New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird (51 page)

[And I close the file, my hands shaking as if with deadly cold, because these images are impossible. I’m awake, and my camera shows battery drain, and none of us, not even Andy, came prepared to dive in this deadly sea.]

November 22:

Miguel watched the impossible video and then walked out of the tent without a word. Andy sat staring at the blank screen, arms wrapped tight around her chest. And after a long silence, Del said calmly, “Nice effects.” I knew what he meant—that I was hoaxing them, or someone was hoaxing me—but I can’t buy it. Even if any of us had the will we don’t have the expertise. We’re explorers, not CG fucking animators. And who made us see what we saw in that inland crevasse? Who’s going to make the evidence of that disappear on the one hand, and then fake a school of aliens on the other?

“Aliens,” Andy said, her face blank and her eyes still fixed on the screen. “Aliens? No. They belong here. They’re the ones that belong.”

“Hey,” I said, not liking the deadness in her tone. “Andy.”

“Screw this,” Del said, and he left too.

Miguel’s not in camp. It took us far too long to realize it, but we spent most of the day apart, Andy in her hut, Del in ours, me in the big one brooding over my video files. We left the tents up for extra retreat/storage/work spaces and Miguel could have been in one of them—Andy assumed he was, since he wasn’t in the hut they share—but when Del finally pulled us together for a meal we couldn’t find him. And the wind is rising, howling through the satellite relay station’s struts and wires—wires that are growing white with ice. The wind has brought us a freezing fog that reeks of brine. If it were Del out there I could trust him to hunker down and wait for the visibility to clear, but does Miguel the sailor have that kind of knowledge? We all did the basic survival course at McMurdo, but the instructors knew as well as Del and I that there’s a world of difference between knowing the rules and living them. The instinct in bad weather is to seek shelter, and god knows it’s hard to trust to a reflective blanket thin enough to carry in your pocket. But it’s worse not to be able to trust your comrade to do the smart thing. We’re all angry at Miguel, even Andy. He’s put us all at risk. Because of course we have to go and find him.

November 24:

We’re back. McMurdo’s relay station is an ice sculpture and our sat phone, even with its own antenna, isn’t working. I don’t know what we’re going to do.

We went after Miguel, the three of us roped up and carrying packs. Our best guess was that he’d gone back to the crevasse where we saw, or didn’t see, the buildings, structures, vehicles—whatever they were in the ice. So we followed the line of orange flags inland. Standing by one you could see the next, and barely discern the next after that, which put the visibility roughly at 6 meters. But with the icy fog blasting your face and your breath fogging up your goggles, the world contracts very quickly to within the reach of your arms. Walking point is hard, but it’s better than shuffling along at the end of the rope, fighting the temptation to put too much trust in a tiring leader. I was glad when Del let me up front after the first hour. Andy, who has the least experience with this kind of weather, stayed between us, roped to either end.

A long hike in bad weather. The sun, already buried behind ugly clouds, grazed the horizon, and the day contracted to a blue-white dusk. We huddled in a circle, knee-to-knee, with our packs as a feeble windbreak. I fell into a fugue state. The blued-out haze went deep and cold and still, like water chilled almost to the point of freezing. The wind was so constant it no longer registered; the hiss of it against our parkas became the hiss of water pressure on my ears. And the whiteout began to build its illusions. Walls rose in the haze, weirdly angled, impossibly over-hung. Strange voices mouthed heavy, bell-like, underwater sounds. Something massive seemed to pass behind me without footsteps, its movement only stirring the water-air like a submarine cutting a wake. No different than the bus I saw on that Andean mountain, except that Andy jerked against me while Del muttered a curse.

And then the ground moved.

Ground: the packed snow and ice we sat upon. It gave a small buoyant heave, making us all gasp, and then shuddered. A tremor, no worse than the one I’d sat through when I was visiting Andy in Wellington, but at that instant all illusion that Atlantis was an island died. This was an iceberg, already melting and flawed to its core, and there was nothing below it but the ocean. Another small heave. Stillness. And then a sound to drive you insane, a deep immense creaking moan that might have come from some behemoth’s throat. I grabbed for Del. Andy grabbed for me.

The ice went mad.

