Aurorarama

by Jean-Christophe Valtat

  Well, he had to admit he wasn’t nowhere yet. He thought of the explorers who had been there before, on a death wish more unconscious than his own, and had left behind them a whole archaeology of dirty, desperate picnics. He knew that if it were daylight, he’d have been able to spot some of their half-crumbled cairns and disembowelled depots, rusty cans of bully beef, empty rifle shells shot at mirages, those illegible scraps of papers with mistaken bearings that are the epic poems of the place. In the least prophetic act of all human exploration, someone had even planted not far from here the flag of a temperance society. Gabriel wished he had a glass of frozen whisky to raise to this seer. But he was turning to glass himself and the alcohol left in his blood would have to do for the toast, too little as it was. Oh God, he thought, don’t let me sober up now.

  What these people had done here, and what he was doing now, was a rather dark business, even to those involved, Gabriel ranted on in the wine-fuelled boiler room of his brain. He remembered that in Venus in Furs—a best-seller in New Venice—Severin, the main character, has a dream in which he finds himself stranded on ice. An Eskimo arrives on a sled (absurdly “harnessed with reindeer” as if he were Santa Claus) and informs him casually that he is at the North Pole. Then Wanda, Severin’s love, skates toward him wearing a rather inspiring—at least to Gabriel’s taste—ermine jacket and cap. They clasp and kiss, only for the foolish Severin to discover “horror-stricken” that Wanda is now a she-bear and is tearing him to shreds. This is how wet dreams freeze below 32°F, and it’s about all one needs to know about North Pole psychology. And, oh yes, beware of girls on skates.

  He could hear the ice shelf on his right snap, crack, gnash and growl, a perpetual slow-motion apocalypse, making him start every time. Gabriel did not buy any of the Earth-as-living-organism theory, but the Arctic, she-bear or not, had much of the beast about her. A man called Tremblay had once gone around Igloolik Island shooting at it with a gun to tame it a little and punish it for all the explorers it had rejected or killed. Gabriel realized he liked that story a lot and wondered how many people knew it—tens, hundreds, thousands?—hoping that he was not the only or the last one to remember it. It was too good for the grave.

  But the grave, it seemed, was creeping up on him. A metamorphosis was overcoming him as if his blood were being drained drop by drop and replaced by an equal quantity of liquid nitrogen. Numb as he felt, the notion of a skin that separated outside from inside seemed like a good idea, but now downright unreal. In spite of his boots and skin socks, his feet almost hurt as he walked. His tingling hands, too, protested against going numb. It struck him as vaguely ludicrous that the fight taking place inside him was for the pain to be allowed to remain. As long as he suffered, he would be alive, and vice versa.

  An Aurora Borealis was now breaking over him, slowly pulsing and wavering, like a reversed flame on gently tossed water. The February Lights were the most beautiful, and it would be great to die watching them, he thought, while lightning strikes of shivering hit and dislocated the icy rod of his spine. He had always had a liking for the crackpot theory that said the Northern Lights were emanations of the Earth’s rut, its sexual longing for the Sun, and that one day they would form a permanent crown that would give warmth as well as light. It made more sense than it seemed, when you lived in New Venice.

  Another thing he almost regretted not believing, as the Inuit did, was that the lights were the Land of the Day and that he would go there. There, the souls of those who had died violently would play football, kicking seal skulls about and laughing like crazy. Eternal childhood and laughter of Flame. Other Eskimos, however, thought that if you whistled to the lights, they would come down and cut your head off. That, too, was tempting to try, but it wouldn’t be that easy with a mouth sealed by conkerbells of snot.

  At least, he could still whistle in his head: as he trod on marble feet, his teeth chattering until the enamel cracked off, he discovered that a stubborn song had now burrowed inside his mind, an old ditty from the Furry Fruits that was broadcasting from a younger part of himself. It was rumoured to have been about Sandy Lake, who had given the cold shoulder to the singer from the Sandmovers’ archrivals. Personally, Gabriel had a theory that it was about self-abuse, but he was not so sure anymore.

