So relates Adam of Bremen in the Historia Hammaburgensis Ecclesiæ.
And this current expedition, if not by its official remit bound all the way to Ginnungagap, must nonetheless acknowledge its presence up there ahead in the fog, in the possible darkening of some day’s water-sky to the reflection of a mythical Interior, the chance, in this day and age, of sailing off the surface of the World, drawn into another, toroidal dispensation, more up-to-date topologically than any simple disk or spheroid.
Already, by the time of Harald Hårdråde, the once terrible void was scarcely a remnant, a vaporous residue of the world’s creation and the high drama of the Ymir-Audumla era, no longer the intersection of Niflheim’s ice and Muspellheim’s fire but the debris from a calamitous birth.
Though Penhallow forebears might have undertaken some similar expedition, all, until now, had found reasons not to. There was even some suggestion of a conspiracy of ancestors, against the future, certainly against this voyage. . . . The Penhallow money came from Iceland spar—they owned extensive deposits all over the Arctic, having been crystal tycoons since the first Penhallows arrived in Iceland late in the seventeenth century as part of a calcite rush set off by the famous arrival of the double-refracting mineral in Copenhagen by way of a sailor who’d discovered some near the Bay of Röerford.
When the Vormance Expedition arrived, Constance’s grandson, Hunter Penhallow, was off on the ferry to the mainland every day in delirious truancy, abandoning his easel and brushes, working whatever odd quayside jobs he could for these scientific folk with their strange lower-eighties accents. His parents, one day too early in his life for him to remember, had “withdrawn” southward to that region of sailors’ yarns and oddities unconfirmed, and Constance—headlong, unable to withhold, even knowing, in the oracular way expected of her, that as soon as he could he would follow their example if not their exact tracks—had become all his home. Of course he would leave—that was only fortune-telling—it could not interfere with her love. He would stow away on the Malus, sail off to sea with the Vormance Expedition, as Constance had known and feared that one day, on some ship, he must. No one in the crew or among the scientists tried to prevent him—hadn’t it become a custom on these expeditions for trustworthy natives to tag along, often in just some mascotte capacity? When he finally did go round the Point and out to sea, it was to bear away with him, first northward and then back down into the lower latitudes, the curse of the great silent struggle which was the ground for the history of this place, since at least the discovery of the first crystal-choked cave.
BUILT ONLY A FEW YEARS BEFORE, in clapboard siding of a vivid cream color, roofed in gray shakes a shade or two lighter than the outcroppings and stone walls that surrounded it, the Hotel Borealis, where the Expedition had set up headquarters, presented at one corner a curious sort of open turret, whose slender white columns supported semicircular balconies on the first and second floors, and above them held up a conical roof, almost a steeple, with a high finial that carried a weather vane and some wireless antennas as well. In back of the hotel rose a steep green mountainside. Mist seethed and glided everywhere. At the end of the lane began the fjord, sudden and deep.
Hunter set up his easel outside across the road and began to try to paint the place, though microscopic droplets of salt fog inevitably got folded though not mixed in with the Payne’s gray and Naples yellow, and in years to come, as the small canvases from this period traveled the world increasing in value, this introduced modelings, shadows, redefinitions of space, which, though they were physically there, Hunter had not seen at the time—would have to wait for his later “Venice” and “London” phases even to recognize.
All night, out in the great fjord, they heard the ice, they woke, they dozed again, the voices of the ice entered their dreams, dictated what they would see, what would happen to each dreaming eye as, helpless, it gazed. Just to the north loomed a far-spreading glacier, the only one in this entire domain of ice that had never been named, as if in fearful acknowledgment of its ancient nobility, its seemingly conscious pursuit of a project. . . .
“We can’t afford to winter here, we’ll have to move while we can still get out to sea.”
“Fine with me. I’m not sure I can take even another week here. The food—”
“Not a Meat Olaf fancier, I gather.”
“Can anything be done?”
