New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird Part 32

A lower angle. [Pause, zoom in, zoom out.] These shapes swirl through the ice like bubbles in an ice cube, subtle in the depths. Ice formations, Miguel said. Ice of a different consistency, a different density? Ice is ice, water molecules shaped into a lattice of extraordinary strength and beauty. The lattice under pressure doesn't change. Deep ice is only different because air has been forced out, leaving the lattice pristine. So what is this? The camera's focus draws back. They're still there, vast shapes in the ice. The wind bl.u.s.ters against the mic.

[blip]

The floor of the creva.s.se-not that a berg creva.s.se has a floor. There's no mountain down there, only water three degrees above freezing. But the crack narrows and is choked with chunks of ice and packed drifts of snow, making a kind of bottom, though a miserable one to negotiate on foot. The camera swings wildly as the videographer flails to keep her balance. Blue ice walls, white ice rubble, a flash of red-Cutter's frozen blood on an ice tusk not too far away.

[blip]

A still shot at last. A smooth shard of ice as big as a man, snow-caked except where Del is sweeping it clear with his ax handle. It could be, he says panting, or part of one. My own voice, sounding strange as it always does on the wrong side of my eardrums: So it broke out when the creva.s.se formed? Del polishes the ice with his mitts. The camera closes in on his hands, the clear ice underneath his palms. It is ice. The videographer's hand reaches into the frame to touch the surface. Ice, impossibly coiled like an angular ammonite sh.e.l.l.

November 15: Del and I hauled the ice-shape up in the rescue sled as if it was another body, but by the time we had it at the surface the constant westerly, always strong, was getting stronger, and Miguel was urgent about battening down the camp. We'd been lazy, seduced by the rare summer sun, and now, with clouds piling up into the blue sky, we had to cut snow blocks and pile them into wind breaks-and never mind the b.l.o.o.d.y huts that should have been set up first thing. Saw blocks of Styrofoam-like snow, pry them out of the quarry, stack them around the tents and gear, all the time with the wind heaving you toward the east, burning your face through your balaclava, slicing through every gap in your clothes. The snow that cloaks the upper surface of the berg blows like a hallucinatory haze, a Dracula mist that races, hissing in fury, toward the east. It scours your weather gear, would scour your flesh off your bones if you were mad enough to strip down.

The bright tents bob and s.h.i.+ver. McMurdo's satellite relay station on its strut-and-wire tower whines and howls and thrums-Christ, that's going to drive me mad. Clouds swallow the sun, the distant water goes a dreadful shade of gray. And this isn't a spell of bad weather, this is the norm. Cherish those first sunny days, we tell each other, huddled in the big tent with our mugs of instant cocoa. Summer or not, this gray howling beast of a wind is here to stay. Andy uplinks on her laptop, downloads the s.h.i.+pping advisories, such as they are for this empty bit of sea. There are deep-sea fis.h.i.+ng boats out here, a couple of research vessels, the odd navy s.h.i.+p, but the Southern Ocean is huge and traffic is spa.r.s.e. We joke about sending a Mayday-engine failure! we're adrift!-but in fact we're a navigation hazard, and the sobering truth is that if it came down to rescue, we could only be picked up by helicopter: there's no disembarking from the tall rough ice-cliffs that form our berg-s.h.i.+p's hull. And land-based helos have a very short flight range indeed.

Like most sobering truths, this one failed to sober us. Castaways on our drifting island, we turned the music up loud, played a few hands of poker, told outrageous stories, and went early to bed, worn out with the hard work, the cold, the wind. And for absolutely no reason I thought, with Del puffing his silent snores in my ear, We're too few, we're going to hate each other by the end. And then I thought of Cutter lying cold and lonesome in the snow.

November 16: Another work day, getting the huts up in the teeth of the wind. Miguel, sailor to his bones, is a fanatic for organization. I'm not, except for my climbing gear, but I know he's right. We need to be able to find things in an emergency. More than that, we need to keep sane and civilized, we need our private s.p.a.ces and our occupations. We also need to keep on top of the observations we promised McMurdo if we want to keep their good will-more important than ever with Cutter dead-which was my excuse for dragging Andy away from camp while the men argued about how to stash the crates. Visibility wasn't bad and we laid our first line of flags from the camp to the berg's nearest edge. Waist-high orange beacons, they snapped and chattered in our wake.

