The Snow

by Adam Roberts

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry, I was an idiot. I,’ and I stalled, uncertain how to phrase it without sounding stupid, ‘I like you now.’

  She laughed, a low fluid sound. ‘Ditto,’ she said.

  We cuddled closer.

  We took comfort in one another.

  ‘Your husband, though,’ I said. I felt her go tense in my arms. ‘Hey,’ I said, ‘hey. I’m only saying.’

  ‘I’m sorry. Ain’t it stupid?’ She spoke softly.

  ‘I guess he knows you’re here?’

  ‘I had a fling – I guess you could call it a fling. With you-know-who.’

  ‘[Name deleted]?’

  ‘The very same.’ She sighed, minutely. ‘You and he were an item, too, weren’t you?’

  I sighed myself. ‘I don’t know why, now, when I look back, but yeah, but yeah. He’s here, you know. He’s in the camp. I saw him today, talked a bit with him, and – man – he’s gone loopy.’

  I could sense her smiling in the dark; some minute shift in her facial muscles. ‘Loopy,’ she said. ‘That’s so British. That’s such a British way of putting it. Nuts. Loco.’

  ‘I mean it, though,’ I said. ‘He was always a bit unhinged, but he’s got much worse. I don’t know what they did to him in interrogation, but his mind is losing it.’

  She was quiet for a bit. ‘He found out,’ she said in a smaller voice.

  ‘[Name deleted]?’

  ‘No, my husband,’ she said, with bitterness in her voice. ‘You remember he was running for the Senate? He had these major ambitions, these political ambitions. That’s what upset him the most, I think, when he found out. Not the personal betrayal, but the damage to his political career.’

  ‘He was angry?’

  ‘Sure enough,’ she said. ‘He was all have you any idea of the damage? and how could you do this? and you’ve betrayed not just me but Liberty, you’ve deprived them of a man who would have been a fine Senator.’ She snorted. ‘As if. He was so pompous.’ (The word ‘so’ came out through her Swanee-whistle accent as a reverse-inflected ‘sew’.) ‘He strode up and down. Do you know the worst thing he said?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He said, if it had to be an affair, couldn’t you have picked a less politically damaging man? Can you believe that? I honest-to-god don’t think he minded me having sex with somebody else, I think he could only think about the political fallout. But then they arrested [Name deleted], and then they arrested me. I guess [Name deleted] gave up all his names straight away.’

  ‘Never a brave or discreet man. Did your husband not get you bailed?’

  She snorted again. ‘He came to see me, told me it was the best place for me, that he was filing a legal separation. I said, good. I told him: good, I’m glad. I told him, I wish I’d had the courage to tell him what I’d thought of him before. Selfish. Oh, he was disgusting sometimes.’ She shuddered in my arms, and I held her more closely. ‘Not like your husband,’ she added, slyly.

  ‘He was out of Liberty when I was arrested,’ I said. ‘On manoeuvres somewhere, I don’t know. When we stepped off the plane – and that guy told me that Crow wanted …’

  ‘Crow?’

  ‘That’s how I call him, my husband. He looks kind of like a crow, with the big nose. Or I used to think so. But when that guy said Crow wanted me to be separated from the prisoners and brought to him – I couldn’t believe it.’

  ‘Wasn’t that weird?’ she said, her accent bending the diphthong in ‘weird’ into fluting outlandishness. ‘That whole scene?’

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  ‘I know,’ she echoed. ‘When he wouldn’t believe that you were you? He really couldn’t see past your skin. Did he really not recognise you from before?’

  ‘I guess not.’

  ‘That’s so racist,’ she said.

  ‘It’s not unusual,’ I said.

  ‘It’s outrageous,’ she said, her voice growing louder. ‘What an asshole. I tried to speak up for you, but he just slapped me down. I remember him from Liberty, and he was always this ass-kissing, toady little guy. When I was still with my husband, he’d a jumped if I spoke to him. He’d have been all, hello, how interesting, my, my.’

  ‘Times change,’ I said.

  ‘Hey!’ called somebody from a nearby bed. ‘Will you girls keep it down? We’re trying to get some sleep, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘Sorry,’ we said, together.

  She was quiet for a long time. ‘You wanted to grab that chance,’ she said, finally, in a whisper.

  ‘Grab?’

