Drowned Worlds

by Jonathan Strahan

  “Shit, it’s a lead!” cried Jackson.

  “Never seen one this far north before!” shouted Golly.

  “A what?” I screamed.

  “A lead!” Jackson replied. “A lane of open water!”

  “They form without warning!” Golly explained. “One of ’em nearly doomed Peary!”

  “Make it stop!” wailed Bernie Seltzer.

  “We didn’t sign up for this!” cried Janet Houghton.

  “I want my money back!” yelled her husband.

  “To the caterpillar!” shouted Jackson.

  “What about us?” screamed Golly.

  “We’ll send a rescue team!”

  Now came a second tremor, as ferocious as the first, rattling the air with brittle thunder. An instant later a floe calved off from Jackson’s side of the channel, leaving him, the Houghtons, and the Seltzers adrift on a raft of ice. Destabilized by its hapless and shrieking passengers—even Jackson was in a panic—the floe suddenly capsized, dumping the explorers into the black water, whereupon the swift current imprisoned them beneath the shelf.

  “Jesus Christ!” shrieked Golly.

  “Holy living fuck!” cried Lucretia.

  Instinctively I rushed to the edge of the lead and flung myself facedown on the ice. The strap holding my Sony Vistaview slid from my shoulder, whereupon the camera skated to the lip of the channel and plopped into the water, but this was the least of my worries. Now Lucretia and Golly appeared beside me, likewise prone. We stretched out our arms as far they could reach. The water’s surface remained unbroken; no wet hands rose from the frigid depths. Slowly, lugubriously, we three survivors regained our feet. We whimpered and wept, the tears freezing on our cheeks, then gradually composed ourselves and wondered aloud what else could go wrong.

  Our question was answered sooner than we would have wished. Glancing toward the snow caterpillar, we watched in horror as the ever expanding fissure coursed between the tank-treads. The pack opened its maw and, bellowing like an immense Arctic dragon, swallowed the caterpillar whole, leaving us stranded and alone at the top of the world.

  ALTHOUGH HE WAS the only experienced North Pole explorer among us, Golly had no idea what we should do next. One obvious option, he noted, was to remain where we were and wait for some EEI employee back in the U.S.A. to realize that an awful fate must have befallen the Milford-Harbison expedition. “But we’ll probably die of dehydration before a rescue plane finds us, the ice pack being no less a desert than the Gobi.” Alternatively, we could start hiking in the general direction of Greenland and hope to encounter an indigenous hunting party that, having failed to find any caribou, seals, or walruses at the usual latitudes, was now venturing into zones where no Inuit—or very few Inuit—had gone before. “Of course, that plan, too, is less likely to end in salvation than dehydration. All things considered, I vote for getting out of here. We might be wandering to our doom, but at least we’d be doing something.”

  Golly’s strategy (if that’s what it was) sounded reasonable to Lucretia and me, and so we three began our journey, hiking along the banks of the newly formed channel. For eight hours we moved south beneath the pale eye of the never-setting sun, eventually reaching a cluster of hummocks configured in a natural lean-to. Acting on an unspoken consensus, we entered the shelter, lay down, and began following a regimen of cat naps alternating with prattle, actual conversation being too dangerous, for once we started discussing happy memories and home fires, there would be no end to it.

  Shortly after first light—a dawn by the clock, not by the quixotic sun—we abandoned the lean-to and resumed our white odyssey. We had gone barely three miles when a distant and astonishing tableau emerged. At first we thought it a mirage, a phenomenon as common at the North Pole as in any other flatland, but then the blessed truth presented itself. We had stumbled upon an Inuit village, a ring of dome-shaped dwellings covered with animal hides, each hut fronting a plaza where perhaps twenty indigenes, half of them children, warmed themselves around a communal cooking fire. Apprehending our scent, a cadre of guard dogs began barking, ribbons of steam pouring from their jaws.

  “It’s a miracle!” I exclaimed.

  “A thousand miracles!” added Lucretia.

  “Jesus always bats last!” declared Golly.

  Galvanized by the dogs, a delegation of three Inuit women came toward us. Their intentions, we soon realized, were benevolent, for they bore a kettle of boiled walrus meat—or so the shortest among them, speaking in English, identified the offering—plus a sealskin canteen filled with potable water. We feasted greedily and drank eagerly.

