The Ice Lovers (15 page)

‘Well, that's one way to show your gratitude,' Alexander said. He towered above her, wind running through his hair, fastened down with a knitted hat of some Scandinavian design, his windbreaker rustling, his mouth, normally a disdainful cast, erupting into a sudden smile.

They had walked on, sunglasses lowered against the glare of the sea, and the smell always present, fishy, peat, copper, the glitter of the southern Atlantic. Strange birds appeared in the undergrowth, lush geese with velvet heads. She saw brilliance in the dun, savaged hills, in the minefields, in the dirty, half-feral sheep that scrabbled away from the bankside on stick legs, crashing against the stark stone that littered the islands. This was no bitter landscape, but lush with flowers, and gorse, a reversed spring, penguins marching in their huddled armies on deserted white beaches and in tourmaline bays.

They had done all this together, and his presence was familiar and exciting at once. Only a week after meeting him, she felt that if he were to disappear from her side a cold rift would open up inside her.

‘Goodnight' he said, and left her at her doorstep.

She opened the door to her temporary home, exhausted by the light, the ground they had covered, and by the knowledge that she was not alone at the end of the world.

The ship was called the Astrolabe, named for an instrument used by early astronomers to measure the altitude of stars and planets. Night disappeared somewhere at the bottom of the Drake Passage, after Elephant Island and the tabular icebergs, the exact stretch of ocean where Helen and David would one day salute his ancestor, darkness thinning to a solemn dusk between two and four in the morning. Nara slept only lightly. Every morning she rushed awake, rising buoyant up and up, as if from a depth chamber, harried by a strange zeal.

Everything about the icebergs astounded her. They easily dwarfed the ship. Some filled the horizon and she could not see where they began or ended. As the ship picked its way through them, she saw that their cobalt hems did not look like ice, but some harder substance: steel, or quartz. Depending on how the light fell, in the dusk of night the icebergs were not white at all but a rose pink or cement grey.

Nara and Alexander watched the ice citadels from their perch in the high deck engineers' chairs in the lab at the rear of the ship. From here they had a nearly 360-degree view of the ocean, low enough to be eye to eye with the cape petrel and sooty albatross, the ship's vigilant chaperones, with their hawkish unblinking eyes.

He was a keen climber, he told her, even though his father had died on a mountain. Sometimes he could taste the rock, he told her; through his sweat, or when he inadvertently licked it. His explanations were, like he himself, largely physical.

He told her about the equations which bound mass and gravity, driven deep into ice by parameters, by hypothetical elasticities. He was interested in thresholds, moments of poise which continue for centuries. The ice sheets flow, or hang back, strung on filaments of forever. They are too grandiose and slow, these processes, to be understood by humans.

The beginning of an ice age was like that of a hurricane, Alexander told her, only much, much slower. What he wanted to model was the moment before the forces gather, when the Caribbean Sea is ruffled by wavelets, and flying fish still ripple through silvered air. The moment before the storm attracts the attention of the fates, with all their rage and scores to settle and lives to erase.

It occurred to her that might be this, too: the moment before the storm. With one half of her being, she thought: I must avoid him. With the other half she thought: I love him. Or it was beyond thought, it was simply a reaction, much as the hydrogen and liquid react in the ice that scrapes against the hull of the ship to create something solid, if not particularly durable.

On the ship, when Alexander walked into her cabin, Nara had the sensation of the room being flooded with sun. When he left, the sun was extinguished and a cool light took up residence: this was the light of her soul, her being. It was the only light she could emit, a timid blue hue. But like the sun he was unstable. The light he threw gave the impression of constancy, but it was born of flarings, firestorms, dark ruptures. Not the kind of light that warms the soul, or promises understanding. Even as she understood this, she wanted that dark flare for herself.

The following day, they encountered pack ice for the first time. For a while, the ship was able to make headway. But eventually the floes nudged closer, then locked around the ship. One engine was kept running, as in port, and it hummed vague and distant. The only other sounds were the crack and sway of ice and the distant cries of birds.

