Hieroglyph

by Ed Finn

  “They say they’ll send him out as soon as the storm blows over.”

  “What storm?”

  She gestured at the horizon. Dark clouds were moving in. “That storm.”

  They pulled in the folding stairs and shut themselves in the airplane. The storm rolled in with remarkable speed. One moment the sky was still, and then the sun vanished behind a wall of white.

  With the storm came a loud series of booming crashes. “Sounds like we’re being bombed,” said Zak.

  “That’s unusual,” Ashanti said. “Usually Antarctica is too cold to get much lightning.”

  The temperature in the cabin dropped to where they could see their breath. Steve started up the port engine, and Ashanti took her place in the copilot’s seat.

  “You’re not planning on taking off in this, are you?” said Zak. He had to shout to make himself heard over the storm. The windshield of the airplane looked as if it had been painted white.

  “One engine? Zero visibility?” Steve shook his head. “I’m not crazy. But we’re not tied down. If I don’t keep the nose pointed into the wind, the plane is likely to flip.” He was steering the airplane mostly with his feet, making small adjustments as the wind shook the plane. “Now shut up and let me concentrate.”

  Another boom, and the whole airplane lurched. “What the hell was—”

  With a noise like the eruption of Mount Doom, the ground tilted. The airplane slid backward, and then sideways. Steve fought to bring the nose around, but with no airspeed he had only limited control. The airplane rolled at a crazy angle. The left wing dipped, touched the ground, bent, and then crimped. Zak felt more than heard it when the propeller hit the ice, a series of staccato jolts shuddering across the plane.

  The engine abruptly cut out, allowing them to hear the grinding and crashing all around them. They could see nothing outside except a pale cottony light filtering in through the windows. But they could feel the airplane sliding, one wing scraping as it skittered across the ice. Steve had not even the illusion of control anymore. But he still fought the controls, trying vainly to bring the nose around.

  They slid backward until the airplane crunched to a stop, hard, against something behind them.

  Whatever it had fetched up against apparently held it firm. Steve tried the radio, but it was dead, along with the rest of the plane’s systems.

  THE INTERIOR OF THE airplane had dropped to what seemed to be nearly cryogenic temperature. They were wearing all their extreme-weather gear and huddled in their down sleeping bags as well. Although the sun would not drop below the horizon for another month yet, the interior of the plane was dark. Nevertheless there was enough light for Zak to see that Steve and Ashanti shared the same bag.

  When New Year’s came, Zak proposed a cheer.

  “I’m not sure your crew is in a proper holiday mood, dear,” Mrs. Binder said. “Perhaps we should wait until we get back.”

  “If we get back,” Steve muttered.

  They tried to sleep. The storm increased in intensity, but they eventually learned to sleep through the irregular lurching of the airframe.

  By the afternoon, the caterwaul of the wind started to subside. The windows were completely caked with ice, but when it was down to a mere whistle, Ashanti judged that it was time and opened the door.

  The Twin Otter was rolled over at such an angle that the door opened down rather than out. Ashanti looked, and then cautiously backed away. “No exit that way,” she said.

  The right side of the plane had only a small emergency exit with a fire extinguisher mounted on it. Ashanti had to climb to get to it, and pulled herself out with her arms. Zak followed her lead, and then Mrs. Binder, with Steve only reluctantly abandoning his post at the now-useless controls.

  A thin stream of icy snow sprayed down against their faces, but a brightness on the horizon—east? Zak had lost all sense of direction—suggested that the storm was abating.

  The airplane was tilted and half buried in a hard-packed drift. It was perched precariously on a twenty-degree slope, with the right wing extended skyward, and only the shards of the left wing, wedged like pitons into the ice, preventing it from sliding down the remaining twenty feet to the restless water.

  The flat plain of snow had vanished. In every direction, no more than a hundred feet away, they were surrounded by ocean.

  “We’re on an iceberg,” Zak said.

  The water was dark and choppy, undulating up until a spume of water broke against the ice, shooting white spray into the air, and then subsiding. Now that he was cued to it, Zak could feel the subtle rolling of the ice beneath him as the iceberg responded to the swells. All around them were dozens, no, hundreds of other icebergs, edges jagged as cut diamonds, some small as schoolbuses, others the size of mountains.

