Troubling a Star (21 page)

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Authors: Madeleine L'engle

BOOK: Troubling a Star
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Siri sat by me at breakfast.
I said, “I'd like a picture of you sitting on an iceberg and playing to the seals.”
She reached for the cream. “I'll sing for them when you write me a seal song, and also when we're closer to land.”
“Siri, that song you sang about troubling a star, who wrote the words?”
“Francis Thompson, an interesting nineteenth-century poet, maybe not a great one, but he had a good and loving mind.”
“Your music to his star poem is lovely, too. You're a fabulous composer.”
“Thanks. I love making music.”
“Will you sing it again?”
“Sure. It's one of my favorites, and I think the penguins like it, too. I'll play them your angel song and see how they respond to that. What gave you the idea for it?”
“A conversation I had with Cookie before we left home, about angels and feathers.” I found myself telling Siri about Aunt Serena and her gift of this trip, and about Cook.
“So he was once a monk? Not surprising, somehow.”
 
All day at sea, the waves worsened, and quite a few people didn't make it up to the Womb Room for the lectures. Todd gave us a lecture about whales, and the disastrous effects of whaling. The figures on remaining whales of various species made me shudder. “Whale oil was used for everything, from dog food to jet turbines. The high temperatures for the turbines required lubrication that was hard to refine from petroleum, but during the Second World War it was discovered that it was much easier to use sperm-whale oil. It is especially tragic to me that the oil of these peaceable creatures should be used for war.” He had a picture of the Antarctic blue whale on the screen, and was silent for a moment, letting us look at it. Then he said, “However! In the 1970s it was discovered that the jojoba bean, a desert shrub found in the American Southwest,
had oil that was an ideal substitute for sperm oil. But the whale population had already been decimated. We can hope that there will be enough calves so that the population will increase, but it is easier to destroy than to create, and greed pays little attention to destruction.” Then he tried to cheer us up by showing slides of whale flukes, each one unique.
By the time we went in for dinner that evening, there were quite a few empty places. Jorge ate about half his dinner, then said, “I took a Meclizine pill, hoping it would keep me from being seasick, but I have a feeling I would like to lie down. Excuse me.”
Suddenly Greta put her hand to her mouth and hurried out. I was glad seasickness didn't seem to be one of my problems.
Sam looked at me, then at Otto. “You two okay?”
“Fine,” I said.
Otto smiled. “Happily, like Vicky, I do not get seasick.” He looked up as the ding-dong sounded for an announcement. Quim told us we were about to sail by Elephant Island, and the captain would make the decision as to whether or not we would be able to anchor and take the Zodiacs in. I was sitting by the window and the water was rough, with large whitecaps, and I didn't think getting in or out of a Zodiac was a good idea. But Elephant Island as we sailed by was awesome. Glaciers. Snow-topped mountains. Blue ice, white ice, yellowish ice, strange shadows and shapes, clouds that looked like part of the glaciers but suddenly swirled and roiled.
“Look!” Angelique cried, and pointed out a large petrel battling the wind.
“My advice as ship's physician is that we should stay right
where we are,” Dick said. Certainly, getting in or out of a Zodiac bobbing up and down was not easy for him.
Angelique leaned against him affectionately. “I'm quite content to see Elephant Island from here.”
Otto put down his knife and fork, asking, “Do you realize that several of Shackleton's men spent—how many months?” He looked at Sam, who shook his head, then at Leilia.
“A long time, right there”—Leilia pointed out the window—“under two upturned lifeboats, waiting to be rescued, and believing they
would
be rescued.”
“Were they?” I asked. Elephant Island looked wild and hostile.
“They were,” Leilia said. “Their faith in Shackleton was justified. I have a not very good video documentary of Shackleton I play for my kids, to teach them something about promises and honor.”
The ding-dong sounded, and the loudspeaker came on. Quim's voice told us that there was no way the Zodiacs could be launched in these seas. Angelique gently touched Dick's knee and gave him a quick, loving smile.
Quim's voice continued, telling us that the portholes on starboard were being covered, but this was normal procedure, nothing unusual or worrisome.
The sense of awe I felt as we sailed past Elephant Island was deeper than Aunt Serena's photographs or even Adam II's journal had prepared me for. What we saw as we looked out the windows was stranger and more alien than pictures of the moon. Not many people nowadays see the planet like this, pure and serene and ruthless.
“Would it happen today?” Angelique asked.
“What?” Dick raised his eyebrows.
“Caring about your colleagues enough to risk your own life for them.”
“It's anybody's guess,” Dick said. “We've become deeply entrenched in uninvolvement.”
“Not you,” Angelique said.
Leilia shook her head. “Quim or Benjy—or any one of our lecturers—I think they'd care enough, be responsible enough.”
“Let's hope they're never tested,” Dick said.
“Are you seasick?” Angelique asked him.
“Because my pessimistic side is to the fore? I don't like the water when it's this rough. I'm off to my bunk.”
“Me, too,” Otto said, and bid us all good night.
 
