Aurorarama

by Jean-Christophe Valtat

  “Oh yes! I almost forgot! That was our own rear base that was being attacked, and we left the city because we were supposed to defend our Inuit allies who watch over it, weren’t we? You remember that?”

  “Ja!” said Schwarz accusingly. “But we had to save all these gentlemen.”

  “And now they think we shouldn’t have. What a pity!” added the doctor, shaking his head.

  “I do not find this very funny,” said Brentford.

  Hardenberg smiled.

  “But since we have changed our course and followed the direction indicated by the dogs, we’ve made some … I think serendipity is the word. Do you know where we’re heading right now?”

  “No,” admitted Brentford darkly.

  “Neither do I. But Herr Torm, our pilot, has noticed that this course seems to be taking us toward some very interesting place.”

  “There is no place around here,” said Brentford, still a bit irritated by Hardenberg’s unbreakable self-confidence, his way of thinking that he could will things into existence.

  “Which is exactly what makes this one interesting.”

  CHAPTER XXVII

  The Crystal Castle

  “It is no speculation of wild improbability to picture a polar paradise, like some titan emerald in its alabaster setting.” Fitzhugh Green, Popular Science Monthly, December 1923

  Hardenberg invited his guests to follow him to the wheelhouse at the fore of the Ariel. The room, fitted on all sides with toughened glass windows, contained the pilot’s and navigator’s seats, the steering wheel, the valve cords, the control wires for rudder and elevators, the instrument panels, a map case, and voice pipes for inside communication. Lit as it was, for the moment, by a single light bulb in the ceiling, its most striking visible feature was the bearded, eye-masked reflection in the windshield of Trom, the pilot. The navigator, introduced as Petersen, was bent over the backlit map, the lead dog on his knees. From where he stood, just behind the navigator’s seat, Gabriel could see that the tinkling medallion around the neck of the dog was quite familiar to him.

  “Look, the Nixon-Knox coat of arms,” he whispered to Brentford, who nodded in the darkness.

  “Where did you get these dogs?” Brentford asked Tuluk, who stood at his side.

  Tuluk hesitated, as he knew it had not been quite legal, but realizing that they were now quite literally above such considerations, he answered good-naturedly.

  “The men of the Trash. The Inuit were hunted, you know.”

  “I know,” Brentford reassured him. “You did very well.” And he meant every word of it. So these were probably the same animals that had brought the coffin to New Venice and brought the airship to his rescue. He did not know if was sheer luck or something more mysterious, but after all, he corrected himself, few things are more mysterious than luck.

  The animal had a paw on the map case and seemed to be scratching with excitement a particular spot that was designated as unexplored.

  Bending a little, the visitors could see the portion of the ice field lit by the searchlight. Rollers and rubble slid past at full speed, rarely revealing stretches of smooth ice. But Gabriel could see something that the others did not seem to notice. Something white that was bounding along with ease at an amazing speed, like some sort of spring-heeled Jack Frost.

  “You see Him?” he whispered into Brentford’s ear. “He’s leading us.”

  “Who?”

  “Kiggertarpok,” said Uitayok, between his teeth.

  The three men looked at each other.

  The dog yelped. It could see Him, too. It was the Polar Kangaroo that had led the dogs first to Gabriel and then Brentford and now to …

  “Das müβte hier sein,” said Petersen.

  “What should be here?” asked Brentford, surprised at his sudden Pentecostal fluency in German.

  Hardenberg smiled, his hand clenched on the back of the pilot’s seat.

  The searchlight revealed a foggy area: at first simple wisps of mist, but then a billow so dense, it became a cloud of white smoke.

  “Volcanic fumes. I knew it,” said Hardenberg, as the ship was enveloped.

  From time to time, as the clouds cleared a little, they could see that the ice on the ground was progressively giving way to ragged slopes of black stone. They were, it seemed, passing over a small mountain range. The dog whined, its tail starting to wag.

  “Home,” said Tuluk, nodding his head, as he watched the animal.

  The smoke progressively lessened to a thinner veil, and then, all of a sudden, it cleared. Land appeared in the searchlight. A dark plateau, with stray patches of snow, and curls of vapour from numerous geysers or hot springs.

