Lincoln Child: Terminal Freeze

The prayer lasted ten minutes. Then-slowly, carefully-Usuguk moved his wrinkled hand to the next object and began his chant anew.

It took two hours to complete the ceremony. At last, bowing one final time before the figurine, the old man said a parting blessing, then uncrossed his legs and rose painfully to his feet. If all had gone well-if he had performed the atonement prayer in the proper way of his ancestors-the taint would leave them and the Hunter would withdraw his fury. He walked around the fire, first clockwise, then counterclockwise. And then, kneeling before the box, he began to place the objects back inside, beginning with the small figurine.

As he did so, he heard cries from outside the snowhouse: sobs, shrieks, voices raised in despair and lamentation.

He stood quickly, dread pressing upon his heart. He shrugged into the parka, pulled back the caribou skin, and stepped outside. The women were there, tearing their hair and pointing at the sky.

He looked heavenward and groaned. The fear and dread, which had receded in the calming motions of the ceremony, consumed him with redoubled strength. They were back-and worse than the night before. Much worse.

The ceremony had failed.

But now, with a horrible creeping certainty, Usuguk realized something else. This was not the result of anything Nulathe or the others had done. It was not merely the wrath of Kuuk’juag, or some accidental desecration. Only a violation of the most serious of all taboos could cause the kind of spirit fury he now paid witness to. And Usuguk had been warned-as had countless generations before him-what that taboo was.

Not only warned-Usuguk knew. He had seen…

He looked at the women, who were staring back, wild-eyed with apprehension. “Pack what you need,” he told them. “Tomorrow, we head south. To the mountain.”

“Hey, Evan. Lunch?”

Evan Marshall put the ziplock bag aside and stood up, massaging his lower back. He’d spent the last ninety minutes with his face inches above the ground, collecting samples from the glacial sediment, and it took his eyes a moment to adjust. The voice had been Sully’s, and now Marshall made him out: a squat, slightly portly figure in a fur-lined parka, standing, arms crossed, thirty yards up the steep valley. Behind him rose the terminal tongue of the Fear glacier, a rich, mysterious blue riddled with white fracture lines. Large ice boulders lay scattered along its base like so many monstrous diamonds, along with daggerlike shards of ancient lava. Marshall opened his mouth to warn Sully against standing so close: the glacier was as dangerous as it was pretty, since the weather had turned warmer and the ice front was calving off deadly chunks at an unprecedented rate. Then he thought better of it. Gerard Sully was proud of his position as nominal leader and didn’t like being told what to do. Instead, Marshall just shook his head. “I think I’ll pass, thanks.”

“Suit yourself.” Sully turned toward Wright Faraday, the party’s evolutionary biologist, who was busying himself a little downslope. “How’s about it, Wright?”

Faraday glanced up, watery blue eyes oddly magnified behind tortoiseshell frames. A digital camera dangled from a heavy strap around his neck. “Not me,” he said with a frown, as if the thought of stopping to eat in the middle of a workday was somehow heretical.

“Starve yourselves if you want to. Just don’t ask me to bring anything back.”

“Not even a Popsicle?” asked Marshall.

Sully smiled thinly. He was about as short as Napoleon, and radiated a combination of egotism and insecurity that Marshall found especially annoying. He’d been able to put up with it back at the university, where Sully was just one arrogant scientist among many, but up here on the ice-with nowhere to escape-it had grown irksome. Perhaps, he reflected, he should be relieved that their expedition had only a few weeks to play out.

“You look tired,” Sully said. “Out walking again last night?”

Marshall nodded.

“You’d better be careful. You might fall into a lava tube and freeze to death.”

“All right, Mom. I’ll be careful.”

“Or run into a polar bear, or something.”

“That’s all right. I’m starved for some good conversation.”

“It’s no joke, you refusing to carry a gun and all.”

Marshall didn’t like the direction this was leading. “Look, if you run into Ang, tell him I’ve got more samples here for transport back to the lab.”

“I’ll do that. He’ll be thrilled.”

Marshall watched the climatologist make his way carefully past them, down the rubble toward the foot of the mountain and their base. He called it “their base,” but of course it belonged to the U.S. government: officially known as the Mount Fear Remote Sensing Installation and decommissioned almost fifty years ago, it consisted of a low, gray, sprawling, institutional-looking structure, festooned with radar domes and other detritus of the cold war. Beyond it lay a frigid landscape of permafrost and lava deposits spewed ages ago from the mountain’s guts, gullied and split as if the earth had torn itself apart in geologic agony. In many places, the surface was hidden beneath large snowfields. There were no roads, no other structures, no living things. It was as hostile, as remote, as alien as the moon.

He stretched as he looked out over the forbidding landscape. Even after four weeks on-site, it still seemed hard to believe that anyplace could be so barren. But then the entire scientific expedition had seemed a little unreal from the start. Unreal that a media giant like Terra Prime had picked their grant applications for approval: four scientists from Northern Massachusetts University with nothing in common save an interest in global warming. Unreal that the government had given them clearance to use Fear Base, admittedly at significant expense and with strict limitations. And unreal that the warming trend itself was occurring with such breathtaking, frightening speed.

He turned away with a sigh. His knees hurt from hours of crouching over the terminal moraine, collecting samples. His fingertips and nose were half frozen. And to add insult to injury, the snow had turned to thin freezing sleet that was now slowly seeping through three layers of clothing and settling into the most intimate crevices of his person. But daylight was brief these days, and their expedition’s window was fast closing. He was keenly aware of how little time he had left. There would be plenty of food back in Woburn, Massachusetts, and plenty of time to eat it.

As he turned to retrieve the sample bags, he heard Faraday speak again. “Five years ago, even two, I’d never believe it. Rain. ”

“It’s not rain, Wright. It’s sleet.”

“Close enough. Rain in the Zone, with winter coming on? Unbelievable.”

The “Zone” was a vast stretch of northeastern Alaska, hard against the Arctic Ocean, sandwiched between the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge on one side and the Yukon ’s Ivvavik National Park on the other. It was a tract so cold and desolate that nobody wanted anything to do with it: temperatures struggled to get above zero only a few months out of the year. Years ago, the government branded it the Federal Wilderness Zone and promptly forgot all about it. There were, Marshall reflected, probably no more than two dozen people in all its two million acres: their own scientific team of five, the base’s skeleton crew of four, a small band of Native Americans to the north, and a scattering of backpackers and loners who were too hard-core or eccentric to settle for anything but the most remote. How strange to think there were few people farther north on the planet than their little group.