Berg cliffs are insanely dangerous because bergs don't mildly dwindle like ice cubes in a G&T. They break up as they melt, softened chunks dropping away from the chilled core, mini-bergs calving off the wallowing parent. All the same, the temptation to look off the edge was too powerful, so we sidled up to it and peered down to where the blue-white cliff descended into the water and became a brighter, sleeker blue. The water was clearer than you might suppose, and since we were on the lee edge there wasn't much surf. We looked down a long way. Andy grabbed my arm. "Look!" she said, but I was already pulling out the camera.

[Tight focus only seems to capture the water's surface. As the angle widens the swimming shadows come into view.]

Deep water is black, so the shapes aren't silhouettes, they're dim figures lit from above, their images refracted through swirling water. Algae grows on ice, krill eat the algae, fish eat the krill, sharks and whales and seals and squids and penguins and G.o.d knows what eat the fish. G.o.d knows what. The mic picks up me and Andy arguing over what we're seeing. They move so fluidly they must be seals, I propose, seals being the acrobats of the sea. Could be dolphins, Andy counters, but when the camera lifts to the farther surface [when I, for once, take my eyes off the view screen and look unmediated] we see no mammal snouts lifting for air. Sharks, I say, but sharks don't coil and turn and dive, smooth and fluid as silk scarves on the breeze, do they? Giant squid, Andy says, and the camera's focus tightens, trying to discern tentacles and staring eyes. Gray water, blue-white ice. Refocus. The dim shapes are gone.

November 17: The huts are up and we sent a ridiculously expensive email to our sponsors, thanking them for the luxuries they provided: chairs, tables, insulated floors-warm feet-bliss. Andy uploaded our carefully edited log to our website while she was online, saying that Cutter had been hurt in a climbing mishap and was resting. We'd agreed on this lie-having failed to report his death immediately, there seemed no meaningful difference between telling his folks days or months late-but once it was posted I realized, too late, what we were in for. Not just hiding his death, but faking his life, his doings, his messages to his family. "We can't do this," I said, and Andy met my eyes, agreeing.

"Too late," Del said.

"No," Andy said. "We'll say he died tomorrow."

"We can't leave now," said Miguel. "We just got set up."

"We can't do this," I said again. "Him dying is one thing. Faking him being still alive is unforgivable. Andy's right. We have to say he died tomorrow."

"They'll pull us off," said Del.

"Who will?" I said, because we're not really under anyone's jurisdiction. "Listen, if his folks want to pay for a helo to come out from McMurdo-"

"We're too far," Andy said, "it'd have to be a navy rescue."

"They can get his body now or wait until we're in shouting distance of New Zealand," I said. "If we upload the video-"

"We can't make a show of it!" Miguel said.

"Why not?" Del said. "It's what people want to see."

"We can send it to the Aussies," I said, "to show how he died. It was a climbing accident, no crime, no blame. If they want the body, they can have it."

Del was convinced that someone-who? the UN?-was going to arrest us and drag us off for questioning, but I just couldn't see it. Someone's navy hauling a bunch of Commonwealth loonies off an iceberg at gunpoint because a climber died doing something rash? No. The Australians wouldn't love us, G.o.d knows Cutter's parents wouldn't, but n.o.body was going to that kind of effort, expense, and risk for us.

"So why the f.u.c.k didn't you say so two days ago?" Del said to me.

"Well," I said, "my friend had just died and I wasn't thinking straight. How about you?"

[The camera's light is on, enhancing the underwater glow of the blue four-man tent.]

