Hieroglyph

by Ed Finn

  In fact, Zak had gotten a letter from Kayla and Saladin. An actual letter! So quaint. But his old e-mail had gone belly-up along with his company and his finances, and they probably had no other way to reach him. They had invited him to visit for the holidays. But if they were happy together, it would only depress him to visit, and if they had broken up—being as Saladin was still, despite everything, his best friend—it would depress him even more. Besides, what would they do? Reminisce about the good old days, when they had maxed every credit card they could apply for and every loan they could scrounge in a doomed attempt to keep his business from going under before launch?

  “No,” Zak said. “I’m free.”

  PREPARING TO VISIT ANTARCTICA was, Zak discovered, much like preparing to visit the moon. They moved their base of operations to the Mistry Oreti in Invercargill, New Zealand, the southernmost hotel in Mistry’s chain. This would be the hotel that Mistry would use to send tourists to Antarctica. So in a sense their expedition was a dry run for the tourist trade.

  The flight from Miami took more than thirty hours on Virgin Australia. The final hop to reach Invercargill was on Air New Zealand, but Mistry had booked them business class, instead of crammed into tiny seats like cattle to slaughter. There were some advantages to working for a billionaire. Zak spent the flight thinking about transportation. Could they send tourists to Antarctica on zeppelins? Back in the day, the Hindenburg had flown passengers from Germany to Rio de Janeiro, so Miami to Antarctica should be doable. He made some calculations and sketched designs. Mrs. Binder also spent much of the flight on her laptop, working on what, Zak could not tell.

  Once they arrived, the first order of business was acquiring supplies for the trip. There was a list of “suggested” gear supplied by Scott Base, the New Zealand scientific station that would be their first stop. The list of required clothing was twenty-eight items long, starting with long underwear and moving layer by layer to an outer shell. Each item had to be tried on, to verify that it fit over the layers underneath and was roomy enough to allow a full range of motion.

  “This is like a space suit,” Zak complained.

  “That’s what you asked for,” Mrs. Binder said.

  “I’m thinking microwave heating,” he said. “We could have a phased-array microwave antenna, sending a low-power beam to keep the suits warm. No reason Antarctica clothing should be any heavier than it needs to be.”

  “Tourists might find that scary.”

  “Feedback circuitry to make sure it doesn’t overheat. And microwave-absorbing sun-goggles, to make sure the beam doesn’t get to the eyes. That’s the only part of the body that’s really affected by microwaves.”

  Mrs. Binder was checking out gloves. Oddly, although she didn’t strike him as a skier, she already had most of the extreme-weather clothing on the list.

  “You don’t need to join this scouting trip, you know,” Zak said.

  “That’s sweet. I do like to see property before we place money on it, though. It’s surprising what you don’t see until you actually see it.”

  “We’ll be taking photos. Lots of photos. You won’t need to be there in person.”

  “I’ll be okay.” Mrs. Binder shrugged. “I don’t expect it could be any worse than the scouting trip for the Mount Everest hotel.”

  Zak was astonished. “You wanted to build a hotel on Everest?”

  “We scouted a site. The numbers ended up looking marginal, and the politics even more marginal, so we didn’t follow through.”

  “Shit,” Zak said. “And I thought I was the crazy one.” That did explain her cold-weather gear. “I picked Antarctica because I thought Everest was too hard.”

  Across the street from the hotel in Invercargill was an enormous billboard with pictures of penguins, and the huge slogan “Save Antarctica for the Animals.” Zak gazed out the window. “That’s the Rainbow Earth Coalition. The people who ran that magazine objecting to the hotel. They know we’re here?”

  “Anjel Earth runs that organization,” Mrs. Binder said. “If he knows that we’re planning to build in Antarctica, he might guess we’d come here first.”

  “That can’t be his real name,” Zak said.

  “I couldn’t say. But it wouldn’t take a genius to figure where we’d stay, and according to the newspapers, he’s a pretty sharp guy. Or it may just be coincidence.”

  “Kind of creepy,” Zak said. “Isn’t he the guy who rammed that Japanese whaling ship?”

