The White Darkness

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  I waited for the rear van to slump into the crevasse and drag us with it. But on we crept, at a snail’s pace, easing, easing ourselves over the gaping trench, easing, easing our way back onto the jumbled mosaic of ice blocks into the dizzying swirl of moving fog. The caterpillar tracks found traction again, and the familiar rippling jolt picked up.

  We had just dared to draw breath again when, with a jarring shock, a giant hand grabbed the Hagglund and wrenched it violently backward. Everything loose in the cab flew forward—pens and ear protectors and the case of the Lee Konitz cassette . . .

  At the end of its tow rope, the Nansen sled had just reached the crevasse and plunged into it, yanking the bracket half out of its rivets. Now it dangled and twisted on its rope end, swinging to and fro. Like an anchor, it pinned us to the spot; then Victor revved up the engine and we countered its weight, overcame its weight, hauled it up out of the crevasse. The sled reemerged like a stretchered patient, its tarpaulin still neatly laced from end to end. Facedown it lay in the snow on the brink of the ravine, and I knew it was recovering its nerve, offering up prayers of thanksgiving, steeling itself for worse to come.

  Manfred Bruch sat on the steps of the van breathing hard, head in his hands, fingers in his thick, strawlike hair. Sigurd took a few steps into the fog to relieve himself, then, panicking, called out to ask where we were. “Shout out!Make a noise!” he called. “Shout out so I can find you!” I called; Manfred did not stir himself. He seemed exhausted, spent. Every few seconds he looked at his watch, as if Time were of the essence, as if his watch would tell him when the point of no return was past. He did not ask Victor to turn back, because to turn back would mean crossing that crevasse again, wandering to and fro among the pressure ridges in a wilderness of mazes and cul-de-sacs. “We should camp here,” he said, jerking his hands at the ground. “We camp here.” But he said it to himself, locked up inside himself. Trouble had gone to ground in his guts, installed itself in his abdomen.

  The GPS blinked, telling us we were stationary, but the map showed nothing to account for what we had just gone through. In fact it showed nothing very much at all; just a coastline: the edge of the Ross Ice Shelf, the end of the Barrier. Geographers can’t map the chaos of the Shear Zone; it is always changing. This is where the Ice Shelf hinges against solid land, flexing, blistering, and gaping, like a scar that won’t ever heal.

  “Onward and upward!” said Victor, but nobody stirred. We were all thinking our own thoughts, and onward and upward didn’t figure in any of them. It was not until Victor ordered Sigurd to walk ahead of the tank that he got our full attention. We all stared at him. “What’s up? Reconnoiter for crevasses! Rope around his waist. Put him on a safety line. Piece o’ cake.” He asked Bruch to back him up. The Viking shrugged, said nothing. He had the look of a man doing mental arithmetic during an exam. Sigurd, though, screamed his refusal—nothing would induce him—nothing! Victor laughed. “Buck up, lad! Want to find the Portal, don’t you? Can’t sign up to these jaunts and then not pull your weight! Am I the only one with his mind on the job?”

  Fleetingly I wondered whether Victor was punishing Sigurd for kissing me. In sitcoms fathers always hate their daughters’ boyfriends, don’t they? And Uncle Victor has always been like a father to me.

  “If you don’t like the work, blame Sym here,” Victor confided jokily. “It’s her who broke the gyro. Tuh! Lasses and technology, eh? It’s her navigating got us here!” And he looked around at the smoke-filled bowl of the world to which my stupidity had brought them. “No harm done, though. Off you go, lad. Walk on. Shoo, shoo! You’re roped on. Safe as houses!”

  He had tied one end of a long, long rope to the rails that frame the front of the tank. Now he advanced on Sigurd with the other end. Sigurd put up his fists.

  “Oh, ripping! A boxing match. I can referee,” said Titus. “It’s like India all over again.”

  I went and untied the rope, fed it through the rails again, tied the second end around my waist. “I’ll walk with you, Sigurd,” I said. We two would walk ahead of the Hagglund like horses ahead of a stagecoach, with rope for our reins.

  You have to do things sometimes to strengthen your courage muscles.

  Anyway, I’ve never been able to stand arguments. I’ll do almost anything to avoid a scene.

  Anyway, we can’t afford for Uncle Victor to get hurt; we need his cleverness. His planning. His mind. His knowing things about fuel consumption. His confidence.