The coiled ice-shape gleams as if it were on the verge of melting, but the videographer's breath steams in the cold. The videographer [me] is fully dressed in cold-weather gear, a parka sleeve moving in and out of view. The camera circles the ice-shape in a slow, uneven pan [me inching around on my knees] and you can see that the shape isn't a snail-sh.e.l.l coil, it's more like a 3D Celtic knot, where only one line is woven through so many volutions that the eye is deceived into thinking the one is many. The camera rises [me getting to my feet] and takes the overview. There, not quite at center, like a yoke in an egg: the heart of the knot. What? The camera's focus narrows. In the gleaming gla.s.s-blue depths of the ice, an eye opens. An eye as big as my fist, translucent and alien as a squid's. The camera's view jolts back [me falling against the tent wall] and only the edge of the frame catches the fluid uncoiling of the ice shape, a motion so smooth and effortless it's as though we're underwater. The camera's frame falls away, dissolves, and then there's only me in the blue-lighted tent, me with this fluid alien thing swirling around me like an octopus in a too-small aquarium, opening its limbs for a swift, cold embrace- [And I wake, sweating with terror, to see Del twitching in his dreams.]

November 18: Cutter died again today. We sent the video file (lacking its final seconds) to our Australian sponsors, asking them to break the news to Cutter's family. Andy wrote a beautiful letter from all of us, mostly a eulogy I guess, talking about Cutter and what it was like to be here now that he was dead. She did a brilliant job of making it clear that we were staying without making us sound too heartless or shallow. So this is us made honest again, and somehow I miss Cutter more now, as though until we told the outside world his death hadn't quite been real. I keep thinking, I wish he was here-but then I remember that he is, outside in the cold. Maybe I'll go keep him company for a while.

[The laptop screen is brighter than the plastic windows of the hut, the image perfectly clear.]

The camera jogs to the videographer's footsteps, the mic picks up the Styrofoam squeak-crunch of snowshoes. There's the team on the move, two bearded men and a lanky woman taller than either, in red and blue and green parkas, gaudy against the drifting snow. The camera stops for a circle pan: gray sky, white surface broken into cracks and tilting slabs. Blown snow swirls and hisses; a line of orange flags snaps and shudders in the wind. The videographer [me] sways to the gusts, or the ice-island flexes as it spins across its watery dance floor. Full circle: the three explorers up ahead now, the one in green reaching into the snow-haze to plant more flags.

[blip]

Broken ice terrain, the sound of panting breath. Atlantis as a glacier once traveled some of the roughest volcanic plains on the planet, and these fault-lines show how rough it was, the ice all but shattered here. You have to wonder how long it's going to hold together. Hey! The explorer in blue gives a sweeping wave. You guys! You have to see this! Shaky movement over tilted slabs of ice, a lurch- [blip]

A creva.s.se, not so deep as the one near camp, with the shape of a squared-off comma. In the angle, ice pillars stand almost free of the walls. Blue-white ice rough with breakage. Slabs caught in the creva.s.se's throat.

[Miguel, watching at my shoulder, says, "That's not what we saw. You know that's not what we saw!"]

November 20: Miguel keeps playing the video of today's trek. Over and over, his voice shouts You have to see this! through the laptop's speakers. Over and over. Del's so fed up with it he's gone off to our hut and I'm tempted to join him, but it's hard to tear myself away. Andy isn't watching anymore, but she's still in the main hut, listening to our voices-hushed, strained, hesitant with awe-talk about the structures (buildings? vehicles? Diving platforms, Andy's voice speculates) that the camera stubbornly refused to record. At first I thought Miguel was trying to find what we saw in the camera images of raw ice, but now I wonder if what he's really trying to do is erase his memory and replace it with the camera's. I finally turned away and booted my own computer, opening the earlier files of the first ice-shapes I found. Still there? Yes. But now I wonder: could they be natural formations?

Could we be so shaken up by Cutter's death that we're building a shared fantasy of the bizarre?

I don't believe that. We've all been tested, over and over, on mountains and deserts, in ocean deeps and tiny boats out in the vast Pacific. Miguel's told his stories about the mind-companions he dreamed up in his long, lonely journey, about how important they became to him even though he always knew they were imaginary. I've been in whiteouts where the hiss of blowing snow conjures voices, deludes the eyes into seeing improbable things. Once, in the Andes, Cutter and I were huddled back-to-back, wrapped in survival blankets, waiting for the wind to die and the visibility to increase beyond two feet, and I saw a bus drive by, a big diesel city bus. I had to tell Cutter what I was laughing about. He thought I was nuts.

So we've all been there, and though we all know what kinds of crazy notions people get when they're pushed to extremes-I've heard oxygen-starved climbers propose some truly lunatic ideas when they're tired-we aren't anything close to that state. Fed, rested, as warm as could be expected . . . No.

