by Jean McNeil
When she could no longer keep her eyes open she went outside in her shirtsleeves – the temperature was minus twenty – to jolt herself awake. She craned her head and looked into the sky. The stars were mute and cold. The night sky in the Antarctic was blacker than any sky she had ever seen, full of dark voids which suggested collapsed galaxies, black holes, bursts of entropic energy.
The light was on in one of the labs. She went to turn it off and found Alexander there, sitting slumped over a piece of paper.
‘What are you doing up?’
He put a pen down on the table with a clack. ‘Can’t sleep.’ He ran his long, lean fingers through his hair. ‘Have a seat.’
On his desk an atlas lay open to a double-page spread of Finland and Sweden. The computer screen was open to a coding programme, and pieces of paper criss-crossed by graphs and plots were scattered on his desk. On the pages were curving precise lines, like an architect’s first sketches for a building.
‘I’m working on hypsometry. I’m looking at paleo-scenarios and it helps me to draft them out by hand first,’ he explained. ‘Here, I’ll show you.’ He opened the coding screen. His ice sheets were not real but a series of equations and calculations fed into a computer model. He worked with two models coupled together, he explained to her, an ice sheet model called FAMOUS. The 3-D ice sheet model was called GLIMMER.
She stared at the hieroglyphic train of symbols and numbers. He watched her watching. He seemed to observe her every move, as if she were a private experiment of his. ‘I feed in observations, which are then correlated to equations.’ He switched screens to the 3-D function. ‘A few years ago this didn’t exist. You couldn’t see the model, it had no existence other than as a string of coding.’
Behind the coding screen ice sheets started to form, hardening first from a grid, then the bottom layers of ice, then the top crust. Colour poured in – white, threaded with thin striations of grey grit. The ice sheets undulated, covering a computer-generated landscape like sheets of frozen meringue.
The landscape looked familiar – was that not the glacier opposite the accommodation block? ‘That’s the end of the last glacial maximum, here on base,’ she said.
‘You recognise it.’
‘But I thought you were modelling the future.’
‘To know the future you have to look at the past. I’m modelling the last stage of the last ice age in order to try to figure out what’s going to happen in the next few decades.’ He opened another file, a computerised version of his architectural sketch. It showed vectors, alignments, depths and surfaces. ‘If I put today’s observations and measurements in, with the model set for twenty years from now, it refuses to produce ice.’
‘What do you mean, refuses?’
‘It should be creating ice through the coming hundred years. But according to the model it’s gone in twenty. All the ice around base.’
‘But that’s impossible,’ she said.
He switched the screen to the 3-D model of the ice sheet and pointed to its edge, to the hollow of ice where the glacier from the centre of their island flowed into the sea. ‘This is the outlet glacier. That’s where it starts to pull back. I can’t run the whole time-sequence for you here, the server doesn’t have the capacity. But once I get back home to the supercomputer, that’s what it will show – a receding edge, taking everything with it, until even the centre is gone. Even if we add the precipitation to the model, the ice still thins.’
Nara understood: The ice was thinning at the edges faster than it could thicken in the centre. ‘You add precipitation, snow crystals, and you should have more ice. But you don’t.’
He nodded. ‘Because it’s too warm.’
The sheets were restructured by heat, by melt, Alexander explained. For melt, there were two processes, mechanical and thermal. Thermal melting began the process of disintegration, but then the top melting percolated through to the next layer and created firn. The waves carved holes, scalloping and weathering its edges – these were the mechanical processes. ‘Ice melts from within, but also from the outside. When these two processes happen together it’s the end of the line for the ice. That’s what’s so interesting,’ he said, ‘its life cycle is just like ours, birth and decay, although over inhumane timescales.’
When they were on the ship Alexander had told her, ‘That’s why I’m here. To see for myself what an ice age would have been like.’ He wanted to witness the stately process of being frozen in for the winter, of watching ice accumulate, advance. He wanted to know the grandiose, slow, invisible dawn of the ice age. Even if in the Antarctic it happened quickly, over the course of a winter, with grindings, the explosions as icebergs capsized in the water, the mortar fire crack of two grounded bergs colliding.