  Anyway, Manfred may be a very good film director, but he’s got the Aurora stomach bug, and he doesn’t know spit about Antarctica.

  “Anyway, you’re bloody angry,” said Titus, amused.

  “Well, I didn’t navigate us here!” I said.

  “You did not.”

  “And I didn’t break the gyro!”

  “You did not,” said Titus.

  As an afterthought, I went back to the cab and got out two of the ice axes. If we lost our footing on an ice slide or went over the edge of . . . something . . . we might need them. And if, behind us, the tank went down a . . . something . . . we might just be able to cut the rope before it dragged us down with it.

  Titus looked at me with his head to one side and a look I could make no sense of.

  “What?”

  A full-in-the-eyes look, no longer amused, no longer the impartial referee, no longer Titus, in fact, his features resolving into those of Sigurd holding the ice axe I had just given him.

  “How much do you weigh, Sigurd?” I asked. (Well, you have to muster your facts, don’t you, and when you’re tied on to either end of a rope with someone, it’s the sort of thing you need to know.)

  We held hands while we walked, looking for the telltale signs of a dip in the surface, a change in the color of the snow. Absurd. The fog was so thick, we could barely see each other, and we were holding hands.

  Dear Nikki,

  Sigurd and I are going out together, you could say. You don’t get more Out than here. I have all the right fashion accessories for a date: an ice axe and goggles, nose-wiper mittens, and a ski pole to prod the ground with, like a blind man’s white stick. My cheeks are just the right shade of blue. We don’t talk much—just commune with Nature. Nature doesn’t say much either. Tell Mum she mustn’t worry. She mustn’t be scared. We’ll be all right.

  XSX

  “This place is ‘the Shear’?” Sigurd said eventually.

  I explained how wherever Ice Shelf meets land, they don’t quite form a perfect seal with one another; how the sea—way, way down below—keeps pushing the ice up and down, up and down, so that it cracks, and screws itself into great welts and folds. I couldn’t tell if he was listening. He had put on one of the grotesque red masks and his goggles. He might almost have been Uncle Victor. Or an Amazon tree frog.

  “Your mother and father, they name you for this clever John Cleeves Symmes?” Sigurd said later on.

  “No! Oh no. A coincidence. No, I’m Symone, that’s all. Coincidence.”

  Of course, it is nothing of the kind. Unofficial uncles don’t name a child. The parents do that. Fathers do that. So Dad must have been part of this lifelong quest for Symmes’s Hole too. Looking back, all kinds of things make sense now. When we went to Iceland, the one place Dad and Victor made a beeline for was Snaefellsnes. I remember the excitement in Dad’s face as he told me, “This is where it begins, love! In the book! In Journey to the Center of the Earth!”

  Maybe they thought Jules Verne knew something the geologists didn’t, and that Iceland really did contain the northern portal to the hollow planet. I recall how the holiday mood suddenly went out of the trip. Snaefellsnes and Jules Verne must have let them down. They found no Hole.

  Oh yes, Dad was in this from the start. Dad knew about the Earth being hollow. And he was so grateful to John Cleeves Symmes for the knowledge that he named his baby daughter after him. Symone. Sym. Maybe he hoped I’d have the genius to match. I always knew I was a disappointment to him—just not how much o
f a disappointment.

  Quite suddenly the fog changed substance over our heads. In a matter of moments, the fleshy gray mist resolved itself into a frozen dew, a precipitation of crystals, a burden of ice particles that fell twinkling out of the air like rice at a wedding, sunlight splitting them into all the colors of the rainbow. We were bombarded with rainbows falling from an infinite height, dazzling us with iridescent spears and darts and cataracts of cascading color. Some of the particles were so sharp that they embedded themselves in our suits like Lilliputian arrows. I didn’t know whether to be afraid or amazed. The fog was gone—a magician’s cloth deftly whipped off a table of marvels. In the sky, the sun was a hub of dull aluminum spoked with strands of light, and at the end of each spoke—another sun. Cloned suns.

  “Oh, my God!” said Sigurd. “Look at that!”

  Black puddles of no-light oozed and smeared the sky between the suns—drops of molasses all the time changing, taking on outlandish shapes: a harp, a hand, an eagle, a dinosaur.

