a sense of nationalism, embracing all the islands, that Ordier himself lacked.

She had sometimes talked of the history of the Archipelago, of the distant years when the Covenant of Neutrality had first come into being. A few of the islands had put up resistance to the enforced neutralization; for some years there had been a unity of purpose, but the big northern nations had eventually overcome the resistance. The whole Archipelago was said to be pacified now, but contact between the islands, for most of the ordinary inhabitants, was restricted to the mail the ferries carried, and one never knew for sure just what was happening in the remoter areas of the Archipelago. Occasionally there were rumors of sabotage on one or another of the islands, or of the armies’ rest-camps being attacked, but on the whole everyone was waiting for the war to end. Jenessa did have a purpose to her work, although it was not of the same order as Jacj Parren’s aggressive aspiration to fame. Ordier knew that she, and other island-born scientists, saw knowledge as a key to freedom, that when the war was over such knowledge would help liberate the Archipelago. She had no illusions about the immediate worth of her own calling—without access to the culturally dominant societies of the north, whatever research she concluded would be futile—but it was scientific knowledge nonetheless. “Where do you fit into all this, Yvann?” Parren was saying. “You’re not an anthropologist, I gather?” “That’s correct. I’m retired.” “So young?” “Not so young as it appears.” “Jenessa was telling me you live up by the Qataari valley. I don’t suppose it’s possible to see their camp from there?” “You can climb the rocks,” Ordier said. “I’ll take you up there, if you like. But you wouldn’t see anything. The Qataari have guards all along the ridge.”

“Ah… then I could see the guards!” “Of course. But you wouldn’t find it very satisfactory. As soon as they see you, they’ll turn their backs.” Parren was lighting a cigar from one of the candles on the table, and he leaned back with a smile and blew smoke into the air. “A response of sorts.” “The only one,” Jenessa said. “It’s worthless as an observation, because it’s responsive to the presence of the observer.” “But it fits a pattern.” “Does it?” Jenessa said. “How are we to know? We should be concerned with what they would do if we weren’t there.” “You say that’s impossible to discover,” Parren said. “And if we weren’t here at all? If there was no one else on the island?” “Now you delve into the realms of fantasy. Anthropology is a pragmatic science, my dear. We are as concerned with the impact of the modern world on isolated societies as we are with the societies themselves. If we must, we intrude on the Qataari and evaluate their response to that. It is a better study than no study.” “Do you think we haven’t tried that?” Jenessa said. “There is simply no point. The Qataari wait for us to leave, and wait, and wait…” “Just as I said. A response of sorts.” “But a meaningless one!” Jenessa said. “It becomes a trial of patience.” “Which the Qataari must necessarily win?” “Look, Jacj.” Jenessa, visibly irritated now, was leaning forward across the table, and Ordier noticed that strands of her hair were falling across the uneaten dessert on her plate. “When the Qataari were first landed here, about eighteen months ago, a team went into the camp. We were testing exactly the kind of response you’re talking about. We made no secret of our presence, nor of what we wanted. The Qataari simply waited. They sat or stood exactly wherever they were when they noticed us. They did nothing for seventeen days! They didn’t eat, drink, speak. They slept where they were, and if that happened to be in a muddy pool, or on stones, then it made no difference.” “What about the children?” “Children too… like the adults.” “And bodily functions? And what about pregnant women? Did they just sit down and wait for you to leave?” “Yes, Jacj. In fact, it was because of two pregnant women that we called off the experiment. We were frightened of what might happen to them. As it turned out, they both had to be taken to hospital. One of them lost her child.” “Did they resist being taken away?” “Of course not.” Luovi said: “But then surely Jacj is right? It is a social response to the outside world.” “It’s no response at all!” Jenessa said. “It’s the opposite of a response, it’s the stopping of all activity. I can show you the films we took… the people didn’t even fidget. They simply watched us, and waited for us to leave.” “Then they were in some kind of trance?” “No, they were waiting !” Watching Jenessa’s animated expression, Ordier wondered if he recognized in her some of his own dilemma about the Qataari. She had always claimed that her interest in them was a scientific one, but in every other aspect of her life she was rarely detached from an emotional reaction to people. And the Qataari were special people, not just to anthropologists. Of all the races in the world, the Qataari were simultaneously the best and the least known. There was not a nation on the northern continent that did not have an historical or social link with the Qataari. For one country there would be the story of the Qataari warriors who had come to fight for their side in some long-forgotten war; for another, there would be the heritage of public buildings or palaces built by visiting Qataari architects and masons; for yet another, there would be the tales of the Qataari doctors who had come in times of plague. Physically, the Qataari were a beautiful people: it was said in Ordier’s own country, for instance, that the model for Edrona—symbol of male potency, wisdom, and mystery, captured in a marble sculpture and famous throughout the world—had been a Qataari. Similarly, a Qataari woman, painted by Vaskarreta nine centuries before, embodied sensual beauty and virginal lust; her face, pirated in the cause of commerce, glowed out from the labels of a dozen different types of cosmetic. Yet for all the legends and visited history, the civilized world knew almost nothing of the Qataari homeland. The Qataari were indigenous to the southern continent, the wild tract of land where the war had been fought for the last two centuries. On the northern coast, the Qataari peninsula pointed a long, cliff-bound finger of land into the Midway Sea, seeming to stretch out to touch the more southerly islands of the Dream Archipelago. The peninsula was joined to the mainland by a narrow, swampy isthmus, and beyond that, where the first mountains rose, there always stood a line of guards… but guards like no other. The Qataari never tried to prevent others entering, but guarded themselves so they always had warning of the presence of outsiders. Few people, in fact, had ever been to the peninsula.

