The Antarcticans (15 page)

“You want to know why I really believed in Mr. Chun for all those years? Because that salesgirl in the Chinese tchotchke store took a minute out of her mundane, everyday world to acknowledge that mine was crumbling. She didn’t know me. She didn’t know what was tearing me up. But it didn’t matter—she cared. That’s what I held on to, that someone cared about me. Even if it was just for a minute, I mattered.” She paused for a long moment. “Ya know, when you strip away all the shit that we build around ourselves, to protect us from the big bad world out there, what’s left is each other. And when it’s your child, you’ll even make a deal with the Devil to save him. Remember this, though, honey: although Tsao Chun is still hanging in my kitchen, I pay about as much attention to him as I do to that set of stamps your father had framed over there.” She pointed to a yellowed, cracked frame hanging above her avocado-colored mixer. “I’m just too damn lazy to take it down. Lazy? Apathetic? I don’t know—pick a word. It doesn’t matter anymore. Those hangings are echoes from my past. They’re real, but they aren’t real to me. I’ve moved beyond them. You take what you need, and then you move on.” She scooted out from her chair then put her arm around him and kissed him on the head. “Stay for dinner.”

“I…” For a moment, Gavin thought about protesting.

“It’ll give me a reason to cook up the vegetables from my garden,” his mother said, moving to the tomatoes and zucchini in the sink. “Plus, with the state you’re in, I don’t want you wrapping your car around a light pole while you’re lost in thought about your situation. Things’ll work out. They might not work out the way you want them to, or think they should, but they’ll work out the way they need to, and then someday you’ll look back and be thankful.”

The tall, muscular Antarctican who had ordered Noila back into her cottage dove at her with such force that when he wrapped his arm around her waist in midflight, she thought she would soar upward. Instead she landed on a pile of snow next to the door. The earth moved again, and the crack near her feet disappeared, the rumbling noise reverberating through the village. The Antarctican stood up and nodded at her, opened the door, took her hand to pull her up from the snow, and made sure she was inside safely. He didn’t say another word.

Noila closed the door behind her; Vinettea was now standing with her back against the fireplace.

“Members of the
Dragon
scientific team, this is a recorded message. Please stay inside your cabins until further notice. The ice shelf has become temporarily unstable and could collapse. The safest place for you is in your cottages. I’ll provide more information as we receive it. Please continue your work.” Her image flickered then contracted into a small point of light before disappearing.

What have I got myself into?
Noila wondered.

She went back into her bathroom and began to organize the laboratory. Keeping busy distracted her mind from running doomsday scenarios that might incapacitate her. The work provided structure around her fear and kept it contained. She searched through the cabinets and drawers of her lab, looking for the equipment she’d been using on the ship. The introduction to the potential use of quantum tunneling in viruses, to attempt to replicate the atomic components of viral DNA to jump through a cell barrier and appear on the other side of the barrier, had been eye-opening. Her mind was filled with ideas of how she could use this knowledge in other ways. She set up the equipment in the same configuration it had been on the ship. She prepared the solutions with the viruses, placed them in the photon chamber, and entered into the control panel the sequence of photon beams she wanted emitted to program the samples she had put in the machine. She felt at ease with the process and realized most of the work she had done on the
Viking
was training for what she would do here.

She heard a knock at the door and then “Hello? Noila?” A soft, sweet voice floated into the room.

Noila pressed the “enter” button on the chamber keypad and poked her head into the living area. One of the female scientists from the
Dragon
, whom Noila recognized but whose name she couldn’t remember, was standing there looking around. The woman made eye contact with Noila, and a huge smile broke out on her face. From her facial features and the color of her skin, Noila could tell she was from the equatorial region of Africa. She exuded kindness, even while they had been on the
Viking
. Noila loved listening to her smooth African accent.