  “Here it is. Welcome to Crocker Land,” said Hardenberg, with a thrill in his voice.

  Brentford and Gabriel looked at each other. The land that Peary had seen from afar, and that had remained part myth, part mirage, and perhaps, some suspected, something of a hoax, was now spread under their gaping eyes.

  “Da!” Petersen exclaimed, pointing his finger at the edge of the searchlight. “Ein Burg!”

  Trom, Hardenberg’s hand now squeezing his shoulder, inclined the ship and made a wide swerve over the place to put it right in the searchlight. For those in the wheelhouse, the manœuver seemed to last forever, and the dog now stood on its hind legs, its muzzle so close to the windshield that its breath made a cloudy blur Petersen impatiently wiped off.

  At last, it appeared.

  It was a mountain. It was a castle. A dazzling crystal mass that sometimes took the shape of an immense palace, a jumble of spires, pinnacles, turrets, and oriels, which as the searchlight moved reverted for a while to a flashing chaos of facets.

  “Greenhouses,” said Brentford, as the searchlight extended to the sides of the crystal structure. Four long hothouses, made of glass or crystal, surrounded the castle at the four points of the compass. This was indeed a human settlement.

  Trom adjusted the valves, filling the inner ballonets with air, so that the Ariel could lower itself. As it did, it became obvious that the base of the castle was inside a crater with the greenhouses located around its rim. It was as if a gigantic gemstone had been excavated and the castle cut directly into the transparent, slightly water-green crystal wherever its angles had evoked architectural shapes—columns, arches, cornices, balconies, towers, footbridges, or kiosks. All of these belonged to architectural styles seemingly piled up at random, and formed a translucent labyrinth whose depths and perspective mutated with every move of the gliding searchlight.

  They couldn’t wait to land and explore it.

  The searchlight picked up a lantern moving to and fro at the entrance to a wide cavernous opening in one side of the crystal. It looked just large enough to accommodate the Ariel, and Hardenberg directed Trom toward it.

  “You do not think it’s dangerous?” Brentford asked Hardenberg.

  “I am just too curious to care,” answered Hardenberg, and that was exactly the answer Brentford wanted to hear.

  Trom positioned the ship in front of the cave, following the indications of the tall man in a white tunic who held the lantern at the edge of the opening.

  “They do not seem to be cold here,” remarked Gabriel.

  “The thermometer says 34°F” said Brentford.

  “Oh.” Gabriel felt frozen just at the thought of leaving the relatively warm Ariel.

  But he forgot about it as soon the searchlight dispelled the dense shadows of the cave. Sloping down a little from the entrance, it was as deep and high as a cathedral, its vault held up by pillars of crystal. Its sides, rough as they were, exploded into myriads of dazzling ornaments as the light passed over their prisms.

  Trom gently took the Ariel down to a few inches above the ground and stopped the motors. The crew jumped out to stabilize the ship, mooring it to the crystal pillars.

  “After you,” said Hardenberg, indicating the door to his guests.

  The floor itself was made of crystal, so smooth
one could see one’s own amazed reflection in it. A light appeared at the base of one of the walls, widening to reveal an opening door. A dozen tall men in white tunics and black breeches advanced toward the visitors, carrying torches. They were very fair, with ruddy complexions, high cheekbones, and slightly slanted eyes. Besides a language that only Hardenberg seemed to grasp, they also spoke a little English. Their manner was easy enough, too, but things went even better as soon as the pack of sled dogs was released from the Ariel. Running toward the men, they jumped at their legs with yelps of joy. Tuluk was right. They were home. And so were Gabriel and Brentford, in a way, if they spooled back the ball of unravelled thread that had brought them here.

  “So, this is where the ghost of Isabella wanted us to be, then,” reflected Gabriel, looking all around him in awe, his bandaged hands crossed under his armpits. “I wonder what this place has to do with her. Or us.”

  “I was supposed to go to the North Pole, if I may remind you,” said Brentford, though the memory of the mess he had made of it still stung a bit.

  “Through Isabella herself, may I remind you. And it’s still her dogs that brought us to you as you were, well, on your way is a big word, but you get my drift,” Gabriel smirked. “And they followed the Polar Kangaroo, who apparently led us here.”

  “So He would be linked with Isabella as well.”