But if we all saw what we think we saw, then why didn't the camera see it too?

[Bubbles rise past the camera's lens. The mic catches the gurgle of the respirator, the groaning of the iceberg, the science fiction sound effects of Weddell seals.]

The camera moves beneath a cathedral ceiling of ice. Great blue vaults and gla.s.sy pillars hang above the cold black deeps, sanctuary for the alien life forms of this bitter sea. Fringed jellies and jellies like winged cuc.u.mbers, huge red shrimp and tiny white ones, skates and spiders and boney fish with plated jaws. Algae paints the ice with living glyphs in murky green and brown, like lichen graffiti scrawled on a ruin's walls. Air, the alien element, puddles on the ceiling, trapped. The water seems clear, filled with the haunting light that filters through the ice, but out in the farther reaches of the cathedral the light turns opaquely blue, the color of a winter dusk, and below there is no light at all. Bubbles spiral upward, beads of mercury that pool in the hollows of the cathedral ceiling, forming a fluid air-body that glides along the water-smoothed ice. It moves with all the determination of a living thing, seeking the highest point. [The camera follows; bubbles rise; the air-creature grows.] The ceiling vault soars upwards, smeared with algae [zoom in; does it shape pictures, words?] and full of strange swimming life [are there shadows coiling at the farthest edges of the frame?], and it narrows as it rises to a rough chimney. Water has smoothed this icy pa.s.sage, sculpted it into a flute, a flower stem . . . a birth ca.n.a.l. The air-body takes on speed, rising unenc.u.mbered into brighter and brighter light. The upward pa.s.sage branches into tunnels and more air-bodies appear, as shapeless and fluid as the first. Walls of clear ice are like windows into another frozen sea where other creatures hang suspended, clearer than jellyfish and more strange. And then the camera [lens streaked and running with droplets] rises from the water [how?], ascending a rough crevice in the ice. The air-bodies, skinned in water-or have they been water all along?-are still rising too, sliding with fluid grace through the ice-choked cracks in the widening pa.s.sage. [The videographer sliding through too: how?] The host seeks out the highest places and at last comes up into the open air-ice still rising in towering walls but with nothing but the sky above. Gray sky, blue-white ice, a splash of red. What is this? Fluid, many-limbed, curious, the water-beings flow weightlessly toward the splash of scarlet [blood]. They taste [blood], absorb [blood], until each gla.s.sy creature is tinted with the merest thread of red.

[And I close the file, my hands shaking as if with deadly cold, because these images are impossible. I'm awake, and my camera shows battery drain, and none of us, not even Andy, came prepared to dive in this deadly sea.]

November 22: Miguel watched the impossible video and then walked out of the tent without a word. Andy sat staring at the blank screen, arms wrapped tight around her chest. And after a long silence, Del said calmly, "Nice effects." I knew what he meant-that I was hoaxing them, or someone was hoaxing me-but I can't buy it. Even if any of us had the will we don't have the expertise. We're explorers, not CG f.u.c.king animators. And who made us see what we saw in that inland creva.s.se? Who's going to make the evidence of that disappear on the one hand, and then fake a school of aliens on the other?

"Aliens," Andy said, her face blank and her eyes still fixed on the screen. "Aliens? No. They belong here. They're the ones that belong."

"Hey," I said, not liking the deadness in her tone. "Andy."

"Screw this," Del said, and he left too.

Miguel's not in camp. It took us far too long to realize it, but we spent most of the day apart, Andy in her hut, Del in ours, me in the big one brooding over my video files. We left the tents up for extra retreat/storage/work s.p.a.ces and Miguel could have been in one of them-Andy a.s.sumed he was, since he wasn't in the hut they share-but when Del finally pulled us together for a meal we couldn't find him. And the wind is rising, howling through the satellite relay station's struts and wires-wires that are growing white with ice. The wind has brought us a freezing fog that reeks of brine. If it were Del out there I could trust him to hunker down and wait for the visibility to clear, but does Miguel the sailor have that kind of knowledge? We all did the basic survival course at McMurdo, but the instructors knew as well as Del and I that there's a world of difference between knowing the rules and living them. The instinct in bad weather is to seek shelter, and G.o.d knows it's hard to trust to a reflective blanket thin enough to carry in your pocket. But it's worse not to be able to trust your comrade to do the smart thing. We're all angry at Miguel, even Andy. He's put us all at risk. Because of course we have to go and find him.

