by Dan Simmons
Now he is being asked to die again — to die as what he was in order to become something else.
But how many men get such a second chance? How many captains who have watched one hundred twenty-five men in their expedition die or disappear would want it?
I could disappear.
Crozier has seen the mass of scars on his arm, chest, belly, and leg each night when he strips to crawl beneath the sleeping robes, and he can feel and imagine how terrible the bullet and shotgun-pellet scars are on his back. They could be an explanation and excuse for a lifetime of silence about his past.
He can hike east across Boothia, hunt and fish in the rich, warming waters off the east coast there, hide from Royal Navy and other English rescue ships, and wait for an American whaling ship. If it takes two or three years there before one comes, he can survive that long. He is sure of it now.
And then, instead of going home to England — has England ever been home for him? — he can tell his American rescuers that he has no memory of what has happened to him or what ship he belonged to — he can show his terrible wounds as evidence — and go to America with them at the end of the whaling season. There he can start a new life.
How many men get a chance to start such a new life at his age? Many men would want to.
Would Silence go with him? Would Silence bear the stares and laughter of sailors and the harsher stares and whispers of “civilized” Americans in some New England city or New York? Would she trade her furs in for calico dresses and whalebone corsets, knowing that she would always be the ultimate stranger in the ultimate strange land?
She would.
Crozier knows this as surely as he knows anything.
She would follow him there. And she would die there — and die soon. Of misery and of the strangeness and of all the vicious, petty, alien, and unbridled thoughts that would pour into her like the poison from the Goldner tins poured into Fitzjames — unseen, vile, deadly.
He knows this as well.
But Crozier could raise his son in America and have a new life in that almost-civilized country, perhaps captain a private sailing ship there. He has been a total failure as a Royal Navy and Discovery Service captain and as an officer and as a gentleman — well, he was never a gentleman — but no one in America would ever need to know that.
No, no, a serious sailing ship would take him to places and ports where he might be known. If he is recognized by any English Naval officer, he would be hanged as a deserter. But a small fishing ship … fishing out of some small New England harbour village, perhaps, with an American wife waiting in port to raise his child with him after Silence dies.
An American wife?
Crozier glances at Silence straining in the sledge harness to his right, pulling with him. The crimson and red and purple and white light from the aurora overhead paints her furred hood and shoulders. She does not look at him. But he is sure that she knows what he is thinking. Or if she does not know now, she will when they curl up together later in the night and dream.
He cannot go home to England. He cannot go to America.
But the alternative …
He shivers and pulls his hood forward so that the polar-bear fur on either side of his face can better capture the warmth of his breath and body.
Francis Crozier believes in nothing. Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. It has no plan, no point, no hidden mysteries that make up for the oh-so-obvious miseries and banalities. Nothing he has learned in the last six months has persuaded him otherwise.
Has it?
Together, they pull the sledge farther out onto the pack ice.
On the eighth day they stop.
This place looks no different than most of the other pack ice they have crossed in the previous week — a bit flatter, perhaps, fewer large ice blocks and pressure ridges, perhaps, but essentially just pack ice. Crozier can see a few small polynyas in the distance — their dark water like blemishes in the white ice — and the ice has broken up here and there into several small, impermanent going-nowhere leads. If the spring breakup is not actually coming two months earlier this year, it is doing a good impersonation of it. But Crozier has seen such false spring thaws many times before in his arctic experience and knows that the real breakup of pack ice will not begin until late April or later.
In the meantime, they have patches of open water and seal breathing holes galore, perhaps even the chance to hunt walrus or narwhal should they appear, but Silence is not interested in hunting.
Both of them get out of their harness and look around. They have stopped hauling in the brief interlude of midday southern twilight that passes for daytime.
Silence steps in front of Crozier, removes his mittens, and then removes her own. The wind is very cold and their hands should not be exposed for more than a minute, but in that minute she holds his hands in hers and looks at him. She moves her gaze to the east, then looks south, and then looks back at him.
The question is clear.
Crozier feels his heart pounding. He cannot remember any time in his adult life — certainly not the night that Hickey ambushed him — when he has felt so frightened.
“Yes,” he says.
Silence puts her mittens back on and begins unpacking the sledge.
As Crozier helps her unpack things onto the ice and then break down parts of the sledge itself, he wonders again how she has found this place. He has learned that while she sometimes uses the stars or moon to navigate by, more often than not she just pays great attention to the landscape. Even on seemingly barren snowy terrain, she is counting the mathematically precise snow ridges and snow mounds created by the wind, even while noting which way these ridges run. Like Silence, Crozier has begun measuring time not so much in days as in sleepings — how many times they have stopped to sleep, whatever time of day or night that might have been.
Out here on the ice, he has been more aware than ever — that is, he has shared some of Silence’s awareness — of the subtleties of hummocked ice and old winter ice and new pressure ridges and thick pack ice and dangerous new ice. He now can see a lead many miles away just by the slight darkening of clouds above it. He now avoids dangerous but almost invisible fissures and rotten ice without actively noticing that he is doing so.