  He found a level spot and sat down, looking across at the crumpled airplane. “What happened?”

  Mrs. Binder said, “It would be prudent to get our equipment out of the airplane. As quickly as possible.”

  They all looked at the airplane. It had seemed to be firmly planted into the ice, but now they could see it flexing slightly as the iceberg rocked back and forth in the swell.

  “I’m not sure that’s wise,” said Steve.

  Mrs. Binder walked back to the airplane. “We’ll need at least the tents,” she said. “And emergency supplies.” She climbed up onto the airplane and disappeared down into it.

  “Does that woman have brass balls?” said Steve. “Or is she just clueless?”

  “She’s got more of a clue than we do,” Zak said. “ ’Cause if that airplane slides into the water, we’re dead without those tents.” He stood up and headed after her.

  It took a minute for his eyes to adjust to the dimness. Inside, the rocking of the airframe in response to the swells now seemed ominous. Mrs. Binder appeared out of the darkness and shoved a load in his arms. “Take this.”

  He levered himself up out the door and found Steve. He shoved the package at him. “Here!” He went back inside for another load.

  With a shuddering crash, the ice beneath them suddenly tilted. Zak lost his footing and tumbled into the dark. Something snapped, and the aircraft slid a good five feet, then stopped. “What was that?” he shouted.

  “Got hit by another iceberg,” Steve shouted back. “Get out. Fast!”

  With one hand Zak grabbed whatever was closest, and with the other he pulled himself toward the square of brighter light that marked the door. Before he reached it, the floor dipped under him. He could feel a nearly subsonic vibration as the two icebergs ground against each other, and then the floor jerked up again as the icebergs separated. The plane bounced.

  The bouncing had jarred the door almost shut again. He squeezed through the opening and turned back for Mrs. Binder.

  She had a flashlight in her teeth and both arms full of equipment. She gestured with her head, and it took him a moment to decode her meaning: Get out of the way. He scrambled up and out, shoved his bundle at Steve, and reached back to pull her out.

  The package he had grabbed, he discovered, was a bag containing six inflatable life vests. Not much use. If any of them fell in the water they would die from exposure long before drowning. Mrs. Binder had salvaged the cold-weather tent, two down sleeping bags, and a case of emergency rations.

  Ten minutes later, the airplane slid into the ocean. Another iceberg had drifted over and the Twin Otter slid into the wedge between them. For a minute the plane hung there, pinned between the two. Pushed by the ocean swells, the motion of the bergs twisted and crumpled the fuselage, until with a final wrench of metal, the plane disappeared beneath the dark water.

  They found a nook behind a knob of ice, a reasonably flat spot to shelter. The wind had picked up again, and low clouds raced by overhead. The sound of the ubiquitous grinding of ice against ice was all around them.

  Mrs. Binder turned to Steve. “Do they know where we are?”

  Steve paused. “I’m not sure. We were supposed to ca
ll back with coordinates when they were ready to send the mechanic out.”

  Mrs. Binder inclined her head toward the water where the airplane had vanished.

  “Yeah,” Steve said. “Probably not broadcasting.”

  Zak turned to Ashanti. “Now, can you tell me just what the hell happened?”

  Ashanti sighed. “The glacier fractured.”

  “What?”

  Ashanti settled back into the nook. “A glacier is a river of ice. This one was blocked from flowing into the sea because of the ice shelf. Kind of a natural dam.

  “With a long enough warming trend—a decade, maybe two; ice shelves don’t melt fast—the ice shelf melts away underneath. Eventually it fractures.

  “Ice shelves don’t break up slowly. Once they start to break, each crack releases pressure that puts stress on another part of the sheet. The fracture propagates exponentially. When it fragments, it goes all at once.”

  “You said it was twelve thousand years old,” Zak said.

  She shrugged. “So, apparently, the climate’s warmer now than it’s been in twelve thousand years.”

  Zak thought about that. “So, what—the storm triggered it?”

  “That was coincidence,” Ashanti said. “Just bad luck. Or, wait, maybe not—the storm surge must have put extra strain on the shelf. That could have triggered the fracture, come to think of it.