November 24: We're back. McMurdo's relay station is an ice sculpture and our sat phone, even with its own antenna, isn't working. I don't know what we're going to do.

We went after Miguel, the three of us roped up and carrying packs. Our best guess was that he'd gone back to the creva.s.se where we saw, or didn't see, the buildings, structures, vehicles-whatever they were in the ice. So we followed the line of orange flags inland. Standing by one you could see the next, and barely discern the next after that, which put the visibility roughly at 6 meters. But with the icy fog blasting your face and your breath fogging up your goggles, the world contracts very quickly to within the reach of your arms. Walking point is hard, but it's better than shuffling along at the end of the rope, fighting the temptation to put too much trust in a tiring leader. I was glad when Del let me up front after the first hour. Andy, who has the least experience with this kind of weather, stayed between us, roped to either end.

A long hike in bad weather. The sun, already buried behind ugly clouds, grazed the horizon, and the day contracted to a blue-white dusk. We huddled in a circle, knee-to-knee, with our packs as a feeble windbreak. I fell into a fugue state. The blued-out haze went deep and cold and still, like water chilled almost to the point of freezing. The wind was so constant it no longer registered; the hiss of it against our parkas became the hiss of water pressure on my ears. And the whiteout began to build its illusions. Walls rose in the haze, weirdly angled, impossibly over-hung. Strange voices mouthed heavy, bell-like, underwater sounds. Something ma.s.sive seemed to pa.s.s behind me without footsteps, its movement only stirring the water-air like a submarine cutting a wake. No different than the bus I saw on that Andean mountain, except that Andy jerked against me while Del muttered a curse.

And then the ground moved.

Ground: the packed snow and ice we sat upon. It gave a small buoyant heave, making us all gasp, and then shuddered. A tremor, no worse than the one I'd sat through when I was visiting Andy in Wellington, but at that instant all illusion that Atlantis was an island died. This was an iceberg, already melting and flawed to its core, and there was nothing below it but the ocean. Another small heave. Stillness. And then a sound to drive you insane, a deep immense creaking moan that might have come from some behemoth's throat. I grabbed for Del. Andy grabbed for me.

The ice went mad.

We were shaken like rats in a terrier's mouth. The toe spikes on someone's snowshoes, maybe my own, gouged me in the calf. I didn't even notice it at the time. We lurched about, helpless as pa.s.sengers in a falling plane, and all the time that unG.o.dly noise, hugely bellowing, tugged at flesh and bone. I knew for a certainty that Atlantis was breaking up and that we were all already dead, just breathing by reflex for a few seconds more. I flashed on Cutter falling, knowing he was dead long before he hit the ground. I was glad we'd told his folks, glad Andy had sent that beautiful letter, eulogy for us all. And then the ice went still.

I lay a moment, hardly noticing the tangle we were in, my whole being focused on that silence. Quiet, quiet, like the final moment in free fall, the last timeless instant before the bottom. But it stretched on, and on, and finally we all picked ourselves up, still unable to believe we were alive. "Jesus," Del said, and I had to laugh.

We went on, me in the middle this time because of my limp, with Andy bringing up the rear. Tossed around as we had been, none of us was sure of our directions, and because of the berg's motion GPS and compa.s.s were both useless. Blown snow and fog-ice erased our footprints as well as Miguel's. In the end all we could do was follow the line of flags in the direction of our best guess and resolve that if it led us back to camp, we would turn and head straight back out again. I was feeling Miguel's absence very much by then, so much so that a fourth figure haunted the edges of my vision, teasing me with false presence. But maybe that was Cutter, not Miguel.

Flags lay scattered among huge tilted slabs of packed snow. We replanted the slender poles as best we could, and by this time I was starting to hope we had been turned around and were heading back to camp. If the berg-quake had scattered the whole line of flags they were likely to be buried by the time we turned around, and if they were, we were screwed. But we couldn't do anything but what we were already doing. We clambered through the broken ice field, hampered by the rope between us and already tired from the wind. Del got impatient and Andy snapped that she was doing the best she could. "You're fine," I said. "Del, ease off." He went silent. We re-roped and I took point, limp and all.

