Aurorarama

by Jean-Christophe Valtat

  “Not at all,” said Gabriel, trying to control the trembling in his voice. “They are quite fascinating actually, and certainly confirm the high regard in which the population holds you. Now, if you will excuse me, there is no company, good as it is, from which one must not eventually be parted.”

  “Let me see you to the door” said DeBrutus, and rose from his seat, while Wynne, standing up as well, bowed to Gabriel and bade him farewell.

  It was a long walk before DeBrutus, who had vainly tried to strike up a conversation, followed a moody Gabriel through the marble reception hall and the gilded revolving door that opened on the Nicolo Zeno Embankment. Gabriel inhaled what remained of the daylight as if it were a bottle of Letheon.

  “Shall I say au revoir, Mr. d’Allier?” asked the Angel of the Law with a smile that Gabriel saw himself punching to a pulp in some kinetoscope of his mind.

  “I hope it’s adieu,” he answered, dashing down the stairs without, this time, taking the offered hand.

  CHAPTER III

  Unhappy Hunters

  O dear native land! How well it is that you are covered with ice and snow … Your unfruitfulness makes us happy and saves us from molestation.

  Paul Greenlander, a convert Eskimo, 1756

  The first thing Brentford noticed about the delegation is that they had a watch hung around their necks: one wore the case and one the face while the others shared the works. Whether that was for ornamental purposes or meant as a comment, he could not tell.

  The group consisted of four Inuit from the local Inughuit people. As far as Brentford could make out, their names were Uitayok (older than the others, and who seemed to be the riumasa, “the one who thinks”); Ajuakangilak (a clever-looking man with searching eyes, who, judging by his belt and amulets, may have been the angakoq, or shaman); Tuluk (tall for an Inuk, some sort of métis, no doubt, deemed useful when dealing with the Whites), and Tiblit (a long-haired fellow of rather uncouth appearance whose insistent smile could easily get on one’s nerves). They lived at—or had been relocated to—Flagler Fjord, and were among those families who had not deemed it a good idea to live in New Venice, though they probably had some relatives among the Inuit workers and servants of the city. All now sat at a round table, watching each other with all sorts of forced smiles.

  Brentford had come to New Venice at an early age and had almost always lived with Inuit around, had known a lot of them, befriended some (even, briefly, loved one), had some inklings of their culture, and had collected their art, for which he showed a connoisseur’s appreciation. However, he had to admit that relationships with them were often a bit of a riddle and could be frustrating at times. When they were with the qallunaat, their word for Whites, unless some sort of personal friendship and trust had developed, Inuit often defended themselves with a blend of comic humility and unfathomable irony verging on contempt, which could make one uncomfortable. Brentford was used to it and had learned to live with it, but he could see that for Mason these meetings were still a source of uneasiness. The captain-general, not of an outgoing nature himself, seemed to subscribe to the classical military axiom about the “natives,” according to which “they couldn’t be trusted,” and as a result, he had firmly settled on the curt side of courtesy. Today’s palaver did not promise to inspire a more amenable attitude in him, as the situation quickly proved delicate.

  Uitayok, who spoke a singular but almost intelligible missionary English, and who, when in trouble, was helped by the slightly more proficient Tuluk, put the matter with more succinctness than Brentford and Mason had feared. It was obvious these Inuit and their families were genuinely worried and in urgent need of a solution. Their problem was this: since self-sufficiency had become one of the goals of the Frobisher Fortress, hunting parties had become the norm for patrols, and the use of noisy aerosleds and rifles had scared or depleted the game in a way that was starting to deprive the Inuit of their main source of food.

  Brentford had already considered this possibility and foreseen it as a drawback to his plan. But he had not thought that the Subtle Army, for once unworthy of its self-bestowed nickname, would show so little understanding or restraint. Mason, on the other hand, assuming he could perfectly grasp what the problem was, had his own agenda: it did actually bring extra food to the fort, it was a welcome distraction for his bored men, and, not unimportantly, it was a show of strength that would remind the “Eskimos” of their real position in the food chain, in more senses than one.

  There was, however, something else to be considered. These past few weeks the city “natives” had been rather “restless.” Pro-Nunavut slogans, in both the Inuktitut and roman alphabets, had been painted on monuments at a more frequent rate than usual, and revolting tupilaat, made of various animal remains glued together in crude miniature human forms, had been found all over the city, probably intended less as spells than as warnings that trouble was brewing.

  There was usually little connection between the urban Inuit independentists and their wilderness cousins, but a recent picture, mysteriously sent to the newspapers, of forty or so fur-clad Inuit defiantly posing with rifles in a barren polar landscape, had made the authorities wonder if this was not changing. In other words, though Uitayok was certainly not implying anything of the sort, it was maybe not the best idea to strengthen those ties by bothering the North Wasteland Inuit.

  If their numbers were few and, in theory, not much of a match for the Subtle Army, they had a better knowledge of the theatre of operations, and one of Mason’s missions was to avoid that kind of conflict at all cost. Then, too, he had to take into account the presence of the mysterious black airship that, as he had himself remarked, might sooner or later be connected, if it wasn’t already, to his other concerns. If Eskimos were to be equipped, by some channel or other, with an allied air force, it might not do any harm to take into account what they had to say.

