SWELL

by Corwin Ericson

  Mercury and Evinrude were in retrograde, or something like that, Angie told me. Planets and stars were both auspiciously-and poorly-aligned, which augured confusing weather and an encounter between a foolish man and a demented wizard. Angie refused to predict whether I’d stay dry on the taxi ride she gave me to Gaiety on the Angie Baby. She played psychic for me sometimes. I liked palmistry the best, because there was touching involved. I liked it when she traced particular lines of biographical development up the inside of my wrist. She was good for freckle-constellations too.

  I had thought we were going to have some kind of meeting of the WhaleNet executive council, but Angie said she was just going to her sister’s to do laundry, and that it was no trouble at all to bring me with. I felt mildly miffed. I wanted to be some trouble, at least. But it was a good day—blue above, gray below, whitish in between—and I was grateful my shepherd was Angie and not one of her sister’s glum Varangian guards. She had called in the morning to say I’d been summonsed by Snorri. I told her “summoned,” and she told me to stop correcting her. Summonsed is worse. I wouldn’t have come if that were the case, but I didn’t tell her that.

  I looked at Snorri’s icon. It had gained ever more clarity over the past few days that he’d been on Gaiety. The longer he’d been around, the more lifelike his icon had become. It had gone from a faux-primitive scrimshaw etching, to Wall Street Journal-style illustration, to U.S. currency accuracy to a meticulous line drawing. This last image was nearly perfect in its representation of Snorri, yet it depicted his eyebrows as stretching beyond the frame, as if the phone were demonstrating its talent to portray and mock its subjects. Angie’s icon was just a silhouette, as the WhaleNet icons were often when their subjects were nearby. I think that was the phone’s way of telling me to quit looking at my phone and look around me instead.

  Mini and Snorri were waiting for us at the floating dock. We tied up and waved. I held Angie’s laundry bag and kept it between us when Snorri came in for a hug. I hadn’t seen the whale-herder in the flesh in nearly a year. It looked like Mini had bought him some clothes. He was wearing a green light wool sweater that did not look like it had been passed down through the generations. Stiff blue American jeans, too. His graying hair had two thin braids that led back from his sideburns to his pony-tail. He looked good, actually—less obsession, more grooming.

  “Orange Whippey, son of Bismuth! Scion of harpoonists, charter member of the Whale Network, Known Associate of the Harbinger. It is very good to see you, Sir.”

  Snorri wasn’t going to let me by without physical contact, so I hoisted Angie’s huge laundry bag to my shoulder and started to tip backward as a result. Snorri pulled me back into a handshake and hug and overcompensated for the bag. In order to keep upright, he wound up holding Angie’s laundry. This wasn’t quite the plank-walk for Snorri I’d fantasized about, but it was about time somebody else was left holding the bag, so I appreciated the moment and walked quickly to shore before Snorri could give it back. This seemed to amuse Mini, and she pecked me on the cheek. Gaiety seemed jolly so far.

  Angie had been lured away by unlimited Internet bandwidth and an industrial-sized frontloader, no quarters necessary. Mini settled Snorri and I on the balcony off her living room and kitchen. We looked over the slantwise pines and arthritic oaks to see the waves horripilating into whitecaps—it was going to be a choppy ride back. She had nice snacks, which was good because I’d skipped breakfast. We had a lemony white wine that was too sweet, cold smoked mussels on ship’s biscuits, seaweed salad I recognized from the Spouter fridge, and caviar and crème fraiche on slices of hard-boiled egg. Chicken egg, probably, I don’t know; I didn’t eat it, since I didn’t like the idea of using the little spoon to lump fish eggs on the chicken egg.

  Mini never did dress like an islander. She was always wearing clothes that would look wrong with axle grease and fish scales, which was probably right for her, since she was on camera a few times a week, instead of being pushed overboard a few times a week, like myself. “We have a lot to catch up on,” she said, when I poured myself a second glass of wine. Snorri looked serious and sober. I must have looked like I was in trouble. What had I done?

