Drowned Worlds

by Jonathan Strahan

  Change everywhere.

  One day, Mike followed a long rimrock trail to a triangulation point at a place called Pulpit Peak, fifteen kilometres south of the town. The pulpit of Pulpit Peak was a tall rock that stood at the edge of a cliff like the last tooth in a jaw, high above the blue eye of a meltwater lake. There was the usual trample of footprints in the apron of sandy gravel around it, the usual cairn of stones at the trail head, and something Mike hadn’t seen before, a line of angular characters incised into one face of the rock, strange letters or mathematical symbols with long tails or loops or little crowns that reminded him of something he couldn’t quite recall. And the triangulation point, a brass plate set in the polished face of a granite plinth, stated that it was thirty metres due north of its stated location ‘out of respect to local religious custom.’

  “I checked it with my phone’s GPS,” Mike told his friend Oscar Manu that evening. They were at the Faraday Bar ’n’ Barbeque after a six-a-side soccer match, sitting on the terrace with their teammates under an awning that cracked like a whip in the chill breeze. “Sure enough, it was exactly thirty metres north of where it was supposed to be. And that writing? It’s elvish. A guy I knew back home, old roustabout there, had a tattoo in the same kind of script. Back in the day, he was an extra in those old fantasy movies, had it done as a memento.”

  Mike’s phone had translated the inscription. The Place of the Meeting of Ice and Water. A reference, maybe, to the vanished glaciers that had flowed into Square Bay.

  “One of the sacred elf stones is what it is,” Oscar said.

  Oscar was from Tahiti, which had had its own share of troubles during the warming, but was in better shape than most Pacific Islands nations. One of its biotech firms had engineered the fast-growing, temperature-tolerant strain of staghorn coral the reclaimers were using to rebuild the reefs of Majuro. He was drinking Pangaea beer; Mike, who knew all too well that he was his father’s son, was on his usual Lemon & Paeroa, saying, “You’re telling me there are people here who believe in elves?”

  “Let’s put it this way: the road between Esperanza and O’Higgins has a kink where it swings around one of those stones,” Oscar said.

  “You’re kidding,” Mike said, because Oscar was famous for his patented wind-ups.

  “Go see for yourself the next time you’re up north,” Oscar said. “It’s just past the twenty kilometre marker.”

  Adi Mara chipped in, saying that a couple of Icelanders she knew took that kind of shit very seriously. “They have elves back home. The Huldufólk—the hidden people.”

  “Elf elves?” Oscar said. “Pointy ears, bad dress sense, the whole bit?”

  “They look like ordinary people who just happen to be invisible most of the time,” Adi said. “They live under rocks, and if you piss them off they can give you bad frostbite or sunburn, or cause accidents. Icelanders reckon some big rocks are actually disguised elvish churches or chapels. Building work and road construction can be held up if someone discovers that a place sacred to elves is right in the way.”

  “They don’t sound that scary,” Oscar said.

  “Scary isn’t the point,” Adi said. She was their goalie, smaller than Mike, Oscar and the other guys, but fearless in the goal mouth. She punted every save way down the field, regardless of the positions of her teammates, and would tear you a new one if you didn’t make good use of her passes. “The point is, Iceland is pretty bleak and tough, so it’s only natural that Icelanders believe in forces stronger than they are, try to humanise the landscape with stories about folk who own it. And it’s the same here.”

  Mike said that maybe it was the other way around. “Maybe the stones are reminders that Antarctica isn’t really a place where ordinary people should be living.”

  “Back in the day that might have been true,” Oscar said. “But look around you, Torres. We have Starbucks and McDonald’s. We have people who are bringing up kids here. And we have beer,” he said, draining his glass and reaching for the communal jug. “Any place with beer, how can you call it inhospitable?”

  The talk turned to rumours of feral ecopoets who were supposed to be living off the land and waging a campaign of sabotage against construction work. Roads and radio masts and other infrastructure damaged, trucks and boats hijacked, sightings of people where no people should be. Freddie Aata said he knew someone who’d seen a string of mammoths skylighted on a ridge with a man riding the lead animal, said that the Authority police had found several huts made of reindeer bones and antlers on the shore of Sjögren Inlet, on the east coast.

  “Maybe they’re your elves,” Freddie told Mike. “Bunch of saboteurs who want to smack us back into the Stone Age, chiselling rocks with runes to mark their territory.”

  Mike still hadn’t seen much of the peninsula. After arriving at O’Higgins International Airport he’d been flown directly to Square Bay in the hold of a cargo plane, catching only a few glimpses of snowy mountains rising straight up from the sea. There were vast undiscovered territories beyond the little town and the short strip of coast where he tooled up and down on service runs. Places as yet untouched by human mess and clutter. He found a web site with a map and a list of GPS coordinates of elf stones, realised that it gave him a shape and purpose to exploration, and started hitching helo and boat rides out into the back country to find them. There really was a stone, The Church of the Flat Land, on the road between Esperanza and O’Higgins, the two big settlements at the northern end of the peninsula. There was a stone at the site of an abandoned Chilean research station on Adelaide Island. The Embassy of the Sea Swimmers. There were stones standing stark on hilltops or scree slopes. A boulder in a swift meltwater river. A boulder balanced on another boulder on a remote stony shore on the Black Coast. The Land Dances. A stone on a flat-topped nunatak in an ice field in the Werner Mountains, the most southerly location known. The Gate to the Empty Country.