He gathered up his papers. He had beautiful hands, fine and delicate, but strong. Those hands could trigger her happiness, like a spark.
‘Look, the sky is clear, for a change.’
They put on their parkas, went outside and walked beyond the verandah, beyond the reach of the emergency lighting. There in darkness they could see the stars better.
The world was spinning so fast, Alexander told her, 1,600 kilometres an hour at the equator, and they didn’t even feel it. But on their latitude, 69 degrees South, the earth spun much slower, so that if they turned round fast enough, they would keep pace with the earth’s rotation. At the South Pole, Alexander said, the planet spun only a centimetre every minute.
‘Do you think time is slower, here, because we’re not moving?’ She asked. ‘Time and space are linked, after all.’
‘No, our perception of it might change, very slightly, but not in any way we would notice.’
‘I can’t believe we’re spinning, all the time, and we don’t feel it.’
They put their arms out and began to turn, faster and faster, heads craned, eyes fixed on the sky, alone in the Antarctic night on a deserted continent, invisible apart from satellites streaking through the sky on their hasty missions.
She slipped and Alexander put his hand on the small of her back, to steady her. She felt again the strange electricity of his touch, and with it a fleeting ghost of the happiness she had felt with him those days in the Falklands, when they were waiting to be transported to their white world.
That dark morning she fell asleep in her pitroom, nearly happy for the first time in months, listening to the thin, stinging sound of snow flung against her window.
The winter days turned to night. The sea became unnaturally calm before it froze, because the ice floes muffled the ocean swells. Nara watched as the ice changed from gruel to porridge, then a hardening, so that the only sound is the clink-clink of ice floes welding together, not a delicate glassy sound, but metallic and rupturing, like steel girders grinding together.
The short journey from the sledge store to the accommodation block became an ordeal. Wind whipping around the corners of the buildings now smothered in seracs of snow caught her unawares. Snow bit at their skin, like a thousand tiny insects. The skin on their lips chapped until it fell off into the soup and floated there, like flakes of salt.
Winter is a door, Nara wrote. Once shut, the Antarctic winter was a door which could not be opened. It had to be passed through, like a ghost.
2
Cirrostratus, Cirrocumulus, Altostratus, Altocumulus, Nimbostratus, Stratocumulus, Cumulonimbus. You see clouds in the Antarctic like nowhere else on earth. The echo of these words surprised him – he did not have a good memory, normally, either for names or for conversations. But yes, he remembered now that Nara had sat beside him on the way down to the Ellsworths, the cloud atlas open on her knees, and he had instructed her in clouds.
He flew through layers of cloud. A pilot had to be able to read the sky, especially in the Antarctic, where the weather changed on a dime. Luke knew that clouds are made of tiny water droplets, ice crystals or both. The frigid temperatures of Antarctica’s interior meant little or no water vapour was held in the air, which could in
hibit cloud formation; at the South Pole, for example, there were hardly ever clouds. But along the coast there were many, because of the influence of the sea, the circumpolar current and the powerful storms that congregated along it.
He usually looked forward to arriving back on base, to having a shower, a drink. This time, though, some kind of reckoning awaited him. Would he tell this writer woman how Nara had inserted herself effortlessly, almost clandestinely, in his thoughts, three – no, four now – years ago, on what had begun as a routine trip to the Ellsworths. For those few months she had filled the space between moments, thoughts, the spasms of necessary concentration while flying, wondering about her intimacies, those secret things she could never tell anyone, wrapped in cloaks of shame and need, the principles she had violated, the people she had been unkind to. He considered that you could say you were in love with someone only when you were more interested in their failures, in their sadnesses, than in their triumphs.