  “Once the ice shelf fragmented, it released pressure on the glacier. The seaward edge fractures. That’s what we were hearing—the booms that sounded like explosions. It was ice fracturing, all around us.”

  “You said the ice was a hundred meters thick!” Zak said.

  Ashanti shrugged again. “When it goes, it goes fast. It’s happened before. A different glacier, a different ice shelf. Back in 1995. An Argentinean science team on the ice heard it. They said it sounded like a volcano erupting. It sounded like the end of the world.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “They were rescued by helicopter before the ice sheet fragmented.”

  Zak looked up. The clouds were thick and opaque as a chocolate milkshake, so low that the peaks of icebergs in the distance cut swirls through them as they raced by.

  “No helicopters for us,” he said. “We’re stranded.”

  Suddenly a thought came to him. He looked at Steve with suspicion. Hadn’t it been just a little too unlikely? The problem with the engine that conveniently allowed them to land but not take off; the fact that they took off just before a storm that hadn’t been forecast—

  “You’re with him,” Zak said.

  “What?”

  “Anjel. The Rainbow Earth people. This was all a trap; you stranded us deliberately. To sabotage the hotel.”

  “Do I look suicidal?”

  Zak stared at him. “That wasn’t an answer.”

  “Okay,” Steve said. “Here’s an answer: no. No, I did not strand us deliberately. Am I an idiot? No, I absolutely did not strand us deliberately. I may be a member of Rainbow Earth, sure, but I didn’t—”

  “You’re a member of Rainbow Earth?” Mrs. Binder said. “That explains how they were so good at figuring out what we were doing.”

  “Well, sure, I’m a member, yes, but hey, I didn’t crash the airplane. And, anyway, Anjel Earth isn’t a bad guy. Give him a chance.”

  “What do you mean, give him a chance?” Zak said, his tone bitter. “We’re dead. We’re not giving anybody a chance. It’s over. He won.”

  “Listen,” Steve said.

  Even as Steve said that, another, fainter sound was beginning to penetrate Zak’s awareness. He had been hearing it intermittently, when the wind abated, but not recognizing it, just another noise buried in the shriek of the wind and the rumble of grinding icebergs.

  Zak turned around and grabbed one of the life vests from the package he’d salvaged, ripped open the plastic, and yanked hard on the lanyard. The orange vest inflated with a soft whomp, and the tiny strobe light on the collar pierced the dimness like a flash of lightning.

  He waved it over his head. The wind slackened for a moment, and in the abrupt quiet, all of them heard it. In the distance, but steadily getting louder, the sound of motors.

  Rounding an iceberg ahead of them, first one, and then the other, two bright yellow Zodiac boats skipped toward them over the swells.

  WHEN THE ZODIACS HAD brought them to the cutter, Anjel Earth welcomed them on board. With his chestnut beard and piercing eyes, he seemed perfectly comfortable in the weather, as if he were born to live in Antarctica. He poured them each a large mug of hot tea from an enormous thermos, instructed them to call him “Anjel” and then corrected their pronunciation, and took them to a large cabin at the back of the ship to warm up.

  The tea was sweet and seemed to be half milk, not the way Zak ever drank it. It was, he thought, the best tea he had ever tasted.

  After they had shed their cold-weather gear and wrapped themselves in thick quilts that Anjel had provided for them, Steve looked at Zak. He looked over at Mrs. Binder, who nodded at him to start the conversation. He looked at the walls. They were covered with posters, some with phrases like “Act before it’s too late” and “Save the planet,” and others with photographs of rain forests and desert flowers.

  “Well,” he said, “we owe you a debt, Mr. Earth. Thank you for the rescue.”

  Anjel smiled. “Yes. Out here, we learn to look out for each other.”

  “I’m surprised, though,” Zak said. “Why did you save us?”

  “You must think we’re barbarians,” said Anjel with an exaggerated expression of shock. “We talk with McMurdo. They said they lost the signal from your plane’s transponder, and they were snowed in but feared you were in trouble. I said we’d go take a look, render what assistance we could.”

  “Thank you for that.”

  “Well, you’re welcome.” He paused. “You work for Mr. Mistry, am I right?” Zak nodded, and he continued. “A hotel.” He paused, apparently lost in thought. “A hotel in Antarctica. How about that.”

