The Ice Lovers (2 page)

What had they talked about, that day? He could remember Nara telling him about the German artist whose name he could not remember. The artist had been a pilot in the Second World War. He'd been shot down in winter and saved by local people, who had transported him to the nearest village. What had saved him was their dual remedy against burns and cold: he'd been covered in lard and felt. For the rest of his life, Nara had told him, the artist had been obsessed by these two substances. Once he had covered himself in them and locked himself in a room full of wolves.

Together they had stared into the horizon, absorbed its barking, infinite light. The convection heat rays of the sun beat down with such intensity the snowfield wavered, as in a desert – which is precisely what this place is: the highest, coldest, driest desert on earth. In tandem they had dragged their hypnotised gaze away from the white plain, blinking into each other's eyes. Nara's were blue, he remembered – an uncommon dark blue, indigo or navy. Her black hair cut short, a small woman with a certain way of moving, something in her gait reminded him of a man. She was steely, she had absorbed many spiked tasks. Not unfeminine, but a dark horse. It was the Antarctic summer of 2012. In their minds they still called each other friend.

Now he will have to think of all this again, he will have to remember. Because back on base the ship is due in, with its cargo of new recruits for the Antarctic summer. This year the ship is carrying a journalist – or was it an historian? He can't remember the base commander's exact term, because what the base commander said next overtook his mind completely. The journalist was writing about the sea-ice incident. She'll want to talk to you, I suppose, the base commander said.

The plane blanked down, he and the field assistant walk toward the edge of the shelf, Mark/Andy probing for crevasses all the way. The ship sits fifty feet below them moored under the sheer cliffs, the crew on the lookout for ice falls. They will crane up the Wor Geordie, as the basket for moving people on and off is called, and he and the field assistant will clamber in. The plane will spend the night on the ice shelf above them, tied down so that the katabatic winds do not flip it over.

On the ship he will be too hot, too comfortable. He would rather be bunked down in the back of the Otter – how he usually sleeps when he's out in deep field. He will be exhausted, but sleep will refuse to congeal inside him. Now that summer has arrived and there is twenty-four-hour daylight, he has trouble sleeping. That night he will lie awake in his bunk listening to the groaning of the ship as the swells nudge it against the ice shelf. He will think, is it possible to extinguish memories? That's the right word. They are fire. They are burning all the time.

On the ship he sits down on his cabin bunk, and drops his head into his hands. He is so tired, but also very, very awake. Lately he has been struggling with a feeling he calls ‘unrealness' – even in waking life, it's as if he is in a dream of his own making, but cannot remember what the dream is supposed to be about, he cannot remember what he is supposed to do next. These days are like sea-smoke, he waits for them to be dissolved under the full albedo of the summer sun.

He hears the dank metal grind of the ship as it scrapes against the ice. No, this is definitely not a dream. It is just the beginning of another Antarctic season, ferrying fuel drums back and forth.

Somewhere around three in the morning, the floodlit daylight of midsummer streaming through his cabin window, he falls asleep.

PART I
The Crystal River

1

Before I came to the Antarctic I met a woman who told me the future is like a crystal river. She said that in all our futures some things are already decided. These events can be seen in advance, because they have already formed in the same way that crystals congeal, binding themselves to each other molecularly. It was these shapes the cards were reading; around them, the river kept flowing in narrow currents, eddies, outflows. This was the river of life. Here, some things were up for grabs, they had not yet been decided. Here, things could go either way.

That the future could be read at all astonished me. If you could read the future, then it meant someone or something wanted it, was willing it, to be so. I asked her what this something was and she said she didn't know. You must have some idea, I said, after all you make your living looking into this realm. She said she was not sure, and in any case she did not think there was an answer, or that the answer would be comprehensible to any of us, were we to know it.

I went to see her on an early winter afternoon: pale, worn skies. Windblown scraps of humanity in parkas, scarves, blown through the dank spidery avenues of Holland Park. Arriving on the doorstep of a smart terraced house, I nearly turned around and left, and perhaps it would have been better if I had.

