Дэн Симмонс - The Terror

Both of them get out of their harness and look around. They have stopped hauling in the brief interlude of midday southern twilight that passes for daytime.

Silence steps in front of Crozier, removes his mittens, and then removes her own. The wind is very cold and their hands should not be exposed for more than a minute, but in that minute she holds his hands in hers and looks at him. She moves her gaze to the east, then looks south, and then looks back at him.

The question is clear.

Crozier feels his heart pounding. He cannot remember any time in his adult life — certainly not the night that Hickey ambushed him — when he has felt so frightened.

“Yes,” he says.

Silence puts her mittens back on and begins unpacking the sledge.

As Crozier helps her unpack things onto the ice and then break down parts of the sledge itself, he wonders again how she has found this place. He has learned that while she sometimes uses the stars or moon to navigate by, more often than not she just pays great attention to the landscape. Even on seemingly barren snowy terrain, she is counting the mathematically precise snow ridges and snow mounds created by the wind, even while noting which way these ridges run. Like Silence, Crozier has begun measuring time not so much in days as in sleepings — how many times they have stopped to sleep, whatever time of day or night that might have been.

Out here on the ice, he has been more aware than ever — that is, he has shared some of Silence’s awareness — of the subtleties of hummocked ice and old winter ice and new pressure ridges and thick pack ice and dangerous new ice. He now can see a lead many miles away just by the slight darkening of clouds above it. He now avoids dangerous but almost invisible fissures and rotten ice without actively noticing that he is doing so.

But why this place? How did she know to come here for what they are about to do?

I am about to do it , he realizes and his heart pounds more wildly.

But not yet.

In the quickly dimming light, they connect some of the slats on the sledge and the unlashed vertical posts to build a crude framework for a small tent. They will be here only a few days — unless Crozier remains here forever — so they do not try to find a drift in which to construct a snow-house, nor do they spend energy on making the tent fancy. It will serve as shelter.

Some of the skins are set in place for the outer wall of the tent, most go inside.

While Crozier is arranging their floor furs and sleeping furs, Silence is outside, quickly and efficiently cutting blocks of ice from some nearby jumble block and building a low wall on the windward side of the tent. That will help some.

Once inside, she helps Crozier rig the blubber-flame cooking lamp and antler frame in the caribou-skin vestibule of the tent and they begin melting snow for drinking. They will also use the frame and flame for drying their outer clothes. The wind blows snow around the abandoned and empty sledge, which is little more than runners now.

For three days they both fast. They eat nothing, drinking water in an attempt to quell their belly’s rumblings; they leave the tent for long hours each day, even when the snow comes, to exercise and relieve tension.

Crozier takes turns throwing both harpoons and both lances at a large snow-and-ice block; Silence had recovered them from her dead family members at the massacre site and prepared one heavy harpoon with its long cord and one lighter throwing lance for each of them months ago.

Now he throws the harpoon with such force that it buries itself ten inches into the block of ice.

Silence walks closer and removes her hood, peering at him in the shifting light from the aurora.

He shakes his head and tries to smile.

He has no signs for Isn’t this what you do to your enemy? Instead, he reassures her with a clumsy hug that he is not leaving or planning to use the harpoon on anything or anyone anytime soon.

He has never seen the aurora like this.

All day and night the cascading curtains of color dance from horizon to horizon with the center of the displays directly overhead. Not in all of his years of expedition near the north or south poles has Crozier seen anything remotely resembling this explosion of light. The hour or so of wan daylight does almost nothing to lessen the intensity of the aerial display.

And there is ample acoustical accompaniment to the visual fireworks.

All around them, the ice groans, cracks, moans, and grinds from pressure, while long series of explosions under the ice begin like scattered artillery fire and quickly move to an unceasing cannonade.

Already unnerved by anticipation, Crozier is more deeply shaken by the noise and movement of the ice pack under them. He sleeps now in his parka — perspiration be damned — and is out of the tent and onto the ice a half dozen times each sleeping period, sure that their broad floe is breaking up.

It never does, although cracks open here and there within fifty yards of their tent and send fissures racing faster than a man could run through seemingly solid ice. Then the cracks close and disappear. But the explosions continue, as does the violence in the sky.

In his last night in this life, Crozier sleeps fitfully — his fasting-hunger makes him cold in a way that even Silence’s body heat cannot compensate for — and he dreams that Silence is singing.

The ice explosions resolve themselves into steady drum-beats that serve as background for her high, sweet, sad, lost voice:

Crozier awakes trembling. He sees that Silence is already awake, staring at him with her dark, unblinking eyes, and in a moment of pure terror deeper than terror, he realizes that it was not her voice that he has just heard singing this dead man’s song to him — literally a song from a dead man to his previous living self — but the voice of his unborn son.

Crozier and his wife rise and dress in mutual ceremonial silence. Outside, though perhaps morning, it is still night, but a night of a thousand thrusting colors laid over the shaking stars.

The shattering ice still sounds like a drumbeat.

The only paths left now are surrender or death. Or both.

All of his life, the boy and man he was and has been for fifty years would rather die than surrender. The man he is now would rather die than surrender.

But what is death itself other than the ultimate surrender? The blue flame in his chest will accept neither choice.

In their snow-house the past weeks, under their sleeping robes, he has learned about another type of surrender. A sort of death. A change from being one to being something else that is neither self nor not-self.

If two such different people who have no words at all in common can dream the same dreams, then perhaps — even with all dreams set aside and all other beliefs ignored — other realities can merge as well.

He is very frightened.

They leave the tent wearing only their boots, shorts, leggings, and the thin caribou-skin shirts they sometimes wear under their parkas. It is very cold tonight, but the wind has died down since the day’s brief glimpse of midday sun.