But why this place? How did she know to come here for what they are about to do?
I am about to do it, he realizes and his heart pounds more wildly.
But not yet.
In the quickly dimming light, they connect some of the slats on the sledge and the unlashed vertical posts to build a crude framework for a small tent. They will be here only a few days — unless Crozier remains here forever — so they do not try to find a drift in which to construct a snow-house, nor do they spend energy on making the tent fancy. It will serve as shelter.
Some of the skins are set in place for the outer wall of the tent, most go inside.
While Crozier is arranging their floor furs and sleeping furs, Silence is outside, quickly and efficiently cutting blocks of ice from some nearby jumble block and building a low wall on the windward side of the tent. That will help some.
Once inside, she helps Crozier rig the blubber-flame cooking lamp and antler frame in the caribou-skin vestibule of the tent and they begin melting snow for drinking. They will also use the frame and flame for drying their outer clothes. The wind blows snow around the abandoned and empty sledge, which is little more than runners now.
For three days they both fast. They eat nothing, drinking water in an attempt to quell their belly’s rumblings; they leave the tent for long hours each day, even when the snow comes, to exercise and relieve tension.
Crozier takes turns throwing both harpoons and both lances at a large snow-and-ice block; Silence had recovered them from her dead family members at the massacre site and prepared one heavy harpoon with its long cord and one lighter throwing lance for each of them months ago.
Now he throws the harpoon with such force that it buries itself ten i
nches into the block of ice.
Silence walks closer and removes her hood, peering at him in the shifting light from the aurora.
He shakes his head and tries to smile.
He has no signs for Isn’t this what you do to your enemy? Instead, he reassures her with a clumsy hug that he is not leaving or planning to use the harpoon on anything or anyone anytime soon.
He has never seen the aurora like this.
All day and night the cascading curtains of color dance from horizon to horizon with the center of the displays directly overhead. Not in all of his years of expedition near the north or south poles has Crozier seen anything remotely resembling this explosion of light. The hour or so of wan daylight does almost nothing to lessen the intensity of the aerial display.
And there is ample acoustical accompaniment to the visual fireworks.
All around them, the ice groans, cracks, moans, and grinds from pressure, while long series of explosions under the ice begin like scattered artillery fire and quickly move to an unceasing cannonade.
Already unnerved by anticipation, Crozier is more deeply shaken by the noise and movement of the ice pack under them. He sleeps now in his parka — perspiration be damned — and is out of the tent and onto the ice a half dozen times each sleeping period, sure that their broad floe is breaking up.
It never does, although cracks open here and there within fifty yards of their tent and send fissures racing faster than a man could run through seemingly solid ice. Then the cracks close and disappear. But the explosions continue, as does the violence in the sky.
In his last night in this life, Crozier sleeps fitfully — his fasting-hunger makes him cold in a way that even Silence’s body heat cannot compensate for — and he dreams that Silence is singing.
The ice explosions resolve themselves into steady drumbeats that serve as background for her high, sweet, sad, lost voice:
Ayaa, yaa, yapape!
Ayaa, yaa, yapape!
Ajâ-jâ, ajâ-jâ-jâ …
Aji, jai, jâ …
Tell me, was life so beautiful on earth?
Here I am filled with joy
Whene’er the dawn comes up above the earth
And the great sun
Glides up into the sky.
But there where you are
I lie in fear and trembling
Of maggots and teeming vermin
Or sea creatures with no souls
That eat into the hollow of my collar bone
And bore out my eyes.
Aji, jai, jâ …
Ajâ-jâ, ajâ-jâ-jâ …
Ayaa, yaa, yapape!
Ayaa, yaa, yapape!
Crozier awakes trembling. He sees that Silence is already awake, staring at him with her dark, unblinking eyes, and in a moment of pure terror deeper than terror, he realizes that it was not her voice that he has just heard singing this dead man’s song to him — literally a song from a dead man to his previous living self — but the voice of his unborn son.
Crozier and his wife rise and dress in mutual ceremonial silence. Outside, though perhaps morning, it is still night, but a night of a thousand thrusting colors laid over the shaking stars.
The shattering ice still sounds like a drumbeat.
66
The only paths left now are surrender or death. Or both.
All of his life, the boy and man he was and has been for fifty years would rather die than surrender. The man he is now would rather die than surrender.
But what is death itself other than the ultimate surrender? The blue flame in his chest will accept neither choice.
In their snow-house the past weeks, under their sleeping robes, he has learned about another type of surrender. A sort of death. A change from being one to being something else that is neither self nor not-self.
If two such different people who have no words at all in common can dream the same dreams, then perhaps — even with all dreams set aside and all other beliefs ignored — other realities can merge as well.
He is very frightened.
They leave the tent wearing only their boots, shorts, leggings, and the thin caribou-skin shirts they sometimes wear under their parkas. It is very cold tonight, but the wind has died down since the day’s brief glimpse of midday sun.