  “Ah, what wouldn’t He be linked with? He is the link, after all.”

  Meanwhile, the landing party had been invited into the castle itself. Its topography, as might be supposed from the outside, was exceedingly complicated, full of twists and turns, but also full of wonders at every one of them. If the Inughuit expressed their awe more vocally than the others, who did their qallunaq best to look blasé, all shared the sense of wonder. Well, thought Brentford, when it comes to sharing, you have to start somewhere, and that was as good a place as any other.

  The mauve light of mock moons shone softly through numberless openings, disclosing, with the help of the torches, adjacent halls whose furniture and decorations were entirely sculpted out of the same local crystal with all the minuteness of frostwork. Some, maybe, were less detailed than others, as if this sculpting were a work in progress that had been going on for centuries. Women in long white robes could be seen in some of these rooms, giggling among themselves and provoking in the newcomers a slight change in demeanour, an imperceptible straightening of the backbone, a refocusing of the eyes.

  “Many women. Good,” said Tiblit, making to Gabriel, who could not contradict him, a thunderous debut in Shakespeare’s tongue.

  The party arrived in a larger hall, decorated with three classical statues, all made of the same crystal. The one closest to Gabriel was dedicated to Elfinor, who, a few carved lines informed him, “was in magick skill’d/he built by art upon the Glassy sea/A bridge of Brass, whose sound Heaven’s thunder seemd to be.” This was a rather standard New Venetian reference, and the d’Ussonville coat of arms right under the verses doubtless expressed Isabella’s familial piety as the daughter of a founding father. The statue at the other side of the hall, depicting a long-bearded man, was dedicated to Elfant, “Who was of most renowned fame/who all of chrystal did Panthea build.” Maybe this was a direct reference to the founder of that most mysterious castle, which certainly looked like the work of a fairy king, though the statue itself surprisingly resembled Henry Hudson. Could it be that he had been rescued by these people? The third statue was a well-endowed God of the Gardens, labelled Elfinstone, In Memoriam, but whose face was not quite unfamiliar to Gabriel.

  A shiver struck him as, warned by the sudden silence of the group, he turned toward the—was it one? or two? persons who had entered the hall to welcome them. The creature was, by all standards, a freak of nature, or even slightly beyond that. Siamese twins are one thing, if one may say so, and being joined at the side is not the rarest thing nor the worst that could happen to them; but conjoined twins of different sex were, at least by Gabriel, unheard of. These twins were also albinos, their snow-white hair and pale complexion underscored by the black velvet clothes they wore. But they were also the most beautiful, graceful, luminous adolescents Gabriel had ever beheld.

  “I am Reginald Elphinstone,” said the boy, who wore a little golden pendant of the sun around his neck.

  “I am Geraldine Elphinstone,” said the girl, whose pendant represented the moon.

  “Welcome to Caer Sidhe,” they said together.

  It was later that night, after a sumptuous dinner of fresh food served on the finest crystal dinner service had been finished, that the twins, in a perfectly executed duet, told their tale …

  THE SURPASSING STORY OF REGINALD & GERALDINE

  The story begins in New Venice, where other stories end. Once upon a time, a woman—let us name her Isabelle, or as she was known later, Isabella—was forbidden by an unfair law to have any children. Her husband, Nixon-Knox, a respected doctor and a member of the Council of Seven, not only never touched her but also watched her very closely. But there came a time when she was required to have her official portrait painted. The painter was a young, gifted, ambitious, hotheaded artist called Alexander Harkness. Alexander fell in love with Isabella’s pale face and fine features, and the benevolent sadness she carried about her like an aura. Isabella fell in love with Alexander’s curly mane and bushy brows, and the way his look stripped her naked as he was painting her. Before the painting was even finished, she discovered she was pregnant.

  Nixon-Knox learned about it, through, let us suppose, a treacherous maid. As a doctor, he suggested to the maid that she serve a pennyroyal infusion to her mistress. Isabella, indeed, felt so sick upon drinking it that both Nixon-Knox and the maid thought that they had succeeded in provoking a miscarriage. The maid, decidedly garrulous and malignant, informed Alexander Harkness of the success of Nixon-Knox’s plan. Harkness, desperate as only a young man can be, called the husband to a secret duel on the ice field, but having counted ten steps and turned toward his opponent, it was himself he shot in the head, for having dishonoured Isabella and lost their child.