Nara went to the bridge, where officers scanned the horizon for signs of dark water sky. Their charts show reefs, rocky underwater islands. In order to get to base they must thread their way between these reefs and the mainland. But the pack stood in their way. They were icebound – this was the term the officers use: stopped, or icebound. Never stuck.

The captain revved the engines, took the ship back, then rammed it forward. She heard a whine of hydraulics, then a rent – the sound of steel groaning – followed by a dull crash. She watched as the floe yielded a fracture, then another, moving aside sluggishly. But the ice stiffened in front of them, and the engines did not have enough horsepower to break through.

The captain ordered the ship stopped, so he could fill the steam compressors on either side. The ship listed to the right, then to the left. Sallying, the engineer yelled at her, above the roar of steam. They were sallying from side to side, nudging the ice open. Still the ice stayed fast, locked around them.

They were far south and night was already a relic of a past life. Now they lived only in the light. To look out onto the icefield from the bridge, even with its tinted windows, sent a searing pain into her corneas. Everyone had to wear their polarised glasses now, to avoid ice-blindness.

Nara and Alexander sat in her cabin and stared at the ice-field at midnight, one, two in the morning, as if keeping vigil. The cape petrels and albatross had disappeared. The ship felt abandoned without the birds, without the sound of water lapping against its hull. Seals, sleeping or drowsing in the midnight sun, were scattered like gleaming slugs across the icefield. They took no notice of the red and white monolith which had installed itself in their world.

The sun slunk along the surface of the floes. To the east they could see the unmistakeable tower and continuity of an ice sheet rising from the sea, and beyond it, mountains. The base where they were headed nestled on the other side of these mountains in a sheltered bay. It was only some forty kilometres away as the crow flies, but it might as well have been four hundred.

In her cabin, Alexander said, ‘I wonder how we're going to get out of this.' She had to manufacture the right note of alarm, in order to give him the impression that she, too, cared whether they escaped. She had found a stalled paradise on this ship, with Alexander, stuck in a white world which will not let them go.

In their stopped world, some of the officers became land-sick; a version of seasickness, because they were on a ship and not moving. Some were so nauseous they couldn't eat. Everyone fell asleep at odd times, and stayed up all night. All Nara's dreams became convoluted parables.

The captain informed them that if the ice did not shift and they were still stopped the following day, then he would back out of the track they had cut in the ice, and head north. Their voyage will come to an end. They might be split up to be flown in from the Chilean base on the north of the peninsula, or they might have to return to the Falklands and try again later in the season.

That night, she made a decision. She will make love to him in the icefield. She wanted time itself to stop, and circle upon itself, like the polar sun which traced ellipses in the sky.

They talked until three, four in the morning and a chromium light singed her cabin. A solemn thrill took hold as she squared herself to her risk. Her attraction for him had been growing by the day until it was a black vein in all this whiteness, a lethal sun. Until she needed it to take up its place in the world, in the whorls of fingers, in hair, in mouths and ripped flesh. Until she needed it to exist, to be an ice-devil creature: red, black, magma, oxide, volcanic. Until she needed to split this white world apart.

PART IV
The Known World

1

‘I've never seen a summer this warm,' Bobby, one of three domestics from St Helena, declared. On base they were called the Saints. Luke had the impression that the Saints saw and heard everything that went on, a silent, knowing chorus protected by their apartness, their lack of investment in the gossip, power struggles, the cliques and allegiances they saw fracturing like summer sea ice all around them.

In late January the MAGIC team's work finished, and Luke was detailed to the ice-coring team. He would spend the rest of the summer flying to and from the ice dome on Berkner Island – an island in name, although it didn't look like one from the air. Its contours could only be seen with radar; the island itself was iced in, trapped in the vastness of the Ronne Ice Shelf.

