Dan Simmons - The Terror

“Oh,” said Cornelius Hickey.

It was the last word that Hickey ever spoke, but it was not so much a word as a single, long, terrified, speechless exhalation. Hickey felt his own last warm breath flowing out of him, out from his chest, up his throat, out through his open and straining mouth, hissing away between his shattered teeth, but instantly he realized it was not his breath leaving him forever, but his spirit, his soul.

The thing breathed it in.

But then the creature huffed, snorted, backed away, shook its huge head as if it had been befouled. It dropped to all fours and left Cornelius Hickey’s field of vision forever.

Everything had left Cornelius Hickey’s field of vision forever. The stars came down from the sky and attached themselves to his staring eyes as ice crystals. The Raven descended as a darkness upon him and devoured what the Tuunbaq would not deign to touch. Eventually Hickey’s blind eyes shattered from the cold, but he did not blink.

His body remained sitting rigidly upright in the stern, legs splayed, boots firmly planted near the heap of gold watches he had plundered and the stack of clothing he had taken from the dead men, his gloved hands frozen to the gunwales, the frozen fingers of his right hand only inches from the loaded shotgun’s barrels.

Late the next morning, before dawn, the storm front arrived and the sky began to howl again, and all that next day and all the next night the snow piled up in the caulker’s mate’s straining, open mouth and covered his dark blue peacoat and watch cap and terror-frozen face and shattered, staring eyes with a thin shroud-layer of white.

The beauty of being dead, he knows now, is that there is no pain and no sense of self.

The unhappy news about being dead, he knows now, is – just as he had feared many times when considering self-murder and rejecting it for just this reason – there are dreams.

The happy news about this unhappy news is that the dreams are not one’s own.

Crozier floats in this warm, buoyant sea of nonself and listens to dreams that are not his own.

If any of his living, mortal-self’s analytical powers had survived the transition to this pleasant floating-after-death, the old Francis Crozier might have wondered at his thought of “listening to” dreams, but it is true that these dreams are more like listening to another person’s chant – although there is no language involved, no words, no music, no chant – than “seeing” dreams the way he always had when he was alive. Although there are most definitely visual images involved in this dream-listening, the shapes and colors are like nothing Francis Crozier ever encountered on the other side of Death’s veil and it is this nonvoice, nonchant narrative that fills his death dreams.

There is a beautiful Esquimaux girl named Sedna. She lives alone with her father in a snow-house far north of the regular Esquimaux villages. Word of the girl’s beauty spreads and various young men make the long trek across ice floes and barren lands to pay homage to the grey-haired father and to woo Sedna.

The girl’s heart is not touched by any of the suitors’ words or faces or forms, and in the late spring of the year, when the ice is breaking up, she goes out alone among the floes to avoid yet another year’s fresh crop of moonfaced suitors.

Since this happened in the time when animals still had voices which the People understood, a bird flies over the opening ice and woos Sedna with its song. “Come with me to the land of the birds where all things are as beautiful as my song,” sings the bird. “Come with me to the land of the birds where there is no hunger, where your tent will always be made of the most beautiful caribou skins, where you shall lie on only the finest and softest bearskins and caribou skins, and where your lamp will always be filled with oil. My friends and I will bring you anything your heart may desire, and you shall be clothed from that day forth in our finest and brightest feathers.”

Sedna believes the bird-suitor, weds him in the tradition of the Real People, and travels with him many leagues over sea and ice to the land of the bird people.

But the bird had lied.

Their home is not made of the finest caribou skins but is a patched, sad place thrown together with rotting fish skins. The cold wind blows in freely and laughs at her for her gullible innocence.

She sleeps not on the finest bearskins but on miserable walrus hides. There is no oil for her lamp. The other bird people ignore her and she has to wear the same clothes she was wed in. Her new husband brings her only cold fish for her meals.

Sedna keeps insisting to her indifferent bird-husband that she misses her father, so finally the bird allows her father to come visit. To do so, the old man has to travel for many weeks in his frail boat.

When her father arrives, Sedna feigns joy until they are alone in the dark, fish-stinking tent, and then she weeps and tells her father of how her husband abuses her and of all she has lost – youth, beauty, happiness – by marrying the bird rather than one of the young males of the Real People.

The father is horrified to hear this story and helps Sedna devise a plan to kill her husband. That next morning, when the bird-husband returns with Sedna’s cold fish for breakfast, the father and the girl fall upon the bird with the harpoon and paddle from the father’s kayak and kill him. Then the father and daughter flee the land of the bird people.

For days they sail south toward the land of the Real People, but when the bird-husband’s family and friends find him dead, they are filled with anger and fly south with a beating of wings so loud that it can be heard by the Real People a thousand leagues away.

The sea distance that took Sedna and her father a week to sail is covered by the thousands of flying birds in a few minutes. They descend upon the little boat like a dark and angry cloud made up of beaks and talons and feathers. The beating of their wings calls up a terrible storm that raises the waves and threatens to swamp the little boat.

The father decides to give his daughter back to the birds as an offering and throws her overboard.

Sedna clings to the boat for dear life. Her grip is strong.

The father takes his knife and cuts off the first joints of her fingers. As they fall into the sea, these finger joints are turned into the first whales. The fingernails become the white whalebone found on beaches.

Still Sedna clings. The father cuts off her fingers at the second joint.

These parts of her fingers fall into the sea and become the seals.

Still Sedna clings. When the terrified father cuts off the final stumps of her fingers, these fall onto the passing floes and into the water and become the walruses.

With no fingers left, only curved bone stumps like her dead bird-husband’s talons where her hands had been, Sedna finally falls into the sea and sinks to the bottom of the ocean. She resides there until this day.

It is Sedna who is the mistress of all whales, walruses, and seals. If the Real People please her, she sends the animals to them and tells the seals, walruses, and whales to allow themselves to be caught and killed. If the Real People displease her, she keeps the whales, walruses, and seals with her down in the dark depths and the Real People suffer and starve.

What in the God-damned hell ? thinks Francis Crozier. It is his self-voice that interrupts the slow no-self flow of the dream-listening.

As if summoned, the pain rushes in.

My men ! he shouts. But he is too weak to shout it. He is too weak to say it out loud. He is too weak even to remember what the two syllables mean. My men ! he cries again. It emerges as a moan.