“There you are,” the woman said. “Aren’t these cottages so cozy? When I first told my husband that I’d be happy to stay here forever, he couldn’t believe I was talking about Antarctica. It’s like we’re in a winterland storybook,” she said with a giggle.

“Aren’t you supposed to be in your cottage? Did you see Vinettea’s message?” Noila asked, concerned.

“Oh, those. Yes, well, you see, that happens all the time. I’ve been here for years now. Every time the ice shelf cracks, the Antarcticans go scurrying in every direction, looking for supercooled water to pump up and shoot into the crack so it’ll refreeze and seal the ice shelf into place. From what I gather, they just don’t want anyone roaming around on the streets while they’re mining the water from the wells. It can be dangerous.”

Noila let out a sigh of relief. “Oh, that’s good to know. I just followed what she said.”

“That’s the right thing to do. So can you take a break? I’d love to get to know you better. I’m Florencia.” She pulled off her heavy parka, tucked her heavy black braids back into place, and tugged her sweater down over her waist. It was a traditional American Christmas sweater with snowmen and evergreen trees against a red backdrop. “Do you have anything warm to drink?”

“I’m not sure what’s in the kitchen, but help yourself.” Noila watched her move into the kitchen. Florencia made her at ease immediately, like an old friend who dropped by the neighborhood, the type of friend she had missed for a long time.

Florencia went into the kitchen and pulled some loose tea from the cabinet, dumped it equally into two oversize green mugs, and pressed a button on the cabinet for hot water to fill them to the top. She dropped a filter spoon into each of them, then carefully balanced them and sat down in one of the leather chairs before the fire. She nodded to Noila to sit down, and when Noila obliged, Florencia handed her a mug.

“You have to sip with your teeth to filter out the leaves. It takes a little getting used to, but the tea they stock us up with here is wonderful.” She smiled and took her first sip. “Ah, lovely. Now, Noila, where are you from? I read the roster sheet of what you’ll be working on. You’re taking over for Dr. Cummings. I hope you find your place here—he could never get used to the climate and the distance from his family. I think it’s why he ended up getting sick in the end. But he was a great biologist and came up with some really important conclusions, which I’m sure you’ve read. I hope you can build on that.” Florencia took another sip of her tea.

“Do you want to know where I’m from originally?” Noila asked, backtracking. “Or where I live now?

“I don’t know, whatever you want to share.”

“I grew up in Scottsdale, Arizona.”

Florencia made an expression that showed she didn’t know where that was.

“It’s part of the Phoenix area,” Noila explained, “southwestern United States. In the middle of the Sonoran Desert.”

“Okay, okay, I know Phoenix. Never been there, though.”

What’s your specialty?” Noila asked.

“I’m a chemist. A general sort, no real specialty. Right now I’m working on the bonding agents important for…oh, I won’t bore you with all the details.”

Noila smiled. “How did you end up down here?”

“A bit of bad luck and good timing. Those things generally don’t go together, right?” Florencia smiled, looked up, and shook her head as if she still couldn’t believe it. “I’m originally from Gabon. I was working on a research project, and a plague hit the country. I was infected, along with my entire family. No one knew how it was spreading. People were vomiting one day, and by the end of the week, they were dead. Turned out the vegetables we were eating were stored in a hut that was infested with rats spreading the disease. I thought we would die. The government had set up beds near the sea, mostly so that when the infected died, they could burn our bodies and scatter the ashes in the water. They were very concerned about polluting the land they lived on. Days passed; I was just lying there, listening to my babies cry and the ocean waves lapping at shore. During high tide, when the moon was full, the water would come right up to my bed.

