Aurorarama (30 page)

At least, he could still whistle in his head: as he trod on marble feet, his teeth chattering until the enamel cracked off, he discovered that a stubborn song had now burrowed inside his mind, an old ditty from the Furry Fruits that was broadcasting from a younger part of himself. It was rumoured to have been about Sandy Lake, who had given the cold shoulder to the singer from the Sandmovers’ archrivals. Personally, Gabriel had a theory that it was about self-abuse, but he was not so sure anymore.

The loop revolved in Gabriel’s brain, in the curious way music is remembered, immaterial but as inexorably real as the grooves in a shellac record. This what was the brain was, maybe, a phonograph of some sort, which would eventually repeat one silly tune in a lock groove before the needle was lifted up for good. Damn, would he have to think halfpenny thoughts until the end? Why couldn’t the brain go numb first so that it could not feel the rest being …

He took a step on a snow patch that hid a crevice and fell through. Time suddenly shifted, reduced to successive still frames. The brain took the pictures, but gave no further orders. The body, after all, did not want to die: it had taken over, a deck hand going mutinous. Pivoting as it fell, it sent its left hand darting toward a jutting edge of rock, clinging to it as tightly as it could. It stayed there for a slow-motion second, while the brain looked down in disbelief. Then, with a jerk, the body shook its shoulders and threw the right knee over the edge of the crevasse, quickly rolling over to pull itself out of the chasm. Its throat ached all of a sudden as if someone were strangling it. The cold had suddenly disappeared. The world was pumping blood, veiling the eyes with an explosion of red, an inner aurora. Then, slowly, the veil dissipated, and the cold rushed back with a shock, waking up the brain. And then the brain saw the body. It was lying at the edge of the crevice, exhausted or dead. The body was also, the brain noticed, neatly decapitated, showing
the white of the spine, the neck caked with already frozen blood. The brain understood that it was still in the head, which had been projected a few yards away from the rest. Maybe the strings of the overmittens had become tangled somehow and, turned to wire by the cold, had cut through flesh and bone as the body had slammed against the edge of the crevice. Bad luck. The brain started to feel cold. Icicles stuck to its lids and lips, gluing them shut. It tried to keep its eyes open and focus on the body, but wondered how long it …

CHAPTER XXII
The
Kinngait

A
s a little boy in Nova Scotia, and as perhaps any other child would, Brentford had first imagined the North Pole as a gigantic, 500-mile-radius skating rink, on which one could glide as in a dream. But as an older child, when he had been deemed strong enough to come to the city where his father worked, he had soon discovered that this was a far cry from the truth. Even the stubborn denial of reality that was at the heart of the New Venetian way of life could do little to alter that saddening fact.

The permanent ice shelf, starting roughly—in every sense of the term—where the city ends, is first signalled by a glacial fringe that is nothing but a tumbled-down great wall of white china. The Arctic Ocean crashes and crushes relentlessly into it,
but the frozen waves it throws up form an ever-changing maze of rolls and ridges that complicate or block the way. Brentford’s first position at the Arctic Administration had been Chief Administrator for City Access, which simply meant that his job was to supervise and maintain the roads people used to come and go. It had been one of his first assignments to make sure that the seldom-used Northern road to New Venice remained somewhat open and practical. It must have been some kind of initiation ritual, for this was a job that it was simply not possible to carry out. Brentford had been happy when he was eventually promoted to Striated Space and given work that could actually be done.

Once this chaotic expanse of tidal ice is crossed, you come to an ice field that is supposed to go all the way to the pole, but as has been often remarked, this remaining icescape is actually little more than a jigsaw puzzle with blank pieces all badly mixed up by a very mischievous child. Still, depending on weather conditions, it is more or less level and cohesive. Had the fall and winter been more windy that year, Brentford would not have even dreamed of going there by ice yacht, but it was his luck that the dark season had been rather calm before the recent snow storms. That meant, he hoped, that he would find stretches of relatively smooth and even ice for the
Kinngait
to run a steady course over the frozen ocean, right in the middle of which stood, like a movie monster, the dreaded, carnivorous North Pole.

Brentford, as a former Navy Cadet and as a regular regatta runner (he had even once won the Cape Durmont d’Urville Challenge), knew the ropes as far as ice-sailing was concerned, and knowing them as he did, he knew very well why ice yachtsmen seldom attempted to go all the way to the pole, and why those who did rarely came back whole or alive. Pressure ridges, ice boulders, and water leads just took the fun out of it (just
try hauling a two-ton ice yacht over a jagged hill in temperatures under -60°F), and should an accident happen—crushed hull, broken mast or split runners—then, in the best of cases, the trip back home would be very lonely. Of course, like most New Venetians rich enough to own an ice yacht, he had a personal “farthest north,” and a rather honourable one, around 85°, but that was still wide of the mark.

Going solo in wintertime did not exactly tip the scales his way: if it meant that water leads would be rare due to constant subzero weather, it also meant there would be little or no visibility. People had received psychiatric care for less absurd ideas than this. His best bet was simply that Helen would not have sent him lightly to his being crushed, frozen, drowned, or starved. He trusted her more than he trusted himself.

