Aurorarama (29 page)

His mind was lucid as ice crystal, and about as brittle. But he had taken his decision, or, as with every true decision, it had taken him. Dying in the cold was the coolest thing to do. In the time-honoured Inuk tradition of the
qivigtoq
, he would lose himself in the polar wilderness, and if he ever came back as one moody, melancholy ghost, he would not be very different from what he had been, anyway.

Easier said than done, though. The Air Architecture, even in its present state, precluded almost all amateur attempts at hypothermia within the city limits. Technically, the city temperatures were such that the trick could be tried if you were determined and had time on your hands. But the numerous examples of people who had been found frostbitten by the Health Angels and brought back to life to be amputated without their consent were enough to make one consider alternative schemes.

Still, getting beyond the city limits was a boring business. Gabriel trudged directly from the hotel, on rather slippery slopes, to the top of Icy Heights and then eastward toward the Black Cliffs, where he knew he could slip beyond the pale. He had to walk atop the precipitous crag, along a narrow path where greasy black rocks emerged from under the snow.

On his right, beyond a wire fence, an immense field of indistinct, spectral wind vanes roared loudly in the darkness, while narrow light beams coming from the mills at their base caught in their pale white glare the slow flakes of a lazy snow. Gabriel had the feeling, which occurred frequently, that he was living out a scene lifted from a book, but usually that was a sensation that soothed him more than it disquieted him.

On his left the city spread and sprawled beneath him, its silver and golden lights strewn in Marco Polo Bay like ducats and doubloons from a burst treasure chest. It moved him, even if he had no tears anymore. Clusters of distant lights was the view of Mankind that he liked the best. The lights had the archaic charm of little fires on a plain, and the frailty about them, if it did not excuse anything, at least explained a lot of Man’s stubborn ruthlessness. Mankind had not started the mess that was life, after all. And on the whole, it had been an interesting species to be a part of, the girls especially, as long as you remembered to watch your back.

New Venice, of course, he had loved. It was the quintessence of what Mankind was about, when he summed it up: the single-mindedness of surviving at any cost, even if it meant eating up the rotting corpses of your friends, and a certain sense of the grandiloquent gesture and gratuitous ornament. But he knew the New Venetian scene by heart, and lately he had seen too much of the wings. There were no regrets to have. The heydays, he was sure, were over. He had lived like a New Venetian, quite to the full, and he would die like one: frozen to the bone, his shape deep in the snow, like another footprint toward no earthly pole. Soon the city disappeared from his sight, preventing the seductive winks of light that could have brought him back, and now, on his left, he could divine, more than he could see, the frozen ocean, a greyish rough expanse of chaotic nothing, like an immense crumpled sheet of paper imperfectly flattened out.

The way the Air Architecture worked was beyond his comprehension. But he could clearly make out the barrier of turbulent yellow-tinted flames—the Fire Maidens, as they were called—that surrounded the city at wide intervals, and the kind of hazy airwall that they built. It made him think of the sword
of flames Mougrabin had talked about. Leaving Eden of one’s own accord, as he was doing now, certainly showed, he thought, some strength of character.

Maybe that was what had happened to Mankind. That original sin story was an embarrassed cover-up. Man had simply walked out, bored or angry at being ordered around. Or he’d lost any interest in God as soon as he had the girl to fool around with. He had abducted her, starting a long tradition of romantic elopement. God had first thought good riddance, but had soon missed his favourite pet. Animals were less fun to play with. Eventually God grew tired of promenading alone in the evening breeze, and for the first time, like an ill-loved, ill-loving father, He learned the pangs of regret and bitterness. He closed the Garden and let it rot like an old fairground park. An angel still kept the rusty gates, just to make it desirable again. By and by, time passed and the Ice had covered everything. When men came back to the pole, even those who remembered Eden and thought it could well have been there did not recognize it. But they still had the Adamic streak and had taken pleasure in renaming everything, beast and plant and crag. What a brilliant theology, chuckled Gabriel, reassured to see that the effects of alcohol had not quite worn off and would carry him, lightheaded, a little further on.

The Air Architecture area was forbidden because the concentrated methane fumes it emanated were notoriously poisonous, but Brentford had once told him of a small opening in a fence near a power plant where someone (let us say a Navy Cadet from the Belknap Base looking for a short cut while on a more or less authorized leave) could go through with minimal fuss. Gabriel found it easy enough, indeed, to crawl through the fence that surrounded the brick building (no light coming now through the strange curlicues of its cast-iron windows) and run, holding his breath, to the other side of the site, to the gate beyond the derrick, and then onward to his death.

