Nowhere: Volume II of the Collected Short Stories and Novellas of Ian R. MacLeod

by Ian R. MacLeod

  Over in an instant. Thought of Tirkiluk. Felt no hesitation, no pity. The grunt and gust of salt air, a face like a dog’s. Drove the spear down hard, and felt the shock of it strike back into my body. It began to thrash and pull, but the line held, and the sea turned foamy red. Felt the ice cracking and the ocean bubbling up as I heaved it out. Frozen splashes. Somehow found the energy to haul the seal back to Tirkiluk, the heat of it sliding in my hands. She sliced and bit and tore. The way she had before, when I was so disgusted. She offered it to me. I took a little, and the taste of it was good. But all hunger seems to have left me, and even the fresh water she lifted from the grey sack in the seal’s belly slaked a thirst I didn’t feel.

  She made me take the bladder back to the bloodied hole. Dragged it there somehow, partly on hands and knees. It floated, a wounded sack, then was drawn down by a rippling current. Suddenly alive, swam away into the darkness. Tirkiluk tells me the spirit has returned. There will now be seal to hunt again.

  Such terrible guilt about the stupidity of the accident. Not just my own life and Tirkiluk’s I’ve endangered. The weather has turned even more against us now, as though it knows, and we’ve packed the snow around to make walls—a rudimentary kind of igloo, although Tirkiluk didn’t even know the word. The wind bites though, threatening to excavate or bury us. Can feel the great anticyclone the icecap inland like a presence, a ghostly conjurer drawing gales out of the Arctic waters. And I think of the lonely men in huts like the one I destroyed, or in the convoys in the Atlantic, and rounding the terrible North Cape towards Murmansk.

  Cold here is quite incredible, yet Tirkiluk feels it more than me. Almost a blessing. Looked at my legs today, cut back leggings that snapped like stiff card. Black skin, a section of dirty white where bone is showing through. Never thought to see my own bone. Wounds that should have gone gangrenous long ago. Think only the cold keeps me alive. A kind of sterility.

  Tirkiluk has shown me how to tame the wind. So simple I should let the boffins at Godalming know. Would have laughed if the fractured skin on my face would allow. Rattled those teeth around her neck, and called on Inua. Tied three knots, and the gale stilled, and a quarter moon brightened over the bay. Says she needs a time of quite now that the baby is near. Says she needs the blood and the liver and the fresh water of the seal.

  I re-sharpened the spear. I went out. Me, the pale hunter.

  When I hunt, the cold disappears. Silence engulfs me. I love the bright darkness, the glassy emptiness. Can hear the glacier moving, and understand that one day it will eat the mountains. Ice is stronger than heat or rock or even the ocean. Was there at the start of the world, and will close over everything at the end, when the stars blink out. I wait. Then flash of movement, and the blood-heat that burns like a fire from the open body of the seal. I leave the cutting of the flesh to Tirkiluk, who eats and drinks most of it anyway, and buries deep into the warmth. I must keep back. Not out of squeamishness, but because I fear the heat.

  Return the bladder to the ocean and let the current draw it away, so that the seal will return for me to hunt again.

  The baby came. A boy. A living boy. It’s like the Aurora—there are no words. Leaned on her belly as she pushed. The incredible heat of her flesh, my fingers like cold leather, and fear in eyes through the pain at what I had become. We made a clean space for the child, brought in the fresh falling snow. She cleaned him and lay him on the skin of the seal. Then she gave him his first name. Naigo. Could feel the spirits crowding in, joining with the baby which is at its oldest when born. Filled with the memory of other lives. That’s why a baby cries before it can laugh. Said she wanted to call him Seymour too, when my name floats free.

  Tirkiluk fears that the wolves and the polar bear must come soon, drawn by the blood-stink of life and death that surrounds this dreadful place. I do not believe that she and the baby will survive, yet I know that I fight for their lives.

  Keeps Naigo against her flesh. Will hardly let me see. Says the spirits will be offended. I know my grip is cold as the glacier now, and that I must look awful, yet still I wish she would relent. The child feels half-mine. Yet I know from the wild fear in Tirkiluk’s eyes that something is wrong. She senses it greatly now that she has Naigo, now that the whispering ancient spirits are gathered around her and the baby. It’s me. Something more than the fire and the cold and this terrible place. I know, yet I cannot bring myself to face it.