  ‘The chance to get out of this internment camp – if that’s what this place is. I don’t know. When that guy read out your husband’s name. You wanted to grab the chance.’

  ‘I guess so,’ I said. ‘But it wasn’t to be.’

  ‘I can understand that,’ she said. ‘I can understand you wanting to get away. But I’m glad you didn’t go.’

  And I held her more tightly, and she held me more tightly. And we fell asleep. I’m not going to put down in writing some of the things we did, because it’s none of your business. Besides, the current NUSA climate – or so I understand, from my secluded position – is increasingly puritanical, so it would probably only inflame somebody or other. On the one hand there’s a lot of irrelevant physical description, but that’s just bodies – under the regime of hunger in which everybody in NUSA lived all bodies were bony, men and women; and there really is surprisingly little difference between male bodies and female bodies under such circumstances. On the other hand, there is stuff like love, tenderness, affection, support, words which the world has tried to discredit by making them sound ridiculous, childish, sentimental. But these are important words. These are the only important words. And it is no dishonour that they are childish; that, as I said, she and I were like nervous schoolgirls on their first day of school, holding hands and helping one another through.

  That’s all I want to say about that.

  We were a week in the camp, each day the same as the next. Internees were permitted to wander about uncuffed, but Pander would sometimes repeat the warning that should we leave the perimeter his men had license to shoot at us.

  There were six buildings, five of wood and one of prefab metal walls and roof. There was a vehicle park, in which two snow-tanks, a couple of snow-bikes and some crates were stored. A helicopter was swaddled with a tarpaulin outside the fence, next to the grid airstrip on which our plane had landed. From time to time, on odd days, a plane would fly in with supplies, and depart after an hour. Sometimes it would depart towards the west, and sometimes towards the east.

  I spent most of that week with [Name deleted]. She and I stuck together, and we slept together. She told me about her life before the Snow, and I told her about mine. She was solicitous on the subject of Minnie.

  On the other hand, there was [Name deleted], who was usually to be found sitting on crates outside one of the army buildings. He sat there, his head burnt brown by the sun, like an old Buddhist monk. Sometimes he would rock backwards and forwards, talking gently to himself. It was pitiful.

  [Name deleted] would have nothing to do with him. I couldn’t draw her on the subject of her affair with him, either. I think she felt ashamed to have gotten herself caught up in such a situation. I didn’t press her.

  Nevertheless, I found myself caught up with him, the mad old monk, almost despite myself. I suppose I need to explain how it was that I found myself outside the fence with him, in the dark small hours of the morning, trudging across the ice.

  He came up behind me one afternoon when I was standing at the wire, looking over the pure white monotony of the landscape beyond. ‘I know the truth of it,’ he said.

  ‘Hi, [Name deleted],’ I said. ‘How you doing?’

  ‘The truth of the snow,’ he said urgently, like an old tramp haranguingly panhandling me. He took hold of my elbow. ‘C’mon, the truth of it, you want to know the truth of it?’

  ‘Let go my arm,’ I said,
but I didn’t snap at him. ‘Jesus, you were always like this, you know. So intense, so obsessed with truth, such a pain in the arse. You always believed the truth was a hidden thing, a secret thing. Did you ever think that maybe the truth isn’t like that? You ever think that? Maybe the truth is exactly what you can see, and not hidden at all? Maybe the truth is in plain view.’

  He seemed delighted at this. ‘At last, you get it,’ he said. ‘At last, somebody gets it. That’s it! The truth is all around! Look at all this snow, lying all around. The sheer amount of it, that’s the truth!’

  ‘You’re crazy,’ I said genially. ‘That’s just, that’s nonsense. How is that truth?’

  ‘Look at the snow,’ he urged me, ‘and tell me where it came from.’

  I ignored him, but he repeated the question, and so to humour him, I said: ‘It fell from the clouds,’ as if to a kid.

  ‘So much, though? Could so much fall from the clouds?’

  ‘[Name deleted], I don’t see what you’re getting at. It’s all there, so I guess so much could. So much did, after all.’

  But he was shaking his head. ‘That’s what I mean. Use your noggin.’ And he wandered off.