As soon as he had left the plant behind and drawn close to the edge of the cliff, Gabriel felt the difference. New Venice was nothing close to hot or even warm, but outside was certainly
airsome
, and the atmosphere was as solid as a hall of mirrors. Cold is an element unto itself, with a whole physics of its own, and even a metaphysics, if he remembered what Boehme had written—that the Deity, at its innermost kernel, is dark and cold, “like winter, when there is a fierce, bitter, cold frost, when water is frozen into ice,” and that is what holds the Creation together. Deity or not, the universe was certainly at heart a cold and dark affair, and here was the best place to never forget it.

Still, Gabriel advanced, bent forward with his fists clenched in his pockets, the cold plastering him in great swathes, as if to mould his death mask. He would have been curious to see a wine-spirit thermometer (mercury would have frozen, no doubt), but some part of him deemed it better not to know the truth. With every breath, vapour crystallized and fell to bits on the ground. It made him feel like that fairy-tale girl whose every word is turned to diamonds, whereas at the wedding he had rather felt like her wicked sister who ends up spewing toads.

By a stroke of luck, though the air was wet, it wasn’t too windy, which Gabriel found a favourable omen. If he wanted to die from the cold, he did not want to suffer from it too much before going numb. Walking headlong through thick curtains made of millions of hanging, tingling razorblades is one thing, but you don’t want buckets of cold water thrown in your face while doing it.

For someone who was on his way to hypothermia, he was not so badly equipped, after all. His warm-whiskered face was bare, because a comforter or balaclava would have caused his breath to freeze right on his moist skin, and that was even more displeasing than having some ice-fiend tricksters slap you and pull your nose in the dark. A fur-lined greatcoat with pockets full of warming
qiviut
—musk ox wool—, thick-soled boots insulated
with bladder-sedge and several pairs of hareskin socks, Knudsen of Copenhagen snow-goggles, an Elsinore hat with comfortable earflaps, wolfskin gloves and woollen overmittens—these were a few of his favourite things. He chuckled at the paradox, and thought, I could always shed some of them on my way, giving dramatic clues to a potential search party. Being found dead in the purple frock coat was a flourish to be considered. Such were his musings as he arrived at Black Cliffs Bay.

On his left, the Lincoln Sea shone moodily, waiting for some better demiurge to put some order into its chaotic rubble, which looked like ruins, or a like a building site. On his right he could make out the mile-high peaks of the New America range, like a starless area of the night. Gabriel tried to advance calmly. He knew he could take a good thermal shock, as long as he was not drenched in sweat. It wasn’t pneumonia that was on his agenda. He also knew, as he had been told countless times, that most people who had died in similar conditions had succumbed to exhaustion rather than from the cold itself. They were persuaded they had to move until they could not move anymore, when a bit of rest could have saved them. So it was important to never ever stop if he wanted to die properly. So he plodded, and tumbled, and trudged onward.

It was rough going, but the tattoo pushed him on, holding him by the neck as if he were some unclean, reluctant kitten. Somewhere above him shone the star that promised death by fever or cold. As soon as Stella had told him about it, the disastrophile in him had known how it would all end. Sometimes, he stopped for a little while and looked up at the night sky, trying to localize the aster that was his (no:
he
belonged to it). But he would not have known the Centaur even if it had kicked him in the face with its hooves, just as the cold was doing right now. Stars were nameless to him and constellations remained dead letters. He would have liked Stella to be with him, both
of them sitting right on that cliff, passing a bottle to and fro, and laughing as they baptized them all again: the Tambourine, the Lobster, the Bearded Woman, the Carrion, the Skunk, the Poleaxe, the Legless Cripple, the Skull, the Fool. He remembered how the zodiac on Stella’s back had made stars out of her birthmarks, and this wrung out a tear from him that stung as it froze on his cheek. He slipped on the treacherous shale and fell, inches away from the cliff edge. “The Fool, huh?” he winced with a painful face that he felt was being flayed alive. It was a good thing again that he was so muffled up in clothes that they cushioned the fall and he did not break any bones. That would not have made things easier, oh no. He got up, a small bruise on his buttocks, relieved that nobody had seen him and that he could still hobble on toward his farthest nowhere.

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.