  “I wonder what they use for fuel,” said Lucretia.

  “Good question,” said Golly.

  “Permafrost peat,” said the tall woman. “Thanks to the greenhouse effect, we find flammable chips all over the pack these days.”

  “It’s an ill apocalypse that blows nobody good,” said the stout woman.

  “The peat also serves for making lager beer,” said the short woman. “Would you like to try some aputi?”

  “No, thank you,” I said.

  An instant later two robust men approached. At their request we furnished our names, and then the elder indigene introduced himself as “Chief Yakone of the Inuit nation called the Pikatti,” his companion as “Prince Ugalik, my learned firstborn son.”

  “I have attended Reykjavík University,” Ugalik explained.

  “Where you studied the history of your people?” Lucretia asked.

  “Western philosophy, actually,” said the prince, “with an emphasis on the pre-Socratics. I’m going for a doctorate.”

  “The Pikatti—I confess that your tribe is unknown to me,” said Golly.

  “That is as it should be,” said Prince Ugalik. “There are but eighty-five of us on the planet, including our children, and we all live right here.”

  “Eighty-five?” said Golly. “That’s a pretty minimal nation.”

  “A nation nevertheless,” said Ugalik. “In any event, it’s best for humankind that we remain a lost tribe. I hope you aren’t anthropologists, because then we would be obliged to kill and eat you in the venerable ceremony of Amaruk.”

  “What’s an anthropologist?” said Golly quickly.

  “There are no anthropologists for miles around,” said Lucretia.

  “We’re merely tourists,” I said. “I’m a video journalist, and Dr. Ramsey is a film studies professor.”

  “Truth to tell, there is no Amaruk ceremony,” said Chief Yakone. “That was my son’s idea of a joke. But it is imperative that our tribe remains free of anthropological scrutiny. For twelve centuries we have performed a sacred mission on behalf of the Earth and all its lifeforms. Should our benevolence come to light—this is admittedly a peculiar thing to say—the cosmos would be thrown off kilter.”

  “Our lips are forever sealed,” I said, beating back a smirk.

  “Your sacred mission is our eternal secret,” said Lucretia with a pained smile.

  “Lunatic indigenes, just our luck,” Golly whispered to me.

  “We live in cataclysmic times,” said Ugalik. “Wounds are opening in the ice. The demon-god Qaumaniq arises. But at the moment we are filled with hope, for two stalwart strangers have come among us, Sivuugun and Luava, just as the Pikatti legend foretells.”

  Yakone touched my shoulder. “We rejoice in your advent, Sivuugun, Lord of Lenses.” The chief squeezed Lucretia’s right-hand mitten. “We welcome you to our tribe, Luava, the Tenured One. You and your husband will together save our people and the rest of the world from catastrophe.”

  “Sivuugun, Luava—and who am I?” asked Golly.

  “From the logo on your parka, I infer you are either Jackson Milford or Golly Harbison,” said Ugalik. “I have read your brochure.”

  “‘The demon-god Qaumaniq,’ is that another one of your jokes?” I asked the prince.

  “There is nothing—or almost nothing—amusing about the end of the world,” said Ugalik.
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  “I’m pleased you’re so impressed with me, but I’m not the savior you’ve been expecting,” I said.

  “I’m out of my depth, too,” said Lucretia.

  “Do you have a CB radio, sir?” I asked Yakone. “We would like to get home as soon as possible.”

  “Haven’t you been listening, Sivuugun, Lord of Lenses?” said the chief. “You and the Tenured One have come to slay Qaumaniq.”

  “Slaying isn’t my forte,” I said.

  “Nor mine,” said Lucretia.

  “How demonic a demon is Qaumaniq?” asked Golly.

  “Follow me,” said Ugalik, “and all will become clear.”

  FOR THE BETTER part of an hour we followed the Pikatti prince as he marched past his village along the newborn water lane, then across the ice field beyond, a tract as immense and forbidding as the frozen lake where, according to Dante, an immobilized Satan presides over the Ninth Circle of Hell.

  “So how are the cubs doing?” asked Ugalik.