  Another day I went over to him, and talked to him for half an hour or more. We talked about the camp, about the snow. He said to me, ‘They’re at a camp, you know. They’re negotiating.’ I said, ‘I heard there were some negotiations goings on, but I don’t see with who – unless it’s the Australians.’ ‘No,’ said [Name deleted]. ‘It’s aliens.’ I almost laughed, but stopped myself, remembering how upset he had become on a previous occasion when I laughed at his alien-abduction story. Then he said, ‘General [Name deleted] is there, he’s leading the negotiations.’ I said, ‘My husband.’ He said, ‘Who are you again?’ with genuine puzzlement in his eyes.

  I knew his wits were badly disarranged.

  The third occasion was late in one afternoon. I wasn’t with [Name deleted] because she had gone for an afternoon lie-down, and I was standing alone when he came up to me. ‘You want to meet them?’ he asked me. ‘You want me to take you there?’

  ‘Where’s that, [Name deleted]?’ I asked, indulgent.

  ‘Your husband.’

  ‘So you know who I am today, do you?’ I smiled.

  ‘I’m serious,’ he said. ‘I’m serious. It’s a few hours’ walk. You can meet them – the aliens, they’re ready to meet me. I talk to them.’

  ‘You talk to them?’

  ‘They,’ he said, ‘talk to me.’

  His gaze was hard, determined, convinced. It was almost convincing, the complete conviction with which he carried it off. ‘Really?’

  ‘This is the way to do it,’ he said. ‘We get out before dawn, under the fence. We walk for a couple of hours. Then we’re at the out-camp, where your husband is. Don’t you want to go meet your husband?’

  I thought to myself: it would cut the Gordian knot of the ridiculous official refusal to recognise me. It would be worth it just to see Pander reprimanded for not obeying his superior’s orders. I pictured the scene: ‘I told you to bring me my wife, here she is, why have you been keeping her with the other internees?’ It would be worth it just for that. I didn’t believe [Name deleted] about the aliens, of course, but I was more prepared to believe that he really knew the way to where my husband was. Perhaps he did know.

  ‘How do you know?’ I asked him. ‘How do you know where he is?’

  ‘I’ve been there. I’ve been involved in the negotiations.’

  ‘You? Negotiating with Australians?’

  ‘No,’ he said, petulant. ‘No, there’s no Australians. But they flew me to the for’ard base a couple times. It’s due east of here, maybe four hours’ walk. Do you want to go or not?’ Why else,’ he pressed me, ‘why else do you think they brought me here?’

  ‘Why did they bring any of us?’

  ‘Me?’ he insisted. ‘Why did they bring me?’

  ‘Jesus, [Name deleted], I don’t know.’

  ‘To play a part in the negotiations,’ he said simply. ‘I’m the key, I’m the chosen one. I’ll come get you before dawn.’

  His words got under my skin. That night I couldn’t sleep properly. Perhaps my sleeplessness, my muddyheadedness, played a part in it. I lay in [Name deleted]’s arms, and her breathing was soothing, but I became conscious of aches in my neck and shoulders. I executed complicated, super-slow movements to extricate my arm from behind her back, to unhook my leg from between hers, without waking her up. I tried lying facing away from her, or turning back to her. But no matter what I did I could not sleep. He had got to me, even in his broken-down madness. Eventually, after what seemed an eternity, I got up. I couldn’t sleep.

  The windows of the block were still black, I got up, put on my boots and coat, and went outside. [Name deleted] was sitting just by the door in the darkness.

  When I came through he stood up as if he had been expecting me, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. ‘Come on,’ he said.

  ‘Look,’ I said, meaning to add, this is crazy, we can’t just stroll out over the snow. But I didn’t say that. I just followed him across the compound. He made his way to the fence and went down on all fours. As I approached I could see that he was digging at the snow at the foot of the fence.

  ‘I changed my mind, I don’t think we should leave the compound,’ I said, as I came over to him. But he ignored me. He was madder than ever. ‘They talk to me,’ he said as he scrabbled at the snow, ‘they talk through me – I’m the key. I’m like the universal translator. You ever see Star Trek? And they – and the army – want to use me for their own ends. But I won’t be used. I’m too canny for them. I communicate what I want to communicate.’ He laughed.

  ‘You’re crazy,’ I told him, hugging myself for warmth.

