The Ice Lovers (32 page)

His needs are equally simple. He needs to be unconfined. He needs no one to have a piece of him. He is interested in other people only in inverse relationship to the extent to which they are interested in him: a simple equation, with perfect symmetry. What he can keep for himself, what he can give away. He is one of those people who will give very little, and for this reason someone or other will always want him.

It is New Year's Day and he goes for a walk on a small crescent beach near his mother's Devon home. He has already decided to return to the Antarctic in February, to finish his fieldwork. Without another two months on base he cannot complete his PhD. An uncompleted PhD means no conferences, post-docs, papers, panels, invitations to speak, no colleagues, no place in the world as a prophet of its disintegration.

It is ten degrees; England is warm now, even in winter, although within ten years the mean temperature could drop ten degrees, plunging the British Isles into its own ice age. This is if the Meridonal Overturning Current – the Gulf Stream – shifts, dislodged by cold fresh water melted from the Greenland Ice Cap. He has seen the models, they mostly agree on this scenario.

For now, he will enjoy this perpetual spring which has replaced their winter. The diluted spring light, the English Channel. The Antarctic feels very far away, now. He has no idea of the drama which is playing out there, for Nara, as he sinks his bare feet into the cold sand on a beach fourteen thousand miles away. He can almost not believe in the Antarctic's existence, as if it is a shape which has been hastily sketched on the globe, an experiment in balancing the symmetry of the planet. Even though he has lived through a winter there – or part of a winter, his mind still skates over the accident – still it is not quite real.

She saw the plane before she heard it, coming at her through an unbroken veil of ice crystals. The sun dimmed and flared in the sky. The lace of ice, dry as dust, filled the air. The sun shone through it, rigid silver pearls of polar sun. She wanted to touch them. She took her hand out of her glove, fingering them. They settled upon her skin, where they melted. Slowly, as if from a long way away, the sensation came to her: her fingertips stung. In another few seconds they would freeze. She put her hand back inside the glove.

Then he is coming toward her and she wants to put her hand out, again: Stop! You're not real! Go away! Then his arms are around her, her cheek thrust into a boiler suit. A cascade of words, all the same: I'm so sorry, sorry, sorry.

She sat down, or collapsed. She got back up again; she was reluctant to stop moving. As long as she kept moving and was under the heat of the sun, her core temperature would stay high enough. She ran in a circle. Her throat was parched. She stopped, and sat down again. The snow was coarse and grainy, it smothered her footsteps. The wind was not wind, but a thousand tiny fiery quartz spears.

The knot in her gut spelled an old word, something to do with sin, with memory. With a vanishing. Light, but within it a black pit, the stone of an olive. Her mind was a curling black bone of treason. She was alone, finally, caught in this bright albedo snare. She saw no aliens, no wolves. Only this rigid God's country spread all around her, its vacant glinting squalor.

Luke – he must be real! – was still saying sorry, sorry, sorry.

A thin curtain of snow crystals blew up all around her. Refracted through the sun they turned blue, and suddenly she saw the sheets of ice all around her as blue, fields and fields of throbbing turquoise, indigo, cerulean: Bluefields.

4

It happens on the sea ice, only twenty kilometres from base. Luke is flying very low, at the lowest threshold of the altimeter, 100 feet, to fix a landing track. They strafe the icefields so that a smoky curtain of ice crystals is blown in their wake.

Nara looks out the window, her face turned away. For the first time since she arrived in the Antarctic, she does not want to see the ice beneath her. She shirks her co-pilot duty, which is to watch out for bird strikes and icebergs.

He is tired and he does not see the nearly invisible silhouette of the iceberg. The plane's skiwheel snags on its top; it is a pinnacle berg, those triangular lumps of weathered ice that look like spinnaker sails.

Of the actual impact, Luke will remember nothing at all, nor of the moment that preceded it, nor the time immediately after. His memory will be erased. Later, he will report to the authorities that the aircraft was destabilised by the berg strike, although very slightly. If he hadn't been coming in to land he would have had the time and room to correct the plane's tilt.