“Well, it’s supposed to be for emergencies, but I guess this qualifies as one.” Unlocking a black valise and gazing inside for a moment. “Here you go,” handing over an ancient hand-blown bottle whose label, carefully engraved and printed in an unfaded spectrum of tropical colors, showed an erupting volcano, a parrot with a disdainful smile and the legend ¡Cuidado Cabrón! Salsa Explosiva La Original. “Couple of drops is all you’ll need really to light that Meat Olaf right up, not that I’m being stingy, understand. My father handed this on to me, as did his father to him, and it isn’t down by even a quarter of an inch yet, so do exercise caution’s all I’m saying.”
As expected, this advice was ignored, and next mealtime the bottle got passed around and everybody slopped on the salsa. The evening that resulted was notable for hysteria and recrimination.
The luxuriant world of the parrot on the label, though seemingly as remote from this severe ice-scape as could be imagined, in fact was separated from it by only the thinnest of membranes. To get from one to the other one had only to fill one’s attention unremittingly with the bird’s image, abasing oneself meantime before his contempt, and repeat “¡Cuidado cabrón!” preferably with a parrot accent, until the phrase no longer had meaning—though in practice, of course, the number of repetitions was known to run into the millions, even as it ran listeners’ forbearance into the ground. In thus acquiring some of the force of a Tibetan prayer-wheel, the practice was thought to serve as an open-sesame to the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra country as well, a point which old Expedition hands were not reluctant to bring up.
At first glance a roomful merely of bearded gentlemen in dark suits and matching waistcoats, these scientists actually made up an international spectrum of motive and eccentricity. Dr. Vormance was on sabbatical from Candlebrow University, where he ordinarily headed the Department of Mineralogy. The noted Quaternionist Dr. V. Ganesh Rao of Calcutta University was seeking a gateway to the Ulterior, as he liked to phrase it, having come to recognize the wisdom of simply finding silence and allowing Mathematics and History to proceed as they would. The American bucket-shop desperado Dodge Flannelette, on the other hand, was chiefly up here for the practical uses any discoveries could be put to, having been privately informed, for instance, that Iceland spar was central to the development of means to send moving images thousands of miles, if not in fact everywhere in the world. And young Mr. Fleetwood Vibe was here at the behest of his father, Wall Street eminence Scarsdale Vibe, who was effectively bankrolling the Expedition. One of Fleetwood’s chores was to observe and write down instances of money recklessly spent, enabling the elder Vibe someday to exact an appropriate revenge.
“The main thing to be looking at, though,” the tycoon gazing off into various distances which failed to include his son, a tell that Fleetwood and his brothers had learned quite early meant that Scarsdale did not fully trust them and was not providing the full story, not by a damn sight, “is the rail-worthiness of the terrain. As we speak, Brother Harriman is out buying up scientists by the shipload, mobilizing some kind of Alaskan junket. Him and old Schiff as usual, hand in glove. Almost certainly suggesting a scheme for a rail link across the Bering Strait, Alaska to Siberia, hooking on into the Trans-Sib, and from there God knows. Setting aside of course the unholy conditions any train trying to cross a railroad bridge over the Bering Strait would likely encounter.”
This had the appearance of an open sharing of deep business confidences, but all it meant was that important data were being withheld, which Fleetwood, if he wished further enlightenment, must inquire after on his own. “So . . . you want to b
eat him to it.”
“Them,” Scarsdale corrected him. “A climber plus a Jew. Any wonder the world’s going to hell.”
THE TRANSNOCTIAL DISCUSSION GROUP met in one of the lounges in the basement of the hotel, located well out of the earshot of other guests who might have wished, for example, to sleep. Tonight’s announced topic was “The Nature of Expeditions.”