  “What?” I asked, wondering what to deny.

  “You are becoming important,” said Mineola.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Wrong!” shouted Snorri. I grabbed my fork, prepared to defend myself. “That’s not how a hero faces importance!”

  “What?”

  Snorri’s eyes rolled back under the scrim of his reaching eyebrows. He sighed. He stroked an eyebrow strand and let his fingers continue down a braid that dangled along his head. “The Whale Council has taken an interest in you.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “It is not often the Whale Council turns its attention to an American,” he said. “You do not have to apologize. You could even be proud, if you wanted.”

  “I think, maybe, I’d rather be home.”

  “Calm down. Just give Snorri a listen,” said Mini.

  “There’s no way I’m giving the money back,” I said.

  Mini smiled gently and reached over to pat the back of my hand. “They don’t want your money. They might even give you some more. In fact, I’m certain they probably will.”

  “I’m calm,” I said. “More money?” “Snorri?” said Mini.

  “Oh, certainly they might.”

  Well that was all right, I figured. We were at a subcommittee meeting of the WhaleNet joint-stock company. I was a decision-making vested member, probably. I guessed I could do a job for them or something. I could probably move some things around and make some time. We’d have to see. “What do I gotta do?”

  “Just hear what Snorri has to say,” said Mini.

  Snorri straightened up in his chair and moved his little plate from his knee to a side table.

  “Wait,” I said. “Is there more wine? Different wine?”

  “Do you mean beer?” she asked.

  “Yes, please.”

  After Mini left, Snorri leaned across the arms of our patio chairs and stuck his face in mine. I checked to make sure I was a safe distance from the balcony rail. He gave me a long curious look. “So, Waldena?” He cocked an eyebrow, signaling his readiness for some whaleman-to-seaman confidences.

  “No,” I said, leaning away.

  He shook his head slightly and looked to see if Mini had returned. “No, really.” “Really, no.”

  “Orange! Waldena?”

  Snorri had no concept of where his business ended and others’ began. “Leave it,” I said.

  “It is left,” he said, but then winked, which was an expression he exceled at due to his branching eyebrows. Snorri could stare into the middle distance like no man I know, but I had special island-bred powers. I glared right through his eyeballs down his optic nerve with enough follow-through to reach the “shut up” region of his brain.

  Mini interrupted my coup d’oiel with the beer. “Play nice and use the glass.” She didn’t pour it for me.

  “Listen,” said Snorri, “I was on the cold Atlantic too long last year. I was lucky to return. Icebergs are loosening from the Arctic like teeth from a jawbone. The frigid lagoons are booming with the lowing of the bergs. Boat-sized chunks of ice bob about like chess pieces knocked from a giant’s table. The floating mountains are growing slushy and the residents are ready to riot.” “The Inuit?” I asked.

  “No, they’re ready to sue, though. I mean the real citizens of the icebergs: the grebes, auks, skua, the seals, the bears, the whales, the fish, the foxes, the squid.…”

  “You don’t have to go epic on us,” I said.

  “Son, I went epic before you were born, and you are interrupting. I’m telling something here.”

  I had half the beer left. Mini made a ‘be nice and listen’ gesture with her hands. One’s fucking elders, one must respect.

  “Change is afloat in the Arctic. It has been stirred like a wasp nest in a rotting r
owboat. Just a few seasons from now, all the ways will be lost, especially for the animals. Do you know what will come next?” he said, pointing at me.

  I wasn’t going to interrupt again.

  He pointed harder. “You. In your lifetime, Orange—well, maybe Moira’s, or her daughters’—men will find new ways through the Arctic. The compass won’t even point to the same places: North is on the move again. But men will explore and find ways and places that never existed before, or at least had not existed since before man. And those men will be islanders, sea-faring men from the very top of the world, where creatures adapt and evolve faster than anywhere else on the planet. Their neighbors will be new kinds of bears, don’t you think? Bears that can swim farther and farther as they adapt to a world without ice shelves. Bears that will eventually only need to haul up on shore now and then to meet other bears. Bears that will need less and less fur and more and more fat to survive the cold sea. Bears that might decide to dive for their food—take some squid from where they live, instead of waiting for them to come up through ice holes.”

