by Neil Clarke
“Atlanta can wait,” she said firmly. “This is my favorite aunt we’re talking about.”
“You were going to go in the summer.”
“Didn’t you hear what I said? The place is closing ahead of schedule. I have to get her things.”
It hit her again that her aunt Rima was dead, had been dead for more than a year, that there was no relief from the shock of it, no matter how many times she mourned. And Chester was being a jerk right now. And she had homework to finish, grad school being what it was. She got up, grabbed her bag, and turned and walked away from him, from his shocked face, his half-suppressed “Varsha!”, the catcalls and laughter from the men at the bar. At the door she looked back very briefly—he was rising to his feet, arms reaching out, his face filled with rage and bewilderment. The night outside was cold—she fell into her familiar jogging rhythm, ignoring the glances of strangers, feet pounding on the pavement, bag strap tight across her chest—all the way to the T-station at the corner.
The tragically delayed letter was lying on her desk. I’m coming, I’m coming, she said silently to Rima. Just like you wanted me to a year ago, I’m coming to Alaska for spring break.
I first heard the songs of the bowhead whale on the internet. Varsha and I and a bunch of neighborhood kids and one of the pariah dogs—I think it was Tinku—were gathered in the front veranda of the Patna house, playing a video game. For some reason that I can’t remember now, we looked up whale songs, and there it was, the long, strange call, filling the space. The dog Tinku started howling in tandem and wagging his tail, as though he could understand what the whale was saying. All of us burst out laughing. But there was something about that song that tugged at me. It occurs to me now that my journey to the Arctic started there, on that afternoon, with the honeysuckle bush in full bloom and the smell of the flowers almost making me dizzy. The shisham trees in the front garden whispered in the breeze—a kind of bass note to the whale’s song—and all those years later it is the whales I hear, and the shisham trees are a warm and distant memory.
We are out in the boat, Jimmy and I, and we are following a pod of bowhead. There is an AUV—an underwater robot—fitted with a hydrophone that is moving with the whales. We can see its output right here on Jimmy’s laptop—the spectral analysis of the conversation below, and the sounds themselves, in their immense complexity. We know each individual in the pod—they were tagged decades ago, but even without the tags, the coloring on their flukes or the injury scars on their flanks tell us who they are. We’re seeing more propeller scars since the Arctic was opened to shipping. The killer whales have been moving up, too, hungry terrors that they are, and the bowheads that survive bear some horrifying scars. No wonder the bowheads are pushing farther North, toward the pole, where the waters are still cold, tracking the changing currents in search of krill.
I have learned that bowheads may be the oldest-living animals in the world. They live for over two hundred years! Apart from the new threats, their lives are relatively peaceful: the slow migrations around the North Pole, in the sub-freezing waters, with their kin; when hungry, they just open their enormous, garage-sized mouths and sieve in millions of tiny krill. Living that long, they must think long, deep thoughts. What do they think about? What do they say to each other?
When we are back at North Point, Jimmy will put on the headphones and scroll through the video feed and spectral analysis. Apart from language-recognition software, he says immersive attention is a way to use the best pattern-recognition device we know—the brain. It’s what his people have always done, paid attention to their environment in a way that makes the most observant scientists among us seem oblivious, blind, bumbling. No wonder I am having such a hard time with the language—Iñupiaq has to be the most precise language in the world.
I wish I could help you all understand what it is about this place that gets me. It is so cold I don’t have the words to describe it. Even with global climate change—even with the warming of the Arctic, the winters here are colder than we tropical flowers can ever imagine. When the wind blows, which it does all the time in gales and gasps, I feel like there is no breath in my lungs. I have to put warm gel packs in my gloves and boots so that I don’t get frostbite. For six months of the year there is darkness or near darkness, and—what I miss the most—there are no trees! But still, this place draws me and draws me and draws me, and it isn’t just Jimmy or the work. The tundra in early spring is astounding. The way the low sun hits the snow, the blinding beauty of it takes the breath away. Once, out in the field, we saw two Arctic foxes playing, chasing each other round and round in circles, without a sound. But the tundra is not silent. Did you know, ice can speak? It squeaks and grunts, makes little slithering, sliding noises, and great explosive, cracking sounds too. Once, early in my stay here, we were out on the sea ice, Jimmy and I, along with a few others from North Point. It was dark and cold, but very still. The stars were out in their billions, and we could see the faint, translucent curtains of the Northern lights high in the sky. We were getting ready to set up our instruments, talking quietly, when Jimmy said: “Guys, we’ve got to get off Now.”
I looked around but there was no obvious threat. I was going to ask Jimmy what the problem was, but then I saw everyone else acquiesce without argument. They packed up in a big hurry too. Hurry, hurry, Jimmy kept saying. I was thinking maybe there was an emergency with his family that he’d somehow remembered, but the moment we got off the ice there was an ear-splitting crack, and the segment we had been on suddenly broke off. You can’t imagine what that was like—a whole great peninsula of floating ice suddenly detached from the rest of the shore ice and floated away, ghost-like in the semi-dark, into the black Arctic Ocean. I was shivering and shaking with shock, but the others were slapping Jimmy on the back and shaking his hand, as we trudged back to the trucks.