  Inua was once a young girl just like Tirkiluk, yet she committed some crime, and her parents rowed out with into the ocean in their umiak, and threw her overboard. When she clung to the side, they cut off her fingers, and they tossed a lamp to her as she sank down into the dark water, so that she might find her way.

  Think that Inua is still out there, somewhere at the edge of this bay where the ice meets the black water in shattering, half frozen waves. Her long hair streams out in the currents like dark weed, uncombed and verminous because she has no fingers, and her lantern shines up at me as I peer down through the ice waiting for the seal to rise. Or perhaps it’s Aquila I see glittering deep down in the water, which Tirkiluk tells me will soon rise back above the horizon. Or some other drowned star.

  I sit outside now, leaving Tirkiluk and Naigo with what little warmth shelter there is. The breath, the damp, the slight radiance that still comes from her half-frozen body, had become intolerable to me, although I think that she is also happier now that she does not have to see me when then ice cracks from her frozen eyelids and she looks up, and when the baby mews and she draws it out from somewhere inside her.

  In starlight, I stand up and I pull back the frozen, useless furs. I can see my hands, my arms, my chest. If I drop the furs now, they skitter across the rocks and ice, shattering like filthy glass. Underneath, there are darkened ropes of chilled muscle, pulled tight by shrivelled skin. My fingernails have peeled back like burned and blackened paint. From what little I can feel of my face with these hands, I have no nose, and my lips are stretched back so that my teeth are permanently bared.

  The snow has returned. It gathers on these pages, and the flakes do not melt as I brush them away. It forms drifts, sculpting my body. I settle back into the downy comfort. I lay back as whiteness falls. My jaw creaks and the softness fills my mouth, settles on these eyes that do not blink. Soon, I will be covered, buried.

  I think of Godalming. Of that hut by the tennis courts, and the sagging nets that no one has ever bothered to take in after the last set was played before war and the place was requisitioned. I think of Kay Alexander, her face sprayed with freckles, listening to the hissing seashell silence that drifts down from space.

  She looks ragged from worry at the loss of the broadcasts from Weatherbase Logos II as she sits each evening at her receiver, although she knows that there’s a war on and that this and worse will happen on every day until it’s won. She remembers the shy man who was sent there, who sometimes came across the lawns from the main house in the summer, and would sit nearby at the edge of a table and fuss with the cuffs of his uniform or a pencil, barely meeting her eyes, talking about things without somehow ever really saying. Kay’s hair is ragged now. Even in Surrey it is winter and the night comes early and the lanterns glow beyond the blackout blinds, and the stars drift down and leaves are tangled like fish in the rotting tennis nets. Kay’s red tresses hang in verminous fronds, and as she lays out the code grid and lifts her headphones from the hook where she keeps them, the chill engulfs her and her fingers snap off one by one.

  Nearly covered in forgetful snow now. Cannot see. But Tirkiluk is hungry. She and Naigo need, blood warmth. Must not give way. Must go and hunt the seal again. I know her face now, the mewling of her pain, the hot scent of her death spilling across the ice, the way the warmth of her blood makes my frozen, blackened flesh liquefy and dissolve.

  The sun is starting to pearl the horizon, and Aquila will soon return. Tirkiluk’s Aagyuuk. It signals the thaw.

  The polar bear came along the frozen beach at mid
day. He came with the changing wind, just as the sun was rising. I knew that he would have to come, just as the seal always returns, bringing Tirkiluk and Naigo the gift of her life.

  A terrible, beautiful scene, the mountains glittering nursery-pink. Then the white pelt, the lumbering flesh. He raised his snout, smelling fire and life and slaughter. He grunted, and howled.