The left wing dips, toward the ice. He corrects it quickly – he is an excellent pilot, no one has better reflexes or judgement – thinking for a moment that it would be all right, but gravity tugs at it again. If he'd had just a little more altitude, he would have recovered the situation. Nara puts her hand out on the console, and this is the last thing he will remember of her, a right hand reaching out toward the altimeter, to steady herself. It is New Year's Day, 2013.

They came for them in the RIBs. It took them two hours to reach the plane, portaging over unstable ice, looking for leads between ice pans. The ice was shifting, blowing in, then blowing out on the Bellingshausen tide. They came for them even though there was no certainty they would all get back; later this is what would impress Luke most, because he knew that in the Antarctic, such missions were not mounted lightly. A few years before a Norwegian man who survived a Twin Otter crash not far from base with only a broken leg was left to freeze to death, because the sea ice was too unstable to rescue him. There was no point in endangering many lives just to save one.

The plane was largely intact. A week later the Navy ship would arrive to salvage the body, winching it up from the ice. Its undercarriage was smashed, but otherwise, not a scratch. Luke had been right in his feeling that no matter what happened, he would always be able to get the plane down, in some form. It would not end in disarray.

He was knocked unconscious by the jolt, but he was only out for ten minutes, he estimated. However long it was, when he came to, Nara was gone.

The Southern Ocean constructed itself piecemeal over 120 million years. Only 38 million years ago the Drake passage appeared, revealing its island archipelago arcing up toward the southern tip of Tierra del Fuego, the land of fire. The protoice sheets of the Antarctic also date from this event. In the early Pliocene, 3 to 4 million years ago, the Antarctic circumpolar current that Nara and Alexander helped study on their journey into the Antarctic by ship that summer stabilised its flow and has not changed much until this day.

The cold current it spawned fanned cold water out to the world's oceans – the Indian, the South Atlantic, the southern Pacific – causing the earth's temperature to plummet. That the early Pliocene was also the date of the onset of the most recent planetary glacial epoch was no accident, Alexander knew; the birth of the Antarctic was in part responsible for the last global freeze.

There is nowhere on earth like the Antarctic, with its consuming vortex, a static frozen whirlpool moored at the bottom of the planet, its weight so heavy that it drags down the magnetic field of the earth, so that the planet is not spherical at all, but pear-shaped. A fulcrum, the coldest place on the planet, far colder than the Arctic. In the Antarctic there is only ice, which makes more ice, and it goes on forever. It is a sinuous, remote, abstract reality. To live there, you have to accept this – that it is not a place, not really part of the world. It is like living in the deep ocean, or on the moon. But also, there is something else, some element of a trick involved. The Antarctic is a hoax, a visual puzzle. It never happened, it does not exist.

PART VIII
Iceblink

1

‘So what do you do, at work?' Helen asked.

‘I make policy.'

She smiled. ‘I know that, but how do you make policy? How does it actually work?'

David drew a breath. ‘Well, it's all a bit mysterious. I spend a lot of time consulting with ministers on – oh, science, resource exploration, territorial claims, military matters, foreign policy. Then we work with lawyers to draft legislation, and go to conferences, and consult with other Antarctic Treaty member states. And then,' he said, shifting in his seat, ‘I do a whole lot of very secret stuff I can't tell you about, or they would shoot me.'

The place has become so familiar to Helen and David, by then, with the low buzz of the squash dispenser and fizz of water boiling in the tea urn, the cans of Nido powdered milk stacked below. On the walls the Antarctic photo gallery: pilots, skidoos, elephant seals. The dog-eared climbing magazines, ten-year-old National Geographics. All this had not changed since Nara's year on base.

They talked more now; in their captivity a new complicity had sprung up between them, more cautious than what they had shared on the ship, yet at least now David spoke with her without those boards nailed across his voice, which simultaneously issued a challenge and refused her entry.

‘What about the future?' she asked.

