A Dream of Ice

by Gillian Anderson

  “I’m always looking for grand answers,” Mikel went on. “I get that from my grandmother’s side of the family. She was very religious, believed there was a kind of sticky fluid substance that bound everything in the universe to every other thing. Called it ‘the Adur.’ ”

  “What kind of religion teaches that?”

  “It’s a Basque pagan faith from before the fourth century. My grandmother was Catholic, devoutly so, but for many Basques the old ways were an inseparable part of their culture.”

  “Do you believe in that?”

  “I don’t know about the Adur, exactly, but I want to believe that there’s still a little bit of wonder out there,” Mikel replied. “You find similar concepts in many, many cultures—the Chinese, the Navajo and Cheyenne of North America, the Polynesians. These and many other people had no contact with one another yet they came up with the same ideas, the same archetypes.”

  Siem made an approving sound. “So what makes the Basque idea special?”

  “Good question,” Mikel said. “The Adur connected not just objects to objects, people to people, and people to objects, but all things to their names. One of the major evolutions of the human brain was its leap to symbolism, to understanding representation.”

  “Like cave paintings?”

  “Exactly like that, whether it was depicting a battle or drawing a map to the nearest hunting ground. Euskara is arguably one of the oldest languages of Homo sapiens, and in it the Basques had made that crucial leap in cognition—object and name, one and the same. And they actually named the leap itself.”

  “You mean that ‘Adur.’ ”

  Mikel nodded. “My grandmother had been raised on the universal, all-encompassing importance of this concept. So she read everything she could find, talked to every priest she met, never stopped searching.” He leaned in slightly. “I’m the same. It’s why I started researching ancient cultures, to learn what they knew. To rediscover what the world has forgotten.”

  Siem struggled with that, but nodded. “I hear what you’re saying, but I don’t think I could chase phantoms. I like to work with things I can feel and fix.”

  “Oh, I do a lot of that,” Mikel said. “There are no phantoms, but there are always relics, ancient tablets, buried cities, tombs.”

  “And magnetized rocks,” Siem said.

  “Everywhere,” Mikel answered. He waited a moment, did not want to seem too eager. “Actually, that’s one reason I want to look at the site of—the incident.”

  Siem lost interest in his food. He pushed his tray away and tended to his nose.

  “Sorry,” Mikel said. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have—”

  “No, I’ve been wanting to do the same,” Siem said. He looked around. “It’s been very frustrating. Everyone here has been avoiding it because it’s so horrible. Strange.”

  “Which one of the two are you replacing?” Mikel asked, loading his voice with kindness.

  “The woman,” Siem said, lowering his eyes.

  “The missing one.”

  Siem nodded.

  “Do you mind talking about it?” Mikel asked, just to be sure.

  Siem shook his head slowly.

  “I heard they haven’t found a trace of her,” Mikel said.

  “Nothing,” Siem replied. “They checked for a couple miles around her Ski-Doo. There were no crevasses, no piled snow or ice. Just—nothing.”

  “Any idea what happened to the other one? Sorry, what was his name?”

  “Fergal, I think.”

  “Right, right,” Mikel said, subtly collecting as much information as possible. Familiarity helped to construct subterfuge. “His Ski-Doo flipped, right?”

  Siem nodded. “He broke his neck. During the briefing in Stanley, they said he was probably careless, maybe racing to the woman.”

  “Yes, but it’s strange. Ski-Doos only flip on rough ground. They’re hefty objects; they don’t turn over for just anything. Wasn’t he on a smooth surface?”

  “Yeah, I’m supposed to get out there and look at that,” Siem said. “They have big fat holes in their reports. They’re also having a problem with the GPS unit, which stopped working again. My first job is going to that site later today with one of the researchers.”

  Siem took another bite but he was force-feeding himself now.

  “What do you think you’ll find there?” Siem asked.

  “Sorry?”

  “At the accident site?” Siem said. “You’re not going to find rocks. Steam vents or something?”

  Mikel chuckled. “Who knows, right? Vents would leave a molten residue but—I was actually wondering if all of this could have something to do with the edge where that berg dropped a week ago.” Finally he’d found a chance to sneak in his real question. “Did they tell you about that calving?”