  Naigo began to cry in the shelter behind me, and Tirkiluk sang to soothe him, her voice ringing clear over the keening wind, knowing that there was no hiding, knowing that the beast sensed the warm meat that was waiting on their bones. I thought for a moment of the seal, and how death was a kinder thing here than the winter, and that if I could truly finish with dying and return to life, it would be to a warm place with faces and smiles, crying with the grief of ages, hooded in silver drifts of placenta. But the bear had seen me, and smelled the death that my own lungs and mouth no longer have to taste, and smelled that I that I was an enemy.

  I grabbed the harpoon as the bear lumbered towards me, driving it hard. It struck near the massive chest, reddening where the wind riffled the pelt. The beast was slowed, but still he came towards me. I had an odd strength in me—the strength to throw a harpoon harder and faster than the wind—yet I was light, thinly bound by rigored muscle and spongy ropes of blood. The bear reached me and tumbled me over and his jaw opened and teeth closed over my arm and shoulder. The teeth gave me no pain. It was the carrion-hot breath that terrified me.

  Somehow, I pulled away from beneath him, dragged back on the bones of elbows and knees. I think he sensed then that he already had victory. Grey strands of ligament hung from his mouth, and my right collarbone dangled beneath. He shook it away. There was something playful and cat-like about the way he struck out at me with the massive pad of his paw. I was blown back as if by the wind as the claws striped my chest. I struck an outcrop of rock, feeling my left hand snap and roll away, and my leg break where the wound had exposed the bone, raising a pointed femur. The bear leapt at me, coming down, blocking the sky.

  My broken femur struck into his belly like a stake. He bellowed and the blood gushed in a salt wave. I knew that I would have to get away before the heat dissolved me entirely.

  I didn’t kill the bear. He ran back up the beach, trailing blood. The wound, which seemed so terrible as it broke over me from his belly, will probably heal easily enough. Spring is coming soon, and life will regather itself, and the bear will survive. I wish him luck, and the flesh of the seal when we have finally finished with her. I use the harpoon as a kind of crutch now that I can no longer walk easily. I have lashed the remains of my left arm to it, and struggle along the shore like a broken-winged bird.

  I have to keep the harpoon lashed that way even when I hunt, but the seal now comes easily. She has died for us so many times now that she no longer fears death.

  How I envy her. The bear’s blood-heat and his teeth and claws have exposed and melted the flesh of my chest and belly. I can look down now as I shelter by a rock from the long ice-glittering shadows of the gathering sunlight. The dark frozen organs inside their cage, furred with ice.

  I look up at the rim of the sky. Aagyuuk is rising. Across sixteen light years, Altair winks at me. While still I have time, I must catch the seal again.

  The thaw is coming now, as Tirkiluk said it would once Aagyuuk had risen. There is faint light much of the day, and sudden flashes of the blazing rim of the sun through the clouds and glaciers that lie piled on the horizon. The wind is veering south. The seabirds are returning.

  The ice in the bay booms now, and cracks like thunder. For Tirkiluk and Naigo, even though I know that there will be bitter storms to come, death has receded. She came out to see me today when the sun was sailing clear of the horizon and I was crouching in the ice-shadows where the cold wind drives deepest at the eastern end of the shore. She brought Naigo with her, gathered deep under her furs. She wept when she saw me, yet she held the child out for me to see. He slept despite the chill. Gently, I let the ragged claw of my remaining hand brush against his forehead, where the marks of birth have left his skin entirely. Then she drew him away, and held him to her breast and wept all the more. I would have wept with her, had I any tears left in me.

  I went today to the place of bones. I’ve known for some time that it is where I should seek to avoid the gathering heat. I stood at the rim of the shadowed ravine with rags of my rotting flesh streaming in the wind, gazing down at those clean and serene skulls. But I know that the souls live elsewhere. They live on the wind, in the ice, and beneath the soft lids of Naigo sleeping eyes.

  I write with difficulty now as the skin sloughs off my fingers like old seaweed. These pages are filthy from the mess I leave, and I can only go out when the wind veers north, or in the cold of the night. Why should I strive to continue now, anyway? I can think of no reason other than fear.

  A wide crack has appeared in the sheet of ice that covered the bay. It runs like a road from the horizon right up to the shore. Somehow, I believe I can smell the sea on it, the salt breath of the ocean.

  Must write before I loose fingers of remaining hand.

