The Cold Pools

‘Nothing changes,’ Karen said. ‘Except everything.’

‘The whole world was like this once,’ I said.

Karen reached out a hand and brushed the side of my head. I felt the calluses and sores on her palm rough against my skin, but beneath them was only tenderness. I could feel her eyes on me, and was thankful that the darkness hid my tears.

Antarctica was the only heavily populated continent now, containing a string-bean two hundred million people. The Himalayan Plateau and parts of northern Russia were home to a scattering, mostly research teams and treasure hunters. There were rumors of die-hards surviving in the desert wastes in the very middle of the planet, but most were just stories, and no one cared to go and find out. And even our continent was close to dying, with the rains coming less and less, the vegetation that could survive the harsh temperatures shrinking year by year. And the people too, exposed too often to the sun’s harsh rays, were going the way of Karen, or worse. By luck or fate I had escaped it so far, but my time could come any day.

‘Thank you,’ Karen said at last.

‘What for?’

I sensed her smiling. ‘You know. For bringing me here.’

‘I just wanted you to be happy.’

‘I am. And it doesn’t matter…’

‘What doesn’t matter?’

She looked away from me. ‘Lewis, I know.’

‘What do you—’ I began, and then understood.

She held up a small glossy pamphlet and waved it back and forth as though fanning herself: the tourist brochure the travel agent had given us. ‘I know about this place,’ she said. ‘I looked on the Net. I was excited, and I couldn’t help myself. They don’t really try to hide the fact.’

I sighed. ‘It’s still cold, though.’

‘And that’s good enough for me.’

She leaned closer and I slipped my arm around her. Looking out on the lake, I felt for the first time that everything was perfect. It didn’t matter that Karen was dying, or that I soon would. It didn’t matter that everything at Cold Pools was fake, that huge machines had built the entire glacier, that massive, hidden turbines up on the mountains behind the bluff kept the air cool, that if I walked up to the glacier and pressed my hand against it the surface would feel dry and cool to the touch, would feel like the mixture of stone and plaster that it was, this monstrous white wave in the middle of this construction of the end of the world.

‘I want to swim,’ Karen said again, untangling herself from me and standing up. ‘I want to swim right up to it.’

‘No, no, you can’t.’

‘Lewis, I love you. I’ve always loved you and I always will. Please, if you love me, let me swim.’

‘Karen…’ I began, but I made no move to stop her as she walked to the edge of the terrace.

The moon broke through the clouds long enough to light her undressing, and I looked upon her silhouette as she stretched out her arms over her head and then reached down to touch her toes. Her body looked as lithe and firm as it had the day I’d met her, and I knew Karen was thankful the night hid the scars and the sores that covered her beautiful skin.

‘Goodbye, Lewis,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll see you soon.’

‘Take care, Karen,’ I whispered back, and for a moment I thought I saw her smile. Then she was gone, diving into the lake, breaking through the surface with a soft splash and then reemerging a few metres out, her arms working in lazy strokes as she kicked away from me. I watched for a few minutes as she moved out into deep water, the sound of her splashes growing fainter, her body no more than a disturbance among the ripples. Finally, as the clouds closed in and she disappeared from view, I turned and walked away.

I glanced back at the black wall of the glacier as I headed back up the overgrown trail, feeling a mixture of awe and disappointment. It did move, as the brochures claimed, but I knew that after a handful of years they moved it back again, reopened the “abandoned” hotels and began the process again. It was all part of the big illusion, the work of far advanced technology that could create an elaborate theme park but could do nothing about the burning sun smiling through the thin glass that remained of the atmosphere, as it slowly cooked us off the world.

Mankind would survive a while, I knew. Fighters, always, if not against each other then against attacks on their lifestyle. Mankind would go underground, living in tunnels as the Earth’s surface baked and crusted, surviving on life-support technology to provide water or food. One day, though, it would all end, maybe five hundred or a thousand years from now. None of that was my concern, though, as I pushed back through the doors of our hotel and headed up to bed.

#

The next morning, there was no sign of Karen, as I knew there wouldn’t be. I got up and dressed, went downstairs and ate a light breakfast of toast and bacon. In the warm light of day the glacier looked more fake than it had under twilight, the surface cracked and glistening, but too cracked, too glistening, to be real. People liked to pretend, but when you knew the truth you could see nothing but the lie.

Outside, the air was cool as I’d known it would be, as I’d paid for it to be, and I felt strangely comfortable as I headed out of town, retracing the way we’d walked last night. The bath houses and karaoke bars and nightclubs rose up on either side, gaudy and classless, divided occasionally by thin, tree-lined roads leading out to bigger, expensive country club resorts that ringed Cold Pools like a group of overpaid sentries.

The town was fading behind me as I came to the abandoned hotel on the edge of the lake.

In the daylight it was obviously fake, a mock up building with nothing but plaster walls behind the broken plastic windows, brown, crumbly rust made of plaster-cast on the chairs, cracks in the wooden terrace made by paint and power tools. A few hundred metres distant, the glacier rose up magnificently, glimmering in the sunlight, and I was sure I could make out tiny people climbing up the steps built into its face. That we would never do that now, didn’t matter. Whatever was on the other side was no longer important, and I felt numbness wash over me as I slumped down into a chair and looked out at the lake.

In the air I heard the occasional pre-recorded bird call, in the lake I saw the occasional splash caused by what was probably a timer set under the surface, and around the lake at regularly intervals I saw the signs that warned strictly no swimming. The small print told of chemicals in the water and of toxins discharged as a result of efforts to keep the water cool. The brown crud at the edge of the water and the metre- wide ring around the lake which was devoid of plant life were a message that told me Karen wasn’t coming back.

She had known, as I had. But she had chosen to swim anyway.

I looked up at the blue-white wall of the glacier, then back at the red sun pushing through thinning clouds. I felt the chill of manufactured air around me and thought back to the night before, when we had walked together, when we had stood by the lake, alone in the perfection of it all.

‘Goodbye, Karen,’ I said to no one, wondering when it would be my turn to swim.

END

Please continue reading for the first chapter of the author’s debut novel, The Tube Riders.

Chris Ward THE TUBE RIDERS A Dystopian Novel

CHAPTER ONE