“So many nights I wished the ocean would just take us out, under the bright harvest moon, and give us a peaceful death. Our beds were covered in nets provided by someone. They kept the sun from burning us and bugs from biting us. On the days I was sure I was going to die, I’d insist that they bring me my babies, set my son and my daughter next to me, so I could feel them one last time. On one of those days, I couldn’t feel my legs anymore. I had vomited so many times my mouth bled, and I called to the nurse, ‘Please, my babies, one last time.’ She ignored me, which in my culture is very unusual. I heard the commotion, but I could only see the waves, and then a huge black ship came over the horizon, pointed toward the shore. I was going in and out of consciousness, but the ship appeared as though it had arrived in seconds. Floods of people in tight black suits that covered their whole bodies—face and eyes included—emerged from small ships that hovered above the water where the mother ship had docked. From their suits, they pulled out long black wands that lit up when they waved them close to my body. It was the most calming light. They were talking to each other, but I couldn’t understand their language. Their eyes seemed to glow behind their suits, their wands waving slowly over our bodies. My children stopped crying. Then the people wearing the suits came to me and touched the wand to my arm. I felt small creatures running from the wand to my body. They covered my whole body—my arms, legs, torso, and face. The small creatures settled in, and then my world went silent, black, and still. I was at peace. I heard myself think, but I was sure this was death.” She stopped for a moment to sip her tea and looked away from the fire and to Noila. “You okay?”

Noila, her mouth open, was so captivated by the story that she had forgotten about the cup of tea in her hand. She broke out of her trance. “Uh, yes, wow.” She sipped her tea nervously, forgetting to use her teeth; the leaves swished into her mouth.

“Then I heard a man’s voice,” Florencia continued. “It was the most comforting voice, like the voice of soft Christmas, my grandparents, and warm cookies rolled together. It said, ‘Will you serve me?’ I heard it over and over: ‘Will you serve me?’ I couldn’t understand what he meant or where I was. I figured it was someone in a divine capacity. A normal person doesn’t ask that, right? ‘Will you serve me?’ he kept whispering. His breath was hot in my ear. It was like melted chocolate pouring over rancid meat, wiping away the death around me. As I assembled the words from my decaying body, each letter seemed an effort; I was building a tower of words to reach up to him, to answer his seductive call. ‘Ye-’ was all I could get out. Then I found the ‘s’ a moment later. I remember thinking it was in my thumb, resting, a listless ‘s.’ I reached my inner self toward it, pulled it up through my arm and into my chest, and wriggled it around until it met up with the ‘y’ and the ‘e’ in my throat and chugged ever so slowly like a limping old dog out of my mouth. ‘Yes.’ I heard my babies screaming and air rushing, but I was dying. My soul had uncoupled from my body and was straining to break away from the heavy shell that was just moments away from the great sleep. I couldn’t help my children; they had to endure whatever hardships life was throwing at them, and soon they would be dead too. I felt my lovely children’s souls—we were all slipping from the world.

“Somehow I survived. I spent the next few weeks in silence, a kind of peaceable darkness. I remember thinking somewhere in my mind that a clock was ticking, reminding me that time was passing. The next memory I have is the blackness being pulled back. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was in the
Dragon
’s medical suite. I’d been wrapped in a medical healing suit. My children were playing in a small room next to my bed. When they saw I had woken up, they yelled, ‘Mommy, Mommy.’

“The rest of my time there was a bunch of well-placed meetings, strange coincidences, and offers for work I never would have received had I worked several lifetimes in my field.”

“Sounds familiar,” Noila said. “What happened to your husband and kids?”

“They live here—moved after my first trip down, after I decided I wanted to pursue this work. My husband is a novelist. He can do his writing from anywhere. The twins are learning several languages. Their test scores are off the charts. They never would have received this type of education on the path we were on.”

“So who was asking you to serve him? And what did he mean by it?”

“It was Lucifer. He was asking me to do all of this. Now, how he knew I was a chemist, well, there could be a million ways.”

“And that didn’t freak you out, making a deal with Satan?”

“I hear that a lot from you Americans: Satan this, Satan that. His name might have well been Abassi.”

“Who?”

“Exactly, you don’t know what god that is, and I didn’t know Lucifer was some mythological creature in your religion.”