The physical hardship aside, Luke looked forward to being at Berkner. Gregory, the ice-core driller, was a good host. The season before, he had shown Luke his handiwork, taking him down to the underground chamber where they worked in refrigerated temperatures even colder than at the surface. Luke had marvelled at the long tubes of ice, so perfectly shaped and formed, brought up from the depths by a giant machine which reminded Luke of those cigarette makers they had when he was a child. This is history, Luke, more than you'll see in any museum. Gregory was always making these eager pronouncements, as if he were being interviewed by a television crew (and indeed Gregory did sometimes appear on the news, in his parka and polarised sunglasses, standing on an icefield). Luke had the sense that Gregory tried them out on him, to gauge their effect, before deploying them in the classroom or in front of politicians.

In the tent, where they retired for tea, Gregory powered up his laptop to the solar panels and took him to a website called The Physics of Glaciers. He spoke to Luke about ablation, velocity, visible and invisible stress, about the mathematical relationship between friction and melt. He did not simplify or condescend. Then, in the ice-coring chamber, an underground cathedral of cold, Gregory shaved off slices of this core, no more than slivers of ice dotted with what looked like hundreds of tiny bubbles. Each was a chapter in the story of the earth, Gregory informed him, that unwritten saga whose ending was still being considered, through ghostly murmurs, unknowable contracts, cement factories and coal-burning plants and the fossilised future remains of humanity, possibly. This was how Gregory saw things, he confided to Luke, during those long tent days they spent together, laid up on Berkner: that the future of the planet would be determined by a shadowy conspiracy between known and unknown forces, human and inhuman. Not a very scientific approach, is it? Gregory asked, with the resignation of a man carrying a deathly burden.

For his part, Luke wondered how bubbles could divulge so much – past cataclysms were contained within their tiny gaseous membranes, extinctions of entire species, volcanic eruptions, nuclear fallout, gigantic forest fires. As it turned out, Gregory told him, the history of the planet was only carbon, nitrogen, sulphur. That was all there was to the planet, and to human beings, ‘basic elements, collusions and explosions – with a little water thrown in.' At one time, Gregory told him, the earth's atmosphere had been suffused with carbon in a cycle of gigantic volcanic eruptions, one after the other. Tonnes of carbon dioxide caused the earth's temperature to rise by ten degrees. But the planet had managed to absorb all that carbon, sinking it into its oceans, chlorophyll, the trees, until it became fossilised in the form of sea-bed crustaceans, their shells almost pure carbon, or in coal.

‘And now we're digging up all that fossilised carbon and burning it,' Gregory said. ‘You see, the planet managed to absorb the carbon, but it took several million years. We're putting all that carbon back into the atmosphere in the space of a hundred years.'

Luke nodded at the portent of what the glaciologist was telling him. He had heard similar estimations over the years, in different forms, but all pointing to the same conclusion: that it was not the damage itself, but the speed at which it was being done. And the question underlying all this clamour was, how quickly can our species adapt? How finely balanced is our survivability? Very finely balanced indeed, Luke thought, if their civilisation could be so disrupted by even a two-degree change in the earth's temperature.

For a long time, he had not wanted to think about it all: his children, their future in a terrifying world of decay, conflict, hunger. Did you know it would be like this? they would ask him, later. And he would have to say, yes. What did you do about it? He was an observer, he would say. He was only a pilot who had found more than his ration of happiness in his job, and in the white continent. He flew above the ice nearly every day, six months at a time, for twelve austral summers, he would say. He watched it happen.

Alexander stood in the door of her laboratory. Nara had to sit back very slightly into her chair. It was like having a live spark, a vital machine, in the room with her.

He had gone to the bootroom, put on boots and jacket, walked down the hill, just to see her. With him, these everyday volitions were a kind of miracle. He never went looking – for her, for anyone or anything. Mostly he waited for people and situations to arrive at his doorstep, and he did not have to wait long.

‘We wondered,' he began, ‘what it was like, being stuck in the Ellsworths.'

‘It was like – like being out of the world.'

‘We tried to imagine what you talked about, you and the pilot.'