  “I understand your worries,” Mason said, articulating carefully as if he were talking to children. “I propose we come to an agreement to limit,”—raising his voice, for while he was talking, Tiblit murmured something into Tuluk’s ear, so that Tuluk was lagging behind on the translation—“to limit the quantity of food we take. If our hunt exceeds this limit, the surplus will be returned to you.”

  Uitayok seemed to ponder this, but Brentford could guess what he would answer.

  “This is very kind of you. But it happens that one likes to hunt for oneself, even if one is a bad hunter,” he said, showing maybe more pride than he intended.

  “Of course,” said Mason. “So, I shall see that a decent limit is not exceeded.”

  Brentford doubted very much that Mason could control his men as well as he said, when they were patrolling in the wild. From hunters they would turn into poachers, and that was all.

  “Why not collaborate?” he allowed himself to say. “It would be more convenient if our friends could set the limit themselves by offering their surplus or even by hunting for the Fortress. In exchange they could benefit from the surplus of the Greenhouse that is being built.”

  Brentford, who could not himself stomach even the sight of a plate of spinach, was well aware that Inuit would not be overexcited at the idea of eating their greens. But he hoped that they would know a fair deal when it came to them, waving a white flag. Mason was casting him a somewhat darkened look, but he could not admit that he wanted to allow his men to have some sport at the expense of the Inuit.

  “But would there be surplus at the Greenhouse?” asked the captain-general, playing his last card.

  “I do not know,” conceded Brentford, “but I doubt very much that sweet peas and french beans run the risk of becoming extinct.”

  Uitayok and his cohorts followed the exchange with, Brentford could see, much curiosity and expectation but also, or so it seemed, some amusement. They had been witnesses to enough betrayals and murders between qallunaat to know that if white men could be bad to them, there was always a chance that they would be still more wic
ked to one another.

  “But,” said Mason, who had obviously found another card up the sleeve of his uniform, “if these gentlemen hunt for us,” this with a note of contempt that made Brentford flinch inwardly, “we will not be as independent as your plan intended to make us. Why do not we define zones where we are allowed to hunt?”

  Uitayok, after having listened to Tuluk’s version, answered this better than Brentford could have done. He drew from a bag some pieces of driftwood that, to the qallunaat’s amazement, he organized to make a map that corresponded precisely to the geography of North Wasteland, though there was little chance that he had ever seen the area otherwise than by paddling around. He pointed to various zones, miming the migrations of species.

  “It happens that the animals move. The lines, they do not know. If qallunaat have them all what will the Inuit do? And the Inuit, they have to move with the animals.”

  Mason frowned, trying to grasp Uitayok’s meaning, and eventually he turned toward Brentford.

  “This gentleman knows the matter,” said Brentford.

  Mason returned him a frowning “whose-side-are-you-on” look, but he also knew a dead end when he saw one. However, he did not feel inclined to give in to Brentford in front of his guests.

  “But you know I am not entirely qualified to decide on such important matters. I will have to refer to the Council of Seven concerning the possibility of this contract, as well as to the City Council for Customs and Commerce, and probably to the Nunavut Administration for Native Affairs to make sure everything is clear to all parties,” he said, both to gain time and to embarrass Brentford a little, knowing of his strained relationship with the Council of Seven.

  Tuluk translated as well as he could, but Uitayok had already understood and his face showed clearly that the word administration in an Inuk’s ear sounded about as promising as the word tupilaat did to the qallunaat’s. Ajuakangilak said something to Uitayok who in turn repeated it to Tuluk.

  “There is another matter,” Tuluk announced.

  “What is it?” said Mason, a little impatiently.

  “Some of qallunaat soldiers. They are very scary.”

  “Some of my soldiers? What do you mean?”

  “They are evil spirits. Dead and living. Very Hungry. Very Evil.”

  Mason turned toward Brentford with an inquisitive look. Brentford was not that surprised. He had heard the story before, when he was a child, actually. The Phantom Patrol was a popular legend when it came to scaring disobedient children: the living dead, mummified, mutilated corpses of British and American sailors or soldiers lost in polar explorations prowling the ice fields for blood, animal or human, on sleds of bones drawn at full speed by skeletal dogs. They were, beyond the lore, not an uncommon hallucination for today’s strayed travellers or Inuit.

  “They are hunting on your grounds?” asked Brentford, with a polite interest.

  Ajuakangilak launched himself into a long explanation that Tuluk translated as an unequivocal yes. They had made their dogs pillortoq—crazy—and dug up graves and stolen one child.

  “Can someone explain this to me?” asked Mason.

  Brentford tried to smile. It was his experience that the less you heard or talked about some things, the less they were bound to bother you. Those who had never heard about the Phantom Patrol were not likely to see them. Or such had been the case so far.

  “Oh, it’s nothing that should concern you, really. Part of the folklore.”

  But he also knew, as the Inuit did, that here fictions were like animals: they could migrate, and they ignored the lines.