  “The polar bear cubs?” I replied. “You would know better than I.”

  “The Chicago Cubs.”

  “They won the pennant last year, but they lost the series to New York.”

  “Fucking Mets,” said Ugalik.

  At last we drew within view of our destination, a lozenge-shaped mass of what appeared to be crimson aspic, perhaps three feet high and twenty long, the whole amoeboid anomaly held fast in the ice field like an imprisoned whale. Armed with bows and arrows, a dozen Pikatti had formed a circle around the thing, keeping a steady watch, as if at any moment it might burst out of the ice and go rampaging across the pack. Ugalik urged us forward. Although it stank prolifically (imagine rotten eggs blended with dead fish), the amoeba was alive and breathing, or so I interpreted the gelatinous waves rippling across its protoplasmic flesh, likewise the sounds it made, a rhythmic, rasping cadence suggesting the exhalations of a blacksmith’s forge.

  A brawny but agile middle-aged man dressed in caribou pelts swooped and glided gracefully among the archers, chanting what Golly called “Inuktitut locutions beyond my comprehension.” Catching sight of his visitors, the furry man stopped dancing and sauntered toward us, a gorget of walrus tusks swaying from his neck. The prince presented him as “Tikasuk, our shaman,” then introduced us as “noble Sivuugun and valiant Luava, heroes of the legend, plus Mr. Harbison, along for the ride.”

  “I shall do my best to facilitate your hallowed task,” said Tikasuk in low, rumbling tones, the voice of an articulate sea lion. He pointed toward the anomaly. “Behold the demon-god Qaumaniq, ancient avatar of cynicism.”

  “Of what?” I asked.

  “Cynicism,” said Tikasuk.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You’ve never heard of cynicism?” said Tikasuk.

  Ugalik said, “If Satan is the wellspring of mendacity—if Beelzebub is sovereign over the flies—then Qaumaniq is misanthropy incarnate.”

  “I must say, it doesn’t look like a demon,” noted Golly. “More like a meatloaf.”

  “The Greek Cynics of antiquity,” said Ugalik, “Antisthenes and his followers, were honorable men, pretentious perhaps, but sincere in their contempt for ease and pleasure. By contrast, for those who worship Qaumaniq, ease and pleasure are the point of existence, as long as those fruits are distributed exclusively to their benefit.”

  Naturally it occurred to me that the prince and the shaman were playing a game with our heads, and the demon-god would prove to be an innocuous and perhaps even artificial component of some tribal ritual or other. And yet the indigenes’ palpable sincerity persuaded me to take their story—for the moment—at face value.

  “But aren’t most Pikatti deities invisible?” asked Lucretia. “Isn’t intangibility the primary attribute of a god, regardless of latitude?”

  “Mutatis mutandis, Qaumaniq is much like your King Kong,” Ugalik replied. “My dear film studies professor, was the god of Skull Island invisible? Was intangibility his primary attribute?”

  “King Kong?” said Golly. “Do you mean this thing is a movie prop?”

  Ugalik rolled his eyes and groaned.

  “How did your amoeba get locked in the ice?” I asked.

  “Over the centuries many nations have claimed credit for the binding of Qaumaniq,” said Ugalik. “Viking lore speaks of a formless devil hunted down and chained by Eric the Red. An Aleut legend tells of the hero Chikuk, who caught a white seal as big as the moon and trapped it in a glacier. True, the Aleuts live thousands of miles from here, but the pack is always turning, fitfully but forever clockwise, which means their seal and our demon could be one and the same. Personally, I believe it was our indomitable Pikatti ancestors who found and fought and immured the beast.”

  “We have an epic poem about it,” noted Tikasuk.

  “Then there’s The Blob, a cinematic narrative once celebrated in the West,” said my wife. “The space monster’s reign of terror ends only after the protagonists freeze it with fire extinguishers, load it onto a cargo plane, and deposit it in the Arctic.”

  “Let’s not play Ugalik’s game,” I muttered in Lucretia’s ear.

  “Next he’ll be taking us to meet Santa Claus,” mumbled Golly.