  But it turned out that Isabella was still pregnant. Nixon-Knox, shocked by Alexander’s suicide, or troubled by some religious scruples, eventually took pity on poor Isabella, and instead of forcing her to get rid of the child, made her swear secrecy and sent her off to exile on distant Melville Island. After this, he seems to have fallen under the influence of a French religious fanatic, Father Calixte, who condemned with the utmost virulence any attempts to reach the pole as a sin against God and, dabbling in visions and prophecies, predicted that New Venice would be doomed because of these attempts. Nixon-Knox, from that point onward, is said to have busied himself with curious medical experiments that bordered on the unwholesome, until finally he was engaged, or so the story went, in stealing the corpses of dead explorers from the Gallery leading to the Boreal Grounds. He was eventually denounced by a young doctor named Douglas Norton, who had conducted his own strange experiments in the field of animal hybridization so far that Nixon-Knox, though he was a longstanding friend of the Norton family, had him expelled from the John Snow School of Surgery. On the grounds of Norton’s public accusations, the Council of Seven could no longer shield Nixon-Knox, and he finished his life as a miserable inmate of the dreaded Haslam Hospital.

  But let us go back to Isabella Nixon-Knox, née d’Ussonville. As you remember, she was supposed to sail to Melville Island. But it happened that her small ship, blocked by the ice near Cape Turnback, had instead been forced northward, until after weeks of hardship she was rescued by chance by the inhabitants of our island, which was not yet known to explorers as Crocker Land, or more accurately, the Crocker Land Mirage. This island, which can mostly be seen from above, and only at certain times of the year, is known to those who inhabit it by a secret name that can only be pronounced when the Island is invisible to the outer world. Its people pretend, or believe, or pretend to believe, that they are descendants of the Irish Tuatha Dé Dannan,
mixed with ancient Arctic Tunit people and, many many centuries later, with the remnants of the Norse colonies of Greenland. Lost or wrecked Westerners, and whatever their cargo consists of, are traditionally welcomed, so much so in fact that the deliberate wrecking of foreign ships has been, at certain times, the tradition itself. Certain legends even mention, in that respect, a certain mysterious woman who used to mislead sailors and travellers toward the island. The inhabitants call her Oene, the fallen Queen of the Arctic.

  Isabella’s rescue was, accordingly, regarded less as a duty than as a gift. There, upon her arrival, and while her husband considered her lost at sea, Isabella gave birth to a little girl, whom, to honour both the father and his death, she had baptized Myrtle Isabella Alexandra Harkness. Thanks to her kindness and distinction, Isabella quickly found her place in the community, so much so that she was chosen as the Lady of the Castle, a purely honorary but much respected title granted only to foreigners by the Island dwellers.

  Myrtle grew up, educated by her mother and by the library that Isabella had brought with her in a trunk. But there was among those books one that especially fascinated the young Myrtle: a little octavo entitled Snowdrift & Reliance, written by the uncle of Douglas Norton, Edward Hilbert-Norton. The Hilbert-Nortons were on excellent terms with Isabella, and Douglas had offered a strange pet straight out his laboratory to keep Isabella company and “remain in contact” with her, while his uncle, an eccentric bachelor and Isabella’s longtime séance partner, had dedicated and offered this book of his to her just before her departure.

  Part melodrama, part Elizabethan tragedy, Snowdrift & Reliance has little to recommend it to the reader’s benevolence, the bewildering intricacies of its plot being further shrouded by unfathomable esoteric symbolism, not to mention an amphigoric style whose only coherent trait is its consistent lack of taste. But on Myrtle, a self-taught, imaginative young girl growing up isolated from the world on an invisible island, and not in the best position to distinguish myth from reality, its effect was devastating. She was especially struck by the fate of the heroine, Princess Ellesmere, who learns, through a prophecy imparted to her mother, the hermaphroditic Quing of Reliance, that her city will be destroyed when she loses her virginity. Somehow, Myrtle seems to have conceived the strange notion that in the same manner she could wreak her revenge on New Venice for killing her father and making a castaway of her mother.