He has no idea what time it is. The sun has been set for many hours, and they have not slept yet.
The ice breaks under pressure with the steady beat of drums. New leads are opening nearby.
The aurora casts curtains of light from the starry zenith to the white-ice horizon, sending shimmers to the north, to the east, to the south, and to the west. All things, including the white man and brown woman, are tinted alternately in crimson, violet, yellow, and blue.
He goes to his knees and raises his face.
She stands over him, bending slightly as if watching a breathing hole for a seal.
As taught, he keeps his arms at his side, but she grips him firmly by his upper arms. Her hands are bare in the cold.
She lowers her head and opens her mouth wide. He opens his. Their lips are almost touching.
She inhales deeply, seals her mouth over his, and begins blowing into his open mouth, down his throat.
This is where — in their practice during the long winter darkness — he had so much trouble. Breathing in another person’s breath is like drowning.
His body tense, he concentrates fiercely on not gagging, on not pulling away. He thinks — surrender.
Kattajjaq. Pirkusirtuk. Nipaquhiit. All clack-clack names he half remembers from his dreams. All names the Real People around the world’s circle of northern ice have for what they are doing now.
She begins with a short rhythmic series of notes.
She is playing his vocal cords like a bank of woodwinds’ reeds.
The low notes rise out over the ice and blend with the pressure-cracking and the pulsing aurora light.
She repeats the rhythmic motif but this time leaves a short gap of silence between the notes.
He takes her breath from his lungs, adds his own, and blows back into her open mouth.
She has no tongue, but her vocal cords are intact. The notes they produce with his breath fluttering them are high and pure.
She blows music from his throat. He brings music from hers. The opening rhythmic motif quickens, overlaps, hurries itself. The range of notes becomes more complex — as much flute as oboe, as distinctly human as any voice, the throat-song can be heard for miles across the aurora-painted ice.
Every three minutes or so in the first half hour, they pause and gasp for breath. Many times in practice they have broken up in laughter here — he understands through her string-signs that this was part of the fun when it was only a woman’s game, making the other throat-singer laugh — but there can be no laughter tonight.
The notes begin again.
The song takes on the quality of a single human voice singing, simultaneously bass-deep and flute-high. They can shape words by breathing through each other’s vocal cords like this and now she does — speaking words in song through the night; she plays his throat and vocal cords like a complex instrument and the words take shape.
They improvise. When one changes rhythm, the other must always follow. In that sense, he knows now, it is very much like making love.
He finds the secret space to breathe in between sounds so that they can go longer and make deeper, purer notes. The rhythm quickens toward an almost climactic point, then slows, then quickens again. It is follow the leader, back and forth, one changing the tempo and rhythm, the other following like a lover responding, then the other taking the lead. They throat-sing each other this way for an hour, then two hours, sometimes going twenty minutes and more without stopping for a breath.
The muscles of his diaphragm hurt. His throat is on fire. The notes and rhythm now are as complicated as those created by any dozen instruments, as interlaced, complex, and ascending as the crescendo of a sonata or symphony.
He lets
her lead. The single voice the two of them make, the sounds and words the two of them speak, are hers, through him. He surrenders.
Eventually she stops and falls to her knees next to him. They are both too exhausted to hold their heads up. They pant and wheeze like dogs after a six-mile run.
The ice has stopped its noises. The wind has ceased its hum. The aurora pulses more slowly overhead.
She touches his face, gets to her feet, and goes away from him, pulling the tent flap shut behind her.
He finds enough strength to stand and to shed the rest of his clothes. Naked, he does not feel the cold.
A lead has opened to within thirty feet of where they made their music, and now he walks toward this. His heart will not slow its pounding.
Six feet from the edge of the water he goes to both knees again and raises his face to the sky and closes his eyes.
He hears the thing rising from the water not five feet from him and hears the scraping of its claws on ice and the huff of its breath as it pulls itself out of the sea onto the ice and hears the ice groaning under its weight, but he does not lower his head nor open his eyes to look. Not yet.
Water from its coming out of the sea laps against his bare knees and threatens to freeze him to the ice he kneels on. He does not move.
He smells the wet fur, the wet flesh, the bottom-of-the-ocean stink of it, and senses its aurora shadow falling over him, but he does not open his eyes to look. Not yet.
Only when his skin prickles and goose bumps rise at the heavy-mass presence seeming to surround him and only when its meat-eater’s breath envelops him does he open his eyes.
Fur dripping like a priest’s wet and clinging white vestments. Burn scars raw amid the white. Teeth. Black eyes not three feet from his own and looking deep into him, predator’s eyes searching for his soul … searching to see if he has a soul. The massive triangular head bobs lower and blots out the throbbing sky.
Surrendering only to the human being he wants to be with and to the human being he wants to become — never to the Tuunbaq or to the universe that would extinguish the blue flame in his chest — he closes his eyes again, tilts back his head, opens his mouth, and extends his tongue exactly as Memo Moira taught him to do for Holy Communion.