  “I saw something mentioned about it,” Siem told him. “But that was dozens of kilometers away.”

  “True, but I was thinking that underground liquefaction might have impacted the site where the woman went missing.”

  “Huh. You mean a kind of quicksand effect—with snow? When they went looking for her, the surface was undisturbed.”

  “I’ve been around all kinds of primordial geologic events that destroyed societies and buried all trace of them. In Pompeii, for instance. People just evaporated. It might be worth getting over to the source, see if there’s anything that compromised the underlying landmass.”

  “That’s a little outside of my job description,” Siem admitted.

  “Of course,” Mikel said. “Hey, do you see any problem with me tagging along today?”

  “I don’t see why not,” Siem replied, shrugging. “The Survey’s anxious for answers. The more minds working on it, the better for everyone, right?”

  “Exactly.”

  “You had better check with the boss of field ops, though,” Siem added.

  “And that would be . . . ?”

  “Dr. Albert Bundy, a.k.a. Dog Alpha. He was the one who ignored us most on the flight.”

  Mikel smiled. Flora had furnished him with a list of personnel being rushed to the station.

  Outwardly, Mikel started up a conversation about survival skills. But inwardly, he was smiling with satisfaction as he neared accomplishing one of his goals. After this short trek with Dog Alpha, it would be that much easier to tag along on future trips to the ice shelf edge. His other goal—getting forty miles inland and then through the ice to the ground—was exponentially tougher. But he figured that after a few days here he could steal a Ski-Doo . . .

  When Siem left to take a pre-excursion nap, Mikel approached Bundy about the reconnoitering mission. The deal was easily sealed and the run was set for two hours hence. Mikel spent some time refamiliarizing himself with extreme-weather gear and a climbing harness, and asked Ivor to reacquaint him with snowmobiles.

  At zero hour Mikel tied himself to his Ski-Doo and tied his Ski-Doo to Siem’s. Siem’s machine was tied to Bundy’s, so that if any of the machines fell through a suddenly breaking snow bridge, the snowmobile—and the man—would only dangle instead of plummet. As this was Bundy’s seventh summer at the base, he led their small convoy southwest across the ice.

  They traveled in sharp sunlight; at this time of year the Brunt Ice Shelf saw only an hour of darkness per day. Once watching for cracks in the white surface had become automatic, Mikel’s mind began to drift. The vast blue and white landscape could not hold his attention; landscapes never did. That was one of the major reasons he got out of Pamplona, with its big skies and endless plains. Even as a child, Mikel had chafed against the place. The only two mildly interesting things about the region were the fact that the residents of Navarre wind-farmed the hell out of it, beating even the Germans at renewable electricity, and a strange blip of mountainous desert that looked like it had been airlifted from the American West. Mikel had done a fair bit of rock climbing there but not to enjoy the landscape. Choosing the right grip on a cliff face was an intellectual game fo
r him, high-stakes chess.

  His thoughts were interrupted when he noticed Siem waving at him. Mikel was slightly off course and if he kept going in this direction the rope would jolt his Ski-Doo. He veered. Siem continued to wave his arm—now he was pointing in the distance, toward the left. Mikel saw a collection of vertical sticks that would have disappeared in a landscape less stark. There was motion at the top of one of the sticks. He squinted and caught sight of the turning blades of a windmill.

  Didn’t Siem say the GPS station was broken? Why are they turning?

  The next instant, Mikel was looking at the sky as he fell backward. The seconds that followed seemed slow and endless. The whine of the Ski-Doo surged into a scream as it lost its grip on ground. The surface beneath the rear of the snowmobile vanished and as the machine slipped backward, the snow dropped from under the front as well. At once, Mikel felt the Ski-Doo fall out from between his legs. He lost his grip on the handlebars and the Ski-Doo crashed against the sides of the crevasse. The shocks traveled up the cable catching him, while the nose of the Ski-Doo pointed to the sky, which was a now a fathom away and very, very small.

