New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird (50 page)

November 15:

Del and I hauled the ice-shape up in the rescue sled as if it was another body, but by the time we had it at the surface the constant westerly, always strong, was getting stronger, and Miguel was urgent about battening down the camp. We’d been lazy, seduced by the rare summer sun, and now, with clouds piling up into the blue sky, we had to cut snow blocks and pile them into wind breaks—and never mind the bloody huts that should have been set up first thing. Saw blocks of Styrofoam-like snow, pry them out of the quarry, stack them around the tents and gear, all the time with the wind heaving you toward the east, burning your face through your balaclava, slicing through every gap in your clothes. The snow that cloaks the upper surface of the berg blows like a hallucinatory haze, a Dracula mist that races, hissing in fury, toward the east. It scours your weather gear, would scour your flesh off your bones if you were mad enough to strip down.

The bright tents bob and shiver. McMurdo’s satellite relay station on its strut-and-wire tower whines and howls and thrums—Christ, that’s going to drive me mad. Clouds swallow the sun, the distant water goes a dreadful shade of gray. And this isn’t a spell of bad weather, this is the norm. Cherish those first sunny days, we tell each other, huddled in the big tent with our mugs of instant cocoa. Summer or not, this gray howling beast of a wind is here to stay. Andy uplinks on her laptop, downloads the shipping advisories, such as they are for this empty bit of sea. There are deep-sea fishing boats out here, a couple of research vessels, the odd navy ship, but the Southern Ocean is huge and traffic is sparse. We joke about sending a Mayday—engine failure! we’re adrift!—but in fact we’re a navigation hazard, and the sobering truth is that if it came down to rescue, we could only be picked up by helicopter: there’s no disembarking from the tall rough ice-cliffs that form our berg-ship’s hull. And land-based helos have a very short flight range indeed.

Like most sobering truths, this one failed to sober us. Castaways on our drifting island, we turned the music up loud, played a few hands of poker, told outrageous stories, and went early to bed, worn out with the hard work, the cold, the wind. And for absolutely no reason I thought, with Del puffing his silent snores in my ear, We’re too few, we’re going to hate each other by the end. And then I thought of Cutter lying cold and lonesome in the snow.

November 16:

Another work day, getting the huts up in the teeth of the wind. Miguel, sailor to his bones, is a fanatic for organization. I’m not, except for my climbing gear, but I know he’s right. We need to be able to find things in an emergency. More than that, we need to keep sane and civilized, we need our private spaces and our occupations. We also need to keep on top of the observations we promised McMurdo if we want to keep their good will—more important than ever with Cutter dead—which was my excuse for dragging Andy away from camp while the men argued about how to stash the crates. Visibility wasn’t bad and we laid our first line of flags from the camp to the berg’s nearest edge. Waist-high orange beacons, they snapped and chattered in our wake.

Berg cliffs are insanely dangerous because bergs don’t mildly dwindle like ice cubes in a G&T. They break up as they melt, softened chunks dropping away from the chilled core, mini-bergs calving off the wallowing parent. All the same, the temptation to look off the edge was too powerful, so we sidled up to it and peered down to where the blue-white cliff descended into the water and became a brighter, sleeker blue. The water was clearer than you might suppose, and since we were on the lee edge there wasn’t much surf. We looked down a long way. Andy grabbed my arm. “Look!” she said, but I was already pulling out the camera.

[Tight focus only seems to capture the water’s surface. As the angle widens the swimming shadows come into view.]

Deep water is black, so the shapes aren’t silhouettes, they’re dim figures lit from above, their images refracted through swirling water. Algae grows on ice, krill eat the algae, fish eat the krill, sharks and whales and seals and squids and penguins and god knows what eat the fish. God knows what. The mic picks up me and Andy arguing over what we’re seeing. They move so fluidly they must be seals, I propose, seals being the acrobats of the sea. Could be dolphins, Andy counters, but when the camera lifts to the farther surface [when I, for once, take my eyes off the view screen and look unmediated] we see no mammal snouts lifting for air. Sharks, I say, but sharks don’t coil and turn and dive, smooth and fluid as silk scarves on the breeze, do they? Giant squid, Andy says, and the camera’s focus tightens, trying to discern tentacles and staring eyes. Gray water, blue-white ice. Refocus. The dim shapes are gone.