  Went out onto the beach. As I gazed at the widening gap in the ice, the seal emerged from the wind-ripped water. She lumbered up across the rocks towards me, and stared without fear with the steam of life rising from her smooth dark pelt. I could only marvel and wonder, and feel a kind of love. She forgives, after all the times that her life has been taken. She turned then, and went back into the water, and dived in a smooth deep ripple.

  I thought then I stood alone in the wind, yet when I looked behind me, Tirkiluk was there. A dark figure, standing just as I have stood so many times at the edge of this shore, looking out at the crystal mountains, the glacier, the bay. She let me hold her, and touch the baby again. I knew that we were saying goodbye, although there were no words.

  I can hear the seal mewling on the midnight wind. She is out on the shore again. Calling. Waiting. All I must do now is stand, and lift these limbs, and walk down towards the glittering path of water that spreads out across the bay. And the seal will lead me to the place in the ocean where a lantern gleams, dark hair streams, and fingerless hands spread wide in an embrace.

  From there, the rest of my journey should be easy.

  ──────────────────────────

  From the log of John Farragar, Ship’s Captain, Queen of Erin. 12 May 1943.

  Sailed 1200 hours Tuiak Bay SSE towards Neimaagen. A fire has destroyed Logos II Weatherbase, and a thorough search has revealed no trace of Science Officer Seymour. Have radioed Metrological Intelligence at Godalming and advised that he should be listed as missing, presumed dead.

  Also advised Godalming that an Eskimo woman and infant survived amid the burnt-out wreckage. They are aboard with us now, and I have no reason to doubt that the truth of this sad matter is as the woman has told me:

  Seymour befriended her when she was abandoned by her tribe, and the fire was caused by an accident with a lantern at the time broadcasts ceased. He died soon after from injuries caused by his attempts to recover supplies from the burning hut, and the body was subsequently taken by wolves. The later journals I have recovered are undated, and clearly the product of a sadly deranged mind. I would not wish them to reach the hands of his relatives, and I have thus taken the responsibility upon myself to have them destroyed in the ship’s furnace.

  Tirkiluk, the Eskimo woman, has asked to be landed at Kecskemet, where the tribe is very different to her own, and the wooded land is somewhat warmer and kinder. As the deviation from our course is small, I have agreed to her request. Her journey aboard the Queen should take little more than two days, but I am sure that by then we shall miss her.

  Afterword

  I was asked to write a zombie story for an anthology. As was typical for me, at least at that stage in what you might loosely call my career, I missed the deadline and then came up with something that could hardly be called a zombie
story at all. Although, of course, it is, at least in the sense that it continues to explore my fascination with the boundary between life and death. That, and lonely men in lonely places, most of which, outside of my imagination—and like Paris when I wrote “Nevermore”, I had never visited. The fact that I’m so conscious of a great big world out there of which I know so little is perhaps one of the reasons that, despite supposedly being an SF author, I’ve so rarely felt the need to go off-planet. That, and a sense that good fiction generally makes the most of what’s already there and twists it in new ways, rather than endlessly attempting to re-invent the wheel. And perhaps, also, a failure of conviction on my part that humanity will ever truly make it to the stars. So when I do go that way, as with a story such as “Isabel of the Fall” elsewhere in this collection, the results tend be be mythic.

  I love harsh, icy environments, or at least the idea of them, and have read many books about polar exploration—especially the ones about ill-fated missions, such as Scott’s and Franklin’s. “Tirkiluk”, though, was my first and only Inuit character. The stuff I read about Inuit folklore in attempting to research my idea was refreshingly free of any undead references, which basically allowed me to go wherever I wanted. Sometimes, that can be limiting. But not here. Diaries are also difficult to make work in fiction, but this story never wavered. Mainly, I guess, because what the narrator knows and doesn’t know is key to its telling. The weather wars idea came from a book called Bodyguard Of Lies, which was one of the first to get to grips with the truth about British secret intelligence during the war: Enigma, Alan Turing and all. Now that that story has been told many times, it’s easy to forget just how long it was hushed up for, and how little about the brave efforts of those dedicated people we were allowed to know.