  Suddenly Qaumaniq’s phlegmatic demeanor changed, and the thing began quivering from end to end. As the archers nocked their arrows, a globule of protoplasm, twice the size of a soccer ball, detached itself from the amoeba’s surface like a matured scab, then sprouted a pair of appendages resembling hot-water bottles. Flapping these uncanny wings, the creature ascended.

  “What the hell?” said Golly.

  A bowman fired. The arrow flew true, piercing its target. The globule plummeted and struck the ice, where it lay twitching like a shot goose before expiring.

  “Obviously we have much to learn about Arctic metaphysics,” said Lucretia.

  Now Qaumaniq spewed forth a second winged globule, then a third, then a fourth, but in each case an archer felled the excrescence before it could soar away.

  “Those are tulugaqs, red ravens,” Tikasuk explained. “An eruption of this sort occurs almost every day. Alas, our archers rarely—”

  Before he could finish his sentence, a large flock of tulugaqs, twenty at least, emerged from Qaumaniq. The archers fired, bringing down half the hellish squadron, but the other ten globules escaped the volley and flapped off in the general direction of Greenland.

  “Our archers rarely kill all the ejecta,” said Tikasuk. “The fugitive tulugaqs fly across the Arctic Circle and keep on going in search of suitable habitations.”

  “Each globule seeks out and fuses with a human being of similar temperament,” said Ugalik. “The relationship is the epitome of symbiosis. The tulugaq enhances its host’s cynicism quotient, and the host provides the tulugaq with a congenial place to live.”

  “So without Qaumaniq, there would be no cynicism in the world?” asked Lucretia.

  “There has always been cynicism, O Tenured One,” said Ugalik. “There will always be cynicism. But owing to Qaumaniq, the scourge has reached epidemic proportions. The crisis became especially acute when the northern ice cap began to melt, as this allowed the demon to launch unprecedented numbers of tulugaqs from its increasingly exposed flesh.”

  Lucretia said, “If I were to believe you—which, by the way, I don’t—then the greenhouse effect is enhancing the cynicism of those who already take a cynical view of the greenhouse effect. I cannot imagine a vicious cycle more… well, vicious.”

  “A very astute analysis, Dr. Ramsey,” said Ugalik. “In the years to come the effects of this dreadful feedback loop will grow ever more dire. Eventually Qaumaniq will break free of its prison, and then there will really be hell to pay.”

  “Drip, drip, drip,” said Tikasuk.

  “Can’t you simply kill the damn thing?” asked Golly. “What if your archers attacked it?”

  “Arrows and harpoons can kill the children of Qaumaniq, but such missiles are powerless against Qaum
aniq itself,” said Tikasuk.

  “Your blob is immortal?” asked Lucretia.

  “Hardly,” said Ugalik. “That’s why we celebrate the coming of Sivuugun and Luava. Tomorrow we shall refloat the Nuliajuk—the state canoe of the Pikatti nation—and then we shall sail away in quest of the weapon with which you and your husband will destroy Qaumaniq.”

  “What sort of weapon might that be?” I asked.

  “Have we not filled your brain with enough improbabilities for one day?” asked Ugalik.

  “True enough,” I said.

  “Since I don’t have a part to play in your legend,” said Golly, “I’m hoping that, after you’ve launched your canoe, you might you drop me off at the Admiral Peary Hotel in Etah.”

  “But you do have a part to play, Mr. Harbison,” said Tikasuk. “To free the canoe, we shall need your broad back and trollish strength.”

  “I assume that around these parts ‘trollish’ is a flattering term,” said Golly.

  “Not really, no,” said Ugalik. “But if you refuse to play ball with us, you might find yourself cast adrift on an ice floe without food, water, or a good book. May we count on your assistance?”

  SUCH WAS THE high caliber of Pikatti hospitality that Lucretia, Golly, and I were accorded the most desirable accommodations in the village, the hut where the guard dogs slept. Thanks to the evening’s promiscuous consumption of peat lager (the brewing of which was surely the least impressive of the tribe’s arts), we entered our lodge in a deliciously drowsy condition. While Golly pressed my wife for details about The Blob, which was evidently to good movies as aputi was to actual beer, I nuzzled into the soothing mountain of canine fur and allowed the dogs and the lager and my love for Lucretia to salve my fear that I would not leave the Arctic alive.