November 17:

The huts are up and we sent a ridiculously expensive email to our sponsors, thanking them for the luxuries they provided: chairs, tables, insulated floors—warm feet—bliss. Andy uploaded our carefully edited log to our website while she was online, saying that Cutter had been hurt in a climbing mishap and was resting. We’d agreed on this lie—having failed to report his death immediately, there seemed no meaningful difference between telling his folks days or months late—but once it was posted I realized, too late, what we were in for. Not just hiding his death, but faking his life, his doings, his messages to his family. “We can’t do this,” I said, and Andy met my eyes, agreeing.

“Too late,” Del said.

“No,” Andy said. “We’ll say he died tomorrow.”

“We can’t leave now,” said Miguel. “We just got set up.”

“We can’t do this,” I said again. “Him dying is one thing. Faking him being still alive is unforgivable. Andy’s right. We have to say he died tomorrow.”

“They’ll pull us off,” said Del.

“Who will?” I said, because we’re not really under anyone’s jurisdiction. “Listen, if his folks want to pay for a helo to come out from McMurdo—”

“We’re too far,” Andy said, “it’d have to be a navy rescue.”

“They can get his body now or wait until we’re in shouting distance of New Zealand,” I said. “If we upload the video—“

“We can’t make a show of it!” Miguel said.

“Why not?” Del said. “It’s what people want to see.”

“We can send it to the Aussies,” I said, “to show how he died. It was a climbing accident, no crime, no blame. If they want the body, they can have it.”

Del was convinced that someone—who? the UN?—was going to arrest us and drag us off for questioning, but I just couldn’t see it. Someone’s navy hauling a bunch of Commonwealth loonies off an iceberg at gunpoint because a climber died doing something rash? No. The Australians wouldn’t love us, god knows Cutter’s parents wouldn’t, but nobody was going to that kind of effort, expense, and risk for us.

“So why the fuck didn’t you say so two days ago?” Del said to me.

“Well,” I said, “my friend had just died and I wasn’t thinking straight. How about you?”

[The camera’s light is on, enhancing the underwater glow of the blue four-man tent.]

The coiled ice-shape gleams as if it were on the verge of melting, but the videographer’s breath steams in the cold. The videographer [me] is fully dressed in cold-weather gear, a parka sleeve moving in and out of view. The camera circles the ice-shape in a slow, uneven pan [me inching around on my knees] and you can see that the shape isn’t a snail-shell coil, it’s more like a 3D Celtic knot, where only one line is woven through so many volutions that the eye is deceived into thinking the one is many. The camera rises [me getting to my feet] and takes the overview. There, not quite at center, like a yoke in an egg: the heart of the knot. What? The camera’s focus narrows. In the gleaming glass-blue depths of the ice, an eye opens. An eye as big as my fist, translucent and alien as a squid’s. The camera’s view jolts back [me falling against the tent wall] and only the edge of the frame catches the fluid uncoiling of the ice shape, a motion so smooth and effortless it’s as though we’re underwater. The camera’s frame falls away, dissolves, and then there’s only me in the blue-lighted tent, me with this fluid alien thing swirling around me like an octopus in a too-small aquarium, opening its limbs for a swift, cold embrace—

[And I wake, sweating with terror, to see Del twitching in his dreams.]

November 18:

Cutter died again today. We sent the video file (lacking its final seconds) to our Australian sponsors, asking them to break the news to Cutter’s family. Andy wrote a beautiful letter from all of us, mostly a eulogy I guess, talking about Cutter and what it was like to be here now that he was dead. She did a brilliant job of making it clear that we were staying without making us sound too heartless or shallow. So this is us made honest again, and somehow I miss Cutter more now, as though until we told the outside world his death hadn’t quite been real. I keep thinking, I wish he was here—but then I remember that he is, outside in the cold. Maybe I’ll go keep him company for a while.

[The laptop screen is brighter than the plastic windows of the hut, the image perfectly clear.]

The camera jogs to the videographer’s footsteps, the mic picks up the Styrofoam squeak-crunch of snowshoes. There’s the team on the move, two bearded men and a lanky woman taller than either, in red and blue and green parkas, gaudy against the drifting snow. The camera stops for a circle pan: gray sky, white surface broken into cracks and tilting slabs. Blown snow swirls and hisses; a line of orange flags snaps and shudders in the wind. The videographer [me] sways to the gusts, or the ice-island flexes as it spins across its watery dance floor. Full circle: the three explorers up ahead now, the one in green reaching into the snow-haze to plant more flags.