  Mikel slammed against the dangling Ski-Doo as the rope to Siem’s snowmobile jerked taut. He tried to grab it but he tumbled over it instead and fell away from the Ski-Doo as his own screams echoed in his ears. Flailing at the walls of the crevasse, his thickly gloved fingers clawed uselessly. The vertical cliffs were far beyond his reach; this was a big goddamned hole. Then the ropes wrenched at his waist and groin and jerked him backward till his feet flipped higher than his head.

  Mikel swung on his back, gazing at the undercarriage of his machine. Far beyond that, against the tiny patch of sky, he could see a black object intruding on the light like a partial eclipse. The back of Siem’s Ski-Doo had nearly dropped into the crevasse as well, prevented from doing so by a swift turn.

  Mikel had to force himself to stop hyperventilating lest he pass out. And then there was silence—pure blue silence, for that was the color all around him. An impossible blue, ethereal and hollow.

  My god, he thought, even in the midst of his desperation. It’s beautiful. And peaceful.

  “Mikel!” he heard reverberating around him. “Mikel, are you all right?!” Siem’s calls shocked him back to reality. Mikel yelled back with every ounce of strength left in him that he was fine. He was told that they would set up a rig to hoist him up but it might take a few minutes. Mikel imagined how Siem’s blood must have been running cold right now. He could not be the replacement for one presumably dead colleague and lose another the day he arrived.

  Silence came again, vast and embracing. Mikel looked around at all the blues layered like petals, the vertical striations of the ice and great fist-sized nubbles extruding from the walls. He noticed one horizontal slice—a ledge. He could fit half of each foot on that he thought. Gently, so gently, he swung himself inch by inch closer to the wall, as the Ski-Doo turned above him. His toes reached the protruding corner and he managed to grab two nubbles, first with his fingertips, then, once balanced, with his entire hand.

  When he felt secure he let go with one hand and pulled his ice ax from a pocket on the leg of his salopette. He thwacked the stainless steel tip into the ice as hard as he could and it stuck fast. Now he had three secure points. He looked down again at the cold, crystal cathedral vanishing into darkness below him.

  Without thought, Mikel unstrapped his helmet, took it off, and refastened its strap with one hand, holding it still against the wall with his chest. He slung the helmet back on his forearm out of his way, reached up, and pulled his fur-lined hood over his head. Then he rested the side of his head against the wall of ice and just breathed. He heard nothing—a total absence of sound. But on the wall, right at eye level, a drop of liquid water caught his attention. Covering his mouth to make sure that he wasn’t melting the ice with his breath, he peered closer. There were a number of drops.

  The Adur, he thought, not entirely in jest. And as he stared, he realized with a jolt deep in his gut that he was witnessing the droplets of water slowly trickling upward, like rain blown against a pane of glass. He held his breath and remained very still to make sure he wasn’t causing the motion. The droplets continued to travel up.

  He peered below him and saw nothing but blue upon blue. He certainly couldn’t feel anything through his layers of cloth. Staring at the drops again, he almost willed them to stop in their tracks. If they somehow did, it would make his life simpler.

  Flora would be angry with that, he told himself. “Mysteries are clues,” was her constant refrain.

  A rope descended from the small, distant sky and the clamp on its end thwacked against Mikel’s hood, then his shoulder and back. Siem shouted for him to attach himself to the cable, then detach from the Ski-Doo connection.

  Mikel looked down again. How many of Flora’s “clues” lay deep in that abyss? Maybe none. Maybe the water was full of sun-seeking microorganisms, colonies of them. Or maybe the cause was wind stirred by something otherworldly. How had the Old Testament described the force that opened the Red Sea? “A blast of God’s nostrils” or some such?

  Regardless, right now, by ascending he risked giving up everything—not just important data but his very concept of what it meant to be a researcher, a scientist, a member of the Group. What if he left and couldn’t return?

  “Are you all right?” Siem called down.

  Mikel pulled an ice screw from a pocket and tapped it into the wall of ice. When it was secure, he detached from the Ski-Doo rope and reconnected—not to Siem’s line and certain rescue, but to the crevasse.

  “Hey! What are you doing?” Siem cried out.