Spires of ice rose like jagged minarets above the broken terrain. Great pillars, crystalline arches, thin translucent walls. Scrambling with my eyes always on the next flag, I took the ice structures for figments of the whiteout at first, but then we were in among them and the wind died into fitful gusts. The line of flags ended, irredeemably scattered, unless this was its proper end and the former creva.s.se was utterly transformed. It was beautiful. Even exhausted and afraid I could see that, and while Andy shouted for Miguel and Del hunkered over our packs digging out the camp stove and food, I pulled out my camera.

[Digital clarity is blurred by swirling fog. Yet the images are unmistakable, real.]

Crystalline structures defy any sense of scale. This could be a close-up of the ice-spray caught at the edge of a frozen stream, strands and whorls of ice delicate as sugar tracery, until the videographer turns and gets a human figure into the frame. The man in red bends prosaically over a steaming pot, apparently oblivious to the white fantasia rising up all around him. The mic picks up the sound of a woman's voice hoa.r.s.ely shouting, and the camera turns to her, a tall green figure holding an orange flag, garish among all the white and blue and gla.s.s. Andy, says the videographer. Hush a minute, listen for an answer. The human sounds die, there's nothing but the many voices of the wind singing through the spires. A long slow pan then: pillars, walls, streets-it's impossible not to think of them that way. A city in the ice. An inhuman city in the ice.

Movement.

The camera jerks, holds still. There's a long, slow zoom, as though it's the videographer rather than the lens that glides down the tilt-floored icy avenue. [The static fog drifting, obscuring the distant view.] Maybe that's all the movement is, sea-fog and wind swirled about by the sharp, strange lines of the ice-structures. [The wind singing in the mic, gla.s.s-toned, dissonant.] But no. No. It's clarity that swirls like a current of air-like a many-limbed being with a watery skin-gliding gravity-less between the walls, in and out of view. [Pause. Go back. Yes. A shape of air. Zoom. A translucent eye. Zoom. A vast staring eye.]

The camera lurches. The image dives to the snow-shoe-printed ground. The videographer's clothing rustles against the mic, almost drowning her hoa.r.s.e whisper. We have to get out of here. Guys! We need to- We roped Miguel between Del and me, with Andy again bringing up the rear. It was an endless hike, the footing lousy, the visibility bad, all of us hungry and aching for a rest. Del tried to insist that we eat the instant stew he'd heated before we left, but I was seeing transparent squids down every street, and when Miguel stumbled out of the ice, crooning wordlessly to the wind even as he clutched at Andy's hands, Del let himself be outvoted. "This is how climbers die," he said to me, but I said to him, "If you're on an avalanche slope you move as fast and as quietly as you can, no matter how hungry or tired you are." Death is here: I wanted to say it, and didn't, and while I hesitated the silence filled with the gla.s.s-harmonica singing of the wind-with Miguel's high crooning, which was the same, the very same. So I didn't need to say it. We followed the broken line of scattered flags back to camp.

And now I sit here typing while the others sleep (Miguel knocked out by pills), and I look up and see what I should have seen the instant we staggered in the door. All of our gear, so meticulously sorted by Miguel, is disarranged. Not badly-we surely would have noticed if shelves were cleared and boxes emptied on the floor-but neat stacks and rows have become cl.u.s.ters and piles, chairs pushed into the table are pulled askew, my still camera and its cables are out of its bag my hands are shaking as I type this there's a draft the door is closed the windows weatherproofed I'm pretending I don't notice but there's a draft moving behind me through the room November 25: I took my ax to the tent where we still kept the ice-shape Del and I brought up from the bottom of the creva.s.se. I was past exhaustion, spooked, halfway crazy. It was just a lump of ice. I took my ax to it, expecting it to bleed seawater, rise up in violent motion, fill the tent with its swirling arms. I swung again and again, flailing behind me once when paranoia filled the tent with invisible things. Ice chipped, shattered. Shards stung my wind-burned face. The noise woke Del in our hut nearby. He came and stopped me. There was no shape left, just a scarred hunk of ice. Del took the ax out of my hand and led me away, gave me a pill to let me sleep like Cutter. I mean, like Miguel. I'm still doped. Tired. I can feel them out there in the wind.