[blip]

Broken ice terrain, the sound of panting breath. Atlantis as a glacier once traveled some of the roughest volcanic plains on the planet, and these fault-lines show how rough it was, the ice all but shattered here. You have to wonder how long it’s going to hold together.
Hey!
The explorer in blue gives a sweeping wave.
You guys! You have to see this!
Shaky movement over tilted slabs of ice, a lurch—

[blip]

A crevasse, not so deep as the one near camp, with the shape of a squared-off comma. In the angle, ice pillars stand almost free of the walls. Blue-white ice rough with breakage. Slabs caught in the crevasse’s throat.

[Miguel, watching at my shoulder, says, “That’s not what we saw. You know that’s not what we saw!”]

November 20:

Miguel keeps playing the video of today’s trek. Over and over, his voice shouts
You have to see this!
through the laptop’s speakers. Over and over. Del’s so fed up with it he’s gone off to our hut and I’m tempted to join him, but it’s hard to tear myself away. Andy isn’t watching anymore, but she’s still in the main hut, listening to our voices—hushed, strained, hesitant with awe—talk about the structures (buildings? vehicles? Diving platforms, Andy’s voice speculates) that the camera stubbornly refused to record. At first I thought Miguel was trying to find what we saw in the camera images of raw ice, but now I wonder if what he’s really trying to do is erase his memory and replace it with the camera’s. I finally turned away and booted my own computer, opening the earlier files of the first ice-shapes I found. Still there? Yes. But now I wonder:
could
they be natural formations?

Could we be so shaken up by Cutter’s death that we’re building a shared fantasy of the bizarre?

I don’t believe that. We’ve all been tested, over and over, on mountains and deserts, in ocean deeps and tiny boats out in the vast Pacific. Miguel’s told his stories about the mind-companions he dreamed up in his long, lonely journey, about how important they became to him even though he always knew they were imaginary. I’ve been in whiteouts where the hiss of blowing snow conjures voices, deludes the eyes into seeing improbable things. Once, in the Andes, Cutter and I were huddled back-to-back, wrapped in survival blankets, waiting for the wind to die and the visibility to increase beyond two feet, and I saw a bus drive by, a big diesel city bus. I had to tell Cutter what I was laughing about. He thought I was nuts.

So we’ve all been there, and though we all know what kinds of crazy notions people get when they’re pushed to extremes—I’ve heard oxygen-starved climbers propose some truly lunatic ideas when they’re tired—we aren’t anything close to that state. Fed, rested, as warm as could be expected . . . No.

But if we all saw what we think we saw, then why didn’t the camera see it too?

[Bubbles rise past the camera’s lens. The mic catches the gurgle of the respirator, the groaning of the iceberg, the science fiction sound effects of Weddell seals.]

The camera moves beneath a cathedral ceiling of ice. Great blue vaults and glassy pillars hang above the cold black deeps, sanctuary for the alien life forms of this bitter sea. Fringed jellies and jellies like winged cucumbers, huge red shrimp and tiny white ones, skates and spiders and boney fish with plated jaws. Algae paints the ice with living glyphs in murky green and brown, like lichen graffiti scrawled on a ruin’s walls. Air, the alien element, puddles on the ceiling, trapped. The water seems clear, filled with the haunting light that filters through the ice, but out in the farther reaches of the cathedral the light turns opaquely blue, the color of a winter dusk, and below there is no light at all. Bubbles spiral upward, beads of mercury that pool in the hollows of the cathedral ceiling, forming a fluid air-body that glides along the water-smoothed ice. It moves with all the determination of a living thing, seeking the highest point. [The camera follows; bubbles rise; the air-creature grows.] The ceiling vault soars upwards, smeared with algae [zoom in; does it shape pictures, words?] and full of strange swimming life [are there shadows coiling at the farthest edges of the frame?], and it narrows as it rises to a rough chimney. Water has smoothed this icy passage, sculpted it into a flute, a flower stem . . . a birth canal. The air-body takes on speed, rising unencumbered into brighter and brighter light. The upward passage branches into tunnels and more air-bodies appear, as shapeless and fluid as the first. Walls of clear ice are like windows into another frozen sea where other creatures hang suspended, clearer than jellyfish and more strange. And then the camera [lens streaked and running with droplets] rises from the water [how?], ascending a rough crevice in the ice. The air-bodies, skinned in water—or have they been water all along?—are still rising too, sliding with fluid grace through the ice-choked cracks in the widening passage. [The videographer sliding through too: how?] The host seeks out the highest places and at last comes up into the open air—ice still rising in towering walls but with nothing but the sky above. Gray sky, blue-white ice, a splash of red. What is this? Fluid, many-limbed, curious, the water-beings flow weightlessly toward the splash of scarlet [blood]. They taste [blood], absorb [blood], until each glassy creature is tinted with the merest thread of red.