Smilla's Sense of Snow aka Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow

by Peter Høeg

  "What happens if the worm gets out?" I ask.

  "We'll keep the stone enclosed."

  "You can't hold on to the worm. It's microscopic."

  He doesn't reply.

  "You can't know," I say. "No one knows. You only know what you've learned from a few laboratory experiments. But there's a small chance that it's a real killer." He doesn't reply.

  "What was the other answer to my question about why the worm hasn't already spread?"

  "As a child I spent a year in Greenland, on the west coast. There I collected fossils. Since then I've occasionally toyed with the idea that the extermination of various species in prehistoric times might have been caused by a parasite. Who knows-maybe it was the Arctic worm. It would have had the necessary characteristics. Maybe it was the worm that eradicated the dinosaurs."

  His voice has a teasing undertone. Suddenly I understand him.

  "But that's not important, is it?"

  "No, it's not important." He looks at me. "The true reality of things is not important. What's important is what people believe. They will believe in this stone. Have you ever heard of Ilya Prigogine? A Belgian chemist who received the Nobel Prize in '77 for his description of dissipative structures. He and his students have been working nonstop. on the idea that life originated from inorganic substances that were irradiated with energy. These ideas have paved the way. People are waiting for this stone. Their belief and anticipation will make it real. They will make it alive regardless of the true nature of the stone."

  "And the parasite?" I ask.

  "I can already hear the first ranks of speculative journalists. They'll write that the Arctic worm represents a significant stage in the encounter between the stone, inorganic life, and higher organisms. They'll come to all sorts of conclusions, none of which is important. What's important are the forces of fear and hope that will be let loose."

  "Why, Tørk? What do you get out of it?"

  "Money," he says. "Fame. More money. In reality it's unimportant whether the stone is alive or not. What counts is its size. Its heat. The worm. It's the biggest scientific discovery of the century. Not just numbers on a piece of paper. Or abstractions that take thirty years to get published in a form that can be sold to the public. A stone. That you can touch and feel. That you can cut up and sell. That you can photograph and film."

  I'm reminded again of Victor Halkenhvad's letter. "The boy was ice," he wrote. That's not quite true. His coldness is superficial. Behind it there is passion. Suddenly whether the stone is alive or not is no longer important to me, either. Suddenly it has become a symbol. At this moment it becomes the crystallization of the attitude of Western science toward the world. Calculation, hatred, hope, fear, the attempt to measure everything. And above all else, stronger than any empathy for living things: the desire for money.

  "You can't remove the worm and transport it to a densely populated part of the world," I say. "Not until you know what it is. You could set off a catastrophe. If it was once widespread around the globe, its numbers were not limited until it had exterminated its hosts."

  He puts the lamp down on the snow. Without interruption it maintains a conical tunnel of light, shining across the mirror of water and the stone. The rest of the world has been erased.

  "Death is always a waste. But sometimes it's the only way to arouse people. Bohr participated in the construction of the atomic bomb and thought that it would promote peace."

  I remember something Juliane once said during a moment of sobriety. She said that we shouldn't be afraid of a third world war; human beings need a new war in order to come to their senses.

  My reaction is the same at this moment as it was then -I'm conscious of the insanity of the argument.

  "You can't force people to feel love by degrading them as much as possible," I say.

  I shift my weight to my other foot and grab hold of a coil of rope.

  "You lack imagination, Smilla. That's unforgivable in a scientist."

  If I can manage to swing the coil I might be able to knock him into the water. Then I could run.

  "What about the boy?" I ask. "Isaiah. Why did Loyen examine him?"

  I step farther away to give my swing a bigger arc. "He jumped into the water. We were forced to bring him along into the cave; he was afraid of heights. His father collapsed while he was still near the surface. The boy wanted to go to him. He was never afraid of cold water; he swam in the sea. Loyen was the one who came up with the idea of keeping him under observation. The worm was subcutaneous in him, not in his intestines. He never even felt it."

  That explains the muscle biopsy. Loyen's desire to get one last, definitive sample. Information about the fate of the parasite when its carrier dies.

  The water has a greenish tinge to it, a peaceful color. It's the thought of death that is horrifying; the phenomenon itself always comes as naturally as a sunset. At Force Bay I once saw Major Guldbrandsen of the Sirius Patrol brandish an automatic weapon to force three Americans away from a bear liver infected with trichinosis. It was broad daylight, they knew the meat was infested, and all they had to do was wait forty-five minutes for it to be cooked. And yet they had cut small slices off the liver and had started to eat it when we reached them. It was all so ordinary. The blue highlights of the meat, the men's hunger, the major's rifle, and their astonishment.

  Tørk reaches behind me and takes the coil from my hand, the way you take sharp tools away from a child. "Go up there and wait," he says.

