Gillian Anderson - A Dream of Ice

Mikel lowered his goggles and squinted. There appeared to be a surface he could stand on about twenty feet below him. He couldn’t be sure; it could have been just a shadow. But if he hesitated, if he started to think, he would be paralyzed. Finding cracks in the wall of ice that he could fit his fingers into, he unhooked from the rope and slowly, very slowly, climbed by hand and spiked foot down the wall. Then he hit a spot where there was nothing to grip. Mikel closed his eyes and rested his forehead on the ice. He had to continue, no matter what the cost. He jerked one foot out of the wall and, gripping his last handholds, jerked the other foot out. Lowering himself by extending his arms, he let the spikes on the soles of his feet search for purchase—

Suddenly, he lost his grip and with the claws on his crampons screeching against the ice, he slid. The drop lasted no more than two or three seconds, though it felt like ten and ended with him landing hard on solid rock. His ankle twisted beneath him. Whether it was a ledge or the bottom of the crevasse didn’t matter so much in that moment.

I’m breathing , he thought. Why the hell am I breathing? This should be ocean down here. He didn’t even hear the sea.

Gingerly, he curled over and got up on his hands and knees. He looked around, no longer damning his headlamp and froze.

The gray-black rock he was on looked tiled . It was all hexagons fitted perfectly together. His mind leaped to ancient peoples, their carvings, but reminded himself more rationally that, under certain conditions rock could form hexagons by itself. Slow lava could harden and fracture into six-sided columns if it was cooled by contact with ice, and if ice sheets moved across the surface for years it could smooth the rock to this even expanse. He would begin with that sensible assumption—well, it was sensible if he conveniently forgot the fact that there are no volcanoes on the east side of Antarctica.

He was kneeling on a long lump of rock. He paused, questioning his judgment—was this really a lump of rock? He searched through his pockets for the first expendable item he could find, which turned out to be a pencil. He placed it on the rock and it rolled haltingly to the left. There was a slight curve here. Could he be on top of a lava tube?

He then cast his light over the ice above him.

There were moving water droplets here too. Could something have melted all the ice that once filled this space?

Mikel noted the direction the water droplets were blowing and began to crawl toward whatever was blowing them. Could something have melted all the ice that once filled this space? he wondered. He had not moved more than half a body length, before his hand knocked against something. He backed up and pivoted his neck so that the headlamp hit the spot.

A human fist was protruding from the rock.

With a stab of horror, Mikel scuttled backward but kept the light on the hand. The fist did not move. Finally he crawled close again, taking off his headlamp so he could direct it more easily. To his relief, the fist was not human. It was rock, purposely sculpted to look like a human hand. And it was not the only sculpture—adjacent was another wrist that ended in a differently shaped hand, one with two fingers pointed outward, the other fingers curled in. A bar, like a scepter, was in another hand, pointing up. Mikel was too stunned by his finding to think about what it was he was seeing, to process the enormity of the discovery. He tugged on the object but it was stuck fast.

Edging forward, Mikel stopped again almost immediately. This time he swept the light over the whole surface. What he saw did not seem possible.

It was like finding Pompeii. The basalt rock held dozens of objects. He recognized a knife, bizarrely twisted; a bowl; a carving of the face of a baby. A huge rock thrust from the surface was in front of him and it was tessellated with a mosaic of olivine-green crystals. The archaeologist in him trumped all else and he pounced forward. He approached it with joy bordering on rapture. When he touched the stone he felt it vibrating.

No. Humming.

Mikel yanked off his glove, and as he gripped the stone, a wave of red broke across his mind. The world skewed, exploded, filled with a sulfurous smell like he was back on the airplane at Montevideo—

Then a weight fell on his left shoulder. Mikel screamed, turned and, skittered backward. When his light finally landed on his target, and a string of curses flew from his mouth with the speed and duration that only a Basque could deliver, there was Siem kneeling on the rock next to him, stunned and shaking. He was still reaching out with the hand he’d placed on Mikel’s shoulder, but his gaze was on the protruding objects all around them.

“What is this?” whispered Siem. “ How is this?”

“Shut up,” Mikel snapped.

Siem closed his mouth and just looked at him, scared.

Collecting himself, Mikel sat up, and waited for his pounding pulse to subside. Siem had pulled him back—but from where? Damn it , he thought, now he had a witness. “How the hell did you get down here anyway?”

“I… rappelled,” Siem said, following the glow of his own headlamp. “There was an argument. Bundy didn’t want me to follow you but I made him see we couldn’t let you—I mean—we already lost two people out here.”

Mikel had to make a decision quickly. If he allowed Siem to see this, then Siem had to die. Mikel could make it happen, regardless of the man’s six-foot-seven frame. But he was just a kid, and scared, and he trusted Mikel. So the archaeologist moved to block further inspection with his body.

“Siem,” Mikel said, “get back up to the surface.”

“Why?”

“Somebody has to tell them to move Halley VI off the ice shelf.”

Siem started to ask why again but changed his mind.

“Because it’s melting,” Mikel answered anyway. That much was true. “These objects, probably from an old shipwreck, will be gone soon. You will be too if you don’t go.”

“But what about you?” Siem asked. “I saw the rip marks in the ice. It looks to me like you fell.”

“I climbed down,” Mikel answered. “Not elegantly, but I made it… and I’ll make it back. I really have to examine a few of these objects before I follow you. But you—you might be saving some lives if you leave now. They’ll need time to make evacuation plans.”

Siem almost turned to go but stopped. “Climbing down is easier than climbing up. I’m not sure you can make it.”

“I’ll make it,” Mikel insisted. “Thanks for the concern. Truly.”

With a sigh, he turned to go. “I hope it’s worth it,” he said as he started back up.

Mikel watched him disappear into the blackness, then looked back at the olivine mosaic and thought, unequivocally, “If anything is worth dying for, this is it.”

Mikel didn’t move for at least ten minutes after the last scuffling sound drifted down from Siem’s ascent. He just stared at the olivine mosaic with a feeling of almost physical hunger.

Each of the olivine tiles embedded in the rock had been etched. Each had an ethereal, internal glow that he could not explain other than through some kind of phosphorescent content. The characters showed a predominance for snakelike crescents and S-shapes, resembling those that comprised the triangular symbol on the troublesome artifact he had brought back to New York. But these were more complex and had many more variations. He was definitely looking at a written language. Seen in aggregate like this, it was obviously more advanced than the artifacts the Group had collected over the years had led them to believe.