Then, when he thought of her, it was preceded by a feeling in his heart: not a comfortable feeling, but a small convulsion, like a sickness. He remembered a TV programme he had seen just before he had come South for the season, a documentary that proved that the heart had a nervous system, that the heart had cells that ‘thought’ for themselves. These cells sent messages to the brain, not vice-versa. That must be where the old saying came from, let your head look after your heart. Or, that’s the heart thinking, not the head. But how incredible that it was true, that the heart could think for itself!
Before his divorce, he’d paid little attention to the workings of the heart. There would be only two chapters, rough-cut, in his emotional life: Married Life, and After Divorce. The end of his marriage was receding now, so that it felt like something lived through in another era, such was its connection to a previous version of Luke. Yes, he had been a different person, when he was married. Complacent, happy. Far kinder.
He had tried to remain that person. He made sure he and his wife went to counselling, first to a bearded man in a glassy Cape Town apartment, then when they were in Britain to a clinic specialising in couple therapy in one of those airless suburbs where people lived and died in the mausoleums of their Victorian houses. But the counselling only stiffened his wife’s resolve.
Then began a time of learning. He learned, oh, so many things he had never wanted to know: about bitterness, the snare of love, the black tar taste of hate on his tongue. The casual damage people inflict on each other. Patience and treachery, the quiet growl of time. He had no doubt that he was becoming more humane. Although at what cost? He was moving closer to death than to life, and all this tarnished knowledge was taking him there. He was on the downward slope of experience: overaware, no more desire in his brain or body, a refusal to believe in almost everything, bruised from days and nights spent on Antarctic bases between flights, waiting to be given orders.
Into this desert walked Nara. He was so unalert he didn’t even notice her until she was sitting there in the cockpit, beside him.
He banked and turned northwest over the Lassiter Coast; he was only an hour from base now. Beneath him he saw the wreckage of ice sheets. It was not a melt, but a slivering. When an ice sheet breaks up into the water it looks as if someone has tipped over a vat of needles. The water hovers at the freezing point, perhaps one degree above, and the needles melt. Now the coastal water was nearly always two degrees above zero in the summer, and the ice sheets dissolved like icing sugar.
Another season was nearly over, another season of flying glaciologists, aerial mappers, surveyors, ice-core drillers, into the scene of their destruction. He loved working with scientists, even if he lamented the destruction that drew their interest. Science was a refuge, he considered, the only asylum from the vulgar scrum of politics. Scientists were wise for the simple fact that they were disinterested. He always liked those ice corers, geologists, glaciologists he worked with and for; less so the VIPs, the ministers, the royal family members on fly-by-night visits to the Antarctic to raise their environmental credibility. They sat in his plane, flying over the most amazing landscape on earth, and did paperwork or fell asleep. And he would sit in the cockpit and shake his head, the sour expression Nara would notice in the Ellsworths playing with his lips.
She would not be there. She hadn’t been there for years, now. No one knew where she had gone, just as no one knew why desire came to an end, or what to do when it did. But he had no doubt Nara had been one of them, the lovers of ice. To be enchanted by ice takes a particular kind of soul, he considered; most people saw death in the frozen continent, they saw lack. It took a strange nature, a person somehow divorced from themselves, from their interests, their destiny, to appreciate its pale fire.
The woman found him quickly, the next morning in fact. She was about forty, he guessed, possibly younger. She was slim, not tall, not short – an indefinite person, the sort who wouldn’t stand out in a group. She’d obviously been on base long enough to pick up the garb. She was dressed in the full Antarctic uniform: fleece, Polar Research Council T-shirt underneath, moleskins, standard issue woollen socks.
She held out her hand. ‘I’m Helen. You’ve probably heard of me.’
‘I have,’ he said. ‘Listen, I’m a bit tired. Why don’t we talk tomorrow. Or maybe the day after. From what I hear, we’ve got plenty of time to talk.’
‘Sure. Whenever is good for you. Just let me know.’
She would have to find him, to lure him. Both understood this perfectly well.