  He shines his lamp on the opposite wall, where the mouth of a tunnel opens. I walk toward it. Now I recognize the path. It doesn't lead upward, it leads into the void. The entrance to the end has always been a tunnel. Like the entrance to life. He has led me up here. He has led me all the way from the ship.

  For the first time I realize his brilliance as a strategist. He couldn't have done it on board. He still has to go back, and the Kronos still has to pull into some port. He wouldn't be able to hide it. But this will be just one more desertion. A disappearance, like Jakkelsen's. No one saw me meet Tørk, no one will see me disappear.

  The mechanic won't be going back either. He would figure things out, he would link me to Tørk as surely as if he had seen us together. Tørk will let him dive; they obviously have a need for him, at least in placing the first fuse. They'll let him dive, and then he will cease to exist. Tørk will return, and there will have been an accident. Maybe something went wrong with the oxygen gauge. Tørk will have planned it all out.

  Now I understand the equipment near the lake. The mechanic was unpacking it while Tørk was talking to me. That's why he took me into the laboratory.

  The light from his lamp catches the stone, casting shadows onto the wall in front of me. When I enter the tunnel the light dims.

  It's a rectangular horizontal shaft, five feet square. Several yards inside the entrance it gets wider and there's a table. On top of the table there are measuring devices, milk bottles, dried meat, oatmeal-everything is twentyeight years old and covered with ice.

  I let my eyes grow accustomed to the faint light from the ice and then continue on until everything is pitch dark, but I keep going, following the wall with my outstretched hand. The floor has a slight incline, but there's no draft that might indicate an exit up ahead; it's a dead end.

  I come to a wall in front me, a wall of ice. This is where I wait.

  There's no sound of footsteps, but there's a light in the distance, coming closer. He has fastened the lamp to his forehead. It locates me next to the wall, and the light stands still. Then he takes it off. It's Verlaine.

  "I showed Lukas the refrigerator," I tell him. "When that's added on top of what you did to Jakkelsen, you'll get a life sentence without parole."

  He stops halfway between me and the light.

  "Even if they ripped off your arms and legs, you'd find some way to kick back," he says.

  He bows his head and mutters to himself. It sounds like some kind of prayer. Then he steps toward me.

>   At first I think it's his shadow on the wall, but then I look back, anyway. A rose is growing on the ice, about ten feet across, composed of little red dots spattered up on the wall. Then he lifts his feet off the ground, spreads his arms, rises a foot and a half in the air, and throws himself against the wall. He hangs there, impaled like a big insect, in the center of the rose. That's when the sound comes. A brief whistle. A gray cloud drifts into the light from the lamp on the ground. Out of the cloud steps Lukas. He doesn't look at me. He looks at Verlaine. In his hand he's holding a compressed-air harpoon gun.

  Verlaine moves. With one hand he fumbles at his back. Somewhere below his shoulder blade a thin black line sticks out. The metal must be a special alloy to have the strength to hold him off the ground. The point was no more than four feet away when Lukas shot it at him. It entered his body in about the same place where Jakkelsen was stabbed.

  I step out of the light and walk past Lukas.

  I walk toward a rising white sun of light. When I emerge from the tunnel walls I see that a lamp is now burning, mounted high on a stanchion. They must have started the generator. Tørk is standing next to the lamp. The mechanic is standing in the water up to his knees. It takes a moment for me to recognize him. He's wearing a big yellow suit with boots and a helmet attached. I make it halfway over to them before Tørk catches sight of me. He bends down. From the gear he takes out a pipe about the size of a furled umbrella. The mechanic is looking down at the water. His helmet would prevent him from hearing me. I take off my compass and toss it in the water. He raises his head and sees me. Then he starts to slide back the glass on the front of his helmet. Tørk is struggling with the umbrella. Unfolds the stock of a weapon.

  "S-Smilla," says the mechanic.

  I keep walking forward. Behind me, in the resonating shaft of the tunnel, there are footsteps.

  "I'm only going to m-make one d-dive. It's necessary for our work tomorrow."

  "There won't be any tomorrow for you or me," I say. "Ask him where Verlaine is."

  The mechanic turns toward Tørk. He looks at him and understands.

  "Why the boy?" I ask.

  I ask the question for the mechanic's benefit and to stop time, not because I need any answer myself. I know what happened, as surely as if I had been on the roof myself.

  I can feel Tørk as if he were a part of me. Through him I can feel the disastrous nature of the situation. All the balls he has in the air. The question of how well he can manage without the mechanic. His need to make a decision. And yet his voice is calm, almost sorrowful.

  "He jumped."

  I keep on walking as I talk. He snaps on a long magazine perpendicular to the weapon.

  "He panicked," Tørk says.

  "Why?" I ask.

  "I wanted to ask him to give me the cassette tape back. But he ran away; he didn't recognize me. He thought I was a stranger. It was dark."

  He releases the safety. The mechanic doesn't notice the weapon, he's looking at Tørk's face.

