by Jean McNeil
The captain informed them that if the ice did not shift and they were still stopped the following day, then he would back out of the track they had cut in the ice, and head north. Their voyage will come to an end. They might be split up to be flown in from the Chilean base on the north of the peninsula, or they might have to return to the Falklands and try again later in the season.
That night, she made a decision. She will make love to him in the icefield. She wanted time itself to stop, and circle upon itself, like the polar sun which traced ellipses in the sky.
They talked until three, four in the morning and a chromium light singed her cabin. A solemn thrill took hold as she squared herself to her risk. Her attraction for him had been growing by the day until it was a black vein in all this whiteness, a lethal sun. Until she needed it to take up its place in the world, in the whorls of fingers, in hair, in mouths and ripped flesh. Until she needed it to exist, to be an ice-devil creature: red, black, magma, oxide, volcanic. Until she needed to split this white world apart.
PART IV
The Known World
1
‘I’ve never seen a summer this warm,’ Bobby, one of three domestics from St Helena, declared. On base they were called the Saints. Luke had the impression that the Saints saw and heard everything that went on, a silent, knowing chorus protected by their apartness, their lack of investment in the gossip, power struggles, the cliques and allegiances they saw fracturing like summer sea ice all around them.
In late January the MAGIC team’s work finished, and Luke was detailed to the ice-coring team. He would spend the rest of the summer flying to and from the ice dome on Berkner Island – an island in name, although it didn’t look like one from the air. Its contours could only be seen with radar; the island itself was iced in, trapped in the vastness of the Ronne Ice Shelf.
The physical hardship aside, Luke looked forward to being at Berkner. Gregory, the ice-core driller, was a good host. The season before, he had shown Luke his handiwork, taking him down to the underground chamber where they worked in refrigerated temperatures even colder than at the surface. Luke had marvelled at the long tubes of ice, so perfectly shaped and formed, brought up from the depths by a giant machine which reminded Luke of those cigarette makers they had when he was a child. This is history, Luke, more than you’ll see in any museum. Gregory was always making these eager pronouncements, as if he were being interviewed by a television crew (and indeed Gregory did sometimes appear on the news, in his parka and polarised sunglasses, standing on an icefield). Luke had the sense that Gregory tried them out on him, to gauge their effect, before deploying them in the classroom or in front of politicians.
In the tent, where they retired for tea, Gregory powered up his laptop to the solar panels and took him to a website called The Physics of Glaciers. He spoke to Luke about ablation, velocity, visible and invisible stress, about the mathematical relationship between friction and melt. He did not simplify or condescend. Then, in the ice-coring chamber, an underground cathedral of cold, Gregory shaved off slices of this core, no more than slivers of ice dotted with what looked like hundreds of tiny bubbles. Each was a chapter in the story of the earth, Gregory informed him, that unwritten saga whose ending was still being considered, through ghostly murmurs, unknowable contracts, cement factories and coal-burning plants and the fossilised future remains of humanity, possibly. This was how Gregory saw things, he confided to Luke, during those long tent days they spent together, laid up on Berkner: that the future of the planet would be determined by a shadowy conspiracy between known and unknown forces, human and inhuman. Not a very scientific approach, is it? Gregory asked, with the resignation of a man carrying a deathly burden.
For his part, Luke wondered how bubbles could divulge so much – past cataclysms were contained within their tiny gaseous membranes, extinctions of entire species, volcanic eruptions, nuclear fallout, gigantic forest fires. As it turned out, Gregory told him, the history of the planet was only carbon, nitrogen, sulphur. That was all there was to the planet, and to human beings, ‘basic elements, collusions and explosions – with a little water thrown in.’ At one time, Gregory told him, the earth’s atmosphere had been suffused with carbon in a cycle of gigantic volcanic eruptions, one after the other. Tonnes of carbon dioxide caused the earth’s temperature to rise by ten degrees. But the planet had managed to absorb all that carbon, sinking it into its oceans, chlorophyll, the trees, until it became fossilised in the form of sea-bed crustaceans, their shells almost pure carbon, or in coal.
‘And now we’re digging up all that fossilised carbon and burning it,’ Gregory said. ‘You see, the planet managed to absorb the carbon, but it took several million years. We’re putting all that carbon back into the atmosphere in the space of a hundred years.’
Luke nodded at the portent of what the glaciologist was telling him. He had heard similar estimations over the years, in different forms, but all pointing to the same conclusion: that it was not the damage itself, but the speed at which it was being done. And the question underlying all this clamour was, how quickly can our species adapt? How finely balanced is our survivability? Very finely balanced indeed, Luke thought, if their civilisation could be so disrupted by even a two-degree change in the earth’s temperature.
For a long time, he had not wanted to think about it all: his children, their future in a terrifying world of decay, conflict, hunger. Did you know it would be like this? they would ask him, later. And he would have to say, yes. What did you do about it? He was an observer, he would say. He was only a pilot who had found more than his ration of happiness in his job, and in the white continent. He flew above the ice nearly every day, six months at a time, for twelve austral summers, he would say. He watched it happen.