  The tank had stopped, but we did not notice until our rope tethers pulled us up short. And when we turned, we were dumbstruck reindeer drawing Christmas in our wake. The Hagglund had grown a phantom duplicate of itself, upside down, hanging in the air nose-to-nose with the genuine article. At our feet the mirror crystals had joined into long shining strands, and hoarfrost had woven patterns over them, white-on-white embroidery.

  “Oh, my God!” said Sigurd.

  Why so beautiful? It can’t be for our special benefit. I never understood about “beautiful.” I can see why running water is beautiful, or a tree full of apples—something that meant good things to our caveman ancestors. But I’ve never understood why lions and tigers and deadly nightshade and sand dunes and lightning are beautiful. Or this. We turned around and around, just staring, hands cupped around our eyes to fend off the ferocious, bludgeoning light.

  “Oh, my God!” breathed Sigurd.

  Next time we looked back at the van, Manfred and Victor were struggling over the wheel. Manfred (who was in the driver’s seat) was leaning forward and pointing, spreading his hand against the windshield as if to lay hold of something. Following his gaze, we saw—it was true—a sight worthy of the Arabian Nights rather than an icy wilderness.

  The horizon, for the first time, was sharp as wire—sharp as three wires, in fact, because the horizon had tripled. And there, floating just above it, with a hand span of sky for a moat, hung a jet-black palace. Turrets and minarets, crenellations and stockades, were all picked out in perfect detail.

  “Yes!” cried Sigurd, ecstatic with relief.

  Seeing it, Manfred steered toward it—took off the handbrake, put the gear into drive. Rather than be run down, we had to grab hold of the corner rails as the tank came by us, and hang on with all our might, reefing in rope before it could catch in the wheels and drag us under the tracks. I beat on the metal with my free fist—pad pad pad—softly clad in its mitten.

  “It’s a mirage,” said Titus.

  But I didn’t want it to be a mirage.

  “It’s a mirage,” said Titus. “Mountains a hundred miles away.”

  But I didn’t want it to be mountains a hundred miles away. I wanted there to be people, sentries, Martians in a flying palace of a ship; a secret U.S. establishment we had stumbled upon by chance. I wanted it to be Aeolus, brass-walled home of the King of Winds, shipwrecked here in the days of myth. I wanted so much for it to be real. In a place where “real” puts five suns in the sky and slices rainbows into sushi, why shouldn’t there be a palace adrift on The Ice?

  “It’s a mirage!” I yelled at Sigurd.

  The triple horizon became a five-bar staff strewn with music. The castle loomed to a prodigious height and leaned toward us, its turrets rounding their shoulders, stooping because of the lowness of the sky. Lurching over the terraces of sastrugi, the tank tried to shake us off. The crack in the windshield grew longer.

  “It’s a mirage!” I yelled over and over again.

  But Manfred Bruch, eaten up with stomachache and ghastly imaginings, thought he had seen his redemption. Not until the sun progressed, and the five suns joined like blobs of mercury into a single blinding silver; not until the refraction failed and the castle blinked out, did he take his foot off the pedal and loosen his grip on the wheel.

  It was gone—a picture stolen from a gallery, whitewashed out, a trick of the light. No manna in the wilderness: just more wilderness. Manfred got out of the cab and sat on the steps, head down, forearms on his knees, hands drooping. His lips flapped loose from his teeth as he wept.

  Sigurd and I stepped down from the front bumper and untied ourselves from the safety ropes. We unpicked the knots around our waists, coiled the rope, and hooked the coils onto the radiator. My legs were shaking uncontrollably, my shoulders and pelvis aching from the effort of clinging on. “Sigurd, we should get warm. We should get warm now.” Sigurd pulled off his mask and flung it on the ground in disgust.

  I wondered why Sigurd didn’t go and comfort his father. “Go on,” I said. But though he did go and stand over the weeping man, all he did was utter an inarticulate snarl, pull off a mitten, and hit Bruch around the head with it. The spikes of frozen moisture on the nose-wiper scratched Bruch’s face, and his head jerked, but he hardly seemed to notice.

  Little by little, he recovered himself. It was like watching a man pull himself out of a well, shake himself dry, breathe in, test his ability to flex his fingers, to speak, to smile, to win.