“We learned once how to break horses and ride them for long distances, with oceangoing ships we left flat surfaces and went into Riemann space, we crossed solid land and deep seas, and colonized what we found,” said Dr. Vormance. “Now we have taken the first few wingbeats of what will allow us to begin colonizing the Sky. Somewhere in it, God dwells in His Heavenly City. How far into that unmapped wilderness shall we journey before we find Him? Will He withdraw before our advance, continue to withdraw into the Infinite? Will He send back to us divine Agents, to help, to deceive, to turn us away? Will we leave settlements in the Sky, along our invasion routes, or will we choose to be wanderers, striking camp each morning, content with nothing short of Zion? And what of colonizing additional dimensions beyond the third? Colonize Time. Why not?”
“Because, sir,” objected Dr. Templeton Blope, of the University of the Outer Hebrides, “—we are limited to three.”
“Quaternionist talk,” shouted his collegial nemesis Hastings Throyle. “Everything, carnal and spiritual, invested in the given three dimensions—for what use, as your Professor Tate famously asked, are any more than three?”
“Ever so frightfully sorry. The given world, in case you hadn’t noticed. Planet Earth.”
“Which not so long ago was believed to be a plane surface.”
So forth. A recurring argument. Quaternionism in this era still enjoyed the light and warmth of a cheerful noontide. Rival systems might be acknowledged now and then, usually for some property considered bothersome, but those of the Hamiltonian faith felt an immunity to ever being superseded, children imagining they would live forever—though the sizable bloc of them aboard the Malus were not quite certain what the closely guarded Mission Document meant when it described the present journey as being taken “at right angles to the flow of time.”
“Time moves on but one axis,” advised Dr. Blope, “past to future—the only turnings possible being turns of a hundred and eighty degrees. In the Quaternions, a ninety-degree direction would correspond to an additional axis whose unit is √-1. A turn through any other angle would require for its unit a complex number.”
“Yet mappings in which a linear axis becomes curvilinear—functions of a complex variable such as w=ez, where a straight line in the z-plane maps to a circle in the w-plane,” said Dr. Rao, “do suggest the possibility of linear time becoming circular, and so achieving eternal return as simply, or should I say complexly, as that.”
Inexpensive cigar smoke thickened the air, and the fifteen-cent bottles of imported Danish aquavit ran out, to be replaced by a locally distilled product stored in somewhat larger earthen crocks. Out in the dark, the ancient ice went creaking, as if trying to express some argument of its own.
As if the hour itself in growing later had exposed some obscure fatality, the discussion moved to the subject of the luminiferous Æther, as to which exchanges of opinion—relying, like Quaternions, largely on faith—often failed to avoid a certain vehemence.
“Bloody idiots!” screamed Dr. Blope, who belonged to that British school, arisen in the wake of the Michelson-Morley Experiment, of belief in some secret Agency in Nature which was conspiring to prevent all measurement of the Earth’s velocity through the Æther. If such velocity produced, as Fitzgerald maintained, a shrinkage of dimension in the same direction, it was impossible to measure it, because the measuring device would shrink as well. “It’s obvious Something doesn’t want us to know!”
“About what I’d expect from the Brits,” thoughtfully countered Dr. Vormance. “Half the dwelling units of that island have been visibly haunted at some time or other. They see ghosts, they see fairies under every fungus, edible and otherwise. They believe in astral projection, foreknowledge, reincarnation, and other proofs of immunity to Time.”
“You’re talking about me, aren’t you?”
“Why no, Blope, no not at all.”
Everyone chuckled condescendingly, except of course for Dr. Blope.
“What cannot be resolved inside the psyche,” put in the Expedition alienist, Otto Ghloix, “must enter the outside world and become physically, objectively ‘real.’ For example, one who cannot come to terms with the, one must say sinister unknowability of Light, projects an Æther, real in every way, except for its being detectable.”
“Seems like an important property to be missing, don’t you think? Puts it in the same class as God, the soul—”
“Fairies under mushrooms,” from a heckler somewhere in the group, whom nobody, strangely, seemed quite able to locate.