‘Oh, that. We spend vast amounts of money on the future. Consultants, presentations by scientists – the NASA guys, they're the best – and future scenario modelling. They're by far the most amusing, the scenario people. They show us everything from dystopia to utopia, the whole gamut laid out on the table. They talk about the Icarus scenario, where we all fly too close to the sun, we want everything, we aim too high for a perfect sustainable society, and we fall, scorched by our own ideals. Or the Lame Duck scenario, where resource poverty cripples growth, and the political momentum that's driven the democratic process atrophies, slowly, over the decades. There's another scenario, but I can't remember what it's called, the To Hell in a Hand-Basket scenario, probably.' He laughed. ‘But how much this changes anything, I don't know – all these futures, floating in front of us like ogres – but we have to choose, that's the problem. We have to choose now, how we want the planet to be, in the future, because there is no way back.'

He paused. ‘My brother is one of them, in fact.'

‘What does he do?'

‘He's an economist by training, but these days he tells the future.'

‘How can he do that?'

‘Don't ask me. All I know is that these days banks, governments, the corporate world, they all go to visit Ben and his crystal ball.'

When had he seen Ben last? David realised he couldn't remember. They must have had lunch, sometime around – could it really have been Christmas? He had a vague memory of a tree blinking on and off in the corner, one of those lavishly decorated trees, in what used to be called a Gentleman's Club. Ben looks so young – this is what David kept thinking, over and over, during their conversation that day. He was only thirty-six. Although there was something about his face, his physique, that suggested he might age in giant leaps, the sort of age acceleration seen in presidents and prime ministers made suddenly old by the stress of running the world.

‘Ben took the right route,' he said it absently, so that Helen barely heard him.

‘To what?'

‘To power, I suppose. PPE at Brasenose, an early career internship with the FCO, then the Treasury, then industry. Next up, government.' David rapped the table, hard, with his fingers, startling Helen. ‘I took the back door, as it turned out. I studied history and science. I wanted to be a scientist. But I suppose I knew from the beginning that I didn't have the stamina, the dedication, for research science. But I never really fitted in at the FCO – Ben did – and they just didn't know what to do with me. So they gave me the Polar Regions. Well, I earned it, actually. My name helped, of course.'

‘And how do you want the future to be?' she asked.

‘A version of this, I suppose.' David swept his eyes around the dining room. ‘Little Antarctic bases, recycling their own rubbish, treating their own sewage, desalinating encroaching floodwaters, producing their own entertainment. Victorian pantomimes, burlesques, vaudevilles.' He laughed. ‘This is how we should all be living.'

‘Don't you miss anything from the outside world?'

‘Only friends. Anonymity. Restaurants. I want to go into a restaurant and order something from the menu, something I want, instead of queueing up at the cafeteria like I'm back in university, or in the Army. I miss swimming. Heat. Being able to walk outside with only a shirt on. Not having to wear socks. Travel.'

‘I only ever wanted to live in cities,' she said. ‘I wanted that anonymity, the choice they give you. We can go to this play, or this concert, or this restaurant. The strange thing, we never do. Near the end of our marriage Eric and I never went out. We were always working.'

Eric would prepare his classes, she would go to her job on a daily newspaper, and at night they would sit at separate computers and catch up on their emails. When they ate dinner together the television would be on; they would watch the news, and exchange views about what they saw happening in the world, their alarm growing in concert. Day after day they had seen each other only this way, and in bed – to sleep. For a long time, bed had been only about sleep.

‘Do you love your brother?' she asked.

He looked away. ‘I feel pride, and envy. Mixed together.' He looked back at her. ‘Do you think that's love?' He meant, Is that the answer you were looking for?

The drinks machine switched on, its buzz filling the silence.

They sat back in their respective chairs and allowed their eyes to roam the dining room, the photographs now so familiar: planes landing against a watermelon sunset, Orcas probing the surface with their lapidary heads, skidoos pulling Nansen sledges across a featureless plain of white.

Night gathered outside the window. Helen knew that in some obscure way she would be the Antarctic's prisoner forever now, that a cold fire had been lit inside her. To keep it stoked she would either have to find a way to return, or run the risk of an eternal homesickness by extinguishing it forever.