Alexander stood in the door of her laboratory. Nara had to sit back very slightly into her chair. It was like having a live spark, a vital machine, in the room with her.
He had gone to the bootroom, put on boots and jacket, walked down the hill, just to see her. With him, these everyday volitions were a kind of miracle. He never went looking – for her, for anyone or anything. Mostly he waited for people and situations to arrive at his doorstep, and he did not have to wait long.
‘We wondered,’ he began, ‘what it was like, being stuck in the Ellsworths.’
‘It was like – like being out of the world.’
‘We tried to imagine what you talked about, you and the pilot.’
‘We talked about everything.’
His mouth twisted into an odd shape. He did not wait for an answer. ‘I’ll come back later. Will you still be here?’
She nodded. She stayed late in her office that night, telling herself she had to stay anyway to analyse her samples, then input the data, then correlate it. With one half of her being, she knew he would not return. With another half, hope thrived so sharp she was afraid.
It was one in the morning when she left. She was shocked to open the door and find a kind of darkness on the other side of it – it was too translucent to be called night, exactly, but neither was it the floodlit day-in-night she had become used to. She had completely forgotten night existed. She put out her hand to feel it, tentatively, as if she were touching velvet or the pelt of a dark animal.
With the return of night the weather changed. Night meant colder temperatures, the land freed from its twenty-four-hour solar oven. In mid-February the sun narrowed its expansive ellipsis in the sky and Nara found she had a shadow, suddenly, after months of walking alone.
Luke invited her for a drink in the shed that doubled as his office. It was a wooden survivor from the eighties, a type of Portakabin hoisted above the ground on wooden pallets beside the hangar. Here the pilots made their tea and the mechanics kept inventories of parts.
‘I dragged out the old maps for you,’ he said. ‘Back in a sec.’ He stepped outside and returned with a bottle of Bailey’s. ‘I keep it outside, in the shadows between the hut and the hangar. I like it better chilled.
If I let the sun get at it, it would boil.’
‘It’s colder now,’ she said. ‘Even though it’s still summer.’
‘This time of year the weather starts to go a bit changeable. It’s always the way: once the Otters start twitching to get away, the weather closes in. I see it year after year.’
‘How much longer will you stay?’
‘Oh, we’ll take the Dash back around the 8th or the 10th, depending on weather. So I’ve got a good ten days left, at least.’
‘Do you know the route you’ll take back yet?’
‘We knew the ferry flight routes about a month ago. They can change, of course. Anything down here can change, any time.’
He poured her a glass. She slid the thick cream around her mouth. The chill cut through the cloying sweetness.
‘I like your office,’ she said. ‘It feels like being in a caravan, like we’re on holiday.’
‘It does. I used to sleep here, in the old days.’ He told her of the days when people used to sleep all around the base, because the pitrooms were full or when the new accommodation wing was being built, and regulations were not adhered to as strictly. ‘People would bed down in P-bags in the sledge store sewing loft, they would sleep on the floor in the wooden container we’re sitting in now – anywhere with some heating,’ he said. ‘There was a certain –’ he paused, ‘– intimacy to base then. It’s become rules-and-regulation-health-and-safety. It was more like home in those days. As much as a place like this can ever be home.’
He extracted books of maps and flight manuals from the shelf. Something was missing from the picture. Everything else spoke of time passing and disuse, but there were no mites streaming in the light, no dust particles, no fluffballs or spiderwebs, no signs of the lives of small creatures, of parasites and scavengers, because no insects could survive in the Antarctic, and the cold flint of the air kept paper, wood, or steel pristine.
‘I look at this often,’ he handed her a book. She read the spine: Historical Maps of the Antarctic.
‘It’s amazing to think that Aristotle imagined the Antarctic, before anyone knew for certain even the Arctic existed.’
‘When was that?’ she asked.
‘Around 330 bc, or so the book says.’ Luke sat down opposite her. ‘And that was a time when the known world was the Mediterranean.’
Nara found the first map drawn of the continent. In its corners lurked sea monsters, half dragon, half whale. She read the explanation:
Aristotle speculated in Meteorology that the earth was a sphere, divided into northern and southern zones, each identical, but opposite. Even before Aristotle, ancient geographers suspected that the world was a globe which spun on axes, that the fiery realms to the middle of the earth at the equator were countermanded by frigid realms at the axles of the spinning globe. These were wastelands to Aristotle, and for hundreds of years afterward, peripheral and uninhabitable, they remained frozen possible apocalypses, unmapped and feared.
‘This is another handy one.’ Luke handed her Antarctic Maps and Place-Names Gazeteer 2007.
‘But isn’t this out of date now? It’s nearly five years old.’
‘Not really. The ice might move, but not much else changes. It takes years to even assign a new place-name. There’s a committee that regulates naming in the Antarctic, did you know that? But they haven’t got much to work with. Everything’s still Ross this, Shackleton that. At least in the British Antarctic. There’s so little human history.’
‘I think it’s a relief, sometimes, to be in a place where there’s hardly anything of human civilisation.’
