by Peter Høeg
He carefully puts down the petri dish.
“I can see that you’re a fine connoisseur of women, Verlaine. What else were you doing in Chiang Rai?”
He’s not unaffected by the compliment. That’s why he answers the question. “I’m a lab technician. We were making heroin. At the time the woman arrived, they had sent the army after us, from all three countries. So Khum Na went on TV and said, ‘Last year we put 900 tons on the market, this year we’ll ship 1,300, and next year 2,000 tons, unless you call your soldiers home.’ The day he made that announcement, the war was over.”
I’m on my way out the door when he speaks again. “Human beings are the parasites. The worm is an instrument of the gods. Like the poppy.”
3
Tørk is waiting for me. When we reach the bottom, we’ve descended about sixty-five feet. The tunnel, which now runs horizontally, has a rough, rectangular concrete reinforcement. It ends in black emptiness. Tørk goes first. We stop in front of an abyss.
At our feet there’s a drop of eighty feet to the floor of the cave. Stalagmites of ice stretch up toward us from the ground, glistening, rainbow-colored.
Tørk breaks off a piece of ice and tosses it into space. The abyss is transformed into a series of rings and then fog; then it ceases to exist. We’ve been looking at the ceiling of the cave reflected in a lake right at our feet; water so still that it could never exist above ground. Even now, as it’s traversed by ripples, my eyes refuse to believe that it’s water. Calm slowly returns, and the underground world is reestablished.
The growth patterns of stalactites and descriptions of their crystal formations were outlined by Hatakeyama and Nemoto in Geophysical Magazine, no. 28, 1958. By Knight in the Journal of Crystal Growth, no. 49, 1980. And by Maeno and Takahashi in their article “Studies on Icicles,” in Low Temperature Science, vol. A, no. 43, 1984. But the most viable configuration to date was proposed by myself and Lasse Makkonen at the Laboratory of Structural Engineering in Espoo, Finland. It demonstrates that a stalactite grows like a reed, a hollow tube of ice that closes around water in its liquid state. That the mass of the stalactite can be simply expressed as:
where D is the diameter, L is the length, a is the density of the ice, and π in the numerator of the fraction is, of course, a result of the fact that we are calculating based on a hemispheric drop with a diameter set at 4.9 mm.
We proposed our formula out of fear of the ice. At a time when there had been a series of accidents in Japan with stalactites falling from the roofs of railroad tunnels and boring right through train cars. Here, above our heads, there are more stalactites and larger ones than I’ve ever seen in my life. Instinctively I want to move away, but I can sense Tørk next to me and give up the attempt.
The room is a cathedral. Overhead, the ceiling forms a vault at least fifty feet high, reaching almost to the surface of the glacier. All around the dome there are fractured areas where pieces have broken off and fallen, and where the ice has covered the floor, filled the grotto, and then melted again.
During periods when Moritz was gone and we couldn’t afford kerosene, or when supplies were short because the ship hadn’t arrived, my mother would set paraffin candles on top of a mirror. Even with only a few candles, the effect of their reflections would be overwhelming. It’s the same way with Tørk’s miner’s lamp. He holds it steady to give me time, and the light is seized by the ice, magnified, and thrown into the air like beams raining upward.
The long spears of ice seem to be floating. Gleaming with prisms, they drip down from the ceiling, stretching toward the earth. There could be ten thousand or even more. Some of them are intertwined, like chains of cascading Gothic cathedrals; others are small and densely packed—pincushions of quartz.
Beneath them is the lake. Maybe a hundred feet across. In the middle lies the stone. Black and motionless. The water surrounding it is slightly milky with bubbles dissolving in the glacier ice. The room has no odor except for the light sting of ice in my throat. The only sounds are drops falling at long intervals. The ceiling is such a distance from the stone that an equilibrium has been established. Very little freezes or melts in this room. Water circulation is minimal. The place is lifeless.
If it hadn’t been for the heat, that is. It’s exactly like the heat in the igloos of my childhood. The cold radiating from the walls makes the heat seem inviting. Even though the temperature is between 32° and 41°F.
A pile of gear is lying near us. Air tanks, coveralls, flippers, harpoons, and a crate containing plastic explosives. Ropes, flashlights, hand tools. No one is here except us. The ice creaks once, as if someone were moving a heavy piece of furniture in an adjoining room. But there are no adjoining rooms. There is only compact ice.
“How will you get it out?” I ask.
“We’ll blast a tunnel,” he says.
That’s possible. It will have to be about a hundred yards long. But they won’t have to reinforce it. And the stone will roll through the tunnel by itself, if it has the proper slant. Seidenfaden could take care of that. Katja Claussen will force him to do it. And Tørk will force her, and the mechanic. This is how I’ve experienced the world ever since I left Greenland. As a chain of force.
“Is it alive?” he asks quietly.
I shake my head. But that’s because I don’t want to believe it is. He cups his hands around the miner’s lamp. Its beam is now directed at the snow beneath us. From there it’s reflected upward. In this way the individual stalactites are obscured but a cloud of hovering reflections is visible, like gemstones defying gravity.
“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 yo
u 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 twenty-eight 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 Terk 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 Tørk 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.