  They were all found pieces, incised with their names but otherwise unaltered. Markers that emphasised the emptiness of the land in which they stood, touching something inside Mike that he couldn’t explain, even to himself. It was a little like the feeling he had when he paged through old images of the Marshall Islands. A plangent longing, deeper than nostalgia, for a past he’d never known. As if amongst the stones he might one day find a way back to a time not yet despoiled by the long catalogue of Anthropocene calamities, a Golden Age that existed only in the rearview mirror.

  He had quickly discovered that visiting elf stones was a thing some people did, like birders ticking off species or climbers nailing every hard XS route. They posted photos, poems, diaries of the treks they had made, and fiercely squabbled about the origin of the stones and their meaning. No one seemed to know how old the stones were or who had made them, if it was a single person or a crew, if they were still being made. Most stoners agreed that the oldest was a tilted sandstone slab just a short steep hike from a weather station on the Wilkins Coast. The House of Air and Ice. It was spattered with lichens whose growth, according to some, dated it to around a century years ago, long before the peninsula had been opened to permanent settlement. But others disputed the dating, pointing out that climate change meant that lichen growth could no longer be considered a reliable clock, and that in any case establishment of lichen colonies could be accelerated by something as simple as a yoghurt wash.

  There were any number of arguments about the authenticity of other stones, too. Some were definitely imitations, with crudely carved runes that translated into mostly unfunny jokes. Gandalf’s Hat. Keep Out: Alien Zone. Trespassers Will Be Shot. There was a stone with a small wooden doorway fitted into a crack in its base. There was a stone painted with the tree-framed doorway to the Mines of Moria. There was a miniature replica of Stonehenge. There were miniature replicas of elf stones hidden on roofs of buildings in O’Higgins and Esperanza.

  And even stones that most stoners considered to be the real deal were disputed by the hardcore black-helicopter conspiracy frea
ks who squabbled over the precise dimensions of runes, or looked for patterns in the distribution of the stones, or believed that they were actually way points for a planned invasion by one of the governments that still claimed sovereignty over parts of Antarctica, or some kind of secret project to blanket the peninsula with mind-controlling low-frequency microwaves, and so forth.

  Oscar Manu found a website run by some guy in O’Higgins who looked a bit like a pantomime elf, with a Santa Claus beard and a green sweater, sitting at a desk littered with books and papers, a poster-sized photo of The Gate to the Empty Country on the wall behind him. Apparently he gave a course in elven mythology that included a visit to the stone set on the shoulder of a pebble bar north of the town’s harbour, and awarded certificates to his pupils.

  “Maybe he knows who made the things,” Oscar said. “Maybe, even, he made them. You should go talk to him, Torres. You know you could ace that test and get yourself certified.”

  But as far as Mike was concerned, it wasn’t really about elves, the whole fake history of aboriginal inhabitants. It was the idea that the essence of the land had survived human occupation and climate change, ready to re-emerge when the warming was reversed. The stones were an assertion of primacy, like the pylons set by the reclaimers around the perimeter of Majuro, marking the atoll’s shape in the rolling waves that had drowned it. One of those pylons had Mike’s name engraved on it, near the top of a list of sponsors and donors.

  Despite their isolation and the stark splendour of the stones’ settings, people couldn’t help despoiling them. ‘Robbo’ had carved his tag at the base of The Church of the Flat Land. When Mike visited Deception Island, a three-day trip that included a stopover in O’Higgins (he ticked off the stone north of the harbour, but didn’t visit the elf university), there was a cruise ship at anchor in the natural harbour of the island’s flooded caldera, and he had to wait until a tourist group had finished taking selfies and groupies in front of a gnarled chimney of lava carved with a vertical line of runes, Here We Made With Fire, before he could have a few minutes alone with it. Someone had planted a little garden of snow buttercup and roseroot around The Embassy of the Sea Swimmers. There’d been some kind of party or gathering at The Land Dances, leaving a litter of nitrous oxide capsules and actual tobacco cigarette butts, illegal on three continents. And people had tucked folded slips of paper, prayers or petitions, amongst the small pyramid of stones, each marked with a single rune, of Our High Haven, on an icy setback high in the Gutenko Mountains.

  Mike had made a short detour to find that last site after dropping off a party of geologists. It was a beautiful day. The blue dome of the sky unmarked except for the trail of a jet plane crawling silently northeast. Hardly any wind. In the absolute stillness he could hear the tide of blood in his ears, the faint sigh of air in his nostrils. Looking out across the pure white expanse of the Dyer Plateau towards mountain peaks sawtoothing the horizon he could imagine that the view was exactly as it had been before anyone had set foot on the continent. Ice and rock and snow and sky. Except that he remembered something one of the geologists had said as they’d unloaded their gear—that in the permanent dark of winter people heloed up to the plateau for wild skiing under the Antarctic moon and stars, using GPS to navigate from ice lodge to ice lodge. The snow here was fantastic, the geologist had said, a lot more of it than there used to be because the warmer air transported more moisture and caused more precipitation. Part of the expedition’s work was measuring erosion caused by increased rainfall and snowmelt.