The way across land was through dense jungle, and an approach from the sea was difficult because along the entire rocky coastline there was only one small jetty. The Qataari community seemed to be self-sufficient in every way, and their customs, culture, and social structure were all but unknown. The Qataari were thought to be of unique cultural importance in the world: their society apparently represented an evolutionary link between the civilized nations of the north, the people of the Archipelago, and the barbarians and peasants of the south. Several ethnologists had visited the peninsula over the years, but all had been frustrated in their work by the same silent waiting that Jenessa had described. Only one aspect of their life had been established, although its details were as much conjecture as knowledge: the Qataari dramatized. Aerial photographs, and the reports of visitors, revealed that there were open-air auditoria by every village, and there were always people gathered there. The speculation was that the Qataari depended on drama as a symbolic means of action: for decision-making, for the resolution of problems, for celebrations. What few pieces of Qataari literature had reached the world’s libraries were baffling to a non-Qataari readership: the prose and verse were impenetrably elliptical, and any character named played a symbolic role, as well as having a seemingly endless list of contracted, familiar, or formal names, and appeared to represent a part in a scheme much larger than what could be inferred as the subject matter. The writing of theses on Qataari literature was a popular activity in northern universities. The few Qataari who traveled, who visited the northern continent, spoke obliquely of such matters, seeing themselves as actors in a cultural play. One Qataari, in Ordier’s country a few years before, had been secretly filmed while he was alone; evidently deep within a personal drama, the Qataari remonstrated with himself, declaimed to an imaginary audience, wept and shouted. A few minutes later the same man had been seen at a public reception, and no one present had discerned anything unusual about his behavior. The war had come, inevitably, to the Qataari peninsula. It had begun when one of the two combatant sides had started the construction of a deep-water refueling base on the northernmost tip of the peninsula. As this was an area hitherto unclaimed by either side, it constituted a breach of whatever neutrality the Qataari had enjoyed until then. The opposing side had invaded the peninsula, and before long a devastating struggle had begun. Soon the Qataari knew, as the rest of their continent knew, the shattering totality of the war, with its neural dissociation gases, its scintillas, its scatterflames, its acid rains. The villages were flattened, the rose plantations burned, the people killed in thousands; in a few weeks the Qataari society was destroyed. A relief mission was sent from the north, and within a few more weeks the surviving Qataari were evacuated unresisting from their homeland. They had been brought to Tumo—one of the islands nearest to the peninsula—and a refugee camp had been built for them. They were housed and fed by the Tumoit authorities, but the Qataari, independent as ever, did what they could to close their camp to the outside world. In the first few days huge canvas screens had been put up around the perimeter fence, silent guards stood by all the entrances. Everyone who had entered the camp since—medical teams, agricultural advisers, builders—returned with the same report: the Qataari were waiting. It was not polite waiting, it was not impatient waiting. As Jenessa had said, it was a cessation of activity, a long silence. Ordier realized that Jacj Parren and Jenessa were still arguing, and that Parren was addressing him: “…You say that if we climbed this ridge of yours, we should see guards?” “Yes.” Jenessa answered for him.

“But why are they there? I thought they never left the camp.” “They’re growing roses in the valley. The Qataari roses.” Parren leaned back in his chair with a grunt of satisfaction. “Then at least they can be studied doing that!” Jenessa looked helplessly at Ordier across the table. He stared back at her, trying not to reveal anything with his expression. He was sitting forward with his elbows on the edge of the table, his hands linked in front of his face. He had had a shower before driving to Jenessa’s apartment this evening, but a certain fragrance was still on his skin. He could smell it as he looked back at her, feeling a trace of the pleasant sexual arousal that was induced by the petals of the Qataari rose.