  She was all dressed up in candles and garlands

  And presents in her eyes

  Falling from Christmas skies

  Have you ever held angels in your hands

  Have you ever been blessed

  She said and then undressed But her kiss was colder than if I’d been alone

  The girl below zero

  Has covered me with snow

  And it soon grew darker than if she had been gone

  She sure can smother you

  Till you’re frozen and blue

  The loop revolved in Gabriel’s brain, in the curious way music is remembered, immaterial but as inexorably real as the grooves in a shellac record. This what was the brain was, maybe, a phonograph of some sort, which would eventually repeat one silly tune in a lock groove before the needle was lifted up for good. Damn, would he have to think halfpenny thoughts until the end? Why couldn’t the brain go numb first so that it could not feel the rest being …

  He took a step on a snow patch that hid a crevice and fell through. Time suddenly shifted, reduced to successive still frames. The brain took the pictures, but gave no further orders. The body, after all, did not want to die: it had taken over, a deck hand going mutinous. Pivoting as it fell, it sent its left hand darting toward a jutting edge of rock, clinging to it as tightly as it could. It stayed there for a slow-motion second, while the brain looked down in disbelief. Then, with a jerk, the body shook its shoulders and threw the right knee over the edge of the crevasse, quickly rolling over to pull itself out of the chasm. Its throat ached all of a sudden as if someone were strangling it. The cold had suddenly disappeared. The world was pumping blood, veiling the eyes with an explosion of red, an inner aurora. Then, slowly, the veil dissipated, and the cold rushed back with a shock, waking up the brain. And then the brain saw the body. It was lying at the edge of the crevice, exhausted or dead. The body was also, the brain noticed, neatly decapitated, showing the white of the spine, the neck caked with already frozen blood. The brain understood that it was still in the head, which had been projected a few yards away from the rest. Maybe the strings of the overmittens had become tangled somehow and, turned to wire by the cold, had cut through flesh and bone as the body had slammed against the edge of the crevice. Bad luck. The brain started to feel cold. Icicles stuck to its lids and lips, gluing them shut. It tried to keep its eyes open and focus on the body, but wondered how long it …

  CHAPTER XXII

  The Kinngait

  I have asked for ice, but this is ridiculous.

  John Jacob Astor IV, on the Titanic

  As a little boy in Nova Scotia, and as perhaps any other child would, Brentford had first imagined the North Pole as a gigantic, 500-mile-radius skating rink, on which one could glide as in a dream. But as an older child, when he had been deemed strong enough to come to the city where his father worked, he had soon discovered that this was a far cry from the truth. Even the stubborn denial of reality that was at the heart of the New Venetian way of life could do little to alter that saddening fact.

  The permanent ice shelf, starting roughly—in every sense of the term—where the city ends, is first signalled by a glacial fringe that is nothing but a tumbled-down great wall of white china. The Arctic Ocean crashes and crushes relentlessly into it, but the frozen waves it throws up form an ever-changing maze of rolls and ridges that complicate or block the way. Brentford’s first position at the Arctic Administration had been Chief Administrator for City Access, which simply meant that his job was to supervise and maintain the roads people used to come and go. It had been one of his first assignments to make sure that the seldom-used Northern road to New Venice remained somewhat open and practical. It must have been some kind
of initiation ritual, for this was a job that it was simply not possible to carry out. Brentford had been happy when he was eventually promoted to Striated Space and given work that could actually be done.

  Once this chaotic expanse of tidal ice is crossed, you come to an ice field that is supposed to go all the way to the pole, but as has been often remarked, this remaining icescape is actually little more than a jigsaw puzzle with blank pieces all badly mixed up by a very mischievous child. Still, depending on weather conditions, it is more or less level and cohesive. Had the fall and winter been more windy that year, Brentford would not have even dreamed of going there by ice yacht, but it was his luck that the dark season had been rather calm before the recent snow storms. That meant, he hoped, that he would find stretches of relatively smooth and even ice for the Kinngait to run a steady course over the frozen ocean, right in the middle of which stood, like a movie monster, the dreaded, carnivorous North Pole.