  “I’m sorry to break it to you, Victor, old man,” he said loudly, calling from where he sat on the metal steps, “but I’m afraid I’ve been keeping you short on a few facts.” There was not a trace of Norwegian in his accent. “Sorry to tell you this, but your damned Hole’s a mirage too. A hoax.”

  “A quick drink,” said Uncle Victor brusquely—annoyed at Bruch for his stupidity over the mirage but ready to forgive. “Cup of something warming.”

  “How can I put this so you’ll understand, you clown, you dingbat?” said Bruch. “It was a sting. A scam. A con.”

  “A swift drink. That’s what we all need. Then we must get back on track.”

  “Get back. Get back, yes,” said Bruch, picking up on the only words that made sense. “Did you hear me, Briggs? I’m calling it a day. You can have your money back. Here. Fact is, I’ve put one over on you. Fleeced you. Taken you for every penny I could wring out of you. I hold my hands up. Some of us have to earn a living. We don’t all have spare millions swilling around in the trough. It’s my calling. It’s what I do. Me, I’m good. I find an obsessive with money to burn and I take it off him. It’s what I do. I’m good! We’d’ve been out of here altogether if the plane hadn’t burned, wouldn’t we, boy?” He said it to Sigurd. (I think it was the closest Sigurd ever got to an apology.)

  Furtively Manfred picked up a fire extinguisher from inside the door of the tank. Clearly he thought that when Victor understood, he would be attacked, and he was not at his Viking peak of fitness.

  But far from attacking him, Victor trudged off around the vehicle to the rear van to make refreshments. Manfred had to go after him, lugging the fire extinguisher. “Did you hear what I said, Briggs?”

  Victor busied himself with the primus stove, arranged the bottles in order of size, the cups in alphabetical order: Manfred, Sigurd, Sym, Victor. He adjusted the spaces between them to be exactly equal. He checked the level in the kettle and added a trickle of water for maximum efficiency and minimum waste of butane. (He hates to see power go to waste.)

  “Do you hear me, Victor?” said Bruch. “That Thoughtextreme website—it’s a great place to find obsessives! That’s why I use it. First I sounded you out to see if there was any cash. . . . Then I fed you what you wanted. . . . Made you a happy man, Briggs, admit it! For a while I made you a happy man! But all right, you were out of my league! You’re a thousand-kilowatt, Born-Again flat-Earther! Away with the fairies!”

  Uncle Victor put a teaspoon into each cup befor
e filling it, so that the heat would be conducted away from the delicate glaze of the china. Except that the cups were made of plastic. I thought: If I keep my eyes on him, I’ll see when he caves in; I’ll see the moment when the realization hits him that all his dreams have come to nothing—that he’s been bled dry by a crook. I thought, Why didn’t you just shoot him, Viking? You didn’t have to rip the heart out of him first.

  Confused by the merry chinking of crockery and the bubbling of the kettle, Manfred grew more and more agitated. “Everyone wants to be in films! Everyone’s secretly hoping they’ll meet a film director one day and he’ll say, ‘Let me film you! Let me make you famous!’” He gave a rasping laugh. “I had that Mimi woman begging me to take the money off her. ‘Joint venture,’ I tell people. ‘I’ll put in my last cent if you’ll put in yours.’ That’s what gets them. They pay out because they think you’re risking everything as well. And it is a joint venture—it is! You pay, I spend! Hey! Nobody dies!” The grin stayed on his face as if fixed there with thumbtacks. In a way he was still playing a role: the lovable rogue, the bad boy, bad but clever, a tireless servant of Free Enterprise. Victor’s failure to react was a bit like an audience refusing to hiss the rakish pantomime villain. Manfred squirmed in his seat. His upset stomach thundered.

  “Don’t you know anything? You can get satellite photos off the Net any day of the week! Any number of ’em! Take your pick! Blow them up. Enhance them. That pit I showed you—it’s an open-cast mine in Siberia. Nothing! Anything! You can show people anything: They see what they want to see!” He might have been coaching an apprentice in the ancient and venerable profession of the confidence trickster. This was how he must have coached Sigurd.

  “Look, I could have killed you back there,” he ranted on. “I had the bank draft—there was that plane overhead—I could have burned the lot of you, but I didn’t! Did I? Fair play! I didn’t!”

  Victor put our drinks into our hands. “Thank you very much, Mr. Briggs,” said Sigurd, his manners as automatic as blinking. I don’t think I remembered to say thank you.