An engineer by trade, and a survivor at heart, he had nevertheless prepared rigorously and, he hoped, cleverly. If he could not allow himself to forget the
least
detail (in a zone where, if God doesn’t lie in the details, then Death certainly does), he also did not want to overburden his ship with useless junk—for, when all was numbered, weighed, and divided, the
Kinngait
was his best asset. At first an amaryllis-class three-hull sailing ice yacht, she had been upgraded in every possible way. Since Alexander Graham Bell’s recent groundbreaking trials with his Ugly Duckling in Nova Scotia, propelled fanboats were thought to be the future in the Arctic, as they allowed travel on water leads as well as on ice fields, and Brentford had been one of the first to take the costly step of making an airboat out of his ship. Now, she was rigged with windmill fan blades coupled to a series of Trouvé electric motors. She certainly wasn’t easier to manœuver, but she thrived against the wind, and given optimal conditions, let us say a clear day on Lake Hazen, she could go a steady 60 mph. In most respects, she was now state of the art, and in her berth at the Nouvelle-Ys Marina, her solid dolphingrey
silhouette compared not unfavourably to most other crafts, even under the gloomy, unflattering light.

Brentford, with as much agility as his fur clothes permitted, jumped aboard and slipped inside the round cabin. It was small and Spartan but convenient, well padded all around, with the helm at the front, a central gas stove in the middle that he immediately lit, a half-circular desk on one side covered with charts and instruments, and a small but well insulated bunk on the other. In the rear, a hatch in the floor led down to the hold, and flashlight in hand, Brentford checked once again that everything he needed, or hoped not to need, was there as he had ordered: pellets of Cornwallis zinc to recharge the motor fuel cells; one month’s supply of “Vril-food,” dried soups, pemmican cakes, cod roe, whey powder, aleuronate bread, bars of his favourite chocolate, lime juice, and coffee; a small sled and harness; a primus stove; a pharmacy; a 16-bore Paradox rifle with boxes of shotgun shells and cartridges; a caribou-fur sleeping bag; spare warm clothes; oil-cloth tarpaulins; ice-axes and guncotton powder; a toolbox with everything necessary to build and live in a snow house or an improvised cave; a captive oil-silk balloon that he could send up to project light signals on—everything that could come in useful to prolong his life or his agony. Satisfied with what he found, or thinking that
alea
was pretty much
jacta
anyway, he went out to unmoor the ship, and, with a leap that was very much of faith, went back to the helm, started the motor, and headed northward-ho.

The routine of leaving the harbour and setting the course correctly was not engrossing enough to prevent Brentford from ruminating on his current situation, which wasn’t, he had to admit, exactly Polaris-bright.

His marriage, to start with, had lasted but a few hours. He had always suspected that it would be more an end than a beginning, for Sybil’s light was not one that you could easily
put under a bushel, however benevolent. But he would never have thought its demise would be so quick, nor so loathsome. Brentford fancied himself as a bullet-biter, but it did not mean he had to swallow everything. If he resented Gabriel as much as he could, or could not, for his behaviour and his aggressive way of breaking the news, he knew instinctively that there was more truth in all of it than he would care to admit. He had been too tired and confused to take any decision the night of the wedding, but having slept badly over it, and woken up to find a dummy trying to stab him and Sybil gone sleepwalking back to that damn magician, he had decided all of a sudden that it would be better to call it a day, even if days, in New Venice, could hardly be called that. Did he really need to accuse Sybil or anyone else? Brentford, after all, had got the
Kinngait
ready the very day after his meeting with William Whale. The call of the North was one thing he could feel, the call of Helen another, which went deeper still. He could have resisted either separately, and he had tried, hadn’t he? But as soon as the hand that retained him had let go, there he was, darting like a wobbly arrow toward an invisible mark. It was as if he had been waiting for the catastrophe to happen as an excuse to flee.

He wondered if he had done anything wrong, if there might have been another way out of his predicament. Certainly, he had not respected his part of the deal with Arkansky Jr. and had never meant to. Had he
really
known who the Ghost Lady was at the time, he could have considered trading the secret against Sybil, but instead he had deliberately bluffed about it. When he realized that the ghost was Isabelle d’Ussonville’s, he’d also had a hunch that neither Arkansky nor the Council of Seven should hear about it: first because everything connected with the Seven Sleepers made the Council grow even more threatening than they usually were, and then because, sooner or later, some way or other, this secret might turn out to be a trump card in the game
Brentford was playing against them. Anyway, because Arkansky had cheated him as well by not telling him at the Greenhouse what he had done with or, as Brentford preferred to phrase it,
to
Sybil, he had no tactical regrets, only sentimental ones, and those were hard enough to live with for the moment. So, good-bye to the circus. He did not know whether Sybil would miss him, or even notice his absence, and he did not want to know. He had simply taken his French leave as soon as, coming back from her sleepwalking, she had entered the studio with the Cub-Clubbers, whose name seemed now strangely prophetic in light of the recent hunting frenzy of the Council.

For there was of course another side to the matter, one that went beyond personal grudges. They were all—Sybil, Arkansky and he—part of a wider picture, whose monumental size Mason had revealed to him. It was no less than the city that was at stake, and they were all, in this, nothing much more than pawns believing themselves to be either tricky knights—like Arkansky—or dependable rooks, like Brentford. But Brentford wanted to play a different game, a game of icy-cold draughts, a game of
dames
, as the French called it: he now hoped that if he went to the edge of the checkerboard he could compensate for losing Sybil by “crowning” himself with Helen and, with her help, moving backward with a vengeance. He was aware that this was a rather fuzzy scheme, but he saw no other options. He just hoped it would not pass, even in his own eyes, as a flight from trouble.