The relay tower is singing outside.

November 27: The ice is always shaking now. New spires lean above our snow wall, mocking our defenses. Miguel cries and shouts words we can't understand, words so hard to say they make him drool and choke on his tongue. The wind sings back whenever he calls. The sat phone has given nothing but static until today when it, too, sang, making Del throw the handset to the floor. The radio only howls static. The fog reeks of dead fish, algae, the sea. Everything is rimed in salt ice. Andy hovers over Miguel, trying to make him take another pill: Del threatened him with violence if he doesn't shut up. I grabbed Del, dragged him to a chair, hugged him until he gave in and pulled me to his lap. We're here now, all four of us together. None of us can bear to be alone.

November 28: A new creva.s.se opened in the camp today, swallowing two tents and making a shambles of the snow wall. Is this an attack? Our eviction notice, Andy says, humor her badge of courage. But I wonder if they even notice us, if they even care. Atlantis is theirs now, and I suppose it always has been, through all those long cold ages at the heart of the southern pole. Now the earth is warming, the ancient ice is freed to move north, to melt-and then what? What of this ice city growing all around us like a crystal lab-grown from a seed? If the clues they've given us (deliberately? I do wonder) are true, then they are beings of water as much as of ice. It won't happen quickly, but eventually, as the berg travels north out of the Southern Ocean and into the Atlantic or Pacific, it will all melt. Releasing . . . what? . . . into the warming seas of our world. Our world is an ocean world, our over-burdened continents merely islands in the vast waters of misnamed Earth. What will become of us when they have reclaimed their world?

Del and Andy, in between increasingly desperate attempts to bring our sailor Miguel back from whatever alien mindscape he's lost in, are concocting a scheme to get our inflatable lifeboat, included in our gear almost as a joke, down the ice cliffs to the water. Away from here, they reason, we should be able to make the sat phone work, light the radio beacon, call in a rescue. I have a fantasy-or did I dream it last night?-that the singing that surrounds us, stranger than the songs of seals or whales, has reached into orbit, filling satellite antenna-dishes the way it fills my ears, drowning human communication. I imagine that the first careless a.s.sault on human civilization has already begun, and that the powers-the human powers-of Earth are looking outward in terror, imagining an attack from the stars, never dreaming that it is already here, has always been here, now waking from its ice-bound slumber. It is we who have warmed the planet; we, perhaps, who have brought this upon ourselves. But brought what, I wonder? And when Andy appeals to me to help her and Del with their escape plan, I find I have nothing much to say. But I suppose I will have to say it before long: why should we leave-should we leave-just when things are getting interesting?

Get beyond it, I'll have to tell them, as I did when Cutter died. We have to look beyond.

In the meantime, though, I'll make a couple of backups, downloading this log and my video files onto flash drives that will fit into a waterproof container. My message in a bottle. Just in case.

My memories are very confused. . . .These cycles of experience, of course, all stem from that worm-riddled book. I remember when I found it . . . it fell open toward the end and gave me a glimpse of something which sent my senses reeling . . .

"The Book" H.P. Lovecraft.

(unfinished story, first published posthumously 1938).

* THE GREAT WHITE BED *

Don Webb.

I wanted to write about the bed because I thought it would be therapeutic. For pretty obvious reasons I never got over that summer, and I know there's a mental part to go along with the physical part. I don't write about the book. And see, I'm already there. I can't make myself think about what I need to think about. The room. The bedroom. I can start with that. It smelled of geraniums. My grandmother had loved them and it had become my job to keep them alive after she died. She grew them in coffee cans, and when they got too root-bound she would put them in plastic buckets that she got working at the cleaners. Clay pots were an extravagance. There were five of the big light blue buckets on a special shelf built across the windows in the bedroom, so the bedroom always had a green smell.