Icelanders, however, had a long tradition of ghostliness that made the Brits appear models of rationalism. Earlier members of the Expedition had visited the great Library of Iceland behind the translucent green walls facing the sunlit sea. Some of these spaces were workshops or mess-halls, some centers of operation, stacked to the top of the great cliff, easily a dozen levels, probably more. Among the library shelves could be found The Book of Iceland Spar, commonly described as “like the Ynglingasaga only different,” containing family histories going back to the first discovery and exploitation of the eponymic mineral up to the present, including a record of each day of this very Expedition now in progress, even of days not yet transpired.
“Fortune-telling! Impossible!”
“Unless we can allow that certain texts are—”
“Outside of time,” suggested one of the Librarians.
“Holy Scripture and so forth.”
“In a different relation to time anyhow. Perhaps even to be read through, mediated by, a lens of the very sort of calcite which according to rumor you people are up here seeking.”
“Another Quest for another damned Magic Crystal. Horsefeathers, I say. Wish I’d known before I signed on. Say, you aren’t one of these Sentient Rocksters, are you?”
Mineral consciousness figured even back in that day as a source of jocularity—had they known what was waiting in that category . . . waiting to move against them, grins would have frozen and chuckles turned to dry-throated coughing.
“Of course,” said the Librarian, “you’ll find Iceland spar everywhere in the world, often in the neighborhood of zinc, or silver, some of it perfectly good for optical instruments. But up here it’s of the essence, found in no other company but its own. It’s the genuine article, and the sub-structure of reality. The doubling of the Creation, each image clear and believable. . . . And you being mathematical gentlemen, it can hardly have escaped your attention that its curious advent into the world occurred within only a few years of the discovery of Imaginary Numbers, which also provided a doubling of the mathematical Creation.
“For this is not only the geographical Iceland here, it is also one of several convergences among the worlds, found now and then lying behind the apparent, like these subterranean passages beneath the surface, which lead among the caves of Iceland spar, blindly among crystals untouched, perhaps never to be touched, by light. Down where the ‘Hidden People’ live, inside their private rock dwellings, where humans who visit them can be closed in and never find a way out again. Iceland spar is what hides the Hidden People, makes it possible for them to move through the world that thinks of itself as ‘real,’ provides that all-important ninety-degree twist to their light, so they can exist alongside our own world but not be seen. They and others as well, visitors from elsewhere, of non-human aspect.
“They have been crossing here, crossing over, between the worlds, for generations. Our ancestors knew them. Looking back over a thousand years, there is a time when their trespassings onto our shores at last converge, as in a vanishing-point, with those of the first Norse visitors.
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“They arrive here in criminal frames of mind, much like those early Norsemen, who were either fleeing retribution for offenses committed back where they came from or seeking new coastlines to pillage. Who in our excess of civilization strike us now as barbaric, incapable of mercy. Compared to these other Trespassers, however, they are the soul of civility.”
THE SUN CAME UP a baleful smear in the sky, not quite shapeless, in fact able to assume the appearance of a device immediately recognizable yet unnamable, so widely familiar that the inability to name it passed from simple frustration to a felt dread, whose intricacy deepened almost moment to moment . . . its name a word of power, not to be spoken aloud, not even to be remembered in silence. All around lay ambushes of the bad ice, latent presences, haunting all transaction, each like the infinitesimal circle converging toward zero that mathematicians now and then find use for. A silver-gray, odorless, silent exit from the upper world. . . . The sun might be visible from time to time, with or without clouds, but the sky was more neutral-density gray than blue. Out on the promontory grew some even-textured foliage, in this light a blazing, virtually shadowless green, and breaking down at the base of the headland was the sea-green sea, the ice-green, glass-green sea.
Hunter had been out with his sketchbook all day, taking down as much as he could, to bring away with him. That night was the last he and Constance would have before his departure. “I wanted this to be a bon voyage party,” she said, “but there’s nothing here to eat.”
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