  Brentford, as a former Navy Cadet and as a regular regatta runner (he had even once won the Cape Durmont d’Urville Challenge), knew the ropes as far as ice-sailing was concerned, and knowing them as he did, he knew very well why ice yachtsmen seldom attempted to go all the way to the pole, and why those who did rarely came back whole or alive. Pressure ridges, ice boulders, and water leads just took the fun out of it (just try hauling a two-ton ice yacht over a jagged hill in temperatures under -60°F), and should an accident happen—crushed hull, broken mast or split runners—then, in the best of cases, the trip back home would be very lonely. Of course, like most New Venetians rich enough to own an ice yacht, he had a personal “farthest north,” and a rather honourable one, around 85°, but that was still wide of the mark.

  Going solo in wintertime did not exactly tip the scales his way: if it meant that water leads would be rare due to constant subzero weather, it also meant there would be little or no visibility. People had received psychiatric care for less absurd ideas than this. His best bet was simply that Helen would not have sent him lightly to his being crushed, frozen, drowned, or starved. He trusted her more than he trusted himself.

  An engineer by trade, and a survivor at heart, he had nevertheless prepared rigorously and, he hoped, cleverly. If he could not allow himself to forget the least detail (in a zone where, if God doesn’t lie in the details, then Death certainly does), he also did not want to overburden his ship with useless junk—for, when all was numbered, weighed, and divided, the Kinngait was his best asset. At first an amaryllis-class three-hull sailing ice yacht, she had been upgraded in every possible way. Since Alexander Graham Bell’s recent groundbreaking trials with his Ugly Duckling in Nova Scotia, propelled fanboats were thought to be the future in the Arctic, as they allowed travel on water leads as well as on ice fields, and Brentford had been one of the first to take the costly step of making an airboat out of his ship. Now, she was rigged with windmill fan blades coupled to a series of Trouvé electric motors. She certainly wasn’t easier to manœuver, but she thrived against the wind, and given optimal conditions, let us say a clear day on Lake Hazen, she could go a steady 60 mph. In most respects, she was now state of the art, and in her berth at the Nouvelle-Ys Marina, her solid dolphingrey silhouette compared not unfavourably to most other crafts, even under the gloomy, unflattering light.

  Brentford, with as much agility as his fur clothes permitted, jumped aboard and slipped inside the round cabin. It was small and Spartan but convenient, well padded all around, with the helm at the front, a central gas stove in the middle that he immediately lit, a half-circular desk on one side covered with charts and instruments, and a small but well insulated bunk on the other. In the rear, a hatch in the floor led down to the hold, and flashlight in hand, Brentford checked once again that everything he needed, or hoped not to need, was there as he had ordered: pellets of Cornwallis zinc to recharge the motor fuel cells; one month’s supply of “Vril-food,” dried soups, pemmican cakes, cod roe, whey powder, aleuronate bread, bars of his favourite chocolate, lime juice, and coffee; a small sled and harness; a primus stove; a pharmacy; a 16-bore Paradox rifle with boxes of shotgun shells and cartridges; a caribou-fur sleeping bag; spare warm clothes; oil-cloth tarpaulins; ice-axes and guncotton powder; a toolbox with everything necessary to build and live in a snow house or an improvised cave; a captive oil-silk balloon that he could send up to project light signals on—everything that could come in useful to prolong his life or his agony. Satisfied with what he found, or thinking that alea was pretty much jacta anyway, he went out to unmoor the ship, and, with a leap that was very much of faith, went back to the helm, started the motor, and headed northward-ho.

  The routine of leaving the harbour and setting the course correctly was not engrossing enough to prevent Brentford from ruminating on his current situation, which wasn’t, he had to admit, exactly Polaris-bright.

  His marriage, to start with, had lasted but a few hours. He had always suspected that it would be more an end than a beginning, for Sybil’s light was not one that you could easily put under a bushel, however benevolent. But he would never have thought its demise would be so quick, nor so loathsome. Brentford fancied himself as a bullet-biter, but it did not mean he had to swallow everything. If he resented Gabriel as much as he could, or could not, for his behaviour and his aggressive way of breaking the news, he knew instinctively that there was more truth in all of it than he would care to admit. He had been too tired and confused to take any decision the night of the wedding, but having slept badly over it, and woken up to find a dummy trying to stab him and Sybil gone sleepwalking back to that damn magician, he had decided all of a sudden that it would be better to call it a day, even if days, in New Venice, could hardly be called that. Did he really need to accuse Sybil or anyone else? Brentford, after all, had got the Kinngait ready the very day after his meeting with William Whale. The call of the North was one thing he could feel, the call of Helen another, which went deeper still. He could have resisted either separately, and he had tried, hadn’t he? But as soon as the hand that retained him had let go, there he was, darting like a wobbly arrow toward an invisible mark. It was as if he had been waiting for the catastrophe to happen as an excuse to flee.