  “I thought that was a different group,” she said. “I think these guys just harass them—circle around the whaling ships with motorboats and shout at them through megaphones.”

  “Great.”

  THEIR TRIP SOUTH WAS on an Australian-flagged icebreaker, Opal Star. A Rainbow Earth ship shadowed them out of the harbor.

  The crew Mrs. Binder had hired as assistants included a civil engineer from the hotel’s staff, a polar geologist, a biologist, and a pilot. Their names, he had learned, were Ashanti, Anita, Alexander, and Steve, but he had already lost track of who did what. If he had a question, he would randomly ask one of them.

  As they left the port of Bluff, the day was beautiful as a postcard for a New Zealand vacation. Zak watched from the rail at the stern of the icebreaker; the Rainbow Earth ship followed about a quarter mile behind. It was about a hundred feet in length, rugged but clearly powerful, and painted with orange and black leopard spots.

  Steve—or was it Alexander?—was looking through a pair of binoculars borrowed from one of the crewmen. “Can you see what the banners say?” asked Zak.

  Steve—if it was Steve—adjusted the focus. “The banner on this side says ‘People Before Profits.’ ” He put the binoculars down and put his hand up to shade his eyes.

  Zak borrowed the binoculars. He could now make out the ship’s name, Earth Avenger, and could see a pair of bright yellow Zodiacs hanging on one side. He’d seen that ship on television. It was a decommissioned Coast Guard cutter that the Rainbow Earth Coalition had repurposed for harassing oil tankers, whalers, and trawlers fishing in protected waters. The Rainbow Coalition were the good guys in all the news stories; it felt odd to have them on his tail.

  “They’re following us,” he said. “I doubt that’s coincidence.”

  “Yep,” said Steve.

  “Looks faster than our boat.”

  “Yep.”

  Zak focused the binoculars on the man standing at the prow. He was perhaps thirty, with a full beard and a long ponytail of chestnut-brown hair, wearing a tie-dye shirt in swirls of green and blue. Zak said, “He’s staring at us.”

  “Who?”

  “Anjel Earth.”

  Zak brought the fact that they were being followed to the attention of one of the icebreaker’s crew. The only response was “We noticed.” When he pressed further, the captain told him, “It’s a free ocean. If they’re still following us in another day, I may radio over and ask them what they’re about.”

  Once they got out on the ocean, the voyage quickly turned boring. Zak went back to his cabin and took out his laptop to do some work. But with the rolling of the ship he found that if he focused on the screen, he felt queasy. It was going to be a long trip.

  On the flight in, Zak had come up with another new idea: the hotel would be made from ice. Not the main structural element—that would be a trusswork of cold hard steel—but as a shell outside an air-gap insulating layer, the ice would serve as a second layer of insulation and stiffening at the same time. It would be translucent to allow natural light in. And it would make the building appear to be a natural part of the landscape. It would make a dazzling sight, glittering in the sun.

  At night they could shine lasers on it—it would be magnificent.

  Seasick or not, he needed to do some design work, get the idea fleshed out. He went back to his computer.

  IN A FEW DAYS they started seeing ice. Zak had never realized that an iceberg would be such a startling crystalline blue. He stared, fascinated. Mrs. Binder
came up beside him.

  “Is this natural?” he said. “Are they always that color?”

  “I believe so.”

  She pointed off to his left. “You’re looking in the wrong direction, though. Look there.”

  He stared in the direction she was pointing. “Where?”

  “To the left of that iceberg. See the spouts?”

  “Yes?”

  “Wait. Okay, now—there! See it? Whales.”

  “Oh my God.”

  Sometime after the first icebergs appeared, Earth Avenger stopped following, possibly because the captain wanted to avoid the potentially ship-killing bergs, or perhaps because Anjel Earth was more interested in following whales.

  As the icebreaker approached the Ross Sea, the coast of Antarctica loomed up on the starboard side, rugged peaks like the gleaming white molars of ancient giants. They glided past mountains, each one more magnificent than the last. Zak, whose experience of mountains had been mostly limited to the foothills of the Appalachians, had never seen anything like it.