  He dug with a splintered board from a packing crate, and I stood watching him. You shouldn’t, by the way, get the impression that this camp was like a prisoner-of-war place, or any of that movie cliché (assuming you’ve seen any of those sorts of movie). There were no guard towers, no searchlights, no guards patrolling the border with Alsatians – nothing like that. The guards were probably all asleep. Surely they were. There was nowhere to escape to, that’s the point. [Name deleted] said he knew where my husband was camped, and he said it was a doable walk over the ice, but I only half believed him. And failing that we were sixty miles from Liberty in god-knows-what direction, and thousands of miles of snow desert at the end of every other compass point. Why would we be so foolish as to break out? Still, Pander’s words kept going round in my head, my men have orders to shoot anyone found outside the compound, and I was getting panicky.

  ‘Are you sure,’ I said to [Name deleted], as he dug, ‘that you know what you’re doing?’

  ‘Are you sure that you know the truth?’ he replied. He was hip deep in the hole he had dug.

  The snow glittered all around, steely grey-blue under the quarter-moon.

  ‘You know what a psychiatrist would call it,’ I told him, hugging myself and wishing for the thousandth time that I had a cigarette. ‘He would call it your hypomanic state. It alternates with depressive periods. The colonel said that your grasp on reality was poor, that you were a fantasist,’ He wasn’t listening to any of this. ‘It means you’re mad. You’re a suitable case for treatment.’

  ‘Here we go,’ he gasped, pulling the bottom of the fence towards him where it had come free of its ground, like a rotten tooth. He ducked down, and wriggled up on the other side. ‘Come on! Come on!’

  I took one last look at the camp. ‘If Pander had only believed me,’ I said, wistfully, ‘I’d be with my husband right now, and I wouldn’t have to do this ridiculous thing.’ But I dropped into the hole, pulled the wire over my head and shoulders and clambered up on the outside.

  We started away immediately at a trot, heading easterly towards a gleaming bar of paler sky. ‘It’s nearly dawn,’ I said.

  He was laughing, softly. It didn’t reass
ure me about his sanity. ‘On a flat plane,’ he told me, as if reciting a school lesson, ‘the horizon is further away than it would be in an undulating landscape. Accordingly we must travel further than we otherwise would to get out of sight of the camp.’

  ‘We’re leaving,’ I pointed out, ‘a pretty obvious trail.’ Not only the hole dug under the fence, but scratchy footmarks over the frozen foam of the snow.

  ‘That doesn’t matter, that doesn’t matter,’ [Name deleted] cackled. ‘We’ll be over the horizon by dawn, and then they’ll come – then they’ll come – then it won’t matter. They talk to me, I understand them. None of the others understand them. Maybe this time I’ll ask them for sanctuary.’

  ‘Sure,’ I said, panting a little to keep up with him. ‘They can take us into their spaceship, give us a nice cooked breakfast. They eat breakfast, do they?’

  He giggled at this. ‘You’re funny,’ he said. It was like being with a hyperactive and slightly paranoid thirteen-year-old.

  The going was good, the snow firm enough under foot with the night’s hardened carapace of frost. It would start to soften as the sun rose. During the day open snow became a much more treacherous place, liable to open suddenly beneath the unwary foot, cracking and bubbling slowly, opening cold lips to form crevasses of various sizes. The best time to walk on open snow is at night. But of course you know that already.

  We walked well, we covered the ground, with ease. It was hard to tell the time, except that the sky to the east grew paler, more platinum-blue, the light suffusing up through the purple and black of the night sky, rising as slowly as osmosis. The stars changed their hue, thinning and then vanishing in the growing light. There were several silk-effect clouds hanging near the horizon, darker blue against the lighter blue-rinse colour of the sky. By the time these clouds had turned mustard- and orange-coloured with the imminent sun we had walked so far that the camp could no longer be seen behind us. [Name deleted] was singing in a warbly tenor:

  Here come the sun, doo-doo-doo

  Here come the sun, doo-doo-doo

  Here come the sun

  My leg muscles were starting to complain at the constant trudging, but I also felt a certain elation – to be out of the camp, to have committed myself to some action (even so crazy an action as [Name deleted]’s) rather than just to be sitting around passively. And also, I’ll confess, I was curious to see what strange little green-men [Name deleted] was going to conjure out of the snow. I wanted to see him bring his fantasy to the point of proof. I had no idea. I had absolutely no idea.