  I had to interrupt. “Squid come up through ice holes?” “Why not? There are flying calamari in the South Seas.” I didn’t like thinking about it.

  “And the whales, of course. The baleens will be affected terribly. They feed on the tiny doomed animals that live in the cold water, the krill, the plankton. That’s our Harbinger Whale, for instance. How will his people adapt? The toothed whales, though, they will have smorgasbord. No ice shelves to keep them from snatching seals from the rocks, and more and more species will take to the sea to feed. What do you think those polar bears will do to adapt? Not lose their talons and teeth, I am sure of that. No, they will only grow vaster and more ferocious. In time the leviathans of the north will be joined by a new lineage, and it will be a huge and fearsome predator.”

  Mini and I said it together: “Bearwhales!”

  Snorri nodded sagely. “They might even outlast humanity. Two of the smartest, best-looking species on the planet; most deserving. The melting of the Arctic and the centuries-long diaspora of dispersing ice that will follow will be a planet-wide evolutionary catalyst. What new species will Ragnarok prepare for us? I would like you both to think about that—the world to come.”

  I did, I did think about it. Mostly, though, I was thinking about bearwhales. Mini was very sophisticated, cosmopolitan, even, in her island-bound way. She was probably thinking about bearwhales too. Was that enough, though, for Snorri to have summonsed me to Gaiety? To tell me ice was going to melt? Even with the thought sweetened, as it were, with bearwhales?

  “There is going to be a new archipelago in the far north,” Snorri continued. “Greenland will come to rival Australia in its deserted vastness, and, oh, what they are going to find under the permafrost plateaus when they melt! Artifacts from forgotten civilizations! Preserved creatures from before time! Meteorite craters mined for iron. Just like the Oregon Trail here on North America, we will find the very sled tracks left by the proto-Northern Indians! We’ll follow them from right here on Bismuth to the very fjords of Finlindia! We will find their sleds made from mammoth bones, their kayaks of baleen and skin, their diving suits made from walrus intestines and flippers. Ancient sauna pits filled with rune stones. Funerary crypts vaulted with ivory ribbing waiting to be discovered under half a mile of ice.”

  Snorri half-stood and stretched so he could touch me on the knee with one hand and Mini on the thigh with the other. “We will seek what my ancestors sought, the greatest city the planet has ever known, the El Dorado of tusk and ivory, the icy Atlantis, the lost paradise of the pole.…”

  “Hyperborea,” Mini said with noticeably less bardic enthusiasm than Snorri.

  “Well, yes, obviously,” he said and sat back down.

  Hyperborea, the mythical city at the North Pole, land beyond the north wind, is everything from the origin of civilization and home to ageless demigods, Frankenstein’s monster’s final resting place, the address of Santa’s workshop, his elves’ slave pens, the home of the frost giants, Superman’s Fortress of Solitude, site of the shaft to the center of the hollow Earth, the Alexandrian Library of all lost Saknussemm lore, and object of Snorri’s fascination. The chief item I knew about Hyperborea was its lack of substantiated existence, and I wondered if Snorri would acknowledge that fact.

  Snorri continued, “The islands that will rise from the Arctic melt are the peaks of the ancient circumpolar continent. They are said to surround a mile-high lodestone mountain. What does that suggest to you two?”

  Mini sighed and asked me if I wanted another beer. She came back with two bottles, already sipping one. I offered her my glass, she waved it away. Snorri, miffed at the distraction, crossed the room to put on a vest of some sort of marine mammal hide that was hanging from the back of a chair. He took his chair again and then pulled out a flask from the vest’s inside pocket and had a swig of what had to be old milk. Mini rolled her eyes. I wanted to take my chance to fidget too, but Snorri started back up too soon.