  He wondered if he had done anything wrong, if there might have been another way out of his predicament. Certainly, he had not respected his part of the deal with Arkansky Jr. and had never meant to. Had he really known who the Ghost Lady was at the time, he could have considered trading the secret against Sybil, but instead he had deliberately bluffed about it. When he realized that the ghost was Isabelle d’Ussonville’s, he’d also had a hunch that neither Arkansky nor the Council of Seven should hear about it: first because everything connected with the Seven Sleepers made the Council grow even more threatening than they usually were, and then because, sooner or later, some way or other, this secret might turn out to be a trump card in the game Brentford was playing against them. Anyway, because Arkansky had cheated him as well by not telling him at the Greenhouse what he had done with or, as Brentford preferred to phrase it, to Sybil, he had no tactical regrets, only sentimental ones, and those were hard enough to live with for the moment. So, good-bye to the circus. He did not know whether Sybil would miss him, or even notice his absence, and he did not want to know. He had simply taken his French leave as soon as, coming back from her sleepwalking, she had entered the studio with the Cub-Clubbers, whose name seemed now strangely prophetic in light of the recent hunting frenzy of the Council.

  For there was of course another side to the matter, one that went beyond personal grudges. They were all—Sybil, Arkansky and he—part of a wider picture, whose monumental size Mason had revealed to him. It was no less than the city that was at stake, and they were all, in this, nothing much more than pawns believing themselves to be either tricky knights—like Arkansky—or dependable rooks, like Brentford. But Brentford wanted to play a different game, a game of icy-cold draughts, a game of dames, as the French called it: he now hoped that if he went to the edge of the checke
rboard he could compensate for losing Sybil by “crowning” himself with Helen and, with her help, moving backward with a vengeance. He was aware that this was a rather fuzzy scheme, but he saw no other options. He just hoped it would not pass, even in his own eyes, as a flight from trouble.

  That would have been unfair, really. Trouble was as much in front of him as it was behind. Passing under the narrow archway that cut through the ramparts of the glacial fringe and heading toward Mushroom Point, he was now entering the hard, hummocky, hillocky stretch of his trip and he could feel the Kinngait snort and vibrate unpleasantly on the uneven ice. The carbon-arc searchlight at the bow showed nothing but a landscape that was about as easy to skate upon as the broken lumps of a gigantic sugar bowl.

  But Brentford had a secret weapon upon his nose: Second Sight goggles. They allowed him, through some cutting of their Iceland-spar lenses, to foresee obstacles before he arrived at them. It only worked, however, if a few bothersome conditions were met: continuous scanning of the surrounding area (hence the half-circular windshield of the ship and the serious risk of a stiff neck), as steady a speed as possible (no mean feat in itself), and, the most mysterious and exacting of them all, possession of at least one quarter Highland Scottish blood.

  Brentford Orsini had plenty of that fluid, being related through his mother (though he had inherited from her more insight than Second Sight) to the Mackays of Anticosti Island, the very house of the Nova Scotia baronetcy. By some fold in the fabric of things, Anticosti had always been known to the native Innu as Notiskuan, “the place where bears are hunted,” and this was where his mother had indeed met and made herself bearable to a polar Orsini. His mother’s mother was a Matheson of Cape Breton, and Matheson meant “son of the bear,” exactly what the Orsini heir apparent, then, was to the second power. There was some transcendence in such coincidences, no doubt, and Brentford liked to think about them, or would have liked to, if he had not had to steer, “by his strong arm,” as the Mackay motto boasted, the ship away from the ice boulders that jumped up in the searchlight. The Matheson motto was Fac et Spere, “Do and Hope,” and seemed good advice for the time being.