  "We get up onto the roof. He doesn't see me."

  "There were tracks," I lie. "I saw the tracks; he turned around."

  "I shouted to him; he turned around, but he didn't see me."

  He looks me in the eye.

  "He was hard of hearing," I say. "He didn't turn around. He couldn't hear a thing."

  There is ice under my feet. I'm on my way across the ice toward him, just as Isaiah was heading away from him. It's as if I am Isaiah. But on his way back now. To do something differently. To see whether there might be an alternative.

  Lukas is fifteen feet away when Tork sees him. He has gone the other way around the stone. Tørk has been dividing his attention between me and the mechanic. You can't do everything. Even he can't do everything.

  "Bernard is dead," says Lukas.

  He's holding the harpoon gun in front of him. He must have loaded it again. It seems as long as a lance; for a moment his wasted and much too rigid figure makes him look like some kind of cartoon character. His pants have frozen into an armor of ice. On his way ashore he must have fallen in.

  "You must be held responsible," he says.

  Tørk's umbrella shudders. A big invisible hand spins Lukas around on the spot. Then the dull blast follows, and Lukas has sketched a full pirouette. His face is once again turned toward us, but now his left arm is missing. He sits down on the ice and the bleeding starts.

  Then the mechanic moves. Because he's coming out of the water for a brief moment he resembles a big fish jumping onto land. The umbrella careens across the ice. Even without it, there is great confidence in Tørk's upright form.

  The mechanic reaches him. One of his yellow gloves clamps onto Tørk's shoulder, the other locks around his jaw. Then he squeezes. When the face beneath the pale hair falls backward, the mechanic bends his helmet over it; they look each other in the eye. I wait for the sound of vertebrae being torn apart. The crack won't be the sound of something breaking but of something slipping into place.

  Tørk kicks, a practiced movement that goes outward and moves in a semicircle toward the mechanic's face. It strikes the side of his helmet with the sound of an ax burying itself in a tree stump. Slowly the yellow form lists sideways and sinks to its knees.

  The umbrella is lying in front of me on the ice. I'm so scared of the weapon that I can't even kick it away. The mechanic straightens up. He starts to take off his oxygen tanks. His movements are weightlessly slow, like an astronaut.

  Then Tørk takes off. I run after him.

  He could force the others to sail away. They wouldn't like it. Especially Sonne. But Tørk could make them leave.

  He runs down along the crevasse. His lamp flickers. It's dark. At night in Qaanaaq I would go up on the ice to get blocks of meltwater. The ice has its own nocturnal hospitality. I have no flashlight now, but I'm running as if it were a level road. Without difficulty, with confidence. My kamiks grip the snow in a different way than his boots do.

  It would take so little. One little mistake and he would fall the way Isaiah fell.

  The white fields where the snow has settled form hexagons in the dark. We're running through the universe.

  I abandon the edge of the glacier before he does and head down. I want to cut him off from the motorboat. He hasn't seen me yet or heard me. But he knows I'm here.

  The ice is hikuliaq, new ice, that has formed where the old ice has drifted out. It's too thick to force a motorboat through but too thin to walk on. A white fog of frost hovers overhead.

  Then he sees me, or maybe he merely sees a figure, and he heads out onto the ice. I take a path parallel to his. He sees that it's me. He realizes that he doesn't have the strength to reach me.

  The Kronos is hidden in the fog. He heads too far to the right. When he instinctively corrects his course, the ship is two hundred yards behind us. He's lost his bearings. He's being led out toward open water. Toward the yot where the current has hollowed out the ice so it's as thin as a membrane, a fetal membrane. Underneath, the sea is dark and salty like blood, and a face is pressing up against the icy membrane from below; it's Isaiah's face, the as-yet-unborn Isaiah. He's calling Tørk. Is it Isaiah who is pulling him along, or am I the one who is trying to head him off and to force him toward the thin ice?

  His strength is about to give out. If you haven't grown up in this landscape, it uses up your strength.

  Maybe in a moment the ice will give way beneath him. Maybe it will seem a relief to have the cold water make him weightless and suck him downward. Even on a night like this the ice will look bluish white, like a neon light, from below.

  Or maybe he will change direction and head to the right again, across the ice. Tonight the temperature will drop even more, and there will be a snowstorm. He'll only survive a couple of hours. At some point he will stop, and the cold will transform him; like a stalactite, a frozen shell will close around a barely fluid life until even his pulse stops and he becomes one with the landscape. You can't win against the ice.

&
nbsp; Behind us the stone is still there, with its mystery and the questions it has raised. And the mechanic. Somewhere ahead of me the running figure slowly grows darker.

  Tell us, they'll say to me. So we will understand and be able to resolve things. They'll be mistaken. It's only the things you don't understand that you can resolve. There will be no resolution.

  Peter Høeg

  ***

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