  “You’re both right, of course,” he said, “an impact crater.”

  “I didn’t say that,” I said.

  “A vast caldera, maybe,” said Snorri, “Maybe it is volcanic in origin, from within the earth. But an impact from an asteroid would explain much. At any rate, the top of the world began in fire, but it will not end in ice.”

  “But it is, right? Covered in ice?” I asked.

  “That is now, but not the past nor the future.”

  “I’ve been meaning to ask, now that you mention it—‘now,’ that is—what am I doing here right now?”

  “At this present moment in history, Orange, you are not paying enough attention.”

  I really did not know what it was I was supposed to be paying attention to. Money had been mentioned but the topic hadn’t come up again yet. Mini looked like she’d heard it before, but she was sticking around anyway. I supposed I could watch Snorri’s Delphic head of steam come to a full boil, as long as we stayed out of the sauna. I gave him a contrite look so that he’d continue.

  “This is Hyperborea I’m telling you about,” he said. “Its possible origin, its future!”

  Mineola cut in, “Snorri, Hyperborea? It’s not a real place. The lodestone mountain, the ring of islands, those are mythical.”

  “Throughout history, entire nations have been absolutely certain of it. My own people, the Northern Indians, have been telling legends about it since before we crossed the Atlantic. The Inuit knew it was there, though for them it was a ring of crystal mountains. The fact is, Hyperborea is a cipher, a mirage. In the far north there is. . . I don’t know if there is an English term. It is a sur-mirage, a mountain can appear to be upside down, balancing on its own peak, as if there were a vast mirror between them. Or entire cities can be seen to appear, fuzzy, squashed, or attenuated. This is how the Inuit knew of Trondheim, how when they first visited the Norwegian city, they already knew their way around the major streets. They’d been seeing the city for decades. Sometimes it’s an island—the Faeroes are seen west of Greenland now and then. So imagine you are one of my grandest ancestors, too many millennia ago to count. You are part of a generations-long migration eastward. How could people of that time even conceive of having a destination another continent away? Especially when they did not know there were such things as continents? They had seen it, that is how. They had seen snow-free forests, islands, maybe even villages. Imagine looking at the horizon, when all is bleak and white around you, and seeing the aurora whoosh and arc around the sky like languid bioluminescent eels scouting from the dark deep. Imagine now seeing a warm forest full of game within the glowing loops of the aurora. How could you not believe that you had glimpsed a paradise? There’s no reasonable way to get there—the compass would be no help, no seaway existed, no dog sled, no human legs could get someone across the unmappable wastes. So there was a paradise, a snowless forest, a city, an impossible mountain; my people always knew it was there, but had neve
r visited. All was legend, but that legend was as matter-of-fact as Bismuth is from Gaiety—of course it is there, whether it can be seen or not. Some of our myths say our people had their origin there, but the rest of our stories, and now our research too, tells us we began right here on these Northeast islands of yours. Other myths say Hyperborea was our race’s destination when we began our migration. History shows that what may have begun as a quest for Hyperborea became a voyage on the Northeastern Passage, a route that became legendary in its own right. We Northern Indians like to think of our people as having experienced a collective vision so powerful, it drew us across the planet. And I do not mean to disparage this vision, but what I began to learn when we met our friend, the Harbinger Whale, was that we had help from other creatures. The Whale Council’s lore is meant to be their own mystery, but they have taken a very serious interest in my discovery of the Harbinger and shared some of the secret archives with me. They believe that not only did whales and other animals show us the way, but the whales may have even induced us to migrate, for their own unknowable whaleish reasons. The Whale Council suggests that when our people were spread along our migration route—a voyage that took centuries—the ancestors of the Harbinger Whale helped us communicate with each other. Messages could be sent from one continent to another, from tribes trudging and paddling the frozen nowheres to the seat of their new civilization. They could tell their relatives, “We saw your cairns; we will be arriving in a few decades. We hope you will be home.”