  “Yeah,” Zak said. “It was a dumb idea. We all can see that now. This is no place for it. It’s just too hostile.”

  Anjel Earth waved his hand. “Nonsense. Wait a few days, and the sky will be such a clear and crystalline blue it will dazzle your eyes. You won’t believe it’s the same continent. You’ll change your mind.”

  Zak stared at him. “But I thought—”

  “I saw the paper you had in Acta Astronautica,” Anjel continued. “The one comparing a hotel in Antarctica to a moonbase.” At Zak’s blank look, he said, “What, do you think I only read nature magazines? You had some good ideas there. I like the way you think. The idea that we have to learn how to make an ecosystem work. Perhaps if we do, we can begin to understand just how wonderful our planet is, how everything works together.”

  Anjel Earth fixed Zak with his eyes. “When I first heard rumors of your hotel, I wasn’t sure. I wrote the article in my magazine, trying to figure out what to think about it—that’s what I do; I write to sort out how I think. What surprised me was the reactions I got. Some were against it. But almost half the letters asked when it was going to open, where to get reservations.

  “My people wanted your hotel, Mr. Cerny. And I thought, what if they’re right? Maybe it would be a good thing. Getting people to really experience Antarctica and the ecosystem and the ice and the interconnectedness of it all—isn’t that just what we were working for? It’s a mistake to lock Antarctica away, keep it as a preserve that nobody ever sees. If it were done right, like a moonbase, self-sufficient, and not trashing the land the way humans have done for thousands of years, it would be an example to the world.

  “Make your hotel, Mr. Cerny.” Anjel Earth’s eyes bored into Zak’s. “Give us that example. We need you.”

  Zak lowered his head. What was Mistry’s motto? Obstacles. Stepping-stones.

  Through the window, the sky was still dark, but at the very horizon, a line of sky showed brilliant blue
, above icebergs glistening white in the sunshine.

  “We will try,” he said. “We will try.”

  Edel/Shutterstock, Inc. & ArchMan/Shutterstock, Inc. (building & penguins)

  FORUM DISCUSSION—An Idea Is Born

  Geoffrey Landis introduced the concept of a hotel in Antarctica to James Cambias, Hieroglyph coeditor Ed Finn, and other Hieroglyph community members in June 2013. Watch the idea gain momentum at hieroglyph.asu.edu/hotel-antarctica.

  STORY NOTES—Geoffrey A. Landis

  In my first-ever attempt at crowdsourcing a story, I wrote this story with assistance of the participants on Project Hieroglyph’s web forum, http://hieroglyph.asu.edu/forums. Contributions to the discussion were made by Ed Finn, Aleks Antic, Larry Orr, James L. Cambias, Will Holz, John Fogarty, Brenda Cooper, and Bruce Sterling. Not all of your comments made it into the final story, but I would like to thank you all for helping me with your imagining.

  Particular thanks to Will Holz for pointing me to the “penguin poo map,” http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090602122621.htm, a novel way of locating colonies of penguins.

  FORUM DISCUSSION—Location, Location, Location

  What’s the best spot for a hotel in Antarctica? Observe Geoffrey Landis’s brainstorm at hieroglyph.asu.edu/hotel-antarctica.

  FORUM DISCUSSION—Ice as a Building Material

  The idea of using ice as the primary building material for the hotel was proposed and developed by Hieroglyph community members. Read their conversation with Geoffrey Landis at hieroglyph.asu.edu/hotel-antarctica.

  FORUM DISCUSSION—Through the Valley of Death

  Geoffrey Landis discusses how to avoid the innovation “valley of death” at hieroglyph.asu.edu/hotel-antarctica.

  RESPONSE TO “A HOTEL IN ANTARCTICA”—George Basile

  George Basile, an expert on green business practices and biotechnology at Arizona State University, responds to “A Hotel in Antarctica” at hieroglyph.asu.edu/hotel-antarctica.

  PERIAPSIS

  James L. Cambias

  I WENT UP TO Deimos for the contest two days after I turned seventeen. My father turned up at the Pavonis terminal to see me off. Good thing, too—just about every media feeder on the planet was there, hoping to get a word with me.