  Maybe Mikel had just sentenced himself to an early death, but maybe before he died he would find out what, below the surface of Antarctica, caused water to flow uphill.

  CHAPTER 9

  Dangling in the crevasse, Mikel pulled spiked crampons from his backpack one at a time. He heard Siem calling down to him, his voice echoing like a distant foghorn, but Mikel did not answer. He was too busy concentrating on the task at hand. Carefully, he latched the crampons to the soles of his boots knowing that dropping even one of them would end the journey before it began.

  Hooks on, he arranged his ropes, then pushed away from the ice wall and down. For the next few minutes, Siem continued to call out to him. Then silence. Mikel looked up at the tiny bright hole to the world and it was empty. He thought he could hear muffled noises over the ridge, but with his next swinging descent that sound disappeared and Mikel heard only his own rapid breathing and the rasp of the ice as he thrust his spikes into it.

  He felt that he could be mesmerized by all the shades of blue in the ice but losing focus might cause him to lose his grip, his life. So he focused on the water droplets instead. There were never many of them, but always enough to confirm that their upward motion was neither temporary nor a fluke.

  Soon he had descended deep enough so that the darkness of the crevasse forced him to fish the head lamp from his backpack and turn it on. Mikel was not enamored of flashlights. They were necessary things but they limited his view and threw off the true colors of a surface. They illuminated dust particles, flecks of ice, and other distractions. Just now the shifting circle of light made everything pop from the surrounding darkness, like it was all pressing in on him. The place felt even more claustrophobic than it was. The creak of the rope seemed like a voice and the shadows seemed to creep.

  Damn it.

  He stopped moving and took a deep breath. Now was not the time to start imagining things. The crevasse was daunting enough as it was.

  Focusing again on the tears running up the ice, Mikel became aware that the cold was not one of his challenges. The temperature certainly wasn’t balmy but at this depth he should have had to crack some hand warmers at least. Instead, the air felt about as cold as the surface and no more.

  He tugged at his rope to test the latest ice screw, then pushed out and down.

&nb
sp; The Brunt Ice Shelf was only one hundred meters deep on average but this crevasse seemed deeper. As if to confirm that, Mikel reached into his pocket for another ice screw and came up with nothing. He checked all his pockets hopelessly, knowing he’d put all the screws in one place. With a very strong grip and cautious movements, he held his backpack open while he searched through it. No luck. He was out.

  A wave of anger swept through him. He shoved his backpack over his shoulders again, dangled in the air a moment, then kicked at the wall, hard. Cursing, he spent the next minute jerking his stuck, spiked foot back out of the ice. Then as he tugged his balaclava down for a breath of fresh air to clear his head—he felt it. A subtle, gentle, but unmistakable breeze.

  The propellant for the water droplets.

  Excited by his discovery, Mikel Jasso did something incredibly stupid. He used one ice ax as an anchor, reattached his ropes to it, descended, and used the other ice ax as another anchor descending as far as he could go into the darkness.

  Literally at the end of his rope, he peered down into the maddening hole. His flashlight beam disappeared into nothingness. He glared at the ice, the running water, looked down again—and caught his breath. He’d seen a flash of green.

  Tiny, just a spark, but familiar—he slowly swept his head lamp over the diameter of the hole. Then he stopped sharply. There it was again, and not just any green. If he was extrapolating correctly through the yellow of his light, this was olivine green, the same as the crystals in the last stone he’d picked up for Flora, the stone that caused them so much trouble.

  Mikel lowered his goggles and squinted. There appeared to be a surface he could stand on about twenty feet below him. He couldn’t be sure; it could have been just a shadow. But if he hesitated, if he started to think, he would be paralyzed. Finding cracks in the wall of ice that he could fit his fingers into, he unhooked from the rope and slowly, very slowly, climbed by hand and spiked foot down the wall. Then he hit a spot where there was nothing to grip. Mikel closed his eyes and rested his forehead on the ice. He had to continue, no matter what the cost. He jerked one foot out of the wall and, gripping his last handholds, jerked the other foot out. Lowering himself by extending his arms, he let the spikes on the soles of his feet search for purchase—