  Despite predictions, they did not have to smash through floating ice to reach Scott Base. “It’s been a warm spring,” Ashanti (Was she the polar geologist? Zak wondered. Or the pilot?) said. The sea was covered by a jigsaw-puzzle pattern of ice, but the only ice they had to break shattered at the first touch of the ship’s bow. “The ice isn’t usually thin like this.”

  “All the better for us,” Mrs. Binder said. She had spent most of the trip in her cabin, possibly suffering from seasickness. Or perhaps she was just catching up on an unending backlog of work. She had joined them on the deck as they cruised up to Scott.

  After they left the ship, they were transported the last few miles to Scott Base by what was called a “taxi.” This taxi turned out to be a Toyota troop-carrier, painted bright red, equipped with snow tracks instead of tires. Scott Base was a collection of lime-green buildings scattered higgledy-piggledy across the slope of a hill. “Why in the world did they choose that color?” Zak wondered aloud.

  “Makes them visible,” Mrs. Binder said. “Harder to get lost.”

  “How lost can people get? This is an island.”

  Mrs. Binder shrugged.

  “You think this place is ugly, you should see McMurdo,” Steve said.

  “We made a wise aesthetic choice when we ruled this out as the hotel site,” Mrs. Binder said.

  They were welcomed to Scott Base by a burly man with a bushy beard nearly matching the orange of the down vest he wore. He called them all “cuz” and introduced himself as doctor something or other with such a strong accent that it sounded almost like a Scottish burr. They carried their luggage to their dorm. The small dorm rooms were equipped with bunk beds and tagged with old Christmas decorations.

  They weren’t going to stay long at the base, though. In the morning—to the extent that there was a morning, in a place where the sun barely broke the horizon—they were to undergo Antarctic Field Training, a mandatory class for people arriving at the base. Then they would board the Twin Otter for their scouting trip.

  Training complete, the orange-bearded scientist saw them to the runway, a section of ice that had been flattened by tractors. He maintained a running commentary that, after Zak got used to the short vowels of his Kiwi accent, he almost understood. The gist was that he loved Antarctica, loved the idea of a hotel, thought that everybody on Earth should visit, and oh, wasn’t the weather amazingly warm for the season. “So you’re to go tramping for a squiz at the wop-wops, eh?” he said. “Beaut of a day, cuz. Beaut.”

  Zak wouldn’t have called it “beaut,” but he did think that the dire warnings that they needed layered parkas or they would die had been overkill, aimed at scaring people away from Antarctica rather than practical travel advice. Scott Base was no colder than a bad winter in Boston.

  Their first trip was to be just a flyover, Zak and Mrs. Binder photographing the site from the air, with Steve as pilot and Ashanti as copilot. So it seemed Steve and Ashanti were both pilots.

  The airplane was an old Twin Otter, equipped with skis instead of wheels and painted brilliant green like everything else in the camp. “Magnificent airplane,” Steve said, and thumped the side of it with his fist. “Solid like a brick. They don’t make them any more reliable than this.” He looked up at the sky. “Wish I had a decent weather report, but it looks good to me. Let’s go.”

  “What’s wrong with the weather report?” Zak asked.

  “Weather service won’t give us more than a six-hour predict,” Steve said. “Don’t get me started.”

  “No. Really.”

  Ashanti answered. “Turns out that a weather satellite covering North America went out of service, and there wasn’t a spare ready—budget cuts. So they shifted the satellite that’s supposed to cover here to take over there until a new one is launched. So, end result, the meteorologist can’t get a good squiz on what’s over the horizon.”

  “Squiz?” Zak asked.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Been talking with too many Kiwis lately.”

  “So,” Zak said. “That a problem?”

  “Nah,” Steve said. “We’re not going to be gone that long.”

  They had filed a flight plan, but it had been deliberately vague, “aerial surveillance along the ice shelf and the coast toward Cape Adare.” Mistry had given firm instructions to not reveal the exact location they had their eyes on. That was clearly paranoid—no other hotel chain was about to outbid them for the spot—but Mrs. Binder seemed to accept it as standard procedure.