We were shaken like rats in a terrier’s mouth. The toe spikes on someone’s snowshoes, maybe my own, gouged me in the calf. I didn’t even notice it at the time. We lurched about, helpless as passengers in a falling plane, and all the time that ungodly noise, hugely bellowing, tugged at flesh and bone. I knew for a certainty that Atlantis was breaking up and that we were all already dead, just breathing by reflex for a few seconds more. I flashed on Cutter falling, knowing he was dead long before he hit the ground. I was glad we’d told his folks, glad Andy had sent that beautiful letter, eulogy for us all. And then the ice went still.

I lay a moment, hardly noticing the tangle we were in, my whole being focused on that silence. Quiet, quiet, like the final moment in free fall, the last timeless instant before the bottom. But it stretched on, and on, and finally we all picked ourselves up, still unable to believe we were alive. “Jesus,” Del said, and I had to laugh.

We went on, me in the middle this time because of my limp, with Andy bringing up the rear. Tossed around as we had been, none of us was sure of our directions, and because of the berg’s motion GPS and compass were both useless. Blown snow and fog-ice erased our footprints as well as Miguel’s. In the end all we could do was follow the line of flags in the direction of our best guess and resolve that if it led us back to camp, we would turn and head straight back out again. I was feeling Miguel’s absence very much by then, so much so that a fourth figure haunted the edges of my vision, teasing me with false presence. But maybe that was Cutter, not Miguel.

Flags lay scattered among huge tilted slabs of packed snow. We replanted the slender poles as best we could, and by this time I was starting to hope we
had
been turned around and were heading back to camp. If the berg-quake had scattered the whole line of flags they were likely to be buried by the time we turned around, and if they were, we were screwed. But we couldn’t do anything but what we were already doing. We clambered through the broken ice field, hampered by the rope between us and already tired from the wind. Del got impatient and Andy snapped that she was doing the best she could. “You’re fine,” I said. “Del, ease off.” He went silent. We re-roped and I took point, limp and all.

Spires of ice rose like jagged minarets above the broken terrain. Great pillars, crystalline arches, thin translucent walls. Scrambling with my eyes always on the next flag, I took the ice structures for figments of the whiteout at first, but then we were in among them and the wind died into fitful gusts. The line of flags ended, irredeemably scattered, unless this was its proper end and the former crevasse was utterly transformed. It was beautiful. Even exhausted and afraid I could see that, and while Andy shouted for Miguel and Del hunkered over our packs digging out the camp stove and food, I pulled out my camera.

[Digital clarity is blurred by swirling fog. Yet the images are unmistakable, real.]

Crystalline structures defy any sense of scale. This could be a close-up of the ice-spray caught at the edge of a frozen stream, strands and whorls of ice delicate as sugar tracery, until the videographer turns and gets a human figure into the frame. The man in red bends prosaically over a steaming pot, apparently oblivious to the white fantasia rising up all around him. The mic picks up the sound of a woman’s voice hoarsely shouting, and the camera turns to her, a tall green figure holding an orange flag, garish among all the white and blue and glass.
Andy
, says the videographer.
Hush a minute, listen for an answer.
The human sounds die, there’s nothing but the many voices of the wind singing through the spires. A long slow pan then: pillars, walls, streets—it’s impossible not to think of them that way. A city in the ice. An inhuman city in the ice.

Movement.

The camera jerks, holds still. There’s a long, slow zoom, as though it’s the videographer rather than the lens that glides down the tilt-floored icy avenue. [The static fog drifting, obscuring the distant view.] Maybe that’s all the movement is, sea-fog and wind swirled about by the sharp, strange lines of the ice-structures. [The wind singing in the mic, glass-toned, dissonant.] But no. No. It’s
clarity
that swirls like a current of air—like a many-limbed being with a watery skin—gliding gravity-less between the walls, in and out of view. [Pause. Go back. Yes. A shape of air. Zoom. A translucent eye. Zoom. A vast staring eye.]

The camera lurches. The image dives to the snow-shoe-printed ground. The videographer’s clothing rustles against the mic, almost drowning her hoarse whisper.
We have to get out of here. Guys! We need to—

We roped Miguel between Del and me, with Andy again bringing up the rear. It was an endless hike, the footing lousy, the visibility bad, all of us hungry and aching for a rest. Del tried to insist that we eat the instant stew he’d heated before we left, but I was seeing transparent squids down every street, and when Miguel stumbled out of the ice, crooning wordlessly to the wind even as he clutched at Andy’s hands, Del let himself be outvoted. “This is how climbers die,” he said to me, but I said to him, “If you’re on an avalanche slope you move as fast and as quietly as you can, no matter how hungry or tired you are.” Death is here: I wanted to say it, and didn’t, and while I hesitated the silence filled with the glass-harmonica singing of the wind—with Miguel’s high crooning, which was the same, the very same. So I didn’t need to say it. We followed the broken line of scattered flags back to camp.