  CHAPTER IV

  A Teacher’s Pet

  And to adorne her with a greater grace,

  And ad more beauty to her louely face,

  Her richest Globe shee gloriously displayes

  Michael Drayton, Endimion & Phoebe, 1595

  For a prelapsarian sensibility such as Gabriel’s, work was nothing but a curse, the sin committed against man. Seldom bored, which was not common at those latitudes, and always busy in his own mysterious ways, he had no spare time to lose in such a tasteless fashion: he would, normally, not have touched a “profession” with a barge pole and a pair of fur overmittens if he could have helped it.

  But, years ago, as the Blue Wild catastrophe had left parts of the city in (beautiful) deep-blue ruins, he had been obliged, like all the other scions of the so-called Arcticocracy, all the more because he happened to be the son of a profligate father whose legacy consisted of nothing but debts, to become, in his own bittersweet words, the Earl of Real. He had been cunning or lucky enough to get into one of the rare trades he could tolerate, and the only one among those that could materialize a monthly paycheck. The task was mostly a bit of acting, which he handled competently enough, in a courteous yet slightly desultory way, always walking the thin line that separates discretion from uselessness. But it has to be said that since his interview with the Gentlemen of the Night, his already minimal commitment had dwindled to Lilliputian proportions. It had even come to the point where he sat in his Doges College office whitewashing his brain with cheap “snowcaine” freshly bought in Venustown from a certain Charley Sleighbells.

  Today his excuse for doing this was not a class to teach but the “private conversation” he had just been invited to in the Dean’s Office, by way of a none too polite letter, which we would gladly have shared with the reader if it were not at this very moment sulkily crumpled at the bottom of the wastepaper basket. Gabriel was fed up with people wanting to discuss things with him, and it was only when he deemed himself sufficiently sharpened that he could bear getting up and going down to the meeting.

  The corridors looked their bleak mid-February selves, with a few stray students gliding about like ghosts and shadows against the dying daylight pouring from the arched windows at each extremity. There had always been, since his own student days at Doges, a light aura of unreality about this place, or maybe about himself, he reflected, sniffing and checking that his nose was not running too much.

  Gibiser, who occupied the honourable and much-coveted position of Dean of Doges, was a white-haired but healthy man, with a sympathetic surface and tolerably murky depths, the kind who would pat you on the back to choose the best spot to stab you. But today, he was not even that cheerful when Gabriel sat before him in his large first-floor office with its view of the mock Parthenon and the—ridiculous—miniature Rialto bridge that marked the entrance to the Campus.

  “I am glad to see you here,” Gibiser said.

  “I work here,” answered Gabriel with typical snowcaine poise, though he knew that Gibiser was a bit challenged when it came to grasping other senses of humour than his own—Gabriel’s especially, peculiar as it was, often proved a tough nut to crack.

  “Oh, I know that very well,” Gibiser said darkly. “Listen, Professor d’Allier, I am going to do for you something I should not do, which is to disclose private correspondence from a third party. If I do so, it is only because I hope it will do more good than ill for the community.”

  He handed Gabriel a letter, which Gabriel read with growing disgust, while barely suppressing his sniffles and hoping those that escaped could pass as sniffs of contempt.

  “Dear Colleague and Dean,

  I wish to speak to you about a Masters student called Phoebe O’Farrell.

  This student has taken my class “The Pen and the Plough: The Peasant as Poet, the Poet as Peasant” this semester, and her paper on “John Clare’s Use of the Word ‘Croodle’ ” was of a very high level and by far the best I have read for this course. I have nothing more to add on this matter.

  She had chosen at the beginning of the term to write a dissertation under the guidance of our colleague Mr. Allier titled “Stoned Landscapes: Laudanhomes & Hashishtecture in Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ and Baudelaire’s ‘Rêve Parisien’ ” (sic). For reasons that she may or may not wish to explain to you (it is her own decision), she would like to ask you if it would be possible th
at this dissertation now be supervised by myself.

  I fully support this request and I think it would be better for all if you and Allier would agree on this point, as she is currently undergoing certain difficulties in her work where I could be of great help.

  She is one of my best students, and I hope you will give her your most benevolent attention.

  Cordially Yours,

  Prof. Albert Corkring

  Full-Fledged Fellow

  House of Humanities

  Doges College

  “What am I supposed to do with this rag,” asked Gabriel, his voice as icy as the tip of his nose. “Propose it as a commentary in a poetry class?”

  He could see that Gibiser was embarrassed. But he could also see, his own brain a dazzling crystal ball, that it was more over being involved in such an imbroglio than for Gabriel’s sake.

  “Do not get carried away, Mr. d’Allier. I’m saying this in your best interest. And please, rather, tell me if you have any idea what these … allusions might refer to?”

  Gabriel could see very clearly indeed what the fuss was all about, and it was not very glorious. In the world of dark muted passions that is Academia, the witches’ brew that blends scholarly susceptibility with delusions of seduction is rather everyday fare, but here Corkring had obviously been scraping the bottom of the cauldron.