  Change everywhere.

  By now, it was long past midsummer. Christmas had come and gone. The weeks of 24-hour sunlight were over. Nights were lengthening inexorably. The first snow had fallen at Square Bay. As the research season ended, Mike and the other helo pilots were kept busy retrieving people from far-flung science camps, and Mike had a brief fling with one of the scientists. Sarah Conway, an English palaeontologist eight years older than him, part of a team which had been working on a rich seam of fossils in a sedimentary layer high in the Eternity Range. They met at one of the social nights in the town’s two-lane bowling alley, where the pins were painted to resemble penguins and an ancient jukebox played K-pop from the last century. Sarah was a good-looking big-boned blonde with the kind of unassailable confidence and ambition, founded on good old-fashioned middle-class privilege, that Mike knew he should resent, but she was smart, funny and vivid, and when he saw how other men looked at her he felt a fierce pride that she had chosen him instead of any of them.

  “She’s a fine woman,” Oscar said, “but you do know she’s only into you for just the one thing.”

  “We’re just having a little fun before she goes back to the World,” Mike said.

  “I have plenty of experience of short-term romances is all I’m saying,” Oscar said. “Have fun, sure, but don’t let her go breaking your heart.”

  Mike knew that Oscar was right, knew that he should keep it cool, fool around but keep a certain distance, but one day he told Sarah about the elf stones, and when she expressed an interest he took her up into the hills to show her the one at Pulpit Peak.

  At first, she seemed to get it, saying that she understood why he hadn’t documented the stones in any way. “It’s about the moment. The connection you make through the stones. The journey you make to find them changes you. And when you actually see them, you’re changed again. It makes you see their context afresh,” she said, her broad smile showing the gap between her front teeth that Mike found terrifically attractive.

  But then he tried to explain his idea that the stones had been sited in places that reminded people of what had been lost, the ice and the snow, the empty quiet of unpopulated Nature that would one day come again, and everything went north.

  “This was all forest ten million years ago,” Sarah said. “And a hundred million years before that, in the Cretaceous, it was even warmer. Covered by rainforest, inhabited by dinosaurs and amphibians and early mammals. Some big non-flying dinosaurs survived here after the asteroid impact wiped them out everywhere else. We found a nest with ankylosaur eggs this season that we think definitely post-dates the extinction event. And last season we found a partial hypsilophodont skull with enlarged eye sockets that confirms the dinosaurs lived here all year around, and had acute night vision that helped them to hunt during the polar night. The point being, choosing one state over another, ice over forest, is completely subjective.”

  “But this time the change isn’t natural. Antarctica should be covered in ice and snow,” Mike said, “and we fucked it up.”

  “I’m just taking the long view. Nothing lasts for ever. But that doesn’t mean that when the Anthropocene passes it will be replaced by a replica of the immediate past. As my grandfather used to like saying, you can’t unring a bell. There’ll be something else here. Something different.”

  “It will come back if we help it,” Mike said.

  “Are we talking about Antarctica or your lost island home?”

  “That doesn’t have anything to do with the stones,” Mike said, although of course it did. He was angry, but mostly with himself. He shouldn’t have told her about the reclaimers. He shouldn’t have shared his stupid ideas about the stones. He’d said too much, he’d opened his heart, and she was repaying his trust with a lecture.

  “Antarctica could freeze over again, but it won’t ever be what it once was,” Sarah said. “And you can build new islands, but it won’t bring back what you’ve lost. It will be something new. You can’t hate change. It’s like hating life.”

  “I can hate the wrong kind of change, can’t I?” Mike said, but he could see that it was no good. She was a scientist. She had all the answers, and he was just a dumb helo pilot.

  So they broke up on a sour note. A few days later, while Mike was out on a supply run to one of the kelp farms, Sarah caught a plane to New Zealand, leaving him with the feeling that he’d somehow fucked up.

  “You definitely fucked up a perfectly goo
d lay with that obsession of yours,” Oscar said.

  “I’m not obsessed.”

  Oscar laid a finger alongside his broad flat nose, pulling down his lower eyelid and staring straight at Mike. “I’ve been watching you, Torres. The time you spend chasing those stones. The time you spend talking about chasing them, or what you found when you ran one down. You think it’s more important than anything else. And anyway, she’s right.”

  “What do you mean, she’s right?”

  “She’s right about bringing back the past. You can’t. You drop a glass, it breaks on the floor. No way the pieces are going to leap up and fit themselves back again.”

  “You could glue them back together,” Mike said, trying to turn it into a joke.

  “You can’t beat time, dude,” Oscar said. “It only runs in one direction, and there’s only one way out of world.”