And now I sit here typing while the others sleep (Miguel knocked out by pills), and I look up and see what I should have seen the instant we staggered in the door. All of our gear, so meticulously sorted by Miguel, is disarranged. Not badly—we surely would have noticed if shelves were cleared and boxes emptied on the floor—but neat stacks and rows have become clusters and piles, chairs pushed into the table are pulled askew, my still camera and its cables are out of its bag my hands are shaking as I type this there’s a draft the door is closed the windows weatherproofed I’m pretending I don’t notice but there’s a draft moving behind me through the room

November 25:

I took my ax to the tent where we still kept the ice-shape Del and I brought up from the bottom of the crevasse. I was past exhaustion, spooked, halfway crazy. It was just a lump of ice. I took my ax to it, expecting it to bleed seawater, rise up in violent motion, fill the tent with its swirling arms. I swung again and again, flailing behind me once when paranoia filled the tent with invisible things. Ice chipped, shattered. Shards stung my wind-burned face. The noise woke Del in our hut nearby. He came and stopped me. There was no shape left, just a scarred hunk of ice. Del took the ax out of my hand and led me away, gave me a pill to let me sleep like Cutter. I mean, like Miguel. I’m still doped. Tired. I can feel them out there in the wind.

The relay tower is singing outside.

November 27:

The ice is always shaking now. New spires lean above our snow wall, mocking our defenses. Miguel cries and shouts words we can’t understand, words so hard to say they make him drool and choke on his tongue. The wind sings back whenever he calls. The sat phone has given nothing but static until today when it, too, sang, making Del throw the handset to the floor. The radio only howls static. The fog reeks of dead fish, algae, the sea. Everything is rimed in salt ice. Andy hovers over Miguel, trying to make him take another pill: Del threatened him with violence if he doesn’t shut up. I grabbed Del, dragged him to a chair, hugged him until he gave in and pulled me to his lap. We’re here now, all four of us together. None of us can bear to be alone.

November 28:

A new crevasse opened in the camp today, swallowing two tents and making a shambles of the snow wall. Is this an attack? Our eviction notice, Andy says, humor her badge of courage. But I wonder if they even notice us, if they even care. Atlantis is theirs now, and I suppose it always has been, through all those long cold ages at the heart of the southern pole. Now the earth is warming, the ancient ice is freed to move north, to melt—and then what? What of this ice city growing all around us like a crystal lab-grown from a seed? If the clues they’ve given us (deliberately? I do wonder) are true, then they are beings of water as much as of ice. It won’t happen quickly, but eventually, as the berg travels north out of the Southern Ocean and into the Atlantic or Pacific, it will all melt. Releasing . . . what? . . . into the warming seas of our world. Our world
is
an ocean world, our over-burdened continents merely islands in the vast waters of misnamed Earth. What will become of us when they have reclaimed
their
world?

Del and Andy, in between increasingly desperate attempts to bring our sailor Miguel back from whatever alien mindscape he’s lost in, are concocting a scheme to get our inflatable lifeboat, included in our gear almost as a joke, down the ice cliffs to the water. Away from here, they reason, we should be able to make the sat phone work, light the radio beacon, call in a rescue. I have a fantasy—or did I dream it last night?—that the singing that surrounds us, stranger than the songs of seals or whales, has reached into orbit, filling satellite antenna-dishes the way it fills my ears, drowning human communication. I imagine that the first careless assault on human civilization has already begun, and that the powers—the human powers—of Earth are looking outward in terror, imagining an attack from the stars, never dreaming that it is already here, has always been here, now waking from its ice-bound slumber. It is we who have warmed the planet; we, perhaps, who have brought this upon ourselves. But brought what, I wonder? And when Andy appeals to me to help her and Del with their escape plan, I find I have nothing much to say. But I suppose I will have to say it before long: why should we leave—
should
we leave—just when things are getting interesting?