The following night he gave a talk and a slideshow on the salvage work on Midas III. Everyone came – fifty-six people ranged around tables in the dining hall, the evening gathering outside.
He explained that Midas IV, the new base, would have to be moved inland from its present position. That was what the director of the Polar Research Council had determined on his visit to the base, a thousand miles to the east. They had radared the ice shelf and it was ready to fracture somewhere around the position of the present base. As for Midas III, Luke explained, the ice shelf had broken off a year previously, taking the old base, by then only three miles from the edge of the shelf, with it. Midas III set sail, now buried in a twenty-mile-long iceberg. The Polar Research Council had to find a way to get onto the iceberg and dismantle the base, Luke explained. He was asked to provide air support, although most of the dismantling had to be done by ship.
‘It was a delicate operation,’ he explained. ‘They had to pull the ship up next to the iceberg, and anchor it, even though they are mooring and it’s moving. My job was to fly there, landing on it as if it were still part of the landmass. I could still see where the old skiway used to be. But icebergs are more prone to crevassing. Because their bottom, however deep, is in contact with the ocean, they split and fracture. At worst, you could lose a plane down a crevasse.’
Helen stared at the photographs projected on the screen: the Mercury, the Astrolabe’s sister ship, moored alongside the iceberg, men driving small tractors to the edge of an ice cliff, lowering down beams, drums, canisters, containers with gigantic cranes. Luke landing on the iceberg, coming in for one run to strafe the ground with his skis, to see if any crevasses opened up.
When Luke finished his talk there was a question and answer session. ‘Why don’t they just leave the base there?’ Helen asked.
‘They can’t. International regulations require us to dismantle it.’ Eventually, he explained, the ice shelf would melt and disappear beneath the waves. The base would become sea junk, excreting toxins.
‘But surely it would be no worse than any shipwreck,’ Helen said.
‘You never know what’s in those chemical containers in the laboratories,’ Luke shook his head. ‘You just don’t know.’
After the talk David caught her arm.‘It’s incredible, isn’t it?’ he says. ‘What they can do, here.’
She agreed. ‘Who would have thought they could dismantle an old base on a moving iceberg.’
‘The pilots here, there are o
nly ten or twelve men in the world who can do what they can do.’
Luke turned his head slightly, as if he had overheard them. Helen watched as he turned off the projector and the photographs of tractors, cranes, the ship dwarfed by the ice cliff, all dissolved into a dark screen.
Luke was just as Nara described him; in four years he had not changed – perhaps a deeper line etched here, a loosening of skin there, but he was still that dark-haired man, a wellmade if not handsome face, grey-blue eyes, in good shape, a man who, at twenty-five, must have been startlingly vital. His Army training had kept him in condition well beyond the years when it ended – Helen had seen this, too, with other men of a similar age in their late forties or fifties, in Afghanistan. These men never lost their military bearing, however much they might have wanted out of the military. That life put its stamp on them.
She approached him. He glanced in her direction, then away. Eventually he said, ‘What is it you’re writing again? A book?’
‘Yes, a book.’
‘On what?’
‘On death. Death in the Antarctic, specifically.’
‘Oh, well.’ Luke laughed. ‘You’ve got plenty of material, then.’
She said, ‘You must see her everywhere, here.’
He stared at her for a moment. ‘Memories fade, don’t they, with time?’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t think they do.’ She paused. ‘What did you think of Alexander?’
‘He was – ’ he stopped. ‘Am I being interviewed here, I mean, formally?’
‘I’m not the police. I don’t conduct formal interviews. We’re just talking.’
‘I don’t think talking with you people is ever just talking.’
She wanted to say, us people? What category have you assigned me to? Lawyers, insurance salesmen? Spies?
‘I sat for years with her, just here – ’ he flung out his arm toward one of the cafeteria tables.
He said no more and turned away, possibly so that she could not see his face. Helen had the impression that everything within him had curled up into a protective posture, a question mark of silence.