  Antarctica was even more impressive viewed from the air than from the ship. They followed the Trans-Antarctic mountain range, flying over glaciers and snowfields. Seen from the air, it was very different from how it had seemed on the maps and satellite views Zak had studied. He saw several possible sites he’d missed before. He kept the map and a GPS in his lap, making notes every time he saw a good place for a hotel, or a possible tour excursion.

  After about two hours in the air, they reached the hotel site that they had identified. As Steve circled, they both photographed out the windows and exchanged comments. The steep northern face of the peak that they had tagged “ski mountain” on the maps was barren gray rock. But the south slope looked perfect, with a thick blanket of smooth snow. Below it, the slope leveled out to a patch of land with an ice-free harbor on the east, and a snow-covered glacier to the south.

  “I can take us down, if you like,” Steve said.

  “Land?” Zak said.

  “Sure, no problem. The plane’s built for this. That glacier’s as flat as an ironing board. That was where you were planning on putting the runway, right?”

  “Yeah,” Zak said, dubiously.

  “That glacier is twelve thousand years old,” Ashanti said. “It’s a hundred meters thick, if that’s what you’re worried about. It will take the weight of the plane. A hundred planes.”

  “How do you know that for sure?” Zak asked.

  Ashanti looked at him. “I’m a glacial geologist. That’s what I do.”

  “I thought you were a pilot.”

  “Well, yeah,” she said. “That too.”

  “Besides, oil pressure on the starboard engine has been running a bit low,” Steve said. “I wouldn’t mind looking at it.”

  The landing was so smooth that Zak wasn’t quite sure when they touched down. The Twin Otter coasted on the skis for what seemed like a mile before it slowed to a stop and Steve finally turned off the engine.

  The snow was about a foot deep, but beneath that, the ice was firm. It was no colder than the weather had been at Scott Base, but the wind across the glacier, unbroken by hills or trees, was biting. Now he had a better appreciation of the need for the cold-weather equipment. He pulled on the wool cap he’d been issued—up until then he had carried it but not worn it—and then pulled the parka’s hood up over his head. With the goggles, only the tip of his nose was left exposed. He looked back toward Mrs. Binder, just coming down the folding stairs out
of the airplane. “We should have brought snowshoes,” he said.

  Mrs. Binder held up her bag. “I did.”

  Meanwhile, Ashanti helped Steve carry out a folding ladder. They set it up next to the engine on the right side. “Better stick pretty close,” he called out. “I’m not sure I like this weather blowing in; I’ll take a look at this engine and then we’ll get back up and out of here.”

  “Got it.” Zak walked out onto the snow. The scene was a landscape in shades of white. “Antarctica,” he said. “I love it!”

  Mrs. Binder looked at Steve and Ashanti and then turned to Zak. “If he’s so worried about getting back,” she said, “why did he land in the first place?”

  Abruptly, an enormous bang echoed across the landscape. He whipped his head around to look back at the airplane, but the sound hadn’t seemed to come from there. Steve and Ashanti were also looking around, just as puzzled as he was. Across the landscape, nothing moved. “What the hell was that?” he said.

  “I have no idea,” Mrs. Binder said. “Sounded like a cannon.”

  Over at the airplane, Steve and Ashanti had turned back to the engine. They seemed to be removing parts from it.

  “I don’t think that looks good,” Mrs. Binder said.

  When they got back to the Twin Otter, Steve and Ashanti were inside, Steve talking earnestly on the radio. “No, it’s not an emergency,” he was saying. “We’re secure. But we sure would appreciate the help when you can send it.”

  Ashanti turned to them. “Oil pump,” she said.

  “What does that mean?” Zak asked.

  “Dead. Turns out we’ve been leaking oil for the last fifty miles or so. The engine’s okay—other than that—but we can’t fly.”

  “Great,” Zak said. “You mean we’re stuck here?”

  “Not permanently.” She inclined her head toward Steve. “Scott doesn’t have the part, but they passed us along to McMurdo, and they have parts. They’ll send a mechanic out by helicopter. It’s an easy job—should be fixed in no time.”

  “So we have an unscheduled layover. We can scout the site, I guess. How long do we have?”