It was hot too. There were two swamp coolers that cooled the house down. One in the living room at the front of the house, one in the den in the back. Neither supplied much cool air to the place where I slept. I remember the first thing that Grandpa had asked when I moved in with him that summer was if I wanted to sleep with him. I thought that was creepy and I said I'd sleep in the guest bedroom, where Granny did her sewing. It was so hot that I never turned down the big white thick bedspread on the bed and lay on the sheets. I just lay on top of it. I didn't want anything over my body. At home I slept on a twin bed; the king size bed seemed the biggest thing in the world to me.

I was thirteen. Next year would be junior high.

I helped Grandpa out. I cooked his meals, did his laundry, cut the gra.s.s. In retrospect it was a big job for someone my age, but I came from a family of workers. I didn't do a good job with the laundry and my food repertoire relied heavily on Spam baked in the oven covered with ketchup.

My friends were rich kids, mainly in camp or hanging out at the private swimming pool. These days I know they weren't rich, but they seemed rich to me. I amused myself with TV, watching old black and white comedies in syndication. I remember that summer had a good dose of The d.i.c.k Van d.y.k.e Show mixed up with the strangeness. Cable TV was new to Doublesign that year. We got twenty-eight stations. Grandpa would get up early and wake me up. He had been a farmer, before they moved to town. Kids are not supposed to see the dawn in summer, no matter what anyone says. He liked cereal for breakfast. He really liked one called Team, I don't think they make it anymore. He would make coffee and I would pour the cereal. Afterward he would go off to read the paper and I would do the dishes. If I had any yard work to do I would do it in the mornings before it got too hot. I trimmed the hedge, cut the gra.s.s, weeded out the dandelions. Early on I had tried to keep a little garden going. I had planted some tomatoes and cuc.u.mbers. But one day Grandpa weeded them all out of the bed where I had planted them. His mind was going, but no one in the family would say so. When I tried to stop him he hit me with his cane and said I was stupid. Like I say, even without the weirdness, it was a big job.

Noon would come around and Mom would join us for lunch, which I had made. She worked downtown, a mysterious place full of much activity. She would eat my ketchup-covered Spam and canned green beans and visit with her dad. Sometimes he would ask her things like "How come I haven't seen you in a month?" even though she came every day. In the afternoons he would forget that we had eaten lunch and ask me when the h.e.l.l I was going to fix it. He took a nap about three, and I know this will sound strange, but I started napping too. Summer was long and boring and it was easy to doze off. I would lay down in the green smell on the huge white bed and snooze.

School had been out about three weeks, when I woke one day to seeing Grandpa reading the book. I always took shorter naps than him so I was startled he was up. I went in the living room. He sat in his rocking chair and even though the light streaming in through the picture window lighted the room, he had Grandmother's prize lamp turned on. I loved that lamp. It had two globes, one above and one below. Someone had painted a rose on each globe. I wonder who has it now.

The book was small and thick-about the size of a Stephen King paperback. It was bound in gold-colored leather, and had a green nine-angled design on its cover. I don't want to say more about it. I didn't mean to say that much.

Grandpa was totally absorbed, his lips moving slowly. I had only seen him with a few Reader's Digests over the years. His concentration had been slipping so much since Granny died I didn't know how he could be reading. I guessed he probably wasn't. Just distracting himself. I was always in favor of his distractions. He didn't get mad at me and I didn't have to think up things to talk about. It was a lot easier cutting his lawn than coming up with discussion topics.

I made macaroni and cheese plus canned yams for dinner. I didn't disturb him until I had food on his plate. He came in, we said our prayers, and afterward we watched the six o'clock news. We watched TV together every night. He would fall asleep about eight. I would get him up and tell him to undress about ten.

The next day I had a pleasant surprise. Sunlight woke me, not Grandpa. I got up, pulled on my clothes, and found him reading again.

"Hey, you ready for breakfast?" I asked.

"You bet," he said.

His eyes had the s.h.i.+ne they used to have when I was a little kid. He got up out of his chair and told me, "You know, I think you're old enough to have coffee now."

He put a great deal of sugar and milk in my coffee. I loved it and I still do. We ate our cereal in our usual crunchy silence, until curiosity got the better of me.

"What's that book you're reading?"

He looked at me as though I had said something very strange, like, "Are we going to the moon this afternoon?" He said, "I'm not reading anything."

"Not now. I meant just before breakfast."

"I wasn't reading anything."

The light went out of his eyes just as though someone had hit the switch.