At the Edge of Waking (6 page)

[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 hoarsely shouting, and the camera turns to her, a tall green figure holding an orange flag, garish among all the white and blue and glass.
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, glass-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 snowshoe-printed ground. The videographer’s clothing rustles against the mic, almost drowning her hoarse 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 glass-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 clusters 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 crevasse. 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.

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 crevasse 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 assault 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.

Brother of the Moon

Our hero wakes in his sister’s bed. Last night’s vodka drains through him in sluggish ebb, leaving behind the silt of hangover, the unbrushed taste of guilt. He rolls onto his stomach, feeling the rumpled bed wallow a little on the last of the alcoholic waves, and opens his eyes. His sister sleeps with her curtains open. The tall window across from the bed is brilliant with a soft spring sunlight that slips past crumbled chimneys and ornate gables to shine on his sister’s hands. She has delicate little monkey’s paws, all tendon and brittle bone, that look even more fragile than usual edged by the morning light. Sitting cross-legged among the rumpled sheets, tough as an underfed orphan in the undershirt and sweatpants she uses as pajamas, our hero’s sister is flipping a worn golden coin. She is a princess. Our hero is a prince.

The coin sparkles in a rising and falling blur. Our hero watches with bemusement and pleasure as his sister’s nimble hands catch the coin, display the winning face, send it spinning and winking through sunlight with the flick of a thumb. Our hero’s sister manipulates the coin, a relic of ancient times, with a skill our hero would never have guessed. It is the skill of a professional gambler who could stack a deck of cards in her sleep, which is mystifying. Our hero’s sister is not the gambling type. Our hero clears a sour vodka ghost from his throat.

“You’re up early.”

The coin blinks at him and drops into his sister’s hand. With her fingers closed around it, she leans over him and kisses his stubbled head.

“You snore.”

“I don’t,” he says. “Are you winning?”

“It keeps coming up kings.” Her monkey’s hands toy with the coin, teasing the golden sunshine into our hero’s eyes. “Who were you with last night?”

Our hero scrubs his tearing eyes with a fold of her sheet. The linen is soft and yellow with age and smells of his sister, comforting. “No one special. No one. I forget.”

His sister’s face is like her hands, delicate, bony, feral. Our hero thinks she’s beautiful, and loves her with the conscious, deliberate tenderness of someone who has lost every important thing but one.

“How do you know I snore?” he says. “You’re the woman who can sleep through bombs.”

This is literal truth. When the New Army was taking the city and the two of them were traveling behind the artillery line, she proved she could sleep through anything. But she says, “Bombs don’t steal the covers,” and since our hero is lying on top of the blanket, fully dressed, with his shod feet hanging off the end of the bed, he understands that she was awakened by something other than him. It troubles him that he cannot guess what might have been troubling her. Or perhaps it is a deeper worry, that he can imagine what it might have been. He stretches out a hand and steals the coin from between her fingers. The gold is as warm and silky as her skin. The face of the king has been the same for five hundred years.

“Granddad,” our hero says ironically.

His sister sighs and stretches out beside him, stroking his head.

“You need to shave,” she says.

People have said they are too close. The new government has cited rumors of incest as one reason to edge our hero out of the public eye. The rumors are false, they have never been lovers. But perhaps it is more honest to say that if they are lovers, they have always been chaste. In any event, they are close. She rubs her palm back and forth across his scalp, and he knows how much she enjoys the feel of stubble just long enough to bend from prickly to soft, because he enjoys it so much himself. Her touch soothes his headache and he is on the verge of dropping off when a van mounted with loudspeakers rolls by in the narrow street below, announcing the retreat of the New Army—the new New Army, our hero thinks, remembering all the friends and rivals who have died—routed from the border in the south. The invasion has begun. Our hero squints to see the losing face of the coin against the mounting sun. The tree and moon of the vanished kingdom has been smoothed into clouds by generations of uncrowned monarchs’ hands.

“One toss,” our hero’s sister says across the echoes of the retreating van. “If it comes up moons, I’ll go.”

A knot of dread squeezes bile into our hero’s throat, but he does as she asks. She is the only person in the world he will obey, not because she rules him, but because he trusts her when he does not himself know what is right. This is often the case these days. Maybe there are no more rights left. Maybe there are only lesser wrongs. He props his head on his fist and flips the coin, catching it in his cupped palm. Moons. He makes a fist before his sister can see, and feels as if he is clenching his hand around his own heart. It’s a dreadful duty, a calamity whichever one of them goes, but he would rather be lost than lose her. Before she can pry his fingers open, he tosses the coin high into the golden light and catches it again with a flourish.

“Kings,” he says. She looks at him, stricken, heart-sick, and he is glad of his lie.

Walking north along the river our hero has the road to himself. No one will evacuate in the advent of this war. It is the last war, the death of the independent state, and in any case, Russia and the West have between them closed the borders: there is nowhere to go. Despite the years of infighting and politics, of failing idealism and the gradual debasement of his figurehead’s throne, our hero still reflects with nostalgic pride on the romanticism and ruthless practicality of the mercenary army-turned-government he and his sister had fought for, legitimized, defended. They had been conquerors and puppets. They had driven the unlikely alchemy that transformed an imposed dictatorship into the last true democracy in the world. They had been used and pushed aside when they were no longer useful, but they had been loyal. This seems odd to our hero as he walks north along the blue river. He has always put his loyalty in the service of necessity, hidden it behind a guise of practicality, and now he has to wonder what moral force, what instinct of worth has shaped the meaning of need. What need—whose need—sends him north, leaving his sister behind to wait for the end alone? He loves her more than ever, and hates her a little for believing his lie and letting him go.

Walking in the sunshine intensifies his hangover thirst. He feels gritty and unkempt, with a sour gut and a spike through his temples, but his worn army boots hug his feet like old friends, and it is good to be on the move, good to have a destination and a goal. He hopes the security service doesn’t give his sister too much grief when they realize he is gone.

There is little traffic after a year of oil embargoes. There are pedestrians, a few horse carts, peasants working their fields with mattock and hoe. Peasants who will watch the invasion on satellite feed, who will email reports to relatives in Frankfurt and London and Montreal, who will tell one another with pride and a languorous despair that they are sticking it out to the end. A young man wearing a billed cap with the logo of an American sports team dips his hand into the bag slung across his back and casts his seed with a sweeping gesture, a generous, open-handed gesture that answers the question
why
with a serene and simple
because.
He pauses between casts to raise his hand to our hero passing on the road. Our hero answers with an abbreviated wave and turns his head away, afraid of being recognized, afraid of being seen with tears in his eyes. Settling into the mud of the ditch between the river and the road lies the burned-out carcass of an army jeep, and there it all is, the present, the future, the past. A blackbird perches on the machine gun mount and sings its three note song. It is an image with all the solace of a graveyard.