In the morning we moved out of fog into sunlight as we sailed through a turbulent sea full of ice floes and spectacular icebergs. Even more than the day before, I felt as though we had sailed back billions of years. The blue coloring in some of the icebergs was so brilliant it made the sky look pale. The water was rough and full of whitecaps, and Siri, who was sitting across from me at breakfast, announced that she was very glad that our ship had radar and depth sounders and that the double hull was ice-hardened. Quimby came on the intercom and told us we'd be sailing south all morning, passing to the east of Joinville Island and the Danger Islands en route to Paulet Island, where there should be thousands, literally thousands, of Adélie penguins.
Otto came into the dining room and joined us, and so did Sam, Angelique, and Dick. Despite the rough sea, we saw several groups of penguins porpoising, incredibly graceful in the water in comparison to their clumsiness on land. Benjy was right about their flying in water. While they were leaping in swiftly graceful arcs, they did look like cetaceans rather than birds. No wonder Benjy found them so fascinating. I wondered if Adam was studying penguins at LeNoir Station.
—No, Vicky. You aren't thinking about Adam.
Todd, our mammal lecturer, came on the intercom to tell us we might see some whales, and maybe a few dolphins, though not many here at this time of year. “Keep a lookout, though,” he urged us, “and if a whale flukes, take as many pictures for me as you can. I'm studying flukes.”
After breakfast, while I was putting on my heaviest sweater, red parka, boots with two pair of heavy socks, Benjy knocked on my door and poked his head in to make sure I was all right. We went together out to the fo'c'sle, to look in all directions as we sailed through seas so full of ice that some of the smaller floes hit against the sides of the ship with a sound like distant thunder. Benjy said the channel had opened just a week before, and there was no way we could go through it without bumping into floes. In another week or so, it would close up again with solid ice.
Todd came out, his parka hood pulled close about his face. He stood with us, and we saw many seals sleeping on ice floes, crab-eater seals, Todd told me, though there are no crabs in these bitter waters. The seals were lazing on the tabular icebergs in larger numbers than the singletons or doubletons on
the floes, snoozing away because they hunt at night. For a while we sailed through a veritable city of icebergs. Benjy said we were seeing a far greater colony of bergs than usual. Then he excitedly pointed out two snow petrels. Benjy had taken this trip many times and had never lost his excitement.
The wind was so fierce that, even with our hoods up, we were driven in. I hadn't seen Otto, but I had tried not to look for him. It was quite easy not to see somebody, because our red parkas made us all look alike.
To my surprise, the ding-dong rang and the announcement was made that we were going ashore. About half of us lined up to get in the Zodiacs. When my turn came, the Zodiac seemed to leap up at me and I dropped in and sat on the side beside Leilia. Getting out was not bad, because the rubber boat was pulled partway up onto the beach and we just had to swing our legs over the side and slosh in. And there were indeed thousands of Adélie penguins. I was surprised to see one languid Weddell seal lying among the penguins nearest the shore, and others on ice floes no more than a few feet away. Papageno's experience had made me a little leery of seals, but Todd assured me that Weddell seals wouldn't harm either me or the penguins.
“What about your harp?” Greta asked Siri.
She shook her head. “I didn't bring her this morning. The water's pretty rough, and I don't want her getting wet. She's hard enough to keep in tune as is.”
I reminded her, “What about singing to the seals?”
She assured me, “There'll be other opportunities, I promise you. Today let's concentrate on penguins and birds.”
Benjy said, “One seal doesn't make a stink, but wait till we get close to a bunch of them. They dribble yellow mucus from their noses to get rid of excess salt, and while the stuff is functional, it's also smelly. Hoy! Look up there on the cliff at that albatross nest!”
Sam let me use his binoculars. “That water's getting mighty rough.” He didn't sound happy. “Once we get back to the ship, the Zodiacs aren't going to stand quietly while we disembark. They're going to go up and down like jumping jacks. It's going to be even harder on Dick than on me.”
“The sailors'll be there to help.” I tried to sound comforting, but leaping out of the Zodiac onto the small metal platform of the ladder wasn't easy in clothes that made you weigh double your normal weight and in boots that made your feet twice their normal size.
“I hope they really check our manifest numbers,” Sam grumbled.
“We do,” Benjy assured him. “On one of our trips, when we checked the board, one manifest number hadn't been turned over, so Quim and I got in a Zodiac and went back to the part of the peninsula where we'd been that afternoon, looking for the missing passenger, who'd climbed high up on a cliff where he shouldn't have been. He was an amateur ornithologist and was trying to take pictures of albatross babies in their nest, and he slipped and fell and knocked himself out. He came to after all the Zodiacs had left for the
Argosy,
and he was mighty glad to see Quim and me, I can tell you. And look—”
High above our heads an albatross was flying, riding the current, its great wings outspread, and I thought of Adam II's
description. The great bird glided serenely, with no motion of the wings, sailing on wind and sky and sun. I watched for so long that I had to run to catch up with Siri and Benjy. If Greta hadn't been with them, I'd have continued to lag behind, but she was chattering away about some zoo in Berlin, ignoring a colony of gentoo penguins.
“My ex-husband liked that zoo,” Siri said.
“Ex?” Benjy asked with what I thought was considerable interest.
“Very ex. He's married to a fifty-year-old heiress so he can live in the life-style to which he always wanted to become accustomed.” Her usually gentle voice was sharp.
“Where'd the heiress's money come from?” Benjy asked.
Siri made a face. “Deodorants, I think.”
“And where does your money come from?”
“It doesn't come. I work for it.”
“My point entirely,” Benjy said, though I wasn't sure what his point was. Whatever, it was meant to make Siri feel better. “I enjoy my work and I think you enjoy yours, right?”
Siri's voice and smile were back to normal. “Right.”
Sam and I were in the same Zodiac on our way back to the ship. It seemed to me that, wherever I went, Sam was apt to be there, too. Not exactly shadowing me. Not exactly hovering. Just there.
I watched two strong sailors heave him safely onto the landing platform. One thing about Sam, he didn't let anything stop him.
Greta said, as she washed the guano off her boots, “Jorge and Otto stayed on the ship. Business talk.”
Fine. I didn't want to get obsessed with Otto. Or anybody.

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