I asked him later how he knew. It’s paying attention. Something he learned from his father and grandfather when he went hunting with them as a little boy, a kind of sixth sense that is developed through experience, a sensitivity to the slightest change in wind direction, the tiniest syllable spoken by the ice. Imperceptible to others, this ability to communicate with the physical environment is what originally earned the respect of scientists for Native Elders.
In the plane, on the final leg of the journey, Varsha’s bravado vanished. It was a really small plane, and there was a crack across the plastic of the seat in front of her, which didn’t inspire confidence. She could pull on her Augs and edit that all away, but she wasn’t such a V-head. Working in the field, you got to know where to draw the line.
It didn’t help that there was sick misery rising in her. There was no avoiding the fact of Rima’s death. Rima was supposed to have come down from Alaska to settle her in last August when Varsha had first arrived from Delhi—but she was already seven months dead and gone, taken by the ice during a storm, along with her partner and lover, an Eskimo scientist called James Young. It had been hard enough for Varsha to alight in Boston alone, to find her way to the International Graduate Students office at the University, to walk the bewildering streets of Cambridge in search of her apartment. But this was harder. The man who had forwarded Rima’s last letter had written to say that the research facility where her aunt had worked was closing down ahead of schedule, and there were some things of Rima’s that the family might like to have. The man’s name was Vincent Jones, and he would be glad to help in any way he could.
The plane banked. They were about to land in Utqiagvik. Her aunt had always, in her restless travels, been drawn to remote places, but this was the end of the world, or so it had seemed from the pictures on the internet—a town of mostly Eskimo people at the edge of the Arctic Ocean. She pressed her face against the window. There was a whiteness everywhere—white sky, white land, no horizon but the undifferentiated whiteness. For a moment she thought they must be flying through clouds, but the plane’s wing was clearly visible. She fought a feeling of wild panic, and reas
oned with herself—the plane wasn’t going to crash. There were people talking all around her, tourists and Natives, excitedly, because this was the first real winter in a decade.
“Which hotel? That must be new. They say the Castle of Light has the best views . . .”
“Worst winter they’ve had in a decade . . .”
“This is a real winter. This is what winters used to be like. Back then, before the Great Melt. It will be good, maybe, for the whaling.”
“The sea ice came back this winter to nearly 70%—no more multi-year ice—it will be thin and dangerous to walk on . . .”
“. . . when you were growing up? Every year like this? Man, that must have been crazy . . .”
In the whiteness below, there appeared a pinprick, then another and another. A line of houses or sheds, all in a row. The plane swooped lower and lower and she held on to the edge of her seat, thinking this is what Rima had seen on her first visit to this place—when was it? Five years ago? Maybe she’d been in this very plane, in the same seat. The misery rose in her like a solid wall.
On the ground there was ice everywhere. The runway was ice, and ice rimed the edges of the small airport. It was a large metal shed with a corrugated roof and an extension clearly under construction—behind it were roads of ice, and buildings in the same utilitarian style. The airport was a single large hall with areas sectioned off for tickets, departures, arrivals and luggage. Native Iñupiaq Eskimos, white tourists, a small knot of men in coast guard uniforms. How strange to be in a place where the whites were so clearly the other, and yet this was still America! Oh America, I thought I knew you. She heard English around her, and a language she took to be Iñupiaq, the Native tongue of peoples who had been here for thousands of years before the Europeans came. What would Rima have thought and felt, coming here for the first time? Waiting for her suitcase, she texted the family group. I’m here in Utqiagvik, all fine. I must only be the second Indian to come to this place. It’s really different. There was her little orange suitcase, between wooden boxes and sacks. She hauled it off the belt and looked around with a feeling of panic. Where was her host? Her Augs beeped and she hastily pulled them on. The scene before her was augmented with scrolling information, and a couple of VReal polar bears wearing toothy welcoming smiles were speaking a welcome. “Welcome to Utqiagvik, Northernmost city in the US,” they said. “Take your taxi or van directly from the airport area. Polar bears have been sighted in town.” Amidst the strangeness and wonder of this was the little message icon flashing, showing her an outline of where Vincent Jones was waiting for her. Near the exit door. She arranged her backpack on her shoulders and wheeled her suitcase ahead of her to the exit.
He was a large man with a broad, quiet face. His thin hair was streaked with white. He looked like the Tibetan refugees she had known in New Delhi. Smiling, he held out his hand.
“Good, good. You’re here. Rima talked so much about you. You look like her.”
“Thanks for receiving me,” she said. It was so strange to be here, to be here without her aunt Rima, who would have stood here shivering like this in this exact spot. There was a wind blowing, sharp in her face like icicles. She pulled up her hood. Vincent seemed unperturbed by the wind. They climbed into a large, black Land Rover which lumbered slowly into the streets of ice.
“It’s a little ways to North Point,” Vincent said. “We’ll go through Utqiagvik and by the ocean, so you can see the sea ice over the Arctic. It’s been some years since we’ve had a winter like this one. Used to be the norm, once upon a time.”
