Viator

The canopy of the linden tree was so dense that the leaves shielded Wilander from rain whenever he lay beneath them, but one Sunday morning a stiff west wind blew in off the sea, driving the rain sideways along the deck, and he was forced to retreat into the officers’ mess, where he sat at a long table, drinking coffee, feeling submerged beneath the noise of the storm, staring out the open door at the lashings of the crown and gazing at the walls, hoping for a let-up so he wouldn’t get drenched when he walked into Kaliaska later that day. Like the majority of Viator’s walls, those of the mess were painted green and the paint had flaked away in spots, hundreds of spots, creating a design of pale lime and brownish black from which, as Wilander’s eyes moved across it, there emerged an astonishingly detailed image rather like one that might be obtained from the Xerox of a photograph done on a copier whose toner was running low, a landscape contrived of darkly etched shapes and blank spaces: it seemed he was looking from a great height between the tops of two firs, down across a forested slope and lower hills toward a circular lagoon at the edge of the sea; surrounding the lagoon was a considerable city. It might have been, he told himself, a variant perspective of the image he had noticed some weeks previously on the passageway wall outside the mess. The impact of this casual observation did not strike him at once, but when, after the span of half a minute, it did, he stepped out into the passageway to determine if the similarity was actual or imagined. He went back and forth from the mess to the passageway, comparing details, and it became clear that, although the image on the wall of the mess offered a more distant view of the lagoon than did the one in the passageway, there were too many correspondences between them to ignore. Each portrayed a large building with a humped roof, like a sports arena or a convention center, on the inland margin of the lagoon; and on the thin strip of land separating the waters of the lagoon from the sea stood a palatial structure, its uppermost floor a third the size of the floor below, atop which was mounted some sort of array; and there were also correspondences, he believed, between the two images and the forest he had seen in Halmus’ mirror: not only were they were aerial views of the same landscape viewed from different angles, that landscape was in its hilly conformation, in the shape of its coastline, very like the forest that enclosed Viator, albeit more extensive and having a city at its heart.