‘I don’t know,’ he said, a wistful look in his eyes. ‘As time passes I miss museums. I miss human comforts. Maybe I’ve just been coming here too long.’
‘But there’s a thrill in being able to survive somewhere you’re not supposed to be at all,’ she said. Every day they were reminded that the Antarctic isn’t habitable, that only five industrial food freezers and VSAT dishes and a generator and a desalination plant and regular shipments by sea and air made life at all viable, even for a small number of people. ‘Sometimes I think we’re not supposed to be anywhere at all, on the planet. And it’s only in coming to the Antarctic that you realise it.’ She paused. ‘I feel closer to the planet, here. To how it works. Sometimes I even think it’s speaking to me.’ She laughed, to show she was not completely serious.
She did not tell him that lately she had begun to hear a voice. It was not inside her head, rather it came to her from a long way away. Like a train heard in the distance, at first very faint, building and building. Some force was gathering on the horizon. Also, there was something else – the voice told her that whatever was coming had been programmed – whether into the species or into the holographic game most of humanity took for reality – and that this something had to do with payback for something long, long before humanity even existed.
He gestured out the window of the Portakabin. ‘I know, it’s this landscape, it does some strange things to your mind. I used to be obsessed with it. Maybe I still am. Every year, I try to get away, I think of taking a job flying helicopters for search and rescue in Scotland, or bush planes in the Northwest Territories. And every year, I come back South.’
‘It’s a magnet,’ she said.
‘It is that,’ he said, nodding solemnly.
They were quiet then and their silence was like in the Ellsworths. She had never felt such ease in silence with a person she hardly knew at all.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘you remind me of a character in a novel.’
‘What kind of novel?’
‘I don’t know. Even your name. Nara.’ The use of her name sounded wrong. Something in the way he said it emerged as old-fashioned, or foreign or both. ‘I mean old novels. I’m sorry, I haven’t read much, but I do know what I’m talking about. A woman – not quite modern, I guess. Those serious, adoring women.’
‘They were too easily destroyed, the women in those novels, by some philanderer, by bad luck, by life not living up to their ideals. I don’t want my life to end like that.’ Her voice was unhappy.
‘Well, nobody says you’re going to.’ He pursed his lips – a sign, she knew by now, of annoyance. ‘I just think you’re special, that’s all. There’s something different about you. You’re not a run-of-the-mill person.’
She looked at the man opposite, who she might yet call friend. He would leave soon. He would fly one of the planes that now sit in the hangar up through the world, passing from snow to ice to the rough late summer of the Falklands to the subtropics, the tropics, the wet Caribbean, through springtime Texas, landing in the tail end of the Canadian winter. He is allowed to leave, and even if he weren’t, he could still escape. I have the keys to the airplane. She has heard him say this, more than once, when he was fed up with the place.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s two-thirty in the morning.’
She said, ‘I never know what time it is on base.’
‘Time doesn’t matter here.’
They walked back to the main building together. The emergency lights of the base lit their way with a thin, yellow light.
Their names hung together, alone, on the tagging board; everyone else was signed in.
‘Goodnight,’ she said, and for the first time since she arrived on base two and a half months ago there was night to bid welcome to.
‘Goodnight.’
In the middle of February, the field operations manager decreed that Nara and Alexander should help shut down King George Base, five hundred miles down the peninsula, for the winter.
She did not see him until they were both in the hangar, waiting for the pilot. They would fly down with another pilot, not Luke; this man, George was his name, was younger and less experienced than Luke and needed to clock up hours at the end of the season.
As usual, on its takeoff run the Otter barely needs to get going before it is airborne. They were off the ground before she could register the surprise of an escape fr
om base one last time before winter.
Without the possibility of flying the plane, the whole venture lost much of its thrill. Her hands literally itched to take the controls. She dared not ask George, although he was friendly enough, masculine and jovial without being crude.
Nara and Alexander watch landscape slide by below. Water channels snaked into the sea at the base of glaciers, loose pancakes of ice dot the open sound. Three years previously, the King George Sound had opened completely for the first time in known history. For perhaps for many thousands of millennia the sea ice had formed fast on its waters. Around ten years before, cracks had started to appear along the perimeter of ice cliffs, widening with each summer until channels of open water snaked through the sound.
The pilot banked right. ‘There’s the hut.’
She pressed her face to the cabin window and saw a red dot on a white sheet and felt a pang of familiar betrayal. She thought they were going to a place, somewhere, but actually they were just going to a hut.
The genny mech and the carpenter were there to greet them. It was an hour’s journey from the skiway to the hut; they would take the skidoos for twenty minutes, then leave them where the snow ran out and walk the rest of the way. The Eros glacier which had once spilled down from above the field station was retreating half a mile a year. ‘They say that as late as the 1990s you could taxi right up to the door,’ the pilot said.
She helped the pilot blank down the plane. Three much taller and stronger men stood below her while she clambered onto the wings and hooked the ropes into the apertures as the pilot hammered ice screws into the snow. When she finished she jumped down, launching herself from the footring outside the cockpit door.