All she knew about Vincent was that he was somebody at North Point Polar Research Station, and he had been Rima’s friend, and he had sent the letter. It had been found on the desk in her office. He had been going through her desk because North Point was closing down. Rima must have meant to send it right before the trip out to sea from which she had never returned.
“What was it like last winter, when my aunt died?” she said. Might as well get it over with. “We got the reports, but I’d like to understand—”
“It wasn’t this cold or icy,” he said, “but we did get one great storm. The Arctic has been in a warming trend for decades, but it’s not steady, it goes up and down. Last winter the sea ice was so thin you couldn’t walk on it. Things are changing so fast weatherwise, it’s hard to predict whether a storm is going to fizzle out or turn into a howling blizzard. Rima and Jimmy were out in one of the research boats less than ten miles from shore when the blizzard hit.”
Her hands clenched on her lap. It was cold despite the heater—the tips of her fingers felt like ice.
“We didn’t used to have much of a coast guard presence when I was growing up,” Vincent was saying. “But even with a coast guard station right here, they couldn’t do anything with that storm. Had to wait two days before they could risk sending out the helicopters and the search vessels. That was the only bad storm we had that winter. This winter the cold and snow and ice are much more steady—this was normal once.”
He cleared his throat.
“Jimmy was my cousin.”
“Oh—God, I’m so sorry,” she said. She glanced at him. He was looking straight ahead, his face set.
She looked out of the window. There were children out on bicycles—bicycles!—with thick treads in the front of a small grocery store. Their parka hoods were lined with fur. An Eskimo couple went by on a four-wheeled open vehicle, their faces ringed with fur-lined hoods. A man was digging out a car from several feet of snow in front of a house. The buildings had the same utilitarian steel-shed look of the airport, except for an extraordinary structure some six floors high that looked like a wedding cake.
“Castle of Light Hotel,” declared the ornate sign.
“Tourist trap,” Vincent said, a short, amused laugh. “Good for the economy, or so I hope. Used to be we’d make money off oil leases, before the oilfields gave up the last of the oil.”
They turned east, leaving behind the houses. Now they were driving into the tundra—ahead and to their right was an expanse of snowy whiteness, flat and featureless. After a while they passed a large sign on their left with a cut-out image of a larger-than-life snowy owl. “Pagliavsi,” declared the sign, standing alone in the snowy emptiness. “Ukpeagvik, site of an ancient Eskimo Village,” Vincent said. Behind the sign the ground rose gently and then fell away into an enormous plain, its smoothness broken only by untidy chunks of ice, like broken piecrust.
“You should know,” Vincent said after a while. “Your aunt. She loved what she did. Like Jimmy—they were a pair. We’ll stop in a bit so you can see the sea ice.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t get to know him,” Varsha said. “She talked about him to us.” She thought of Rima’s full-on zest for life. It was possible to be a fifteen-year-old and feel older and duller than her then-thirty-year-old aunt. Those days, Rima’s enthusiasms and adventures had led her from a short stint as an adventure and travel writer to a degree in mechanical engineering and the design and customization of wind generators in the high Himalayas. In the lush back garden of the old house in Patna, under the mango tree as old as her great-grandfather, Varsha had sat on the swing with Rima and heard all about the great expanse of the Tibetan desert, the lakes of meltwater from the vanished glaciers, oases in the arid heights. The wind that blew hard and cold, the measuring instruments that recorded wind speed and direction over an entire year, so that Rima and her team could design the best wind-energy-capture system for that particular locale. She saw the pictures and felt the possibilities of the world open up, a familiar side-effect of being with Rima.
And now there was a lump in her throat, but Vincent was already pulling over by the side of the road and motioning her to get down. Here she was, Varsha of the tropics, on the Alaskan North Shore. There was the endless white expanse before her, with only the shiny ice road winding away before them. The sun had emerged from the clouds, and lay low on the horizon—the light on the snow hurt her eyes. She pulled up he
r Augs in world mode. You are 1280 miles from the North Pole, scrolled the message to the right of her field of view. Vincent led her to the top of the rise on the left. Her boots crunched on the snow. At the top they paused. Before them was the great, white plain broken by small piles of cracked ice. It extended all the way to the horizon, as far as she could tell.
“That’s the Arctic Ocean,” Vincent said. “Sea ice. Frozen sea water. You can tell there’s water under there from the way the currents make the ice break up.”
“Can you walk on it?”
“In places. Used to be parts of the sea ice attached to the shore stayed all year round, built up a little every season. As much as three, four meters thick sometimes. We used to camp on the ice when we cut whaling trails in the Spring. Your aunt ever tell you about that?”
“A little,” Varsha said. “She said the whaling hadn’t been very good for a while.”
“You’re cold—let’s get back in the car. Yes, the bowheads changed their migration patterns after the Big Melt. We, the Iñupiaq—my people—had always lived with the whales, and when they started to change, our old knowledge wasn’t as much help. The killer whales started coming up into the warming waters, hunting the bowheads. And the TRexes became active at the time.”
In the car the heater was running on high. She put her hands in front of the vents.
“We’ll get you proper gear for this place,” he said. “Your aunt’s stuff. She loved this place but never liked the cold.”