The woman was elfin, almost necessarily androgynous. Her toenails were huge and ingrown (she did readings with her shoes off, so she could feel more connected to the earth). Her flat was crammed with amulets and statues. Isis, for example, stood sentinel by the window. Chunks of quartz and crystals studded every surface. There was one anomaly in this gypsy fairground picture – the woman's diction was that particular upper-class timbre, like a handful of diamonds falling on a glass table.

‘But don't you wonder?' I asked her. ‘Don't you want to understand?'

She gave me a blank look in return. I said that I believed everything was understandable. I said I believed in the human mind, but I did not believe in a will outside of human minds.

‘Why come here, then,' she asked, ‘if you don't believe?'

‘Because I feel as if I'm dying.'

‘And you want me to show you that isn't true.'

‘I'm sick of the uncertainty. I just want to know what

‘I'm sick of the uncertainty. I just want to know what will happen.' I could have said, and to hell with it.

She showed me, then, what would happen. Or, as she put it, what was wanting to happen. I said, who wants this to happen? Who is this wanter? Someone else, it seemed, had designs for my existence.

That was when she told me that some things are written down already, and in the same way that the shapes in the crystal river have already cohered, these lines of text had also been decided upon.

‘I am not a child,' I said. ‘I will not have my future dictated to me by some outside force.'

‘Your future is inside you. It has already happened. You know it, on some level, you know exactly what will happen, and you are only dreaming it into existence, and the cards are reading the dreams.'

‘You mean I wanted my husband to die? That's why it happened.'

‘Not consciously.'

The woman said I see lots of travel, and she showed me the card with two ravens. One looked straight at me with a single gleaming coal eye, the other had its head turned away, toward an unseen horizon. She told me that these two birds belonged to Odin; their names are Huginn, which means Thought, and Muninn, or Memory. Every day Thought and Memory fly around the world and report to Odin all they have seen. I thought, even the albatross, with its epic flights, cannot manage that. ‘Nothing that is of any value is untouched by the eyes of these two birds,' she said. Together they had been to the Antarctic many times.

Perhaps, if the future had already happened it explained the dreams I had of the Antarctic before I ever went there, and which turned out to be true, in their own way – dreams of being stranded in a colony on a recently discovered continent, of red planes circling in a white sky, of not being able to leave.

Every time I tried to imagine being there, I could picture only a white plain, the gnaw of perpetual daylight. I could not see my feet on the surface of the snow, under which lay two kilometres of compressed ice crystals. I could not see my hands in that air. We have only a few ways of conceiving the world: personal knowledge, species knowledge, memory, imagination, and dreams. I could perhaps add books, reading. But none of these helped me imagine myself in that place.

Later, in the Antarctic, with winter closing in, I would only be able to remember a few of these cards: Odin and his two birds, a man and a woman in a clearing, surrounded by a forest embroidered by spring. And behind me, somewhere in the relatively recent past, Ragnarok – the end of the world.

And the final three cards the woman laid down. One was a wolf howling at the moon; in another a wolf wandered through an iron forest. The first wolf card meant that I would want something emotionally which I could not have. The second card meant fear. Last of all, she put down a card which showed a dark sky. In it, the moon was absorbed by a cloud.

‘The nightmare card,' she said. ‘I wonder what it is hiding.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘It's refusing to tell you something. Why you have to go there, perhaps. Or you have to go there to find out.'

I looked again at the cards on the table. My mind slipped off them, it seemed to need to reject the stark symbols they showed. I did not want to acknowledge that a nightmare awaited me. I had made a naïve calculation about how much shock and distress one would be handed at once, or how many episodes in succession, how much hatred and betrayal. I didn't know it then, but I had been living with a false sense of protection. I had assumed that from this juncture in my life I would flow through the crystal river, as if there were a quota of harm and corrosion dealt to us all, and I had exhausted mine.

Here, there is no sovereignty. In the Antarctic, everyone has to unite against the cold. We live in nobody's country.

Winter does not arrive, it congeals. The sea ice does the same; one day the sea is that blue-black of the Antarctic, the next day it is white.

The cryospheric cycle is one of lags, of flux and melt. It is about the way ice builds and binds. Over 10,000 years ago, at the beginning of the last ice age, the northern hemisphere summers cooled for an unknown reason, and the cool summers meant the ice did not melt. By the winter the ice was well established and it grew, advancing by inches each year, a many-fingered, cold hand reaching out from the poles, from the moutains, to the sea, to the plains of the grain-growing countries.

We we are living in an ice age, still. To a glaciologist an ice age means literally a period of glaciation and we are still in one because the ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland still exist. Our current interglacial is called the Holocene; the present ice age began over 40 million years ago, with the growth of the Antarctic ice sheet. Since then, ice sheets have been advancing and retreating in 40,000- to 100,000-year cycles. The most recent intense glacial period ended about 10,000 years ago, just as Asiatic man was making his migration over the Bering Strait to populate the Americas. Predicted changes in the earth's orbital forcing, based on past records, show that the next ice age will begin in 50,000 years' time, regardless – possibly – of man-made global warming.

Or will this happen? Alexander's models of the ice sheets of the future were refusing to make ice. He and Nara sat together on base on those winter nights and he showed her how, when he input the data for current conditions and temperature rises, the ice sheets of the future would not form.

For years, the stories I wrote were all about endings. First, they were about war and destruction, the lives that had been abruptly and prematurely ended by history. Then, when I started to write about science, I discovered a new crop of endgames: glaciers which had accelerated far beyond their predicted velocity, local species extinctions, red algae blooms, the water poisoned by it, plankton and krill asphyxiated. The species which will die out are those which are unable to adapt in time. I wrote lines like that, passing sentence on entire categories of creatures, the end of certain species of temperate latitude fruits, a type of whale. The end, even, of winter.

People rapidly become accustomed to stories of ending, I found, until it is really the only story they will consent to hear. We need these narratives of termination in order to confirm our worst suspicions about ourselves, the fleetingness of our lives, the power of destruction we have, the harm we are capable of wreaking on all and anyone who strays too near.

This story of endings is the great story of our day – our present disintegration, our eventual extinction. The play has already been scripted, despite our rising mercury of emergency, and we are figures already exiting stage right, moving ghost-like, nudged by heat. I cast myself as the witness, valuable and futile at once, charged with documenting this slow Armageddon. How long these final days will last, was hard to say.

Then I discovered a different, although related, story. The sparseness and silence surrounding it intrigued me. Nara was part of a vast puzzle of researchers sent to discover clues to the future. She became convinced that the planet had a will, that it was adjusting its settings. This was the cause of her distress that winter, her uncertainty. But distress was fuelled by many things, not least that she heard voices in her head that she could not decipher.

I know very little about her; only a skeletal listing of impersonal facts. Born in London, educated there until her father, a university lecturer, took a position in Canada at a provincial though respected university. They lived there for six years before returning to the UK. She did a year as an undergraduate at an oceanographic institute in Canada, finishing her undergraduate degree at University College London, then a postgraduate degree at the University of East Anglia, in Environmental Science. She stayed there to do a postdoc. There were rumours on base that she'd had an affair with a married professor while there, and that this had ended unhappily. It was one of the reasons she came to the Antarctic, although she never said so directly.

Her parents refused to speak to me, either by telephone, email, or personal interview. I pressed my case, but only managed to press them into silence. So I would have to guess, or, to use a more intellectual term, to imagine. There is archival research of course, and photographs. But photographs are static tableaux, a false promise lurking within their fabric: that they will tell you something essential, definitive about the person depicted. But they are ciphers, ghosts in the machine. To know someone you must see them moving.